Teen girls, ages 14 and 15, charged after allegedly robbing a bank
FALL RIVER, Mass. (Meredith/AP) — Two teenage girls in Massachusetts have been charged after police say they allegedly robbed a bank.
Fall River police say a 14-year-old girl walked into a BayCoast Bank branch in the city on Wednesday afternoon and told a teller she would “blow everything up and kill everybody” if the teller did not hand over cash.
A bank employee handed the girl an “undetermined” amount of money and she left.
The girl was seen on surveillance video getting into a black Toyota Camry outside the bank allegedly driven by a 15-year-old girl.
Police got a look at the license plate and traced the car to a home in the city where they found the girls.
Both are charged with armed robbery. Their names were not released because of their ages.
Man Returns Home, Finds Stranger and Kids Living There
Kent Foster says he knew something was wrong the instant he returned to his house in Union, South Carolina, last week.
A dog he’d never seen before was in his yard — and a car seat was barricading his front door, he told local Fox affiliate WHNS.
He wasn’t sure what was going on. Then he heard a baby cry.
Moments later, a woman he was unfamiliar with poked her head out the door and asked, “What are you doing at my house?” Foster said.
“I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I said, ‘I live here.’”
Standing outside his house while the woman remained inside with the door shut, Foster immediately called 911.
When police arrived, the woman opened the door and said, “Can I help you?” Foster recalled.
He replied to the woman, “Yeah, the first thing you can do is leave my house.”
The length of time from which Foster had been away from the house was not immediately clear, Union Public Safety Captain Kevin Powers tells PEOPLE.
The woman, identified by police as Savannah Rhinehart, 25, left the house – wearing Foster’s wife’s clothes from head to toe, he said. Two children came out wearing his children’s clothing.
The dog he saw had urinated in the house and the family that had allegedly moved into his clean home had trashed it, he said, even eating his food.
After being taken to the hospital to be evaluated, Rhinehart was arrested and charged with burglary, neglect of a child and petty larceny, Powers tells PEOPLE.
Authorities do not know exactly why she allegedly moved into the home or chose that house.
“I spoke to the officer who responded who said that in her mind she thought she lived there,” Powers tells PEOPLE.
Rhinehart’s two children were placed in emergency protective custody, he says.
Foster said he still cannot believe someone actually moved into his house while he was gone.
“I feel violated,” he tells WHNS. “I feel extremely violated.”
Rhinehart has not yet entered a plea. It is unclear whether she had retained an attorney to speak on her behalf.
Sex Offender Arrested After Trying to Use Cookies to Lure Underage Girls Into Van at Central Valley Park
A sex offender was arrested after allegedly trying to use cookies to lure teens into his van at a public park across the street from a high school in the Central Valley, officials said Friday.
Officers made contact with Ronald Gene Thomas, 61, after receiving a 911 call reporting someone bothering juveniles at Veterans Park in Porterville just before 5 p.m. Tuesday, Porterville police said in a news release.
The town is in an agricultural area 50 miles north of Bakersfield.
The caller told authorities the suspicious man was making contact with youth near a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter that’s part of a Vietnam War memorial at the park on Henderson Avenue, across the street from Monache High School.
Officers who responded made contact with two girls, ages 13 and 15, who said Thomas had been annoying them and pointed out the white van he was sitting in, police said.
Witnesses told officials Thomas had been whistling at and trying to lure or contact several underage girls in the area.
Officers found Thomas in his van and noticed two chocolate chip cookies were sitting on the windshield, positioned so they could only be grabbed from outside the vehicle, authorities said.
Upon further investigation, police determined that Thomas had been ordered to register as a sex offender following a previous conviction of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under 14 years of age in Arkansas.
Thomas was subsequently arrested and booked on suspicion of annoying or molesting a child and two offenses related to his status as a sex offender: failure to change registration address and failure to notify of transient status.
Police said Thomas had been registered locally but failed to let authorities know he had become homeless, which is a violation.
The suspect was scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 28, inmate records show.
Police ask anyone who may have had questionable contact with Thomas to contact Detective Orlando Ortiz at 559-782-7400.
Mother says suspect arrested for killing her son mourned with her at her home
EMPORIA, Va. – Police shocked the mother of a man murdered on Valentine’s Day when they told her a 15-year-old boy, who she said mourned with her, had been arrested for the crime, according to WTVR.
Police said 20-year-old Jaquan Crumpler was found shot to death in his bedroom at around 9:30 p.m. Feb. 14.
Officials said days of investigating and interviewing some of the same friends over and over developed enough probable cause for a search warrant.
Emporia Police arrested a 15-year-old boy for first-degree murder Thursday night.
“He came over here after my son passed every day and grieved with us,” LaToia Crumple said. “He told me it would be OK – and the whole time I’m standing next to my son’s killer.”
