History > 2014 > USA > Violence (I)

Lt. Ken Landwehr.

Mike Hutmacher/The Wichita Eagle,

via Associated Press

Ken Landwehr,

Who Played Key Role in Capture of Serial Killer, Dies at 59

NYT

15.1.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/
    ken-landwehr-who-played-key-role-in-capture-of-serial-killer-dies-at-59.html

Woman Is Beheaded

in Attack at Oklahoma Food Plant

SEPT. 26, 2014

The New York Times

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

A man beheaded a co-worker at a food processing company in Oklahoma on Thursday afternoon, and stabbed another employee before he was shot and wounded by a company executive, the police said Friday.

The suspect, identified as Alton Nolen, who has a criminal history, had just been fired from the company, Vaughan Foods, and “he recently started trying to convert some of his co-workers to the Muslim religion,” said Jeremy Lewis, a spokesman for the police department in Moore, Okla. It was not immediately clear if that proselytizing was a reason for his termination.

After being fired, “he drove to the front of the business, running into a vehicle, exited his vehicle, entered the business, where he encountered the first victim, Colleen Hufford, and began assaulting her with a knife,” Mr. Lewis said. “He did kill Colleen and did sever her head.”

After killing Ms. Hufford, 54, he attacked Traci Johnson, 43, with the same knife, the police said.

“Mark Vaughan, who is the chief operating officer of Vaughan Foods and is also an Oklahoma County reserve deputy, confronted Nolen, and at that time shot him and stopped the threat and the assault,” Mr. Lewis said.

Mr. Nolen, 30, was convicted in 2011 of multiple drug charges, assault and battery on a police officer, and escape from detention, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. He had earlier arrests on drug and assault charges.

Mr. Nolen was taken to Oklahoma University Medical Center and is expected to survive. He has not been charged. He and Ms. Johnson were both listed in stable condition.

The Moore police called in the F.B.I. to assist in the investigation. After the United States began its bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria on Monday, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security put out an alert to local law enforcement officials across the country to be on the watch for so-called lone wolves who might respond violently.

A law enforcement official said the F.B.I. had not found any connection between Mr. Nolen and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, or other groups. “It’s not a typical workplace response, and given the current environment it is very alarming and is something we are closely looking into,” one of the officials said. “So far, there is no nexus to terrorism we are aware of.”

Law enforcement officials said Mr. Nolen recently converted to Islam. On a Facebook page that appears to be his, references to Islam began in April 2013, and he called himself Jah’Keem Yisrael. The page is filled with criticism of American culture, and dire warnings for those who do not follow that religion.

“This is the last days,” he wrote in his most recent post, on Tuesday. In another, in July, he wrote: “AMERICA AND ISRAEL ARE WICKED. WAKE UP MUSLIMS!!!”

Mr. Nolen grew up in Idabel, Okla., and in elementary school he often had extended absences, bouncing from family member to family member, a former friend, Ryan Impson, recalled. At Idabel High School, where the main pursuits were fishing and playing sports for the Idabel Warriors, he said, Mr. Nolen seemed like a normal teenager who played defense on the football team and was a shot-putter on the track team.

“He wasn’t into getting into trouble,” said Mr. Impson, an engineer who said he lost track of Mr. Nolen years ago. “He just did his work. We always joked around. He wasn’t an outcast, he didn’t cause problems, he wasn’t a troublemaker or anything like that.”

The police learned of the attack while it was still underway, at 4:05 p.m. on Thursday, from a 911 call from inside the plant. “We have someone attacking someone in the building,” a man, remaining remarkably clear and calm, told the 911 operator, a recording of the call showed. “They’re in the front office of the building. We can hear a lot of screaming.” Between telling someone else to close and lock a door, the man said: “We know that he’s loose. He has stabbed someone.” Then gunshots can be heard in the background.

Mr. Lewis, the police spokesman, said Mr. Vaughan “is obviously a hero in this situation” and saved Ms. Johnson’s life. “This guy definitely was not going to stop,” Mr. Lewis said. “He didn’t stop until he was shot. He was still assaulting Traci whenever he was shot.”

It appeared that Mr. Nolen had no relationship with either victim, he said.

“It did appear random,” Mr. Lewis said. “He wasn’t targeting anyone, wasn’t going specifically after them. It appears they were just in his way as he came in.”
 

Richard Pérez-Peña reported from New York, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington. Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Denver. Susan C. Beachy and Elisa Cho contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Woman Is Beheaded in Attack at Oklahoma Food Plant.

    Woman Is Beheaded in Attack at Oklahoma Food Plant,
    NYT, 26.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/us/
    oklahoma-man-is-said-to-behead-co-worker.html

Homicide Charges Likely

in Baruch College Fraternity Retreat Case

JULY 4, 2014

The New York Times

By ARIEL KAMINER

Pennsylvania authorities expect to bring charges against most of the 30 or so Baruch College students who were on a rural fraternity retreat in December when a freshman died after a pledging ritual, a police official said this week.

Chief Harry W. Lewis of the Pocono Mountain Regional Police Department, who oversaw the investigation, said the charges would probably include homicide, which Pennsylvania law defines as anything from involuntary manslaughter, a first-degree misdemeanor that could result in less than a year of jail, to premeditated murder. He said the students could also be charged with hazing, a misdemeanor.

Charges had been expected to be filed by May, but Chief Lewis said prosecutors were still awaiting a medical report and a digital animation that would depict the events surrounding the death of the freshman, Chun Hsien Deng. Local authorities have said that Mr. Deng, 19, died on Dec. 9 after a ritual in which fraternity pledges were strapped into weighted backpacks and blindfolded, then made to find their way across a frozen lawn while others tried to tackle them.

The students were from Pi Delta Psi at Baruch, in Manhattan, and had rented a home in Tunkhannock Township, Pa.

A coroner found that Mr. Deng, who went by the name Michael, had suffered “blunt force head trauma.” When fraternity members noticed that he was unresponsive, they carried him inside, changed his clothes and conducted Internet searches on head injuries, the authorities said, and waited an hour or more before driving him to a hospital, where he was placed on life support.

Several students left the house after Mr. Deng was taken to the hospital, Chief Lewis said, and some tried to hide their cellphones from police officers. But he said that “every video, photo, content, conversation” was successfully retrieved from their phones, including “rituals, pictures” and panicked communications about concealing evidence.

In addition, Chief Lewis said, prosecutors intend to present the computer animation. “We want to put it all together,” he said. “Because of the backpack, because of being pushed and how he hit his head, all those things being combined, we want to be able to show exactly how it happened, instead of just explaining how it happened.”

The district attorney’s office declined to comment on details of the case.

Computer animation is an increasingly popular tool among litigators. When George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin in a Florida subdivision, the defense commissioned an animation to dramatize the events of their fatal encounter. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted.

An article in a 2004 publication of the American Bar Association says computer animation is “the most sophisticated demonstrative evidence presentation system available to litigators today,” but the article notes that “courts also recognize a computer animation’s dramatic effect and inherent potential to mislead or confuse the jury.”

In Pennsylvania, the rules governing its use were set forth in a 2006 case, Commonwealth v. Serge, said Colin Miller, a University of South Carolina law professor who runs the EvidenceProf blog. That case, involving the appeal of a life sentence for murder, established three criteria that animation must meet to be admitted as evidence.

The first, Professor Miller said: “Is it a fair and accurate representation of the evidence that it purports to portray?” The second is whether the animation addresses and clarifies issues relevant to the trial. The third is whether its value outweighs its potential to prejudice jurors.

“Usually in these cases,” he explained, “the animation is admitted but some type of limiting instruction is given” — a warning by the judge that the animation is nothing more than a tool to illustrate some testimony or other form of evidence.

“The big concern is that jurors will see this animation and it’s going to overwhelm anything someone might say on the witness stand,” Professor Miller said.

Thomas M. Goutman, a partner at the Philadelphia firm White and Williams who has written about the use of computer animation, said it could be a particularly effective way to simplify complex expert testimony. But he added, “It can backfire unless it’s extremely scrupulous.”

Mr. Goutman cautioned that if the opposing counsel could point to any factual errors, even small ones, “the jury may feel as though they’re trying to pull something over on them.”

Mr. Deng, a Queens native who graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was a member of the bowling and handball teams, lived in a Baruch residence hall and studied finance. A lawyer for his family, Douglas E. Fierberg, said they had not gotten much information from Pennsylvania authorities. Having previously announced that they would pursue a lawsuit, Mr. Fierberg added that the family would “wait to see what form of justice they’re able to obtain through the criminal process” before deciding how and against whom the suit might proceed.

