Crime

Photo: Richard Heene's mug shot.

The Heene family pulled on the heartstrings of American last month when it was reported that their young son had climbed into a homemade hotair balloon that became untethered and floated over the skies of Colorado. After hours of news coverage and worrying, it turned out the whole thing was a ruse. The boy was found in the attic of the family's home, and later let it slip on TV that the whole thing was a stunt. Naturally, the law enforcement officials, rescue teams, and TV viewing audience who were caught up in the whole stunt wanted the Heene family to pay for their mistake.

Father Richard Heene turned himself in Thursday and was released on $5,000 bond. His lawyer claims that he will plead guilty to felony charges. His wife, Mayumi Hene will plead guilty to false reporting to authorities, which is a misdemeanor.

Charges were officially filed against the Heenes on Thursday, which is why Richard turned himself in.

An attorney for the Army psychiatrist accused of gunning down fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last week says that doctors have informed him that he may be paralyzed from the waist down. On Friday, attorney John Galligan said that Major Nidal Malik Hasan told him that he has no feeling in his legs and doctors believe the condition may be permanent.

Galligan also said that Hasan told him that he had extreme pain in his hands.

Hasan was shot by civilian police responding to the shootings at the Fort Hood military installation. Galligan was able to speak with him on Thursday in the intensive care unity at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the attack that also left 29 people wounded.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army major accused of carrying out the Fort Hood massacre, was charged on Thursday with 13 counts of premeditated murder. If convicted, he will be eligible for the death penalty.

Hasan, 39, will face justice in a military court. Prosecutors are expected to begin putting together the military equivalent of a grand jury. Under the military court system, fellow Army officers will decide whether Hasan is guilty of mass murder, and if so, on his punishment. If the death penalty is decided upon, he would die by lethal injection.

Chris Grey, a spokesman for the US Army Criminal Investigation Command, said that additional charges could be filed against Hasan. Officials are still trying to decide whether or not to charge him with a fourteenth count of murder in connection with the death of a pregnant victim's unborn child.

Captured alive, the Army psychiatrist, feds say he killed 13 people and wounded 42 others at the Fort Hood army installation in Texas last week. Hasan was said to be armed with two handguns, opening fire inside a medical office waiting room packed with unarmed soldiers. His shooting spree was put to an end when he was wounded in a shootout with civilian police.

A playful Facebook message to his pregnant girlfriend about pancakes saved Rodney Bradford, 19, from being convicted of a crime he didn't commit. Prosecutors dropped a robbery charge against the Brooklyn teen after learning his Facebook account status had been updated with the inside joke "WHERE MY IHOP?" from a computer inside his father's Harlem apartment one minute before an Oct. 17 stickup of two men in Brooklyn's Farragut Houses.

Bradford said, "They had on me Rikers Island for 12 days. It was really miserable. If it wasn't for Facebook I'd still be on Rikers Island."

His stepmom, Ernestine Bradford agreed. She said:

"Facebook saved my son. Normally, we yell at our kids, 'Oh, you're on the computer!" It's completely different. If it wasn't for Facebook, my son wouldn't be here."

Electronic footprints created by Bradford's posting on Facebook backed up multiple witnesses who said that he was at his dad's house that day. It also refuted a victim's claim that he recognized one of the robbers as Bradford, who lives in Farragut Houses.

Bradford's lawyer, Robert Reuland, said:

On Monday, Cleveland police confirmed that the Cuyahoga County Coroner had identified the eighth victim in the Imperial Avenue murders. The family of 49-year-old Janice Webb was notified by police that she was amongst the 11 slain womens found at the home of Anthony Sowell.

Webb's family said that she disappeared in June.

Other victims that have so far been identified include: Amelda Hunter, 47; Crystal Dozier, 38; Michelle Mason, 45; Tishana Culver, 31; Nancy Cobbs, 43; Telacia Fortson, 31; Tonia Carmichael, 52. All were from Cleveland with the exception of Fortson who was from East Cleveland and Carmichael who was from Warrensville Heights.

On Monday, Sowell was indicted by a grand jury in connection with the assault and rape of a 36-year-old woman in September. The investigation of this attack led to the discovery of the eleven bodies at Sowell's home.

