Tag: new york
Girl severely burned by boiling water poured on her at sleepover
NEW YORK — An 11-year-old girl has been severely burned after another girl poured boiling water on her during a sleepover, police said.
Jamoneisha Merritt was at a sleepover at a friend’s home in the Bronx early Monday morning when the attack occurred, police said.
Police said a 12-year-old girl at the sleepover boiled water and then poured it on Merritt while she slept on a couch.
Merritt was taken to a hospital in serious but stable condition. Authorities said the 11-year-old victim suffered second-degree burns to her face, shoulders, neck and chest.
Police said the 12-year-old girl who is accused in the attack has been charged with felony assault.
Merritt’s family is devasted. They said her burns are so bad, they are life-changing and doctors and family members don’t want the child to see herself yet.
Merritt’s cousin said she couldn’t spend too much time in the girl’s hospital room without crying.
“Her and her friend got into an argument and she told her if she go to sleep, they were going to do something to her,” Merritt’s cousin said. “She said she was screaming that she was burning.”
A so-called “hot water challenge” has been proliferating online, apparently pushing people to boil water and toss the scalding liquid on unsuspecting victims.
Last week, an 8-year-old girl in Florida died from her injuries five months after she drank boiling water through a straw on a dare.
via: http://pix11.com/2017/08/10/girl-severely-burned-after-boiling-water-poured-on-her-at-sleepover/
Upstate New York Couple Accused of Killing Adopted Special Needs Son, Setting Fire to Home
Foul play was suspected from the first moments the disabled boy’s body was discovered in the ashes of an upstate New York home.
Jeffrey Franklin, a 16-year-old adopted child with special needs, did not perish in an early-morning blaze that appeared to have started in the wood stove that heated the house in the town of Guilford, about an hour and half southeast of Syracuse, investigators said.
“Early on, almost immediately at the scene that night, some red flags went up,” Chenango County Sheriff Ernest Cutting Jr. said Saturday. “We chose to kind of keep it close to the vest.”
Jeffrey’s adopted parents were indicted on second-degree murder and arson charges Friday — weeks after the March 1 fire that authorities allege they started to cover up the killing.
Ernest Franklin II, 35, and wife Heather, 33, are also accused of tampering with physical evidence but could face additional charges, according to Cutting.
Attorneys for Franklin and his wife did not return calls seeking comment.
Authorities have not said how or when Jeffrey was killed in a case that has stunned the rural south central New York town of about 2,900 residents.
‘Totally reliant on his parents’
“It’s shocking,” Cutting said. “Jeffrey was a handicapped person who was totally reliant on his parents. You would hope in your mind that they would be there for the right reasons and try to take care of this boy. Unfortunately, his life ended brutally.”
The couple adopted Jeffrey six or seven years ago, according to Cutting. Franklin had served in the military; his wife stayed home to care for their adopted son.
“Jeffrey was developmentally challenged,” Cutting said. “He was also physically handicapped — pretty much in a wheelchair.”
Heather Franklin is 28 weeks pregnant, the sheriff said.
Investigators were looking into the possibility that Jeffrey may have been physically abused in the past. The Franklins, who were arrested earlier this week, are being held without bail.
Shortly after the fire, a GoFundMe page created to help the Franklins raised more than $11,000, Cutting said. The page has been taken down and a GoFundMe statement said donors will be refunded their money.
‘Feeling lost without JR’
Sunday morning — days before her arrest — Heather Franklin wrote of her late son on Facebook: “I am still feeling lost without JR to take care of.”
The post said the couple was staying with friends, had found a new home and had set up a gift registry to replace items lost in the fire.
“Many people have asked us what kind of things we need,” she wrote. “We have came up with a list of needs, and, or wants.”
Cutting said the probe of the fire — reported at 1:15 a.m. — became a homicide investigation shortly after Jeffrey’s body was found. He would not elaborate. One of the parents was home at the time.
The Franklins were mostly cooperative until they were recently called in for an interview with investigators, Cutting said.
“They would talk to us initially and it got to the point that he asked for an attorney and the questioning stopped,” the sheriff said. “She talked for a while and … it then became obvious that she wasn’t to cooperate either.”
