Wednesday, June 28, 2017

my friend

1 of my friends might be coming back to Maryland to visit. if she does i don't think i can accommodate her but she can visit

diabetes

One of my friends I’d inadvertently came out as a diabetic to when i tested my blood in front of her. She didn’t realize I had diabetes. She also assumed I have to take insulin. I don’t but whatever works. I’ll tell her eventually that I just take pills but not for a little while as I don’t know when I’ll see her next. She may ask if I’ve got to count carbs or whatever, which I don’t but I’ve got to watch my sugar anyways due to a sugar allergy.

aw

i can't believe a guys mom came up and introduced me to her son. i think its adorable and awesome.

not up for it

Last Sunday a few friends suggested I ditch Sunday school for genealogy stuff since it had something to do with my favorite subject: forensic science. I wasn’t up for it since I needed the monotony of Sunday school to numb my mind off my aunt’s illness. I said I wasn’t up for it because my aunt was sick and needed to take a break from my favorite subject for a few months.

yay

i saw a friend on sunday. she's back from college and i think she's heading to med school

boyfriend

I cut my nails, and double cleared my pores for Sunday since I was going to church. I only did that so I can make my dad happy as he thinks I’ll be much happier with a boyfriend. I don’t know since I like boys but I’m not sure I want a boyfriend. Mainly as I’ve been hurt in the past.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Death of John Hernandez

On May 31, 2017, John Hernandez died after being strangled outside a Denny's in the Houston area. The death was ruled a homicide by the Harris County medical examiner on June 6th, 2017. Incident: The incident took place on May 28th around 11:40pm. Hernandez was supposedly urinating in public which sparked a confrontation between Hernandez and Terry and Shauna Thompson, a Harris County Sheriff's deputy, after Thompson pulled into the Denny's parking lot in the 17700 block of the Crosby Freeway with his children. A fight broke out between the two, unclear who initiated the altercation. Shauna Thompson arrived, off-duty, to meet her family where she saw the altercation and called for assistance from the Sherrif's office. Terry Thompson held Hernandez into a chokehold while his spouse pinned him down. Hernandez was seen kicking and screaming and then became motionless upon the arrival of medical personnel. Death: Hernandez was rushed to Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. where he was placed on life support and slipped into a coma. He died 3 days later at the age of 24 when his life support was removed. The caused of death was ruled by the Harris County medical examiner as lack of oxygen and chest compression caused by strangulation. John Hernandez: Was was the common-law husband of Maria Toral who he shared a daughter with. Shauna and Terry Thompson: Shauna Thompson is a Sheriff's deputy of the Harris County Sheriff's Department. Terry Thompson, 41, is married to Shauna Thompson. Video Release: Attorney Jack Carroll, the lawyer representing Hernandez's family, released a cellphone video at a news conference on June 5th, 2017. The 52-second video shows Terry Thompson holding Hernandez in a chokehold while Shauna Thompson pins Hernandez down. The video was released by an anonymous source. The video shows bystanders trying to block the videographer as well as telling the videographer that recording the altercation was illegal, with one bystander commenting that Shauna Thompson was a Sherrif's Deputy and she could arrest him for filming. Investigation: The investigation is currently being held by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said that internal affairs is looking into the incident. Reactions: Hernandez family is calling for "justice". There have been demonstrations by family and friends of Hernandez asking for an arrest. Shauna Thompson has been placed on administrative leave as of June 6th, 2017.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Disappearance of Sneha Anne Philip

