History > 2008 > USA > Violence, Crime (II)

After 3 Die,

Questions on Why Erratic Mother

Kept Custody

February 26, 2008
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES and COREY KILGANNON

They could have been sleeping. The three children, all in pajamas, lay neatly arranged in a bed in their Long Island apartment — Michael Demesyeux, 5, on one side; his half-sister, Jewell Ward, 6, on the other; and Innocent Demesyeux, 18 months old, in the middle.

“It almost looked like they were cuddled up together for the night,” said Detective Lt. Michael Fleming of the Nassau County Police Department.

But the three children had been drowned, Jewell’s throat had been slashed and all showed signs of possible poisoning, the Nassau County police said on Monday.

The Nassau County police commissioner, Lawrence W. Mulvey, described the chilling scene as “most horrific.”

Even before police officers arrived at the apartment of Leatrice Brewer in New Cassel on Sunday morning, they knew that something was horribly wrong.

Minutes earlier, they said, Ms. Brewer, 27, had calmly called 911 to say that she had killed her sons and daughter. Lieutenant Fleming said that according to police policy, confessions are usually withheld, but “I would like to say that she did admit killing the children.”

“There was no doubt about it,” he added. “She even spelled her name for the 911 operator.”

Then shortly before the police arrived at the brick apartment building on Prospect Avenue about 9 a.m., the authorities said she jumped from the second-floor window, fracturing a vertebra in the fall.

Ms. Brewer’s arraignment on murder charges was postponed until Tuesday on the advice of doctors at the Nassau University Medical Center, according to a spokesman for the district attorney.

While the authorities searched for a motive in the slaying, relatives and neighbors questioned why Ms. Brewer, who most seemed to agree was troubled, was allowed to retain custody of her children.

The father of two of Ms. Brewer’s children, Innocent Demesyeux, said he had warned officials of the county Child Protective Services about her erratic behavior and alleged drug abuse. A child custody hearing had been scheduled in Family Court on Monday.

Two people who were briefed on the agency’s handling of the case confirmed that there had been many accusations of neglect and abuse filed against the Brewer family in recent years, including one that resulted in a visit last Friday. One of them said that workers had tried to visit the home on three consecutive days — no one was home on the first day — before meeting with Ms. Brewer. There were no immediate indications of what caseworkers found.

“Obviously something went seriously wrong, and we need to determine whether part of that wrong was with the system itself,” said the Nassau County executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, who promised a full investigation into the handling of the case.

Mr. Suozzi said that his review would include the Department of Social Services and the Nassau County police.

A union representative, Jerry Laricchiuta, said that child welfare workers were jolted by the children’s deaths, but cautioned against placing blame on caseworkers who had apparently investigated complaints that Ms. Brewer was abusing her children.

In Nassau, as in most jurisdictions, child welfare workers investigating abuse complaints may ask a family court judge for the emergency removal of the child from the home if he or she is in imminent danger. Those steps were apparently not taken in the Brewer case. “I’m sure in hindsight, everybody can say that it’s apparent that something was wrong,” Mr. Laricchiuta said. “These judgment calls — and that’s what they are, judgment calls — can have a devastating effect, either way.”

He said his office had not yet been in contact with the caseworker, whom agency officials declined to identify.

Mr. Laricchiuta said that most caseworkers at the agency were burdened with heavy caseloads. Although the Child Welfare League of America has indicated that caseworkers should have no more than 12 active cases a month, officials said that the 46 investigators in Nassau County currently handled about 1,043 cases — an average of 23 each.

In 2006, the last year for which comprehensive statistics are available, there were 5,759 completed investigations into allegations of abuse and neglect in Nassau. In 1,512 of those cases, or 26.3 percent, the accusations were determined to be valid. The other 4,247 complaints were classified as “unfounded.” In New York State, 150,777 investigations into abuse and neglect allegations were completed for 2006. Of those, 49,820 or 33.4 percent, were valid and the rest were classified as “unfounded.”

Richard Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform said that Nassau’s child welfare agency shared many of the same ills as other agencies. “My general perception of Nassau is that it’s basically your typical mediocre system,” Mr. Wexler said. “What you read about the system is that it’s not that it’s exceptionally bad and it’s certainly no model.”

High caseloads and overburdened workers in the county, Mr. Wexler said, was a prescription for calamity.

“They get so overwhelmed that workers make bad decisions in both directions,” he said, referring to workers who demand that children be removed from their homes unnecessarily and those who allow children to remain when they might be in danger.

On Prospect Avenue in the hamlet of New Cassel, neighbors were struggling on Monday to reconcile two conflicting images of Ms. Brewer, who had six previous arrests — four felony charges and three misdemeanors — which included weapons and assault charges. Some described her as doting on her children; others said that she was troubled and battled drug addiction.

Roland Fisher, 22, who said he knew Ms. Brewer and visited her and played with her children, said she was a loving mother who was constantly cooking for them and planning parties and vacations and buying them presents.

“I never saw any sign of her being hurtful to her kids,” he said.

Satina Fenner, 26, who said she knew Ms. Brewer since grammar school and attended middle and high school with her in Westbury, said she noticed that Ms. Brewer became more troubled after her mother died in 2004, and after Ms. Brewer and Mr. Demesyeux split up months ago.

“People can snap,” Ms. Fenner said, “and I think she just snapped.”

Matt Mabe and Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

    After 3 Die, Questions on Why Erratic Mother Kept Custody, NYT, 26.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/nyregion/26slay.html?hp

Mother Is Held in L.I. Slaying of 3 Children

February 25, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS

A Long Island woman described as emotionally disturbed and afraid of losing custody of her children called the police on Sunday and led officers into a blood-spattered bedroom where her young daughter and two small sons lay slain on a bed, investigators said.

The woman, Leatrice Brewer, 27, who lived with the children in an apartment in the Nassau County hamlet of New Cassel, was taken to a hospital for physical and mental examinations, the police said. Late Sunday evening, she was charged with the murder of all three children.

Neither the police nor the county medical examiner said what caused the death of the children, who were identified as Jewell Ward, 6; Michael Demesyeux, 5; and Innocent Demesyeux, 18 months old. But investigators said one appeared to have been drowned, while the others had been slashed to death.

“It was a very disturbing scene, not only because they were children,” Detective Lt. Kevin Smith of the Nassau police said of the bedroom where the victims were found, at 891 Prospect Avenue in New Cassel. He declined to give details, pending inquiries by homicide detectives and the medical examiner.

The killings on Sunday appeared to add another grim chapter to a growing casebook of children slain by mothers: five drowned in a bathtub near Houston; two battered with rocks in Tyler, Tex.; three drowned in San Francisco Bay. The cases — some ending in verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity — have ignited a national debate over mental illness and the legal definition of insanity.

Nassau authorities declined to discuss any motives behind Sunday’s killings. But relatives and acquaintances described Ms. Brewer as emotionally unstable.

The two fathers of the children said they had tried through the courts to gain custody. Ricky Ward, Jewell’s father, said he had been trying in Family Court for a year. “Whenever I tried to get my daughter, Family Court wouldn’t let me,” he said. “The courts wouldn’t hear me out. I blame this on Leatrice Brewer and Family Court.”

In the 12 years that he had known her, Mr. Ward said Ms. Brewer had tried to kill herself a number of times. The Nassau police said they were investigating a report that she had jumped out a window of her apartment on Sunday. “He problem was her mind state,” Mr. Ward said. “She wasn’t stable and wasn’t able to communicate. She didn’t want anyone to have her kids. It’s a tragedy that my daughter’s gone.”

Innocent Demesyeux, the father of Ms. Brewer’s two sons, said that he and Ms. Brewer had been battling in court for 18 months over visitation rights and custody of the boys, and that she feared she might soon lose custody.

“I’ve been fighting to see them,” he said. Interviewed while sitting in a car parked outside the scene of the killings, Mr. Demesyeux, 28, of Hollis, Queens, said he had last seen his sons a month ago. He said that he and Ms. Brewer had a date in Nassau County Family Court on Monday, and that he had hoped to win the case. He said Ms. Brewer had missed court dates recently and had refused to take drug tests, which he said he had passed.

He said that he had recently been in contact with a county child protective services agency and that a representative was to have visited Ms. Brewer’s apartment on Friday. It was unclear if that visit took place.

Some neighbors said Ms. Brewer had behaved bizarrely. “I used to see her walking down the street during the day in her pajamas,” said Lisa Jones, who said she was a distant relative of Ms. Brewer. Asked if Ms. Brewer had seemed mentally unstable, Ms. Jones said, “Absolutely.”

Tatiana Wideman, 13, who said she had been a baby sitter for Innocent, said of Ms. Brewer: “She was stressed out. Everybody knew it. She would go around asking people for money.”

The Rev. Elijah Crawford, pastor of the Healing Power Church, spoke on behalf of the family at the Westbury home of a relative of Ms. Brewer’s, where family members had gathered. He said he had been told that Ms. Brewer had snapped because money she had expected from a social services agency — money she needed for the children — had failed to arrive.

“She didn’t get it, and snapped out,” the pastor said. He later said of family members: “They don’t know what happened. All they know is that she snapped. They said she had great love for her children. It’s just something that happened all of a sudden.”

Lieutenant Smith said the police responded to a 911 call at 8:55 a.m., summoning them to the Prospect Avenue address. It is a white-brick, two-story apartment building on the northwest corner of Swalm Street.The avenue, lined with commercial and residential buildings, is the main thoroughfare of New Cassel, a hamlet in the town of North Hempstead with 13,000 residents.

The 911 caller was apparently Ms. Brewer, but the police declined to specify what was said. Officers arriving at the scene found a building with four apartments, two on the ground floor and two upstairs, and were met on the second-floor landing by Ms. Brewer, who took them into her apartment, No. 3, and then into the bedroom, where the three children lay on a bed.

The children, the lieutenant said, were “obviously dead.”

Homicide detectives and dozens of police officers arrived shortly afterward, along with a crime scene investigation truck, which pulled into a driveway behind the building. The avenue was cordoned off to vehicular traffic, and yellow tape was set up to contain the large crowd — people from New Cassel and adjacent Westbury, as well as members of the news media — who gathered to watch the police activity.

Many people emerging from nearby church services joined the throng, and the talk for much of the day was of the deaths of the children, whose bodies were in the building all day and into the evening. They were to be taken to the medical examiner’s office in Mineola, and an autopsy was planned for Monday.

While the debate over degrees of mental illness and the legal definition of insanity continues, mental health experts and defense lawyers in recent years have been encouraged by the outcome of several high-profile cases in which mothers who killed their children have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to mental institutions instead of prisons.

Last year, Lashuan Harris, 24, who threw her three young sons to their deaths in San Francisco Bay in 2005, was declared insane by a judge one day after a California jury found her guilty of second-degree murder. The defense argued that she was schizophrenic, borderline mentally retarded and convinced that she was acting on orders from God when she threw the boys — ages 6, 2 and 16 months — into the water.

In 2006, Andrea P. Yates, who drowned her five small children in a bathtub at their home in the Houston area in 2001, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in her second trial. In 2002, another jury had convicted her of murder, rejecting defense claims that she was so psychotic that she thought she was saving the souls of her children by killing them. An appeals court overturned that conviction because of erroneous testimony by a prosecution witness.

And in 2004, Deanna L. Laney, who bashed in the heads of her sons, 6 and 8 years old, in Tyler, Tex., in 2003, saying that God had ordered her to do it, was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity.

Her lawyers argued that insanity was the only way to explain why Ms. Laney, a deeply religious woman who had home-schooled her children, would kill her sons without shedding a tear. Psychiatrists testified that Ms. Laney believed that she was chosen by God to kill her children as a test of faith.

Daryl Khan contributed reporting.

    Mother Is Held in L.I. Slaying of 3 Children, NYT, 25.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/nyregion/25slay.html?hp

Thousands Mourn Slain College Student

February 24, 2008
Filed at 1:53 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

RENO, Nev. (AP) -- More than 3,000 mourners gathered Saturday night to remember a 19-year-old college student believed killed by a serial rapist as a loving, caring woman with many friends and a winning personality.

Brianna Denison's body was found in a Reno field on Feb. 15. Police said she was abducted Jan. 20 and strangled by a man linked to two earlier attacks on the edge of the University of Nevada, Reno.

