Teacher secretly ran white supremacist podcast – claims it was just satire
CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. — Dayanna Volitich is a social studies teacher at Crystal River Middle School in Florida. Online, she was also known as “Tiana Dalichov,” the pseudonymous host of a white supremacist podcast called “Unapologetic” and the voice behind a Twitter account riddled with racist and anti-Semitic posts.
In a statement through her attorney, Volitich confirmed that she was the one speaking as Dalichov on the podcast, but claimed her comments were “political satire and exaggeration” and the persona was a “hobby.”
“None of the statements released about my being a white nationalist or white supremacist have any truth to them, nor are my political beliefs injected into my teaching of social studies curriculum,” she said in the statement.
Now that her alter ego has come to light, Volitich has been removed from the classroom while the school district investigates her behavior.
In a statement provided to CNN, the Citrus County School District said “the Human Resources department was notified and an investigation was initiated immediately” when they learned of Volitich’s alleged online behavior.
“The teacher has been removed from the classroom and the investigation is ongoing,” the statement read.
Assistant Superintendent Michael Mullen also told CNN Volitich is still employed by the school, but “does not have contact with students while the investigation is being conducted.”
The Huffington Post first connected the 25-year-old teacher to her online persona earlier this week. Details tweeted from @TianaDalichov’s account matched up with details of Volitich’s life, and the account appeared to use a photo of Volitich as its avatar, according to the news outlet. Dalichov’s online presence has now mostly been scrubbed.
On Twitter, Volitich, as Dalichov, would tweet about the “horrors” of Islam and the superiority of white culture, and referred to the “Jewish Question,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory. In screenshots of tweets captured by The Huffington Post, Volitich abbreviates this as “JQ” — a common practice in alt-right and white supremacist circles.
In a February 26 episode of the podcast obtained by HuffPost, Dalichov talked about being a middle school teacher in her second year — the same as Volitich, according to Citrus County Schools. In the recording, she says she strives to teach her views to her students and take back influence in the classroom from “the left.” She also says she staved off any suspicion by encouraging students to “play along” when she acted differently under the observation of superiors.
“I danced like a little puppet and I waited until they were gone,” she says in the recording posted to HuffPost’s website.
Dalichov’s guest talks about “closet Red Ice listeners.” Red Ice is a white supremacist media company that produces podcasts and videos trading heavily in Holocaust denial, ethno-nationalism and white genocide.
“I do hear from teachers all the time that are closet Red Ice listeners that support what we do,” the guest says.
“Well I am absolutely one of them, then,” Dalichov replied.
Later in the same episode, she invokes racial biology, another popular white supremacist theory.
“So many other researchers have looked into this,” she says. “There are races that have higher IQs than others.”
Although the “Unapologetic” recordings have been deleted, an entry on podcast search engine Listen Notes identifies the guest in the February 26 episode as Lana Lokteff, one of the hosts of Red Ice.
A Twitter account appearing to belong to Lokteff recently tweeted in support of Volitich, saying she’s the target of a “witch hunt.”
“Lefties never wanted diversity of thought/opinion,” she tweeted. “They want leftist totalitarian rule where they police everyone for ‘wrong think.’ They are delusional religious zealots who hate nature.”
via: http://pix11.com/2018/03/07/teacher-secretly-ran-white-supremacist-podcast/
Tenant accused of killing landlord was ‘upset’ over $30 rent increase
MILWAUKEE – A 37-year-old Wisconsin man accused of killing his landlord was upset over a $30 rent increase, prosecutors say.
Jason Tilley, of Cudahy, faces charges of first degree intentional homicide and possession of a firearm by a felon after he admitted to shooting his landlord in the back of the head, police say. Authorities have not yet identified the landlord.
“We never thought Jason would do that,” said tenant Sharon Cebula.
According to the criminal complaint, the victim’s wife reported her husband missing on Thursday, March 1. She told police her husband had gone to the apartment complex he owns in Cudahy to meet with a tenant who was identified as “Jason.”
The complaint indicates an officer went to the apartment complex to speak with Tilley. Tilley was not there — but the officer “did observe what appeared to be blood on the door and door frame” of Tilley’s unit. Another resident indicated she saw Tilley and the victim “talking outside the garage area around 3:30 p.m.” on March 1.
The next day, two officers returned to the apartment complex and looked in the garage, where they “observed what appeared to be a pool of blood that led to a large blanket rolled up against the wall.” The victim was inside. An autopsy shows the victim died as a result of a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
“Someone loses a temper, maybe smack ’em or something, but to kill him…” said Cebula.
