USA > History > 2006 > Violence (I)

The body of Nixzmary Brown, 7,

at the R. G. Ortiz Funeral Home on the Lower East Side on Monday.

The police say her stepfather beat her to death on Wednesday.

Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Hundreds Mourn Slain Girl,

Moved by a Life Too Sad and Too Short        NYT

17.1.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/17girl.html

Baby left for dead after family killed

Updated 5/31/2006 11:43 PM ET
AP
USA Today

GARDEN GROVE, Calif. (AP) — A 1-year-old girl spent up to three days alone with the bloody bodies of her murdered family, her face kicked or beaten and lips cracked from dehydration, police said.

"She was left for dead," Lt. Mike Handfield said Tuesday. "If she would have been here any longer, she could have perished from lack of food and water."

Police found the bodies of Phuong Hung Le, 30, his wife, Trish Dawn Lam, 25, and Lam's 6-year-old son, Tommy, on Monday when they conducted a welfare check at the family's home, on a street lined with two-story stucco houses about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County.

All the victims were stabbed, Lt. Dennis Elsworth said Wednesday, withholding details of the wounds.

The girl, whose name was not immediately available, was treated at a hospital for dehydration and facial injuries and placed in protective custody.

The girl smiled at the officer who found her, Handfield said. "She clung to him and he hugged her. She was glad to be next to a warm human body, to have somebody with her."

Because of the girl's dehydrated state, detectives believe the killings may have occurred Friday evening ? the last time the family was heard from.

Investigators did not know the motive for the attack, and no arrests had been made. Authorities did not say what type of weapon was used in the attack but ruled out a murder-suicide.

There were no signs of forced entry, and evidence at the scene suggested that the family knew the attacker or attackers, police said.

"It looks like they took some time in the house. It wasn't like they went in and left right away," Elsworth said. Police would not say whether a security camera on the home's eaves recorded anything.

Lam worked for a small casino in San Bernardino County, and Le was unemployed, police said.

The slain man had a history of arrests on non-violent charges and had once spent time in prison, but police said they were not sure whether that had any bearing on the case. State prison records showed a Phong Hung Le, 30, was sentenced to four years on a robbery conviction and more than two years for destruction of jail property.

"I don't know about enemies, and I don't know how my brother-in-law was doing," said Lam's older brother, Philip. "He didn't really go out much."

The couple, who had been dating for several years, married in 2005, he said. His family emigrated from Vietnam a decade ago.

"I'm trying to figure this all out," Philip Lam said from the family home in Escondido. "So far there are a lot of broken hearts around here."

    Baby left for dead after family killed, UT, 31.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-baby-left-for-dead_x.htm

Stolen Lives

Technology and Easy Credit Give Identity Thieves an Edge

May 30, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN LELAND and TOM ZELLER Jr.

PHOENIX — In a Scottsdale police station last December, a 23-year-old methamphetamine user showed officers a new way to steal identities.

His arrest had been unremarkable. This metropolitan area, which includes Scottsdale and Phoenix, has the highest rate of identity theft complaints in the nation, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Even members of the Scottsdale police force have had their identities stolen.

But the suspect showed officers something they had not seen before. Browsing a government Web site, he pulled up a local divorce document listing the parties' names, addresses and bank account numbers, along with scans of their signatures. With a common software program and some check stationery, the document provided all he needed to print checks in his victims' names — and it was all made available, with some fanfare, by the county recorder's office. The site had thousands of them.

The data were not as rich as some found in stolen mail or trash bins. But for law enforcement officials here, this was another turn in a cat-and-mouse game in which criminals have outpaced most efforts to stop them.

"We're trying to keep up with the technology," said Lt. Craig Chrzanowski, who runs Scottsdale's property crimes division, including a computer crimes unit started two years ago. "But they're getting a lot better."

In an economy that runs increasingly on the instantaneous flow of information and credit — aggressively promoted by banks and credit card companies despite the risks — Phoenix and its surrounding area provide a window on one of the system's unintended consequences.

According to a Federal Trade Commission survey in 2003, about 10 million Americans — 1 in 30 — had their identities stolen in the previous year, with losses to the economy of $48 billion. Subsequent surveys, by Javelin Strategy and Research, a private research company, found that the number of victims had declined to nine million last year but that the losses had risen to $56.6 billion.

In Arizona, one in six adults had their identities stolen in the last five years, about twice the national rate, according to the Javelin survey.

Arizona officials have responded with a preventive mantra: shred all documents and avoid giving Social Security numbers or bank account numbers to strangers over the telephone or the Internet. The State Legislature has passed tougher penalties for people caught stealing or trafficking in stolen identities.

But the real problem, many officials and consumer advocates say, lies elsewhere. In recent years banks have campaigned energetically to extend more credit to more people with fewer hassles, and retailers and consumers have embraced instant, near-anonymous access to credit.

Last year a group of prosecutors, law enforcement officers and security executives from banks and credit card associations met to discuss ways of curbing identity theft. The group had plenty of ideas, including PIN numbers or fingerprint verification for all credit card purchases and a ban on mailings that include blank checks.

But all ran counter to the promotional campaigns of banks and, banks say, to the desires of consumers.

"There's a disconnect between corporate leadership at financial institutions and their security departments," said Brad H. Astrowsky, a former prosecutor who was part of the group. "Marketing people are ruling the day in banking. They can do things to fix the problem, but they have no incentive and motivation to do it. Preventing something from happening is a cost. What's the benefit? It's hard to quantify."

A Hot Spot for Thieves

Several factors converge to make Arizona a hot spot for identity theft. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, according to the Census Bureau, and its growth exaggerates trends that exist in many communities: a mobile population and high numbers of immigrants and retirees. It also has a heavy traffic in methamphetamine.

Methamphetamine users, whose binges keep them up for days in a row, have the time to sort through trash or old mail for Social Security numbers, bank account numbers or other identifying information, said Andrew P. Thomas, the county attorney. Dealers trade drugs for stolen identities that they use to launder their profits. Nearly half the identity theft cases in Mr. Thomas's office have a connection to methamphetamine, he said.

At the same time, he added, "More than half of the illegal immigrants entering the U.S. come through Arizona," creating a market for fraudulent Social Security numbers and driver's licenses.

Though Arizona passed the nation's first identity theft law in 1996, law officers say they are fighting a crime that is as swift and adaptive as the economy it exploits.

The newest wave of thefts here involves copying the magnetic strip from a victim's credit card onto the back of another. When thieves use the doctored cards, the transactions are charged to their victims' accounts. "Even if the cashier asks for my driver's license, the name on the front is going to match," said Todd C. Lawson, an assistant attorney general in Phoenix who specializes in identity theft prosecutions.

The machine to copy the magnetic strip, Mr. Lawson added, is the one nearly every hotel in America uses to recode room key cards.

And the county's Web site, which earned a place in the Smithsonian's permanent research collection on information technology innovation, has made Social Security numbers and other information, once viewable only by visiting the county recorder's office, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Police officers and prosecutors in Phoenix knew of just two cases involving public records, but most victims do not know how their identities are stolen.

For local law enforcement, pursuing even low-tech, small-time thieves is often complicated and expensive. The victim could be in Arizona, the thief in another state and the transactions spread all over the world. "If someone goes on the Internet and buys goods from Bangladesh, do you call witnesses from Bangladesh?" asked Barnett Lotstein, a special assistant county attorney.

Mr. Lawson said, "I don't think we prosecute 5 percent of it."

On a recent afternoon, Lt. Russ Skinner, who runs the county sheriff's computer crimes division, hefted three vinyl binders onto a wooden table. For the detectives in his unit, this is what the "crime of the 21st century" looks like: photographs of litter-strewn hotel rooms, and of a 33-year-old woman in various stages of methamphetamine-fueled decline.

When detectives caught up with her last August, after nearly three months of investigation, the woman was paying other users to steal mail for her — especially preapproved credit offers — and had parlayed those into credit cards or fraudulent accounts in 46 different names. She had secured housing, utilities and a series of small online loans in her victims' names.

"She wasn't the smartest or the most creative," Lieutenant Skinner said. "She just knew how to get it done."

A Connection to Drug Use

In the past, a drug user who needed money might go into a convenience store with a gun, Lieutenant Skinner said. "They're on the surveillance camera. They might get shot. They might get stopped in the parking lot for having a broken taillight," he said. "Now they can just sit at a computer, no one sees them and they can buy whatever they want."

Officials here began to notice a sharp rise in identity theft about five years ago, said Paul K. Charlton, United States attorney for the District of Arizona.

"The first tip-off was that we started to see a lot of mailbox break-ins by tweakers," Mr. Charlton said, referring to methamphetamine users.

When police officers raided home methamphetamine laboratories that were then proliferating on the outskirts of town, they found stacks of stolen mail or notebooks filled with credit card information. They also found thieves were using acetone, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, to "wash" the ink off checks, a simple means of identity fraud.

These small laboratories lend themselves to identity theft rings, said John C. Horton, a White House aide in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a laboratory, one or two people typically have some technical knowledge, and others specialize in procuring materials.

Identity theft rings follow the same pattern, with a handful of grunts stealing mail for one person who knows how to turn the information into credit cards or checks, Mr. Horton said. "It doesn't seem to happen with cocaine or heroin because we don't produce heroin and cocaine in this country," he said. "Meth production is to some degree a social activity in the same way as identity theft."

Though the Arizona police have closed many laboratories, the identity theft rings have survived or multiplied.

From its commercial downtown, Phoenix extends in a patchwork of satellite communities, some so new that the highway connecting them does not appear on the maps in the central post office. In the mid-1990's, as Phoenix's population boomed, the Postal Service created cluster mailboxes that served whole housing developments. Like other conveniences associated with the city's rapid growth, the boxes have proved a boon for identity thieves.

"You can jimmy one open and get everyone's mail at the same time," said Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor. After numerous break-ins, the Postal Service has spent $12 million on reinforced mailboxes, but many communities here still have the old ones.

Some thieves drive around neighborhoods with their laptops until they find a resident's unsecured wireless Internet connection. If the police investigate a fraudulent purchase, they will trace it to the customer with the connection, not to the thief who placed the order.

Since 1994, a Phoenix security officer named Bob Hartle, frustrated by his own experience with identity theft, has led an often lonely campaign for tighter controls on organizations that handle people's data, and curbs on the way credit card companies, banks and stores grant credit.

Data breaches in the last year have exposed the personal information of more than 80 million Americans, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that follows identity theft. On May 3, a thief stole computer disks holding the names, Social Security numbers and other information of 26.6 million veterans from the residence of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who had taken the data home without authorization. In most states, organizations are not required to tell consumers if their identities have been compromised.

"It's the sharing of data without necessary safeguards that enables this crime to grow as it has," said Torin Monahan, an assistant professor of justice and social inquiry at Arizona State University. "The response is always 'protect yourself, go to these workshops, get a shredder.' That diverts attention away from the extent to which these are systemic problems."

Seventeen states have passed "credit freeze" laws enabling consumers to prevent banks or credit agencies from issuing new accounts in their names.

But here, as in other states, businesses have successfully opposed such legislation.

"They're fighting us tooth and nail," said Mr. Hartle, who runs ID Theft Services Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides free help for victims.

"Banks, credit card companies, retailers want to make it easy to buy," Mr. Hartle said. "They write off identity theft as a cost of doing business. So whenever legislation comes up that's going to cost them money, they throw themselves against it."

Nessa E. Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association, said freezing credit could create problems for consumers, especially if they needed to get a new cellphone or change residences in a hurry.

"A credit freeze is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but people don't realize how often they need to use their credit report," Ms. Feddis said. "There's a balance between security and convenience."

She continued, "We all want fraud to go away, but we don't want to take 20 extra minutes every time we do online banking. We like buying airline tickets online, but there's a risk."

Though consumers worry about identity theft, Ms. Feddis said, banks absorb most of the losses.

Credit card companies point to new monitoring systems that have reduced loss from fraud as a percentage of overall transaction volume. At Visa, fraud accounted for 7 cents per $100 in transactions, down from 18 cents per $100 in 1990. "We could have a system reducing fraud to zero basis points, but it wouldn't meet what consumers are demanding," said Rosetta Jones, a Visa spokeswoman. "We need to deliver what consumers want in a way that is secure."

Fritz M. Elmendorf, a spokesman for the Consumer Bankers Association, described a chess match with identity criminals. For example, banks now protect prescreened credit card offers with address-matching technologies that make it harder for thieves to have cards sent to a drop address, Mr. Elmendorf said.

"There are more tools today than ever to ascertain the identity of a credit applicant," he said. "And the industry can point to a lot of things — some of which they won't talk about in detail — to validate people."

In the community of Chandler, southeast of Phoenix, Bobby Joe Harris questioned the efforts of businesses and banks to protect his identity.

Mr. Harris, 60, is a retired police chief. His wife, Judy, is a retired bank manager. Last December, Mrs. Harris was shopping at a Sam's Club store when a cashier said their membership had been canceled. When Mr. Harris tried to reactivate their membership in January, he learned that the store had issued a new credit card on their account to a woman who had said she was the couple's daughter.

"I don't have a daughter," Mr. Harris said. "I told the lady, 'I don't think so.' "

In two phone calls, possibly working with a store employee, the thief had raised the Harrises' credit limit to $10,000 from $3,500 and then to $15,000, and had run up charges of $11,093. No one had called them.

"It was only by luck that we found out," Mr. Harris said.

Seeking Protection

Though like most consumer victims the Harrises did not have to pay the bogus charges, they now pay $220 a year to LifeLock, a protective service that started last September in Phoenix.

