Tag: child abuse

NEW JERSEY ‘SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME’ RULING PUTS ‘JUNK SCIENCE’ DIAGNOSIS UNDER FIRE

Darryl Nieves’s wrongful prosecution began as many Shaken Baby Syndrome cases do—with a call for help.

On February 10, 2017, Nieves’s 11-month-old son, D.J., appeared to be having a seizure, Nieves told The Appeal. He called 911. The paramedics arrived, administered oxygen, and D.J. regained consciousness. They took him to St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the same hospital where D.J. had been born prematurely, at just 25 weeks gestation, according to a brief filed by Nieves’s attorneys with the Office of the Public Defender. (The Appeal is using the child’s nickname to protect his privacy.)

Despite D.J.’s well-documented medical conditions—he’d spent the first seven months of his life hospitalized and had already undergone two cardiac surgeries—a child abuse pediatrician at the hospital diagnosed him with abusive head trauma, or AHT, “as occurs with a shaking event with or without impact.” This diagnosis is often known as Shaken Baby Syndrome. 

Nieves was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and child endangerment. He was released after about four days in jail but was not allowed to have any contact with his son, he said. It would be more than four years until he could see D.J. again. 

“I was thinking the government fails everyone, especially Black African Americans, so I felt it was going to fail me,” Nieves told The Appeal.

Prosecutors offered him probation if he pleaded guilty, according to Danica Rue, a member of Nieves’s legal team at the public defender’s office. Nieves turned it down. 

The then-26-year-old father appeared to be on the same catastrophic path that has sent many parents and other caregivers to prison based solely on a doctor’s “shaken baby” diagnosis. 

“Detectives were saying the doctor has proof; the doctors are never wrong,” Nieves said. “That’s what they were saying to me. Basically trying to scare me into admitting something I didn’t do.”

But then something happened that changed the course of Nieves’s case and future Shaken Baby Syndrome prosecutions in New Jersey. 

On January 7, 2022, after years of delays, a trial judge sided with Nieves’s defense and ruled that prosecutors could not introduce testimony on Shaken Baby Syndrome in the case. The judge declared the controversial theory “akin to junk science” and, a few weeks later, dismissed the indictment against Nieves.

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office appealed to the Superior Court of New Jersey. In a decision last month, the superior court affirmed the trial judge’s ruling. 

“The very basis of the theory has never been proven,” Judge Greta Gooden Brown wrote in the court’s opinion. “The State has not demonstrated general acceptance of the SBS/AHT hypothesis to justify its admission in a criminal trial.”

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The predators’ playground

Clara didn’t think much of it when the social science teacher gave her his phone number.

She’d met Alex Rai in her fifth-period journalism class. He was friends with the journalism teacher, Eric Burgess, and often stopped by Room 16 during his prep period to kill time. Burgess introduced Rai to Clara, telling her that Rai had been his student a decade before. Burgess thought they’d get along.

In the weeks that followed, Rai would perch on Clara’s desk, leaning over as he asked about her day and who she hung out with after school. He’s only a few years older than my sister, Clara thought when Rai texted her one day after volleyball practice. It was a hot Southern California afternoon in 2008, the kind where dry heat radiates off the asphalt. She was bored. Why not pass the time by chatting with the cool teacher?

Soon, Rai was texting her regularly. At first, the messages were flirtatious. Before long, he was calling Clara late at night. She recalled him asking whether she’d had sex yet with any boys her age. Halfway through her senior year, Clara dropped her humanities class so she could become his teacher’s aide.

She loved her humanities class. But Rai had encouraged her to make the switch. They could spend more time together, she recalled him telling her, and he could make her truancies from ditching other classes disappear.

Clara remembers her sister warning her not to get too close. She’d heard stories about Rai from girls who’d attended Rosemead with him, when he was a wrestler on a team known as much for its aggressive pursuit of teenage girls as its state champions. But Clara brushed the concerns aside. She didn’t show her sister the texts Rai sent, teasing her — “you wish you were sleeping next to me” — and asking if she missed him.

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An inside look at the ‘Satanic, neo-Nazi’ pedophile cult that ensnared NYC man arrested on gun charges

A Satanic pedophile cult uncovered by the FBI after the arrest of a Queens man two years ago is an offshoot of a much older neo-Nazi organization that wants to destroy Western civilization, according to an overseas nonprofit that’s been tracking the hate group.