Tilley was arrested at his workplace on March 2. When questioned by investigators, Tilley stated he did meet with the victim. He paid the victim money for rent “and was told by the victim that his rent was being increased by $30,” and Tilley said this upset him, according to the complaint.
Initially, Tilley gave investigators a description of his activities — and did not mention any altercation with the landlord. When a detective stated that Tilley shot the victim and asked whether that was “right or wrong,” Tilley paused and said, “yes.”
“He just had a personal vendetta, you could say, against him,” said Cebula.
Tilley told investigators when he went to the garage area to discuss the rent issue, “they were not arguing and there was no physical confrontation.”
Prosecutors say Tilley admitted he went to the garage with a gun in the pocket of his hoodie and “while they were talking, the victim turned away from him and … Tilley took out the gun and shot the victim.”
Tilley allegedly took the victim’s money and car keys before fleeing. He later abandoned the victim’s car and bought new clothes, leaving the old ones at the store, prosecutors say.
Cebula told WITI she will never forget the landlord for his genuine kindness and dedication to the people in his buildings.
A check of criminal records indicates Tilley has previously been convicted of felony offenses.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/03/07/tenant-accused-of-killing-landlord-was-upset-over-30-rent-increase/
Illinois day care workers gave melatonin gummies to kids before naptime
Three employees of a day care facility in suburban Chicago were arrested Friday after they gave children gummy bears laced with sleep aid melatonin without parental consent, according to police.
The Des Plaines Police Department said Monday that officers were called to Kiddie Junction after management learned a teacher was giving children the gummies. A further investigation revealed that two other teachers were also involved.
Three workers – 25-year-old Ashley Helfenbein of Chicago, 19-year-old Jessica Heyse of Des Plaines and 32-year-old Kristen Lauletta of Niles – now face charges of endangering the life or health of a child and battery. They are all due in court April 4.
Police said the children were given the melatonin “in an effort to calm them down before nap time,” and that parents hadn’t given permission for their children to receive the melatonin.
“You can’t distribute that without the parents being told,” Des Plaines police Cmdr. Christopher Mierzwa told the Chicago Tribune. “(The teachers) didn’t know if the child was allergic to melatonin.”
Police told FOX 32 Chicago they have footage showing the teachers giving the melatonin gummy bears on two occasions, and one of the teachers may have been doing this since November 2016.
Authorities contacted parents who had children at the facility, and said that no children were sickened. “When the detective called me he didn’t specify what classroom it happened and he called me and said I’m detective so and so with the Des Plaines Police Department and I’m here at the Kiddie Junction and my heart dropped,” parent Edi Kulasic told FOX 32.
Des Plaines Police said the management of the facility is cooperating in the investigation.
Kathy Wiley, whose grandson Mason goes to the day care, told FOX 32 he still has faith in the teachers at the facility.
“I feel terrible for the owners and the management and this is just some poor choices that these girls made,” she told FOX 32.
Woman arrested after dumping popcorn on 2-year-old during movie, police say
LEVITTOWN, L.I. — A woman is accused of dumping popcorn on a 2-year-old girl at a Long Island movie theater earlier this year.
On Jan. 2, while a toddler was asking her mother for popcorn during a movie, Keri Karman, 25, allegedly tried to quiet the child down verbally, police said.
According to authorities, when the child’s mother intervened, Karman started to yell and curse at the mother and daughter then placed her hand over the toddler’s mouth.
Karman then dumped a container of popcorn on the child’s head and struck her in the head with the container, causing her to cry, said police. The child suffered a contusion on her head.
Karman and Charles Karman, 61, fled the theater.
Following investigation, the Karmans were arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child.
Bayonne Public Schools closed Monday following threat to shoot up schools
BAYONNE, N.J. — Bayonne Public Schools will be closed Monday, several days after a threat to shoot up the schools was posted to social media, and the day after officials said officers would be stationed at the schools, which would remain open.
The school closures were announced on social media around 7:30 a.m.
The statement from Interim Superintendent of Bayonne Public Schools Dr. Michael Wanko read, in part, “The Bayonne School District received a twitter post that has yet to be discredited by the Bayonne Police Department. Therefore, Mayor Davis contacted me at 6:40 AM today and in the interest of safety it was decided to close all schools today, Monday, March 05, 2018.”
Some 10 hours earlier, the district stated schools would remain open but police officers would be stationed at Bayonne schools on Monday.
