Eideard

The burial site near Huddersfield
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A father who attacked his fiancée with a Taser gun before burying her alive in a cardboard box because he was “bored” with her was facing jail today after being found guilty of attempted murder.

Marcin Kasprzak attacked Michelina Lewandowska, 27, the mother of his young son, with the electric shock device at their home and then bound and gagged her with tape. He stuffed her into a cardboard box and later buried in a wood near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, leaving her to suffocate.

The 25-year-old launched the attack because their relationship had ended and he feared she would take their three-year-old son Jakub back to their native Poland, the court heard.

Despite being trapped in a hole, beneath a pile of earth and the branch of a tree, Miss Lewandowska managed to escape by using her engagement ring to cut herself out of the box.

She was later found in a distressed state at the side of a road after flagging down a passing motorist.

Kasprzak denied attempted murder but was found guilty by a jury at Leeds Crown Court today after three days of deliberation…

Miss Lewandowska described how she feared she would die inside the box and still has nightmares about her ordeal. She said the thought of her young son gave her the strength to save herself…

Meanwhile, her former fiancé took her bank card and withdrew £500 before returning to his accomplice’s home, where they were arrested about nine hours later…

Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, had told the jury that the case was about a young man who had become “bored” with his partner, and had “decided to get rid of her”.

Throw away the key!

The piece that Miller and Reddin took away from Graves

A police sergeant saved his own life by sticking his finger between the hammer and cylinder of a gun jammed into his stomach by a desperate suspect during a Brooklyn struggle. Police said the suspect pulled the trigger of the loaded .38 caliber revolver several times during the struggle before he was subdued.

Sgt. Michael Miller emerged with a broken finger.

The incident began about 4 a.m. after Miller and Officer William Reddin of the 81st Precinct’s anti-crime team, on patrol in an unmarked car, stopped a speeding livery car on Quincy St. and Malcolm X Blvd. in Bedford-Stuyvesant…

…When Miller felt a gun in the waist of one passenger during a frisk, he ordered him to put his hands behind his back…

The suspect attacked the cop, pushing the gun against his stomach. Miller used his right ring finger to prevent the suspect, identified as Eugene Graves, 30, of Madison St., Brooklyn, from firing. Reddin jumped into the fray and helped subdue Graves. His companion fled, cops said.

Graves was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, criminal possession of about 2 ounces of what cops believe to be crack cocaine, weapons possession, assaulting a police officer, menacing and resisting arrest.

It’s an old stunt that still works. Good for you Sgt. Miller – glad you made it, OK.

After Graves lands in the slammer – throw away the key.

The father of a boy found abandoned on Interstate 20 on Tuesday is facing attempted murder charges.

Sweetwater Police Detective Lance Richburg said Carlos Rico was in custody Wednesday in Nolan County Jail after being arrested in Saginaw in Tarrant County on a charge of endangering a child…

During the investigation, Richburg said officers learned that Rico claimed to have had a religious experience. “He said he had been compelled by a higher power to take his son’s life”.

Richburg said Rico had taken the boy off the interstate to a fence, in the middle of a thick stand of mesquite trees and cactus plants. He allegedly threw the child over the fence and left. Richburg said there was some physical evidence that indicated the boy had been choked or strangled.

Angel was found in the middle of I-20 east of Sweetwater about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday by the high school basketball coach and his son, who were headed to a golf tournament. Angel was bruised and covered in hundreds of cactus spines.

Why do the folks who get direct communications from their favorite invisible old fart in the sky either try to kill off some innocent member of their family – or a passerby – or try to involve the whole country in some extra-suicidal international stupidity?

Samantha Broadhead released into her aunt’s custody

Although prosecutors once pleaded with a judge to keep her locked up, the 11-year-old Clearwater girl accused of setting her mother on fire has been sentenced to probation.

That’s a big contrast compared to early stages of the case, when the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office said “she’s a danger to herself, and she’s a danger to the community,” and seriously considered whether to try to indict the girl in the adult court system for attempted murder.

