Saturday, July 26, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Wrenching 911 tape played in sleepover slayings
Taylor Placker, left, and Skyla Whitaker were friends who both loved animals, their families say.
The 911 tape was released six weeks after the bullet-riddled bodies of 13-year-old Taylor Placker and 11-year-old Skyla Whitaker were discovered along a remote country road in the town of Weleetka.
A breathless woman, identified only as a member of a family, can be heard on the tape. Her voice is raw with emotion.
"Somebody killed two young girls." she says. "They are both down here dead. My granddaughter and her friend. ... Help me. Please!" 
Listen to authorities play the dramatic tape »
Jessica Brown, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman, said she hoped someone would hear the tape and be inspired to identify the killers.
"We know someone knows what happened," said Brown. "Hopefully if they hear the tape they will understand what happened and come forward."
Brown said investigators have run down about 500 leads and have eliminated 100 possible suspects but have not been able to crack the case.
"Someone has to come forward," she said.
Police are asking members of the public with more information about the case to call (800) 522-8017.
The two girls had planned a sleepover at Taylor's house on June 8, the night they were killed. They left the house about 5 p.m.
Less than 30 minutes later, Taylor's grandfather discovered the bodies in a ditch on the side of a road, near a bridge that is a popular gathering spot in the area.
The killings have rattled the community of Weleetka, a town of about 1,000 residents 75 miles from Tulsa. Taylor and Skyla were the only girls in their sixth- and fifth-grade classes,
Investigators don't have any suspects or motives, but a forensic examination of the bodies indicated that two guns had been used. Police have said they are looking for two shooters.
There has been speculation the girls' slayings were "thrill killings," and police investigators have said they hope one of the shooters will turn against the other.
Several witnesses reported seeing a suspicious man on the same dirt road where the girls were shot, Brown said last month.
She said authorities believed that the man, "who didn't look like he should have been there," was on the road before the girls were shot multiple times in the head and chest and left in a ditch.
Witnesses described the man as having a black ponytail, about 6 feet tall and 35 years old. They said he was standing in front of a white single-cab pickup with chrome striping, possibly a Chevy or Ford model, with Oklahoma tags, Brown said in a press conference on June 13.
"He acted a little suspiciously but we don't know what he was doing," said Brown, stopping short of calling him a suspect. "We just want to talk to him. We think he might have seen something."
Brown said other witnesses reported hearing gunshots near the crime scene.
Taylor's uncle, Joe Mosher, described his niece as an intelligent girl who loved animals.
"She rescued turtles on the highway and wrote her name on them and turned them loose in the country," Mosher said Wednesday.
Mosher said Taylor was at the top of her class in public school after being homeschooled most of her life.
"She was very smart," said Mosher, who last saw Taylor at a family reunion two weeks before her death.
Skyla's grandmother, Claudia Farrow, described the girl as "a typical tomboy. She lived out in the country. She loved animals, loved to fish."
"Every time she`d come over here in my yard, which they just lived about a hundred yards from me, all her animals would follow her over here," Farrow told CNN last month. "She'd have five or six cats following her, her little dog and her goat. I'd get on to her daddy, I said, 'Now, don't you let that goat eat my flowers,' because she'd always eat my flowers. I will miss that. I will miss her."Sunday, July 20, 2008
The Pursuit of Teen Girl Purity
There are some mothers and some uncles among the 150 people in the ballroom of the Broadmoor hotel, but the night belongs to fathers and daughters. The girls generally range in age from college down to the tiny 4-year-old dressed all in purple who has climbed up into her father's arms to be carried. Some are in their first high heels--you can tell by the way they walk, like uncertain baby giraffes. Randy Wilson, co-inventor of the Father-Daughter Purity Ball, offers a blessing: he calls on the men to be good and loving listeners, tender, gracious and truthful. And he prays that the girls might "step into the world with strength and passion, to lead this generation."
Photos
Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She'll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today's world," she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet--a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. "On my wedding day, he'll give it to my husband," she explains. "It's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I'm supposed to be loved."
Kylie talks with an unblinking confidence about a promise that she says is spiritual, mental and physical. "It's something I'm very proud of. I plan to keep pure until marriage. It's a promise I made to myself--not pressure from my parents," she says. She speaks plainly about what she wants in her life, what she thinks she has the power to control and what she doesn't. "I'm very much at peace about this," she says, and looks out across the twirling room. "I don't feel like I need to seek a man. I will be found."
