Texas police chief apologizes after horseback officers lead man by rope
GALVESTON, Texas (AP) – Galveston’s police chief is apologizing after two of his officers, mounted on horseback, led a handcuffed trespassing suspect by a rope through downtown streets.
Photos of the Saturday incident went viral on social media. The two officers linked the rope to handcuffs worn by 43-year-old criminal trespass suspect Donald Neely and led him around the block to a mounted patrol staging area.
In a statement Monday, Police Chief Vernon Hale said “this is a trained technique and best practice in some scenarios,” such as with crowd control. However, he said he believes his officers “showed poor judgment in this instance and could have waited for a transport unit at the location of arrest.” He said his department has “immediately changed the policy” to prevent use of the technique.
Neely is free on bond. He has no listed telephone number and couldn’t be reached for comment.
Photo Credit: fox2now.com
Man who killed wife in Queens salon hugged her after fatal stabbing
The man who stabbed his estranged Queens salon worker wife to death was seen on video standing over her with the knife and then hugging her before he was arrested and charged with murder.
Video obtained by The Post shows William Rivas, 39, laying on top of his bleeding estranged wife, 35-year-old Carmen Iris Santiago, after stabbing her repeatedly around 7 p.m. Wednesday inside the Jackson Heights shop.
“We tried to get him off of her but his strength was greater than ours,” explained Tu S’tilo Salon SPA owner Lourdes Salazar, through tears. “And then he tried stabbing us.”
The footage later shows plainclothes police officers arriving at the scene and pulling Rivas away from his dying wife as bystanders look on, some even videotaping the tragic aftermath.
Santiago, a mother of two boys who also goes by the name Iris Rodriguez, was rushed to Elmhurst General Hospital, but could not be saved.
A memorial was set up Thursday at Santiago’s work station within the salon, where co-workers placed a framed photograph of the woman, surrounded by candles, as well as a bouquet of white and purple roses, a cross and a wreath of white flowers.
A second dedication was arranged outside the store, where the same framed picture was placed on top of a donation box and lined with more candles and flowers.
The salon owner’s son, 21-year-old Freddy Chavez, described Santiago as a “single parent” who came to the country from the Dominican Republic about five years ago.
“Iris, she was a really good person, she was very caring,” he said. “They always talk about how good of a mother she was, being a single parent, coming to this country. She put them (her children) first.”
Rivas — who was hospitalized following the stabbing for an injury he suffered during the attack — was charged Thursday with murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
He has no criminal history with the NYPD and there is no documented history of domestic incidents between the couple.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/08/08/man-who-killed-wife-in-queens-salon-hugged-her-after-fatal-stabbing/
Photo Credit: nypost.com
Sales of Bulletproof Backpacks Surge in Wake of Last Week’s Mass Shootings, Companies Say
It’s a fear particularly potent among parents of young children and especially now, days away from the start of the school year. It’s not unwarranted — CNN examined 10 years of shootings on K-12 campuses and found two sobering truths: School shootings are increasing, and no type of community is spared.
Instead of letting their children choose a plastic backpack covered in Hello Kitty or Spider-Man, some parents are purchasing bags that double as shields in case kids get caught in gunfire.
Companies like Guard Dog Security, Bullet Blocker and TuffyPacks designed bulletproof backpacks to quell those concerns.
The retailers said backpack sales spike during the back-to-school season, and all three said they they saw a significant uptick in the aftermath of mass shootings.
Bulletproof backpacks are a ‘consumer favorite’
Joe Curran founded Bullet Blocker 12 years ago after a shooting at Virginia Tech killed 33 people.
To protect his two school-aged children, the former sheriff’s deputy inserted body armor into their backpacks, he said. Classmates’ parents asked for inserts for their children’s bags, and it grew into a business.
The company’s website calls the bulletproof backpack a “consumer favorite.” Prices range from $160 to $490. Most are JanSport or High Sierra backpacks retrofitted with ballistic panels sewn into the back. The smallest offering, the “Junior Pack,” is suggested for preschoolers.
Sales have increased 200% since the mass shootings last weekend, Curran said.
Demand increased after Parkland
Yasir Sheikh, president of Guard Dog Security, said the company launched a line of bulletproof backpacks in 2013. And since 2018, they’ve cropped up in major retailers like Office Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond.
