#Parolee attacks woman

[coochiequeens]

The man busted for the hate-fueled attack on an Asian woman in Midtown was out on parole for killing his own mother back in 2002, authorities said Wednesday.

Brandon Elliot, 38, who lives in a nearby hotel that serves as a homeless shelter, was arrested early Wednesday and hit with a number of charges, including assault as a hate crime and attempted assault as a hate crime, police said.

He was caught on video mercilessly punching and kicking the 65-year-old victim in front of an apartment building at 360 West 43rd Street around 11:40 a.m. Monday, yelling “F–k you, you don’t belong here,” according to cops and police sources.

In April 2002, Elliot was charged with murder for using a kitchen knife to stab his mother, Bridget Johnson in the chest three times in their East 224th Street home in the Bronx, according to previous reports.

Johnson, 42, died a couple days later. It’s unclear what led to the fatal attack.

The man busted for the attack on an Asian woman in Midtown was out on parole for killing his own mother back in 2002, authorities said.DCPI

Elliot was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years-to-life in prison and was released on parole in November 2019, state corrections records show.

He was previously arrested in 2000 for robbery, cops said.

The broad daylight beatdown on Monday stoked outrage after the surveillance footage showed witnesses — including building workers — doing nothing to intervene.

One of the building employees even appears to shut the door to the building as the attacker flees.

Brandon Elliot mercilessly punched and kicked the 65-year-old victim in front of an apartment building at 360 West 43 Street, cops say.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Elliot allegedly kicked the victim to the ground — then stomped on her head several times as she was down on the sidewalk.

Staff members at 360 West 43rd Street were suspended over their apparent inaction.

The victim suffered a broken pelvis and was taken to the hospital. She was later released.

Elliot’s latest bust comes in the wake of a surge of attacks against Asian victims in New York City and elsewhere.

The NYPD has recorded a 1,300-percent increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He killed his own mother and then attacked another woman that was old enough to be his mother. This time let him rot in jail. Women deserve to be safe from this guy.

[bibliophileiz]

There’s No Place like Magic School

A very fluffy holiday story for @prudencemelinda

Happy Holidays, Bri!

For Charmed Secret Santa

“OK, Magic School is officially ready for Christmas!”

With that announcement, Paige collapsed dramatically on the couch with a sound that was more humph than sigh. Smiling, Henry set aside the file on his latest parolee and put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer to him. Paige dropped her head on his shoulder and let herself relax for the first time in … well, all month.

There were eight kids staying at the school for the holidays this year – either because they didn’t have families of their own, or they did, but those families didn’t approve of their magic. Leo and the other teachers were pulling their hair out. Every year, it seemed more and more kids weren’t accepted by the outside world because of their magic.

Paige knew, logically, that it wasn’t her responsibility to take care of the kids at Magic School anymore. Leo and his staff did a fantastic job with everything from teaching them to feeding them and offering them emotional support, since Phoebe had introduced a curriculum that was less about duty and destiny and more about wellness and acceptance of yourself and your magic. 

And it wasn’t like Paige didn’t have enough to worry about. When she wasn’t chasing down demons with her sisters or running Whitelighter-related errands for the Elders, she was taking care of the new baby or arguing with Henry over whether to bind the twins’ powers (although honestly, after Tamora nearly burned the house down, Paige was starting to come around to her husband’s side). But then the whole family got together for Thanksgiving dinner, and Leo said Kaci’s parents told her that they were spending the holidays in Bermuda and she wasn’t invited – Kaci, who was only 9 years old, a scared and confused witch still learning to control her powers, and who Paige had once bonded with over a mutual love of The Wizard of Oz – and well, Paige had become a woman on a mission.

An exhausting mission.

But hey, it was done now. The 20-foot tree was strung with magical lights of the Whitelighers (or one half-witch, half-Whitelighter), as well as more mundane but still festive garland and tinsel, and she’d taken time out of work to help the students decorate it with handmade ornaments yesterday. Earlier this month, she’d set up a menorah enchanted so that the flames would stay lit through the final night of Hanukkah. She and some of the teachers had set aside a special room in Magic School and turned it into a winter wonderland, with real snow so the students could make snow angels and snowmen (and snowwomen. And snowpeople.) and have snowball fights. She’d organized a Secret Santa between the students.

That last one was what she was proudest of. Because the eight students all had each other’s names, but what they didn’t realize was that each of Paige’s family members had all their names too. Piper, Leo, Phoebe, Coop and of course Paige and Henry each had one, while the remaining two students were covered by other teachers who were still here for the holidays. In addition to receiving student-made presents, each kid would get their own big present from a very Charmed helper of Santa.

Now, late afternoon on Christmas Eve, everything was finalized. All Paige could do now was wait – and hope everything went off without a hitch tomorrow.

Henry must have known what she was thinking, because he kissed the top of her head and said, “Paige, you’ve worked really hard to give these kids a Christmas. Even if it’s not exactly how you want it, it’s going to be perfect for them.”

Paige crinkled her nose. “Nothing in our lives ever goes perfectly. Every time we try to plan a party or have a normal holiday, something goes wrong – a demon attacks, or one of the kids does magic we can’t reverse without calling in a family therapist.”

“Well, if you would agree to bind Kat and Tamora’s powers, we wouldn’t have that–”

“Oh my God, we are not having this argument at Christmas.”

Henry pursed his lips, and Paige knew they were far from done with this discussion, but he seemed to be willing to let it go tonight. “My point is,” he said, “what these kids are really going to want for Christmas is a family. Someone who cares enough to make the holidays special. That’s what you’ve done.” He gave her a squeeze. “Take it from someone who grew up in the foster system. All they need is for you to be there. The rest will figure itself out.”

Paige hummed thoughtfully. “You’re getting wise in your old age, Mr. Mitchell.” She leaned in and kissed him. He turned more fully toward her and deepened it immediately, and she moved so that she was straddling his lap.

Just when things were starting to get really interesting, Paige remembered what night it was – and that her house was suspiciously silent for one with three small children, two of whom were witches. “Um, where are our children?”

Unconcerned, Henry kissed her again. “With your sister.”

He couldn’t have killed the mood faster if he’d announced a marching band was about to pass through their living room playing “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.” “You left them with Piper?! On Christmas Eve, do you know how much baking she’s gonna do?! We’ll never get the girls to sleep tonight, they’ll be so hopped up on sugar –”

“With Phoebe.”

“Oh.” That was better. Phoebe would probably cast a calming spell over them and have them draw pictures from their favorite holiday movies while drinking glasses of warm milk at the kitchen table – all so she could coo over baby Henry Jr. Little Henry. Whatever they were going to end up calling him, Paige supposed.

“Well, I guess we better pick them up,” she mused, “seeing as it’s Christmas Eve and we should be having family time right about now.”

Henry shifted a little, causing a pleasant sensation in Paige’s … well …. “We don’t have to go right this minute, though, right?” he asked.

He shifted again – very deliberately, Paige realized – and well, yes, Christmas Eve with family could wait a few more minutes.