Her cousin, Spencer Terry, said Denison's spirit would continue to live in the hearts of friends and family.

''Could anybody have asked for a prettier face and a more beautiful soul? I don't think so,'' Terry said.

Friend Danielle DeTomaso said Denison embraced all kinds of people.

''She knew people from all walks of life,'' DeTomaso said. ''She was the glue that held all of us together.''

Denison's aunt, Lauren Denison, reminded the crowd at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center that ''we still have a job to do: bring Brianna's killer to justice.''

The sophomore at Santa Barbara City College in California was visiting her hometown over winter break when she was abducted while she slept on a couch in a friend's home just off the Reno campus.

Outside the memorial service, several members of a fundamentalist Kansas church faced off against more than 150 counter-demonstrators.

The standoff, which occurred during a fierce snowstorm, ended peacefully when police escorted the three protesters associated with the Westboro Baptist Church away from the convention center, Sgt. Chris Lange said.

''There were a couple of eggs thrown at them and that's about it,'' Lange said.

Members of the Topeka, Kan., church picket military funerals out of a belief that the Iraq war is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality. Last month, the church announced it would protest the service for Denison because it believes God hates Reno.

Church officials said they targeted the city because local law enforcement officers failed to protect church members who picketed a Jan. 26 memorial service there for a soldier who was killed in Iraq.

On Saturday, the three protesters waved placards reading ''Pray for More Dead Kids,'' ''Don't Worship the Dead'' and ''God Sent the Killer.''

Counter-demonstrators said they strongly disapprove of the church's message and tactic of picketing outside memorial services.

''For them to come out and target tragedies like this, I don't think it's right,'' Greg Bailor Jr. said. ''There's enough emotions as it is.''

    Thousands Mourn Slain College Student, NYT, 24.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Serial-Rapes-Memorial.html

Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers

February 19, 2008
The New York Times
By PATRICIA COHEN

Shannon Neal can instantly tell you the best night of her life: Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2003, the Hinsdale Academy debutante ball. Her father, Steven Neal, a 54-year-old political columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times, was in his tux, white gloves and tie. “My dad walked me down and took a little bow,” she said, and then the two of them goofed it up on the dance floor as they laughed and laughed.

A few weeks later, Mr. Neal parked his car in his garage, turned on the motor and waited until carbon monoxide filled the enclosed space and took his breath, and his life, away.

Later, his wife, Susan, would recall that he had just finished a new book, his seventh, and that “it took a lot out of him.” His medication was also taking a toll, putting him in the hospital overnight with worries about his heart.

Still, those who knew him were blindsided. “If I had just 30 seconds with him now,” Ms. Neal said of her father, “I would want all these answers.”

Mr. Neal is part of an unusually large increase in suicides among middle-aged Americans in recent years. Just why thousands of men and women have crossed the line between enduring life’s burdens and surrendering to them is a painful question for their loved ones. But for officials, it is a surprising and baffling public health mystery.

A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.)


For women 45 to 54, the rate leapt 31 percent. “That is certainly a break from trends of the past,” said Ann Haas, the research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

By contrast, the suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased less than 2 percent during that five-year period — and decreased among people 65 and older.

The question is why. What happened in 1999 that caused the suicide rate to suddenly rise primarily for those in midlife? For health experts, it is like discovering the wreckage of a plane crash without finding the black box that recorded flight data just before the aircraft went down.

Experts say that the poignancy of a young death and higher suicide rates among the very old in the past have drawn the vast majority of news attention and prevention resources. For example, $82 million was devoted to youth suicide prevention programs in 2004, after the 21-year-old son of Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, killed himself. Suicide in middle age, by comparison, is often seen as coming at the end of a long downhill slide, a problem of alcoholics and addicts, society’s losers.

“There’s a social-bias issue here,” said Dr. Eric C. Caine, co-director at the Center for the Study of Prevention of Suicide at the University of Rochester Medical Center, explaining why suicide in the middle years of life had not been extensively studied before.

There is a “national support system for those under 19, and those 65 and older,” Dr. Caine added, but not for people in between, even though “the bulk of the burden from suicide is in the middle years of life.”

Of the more than 32,000 people who committed suicide in 2004, 14,607 were 40 to 64 years old (6,906 of those were 45 to 54); 5,198 were over 65; 2,434 were under 21 years old.

Complicating any analysis is the nature of suicide itself. It cannot be diagnosed through a simple X-ray or blood test. Official statistics include the method of suicide — a gun, for instance, or a drug overdose — but they do not say whether the victim was an addict or a first-time drug user. And although an unusual event might cause the suicide rate to spike, like in Thailand after Asia’s economic collapse in 1997, suicide much more frequently punctuates a long series of troubles — mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, failed romances.

Without a “psychological autopsy” into someone’s mental health, Dr. Caine said, “we’re kind of in the dark.”

The lack of concrete research has given rise to all kinds of theories, including a sudden drop in the use of hormone-replacement therapy by menopausal women after health warnings in 2002, higher rates of depression among baby boomers or a simple statistical fluke.

At the moment, the prime suspect is the skyrocketing use — and abuse — of prescription drugs. During the same five-year period included in the study, there was a staggering increase in the total number of drug overdoses, both intentional and accidental, like the one that recently killed the 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger. Illicit drugs also increase risky behaviors, C.D.C. officials point out, noting that users’ rates of suicide can be 15 to 25 times as great as the general population.

Jeffrey Smith, a vigorous fisherman and hunter, began ordering prescription drugs like Ambien and Viagra over the Internet when he was in his late 40s and the prospect of growing older began to gnaw at him, said his daughter, Michelle Ray Smith, who appears on the television soap “Guiding Light.” Five days before his 50th birthday, he sat in his S.U.V. in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., letting carbon monoxide fill his car.

Linda Cronin was 43 and working in a gym when she gulped down a lethal dose of prescription drugs in her Denver apartment in 2006, after battling eating disorders and depression for years.

Looking at the puzzling 28.8 percent rise in the suicide rate among women ages 50 to 54, Andrew C. Leon, a professor of biostatistics in psychiatry at Cornell, suggested that a drop in the use of hormone replacement therapy after 2002 might be implicated. It may be that without the therapy, more women fell into depression, Dr. Leon said, but he cautioned this was just speculation.

Despite the sharp rise in suicide among middle-aged women, the total number who died is still relatively small: 834 in the 50-to-54-year-old category in 2004. Over all, four of five people who commit suicide are men. (For men 45 to 54, the five-year rate increase was 15.6 percent.)

Veterans are another vulnerable group. Some surveys show they account for one in five suicides, said Dr. Ira Katz, who oversees mental health programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs. That is why the agency joined the national toll-free suicide hot line last August.

In the last five years, Dr. Katz said, the agency has noticed that the highest suicide rates have been among middle-aged men and women. Those most affected are not returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, he said, but those who served in Vietnam or right after, when the draft ended and the all-volunteer force began. “The current generation of older people seems to be at lesser risk for depression throughout their lifetimes” than the middle-aged, he said.

That observation seems to match what Myrna M. Weissman, the chief of the department in Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology at New York State Psychiatric Institute, concluded was a susceptibility to depression among the affluent and healthy baby boom generation two decades ago, in a 1989 study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. One possible reason she offered was the growing pressures of modern life, like the changing shape of families and more frequent moves away from friends and relatives that have frayed social support networks.

More recently, reports of a study that spanned 80 countries found that around the world, middle-aged people were unhappier than those in any other age group, but that conclusion has been challenged by other research, which found that among Americans, middle age is the happiest time of life.

Indeed, statistics can sometimes be as confusing as they are enlightening. Shifts in how deaths are tallied make it difficult to compare rates before and after 1999, C.D.C. officials said. Epidemiologists also emphasize that at least another five years of data on suicide are needed before any firm conclusions can be reached about a trend.

The confusion over the evidence reflects the confusion and mystery at the heart of suicide itself.

Ms. Cronin explained in a note that she had struggled with an inexplicable gloom that would leave her cowering tearfully in a closet as early as age 9. After attempting suicide before, she had checked into a residential treatment program not long before she died, but after a month, her insurance ran out. Her parents had offered to continue the payments, but her sister, Kelly Gifford, said Ms. Cronin did not want to burden them.

Ms. Gifford added, “I think she just got sick of trying to get better.”

    Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers, NYT, 19.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/19suicide.html?hp

After Rape, Calls to Limit Where Sex Offenders Go

February 18, 2008
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — After an arrest in the rape of a 6-year-old boy at the city library here late last month, the mayor drafted an ordinance to bar high-risk sex offenders from entering or coming within a certain distance of numerous public places.

Offenders caught inside a so-called safe zone would be fined and asked to leave it immediately. Those who refused would be arrested.

Shocked by the crime, other cities and towns in Massachusetts, including nearby Fall River and Somerset, are considering similar ordinances.

“Considering the fact that individuals released on probation or parole have strict conditions that say they are not to mix or interfere with children,” said Scott Lang, the mayor of New Bedford, “it occurred to me that anywhere children gather should have the equivalent of a no-trespass order” for certain sex offenders.

“We wanted to have an instantaneous way for police officers to react and put them on notice,” Mr. Lang added.

Mr. Lang, a former prosecutor, also recommended that everyone who entered the library present identification and a library card.

“If it means the inconvenience of swiping an ID or using a guest pass to let people in,” he said, “it’s a small price to pay to let people know they’re completely safe.”

Librarians have put a computer monitor at the entrance to the building that rotates pictures of the more than 300 registered sex offenders who live in the city.

The City Council voted Thursday to send Mr. Lang’s proposal — which would cover places like libraries, video arcades and playgrounds — to a committee. The council also introduced a measure that would put additional places like carnivals off limits and subject offenders to immediate arrest. City officials expect the final ordinance to blend both proposals.

Many states and municipalities have tried to enact restrictions on where sex offenders can live, including keeping them a certain distance away from parks, playgrounds and even bus stops, with mixed results. While officials here say the safety of children is a top priority, some question whether such an ordinance can be enforced.

“It seems like it can be kind of byzantine,” said the council president, Jane Gonsalves, who supports the measure. “The police have to know the guy already, have some suspicion and ask for his name and phone number. It presupposes that there will be an officer present.

“Someone could call the police and just say that someone looks like a sex offender,” Ms. Gonsalves continued. “Those areas can be gray areas, and I don’t know how they will play out.”

David M. Siegel, a professor at the New England School of Law in Boston, said such a ban could raise constitutional issues.

“Excluding people from so many places and certain places could violate their fundamental rights,” Professor Siegel said. “The idea of identifying some public spaces as off-limits to people who are registered sex offenders because there are children in them, like libraries, is potentially unlimited.”

Samuel Sutter, the Bristol County district attorney, and others are also calling for an overhaul of the state’s sex offender classification system.

The man charged in the rape at the library, Corey Saunders, 26, is a convicted sex offender who was released from prison in 2006 and classified as high risk, but had appealed his classification, said Lt. Jeffrey Silva of the New Bedford Police Department.

Mr. Saunders, who moved to New Bedford in August, registered there on Jan. 17, a week after he lost his appeal, Lieutenant Silva said.

“It appears as if when a defendant appeals the classification,” Mr. Sutter said, “the convicted defendant goes into limbo until the appeal is resolved. And I think there has to be a better solution than that.”

Along New Bedford’s main street and in the library, residents in the seaside city of 93,000 said they supported the proposal.

Owen Thatcher, 33, said he took his 2-year-old daughter to the library two or three times a week, but had not returned since the boy was attacked. “It makes the whole place feel dirty,” Mr. Thatcher said. “I’m looking at people differently now, especially people I see in the library.”

Alisha Clark, 19, who was looking over microfilm in a room adjacent to where the rape took place, said she was shaken by the computer at the entrance. “It’s sad how it ain’t even safe to bring your kids here,” Ms. Clark said.

    After Rape, Calls to Limit Where Sex Offenders Go, NYT, 18.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/us/18newbedford.html

Before Killing, an Obsession to Find Mother

February 18, 2008
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY and AL BAKER

In the eight and a half months before his arrest in the fatal stabbing of a Manhattan therapist, a Queens man became so obsessed with his institutionalized mother that his father kept moving her from nursing home to nursing home, a law enforcement official said on Sunday.