The company's core service is simple: Whenever a bank or other business requests to look at a LifeLock subscriber's credit history, the company gets a fraud alert asking to confirm that the customer applied for credit. Federal law empowers consumers to get these alerts on their own, but they must reapply regularly to one of the three companies that issue credit reports.

Other companies offer different protections. None has had to prove that its services are effective.

When the Maricopa County recorder's office began posting records online in 1997, it was one of the first in the country to do so. Since then, legislatures in other states, including New York and Florida, have wrestled with whether — or how — to make their information available online.

A law in Florida requires that all Social Security and financial account numbers be stripped from online records by 2007, although new legislation may delay that another year.

In Phoenix, the county recorder's office posts 8,000 to 10,000 documents a day. Most are innocuous, but some, including divorce decrees and tax lien records, have sensitive information.

"I'm not insensitive to people's fear," said Helen Purcell, the county recorder. "I have the same fear. My information is out there, too." But it is far too late to start editing Social Security numbers or other data from the county Web site, she said. "We have 100 million documents out there now."

In the absence of full security, Arizonans cling to what protections they can. On a recent morning in Ventana Lakes, a development of older residents northwest of Phoenix, Lois Owen and Joan Schanks joined a small procession of neighbors to a community "shredathon" organized by the attorney general's office and AARP. Since the first shredathon last fall, residents around the state have carted 12 tons of paper to the mobile machines, in many cases supplementing the shredding they do at home.

"It's a big relief," Ms. Schanks said as she watched 20 pounds of old bank statements disappear. Yet even with the shredding, the residents here cannot begin to estimate how many people have their personal information, or how tempted any of those individuals may be to sell that information, Mr. Lawson, the prosecutor, said.

"You can take all the precautions you want," he said. "But everyone's exposed to a certain extent."

    Technology and Easy Credit Give Identity Thieves an Edge, NYT, 30.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/us/30identity.html?hp&ex=1148961600&en=0f656929851f45e2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Mo. Suspects in Taped Rape, Killing Nabbed

May 27, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:46 a.m. ET
The New York Times

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- A couple accused of videotaping the rape of a woman and killing her were arrested after an accident that followed a 911 call in which one suspect said they planned to hurt themselves, authorities said Friday.

Richard Davis and Dena Riley, who lived together in Independence, Mo., were arrested Thursday evening in southwestern Missouri after their truck apparently spun out on a rural dirt road and fell into a ditch, Barton County Sheriff Shannon Higgins said.

Both were injured, as was Davis' 5-year-old niece, who was in the truck and was later reported missing by the girl's parents, police said. The girl, who had a small cut above her left eye, ran to farmers who were working in the area at the time of the crash, Higgins said.

FBI spokesman Michael Pettry said authorities were looking into possible federal kidnapping charges in connection with the girl.

Davis, 41, and Riley, 39, already are charged with first-degree murder, first-degree assault, kidnapping, forcible rape and two counts of forcible sodomy in the death of Marsha Spicer, 41. Her naked body was found May 15 in a shallow grave, a day after she was believed to have been strangled.

The couple fled soon after police interviewed them last week, and before authorities obtained a search warrant and found the chilling videotape on a TV stand in the couple's apartment.

Davis and Riley had stayed Wednesday in the southeastern Kansas town of Arcadia with Davis' half-sister. The next day, the family decided to go to lunch in nearby Pittsburg, Kan., and Davis' niece rode with him and Riley, Higgins said. The three never showed up at the restaurant.

Higgins would not say what the couple's intentions were with the girl.

''Judging from their past,'' Higgins said, ''use your worst imagination and run with it.''

Higgins' office said in a statement Friday that Riley told a deputy during a 911 call shortly before the couple's capture that she and Davis planned to hurt themselves.

Higgins said in a phone interview later Friday that when the deputy pressed Riley for her location, she named a road sign that helped authorities determine they were probably on an eight-mile stretch of dirt road that winds through a rural area of southern Barton County.

The truck crashed as deputies searched for the couple, Higgins said, adding that he reached the scene a short time later. He said he handcuffed Davis without incident and left him on the side of the road while he tended to Riley, who had a facial injury and was in and out of consciousness.

Riley remained hospitalized Friday, authorities said, but information on her injuries was not released. Davis was released from the hospital and was being held in Independence awaiting arraignment.

Authorities would not release audio or a transcript of the 911 call, saying it could be used in a possible trial.

Mike Sanders, the Jackson County prosecutor, said the video, which appears to have been taped in the couple's bedroom, is so disturbing that there was talk of offering counseling to those involved in investigating the case. The video shows Spicer with duct tape over her eyes and her hands behind her back. She is beaten, raped and sodomized as she pleads for the attack to stop, police said.

Sanders said his office will determine whether to pursue the death penalty. Pettry, the FBI spokesman, said authorities were not aware of any other victims.

Davis is on parole after spending nearly 18 years in prison for a 1987 rape and sodomy conviction. Riley has previously been charged with misdemeanors, but no felonies.

Associated Press Writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this report.

    Mo. Suspects in Taped Rape, Killing Nabbed, NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Couple-Charged.html

3 Bronx Teenagers on Different Paths, and a Bloody Crossing

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and MATTHEW SWEENEY

One wintry Saturday afternoon, Joel Rivera, 13, skulked around his Bronx apartment while his family prepared for his sister's baby shower. He was bored. When someone complained that Joel was getting in the way, he decided to go out. He promised to be back by his 8:30 p.m. curfew.

A few blocks away, Edwin Owusu-Hammond, 15, was hanging out in his apartment with a friend, playing video games. As the sun began to set, Edwin, whose nickname was Smart and who was so unfailingly polite that he irritated relatives by prefacing his questions with "Please," walked his friend to a nearby bus stop. Then he started back home.

Moments later, Edwin, his clothes bloody, was wrapped in his mother's arms, dying with three stab wounds. Five days later, Joel was arrested in the stabbing, and on Tuesday — 80 days after Edwin's death — another 13-year-old, Wendell Belle, was indicted in Edwin's murder. Wendell, charged as an adult, pleaded not guilty to charges that he was the one who stabbed Edwin. Joel, who is being charged as a juvenile, pleaded guilty to the equivalent of second-degree murder.

Wendell's arrest took so long, officials said, because it took time to try to unravel the events of the evening of the murder. But in the end, investigators came to believe that the motive may have been grimly simple: Edwin was probably stabbed because he was an easy target for robbery.

Two 13-year-olds charged in the killing of a 15-year-old — a rare occurrence in a city with falling crime rates, detectives investigating homicides say. A close look at the events leading up to Edwin's death on Feb. 25, compiled through interviews with the police, as well as relatives and friends of the suspects and victim, presents a stark chronology of tiny moments that ended in death.

The three boys may have lived near one another, but their lives could not have been more different, and in those differences may well have rested the seeds of the fatal encounter.

It is unclear whether Edwin knew the other boys, though all three lived in University Heights, a neighborhood of immigrants from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Ghana — where Edwin's family came from.

Family members and friends said Edwin was earnest, polite and uncharacteristically responsible for a 15-year-old. He was doted on by his mother. Wendell and Joel, meanwhile, had chaotic family lives. Each had had run-ins with the police, even though they were barely out of grade school.

Edwin moved easily between Ghana and New York City; Wendell and Joel rarely left the South Bronx. Edwin attended one of the most respected Catholic high schools in the city, while Wendell and Joel had spotty attendance records at two of the lowest-scoring public middle schools in the city.

Joel grew up with his grandmother, a day care worker; his sister Crystal, 17; and a 15-year-old sister in a third-floor apartment on Andrews Avenue. His mother had a history of drug abuse and mental illness and vanished from the hospital after giving birth to Joel, relatives said. "The hospital called and said: 'Listen, we've got this baby here; what do you guys want to do with it?' " said Joel's uncle Nick Rivera. "My mom and me went and got him."

From that beginning, Joel moved smoothly through childhood — until adolescence. "Then he started hanging out with the wrong crowd," Mr. Rivera said.

Joel's grandmother imposed a strict curfew and bought Joel an Xbox video game system to keep him happy at home. But the lure of a group of tough boys who hung out in the building's stairwells proved too much. "Everybody goes through that stage," Mr. Rivera said. "You want to be with the big boys. You want to make a name for yourself. That leads to you getting arrested."

Relatives said Joel was arrested for robbery and assault as a juvenile. His criminal record is sealed.

"Joel has a lot of problems, but he's not a bad kid," said Crystal, his sister. "He just wanted to be down with his friends."

Wendell Belle lived with his mother and several siblings on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Known by his nickname, Winky, Wendell was a member of a local group of boys who called themselves the Pop Off Gang, possibly because the group took pride in being ready to "pop off," a phrase referring to fighting, Joel's relatives said.

They hung out in the stairwell of Joel's building, smoking marijuana, neighbors said. Even now, the gang's graffiti tags cover the building's interior walls, elevators and doors. Crystal said older members pressured younger boys to sell marijuana and to rob neighborhood children.

Evelyn Lopez, Wendell's mother, said she called the police in early February to have him arrested for refusing to stay at home — a violation of his probation after a robbery arrest. "He's been running away from home, so I called the cops and told them to put him away," she said.

She denied that her son had been involved in the stabbing but acknowledged that Wendell was not staying at her house at the time.

"My son is a good boy," Ms. Lopez said. "It's only when he's outside. He wants to go to parties. He don't want to listen to my curfew. I guess he feels that 9 o'clock is too early."

Edwin was a freshman at All Hallows High School. He wanted to be an engineer, loved computers and — like Joel — enjoyed playing video games. He spent hours on homework in the library and had a knack for repairing electronics, like the family's videocassette recorder. "There was nothing my son couldn't fix," said Patricia Hammond-Church, Edwin's mother, who is a chef for a catering company.

About 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 25, Edwin said goodbye to his mother and accompanied his best friend, Duke Afihene, 15, to the bus stop after the two spent several hours playing video games at Edwin's apartment.

Afterward, Edwin called to leave a message on Duke's cellphone to make sure his friend had arrived home safely.

At about the same time, Joel ran into Wendell on Andrews Avenue, just moments after leaving his family's apartment. As the boys walked, according to the police, Wendell showed Joel a kitchen knife that he had brought along. Then they saw Edwin chatting on a cellphone, just steps away from the first-floor apartment he shared with his mother.

There are two versions of what happened next: Joel would later tell his sister Crystal that Wendell saw Edwin and said, "Yo, let's get him for his cellphone." But the police said the two boys had been lurking along Andrews Avenue for hours, looking for an easy target to "juke," or rob.

At a court hearing for Joel last month, Officer Peter Vasquez said that the 13-year-olds demanded Edwin's cellphone, that Edwin refused, that an argument broke out and that Edwin was stabbed three times — in the wrist, the abdomen and the chest. The attackers ran, one tossing a kitchen knife into a vacant lot across the street from Edwin's building, the police say.

Edwin, who was bleeding heavily, staggered home. He reached his front door and was able to pound on it before he collapsed on the threshold. His mother came out and cradled him. Later, she said that when she saw her son's pupils dilate, she knew he might not survive. He was pronounced dead at 7:29 p.m. at Lincoln Hospital, the hospital where he was born.

The next evening, Joel was relaxing in his family's living room.

A report came on the evening news about a boy named Edwin Owusu-Hammond. He had been stabbed to death in the neighborhood. The family did not suspect Joel had been in trouble, in part because he had arrived home well before his 8:30 p.m. curfew.

"His eyes opened up wide," Crystal said. "He was scared. He started immediately telling me what happened. That's not like him."

Joel told Crystal he did not think Wendell was going to stab Edwin. "He thought the kid was just going to scare him with the knife," she said. Joel's family would not say whether any of them had gone to the police.

A few days later after Edwin's death, Wendell's mother, Evelyn Lopez, answered her door in a bathrobe. She started to cry, saying, "I don't want my son in no more trouble."

    3 Bronx Teenagers on Different Paths, and a Bloody Crossing, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/nyregion/18kid.html

Wider Use of DNA Lists Is Urged in Fighting Crime

May 12, 2006
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE

A team of Harvard scientists is proposing that DNA databases contain enough information to identify many criminals whose DNA has not been catalogued through their kinship to people already listed. They say this could be done by a method developed to identify victims of the World Trade Center attacks and other disasters.

The F.B.I.'s DNA database can now be searched only for exact matches to DNA found at crime scenes. But with slight modifications, it could be searched for close relatives of whoever left the DNA.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual to the family," the scientists, Frederick R. Bieber and David Lazer, say in an article in today's issue of Science.

Kinship-based DNA searching is already used in Britain but has not become routine in the United States.

Such searches might be valuable in generating leads, Dr. Bieber said, because 46 percent of prisoners said they had close relatives who either were or had been incarcerated, a Department of Justice survey found in 1996.

Exact matches between crime scene and database DNA may be used as evidence of identity in court. Kinship searching is not intended to provide the same kind of proof but would be simply an investigative tool.

To look for a match, a computer would rank entries in its DNA database in order of their relatedness to the DNA from the crime scene. The police could then look into whether siblings or children of those donors might be suspects.

DNA databases contain only a list of numbers, recording a feature of the DNA at 13 sites along a person's genome. The numbers, though representing only a minute fraction of the genomic information, suffice to indicate the degree of kinship between two donors.

Dr. Bieber said he expected possible objections to a method that places whole families under suspicion. But, he said, "we have a duty to victims to use any reasonable methods as long as there is a basis in law, and this would give investigators new leads in some cases."