Federal authorities stumbled upon the newer group – which is named “764” but goes by a number of aliases – while investigating Angel Almeida, a 23-year-old convicted felon from Queens who was busted with a gun in November 2021.

The loosely organized commune of creeps appears to be intensely interested in targeting kids on the internet, then threatening, intimidating or blackmailing them into recording acts of self-mutilation, animal abuse, sex acts and even their own suicides, according to an FBI warning issued earlier this month.

But sources told The Guardian that 764 is an outgrowth of an older, larger organization known as the Order of Nine Angles — which the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) called a “decentralized, Satanic, neo-Nazi organization” bent on the overthrow of Western governments.

The group — commonly referred to as O9A — believes the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage “corrupts modern society,” according to the ISD, an independent, non-profit human rights organization based in London.

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Hundreds of trans teens under 18 have had breasts removed in Canada, new data show

As tensions rise over the medical care of trans children, a new analysis shows hundreds of adolescents in Canada have undergone female-to-male “top surgery” — double mastectomies  — over the past five years.

Hospitalizations and day surgery visits for bilateral mastectomies for gender reassignment surgery have risen sharply, from 536 in 2018-19, to 985 in fiscal 2022-23, according to data compiled for National Post by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Of the 4,071 visits in total involving gender-affirming mastectomies or breast reductions reported since 2018, 602 involved youth 18 and under.

Of those, 303 involved teens 17 and younger. The youngest age was 14.

The numbers tell only part of the story. The CIHI data exclude Quebec hospitals as well as surgeries performed in private clinics like the McLean Clinic in Mississauga, which describes its surgeons as “industry pioneers” for top surgery — mastectomies and breast reductions in those assigned female at birth, and breast augmentation for those born male transitioning to female.

One specialist in transgender health issues said that, when applying for OHIP funding for people seeking top surgery, “50 to 70 per cent will go to McLean.”

Female-to-male chest surgery involves removing the breasts to achieve a flatter, more masculinized torso, to better align the person’s physical body with their gender identity and reduce gender dysphoria, defined as the persistent distress that can accompany the incongruence between the gender one identifies with and one’s gender at birth.

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How NYC gun arrest uncovered a huge pedophile Satanic cult

The arrest of a Queens man on gun charges two years ago has led federal authorities to the discovery of a Satanic pedophile extortion cult that targets minors over the internet, a report said Thursday.

Investigators uncovered the heinous group, named 764, while probing disturbing social media posts made by Angel Almeida, 23, who was busted in November 2021 and charged with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, according to court documents and a report from The Guardian.

In February, Brooklyn federal prosecutors announced they had filed a superseding indictment against Almeida, adding charges related to child exploitation and enticement of minors.

Prior to Almeida’s arrest, the FBI followed anonymous tips that allegedly linked him to social media accounts containing vile posts about child sex abuse — including one Instagram profile, “@necropedocell,” that featured a photo of what appeared to be a child bound and gagged.

A post on another of Almeida’s alleged Instagram profiles showed him posing with ammunition strapped to his chest, in front of a black flag bearing the logo of the Order of Nine Angels (O9A), which prosecutors described as “a worldwide Satanist … group which embraces elements of neo-Nazism and white supremacy.”

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NY Teacher Who ‘Prefers’ Underage Girls Hid Disturbing Content in Secret Application on Phone

A New York educator has been apprehended for his alleged involvement in child exploitation.

Kostas Fekkas, 34, was employed at a Manhattan charter school at the time of his arrest on September 14. His teaching career also spans several other schools in the Bronx and neighboring Westchester County.

Court documents reveal that Fekkas communicated with an undercover Homeland Security Investigations agent, who was posing as a 13-year-old girl. During this interaction, Fekkas allegedly stated his preference for underage girls and even claimed to have had sexual relations with a 10th grader.

“Cool. I usually cut off at 9th grade but you’re insanely gorgeous,” Fekkas allegedly told the undercover agent, who identified herself as an 8th grader. Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was unequivocal in his condemnation.

“Kostas Fekkas’s alleged conduct is despicable,” Williams said. “As a teacher, Fekkas was entrusted with the care and well-being of children, who he in turn allegedly sought to victimize.”

