Synthetic pot warning issued after 22 people in Illinois report bleeding from eyes, ears
By Kate Thayer
Chicago Tribune
March 29, 2018
State and local health officials issued a warning Thursday about a new symptom of synthetic pot —excessive bleeding from the eyes and ears.
The Illinois Department of Public Health reported 22 people in the past few weeks visited emergency rooms with severe bleeding after using a synthetic cannabinoid product.
Most of those affected were in the Chicago area, but health officials warned the contaminated products could also be present elsewhere across the state, said department spokeswoman Melaney Arnold.
Though synthetic pot has long been considered dangerous, severe bleeding is not a known side effect, said Dr. Melissa Millewich, an emergency room physician at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.
“This bleeding is not expected, at least in such a significant population so quickly,” she said.
Despite a statewide ban, Arnold said manufacturers could be slightly tweaking the molecular makeup of the products as a way to “get around” the law, allowing for them to be sold legally. They are also sold on the street, she said, and those experiencing the bleeding said they obtained the products in convenience stores and from dealers and friends.
Health officials reported 22 known people who experienced the symptom since March 7, and they continue to track the situation, Arnold said. So far, there are no deaths reported.
A change in the latest formula could be behind the new, dangerous symptom, Millewich said. Because health officials don’t know the exact makeup of the products, it’s unclear what’s causing the bleeding, she added.
While there have been no such cases at Good Samaritan’s ER, Millewich said, synthetic pot, often called “fake weed,” “K2” or “spice,” has previously displayed life-threatening symptoms like kidney failure, along with psychosis.
“People don’t realize how dangerous this is,” she said.
The man-made substance is a mixture of hundreds of chemicals, often called cannabinoids because they affect the same brain cell receptors as the main ingredient in marijuana. Cannabinoids are sometimes sprayed on plant material for smoking, or are sold as liquids to be vaporized and inhaled in e-cigarettes and other devices, the health department’s warning said. The products are also sometimes referred to as herbal or liquid incense.
Recent patient reports of severe bleeding led health officials to warn the public not to use any synthetic cannabinoid products.
While those affected by the outbreak admitted using cannabinoids, it’s been difficult to determine their exact source for the substance, Arnold said.
Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the public health department, says there’s an erroneous perception that synthetic cannabinoids are a safe and legal alternative to marijuana.
Shah says they're unsafe because it's difficult to know what chemicals they contain or what an individual's reaction will be.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found there’s also an association between teens who use synthetic pot and a heightened risk for violent behavior, risky sex and abuse of other drugs.
Anyone who uses these drugs and experiences unexplained bleeding or bruising is advised to call 911 or have someone take them to an emergency room.
Saturday, March 31, 2018
MOONBEAM GREASES THE SKIDS FOR MORE ILLEGAL ALIEN FELONS
by Bob Walsh
The governor of the formerly great state of California, Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown, has taken action to try to ensure that at least five more illegal alien criminals will be permitted to stay in the state.
Shokha Chhan was facing deportation to Cambodia. He was convicted of wife beating and threatening a crime with the intent to terrorize.
Daniel Maher was sentenced in 1995 for kidnapping and robbery with the use of a firearm.
Phann Pheach was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. In 2005 he was convicted of possession and obstructing a police officer.
Francisco Acevedo Alaniz was convicted of vehicle theft in 1997.
Sergio Mena was sentenced in 2003 for possession with intent to sell.
Just the sort of people we need more of in the U. S. in general and California in particular. .
The governor of the formerly great state of California, Jerry 'Moonbeam' Brown, has taken action to try to ensure that at least five more illegal alien criminals will be permitted to stay in the state.
Shokha Chhan was facing deportation to Cambodia. He was convicted of wife beating and threatening a crime with the intent to terrorize.
Daniel Maher was sentenced in 1995 for kidnapping and robbery with the use of a firearm.
Phann Pheach was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. In 2005 he was convicted of possession and obstructing a police officer.
Francisco Acevedo Alaniz was convicted of vehicle theft in 1997.
Sergio Mena was sentenced in 2003 for possession with intent to sell.
Just the sort of people we need more of in the U. S. in general and California in particular. .
THIS SHIT JUST GOT WAY MORE INTERESTING
by Bob Walsh
The Stephon Clark homicide in Sacramento just got way more interesting, and troubling for the Sac P.D.
The results of the private autopsy commissioned by the family was announced on Friday. It is substantially in conflict with the official information (though not the official autopsy, which is yet to be released) being released by the P.D.
According to the cops four of the 20 shots fired hit the dead criminal. The private autopsy, which by the way was done by an internationally known and imminently qualified pathologist) say the dead guy was in fact hit eight times. Additionally the cops strongly implied that the bad guy was facing them and in fact moving towards them while the shit was gong down. The brief snippets of surveillance released seem to support that. Trouble is the medical results say that seven of the eight shots entered from the rear.
No matter WHAT WAY this goes down in the long run this just got a lot more problematic for the cops involved and the Sac P.D.
The Stephon Clark homicide in Sacramento just got way more interesting, and troubling for the Sac P.D.
The results of the private autopsy commissioned by the family was announced on Friday. It is substantially in conflict with the official information (though not the official autopsy, which is yet to be released) being released by the P.D.
According to the cops four of the 20 shots fired hit the dead criminal. The private autopsy, which by the way was done by an internationally known and imminently qualified pathologist) say the dead guy was in fact hit eight times. Additionally the cops strongly implied that the bad guy was facing them and in fact moving towards them while the shit was gong down. The brief snippets of surveillance released seem to support that. Trouble is the medical results say that seven of the eight shots entered from the rear.
No matter WHAT WAY this goes down in the long run this just got a lot more problematic for the cops involved and the Sac P.D.
POPE SAID THERE IS NO HELL
by Bob Walsh
It was widely reported in the media on Friday that, in a private conversation with a personal friend who happened to be an atheist, that the Pope asserted flat-out that Hell does not in fact exist. (Clearly he has not been to Passaic, N.J. or Baltimore recently.)
I wonder how vigorously and quickly the Vatican is going to be working to dial this back.
It was widely reported in the media on Friday that, in a private conversation with a personal friend who happened to be an atheist, that the Pope asserted flat-out that Hell does not in fact exist. (Clearly he has not been to Passaic, N.J. or Baltimore recently.)
I wonder how vigorously and quickly the Vatican is going to be working to dial this back.
‘GOD BLESS AMERICA, FUCK THE BLACKS!’
Michigan State University blasted for not disciplining student over racist posts
By Jackie Salo
New York Post
March 29, 2018
A Michigan college is under fire for refusing to take action against a female student whose social media accounts are reportedly littered with racist taunts.
Michigan State University students condemned school officials for what they believe has been an inadequate response to posts by sophomore Jillian Kirk, which includes one reportedly saying “GOD BLESS AMERICA, FUCK THE BLACKS!”
In other tweets, Kirk allegedly uses the N-word and once wrote, “Fuck niggers I’m so over it,” The Tab reported.
Her Twitter account has since been deleted.
School officials issued a statement Wednesday to the news site saying they don’t “condone racial harassment or bullying,” but “do not get to control what every member of [their] community says.”
Kirk’s posts first started circulating on social media when freshman Miyanna Fowlkes shared several tasteless screenshots Tuesday from Kirk’s accounts.
“Let’s play a game… it’s called ‘How many retweets does this girl need before MSU kicks her out,’” Fowlkes tweeted.
In the screengrabs, Kirk appears to claim she “used to bully retards” and called a man the N-word.
Kirk responded to the backlash Thursday, saying she “apologizes for the inappropriate social media posts I made,” according to The Tab.
Fowlkes said she shared Kirk’s posts because she was frustrated there weren’t any consequences after two complaints were filed against her.
“I just don’t believe people like her should be allowed the privilege of becoming successful and be in a position of power,” Fowlkes told The Post. “Also MSU is legally allowed to kick her out but they chose not to.”
She said Kirk’s posts are not her “first offense” and that she will continue to pressure administrators to consider disciplinary action against Kirk.
“She should be required to do some sort of diversity training to attend this university,” Fowlkes told The Post. “Actions like this without consequence are unacceptable because people begin to realize nothing will happen to them.”
The freshman said she was disappointed by the college’s statement in response to the alleged posts.
“MSU is trying to pretend care because they are being exposed but they lay complacent to racism every day,” she said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In California she would have been sent packing in a New York minute.
By Jackie Salo
New York Post
March 29, 2018
A Michigan college is under fire for refusing to take action against a female student whose social media accounts are reportedly littered with racist taunts.
Michigan State University students condemned school officials for what they believe has been an inadequate response to posts by sophomore Jillian Kirk, which includes one reportedly saying “GOD BLESS AMERICA, FUCK THE BLACKS!”
In other tweets, Kirk allegedly uses the N-word and once wrote, “Fuck niggers I’m so over it,” The Tab reported.
Her Twitter account has since been deleted.
School officials issued a statement Wednesday to the news site saying they don’t “condone racial harassment or bullying,” but “do not get to control what every member of [their] community says.”
Kirk’s posts first started circulating on social media when freshman Miyanna Fowlkes shared several tasteless screenshots Tuesday from Kirk’s accounts.
“Let’s play a game… it’s called ‘How many retweets does this girl need before MSU kicks her out,’” Fowlkes tweeted.
In the screengrabs, Kirk appears to claim she “used to bully retards” and called a man the N-word.
Kirk responded to the backlash Thursday, saying she “apologizes for the inappropriate social media posts I made,” according to The Tab.
Fowlkes said she shared Kirk’s posts because she was frustrated there weren’t any consequences after two complaints were filed against her.
“I just don’t believe people like her should be allowed the privilege of becoming successful and be in a position of power,” Fowlkes told The Post. “Also MSU is legally allowed to kick her out but they chose not to.”
She said Kirk’s posts are not her “first offense” and that she will continue to pressure administrators to consider disciplinary action against Kirk.
“She should be required to do some sort of diversity training to attend this university,” Fowlkes told The Post. “Actions like this without consequence are unacceptable because people begin to realize nothing will happen to them.”
The freshman said she was disappointed by the college’s statement in response to the alleged posts.
“MSU is trying to pretend care because they are being exposed but they lay complacent to racism every day,” she said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In California she would have been sent packing in a New York minute.
PRELUDE TO ‘MARCH OF RETURN’
Palestinians report 4 killed as Gaza border march draws thousands
By Nikki Guttman, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Israel Hayom
March 30, 2018
Dozens of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces near the Israel-Gaza Strip border Friday ahead of the mass Hamas-orchestrated march on the security fence.
The area has been declared a restricted military zone.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said four protesters had been killed, two in northern Gaza and two in separate incidents near Khan Yunis, and over 350 people were wounded when Israeli troops used both crowd control measures and live fire against the protesters.
Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the coastal enclave, said it expected as many as 100,000 Palestinians to take part in the so-called "March of Return," scheduled to coincide with Land Day, which commemorates a 1976 incident in which Israeli forces killed six unarmed Arab citizens and wounded about a hundred amid violent riots.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in six areas near the border by noon on Friday. Several clashes erupted as protesters hurled rocks at Israeli troops and torched tires.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived at the border shortly before noon and addressed the protesters.
"The masses protesting here have come to make it clear that there is no alternative to Palestine or the right of return. Our people have proven that they are not only devoted to this goal but are also united on the ground," Haniyeh said.
"We are working to realize our right of return in many ways," he continued. "We will never give up and we will not recognize the Zionist entity on the Palestinian land. Jerusalem is ours and there is no solution without the right of return."
"This march is the beginning of the return to all of Palestine. We will not relinquish one inch of our blessed land. The Palestinian people today are sending a clear message to [U.S. President Donald] Trump – we will never relinquish Jerusalem," Haniyeh declared.
Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar made a rare public appearance on Friday when he, too, arrived at the protest.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit issued a statement saying, "Thousands of Palestinians have gathered at six points along the fence. They have set fire to tires and are hurling rocks at the fence and at security forces, who are responding with crowd control measures.
"The IDF has deployed large forces to the area and is ready to handle any scenario. We will not allow protesters to compromise security infrastructure or violate Israeli sovereignty," the statement said. "The Hamas terrorist group is putting Gazans in harm's way and using them as cover for its terrorist activity. Hamas is responsible for these events and their consequences."
The military added further that no special instructions have been issued to the border-adjacent communities at this time.
A military official said the IDF was investigating reports that demonstrators had breached the Erez border crossing in an attempt to sabotage security cameras and cross the border into Israel.
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned the residents of Gaza against participating in the march.
"To the residents of Gaza – the Hamas leadership is playing with your lives. Anyone who approaches the fence today puts themselves at risk. I suggest you go on with your life and not participate in this provocation," he tweeted in Arabic.
IDF Spokesman in Arabic Maj. Avichay Adraee tweeted, "Hamas is ignoring the rights of women and children and sends them to the border to advance its terrorist goals while shirking responsibility for their lives and well-being."
Following four separate Palestinian attempts to breach the border fence over the last week, ahead of Friday's march, the Prime Minister's Office Arabic Spokesman Ofir Gendelman tweeted Friday that "Hamas terrorists send thousands of Palestinians, some armed, to illegally cross the Gaza border fence and infiltrate Israeli territory in order to attack Israelis."
In the early hours of Friday morning, IDF troops deployed near the border fired at two suspects who were tampering with the security fence in the northern part of the border. No injuries were reported.
Overnight, an Israeli tank fired at two Palestinian suspects who reportedly attempted to tamper with the southern section of the border. The Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV channel said one man was wounded and another, named as 27-year-old Omar Wahid Sammour from the village of Qarara near Khan Yunis, was killed.
An IDF statement confirmed that during the incident outside Khan Yunis, "two suspects approached the perimeter fence and engaged in suspicious behavior on the ground alongside it. In response, an IDF unit fired tank shells at them."
Bracing for potential violence, the IDF has deployed Infantry, Armored Corps and Combat Intelligence troops, alongside special forces, sappers and more than 100 snipers to the border.
Military, Border Police and Israel Police troops on the ground were backed by aerial assistance to better monitor protesters' movement along the fence and alert the troops in the event of attempts to target IDF posts or infiltrate border-adjacent communities.
Security forces have been ordered to prevent a breach of the security fence, but they have also been instructed to exercise maximum restraint so as to minimize the number of Palestinian casualties.
A senior Hamas official in Gaza told Israel Hayom Thursday that the mass march is planned as a peaceful protest and that Hamas has instructed its security forces to prevent protesters from coming within 800 meters (2,600 feet) of the security fence.
The official said that Hamas security forces were planning to search protesters to ensure no weapons are brought in.
"We don't want to see a bloodbath. Just a quiet protest," he said, warning that "if there are Israeli provocations and if Israel deliberately harms protesters or our people, we will mount a harsh response."
"We will not tolerate any aggression by the Israeli enemy," he vowed.
By Nikki Guttman, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Israel Hayom
March 30, 2018
Dozens of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces near the Israel-Gaza Strip border Friday ahead of the mass Hamas-orchestrated march on the security fence.
The area has been declared a restricted military zone.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said four protesters had been killed, two in northern Gaza and two in separate incidents near Khan Yunis, and over 350 people were wounded when Israeli troops used both crowd control measures and live fire against the protesters.
Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the coastal enclave, said it expected as many as 100,000 Palestinians to take part in the so-called "March of Return," scheduled to coincide with Land Day, which commemorates a 1976 incident in which Israeli forces killed six unarmed Arab citizens and wounded about a hundred amid violent riots.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in six areas near the border by noon on Friday. Several clashes erupted as protesters hurled rocks at Israeli troops and torched tires.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh arrived at the border shortly before noon and addressed the protesters.
"The masses protesting here have come to make it clear that there is no alternative to Palestine or the right of return. Our people have proven that they are not only devoted to this goal but are also united on the ground," Haniyeh said.
"We are working to realize our right of return in many ways," he continued. "We will never give up and we will not recognize the Zionist entity on the Palestinian land. Jerusalem is ours and there is no solution without the right of return."
"This march is the beginning of the return to all of Palestine. We will not relinquish one inch of our blessed land. The Palestinian people today are sending a clear message to [U.S. President Donald] Trump – we will never relinquish Jerusalem," Haniyeh declared.
Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar made a rare public appearance on Friday when he, too, arrived at the protest.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit issued a statement saying, "Thousands of Palestinians have gathered at six points along the fence. They have set fire to tires and are hurling rocks at the fence and at security forces, who are responding with crowd control measures.
"The IDF has deployed large forces to the area and is ready to handle any scenario. We will not allow protesters to compromise security infrastructure or violate Israeli sovereignty," the statement said. "The Hamas terrorist group is putting Gazans in harm's way and using them as cover for its terrorist activity. Hamas is responsible for these events and their consequences."
The military added further that no special instructions have been issued to the border-adjacent communities at this time.
A military official said the IDF was investigating reports that demonstrators had breached the Erez border crossing in an attempt to sabotage security cameras and cross the border into Israel.
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned the residents of Gaza against participating in the march.
"To the residents of Gaza – the Hamas leadership is playing with your lives. Anyone who approaches the fence today puts themselves at risk. I suggest you go on with your life and not participate in this provocation," he tweeted in Arabic.
IDF Spokesman in Arabic Maj. Avichay Adraee tweeted, "Hamas is ignoring the rights of women and children and sends them to the border to advance its terrorist goals while shirking responsibility for their lives and well-being."
Following four separate Palestinian attempts to breach the border fence over the last week, ahead of Friday's march, the Prime Minister's Office Arabic Spokesman Ofir Gendelman tweeted Friday that "Hamas terrorists send thousands of Palestinians, some armed, to illegally cross the Gaza border fence and infiltrate Israeli territory in order to attack Israelis."
In the early hours of Friday morning, IDF troops deployed near the border fired at two suspects who were tampering with the security fence in the northern part of the border. No injuries were reported.
Overnight, an Israeli tank fired at two Palestinian suspects who reportedly attempted to tamper with the southern section of the border. The Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV channel said one man was wounded and another, named as 27-year-old Omar Wahid Sammour from the village of Qarara near Khan Yunis, was killed.
An IDF statement confirmed that during the incident outside Khan Yunis, "two suspects approached the perimeter fence and engaged in suspicious behavior on the ground alongside it. In response, an IDF unit fired tank shells at them."
Bracing for potential violence, the IDF has deployed Infantry, Armored Corps and Combat Intelligence troops, alongside special forces, sappers and more than 100 snipers to the border.
Military, Border Police and Israel Police troops on the ground were backed by aerial assistance to better monitor protesters' movement along the fence and alert the troops in the event of attempts to target IDF posts or infiltrate border-adjacent communities.
Security forces have been ordered to prevent a breach of the security fence, but they have also been instructed to exercise maximum restraint so as to minimize the number of Palestinian casualties.
