A Light Sentence For A Child Molester

     In December 2018, an 18-year-old woman from the Western Pennsylvania town of New Castle went to the local police with a terrible complaint. When she was 9-years-old a 36-year-old man named William Quigley began sexually molesting her. He continued to have indecent sexual contact with her until she was 11 when the molestation escalated to sexual intercourse. The girl was raped by this man for another two years.

     When taken into custody, William Quigley confessed to the almost five-year sexual relationship with the minor. The Lawrence County District Attorney charged him with rape and several lesser sexual offenses.

     In September 2019, pursuant to a plea agreement, a Lawrence County judge sentenced the 45-year-old child rapist to 5 to 12 years in prison followed by three years of probation.

     A man who sexually molests a 9-year-old girl for two years and rapes her for almost another three should not be sentenced to less than 20 years in prison. William Quigley should not have been allowed to plead guilty in return for such a lenient sentence.

     What's also disturbing about this case is that no one in the New Castle community seemed upset by Quigley's light sentence.

Airline Mechanics Are Supposed To Keep Planes In The Air, Not On The Ground

     On July 17, 2019 American Airlines Flight 2834 with 150 passengers aboard was about to depart from Miami en route to Nassau, Bahamas when an error message appeared in the cockpit that caused the Boeing 737-800 to taxi back to the gate and be taken out of service. The passengers were taken off the plane and put on another flight.

     Maintenance inspectors found that someone had inserted a piece of foam into a tube that obstructed the aircraft's flight navigation system. Specifically, the foreign object affected the pilot's ability to monitor air speed, pitch and other flight data.

     Following an investigation into the matter, Miami FBI agents, on September 4, 2019, arrested 60-year-old Abdul-Majeed Marquf Ahmed Alani, an airline mechanic who had worked at American Airlines since 1988.  He was a U.S. citizen who was born in Baghdad, Iraq.

     A local Assistant United States Attorney charged Alani with sabotaging an aircraft.

     Alani told his federal interrogators that he had been upset about the stalled contract negotiations between the airline and the mechanics union. He said the labor dispute had hurt him financially and that he tampered with the plane's navigation system to cause a flight delay in anticipation of overtime work. Alani insisted that it had not been his intention to harm the aircraft or endanger its passengers.

     Mr. Alani had also worked as an aircraft mechanic for Alaska Airlines. But in 2008, after working there twenty years during which time he was also employed at American Airlines, he was fired. Alaska Airlines let him go because he had made several maintenance mistakes. In 2010 Alani sued Alaska Airlines for wrongful termination due to discrimination based on his national origin. He lost his case. The FAA briefly suspended his airlines mechanic license.

     On September 6, 2019 American Airlines fired the suspected aircraft saboteur and in March 2020 he was convicted of sabotaging an aircraft. The federal judge sentenced Mr. Alani to 37 months in prison. 

In England the Criminalizing Insult

     Forty-six-year-old Peter Nelson, an IT consultant with GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company in the United Kingdom, lived with his wife and three children in a $1.8 million five-bedroom home in Ascot, Berkshire. On June 2, 2018, the 20-year employee of the drug company was traveling from London to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil aboard an 11-hour British Airways flight. Having had more than a few drinks, Mr. Nelson was asleep when awoken by flight attendant Sima Patel-Pryke who asked him for his food order.

     Enraged over being so disturbed, Nelson lashed out at the attendant. "You Asians," he yelled, "think you are better than us. I don't want to be served by your lot. I've paid your wages for the last 20 years." The out-of-control passenger demanded to be served by a "white girl."

     Peter Nelson's verbal outburst reduced the flight attendant to tears and caused the pilot to authorize the cabin crew to break out a "restraining kit" and inform the unruly passenger that if he continued disrupting the flight he would be "arrested."

     Upon his return to England, Peter Nelson was charged with one count of racially aggravated abuse. The criminal charge and the publicity that followed resulted in Nelson's discharge from the pharmaceutical company.

     The Peter Nelson racially aggravated abuse trial got underway in August 2019 before a jury sitting in Iselworth Crown Court. In his opening remarks to the jury, Crown Prosecutor Michael Tanney said, "It's no mere mischief to say he bullied and ranted and shouted. At one point, after a sustained targeting of Ms. Pryke, she began to back away in fright and became tearful."

