PHILADELPHIA — Countless people in Philadelphia walked by a snow-covered sedan with dark windows and a slew of parking tickets before police this week found the body of a young mother inside.
Nadia Malik, of Marple Township, had been missing for 11 days when her body was found lying face-down in the front seat Thursday, under a pile of clothes and a gym bag.
Police said the 22-year-old had a volatile relationship with her boyfriend. He was arrested at his parents’ home near Cleveland.
As her nephew started turning blue, Pamela Rauseo panicked.
She didn’t want anything bad to happen to 5-month-old Sebastian de la Cruz, who was born premature and with respiratory issues. So Rauseo stopped her SUV along Miami’s Dolphin Expressway Thursday and screamed for help.
She started giving the baby CPR.
Rauseo hadn’t performed CPR in years.
“I don’t know how I remembered what to do … I just knew I couldn’t let him die,” she told ABC News.
With traffic at a standstill, fellow drivers began to help. Lucila Godoy left her own son in the car to assist in CPR and comfort Rauseo. Miami Herald photographer Al Diaz ran through lanes of traffic to alert police officers before capturing the tense scene.
Officer Amauris Bastidas arrived, helping as Rauseo twice got the baby breathing again.
Rescue crews took Sebastian to the hospital. He was photographed later that day in his mother Paola’s arms, smiling, the color returned to his face.
Rauseo, 37, works in interior design. She runs Round321, a company dedicated to designing innovative and unique pieces for parents and children. One of her room designs is called “Sebastian’s Circus” and features stylized elephants and a play tent.
Donald Maiden Jr., known to family and friends as D.J., was playing tag outside of his home in Dallas. That’s when 46-year-old Brian Cloninger, shot the youth in the face. Cloninger told police that he shot the boy simply because “he wanted to.”
Donald has spent several weeks in the hospital hooked up to life support machines and breathing tubes. He had a metal plate and wire mesh holding his jaw together.
But now, months later D.J.’s mother, Monique Locklin says he is doing “much better.”
Donald still has a tracheotomy tube in his neck to help with breathing. He has continued reconstructive surgery scheduled for March 10th. But considering what he’s been through, his recovery is remarkable.
“He goes to school, he still plays outside,” his mother said. “Light playing, but he still does everything pretty normally like he would before. As his face enhances he’ll have to keep on getting it fixed.”
But beyond the physical scares, Donald has been severely psychologically impacted by the hate crime.
“He’s afraid,” D.J.’s mother explained, that once Cloninger gets out of jail he will come after him and will hurt him or “hurt somebody else.
“He has nightmares almost every night. He won’t sleep alone, and he wakes up almost every night crying because he has nightmares.”
As for Cloninger, D.J.’s mother explained, “I just want to see him get punished to the maximum, and I just want justice for what he did, because it really was unnecessary and just cruel. I don’t want him to be able to be free so he could do that to someone else.”
h/t – politicalblindspot
A cruise ship worker with murderous intent broke into a passenger’s room then raped, beat and strangled her before trying to throw her overboard, the FBI said.
Ketut Pujayasa, 28, admitted his evil plan to investigators after the MS Nieuw Amsterdam returned to Fort Lauderdale on Sunday, the Sun Sentinel reported.
The devilish Indonesian citizen told the FBI he attacked the 31-year-old American after he knocked on her door several times during a breakfast delivery and she dissed him, saying, “Wait a minute, son of a bitch!”
“Pujayasa stated that the passenger’s comment of ‘son of a bitch’ was offensive to himself and his parents. He was angry and upset the rest of the day,” FBI Special Agent David Nunez wrote in his report, according to the newspaper.
After stewing over the slight for a few hours, Pujayasa planned to punch the woman in the face as revenge.
Instead, and though off-duty, the plotting Pujayasa used a master key to get into the woman’s stateroom and hid on her balcony, where he fell asleep.
When he awoke, the woman was back inside and he jumped on top of her and began his terrifying attack. He smashed her with a laptop and a curling iron while he beat her. The perv then used the curling iron cord and phone cord to choke the woman and silence her screams, the Sun Sentinel reported.
The woman bit the twisted attendant’s hand “then continued to fight for her life by all means available including striking Pujayasa’s exposed genitals as well as utilizing a corkscrew in an attempt to stab him,” Pujayasa reportedly told the FBI.
Fed up with the wailing woman, Pujayasa told the feds he wanted to dump his victim off her balcony to get rid of the evidence while the boat sped through waters near Roatan, Honduras.
But another passenger pounding on the woman’s door spooked the sicko, who, still naked from the waist down, jumped from his victim’s balcony to another one before he entered another occupied room from its balcony and fled inside.
The woman, meanwhile, escaped Pujayasa’s grasp and fled for the hallway, where another passenger found her only in a tank top covered in blood.
“The passenger also noted that (the victim) had a curling iron wrapped and tangled around her neck and/or hair. He also described (her) as having black eyes and visible bruising around her neck and shoulders. (The woman), fearing death was imminent, asked the passenger to relay to her family how much she loved them,” agents wrote in their criminal complaint, according to the Sun Sentinel.
