History > 2007 > USA > Crime, violence (IV)

Mo. Tries New Approach

on Teen Offenders

December 29, 2007
Filed at 1:12 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

MONTGOMERY CITY, Mo. (AP) -- At age 9, Korey Davis came home from school with gang writing on his arm. At 10, he jacked his first car. At 13, he and some buddies got guns, used them to relieve a man of his Jeep, and later, while trying to outrun a police helicopter, smacked their hot wheels into a fire hydrant.

For his exploits, the tough-talking teen pulled not only a 15-year sentence (the police subsequently connected him to three previous car thefts) but got ''certified'' as an adult offender and shipped off to the St. Louis City workhouse to inspire a change of heart.

It didn't have the desired effect.

''I wasn't wanting to listen to nobody. If you wasn't my momma, or anybody in my family, I wasn't gonna listen to you, period,'' says Korey, now 19. ''I was very rebellious.''

At that stage, most states would have written Korey off and begun shuttling him from one adult prison to the next, where he likely would have sat in sterile cells, joined a gang, and spent his days and nights plotting his next crime.

But this is Missouri, a place where teen offenders are viewed not just as inmates but as works in progress -- where troubled kids are rehabilitated in small, homelike settings that stress group therapy and personal development over isolation and punishment.

With prisons around the country filled to bursting, and with states desperate for ways to bring down recidivism rates that rise to 70 and 80 percent, some policymakers are taking a fresh look at treatment-oriented approaches like Missouri's as a way out of America's juvenile justice crisis.

Here, large, prison-style ''gladiator schools'' have been abandoned in favor of 42 community-based centers spread around the state so that now, even parents of inner-city offenders can easily visit their children and participate in family therapy.

The ratio of staff to kids is low: one-to-five. Wards, referred to as ''clients,'' are grouped in teams of 10, not unlike a scout troop. Barring outbursts, they're rarely separated: They go to classes together, play basketball together, eat together, and bunk in communal ''cottages.'' Evenings, they attend therapy and counseling sessions as a group.

Missouri doesn't set timetables for release; children stay until they demonstrate a fundamental shift in character -- a policy that detainees say gives kids an added incentive to take the program seriously.

Those who are let out don't go unwatched: College students or other volunteers who live in the released youths' community track these youths for three years, helping with job placement, therapy referrals, school issues and drug or alcohol treatment.

The results?

--About 8.6 percent of teens who complete Missouri's program are incarcerated in adult prisons within three years of release, according to 2006 figures. (In New York, 75 percent are re-arrested as adults, 42 percent for a violent felony. California's rates are similar.)

--Last year, 7.3 percent of teen offenders released from Missouri's youth facilities were recommitted to juvenile centers for new offenses. Texas, which spends about 20 percent more to keep a child in juvenile corrections, has a recidivism rate that tops 50 percent.

--No Missouri teens have committed suicide while in custody since 1983, when the state began overhauling its system. From 1995 to 1999 alone, at least 110 young people killed themselves in juvenile facilities nationwide, according to figures from the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives.

Does this ''law-and-order'' state know something others don't?

Hardly, says Mark Steward, who, as director of the state's Division of Youth Services from 1987 to 2005, oversaw the development of what many experts regard as the best juvenile rehabilitation system in America.

''This isn't rocket science,'' Steward says. ''It's about giving young people structure, and love and attention, and not allowing them to hurt themselves or other people. Pretty basic stuff, really. It's just that a lot of these kids haven't gotten the basic stuff.''

Take Korey Davis. He didn't meet his dad until he was 5. He and his siblings were raised largely by aunts and uncles. If the judge handling his case had left him in county detention centers until he reached adult age -- 17, in Missouri -- then had him serve the rest of his sentence in prison, few eyebrows would have been raised.

But a chance to save a life would have been missed. ''In jail, I wouldn't never have changed what I always done,'' Davis says. ''There was no treatment at all.'' He contemplates this for a second, and adds with a near-whisper: ''Right now, I'd probably be dead.''

In Missouri, judges can keep serious felons in the juvenile system until they are 21. That's what happened with Davis. At 15, he was sent to the Montgomery City Project, where robbers, rapists and the like get one last shot.

At first, he didn't want it.

But a year into his stay, two things knocked him back on his heels: the news that his younger brother had been shot and wounded in a gang fight, and an invitation from a counselor to sit down, after class, to read a book out loud with her.

To a boy accustomed to hiding his illiteracy, the offer felt awkward. But because this woman had given him a chance, he responded, and ''when I actually learned how to read, it made everything in the world easier for me.''

Three years later, Davis is a group leader -- and no softy with his peers, either. ''We don't let each other get by with slick stuff, just doing the bare minimum,'' he says. He reads voraciously (recently, ''The Bond,'' about three fatherless teens in Newark, N.J.). He's been accepted by a community technical college, plans to study carpentry. And, he's proud to say, his kid brother has taken to heart this advice:

''Put the guns down.''

------

Many states are trying to bring down high rates of repeat offending by juveniles.

Wisconsin now treats some repeat offenders with mental health counselors in hospitals, instead of corrections officers in jails.

Illinois offers them drug treatment, job placement -- or an expedited return to custody.

And Washington state targets kids at risk of becoming its most serious offenders with early, intensive anger-management, drug and family therapy.

Research guided these approaches. One 2006 study, for example, found that anger-management, foster-care treatment and family group therapy cut recidivism drastically among teens, resulting in taxpayer savings up to $78,000 per child. Programs that tried to scare kids into living a clean life were money losers, according to the study, conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

Missouri employs similar carrot-and-stick techniques. But it takes rehabilitation one step further by normalizing the environments of children in custody, says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif.

''It's a pretty simple concept: The more normal the environment, the more likely these young people will be able to return home and not be sucked into a criminal subculture,'' he says.

Montgomery City, built for Missouri's worst juvenile offenders, could be mistaken for a college campus.

In a literature class, students analyze plot lines in ''Julius Caesar'' and ''A Farewell to Arms.'' In a computer lab, they write resumes and peck out cover letters to employers. In a central courtyard, they celebrate ''Victim Empathy Week'' by huddling in a circle with lit candles, praying silently for those harmed by their crimes.

The cottages where they sleep resemble college dorms, with one notable difference: These are all immaculate.

Ten teens are assigned to a cottage. Each gets a bed with quilt, pillow, nightstand, and an understood ''space.'' In this space are often collected the precious remnants of a truncated childhood: dream catchers, stuffed animals, Dr. Seuss books.

''When you walk into these facilities and see 17- and 18-year-olds with dolls on their pillows, that's when it hits you: 'Hey, these really are just kids,''' says Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.

Some things you won't see in this detention center: razor wire, barred windows, uniformed guards, billyclubs, or kids in orange jumpsuits with broken noses.

''We're all about creating a safe environment for our kids,'' Larry Strecker, Missouri's northeastern regional administrator, explains.

Here, boys wear -- well, what boys wear: jeans, knee-length Bermudas, an occasional earring, T-shirts. Staff members dress almost as casually.

To the teens, many of whom have done long stretches in adult jails awaiting adjudication, the sight and feel of Montgomery City come as a shock.

It was for Josh Stroder, who at 15 was arrested by a SWAT team in 2004 at his home in Dexter, Mo., and charged with 12 crimes, including terrorism. He confessed to improvising a bomb, which took off the front door of an appellate judge's home. No one was hurt by the blast. Police also found a car bomb in his basement.

The youth was detained in a juvenile center for a year, then sat in the Dexter City jail for 5 months before being sent to Montgomery City.

In a 6-by-9 cell, says Stroder, now 18, ''there's really nothing to challenge you, nothing to stimulate you. It becomes easy to succumb to apathy, bitterness, or whatever is boiling in your brain.''

He contrasts that with Montgomery City: ''Here, you are faced with the possibility of reconciliation with so many people, and forgiveness. I was expecting a treatment program, but not so intense -- not the way it is here. I expected maybe to crack the surface of the ice, but not go in so deep.''

Treatment comes in ''group builders'' -- sessions in which detainees open up to one another about traumas, crimes and family conflicts that have scarred them. Kids can also call a ''circle,'' in which team members stand and face each other to air grievances, fears, anguish.

Two staff specialists, college graduates in counseling, psychology or social work, sit in on the circles, but the kids generally run them. ''Adults lived in a different generation -- they can only tell us so much,'' says Korey Davis.

Teams that interact more are rewarded -- day furloughs to visit family, fishing trips, bicycle excursions, an afternoon volunteering at a food bank or a soup kitchen. Those who pull against the program -- generally, new arrivals -- quickly find themselves pressured by their peers to shape up.

''We know that when we do positive things as a group, we earn things,'' says Chan Meas, 17. Three years ago, he ran with a gang in Columbia, Mo., smoked dope, broke into people's homes. ''Now, I look for positive people that care about others.''

Montgomery City is no fairyland. It's a ''Level 4'' facility, meaning high security. It has isolation rooms, and every door locks automatically. Video cameras in walls and ceilings film everything, everywhere, 24-7. Kids need passes to go from one room to the next.

Kids are trained to restrain peers who threaten the team's safety. Only staff may authorize a restraint, but once they do, team members grab arms and legs and pin their peer to the floor until the child stops resisting.

This practice has its critics, such as Loughran, a former commissioner of the Massachusetts state Department of Youth Services, who called it ''very, very dangerous.''

''The juveniles have learned violence all their lives, and we're going to use them to control other residents? It's a confusion of roles,'' he says.

But Tim Decker, Missouri's youth services director, says there's never been a serious injury during a restraint, and rates of injury are markedly lower here than in states that rely on billyclubs and mace.

Besides, he says, the restraint policy reinforces the notion that ''everyone in the facility takes responsibility for keeping it safe.''

------

A half hour west of Montgomery City, in the university town of Fulton, there is a house that looks just right for a summer camp. It's brick, with a maple tree out front, a wide lawn and a wrought-iron sign that reads, ''Welcome Friends.''

Inside are comfy sofas, bookcases holding trophies, vases full of flowers, and 11 girls, ranging in age from 12 to 17, who've been convicted of truancy, assault, drug crimes, theft and forgery -- bright kids carrying darkness around inside.

This is the Rosa Parks Center, a detention home on the campus of William Woods University. Here, the girls get counseling, schooling, a feeling of togetherness.

''I had a lot of problems being angry,'' says Brooklyn Schaller, 15, who was arrested on drug charges and for violating a parental curfew. ''I would be aggressive. I didn't care about anyone else, or anything else.'' But after just a year, even she has noticed a change.

''Last weekend I went home for a furlough, and me and Mom got into an argument, and so I left her alone. I let her have her space, and she came back and I listened to everything she had to say and she listened to me. And that was the most amazing thing, to sit down and talk and have someone listen to you.''

What's been the difference?

Good role models help: The girls get to mingle with college students in the campus dining hall and attend campus plays and other cultural events. At the start of the school year they describe their experiences to incoming students during orientation week.

But the biggest plus, Schaller says, is that ''you have people to talk to here, you have people who truly do care.''

Rosa Parks Center opened in 2001, part of Missouri's response to the notion -- resurrected about a decade ago -- that it might be worthwhile to punish teen offenders by locking them up in adult prisons or in remote, sprawling juvenile prisons.

In the early '90s, a series of high-profile crimes had prompted dire predictions of teen ''superpredators.'' Legislators across the country backed ''scare-kids-straight'' approaches.

But Missouri was on a different path by then, and stayed with it.

It had tried the traditional approach: From 1887 to 1983, young offenders from truants to attempted murderers were confined either at the Boonville Training School for Boys, or the Chillicothe Training School for Girls.

Boonville warehoused 650 boys, most of them minorities, in grim, two-story brick structures. There was rape and other brutality by guards, and a solitary confinement room atop the facility's administration building known as ''The Hole,'' until judges demanded its closure.

''You had rural, white staff with inner-city kids of color, thrown in together with kids from all across the state who were disconnected from their families and neighborhoods,'' recalls Steward, the former director of youth services. ''It wasn't a terribly successful formula.''

