Tag: mysterious deaths

Their son’s prison death was under investigation — then the funeral home found evidence in his body bag

Patrick LeBranch Jr. had just viewed the body of his brother at the Richardson Funeral Home of Jefferson in River Ridge when the funeral director pulled him aside. Something strange had happened, LeBranch said the man told him. He handed LeBranch a bulky, clear plastic bag sealed with red tape. On the front, in all black capitalized letters, was the word “EVIDENCE.”

LeBranch’s brother, Markus Lanieux Jr., had been found dead in early September while in state custody at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport. Prison officials told the family Lanieux killed himself, but they wouldn’t say how, or provide any additional information.

Lanieux Jr. is the son of Markus Lanieux, who is serving a life sentence at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel and was the subject of a joint report on Sept. 8 by Verite News and ProPublica. Lanieux Jr. died the day before that story was published. The death is still under investigation, according to corrections officials.

LeBranch held the plastic bag, squeezing the contents gently as he continued to read. Next to a line marked, “Description and/or location,” someone had written, “Sheet modified into a rope.” Inside the plastic bag was the bedsheet his brother had allegedly used to hang himself the prior week. LeBranch said the funeral director told him it came with his brother inside the body bag.

From the moment Laborde’s warden, Marcus Myers, told the family of Lanieux Jr. that the 22-year-old died by apparent suicide, they’ve had questions about it. While they don’t have firm evidence to suggest anything other than suicide, they reported receiving phone calls from Laborde inmates urging them to challenge the prison’s version of events. Adding to their doubts, family members said, is a lack of communication from Laborde.

A few days after getting the news, the family said prison officials cut off all contact. When they tried to call Myers back, an assistant instructed them to direct any future questions to Jonathan Vining, general counsel for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Despite calling him repeatedly, the family said Vining hasn’t returned any of their messages.

Then came the evidence bag, further deepening the family’s concerns about how the investigation was being handled.

“It took me for a loop,” LeBranch said of that moment when the funeral director handed him the evidence bag, which is still in the family’s possession. “For y’all to say he took his life, and this is y’all’s evidence — why would it be down here with us?”

Katherine Mattes, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at Tulane Law School, said she has never heard of an evidence bag related to an in-custody death being misplaced like this. She described it as “bizarre” and said it is “certainly understandable why this mistake would cause the family to not trust the integrity of an investigation.”

The Department of Corrections acknowledged that the evidence should not have been sent to the funeral home with Lanieux’s body. A DOC spokesman, however, indicated the blame lies outside of the department.

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Flight Attendant Found Dead in Philadelphia Hotel with Sock in Mouth Identified

Officials have identified the 66-year-old American Airlines flight attendant found dead late Monday in a Philadelphia hotel room with a sock in her mouth.

According to authorities, Diana Ramos’s body was found at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott, Fox News reported Thursday.

Housekeepers in the building discovered her body just before 11:00 p.m., according to Breitbart News, noting she was supposed to have checked out of the hotel two days before.

There were reportedly no signs indicating forced entry or a struggle at the scene.

An image shows Ramos, who was reportedly from Las Vegas. A Fly Guy’s Crew Lounge described her as a “seasoned crew member.”

Officials are calling her death “suspicious” and homicide investigators are working to gather answers in the case. According to law enforcement, there were no weapons found at the scene and no one has been arrested regarding the incident.

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American Airlines Flight Attendant Found Dead With Sock in Her Mouth in Hotel Room

Editor’s note: New information has come to light, and it has been confirmed that it was a “cloth” rather than a “sock” that was found in the airline attendant’s mouth, according to the New York Post.

An American Airlines attendant has been found dead in a hotel room in Philadelphia.

The attendant’s identity has not been made public. According to NBC 10 News, Chief Inspector Scott Small reported the cause of death “has not been determined.”

Small added the following details:

The attendant was 66 and a resident of Las Vegas.

The woman was found by the Marriott hotel cleaning staff. Medics responded quickly and pronounced her dead at the scene at 10:40 a.m., Monday, Sept. 25.

The woman was to have checked out two days prior.

Sealed prescription bottles were found inside the room.

Officials have verified that the attendant had been prescribed “several medications.”

The room showed no signs of forced entry or struggle.

No weapons were found inside the room.

The woman’s identity is being withheld pending an autopsy.

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26-Year-Old Tech CEO Pava LaPere Found Dead With Blunt-Force Trauma Inside Her Apartment

Tech CEO Pava LaPere, 26, has been found dead in her apartment with “blunt force trauma.”

