In other family news, George Telidis is not alone in being an energetic
soccer dad. Some think he went overboard by leaping from his seat to
punch a member of the opposing team in the mouth.
However, he may be alone in deciding to sue the school board for
depriving him of his liberty and violating his constitutional rights.
What he means is that he is annoyed that he won't be allowed to attend his
son's future games.
They didn't heed this advice. Wynema Faye Shumate was a South Carolina
woman who thought she had found love in an Englishman (it gets worse).
Trevor Tasker wooed the 30-something woman over the Internet and went to
meet her earlier this month.
It was also earlier this month that the
65-year-old Shumate was jailed. Although there is no evidence that she
killed wheelchair-bound roommate Jim O'Neil, she did hide the body in her
freezer, where it was found over a year later.
The tabloids have other
details, such as her cutting off the legs with an axe so he would fit
inside, but I don't report trashy stuff.
It may be old news, but it is now becoming much bigger business. And the
names are wonderful...
Working mothers can now devote even more of their waking hours to their
children. Kimberly Sedlacek, of Tacoma, Washington, said the daycare
webcam doesn't distract her from her work for Boeing. Rather, 'if I
didn't have it, that would be more distracting'.
Six companies are now selling daycare webcams, led by New York-based
ParentWatch, whose systems are used in more than 150 daycare centres.
Darius Vasefi, a vice president of KinderView, said, 'It's a way of
portraying trust, saying "Hey, we've got nothing to hide"' to parents
who are willing to pay $24.95 a month for this reassurance.
'You get to check in on your children and know they're safe', said
Sedlacek, whose four-year-old daughter's dance performances are available
online each Friday. A sales executive for the Georgia-based Kids'R'Kids
daycare chain said privacy is not a problem because 'our centers always
had an open-door policy. Parents could come in anytime, and this just
expands on that'.
In case my sister felt left out, here is an Iowa item. Des Moines's
David Parks wanted his mother, Michaeleen, to give him money for his
rent. She said she couldn't give him money until she got paid at the end
of the week, so he locked her in her closet for three days. Well, he did
unlock the closet when he beat her with the belt. And I guess he opened
the door when he fed her (only the best stale popcorn). He was
considerate, letting her defecate in a garbage bag and not following
through on his threat to cut off her toes.
After three days, Parks decided his mother needed medical attention.
To keep a low profile, he took her to a beauty salon, from which one of
his friends took her to a drugstore whence she was able to ring police.
What a way to go! A Misourri man pushed steak down his girlfriend's
throat, eventually killing her. James Krebs was found guilty of
involuntary manslaughter after plea-bargaining.
Krebs dsecribed telling his girlfriend that her steak had too much fat
on it. She said she would eat what she wanted. Krebs said it was at
this point that he shoved a bunch of meat down her throat. She
reportedly died of asphyxiation.
This next item came from the Times, but it still sounds a little like an
urban legend. A few seconds after they met, she started to hit him.
'Zhang' and 'Zhuer' fell in love through a chat room - an increasingly
popular pastime in China - and then started to send e-mail to each
other. They told each other that their loneliness would finally end
when they met in person. Fortunately, they lived in the same province
and this dream could come true easily.
Although there are a lot of people in China, the two who met on
Haimiao Beach, near Laizhou, had met each other once before, more than
two years earlier, when they became partners. Police intervened as they
argued about such issues as why 'Zhuer' was 'in desperate need of a
boyfriend'.
In slightly more macabre news, a Melbourne woman tried to do what any
self-respecting mother would do if she suspected her children were
possessed by Satan: kill her son and then try to resurrect him.
The mother of five, whose name was not released, attacked her other
children before settling on drowning her three-year-old as part of a
home-brew exorcism. Her attempt to resurrect him involved lovingly
pouring boiling water over his body.
She claimed to be not guilty by reason of looniness. Justice Greg
James agreed with her claim.
A couple travelling from Dallas were fined 5000 pounds for being pissed
on their flight back to Manchester. The charges relating to their
fondling of each other were dropped. But not before their employers, on
whose business they were travelling, found out about the public removal of
Amanda Holt's blouse and trousers. Both Holt and David Machin were
fired.
After other passengers complained about the actions of Holt, 37, and
Machin, 40, flight attendants asked them to stop cavorting, to no avail,
according to witnesses for the prosecution. The prosecution quoted
Machin as saying 'We became a little over-familiar, that's all'.
