Youth pastor claims he was kidnapped by black men to avoid admitting why he was in a hotel room
Christopher Keys has been arrested and charged with solicitation of sodomy for attempting to hire a male prostitute. Unfortunately for Keys, his hoped-for night with the hooker cost more than he anticipated.
Keys was robbed by two masked men in his hotel room, but instead of telling his family the truth, he claimed he’d been kidnapped by two black men. Once the wild story made its way to Facebook, the whole story crumbled as quickly as the good pastor’s reputation.
Keys admitted to the police why he was at the hotel and an employee told officers that he was a frequent visitor to the location. According to the police report, he admitted that he is married but told officers, but “he liked to play around.”
But that’s not the story he wanted to tell. In fact, he told the officers he planned on telling his family he was kidnapped.
Keys was robbed after checking in to the hotel. When he opened his door expecting his hookup, a masked man walked into the room. He forced Keys onto the bed at gunpoint. When he left to go to the pastor’s truck to take his wallet, another man came in to keep him fleeing.
The gunmen took his wallet, phone and keys. His phone was later recovered in a nearby Walmart parking lot.
Keys told a friend that he had been carjacked and kidnapped by two black men who robbed him and took him to the hotel. As the story spread, someone posted it to social media where it went viral in the local community.
That’s when things started to unravel.
A local television station caught wind of the story and wondered how they could have missed the police report for a kidnapping in the community. After investigating, they confirmed that the whole story was fake and got the actual story from the cops.
Keys has now been arrested and charged with solicitation of sodomy. While sodomy is legal in the United States, soliciting a prostitute is still against the law. The term is commonly used to refer to “offering to pay for sex” of any kind
Photo Credit: Bibb County Sheriff’s Department
13-year-old boy earns four associate’s degrees
(Meredith) — 13-year-old Jack Rico can’t legally drive yet, but he has already earned four associate’s degrees.
“Well, I mean, I’m 13, so I don’t want to rush everything,” he told KABC. “I’m still trying to figure it out, but I just want to focus on learning right now. That’s what I love to do.”
So what’s his next stop? He’s heading to the University of Nevada on a full scholarship to get a bachelor of science degree in history.
Rico started his college career at age 11, which means he earned all four of those degrees in just two years.
But he’s still a kid, after all. And he said when he’s not studying, he’s playing video games.
Photo Credit: kmov.com
Pastor Calls Trump ‘Most Pro-Black President in My Lifetime’ as New Poll Gives Biden 64-point Lead Among Black Voters
Darrell Scott, a pastor who served on the presidential transition team, has described the President Donald Trump as the “most pro-black president” he has ever seen.
Scott, who is also part of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, accompanied the president in his trip to Michigan on Thursday, making the comments at a roundtable event during the visit.
“I’ll say it again, this president, and I’ve lived under 12 presidential administrations, I was born during Eisenhower’s administration, this president has been the most pro-black president in my lifetime,” he said.
“But when I say pro, I’m saying pro in the sense of being proactive. He’s been proactive rather than reactive to issues concerning minorities, underserved and disadvantaged communities than any other president in my lifetime.Ads by scrollerads.com
“I really believe history is going to be kinder to you, Mr. President, than fake news media is today.”
To this the president laughed and said: “It can’t be any worse, thank you.”
Yesterday, Scott shared a video of the meeting, in which Trump can be heard speaking in the background and wrote: “Great roundtable.”
In contrast to Scott’s comments, a poll conducted earlier this year suggested black Americans are largely dissatisfied with the president’s performance.
A Washington Post/Ipsos survey of more than more than 1,000 respondents in January found 90 percent of black Americans disapproved of Trump’s actions in office. While around three quarters (76 percent) said Trump is doing things in his role which are bad for the black community. A majority of those surveyed also said they believe Trump is a racist, accusations he has denied, having previously describing himself as “the least racist person.”
Another poll in May found the approval rating of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic among black Americans had dropped, with 68 percent of those asked in a Navigator poll saying they disapproved of how he had handled the COVID-19 crisis. This puts them among the groups in which Trump’s approval ratings in regards to the crisis are at their worst.
A survey from Fox News showed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden also had a lead on Trump with black voters ahead of the election, with Biden ahead by 64 points.
The telephone poll was conducted from May 17 to 20, with 1,207 randomly-chosen registered voters. It also showed Biden lead by 20 points among women voters.
Scott has made similar comments in the past, having described Trump in the same terms during a meeting with a group of inner city pastors at the White House in 2018.
“This is probably going to be, and I’m going to say it at this table, the most pro-black president that we’ve had in our lifetime. Because, and I try to analyze the people I encounter, this president actually wants to prove something to our community.”