A senior Hamas official in Gaza told Israel Hayom Thursday that the mass march is planned as a peaceful protest and that Hamas has instructed its security forces to prevent protesters from coming within 800 meters (2,600 feet) of the security fence.
The official said that Hamas security forces were planning to search protesters to ensure no weapons are brought in.
"We don't want to see a bloodbath. Just a quiet protest," he said, warning that "if there are Israeli provocations and if Israel deliberately harms protesters or our people, we will mount a harsh response."
"We will not tolerate any aggression by the Israeli enemy," he vowed.
ISRAELI STEALTH FIGHTER JETS UNDETECTED OVER IRAN
Israeli Jets Enter Iranian Airspace, Target Major Cities
Israel Today
March 30, 2018
Arab media reported this week that Israeli fighter jets recently entered Iranian airspace and locked on to targets in several major Iranian cities.
The jets in question were all from Israel's new fleet of advanced F-35 stealth fighters, which were able to carry out the probing mission without detection by Iran's Russian-supplied air defenses.
All this according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.
The newspaper reported that two Israeli F-35s flew over Syria and Iraq, presumably in coordination with American forces in the region, before penetrating Iranian airspace and circling high over three large Iranian cities - Bandar Abbas, Esfahan and Shiraz.
All three cities house major components of Iran's nuclear program, and the Israeli jets practiced locking on to these targets before returning safely to Israel.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Obama administration threatened to shoot down any Israeli warplanes that attacked Iran.
Israel Today
March 30, 2018
Arab media reported this week that Israeli fighter jets recently entered Iranian airspace and locked on to targets in several major Iranian cities.
The jets in question were all from Israel's new fleet of advanced F-35 stealth fighters, which were able to carry out the probing mission without detection by Iran's Russian-supplied air defenses.
All this according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.
The newspaper reported that two Israeli F-35s flew over Syria and Iraq, presumably in coordination with American forces in the region, before penetrating Iranian airspace and circling high over three large Iranian cities - Bandar Abbas, Esfahan and Shiraz.
All three cities house major components of Iran's nuclear program, and the Israeli jets practiced locking on to these targets before returning safely to Israel.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Obama administration threatened to shoot down any Israeli warplanes that attacked Iran.
DO US ALL A FAVOR AND SHUT UP!
Marine Corps Veteran Pens Open Letter to David Hogg
By Joe Newby
The Constitution
March 29, 2018
As we reported earlier Thursday, teen demagogue David Hogg has called on his supporters to boycott and pressure companies that advertise on Laura Ingraham’s program in retaliation for her statement regarding news that he has been rejected by four colleges.
Here is my response to young Mr. Hogg:
David,
I understand how you must feel after losing 17 of your classmates. As a 10-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps, I know what it’s like to lose comrades and friends in a senseless act of bloody violence.
We all deal with our losses in various ways. Some of us do so quietly, while others comfort themselves with prayer, confident that the day will come when we’ll all be reunited. You, however, chose to become a public spectacle.
Since the Parkland shooting, the country has watched as you and some of your fellow students chose to smear millions of law-abiding gun owners and NRA members, accusing them of having blood on their hands. We watched as you accused lawmakers of being child murderers.
We watched as you engaged in profane attacks against gun owners and even your own parents.
We watched as you spread lies and misinformation about the NRA, falsely claiming the organization is out to sell guns and make money while cheering the deaths of children.
We watched as you bragged about hanging up on the Trump White House and we all watched as you falsely claimed the NRA is trying to turn the United States into a dictatorship.
Now you’re upset because Laura Ingraham tweeted something about you being rejected from four colleges and are demanding her advertisers face boycott unless they drop her.
Let’s get something straight — YOU chose to become a public figure and YOU chose to use your First Amendment free speech right to express yourself and call for restrictions on a fundamental constitutional right. And YOU chose to let the world know that you were rejected by those colleges. No one forced you to do that — you did it all by yourself.
Now you’re mad because someone dared to respond.
Guess what, sports fans? When you choose to become a public figure, you open yourself up to criticism. That’s the way it is. You don’t get a pass from criticism despite what some at CNN might think.
What makes it worse is this tweet, which has been pinned to the top of your Twitter feed for some time:
This certainly doesn’t line up with your own actions before and since this tweet. In fact, your actions and statements since this tweet have exposed you as a rank hypocrite.
Here’s the bottom line — If you’re going to be a public figure you need to put on your big boy pants and grow up. You can’t trash and lie about millions of Americans and expect no backlash whatsoever. That’s not the real world.
So either grow up and deal with the criticism like an adult or do us all a favor and shut up.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Apparently Hogg thinks Newby can go fuck himself. Instead of shutting up, the little fart has attacked 81-year-old cancer-stricken Senator John McCain for taking “so much money from the NRA.”
By Joe Newby
The Constitution
March 29, 2018
As we reported earlier Thursday, teen demagogue David Hogg has called on his supporters to boycott and pressure companies that advertise on Laura Ingraham’s program in retaliation for her statement regarding news that he has been rejected by four colleges.
Here is my response to young Mr. Hogg:
David,
I understand how you must feel after losing 17 of your classmates. As a 10-year veteran of the United States Marine Corps, I know what it’s like to lose comrades and friends in a senseless act of bloody violence.
We all deal with our losses in various ways. Some of us do so quietly, while others comfort themselves with prayer, confident that the day will come when we’ll all be reunited. You, however, chose to become a public spectacle.
Since the Parkland shooting, the country has watched as you and some of your fellow students chose to smear millions of law-abiding gun owners and NRA members, accusing them of having blood on their hands. We watched as you accused lawmakers of being child murderers.
We watched as you engaged in profane attacks against gun owners and even your own parents.
We watched as you spread lies and misinformation about the NRA, falsely claiming the organization is out to sell guns and make money while cheering the deaths of children.
We watched as you bragged about hanging up on the Trump White House and we all watched as you falsely claimed the NRA is trying to turn the United States into a dictatorship.
Now you’re upset because Laura Ingraham tweeted something about you being rejected from four colleges and are demanding her advertisers face boycott unless they drop her.
Let’s get something straight — YOU chose to become a public figure and YOU chose to use your First Amendment free speech right to express yourself and call for restrictions on a fundamental constitutional right. And YOU chose to let the world know that you were rejected by those colleges. No one forced you to do that — you did it all by yourself.
Now you’re mad because someone dared to respond.
Guess what, sports fans? When you choose to become a public figure, you open yourself up to criticism. That’s the way it is. You don’t get a pass from criticism despite what some at CNN might think.
What makes it worse is this tweet, which has been pinned to the top of your Twitter feed for some time:
This certainly doesn’t line up with your own actions before and since this tweet. In fact, your actions and statements since this tweet have exposed you as a rank hypocrite.
Here’s the bottom line — If you’re going to be a public figure you need to put on your big boy pants and grow up. You can’t trash and lie about millions of Americans and expect no backlash whatsoever. That’s not the real world.
So either grow up and deal with the criticism like an adult or do us all a favor and shut up.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Apparently Hogg thinks Newby can go fuck himself. Instead of shutting up, the little fart has attacked 81-year-old cancer-stricken Senator John McCain for taking “so much money from the NRA.”
IS FORENSIC HYPNOSIS JUNK SCIENCE?
Death Row Case in Dallas County Puts Hypnosis on Trial as "Junk Science"
By Christian McPhate
Dallas Observer
March 27, 2018
Charles “Big Charlie” Flores and Richard Childs were searching for money when they slid under the garage door of a one-story brick home on Bergen Street. The Black family had built it in the early 1960s when the one-block neighborhood of Farmers Branch was nothing but pasture. They had raised two children and four grandchildren there and were hiding $39,000 in cash for their son Gary Black. Flores and Childs aimed to find it when they entered the house early in the morning Jan. 29, 1998.
Flores was a big man rumored to have connections to the Mexican mafia. Childs, who had a strung-out Joe Dirt look, was involved with Gary Black's ex-wife, Jackie Roberts. Both men had criminal records. Childs and Flores distributed methamphetamine and used it. They had been smoking it with Childs' girlfriend shortly before they pulled up in a psychedelic-colored Volkswagen Beetle and slipped underneath the Blacks' garage door at 7:30 a.m., police say.
Meth is why they wanted the cash. They scored a half-pound of it a few hours earlier and took it back to Flores' trailer, where he weighed it and found Childs' drug dealer had shorted him. Flores pointed a handgun at Roberts, purportedly as a joke, and persuaded her “to call the drug dealer to try to rectify the situation,” but dealers are not known for rectifying situations. So Roberts told Flores about the $39,000 in cash stashed behind a medicine cabinet at her mother-in-law's house in Farmers Branch. Her ex had left it there and told his mother, Elizabeth, to give Roberts $500 a month in spousal support while he served 15 years in prison on a drug charge.
They were searching for money and planning to shoot the guard dog, Santana, but didn't realize Elizabeth Black would be home, too. Each man had placed a potato on the end of his gun — a .380 and .44 Magnum — to act as a poor-man's silencer. When Bill Black came home from work later that morning, he discovered potato fragments splattered on the walls and ceiling and his 64-year-old wife, Elizabeth, and Santana dead. The $39,000 was still hidden in the master bedroom closet. The medicine cabinet had been torn off the wall.
Law enforcement recovered the .44 Magnum, believed to have been used to kill the dog, from Childs' home after his arrest on the night of Elizabeth Black's murder. Flores was captured a few months later in Dallas. The murder weapon was never recovered.
Childs took a plea deal and served 17 years of a 35-year prison sentence before being paroled. Flores, who went to trial before Childs' deal, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Witnesses against him included a friend and Flores' father-in-law, who claimed Flores told them he was there at the murder; Childs' former girlfriend, who smoked dope with them moments before the murder; and an eyewitness who had undergone forensic hypnosis shortly after the murder. Although Childs said he was the one who killed Elizabeth Black when he signed the deal, Flores was culpable for the murder since he took part in the crime.
Forensic hypnosis is what brought Flores, who is now 47, back to a Dallas district courtroom in October and again in December. Texas was supposed to execute him in June 2016, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals delayed the lethal injection a week before it was scheduled. Flores' new attorneys filed a motion that argued, in part, that he deserved a new trial because forensic hypnosis “was based on junk science.”
Law enforcement officials, however, claim that forensic hypnosis is one of several tools that has helped generate leads in some high-profile cold cases. Former Texas Department of Public Safety Inspector Marx Howell, who helped to develop forensic hypnosis for the department, acknowledges that some investigators may have misused hypnosis but says when it's done appropriately, it's a reliable and viable technique.
“When you look at that research on memory and eyewitness testimony, a lot of the research doesn't necessarily apply to real-world thinking,” Howell says. “It's made-up crimes and made-up information and watching video tapes of the crime and hypnotize [the supposed witness]. But how do you re-create the emotional terror of a sexual assault victim? We're talking about real-world application here.”
Texas courts have allowed hypnosis-induced testimony since the early '80s. Twenty-one other states also allow it. Federal investigators and the Texas Rangers are known to use it more often than local police, and Howell has traveled around the world to teach forensic hypnosis to law enforcement officials.
Gerald Carruth, former chief of legal services for the Texas DPS, points out that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has already upheld hypnosis-induced testimony — in State v. Medrano in 2004 and Zani vs. State in 1988, in which the court created 10 procedural safeguards known as the "Zani factors" that a trial court should use to determine whether a testimony is trustworthy. Some of those factors include the forensic hypnotist's level of training, the creation of recordings of all contacts between the hypnotist and the subject, and the presence of persons other than the hypnotist and the subject during any phase of the hypnosis session.
"Zani has been challenged and upheld over 30 years now," Carruth says.
Flores' case hinges on the Court of Criminal Appeals' willingness to take another look at Zani in light of the fact that the scientific view of hypnosis has changed over past 30 years.
"An invaluable brick"
The first case of hypnosis-induced testimony to be introduced by prosecutors in a Texas trial court involved George Vizard IV, who was found dead in a cold-room storage locker at the Town and Country convenience store in Austin where he worked in the late '60s. A political radical and staff member of the Rag, an underground newspaper in Austin, he'd been shot twice with a .357 Magnum.
Mariann Garner-Vizard, a well-known activist, writer and spoken-word poet who legally adopted her pen name, Mariann G. Wizard, after Vizard's death, thought he looked too serious for her when she met him, but she enjoyed hearing him argue about politics in the Union at the University of Texas at Austin. She began attending demonstrations with him and “learned a little about nonviolence and not to wear earrings or open-toed shoes on a picket line,” she wrote in her 1991 essay “The Lie.” They married in December 1965 at the old Methodist Student Center in Austin and spent the next two years exploring the left political landscape and living in a series of roach-infested apartments near the UT campus.
“Sunday, July 23, 1967, [is] engraved on my heart,” she says.
Wizard, who was 20 when her husband died that day, wrote in her essay that most people at the time were convinced that it was a political murder. Austin police believed otherwise. Vizard's killer, Robert Zani, a former UT student, had decided to rob the store early that Sunday morning because he had once worked there and knew the safe's combination. Former prosecutor “Mad Dog” Joe Turner recalls that Zani had “sociopath eyes” and needed the money because he planned to marry a Mexican prostitute and had only $2 in the bank.
Two nights before the shooting, Zani tried to elicit help from two other UT students, but they turned down his offer and reported him to authorities when word began to spread about Vizard's murder. Austin police never questioned him.
Fourteen years passed before Zani was brought to justice. He was arrested in Austin on a credit card fraud charge and was a suspect in several Austin and San Antonio robberies and in the murder of Julian Dress, a San Antonio real estate agent. He'd also been cashing his mother's Social Security checks. He made one fatal mistake: He upset his wife.
Irma Zani told investigators that her husband had killed his mother in the early '70s, as well as some “smart-ass communist” at a convenience store in 1967.
But he didn't just kill his mother. He hit her in the head with a hammer, took her body to the basement, sawed off her head and limbs, and put her body parts into suitcases. Once they cleaned up the blood, the Zanis left Tulsa, Oklahoma, for Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and threw out her body parts along the way. Irma Zani was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Robert Zani had been using different aliases and posing as a rich doctor to gain access to expensive homes to rob them. He also killed a real estate agent in the late '70s. After police captured him at a Ramada Inn in Austin in March 1980, Zani wouldn't tell them who he was.
“OK, motherfucker, we're going to find out,” Turner, who was 25 at the time and a fairly new prosecutor, recalls thinking.
Turner started looking for witnesses to Vizard's murder and found one with only vague memories of the crime. Turner asked him if he would be willing to go under forensic hypnosis, a fairly new law enforcement technique that had never been admitted as scientific evidence until Zani's trial in the early '80s.
“This is not junk science,” Turner says. “It's provable and it works. It's just another piece of the puzzle. If all you had was hypnosis and tech, it might be difficult but not impossible. It's a brick in that [case] wall. In my case, it was an invaluable brick.”
"A guiding hand"
Texas Ranger Carl Weathers conducted the forensic hypnosis interview with the witness, a regular customer of Town and Country convenience store. Weathers and other Rangers had persuaded the DPS in 1980 to send them to the new forensic hypnosis class taught by Michael Boulch, a Houston resident who'd been trained in forensic hypnosis.
“I was skeptical at first, a real bad skeptic,” Weathers told the Texas Ranger Association Foundation for a project known as “In Their Own Words — Oral Histories of the Texas Rangers.”
“But during that school, I learned what hypnosis really is and the benefits of it,” Weathers continued. “And, uh, really, just to let you know what it is, it's relaxation. Everybody in this whole world is hypnotized at least twice a day and that's just as you're waking up in the morning and just as you're going to sleep at night. You're totally, completely relaxed, and that's what hypnosis is.”
He went to Houston to interview the witness in Vizard's murder, Jerry Magoyne Jr., whose father had a construction business in Austin. They'd often go to the Town and Country store on their breaks.
“The guy relaxed, I mean to tell you,” Weathers said. “I got him to regress back. … I had him in there, and he was reliving it. He was telling me verbatim what was going on. I would have to stop him because time was going like it was in regular time back then. It was going to take forever. I got a two-hour tape I gotta get this on, you see. So I said, 'OK, time's moving forward real fast.' And you can do that in hypnosis. Time, you can make it stand still, back up, go forward, slow motion, whatever.
“Anyways, I got him to the point where he's up at the counter and the guy's waiting on him. And I get him to describe this clerk that's waiting on him. He started at the top of his head, come down as far as he can see and go back, back down, back up.”
A forensic sketch artist was sitting in the hypnosis interview and sketching the clerk, whom police believe was Zani, but Magoyne couldn't recall the man's eyes. Advocates for forensic hypnosis claim it is a telling point because he was unwilling to fill in the details when he couldn't recall them. Magoyne wasn't trying to please officers by making up details, they say; he was simply recalling what he could remember in a relaxed state.
Paul Ruiz, an Austin police detective who'd been investigating the cold case, had a picture of Zani in his briefcase and showed it Weathers.
“It looked like that artist had used that picture to draw this composite,” Weathers said. “It was scary.”
Austin police had sent over seven or eight pictures of suspects. Weathers took Magoyne out of the hypnotic trance and said, “See if you can pick this guy out.”
“That's him,” Magoyne said when he came upon the picture of Zani.
At Zani's murder trial, the defense brought in an expert witness, a psychologist trained in hypnosis. The defense grilled Weathers during cross-examination. Similar to Flores' expert witness, Weathers acknowledged that people sometimes confabulate and fill in blanks to please the hypnotist. The defense also suggested that Weathers asked leading questions, but Weathers testified that he followed protocol and recorded the entire interview. The witness didn't confabulate, Weathers said, because if he had, he would have filled in the details about the eyes.
The interview recording was admitted into evidence and played for the jury. Law enforcement was also able to trace the .357 magnum used to kill Vizard back to Mexico with the help of Zani's wife. The jury convicted Zani of murder in March 1981. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A year later, he was found guilty of murdering his mother.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the latter conviction in April 1986 and barred the state from retrying the case, citing “many errors,” such as not giving Zani a speedy trial when he requested it to sentencing him under murder laws that were passed after he hammered his mother to death. The prosecution had also failed to tell jurors that Zani's wife was an accomplice whose testimony had to be corroborated, according to news reports.
Zani also appealed the conviction for Vizard's murder, claiming hypnosis was junk science, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed with the lower court's ruling and found Weathers had followed the necessary protocols. In 1988, the appellate court requested that guidelines be implemented so other law enforcement officials would follow what Weathers had done during his interview. It became known as the “Zani ruling.”
“I didn't know when I was doing this hypnosis that I was creating guidelines that the Court of Criminal Appeals was gonna use as case law,” Weathers said. “I'm like the woodpecker, though, that was in this real tall tree, pecking away. Directly, a bolt of lightning hit it and split the tree in half. Well, the woodpecker still thinks he did that. So there's a guiding hand on me, I guarantee you.
