Yonkers 8th-grader wanted for shooting death of innocent teen
An 8th-grade boy with gang ties and a violent criminal past fired the stray round that killed a Yonkers teen Thursday as she protected her little sister, cops said Monday, pleading with the shooter to surrender and face justice.
Jamir Thompson, 15, intended the fateful bullet for a rival from whom he’d stolen a gold chain earlier Thursday — but he instead struck 18-year-old Marilyn Cotto Montanez as she pushed her 9-year-old sister to safety, police said.
“This incident has deeply affected our community because an innocent life was lost,” said Yonkers Police Commissioner Charles Gardner in a press briefing. “We will not rest until Jamir Thompson answers for his reckless and despicable conduct.”
Hours after allegedly stealing the chain from another teen, Thompson had another run-in with that victim near Montanez’s Morningside Avenue home, Gardner said.
Amid the dispute, Thompson — a Yonkers resident who attends the Linden Hill School in Hawthorne, New York — opened fire with a 9 mm handgun, Gardner said.
Montanez, a high school senior, shoved her younger sister out of the the way at the cost of her own life — a round struck her in the head.
Cops identified Thompson as the alleged shooter through a painstaking review of surveillance footage and a series of witness interviews.
The top cop, his voice strained with emotion at points, appealed directly to the teen triggerman to make it easy on himself and come forward.
“If Jamir Thompson is watching, I have a message for you,” Gardner said. “We are considering you armed and dangerous. We are out looking for you as we speak. And for the safety of everyone, I urge you to turn yourself in.”
Thompson lives in Yonkers with his mom, who has refused to give cops any info on her son’s whereabouts, Gardner said.
His department has had “multiple” contacts with Thompson over his “violent” criminal history, but Gardner said he couldn’t divulge specifics due to Thompson’s age.
Cops released a wanted poster showing the fresh-faced shooter, and announcing a $5,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
Gardner also issued a stern directive to anyone thinking of giving Thompson quarter.
“I am also sending a warning to anyone who is harboring Mr. Thompson,” he said. “You will also be arrested and held accountable for your actions.”
via: https://nypost.com/2019/04/29/yonkers-8th-grader-wanted-for-shooting-death-of-innocent-teen-cops/
No prison time for school bus driver who admitted to raping 14-year-old girl
(Meredith) – A former upstate New York bus driver who admitted to raping a 14-year-old girl will avoid prison time.
Shane M. Piche, 26, was sentenced to 10 years’ probation last week, the Watertown Daily Times reported. The ruling comes two months after Piche pleaded guilty to third-degree rape in the 2018 incident.
Police said he met the girl on a bus he drove for the city’s school district, but raped her at his Watertown home.
As part of his plea deal, Piche is not allowed to be alone with anyone under the age of 17. He must also register as a Level 1 sex offender — which is less severe than the Level 2 designation the district attorney recommended.
Level 1 offenders are considered to be “low risk” of committing the crime again and are not included in online sex offender databases, according to the Daily Times.
Judge James P. McClusky noted that Piche had no prior arrests, and his crime involved one victim.
In a written statement to WWNY-TV, the victim’s mother said she was disappointed with the sentence.
“I wish Shane Piche would have received time in jail for the harm he caused to my child,” she wrote, according to the station. “He took something from my daughter she will never get back and has caused her to struggle with depression and anxiety.”
Piche’s defense attorney, Eric T. Swartz, said he feels good about the judge’s decision and confirmed that Piche no longer works for the bus company.
“He’ll be a felon for the rest of his life,” he said, according to WWNY-TV. “He’s on the sex offender registry for a long time. Maybe not the rest of his life because of the level, but this isn’t something that didn’t cause him pain. And this isn’t something that didn’t have consequences.”
Mom charged with murder 29 years after she allegedly left baby to die in cardboard box
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Charges have been upgraded against a South Carolina woman accused of leaving her newborn daughter to die in a cardboard box in an empty field.
Brook Graham was arrested earlier this month and charged with homicide by child abuse, 29 years after her daughter’s death.
Prosecutors upgraded that charge to murder last week.
A man was picking flowers in the vacant field to prepare for Valentine’s Day in 1990 when he found the baby now known as Julie Valentine.
Julie was born alive outside of a hospital. She was found dead, wrapped in newspaper and bedding with her umbilical cord and placenta still attached. It’s unclear why she was abandoned.
Authorities said DNA submitted to genealogy sites revealed a likely match to the baby’s father, who then pointed police to Graham.
