It comes after a 16-year-old boy confessed to pulling the trigger and killing Lane, according to police chief Danny Ford.
Chief Ford said the 16-year-old was with two other teens aged 15 and 17 when they killed Lane during a random drive-by shooting in the town of Duncan.
He said the three teenagers had no motive other than to make a name for themselves.
All three are facing the charge of first-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of the death penalty.
Chief Ford told 3AW this morning one of the accused has confessed to pulling the trigger, saying he just wanted to kill someone.
"Lately there has been some pretty weak motives, but I don’t know that I’ve had one that they told us they were just going to kill somebody," he said.
He said the three teens were on a "killing spree" after , leaving a chilling message on Facebook.
Peter Lane said his son had left his mark and his death was just so pointless.
(snip)
Chief Ford said the teens drove to another house to murder a second unrelated victim just hours after shooting Lane in the back and leaving him to die in an upper-class area of Duncan at 2.57pm local time Friday (5.57am Saturday Melbourne time).
"They wanted to be Billy Bob Badasses," Chief Ford said.
"I think they were on a killing spree.
"We would have had more bodies that night if we didn't get them."
On one of the alleged killer's Facebook pages investigators said they found the message: "Bang. Two drops in two hours".
The accused are in custody in Stephens County Jail, awaiting formal murder charges expected on Monday local time.
Earlier, Chief Ford said one of the teens had been co-operating.
"He said, ‘Yeah, we did it but I’m not going to tell you who pulled the trigger’," he said.
One of the alleged murderers was Caucasian, the other two were black, Chief Ford said.
Lane, 22, grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne’s north and was in the US on a sports scholarship.
He was jogging through an area of "high dollar homes" after leaving the home of his American girlfriend, Sarah Harper, when he was followed and shot at the intersection of Country Club Rd and Twilight Beach Rd.
I'll bet Rusty Domingue is sooooo pissed off right now.“He’s not a guy that has had constant bad behavior,” Miles said of Hill. “Obviously he’s had a lack of judgment and bad behavior in these two instances. But the reality is we all see him around here as a good person.”YEAH, and John Wilkes Booth was a mensch except for that one instance of bad behavior and lack of judgment. If Hill had just blocked a field goal attempt by No. 1 Nebraska to preserve a 6-6 tie just like the star-crossed Domingue, the judge may have sentenced the Tiger sophomore to 60 minutes with an underage girl.
Miles’ decision to reinstate the sophomore running back came early Monday evening and ends a three-month exile for Hill, who was suspended from the team after he punched a fellow student outside a Tigerland bar in April. He pleaded guilty to simple battery last month but faced up to six months in jail for violating probation in a 2012 case in which he pleaded guilty as a high school senior to carnal knowledge of a minor.TRUST ME, telling someone in Louisiana "to refrain from all other criminal conduct" is stern, indeed. Probably cruel and unusual punishment.
Hill returned to practice Monday afternoon, the first day of preseason workouts for the Tigers. Miles said there will be “further punishment” for Hill but did not give specifics.
Miles also would not say whether Hill will be suspended from any of LSU’s games in the upcoming season.
“I’m going to kind of review, and make a quality call as best I can,” Miles said.
Earlier in the day, State District Judge Bonnie Jackson lectured Hill and not only added a special condition — 40 hours of community service at the Bishop Ott Center — to the two years of probation she gave him in January 2012, but also issued a stern warning.
“You are to refrain from all other criminal conduct,” the judge told Hill, who wore a dark suit and purple tie as he stood next to his attorney, Marci Blaize.
A cavalcade of 28 black and white hearses rolled through Baton Rouge on Sunday as the mostly local group of funeral directors made a statement to residents about the pervasive violence in the city.
Charles Muse, president of the Baton Rouge Funeral Directors and Morticians Association, said he helped to organize the “Stop the Violence and Live” motorcade because he’s tired of the violence.
“There’s so much violence now and we are trying to show the public that we are concerned about the violence going on,” Muse said. “We’re looking down in the caskets on too many young people that are being gunned down.”
The hour-long motorcade, sponsored by Muse’s organization, began at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church on Scenic Highway at 2 p.m.
Visitors to the church were greeted with a large sign in front that said, “Put down the gun and pick up a Bible” upon entering the parking lot.