***

Surprisingly, Christmas at Magic School did go off without a hitch. Everyone exchanged magical presents and ate too much of Piper’s enchanted gingerbread castle that tasted like whatever most made you think of home (and which Chris told Paige that Piper had stressed over so much she’d banished him and Wyatt to the attic to play with Grams’ spirit for five hours on Christmas Eve). Now all the kids – including the Charmed Ones’ kids – were playing in the winter wonderland while the adults cleaned up wrapping paper and munched on leftover food.

“I say next year we make the leprechauns do all the work,” Piper grumbled as she spooned the leftover mac and cheese into a casserole dish. 

“You’re thinking of St. Patrick’s Day, sweetie,” said Phoebe as she gathered pieces of torn wrapping paper into a trash bag. She was in a good mood because Gwen had loved her Secret Santa gift of a spell book full of soothing spells, like how to keep distractions away while meditating and how to keep tea warm. Paige kind of wished Phoebe had given her the spell book.

Ah well, the Louis Vuitton knock-off was great too.

“I think it went well,” Paige said. “The kids were happy, and that’s all that matters.”

“Aw, sounds like Paige discovered the true meaning of Christmas,” Piper said, but she didn’t sound quite as sarcastic as usual.

“What did your gingerbread house taste like to you, Piper?” Henry asked.

Piper’s movements to put away the food stilled, and a thoughtful look came over her face. “The lemon cookies Grams used to make when I was little,” she said with a small smile. “Prue and I always insisted on leaving them out for Santa, you remember that Phoebes? Then when we came downstairs on Christmas morning, Grams would present us with three cookies each and say, ‘Santa left them for you, my darlings.’”

At that moment, Chris and Kaci came running in, still in snow covered hats and coats, their noses and cheeks pink from the cold. “Aunt Paige, Aunt Paige,” Chris panted. “Kaci has something to give you.”

Smiling shyly, Kaci handed her a box wrapped in sparkling silver paper. “Aw,” Paige said taking the box from her, “you didn’t have to get me anything, Kaci.”

“It’s for Christmas,” Kaci said.

“Can I open it now?” Paige asked. Kaci nodded.

Paige began tearing at the paper, noticing as she did that her sisters came up behind her to peer over her shoulders.

The wrapping paper fell away to reveal a beat up old shoebox. Paige flipped off the lid and saw –

“Oh, wow,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.

Inside were a pair of shimmering ruby slippers, close – though not quite the same – as Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz. “Kaci,” she said. “These are beautiful.”

“Put them on and click your heels together,” Kaci ordered.

“OK,” Paige said. She slipped her boots off and replaced them with the slippers. They looked a little silly over her candy cane stockings, but Paige had never loved footwear more.

Giggling, she snapped her heels together three times. “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like–”

And suddenly, she was standing in the winter wonderland. Lined up in front of her were the kids, with the twins dead center. “Merry Christmas, Paige!” they all shouted, and Kat and Tamora ran up to her. Kat handed her a handmade card.

“Aw, thank you guys!” Paige said. She opened the card. 

Dear Paige, thank you for making Magic School home for the holidays! Followed by the kids’ signatures.

“Aw, come here,” Paige said. “Group hug, everyone.” Partly because she was cold – she hadn’t expected to be transported to the snow – but also because she would have a million stressful Decembers in a row for these kids. “Merry Christmas, guys!”

They shared a hug, then Paige said, “OK, come inside for hot chocolate, everybody, it’s cold,” and they all trooped back to the great hall where the rest of the adults were waiting. Leo corralled the kids for hot chocolate, and Paige went to her sisters. 

“So I take it Kaci had some help with the enchantment,” she said, raising her eyebrows at them.

“Yeah, but she really wanted to give you something,” Piper said.

“And it was cute!” Phoebe agreed. “What else could we say?”

“You always wanted to be Dorothy,” Piper said.

“Actually I wanted to be Elphaba, but that’s neither here nor there,” Paige said. “Thanks, you guys.”

“Merry Christmas, Paige,” Piper said.

“Yeah, unfortunately the shoes only work at Magic School,” Phoebe said. “It’s complicated magic with a short shelf life, so….” She trailed off apologetically.

“It’s OK,” Paige said. “I’m just glad Kaci and the rest of them got a good holiday.”

“All because of you,” said Phoebe.

The three of them shared a quick hug, which Piper broke when Chris began throwing food at Wyatt, and the party began to break up. Paige slipped the ruby shoes off her feet and back into the box.

Henry, who had the baby asleep in a pouch on his chest, slid an arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head. “So did they have a good Christmas?” As he spoke, the twins ran up and put their arms around her legs.

Paige returned the kiss to Henry’s cheek and touched her daughters’ hair affectionately. “Yeah,” she said. “Best Christmas ever.”

[northernindigenousbeautyhailey]

TAMRA JEWEL KEEPNESS.

FEW CHILDREN IN CANADA JUST VANISH. Fewer still stay gone for longer than a couple of days. Some are found alive, others are hurt or killed, but rarely does a child simply disappear. The RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains database lists 147 missing children, in a country of more than 35 million people. Of the sixty children under the age of twelve, a quarter are thought to have been abducted by their parents. A large portion of the others were lost to apparent accidents or misadventure, falling through ice or swept away in the pull of wild rivers, their bodies never recovered. The database shows twenty-four children in the past sixty years who have inexplicably disappeared. Because there are so few, we know them. In Edmonton, there is Tania Murrell, six when she vanished while walking home from school for lunch in January 1983. In Toronto, Nicole Morin, eight when she disappeared from a condominium building in July 1985. Michael Dunahee was four years old when he went missing from a playground in Victoria in 1991. In Regina, there is only Tamra Keepness.

THE LAST TIME anyone saw Tamra, she was five years old, with bobbed black hair and soft, round cheeks. In one picture, she wears a T-shirt dotted with flowers, standing against the colourful collage of a classroom wall. Her smile is broad and open, her eyes lively. She was so smart that her mother called her “my little Einstein,” so feisty that when a little boy pushed her once, Tamra shoved him right back, and harder. She liked playing Mario Kart on Nintendo and climbing her favourite tree, down the block from her house.

July 6, 2004, was the first time Sergeant Ron Weir would hear Tamra’s name. He was getting ready to leave on vacation that day when he got an urgent call back to the police station. Weir was a veteran cop with the Regina Police Service and head of emergency services, which included search and rescue. In a meeting, officers from the major crimes unit laid out what they knew: sometime between the night of Monday, July 5, and the morning of Tuesday, July 6, a five-year-old girl had gone missing from her home in central Regina.

Weir had been a police officer for twenty years. He knew that kids often went missing and turned up safe a short time later. Sixty-five percent of missing children and teens are located within the first day, and almost 90 percent within the first week. But Weir also knew that Tamra was too young to get far as a runaway. Patrol officers had already checked the neighbourhood to make sure Tamra hadn’t wandered away or ended up at the house of a playmate or relative, as was often the case with missing children. They’d found nothing. Even in the early hours of the investigation, Weir suspected this case would be different.