Kansas teacher kicks student; mother says school ignored abuse
SHAWNEE, KS (KCTV) — A mother says an elementary school teacher grabbed and kicked her 5-year-old daughter and when her daughter told a teacher about it, she says the school did nothing.
The only reason this mother says she knows a teacher hurt her daughter, was because her daughter, not the school, told her and there was video to prove what the teacher said happened was a lie.
The incident happened at during a kindergarten class at Bluejacket Flint Elementary school in Shawnee, KS.
That girl’s mother requested not to be identified and did not want to share her daughter’s name. The mother said she picked her daughter up from school Feb. 21, and that’s when she first heard something might be wrong. She asked her daughter how her day went, when her daughter responded, “I don’t like my teacher. She’s really mean. She hit me on my arm.”
Her mother saw a large red mark on her arm. She tried called the school principal but couldn’t get through so she went back to the school to find out what happened. She learned her daughter had actually already told another teacher she’d been hit but nothing was done.
The mother recorded all of her conversations with her daughter’s teachers and school district staff from that point on.
You can hear the daughter’s IEP teacher talking to the mother, admitting the 5-year-old told her a teacher hit her, saying, “[The 5-year-old] did mention to me, ‘My teacher, like hit me’. I asked her what happened and she said she touched her on her arm but I wasn’t there so I’m not sure what happened.”
Then the mother met with Crystal Smith, the teacher her daughter accuses of hitting her. But that teacher tries to blame the child for what happened. You can hear Smith say the following:
“So, I’m not surprised she has some marks on her. She was crawling in the bookshelf. She has a red spot on her arm. And I’m not surprised because she shoved herself into that bookshelf…I mean, she kicked me a couple of times. She was reaching over into the bookshelf pulling books out and there were those metal, metal book divider things … I said don’t we can’t do that. So I put myself kind of standing around her so that if she does throw something she wouldn’t break something…”
But sensing something didn’t seem quite right, the mother pushed for more information and found out there may be video of the incident. The school confirmed the next day it existed, but it was more than a week before the mother was allowed to see it.
“When I saw the video it was heartbreaking, because everything she said, she sat at the same table as me and just lied about everything … she lied to me. She lied to everyone else. She was almost really convincing,” the mother told KCTV5.
The kindergartner’s teacher had described a violent 5-year-old thrashing around, throwing books, kicking her teacher, but the video shows something very different.
The video shows the little girl refusing to get in line with the rest of her class. She crawls up into a bookshelf while the rest of her class leaves the library. That’s when her teacher finds her in the bookshelf, grabs her by the arm, drags her out on the ground, and when no one is looking, kicks her in the back.
“I can’t really even put it into words. I hurt for my child, and I was just angry that someone could do that,” the mother said.
She worries about not only her daughter’s, but other students’ safety.
“I said, ‘OK, had my child not said anything to me, you were just going to go behind closed doors and speak to everyone else, and if something came up then you’d let me know? But had she not said anything to me it all. I may not have ever known,” she said.
The mother says the school told her Smith was put on leave pending the end of the investigation and was officially terminated March 25.
The Shawnee Mission School District issued the following statement:
“The Shawnee Mission School District was deeply distressed by the actions shown in the video. We take our responsibility to keep our children safe extremely seriously, and as parents and educators, we are heartbroken whenever a child is not treated with love and respect. As soon as we discovered what happened, we acted to remove the teacher from contact with students, and proceeded immediately to terminate that teacher.”
The Johnson County District Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case to determine whether to press charges.
Police say New York woman asked 911 dispatcher how to commit murder
BUFFALO, N.Y. – A New York woman is facing charges after reportedly calling 911 to ask how to kill her boyfriend, WKBW reported.
Zelda Cotton, 54, is charged with endangering the welfare of an elderly person and criminal possession of a weapon, according to WKBW.
Police said they responded to the home, where Cotton was swinging a leaf blower battery at her 76-year-old boyfriend. She reportedly said she had hit him with a VCR tape five times.
WKBW reported Cotton was intoxicated at the time of the attack, but her boyfriend was not injured.
Woman arrested after calling 911, claiming husband was a burglar
An Alabama woman is facing several charges over what police say was an “utterly ridiculous” attempt to scare her allegedly cheating husband.
Police in Millbrook say 33-year-old Amber Lewis called 911 to report a burglary Wednesday morning. They say when they responded, they found Lewis and a female friend outside Lewis’ home, and the pair told officers they didn’t know who was inside.
Officers soon determined that the “suspect” was Lewis’ husband and arrested her for filing a false police report, the Montgomery Advertiser reports. Police say they also noticed a “pervasive” odor of marijuana inside the home and found marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs inside the home, including in a 5-year-old child’s bedroom.