He later took a different tone, saying his 'drunken stupidity' almost
let him throw away his relationship with his wife and three children.
Holt said her actions were 'a matter of regret', as she left court with
her husband.
That was UK-style romance. Here is the style of Stavanger, in Norway.
Most people try to go for the most sensational, not the most banal, in
proposing marriage... Frode Jonassen heard the loudspeakers in the grocery
store blare 'I love you and want to marry you. You have 10 seconds to
decide'.
His girlfriend, Tone Soerensen, had stepped into a back room. Frode
didn't think that odd, since she works there. But he was a little less
composed when the customers started to count down from ten. He did manage
to say 'yes' at the last minute, reported Verdens Gang.
Or Cambodian style.
In a report from Phnom Penh, we find a man who was annoyed that he
couldn't marry his lover, Nha Thavy. So the 35-year-old Hout Sitha
toted an AK-47 and a bucket of gasoline in the general direction of her
family. After he took them hostage and threatening to shoot them and
burn their house down if they didn't give their blessing to the union,
the family were not rescued through police intercession. Finally,
members of Sitha's own family intervened. The families came to an
understanding, and the two will be married.
And we can't forget the Americans.
Kendall Francois kept romance alive by taking prostitutes home with
him. Now where is the best place to keep the decomposing bodies of
eight women you have killed? This Poughkeepsie, New York, idiot hid his
stranglees' corpses amid various other rubbish scattered about his home,
where he lived with his parents and younger sister.
Francois killed the women over 22 months. He was finally arrested
after a woman he had brought home escaped.
Another death by baptism: she told police that voices told her to be
good to her cats, 'baptizing them to get them ready for heaven'. She
is from Florida, Dade City. She poured scalding water on six cats.
A neighbour said the 68-year-old woman threw some of her cats against
the side of her house. Another said he found a dead cat on her car.
But wait, you say, that's not baptism. 'I don't think she had a clue
what she was doing', said Capt. David Duff, who said she has a history
of mental problems and decided she didn't need her pills anymore.
Neighbours said the day before the cat slayings, she was wandering
around town leaving empty casserole dishes in driveways and yelling.
Dorothy Parker said, 'Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful;
you might as well live'. Robert G., 28, and Antonija, 24, may have agreed
after their attempt to kill themselves when their parents opposed their
union. AFP reports describe the Croatian couple as running a plastic tube
from the exhaust pipe to the cab of their car, drinking an unspecified
large amount of alcohol, and swallowing around 50 valium pills. They then
put their heads together, where Robert shot himself in the temple.
The bullet went through the policeman's forehead and grazed his
beloved's ear. He was placed in intensive car in a Zagreb hospital, while
Antonija sustained minor injuries.
Innocence and guilt indeed are not cut and dried. Seven years after she
was put in prison, an Ohio woman may be relieved of her life sentence
now that her son has testified that the dog raped him when she was taking
a bath and that she didn't sodomise the then-seven-year-old. Revisiting
the incident since he reached the age of competency to testify (10 in
Ohio), the boy said 'My mother is innocent' and named Bugsy the 70-pound
pit bull as to blame.
When the 40-year-old woman brought her faeces-covered son to the
Children's Hospital Medical Center of Akron, he was found to have a torn
rectum with dog semen inside it. The woman said her son said he pulled
down his pants as he desperately ran toward the bathroom, but prosecutors
contended that she attacked him and used a turkey baster or similar device
to cover her tracks with semen. A social worker testified that the boy
told her his mother hurt him, testimony the defence now claim was what the
adults had seemed to want to hear. The woman's life sentence for
'felonious sexual penetration' may be reconsidered if the boy's statement
is deemed substantial, new evidence.
Another aggressive dog features in this Clippings edition. A six-week-old baby in California was killed by a dog when a relative went to warm a bottle of milk. Pomeranians are not usually thought of as terribly aggressive dogs, but sheriff's deputy Cruz Solis said the relative returned to find at least part of the girl's head in the dog's mouth Saturday night, according to the Associated Press. The baby, whose name has not been released pending notification of her parents, died of head trauma at a local hospital. The miniature dog was taken away by animal control officers, and the relative has not been charged.