"It wasn't because I was that smart. I had some good training, and I was lucky. I had a guiding hand.”
Zani died in prison in 2011. He's buried in the prison graveyard in Huntsville.
Questioning credibility
Howell, the DPS inspector, was a skeptic when his superiors appointed him to a seven-member committee a year before Zani's arrest in 1980. It was to determine how best to use hypnosis to help solve cases.
The state police were interested in studying data concerning law enforcement's use of hypnosis and developing criteria in training personnel. At the time, the biggest case of law enforcement using forensic hypnosis regarded a crime in July 1976 in Chowchilla, California, when 26 children and a school bus driver, Edward Ray, were kidnapped and buried alive in a makeshift grave. They were able to dig themselves out and contacted police, who decided that forensic hypnosis should be used to help track down the suspects.
Ray had seen the license plate of the kidnapper's vehicle but couldn't remember all the digits. Psychiatrist William S. Kroger, considered the leading authority on hypnosis, conducted the hypnosis session for law enforcement. Ray was able to recall all but one of the digits, which led to the arrest and conviction of three suspects, Fredrick Wood and James and Richard Schoenfield.
“It was the catalyst case that got law enforcement off high center to look at this technique as a valuable interviewing strategy under certain conditions,” Howell says.
After his appointment to the committee, Howell went to visit psychologist Martin Reiser's Law Enforcement Hypnosis Institute in Los Angeles to check out the program. Unlike stage hypnosis, a form of mind control to entertain audiences, forensic hypnosis seeks to relax witnesses by eliminating distractions to help them recall details of crimes. Its only purpose, Howell says, is to refresh the subject's memory. He compares it to struggling to recall a name that you knew, only to remember it later when you're relaxed.
“I became a believer instead of a skeptic,” he says.
Howell began teaching forensic hypnosis in 1982 and criminal profiling in 1984. He went on to serve as the president of the Texas Association for Investigative Hypnosis and the International Society for Investigative and Forensic Hypnosis. He was also inducted into the International Hypnosis Hall of Fame.
The seven-member Texas committee developed self-imposed guidelines, such as using trained investigators unfamiliar with the case to eliminate the possibility of leading the witness. It also established record-keeping requirements, including audio and video recording, and created a 50-hour training course for state police.
In late 1979, the DPS hypnosis program became an official part of the DPS training manual.
Howell claims that forensic hypnosis is about 75 percent effective and acknowledges that defense attorneys and some people in the scientific community often misunderstand it.
Dr. Bernard Diamond, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the discipline's earliest critics. In 1980, he wrote and published “Inherent Problems in the Use of Pretrial Hypnosis on a Prospective Witness” in the California Law Review. At that time, police in cities such as Los Angeles; Seattle; Denver; Houston; San Antonio; Washington, D.C.; and New York were using forensic hypnosis, as were the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Air Force special investigations unit.
“Unfortunately, sensitivity to the limitations and hazards of hypnotism and especially to the myriad ways of intentionally and unintentionally suggesting response to the subject requires much more experience and training,” Diamond wrote. “In my opinion, even psychiatric and psychological professionals highly skilled in the use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes are apt to be naive in recognizing its limitations as a 'truth-telling' technique.”
Diamond encouraged the courts to re-examine the general rule of law that hypnotic-induced testimony is admissible. He claimed that hypnotized witnesses' recollections were contaminated, which made them incompetent to testify. The risk is so great, he wrote, that police using hypnosis is the same as the destruction or fabrication of evidence.
Diamond wasn't the only one raising concerns about law enforcement's practice of hypnosis. The American Psychological Association and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis claimed that the training of lay hypnotists such as law enforcement officials was unethical, but psychologist Steve K. Dubrow-Eichel said the medical community should accept lay hypnotists, as it had clinicians, in his editorial “Turf War Battle: Who Owns Hypnosis?” in the October 1996 American Society of Clinical Hypnosis newsletter.
"Not a shortcut"
Jill Barganier sat in an office chair at the Farmers Branch Police Department with her head bowed and hands crossed in her lap as a forensic hypnotist began her session. It was a week after Elizabeth Black's murder in the late '90s. Bargainer, 36, lived next door to the Blacks and had peered through her mini-blinds that January morning. She had seen the killers get out of the Volkswagen Beetle and later described Childs to a sketch artist and picked him out of a photo lineup.
But Barganier could only recall that the passenger was big like Flores, possibly white, with dark hair that she thought may have been long like Childs, Flores' defense attorney Gretchen Sween wrote in court documents. (Flores had short hair.)
Farmers Branch PD's hypnosis officer, Alfredo Serna, had placed Barganier into a deep state of hypnosis by speaking in a neutral tone and asking her to focus on the space between her fingers and visualize the events of that late morning in 1998. It was known as the movie theater technique, in which the hypnotist asks the subject to pretend as if she were sitting in a movie theater and watching a movie of her memories of the day in question.
Although the technique has been largely discredited, Barganier was able to recall the color of the car and the hair and eye colors of both suspects. But she wasn't able to pick Flores out of a photo lineup after the hypnosis session and didn't fully recognize him until his capital murder trial a year later. Serna told the court that he was aware that some people were not able to be hypnotized and he wasn't certain if Barganier had been hypnotized. If she wasn't, then it was simply a police officer interviewing a witness, he testified.
At the time, DPS investigators had conducted more the 1,100 hypnosis sessions, resulting in additional information in 876 sessions. The Texas appellate courts had upheld convictions in which hypnosis was used for the purpose of memory enhancement in four criminal appeals from 1983-88, including the Zani case. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reaffirmed it in 2004.
The Texas Legislature had passed a law effective in 1988 that charged the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education with implementing forensic hypnosis training and testing for law enforcement. It grandfathered in prior forensic hypnosis training but not the testing requirements.
“The DPS stresses that hypnosis should be used as an aid to investigations, not a substitute,” Howell wrote in one of many reports posted on his personal website. “Investigators have been cautioned to assure that standard investigative methods have been fully utilized before hypnosis is used.”
Forensic hypnosis also can be used in certain limited cases at the federal level to help generate leads, according to the U.S. Attorneys' Criminal Resource Manual. But it notes, "The information obtained from a person while in a hypnotic trance cannot be assumed to be accurate. Therefore, any information obtained by the use of hypnosis must be thoroughly checked as to its ultimate accuracy and corroborated.”
Today, the Texas Rangers use forensic hypnosis more than any other law enforcement agency in the state because they're less likely to know specific details of a local investigation when they're called in for help, says Perry Gilmore of the Texas Association for Investigative Hypnosis and the Texas Crime Stoppers Council, which advises the governor on crime stoppers programs around the state. He is trained in forensic hypnosis.
“We always say it is not a shortcut for a good traditional investigations,” he says. “When we do get information from hypnosis, we try to verify as many of those facts as we can.”
Captured in Dallas
Flores watched Sween "dismantle" the Dallas county prosecutor's case during closing arguments of his hearing in late 2017. He called her a “superhero” on his blog, “Innocent on Death Row.” Sween used a PowerPoint presentation projected on three screens in the courtroom to give a lesson on the history of the criminal appellate law and statute related to forensic hypnosis. She discussed a recent change in Texas law that allows defense attorneys to challenge hypnosis as “junk science.”
Flores, who is now his late 40s, has been sitting on death row for 20 years. He's still a large man, but his dark hair is gone. Dressed in prison whites, he's smiling in a photo on his blog, where he shares journal entries and news from death row. He shared a link to a January 2016 news article that paints him as a victim of racism, using that to justify the fact that he spray-painted Childs' Volkswagen black and burned it a couple of days after Black's murder, firing his gun several times at a passerby and fleeing to Mexico for several months until law enforcement captured him when he returned to Dallas.
It wasn't a simple capture. Flores gave officers his brother's name when he was arrested in Kyle, about three hours southwest of Dallas, for driving while intoxicated and two counts of assault on a police officer. He was caught after the FBI picked up his trail and law enforcement chased him through Dallas until he crashed his mother's blue Volvo. At Parkland Hospital, where we was getting treatment for his injuries, he tried to take an officer's gun and sprayed the the officer and hospital staff with mace before being restrained.
“People say that guilty people run, but I can also tell you that you also run if you're scared, you run when you know they can give you a life sentence, you also run if you know you're the only Mexican in the a group of whites,” Flores told Splinter news.
Seeking a consensus
At Flores' hearing late last year in Dallas, Sween called Flores' expert, Steven Lynn, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He explained that in the past 15 years, a shift has occurred in the psychological community, which believes hypnosis is not safe to use on lost memory retrieval in any way and the findings in the Zani case were erroneous, meriting a new trial for Flores.
The prosecution claimed that Lynn wasn't pointing out anything new and the substance of his opinion was available in Flores' original trial in the late '90s.
"The court finds that, through reasonable diligence, [Flores] could have obtained the testimony of Dr. Lynn or a similar expert at the time of his trial," wrote Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Ott.
In court documents, Sween introduces testimony from hypnosis and memory expert Martin Orne, one of the world's foremost forensic psychologists and someone whom courts have used to determine if forensic hypnosis should be submitted as evidence.
“Dr. Orne no longer believes that procedural safeguards reduce the risk associated with hypnotically enhanced memory,” she wrote. “There is a consensus among scientists in the field of memory and eyewitness identification that hypnosis is an inherently suggestive pretrial procedure based on data that supports that perspective.”
The prosecution introduced its expert witness, Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University whose knowledge of hypnosis spans 45 years. He is also part of the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs panel that evaluated the effects of hypnosis on memory.
"It suggested that there can be complications with hypnotically refreshed memory, not unlike the things that are in the Zani hearing," Spiegel testified. "And it suggested that caution should be used when hypnosis is used in the forensic setting. ... Sometimes false information or confabulation can occur. So it should be used with caution."
Spiegel testified that although new scientific studies on hypnosis and memory have been conducted, their findings have been consistent with what was already known before Flores' original trial.
Sween also argues that the state did not present any physical evidence and rested its case on the testimonies of drug dealers and users, some of whom were seeking leniency in their own cases. The only “seemingly untainted evidence the state presented to place Flores on the scene was Bargainer's hypnotically altered testimony,” she said.
Prosecutors, however, claim hypnotically refreshed testimony is still admissible in Texas courts as long as it meets the Zani factors. In Barganier's case, when she arrived at Flores' trial in the late '90s and recognized Flores as the passenger, the court conducted a hearing and determined that her testimony was admissible.
Psychologist George Mount, an expert for the prosecution, testified during Flores' original trial that he'd evaluated hundreds of hypnosis sessions, taught hypnosis for 20 years and served on the board that developed the exam for Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officers Standards and saw no evidence of any incorrect procedures on the video recording of Barganier's forensic hypnosis session.
Jason January, the lead prosecutor in Flores' original trial, summarized the corroborating evidence placing Flores at the scene as follows: Eight people witnessed Childs and Flores together shortly before Black's murder, two people claimed Flores admitted being present at the scene and one person saw Flores torching Childs' Volkswagen on Interstate 30 two days after Black's murder.
Flores' case is now in the hands 195th District Judge Hector Garza, who will rule sometime in the coming months.
"Drowning in fear, choking on terror"
Flores' picture hangs in the center of the living room wall in his mother's home. As in his blog photo, he's smiling in his prison whites. This time, he's making a heart with his hands in front of his chest.
His mother, Lily, has lived in the small home for 18 years. They moved to the Dallas area from Midland in the '80s when the oil economy bottomed out. Her husband, Catarino, died shortly before her son's scheduled execution in 2016.
In her early 80s, Lily is stooped with age and doesn't hear very well anymore. She wasn't able to hear much during her son's recent hearings. She hasn't gotten to hug her son since he was arrested. Over the years, she'd visit him at least once in month on death row in Livingston, about four hours away, but a thick glass always separated them.
Flores, the youngest of four brothers and one sister, played football in junior high school and was always coming and going and running around when he was in high school. Lily isn't sure when he started his life of crime.
"I could not tell you," she says and laughs. "I'm his mother."
Flores' brother Juan Jojola blames it on Flores' roofing work and the appeal of easy money.
"You know, in this roofing work, you get brain damage up on that roof, especially when it's hot," he says. "We'd drink a few beers, man, but ol' Charlie wasn't into drugs. He just got caught up in it, and it went sour on him. That's really it in a nutshell."
Flores claimed in his January 2016 Splinter news feature that he'd been cooking breakfast for his wife, Myra Wait, at the time of Black's murder, but court records show that Wait claimed he was with Childs at the Blacks' home.
Flores' father was getting ready for work in the bathroom one morning when he heard about his son's arrest on the radio, but Lily says it wasn't long before they joined him in Dallas County Jail. They were arrested for hindering the apprehension of a felon in May 1998. She told the prosecutor, Jason January, that they didn't know where he'd gone, but January claimed she had sent money to her son in Mexico and let him borrow the car.
"And we ate bologna sandwiches, too," she says and chuckles. "I got a four-year probation."
Flores' book The Warrior Within: Inside Report on Texas Death Row sits on the coffee cable in the living room. His mother been selling copies.
Inside, Flores writes, "I started to comprehend what it meant to be on death row. I was beginning to understand it was a race against the clock, the most important race I'd ever run. That understanding came at a terrible price, a price I pay daily. It's paid in the form of anxiety attacks that come from nowhere that I have today. It's paid in nightmares that wake me up in a cold sweat, shaking my head trying to knock the haunting images out of it, nightmares of living my last day on death row, being taken to Huntsville and being put in the holding cell next to the death chamber, drowning in fear, choking on terror, as I wait for them to execute me."
By Christian McPhate
Dallas Observer
March 27, 2018
Charles “Big Charlie” Flores and Richard Childs were searching for money when they slid under the garage door of a one-story brick home on Bergen Street. The Black family had built it in the early 1960s when the one-block neighborhood of Farmers Branch was nothing but pasture. They had raised two children and four grandchildren there and were hiding $39,000 in cash for their son Gary Black. Flores and Childs aimed to find it when they entered the house early in the morning Jan. 29, 1998.
Flores was a big man rumored to have connections to the Mexican mafia. Childs, who had a strung-out Joe Dirt look, was involved with Gary Black's ex-wife, Jackie Roberts. Both men had criminal records. Childs and Flores distributed methamphetamine and used it. They had been smoking it with Childs' girlfriend shortly before they pulled up in a psychedelic-colored Volkswagen Beetle and slipped underneath the Blacks' garage door at 7:30 a.m., police say.
Meth is why they wanted the cash. They scored a half-pound of it a few hours earlier and took it back to Flores' trailer, where he weighed it and found Childs' drug dealer had shorted him. Flores pointed a handgun at Roberts, purportedly as a joke, and persuaded her “to call the drug dealer to try to rectify the situation,” but dealers are not known for rectifying situations. So Roberts told Flores about the $39,000 in cash stashed behind a medicine cabinet at her mother-in-law's house in Farmers Branch. Her ex had left it there and told his mother, Elizabeth, to give Roberts $500 a month in spousal support while he served 15 years in prison on a drug charge.
They were searching for money and planning to shoot the guard dog, Santana, but didn't realize Elizabeth Black would be home, too. Each man had placed a potato on the end of his gun — a .380 and .44 Magnum — to act as a poor-man's silencer. When Bill Black came home from work later that morning, he discovered potato fragments splattered on the walls and ceiling and his 64-year-old wife, Elizabeth, and Santana dead. The $39,000 was still hidden in the master bedroom closet. The medicine cabinet had been torn off the wall.
Law enforcement recovered the .44 Magnum, believed to have been used to kill the dog, from Childs' home after his arrest on the night of Elizabeth Black's murder. Flores was captured a few months later in Dallas. The murder weapon was never recovered.
Childs took a plea deal and served 17 years of a 35-year prison sentence before being paroled. Flores, who went to trial before Childs' deal, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Witnesses against him included a friend and Flores' father-in-law, who claimed Flores told them he was there at the murder; Childs' former girlfriend, who smoked dope with them moments before the murder; and an eyewitness who had undergone forensic hypnosis shortly after the murder. Although Childs said he was the one who killed Elizabeth Black when he signed the deal, Flores was culpable for the murder since he took part in the crime.
Forensic hypnosis is what brought Flores, who is now 47, back to a Dallas district courtroom in October and again in December. Texas was supposed to execute him in June 2016, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals delayed the lethal injection a week before it was scheduled. Flores' new attorneys filed a motion that argued, in part, that he deserved a new trial because forensic hypnosis “was based on junk science.”
Law enforcement officials, however, claim that forensic hypnosis is one of several tools that has helped generate leads in some high-profile cold cases. Former Texas Department of Public Safety Inspector Marx Howell, who helped to develop forensic hypnosis for the department, acknowledges that some investigators may have misused hypnosis but says when it's done appropriately, it's a reliable and viable technique.
“When you look at that research on memory and eyewitness testimony, a lot of the research doesn't necessarily apply to real-world thinking,” Howell says. “It's made-up crimes and made-up information and watching video tapes of the crime and hypnotize [the supposed witness]. But how do you re-create the emotional terror of a sexual assault victim? We're talking about real-world application here.”
Texas courts have allowed hypnosis-induced testimony since the early '80s. Twenty-one other states also allow it. Federal investigators and the Texas Rangers are known to use it more often than local police, and Howell has traveled around the world to teach forensic hypnosis to law enforcement officials.
Gerald Carruth, former chief of legal services for the Texas DPS, points out that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has already upheld hypnosis-induced testimony — in State v. Medrano in 2004 and Zani vs. State in 1988, in which the court created 10 procedural safeguards known as the "Zani factors" that a trial court should use to determine whether a testimony is trustworthy. Some of those factors include the forensic hypnotist's level of training, the creation of recordings of all contacts between the hypnotist and the subject, and the presence of persons other than the hypnotist and the subject during any phase of the hypnosis session.
"Zani has been challenged and upheld over 30 years now," Carruth says.
Flores' case hinges on the Court of Criminal Appeals' willingness to take another look at Zani in light of the fact that the scientific view of hypnosis has changed over past 30 years.
"An invaluable brick"
The first case of hypnosis-induced testimony to be introduced by prosecutors in a Texas trial court involved George Vizard IV, who was found dead in a cold-room storage locker at the Town and Country convenience store in Austin where he worked in the late '60s. A political radical and staff member of the Rag, an underground newspaper in Austin, he'd been shot twice with a .357 Magnum.
Mariann Garner-Vizard, a well-known activist, writer and spoken-word poet who legally adopted her pen name, Mariann G. Wizard, after Vizard's death, thought he looked too serious for her when she met him, but she enjoyed hearing him argue about politics in the Union at the University of Texas at Austin. She began attending demonstrations with him and “learned a little about nonviolence and not to wear earrings or open-toed shoes on a picket line,” she wrote in her 1991 essay “The Lie.” They married in December 1965 at the old Methodist Student Center in Austin and spent the next two years exploring the left political landscape and living in a series of roach-infested apartments near the UT campus.
