SANTA ANA, Calif. — An 81-year-old man has been charged with the murder of his 94-year-old roommate at a Southern California rehabilitation center where the two were recovering from hip surgeries, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Monday that William McDougall became angry with 94-year-old Manh Van Nguyen, who was singing in their room in Vietnamese at the Palm Terrace Health Care Center in Laguna Woods.

A nurse saw the attack and employees of the rehabilitation center restrained McDougall, prosecutors said according to the Orange County Register.

McDougall is accused of taking a metal rod from the closet and hitting Nguyen multiple times on the head. Nguyen died at a hospital of blunt-force trauma to the head, the Register said.

The Register also reported that workers at Palm Terrace Health Care Center said the two men had not had any trouble previously.

McDougall faces 25 years to life in state prison if convicted of the Oct. 1 attack. He is being held at Orange County Jail on a $1 million bail, the Register said.

He is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Santa Ana.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): BLOG.CAMERA.ORG

Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, long the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of a U.S. teen in Aruba, has confessed to killing a young Peruvian woman in his Lima hotel room, a police spokesman said.

Peru’s chief police spokesman, Col. Abel Gamarra, told The Associated Press that Van der Sloot admitted under police questioning Monday that he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores on May 30.

The broadcaster America Television reported that Van der Sloot killed Flores in a rage after learning she had looked up information about his past on his laptop. It said it had access to details of the confession but did not cite its source.

Gamarra would not provide details of the confession. Nor would the chief of Peru’s criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, when the AP reached him by telephone. Guardia said only police director Gen. Miguel Hidalgo could authorize the information to be divulged. Hidalgo’s cell phone rang unanswered.

Asked about the Van der Sloot confession, a brother of the victim, Enrique Flores, told the AP “we are not going to make any comment. This is in the hands of the police, of the justice system.”

Van der Sloot’s confession came on his third full day in Peruvian police custody, on the eve of a planned trip to the hotel in which he was to participate in a reconstruction of the events leading to Flores’ slaying, Gamarra said.

Flores, a business student, was found beaten to death, her neck broken, in the 22-year-old Dutchman’s hotel room. Police said the two met playing poker at a casino.

Video from hotel security cameras shows the two entering Van der Sloot’s hotel room together at 5 a.m. Saturday and Van der Sloot leaving alone four hours later with his bags. Police say Van der Sloot also left the hotel briefly at 8:10 a.m. and returned with two cups of coffee and bread purchased across the street at a supermarket.

Gamarra said the case would now be turned over to prosecutors to present formal charges and Van der Sloot will be assigned to a prison while he awaits trial. Murder convictions carry a maximum of 35 years in prison in Peru and it was not immediately clear if a confession could lead to a reduced sentence.

Van der Sloot remains the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway, then 18, on the Caribbean resort island of Aruba while she was celebrating her high school graduation.

He was arrested twice in the case — and gave a number of conflicting confessions, some in TV interviews — but was freed for lack of evidence.

Holloway’s father told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that Van der Sloot should tell all he knows about the disappearance of his daughter.

“He confessed to this one … I would like for him to tell everyone what happened” in the earlier case, Dave Holloway said. “Hopefully this is his last victim.”

A fixture on true crime shows and in tabloids after Holloway’s disappearance, he gained a reputation for lying — even admitting a penchant for it — and also exhibited a volatile temper. In one Dutch television interview he threw a glass of wine in a reporter’s eyes. In another, he smashed a glass of water against a wall in a fury.

The 6-foot-3 (191-centimeter) -tall Van der Sloot had been held at Peruvian criminal police headquarters since arriving Saturday in a police convoy from Chile, where he was captured on Thursday.

He had crossed into Chile on Monday, nearly a day after leaving the Lima hotel — five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance.

Lima’s deputy medical investigator, Victor Tejada, told the AP that Flores was killed by blows with a blunt object, probably the tennis racket found in the hotel room.

Guardia told the AP her body was found face down and clothed with no indication of sexual assault.

In video taken of the Dutchman that was broadcast by a TV channel, Peruvian police were seen searching Van der Sloot’s belongings in his presence, pulling a laptop, a business-card holder and 15 bills in foreign currency from his backpack.

Chilean police who questioned Van der Sloot earlier said he declared himself innocent of the Lima slaying but acknowledged knowing Flores.

Van der Sloot was represented by a state-appointed lawyer during Saturday’s questioning and both a Dutch Embassy official and his U.S.-based attorney told the AP on Sunday that he was seeking to hire his own counsel.

