ST. PAUL, Minnesota (AP) -- A 17-year-old girl who spent weeks looking for her missing dog unwrapped a box left on her doorstep and found the pet's severed head inside, authorities said.
Homicide investigators were looking into the case because of the "implied" terroristic threat, St. Paul Police Sgt. Jim Gray said. The Humane Society of the United States said Wednesday it was offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
"This was extraordinarily heinous," said Dale Bartlett, the Humane Society's deputy manager for animal cruelty issues. "I deal with hundreds and hundreds of cruelty cases each year. When I read about this case, it took my breath away. It's horrible."
After Crystal Brown's 4-year-old Australian shepherd mix,Chevy, wandered away last month, she put up "missing" posters in her neighborhood and went door to door looking for him. She called the St. Paul animal shelter and rode the bus there several times.
"I felt empty," Crystal told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. "I couldn't talk to anyone. He was my dog. It was just me and him. ... I told him everything and he never shared any of my secrets."
Two weeks ago, a gift-wrapped box was left at the house Crystal shares with her grandmother. The box had batteries on top, and a note that said "Congratulations Crystal. This side up. Batteries included."
Crystal opened the box and found her dog's head inside. The box also contained Valentine's Day candy.
Crystal screamed when she saw her dog's face.
"She was just hysterical," said Crystal's grandmother, Shirley Brown. "She was screaming. She said, 'Grandma, it's my dog's head!'
"I said, 'no it can't be!"'
Authorities say the case is an isolated incident and the suspect likely knew the family. A motive is unclear.
"This was so cruel," Crystal said. "This is one sick, twisted person."
She now has a new puppy, another Australian shepherd. She's named it Diesel. "Hopefully, he'll be my best friend," Crystal said.
The Online Journalism Review reports on Jakob Nielsen's use of an eye-tracker to look at how different people read the Web -- particularly news. There are lots of interesting findings, but the best is the revelation that men fixate on any visible genital areas in photos -- even animals' crotches come in for a good eyeballing.
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.
This image of George Brett was part of a larger page with his biographical information. All users tested looked the image, but there was a distinct difference in focus between men and women.
Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place.
There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would gather to watch and cheer as black men were dragged onto a scaffold, scalded with hot irons and finally burned to death or hanged.
Brenda Cherry, a local civil rights activist, can see the fairgrounds from the front yard of her modest home, in the heart of the "black" side of this starkly segregated town of 26,000. And lately, Cherry says, she's begun to wonder whether the racist legacy of those lynchings is rebounding in a place that calls itself "the best small town in Texas."
"Some of the things that happen here would not happen if we were in Dallas or Houston," Cherry said. "They happen because we are in this closed town. I compare it to 1930s."
There was the 19-year-old white man, convicted last July of criminally negligent homicide for killing a 54-year-old black woman and her 3-year-old grandson with his truck, who was sentenced in Paris to probation and required to send an annual Christmas card to the victims' family.
There are the Paris public schools, which are under investigation by the U.S. Education Department after repeated complaints that administrators discipline black students more frequently, and more harshly, than white students.
And then there is the case that most troubles Cherry and leaders of the Texas NAACP, involving a 14-year-old black freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, who shoved a hall monitor at Paris High School in a dispute over entering the building before the school day had officially begun.
The youth had no prior arrest record, and the hall monitor--a 58-year-old teacher's aide--was not seriously injured. But Shaquanda was tried in March 2006 in the town's juvenile court, convicted of "assault on a public servant" and sentenced by Lamar County Judge Chuck Superville to prison for up to 7 years, until she turns 21.
Just three months earlier, Superville sentenced a 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, to probation.
"All Shaquanda did was grab somebody and she will be in jail for 5 or 6 years?" said Gary Bledsoe, an Austin attorney who is president of the state NAACP branch. "It's like they are sending a signal to black folks in Paris that you stay in your place in this community, in the shadows, intimidated."
The Tribune generally does not identify criminal suspects younger than age 17, but is doing so in this case because the girl and her family have chosen to go public with their story.
None of the officials involved in Shaquanda's case, including the local prosecutor, the judge and Paris school district administrators, would agree to speak about their handling of it, citing a court appeal under way.
But the teen's defenders assert that long before the September 2005 shoving incident, Paris school officials targeted Shaquanda for scrutiny because her mother had frequently accused school officials of racism.
Retaliation alleged
"Shaquanda started getting written up a lot after her mother became involved in a protest march in front of a school," said Sharon Reynerson, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, who has represented Shaquanda during challenges to several of the disciplinary citations she received. "Some of the write-ups weren't fair to her or accurate, so we felt like we had to challenge each one to get the whole story."