The announcements came after someone on Friday tweeted a threat to shoot up all Bayonne Public Schools, officials said.
“Postings like this cause much anguish and concern for parents, students, and staff,” Wanko said Sunday.
Child sex offender serving 300 years is set free
COLORADO — He was set to pay for his crimes in prison for at least 316 years. But on Tuesday, 46-year-old Michael McFadden walked out of Colorado’s Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility a free man, released under circumstances that have left Mesa County’s district attorney “appalled,” per the Daily Sentinel.
McFadden, who was convicted in 2015 of sexual assault against six children, appealed his conviction by claiming that his right to a speedy trial had been violated due to delays, and in June of last year, the Colorado Court of Appeals overturned his conviction, KKCO reports.
The state’s Supreme Court declined to hear the case last month, keeping the appeals court’s decision in place and resulting in McFadden’s release.
“We are without remedy,” DA Dan Rubenstein lamented. “If you’ve heard the phrase, ‘he got off on a technicality,’ this is exactly that situation,” he added, per KKCO.
Rubenstein took to Facebook to explain McFadden’s release at length so the community “can take action at the next election of [the] court of appeals judges” involved.
It initially appeared McFadden wouldn’t have to add his name to any sex offender registry, since his crimes were officially vacated. He’d been convicted once before for sexually assaulting a child, but that conviction happened before it was required by law for sex offenders to add their names to a public register.
However, Rubenstein said Thursday that McFadden will have to register based on that 1990 case.
Word as of Thursday was that McFadden was holed up in homeless shelters in Colorado Springs and was trying to get enough cash to take a bus to Florida.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/03/02/child-sex-offender-serving-300-years-is-set-free/
Georgia teacher arrested for shooting gun in classroom
GEORGIA — A north Georgia high school teacher was arrested on Wednesday after he barricaded himself in a classroom and fired a shot from his handgun out of a window, police said.
No one was injured in the incident at Dalton High School, except for a female student who injured an ankle running through the school, police spokesman Bruce Frazier said.
The shooting about 85 miles north of Atlanta heightened the already tense debate around guns in schools in the wake of the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, two weeks ago.
President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association, among others, have proposed that teachers should be allowed to bring firearms into schools to defend against possible attacks. But critics have said arming teachers would create a host of other dangerous side effects, and pointed to the Dalton shooting as Exhibit A in that argument.
The incident began about 11:30 a.m. when Randal Davidson, a 53-year-old social studies teacher, refused to let students into his classroom while he was in his planning period, Frazier said. When the principal put a key in the door in an attempt to enter, Davidson fired a shot from a handgun through an exterior window of the classroom, Frazier said.
The school went into lockdown, and police quickly arrived and evacuated the immediate area around his classroom. After about 30 to 45 minutes, Davidson agreed to surrender and was taken into custody without further incident, Frazier said.
Frazier said there was no evidence Davidson was trying to fire at anyone.
“It certainly seemed like he didn’t have any intention to harm anybody else,” Frazier said.
Police later tweeted that Davidson would face charges of aggravated assault, carrying a weapon on school grounds, terroristic threats, reckless conduct, possession of gun during commission of a crime, and disrupting a public school.
Dalton police said the school resource officer, who has a close relationship with school staff, was at the junior high school when the incident began and then came to Davidson’s classroom. The officer was able to speak to the teacher and persuade him to leave his room without harming anyone.
“We’re very, very proud of this officer and everything that he did to render this horrible situation safe as quick as what he did,” Dalton police Assistant Chief Cliff Cason said.
Cason praised the school’s lockdown drill as “flawless” and said it made it easier for police to quickly reach the teacher.
“When we got there, they directed us where we needed to go and it made things so much easier for us because it wasn’t mass chaos, as you see at times,” Cason said.
In a lockdown drill, teachers are instructed to gather students into classrooms, lock the room, turn off the lights and move away from windows, Principal Steve Bartoo said.
Davidson has been a teacher at Dalton since 2004 and was the play-by-play radio announcer for the high school’s football team, Frazier said. Police did not release any explanation for what happened.
Bartoo said Davidson was an “excellent teacher” who was “well thought of in our building.”
Classes will resume Friday. Students can go by the school Thursday to claim their belongings.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/03/01/georgia-teacher-arrested-for-shooting-gun-in-classroom-police/
PA – Starving kids were eating paint off the walls to survive. Parents Plead Guilty
The children were so hungry they were peeling paint off the walls to eat.