Which is why conservatives such as John Ashcroft, the former Missouri senator and U.S. attorney general, and state Supreme Court Justice Stephen Limbaugh, a cousin of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, joined with liberals such as the late Gov. Mel Carnahan to stick by systemwide reforms initiated in the late 1970s.

''What is remarkable about Missouri's system is that is has been sustained by conservative and liberal governments,'' says Krisberg, of the national crime and delinquency council. ''They've seen that this is not a left-right issue. In many ways, its a commonsense issue.''

A common-cents issue, too -- since it costs states between $100 and $300 a day to keep a juvenile in so-called ''punitive'' correctional facilities, according to a 2005 report by the Youth Transition Funders Group, a philanthropy network.

Missouri's per capita cost of its juvenile rehabilitation program is $130 a day.

''The fact is that most kids from punitive states get out, get re-arrested, and get thrown back into correctional facilities,'' Krisberg says. ''What amazes me is that taxpayers in these punitive states put up with such rates of failure.''

Miriam Rollin, vice president at Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., with a membership of 3,500 police officials, prosecutors and crime victims, agrees:

''Twenty years ago, people threw up their hands and said, 'We don't know what works.' But now, we actually do know ... We're just not doing it -- or not doing enough of it.''

    Mo. Tries New Approach on Teen Offenders, NYT, 29.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Youth-on-Trial-What-Works.html

Daughter and boyfriend charged in grisly murders

Fri Dec 28, 2007
6:05pm EST
Reuters

SEATTLE (Reuters) - A woman and her boyfriend were charged on Friday in the Christmas Eve massacre of three generations of her family, including two young children whom prosecutors say watched their parents die.

Michele Anderson, the daughter of the two oldest victims, and boyfriend Joseph McEnroe could face the death penalty if convicted of the killings in Carnation, a town near Seattle.

"In the span of one hour, the defendants had turned this family's Christmas Eve celebration into a scene of mass murder," King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a statement.

Anderson and McEnroe, both 29 years old, are charged with six counts of aggravated first-degree murder. Satterberg said he may seek the death penalty after their January 9 arraignment.

Investigators said they still lack a clear motive for the crime. Satterberg said Anderson believed her brother owed her money and she seemed angry at her parents for a lack of support.

Anderson and McEnroe entered her parents' home armed with handguns on Monday and first killed her father, Wayne Anderson, with one shot to the head, according to the prosecutor.

Then they shot to death her mother, Judy Anderson, when she came out of a back room where she had been wrapping presents, Satterberg said.

The couple hid the parents' bodies and waited 30 to 45 minutes before her brother, Scott, and his family arrived for dinner. Anderson and McEnroe shot Scott multiple times, the prosecutor said.

To eliminate any witnesses, the couple turned and killed Scott's wife, Erika, who tried to call the police emergency number, he said.

Finally, McEnroe apologized to the children, 6-year-old Olivia and 3-year-old Nathan, and shot them in the head, Satterberg said.

(Reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi; Editing by Xavier Briand)

    Daughter and boyfriend charged in grisly murders, R, 28.12.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2846428520071228

Suspects in Deaths of 6 Due in Court

December 27, 2007
Filed at 3:01 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CARNATION, Wash. (AP) -- Detectives painstakingly picked their way Thursday through the rural property where six people were killed Christmas Eve, and prosecutors prepared charges against the property owners' daughter and her boyfriend, authorities said.

Hours after the bodies of the victims -- reportedly three generations of the same family -- were discovered, police arrested Michele Anderson, 29, and Joseph McEnroe, 29, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the names.

King County Sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said the suspects went to the crime scene after investigators had arrived, were questioned and arrested Wednesday. Investigators had not found a weapon, and the only hint of a motive they have disclosed is a long-standing dispute between Michele Anderson and her parents. Urquhart declined to elaborate on the nature of the dispute.

The owners of the property are Wayne Anderson, 60, and Judy Anderson, 61, according to public records. Multiple media reports said the couple, along with their son, Scott; his wife, Erica; and their two children, Olivia and Nathan, were the victims.

The sheriff's office would only say the victims were the homeowners, ages 60 and 61, their daughter and son-in-law, both 32, and the younger couple's 6-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son.

McEnroe and Michele Anderson were expected to make their first court appearance Thursday afternoon, and the King County prosecutor's office planned to file charges against them Friday, Urquhart said. Authorities have not said what role either person played in the slayings, but Urquhart said both are expected to be charged with first-degree murder.

A message left Wednesday night at a telephone listing for a Michele Anderson in the Carnation area was not immediately returned.

The six were likely killed late afternoon or early evening on Christmas Eve, Urquhart said.

Authorities are trying to determine why deputies didn't further investigate a 911 hang-up call on Christmas Eve that came from the house. The call ended after about 10 seconds, and the operator reported hearing ''a lot of yelling in the background ... sounded more like party noise than angry heated arguing.''

Operators twice called back, but both calls went into voice mail. About 30 minutes later, two deputies arrived at the property, but found a locked gate and did not go onto the property. The dispatchers log reported the deputies saying, ''gate is locked, unable to gain access.''

''They didn't go past it,'' Urquhart said. ''I don't know why yet. That's one of the things we're looking into.''

Urquhart said the bodies were found by a co-worker of one of the victims who had come to the house because one of the victims, who works for the U.S. Postal Service, did not report to work.

The bodies were found on a rural property that includes a house and a mobile home at the end of a long dirt road. The property is near this town about 25 miles east of Seattle.

Mark Bennett, a family friend, said the Andersons lived in a house there, and their daughter Michele lived on her parents' property in a mobile home with a male companion.

Bennett said he spoke with Judy and Wayne Anderson on Christmas Eve and tried to call them Christmas Day but could not reach them. He told reporters he came to the property Wednesday morning after seeing the home on the news.

''I didn't want to believe what I heard and saw, so I drove over,'' he said.

Autopsies had not been performed.

Ben Anderson, who said he was the grandson of Wayne and Judy Anderson, told reporters outside his grandparents' property late Wednesday that money could have been a factor in the deaths.

''She felt she wasn't loved enough and everyone didn't appreciate her and she was pushed out of everyone's life,'' he said, referring to Michele Anderson.

Urquhart declined to say where on the property the victims were found, other than to say they were ''not found in the same room.'' As investigators searched the property, they removed a black pickup truck.

Bennett said Wayne Anderson is a Boeing Co. engineer and Judy Anderson works for the post office in Carnation.

''It's shocking,'' said Don Lovett, owner of Pete's Grill and Pub in downtown Carnation. ''It's a real small community out here, even being so close to a metropolitan area. We're really familiar with folks out here.''

    Suspects in Deaths of 6 Due in Court, NYT, 27.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Carnation-Killings.html

Los Angeles Combating Gangs Gone International

December 26, 2007
The New York Times
By REBECCA CATHCART

LOS ANGELES — Two gangs that originated on the streets here have grown so large in El Salvador that there are two prisons in that country devoted exclusively to their members, one for each gang, according to officials who traveled there recently to meet with the local authorities.

That is just one measure of the way gangs in this city with the worst gang problem in the United States have bolstered their presence in Mexico and Central America, where they attract new members eager to come here. The growth in their transnational networks has made these criminal organizations all the more worrisome, officials say.

“These gangs are the new and emerging organized crime in America,” said Bruce Riordan, director of anti-gang operations for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.

Last week the federal government and Los Angeles County undertook a joint attack on transnational gangs by charging 23 incarcerated gang members with the felony offense of re-entering the United States after being deported. The men, in their 20s and 30s, had been awaiting release from state prisons or city jails where they were serving time for a variety of offenses. They now face up to 20 more years in federal prison if convicted.

Prison sweeps like last week’s are the latest phase in a two-year-old program to identify transnational gang members in Southern California who have violated immigration law, said Jim Hayes, a field officer here for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Though a majority of gang members are American citizens, the large number of deportations of those who are not has facilitated cross-border movement that abets transnational gang expansion, said Gary Hearnsberger, chief of the Hardcore Gang Division at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Part of the reason is that after deportation without federal prosecution, gang members are generally not subject to penalties in the countries to which they are expelled, officials say. “They get a chance to hang out in another country for a while, then come right back,” often having recruited new members, Mr. Hearnsberger said.

With regular prison sweeps, however, those who have violated deportation will be less likely to slip through the cracks. After a felony conviction for the offense, they will not only serve a federal sentence here but then be released into the custody of law enforcement officials in their home countries.

Some of the men charged last week had been deported as many as seven times. Deportees carry with them the gang tattoos and the uniform of white T-shirts, thin belts and baggy pants with split cuffs. Those marks of gang affiliation are alluring to potential recruits in Latin American countries seeking work and support networks.

The deportees “don’t typically just quit their gang attitudes and gang associations,” Mr. Hearnsberger said. “They take those with them,” and as a result “you might be transporting their gang business to another country.”

Mr. Riordan traces the growth of transnational gangs to the Sept. 11 attacks and a resulting shift in federal law enforcement resources.

“In the late 1990s, we were having a lot of success convicting the leadership of the Mexican Mafia, 18th Street Gang and the Rolling 60s,” he said, referring to three of the largest of the estimated 1,000 gangs in Los Angeles County. “The events of 9/11 led to a shift of resources away from domestic violent crimes to terrorism.”

That shift, along with a vacuum created by a decline in traditional organized crime networks, allowed transnational gangs to gain a foothold in the narcotics trade and human trafficking, Mr. Riordan said.

    Los Angeles Combating Gangs Gone International, NYT, 26.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/26gangs.html?hp

Statistics on Children in Newark: Grim, With a Ray of Hope

December 20, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS

NEWARK — The numbers bear out the conventional wisdom that growing up in New Jersey’s largest city can be rough. Each week, the authorities remove an average of 33 children from their homes because of abuse and neglect. Every month, about 150 teenagers are infected with a sexually transmitted disease. One-third of all children here live in poverty.

But amid the grim litany of statistics released on Wednesday by the Association for Children of New Jersey, a children’s advocacy group, there was a handful of encouraging surprises. More young adults are enrolling in college, infant mortality fell 40 percent from 2000 to 2004 and the number of children finding themselves in handcuffs has dropped 27 percent since 2002.

To the authors of the report, “Newark Kids Count 2007,” the most unexpected finding was that juveniles in Newark are no more likely to be arrested for violent crime than youths in surrounding Essex County, which includes wealthy suburbs, or in New Jersey as a whole.

Considering Newark’s reputation for lawlessness — and the national attention it received last summer when four teenagers and two adults were charged with killing three students on a playground. Cecilia Zalkind, the organization’s executive director, said she found such statistics refreshingly counterintuitive.

“This data shows we’re on the right track,” said Ms. Zalkind, whose organization has been issuing an annual scorecard for Newark since 1993.

But during a news conference on Wednesday, the association made it clear that Newark still faces sobering challenges. Although juvenile arrests on all charges have been dropping in recent years, the number of youths apprehended on drug charges jumped 66 percent in 2006, while the number found with weapons did not drop, a signs, officials said, that gang activity had an increasingly pernicious grip on teenagers here.

In a trend reflected in cities nationwide, a growing number of young adults are drifting into gangs; the Newark Police Department, for example, has compiled a list of 3,600 suspected gang members, most of them under 25, and during the past year, arrests of teenagers for violent offenses jumped 11 percent compared with 2006. “There is plenty of cause for concern,” Ms. Zalkind said.

Even the overall decline in juvenile arrests does not necessarily reflect a seismic drop in teenage crime. The report points out that there has been an 8 percent drop in the city’s child population in recent years and that the police have stopped arresting youths for fights that do not involve weapons, a policy change that may be reducing arrest figures. (The hope behind that policy, city officials said, was to shield young people from the potentially ruinous effects of the criminal justice system, especially when it involves minor incidents.)

Behind every bright statistic, it seemed, was a reason for continued hand-wringing. The association found, for example, that the child-poverty rate in Newark has been dropping significantly in recent years — 40 percent since 2002 — while incomes were rising. But celebrating such gains is hard when the median household income, of $34,500, is half the state average — in one of the nation’s most expensive regions.

