Tag: crime

Reward increased to $50K in slaying of Fort Bragg paratrooper found beheaded: ‘The tragic death is a real mystery’

Army officials have increased the reward in the case of a Fort Bragg paratrooper whose partial remains were found along an Outer Banks seashore last year.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command increased the award in the homicide case of Spc. Enrique Roman-Martinez to $50,000, according to a news release issued this week.

“We are increasing the reward in the hopes of developing new credible leads to determine exactly what happened to our soldier,” CID special agent Steve Chancellor said in the news release. “We do not want to leave any stone unturned.”

Roman-Martinez, 21, of Chino, California, was reported missing May 23, 2020, at Cape Lookout National Seashore in Carteret County. His severed head washed ashore six days later.

At the time of his death, Roman-Martinez was a human resource specialist assigned to Headquarters Company, 37th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.

He joined the Army in September of 2016 and was assigned as a paratrooper to Fort Bragg in March 2017.

Roman-Martinez was last seen alive May 22, 2020, when he was camping with seven other soldiers, the Army CID’s news release states.

The release states that “agents have investigated suspected illegal drug use on the evening of May 22, 2020,” but does not indicate if any evidence was found to support that suspicion.

“Roman-Martinez’s friends reported him missing” the following evening, the news release states.

In an interview with The Fayetteville Observer in May, Roman-Martinez’s older sister, Griselda Martinez, said investigators have told the family there doesn’t seem to be a motive for the other soldiers her brother was camping with to harm him.

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‘Who could devise these tortuous packages?’ Shaken Massachusetts couple speak for first time about how eBay staff tormented them with pig fetus, funeral wreath and porn for criticizing web giant on their e-commerce news site

A couple have details of a ‘depraved’ campaign of harassment they endured at the hands of eBay staff after criticizing the web giant on their e-commerce news site.   

David and Ina Steiner received live cockroaches, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, a bereavement wreath and a mask from the movie Saw that the killer wears before kidnapping, torturing and killing his victims.

David also recalled the moment he received a disturbing call from a shop in Arizona telling them they couldn’t deliver the ‘wet specimen’ they ordered. 

‘Not having any idea what a wet specimen was, I asked her. It was an embalmed pig fetus’, the shaken stalking victim told Good Morning America. 

The neighbors even received pornography addressed to David in a bid to cause the couple maximum embarrassment. 

‘Who could devise these tortuous packages? And the depravity – the messages , if you read the language – I never in a million years would have thought it was a company,’ Ina said.

The harassment started in June 2019 when a neighbor walking his dog pointed out that the Steiners’ fence had been graffitied.

It soon spiraled from the vandalism and unwanted, ‘really disturbing’ email subscriptions to eBay employees trying to place a tracking device on the car.

Prosecutors suspected the campaign was to stop the Steiners from continuing EcommerceBytes, a site dedicated to e-commerce news David and Ina have been running from their home for the past 22 years.

The site had been critical of eBay and its policies over the course of its reporting, which the Steiners say was honest and fair. 

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Washington, DC, murders surpass coronavirus deaths in July by nearly 3-to-1 ratio

The number of homicides in Washington, D.C., surpassed coronavirus deaths in the city by a nearly 3-to-1 ratio in July as the nation’s capital continues to grapple with an uptick in murders. 

There were 21 homicides throughout the month compared to eight coronavirus deaths, according to FOX5 DC.  

“We’ve put a lot of resources and time into the COVID pandemic,” Trayon White, the councilman of Ward 8, said following the July 16 killing of 6-year-old Nyiah Courtney in his area, according to the station. “We’re in a pandemic right now when it comes to crime in this community and we got to start acting it.” 

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‘I Caused the Death’: Cop With Beer in Car, Admits He Killed Woman in Crash, NOT Arrested or Fired

In June of 2020, Sgt. Ryan Hartman was drinking and driving when we stopped “paying attention” and crashed into a car occupied by Jennifer Miller and her life partner, Pam Watts. The crash would put Watts in the hospital and her partner in the ground. It has been over a year since Hartman killed Miller and not only have police refused to arrest him, but he’s back on duty.

This is not some case with no evidence or disputed facts. According to body camera footage that was released this week, Hartman admitted that his lack of attention caused Miller’s death and police found an open Dos Equis beer in his truck.

“I caused the death of somebody buy me not paying attention,” Hartman says according to the newly released video. According to a search warrant carried out on Hartman’s phone after the crash, he was using his phone whilst drinking a beer.

Despite finding a beer can in his truck and admitting that he caused Miller’s death, Hartman was not arrested that day — or any day after. Instead, he was put on paid vacation for five months while his office “investigated” the crash. Hartman received blue privilege from the start.

After the crash, Hartman refused a breathalyzer and police waited over eight hours to get a warrant for a blood draw. Since so much time had passed after the crash, Hartman still had alcohol in his system but his levels had fallen below the legal limit.