They’re marketed as “bulletproof” or “bullet-resistant,” depending on the store, but the two are synonymous, he said. The bags retail for between $119.99 and $299.99.
Sheikh couldn’t draw a direct correlation between mass shootings and sales increases, but he said there was a significant rise in demand after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting last year.
“What we’re finding is, sometimes, events trigger heightened awareness of the product,” he said.
The Florida company builds and designs its bulletproof backpacks and tests them at a facility accredited by the National Institute of Justice, a research branch of the Department of Justice.
Guard Dog’s backpacks offer Level IIIA protection, a National Institute of Justice standard that means they were tested to withstand 9-mm, .44 magnum and shotgun ammunition. They’re not built to protect against the ammunition of rifles or assault weapons.
Lightweight inserts double as shields from bullets
Steve Naremore, CEO of TuffyPacks, said he launched the company in 2015 after his daughter, who teaches fourth grade, told him how frequently her school required her to perform active shooter drills with her students.
Although the company sells some retrofitted backpacks, it specializes in lightweight, removable ballistic shields.
The Level IIIA-rated shields are made of a ballistic-rated synthetic fiber that’s five times stronger than steel, according to the website. The 24-layer inserts last up to five years.
About 95% of the company’s customers are parents and grandparents who buy them for children, Naremore said.
“We always see spikes in sales in the days or weeks after shootings,” he said. TuffyPacks’ sales rose nearly 300% over the past week, according to Naremore.
There’s a mixed reaction from consumers
The weekend’s mass shootings are a painful reminder for parents
Raquel K.W. Donahue decided to purchase a bulletproof insert for her 6-year-old son before he starts first grade. She opted for the insert instead of the pricier backpack because he’ll outgrow a bag quickly, and the insert was marketed to last 20 years, she said.
Donahue is a reference and instruction librarian at Prairie View A&M University in Texas. About an hour and a half away is Santa Fe, Texas, where 10 people were killed at a high school in May 2018; 10 hours away is El Paso, where a gunman killed 22 people at a Wal-Mart on Saturday.
Her campus, like all public college campuses in the state, is legally required to allow adults over 21 who have concealed carry permits to carry a handgun on school grounds.
Gun violence is something she’s thought about fleetingly, she said, but the horror in El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, brought it to the forefront, not just for her son but for her family.
Her brother lives in El Paso, and it wasn’t until Monday that she heard from him and learned that he was uninjured. And with racist sentiment swirling in the state and beyond, being Mexican American has become an “added concern” to gun violence, she said.
“I dislike the additional level of anxiety that’s sort of randomly interjected into my life,” she said.
An uncomfortable truth
“There is the morbidity factor,” Naremore acknowledged of the product’s purpose.
The very existence of a bulletproof backpack forces parents confront an uncomfortable reality, but it’s a conversation many children are having in schools and an essential one for parents who want to protect them, Sheikh said.
“When I was in school, there was no such thing as active shooter drills,” he said. “But times have changed.”
Donahue’s son brought it up first. He came home from an active shooter drill in kindergarten and shared what he’d learned to do if a “bad guy comes to hurt him,” she said.
“He’s worried about things I never dreamed of,” she said. “It makes me sad — and angry.”
She’s had active shooter trainings at work, too. After a 2014 shooting in a library at Florida State University in Tallahassee — the same town where a gunman would kill two women in a yoga studio four years later — Donahue her fellow librarians have planned what they’d do in case of an attack.
“It’s sort of incredible how this is impacting both my personal and professional life.”
Companies like Guard Dog make bulletproof bags for Donahue, too. Although their more popular items are children’s backpacks, they manufacture laptop bags and heavier, larger packs, modeled by men in suits.
Donahue and her son’s father saw the backpack inserts emblazoned with the Avengers and Disney princesses — TuffyPacks stopped selling them after Disney released a statement saying it hadn’t authorized the use of the characters — but they chose a black AR500 Level III bulletproof insert. Unlike the children’s packs sold in Office Depot, her son’s plate can withstand rifle ammunition.
“I think we’re both upset that this is the reality, but we feel it’s important to address the reality,” she said. “It’s not a guarantee, but it’s some measure we can take to feel just a little bit better about sticking him on that school bus every day.”