Dr. Bieber, a pathologist at the Harvard Medical School, and Charles H. Brenner, a forensic mathematician at the University of California and a co-author of the Science article, were both members of a panel that helped identify remains from the World Trade Center by matching DNA to living relatives.

It was not clear if the formula developed for that situation, where a match was inherently likely, could also be applied to criminal DNA databases, but new calculations have suggested it should work, Dr. Bieber said.

Dr. Lazer said that kinship searches were not usually done on the federal or state DNA databases, but that in most cases they would not be prohibited.

    Wider Use of DNA Lists Is Urged in Fighting Crime, NYT, 12.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/science/12dna.html

Body Was Cut Up and Scattered Through Bronx Neighborhood

May 11, 2006
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and SARAH GARLAND

A Bronx man was expected to be charged yesterday with murdering a co-worker in a late-night dispute in the apartment of the victim's girlfriend. But what stunned detectives and neighbors was not so much the killing itself, but the extraordinary lengths that the authorities say the suspect went to in disposing of the body.

The police say the suspect, Victor Gonzalez, used three knives and a saw to dismember the co-worker, Wilfredo Pinto Jr., and then loaded the parts into black lawn-and-leaf bags and dispersed them throughout Longwood.

Two legs and an arm, cut off at the elbow, were found in a bag dumped on a weedy patch of sidewalk on a corner of Kelly Street. Bloody clothes were found stuffed in another bag about 10 yards away, on Intervale Avenue near Tiffany Street. A blood-covered quilt was tossed under a tree in a park in the quiet residential neighborhood. The victim's head, wrapped in a jacket, was dropped in a trash can in an alley beside a Dawson Street residence.

Other parts, including a shoulder, were thrown near Intermediate School 116. A bag with part of a leg was found near Bruckner Boulevard.

And the victim's torso, the heaviest part, was found in a bag discarded in an alley off 923 Kelly Street, where neighbors said Mr. Gonzalez spent a great deal of time in Apartment 3B with the victim, who was 36, and the victim's girlfriend, Sandra Estrada.

"It was crazy; unbelievable," said Angel Romero, who lives on the block and who, with a local maintenance man, found the bag with the limbs and spent the next several hours trailing police officers as they trekked from place to place retrieving the rest of the remains.

"I found a severed arm and a leg," he added. "You don't ever hear about a body being chopped up. And on your own block? It's crazy."

To the police, the killing fell into some familiar categories: the victim knew the suspect; the murder happened late at night; the motive, the police said, was a dispute, possibly over competing claims to Ms. Estrada's affections.

Homicide detectives had a virtual trove of evidence — the body parts — which made for a grisly trail from the blood-stained apartment where the police believe the killing happened at about 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday, and where they took Mr. Gonzalez into custody early yesterday.

Yesterday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the remains — and the tools used in the crime — were being gathered.

"We believe all the body parts have been found," Mr. Kelly said.

All told, the police said yesterday evening, six bags with remains had been recovered.

Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Pinto worked together on roofing jobs for Triboro Maintenance, on Kelly Street, a company manager said yesterday. He said Mr. Pinto was the supervisor of a team of workers that included Mr. Gonzalez.

Neighbors said that the work arrangement caused tension in the men's private lives. The neighbors described Mr. Pinto as loud and aggressive, often bossing Mr. Gonzalez around.

Reina Laguna, 55, who lives in the building, described Mr. Gonzalez as "a very quiet man." She said Mr. Pinto "likes to intimidate you."

On Tuesday evening, she had Ms. Estrada over for dinner and, about an hour afterward, her guest came back to say the two men were fighting. "She said, 'They're at it again,' " Ms. Laguna said.

True to past episodes, the police said, the men were drinking and began to argue. Ms. Estrada left initially, the police said. At some point, Mr. Gonzalez got a hammer and hit Mr. Pinto with it, the police said, before hacking him to pieces. Ms. Estrada is believed to have witnessed this, the police said.

Mr. Kelly said the fight might have had something to do with work. A detective at the scene said that the cutting had taken hours, and that Mr. Gonzalez had made several trips in and out of the apartment to scatter the bags. He said the suspect had been a butcher in Puerto Rico.

About 5 a.m. yesterday, the police received a call from a woman who described her friend's body parts being in bags. It was about that time that neighbors saw Ms. Estrada race into the street, screaming. "It's not real, it's not real, I can't believe it," Ms. Estrada was yelling, according to Martha Saninocencio, 31, who got Ms. Estrada a chair to sit in and tried to calm her.

Steven Reed, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office, said that Mr. Gonzalez would be charged with second-degree murder and other charges.

He said Mr. Gonzalez was still in the custody of the police in the 41st Precinct last evening.

    Body Was Cut Up and Scattered Through Bronx Neighborhood, 11.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/nyregion/11chop.html

Teen with broken neck survives in woods

Updated 5/2/2006 9:21 PM ET
By Jim Suhr, Associated Press Writer
USA Today

ST. LOUIS — Ashley Reeves had been lying in the woods for more than 30 hours by the time searchers spotted her through the driving rain. The 17-year-old was covered with insect bites, her neck was broken, and investigators were sure she was dead — until she took a breath.
A day earlier, authorities now believe, a high school teacher tried to kill her.

"It was almost disbelief that she was still alive," investigator Steve Johnson of the St. Clair County, Ill., Sheriff's Department, recalled Tuesday.

They had to clear brush and trees to get a stretcher to the girl, then rushed her to Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis, where she was in serious condition Tuesday.

Johnson is now helping to build a case against the 26-year-old teacher and wannabe pro-wrestler, Samson Shelton, who is jailed on $1 million bond and charged with kidnapping and attempted murder.

Authorities have said Ashley and Shelton had a "relationship," though Johnson wouldn't elaborate or say how the girl, who attended a different school, knew the older man.

The investigator would only describe Shelton as a known acquaintance of Ashley and say that Shelton was with investigators early Saturday when they finally found her in a desolate area of Citizens Park in the St. Louis suburb of Belleville, Ill.

She had been missing since leaving her home Thursday afternoon for a job interview; the Jeep she was driving was found eight hours later in another park in the area.

Shelton was a driver's ed teacher by day in tiny Freeburg, Ill., and a pro wrestler and country line dancer by night, authorities said.

No phone listing could be found for him in Smithton, Ill., listed as his home. He has declined a public defender and indicated he would hire his own attorney, though there was none of record as of Tuesday, a St. Clair County Circuit Court clerk said. His arraignment could come later this week, authorities said.

Ashley's family has declined to comment. No further information about her chances for recovery has been released.

Johnson said he hopes the details of what happened to the girl surface more quickly than the long and frustrating search to find her.

Teams with dogs and in helicopters had searched for hours but couldn't locate the girl, and even before Johnson and other searchers entered Citizen's Park with Shelton in tow, Johnson said, "we all believed she was deceased."

When they finally spotted her in the dark, they thought they had a body — until Johnson saw the blonde, blue-eyed girl breathe.

"I wouldn't use the word conscious, and I wouldn't use the word awake," he said. "Her eyes would respond to flashlights, and literally that was about it."

Crews spent roughly half an hour using chain saws to clear the way for emergency workers to finally get a stretcher to the teenager.

Johnson, the father of two daughters, still gets upset when he talks about the case.

"It's critical to get the message out (to parents to know) about who their loved ones associate with and where they're at," he said.

    Teen with broken neck survives in woods, UT, 2.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-02-teen-woods_x.htm

New York Killers, and Those Killed, by Numbers

April 28, 2006
The New York Times
By JO CRAVEN McGINTY

The oldest killer was 88; he murdered his wife. The youngest was 9; she stabbed her friend. The women were more than twice as likely as men to murder a current spouse or lover. But once the romance was over, only the men killed their exes. The deadliest day was on July 10, 2004, when eight people died in separate homicides.

Five people eliminated a boss; 10 others murdered co-workers. Males who killed favored firearms, while women and girls chose knives as often as guns. More homicides occurred in Brooklyn than in any other borough. More happened on Saturday. And roughly a third are unsolved.

At the end of each year, the New York Police Department reports the number of killings — there were 540 in 2005. Typically, much is made of how the number has fallen in recent years — to totals not seen since the early 1960's. But beyond summarizing the overarching trends, the police spend little time compiling the individual details.

The New York Times obtained the basic records for every murder in the city over the last three years, and while the events make for disturbing reading, the numbers can hint at trends, occasionally solve a mystery and in at least some straightforward way answer for the city the questions of who kills and who is killed in the five boroughs.

From 2003 through 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. No information, beyond an occasional physical description, is available on the killers in the unsolved cases.

Of the rest, men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; they killed with guns about two-thirds of the time; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and in more than half the cases, the killer and the victim knew each other.

The police said they were more interested in disrupting crime patterns. "We're looking for things with operational implications — time of day, day of the week — to see that we deploy officers at the right times and in sufficient numbers," said Michael J. Farrell, deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives.

The offender and victim were of the same race in more than three-quarters of the killings. And according to Mr. Farrell, they often had something else in common: More than 90 percent of the killers had criminal records; and of those who wound up killed, more than half had them.

"If the average New Yorker is concerned about being murdered in a random crime, the odds of that happening are really remote," Mr. Farrell said. "If you are living apart from a life of crime, your risk is negligible."

Criminologists confirm that assessment. "People will be shocked to see how safe it is to live in New York City," said Andrew Karmen, a sociology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on victimology. "Victims and offenders are pretty much pulled from the same background. Very often, young victims have young killers. Very often, the victim and killer knew each other."

But plenty of times, events diverge from the norm.

At least a quarter of the city's murders in these three years, were committed by strangers, and in those instances, most were the result of a dispute. Stranger homicides now happen at almost twice the rate of 50 years ago, when, according to a classic study by Marvin Wolfgang, a criminologist, about 14 percent of murders were committed by strangers.

"Homicide used to be regarded as an acquaintance phenomenon with relatively rare incidents involving strangers," said Steven F. Messner, a homicide expert and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. "It's still characteristically an acquaintance event. But the stranger homicides are now nontrivial."

After four years as commander of the Brooklyn North homicide squad, Lt. John Cornicello said the murders in his section of the borough had begun to run together. Yet from memory, he rolled off the details of several: The good Samaritan shot for his Lincoln Navigator after offering a ride to a group of stranded people. The ".40-caliber killer," a serial murderer who shot and killed but did not rob four shopkeepers because he believed they were Middle Eastern.

"More and more, they seem to be the result of stupidity," Lieutenant Cornicello said. "Take the Potato Wedge Killer."

In that recent case, a customer at a KFC restaurant became incensed when he did not receive enough starch with his fried chicken order. After demanding both a refund and an order of potato wedges, he later confronted the cashier with whom he had argued and stabbed him to death.

Among all the city's victims, the oldest was 91; she died during a robbery. Whites and Asians, who seldom murdered, were also infrequently killed: Together, they represented 75 or fewer victims each year. Most homicides occurred outdoors. The deadliest hour was 1 to 2 a.m.

And a small but unsettling number of children were among the victims, including 21 infants and 32 children ages 1 to 10, most of whom died at the hands of a parent.

According to Professor Karmen, 10 is the safest age. "You're too old to be abused or neglected as a child," he said, "and you're not old enough to be out on the streets."

An interesting, though uncommon, group of murders that made it into the police accounting in these years involved a handful of victims who died of injuries they had first suffered in crimes committed one or more years before.

Stabbed, shot, beaten or burned, they survived long enough to be counted as murder victims in another calendar year.

Sixty-nine victims fit this description.

In some instances, they were injured decades ago. The medical examiner alerts the police when such deaths occur, according to Sgt. Edward Yee of the Police Department's crime analysis unit, and the police add the victims to that year's murder tally.

For example, 21 deaths that were counted as murders in 2005 resulted from injuries that occurred in earlier years.

The oldest involved a shooting in 1975, when a man attacked his brother in a domestic dispute. That raised the murder toll to 540, the lowest figure recorded by the city in four decades, but only 519 murders were committed last year.

Subtracting these belated deaths makes the recent decline in the number of homicides — which has grabbed headlines — seem even more stunning. But for the purpose of generating the annual murder tally, the police do not distinguish between fresh and delayed murders.

"No one does," Mr. Farrell said, referring to other police departments.

Within the city, 40 percent of the murders occurred in Brooklyn. The 75th Precinct, with 90, had the most of any precinct, but there were hot spots scattered throughout the city, in Brooklyn's 73rd, 79th and 83rd Precincts, for example, and in the 44th and 46th Precincts in the Bronx. In and around the 32nd Precinct in Harlem could be dangerous, too.

No one is certain what explains the recent decreases in the overall number of homicides, but many criminologists believe social factors may help explain why, and where, most murders continue to occur.

"The problem of crime and violence is rooted in neighborhood conditions — high rates of poverty, family disruption, failing schools, lack of recreational opportunities, active recruitment by street gangs, drug markets," Professor Karmen said. "People forced to reside under those conditions are at a greater risk of getting caught up in violence, as victims or as perpetrators."

The police are generally unimpressed by such theories, as well as the minutiae surrounding the deaths.

"Crime is concentrated," Mr. Farrell said. "Who knows why? We're looking at what we can affect."

The roughly one-third of the homicides that remain unsolved create one of the larger categories of murder. Typically, 50 to 55 percent of murders are solved in the same calendar year in which the crime is committed, according to Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner in New York.

The police clear an additional number of murders from previous years, for an overall annual clearance rate of about 70 percent. That beats the national average, which is closer to 62 percent, according to F.B.I. statistics.