Hazing has been a growing concern on college campuses, but Baruch, a college to which most students commute from their homes in Brooklyn or Queens, has no strong fraternity presence. Pi Delta Psi, which describes itself as an “Asian American cultural fraternity,” did not have a house of its own and held meetings in a small shared office.

At Baruch, which is a part of the City University of New York, the disciplinary process “is still underway,” said Christina Latouf, the college’s spokeswoman. Some students, on the advice of their lawyers, have declined to speak with college officials “until potential criminal charges are clarified,” she said, and are suspended in the meantime.

The Baruch chapter of the Pi Delta Psi fraternity was disbanded after Mr. Deng’s death. Pi Delta Psi’s national organization says the Pennsylvania retreat was not sanctioned and violated the fraternity’s rules.

Andrew Kayserian, who is the current national president, said the organization was waiting until the prosecution is resolved before taking steps against the Baruch members. “But most likely they are going to be former members,” he said.
 

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2014, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Homicide Charges Likely in Baruch Pledge’s Death.

    Homicide Charges Likely in Baruch College Fraternity Retreat Case,
    NYT, 4.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/nyregion/
    homicide-charges-likely-in-baruch-college-fraternity-retreat-case.html

First Victim in a Cluster of Stabbings

JUNE 3, 2014
The New York Times
By VIVIAN YEE

Whether she was practicing her drumming, riding her bike around her neighborhood in Brooklyn or going to the movies, Tanaya Copeland was often accompanied by friends in purple, fellow members of a community marching band who had known her, in some cases, since middle school.

The killer struck at virtually the only time she was alone on Friday walking down a desolate stretch of Stanley Avenue in East New York, a shortcut she had taken many times.

“That’s what hurts the kids the most — they’re always together,” said Osei Smith, the director of the marching band, the Royal Knights, whose members wear purple. “That’s just the one time one of us was alone.”

The police said Ms. Copeland, 18, might have been stabbed by the same man who killed a 6-year-old boy and left a 7-year-old girl in critical condition in the elevator of a public-housing project on Sunday evening, just a few blocks from where a taxi driver found Ms. Copeland, bleeding and unconscious. The stabbings have shaken residents and brought dozens of police officers streaming into the area. Yet Ms. Copeland’s killing attracted little attention — at least compared with the response to the attack on the children, Prince Joshua Avitto, known as P.J., and Mikayla Capers — until the police said the deaths might be linked.

A grainy image from a security camera near where Ms. Copeland was attacked, appears to show a man with a heavy build running away from the site that night; he resembles the suspect described in the attack on Sunday and is wearing similar clothing. In both stabbings, the police recovered kitchen knives of the same make and brand.

“They stabbed an 18-year-old girl over 30 times, a 7-year-old girl more than 15 times,” Ms. Copeland’s mother, Rochelle Copeland, said at a candlelight vigil on Monday evening, pointing to the television cameras. “We need help. You help us.”

On Tuesday afternoon, P.J.’s paternal grandmother, Anita Edgerton, sat on a bench beside the boy’s makeshift memorial and wept.

“I just want him to come in,” she said, referring to the killer. “Please don’t hurt any more children, please.”

Ms. Copeland’s death came just a few hours after her band, the Royal Knights, ended a practice. Bandmates dropped her off at home in the Louis H. Pink Houses and offered to pick her up again on their way to another get-together at a band member’s house, but she told them not to worry.

She posted on Facebook that she was on her way, attracting a few playful comments from the friends who were waiting for her. Then she stopped responding.

She normally rode her bike, said Tony Herbert, a spokesman for her family, but had left it at a friend’s house.

“Everybody loved her to death. She was a pleasure to be around,” Mr. Herbert said. “And everything she did was around her bandmates. They were always doing stuff together. They didn’t have time to get in trouble.”

Ms. Copeland was a freshman at Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she was studying nursing. To help pay for college expenses, she had applied for a summer job working with local youth. She often came back to East New York enthusiastically repeating the conversations she had with college acquaintances and describing her goal of managing the basketball team.

But it was the Royal Knights that consumed her days and fueled her passions. Assigned to the drums when she joined the band in middle school, she made it her goal to advance from the beginners’ drum section, the tenors, to the most advanced section, the “quints,” who must play five drums at once.

“The moment she picked up a pair of sticks, she fell in love with it,” Mr. Smith, the band leader, said.

Within a year, she had moved up to the intermediate section, the bass. Not long after, she was promoted to quint. Given a particularly tricky part for one performance, she showed such determination to master it that Mr. Smith rewarded her with a set of practice drums, which she carried around everywhere.

The Royal Knights came from many backgrounds, but life was easy for none. A few had lost their parents; many came from financially struggling families. They were, in many ways, one another’s family, Mr. Smith said.

And in that family, Ms. Copeland was a respected elder. At practice, her sarcastic jokes and ribbing of the others loosened up the atmosphere, Mr. Smith said, teaching younger members to value themselves enough to withstand gentle teasing. As a senior member of the group, she took seriously her responsibility of scheduling rehearsals, mentoring younger bandmates and keeping them in line. “You’re proud of us, right?” she asked Mr. Smith in their last conversation.

She knew how to take a joke and how to lob it back. When she was younger, classmates had teased her about her boyish appearance; as she settled in with the band, she came out as gay and freely joked around about her identity.

Though she continued dressing like a boy and her male friends accepted her as a “brother,” she good-humoredly contradicted anyone who tried to pin her down. Once, when there was an uneven number of boys and girls on a band trip to Virginia, she readily volunteered to stay in the boys’ hotel rooms. Yet, asked if she wanted to join an all-female dance line for one performance, Mr. Smith said, she replied, “I’ve still got girl parts, and I can be in the dance line if I want to.”Mr. Smith described her attitude as one of “ ‘I don’t care what you call me. I’m still who I am.’ ”

Reporting was contributed by J. David Goodman,

Marc Santora and Nate Schweber.

A version of this article appears in print on June 4, 2014,

on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline:

First Victim in a Cluster of Stabbings.

    First Victim in a Cluster of Stabbings, NYT, 3.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/nyregion/
    brooklyn-stabbing-investigation-boulevard-houses.html

Boy, 6, Dies After a Stabbing in Brooklyn

 

JUNE 1, 2014
The New York Times
By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

Mikayla Capers and her best friend, Prince Joshua Avitto, wanted to get Icees. The two hopped in an elevator on Sunday at the Brooklyn housing project where they lived. A man got on after them, pulled out a knife and stabbed the children, the police said, in an attack that left residents stunned.

Deputy Chief Patrick Conry said the two children — the 6-year-old-boy and the 7-year-old girl — were stabbed shortly before 6 p.m. at the Boulevard Houses on Schenck Avenue in East New York. Police officials said they did not believe the children were related to each other or to the assailant, a man who Chief Conry said fled on foot and who was described as heavyset and in his 20s.

The boy was pronounced dead at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where the girl had been in critical condition before she was transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

No arrest had been made on Sunday, and the police recovered a knife at the scene.

Sophia Diaz lived near the boy, who was known in the neighborhood as P.J. She was inside her apartment when she heard someone call her, saying that Mikayla had been stabbed. She rushed outside and saw the girl bloodied, then heard screams about P.J. also being stabbed.

“ ‘Did P.J. die?,’ ” she said the girl asked Ms. Diaz’s sister in the ambulance. “‘Why did this man hurt me?’” Ms. Diaz’s sister said Mikayla was stabbed in the chest and had cuts on her hand.

Chief Conry spoke briefly at a news conference at the scene that Police Commissioner William J. Bratton attended. People gathered at the scene were embracing each other, crying and shaking their heads.

“That mother lost a child, but we all lost a child,” said Clara Woods, the vice president of the Boulevard Houses Tenant Association. “This is a happy little boy. This is a pleasant little girl. They were going to get an Icee on a nice warm day,” she said in disbelief. “When something happens to one, it happens to us all.”

Lemar King described Mikayla as a niece. She lives with her aunt, who was in their apartment at the time, Mr. King said.

“She loves to draw and she’s a chatterbox — talking, talking, talking, talking,” he said.

The children had been best friends since they were toddlers and had grown up together in the Boulevard Houses, he said. The girl was visiting P.J.

Kevin Velez, a neighbor, described seeing the boy’s mother run after his ambulance and bang on the door, begging to be allowed to ride with him. The medics would not let her in, he said.

Ms. Diaz drove the boy’s mother to the hospital. After the mother was told that P.J. had died, she asked to see his body. When she saw that the boy had stab wounds in his neck, she began hugging him. “ ‘He was just a baby. He was just a baby,’ ” she cried, according to Ms. Diaz.