And, a Dauphin County prosecutor said Thursday, two of those three children would have died of starvation within a week had they not been rescued from the bedroom where they were imprisoned.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Gettle painted that horrific picture as the couple responsible for caring for those kids, Joshua and Brandi Weyant, entered guilty pleas that will guarantee them prison stays of at least a decade each.
The Halifax Township couple entered those pleas 14 months after state police, acting on an anonymous tip about a sickly child, raided their house of horrors in the 1000 block of North River Road.
Both Weyants pleaded guilty to multiple charges of aggravated assault, conspiracy, false imprisonment, unlawful restraint, and child endangerment.
Gettle said their plea deals require county Judge Scott A. Evans to impose minimum sentences of at least 10 years in state prison. Evans has the leeway, however, to send each of the Weyants to prison for up to 20 to 40 years, the prosecutor said,
Evans is to sentence the couple in May.
Joshua Weyant, 34, also pleaded no contest to unrelated charges of indecent assault and corruption of minors. In that case, he was accused of molesting a pre-teen girl from 2013-15, Gettle said.
Neither of the Weyants said anything other than “yes,” as they stood before Evans with attorneys – Chief Deputy Public Defender Deanna Muller for Joshua and Bryan Depowell for Brandi, 39, whose voice was barely audible as she pleaded guilty.
The charges against the Weyants stem from the December 2016 visit of police and Children & Youth Services workers to their home in response to the anonymous tip.
Gettle said investigators found the children in a bare, unheated bedroom without any beds or other furniture, no toys and no sign that they were getting anything to eat. The paint was peeled from the walls for as high as the kids could reach, she said, and the children were eating it “to try to survive,” Gettle said.
She said the children, ages 6, 5 and 4, told police they were imprisoned in the room for trying to steal food. They said the Weyants weren’t feeding them.
The children were rushed to Penn State Hershey Medical Center, where experts determined two of them were within a week of dying from malnutrition, the prosecutor said. Investigators said none of the children weighed more than 28 pounds, well below healthy weight for their ages.
Although the Weyants were responsible for caring for the children, they are not their biological parents, investigators determined. Police said it appears 10 people were living in the Halifax Township house.
Investigators said they believe the Weyants conspired to starve the children because Joshua no longer wanted them.
Gettle said the children are now in foster care.
via: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2018/02/starving_kids_were_eating_pain.html
Teacher accused of choking 12-year-old student in dispute over school dance
PLAINS TOWNSHIP — A Pennsylvania teacher faces charges of strangulation and harassment for allegedly choking a 12-year-old student, according to WNEP.
The incident reportedly happened earlier this month, and charges were filed Monday against Brian Fischer, a teacher at Solomon-Plains Educational Complex, part of the Wilkes-Barre Area School District.
Standing with his mother Crystal, Keyon Mutua told WNEP he had an argument with Fischer on Feb. 9 inside the cafeteria at Solomon-Plains Educational Complex, shortly before he turned 13.
Court papers show Mutua had been suspended from school for using foul language and wasn’t allowed to attend a dance later that night. He wanted to get back the $30 he paid for the dance, but Fischer wouldn’t return the money.
“The first time I was like calmly asking him for my money and the second time, not the third time I asked him,” said Mutua. “I yelled at him, so he decided to lean forward and put his hands around my neck.”
Mutua says Fischer grabbed him by the neck with both hands, choking him for a few seconds.
“I was surprised he leaped at me like that for, like, just yelling at him,” said Mutua.
According to court papers, the principal and school resource officer had to separate Mutua and Fischer, who later said the middle schooler had “entered his space” and made the 57-year-old feel threatened, according to the Times Leader. Fischer claimed he only put his hands on the boys shoulders.
“They did call me the day of the incident, and what was explained to me was he had to use force for my son,” said Crystal Mutua. “So I found myself apologizing to him.”
But the school resource officer told the court the choking was caught on the school’s security cameras.
He said the video showed that Mutua was not aggressive toward Fischer and that the teacher acted out, seemingly unprovoked.
“When I saw this video my stomach hurt, really, really bad, like really bad because that’s a child. This is your role model. This is somebody they look up to. This is the person who is supposed to assist him going forward,” said Crystal.
Fischer is now charged with harassment and a misdemeanor charge of strangulation.
WNEP tried to reach him, but no one answered the door at his home in Mountain Top.
“You just took my son back five steps with trust of the system, with trust of the school system. I was hurt. I was really, really hurt,” said Crystal.
Brian Fischer is now suspended from his $86,000 teaching job without pay, according to the paper.
He has a court appearance set for April 3.