Police rule out woman’s parking-lot abduction as being a random act

By Calvin Palmer

The abduction of Susana De Jesus from a parking lot in Pearland, Texas, on Monday night may not have been a random crime, police said today.

“She may have known or been aware of what was happening,”  Capt. Chris Kincheloe of Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office told a news conference. He added that she was taken against her will.

Kincheloe did not elaborate on a motive but said: “We are still trying to find a living breathing person. I’m very optimistic we can find her.”

He based his statements on the abduction on background checks of the victim and people associated with her, but would not elaborate because the investigation is continuing.

Asked if authorities had a profile of the suspect, he replied, “He’s mean as hell.”

He said he’s very street-wise and knew what he was doing. The fact that he shielded his face with a mask and the door of the car when he used an ATM showed that knew what he was doing.

Kincheloe said the fact that the kidnapping may not have been random should allay the fears of people in the area. People in the area have been jittery over three home invasions in a nearby subdivision in three weeks.

De Jesus, 37, was abducted as she left her place of employment Catherine’s Plus Sizes store at 2754 Smith Ranch Road.

Witnesses said a masked gunman told De Jesus to get into a car, a 2008 black Cadillac, which was later recovered by the Houston Police Department in the 6000 block of West Airport.

Investigators from several agencies are looking for De Jesus. Kincheloe said the FBI has promised to expedite processing of evidence from the kidnapping, as well as from three recent home invasions in the nearby Silverlake subdivision.

Since the incidents, Sheriff Charles Wagner said he has boosted patrols by pushing all available personnel into the area, including undercover officers in unmarked cars.

Calls to the sheriff’s office reporting suspicious persons and unfamiliar cars have also increased, Wagner said. Some of the suspicious people that callers complained about turned out to be undercover officers in the area, he said.

The increased number of homes in Pearland and population boost have likely drawn criminals’ attention, Wagner said.

Pearland is located 20 miles south of Houston.

[Based on reports by the Houston Chronicle and KHOU.com.]

Man’s body found two years after car accident

By Calvin Palmer

A New Jersey man who was last seen two years ago walking away from a car after it hit a utility pole has turned up – dead.

The skeletal remains of William Amendolia, Jr. were found last week by a hunter in woods less than a quarter of a mile from the scene of the accident.

Amendolia’s nephew, Christopher Kapral, who was driving the car on January 22, 2007, when it hit a utility pole on Williamstown Road, Monroe Township, never told police his uncle fled the scene, authorities said yesterday.

According to the missing person’s report, filed some two weeks after the crash, Amendolia’s estranged wife figured her 53-year-old husband thought he had a warrant out for his arrest. She indicated he had a drug addiction, but had been clean for a year.

It does not appear there was an active warrant against Amendolia.

Amendolia’s wife said he had a history of disappearing for periods of time. She told police he had been in the car and was worried he might have been injured in the accident.

Police checked local jails and hospitals, even searched the scene of the accident but found no trace of Amendolia.

No charges have been filed against Kapral, 21, of Franklin Township.

“He was interviewed after the remains were found,” Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Bernie Weisenfeld said. “We don’t have any indication there was a crime here.”

When Amendolia’s clothed remains were found on January 30, an autopsy was performed but it was unable to determine a cause of death.

Investigators with the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office determined the remains were Amendolia’s after matching records from medical treatment he received for a prior rib injury, according to Weisenfeld. Dental records were not available.

[Based on reports by the Gloucester County Times and newsday.com.]

Former high school teacher charged with sexual assault on female students

By Calvin Palmer

A former music and drama teacher at a Connecticut high school has been charged with having sexual relations with two female students.

Russell Andrews, 33, of Lebanon appeared in Superior Court in Norwich today and was charged with six counts of second-degree sexual assault.

He was being held on $100,000 bond.

Andrews was hired by Montville High School, in 2007, as a drama and music teacher.  He resigned in December after the superintendent and high school principal confronted him with information that he had inappropriate sexual contact with a 17-year-old student.

Andrews is married with three children.

[Based on reports by The Day and newsday.com.]

Medical board to investigate birth of octuplets

By Calvin Palmer

The Medical Board of California is to investigate whether a fertility doctor who helped a Whittier woman become pregnant with octuplets committed any violations of the standard of care.

Nadya Suleman gave birth to six boys and two girls on January 26 at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center. The 33-year-old single mother has six other children.

Board spokeswoman Candis Cohen says the board will determine whether there was a violation of medical standards. The board has not identified who is under investigation or where the fertility treatment was performed.

Cohen said: “We want to assure the public we’re responding, we’re doing our job.”

She refused to give more information.

“We don’t give details of how we’re going to investigate physicians,” Cohen said. “We’re not answering questions about the matter. We haven’t even called it an investigation.”

The Medical Board is responsible for licensing of doctors and has the power of discipline them, up to and including revocation of licenses.

Jim Anderson, spokesman for Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center, said the hospital hadn’t  received any questions from the Medical Board.

“We can only speculate if there is an investigation it would most likely be about the treatment received by Nadya Suleman prior to the time she came to Kaiser for her maternity care,” he said.

[Based on reports by the Whittier Daily News and Associated Press.]

Florida physician loses license over botched abortion

By Calvin Palmer

The Florida Board of Medicine, meeting in Tampa, today revoked the license of a doctor involved in a botched abortion.

Physician Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique worked at an abortion clinic outside Miami that was supposed to carry out an abortion on 18-year-old Sycloria Williams who was 23 weeks pregnant.

The doctor did not arrive on time and Williams went into labor and delivered a baby girl.

Officials say one of the clinic owners, who has no medical license, cut the umbilical cord.  Williams says the woman put the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.

Police discovered the decomposing remains a week later after receiving anonymous tips.

