3 workers fired at L.A. Fitness after black men kicked out of NJ gym
SECAUCUS, NJ — Three workers at a New Jersey gym were fired after they kicked two black men out and called police on them Monday night, according to an L.A. Fitness employee.
Tshyrad Oates posted now viral videos of his encounter with employees to Facebook. Oates, who was at the gym using a guest pass with a friend who is a member, said a manager at the gym called Secaucus police.
Both men had checked in when they arrived, but employees apparently harassed them, Oates said. About a half hour after they arrived, an employee came over to Oates and told him he had to leave or pay. He said he’d just signed in with her with the guest pass, and then she said it was his friend who did not pay. His friend is a member and has swiped in with a tag when they arrived.
“He felt racially profiled and embarrassed by the harassment of this La Fitness employee in front of other members at the gym,” Oates wrote on Facebook.
The men continued their workout until two police officers showed up and questioned them about their presence in the gym. Oates and his friend explained the situation to them and the gym rescanned Oates’ friend’s member tag, which showed a current active statues.
They went back to working out, but then a manager came over to tell them to leave, Oata said. Then five police officers showed up telling them to leave.
“This La Fitness manager who refused to give us his reason to kicking us out, and refused to give us his name stated that I was banned from the gym and my friend’s gym membership has been terminated effective immediately,” Oates wrote on Facebook. This is ridiculous and the last video sealed the deal.”
In one video, Oates said he and his friend were the only two black people in the gym.
The incident took place the day before Starbucks announced plans to close stores for racial bias training in the wake of the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks.
PIX11 has reached out to L.A. Fitness for a comment, but has not yet heard back.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/04/18/3-workers-fired-at-l-a-fitness-after-black-men-kicked-out-of-nj-gym/
Teacher says he was suspended for making students breakfast during state test
LANCASTER, Pa. – A teacher at a Pennsylvania middle school said he was suspended and expected to lose his job after making breakfast for his students while they took state tests last week.
LancasterOnline.com reports Hand Middle School teacher Kyle Byler brought an electric griddle and made a whole-grain pancake for each student to eat during the test.
Less than 24 hours later, the eighth-grade social studies teacher said he was told the school board would be voting at a Tuesday meeting to decide whether or not to terminate him for causing a distraction during the tests. He was suspended without pay, but the school board said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that “there was never any dismissal action on the Board’s agenda,” and that he’s due back in the classroom this week.
District officials added that “no teacher can be dismissed without the School Board first approving a written notice that offers the opportunity for a School Board hearing, and that step has also not occurred.”
“I don’t understand what I did wrong, to be honest with you. There was no infraction whatsoever,” Byler, 38, told LancasterOnline.com. “At no point was it any distraction for any of the students. They worked their butts off.”
School officials said in the statement that they already provide food for the students, and that “the Pennsylvania Department of Education strictly requires that teachers who proctor PSSA testing focus their full attention on monitoring students during the test.”
Nicole Reigelman, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, told the paper that while no rules are in place to keep teachers from preparing a meal for students during a test, doing so would “likely interfere with ‘actively monitoring’ the assessment, which is a key task.”
Meanwhile, Byler’s students have come to his defense and even protested for two hours outside the school Friday.
Lancaster Education Association President Jason Molloy told the newspaper that the situation should have been handled differently. He said that losing Byler would be “a terrible injustice to his students,” and that many of them are from economically distressed households and often come to school hungry.
“For some, whole-grain pancakes may be the only hot meal they’ve gotten that day,” said Molloy.
See the full response from the school district below:
There is an inaccurate news report that the School Board is scheduled to take action tonight to dismiss a teacher. That is wrong. There was never any dismissal action on the Board’s agenda. In any event, no teacher can be dismissed without the School Board first approving a written notice that offers the opportunity for a School Board hearing, and that step has also not occurred. Nor will it occur in this situation, as the personnel matter has been resolved with the employee, who is scheduled to return to work.
Regarding the incident addressed in the news report, the School District provides a free breakfast and lunch for all students every day, including PSSA testing days. Moreover, the Pennsylvania Department of Education strictly requires that teachers who proctor PSSA testing focus their full attention on monitoring students during the test. All teachers serving as PSSA test proctors receive specific training on testing protocol. Had permission been sought by a teacher to cook in the classroom during PSSA testing and serve food to the students, the response would have been that such activities would distract the teacher from the required duties as a test proctor. PDE has requested information about this incident for its review.