“To see them come out and tell her he didn’t make it — ” Ms. Diaz started sobbing. “His birthday is June 17. He didn’t even make it to seven years old. How could a grown man who was as big as they say he is find it in his heart to do that them? When P.J. is only 40, 50 pounds?”

Mr. Velez’s daughter, Ciaralyn, said the children were her playmates. The girl likes to jump rope; the boy liked pretending he was a superhero. “I feel really heartbroken right now, because they were my friends,” she said.

J. David Goodman, John Surico and Vivian Yee

contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2014,

on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:

Boy, 6, Dies After a Stabbing in Brooklyn.

    Boy, 6, Dies After a Stabbing in Brooklyn, NYT, 1.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/nyregion/
    boy-6-dies-after-a-stabbing-in-brooklyn.html
 

Family Mourns at Site of a Fatal Beating

MAY 12, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIE TURKEWITZ
and JEFFREY E. SINGER

Wen Hui Ruan, 68, was just a block from his East Village home on Friday night when a man stopped him on East Sixth Street and hurled him against a wall. When Mr. Ruan fell to the ground, the man punched him and began stomping on his head.

A witness called 911 to report the attack, but it was several minutes before anyone came to the aid of Mr. Ruan, a retired garment factory worker who came to United States from China two decades ago to seek a better future for his three daughters.

Security video of the attack, posted online by an East Village blog, showed several passers-by continuing past Mr. Ruan’s crumpled form, before a woman knelt down beside him. A law enforcement official said the video of the episode, posted to YouTube by the blog EV Grieve, “appears to be the same” video as the one that investigators have in their possession.

A police spokesman said on Monday that a 911 caller reported the attack at 8:41 p.m. on Friday and that the police arrived at the scene at 8:45 p.m. Mr. Ruan was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where on Saturday he died of injuries from the attack, the police said.

Based on what a witness has told investigators, the police believe that the man who beat Mr. Ruan had been trying to rob him. The police spokesman said that investigators had identified a suspect and were looking for him. The police have not publicly released the suspect’s name.

Around 4 p.m. Monday, Mr. Ruan’s three daughters, joined by a large extended family, proceeded down East Sixth Street and stopped at the site of the attack, a residential building with a maroon facade and an ornate wrought-iron balcony.

Several women began to sob uncontrollably, and family members lined the maroon wall with a hasty memorial — five bouquets of white flowers, six tall white candles and incense.

Jenny Ruan, 39, the second-oldest daughter, dropped to her knees and wailed in Chinese: “So many people passed. They didn’t help, they didn’t call the police. Why wasn’t I here when you needed me?”

The gathering lasted 10 minutes or so. A fellow mourner held Ms. Ruan’s face in her hands, and she stood. The group left the site, traveled down Sixth Street, made a right on Avenue C and walked toward the apartment building where Mr. Ruan had lived with his family.

Mr. Ruan’s attacker, Ms. Ruan said, “didn’t just kill my father, he killed my family’s heart.”

As Mr. Ruan’s wife, Ling Tsang, her three daughters and other family members prepared to enter the Ruans’ apartment, Ms. Tsang, 63, was holding three sticks of incense, and family members were still crying.

“We took three back home to guide his spirit back to where he lives,” said Michelle Ruan, 36, Mr. Ruan’s youngest daughter, who had flown to New York from her home in Arizona after she learned of the attack.

Mr. Ruan emigrated from Taishan, China, in 1993 along with his wife and two youngest daughters. The eldest came later. In Taishan, Mr. Ruan had worked as an accountant at a meat products company.

“They had a good life in China, but they came here just for me and my sisters,” Michelle Ruan said.

Mr. Ruan, who retired four years ago, spent much of his free time playing Chinese chess at a park on Mulberry Street. At home he would play Sudoku and listen to Chinese opera while his wife prepared meals.

Jenny Ruan said that even after he retired he would cover shifts for his friends at the factory when they needed, and would always refuse payment.

Every weekday he would pick up his two granddaughters from school, take them to his apartment, where they had dinner, then walk them home to their parents afterward.

On Friday, in the hours before the attack, Mr. Ruan had taken his two grandchildren to play on the slides and swings at a nearby playground. After dinner, Michelle Ruan said, the grandchildren pleaded to stay a little later to spend more time with their grandfather and grandmother, whom they called Gong Gong and Po Po.

Mr. Ruan had already dropped off his granddaughters at home after dinner and should have been home around 9 p.m. His wife, Ms. Tsang, sensing something was wrong, called his cellphone, and a police officer answered instead. That’s when she learned that her husband had been taken to the emergency room.

The assault occurred on a tree-lined section of East Sixth Street, about 100 feet from Avenue D. The Jacob Riis Houses, a sprawling public housing complex, are visible from the scene, and sit just across Avenue D.

On Monday afternoon, the street bustled with life — a mother waited to pick up her child from school; three adolescent girls in hijabs walked together; a boy bounced his lunchbox against his leg as he skipped down the sidewalk.

Tompkins Square Middle School and the Lower Eastside Girls Club, an after-school center, are both short walks from the site of the assault. There is a basketball court across the street, and a small church sits next door.

Many signposts already displayed Crime Stoppers posters that described the fatal assault of Mr. Ruan and advertised a $2,000 reward for pertinent information.

Longtime residents said the neighborhood gets more dangerous at night. Will Pentecost, 28, said the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue D is a well-known hangout for drug dealers and their clients. Assaults are not uncommon, he said. “Families,” he said, “try to get their kids in by nightfall.”

Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2014,

on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline:

Family Mourns at Site of a Fatal Beating.

    Family Mourns at Site of a Fatal Beating, NYT, 12.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/nyregion/
    family-mourns-at-site-of-a-fatal-beating.html

White House to Press Colleges

to Do More to Combat Rape

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Reacting to a series of highly publicized rapes on college campuses, the White House on Monday released guidelines that increase the pressure on universities to more aggressively combat sexual assaults on campus.

The recommendations urge colleges, among other measures, to conduct anonymous surveys about sexual assault cases, adopt anti-assault policies that have been considered successful at other universities and to better ensure that the reports of such crimes remain confidential. The guidelines are contained in a report by a White House task force that President Obama formed early this year, and the administration is likely to ask Congress to pass measures that would enforce the recommendations and levy penalties for failing to do so. The government will also open a website, NotAlone.gov, to track enforcement and provide victims with information.

Many advocates for such a crackdown may see the proposals as an inadequate response to a crisis, but the White House is hamstrung about what it can do without congressional action and has just begun its own attack on the issue.

“Colleges and universities need to face the facts about sexual assault,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said. “No more turning a blind eye or pretending it doesn’t exist. We need to give victims the support they need, like a confidential place to go, and we need to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

The task force says that one in five college students has been assaulted, but that just 12 percent of such attacks are reported.

Mr. Obama appointed the panel after a number of recent cases — at Yale, at Dartmouth and at Florida State — focused attention on the problem and led to accusations that college and university officials are not doing enough to police sexual crimes committed by students. The resulting furor has led to calls that Washington, where Congress and the administration are already moving to crack down on sexual assault in the military, take similar action when it comes to colleges and universities.

“The American people have kind of woken up to the fact that we’ve got a serious problem when 20 percent of coeds say they’ve been sexually assaulted,” said Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California.

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said the recommendation for mandatory sexual assault surveys “has been consistently the No. 1 request of student survivors and advocates.”

“I am pleased that the task force has recommended this important step to increasing transparency and accountability, and look forward to growing our bipartisan coalition supporting this and other much-needed reforms,” she said.

The report emphasizes that universities need to do a better job to make sure that sexual assault reports remain confidential. Sometimes fears that reports will become public can discourage victims from coming forward.

The task force further found that many assault-prevention training efforts are not effective, and it recommends that universities and colleges institute programs like those used at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Kentucky, which train bystanders on how to intervene.

Lawmakers and the White House have previously condemned the assaults on campuses, but the federal government has largely left responses up to college officials and the local authorities. Congress last year passed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, which requires that domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking cases be disclosed in annual campus crime statistics. But victims’ advocates say that does not go far enough.

And a federal law from two decades ago that requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses, including sexual offenses, is rarely enforced, critics say.

There have been some high-profile instances in which the Department of Education has gotten involved in an effort to raise awareness by imposing fines at universities where the most egregious cases have been reported.

