History > 2008 > USA > Gun violence (I)

Gun Wound Leads to Weapons Trove

January 21, 2008
The New York Times
By KAREEM FAHIM and MICHAEL WILSON

A 37-year old man who was storing weapons, including pipe bombs, crossbows, guns and silencers, in his Brooklyn Heights apartment was also responsible for writing a rash of hateful messages aimed at Jews in his neighborhood last year, the police said.

The man, Ivaylo Ivanov, was arrested on Sunday after he approached police officers and told them he had been shot in the index finger on a Brooklyn street. As the police investigated his claim, they came upon the cache of weapons in his house, including six or seven pipe bombs and tools used to make them.

The police determined that Mr. Ivanov had shot himself, probably while cleaning a gun. He was arrested and charged with weapons possession, unlawful wearing of a body vest and reporting a false incident.

During questioning, Mr. Ivanov acknowledged that he was responsible for anti-Semitic messages that had been spray-painted on surfaces or written on fliers at more than dozen locations in Brooklyn Heights in September, the police said. Investigators had questioned Mr. Ivanov about the messages before, and they had even taken a sample of his handwriting, but had not been able to conclusively link him to the graffiti and flyers.

It was not immediately clear how Mr. Ivanov’s collecting of weapons related to his spraying of the hateful words. He has told investigators he kept the weapons for personal protection, according to a police official, who said he made other claims as well, including that he had been trained by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

Mr. Ivanov will be arraigned later on Monday. He is expected to face additional charges because of the messages, including criminal mischief as a hate crime and aggravated harassment as a hate crime, according to a spokesman for Charles. J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney.

The discovery of the arms cache early on Sunday morning led to a predawn evacuation of the building at 58 Remsen Street. The building’s residents huddled in a nearby diner for several hours while the bomb squad searched the building. Nearby buildings were also evacuated after the weapons were discovered.

In all, officers found said they found the six or seven pipe bombs, a pistol, a rifle, a shotgun, two pellet rifles, a crossbow with arrows, silencers, ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a machete, the police said.

The events rattled residents on the block of brick and brownstone homes in this historic area of Brooklyn Heights as the police banged on doors at 3:30 a.m.

“They asked us all to leave the apartment building because they were investigating explosives or something,” said James Robinson, 45, a resident of the building. “It’s such a quiet street. It’s all kind of surprising to us that this was going on.”

Neighbors said that Mr. Ivanov shared the apartment with Michael C. Clatts, 50, a medical anthropologist and researcher who is the director for the Institute for International Research on Youth at Risk at National Development and Research Institutes in New York. Mr. Clatts, who owns a unit in the building, according to property records, was commissioned by the Giuliani administration to study New York’s homeless teenagers.

Mr. Clatts was not charged with any crime on Sunday, and neighbors said he traveled frequently and was not seen during the evacuation. He has been teaching at the University of Puerto Rico recently. Messages left at a telephone number listed for the apartment were not returned on Sunday.

Neighbors said that Mr. Ivanov, known as Ivo, and Mr. Clatts had lived there for several years. “He seems like a really nice guy, a really gentle person,” Mr. Robinson said of Mr. Ivanov.

Alan Brasunas, another neighbor in the building, said he was awakened by “a dog barking and neighbor shouting at a police officer in the hallway.” He said Mr. Ivanov was personable. “I know him in passing,” he said.

The neighbors were permitted back into their apartments around 11 a.m. on Sunday, they said.

Kate Hammer and Bruce Lambert contributed reporting.

    Gun Wound Leads to Weapons Trove, NYT, 21.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/nyregion/21cnd-weapons.html

2 Police Officers Shot Dead in Georgia

January 16, 2008
Filed at 6:30 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) -- Two police officers were shot and killed in an apparent ambush at an apartment complex early Wednesday, police said.

The two officers were investigating a suspicious person at the complex when shots rang out, DeKalb County Police Chief Terrell Bolton said.

A tow truck driver later called police to the scene around 12:40 a.m. and the arriving officers found their two colleagues, Bolton said.

One officer was dead at the scene. The other was later pronounced dead at a hospital in Atlanta, Bolton said.

Bolton said the shooting looked like an ambush.

''It just appeared that they were gunned down without a chance,'' he said.

Authorities were searching for two males seen running from the scene, Bolton said. Police set up a mobile crime unit and were using dogs and a helicopter to search for the suspects.