We acknowledge, appreciate and support the many SDoL educators who go above and beyond to meet the needs of our students every day, and we thank the community for advocating on behalf of our students.
Mom uses 12-year-old daughter to smuggle $24,000 worth of cocaine
TUCSON, Ariz. – A mom was busted after she allegedly used her 12-year-old daughter to smuggle $24,000 worth of cocaine.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested the 35-year-old mom on Friday, officials said.
She was driving from the Mexico into the U.S. with her three children in the car when she was stopped, officials said. A customs and border protection canine smelled drugs on the 12-year-old girl.
Officers found more than 2 pounds of cocaine taped to her torso.
CBP officers seized the vehicle and the drugs, then turned the case over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/04/17/mom-uses-12-year-old-daughter-to-smuggle-24000-worth-of-cocaine-cbp/
Parents Of Children Who Were Killed In Sandy Hook Are Suing Alex Jones Over His Conspiracy Theories
Three parents who lost their children in the mass shooting are suing the Infowars host
Infowars host Alex Jones is being sued by the parents of two children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre over his claims that it was a hoax.
Jones’ conspiracy theories led to death threats and “intense emotional anguish,” the parents allege in two separate lawsuits that seek more than $1 million in damages each.
Adam Lanza, 20, shot and killed 20 children and six adults at the Newtown, Connecticut, school in 2012 before turning the gun on himself. In the years since, Jones has aired several segments accusing the parents of the children who were killed of lying and calling them “crisis actors” involved in an elaborate plot.
The lawsuits were filed late Monday in Texas’s Travis County District Court by Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, who lost their 6-year-old son Noah in the shooting, and Neil Heslin, who lost his son Jessie, also 6.
The lawsuits chronicle Jones’ campaign since the shooting, claiming that De La Rosa is a “crisis actor” and urging his audience to not “believe any of it.”
The lawsuit cites an April 2017 segment called “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed” in which Jones talks about an interview De La Rosa did with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Jones claims the interview uses a green screen and that it did not take place at the Edmond Town Hall in Newtown. He also rants about CNN, the Gulf War, the Arab Spring, Libya, and Syria, before circling back to say that CNN and De La Rosa are not to be believed.
“Based on the video footage of the Anderson Cooper interview with Mrs. De La Rosa, Mr. Jones sought to convince his audience that they should not “believe any of it.” the lawsuit states.
Jones’ conspiracy theories have not only caused emotional suffering but resulted in Pozner receiving death threats from an Infowars fan in January 2016, the lawsuit adds.
Florida resident Lucy Richardson sent four voice and email messages to Pozner, with threats, such as “you gonna die, death is coming to you real soon” and “LOOK BEHIND YOU IT IS DEATH,” according to the complaint. She was sentenced in 2017 to five months in prison and three years of supervised release over the threats and is banned from accessing conspiracy theory sites, including Infowars.
The other lawsuit, filed by Heslin, focuses on Jones’ claim that the father was lying when he told Megyn Kelly in a June 2017 interview that he had held his son’s dead body and seen the bullet hole in his head.
“I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head,” he responded when asked to about Jones’ claims.
Jones and Infowars correspondent Owen Shroyer, who is also named as a defendant in Heslin’s lawsuit, then aired a segment in which Shroyer claimed that Heslin couldn’t have held his child because bodies were identified through photo identification after the shooting.
“The statement [Plaintiff] made, fact-checkers on this have said cannot be accurate. He’s claiming that he held his son and saw the bullet hole in his head. That is his claim. Now, according to a timeline of events and a coroner’s testimony, that is not possible,” Shroyer said on the show.
“You would remember if you held your dead kid in your hands with a bullet hole. That’s not something you would just misspeak on,” he added.
The bodies of Sandy Hook victims were released to their families for burial after the initial photo-based identification.
“This heartless and vile act of defamation re-ignited the Sandy Hook ‘false flag’ conspiracy and tore open the emotional wounds that Plaintiff has tried so desperately to heal,” the lawsuit states.
In November 2016, Jones aired a segment titled “Alex Jones Final Statement on Sandy Hook,” but continued to repeat his conspiracy theories into 2017.
“By making renewed accusations about the plaintiffs in 2017, Infowars breathed new life into this conspiracy and caused intense emotional anguish and despair,” the lawsuit states.