Our next girl, a 15-year-old who was home-schooled and grew up with goats
but without electricity, wanted to be an actress and singer. When the
singing lessons provided by Wayne Allen Geis and his common-law wife
escalated from singing and kissing to oral sex and intercourse, the
girl balked, so Geis warned her that she had hurt her voice and would be
better only with continued special coaching and sex.
After this, the teenager wrote a letter to entrepreneur J.Z. Knight, the
'channeler' of 'Ramtha', a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit. Knight invited
the couple and the girl's family to attend a retreat at Ramtha's School of
Enlightenment, where she interrogated the couple for over an hour in front
of a crowd of 800. (The confession isn't considered privileged because it
was public and the 'school' (I'm running out of inverted commas in
this item) isn't considered a religious organisation.)
The defence may call Knight as a witness in an attempt to divert
attention to the credibility of Ramtha's manifestations in the medium's
trances and as a display of purple light seen by Knight.
About the only credible person is the prosecutor, who said, 'This is one
of the most egregious allegations of long-term systematic grooming and
manipulation of this girl's belief system I have ever seen'.
A Waterloo, Iowa, man was found naked in a community college farm's hay
loft at 8am. In the corner was a bound ewe with her hindquarters
elevated. Next to her was a blue nightgown.
Held by students until the polie arrived, Robert Allen Broderson was
arrested for criminal trespass and animal abuse. (Iowa is one of 26
states which have no laws against sex with animals.)
Finally, I can report that the Virginia woman who microwaved her month-old
son has been sentenced to five years in prison. Elizabeth Renee Otte's
claim that 'I can't remember doing this if I did this' was part of her
'epileptic blackout' defence. Otte had stopped taking her seizure
medicine when she found herself pregnant. Her lawyer, Stephen Harris,
added, 'The river was right across the street. There were ways that were
more surreptitious than placing the baby in the microwave and going to
bed'.
At the trial, experts testified that Joseph Lewis Martinez probably died
when his blood reached 106 degrees, 10 minutes after Otte may or may not
have pressed 'Start'.
Maybe this isn't a fucked relationship story, but it will be once he
gets into prison and meets Bubba
Joseph Nichols will spend the next four years in prison, where he will
receive counselling. He will probably be told that it is socially
unacceptable to steal water pistols from department stores. He may also
be told that it is perverted to use them to squirt semen at girls. Over a
year, Nichols perpetrated at least nine such incidents in Orange County,
Florida. He sometimes took pictures. The end came in April, when he
squirted and photographed a girl when she refused to open her mouth in a
K-Mart parking lot. He too was being photographed.
Tracy Thacker, a marine recruiter, got his children out of school early,
writing on the sign-out sheet that he was taking them 'to pay back mom'.
After he had allegedly tried to break the neck of his wife, Holli, when
she refused to have sex with him a few months earlier, the two were in the
process of a divorce.
When police arrived at Thacker's house, at the behest of his
step-daughter, who called from a neighbour's house, he threatened to
kill himself and kept police at bay until a sheriff's deputy shot him. He
had already set a fire and stabbed the 5- and 9-year-olds to death.
For more marital bliss, we turn to Kevin Fraze. Less than a month after
his marriage, this 29-year-old allegedly choked his wife into
unconsciousness and didn't let her receive medical attention. He
threatened to kill the woman's five-year-old daughter and other relatives
if she didn't do what he wanted.
After abandoning the girl, Fraze then took his wife on a honeymoon which
included Colorado, Las Vegas, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and
Florida. Along the way, he beat, burned, raped, stabbed, and prostituted
her, at one point restraining her while another man raped her. In Dade
County, Florida, on 15 November, the woman, whose name has not been
released, convinced someone to call police, whereupon Fraze was arrested.
From the Associated Press we hear of a man who used a 15-year-old girl's
closet as a home base for three weeks before his blankets, Bible, dishes,
and pictures of the girl were discovered by her mother. His truck was found
near the family's Mount Vernon, Ohio home.
The 26-year-old Jeffrey Scott Martin abruptly left his Army unit to be
with the girl he had met seven months ago on the Internet. When arresting
Martin for such things as his picture of the girl naked, police found
military dynamite and munitions in the truck.
Martin, who had free rein in the house when the girl's mother was at
work, settled into his life there, going as far as to get a library card.