     Representing the defendant, Lauren Sales informed the jurors that Mr. Nelson's wife, as a result of the publicity regarding her husband, had broken down under stress and had to be hospitalized. "He has lost his job. He was the breadwinner of the family. It is life changing for Mr. Nelson. He and his wife have taken their children out of school because it's an international school. The children feel they cannot go to the gates of the school and stand in the playground." According the Barrister Sales, the family might be forced to return to New Zealand.

     The Crown Court jury found Mr. Nelson guilty as charged. Before sentencing the defendant, Judge Edward Connell said, "You plainly displayed a contemptuous attitude towards the staff from the onset. When Ms. Pryke, simply doing her job, came to wake you up to take your food order you took immediate offense at her having the audacity to wake you up. It seems that was the beginnings of what turned out to be an opportunity for you to get upset without any justification at all. That manifested itself in the most unpleasant of ways. It was thoroughly unpleasant conduct by you."

     A bit longwinded, the judge continued his pre-sentence lecture: "It's quite plain, albeit this wasn't the most serious case the court hears, that it had an impact on Ms. Pryke who we heard in evidence was upset and ended up in tears because of your behavior. It was clearly unacceptable and I'm entirely satisfied it was contributed by the fact you drank a significant amount of alcohol during the course of the flight. I accept that this conviction will have profound ramifications for you and your employability so I'm persuaded that this can be dealt with as a financial penalty.

     Judge Connell fined Peter Nelson $2,450. He also had to pay $615 in compensation to the victim and $4,300 in prosecution costs.

The David Pichosky/Rochelle Wise Murder Case

     In 2008, a year after his wife died of breast cancer, David "Donny" Pichosky, on a blind date arranged by his children, met Rochelle Wise. Donny, an active member of Toronto, Canada's Shaarei Shomayin Synagogue, a modern Jewish Orthodox congregation, retired after selling his office-carpet business in the North York section of the city. Rochelle, a divorcee, had retired in 2005 as a teacher and vice principal of the Bialik Hebrew Day School just outside of Toronto. She was also the founding director of the Crestwood Valley Day Camp. Shortly after their blind date the couple were married.

     In 2013, the 71-year-old Pichosky and his 66-year-old wife were wintering in Venetian Park, an affluent island neighborhood in Hallandale Beach, Florida, a town of 38,000 located between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Surrounded by canals and waterways, the snowbirds resided in a stucco townhouse amid palm trees and the other pastel-colored dwellings. Donny and Rochelle must have felt safe living in this gated, security guard patrolled retirement enclave. (In 2012 there had been four criminal homicides in Hallandale Beach.)

     On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 Danny and Rochelle failed to show-up for a lunch date with a neighbor. The friend made several calls to the couple that were not returned. The next day, at six-thirty in the evening, a friend with a spare key entered the townhouse to check on the couple. The neighbor found Donny and Rochelle dead. Shortly after the discovery, a spokesperson with the Hallandale Beach Police Department announced that the Canadian retirees had been murdered.

     According to the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office the Canadian Couple had been murdered in their home. The cause of their deaths: asphyxiation either by hand or by ligature.

     In April 2013 Hallandale Chief of Police Dwayne Flourney told a reporter with the Miami Herald that detectives were looking for an intruder or intruders who had been motivated by robbery. Rochelle Wise's wedding band--valued at $16,000--was missing from the dwelling. Investigators asked local pawn shop operators to report anyone coming to their places of business with the platinum, five half-carat white diamond ring. 

     A month before publicizing the missing ring the police released a video taken from a neighbor's surveillance camera that showed a woman walking toward the rear of the murdered couple's home. That person remained unidentified. Detectives believed the murders were committed by two people.

     The home invasion criminal homicide in a place once considered relatively safe from crime made residents of that community fearful. The double-murder in Venetian Park put a lot of pressure on the local police to identify and catch the perpetrators.

     On January 8, 2014 a spokesperson for the Hallandale Beach Department held a press conference on the Pichosky murder case. It had been almost a year since the double murder. According to the spokesperson, crime scene investigators recovered DNA profiles of two women from the murder site. This DNA evidence did not match anyone who had access to the Pichosky home.

     In addition to the DNA, a partial shoe print left at the murder scene was identified as an Adidas model shoe that had been out of production since 2000. Over the past year detectives had questioned more than fifty people in the investigation of the case. A $57,000 reward had been posted for information leading to the identify of the killer or killers.

     This was one of those frustrating cases where the police had physical evidence but no suspects to match it to. 

     In January 2015, Jamie Wise, Rochell's son, wrote a letter to Florida Governor Rick Scott requesting the appointment of another law enforcement agency to take over the unsolved murder case. "What is desperately needed," he wrote, "is a fresh set of eyes, an independent investigation by an experienced entity capable of cultivating new leads through diligence, openness and the willingness to collaborate more purposely with agencies throughout the state."

