USA > History > 2006 > Violence (II)

Mourners carried the coffin of Monica Armanious, 8, on Jan. 17, 2005.

She and three family members were found slain at home in Jersey City.

Marko Georgiev for The New York Times        NYT        June 15, 2006

Small Cities Hit Hard in Crime Report        NYT        15.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/nyregion/15crime.html

N.Y. Man Kills His Children and Himself

August 31, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:29 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- A father, convinced he was the victim of a voodoo curse, apparently drowned his two young children in the bathtub and then jumped to his death in front of a subway train, police said Thursday.

Franz Bordes, 39, died at Wednesday evening at a Brooklyn subway station. Investigators found several suicide notes indicating he was at odds with relatives of the children's mother, a Haitian immigrant like Bordes.

''They're using everything they can to destroy me, most of all voodoo,'' one of the notes read, according to police.

Bordes, who was unemployed, lived with Francoise Mercier, 42, and their children, Sweitzer, 2, and Stephanie, 4, in an apartment on Staten Island. Family members told police that the father usually looked after the children while Mercier worked as a nurse's aide.

After Mercier learned Bordes was dead, she rushed home from work to check on her children, and found them in the bathtub, not breathing, police said. Paramedics later pronounced them dead.

One of the suicide notes was found on Bordes' body. Six more were in the home.

    N.Y. Man Kills His Children and Himself, NYT, 31.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Children-Drowned.html


 

Jonathon Edington, a 29-year-old patent lawyer, was released on a $1 million bond from Bridgeport Correctional Facility.

Douglas Healey/Associated Press        August 31, 2006
Told His Daughter Was Molested, a Lawyer Kills His Neighbor, Police Say        NYT        31.8.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/nyregion/31stab.html 


 

Told His Daughter Was Molested,

a Lawyer Kills His Neighbor, Police Say

August 31, 2006
The New York Times
By AVI SALZMAN

FAIRFIELD, Conn. Aug. 30 — A patent lawyer in this suburb was released on $1 million bond Wednesday, two days after, the police say, he broke into the home of a next-door neighbor and fatally stabbed him after a relative told him that his 2-year-old daughter had been molested by the neighbor.

The police said the lawyer, Jonathon Edington, 29, repeatedly stabbed the neighbor, Barry James, 59, and then walked back home. Mr. James, whose mother found him bleeding to death just after 4:30 p.m. Monday, was taken to Bridgeport Hospital, where he was pronounced dead an hour later.

The Fairfield police charged Mr. Edington, who had no criminal record, with murder and burglary after officers said they found him in his kitchen later that afternoon, covered in blood.

The police said Wednesday that they had not been able to verify whether Mr. Edington’s daughter had been molested, and noted that no sexual assault complaint had been filed against Mr. James.

“We have no information to indicate it did occur, and we weren’t investigating Mr. James for any illegal activity” said Capt. Gary MacNamara, chief of the administrative division for the Fairfield Police.

Captain MacNamara said the police believed Mr. Edington had heard from a family member that his daughter had been molested, and “within moments” walked over to his neighbor’s house and broke in. The Associated Press quoted Mr. Edington’s lawyer, Michael Sherman, as saying that the 2-year-old “gave the mother information which was alarming and disturbing. The mom relayed it to her husband. That was the spark.’’

Mr. Edington, who had been held at the Bridgeport Correctional Facility, was released Wednesday afternoon on a bond put up by a Stamford bondsman, Mr. Sherman said.

Four people who got out of a car at Mr. James’s house late Wednesday afternoon did not answer questions posed by a reporter. Messages left at the James home were not returned.

Kristen Maynard, a middle school teacher whose backyard is adjacent to Mr. James’s yard, said she heard yelling and dogs barking around the time of the killing, but was busy with her daughter and did not look outside the window.

“I thought to myself, ‘That’s too loud for this neighborhood,’ ” she said.

Neighbors said they were shocked over the molestation accusations, particularly in a neighborhood with so many children. Bob Kimmerling, a 66-year-old teacher and neighbor of Mr. James, said he understood how those kinds of charges could make someone snap.

“I don’t know that it was justified,” he said. “I just don’t know if a person can cope with hearing things like that and be rational.”

Neighbors described Mr. Edington as a quiet man who would walk through the neighborhood with his daughter and his small dog. He earned a degree in engineering at Syracuse University and finished at Fordham Law School in 2004, passing the New York bar in July of that year. He passed the Connecticut bar this year.

Pat Wysocki, a 70-year-old woman who lives across the street from Mr. Edington said that the Edingtons, unlike many of the families on the street, kept their children in the backyard to play. On Wednesday, children from the neighborhood played outside, riding their bikes and running around.

Mr. James, a stocky man who neighbors said had worked in a funeral parlor, lived with his parents in the house, at 101 Colony Street. He rarely was seen in the neighborhood, except for a few moments every morning, Ms. Wysocki said.

“The only time you’d see him come out is to pick up the paper,” she said.

But others said that Mr. James had struggled for years with alcoholism and that neighbors would sometimes have to drag him back into his house when he passed out outside. Joe Peddle, a retired police officer whose yard abuts Mr. James’s garage, said he and his son had helped Mr. James into his house a few years ago.

“He had passed out in his driveway, and his parents are quite old, so me and my son helped him inside,” he said.

In the past month, however, Mr. James had gotten more erratic, said Darrell Maynard, a neighbor. A few weeks before his death, a neighbor found him screaming obscenities and helped him into the house, he said. And about a week and a half beforehand, Mr. James drove through the back of his own garage and into Mr. Peddle’s shed, Mr. Peddle said.

“I was sitting out front on my porch when I heard an explosion,” he said. “The back half of the car was in his garage and the front half was in my shed.”

Mr. James was convicted in 2001 of driving under the influence, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 18 months of probation.

Mr. Edington is scheduled to be arraigned on Sept. 12.

Margot Williams contributed reporting for this article.

    Told His Daughter Was Molested, a Lawyer Kills His Neighbor, Police Say, NYT, 31.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/nyregion/31stab.html

Death toll from Indianapolis crime spree hits 14

Posted 8/11/2006 1:23 PM ET
AP
USA Today

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A man shot outside a nightclub died Friday, becoming the city's 14th homicide victim in a crime spree that has terrorized residents and prompted the mayor to declare an "extreme emergency."

Billy Isaac Jr., 18, was shot Aug. 5, along with a 16-year-old who died shortly after. The fatal shootings were among 14 that occurred over less than a week earlier this month, prompting police to step up patrols in trouble spots and lengthen officers' shifts.

Even before the rash of killings stunned the city of about 863,000, Indiana's capital already was on track for its bloodiest year since 1998, when 162 people died. So far this year, 95 people have been slain in Indianapolis.

Prayer vigils and special church services are planned for victims.

Mayor Bart Peterson, meanwhile, has declared the spree an "extreme emergency." City leaders announced a plan Wednesday intended to relieve strain on the Marion County Jail by spending about $2.2 million this year to create a night court for some cases.

Peterson called for an extra $54 million increase in public safety and criminal justice spending in 2007, comparing the crime wave to a natural disaster.

Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said he plans to add six deputy prosecutors to the homicide unit, bringing the total to 12.

    Death toll from Indianapolis crime spree hits 14, UT, 11.8.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-11-indianapolis_x.htm

Police groups to hold summit on rising crime

Updated 7/31/2006 8:55 AM ET
USA Today
By Kevin Johnson

WASHINGTON — Citing increasing concerns about violent crime, law enforcement authorities are convening a national summit here next month to deal with sudden spikes in homicides, robberies and assaults.

Local police officials and municipal authorities from more than a dozen cities, including Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Louisville, Charlotte and Boston will meet Aug. 30 in Washington, where the mayor and police chief recently declared a "crime emergency."

"What we've seen happen in the past year across this country deserves all of our attention," said Charlotte Police Chief Darrel Stephens, referring to the first significant jump in homicides and other major crimes in more than a decade. "We need to get a better sense of what is going on."

Charlotte experienced the same increases in homicides and robberies reported last year nationally. The FBI said overall violent crime was up 2.5% in 2005, and homicides increased nearly 5%.

"Many cities are facing things they haven't confronted in five or 10 years," said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which is hosting the meeting. "The purpose of this (summit) is not to scare anyone. But there are signs that things are changing. We don't want to go back to the 1990s when things were out of control."

In many parts of the country, violent crime hit all-time highs in the early '90s when warring criminal groups vied for control of thriving street-drug markets.

The violence, much of it blamed on the spread of crack cocaine, led to landmark anti-crime legislation during the Clinton administration that provided federal funding to hire thousands of additional police.

Violent crime then declined for nearly a decade until last month, when the FBI reported increases in almost all categories of major crime during 2005.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau was analyzing possible causes of the increased crime, which has been concentrated in the Midwest but also stretches to other regions of the country. "I'm not certain that anybody has an idea of what is triggering this," Mueller said.

In many cities, however, police are linking the recent trouble to increasing numbers of juveniles involved in robberies and assaults.

Minneapolis police estimated that juveniles will account for 63% of all suspects in violent crimes this year, up from 45% in 2002.

In Boston, juvenile arrests in robbery cases rose 54% in 2005. And in Washington, Police Chief Charles Ramsey has linked a surge in robbery to juveniles.

In an address to a Justice Department-sponsored conference on community policing here last week, Ramsey noted that juveniles account for four of every 10 suspects arrested on robbery charges this year. "Some as young as 12 or 13 and many armed with handguns," he said. "I know that D.C. is not alone in confronting these and other very troubling trends. All of us are very concerned that we not lose any ground."

In Charlotte, where robberies were up 30% last year, Stephens said police are noting clusters of robberies involving two or three assailants.

Stephens and others said they are worried that local crime problems have not registered with national officials occupied with the war on terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the recent conflict in the Middle East.

"Public safety has disappeared from the national radar screen," he said.

    Police groups to hold summit on rising crime, UT, 31.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-30-police-summit_x.htm

Phoenix residents help in hunt for serial killers

Updated 7/29/2006 3:00 PM ET
AP
USA Today

PHOENIX (AP) — With two serial killers on the loose in Phoenix, Marnie Reiher knows she should stay off her front porch. She shouldn't answer the door. And if the cats sneak out at night, she should leave them on their own till morning.

"But then I'd be giving in," said Reiher, 36, who refuses to hunker down even though she lives a few blocks from where one of the killers struck. "I'd be imprisoning myself."

It is a common feeling in this city of 1.5 million, where gunmen have randomly shot dozens of people since May 2005, killing 13. While many still shutter themselves inside their homes, a growing number have decided to fight back.

They are patrolling their neighborhoods at night, cellphones and emergency whistles in hand. Some have started new block watch groups, while others have donned the red berets and white T-shirts of the Guardian Angels, who are starting a chapter here.

At community meetings, women remind each other of the safety advice they heard while growing up: Squeeze a car key between your fingers and you have a knife. Wear your purse in the front so someone can't strangle you with the strap. Keep your head up. Make eye contact. Kick him in the groin.