TAMRA LIVED with her mother, stepfather, and five siblings at 1834 Ottawa Street, a shabby brown-and-white two-storey with a windowed porch at the front. The house stood between 11th and 12th avenues, just east of downtown Regina. The neighbourhood was a mix of long-time elderly residents, young families drawn by low prices for heritage houses, and ramshackle homes where residents struggled with poverty and addiction. The area was sometimes known as the “low stroll,” a place where women and girls sold their bodies for drugs or booze and men drove around looking to buy them, circling the neighbourhood in trucks and station wagons. Many of the women and girls who lived or worked in the area were First Nations, like Tamra. Long before calls for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women would dominate the political conversation, women were going missing from those streets. It was from that same area that nineteen-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared in 1983, followed by eighteen-year-old Patsy Favel in 1984 and Joyce Tillotson in 1993. Two years later, two young white men picked up a woman named Pamela George, sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user posted to the website a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.”

Tamra’s house was less than a block from the Oskana Centre, a halfway house for federal parolees, and not far from the Salvation Army’s Waterston House, a residence and shelter inhabited by former inmates and men struggling with drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric issues. Residents of both facilities had been responsible for serious attacks in the past. Just four months earlier, convicted violent sex offender Randy Burgmann had lured a woman into his room at Waterston House with alcohol, before violently sexually assaulting her and leaving her beside a dumpster to die. The Oskana Centre had previously been home to both serial rapist Larry Deckert and Billy John Francis Whitedeer, who began committing violent sexual offences on children when he was ten years old. A few blocks farther was the Ehrle Hotel, one of the worst bars in town, from which patrons spilled soggy and staggering onto the sidewalk, and which appeared regularly in police reports and court testimony.

Police also had serious questions about what was happening at 1834 Ottawa Street. There was a broken window and blood spatter in the porch. Social Services had been involved with the family since not long after the oldest child was born in 1993, and there had been more than fifty reports made to crisis workers, most often about Tamra’s mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and neglect of the children. Her mother’s boyfriend had a history of violence and domestic assault. In most cases, investigators knew, children are hurt by people closest to them.

POLICE STARTED with a thorough search of the area immediately around the home, then cast their efforts outward in an expanding grid. As the sun rose on the morning of July 7, 2004, the search effort intensified. First, there were ten officers, then twenty, then more. Some officers accompanied trained volunteer search teams; others questioned family members and potential witnesses, going door-to-door gathering leads or chasing down tips. The RCMP training academy provided cadets, and members of the public soon began arriving on their own to help.

Police set up a command-centre bus in the parking lot of a nearby church, from which Weir co-ordinated the search. Though it was an urban environment, the terrain posed serious challenges. The area was filled with overgrown yards, empty houses, piles of garbage. Tamra weighed forty pounds, and stood three foot five. There were so many places a child could hide or get trapped or be held, where a child’s body could be concealed or dumped. Searchers in orange vests worked in grids, knocking on doors, inspecting junked cars and crumbling garages, peering under discarded mattresses and piles of wood, looking down manholes. Police stopped garbage pickups, checking all the bins in the neighbourhood, the trash putrid and reeking in the summer heat. Some bins had already been emptied, so plans were made to search the dump as well.

And what if she had been taken farther? Not far away were industrial areas, large abandoned lots and buildings, Wascana Creek, and beyond that, the vast Prairie. With a thirteen-hour head start, someone in a vehicle could have had Tamra in Vancouver before she was reported missing.

When they were not speaking to police, members of Tamra’s family waited anxiously on the fringes, watching the searchers, eyeing the growing assembly of reporters and news crews holding out microphones and pointing camera lenses. “It’s not like her to go off by herself,” said Tamra’s father, Troy Keepness, sitting on the front steps of his ex-wife’s house, his voice tight with worry. “We’re trying to do our best to get her back.”

Weir worked in the command-centre bus, surrounded by maps and whiteboards. A scribe logged every aspect of the search in real time, recording ideas and progress. No one wanted to break, not for food or rest. Everyone knew the situation grew more serious with every passing hour. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, Weir stood outside and looked up. A strong wind had come in, and storm clouds were spreading, darkening the Prairie sky.

The next day, police strung crime-scene tape around Tamra’s house and the one next door, drawing it through the back alley and across six garages, long slashes of yellow dividing the street. Officers guarded the perimeter while forensic investigators went in and out of the house in boots and masks. “While we don’t have any direct evidence that Tamra has come to any harm, we also don’t know where she is,” police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich told reporters. “And if, in fact, this comes to a point where we determine that she’s come to some harm and it’s because of a criminal act, this location could potentially be the scene of some evidence.”

THERE WERE three adults in the house that evening: the children’s mother, Lorena Keepness; her boyfriend, Dean McArthur; and a family friend named Russell Sheepskin, who had been staying with the family. All three had come and gone during the night, and investigators were starting to question their movements. There were no signs of forced entry to the house, and there were gaps, inconsistencies in their timelines that didn’t make sense to investigators.

The story the three told publicly, compiled from various interviews, was that Lorena and McArthur got into an argument while watching a movie on Monday evening, and McArthur and Sheepskin left the house around 8:30 p.m. to go drinking. The men returned briefly to drop off a bottle of formula for the baby, then left again. Lorena went out around 11 p.m, kissing Tamra goodbye before she went. The oldest child in the house was ten-year-old Summer, the youngest was Lorena and McArthur’s nine-month-old baby. Lorena returned briefly to check on the children and then left again around midnight. At about 3 a.m., Sheepskin returned home drunk and saw Tamra sleeping on the couch. Not long after, McArthur got back to the house and assaulted Sheepskin on the porch, punching him through a window and then stomping on his head. (Both men later said the fight had nothing to do with Tamra.) Sheepskin walked alone to the hospital to get stitches, and McArthur went to stay at his aunt’s house a few blocks away. Though it should have been a short walk, he said he got lost and kept passing out as he walked there. He didn’t arrive for at least two hours, until 5 or 5:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Lorena got home around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., climbed in through a window, and passed out on the couch. She said that she got up to undo the latch on the door for her mother around 8 or 9 a.m. and that the two eldest children, Summer and Rayne, left on their own in the morning to attend a summer day-camp. Lorena didn’t realize Tamra wasn’t there until about three hours later, when the five-year-old didn’t come downstairs. At 12:16 p.m., a family member called the police and told them Tamra was missing.

Rayne, who was eight, said he had gone to bed squeezed into the space between the wall and mattresses piled on the floor in an upstairs bedroom. He told his mother he felt Tamra get up at some point, the slight movement of a child’s weight. All he could remember was that it was light outside.

FRIDAY WAS hot again and wet from the previous night’s rain. An odour of decay hung in the air around Ottawa Street. Tamra had been gone three full days and become national news. Her picture seemed to be everywhere, hanging on street poles and store windows. In news stories, she became “missing five-year-old Tamra Keepness,” but more often she was just Tamra, as if we knew her. The front page of the Regina Leader-Post spoke directly to her, asking, “Tamra, Where Did You Go?”

Tips flooded in to police. On the street, there were rumours that Tamra had been seen at a dollar store with an older woman. Business owners in the neighbourhood said detectives had been looking for a middle-aged white man named Roch or Rocky, but police wouldn’t confirm whether that was related to the search. Lorena and McArthur said they gave police the names of five people they thought could be suspects, including a man who had befriended Tamra and later been discovered to be a pedophile. For a while, there was even a theory that Tamra had never existed at all, that she had been a scam to get extra money from Social Services. (Hospital records proved that was not the case.)

