This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Crime

  • Tyler Barriss arrested for deadly “Call of Duty” SWATing prank

    Tyler Barriss arrested for deadly “Call of Duty” SWATing prank

    Fox News reports that Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles has been arrested and believed to be the person that sent a SWAT team to an address in Wichita, Kansas that he believed to be the address of a “Call of Duty” gaming rival.

    In the audio of the 911 call, the caller claimed his father had been shot in the head and that he was holding his mother and a sibling at gunpoint. The caller added that he poured gasoline inside the home and “might just set it on fire.”

    The address he gave was that of 28-year-old Andrew Finch. When police arrived, Finch let them in his home, but for some reason during the conversation with police, Finch made a motion towards his waistband causing officers to feel threatened and Finch was dead from a single fired round. It turns out that Finch was unarmed and his mother denies that he was even a gamer.

    Swatting is designed to make the responding officers hyper-alert when they arrive at the intended-victims’ homes.

    The FBI estimates that roughly 400 cases of swatting occur annually, with some using caller ID spoofing to disguise their number.

    People generally suck.

  • Anthony Woodridge and Chicago justice

    Anthony Woodridge and Chicago justice

    Anthony Woodridge, a twenty-five year old from Chicago, Illinois was out on parole since June after serving a 4 1/2 year sentence for felony handgun possession. He’s been arrested 15 times and he has four felony convictions as an adult. On Wednesday, he fired another handgun at a Chicago police officer, striking him in the hand. When the officer fell to the ground, Woodridge continued to fire at the officer. When the gunsmoke cleared, another bullet was found lodged in the officer’s protective vest.

    From the Chicago Tribune;

    “I can’t find the words to articulate to you all how this upsets me because, listen, this officer could’ve easily gotten killed last night,” [Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson] told reporters outside Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. “And I’ve told you all before, it’s not my goal to have mass incarceration or to lock everybody up, but these violent offenders, they don’t deserve to be on the streets of this city.”

    Thanks to our friends at Maxon Shooter’s Supplies and Indoor Range for the link.

  • Julia Jacobson found buried with her dog

    Julia Jacobson found buried with her dog

    On September 2, 2017, Retired Army Captain Julia Jacobson and her dog, Boogie, vanished. On information gleaned from her ex-husband, Dalen Ware, Ontario, California Police, with help of their cadaver dog, Ellie, discovered remains that they believe to be the Captain’s and her dog buried in a shallow grave.

    According to CBS News, her ex-husband has been arrested;

    Jacobson was reported missing to San Diego police on Sept. 2, CBS Los Angeles reports. Her car was found abandoned in San Diego five days later. The investigation eventually led San Diego police detectives to Ontario, where it was determined she had been last seen on the same day she was reported missing, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.

    A forensic analysis of her car and other evidence soon convinced detectives that she had been murdered, Ontario police Detective Melissa Ramirez told CBS affiliate KFMB. Officials have declined to reveal the nature of those findings.

    Ontario police say that the evidence found in the car leads them to believe that she died a violent death.

    The Huffington Post reports that Jacobson served twice in Iraq and once in Bosnia as a finance officer and earned a Bronze Star for merit.

  • Jeffrey Grenier; stealing from the dead

    Jeffrey Grenier; stealing from the dead

    In May, Sabrina Galusha was stabbed to death by Daswan Jette, 20, to whom she was selling a bag of weed in Concord, New Hampshire. Soon after, Jeffrey Grenier set up a GoFundMe page to rattle a tincup for Sabrina’s family to cover their funeral expenses. He was rather successful in that endeavor;

    His problems began when he took the money from the donations and bought himself a car with the proceeds according to the Concord Monitor;

    Police arrested Grenier on Wednesday and charged him with a felony count of theft by unauthorized taking. He is accused of stealing $5,877, which is the total amount of all the donations minus administrative fees from the website.

    Grenier was released on $20,000 personal recognizance and is scheduled to be arraigned Dec. 14 in Merrimack County Superior Court.

    An official with GoFundMe said Galusha’s family will receive the money raised on their behalf.

    “In this case, GoFundMe has taken action and banned the individual and will make sure the families receives the funds raised on their behalf,” Bobby Whithorne, a spokesman for GoFundMe said in a statement.

    I hate these GoFundMe donation pages because there’s a tendency for grifters to publish these things without doing much work taking advantage of well-meaning folks.

    Thanks to AnotherPat for the tip.

  • Opal Charles sentenced

    We wrote about Opal Charles a year ago when she was arrested for skimming thousands of dollars from charities that were donating to the Warrior Transition Brigade at San Antonio Military Medical Center to meet the basic needs of the soldiers there. It was her job to solicit for those donated funds, and she used the money that she stole for 12 years to pay for her own stuff. According to the San Antonio Express-News she swiped more than $260,000.

