Would-be NJ Samaritans restrain victim, help thief
(chivalry is not dead misguided in this case but not dead!)
PLAINFIELD, N.J. — Police say a thief got away after two good Samaritans grabbed the wrong person on a northern New Jersey street.
The Samaritans were driving down a street in Plainfield when they saw what appeared to be a man assaulting a woman early Monday.
But it turns out the man was walking down the street when he said the woman robbed him of about $400 in cash and a gold chain.
Public Safety Director Martin Hellwig tells the Courier News of Bridgewater ( http://mycj.co/PA5muX) the suspect ran off when the passing motorists intervened.
Investigators are using videotape to try to identify the suspect.
Pa. woman, 72, robbed twice in a single day
(robbed on her way to the police station to report a robbery talk about no honor among thieves )
MCKEES ROCKS, Pa. — Police say a western Pennsylvania woman had her checkbook stolen and as she went to the police station to report the crime, her purse was swiped.
Seventy-two-year-old Harriet Sweger says she was first robbed by a woman who bumped into her and grabbed her checkbook at a grocery store.
The McKees Rocks woman says she was driving to a police station when she stopped to ask for directions and had a man reach into her car and grab her purse.
Police in Stowe Township, Allegheny County say they have a suspect in the purse snatching but didn't release a name.
Israeli archaeologist digs into Nazi death camp
( ah Nazis never out of style, such well orchestrated brutality such snappy uniforms. This exercise is modern archeology will no doubt give us a wealth of information about a closely examined but poorly understood period of human history. Under the circumstances it is easy to take this valuable data and just say, “yup Nazis were monsters” and move on, however I think this is missing a far greater and important point, despite what movies, video games, and some dyed in the wool propaganda may say Nazis were people too. these atrocities were committed by otherwise sane and normal people, unless somehow under some magical spell an efficient and savage infrastructure to carry out these heinous deeds formed out of nothing and returned to that same void whence it came when the war ended. I do not support in any way the truly monstrous deeds organizations like S.S. or the Nazis performed but I do wish they would be examined as people too, so we may discover what frailty in the human condition caused thousands if not millions of sane and rational people to accept if not outright condone such slaughter. Death camps don’t build themselves, they don’t run themselves, and to the best of my knowledge are not manned by zombies. If we could find some untainted record of the thoughts and daily lives of the people on both sides of this horror perhaps a better humanity can be made from those lessons.)
By ARON HELLER, APKIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — When Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi decided to investigate his family's unknown Holocaust history, he turned to the skill he knew best: He began to dig.
After learning that two of his uncles were murdered in the infamous Sobibor death camp, he embarked on a landmark excavation project that is shining new light on the workings of one of the most notorious Nazi killing machines, including pinpointing the location of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were killed.
Sobibor, in eastern Poland, marks perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to wipe out European Jewry. Unlike other camps that had at least a facade of being prison or labor camps, Sobibor and the neighboring camps Belzec and Treblinka were designed specifically for exterminating Jews. Victims were transported there in cattle cars and gassed to death almost immediately.
But researching Sobibor has been difficult. After an October 1943 uprising at the camp, the Nazis shut it down and leveled it to the ground, replanting over it to cover their tracks.
Today, tall trees cover most of the former camp grounds. Because there were so few survivors — only 64 were known — there has never been an authentic layout of the camp, where the Nazis are believed to have murdered some 250,000 Jews over an 18-month period. From those few survivors' memories and partial German documentation, researchers had only limited understanding of how the camp operated.
"I feel like I am an investigator in a criminal forensic laboratory," Haimi, 51, said near his home in southern Israel this week, a day before departing for another dig in Poland. "After all, it is a murder scene."
Over five years of excavations, Haimi has been able to remap the camp and has unearthed thousands of items. He hasn't found anything about his family, but amid the teeth, bone shards and ashes through which he has sifted, he has recovered jewelry, keys and coins that have helped identify some of Sobibor's formerly nameless victims.
The heavy concentration of ashes led him to estimate that far more than 250,000 Jews were actually killed at Sobibor.
"Because of the lack of information about Sobibor, every little piece of information is significant," said Haimi. "No one knew where the gas chambers were. The Germans didn't want anyone to find out what was there. But thanks to what we have done, they didn't succeed."
The most touching find thus far, he said, has been an engraved metal identification tag bearing the name of Lea Judith de la Penha, a 6-year-old Jewish girl from Holland who Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial confirmed was murdered at the camp.
Haimi calls her the "symbol of Sobibor."
