Human remains were found in two different storage containers in Bakersfield on Tuesday.
First, some east Bakersfield residents received an unpleasant surprise when they found a decomposed hand inside a container. The residents of 730 Crane St. called deputies after making the find. Deputies agreed it looked like a badly decomposed hand and called the homicide unit, Cmdr. Dan Leper said.
The residents had taken numerous items from a storage shed they share with others at Derrell’s Mini Storage on Mt. Vernon Avenue near East Brundage Lane, Leper said. For reasons unknown, they were cleaning the shed out and brought several containers home with them on Monday.
The hand was in a trash container that didn’t belong to the residents, Leper said.
During the investigation, detectives received information about a second storage container at a different location. That container also had partial human remains inside it.
The specific body parts found in the second container weren’t named and it was unknown if the remains were from more than one person.
The coroner’s office has taken custody of both sets of remains.
Derrell’s employees declined comment, as did the people on Crane Street who made the grisly discovery. Crane Street is south of Niles Street and east of Oswell Street.
Leper said the people who found it were shocked.
“You can only imagine what it’s like to look into a can and find what you think is a human hand in there,” he said.
Bakersfield resident Leroy Peters can probably relate to the find on some level. In 2003, Peters got more than he bargained for when he found the cremated remains of a body in the contents of a storage locker he won in an auction after the owners were late on rent.
The ashes were identified as those of Patricia Ann Mathes and relatives were eventually notified.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- A 9-year-old boy who was tortured and killed by a convicted pedophile in front of his younger sister might have been able to survive a shot to the abdomen had he been taken to a hospital, a doctor told a jury that will decide whether the man gets the death penalty.
As it was, the girl testified that Joseph Edward Duncan III blasted the boy in the head after accidentally shooting him in the stomach, having decided his life couldn't be saved.
The boy probably suffered excruciating pain, Dr. Sharon Cooper, a forensic pediatrician, testified.
The doctor said the description of the boy's injury -- he was eviscerated, his sister Shasta said, with his "guts" hanging out -- indicated it was "a very potentially salvageable injury."
Cooper also said Duncan might have had enough time to get Dylan Groene to a hospital from the remote western Montana campsite where the shooting occurred.
Cooper, former chief of pediatrics at Fort Bragg, a military base in North Carolina, performed a medical assessment of Shasta Groene after her rescue; interviewed her father, Steve Groene; and reviewed interviews of the girl by law enforcers.
Cooper's testimony in U.S. District Court followed the presentation of a videotaped interview in which Shasta Groene, 8 at the time, described how she and her brother were raped and forced to perform sex acts together by Duncan, whom she called "Jet."
Duncan pleaded guilty in December to 10 federal counts in the 2005 kidnapping of the Coeur d'Alene-area children and the murder of the boy. Duncan also faces the death penalty in a separate state case in which he pleaded guilty to murdering the siblings' family.
The children were abducted from their home in May 2005 after Duncan fatally bludgeoned their mother, Brenda Groene; their 13-year-old brother, Slade; and the mother's fiance, Mark McKenzie.
Duncan, acting as his own attorney in the sentencing phase, suggested in cross-examining Cooper that the girl was exaggerating her brother's injury.
"How much in your experience do children tend to elaborate or exaggerate and fill in details ... especially after a traumatic experience like that?" Duncan asked.
Children who exaggerate are typically much younger, between 4 and 6, and lack the vocabulary to describe what happened to them, Cooper said.
While it is CNN and The Associated Press' policy not to identify victims of sexual assault in most cases, the search for Shasta and Dylan Groene was so heavily publicized that their names are widely known.
Duncan, formerly of Tacoma, Washington, has a long string of arrests and convictions for crimes ranging from car theft to rape and molestation. He is suspected in the slayings of two half-sisters from Seattle in 1996 and is charged with killing a young boy in Riverside County, California, in 1997.
Human remains were found in two different storage containers in Bakersfield on Tuesday.
