Modern Day Wild West!! Crime Pours In As Oil Floods Plains Towns

Article actually written by Jack Healy

As oil floods plains towns, crime pours in

Published on Sunday, 01 December 2013 21:10

Written by Matthew Staver for The New York Times

SIDNEY, Mont. — One cold morning last year, a math teacher jogging through her hometown in eastern Montana was abducted, strangled and buried in a shallow grave. Charged in her death were two drifters from Colorado, drawn to the region by the allure of easy money in the oil fields.

New homes just outside Williston, N.D. The Family Crisis Shelter there has added bunk beds and has converted a living room to accommodate more people.

One hundred fifty miles away, in a bustling oil town in North Dakota, a 30-year-old man disappeared one afternoon from the street where he had been putting in water and sewer pipes, leaving behind a lunchbox with his paycheck inside and a family grasping for answers. After months of searching, his mother said she now believes her son is gone, buried somewhere on the high plain.

Stories like these, once rare, have become as common as drilling rigs in rural towns at the heart of one of the nation’s richest oil booms. Crime has soared as thousands of workers and rivers of cash have flowed into towns, straining police departments and shattering residents’ sense of safety.

“It just feels like the modern-day Wild West,” said Sgt. Kylan Klauzer, an investigator in Dickinson, in western North Dakota. The Dickinson police handled 41 violent crimes last year, up from seven only five years ago.

To the police and residents, the violence shows how a modern-day gold rush is transforming the rolling plains and farm towns where people once fretted about a population drain. Today, four-story chain hotels are rising, and small apartments rent for $2,000 a month. Two-lane roads are jammed with tractor-trailers. Fast-food restaurants offer $300 signing bonuses for new employees, and jobs as gas station attendants can pay $50,000 a year. Workers flush with cash are snapping up A.T.V.s, and hotel menus offer crab and artichoke dip and bacon-wrapped dates.

Amid all of that new money, reports of assault and theft have doubled or even tripled, and the police say they are rushing from call to call, grappling with everything from bar brawls and shoplifting to kidnappings and attempted murders. Traffic stops for drunken or reckless driving have skyrocketed; local jails are spilling over with drug suspects.

Last year, a study by officials in Montana and North Dakota found that crime had risen by 32 percent since 2005 in communities at the center of the boom. In Watford City, N.D., where mile-long chains of tractor-trailers stack up at the town’s main traffic light, arrests increased 565 percent during that time. In Roosevelt County in Montana, arrests were up 855 percent, and the sheriff, Freedom Crawford, said his jail was so full that he was ticketing and releasing offenders for minor crimes like disorderly conduct.

“I don’t have nowhere to put them,” Sheriff Crawford said.

Officials say that most of the new arrivals are hard workers who are simply looking for better lives, and that much of the increase in crime has resulted from population growth: Waves of new residents inevitably mean more traffic crashes and calls to 911.

Police and sheriff’s departments are responding by hiring more officers, in part with new tax revenue but often not fast enough to keep pace with their booming populations. In Dickinson, for example, the population has surged to an estimated 25,000 from 16,000 in 2000, with new hotels, condominiums and extended-stay inns being built every week. The city’s police department has 38 officers, but Sergeant Klauzer said it would need to add 12 more to keep up with the growth. Each detective’s caseload has doubled.

Once a month, Sergeant Klauzer receives a phone call from a mother looking for news about her son, Eric Haider, the 30-year-old pipe layer who vanished in May 2012, one of several disappearances in the region. Mr. Haider hated the tiring three-hour commute to his job in Dickinson, but the town’s breakneck growth meant steady work and money to support his daughter, said his mother, Maryellen Suchan.

The family has made buttons and printed fliers with Mr. Haider’s brown-bearded face, and has silk-screened T-shirts with the words “Have You Seen My Son?” The police dug up the streets and searched with dogs. As hopes dimmed, Mr. Haider’s family began asking hunters and oil workers to look out for shallow graves. Not a trace has been found.

“It’s a living nightmare,” Ms. Suchan said. “There isn’t a single day that we don’t think of him, talk of him. I don’t have an end.”