     The Hallandale Beach Police Department remained in charge of the still unsolved double-murder.

     In April 2016, Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy told reporters that the best lead in the case involved crime scene DNA phenotyping that pointed to a pair of unidentified females. Flourney said that the constant running the DNA profile through CODUS, the U.S. DNA database, had to date failed to identify the killers. 

     As of June 2022 the Wise/Pichosky murder case remained unsolved.

Crematorium Fires

     Crematoriums are all about fire, that's where they incinerate bodies. So, a fire at a crematorium is nothing unusual. However, if an overweight corpse burns too hot the excessive lava-like body fat can leak out of the incinerator and take the fire to places it doesn't belong. That's when the fire department, as strange as it sounds, is called out to extinguish a crematorium fire.

Henrico County, Virginia

     In October 2014 a 500-pound corpse was being burned at Southside Cremation Services not far from Richmond. The body was not burned slow enough (it should take five hours to incinerate a 300-pound corpse) and the body fat melted too quickly and leaked out of the fire chamber. By the time firefighters arrived the building's roof was engulfed in flames.

Cincinnati, Ohio

     In April 2017 a fire broke out at the Hillside Chapel Crematory when an obese corpse's body fat leaked out of the chamber onto the floor. The body fat, acting like a combustion accelerant, seeped into the flooring and started a hot-burning fire that had to be put out by the fire department.

Nitro, West Virginia

     On October 25, 2019, at ten-forty-five in the morning, a fire broke out at the Cooke Funeral Home just outside of Charleston. The cause: the super-heated body fat from an overweight corpse. Employees called 911 and kept the fire from spreading to the rest of the building by using a pair of  fire extinguishers.

Extreme Cruelty: The Samilya Brown Murder Case

     On October 30, 2019, police officers and medics responded to a 911 call from a house on the 1700 block of Folsom Street on the north side of Philadelphia Pennsylvania. A 4-year-old girl had fallen from a second-story window of the house and landed on some chairs, seriously injuring her face. The child was rushed by ambulance to Jefferson University Hospital then transferred to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where she was listed in critical condition.

     The injured girl was being cared for by 38-year-old Samilya Brown who had gained custody of her from Zya Singleton, the girl's mother. Singleton gave up custody of her daughter two years earlier because she didn't have the means to support her. She granted custody to Brown, who was married to her stepbrother, because she didn't want the child placed into foster care.

     When questioned by police officers at the scene regarding how the child had gone out the window Samilya Brown said the girl fell while playing with a cat.

     On November 3, 2019 Zya Singleton's daughter died from her injuries and a serious blood infection. Because she had not died from natural causes the city medical examiner performed an autopsy. What the forensic pathologist discovered was shocking.

     The medical examiner discovered evidence that the girl had been the victim of years of physical abuse. Her body was covered with burns from some kind of acid, human bite marks and healed-over puncture wounds. The tiny victim had an incised wound that had been stitched up by an amateur, a cut that had become seriously infected. The child was also malnourished. The medical examiner also concluded that the girl's recent head trauma was not consistent with a fall.

     The forensic pathologist, presented with evidence pointing to a history of abuse at the hands of an extremely cruel adult, ruled the child's death a criminal homicide.

     When interrogated by homicide detectives, Samilya Brown admitted that she had been the one who had stitched up the girl's cut. She denied, however, causing any of the other signs of physical trauma found on the victim's body.

     On November 12, 2019, Philadelphia County District Attorney Larry Krasner charged Samilya Brown with murder and several lesser offenses. Child protection agents removed Brown's four biological children from her house. According to reports these children showed no signs of physical abuse.

     In May 2022, after confessing to the prolonged torture of the 4-year-old girl in her custody, Samilya Brown was allowed to plead guilty to third-degree murder, a crime that in Pennsylvania carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years. She is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, 2022. Brown should have been charged with second-degree murder, an offense punishable by life in prison.

"Breaking Bad" at Henderson State University

     Henderson State University is a public liberal arts school with 3,500 students in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, a town located 70 miles southwest of Little Rock. On October 8, 2019 a powerful odor that came from the university's Reynolds Science Center forced the closing of the chemistry laboratory. The inquiry that followed revealed the elevated presence of benzyl chloride, a chemical commonly used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. The identity of this chemical prompted an investigation by the university police department.