''We've got every able body looking for them,'' he said.

The officers' names were not immediately released. Bolton said one was a two-year veteran and the other had been on the force for four years.

''It's a challenging day for us,'' Bolton said. ''However, today's act of senseless violence is a display of what we're seeing around the country where people will shoot down a police officer without regard to any repercussions.''

    2 Police Officers Shot Dead in Georgia, NYT, 16.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Officers-Killed.html

3 Buddies Home From Iraq

Are Charged With Murdering a 4th

January 12, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

COLORADO SPRINGS — After surviving intense combat in Iraq, Specialist Kevin Shields was killed on what he had thought was friendly soil. His bloody, bullet-riddled body was found by a newspaper deliverer, sprawled on a downtown sidewalk here on Dec. 1.

Three of Specialist Shields’s buddies, all current or former soldiers who served with him in Iraq before their return last year, have been charged with murdering him. Details are still emerging, but his death, and that of an Army private whose killing has now been attributed by the authorities to two of the three men charged in the Shields case, have shaken this staunchly pro-military city and Fort Carson, an expansive Army base on the edge of town.

According to court documents released this week and accounts from his family, on the night of Nov. 30 Specialist Shields celebrated his 24th birthday by getting together with those three friends: Louis Bressler, 25; Kenneth Eastridge, 24; and Pfc. Bruce Bastien Jr., 21. The four men, who had served together as members of the Second Infantry Division’s Second Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Carson, went drinking at a Colorado Springs nightclub.

Most of what is publicly known about the events of that night comes from a police interview about a month ago in which, prosecutors say, Private Bastien, having earlier denied knowledge of the killing, declared that he was present when Mr. Bressler committed it. And that was just one of several crimes that Private Bastien said the three had carried out around Colorado Springs.

Investigators say Mr. Eastridge has confirmed most of Private Bastien’s account of the Shields killing, but have revealed little else.

In that account, the authorities say, the four friends had met at the nightclub when Mr. Bressler and Mr. Eastridge began discussing plans to commit a series of robberies in Colorado Springs. After leaving the club, the men drove to a park, where Mr. Bressler and Specialist Shields engaged in a drunken quarrel. The two came to blows, Private Bastien said, but appeared to patch things up and returned to the car.

Soon afterward, the four stopped again, because Mr. Bressler felt ill. But when they got out of the car, the police quote Private Bastien as saying, Mr. Bressler walked over to Specialist Shields and, without provocation, shot him five times with a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver.

The police say Private Bastien told them that he thought the attack had been motivated by Mr. Bressler’s fear that Specialist Shields would tell someone about the robbery plans.

“It’s such a tragic event that none of us were expecting,” said Capt. Ben Jackman, who commanded both Specialist Shields and his three friends at Fort Carson. “Everyone was shocked to hear about this.”

J. D. Hill, a Vietnam veteran who manages a local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, says the killing has outraged many onetime soldiers in Colorado Springs. “A lot of veterans here can’t understand how this happened,” Mr. Hill said. “This man had just returned from Iraq. What these guys were thinking is beyond comprehension.”

Specialist Shields’s family feels particularly stricken at the thought that his death may have come at the hands of fellow soldiers. “We don’t know if it was something from Iraq that might have set them off,” said his grandfather, Ivan Shields, who raised him in and around Roscoe, Ill. “We don’t know what in the world made them do this.”

The arrest of the three accused may have solved the killing of another soldier here. Mr. Eastridge, officials say, has accused Private Bastien and Mr. Bressler of involvement in the robbery and fatal shooting of Pfc. Robert James, whose body was found in the parking lot of a Colorado Springs bank last Aug. 4, and Private Bastien says Mr. Bressler was the triggerman in that slaying as well. Both Private Bastien and Mr. Bressler have now been charged with murder in the James case.

Mr. Bressler, from North Carolina, was honorably discharged last summer after Army doctors found that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his service in Iraq, says his lawyer, Ed Farry. Mr. Bressler was framed by his two co-defendants, Mr. Farry says, because they knew that his memory had been distorted by the condition.

Mr. Eastridge, from Ekron, Ky., received a Purple Heart after being wounded by a mine in Iraq. A public defender representing him would not comment on the case.

A lawyer for Private Bastien, a medic from Fairfield, Conn., who received a commendation for administering aid in combat, also declined to comment.