In New York, several things may contribute to the number of open cases, according to the police and criminologists. A significant number may have been stranger murders, which are particularly hard to solve. It can take months to collect witness statements.

And sometimes, detectives just cannot get the right person to talk.

"The big secret of detective work," Lieutenant Cornicello said, "is that you've got to get somebody else to tell you what happened."

    New York Killers, and Those Killed, by Numbers, NYT, 28.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/28homicide.html?hp&ex=1146283200&en=bda64c7c2945b725&ei=5094&partner=homepage

2 Texas teens charged in vicious attack at party

Posted 4/27/2006 7:06 PM ET
USA Today

SPRING, Texas (AP) — Two white teenagers severely beat and sodomized a 16-year-old Hispanic boy who they believed had tried to kiss a 12-year-old girl at a party, authorities said.

The attackers forced the boy out of the Saturday night house party, beat him and sodomized him with a plastic pipe, shouting anti-Hispanic epithets, said sheriff's Lt. John Martin.

He was in critical condition Thursday, five days after the attack.

Harris County prosecutor Mike Trent said the attackers also cut the victim with a knife. They then poured bleach over the boy, apparently to destroy DNA evidence, and left him for dead, authorities said. He was not discovered until Sunday, 12 hours after the attack.

The victim, whose name was not released, suffered severe internal injuries, cuts on his chest and head injuries.

"It's about 50-50 whether he lives or dies at this point," Trent said.

Investigators said no adults were supervising the party, where they found evidence of the use of marijuana and the sedative Xanax.

David Henry Tuck, 18, and a 17-year-old male were charged with aggravated sexual assault, which carries a maximum of five years to life in prison, investigators said. Prosecutors were considering whether to add hate-crime charges.

"Whether it is one or isn't a hate crime, and it may be, that will make no difference here," Trent said. "This is already a first-degree felony and it can't be elevated any higher. There's nowhere to go beyond this, unless the victim dies."

If the boy dies and it is ruled a hate crime, Tuck could face the death penalty, authorities said. The 17-year-old would be too young to face execution.

Next-door neighbor Nancy Benavides said teens frequent the house where the attack took place but they were never loud. She said she didn't hear anything unusual Saturday night, including the attack.

"I feel bad. I wish I would have been able to hear something so we could have helped," she said.

Sheriff's Lt. John Denholm said investigators believe the attack was prompted by the age difference between the 12-year-old girl and the 16-year-old boy.

"The two suspects were being mean and vicious and looking for any excuse to stomp somebody," he said.

Denholm said the 12-year-old girl and her older brother witnessed the attack, but made no effort to stop it.

Turner was jailed on $100,000 bail and was waiting to make his initial court appearance. Tuck's bail was initially set at $20,000, but it was revoked Thursday. He was being held in the Harris County Jail.

Charles Hinton, Tuck's attorney, did not return a telephone call Thursday seeking comment. It was not immediately known if the other youth had an attorney.

Spring is a middle-class, largely white suburb of 36,000 residents, about 10 miles north of the Houston city line. The town's population is about 18% Hispanic.

    2 Texas teens charged in vicious attack at party, UT, 27.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-27-texas-teens-charged_x.htm


 

During the funeral procession Saturday, Karrie Harvey-Edwards, manager of Eternity Funeral Services,
and Leroy Whiting, hearse driver, left mementos at the Bronx intersection where David Pacheco Jr. was shot.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times        NYT        April 23, 2006

Sad Farewell to Bronx 2-Year-Old Slain on Easter Sunday        NYT        23.4.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/nyregion/23funeral.html
 

At St. Raymond's Cemetery Saturday, David Pacheco Jr.'s mother,
Joanne Sanabria, in fur-trimmed hood, and father, David Sr., in white suit.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times        NYT        April 23, 2006

Sad Farewell to Bronx 2-Year-Old Slain on Easter Sunday        NYT        23.4.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/nyregion/23funeral.html 

Sad Farewell

to Bronx 2-Year-Old Slain on Easter Sunday

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

The little boy used to wake up in the mornings and ask for his SpongeBob SquarePants doll. He used to get excited and jump on the sofa when a fire truck passed by. Yesterday, he lay in a white coffin in an old Bronx church.

He lived for only about 900 days. The little closed coffin, only 44 inches long, was wheeled into Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church on East Gun Hill Road at precisely 10:30 a.m. by two pallbearers.

People stared at it, there in front of a pink-hued altar, beneath a dome-shaped painting of the Virgin Mary above. They sniffled occasionally, and sat slumped in the pews, quietly pondering why.

They had come in the rain to mourn David Pacheco Jr., a 2½-year-old boy shot and killed by a stray bullet in the Bronx on Easter Sunday. The randomness of the shooting, the brutality of its Easter timing, the innocence of the victim, the visible grief of the boy's parents, all weighed the mourners down with a kind of numbness.

In the wooden pews sat family members — including David's mother, Joanne Sanabria, and his father, David Pacheco Sr., who was dressed like his son in a white suit — and a few strangers who felt compelled to pay their respects.

Aida Jimenez, a schoolteacher in the Bronx who did not know David, brought her 9-year-old daughter, Christina, and held her hand tightly. Christina had never before seen a child's coffin. "I felt that as a parent I have to give my support," Ms. Jimenez said.

The pastor, Father John LoSasso, made a plea during the service to get guns off the streets of New York to prevent more children from dying. "God is sick and tired of our weapons," he told the mourners. "He's sick and tired of our guns."

After the Mass, the funeral procession of about 30 vehicles made a detour. At West Tremont and Harrison Avenues in Morris Heights, scene of the shooting, a hearse stopped and a funeral home official, Karrie Harvey-Edwards, placed a light brown teddy bear and an arrangement of white daisies and yellow roses among the stuffed animals, candles and notes that had been left since last Sunday.

Ms. Sanabria had been driving her son — strapped into a car seat behind her — to an Easter dinner. His two sisters and a cousin were also in the minivan. It was about 2 p.m. when a single bullet punctured the rear door on the driver's side and hit David in the chest. An off-duty emergency medical technician went down from his apartment to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the boy, but David was pronounced dead at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, where he was taken by a livery cab driver who had been passing by.

The police say that two men had gotten into a confrontation with another man near the intersection. Hard looks were exchanged and someone was slapped in the face. The two men left, then returned with a 9-millimeter gun, and one of them fired shots across the intersection.

The man accused of firing the gun, Nicholas Morris, 26, was charged with second-degree murder and other offenses. Police continue to look for another man, Ronneil Gilliam, 25.

David was the latest in a string of children to have died violently in the Bronx in recent months. At least eight other boys and girls, from infants to 10-year-olds, have been killed or seriously wounded by gunfire, stabbings or beatings since the start of 2005 in the Bronx, the borough with the largest percentage of children.

Last year, a 10-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet after a fight broke out in a park in the Mott Haven section.

Before the procession arrived at the memorial at West Tremont and Harrison, Angelo Cruz stopped by on his way home from work. Mr. Cruz, 44, is the emergency worker who tried to revive the boy. "I check on the shrine," he said. "I still can't believe it."

At St. Raymond's Cemetery, where the family members gathered at the grave, the boy's mother, Ms. Sanabria, approached the coffin and let go of two doves from her hands. They fluttered low, just above the heads of the mourners, and then flew back toward her.

"They want to stay with you," someone standing next to Ms. Sanabria said just before the doves flew away. "He wants to stay with you."

Sarah Garland, Colin Moynihan and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting for this article.

    Sad Farewell to Bronx 2-Year-Old Slain on Easter Sunday, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/nyregion/23funeral.html

6 slain in Pennsylvania mourned in NYC

Posted 4/20/2006 1:13 AM ET
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — Six people slain in rural Pennsylvania were memorialized Wednesday evening in New York City, where the family lived for decades before trading in urban streets for what was supposed to be a quieter life in the country.

Weeping relatives filed past six flower-draped coffins — including a child-size casket for the youngest victim, a 5-year-old boy named Chance — before the service at Brooklyn's Mount Sinai Cathedral overflowing with more than 500 people.

Investigators said a young relative confessed to the slayings after the bodies were discovered in the in Leola, Pa., home's basement earlier this month. The motive remains a mystery.

Over the Palm Sunday weekend, police said, Jesse Wise Jr., 21, bludgeoned or strangled everyone in the home, leaving the walls and ceilings in three bedrooms splattered with blood.

Among the victims was the clan's 64-year-old matriarch, Emily Wise, who tended to three generations of relatives living under her roof while her husband, Jessie L. Wise, commuted weekdays to work in his Brooklyn construction business.

The Rev. Clarence Sexton Jr. said Emily Wise "loved her grandchildren, whether they were right or whether they were wrong."

"She loved them, and I know for a fact that regardless of the circumstances she would still want us to pray for the soul," he said, stopping amid thunderous applause and cheering. It was clear he was referring to Jesse Wise Jr., who is charged with six counts of criminal homicide.

Police said the young man also killed his uncle Jessie James Wise, 17; his aunt Agnes Arleen Wise, 43; another aunt, Wanda Wise, 45; and her two children, Skyler Wise, 19; and Chance.

A preliminary hearing for Jesse Wise was scheduled for Thursday.

    6 slain in Pennsylvania mourned in NYC, UT, 20.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-20-pa-bodies_x.htm

Poisonings at Church Are Termed Retaliation

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

The man who committed one of Maine's most notorious crimes, poisoning parishioners at a church with arsenic three years ago, was trying to retaliate against his fellow church members because he believed they had once put chemicals in his coffee, the man's lawyer said yesterday.

The lawyer, Peter Kelley, revealed authoritatively for the first time the motive for the poisonings at Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church in New Sweden, which killed a 78-year-old man and injured 15 other people, bringing international attention to the tiny, insular town in far-northern Maine.

Mr. Kelley said in an interview that Daniel Bondeson, a parishioner at the church who the police had previously said had not acted alone in the poisoning, came to see him several days after the poisonings and explained how and why he had poured an arsenic-laced chemical in the coffee at Sunday services on April 27, 2003. Mr. Bondeson killed himself the day after he met with Mr. Kelley.

At some point in the past, Mr. Kelley said, Mr. Bondeson "felt someone had made bad coffee for him, although he could not prove it, and he had a tummy ache and he was going to get back at them."

"He just obviously overreacted," he added. "He decided to do something to the parishioners."

Mr. Kelley said he decided to disclose the information yesterday because the Maine State Police and the attorney general's office announced in the afternoon that they were closing the case, having concluded that Mr. Bondeson was the only culprit.

Mr. Bondeson, a 53-year-old potato farmer who also worked at a nursing home, left a suicide note taking responsibility for the crime. The police had long said that details in the note persuaded them that Mr. Bondeson was assisted by at least one other person.

But yesterday, Stephen H. McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Public Safety, said Mr. Bondeson "acted alone. There is no one else involved."

Mr. McCausland confirmed Mr. Kelley's description of the motive. He said the police closed the case because of "new information."

Mr. Kelley said he was the source of the new information. He said that until a few months ago he believed that he was unable to tell investigators about his conversation with Mr. Bondeson because of attorney-client privilege. But the matter went before a judge, who ruled that Mr. Bondeson's suicide note had essentially waived the privilege.

Mr. Kelley said Mr. Bondeson had gone to the church that Sunday and poured liquid from an old spray can on his farm into the percolating coffee.

"He did not know it contained arsenic and he had no intent of seriously harming anyone," Mr. Kelley said.

He said Mr. Bondeson, whom he barely knew, sought legal advice, and "I told him that there's no trail at all to him, that he'd be the last person in the world people would think would do this, that he should go about his work and be busy and let it roll over, so to speak."

Mr. Kelley said Mr. Bondeson met with him twice that day. He mentioned suicide and "I strongly urged him to get counseling," Mr. Kelley said. "He's stoic, physically tough, quiet, never been married. He was, as best he could show emotions, very upset about it."

Reaction yesterday in New Sweden, whose 621 people are largely of Swedish descent, seemed stoic as well. Some were not too surprised because a book came out last year asserting that Mr. Bondeson had acted alone out of revenge.

"I'm kind of glad it's closed," Ralph Ostlund, 82, who suffered damage to nerves in his feet from the arsenic, said by telephone. "I don't have the feeling in my feet that I should have, but life's got to go on."

Peter Drever, a pastor at the church in 2004 and 2005, said in a telephone interview that people would probably be relieved the case was over.

"Scandinavian folk by nature don't like to be in the limelight," Mr. Drever said.

Ariel Sabar contributed reporting from Bangor, Me., for this article, and Katie Zezima from Boston.

    Poisonings at Church Are Termed Retaliation, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/us/19maine.html

Suspect Surrenders in Killing of 2-Year-Old

April 18, 2006
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and ANDREW JACOBS

The man accused of killing a 2½-year-old Bronx boy who was riding in a minivan with his family to Easter dinner turned himself in last night after a day in which the police and the family pleaded for help in finding the gunman.

The police had been searching for the suspect, Nicholas Morris, 26, who they say was shooting at a group of people at a busy intersection in the Morris Heights neighborhood when the minivan passed by about 2 p.m. on Sunday.

According to the police, the events leading up to the shooting began with an exchange of "hard looks." The dispute escalated into offensive words and a slap on the face, and in a matter of minutes erupted into the gunfire in which the boy was killed in his car seat as his mother drove him, his two sisters and a cousin through the intersection.

The police identified Mr. Morris, of 1926 University Avenue, and another man, Ronneil Gilliam, 25, of 1878 Harrison Avenue, as suspects earlier yesterday. The police arrested Mr. Morris about 7:45 p.m. after he called them from News 12 the Bronx, a local cable channel, to say he would surrender. Mr. Gilliam was still being sought last night.

