skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Meredith Emerson used her wits and martial arts training when she was attacked in the north Georgia mountains by a drifter who eventually killed and decapitated her, the convicted killer told investigators.
Gary Michael Hilton described his four days with Emerson, and how she fought him from the moment he tried to overpower her as she hiked with her dog, Ella, according to the interviews that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"She was doing everything she could to stay alive," GBI Director Vernon Keenan told the newspaper. "It's not something you can train for. Instinct kicks in ... She nearly got the best of him. She's very much a hero."
BRIAN SKOLOFF writes:
[In December, 2007,] The 911 call lasted a split second. Not even a breath was heard.
It was Nancy Bochicchio's last desperate plea for help.
The single mom and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, would soon be dead, each bound and shot in the head in the back seat of their black Chrysler Aspen.
March 23, 2007
Randi Gorenberg, 52, heads to the mall to do some shopping. It's a typical day for the bubbly, outgoing doctor's wife and mother of two.
Surveillance video shows her leaving the mall at about 1:16 p.m. She walks into the parking lot to her black Mercedes SUV.
Just over a half-hour later, at 1:54 p.m., witnesses spot her car driving through a park in nearby Delray Beach.
Then a gunshot.
Gorenberg's body falls limply from the passenger door, shot in the head.
Her Mercedes is found a few minutes later abandoned behind a Home Depot. Her purse and cell phone are missing. So are her black and white Puma shoes.
No one sees the killer. To this day, he's a ghost.
"It's been a very hard and sad year for me," said Gorenberg's mother, Idey Elias. "And whoever he is, he's still out there doing these evil things."
___
August 7, 2007
A 30-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son leave the Town Center mall on a balmy afternoon and head for their black Lincoln Navigator in Nordstrom's parking garage.
The woman puts her son in his car seat and loads her purchases in the back.
She gets behind the wheel and is startled to see a man sitting beside her child with a gun to his head. The gunman is dark-skinned, about 5'11", 180 pounds, wearing sunglasses and a full-brimmed floppy hat, possibly with a ponytail.
"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she tells him.
The man orders the woman to drive to an ATM where she withdraws $600.
He then orders her into the back seat, where he binds her feet with plastic ties, secures her hands with cheap novelty handcuffs and fixes her neck to the headrest with another tie.
He's calm but threatens to kill her. She doesn't resist. They drive back to the mall where he puts a pair of blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes.
He asks if she's OK, even gets her a drink of water and her inhaler for asthma. Then he disappears.
The woman eventually frees herself.
"He took my license and told me if his picture was on the news that he would come after me ... and my son," she would later say. "I'm terrified."
She has concealed her identity from the public out of fear for her own and child's safety, appearing before reporters on the condition that her name and face not be shown.
Three days after she was attacked, the same man is believed to have robbed a woman at gunpoint in a parking garage at another nearby shopping area.
___
Dec. 13, 2007
It's just after midnight at the mall. A security guard making his rounds notices a black SUV idling in the parking lot and calls police.
The Bochicchios are dead inside.
Just 10 hours earlier, Nancy Bochicchio picked up Joey from her second grade class for a doctor's appointment. The inseparable pair then hit the mall.
They enter between Neiman Marcus and Sears and come out the same way less than an hour later, spotted on surveillance video, their long shadows trailing them in the afternoon light.
Video from a nearby bank then shows their car at a drive-through ATM.
Bochicchio withdraws $500. No one knows what happens next but the killer.
Both are bound in the exact manner as the August victim. Their eyes, too, are covered with blacked-out goggles.
Witnesses said the gunman went into a crowded hall during dinner at the Mercaz Harav seminary in the city's Kiryat Moshe quarter and opened fire.
The assailant, who Israeli police said was a resident of East Jerusalem, was shot dead by an Israeli army officer.
The attack is the worst of its kind in Israel for a number of years.
The White House has led international condemnation but the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas called the attack "heroic" while not claiming responsibility.
When we got in... we saw young, 15-, 16-year-old guys lying on the floor with their Bibles in their hands - all dead on the floor
A previously unknown group called the "Jalil Freedom Battalions - the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh and Gaza" claims to have carried it out, according to Lebanese Hezbollah media.
A gunman entered a prominent Jewish seminary in the heart of Jerusalem Thursday night, killing at least eight students and wounding at least nine others, three of them seriously, the Israeli police said.
In a scene of havoc and confusion while the students prayed, the gunman killed two people at the entrance to the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and then entered the first-floor library, spraying the religious students with gunfire from a Kalashnikov rifle, according to the Israeli police.
The gunman, who has not yet been identified, was thought to be either a Palestinian or an Israeli Arab living inside Jerusalem. The dead were thought to be mostly between 20 and 30 years of age.
Five people were found dead, three of them children, in what appeared to be a murder-suicide in a home across the street from the Richard Nixon Library, police said Sunday.
A 14-year-old boy called 911 about 11 p.m. Saturday to report that his father had shot him and his brother at their condominium, said Sgt. Peter Rodriguez of the police department in Brea, which was investigating the shooting in neighboring Yorba Linda.
Police found the body of a woman on the doorstep. Inside, they found the bodies of a 5-year-old boy and two girls, ages 8 and 9. Officers also found the body of a man with a shotgun beneath him.