Sneha Anne Philip (October 7, 1969 – ruled to have died September 11, 2001) was an Indian American physician who was last seen on September 10, 2001, by a department store surveillance camera near her Lower Manhattan apartment. She may have returned to the building at some point that night or the next morning. Due to the proximity of the World Trade Center and her medical training, her family believes she perished trying to help victims of the following day's terrorist attacks. Two investigations were conducted. The first by Ron Lieberman, her husband, and private investigator Ken Gallant, a former FBI agent, initially presumed her disappearance and possible death were unrelated to the attacks but later concluded it was the most likely outcome. A later investigation by New York City police delved into her life leading up to September 11 and found details of a double life, a history of marital problems, possible affairs with other women, job difficulties and alcohol and drug abuse by Philip, as well as a pending criminal charge against her, in the months before her disappearance. This led them to conclude it was just as likely that she had met a different fate. Lieberman and Philip's family have strongly disputed some of the facts and many of the conclusions of the police report, insinuating that the police did poor work or even fabricated some of their evidence. Her family have pointed out that there are many other 9/11 victims whose remains were never found, and other victims who were added to the list despite equally tenuous connections to the attack. No physical evidence has been found to suggest that she was killed in the attacks. Citing the evidence from the police report, a Surrogate's Court judge had denied her family's petition to have her declared a victim of the attacks, suggesting it was equally possible she may have intentionally disappeared or been murdered by someone she met on her frequent nights out. However, on January 31, 2008, a New York State appeals court overturned a lower-court ruling and declared that she had been a victim of the attacks, officially making her the 2,751st victim of the Twin Towers' collapse. Early life: Sneha Anne Philip was born in the Indian state of Kerala. Philip later moved with her parents to upstate New York, settling first in the Albany area and then in Hopewell Junction, New York, a small hamlet in Dutchess County. Following her graduation from Johns Hopkins University, she decided to pursue a career in medicine and enrolled in the Chicago School of Medicine in 1995. There she met Ron Lieberman, a student a year behind her from Los Angeles, and began dating him. The two shared creative interests outside of their intended career—he was a musician and she was interested in painting. She took a year off traveling around Italy so the two could graduate together. They moved to New York City where they had both gained internships. Lieberman was at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, while she did hers at Cabrini Medical Center, closer to their small apartment in the East Village. The couple were married in May 2000 at a small ceremony held in Dutchess County, combining Jewish and South Indian Christian elements. Lieberman gave his bride a minnu, a traditional Indian wedding pendant shaped like a gold teardrop with a diamond set in it. They moved to a larger apartment in Battery Park City shortly afterwards. Disappearance: Philip was last seen on September 10, 2001. On the day she disappeared, Philip was off from work. According to Lieberman, she was planning to spend the day cleaning up the apartment in anticipation of a dinner visit by her cousin two nights later. She had a two-hour online chat with her mother, during which she mentioned that she was planning to check out the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the nearby North Tower of the World Trade Center, where a friend was to be married the next spring. At 4 p.m. she signed off and went to drop off some clothes at a neighborhood dry cleaners, then went to a Century 21 where she used the couple's American Express card to buy lingerie, a dress, pantyhose and bed linens. Afterwards she bought three pairs of shoes at an annex to the store. A security camera at Century 21 recorded her during this shopping trip. The taped image and the credit-card records are the last confirmed records of Philip's presence anywhere. Ron Lieberman returned to the couple's apartment after midnight that night and noticed Philip was not there. He believed she had stayed out late or all night, as she had been doing, and resolved to remind her the next time he saw her to call him under those circumstances. He went to bed as he had to get up early the next morning for work. Later investigation found that someone had called Lieberman's cell phone from the apartment at 4 a.m. Lieberman doesn't remember it, but thinks he may have awoken briefly to check his voicemail. When he got up for work at 6:30, his wife had still not returned. That evening, after the terrorist attacks, he was able to use his medical credentials to get through the security perimeter and return to their apartment. Since the window had been left open, dust from the towers had accumulated throughout. There were tracks in it from the couple's two kittens, but none from any human. She was one of hundreds of people reported to police as missing that day. Like those of other victims, her family posted flyers all over the city in an effort to find her. Her case was the only one not connected to the attacks, and, in order to generate media interest, her brother claimed to the media that he had last heard from her during the attack. She has never been found or otherwise accounted for. Investigations- By Lieberman and Gallant: Lieberman called American Express and learned about the credit-card purchases on the previous evening. He posted flyers in other Century 21 stores, and later that week a clerk from the Lower Manhattan store who had been relocated to Brooklyn