The procession took a circuitous route through the northern part of the city as well as downtown before heading to Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church on Robinson Sr. Drive where the procession ended.
(snip)
Jonathan Rose Sr., owner and general manager of Desselle Funeral Home, said he would be happy to change jobs.
“If … the young people would find a way to stop killing one another, and I had to find a new job, I would be fine with that,” Rose said.
Prosecutors dropped charges on Tuesday against a Mississippi man accused of sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama, a senator and a state judge, according to court documents.
The surprise decision came hours after Paul Kevin Curtis was released from a Mississippi jail on bond.
Prosecutors said the "ongoing investigation has revealed new information," but provided no additional details, according to the court order dismissing the charges.
Curtis told reporters he respected Obama. "I would never do anything to pose a threat to him or any other U.S. official," he said. "I love this country."
He said he had no idea what ricin was. "I thought they said 'rice,' I told them I don't eat rice," he said.
Curtis, who is 45 and known in Mississippi as an Elvis impersonator, had been released from jail on bond earlier on Tuesday after a judge indefinitely postponed a court hearing on his detention. The case was later dismissed "without prejudice," meaning the charges could be potentially reinstated if warranted.
Later on Tuesday federal law enforcement officials searched the house of a second Mississippi man, Everett Dutschke, Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson told Reuters.
It was not clear if the search was related to the ricin case.
A representative for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Oxford, Mississippi, did not return calls for comment.
Dutschke is "cooperating fully" with the FBI, his attorney Lori Nail Basham told the Northeastern Mississippi Daily Journal. Dutschke has not been charged in the ricin case, she said.
(snip)
Christi McCoy, Curtis's attorney, told CNN she believed her client had been framed.BACK at the jailhouse, Nos. 47 and 3 couldn't be reached for comment on the Man Who Would Be the King's sudden release. According to fellow inmates Shifty Henry and Bugs, they were otherwise occupied.
"I do believe that someone who was familiar and is familiar with Kevin just simply took his personal information and did this to him," McCoy told CNN. "It is absolutely horrific that someone would do this."
Curtis was arrested on April 17 at his home in Corinth, Mississippi. He was charged with mailing letters to Obama, Republican U.S. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Sadie Holland containing a substance that preliminarily tested positive for ricin, a highly lethal poison made from castor beans.
Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer on Friday temporarily reassigned an officer involved in the arrest of three men whose relatives allege the use of excessive force by police.
Schmaderer, who also ordered an internal investigation, and other police officials watched a video of the arrest posted on YouTube, according to a police statement issued Friday.
The video shows officers near 33rd and Seward Streets just before 5:30 p.m. Thursday.
Officers were there to investigate a parking complaint. The incident quickly escalated, with about a dozen police vehicles responding. It ended with the arrest of three brothers.
Police and a family member gave different accounts of what happened.
Officers said they were impounding vehicles with expired license plates when Octavious Johnson, 28, pulled up at a high rate of speed in front of the officers.
Johnson was “argumentative and aggressive'' and had to be wrestled to the ground by an officer to be arrested, according to a police report.
The video shows another officer assisted in subduing and handcuffing Johnson. Later, it appears that one officer strikes Johnson three times.
Officers also can be heard on the video yelling at a second man on the sidewalk.
After that man — Juaquez Johnson, Octavious's 23-year-old brother — went inside a nearby house, several officers raced after him. Officers came back outside with him and the third brother, Demetrius Johnson, 22.OF COURSE, we don't know exactly what happened here. And, of course the local police union wants everybody to hold their horses . . . and withhold judgment.
The police report indicates the officers who initially responded were Matthew Worm, Dyea Rowland and Bradley Canterbury, though the specific role each played was not clear. None was placed on administrative leave. One of the officers was reassigned until the investigation concludes, a police spokeswoman said. She declined to identify the officer.
Sharon Johnson, the men's aunt, told The World-Herald that Juaquez Johnson had been filming the incident as it unfolded and was told by police to stop. He ran inside the house to get away from them, and they followed to get the video, she said.
Juaquez Johnson didn't post the video on YouTube. The video posted there was shot by a neighbor from an upstairs window across the street.
Sharon Johnson, 45, who uses a wheelchair, said as one officer ran onto the front porch he knocked into her. She said the wheelchair fell backward, and she hit her head.
“My legs were up in the air, and my head hit the ground,” Johnson said. She said the family planned to file a formal complaint with the Police Department.