"The Germans didn't discriminate. They killed little girls too," he said. "This thing (the tag) has been waiting for 70 years for someone to find it."
Haimi's digs, backed by Yad Vashem, could serve as a template for future scholarship into the Holocaust, in which the Nazis and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jews.
"I think the use of archaeology offers the possibility of giving us information that we didn't have before," Deborah Lipstadt, a prominent American Holocaust historian from Emory University, said. "It gives us another perspective when we are at the stage when we have very few people who can speak in the first person singular."
She said that if the archaeological evidence points to a higher death toll at Sobibor than previously thought, "it is not out of sync with other research that has been done."
Haimi's basic method is similar to what he does at home, where he does digs for Israel's antiquites authority in the south of the country — cutting out squares of land and sifting the earth through a filter. Because of the difficult conditions at Sobibor and the sensitive nature of the effort, he is also relying on more non-invasive, high-tech aids such as ground-penetrating radar and global positioning satellite imaging.
Based on debris collected and patterns in the soil, he has been able to figure out where the Nazis placed poles to hold up the camp's barbed wire fences.
That led him to his major breakthrough — the mapping of what the Germans called the Himmelfahrsstrasse, or the "Road to Heaven," a path upon which the inmates were marched naked into the gas chambers. He determined its route by the poles that marked the path. From that, he determined where the gas chambers would have been located.
He also discovered that another encampment was not located where originally thought and uncovered an internal train route within Sobibor. He dug up mounds of bullets at killing sites, utensils from where he believes the camp kitchen was located and a swastika insignia of a Nazi officer.
Along the way, he and his Polish partner Wojciech Mazurek, along with some 20 laborers, have stumbled on thousands of personal items belonging to the victims: eye glasses, perfume bottles, dentures, rings, watches, a child's Mickey Mouse pin, a diamond-studded gold chain, a pair of gold earrings inscribed ER — apparently the owner's initials — a silver medallion engraved with the name "Hanna."
He also uncovered a unique version of the yellow star Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis, made out of metal instead of cloth, which researchers determined to have originated in Slovakia.
Marek Bem, a former director of the museum at Sobibor, said the first excavations began at the site in 2001, with several stages before he invited Haimi to join in 2007. He said the mapping of the 200-meter (yard) long Himmelfahrsstrasse opens the door for looking for the actual gas chambers.
"We are nearer the truth," he said. "It tells us where to look for the gas chambers."
Haimi is not allowed to take any of the items out of Poland, but he consults regularly with Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research, which helps him interpret his findings and gives them historical perspective.
Dan Michman, head of the institute, said Haimi's research helps shed light on the "technical aspects" of the Holocaust. It also grants insight, for example, on what people chose to take with them in their final moments.
"His details are exact and that is an important tool against Holocaust denial. It's not memories, it's based on facts. It's hard evidence," he said.
But the accurate layout is Haimi's greatest contribution, allowing researchers to learn more about how it functioned, said Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
She said some critics have suggested that the sites of former death camps are "sacred" and "should remain untouched." But she said she believes the excavation is justified. "I feel that our need for knowledge outweighs those concerns."
Once his work in Sobibor is done, Haimi hopes to move on to research at Treblinka and other destroyed death camps.
Though archaeology is usually identified with the study of ancient history, Haimi thinks that with survivors rapidly dying it could soon become a key element in understanding the Holocaust.
"This is the future research tool of the Holocaust," he said.
Storms, stings push Nyad to end Cuba-to-Fla. swim
By MATT SEDENSKY, APKEY WEST, Fla. — Diana Nyad ended her fourth attempt in nearly 35 years to swim across the Straits of Florida on Tuesday, her dream of setting a record thwarted by storms, jellyfish stings, shark threats, hypothermia and swollen lips.
The swimmer was pulled from the water at 12:55 a.m., her crew reported, as a thunderstorm raged and winds and waves tossed her support boats around. Her team had previously tweeted that she came out of the water at 7:42 a.m., and offered no explanation for the change.
In a blog posting, crew member Candace Hogan wrote that Nyad angrily shook her head after being pulled from the water and planned to return to finish the swim after the storms subsided.
"When can I get back in?" Hogan quoted the swimmer as saying. "I want full transparency that I was out. But I have plenty left in me and I want to go on."
She was aboard a boat headed to the Florida Keys and was likely to arrive Tuesday afternoon.
Nyad, who turns 63 on Wednesday, was making her third attempt since last summer to become the first person to cross the Florida Straits without a shark cage. She also made a failed try with a cage in 1978.
