Cops reveal motive in chopping death

A 22-year-old man has been arrested in the slaying of U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s nephew after telling a friend in a recorded phone call that he did it because the nephew had abused a 17-year-old girl, authorities said Thursday.
The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office said investigators arrested 22-year-old John A. Radavich on Thursday evening at an apartment in Spokane Valley for investigation of first-degree murder. It was not immediately clear if Radavich had an attorney
or someone who could speak on his behalf.Robert Tester, the 35-year-old nephew of the Democratic senator from Montana, was found dead on Sept. 6, after his 8-year-old daughter reported witnessing part of the homicide. The girl had been sleeping in bed with her father when he was attacked, investigators said.
The girl called a family member, who then called 911. The girl wasn’t able to identify the assailant, who she said was wearing all black with most of his face covered, the station reports. The girl told deputies the man had a sword and a knife, the station reports. She said the man told her to stay in bed because he was going to kill her dad.
An ax was found at the scene, authorities have said. The medical examiner said Tester died from “chop wounds” to the head and his stomach area and chest, KREM reports.
“Detectives learned Tester had a 17-year-old girlfriend who he assaulted the day before the murder,” the sheriff’s office wrote in a news release. “During the last week of 2016, detectives received information from a friend of Radavich. The friend stated Radavich confessed to killing Tester during a phone call he had recorded and provided a copy of the call to detectives.”
Radavich had previously dated the girl, who contacted him after Tester abused her on Sept. 5, the sheriff’s office said. In the recorded call, Radavich told his friend he had to take care of it by killing Tester, the news release said.
The sheriff’s office did not immediately release more details of the alleged abuse, but said the case remains an active investigation.
In the wake of the arrest, Sen. Jon Tester released thsi statement to MTN news: “Sharla and I and the entire Tester family would like to thank the public for their continued thoughts, prayers and respect for our privacy during this difficult time.”

Ex-Mich. teacher who admitted sex with student

Jamee Hiatt of Grass Lake told a Jackson County Circuit Court judge on Thursday that her actions “were inexcusable” and she “became out of control.”
The 32-year-old Hiatt earlier pleaded guilty to one count each of first-degree and third-degree criminal sexual conduct. Hiatt told the court that she began a sexual relationship with a student in 2014, when he was 13.
The victim told police that Hiatt had sex with him “so many times that he couldn’t begin to tell how many times that there were,” Jackson Police Det. Gary Schuette testified. The boy recounted five or six specific incidents, Schuette said, which took place at Hiatt’s home in Grass Lake and on one occasion in a parking lot of a store in Jackson.
The Jackson Citizen Patriot reports Judge Thomas Wilson ordered her to spend 3 to 20 years in prison, followed by a lifetime of monitoring as a sex offender. She was arrested by Jackson police in January 2016 after resigning from her job as third-grade teacher at Woodworth Elementary School in Leslie, Mich., the station reports. Prior to that, she taught at Leslie Middle School as recently as 2013, according to the district’s website.
Last year, authorities also said she gave the student a gun that was believed to have been used in a Jackson shooting.
Defense lawyer Phillip Berkemeier said Hiatt has done “a lot of things she regrets.” Berkemeier said Hiatt had been “forthcoming” about the gun.

Woman killed in motel

A Martinez woman was found beaten to death in an Antioch motel room Friday morning, and her estranged boyfriend who was with her is considered a suspect, police said.

A male friend of the 52-year-old victim called police to the Riverview Motel on East 18th Street just before 8 a.m. after going to a motel room and discovering the aftermath of a violent struggle, police said.
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene from what appeared to be blunt-force injuries. Her identity was not immediately released. Her death marked the city’s seventh homicide of the year.
The woman’s estranged boyfriend, a 62-year-old Antioch resident, was present when police arrived, and investigators believe he was with the victim in the room, which police said was “in disarray.”
Acting Lt. Diane Aguinaga said the victim and her boyfriend were attempting to reconcile before violence broke out. The man is considered a suspect and is being questioned by police, but no arrest has been made.