So, how now does the ledger read, 10 years on? What is history’s present verdict on what history has come to call Bush’s war?THERE'S NOT really anything to add to this, is there? Except that a lot of us -- me included -- should have learned our lesson after Vietnam. But no . . . we f***ed up. We trusted our government.
Of the three goals of the war, none was achieved. No weapon of mass destruction was found. While Saddam and his sons paid for their sins, they had had nothing at all to do with 9/11. Nothing. That had all been mendacious propaganda.
Where there had been no al-Qaida in Iraq while Saddam ruled, al-Qaida is crawling all over Iraq now. Where Iraq had been an Arab Sunni bulwark confronting Iran in 2003, a decade later, Iraq is tilting away from the Sunni camp toward the Shia crescent of Iran and Hezbollah.
What was the cost in blood and treasure of our Mesopotamian misadventure? Four thousand five hundred U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded and this summary of war costs from Friday’s Wall Street Journal:
“The decade-long [Iraq] effort cost $1.7 trillion, according to a study … by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Fighting over the past 10 years has killed 134,000 Iraqi civilians … . Meanwhile, the nearly $500 billion in unpaid benefits to U.S. veterans of the Iraq war could balloon to $6 trillion” over the next 40 years.
Iraq made a major contribution to the bankrupting of America.
As for those 134,000 Iraqi civilian dead, that translates into 500,000 Iraqi widows and orphans. What must they think of us?
According to the latest Gallup poll, by 2-to-1, Iraqis believe they are more secure — now that the Americans are gone from their country.
Left behind, however, is our once-sterling reputation. Never before has America been held in lower esteem by the Arab peoples or the Islamic world. As for the reputation of the U.S. military, how many years will it be before our armed forces are no longer automatically associated with such terms as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions and waterboarding?
As for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christian communities of Iraq who looked to America, they have been ravaged and abandoned, with many having fled their ancient homes forever.
We are not known as a reflective people. But a question has to weigh upon us. If Saddam had no WMD, had no role in 9/11, did not attack us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us, was our unprovoked attack on that country a truly just and moral war?
Baton Rouge police found the body of a male late Saturday after responding to a call of shots fired on Geronimo Street, a news release says.
Officers received the call about 11:45 p.m. Saturday that shots were being fired on Geronimo Street, near Mohican Street, Capt. Dwayne Bovia said in the news release.
They found the body of a black male in a grassy area in the 3800 block of Geronimo Street, the release says.
Police did not provide the name or any other information about the victim.
JUST ANOTHER nothing story about the mundane destruction of human life and entire worlds. Entire worlds? Yes, entire worlds.
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| Tyree Bell |
An Omaha man was mentally ill and suicidal when he pointed two guns at police from his front porch, prompting four officers to open fire in the early hours of New Year's Day.
Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said Wednesday that one of the man's guns turned out to be a pellet gun; the other was unloaded. But police couldn't determine that until Tyree Bell, 31, had been killed in the Police Department's second officer-involved shooting in five weeks.
“We still have to treat that weapon as being loaded,” Schmaderer said.
The standoff at 3727 N. 42nd St. began at 4:11 a.m. Tuesday with Bell holed up in the house with his girlfriend and twin 3-year-olds. The children's mother escaped as officers arrived to investigate a domestic disturbance involving an armed person. Bell later let his daughter run to the safety of officers who surrounded the house.
After nearly two hours of negotiating, an armed Bell emerged from the house – his son in his arms to serve as a human shield.
Officers “were in peril, as they could take no action for fear of harming the 3-year-old,” Schmaderer said.
It was about 6:20 a.m. Bell had become more agitated, Schmaderer said.
He returned to the house, put his son down and reappeared on the front porch, pointing both guns at police, the chief recounted. That's when the officers fired “numerous” times at Bell, Schmaderer said.
Bell died of multiple gunshot wounds shortly after he arrived at Creighton University Medical Center. His son was unharmed; he toddled out of the house after the shooting and was swooped up by an officer.
Bell at no time attempted to surrender, the chief said. Alcohol and drugs likely compounded his suicidal behavior, Schmaderer said.
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| Frame from video recorded by a police-cruiser camera |
Levette Spracher’s new year starts with the unthinkable.
