The soldier in custody was described by one U.S. official in Washington as a staff sergeant who was married with three children. The sergeant had served three tours in Iraq but was on his first deployment in Afghanistan
- As I’ve stated before, everything becomes so numbing that the mind and body succumbs to its environment and eventually the mind turns you into someone that at one point you vowed you would never become. Your mind and body can only endure so much trauma before it depletes.
I know Whitney Houston has passed away but I don’t think every single channel on tv should be talking about it. Yes it is sad but on that same note, the news media has made the assumption that it was her mixture of drugs and alcohol that night. She’s not the first celebrity to die by drugs and she won’t be the last. Every time a celebrity dies from some drug overdose or drug mixture, the news acts as though it is the first time they are hearing of a celebrity doing drugs and dying from it. Celebrities are rich, some more than others BUT they have more than enough money, I don’t care what those SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA Fool laws want to say about Hollywood losing billions each year, celebrities have money to spend. If they honestly wanted to get help for their drug and/or alcohol problems, they would do so. If the people around them really cared about them, they would get them the help that they needed. If they want help, they’ll get it but if they don’t want help then the conclusion should not be surprising. Heart breaking, yes but surprising, no. There are other things going on in the world and in the U.S alone that are very important, but it seems as though unless you have some celebrity name attached it the situation, everything else must take a back seat.
took me a few seconds but I finally figured out what the problem with the picture was :)
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Jose Guerena Ortiz was sleeping after an exhausting 12-hour night shift at a copper mine. His wife, Vanessa, had begun breakfast. Their 4-year-old son, Joel, asked to watch cartoons. An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood — until an armored vehicle pulled into the family’s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.
They were a sheriff’s department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a “boom” and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside. A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun — an AR-15 assault rifle. What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.
The officers — four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 — moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting “Police!” in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house. And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet. ”Hurry up, he’s bleeding,” Vanessa Guerena pleaded with a 911 operator. “I don’t know why they shoot him. They open the door and shoot him. Please get me an ambulance.” When she emerged from the home minutes later, officers hustled her to a police van, even as she cried that her husband was unresponsive and bleeding, and that her young son was still inside. She begged them to get Joel out of the house before he saw his father in a puddle of blood on the floor. But soon afterward, the boy appeared in the front doorway in Spider-Man pajamas, crying. The Pima County Sheriff’s Department said its SWAT team was at the home because Guerena was suspected of being involved in a drug-trafficking organization and that the shooting happened because he arrived at the door brandishing a gun. The county prosecutor’s office says the shooting was justified.
But six months after the May 5 police gunfire shattered a peaceful morning and a family’s life, investigators have made no arrests in the case that led to the raid. Outraged friends, co-workers and fellow Marines have called the shooting an injustice and demanded further investigation. A family lawyer has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the sheriff’s office. And amid the outcry in online forums and social media outlets, the sheriff’s 54-second video, which found its way to YouTube, has drawn more than 275,000 views. The many questions swirling around the incident all boil down to one, repeated by Vanessa Guerena, as quoted in the 1,000-page police report on the case:
“Why, why, why was he killed?”
The shooting was justified, he said, because Guerena pointed his AR-15 at the SWAT officers and said, “I’ve got something for you,” before they opened fire. The five SWAT team members who shot Guerena believed that he had fired his weapon first, he said. Subsequent investigation revealed that the gun’s safety was on and hadn’t been fired. Ultimately, that is not an issue, Kastigar said. ”What reasonable person comes to the front door and points a rifle at people?” he said. “It takes several milliseconds to flip the switch from safety to fire and take out a couple of SWAT officers. I’m firmly of the opinion that he was attempting to shoot at us.” The officers laid down “suppressive” fire because one had tripped and fallen and the others thought he’d been shot.
- I never understood why people who commit terrible crimes that result in the death of others only seem to show emotion when it’s their life a stake. You show no mercy to me, I show no mercy to you
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SIRTE, Libya (AP) — Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: “Don’t kill me, my sons.” Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator’s hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.
Other leaders have fallen in the Arab Spring uprisings, but the 69-year-old Gadhafi is the first to be killed. He was shot to death in his hometown of Sirte, where revolutionary fighters overwhelmed the last of his loyalist supporters Thursday after weeks of heavy battles. Also killed in the city was one of his feared sons, Muatassim, while another son — one-time heir apparent Seif al-Islam — was wounded and captured. An AP reporter saw cigarette burns on Muatassim’s body. Bloody images of Gadhafi’s last moments raised questions over how exactly he died after he was captured wounded, but alive. Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling the goateed, balding Gadhafi, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt. Gadhafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him onto the hood of a pickup truck. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.
Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.
Later footage showed fighters rolling Gadhafi’s lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head. His body was then paraded on a car through Misrata, a nearby city that suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gadhafi. Crowds in the streets cheered, “The blood of martyrs will not go in vain.” Thunderous celebratory gunfire and cries of “God is great” rang out across Tripoli well past midnight, leaving the smell of sulfur in the air. People wrapped revolutionary flags around toddlers and flashed V for victory signs as they leaned out car windows. Martyrs’ Square, the former Green Square from which Gadhafi made many defiant speeches, was packed with revelers.
A 15-year-old from Syracuse, Anthony Stewart, was sentenced to 2 to 6 years in a juvenile detention facility by Judge William Walsh of Onandaga County for a robbery in which the teenager took a mere 7 cents. Walsh said he issued the harsh sentence because Stewart declined to plead guilty, choosing to fight the charges. A jury found him guilty of first degree robbery. The victim had identified Stewart and a friend as the perpetrators, Walsh said, “and yet you still denied it,” the Post-Standard newspaper of Syracuse reported. “Well, that cost you,” Walsh added. The other teenager, Skyler Ninham, 16, pleaded guilty in July and was sentenced to 1 to 4 years in prison. Stewart and Ninham carried BB guns that looked like real pistols when they knocked a 73-year old man to the ground—Stewart punching him in the face—and took all the cash he had on him, prosecutors said. That amounted to 7 cents. Stewart’s lawyer, Laurin Haddad, had pleaded with Walsh to treat her client as a youthful offender, so that a felony conviction wouldn’t remain on his permanent record. “For 7 cents, now you’re making someone a felon for the rest of his life,” Haddad told the Post-Standard. When I first read the story, I was thinking that the judge definitely being way too harsh on this sentencing because I was under the impression that the little pocket change was taken from somewhere. I think the ruling is somewhat just seeing as to how I’ve seen similar cases where the teens get a more lenient punishment but hopefully the time the boys get will give them time to reflect on the situation and make an attempt to better themselves once they are released because unfortunately, the rate of recidivism is higher than the rate of those who stay out for good.