Searchers were coming from around the province to volunteer, streaming into the city from towns and First Nations communities, motivated by the faces of their own children or grandchildren to help in whatever way they could. “I’ve got a boy, and he’s twenty-one,” said Jerry Scott, one of the volunteers who joined the search. “And if he left, I’d go nuts, too.” Around the city, people organized vigils and barbecues, brought water and snacks for the searchers, wrapped ribbons around trees to show their support. Some left teddy bears and angels on the steps of Tamra’s house. Days of intensive searches had turned up lots of items that seemed as though they could be connected—clothing, a child’s shoe—but none of it belonged to Tamra. “I’m starting to go on different conclusions, like maybe someone took her, I don’t know,” Troy Keepness said. “I just hope nobody would hurt my daughter.”

WHEN Tamra had been gone a week, police announced they were suspending the ground searches. At a press conference, Regina police chief Cal Johnston announced a $25,000 reward for information and vowed, “We will find Tamra.” Police questioned sex offenders living in the area and obtained surveillance tapes from convenience stores, bars, gas stations, and the Greyhound bus depot nearby. Johnston confirmed that “criminal interference with Tamra is a distinct possibility” and drew attention back to Tamra’s house and family. “There were comings and goings from the house that night that remain not fully explained to our satisfaction, and we continue to ask those questions,” he told reporters. He would not elaborate.

Tamra’s family was growing increasingly angry at the police, and the strain of the situation was starting to show. Lorena told reporters she’d signed consent forms for police to search her house and had given her DNA, but still she felt as if they were focusing too much on her family and not enough on trying to find Tamra. She was angry that police hadn’t closed the highways out of the city and that there was no Amber Alert because police said it didn’t meet the criteria. “I’m fed up,” she told reporters. “They are wasting time. This is my little girl we’re talking about.”

The family was growing frustrated with the media, too. Lorena’s mother yelled obscenities at reporters one day, and on another, members of the family nearly came to blows with a TV reporter doing a live update from the front lawn. They had been watching the news inside the house when they heard the reporter imply what many in the city were already wondering: If not someone in that house, then who?

On July 19, two weeks after Tamra had been reported missing, police charged McArthur with assaulting Sheepskin the night Tamra disappeared. McArthur told reporters he had been interrogated for twenty hours, not about the assault, but about Tamra and about what had gone on inside the house that night. “It was always the same questions, and they were assuming that I knew the answers to those questions, but I didn’t know the answers, and I still don’t know the answers,” he said. “I would never hurt a hair on that little girl’s head.”

Two days later, Tamra’s brothers and sisters were removed from the home by child-protection officers. Tamra’s twin sister wore messy pigtails and clutched a colouring book and a yellow blanket as two women led the children away down the front steps of the house. Neither government officials nor police would say whether the children’s seizure was related to Tamra’s disappearance. When the children were gone, police searched the house again.

One night late that summer, Tamra’s father, Troy, showed up at the house with a baseball bat and confronted her stepfather, McArthur. Troy was charged with assault, though McArthur later said police “got things misunderstood.” “Everybody’s looking for answers,” he said. “We more or less talked.”

LORENA KEEPNESS was fourteen years old when she ran away from her home on the White Bear First Nation, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina. She had been in residential school for about three months, but that wasn’t what did it. For her, it was the same ugly stuff at home. She found her way to Regina. When her mom tried to take her home, Lorena wouldn’t go. She lived on the streets instead.

She had her daughter Summer Wind when she was twenty, her son Rayne Dance not long after. It was after the ultrasound for her third baby that she walked home in a daze and told her husband, Troy, “We’re having twins.” She kept repeating it until it sunk in, and then they just stood together in the kitchen and laughed. Her mother said “Way to go!” but Lorena told her, “They came from God. Not like I planted those in me.”

The babies were born on September 1, 1998. Fraternal twin girls, each weighing more than six pounds, carried almost right to term and curved around one another like pieces of a puzzle. Lorena and Troy split up when the twins were little, and after that, the girls stayed sometimes with their mother, sometimes with their father or with other relatives. Lorena and Troy each struggled with substance abuse, and their lives were sometimes too troubled and unstable to have the children with them. At five, Tamra was bold and courageous, and protective of her twin sister. Once, Lorena heard a soft knock in the middle of the night and opened the door to find the twins standing there. The children had left their father’s house and walked four blocks back to Lorena’s in the middle of the night, Tamra leading her sister by the hand as they found their way through the dark. REGINA POLICE received more than a thousand tips in the first six weeks after Tamra’s disappearance. At one point, a Volkswagen van that had been stolen the night Tamra disappeared was found burned outside the city. A jail guard told police she and a former inmate had stolen it, picked up Tamra, and then dumped the child’s body in a ravine on the Muscowpetung First Nation. Ron Weir led a week-long search on Muscowpetung, draining multiple beaver dams with compressor pumps, while searchers slogged through water up to their hips. The jail guard later confessed she had made up the story. She was charged with mischief and wrote a letter apologizing to the police. In court, her lawyer said she had been trying to get her abusive boyfriend locked up again.

Returning from medical leave to the police department in the fall of 2004, superintendent Troy Hagen could feel how Tamra’s disappearance was weighing on his colleagues. Hagen noticed it in everyone he spoke to, from the police chief down, whether they were involved with the case or not. Sergeant Rod Buckingham, one of the lead investigators, was among those who felt the growing frustration. “It’s a mystery,” he would say. “And I don’t like mysteries.”

Officers had spoken with more than 6,000 people by then, but there had been no arrests, and leads were drying up. Shortly after, a special task force was struck to re-examine the case, to see whether anything had been missed. The name of the project was iskwesis ayishowak e mamayahi, a Cree term meaning “little girl bring people together.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Lorena Keepness spends her days doing odd jobs and picking bottles, trading them in at the depot for cash. She is forty-three and lives with her eldest son in a rundown shack of a house on Victoria Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Ottawa Street. Lorena’s children were never permanently returned to her custody after the disappearance, and the three babies she had after that were all taken by Social Services, too. Tamra’s twin sister is seventeen now. Lorena says she is an athlete, smart and beautiful. Lorena lost her family pictures when someone threw all her stuff in the garbage a few years ago. The only photos she has of Tamra now are the ones on missing-child posters.

Tamra’s twin and her older sister, Summer, don’t want to be interviewed. Neither does Tamra’s father, Troy. McArthur couldn’t be reached. Lorena needs a six-pack of Black Ice beer to talk. She doesn’t really want to be interviewed either. She has never liked reporters or their questions, and it hurts to talk about that time. “But part of me wants to,” she says, as her face crumples. “Part of me needs to share what the fuck happened. Someone stole my child.”