Each time the man, David Tarloff, found her, trouble eventually ensued, with Mr. Tarloff becoming belligerent and threatening the home’s workers, according to officials and court records. His father, Leonard Tarloff, in a vain attempt to keep his son from causing havoc, moved Beatrice Tarloff, his 73-year-old ex-wife, into at least three nursing homes.

But David Tarloff, unemployed and living alone, kept trying to seek her out in the hopes of bringing her home to live with him again, growing increasingly agitated with each thwarted effort. His father told investigators that his son was fixated on his mother, the law enforcement official said, and some neighbors said that Mr. Tarloff seemed lost after she moved away.

From June 2007 to Feb. 1, Mr. Tarloff’s quest was punctuated by three encounters with the police, who took him to three hospitals for psychiatric evaluations. Each time, he was released.

Mr. Tarloff, 39, was arrested on Saturday in the killing of the therapist, Kathryn Faughey, 56, and the attack on a psychiatrist, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, 70, on Tuesday night in the offices they shared on East 79th Street.

Mr. Tarloff told investigators that Dr. Shinbach had him committed to a mental health institution 17 years ago, and on Sunday, officials confirmed that Dr. Shinbach had indeed played a role in his commitment. Mr. Tarloff said that he did not intend to attack Dr. Faughey. Instead, Mr. Tarloff said his plan was to rob Dr. Shinbach and then leave the country or go to Hawaii with his ailing mother. Drawn by Dr. Faughey’s screams, Dr. Shinbach was slashed after rushing to try to help her and is recovering at his Manhattan home.

Leonard Tarloff expressed deep remorse on Sunday for the crimes his oldest son stands accused of committing.

“If you can convey our sincere condolences to the families of Dr. Faughey and Dr. Shinbach,” Leonard Tarloff said, his voice breaking, in a telephone interview from his Staten Island home. “We hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive my son.”

Mr. Tarloff’s at-times erratic behavior, described by his neighbors and others who had crossed his path, was on display at his appearance on Sunday in Manhattan Criminal Court, where he was charged with second-degree murder in Dr. Faughey’s death, and attempted murder and assault and battery in the attack on Dr. Shinbach.

During the five-minute hearing, Mr. Tarloff fidgeted and chewed his lip, denigrated his court-appointed lawyer and asked to be taken to a vending machine for snacks. The judge, Acting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Pickholz, adjourned the case and ordered that Mr. Tarloff undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Mr. Tarloff was being held at Bellevue Hospital Center.

A review of court records by investigators showed that Dr. Shinbach took part in recommending that Mr. Tarloff be institutionalized in 1991, according to law enforcement officials. It was unclear whether Dr. Shinbach was his primary care physician or was part of a team that handled his case. But the doctor had no recollection of ever having encountered Mr. Tarloff before being attacked on Tuesday night, officials said.

On Sunday, interviews with the police and with Mr. Tarloff’s family and neighbors, offered a portrait of an increasingly troubled and depressed man whose actions were deemed serious enough to draw the attention of the authorities, but not grave enough to merit committing him to a psychiatric hospital for any substantial length of time. It was unclear what mental health problems Mr. Tarloff had experienced.

On June 6, 2007, the police were called to Midway Nursing Home in Queens, where his mother had been admitted, after workers called 911 to say that Mr. Tarloff had arrived at 7:30 a.m., and had threatened to kill everyone there. After arresting Mr. Tarloff, the police took him to Elmhurst Hospital Center for a mental health evaluation. The duration of his stay was unclear, and a hospital spokesman did not return phone calls.

On Aug. 3, Leonard Tarloff called the police to his home, saying that Mr. Tarloff had stopped taking his medication and was behaving violently. The police found Mr. Tarloff wandering the streets, and took him to Staten Island University Hospital. The duration of his stay there was also unclear, and a hospital spokeswoman, Rochelle Steinhaus, said she could not comment on whether Mr. Tarloff had been admitted.

On Feb. 1, Mr. Tarloff was arrested at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, where his mother was a patient, after menacing staff members and attacking a security guard. Mr. Tarloff had violated prearranged hospital visitation rules by trying to get too close to his mother, the authorities said, and lashed out after a guard upbraided him.

After his arrest, Mr. Tarloff was taken to a psychiatric unit in the hospital, and was released on his own recognizance the next day, 10 days before Dr. Faughey’s murder. His next court appearance in that case was scheduled for Feb. 25.

Without specific details about the evaluations conducted at the hospitals where Mr. Tarloff was treated, it is difficult to assess the quality of his care. A hospital cannot commit someone against his will unless the patient is deemed a danger to himself or others, and laws limit the amount of time people committed involuntarily can be kept in hospitals.

And because no centralized system exists to track a person’s history in different hospitals around New York City, a hospital would not necessarily know if a patient had been admitted elsewhere for psychiatric reasons, said Dr. Spencer Eth, the medical director of behavioral health services at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan.

Dr. Eth said most hospital acute care units, where patients considered dangerous are assigned, are short-term facilities. “In a matter of days or weeks, he’ll be discharged again,” Dr. Eth said. “That’s the so-called revolving door.”

A state law does allow relatives and others to ask a judge to force patients to receive outpatient treatment or to be involuntarily committed. The statute is known as Kendra’s Law, named after Kendra Webdale, who was pushed in front of a subway train by Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic patient. Whether such a court order had been sought for Mr. Tarloff’s commitment could not be determined.

Neighbors and acquaintances said Mr. Tarloff had been deteriorating before their eyes for the last decade or so.

Phyllis Zicherman — a neighbor who lives in the same apartment complex as Mr. Tarloff, on 60th Avenue in Corona, Queens — said Mr. Tarloff had been a slim, dapper and exceedingly neatly dressed teenager. “He was always the ladies’ man, back then,” said Ms. Zicherman. “He was tall and thin, you know, with the tight jeans and always looking good.”

But after college at Syracuse University, he returned to Queens, and began to change into a depressed, slovenly and overweight man who became despondent when his father moved out and later despaired when his mother was moved to a nursing home. The reason for his mother’s placement in a nursing home was not known.

It was unclear whether Mr. Tarloff finished his degree, and details about the years that followed are sketchy. While State Supreme Court records show that he was institutionalized in 1991, where he was sent, the reason and the duration could not be determined. Mr. Tarloff told investigators that he had used cocaine, but officials could not confirm that.

He eventually returned to his mother’s second-floor two-bedroom apartment.

His younger brother, Robert Tarloff, moved out, married and had children, Ms. Zicherman said. But David Tarloff was clearly in a rut.

As the years passed, people in his neighborhood said, he became known as the “crazy guy.” He would pester neighbors and nearby shopkeepers, asking for money. Sometimes he stole Yoo-hoo chocolate drinks and cat food from B. P. Connection, a convenience store across the street. Sometimes the clerks there gave him a sandwich or a banana, partly out of sympathy, partly because he would sometimes pay them back.

Lameka Bell, 23, a store clerk, said that while workers were wary of Mr. Tarloff’s state of mind, no one was afraid of him. Instead, she described him as a sad figure whose stomach often hung out, with his pants cuffs dragging and his fly unzipped.

Neighbors said he and his mother often got into screaming matches late at night, but despite that, her absence left him lonely and led him to behave increasingly strangely.

Bruce Wayne Griffin, 45, who lived down the hall from Mr. Tarloff, said that a strong stench of cat urine often emanated from Mr. Tarloff’s apartment. Inside, Mr. Griffin said, the place was sparsely decorated, with little furniture, and covered in grime.

But Leonard Tarloff still visited his son. Ms. Bell said she often saw Mr. Tarloff sitting with his father, talking in a sedan in the parking lot in front of her store. Once, she said, Leonard Tarloff came in and paid for the Yoo-hoos and cat food that Ms. Bell said his son had stolen.

On Sunday, Robert Tarloff told reporters that his family had struggled for years to get his brother the care he needed. He would not elaborate, though, on his brother’s mental condition or where he had been hospitalized.

“What I want the city to know is that my father and I and our mother all tried our best to keep him in the facility that he was hospitalized in over the many, many years of his illness,” he said, standing outside his father’s home. “But they kept on releasing him, after we told them what had been going on.

“We did the best that we could, asking them to keep him in there,” Robert Tarloff added. “They didn’t.”

Reporting was contributed by C.J. Hughes, Daryl Khan, Thomas J. Lueck, Colin Moynihan, Fernanda Santos, Maureen Seaberg and Karen Zraick.

    Before Killing, an Obsession to Find Mother, NYT, 18.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregion/18murder.html

Doctor Is Charged in a Killing, and Her People Bear the Shame

February 17, 2008
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

Dr. Daniel Malakov’s name is still on the placard that hangs outside his office in Rego Park, Queens, even though he was killed three and a half months ago, and even though another orthodontist now works there in his stead.

Inside, across from the polished black desk where a receptionist answers calls in Russian, Dr. Malakov’s degrees and awards still crowd one wall.

His name hangs heavily over the small, proud community of Bukharan Jews who immigrated from Uzbekistan in the early 1990s, and who speak of Dr. Malakov with reverence and sorrow.

Yet the manner of Dr. Malakov’s death has evoked something that this young immigrant group is not used to feeling: shame.

On Oct. 28, a brilliant Sunday morning, Dr. Malakov, who was 34, died after being shot three times in a playground close to his office and near 108th Street, the bustling heart of Bukharan society in Queens. He had brought his daughter, Michelle, 4, to be picked up by his estranged wife, Dr. Mazoltuv Borukhova, who is 34 and a physician. The pair had been in a rancorous custody battle over Michelle, and a judge, a week earlier, had given Dr. Malakov temporary custody of the girl. That morning, moments after Michelle ran into her mother’s arms, Dr. Malakov was shot. The gunman fled.

The Bukharan Jews in Queens reeled. Dr. Malakov was widely seen as gentle and humble, and his family was revered. His father, Khaiko Malakov, had been the chief of a major hospital in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic. His uncle Ezro Malakov was a famed musician. His brother, Gavriel, is a physical therapist; they shared the office in Rego Park. His sister, Stella, was a much-loved high school math teacher. She died of leukemia about a year before Dr. Malakov was killed; Khaiko Malakov, distraught, wrote a book about her.

“This is a known family,” said Alex Stanberg, 25, a Bukharan Jew. “Every person likes them.”

He added, “Why this happened, I cannot say. Now the Bukharans are in shame, for the first time ever.”

As the days and weeks after the shooting passed, allegations and the investigation into the crime only deepened the bewilderment of the Bukharan Jews.

Late in November, a distant relative of Dr. Borukhova’s was arrested and accused of murdering Dr. Malakov. On Feb. 7, Dr. Borukhova was arrested and charged with arranging the killing. According to the indictment, she and her relative, Mikhail Mallayev, had exchanged 91 phone calls in the days leading up to Dr. Malakov’s death.

She pleaded not guilty, but among the Bukharans in Queens, both Dr. Borukhova and her family had already been condemned.

Within hours of her son’s murder, Dr. Malakov’s mother, Malka, had begun blaming Dr. Borukhova. The next week, in a custody hearing for Michelle, Gavriel Malakov testified that Dr. Borukhova’s mother, Esta, screamed at his father, saying, “You will bury all your kids.”

The condemnation spread. It seemed unthinkable that anyone would arrange for a child to see her own father gunned down. (Michelle is now in foster care, though the Malakovs are trying to gain custody).

While the Malakov family is known and respected, few people seemed to know of the Borukhovas before the murder, and Dr. Borukhova’s testimony in family court after the murder that Dr. Malakov had repeatedly beaten her and sexually abused their daughter did little to sway their sympathy.

Long before her arrest, people on 108th Street, recognizing her face from news accounts, began staring stonily at Dr. Borukhova, sometimes falling silent or pointing when her relatives passed by. A few business owners turned members of the Borukhova family away. Some clients stopped going to her office, which she shared with her brother-in-law, Arthur Natanov.

Underlying the shock was a sense of amazement that a woman could have been behind Dr. Malakov’s murder.

“Women are usually respectful,” said Merik Mordecai, 43, a jeweler on 108th Street who is a Bukharan Jewish immigrant. The custody battle, he said, was for a court of law to decide. “What is going on with a Bukharan woman to have decided to do a thing like that?” he asked.

Through a rabbi, Dr. Borukhova and her family declined to comment. Her lawyer stressed that early judgments should not be made.

“Everybody should keep in mind the presumption of innocence, since she has entered a not guilty plea,” the lawyer, Stephen Scaring, wrote in an e-mail message.