The police said they believed that the boy was struck by a bullet from a 9-millimeter gun fired by Mr. Morris. At least five bullets were fired, and shell casings were found at the scene, but no one else was injured. The gun has not been recovered.

Earlier yesterday, a day after the boy, David Pacheco Jr., died from a bullet to his chest, the police provided more details about the events that led to the violence, and the boy's mother asked the public for help in finding those responsible for her son's death.

"You have to feel my pain," the boy's mother, Joanne Sanabria, 28, said yesterday, standing at in front of her home on Bruckner Boulevard, clutching a SpongeBob SquarePants doll that belonged to her son. "He didn't sin. He was a good little boy.

"That bullet went through my door and hit my son's car seat and went through my son."

Yesterday afternoon, detectives carried cardboard boxes from the fourth-floor apartment where Mr. Morris lives with his mother, brother and girlfriend. Last evening the police said they had recovered a .22-caliber rifle and a small amount of narcotics from the home and had Mr. Morris's brother, though they did not provide his name or the charges.

Officials appealed for the public's assistance: They placed fliers on car windshields, circulated photographs of the suspects and roamed the Morris Heights neighborhood in a car with a rooftop loudspeaker to spread their appeal. And the boy's family held a news conference to ask anyone who might have information about the case to step forward.

"I want the person who did this to be caught," Ms. Sanabria said earlier yesterday, hours before Mr. Morris was arrested. "I want him to wake up every day and see my face and hear my voice and see my son's face."

Last night, in an interview with News 12, Mr. Morris maintained his innocence. "I did not shoot anybody ever in my life," he said, speaking directly into the camera. "I wanted somebody to hear my story before I'm stuck in the interrogation room and with them trying to mix me up." Mr. Morris said he was blocks away when he heard the gunshots and ran with a crowd away from the shots, according to the station's report.

About 7:45 p.m., the police arrived and took him into custody, though specific charges against him were still pending last night.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made battling gun crime a priority of his second administration, pushing a raft of initiatives aimed at reducing the number of shootings in the city, which is down compared to the same period last year.

The events on Sunday began to unfold shortly before 2 p.m., said the police, who gave the following account: Mr. Morris and Mr. Gilliam encountered a man on the street in front of 1730 Harrison Avenue. A stare down ensued.

One of the two suspects slapped the man across the face. Then two men and a woman, all friends of the man who was slapped, approached. Outnumbered, the two suspects fled.

The two men then went to Mr. Gilliam's home at 1878 Harrison Avenue, where they retrieved a gun, the police said. They returned to the street moments later, and, after seeing that the group had walked a block or so north and crossed the street, fired at them across the intersection of Harrison and West Tremont Avenues.

According to witnesses, Mr. Morris was standing in front of 1812 Harrison Avenue when he fired at the group, which was at 1731 Harrison Avenue.

Investigators said that they believed the two groups did not know one another and that there is no indication that gang affiliation or drugs played a part in the shooting, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman.

In Morris Heights, the neighborhood where the shooting took place, crime has fallen significantly in recent months. At the direction of Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, the 46th Precinct, where the shooting happened, has been split in two, with a captain assuming command of each half, and more crime-fighting resources have been sent into those areas.

Compared to the same period last year, overall crime in the precinct has dropped nearly 24 percent and murders are also down, to four from five, the police said.

At the news conference yesterday, Ms. Sanabria recounted the moment when her son was hit. She said she was driving when she heard the gunshots, and then her son screamed. His sister, she said, shouted, "The baby, the baby's been hit!"

When she stopped the minivan, she saw the bullet hole on the door behind her and then pulled up her son's shirt and saw his body covered in blood. "God only knows how much I wish that bullet had hit me," she said.

Ms. Sanabria, who was joined at the news conference by the boy's father, David Pacheco Sr., thanked an off-duty emergency medical technician who came out of his apartment across the street and administered CPR. In an interview yesterday, the technician, Angelo Cruz, recounted the boy's final moments. He said that a livery cab driver stopped at the scene and took him, the wounded boy and his mother to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, where he was later pronounced dead.

On the way, Mr. Cruz said the boy suddenly regained consciousness for a moment, opened his eyes, stretched his arms and looked around. "It was like a moment of hope," Mr. Cruz said. "But it had a feeling of a last goodbye."

Then, he said, Ms. Sanabria, kissed her son on the head.

Colin Moynihan and Manny Fernandez contributed reporting for this article.

    Suspect Surrenders in Killing of 2-Year-Old, NYT, 18.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/nyregion/18shot.html

Man Sought for 2 Maine Murders Shoots Self

April 17, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- Two registered sex offenders were gunned down in their central Maine homes early Sunday, and a Canadian man sought in connection with the slayings fatally shot himself after Boston police cornered him on a bus, officials said.

Stephen A. Marshall, 20, shot himself in the head with a .45 caliber handgun when officers stopped the bus he was on and climbed aboard, said David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney.

Officers heard a gunshot and found Marshall with a massive head wound in a window seat 13 rows behind the driver, Procopio said.

He was rushed to Boston Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 11:24 p.m., a hospital spokeswoman said.

No one else on the bus was injured, Procopio said, but five passengers who were splattered with blood were taken to area hospitals to be examined.

Maine State Police alerted Boston authorities that Marshall could be heading to the city, about 250 miles south, after Marshall's pickup truck was found abandoned. Police discovered bullets linked to him in the bathroom at a bus station in Bangor, Maine.

The shootings of Joseph L. Gray, 57, of Milo, and William Elliott, 24, of Corinth, led state police to take down the Maine Sex Offender Registry Web site as a precaution, state Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland said. The site lists the photos, names and addresses of more than 2,200 sex offenders.

The pickup truck Marshall was driving was spotted leaving one of the victims' homes after the shooting, Maine police said.

It was not immediately clear if or how Marshall knew either Gray or Elliott, or whether the three men had any connection, McCausland said.

Marshall, who lived in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, had come to Houlton, Maine, for the first time to meet his father, McCausland said. He added that Marshall was driving his father's pickup.

    Man Sought for 2 Maine Murders Shoots Self, NYT, 17.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-BRF-Maine-Shootings.html

Okla. Slay Suspect Joked About Cannibalism

April 17, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PURCELL, Okla. (AP) -- The man accused of killing a 10-year-old neighbor girl for an elaborate plan to eat human flesh joked about cannibalism on his online diary, discussed the effects of not taking his anti-depression medication and mentioned ''dangerously weird'' fantasies.

All he wanted in life, Kevin Ray Underwood wrote in his blog, was ''to be able to live like a normal person.''

People who knew Underwood described him Sunday as a quiet, ''boring'' and seemingly trustworthy young man. His mother who lived across town called him a ''wonderful boy.''

''This is something that I don't know where it came from,'' Connie Underwood said of her son through tears in a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press. ''I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible.''

Kevin Underwood, a 26-year-old grocery store stocker in this small community 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, was arrested Friday. Investigators searched his apartment after he aroused their suspicions at a checkpoint, and found a large plastic tub in a bedroom closet. According to a police affidavit, he confessed that he killed Jamie Rose Bolin, telling FBI agents: ''Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up.''

Jamie's unclothed body was inside the tub, along with a towel used to soak up blood, officials said. Police said that, while there were deep saw marks on the girl's neck, she had not been dismembered.

Kevin Underwood, who is to be formally charged with first-degree murder Monday, lived alone in an apartment downstairs from the one where Jamie lived with her father.

Authorities believe Kevin Underwood killed the girl Wednesday, when she disappeared after going to a library, by beating and smothering her.

Investigators found meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers that he planned to use on the body, McClain County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall said.

On his blog, an online diary that he had kept since September 2002, Kevin Underwood described himself as ''single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy.''

He mentions cannibalism, asking ''If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?'' and responding: ''The skin of last night's main course.''

In an entry dated Feb. 4, 2006, Kevin Underwood wrote that he struggled with depression and social interaction.

''Pretty much the only time I believe in God is when I blame him for something,'' he said. ''Or, when I'm really depressed, to cry and beg him to make me better, to make whatever is wrong in my brain go away, so that I can live like a normal person.

''That's all I want in life, is to be able to live like a normal person.''

He wrote that he rarely left his apartment for long stretches, except to go to work and to buy food. ''I just sit here at the computer every minute of the day, when I'm not at work. A week or so ago, I spent my day off sitting here at the computer, barely moving from the chair, for 14 hours.''

He said one of his main interests was the online role-playing game ''Kingdom of Loathing,'' in which stick figures battle one another.

In September 2004, he wrote that his depression deepened after several months without taking the medication Lexapro, an antidepressant also used in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

''For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird,'' he wrote. ''If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.''

Kevin Underwood worked for nearly seven years at a Carl's Jr. restaurant, where shift leader Bill Berdan described him as a quiet person who kept to himself. ''He did a good job,'' Berdan said Sunday.

However, he said Kevin Underwood, who quit about a year ago, was a ''boring'' man who rarely smiled.

''Just his tone of voice, he just sounded dull,'' Berdan said. ''Trying to get a smile out of him took an act of Congress.''

Berdan said he and his wife and young daughters never suspected anything unusual.

''He gave my wife rides home from work numerous times,'' Berdan said. ''We never felt uncomfortable. I talked to my girls after this happened, and they said they felt comfortable around him.''

His most recent job was as a stocker at a Griders Discount Foods grocery store in Oklahoma City, where he arrived early for his shift Friday, said a manager at the store, Jerry Castro.

''He was the same as always,'' Castro said. ''He was quiet and kept to himself. He didn't interact with people. It just didn't dawn on you that this was something he'd do.''

    Okla. Slay Suspect Joked About Cannibalism, NYT, 17.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Girl-Slain-Oklahoma.html

Man planned to eat murder victim: police

Sun Apr 16, 2006 2:36 AM ET
Reuters

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - A man in the Oklahoma town of Purcell has been arrested on suspicion of murdering the 10-year-old daughter of his neighbor and planning to eat her body, police said on Saturday.

Kevin Underwood, 26, was arrested on Friday in the murder of Jamie Rose Bolin, who was reported missing after she failed to return home on Wednesday from a public library in Purcell, 36 miles south of Oklahoma City.

"Regarding a potential motive, this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones," Purcell Police Chief David Tompkins told a news conference.

Underwood was among many Purcell residents who participated in a search for Bolin, but police said he acted strangely when pulled over at a Highway Patrol checkpoint.

Police found the girl's body after Underwood, who lived upstairs from Bolin and her father in an apartment complex, allowed them to search his apartment.

He confessed to the murder after investigators found a plastic tub in his closet that had been taped shut, according to an affidavit released by Purcell Police.

"At that time Mr. Underwood stated 'go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up,'" the affidavit said.

Based on interviews with Underwood and files found on his computer, investigators said it appeared that Underwood had planned to eat the body.

McClain County District Attorney, Tim Kuykendall, said he would file a first-degree murder charge against Underwood on Monday and seek the death penalty.

In addition to finding the girl's bicycle dismantled and stowed under Underwood's bed, police found "a decorative dagger believed to be used in an attempt to cut off the victim's head, a hacksaw, duct tape, meat tenderizer, skewers, and a duffle bag."

    Man planned to eat murder victim: police, R, 16.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-04-16T063635Z_01_N16225170_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-OKLAHOMA-GIRL.xml

Coroner: Pa. slaying victims were beaten

Updated 4/14/2006 12:18 PM ET
USA Today

LEOLA, Pa. (AP) — Six family members who were beaten to death over the weekend were attacked with so much force that each died almost instantly, a county coroner said Friday.

Jesse Dee Wise, the grandson of the oldest victim, admitted killing his relatives and dumping their bodies in the basement of the family home, police said. He was charged Thursday with six counts of criminal homicide.

Wise confessed to strangling three of the victims and bludgeoning three others, according to court documents, although Lancaster County Coroner Dr. G. Gary Kirchner said Friday "there was nobody that we could say definitely was strangled."

"They were hit with a blunt instrument with incredible force," Kirchner said, and the trauma resulted in "pretty much instant death."

"I don't think anybody suffered," Kirchner said.

Wise, 21, lived with his grandparents in Leola, a small village in Lancaster County's rural Amish country.

In a guitar case at the home, police found two 17-inch pieces of metal wrapped at one end with cloth, "which had the appearance of a homemade weapon/club, capable of causing death if used as a weapon," a police affidavit said. Police said it appeared to have blood on it.

Court records show he was familiar to area police.

More than a dozen charges involving Wise, including burglary, theft and agricultural vandalism, from 2004 are pending in Lancaster County Court. In September, police used a stun gun to subdue him after he allegedly punched a man and stole $20 from him at a fair. He was charged with third-degree robbery and simple assault, court records show.

Wise went by the nickname "Jay." He has a baby daughter who lives with her mother, and he worked at a supermarket until a couple of weeks ago, said a relative, John Sean Adams.

The victims apparently died sometime last weekend, prosecutors said. They were found after Wise's grandfather, Jessie L. Wise, 60, called Adams from New York on Wednesday and asked him to check on his family because he hadn't heard from in five days.

Adams went into the basement ahead of police, and stopped halfway down the steps.

"They're all dead! All six of them are dead!" he yelled, police said in court papers.

The dead were identified as Jesse Dee Wise's grandmother, Emily Wise; two relatives believed to be his aunts, Wanda Wise, 45, and Agnes Arlene Wise, 43; two of Emily Wise's grandchildren, Skyler Wise, 19; Chance Wise, 5; and 17-year-old relative Jessie James Wise, authorities said.