Nyad had previously said this would be her last attempt, though she made the same promise to her friends and handlers last September as she stepped from her boat onto a Key West dock, her lips and limbs red and swollen from jellyfish stings.
"I just don't want to spend the rest of my life trying and failing and trying and failing this, but it's a bear of a swim," Nyad said in Key West last week. "I would hate to stand here again with you next year and say, `Well, didn't make it again.'"
She started this effort Saturday in Havana and lasted longer, and made it farther, than in her previous tries, her team said. She swam this time for more than 41 hours.
"She realized that the obstacles against this swim were too great and agreed at dawn to return to Key West by boat," Hogan said.
Another team member, Vanessa Linsley, told The Associated Press the swimmer encountered a triple threat of obstacles.
"Instead of getting hit with one doozy they got hit with three," Linsley said, "They got hit with the weather, they got hit with the jellyfish and they got hit with the sharks all at the same time."
Nyad was stung nine times by box jellyfish on Monday night alone, the team blog reported.
She got out of the water after a second straight night of storms. On Monday evening, the crew was improvising ways to prevent hypothermia and to fend off more swelling of her lips and tongue. Though she's swimming in 85-degree waters, because that is lower than the body's core temperature, it will reduce her body temperature over time. Her team said she had been shivering.
"We all know her mind can handle it," Candace Hogan, a crew member traveling with Nyad, wrote on the swimmer's blog. "But there will always be a point where a human body can't go any farther. What no one knows is where that line is drawn in Diana Nyad."
In 1978, American marathon swimmer Walter Poenisch swam from Havana to Marathon, Fla. in a shark cage made out of aluminum tubing and chicken wire that broke apart in the rough seas. The 65-year-old Poenisch was a former cookie baker from Grove City, Ohio, who used flippers and snorkels during the swim. Reports later surfaced that said he had faked previous marathon swims by travelling part of the distance in a boat.
Australian Susie Maroney successfully swam the Straits in 1997, but she used a shark cage. In June, another Australian, Penny Palfrey, made it 79 miles (127 kilometers) toward Florida without a cage before strong currents forced her to abandon the attempt.
Nyad had been training for three years for the feat. She was accompanied by a support team in boats, and a kayak-borne apparatus shadowing her to keep sharks at bay by generating a faint electric field. A team of handlers was on alert to dive in and distract any sharks that made it through.
She took periodic short breaks to rest, hydrate and eat high-energy foods such as peanut butter.
AP Exclusive: Unheard King audio found in attic
By LUCAS L. JOHNSON II, APNASHVILLE, Tenn. — Stephon Tull was looking through dusty old boxes in his father's attic in Chattanooga a few months ago when he stumbled onto something startling: an audio reel labeled, "Dr. King interview, Dec. 21, 1960."
He wasn't sure what he had until he borrowed a friend's reel-to-reel player and listened to the recording of his father interviewing Martin Luther King Jr. for a book project that never came to fruition. In clear audio, King discusses the importance of the civil rights movement, his definition of nonviolence and how a recent trip of his to Africa informed his views. Tull said the recording had been in the attic for years, and he wasn't sure who other than his father may have heard it.
"No words can describe. I couldn't believe it," he told The Associated Press this week in a phone interview from his home in Chattanooga. "I found ... a lost part of history."
Many recordings of King are known to exist among hundreds of thousands of documents related to his life that have been catalogued and archived. But one historian said the newly discovered interview is unusual because there's little audio of King discussing his activities in Africa, while two of King's contemporaries said it's exciting to hear a little-known recording of their friend for the first time.
Tull plans to offer the recording at a private sale arranged by a New York broker and collector later this month.
Tull said his father, an insurance salesman, had planned to write a book about the racism he encountered growing up in Chattanooga and later as an adult. He said his dad interviewed King when he visited the city, but never completed the book and just stored the recording with some other interviews he had done. Tull's father is now in his early 80s and under hospice care.
During part of the interview, King defines nonviolence and justifies its practice.
"I would ... say that it is a method which seeks to secure a moral end through moral means," he said. "And it grows out of the whole concept of love, because if one is truly nonviolent that person has a loving spirit, he refuses to inflict injury upon the opponent because he loves the opponent."
The interview was made four years before the Civil Rights Act became law, three years before King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, and eight years before his assassination. At one point in the interview, King predicts the impact of the civil rights movement.
"I am convinced that when the history books are written in future years, historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage," he said.
King had visited Africa about a month before the interview, and he discusses with Tull's father how leaders there viewed the racial unrest in the United States.