Lorena has heard many theories about what happened to her daughter. Some believe Tamra wandered away and was abducted by a driver cruising the area or that she got lost, then crawled in somewhere so small she has never been found. Other theories focus on the adults in the house that night. Some officers will say off-the-record that they think Tamra is in the dump but that they just couldn’t find her in the mountains of debris. Many in the city believe that Lorena and McArthur sold or traded Tamra to pay off a cocaine debt. Lorena has heard that one the most. One night, she was at a bar and heard some women talking, loud enough so she could hear. “Yeah, she sold her kid for dope. She has a whole bunch of babies. She has kids just to sell them for drugs.” Her friend told her not to listen, but Lorena couldn’t ignore it. She swore at the women, promised she would get them for even thinking she could do that to her child. They met at the same bar again the next day, and that time they fought, a tangle of hair and fists. One of them had a knife and slashed her twice on the back of her arm. More scars to wear for life. It wasn’t the only time. One night, she was attacked in Moose Jaw. Not long ago, a woman shouted “Baby killer!” at her across the street.

Lorena and Dean McArthur are still together, on and off—“more on than off,” she says. Police tried hard to turn them against each other, but she always believed him in the end. He may be all kinds of things, she says, but he’s not a baby killer. “If I thought he did something to my daughter, I would have killed him myself,” she says. “I think the police were just so sure. They figured, ‘These guys are a bunch of nobodies. She did her own child.’ They already had their conclusions drawn before they even tried to look for anything.”

The suggestion she could have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance still pushes Lorena to the point of violence. You can see her eyes flash, her muscles tighten at the question. But she holds back— it’s not worth going to jail. She’s had enough of the police, has grown used to the accusations. In the past twelve years, she’s repeated her story publicly many times, and it has never really changed.

REGINA POLICE have never released full details about the investigation into Tamra’s disappearance, on the grounds that it remains an open case that they still hope to solve. In an interview, Troy Hagen, now Regina’s police chief, would not speak about any working theories or confirm any specifics of the investigation, including whether one of the people questioned about Tamra’s disappearance had failed a polygraph test. Instead, Hagen echoed what police have said since the beginning: That there remain important unanswered questions about the comings and goings from the house on Ottawa Street that night. That they will continue to investigate every tip. That they won’t stop looking for Tamra until they find her. He pointed to cases in the United States where children have been gone for years, sometimes decades, and then been found alive. In Canada, twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held in an underground bunker in Port Moody, British Columbia, for six months after being abducted by her neighbour in 1976. There was an intensive search of her community—including by her abductor—but she had been only feet away from her house the entire time. She was found alive. It seems impossible, but it happens. “I refuse to lose hope,” Hagen says.

The years since Tamra’s disappearance have exposed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Suspected serial killers are facing charges in the Prairies, but there has been no public indication that Tamra’s disappearance may be connected to any of those cases. Hagen said police have also explored a possible connection with thirteen-year-old Courtney Struble, who disappeared from Estevan, a city 200 kilometres from Regina, four days after Tamra was last seen. Investigators initially believed that Struble was a runaway, and she had been gone for seven years before RCMP announced that her case had become a homicide investigation. No one has ever been charged, and her remains have never been located. Hagen says it’s strange to have two unsolved missing-children cases linked so closely in time and geographic proximity. He says the possibility of a connection was “very much” explored by police, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. The police investigation into Tamra’s disappearance is one of the largest and costliest in Regina’s history, but Hagen says it has never been about the money. If there were more leads or work for investigators, the police chief says he would reconvene the task force “in a heartbeat.” But the flood of tips has slowed. The reward for information that leads to finding her, now $50,000, sits unclaimed. The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user with the name MySecretIsOut posted a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.” The person later wrote that the map belonged to their grandmother and had come from a great-aunt who had visited an inmate in Alberta. “We, like many others, haven’t forgotten about you, Tamra, and continue to search and hope you are found,” the person posted. Police searched twenty-one wells around Muscowpetung but found nothing.

Sheepskin died on January 1, 2009, “with his family by his side,” according to his obituary. Many of the police officers who worked on Tamra’s case have retired or moved from the department to other jobs. Hagen says he thinks of Tamra whenever he is walking through the forest, not looking for her but always half expecting to see her there. Sometimes he looks at people he passes on the street, examining their faces and imagining what Tamra might look like now.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Lorena has developed her own theories about what happened to her daughter. These days, she mainly wonders about a drifter who used to stay with them, a woman Lorena knew from when she was a girl. A woman who sometimes told people she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, who Lorena knew by one name but whose medical documents said something else. The woman was around so much that Lorena’s children called her Big Auntie. Big Auntie had been staying at the house before Tamra disappeared, but left after she and Lorena had a falling out. Lorena says it took a long time to realize Big Auntie wasn’t coming around any more. When she did, she put word out on the streets, but no one there had seen her either. Big Auntie didn’t even show up for her own sister’s funeral in Regina a few years back. Lorena says she told the police about Big Auntie many times, but doesn’t know whether they ever found her, or whether they even looked. “She’s just gone now,” Lorena says. “Same time as my child.” Maybe it’s something. Or maybe Big Auntie is missing, too.

When I ask Lorena whether she thinks Tamra will ever be found, she struggles for an answer. “I don’t know,” she says. “But can I tell you about a dream I had?” There are two, both so vivid it’s as if they were real. In one, Tamra is inside a big house in a city Lorena has never seen. There are silk clothes draped around, and broad windows, and Tamra is upstairs, sitting on the edge of a bathtub putting on stockings. She is grown, with dark, shiny hair like her mother’s but cut straight all around. In the other dream, Tamra is still a little girl, running into her mother’s arms. “There you are!” Lorena says. “There you are!” She picks up her child and holds her, until Tamra wriggles free and is lost again.

[conradscrime]

Winnie Ruth Judd: The Trunk Murderess

March 11, 2021

This is one of my all time favourite true crime cases. I first heard about Winnie Ruth Judd, also known as “the Trunk Murderess” a few years ago when my grandmother let me borrow a book she had read about it. The book I read was written by Jana Bommersbach and was truly amazing, she did an incredible job telling the story and did not skip a detail. This is a long case and I will not be covering everything in this short post, however I encourage everyone to do their own research and read the book!

Winnie Ruth McKinnell, also known as Marian Lane later in life, was born on January 29, 1905 in Indiana to parents Rev. H. J. McKinnell who was a Methodist minister and his wife Carrie. 

Winnie met and married Dr. William C. Judd in 1922 at the age of 17. Dr. Judd was 20 years older than Winnie and a World War I veteran and their marriage had various problems. Dr. Judd was a morphine addict who had a hard time keeping down a job thus making the couple move around a lot and face financial struggles. Winnie was unable to have children and this further strained the marriage. 

In 1930 Winnie and her husband were living separately but still communicated quite frequently. Winnie moved to Phoenix Arizona and began working as a governess for a wealthy family. 

It was in Phoenix where Winnie met John J. Halloran, also known as “Happy Jack” by the media. Happy Jack was a very well known businessman and extremely good looking and though he was married him and Winnie began an affair. 

Winnie found a job working as a secretary at a medical clinic and this where she would meet her two best friends, Agnes Anne LeRoi and Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson who were roommates having moved from Alaska to Phoenix due to Sammy contracting tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was extremely common back in the 1930′s and it was known that areas of warmer climates helped those with TB get better, so Phoenix being an extremely hot and sunny place was ideal. 

Anne and Sammy also knew Happy Jack and it seems as though they were very flirty with him as well. Jack apparently was the ladies “meal ticket” they relied on him heavily financially and emotionally and he had made a connection with all of them.

