Tag: crime

In Idyllic Celebration, Florida, a Father Killed His Family to Prepare for the ‘Apocalypse’

A prosecutor claimed a man admitted to murdering his family to prepare for the “apocalypse” while living in the formerly Disney-affiliated community of Celebration, Florida.

Opening arguments began Monday in Osceola County Court in the case against 46-year-old Anthony Todt, who faces four counts of capital murder for the deaths of his wife and three children. He also faces one count of animal cruelty for allegedly killing Breezy, the family dog. He has pleaded not guilty.

In opening statements, prosecutor Danielle Pinnell said Todt told authorities in a confession that he and his wife had an agreement that “everybody needed to die in order to pass over to the other side together because the apocalypse was coming.”

Keep reading

Seattle rape cases moved to back burner, police insiders say

nvestigating sex crimes has become much less of a priority in Seattle.

In the last year, Seattle Police have forwarded far fewer sex assault cases to the King County Prosecutor’s Office. Meanwhile, arrests for sex crimes involving adults and children have plummeted: This year so far, 1.6% of cases investigated by the sexual assault and child abuse unit have resulted in an arrest, down from 14% in 2019.

This impacts adult victims most often; two employees of Seattle Police confirmed that adult sex assault cases are seldom assigned — a recent development.

In March, outside of arrests, not a single sexual assault case involving an adult victim was assigned to a detective, according to documentation provided by a Seattle Police employee.

The Seattle Police Department says there are fewer officers to investigate these crimes. The two anonymous Seattle Police employees agreed that employee retention is part of the problem; 16% of Seattle officers are on leave. Others have left permanently. But it’s not the only reason, they say.

A new mayor means a new policing strategy, and Mayor Bruce Harrell made it clear during his campaign that he aims to address “visible crime.”

Keep reading

Serial Killer Known As The ‘I-65 Killer’ Identified After 30 Years

In 1987, 41-year-old Vicki Heath was working at the Super 8 Motel just off I-65 in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, in order to make some extra money. She had recently gotten engaged, and was looking forward to this new chapter in her life as her two kids were reaching adulthood. That all tragically ended on February 21, 1987, when police received a call about a “complete mess” in the lobby of the motel. The caller worried that the front desk clerk was missing. Police arrived and found Heath’s body behind a nearby dumpster.

Two more women – Margaret “Peggy” Gill and Jeanne Gilbert – were killed two years later, each while working at different Days Inn motels in Indiana. A final woman, referred to only as Jane Doe, was sexually assaulted at the Columbus, Indiana, Days Inn in 1990.

More than 30 years went by without police being able to charge a suspect, whom they referred to as either the “Days Inn Killer” or the “I-65 Killer,” since the motels were off the highway.

On Tuesday, however, Indiana State Police (ISP) announced that they had finally identified the serial killer as Harry Edward Greenwell, who died in 2013 at the age of 68. He had been living in New Albin, Iowa and had an “extensive criminal history ranging from 1963 to 1998,” the ISP announced.

Keep reading

New ‘Antilynching’ Federal Law Could Let Prosecutors Imprison You For A Crime You Never Committed

Touted as an overdue (if duplicative) law that no one could disagree with, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act signed by President Biden last week includes a subtle provision that could boost the Biden administration’s war on wrongthink.

The bill sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House with ease. The tactful naming made the bill radioactive to oppose, which is why 422 congressmen voted in favor while only three opposed.

Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the three who voted against the bill, expressed a handful of concerns, including that there are a limited number of constitutionally specified federal crimes, that lynching is already criminalized, and that “Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ [on top of existing criminal punishments] tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech.”

He also highlighted another potential pitfall of the legislation: “The bill creates another federal crime of ‘conspiracy,’ which I’m concerned could be enforced overbroadly on people who are not perpetrators of a crime.” Here’s the section Massie is referring to:

Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, or if the offense includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.

The bill amends the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in 2009, which defines and criminalizes hate crimes. The minimum qualification is an attempt “to cause bodily injury” due to the victim’s race, sexual orientation, nationality, gender, religion, or disability. 

Bodily injury can be defined as “physical pain” or “any other injury to the body, no matter how temporary.” Sensibly, the 2009 law requires an attempt at violence to be made, which is a crime itself regardless of prejudiced motives. The new “antilynching” law takes this a step further by criminalizing “conspiracy” to commit certain hate crimes.

I’m sure someone will retort: conspiracy to commit a federal crime is already a federal crime. This is not a universally accepted interpretation of conspiracy law, nor does the law’s language or historical precedent justify such a broad interpretation — hence the ostensible necessity for the new antilynching law. Criminalized conspiracies are those plotting “against the United States” – like the Volkswagen executives who attempted to defraud the Environmental Protection Agency by faking emission results and, more recently, the leader of the Oath Keepers who plead guilty to seditious conspiracy for his part in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot. 

So as of last Tuesday, it is illegal to simply “agree” to participate in an act if it falls under the categories highlighted above. One can imagine dark political humor venturing into these categories (a comment such as “I hate so-and-so so much I could kill him,” for example) being interpreted as “conspiring to lynch.”

The key issue here is that intent should not be the sole subject of a court case. The purpose of courts is for a neutral arbiter to determine whether someone’s rights were violated during an encounter between two parties. Conspiracy, if no action is taken in pursuit of it, involves only one party: the conspirators. Therefore, it alone constitutes no crime as it couldn’t have possibly violated someone else’s rights. 

With this new law, the U.S. government has further expanded into the realm of policing thought crimes. Ominously, this law comes on the heels of the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to broaden the “domestic terrorism” category and expand methods for identifying “threats.”

