Sometimes justice wins out...

While I'm sad for his wife, I'm glad justice was served on this piece of crap.

St. Augustine man kills himself before jury's 'not guilty' verdict

The Associated (with Terrorists) Press
4:36 a.m. EDT, August 28, 2009

ST. AUGUSTINE - Authorities say a St. Augustine man on trial for sexual battery charges apparently killed himself before learning the verdict: not guilty.

A St. Johns County judge became concerned Thursday when 57-year-old William Telano Evans didn't show up for the reading of the verdict. The judge sent deputies to find Evans but let the jury read its verdict without him present. Evans, never hearing the verdict, was found at his home minutes later dead of a gunshot wound.

Evans was arrested in 2004 after a now-38-year-old woman reported that he began routinely molesting her about 29 years ago when she was 9 or 10.

Here's the full story:

Accused in sex case not guilty, kills self

Deputies find William Evans' body at home after he was no-show in court

By CHAD SMITH | More by this reporter | chad.smith@staugustine.com | Posted: Friday, August 28, 2009 ; Updated: 11:47 PM on Friday, August 28, 2009

Shortly after the jury gave its verdict in the case of William Telano Evans on Thursday afternoon, it was clear something was wrong.

In the courthouse hallway, Evans' wife, Peggy, used her cell phone to call her husband, who hadn't returned to court after lunch to hear the verdict.

"They found you not guilty," she said. "Please, please don't do anything."

He never got the message.

*

Minutes before the jury came into the courtroom around 3:45 p.m., Peggy Evans stood alone in the hallway, hunched over a railing, sobbing.

Then, a few minutes later, the bailiff announced that the jury had reached a verdict on the charge against Evans, 57, a lifelong St. Augustine resident accused of sexually abusing a girl nearly three decades ago.

Evans' attorney, Curtis Fallgatter of Jacksonville, looked around the courthouse for his client, then called to tell him to return to court.

About 20 minutes passed before Circuit Court Judge J. Michael Traynor decided to bring the jury into the courtroom to announce its verdict without Evans.

The jury forewoman passed the decision to the bailiff, who then passed it to the judge, who gave it to the clerk.

She read through the case number, the charge, then the verdict: "Not guilty."

*

The case came down to not whether Evans had sexually abused the victim, but when.

Under the law, there is no statute of limitations on sexual battery on a victim younger than 12.

Specifically, Evans was charged with sexual battery between the summer of 1980 and Jan. 14, 1983, the day before his accuser turned 12.

If the victim had been 12 or older at the time, the charge would have been lewd and lascivious behavior. And for that offense, the statute of limitations had expired.

The victim, now 38 and living in Virginia, testified that she was in the second grade when she was first abused, making her about 9 or 10.

But the defense argued that she told investigators she remembered it starting around the time her mother had breast-implant surgery in November 1984, when she was 13.

The jury found that there was not enough compelling evidence of her age at the time of the abuse and found Evans not guilty.

The victim's mouth dropped as she heard verdict. She turned to her husband, and asked, "Not guilty?"

*

After the jurors gave their verdict, the judge thanked them for their service and dismissed them. Shortly afterward, a deputy accompanied them to the elevators. After the jurors were gone, a woman, friend of the victim, walked by Peggy Evans and said, "You next."

The deputy yelled at her and the woman walked away.

*

After the ruling, Peggy Evans passed by the victim, seated with a victim's advocate, the victim's husband and a childhood friend.

Peggy Evans tilted her head and gave the four a mocking smile. The four looked as each other, and the victim asked them, "Did you see that?"

Mrs. Evans walked out of the courtroom, then returned seconds later to hear the judge order deputies to find Evans and bring him to court.

A couple of minutes later, a bailiff told the judge that Evans' truck was at his house but there was no answer at the door.

Traynor said they could force entry if need be.

"Can you tell them to not let my dog out?" Peggy Evans asked half-jokingly before leaving the courtroom.

About 10 minutes passed, during which the judge said he was considering holding the defendant in contempt of court, when a group of bailiffs barged in and approached the bench.

"Dead body," one said.

"Dead body?" the judge asked.

*

Deputies arrived at the Evans' home on Stokes Landing Road at 3:55 p.m., just as a 911 call came in from the residence.

Relatives had gone to the house to tell Evans he needed to go back to the courthouse. Instead, they found him dead at the rear of the house.

Fallgatter, the attorney, and family members stood around the yard along with scores of deputies and investigators.

Teary-eyed, Fallgatter said he had eaten lunch with Evans at the cafeteria in the tax collector's office after the court recessed for deliberation.

Evans made no indication he was going to kill himself, Fallgatter said.