Among the write-ups Shaquanda received, according to Reynerson, were citations for wearing a skirt that was an inch too short, pouring too much paint into a cup during an art class and defacing a desk that school officials later conceded bore no signs of damage.
Shaquanda's mother, Creola Cotton, does not dispute that her daughter can behave impulsively and was sometimes guilty of tardiness or speaking out of turn at school--behaviors that she said were manifestations of Shaquanda's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which the teen was taking prescription medication.
Nor does Shaquanda herself deny that she pushed the hall monitor after the teacher's aide refused her permission to enter the school before the morning bell--although Shaquanda maintains that she was supposed to have been allowed to visit the school nurse to take her medication, and that the teacher's aide pushed her first.
But Cherry alleges that Shaquanda's frequent disciplinary write-ups, and the insistence of school officials at her trial that she deserved prison rather than probation for the shoving incident, fits in a larger pattern of systemic discrimination against black students in the Paris Independent School District.
In the past five years, black parents have filed at least a dozen discrimination complaints against the school district with the federal Education Department, asserting that their children, who constitute 40 percent of the district's nearly 4,000 students, were singled out for excessive discipline.
An attorney for the school district, Dennis Eichelbaum, said the Education Department had determined all of the complaints to be unfounded.
"The [department] has explained that the school district has not and does not discriminate, that the school district has been a leader and very progressive when it comes to race relations, and that there was no validity to the allegations made by the complainants," Eichelbaum said.
Not so clear
But the federal investigations of the school district are not so clear-cut, and they are not finished. In one 2004 finding, Education Department officials determined that black students at a Paris middle school were being written up for disciplinary infractions more than twice as often as white students--and eight times as often in one category, "class disruption."
The Education Department asked the U.S. Justice Department to try to mediate disputes between black parents and the district, but school officials pulled out of the process last December before it was concluded.
And in April 2006, the Education Department notified Paris school officials that it was opening a new, comprehensive review to determine "whether the district discriminated against African-American students on the basis of race" between 2004 and 2006. Federal officials say that investigation is still in progress.
According to one veteran Paris teacher, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, such discrimination is widespread.
"There is a philosophy of giving white kids a break and coming down on black kids," said the teacher, who is white.
Not everyone in Paris agrees, however, that blacks are treated unfairly by the city's institutions.
"I've lived here all my life, and I don't see that," said Mary Ann Reed Fisher, one of two black members of the Paris City Council. "My kids went to Paris High School, and they never had one minute of a problem with the school system, the courts or the police."
A peculiar inmate
Meanwhile, Shaquanda, a first-time offender, remains something of an anomaly inside the Texas Youth Commission prison system, where officials say 95 percent of the 2,500 juveniles in their custody are chronic, serious offenders who already have exhausted county-level programs such as probation and local treatment or detention.
"The Texas Youth Commission is reserved for those youth who are most violent or most habitual," said commission spokesman Tim Savoy. "The whole concept of commitment until your 21st birthday should be recognized as a severe penalty, and that's why it's typically the last resort of the juvenile system in Texas."
Inside the youth prison in Brownwood where she has been incarcerated for the past 10 months--a prison currently at the center of a state scandal involving a guard who allegedly sexually abused teenage inmates--Shaquanda, who is now 15, says she has not been doing well.
Three times she has tried to injure herself, first by scratching her face, then by cutting her arm. The last time, she said, she copied a method she saw another young inmate try, knotting a sweater around her neck and yanking it tight so she couldn't breathe. The guards noticed her sprawled inside her cell before it was too late.
She tried to harm herself, Shaquanda said, out of depression, desperation and fear of the hardened young thieves, robbers, sex offenders and parole violators all around her whom she must try to avoid each day.
"I get paranoid when I get around some of these girls," Shaquanda said. "Sometimes I feel like I just can't do this no more--that I can't survive this."
SAVANNAH, Georgia (AP) -- A convicted child molester and his father took turns sexually assaulting a 6-year-old boy while the molester's mother watched, then they choked the boy to death, according to an indictment issued Wednesday.
The indictment charges all three family members with murder and child molestation in the slaying of young Christopher Michael Barrios, whose body was found last Thursday inside a trash bag dumped by a roadside.
District Attorney Stephen D. Kelley said he will seek the death penalty against 32-year-old George David Edenfield, who has a prior child molestation conviction from 1997, and his parents, David and Peggy Edenfield.
"This is one of the most horrific crimes that I have seen in 21 years of prosecutions," Kelley said.
Christopher went missing for a week before police found his body about three miles from his trailer park home outside Brunswick, a Georgia port city 60 miles south of Savannah. The suspects lived in a mobile home across the street from the boy's grandmother.