Family Ministry
Randy and his wife Lisa Wilson believe in celebrating God's design and life's little growth spurts. But the origin of the purity-ball movement was not so much about their five daughters; it was about the fathers Randy saw who, he says, didn't know what their place was in the lives of their daughters. "The idea was to model what the relationship can be as a daughter grows from a child to an adult," Randy says. "You come in closer, become available to answer whatever questions she has."
So he and Lisa came up with a ceremony; they wrote a vow for fathers to recite, a promise "before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the areas of purity," to practice fidelity, shun pornography and walk with honor through a "culture of chaos" and by so doing guide their daughters as well. That was in 1998, the year the President was charged with lying about his sex life, Viagra became the fastest-selling new drug in history, and movies, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reflected "a surge in the worldwide relaxation of sexual taboos."
Word of the event spread fast: soon the camera crews came, and so did Tyra Banks and Dr. Phil. The Abstinence Clearinghouse estimates there were more than 4,000 purity events across the country last year, with programs aimed at boys now growing even faster. And inevitably the criticism arrived as well, dressed up in social science and scholarly glee at the semiotics of girls kneeling beneath raised swords to affirm their purity. The events have been called odd, creepy, oppressive of a girl's "sexual self-agency," as one USA Today columnist put it. Father-daughter bonding is great, the critics agree--but wouldn't a cooking class or a soccer game be emotionally healthier than a ceremony freighted with rings and roses and vows? Some academic skeptics make a practical objection: The majority of kids who make a virginity pledge, they argue, will still have sex before marriage but are less likely than other kids to use contraception, since that would involve planning ahead for something they have promised not to do. This puts them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. To which defenders say: Teen pledgers typically do postpone having sex, have fewer partners, get pregnant less often and if they make it through high school as virgins, are twice as likely to graduate from college--so where's the downside?
The purity balls have thus become a proxy in the wider war over means and ends. It is being fought in Congress, where lawmakers debate whether to keep funding abstinence-only education in the face of studies showing it doesn't work; in the culture, as Lindsay and Britney and Miley march in single file off a cliff; at school-board meetings, where members argue over the signal sent by including condoms in the prom bag; at the dinner table, where parents try to transmit values to children, knowing full well that swarms of other messages are landing by text and Twitter. "The culture is everywhere," says Randy's daughter Khrystian, 20. "You can't get away from it." But maybe, the new Puritans suggest, there's a way to boost girls' immunity.
Rules of Engagement
It was an elbow in the ribs from his wife that drove Ken Lane to his first purity ball with their daughter Hannah, now 11. Tonight is their fourth, and they are sitting in the gold-and-white Broadmoor ballroom, picking at the chicken Florentine and trying to explain what they're doing here. "My kids are on loan to me for a season; it's important how I use that time," Ken is saying as a string quartet plays softly. "There's a lot for us to talk through--the decisions she'll have to make are more complex. I want to be close enough to her that she can come talk to me. That's what my wife understood. I didn't understand the role dads can play to set her up for success."
In the face of the hook-up culture of casual sexual experimentation, he explains, with its potential physical and emotional risks, he wants to model an alternative. Even with older teenagers, many of these families don't believe in random dating but rather intentional dating, which typically begins with a young man's asking a father for permission to get to know his daughter. Lane was so stymied by how exactly that conversation would go that he even asked Randy Wilson if he could sit at a nearby table and listen in one day when Wilson met one of Khrystian's potential suitors at a local Starbucks. "We're trying to be realistic," Lane says. "I'm not ready to be like India--have arranged marriages. But there is some wisdom there, in that at least the parents are involved."
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Battered but not beaten, Zimbabwe farmers seek justice
CNN
Angela Campbell, 67, was beaten and kidnapped days after Zimbabwe's runoff election.
The kidnappers demanding her signature at gunpoint were so-called "war veterans" from President Robert Mugabe's heyday as a liberation hero, and they made it clear her refusal would mean more beatings.
Though Campbell signed the document, her son-in-law said she has no intention of giving up her battle; Campbell's family will be in Windhoek, Namibia, on Wednesday to present arguments to a Southern African Development Community tribunal.
