Shane Zoller said that his four-year-old daughter, Yanelly, had 'just wanted some damn candy' when reaching into her grandmother's handbag. The grandparents soon found themselves explaining to police officers that Yanelly found a handgun instead and somehow accidentally fired it, shooting herself in the chest. The girl, who enjoyed candy and doing her make-up, will be replaced by a child already on the way.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, Matthew Phelps told a 911 dispatcher that,
after taking too much cold medicine, 'I had a dream and then I turned
on the lights and [my wife is] dead on the floor'. He was initially
uncomfortable with trying to verify her status for the dispatcher,
explaining 'I don't know. I'm too scared to get too close to her',
but it was soon clear that she wasn't breathing. Musing on clues in
the room, Phelps, 28, added: 'I have blood all over me and there's a
bloody knife on the bed. I think I did it.'
Not long after 29-year-old Lauren Phelps was taken to hospital, she
died of her stab wounds. The authorities seemed to agree with
Phelps's statement that she 'didn't deserve this', and he has been
charged with murder. Meanwhile, the manufacturer of the cold medicine
have commented that 'Bayer extends our deepest sympathies to this
family'.
After his daughter was born, Cody Hulse, of Latrobe, Pennsylvania,
decided to make the most of his time at the maternity ward. In
addition to receiving well-wishers welcoming the girl into the world,
he sold some heroin there.
After motorists in a traffic stop explained where they'd bought
the heroin they were carrying, the police decided to join the visitors
to the maternity ward. According to the Greensburg Police Department's
Facebook page, the 25-year-old Hulse was found with 34 bags of
suspected heroin and some drug paraphernalia. He admitting to selling
drugs from the maternity room and was taken into custody. Meanwhile,
the baby's mother told the police that she'd been unaware of the
various drug deals.
When 35-year-old homeless man Justin Rey rang the front desk of the Kansas City, Missouri, hotel where he had been staying with his wife and two-year-old child, he disguised his voice as a woman's. This is because his wife, Jessica Monteiro Rey, was no longer alive. It soon emerged that Rey had flushed parts of her body down hotel toilets, and surveillance video showed him lugging a bin liner and cooler from the hotel. The police caught up with him at a local storage unit, where they confirmed that these contained body parts. Rey explained that his wife had killed herself once she'd given birth at the hotel. To have some family photos after this, he took pictures of the newborn and toddler with the body, then dismembered it in the room. He is being charged with abandonment of a corpse and, partly because the children seemed inadequately clothed, child endangerment.
David W. Romig had a wife and a live-in girlfriend, and he had a decision to make. We also know that he is a murderer. We know this not so much through clever sleuthing work on the part of Marion County, Florida, sheriff's officers as because of wayward text messages he sent after staging a burglary and fatally shooting his 64-year-old live-in girlfriend. Romig, 52, intended to report to his wife that was worried that he'd be arrested. In his nervousness, he fumbled and the messages went instead to the investigating detective who had interviewed him. Romig's worries about being arrested were soon proved valid. Then his DNA was found to match that on a partially smoked cigarette planted outside the home and a piece of torn-looking cloth caught on the damaged door frame. The cloth was later ascertained to have probably been cut with scissors. Romig has admitted that he may have killed the woman.
And a happy family...
A teenager in Phoenix, Arizona, didn't want to attend church services
on Easter. He asserted his desire to keep sleeping, so his mother,
Sharron Dobbins, decided to assert her authority by means of a stun
gun. The 17-year-old boy reported her to the police for child abuse,
pointing to small bumps on his leg from where he'd been shocked. In
response, Dobbins, 40, alleges that she did not actually shock him,
just used the noise from the stun gun to wake her two recalcitrant
sons. She is expected to appear in court soon.
Meanwhile in Nebraska, a Council Bluffs police officer on patrol at 4am
heard the sound of a stun gun, then saw a nearly naked man with a
bottle of vegetable oil streak down the street. A woman was not far
behind.