"It's not like we didn't know there are crimes in Phoenix," said Wendy Fields, 42, who delivers rental tuxedos. "But we always thought they were in another part of town. Guess what? The shootings are right here where we live."

Every night last week, Fields marched through her neighborhood after work and stood sentry in a park with the Guardian Angels.

"This is a nice place," she said. "I want to keep it that way."

Police have no suspects in either case.

They believe the attacks started more than a year ago, beginning with a gunman who fires from a car and has been dubbed the Serial Shooter. That assailant — police do not know if they are dealing with a man or a woman, or if the shooter is acting alone — is thought to have killed five people, wounded 17 and targeted horses and dogs, too.

Another predator known as the Baseline Killer, so-called because some of the killings took place near Baseline Road, is thought to be responsible for eight more slayings and 11 sexual assaults since August. In all but one case, his victims were women. He attacks at close range.

The Baseline Killer tends to strike in the late afternoon and evening, while the Serial Shooter usually opens fire during the overnight hours.

Karate instructor Mike Wall has been teaching rape-awareness seminars to packed rooms since the attacks began. "When it's bad out there, business is great here," he said.

Even the best self-defense tips would be worthless against someone randomly shooting from a car, like the Serial Shooter. But if the attacker gets close enough to rape, he is close enough for a good tough kick to the middle.

Wall teaches his students to drop to their backs and kick at the attacker with their feet.

"Women really don't know how strong their legs are," Wall said.

At one of Wall's recent seminars, police Sgt. Paul Penzone told families to keep their eyes open. Phoenix neighborhoods can be anonymous places, divided by cinderblock walls and wide streets.

"The population growth in Phoenix is just overwhelming," Penzone said in an interview. "You're not going to know people who frequent your neighborhood. But if people took an active role in this, it would be like we had police officers on every street corner."

So far, the message has been working. The Silent Witness tip line that Penzone manages has been loaded with calls in recent weeks.

Reiher and her mother now call 911 every time they hear gunfire. Shots are common at night in Phoenix, said Dyan Reiher, 58.

"We used to ignore them," she said. "We used to think they were far away. But really, those gunshots could be coming from anywhere."

Marnie also has been busy making safety whistles for everyone in the neighborhood. She attaches them to bright, stretchy bracelets and adds a luggage tag with a message for both the wearer and any would-be attacker: "Not me."

"It means if you come near me, I'm going to blow this," Marnie said. "I'll blow this until I'm blue in the face. Don't come this way. Not here. Not me."

    Phoenix residents help in hunt for serial killers, UT, 29.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-29-phoenix-serial-killers_x.htm

Two Serial Killers Sought in Phoenix

July 29, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL GIBLIN

PHOENIX, July 28 — The authorities this week linked a double murder and a nonfatal shooting to two serial killers who have evaded capture despite an intensive police investigation in Phoenix and its suburbs.

The unknown gunmen, who the police believe are acting independently, are thought to be responsible for dozens of killings, rapes, robberies and shootings since last year. The most recent shooting was Saturday.

The police used forensic evidence to connect the killing of two women, Romelia Vargas, 38, and Mirna Palma-Roman, 23, in south Phoenix on Feb. 20 to the crimes attributed to the person they call the Baseline Killer, Sgt. Andy Hill said. The women were shot before dawn as they prepared for work in a catering truck parked near a construction site.

“One of the things we have done investigatively is to go back over cases — and there’s a lot of them to go back over,” Sergeant Hill said. “In the last year and a half, there’s been almost 400 homicides and a lot of other violent crimes.”

The police attribute 23 cases to the Baseline Killer, whose first crimes in August were clustered around Baseline Road in Phoenix. The person is thought be responsible for eight killings, seven rapes and eight robberies.

The police also linked the nonfatal shooting of a man riding a bicycle before dawn in the suburb of Mesa on Saturday to the second gunman, who is known as the Serial Shooter.

The shooting was a new eastern expansion for the attacker, whose territory has spanned 32 miles from the bedroom cities of Avondale, west of Phoenix, to Mesa, east of Phoenix.

The police think he may shoot people walking or riding bikes from a light-colored sedan. The Serial Shooter is believed to be responsible for 5 killings, 17 nonfatal shootings, 12 shootings of animals and one property shooting at a business.

    Two Serial Killers Sought in Phoenix, NYT, 29.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/us/29serial.html

Neighbor Charged in Death of Utah Girl

July 28, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:58 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Prosecutors on Thursday charged a man with kidnapping and aggravated murder in the death of a 5-year-old girl, saying he confessed to smothering the girl, then sexually assaulting her -- a crime that could bring the death penalty.

Destiny Norton had been missing for eight days when police found her body Monday night stuffed in a plastic storage box in a cellar at the man's house just two doors away, prosecutor Bob Stott said at a news conference to announce the charges Thursday.

The neighbor, Craig Roger Gregerson, 20, will be appointed a defense lawyer at a court appearance scheduled for Friday, he said.

Destiny's parents, Rich and Rachael Norton, were in seclusion Thursday and making funeral plans for their daughter, but a close friend speaking on their behalf said Gregerson should be executed.

''Let him fry,'' Peter Brooks said. ''He took an innocent child out of her own backyard. Your own backyard. That's where we send our children. Lured her into his house, and did the unspeakable act that he performed on this child. ... No human being deserves to walk on this planet after doing that.''

Brooks and other friends said Gregerson had volunteered to help search for the girl and lighted a candle in a vigil outside the family's home before he led police to her body.

Authorities added a few details about the girl's disappearance and why police couldn't find her body the first time they searched Gregerson's tiny row house unit. The storage box had been hidden in a ''tight, confined basement with a lot of material down there,'' Stott said.

Gregerson told police he lured Destiny into his home the night of July 16, and that she protested. ''Destiny wanted to leave and became very vocal,'' Stott said.

Stott said Gregerson covered the girl's mouth, then carried the limp body into his cellar. An autopsy determined Destiny was smothered to death, then sexually assaulted.

The aggravating circumstances in the murder charge come from kidnapping the girl and desecrating her body, said Stott, who added he hadn't decided whether to seek the death penalty.

''Before any sentence can be given we have to get a conviction,'' Stott said.

    Neighbor Charged in Death of Utah Girl, NYT, 28.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Missing-Girl-Utah.html

Night Out in City Ends in Slaying of Woman, 18

July 28, 2006
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

They had set out from northern New Jersey, two teenage friends headed for a Monday night out in Manhattan. They wound up in a nightclub and, after having perhaps too much to drink, they emerged into the early-morning city streets to discover that their car had been towed, their ride home locked up in a New York Police Department impound lot in a lonely section of the Far West Side.

Over the next several hours, the authorities said yesterday, the two friends, after trying to retrieve their car, became separated. And Jennifer Moore, 18, who was to start college in the fall, found herself wandering alone on a road near the Hudson River.

Yesterday, her body was found in a trash bin in West New York, N.J. A 34-year-old man with a lengthy criminal record was accused of killing the young woman — having taken her to a hotel across the river in Weehawken, N.J., and beaten and strangled her.

Ms. Moore’s family, who live in Harrington Park, N.J., in Bergen County, were left to grapple with her death, and the city had another nightmarish outcome for a young woman who had done nothing more than head into the night in search of fun.

Ms. Moore’s father, Hugh Moore, speaking to reporters outside his home, said that in retrospect it would have been “a great thing,” if his daughter had stayed at the tow pound.

“I’m so numb I haven’t been able to think,” he said. “Staying at the pound would have been the right thing.”

Her family and friends had appealed for help in trying to find Ms. Moore, a graduate of Saddle River Day School, and investigators scoured the West Side, including the nightclub and the tow lot, and other parts of the city. Her description was left on missing-person police fliers. She was 5 feet 2 inches, weighed 105 pounds, and was wearing a white miniskirt with a black halter top.

Her body was found at 4:30 a.m. yesterday inside the trash bin in a parking lot in the shadow of two 24-story buildings at Park Avenue and West Broadway in West New York. From there, the trail led two blocks away to the Park Avenue Motel, at 60 48th Street in Weehawken, where witnesses said Ms. Moore was seen at 5:20 a.m. Tuesday, and where investigators believe she was beaten and strangled.

About three hours earlier, Ms. Moore and her friend, Tara Keenan, 18, left the nightclub, the Guest House on West 27th Street in Chelsea in Manhattan, and found that Ms. Keenan’s red Dodge sedan had been towed from a “no standing” zone nearby, officials said. The women tracked it more than 10 blocks to the Police Department’s impound lot, at 38th Street and 12th Avenue on the Far West Side.

But tow lot attendants refused to give Ms. Keenan the car because she appeared to be intoxicated, the police said. Ms. Keenan then passed out, collapsing, and the attendants called for an ambulance. The lot workers also called officers to the scene because another apparently inebriated woman, who was not with Ms. Moore and Ms. Keenan, was there trying to retrieve her car and was becoming ill, the authorities said.

Ms. Moore went to use the tow lot’s bathroom. About 3 a.m., just before the ambulance arrived and with officers there attending to the two ill women, Ms. Moore apparently left the bathroom, slipped by all the authorities and simply walked off unnoticed, the police said.

Later, about 4 a.m., she used her cellphone to call her boyfriend, Kofi Boakye, who lives in Alpine, N.J., and told him that an African-American man was following her, the police said.

Law enforcement officials said they had picked up the suspect in the case, Draymond Coleman, 34, a drifter and career criminal who encountered Ms. Moore sometime early Tuesday after she left her friend. It was unclear how Ms. Moore and Mr. Coleman met, but at some point, she wound up in a taxi with him, and the taxi took them to Weehawken.

Mr. Coleman, who was released from prison last year, was arrested at 2:45 a.m. yesterday as he arrived at a single-room occupancy hotel at 145th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Ms. Moore’s body was found in New Jersey about two hours later.

Law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation, said Mr. Coleman used Ms. Moore’s cellphone in the Weehawken hotel room on Tuesday to call a woman and ask for cab fare. The authorities said they were able to track down the woman, who helped provide Mr. Coleman’s identity.

Last night, Hudson County investigators were questioning the woman, whom they did not identify, and said they expected her to face charges in connection with the killing.

Investigators at the Weehawken hotel yesterday said that video surveillance tape from inside the hotel showed Mr. Coleman entering the hotel with Ms. Moore slumped over his arm, as if he were helping her. They said she appeared to be drugged or drunk.

Investigators said that Mr. Coleman also used Ms. Moore’s cellphone to call his mother and ask her for the phone number of a former companion. City detectives visited the mother in her Manhattan apartment on Wednesday night looking for Mr. Coleman.

Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman, declined to speak about how Mr. Coleman was linked to the killing, but said that detectives obtained his photograph and left it at several hotels where he was said to have stayed.

After being questioned by investigators at the 10th Precinct, on the West Side, Mr. Coleman was charged with one count of first-degree murder, said Gaetano T. Gregory, the first assistant Hudson County prosecutor.

About 1 a.m. today the police led Mr. Coleman out of the 10th Precinct station house to take him to Central Booking. He emerged wearing a blue T-shirt, black shorts, handcuffs and ankle shackles. A reporter asked if he was innocent and he said, “Yep.” A moment later he cursed at several photographers who surrounded him.