"I had the opportunity to talk with most of the major leaders of the new independent countries of Africa, and also leaders in countries that are moving toward independence," he said. "And I think all of them agree that in the United States we must solve this problem of racial injustice if we expect to maintain our leadership in the world."
Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Maryland's Morgan State University, said the tape is significant because there are very few recordings of King detailing his activity in Africa.
"It's clear that in this tape when he's talking ... about Africa, he saw this as a global human rights movement that would inspire other organizations, other nations, other groups around the world," said Winbush, who is also a psychologist and historian.
"That to me is what's remarkable about the tape."
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who organized Tennessee's first lunch counter sit-in at age 19 in Nashville, said hearing King talk about the sit-ins took him back to the period when more than 100 restaurant counters were desegregated over several months.
"To ... hear his voice and listen to his words was so moving, so powerful," said Lewis, adding that King's principles of nonviolence are still relevant today.
"I wish people all over America, all over the world, can hear this message over and over again," he said.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who worked with King while a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, agreed.
"I can't think of anything better to try," Lowery said of nonviolence. "What we're doing now is not working. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Matching violence with violence. We've got more guns than we've ever had, and more ammunition to go with it. And yet, the situation worsens."
A spokeswoman for King's daughter Bernice, head of The King Center in Atlanta, said she was traveling and couldn't comment on the audio.
Tull is working with a New York-based collector and expert on historical artifacts to arrange a sale. The broker, Keya Morgan, said he believes that unpublished reel-to-reel audio of King is extremely rare and said he's confident of the authenticity of the recording based on extensive interviews with Tull, his examination of the tape and his knowledge of King. He's collected many of the civil rights icon's letters and photos.
"I was like, wow! To hear him that crisp and clear," Morgan said. "But beyond that, for him to speak of nonviolence, which is what he represented."
Turkmenistan formally ends 1-party system
(industrialists and entrepreneurs have their own party now? And it’s aptly named. Just ‘cause you have two parties doesn’t mean the same old Bosses ain’t in charge)
ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan — Turkmenistan has formally ended its one-party system with the creation of a business-oriented political party. But the new group's arrival is unlikely to substantively lead to democratization in the authoritarian state.
The TDH state news agency said Tuesday that 300 delegates from business groups around the ex-Soviet Central Asian nation attended the founding congress of the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan.
Elections to be held in 2013 look likely to formally end the Democratic Party's two-decade-long monopoly in parliament. The Democratic Party was created on the basis of the dissolved Communist Party in 1991.
It is highly unlikely that the new party would have been allowed to exist without the approval of Turkmenistan's President Gurbanbuly Berdymukhamedov, who runs the country with an iron fist.
Americans tune out Afghan war as fighting rages on
(the graveyard of empires still living up to its name. politics be damned! Our fighting men and women need to come home,Now is not soon enough. Many a nation has sent troops into Afghanistan over its many years none has found success there, just ask the Soviet Union they slogged away in that mountainous hellhole for years and all they got for it was dead soviets. Let us learn from that tragic error and get our troops out. Write your congressman today. )
By DEB RIECHMANN, APKABUL, Afghanistan — It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.
The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.
Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.
By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.
Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.
Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.
"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.
"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the `support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."
Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.
"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."
Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.
More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.
Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."
Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.
But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.
Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.
And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.
While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.
"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.
It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.
World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success if measured in increments.
The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.
In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.
Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.
"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.
Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.
Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?
"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."
Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.
After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.
"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"
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Soldiers find charred human remains in west Mexico
(apparently the war on drugs has a metric ass ton of casualties sometimes entire towns. At least in this case the numbers are in single digits.)
MORELIA, Mexico — Prosecutors in the western Mexico state of Michoacan say soldiers found charred human remains buried in at least five clandestine graves and left on the slopes of a hill in the town of Tuxpan.
They say the troops found more than 150 pieces of bone, some mixed with pieces of wood and coal, on Tuesday. The soldiers also found traces of at least two bonfires.
Michoacan is the home base of the cult-like Knights Templar drug cartel.
Elsewhere in Mexico, prosecutors in Tamaulipas states say soldiers clashed with gunmen in two towns, killing at least 12 people.
Prosecutors say the first firefight was in the town of Hidalgo, where five men and a woman were killed Monday morning. Three hours later, soldiers killed six people in the town of Padilla.