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Doomsday cult leader who says he is reincarnation of Jesus is turning 1,500 children into sex slaves on remote Philippines island, lawmakers say

Clad in a white suit with gold watch and aviator sunglasses, the leader of quasi-religious cult Omega de Salonera looks more pop star than a Messiah.

But Jey Rence B Quilario was this week accused of heading a doomsday cult where ‘rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage was perpetrated on minors’.

Quilario, who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, was named using congressional privilege as well as his group in connection to ‘widespread exploitation’.

And Save the Children has urged the Filipino government to take immediate action to free the estimated 1,500 children held by the cult on a remote island.

On Monday the chairman of the senate committee on women and children senator Risa Hontiveros said: ‘This is a harrowing story of rape, sexual violence, child abuse, forced marriage perpetrated on minors by a cult in the municipality of Socorro, Surigao del Norte.

‘We are talking about over a thousand young people in the hands of a deceitful, cruel, and abusive cult… real children are in danger, and time is of the essence. We cannot, we must not, look away.’

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Tortured and raped in a soundproof dungeon as they were slowly starved to death: How killer paedophile Marc Dutroux abused children as young as eight with the aid of his wife in ‘house of horror’

Last year, authorities in Belgium ordered a modest red brick house in the south-west city of Charleroi to be torn down.

For anyone not in-the-know, the destruction of the property – which sat on a street corner yards away from a railway track and a busy flyover – would have seemed wholly unremarkable. Just another old building making way for something new.

But the move had been in the making for more than a quarter of a century, and even to this day, the local community in Charleroi and those affected by the events that unfolded there in the mid-90s are continuing to process their grief.

As of Tuesday, as part of these efforts, anyone passing the site will find a newly-opened memorial: a tree-filled garden surrounded by white walls that are decorated with a mural of a child watching a kite soar into the sky.

Underneath the memorial lies something more sinister: a soundproofed dungeon that was once used to imprison young girls who were tortured and raped by the former owner of the house and Belgium’s most notorious criminal, Marc Dutroux.

The memorial is a homage to Dutroux’s victims, and at the request of their parents, the basement will remain preserved underneath for potential future investigations that some believe could uncover a wider criminal network.

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Confirmed: Man Who Raped His 10-Year-Old Daughter Housed With Female Prison Inmates

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections is housing a man who raped his own daughter in a women’s prison because he said he identifies as a woman himself—and the DOC is refusing to offer any kind of insight or explanation on the matter.

Mark Campbell is currently incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, inmate records show. He is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child.

That child was his own 10-year-old daughter, court documents allege.

Born in 1971, Campbell is currently 52 years old, weighs 225 pounds, and stands at 5 feet 9 inches, according to the DOC inmate locator.

Under Campbell’s listed “sex,” the Wisconsin DOC states in bold, “FEMALE.” The department has not responded to many requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

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Texas mother who blamed son’s life-threatening injuries on ‘white couple’ arrested for lying to police

A Texas mother was arrested on Saturday for allegedly making false statements to police about her two-year-old son’s life-threatening injuries sustained in February, in which he had suffered internal injuries, burns, and a lacerated liver.

Shelby Martinez, 30, was arrested on Saturday at her apartment complex where her son was injured and has been charged with making false statements to police, according to KFDX Wichita Falls.

Authorities say Martinez and the boy’s father, Thomas Gates, tried to cover up how their child received life-threatening injuries.

Their two-year-old son was allegedly run over by Gates when he was backing out with his vehicle, but the couple blamed it on an “unknown white couple,” according to police. Martinez and Gates are both black.

Gates was arrested in February, several days after the incident, for the same charge after coming clean to the police about how the incident played out.

According to authorities, Gates told them that a car driven by an unknown white female and male had pulled out of a parking spot at the Maverick on Maurine Apartments on Ridgeway and hit his son as he and his family were getting into their car.

After Martinez was questioned by police, they claimed that the details of her account were different from Gates’. Martinez was reportedly combative at the Fort Worth hospital and refused to give an interview to police.

Forensic evidence showed that Gates had lied to police about the location of where his child had been hit. Detectives found blood in the parking lot of their apartment complex, not across the street which Gates had stated, police said.

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