Mayor Cory A. Booker welcomed the findings, saying the statistics were a useful benchmark for measuring the failures and successes of his administration. He pointed out that during his first year in office, the city had drastically increased the child immunization rate to 75 percent, from 58 percent in 2001, an accomplishment that recently earned the city a commendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But he said that he was especially dismayed by figures showing that a third of Newark’s adult residents do not have high school diplomas and that fewer than 12 percent attended college. “Our dropout rates are incredibly high,” Mr. Booker said. “These children lose the opportunity to fully participate in a knowledge-based global economy.”

The mayor recounted an encounter he had early this week with three teenagers who were walking the streets about 11 p.m. The three boys told him they were no longer in school and when pushed, admitted having no plans for the future. Mr. Booker found the encounter troubling. “It’s not O.K. for children to be walking around at night,” he said. “They have to be confronted.” He added: “They were not bad kids, but they had fallen through the cracks. We have to show that this is a city that truly loves its children.”

    Statistics on Children in Newark: Grim, With a Ray of Hope, NYT, 20.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/nyregion/20newark.html

Tecate Journal

Smugglers Build an Underground World

December 7, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

TECATE, Calif., Dec. 6 — The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets. The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office building in sight of the steel-plated border fence.

Three or four feet wide and six feet high, the passageway is illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two pumps. The neatly squared walls, carved through solid rock, bear the signs of engineering skill and professional drilling tools.

Shrink-wrapped bundles of marijuana, nearly 14,000 pounds worth $5.6 million in street sales, were found in the shipping container and in a trailer next to it, making clear the tunnel’s purpose: to serve as another major smuggling corridor. Found Monday here in Tecate, it is the latest of 56 cross-border tunnels found in the Southwest since the onset of additional guards and fencing aboveground after Sept. 11, 2001.

“I’m never alarmed when they are found,” said a senior investigator with a task force of federal law enforcement agencies still combing the scene Tuesday. “I am alarmed we don’t find them enough.”

The authorities believe that the increased border enforcement has helped deter illegal immigrant traffic and allowed agents to make more drug seizures. But they acknowledge that it has also been driving traffickers to redouble their efforts to find alternative ways of breaching the border.

It is not just tunnels. Immigration agents in San Diego say they are concerned about a spate of rickety boats found in the last year along San Diego County beaches, some having just dropped off illegal immigrants. People smuggled through official border crossings have been discovered tucked into hollowed-out dashboards in vans and trucks and in perilous pockets in vehicle undercarriages.

“It’s like squeezing a balloon,” said Michael Unzueta, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of the San Diego area. “The air has got to go somewhere.”

But the tunnels are now found with alarming regularity, and often just under the noses of law enforcement officers. This latest one is a block from a Border Patrol station and next to a hill that agents often use to watch for illegal immigrant traffic. And in September, a Border Patrol vehicle became stuck in a sinkhole in San Luis, Ariz., 50 yards north of a border fence, that turned out to be a collapsed segment of a smuggling tunnel under construction.

A total of 69 such tunnels have been discovered — 68 along the Southwest border, the other at the Canadian border with Washington State — since the authorities began keeping records on them in 1990. Of that total, 80 percent have been found, mostly through informant tips, since the terrorist attacks, when border enforcement was significantly stepped up. The longest, found last year in the Otay Mesa district of San Diego, stretched nearly half a mile.

Because of concerns that terrorists could adopt the tactic to smuggle radioactive and chemical materials into the United States, a military team checks each underground passageway discovered; no residue from such materials has ever been found.

Most of the tunnels are of the “gopher” variety, dug quickly and probably by small-time smugglers who may be engaged in moving either people or limited amounts of drugs across the border. But more than a dozen have been fairly elaborate affairs like this one, with lighting, drainage, ventilation, pulleys for moving loads and other features that point to big spending by drug cartels. Engineers have clearly been consulted in the construction of these detailed corridors.

The tunnel here has drawn additional scrutiny because just hours after it was discovered, the deputy police chief of the twin city across the border, Tecate, Mexico, was killed in a fusillade at his home, in what appeared to be a cartel assassination. The deputy chief had helped find the passage’s Mexican end.

A Border Patrol agent on routine patrol discovered the tunnel when his drug-sniffing dog reacted to the smell of marijuana several hundred feet away. When the agent entered the container, the Border Patrol said, a man with a pistol in his waistband disappeared deep into the opening.

The tunnel, like the others found, will be sealed at the border and eventually filled with cement slurry.

Though few people have been prosecuted for activities related to the construction of these tunnels, a federal law enacted this year makes it a felony to design or build one, or to participate in smuggling involving it.

There was no answer at the telephone number listed for the owner of the lot where the tunnel was discovered on the American side. But The San Diego Union-Tribune identified him as Flavio Aguirre, an auto broker in Tecate, Mexico, who told the paper that he rented the site a couple of years ago to men who said they operated a furniture-moving company.

The building where the tunnel opens on the Mexican side has been closed by the police. People who work nearby say that drug trafficking is common in the area but that they never saw anything unusual at the building, at least during working hours.

“They are all over here,” one man said of drug smugglers, “but you don’t see anything.”

    Smugglers Build an Underground World, NYT, 7.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/us/07tunnel.html

This Land

Caught Up in a Storm, With His Eyes Wide Open

December 2, 2007
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

PASCAGOULA, Miss.

A boy named Isaiah Polk went off one day to see what he could see. He scaled a chain-link fence at the back of his tired FEMA trailer park, where fetid water gathers, and escaped into woods declared off-limits by his mother after reports of poisonous snakes.

On that hot July afternoon, Isaiah and two friends hunted for tiny crabs, threw dirt bombs and visited the cemetery across the creek where his grandfather, who used to give him firecrackers, is buried. They also found treasure: a mysterious black duffel bag that came with them on their return climb over the wobbly fence separating the forbidden from the forgotten.

The bag was jostled, kicked, and finally opened to reveal strange things, including a pair of pliers, some tubing, nail clippers and a two-liter plastic bottle filled with a milky liquid. Isaiah waved a younger boy away from the bag, then bent over to zip it up. He heard a hiss and then BAM!

The bottle exploded in his searching brown eyes. Eyes that had danced upon strings of joyous Seussian words, followed spiraling footballs into outstretched hands, hunted creeks for crabs. Eyes that had taken in the absence of a long-gone father, the struggles of a stretched-thin mother, the bruises given her by a violent boyfriend, the Gulf Coast rot of Hurricane Katrina. Eyes of a boy just being a boy, and not yet 10.

Isaiah felt the wetness, and then the acidic burn. “I saw blue,” he says. “And then everything started turning colors and stuff.” Then came a kind of FEMA-park fog, as people shouted and cried, and the police came to ask what happened, son.

Late that night, an ambulance headed for the burn unit at Children’s Hospital in Birmingham, 300 miles north. In the front, one worried mother; in the back, a curious-now-terrified boy who had just stumbled upon a meth lab dumpsite.

To cook the white drug that dictates their lives, the haggard, frenzied denizens of the methamphetamine world need assorted materials that go together only in the context of a meth lab: paint thinner and coffee filters, drain cleaner and tubing, fertilizer and cold medicine. And when these amateur chemists are done — that is, if they have not set themselves on fire — they dump their hazardous and potentially explosive waste in the Dumpster of a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, say, or in the woods.

Isaiah spent a week in the hospital having his burned face and lips treated with salve and his damaged eyes flushed with solution, over and over. A blond nurse asked him what her hair color was, and he said brown. Although he could not see well, he could hear people talking about his bluish-white eyes. He worried that he was ugly, and that no one would like him.

Isaiah returned to the trailer park, the local news media converged and all of Pascagoula sighed at the sight of him. Scarring and scabbing on the face, left eye clouded, right eye less so, both eyes asking why me.

One way the community responded was down at the Wal-Mart, where the receiving manager, Patsy Poole, set up a fund-raising booth near Register 1 that displayed photos of Isaiah’s transformed face. More than $2,000 in four hours; more than $5,000 in a few days.

“Twenties!” Ms. Poole says. “They was just throwing in the money.”

Another way was by inundating the Narcotics Task Force of Jackson County, still working out of a poststorm trailer, with tips about dozens of meth labs and dumpsites. Sgt. Curtis Spiers, its commander, said many calls came from local meth users, whose arms and hands often carry telltale burn scars of their own accidents. They hadn’t informed in years, but what happened to this boy was too much.

A couple of people told Chad Heck, the task force’s assistant commander, to check out two young men who hang out in a trailer a few yards from Isaiah’s, including one who had been laughing that it was his stuff that blew up.

The police soon arrested James McCall and Terry Shimp. Both said they were sorry. Asked if he would like to apologize directly to Isaiah, Mr. McCall said, “Hell, yeah.”

Some good things happened because of the bad thing that happened to Isaiah. It reminded anyone who needed to be that there are still FEMA trailer parks two years after Hurricane Katrina, no matter that Mississippi has spent $1.7 billion in federal aid on projects for businesses and the middle class. It scared people into realizing methamphetamine’s potential for collateral damage. It prompted one of the suspects to pass on information that cracked a nine-year-old murder case.

“I really believe it was part of his penance,” Sgt. Spiers says.

As for Isaiah: he endures.

His mother, Monaleissa Polk, said most of the $15,000 in donations went for medical-related bills early on, although Isaiah now has Medicaid. She used the rest of it to move the family out of the FEMA trailer park and into one place, then into another, and, finally, into a house a few miles north of Pascagoula, close behind a truck stop.

She says the anger that Isaiah had before his accident has only intensified since; he recently roughed up a smaller schoolmate and was suspended from the fourth grade for three days. One minute he is surly and distant, and the next he is a loving and lovely and thoroughly boyish boy.

He is also a bit of a medical marvel. The scars on his face have disappeared. Sight in his right eye is restored. And there is only a rim of that milky blueness in his left eye. Doctors who had planned to perform a corneal transplant are waiting to see what more the young boy’s body can do to heal itself.

Isaiah is supposed to wear glasses, but for some reason they keep breaking. He says that’s all right, because he sees everything around him.

Audio and photographs from Pascagoula are online at nytimes.com/danbarry.

    Caught Up in a Storm, With His Eyes Wide Open, NYT, 2.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/us/02land.html?hp

Mute Autistic Boy Stabbed in Eyes

December 1, 2007
Filed at 10:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LAUDERHILL, Fla. (AP) -- A woman stabbed her 12-year-old autistic nephew in both eyes with a military-style dagger, likely leaving him permanently blind, police said.

The woman then stabbed herself in one eye after attacking the boy on Friday, police said.

Relatives, for unclear reasons, waited more than 10 hours before calling 911, police said. No charges have been filed and no names have been released.

The woman gave no reason for the stabbing and the boy is mute, police said.

''The preliminary prognosis is that the child is going to be blind,'' said Lt. Rick Rocco, spokesman for the Lauderhill Police Department.

The boy lives with his grandmother in the South Florida community.

''She adored that child,'' neighbor Peggy Burrows said. ''Sometimes the boy would be running around the lawn in his underwear, but we rarely saw him. They keep mostly to themselves.''

Neighbor Joanne Kull said the aunt ''looked very angry'' as police pulled her away.

    Mute Autistic Boy Stabbed in Eyes, NYT, 1.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Eye-Stabbing.html

New Philadelphia Mayor’s Top Task: Fight Crime

November 23, 2007
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

PHILADELPHIA — The day after Michael Nutter won a landslide victory to become this city’s next mayor, he put on a charcoal gray suit and drove to his first public event: the funeral of a police officer shot in a brazen daytime robbery.

Two nights before he announced his choice for police commissioner, two more officers were shot and wounded.

When Mr. Nutter takes office on Jan. 7, he will face a crime wave that has left at least 355 people dead so far this year and that gave Philadelphia the highest homicide rate of any big city in the country last year, with 406 killings — more than even New York City, which has six times the population.

Crime is clearly the biggest challenge facing the new mayor. It is also the reason for his surprise victory.