Pujayasa ended up back at his room, where he told his roommate he’d killed a passenger.
The Holland America Line cruise liner docked in Honduras on Valentine’s Day, Friday, and the badly beaten woman was flown to a South Florida hospital.
Cruise security kept Pujayasa detained until the ship docked at Port Everglades on Sunday, when he was booked at a Broward jail on charges of attempted murder and aggravated sexual abuse.
The cruise liner immediately fired the man, who is held without bond. He’d been hired in 2012 following “a careful screening that included a clean criminal history check,” the company said in a statement. “He had no performance issues and came with good references.”
h/t NY Daily News
Fired for doing a good deed. The firefighters had just finished putting out a fire in the freezing temperatures and visited the McDonald’s where Heather Levia worked. The worker offered to pay for their meal and when she returned to work the next day, she was fired.
Heather, 23, from Olean, New York, has worked at McDonald’s for eight years, has twins at home and is putting herself through nursing school.
She says she knows what it is like to work hard. So when the firefighters came in and ordered 25 breakfast sandwiches and hash browns, Levia paid the $92 bill herself.
When a second department ordered $70 of food, Levia texted her boss to see if the company would pay the tab. But when her boss said no, Levia and other workers again picked up the bill.
“Just because I appreciate everything they do,” she told WIVB.
After the firefighters found out that Levia had paid for the food herself, some firefighters called her boss and complained.
(AP) — Georgia officials have once again approved a specialty license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag, infuriating civil rights advocates and renewing a debate among those who believe the symbol honors Confederate heritage and those who see it as racially charged.
Spokesman Ray McBerry said the group meant no offense and views the plates as a way for people to honor their heritage.
“We believe that everyone has the right to preserve their heritage,” he said. “Southerners have as much right to be proud of their heritage as anybody else.”
Southern Christian Leadership Conference spokesman Maynard Eaton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the state shouldn’t have sanctioned the move.
“To display this is reprehensible,” Eaton said. “We don’t have license plates saying ‘Black Power.'”
Gov. Nathan Deal said Tuesday that he was unaware of the plate.
“I hadn’t heard that, so I don’t know anything about it,” Deal said. “I’ll have to talk to them about it. I had no information in advance about it.”
Three men in Georgia are facing a number of charges after a 36-year-old woman survived a brutal attack from the group that involved rape, burning and a shooting. The woman was found in a vacant lot on New Year’s Day (January 1) and has since undergone hours of treatment for her injuries.
Police in the town of Columbus, some 100 miles southwest of Atlanta, say that the men, Joey Betrail Garron, 28, Robert Carl Johnson, 23, and Ketorie Glover, 23, all hailing from the town, came to approach their victim in a bizarre fashion. According to the investigation, the victim was at a New Year’s Eve party where she was part of a rap battle with a group of men outside the home that got heated. The Ledger-Enquirer has more.
From the Ledger-Enquirer:
Subsequent investigation discovered that the victim, 36, had been to a party at a house located on Garden Drive. There, outside the house, she became engaged in a spirited rap contest with some men. At some point, the exchange became heated and one of the men produced a handgun and forced the victim inside of her vehicle.
Two other men, one of whom was also armed, joined them in the car. The woman was driven to a vacant lot located at 988 Farr Rd. At that location, police say, all three men sexually assaulted her.
The woman’s vehicle and the woman were doused with gasoline and set on fire. She was also shot several times.
Police Lt. John McMichael said in a news release Sunday (February 16) morning that the men face felony charges of aggravated assault, rape, kidnapping, aggravated battery, aggravated sexual battery, aggravated sodomy, arson first degree, hijacking a motor vehicle and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.
A police sergeant would not elaborate on how they came to identify and arrest the men, but did say there is more investigating to be done in the case. The cops didn’t confirm if the rap battle was connected to the assault of the victim.
Garron and Johnson have already appeared in Columbus Recorder’s Court and their cases were sent to the state’s Superior Court. Glover appeared in court yesterday (February 17) morning.
Hit the jump to see the full mug shot of the men in question, and photos from the crime scene as well in the gallery
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Photo: Cleveland Police Department, WTVM
– See more at: HipHopWired
An asteroid with an estimated diameter of three football fields is expected to zoom by Earth late Monday, missing our home by about that distance.
It’ll travel at some 27,000 miles per hour and make its closest approach starting at 9 p.m. ET.
Folks can watch the flyby on Slooh.com, which tracks potentially hazardous objects.
The asteroid comes just about a year after a relatively small asteroid blew up over Russia. The roughly 60-foot space rock plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk with the force of about 30 early nuclear bombs.
The blast left more than 1,500 injured, mostly by glass from shattered windows, and raised concerns about humanity’s vulnerability to stray asteroids.
“On a practical level, a previously unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908, and February 15, 2013,” said Bob Berman, Slooh host and astronomer.
He added: “Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us — fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such as Antarctica.