But, he said, the five-year legal process had beaten his client down and he couldn't handle spending the rest of life in prison, the rest of his life away from Peggy Evans.

"She's a loyal wife, and she'd stay with him for 25 years if he lived that long. But he wasn't going to do that to her," Fallgatter said. "I just wish he'd talked to me first."

*

St. Johns County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Chuck Mulligan said at the scene that Evans died from a gunshot wound that was apparently self-inflicted. Mulligan said he did not know what kind of gun was used or whether Evans left any indication he was going to shoot himself.

The prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Dennis Craig, declined to comment.

A statement from Assistant State Attorney Christopher Kelly said: "Regarding the events surrounding the trial of William Evans, we believe it is paramount to respect the privacy of the family at the present time. The events surrounding the trial and today had a profound effect on all involved. The facts of today's events are still being gathered and it would be premature to comment further."

Prosecutor Craig had the last word in the trial, and his rebuttal left the five women and one man on the jury with the most damning evidence against Evans, the "apology letter" that he had apparently written to the victim as part of counseling, eight years before he was charged.

Evans' wife, daughter, son-in-law, sister and brother sat on the defense side of the courtroom and listened to Craig read the lurid details.

Peggy Evans hung her head.

The victim cried.

Evans jotted on a notepad, as he had done throughout most of the trial.

The letter, dated April 10, 1996, described how he was "overcome with selfish desires."

After several years of taking advantage of her nightly fear of what might happen and her youthful ignorance about sex, he promised to stop, according to the letter.

"For a while, I kept my promise."

Contributing: Daron Dean of The St. Augustine Record

Lack of updates

No, I'm not dead. (Sorry to disappoint Heysus!)

Just tired of the whole political thing and haven't felt like posting anything.

Pretty terrifying.

Poor bastards.

This is a computer sim of what happened when two news helo's collided over Phoenix a couple of years back.


H/T: RofaSix

Ryan O'Neal is an asshole.

Ryan O'Neal Hit on Daughter By Mistake at Fawcett's Funeral

O'Neal, 68, reveals that he was so out of touch with his own daughter, Tatum, that he didn't recognize her at Fawcett's funeral and tried to pick her up.

KTLA News
5:32 PM PDT, August 3, 2009

LOS ANGELES -- In a deeply revealing interview Ryan O'Neal admits being a 'jerk' to Farrah and even hitting on his own daughter by mistake at the actress' funeral.

In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine (due to hit newsstands on August 5th), O'Neal says he wishes he could "do it over" and "change the way he treated" his longtime partner.

"I would have been much kinder, more understanding, more mature. I'd lose some of the savagery. I don't know how she got cancer; maybe some of it was me."

O'Neal, 68, also talked about his failure as a parent.

O'Neal revealed that he was so out of touch with his own daughter, Tatum, that he didn't recognize her at Fawcett's funeral and tried to pick her up.

"They had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me," Ryan tells Vanity Fair.

"I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?'

She said, 'Daddy, it's me -- Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick."

What a prick.

Why so Socialist?

Found in of all places - L.A.

I hope this catches on.

I was a racial profiler...

Every good cop knows it isn't racial profiling, it's criminal profiling.

Race is but one part of the whole equation.

The race-baiters know this too, but if they admit it, blacks (or any other "minority") stop being victims and the race-baiters no longer have a job.

Pretty simple really.

I was a racial profiler: Ex-cop says he used skin color to make arrests

By Jake McNicholas

Sunday, August 2nd 2009, 4:00 AM
Darren Gygi

I'm retired now after a wonderful career with the New York City Police Department, and I have a confession to make.

I used a person's race to initiate investigations and make subsequent arrests. In fact, according to the definition bandied about by those on the left who have no idea what they are talking about nor a clue when it comes to police work, I was - yes - a racial profiler.

A little background. I was a detective, a third generation member of the greatest police department in the world, descendant of my grandfather who sailed from the west of Ireland and then served as a cop for 35 years. My dad, the man I most admire, is a retired first grade detective who put in 33.

In November 1992 I was transferred to Manhattan North Narcotics. We covered the precincts north of 59th St. but rarely did enforcement south of 96th St.

I never had a better time in my life than my early years in Manhattan North. I worked with the greatest guys in the world and had more laughs than you could imagine. I went to war with these guys and gals, white, black, Hispanic.

Put it this way. When you were up there during this time, you didn't want to take off or go on vacation and miss something. There was nothing worse than coming back to work and have some guy say, "Wow, you should have been here yesterday."