But to many, the Borukhova name is already irreparably soiled, partly because they believe she has sullied them.

“I don’t ever want to see her, or her mother, or anyone of her blood,” said a limousine driver and Uzbek immigrant, who would not give his name. “We are all shamed, we are all depressed, because it is unbelievable.”

Bukharans began emigrating from Central Asia in significant numbers in the 1970s, but it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that they left in great waves, most bound for Israel or the United States.

Bukharan Jews have been in Central Asia for about 2,500 years, largely in what became the republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Deeply isolated, they spoke Russian and Bukhori, a hybrid of Farsi and Hebrew. In 2006, there were 17,277 people born in Uzbekistan living in the city, according to the Department of City Planning, but local religious leaders said the number was much larger. Rabbi Itzhak Yehoshua, the chief rabbi of the Bukharans in the United States, estimates that about three-quarters of the roughly 60,000 Bukharan Jews in America, mostly from Uzbekistan, live in New York. The vast majority settled in Queens.

The group is tight-knit. The Congress of the Bukharan Jews of the United States and Canada publishes its own version of the yellow pages, listing the names of every known Bukharan in the two countries.

As with any ethnic group emerging in another country, successes — and failures — are deeply felt. Having a doctor or lawyer or accountant in the family is highly valued, proof of success and acceptance in a newly adopted land. In this way, the Malakov murder was especially devastating.

“The immigrant way of thinking is very sensitive,” said Rabbi Yehoshua, who lives in Queens. “These were two successful young doctors, and after the shock was a feeling of opportunity lost. It’s an American dream that became a nightmare.”

The pairing of Dr. Malakov and Dr. Borukhova had seemed ideal. The couple adhered to the edict of marrying within their community. They were both well educated. Dr. Malakov had a degree from New York University and also studied at Columbia. Dr. Borukhova was a specialist in internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island.

But soon after the couple wed in December 2001, the relationship began to falter. Khaiko Malakov said that they often quarreled, especially over how to best raise Michelle, and that Dr. Borukhova’s mother, who lived with them, was deeply critical of Dr. Malakov. Local leaders tried to help patch things up. Rabbi Yehoshua met several times with the couple and their families, but, he said, the problems seemed nearly intractable, and puzzling.

“We believe in the system. We tried to mediate,” Rabbi Yehoshua said. “But in order for me to mediate, I have to feel a cooperation. But both of them were very difficult.

“It was difficult to understand, maybe there were issues I didn’t know about. But they weren’t listening,” he said.

The couple separated after Michelle was born, then reunited, then separated again. Then the custody battle began. After Dr. Malakov’s death, harsh allegations surfaced from both sides, both in and out of court. Dr. Borukhova said her husband’s outward charm disguised a vicious side, and described horrific abuse. The Malakov family said Dr. Malakov told them he was scared of his in-laws.

A state senator from Staten Island, Diane J. Savino, testified in family court that two of Dr. Borukhova’s sisters had approached her on Oct. 18, 10 days before the murder. They had been brought to the senator, a former child services caseworker, by staff members who thought she could help them. The sisters asked Ms. Savino what would become of Michelle if Dr. Malakov could not take care of her anymore. Dr. Malakov had been awarded temporary custody after complaining that his wife had thwarted his visitation rights.

Even now, after Dr. Borukhova’s arrest, the Malakov family fears retribution. A police officer was recently posted outside the home of Dr. Malakov’s parents.

Many along 108th Street said nothing could excuse Dr. Malakov’s murder, or the damage it almost certainly has inflicted on Michelle.

“We are ashamed, of course, but mostly we are so upset at what has happened to this little child,” said a woman wrapped in a floor-length fur coat who was buying fruit at an outdoor market near nightfall one day last week. She knew Dr. Borukhova, she said, and would not give her name. “It’s one thing to do this right in our community. It’s another to do it in front of a child.”

    Doctor Is Charged in a Killing, and Her People Bear the Shame, NYT, 17.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/nyregion/17uzbek.html

Therapist Remembered as One Who Refreshed the Broken

February 17, 2008
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

Much of the later part of Kathryn Faughey’s life was contained on this block of East 79th Street between First and York Avenues. It was where she shared a top-floor apartment with her husband, bought flowers on the corner on special occasions and listened to her patients as they shared their troubles. And it was where her funeral Mass was held on Saturday — at a church steps away from where she was killed on Tuesday.

Dr. Faughey, a 56-year-old psychologist who practiced in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom.

About 350 people attended the hourlong service, including many of her patients, which was held at St. Monica’s Catholic Church. From the steps of the church a small memorial of flowers and cards was visible outside the building a half-block away at 435 East 79th Street where Dr. Faughey was slashed to death in her office.

“It’s just such a tragedy,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral. “We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst.”

Dr. Faughey’s body was carried into the church in a poplar casket and followed closely by a procession of family members and friends, including her husband, Walter Adam.

The Mass was presided over by the Rev. Seamus Finn, who knew Dr. Faughey and had last seen her at a fund-raiser for Northern Ireland at the Waldorf -Astoria in November.

“In one way,” Father Finn said in his sermon, “her profession was so solemnly centered on the act of listening and trying to bring freshness to lives, trying to bring freshness to lives that are often broken apart by anger, by bitterness, by pain and by suffering.”

The circumstances of Dr. Faughey’s death has drawn an inordinate amount of news media attention. Mourners had to push through crowds of reporters, photographers and television cameras to enter and leave the church on Saturday. Some spoke to reporters but most shied away to grieve in private.

Father Finn recalled Dr. Faughey as a woman who found beauty in many places. “She found it in the city that she loved so dearly, for as many times as Walter tried to convince her to move out of it,” he said in his sermon. “We know she found it in places like Paris. We know she found it in just the simplest conversations with anyone of us.”

The eulogy was given by her friend, Sister Patricia Daly of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Caldwell, N.J., who knew her from their days together at St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, where Dr. Faughey had once been a professor.

Sister Daly described her as a woman of “incredible wisdom” and deep spiritual faith.

She then turned to her friend’s coffin and, clapping her hands together, said, “Kathy, well done.” The congregation rose to its feet and joined in a standing ovation.

    Therapist Remembered as One Who Refreshed the Broken, NYT, 17.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/nyregion/17funeral.html

Queens Man Is Arrested in Killing of Therapist

February 17, 2008
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A 39-year-old man who blamed a Manhattan psychiatrist for having him institutionalized 17 years ago was charged on Saturday with killing a female therapist in a furious knife attack and then slashing the psychiatrist when he tried to come to the woman’s aid, law enforcement officials said.

The man, David M. Tarloff, was picked up at his home in Queens at 7:20 a.m. and later made statements implicating himself in the killing of the therapist, Kathryn Faughey, 56, and the assault on the psychiatrist, Dr. Kent D. Shinbach, who is in his 70s, on Tuesday night inside the East 79th Street offices they shared, the police said.

Mr. Tarloff told investigators he went to the doctors’ offices with plans to rob Dr. Shinbach. He then planned to take his ailing mother, Beatrice, either out of the country or to Hawaii. It was unclear why Dr. Faughey was attacked: she may have inadvertently crossed his path.

Mr. Tarloff told investigators that he did not know that she would be in the offices and had not intended to attack her. Dr. Shinbach was slashed when he ran to try to help Dr. Faughey after hearing her screams, the police said.

The suspect spoke to detectives for 25 minutes — from 8:15 to 8:40 a.m. — and had “cuts on his hands,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who announced the arrest at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Saturday. Then Mr. Tarloff said he wanted a lawyer “and the questioning ended,” Mr. Kelly said.

Law enforcement officials have said that detectives found Dr. Faughey’s office awash in blood and discovered two suitcases the assailant had left behind in the building’s basement. One held women’s fluffy slippers, a blouse and adult diapers. The other had eight knives, three lengths of rope and duct tape. The police said that the suspect had been in the basement in the hours before the killing, possibly to scout out an escape route, and fled through a side door to the street after the attack.

A palm print found on the handle of one of the suitcases matched a print from Mr. Tarloff’s left hand that was taken after he was arrested on Feb. 1 at a Queens hospital. He had tried to visit his mother and got into a confrontation with a security guard, according to court records and law enforcement officials.

Two more palm prints from Mr. Tarloff’s right hand were found on the packaging for the diapers that were inside the same suitcase, officials said.

In addition, Mr. Tarloff was picked out in police lineups by three people who saw him on the night of the attack: Dr. Shinbach, a female patient of his who saw the assailant in the office’s waiting room and another patient who was leaving when the assailant showed up, at about 8 p.m., the police said.

“Forensic evidence and Tarloff’s own words placed him at the scene of the crime,” Mr. Kelly said. “These officers knocked on doors, they followed leads and they examined evidence around the clock to make this arrest possible.”

Charges filed against him on Saturday included second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder and assault.

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Tarloff was captured on surveillance videos from the lobby and the basement of the building where Dr. Faughey and Dr. Shinbach were attacked.

On one video, the suspect entered the lobby shortly after 8 p.m. wearing a black cap, a dark coat and sneakers, and toting the two suitcases.

He told the doorman that he was there to see Dr. Shinbach, and walked swiftly up a set of stairs to the professional offices on the first floor.

But Dr. Shinbach had another patient, a woman, waiting for him, so the man who entered the suite sat on the couch next to her until she went in to see Dr. Shinbach at 8:30 p.m.

At 8:50 p.m., Dr. Shinbach heard Dr. Faughey’s screams and rushed into her office and saw her lying still on the blood-soaked carpet by her desk.

The attacker then turned on him, slashing him in the face, head and hands. “She’s dead,” the killer said, as he continued his attack on him, police said. When he finished, he pinned Dr. Shinbach against the wall with a chair, took $90 from his wallet and fled out the building’s basement exit, 59 minutes after he had arrived.

During the interrogation of Mr. Tarloff, “there were no statements concerning his interaction with Dr. Faughey,” Mr. Kelly said.

As Mr. Tarloff waited at the 19th Precinct station house, where he was questioned, a portrait emerged of a quiet, eccentric person who had shared a second-floor apartment in Corona, Queens, with his mother until she recently moved to a nursing home. A balding, 5-foot-10 man, he was sometimes seen walking on his block dressed in slippers and a corduroy blazer. He was prone to bursts of anger, those who knew him said, and he had agitated some of his neighbors by knocking on their doors to ask for money.

The developments in the case came as Dr. Faughey’s family and friends gathered for her funeral Mass on Saturday morning at a church steps away from where she was murdered five days earlier.

Dr. Faughey, a psychologist who practiced cognitive behavior psychotherapy in a building across the street from her apartment, was remembered as a woman with a winning smile and a patient wisdom. She grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and lived with her husband of 25 years, Walter Adam.

About 350 people, including many of her patients, attended the hourlong service at St. Monica’s Catholic Church.

“We’re all very disturbed at the level of violence, that someone could strike down someone in our midst,” said Emily Fragos, 57, a neighbor who attended the funeral.

Mr. Tarloff, in statements to investigators, expressed anger at Dr. Shinbach, whom he blamed for having him committed to a mental health institution in 1991. But officials said it was unclear if Mr. Tarloff had ever been Dr. Shinbach’s patient or if he had ever been institutionalized.

Mr. Tarloff had indicated that he might have been “institutionalized or incarcerated up to 20 times,” Mr. Kelly said, though a records check to confirm that was still being done.

The Feb. 1 arrest in Queens occurred at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway, in the third-floor critical-care unit, said Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.

Mr. Tarloff was trying to visit his mother, a law enforcement official said. A security officer at the hospital, Joel Leroy, saw Mr. Tarloff “touching a critical-care patient, in violation of prearranged visitation conditions,” Mr. Ryan said. “Then he yelled and cursed loudly inside the unit, and approached the nursing station in a threatening manner.”

When Mr. Leroy tried to restrain Mr. Tarloff, he attacked the guard and wrestled him to the floor, Mr. Ryan said.

Mr. Tarloff was charged with third-degree assault, disorderly conduct and harassment and was released on his own recognizance the next day, 10 days before Dr. Faughey’s murder. Mr. Tarloff was due in court on Feb. 25.

Growing up, Mr. Tarloff seemed popular with his friends and took care with his appearance, said one neighbor, Phyllis Zicherman, who said she had known the Tarloffs for decades. She said he had attended college but left under unknown circumstances — around the time she and other neighbors said they noticed he began to change.