He said “the last president [Barack Obama] didn’t feel like he had to.”
“This administration is probably going to be more proactive regarding urban revitalization and prison reform than any president in your lifetime,” he said.
Scott has also been involved in the Black Voices for Trump campaign, encouraging members of the black community to reelect him Trump as president.
Exit polls from 2016 showed Trump only received 8 percent of the black vote.
via: https://www.newsweek.com/darrell-scott-calls-donald-trump-most-pro-black-president-1505906
Photo Credit: newsweek.com/JIM WATSON/AFP
Boys let black widow bite them in hopes of turning into Spider-Man
Three young Bolivian brothers were hospitalized after getting a black widow spider to bite them — thinking it would turn them into Spider-Man, according to officials.
The Marvel-loving siblings — aged 12, 10 and 8 — found the spider while herding goats in Chayanta, a Ministry of Health official revealed at coronavirus briefing Saturday, according to Telemundo.
Thinking it would give them superhero powers, they prodded it with a stick until it bit each of them in turn, the official, Virgilio Pietro, said.
Finding them crying, their mom rushed them to a nearby health center, which transferred them to a nearby hospital, Telemundo said.
The would-be Peter Parkers were transferred a third time, taken to the Children’s Hospital in La Paz the next day with fevers, tremors and muscle pains, according to the report.
There, they were successfully treated and discharged last Wednesday, almost a week after they were bitten, the report says.
Pietro shared the drama as a warning to parents, saying that“for children everything is real, movies are real” — even though they are in fact an “illusion,” according to Telemundo.
With venom 15 times stronger than a rattlesnake’s, black widows are one of the most feared spiders in the world, and the most venomous in north America, National Geographic says.
While their bites are not usually fatal, children are among those most at risk, along with the elderly and infirm, the site says.
They are not aggressive and bite only in self-defense, National Geographic says — including, it seems, when prodded by young superhero fans.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/05/25/boys-let-black-widow-bite-them-in-hopes-of-turning-into-spider-man/
Photo Credit: nypost.com
Michigan man charged with nursing home attack that outraged Trump
Michigan man charged with nursing home attack that outraged Trump
A young Detroit nursing home patient has been charged in the brutal, caught-on-video beatdown of his 75-year-old roommate that left President Trump outraged.
Jaden Hayden, 20, is facing assault charges for allegedly filming himself repeatedly punching Norman Bledsoe and stealing his credit cards. The alleged attack left the elderly man hospitalized with head injuries.
Hayden allegedly told staff at Westwood Rehabilitation Nursing Center that his roommate had fallen out of bed. But he was busted after posting video of his attack online — grabbing the attention of the president.
“Is this even possible to believe?” Trump tweeted last Thursday.
The video also reached Detroit police, who arrested Hayden the same day Trump tweeted.
He was charged Sunday with two counts of assault, larceny and two counts of stealing a financial transaction device, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office said. He was arraigned later that day with his bond set at $300,000, the Detroit Free Press said.
“The alleged actions of this defendant are truly and uniquely disturbing. We must be able to trust our loved ones in specialty care facilities. I truly hope that the facts of this case are one of a kind,” prosecutor Kym Worthy said, according to the paper.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/05/25/michigan-man-charged-with-brutal-nursing-home-attack/
Photo Credit: nypost.com
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Wendy’s shooting massacre haunts survivor, families 20 years later
FLUSHING, Queens — Twenty years after a brutal shooting at a Wendy’s in Queens, Benjamin Nazario can’t shake the horror of what happened to his brother, Ramon, and six co-workers in the basement freezer of the fast food franchise.
“I was sleeping, and my sister called me yelling that something happened at Wendy’s,” Nazario recently told PIX11.
Now, he avoids the site of the former Wendy’s at 40-12 Main St. in Flushing.
“When I go there, I go to the other side of the street,” he said.
The night that changed everything
Jaquione Johnson was only 18 when he showed up for his evening shift at Wendy’s on May 24, 2000.
He was working with five other men that Wednesday night.
Anita Smith, a 22-year-old Jamaica resident, was the only woman on duty, and she was posted at the cash register. She was planning to start college in the fall, so she could teach children with autism.
“She was supposed to have left at 11 p.m., which was closing time,” Johnson, now 38, recalled. “But she stayed a little later.”
That decision would prove fatal for Smith, who smiled at one of two men who strolled into Wendy’s five minutes before it closed.
That man was John Taylor, 36, a former assistant manager at the fast food restaurant. He had hired Smith about a year-and-a-half earlier.
The manager on duty that night was Jean Auguste, who’d had some issues with Taylor when they worked together. Yet the two men chatted rather amiably that night.