Beyond additional local shootings and a stabbing in which investigators say Private Bastien has implicated himself and his co-defendants, court records show that he has accused Mr. Eastridge of firing without provocation on Iraqi civilians while on patrol in Baghdad, using stolen AK-47s.

In that accusation, made to an Army investigator a few days after Private Bastien had given details in the Shields killing, he “said that he knows that an Iraqi civilian was struck on at least one occasion,” according to the court records.

A spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command, Chris Grey, said the military was conducting a preliminary inquiry but had not uncovered any credible evidence to substantiate Private Bastien’s account.

At a court hearing in the Shields case on Tuesday, Mr. Bressler and Mr. Eastridge, both strikingly youthful, fidgeted nervously with their shackles, their eyes darting around the courtroom, their lips flashing an occasional grin to the gallery.

Afterward, Mr. Bressler’s wife, Tira, said in an interview that he had thought of Specialist Shields “pretty much like his brother.”

“He’s not the person who would do something like this,” Ms. Bressler said.

Specialist Shields, who suffered head injuries when a roadside bomb exploded next to his Humvee, was haunted by his time in Iraq, particularly the searing images of children who had been killed in cross-fire, his family says.

He was overjoyed to be home and was awaiting the birth of his second child. He loved computers, says his grandmother, Madlyn Shields, and was preparing for his Army discharge and the start of a new job at Hewlett-Packard.

“If it had happened in combat,” Ms. Shields said, “we would have understood. But not this. This is senseless.”

    3 Buddies Home From Iraq Are Charged With Murdering a 4th, NYT, 12.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/us/12soldier.html

Man Charged in Wife’s Death

Acknowledged Having Affairs

January 5, 2008
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

The Chappaqua lawyer accused of murdering his wife on the side of a darkened Westchester road admitted he sent flowers to his longtime mistress on her birthday in November 2006 — the day of the shooting — according to the details of an indictment made public on Friday.

The details about the shooting and the affair with the mistress came from numerous interviews with New Castle police detectives, beginning in the emergency room minutes after the shooting and continuing until November 2007, according to portions of an indictment unsealed in court Friday.

The lawyer, Carlos Perez-Olivo, 59, who was a neighbor of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in Chappaqua, a wealthy Westchester suburb, was arrested last month and charged with second-degree murder. He was also charged with possession of a .32-caliber Walther automatic pistol that court documents said was used to kill his wife, Peggy Perez-Olivo, 55, a teacher’s assistant at a Chappaqua elementary school and the mother of his three children.

But details of his affair were not all that Mr. Perez-Olivo told detectives about days after the shooting. He said he made “a lot more money than I said on my taxes,” according to a 69-page document provided by Westchester County prosecutors.

He asked detectives to be discreet about the affair, and admitted that he was “less than perfect” and that he had had other “small affairs” and had used escort services, according to the indictment. He said wife was faithful and the most “honest and honorable” person he knew.

Mr. Perez-Olivo’s lawyer, Robert A. Buckley of Manhattan, said on Friday that his client’s affair with the woman, Ileana Poole, ended about 18 months before the shooting. After the breakup, he said, Mr. Perez-Olivo maintained “continued limited contact” and sent the flowers simply “because it was somebody he still cared about.”

“The affair had nothing to do with the marriage,” Mr. Buckley said. “The relationship between him and Peggy was much deeper than sex. If we indicted every man for murder who underpaid his taxes and slept outside the marital bed, we’d need a lot more jails.”

Mr. Perez-Olivo, who moved into a house in the same cul-de-sac as the Clintons in early 2006, told detectives shortly after the shooting that he had met the woman, Ileana Santana, in 1996 at a shoe store in Puerto Rico where she was working, and continued to see her even after she married a man from Georgia and moved there, taking the married name Poole.

The same day that Ms. Poole received the flowers in Georgia for her 35th birthday, prosecutors said, Mr. Perez-Olivo shot his wife in the back of the head with a pistol after pulling over on Route 100 as they drove home after a night out in Manhattan.

The authorities continued to investigate Mr. Perez-Olivo for 13 months before arresting him last month. According to a person who had been briefed on the investigation, it was only recently that detectives were able to connect Mr. Perez-Olivo to the handgun recovered from a nearby lake shortly after the killing.

On Friday, Mr. Perez-Olivo, who has pleaded not guilty and was being held in $1 million bail at the Westchester County jail in Valhalla, stood handcuffed and silent at the hearing as lawyers discussed scheduling and logistics for his case.