LaPere had been on the Forbes “30 under 30” list for her success in the tech world.

LaPere was reported missing on Monday and was found a short time later in her Mount Vernon luxury apartment.

The EcoMap tech company founder was found with “blunt force trauma,” according to local police.

Few details are available at this time. The New York Post announced her social media accounts indicated “she was single” and that it “is unknown whether LaPere had any guests over prior to her death.”

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Actor who plunged to his death while partying with Pete Doherty in London flat was likely ‘pushed’ FBI expert says – as man’s heartbroken mother hits out at police investigation

An actor who fell from a balcony to his death at a London party after an argument with Libertines frontman Peter Doherty was likely ‘thrown’, an expert has claimed.

Mark Blanco, 30, died in 2006 after falling from a block of flats at an event attended by a number of friends and the then-Babyshambles singer-songwriter. 

Police investigated the case, and Doherty was implicated after an inquest into the actor’s death, but there have been no charges to date.

Doherty wrote in a blog post in 2011, now inaccessible, that neither he nor anybody else was with Blanco just before he died. 

‘When he fell or jumped he was alone,’ he wrote, according to NME.

But CCTV analyst and FBI instructor Grant Frederick has now alleged, based on fresh analysis of footage of the fall, that ‘there couldn’t be just one person on the balcony’.

He told The Mirror: ‘What I would see is that Mark has come out and somebody has taken Mark and is putting him over the balcony. 

‘If the measurements and the distance are correct, then Mark was thrown over the balcony, Mark was murdered.’

Frederick claimed he had asked the Metropolitan Police to perform his analysis ten years ago, but they had failed to.

Blanco’s mother has continued to seek answers to the unresolved questions around her son’s death, reportedly spending £100,000 on her own investigation.

Sheila Blanco believes the Met made mistakes in the investigation, including missing key evidence, and will feature in a new Channel 4 documentary, ‘Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son?’, on September 25.

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A Putin Critic Fell to His Death in Washington. We Still Don’t Know Why.

Almost exactly a year before the plane crash that killed mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, local police in D.C. were called to investigate the case of another former Moscow businessperson who also fell from the sky.

Twelve months later, the plunge from an M Street apartment building of Dan Rapoport, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who made a mint in post-communist Russia before souring on the regime, remains unexplained.

Tellingly, it’s been largely forgotten in Washington.

Though international media gave the story a lot of ink, the city had paid little attention — even though it involved a ghastly local death of a man who once moved in elite circles and owned the house that later became the Kalorama residence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Now, with the Prigozhin crash focusing new attention on murky Kremlin-adjacent deaths, some allies of Rapoport are speaking up about their unhappiness with Washington’s investigation of his demise, something city police almost immediately said likely didn’t involve foul play.

“There’s something here that doesn’t add up for me,” says Jason Jay Smart, a Kyiv-based American political consultant and outspoken pro-Ukraine media figure who was close with Rapoport. “Those who knew him — I’ve talked to a lot of venture capitalists — nobody is convinced he just up and decided to jump.”

“The main thing that’s happened is something that hasn’t happened: It’s that the law enforcement authorities in Washington, D.C. have not come up with anything more conclusive about what took place,” says another longtime associate, Bill Browder, the onetime Moscow financier turned bestselling Kremlin antagonist. “This is a very serious issue. He’s an American citizen who was an enemy of Vladimir Putin who came to an untimely death. That warrants a serious investigation.”

Confounding critics is the tight-lipped public posture adopted by the capital’s Metropolitan Police Department in the days after Rapoport’s death — and still evident today, even as tallies of dubious Russian-insider suicides add up around the world.

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GOP legal activist, Alexander Talcott, 41, is stabbed to death at his New Hampshire home

A Republican legal activist was stabbed to death inside his home in New Hampshire as cops investigate whether the killer acted in self-defense. 

Alexander Talcott, 41, was found dead inside his house in Durham on Saturday morning with a stab wound to his neck, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said.

Police have launched an investigation into his death, which they ruled as homicide, and the attorney general has identified all parties involved in the incident. 

Investigators are now trying to determine whether the person who stabbed Talcott was acting in self-defence, reports NBC 10 Boston. Their name has not been released and police said there was no danger to the public. 

No arrests have yet been made, police said, after naming Talcott as the deceased on Sunday.  

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Is There a Serial Killer Stalking the Brooklyn Mirage?

Or maybe this EDM club is just too big and messy.