Photo Credit: pix11.com
Mass Shootings Can Be Contagious, Research Shows
There were three high-profile shootings across the country in one week: The shooting in Gilroy, Calif., on July 28, and then the back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, this past weekend.
That’s no surprise, say scientists who study mass shootings. Research shows that these incidents usually occur in clusters and tend to be contagious. Intensive media coverage seems to drive the contagion, the researchers say.
Back in 2014 and 2015, researchers at Arizona State University analyzed data on cases of mass violence. They included USA Today‘s data on mass killings (defined as four or more people killed using any means, including guns) from 2006 to 2013, data on school shootings between 1998 and 2013, and mass shootings (defined as incidents in which three people were shot, not necessarily killed) between 2005 and 2013 collected by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The lead researcher, Sherry Towers, a faculty research associate at Arizona State University, had spent most of her career modeling the spread of infectious diseases — like Ebola, influenza and sexually transmitted diseases. She wanted to know whether cases of mass violence spread contagiously, like in a disease outbreak.
So, she plugged each data set into a mathematical model.
“What we found was that for the mass killings — so these are high-profile mass killings where there’s at least four people killed — there was significant evidence of contagion,” says Towers. “We also found significant evidence of contagion in the school shootings.”
In other words, school shootings and other shootings with four or more deaths spread like a contagion — each shooting tends to spark more shootings.
“So one happens and you see another few happen right after that,” says Jillian Peterson, a criminologist at Hamline University in Minnesota and founder of the nonpartisan think tank, The Violence Project. She wasn’t involved in the Arizona State research but has found similar patterns in her own research.
Towers and her colleagues also found that what set apart shootings that were contagious was the amount of media coverage they received. “In the incidences where there were four or more people killed, and even school shootings, those tended to get national and even international media attention,” says Towers.
She also found that there is a window when a shooting is most likely to lead to more incidents — about two weeks. Towers and her team published their results in 2015.
It’s a form of social contagion, says Peterson, somewhat like a suicide contagion — that’s when a high-profile suicide leads to more people to take their own lives. For example, following the suicide of actor Robin Williams, researchers documented a 10% spike in suicides in the months following his death. Vulnerable individuals who are already struggling with suicidal thoughts read or watched news reports of the actor’s death and then took their own lives.
Mass shooting contagion is similar, she says.
Peterson has interviewed living mass shooters in prison and people who knew such perpetrators and has found that these individuals often start out feeling suicidal.
“We can show about 80 percent were actively suicidal prior to the shooting,” she says.
Now, the vast majority of people who are suicidal don’t attack others. And people with any kind of mental health problems aren’t more likely to be violent than others. In fact, they are more likely to be victims of violence than those without mental illness.
But Peterson says that in very rare cases, a tiny minority of people considering suicide go down the path of violence toward others. She has come to think of mass shootings as a form of suicide. “They’re angry, horrible suicides that take a lot of people with them,” she says. “The shooter never intends to live; there’s never a getaway plan. Typically they tend to think of this [as] their kind of last moment.”
Other researchers have documented the same in studies of active shooters.
“About half of the school shooters I’ve studied died by suicide in their attack,” Peter Langman, a clinical psychologist in Allentown, Pa., told NPR earlier this year. “It’s often a mix of severe depression and anguish and desperation driving them to end their own lives.”
Vulnerable individuals who are also angry and already considering violence may read or watch the news of a mass shooting and identify with the shooter and be inspired by them.
“So a mass shooting happens and then vulnerable individuals who are actively suicidal and in crisis and hear about the shooting and see this as kind of a script that they could also follow,” she says.
Access to guns and a venue allows them to follow that script.
“There is this element of wanting notoriety in death that you don’t have in life,” Peterson says. “So when one happens and it makes headlines and the names and pictures are everywhere and the whole world is talking about it, that becomes something that other people see as a possibility for themselves.”
Now it’s hard to know yet whether the shooter in Dayton, Ohio, was consciously influenced by the shooter in El Paso, the one in Gilroy, Calif., or another shooting.
But Sherry Towers notes that there’s clear evidence that the shooter in El Paso, Texas, was inspired by the shooting at a mosque in New Zealand back in March.
“It’s in his manifesto that he published online,” says Towers. “He mentions that he wanted to emulate the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooting.”