“Sunday, July 23, 1967, [is] engraved on my heart,” she says.
Wizard, who was 20 when her husband died that day, wrote in her essay that most people at the time were convinced that it was a political murder. Austin police believed otherwise. Vizard's killer, Robert Zani, a former UT student, had decided to rob the store early that Sunday morning because he had once worked there and knew the safe's combination. Former prosecutor “Mad Dog” Joe Turner recalls that Zani had “sociopath eyes” and needed the money because he planned to marry a Mexican prostitute and had only $2 in the bank.
Two nights before the shooting, Zani tried to elicit help from two other UT students, but they turned down his offer and reported him to authorities when word began to spread about Vizard's murder. Austin police never questioned him.
Fourteen years passed before Zani was brought to justice. He was arrested in Austin on a credit card fraud charge and was a suspect in several Austin and San Antonio robberies and in the murder of Julian Dress, a San Antonio real estate agent. He'd also been cashing his mother's Social Security checks. He made one fatal mistake: He upset his wife.
Irma Zani told investigators that her husband had killed his mother in the early '70s, as well as some “smart-ass communist” at a convenience store in 1967.
But he didn't just kill his mother. He hit her in the head with a hammer, took her body to the basement, sawed off her head and limbs, and put her body parts into suitcases. Once they cleaned up the blood, the Zanis left Tulsa, Oklahoma, for Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and threw out her body parts along the way. Irma Zani was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Robert Zani had been using different aliases and posing as a rich doctor to gain access to expensive homes to rob them. He also killed a real estate agent in the late '70s. After police captured him at a Ramada Inn in Austin in March 1980, Zani wouldn't tell them who he was.
“OK, motherfucker, we're going to find out,” Turner, who was 25 at the time and a fairly new prosecutor, recalls thinking.
Turner started looking for witnesses to Vizard's murder and found one with only vague memories of the crime. Turner asked him if he would be willing to go under forensic hypnosis, a fairly new law enforcement technique that had never been admitted as scientific evidence until Zani's trial in the early '80s.
“This is not junk science,” Turner says. “It's provable and it works. It's just another piece of the puzzle. If all you had was hypnosis and tech, it might be difficult but not impossible. It's a brick in that [case] wall. In my case, it was an invaluable brick.”
"A guiding hand"
Texas Ranger Carl Weathers conducted the forensic hypnosis interview with the witness, a regular customer of Town and Country convenience store. Weathers and other Rangers had persuaded the DPS in 1980 to send them to the new forensic hypnosis class taught by Michael Boulch, a Houston resident who'd been trained in forensic hypnosis.
“I was skeptical at first, a real bad skeptic,” Weathers told the Texas Ranger Association Foundation for a project known as “In Their Own Words — Oral Histories of the Texas Rangers.”
“But during that school, I learned what hypnosis really is and the benefits of it,” Weathers continued. “And, uh, really, just to let you know what it is, it's relaxation. Everybody in this whole world is hypnotized at least twice a day and that's just as you're waking up in the morning and just as you're going to sleep at night. You're totally, completely relaxed, and that's what hypnosis is.”
He went to Houston to interview the witness in Vizard's murder, Jerry Magoyne Jr., whose father had a construction business in Austin. They'd often go to the Town and Country store on their breaks.
“The guy relaxed, I mean to tell you,” Weathers said. “I got him to regress back. … I had him in there, and he was reliving it. He was telling me verbatim what was going on. I would have to stop him because time was going like it was in regular time back then. It was going to take forever. I got a two-hour tape I gotta get this on, you see. So I said, 'OK, time's moving forward real fast.' And you can do that in hypnosis. Time, you can make it stand still, back up, go forward, slow motion, whatever.
“Anyways, I got him to the point where he's up at the counter and the guy's waiting on him. And I get him to describe this clerk that's waiting on him. He started at the top of his head, come down as far as he can see and go back, back down, back up.”
A forensic sketch artist was sitting in the hypnosis interview and sketching the clerk, whom police believe was Zani, but Magoyne couldn't recall the man's eyes. Advocates for forensic hypnosis claim it is a telling point because he was unwilling to fill in the details when he couldn't recall them. Magoyne wasn't trying to please officers by making up details, they say; he was simply recalling what he could remember in a relaxed state.
Paul Ruiz, an Austin police detective who'd been investigating the cold case, had a picture of Zani in his briefcase and showed it Weathers.
“It looked like that artist had used that picture to draw this composite,” Weathers said. “It was scary.”
Austin police had sent over seven or eight pictures of suspects. Weathers took Magoyne out of the hypnotic trance and said, “See if you can pick this guy out.”
“That's him,” Magoyne said when he came upon the picture of Zani.
At Zani's murder trial, the defense brought in an expert witness, a psychologist trained in hypnosis. The defense grilled Weathers during cross-examination. Similar to Flores' expert witness, Weathers acknowledged that people sometimes confabulate and fill in blanks to please the hypnotist. The defense also suggested that Weathers asked leading questions, but Weathers testified that he followed protocol and recorded the entire interview. The witness didn't confabulate, Weathers said, because if he had, he would have filled in the details about the eyes.
The interview recording was admitted into evidence and played for the jury. Law enforcement was also able to trace the .357 magnum used to kill Vizard back to Mexico with the help of Zani's wife. The jury convicted Zani of murder in March 1981. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. A year later, he was found guilty of murdering his mother.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the latter conviction in April 1986 and barred the state from retrying the case, citing “many errors,” such as not giving Zani a speedy trial when he requested it to sentencing him under murder laws that were passed after he hammered his mother to death. The prosecution had also failed to tell jurors that Zani's wife was an accomplice whose testimony had to be corroborated, according to news reports.
Zani also appealed the conviction for Vizard's murder, claiming hypnosis was junk science, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed with the lower court's ruling and found Weathers had followed the necessary protocols. In 1988, the appellate court requested that guidelines be implemented so other law enforcement officials would follow what Weathers had done during his interview. It became known as the “Zani ruling.”
“I didn't know when I was doing this hypnosis that I was creating guidelines that the Court of Criminal Appeals was gonna use as case law,” Weathers said. “I'm like the woodpecker, though, that was in this real tall tree, pecking away. Directly, a bolt of lightning hit it and split the tree in half. Well, the woodpecker still thinks he did that. So there's a guiding hand on me, I guarantee you.
"It wasn't because I was that smart. I had some good training, and I was lucky. I had a guiding hand.”
Zani died in prison in 2011. He's buried in the prison graveyard in Huntsville.
Questioning credibility
Howell, the DPS inspector, was a skeptic when his superiors appointed him to a seven-member committee a year before Zani's arrest in 1980. It was to determine how best to use hypnosis to help solve cases.
The state police were interested in studying data concerning law enforcement's use of hypnosis and developing criteria in training personnel. At the time, the biggest case of law enforcement using forensic hypnosis regarded a crime in July 1976 in Chowchilla, California, when 26 children and a school bus driver, Edward Ray, were kidnapped and buried alive in a makeshift grave. They were able to dig themselves out and contacted police, who decided that forensic hypnosis should be used to help track down the suspects.
Ray had seen the license plate of the kidnapper's vehicle but couldn't remember all the digits. Psychiatrist William S. Kroger, considered the leading authority on hypnosis, conducted the hypnosis session for law enforcement. Ray was able to recall all but one of the digits, which led to the arrest and conviction of three suspects, Fredrick Wood and James and Richard Schoenfield.
“It was the catalyst case that got law enforcement off high center to look at this technique as a valuable interviewing strategy under certain conditions,” Howell says.
After his appointment to the committee, Howell went to visit psychologist Martin Reiser's Law Enforcement Hypnosis Institute in Los Angeles to check out the program. Unlike stage hypnosis, a form of mind control to entertain audiences, forensic hypnosis seeks to relax witnesses by eliminating distractions to help them recall details of crimes. Its only purpose, Howell says, is to refresh the subject's memory. He compares it to struggling to recall a name that you knew, only to remember it later when you're relaxed.
“I became a believer instead of a skeptic,” he says.
Howell began teaching forensic hypnosis in 1982 and criminal profiling in 1984. He went on to serve as the president of the Texas Association for Investigative Hypnosis and the International Society for Investigative and Forensic Hypnosis. He was also inducted into the International Hypnosis Hall of Fame.
The seven-member Texas committee developed self-imposed guidelines, such as using trained investigators unfamiliar with the case to eliminate the possibility of leading the witness. It also established record-keeping requirements, including audio and video recording, and created a 50-hour training course for state police.
In late 1979, the DPS hypnosis program became an official part of the DPS training manual.
Howell claims that forensic hypnosis is about 75 percent effective and acknowledges that defense attorneys and some people in the scientific community often misunderstand it.
Dr. Bernard Diamond, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the discipline's earliest critics. In 1980, he wrote and published “Inherent Problems in the Use of Pretrial Hypnosis on a Prospective Witness” in the California Law Review. At that time, police in cities such as Los Angeles; Seattle; Denver; Houston; San Antonio; Washington, D.C.; and New York were using forensic hypnosis, as were the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Air Force special investigations unit.
“Unfortunately, sensitivity to the limitations and hazards of hypnotism and especially to the myriad ways of intentionally and unintentionally suggesting response to the subject requires much more experience and training,” Diamond wrote. “In my opinion, even psychiatric and psychological professionals highly skilled in the use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes are apt to be naive in recognizing its limitations as a 'truth-telling' technique.”
Diamond encouraged the courts to re-examine the general rule of law that hypnotic-induced testimony is admissible. He claimed that hypnotized witnesses' recollections were contaminated, which made them incompetent to testify. The risk is so great, he wrote, that police using hypnosis is the same as the destruction or fabrication of evidence.
Diamond wasn't the only one raising concerns about law enforcement's practice of hypnosis. The American Psychological Association and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis claimed that the training of lay hypnotists such as law enforcement officials was unethical, but psychologist Steve K. Dubrow-Eichel said the medical community should accept lay hypnotists, as it had clinicians, in his editorial “Turf War Battle: Who Owns Hypnosis?” in the October 1996 American Society of Clinical Hypnosis newsletter.
"Not a shortcut"
Jill Barganier sat in an office chair at the Farmers Branch Police Department with her head bowed and hands crossed in her lap as a forensic hypnotist began her session. It was a week after Elizabeth Black's murder in the late '90s. Bargainer, 36, lived next door to the Blacks and had peered through her mini-blinds that January morning. She had seen the killers get out of the Volkswagen Beetle and later described Childs to a sketch artist and picked him out of a photo lineup.
But Barganier could only recall that the passenger was big like Flores, possibly white, with dark hair that she thought may have been long like Childs, Flores' defense attorney Gretchen Sween wrote in court documents. (Flores had short hair.)
Farmers Branch PD's hypnosis officer, Alfredo Serna, had placed Barganier into a deep state of hypnosis by speaking in a neutral tone and asking her to focus on the space between her fingers and visualize the events of that late morning in 1998. It was known as the movie theater technique, in which the hypnotist asks the subject to pretend as if she were sitting in a movie theater and watching a movie of her memories of the day in question.
Although the technique has been largely discredited, Barganier was able to recall the color of the car and the hair and eye colors of both suspects. But she wasn't able to pick Flores out of a photo lineup after the hypnosis session and didn't fully recognize him until his capital murder trial a year later. Serna told the court that he was aware that some people were not able to be hypnotized and he wasn't certain if Barganier had been hypnotized. If she wasn't, then it was simply a police officer interviewing a witness, he testified.
At the time, DPS investigators had conducted more the 1,100 hypnosis sessions, resulting in additional information in 876 sessions. The Texas appellate courts had upheld convictions in which hypnosis was used for the purpose of memory enhancement in four criminal appeals from 1983-88, including the Zani case. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reaffirmed it in 2004.
The Texas Legislature had passed a law effective in 1988 that charged the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education with implementing forensic hypnosis training and testing for law enforcement. It grandfathered in prior forensic hypnosis training but not the testing requirements.
“The DPS stresses that hypnosis should be used as an aid to investigations, not a substitute,” Howell wrote in one of many reports posted on his personal website. “Investigators have been cautioned to assure that standard investigative methods have been fully utilized before hypnosis is used.”
Forensic hypnosis also can be used in certain limited cases at the federal level to help generate leads, according to the U.S. Attorneys' Criminal Resource Manual. But it notes, "The information obtained from a person while in a hypnotic trance cannot be assumed to be accurate. Therefore, any information obtained by the use of hypnosis must be thoroughly checked as to its ultimate accuracy and corroborated.”
Today, the Texas Rangers use forensic hypnosis more than any other law enforcement agency in the state because they're less likely to know specific details of a local investigation when they're called in for help, says Perry Gilmore of the Texas Association for Investigative Hypnosis and the Texas Crime Stoppers Council, which advises the governor on crime stoppers programs around the state. He is trained in forensic hypnosis.
“We always say it is not a shortcut for a good traditional investigations,” he says. “When we do get information from hypnosis, we try to verify as many of those facts as we can.”
Captured in Dallas
Flores watched Sween "dismantle" the Dallas county prosecutor's case during closing arguments of his hearing in late 2017. He called her a “superhero” on his blog, “Innocent on Death Row.” Sween used a PowerPoint presentation projected on three screens in the courtroom to give a lesson on the history of the criminal appellate law and statute related to forensic hypnosis. She discussed a recent change in Texas law that allows defense attorneys to challenge hypnosis as “junk science.”
Flores, who is now his late 40s, has been sitting on death row for 20 years. He's still a large man, but his dark hair is gone. Dressed in prison whites, he's smiling in a photo on his blog, where he shares journal entries and news from death row. He shared a link to a January 2016 news article that paints him as a victim of racism, using that to justify the fact that he spray-painted Childs' Volkswagen black and burned it a couple of days after Black's murder, firing his gun several times at a passerby and fleeing to Mexico for several months until law enforcement captured him when he returned to Dallas.
It wasn't a simple capture. Flores gave officers his brother's name when he was arrested in Kyle, about three hours southwest of Dallas, for driving while intoxicated and two counts of assault on a police officer. He was caught after the FBI picked up his trail and law enforcement chased him through Dallas until he crashed his mother's blue Volvo. At Parkland Hospital, where we was getting treatment for his injuries, he tried to take an officer's gun and sprayed the the officer and hospital staff with mace before being restrained.
“People say that guilty people run, but I can also tell you that you also run if you're scared, you run when you know they can give you a life sentence, you also run if you know you're the only Mexican in the a group of whites,” Flores told Splinter news.
Seeking a consensus
At Flores' hearing late last year in Dallas, Sween called Flores' expert, Steven Lynn, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He explained that in the past 15 years, a shift has occurred in the psychological community, which believes hypnosis is not safe to use on lost memory retrieval in any way and the findings in the Zani case were erroneous, meriting a new trial for Flores.
The prosecution claimed that Lynn wasn't pointing out anything new and the substance of his opinion was available in Flores' original trial in the late '90s.
"The court finds that, through reasonable diligence, [Flores] could have obtained the testimony of Dr. Lynn or a similar expert at the time of his trial," wrote Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Ott.
In court documents, Sween introduces testimony from hypnosis and memory expert Martin Orne, one of the world's foremost forensic psychologists and someone whom courts have used to determine if forensic hypnosis should be submitted as evidence.
“Dr. Orne no longer believes that procedural safeguards reduce the risk associated with hypnotically enhanced memory,” she wrote. “There is a consensus among scientists in the field of memory and eyewitness identification that hypnosis is an inherently suggestive pretrial procedure based on data that supports that perspective.”
The prosecution introduced its expert witness, Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University whose knowledge of hypnosis spans 45 years. He is also part of the American Medical Association's Council on Scientific Affairs panel that evaluated the effects of hypnosis on memory.
"It suggested that there can be complications with hypnotically refreshed memory, not unlike the things that are in the Zani hearing," Spiegel testified. "And it suggested that caution should be used when hypnosis is used in the forensic setting. ... Sometimes false information or confabulation can occur. So it should be used with caution."
Spiegel testified that although new scientific studies on hypnosis and memory have been conducted, their findings have been consistent with what was already known before Flores' original trial.
Sween also argues that the state did not present any physical evidence and rested its case on the testimonies of drug dealers and users, some of whom were seeking leniency in their own cases. The only “seemingly untainted evidence the state presented to place Flores on the scene was Bargainer's hypnotically altered testimony,” she said.
Prosecutors, however, claim hypnotically refreshed testimony is still admissible in Texas courts as long as it meets the Zani factors. In Barganier's case, when she arrived at Flores' trial in the late '90s and recognized Flores as the passenger, the court conducted a hearing and determined that her testimony was admissible.
Psychologist George Mount, an expert for the prosecution, testified during Flores' original trial that he'd evaluated hundreds of hypnosis sessions, taught hypnosis for 20 years and served on the board that developed the exam for Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officers Standards and saw no evidence of any incorrect procedures on the video recording of Barganier's forensic hypnosis session.
Jason January, the lead prosecutor in Flores' original trial, summarized the corroborating evidence placing Flores at the scene as follows: Eight people witnessed Childs and Flores together shortly before Black's murder, two people claimed Flores admitted being present at the scene and one person saw Flores torching Childs' Volkswagen on Interstate 30 two days after Black's murder.
Flores' case is now in the hands 195th District Judge Hector Garza, who will rule sometime in the coming months.
"Drowning in fear, choking on terror"
Flores' picture hangs in the center of the living room wall in his mother's home. As in his blog photo, he's smiling in his prison whites. This time, he's making a heart with his hands in front of his chest.
His mother, Lily, has lived in the small home for 18 years. They moved to the Dallas area from Midland in the '80s when the oil economy bottomed out. Her husband, Catarino, died shortly before her son's scheduled execution in 2016.
In her early 80s, Lily is stooped with age and doesn't hear very well anymore. She wasn't able to hear much during her son's recent hearings. She hasn't gotten to hug her son since he was arrested. Over the years, she'd visit him at least once in month on death row in Livingston, about four hours away, but a thick glass always separated them.
Flores, the youngest of four brothers and one sister, played football in junior high school and was always coming and going and running around when he was in high school. Lily isn't sure when he started his life of crime.
"I could not tell you," she says and laughs. "I'm his mother."
Flores' brother Juan Jojola blames it on Flores' roofing work and the appeal of easy money.
"You know, in this roofing work, you get brain damage up on that roof, especially when it's hot," he says. "We'd drink a few beers, man, but ol' Charlie wasn't into drugs. He just got caught up in it, and it went sour on him. That's really it in a nutshell."