Suicide ruling doesn't end questions in Ark. case
By JEANNIE NUSS, AP
12 hours ago
12 hours ago
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Hours after police released an autopsy report that ruled the shooting death of a young man in the back of a patrol car a suicide, dozens of the man's supporters and relatives gathered Monday night in Memphis for a candlelight vigil.
The report from the Arkansas state crime lab says Chavis Carter, 21, tested positive for methamphetamine, anti-anxiety medication and other drugs. It ruled his death a suicide and says the muzzle of a handgun he apparently concealed from arresting officers was placed against his right temple when it was fired.
Instead of focusing on the newly released report, some supporters at the vigil were asking more questions.
"How (did) he shoot himself in his right temple and he (was) left-handed? In handcuffs?" one of his friends, Bianca Tipton, asked.
The state crime lab report, released to The Associated Press and other news organizations under a public records request, didn't answer that question.
Instead, the report says Carter's death was ruled a suicide based on autopsy findings and investigative conclusions from the Jonesboro Police Department, which has faced questions from Carter's family and community members about the circumstances surrounding the July 28 death.
"He was cuffed and placed into a police car, where apparently he produced a weapon, and despite being handcuffed, shot himself in the head," the report says.
The report also says Carter's blood tested positive for at least trace amounts of the anti-anxiety medication diazepam and the painkiller oxycodone. His urine test returned a positive result for marijuana.
Benjamin Irwin, a Memphis-based lawyer representing Carter's family, declined to comment Monday afternoon on the specifics of the toxicology report, calling instead for police to release details of any gunpowder residue or other such tests.
"If those tests were taken ... what were the results?" Irwin asked.
On Monday night dozens of Carter family supporters gathered outside the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., for a candlelight vigil.
Carter's mother, Teresa Carter, wiped her eyes as people spoke about her late son.
"My heart is so heavy," she said.
She didn't talk about the autopsy results as she addressed the small crowd, but others did. One man read part of the autopsy report as he stood at the podium and some continued to demand answers about how Carter died.
Police have said officers frisked Carter twice after a traffic stop without finding a gun, but the department's internal investigation continues. The FBI also is monitoring the case, and the local branch of the NAACP has called for a thorough investigation into the death of Carter, who was black. Two other men who were in a truck with him during the stop and the two officers who were on the scene are white, according to police.
The autopsy report comes days after police released dashboard camera video recorded the night Carter was shot in Jonesboro, about 130 miles northeast of Little Rock. Part of the video shows Carter being patted down and ends before officers found Carter slumped over and bleeding in the back of a patrol car, as was described in a police report. Police later released additional video they said was recorded after Carter was found.
Neither included the moment they say Carter shot himself, and the footage did little to resolve questions about how the shooting could have happened. Jonesboro police previously had released a video reconstruction of the shooting showing how a man could shoot himself in the head with his hands cuffed behind him.
In producing that video, the agency said it used the same type of handcuffs used on Carter and the same model of handgun found near him after he was shot: a .380-caliber Cobra semi-automatic. An officer of similar height and weight as Carter sat in the back of a cruiser, leaned over and was able to lift the weapon to his head and reach the trigger.
The autopsy report says Carter was about 5-foot-8 and that his body weighed 150 pounds.
Irwin called Monday for the full dashboard video and audio from the night of the shooting to be released before final conclusions are drawn.
"They should be disclosing every bit of evidence as quickly as they can," he said.
Cellphone videos, other phone records, search warrant returns and investigative portions of the incident report had yet to be released, police spokesman Sgt. Lyle Waterworth said.
"As the investigation continues and as prudent further information will be released," Waterworth said in an email. "Any other questions will be answered upon completion of investigation."
Carter's death came after police stopped a truck in which he was a passenger. The driver and another passenger eventually were allowed to go, but police said Carter had an outstanding arrest warrant. Court records show it had to do with a drug charge out of Mississippi's DeSoto County.
Carter was searched twice, and police said they found a small amount of marijuana but no gun. After the first search, an officer put Carter into a patrol car without handcuffing him. He was later searched again, handcuffed and returned to the same car.
"It's obvious they did miss the weapon on the first search. It is likely, since he was placed into the car un-handcuffed the first time, that he had an opportunity to stash the weapon in the car," Jonesboro Police Chief Michael Yates said last week. "The second search, which was more thorough and inclusive, did not disclose the weapon either."
Officers a short time later saw Carter slumped over in the backseat and covered in blood with his hands still cuffed, according to the police report, which concluded he had managed to conceal the handgun with which he shot himself. He later died at a hospital.
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Associated Press writer Chuck Bartels in Little Rock contributed to this report.
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