After a few days of relative inactivity at Anthony Sowell's Imperial Avenue house, police homicide detectives and cadaver dogs are back on the scene. Two cadaver dogs went into an abandoned school building on East 125th and Abell Street about a block and a half from Imperial Ave. at around 12:30pm Monday. Neighbors say that the school building has been abandoned for about twenty years.

So far, a total of eleven victims have been found in Sowell's home and backyard, but police had also searched the areas around his home for more potential victims and evidence.

The Cuyahoga County Coroner says that eight victims were strangled, and seven of them still had something around their neck. One victim was manually strangled, and the other two were killed by homicidal violence. The cause of death of the last victim is undetermined.

FBI profilers were also in town over the weekend, meeting with police about Sowell. Currently, they are putting together a timeline of all of the places he lived. The FBI has offered to assist the Cleveland Police in following up on any leads on unsolved crimes outside of the Cleveland area.

Nidal Malik Hasan, who savagely opened fire on his fellow servicemen in Fort Hood, Texas last week, killing 12 and injuring dozens others, may have a link to 9/11. Hasan attended a Virginia mosque at the same time as two of the 9/11 hijackers, and the FBI is now investigating whether there is a connection between the men.

Major Hasan, a psychiatrist for the Army, had held his mother's funeral at the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va. during May 2001. At the time, the mosque's imam was the ultraradical Anwar Aulaqi, who was believed to have ties to Osama bin Laden. After the events of September 11, 2001, Aulaqi admitted to the FBI that he had met with Nawaf al-Hazmi, one of the hijackers who crashed a jet into the Pentagon. Al-Hazmi and another hijacker, Hani Hanjour, had attended his mosque in early April 2001 - at the same time Hasan's family worshipped there.

The Falls Church mosque is one of the largest on the East Coast, with thousands attending prayers and services there. However, Imam Abdul-Malki, the mosque's outreach director, said that it is a mistake to tie regular attendance at a mosque to extremism.

After 11 bodies were found at the home of Anthony Sowell on Imperial Ave. in Cleveland, Sowell's face was plastered over the country's television news broadcasts and newspapers. It has thus far been determined that all of his victims were black women, and most were caught up in drugs and prostitution. Some were not even reported missing by their families because of the lifestyles they led. And as police in Cleveland uncovering the bodies, detectives from other cities began to wonder if Sowell might be responsible for some of their unsolved murders. Police in East Cleveland, OH; Coronado, California, and North Carolina are now investigating Sowell's possible links to crimes in those areas.

In East Cleveland, police are looking to see whether he could have been involved in the "Strawberry Murders" of the late 1980's. Sowell is suspected because he lived in East Cleveland at the time, and once he was incarcerated in 1990 on rape charges, the murders stopped.

A woman from Coronado, California, upon seeing Sowell's face on TV, called up the Coronado Police and identified him as the man who had brutally raped her in the late 1970's. A former member of the US Marines, Sowell was stationed in the area on and off during his 8-year-military career.

During their 11 o' clock broadcast, WKYC reported that suspected serial killer Anthony Sowell may be linked to a handful of murders that occurred in East Cleveland prior to his incarceration in 1990. The murders involved prostitutes who were also linked to drug use and the circumstances are eerily similar to the victims on Imperial Ave.

Sowell happened to live in East Cleveland at the time. All of the victims also died by strangulation, and the deaths stopped around the same time he began to serve his 15-year prison sentence.

Two detectives are now working on re-opening the cold case files. All of the detectives that worked on the case at the time are now retired, but will be contacted and consulted about the cases.

Tanja Doss, 43, went up to suspected serial killer Anthony Sowell's third-floor bedroom for a beer and said that he seemed like a "civilized person", until, she says, he leapt up and began choking her and threatening to killer. Doss says she survived the night with him through a combination of calm, prayer, trickery and cajoling.

Doss says that she met Sowell in 2005 after his prison release, but did not know the real reason for his sentence. She said that she found him to be "a civilized person, siting outside drinking beer, a nice person." So she didn't hesitate to join him for a drink. However, things quickly turned ugly.

"And then he just clicked. I'm sitting on the corner of the bed and he just leaped up and came over and started choking me," she said.

In a state of shock, Doss said that she laid back and tried not to struggle. She said:

"He said, 'If you want to live, knock three times on the floor.' And I knocked on the floor."

With his hands still around her throat, Doss says that he then told her using a string of profanities that she could be "dead in the street" and no one would care. He then made her strip and lay on the bed. But she says that he did not attempt to rape her.