Flores claimed in his January 2016 Splinter news feature that he'd been cooking breakfast for his wife, Myra Wait, at the time of Black's murder, but court records show that Wait claimed he was with Childs at the Blacks' home.
Flores' father was getting ready for work in the bathroom one morning when he heard about his son's arrest on the radio, but Lily says it wasn't long before they joined him in Dallas County Jail. They were arrested for hindering the apprehension of a felon in May 1998. She told the prosecutor, Jason January, that they didn't know where he'd gone, but January claimed she had sent money to her son in Mexico and let him borrow the car.
"And we ate bologna sandwiches, too," she says and chuckles. "I got a four-year probation."
Flores' book The Warrior Within: Inside Report on Texas Death Row sits on the coffee cable in the living room. His mother been selling copies.
Inside, Flores writes, "I started to comprehend what it meant to be on death row. I was beginning to understand it was a race against the clock, the most important race I'd ever run. That understanding came at a terrible price, a price I pay daily. It's paid in the form of anxiety attacks that come from nowhere that I have today. It's paid in nightmares that wake me up in a cold sweat, shaking my head trying to knock the haunting images out of it, nightmares of living my last day on death row, being taken to Huntsville and being put in the holding cell next to the death chamber, drowning in fear, choking on terror, as I wait for them to execute me."
Friday, March 30, 2018
THE MAKING OF A HOCKEY BEER LEAGUE LEGEND
Emergency Goalie Takes Over for Blackhawks, Desk Jockey Scott Foster Makes Debut At 36 Years Old
By Chris Chavez
Sports Illustrated
March 29, 2018
Chicago Blackhawks goalie Collin Delia was injured in Thursday night's game against the Winnipeg Jets and the team needed to call on 36-year-old goalie Scott Foster to make his NHL debut as the emergency back-up.
Delia, making his first NHL start, was helped off the ice with an apparent lower-body injury in the third period. He was filling in for starter Anton Forsberg, who was injured during warmups. The team's No. 1 goalie Corey Crawford has been on injured reserve since late December.
Foster only found out he was dressing as the backup "moments before game."
"The initial shock happened when I had to dress," Foster told media. "I think I blacked out after that."
Foster took the ice wearing No. 90. He finished the night with seven saves on seven shots—including one on sniper Patrik Kaine—in 14:01 of ice time and was named the game's No. 1 star for his efforts in the Blackhawks' 6-3 win.
Fans at the United Center got into it, chanting Foster's name throughout his time in the crease, a moment the accountant enjoyed.
"That’s something I’ll never forget," he said. "You understand what’s happening and they’re gonna have a lot of fun with it, so you might as well, too. A few hours ago, I was sitting on the computer, typing on a 10-key, and now I’m standing in front of you."
The Blackhawks announced Foster's signing earlier in the day, an Amateur Tryout (ATO), which does not require any kind of compensation. He last played in a competitive hockey game on October 15, 2005 for Western Michigan when he allowed three goals in relief against Robert Morris, according to Sportsnet Stats. In his four seasons at Div. I Western Michigan, Foster posted a 20-22-6 record with an .875 save percentage and 3.44 GAA. While Foster will become something of a beer league legend in short order, he'll be back at his office desk tomorrow.
The Blackhawks announced Fosberg is likely done for the season, Delia is expected to be available on Friday and the team recalled goalie J-F Berube from AHL Rockford.
EDITOR’S NOTE: From desk jockey to instant hockey hero. The stuff movies are made of.
By Chris Chavez
Sports Illustrated
March 29, 2018
Chicago Blackhawks goalie Collin Delia was injured in Thursday night's game against the Winnipeg Jets and the team needed to call on 36-year-old goalie Scott Foster to make his NHL debut as the emergency back-up.
Delia, making his first NHL start, was helped off the ice with an apparent lower-body injury in the third period. He was filling in for starter Anton Forsberg, who was injured during warmups. The team's No. 1 goalie Corey Crawford has been on injured reserve since late December.
Foster only found out he was dressing as the backup "moments before game."
"The initial shock happened when I had to dress," Foster told media. "I think I blacked out after that."
Foster took the ice wearing No. 90. He finished the night with seven saves on seven shots—including one on sniper Patrik Kaine—in 14:01 of ice time and was named the game's No. 1 star for his efforts in the Blackhawks' 6-3 win.
Fans at the United Center got into it, chanting Foster's name throughout his time in the crease, a moment the accountant enjoyed.
"That’s something I’ll never forget," he said. "You understand what’s happening and they’re gonna have a lot of fun with it, so you might as well, too. A few hours ago, I was sitting on the computer, typing on a 10-key, and now I’m standing in front of you."
The Blackhawks announced Foster's signing earlier in the day, an Amateur Tryout (ATO), which does not require any kind of compensation. He last played in a competitive hockey game on October 15, 2005 for Western Michigan when he allowed three goals in relief against Robert Morris, according to Sportsnet Stats. In his four seasons at Div. I Western Michigan, Foster posted a 20-22-6 record with an .875 save percentage and 3.44 GAA. While Foster will become something of a beer league legend in short order, he'll be back at his office desk tomorrow.
The Blackhawks announced Fosberg is likely done for the season, Delia is expected to be available on Friday and the team recalled goalie J-F Berube from AHL Rockford.
EDITOR’S NOTE: From desk jockey to instant hockey hero. The stuff movies are made of.
KUDOS TO DALHART PD FOR GIVING DEAF APPLICANT A CHANCE
A police department in Texas just hired its first ever deaf female officer
by Drew Powell
KVII
March 26, 2017
DALHART, Texas -- -The newest member of the Dalhart Police Department is helping the department make history. When police chief David Conner hired 25-year old Erica Trevino, she became the first female deaf commissioned police officer hired to work at the department and is believed to be the first in the state of Texas.
“It’s a passion of mine,” said Erica Trevino, newly hired police officer at Dalhart P.D. “It’s not something I just want, it’s something God has called me to do. That’s what I believe. This truly is a career and I can’t tell you how much I look up to the people and I respect how much work the officers put into becoming a police officer.”
Trevino tells ABC 7 News she is fluent in four sign languages and can communicate in ways most officers can’t when someone is in distress or needs help.
“With officer Trevino being here that’s going to be tremendous asset for those who are hard of hearing or deaf,” said David Conner, Dalhart Police Chief. “She will be able to communicate and assist us in that realm as well.”
Day to day communications can be a challenge for deaf people. Overcoming challenges is something she has conquered since being deaf. She graduated from Caprock H.S. then went to West Texas A&M University before graduating third in her class at the police academy at Amarillo College.
“It’s not going to be easy, I know that,” said Trevino. “I’m preparing to put in the work and get to where I need to be. I want to be the best officer I can be.”
“Is it going to be a challenge for her and us? Yes, there’s no doubt,” said Conner. “Through all the obstacles she’s had to face in life and all the times she’s been told now she can’t do something she has succeeded. Who am I to say she can’t do this? There’s no doubt she can do it and she is qualified."
She reports for duty on April 14. The first six months on the job she will be partnered with a field training officer and work the night shift. Her goal is to work in Criminal Investigations Division after she climbs up the ranks at the department.
by Drew Powell
KVII
March 26, 2017
DALHART, Texas -- -The newest member of the Dalhart Police Department is helping the department make history. When police chief David Conner hired 25-year old Erica Trevino, she became the first female deaf commissioned police officer hired to work at the department and is believed to be the first in the state of Texas.
“It’s a passion of mine,” said Erica Trevino, newly hired police officer at Dalhart P.D. “It’s not something I just want, it’s something God has called me to do. That’s what I believe. This truly is a career and I can’t tell you how much I look up to the people and I respect how much work the officers put into becoming a police officer.”
Trevino tells ABC 7 News she is fluent in four sign languages and can communicate in ways most officers can’t when someone is in distress or needs help.
“With officer Trevino being here that’s going to be tremendous asset for those who are hard of hearing or deaf,” said David Conner, Dalhart Police Chief. “She will be able to communicate and assist us in that realm as well.”
Day to day communications can be a challenge for deaf people. Overcoming challenges is something she has conquered since being deaf. She graduated from Caprock H.S. then went to West Texas A&M University before graduating third in her class at the police academy at Amarillo College.
“It’s not going to be easy, I know that,” said Trevino. “I’m preparing to put in the work and get to where I need to be. I want to be the best officer I can be.”
“Is it going to be a challenge for her and us? Yes, there’s no doubt,” said Conner. “Through all the obstacles she’s had to face in life and all the times she’s been told now she can’t do something she has succeeded. Who am I to say she can’t do this? There’s no doubt she can do it and she is qualified."
She reports for duty on April 14. The first six months on the job she will be partnered with a field training officer and work the night shift. Her goal is to work in Criminal Investigations Division after she climbs up the ranks at the department.
A STUDY IN FAILURE
by Bob Walsh
There was a very interesting front page piece in yesterday's S F Chronicle. It told the story of an unnamed student in the S. F. public school system. It is coming up to graduation time and he is NOT going to graduate. Why, you might well ask. He didn't murder anybody, at least not at school. He didn't rape anybody, at least not at school. Why isn't he going to graduate?
His transcript for the last five years, grades 8-12, is straight Fs. He failed every class, every year. Without exception, though he was still prompted from grade to grade.
He was never reported as a chronic truant, though he in fact was. He came from a two parent household, but worked himself and had significant time invested in the care of his younger siblings. During his freshman year the student, who is Latino, had once contact with a school counselor, who is Asian. The student reported that the counselor was aggressive, judgmental and unhelpful. He never went back. There was never any follow-up or attempts to direct the student to available resources.
Aren't public schools wonderful?
There was a very interesting front page piece in yesterday's S F Chronicle. It told the story of an unnamed student in the S. F. public school system. It is coming up to graduation time and he is NOT going to graduate. Why, you might well ask. He didn't murder anybody, at least not at school. He didn't rape anybody, at least not at school. Why isn't he going to graduate?
His transcript for the last five years, grades 8-12, is straight Fs. He failed every class, every year. Without exception, though he was still prompted from grade to grade.
He was never reported as a chronic truant, though he in fact was. He came from a two parent household, but worked himself and had significant time invested in the care of his younger siblings. During his freshman year the student, who is Latino, had once contact with a school counselor, who is Asian. The student reported that the counselor was aggressive, judgmental and unhelpful. He never went back. There was never any follow-up or attempts to direct the student to available resources.
Aren't public schools wonderful?
NOW THE DETAILS CHANGE A BIT
by Bob Walsh
I reported yesterday about a hit-and-run driving thru a street fight in the Peoples Republic of San Francisco, resulting in one death and four injuries. Turns out the "fight" was an attempt to jack the vehicle and the driver of the vehicle made a hasty exit from the area, to the detriment of those trying to jack him.
It is not completely clear what the charges are, but the driver has been arrested. It is also not clear if the cops had to find him or if he notified them somewhat later of the incident.
I reported yesterday about a hit-and-run driving thru a street fight in the Peoples Republic of San Francisco, resulting in one death and four injuries. Turns out the "fight" was an attempt to jack the vehicle and the driver of the vehicle made a hasty exit from the area, to the detriment of those trying to jack him.
It is not completely clear what the charges are, but the driver has been arrested. It is also not clear if the cops had to find him or if he notified them somewhat later of the incident.
DRIVING OFF CALIFORNIA CLIFF IS BAD
by Bob Walsh
A minivan drove off a cliff on the coast in Mendocino county on Monday afternoon. The married female couple in the van and three of their six adopted children died in the crash. The other three children are missing. It is not known if they were actually in the vehicle or not at the time of the crash. The cause of the crash is unknown.
The family had lived in the Portland area until the Michael Brown demonstrations resulted in a photo of one of the adopted children, who is black, hugging a white police officer went viral. Apparently "intense media coverage" after this photo resulted in the family relocating.
A minivan drove off a cliff on the coast in Mendocino county on Monday afternoon. The married female couple in the van and three of their six adopted children died in the crash. The other three children are missing. It is not known if they were actually in the vehicle or not at the time of the crash. The cause of the crash is unknown.
The family had lived in the Portland area until the Michael Brown demonstrations resulted in a photo of one of the adopted children, who is black, hugging a white police officer went viral. Apparently "intense media coverage" after this photo resulted in the family relocating.
THOUGHTS ON TRYING PLAN B
by Bob Walsh
THE MOB has been ruling Sacramento for the last three days. They have not been wildly destructive but they have been terribly disruptive. They have closed down streets, closed down freeways, closed down mass transit and repeatedly closed down a major sports venue, even after the Kings kissed their asses in public. They disrupted the city council and made the mayor, Dickless Darryll, look like the gutlass asswipe he really his.
So they are looking at a Plan B.
They are going to shut down the plaza around the Golden One Center today and only allow people who actually have Kings tickets in their possession to enter the plaza, so that theoretically paying customers will be able to actually get into the venue to watch the Kings loose.
The funeral for dead criminal Stephon Clark is supposed to be. That well-known poverty pimp and race-baiter Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton will be there are a principle instigator-speaker. It is right now an open question what will happen at the funeral and what, if anything, will happen when-if THE MOB tries to shut down the sports venue or the roads in the area.
Perhaps the power structure has gotten tired of THE MOB usurping the power and making them look like impotent, gutless punks. Perhaps not. We will find out by the time you read this.
THE MOB has been ruling Sacramento for the last three days. They have not been wildly destructive but they have been terribly disruptive. They have closed down streets, closed down freeways, closed down mass transit and repeatedly closed down a major sports venue, even after the Kings kissed their asses in public. They disrupted the city council and made the mayor, Dickless Darryll, look like the gutlass asswipe he really his.
So they are looking at a Plan B.
They are going to shut down the plaza around the Golden One Center today and only allow people who actually have Kings tickets in their possession to enter the plaza, so that theoretically paying customers will be able to actually get into the venue to watch the Kings loose.
The funeral for dead criminal Stephon Clark is supposed to be. That well-known poverty pimp and race-baiter Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton will be there are a principle instigator-speaker. It is right now an open question what will happen at the funeral and what, if anything, will happen when-if THE MOB tries to shut down the sports venue or the roads in the area.
Perhaps the power structure has gotten tired of THE MOB usurping the power and making them look like impotent, gutless punks. Perhaps not. We will find out by the time you read this.
COMMON NONSENSE LA CITY COUNCIL PROPOSAL
L.A. Councilman Wants to Cut Ties With Companies Linked to NRA
KTLA
March 28, 2018
A Los Angeles lawmaker wants the city to cut ties with companies that are linked to the National Rifle Assn., saying that its opposition to “common sense gun safety laws” is at odds with the city.
City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell introduced a proposal Wednesday asking city staffers to provide a list of all businesses and groups that have a “formal relationship” with the NRA and lay out options for boycotting them.
“It’s important that we send a message as a city with an annual budget approaching $9 billion,” O’Farrell said, invoking mass shootings in Newtown, Conn.; Orlando, Fla.; Las Vegas; and Parkland, Fla.; as well as gun violence that happens regularly across the country.
“It’s time to speak with one voice and call attention to the assault weapon epidemic,” the councilman said.
KTLA
March 28, 2018
A Los Angeles lawmaker wants the city to cut ties with companies that are linked to the National Rifle Assn., saying that its opposition to “common sense gun safety laws” is at odds with the city.
City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell introduced a proposal Wednesday asking city staffers to provide a list of all businesses and groups that have a “formal relationship” with the NRA and lay out options for boycotting them.
“It’s important that we send a message as a city with an annual budget approaching $9 billion,” O’Farrell said, invoking mass shootings in Newtown, Conn.; Orlando, Fla.; Las Vegas; and Parkland, Fla.; as well as gun violence that happens regularly across the country.
“It’s time to speak with one voice and call attention to the assault weapon epidemic,” the councilman said.
HOW PREPARED ARE YOU?
Surviving a prolonged power outage
By Trey Rusk
Running Code 3
March 28, 2018
In the last couple of days two major metropolitan areas, Atlanta and Baltimore have been hit with cyber attacks. These attacks disabled vital systems used including a 911 system and other city services. The systems are back up and running. But what if it had been a section of our nations power grid or your city's water supply?
In 2008, our area was devastated by Hurricane Ike. We were without power for a few days. We took care of several people in our home during this time. We did the same thing after Hurricane Harvey last year.
On the second day after Hurricane, Ike I was cooking just outside the garage door on a propane grill. A neighbor that I didn't know very well walked up and asked where I was getting the fuel to run my generator. I told him I had fuel stored for power outages. Then he started talking about how he had been in Vietnam and how neighbors would start stealing from each other if the power remained off very much longer. It was a little weird. I turned to pick something up to where he could see I was wearing a Glock. Once he saw it he said, "Oh. I see your really prepared" I replied, "yes." He waived goodbye and walked away.
I tell you this story because I firmly believe that each household should be prepared to live off the grid for at least thirty days. People need to stock up on certain items, like storable food and water. They also need a power source and fuel to run it.
Here are a few things that I do in case of a prolonged power outage.
The older 5000 watt generators usually burn about a gallon of fuel an hour and have a 5 gallon tank. I had one and sold it.
I can get better fuel economy with an power inverter on a 4 cylinder car and it's not as loud. I power a small chest freezer, refrigerator and a few LED lights where needed in the house. Always use a chest freezer because the cold air will not empty when you open it. You do not need to run the inverter all the time. Run it just enough to keep your perishable food cold/frozen.
Metal 5 gallon gas cans and a good funnel is what I use. The newer red plastic gas cans all come with some sort of safety nozzle that I find difficult to use.
Solar powered lights have also come a long way in the last few years with LED bulbs. I caution folks not to draw attention to their property with a lot of outside lighting during a power outage.
I use a propane stove and as back up a white gasoline stove (Coleman) to cook and boil water.
Stored food should be kept indoors in a old style metal trash can. Never store food in a plastic storage container because vermin can eat through the plastic. MRE's are good but expensive. I buy small non refrigerated dinners from Hormel. Lots of rice and beans should be kept as well. You don't have to be fancy, just fed.
In addition to filling my bath tubs before a storm, I keep 220 gallons of fresh semi filtered water. It is rain water run off from my roof that goes through a mesh filter. I watch the weather and when I see rain forecast, I deplete the storage and it refills automatically when it rains. The storage container must be black so that algae cannot grow. You also need a sturdy steel bucket to transport water. If I find a good deal on bottled water for say $2 a case then I will buy 10 cases and keep it for one year. We then drink it and wait for another sale.
A good first aid kit is essential. My first aid kit is self made. It includes plenty of antibiotics that I buy from Mexico, gauze, tape, alcohol, sewing kit, forceps and a tourniquet.
I only use LED flashlights and I buy batteries when they are on sale. In my experience LED flashlights last a lot longer.