Mr. Coleman will be held until a possible court hearing is held to enable his extradition to New Jersey, the police in New York said.

An autopsy performed yesterday found that the cause of Ms. Moore’s death was homicide as a result of blunt-force trauma to the head and strangulation, Mr. Gregory said.

Investigators believe Mr. Coleman clipped Ms. Moore’s fingernails, trying to remove possible DNA evidence that he feared had accumulated during a struggle with her, officials said.

Mr. Coleman has been arrested multiple times in New York since the 1990’s and served five years in jail for the 1997 sale of a $10 bag of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer on West 43rd Street, officials said. At that time, he had told investigators that he once worked as a bouncer at a club in Chelsea. A law enforcement official said that Mr. Coleman was a pimp.

After his release from prison in 2002, officials said, he violated the terms of his parole three times and was returned to prison each time before his release in January of last year.

It was unclear how Ms. Moore and Ms. Keenan were able to get inside the Guest House, because they were underage. Brad Veifman, a spokesman for the club, said in a statement that the club’s management was cooperating with the police.

Mr. Boakye, Ms. Moore’s boyfriend, declined to speak to reporters when he was with Mr. Moore earlier at the Moore home.

Ms. Moore’s father said, “Nothing is going to bring back Jen.”

A teacher at her high school, Bernard Revoir, said Ms. Moore’s high grades in his psychology class meant she was able to skip his final exam in the spring. She seemed to like his lessons on child psychology, he recalled.

“She was a spark,” he said.

Ms. Moore, a captain of the soccer team, had attended the small, private school since seventh grade, said another teacher who refused to be identified. “She was a very important person in our school,” the teacher said, adding that she planned to attend Hartford University in the fall.

Mr. Revoir said the reports that she was missing had disturbed him. “I knew that she was an adventurous girl,” he added. “At times, because of the age they’re at, they overestimate their invulnerability.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by Michael Amon, Kareem Fahim, John Holl,Colin Moynihan, Nate Schweber and Carolyn Wilder.

    Night Out in City Ends in Slaying of Woman, 18, NYT, 28.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/nyregion/28murder.html?hp&ex=1154145600&en=64d3d144511c6ac6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Colo. killer claims creativity in slayings

Posted 7/28/2006 11:36 PM ET
AP
USA Today

DENVER (AP) — Robert Charles Browne says he shot some of his victims and strangled others, in one case with a pair of leather shoelaces. He knocked out one woman with ether, then used an ice pick on her. He put a rag soaked in ant killer over another victim's face and stabbed her nearly 30 times with a screwdriver.

If Browne is telling the truth about killing 49 people across the country, his crimes practically constitute a manual on the many ways in which to kill.

In fact, it may have been the variety in his methods that kept authorities from connecting the crimes until Browne sent a taunting letter to prosecutors six years ago.

"Sometimes killers do not replicate things from one crime to the next," said criminologist Robert Keppel, a professor at Sam Houston State University and author of the 1997 book "Signature Killers." "That makes it hard on police."

Colorado authorities announced Thursday that Browne, 53, claimed to have committed scores of killings between 1970 and his arrest in 1995. He has pleaded guilty to two slayings and is serving a life sentence for murdering a Colorado girl in 1991.

Investigators so far have been able to corroborate Browne's claims in six slayings — three in Louisiana, two in Texas and one in Arkansas, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said.

In some cases, however, investigators have been unable to confirm some of his claims to have dumped bodies in certain places. And in other cases, he cannot remember enough details for investigators to check out what he is telling them.

Court papers paint a picture of a predator who loathed women and thought he was justified in killing them because they were cheating on their husbands and boyfriends — in many cases, with him.

Browne, who has been married six times, said he has been disappointed with women his whole life. "Women are unfaithful, they screw around a lot, they cheat and they are not of the highest moral value," he told investigators. "They cheat and they are users."

Vicki Woods, a lifelong friend of Browne in his hometown of Coushatta, La., said she was stunned to hear of the allegations. "This is not a side of Robert I ever imagined," she said.

Woods said she had complete trust in Browne, who baby-sat her preteen son and daughter in the 1980s. Her children also went to Browne's Easter egg hunts and spent weekends at a trailer he owned near the small rural town in northern Louisiana.

"I am so confused. I have no idea what's going on, except that I feel like I have lost a friend," she said.

After one of the killings in Coushatta — a killing now linked to Browne — he often insisted that women and children in the neighborhood stay indoors after dark, she said.

"He was so protective of us," Woods said.

Browne told investigators he rarely if ever planned a killing, choosing his prey at random. He met his victims in everyday settings — a motel bar, a convenience store where he worked. In one case, he was familiar with a victim's apartment because he had changed the locks there as a maintenance man.

He said he used different types of guns and sometimes beat his victims. One died after he put a rag soaked in ant killer over her face while she was asleep, he said.

An Army veteran who served in South Korea during the 1970s, Browne described killings committed with unspeakable cruelty. He said he dismembered Rocio Sperry, whose remains have never been found, in a bathtub, "just popping" her joints and taking the body apart, investigators said. He said he was worried about being spotted carrying the body outside.

The remains of Nidia Mendoza, 17, were found dumped along a Houston interstate, her legs and head cut from the body. Browne told authorities he used a dull butcher knife that was in his motel kitchenette.

He told investigators in prison interviews that he never just went "looking for someone." When the opportunity was there, Browne said he took it — "it was just disgust with the person and some of it just confrontation."

"No plan?" an investigator asked.

"No," Browne replied.

Maketa said Browne probably got away with his crimes because he never spent much time with his victims before killing them and was adept at disposing of their bodies.

If Browne's claims prove true, he would be one of the most prolific killers in U.S. history. Gary Ridgway, Seattle's Green River Killer, became the nation's deadliest convicted serial killer in 2003. He admitted to 48 murders but once said he killed as many as 71 women.

It was Browne who spurred investigators to take another look at his past when he sent a letter in 2000. It read: "Seven sacred virgins entombed side by side, those less worthy are scattered wide. The score is you 1, the other team 48."

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, who was once El Paso County district attorney, said he believes Browne's claim to multiple slayings. He described the killer as intelligent.

"The combination of moving around a lot, picking random victims and being pretty clean about it, if he's telling the truth about how he disposed of the bodies — that would show some pretty calculated methods to avoid detection," Suthers said.

But Keppel was skeptical of Browne's claim that he killed close to 50 people.

"Probably no doubt the guy's murdered a lot of people, but numbers are just for media purposes," Keppel said. "This guy has lied, cheated and stolen his whole life and there's no indication he's going to tell you the whole truth about all his victims."

Browne's public defender, Bill Schoewe, did not return calls seeking comment.

    Colo. killer claims creativity in slayings, UT, 28.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-28-colorado-killer_x.htm

Colorado Killer Claims He Murdered 49 Others in 25 Years

July 28, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE KELLEY

COLORADO SPRINGS, July 27 — A man serving a life sentence in a state prison for a 1991 murder says he is responsible for 49 other murders, and investigators say they believe his claims are credible, law enforcement authorities revealed Thursday.

A four-year investigation has linked the man, Robert C. Browne, 53, to murders in Colorado, Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, Sheriff Terry Maketa of El Paso County said at a news conference on Thursday. Mr. Browne has also claimed responsibility for murders in California, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Washington, as well as one in South Korea.

The murders occurred from 1970 until Mr. Brown’s conviction in 1995 for the murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church, who was abducted from her home in the Black Forest area in September 1991 while she baby-sat for a younger brother. Her remains were found in 1993.

Mr. Browne contacted investigators from prison in 2002 with claims of the other killings. Since then, seven killings have been linked to him, including that of a 15-year-old girl, Rocio Delpilar Sperry, who was found dead at a Colorado Springs apartment in late 1987. Mr. Browne pleaded guilty on Thursday to her murder, the sheriff said.

Sheriff Maketa said Mr. Browne initially contacted investigators by letter about the additional killings.

“His letters, his taunting letters, indicated that there were others and basically challenged us to find them,” Sheriff Maketa said. In interviews with detectives, Mr. Browne gave details of the murders that only the police and the killer would have known, the sheriff said.

Of the confirmed deaths, all the victims were female, ranging in age from 13 to 26. They were either strangled or stabbed with a knife, screwdriver or ice pick. Mr. Browne indicated that he used chloroform or ether to subdue them, the sheriff said, and also told investigators that he had consensual sex with some of the victims.

If Mr. Browne’s claims are true, he will rank among other notorious serial killers like Gary Leon Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, who admitted to killing 48 women; and John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of murdering 33 young men and boys.

Sheriff Maketa said that while police had not specifically termed Mr. Browne a serial killer, the number of victims was hard to deny.

“He fits the definition,” the sheriff said.

    Colorado Killer Claims He Murdered 49 Others in 25 Years, NYT, 28.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/us/28killer.html

Child-prostitution cases reveal cruel underworld

Updated 7/26/2006 10:21 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Judy Keen

CHICAGO — A harrowing picture of the seamy world of child prostitution is emerging in court documents stemming from a nationwide crackdown that has produced 543 arrests and 94 convictions.

Women have told investigators they started working as prostitutes for a suburban Chicago man, Jody Spears, when they were 16 and 17, according to an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court here this week. "So what? Some of my best girls were minors," Spears is quoted saying in the affidavit.

Witnesses, whose names are not used, said Spears took them to New York, Las Vegas and Honolulu.

The case here is part of "Innocence Lost," a project launched in 2003 by the Justice Department. The FBI set up 14 task forces in cities with the most reports of child prostitution; now the task forces are in 27 cities, says Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation section.

Legal filings in other "Innocence Lost" cases reveal how pimps recruit and abuse teen prostitutes:

•A Chelsea, Mass., woman, Evelyn Diaz was charged this month with recruiting girls who were 13, 15 and 16 to work as prostitutes. FBI special agent Tamara Harty testified that one girl, 13 at the time, told agents that Diaz took her shopping and to restaurants, then to clients in New York.

•Juan Rico Doss of Reno was convicted last month of recruiting girls 14 and 16 to work as prostitutes in California. They were told to lie about their ages if arrested.

•In Detroit, four Ohio residents were charged in December with holding girls as prisoners and making them call their pimp "Daddy."

•Indictments of 16 people in Harrisburg, Pa., in December alleged that one 12-year-old girl was forced to have sex to pay for her grandfather's crack cocaine.

The indictments also said pimps from Toledo, Ohio, bought women from one another and beat them if they didn't make enough money.

Of more than 100 prostitutes identified in that investigation, more than 20 were underage; the youngest was 13. Many were rotated through rest areas and truck stops from California to Maryland.

The maximum sentence for sex trafficking is life in prison.

"Innocence Lost' will continue, Oosterbaan says. "When I see cases cropping up in places like Harrisburg," he says, "that suggests that the problem is more pervasive than people might think."