The indictment contains grim details about the case that police and prosecutors had not previously revealed. It says Christopher died from asphyxiation March 8 -- the day he was reported missing -- after the suspects choked him while "ignoring his complaints that they were hurting him." The indictment does not say which of three caused the boy's death. (Watch how three shovels helped police Video)
It also claims George Edenfield and his 58-year-old father sodomized the boy and forced him to perform oral sex while Peggy Edenfield watched and masturbated.
"They deserve the worst, for them to torture my son like that, every last one of them," said Mike Barrios, the slain boy's father.
A friend of the Edenfield family, Donald Dale, was indicted on charges of concealing a death and tampering with evidence. Kelley said Dale did not become involved until after Christopher had been killed.
Nathan Williams, the attorney for 57-year-old Peggy Edenfield, declined to comment Wednesday. Attorneys for George and David Edenfield did not immediately return phone calls.
Glynn County police arrested the Edenfields four days after the child vanished while playing alone outside. Police Chief Matt Doering said all three suspects confessed to playing roles in the boy's abduction.
Police have said Dale admitted to investigators he helped the Edenfields dispose of Christopher's body.
Other charges against the Edenfields include false imprisonment, cruelty to children and enticing a child for indecent purposes.
Police have described George David Edenfield as mentally slow, but not retarded and capable of understanding right from wrong.
Ironically, the Edenfields moved into the trailer park where Christopher lived last year because of a Georgia law intended to keep child molesters away from children. Sheriffs' deputies told George Edenfield in September that he had to leave his home near downtown Brunswick because it was too close to a playground. Georgia law prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools and other places that draw children.
His family went to live in the trailer park in October after George Edenfield was arrested for failing to move as ordered. He pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to probation March 5, three days before Christopher disappeared.
George Edenfield was required to register as a sex offender after he pleaded guilty in 1997 to molesting two boys, ages 7 and 9. Prosecutors said he rubbed his clothed body "in a sexual manner" against the boys, who also were fully dressed. He was sentenced then to 10 years on probation.
His father, David Edenfield, pleaded guilty to incest in 1994. He was accused of having sex with an adult relative who was not his son.
How the hell could the first review find that the charges were unfounded? She was disciplined for putting too much paint in a damn jar? Christ. I can't even imagine how this whole thing played out. Even if the school discriminated against her, wouldn't there have to have been a judge that handed down that ridiculous sentence?
Schools can discipline you for whatever reason they want. I got detention frequently in my high school for wearing socks that were too short. Those disciplinary actions don't involve the judge, and in most cases wouldn't be mentioned outside school.
But the punishment is fucking hideous. Seven years for that? Even one year would be ridiculous! That's a suspension-worthy crime at best.
I don't know about the detention. I think a school should punish any incident of a student physically attacking anyone pretty harshly, especially when they attack faculty or staff. A school needs to set boundaries like that. But I really don't think the shoving should have become a police matter.
NOVEMBER 22--A Wisconsin man who argued that he could not be prosecuted for having sex with a deer because the animal was dead at the time, was dealt a legal setback today when a judge rejected a motion seeking dismissal of a criminal charge against him. As a result of Circuit Court Judge Michael Lucci's ruling, defendant Bryan James Hathaway, 20, will have to stand trial for his alleged assault last month of the deer carcass. In his ruling (a copy of which you'll find below), Lucci denied a November 7 motion filed by Hathaway's lawyer, Fredric Anderson, which argued that the deer ceased being an animal upon its death (Hathaway, pictured at right, allegedly found the carcass in a roadside ditch). Anderson contended that a charge of sexual gratification with an animal could not be sustained because "the term 'animal' refers to a living organism, not a carcass." Lucci, however, noted that "most people understand that an animal does not necessarily cease being or qualifying as an animal or even being referred to as an animal once it's dead." He added that the "primary focus" of Wisconsin's criminal statute dealing with crimes against sexual morality is on "human behavior and on protecting sexual morality in the community, and not necessarily on animal protection."
the "primary focus" of Wisconsin's criminal statute dealing with crimes against sexual morality is on "human behavior and on protecting sexual morality in the community, and not necessarily on animal protection."
Protecting sexual morality in the community....I'm kinda conflicted on this myself, but I'm not sure I think that having sex with a dead animal should be a crime. I think it's weird and I certainly wouldn't want to do it, but should it be a criminal offense? The animal is dead, so it isn't an issue of animal cruelty. If some guy wants to put his penis into a carcass, who does he hurt besides himself?
I wonder if the answer to that is the children he might raise. I dunno. What does everyone think?