I spent a lot of time in Washington Heights during those years, working narcotics in the confines of the 30th Precinct. It was a busy place with loads of illegal drug activity - dealing on the street and in residential buildings outfitted and barricaded as drug spots. We made arrests, thousands of arrests, and here is one of the ways the white cops and Hispanic cops and black cops did it.

We looked for white people.

That's all you really had to do. Cruise Broadway or Amsterdam Ave. or Riverside Drive in an unmarked car, spot the white guy driving the vehicle with the Jersey plate slow and deliberate, watch him park and shuffle to the sale location, watch him walk back to the vehicle with the pep in his step shortly thereafter and bingo. Most times you had a collar.

That's what you were paying us for, wasn't it? The good people of Washington Heights have a right to live in a neighborhood free of cretins driving over the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan for the sole purpose of buying drugs, don't they?

Is that not good police work? Of course it is.

So please, ponder this for a moment. Who do you think is terrorizing the black community? Who do you think is raping and assaulting young black women? Who do you think is pulling out the nine and shooting young male blacks on the corner over a bag of Cheez Doodles and a Philly blunt?

Pause and ask yourself why do you think more blacks and Hispanics are stopped? Because, you guessed it, they are the ones committing the crimes and fitting the description. The Police Department is not making this up. This is the horrible truth. The carnage is appalling, and rather than address the real issue, liberals and civil rights leaders make excuses and ignore the facts.

Now the left is all worked up over a cop responding to a 911 call of a burglary in progress and the resulting collar. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a Harvard professor. How about this novel approach, "Certainly, here's my ID and thanks for the quick response Sergeant."?

But here is the most profoundly sad part about it all. Even after Thursday's "beer summit," this will be an issue for months, a ridiculous issue. And all the while the body count from black-on-black crime will continue to rise.

McNicholas served with the NYPD from 1985 to 2007, retiring as a first grade detective from the terrorist interdiction unit of the Intelligence Division.

The bottom line: It's perfectly okay to be a racist in modern America; as long as you're Black.

Spike is coming home!

Thank you, Lord.

I'm so glad the anguish has finally come to an end for Scott's family and friends.

Semper Fi Scott!

Remains of pilot missing 18 years in Iraq found

Capt. Michael 'Scott' Speicher's jet was shot down over the desert on the first night of the 1991 war. The inability to find his body led to nearly two decades of speculation.

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
4:57 AM PDT, August 2, 2009

The military has identified the remains of a Navy pilot shot down on the opening night of the Persian Gulf War, officials announced early today.

The F/A-18 Hornet flown by Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher was shot down on Jan. 17, 1991, while on a combat mission over western Iraq. He was considered the first U.S. casualty of the war.

The inability to find his body led to nearly two decades of controversy and uncertainty about how to classify his disappearance and speculation on whether Speicher survived the crash and was being held as a prisoner. Now the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware has identified remains found in Al Anbar Province as those of Speicher.

"The teeth are a match, both visually and radiographically," the military said in a formal statement.

Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of Naval operations, has notified Speicher's family. "The Navy will never give up looking for a shipmate, regardless of how long or how difficult that search may be," Roughead said.

The discovery of the remains began when an Iraqi contacted Marines in Anbar province with information about a desert location believed to be the crash site. From that information, Marines found a Bedouin living in the desert who said he was present when Speicher's plane crashed and his body was buried.

The remains included bones and multiple skeletal fragments, the military said. Although the dental records match, the military is running DNA tests at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology DNA Laboratory in Rockville, Md., for additional confirmation.

The official status of Speicher has changed several times in the 18 years since his plane disappeared, from missing-in-action to missing-in-action/body not recovered to missing-in-action/captured.

In 2005, then-Navy Secretary Gordon England concluded that there was no credibile evidence that Speicher was dead. And in March of this year, then-Navy Secretary Donald Winter determined that Speicher's status was missing-in-action.

After the U.S. toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, investigators fanned out across Anbar province looking for clues about Speicher's crash.

Speicher, a graduate of Florida State University, was flying off the carrier Saratoga. Various reports have said his plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile or by an Iraqi MIG. Speicher was 33, married with two children.

The U.S. has renamed an Iraqi air base near Tikrit in his honor. President George W. Bush, in addressing the United Nations about the need to bring down the government of Saddam Hussein, mentioned Speicher.

"We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Capt. Speicher and his family for the sacrifice they have made for our nation and the example of strength they have set for all of us," Roughead said in announcing the identification.

DC 911 dispatchers put officers lives in jeopardy!

This is disgusting.

Every one of these dispatchers should be fired.

These women are incompetent, unprofessional and lazy. They need to be collecting unemployment. Pronto!

(Click on the links below for more.)