The state attorney’s homicide division is investigating, though no charges have been filed.

The Florida Department of Health believes Renelique committed malpractice by failing to ensure that licensed personnel would be present when Williams was at the clinic.

Renelique’s attorney, Joseph Harrison, said Renelique was on his way to the clinic when he was called on “an emergency bleeder… a woman who could have bled to death at another facility.”

Renelique faced “the choice many other physicians do,” said Harrison.

Tom Pennekamp, the attorney for Williams, said he was “pleased at the action the board took and I was saddened a man like this had a licnese in the first place.”

Pennekamp said he hopes the board next turns it sights on the clinic, which he said was still operating.

According to state records, Renelique received his medical training at the State University of Haiti. In 1991, he completed a four-year residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Interfaith Medical Center in New York.

New York records show Renelique has made at least five medical malpractice payments in the past decade, the circumstances of which were not detailed in the filings.

Williams struggled with the decision to have an abortion, Pennekamp said. She concluded she didn’t have the resources or maturity to raise a child, he said, and went to the Miramar Women’s Center on July 17, 2006. Sonograms indicated she was 23 weeks pregnant, according to the Department of Health.

She met Renelique at a second clinic two days later. Renelique gave Williams Laminaria, a drug that dilates the cervix, and prescribed three other medications, according to the administrative complaint filed by the Health Department.

She was told to go to yet another clinic, A Gyn Diagnostic Center in Hialeah, where the procedure would be performed the next day, July 20, 2006. Williams arrived in the morning and was given more medication.

Just before noon she began to feel ill. The clinic contacted Renelique. Two hours later, he still hadn’t shown up. Williams went into labor and delivered the baby.

The complaint says one of the clinic owners, Belkis Gonzalez, came in and cut the umbilical cord with scissors, then placed the baby in a plastic bag and the bag in a trash can.

Williams’ lawsuit offers a cruder account and states Gonzalez knocked the baby off the recliner chair where she had given birth, on to the floor. The baby’s umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.

At 23 weeks, an otherwise healthy fetus would have a slim but legitimate chance of survival. Quadruplets born at 23 weeks last year at the Nebraska Medical Center survived.

An autopsy determined Williams’ baby — she named her Shanice — had filled her lungs with air, meaning she had been born alive, according to the Department of Health. The cause of death was recorded as extreme prematurity.

If  prosecutors file murder charges, they’d have to prove the baby was born alive, said Robert Batey, a professor of criminal law at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport. The defense might contend that the child would have died anyway, but most courts would not allow that argument, he said.

[Based on reports by the Tampa Tribune and Associated Press.]

Setback for Knox as judge rules ‘confession’ admissable

By Calvin Palmer

Amanda Knox, the American accused of murdering British student Meredith Kercher, suffered a setback today when the judge in the case ruled that her confession to being at the scene of the crime could stand as evidence.

Lawyers for Knox had argued that the hand-written document should not be accepted as evidence because it was written after she had spent most of the previous night being interrogated by Italian police. But the judge, Giancarlo Massei, said that it had been made voluntarily and not under duress.

Knox, 21, and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 24, are charged with sexually assaulting and murdering Kercher on November 2, 2007, in the cottage the two women shared in Perugia.

Kercher, 21, a Leeds University exchange student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was found semi-naked in her bedroom with her throat slashed.

The statement Ms Knox was trying to keep from the court contains the same testimony as a controversial “confession” she made to police four days after the murder. In it she admitted to having been at the cottage the night Kercher was killed. She said that she had covered her ears so as not to hear her flat mate’s screams and accused Patrick Diya Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner in Perugia, of being the murderer.

That statement was made with no lawyer or interpreter present and has been ruled inadmissible by the Supreme Court.

Luciano Ghirga, Knox’s lawyer, told the court that although Knox had asked for a lawyer she had been questioned without one. She had been “alone and confused, with no knowledge of Italian police or legal procedure”. Her statement had been signed under duress at 5.45 a.m. after 14 hours without food. Knox also claimed that police officers struck her, though the police deny this.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the judge in today’s trial decided that a memorandum Knox had later written in English was admissible because it had been given voluntarily. It could be heard in the defamation case brought by Lumumba, who was later cleared of any involvement in the crime, against Knox and which is being heard at the same time as the criminal trial.

Prosecution lawyers claim that Knox, Sollecito and another man, Rudy Guede, 22, took part in a drugs-fuelled “sex game” and then killed Kercher. Guede, an Ivory Coast immigrant brought up in Perugia, was last year sentenced to 30 years for the murder.

At the start of today’s proceedings, Sollecito made a dramatic declaration of his innocence. His voice shaking, and pausing frequently to clear his throat, he told the court in Perugia that he “would not hurt a fly”.

The declaration was unexpected because the court had been scheduled to hear from the first witnesses in the case.

“As anyone who knows me will tell you, I would never hurt anyone, I would never hurt even a fly,” Sollecito told the court. “I can’t understand why I’m in this situation. I have been in jail for 15 months and I don’t have anything to do with this.”

He pointedly omitted any protestation of innocence of behalf of his former girlfriend Knox, who prosecutors say was responsible for stabbing Kercher in the neck and causing her to bleed to death on the night of November 1, 2007.

He said he had started a “romantic relationship” with the University of Washington student on October 25, 2007, just a week before Kercher’s semi-naked body was found in the hillside cottage she shared with the American. 

He stressed that he did not know Guede: “I never met him.”

“There has been a lot of confusion in this case and I just want it all to be cleared up,” he said. “I ask you to investigate everything properly and thoroughly and not to have any presumptions because I feel that I am here as a result of a miscarriage of justice.”

The trial continues.

[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph and The Times.]