First, some east Bakersfield residents received an unpleasant surprise when they found a decomposed hand inside a container. The residents of 730 Crane St. called deputies after making the find. Deputies agreed it looked like a badly decomposed hand and called the homicide unit, Cmdr. Dan Leper said.
The residents had taken numerous items from a storage shed they share with others at Derrell’s Mini Storage on Mt. Vernon Avenue near East Brundage Lane, Leper said. For reasons unknown, they were cleaning the shed out and brought several containers home with them on Monday.
The hand was in a trash container that didn’t belong to the residents, Leper said.
During the investigation, detectives received information about a second storage container at a different location. That container also had partial human remains inside it.
The specific body parts found in the second container weren’t named and it was unknown if the remains were from more than one person.
The coroner’s office has taken custody of both sets of remains.
Derrell’s employees declined comment, as did the people on Crane Street who made the grisly discovery. Crane Street is south of Niles Street and east of Oswell Street.
Leper said the people who found it were shocked.
“You can only imagine what it’s like to look into a can and find what you think is a human hand in there,” he said.
Bakersfield resident Leroy Peters can probably relate to the find on some level. In 2003, Peters got more than he bargained for when he found the cremated remains of a body in the contents of a storage locker he won in an auction after the owners were late on rent.
The ashes were identified as those of Patricia Ann Mathes and relatives were eventually notified.
A pastor who claimed terminal cancer inspired him to write a hit evangelical pop song has been exposed as a fraud.
Michael Guglielmucci told worshippers, friends and his own family that he was likely to die from the disease.
He claimed his hit song "Healer", which was included on mega-church Hillsong's latest album, came to him as a "gift from God" on the day the diagnosis was revealed.
It propelled Mr Guglielmucci, formerly a pastor with Melbourne-based church Planetshakers, to the forefront of Australia's Christian youth movement.
But the story was completely made up.
A statement from Australian Christian Churches vice president Alun Davies said Mr Guglielmucci, now living in Adelaide, had admitted to fabricating his cancer story.
"Representatives of the National Executive for the Australian Christian Churches recently met with Michael Guglielmucci," Mr Davies said.
"At this meeting, he read a statement indicating that his claim to have cancer was untrue.
"His credential with the Australian Christian Churches was immediately suspended."
An abundance of material documenting Mr Guglielmucci's falsified illness is available on the internet.
In one Hillsong video, subtitled in Spanish and posted to YouTube, the pastor described his made-up cancer diagnosis in meticulous detail.
"I went to the hospital expecting to have some tests and got the news that I had cancer, and quite an aggressive form of cancer," he said.
"I walked into my studio at home and for some reason pressed record, which was a good thing ... I just sat at a piano and began to worship.
"I didn't, like, sit down and write the verses and the chorus, I just sang that song from the start to the finish.
"I just realised that God had given me an incredible gift and I knew that was going to be my strength."
A Facebook group entitled "I continue to love and support Michael Guglielmucci" has been set up, with many young Christians calling for the pastor to be forgiven.
But comments attached to YouTube videos have been less kind.
"Should this still be on [here]? Can someone delete it? Mike never had cancer, it's all a lie he made up. It's embarrassing and sad to watch," read one comment.
In an e-mail sent to Hillsong members yesterday, the church's general manager George Aghajanian said the news was even a shock to Mr Guglielmucci's own family.
The suspended pastor was seeking professional help, the e-mail said.
Planetshakers spokesman Darryn Keneally said his church was "devastated by the elaborate hoax".
He said Mr Guglielmucci would make reparations to anyone who gave him money because of his made-up sickness. "There were no fundraisers conducted however when Michael left the church, 18 months ago, a special offering was taken up in honor of his services to the church," he said.
"Planetshakers Church did not ask for any congregational financial support to be given to Michael and we have not given him any financial assistance since.
"We have asked that all money generated from the proceeds of his song Healer be donated to charity."
I assumed that someone got some sort of medical record on him (or, more accurately, a lack of any record) to prove that he never actually had cancer. Since the article said he actually told a story about being at a hospital when he found out he had cancer, I'm betting someone tried to figure out what hospital it was, and then figured out there was no hospital.