Federal prosecutors say the boom’s riches have attracted opportunists and criminals. Mexican cartels and regional methamphetamine and heroin traffickers have proliferated, hoping to tap the same sources of wealth that have turned farmers into millionaires and shaved unemployment rates to as low as 0.7 percent.

 

“It’s following the money,” said Michael W. Cotter, the United States attorney for Montana. “I hate to call the cartels entrepreneurs, but they’re in the business to make money. There’s a lot of money flying around that part of Montana and North Dakota.”

Over the last year, the police and prosecutors in North Dakota, Montana and Canada have tried to crack down on drug traffickers and the most violent offenders systematically with an effort they call Project Safe Bakken, named for the rich oil formation under the plains. The F.B.I. is adding a handful of agents to the region. Federal officials have charged more than two dozen people they say were trafficking drugs into the area.

As more families arrive, domestic-violence shelters are also filling up, often with similar stories of troubled migrations. Families arrived hoping for $20-an-hour jobs, but discovered that modest homes rent for $2,000 and that things like gasoline and dinner cost more. The stresses of life piled up. Alcohol and drugs added to the problem. Old patterns of domestic abuse crossed state lines.

In Dickinson, mothers in the shelter sleep on couches with their children. In Williston, the small Family Crisis Shelter has added four sets of bunk beds and turned its living room into a bedroom to accommodate more people. The executive director, Lana Bonnet, said that 83 percent of her clients were from out of town, and that many had sought refuge after being choked, threatened with a gun or beaten until bones broke or teeth fell out.

While the raw numbers of murders and rapes remain low, every few months seem to bring an act of violence that flares like a gas flame on the dark prairie, shaking a community and underscoring how much life here is changing.

In Dickinson, it was the rape of an 83-year-old woman, who the police say was attacked inside her home by a 24-year-old man who had come to town looking for work. In Culbertson, Mont., it was a man who was beaten with brass knuckles by a group of drug dealers and left for dead along the side of a road. In Sidney, it was the murder in January 2012 of Sherry Arnold, the 43-year-old schoolteacher abducted during her Sunday morning jog.

Hundreds of people searched for Ms. Arnold in frozen fields, neighborhoods and ditches until her body was found in North Dakota, near a line of trees planted as a windbreak by farmers. After receiving a tip, the police arrested two men, Lester Van Waters Jr. and Michael Spell. Mr. Van Waters has pleaded guilty, and Mr. Spell is expected to go on trial in January. His lawyer has said Mr. Spell is mentally disabled.

After Ms. Arnold’s killing, there was a run on pepper spray and stun guns in Sidney, and the town offered martial arts classes to women. Mayor Bret Smelser, who attended the same Lutheran church that Ms. Arnold did, said his wife had bought a small handgun to help her feel safer when he was away.

“Nobody knew anybody anymore,” he said. “We were a community that never locked our doors. That’s all changed.”

Source: NY Times

"Cheshire Cat Cry" by Yoko Ono

CHESHIRE CAT CRY

I’m rolling in your dreams
Listening to your screams
Cheshire Cat Cry
The River is dry

We the expendable people of the United States
Digging our own ditches
While the Dead in the trenches
Are covered with sand
Covered with sand

Stop the violence
Stop all wars
Stop the violence
Stop all wars

We the expendable people of the United States
Ask to stop the violence
Stop all wars

The sand is still moving
They can’t die
Cheshire Cat Cry
Cheshire Cat Cry

We the expendable people of the United States
Ask to stop the violence
Stop all wars

“Ma, they told us that
Our blood money will give us
Independence, freedom and power

This is my blood money
30 thousand dollars!
I want you to have it
And I want you to quit your job
All these years,
You’re standing on your feet all day
Don’t worry, I’ll be back
I’ll be back soon.
to take care of you”

He came back with no arms no legs

A guy with fat hands
fat fingers
Counting my money
Over my dead body

Cheshire Cat Cry
Cheshire Cat Cry

We the expendable people of the United States
Ask to stop the violence
Stop all wars