The officer interrupted the chase, whereupon the man explained that
the woman was his girlfriend, who had earlier refused to leave his
home or at least argue at a volume less likely to awaken his mother.
She did leave but only in pursuit of him after he'd emphasised his
point by biting her arm. As for the oil, he'd planned to dump it on
her head. He and some clothes from his home were deposited in a jail
cell after the girlfriend echoed his recounting of events.
In the 'Do not go gentle into that good night' department sits
Arizona's Anna Mae Blessing, who spent a few days contemplating her
72-year-old son's resolution to send her to a care home. With a
handgun in a robe pocket, she visited the bedroom he shared with his
girlfriend. She fatally shot him and then turned the weapon on the
girlfriend, who wrested it from her grasp and discarded it. Blessing
then produced a second 1970s revolver, from her other robe pocket, and
that too was confiscated.
Blessing, 92, sat in a reclining chair and waited for Maricopa
County sheriff's officers to arrive. As she was being led away, she
had this parting shot for her son: 'You took my life, so I'm taking
yours'. She told officers that she'd had planned to kill herself too,
adding that she deserves to be 'put to sleep' for first-degree murder.
Meanwhile, Florida brings us a story of someone who _didn't_ want a loved one to leave. In the town of Clearwater, 67-year-old Colin Lee Showard was engaged in an argument with girlfriend Crystal Grimes, who was in his car. To prevent her from driving off without at least hearing him out, he got into a forklift truck and pinned the car against a bus. Grimes suffered a back injury, and Showard faces a charge of aggravated battery.
Kahali Johnson says that he was investigating an alarm sounding at
his New Jersey home when the stench of vehicle exhaust led
him to the running vehicle in the garage and the corpse of his partner
of 13 years, one Tamika or Tameka Hargrave, and of her 56-year-old
mechanic. He rang the emergency services, who believe the deaths to
have been accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The Newark police
have neither confirmed nor denied reports cited by local media that 'law
enforcement sources' believe Hargrave to have been paying for car
repairs via sex at the time of her death.
Johnson puts the blame on owners who didn't have adequate alarm
systems in place. Echoing this, Hargrave's daughter Khalisha stated:
'They have cameras and stuff. Why can't they get smoke detectors?'
Our next report comes from China, where Hong Kong's high court has sentenced an anaesthetist to life in jail for killing his wife and 16-year-old daughter. Both were found dead in a locked Mini Cooper whose boot contained a deflated exercise ball, from which carbon monoxide had leaked. The anaesthetist, Malaysian national Khaw Kim-sun, testified that he had been planning to use the ball to eradicate rats at his home, not kill his family. This contradicted what he had told colleagues at Chinese University mid-inflation, about plans to kill rabbits with the gas. The jury were more convinced by prosecutors' evidence that he had been having an affair and his wife was unwilling to grant him a divorce.
And then there's the tale of California thirty-something couple Dean Cram and Lucille Trolinger, who started arguing in a car. The driver, Ricky Holt, stopped the vehicle on a rural Madera County road, where the pair continued to argue. Holt's attempt to intervene earned him a punch in the eye, and further fisticuffs followed. Well, until an oncoming pick-up truck put an end to the fight - motorist Joi Phatdouang, 68, was blinded by Holt's head lamps and fatally struck Cram and Trolinger.
Mount Vernon, Washington, police officers tracked down 32-year-old Timothy Hernandez after
his girlfriend was found headless at her home. According to court documents, Hernandez
proceeded to explain that God had told him to strike her down for not
repenting. Hernandez, who then cited two Bible passages about striking down women who do not heed God's word, added
that he would have to pray for forgiveness for having questioned God's
will and given the woman an opportunity to repent.
Investigators spoke also with the couple's three-year-old daughter, who had witnessed her
father apply a butcher knife to her screaming mother. The girl said that Hernandez told
her that she had to say goodbye to Mommy, whose closed eyes and bloody face confused her.
Hernandez told investigators that he is not crazy - a crazy person would not tell the
truth.