Jones, Shroyer, Free Speech Systems, and Infowars did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“For the last five-and-a-half years since they have had to bury their children, Infowars and Alex Jones have repeatedly and continuously called them liars, called them crisis actors, and have made them re-live what they’ve had to go through. As a parent, it takes a toll on you,” Bill Ogden, an attorney representing the parents in both cases, told BuzzFeed News.
Ogden’s law firm, Farrar & Ball, is also representing Marcel Fontaine, a man suing Jones and Infowars for defamation after the site falsely identified him as the attacker in the Parkland school shooting.
“The First Amendment has restrictions on it. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a movie theatre, you can’t incite a riot,” Ogden said. “You don’t have the right to just make up anything you want, especially as a news outlet, which they count themselves as the truth of journalism and truth media. You can’t just make up something that’s going to damage people this way and not expect consequences.”
Another man, Brennan Gilmore, is also suing Jones in a separate defamation claim after Infowars published conspiracy theories about him being an “operative of the Deep State” because he captured on video the moment a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, allegedly plowed his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters last year, killing one and injuring dozens.
Scientists can’t explain why diplomats in Cuba are suffering from ‘traumatic brain injury’
For two years, diplomats posted to Cuba have been suffering a mysterious illness.
They say they have heard painful, high-pitched noises and lost their hearing. “Some were asleep and awakened by the sound, even as others sleeping in the same bed or room heard nothing,” the Associated Press reported. Scores have reported headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty concentrating.
Douglas Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, evaluated 24 affected Americans. He said his patients looked “exactly like the patients we would see in a concussion clinic,” according to the CBC.
His team has found “perceptible changes in [the] brains” of the victims, including changes to the “white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate.” But none reported blows to the head.
Many of the victims reported trouble processing information. Some said they could not remember things anymore and struggled to come up with the right words when writing or speaking.
The symptoms have struck 24 Americans and 10 Canadians, including some minors. So far, investigators have not found their cause.
Initially, investigators suspected some kind of sonic attack. But they found little evidence of that. And scientists say acoustic waves have never been shown to alter the way the brain works. There has been suspicion that the ailment is something like a mass hysteria. But doctors say the changes to the brain that they see rule that out. They suspect it is a medical condition, though environmental assessments have yielded few clues.
14-year-old mom charged in murder of baby boy in NJ
HIGHLAND PARK, NJ — Police arrested and charged a 14-year-old mom in the death of her newborn baby boy, whose body was found outside of a Highland Park home on Monday, officials with the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said.
The baby’s death is being investigated by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the Highland Park Police Department.
His mother is from Highland Park. Her identity is being withheld because of her age. She was charged in a juvenile complaint with murder in the first degree.
Officials said she “caused the death of her newborn baby boy,” but did not immediately offer any additional details.
An autopsy by the Middlesex County Medical Examiner will be scheduled.
The baby’s death is the second in New Jersey in the last week. A baby was found dead in a suitcase left near PATH tracks in Jersey City on April 11.
Police also found a baby boy alive in a duffel bag in Trenton on Sunday. Officials are asking for the public’s help to find the baby’s family.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/04/16/newborns-body-found-in-highland-park/
Instagram model destroys eyes in cosmetic surgery gone wrong – changing eye color from brown to light grey
Nadinne Bruna, a 32-year-old Instagram model who has more than a million followers, has the eyesight of a 90-year-old after undergoing a controversial procedure: She had silicone implanted in her peepers to change her eye color from brown to light gray.
“Before this surgery, my eyes were completely healthy,” Bruna, who’s based in Miami, tells South West News Service. “My pupils, they can’t adjust to light anymore, so I’m very photosensitive now too. This surgery completely f–ked up my life.”
Retinal implants are illegal to perform in the United States and not approved by the FDA. Ophthalmologists say that they can cause irreparable damage.
“The implants interfere with normal fluid leaving the eyes, which causes scarring, increases pressure and damages the nerves permanently,” Dr. Richard Rose, retina surgeon at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, tells The Post. And he’s heard of Americans going to Central and South America to have the procedure. “There are definitely some patients I’ve seen that do OK with them, but I’ve also seen some real disasters.”
It was a risk that Bruna was willing to take. In September 2016, she flew to Bogota, Colombia, to have the procedure, where she was charged a discounted rate of $3,000 in exchange for posting her results on Instagram.