Crumple said the arrest of her son’s killer reignited the heartache.
“They knew each other, they hung with each other,” Crumple said. “He used to always say, ‘You can’t trust nobody.'”
Emporia Police Chief Ricky Pinksaw said he can’t wrap his mind around the violence.
“It’s really hard to make sense out of nonsense, and for an individual to perpetrate the act that he did on the victim and then to go back and grieve with family makes no sense to me,” Pinksaw said.
The teen is being held at a juvenile detention facility.
Chicago mother says son attempted to take his own life after persistent bullying
CHICAGO — An 11-year-old boy is on life support after attempting suicide. His mother said he was bullied at his Chicago Public School, and authorities allegedly did nothing to help, the family told WGN.
Jamari Dent is a student at Carter G Woodson Middle School. According to his family, Jamari attempted to take his own life Monday. His younger sister found him and yelled for their mother, Tianna Black.
“I ran to his room and he was on his knees with sheet wrapped around his neck and gone already,” Black said.
Black said she performed CPR until paramedics arrived.
She said her son, who has a learning disability, was the victim of bulling from both students and teachers. She said her son was called “stupid, dumb and retarded.”
Black said the bullying went on for more than a year, and despite going to Woodson principal Tamara Littlejohn, nothing changed.
“My son told me he wished he died four months ago,” Black said. “He’s tired of the teachers messing with him.”
Black met with the school administration Friday.
In statement CPS said:
This is a horrible tragedy, and the thoughts and prayers of the Chicago Public Schools community are with Jamari and his loved ones. The allegations that have been made are highly concerning, and the district is conducting a full investigation.
Community activist Ja’Mal Green is helping the family and was with them Friday.
“We conditionally have to get to the point where families have to suffer for something to be done,” he said. “Jamari is on life support for extensive brain damage because he tried to attempt suicide. Jamari was jumped by several students in a gym room a month ago. (He) was bullied and taunted by teachers as well as students.”
Another mother of a Woodson student said she has complained about bullying at the school.
After meeting with the school, Black said her children will be transferred to a new school.
“If they would have nipped this in the bud when I came up here it wouldn’t have gotten this far,” Black said.
If you or someone you know is struggling, there is help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is answering calls 24-7, with free and confidential support for those in distress. The number is 1-800-273-8255. The lifeline can also connect you with resources for loved ones and best practices for professionals.
Mother took children from school for fake appointment before shooting them
SOLON TOWNSHIP, Mich. — The Michigan mother who shot her three children in a wooded area unexpectedly picked them up from school on the day of their deaths, investigators told WXMI.
Kent County Sheriff’s Office detectives said Aubrianne Moore showed up at the children’s school in the middle of the day to pick them up, saying they had a doctor’s appointment. Investigators determined this to be fake.
Authorities said the 28-year-old mother took her children to lunch and then went to a wooded area behind a home Monday. Once there, authorities said she took the children into the woods one at a time and shot them with a bolt-action hunting rifle.
After the children were shot, Moore put them in her car and drove them to her boyfriend’s home, where she shot herself, authorities said.
Moore’s boyfriend found the bodies of 6-year-old Cassidy Rodery, 8-year-old Kyrie Rodery and his daughter, 2-year-old Alaina Rau, inside the vehicle in his home’s driveway over an hour later. Moore’s body was found just outside the vehicle, authorities said.
According to court documents, a social worker recommended Moore receive mental health treatment in September after exhibiting strange behavior.
A petition for mental health treatment filed in Newaygo County Probate Court said Moore wasn’t eating because she thought her food was contaminated, she was keeping her kids home from school because her TV said there would be a school bus crash, and she was staying awake at night out of fear burglars would break into her home.
Court documents show Moore was diagnosed with “unspecified schizophrenia” and had an inability to understand her need for treatment.
Moore was recommended to receive 60 days of in-patient treatment at Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids. She was discharged on deferral status Sept. 28.
Authorities said Moore was also making statements on social media that indicated she thought her children were in danger. Investigators suspect that may have led to Monday’s shooting.
Memorial services have been set for the children.
A private family service will be held for the Roderys on Saturday. A service has not yet been set for Alaina. Service plans are still pending for Moore.
Father arrested for killing 2-year-old girl with a hammer
ORANGE, Texas (AP) — A Southeast Texas man accused of bludgeoning his 2-year-old daughter to death with a hammer was naked and blood-stained when he told police officers he had killed the toddler, according to an affidavit.
An officer’s body camera captured 26-year-old Yovahnis Roque confessing Tuesday in the death of his child at their home in Orange, near the Louisiana border, according to the police affidavit. Roque was arrested and charged with capital murder .
Roque lived with his mother at the house and it was she who found the girl’s body and called police.