Woman claims her body brews alcohol, has DUI charge dismissed – suffers from “auto-brewery syndrome”
That’s what happened to an upstate New York woman when she blew a blood alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. Just before Christmas in Hamburg, New York, a judge dismissed the charges after being presented with evidence the woman suffers from “auto-brewery syndrome.”
“I had never heard of auto-brewery syndrome before this case,” attorney Joseph Marusak told CNN on the condition his client’s identity remain anonymous. “But I knew something was amiss when the hospital police took the woman to wanted to release her immediately because she wasn’t exhibiting any symptoms.”
“That prompts me to get on the Internet and see if there is any sort of explanation for a weird reading,” adds Marusak. “Up pops auto-brewery syndrome and away we go.”
“I’m in touch with about 30 people who believe they have this same syndrome, about 10 of them are diagnosed with it,” said Panola College Dean of Nursing Barbara Cordell, who has studied the syndrome for years. “They can function at alcohol levels such as 0.30 and 0.40 when the average person would be comatose or dying. Part of the mystery of this syndrome is how they can have these extremely high levels and still be walking around and talking.”
Extremely rare condition
Also known as gut-fermentation syndrome, this rare medical condition can occur when abnormal amounts of gastrointestinal yeast convert common food carbohydrates into ethanol. The process is believed to take place in the small bowel, and is vastly different from the normal gut fermentation in the large bowel that gives our bodies energy.
First described in 1912 as “germ carbohydrate fermentation,” it was studied in the 1930s and ’40s as a contributing factor to vitamin deficiencies and irritable bowel syndrome. Cases involving the yeast Candida albicans and Candida krusei have popped up in Japan, and in 2013 Cordell documented the case of a 61-year-old man who had frequent bouts of unexplained drunkenness for years before being diagnosed with an intestinal overabundance of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewer’s yeast, the same yeast used to make beer.
It was a beautiful fall afternoon in 2014 when Marusak’s client met her husband at a restaurant for food and drinks. She consumed “four drinks between noon and 6 p.m.” says Marusak, “less than one drink an hour. We hired a local pharmacologist who said that a woman of her size and weight having four drinks in that period of time should be between 0.01 and 0.05 blood alcohol levels.” That would be beneath the legally impaired level of 0.08 BAC in New York state.
And here’s the “crazy thing,” says Marusak. “Her husband drives to meet friends and she is driving home. She gets a flat close to home but doesn’t want to change the tire so keeps on driving. Another driver sees her struggling with the car and calls it in as an accident. So if she hadn’t had that flat tire, she’d not know to this day that she has this condition.”
Because she blew a blood alcohol level of nearly 0.40, police procedure is to take the accused to a hospital, as that level is considered extremely life-threatening.
Instead of allowing his wife to be released as the hospital recommended based on her lack of drunken symptoms, the husband asked for tests to be run. Sure enough, Marusak says, the results showed a blood alcohol level of 0.30, hours and hours after her last drink. That prompted Marusak to do his own sleuthing.
“I hired two physician assistants and a person trained in Breathalyzers to watch her and take blood alcohol levels over a 12-hour period and had it run at the same lab used by the prosecution,” said Marusak. “Without any drinks, her blood level was double the legal limit at 9:15 a.m., triple the limit at 6 p.m. and more than four times the legal limit at 8:30 p.m., which correlates with the same time of day that the police pulled her over.”
Even more strange, says Marusak, is the fact that the woman exhibited no signs of the levels until she reached a blood alcohol level of between 0.30 and 0.40.
“That’s when she started to feel a bit wobbly on her feet.” Marusak explains that by pointing to the world of alcoholism, where the bodies of “functioning alcoholics” adapt to the high levels of booze in their blood.
Even though the Hamburg judge dismissed the case against his client, Marusak says it’s not over yet.
“I’ve heard the DA’s office says they plan to appeal. I’ll know more by the middle of January.”
Assistant Erie County District Attorney Christopher Belling confirmed a review of the judge’s decision is underway but declined to comment further.
In the meantime, Marusak’s client is treating her condition with anti-fungal medications and a yeast-free diet with absolutely no sugar, no alcohol and very low carbs. While that works for some, Cordell says, others relapse or find little relief.
via: http://fox2now.com/2016/01/01/woman-claims-her-body-brews-alcohol-has-dui-charge-dismissed/