    From KENS5;

    She admitted from 2004 to December 2016, she stole the donations and used them for her own personal affairs, including gambling.

    She further admitted to keeping the deposits under $10,000 in order to avoid automatic currency transaction reports.

    Officials say she was sentenced to five years in federal prison and ordered to pay $260,000 in restitution.

    From My San Antonio;

    At sentencing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez gave her 60 months in prison on each count, then ran the terms concurrently. He also ordered Charles to pay $260,000 in restitution, which was bilked from donations meant for the Warrior Transition Battalion at SAMMC, where Charles worked from 2004 to Dec. 7.

  • Jose Ines Garcia Zarate slides on murder charge

    Jose Ines Garcia Zarate slides on murder charge

    Yesterday a jury found that illegal alien Jose Ines Garcia Zarate who had been deported five times until he murdered 32-year-old Kate Steinle two years ago with a handgun that he had stolen from a federal law enforcement officer was not responsible for her death on the San Francisco pier. Zarate successfully convinced the jury that the gun went off by itself. From CNN;

    Kate Steinle’s brother said the theft of the gun set off a series of system failures that culminated with the ruling.

    “I’m not surprised. The system failed Kate from the start of this chain of events. Why would the verdict be any different?” Brad Steinle said. “From the drug charge. To being released. To not being detained by ICE. The BLM agent leaving a loaded weapon in an unlocked car. It is failure after failure.”

    According to Fox News, the Justice Department is considering Federal charges against Zarate;

    U.S. immigration officials had said they would deport Garcia Zarate – also known as Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez — who already had been deported five times and was wanted for a sixth deportation when Steinle was fatally shot in the back while walking with her father.

    The undocumented felon could spend three years in prison for the firearm charge but has already been behind bars for over two years as the case has made its way through court.

    Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores acknowledged Friday that the DOJ is looking at federal charges. She suggested a possible charge could be felony re-entry or a charge pertaining to a violation of supervised release.

    “We’re looking at every option and we will prosecute this to the fullest extent of the law because these cases are tragic and entirely preventable,” Flores said on “Fox & Friends” Friday.

    She also urged local governments to “reconsider” sanctuary policies.

    This whole case highlights the failures of depending on the government to protect us from the worst criminals.

  • Slobodan Praljak poisons himself in courtroom

    Mick sends a link from MSN which reports that Slobodan Praljak, a Bosnian-Croat commander who was convicted of war crimes during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, drank a vial of poison in The Hague courtroom when a judge read a ruling against him and five other defendants.

    The apparent courtroom suicide, which was broadcast on a video feed, came in the final minutes of the last judgment at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which closes next month.

    “I just drank poison,” he said. “I am not a war criminal. I oppose this conviction.”

    After gulping down the drink, Praljak sat back down and slumped in his chair, a lawyer who was in the courtroom at the time said. U.N. court representatives and Dutch hospital officials declined to comment on his condition.

    One has to wonder about the security measures they have in these courtrooms. But, at least justice was done on behalf of his victims. He was convicted of committing “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims;

    The ICTY, established in 1993 by the U.N. Security Council, indicted 161 war crimes suspects from Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Of the 83 convicted, more than 60 of them were ethnic Serbs.

    The court’s lead suspect, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, died of a heart attack in March 2006 months before a ruling in his genocide case.

    Slavko Dogmanovic and Milan Babic, two other convicts were found hung in their cells more than ten years ago in separate incidents.

  • LTC Frederick Lamar Burnett sentenced

    Another Pat sends us a link to the Department of Justice, Northern District of Alabama, press release announcing the sentencing of Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Lamar Burnett in a case of fraud wherein Burnett had contracts to deliver US-made ball caps and backpacks to Recruiting Command to hand out to recruits as promotional items. Instead, he delivered Chinese-made items.

    A federal judge today sentenced a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves to four years in prison and ordered him to forfeit $4.4 million to the government for fraudulently supplying hundreds of thousands of Chinese-produced baseball caps and backpacks to the Army Recruiting Command and passing them off as American-made products.

    U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town, Defense Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent in Charge John F. Khin, and U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command Special Agent in Charge James T. Wallis announced the sentence.

    FREDERICK LAMAR BURNETT, 50, of Madison, received millions of dollars under contracts with the Army stating he must supply promotional items for the Recruiting Command that were “100 % U.S. MADE.” A federal jury convicted Burnett in April on three counts of wire fraud for using his Huntsville-based company, Lamar International Inc., in the scheme to defraud the Defense Department on three contracts, worth $6.2 million, between 2005 and 2009. U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Blackburn sentenced Burnett and ordered him to serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

    I guess he intentionally negotiated with companies that he knew were buying their wares from the Chinese. He certainly deserves every second that he will spend in jail that he was handed, but, then Bergdahl gets off without a minute in jail for misbehavior in the face of the enemy and Manning skates out of more than twenty years of his sentence for being a traitor.