Peterson and other researchers who study mass shootings think the media should avoid showing the shooters’ images and dwelling on their life histories and motives. “The fact that we give them that notoriety is problematic,” says Peterson.
Article via NPR
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A Louisiana woman reportedly told police the meth found in her vagina was not hers
OUACHITA PARISH, La. – A Louisiana woman reportedly told police she did not know where the meth – found in her vagina – came from, Fox News reported.
Ashley Beth Rolland, 23, was accused July 31 of stealing thousands of dollars from the home of a man she’d been saying with, according to documents from the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The man told West Monroe police Rolland had swiped the cash and left while he was in the shower; Rolland reportedly confirmed that she took the money and left.
According to the documents, a female correctional officer later searched Rolland and found – hidden in her vagina – $6,233 in cash and about one gram of meth. According to Fox News, Rolland denied the meth was hers.
Rolland was arrested and charged with theft and narcotics possession. She remains in jail on an $8,000 bond.
Photo Credit: pix11.com
A Groundbreaking Photo Of Beyoncé Has Been Selected For The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
“See Your Halo” was shot by Tyler Mitchell, the first black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue.
A groundbreaking photograph of Beyoncé has been selected to enter the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
The shot was coordinated for Vogue by Tyler Mitchell, the first black photographer to shoot a cover for the magazine in its 126-year history and one of the youngest photographers to do so.
Mitchell shared the news in a tweet on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for the National Portrait Gallery confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the portrait has been acquired, but is not currently on view to the public.
The museum is still in the planning stages of when the picture will be displayed, the spokesperson said.
Leslie
Ureña, the associate curator of photographs for the gallery, said
staffers were “thrilled to acquire this magnificent portrait.”
“This acquisition will allow us to document a significant shift in the history of fashion photography through the depiction of a key figure in American culture,” Ureña said in an emailed statement.
This will be the second portrait of Beyoncé to enter the museum’s collection, the first being a poster of the singer’s debut album, Dangerously in Love, which is currently not on display.
According to HuffPost, the performer was given an unprecedented amount of control over the September 2018 issue of Vogue, allowing her to be in charge of various details such as the photographer, which eventually opened the door for Mitchell.
In the extended captions that accompanied Mitchell’s photography, Beyoncé explained why she chose to work with the young black photographer.
“Until there is a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnicities behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow approach and view of what the world actually looks like,” she said.
“It’s important to me that I help open doors for younger artists,” she added.
Mitchell, who previously shot for Teen Vogue and Marc Jacobs, told the New York Times that he depicts “black people and people of color in a really real and pure way.”
“There is an honest gaze to my photos,” he said.
Mitchell’s work will join the works of other black photographers featured in the gallery, including Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee, and Augustus Washington.
Article via BuzzFeed
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Long Beach Man Put Hot Stove in Van That Caught Fire, Spreading and Killing Girl Outside Minneapolis Walmart
A 70-year-old man camping in a Walmart parking lot put a hot cook stove in his van, causing it to catch fire and spread to another van, burning two young sisters and killing one of them, authorities in Minneapolis said Wednesday.
Prosecutors charged Roberto Lino Hipolito of Long Beach, California, with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of negligent fire, all felonies.
According to the complaint, Hipolito and his wife slept overnight in their van outside a Walmart in Fridley, Minnesota, a northern Minneapolis suburb. Surveillance video shows Hipolito cooking something on the stove, then putting it in the van before going into the store.
The van caught fire and spread to an adjacent van where police say two girls were alone up to an hour Tuesday morning as their mother shopped at the store.
Six-year-old Ty’rah White died Tuesday night while being treated at HCMC in Minneapolis, Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Daniel Douglas told the Star Tribune. Her 9-year-old sister, Taraji White, remained in critical condition at HCMC on Wednesday evening, a hospital spokeswoman said.
The girls’ mother, 33-year-old Essie McKenzie of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, said Ty’rah was “such a bright kid” with “a huge personality,” and said her daughter “loved people.”
“My baby fought a good fight. She was so strong through the whole process. She was even stronger than I was,” McKenzie told WCCO-TV on Wednesday.
McKenzie told the station she let her daughters keep sleeping in the van while she ran into the store to grab something. The sheriff’s office says McKenzie cooperated with law officers at the scene.
Fire investigators came to a preliminary conclusion that the fire started in the rear of Hipolito’s Dodge Caravan and may have been caused by a cook stove recovered from the van, the complaint said.