Just 12 months ago, Mr. Nutter, a 50-year old former city councilman, was a little-known candidate with a controversial plan to reduce crime who was working 20-hour days, handing out Nutter Butter cookies to voters in a desperate effort to climb out of fifth place in a five-man race.

Now, he has been called the Seabiscuit of this year’s urban politics, having beaten two congressmen, a veteran state legislator and a billionaire businessman in the Democratic primary in May before taking the general election on Nov. 6 by a four-to-one ratio, the largest the city has seen since 1931.

Mr. Nutter distinguished himself on the campaign trail with aggressive plans to declare crime emergencies in the city’s most violent neighborhoods, which could allow the police to close streets or set curfews. He also offered plans for an increased use of “stop, question and frisk” tactics to confront anyone the police suspect is carrying an illegal weapon.

Responding to concerns by opponents about the risk of civil rights abuses and racial profiling, Mr. Nutter said bluntly, “My view is that people also have a civil right not to get shot.”

But crime is not the only reason for Mr. Nutter’s rise.

Voters also see him as the antidote to the political malaise that set in from what many here simply call “the bug.” The term refers to the bribery scandals unveiled by a federal wiretap of the office of the current mayor, John F. Street, and an investigation made public in 2003 that led to the conviction of the city treasurer.

Though Mayor Street, who was never charged, did not seek a third term this year because of term limits, Mr. Nutter won because he was able to strike the starkest contrast to him, political analysts here said.

“The investigations turned his administration into a lame duck from an early moment in his second term at a time when the city needed a proactive, accessible, get-things done leader,” said G. Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs and director of the Keystone Poll at Franklin & Marshall College. “So, instead of running the city, Street is seen a couple months ago standing in line for hours in front of a store to be the first to person to get the new iPhone. The public saw that as endemic of a guy who had become irrelevant, who had no pull and who had all the wrong priorities.”

By contrast, Mr. Nutter is seen as an able leader with a strong mandate. When he walked into a restaurant with a reporter for lunch, he received a spontaneous standing ovation.

He will face a looming budgetary crisis and the risk of alienating one of the city’s largest voting blocs when he enters negotiations in July for a new contract with the union for about 30,000 current and retired municipal workers.

Crime, however, is the most urgent concern.

On Oct. 30, a masked gunman fired on several people in a car before shooting and wounding a nearby police officer just blocks from Drexel University, where a Democratic presidential debate was taking place. The shooting sparked a frenetic scene in front of the debate hall as ambulances and police cars filled the area, sirens blaring. Twelve hours later, another officer was shot, this time fatally, in a daytime robbery.

“Crime here is an economic problem, it’s an education problem, it’s a public safety problem and it’s something that we’re going to have to aggressively tackle,” said Mr. Nutter, who pushed for an annual tax credit of up to $10,000 for each ex-offender a business hires for up to three years.

But Mr. Nutter is best known for having helped change the city charter to strengthen ethics and transparency standards, and for pushing through legislation involving wage-tax cuts, same-sex partner benefits and a smoking ban at most bars and restaurants.

Still, not everyone believes his stop-and-frisk tactics will work.

“While I’m the police commissioner, I’m not going to do it,” said the outgoing commissioner, Sylvester Johnson.

He said Mr. Nutter’s plan would backfire because it would sow dissent in the neighborhoods where Mr. Johnson’s department has worked hard to build trust. As evidence of the improved relations, Mr. Johnson cited the thousands who turned out in response to the call for 10,000 men to participate in community patrols and to defend their neighborhoods against crime.

Mr. Nutter said he believed the increased stop-and-frisk tactics could be carried out in ways that did not impinge on civil rights, and he added that he believed most of those concerns had been raised by people who did not live in the neighborhoods most affected by the crime.

Raised in a gritty section of West Philadelphia by his mother, who worked for Bell Telephone, Mr. Nutter went to the University of Pennsylvania before becoming an investment manager focused on public finance. He joined the City Council in 1992 and served until 2006.

His wife, Lisa, runs an organization that provides job training to high school children. He has a 12-year-old daughter, Olivia, and a 24-year-old son, Christian. He drinks no caffeine, does not smoke and eats no meat (“I lost my stomach for meat after reading a little too much in college about how it gets processed,” he said).

Mr. Nutter said he learned the most about politics in the summer of his freshman year at Penn, when he was a disc jockey and helped manage the old Impulse Disco, one of the city’s first black-owned discothèques.

“You’re shaking a lot of hands, managing people many of them older than you, you’re running a business, and you’re constantly in public view,” he said, recounting his signature shout-out from that era: “Mixmaster Mike, laying the labels on the tables for the ladies tonight.” At the after-party on election night, he dazzled the crowd by taking the microphone and giving a spirited rendition of the 1979 Sugarhill Gang hit “Rapper’s Delight.”

But Anna C. Verna, president of the City Council, said voters supported Mr. Nutter primarily for his work ethic.

“Michael can be really fun, and he has a great sense of humor,” Ms. Verna said. “But when it comes time to do business, he is all about business and the fact is, right now in this city there is a lot of serious business to be done.”

    New Philadelphia Mayor’s Top Task: Fight Crime, NYT, 23.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/us/23philadelphia.html

City Homicides Still Dropping, to Under 500

November 23, 2007
The New York City
By AL BAKER

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million.

If that trend holds up, fewer than 100 homicide victims in New York City this year will have been strangers to their assailants. The vast majority died in disputes with friends or acquaintances, with rival drug gang members or — to a far lesser degree — with romantic partners, spouses, parents and others.

The low number of killings by strangers belies the common imagery that New Yorkers are vulnerable to arbitrary attacks on the streets, or die in robberies that turn fatal.

In the eyes of some criminologists, the police will be hard pressed to drive the killing rate much lower, since most killings occur now within the four walls of an apartment or the confines of close relationships.

“What are you going to do, send cops to every house?” said Peter K. Manning, the Brooks professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston.

“We know that historically, homicide is the least suppressible crime by police action,” he added. “It is, generally speaking, a private crime, resulting from people who know one another and have relationships that end up in death struggles at home or in semipublic places.”

Police officials did not dispute the validity of that assessment.

The homicide figure continues a remarkable slide since 1990, when New York recorded its greatest number of killings in a single year, 2,245, and when untold scores of the victims were killed in violence between strangers.

Homicides began falling in the early 1990s, when Raymond W. Kelly first served as police commissioner, and plummeted further under subsequent commissioners. Mr. Kelly returned to serve under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2002, the first year there were fewer than 600 homicides. There were 587 that year, down from 649 in the previous year.

Nearly two decades ago, the city’s crack-cocaine epidemic led to headlines about gang wars, semiautomatic gunfire in schoolyards and a police blotter that showed more than six homicides a day, on average.

This year, with 428 killings logged through Sunday — 412 actual killings plus 16 crime victims who have died this year from injuries sustained long ago — the average number of killings is a bit more than one a day.

The numbers on file from before 1963 are not considered reliable for comparison because until then, many homicides were not recorded until an arrest was made and the case was closed, but ever since, they have been recorded as they occurred. There were 390 homicides recorded in 1960, fewer than this year, but any comparison would be faulty.

The killings that have seized the headlines this year appear to have personal motives at their core: An assistant has been charged with killing her boss, Linda Stein, inside Ms. Stein’s Fifth Avenue penthouse after a vicious argument; a Queens orthodontist, Daniel Malakov, was gunned down, and a relative of his estranged wife, whom he was fighting in divorce and child custody proceedings, has been charged.

In contrast to the 35 cases this year in which officials have found that victim and assailant were strangers, there were 121 in the whole of last year, officials said. The motives in the remainder of the killings this year are still being analyzed.

The dropping homicide rate raises a question of whether other types of crime are on the rise. But police statistics, which are subject to an internal auditing system in use since the early 1990s, show dips in six of the seven major crime categories, according to the department’s latest reports.

As of Sunday, overall crime was down 6.47 percent, compared to the same period last year. In addition to the homicide rate, the number of rapes, robberies, burglaries, grand larcenies and car thefts are all on the decline.

Felony assaults have increased slightly, to 15,372 from 15,344, a 0.1 percent increase, according to the police statistics. Shootings, which the department has tracked for 14 years, as well as the number wounded in those shootings, are both down.

After years when crime fell across the nation, many cities in the country are now experiencing a surge in homicides, said Thomas A. Reppetto, a police historian who monitors the city crime numbers and helped write “NYPD: A City and Its Police.”

“You would expect New York to follow the national trend, but instead, murders continue to go down considerably,” Mr. Reppetto said.

“Not only has the N.Y.P.D. reduced murder, by nearly 80 percent, but it has changed the pattern of homicides,” he added. “In the early 1990s, many innocent citizens were killed by bullets from battling drug gangs. Today, thanks to the police drive against the gangs, that type of homicide is far less common.”

It is extremely common around the nation to find in killings involving acquaintances that those involved are not family members but criminals or drug gang members, said David M. Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

In the 412 killings this year, the number of people with previous arrests for narcotics was striking: 196 victims and 149 assailants. And 77 percent of the assailants had a previous arrest history, while 70 percent of the victims did, the statistics showed.

Killers and those killed are overwhelmingly male and most in both categories are between 18 and 40, according to the police analysis. In terms of race and ethnicity, whites make up 7 percent of victims and assailants, while 66 percent of the victims and 61 percent of the assailants are black and 26 percent of the victims and 31 percent of the assailants are Hispanic.

When told about the low homicide numbers, Dr. Manning uttered a single word: “Wow.”

Mr. Kennedy said, “What this shows is that the N.Y.P.D. — and whatever else is going on in New York — has managed to squeeze the problem of active offenders against active offenders down to a remarkably, historically low level.”

    City Homicides Still Dropping, to Under 500, NYT, 23.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/nyregion/23murder.html?hp

Ga. Boys Ages 8 and 9 Charged With Rape

November 19, 2007
Filed at 11:51 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ACWORTH, Ga. (AP) -- Three boys ages 8 and 9 were being held Monday in a detention center on charges of kidnapping and raping an 11-year-old girl in the woods near a suburban apartment complex, officials said.

The alleged attack happened Thursday and the girl's mother reported it to authorities Sunday, Acworth police Capt. Wayne Dennard said.

''The victim said they were playing outdoors and the girl was forced into a wooded area where she was sexually assaulted, where one of the boys raped her,'' Dennard told The Associated Press.

The three boys -- an 8-year-old and two 9-year-olds -- were charged with rape, kidnapping, false imprisonment and sexual assault, Dennard said. They were due in juvenile court Monday afternoon. Their names were being withheld because of their age.

Dennard would not comment further.

Prosecutors had not received the case report from police on Monday, nor had they decided whether to try the suspects as adults.

''That decision hasn't been made,'' said Kathy Watkins, a spokeswoman for the Cobb County District Attorney's office. She had no further comment.

Acworth, 30 miles northwest of Atlanta along the shores of Lake Allatoona, is a town of about 17,000.

''This wouldn't be normal anywhere, but especially not Acworth,'' Dennard said.

    Ga. Boys Ages 8 and 9 Charged With Rape, NYT, 19.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Boys-Rape.html

Families Stay Close After Murder - Suicide

November 18, 2007
Filed at 9:28 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WAPAKONETA, Ohio (AP) -- They grew up 20 minutes apart in northwest Ohio, Michelle from a town of 1,750, her dad a postal worker, her mom a shirt embroiderer.

Andy lived just outside this city of 9,400 known for hometown hero Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. His dad sells farm supplies -- vaccines, pet food, pond chemicals. His mom is a secretary at a nursing home.

Andy and Michelle, so close that he drove 436 miles round trip in a weekend to visit her in college.

Yet for reasons no one can explain, Andy shot Michelle to death outside his apartment June 3, 2006. He fired 16 shots at his girlfriend of three years, then walked back inside his apartment, knelt on the living room floor, placed his Glock 9 mm semiautomatic in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

''Two good kids,'' said Dan Brown, Andy's father. ''We don't know what happened.''

Another murder-suicide, another wrenching headline. Yet this time two families were brought together, not torn apart.