"If he killed his little 5-year-old cousin, he has no heart. He has to go down for it," Adams, 24, told The Associated Press.

The bodies were released to a funeral director who was taking them to Brooklyn, N.Y., Kirchner said.

The suspect's grandfather is a founding member of the Federation of Black Cowboys, a New York group that introduces inner-city children to horses.

"There is nothing ... that could have given us any clue that there was anything going on with his grandson," said Warren Smalls, the federation's spokesman.

    Coroner: Pa. slaying victims were beaten, UT, 14.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-14-bodies_x.htm

Sex tourism thriving in Bible Belt

Tue Apr 4, 2006 10:01 AM ET
Reuters
By Verna Gates and Mickey Goodman

ATLANTA (Reuters) - In a sleazy hotel room, "Brittany," then aged 16 and drugged into oblivion, waited for the men to arrive. Her pimps sent as many as 17 clients an evening through the door.

A "john" could even pre-book the pretty young blonde for $1,000 a night, sometimes flying in and then flying out from a nearby airport.

None of this happened in Bangkok or Costa Rica, places that have become synonymous with sex tourism and underage sex.

It took place in Atlanta, the buckle of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the world's busiest passenger airport provides a cheaper, more convenient and safer underage sex destination for men seeking girls as young as 10.

"Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family," said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia.

A new federal law passed in 2003 ensures that American sex tourists landing on foreign soil and hiring prostitutes under the age of 18 can get 30 years in prison.

But in Georgia, punishment for pimping or soliciting sex with a girl under 18 is only five to 20 years, according to Deborah Espy, the Deputy District Attorney of Fulton County.

"Men are coming to Atlanta to have sex with a child," said LaKendra Baker, project manager for the Center to End Adolescent Sexual Exploitation (CEASE).

Half of the street-level prostitutes in Atlanta are believed to be under 18, according to experts.

Others are booked through Internet sex sites and from social sites like Black Planet, where girls innocently post profiles, said Baker.

Just in March, police arrested a Canadian man meeting a 14-year-old girl he found through the Internet, said Cathey Steinberg, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Fund, which funds treatment for abused girls and prevention.

Another man drove from North Georgia, with a bag containing a teddy bear, a love note and condoms, snorting methamphetamine on the way.

He expected a 13-year-old girl, but instead found Heather Lackey, a corporal with the Peachtree City Police Department.

"People are stunned that Atlanta's the No. 1 sex center in the country," said Steinberg.

The FBI has identified 14 U.S. cities as centers for the sexual exploitation of children. In addition to Atlanta, they are Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington, D.C.

RUNAWAYS AT MOST RISK

In all, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 underage girls are prostituted in the United States, according to a University of Pennsylvania study.

Most youths caught up in the sex trade are runaways, like Brittany, whose 19-year-old "rescuers" soon demanded a return on their investment.

"I didn't have any place to go. My mom hated me for what I was doing to the family," said Brittany, who did not want to be identified by her real name.

Up to 90 percent of runaways are believed to end up as prostitutes, with a third lured into prostitution within 48 hours. Some are sold into sexual slavery by their parents, according to a 2005 study by the Atlanta Women's Agenda.

Some get seduced by recruiters. Pimps use handsome young men and sometimes girls as fronts.

"A 16-year-old controlling a group of girls will not face the same penalties an adult would receive," said Patricia Crone, director of the Office of Juvenile Justice Demonstration Project.

Once snagged, the grooming process begins. Typically, the pimp's friends sleep with her, then come threats, beatings and gang rapes. Caresses and gifts, including drugs and alcohol, follow abuse, the Atlanta Women's Agenda study found.

Brittany said she was showered with fancy dinners, clothes and methamphetamine. But she also describes horror. "It made me feel dirty. It was demeaning," said Brittany.

The sex slaves are trafficked in and out of cities to supply sporting events, conventions or rap concerts.

During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, one man kept boys and hosted sex parties nightly, said Baker of the group CEASE.

The pimps even held an annual "Player's Ball" in Atlanta in 2003, openly buying and selling women and naming a "Player of the Year," according to the Atlanta Women's Agenda study.

The risks are worth it. While there are few reliable statistics, child sexual exploitation is believed to be the world's third-biggest money maker for organized crime, said Stephanie Davis, policy adviser to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

One reason for the demand is the false assumption that youths are disease-free.

On the contrary, with tissues not fully developed, they are more prone to lacerations. HIV infections among females aged 16 to 21 are 50 percent higher than for men, a 1998 study in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes reported.

Atlanta has won two new federal grants to establish units to fight the trafficking of underage sex slaves and to hire more undercover detectives, said Carole Morgan, director of the North Central Georgia Law Enforcement Academy.

But the experts fear that may not be enough.

"It won't stop until people say, 'My city isn't safe for kids anymore,'" said Crone.

"This is a place where you can buy, sell or rent kids. It must be stopped."

    Sex tourism thriving in Bible Belt, R, 4.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-04-04T140124Z_01_N03210934_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-SEXTOURISM.xml

Cops: Dad strangles, stabs girl

March 28, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
BY MAUREEN O'DONNELL Staff Reporter

She was just a little girl and he was a big man.

Not just any man. Her father. A Sunday school teacher.

On Sunday night, police say, after offering to put their children to bed in their Clarendon Hills home, Neil J. Lofquist, 40, strangled and stabbed his 8-year-old daughter, Lauren, and tried to drown her in the toilet.

Prosecutors say he committed the murder while his wife was downstairs in their home, in the 100 block of Chicago Avenue. Their 6-year-old son, Lars, was in his bed nearby.

Perhaps there will be some answers today, when Lofquist appears in DuPage County Court on first-degree murder charges.

In the meantime, Lofquist's mother is mystified, the police and paramedics who tried to save the girl are getting counseling, and Clarendon Hills parents are struggling with what to tell their kids.

"As this progresses, people will be [as] bewildered as we are," said Police Chief Patrick Anderson.

"It's just unreal," said Lofquist's mother, Dorothy. "It just is a mystery to me. I talked to him just yesterday, and everything seemed great."

Neil Lofquist is from a family with deep roots in Glen Ellyn. he graduated from Glenbard West and Iowa State University in Ames and had an MBA from DePaul University, his mother said.

Lofquist worked in the financial sector, most recently in insurance, his mother said, while his wife was an occupational therapist.

Up until he sold them two years ago, Lofquist owned two pottery shops: The Mad Potter in Downers Grove and Oak Park.

"Based upon the facts and circumstances of this tragic situation, I will request a psychiatric forensic evaluation to determine the defendant's mental capacity," DuPage County State's Attorney Joe Birkett said in a statement.

Asked if her son had any mental health problems or financial trouble, Dorothy Lofquist said: "No. Seemingly no."

Police received a 911 call about 10 p.m. Sunday, said First Assistant State's Attorney Nancy Wolfe.

"The defendant offered to put the young children to bed. Sometime during this process, he began to strangle her in her bedroom and attempted to drown her in the commode and inflicted a knife wound on her neck," according to Wolfe.

Prayer service set for today

"Lofquist then allegedly went to a neighbor's house unexpectedly and was told by the neighbor to go back home," according to a statement from Wolfe's office. Lofquist, who had a minor hand wound, returned to his home and told his wife he needed to go to Hinsdale Hospital, Wolfe said.

Then Lofquist directed his wife to ask a next-door neighbor to baby-sit Lauren while he, his wife and son went to the hospital, officials said.

It was hospital workers who called 911 to ask police to make a well-being check at the home, officials said. Police arriving at the scene met the neighbor, who was already giving the girl CPR.

The slaying stunned neighbors. Gert Masulis, a 48-year resident, said the Lofquists, who moved in about six years ago, seemed like a happy family. She said the children were riding their bikes around the neighborhood Sunday. A prayer service is set for 4 p.m. today at the family's church, Clarendon Hills Community Presbyterian.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has begun a "death by abuse investigation," said agency spokeswoman Diane Jackson. The agency had no prior contact with the family.

Contributing: Lisa Donovan

    Cops: Dad strangles, stabs girl, Chicago Sun-Times, 28.3.2006, http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-girlded28.html


 

Mary Winkler, charged with murdering her husband, entering a satellite courthouse Friday in Foley, Ala..

John David Mercer/Mobile Register, via Associated Press        NYT        March 25, 2006

 Police Charge Pastor's Wife in His Slaying in Tennessee        NYT        25.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/national/25minister.html
 

Police Charge Pastor's Wife

in His Slaying in Tennessee

March 25, 2006
The New York Times
By THEO EMERY

SELMER, Tenn., March 24 — The wife of a slain Tennessee minister was charged with first-degree murder on Friday after confessing to shooting him, the police said.

The defendant, Mary Winkler, 32, was arrested in Orange Beach, Ala., where the police discovered the family minivan on Thursday night pulled over on a roadside hundreds of miles from Selmer, where the family lived. She was found with the couple's three young daughters, who were unharmed.

The killing has roiled the town of Selmer, a southwestern Tennessee community about 80 miles east of Memphis where Matthew Winkler, 31, was known as an energetic and vibrant preacher at the Fourth Street Church of Christ, as well as a loving father and husband.

"I don't know what her reason is," said Betty Wilkerson, the church secretary. "I know we'll probably find out in the weeks to come. But I'm not going to judge her."

John Mehr, special agent in charge for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations Western District, declined to comment about a motive or why Mrs. Winkler went to Alabama with the children. She remained in custody in Alabama on Friday night.

Church members searched for Mr. Winkler after he failed to show up for a service Wednesday night and calls to his telephone were unanswered. When they went to the church-owned home across town, they let themselves in with a key they found and discovered Mr. Winkler's bloodied body in a bedroom.

With no sign of his wife, daughters or the family car, many in the congregation thought Mrs. Winkler and the children had been kidnapped.

The news that the police said Mrs. Winkler had confessed baffled those who knew them and their daughters, Breanna, 1, Mary Alice, 6, and Patricia, 8.

Ms. Wilkerson described Mrs. Winkler as "very domestic" and said she would often bring lunch to her husband at the church. The two would sit and visit in an office. "They just seemed like the all-American family," Ms. Wilkerson said.

The Winklers' church was one of many that posted advertisements in the fields along nearby U.S. 45. But members said that Matthew Winkler attracted new members with his dynamism and energy, increasing the congregation to 200 members from about 140 in the year he had been its pastor.

The church was mostly quiet on Friday, with no services or events planned. By midafternoon, a handwritten sign went up on the front door: "No more interviews today."

Inside the door, photographs of the children and their mother were stapled to a bulletin board. More photos were on display in an inside room: pictures of the older girls in costumes, playing basketball and sitting with Santa, along with a picture of Mrs. Winkler holding her youngest daughter.

A steady trickle of church members knocked on the locked door and slipped inside, where they greeted one another, embraced and offered words of support. One was Janet Sparks, a retired teacher who has attended the church for decades.

Mr. Winkler's effusive energy "just wore you out," Ms. Sparks said with a laugh. She said she knew nothing about the family that would have predicted the killing.

"Everything you saw belies what has happened," she said. "It just doesn't go together. There's something amiss, and we don't know what that is."

Still, Ms. Sparks said, it had only been a year since the Winklers had come to town, and it was hard to know if something lay beneath the surface.

"When you get right down to it, we didn't know these people," she said. "But do you ever know anybody? We don't really know what goes on when they go home and close the doors."

Nekki King, 32, a church member, lived just up Mollie Drive from her minister's family in a wooded neighborhood. She called the couple "very sweet people."

Her three children often played with the Winkler children, and the families got together for birthday parties. She pointed to a page torn from the church directory with a color photo of Mr. Winkler and said, "That was a good man."

Ms. King had gotten to know Mrs. Winkler. The women had planned to assemble scrapbooks, and they often sat and talked about what was going on in their lives.

"Nothing was ever wrong," Ms. King said. "I just wonder if something happened that no one knows about."

    Police Charge Pastor's Wife in His Slaying in Tennessee, NYT, 25.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/25/national/25minister.html

Tanya Nicole Kach was reunited Wednesday with her father, Jerry, at his house in Elizabeth, Pa.

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times        March 24, 2006

Woman, 24, Says Neighbor Held Her Captive for 10 Years        NYT        24.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/national/24missing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The defendant, Thomas Hose, 48, center, with his lawyer, James M. Ecker.

Sidney Davis/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, via Associated Press

Woman, 24, Says Neighbor Held Her Captive for 10 Years        NYT        24.3.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/national/24missing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Woman, 24, Says Neighbor

Held Her Captive for 10 Years

March 24, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

A girl who vanished more than 10 years ago was reunited yesterday with her mother in a Pittsburgh suburb two days after confiding to a store owner that she was being held captive, the police said.

"I guess she just chose me to lean on," said Joe Sparico, owner of J. J.'s Deli Mart in McKeesport, Pa., where the young woman, Tanya Nicole Kach, broke into tears on Tuesday while telling him that she was living with a man against her will. "I'm just glad she's happy and home now."

Ms. Kach, now 24, was 14 when she was reported missing on Feb. 10, 1996, after walking out of her father's house, two miles from where she said she had lived in secrecy.

"We're investigating this further, but I have to tell you there is still a lot we need to figure out," said Charles Moffatt, superintendent of the Allegheny County Police Department.