But the procedure damaged her optic nerves, and she ended up with glaucoma, an incurable eye condition that can gradually cause blindness. On top of that, her eyes were constantly red and itchy for a year, and she had to stop booking modeling jobs because of her condition.
“I make most of my money through my Instagram account and I couldn’t do photo shoots,” she says. “I’ve been living on my savings.”
She had the implants removed in Miami in September, but the damage was already done.
“Nadinne’s eye problems are something she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. She’s never going to be done with it,” ophthalmologist Dr. Ranya Habash, who performed the implant-removal surgery on Bruna at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, tells the Daily Mail.
Dr. Eugenio Cabrera, the Colombian doctor who performed the surgery, did not comment on the procedure.
If you want to switch up your eye color without destroying your vision, Rose suggests colored contact lenses.
“They’re safe, approved and you can take them out,” Rose says.
Ultimately, the surgical nightmare was a learning moment for Bruna.
“I was completely stupid. I trusted the wrong person,” she says. “I don’t think surgeries are bad. I just didn’t know the risks and I made a mistake by not doing my research.”
via: https://nypost.com/2018/04/12/instagram-model-destroys-eyes-in-cosmetic-surgery-gone-wrong/
Substitute teacher ran ‘fight club’ during math class
MONTVILLE, Conn. – A former substitute teacher was arrested Thursday for starting a “fight club” at a Connecticut high school, according to police.
Instead of supervising Montville High School students as they studied, 23-year-old Ryan Fish is accused of encouraging students in his class to fight while others watched.
Fish was arraigned in Norwich Superior Court Thursday on four counts of second-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of risk of injury to a minor and one count of breach of peace, according to the Hartford Courant.
“I didn’t realize what was happening at the time,” said Ryan Fish. “I didn’t have the training to know what was going on.”
State police believe otherwise.
“He’s not a certified teacher,” said Montville Resident State Trooper Sargent Mark Juhola. “It bothers me that so many teachers work so hard to get where they are and that this wasn’t a teacher but he was in that role.”
Juhola said Fish oversaw at least three scheduled fights last October involving five male students ages 14 to 16 .
Montville police began investigating after an injured student told a social worker he’d been beaten and robbed at school.
Police said cellphone video shows Fish encouraging the students and moving items out of the way so the teenagers could continue fighting.
After being confronted about the fighting on October 10th, 2017, police said Fish told the principal that “boys will be boys.”
Montville Public Schools Superintendent Brian Levesque fired Fish later that day.
But Sgt. Juhola said school officials never contacted police and only acknowledged the incident during the police investigation.
“Anytime a student is put in any type of injurious situation they need to contact the police department,” Juhola said.
Fish told WTIC that he was wrong, and was just trying to be friends with the students.
“I am so sorry…To be perfectly honest I was just trying to reach the kids. I thought these kids were just being rambunctious I just thought they needed an out.”
Students also told police Fish allowed them to draw lewd photos on the classroom board and admitted to doing drugs.
Fish was released on a promise to appear and is due back in court on May 8th.
via: http://pix11.com/2018/04/12/substitute-teacher-ran-fight-club-during-math-class-police-say/
Man charged with incest kills 3, including daughter and their baby, before turning gun on himself
NEW MILFORD, Conn. — A man accused of impregnating his biological daughter allegedly killed her, their infant son, and her adoptive father before turning the gun on himself in an apparent murder-suicide spanning three states, including New York, according to his defense attorney.
Steven Walter Pladl, 42, and Katie Rose Pladl, 20, were charged with incest after Katie gave birth to their son in September 2017.
On Thursday, officers found the first body at 106 Earlston Court in North Carolina, where 7-month-old Bennett Pladl was discovered dead around 9 a.m. Police made the grisly find while performing a welfare check, according to Knightdale Chief of Police Lawrence Capps.
Then, police found a man and a woman shot to death in a pickup truck in New Milford, Connecticut, after a passerby reported the shooting, according to WTIC. The victims were identified as Katie Pladl and her adoptive father, 56-year-old Anthony Fusco, Capps said at a press conference Thursday.
Steven Pladl was found dead just miles away in Dover, New York, in a light blue mini-van with North Carolina registration. According to Lieutenant Larry Ash, spokesperson for New Milford Police, they found the murder suspect with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators are working to establish a timeline of events.
