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Ft. Hood case update

 

FT. HOOD, Texas — Sgt. 1st Class Maria Guerra was heading to lunch in her office at this central Texas Army base back on Nov. 5, 2009, when she heard the first shots of what would become the deadliest shooting on a U.S. military installation.

Guerra and other witnesses detailed the carnage they saw unfold that day during testimony Thursday at the court-martial of the shooter, Maj. Nidal Mailk Hasan.

Hasan, 42, is representing himself with the aid of military legal advisers and faces 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. If convicted by a jury of 13 fellow officers, the Army psychiatrist could be sentenced to death.

Guerra, of Chino Hills, took the stand shortly after noon wearing a dress uniform and explained that, at the time of the shooting, she was responsible for the soldier readiness processing center providing treatment for those about to deploy.

The day of the shooting, as she headed to her office for lunch, Guerra saw Hasan waiting. She didn’t know the Army psychiatrist, but recognized him as a fellow officer, and made a mental note to check in with him after eating.

By the time she reached her office, she heard shots.

Guerra opened the office door, incensed, and demanded to know what was “going on in my building.”

She heard someone yell, “Shooter, shooter!”

That’s when she saw a figure in fatigues with a handgun.

“He was firing into the crowd of soldiers,” Guerra testified, “very efficiently dropping his magazine and coming up with another magazine—I mean, it was seconds. Down came the magazine, up came another one… he was firing at anyone who was moving and anyone who was trying to get out of the building.”

Guerra heard someone call out, “When he reloads, get him!” and then, “He’s reloading, get him!”

Then she saw three men charge the shooter, one with a chair, but the shooter quickly reloaded and began firing, taking two of them down as the third fled.

It was about then that she recognized the shooter—and that he was headed in her direction.

Two staff were hiding in her office, crouching under desks.

“Shhh, he’s coming—don’t move!” Guerra said, placing a finger over her mouth and closing the door, which opened inward, sitting with her back to the door as she braced her legs against desks.

“I told them to stay down and don’t get up—he’s coming,” she testified.

She listened closely to the sounds of shooting outside the door, trying to figure out where the attacker was. She could hear screams, people yelling “Run, run!” “Move, move—he’s coming!” and then “Please don’t!” and “My baby, my baby!”

“And then I hear shots,” Guerra said. Referring to the voice shouting about a baby, the military prosecutor asked,  “Do you hear that voice again Sgt. Guerra?”

“No, I do not,” Guerra said.

Among those killed in the attack was Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, of Chicago, who was pregnant.

 

Leah Remini files police report on Scientology leader’s wife

Actress Leah Remini, who made headlines last month when she publicly left the Church of Scientology, has reportedly filed a missing persons report for church leader David Miscavige’s wife, Shelly, who allegedly hasn’t been seen in public for six years.

“We can confirm that the missing person report has been taken, and that’s all the information we have at this time,” a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson told Us Weekly.

TMZ confirmed that an ongoing investigation into Miscavige’s whereabouts is underway. LAPD did not say whether Remini had any connection to the case, but a source told the site that Remini had filed the report shortly after cutting ties with the church last month.

Previous reports indicated that the “King of Queens” star left the church because it allegedly bars members from questioning leaders’ management and reportedly forces them to “disconnect” from family members deemed “suppressive persons” if they choose to leave the church.

PHOTOS: Famous Scientologists

Remini, who has said she’ll pen a tell-all memoir about science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial faith, has not publicly explained why she defected from the organization but told People that “no one is going to tell me how I need to think, no one is going to tell me who I can, and cannot, talk to.”

Any previous tension Remini may have had with the church is surely being exacerbated amid these most recent reports.

In the past, Remini was allegedly derided by Tommy Davis, the former head of the Scientology Celebrity Centre, for asking about Shelly Miscavige’s whereabouts at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ wedding in 2006. The incident was among the alleged reasons that Remini broke ties with the church. Davis reportedly scolded her and told her she didn’t have the “rank” to ask about Shelly.