Norma Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project in San Francisco, which counsels victims, once got calls only from large cities asking for help creating programs for former child prostitutes but now hears from small cities. "It's like a virus, it doesn't just go away." She says there's too little federal funding to help women make the "long journey" back from prostitution.

Celia Williamson, a professor of social work and prostitution researcher at the University of Toledo, says the crackdown "shocks the community" and prompts discussion about "modern-day slavery."

In Toledo, she says, 48% of adult street prostitutes started when they were younger than 18. A 50-member roundtable of police, social service workers, health care providers, former prostitutes and others meets there monthly to find better ways to intervene.

Various studies say 300,000-800,000 youths are at risk of sexual exploitation. Hotaling says the crackdown is a first step toward dealing with the problem.

"Everything has been done so wrong in the past," she says. "We arrest children for their own sexual abuse and their own rape. We don't provide any services. We let them out (of jail) to their pimps."

    Child-prostitution cases reveal cruel underworld, UT, 26.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-26-prostitution-crackdown_x.htm

L.A. sheriff hopes to I.D. 50 women in killer's photos

Updated 7/25/2006 11:16 PM ET
USA Today
By Martin Kasindorf

LOS ANGELES — Investigators asked the public's help Tuesday in identifying nearly 50 women that police say could be victims of a man currently on death row for murdering two aspiring models.

At a news conference, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Capt. Ray Peavy displayed row after row of fading photographs of unidentified women taken in the 1970s and 1980s.

The pictures were seized from the home of William Richard Bradford, who was convicted in 1988 for sexually assaulting and killing Shari Miller, 21, and Tracey Campbell, 15.

Prosecutors said Bradford posed as a photographer and lured the women to their deaths with promises that posing for him would open doors to modeling and film careers.

Police have had the photos since Bradford, 60, was arrested in 1984 but stored them into the case file following his conviction. Retired detectives working on cold cases recently went back into the file.

"We're convinced that some of these people met with foul play," Peavy said.

One, No. 28 on the display, was identified as Donnalee Campbell Duhamel, whose decapitated body was found in a Malibu canyon in 1982 a few days after she met Bradford at a bar, Peavy said.

Peavy said detectives might ask Bradford to identify who is in the photos. At the penalty phase of his trial Bradford alluded to other possible victims in asking that he be put to death.

"Think of how many you don't even know about," he told the jury.

The two women Bradford is known to have killed were strangled and their bodies dumped in a desert and a mountain areas, Peavy said. Campbell was a neighbor of Bradford, and Bradford had met Miller at a Los Angeles-area bar, Peavy said.

Peavy called the case "unusual" and said detectives should have asked questions about the photos "probably long before now."

Though investigators believe that most women in the photos lived in Southern California, Peavy said, Bradford lived in or visited other places such as Grand Rapids, Mich.; Mundelein, Ill.; Valparaiso, Fla.; Cornelius, Ore., and Pasadena, Texas.

"We could have victims, theoretically, all over the country," Peavy said.

After posting photos of 52 women on the Sheriff's Department website, detectives learned the names of five women before Tuesday's news conference. Three were ex-wives of Bradford, who was married four times. Police believe the former wives are still alive and hope to locate them, Peavy said.

A fourth picture depicted a former roommate of Bradford, Peavy said.

Relatives of women who have been missing for decades may "get closure" if they call sheriff's detectives to identify a photograph, Peavy said.

Photographs of the women can be found at www.lacountymurders.com/wanted/LADIES1.html .

    L.A. sheriff hopes to I.D. 50 women in killer's photos, UT, 25.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-25-missing-women_x.htm

Guardian Angels patrolling Phoenix

Updated 7/23/2006 6:29 PM ET
AP
USA Today

PHOENIX (AP) — A volunteer public safety group is patrolling parts of the city amid reports that two serial killers have been striking separately in recent months, killing as many as 11 people.

The Guardian Angels began their patrols in an east Phoenix neighborhood last week and expanded them to southeast Phoenix on Saturday. Some of the 16 shootings authorities attribute to the serial killers occurred in those areas.

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said the new patrol area was crime-ridden even before the shootings.

"They're welcoming us and telling us horror stories related to drug-dealing, gang-banging and the prostituting that takes place here," Sliwa said. "They generally feel unsafe, so you add to it these serial killers, they're at their wit's end."

He said many people in the neighborhood live in trailers without air conditioning and don't have a choice but to be outside in triple-digit heat.

"By being out there, that potentially makes them a target, and that gets them unhinged," Sliwa said.

Twenty-four unarmed volunteers will be divided between the two locations, and the group will discuss patrolling other areas, he said.

"We just want to keep the visibility up, make (neighbors) comfortable, give them a little relief," he said.

Sliwa founded the Guardian Angels in 1979. At the time, he was a night manager at a New York City McDonald's who was frustrated by rampant crime in the city. The group's first patrols were on subways and streets, and now it has 20 chapters around the world.

Sliwa traveled to Arizona on Saturday to determine whether the group had enough resources to sustain patrols through August. He said it does, but additional members were also expected to arrive from Chicago and San Francisco.

Sgt. Andy Hill, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department, said investigators have no problem with the Guardian Angels' patrols as long as members are careful and follow the law.

"It's really not significant to what we're doing," Hill said. "We just want them to be safe and get a hold of us if they have a problem out there."

One of the serial killers has been linked to a series of sexual assaults, robberies and six killings. The other has been definitively linked to the Dec. 29 wounding of one man, and authorities believe he could be responsible for five shooting deaths.

    Guardian Angels patrolling Phoenix, UT, 23.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-23-phoenix-patrol_x.htm

Puzzling Killing of 3 Students Leaves Wyoming City on Edge

July 19, 2006
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

LARAMIE, Wyo., July 18 — The bodies of three college students were discovered by the police early Sunday morning in a modest rental house a few blocks from the University of Wyoming, sparking a convulsion of conflicted emotion and grief in this small town.

No homicide like this — with multiple victims and multiple weapons — has occurred here in at least a quarter-century, and probably longer, the police said.

Reactions to the crime have been complex, partly because so many questions remain. The police say that the people involved all knew one another and that this was not a random event that should cause fear. But that has left ample room for speculation about how the people came to be in the house that night and what happened there.

“There is no threat to the community,” Cmdr. Dale Stalder of the Laramie Police Department said in an interview. As of late Tuesday, Commander Stalder said, investigators had not decided whether to classify the crime a triple homicide or a double-murder-suicide.

The police have said that two of the victims lived in the house and that there had been a small gathering where alcohol was served. They have also said that more than one type of weapon was used but have not provided details or speculated on a motive.

A community forum with the police is scheduled for Wednesday night to answer residents’ questions and “to start a healing process,” Commander Stalder said.

Many residents said the not knowing was the worst.

“People are waiting to see,” said John M. Burman, a professor at the university’s law school who lives just a few blocks from the crime scene.

Mr. Burman knew the parents of one of the victims, Adam Towler, 20, who grew up here and was to transfer to Georgetown University in Washington in the fall. “Right now the reaction is disbelief,” he said.

But that reaction will evolve, Mr. Burman said, depending on what the police say occurred and how confident they are in that determination.

Laramie, like many towns in the West and Midwest, has been unnerved by the scourge of methamphetamines, and by the resulting property crimes and social decay that accompany drug addiction. The city of 28,000 is also undergoing a big construction wave, especially at the university, as state tax revenue collected from Wyoming’s energy boom has poured in. The growth spurt and the arrival of an itinerant construction work force have unsettled people who worry that Laramie’s treasured small-town coziness is fading.

The police are not suggesting that drugs or out-of-town strangers played a part in the killings. But Jeff Theis, a university custodian who was born and raised here, said the crime had reinforced his conviction that Laramie is not what it was.

“I sleep with a loaded gun in my house,” Mr. Theis said while taking a break outside a residence hall. “Things that happen all around the country are starting to happen here.”

Of the three dead students, two had recently finished their freshman year and decided to stay in town for the summer. One of the two, Amber N. Carlson, 19, of Denver, had declared a nursing major. The other, Justin R. Geiger, 20, of South Beloit, Ill., was majoring in marketing.

Mr. Towler, whose father, Brian, is the department head of chemical and petroleum engineering at the university, had attended Emory University and was a two-time Wyoming geography bee champion, a university spokesman said.

A fourth person, Anthony N. Klochak, 19, a sophomore at the university, ran bleeding from the crime scene just after 2 a.m. and had a neighbor call 911, the police said. Mr. Klochak was treated for injuries and released from a hospital on Sunday. He has spoken with the police but could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Graham Barrett, 20, a junior from Colorado Springs who said he had played hockey with Mr. Klochak, said he had heard so many rumors that he did not know what to think. He has not been able to speak to his friend yet, either. “Just not knowing what happened is the biggest thing,” Mr. Barrett said.

    Puzzling Killing of 3 Students Leaves Wyoming City on Edge, NYT, 19.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/us/19slay.html

Police tie jump in crime to juveniles

Updated 7/12/2006 11:43 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Kevin Johnson

Police in cities across the USA are linking the recent jump in the nation's violent-crime rate to an increasing number of juveniles involved in armed robberies, assaults and other incidents.

In Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Washington, Boston and elsewhere, police are reporting spikes in juvenile crime as a surge in violence involving gangs and weapons has raised crime rates from historical lows early this decade. The rising concern about juveniles comes a month after the FBI said the nation's rate for violent crimes — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — rose in 2005, the first time in five years.

Minneapolis police estimate that this year, juveniles will account for 63% of all suspects in violent and property offenses there, up from 45% in 2002.

In Washington and Boston, police say there have been alarming increases in robberies by juveniles. This year, 42% of all robbery suspects in Washington have been juveniles, up from 25% in 2004, the police department says. A series of homicides — 14 in July — has led D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey to declare an emergency that allows him to put more cops in troubled areas. Four suspects have been arrested in the slaying of a British man in the upscale Georgetown area Sunday; they include a 15-year-old.

In Boston, juvenile arrests for robbery rose 54% in 2005; weapons arrests involving youths rose 103%. "Kids are jumping into this violence," police Superintendent Paul Joyce says. "We're very concerned."

The forces behind rising juvenile crime vary by city, but officials cite some common factors. Among them:

•Reduced funding for police and community programs. Localities often complain they don't have enough money; now the chorus is getting louder. Tight budgets and an emphasis on terrorism have shifted federal and state money from police and programs for youths. "It should be no surprise that the streets are more violent," Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak says. Since 2003, he says, Minneapolis has lost at least $35 million a year in state funding for city programs.

•A changing social climate. In Boston and other cities, gang leaders imprisoned a decade or longer ago are being released and are reclaiming their turf. Joyce says they're recruiting — or forcing — youths to carry guns or deliver drugs to shield older gang members from additional charges. The weapons can turn disputes among teens into violent confrontations, he says.

"Every 10 years, we seem to go through a cycle of violence," says Tom Cochran of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Everybody is trying to figure this out."

    Police tie jump in crime to juveniles, UT, 12.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-12-juveniles-cover_x.htm

Cities grapple with crime by kids

Updated 7/12/2006 11:44 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Kevin Johnson

MINNEAPOLIS — Barely 15, the skinny youth from the city's troubled North Side already had a long rap sheet.