When asked about the stove, Hipolito said he had not used it for several days, the complaint said. He later clarified that he had used the stove the previous night.
Video from just before the fire showed Hipolito placing the stove on the pavement by the rear of his van, then using the stove to cook something. After cooking, Hipolito put the stove in the rear of the van, which was driven to a parking spot closer to the store entrance, according to the complaint. Hipolito is seen going into the store, and about 2 minutes later his wife is told by passers-by that the rear of their van was on fire.
“She gets out and tries to remove belongings, but the fire intensifies within thirty seconds of the rear door being opened. Within 3-4 minutes the two vehicles on each side of the van are also on fire, including the one from which the children were ultimately recovered,” the complaint said.
Investigators interviewed Roberto Hipolito again, and he said he had used the stove that morning to cook and then placed it in the rear of his van, according to the complaint. Before moving to the closer parking spot, he said he had tossed pillows and blankets to the rear of the van where the stove was.
Walmart is well known for allowing overnight RV parking at some locations, and the company’s corporate website says it does so “as we are able,” with permission coming from individual store managers. A frequently asked questions section on the company’s website didn’t cover other vehicles. A manager of the Fridley Walmart referred questions to a corporate media relations number, and messages weren’t immediately returned.
Hipolito is scheduled to appear in court Thursday. The Anoka County Attorney’s office says it does not know if he has an attorney who could speak for him.
A GoFundMe page has been started to help the family of the victims.
Photo Credit: Anoka County Jail
Mom, man face murder charge after intentionally leaving disabled girl in hot car
WALTERBORO, S.C. — Authorities say the mother of a 13-year-old girl and a man living with her are charged with murder after intentionally leaving the disabled child inside a hot car for five hours.
A Colleton County Sheriff’s Office report says Rita Pangalangan and Larry King checked on her twice Monday before discovering the doors were locked around 3 p.m., and then went for spare keys. They said she was dead by the time they got the doors unlocked around 4:15 p.m.
The couple was denied bond. It’s not clear if they have lawyers to speak for them.
Pangalangan was the 2014 teacher of the year at Walterboro’s Black Street Early Childhood Center.
Nationally, 26 other children have died in hot vehicles this year, according to https://noheatstroke.org/
Photo Credit: pix11.com
Panic in Times Square after motorcycle backfire mistaken for gunshots
Chaos erupted in Times Square on Tuesday night as people stormed out of the area when a backfiring motorcycle was mistaken for gunshots.
The false alarm took place around 10 p.m. as a loud boom sent tourists darting into restaurants and theaters, disrupting a performance of “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the Shubert Theatre on 44th Street near 7th Avenue.
“Stopped our show tonight due to a motorcycle backfire that was mistaken for a bomb or shooting,” tweeted cast member Gideon Glick.
“Screaming civilians tried to storm our theater for safety… This is the world we live in. This cannot be our world.”
The NYPD was quick to quell the fears, sending out a tweet explaining the false alarm.
“There is no #ActiveShooter in #TimesSquare,” the department’s Midtown North precinct tweeted at 10:09 p.m.
“We are receiving multiple 911 calls. Please don’t panic. The Times Square area is very safe!”
Eight people suffered minor injuries, and six were taken to area hospitals for further treatment, an FDNY spokesman said.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/08/07/panic-in-times-square-after-motorcycle-backfire-mistaken-for-gunshots/
Photo Credit: nypost.com/John Roca
Employee at kids club showed porn to two girls
AMES, Iowa — An Ames resident has been accused of showing pornography to girls under the age of 13 while he worked at the Ames Boys and Girls Club.
Story County court records say 18-year-old Bobby Chase is charged with two misdemeanor counts of showing obscene materials to minors. Jail records show he remained in custody Wednesday. It’s unclear whether he has an attorney who could comment for him.
The court documents say Chase used his phone Monday to show two girls at the club a few seconds of a naked female on a porn website. Erika Peterson is chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Club of Story County, and she says Chase has been fired. He was hired in June as a youth development professional.
Police say Peterson shared the allegations against Chase after a parent of one of the girls reported the incident to Peterson.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/08/07/employee-at-kids-club-showed-porn-to-two-girls-cops/
Photo Credit: Story County Jail