     Two days after the closure of the university chem lab the president of the school placed 45-year-old Terry David Bateman, an associate professor and director of the undergraduate research department, on administrative leave. Bateman had been with Henderson State University since 2009.

  The university president also placed 40-year-old Bradley Allen Rowland on administrative leave. Rowland was an associate professor in the chemistry department.

     On October 29, 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency okayed the re-opening of the chemistry lab. The investigation into the potentially criminal activities of the two professors by the campus police department produced enough evidence to bring in narcotics specialists with the Clark County Sheriff's Office.

     On November 15, 2019 a Clark County prosecutor charged professors Terry Bateman and Bradley Rowland with the manufacture of methamphetamine. The suspects were booked into the Clark County Jail.

     In October 2021, a Clark County jury found Terry Bateman not guilty. A month later Bradley Rowland pleaded guilty to manufacturing methamphetamine and was sentenced to 120 days in the county jail and six years probation. The former professor was also ordered to pay a $150,000 fine to cover the cost of the methamphetamine lab clean up. 

     For many, the arrests of the college professors suspected of cooking meth brought to mind the popular television series "Breaking Bad" that was broadcast on the AMC channel from 2008 to 2015. The drama followed the life of Walter White, a high school chemistry professor from Albuquerque, New Mexico who became a major underworld figure as a world-class meth cook. 

The Trigger-Happy Constable

     On November 2, 2011 at 3:30 in the afternoon Jefferson County Constable David Whitlock, while shopping in a Louisville, Kentucky Walmart where he worked off-duty as a retail security officer, received a call on his cellphone regarding a possible shoplifter. Constable Whitlock approached the suspect, Tammy Lee Jamian, aka Tammy Ortiz as she sat in her car in the parking lot. When Whitlock reached the vehicle the suspect started to drive away. Her car ran over Whitlock's foot so he shot her in the arm and hand.

     In Kentucky constables were elected under the state constitution that gave them powers of arrest in the enforcement of traffic laws. They also served certain types of warrants. Whitlock, in 2000 and 2002, had been charged in a couple of theft cases. Other law enforcement officers had criticized him for carrying a gun without the proper firearms training. While in Kentucky constables were not required to undergo special law enforcement instruction, Whitlock claimed to have taken 122 hours of deadly force classes. According to a Jefferson County Sheriff's Deputy Whitlock failed the shooting portion of the course and was sent home.

     In a newspaper interview following the Walmart shooting Whitlock told the reporter he spent 20 to 25 hours a week writing citations for illegal parking in fire lanes and handicapped spots. He also patrolled Louisville making sure addresses were visible on buildings as required by law.

     Tammy Lee Jamian, with an arrest record for burglary, theft and prostitution, claimed she was not shoplifting in the store and that Constable Whitlock, when he confronted her in the parking lot, did not identify himself as a police officer. She drove off because she thought she was being mugged. Referring to Whitlock, Jamian's attorney told a reporter "This cowboy shot an unarmed woman for shoplifting. He didn't know if she was Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde or Sister Teresa. He just shot her."

     On November 11, 2011 Louisville Councilman Rick Blackwell called for the state legislature to remove Whitlock as a Jefferson County Constable. According to the councilman Whitlock violated three state laws: deputizing staff members, failing to file monthly reports to the county clerk and using oscillating blue lights on his car.

     In October 2012, pursuant to his guilty plea to charges of wanton endangerment and second-degree assault, Whitlock agreed never to work in law enforcement again. After he completed a diversion program, the prosecutor dropped the charges against the former constable.

     In Louisville, on January 27, 2014, David Whitlock announced his plan to run for a seat on the Metro Council. He lost.

The Patrick Wetter Police-Involved Shooting Case

     At three-thirty in the afternoon of Tuesday January 6, 2015 a drunk or drugged-up 25-year-old gang member named Patrick Wetter kicked in the front door of a young adult group home in Stockton, California. Residents of the home barricaded themselves into a bedroom and called the police.

     Three police officers accompanied by Rocky, a Dutch Shepherd who had been on the force five years, arrived at the scene to find Wetter armed with a knife and trying to break into one of the group home's bedrooms. The officers ordered the crazed man to surrender. When Wetter ignored the command the K-9 handler deployed Rocky to subdue him. The intruder responded by stabbing Rocky in the shoulder.

     When the K-9 officer tried to retrieve his wounded dog Wetter threatened  him with the knife. That's when the other two officers opened fire, hitting Wetter several times. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene.