“But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all NEOs (near-Earth objects), as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources
Anyone who’s been paying attention to New Jersey politics and education should have seen this one coming from a mile away: the resignation of Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf. What makes it even more predictable is that he’s taking a job with his good buddy, and former Education Chancellor of New York City, Joel Klein. Those two might be the only people currently working in education today who are making big time money. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with improving schools.
Governor Christie is talking a good game about extending the school day and year and is making noise about having public workers contribute more to their pensions and benefits than they are now, but those proposals won’t become law as long as the focus is on Sandy funds and the George Washington Bridge. The same is true of a new Charter Schools bill, vouchers and weakening employee sick day policies. Done. Over. Not going to happen. The new teacher evaluation system is up and running and is working just as poorly as those who know about the teaching profession said it was going to work, so there’s not much more a Commissioner can do. Cerf is smart enough to see this, so it’s goodbye for him. And I can’t really blame him.
My interaction with Commissioner Cerf came last January, and I wrote about it at length here and here. In short, I was not impressed with either his answers to my questions or his attitude towards education. His main point throughout our discussion was that the state Board of Education supported him, and as long as that was the case there wasn’t anything he needed to change. He had little to say about the mechanics of teaching, because he never was a teacher, so the subject was foreign to him, and he seemed to be a completely political animal, which didn’t surprise me. So when the Christie Administration scandals began piling up, I figured he would be one of the first to leave because, really, there isn’t going to be much else to do on education.
Whoever becomes the new chief will essentially be a caretaker for the rest of Christie’s term. They’ll get to oversee the implementation of the Common Core Curriculum Standards and the PARCC tests and all of the mischief that those will bring. The test scores will ruin some teachers’ careers and of course there’s all that Facebook money to spend in Newark, but otherwise, I don’t see the Democrats caving the way they did in 2011. It will be up to the next administration, presumably, OK, hopefully, a Democratic one, to undo some of the damage. By that time, Cerf will be on to a new adventure.
Meanwhile, education professionals will be left to comply with rules that don’t make sense, that don’t contribute to the education of children, that saddle districts with unfunded costs associated with unproven and dangerous policies, and that reflect an attitude that doesn’t trust educators to, you know, educate. That’s hardly a legacy to be proud of.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
It’s insane, scary and believable … a 19-year-old girl admits to not only killing a guy who hired her for sex on Craigslist, she says she killed so many others, “When I hit 22, I stopped counting.”
Miranda Barbour is in a Pennsylvania jail, awaiting trial for allegedly stabbing Troy LaFerrara 20 times, because she tested him and said she was only 16 and he responded by saying he’d still have sex with her. And — as a molestation victim herself — that set her off.
Barbour said in a jailhouse interview over the weekend she’s been killing people since she was 13. She insists she only kills bad people, claiming, “I did this to people who did bad things and didn’t deserve to be here anymore.”
In an interview with the Daily Item … Barbour says the first murder coincides with joining a satanic cult in Alaska.
As for the LaFerrara murder, Barbour says she and her husband of 3 weeks killed him in their car.
Barbour says she has no remorse but does not want to be sprung from jail because, “If I were to be released I would do this again.”
Read more: TMZ
The Florida jury in the case of Michael Dunn found him guilty on four charges, including three for attempted second-degree murder, but they couldn’t reach a verdict on the most significant charge — first-degree murder in the death of Jordan Davis.
After the decisions were read out around 7 p.m. Saturday in court, Judge Russell Healey — who moments before had said that the jury had reached a verdict on all counts — declared a mistrial on the murder count.
That possibility had floated around since 4:45 p.m. Saturday, when the 12 jurors sent a note saying they’d decided on four of the five counts that Dunn faces. But they hadn’t unanimously reached a verdict “on count 1 or any of the lesser included offenses related to it.”
Count 1 is first-degree murder in the shooting death of 17-year-old Davis.
Jurors could have decided not to convict Dunn on that charge but instead find him guilty on lesser charges such as manslaughter. Or they could have acquitted him altogether on this count.
With the hung jury, prosecutors could press for a new trial on the murder charge.
Regardless — and pending defense appeals — Dunn appears set to face a lengthy prison term.
h/t CNN
Really, dude?
According to the Daily Mail:
The boy – who lives near Dokka, a town 110kms (68 miles) north of Oslo – put his 18-month old sister into the car sometime before 6am, while his parents were still sleeping and set off to visit his grandparents in Valdres, about 60 kilometers away.
“The parents woke up and discovered that the children were missing and that someone had taken off with their car. They were pretty upset, as you can imagine,” said Baard Christiansen, a spokesman for the Vest Oppland police district.
When authorities finally found him (with the help of a snowplow who saw the boy in the ditch) he offered up that ridiculous explanation:
“The boy told the snowplow driver that he was a dwarf and that he had forgotten his driver’s license at home.”
Which is both clever and alarming for a 10-year-old to conjure up.
Thankfully, the kids and the car were uninjured. We do not, however, have details on what happened when his parents got ahold of him. But we’re guessing nothing good.
SOURCE: Daily Mail | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