Two families mourned two victims. Both were 21 years old.

''We didn't just lose a daughter,'' said Michelle's mom, Becky Mielecki. ''We also lost a son.''

------

In high school Michelle and Andy were just friends. Their gang of nine girls and three guys hung out almost every weekend, painting their faces for football games, grabbing Mexican food at El Azteca, a restaurant just off Interstate 75 where Andy always ordered No. 32 -- enchiladas tapatias -- for the number on his basketball jersey.

Michelle ran cross country, and both were members of the Octagon Club, a service group that cleaned up the stadium after football games, visited nursing homes.

Silly and funny and caring, always telling jokes to make you laugh, said Cary Fell, a friend who still chatted with Michelle almost every day in college.

A loyal friend, always willing to help, lend a few bucks, be there for you, said Cody Hefner, Andy's best friend.

Family came first. Andy spent hours with his grandfather. Michelle took her younger sister, Jenny, along whenever she headed out with friends.

On Sept. 11, 2001, his 17th birthday, Andy turned down a dinner out to watch news of the World Trade Center attack. From that day on he wanted to be in law enforcement.

He rode with Wapakoneta police officers. He bought a Mag-Lite flashlight, the kind police carried, and a scanner and walkie-talkies. Right after turning 21, he bought the Glock, a common gun in police departments.

Michelle's sister Jenny didn't like guns and told Andy so. Guns don't kill people, he and Michelle replied.

They started dating the summer after graduating from high school.

Michelle spent a semester at college in southern Ohio but didn't like being so far away and transferred to the University of Toledo, where Andy was studying criminal justice and accounting.

She studied sports marketing and dreamed of handling public relations for the Cleveland Indians. A lifelong fan, she'd gone to a game on her birthday every year since she was a little girl.

At his apartment Andy had a poster of a model holding a Glock in a ''Charlie's Angels'' pose over his bed. He kept his black-colored gun in a drawer by his bed. His MySpace username was ''glockamb.''

''Being alone,'' he wrote on his MySpace page, as his greatest fear.

''Saving someone's life,'' he wrote under ''How do you want to die?''

Michelle revealed her biggest fear on her own page. ''Dying or someone I love or close to me dying.''

------

Andy was devastated when his grandfather died in a fire in March 2006. Michelle saw how emotional he'd become, how tearful. Different from before.

She was dealing with her own emotions. ''Am I too young to be in a committed relationship?'' she asked in an instant message of Hallie Sheck, a friend from Grady's Ladies, a group of female fans of handsome Cleveland Indians center fielder Grady Sizemore.

A few days later she'd write, ''It's good and I'm happy.''

Andy sensed a change too. One day he'd tell Cody he was worried they might be breaking up. The next he'd say they had talked and everything was fine.

On Memorial Day, Andy and Michelle were together at her parents' house, sitting in the living room, cuddling and holding hands.

The next week, Andy called his sister Lindsey, upset that Michelle had broken a date to spend time with a friend.

On Friday, June 2, Michelle told a co-worker at a Bed, Bath and Beyond store that she was going to break up with Andy that night, police say.

That evening Michelle and Lindsey -- her roommate -- left a party and headed for the Distillery, a popular Toledo bar. Michelle called Andy at work to tell him to meet them there.

''I'll see you tomorrow night,'' Andy told co-workers as he left.

Meeting at about 11 p.m., they had a few beers. Andy and Michelle were close, holding hands. Then they were gone. Their abrupt departure seemed unusual.

About 2 a.m. June 3, neighbors on the third floor of Andy's apartment building heard loud arguing. ''Help me,'' one couple heard. ''No, Andrew,'' someone else heard.

As the neighbors ran into the hall they saw Michelle pull her wrist free from Andy's grip at the door of his apartment. Andy stepped into the hall, raised his Glock and began shooting. At least two bullets struck Michelle in the torso. The rest hit a stairway wall.

Finished, Andy went back into his apartment, not bothering to shut the door. He called Lindsey on her cell phone but disconnected the call before she answered.

He killed himself with his final bullet.

Coroner's tests showed Andy's blood-alcohol content was 0.10 percent, legally drunk in Ohio. Michelle's level was 0.16.

Family members say they don't believe alcohol played a role. Police say it can't be ruled out.

------

Andy's father, Dan, calls the hour-and-a-half drive to Toledo that morning the longest of his life. Later that day, he and Andy's mom, Dorothy -- everyone calls her Dort -- took another long drive to a house just 20 minutes away in Cridersville.

Dort told Dan she had no idea how the Mieleckis felt toward them but knew they had to go.

''Don't hate Andy and don't hate us,'' she said to Michelle's parents.

The Mieleckis decided the day of the shooting that anger wasn't the answer.

''It's not that I'm real religious but I do believe in God and I believe in forgiveness and you're not supposed to hate,'' Becky says.

The Browns went to Michelle's viewing and funeral; the Mieleckis to Andy's.

Over the next year the couples stopped by each other's homes to visit. They went to the Dairy Stand for ice cream. Dort, 54, and Becky, 47, talked on the phone. Still do. Not long ago the couples went out to dinner together at the Inn Between.

''Friends Say Boyfriend Was Jealous Type,'' said one headline after the shooting. But family and friends say that what happened was out of character.

The shooting ''was probably the only thing wrong the kid ever did in his life,'' Tom Mielecki says.

As the one-year anniversary approached, Dort suggested a cookout to honor the couple's memory. Friends came from around the country. They talked and laughed for hours.

The Mieleckis showed up first and left last, as darkness fell.

''Two good kids,'' says Tom Mielecki, 51. ''I wish we knew why, but we don't.''

Jenny and Lindsey see each other often. What's the sense in being angry, says Jenny, 20. Lindsey needs her as much as she needs Lindsey.

Andy's other sister, Stacey Jutte, was pregnant as the anniversary approached. She and her husband, Rick, hit upon the name for the baby as they visited Andy's grave.

''You tell me first,'' Stacey said to her husband. She wept at his reply. ''It was the exact same name.''

Andrea Michelle.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is based on interviews with Wapakoneta High School principal Aaron Rex; Michelle's parents, Tom and Becky; her sisters, Jenny and Trish; Andy's parents, Dorothy and Dan; his sisters, Lindsey and Stacey; Michelle's friends Cary Fell, Jodi Lynn Gray and Hallie Sheck; Andy and Michelle's friends Cody Hefner and Drew Dorner; Toledo police Detective Liz Kantura; and several witnesses of the shooting.

------

On the Net:

Grady's Ladies: http://www.gradysladies.com/

Michelle Mielecki's MySpace page: http://tinyurl.com/33y5cy

Andrew Brown's MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/glockamb#22840760

    Families Stay Close After Murder - Suicide, NYT, 18.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Two-Good-Kids.html

4 Atlantic City Hooker Deaths Unsolved

November 19, 2007
Filed at 9:38 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) -- Hugh Auslander met Kim Raffo when they were teenagers in Brooklyn. They moved to Florida, got married and had two children. Auslander worked as a carpenter, while his wife took care of the kids and volunteered with the Girl Scouts and the school PTA.

But a year ago, her life came to an end that would have been unimaginable in those happier times: She was one of four women whose bodies were discovered in a ditch behind a string of cut-rate motels known for drugs and prostitution, on a road called the Black Horse Pike.

They were barefoot, with their heads facing east toward the casinos of Atlantic City, just a few hundred yards away. Speculation spread that a serial killer might be on the loose in the city whose motto is ''Always Turned On.''

Auslander wishes he knew what happened between the time his wife left him and the day she was found, Nov. 20 of last year.

''We get up each day and we wait for answers, some glimmer of hope,'' he said.

Authorities have been tight-lipped about how the investigation is going, including whether they believe one person killed all four women. The other victims were Barbara Breidor, Molly Jean Dilts, and Tracy Ann Roberts.

''We fully recognize that it's been a year since the bodies of the women were discovered,'' said Atlantic County Prosecutor Theodore Housel. ''This is an open, active, important investigation. We are pursuing a number of investigative techniques including, but not limited to, additional forensic tests.''

Relatives said Raffo grew bored with life as a housewife. She enrolled in a cooking class and met a man who had a long history of drug use. They started an affair.

Auslander took the kids and left, and Raffo and her boyfriend went to Atlantic City. When she wasn't working as a waitress, they binged on cocaine.

Her habit grew worse and she stopped going to work, eventually selling herself. She started out asking for $100, but often settled for much less, according to police records and other prostitutes who knew her.

''They lived a very bad life,'' Auslander said. ''I basically gave up on her. Then I heard news that she was in trouble.''

The couple's children had since been placed in foster care and Auslander, who continues to chase carpentry work up and down the East Coast, came back from Florida to New Jersey to help her.

''She was extremely excited to get the hell out,'' he said. ''We went to Long Island for five weeks. We were happy there, but it wasn't like we were getting back together or anything. I had another life, she had another life. We were more friends helping each other out.

''Unfortunately, she said she had some unfinished business in Atlantic City,'' said Auslander, who added that she didn't elaborate. ''We parted ways with the hope of getting together the week after that -- a week too late.''

Raffo's body was the first to be identified. An autopsy determined she was strangled with a rope or cord and had been in the ditch for a couple of days.

Although they never explicitly said so, Terry Oleson, 35, was once prosecutors' prime suspect in the hooker deaths. He had been staying at the Golden Key Motel -- the same $27-a-night hot-sheet hovel behind which the bodies were found -- just before they were discovered.

Inside his house, which was rigged with hidden video cameras, authorities discovered nude images of his then-girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter.

He was arrested in April in connection with the videotaping, and agreed when prosecutors requested in June that he submit DNA samples.

Authorities still won't say what the tests revealed.

Oleson pleaded guilty to the nude videotaping charge last month and was released on bail until he is sentenced in two weeks. He walked free wearing a tow-truck company T-shirt with the slogan ''Off The Hook'' written across the chest.

''When he walked out of the Salem County jail, that certainly spoke volumes,'' said his lawyer, James Leonard. ''If they had DNA that linked Terry Oleson to any of these women, without question they would have charged him. I haven't seen a shred of evidence that would link him to these crimes.''

Oleson said the past seven months have been ''a living nightmare.''

''There's no way my DNA was anywhere near them,'' he said. ''I never met them. I wish I had some information for everybody. I hope they find whoever did this.''

The case has filled other prostitutes with fear.

''I still think about it every day,'' said Shorty, a Philadelphia native who started work as a stripper at age 22 and switched to prostitution six years later when she couldn't compete with the young, fresh faces.

Shorty used to carry a knife at all times, but ditched it shortly after the killings, fearing that a violent customer might use it against her. Now she regrets getting rid of it.

She continues ''dating'' men who drive up along Pacific Avenue and flag her down, mainly to support her crack habit. The four women in the ditch each had also used drugs, authorities said.

''Nobody misses drug addicts,'' she said. ''We disappear, and it's normal. Nobody comes looking for us.''

Still, she takes precautions.

''When a guy wants to go to the Black Horse Pike, that's a big, big red flag,'' Shorty said. ''I try to stay in control. I tell them where I'll go with them. Lose control, and you're done.''

    4 Atlantic City Hooker Deaths Unsolved, NYT, 19.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bodies-Found.html

FBI: Hate crime up nearly 8% in 2006

19 November 2007
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by nearly 8%, the FBI reported Monday, as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances.

Police across the nation reported 7,722 criminal incidents in 2006 targeting victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin or physical or mental disability. That was up 7.8% from the 7,163 incidents reported in 2005.

Although the noose incidents and beatings among students at Jena, La., high school occurred in the last half of 2006, they were not included in the report. Only 12,600 of the nation's more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006 and neither Jena nor LaSalle Parish, in which the town is located, were among the agencies reporting. justice protest

Nevertheless, the Jena incidents, and a rash of subsequent noose incidents around the country, have spawned civil rights protests in Louisiana and last week at Justice Department headquarters here. The department said it investigated the incident but decided not to prosecute because the federal government does not typically bring hate crime charges against juveniles.