      Six months earlier Stockton police officers had arrested Wetter for carrying a concealed knife and resisting arrest. The gang member posted his bond and walked out of the county jail.

     Officers rushed Rocky to an emergency veterinary hospital in Stockton. A veterinarian at that facility concluded that Rocky required surgery. After spending the night in Stockton, Rocky was transferred to a veterinary hospital in Sacramento where he had the operation. The surgery was successful and Rocky recovered from his wounds.

     The two officers who shot Patrick Wetter to death were placed on three-day administrative leave. The officers were returned to duty after the shooting was ruled justifiable. 

The White Van Scare

     Before the Internet we had the urban legend, scary myths spread by word of mouth. One such legend was called "The Hookman." This myth featured a young couple parked in a lover's lane. Over the car radio they hear that a homicidal lunatic with a hook for a hand had escaped from a local mental institution and was roaming the area's back roads. When the couple arrived home that night they discovered, dangling from one of the car door handles, a hook.

     In the Internet era the urban legend has been replaced by scarelore, a term that refers to vague terrifying news items published on social media, scary tales that have no basis in fact. Quite often scarelore stories involve shadowy men committing terrible crimes against helpless women and children.

     The scarelore that  made the rounds in 2019, mainly through Facebook, featured men in white commercial vans who patrol shopping center parking lots looking for young women to abduct. When the kidnappers saw a vulnerable young woman pull into the lot, they'd wait until she walked away from her car then park next to it. When she returned, these men would throw her into their van and drive off. The abducted women became sex slaves and were ultimately killed for their body parts.

     The spread of the white van myth was not good for drivers of white commercial vans of which there are a couple hundred thousand in circulation at any given time. At the height of the abduction scare many white van drivers were harassed by citizens or reported to the police. In November 2019 an innocent driver of a white van in a Memphis, Tennessee parking lot was shot to death by the police.

     Jack Young, the mayor of Baltimore, in a December 2019 television interview added credibility to the white van abduction hoax when he said this: "We're getting reports of some people in white vans trying to snatch up young girls for human sex trafficking and selling body parts. So, we have to be careful because there is so much evil going on, not just in the city of Baltimore, but around the country. Don't park near a white van and make sure you keep your cellphone in case somebody tries to attack you."

    Even for a politician this was a stupid thing to say. Shortly after Mayor Young raised the abduction alarm the chief of police of Baltimore came forward and told reporters that his department had received no reports of white van abductions. Moreover, a spokesperson for the FBI announced that there had been no reports of white van kidnappings nationwide.

     After the mayor helped spread the white van scarelore Facebook issued the following statement: "Posts with this [white van] claim have been rated as false by third party fact checkers and we are dramatically reducing their distribution. People who see these false posts on Facebook and share them, or have already shared them, will see a warning they're false."

Charity Johnson: The 34-Year-Old Tenth Grader

     In March 2013, 30-year-old Tamica Lincoln, the shift manager at a McDonalds in the east Texas town of Longview, took pity on a fellow-employee who identified herself as 15-year-old Charity Stevens. Stevens said she was an orphan who had been abused by her now dead parents. The five-foot, three-hundred pound girl said she needed a place to live.

     Feeling sorry for this child, Tamica Lincoln took her in and became Charity's unofficial guardian. Lincoln fed the girl and bought her clothing. In the fall of 2014 Lincoln enrolled Charity as a tenth grade student at the New Life Christian School in Longview. To explain why there were no academic transcripts from previous schools, Charity said she had been home schooled. At the New Life Christian School Charity made friends and earned good grades.

     Charity's life as a teenager came to an abrupt end on May 13, 2014 when Tamica Lincoln learned that the girl she had been taking care of, at age 34, was four years older than her. Charity Stevens in reality was Charity Anne Johnson. Instead of being born in November 1997 she had entered the world in 1980.

     Upon the shocking discovery, Lincoln called the school then notified the police. She wanted Charity Johnson out of her house.

     Following a brief police investigation a Gregg County prosecutor charged Johnson with the misdemeanor offense of providing false information to the police. Officers booked the impostor into the county jail in lieu of $500 bond. (Johnson could have been charged with the more serious offense of theft by deception.) According to the police Johnson did not have a criminal record.

     Tamica Lincoln, in speaking to a local television reporter, said, "I sympathized with her and invited her into my home. I took her in as a child, did her hair, got her clothes and shoes."

     All along this good samaritan had been caring for an impostor. This case fell squarely into the "no good deed goes unpunished" category.

     Three months following her arrest Charity Johnson pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of 84 days in the local jail.