Samuel Colt made all men equal. That is true to a point. I don't care if you like guns or are vehemently opposed to firearms, you need to keep one in your home. If you own a firearm, you need to be proficient in it's use. Keep it loaded and stored securely. If you feel you need it, strap it on. All it takes is one criminal to kick in your back door armed with a club, knife or gun and without a gun, you lose. Remember, when seconds count the police are usually minutes away.
By Trey Rusk
Running Code 3
March 28, 2018
In the last couple of days two major metropolitan areas, Atlanta and Baltimore have been hit with cyber attacks. These attacks disabled vital systems used including a 911 system and other city services. The systems are back up and running. But what if it had been a section of our nations power grid or your city's water supply?
In 2008, our area was devastated by Hurricane Ike. We were without power for a few days. We took care of several people in our home during this time. We did the same thing after Hurricane Harvey last year.
On the second day after Hurricane, Ike I was cooking just outside the garage door on a propane grill. A neighbor that I didn't know very well walked up and asked where I was getting the fuel to run my generator. I told him I had fuel stored for power outages. Then he started talking about how he had been in Vietnam and how neighbors would start stealing from each other if the power remained off very much longer. It was a little weird. I turned to pick something up to where he could see I was wearing a Glock. Once he saw it he said, "Oh. I see your really prepared" I replied, "yes." He waived goodbye and walked away.
I tell you this story because I firmly believe that each household should be prepared to live off the grid for at least thirty days. People need to stock up on certain items, like storable food and water. They also need a power source and fuel to run it.
Here are a few things that I do in case of a prolonged power outage.
The older 5000 watt generators usually burn about a gallon of fuel an hour and have a 5 gallon tank. I had one and sold it.
I can get better fuel economy with an power inverter on a 4 cylinder car and it's not as loud. I power a small chest freezer, refrigerator and a few LED lights where needed in the house. Always use a chest freezer because the cold air will not empty when you open it. You do not need to run the inverter all the time. Run it just enough to keep your perishable food cold/frozen.
Metal 5 gallon gas cans and a good funnel is what I use. The newer red plastic gas cans all come with some sort of safety nozzle that I find difficult to use.
Solar powered lights have also come a long way in the last few years with LED bulbs. I caution folks not to draw attention to their property with a lot of outside lighting during a power outage.
I use a propane stove and as back up a white gasoline stove (Coleman) to cook and boil water.
Stored food should be kept indoors in a old style metal trash can. Never store food in a plastic storage container because vermin can eat through the plastic. MRE's are good but expensive. I buy small non refrigerated dinners from Hormel. Lots of rice and beans should be kept as well. You don't have to be fancy, just fed.
In addition to filling my bath tubs before a storm, I keep 220 gallons of fresh semi filtered water. It is rain water run off from my roof that goes through a mesh filter. I watch the weather and when I see rain forecast, I deplete the storage and it refills automatically when it rains. The storage container must be black so that algae cannot grow. You also need a sturdy steel bucket to transport water. If I find a good deal on bottled water for say $2 a case then I will buy 10 cases and keep it for one year. We then drink it and wait for another sale.
A good first aid kit is essential. My first aid kit is self made. It includes plenty of antibiotics that I buy from Mexico, gauze, tape, alcohol, sewing kit, forceps and a tourniquet.
I only use LED flashlights and I buy batteries when they are on sale. In my experience LED flashlights last a lot longer.
Samuel Colt made all men equal. That is true to a point. I don't care if you like guns or are vehemently opposed to firearms, you need to keep one in your home. If you own a firearm, you need to be proficient in it's use. Keep it loaded and stored securely. If you feel you need it, strap it on. All it takes is one criminal to kick in your back door armed with a club, knife or gun and without a gun, you lose. Remember, when seconds count the police are usually minutes away.
ANOTHER DIARY OF A JEWISH GIRL, THIS ONE FACING DEATH IN POLAND
The harrowing diaries of 'Polish Ann Frank' that laid forgotten in New York for DECADES: Memoirs of eighteen-year-old girl who was shot dead in Przemyśl ghetto
By Charlie Bayliss
Daily Mail
March 25, 2018
The tragic story of 'Poland's Anne Frank' who was killed during the Second World War has given a harrowing insight into what life was like in Nazi Germany.
Renia Spiegel was just 18-years-old when the Nazis invaded Przemysl, a city in south-east Poland, and began to round up Jews.
Some 22,000 were gathered for deportation to death camps but Renia hid herself in an attic on the outskirts of the Jewish ghetto where the Nazis were rounding up Jews.
There, she penned her diary - pages from school exercise books which had been bound together - which was nearly 700 pages long by the time Germans found and shot her in 1942.
She had begun writing it at the end of January 1939, eight months before Germany's invasion of Poland triggered the Second World War.
Her last entry, dated July 25, 1942, was shortly before her death at the hands of Nazi officers.
The diary reappeared in New York City in late 1960s and her story remained a relative secret until a few years ago. But Renia's younger sister, Elizabeth Bellak, 87, wants her legacy to live on.
The journal has been published in Poland and is currently being translated into English, while a documentary is also set to be made. In Speigel's native Poland, the diary has helped launch a national poetry competition.
Renia's tragic demise is all the worse as she writes about her aspirations to travel to France.
In April 2, 1939, she wrote: 'I learn French now and if there is no war, I might go to France. I was supposed to go before, but Hitler took over Austria then Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia... and who knows what he will do next. In a way, he affects my life, too.'
She also details how she has fallen madly in love with a student called Zygmunt Schwarzer, just a few months before the Nazis marched into her town and destroyed her perfect bliss forever.
Their first kiss took place on June 20, 1941, just as the Germans were preparing to launch their invasion, dubbed Operation Barbarossa.
By 1942, the relationship between Renia and Zygmunt, who was two years older, seemed to become more passionate in nature.
Just a few days before her 18th birthday, she wrote: 'Now I know what the word ecstasy means.
'I almost understand it. It is indescribable; it is something that is the best, which only two loving creatures can do. And for the first time I felt this longing to become one, to be one body and to feel more.'
Just five days after writing about what appears to be the consummation of her relationship with Zygmunt, Renia's world is turned upside down by the war which had finally reached her doorstep.
She wrote: 'There is killing, murder. God, for the umpteenth time I humble myself in front of you, help us, save us! God, let us live, I beg you.'
Zygmunt managed to sneak Renia and her sister out the ghetto they had been forced into, putting her sister, just 12 at the time, into the care of a Christian family.
Renia, along with Zygmunt's parents, were hidden in the attic of his uncle's building. His uncle, Samuel Goliger, was a member of the Judenrat, who were put in charge by the Nazis to administer ghettos and were given the privilege of living outside the ghetto's walls.
In her diary, she pleaded for God to save them, but two days later on July 30, 2942, she was rounded up with Zygmunt's parents and shot dead.
A day after they were killed Zygmunt returned to the house from his own hiding place and found Renia's diary. He added his own entry into the diary, writing: 'Three shots! Three lives lost!' he wrote.
'It happened last night at 10:30 p.m. Fate has decided to take my dearest ones away from me. My life is done. All I can hear are shots, shots... Shots! My dearest Renia, the last chapter of your diary is complete.'
Tomasz Magierski, a Manhattan filmmaker who has been researching Renia's story for the last few years, told the New York Post it could have been neighbours of Nazi-imposed Jewish ghetto administrators who turned her in.
'It's an enigma,' he said. 'We're not sure if it was the Polish neighbours or members of the Judenrat who gave them up.'
Bellak immigrated to New York with her mother, as did Zygmunt, who gave them the diary.
She told the New York Post that she and her mother struggled to read the diary but that it had passed it onto filmmaker Magierski, who read the diary in three days and has made trips to Poland in an attempt to solve the puzzle of Renia's last remaining days.
He said: 'This is the best story never told.'
By Charlie Bayliss
Daily Mail
March 25, 2018
The tragic story of 'Poland's Anne Frank' who was killed during the Second World War has given a harrowing insight into what life was like in Nazi Germany.
Renia Spiegel was just 18-years-old when the Nazis invaded Przemysl, a city in south-east Poland, and began to round up Jews.
Some 22,000 were gathered for deportation to death camps but Renia hid herself in an attic on the outskirts of the Jewish ghetto where the Nazis were rounding up Jews.
There, she penned her diary - pages from school exercise books which had been bound together - which was nearly 700 pages long by the time Germans found and shot her in 1942.
She had begun writing it at the end of January 1939, eight months before Germany's invasion of Poland triggered the Second World War.
Her last entry, dated July 25, 1942, was shortly before her death at the hands of Nazi officers.
The diary reappeared in New York City in late 1960s and her story remained a relative secret until a few years ago. But Renia's younger sister, Elizabeth Bellak, 87, wants her legacy to live on.
The journal has been published in Poland and is currently being translated into English, while a documentary is also set to be made. In Speigel's native Poland, the diary has helped launch a national poetry competition.
Renia's tragic demise is all the worse as she writes about her aspirations to travel to France.
In April 2, 1939, she wrote: 'I learn French now and if there is no war, I might go to France. I was supposed to go before, but Hitler took over Austria then Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia... and who knows what he will do next. In a way, he affects my life, too.'
She also details how she has fallen madly in love with a student called Zygmunt Schwarzer, just a few months before the Nazis marched into her town and destroyed her perfect bliss forever.
Their first kiss took place on June 20, 1941, just as the Germans were preparing to launch their invasion, dubbed Operation Barbarossa.
By 1942, the relationship between Renia and Zygmunt, who was two years older, seemed to become more passionate in nature.
Just a few days before her 18th birthday, she wrote: 'Now I know what the word ecstasy means.
'I almost understand it. It is indescribable; it is something that is the best, which only two loving creatures can do. And for the first time I felt this longing to become one, to be one body and to feel more.'
Just five days after writing about what appears to be the consummation of her relationship with Zygmunt, Renia's world is turned upside down by the war which had finally reached her doorstep.
She wrote: 'There is killing, murder. God, for the umpteenth time I humble myself in front of you, help us, save us! God, let us live, I beg you.'
Zygmunt managed to sneak Renia and her sister out the ghetto they had been forced into, putting her sister, just 12 at the time, into the care of a Christian family.
Renia, along with Zygmunt's parents, were hidden in the attic of his uncle's building. His uncle, Samuel Goliger, was a member of the Judenrat, who were put in charge by the Nazis to administer ghettos and were given the privilege of living outside the ghetto's walls.
In her diary, she pleaded for God to save them, but two days later on July 30, 2942, she was rounded up with Zygmunt's parents and shot dead.
A day after they were killed Zygmunt returned to the house from his own hiding place and found Renia's diary. He added his own entry into the diary, writing: 'Three shots! Three lives lost!' he wrote.
'It happened last night at 10:30 p.m. Fate has decided to take my dearest ones away from me. My life is done. All I can hear are shots, shots... Shots! My dearest Renia, the last chapter of your diary is complete.'
Tomasz Magierski, a Manhattan filmmaker who has been researching Renia's story for the last few years, told the New York Post it could have been neighbours of Nazi-imposed Jewish ghetto administrators who turned her in.
'It's an enigma,' he said. 'We're not sure if it was the Polish neighbours or members of the Judenrat who gave them up.'
Bellak immigrated to New York with her mother, as did Zygmunt, who gave them the diary.
She told the New York Post that she and her mother struggled to read the diary but that it had passed it onto filmmaker Magierski, who read the diary in three days and has made trips to Poland in an attempt to solve the puzzle of Renia's last remaining days.
He said: 'This is the best story never told.'
Thursday, March 29, 2018
FBI OIG TO INVESTIGATE ASSORTED PERFIDITY
by Bob Walsh
The FBI OIG announced yesterday that they WERE going to investigate various claims of bias, collusion, nastiness and general bad form witin the FBI when it came to what is generally called The Trump Investigation.
There is, at least on the surface, ample reason to believe that certain high ranking assholes within the FBI actively worked against the Trump election and have been actively working to undermine the Trump presidency. Whether or not the OIG has the ability to adequately investigate is a legit question as they have no hold on persons no longer employed by the government. I do honestly expect that a special counsel will eventually be appointed. The Republicans are mad at themselves that they let Lois Lerner and similar toads get away and I don't believe they are of a mind to allow it to happen again.
HEADS ON A PIKE (after a fair and impartial inquiry of course).
The FBI OIG announced yesterday that they WERE going to investigate various claims of bias, collusion, nastiness and general bad form witin the FBI when it came to what is generally called The Trump Investigation.
There is, at least on the surface, ample reason to believe that certain high ranking assholes within the FBI actively worked against the Trump election and have been actively working to undermine the Trump presidency. Whether or not the OIG has the ability to adequately investigate is a legit question as they have no hold on persons no longer employed by the government. I do honestly expect that a special counsel will eventually be appointed. The Republicans are mad at themselves that they let Lois Lerner and similar toads get away and I don't believe they are of a mind to allow it to happen again.
HEADS ON A PIKE (after a fair and impartial inquiry of course).
PAYING THE DANEGELD
by Bob Walsh
So, it seems that the NFL has announced they are going to kick down $90 million to assorted "social justice" causes this year. I wonder if it will get their viewers back? Hell, I wonder if they have the stones to require that players stand for the National Anthem. Another pack of gutless pukes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Does this mean the NFL is going to fund Black Lives Mater since Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem as a protest against white cops killing black men.
The NFL is utterly disgusting and disgraceful!
__________
NFL owners finalize $90M social-justice deal without resolving anthem protests
by Valerie Richardson
The Washington Times
March 27, 2018
NFL team owners have unanimously given their final approval to an unprecedented $90 million social justice initiative but have made no decisions about how to handle players who refuse to stand for the national anthem.
Instead, owners are expected to continue the discussion about whether to change the game-day policy, which does not require players to stand, at the spring league meeting in May, according to a post on NFL.com citing the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
“The NFL is committing $90 million to a new social justice initiative that supports efforts and programs to combat social inequality,” the NFL post said Monday. “In a memo sent to all 32 teams in early December, the league said it plans to work closely with players, teams and other groups in the new and expanded community improvement program.”
In addition, the NFL Foundation “contributed $3 million in initial funding for the program,” the statement said.
The decision to avoid an anthem vote at the March 25-28 annual league meeting in Orlando came with the owners split on how to handle the divisive two-year-old sideline protests, which have been blamed in large part for the NFL’s 9.7 percent ratings decline in the 2017 regular season.
New York Jets CEO Christopher Johnson told reporters Sunday that “I just think that trying to forcibly get the players to shut up is a fantastically bad idea,” while Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said the field is “not the place for political statements.”
“We’re going to deal with it in such a way that people will understand we want everybody to respect our country, respect our flag,” Mr. McNair said on ESPN. “Our playing field, that’s not the place for political statements. That’s not the place for religious statements. It’s the place for football. That’s what we need to be doing.”
The 32 owners, who had already agreed to spend $73 million over seven years on social-justice causes at the national level, said Monday they would provide team matching funds for local causes as part of the agreement reached in November with the Players Coalition.
Under the deal, owners would pony up $250,000 and players would match that amount annually for a total of $500,000 per team for social-justice efforts in their communities, according to ESPN.
The $73 million for national causes would be divided between three organizations: 25 percent for the United Negro College Fund; 25 percent to Dream Corps, and 50 percent to the Players Coalition, led by Malcolm Jenkins and Anquan Boldin, which has filed for nonprofit status.
Critics have described the deal as a payoff for progressives, pointing out that the Dream Corps was founded by former Obama administration adviser Van Jones and promotes a number of left-wing causes.
“The NFL’s brand has suffered because it has given left-wing agitators a platform and the millions deciding not to watch the games is evidence that the fans are tired of the politicization of football,” said Robert Kuykendall, spokesman for 2ndVote, a conservative corporate watchdog.
“By formally caving, the NFL will confirm it has no qualms against using the dollars fans spend on tickets and merchandise to fund the left’s agenda and further alienate viewers who just want to see agenda-free football,” he said in a statement.
Still, the deal may have produced the desired result: Last week, free-agent safety Eric Reid said he would no longer kneel during the national anthem, as he has done for two years, telling reporters it was time to channel his efforts in other ways.
Reid, who has not been signed by a team since free agency began March 14, had been viewed as a protest leader since the departure of his former San Francisco 49ers teammate Colin Kaepernick, who is also unsigned and has not played since 2016.
Commissioner Roger Goodell is expected to wrap up the results of the Orlando meeting at a Wednesday press conference.
The protests began in the 2016 regular season but spiked in late September after President Trump suggested that owners should fire players who refuse to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
About 20 players, most of them San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks, were still sitting or kneeling in Week 17 for the last game of the 2017 regular season, despite fan outrage and slumping television ratings.
No players protested by refusing to stand for the national anthem during this year’s playoffs.
EDITOR'S NOTE: God bless Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, fuck Roger Goodell and his lapdogs of the other team owners.
And to answer your question, Bob ... The NFL obviously does not have the stones to require its players to stand for the anthem. This contribution was only made to placate its black players.
So, it seems that the NFL has announced they are going to kick down $90 million to assorted "social justice" causes this year. I wonder if it will get their viewers back? Hell, I wonder if they have the stones to require that players stand for the National Anthem. Another pack of gutless pukes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Does this mean the NFL is going to fund Black Lives Mater since Kaepernick refused to stand for the anthem as a protest against white cops killing black men.
The NFL is utterly disgusting and disgraceful!
__________
NFL owners finalize $90M social-justice deal without resolving anthem protests
by Valerie Richardson
The Washington Times
March 27, 2018
NFL team owners have unanimously given their final approval to an unprecedented $90 million social justice initiative but have made no decisions about how to handle players who refuse to stand for the national anthem.
Instead, owners are expected to continue the discussion about whether to change the game-day policy, which does not require players to stand, at the spring league meeting in May, according to a post on NFL.com citing the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
“The NFL is committing $90 million to a new social justice initiative that supports efforts and programs to combat social inequality,” the NFL post said Monday. “In a memo sent to all 32 teams in early December, the league said it plans to work closely with players, teams and other groups in the new and expanded community improvement program.”
In addition, the NFL Foundation “contributed $3 million in initial funding for the program,” the statement said.
The decision to avoid an anthem vote at the March 25-28 annual league meeting in Orlando came with the owners split on how to handle the divisive two-year-old sideline protests, which have been blamed in large part for the NFL’s 9.7 percent ratings decline in the 2017 regular season.
New York Jets CEO Christopher Johnson told reporters Sunday that “I just think that trying to forcibly get the players to shut up is a fantastically bad idea,” while Houston Texans owner Bob McNair said the field is “not the place for political statements.”
“We’re going to deal with it in such a way that people will understand we want everybody to respect our country, respect our flag,” Mr. McNair said on ESPN. “Our playing field, that’s not the place for political statements. That’s not the place for religious statements. It’s the place for football. That’s what we need to be doing.”