In another story, a 14-year-old cocaine and paint thinner abuser pleaded
guilty for sexually assaulting his 2-year-old niece. According to the
Houston Chronicle, Roshalle Tatmon died of sepsis after an
encounter with Prentise Waire Jr. gave her a ruptured rectum. Authorities
believe medical help was only summoned the day after the attack. When a
Children's Protection Services (CPS) worker made a routine visit to the
home, the family at first refused to let her in, then was 'very hostile,
especially the 14-year-old'. Tatmon was not present for the visit. Less
than an hour later, someone in the home--which was shared by Prentise,
Tatmon, Tatmon's mother, three adults, two 4-year-olds and a
1-year-old--rang emergency services to report that a child had died.
During his psychiatric evaluation, Waire said 'I can barely read and I
can't be too much around distraction'. He said he didn't remember the incident
with Tatmon, emphasising 'she was an angel to me ... I can't see myself hurting
my niece because we were very close; we were family'. He said he went home
and merely slept after drinking and using drugs in a park. He said, 'I
said I did it because what I wanted was to take somebody else's spot'
rather than letting 'whoever did it' be imprisoned.
In 1994, CPS had decided Tatmon's mother's three children should live
with relatives, owing to the family's poverty. After that, the woman had
Roshalle and another baby and, when her own mother died, took in Waire and
four of her relatives--a four-year-old, two adults, and the girlfriend of
one of the adults. More recent CPS involvement was to determine how many
people lived there and if the children were adequately nourished and
supervised.
Following a trend in Bucharest, a Tokyo club offers special prostitute service for the equivalent of $1000. The customer visits a brothel which is decked out as a 'home' fantasy, including a beautiful 'wife' who cooks him a meal, has sex with him, watches the television programmes he wants to watch, and listens to him describe his day at work. Hmm.
In Ravenna, Ohio, Michelle Zonko Bica, 39, kidnapped Theresa Andrews after
she pretended to be interested in the Jeep the Andrewses were selling.
Bica took the nine-months-pregnant woman to her home, where she killed her
and performed a simple Caesarian section. She then buried the woman's body in the dirt
floor of her garage and placed gravel over the evidence there. Bica then
claimed the baby to be hers.
For nine months Bica had fooled neighbours and, apparently, her own
husband Thomas. They had thought she was pregnant so accepted newborn
'Michael Thomas Bica' with little difficulty. She explained to her
husband that she went into labour shortly after he left in the early
morning for work. She said she was discharged early from hospital due to
a tuberculosis scare.
A month earlier the Bicas met the Andrews family in the local
Wal-Mart's baby department, where they discussed their due dates and their
homes' proximity. Shortly thereafter, Bica started telling people she was
due near the due date mentioned by Andrews. She encouraged relatives to
feel the baby kick and showed them ultrasound pictures.
When police came to the Bica home a few days later, hoping to find out
about a 'phone call made to Andrews shortly before the woman's
disappearance, they heard Thomas Bica screaming his wife's name. She had
shot herself with the gun she had used on Andrews.
When 39-year-old Indle King, Jr. strangled Anastasia, his 20-year-old Kyrgyz mail-order bride, the Everett, Washington, man was not too clever. It seems he thought that he could conceal the woman's identity by removing the woman's clothing and cutting off her long, blond ponytail. By the way, will I ever read a story which says 'he buried her body in a deep grave'?
Ariana Swinson died in her parents' Michigan apartment almost five months
after child welfare officials determined that they no longer needed to
supervise the care of the girl and her three siblings. Parents Linda
Paling and Ed Swinson insist that a nearby bottle of Five Star whiskey had
nothing to do with the death. Instead, they described hearing noises from
the bedroom where the three oldest children were playing. He told police
that he then stood the lightly crying girl up and she 'threw her hands up
into the air and let out a terrible screm and started to collapse',
hitting her head on the floor. He ran to a pay 'phone across the street
and rang emergency services. (When deputies asked, Ed wasn't sure how to
spell his daughter's name.) The eight-months-pregnant Linda said she was
in the bathroom at the time and heard her boyfriend ask 'What's going on?'
before asking for her help. She said she did her best as a trained
nurse's aid.
One of the living children told a similar story, saying that he jerked
backward too hard whilst playing 'choo-choo train', causing her to hit her
head on the lightly carpeted concrete floor. Sergeant Richard DeShon said
the boy's 'statements weren't very consistent and it did appear to be
somewhat rehearsed'.