The Jena case began in August 2006 after a black student sat under a tree known as a gathering spot for white students. Three white students later hung nooses from the tree. They were suspended by the school but not prosecuted. Six black teenagers, however, were charged by LaSalle Parish prosecutor Reed Walters with attempted second-degree murder of a white student who was beaten unconscious in December 2006. The charges have since been reduced to aggravated second-degree assault, but civil rights protesters have complained that no charges were filed against the white students who hung the nooses.

The Justice Department says it is actively investigating a number of noose incidents at schools, work places and neighborhoods around the country. It says "a noose is a powerful symbol of hate and racially motivated violence" recalling the days of lynchings of blacks and that it can constitute a federal civil rights offense under some circumstances.

The FBI report does not break out the number of noose incidents but the two most frequent hate crimes in 2006 were property damage or vandalism, at 2,911 offenses, and intimidation, at 2,046 offenses. There were 860 aggravated assaults and 1,447 simple assaults. There were three murders, 6 rapes and 41 arsons. Other offenses included robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.

The 7,722 criminal hate crime incidents involved 9,080 specific criminal offenses, include 5,449 against individuals, 3,593 against property and 38 classified as against society at large. An incident can involve attacks on both people and property.

As has been the case since the FBI began collecting hate crime data in 1991, the most frequent motivation was racial bias, accounting for 51.8% of the incidents in 2006. That was down slightly from the 54.7% in 2005.

Also in 2006, religious bias was blamed for 18.9% of the incidents; sexual orientation bias for 15.5%, and ethnic or national origin for 12.7%.

Of the 7,330 offenders identified by police, 58.6% were white, 20.6% were black, 12.9% were of unknown racial background and other races accounted for the remainder.

The greatest percentage of incidents, 31%, occurred near residences or homes. Another 18% occurred on highways or streets, 12.2% at colleges or schools, 6.1% in parking lots or garages, 3.9% at churches, synagogues or temples. The remainder occurred at other specific locations, multiple locations or unknown locations.

Lack of full participation by the more than 17,000 police agencies around the nation somewhat undermines year-to-year comparisons.

For instance, in 2004, 12,711 agencies reported 7,649 incidents. In 2005, only 12,417 agencies reported and incidents dropped 6% to 7,163. But in 2006, agencies reporting rose to 12,620 and incidents climbed 7.8% to 7,722.

    FBI: Hate crime up nearly 8% in 2006, UT, 19.11.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-19-hate-crime_N.htm

Many sex offenders are often homeless

18 November 2007
USA Today

Thousands of convicted sex offenders are reporting to police that they are homeless, raising concerns that their lack of a permanent address could make them difficult to track, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

Sex offenders, who are required to register with police and often barred by law from living near places where children gather, list addresses such as a tent, "near a bike path," "behind a cemetery" or "woods behind Wal-Mart."

In Boston, nearly two-thirds of 136 high-risk sex offenders lack permanent addresses. In New York City, more than 100 registered at two homeless shelters. In Miami last month, 22 reported living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway that links the city to Miami Beach.

"People should be concerned about this," says Jill Levenson, sex-crimes policy analyst at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla. She says homeless sex offenders are more likely to commit another crime.

USA TODAY reviewed each state's sex-offender registry, searched tens of thousands of addresses and interviewed officials in 45 states after contacting all states. The analysis shows:

•Two-thirds of the states allow convicted sex offenders, including violent predators, to register as homeless or list a shelter or inexact location as long as they stay in touch with police.

•At least a dozen states list hundreds of sex offenders without specific addresses. California registered 2,716 as "transient." Washington state listed 564 as homeless, but the number is probably much higher, says Carolyn Sanchez of the Washington State Patrol.

•Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maine and other states say the number of homeless sex offenders is rising. Landlords often won't rent to them, and laws in dozens of states and hundreds of cities bar them from living near areas where kids play.

"Residency restrictions are the linchpin for causing homelessness among sex offenders," says Frances Breyne of the Kansas Department of Corrections.

In California, about 500 have registered as "transient" since a law last year blocked them from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park, says Bill Sessa of the California Department of Corrections. They must report daily where they'll spend the night.

An exact count of convicted sex offenders who are homeless could not be done because not all state records are online. Some states do not list homeless as an address but allow shelters, post office boxes, highway mile markers and streets without house numbers.

Illinois prefers that an offender register as homeless and report weekly to police rather than register once a year and list a shelter where he might stay one night, says Cara Smith, deputy chief of staff to the attorney general.

Some states keep sex offenders locked up until they find housing. In Michigan, they are less likely to get parole than murderers, says Russ Marlin, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections. In Georgia, sex offenders can be arrested for being homeless.

Homeless sex offenders are not necessarily more dangerous than those with housing, says Laura Rogers, director of the Justice Department's office for tracking sex offenders.

She says, "The people you need to be worried about most are the ones who aren't registering at all."

    Many sex offenders are often homeless, UT, 18.11.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-18-homeless-offenders_N.htm

Abuse Risk Seen Worse As Families Change

November 17, 2007
Filed at 9:19 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Six-year-old Oscar Jimenez Jr. was beaten to death in California, then buried under fertilizer and cement. Two-year-old Devon Shackleford was drowned in an Arizona swimming pool. Jayden Cangro, also 2, died after being thrown across a room in Utah.

In each case, as in many others every year, the alleged or convicted perpetrator had been the boyfriend of the child's mother -- men thrust into father-like roles which they tragically failed to embrace.

Every case is different, every family is different. Some single mothers bring men into their lives who lovingly help raise children when the biological father is gone for good.

Nonetheless, many scholars and front-line caseworkers interviewed by The Associated Press see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a broader trend that deeply worries them. They note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the nontraditional family structures.

''This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation,'' said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. ''Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, 'What's the harm?' The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children.''

The existing data on child abuse in America is patchwork, making it difficult to track national trends with precision. The most recent federal survey on child maltreatment tallies nearly 900,000 abuse incidents reported to state agencies in 2005, but it does not delve into how rates of abuse correlate with parents' marital status or the makeup of a child's household.

Similarly, data on the roughly 1,500 child-abuse fatalities that occur annually in the United States leaves unanswered questions. Many of those deaths result from parental neglect, rather than overt physical abuse. Of the 500 or so deaths caused by physical abuse, the federal statistics do not specify how many were caused by a stepparent or unmarried partner of the parent.

However, there are many other studies that, taken together, reinforce the concerns. Among the findings:

--Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

--Children living in stepfamilies or with single parents are at higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents, according to several studies co-authored by David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.

--Girls whose parents divorce are at significantly higher risk of sexual assault, whether they live with their mother or their father, according to research by Robin Wilson, a family law professor at Washington and Lee University.

''All the emphasis on family autonomy and privacy shields the families from investigators, so we don't respond until it's too late,'' Wilson said. ''I hate the fact that something dangerous for children doesn't get responded to because we're afraid of judging someone's lifestyle.''

Census data leaves no doubt that family patterns have changed dramatically in recent decades as cohabitation and single-parenthood became common. Thirty years ago, nearly 80 percent of America's children lived with both parents. Now, only two-thirds of them do. Of all families with children, nearly 29 percent are now one-parent families, up from 17 percent in 1977.

The net result is a sharp increase in households with a potential for instability, and the likelihood that adults and children will reside in them who have no biological tie to each other.

''I've seen many cases of physical and sexual abuse that come up with boyfriends, stepparents,'' said Eliana Gil, clinical director for the national abuse-prevention group Childhelp.

''It comes down to the fact they don't have a relationship established with these kids,'' she said. ''Their primary interest is really the adult partner, and they may find themselves more irritated when there's a problem with the children.''

That was the case with Jayden Cangro.

In July 2006, his mother's boyfriend, Phillip Guymon, hurled the 2-year-old nine feet across a room in Murray, Utah, because he balked at going to bed. The child died from his injuries.

Jayden's mother, Carly Moore, has undergone therapy since the killing. Yet she continues to second-guess herself about her two-year relationship with Guymon.

''There's so much guilt,'' she said in a telephone interview. ''I never saw him hit my kids, ever. But he was gruff in his manner -- there were signs that he wasn't most pleasant person for kids to be around.''

Guymon has been sentenced to five years in prison for second-degree felony child abuse homicide. Moore thinks the penalty is far too light.

''It's a hard thing,'' she said, recalling Jayden's death. ''You go off to work, you say, 'See you later,' and then everything's completely shattered in a split second.''

Some women can't see the trouble even when it's right in front of them.

Jennifer Harvey of Springfield, Mo., acknowledged in court last summer that she continued to date a man for two months after becoming suspicious that he had killed her 18-month-old son, Gavin.

''I was in denial,'' said Harvey, who was placed on five years' probation for not acting on her suspicions. The boyfriend, Joseph Haslett, was sentenced to life in prison for suffocating the toddler with a headlock.

The slaying of toddler Devon Shackleford in 2004 was premeditated.

Derek Chappell, who was sentenced to death this month, considered Devon an obstacle to an on-again, off-again relationship with the boy's mother, and drowned him in an apartment complex's swimming pool in Mesa, Ariz.

The mother, Kristal Frank, has created a Web site in memory of her son, full of reminiscences and snapshots. Chappell is referred to only as ''that inhumane thing.''

Such cases trigger a visceral reaction, but there are no simple solutions. Some of the worst cases of child abuse involve biological parents, and examples abound of children thriving in nontraditional households

''There's no going back to the past,'' said Washington and Lee's Robin Wilson. ''We don't tell people who they can cohabit with. We don't tell them they can't have children out of wedlock.''

There are, of course, some initiatives aimed at reducing the percentage of children raised by single parents. That's one of the goals of the Bush administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative.

''The risk (of abuse) to children outside a two-parent household is greater,'' said Susan Orr, one of the top child-welfare specialists in the Department of Health and Human Services. ''Does that mean all single parents abuse their children? Of course not. But the risk is certainly there, and it's useful to know that.''

As with many local programs, the federal effort encourages single parents to at least consider marriage, while other programs focus on broadening the support network for single parents. One long-standing initiative, the Nurse-Family Partnership, has lowered abuse rates by arranging for nurses to visit low-income, first-time mothers throughout their pregnancy and after their child is born.

Many social workers say the emphasis should be on nurturing healthy relationships, whether or not the parent is married.

''The primary thing is to have adults around who care about these kids, whatever shape it takes,'' said Zeinab Chahine, who was a New York City child-protection caseworker and administrator for 22 years before taking a high-level job in July with Casey Family Programs.

Chahine said caseworkers need to learn as much as possible, in a nonconfrontational manner, about the personal dynamics in at-risk households. Is there an unmarried partner who spends time there, or a newly arrived stepparent? Does that person care about the children, or consider them a nuisance? Is a criminal background check warranted?

''We start from perspective that the mom is as concerned about her kids as we are,'' Chahine said. ''We can try to help her see the need for us to look into the situation.''

Judith Schagrin, a Baltimore-based social worker engaged in child welfare for 24 years, said live-in boyfriends can be valuable resources for a single mother and her children. Some even have been awarded custody of children as an alternative to foster care while the mother is in jail.

''We look at the relationship the kid has with whomever is around -- is it supportive or destructive?'' Schagrin said. ''Does the mother have a long-term, stable relationship with this individual, or does she have rotating list of partners coming in and out?''

In the real world, however, learning crucial details about a potentially fragile family is not easy.

''The field struggles with the balance between intrusion in private matters and awareness of significant risks to the child,'' said Fred Wulczyn, a research fellow at the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children.

''With a social worker who's in the house on a once-a-month basis, how good do we expect our diagnostics to be?'' Wulczyn asked. ''Achieving the right balance, so you never have to ponder 'What if?' -- that's hard to do.''

The sensitivity of probing into private lives is one of many problems underlying the lack of definitive national data that correlates child abuse with parents' marital status and household makeup. Some conservative commentators say ''political correctness'' is partly to blame -- namely a reluctance to press for data that might reflect negatively on single motherhood.