Finally, quite a few men were enticed by online adverts from a women seeking
no-strings-attached sex. Arriving at her Homestead, Florida, home, they were greeted by a
cross-dressing 33-year-old man. This is pornographer Bryan Deneumostier, whose latest
project is 'StraightBoyz', a pay site that offers videos of straight men being tricked into
performing gay sex acts while blindfolded or wearing dark goggles. At least 80 of the
150-plus men who feature in the videos were unaware that they were being recorded. Some men
did ask whether the acts were being recorded, whereupon Deneumostier assured them that 'she'
wouldn't do that, since her husband is in the Army.
Plea-bargaining, he has stated that he is guilty of two counts of illegal interception of
oral communications. But Deneumostier still has other legal woes to contend with. He is
accused of having sex with a boy under the age of consent at a hotel in recent months.
In France, meanwhile, Rosa-Maria Da Cruz's partner and three children
had no idea that she was pregnant. She later concealed giving birth
and the existence of the resulting child, Serena, whom she
clandestinely moved between her home and her car in the course of the
day. The child's existence came to light when Da Cruz took that car
for repairs at a shop in Terrasson-Lavilledieu, where a mechanic heard
strange sounds emanating from the boot. Investigating, he discovered
the faeces-encrusted Serena, by now a malnourished two-year-old, within.
Although Da Cruz saw the girl as 'not a baby but a thing', she
told the police that she had at least started talking to Serena, once
the child had smiled at her at age 18 months.
Serena is in foster care, and Da Cruz's eldest three children have
been returned to her while she awaits trial for repeated violence
leading to a minor's permanent disability.
Alyssa Noceda, an 18-year-old Washington resident, passed out
when getting high with 20-year-old boyfriend Brian Varela.
His friends soon received a group text message with a photo of the
unconscious Noceda and Varela's comments that he was having sex with
her to 'pass the time' while she overdosed. He would later tell a
friend that 'she died having sex with me'.
In the following days, Varela kept the corpse in his mobile home,
using Noceda's thumb print to unlock her mobile phone so that he could
fake social-media posts from her about a plan to run away from home.
A co-worker at Dairy Queen contacted the police after hearing Varela
explain all this.
After being sentenced to a little under three years in jail, Varela
said: 'What I get is what I deserve.' Judge Linda Kerse disagreed,
expressing regret that sentencing guidelines limited the punishment
she could dish out to him.
Utah's Jason Dee Maughn is accused of ending an argument with a choice. Maughn, 45, allegedly told the other man, who was handcuffed to a chair at the time, to decide whether to be killed out in the desert or have a nail punched through his penis. The following day, Maughn's opponent went to the hospital to be treated for genital injuries sustained via a tool resembling an ice pick. Maughn has been charged with sexual assault and kidnapping in conjunction with domestic violence.
Barbara Davis, 56, was doing some New Year's Day cleaning in her Duncan, South Carolina, home
when her husband, in the heat of an argument, dared her to throw the bleach into his eyes.
So she did.
She later told the police that she'd complied on account of her fear that he intended to
attack her. He later told the police that he had been rendered blind, though he refused
medical treatment. Davis has been charged with second-degree domestic violence, and there
are now bleach stains on the sofa for her to deal with.
A woman in Oklahoma, in contrast, might have been better off not admitting to throwing a
punch or two. When Cannon Harrison entered into online conversation with a woman he'd met
via the dating application Bumble, one of the first things she did was brag about having
'spotlighted' a deer and punched it, before shooting it dead. Cannon, whose title is
Department of Wildlife Conservation Game Warden, figured that she must have been joking about
the illegal acts and known about his job, so he asked whether she had used a crossbow, since
rifle-hunting season was over. She provided photos of the slain animal in response.
He traced her details via social media, and game wardens tracked her down the next day.
She and her hunting partner have been fined $2,400 in total.
It seems that two girls in Magnolia, Mississippi, did not appreciate their mother
confiscating their mobile phones. This explains why the mother, 32-year-old Erica Hall, soon
found a bullet hole in her abdomen and a knife in her back. While she was staggering
outside, the girls, ages 12 and 14, went to a neighbour's house and requested a ride to
another town. They explained that their grandmother had just passed away.