People Who Swear May Be More Honest

Swearing may be considered impolite and vulgar, but a new two-part study has revealed a more gracious attribute for those with an off-color vocabulary: Honesty. According to the research, people are more likely to swear as a way to express themselves, rather than cause harm to others, and the more an individual swears, the more honest they are likely to be.
The researchers found that while liars are known to prefer third-person pronouns and negative words in their speech, honest individuals are more likely to use profanity. According to the researchers, that's because swearing is often used to express one’s feelings, and people who do this more regularly portray themselves in a more honest light it was said.
“The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that the relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level,” the study read.
For their report, the team of international researchers asked a group of 276 participants about their swearing habits as well as how honest they were in different situations. In addition, they analyzed the status updates of more than 73,000 Facebook users, measuring for honesty and profanity. In the second study, the same team used previous data to compare the integrity levels of US states with how often they swear. All the experiments had the same result: honesty was associated with higher levels of swearing.
Past research has suggested that swearing may also be a sign of increased intelligence. A 2016 study found that individuals with higher levels of verbal intelligence, that is intelligence associated with oral language, tended to use more swear words.

3 year student was a rapist

For three years, Benjamin Holm walked the Catholic campus at Loyola University in Chicago like any other student, pursuing a double major in finance and economics and playing for the school’s golf team.
But his life in Chicago hid the reality he faced back home in the suburbs of Atlanta.
There, he was being investigated for rape.
Holm had been accused of and arrested in the crime in the spring of 2013, weeks before his high school graduation and five months after he had committed to playing golf at Loyola, but his trial didn’t start until the end of last month — more than three years after the alleged sexual assault.
And it seems throughout that lengthy span, nobody at the university knew of Holm’s pending rape trial, not as his charges were upgraded to felony status while he was already on campus or even when he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and statutory rape Dec. 5.
Media reports about the rape case published last week — in which the university refused comment — were followed by days of outrage from Holm’s former Loyola classmates, which included a change.org petition signed by more than 1,200 people demanding an explanation from the university.
“Students at Loyola University Chicago are disgusted by the institution’s actions and do not feel safe on campus,” wrote sophomore student Ashley Kennedy. “The administration’s silence is only making things worse.”
On Dec. 16, 11 days after Holm pleaded guilty to the sexual assault, the university issued a statement from Title IX coordinator Thomas M. Kelly, who oversees sexual assault education and enforcement on campus.

To our knowledge, we neither received information about the crime, nor had any awareness that it occurred until Monday, December 12, when we received a media inquiry. Based on media reports, the individual is in police custody in Georgia. The individual is not registered for classes in the Spring Semester.

Violence of any kind is not tolerated at Loyola, and the safety and security of all members of our campus community remain a top priority.

The uproar comes at a critical juncture in the national controversy about sexual assault at America’s college campuses, an issue that in 2016 became more prominent in part because of White House initiatives, publicity about Rolling Stone’s now-retracted article about a gang rape that wasn’t at the University of Virginia and several high profile cases.
Just this week, the California judge who sentenced Brock Turner to six months in jail for sexually assaulting a woman on the Stanford University campus was cleared of judicial misconduct by an independent state agency after critics called for him to resign because of what they considered an unjustly light punishment.
At the University of Minnesota, the football team for two days last week refused to play in an upcoming bowl game because players disagreed with the way campus officials handled the suspensions of 10 of their teammates accused of sexual assault. An ongoing investigation at Baylor University in Texas this year revealed a widespread, chronic pattern in the football program of covering up alleged sexual assaults involving football players.
And in recent months, athletic teams at a handful of colleges, including several Ivy League universities, have faced discipline for digital conversations deemed inappropriate by officials that included lewd language and physical rankings of women or other female athletes.
Other, less high-profile incidents have been chronicled in lawsuits challenging the fairness of Title IX investigations for both the accuser and the accused.
But what sets Holm’s case apart is that the assault occurred before the student-athlete stepped onto campus — something the university emphasized in its statement.
“In the past few days, Loyolans have expressed concern following media reports related to a student-athlete who was charged and pled guilty to a gender-based violent crime that occurred in his home state of Georgia,” the Dec. 16 statement said. “This crime occurred prior to the individual joining Loyola.”
Critics in the online petition argued that the university should keep closer tabs on its student-athletes, who are often offered additional resources and scholarship money not granted to an average student. A 2012 article published in the North Fulton Herald reported that Holm was offered an athletic scholarship when he committed to playing golf at Loyola, but the university Athletic Department would not confirm that information in an interview with the student newspaper.
The university publication, the Loyola Phoenix, wrote:

The Loyola Athletic Department had no comment on the situation, wouldn’t disclose information regarding Holm’s possible scholarship and didn’t confirm whether he had athletic or academic scholarships. Loyola’s Athletic Director Steve Watson and Deputy Director of Athletics Jermaine Truax, the administrator in charge of the golf program, declined multiple interview requests from The PHOENIX.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Holm’s case began in April 2013, when during a high school party weeks before his graduation, the then-18-year-old sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at a playground at the Country Club of the South, Johns Creek police said.
The victim’s friends grew worried when she disappeared, police told the AJC, and eventually found her at the playground. Her pants were down, police said, and Holm was on top of her.
“They observed the sexual assault taking place and heard her clearly saying ‘No, stop,’ ” Capt. Chris Byers of the Johns Creek police told the AJC.
He was initially charged with statutory rape, a misdemeanor in Georgia, and pleaded not guilty. He bonded out of jail and headed to Loyola’s campus several months later. Nearly two full years after the incident, in April 2015, according to a timeline from the Loyola Phoenix, the county solicitor determined Holm should have been charged with felony rape, and a year later, in April 2016, a grand jury issued an indictment on the upgraded, more severe charge.
That spring, Holm left the Loyola golf team for unspecified reasons, reported the student newspaper.
Holm pleaded not guilty again, according to the Phoenix, and on Nov. 28 his trial began. It wasn’t until jury deliberations that Holm, now 21, reversed course and decided to take a deal offered by the prosecution, pleading guilty to aggravated assault and statutory rape.
He received a 20-year sentence, 10 of which he would serve in prison and the other 10 on probation, according to the AJC. He was booked into the Fulton County Jail

Toddler killed in road rage attack

Newly released 911 recordings depict a frantic, chaotic scene as a grandmother pulls into a Little Rock shopping center and discovers her 3-year-old grandson has been shot in what police describe as a road-rage killing.

"The woman's saying this little kid's been shot," a female caller said on the 911 call, released Tuesday to The Associated Press under an open-records request. According to police, the grandmother, Kim King-Macon, was in her car at a stop sign in the pouring rain Saturday when a man driving a black Chevrolet Impala opened fire on her vehicle, fatally striking the boy.
King-Macon told police that she didn't realize her grandson had been shot until she pulled into the shopping mall, about 10 miles from where the shooting occurred, and discovered the toddler slumped over in his seat. No arrests have been made and the FBI said Monday's it's joining the investigation. A $40,000 reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.
In the 911 recording, a dispatcher asks the caller — an apparent bystander at the shopping mall — for any suspect information. The caller yells: "Ma'am, do you know who did it?"
A woman, presumably King-Macon, is heard responding: "I was at the stop sign and the guy blew the horn at me, and I blew it back. And he shot, but I thought he shot in the air. He shot at the car!"
Little Rock police have said there is no apparent connection between King-Macon and the shooter and described the shooting on Twitter as a "road rage incident."
It's the second fatal shooting of a toddler in a month in Little Rock. Last month, 2-year-old Ramiya Reed, who went by the nickname "TinkerBell," was fatally struck by gunfire while riding in the back seat of a vehicle with her mother. No arrests have been made in that case, and police have said they don't know if the two shootings are connected.

Bus driver was holding cell phone & speeding...

The driver of a school bus that crashed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, last month, killing six children, was speeding and holding a cellphone while he drove, police said on Thursday.
Johnthony Walker, 24, who police have said was driving the bus on Nov. 21 on a winding road well above the speed limit of 30 miles per hour (48 kph), has been charged with five counts of vehicular homicide, reckless endangerment and reckless driving.
A Hamilton County Criminal Court judge on Thursday said there was enough evidence to send the case to a grand jury.
“I do find the conduct to be reckless," Hamilton County General Sessions Judge Lila Statom said. "There was a conscious disregard for the risk in this case.”
The bus veered off the road, flipped on its side and smashed into a tree, injuring over a dozen children in addition to the six killed, police have said.
Officials said on Thursday that Walker had been videotaped on the bus holding his cell phone while he drove, which is illegal for school bus drivers in Tennessee.
Electronic evidence, including readings from a GPS unit and engine monitor on the bus, shows the bus was traveling between "50 and 52 miles an hour," (80 to 83 kph), Chattanooga Police Department traffic officer Joe Warren told the court on Thursday during a court appearance by Walker, who did not speak.
In addition, there were several caution signs saying that the road's curves need to be negotiated at 20 mph, Warren said.
Warren described a video showing Walker holding his cell phone while he drove. Warren did not say whether Walker was using the phone at the time. The video was not shown in court. Warren said it was recorded by a camera inside the bus.
No drugs or alcohol were found in Walker's system.
Walker's attorney, Amanda Dunn, could not be reached for comment. She refused to comment to local reporters as she left the courtroom Thursday.
According to court records, Walker remains in jail on $107,000 bond.
(Writing by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Leslie Adler)