Last year, the agency fined Yale University $165,000 for failing to disclose four sexual offenses involving force over several years. Eastern Michigan University paid $350,000 in 2008 for failing to sound a campus alert after a student was sexually assaulted and killed. The department also reached a settlement last year with the University of Montana at Missoula after investigating the university’s sexual-misconduct policies and finding them woefully inadequate.

Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, universities that violate student rights in sexual assault cases also risk the loss of federal funding, but the punishment has never been applied.

In the recommended “climate surveys,” participants anonymously report their experiences with unwanted physical contact, sexual assault or rape, and how their schools responded. Some lawmakers would like to see such surveys be mandatory and to possibly make federal funds like Pell grants contingent on their being carried out.

Ms. Gillibrand and Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who both spent much of last year trying to legislatively police sexual assault in the armed forces, have now turned significant attention to such problems on the nation’s campuses.

“After a year of working hard to reform how the military handles sexual assault cases,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an email, “the stories I have heard from students are eerily similar.”

Ms. McCaskill said she planned to conduct her own survey of 350 colleges.

In all, nearly a dozen senators seeking new federal funding to battle campus sexual assaults.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

White House Sets A College Agenda On Sex Assaults.

    White House to Press Colleges to Do More to Combat Rape,
    NYT, 28.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/us/
    tougher-battle-on-sex-assault-on-campus-urged.html

One Mother, 7 Dead Newborns

and a Stunned Community in Utah

APRIL 26, 2014
The New York Times
By JACK HEALY
and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

PLEASANT GROVE, Utah — For Megan Huntsman, life was a miserable struggle. Her marriage decayed into substance abuse and violence, she told people close to her. Her ailing father’s suicide pitched her into despair and heavy drinking. Illness ravaged her family. She lost her job at a supermarket bakery and spent recent days alone at her boyfriend’s trailer home.

But all the while, the police say, Ms. Huntsman, 39, concealed a secret grimmer and darker than any hardship she had suffered: In the garage of her home, tucked away among old shoes and an artificial Christmas tree, were the bodies of seven infants. One was stillborn, she told the police, but she admitted to strangling or suffocating the other six just minutes after they were born from 1996 to 2006.

Like the cases of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, the tale of a profoundly troubled mother and her dead children here in central Utah has again cast a national glare on the most intimate and inexplicable kind of crime. It has left this stunned community agonizing over how a slight, shy woman had concealed so many pregnancies and births, and whether officials had missed a chance to intervene before the grim mausoleum was discovered on April 12 as others in the family cleaned out the garage.

Federal drug enforcement officers did not find the bodies when they visited the home in 2005 to investigate Ms. Huntsman’s husband, Darren Brad West, on charges of mail-ordering methamphetamine ingredients. Court records show that Ms. Huntsman allowed investigators to “look through the residence” and that they had found drug evidence in the garbage. Pleasant Grove police officials said federal agents had not gotten a search warrant for the home.

Two weeks after Mr. West was indicted — he would plead guilty to federal drug charges and be sentenced to nine years in prison — Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services received an anonymous tip that Ms. Huntsman was using methamphetamine, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation into Ms. Huntsman was continuing.

It is unclear how the agency responded. Elizabeth Sollis, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Human Services, said federal and state laws prevented her from discussing whether Child and Family Services had received such information.

Relatives, neighbors and friends said they had never even realized Ms. Huntsman had been pregnant. In the early 1990s, when she gave birth to her two oldest daughters she concealed those pregnancies from her family until she was close to going into labor, according to the police. Over the years, people who knew Ms. Huntsman said, they simply chalked up the fluctuations in her 5-foot-4, 105-pound frame to weight gain.

“We are still in the dark about most of this stuff,” said her uncle, Larry Huntsman, speaking publicly for the first time. “We have no idea why she did this. How do you go through that many pregnancies without anyone knowing it?”

Even now, investigators say some details of what happened are shrouded in mystery, and may remain so. Medical examiners have completed preliminary physical examinations of the seven children and have sent DNA samples to the F.B.I. to confirm that Ms. Huntsman and Mr. West, her now-estranged husband, are the parents. But they say the amount of time passed and physical decay may make it impossible to know with certainty the order in which the babies were born, or precisely when they died.

So now, Ms. Huntsman sits on suicide watch in a Utah County jail, awaiting a court appearance on Monday, when she is expected to face six charges of murder. And friends and neighbors in this conservative community of 35,000 at the foot of the Wasatch Range keep trying to understand how they missed so much for so many years.

Codi Sorensen, a friend from high school, recalled bumping into her at a local Walmart during the period that the police say Ms. Huntsman was killing her infants. She had seemed like the same old Megan, just a little older, Ms. Sorensen recalled.

Pleasant Grove’s mayor, Mike Daniels, said in an interview: “It shocks the system to think that something this horrific can happen next door and that you are completely unaware of it and that it went on for so long. It is a rude awakening that strange things and heinous crimes can happen anywhere.”

Pleasant Grove is a town with one downtown tavern and more than a dozen churches, a place Mr. Daniels called “suburban America, if not smaller.”

Ms. Huntsman grew up here, the oldest child of an industrial painter and a mother who worked in a grocery store, among other jobs. She was raised in the Mormon Church, but had not been active recently, her uncle said.

The family is not directly related to Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, but appears to share at least one ancestor from 18th-century Pennsylvania, before the Huntsman clan decamped for the unsettled West.

In an interview and in Facebook messages, classmates from Pleasant Grove High School recalled sleepovers with Ms. Huntsman and hiking trips into a nearby canyon. Her yearbook from 1993, her senior year, shows a young woman with strawberry-blond bangs, smiling softly.

She married Mr. West, whom she had met in high school, soon after she turned 18, and settled down close to her family in a home owned by her in-laws. Mr. West worked in construction, neighbors said. Ms. Huntsman occasionally babysat and cleaned houses to earn extra money.

After their first two daughters, the couple had a third who was born during the time that Ms. Huntsman has admitted to killing the other babies.

Ms. Huntsman later described a violent turn in the marriage, according to her uncle, Mr. Huntsman, and her most recent boyfriend, Jimmy Brady, with whom she was living when she was arrested.

“She had black eyes and was embarrassed to tell anyone about it, to tell people what had happened,” Mr. Huntsman said. “It was pretty severe. She would not come around for long periods of time.”

The police said they had never received any complaints of domestic abuse from the home. Mr. West and members of his family either declined to be interviewed or did not return calls seeking comment. Richard Mauro, a lawyer who represented Mr. West in his federal drug case, said the allegations of spousal abuse were untrue.

Mr. West has not been charged with any crime related to the infants’ deaths. Neighbors described him as a caring father who had been hoping to rebuild his life after his recent release from prison. When the bodies were discovered, he had been cleaning the home in hopes of moving back in with their daughters, and denied knowing anything about the babies or his wife’s hidden pregnancies.

Michael Esplin, a lawyer, represented Mr. West in a 1991 case in which he pleaded guilty to raping a 13-year-old acquaintance when he was 18. More recently, Mr. Esplin said, Mr. West was addicted to methamphetamine, but was treated in prison. Mr. Esplin said Mr. West was “not a violent person.”

After Mr. West went to prison, his family asked Ms. Huntsman to leave the house. Her own family urged her to get a divorce, her uncle said, but — despite her apprehensions about Mr. West — she refused.

“She had no self-esteem,” Mr. Huntsman said.

Meanwhile, Ms. Huntsman’s own family struggled with illness and death. Her mother has fought cancer, and her sister has endured life-threatening complications from diabetes. In March 2012, her father committed suicide after having chronic, painful leg and hip problems, Mr. Huntsman said. Ms. Huntsman’s drinking became so bad that her mother intervened and got her to enter a treatment program.

Mr. Brady said she moved in with him last year, and for a time their lives were stable. She could be loving and mothering. Mr. Brady’s father, Mike, recalled one evening at a restaurant when his wife fell and Ms. Huntsman was the first to swoop in to pick her up.

She helped care for Mr. Brady’s 5-year-old son, and spent hours playing with the young children of her next-door neighbor Joshua Flowers, 34, taking them to a playground and chasing them around on bicycles, he said. “She’d come out and smile and say hi and talk about her kids,” Mr. Flowers said.

Two years ago, Mr. Brady said, she learned that she was pregnant. The two of them discussed the pregnancy and how it could affect their lives. She miscarried that August and seemed upset at the loss, Mr. Brady said.

On the day Mr. West’s family uncovered the seven tiny bodies wrapped in plastic and boxed away on the garage shelves, Ms. Huntsman and Mr. Brady had their last conversation. Mr. West had called her to relay the grim discovery, and she told Mr. Brady that years ago, she had miscarried a child, panicked and hid it away. She did not mention the other six, he said. Knowing the police were coming, he said, she begged him for a gun.