 The three women hit it off and soon became fast friends, with Winnie even moving in with Anne and Sammy for a brief period in 1931, though she soon moved out in her own apartment as there was some differences among them. I’m assuming these differences were very minor, they just seemed to have differences about running a household because the three remained besties even after Winnie moved out on her own. 

On the night of October 16, 1931 an alleged fight broke out between the three women and Winnie Ruth Judd murdered Anne LeRoi and Sammy Samuelson. Winnie shot both women with a .25 caliber handgun in their bungalow and what she did with the bodies is extremely disturbing. 

Two days later on October 18, 1931 Winnie boarded the train on her way to Los Angeles, California and had two trunks of luggage with her. However, one of the baggage handlers said the luggage smelled really bad as well as he could see some kind of “fluid” escaping from them. He notified the district baggage agent thinking that what was inside the trunks was just deer meat. How wrong he was.

 The trunks were then tagged to be held for inspection and when asked for the key to open the trunks Winnie Ruth Judd claimed she did not have a key for them. The trunks were sent to the police station where the police finally opened them and what was found inside was extremely disturbing. 

The dismembered body of Sammy Samuelson were found inside of the trunks, while Anne LeRoi’s body was found stuffed into a trunk but completely intact; she had not been dismembered. Winnie was not there when the police discovered the contents in the trunks, she had actually gotten her brother to pick her up and drop her off somewhere in L.A. When the contents of the trunks were discovered Winnie Ruth Judd had disappeared though she eventually turned herself in a few days later on October 23, 1931. 

Of course Winnie became the prime suspect right away since she literally was attempting to travel with two trunks full of her best friends dismembered bodies. She was dubbed “The Trunk Murderess” “Tiger Woman” and “The Blonde Butcher” and the media had an absolute field day with it. 

The main motive people suspected was obviously jealously. The prosecution believed that Winnie had murdered her friends because they also had feelings for Happy Jack and that the women were fighting over him when they were killed. 

When police visited the bungalow where the murders took place on October 19, 1931 they made some shocking discoveries. According to police it did not appear as if the women were shot during an enraged fight at all, it appeared as though they were actually shot and killed in their sleep. 

The strange part was that both of the women’s mattresses were not found in the house when police went. One mattress was found miles away in a vacant lot with no blood stains on it and one mattress was never found at all. 

Winnie Ruth Judd’s trial began on January 19, 1932. She was only being tried for the murder of Anne though, not Sammy, therefore the dismemberment aspect was never brought up in court because Anne had not been dismembered. 

They argued that the murders were premeditated and that Winnie had planned this due to the fact that the women’s friendship was deteriorating with jealously over Jack Halloran. Winnie herself had a gunshot wound on her left hand which they believed was self-inflicted; her attempt to take the blame off of herself. 

Winnie Ruth Judd was charged with first-degree murder on February 8 and was sentenced to hang on February 17, 1933. They figured a death sentence would make Winnie confess who her accomplice was because a lot of people found it impossible that a small woman like Winnie Ruth Judd would have been able to kill, dismember, and get the bodies in the trunks all on her own. 

However, Winnie’s death sentence was overturned after they found her mentally incompetent and she was sent to the Arizona State Asylum for the Insane on April 24, 1933. 

Jack Halloran became under suspicious when it was found that he had been having an affair with Winnie. Lots of people believed that he was Winnie’s accomplice in the murders and had helped her dismember them. Winnie testified against Jack in mid January 1933. 

Winnie claimed that on the night of the murders she had gone over to Anne and Sammy’s place to hangout and play bridge with them. At one point she said the three women began fighting because Winnie had told them that another woman Jack had been seen hanging with named Lucille Moore had syphilis and was being treated for it. Supposedly the women began telling Winnie that she needed to let Jack know about the syphilis but Winnie told the women she could not tell Jack about Lucille’s medical history because of her job and the risk of losing it plus according to her Jack and Lucille were just friends. 

Anne and Sammy did not believe this and Anne threatened Winnie telling her she would tell Jack about Lucille’s syphilis. Winnie fighting back told Anne that if she told Jack, Winnie would go around and tell everyone that Anne and Sammy were lesbians which I think was a rumour going around considering the two women lived together and were unmarried at their age, and back in the 1930′s that was insane. 

Winnie said the women started physically attacking her and she killed them in self defence. I just want to say the above information about syphilis and lesbianism is from one source I found and there is probably no way of knowing if this is exactly what started the fight between the three women. 

Jack’s team argued that Winnie was crazy and that this was the story of a crazy person and Jack was freed from the case on January 25, 1933 though his reputation was still ruined and he eventually fell out of business and died in 1939. 

Winnie escaped from the asylum a total of 6 times, with the longest time being from 1963 to 1969 when her identity was finally discovered in California and she was taken back to Arizona. 

Winnie Ruth Judd was paroled on December 22, 1971 and in 1983 she was issued an absolute discharge meaning she was no longer considered a parolee. Winnie Ruth Judd died at the age of 93 on October 23, 1998 in Stockton California. 

Winnie had written a confession in 1933 stating that she had planned to murder Anne due to her fighting for Jack’s affection with Winnie. Winnie claimed she had not intended to kill Sammy, but when Sammy walked in on Winnie and found Anne dead she began to fight with her. In this confession Winnie said that everything had been done by her alone, she had not had an accomplice, not even to help her transport the trunks. 

Some people do not believe that this is a true confession, they think that Winnie just wrote this in an attempt to keep going with an insanity plea. So what do you guys think? Is Winnie guilty of murdering her friends in cold blood, did she really just mean to kill Anne or did she kill both women in self-defense? I’d love to hear what you guys think about this one!

I barley scratched the surface of all of the interesting information about this case, I 100% recommend you all look further into this one because it’s insanely interesting to me and there’s so much more to it. 

I don’t think we will ever truly know what happened on the night of October 16, 1931, but after almost 90 years this case still haunts America. 

[sanfranciscoblog]

There was yet another attack on an elderly Asian person in San Francisco on Tuesday, and the alleged perpetrator is now in jail — but it's also another case of a repeat offender who was out on bail at the time of his latest crime.

The incident happened in Japantown on Tuesday around 11 a.m., near the intersection of Laguna and Ellis streets, and both a security officer from Armada Security who was guarding the nearby Chinese consulate and a bystander ended up intervening and flagging down police, leading to an arrest.

The suspect, whom the security guard described as seeming "disturbed," allegedly assaulted a 77-year-old Asian woman, pushing her to the ground from behind, and then stole her purse.

This latest attack comes just a week after a chilling double stabbing on Market Street that had already heightened safety concerns.

[elfysparkles88]

Stories Sam McCall can have that’s not this: a thread

Samantha McCall is supposed to be your bad ass character and GH is fucking it all up. They could do so much more...

How about after the Zaccara’s were gone some other power hungry people wanted to fill the vacuum and took over the stripper business. One of the girls who work there come to Sam because they’re not being treated right and she needs some leverage to get out. Cue Sam investigating and uncovering a sex trafficking ring or something and putting an end to that.