Nobody tried to explain Ariana's blackened, scaled feet; puncture wounds
to the head; dehydration; and weight of 26 pounds. Emergency room
physician Geoffrey Mills said, 'You could pretty much see the entire
skeleton structure, which I rarely have ever seen in a child of that age'.
Police found half the girl's blood under her mattress and a bloody
t-shirt. Cause of death was listed as repetitive abuse with head and brain
injury as well as drowning. Linda, when asked to describe the cause of
each wound, blamed the older children for playing roughly, but she added
that she may sometimes have picked Ariana up roughly. She later admitted
that she had on occasion hit the girl; for instance, a few days earlier
she bruised Ariana's face when trying to hit her mouth as punishment for
swearing. Ed's comment, after further questioning, was, 'Well, take me
in'.
Four months earlier, the parents had been told that although two rooms
were not enough for so many people, they had made commendable progress
on learning to become better parents.
Edwin Sandoval of Manchester, Connecticut, is also in trouble for his sexual antics. Five days after his girlfriend told him she was pregnant, the 35-year-old man put an ulcer medicine in her vagina in an attempt to cause vaginal contractions with misoprostol and induce an abortion. The woman, who consulted a doctor when she began bleeding, has now delivered a baby, and Sandoval faces up to 95 years in prison, where he won't have to care for a baby.
When London's Anna Climbie, 8, died of starvation and hypothermia, she had
128 bruises. Her French great-aunt Marie Therese Kouao and Kouao's
boyfriend Carl Manning (a London bus driver), were convicted and sentenced
to life in prison. Manning admitted to responsibility for only about 'a
third' of the girl's injuries, including a head wound from a bicycle
chain. He did point out that Climbie 'could take the beatings and pain
like anything', without crying at all.
The girl, deemed a nuisance by the couple, was sometimes left tied in
the bath for 24 hours or so. The fun part is that Kouao insisted that the
girl's problems were caused by witchcraft. She took Climbie to various
churches, asking pastors to pray that the child be freed of demons.
In Minco, Oklahoma, a ouija board told a woman to stab her son-in-law to
death. Carol Sue Elvaker, her daughter Tammy Roach, and Tammy's two
daughters were using the board for entertainment as he slept. Elvaker,
53, complied with the board's request and stabbed Brian Roach in the
chest. Elvaker had hoped to kill Roach's 10-year-old daughter but instead
left the house with Tammy, who hid the knife first, and the two
aforementioned grand-children. Elvaker was driving. After she crashed
the car into a road sign and (apparently) broke her ankles, she tried
pushing her 15-year-old grand-daughter into traffic, authorities
said. Despite her injuries, Elvaker managed to run from the scene, jump
over the highway median barrier, and make her way, naked, into a wooded
area, where police later found her.
Relatives told police that Elvaker does not have a history of mental
illness or odd behavior.
A Parkman, Maine, man asked that his dog stand with him in court. Frank
Buble, 71, is charged with attempting to kill his son Phillip with a
crowbar. The father, who reportedly attacked his son because of the
younger Buble's attraction to a dog, will, however, not have to see his
son's 'significant other' during the sentencing. Phillip's request,
denied by the court, said, in part, that he wanted 'Lady' to 'attend by
my side if possible as she was present in the house during the attack,
though not an eyewitness ... I've been informed your personal permission
is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36 pounds
weight and very well behaved.'
Bestiality is not a crime in Maine, but the last year has seen 'sexual
animal abuse cases' involving two dogs, two horses, and two cows.
According to news reports from Romania, Mircea Rau bought necklaces for his wife and his mistress, each bearing the relevant woman's initial, but accdientally gave his wife the parcel with the wrong necklace. After his wife threw an ashtray at him as he tried to flee his wife's wrath, Rau fell unconscious and was taken to hospital in Focsani, County Vrancea. In the meantime, his wife has reportedly asked for a divorce.
Police arrested a Beverly, Massachusetts, man who threatened to shoot his girlfriend with a homemade potato launcher. The woman alleges that Sean McGrath told her he would 'put a potato through' her head with the spud gun. He also got into fisticuffs with her teenaged daughter. The woman found the spud gun in the basement of McGrath's apartment building. He was arraigned in Salem District court for charges including making threats and possession of an infernal machine.