Former Village Voice editor Tony Ortega runs the Scientology blog Underground Bunker, which chronicles the church’s inner workings. Ortega, whose reliability has been denounced several times by the church, reported that Remini filed the report recently.

RELATED: What is Scientology?

He also said that in 2006 Shelly was transferred to a “secret compound near Lake Arrowhead in the mountains above Los Angeles.” The place is the headquarters to the Church of Spiritual Technology and is home to about a dozen Scientologists who are “completely cut off from the outside world,” he said.

However, Shelly Miscavige’s attorney has said that she is “not missing.”

“Any reports that she is missing are false,” the attorney told Us Weekly. “Mrs. Miscavige has been working non-stop in the Church, as she always has.”

“This is just harassment. It is a publicity stunt cooked up by a small band of unemployed fanatics who live on the fringe of the Internet,” a rep told The Times. “The Church and the attorney for Mrs. Miscavige have already responded to this ludicrous claim.”

 

DEA agent ‘Kiki’ Camarena’s Mexico slaying called a game changer

MEXICO CITY — The former boss of slain DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena says the 1985 killing was a game changer, both in how the U.S. worked with Mexico on narcotics enforcement and how the traffickers themselves operated.

James Kuykendall, who served as resident agent in charge in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Guadalajara in the 1980s, recalled Camarena’s slaying after learning that the drug lord convicted in the crime was freed from prison Friday on a technicality.

An appeals tribunal ruled that Rafael Caro Quintero was improperly convicted on federal charges, when the proper venue should have been state court. The tribunal ordered Caro Quintero, who has been in prison for 28 years of a 40-year sentence, released and the conviction voided. The prosecutor’s office in Jalisco, the state where Caro Quintero was serving time, confirmed he walked free about 2 a.m. Friday.

“The decision [by traffickers] to kill a U.S. federal agent changed everything,” Kuykendall, now retired, said in a telephone interview Friday from his home in Laredo, Texas.

For one, he said, it made the bosses in Washington realize the dangers that agents in the field faced and the apparent complicity of the Mexican government in protecting and facilitating drug traffickers. The killing seriously strained U.S.-Mexican relations. The U.S. all but shut its border with Mexico for a period, and Mexico eventually imposed restrictions on DEA activities inside the country.

One upside may have been that traffickers who had swaggered unabashedly about Guadalajara were forced to lie low, at least in the short term, Kuykendall said.

“Before Kiki was killed, the traffickers lived and worked with impunity and with [government-licensed] bodyguards,” he said. “They did whatever they damn well pleased.”

The agents in the Guadalajara office knew they were being watched and felt under threat, Kuykendall said. The car of one had been machine-gunned just weeks before Camarena was kidnapped. But he said their complaints and requests for more security fell on deaf ears in Washington, a charge that has been aired before.

“There were warnings,” he said. “We knew we were in danger.”

Camarena vanished on Feb. 7, 1985, after leaving the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara to meet his wife at a restaurant. A month later, the search ended when investigators, purportedly acting on an anonymous tip, went to an area in western Michoacan state where they found the tortured bodies of Camarena and a Mexican pilot he frequently worked with on aerial hunts for marijuana fields.

Including Caro Quintero, about two dozen people were eventually convicted in Mexico in connection with the Camarena case, as well as seven in U.S. courts.

Now 61 and silver-haired, Caro Quintero is ranked among the legendary founders of Mexico’s most important drug-trafficking cartels. U.S. officials believe he has continued to run trafficking and money-laundering operations from inside prison.

In June, the U.S. Treasury Department added several of his alleged associates to its so-called kingpin list, imposing sanctions against 18 people and 15 companies.

His former attorney, meanwhile, said Friday that he believed the reputed drug lord was held in prison for such a long time for purely political reasons and because of U.S. pressure. Jose Luis Guizar suggested that some of Caro Quintero’s convicted accomplices should also go free.

“In this case, politics did not permit the imparting of justice,” the lawyer said in a radio interview.