And his mother’s absence profoundly affected him, several neighbors said. “He was depressed because of his mom,” Ms. Zicherman said.

A worker at the nursing home where his mother is living said that Mr. Tarloff sometimes phoned her three or four times a day.

“He calls here harassing his mother,” said Robin Moore, a security officer there. “He gets her upset. She’s very sick. When he doesn’t get to speak to her, he makes threats.”

Another security officer, Veronica Darby, said Mr. Tarloff was not allowed” to see his mother, who has been at the home for less than six months. The police had two encounters with Mr. Tarloff last year that led to evaluations of his mental health, officials said, although the details were sketchy.

In one instance in August 2007, officers responded to his father’s Staten Island address and treated him as an emotionally disturbed person, officials said, meaning that he was taken to a hospital to have his mental health evaluated. At that time, his father, Leonard, told officers he was “off his medication,” the police said.

A person who answered the phone at the home of Mr. Tarloff’s father declined to answer questions and hung up.

Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Kareem Fahim, Ann Farmer, Christine Hauser, Daryl Khan, Dmitry Kiper, Colin Moynihan, Ray Rivera, Jack Styczynski, Mathew R. Warren and Karen Zraick.

    Queens Man Is Arrested in Killing of Therapist, NYT, 17.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/nyregion/17murder.html?hp

War Torn

When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly

February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and DEBORAH SONTAG

A few months after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned to a Texas Army base from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her mercilessly. He struck her, choked her, dragged her over a fence and slammed her into the sidewalk.

As far as Erin Edwards was concerned, that would be the last time he beat her.

Unlike many military wives, she knew how to work the system to protect herself. She was an insider, even more so than her husband, since she served as an aide to a brigadier general at Fort Hood.

With the general’s help, she quickly arranged for a future transfer to a base in New York. She pressed charges against her husband and secured an order of protection. She sent her two children to stay with her mother. And she received assurance from her husband’s commanders that he would be barred from leaving the base unless accompanied by an officer.

Yet on the morning of July 22, 2004, William Edwards easily slipped off base, skipping his anger-management class, and drove to his wife’s house in the Texas town of Killeen. He waited for her to step outside and then, after a struggle, shot her point-blank in the head before turning the gun on himself.

During an investigation, Army officers told the local police that they did not realize Erin Edwards had been afraid of her husband. And they acknowledged that despite his restrictions, William Edwards had not been escorted off base “on every occasion,” according to a police report.

That admission troubled the detective handling the case.

“I believe that had he been confined to base and had that confinement been monitored,” said Detective Sharon L. Brank of the local police, “she would not be dead at his hands.”

The killing of Erin Edwards directly echoed an earlier murder of a military wife that drew far more attention. Almost 10 years ago, at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, a different Army sergeant defied a similar restriction to base, driving out the front gate on his way to a murder almost foretold.

That 1998 homicide, one of several featured in a “60 Minutes” exposé on domestic violence in the military, galvanized a public outcry, Congressional demands for action and the Pentagon’s pledge to do everything possible to prevent such violence from claiming more lives.

Yet just as the Defense Department undertook substantial changes, guided by a Congressionally chartered task force on domestic violence that decried a system more adept at protecting offenders than victims, the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq began.

Pentagon officials say that wartime has not derailed their efforts to make substantive improvements in the way that the military tackles domestic violence.

They say they have, for example, offered more parenting and couples classes, provided additional victims advocates and afforded victims greater confidentiality in reporting abuses.

But interviews with members of the task force, as well as an examination of cases of fatal domestic violence and child abuse, indicate that wartime pressures on military families and on the military itself have complicated the Pentagon’s efforts.

“I don’t think there is any question about that,” said Peter C. McDonald, a retired district court judge in Kentucky and a member of the Pentagon’s now disbanded domestic violence task force. “The war could only make things much worse than even before, and here we had a system that was not too good to begin with.”

Connie Sponsler-Garcia, another task force member, who now works on domestic violence projects with the Pentagon, agreed.

“Whereas something was a high priority before, now it’s: ‘Oh, dear, we have a war. Well get back to you in a few months,’ ” she said.

The fatalities examined by The New York Times show a military system that tries and sometimes fails to balance the demands of fighting a war with those of eradicating domestic violence.

According to interviews with law enforcement officials and court documents, the military has sent to war service members who had been charged with and even convicted of domestic violence crimes.

Deploying such convicted service members to a war zone violates military regulations and, in some cases, federal law.

Take the case of Sgt. Jared Terrasas. The first time that he was deployed to Iraq, his prosecution for domestic violence was delayed. Then, after pleading guilty, he was pulled out of a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps and sent to Iraq again.

Several months after Sergeant Terrasas returned home, his 7-month-old son died of a brain injury, and the marine was charged with his murder.

Deployment to war, with its long separations, can put serious stress on military families. And studies have shown that recurrent deployments heighten the likelihood of combat trauma, which, in turn, increases the risk of domestic violence.

“The more trauma out there, the more likely domestic violence is,” said Dr. Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who also was a member of the Pentagon task force.

The Times examined several cases in which mental health problems caused or exacerbated by war pushed already troubled families to a deadly breaking point.

In one instance, the Air Force repeatedly deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere Sgt. Jon Trevino, a medic with a history of psychological problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Multiple deployments eroded Sergeant Trevino’s marriage and worsened his mental health problems until, in 2006, he killed his wife, Carol, and then himself.

The military declared his suicide “service related.”

A Call to Action

Within a six-week period in 2002, three Special Forces sergeants returned from Afghanistan and murdered their wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two immediately turned their guns on themselves; the third hanged himself in a jail cell. A fourth soldier at the same Army base also killed his wife during those six weeks.

At the beginning of this wartime period, the cluster of murder-suicides set off alarms about the possible link between combat tours and domestic violence, a link supported by a study published that year in the journal Military Medicine. The killings also reinvigorated the concerns about military domestic violence that had led to the formation of the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence two years earlier.

National attention to the subject was short-lived. But an examination by The Times found more than 150 cases of fatal domestic violence or child abuse in the United States involving service members and new veterans during the wartime period that began in October 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan.

In more than a third of the cases, The Times determined that the offenders had deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or to the regions in support of those missions. In another third, it determined that the offenders never deployed to war. And the deployment history of the final third could not be ascertained.

The military tracks only homicides that it prosecutes, and a majority of killings involving service members are handled by civilian authorities. To track these cases, The Times used records from the Army, Air Force and Navy — the Marines did not provide any information —and local news reports.

It is difficult to know how complete The Times’s findings are. What is clear, though, is that these homicides occurred at a time when the military was trying to improve its handling of domestic violence.

The Pentagon’s domestic violence task force, appointed in April 2000 and comprising 24 military and civilian experts, met regularly for three years to examine a system where, they found, soldiers rarely faced punishment or prosecution for battering their wives and where they often found shelter from civilian orders of protection.

When the moment arrived to explain their findings and recommendations to Congress, however, the timing could not have been poorer. Deborah D. Tucker and Lt. Gen. Garry L. Parks of the Marines, the leaders of the task force, presented their final report to the House Armed Services Committee on the very day that the Iraq war began, March 20, 2003. Ms. Tucker called it “one of the more surreal experiences of my life.”

“Periodically, members of the committee would call for a break and there would be some updated information provided on the status of our troops’ entry into Iraq and how far they’d gotten,” she said. “There was a map on an easel to the side.”

“I knew that while we were at war all other considerations would push back,” she added, “and I hoped that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be a quick matter on the order of Desert Storm.”

The task force was disbanded, and its request to reconvene after two years to evaluate progress was rejected. But the Defense Department embraced most of its 200 recommendations and gradually made many changes, from the increase in advocates to domestic violence training for commanding officers.

“The services have taken huge strides to implement the recommendations,” said David Lloyd, director of the Pentagon’s Family Advocacy Program, starting with sending out “a strong message across the department that domestic violence is not acceptable.”

Further, after the killings at Fort Bragg, Congress passed a law that made civilian orders of protection binding on military bases, and the Army gradually slowed the transition from war to home to help soldiers adjust.

Mr. Lloyd said he could not verify or comment on The Times’s findings on domestic killings. But, he said, domestic fatalities do not provide a complete picture of the incidence of domestic violence in the military.

“You have a pie, a nine-inch shell, and you have a slice of that pie, but there are other slices: verbal abuse and psychological control and assault that didn’t result in a homicide,” Mr. Lloyd said. “Even if the fatality slice has increased and it would look larger, the other numbers have gone down.”

According to the military, the number of general spouse and child abuse incidents reported to on-base family advocacy programs began declining in 1998, before the special effort to address the issue began, and continued to decline significantly through 2006. But whether those numbers reflect a genuine decline is a matter of debate, given that large numbers of service members have spent considerable time away on deployments and that the strengthening of sanctions for domestic violence has made some women more reluctant to report abuse.

The accuracy of the military’s domestic violence data has also been questioned, by advocates, the Government Accountability Office and military officials themselves.

Last fall, in a statement released during domestic violence awareness month, Mike Hoskins, a Pentagon official, said, “We shouldn’t necessarily take comfort in reduced rates of violence.” He said they probably reflected “good news” but urged caution in interpreting the numbers.

Dr. Campbell, the former task force member, said the task force had recommended periodic anonymous surveys to ascertain the full extent of domestic violence. She also said that she believed the “true incidence” of domestic violence had probably increased as a result of service members returning from Iraq with combat trauma, which can exacerbate family violence.

“It’s sort of like, on the one hand, they’re improving the system, and on the other hand, they’re stressing it,” she said.

Others agree, noting that wartime places a burden on the military as a whole, even on those who do not deploy to combat zones but absorb additional duties at home.

Christine Hansen, executive director of the Miles Foundation, which provides domestic violence assistance mostly to the wives of officers and senior enlisted men, said the organization’s caseload had tripled since the war in Iraq began.

And John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel who served as a military judge at Fort Hood and now represents military clients in private practice, said he, too, had seen a “substantial” increase in military domestic violence cases in his area.

“Sometimes I just sit and scratch my head,” he said.

The separation of deployment, in and of itself, often causes marital strains.

“Even with a healthy marriage, there is a massive adjustment,” said Anita Gorecki, a lawyer and former Army captain who represents soldiers near Fort Bragg and is married to an officer currently in Iraq. “Add on to that combat stress and injuries and sometimes it can create the perfect storm.”

Some researchers draw a fairly firm connection between post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic violence. A 2006 study in The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy looked at veterans who sought marital counseling at a Veterans Affairs medical center in the Midwest between 1997 and 2003. Those given a diagnosis of PTSD were “significantly more likely to perpetrate violence toward their partners,” the study found, with more than 80 percent committing at least one act of violence in the previous year, and almost half at least one severe act.

Pamela Iles, a superior court judge who was permitted by the Marines to set up a privately financed domestic violence education program at Camp Pendleton in California, views much of the domestic abuse on the base as “collateral” from the war. She sees the domestic violence committed by marines, many of them young, as a reaction to jumping back and forth between the dangers of war and the trouble at home.

“One minute you are in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and the next minute you are in Burger King,” Judge Iles said. “There is a lot of disorientation.”

A 9-Year-Old Witness

It was a little before dawn on Feb. 20, 2006, in a bedroom in Edwardsville, Ill. Carol Trevino and her 9-year-old son, sleeping deeply after watching “Wayne’s World,” were startled awake by a series of booms. “What was that?” Carol Trevino asked her son.

In seconds, Sgt. Jon Trevino, her estranged husband, barged through the door, according to a police report. Mrs. Trevino had just enough time to reach for her pepper spray before he shot her five times, the last time in the head. Then he shot himself.

Their son, wide-eyed, sat in bed watching his life explode, bullet by bullet.

Few details escaped the boy’s notice. His father used a silver gun and it “didn’t have a wheel on it, like the cowboys used,” he told the Edwardsville police. The boy could even name the precise time of his mother’s death: 4:32 a.m., as the glowing clock read.

Outside in Mr. Trevino’s car was the immediate motive for the murder-suicide: divorce papers, evidence of a marriage destabilized by multiple deployments to war zones and by Sergeant Trevino’s own increasing instability.