In pursuing the case, the Campbells and 77 fellow Zimbabwean farmers are risking theft, torture and death for what may be their only remaining chance to save the homes and farms so coveted by Mugabe and his loyalists.
Mugabe blames the West for his nation's soaring inflation and poverty. But analysts say Mugabe's 2000 "resettlement" policy, in which property was snatched from white farmers and redistributed to landless blacks, is more to blame for the country's turmoil. Watch a report from the time of the Campbell attack »
"All I want to see is justice," said Richard Etheredge, 72, a white farmer who was evicted from his farm last month. "The world cannot carry on with criminals."
On June 15, Etheredge, who has joined the SADC case, and his family received word that a Zimbabwean senator planned to take over his Chegutu farm -- a process known as "jambanja."
"We're going to murder you if we catch you," Etheredge recalls an assailant yelling from outside his son's house two days later.
The Farmers' Case
Mike Campbell and 77 fellow Zimbabwean farmers are appealing to a tribunal for protection from the government. The farmers are asking the tribunal:• To appeal to Zimbabwe to strike down Amendment 17 of its constitution, which permits the acqusition of "agricultural land for resettlement and other purposes" without recourse or compensation to the landowner
• To rule that the land resettlement policy is racially motivated and targets only white landowners
• To push Zimbabwe's government to establish a system for compensating landowners whose property has been commandeered via the land resettlement policies
• To find the Zimbabwean government in contempt for violating tribunal rulings ordering Zimbabwe to refrain from directly or indirectly evicting or "interfering with the peaceful residence of" any farmers seeking relief from the tribunal.
Sources: Farmer Ben Freeth, attorneys David Drury and Matthew Walton, the Zimbabwe Constitution and the Southern African Development Community
The senator bused "criminals" to his property, Etheredge said. Etheredge, his wife and one of his twin sons escaped, but the other twin and Etheredge's daughter-in-law were later beaten, he said.
Looters stole his computers, farm equipment, antiques, custom gun collection and a safe with billions in Zimbabwean currency (hundreds of thousands in U.S. dollars). Etheredge said he watched the thieves abscond with his possessions in vehicles belonging to the senator.
The looters also caused about $1 million in damage to his property, which includes three houses and a fruit-packing plant that was once among the most sophisticated in southern Africa. The Etheredges have been farming for 17 years, and before the attack, were producing 400,000 cartons of navel oranges and kumquats a year, he said.
"The destruction is absolutely incredible," Etheredge said.
Mugabe's cronies visited the adjacent Mount Carmel farm about two weeks later, just days after Mugabe won a majority of votes in a runoff election denounced as a "sham" by the international community. Watch how violence persists after the election »
Like the Etheredges, Mike and Angela Campbell were warned that Mugabe loyalists, members of his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, were planning to invade their farm. The government had given the 1,200-hectare (2,965-acre) tract to a ZANU-PF spokesman who also served as Mugabe's biographer, according to the Campbells' son-in-law, Ben Freeth.
Two nuns went to Mount Carmel on June 26, the day before the runoff, wanting to buy sweet potatoes, Freeth said. But their quest for tubers was a ruse; they actually wanted to tell Freeth that ZANU-PF members were planning to raid the Campbell land, where the Campbells and Freeth and his wife, Laura, live.
On June 29, Freeth received a phone call: "War veterans," as the clans of pro-Mugabe thugs call themselves, were heading to his in-laws' house. Laura and her brother, Bruce, gathered their children. Laura fled with the children through a fence on the northern boundary of Mount Carmel farm, Freeth said.
Freeth jumped in his car and sped 1½ kilometers to the Campbell house.
"These guys had already arrived and they started shooting at me as soon as I drove through the gate," he said.
The bullets missed, but one of the war veterans hurled a rock through the driver's side window, smashing Freeth's right eye shut.
"They dragged me out of the vehicle and began beating me over the head with rifle butts," Freeth said.
The men tied up Freeth, he said, and took him to where his in-laws were lying bound on the gravel outside their home.
Angela Campbell was still conscious. The men had caught her on her way to feed a calf. They had beaten her and broken her upper arm in two places, Freeth said. Mike Campbell was in bad shape, "just groaning on the ground; in fact, he remembers nothing."