called to say she remembered Philip, who had come in frequently. On the evening of September 10, the clerk recalled that Philip had been accompanied by another young woman, possibly Indian. After reviewing videotape footage for three weeks, Lieberman found the recording of his wife browsing in the coat department, but without anyone else. Since police detectives initially seemed to be unhelpful to Lieberman and assumed that Philip had died with the other victims, he hired Gallant, who found two pieces of evidence suggesting that she may have returned to the apartment building early on the morning of September 11. The first was the call from the home phone to Lieberman's cell; the second was some videotape from the security cameras in the lobby. Timestamped at 8:43 a.m., just 3 minutes before American Airlines Flight 11 was crashed into the North Tower, and within the 7-9 a.m. timeframe during which, Lieberman later testified, Philip always returned after her nights out, it shows a woman entering the building, waiting near the elevator and leaving after a few minutes. Due to the poor contrast from the sunlight in the lobby, she was visible only in silhouette, but her hair and dress are consistent with Philip as seen in the Century 21 tape from the previous evening. Her family also says the woman exhibits similar mannerisms. She is, however, not carrying any of the bags that she would have had from her shopping trip, and again she is apparently unaccompanied. Lieberman could not positively identify her as his wife, but a city police investigator believes it was her. Gallant at first considered the possibility that Philip had used the attack to flee her mounting personal problems and start a new life under a new identity. But her computer's hard drive revealed no evidence of any such plans or contacts, and she had also left her glasses, passport, driver's license and credit cards, except the American Express card, behind. Lieberman kept the account open in case any leads developed from attempts to use it, but none ever did. Gallant and Lieberman eventually concluded that Philip witnessed the attack and, as a physician, rushed to the site to render aid and subsequently perished there, either within the towers or in the ensuing collapse. By New York City police: The police department was not able to begin investigating the Philip case for some time after the attacks. When it did it found many details about Philip's life prior to September 11 that suggested she may have been elsewhere, or already dead, when the towers fell. Earlier in the year, Cabrini had declined to renew Philip's contract, citing repeated tardiness and alcohol-related issues, effectively firing her. Shortly after she had been informed of that decision, she went out to a bar with other Cabrini employees. The outing led to her spending the night in jail. She complained to police that a fellow intern touched her inappropriately during that time. The prosecutor who investigated the case dropped the sexual abuse charge and instead charged Philip with third-degree falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor under New York law. He offered to drop the charge if she recanted the original complaint, but she refused and was held overnight pending release. After her dismissal from Cabrini, she began spending nights out at gay and lesbian bars in the city, some known for their rough clientele. According to police, she would sometimes leave with women she met at these bars. Police also claim her brother discovered her and his then-girlfriend having sex, which her brother disputed. She got another internship, in internal medicine, at St. Vincent's Medical Center on Staten Island, but was running into similar problems there — she had already been suspended for missing a meeting with a substance abuse counselor. On the morning of September 10, she had been formally arraigned on the criminal charge and pleaded not guilty. The police report says she and Lieberman fought loudly at the courthouse afterwards about her problems and nights out, which ended with her walking away and leaving him to go home alone and get ready for work. After reviewing it, the city medical examiner removed Philip from the official list of victims in January 2004, one of the last three. Family response to police report: Philip's husband, brother and family dispute much of what the police say and their interpretations of the documentary evidence. She was fired from Cabrini not because of alcoholism but because she had been a "whistleblower" who complained about racial and sexual bias (the hospital later told a reporter it had no evidence of any formal complaints by her). Lieberman says that while his wife frequented lesbian bars, it was because she did not want a repeat of the situation that had happened with her coworker. She never had sex with the women she went home with, he claims, and they would often merely listen to music, sleep or paint. One time, in fact, she came home covered with paint after going home with an artist. Her drinking was a temporary phase to ease her through the depression she was experiencing after being fired by Cabrini, and would stop once her life got back to normal, as he believed it was doing. Her brother says the report of him catching her with his girlfriend is completely fabricated and that he never even spoke with the detective who wrote it. Similarly, Lieberman says the couple never fought at the courthouse after her arraignment. The police, they believe, were extrapolating from what little they could find in an effort to make up for their early inattention to the case. Court proceedings- Surrogate's Court: In 2003, after the police investigation concluded, Lieberman filed a court petition in New York County Surrogate's Court, which handles probate matters, to have his wife declared a victim of the attacks regardless of what the police had said. New York state law requires "clear and convincing" evidence of a possible victim's exposure to any lethal peril in order