If he hadn't have told the story about being at a hospital when he found out, he could have gone all out! He could have said that God told him he had terminal cancer, THEN taught/gave him the song, and THEN cured him from said cancer. I mean, it sounds perfectly believable and reasonable to me, I don't know about you guys.
I don't understand why he even lied in the first place. Sounds like he still wrote the song by himself, just lied about the inspiration. Does a song really need to be inspired by a terminal illness to still be good?
I'm guessing he lied about it so more people would buy the music, thinking it was created from a miracle. It would be inspiring, and plus people would think they were doing a good deed by supporting the album, since the money would be going to a guy who's supposedly dying. It's all a scam to get mo' money.
A dog sheltered a newborn baby abandoned by its 14-year-old mother in a field in rural Argentina until the boy was rescued, a doctor said Friday.
The abandoned infant was found in a field with this dog and her newborn puppies.
A resident of a rural area outside La Plata called police late Wednesday night to say that he had heard the baby crying in a field behind his house.
The man went outside and found the infant lying beside the dog and its six newborn puppies, Daniel Salcedo, chief of police of the Province of Buenos Aires, told CNN.
The temperature was a chilly 37 degrees, Salcedo said.
The dog had apparently carried the baby some 50 meters from where his mother had abandoned him to where the puppies were huddled, police said.
"She took it like a puppy and rescued it," Salcedo said. "The doctors told us if she hadn't done this, he would have died."
"The dog is a hero to us."
Dr. Egidio Melia, director of the Melchor Romero Hospital in La Plata, told CNN that police showed up at the hospital at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday with the baby who doctors say was only a few hours old.
Though the infant had superficial scratches and bruises and was bleeding from his mouth, he was in good shape, Melia said.
The next morning, the child's mother was driven by a neighbor to the hospital and told authorities the 8 pound, 13 ounce infant is hers, Melia said.
The teenager was immediately given psychological treatment and was hospitalized, he said. She has said little about the incident.
The child has been transferred to a children's hospital in La Plata, 37 miles from Buenos Aires.
What a nice dog! I wonder if it went through any moral thought process before saving a newborn baby, or if, since it's a dog, it just went on a first instinct to save a newborn. Whichever it is... I hope they give the dog some sort of reward, haha. I know it's silly, but that dog saved a babies life! That's awesome.
Fucked up, sure, but almost cute, if you ignore the reason for why the baby had to be rescued in the first place!
HARROLD, Texas (AP) -- Along with normal first-day jitters and excitement, students in this tiny district started school Monday wondering which teachers might be toting firearms.
"It was kind of awkward knowing that some teachers were carrying guns," said Adam Lira, 17, a senior. "I don't feel like they should be, 'cause we already have locked doors and cameras. But I didn't feel threatened by it."
Several parents said they had no idea that employees of the K-12 school were allowed to carry concealed guns on campus until recent publicity about the school board's policy, approved quietly last fall. They said they were upset that the rural community near the Oklahoma border had not been able to give input.
While some parents said they felt their children were safer, others opposed the plan, which appears to be the first of its kind nationwide.
"As far as I'm concerned, teachers were trained to educate my children -- not carry a gun. Even police officers need years of training in hostage situations," said Traci McKay, whose three children are among the 110 students in the red-brick Harrold school. "I don't want my child looking over her shoulder wondering who's carrying a gun."
But Harrold Superintendent David Thweatt said the board approved the policy in an October open meeting that had been publicized. He said the decision was made after nearly two years of researching the best school security options at the school, which is just off a busy highway and 30 minutes away from the sheriff's office.
"When you outlaw guns in a certain area, the only people who follow that are law-abiding citizens, and everybody else ignores it," Thweatt said.
The superintendent said some of the school's 50 employees are carrying weapons, but he wouldn't say how many. When pressed further, he first said that revealing that number might jeopardize school security. He then added that he considered it to be personnel information and not a matter of public record.