Another problem is lack of thoroughness and consistency among the states as they forward abuse reports to federal agencies. Differing definitions of ''household'' and varying efforts to ascertain marital status result in a statistical ''hodgepodge,'' according to Elliott Smith, who oversees a national archive of child-abuse research at Cornell University.

Among child-welfare specialists, there is hope that the statistical gaps will be filled by a comprehensive federal survey, the National Incidence Study, that will be completed next year.

The previous version of the study, released in 1996, concluded that children of single parents had a 77 percent greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse than children living with both parents. But the new version will delve much deeper into the specifics of family structure and cohabitation, according to project director Andrea Sedlak.

''We can ask the questions,'' Sedlak said. ''But it's hard to look at cohabiting. It could well be there will be too much missing data to make definitive statements.''

Long term, many child-welfare advocates say economic and social changes are needed, so day-care options improve and young men in poor communities have job prospects that make marriage seem more feasible. There's also agreement that many adults in high-risk households need better parenting skills -- whether it's the harried young mothers often guilty of harmful neglect or the boyfriends and stepfathers often responsible for physical abuse.

''These boyfriends increasingly have been raised without fathers and been abused themselves,'' said Patrick Fagan, a family-policy specialist with the conservative Family Research Council. ''Among the inner-city poor, the turnover of male partners is high. Where's a boy getting the model of what a father is like?''

Oscar Jimenez Jr., the San Jose, Calif., boy found buried under cement and fertilizer, did have a biological father who was devoted to him. But the father, Oscar Sr., separated from Oscar Jr.'s mother in 2002 and was prevented from seeing his son in the weeks before the boy's death in February, allegedly from a beating by live-in boyfriend and ex-convict Samuel Corona.

The mother, Kathyrn Jimenez, says she, like her son, was abused by Corona, yet she has pleaded guilty to three felony charges for assisting him -- driving with him from San Jose to Phoenix to hide her son's remains, then keeping quiet about the killing for months.

Kathryn Jimenez was in custody when Oscar Jr.'s funeral took place Sept. 29. She didn't hear the plea of a longtime family friend.

''Listen carefully to the message,'' Olessia Silva said at the service. ''To all the mothers in this world who may find themselves in a difficult situation or harmful relationship: know that there is always, always someone willing to help if you would just reach out.''

    Abuse Risk Seen Worse As Families Change, NYT, 17.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Child-Abuse.html

Assistant Arrested in Killing of Real Estate Agent

November 9, 2007
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and SEWELL CHAN

A Manhattan personal assistant fatally bludgeoned her boss, the well-connected real-estate agent Linda Stein, in the woman’s opulent Fifth Avenue apartment because Ms. Stein “just kept yelling at her,” a law enforcement official said today. The assistant was arrested this morning.

Officials said the assistant, Natavia Lowery, 26, of Brooklyn, made statements implicating herself in the Oct. 30 killing of Ms. Stein after detectives interviewed her and re-interviewed her in recent days. Criminal charges from the Manhattan district attorney’s office are pending. Ms. Lowery was being held at the Seventh Precinct on the Lower East Side.

According to the woman’s account, her tempestuous relationship with Ms. Stein — a punk-rock pioneer and real estate agent who worked with numerous celebrities — built from animosity to violence, the official said.

“It was that Linda just kept yelling at her, over everything” the official said. “They fought. It was like a continuous thing, like a buildup.”

Another official, Paul J. Browne, who is the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that investigators followed a dual path of combing for physical evidence while conducting dozens of interviews with Ms. Stein’s friends, acquaintances and family members.

Investigators returned to Ms. Stein’s apartment to examine the door frame of the apartment and collect fiber samples from the carpet, while detectives from the 19th Precinct in Manhattan and from the Manhattan North Homicide Task Force interviewed Ms. Lowery repeatedly.

Ms. Stein, 62, a real estate broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman, had a varied and storied career. Born in the Bronx, the daughter of a Jewish caterer, she was a pioneer on the punk-rock scene and became a manager for the Ramones. Later, she turned to real estate, working with celebrity clients like Madonna and Billy Joel.

The singer Elton John is preparing a memorial concert in Ms. Stein’s memory.

Citing friends of Ms. Stein, The Daily News reported that the real estate broker might have met Ms. Lowery when the younger woman worked as a secretary at the Rogers & Cowan public relations agency in Manhattan.

The News, citing unidentified sources, reported that Ms. Lowery had been arrested in December on misdemeanor charges of identity theft and petty larceny — and that Ms. Stein did not know about the arrest.

According to The News, Ms. Lowery had been accused of stealing a high school friend’s identity and using it to open accounts at Target and T-Mobile and to make additional purchases in Virginia. The charges against Ms. Lowery were eventually dropped and the case was sealed, The News reported.

    Assistant Arrested in Killing of Real Estate Agent, NYT, 9.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/nyregion/09cnd-stein.html?hp

Pregnant Woman Killed in L.A. Brawl

November 6, 2007
Filed at 11:02 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A pregnant woman was killed and two other people were injured when a woman rammed her car into them during a planned street fight involving as many as 30 young women, authorities said.

The driver of the car, Unique Bishop, 21, fled after Monday afternoon's fight but later turned herself in to authorities and was booked for investigation of murder, police said. She was being held on $1 million bail.

''It was totally an intentional act to kill the woman. It was the driver's way of settling the dispute. It was a horrific act,'' said LAPD Deputy Chief Charlie Beck.

It was not immediately known if Bishop had obtained an attorney.

Police said the cause of the dispute is unclear, but was part of a planned confrontation between two groups of women in their early 20s. Witnesses told police they saw women shouting at each other and fighting at a discount store parking lot. The fight then moved onto the street and into a gas station.

Dozens gathered at the gas station and watched as Bishop got into her car and drove it into the group. One of the victims was pinned against another car, police said.

The woman killed was eight months pregnant and another victim was in critical condition and expected to lose her leg, authorities said. None of the victims' identities were released.

''We have seen women around gangs before, but we haven't seen anything like this event before,'' said police Cmdr. Pat Gannon.

    Pregnant Woman Killed in L.A. Brawl, NYT, 6.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Women-Street-Fight.html

Police Arrest S.C. Mom in Son's Death

November 5, 2007
Filed at 11:20 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- A mother who claimed a carjacker had smothered her 7-year-old son with a pillow was arrested Monday and charged with murdering the boy.

Amanda Reagan Smith, 27, was taken into custody nearly three months after she told authorities that a knife-wielding carjacker forced her to drive to a secluded, wooded area in Greenville.

Once there, she said the carjacker locked the car doors and pressed a pillow to her son's face. Autopsy results showed that the boy died of asphyxia due to neck compression, authorities have said.

The case revived memories of Susan Smith -- the two are not related -- who claimed in 1994 that a carjacker escaped with her two sons only to confess later that she drowned them in a pond about 43 miles east of Greenville.

Authorities did not reveal the evidence that led them to charge Amanda Reagan Smith, including whether she had changed her story or confessed.

Greenville County Sheriff Steve Loftis said police had ''our doubts and suspicions'' as Smith provided tips to them during the investigation, but declined to elaborate. Loftis said authorities believe Smith acted alone.

''We are confident that we have the suspect in jail now,'' Loftis said at a news conference in Greenville.

Smith was being held in jail without bond Monday, the sheriff said.

It was not immediately clear if Smith had an attorney. A woman who answered the phone at the jail did not know if she had an attorney, and the Greenville public defender's office said it had not been contacted to represent her.

In the hours after the killing, police dogs and helicopters searched the woods where Smith said the attacker had fled. Sketches of a suspect she described, a man who she said scratched her arm as she fought with him, were posted in businesses and neighborhoods.

In Susan Smith's case, she pleaded on national television for the safe return of her sons. She then confessed to strapping them into their car seats and letting her vehicle roll into a lake just east of Union, where they drowned.

She was sentenced to life in prison.

    Police Arrest S.C. Mom in Son's Death, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Boy-Smothered.html

Fatal Beating Unnerves University in Quiet Town

November 5, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES

GLASSBORO, N.J., Nov. 1 — Donald Farrell did just about everything right. As Mr. Farrell, a 19-year-old Rowan University sophomore, walked to a convenience store the night of Saturday, Oct. 27, he had followed nearly all of the precautions given to the college’s students about staying safe. He was traveling in a group. It was about 9 p.m., so he was not out particularly late. And he moved along busy roads in well-lighted areas.

Somehow, though, those safety measures were not enough. After he and his friends left the store, Mr. Farrell was attacked by a group of men and beaten to death — a crime that the authorities said was a robbery gone awry.

The random nature of the attack, the suddenness of Mr. Farrell’s death and that it occurred here in this otherwise tranquil town of 19,000 has sent a chill through Rowan students and thrust Glassboro into the kind of spotlight not seen since it was the unlikely location for a summit meeting between President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Soviet leader Aleksei N. Kosygin in 1967.

“It’s scary, it’s sad,” said Lesley Flynn, 20, a junior from Haddonfield, N.J., referring to the mood on campus after Mr. Farrell’s death. “There was no other reaction except to cry. That’s what I did.”

The killing of Mr. Farrell has brought a discussion about student safety that is more typical for colleges and universities in New Jersey’s urban areas, like Rutgers’s campuses in Camden and Newark, than for this small, sylvan campus about 20 miles south of Philadelphia. Even as the authorities continue to look for Mr. Farrell’s killer, Rowan administrators have added five more officers to the university’s roughly 30-member force, and Glassboro officials have stepped up police patrols around town to assuage the concerns of the university’s 10,000 students and their parents.

And the episode, taken together with a handful of other robberies and beatings since the school year began, has forced Rowan officials to face tough questions about school security, despite steps to expand the university’s police force in recent years and three consecutive years of falling crime rates on campus.

“There’s anger, fear, a sense of being violated, that this is not supposed to happen here,” said Donald J. Farish, the university’s president. “And we’re sensitive to those feelings.”

Still, some students say that recent events have left them feeling uneasy. “I’ve never felt extremely unsafe except for this year,” said Nicole Fantozzi, 21, a senior from Lincoln Park, N.J. “I don’t know whether it’s a lack of security or what. But there have been a lot of incidents this year.”

The authorities said that Mr. Farrell was walking with five friends from his off-campus apartment to the Xpress Mart convenience store along busy Route 322 on that Saturday night, just hours after the university’s homecoming festivities got under way.

The prosecutor for Gloucester County, Sean F. Dalton, said that five people approached Mr. Farrell’s group on Bowe Boulevard near an apartment complex at the edge of campus.

“One individual asked where the parties were,” Mr. Dalton said. “When he” — Mr. Farrell — “responded, he was attacked. He was punched twice in the head; he fell to the ground was kicked in the stomach, rendered unconscious.”

Mr. Dalton said that the man who punched Mr. Farrell then took his wallet and cellphone, and he and the others in his group fled before anyone in Mr. Farrell’s group could react. “It was a robbery, plain and simple,” Mr. Dalton said.

Mr. Farrell was pronounced dead the next afternoon at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. The authorities said that an autopsy showed that Mr. Farrell died of blunt force trauma to the right side of his neck.

Mr. Dalton said that his investigators had assembled a composite sketch of a “person of interest” in the case that was based on interviews with witnesses and a video from the convenience store, which the authorities believe Mr. Farrell’s attacker visited shortly before the assault.

The prosecutor’s office posted a picture from the video on its Web site and said that the suspect was wearing what appeared to be a gray and red Coogi Heritage hoodie with a British flag on the chest. There is a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

More than a dozen investigators from Mr. Dalton’s office are working on the case along with officers from the Glassboro police and the university’s police force.

“I always say, ‘So goes Rowan, so goes Glassboro and so goes Glassboro, so goes Rowan,’” said Leo J. McCabe, the mayor of Glassboro. “We have a significant stake in this.”

Mayor McCabe said that the city and the university had experienced the typical town-and-gown disputes over issues like noise and congestion, but that relations had improved in recent years and that groups had been formed including residents and students from the university. The institution was called Glassboro State College until it was renamed for Henry M. Rowan, a wealthy benefactor, in 1992. It became a university in 1997.