for any presumption of death and subsequent legal provisions, including benefits from the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, to apply. He believed that his wife's profession would have led her to rush to the nearby World Trade Center, if she was in the vicinity, and offer aid to victims. Her mother further testified to their online chat, in which she said she was going to check out Windows on the World and possibly do some shopping at the Trade Center's mall. The author of the police report testified that he believed Philip probably died in the attacks. Ellen Winner, appointed guardian ad litem for Philip, introduced the police report and argued that there was no clear evidence she was at or near the Trade Center during the attacks. On June 29, 2006, Judge Renee Roth ruled that it could not be established that Philip died on September 11, 2001 and instead set the date of her legal death at September 10, 2004, three years after she was reported missing, per state law. The family appealed, contrasting her case with that of Juan Lafuente, another possible victim whose petition the court's counterpart in Dutchess County, where he lived, had accepted. Like Philip, his exposure to the attacks is based on circumstantial evidence. He, too, had recently lost a job and struggled with depression, and as a volunteer fire marshal in Poughkeepsie might himself have had a reason to offer assistance at the attack site. His office was eight blocks north of the W.T.C. complex, but the court accepted testimony from someone who frequented the same local deli claiming he had overheard Lafuente say he had a meeting at the Trade Center that morning. Philip's family believes Lafuente's petition, with similarly minimal evidence of the alleged decedent's presence at the site of the attacks, was accepted primarily because his wife, Colette, was mayor of Poughkeepsie at the time and the case was heard there rather than in Manhattan. Appeals court: Despite it being suggested that the chances of success were low, Lieberman and the family's lawyer went ahead with an appeal. On January 31, 2008, a five-judge panel reversed Judge Roth's decision, finding the simplest explanation to be the most likely – that Philip died trying to help people at Ground Zero. "This is a disturbing case", wrote Judge David Saxe for the other three majority judges. Its central problem was the lack of direct evidence putting Philip at the site of the attack, he agreed. However, he said the "clear and convincing" standard...does not require an absolute certainty; it merely requires that the evidence make the conclusion "highly probable". Even without direct proof irrefutably establishing that her route that morning took her past the World Trade Center at the time of the attack, the evidence shows it to be highly probable that she died that morning, and at that site, whereas only the rankest speculation leads to any other conclusion. He dismissed the claims made in the police report, saying they were hearsay and had not been properly introduced in the original hearing, instead appended by Winner to a post-hearing report. Nor did she properly follow up on assertions made in the report during the actual hearing. Thus, "any reliance by the court on purported facts asserted in those reports but unproved at hearing was improper." If Juan Lafuente had been found to have faced exposure to the attacks, then Philip could be too, he concluded. He considered it unlikely that she had deliberately disappeared due to the lack of evidence of preparations, and agreed with Lieberman, Gallant and Stark that had she died some other way, some evidence would have turned up in the years since the attack. The dissenting judge, Bernard Malone Jr., said: Since it is not known where the decedent spent the night of September 10, it requires speculation to say, as petitioner does, that her route home … southwest of the World Trade Center, took her across or dangerously near the World Trade Center grounds, or that at 8:48 a.m., when the attacks began, she was even in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. He contrasted her case to Lafuente's by noting that he had had a more predictable daily routine, a stabler life, and that there was independent evidence confirming the meeting at the World Trade Center he might have been on his way to. "The degree of speculation is greater here", he said. Philip was thus officially declared the 2,751st victim of the Twin Towers' collapse. The decision leaves only one missing person whose possible death at the World Trade Center is unresolved. Fernando Molinar, an Ecuadorean immigrant, has not been seen or heard from since September 8, 2001, when he told his mother on the telephone that he was starting a new job at a pizzeria near the building. A similar petition to Surrogate's Court on his behalf also was rejected. Aftermath: Since the victims' fund made all its payments and closed in 2003, Lieberman will not receive any money. The decision does mean that Philip's name can be added to official memorials to the victims. One to her specifically has already been established at Dutchess Community College, where her mother works as a computer programmer. The family buried an urn full of ashes from Ground Zero at a cemetery near their home. Six months after the appeals court decision, in July 2008, the family was officially notified by the city that Philip had been added to the victims' list. No physical remains have been found for over a thousand victims of the attacks at the Trade Center, but the family still hopes that they might find yet some remnant of Philip. Her minnu, which they believe she was wearing at the time of the attacks, could have survived in the freshly collapsed buildings. They have sent pictures of it to the city property clerk's office in the event it can be matched to several hundred other unmatched personal items recovered from the ruins. At the National 9/11 Memorial, Philip is memorialized at the South Pool, on Panel S-66.