The suspect’s father, a former judge and attorney on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, died in February. Van der Sloot has two brothers.

There were indications Van der Sloot may have been traveling on money gained through extortion.

The day of his arrest in Chile, Van der Sloot was charged in the United States with trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway’s family in exchange for disclosing the location of her body and describing how she died.

U.S. prosecutors say $15,000 was transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name on May 10. He arrived in Peru four days later, his visit coinciding with the runup to a June 2-5 Latin America Poker Tour tournament with a $930,000 prize pool.

Tournament organizers said Van der Sloot did not sign up to participate in the event.

Van der Sloot is an avid gambler and was known to frequent Aruba’s casino hotels, one of which was lodging Natalee Holloway.

In a lengthy 2006 interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News, Van der Sloot described drinking shots of rum with Holloway, whom he said he met while playing poker at an Aruba casino, then taking her to a beach and leaving her there around 3:30 a.m.

Two years later, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of Van der Sloot saying that after Holloway, drunk, collapsed on the beach while the two were kissing he asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.

“I would never murder a girl,” he said.

That interview prompted authorities in Aruba to reopen the case, but Van der Sloot later said he made up the whole story and he was not charged.

The crime reporter, Peter de Vries — the victim of the wine-throwing incident — reported later in 2008 that Van der Sloot was recruiting Thai women in Bangkok for sex work in the Netherlands.

——
Associated Press Writers Carla Salazar in Lima, Frank Bajak in Bogota, Colombia, and Arthur Max in Amsterdam contributed to this report.

Source(article): MSNBC

Source(pictures): NYDAILYNEWS, EXAMINER, OPTIMUSNEWS

BEIJING - An attacker with a cleaver hacked to death seven children and two adults at a kindergarten in northwest China on Wednesday, the latest in a string of savage assaults on the country’s schools. Eleven other children were wounded.

The killer, 48-year-old Wu Huanming, returned home after the attack on the outskirts of the city of Hanzhong and committed suicide, the local government reported.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Wu owned the property used by the school and had argued with the school’s manager, who was among the victims.

It was the fifth major assault on young students in China since late March and occurred despite increased security at schools countrywide, with gates and security cameras installed at some schools and additional police and guards posted at entrances. It was not clear if security had been beefed up at the school attacked Wednesday.

The latest deaths were sure to fuel speculation about why assailants — usually lone males — are targeting schools.

Sociologists say the recent attacks that have killed 17 and wounded more than five dozen reflect the tragic consequences of ignoring mental illness and rising stress resulting from huge social inequalities in China’s fast-changing society.

“The perpetrators have contracted a ’social psychological infectious disease’ that shows itself in a desire to take revenge on society,” said Zhou Xiaozheng of Beijing’s Renmin University.

“They pick children as targets because they are the weakest and most vulnerable,” Zhou said.

The recent attacks are classic “copycat crimes,” the effects of which may be amplified by media coverage, Zhou said.

Limited media coverage
After past attacks, authorities have banned or limited media coverage, and early reports on Wednesday’s attack were removed from Chinese websites or moved to less prominent pages. There was no mention of it on state television’s national evening news report.

The apparent attempts to play down the assault may indicate fears that coverage inspires other assailants, but authorities may also have wanted to avoid the embarrassing news, especially during the World Expo in Shanghai, a pet government project.

The attack began at about 8:20 a.m., as children were arriving at the private Shengshui Temple Kindergarten in Hanzhong’s Nanzheng county, a Hanzhong government statement said. The area is on the city’s rural outskirts in a relatively poor part of the country, and images posted on the Internet showed the school, which had only about 20 students, housed in a tumbledown two-story farmhouse.

Wu killed the school’s manager, 50-year-old Wu Hongying, and a student on the spot, then hacked at 18 others, the statement and Xinhua said. Six students and Wu Hongying’s 80-year-old mother later died in the hospital, the reports said. None of the 11 others hospitalized was in immediate danger, it said.

Wu is a common Chinese surname and it wasn’t clear if the assailant and administrator were related.

Citing the police, Xinhua said Wu had rented his house to Wu Hongying for the kindergarten without government approval. He then demanded the property back, but Wu Hongying had asked to hold onto it until the children went on summer vacation.

The ages of the seven children killed were not disclosed, but kindergarten students would typically be 5 years old or younger. Xinhua said they were five boys and two girls.