If you died in a ditch someplace would you want some animal coming along and having sex with your corpse? No? I'm sorry, but having sex with a corpse is wrong regardless of whether it is harmful and/or a crime or not.
Given that there are also laws (at least in some places) against having sex with a human corpse, I don't see why someone would think a dead animal is no longer an animal. If he tried calling a dead human no longer a human I'm sure someone would get up in his face about it.
somehow i get the feeling the "corpse" was a deer he ran over in his pick up intentionally. and honestly... who sees roadkill and goes "oh god that's hot." *SCRRREEEEEEECH*es to a stop. Gets out of their car *SLAM* and runs over to go to town with it.
Oh and final point: did he at least buy it dinner?
Perhaps you’ve heard about the schools that have banned tag. Or dodgeball. Or stories about pigs.
If so, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle has banned Legos.
A pair of teachers at the center, which provides afterschool activities for elementary-school kids, recently described their policy in a Rethinking Schools cover story called “Why We Banned Legos.” (See the magazine’s cover here.)
It has something to do with “social justice learning.”
My vision of social justice for children of elementary-school age is as follows: If you’re tagged, you’re it; if the ball hits you, you’re out; and pig stories are fun, especially when told over microwaveable hot dogs.
But I try to keep an open mind, so I read the article on why Hilltop banned Legos.
As most aficionados know, Legos are made by a Danish company. The company name comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means play well. “Lego became a national treasure and one of the strongest brands in the toy industry,” wrote The Economist last year. “Its colorful bricks are sold in over 130 countries: everyone on earth has, on average, 52 of them.”
In their Rethinking Schools article, teachers Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin describe how the kids at Hilltop built “a massive series of Lego structures we named Legotown.” I sensed that something was rotten in the state of Legotown when I read this description of it: “a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places.”
My children have spent a large portion of their young lives playing with Legos. They have never, to my knowledge, constructed “community meeting places.” Instead, they make monster trucks, space ships, and war machines. These little creations are usually loaded with ion guns, nuclear missiles, bunker-busting bombs, force-field projectors, and death-ray cannons. Alien empires have risen and fallen in epic conflicts waged in the upstairs bedrooms of my home.
Perhaps kids in Seattle, under the careful watch of their latte-sipping guardians, are different. But I don’t think so.
At Hilltop, however, the teachers strive to make them different. “We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity,” write Pelo and Pelojoaquin. “We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice. So we decided to take the Legos out of the classroom.”
The root cause of Hilltop’s Lego problem was that, well, the kids were being kids: There were disputes over “cool pieces,” instances of bigger kids bossing around little ones, and so on.
An ordinary person might recognize this as child’s play. But the social theorists at Hilltop saw something else: “The children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys — assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”
Pelo and Pelojoaquin continue: “As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.”
So they banned the Legos and began their program of re-education. “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation,” they write.
Instead of practicing phonics or memorizing multiplication tables, the children played a special game: “In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt. ... The rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. ... Our analysis of the game, as teachers, guided our planning for the rest of the investigation into the issues of power, privilege, and authority that spanned the rest of the year.”
After “months of social justice exploration,” the teachers finally agreed it was time to return the Legos to the classroom. That’s because the children at last had bought into the concept that “collectivity is a good thing.” And in Hilltop’s new Lego regime, there would be three immutable laws:
All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
All structures will be standard sizes.
You can almost feel the liberating spirit of that last rule. All structures will be standard sizes? At Hilltop Children’s Center, all imaginations will be a standard size as well: small.
Is there something in the water up there?[/quote]
THAT SOUNDS A LITTLE RED TO ME.
But srsly seattle what the hell. There are reasons Communism failed, particularly forced control and lack of free speech, or in this case freedom of lego creativity.
Comments
FTW!
I lol'd
Molester, dad abused boy while mom watched
But the punishment is fucking hideous. Seven years for that? Even one year would be ridiculous! That's a suspension-worthy crime at best.
A detention would be the most suitable thing, not 7 years in jail...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17787893/?GT1=9145
Protecting sexual morality in the community....I'm kinda conflicted on this myself, but I'm not sure I think that having sex with a dead animal should be a crime. I think it's weird and I certainly wouldn't want to do it, but should it be a criminal offense? The animal is dead, so it isn't an issue of animal cruelty. If some guy wants to put his penis into a carcass, who does he hurt besides himself?
I wonder if the answer to that is the children he might raise. I dunno. What does everyone think?
Oh and final point: did he at least buy it dinner?
Is there something in the water up there?[/quote]
THAT SOUNDS A LITTLE RED TO ME.
But srsly seattle what the hell. There are reasons Communism failed, particularly forced control and lack of free speech, or in this case freedom of lego creativity.