His juvenile court record included citations for 19 offenses, dating back three years. Last Thursday, police pulled up beside him with a warrant to arrest him again: He allegedly had violated the terms of his probation from a robbery citation last month by cutting off a leg bracelet that allowed Hennepin County authorities to monitor his whereabouts.

After a chase on foot through a crowded city park, "Killer," one of several aliases the youth uses, was back in handcuffs. "I am a maniac!" he screamed, declaring his affiliation with a local gang. "I am a maniac!"

The fugitive, whose name was not released by police because he is a juvenile, was among eight frequent-offender youths pursued last week by a team of officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, the county Probation Department and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The team was formed last month as part of a crackdown on violent young offenders who represent an increasing problem at a time when crime rates are ticking upward.

After nearly a decade in which violent-crime rates fell or were stable throughout the USA, the FBI reported last month that there was a 2.5% rise last year in violent crimes, which include homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults.

Here and in cities across the nation — including Washington, Milwaukee and Boston — police are linking the increase to a growing problem: Crime by kids as young as 10, many of whom have been recruited by gangs.

Budget cuts may be factor

The reasons for rising crime among juveniles are complex.

Tight local budgets and reduced federal funding for police, along with new anti-terrorism duties, have stretched police departments and led to cuts in community programs for youths. Historically low crime rates in recent years often have been linked to a booming economy. Now, with the economy slowing, officials in several cities are tying poverty and financial uncertainty to rising crime, particularly among juveniles.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett says 41% of the children in his city are in households in which the annual income is below the federal poverty line, about $20,000 for a family of four. "A lot of young people have no hope in their lives," Barrett says, and many "think nothing of carrying a gun."

"We have a lot of young people involved in robbery," Milwaukee Deputy Police Chief Brian O'Keefe says. "Some are 10 and 11. A lot of the kids we see never know anything but violence."

Many officials, including Boston police Superintendent Paul Joyce, say the release of thousands of felons who were imprisoned during drug crackdowns in the 1990s also has become a significant factor in boosting juvenile crime.

Joyce says just-released gang members, seeking to stake out turf without getting arrested again, have recruited juveniles to carry weapons for them or make drug deliveries. Earlier this year, Joyce says, Boston police found a 13-year-old boy with a handgun, standing with a 23-year-old gang member.

"The young kids don't think about the consequences of their actions," Joyce says.

"We have videotapes of young children working as mules for gang members," says Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The group has hosted two summits during the past year to discuss the gang problem and plans to examine juvenile violence when it meets in September.

Juveniles "are carrying the guns and the drugs for the gang leaders so (the leaders) can avoid prosecution," Cochran says. "This is a major problem."

In Minneapolis, police began looking for "Killer" early last week, after he removed the leg bracelet. Keeping the bracelet on was a condition of the youth's probation, Hennepin County probation officer Mick Sandin says. The group that rounded up the fugitive youths represents an effort to reduce a backlog of 500 juvenile arrest warrants that grew after budget cuts forced the closure of the police department's Juvenile Division in 2001. The division was re-established in May.

"Before now, the pursuit of juveniles had not been a high priority," says police Lt. Bryan Schafer, who heads the Juvenile Division. "That created a perception that nothing much happens to juveniles" who commit crimes. "So (adult gang members) began sending the kids out to carry their guns, because they knew nothing would happen to them. We think we're changing that perception."

Since the fugitive-hunting team began work, many parents and family members of juvenile suspects have been reluctant to provide information to police, says police Sgt. Ron Stenerson, who leads the team.

That wasn't the case with "Killer," however. A concerned family member provided the tip that led to his capture by telling police they should search a park near his home.

Sandin spotted the youth at the park. When Stenerson called his name, the teenager turned toward the officers and then sprinted away. After running about 50 yards, he was hauled down by Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Payton, who's training for a triathlon.

Witnesses told investigators that the youth had tossed a gun into some tall grass before he was chased, police Lt. Bryan Schafer says. Police found a loaded .38-caliber gun, and are investigating whether it belonged to the youth.

Proliferation of guns

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, noting that the number of juveniles suspected in violent crimes jumped by 18% from 2004 to 2005, says a "shocking proliferation" of guns is partly to blame.

Rybak has recruited local businesses to fill gaps in community programs for young people, from evening recreation events to summer job placements and college tuition assistance. He says the key is "winning back" kids who have drifted into delinquency.

"The issue of hopelessness is what we are addressing."

    Cities grapple with crime by kids, UT, 12.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-12-juveniles-inside_x.htm

Subway rider sliced in power saw attack

Updated 7/6/2006 10:46 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — A man wielding a cordless power saw in each hand rampaged through a Manhattan subway station early Thursday, using one of the buzzing blades to carve into the chest of a postal worker who later said it felt like "he was trying to cut through me."

Police arrested Tareyton Williams, 33, of the Bronx, on attempted murder and other charges about two hours later after they said he punched someone in another random attack on the street.

The victim, Michael Steinberg, 64, was hospitalized in stable condition. Speaking by telephone to reporters who gathered outside the hospital, he said the attack was unprovoked.

The assailant "never spoke," Steinberg said. "I think he was out of his mind."

The attacker snatched the two saws from a cart being used by workers upgrading the public address system at a subway station a few blocks south of Columbia University. He assaulted Steinberg moments after taking a swipe at another rider and missing, police said.

"He looked at me and before I knew it he was attacking me," Steinberg said of the pre-dawn attack. "The motor kept going on. He was trying to cut through me."

Steinberg said the attacker finally paused to demand money, then bolted out of the station with his wallet and the power tools. The saws were later found in a trash can.

Williams was in police custody Thursday evening. There was no telephone listing for him at the home address provided by police.

The attack came two weeks after a Boston man was charged with stabbing four people — three of them tourists — over a 13-hour period in the subway and the theater district in Manhattan.

    Subway rider sliced in power saw attack, UT, 6.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-06-subway-saw-attack_x.htm

Utah Man Kills Himself During Standoff

June 25, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:44 a.m. ET
The New York Times

OGDEN, Utah (AP) -- A man fatally shot himself during a standoff with police, and a woman sitting next to him in the car was struck by his bone fragment, authorities said.

Autumn Lee was listed in good condition at McKay-Dee Hospital on Saturday night after getting struck in the neck by a piece of bone, police said.

The standoff began after police received a call that Lee, 30, of South Ogden, had been taken from a women's shelter by her ex-boyfriend, against whom she had filed a protective order.

Lee was driving and Ryan Todd Oman, 21, of Ogden, was in the passenger seat with a handgun when police pulled the car over in a parking lot around 2:30 p.m., said assistant police Chief Randy Watt.

Lee told police she wasn't being held hostage, but was worried Oman would shoot himself if she got out of the car.

Oman shot himself just before 4 p.m. as a negotiator tried to talk to him, Watt said. He later died at the hospital.

Police had been looking for Oman in connection with a June 13 shooting.

Ogden is about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City.

    Utah Man Kills Himself During Standoff, NYT, 25.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Standoff-Shooting.html

5 teenagers dead after New Orleans shooting

Updated 6/18/2006 1:57 AM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Five people ranging in age from 16 to 19 were killed in a street shooting early Saturday, the most violent crime reported in this slowly repopulating city since Hurricane Katrina hit last August.

All were believed to have been gunned down in a volley of bullets on a street in the Central City neighborhood just outside the central business district. Three of the victims were found in a sport-utility vehicle rammed against a utility pole and two were found nearby on the street.

Authorities said they were looking for one or more suspects but did not elaborate.

Capt. John Bryson said police think the shootings were either drug-related or some type of retaliation attack. A semiautomatic weapon was used and "multiple, multiple rounds" were fired, he said.

"I think the motivation we're looking at is pretty obvious," he said. "Somebody wanted them dead."

Bryson said he could not remember the last time this many people were killed in once incident — before or after Katrina. "I can't remember five," he said.

Four of the victims — a 16-year-old, a 17-year-old and two 19-year-olds — died at the scene. Another 19-year-old, believed to be the brother of the youngest victim, died later at a hospital, police said.

There was no immediate word if any of the victims had been armed. Their identities were not immediately released.

Terrance Rayly, 23, who was staying in a home nearby, said he heard the shots after getting in from a music club.

"It was like 15 gun shots," he said. "I heard pop, pop, pop, pop, pop."

The shooting left many people feeling unsafe in the poor Central City neighborhood where people sat on porches and discussed the incident Saturday.

"Lord, this is like the sixth person killed around here in the last month," said Monique Jackson, a 27-year-old housekeeper who lives around the corner from the crime scene. "It's getting bad now."

She added: "I don't want to ever hear about a murder ever again. It's just young people doing it to each other."

Crime, including murder, has been creeping back after Katrina emptied the city of its residents when it hit on Aug. 29, flooding 80% of New Orleans. Current population estimates vary but the city is believed to have less than half its pre-storm population of about 455,000.

So far, 52 people have been murdered in the city since Jan. 1, half the number of murders at this time last year, Bryson said.

There were only 17 killings in January through March. But the rate picked up after that — there were 13 in April alone, followed by 22 in May and June, including Saturday's killings.

Bryson said the recent spike in murders, which he said was connected to drugs, was not just a "police problem" or a "New Orleans problem."

"It's a Louisiana problem, it's a United States problem," he said. "We're begging the citizens to join with us to coordinate with watch groups."

    5 teenagers dead after New Orleans shooting, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-17-new-orleans_x.htm

Seemingly Random, a 13-Hour Stabbing Spree Recalls Violent Outbursts of the Past

June 18, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

Maybe it was the moon.

What else might have prompted a 20-year-old Boston man, his condition diagnosed earlier as "limited but not mentally ill," to embark on a 13-hour stabbing spree that injured four random victims in Manhattan last week?

The attacks that the Boston man, Kenny Alexis, is accused of committing bore none of the earmarks of a serial killer. Nor of a circumstantial succession of crimes, like the robbery that leads to a kidnapping and a car theft. Nor of the mob mentality that fuels a binge of teenage wilding.

Rather, the attacks evoked past paroxysms of violence that appeared to have been triggered by the most innocent gesture — visible or spoken, genuine or imagined — and that generally ended just as abruptly when a suspect was captured or killed.

"Sometimes, extreme acts of violence seem to come out of nowhere," said Jack Levin, a criminologist and director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. He said the attackers were almost always quickly caught.

"Their crimes are so disorganized and ineffectual that they never run up a large body count," he said. "In a frenzied state, they go from victim to victim without any cooling-off period. The entire rampage is held together by their lack of mental health, and little more."

Last week's stabbings fit the pattern of other multiple attacks that, because of their apparent randomness and short duration, briefly gripped the public's imagination.

In January 2005, Jesse Nettles, 58, stabbed five strangers, including a man pushing his two children in a stroller in Times Square, during a two-day rampage in Manhattan. Mr. Nettles, who was homeless, pleaded guilty to assault charges and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 1974, he had killed a man at the Port Authority bus terminal.