“He ordered his food, I said ‘That’s his boy, I’m gonna hook him up, boom, boom, boom,’” Johnson said, remembering how he made a nice meal for Taylor with extra fixings.
The man who walked in with Taylor was Craig Godineaux, 30, who worked as a security guard with Taylor at a Jamaica clothing store.
Godineaux was an imposing 6 feet, 5 inches tall with a slim build.
Taylor stood about 5 feet, 5 inches tall and was husky.
Both had been arrested for robbery before.
The men sat at separate tables to eat. Then, they made another move.
“They both went in the bathrooms. There was a women’s bathroom and a men’s bathroom,” Johnson said. “John, he came out and started talking to Jean. They went downstairs … I thought they were friends.”
But this wasn’t a friendly visit.
Godineaux came out of the bathroom, Johnson remembered, “and he heard me freestyling. He asked me if I knew any rappers.”
Godineaux and the fast food worker then did some name-dropping of rap stars they liked.
Then, Johnson heard his manager’s voice.
“I get a call on the intercom, which was Jean telling us to come downstairs, we’re having a meeting,” Johnson remembered.
The employees were dutiful and started going downstairs to the basement.
Ramon Nazario, 44, the oldest employee on duty, was locking up Wendy’s front door, according to his brother, who worked at a hotel around the corner. Benjamin Nazario often stopped at Wendy’s on his way home.
“My brother opened the door and I asked him, ‘You going home?’ He said, ‘Not yet. They’re having some kind of meeting. I will catch up,’” Nazario recalled. “He would have survived, because he had the keys to the door … And he closed it. And I watched him go down. So I walked away. I asked him if he had change for the bus, he said ‘Yes.’”
Once all the employees got downstairs, it quickly became apparent there was no meeting.
“John was like, ‘Everybody back up and get down on the floor!” Johnson said. “John had the gun on everybody and Craig duct-taped everybody up.”
“The manager popped the tape off his hand and pulled it off his face, and started breathing funny, yo ‘my asthma, my asthma!’” Johnson said. “Then they beat him up, put more duct tape on him, picked everybody up and walked us in the freezer.”
“That’s when they came in with plastic bags,” Johnson remembered.
Godineaux put bags over all seven employees’ heads, but the bag on Johnson failed to cover his right eye.
“’Everybody get down on your knees.’ That’s what he said, ‘Everybody get down on your knees.’ Basically, it was an execution,” Johnson said.
“So, that’s when they shot Jean,” Johnson recalled. “Then Anita started screaming. They shot her. I’m right next to Jeremy. He [Taylor] passed the gun to Craig. ‘Craig, take the gun.’ I figured he was going to shoot me. Instead of shooting me, he goes to the corner, he shoots Ramon, Patrick, Ali and then me. I was the last one to get shot.”
Johnson said when he got shot in the head, it “felt like I was hit with a sledgehammer.”
When he came to, he recalled co-worker Patrick Castro asking him if he was OK.
The body of one co-worker, Ali Ibadat, had fallen on Castro’s knees.
Castro only had his cheek grazed.
When Castro thought the killers were still inside Wendy’s, he lay back down and played dead, placing his co-worker’s body back over his knees.
As it turned out, the shooters were gone, and Castro was able to call 911 using a fax machine.
“I was blacking out, going in and out,” Johnson told PIX11. “I think he put me in a chair for a second. And then he was like, ‘Yo, you think you can make it up the stairs?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ I blacked out, I woke back up, and that’s when the cops and everyone were coming in.”
Castro had carried his critically wounded co-worker, Johnson, up the staircase.
“If it wasn’t for God saving Patrick, Patrick wouldn’t have saved me,” Johnson said.
In the freezer, five of Johnson’s co-workers were dead: Auguste, who at age 27 was engaged to be married; Nazario, a father of two; Ibadat, a 42-year-old native of Pakistan; Jeremy Mele, an 18-year-old from the Jersey Shore who wanted to join the military; and Smith, the oldest of four children.
The aftermath of a massacre
“She was so kind … She didn’t say ‘no’ to anything,” Smith’s mother, Joan, told PIX11. “You know, every time I see young people walking, and I see someone who looks just like my daughter, I hug them.”
“A lot of times, I cry through my heart, when I’m by myself,” Smith’s father, Michael, said.
He recalled Smith as a newborn and all the love he had for his first child.
“I’m the one who took her out of the hospital! I’m the one who brought her little clothes in. And every day, I put a bottle in my pocket and put her on my chest,” he remembered. “And I raise her and I cook her a little porridge, and she always stick to me … I teach her to walk. Every little thing that a father would do.”
After the shooting, Johnson had to learn to walk all over again.
The bullet entered his head between the two lobes of his brain and travelled down his nasal cavity, before exiting in his mouth.