Police did not immediately know the motive for the shootings or the relationship of the victims.
In her [Jessica Baty] second conversation with CNN, on Tuesday, Baty said [Steven] Kazmierczak began seeing the psychiatrist shortly after they transferred from NIU to the University of Illinois in Champaign in June 2007.
A psychiatrist not familiar with the details of the case said the three-drug combination was not necessarily either unusual or dangerous.
"It's not terribly unusual to prescribe all three," said Dr. Nada Stotland, professor of psychiatry at Rush Medical College in Chicago and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.
Xanax typically has a sedating, calming effect on users, she said.
"If you take a lot of that class of medication, you can be sort of like somebody who is drunk, out of it, but not violent," she said.
A person who had stopped taking it might feel anxious and edgy, she said.
And Ambien is commonly prescribed to overcome sleeping difficulties sometimes attributed to Prozac, she said.
Baty also said that Kazmierczak had been on the computer recently, but she did not know what he was doing and did not ask.
"He was being secretive with his computer," Baty said. "When he would sit on the couch with his laptop he would turn it away from me so I couldn't see what he was looking at."
"The person I knew was not the one who went into Cole Hall and did that," Baty told CNN. "He was anything but a monster. He was probably the ... nicest, (most) caring person ever."
The day of the shooting or the day after, Baty received a package from Kazmierczak containing two textbooks, a cell phone and what she characterized as a "goodbye note."
"You've done so much for me," the note said, according to Baty. "You will make an excellent psychologist and social worker someday."
Another package contained a gun holster and ammunition. She confirmed that he had stopped taking an antidepressant about three weeks ago because "it made him feel like a zombie," but she denied that his recent behavior was unusual.
NY TIMES reports:
Confronted with the scene of horror, people who knew him at the campus he attacked and the one he was currently enrolled in, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, struggled with shock.
His adviser in Champaign, who saw him earlier this year, used words like “nice,” “engaging,” “motivated” and “responsible” to describe him. "I saw nothing that would suggest that there was anything troubling about his behavior or him,” Professor Jan Carter-Black told reporters today, according to USA Today. “I enjoyed having him as a student.”
When Mr. Kazmierczak was a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois University, he appeared to be a model student, earning a dean’s award in 2006.
He also served as vice president of the Academic Criminal Justice Association, a student group focused on educating the community. In a biography posted to the college’s Web site, he vowed to serve as treasurer “best of my ability.”
“I’ve worked very hard as a student,” Mr. Kazmierczak wrote. “I feel that I’m committed to social justice.”
He wrote a paper on prison issues, “Self Injury in Correctional Settings,” with several co-authors, including the group’s president.
A 23-year-old woman killed two fellow students in a classroom at a vocational college Friday, then killed herself, police said.
The women apparently were shot in their seats in the second-floor classroom at Louisiana Technical College, Baton Rouge Sgt. Don Kelly said. About 20 people were in the room at the time, he said.
Officers ran into the building within four minutes of the first 911 call, which came at 8:36 a.m., Kelly said.
Earlier Friday, Mos' office announced prosecutors were reopening their probe into Holloway's vanishing after seeing tapes recorded by Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries, The Associated Press reported.
Mos' office said Thursday it had "intensified" its investigation of the Holloway case because of the information from de Vries.
For his part, de Vries was promoting what he called "the most revealing report I've ever made," according to a translation of the video, posted on the Web site YouTube.
De Vries said that in an undercover camera operation, "we've found what became of Natalee and who's responsible." The report is scheduled to be broadcast Sunday on Dutch television.
But van der Sloot -- in a telephone interview from Holland -- told the Dutch television show "Pauw and Witteman" on Friday that he lied when he said he was involved in Holloway's disappearance, said one of his attorneys, Joe Tacopina.
"Joran maintains his innocence," Tacopina told CNN.
By RYAN NAKASHIMA and KATHLEEN HENNESSEY
LAS VEGAS - Assailants shot six young people Tuesday at a school bus stop, wounding two critically, in a midday attack that followed a fight over a girl, authorities said.
School police arrested three teenagers in the fight that happened hours before the shooting, Sheriff Doug Gillespie said. Investigators were still seeking two gunmen, who were believed to have fled on foot from the scene of the shooting, a working class neighborhood of northeast Las Vegas.
An 18-year-old man was in critical condition and a 17-year-old boy was upgraded to serious condition, both with gunshots to the torso, said Cheryl Persinger, a University Medical Center spokeswoman.
Four people, including at least two boys and a girl who are under 18, were treated for gunshot injuries to their arms and legs and released, she said. All four are students at Mojave High School who had just stepped off the bus, which was coming from the school, police said.
COLORADO SPRINGS, CO -- A family is grieving Monday after their two teenage girls were killed in Sunday's shooting spree at the New Life Church.
"I'm asking Colorado Springs and the country to please pray for that family this morning because they're going through a very difficult time," said Reverend Brady Boyd, the senior pastor at New Life Church.
Authorities say 18-year-old Stephanie Works and 16-year-old Rachael Works died from their injuries after a gunman opened fire outside New Life Church on Sunday.
My StumbleUpon Page