We don’t need it
Who needs it
Who needs it
Who needs it

Cheshire Cat Cry
Our Hearts are Dry

yoko ono

 — at The New York Times

Fatal Mercies - Assisted Suicide? Yes or No

New York Times August 10, 2013 Fatal Mercies By FRANK BRUNI FEW of us get anything approaching the degree of control we’d like over our lives. Must we also be denied a reasonable measure over our deaths? That’s all that Joseph Yourshaw, 93, seemingly wanted: to exit on his own terms, at home, without growing any weaker, without suffering any more. And that’s all that one of his daughters, Barbara Mancini, 57, was trying to help him do, according to the police report that set her criminal prosecution in motion. She’s charged, under Pennsylvania law, with aiding a suicide, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Such a sentence would be ludicrous, but so, by all appearances, is the case against her: a waste of public resources, a needless infliction of pain on a family already grieving, and a senseless prioritization of a frequently ignored (and easily ignorable) law over logic, compassion, decency. It would have been easy for prosecutors to walk away; that sort of thing happens all the time. That it didn’t happen here suggests how conflicted, inconsistent and bullheaded we Americans can be when it comes to the very private, very intimate business of dying. These are the facts of the case, according to public records and news reports: Yourshaw was receiving hospice care at his home in the small central Pennsylvania city of Pottsville. A decorated World War II veteran who had gone on to run his own contracting business, he was terminally ill, with severe diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease, among other ailments. He was frail and in pain, and had indicated a yearning for an end to it all. On Feb. 7, he sought one, swallowing an unusually large measure of his morphine in the presence of Mancini, who did nothing about it. A hospice nurse who stopped by the house afterward found him unresponsive and later said that Mancini, herself a nurse, confessed to having provided him, at his request, a vial or bottle of his painkiller that contained a potentially lethal dose. The hospice nurse called 911. The police and paramedics arrived. Although Mancini insisted that her father did not want to be revived, he was given medical attention and brought to a local hospital, where his condition stabilized. He nonetheless died there on Feb. 11. He did not get to spend his final days in his own home or his final hours in his own bed. The statement of the police officer who interacted with Mancini on the day of the overdose says, “She told me that her father had asked her for all his morphine so he could commit suicide, and she provided it.” Mancini, through her lawyers, later denied that she was deliberately enabling him to end his life. Trying to reconcile these conflicting claims is, for now, impossible: a judge has issued a gag order for the main players in the case, which is headed to trial, barring a plea agreement or a prosecutorial change of heart. But nowhere can I find any dispute that Mancini’s 93-year-old father was fading and hurting. Nowhere can I find any insinuation that Mancini coaxed him toward suicide. Or poured the morphine down his throat. Or did anything more than hand it to him. That’s it. And the lightness of this alleged assist, coupled with the ambiguity of its connection to his death after he’d rebounded from the overdose, has not only provoked outrage from Compassion and Choices, an organization that supports more options in end-of-life care. It has also prompted befuddlement on the other side of the issue, with a leading opponent of assisted suicide scratching his head about the way the case is being handled. “It is odd to see one like this prosecuted,” Stephen Drake, the research analyst for the advocacy group Not Dead Yet, told me. He added that the case worries him, because if it gets significant publicity and informs what many people believe assisted suicide is, they’ll see it as a more benign act than he believes they should. “It’s going to make it even harder to prosecute ones that really call out to be prosecuted,” he said. Such prosecutions are rare all in all, even though assisted suicide — under medical supervision and specific circumstances — is legal in only four states: Oregon, Washington, Montana and, as of a few months ago, Vermont. Alan Meisel, the founder and director of the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh, said that that’s partly because “these kinds of things usually happen in secret.” But that’s also because when they do come to light, the police and prosecutors exercise enormous discretion, knowing that there are all kinds of gray areas in which the law is a clumsy, crude instrument; that a jury may be loath to punish a gesture of apparent mercy; and that it’s not uncommon for death to be hastened by painkillers, even in hospitals. Did Mancini break the law? If the accounts of both the hospice nurse and the police officer are accurate, probably so, but the Pennsylvania statute that forbids assisted suicide, like similar statutes in other states, is worded broadly and says nothing about what rises to the level of assistance. That vagueness can be a blessing, allowing the police and prosecutors to filter the law through their own good judgment and sensitivity. No such filter has been applied here, at least based on the evidence presented at a preliminary court hearing early this month. A SPOKESMAN for the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, which is in charge of the prosecution, declined to comment for this column, citing the gag order. So I couldn’t ask anyone there how, in an era of severely limited government resources, the dedication of time and money to this case made any sense. I couldn’t ask anyone how, precisely, Mancini had done her father wrong. I couldn’t point out that his widow — her mother — had spoken out in defense of her before everyone involved stopped talking. I couldn’t note the different exit made recently by a terminally ill journalist in Seattle, thanks to Washington’s Death With Dignity Act. Her name was Jane Lotter, and last week, in The Times, Michael Winerip wrote this of her last moments with her family, including her husband, Bob Marts: “On July 18, the couple and their two children gathered in the parents’ bedroom. Ms. Lotter asked to keep in her contact lenses, in case a hummingbird came to the feeder Mr. Marts had hung outside their window. The last song she heard before pouring powdered barbiturates, provided by hospice officials, into a glass of grape juice was George Gershwin’s ‘Lullaby.’ Then she hugged and kissed them all goodbye, swallowed the drink and, within minutes, lapsed into a coma and died.” No paramedics. No arrest. No need.