The sisters' aunt, Robin Coney, soon arrived and confronted the girls. She later said that
at the scene 'they were like "Tee Tee we didn't do this", and I was like "OK, if y'all didn't
do it, where were y'all when the people that was doing it did it?"'. Their case was not aided
by Pike County authorities' report that the girls had attempted to run over Hall with the
family car a few days earlier. The older daughter, Amariyona Hall, has been jailed on a
murder charge, and the younger is being treated as a juvenile.
Deanna Seltzer is a slightly older girl who was displeased with a parental decision. This
28-year-old Lake Worth, Florida, woman allegedly went into a violent rage when her parents
said 'no' to her pleas for a meal at Outback Steakhouse. She is accused of directing a
series of punches at her mother, then attacking her father when he intervened. Her arrest
report also mentions her flipping over a glass-topped table and other furniture and then
removing a large decorative knife from the wall and slashing it near her father while
screaming death threats.
According to the arrest report, he was able to wrest the knife from her grasp before
ringing the emergency services. Seltzer's future holds charges of aggravated assault and
battery of an elderly person, a mental-health evaluation, and perhaps no visit to the
steakhouse.
Also in Wisconsin, teenager Damian Hauschultz maintains that all the fun left his life when the
courts appointed his parents, Timothy and Tina, as guardians of three other children. At
least one of those children may well have agreed with Damian's description of the home
as akin to a prison, thanks to punishments such as 'carrying wood' for two hours a day for
not having memorised certain Bible verses. Timothy, 48, selected logs of specific sizes for
the younger children and ordered Damian, 15, to supervise the carrying.
For seven-year-old Ethan, the final punishment involved a stump about 2/3 his 37-kilo body weight.
He repeatedly paused for more than the allowed five seconds before starting a new 'lap' of
the garden, so Damian hit him 100 times for being ornery in the adults' absence. The
punishment culminated in shovelling about 35 kilos of snow onto Ethan and packing him into
what Damian termed 'his own little coffin of snow'.
A while later, Timothy and Tina took the young boy to hospital, where he died from hypothermia and
blunt-force trauma to the head, chest, and abdomen. Ethan's two siblings have been removed
from the home, and court proceedings are under way.
Let me tell you of the death of Los Angeles news anchor Christopher Burrous. His wife may have been unhappy to hear where he died - in a Days Inn hotel room with a male sexual companion - but she may be even less happy now that she knows the cause of death: a methamphetamine overdose caused by two 'rocks' of meth placed in his rectum. According to the autopsy report, Burrous's companion followed these two ministrations with some amyl nitrate. He began to worry when the masked Burrous's vomiting and grunting gave way to unresponsiveness. After trying to administer CPR, he summoned medical help, who pronounced Burrous dead.
Not to be outdone, Florida offers the story of Michael Johnson, 29,
who lived in his vehicle in his father's driveway. He was about to take a
post-yard-work shower in the home when his uncle, 72-year-old Dan Johnson, started banging
on the bathroom door, insisting that 'you've been in there too long'. Continued banging led
to a towel-wrapped Michael opening the door, at which point Dan began punching him in the
chest and back - while holding a fillet knife. After some stabbing, Dan returned the knife
to his collection.
First responders honoured Michael's request to be airlifted for
medical assistance, and he is expected to survive. They also arrested Dan, who is being held
without bail on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. In his defence, the elder
Johnson explained that his nephew had spent at least 15 minutes in the bathroom and had
'buffed up' at him when opening the door, such that he felt disrespected.
For another Florida man, disrespect alone was sufficient cause for violence. According to a police report, 73-year-old Broward County resident Fernando De Baere did not like wife Marisa Sherman's tone during an argument about a former co-worker. A few minutes later, he called on a neighbour and confessed to having responded by shooting her in the face 'one or two times' while she was sitting on the sofa. Sherman, 47, died later, and De Baere is being held without bail.
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