T. Robert Cook, his brother-in-law, said he believed Sergeant Trevino’s domestic violence was triggered by his combat trauma. “I’m 100 percent sure it was the war,” said Mr. Cook, who is raising the Trevinos’ son along with his wife, Sheryl Gusewell, who is Carol’s sister. “I don’t have any doubt their marital problems placed a burden on him, but I am quite sure that, but for the war, he would have taken a different approach. When you see people being shot every day, death is not a big thing.”

Sergeant Trevino, who had endured childhood sexual abuse and a difficult first marriage, suffered psychiatric problems long before he was dispatched to war zones to perform the highly stressful job of evacuating the wounded.

And the Air Force knew it.

Air Force mental health records show that Sergeant Trevino, who was 36, had been treated twice for mental health problems before the war: once in 1995 for serious depression as his first marriage crumbled, and then in 1999 for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the childhood abuse and marital problems with his new wife, Carol. He was counseled and treated with medication both times.

As a result of these problems, the Air Force insisted that he secure a medical waiver for a promotion that he sought to become an aeromedical evacuation technician. And military doctors certified that he could handle the job, despite research that shows that pre-existing post-traumatic stress disorder is exacerbated in a war zone.

Col. Steven Pflanz, a senior psychiatrist in the Air Force, who was not involved in the Trevino case, said the Air Force considered the stress disorder to be treatable and therefore was willing to deploy an airman with a history of it. But the decision is not taken lightly, he said.

“It’s not an exact science,” he said. “You try to make your best prediction. We spend a lot of time with our customers.”

In Sergeant Trevino’s case, the prediction was wrong. He had trouble shaking off the carnage that he experienced so viscerally while evacuating injured service members. After one deployment to Afghanistan and two to Iraq, his mental health and his marriage deteriorated. When he returned from his second tour in Iraq, Sergeant Trevino acknowledged in a health assessment that he had “serious problems” dealing with the people he loved and that he was feeling “down, helpless, panicky or anxious.”

The Air Force acted quickly. He was abruptly restricted from “special operational duty.” An Air Force doctor diagnosed “acute PTSD,” calling it a reaction to the war and marital problems. Sergeant Trevino began taking a cocktail of antidepressants and underwent therapy. According to doctors’ notes, he did not express thoughts of homicide or suicide. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August 2005, he was considered well enough to be deployed domestically.

But his wife’s family, which had taken him under its wing, found the once affable, quick-witted sergeant to be profoundly altered. His temper flashed unpredictably, white-hot. He acted threatened and paranoid, his behavior so erratic that he frightened his son. One late night, he took his son on a rambling drive to nowhere, ranting to the boy about his mother.

At least one time, he struck his wife. A friend gave Carol Trevino the pepper spray that she reached for the night of her murder. But she never considered his abuse serious enough to report him to the authorities.

Four days before the murder-suicide, Sergeant Trevino bought a gun.

“This is just one of those things that unfortunately happens,” he wrote to his son in a suicide note. “I love you, and I know I let you down.”

Justice Delayed

The Pentagon task force had one overarching recommendation: that the military work hard to effect a “culture shift” to zero tolerance for domestic violence by holding offenders accountable and by punishing criminal behavior.

There was, members believed, a core credo that needed to be attacked frontally: “this notion that the good soldier either can’t be a wife beater or, if they are, that it’s a temporary aberration that shouldn’t interfere with them doing military service,” as Dr. Campbell put it.

The way the military handled several cases involving the deaths of babies and toddlers indicates that this kind of thinking has been difficult to demolish at a time of war.

In October 2003, four months after Jose Aguilar, 24, a Marine Corps sergeant, returned from the initial invasion of Iraq, his infant son, Damien, wound up in the intensive care unit of a local hospital with bleeding in his brain and eyes.

Sergeant Aguilar, a mechanic based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, acknowledged to the local police that he had been rough with the 2-month-old baby, shaking Damien to stop him from squirming during a diaper change. He said that he had been abused himself as a child and that he did not mean to hurt the baby.

After the marine was charged with felony child abuse, he and his wife completed a parenting program.

The following summer, while the felony charge was pending, Sergeant Aguilar was deployed once more to Iraq, this time for nine months. His court case was delayed, which did not surprise local prosecutors.

Michael Maultsby, the assistant district attorney in Onslow County, N.C., who prosecuted Sergeant Aguilar, said that such frustrating delays in justice sometimes occur in his county, home to Camp Lejeune.

“It depends on the needs of the unit,” Mr. Maultsby said. “We can’t overrule them.”

In April 2006, a year after Sergeant Aguilar returned from Iraq but before his felony case was resolved, Damien, who by then was 2, died of a brain injury. His father claimed that the boy had been injured by a fall in the bathtub. The medical examiner disputed that explanation. The marine was arrested, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and felony child abuse, and was sentenced last fall to 28 to 35 years in prison.

Marine officials would not comment on individual cases. Elaine Woodhouse, a Marine Corps social services program specialist, said that “the family advocacy program does not recommend or advise deployment of a marine when domestic or felony child abuse charges are pending.” Still, that decision, she said, is left to the discretion of the commanders.

A conviction for domestic violence, unlike pending charges, almost always renders a service member ineligible to go to war, but that restriction has not always been considered binding, as is clear in the case of Sergeant Terrasas, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton.

One night in late December 2002, Sergeant Terrasas, drunk and angry over a telephone conversation about the looming war in Iraq, vented his anger by punching his wife, Lucia, in the face.

“He seemed to just lose it,” Mrs. Terrasas told the police in Oceanside, Calif., who arrested him on misdemeanor charges.

But Sergeant Terrasas was deployed to Iraq before his case was heard. It was not until his return seven months later that he pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and was ordered to complete a 16-week batterers intervention program run by the Marine Corps.

Sergeant Terrasas attended a few classes. But the Marine Corps, facing a runaway insurgency in Iraq, pulled him out of the batterers program and shipped him off to war for a second time in early 2004.

This deployment was illegal. A 1996 law bans offenders who are convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from carrying firearms, with no special exception for military personnel. The ban is referred to as the Lautenberg amendment after its sponsor, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey.

Army and Marine regulations, formulated in response to the weapons ban, explicitly prohibit deployments for missions that require firearms, and extend the policy to felony domestic violence offenders, too. The Marine Corps would not comment on Sergeant Terrasas’s deployment, citing confidentiality rules.

When Sergeant Terrasas returned from war, he completed his batterers program, said his lawyer, Philip De Massa. But his anger, tested by two tours in Iraq, still surfaced. In September 2005, when the police responded to a domestic argument, he broke down crying and told one officer that he suffered from “postwar traumatic syndrome.” There is no record that he sought or received mental health help.

Nearly two weeks later, the Terrasases’ 7-month-old son, Alexander, died from a powerful blow to the head. Mr. Terrasas was charged with murder. Last August, after a deal with prosecutors, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for felony child endangerment.

He never admitted to abusing his child.

Broken Promises

Sgt. Erin Edwards, emboldened by a year in Iraq, returned to Texas with the courage to end her troubled marriage.

“Being apart for such a long period of time enabled her to realize she could survive without him,” said Sgt. Jami Howell, 28, who was her best friend.

When Erin Edwards told her husband that she wanted a divorce after four years of marriage, he responded as she had long feared.

On June 19, 2004, he followed her to their baby sitter’s house to hand her a written proposal for a custody arrangement. When she did not immediately respond, he beat her so badly that she wound up in the emergency room.

Even before the assault, William Edwards’s troubles had so badly affected his performance at work that his commanding officer, Capt. Brian Novoselich, took the time to meet with him weekly to check on his welfare. After the assault, it was the captain who confined him to the base.

But William Edwards repeatedly left unescorted and often stayed with his brother, who lived across the street from Erin Edwards in Killeen. On several occasions, she alerted the police and his superiors that he was lurking.

On July 21, 2004, Erin Edwards went to court to make the temporary protection order permanent. At the hearing, William Edwards told the judge that he had enrolled in alcohol and domestic violence classes after the June assault, according to a transcript.

“I had hit rock bottom when I touched my wife, man,” he said in court. “That was the worst day ever in my life. I had always told my wife that I would never touch her, ever, physically.”

William Edwards also acknowledged that when the police showed up that day, he begged his wife not to press charges, saying: “Don’t do this to my career. Don’t do this.”

Erin Edwards spoke of the effect on their children, who witnessed the assault. “Since the incident happened, all my son talks about is how his father hurt his mother, and that ‘Daddy is going to kill Mommy,’” she said.

She also stated, and her husband learned for the first time, that she was transferring and moving with the children. William Edwards was “visibly upset” by this, according to Army documents turned over to the police.

The following morning, after reporting to an exercise session with other soldiers, William Edwards left the base alone one final time. After the murder-suicide, local police officers securing the scene noted that both bodies were dressed in military camouflage clothing with nameplates that said Edwards. Both were 24.

At Erin Edwards’s funeral, her boss, Brig. Gen. Charles Benjamin Allen, who was killed in a helicopter crash in late 2004, eulogized the soldier with a cracking voice. More than three years later, her relatives note that not even he, with his high rank, was able to ensure that the military was doing more than taking a troubled soldier “at his word,” as Mary Lou Taylor, Erin’s aunt, said.

“He couldn’t or failed to help her be safe,” Ms. Taylor said.

William Edwards’s former commanding officer, Major Novoselich, said in a recent interview that he was “shocked by the end result.” Now a professor at West Point, he said he had assumed that William Edwards’s immediate supervisors were monitoring him.

Near Fort Hood, Detective Brank of the Killeen police said soldiers continued to defy restrictions to the base.

“I am surprised,” she said. “Fort Hood is not enforcing these orders.”

The Army examined Erin Edwards’s death as part of a fatality review program recommended by the Pentagon task force “to ensure no victim dies in vain.”

A one-paragraph summary of the review seemed to discount the findings of the civilian police investigation. The summary noted that Erin Edwards had refused the assistance of the base’s family advocacy program, while William Edwards had enrolled in it. It added that William Edwards had “appeared to comply” with his restrictions. Until the day he “eluded his military escort” and killed his wife.
 

Alain Delaquérière and Margot Williams contributed research.

    When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly, NYT, 15.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15vets.html?hp

Attacks on the Homeless Rise, With Youths Mostly to Blame

February 15, 2008
The New York Times
By AMY GREEN

CROSS CITY, Fla. — Warren Messner was 15 when he and some friends attacked a homeless man and left him for dead. Mr. Messner jumped on a log laid across the man’s ribs. He does not know why. He was high, does not remember much and wants to forget the rest.

Today Mr. Messner is a baby-faced 18-year-old serving 22 years for second-degree murder. He used to like skipping school and listening to rap music with friends. He imagined he eventually would help his father install flooring. Now he talks to his parents nearly every night from the maximum-security Cross City Correctional Institution.

“It was just a senseless crime.” he said, his eyes down, his shoulders slumped. “I wish it would have never happened. It made no sense. It was stupidity.”

Mr. Messner’s story is not unusual. Nationwide, violence against the homeless is soaring, and overwhelmingly the attackers are teenagers and young adults. In Florida the problem is so severe that the National Coalition for the Homeless is setting up speakers bureaus to address a culture that sees attacking the homeless as a sport. It is the first time the organization has singled out a particular state.

Of more than 142 unprovoked attacks on homeless people in 2007, the most — at least 32 — were in Florida, according to a preliminary count by the coalition and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Nationwide, such attacks rose about 65 percent from 2005.

In Fort Lauderdale a group of teenagers captured national attention in 2006 when a surveillance camera caught one laughing as he beat a homeless man with a baseball bat. The teenagers attacked three homeless men that night and face a murder trial in one man’s death. A year later in Daytona Beach, a 17-year-old and two 10-year-olds attacked a homeless Army veteran. One 10-year-old dropped a cement block on the man’s face, the police said.

“What could possibly be in the mind of a 10- or 12-year-old that would possess them to pick up a rock and pick up a brick and beat another human being in the head?” said Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. “It defies any rational thought process, but it’s also why we felt so strongly we had to do something.”

The trust has teamed with the local schools to develop a curriculum for elementary, middle and high schools teaching respect for the homeless.

Advocates for the homeless blame a society that they say shuns the homeless through laws that criminalize sleeping in parks, camping and begging.