Manatee Nebula-Outer Space Or Deep Sea?/20,000-Years-Old

• 29 Jan 2013
• The New York Times

Beast of the Celestial Wild

W50, the remnant of a supernova, has been nicknamed the Manatee Nebula for its resemblance to the Southern mammal. 





W50 is the 20,000 year old remnant of a supernova.  The above image was based on readings from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, with 27 independent antennas, in New Mexico.

January 29, 2013
	Alex Nabaum ESSAY That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer By JARED DIAMOND Published: January 28, 2013 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE E-MAIL SHARE PRINT REPRINTS The other morning, I escaped unscathed from a dangerous situation. No, an armed robber didn’t break into my house, nor did I find myself face to face with a mountain lion during my bird walk. What I survived was my daily shower. Enlarge This Image Alex Nabaum Connect With Us on Social Media @nytimesscience on Twitter. Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter Like the science desk on Facebook. Enlarge This Image Alex Nabaum You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall. “Really!” you may object. “What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?” My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough. Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475. This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I’ve learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently. I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us. Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent. I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view. Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea. I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as “constructive paranoia”: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people. Traditional New Guineans have to think clearly about dangers because they have no doctors, police officers or 911 dispatchers to bail them out. In contrast, Americans’ thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers. Studies have compared Americans’ perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way. Having learned both from those studies and from my New Guinea friends, I’ve become as constructively paranoid about showers, stepladders, staircases and wet or uneven sidewalks as my New Guinea friends are about dead trees. As I drive, I remain alert to my own possible mistakes (especially at night), and to what incautious other drivers might do. My hypervigilance doesn’t paralyze me or limit my life: I don’t skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things. But I try to think constantly like a New Guinean, and to keep the risks of accidents far below 1 in 1,000 each time. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the new book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?” A version of this article appeared in print on January 29, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer.

Seeking Unmarked Graves & Reasons At NotoriousReform School In FL, Now Closed Finally

State sanctioned abuse for decades!  Some runaways were shot.  Shame, Shame, Shame!!:

E

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February 9, 2013

At Boys’ Home, Seeking Graves, and the Reason

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MARIANNA, Fla. — Nobody is quite sure how many boys’ bodies lie beneath the grounds of the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, or which one is Thomas or Owen or Robert.

Nobody is quite sure how most of them died — the cause is often listed as “unknown” or “accident” — or why a great number were buried with such haste.

The scattered graves bear no markings: no names, no loving sentiment. The only hint of a cemetery are the white crosses that the state planted in the 1990s, belatedly and haphazardly.

From the time it opened in 1900, as the state’s first home for wayward children, until it closed in 2011, as a residential center for high-risk youths, Dozier became synonymous with beatings, abuse, forced labor, neglect and, in some cases, death. It survived Congressional hearings, state hearings and state investigations. Each one turned the spotlight on horrific conditions, and little changed.

But now, spurred on by families of the dead boys and scores of former students — now old men — forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida have spent the last year using sophisticated radar equipment to search for answers beneath the 1,400-acre campus.