Ms. Kach said she had been living against her will with Thomas Hose, 48, a security guard at Cornell Intermediate School in McKeesport, where Ms. Kach was an eighth grader when she was reported missing, Mr. Moffatt said. For the first four years of captivity, she told the police, she was never permitted to leave the two-bedroom house, and Mr. Hose threatened to kill her if she told anyone about her captivity.

Locked in his bedroom, she was often forced to use a metal can for a toilet, she said, and even though he shared the house with his parents and his 22-year-old son, he forbade anyone to let her out, Ms. Kach told Mr. Sparico. In later years, Ms. Kach said, she was allowed to leave during the day, but she said she never spoke about her situation because she believed Mr. Hose's threats.

"I was so scared that nobody would believe me," Ms. Kach told WTAE-TV on Wednesday from the home of her father, Jerry Kach, in Elizabeth, a Pittsburgh suburb.

Mr. Sparico said, "From the way she was shaking when she told me, I think she really believed he would do it."

On Tuesday, after growing close to Mr. Sparico and his family over eight months, she revealed her secret.

"If you go to a Web site for missing children, you will see a picture of me there," he said she told him.

Mr. Sparico's wife, Janet, said Ms. Kach had told her in recent days that when she was in the eighth grade her parents were going through a contentious divorce and that she was convinced neither parent wanted her, leading her to run away.

At the time, Ms. Kach said, she had a crush on Mr. Hose, and when she confided her plans to leave home, he offered to take her in, Ms. Sparico said. "After that, I guess he never let her go," she added.

It was unclear why Ms. Kach did not seek help sooner, Superintendent Moffatt said, "but in my view, that part doesn't much matter, because you can't be 14 and make an adult decision that you want to be involved with an adult in this way."

Mr. Hose's lawyer, James M. Ecker, said his client was innocent. Mr. Hose has been charged with one count of statutory sexual assault and three counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and released on $200 bail. "I think if the police believed she was being held against her will or that she was physically abused, they would have charged him with kidnapping or abuse," Mr. Ecker said. "But they didn't."

A woman who answered the phone at Mr. Hose's house said she had no comment.

Ms. Sparico said of Ms. Kach, "She was always well put together, like a little Barbie doll, and I never saw any signs of physical abuse."

She added, "But I have spoken with her quite a bit and I think that she was really brainwashed by this guy."

After Ms. Kach told her secret to Mr. Sparico, he said he immediately called his son Shawn, a retired detective with the McKeesport police who had worked on Ms. Kach's case.

Interviewed by WTAE-TV, Ms. Kach's mother, Sherri Koehnke, said, "It's the best ending I could have thought about when I thought about what could have happened to her."

    Woman, 24, Says Neighbor Held Her Captive for 10 Years, NYT, 24.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/24/national/24missing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

New York City Adding 800 Police Officers, Bloomberg Announces

March 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN and JIM RUTENBERG

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced this morning that New York City would add 800 police officers and 400 civilians to the 36,400-member Police Department in the largest city-financed expansion of the nation's largest police force since the Safe Streets/Safe City program began in 1993 under the Dinkins administration.

In announcing the 3 percent expansion of the Police Department, Mr. Bloomberg said the officers were needed because the city had grown by 125,000 residents since 2001, when he was elected, and was expected to add an additional 200,000 over the next five years. "An increase that size would be like adding the entire city of Pittsburgh to the five boroughs," he said.

Today, the city has 4,000 fewer police officers than it had before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in part because 1,000 officers are now assigned to intelligence and counterterrorism tasks. "We must face the reality that as our population grows and as terrorism remains a threat, making the safest big city in America even safer requires additional resources," Mr. Bloomberg said.

Keeping crime rates low, the mayor said, is essential for future growth. "Public safety is the foundation of economic progress and of our city's success," he said. "To keep creating new jobs and opportunities, we need to keep attracting new entrepreneurs, private investors, immigrants, tourists and students."

The civilian employees will take over duties now performed by uniformed officers, freeing them for reassignment on patrols, so the expansion will result in a net increase of 1,200 officers available for patrol duties.

The announcement came as a surprise even to leaders of the City Council. "Bar none, the call for more officers is the thing that I and my fellow colleagues hear most from the constituents in our districts," said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who joined the mayor for this announcement.

In February, when the mayor released his preliminary budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, expanding the Police Department was not part of the budget plan, even though the city expects a surplus of at least $3.3 billion for the current fiscal year. The expansion plan will be included in the mayor's executive budget, which will be released next month and requires Council approval.

The addition of 1,200 employees will cost the city $33.8 million in the next fiscal year, rising to $66 million in 2008 and $80 million in 2010. The first wave of new recruits will begin training at the Police Academy in July and a second class will begin training in January.

The 800 recruits, over the course of their six months in training and their first six months on the force, will receive average cash compensation of $35,000, plus a $1,000 allowance for uniforms. By their sixth year, their average salary will rise to $72,000, plus an additional $1,000 allowance.

Although several large American cities have seen increases in street crime over the last year, New York City has so far been exempt. Last year, major crimes were at their lowest level since the department began keeping records in 1963, during the mayoralty of Robert F. Wagner.

Mr. Bloomberg said that crime had fallen nearly 25 percent since 2001, and that there have been four consecutive years in which the number of murders was less than 600, which "no one ever imagined possible." He said the expansion was a prudent investment, not a response to any alarming trends.

"Our administration is trying to run this city intelligently and not react, but to prospectively look and see what the needs of this city are going forward, and to put the resources in place," he said. "We have the luxury of doing it now, so we can recruit and train and deploy our resources before there are problems."

Twice this morning, Mr. Bloomberg said the trend in government is often to starve well-performing agencies while pouring resources into dysfunctional ones. "In business, you would devote more resources to the successful parts of your business and cut back those that aren't successful," he said. "In government, people tend to do the reverse. I don't think that's a good way to manage your resources."

The announcement underscored the confidence Mayor Bloomberg has shown in the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, who first held the job from 1992 to 1994, under Mayors David N. Dinkins and Rudolph W. Giuliani, and in 2002 became the first person to be police commissioner a second time.

Mr. Kelly has made counterterrorism a major focus of his tenure, deploying detectives to gather intelligence overseas and implementing random searches of bags and packages brought into the subways. On Sunday, the department's counterterrorism efforts were profiled in a lengthy segment on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," one of the most-watched news programs on television.

"We're bigger than the next four departments, but that's what you need to police a city of 8.1 million people and growing," Mr. Kelly said this morning. "That's the kind of heft that allows the N.Y.P.D. to mass force when needed, and to respond to any emergency imaginable. We don't need to wait for the cavalry, because we are the cavalry."

    New York City Adding 800 Police Officers, Bloomberg Announces, NYT, 21.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/nyregion/21cnd-police.html?hp&ex=1143003600&en=7fe728b156216d2a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Killing in Texas Spotlights Attacks on Social Workers

March 20, 2006
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN, Tex., March 19 (AP) — In six years as a social worker with the state's Child Protective Services, Holly Jones has been cursed, chased by dogs and run out of houses by angry parents.

Threats are a daily part of the job for caseworkers who investigate accusations of child abuse and neglect and often remove children from their homes. But the killing of a social worker in South Texas last week has prompted Ms. Jones and her colleagues to re-evaluate the steps they take to keep safe and has raised questions about what the state can do to better protect them.

"We don't have weapons, we don't have training in self-defense, we didn't go through a police academy and we're dealing with the same people they are," Ms. Jones said.

The social worker who was killed last week, Sally Blackwell, 53, was found in a field in Victoria on Wednesday. Her family said she had received threats in her position as program director, overseeing several offices of caseworkers. The authorities have ruled the case a homicide but have not said whether her death was related to her job.

The killing comes a year after a woman fired a shotgun at two caseworkers who had come to her home near Alice, about 45 miles west of Corpus Christi, to investigate a child abuse complaint. The caseworkers fled. The woman was convicted in December of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Ms. Jones, 28, who recently became a supervisor for a Child Protective Services unit in suburban Austin, said caseworkers needed to know how to protect themselves.

A study released last week by the National Association of Social Workers found that 55 percent of 5,000 licensed social workers surveyed said they faced safety issues on the job. Sixty-eight percent of them said their employers had not adequately addressed their concerns. A survey in 2002 of 800 workers found 19 percent had been victims of violence and 63 percent had been threatened.

As the investigation into Ms. Blackwell's death continues, state protective services officials are thinking about ways to make the job safer, the Family and Protective Services commissioner, Carey Cockerell, said in an e-mail message to employees on Thursday.

Currently, social workers in Texas receive a half day of safety training, and the issue frequently comes up in a 12-week course, said a spokesman, Chris Van Deusen.

The child services department has no way of tracking how many threats its roughly 3,000 caseworkers receive, said Patrick Crimmins, spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services. But even people who have spent their entire careers with the agency can remember only a few instances in which threats escalated to violence, Mr. Crimmins said.

In 2001, Michigan lawmakers toughened the penalties for people who threaten or attack social workers after a child welfare caseworker was beaten, bound, gagged and suffocated while checking on a family. The law also required safety training for workers who make home visits.

The death of a Kansas mental health social worker prompted Representative Dennis Moore, Democrat of Kansas, to introduce a resolution last fall that would encourage state and local agencies to improve the safety of social workers. The resolution is pending.

    Killing in Texas Spotlights Attacks on Social Workers, NYT, 20.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20social.html

Officials Find Drug Tunnel With Surprising Amenities

January 27, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 — Drug smugglers have dug one of the longest, most sophisticated tunnels discovered in recent years along the Mexican border, and the American and Mexican authorities have hauled nearly two tons of marijuana out of it since they entered it on Wednesday, officials said.

The tunnel is 60 feet below ground at some points, five feet high, and nearly half a mile long, extending from a warehouse near the international airport in Tijuana, Mexico, to a vacant industrial building in Otay Mesa, Calif., about 20 miles southeast of downtown San Diego. The sophistication of the tunnel surprised officials, who found it outfitted with a concrete floor, electricity, lights and ventilation and groundwater pumping systems.

The authorities said a tip led to the discovery.

"The tunnel is absolutely amazing," said Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's San Diego office. "It is probably the biggest tunnel on the southern border so far."

On the American side, agents found about 200 pounds of marijuana in the building in Otay Mesa, which had several bays for tractor-trailers. On the Mexican side, drug agents found a pulley system at the entrance to the shaft and several thousand pounds of marijuana and hauled it out for several hours Wednesday. Mexican authorities also found seven cellphones, two trucks, a van and various documents in the warehouse, according to a statement from the Mexican attorney general's office.

The customs enforcement agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Border Patrol are sending a forensics team from Los Angeles to determine how long the tunnel has been in use.

The tunnel is one of the latest to be found along the border. Most are attributed to Mexican drug cartels searching for ways to move contraband into the United States, but some appear to be the work of smugglers of illegal immigrants.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, when border security was tightened, agents have uncovered 21 tunnels of varying degrees of length and sophistication, from "gopher holes" to engineered marvels like Wednesday's discovery, Mr. Unzueta said.

The builders, he said, "had to have access to money and somebody with a strong construction and engineering background."

"Our quick assumption is it's the drug cartels," he said.

The tunnel, Mr. Unzueta added after touring it, " is almost like a mineshaft."

Wednesday's discovery was the result of a tip investigated by a task force of federal agents devoted to tunnels. On Monday, they narrowed their search to the area in Otay Mesa and notified Mexican agents about what they suspected was the opening of the tunnel near the airport.

Both sides began digging. Mexican agents discovered a concrete-lined, 85-foot-deep shaft in a warehouse, descended, walked through the tunnel and popped up on the American side, Mr. Unzueta said. Officials on each side are searching records to determine who owns the buildings.

Also on Wednesday, several miles west of the big tunnel, the authorities found a smaller one — about two feet underground and extending 30 feet across the border near a storm drain — after a United States Border Patrol vehicle hit a sinkhole.

    Officials Find Drug Tunnel With Surprising Amenities, NYT, 27.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/national/27tunnel.html?hp&ex=1138338000&en=21bbafd399a2818f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Hundreds Mourn Slain Girl, Moved by a Life Too Sad and Too Short

January 17, 2006
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

The line outside the R. G. Ortiz Funeral Home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan snaked a half-block north along First Avenue yesterday before veering east on Second Street, stretching as far as the eye could see.

The first people arrived at noon, carrying flowers and balloons, toys and sympathy cards. They waited for hours in the bitter cold for a chance to see the girl who lay inside in a gold-rimmed coffin, her gloved hands clasped over her stomach, the bruises on her face masked by makeup.

Few, if any, knew the girl, Nixzmary Brown, but all knew the story of her sad, short life.

Nixzmary died Wednesday at the age of 7, in her family's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, after months of abuse, the authorities say. They have said that her stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, tortured and molested her, then beat her to death when she took a container of yogurt without his permission.

Mr. Rodriguez, 27, has been charged with murder and endangering the welfare of a child. Nixzmary's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, 27, faces charges of manslaughter, reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. Authorities said she stood by while her daughter lay on the floor, naked and unconscious, after the fatal beating.

"She died with dreams and hopes never to be fulfilled," said one mourner, Luis Negrón, 35, a doorman on the Upper East Side who lives near where Nixzmary lived.

Mr. Negrón was one of at least 500 people who filed through the funeral home from 3 and 9 p.m. to pay their respects to a girl who has come to represent the failures of a system set up to protect New York City's children from abuse and neglect.

A long series of alarms preceded Nixzmary's death. At Public School 256, teachers noticed that she was missing classes, looked malnourished and had bruises around her eyes. They filed numerous complaints, and in response, city child welfare workers talked to the girl and her parents, visited her apartment and took her to a doctor. But in the end, they saw no reason to remove her from her home.