The 32 owners, who had already agreed to spend $73 million over seven years on social-justice causes at the national level, said Monday they would provide team matching funds for local causes as part of the agreement reached in November with the Players Coalition.
Under the deal, owners would pony up $250,000 and players would match that amount annually for a total of $500,000 per team for social-justice efforts in their communities, according to ESPN.
The $73 million for national causes would be divided between three organizations: 25 percent for the United Negro College Fund; 25 percent to Dream Corps, and 50 percent to the Players Coalition, led by Malcolm Jenkins and Anquan Boldin, which has filed for nonprofit status.
Critics have described the deal as a payoff for progressives, pointing out that the Dream Corps was founded by former Obama administration adviser Van Jones and promotes a number of left-wing causes.
“The NFL’s brand has suffered because it has given left-wing agitators a platform and the millions deciding not to watch the games is evidence that the fans are tired of the politicization of football,” said Robert Kuykendall, spokesman for 2ndVote, a conservative corporate watchdog.
“By formally caving, the NFL will confirm it has no qualms against using the dollars fans spend on tickets and merchandise to fund the left’s agenda and further alienate viewers who just want to see agenda-free football,” he said in a statement.
Still, the deal may have produced the desired result: Last week, free-agent safety Eric Reid said he would no longer kneel during the national anthem, as he has done for two years, telling reporters it was time to channel his efforts in other ways.
Reid, who has not been signed by a team since free agency began March 14, had been viewed as a protest leader since the departure of his former San Francisco 49ers teammate Colin Kaepernick, who is also unsigned and has not played since 2016.
Commissioner Roger Goodell is expected to wrap up the results of the Orlando meeting at a Wednesday press conference.
The protests began in the 2016 regular season but spiked in late September after President Trump suggested that owners should fire players who refuse to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
About 20 players, most of them San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks, were still sitting or kneeling in Week 17 for the last game of the 2017 regular season, despite fan outrage and slumping television ratings.
No players protested by refusing to stand for the national anthem during this year’s playoffs.
EDITOR'S NOTE: God bless Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, fuck Roger Goodell and his lapdogs of the other team owners.
And to answer your question, Bob ... The NFL obviously does not have the stones to require its players to stand for the anthem. This contribution was only made to placate its black players.
MAYOR IS A GUTLESS WONDER
by Bob Walsh
On Tuesday evening there was supposed to be a meeting of the Sacramento city council. A MOB of protesters forced their way into the building and past the metal detectors and entered the council chamber. The brother of dead criminal Stephon Clark proceeded to scream, do an interesting impromptu dance (maybe he was auditioning for America's Got Talent) and then jumped up on the dias in front of the mayor, Darryll Dickless Steinberg, and screamed some more.
At some point Mayor Dickless offered death criminals brother the microphone and he and his supporters started screaming, shouting and in general being assholes. Finally Mayor Dickless shut down the meeting. At that time the mob moved to the Golden One Center and again barricaded the entrances, preventing the paid ticket holders from entering the venue to watch the Kings play. (Why anybody would want to do that I have no idea, but some people do.) The teams showed up wearing #StephonClark t-shirts for warmup but I guess it didn't help.
The mob still wants the cops fired, tried and summarily executed. Little details like a trial, due process or actual guilt or innocence is not an issue.
On Tuesday evening there was supposed to be a meeting of the Sacramento city council. A MOB of protesters forced their way into the building and past the metal detectors and entered the council chamber. The brother of dead criminal Stephon Clark proceeded to scream, do an interesting impromptu dance (maybe he was auditioning for America's Got Talent) and then jumped up on the dias in front of the mayor, Darryll Dickless Steinberg, and screamed some more.
At some point Mayor Dickless offered death criminals brother the microphone and he and his supporters started screaming, shouting and in general being assholes. Finally Mayor Dickless shut down the meeting. At that time the mob moved to the Golden One Center and again barricaded the entrances, preventing the paid ticket holders from entering the venue to watch the Kings play. (Why anybody would want to do that I have no idea, but some people do.) The teams showed up wearing #StephonClark t-shirts for warmup but I guess it didn't help.
The mob still wants the cops fired, tried and summarily executed. Little details like a trial, due process or actual guilt or innocence is not an issue.
TWO WRONGS MAKE AN INTERESTING MESS
by Bob Walsh
On Wednesday morning a hit-and-run driver plowed thru a street fight in the People's Republic of San Francisco. So far one of the fighters id known to be dead. Too bad, so sad.
On Wednesday morning a hit-and-run driver plowed thru a street fight in the People's Republic of San Francisco. So far one of the fighters id known to be dead. Too bad, so sad.
PALESTINIAN WOMEN URGED TO BECOME TERRORISTS TO SHOW PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY PRACTICES GENDER EQUALITY
Palestinian Authority Touts Its Gender Equality For Letting Women Be Terrorists
By Ryan Jones
Israel Today
March 28, 2018
Not wanting to miss out on the gender equality movement that's all the rage in most of the Western world these days, the Palestinian Authority has been talking up the prominent role of women in its society.
For instance, most Palestinian leaders have absolutely no problem with women joining men as equals in the merciless slaughter of Israeli Jews.
In fact, the most deadly Palestinian terrorist attack on Israelis ever was led by a women. In 1978, Dalal Mughrabi and her team of killers from current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, hijacked a passenger bus on Israel's coastal highway and executed 37 of the people aboard, including 12 children.
Mughrabi has ever since been held aloft as a role model for Palestinian girls.
On International Women's Day, which was marked earlier this month, the secretary-general of Abbas' "moderate" Fatah party, Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim, highlighted Mughrabi as evidence of the gender equality in Palestinian society.
"From the outbreak of our revolution in 1965, the outlook of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement - Fatah - has been clear in its social aspect; it saw no difference between women and men, and Dalal Mughrabi who led men is testimony to this," said Al-Rahim in remarks carried by the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. [Translation by Palestinian Media Watch]
March 11 was the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Road Massacre, and the Palestinian Authority took that, too, as an opportunity to encourage young Arab girls to emulate the blood-soaked female terrorist.
At a local high school event, the Palestinian Authority's Al-Yasser Cultural Forum announced that its agenda is to "return the glory to the fighting Palestinian girls and women such as Dalal Mughrabi and others who sacrificed their lives for Palestine [sic], and also to provide information and knowledge to these female students during recesses."
The Palestinian Authority obligated itself in the various signed agreements with Israel to cease all incitement that could lead to violence against Israeli Jews. Ongoing violations of this stipulation are seen by Israel as the primary obstacle to peace.
By Ryan Jones
Israel Today
March 28, 2018
Not wanting to miss out on the gender equality movement that's all the rage in most of the Western world these days, the Palestinian Authority has been talking up the prominent role of women in its society.
For instance, most Palestinian leaders have absolutely no problem with women joining men as equals in the merciless slaughter of Israeli Jews.
In fact, the most deadly Palestinian terrorist attack on Israelis ever was led by a women. In 1978, Dalal Mughrabi and her team of killers from current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, hijacked a passenger bus on Israel's coastal highway and executed 37 of the people aboard, including 12 children.
Mughrabi has ever since been held aloft as a role model for Palestinian girls.
On International Women's Day, which was marked earlier this month, the secretary-general of Abbas' "moderate" Fatah party, Tayeb Abd Al-Rahim, highlighted Mughrabi as evidence of the gender equality in Palestinian society.
"From the outbreak of our revolution in 1965, the outlook of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement - Fatah - has been clear in its social aspect; it saw no difference between women and men, and Dalal Mughrabi who led men is testimony to this," said Al-Rahim in remarks carried by the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. [Translation by Palestinian Media Watch]
March 11 was the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Road Massacre, and the Palestinian Authority took that, too, as an opportunity to encourage young Arab girls to emulate the blood-soaked female terrorist.
At a local high school event, the Palestinian Authority's Al-Yasser Cultural Forum announced that its agenda is to "return the glory to the fighting Palestinian girls and women such as Dalal Mughrabi and others who sacrificed their lives for Palestine [sic], and also to provide information and knowledge to these female students during recesses."
The Palestinian Authority obligated itself in the various signed agreements with Israel to cease all incitement that could lead to violence against Israeli Jews. Ongoing violations of this stipulation are seen by Israel as the primary obstacle to peace.
COULD FORMER COPS OF DISBANDED COMPTON PD HAVE STOLEN THE GUNS?
31 police handguns missing from Compton City Hall vault
City News Service
March 27, 2018
COMPTON — Authorities today announced a $10,000 reward for information that helps them find out who took 31 firearms from a vault in the old Compton City Hall building, where they were being stored following the disbanding nearly 20 years ago of the city’s police department.
Investigators believe the firearms were taken some time between March 6 and Aug. 31, 2017, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Compton city officials had maintained the former Compton Police Department’s inventory of firearms in its vault in the old City Hall building at 600 N. Alameda St. after the police department was dismantled in 2000, the ATF reported.
Police functions in the city were taken over by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which conducted an inventory of the firearms in March 2017.
“Compton’s City Council … determined the LASD should take control of the firearms until a final adjudication was made on whether the Compton Police Department would be restored,” an AFT statement said. “The LASD transferred the firearms to its vault on Aug. 31, 2017 and discovered 23 Beretta .40-caliber pistols and eight Glock .40-caliber pistols were missing from the inventory.”
The ongoing investigation is being conducted by the ATF.
City News Service
March 27, 2018
COMPTON — Authorities today announced a $10,000 reward for information that helps them find out who took 31 firearms from a vault in the old Compton City Hall building, where they were being stored following the disbanding nearly 20 years ago of the city’s police department.
Investigators believe the firearms were taken some time between March 6 and Aug. 31, 2017, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Compton city officials had maintained the former Compton Police Department’s inventory of firearms in its vault in the old City Hall building at 600 N. Alameda St. after the police department was dismantled in 2000, the ATF reported.
Police functions in the city were taken over by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which conducted an inventory of the firearms in March 2017.
“Compton’s City Council … determined the LASD should take control of the firearms until a final adjudication was made on whether the Compton Police Department would be restored,” an AFT statement said. “The LASD transferred the firearms to its vault on Aug. 31, 2017 and discovered 23 Beretta .40-caliber pistols and eight Glock .40-caliber pistols were missing from the inventory.”
The ongoing investigation is being conducted by the ATF.
WHERE WILL LA FIND THE MONEY TO HOUSE ALL THE HOMELESS?
LA Considers Ambitious Proposal To Provide Housing For Every Homeless Person
CBS LA
March 23, 2018
LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles City Council Friday is considering a motion that would enact a plan to provide housing for every transient in the city, as it continues to grapple with a housing shortage which has spiked rents and sent thousands of people into homelessness.
The motion, introduced last month by Councilmen Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, says there is little evidence that anything is being done to create or improve shelters for the homeless in the city and that a true sense of emergency is needed to deal with the problem.
The 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count found that 57,794 people are living on the streets of L.A. County, a 23 percent jump from the year before. Within the city of L.A., that number is more than 34,100.
The city has explored multiple options for dealing with its growing homeless population. In February, the council unanimously approved putting about 60 homeless people in trailers on a downtown lot at Arcadia and Alameda streets. The trailers, which contain bathrooms, showers and beds, are expected to cost about $2 million to build and another $1 million to operate.
However, the plan has received pushback from nearby restaurant owners, who say the high concentration of transients in the area has already hurt their business, and the trailers could make it worse.
Mayor Eric Garcetti defended it earlier this month.
“It’s not a choice of bringing homeless people to your neighborhood or not: they’re there,” Garcetti said. “You want to keep them off the street or bring them home. So from Boyle Heights, to downtown, to the Westside, to San Fernando Valley, we’re finding those allies and we’re pushing. And as mayor, I won’t accept no.”
Another proposal would convert hotels into permanent housing.
In November 2016, L.A. voters passed Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure to fund permanent housing for the homeless, but the units will take years to approve and build.
In March 2017, L.A. County voters adopted Measure H, a quarter-cent Los Angeles County sales tax to fund anti-homelessness programs. It is meant to generate $355 million annually for 10 years to fund a variety of programs to combat homelessness.
The motion being considered Friday seeks a number of actions from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority and from some city departments. With city assistance, the authority would be asked to provide several comprehensive reports within 14 days, including the framework for an Emergency Response Homeless Plan, outlining what steps and what funds would be required to provide an alternative to homeless encampments for 100 percent of the homeless population by the end of the year.
Peter Lynn, executive director of LAHSA, noted that since the passage of Measure H, they have seen an increase from 10 percent to 50 percent in the number of people who enter temporary shelters in the county and are transitioned into permanent supportive housing.
The homelessness crisis has plagued the entire Southland. In February, hundreds of homeless people were removed from a two-mile stretch of the Santa Ana riverbed, prompting a lawsuit from homeless advocates.
The transients who were cleared out were given motel vouchers as part of a deal worked out in federal court. But those vouchers are expiring, and Orange County and city officials have been scrambling to come up with a permanent housing solution for them.
Proposals to move the homeless to temporary locations in Laguna Niguel, Huntington Beach and Irvine have been met with large protests from local residents.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A really heartwarming proposal. But the taxpayers are going to be stuck with the bill and that will drive up LA’s already uber- high cost of living in a house or apartment. Homeowners and renters will then be taxed out of their homes, thus creating more homeless people in LA.
CBS LA
March 23, 2018
LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles City Council Friday is considering a motion that would enact a plan to provide housing for every transient in the city, as it continues to grapple with a housing shortage which has spiked rents and sent thousands of people into homelessness.
The motion, introduced last month by Councilmen Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, says there is little evidence that anything is being done to create or improve shelters for the homeless in the city and that a true sense of emergency is needed to deal with the problem.
The 2017 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count found that 57,794 people are living on the streets of L.A. County, a 23 percent jump from the year before. Within the city of L.A., that number is more than 34,100.
The city has explored multiple options for dealing with its growing homeless population. In February, the council unanimously approved putting about 60 homeless people in trailers on a downtown lot at Arcadia and Alameda streets. The trailers, which contain bathrooms, showers and beds, are expected to cost about $2 million to build and another $1 million to operate.
However, the plan has received pushback from nearby restaurant owners, who say the high concentration of transients in the area has already hurt their business, and the trailers could make it worse.
Mayor Eric Garcetti defended it earlier this month.
“It’s not a choice of bringing homeless people to your neighborhood or not: they’re there,” Garcetti said. “You want to keep them off the street or bring them home. So from Boyle Heights, to downtown, to the Westside, to San Fernando Valley, we’re finding those allies and we’re pushing. And as mayor, I won’t accept no.”
Another proposal would convert hotels into permanent housing.
In November 2016, L.A. voters passed Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure to fund permanent housing for the homeless, but the units will take years to approve and build.
In March 2017, L.A. County voters adopted Measure H, a quarter-cent Los Angeles County sales tax to fund anti-homelessness programs. It is meant to generate $355 million annually for 10 years to fund a variety of programs to combat homelessness.
The motion being considered Friday seeks a number of actions from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority and from some city departments. With city assistance, the authority would be asked to provide several comprehensive reports within 14 days, including the framework for an Emergency Response Homeless Plan, outlining what steps and what funds would be required to provide an alternative to homeless encampments for 100 percent of the homeless population by the end of the year.
Peter Lynn, executive director of LAHSA, noted that since the passage of Measure H, they have seen an increase from 10 percent to 50 percent in the number of people who enter temporary shelters in the county and are transitioned into permanent supportive housing.
The homelessness crisis has plagued the entire Southland. In February, hundreds of homeless people were removed from a two-mile stretch of the Santa Ana riverbed, prompting a lawsuit from homeless advocates.
The transients who were cleared out were given motel vouchers as part of a deal worked out in federal court. But those vouchers are expiring, and Orange County and city officials have been scrambling to come up with a permanent housing solution for them.
Proposals to move the homeless to temporary locations in Laguna Niguel, Huntington Beach and Irvine have been met with large protests from local residents.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A really heartwarming proposal. But the taxpayers are going to be stuck with the bill and that will drive up LA’s already uber- high cost of living in a house or apartment. Homeowners and renters will then be taxed out of their homes, thus creating more homeless people in LA.
NOW THAT ANTI-GUNNER OBAMA IS GONE, SO IS THE RUSH TO OBTAIN FIREARMS
Remington seeks bankruptcy protection as gun sales appear to continue decline
The Dallas Morning News
March 27, 2018
Remington, a company that began making flintlock rifles when there were only 19 United States, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Mounting debts at the arms manufacturer have snowballed, ironically, since the election of Donald Trump, who has called himself a "true friend" to the gun industry.
Remington, which as roots dating to 1816, has lined up $100 million with lenders to continue operations. It remains unclear what will happen to its 3,500 or so employees as it reorganizes.
Panic sales that drove revenue for gun makers ever higher evaporated with Trump's arrival in the White House. Fading sales and Remington's production of one of the most well-known weapons in the world, the Bushmaster AR-15, have overwhelmed the Madison, North Carolina, company.
Late Sunday, according to records from the bankruptcy court of the district of Delaware, Remington Outdoor Co. agreed to a prepackaged deal that would give holders of the company's $550 million term loan an 82.5 percent stake, according to a release.
Third-lien noteholders will take 17.5 percent of Remington and four-year warrants get a 15 percent stake.
The Bushmaster AR-15 rifle was used in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in which 20 first-graders and six educators were killed in 2012.
The same type of gun was used to kill 17 in a Parkland, Florida, high school, a massacre that lead to drew hundreds of thousands of anti-gun violence protesters to the capital and to the streets in cities across the nation this past weekend.
The company was cleared of wrongdoing in the Sandy Hook shooting, but investors wanted nothing to do with it. Cerberus Capital Management, which had acquired the company in 2007 as gun sales began to boom, tried to sell it less than a week after the shooting.
There were no takers.
But it was larger trends already underway that doomed Remington.
Arms manufacturers had for years ramped up production as gun ownership became a red-hot social, and political flashpoint. Some gun-rights advocates have binged on guns on the misguided belief that a Democratic administration would harshly restrict gun sales.
Those misperceptions became moot with Trump's rise to the White House.
Trump was the first sitting president to address the National Rifle Association in three decades, telling members at their annual meeting last spring that "You have a true friend and champion in the White House."
Any belief that more restrictive regulation was on the way faded quickly.
In 2017, firearm background checks, a good barometer of sales, declined faster than in any year since 1998, when the FBI first began compiling that data.
But there were clear signs that gun sales, even as production increased, were already in decline. That is partially because a larger percentage of guns in the U.S. are owned by an increasingly small group of people.
According to a recent study by Harvard University and Northeastern University, the number of privately-owned guns in America grew by more than 70 million to approximately 265 million between 1994 and 2015. But half of those guns are owned by only 3 percent of the population.
That smaller base of what are sometimes referred to as super-owners has made the industry more unstable.