You wanna do the whole corrupt parole officer angle? FINE. Do it right. But listen Sam McCall is an attractive, well-connected white woman. She wouldn’t really get this much grief from law enforcement. However what if during her meetings with her P.O. she meets someone else who has the same P.O. Preferably a young man of color who made a mistake that landed him in prison but he’s trying. Him and Sam connect. But then one day he gets picked up on some violation. Sam’s senses go haywire because something is fishy. Cue Sam investigating and discovering a conspiracy between the parole officer, a paid judge, and privatized prisons that set up parolees/recently released people to keep their jail full.

This whole Cyrus bringing drugs into the community thing. Maybe Danny came across someone trying to sell him drugs even as young as he is. Or somebody OD’d in Sonny’s coffee shop. Have Sam investigate and discover where they’re funneling the drugs from. Maybe she and Jordan work together because Jordan is like “you can go places I can’t” and we need to put a stop to this.

Let Sam be the one to help bring down Peter! I know they hate acknowledging it and Dream vs JaSam aside, Drew was Scout’s father and Sam finds his death/Maddox attack thing SUSPICIOUS. So she digs deeper and finds all kinds of evidence that point to Peter. Hell have the WSB solicit Sam because she’s come closer than most in this case.

There’s so much potential with Sam McCall as a character and they are dropping the ball with this mess.

[missredherring]

Looking Up From Underneath

Orm x Reader

A/N: Lighthouse keepers are no longer a thing. Who knew? I wanted to write something with Mera and Arthur, but this idea about Orm wouldn’t quit. 

Orm was ready to talk sooner than Arthur had been expecting. Maybe he’d seen too many movies where the villain stays in his cell, dwelling in hatred and planning revenge.

He didn’t want Orm to be a villain. He might be a dick, but he was still his half-brother.

The deal was simple: release on the condition that Orm stay on the Surface for a while and learn about the world above. 

With his mother’s words about a united world echoing in his mind, Orm agreed. 

“This is where I’m going to be staying? Isn’t there somewhere... grander? As someone of my position--”

“As a parolee, there’s no where better.” Arthur interrupted. 

“What did he call me?” Orm turned to Mera, but she shook her head.

“This is the best place on Earth.” Arthur continued as they moved forward.

Thomas Curry stood at the end of the pier, waiting for them.

The house attached to the lighthouse had seen better days. Especially after the attack on Atlanna all those years ago. Thomas liked to say it gave the place character, and Arthur had never known it differently.

Mera and Orm waited in the living room while Arthur and his father talked privately in the kitchen.

“The Surface isn’t the place of nightmares like we were told when we were children, Orm.” Mera offered. Orm might be a dethroned king, but she couldn’t turn her back completely on her childhood friend.

“I suspect I’ll be learning a lot about it.” Orm said, his voice flat as he surveyed the frayed furnishings of the room. 

They both turned at the sound of heavy boots coming up the porch. The front door swung open and a woman rushed in, juggling bags and cups.

“Sorry I’m late, Tom! Traffic was a bitch.” She yelled to the house.

“There’s hardly any traffic up here; you’re just late.” Tom replied from the kitchen. Arthur laughed while coming out into the hallway.

“Arty’s here? I didn’t see another truck.”

“Hey, Shorty.” Arthur greeted her. She’d just put the cups down when he swung her up into a bear hug. “I’m mysterious, you never know when I’m coming around.”

She laughed. “Bullshit. You just make your dad drive you everywhere.”

When he put her down she finally looked into the living room where the Atlanteans were standing. Thankfully they’d changed into Surface clothing earlier.

“Oh, hey. Friends of yours, Arty?”

Arthur looked at Orm and Mera with mischief in his eyes. “Something like that.”

[a-wandering-fool]

Via NY Post:

A black parolee arrested for raping and bashing a white woman on the roof of his Bronx apartment building allegedly told a witness that she “deserved” the brutal attack because of slavery, according to court papers.

“She was a white girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery,” Temar Bishop, 23, allegedly said to someone who witnessed the bloodied 20-year-old woman after the assaults, according to a criminal complaint.

“This is what they used to do to us. This is what they did to us during slavery. They used to beat us and whip us.”

Temar Bishop, 23, was arrested by authorities on Friday in Virginia on a slew of charges connected to the early morning June 1 assault, which officials have deemed a hate crime, according to authorities.

Keep reading…

================

Sick.   This man was never a victim of slavery.  And every race has been both the slave and the slave owner.

Using horrific past events to justify doing evil is morally despicable.   Two fucking wrongs don’t make a right.

I’m hoping they charge this with a hate crime along with rape.  

[orbemnews]

Attack on Jewish family is under investigation by NYPD Hate Crime Task Force A man, woman and their 1-year-old child were slashed with a knife on Wednesday, according to Shea, who spoke with CNN Newsroom’s Jim Sciutto Friday. The family was dressed in traditional Hasidic garb, but no anti-Semitic slurs were used during the attack, based on the preliminary investigation, a source in the NYPD told CNN. Police arrested Darryl Jones, 30, in connection to the incident, the NYPD said in a release. Jones was arraigned on Friday and charged with one count of attempted murder, three counts of assault in the second degree, three counts of attempted assault, endangering the welfare of a child and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Jones has not entered a plea yet, according to the District Attorney’s office. The Manhattan DA’s Hate Crimes Unit also is reviewing the incident, though to date, there is no evidence this was a hate crime, according to spokeswoman Emily Tuttle. Jones was paroled last month after a seven-year period of incarceration for attempted murder, said Shea. CNN has contacted Jones’ attorney, Edward McGowan, for comment. Key factors driving a recent spike in hate crimes in NYC Asked about this incident as well as the recent spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, Shea said rhetoric and mental illness are key factors driving the spike. “You really have to drill down on this mental illness piece,” Shea told Sciutto.”The police alone are not going to solve this problem. We need everyone really to come together here.” In most of the recent hate crimes, the suspects were paroled recently, according to Shea. A lifetime parolee assaulted a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown in broad daylight, an attack captured on video that included the alleged suspect kicking the victim’s head on the pavement. “We got to make hard decisions and there’s got to be middle ground,” said Shea. “When you look at the individual that kicked the woman: paroled recently. When you look at the individual that, just stop and listen to this now slowly, slashes a mom, slashes a dad and then intentionally stabs a child, 1-year-old girl in a stroller: paroled last month.” “So, something is clearly broken here,” said Shea. “We have to be compassionate, we have to help people, but we also can’t forget the people that live and work and come to New York City to enjoy everything that it offers, and you can’t be putting people on to the street and having them victimize New Yorkers without consequences.” Source link Orbem News #attack #AttackonJewishfamilyisunderinvestigationbyNYPDHateCrimeTaskForce-CNN #Crime #Family #force #hate #Investigation #Jewish #NYPD #Task #us

[sleepysera]

Mar. 31 Headlines

WORLD NEWS

Myanmar: Junta deepens violence with new air attacks in east (AP)

“The military launched more airstrikes Tuesday in eastern Myanmar after earlier attacks forced thousands of ethnic Karen to flee into Thailand and further escalating violence two months after the junta seized power.”

France: Schools to close under third lockdown (BBC)

“The country is facing a peak of over 5,000 people in intensive care. The French hospital federation (FHF) last week warned that wards across the country were facing an "unprecedented violent shock" in the coming weeks if authorities were unable to curb the rise in cases.”