His voice trembling as he spoke on his front steps, Mr. Brady said he was still shaken.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said. “I knew a totally different person than what’s on the news. I just don’t see how somebody could hide this many demons in the closet for so long.”

Jack Healy reported from Pleasant Grove,

and Serge F. Kovaleski from New York.

Jennifer Dobner contributed reporting from Pleasant Grove,

and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2014,

on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline:

One Mother, 7 Dead Newborns

and a Stunned Community in Utah.

    One Mother, 7 Dead Newborns and a Stunned Community in Utah,
    NYT, 26.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/us/
    one-mother-7-dead-newborns-and-a-stunned-community-in-utah.html

A Beating in Detroit

APRIL 25, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By CHARLIE LeDUFF

DETROIT — AS Detroit burned to the ground on a hot summer night in July 1967, my grandparents stood on their front lawn listening to the sounds of our civic suicide.

“Pa,” my grandmother is said to have said. “We’ve got to get out of this neighborhood.”

To which my grandfather replied, “How many of them can there be?”

Grandpa was talking about black people, of course.

Grandpa wasn’t black. Not anymore. The census of 1920 may have listed him as a “mulatto” down in Louisiana, but he was light-skinned and when the family moved north to Detroit he was able to become “white” by the time the 1930 census rolled around.

I don’t judge him. Life and race and class in America are complicated and murky things. But it is easier to be white. Grandpa knew that. We all know that if we’re being honest.

In any event, the next morning, my grandfather got a gun. A few years later they got out of town. Their home is for sale again. Asking price around $500.

I’ve been thinking about my grandfather and his gun these past few weeks, ever since a mob outside a gas station in Detroit beat up a man who had accidentally hit a child with his truck after the kid stepped into traffic, perhaps playing a game of chicken. When the driver stopped to come to the aid of the child, he was attacked.

After what happened, I suspect lots of people in Detroit are getting guns. And if they’re not getting guns, then for sure they’re not stopping for gas.

The motorist, Steve Utash, was white. The mob, witnesses say, was made up of a dozen black men. A crowd of onlookers gathered while the mob beat Mr. Utash within an inch of his life. He was saved by Deborah Hughes, a black woman and a retired nurse who carries a .38. After attending to the child, who was not critically injured, Ms. Hughes lay across the body of Mr. Utash and promised herself that she would put a bullet in the next person to strike him.

Four adult men were bound over for trial this week and charged with intent to murder. A teenager has also been charged with ethnic intimidation. Mr. Utash spent nine days in a coma, and is now conscious and recovering in the hospital.

Was the beating race-related? Probably. This is America, after all. This is Detroit. We have a history. The city has endured three major race riots. In my lifetime I remember two out-of-work white autoworkers in 1982 beating a Chinese-American man to death because they thought he was Japanese. In the early 1990s, white cops went to prison for beating a black motorist to death. Last year, a white man shot a black woman to death after her car broke down and she was wandering the neighborhood, presumably looking for help. Now this. So the circle spins on. Black mob. White fear. More guns.

Sadly, the talk after the attack on Mr. Utash wasn’t about a man who stopped to do the right thing. It wasn’t about Ms. Hughes, the gun-toting angel of mercy who saw no color except the red of his blood. It wasn’t about the use of justifiable force or the value of carrying a sidearm.

Instead white people asked: Where were the old-school civil rights advocates who usually spoke out against such beatings? Where was Reverend Al? Why did it take Jesse Jackson almost two weeks to say something? Not that any of them really wanted famous civil rights leaders coming to town and marching around. What they seemed to be demanding was an admission from black leaders that blacks harbor racial hatred, too.

But leaders nationally and in Detroit stayed curiously silent. A medical fund was established for Mr. Utash, but it took more than a week to convene a vigil for him as he lay in a coma. Until that vigil not even Mike Duggan — the first elected white mayor of Detroit in 40 years — made a public appearance about it. (Though he did put out a press release and a tweet.) Nor did any City Council person that I’m aware of. And nothing from President Obama. Rage and hopelessness are no excuses here. All Detroit, whether black or white, noticed the silence.

The fact is, it’s often hard to be white in America, too, especially in a struggling city like Detroit. Just ask the Utash family.

Three black men I spoke with at the gas station a few days after the beating acknowledged this two-way street. They called Mr. Utash an honorable man for stopping to help when too many people in this city don’t. They mocked the silence of civic leaders. They wanted to know why the mayor had not come to their neighborhood. They knew the score. They’re Americans. And they also know that we can’t expect those leaders to solve this riddle of ours called race.

If you’re looking for any hope in this story, go back to the corner of Morang and Balfour on the east side of the city of Detroit, where two very good people named Steve Utash and Deborah Hughes met one very bad day.

Charlie LeDuff is the host of Fox Television’s

“The Americans With Charlie LeDuff”

and the author of “Detroit: An American Autopsy.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 26, 2014,

on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Beating in Detroit.

    A Beating in Detroit, NYT, 25.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/a-beating-in-detroit.html

Girl Fatally Stabbed at School

in Connecticut on Day of Prom

APRIL 25, 2014
The New York Times
By NATE SCHWEBER
and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

MILFORD, Conn. — A 16-year-old student was stabbed to death in the hallway of a high school here on Friday morning, the day of the school’s junior prom.

The authorities arrested a 16-year-old male student and charged him as a juvenile with murder, and the police said they were looking into reports that a dispute about the prom might have prompted the attack.

The killing occurred around 7:15 a.m., just as the school day was about to begin. Students crammed the halls of Jonathan Law High School, some giddily anticipating donning gowns and tuxedos later that day.

A scream cut the air, and there was momentary confusion as students were hustled into classrooms and told to stay. In one of the halls beneath a stairwell, Maren Sanchez, a well-liked member of the drama club known for her singing voice, lay dying.

Chief Keith Mello of the Milford Police Department said that officials had not made any rulings on possible motives, but that investigators were looking into reports that the victim had declined an invitation to the prom from the suspect, whose name the authorities did not release because he is a minor. The prom was postponed.

“This is a very raw, a very fresh investigation,” the police chief said.

Tyler Curtin, 16, a junior at the school who said he had known Ms. Sanchez and the suspected attacker since they were in sixth grade together, said the attacker was dejected when she turned down his invitation. “He liked her for a while,” Mr. Curtin said. “She just got a new boyfriend.”

Mr. Curtin said he was in the media center just before the first class of the day at 7:20 a.m. He said the librarian reported hearing what sounded like someone falling down the stairs, called 911 and told all of the students to stay there.

Immediately after the attack, staff members and a police officer assigned to the school subdued the suspect, Chief Mello said.

Some staff members tried to resuscitate Ms. Sanchez as students ran for safety, the authorities and witnesses said.

“I saw someone lying there, a teacher was hysterical, the librarian was freaking,” said Rebecca Golden, 17. “I guess they were trying to help.”

Ms. Sanchez had cuts to her neck, chest and face, the Police Department said in a statement. She was pronounced dead at 7:43 a.m. at Bridgeport Hospital.

Classes continued and students said they knew little of the attack until the school was evacuated about 9 a.m. Sarah Golden, a freshman, said students were initially told that Ms. Sanchez had not been gravely wounded, though rumors spread rapidly on Twitter, where students created a hashtag, #prayformaren. Ms. Golden said she did not hear that Ms. Sanchez had died until about 10 a.m., when she saw it on the television news.

Edward Kovac, a cousin, who acted as a spokesman for Ms. Sanchez’s family, said more must be done to protect children from violence at school.

“The unprovoked attack on Maren this morning has unfortunately for our family resulted in the permanent loss of Maren Victoria Sanchez, a bright light full of hopes and dreams with her future at her fingertips,” Mr. Kovac said. “Maren should be celebrating at her prom this evening with her friends and classmates. Instead, we are mourning her death and we are trying as a community to understand the senseless loss of life.”

Among her many roles at the high school, Ms. Sanchez had served as class president, manager of the swim and softball teams and a member of the drama club. Last year she won the school’s talent show with a rendition of “Home” by Phillip Phillips. She was also in the National Honor Society and other service clubs.

“She was the most beautiful person I knew,” Annalyse Rose DeLucca, 16, said. “She had a very big heart. She never let anybody feel left out. Every time I saw her she had a smile on her face.”

Recently, she was cast in “Little Shop of Horrors,” a musical comedy scheduled to be shown next Friday and Saturday in the high school auditorium, said Michael Mele, the drama program’s adviser. She was involved in some key puppetry in the show, a role at which flashier students might have turned up their noses: operating Audrey II, the giant man-eating plant.