The Death Valley Germans

The Death Valley Germans refers to a missing persons case where four German tourists went missing while driving through Death Valley in California. The four who vanished in the vast wilderness on July 22, 1996 were Dresden residents Cornelia Meyer, 27; her 4-year-old son, Max; her boyfriend, architect Egbert Rimkus, 34, and his 10-year-old son, Georg Weber. The mystery was solved in November 11th, 2009 when two hikers discovered their remains several miles south of the spot where an abandoned minivan the tourists had rented was found months after they were reported missing.

Disappearance of Asha Kreimer

On September 21, 2015, a 26-year-old Australian woman named Asha Kreimer disappeared. She had been awake for five days, suffering a mental health crisis, and had been released following a psychiatric evaluation. While eating breakfast with her boyfriend and a family friend in the Rollerville Cafe in Flumeville, California, she went to the restroom. Her friend followed, but found that Kreimer had disappeared. Background: Twenty-six-year-old Asha Kreimer, who held dual US-Australian citizenship, had been living with her boyfriend in Albion, California, for three years when she suffered a mental health crisis. After being awake for four nights and shouting incoherently, she was taken to Mendocino Coast District Hospital in Fort Bragg, California, on September 20, 2015. Mendocino County's privatized mental health service, evaluated her under California Code 5150 to determine whether she was a risk to herself or others. However, Kreimer was so resistant to having her vital signs taken that the Fort Bragg Police Department was called. In the end, Kreimer was released to her boyfriend and a visiting Australian childhood friend. Disappearance: After Kreimer's release, the trio then drove south toward Point Arena, stopping at the Rollerville Cafe in Flumeville. At 9:30 a.m., while they were in the cafe, Kreimer's friend got up to go to the restroom. A few seconds later, Kreimer decided that she would also go to the restroom, and followed her friend, although the friend was unaware that Kreimer was behind her. When the friend returned to the table, Kreimer's boyfriend told her that Kreimer has followed her to the bathroom, but the friend said she never saw Kreimer in the bathroom. Investigators believe that Kreimer never entered the bathroom and wandered off at this point. At the time she disappeared, Kreimer was barefoot and dressed in black skinny jeans and a gray hoodie. She left without money, credit cards, or identification. She also may have left her cell phone behind, though that is debated. Her jacket was subsequently found along the road to the Point Arena Light. There have been subsequent vague reports of Kreimer. According to a spokesman for the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, she supposedly returned north to her Albion home and retrieved her German shepherd. A surfer at Gualala, south of the cafe, also purportedly saw her at about 3 p.m. on the day she disappeared. As of February 2016, the search for Kreimer continued, as her friends at her ancestral home in Alice Springs, Australia, raised funds to continue looking.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