Decades after some of the worst abuses, former students have come forward to talk of brutal and repeated beatings; the families of some of the dead want dignity for those they lost. The crosses, they say, are an afterthought. They want to know more: where the children are buried and how they died, and whether the deaths were accidental, intentional or simply the result of illness. And they want the bodies brought home.

“What happened, happened, and I am willing to forgive,” said Glen Varnadoe, whose Uncle Thomas was sent to the school in 1934 after he was accused — falsely, the family says — of stealing a typewriter from a neighbor’s yard in Brooksville. Thomas was declared dead of pneumonia a month later. “But I want my uncle’s remains, and I want to return him to his rightful place, next to his mother,” he said. “He was 13. He didn’t do anything but walk across a backyard.”

The anthropology team has focused largely on Boot Hill, which during the segregation era was a documented cemetery on the African-American side of campus. So far, the team has located 50 grave shafts there, 19 more than a 2009 Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation said existed. And with the help of school, state and historical records, they have counted at least 98 deaths dating from 1913 to 1960.

Their search was stymied last year when the state tried to sell the property. But a court order halted that. The team now has permission from the state to keep searching.

“With the possibility of additional graves on the Dozier School property, I asked that the Department of Environmental Protection refrain from selling the land to allow for further research into this very disturbing matter,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Dr. Erin Kimmerle, who is leading the team, said she believed that more boys were probably buried at the school. It is highly unlikely, she said, that black and white children at the school, in northern Florida, would have been laid to rest in the same cemetery before desegregation, which means that white boys, like Thomas Varnadoe, may be buried elsewhere. Documents and witnesses make mention of other burial spots, but none are directly identified.

Some families of the dead want their boys found, exhumed and brought home. The state and the district medical examiner’s office, which can exhume decades-old bodies if the deaths appear suspicious, are still considering whether to grant permission.

“Where there is smoke, there is fire,” Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who also urged the Justice Department to get involved, said at a recent news conference with two families. “I want them exhumed. I want them examined. I want to see if potential crimes were committed.”

Getting to the children, and perhaps the truth of what occurred, has been a hard-fought battle, mostly because decades-old records are contradictory and incomplete.

“This is what is important: to get some closure in our lives,” said Ovell Krell, 84, whose brother is said to be buried there. In 1941, school officials told her parents that Owen, who was sent to the school for stealing a car, had run away. He was later found dead under a house on a January night, apparently from pneumonia. The family wondered: why would a 14-year-old boy not seek help for days if he was dying of pneumonia?

By the time his parents learned of his death and drove hours to the school, Owen was in the ground. With little money or know-how to do battle, the family simply went home. Their mother never recovered, Mrs. Krell said. Most nights, she sat on the porch, listening for Owen’s whistle.

“If my mother could have been sure that was Owen in that grave, she might have come to terms with it,” Mrs. Krell said. “It was the not knowing. This is the thing that eats people up inside.”

Almost from the moment it opened as the Florida State Reform School, there was a steady stream of reports of abuse, indentured servitude, crowding and neglect. So many children — among them incorrigibles and runaways — were sent to the institution that it became the largest in the country.

Accounts surfaced early on of children as young as 6 chained to walls. Fierce whippings were common. Children were forced to pick crops, make bricks and print paper, all to profit the prison and other businesses, records show. A fire in 1914 killed eight boys who had been locked in a room. Flu epidemics killed others. Some runaways were shot.

The beatings continued well into the 1960s. When Gov. Claude Kirk made a surprise visit in 1968 to inspect the decrepit school, he said, “If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you’d be up there with rifles.”

Even when the beatings stopped, abuse continued. The “whips and chains” mentality of the staff, as a former student called it, was deep-rooted. In the 1980s, children at the school said they were hogtied and put in isolation. This led to a 1983 class-action suit, which the state settled. Yet problems persisted.

A highly critical 2011 Justice Department report called the mistreatment of children at the school “systemic, egregious and dangerous.” The school was closed that year for cost-cutting.