“I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Troubled by news photos showing those two 10-year-olds in Daytona Beach in prison suits and handcuffs, the National Coalition for the Homeless joined with AmeriCorps Vista to open speakers bureaus last fall in Key West, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Nine more are planned in Florida. The idea is to educate students using speakers who are homeless or once lived on the streets, and the organization wants to open more bureaus nationwide, said Michael Stoops, executive director of the coalition.

The speakers are like George Siletti, who grew up in foster care and lived as a homeless drifter on and off for 25 years, starting at the age of 16. Now 51, Mr. Siletti said he took medication for schizophrenia and depression and lived in subsidized housing in Washington, addressing schools, churches and organizations about homelessness.

“I’ve had bottles thrown at me. I’ve had people spit on me, cursed me out for no reason,” said Mr. Siletti, who was attacked by teenagers in Fort Lauderdale as he and others slept under a bridge in the 1980s. “People seem to pick on the most vulnerable because they really think that they won’t do nothing.”

In Miami, students are learning from a weeklong curriculum and a DVD teaching that families are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. The curriculum requires younger students to make posters and older students to write essays about what they learned.

Legislation adding the homeless to hate-crime laws has been introduced in Alaska, California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio and Texas. Bills are also pending in Congress.

Mr. Messner, who is an imposing six feet, 240 pounds in his blue prison suit, talks about his crime with quiet resignation.

He and his friends were looking for a place to smoke marijuana near his home in the Daytona Beach area when they stumbled on Michael Roberts. Mr. Messner joined the attack and remembers hearing Mr. Roberts groan when he jumped on the log, but then Mr. Messner tried to pull his friends away, he said.

“He was making noises,” Mr. Messner said. “He asked one time why we was doing it to him. Why we was messing with him.”

A few days later, Mr. Roberts’s body was found. Mr. Messner agreed to a plea bargain and drew the lightest sentence of the four convicted in the attack.

He does not like prison much. He keeps busy doing yard work, exercising and reading. He likes James Patterson novels and murder mysteries. He has dropped at least 40 pounds and developed a penchant for prison tattoos. One arm reads “thug” while the other reads “life.” His mother’s name, Lori, is on one hand. On one arm is the same cross he wears around his neck, surrounded by the words “hope,” “faith” and “love.”

“I’m not a killer. I know that,” Mr. Messner said. “A lot of people, they see this story and call us killers. I’m not a killer. I regret what I did. I wish I could take it back.”

    Attacks on the Homeless Rise, With Youths Mostly to Blame, NYT, 15.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15homeless.html

Vicious Killing Where Troubled Seek a Listener

February 14, 2008
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

It was just after 8 p.m. in a suite of mental health offices at East 79th Street and York Avenue. One doctor was seeing patients; another was working in her study.

It is a common scene in the offices of countless Manhattan therapists after dark: The lights stay on as paperwork is done and patients are treated into the evening.

Then a middle-aged man in a black cap and sneakers came in from the freezing rain, toting two pieces of black luggage. He said he was there to see a psychiatrist named Kent D. Shinbach. But Dr. Shinbach had another patient, a woman, waiting for him, so the man sat on a couch and made small talk. Then he disappeared into the office of the other doctor, Kathryn Faughey, the police said.

And there — in what investigators described as a furious swirl of violence on Tuesday night — the man stabbed Dr. Faughey in the head, face and chest. Hearing her screams, Dr. Shinbach rushed in and saw her lying still and bleeding on the tan carpet by the foot of her desk.

The attacker turned on him, stabbing him in the face, head and hands, the police said. Dr. Faughey, 56, was declared dead at the scene; Dr. Shinbach, who is in his 70s, survived, but was left in critical condition.

A day later, the police said they did not know the motive for the frenzied attack nor the identity of the killer, though investigators are pursuing the possibility that he was a patient at the offices, where five health care professionals work, or that he was a relative of a patient there or was somehow involved with one.

But even before a motive had been determined, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers who work in Manhattan — a place long linked in the public imagination with the stereotypical image of an urbanite on a couch discussing his worries — reacted with alarm. Several said the violence in the office at 435 East 79th Street reminded them of the dangers inherent in a career spent helping people, particularly those in emotional pain.

Dr. Faughey grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and lived across the street from her office. Her husband of 25 years, Walter Adam, said he became worried about 8:30 p.m. because his wife was late. He looked out the window of their 17th-floor apartment and noticed that the light was still on in her office. He called and got no answer. Then he saw police cars on the block.

“I thought it was an automobile accident,” he said. “Finally I said, ‘I better go over and see what’s going on.’ ”

He heard the news from a police officer: His wife had been killed.

“She’s taken very good care of me,” Mr. Adam said. “She’s looked after me. She’s a good and decent woman. Never harmed anyone.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that after stabbing both doctors, the attacker pinned Dr. Shinbach against the wall with a spindled chair, took $90 from his wallet and fled to the building’s neatly painted basement and out a service exit. He left his two suitcases behind in the basement, where the police found a smear of blood on the door. The woman who had been waiting to see Dr. Shinbach had gone into his office at one point and was unharmed.

During the attack on Dr. Shinbach, which lasted about 10 minutes, the attacker told him, “She’s dead,” the police said, adding that other comments he made did not shed light on his actions.

Mr. Kelly said a key part of the investigation was to determine whether the killer “was a patient of any of the health care professionals in that suite of offices.”

Three knives were later found: one at Dr. Faughey’s left foot; another, a 9-inch blade that was bent in the attack, underneath her desk; and a meat cleaver, also bent and with a broken handle, lying in front of a wall of books. Blood was splashed on the walls and floor. “It was obvious a fierce struggle had taken place,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

Investigators found that the larger suitcase, which had wheels and a handle, held women’s slippers and a blouse, as well as disposable diapers for adults. Inside the smaller bag were eight knives — mostly kitchen knives — three lengths of rope and rolls of duct tape.

Dr. Faughey received a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University in 1981. She had been practicing cognitive behavior psychotherapy on the Upper East Side for more than 20 years, according to her Web site.

“My approach is focused and solution-oriented,” according to a quotation on the site. “My sessions move quickly. I am interactive, and I give feedback.”

Mr. Adam said his wife achieved tremendous results for her patients. “The way she turned around people’s lives, saved people’s lives,” he said.

“She was always a person who was reading and studying,” said Kevin Faughey, Dr. Faughey’s oldest brother and one of her six siblings. “She always had goals in her life that she wanted to do something for humanity, in some way, shape or form to help.”

Dr. Shinbach has admitted patients to Beth Israel Medical Center and Gracie Square Hospital, said Dr. Michael Serby, an associate chairman of Beth Israel. “Clearly he’s a brave individual and a hero.”

Dr. Frederick J. Long, a Manhattan psychiatrist who has known Dr. Shinbach for 14 years, described him as dedicated and caring. “He is the best mentor I’ve ever had,” Dr. Long said, adding that Dr. Shinbach was among the first psychiatrists to take an interest in elderly patients.

Another colleague said Dr. Shinbach’s relationship with Dr. Faughey was limited to the shared office space; they did not see each other’s patients.

The attacker’s entrance and departure were captured by security cameras. He arrived at the first-floor offices just after 8 p.m. He left at 8:59 p.m. through the basement door, on which investigators found blood. Investigators said the attacker might have cut his hand. It is common in such furious attacks, when blood can make the weapons slick. The police said DNA tests would be conducted to determine whose the blood was, but it was unclear how long the tests would take.

In the videotape, the man’s arrival is seen as a doorman holds a glass door open for him; he briskly walks in, stating that he was there to see Dr. Shinbach. Pulling his bags, he then goes up a short set of steps from the lobby to the professional offices.

The videotape of the man leaving shows him from behind, as he rounds a corner in the basement and disappears out the exit, onto 79th Street between First and York Avenues. The police are checking security videos from businesses in the area to see if they can pick up images of him.

At a news conference, Mr. Kelly held up a sketch of the suspect that was based on descriptions provided by witnesses who saw the man before the attack.

Dr. Shinbach, who was interviewed by detectives after undergoing surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, did not recognize his attacker.

Mr. Kelly described the killer as a man in his 40s, about 5-foot-9, with brownish or blond hair. He was wearing a three-quarter-length green coat and sneakers. A baseball cap believed to be the killer’s was found in Dr. Faughey’s office, the police said.

After the attack, Dr. Shinbach yelled for help from Dr. Faughey’s office window. The building’s doorman had left just left on a break and heard his cries.

Later, the doorman, Frank Batista, said he was almost certain he could identify the attacker — “99.9 percent.”

Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Dmitry Kiper, Robin Stein, Stacey Stowe, Andrew Tangel and Carolyn Wilder.

    Vicious Killing Where Troubled Seek a Listener, NYT, 14.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/nyregion/14slay.html?hp

Working in Mental Health, the Prospect of Violence Is a Part of the Job

February 14, 2008
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

Therapists — psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychiatric social workers and other mental health professionals — are as much part of the New York landscape as hot dog vendors. And they have discovered, sometimes the hard way, that delving deeply into people’s feelings can be dangerous.

As police detectives searched on Wednesday for a man who killed a psychologist with a meat cleaver and other knives — and seriously injured another therapist, who heard their struggle from his nearby office and went to help — therapists said they had learned to develop their own physical and psychological defenses against violence.

But they conceded that a shrewd and determined attacker who appears normal could fool them.

“You do this work long enough, and you pretty much see everything, even in Manhattan,” said Dr. Robert H. Reiner, the executive director of Behavioral Associates, a private outpatient psychotherapy institute on the Upper East Side.

The identity of the attacker in Tuesday’s killing was not known, and the police said it was not clear if he was a patient or a patient’s relative, or if he had some other connection to the victims.

Still, therapists said they recognized the inherent risk in treating some types of patients. Dr. Reiner said most of the patients he saw, in six to eight “intake interviews” a day, had anxiety disorders that carried a low risk of violence. But every so often, he realizes that a patient has a severe psychosis.

“Often as not, it’s someone who’s walking around like you and me, and the psychosis is well disguised, and I realize they could be dangerous,” Dr. Reiner said. “And I look at the window and I think, ‘How quick can I get out?’ Every psychotherapist in an urban area knows this feeling.”

Just how much violence is directed at therapists is an open question. Of a dozen therapists in private practice in New York City who were interviewed on Wednesday, only one said he had ever seen violence in his office, and he was not the target: A father and son came to blows, he said.

But when Christina E. Newhill, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, surveyed 1,129 therapeutic workers nationwide in 2003, 58 percent said they had had to deal with violence, though only 24 percent of those said they had actually been attacked. Twenty-five percent of those who had to deal with violence said clients had damaged or destroyed property, while half said the episodes did not go beyond threats.

Gary Arthur, a professor emeritus at Georgia State University, surveyed all 6,400 licensed therapists in Georgia in 2001. Of the 1,132 who responded, 14 had been shot at, 6 attacked with a knife, 209 pushed or shoved, 112 slapped and 87 hit by objects thrown at them. None of the therapists who said they had been shot at were struck by the bullets, he said.

“The results were scary,” he said in an interview. “Our profession remains very high on the list for risk of danger.”

Twice in his years as a psychologist, Dr. Alan Hilfer, now the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, has had to deal with violent patients: once when a father and son got into a knock-down-drag-out brawl in his consultation room, and once when a teenager threw a paperweight at the therapist in the next office.

Dr. Hilfer said therapists were not taught precautions — like where to position oneself during a consultation — during training.

He recalled being asked, early in his career, to interview a man seeking treatment. “I allowed him to come between me and the door” in the consultation room, Dr. Hilfer said. “He became agitated and threatening, and I couldn’t get out of the room.”

In some group practices or in hospitals, he said, therapists leave the door open during a first encounter with a patient. They also alert a colleague, who listens for sounds of a disturbance.

Dr. Newhill teaches a class that tells prospective therapists how to do risk assessments and handle patients who turn violent. In a telephone interview, she said she started the class because of a murder in California in 1989. A therapist at a mental health clinic in Santa Monica was stabbed 31 times in her office by a patient, a street person who Dr. Newhill said was delusional.

“Violence is an interaction between the person and their environment,” she said, adding that the best predictor of future violence is a recent history of violence. She tells her students to work out, in advance, a plan that includes a way to signal for help. Some therapists install silent alarms. Others work out a phrase that lets a colleague know help is needed: “Please cancel my appointment for 3 o’clock” could mean “Call 911,” for example.