The heavily armed men threw the three in the back of Mike Campbell's Toyota Prado truck, and "the next nine hours were quite a nightmare," Freeth said.
Freeth and the Campbells were driven about 50 kilometers (31 miles) to Pickstone Mine. Their captors stopped at a dairy farm on the way and killed a white farmer's dogs, Freeth said. Night had fallen by the time they arrived at the mine to find about 60 men in ZANU-PF regalia waiting for them.
"They were pointing guns at us the whole time, telling us they were going to kill us," Freeth said.
Freeth and the Campbells were doused with cold water and left "shivering in the dust on the ground," Freeth said. They received more beatings, and Freeth said one of their captors thrashed the bottom of his feet with a shambock, a whip made of hippopotamus hide.
It was during this time that their captors made Angela sign a document promising to drop the case scheduled this week before the SADC tribunal.
Mike Campbell moved in and out of consciousness, as Ben and Angela prayed -- not for their lives, but for their captors. Freeth said he had never understood Luke 6:28 -- "Bless those who curse you" -- until that moment, and a "supernatural" peace came over him.
Freeth told God, "If I'm going to be with you today, then I'm ready."
It was almost midnight when Freeth and the Campbells -- still bound -- were tossed in the back of the Prado. They bounced around the sports-utility vehicle as their captors drove 30 kilometers down a craggy dirt road to Kadoma, where they were dumped in the streets.
"I managed to walk toward a light and knocked on the door of a house and used the phone to phone my wife," Freeth said.
The Campbells were released from the hospital last week. Both remain weak and still bear considerable scrapes and bruises. Angela has a pin in her arm. Mike, 75, suffered four broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a dislocated finger.
Mike is recovering just enough to sit up, and "he can walk a few paces," Freeth said Monday, complaining his hands were "still tingly" from being bound so tightly.
The hospital released Freeth at the weekend after neurosurgeons had to drill a 4-centimeter (1½-inch) hole in his skull to relieve pressure from a hematoma stemming from the rock and rifle-butt blows to the head.
One thing not battered is the farmers' resolve to remain on the land that the Campbells have owned for 34 years.
"We intend to be there on Wednesday, and we just hope for an outcome that is good for everyone, an outcome for justice," Freeth said of the SADC hearing, which is slated to last through Friday.
Freeth said he believes the SADC tribunal will carry more clout with Mugabe than do Western nations and the African and European unions. Many of SADC's member nations are led by Mugabe's contemporaries, and Mugabe is aware that his status as an African hero is waning, he said.
"I think it means a lot to him whether SADC is going to isolate him or continue to support him," Freeth said. "Once we get to the SADC tribunal and we get a judgment and it's basically binding in black and white, it's going to be difficult for Mugabe to say, 'We're abiding by our own law.' It's going to be very difficult for him to defend what he's doing."
Monday, July 14, 2008
Husband charged with murdering soldier wife
Fayetteville, North Carolina, police released this undated photo of 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc.
Authorities have been searching for the missing soldier, Army 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, 24, since a fire torched her apartment on July 10.
Recently Wimunc's charred body was found in a wooded area, said Fayetteville Police Chief Tom Bergamine. Detectives then arrested Wimunc's husband, Marine Cpl. John Wimunc, and fellow Marine Lance Cpl. Kyle Alden.
The two were initially charged with the arson of Wimunc's apartment but after police interviews John Wimunc was charged with first degree murder. Alden was charged with felony accessory after the fact to first degree murder. They were taken to Cumberland County's jail and held without bond.
Wimunc's father released a statement about the death Monday in which he said his daughter was a nurse at a military hospital and had two children.
"It is with profound sadness that our family just received the news from authorities that our beloved daughter Holley is dead," Wimunc's father said in a statement released to CNN affiliate WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina.
"Since last Thursday's shocking news about Holley's burned apartment and her missing person status, our family through the country has nonetheless been holding on to a thin thread of hope that she would be found alive."
Military officials said both Marines were stationed at Camp Lejeune, which is about two hours away from Wimunc's Fayetteville home.
Joe Lenczyk -- resident agent-in-charge for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- said Wimunc and her husband were estranged and lived apart.
Wimunc is the second female soldier from Fort Bragg to die under suspicious circumstances in recent weeks.