The Alcasser Girls

Miriam García Iborra, Antonia (Toñi) Gómez Rodríguez and Desirée Hernández Folch, known as The Alcàsser Girls (Spanish: Las niñas de Alcàsser), were three teenage girls from Alcasser, a small town near Valencia, Spain, who were kidnapped, raped, beaten, tortured and murdered after hitchhiking to get to a disco in the nearby town of Picassent in late 1992. It is widely regarded as one of the darkest and most haunting criminal cases in Spanish history due to the extreme violence with which it was committed and the details of the autopsies. It shocked the country, and the images of their faces were very prominent in media coverage. Posters were published in various languages throughout Spain and abroad. The initial uncertainty of the girls' whereabouts and the increasing fear about the nocturnal risks facing teenagers added to the sense of unease. The case was also very relevant due to a highly criticized investigation full of mistakes and gaps. The autopsies revealed the existence of seven hairs with seven distinct DNA profiles that belonged neither to the girls or their two alleged murderers, the men who drove the car they hitchhiked. Of the two, Miguel Ricart Tárrega was the only one jailed, whereas the whereabouts of Antonio Anglés Martins are not known and he is still among Interpol's most wanted criminals. Many observers claim that the official version was a coverup to hide the reality of the triple murder, and several theories were proposed about its main motive, from satanic rituals to a snuff movie recording, and even including a crime involving the highest political circles in Spain. The event also marked a turning point in Spanish mass media, which quickly focused on the anguish and suffering of the girls' families and the local people. It is often cited as the zenith of trash TV in Spain, in which anything went in the name of morbidity and high audience rates. Crime scene reconstruction: Miriam, Toñi and Desirée disappeared on 13th November 1992, while traveling to a secondary school party that was going to be held in Coolor, a popular discothèque located just off Picassent. The day of their disappearance they had previously visited another friend who was ill and declined to join them. Miriam asked her father (Fernando García) to pick them up and drive them to the club, but he was suffering from influenza and was unable to do so. The girls thus tried to get to the disco by hitchhiking, as they had done the previous summer, and as many teenagers did at the time. A young couple from Alcàsser took them to a petrol station near Picassent. Then they got into another car (likely a white Opel Corsa, presumably driven by Antonio Anglés and Miguel Ricart). A lady saw them get in, but as it was dark she was unable to see the back doors. From that moment on, all trace of the girls was lost, and during 75 days posters were published in all languages throughout Spain and even abroad. According to a statement by Miguel Ricart, the only person heretofore charged regarding the event, when arriving at Coolor, Antonio Angles told Ricart to continue driving. The girls began to scream. Angles then pulled a Star Model BM gun and hit the girls with the butt, which broke some of their teeth. They headed to a crumbling abandoned house near a place known as La Romana, in a very isolated and mountainous area close to the Tous dam. They tied up the girls, raped two of them vaginally and anally, occasionally using objects like sticks. Then they went to Catadau in search of some food and returned two hours later, raping the third girl. After all sorts of atrocities and humiliations that left the girls with various injuries and bruises, the attackers slept until morning, ignoring the cries and screams of the dying girls. When they woke up they forced the girls to walk to a pit they had previously dug, and beat them again. There they continued torturing the girls. According to the autopsy, Desirée suffered a traumatic amputation of the right nipple and areola with a sharp object, likely a knife or perhaps pliers, and was then stabbed twice in the back. The other girls screamed while being beaten with sticks and stones, almost killing them. They were finally shot and buried. Miriam's corpse displayed vaginal wounds caused by an object provided with sharp edges, possibly produced postmortem. The killers picked up the spent cases and cleaned the car. Aftermath: From that moment, an intensive search was conducted to try to find the girls' bodies. They were found on January 27, 1993, 75 days after their demise—by two beekeepers in a ditch located near La Romana. The heavy rains of the previous days softened the land and the corpses appeared from their improvised grave. It was soon confirmed that they had apparently been murdered, having suffered unimaginable tortures before they died. The Civil Guard police later found at the scene one of Ricart's gloves, a referral note of the Social Security on behalf of Enrique Angles Martins (brother of Antonio) and a bullet case. TV channels quickly rushed to Alcàsser to broadcast live and provide coverage of the grief of girls' families and the overwhelmed town. Antonio Angles was not at home when the Civil Guard police appeared in search of his brother Enrique. He escaped while being hunted by the Civil Guard and was about to be captured in the town of Villamarchante. The last trace of him in Spain was when he was near Minglanilla, Cuenca for a few days, after which he went to Lisbon, and stowed away on board the container ship City of Plymouth. He is reported to have jumped overboard when the ship arrived off the coast of Ireland, and is assumed to have either died instantly, or from subsequent cold and/or drowning. The controversial trial of the two arrested suspects became a prime time showcase, featuring gruesome pictures of the teenagers' corpses, preceded by standard warnings to the audiences.