Rescue 911: Dispatchers Caught on Tape

Updated: Thursday, 30 Jul 2009, 2:13 PM EDT
Published : Wednesday, 29 Jul 2009, 10:59 PM EDT

* By TISHA THOMPSON/myfoxdc

WASHINGTON, D.C. - 911 operators caught on tape talking about police officers and potentially putting their lives in danger.

For the past several months, FOX 5 has been investigating complaints into the Office of Unified Communications, which runs the 911 call center in the District.

Now, police and firefighters are coming forward, saying their lives are being put in danger because of some dispatchers behaving badly. And FOX 5 has obtained inside recordings that they say proves their case.

* TO HEAR THE RECORDINGS AND READ THE TRANSCRIPTS, FOLLOW THIS LINK TO OUR SPECIAL COVERAGE OF THIS FOX 5 INVESTIGATION

OUC Employee: "Can you find out what the deal is with the officer? He got my nephew stopped on 5th and Newcomb."

On the recordings, you can hear an OUC employee call the 7th District dispatcher and ask her to interrupt a police officer in the middle of a traffic stop.

7-D DISPATCHER: "Be advised, before you complete the traffic stop, I need to call you. That vehicle belongs to...um...a worker here at this time, sir."

OFFICER 7053: "Yeah, that's irrelevant at this time, ok?"

7-D DISPATCHER: "He's nasty."

OUC EMPLOYEE: "Yes, he is."

7-D DISPATCHER: "I can always count on you sir…Motherf-----, I don't like him."

Determined, the dispatcher now calls the 7-D police supervisor. But, at the same time, another police officer in the field, who goes by the call sign 1105, calls in to 911 for backup.

7-D DISPATCHER: "That's somebody's car up here and that's her son driving it, is he being arrested? That's all she wanted to know so she can go out to the scene."

OFFICER 1105: "Cruiser 1105."

7-D SUPERVISOR: "She doesn't need to come out to the scene anywhere if somebody is being arrested."

7-D DISPATCHER: "I don't know, she wants to know, she says her son called her and they told him to hang up the phone or whatever."

OFFICER 1105: "Cruiser 1105."

The dispatcher finally responds to Officer 1105 by trying to put him on hold.

7-D DISPATCHER: "You're on standby, unless you have a prior."

OFFICER 1105: "Send me another unit."

7-D DISPATCHER: "You're on standby."

OFFICER 1105: "Need an officer for safety, send me another unit."

The dispatcher continues to talk on a separate line about the ticket.

7-D DISPATCHER: "I don't like this officer because when Damon busted a hole in my wall, he told me he was going to arrest me because I threatened to beat Damon's a--. I don't like him."

The officer who called in for backup ended up being okay. But police union spokesman Kris Baumann says incidents like this one from last summer continue to happen everyday. "The amount of time that it happens on a daily basis is just astounding."

Ray Sneed of the DC Fire Fighters Association agrees. "For us, it’s a life or death situation."

He’s says he’s especially frustrated by dispatchers giving wrong information. "You get a bad address and then you get there late and as you know in our profession, every second counts."

The recordings FOX 5 obtained have plenty of examples.

7-D DISPATCHER: "30-20 7th Street Southeast."

OFFICER 7055: "Can you repeat address?"

7-D DISPATCHER: "Its 3-20 7th Street Southeast."

WATCH COMMANDER: "No such address in the 7th District."

OFFICER 7061: "Are you saying 3-20 7th Street or 30-20?"

7-D DISPATCHER: "Its 30-20 7th Street Southeast. 30-20."

The unions say they file formal complaints. In this case, the Fraternal Order of Police cited a “lack of professionalism” and “outright hostility by the dispatchers.”

OUC responded to the complaint, saying, “although radio etiquette is open for discussion...at no time was the dispatcher negligent in her response."

The Mayor’s office and the Metropolitan Police Department say they stand behind OUC Director Janice Quintana.

The unions say it’s just a matter of time before someone gets hurt or killed.

FOX 5 tried several times to talk with Quintana about these concerns. After being repeatedly turned down, we finally met up with her at her office…

“You can’t come past here.”

…where security guards wouldn’t let us approach her. Instead, she quickly walked away from us and into the OUC building as we called out questions.

"Ms. Quintana, its Tisha Thompson with FOX 5, can we talk to you? We want to talk to you about the problems with OUC. Ms. Quintana, we've been trying to talk to you about the problems. Police officers say your dispatchers are putting them in danger."

Baumann believes there’s a reason why Quintana won’t answer our questions. "When you're shutting the media out, when you're shutting the City Council out, when you're shutting the police out, people should be alarmed. Because this means that there is no way to change anything and it means someone is hiding something."