In 2008, a group of men who attended the school in the 1950s and ‘60s began to tell harrowing stories to The Miami Herald and The St. Petersburg Times. They called themselves “The White House Boys,” a nod to the small cinder-block building where they say they were viciously flogged for the slightest infraction. The men who say they were abused now number about 300.

Robert Straley, 66, who arrived in 1963, soon after he was caught riding in a car a friend had stolen, said he was beaten his first day. Echoing the stories of the other White House Boys, Mr. Straley said he was taken to the house and was told to lie stomach down on a blood-specked mattress and hold tight to the head rail.

A one-armed guard pummeled him with a leather strap lined with sheet metal, he said. Forty blows tore up his bottom, leaving him bloodied and terrified. Other boys sometimes received as many as 100 blows, he said. An oversize industrial fan roared outside to drown out the sound.

“I thought he was hitting me with a two-by-four,” Mr. Straley said. He was told: “ ‘You could bite the pillow.’ You weren’t supposed to let go. If you did, they would start over. You were allowed to cry but not scream.”

In 2008, Gov. Charlie Crist ordered a state investigation. The inquiry, which acknowledged that it relied in part on incomplete school records, found only 31 grave sites and did not substantiate or refute claims of abuse. It concluded that the 31 deaths were attributable to known causes. The families called it a whitewash. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement defended its report in December, when researchers found more graves.

Now Dr. Kimmerle and her team have brought new hope that the children may finally be honored. “They want the boys brought home,” said Dr. Kimmerle, who has helped locate graves all over the world. “These were not throwaway children.”

Deathrow Inmate Exonerated By DNA Evidence Quote-NY Tims Quote Of The Day

QUOTATION OF THE DAY "The adversarial system doesn't know who's guilty or who's innocent. The millstone does not know who's under it." KIRK NOBLE BLOODSWORTH, the first inmate in the nation to be sentenced to death and then exonerated by DNA evidence.

Cuddly Cats Considered Killing Machines! Shocking!

New York Times, Page A19, Wednesday, January 30, 2013

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January 29, 2013

That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think

By NATALIE ANGIER

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high.”

“When we ran the model, we didn’t know what to expect,” said Dr. Marra, who performed the analysis with a colleague, Scott R. Loss, and Tom Will of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “We were absolutely stunned by the results.” The study appeared Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings are the first serious estimate of just how much wildlife America’s vast population of free-roaming domestic cats manages to kill each year.

“We’ve been discussing this problem of cats and wildlife for years and years, and now we finally have some good science to start nailing down the numbers,” said George H. Fenwick, the president and chief executive of the American Bird Conservancy. “This is a great leap forward over the quality of research we had before.”

In devising their mathematical model, the researchers systematically sifted through the existing scientific literature on cat-wildlife interactions, eliminated studies in which the sample size was too small or the results too extreme, and then extracted and standardized the findings from the 21 most rigorous studies. The results admittedly come with wide ranges and uncertainties.

Nevertheless, the new report is likely to fuel the sometimes vitriolic debate between environmentalists who see free-roaming domestic cats as an invasive species — superpredators whose numbers are growing globally even as the songbirds and many other animals the cats prey on are in decline — and animal welfare advocates who are appalled by the millions of unwanted cats (and dogs) euthanized in animal shelters each year.

All concur that pet cats should not be allowed to prowl around the neighborhood at will, any more than should a pet dog, horse or potbellied pig, and that cat owners who insist their felines “deserve” a bit of freedom are being irresponsible and ultimately not very cat friendly. Through recent projects like Kitty Cams at the University of Georgia, in which cameras are attached to the collars of indoor-outdoor pet cats to track their activities, not only have cats been filmed preying on cardinals, frogs and field mice, they have also been shown lapping up antifreeze and sewer sludge, dodging under moving cars and sparring violently with much bigger dogs.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into trying to educate people that they should not let their cats outside, that it’s bad for the cats and can shorten the cats’ lives,” said Danielle Bays, the manager of the community cat programs at the Washington Humane Society.

Yet the new study estimates that free-roaming pets account for only about 29 percent of the birds and 11 percent of the mammals killed by domestic cats each year, and the real problem arises over how to manage the 80 million or so stray or feral cats that commit the bulk of the wildlife slaughter.