Each employee who wants to carry a weapon first must be approved by the board based on his or her personality and reaction to a crisis, Thweatt said. In addition to training required for a state concealed weapons license, they also must be trained to handle crisis intervention and hostage situations.
State education officials said they did not know of any other Texas schools allowing teachers to carry guns. National security experts and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence said they did not know of other U.S. schools with such a policy.
School districts in some states, including Florida and Arizona, have closed loopholes that allowed guns on K-12 campuses. Utah allows concealed weapons at public universities but not at primary or secondary schools.
Thweatt said the board took extra precautions, such as requiring employees to use bullets that will minimize the risk of ricochet, similar to those used by air marshals on planes.
"I can lead them from a fire, tornado and toxic spill; we have plans in place for that. I cannot lead them from an active shooter," Thweatt said. "There are people who are going to think this is extreme, but it's easy to defend."
Judy Priz, who has a third-grade daughter, said that "everyone I've talked to thinks it's great." She said she trusts the teachers with her child's life.
"Look how long it takes the police or anybody else to get here," she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for a story in its Monday online edition. "If someone wants to come here and harm someone, at least we would have sort of defense."
Gov. Rick Perry has said he supports the policy because "there's a lot of incidents where that would have saved a number of lives."
The Brady Center has spoken out against the plan, saying it may not comply with Texas law, which bans firearms at schools unless carriers have given written permission. If the school board authorizes an employee to carry a gun, then that person must be a peace officer, according to the center.
"It's unfair of us to ask teachers to take on the additional job of being police officers," said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign.
Cheryl Mehl, an attorney for the Harrold school district, said the statute the Brady Center cites applies only to security guards, not teachers and other employees. The district has no security guards.
I don't see anything effed-up about this story. I'm fine with armed teachers, and it says they have to apply for permission and be trained first anyway.
This is quite fucked up to me. People are retardedly afraid enough to think that every school is a prime target for a school shooting. So they're letting teachers start walking around with loaded guns.
Seriously, is this going to solve any problems? Kids are dumb, and if they want to bring a gun to school, they're going to. So now what are they going to do? They're going to shoot the teachers first. Since they don't know who is and is not packing, any teachers who morally opposed this idea are going to be at an increased risk.
Furthermore, soliders in war have enough trouble bringing themselves to shoot enemies, even if they are in danger themselves. It causes a lifetime of mental trauma that many veterans never get over. So now we're going to expect a bunch of teachers to have the mental capacity to pull out a gun and instantly shoot a FUCKING CHILD? Not only that, but we expect teachers to shoot with ruthless timing and accuracy?
No. Absolutely not. This is fucked up. I'm getting fucking pissed off just thinking about it. This is completely unnecessary.
You're missing the point; it's not for risk of the kids bringing guns to school, it's worrying about someone else coming in and shooting. Sure, I don't think it's LIKELY to happen, but I am able to understand why they would feel safer with at least some sort of weapons available to them for self defense. If the closest sheriff's office is a half hour away, chances are with a school that small, everyone would be dead by the time anyone capable of stopping it arrived to the scene. If the teachers have gone through training, personality tests, and have been deemed responsible enough to carry around guns... in a worst case scenario, I'd say good for them. They at least have a chance, instead of the grim fate they would have otherwise.
Plus, this is Texas. Don't we automatically get the stereotype of carrying guns around with us everywhere?
Furthermore, soliders in war have enough trouble bringing themselves to shoot enemies, even if they are in danger themselves. It causes a lifetime of mental trauma that many veterans never get over. So now we're going to expect a bunch of teachers to have the mental capacity to pull out a gun and instantly shoot a FUCKING CHILD? Not only that, but we expect teachers to shoot with ruthless timing and accuracy?
That is an excellent point. I was all for this when I first heard about it, but I never considered that. Even still, I'm leaning more towards agreeing with the decision. They are trained and I think just the knowledge that teh teachers have guns could help to deter even the craziest kid. I think if a teacher saw a student targeting other students or even themselves, they'd be able to fire back. It may fuck them up for years to come, but it may also save many lives of innocent students and teachers. Until guns are outlawed completely, this really seems like the best option.