It was not immediately clear whether the U.S. would pursue an extradition claim against Caro Quintero.

Justice Department takes a stand on solitary confinement

SACRAMENTO — The U.S. Justice Department has weighed in on California’s use of solitary confinement and other forms of isolation for mentally ill inmates, saying it has found that such conditions subject prisoners “to a risk of serious harm.”

In a court filing Friday, lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division took no position on inmates’ request for a court order to block California from keeping mentally ill prisoners in its controversial isolation units.

But they call U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton’s attention to a May 31 decision the agency issued about similar circumstances in Pennsylvania, where it found that such treatment violated prisoners’ constitutional rights.

Pennsylvania is the home state of California prisons chief Jeffrey Beard, who previously served as head of corrections there.

Although the investigation focused on just one prison — the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Cresson — the Justice Department raised questions about the policies that allowed detrimental conditions to occur.

As in California, the Pennsylvania inmates were locked in their cells for roughly 23 hours a day for months or years at a time. Investigators found that mental health care was inadequate and other services and programs were “unreasonably denied.”

Federal investigators said mentally ill inmates in isolation suffered trauma, physical injuries and sometimes death, and were subjected to excessive force and punishment by guards.

The Justice Department decision said it was expanding its investigations to other prisons in Pennsylvania.

Michael Bien, lead lawyer for inmates suing California over mental health care in state prisons, said he had been contacted by the Justice Department for information about conditions here. He was unsure how much federal officials intended to become involved in the California case.

Deborah Hoffman, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, had no immediate comment on the filing.

The Justice Department investigation began in 2011. Beard retired in 2010 after a decade as head of Pennsylvania prisons. He took over California’s corrections system in January.

Third person charged with filing false claim for Boston bombing

A New Jersey woman is the third person to be charged with trying to defraud the One Fund Boston, established to aid people involved in the bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April.

Iris Gamble, 44, was charged with third-degree attempted theft by deception, fourth-degree fraud and fourth-degree creating fraudulent documents, said Union County Prosecutor Grace H. Park in a statement Friday. Gamble’s first court appearance is scheduled for Aug. 16 in Union County Superior Court.

Gamble submitted a claim in June, saying she was injured in the April 15 explosions of two pressure-cooker bombs along Bolton Street in Boston. Three people were killed and more than 260 injured in the attack.

Gamble claimed she was in Boston and had been injured in the bombing. But the application had irregularities and was investigated, officials said.

“Before any money was distributed, One Fund Boston forwarded concerns about this claim to our office. After an initial investigation, we informed the Union County Prosecutor’s office, which agreed to further investigate the case. Attempting to steal money from the real victims of the Marathon bombing, and from the people who gave so generously to help them, is unconscionable,” Christopher Loh, a spokesperson for Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley, said in a statement emailed to reporters.

Gamble, who withdrew her claim, is the third case of alleged fraud stemming from applications to the fund. Two of the cases were uncovered by fund investigators who then passed them on for prosecution. One person got so far as receiving money until a tip was sent in to authorities.

The person who received funds was Audrea Gause, 26, of Troy, N.Y. She was arrested on July 19 and arraigned earlier this month on larceny charges.

Gause is accused of filing a claim in June and included several “pages of purported medical records, indicating that she had been hospitalized at the Boston Medical Center for two days, and thereafter at the Albany Medical Center for ten days,” Massachusetts prosecutors said. Her claim was approved by the Fund based on those records.

Officials said they received a tip that Gause was not in Boston during the bombing. The attorney general’s office said it began an immediate investigation and charged Gause, who is due back in court in September.

The third case involves Branden Mattier, 22, of the South End of Boston who made a claim on behalf of his aunt. That case was uncovered by the One Fund Boston which found that the aunt had died 10 years earlier and referred the case to the attorney general’s office, which brought charges.

Mattier was arrested while receiving a fake check for $2.195 million.

“We will continue our review of all claims made to ensure that the only people who receive money are the true victims of this horrible event,” Loh said.


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