Officers found Roque “completely covered in blood” and discovered the girl’s body in a closet, the affidavit says. Orange police Capt. Robert Enmon has described it as the most horrific crime he’s dealt with in his 29-year career, calling it “the crime scene of nightmares.”
In court Wednesday, a judge was explaining the capital murder charge when Roque exclaimed: “The government made me do it.”
He was ordered to be held on $2 million bond in the Orange County jail. Online jail records don’t show whether he has an attorney to speak on his behalf.
Enmon said Thursday that authorities investigated a disturbance at the house several months earlier, but that the call didn’t appear to involve the child.
A friend of the suspect, Abner Santiago, told the Beaumont Enterprise that he received a series of messages from Roque on Tuesday, including one in which he told his friend to start digging because there was going to be “an all-out war.”
“He was messaging me weird coded messages about the world ending,” Santiago said. “He wasn’t like this before when I knew him back in Miami.”
The girl was just weeks old in 2016 when her mother, Rachel Foster, was struck and killed by an impaired driver, according to WTVJ-TV in Miami-Dade County. Roque was seriously injured in the wreck.
Foster’s mother, Delia Foster, told the station that the death of her daughter, and now the killing of her granddaughter, brings “a complete emptiness. And it’s just so gloomy and so devastating.”
Man charged after grandma dies; bed filled with maggots
MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida man has been charged after his 87-year-old grandmother died and authorities say her bed was filled with live maggots.
Brevard County Sheriff’s deputies say Allen Arias brought an unresponsive Anita Arias to the hospital last month. The woman was covered in bed sores and some were infested with maggots.
A search warrant of the home revealed frozen dinners and dirty diapers stacked up and blood and feces stains on the bed and walls. Authorities said they also found full prescription bottles for Anita Arias who suffered from dementia. Authorities said she was in fair health when Allen Arias brought her home from a rehabilitation center in December.
An autopsy showed she died of dehydration and emaciation and that her blood sugar was as high as could be measured.
Florida Today reports Arias was charged Thursday with aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person.
Mom discovers daughter bought robot to do her homework, destroys it
We’ve gone from the days of “The dog ate my homework” to “The robot did my homework for me.”
According to a report from a Chinese newspaper, a young schoolgirl there recently spent the 800 yuan (equivalent to about $120) that she’d saved from Lunar New Year presents to buy herself a robot — one that she didn’t buy because it looked cool or she just likes robots.
Rather, she had a specific purpose in mind for the machine — doing her handwriting homework assignments for her, the kind that are common in China and involve writing down phrases from textbooks that help with learning the Chinese language and characters.
According to the South China Morning Post, the girl’s mother discovered the robot while she was cleaning her daughter’s room. And, predictably, she smashed it to teach the girl a lesson.
The mom apparently realized something was possibly amiss when her daughter was able to complete all her homework in just two days, with neat penmanship, despite also juggling festivities and travel that seemed to leave little time to get the work done.
The news about the young girl’s inventiveness actually sparked a flood of sympathetic comments from Chinese social media users.
“Give her a break, how meaningful is copying anyway?” one commenter noted on Weibo, the popular social media platform in China, per the New York Times.
“Proficiently reading and writing in Chinese requires knowing thousands of characters,” the newspaper continued. Copying them in repeated exercises is a steppingstone in Chinese education to learning how to freely write them — and students are also sometimes asked to transcribe a literary text from memory, according to the Times.
It’s tedious work, though, which explains why the girl turned to her robot for help.
It’s also not just students in China sometimes turning to these stylus-gripping robots.
The South China Morning Post found one teacher who acknowledged using one of these robots herself for lesson preparations.
Interestingly, she’d spent a week writing 6,000 Chinese characters to create her own font, but she said nobody could tell the difference between the robot’s writing style and her own.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/02/22/mom-discovers-daughter-bought-robot-to-do-her-homework-destroys-it/
New Jersey School Bus Driver Overdoses on Drugs, Crashes With 12 Students Aboard
A school bus driver was arrested after she overdosed while driving and crashed into a tree, Newark police said.
The driver, Lisa Byrd, was transporting a dozen students from 14th Avenue School in Newark when the vehicle crashed into a tree on Wednesday, officials said in a statement.
When first responders arrived, police said they revived the 57-year-old woman with Narcan – a drug that instantly reverses the effects of overdose from heroin and other opioids.
The students, ages 5 to 13, were not injured, police said.
Byrd, who was taken to a local hospital, is facing 12 charges of endangering the welfare of a child, driving while impaired and possession of drug paraphernalia, police said.
It was not immediately clear whether Byrd has an attorney.
“Endangering the lives of Newark children is something we will not tolerate,” said Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka in a statement. “We are grateful that none of the students were injured and that no other residents were harmed due to this incident.”
The company employing the driver, F&A Transport, has been “removed from transporting children” until an investigation is completed, Newark Public Schools said in a statement.