“It wasn't right,” Spracher said. She talked to KETV Newswatch 7’s Natalie Glucklich just hours after her fiancé, Tyree Bell, 31, was shot by Omaha police during an armed confrontation.
Spracher says early Tuesday morning, she and Bell had an argument and, for Bell, a painful discussion about the future.
"He cried and I [could] see it in his eyes, it's like, he was giving up,” said Spracher. “I mean, I actually looked and I felt his pain; he was giving up.”
Spracher says her fiancé struggled with depression and schizophrenia. He’d been convicted of terroristic threats and assault, among other crimes. Spracher says Bell assumed the worst after someone called police to their house near 42nd and Pratt.
“He was like, ‘Man, they’re going to kill me, they're going to kill me,'" said Spracher. “I was like, ‘No, they're not, no, they're not.'"
Spracher says she ran outside to tell officers her fiancé was armed with a shotgun.
“I said, ‘It’s not loaded,'" said Spracher. “It wasn't loaded.”
But we, as a nation, we are left with some hard questions. Someone once described the joy and anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your body all the time, walking around. With their very first cry, this most precious, vital part of ourselves -- our child -- is suddenly exposed to the world, to possible mishap or malice. And every parent knows there is nothing we will not do to shield our children from harm. And yet, we also know that with that child’s very first step, and each step after that, they are separating from us; that we won’t -- that we can’t always be there for them. They’ll suffer sickness and setbacks and broken hearts and disappointments. And we learn that our most important job is to give them what they need to become self-reliant and capable and resilient, ready to face the world without fear.
And we know we can’t do this by ourselves. It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself. That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation. And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.
This is our first task -- caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.
And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children -- all of them -- safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know that they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?
I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change.
Since I’ve been President, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by a mass shooting. The fourth time we’ve hugged survivors. The fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims. And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and big cities all across America -- victims whose -- much of the time, their only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law -- no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society.
But that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely, we can do better than this. If there is even one step we can take to save another child, or another parent, or another town, from the grief that has visited Tucson, and Aurora, and Oak Creek, and Newtown, and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that -- then surely we have an obligation to try.
-- President Barack Obama,
speaking at a Sunday night
memorial in Newtown, Conn.
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| Emilie Parker and dad |
The reductions mark the fifth year of budget cuts in the middle of the fiscal year. The trimming started at the end of the governor’s first year in office, coinciding with a rare snowfall in Baton Rouge.
For the latest round of cuts, the governor was able to fill the gap without needing legislators’ approval. Nichols outlined a combination of spending cuts, found money and streamlining savings to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget.
Among the deepest cuts were at the state Department of Health and Hospitals and the state Department of Children and Family Services.
Doctors, hospitals, mentally ill patients, pregnant women and dying patients will be affected by the state’s financial problems.
State Sen. Sharon Broome, D-Baton Rouge, complained that the reductions affect departments that deal with the state’s most fragile residents. “I hope we can see these reductions with faces on them,” she told Nichols.
Nichols said the administration avoided across-the-board reductions that would have dealt heavier cuts to health care and higher education. Instead, she said, the governor made cuts and drew in dollars from a legal settlement, a prison closure and a self insurance fund.
Higher education received $22 million in reductions. Nichols said that is softened by tuition increases producing more money than expected.
Other reductions include:
- Contract reductions for health care providers who help the poor, the mentally ill and the drug-addicted.
- A 1 percent cut in the rate that doctors and hospitals are paid by the state to care for the poor.
- The elimination of dental benefits for pregnant women relying on the state for health care.
Additionally, the administration will use money in a maintenance fund to operate state parks. Domestic violence victims will move into hotels or seek shelter with their families, reducing the cost of residential care. Some children at risk for mental illness might not receive treatment.
- Possibly laying off 63 state government workers.
Several legislators zeroed in on the hospice program cut.
State Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, said the cut amounts to the state not assisting people on their death beds unless they are in a nursing home.
“That’s pretty rough,” Claitor said.
Fallen child of God that I am -- no angel am I . . . no way -- the first thing I wanted for the killer of 6-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary School was for vengeance to be wrought upon him. I envisioned a .45 caliber handgun, and some administrator of God's wrath shooting off one of his digits at a time, until none were left.
The Quicky's convenience store in Mid-City takes its parking lot rules seriously. Very seriously.
About 4 p.m. Friday, New Orleans paramedics rushed inside the store for a man with a life-threatening medical issue.