The killing of Mr. Farrell, Dr. McCabe added, has shaken Glassboro, which was founded in the 18th century as a locus for glass manufacturers and is perhaps best known for the 1967 summit meeting, when President Johnson and Mr. Kosygin tried unsuccessfully to forge an agreement to limit nuclear missiles. (Glassboro was chosen as a compromise: it was an approximate midpoint between two proposed sites for the summit, New York and Washington.)

“This is very disturbing to us all,” Dr. McCabe said of Mr. Farrell’s killing. Violent crime is so rare in this rural part of South Jersey, where soybean and corn farms are not uncommon, that the mayor struggled to recall the town’s last homicide. (He finally settled on a case in which someone was killed by a drunken driver.)

Still, Mr. Farrell’s death is not the first time violent death has visited Rowan’s campus. In the early 1990s, a female student was shot and killed by a former boyfriend, who then killed himself.

“That was nothing like the random nature of this,” Dr. Farish said.

Students, too, are still reeling from the indiscriminate aspect of Mr. Farrell’s death. Ms. Fantozzi said that she and Mr. Farrell were acquainted — besides their Rowan connection, they had attended rival high schools near Boonton, N.J., Mr. Farrell’s hometown — and she remembered him as a reserved but friendly student.

“A real nice guy,” Ms. Fantozzi said.

Sitting at a table with friends in the Student Center Patio here on Thursday, Ms. Fantozzi said that despite her reservations about crime on campus, she would still urge high schoolers to attend Rowan.

Nearby, David Ruggieri, a friend of Ms. Fantozzi, chimed in.

“I would still tell them to come,” said Mr. Ruggieri, 20, a junior from Middlesex, N.J. “I would just tell them to make sure that they stay safe.”

    Fatal Beating Unnerves University in Quiet Town, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/nyregion/05rowan.html

Gang Rape Suspects Linked by DNA

November 2, 2007
Filed at 1:23 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Three teenagers charged in the gang rape and beating of a woman and her son have been linked to the crime by DNA, authorities said.

DNA from suspects Tommy Lee Poindexter and Nathan Walker Jr. was found on the woman's dress, according to an analysis by the Palm Beach County Crime Laboratory, released in documents Thursday. DNA from Avion Lawson also was found on a condom left at the scene, according to the documents.

Poindexter, 18, Walker, 17, and Lawson, 14, face charges including sexual battery, kidnapping and burglary. A fourth suspect, Jakaris Taylor, 16, has been previously linked to the crime through fingerprints, police said.

All face life sentences if convicted.

The woman told police that as many as 10 masked teens accosted her and her 12-year-old son in their apartment on June 18. The teens are accused of raping and sodomizing the mother, forcing mother and son to have sex with each other and beating both of them.

The suspects then doused them with cleaning solutions in an attempt to destroy evidence, police said.

Attorneys for Lawson and Walker declined to comment on Friday. Attorneys for Poindexter and Taylor did not immediately respond to telephone messages and e-mails.

    Gang Rape Suspects Linked by DNA, NYT, 2.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gang-Rape-Teens.html

A Slain Broker Is Recalled as a Loyal Friend With Nerve

November 2, 2007
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

Linda Stein, the punk-rock manager turned real estate broker who was found bludgeoned to death on Tuesday in her Fifth Avenue penthouse, was a vibrant and volatile person who aroused strong and often contradictory feelings in those who knew her, friends and colleagues said yesterday as the police struggled to find a motive in her killing.

Ms. Stein, 62, is said to be the only person in the 1970s downtown punk scene who had the courage to stand up to — and curse out — Johnny Ramone, the intimidating punk pioneer, said Danny Fields, who worked with her as co-manager of the Ramones.

Friends say she sometimes wrangled with her daughters, ex-husband and close friends, only to make up as if nothing had happened. She was a fierce competitor who from her hospital bed hours after cancer surgery yelled at her boss over pending real estate deals. But she also had a warm, energetic and flashy presence that buoyed her to success, those who knew her said.

Yet despite a life played out in the spotlight, Ms. Stein’s death remained wrapped in secrets yesterday as investigators struggled to reconstruct what had taken place in a crime scene that was yielding few clues.

Investigators scurried in and out of the building at 965 Fifth Avenue throughout the day and evening. Police Department posters were put up asking anyone with information to call the department’s tip line. A forensics team carried away several paper bags of evidence, while investigators were trying to piece together whether anyone had quarreled recently with the outspoken Ms. Stein. They stressed that the case could still go in any direction.

Detectives questioned nine construction workers who were on the roof on Tuesday, the day Ms. Stein’s daughter Mandy and a friend found her body, with multiple wounds in the head and neck, on the living room floor of her apartment.

The construction foreman, Manuel Chiqui, said that the workers had signed forms allowing DNA tests and that investigators had fingerprinted them and vacuumed their clothes.

Perhaps seeking to dispel parallels to the death last year of Adrienne Shelly, an actress who was killed by a construction worker after complaining about noise, Mr. Chiqui said the workers had nothing to do with the crime. He emphasized, “We want to cooperate.”

The police have also questioned several people who knew Ms. Stein, including friends and relatives, an acquaintance who once worked with her, and a former companion. But they have not officially identified a suspect in the case.

Investigators were still trying to pinpoint the time of her death. They believe Ms. Stein spent time with someone in the middle of the afternoon and then received some telephone calls.

Even though the building is staffed 24 hours a day and guests usually ride in an attended elevator, the police could not figure out who had been in Ms. Stein’s apartment.

There were no signs of forced entry, investigators said. They were trying to determine if someone could have gained access through a service entrance, and learned that there were some periods during the day when the elevator was unattended.

As the investigation continued, those who knew Ms. Stein described her as close to her ex-husband, Seymour Stein, her daughters Mandy and Samantha, and Samantha’s 3-year-old daughter, Dora.

“As a mother, Linda was beyond loving to our two daughters,” said Mr. Stein, who founded Sire Records and helped get the careers of Madonna, the Talking Heads, the B-52’s and the Ramones under way. “She was in many ways their mentor and role model. I know Samantha, Mandy and I will be comforted by our many happy memories of Linda. She was one of a kind.

“When I first met Linda, she was teaching school and my niece was in her class,” Mr. Stein said. “Our deeply shared love for rock ’n’ roll helped us click immediately.” The Steins married in 1971 and divorced before the end of the decade. Mr. Stein said they were much better off as best friends than as husband and wife.

Ms. Stein’s daughter Samantha was distraught as she left her apartment on the Upper West Side. Her husband shielded her from reporters, and she said only: “How do you think I feel? I feel devastated.”

Several friends said that Ms. Stein had been in good spirits. She had beaten back cancer, which had threatened her several times, and they said there were no dark clouds in her personal life.

Dottie Herman, the president and chief executive of Prudential Douglas Elliman real estate, where Ms. Stein worked, said, “She certainly was volatile, but she had a heart of gold.”

Ms. Herman described how last year, Ms. Stein shouted at her so loudly from her hospital bed — worried that other agents had not taken care of her clients during her illness — that security guards entered the room to see what was going on.

“Somebody was supposed to be on top of it and they weren’t on top of it,” Ms. Stein had said, according to Ms. Herman. “I can take cancer, I can take everything, but I have to make sure that all my bases are covered!”

But Ms. Herman added that “if she went off on something, she was over it in two seconds and forgot about it.”

Robby Browne, an agent at the Corcoran Group, said he could barely talk about her without crying. “She was perfect,” he said. “Every time we saw each other, it was like magnets, and we’d just lock arms and no matter where we were, it was like no one else was around.”

Other friends talked about her generosity to people from all walks of life. “She was the first person who would open up her wallet, take out some cash and say don’t bother paying me back,” said Liz Spahr, another Corcoran broker.

Ms. Spahr described Ms. Stein as a beautiful woman who had many companions over the years, but no serious relationship at the time of her death.

Mr. Fields, a longtime friend, said she was struggling to break ties with a “distasteful” ex-companion whom she dated about a year ago.

“She hated him,” he said, adding that Ms. Stein had told him the last straw was taking the man to a $5,000 charity ball where he walked off saying, “I’m going to work the room.”

As the daughter of a kosher caterer in Riverdale, she might not have been a natural punk, Mr. Fields said, but she had an ear for music.

She was one of the few people who could wrangle with the fierce Johnny Ramone, he said, recalling one night on tour in England when Mr. Ramone exploded, using expletives while insisting, “I hate curry, I hate foreign countries, I hate foreign food, I hate everything foreign.”

Ms. Stein said, just as fiercely and with her trademark expletive-laced comments, that he should pack up his guitar and go back to America if he didn’t like it.

Mr. Fields said Mr. Ramone backed down, with “his tail between his legs.”

He said her list of enemies had “a bottle of Wite-Out next to it. You come on and you go off.”

Ms. Stein’s death prompted loving farewells from stars like Madonna, who issued a statement praising her fight against cancer and her dedication to her daughters.

She would have loved the publicity, friends said. One music-business friend said she might even have loved being part of a tabloid story.

Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Christine Haughney, Daryl Khan, Colin Moynihan, Sharon Otterman, Anthony Ramirez and Ben Sisario.

    A Slain Broker Is Recalled as a Loyal Friend With Nerve, NYT, 2.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/nyregion/02murder.html

Ex - Manager for Ramones Beaten to Death

November 1, 2007
Filed at 8:25 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Linda Stein, a pioneer in New York's punk music scene who later became known as a real estate ''broker to the stars,'' was beaten to death inside her Manhattan apartment, the medical examiner ruled.

Stein's daughter found her body Tuesday night face down in the living room of the Upper East Side apartment, where she lived alone. There were no signs of a break-in or robbery, and police said they had no motive or suspects.

An autopsy found that Stein, 62, died from blows to the head and neck, medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said Wednesday.

Stein was the ex-wife of Seymour Stein, former president of Sire Records, which was the launching pad for the Ramones, Talking Heads and Madonna.

A former schoolteacher, she and Danny Fields co-managed the Ramones during the band's heyday. She is credited with bringing the Ramones to England for their infamous July 4, 1976, concert that helped spark the young British punk scene.

Reached Wednesday by telephone, Fields said Stein had the right temperament for the rough and raunchy world of punk.

''She was very tough, but very loving and generous,'' he said.

Friends and family were stunned by the news she was a victim of violence, Fields said.

''It was enough dealing with her death,'' he said. ''Now it's a murder.''

After Stein and Fields parted ways with the Ramones in 1980, she eventually launched a real estate career brokering multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartments for rock 'n' roll royalty, including Sting and Billy Joel.

Aside from real estate, ''her great joy in life was her first grandchild,'' a 3-year-old girl, Fields said.

Stein was asked in an interview earlier this year whether managing the Ramones or selling real estate was harder.

''Real estate,'' she responded. ''Firstly, if you manage a band, every time you hear an encore, every time the audience increases, every time your radio increases, it's an upper. With real estate, the only upper is how much you don't owe to Uncle Sam on the check you're getting. There is no high except the money, which is extremely taxable.''

    Ex - Manager for Ramones Beaten to Death, NYT, 1.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ex-Punk-Manager-Slaying.html

Slain Student Had Nearly 2 Dozen Wounds

November 1, 2007
Filed at 7:36 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- A University of Arizona student who was fatally stabbed inside her dorm room received nearly two dozen knife wounds, mostly to her back, according to an autopsy report.

Mia Henderson, 18, was killed Sept. 5, about a week after reporting to campus police that her roommate had stolen from her, authorities said.

Investigators say Galareka Harrison, also 18 and a Navajo Nation tribal member, was so upset about the accusation that she bought a knife, wrote a phony suicide note and attacked Henderson as she slept.

The autopsy report released Wednesday said Henderson was stabbed 14 times in the back. She also received wounds to the neck, cheek, shoulder, arm, hand and right knee.

Some of the wounds pierced internal organs, the report said.

Harrison remained in jail Wednesday night on suspicion of first-degree murder. She is being held on $500,000 bond.

Slain Student Had Nearly 2 Dozen Wounds, NYT, 1.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-BRF-Dorm-Death.html