“Her natural ease of just being able to manipulate this giant avocado-looking plant” clinched the role for her, Mr. Mele said.

The suspect will be formally arraigned in Juvenile Court in New Haven on Monday. A knife was recovered from the scene, authorities said.
Photo
The vigil on Walnut Beach. Credit Wendy Carlson for The New York Times

The suspect’s lawyer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Instead of attending the prom, students of the junior class wearing their tuxedos and dresses, joined hundreds of others on Friday evening for a memorial on Walnut Beach in Milford. At one point, a man told the crowd to shout the two words that came to mind about Ms. Sanchez.

“Best Friend!”

“Great Smile!”

Then 20 purple balloons were released into the air.

When the group broke up, young men in black, gray and white tuxedos marched down the beach followed by young women in peach, turquoise, crimson and black dresses. They walked to the end of a long pier and clustered again, above a pewter sea.

They shouted in unison: “Maren!”

Nate Schweber reported from Milford,

and Michael Schwirtz from New York.

Reporting was contributed by Alison Leigh Cowan,

Matthew Lloyd-Thomas, Marc Santora

and Kirsten Schnackenberg,

and research by Alain Delaquérière.

A version of this article appears in print on April 26, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Girl Fatally Stabbed at School in Connecticut on Day of Prom.

    Girl Fatally Stabbed at School in Connecticut on Day of Prom, NYT, 25.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/nyregion/
    connecticut-teenager-is-fatally-stabbed-by-fellow-student-police-say.html

Utah Garage Cleaning

Turns Up Boxes of Suffocated Infants

APRIL 14, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER DOBNER
and JACK HEALY

PLEASANT GROVE, Utah — The infants were found in cardboard boxes, each one rolled up in a shirt or towel and tucked into a plastic bag. One had been stillborn, their mother, Megan Huntsman, told the police. The other six, she said, she had strangled or smothered immediately after giving birth, and interred them in the garage of her family’s brick home here.

For more than a decade, Ms. Huntsman’s pregnancies and the short lives of her seven babies apparently went unnoticed by relatives and neighbors. Then, this weekend, as her estranged husband and other relatives were cleaning out the garage, they found a tiny body in a plastic bag, uncovering a grisly scene that has left veteran police investigators shaken and exposing a story that has stunned families across this city.

“I just can’t imagine how something like this happens,” Police Chief Michael Smith said. “I don’t think there’s any motive that could ever be given that allows you to wrap your mind around it in any way.”

On Monday, as a Utah district judge set a $6 million bail for Ms. Huntsman — $1 million for every count of murder she is expected to face — investigators sought to unravel questions about how a mother of three who babysat for neighbors’ children could have concealed such a terrible secret for so long, and how nobody else could have noticed.

“There are still things we’re still puzzled about,” Chief Smith said.

In an affidavit released on Monday, a Pleasant Grove detective reported that Ms. Huntsman, 39, said that she had given birth to the seven children at home from 1996 through 2006, and that all but one had been born alive. After waiving her right against self-incrimination, the affidavit said, she admitted to killing six of those children.

But neighbors said that, in addition to her two adult daughters, Ms. Huntsman also has an adolescent daughter who was born during that period, raising further questions about the timing of the deaths, and why one child may have lived while seven others died. The police have said that DNA tests were being conducted on the dead babies to determine their biological parents.

The police declined to answer any questions about Ms. Huntsman’s background or her mental health history, and the affidavit made no mention of a motive.

Cases involving mothers who kill their own children, such as Susan Smith or Andrea Yates, often draw intense shock and publicity, but psychiatrists say such murders are rare and poorly documented by researchers and criminologists. They are crimes often committed by mothers who have severe postpartum depression or psychosis, said Dr. Kenneth Robbins, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

“This is not generally a thoughtful, rational decision that somebody makes,” he said. “It’s generally related to some kind of mental health problem, and there is some ambivalence. This is a cousin of suicide. They’re killing a part of themselves.”

In 2001, Utah became one of the first states with a “safe haven” law allowing mothers to anonymously drop off unwanted newborns at a hospital without fear of being investigated or prosecuted. Such laws, which seek to prevent babies from being abandoned without any care, have been approved by every state in some form.

Here in Pleasant Grove, people are left with little else but questions. Neighbors who knew the family for years called Ms. Huntsman a shy but kind neighbor who occasionally watched their children and grandchildren. Her weight seemed to fluctuate over the years, but they said she often wore baggy clothes.

SanDee Wall, a real estate agent and mother of three who has lived next door for 14 years, said she occasionally wondered whether Ms. Huntsman was pregnant, but thought little of it.

“I had no suspicion of anything,” she said.

Neighbors said that Ms. Huntsman; her now-estranged husband, Darren West; and their two oldest daughters had moved into the home in Pleasant Grove more than 15 years ago, and some of the neighbors offered fond recollections of play dates and backyard barbecues. But those days did not last.

In December 2005, Mr. West pleaded guilty to federal charges of possessing chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine, though he said he was an intermediary and did not make the drug or even know how to produce it. He was recently released from prison and was in a residential re-entry management program in Salt Lake City, according to a federal prisoner database.

Ms. Huntsman and her children stayed in the home, which is owned by Mr. West’s family, and she worked for a time at a supermarket bakery, said Aaron Hawker, a longtime neighbor who said he had corresponded with Mr. West during his incarceration.

About two years ago, Ms. Huntsman left the home and moved about 35 miles north, to West Valley City, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Her daughters stayed behind, living with a paternal aunt and uncle who live in a lower-level apartment in the house.

Neighbors and police officials said that Mr. West had been hoping to move back into the Pleasant Grove home with his family, and this weekend had gone over to help clear away a garage full of boxes.

“He’s paid his dues and just wants to start a new life,” said Sharon Chipman, a neighbor whose grandson grew up playing with Ms. Huntsman’s adolescent daughter. “And that’s what he was doing when this hit.”

Jennifer Dobner reported from Pleasant Grove, Utah,

and Jack Healy from Denver.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Utah Garage Cleaning Turns Up Boxes of Suffocated Infants.

    Utah Garage Cleaning Turns Up Boxes of Suffocated Infants,
    NYT, 14.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/us/
    utah-garage-cleaning-turns-up-boxes-of-suffocated-infants.html

Echoes of the Superpredator

APRIL 13, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Remember “superpredators”? Nearly 20 years ago, they prowled into the American consciousness — a menacing new breed of children, born of crack-addled mothers and absent fathers, and programmed solely for murder and mayhem.

The superpredator “is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim, without giving it a second thought,” said John DiIulio Jr., the Princeton political scientist who coined the term in 1995.

News reports — usually featuring images of glowering black teenagers — warned of the coming wave of violence that would flood the country. Respected criminologists bought into and amplified the hysteria. Most destructively, almost every state passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles as adults, by increasing the number of crimes or reducing the age that triggered adult prosecution — and in some cases eliminating the minimum age altogether.

Of course, the superpredator predictions were completely unfounded, as Mr. DiIulio himself later admitted. “Thank God we were wrong,” he said in 2001, from his comfortable post in the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Juvenile crime, like all crime, was in fact declining throughout the 1990s.

Two decades later, it’s easy to look back in judgment, but it would be a mistake to think the nation has fully moved beyond that mind-set. Many states continue to punish juveniles as harshly as they can, even though the Supreme Court has held in a series of landmark rulings since 2005 that young people are “constitutionally different” from adults.

In a 2012 case, Miller v. Alabama, the court ruled that juveniles may not receive a mandatory sentence of life without parole, because it prevents judges from considering the “hallmark features” of youth — including “immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences.” Recognizing that younger offenders have a greater capacity for change, the court required that judges give them “individualized” sentencing decisions and, except in extremely rare cases, a “meaningful opportunity” for release “based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

Some states have taken the court’s rulings, and its reasoning, to heart. Since the ruling in Miller, five states have abolished juvenile life without parole in all cases. In March, West Virginia lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill that provides parole review for any juvenile who serves at least 15 years in adult prisons. Similar legislation is pending in Connecticut and Hawaii.

But other states keep fighting to prevent their juvenile offenders from ever having the chance to see the light of day. Michigan now gives judges the “choice” of imposing a minimum sentence of 25 to 60 years instead of life without parole. Courts in other states have refused to apply the Supreme Court’s ruling retroactively, stranding many of the more than 2,000 inmates who were sentenced before the Miller decision.