At one point, two police detectives accompanied caseworkers visiting Nixzmary. A doctor was also called to examine her black eye and agreed that her injury could have occurred during a fall, which is how her family had explained it. In the weeks before her death, caseworkers were repeatedly barred from entering her home, but did not take the steps to get a warrant granting them access.

Each missed opportunity to save Nixzmary has been painstakingly detailed in newspapers and on television, seizing the hearts of New Yorkers and fueling outrage over a death that could have been averted.

"I haven't been able to sleep right," George Joseph, 42, of Mount Vernon, N.Y., said as he was about to enter the home. "I haven't been able to eat right. I've been having nightmares. I keep thinking of her last few hours, screaming for help."

Many who attended the wake said they had come to grieve for Nixzmary as though they were grieving for a sister, a daughter or a close friend. Some, like Ramona Polanco, 38, a nurse from Corona, Queens, cried while waiting in line.

"I can't explain why, but it's like this girl was family to me," Ms. Polanco said as she clutched the hands of her daughter Rafaela, who turns 7 in three weeks.

Inside the funeral home, Nixzmary's relatives mourned in silence. By nightfall, her grandmother, Maria Gonzalez, stood staring at the coffin and the stuffed animals, flowers and pictures surrounding it.

Ms. Gonzalez had said little all day. She rose before sunrise, a relative said, and ironed the light-pink dress she wore at the wake. At 9 a.m., she left home with a friend, Awilda Cordero, and headed to a Spanish diner on East 20th Street for a breakfast of eggs, bacon and plantains, Ms. Cordero said.

Nixzmary "looked like an angel," Ms. Cordero said Ms. Gonzalez told her afterward. The girl was clutching a wooden crucifix, pink rosary beads intertwined in her fingers. In a picture placed next to her, she was smiling, wearing a red Power Ranger costume from last Halloween, one of the last times Ms. Gonzalez saw her alive.

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting for this article.

    Hundreds Mourn Slain Girl, Moved by a Life Too Sad and Too Short, NYT, 17.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/nyregion/17girl.html

A Tough Road for Siblings Who Survived Cases of Abuse

January 15, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

In death, they have become indelible symbols of the city's failures to protect the weak from the cruel: Five-year-old Adam Mann, killed by parents for eating a piece of cake in 1990. Six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, battered and burned by her mother in 1995. And now, 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, who the authorities say was tortured over time and finally beaten to death by her stepfather for taking a container of yogurt.

In life, the dead children's surviving siblings are often forgotten. Yet in many ways, their hard journey toward adulthood may show more about the day-to-day problems and progress of the city's child welfare system than the fatalities that capture so much public outrage. Will the survivors find safe, permanent homes, or be bounced from one foster care placement to the next? Will they be kept together, or scattered far apart?

Sometimes, children taken from the most notoriously abusive homes have, years later, come full circle: In the Mann case, the oldest surviving sibling returned by choice to live with his mother, who had served prison time in the death of his abused brother.

For Nixzmary's two surviving half sisters and three half brothers, aged 9 months to 9 years, the journey began Wednesday after their sister's battered body was discovered in their mother's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. For now, said Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, all five of Nixzmary's siblings are in a home in Brooklyn with Spanish-speaking foster parents specially trained to deal with psychologically fragile children.

That they are together reflects an achievement. A decade ago, siblings were as likely as not to be separated. In 2004, sibling groups entering foster care were placed together almost 90 percent of the time.

But the road ahead is long. The plan is to avoid the black holes of the old foster care system, in which damaged children cycled through temporary placements heedlessly - in the case of the surviving Mann siblings, the city eventually paid thousands of dollars in damages in a lawsuit brought on their behalf.

The challenge of healing the shattered lives of Nixzmary's brothers and sisters underscores some of the unmet goals of the new system, which is still struggling to reduce the time that children in foster care wait for permanent homes.

Though details of Nixzmary's ordeal are still emerging, her younger sisters, in kindergarten and first grade, and her older brother, a third grader, have traumas of their own to overcome.

The authorities said the girls had been sexually abused by their stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, and that he punished them in one of the ways he punished Nixzmary, by plunging their heads under water. The youngest boys, Mr. Rodriguez's sons, apparently escaped abuse - part of a pattern of scapegoating that is familiar to experts on child maltreatment.

"It's likely that these children have been terribly damaged," said Marcia Robinson Lowry, the executive director of Children's Rights, an advocacy group. "They now face a foster care system in which the average length of care is four years. So having faced one terrible situation, they may wind up in another."

Some child welfare experts consider the city's child welfare system - overhauled since Elisa Izquierdo's death more than 10 years ago - close to a national model. And even veteran critics like Ms. Lowry, who called the current commissioner of children's services, John B. Mattingly, "the best ever," acknowledge that the system has vastly improved.

But the average length of time it takes for children either to be safely returned to their parents, or to be successfully adopted, Ms. Lowry said, is much longer in New York than in many cities.

Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the children's services agency, said the cases of siblings who survived some of the city's worst child abuse fatalities are among the system's greatest challenges.

"What is the future for kids whose own parents have shown in the worst possible way that they are not viable?" Ms. Stein asked. The system has to go step by step, she said: "First, trying to see if there's a good family member to take them, trying to keep siblings together, trying to get them help, and, once parental rights are terminated, trying to get them in a permanent placement."

The story of the Izquierdo siblings, now 12 to 19 years old, illustrates how the bad old days of a chaotic, overwhelmed system can still haunt the lives of children and parents today.

About a month before Elisa's birth on Feb. 11, 1989, child-protection workers found her half sister and half brother neglected and took them from their mother, who was using crack cocaine.

Elisa was lucky at first. She went from the hospital to the custody of her father, Gustavo Izquierdo. But after his death, she was sent to the home of her mother, Awilda Lopez, joining older siblings who had also been returned after Ms. Lopez had drug treatment and settled into an apparently steady relationship with a new man, Carlos Lopez.

Eventually, five siblings would watch helplessly as their parents targeted Elisa, sexually abusing her, beating her and at one point forcing her to eat her own feces.

Ms. Lopez was sentenced to 15 years to life for her role in Elisa's beating death and is still in prison. Mr. Lopez, who pleaded guilty to attempted assault of his stepdaughter, was sentenced to one and a half to three years.

Fewer than 10 percent of foster care cases involve abuse, not neglect, and child homicides are extremely rare. The instability the Izquierdo siblings experienced in foster care is all too common, however. Three years after Elisa's death, the four youngest had moved through four different homes, as ill-prepared foster parents gave up on them.

But now, said Ms. Stein, the spokeswoman for the agency, two of Elisa's siblings have been adopted and are living with a family on Long Island. A third, who does not want to be adopted, lives with them. A fourth sibling is in a separate foster home.

In late 2002, Ms. Stein said, after seven years in foster care, the oldest boy, now 19, went to live with his biological father, who was not involved in Elisa's life or death. Such an outcome after years in care is far more common than the public imagines, experts say, especially when adolescents leave foster care with no other family to call their own.

In the Mann case, too, the oldest surviving son returned to live with a parent, his mother, Michelle Mann, who served time for assault in Adam's death and was released from prison in 1994, according to Ms. Lowry, of Children's Rights. She and his father, Rufus Chisolm, who pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter, subjected all the siblings to terrible beatings that culminated in Adam's death.

The case was the focus of a celebrated "Frontline" documentary detailing how the city had failed to properly investigate earlier reports of abuse and neglect. But years later, as the parents were nearing the end of their prison terms, all but the youngest, the only girl, were still being shuttled from foster home to foster home. Ms. Lowry filed a wrongful-death suit against the city on behalf of the estate of Adam Mann, and won $183,000 for the survivors.

"These are the cases in which intense public scrutiny is focused on child welfare agencies," said Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, which supports programs to keep children safe in their own homes whenever possible. "If those agencies can't even do well by these children, imagine what happens to the hundreds of thousands of children, almost all of them anonymous, taken each year and thrown into foster care."

    A Tough Road for Siblings Who Survived Cases of Abuse, NYT, 15.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/nyregion/15foster.html

Girl, 7, Found Beaten to Death in Brooklyn

January 12, 2006
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and LESLIE KAUFMAN

A 7-year-old girl was found beaten to death yesterday inside her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she had been isolated from her five brothers and sisters, bound to a chair in her room and sexually abused, law enforcement officials said. She weighed just 36 pounds.

The girl, Nixzmary Brown, died of at least one blow to the head, the city medical examiner said. Investigators say they believe her stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, killed her when he banged her head against a faucet in the bathtub. Mr. Rodriguez and the girl's mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, were charged with murder last night. Mr. Rodriguez was also charged with other crimes, including sexually abusing Nixzmary and a sister.

Later in the day, a 2-month-old boy in Brownsville, Brooklyn, whose mother was undergoing treatment for drug abuse, was found dead in his crib. The cause was not known last night.

Nixzmary's family had been investigated twice by the city's child welfare agency - in May for neglect, and again in December after it received a tip that she was being abused.

A spokeswoman for the agency, the Administration for Children's Services, said yesterday that investigators interviewed the girl, her relatives and officials at her school after the December tip, as well as the child's doctor, but detected no signs of imminent risk. Agency officials would not say if their investigators visited Nixzmary's home.

A law enforcement official said Nixzmary had been forced to eat cat food and, because she was confined to her room, had to use a litter box. The official said that Mr. Rodriguez was "emotionless" when he talked to investigators last night, and that he tried to portray the girl as a troublemaker.

Nixzmary, who was 45 inches tall, was the fourth child from a family known to city child welfare authorities to die in a parent's home in the last two months.

The deaths come as the city has aggressively pursued a strategy of keeping troubled families together whenever possible with intensive services instead of placing children into foster care.

City officials acknowledge that the spate is unnerving, but say it is not necessarily a reflection on city policy. They say there were 30 deaths of children known to the authorities in 2005, down slightly from 33 in 2004.

Staff members at the Nixzmary's school, Public School 256, had seen hints of abuse in recent months, including a cut on the girl's forehead, and had noticed that the girl had missed weeks of school, law enforcement officials said. Someone at the school contacted the authorities last month, city officials said.

Nixzmary died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a blow to the head, and she had other injuries, though it is still not known when she received them, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.

Nixzmary's mother, Ms. Santiago, 27, told investigators that after discovering her daughter unconscious, she alerted a neighbor who in turn called the authorities, the police said. Nixzmary was pronounced dead at her home, the police said. After discovering Nixzmary, the police sent her five siblings to Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center for observation. The children, ranging in age from 6 months to 9 years, were later taken into the custody of the Administration for Children's Services, an agency spokeswoman said.

The agency is reviewing its policies for dealing with abuse reports, and last month it issued separate reports on the death of two children last year who had been removed and eventually returned to their homes, that were critical of the agency's handling of the cases.

But John B. Mattingly, the commissioner of children's services, said in a statement: "We do not believe there are systemic issues here, nor do we believe there are ideological issues. There are clearly practice issues and that's what we are addressing right now. The first thing we need to go after is reinforcing everyone's focus on safety."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called Nixzmary's death "a great tragedy" and voiced his confidence in Mr. Mattingly. "A.C.S. was called, somebody alerted them, they tried to do an investigation, obviously not fast enough," the mayor said. "And John Mattingly is looking at it. Over all, A.C.S. does a very good job, but any tragedy, anybody that slips through, is one too many."

Outside the three-story apartment building on Greene Avenue where Nixzmary had lived, investigators could be seen removing evidence, including a small wooden school chair with bits of white twine attached to its legs. They brought out a computer, a DVD player and a paper evidence bag marked: "Pink towel with blood on it."

The family's neighbors remembered them as distant, saying they kept to themselves and did not socialize. At least one neighbor said he saw signs of something worse.

Perry Robinson, 49, said his 11-year-old cousin would play with Nixzmary in a nearby park. "I saw her with welts on her arms, and limping as she was walking," Mr. Robinson said. He said that she told him that she had fallen. Other times, she explained the injuries differently, saying that Mr. Rodriguez had struck her, and had threatened that if she told anyone, he would kill her and her mother, Mr. Robinson said.

At least once, Mr. Robinson said he saw Mr. Rodriguez grab the girl. "He was so domineering," he said. "I thought he'd break her arm."

The circumstances of the other child's death yesterday were less clear. The boy, Michael Segarra, was found in his crib about 2:15 p.m. when a neighbor came by to get a cigarette from his mother.

The neighbor, Monique Whitfield, said that the door to the apartment, at 663 Howard Avenue in Brownsville, was open, and that the boy's mother, Melisa Segarra, was asleep.

Ms. Whitfield said Michael lay face down in the crib with his arms splayed out. She went to turn his face and saw that his whole body was cold, stiff and purple.

"I said, 'Come and see the baby,' " she said. Ms. Segarra replied, "You check the baby," she said.

After much urging, she said, she was able to get Melisa up to check on Michael, and when she saw her son, "she started screaming."

Ms. Segarra was questioned by the police yesterday, a law enforcement official said. There was no one home at her apartment last night.

The medical examiner's office said an autopsy had been completed, but it was waiting for toxicology test results before making its findings.

An official with knowledge of the case said that the child welfare agency had been involved with Ms. Segarra because of past drug use and that she was undergoing treatment under the agency's supervision. .

Reporting for this article was contributed by Ann Farmer, Colin Moynihan, Michelle O'Donnell, William K. Rashbaum and Jim Rutenberg.

    Girl, 7, Found Beaten to Death in Brooklyn, NYT, 12.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/nyregion/12child.html