Spc. Megan Lynn Touma, 23, was seven months pregnant at the time of her death in June, authorities said. Investigators say they are treating that death as a homicide.
Camp Lejeune also has had a suspicious death of a female soldier this year. Twenty-year-old pregnant Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach's charred body was found January in the back yard of another Marine stationed at the base.
That suspect, U.S. Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean, is being pursued by prosecutors.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Woman who died on hospital floor called 'beautiful person'
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) -- To people around the world who have seen the video, Esmin Green is a symbol of a health-care system that seems to have failed horribly.
Fellow churchmembers say they served as a family for Esmin Green, shown in 2007, after she left Jamaica.
Surveillance video captures her lying on the floor for more than an hour as several hospital workers see her and appear to ignore her. She died there.
But to fellow members of her church, she was known as "Sister Green." Together, they served as a family for her in the decade after she left Jamaica for New York.
Green left six children in Jamaica -- the youngest now 14. She had been sending money home. Watch 'Sister Green' in church »
Her oldest daughter, 31-year-old Tecia Harrison, told CNN that she cannot bear to think of her mother's last moments.
"I haven't seen it, and I don't think I have the heart or mind to watch it because that's my mother there," Harrison said. "That's the woman who gave birth to me 31 years ago. I cannot watch that."
Green was involuntarily admitted to the hospital's psychiatric emergency department June 18 for "agitation and psychosis."
Friend Peter Pilgrim says he saw Green a few days before her death. He says she was struggling with losing her job at a day care center and had been forced to move out of her apartment.
"Esmin Green is a beautiful person," he said. "She has a good heart. She loved people, and she loved children."
Don't Miss
Green's pastor says she had been hospitalized with emotional problems once before and recently appeared to be in distress again. So the pastor called 911, a decision that haunts her.
Upon her admission, Green waited nearly 24 hours for treatment, said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which released the surveillance video of the incident Tuesday.
Her collapse came at 5:32 a.m. June 19, the NYCLU said, and she stopped moving at 6:07 a.m. During that time, according to the organization, workers at the hospital ignored her.
At 6:35 a.m., the tape shows a hospital employee approaching and nudging Green with her foot, the group said. Help was summoned three minutes later. Watch the surveillance video »
In addition, the organization said, hospital staff falsified Green's records to cover up the time she had lain there without assistance.
"Contrary to what was recorded from four different angles by the hospital's video cameras, the patient's medical records say that at 6 a.m., she got up and went to the bathroom, and at 6:20 a.m. she was 'sitting quietly in waiting room' -- more than 10 minutes since she last moved and 48 minutes after she fell to the floor."
The medical examiner's office says it is still trying to determine what caused Green's death. Her medical records will be the focus of an investigation. Hospital documents say she was "awake and sitting quietly" at the very moment she was actually struggling on the floor.
The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees the hospital, released a statement Tuesday saying it was "shocked and distressed by this situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care."
James Saunders, a spokesman for the corporation, said seven employees have been fired or suspended: the chief of psychiatry, chief of security, a doctor, two nurses and two security guards.
A Health and Hospitals Corporation spokeswoman said it was aware of the discrepancies in Green's record when it began the preliminary investigation June 20.
The corporation pledged to put "additional and significant" reforms in place in the wake of the death.
A federal investigation is also under way, looking into abuse allegations at Kings County that were detailed in a lawsuit in 2007.
In May 2007, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Mental Hygiene Legal Service sued Kings County in federal court, alleging that conditions at the facility are filthy. Patients are often forced to sleep in plastic chairs or on floors covered in urine, feces and blood while waiting for beds, the groups allege, and often go without basic hygiene such as showers, clean linens and clean clothes.
The lawsuit claims that patients who complain face physical abuse and are injected with drugs to keep them docile.
The hospital, the suit alleges, lacks "the minimal requirements of basic cleanliness, space, privacy, and personal hygiene that are constitutionally guaranteed even to convicted felons."
Among the reforms agreed to in court Tuesday by the hospital are additional staffing; checking of patients every 15 minutes; and limiting to 25 the number of patients in the psychiatric emergency ward, officials said.
In addition, the hospital said it is expanding crisis-prevention training for staff; expanding space to prevent overcrowding; and reducing patients' wait time for release, treatment or placement in an inpatient bed.