In Stuart, Florida, a St. Patrick's Day marriage got off to a good start when new bride Kathryn Marie Patrick, 36, hit her husband with the wedding cake and kicked him when he was on the floor. The husband, Brett, told police he and his wife began to argue after coming home from the wedding. In light of the bruises, scratches, and icing on Brett's body, Kathryn is being charged with battery.
And in other wedding news, Fox News reports that a Stupava, Slovakia, couple's Wild-West-themed wedding got a little bit out of hand. Three guests fired celebratory rounds from their pistols after the couple exchanged wedding vows, and one of the bullets lodged in the bride's ankle. Tereza Surname-unreleased's wedding day included a couple hours of surgery.
This isn't another story about a baby freezing to death after being left in a car overnight. Five-month-old Ethan Fletcher fried in his car seat as the temperature in his mother's car in Dallas, Texas, reached about 100 degrees. When the single mother's shift at a nearby restaurant ended five hours later, she returned to the car and started screaming. She told police that she was sure she remembered taking the boy to day care. The woman, unlike her name, was released. Deputy police chief Alfredo Saldana said, 'It's a tragic example of how quickly these things can happen'.
In Garner, North Carolina, the husband of a day-care centre owner was
arrested on multiple charges of child abuse and sexual offences.
Raheem Renard Robinson, who lived at the One Big Family Day Care Center,
turned himself in, stating "It's all lies". Five children interviewed
by
a social worker said Robinson spanked them with a fishing pole and belts,
made them eat coffee grounds, taped their eyes and mouths shut with
electrical tape. One girl saw one of the eight alleged victims being
left in a box in the yard for several hours. Another child was forced
to eat a brownie which (s)he had thrown in the toilet.
A 13-year-old occasional visitor to the centre described how Robinson
showed her and another girl a pornographic movie and then gave the girls a
few green condoms and told them to go have sex, particularly with someone
older. Then, months later, Robinson started showing the movie again, went
into his bathroom, and emerged wearing only his boxers and a green condom.
He pulled up her dress but stopped touching her when she screamed, she
said.
Evelyn Graham, who operates a day-care business next door to the
now-closed Big Family centre, said "Spanking with a belt maybe, but the
other charges seem so far-fetched".
Caron Simmons of Orange County, Florida, was charged in the death of her husband, William. After the couple argued over the satellite television system, William allegedly hid the television control in order to frustrate his wife. Looking for it in a dresser, she found a gun, which, she told police, she pointd at her husband. Caron said she didn't mean to kill her husband, who died at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Wethersfield, Connecticut, police arrested Richard Levitt for disseminating voyeuristic materials after Levitt's girlfriend reported him after she discovered that his web site contained a video of her having sex with him. Meanwhile, one of the girlfriend's friends rang her to report that she too was Levitt's girlfriend. The two women decided to confront the 42-year-old man, showing up on his doorstep at 2am on 25 March. Levitt and his wife answered the door. The Hartford Courant reports that in April Levitt was charged with lewd conduct and distribution of pornography.
Texas accountant John David Battaglia was jailed after he shot his 6- and
9-year-old daughters when talking to his ex-wife on the telephone. The
girls' mother, Mary Jean Pearle, rang Battaglia after he told her mother he
needed to ask Pearle a question. Battaglia gave the 'phone to his eldest
daughter on the 'phone to ask "Why are you trying to have Daddy arrested and
have him put in jail". Before Pearle could answer, she says, the
nine-year-old screamed "No, Daddy, no!" and gunshots rang out. Pearle
believes the question referred to a Christmas 1999 attack on her for which
Battaglia was fined and put on probation.
The couple have been divorced about a year. The girls, Liberty and Faith,
lived with their mother and were visiting their father at the time of the
murders.
A 13-year-old Cleveland, Ohio, boy was charged with murder after allegedly
beating his eight-week-old daughter to death. Brandon Miller claimed he was
innocent. The infant, named Diamond, died from massive head injuries and
internal bleeding.
Miller claims that the noticed that the girl, who was in bed with her
14-year-old mother, had her head wedged between the bed and the wall. When
he picked her up, she "started to spit up white stuff". When he noticed the
baby was not breathing, he said, he woke the mother, who rang emergency
services. He was tried in Juvenile Court because state law deems him too
young to be tried as an adult.
The Houston Chronicle said Linda Anita Carty told her neighbours she would
have a baby. They were right to believe she wasn't pregnant, but she had a
baby anyway, for a short while. She had four accomplices kidnap Juana
Rodriguez and her five-day-old baby, also taking some money.