They worked on the patient with chest pain, put him inside the vehicle, then started to speed off.
The paramedics “heard a loud noise,” and the vehicle came to a screeching halt, according to Jeb Tate, spokesman for New Orleans Emergency Medical Services.
The medics stepped out and found a boot on their ambulance.
Convenience store employees allegedly put a restrictive parking boot on the ambulance. And now it was stuck.
The paramedics were perplexed.
Tate said the ambulance had its emergency lights on the whole time.
Store employees didn’t want to talk about it. They declined requests for comment.
Apparently one of the employees took the boot off. The tire was left flat.
And so the paramedics and the man with the emergency waited.
“We actually had to delay that patient's care by calling another ambulance out here to come transport this patient,” Tate said.
The man who booted the ambulance was a Quicky’s convenience store employee and New Orleans Police cited him for simple criminal damage to property for putting the boot on the ambulance.SO, do you need any more proof that New Orleans is not of this country, if indeed of this world? It's not just anywhere that you will find such a perfect storm of abject stupidity plus people always, always on the make and looking for somebody, anybody to shake down.
Eyewitness News saw workers continuing to boot cars in their parking lot Monday morning. A worker at Quicky's convenience store said the employee, identified in a police report as Ahmed Sidi Aleywa, who booted a working ambulance Friday has been fired.
“The guy that did this, he came from another country. He didn't even know what an ambulance looked like. He's been fired,” said Ali Colone, a man identified as a worker at Quicky’s. The owners declined to comment, but Colone said the owners are sorry it happened.
“We just have rules and regulations that we have to follow by. There are signs out here for our regular customers,” Colone said.
Those rules and regulations are self-imposed. Quicky’s parking lot is private property. Signs posted read, “If you leave the property your vehicle will be booted."
Akesha Allen is a private investigator and in September, she stopped to get a drink at Quicky's. Before getting out, she climbed to the back of the van to secure her equipment when it started shaking.
“I said, what are you doing? I'm not illegally parked. He goes, yes you are. You didn't pay the fee. I said I never got out of the van to pay the fee,” Allen said about a $5 charge for parking in the lot.
They gave her a sheet that said she owed them $120 to remove the boot.
“We had to come out there with cash. They wouldn't take a check,” said Mark Avery, Allen’s employer at Deep South Investigations.
Of course, then there was the Utah one in June and some others last year. To put this recent phenomenon in sociological terms . . . WTF, dude?JUSTICE doesn't always happen as we expect, or by ordinary legal means, but it usually occurs. One way or another. On earth or in the great beyond.A 29-year-old man killed in a confrontation with Omaha police officers early Sunday near 30th and Pratt Streets was on a 48-hour furlough from the Community Corrections Center of Lincoln.
Jermaine Lucas of Omaha began serving five to eight years in the Nebraska Department of Corrections on Dec. 7, 2010, for being a felon in possession of a gun. Robert Houston, the director of the Nebraska Department of Corrections, said Lucas started his 11th furlough on Friday.
Houston said it's a rare occurrence for an inmate to run into trouble with the law while on an unsupervised release.
(snip)
Lucas was no stranger to police and had a long arrest record. Police have said in the past that they believed him to be a member of the 29th Street Bloods gang.
In 2006, Lucas and another suspected 29th Street Bloods member, Jimmy Levering, were charged in connection with the fatal shooting of Kenny Miller, 24, outside a convenience store at 24th Street and Redick Avenue.
Levering was charged as the shooter, and Lucas was accused of driving Levering from the scene.
Prosecutors said charges against both men were dropped after witnesses, fearing retaliation, refused to testify.
In 2010, Levering was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for being a felon in possession of ammunition after police found him with two .45-caliber bullets during a Jan. 29 traffic stop. He died in May 2011 after being shot in the head outside the Club Seville at 30th and Pratt Streets.
LIKEWISE, you may be wondering why I didn't point out that the Register's uncritical, incurious interview wasn't terribly surprising, being that Groeschel was a marquee personality for the Eternal Word Television Network, and that EWTN is owner of the newspaper. Or why I didn't express my bemusement at why EWTN, in announcing Groeschel's "retirement" from television Monday, noted the friar's advanced age and illness, that his comments to the Register were a sign of that . . . but didn't mention it never had a problem with such sentiments when he was a decade younger.