On an afternoon in May 2004, Jose Rodriguez-DeJesus, 29, used a 13-inch kitchen knife to stab three people in Greeley Square, just south of Herald Square in Manhattan, before being shot by the police. He is now serving a 25-year sentence.

Mr. Rodriguez-DeJesus had served 30 months in a Massachusetts prison for stabbing an uncle and was committed in 2000 for a psychiatric evaluation but was not found to be insane. He was described as distraught and volatile, and a relative said he "was into violence; he liked talking about killing."

In some cases, bizarre behavior came seemingly without warning.

Ronald J. Popadich, 39, of Garfield, N.J., was arrested in 2002 for injuring 18 people whom he tried to run down with a car on Feb. 12, and 7 more people two days later in a second hit-and-run spree in Midtown. One pedestrian died.

In between the attacks, the police said, he shot a cabdriver in the East Village. The police said that Mr. Popadich told them later he wanted to kill as many people as he could. Two days before the first attacks, he had shot a woman who had refused his sexual advances. She later died.

In 1996, John Royster, 22, a drifter with a minor criminal record, was charged in an eight-day rampage that included the murder of a woman outside her dry-cleaning shop on Park Avenue, a sexual attack on a woman in Central Park and a vicious attack on a woman who was jogging.

At his sentencing two years later, he said, "It should be apparent to anyone with common sense that I'm mentally disturbed." Defense lawyers said the spree began when Mr. Royster was spurned by a tourist with whom he had had a brief affair.

While they declined to elaborate on specifics of the latest case, several criminologists said it did not seem atypical.

"It's probably the end result of a series of disappointments or stresses this guy has had over the past several years," said N. G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

"He could be mentally ill. He feels angry that a girl just dropped him, or he didn't get a job, or his parents kicked him out of the house," Dr. Berrill continued. "This is more like, 'I'm going to take my little knife and show people how angry I am.' "

On June 8, Mr. Alexis was released on bail in Boston after a court hearing on vandalism charges.

Last Tuesday afternoon, the police said, he was stopped for fare-beating at a subway station near the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown. He was issued a summons after officers found that he was not wanted on any outstanding warrants.

At 3:41 p.m., the authorities say, Mr. Alexis stabbed a 21-year-old tourist from Texas on a southbound C train in Harlem, saying later that the man was in his way.

About 12 hours later, the police said, Mr. Alexis stabbed a 30-year-old Brooklyn man on a subway platform at Rockefeller Center after the victim refused to give up his cellphone.

Then Mr. Alexis stabbed two students from Montreal, one 22 years old and the other 25, who were standing on a traffic island in Times Square, after he unsuccessfully tried to engage the two women in conversation, the police said.

He was arrested after witnesses to the last attack followed the assailant to a McDonald's in Times Square and called the police.

All four victims were recovering. "In all likelihood," Professor Levin said of the attacker, "he sought revenge for his miseries, not against any particular individual, but against an entire group of people — all New Yorkers, all Americans, all of humankind."

Another criminologist at Northeastern, James Alan Fox, said that sometimes there was method to the madness. "Most people who go on crime sprees like this don't necessarily attack randomly," he said. "It may look random — they may not be targets they know — but certain kinds of targets. Those are people who 'just snap,' but who have a longstanding grudge.

"The more random the event, the more likely it's a case of mental illness where the person is delusional in some way," Professor Fox said. "Alexis is a homeless man. There's a good possibility he is suffering from some undiagnosed mental disorders that play into his decision to attack and his decision whom to attack. Then, there's no pattern to victims except unfortunately for them being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The rampage ends, Professor Fox said, "when he is caught, killed, or the voices stop talking to him."

When the moon set Tuesday morning, it was almost full.

But Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly did not resort to folklore to explain the string of stabbings that began in the city's subways.

"When you get four and a half million people a day into the system," Mr. Kelly said, "every once in a while a really bizarre thing can happen."

    Seemingly Random, a 13-Hour Stabbing Spree Recalls Violent Outbursts of the Past, NYT, 18.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/nyregion/18spree.html


 

The bodies of a woman and two of her children, ages 6 and 13,
were removed from their apartment in Jersey City on Sept. 21, 2005.

Timothy Ivy for The New York Times        June 15, 2006

Small Cities Hit Hard in Crime Report        NYT        15.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/nyregion/15crime.html

Small Cities Hit Hard in Crime Report        NYT        15.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/nyregion/15crime.html

Small Cities Hit Hard in Crime Report

June 15, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURA MANSNERUS

In Jersey City, where the gentrifying waterfront deflects the public eye from unchangingly poor neighborhoods, violent crime rose by 8.4 percent last year. Thirty-eight people were killed, an increase of 15 compared with the previous year.

Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J., fared even worse with violent crime, each registering an increase of about 20 percent. In New York, Syracuse also had a 20 percent increase, and violent crime was up in Stamford, Conn., as well.

In most smaller cities and even in some quiet suburbs in the region, violent crime rose last year, according to preliminary statistics released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The increases were such that New York City, with a slight decline, appeared to be an oasis of relative calm.

Among the 15 other cities with 100,000 or more people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, 10 had increases in violent crime, including 4 in the double digits. And in those 15 cities, taken together, the number of homicides rose by 28 percent.

The reasons, experts said, included the spread of gangs to smaller cities and suburbs and cuts in federal grant programs to local police agencies. Many attribute the success of bigger cities in part to sophisticated police techniques that they have developed, while smaller ones are just catching up — especially in their approaches to violent offenders.

While experts do not consider homicides to be a very telling gauge of crime, they agree that the increase is striking — even more so than the nationwide figures, which showed a 12.5 percent increase in homicides last year in cities with populations of 50,000 to 249,000. The numbers underscore what they describe as a resurgence of senseless violence among young men in impoverished neighborhoods.

"These ideas of respect and disrespect and how you have to respond to being disrespected may have started on the mean streets of the core urban areas, but you now see them in smaller places," said David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

By and large, the numbers in the New York region fit the pattern in the nationwide statistics released on Monday, showing a 2.5 percent increase in violent crime — which comprised homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — after an impressive 15-year decline.

Violent crime in the largest cities declined slightly between 2004 and 2005, with New York City recording a 1.9 percent decrease over all and a 5 percent decline in homicides. In cities with populations under one million, however, violent crime was on the rise. The report did not contain data on individual cities with populations of less than 100,000.

"Right now, comparing anywhere to New York City is kind of a setup because New York City has become extraordinarily safe," Mr. Kennedy said. "It's places not just the size of Albany and Buffalo but places the size of Newburgh that are having big-city crime problems."

Experts also caution that a one-year increase in crime may be just a small bump. It is, nonetheless, a bump visible all over the country. While violent crime in cities of over 1 million dipped by 0.4 percent, it rose 8.3 percent in cities of 500,000 to 999,999, 2.9 percent in cities of 250,000 to 499,999 and 3.4 percent in cities of 100,000 to 249,999. In cities of fewer than 10,000 people, violent crime rose 1.6 percent nationally.

John Klofas, a professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said that while "the medium-size cities have been affected the most dramatically" in the latest rise in crime, "it's too tempting to try to read a lot into this at this time."

In Rochester, for example, homicides are down slightly so far in 2006, while aggravated assaults are far ahead of the number in the comparable period of 2005, Professor Klofas said. And the increase in homicides last year, to 53 from 36 in 2004, followed a huge decrease from 2003.

The F.B.I. report led officials in some cities to protest that one year's numbers were no basis for judging their handling of crime. In Jersey City, the report prompted Mayor Jerramiah Healy and Police Chief Robert A. Troy to announce that property crimes have been on a significant decline this year and that homicides — 14 so far — were down significantly compared with the same period last year.

The department has added bicycle patrols and surveillance cameras, has offered cash to people who turned in their handguns and has announced a program called "Operation Little Rascal" to enforce a curfew. "We're going to start bringing these kids off the streets and bringing them to their parents," Mayor Healy said.

In Paterson, a Police Department spokesman, Lt. Anthony Traina, said crime statistics often fluctuated for reasons that might not be immediately apparent, citing one crime wave a few years ago after more than 400 convicts were released from prison and returned home.

As to homicides, which doubled last year, reaching 20, Lieutenant Traina said, "Over the years, we've been over 20 and down to 7."

A few other cities reported numbers just as stark: Hartford had 25 homicides in 2005, up from 16 in 2004, and in Elizabeth the number rose to 17 from 10.

One exception, oddly, was Camden, N.J. — named "America's most dangerous city" for the last two years — which had 35 homicides last year, down from 49 in 2004. The overall violent crime data for Camden, a city of almost 80,000, was not in the F.B.I. report, since it is too small.

And in Newark, where violent crime has slowly receded — declining 1.6 percent in the preliminary 2005 data — homicides increased, to 97 from 84 in 2004.

"To have had an increase in murder for the past two years is very troublesome," said Michael Wagers, the executive director of the Police Institute at Rutgers in Newark. Mr. Wagers said 90 percent of homicides in Newark were committed with guns, compared with 67 percent nationally, in a pattern he saw in other medium-size cities like Hartford and Charlotte, N.C.

"You have an intersection with gangs and guns," he said. "In the typical homicide or shooting, the victim is a gang member in some kind of dispute, disrespecting someone at a party or bumping into them, and then there's an escalation of violence between groups."

    Small Cities Hit Hard in Crime Report, NYT, 15.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/nyregion/15crime.html

Man Suspected of Stabbing 4 in N.Y. Is Arrested

June 14, 2006
The new York Times
By AL BAKER and JOHN HOLUSHA

Police officers took into custody today a man suspected of stabbing four people in three separate attacks, including a tourist from Houston who was critically injured in what was described as an unprovoked encounter on a C train Tuesday afternoon.

The suspect was being questioned today at the Midtown North police precinct, but had yet to be charged with a crime. The police were conducting lineups with the accused and witnesses to the attacks to determine if there was a single assailant.

The man was taken into custody shortly after two women were stabbed outside the W hotel at 47th and Broadway early this morning. The women, described by the police as 22- and 25-year-old visitors from Canada, were reported to be in stable condition at St. Vincent's Hospital downtown.

The police said the two women left the W about 4 this morning and were approached by a man described as black, about 5 feet 5 inches tall and dressed all in black, the same as the description of the subway assailant. They say there was only a little conversation before he stabbed both women in the back, knocking them to the sidewalk.

A doorman from the hotel had followed the women out the door and the police said he witnessed the attack. He and some taxi drivers watched the attacker cross the street and enter a McDonald's restaurant. The doorman used his cellphone to call the police, who arrived and took the man into custody.

The police said the suspect also fits the description of the person who attacked a man an hour earlier as he waited for a southbound F train at 50th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, as well as the attack Tuesday on Christopher McCarthy, a 21-year-old tourist who was stabbed while riding a C train on the Upper West Side.

The man in the F train incident was also reported to be in stable condition today.

In the attack on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy apparently thought at first that he had been punched, the police said, until he realized he was bleeding. By that time, his assailant had left the train at 110th Street and Central Park West. The train, a southbound C, continued to the next station, 103rd Street, before the authorities stopped it. An ambulance then took Mr. McCarthy to a hospital.