The baby was found in a parked car, with the dead mother in the trunk of
another car nearby. The relationship between Carty and her boyfriend Chris
Anthony Robinson - also charged - and the armed kidnappers is not yet clear.
A Kissimmee, Florida, man beat his girlfriend's three-year-old son to death. Giovanni Vega said the boy fell on a concrete stairway at the hotel where his family lived. Vega said he tried to revive the boy by running a cold bath and hitting the child in the face. He said he didn't call emergency services because he feared police would discover his supplies. Vega is a heroin addict and drug dealer. He explained that the boy, Xavier Collado, and sister Xaimara were alone at the time of the accident because Vega was busy dealing drugs.
A Texas sex offender's probation includes the controversial condition that he not have sex until he is married. In 1999 Robert Torres, now 19, was sentenced to five years on probation after he had sex with a 13-year-old girl. Since then he impregnated a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old. After learning of this, at a probation revocation hearing Judge J. Manuel Badales imposed the "no sex until marriage" condition, extended Torres's probation for another five years, and sentenced the teenager to 30 days in jail. Torres said of the order: "I would like to get married, but how am I going to meet anyone?" Diana Philip of the Texas ACLU called the order irresponsible as well as cruel and unusual. Another search for a missing child... this time in Kissimmee, Florida. Donna Gillum rang emergency services to say she hadn't seen her daughter for an hour. She rang 911 three more times that evening while the squad car was on its way. After helicopters, police dogs, and over a dozen officers became involved in the search, Gillum thought of checking with her secondary babysitter. Investigator James Napier said "We go over there, and the child was there. The kid said mom took her over there around 6:30 [in the evening]." Gillum, who faces child neglect charges and may have to pay $2000 for the search, said she didn't remember taking her daughter to the babysitter. She admitted to drinking nine beers in three hours before ringing police.
Wisconsin's David W. Oakley has nine children, by four women. He has at
least $25,000 in unpaid child support. The state supreme court ruled this
week that a judge was not wrong to bar Oakley from having more children
unless he could support them. One of the mothers, carnival worker
Lucretia Thompson-Smith said she still is supportive of Oakley; after all,
her other children's fathers don't always pay child support. Oakley's
current girlfriend, Rachel Ward, said "He's a completely different
person now" and that Oakley, who was born in prison, is "more or
less used to everybody leaving him. That's why I can understand how he's
been leaving the women".
Ward, whose tubes are tied, said "He don't want [children]. He's
just a very potent guy". His ex-wife Jill Cochrane said "He
keeps his girls pregnant so they're his and no other guys are attracted to
them".
A 15-year-old Hutchins, Texas, girl was locked in her bedroom at night,
ostensibly to prevent her from making herself vomit after meals. The
girl, who fled to a neighbour's property, was examined at hospital and was
determined to have no signs of an eating disorder. Police chief G.E.
Griffin said the girl's family belong to Believer's Fellowship, a group
which encourage followers to have many children. The girl's mother said
she has 12 children.
Last month in this city of 2,000, an eight-year-old girl was found to
have been locked in a closet for months. The girl was severely
malnourished.
One wonders about the health of this family. Clearwater, Minnesota, County Undersheriff Lyle Colligan called it "an absolutely unbelievable, tragic coincidence" when Arne and Carol Kleppe's 3-year-old adopted son drowned in Six Lake on Sunday. The couple's son and daughter drowned in the same lake in 1998. The Kleppes said the boy vanished when he was off playing with the family dog. Colligan said "we've done a very thorough investigation, and we aren't seeing anything other than a horrible repeat of an awful tragedy" and that the investigation is closed unless new information is brought forward.
Rounding off the obligatory "dead children" section is Maria
Ricardo, who looked on as two of her sister's children were tortured,
killed, and buried by their father, Marco Barrera, in the Angeles National
Forest. Sheriff's deputies happened to see the family near a freshly dug
grave in the forest. They dug up five-year-old Ernesto Barragon's
starved, beaten body and later found two-year-old Lupita Esquivel's body
nearby.
Ricardo, 31, was sentenced to 12 years, eight months in prison on Friday.
Her sister has just completed her sentence for child endangerment.
Barrera now has only 14 children, eight by his wife and six by her sister,
Ricardo.
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