Problem under control?
State media have steered clear of examining what might be motivating school attackers, preferring to focus on increases in security.

The government has sought to show it has the problem under control, mindful especially of worries among middle-class families who, limited in most cases to one child due to population control policies, invest huge amounts of money and effort to raise their offspring.

Recent scandals in which children have been the main victims have sparked public anger and occasional protests, such as when at least 3,000 children around the country were found to have lead poisoning from polluting factories built too close to villages, and when more than 300,000 infants were sickened by tainted baby milk powder.

The statement from the Hanzhong city government after Wednesday’s attack vowed to “leave no stone unturned, learn from the mistakes, and strictly ensure nothing happens like this again.”

The city government earlier reported that about 2,000 police officers and security guards had been detailed to patrol public schools, kindergartens and surrounding areas beginning last week. The city in Shaanxi province has a population of nearly 4 million.

Parents and grandparents waiting to pick up children at schools in Beijing and Shanghai said they were reassured by the increased security.

“When we hear about those attacks on children, all parents worry. We don’t let the child walk home alone,” said Guo Xiumei, 52, waiting to pick up her 7-year-old grandson at Beijing’s Yonganli Elementary School. Two police officers and a pair of security guards flanked the downtown school’s tall metal gate.

In Shanghai, a father waiting in his car outside the Aiguo Elementary School, where a single uniformed policeman stood watch at the gate, said he would adjust his work schedule to drop off and pick up his daughter.

“Who knows how those people think? They shouldn’t take out their dissatisfaction with society on innocent children. It’s not fair,” said the man, who gave only his surname, Su.

The string of school assaults began with an attack on a primary school in March in the city of Nanping in Fujian province where eight children were slashed to death by a former community clinic doctor with a history of mental health problems. Since then, dozens have been wounded in similar attacks.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): CHINADIGITALTIMES, THEEPOCHTIMES

WINTER HAVEN, Fla. - WESH.com

Winter Haven Police are investigating a murder-suicide that happened in a surgical ward at Winter Haven Hospital around 1:30 p.m. Monday.

According to reports, Ramon Duckworth, 77, hid a gun when he went to visit his wife, Patricia, 76.

Once in her room, investigators said he shot her and then turned the gun on himself.

Patricia Duckworth recently had surgery for a kidney infection and family members said she had a stroke a few months ago.

The couple married 57 years ago.

Some of the couple’s neighbors and family members said Ramon Duckworth was suffering from a number of illnesses including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and prostate cancer.

Investigators believe the couples’ declining health may have contributed to this murder-suicide.

“It’s shocking,” Maria Sykes said.

Sykes’ mother recently came out of surgery on the same floor where the shooting happened.

She found out about the murder-suicide when she called to check on her mother.

“My mother was there, and that made it worse,” she said.

Following the shooting, the hospital cleared out most patients on the floor. Twenty workers were also rushed out.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): CENTRAL-ORTHOPEDICS

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - A woman accused of strangling her daughter on a college campus apartment in Purchase, N.Y., told police she did it because the daughter was “disrespectful all the time,” according to court papers made public Thursday.

Police accounts filed with a murder indictment quote Stacey Pagli, 37, as saying that Marissa Pagli, 18, had “pushed my last button.” Police say Pagli admitted to killing her daughter and also tried to kill herself because she said they were “too much baggage” for her husband.

Stacey Pagli is accused of strangling her daughter Feb. 22 in the family’s staff apartment at Manhattanville College. Marissa was a freshman at the school. Her father, John Pagli, was a maintenance supervisor. He found his wife unconscious and his daughter dead.

According to the police account:

When police asked what prompted Marissa to be disrespectful, her mother said, “I asked her where she was going.” She said she told her daughter, “Don’t ever speak to me like that. This will be the last time you speak to me like that.”

She said she choked Marissa with her hands and knew she had killed her.

Pagli expressed regret, saying, “I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. I can’t make it better, she’s not here anymore.”

She also said she killed her daughter and tried to kill herself because they were “too much baggage” for her husband. “Me and Marissa, we ruined his life,” the mother is quoted as saying, without elaborating.

The documents are police accounts of recorded interviews at White Plains Hospital and police headquarters.

Pagli’s lawyer, Allan Focarile, would not comment on the indictment or the police accounts.

Pagli tried to commit suicide by cutting her left wrist and hanging herself on a doorknob, the Westchester district attorney’s office said. Her arraignment is pending.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (Picture): EDUINREVIEW