Keep reading

Why the FBI Won’t Release Quarterly Crime Stats for 2021

Every year, the FBI releases its annual year-end crime report, which is based on data provided voluntarily by police departments across the country. This report typically comes out near the end of the following year. (The 2020 report, for example, came out in September of 2021.) Quarterly reports were actually a relatively new innovation, having been introduced in 2020.

To track the numbers that police departments report, the FBI for decades used a system called the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) to collect data. But in 2021, the Bureau switched to a different system, called the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which provides more details on crimes that are reported. Though the change is meant to improve tracking, this week’s announcement from the FBI highlights what experts say are serious concerns about its impact on crime statistics for years to come.

The problem is that a large portion of police departments do not have the NIBRS system, which is expensive and can be difficult to implement into a department. According to the Bureau of Statistics, it could cost up to $377,000 for a department to switch over to NIBRS and over $53,000 for annual maintenance. According to the FBI, 63% of all police agencies in the country are using the NIBRS system; however, many of the big cities, like New York and Los Angeles, don’t use NIBRS, which means their crime trends will be completely left out of the FBI’s data analysis for 2021, including the annual reports.

“The absence of the two largest cities in the country begs the question as to what kind of confidence the public should have in the numbers produced by the FBI,” Rick Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says. “This is a time period in which we really want to know what’s happening with respect to the most serious crimes. The uncertainties around the data are going to make definitive conclusions very difficult to draw.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism of their collecting process and releasing the information.

Keep reading

Chicago Mayor Lightfoot Has 71-Person Police Unit To Protect Her, Blames Trump For Being In Danger

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat who proposed cutting a huge $80 million from the Chicago Police Department budget in 2020, has a personal police unit consisting of a whopping 71 officers to protect her, and blamed some of her personal need for protection on former President Trump, telling the Chicago Sun-Times, “When the president of the United States uses the world’s largest megaphone and platform to target you personally, terrible things happen. And he not only blew a dog whistle, he pointed really evil and dangerous people right at my doorstep.”

The special unit, named Unit 544, now is comprised of 65 officers, five sergeants and a lieutenant, but that’s not all; “Lightfoot also has a separate personal bodyguard detail, which includes about 20 officers, the records show,” The Sun-Times noted.

On July 7, 2020, the police department issued a memo to officers who had served for at least five years; it stated:

The unit’s mission will be to provide physical security for City Hall, the mayor’s residence and the mayor’s detail command post. … Through the coordination of intelligence and resources, officers will respond to all threats related to the mayor’s physical properties to ensure its protection.

“Around the same time the unit was being formed in the summer of 2020, residents of Humboldt Park and Logan Square were complaining that the Shakespeare district, which covers their neighborhoods, was getting stretched thin because so many patrol officers there were being assigned to keep protesters from gathering outside Lightfoot’s house in Logan Square,” The Sun-Times added.

John Catanzara, president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, commented, “While murders are soaring, while districts are barebones for manpower, all that matters is protecting her castle.”

Keep reading

Rep. Ayanna Pressley says black and Latinx commuters ‘are disproportionately criminalized by fare evasion policies’

Rep. Ayanna Pressley popped up on Twitter Saturday to urge Congress to pass her Freedom to Move Act, which would “grant Black and brown riders the freedom to navigate their community without fear.” Apparently, black and Latinx commuters are hardest hit by “fare evasion policies.” It was back in 2019 when fellow squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a similar point, tweeting that “arresting people who can’t afford a $2.75 fare makes no one safer and destabilizes our community.” We suspect no one was arrested for not being able to afford subway fare; our suspicion is that the arrests had more to do with not paying one’s subway fare.

Keep reading

Eric Adams considering using drones to fight NYC crime, sources say

Mayor Eric Adams is mulling a mini-army of drones to fight surging crime in the Big Apple — possibly deploying the high-flying robocops from rooftops as watchful guardians of Gotham, sources told The Post.

Tel Aviv-based Blue White Robotics and Easy Aerial of Brooklyn were two drone manufacturers featured earlier this month at an event to launch a NYC-Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Adams attended the gathering in the Williamsburg Hotel, and sources said the mayor was so impressed with the joint presentation that he suggested his chief technology officer Matthew Fraser and the firms’ honchos begin talks about the city potentially buying drones and expanding the NYPD’s use of them.

“Eric is a big booster of drones and how they can be used to streamline government function, but obviously whatever he would try to roll out would be constrained” under existing laws limiting drone use, said a source familiar with the mayor’s thinking.

The drone makers – whose clients include the US Department of Defense, Air Force and Customs and Border Protection – say they’ve dubbed the plan the “Soteria Project,” derived from a Greek word meaning “deliverance from a crisis.”

Keep reading

How a serial killer family got away with murdering seven men and a baby

On a Kansas evening in 1872, Julia Hestler immediately regretted her visit to the Bender family. The stagecoach that dropped her off was already racing away, leaving her alone on the prairie in front of a solitary, decrepit cabin.   

When the self-proclaimed “spiritualist” Kate Bender invited Julia inside for their scheduled séance, she was revolted by a strong stench and buzzing flies. She sat across from Kate and held hands to begin, not wanting to insult her hostess. 

But with her eyes closed, Julia felt doom. She looked up to see three Bender family members suddenly standing silently behind Kate. Pa Bender held a heavy tool that shone in the candlelight. Terrified, Julia leapt up and fled. She tumbled down the cabin’s front steps before scrambling to her feet and running for her life across the darkened plains. 

Julia was lucky to survive, as Susan Jonusas writes in “Hell’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of the Benders, a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier” (Viking), out now. The neighbors she told found the incident more creepy than criminal, but the following spring her fears were validated when eight corpses were found buried beneath the Benders’ apple trees. The Benders would go down in American history as the most infamous family of serial killers.

Keep reading