Witnesses said that he and the victim had exchanged no words before he suddenly lashed out and that the attack did not appear to be part of a robbery. At least four other people were in the car, the last one on the train, at the time, the police said.

The police said the couple had evidently gotten lost and went farther north than they intended. to 135th Street. Realizing their error, they boarded a southbound train, where the attack occurred.

The crime — its violent details, its setting in the subway in the middle of the day and its tourist victim — recalled a notorious New York City killing, the murder of Brian Watkins, a visitor from Utah, by a robber in 1990. Mr. McCarthy was in stable condition today at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center on West 114th Street, where he underwent surgery after being stabbed multiple times in the left side of his chest, the police said. On Tuesday he had been listed in critical condition.

His parents arrived in the city from Texas today and were visiting with Mr. McCarthy. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has offered them free hotel rooms in the city, according to Marcus McCarthy, an uncle of Mr. McCarthy's who lives in Katy, Tex.

Mr. McCarthy and his girlfriend, Ganda Krisananuwatara, 20, were on the second day of a planned two-week vacation in New York. "Everyone was so excited," Ms. Krisananuwatara said in an interview. "They told me to take pictures — now I'll have the most terrible story when I get back."

The two left for Washington on Saturday morning, then came to the New York metropolitan area, where they were staying in Connecticut with one of Mr. McCarthy's friends.

"It seemed totally unprovoked," said an investigator of the McCarthy attack. "As far as we know now, he walks up, makes a motion that's he's going to hit him. He's got the thing in his hand. He cuts him. And then he leaves."

The man's escape prompted a police dragnet, as officers with flashlights poured into subway tunnels while others in helicopters scoured the north end of Central Park and the Morningside Heights neighborhood.

The search of the tunnels turned up nothing, the police said, and the investigator said there were no surveillance cameras on the train or on the platform at 110th Street. Late Tuesday, the police had not yet recovered any weapon.

The attack occurred shortly before 4 p.m. on the last car of the C train as it pulled into the station at 110th Street, the police said.

Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Krisananuwatara had boarded the train at 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. "We sat down first, and he came in the next stop," Ms. Krisananuwatara said. "He got up to leave, and then he stabbed my boyfriend. He didn't say anything."

They sat in the middle of the car, directly across from the attacker. The man then got up and, in a punching motion, slammed his fist into Mr. McCarthy's chest repeatedly. "It happened so quickly that I didn't see the knife," she said.

Everyone thought he had been punched, Ms. Krisananuwatara said. It was not until Mr. McCarthy began to bleed that he and the other passengers realized what had happened. By then, the attacker was gone, and the train was approaching the next stop.

Mr. McCarthy graduated three years ago from Langham Creek High School in Houston and works as a computer technician, said his aunt, Mindy McCarthy of Katy, Tex. Mr. McCarthy, who lives at home with his parents, owns a company, Computer Medics of Houston, with his father, Joe McCarthy.

"He's a smart, very bright kid," his aunt said. "He's not violent. He's pretty passive."

The attack must have been unprovoked, she said. "It had to be a random deal," she said of the attack. "He's not that type of kid."

She described her nephew as a big science fiction and fantasy fan who used to collect Star Wars paraphernalia.

Hours after the attack, Ms. Krisananuwatara walked out of the 24th Precinct station house on West 100th Street and said little to reporters before getting into a black unmarked police car. The authorities said the couple had come into the city for a day trip.

Although violent subway crime is far less frequent than in years past, it still strikes a raw nerve among New Yorkers and many visitors.

"It is much less common, but still terrifying, in large part because when a crime happens in somebody else's neighborhood, you can put it at a distance," said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, the riders' advocacy group. "When an attack happens on the subway, it's like it happens in your own backyard."

In September 1990, Mr. Watkins, a 22-year-old former tennis instructor from Provo, Utah, who came to New York to see the United States Open, was fatally stabbed in a Midtown subway station as he tried to defend his family from a gang that had robbed his father and attacked his mother. The attack occurred at 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue as the family was headed to dinner at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park.

His parents, Sherwin and Karen Watkins, have spent the 16 years since their son's murder as forceful advocates for crime reduction. In 1990, their son was one of more than 2,000 people murdered in New York City. Last year, there were fewer than 600, the fewest in more than four decades.

"We saw some change after our son's death," Mr. Watkins said in a telephone interview last night. "I think it's continued. The worst thing I can think of is for it to return to what it was before."

But New York's reputation is better than it was 15 years ago. When Ms. Krisananuwatara was asked if she would return to New York, she said, "Maybe."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Kareem Fahim,Thayer Evans, Sarah Garland, Kate Hammer, Jennifer 8. Lee, Thomas J. Lueck and Matthew Sweeney.

    Man Suspected of Stabbing 4 in N.Y. Is Arrested, NYT, 14.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/nyregion/14cnd-stab.html?hp&ex=1150344000&en=4ce728d90431a664&ei=5094&partner=homepage

On June 4, 1996, Kyle Kevorkian McCann was attacked in Central Park by a drifter, John J. Royster, above,
who beat her and tried to rape her. She was given a 10 percent chance of survival.
Mr. Royster is serving life in prison for that attack and two others, including one in which a woman was killed.

Associated Press        NYT        June 8, 2006

  A Central Park Victim Recalls 'When I Was Hurt,' and Her Healing        NYT        8.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/nyregion/08pianist.html

A Central Park Victim Recalls

'When I Was Hurt,' and Her Healing

June 8, 2006
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

On an album of bittersweet children's songs that she wrote more than a decade ago, the woman who came to be known only as "the piano teacher" offered what, in hindsight, seems like an eerie glimpse of her own future.

"I'm moving away today to a place so far away, where nobody knows my name," she wrote in the lyrics of a song called "Moving."

When she wrote that song, she was young and vivacious, a piano teacher and freelance music writer who loved Beethoven and jazz, sunsets and river sounds, long walks and everything about New York.

On one of those beloved walks, through Central Park in the bright sun of a June day in 1996, a homeless drifter beat her and tried to rape her, leaving her clinging to life. After the attack, the words to her song came true. She "moved away," out of New York City, out of her old life, and all but her closest friends did not know her name. To the rest of the world, she was — like the more famous jogger attacked in Central Park seven years earlier — an anonymous symbol of an urban nightmare. She was "the piano teacher."

Now, on the 10th anniversary of the attack, she is celebrating what seems to be her full recovery from brain trauma. She is 42, married, with a small child. She is Kyle Kevorkian McCann, the piano teacher, and she wants to tell her story, her way.

Her doctor told her it would take 10 years to recover, and Sunday was that talismanic anniversary. "I feel my life has been redefined by Central Park," she said several days ago, her voice soft and hopeful. "Before park; after park. Will there ever be a time when I don't think, 'Oh, this is the 10th anniversary, the 11th anniversary'?"

She spoke in her modest ranch house in a wooded subdivision in a New York suburb. She sat in a dining room strewn with toys, surrounded by photographs of her cherubic, dark-haired 2-year-old daughter. A Steinway grand filled half the room, and at one point she sat down and played. Her playing was forceful, but she seemed embarrassed to play more than a few bars, and shrugged, rather than answering, when asked the name of the piece. She asked that her daughter and her town not be named.

She calls that day, June 4, 1996, the day "when I was hurt."

Hers was the first in a string of attacks by the same man on four women over eight days. The last victim, Evelyn Alvarez, 65, was beaten to death as she opened her Park Avenue dry-cleaning shop, and ultimately, the assailant, John J. Royster, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Yet the attack on the piano teacher is the one people seem to remember the most. Part of the fascination has to do with echoes of the 1989 attack on the Central Park jogger. But it also frightened people in a way the attack on the jogger did not because its circumstances were so mundane.

It did not take place in a remote part of the park late at night, but near a popular playground at 3 in the afternoon. It could have happened to anyone. The tension was heightened by the mystery of the piano teacher's identity.

For three days, as police and doctors tried to find out who she was, she lay in a coma in her hospital bed, anonymous. Her parents were on vacation and her boyfriend, also a musician, was in Europe, on tour. Finally, one of her students recognized a police sketch and was able to identify her in the hospital by her fingers, because her face was swollen beyond recognition. The police did not release her name.

The last thing she remembers about June 4, 1996, is giving a lesson in her studio apartment on West 57th Street, then putting her long hair in a ponytail and going out for a walk. She does not remember the attack, although she has heard the accounts of the police and prosecutors.

"To me it's like a fact I learned and memorized," she said. "As if I were a student in school studying history."

She does not think about the man who did it. "I might have been angry for a moment, but not much longer than that," she said. "How could I be angry at John Royster? He was declared not insane, but I guess by our standards he was."

Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, her doctor at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, as it was known in 1996, told reporters that she had a 10 percent chance of survival. Doctors had to remove her forehead bone, which was later replaced, to make room for her swelling brain. When her mother made a public appeal to "pray for my daughter," thousands did.

After eight days, she came out of a coma, first in a vegetative state, then in a childlike state. As she recovered, she slept little and talked constantly, sometimes in gibberish. "I was getting mad at people when they didn't respond to these words," she said.

Like an Alzheimer's patient, she had little short-term memory and would forget visitors as soon as they left the room.

Over several months, she had to relearn how to walk, dress, read and write. Her boyfriend, Tony Scherr, visited every day to play guitar for her. He encouraged her to play the piano, against the advice of her physical therapists, who thought she would be frustrated by her inability to play the way she once had. Mr. Scherr played Beatles duets with her, playing the left-hand part while she played the right.

"That was my best therapy," she said.

In August, she moved back home to New Jersey, with her father, an engineer, and mother, a schoolteacher. She visited old haunts and called friends, trying to restore her shattered memory. "I was very obsessed with remembering," she said. "Any memory loss was to me a sign of abnormality or deficit."

Her therapists thought her progress was terrific, but her two sisters protested that she was not the deep thinker she had been.

What bothered her most was that she had lost the ability to cry, as if a faucet inside her brain had been turned off. One night, nine months after she was hurt, she stayed up late to watch the John Grisham movie "A Time to Kill." Just after her father had gone to bed, she watched a courtroom scene of Samuel Jackson's character on trial for killing two men who had raped his young daughter.

The faucet opened, and the tears trickled down her cheeks. "I thought about my parents, my father, and what they went through," she said. "Little by little, my feeling returned, my depth of mind returned."

Urged by her sisters, she went back to school and got a master's degree in music education.

Not everything went well. She and Mr. Scherr split up five years after the attack, though they remain friends. She dated other men, but she always told them about the attack right away — she could not help it, she said — and they never called for a second date.

"We have to find you someone," her friend David Phelps, a guitar player, said four years ago, before introducing her to Liam McCann, a computer technician and amateur drummer. For once, she did not say anything about the attack until she got to know Mr. McCann, and then when she did, he admired her strength.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had often visited her at her bedside while she was in the hospital, married them in his Times Square office. She wore a blue dress and pearls. While she was pregnant, in a burst of creativity, she and her friends recorded "When We're Young," an album of children's songs that she had written before the attack, including the song "Moving." Her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Scherr, produced the CD. On it, her husband plays drums and she plays electric piano.