Disappearance of Sara Wood

Sara Anne Wood is a missing woman who was last seen on August 18, 1993. Disappearance: The last time that Wood was seen was when she was riding her bicycle at 2:30pm after leaving a church in Frankfort, New York. During the evening that wood disappeared her bicycle, and her coloring book and crayons were discovered hidden in an area of brush off of Hacadam Road. Wood was last seen wearing a pink T-shirt with the words "Guess Who" embroidered on the front, with turquoise blue shorts, and with brown sandals. Investigation and aftermath: A known murderer named Lewis S. Lent Jr. was charged with abducting Wood in 1996, three years after she was last seen, the reason being that Lent originally had claimed that he had killed Sara and that he had buried her body in the Adirondacks. But when he drew a map of the burial location for the police, extensive searches were conducted, but did not produce any evidence as to Wood's whereabouts and nothing was found. Lent later recanted his statements, but was still convicted of the crime was sentenced to 25 years to life with no chance of parole. In 2015 the case has been reopened and remains unsolved.

Friday, June 23, 2017

Kidnapping of Yingying Zhang

Yingying Zhang is a visiting scholar from China, who has not been seen since she got into a car driven by a man at a bus stop near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. Biography: Yingying Zhang was born on 21 December 1990 in China. She arrived in the United States in April 2017 to conduct research on photosynthesis and crop productivity in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois. Abduction: On the afternoon of 9 June 2017, Zhang was waiting at a bus stop in Urbana, Illinois for an MTD bus to take her to an off-campus apartment complex where she was going to sign a new lease. She was running late and sent a text message to the leasing agent to inform them. Surveillance video from a nearby parking garage showed that a black Saturn Astra approached her, after circling the surrounding area a few times. She spoke to the driver for a couple of minutes, then got into the car. She has not been seen since. From surveillance video obtained from a nearby parking garage, the perpetrator appears to be a white male. The car circled the campus for some time before approaching the victim. Zhang was last seen wearing a charcoal-colored baseball hat, with a pink-and-white top, was wearing jeans, and with white tennis shoes, and was carrying a black backpack. Search efforts: The University of Illinois Police Department is working with the FBI to find Zhang. Chinese students at the university are helping with the search. The FBI has announced a reward of $10,000 for information leading to her location. On June 19th, The University of Illinois in conjunction with Champaign County Crime Stoppers, announced a reward of $40,000 for information leading to the arrest of the individual or individuals responsible for the apparent kidnapping of Zhang. This reward is the largest offered in the 31-year history of the Champaign Crime Stoppers organization. Arrest of Brendt Christensen: On June 30th, the FBI arrested and charged a Champaign man, Brendt Christensen, with kidnapping Zhang. Based on evidence gathered during the investigation, they believe that Zhang is no longer alive. Prior to the alleged kidnapping, Christensen used the sexual fetish website, Fetlife, to explore topics such as "Abduction 101." Christensen is charged under 18 U.S.C. Code § 1201. If Zhang is found to be dead, he faces life imprisonment or the death penalty. At a court hearing on July 5, US Magistrate Eric Long denied bail for Christensen charged with kidnapping Zhang. The assistant US attorney Bryan Freres said no “combination of conditions” where Christensen was not a danger to the community.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Right

My mom's not gonna want a program from the church unless I'm in it.

Yum

I tried making coffee cake. I hope it'll be ok.

Monday, June 5, 2017

More food

I've gotta eat more food as I'm crabby and I'm tired

Crud

I didn't think my current diet the whole way thru. I'm crabby, have heart palpitations, headaches and dizzy spells. This is good as I'm lowering my blood pressure but its awful side effects

Friday, June 2, 2017

Oh well

I don't think there's any singles ward activities tonight. Maybe I'll go next week.

Back pain

I've been so crabby for the last week and I never knew why until I realized that my leg is sore. I took a pain killer and for the most part I'm better.