The issue is not, as supporters of mandatory sentencing would have it, about going easy on criminals. No one is ordering judges to release inmates who are not rehabilitated, or who pose a threat to society. Rather, it is about giving legal meaning to the neurological, psychological and emotional vulnerabilities of young people. Those who make mistakes — even terrible ones — should not be sentenced to die in prison.

The myth of the superpredator helped spawn a generation of misguided laws that treated young people as adults, despite evidence that doing so actually increases recidivism. Most of these laws remain in effect. The Supreme Court has rightly begun to dismantle their constitutional foundations, but some states are determined to act as if it were always 1995.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 14, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

Echoes of the Superpredator.

    Echoes of the Superpredator, NYT, 13.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/echoes-of-the-superpredator.html

To End the Abuse, She Grabbed a Knife

MARCH 8, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview|Op-Ed Columnist

ATLANTA — WHAT strikes one American woman in four and claims a life in the United States every six hours?

This scourge can be more unsettling to talk about than colonoscopies, and it is so stigmatizing that most victims never seek help.

Paula Denize Lewis, an executive assistant here in Atlanta, was among those who kept quiet about domestic violence, for that’s what I’m talking about. She tried to cover up the black eyes and bruises when she went to work, and when she showed up with her arm in a sling she claimed that she had fallen down the stairs.

Then one evening, she says, her alcoholic boyfriend was again beating her, throwing beer cans at her and threatening to kill her. She ran for a telephone in the kitchen to call 911, but he reached it first and began clubbing her on the head with it.

Lewis reached frantically into a kitchen drawer for something to defend herself with. “I grabbed what I could,” she said.

What she had grabbed turned out to be a paring knife. She stabbed her boyfriend once. He died.

Lewis was jailed and charged with murder. With the help of the Women’s Resource Center to End Domestic Violence, the charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and she was sentenced to probation.

That episode underscores the way our silence and squeamishness about domestic violence hurts everyone. If there had been earlier intervention, Lewis might have avoided years of abuse and a felony conviction — and her boyfriend might still be alive.

Domestic violence deserves far more attention and resources, and far more police understanding of the complexities involved. This is not a fringe concern. It is vast, it is outrageous, and it should be a national priority.

Women worldwide ages 15 to 44 are more likely to die or be maimed as a result of male violence than as a consequence of war, cancer, malaria and traffic accidents combined. Far more Americans, mostly women, have been killed in the last dozen years at the hands of their partners than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

American women are twice as likely to suffer domestic violence as breast cancer, and the abuse is particularly shattering because it comes from those we have loved.

“He’s the only person I’ve ever loved,” Ta’Farian, 24, said of her husband, whom she met when she was an 18-year-old college student. He gradually became violent, she says, beating her, locking her up in a closet, and destroying property.

“My family was like, ‘He’s your husband. You can’t leave him. How would you support yourself?’ ”

Still, she says, it became too much, and she called 911. Police arrested him. But she says that the day before the trial, her husband called and threatened to kill her if she testified against him, so she says that out of a mix of fear and love she refused to repeat in court what had happened. Her husband was let off, and she was convicted of false reporting of a crime.

Ta’Farian is now in hiding, fearful of her husband as well as of the courts; she dissolved into tears as she was telling her story, partly out of fear that her conviction could cost her the custody of her son. Ayonna Johnson, who works for the Women’s Resource Center, comforted her, saying: “You should not have gotten punished for trying to stay alive.”

Domestic violence is infinitely complex in part because women sometimes love the men who beat them: they don’t want the man jailed; they don’t want to end the relationship; they just want the beatings to end.

Women can obtain temporary protective orders to keep violent boyfriends or husbands away, but these are just pieces of paper unless they’re rigorously enforced. Sometimes the orders even trigger a retaliatory attack on the woman, and police officers around the country don’t always make such a case a priority — until it becomes a murder investigation.

One way of addressing that conundrum is mandated classes for abusers, like one run by the group Men Stopping Violence. One session I sat in on was a little like Alcoholics Anonymous in its confessional, frank tone, but it focused on domestic abuse. The men were encouraged to be brutally honest in examining their shortcomings in relationships; it’s surely more effective than sending abusers to jail to seethe at their wives and wallow in self-pity.

Sometimes there’s a perception that domestic violence is insoluble, because it’s such a complex, messy problem with women who are culprits as well as victims. Yet, in fact, this is an area where the United States has seen enormous progress.

Based on victimization surveys, it seems that violence by men against their intimate partners has fallen by almost two-thirds since 1993. Attitudes have changed as well. In 1987, only half of Americans said that it was always wrong for a man to beat his wife with a belt or stick; a decade later, 86 percent said that it was always wrong.

A generation ago, police didn’t typically get involved. “We would say, ‘don’t make us come back, or you’re both going to jail,’ ” recalled Capt. Leonard Dreyer of the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office. In contrast, sheriff’s officers now routinely arrest the aggressor.

Three steps are still needed. First, we must end the silence. Second, we must ensure that police departments everywhere take the issue seriously before a victim becomes a corpse. Third, offenders should be required to attend training programs like the one run by Men Stopping Violence.

A young mom named Antonya Lewis reflects the challenges. She stayed with a violent boyfriend for years, she said, because he was the father of her daughters and was always so apologetic afterward — and also because that was what she had been told was a woman’s lot in life.

“My mom always told me to suck it up,” she said. But then her boyfriend beat her up so badly that he broke a bone near her eye and put her in the hospital. She told him that she was done with him, and when he continued to stalk her and threaten to kill her, she called the police — repeatedly — with little effect. Now she has moved to a new city and is starting over.

“I didn’t want my daughters to see him beat me,” she said. “I didn’t want them to think this is what a man can do to a woman.”

That, too, is progress.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 9, 2014,

on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline:

To End the Abuse, She Grabbed a Knife.

    To End the Abuse, She Grabbed a Knife, NYT, 8.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/
    kristof-to-end-the-abuse-she-grabbed-a-knife.html

When Emily Was Sold for Sex

FEB. 12, 2014
The New York Times
Nicholas Kristof

BOSTON — Emily, a 15-year-old ninth-grader, ran away from home in early November, and her parents are sitting at their dining table, frightened and inconsolable.

The parents, Maria and Benjamin, both school-bus drivers, have been searching for their daughter all along and pushing the police to investigate. They gingerly confess their fears that Emily, a Latina, is being controlled by a pimp.

I’m here to try to understand the vast national problem of runaways, and I ask if they have checked Backpage.com, the leading website for prostitution and sex trafficking in America. They say they haven’t heard of it. Since I’ve written about Backpage before and am familiar with how runaways often end up in its advertisements, I pull out my laptop — and, in two minutes, we find an ad for a “mixed Latina catering to your needs” with photos of a semi-nude girl.

Maria staggers and shrieks. It’s Emily.

A 2002 Justice Department study suggested that more than 1.6 million American juveniles run away or are kicked out of their home each year. Ernie Allen, a former president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has estimated that at least 100,000 kids are sexually trafficked each year in the United States.

Perhaps they aren’t a priority because they’re seen as asking for it, not as victims. This was Emily’s fourth time running away, and she seems to have voluntarily connected with a pimp. Based on text messages that her family intercepted, Emily was apparently used by a pimp to recruit one of her girlfriends — a common practice.

“Made about 15 or 16 hundred,” Emily boasted to her friend in one text. “Come make money with me I promise u gonna be good.”

So it’s true that no one was holding a gun to Emily’s head. Then again, she was 15, in a perilous business. And, in this case it turned out, having sex with a half-dozen men a day and handing over every penny to an armed pimp.

A bit more searching on the Web, and we find that Emily has been advertised for sex in four states: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The ads say that Emily (the name used in the ads, which is not her real name) is “fetish-friendly,” and that’s scary. Pimps use “fetish-friendly” as a dog whistle to attract deviants who will pay more for the right to be extra violent or abusive.

“We don’t care what she did,” says Benjamin, in a shattered tone. “We just want her back.”

The ads for Emily include a cellphone number to set up “dates,” and we pass the information to the authorities. The pimp’s phone number should make it easy to find the girl, so we wait to see what will happen.

Maria is bitter that the police haven’t done more. She has been pleading for months for help, hounding the police — and now she finds that her daughter has been advertised in four states on multiple prostitution websites and no one seems to have checked or noticed.

“I feel very strongly that it was racism,” Maria says. In fact, the Boston police force is admired nationally for its three-detective unit that fights human trafficking. This is the gold standard, yet, even here, a missing 15-year-old girl seemed to slip through the cracks.

Every day, more than 4,000 children run away or are kicked out of their home — and there’s negligible interest. We feel outrage when Penn State or the Roman Catholic Church ignore child sexual abuse, but we, as a society, avert our eyes as well.