The Washington Humane Society and many other animal welfare organizations support the use of increasingly popular trap-neuter-return programs, in which unowned cats are caught, vaccinated, spayed and, if no home can be found for them, returned to the outdoor colony from which they came. Proponents see this approach as a humane alternative to large-scale euthanasia, and they insist that a colony of neutered cats can’t reproduce and thus will eventually disappear.

Conservationists say that, far from diminishing the population of unowned cats, trap and release programs may be making it worse, by encouraging people to abandon their pets to outdoor colonies that volunteers often keep lovingly fed.

“The number of free roaming cats is definitively growing,” Dr. Fenwick of the bird conservancy said. “It’s estimated that there are now more than 500 T.N.R. colonies in Austin alone.”

They are colonies of subsidized predators, he said, able to survive in far greater concentrations than do wild carnivores by dint of their people-pleasing appeal. “They’re not like coyotes, having to make their way in the world,” he said.

Yet even fed cats are profoundly tuned to the hunt, and when they see something flutter, they can’t help but move in for the kill. Dr. Fenwick argues that far more effort should be put into animal adoption. “For the great majority of healthy cats,” he said, “homes can be found.” Any outdoor colonies that remain should be enclosed, he said. “Cats don’t need to wander hundred of miles to be happy,” he said.

James Morton

A domestic cat with a European rabbit. Domestic and feral cats are significant predators of a wide range of prey species, including rabbits.

January 30, 2013
	Sebastian Nebel Whether feral or domestic, cats are tuned to the hunt, and when they see something flutter, they cannot help but pounce.

Poverty Addiction Hope Death-RIP DeAndre McCullough/A Poem

Shame on America!  Where is our compassion, empathy, sympathy, concern, love, help for those in need, whatever their need?  Pray for DeAndre.  We're all in this forever.

A poem by DeAndre McCullough:

Silent screams and broken dreams,
Addicts, junkies, pushers and fiends.
Crowded spaces and sad faces,
Never look back as the police chase us ...

If I had one wish it would surely be
That God would send angels to set me free.
Free from the madness, of a city running wild,
Free from the life of a ghetto child.

— DeAndre McCullough, 1977-2012

---

August 29, 2012

A Better Life Eternally Eluded the Boy From ‘The Corner’

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

BALTIMORE — In good times, DeAndre McCullough inspired nearly everyone he touched. He was a small-time drug dealer made good, a recovering addict who had a fledgling career counseling troubled teenagers. He played bit roles on HBO in “The Wire” and in “The Corner,” which chronicled his life in the drug trade at the age of 15.

He had survived the inner-city whirlpools that swallowed so many people he knew. His father and several friends lost their lives to drug overdoses or gunfire. Mr. McCullough, who abused cocaine and heroin, never expected to live past 20.

“I’m 35 today,” he marveled in a text message that he sent to his mentor, David Simon, the writer and television producer, in May. “Never thought I’d make it. How ’bout that?”

But on Aug. 1, Mr. McCullough was found dead of heroin intoxication, making him a powerful symbol of the urban maelstrom that has devoured so many young men. To the people who knew him, his death was all the more heartbreaking because a better life had seemed so tantalizingly within his reach.

Michael Potts, the actor who played Brother Mouzone on “The Wire,” heard the news just as he was about to perform in “The Book of Mormon” on Broadway. Mr. McCullough had played Mr. Mouzone’s sidekick, Lamar.

“I was devastated,” said Mr. Potts, who said he had to steady himself for his performance. “As an African-American man, I thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m losing another one, not another one.’ ”

Here in Baltimore, friends and relatives had hoped he would avoid this all-too-familiar fate. Of Mr. McCullough’s closest teenage buddies, three ended up dead, four ended up in prison and several ended up addicted to drugs.

“Once ‘The Wire’ and everything hit, I thought life was going to be good for DeAndre,” said Kevin Thomas, the only one of Mr. McCullough’s close male friends to graduate from college.

Mr. Thomas, who works for a real estate company, knows how drugs and violence can burn through a family. His father died of a drug overdose. His mother, who was also an addict, died of AIDS. His brother was shot to death leaving a nightclub.