His attempts to collect more than $500,000 in life insurance proceeds have been blocked by the insurance companies because he was a suspect in the killing, which prosecutors have called an “execution.”

Mr. Perez-Olivo, who was disbarred before the shooting, has insisted that he and his wife were forced off the road by another driver — perhaps a hit man hired by a dissatisfied client, he has speculated to the authorities — who then shot her in the head and him in the abdomen.

“He is not guilty, and the killer is still out there,” Mr. Buckley said, insisting that his client’s honesty about the unsavory parts of his life underscored his truthfulness about the shooting.

“He volunteered all this, and part of the reason is, he was telling them, ‘Guys, I’m putting my life in your hands. I’m not a perfect guy, and I’m telling you these things so you don’t waste your time running around and finding them and then saying aha.’”

As for the fact that the wife was killed on Ms. Poole’s birthday, Mr. Buckley dismissed it as a coincidence. “It’s also the day of my father’s death and he didn’t do it, either,” he said.

Reached by phone in Georgia, a woman who identified herself as Anita Poole, Ileana Poole’s mother-in-law, said that she had never heard of the case or of Mr. Perez-Olivo, and that she was surprised by the claim of an affair.

“She’s had two kids in the past 18 months — I’m watching one of them right now,” she said.

Anita Poole said that her daughter-in-law met her son, Shawn Poole, while he was visiting a former college roommate in Puerto Rico in 1996 — the same place and the same year that Mr. Perez-Olivo said he had met her.

Mr. Perez-Olivo told the police that she had called and left him a message after the shooting, but that he had an acquaintance get in touch with her and ask her not to contact him anymore.

    Man Charged in Wife’s Death Acknowledged Having Affairs, NYT, 5.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/nyregion/05slay.html

A Second Girl Is Hit by Stray Gunfire

January 2, 2008
The New York Times
By ERIC KONIGSBERG and ANNIE CORREAL

For the second time in less than 12 hours, a young girl in New York City was shot by stray gunfire. And like the girl in the first case, the second victim escaped with a nonfatal wound and was expected to make a full recovery, a hospital administrator said.

At 3:50 a.m Tuesday, the girl, 11, accompanied by family members, was walking home from a friend’s house when shooting broke out near Third Avenue and 166th Street, the police said. A bullet grazed the head of the girl, whose name was not released, and she was taken to Montefiore Medical Center to have pieces of buckshot removed from her scalp, the police said.

Hospital officials said the girl was in stable condition, and one said that her injury was probably “a cosmetic matter, at this point.”

Around dusk on Monday evening, a 3-year-old girl in the Bronx was riding in the back seat of a car with her mother’s male companion and was hit in the shoulder by a bullet not intended for her, the police said. She was treated at St. Barnabas Hospital.

The driver of the car, Jonathan Boykins, 24, was idling at a stop signal on East 184th Street near Tiebout Avenue in the Tremont section of the Bronx, the police said, when shots pierced the window of his sedan, hitting the girl.

Relatives of Mr. Boykins, who grew up on West 151st Street but now lives in New Jersey, gave the girl’s name as Leah Sesay.

Mr. Boykins had been on his way to buy provisions for a New Year’s Eve party his sister was giving, said his father, Carlton Boykins.

“At this time of year, I worry,” Carlton Boykins said. “I know this from life. A lot of people go out again after dark, and something happens to them. Thank God, the baby’s all right.”

Mr. Boykins’s brother Calvin, 19, said of Leah: “She’s a good girl. She’s outspoken, and once she gets to know you, she has no trouble talking and joking.

“She’s just a joyful kid.”

The police did not say whether they had suspects in either shooting.

The victim of the second shooting was initially taken to St. Barnabas as well, but was later transferred to Montefiore, which has a large children’s hospital, officials said.

An administrator at St. Barnabas said that typically, children’s surgery cases are sent to NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, though in this case, the second option — Montefiore — received the patient.

It must have been a very busy night “if they didn’t have room at NewYork-Presbyterian,” the administrator said.

Colin Moynihan and William Neuman contributed reporting.

    A Second Girl Is Hit by Stray Gunfire, NYT, 2.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/nyregion/02shot.html

Boy’s Brother, 16,

Believes Bullet Was Meant for Him

January 1, 2008
The New York Times
By DARYL KHAN

The teenage brother of an 11-year-old Queens boy who was shot in the chest on Sunday night after he answered the front door of their home said he believed that the bullet had been intended for him.