As a result of the drug find, Lewis was charged with second-degree possession of marijuana and chemical endangerment of a child. Her husband was charged with drug possession and her friend was charged with lying to police.
“Your guess is as good as mine. She knew her husband was engaged in an extramarital affair and called the police on her husband and told us it was a burglary. What her goal was, I have no idea,” Millbrook Police Chief PK Johnson tells the Advertiser. “Bottom line: You lie to the police, you go to jail.”
Johnson says officers were “absolutely furious” about the situation, especially since a small fire broke out at a nearby school at the same time and officers’ ability “to respond to calls for service and assist our fire department was severely handicapped.”
via: https://pix11.com/2019/04/29/police-woman-arrested-after-calling-911-claiming-husband-was-a-burglar/
Man arrested in ‘grisly rape’ of 5-year-old girl whose injuries required surgery
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A 28-year-old Alabama man faces multiple charges after he allegedly raped a 5-year-old girl, leaving her with injuries that required surgery, police said.
Steven Sarandon Barnes faces charges of first-degree rape, aggravated child abuse, chemical endangerment of a child and marijuana possession, according to the Montgomery Advertiser.
“I will say that this is one of the worst cases that I’ve seen in my 31 years in law enforcement,” Millbrook Police Chief PK Johnson told the paper in an email.
Police arrested Barnes over the weekend after the girl was admitted to Prattville Baptist Hospital’s emergency room Friday. Police say she was taken to Children’s Hospital in Birmingham for surgery, and, as of Saturday night, she was recovering and in stable condition.
Prosecutors say they want to see Barnes sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“The defendant has four prior felony convictions, including a crime of violence,” Chief Assistant District Attorney C.J. Robinson told Judge Glenn Goggans. “The defendant is a known drug user. Judge, this was a grisly rape, sexual assault of a 5-year-old child.”
Goggans ordered Barnes to be held on a total bond of $10,010,000. The judge reportedly said that he “would grant no bond in the case if I could.”
Chief Johnson added that investigators will do “everything we can to see justice is served for this little girl.”
Video shows rats scrambling over stove as Brooklyn mom tries to heat daughter’s bottle
BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, Brooklyn — A Brooklyn mother of three, who lives at the Brevoort Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, says rats have ruled her kitchen for years.
As an example, the mother, who did not want to be identified, said she was just about to heat her 7-month-old daughter’s bottle of milk when several rats ran across the stove.
She captured the frolicking rodents on cellphone video.
“I went into the kitchen to make her a bottle and I see the mice playing on the stove,” the mother said. “I see them dancing and playing on the stove and chasing each other. I have clean pots — no, they are looking for food.”
A NYCHA spokesperson says the resident previously declined a scheduled extermination treatment last Monday. Staff began making repairs in the kitchen Monday, including removing kitchen cabinets and repairing any holes in the walls, and a new extermination has been scheduled.
The mother countered that she never declined extermination or a previous transfer and has a meeting with management Wednesday to fill out transfer paperwork.
PIX11 will stay on her story.
If you have a story, send a selfie video to Monica Morales at [email protected].
Smiling man pins woman to bed, rapes her in Queens after asking for foot massage
FLUSHING, Queens — A man pinned a woman to a bed and raped her at a Queens massage parlor on Saturday afternoon, police said.
He walked into the parlor, which is near 37th Avenue and Main Street, and asked for a foot massage around 2:30 p.m., officials said. One he was inside a massage room with a 56-year-old worker, the man pinned her against a bed and raped her.
The man took the woman’s cell phone afterwards, but dropped it on the floor as he fled the building.
Police have asked for help identifying him. He’s believed to be in his 20s. The man is about 6 feet tall. He was last seen wearing a light blue long sleeved shirt, blue jeans and black and white sneakers. The man had on a light colored backpack.
The victim was taken to an area hospital in stable condition.
Submit tips to police by calling Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), visiting http://www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, or texting 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577. Spanish-speaking callers are asked to dial 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).
Toddler tests positive for STD after rape
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Police in Kansas are investigating what led to a 2-year-old girl testing positive for a sexually transmitted disease after evidence of rape was discovered, according to WDAF.
Kansas City Police Chief Terry Zeigler said on Twitter the toddler and her siblings had been left at home with a family friend. The next day, the girl’s mother noticed evidence of sexual assault.
She was taken to Children’s Mercy Hospital where she tested positive for an STD, KAKE reported.
No arrests have been made.
via: https://pix11.com/2019/04/29/kansas-toddler-tests-positive-for-std-after-rape-police-say/