He had hoped that Mr. McCullough, his best friend from third grade, would be spared. “To see him go down that road of self-destruction was heartbreaking,” he said.

He still remembers Mr. McCullough as a teenager, laughing and joking on Fayette and Mount Streets, a drug-infested street corner in an impoverished community. The son of two drug addicts, Mr. McCullough sold drugs, skipped school and rarely read books.

Yet Mr. McCullough also wrote poetry. He was familiar with Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and he had a wry sense of his place in a warped world.

Ed Burns, who with Mr. Simon wrote the book “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” which inspired the HBO mini-series, said Mr. McCullough stood apart.

“He seemed to know a lot of what the world was about,” he said. “He could articulate the injustice, which was all around him. The other kids couldn’t. They suffered it, but they weren’t conscious of it. He was conscious of it.”

The book, published in 1997, opened up new possibilities. Suddenly, Mr. McCullough was being interviewed on “Nightline” on ABC and on NPR. He was 20 and thinking there might be another way of living.

“This is what I’ve done my whole life,” Mr. McCullough told NPR in 1998, describing his years of dealing and abusing drugs. “It defined me as a person. And now I’m trying to define myself as someone else that I’ve never been.”

He enrolled in drug-rehabilitation clinics and tried to get clean. He got his G.E.D. and went to community college for a semester with help from Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns.

He found honest work at a furniture store and a hospital, and at security companies. And he played bit roles in Mr. Simon’s productions.

In “The Corner,” he played the policeman who arrests the character based on his life. In “The Wire,” he took on the role of the assistant to Brother Mouzone, a hit man.

But it was at Mountain Manor Treatment Center where he found his niche. He spent about two years there, counseling young drug addicts, and dreamed of opening a youth center of his own.

“Oh my God, he just had a gift,” said Charlotte Wilson, a counselor who worked with him in 2004 and 2005.

“He could share the pain and he could share the joy. He would read the kids his poetry about living life on the street, hard knocks, talking about drugs and how you can come up out of it. They loved him.”

His mother, Fran Boyd Andrews, who overcame her own addiction, said it was the longest time he would stay sober. “I think that was the happiest I ever seen my son,” she said.

But no matter what Mr. McCullough did, the cravings kept creeping back. He started missing work, and finally his supervisor let him go.

Over the next seven years, he drifted from one low-wage job to another, in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics, and he spent long stretches unemployed.

His relatives, friends and two young sons prayed for him and helped whenever they could. But he couldn’t escape the pain within himself, the gnawing sense that he would never succeed.

“It just ate at him and ate at him,” his mother said, “until he couldn’t get a grip on it.”

Last fall, he turned to Mr. Simon again, pleading for work on the set of “Treme” in New Orleans.

“He said, ‘I’ll get clean. I’ll do whatever I have to do,’ ” Mr. Simon recalled. “There was a weariness and a fear in his voice that convinced me that we had to try.”

Mr. Simon offered him a position on the set’s security team. Mr. McCullough started in October. By January, he was out of a job. “There are corners here, too,” he told Mr. Simon.

“What was the trigger that sent him back to addiction?” Mr. Simon asked. “It’s the biggest question in the world.

“But the journey from one America to the other is epic,” he said. “Once you’ve become a citizen of one, it’s really hard to find citizenship in the other.”

Back home in Baltimore, Mr. McCullough couldn’t find work. By June, the police said, he had found another way to fuel his drug habit.

“My heart nearly fell to my feet,” Mrs. Boyd Andrews said of the moment that she saw a crime scene photo that the police had posted online. The authorities said it was her son, who was accused of robbing two pharmacies and fleeing with bottles of morphine and oxycodone.

Mr. McCullough promised to turn himself in once he was clean, and he enrolled in another drug clinic. But two weeks before the program was over, he checked himself out.

“I knew then that he was back at it,” his mother said.

On the day before the police found his body, Mr. McCullough was hopeful. He had a line on a landscaping job and was talking about getting back on his feet.

The next morning, Mr. McCullough, who always called his mother at 8 a.m., didn’t call. That evening, a cousin went to Mr. McCullough’s girlfriend’s house and found him lying dead in the bathroom. His addiction had finally swallowed him whole.