Russia: Putin critic Navalny announces hunger strike (CNN)

“One of Navalny's lawyers said last week the Russian opposition figure had been suffering from acute back pain that had affected his ability to walk, and his condition was being exacerbated by alleged ‘torture by sleep deprivation.’”

US NEWS

AAPI: Suspect in NYC attack on Asian American woman arrested (AP)

“A parolee convicted of killing his mother nearly two decades ago was arrested on assault and hate crime charges in an attack on an Asian American woman in New York City, police said early Wednesday. Police said Brandon Elliot, 38, is the man seen on surveillance video kicking and stomping the woman near Times Square on Monday.”

California: Another drought four years after last (AP)

“The state appears in the midst of another drought only a few years after a punishing 5-year dry spell dried up rural wells, killed endangered salmon, idled farm fields and helped fuel the most deadly and destructive wildfires in modern state history.”

Palestine: Biden Admin quietly ramping up aid (AP)

“The Biden administration is quietly ramping up assistance to the Palestinians after former President Donald Trump cut off nearly all aid. Since taking office with a pledge to reverse many of Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian decisions, the administration has allocated nearly $100 million for the Palestinians, only a small portion of which has been publicized.”

[wdshow]

We don't know if Mr. Floyd's death was a racist hate crime...But we do know that this woman's brutal rape and near-death beating was. Yet, even so...crickets. https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/06/temar-bishop-hate-crime-white-woman-slaves-attacked/

[buddylistsocial]

NYC Parolee Beat and Raped a White Woman Within an Inch of Her Life Because “Blacks Were Salves”  

There will be no riots and political rallies for this young woman who was beaten within an inch of her life and raped by a parolee who attacked her because she’s white.

23-year-old Temar Bishop is a Bronx parolee who stands accused of the brutal beating and rape of a 20-year-old white woman.

More from Wayne Dupree

He told a friend that the woman “deserved it” because minorities had to go…

[pitbulls-pitpaws-justice-blog]

Pit Bulls and Parolees “Lifts”

A sense of uneasiness sweeps over as we enter the clip from this episode of Pit Bulls and Parolees. Pit Bulls and Parolees is a show about a pit bull rescue called Villalobos ran by Tia Torres and her family, along with a few select Parolees, who Tia has given a second chance to change their lives around. As the eerie music plays, Tia begins to explain that her and her team have been asked to come to an animal control shelter called St. Martin Parish, in order to take some of the pit bulls the shelter just rescued from one of the worst dog fighting rings ever reported in that area.  Collecting a total of forty-seven dogs, the shelter and police disclose their belief that one of the most dangerous suspects of the fighting ring is still at large. They urgently request, that for the safety of the dogs, Tia take them back to Villalobos where they can be safely taken care of by her and her organization.

The camera transitions to a woman approaching Tia.  We find out this woman’s name  is Michelle, and she is the women who contacted Tia regarding the dog’s situation. We then see Michelle in an exclusive camera frame stating, “I called Tia maybe because, it’ll help relieve some of the pressure of having the dogs here…”   (Pit Bulls and Parolees, Season 6, 2014)  After Tia and Michelle exchange a brief conversation, Michelle takes Tia and her crew back to an outside area  where we see a line of chain linked pens, holding different pit bulls.  Michelle begins to retell what she experienced when first arriving on scene to collect the dogs.  “We showed up on scene and it was like walking into hell.”  (Pit Bulls and Parolees, Season 6, 2014)  She begins describing the horrific conditions these poor abused animals were in.  Even how some were kept in small chicken coops. She then further describes how every single dog was so severely emaciated from the scars of  their miscellaneous broken bones, open wounds, and many other indescribable things they were exposed to. The combination resulting in their inability to walk out, they had to be carried.

[Transitioning to Tia giving attention to a very eager, skinny pit bull, she begins to recount what she sees and makes a very interesting statement.]

‘They’ve gone through the most horrific treatment any animal could ever go through, and yet they're all happily wagging their tails…. You think ‘Wow,  you should hate me right now,  you should be attacking me… these dogs here are true pit bulls.” (Pit Bulls and Parolees, Season 6, 2014)  As she strongly, makes this statement, it leaves a sense of wonder and amazement for the audience to reflect upon.  Tia then has to make the hard decision of what dogs she can and cannot take due to their increased population. Villalobos already has an overwhelming number of recovered survivors of  hurricane Katrina.

After watching this clip a few times, it really makes a person think on what exactly causes a dog to want to attack someone. You see this group of dogs jumping happily, wagging their tails, and just wanting to play, but yet, they came from one of the worst dog fighting busts ever recorded in Martin Parish, Louisiana.   Tia and her team do everything they can to help people see the truth in just how different the pit bull breed is compared to the stereotype and stigma that many people hold against them.

"Lifts" Pit Bulls and Paroles, written by Lauren Stone Jackson, directed by J. McMahon and Lance Jeffery, Animal Planet, 2014.  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu2RYCTDKbQ 

[dipulb3]

Attack on Jewish family is under investigation by NYPD Hate Crime Task Force

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/attack-on-jewish-family-is-under-investigation-by-nypd-hate-crime-task-force/

Attack on Jewish family is under investigation by NYPD Hate Crime Task Force

A man, woman and their 1-year-old child were slashed with a knife on Wednesday, according to Shea, who spoke with Appradab Newsroom’s Jim Sciutto Friday.

The family was dressed in traditional Hasidic garb, but no anti-Semitic slurs were used during the attack, based on the preliminary investigation, a source in the NYPD told Appradab.

Police arrested Darryl Jones, 30, in connection to the incident, the NYPD said in a release.

Jones was arraigned on Friday and charged with one count of attempted murder, three counts of assault in the second degree, three counts of attempted assault, endangering the welfare of a child and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Jones has not entered a plea yet, according to the District Attorney’s office.

The Manhattan DA’s Hate Crimes Unit also is reviewing the incident, though to date, there is no evidence this was a hate crime, according to spokeswoman Emily Tuttle.

Jones was paroled last month after a seven-year period of incarceration for attempted murder, said Shea.

Appradab has contacted Jones’ attorney, Edward McGowan, for comment.

Key factors driving a recent spike in hate crimes in NYC

Asked about this incident as well as the recent spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, Shea said rhetoric and mental illness are key factors driving the spike.

“You really have to drill down on this mental illness piece,” Shea told Sciutto.”The police alone are not going to solve this problem. We need everyone really to come together here.”

In most of the recent hate crimes, the suspects were paroled recently, according to Shea.

A lifetime parolee assaulted a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown in broad daylight, an attack captured on video that included the alleged suspect kicking the victim’s head on the pavement.

“We got to make hard decisions and there’s got to be middle ground,” said Shea. “When you look at the individual that kicked the woman: paroled recently. When you look at the individual that, just stop and listen to this now slowly, slashes a mom, slashes a dad and then intentionally stabs a child, 1-year-old girl in a stroller: paroled last month.”

“So, something is clearly broken here,” said Shea. “We have to be compassionate, we have to help people, but we also can’t forget the people that live and work and come to New York City to enjoy everything that it offers, and you can’t be putting people on to the street and having them victimize New Yorkers without consequences.”