“I was like half-paralyzed on my right side,” Johnson said. “Couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat.”
But Johnson made a rather miraculous recovery.
“I got shot May 24, 2000. By July 16, I was out of the hospital, walking and talking,” he said.
Yet the last 20 years have been tough for him.
He suffered from seizures, and emotionally he’s been stuck, his mother said.
When asked about his biggest struggles, Johnson said, “Smoking weed, drinking.”
“It keeps me relaxed,” he added.
Within 48 hours of the shooting, the NYPD had the two suspects in custody thanks to a fingerprint of Taylor’s found on a box holding the plastic bags.
When Taylor was arrested, he was still carrying the .380 semi-automatic used in the shooting, along with the surveillance tape he took from the video machine at Wendy’s — and most of the $2,400 he made away with.
The former Wendy’s is now a mini-shopping mall, currently shuttered to shoppers because of the coronavirus outbreak.
“It’s 20 years now, and I actually can talk about it,” said Smith’s sister, Michelle.
Michelle said she spent most of the last two decades denying her pain.
“When you’re born nine months apart, it’s like a twin,” Michelle Smith told PIX11. “We grew up together. I was called little Anita. We were hand in hand. We were best friends.”
“It’s taken time and it does affect me in a lot of ways,” Michelle Smith said. “But I try not to let it overpower me.”
Ramon Nazario’s son — who was a 2-year-old waiting at the window for his dad the night of the shooting — is now a United States Marine stationed in California.
The pandemic prevented Ramon Nazario III from coming to New York City this May to visit his family.
Johnson is grateful for his survival, but the trauma of what happened never leaves him.
“I still think of my friends all the time,” Johnson said. “I got to live with that the rest of my life.”
Photo Credit: pix11.com
Second Missouri hairstylist tests positive for COVID-19, total of 140 clients possibly exposed
(CNN) — Two Missouri hairstylists potentially exposed 140 clients to coronavirus when they worked for up to eight days this month while symptomatic, health officials said.
The Springfield-Greene Health Department announced Saturday that a second hairstylist tested positive for coronavirus, and may have exposed 56 clients at the same Great Clips salon.
A day earlier, it had said another hairstylist with coronavirus at the same salon potentially exposed 84 customers and seven coworkers.
Both stylists had symptoms while at work, officials said. They did not provide details on their conditions or when they tested positive.
The incident highlights the dangers of community spread in the United States as businesses reopen after weeks of restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The stylists and clients wore face coverings
Both stylists worked from the second week of May to Wednesday. The clients and the stylists all wore face coverings, the Health Department said. At the time, businesses like barbershops and hair salons were allowed to operate in the state.
“It is the hope of the department that because face coverings were worn throughout this exposure timeline, no additional cases will result,” it added.
The salon kept impeccable records that made contact tracing possible, said Clay Goddard, director of the Springfield-Greene County Health Department.
But he cautioned about the risks of overwhelming resources.
“I’m going to be honest with you: We can’t have many more of these,” he said at a news conference. “We can’t make this a regular habit or our capabilities as a community will be strained.”
Goddard said he was pleased with the deep cleaning measures taken by Great Clips, adding that he now considers the business safe.
“The well-being of Great Clips customers and stylists in the salon is our top priority and proper sanitization has always been an important cosmetology industry practice for Great Clips salons. We’ve closed the salon where the employee works and it’s currently undergoing additional sanitizing and deep cleaning,” the owners of the business said in a statement to CNN affiliate KYTV.
More than 97,000 people have died from coronavirus in the United States, where the number of confirmed cases is more than 1.6 million, according to Johns Hopkins. Missouri has nearly 12,000 cases of infections and more than 650 deaths.
Photo Credit: nbcnews.com
Basketball legend Patrick Ewing tests positive for coronavirus
(CNN) — Basketball Hall of Famer and Georgetown men’s basketball coach Patrick Ewing said Friday he has tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
Ewing, 57, tweeted, “This virus is serious and should not be taken lightly. I want to encourage everyone to stay safe and take care of yourselves and your loved ones.”
Ewing, who won an NCAA championship in 1984 as a Georgetown player, said he wanted to thank health care workers and everyone on the front lines of the pandemic.
“I’ll be fine and we will all get through this,” Ewing said.
The university said Ewing is isolated at a hospital. He is the only person in the program to have tested positive for the virus, Georgetown said.
Ewing played most of his NBA career with the New York Knicks but also had stints with the Seattle SuperSonics and the Orlando Magic. He scored almost 25,000 points and had more than 11,000 rebounds in his 17-year career.
He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.
He has been the coach at Georgetown since 2017.
Photo Credit: kmov.com