Before I set off for a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Mirage, the teeming oasis of dance-till-sunrise, every-night’s-an-EDM-festival culture that sprang up a few years back on the site of a former lumberyard on Stewart Avenue in East Williamsburg, all my friends cautioned me to “stay safe.” They didn’t just mean “Hydrate” or “Don’t take drugs from strangers.” They were warning of something more sinister that those who go out late in Brooklyn have become absolutely convinced is happening: that a killer is on the loose, preying on zonked-out party boys. If you listen to alarmed reports confidently circulating on TikTok, X, and Reddit, something terrifying is definitely afoot in this admittedly end-of-days landscape of empty streets, chain-link-fenced-off lots, and graffitied warehouses of the industrial neighborhood the Mirage sits in. After all, it already looks like the set for a true-crime documentary or a zombie movie. So just maybe…

This goes back to June 16, when the police found the first body. Karl Clemente, 27, went missing shortly after he failed to get into a party at the Mirage. Five days later, his body was found a few blocks away in Newtown Creek, “unconscious and unresponsive floating in the water,” according to the cops. His wallet was located nearby, and security footage from the night shows him running down the street.

Amateur social-media sleuths wanted to know: But from what? Or whom? 

Then, on July 29, John Castic, also 27, and a Goldman Sachs analyst, disappeared after leaving the Mirage. His friends said he hadn’t been “feeling well,” and he left alone around 3 a.m. Security footage shows him walking calmly down the street, past a pizza cart in front of the club. Three days later, his shirtless body was found floating a short distance from where Clemente’s was found.

Online, people wanted to know: how could this really be just a coincidence?

Then things got even weirder. A story began circulating on social media about a partygoer who claims they were almost “strangled” by a man near the Mirage, before an Uber driver stopped and its passengers saved them. But it never was substantiated by a legit news source or the cops. Then the tabloids dug up an actual police report from a Connecticut doctor who claimed to have been kidnapped by a man pretending to operate a taxi in front of the Mirage on July 21. (The Mirage, which is outside the patrol-range of most yellow cabs, attracts throngs of unofficial people offering rides for money at the end of the night.) According to the New York Post, the doctor told the police that his captor told him he had “put people in body bags,” before taking him on a $6,000 spending spree and returning him to the hospital he worked for in Norwalk.

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Obama chef Tafari Campbell’s cause of death is revealed as an accident – after he died while paddleboarding at their Martha’s Vineyard home last month

The death of Barack Obama’s personal chef while paddleboarding in Martha’s Vineyard has been ruled an accident, a state official has said.

Tafari Campbell, 45, visited the resort island in late July and was on Edgartown Great Pond near the former president’s summer home.

He was seen going under the water, sparking a two-day search for his body.

Timothy McGuirk, from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, said on Tuesday the cause of death was drowning and an accident.

But the update has left numerous unanswered questions, not least surrounding the identity of the female paddleboarder who was with him and the identity of the 911 caller from the Obamas’ home and what they said.

McGuirk also said that Massachusetts does not release autopsy results to the public – the accident ruling was all that was released by the authorities on Tuesday night.

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Mystery deepens as USAF reveals 11 of the 17 service members who have died at Tinker Air Force base since January passed away ‘due to natural cause’ – and REFUSES to disclose how the other six lost their lives

The USAF has revealed 11 of 17 deaths on an Oklahoma air base this year were from natural causes – but six remained under investigation.

Tinker Air Force Base has found itself in the spotlight since Military.com confirmed there had been 17 deaths on the base this year, where more than 30,000 service members, government employees, contractors and civilians work.

Most of the 17 who died were civilians, said Colonel Abigail Ruscetta, the 72nd Air Base Wing Commander.

One source told Military.com that some of the deaths were potential suicides, and some were Covid-19-related.

‘Tinker Air Force Base experienced 17 deaths since January of this year,’ said Ruscetta, in a statement to DailyMail.com.

‘Eleven of the lost uniformed and civilian Airmen died as a result of natural causes or accidents.

‘The six remaining losses are a result of other causes, some of which remain under investigation.’

There are few details about the people who have died at the base. Only an obituary for Senior Airperson Tyler Jo Law, who died on May 28, listed her at the base.

The obituary did not reveal a cause of death. Ruscetta said the Air Force worked to support the friends and relatives of those who have died.

‘Each and every death, either by suicide or some other means, is a tragedy,’ she said.

‘Following each loss of life, leaders from the affected unit engaged with their people to acknowledge the loss of a valued teammate.

‘We offered many avenues of support, including a network of helping agencies, mental health counselors, chaplains, and Military Family Readiness professionals.’

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