I'm inclined to agree with this plan as well, but I really wish that the government in this case would spend more money on research and programs designed to help people inclined to go on shooting sprees long before they get to that point rather than throwing all their hopes on this ultimately inadequate 'band-aid' type of solution. Attack the source of the problem, not just the consequences.
My real objection to this is the idea that because guns are the problem, we need to solve it with guns. More guns. I'm just depressed about American society because people think this is a big enough problem to merit letting people conceal guns.
Although this would never happen in America, there is a distinctly safe feeling being in a country that bans guns. I have no fear of walking down dark alleys late at night, and I know that if someone attacks me, I have a slightly better chance of walking away. I'm not going to say America should ban guns, I'm just saying I recognize the other side of the argument.
Isn't there a better way to solve this? There has to be a better solution than just letting more people have guns. The system isn't perfect anyway. Some teachers still have sex with their students, and some teachers still hit and beat their more disobedient students. Are you telling me that there is absolutely no chance for a teacher to take his gun out and threaten his students, or worse? Are you telling me that there is absolutely no chance of an accident ever happening? And that there is absolutely no chance that a student, maybe a big student, will make an effort to grab at a gun in an act of simple teenage rebellion?
And, are the chances of any of these events happening smaller than the chance of a kid bringing a gun to school?
Comments
Witness: Tortured boy didn't have to die
If he hadn't have told the story about being at a hospital when he found out, he could have gone all out! He could have said that God told him he had terminal cancer, THEN taught/gave him the song, and THEN cured him from said cancer. I mean, it sounds perfectly believable and reasonable to me, I don't know about you guys.
Dog protected abandoned newborn, doctors say
Fucked up, sure, but almost cute, if you ignore the reason for why the baby had to be rescued in the first place!
Seriously, is this going to solve any problems? Kids are dumb, and if they want to bring a gun to school, they're going to. So now what are they going to do? They're going to shoot the teachers first. Since they don't know who is and is not packing, any teachers who morally opposed this idea are going to be at an increased risk.
Furthermore, soliders in war have enough trouble bringing themselves to shoot enemies, even if they are in danger themselves. It causes a lifetime of mental trauma that many veterans never get over. So now we're going to expect a bunch of teachers to have the mental capacity to pull out a gun and instantly shoot a FUCKING CHILD? Not only that, but we expect teachers to shoot with ruthless timing and accuracy?
No. Absolutely not. This is fucked up. I'm getting fucking pissed off just thinking about it. This is completely unnecessary.
Plus, this is Texas. Don't we automatically get the stereotype of carrying guns around with us everywhere?
That is an excellent point. I was all for this when I first heard about it, but I never considered that. Even still, I'm leaning more towards agreeing with the decision. They are trained and I think just the knowledge that teh teachers have guns could help to deter even the craziest kid. I think if a teacher saw a student targeting other students or even themselves, they'd be able to fire back. It may fuck them up for years to come, but it may also save many lives of innocent students and teachers. Until guns are outlawed completely, this really seems like the best option.
Although this would never happen in America, there is a distinctly safe feeling being in a country that bans guns. I have no fear of walking down dark alleys late at night, and I know that if someone attacks me, I have a slightly better chance of walking away. I'm not going to say America should ban guns, I'm just saying I recognize the other side of the argument.
Isn't there a better way to solve this? There has to be a better solution than just letting more people have guns. The system isn't perfect anyway. Some teachers still have sex with their students, and some teachers still hit and beat their more disobedient students. Are you telling me that there is absolutely no chance for a teacher to take his gun out and threaten his students, or worse? Are you telling me that there is absolutely no chance of an accident ever happening? And that there is absolutely no chance that a student, maybe a big student, will make an effort to grab at a gun in an act of simple teenage rebellion?
And, are the chances of any of these events happening smaller than the chance of a kid bringing a gun to school?