Partly the problem is that many see sex trafficking as serious only when the victim is dragged off in chains; we don’t appreciate Stockholm syndrome or understand that often the handcuffs are psychological. Attitudes are changing, just as they have toward domestic violence, but too slowly.

There are failings here beyond law enforcement. You wonder about the men paying to have sex with a girl who looks so young. About the hotel clerks. And about why we tolerate websites like Backpage.com that peddle teenage girls.

A few hours after I sent police the link, officers located Emily in New Hampshire. Police raided a hotel, rescuing her and arresting a man, Andy Pena, 19, who, they said, was her pimp and took all the money she made. Police said that Pena was armed.

Pena is in jail in New Hampshire; his public defender declined to comment.

Emily is ambivalent about her rescue. She’s in a group home, getting support from other survivors of human trafficking through a group called My Life My Choice. She’s still rebellious, but it’s a good sign that she hugged her mom. Maria wept.

Today Emily is safe, but there are hundreds of thousands of other runaways out on the streets. These are our kids, in danger. Shouldn’t they be a national priority?

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 13, 2014,

on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline:

When Emily Was Sold For Sex.

    When Emily Was Sold for Sex, NYT, 12.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/opinion/kristof-when-emily-was-sold-for-sex.html

Ken Landwehr,

Who Played Key Role

in Capture of Serial Killer,

Dies at 59

JAN. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By BRUCE WEBER

Lt. Ken Landwehr, a homicide detective in Wichita, Kan., who played a pivotal role in the capture of the serial killer known as B.T.K., whose terrorizing spree went unredressed for more than 30 years, died at his home on Monday in Wichita. He was 59.

The cause was kidney cancer, said Joel Vanatta, who is married to the lieutenant’s stepdaughter.

Lieutenant Landwehr, whom the city’s mayor, Carl Brewer, called “the Dick Tracy of Wichita,” served on the Wichita police force for more than 30 years. He was commander of the department’s homicide unit from 1992 until his retirement in 2012, by which time he had had a hand in more than 600 murder investigations, the department said.

They included a pair of unrelated quadruple murders that occurred within eight days in 2000, and the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in 1990.

But by far his most prominent case was that of Dennis Rader, who killed 10 people from 1974 to 1991 and who, in communications with the news media and the police, called himself B.T.K., an abbreviation of his working method: bind, torture, kill.

An egotist who enjoyed playing cat-and-mouse with the police, Mr. Rader bragged of his crimes and taunted the police with letters, poems and packages delivered to local news agencies and left in public places.

After his final murder — he strangled Dolores Davis, 62, in her Wichita home in 1991 — he vanished. But he resumed sending messages to newspapers and television stations in 2004.

He was finally caught in 2005. Lieutenant Landwehr and Mr. Rader had been exchanging coded messages placed in newspaper ads when the detective tricked him into using a floppy disk for his next communication, falsely telling him that the disk could not be used to track him down.

A few weeks later, Mr. Rader sent such a disk to a local television station. It was quickly traced to a computer at the church where Mr. Rader was a congregation leader. He was arrested days later, confessed to his crimes and was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms, which he is serving at El Dorado Correctional Facility in El Dorado, Kan.

Born Jan. 23, 1954, Kenneth Landwehr grew up in Wichita, where local news reports said he was an Eagle Scout, a high school debate champion and a devotee of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, but also a drinker and an occasional brawler as a teenager. His father, Lee, worked at Cessna, the aircraft company; his mother, Irene, was a homemaker.

By his own admission he was a poor student at Wichita State University, though he excelled in algebra and criminal justice and considered applying to join the F.B.I. He decided to pursue a career in law enforcement in 1977, after the store where he was working as a clerk was robbed.

He and others in the store were tied up, and one robber stood over him, loading a pistol. No one was killed, but the episode gave Lieutenant Landwehr the experience of being a victim and fostered a compassion for crime victims and their families that he said became his prime motivation in doing his job.

Indeed, he was known among friends and colleagues for taking cases personally.

“When I did my interview to get on the Police Department, they always ask you one question, ‘How far do you want to go in the department?’, and at that interview, I said I want to command homicide,” Lieutenant Landwehr said in a television interview. “Those victims cannot speak for themselves, so that’s probably the only reason why I picked homicide.”

His survivors include his wife, the former Cindy Gibson; their son, James; a stepdaughter, Holly Vanatta; a brother, David, and two step-grandchildren.

Lieutenant Landwehr was not yet 20 when Mr. Rader’s first victims — a family of four named Otero — were killed. He became involved in the B.T.K. case in the mid-1980s, when Wichita’s police chief formed a task force, known locally as Ghostbusters, to investigate the killings.

It was Lieutenant Landwehr, news reports said, who originated the strategy of playing on the killer’s demonstrated narcissism, prodding B.T.K. in public statements about the case to communicate ever more frequently with the police. It was he who made sure that the small amount of DNA evidence gathered at the Otero crime scene was saved until it was sure to be useful. And after the disk and other evidence pointed to Mr. Rader, it was he who arranged to test the DNA of a relative of Mr. Rader’s to compare with the Otero sample.

Upon Mr. Rader’s arrest, Lieutenant Landwehr took charge of his interrogation.

“I look right at him, he looks at me,” he recalled of their first meeting. “His first words are, ‘Hello, Mr. Landwehr.’ ”

Mr. Rader was especially annoyed that Lieutenant Landwehr had misled him about the police’s ability to trace a floppy disk.

“How come you lied to me?” he asked, to which Lieutenant Landwehr replied, “Because I was trying to catch you.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 16, 2014,

on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline:

Ken Landwehr, Who Played Key Role

in Capture of Serial Killer, Dies at 59.

    Ken Landwehr, Who Played Key Role in Capture of Serial Killer, Dies at 59,
    NYT, 15.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/
    ken-landwehr-who-played-key-role-in-capture-of-serial-killer-dies-at-59.html

Charred Body of Kidnapped Man

Is Found on Long Island

January 4, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
and JULIE TURKEWITZ

The charred body of a prominent Hasidic real estate developer who was kidnapped Thursday near his Brooklyn office has been found in a smoldering trash bin outside a Long Island gas station, the police said on Saturday.

The body of the developer, identified as Menachem Stark, 39, was discovered on Friday afternoon by workers at a Getty gas station in Great Neck, about 20 miles away from where he was kidnapped, the Nassau County Police Department said in a statement on Saturday.

When Mr. Stark left his office at 331 Rutledge Street in Williamsburg at about 11:35 p.m. on Thursday, two men were waiting for him in the darkness, the New York Police Department said Saturday. A struggle ensued for several minutes as the men tried to force Mr. Stark into a 2006 or 2007 Dodge Caravan, the police said.

The Police Department released a blurry surveillance video on Saturday, which it said showed Mr. Stark wrestling in the driving snow with the two men who eventually overcame him and put him in the van. The light-colored vehicle then drove off.

The authorities did not release information about a motive for the crime, or any word about arrests. A police spokesman said Mr. Stark was known to carry large amounts of cash with him.

On Mr. Stark’s street in Williamsburg, neighbors said they were shocked that a man who was known for his generosity could meet such an end. They said Mr. Stark and his wife regularly held parties at their home to raise money for charity.

The Starks have seven children, five girls and two boys, neighbors said. The oldest, a daughter, is 16.

Court records show that Mr. Stark and his business partner, Israel Perlmutter, were sued several times after defaulting on major loans. In 2009, they declared bankruptcy after defaulting on a $29 million loan for a Brooklyn property consisting of 74 rental units and two joining lots.

Fernando Cerff, who owns the Getty gas station where Mr. Stark’s body was found and is a snowplow operator, said he arrived to work at 7 on Friday morning and noticed smoke coming from the open trash bin. Thinking a colleague had thrown a lit cigarette away, Mr. Cerff said, he threw some snow into the bin without looking and left in his truck to plow.

When he returned at 3 p.m., he noticed the smell.

“I went to throw out the garbage and it smells terrible. I was sick,” he said. “The police came and found a body.”

Mr. Stark’s funeral was held just before 9 p.m. on Saturday. At least a thousand people gathered at the corner of Marcy Avenue and Hooper Street, outside a tiny synagogue.

In the crowd, Joseph Kohn, 53, said Mr. Stark had played a key role in the community.

“He was the livelihood of the synagogue,” he said.

Susan C. Beachy contributed reporting.

Charred Body of Kidnapped Man Is Found on Long Island,
    NYT, 4.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/nyregion/
    charred-body-of-kidnapped-man-is-found-on-long-island.html