Is her life as it was? Not exactly, though she is reluctant to attribute the differences to her injuries. Her last two piano students left her, without calling to explain why, she said. She has resumed playing classical music, but simple pieces, because her daughter does not give her time to practice. As for jazz, "I don't even try," she said.

She would like to drive more, feeling stranded in the suburbs, but she is easily rattled. She tries to be content with staying home and caring for her daughter.

Dr. Ghajar, a clinical professor of neurological surgery at what is now called NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, who operated on Ms. Kevorkian McCann after the attack, said last week that her level of recovery was rare. "She's basically normal," he said.

Other experts, who are not personally familiar with Ms. Kevorkian McCann's case, are more cautious.

Regaining the ability to play the piano may involve an almost mechanical process, a semiautomatic recall of what the fingers need to do, said Dr. Yehuda Ben-Yishay, a professor of clinical rehabilitation medicine at New York University School of Medicine. "Once brain-injured, you are always brain-injured, for the rest of your life," Dr. Ben-Yishay said. "There is no cure, there is only intensive compensation."

The more telling part of a recovery, in his view, is psychological, and on that score he counts Ms. Kevorkian McCann's marriage and child as a significant victory.

For her part, the piano teacher knows she has changed, but she has made her peace with it. "I was sort of a hyper —— I don't know if I was a Type A, but I was ambitious," she says. "Why was I so ambitious? I was a piano teacher. I don't know what the ambition was about. I really did come back to the person I'm supposed to be."

    A Central Park Victim Recalls 'When I Was Hurt,' and Her Healing, NYT, 8.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/nyregion/08pianist.html

Indianapolis Neighbors Mourn Slain Family

June 5, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:07 a.m. ET
The New York Times

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Candlelight flickered Sunday night as a neighborhood united on the street for song and prayer outside the home where seven family members were gunned down three days earlier.

Relatives said they were touched by the outpouring of support that crossed the lines of race and religion.

''The reaction of the community -- we've never seen anything like this before,'' said Luis Juarez, whose sister-in-law, Emma Valdez, was killed.

Some were comforted by news that police believed they had arrested the two men accused of gunning down 46-year-old Valdez, 56-year-old Alberto Covarrubias, their two adult children, two young children and a grandchild.

Among the 500 gathered at the bilingual memorial service was Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson who praised the community and thanked investigators.

The police said they had put pressure on people who knew the main suspect to ensure that they wouldn't give him refuge during a two-day manhunt.

On Saturday night, Desmond Turner, a 28-year-old prison parolee, surrendered to officers at a fast-food restaurant while accompanied by relatives.

Turner, who finished serving a 3 1/2-year prison term on drug and weapons charges last fall, was being held without bond Sunday on seven charges of murder and one charge of robbery, jail records indicated.

Formal charges likely would be filed Tuesday, Marion County prosecutor Carl Brizzi said.

He also said he would seek the death penalty against Turner. ''It deserves the strongest sanction possible,'' Brizzi said.

Another suspect, 30-year-old James Stewart, was arrested Friday after a traffic stop. He was being held on a preliminary charge of murder, police said. Prosecutors had not decided whether to seek the death penalty against him.

Brizzi said Turner and Stewart mistakenly believed there were significant amounts of cash in the home. But there was no evidence that the household was anything other than a hardworking family, he said.

The sidewalk in front of the home in a working-class neighborhood had become a shrine to the family with an angel statue, candles, flowers, ribbons and stuffed animals left in tribute to them.

''Today we weep. We weep for the consequences of sin,'' said Pastor Jay Height, director of Shepherd Community Center where the two youngest brothers had attended programs.

To the family's relatives, Height said ''This community rallied behind you, and know we are behind you.''

The other victims were identified as the couple's sons, Alberto Covarrubias, 11, and David Covarrubias, 8 or 9; Valdez's children, Flora Albarran, 22, and Magno Albarran, 29; and Flora Albarran's son, Luis, 5.

Funerals for the victims were scheduled on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Associated Press Writer Charles Wilson in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

    Indianapolis Neighbors Mourn Slain Family, NYT, 5.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Indianapolis-Slayings.html

Man Suspected in Killings of 7 Turns Self In

June 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

INDIANAPOLIS, June 3 (AP) — A man suspected of gunning down seven family members in their home here surrendered to the authorities on Saturday, a deputy police chief said.

More than 100 officers had searched for the suspect, Desmond Turner, since the killings on Thursday, including unsuccessful raids at two Eastside houses.

Mr. Turner, 28, grew up near the house where the shooting took place and returned last fall after serving a three-and-a-half-year prison term for drug and weapons charges.

The deputy chief, Tim Foley, said investigators had put pressure on people who knew Mr. Turner to ensure that they would not take him in.

"He didn't turn himself in out of remorse," Chief Foley said. "He turned himself in because he had no place to go."

Mr. Turner, accompanied by family members, surrendered at 7 p.m. at a downtown fast-food restaurant, Chief Foley said. He was charged with seven counts of murder.

On Friday, officers arrested another suspect, James Stewart, 30, after a traffic stop. He was being held Saturday on a preliminary charge of murder, the police said.

Chief Foley said both suspects were believed to have fired shots at the victims.

He said the police believed that the suspects had targeted the home for robbery after hearing exaggerated accounts of money and other valuables inside. Those accounts were "fiction," Chief Foley said.

On Saturday morning, police officers fired tear gas into a house while searching for Mr. Turner, but he was not inside. No one in the house was injured.

The seven victims were found dead late Thursday. The bodies of three boys were found on a bed. Four adult relatives were discovered elsewhere in the house after neighbors heard screaming and gunfire.

The victims were identified as Emma Valdez, 46; her husband, Alberto Covarrubias, 56; their sons Alberto Covarrubias, 11, and David Covarrubias, 8 or 9; Ms. Valdez's daughter, Flora Albarran, 22; Ms. Albarran's 5-year-old son, Luis; and Ms. Albarran's brother Magno Albarran, 29.

By Saturday morning, mourners had left flowers, stuffed animals and an angel statue along a sidewalk in front of their house.

    Man Suspected in Killings of 7 Turns Self In, NYT, 4.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/04indianapolis.html?hp&ex=1149480000&en=f61e6429e0d9a7ca&ei=5094&partner=homepage

7 in a Family Are Killed; Police See a Robbery Link

June 3, 2006
The New York Times
By GRETCHEN RUETHLING

INDIANAPOLIS, June 2 — Seven members of a family, including three children found together in a bed, were shot to death in their home here Thursday night in what the police believe began as a robbery.

The police said Friday that they had arrested one suspect in the shootings, James Stewart, 30, of Indianapolis, and planned to charge him with murder. They were asking for the public's help in finding a second suspect, Desmond Turner, 28, also of Indianapolis.

Officers responded just after 10 p.m. on Thursday to a report that shots had been fired at the home in the Near Eastside section of the city. They found three children ages 5 to 11 and four adults shot to death.

Chief Mike Spears of the Indianapolis Police Department said the motive appeared to be robbery. Mr. Turner may have known at least one member of the family, Chief Spears said, and had a last known address within a couple of miles of the home.

According to the police, a witness said one of the victims, Flora Albarran, 22, came to the home to pick up her 5-year-old son, Luis, and immediately started screaming when she entered the house, yelling: "Don't do that! My child!"

The witness, a friend of Ms. Albarran who was waiting for her in a car, said she then heard shots.

In addition to Luis and Ms. Albarran, the victims were identified as Alberto Covarrubias, 56; his wife, Emma Valdez, 46; their sons, Alberto Covarrubias, 11; and David Covarrubias, 8 or 9; and Ms. Valdez's son, Magno Albarran, 29. Ms. Albarran, the daughter of Ms. Valdez, had been living at the house until Thursday, but had moved into an apartment with Luis that day.

That witness reported seeing three or four men running from the back of the house, the police said, and another witness identified Mr. Turner as having been involved in the crime. Mr. Turner has convictions for crimes including battery, possession of cocaine and carrying a handgun without a license, the police said.

A neighbor, Shirley Higgins, 49, said a 16-year-old friend of Mr. Turner told the suspect on Thursday that the family kept $42,000 in a safe in their modest two-story house. Ms. Higgins said she was friends with the 16-year-old's mother, who told her of the conversation and said the boy had been talking to the police all day. She did not want to identify them because she feared for their safety.

"That Desmond kid told him he needed some fast cash," Ms. Higgins said. "It's just sad that that family got killed over something so senseless."

Ms. Higgins said the family of the 16-year-old and the family that was killed began feuding about two years ago over a woman and had been fighting about "silly stuff" ever since. She said that Mr. Covarrubias was a "wealthy" landlord and that his wife worked at an industrial laundry service and cleaned houses.

Matthew Mount, a police spokesman, said he was not aware of any reports of a large sum of money in the house. Mr. Mount said that there was no evidence of drug activity in the house and that none of the family members had criminal histories

The well-kept home is on a rundown street, with boarded-up houses nearby, overgrown yards and trash on the sidewalks. Several neighbors said drug activity, prostitution, robberies and gang activity were common in the area. They described the family as quiet and friendly and said Ms. Valdez walked her sons to school every day.

"It is horrific," said Mayor Bart Peterson, who added that he could not remember killings of such a scale in the city. "Out of tragedy, let's find a reason to hope and to work together and make sure that this doesn't serve as an excuse for anybody for further violent acts."

One neighbor, Ashley Wright, 28, said her house had been broken into several times. She said she was not shocked to hear that there had been killings in the neighborhood but was "floored" by the scale of the tragedy. "I think we're safe," Ms. Wright said, "but I will look twice at everybody that walks down the street now."

John Ferry, 68, who lives down the street, was sitting on his porch swing Friday afternoon smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. "I just feel sad," Mr. Ferry said. "The heck of it is, they had fixed that house up real nice."

    7 in a Family Are Killed; Police See a Robbery Link, NYT, 3.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/us/03indianapolis.html

7 Killed in Indianapolis Shootings
 

June 2, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Police officers found seven people fatally shot execution-style Thursday night inside a home near a prison, according to media reports.

Officers were called to the home in a residential neighborhood about a block from the Indiana Women's Prison about 10 p.m. They found a young woman screaming that her mother had been shot, police Sgt. Steve Staletovich said.

Staletovich would not confirm the number of people killed or give details on their ages or relationships, but said no survivors were found inside the house.

''It appears everyone that was shot is dead,'' he said. ''I can't give you a number, there are multiple victims.''

Dozens of police officers blocked off streets in the neighborhood and were talking to the residents who were watching from nearby yards.

What might have led up to the shootings was not immediately know, Staletovich said. No arrests were immediately made.

''At this point we don't know who did what to whom,'' he said.

John Henry, who lives nearby, said a family with three children lived in the home.

    7 Killed in Indianapolis Shootings, NYT, 2.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Indianapolis-Slayings.html