Highlighting the nature of Hartman’s blue privilege was the fact that the neighboring department who responded to the crash, the Lockhart Police Department, recommended charges of negligent homicide. However, the investigation was turned over to Hartman’s department, the San Marcos Police Department.

That investigation was subsequently passed to Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz, who chose not to send Hartman’s case before a grand jury.

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US diplomat, 45, faces life in prison after pleading guilty to raping and drugging TWENTY THREE women over 14 years while stationed at U.S. Embassy in Mexico City

A former U.S. diplomat may face life in prison, after pleading guilty to raping and drugging 23 women over the course of several years, while he was employed at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

Brian Jeffrey Raymond, 45, of La Mesa, California, pleaded guilty Friday to federal sexual abuse and transportation of obscene material charges, according to the Department of Justice. 

An investigation into Raymond was launched after a nude woman was spotted screaming for help on the balcony of his Mexico City apartment last May. 

The woman told the FBI she had no recollection of events after consuming drinks and food provided by Raymond.  

He was arrested in La Mesa last October, on one count of coercion and enticement.

‘Brian Raymond betrayed the trust granted to him as a U.S. government employee representing the United States abroad by engaging in years of predatory conduct sexually abusing, exploiting, and recording vulnerable women he targeted in the United States and around the world,’ Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. 

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Who Killed the Nazi on Campus?

Of all the folks ambling around the folksy-cute rock-climbing community of Squamish, British Columbia, which is about 65 miles north of the U.S. border, no one is more perplexed by the unsolved 2017 murder of a onetime neo-Nazi troublemaker lunatic named Davis Wolfgang Hawke than his last girlfriend, Eva McLennan, who knew him only by how he first introduced himself, as Jesse James, avid vegan cragsman, adventurer, technologist, futurist, nutritionist, philosopher, writer, occasional poet, ex-officer in the Israeli Defense Force, and holder of a theoretical physics Ph.D. from Stanford. If that seems like a lot to take in, just imagine how it was for her. The guy she’d been in love with was pretty much just a spectral figment of his own imagination. Even his theoretical degree was purely theoretical.

The fullness of this realization didn’t happen right away. First came the murder, him found shot inside his 2000 GMC Yukon XL, which is where he lived, off a service road outside of town, digging the peripatetic so-called vanlife, the truck then torched such that you’d never know it was once bright red. All his gear vanished in the inferno, too — his climbing stuff, two phones, two laptops, a bunch of USB drives, everything. At the time, McLennan spent her nights in a tent a short distance away and stumbled upon the scene expecting only to enjoy another day of climbing the area’s many outcroppings and crags. Their last words to each other were “Good night, sweet dreams, I love you.” Instead, chaos and upheaval and death and cops.

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‘Dating Game Killer’ Rodney Alcala dies at 77

Convicted serial killer Rodney Alcala, known as the ‘Dating Game Killer’ because of his appearance on the TV show as a contestant in 1978, has died of natural causes, California prison officials said Saturday.

Alcala, 77, was condemned to death row for murdering five people, including 12-year-old Robin Samsoe in 1979.

He died at 1:43 a.m. Saturday at a hospital, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.

He was twice granted a new trial in the Orange County kidnapping and killing of Samsoe but was convicted of her murder, as well as that of four women, by an Orange County jury in 2010. He was sentenced to death.

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UK law commission recommends making speech offenses based on “likely psychological harm”

Recommendations unveiled by the UK’s Law Commission are seeking to establish a new offense by criminalizing communications that could cause “likely psychological harms.”

Another offense that is recommended in the document concerns “knowingly false communications.” This is a serious threat to freedom of expression, and a chance for the authorities to get the last word on what is perceived as true and false.

The recommendation defines “harm” as something that causes “serious distress,” while “psychological harm” is also being mentioned. As for defining “serious distress” – the Commission refers to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

The proposed reforms are aimed at protecting victims of online abuse, but there are fears that the vague language and prioritizing subjective perception of speech over objective content could have dangerous consequences.

And the fact that identity and characteristics of the recipient of a communication is also given center stage leaves the door wide open for censorship based on identity politics.

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You’re More Likely to Get Murdered in Chicago Than Be Hospitalized for COVID-19

“The Delta variant does not appear to be especially deadly,” says Dr. Joel Zinberg in a Tuesday New York Post op-ed.

Zinberg — who practiced medicine for 30 years at Mt. Sinai Hospital — notes that “despite rising numbers of Delta cases in July, hospitalizations have only increased moderately.” Delta victims, he notes, “are no more likely to be hospitalized or die than with other variants.”

Not only that, but as I noted elsewhere here at PJ Media on Wednesday, you’re more likely to get murdered in Chicago (18 murders per 100,000 people) than a senior citizen is to be hospitalized for the Wuhan Flu (2.9 per 100,000), Delta variant or no Delta variant.

While Zinberg adds that most of the increase “is concentrated in areas with low vaccination rates,” the actual COVID death rate is “lower than it was three weeks ago.”

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