It’s also a contrast to her 15-year-old accomplice, who was sentenced to a juvenile program that could keep him locked up for two years.

The girl, with her blond hair tied back, wearing black slacks and a green top, pleaded guilty on Monday to juvenile charges of attempted murder, arson and grand theft. It all stemmed from a December night in which she and Jack Ault, her boyfriend, were accused of dousing her mother’s bed with gasoline and setting it ablaze. Nancy Broadhead, then 47, suffered serious burns and smoke inhalation.

On Monday, Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Jack Day sentenced her to “indefinite probation,” and to comply with doctors’ recommendations that she stay in a mental health facility for as long as needed. The sentence prohibits her from contacting her accomplice, Ault, and says she can only talk to her mother/victim under the terms of a separate child welfare court case. Also, a formal finding of guilt was withheld.

RTFA. Bad Seed or Best-Interest Plea in response to an abusive parent?

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The long, rambling rant posted on a website eerily reflected the angry populist sentiments that have swept the country in the past year. In it, a Joe Stack inveighed against intrusive Big Brother government, corrupt corporate giants, irrational taxes, as well as the “puppet” George Bush. “I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue,” he wrote. “I have just had enough. I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt.” And then Stack apparently got in a Piper Cherokee PA-28 at about 9:40 a.m. at an airport in suburban Austin, Texas, and flew the plane into a commercial building housing an IRS office, killing himself, seriously injuring two people on the ground and starting a conflagration that lasted several hours…

“It sure was hauling. It was a really speedy dive,” Jerry Cullin, a pilot, told KXAN, the local NBC affiliate. “It shot across the road going really fast.” Cullin had stopped to get his midmorning coffee at the local Marie Callender’s when he saw the plane swoop down. It was so low, Cullin said, he could see the plane’s belly and thought he might get hit. The plane almost clipped one of the tall light poles lining the freeway before crashing into the building.

After the fireball, Cullin said, the black-glass windows blew out and the venetian blinds starting flapping in the wind. The building houses regional offices of the IRS and other federal agencies. As one unidentified office worker from the building said, “If you have problems with the IRS, this is where you come in person to work them out.” According to news reports, 199 IRS employees work in the building, and all are accounted for. Toward the end of what appears to be his final note, Stack wrote, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

RTFA. No doubt, the next Tea Party rally in Austin will eulogize this man and his suicide bombing.

Kay Gilderdale and her daughter, Lynn

A judge made the rare step of attacking the Crown Prosecution Service…for pursuing a case of attempted murder against a loving mother who helped her seriously ill daughter to die.

Stoking the debate over mercy killings, he praised the common sense, decency and humanity of the jury at Lewes crown court, who took just two hours to clear Kay Gilderdale over the death of 31-year-old Lynn.

Kay Gilderdale administered a cocktail of lethal drugs to end Lynn’s life in December 2008 after her daughter called her for help when her own attempts at suicide failed…

At Lewes today Mr Justice Bean, the Gilderdale trial judge, openly challenged prosecutors, demanding to know who had made the decision to pursue the case.

“Are you in a position to tell me why it was thought to be in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution of attempted murder rather than accepting the plea of assisted suicide?” he asked the prosecutor, Sally Howes QC.

He said interim guidelines on assisted suicide, drawn up last November by the director of public prosecutions to reassure relatives they would not be prosecuted for helping a loved one die, should have applied in the case.

Turning to the jury he said: “I do not normally comment on the verdicts of juries but in this case their decision … shows that common sense, decency and humanity which makes jury trials so important in a case of this kind.”

I have nothing polite to say about the officials who decided to prosecute for murder. I hope their political careers are over.

Kay Gilderdale, Justice Bean, the members of the jury gathered to rule on her aid to her daughter – obviously – were the only human beings in the courtroom. They deserve all the praise in the world.