The relationship between Pladl and Katie began when they met as adults. He and former wife, Alyssa, gave birth to Katie 20 years ago, when Alyssa was 17 years old.
Alyssa and Pladl, who was 22 at the time, opted to put the baby up for adoption. Eighteen years later, Katie located her biological parents on social media — who lived in Henrico County, Va. She later moved in with them, and called the pair mom and dad, WTVR reported.
Before Katie moved into Alyssa and Pladl’s Virginia home, she lived in New York with her adoptive parents, Kelly and Anthony Fusco. Katie, an artist, said in her online portfolio that she planned to attend Dutchess Community College in August 2016 and focus in online advertising.
But instead, she moved to Virginia and a short while later, Alyssa and Pladl separated with the intent to divorce.
Alyssa said she had no idea about the sexual relationship between Pladl and Katie until she read one of her other daughter’s journals where she found drawings of a pregnant Katie, WTVR reported. She also said her daughter had written that Pladl was making her call Katie her step-mom.
“There are no words to describe the sense of betrayal and disgust I’m feeling,” she told DailyMailTV. “I waited 18 long years to have a relationship with my daughter – and now he’s completely destroyed it.”
Alyssa later took out protective orders against Pladl, so he could not go near her or their two younger daughters. She said she believed Pladl brainwashed and manipulated Katie.
Pladl and Katie reportedly married in July 2017 and their son was born a few months later, in September. The arrest warrant indicated that the couple intended to marry after he was divorced in June 2017 and online pictures were captioned as wedding photos between the couple.
“I too have seen postings that they were married, my guess would be that it would not be legal under North Carolina or Virginia law for two people who are biologically related to get married,” Friedman said.
In addition to the incest charge, Steven and Katie were charged with two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
On March 16, Pladl, who was released on an amended bond by Henrico County Judge Stewart Williams, was not allowed contact with Katie Pladl or his two children who live in Henrico. As a condition of his bond, he could no longer reside at the 106 Earlston Court home he shared with Katie, where the infant was found dead Thursday.
Katie, age 20, was also previously jailed in Henrico after the couple was extradited to Virginia. She was released on Feb. 28, with a $12,000 secured bond and ordered to avoid contact with Pladl. The conditions of her release were that she must reside with her adoptive parents, who live in New York, and was allowed to travel outside of state.
“My understanding is that when Katie Pladl and Steven Pladl were arrested, that my client’s mother moved into that house to take care of their biological son,” said Rick A. Friedman II, the Chesterfield defense attorney who was represented Steven Pladl.
He believed that Pladl’s mother was going to continue to reside with the minor child. North Carolina authorities said that she contacted police for the welfare check Thursday, the morning after Pladl picked up his son from her care.
“If any judge or any prosecutor or defense attorney involved in any of these cases believed that the Pladl child would be in harm’s way, there would not have been any bond,” Friedman said. “The professionals care too much about children.”
Mom arrested for leaving her three young children home alone for weekend trip to Texas
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. – An Oklahoma City mother is accused of leaving her three young kids home alone while she went on a trip to Texas to meet a man.
“It’s not even worth it. Your kids should be your first priority,” neighbor De’Votnay Linzy told KFOR.
A police report says Shelly Harjo allegedly left her three children, ages 3, 4, and 11, home alone for the weekend, and that her priority was getting to Texas.
“She had been left there apparently for several days. All they had to eat was old pizza that had been purchased before the mom left town,” said MSgt. Gary Knight.
Knight said the 11-year-old child called police Monday because she thought her mom was missing. Harjo left for Texas on Friday and was supposed to return Sunday.
“She indicated to the daughter that she was going to Texas to get some money,” Knight said.
Linzy says it’s a poor excuse to leave your kids home alone.
“These kids are very precious and you shouldn’t leave the bigger one to watch the little ones, or the little ones to watch the big ones,” she said.
Police arrived to the south side apartment and gave the kids something to eat while notifying DHS.
“It was at that point the mother actually showed back up there at the residence,” said Knight.
Harjo told DHS officials that her friend was supposed to watch the kids that weekend and never showed up.
Limzy said leaving her kids alone is never an option.
“Not even out of town or even to the store,” she said.
The kids were placed in DHS custody. The children told officers they lived in the apartment for a month and haven’t been enrolled in school yet.
Harjo was arrested on child neglect charges.