In 2015 Colt Holdings Co., another storied gun maker, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Profit growth at Sturm, Ruger & Co. is under severe pressure and the company's shares are down 18 percent this year.
Some of Wall Street's heaviest hitters are stepping into the national debate on guns as investment firms ask firearms makers what they are doing about gun violence.
BlackRock is a major shareholder in gun makers Sturm Ruger, American Outdoor Brands, and Vista Outdoor Brands. About a week after the shooting in Parkland, BlackRock said it wanted to speak with the three firearms makers about their responses to the tragedy.
It's also looking into creating new investment funds for investors that exclude firearms makers and retailers.
The Dallas Morning News
March 27, 2018
Remington, a company that began making flintlock rifles when there were only 19 United States, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Mounting debts at the arms manufacturer have snowballed, ironically, since the election of Donald Trump, who has called himself a "true friend" to the gun industry.
Remington, which as roots dating to 1816, has lined up $100 million with lenders to continue operations. It remains unclear what will happen to its 3,500 or so employees as it reorganizes.
Panic sales that drove revenue for gun makers ever higher evaporated with Trump's arrival in the White House. Fading sales and Remington's production of one of the most well-known weapons in the world, the Bushmaster AR-15, have overwhelmed the Madison, North Carolina, company.
Late Sunday, according to records from the bankruptcy court of the district of Delaware, Remington Outdoor Co. agreed to a prepackaged deal that would give holders of the company's $550 million term loan an 82.5 percent stake, according to a release.
Third-lien noteholders will take 17.5 percent of Remington and four-year warrants get a 15 percent stake.
The Bushmaster AR-15 rifle was used in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in which 20 first-graders and six educators were killed in 2012.
The same type of gun was used to kill 17 in a Parkland, Florida, high school, a massacre that lead to drew hundreds of thousands of anti-gun violence protesters to the capital and to the streets in cities across the nation this past weekend.
The company was cleared of wrongdoing in the Sandy Hook shooting, but investors wanted nothing to do with it. Cerberus Capital Management, which had acquired the company in 2007 as gun sales began to boom, tried to sell it less than a week after the shooting.
There were no takers.
But it was larger trends already underway that doomed Remington.
Arms manufacturers had for years ramped up production as gun ownership became a red-hot social, and political flashpoint. Some gun-rights advocates have binged on guns on the misguided belief that a Democratic administration would harshly restrict gun sales.
Those misperceptions became moot with Trump's rise to the White House.
Trump was the first sitting president to address the National Rifle Association in three decades, telling members at their annual meeting last spring that "You have a true friend and champion in the White House."
Any belief that more restrictive regulation was on the way faded quickly.
In 2017, firearm background checks, a good barometer of sales, declined faster than in any year since 1998, when the FBI first began compiling that data.
But there were clear signs that gun sales, even as production increased, were already in decline. That is partially because a larger percentage of guns in the U.S. are owned by an increasingly small group of people.
According to a recent study by Harvard University and Northeastern University, the number of privately-owned guns in America grew by more than 70 million to approximately 265 million between 1994 and 2015. But half of those guns are owned by only 3 percent of the population.
That smaller base of what are sometimes referred to as super-owners has made the industry more unstable.
In 2015 Colt Holdings Co., another storied gun maker, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Profit growth at Sturm, Ruger & Co. is under severe pressure and the company's shares are down 18 percent this year.
Some of Wall Street's heaviest hitters are stepping into the national debate on guns as investment firms ask firearms makers what they are doing about gun violence.
BlackRock is a major shareholder in gun makers Sturm Ruger, American Outdoor Brands, and Vista Outdoor Brands. About a week after the shooting in Parkland, BlackRock said it wanted to speak with the three firearms makers about their responses to the tragedy.
It's also looking into creating new investment funds for investors that exclude firearms makers and retailers.
NYPD HAD BEEN PREVIOUSLY EXPOSED FOR REPORTING RAPES AS ILLEGAL ENTRY OR AS TRESPASSING
NYPD Slammed for Downgrading Importance of Date Rape Cases
By Greg B. Smith
New York Daily News
March 28, 2018
NEW YORK -- A Department of Investigation report released Tuesday blasts the NYPD for failing to commit adequate resources to investigating rape.
The report specifically criticizes the department’s policy of downgrading the importance of “acquaintance” or date rape by not forwarding these cases to the Special Victims Division.
Instead, the SVD is directed to handle only stranger rapes and high profile cases, while date rapes are kept with local detective squads, the DOI report found.
This practice contradicts Commissioner James O’Neill’s assertion in December that all reported rapes are “fully investigated by the seasoned professionals in Special Victims.”
“The failure to treat acquaintance and domestic rape as crimes on par with stranger rape is unacceptable in modern law enforcement,” the DOI report states.
The DOI report quotes multiple internal SVD memos, including an undated one that states, “SVD currently has very serious operational problems that place the Department at substantial risk and those problems are staffing dependent."
A Nov. 24, 2014 internal memo by the SVD commanding officer asserts that a higher-up told him “that we did not have to investigate every misdemeanor case.”
The commanding officer, who is not identified in the DOI report, responded in the memo, ”This was an unacceptable proposition for sex-crime complaints and one in which the undersigned ignored.”
The report makes clear the insufficient staffing of the Special Victims Division is by no means a new problem.
DOI says back in 2010 an internal NYPD working group found that the SVD was overworked and that staffing needed to be increased significantly.
Eight years ago that working group recommended hiring 26 more adult sex crime detectives, bringing the unit staffing to 96. But staffing has actually stayed more or less the same since. As of this month there were 67 detectives in the adult sex crime units, DOI found.
“NYPD has understaffed and under-resourced SVD,” the DOI report stated. “Internal NYPD documents acknowledge that many sexual assault cases are not properly investigated due to staffing and resource limitations.”
DOI made several responses but said in its report that NYPD rejected all of them, insisting that SVD staffing was adequate and that all reported rapes are thoroughly investigated.
NYPD had no immediate response early Tuesday.
By Greg B. Smith
New York Daily News
March 28, 2018
NEW YORK -- A Department of Investigation report released Tuesday blasts the NYPD for failing to commit adequate resources to investigating rape.
The report specifically criticizes the department’s policy of downgrading the importance of “acquaintance” or date rape by not forwarding these cases to the Special Victims Division.
Instead, the SVD is directed to handle only stranger rapes and high profile cases, while date rapes are kept with local detective squads, the DOI report found.
This practice contradicts Commissioner James O’Neill’s assertion in December that all reported rapes are “fully investigated by the seasoned professionals in Special Victims.”
“The failure to treat acquaintance and domestic rape as crimes on par with stranger rape is unacceptable in modern law enforcement,” the DOI report states.
The DOI report quotes multiple internal SVD memos, including an undated one that states, “SVD currently has very serious operational problems that place the Department at substantial risk and those problems are staffing dependent."
A Nov. 24, 2014 internal memo by the SVD commanding officer asserts that a higher-up told him “that we did not have to investigate every misdemeanor case.”
The commanding officer, who is not identified in the DOI report, responded in the memo, ”This was an unacceptable proposition for sex-crime complaints and one in which the undersigned ignored.”
The report makes clear the insufficient staffing of the Special Victims Division is by no means a new problem.
DOI says back in 2010 an internal NYPD working group found that the SVD was overworked and that staffing needed to be increased significantly.
Eight years ago that working group recommended hiring 26 more adult sex crime detectives, bringing the unit staffing to 96. But staffing has actually stayed more or less the same since. As of this month there were 67 detectives in the adult sex crime units, DOI found.
“NYPD has understaffed and under-resourced SVD,” the DOI report stated. “Internal NYPD documents acknowledge that many sexual assault cases are not properly investigated due to staffing and resource limitations.”
DOI made several responses but said in its report that NYPD rejected all of them, insisting that SVD staffing was adequate and that all reported rapes are thoroughly investigated.
NYPD had no immediate response early Tuesday.
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
A DING IN THE ARMOR?
by Bob Walsh
The Santa Clara County (CA) S. O. allowed federal deportation offices into the jail on March 7 and 8 to interview five prisoners in possible violation of county and state policy.
The Sheriff, Laurie Smith, has said the ICE officers were allowed access in error and should not have been let in.
None of the five prisoners were detained by ICE.
At some point push will have to come to shove in this pissing contest. It should be sooner rather than later.
The Santa Clara County (CA) S. O. allowed federal deportation offices into the jail on March 7 and 8 to interview five prisoners in possible violation of county and state policy.
The Sheriff, Laurie Smith, has said the ICE officers were allowed access in error and should not have been let in.
None of the five prisoners were detained by ICE.
At some point push will have to come to shove in this pissing contest. It should be sooner rather than later.
ASTUTE OR GUTLESS?
by Bob Walsh
Stephon Clark is a now-dead criminal. He was shot to death by two Sacramento PD officers a week ago when he first ran, and then charged at them with his arms extended as though he were holding a weapon. Turns out he wasn't. And of course since the dead criminal is black, and even though one of the two cops is black, the mob is screaming for them to be fired, prosecuted and summarily executed. The mob, including BLM thugs, has harassed land assaulted passers-by at their "ralleys" and damaged both public and private property, all the while screaming NO JUSTICE NO PEACE. The cops are already receiving death threats.
The Chief of Police in Sac is a relatively young personable black man. He reminds me a lot of Barack Obama with less hair. He has asked the Cal DOJ to run a simultaneous, parallel investigation into the shooting.
All big city chief's are to some extent politicians. It comes with the job. So, is he smart to try to dodge some lightning and spread the responsibility thin, or is he gutless for not backing his people up, at least until some malfeasance is clearly demonstrated?
Maybe it's a bit of both. In the real world, that is not uncommon.
Stephon Clark is a now-dead criminal. He was shot to death by two Sacramento PD officers a week ago when he first ran, and then charged at them with his arms extended as though he were holding a weapon. Turns out he wasn't. And of course since the dead criminal is black, and even though one of the two cops is black, the mob is screaming for them to be fired, prosecuted and summarily executed. The mob, including BLM thugs, has harassed land assaulted passers-by at their "ralleys" and damaged both public and private property, all the while screaming NO JUSTICE NO PEACE. The cops are already receiving death threats.
The Chief of Police in Sac is a relatively young personable black man. He reminds me a lot of Barack Obama with less hair. He has asked the Cal DOJ to run a simultaneous, parallel investigation into the shooting.
All big city chief's are to some extent politicians. It comes with the job. So, is he smart to try to dodge some lightning and spread the responsibility thin, or is he gutless for not backing his people up, at least until some malfeasance is clearly demonstrated?
Maybe it's a bit of both. In the real world, that is not uncommon.
WOMAN GETS 50 YEARS IN KILLINGS OF 2 CALIFORNIA DEPUTIES
Janelle Monroy was sentenced for helping her husband, Luis Bracamontes, as he killed two California deputies in 2014
Associated Press
March 24, 2018
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Utah woman was sentenced to nearly 50 years in prison Friday for helping her husband as he killed two Northern California sheriff's deputies in 2014.
Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White sentenced Janelle Monroy after jurors last month rejected her argument that she feared Luis Bracamontes would have killed her if she didn't help him.
"Ms. Monroy, you did not start this reign of terror, but you joined in immediately after as an active participant," White said, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Bracamontes is a Mexican citizen who repeatedly entered the United States illegally. President Donald Trump has cited his case to illustrate problems with the nation's immigration policy.
Bracamontes has repeatedly said in court that he killed the deputies and wished he had killed more.
Monroy, 41, who is a U.S. citizen, willingly moved her husband's assault-style rifle from vehicle to stolen vehicle after he killed Sacramento County sheriff's Deputy Danny Oliver and before he killed Placer County sheriff's Detective Michael Davis Jr. hours later, prosecutors said.
She faced a life sentence after she was convicted of 10 charges including murder, attempted murder and carjacking, attempted carjacking and possessing an assault rifle.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Bracamontes, who was convicted by a separate jury.
The deputies were killed shortly after the couple arrived in Sacramento during what Monroy said was a wandering journey spurred by Bracamontes' drug-infused paranoia.
Associated Press
March 24, 2018
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Utah woman was sentenced to nearly 50 years in prison Friday for helping her husband as he killed two Northern California sheriff's deputies in 2014.
Sacramento Superior Court Judge Steve White sentenced Janelle Monroy after jurors last month rejected her argument that she feared Luis Bracamontes would have killed her if she didn't help him.
"Ms. Monroy, you did not start this reign of terror, but you joined in immediately after as an active participant," White said, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Bracamontes is a Mexican citizen who repeatedly entered the United States illegally. President Donald Trump has cited his case to illustrate problems with the nation's immigration policy.
Bracamontes has repeatedly said in court that he killed the deputies and wished he had killed more.
Monroy, 41, who is a U.S. citizen, willingly moved her husband's assault-style rifle from vehicle to stolen vehicle after he killed Sacramento County sheriff's Deputy Danny Oliver and before he killed Placer County sheriff's Detective Michael Davis Jr. hours later, prosecutors said.
She faced a life sentence after she was convicted of 10 charges including murder, attempted murder and carjacking, attempted carjacking and possessing an assault rifle.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Bracamontes, who was convicted by a separate jury.
The deputies were killed shortly after the couple arrived in Sacramento during what Monroy said was a wandering journey spurred by Bracamontes' drug-infused paranoia.
KAPOW KAPOW ….. OH SHIT!
by Alex Cooke
Fstoppers
March 22, 2018
You might remember Andy Grimm, an Ohio photographer who was shot by Deputy Jake Shaw after he stopped to take pictures of a traffic stop and his tripod was mistaken for a gun. Grimm filed a lawsuit against the county, but lawyers say not only were the deputy's actions "reasonable," but Grimm's own "negligence... contributed to cause the injuries."
Lawyers for Clark County allege that Deputy Shaw's actions were reasonable and Grimm is responsible for causing the shooting that left him seriously injured last year:
“Defendants aver that it reasonably appeared to Deputy Shaw that Andrew Grimm possessed a firearm under the conditions facing him, in the course and scope of his employment, and in good faith, to make a split-second decision to discharge his weapon in order to protect the public and himself from perceived deadly harm. Plaintiff Andrew Grimm’s own contributory and or comparative negligence and/or assumption of the risk may have caused or contributed to cause the injuries and damages of which he complains.”
The shooting happened when Grimm pulled up in his Jeep to take pictures of a traffic stop. Deputy Shaw saw him pulling a tripod out of the back of the vehicle and shot him after assuming it was a gun. Grimm says prior to that, he had flashed his lights and waved at the deputy, whom he knew personally.
The lawsuit further alleges that Grimm's wife, Melanie, and the New Carlisle News have experienced loss of business after law enforcement agencies retaliated against them. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations is still investigating the shooting.
__________
No Charges for Deputy Who Shot Photographer After Mistaking Camera Equipment for a Gun
By Alex Cooke
Fstoppers
March 23, 2018
Deputy Jacob Shaw, who shot Photographer Andy Grimm after mistaking his tripod for a gun, will not face any criminal charges. A grand jury declined to bring charges against the deputy earlier today.
The grand jury document was released today:
“After due consideration of the above case the Special Grand Jury returned NO BILL(s), regarding the on duty shooting by Deputy Jacob Shaw of Andrew Grimm and the surrounding circumstances. After due consideration of the above case the Grand Jury returned a NO BILL(S) and Deputy Shaw is discharged.”
Though he will not face criminal charges, Deputy Shaw will now be the subject of an administrative investigation by his department. He's currently working under reassignment at the Clark County Jail.
Grimm's lawsuit is also still being pursued, and thus, both the sheriff's office and Grimm declined any meaningful comment on the grand jury's decision today. You may remember that lawyers are attempting to blame Grimm, saying his "negligence" and "assumption of risk" were to blame for his injuries. Shaw's body cam footage (warning: the footage is not graphic, but may be distressing) shows the deputy relaying license and insurance information relating to a traffic stop before quickly exiting his car and shooting Grimm (who had stopped across the street) without any warning. The footage does not show Grimm's actions before being shot, though he does say he tried to make the deputy aware of his presence by flashing his lights and waving at him.
Fstoppers
March 22, 2018
You might remember Andy Grimm, an Ohio photographer who was shot by Deputy Jake Shaw after he stopped to take pictures of a traffic stop and his tripod was mistaken for a gun. Grimm filed a lawsuit against the county, but lawyers say not only were the deputy's actions "reasonable," but Grimm's own "negligence... contributed to cause the injuries."
Lawyers for Clark County allege that Deputy Shaw's actions were reasonable and Grimm is responsible for causing the shooting that left him seriously injured last year:
“Defendants aver that it reasonably appeared to Deputy Shaw that Andrew Grimm possessed a firearm under the conditions facing him, in the course and scope of his employment, and in good faith, to make a split-second decision to discharge his weapon in order to protect the public and himself from perceived deadly harm. Plaintiff Andrew Grimm’s own contributory and or comparative negligence and/or assumption of the risk may have caused or contributed to cause the injuries and damages of which he complains.”
The shooting happened when Grimm pulled up in his Jeep to take pictures of a traffic stop. Deputy Shaw saw him pulling a tripod out of the back of the vehicle and shot him after assuming it was a gun. Grimm says prior to that, he had flashed his lights and waved at the deputy, whom he knew personally.
The lawsuit further alleges that Grimm's wife, Melanie, and the New Carlisle News have experienced loss of business after law enforcement agencies retaliated against them. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations is still investigating the shooting.
__________
No Charges for Deputy Who Shot Photographer After Mistaking Camera Equipment for a Gun
By Alex Cooke
Fstoppers
March 23, 2018
Deputy Jacob Shaw, who shot Photographer Andy Grimm after mistaking his tripod for a gun, will not face any criminal charges. A grand jury declined to bring charges against the deputy earlier today.
The grand jury document was released today:
“After due consideration of the above case the Special Grand Jury returned NO BILL(s), regarding the on duty shooting by Deputy Jacob Shaw of Andrew Grimm and the surrounding circumstances. After due consideration of the above case the Grand Jury returned a NO BILL(S) and Deputy Shaw is discharged.”
Though he will not face criminal charges, Deputy Shaw will now be the subject of an administrative investigation by his department. He's currently working under reassignment at the Clark County Jail.
Grimm's lawsuit is also still being pursued, and thus, both the sheriff's office and Grimm declined any meaningful comment on the grand jury's decision today. You may remember that lawyers are attempting to blame Grimm, saying his "negligence" and "assumption of risk" were to blame for his injuries. Shaw's body cam footage (warning: the footage is not graphic, but may be distressing) shows the deputy relaying license and insurance information relating to a traffic stop before quickly exiting his car and shooting Grimm (who had stopped across the street) without any warning. The footage does not show Grimm's actions before being shot, though he does say he tried to make the deputy aware of his presence by flashing his lights and waving at him.
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