It was “a message someone wants me dead,” Tony Falconer Jr., 16, said in a hushed voice outside his home in Springfield Gardens before going to visit his brother, Tyshaun, who was in stable condition at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. “Three weeks ago, a cousin got shot — it was over a girl. They know I’m related to them.”

Tony told the police on Monday that he believed the shooting outside his home was related to the earlier one. But he said he did not know the identity of the hooded gunman.

Police said that the investigation into Tyshaun’s shooting was continuing, and that they were exploring a possible connection to the earlier shooting.

On Monday, detectives continued to canvass the neighborhood of well-tended single-family homes, and retrieved videotape from a neighbor’s security camera. Meanwhile, Tyshaun’s father, Tony Falconer Sr., 43, recounted the shooting and the chaotic moments that followed.

He said Tyshaun went to answer the door. He was excited — he thought it was his brother. Instead, a stranger with a fair complexion greeted him. He had freckles and a mole on his cheek, and he was wearing a white hooded sweatshirt.

“He opened the door and the guy asked for his brother,” Mr. Falconer said. “He said he’s not here. All he saw was the fire from the gun. He shot him point-blank.”

Tyshaun ran upstairs. His father intercepted him.

“There was blood coming out of his mouth,” he said. “He said, ‘Daddy, I think I got shot.’ I took off his shirt. I saw the hole in the middle of his chest.”

He applied pressure to his son’s wound until Tyshaun’s mother raced into the room and he dialed 911.

“I almost fainted myself,” he said. “I couldn’t keep my emotions back. I was losing it. He told his mom, ‘Sorry I opened the door.’”

A steady stream of family and friends visited Schneider Children’s Hospital, part of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, in New Hyde Park, N.Y., where Tyshaun underwent surgery and was recovering Monday.

“We’re just grateful he’s alive,” said Erlenda Falconer, Tyshaun’s aunt. “He told me, ‘Auntie, I thank God I have a second chance.’ It’s heartless, cold-blooded stuff.”

Keyala Rigg, 19, a neighbor, used to baby-sit for Tyshaun and his older brothers after school.

“It’s really shocking to hear this little boy had been shot,” she said. “All of the kids are great. They’re very popular boys. There are some kids who hang out in the street and get into trouble — these aren’t those kids.”

Jay Mack, 13, a friend and classmate of Tyshaun’s at Intermediate School 59, agreed. He and his friends playing outside the house said Tyshaun and his brothers were not troublemakers.

“He’s the smartest kid in the class,” he said. “All the teachers like him.”

The children said Tyshaun played football in a local league. He was a member of the Springfield Rifles.

“He’s the kind of kid if you pulled out a gun, he’d fall on the ground and start crying,” Jay said, while he wrapped his scooter in discarded yellow police tape. “I don’t even think he played games like that.”

    Boy’s Brother, 16, Believes Bullet Was Meant for Him, NYT, 1.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/nyregion/01shot.html

Two die from shot

possibly fired to celebrate new year

1 January 2008
USA Today

DENVER (AP) — A single bullet that may have been fired in celebration of the new year ripped through the wall of a house shortly after midnight Tuesday, killing an 11-year-old girl and a woman attending a party inside, investigators said.

"It might have been an accident, which still would be illegal if someone was firing a weapon recklessly in the city," Police Chief Gerry Whitman said.

Investigators believe the weapon was a high-powered rifle, Whitman said. The shot was fired at about 12:20 a.m., and the shooter may have been a reveler celebrating the new year, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.

Witnesses reported hearing several shots, and a second bullet was found in a snowbank in front of the home.

The victims were at a party with about 10 other people when the bullet pierced the front wall of the house, passed through the head of the woman, who was seated, and struck the girl in the side, Jackson said.

The woman died at the scene and the girl was pronounced dead at a hospital. It wasn't immediately known whether they were related.

No arrests had been made. Police offered a $2,000 reward for information.

Investigators believe the shot was fired from as far as 300 yards away, possibly from across a greenway flanking a walking path near the house, investigators said.

Police said they used lasers to trace the trajectory of the shot and to determine that one bullet killed both victims.

The house is in a neighborhood of modest single-family homes, duplexes and apartment buildings.

    Two die from shot possibly fired to celebrate new year, UT, 1.1.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-01-NewYearShooting-me_N.htm