Dr. Reiner, of Behavioral Associates, said patients who turn violent had often “scoped things out in advance.” He said they would figure out whether a therapist worked alone or in an office with secretaries, other therapists or even video surveillance cameras.

But therapists who work by themselves, as many do in Manhattan, cannot turn to a colleague or a subordinate for assistance when a session degenerates.

“There is no warning system” for solo practitioners, Dr. Hilfer said. “We can try to use our clinical awareness and our knowledge of the patient, and if we are concerned about a patient, we will send them for a consult with someone. But in terms of protection, there’s none. It underscores the vulnerability that many of us understand.”

John Eligon and Anthony Ramirez contributed reporting.

    Working in Mental Health, the Prospect of Violence Is a Part of the Job, NYT, 14.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/nyregion/14pysch.html?ref=nyregion

Man Sought in Psychologist’s Stabbing

February 13, 2008
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

Armed with a suitcase full of knives, an unidentified middle-aged man unleashed a rampage of violence inside the offices of an Upper East Side psychiatry practice on Tuesday night, fatally stabbing and slashing a well-known psychologist before wounding her colleague when he tried to come to her aid, officials said on Wednesday.

The assailant had not been identified as of Wednesday afternoon, the police said, though investigators were pursuing a theory that he was either a patient at the suite of offices, at 440 East 79th Street, or that he had some kind of ties to the establishment or the services it provided.

Originally, the assailant had arrived at the offices, about five seconds after 8 p.m. on Tuesday, asking to visit Dr. Kent T. Shinbach, 70, a psychiatrist there, the police said.

But at some point he disappeared inside the office of another counselor there, Kathryn Faughey, 56, the police said.

There, he unleashed a barrage of violence, fatally stabbing Dr. Faughey. At some point, when Dr. Shinbach heard the attack and went to the office of his colleague, the assailant turned on him and Dr. Shinbach was seriously injured, officials said.

The scene was marked by blood and upended furniture, the police and neighbors said.

“We could see in the office where the blinds had been ripped off and were hanging at a strange angle and the entire office was in disarray,” said Alexandra Pike, 20, a student who could see into the office where the attack occurred from the window of her apartment across the street. “Papers were strewn around and there was overturned furniture. And it was clear there was some kind of scuffle.”

It is unclear what the man’s motive was, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly released a sketch of the suspect after a news conference at 1 Police Plaza on Wednesday, saying detectives were seeking him. The sketch was based on descriptions provided to detectives of those who saw the man in the moments before the attack — including the surviving victim — but who could not identify him by name.

“Obviously there is a forensic evidence aspect to this case,” Mr. Kelly said. “We’re getting information from the doctor and other medical professionals in the suite to determine if they have any information to add as the investigation goes forward.”

He added: “We’re fully engaged on several fronts.”

Mr. Kelly described the assailant as a man in his 40’s, about 5 feet 9 inches, with brownish or blond hair. He was wearing a three-quarter length green coat, with sneakers and a baseball cap, said Mr. Kelly, as he held up the sketch before a bank of television cameras.

The first sign of the man’s entrance at the building was captured on videotape —as he walked in the front door about five seconds after 8 p.m., passed by a doorman and went into the counselors’ suite of offices, the police said. He was inside for about an hour: A videotape showed him leaving through a basement door about 8:54 p.m., the police said, and it showed a view of him from his back.

Blood was found on the door — a panic door that locks on its own when it shuts — indicating the assailant might have been wounded.

Before he fled, the assailant left two suitcases in the basement. Inside one was assorted women’s clothing — some shoes, a top, as well as diapers for adults. He other had about eight knives, the police said. Upstairs in the room of Ms. Faughey, investigators found three other weapons, including two knives and a cleaver with a broken handle, the police said.

A female patient was in the lobby of the counselors’ suite when the assailant showed up, the police said. She apparently left before the attack on Dr. Faughey became known, but detectives tracked her down and interviewed her, the police said. Dr. Shinbach was also interviewed after undergoing surgery at New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

    Man Sought in Psychologist’s Stabbing, NYT, 13.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/nyregion/13doc.html

Mob Figure Is Arrested

in Officer’s 1976 Killing

February 8, 2008
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

For more than three decades, the shooting death of Albert Gelb remained a mystery. On March 11, 1976, Mr. Gelb — at that time, the city’s most-decorated uniformed court officer — was found behind the wheel of his car with four bullets shot into his chest and face. It was 1:35 in the morning, and the car was parked only a few hundreds yards from his house.

He had just come off the late shift — 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. — at night court in Brooklyn. Witnesses described a gunman in a white Chevy Nova lying in wait for him. His union offered a $5,000 reward for information. The 15th Homicide Squad, the local squad in Queens, put its number in the newspaper, urging anyone who knew something to call.

So passed months, then years, with leads pursued then dropped, yet with dark whispers persisting among those who knew the man: Before he was killed, they said, Mr. Gelb had scuffled with, and then arrested, a well-known gangster at a diner in Queens.

He was scheduled to testify at the gangster’s trial. It was four days before he was to take the stand that his body turned up in the car, mid-block on 109th Street in Ozone Park, Queens.

Then on Thursday morning, nearly 32 years later, the unsealing of a federal indictment turned those distant whispers into formal charges. Charles Carneglia, 61, a reputed soldier in the Gambino crime family, was accused of murdering

Mr. Gelb in a wide-ranging racketeering case in which 61 others were also charged. It was Mr. Carneglia, the indictment said, whom Mr. Gelb had arrested on a gun charge all those years ago.

The news of the charges rippled through a small, yet tightknit universe of family and court personnel, some of whom have always suspected the mob.

“From the very beginning we accused the Carneglia crew,” said Dennis Quirk, president of the New York State Court Officers Association, who spoke with Mr. Gelb at 8 p.m. on the night before his death. “The day after it happened, at the station house in Queens, we accused them right there.”

According to Mr. Quirk, Mr. Gelb was off duty and eating at the diner when Mr. Carneglia and some associates began to hassle a waitress. He intervened and ended up arresting Mr. Carneglia when he saw that he was carrying a pistol.

Mr. Gelb soon began getting death threats not to testify at Mr. Carneglia’s trial, Mr. Quirk said. When Mr. Quirk spoke to Mr. Gelb the night before his death, Mr. Gelb “said that he had gotten more death threats, and they were not going to intimidate him,” Mr. Quirk said.

Mr. Gelb was only 25 on the night that he was shot, and the court officers’ union soon established an annual award for public service in his honor.

The award has been given to the likes of Mayor Edward I. Koch, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Cardinal John O’Connor and Vice President Al Gore. A bronze plaque also hangs in memory of Mr. Gelb at the Brooklyn criminal courthouse at Schermerhorn Street.

In one of those strange closed loops that seem to permeate the New York law enforcement world, one of the last men to have seen Mr. Gelb alive was Richard A. Brown, at the time a fledgling criminal court judge in Brooklyn and now the Queens district attorney whose office is involved in the current case.

Mr. Gelb was Mr. Brown’s “bridge man,” the court officer who serves as a bridge between the bench and the lawyers, calling cases into the record and handing up files. On the night he died, Mr. Gelb escorted Mr. Brown to his car outside the courthouse, as he often did.

“And that was the last I saw of him, that night he was shot and killed,” Mr. Brown said in an interview Thursday. “The case has special meaning to me. I guess what I’d tell you is that what comes around goes around.”

Mr. Gelb’s sister, Emily Gelb, who is his only surviving immediate relative besides his mother, moved away from New York a year before his death. Ms. Gelb, the vice president of a large retail chain, was informed of the charges in her brother’s murder by a reporter calling for comment. She was speechless at first, then said she needed a moment and hung up.

Twenty minutes later, when she called back, she said the whole thing was utterly surreal.

“I’m shocked, obviously, after 32 years, but I’m very pleased that the wheels of justice are turning. The pain is still there,” she went on, her voice beginning to quake. “He was my only brother. It gets better, but it doesn’t go away.”

    Mob Figure Is Arrested in Officer’s 1976 Killing, NYT, 8.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/nyregion/08slain.html

Quarter of U.S. women

suffer domestic violence: CDC

Thu Feb 7, 2008
3:08pm EST
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About a quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday, with ongoing health problems that one activist likened to the effects of living in a war zone.

Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.

The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.

The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.

Many of these women have other long-term health risks and problems, the CDC said.

"It confirms ... that living in a dangerous and stressful environment has long-term health impacts. It's like living in a war zone," said Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an advocacy group.

More than 70,000 people in 16 U.S. states and two territories -- Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands -- responded to the CDC survey in 2005.

Black women were more likely to report domestic violence than whites or Hispanics, but it was most frequent among multiracial, American Indian and Alaska native women.

Women of all income and education levels suffer such abuse, although it was more frequent among the poorest and those who attended but did not graduate from college.

"Perhaps one of the factors at play here is the high prevalence of sexual violence on college campuses, and dating violence," Michele Black, a CDC epidemiologist who helped write the agency's report, said in a telephone interview.

Black said she could not say whether domestic violence rates were rising. The results were comparable with those of a 1995 government survey that found that 24.8 percent of women and 7.6 percent of men reported suffering domestic violence.

The CDC said women who suffer domestic violence are three times as likely to engage in risky sex and 70 percent more likely to drink heavily than other women.

They are also twice as likely to report that their activities are limited by physical, mental or emotional problems and 50 percent more likely to use a cane, wheelchair or other disability equipment, the CDC survey found.

These women also were 80 percent more likely to have a stroke, 70 percent more likely to have heart disease or arthritis and 60 percent more likely to have asthma.

Kiersten Stewart, director of public policy for the Family Violence Prevention Fund advocacy group, said the CDC figures broadly fit other assessments that about a quarter to a third of U.S. women experience domestic violence.

Stewart endorsed the CDC's call for doctors to ask women about possible domestic violence if they are showing signs of stress or other symptoms indicating possible violence.
 

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Alan Elsner)

    Quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence: CDC, R, 7.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0737896320080207

Sex Offender Accused of Raping Boy, 6,

in Public Library

February 2, 2008
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON — A convicted sex offender was arrested this week and charged with raping a 6-year-old boy in the New Bedford public library, feet away from his mother, who was working on a computer.

The suspect, Corey Saunders, 26, had pleaded guilty to attempted rape of a child in 2001, but was released from prison in 2006 over the strong objections of prosecutors and psychiatrists.

The police said Mr. Saunders lured the boy into the library’s book shelves on Wednesday. “He sees the little boy and asks him if he can show him something,” said Lt. Jeffrey Silva of the New Bedford Police Department. “The little boy thought he was going to show him a book in there.”

Lieutenant Silva said a librarian noticed Mr. Saunders speaking to the boy after the alleged rape. The librarian remembered Mr. Saunders’s name from a previous encounter, he said, and looked him up on the state’s sexual offender registry. When Mr. Saunders’s name came up, the librarian approached the boy’s mother and called the police.

Mr. Saunders fled the library and was later arrested smoking a cigarette outside a homeless shelter, Lieutenant Silva said.

Mr. Saunders’s lawyer, Lee Fortier, could not be reached for comment.

Judge Richard Moses of Superior Court had ruled in December 2006 that prosecutors did not prove in a civil commitment hearing that Mr. Saunders was a sexually dangerous person and that he should be held in a treatment program after his sentence was completed. Instead, Mr. Saunders received probation and was required to register as a Class 3, or high risk, sex offender.

Paul F. Walsh, the former Bristol County district attorney who handled Mr. Saunders’s case, strongly objected to his release, as did psychiatrists who testified at the hearing. In an interview, Mr. Walsh said he and others had feared that Mr. Saunders would commit another crime.

“I was D.A. for 16 years,” Mr. Walsh said, “and I put him in the top 10 most dangerous offenders. Everybody knew this guy was just another incident waiting to happen.”

In his ruling, Judge Moses wrote that Mr. Saunders was “far from emotionally mature” at the time of his offense, and that his difficult childhood and low I.Q. were mitigating factors in the decision.

Court records show that Mr. Saunders’s mother left him when he was 9. At 14 he was found wandering the streets clutching a teddy bear and was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a month.

A court spokeswoman said Judge Moses could not comment because the case was on appeal.

    Sex Offender Accused of Raping Boy, 6, in Public Library, NYT, 2.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/02/us/02rape.html