Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

CNN.com

An Oakland, California, police officer critically injured in one of two Saturday shootings that killed three fellow officers was pronounced brain dead on Sunday, a police spokesman told CNN.

Initially, Oakland police spokesman Jeff Thomason said John Hege, 41, was the fourth officer to die after a man being pulled over in a traffic stop opened fire and then battled SWAT officers at a nearby building Saturday.

However, Thomason clarified later Sunday that Hege was pronounced brain dead about noon Sunday, but being kept on life support until a decision is made on organ donation.

The man who police said was the gunman -- Lovelle Mixon, 26, of Oakland -- was fatally shot in a gunbattle with SWAT officers in an apartment complex Saturday.

Police said in a late-night news conference Saturday that Mixon had an extensive criminal history and was in violation of parole for assault with a deadly weapon. He also had prior convictions in Alameda County for grand theft and possession of marijuana, the Oakland Tribune newspaper reported. The city of Oakland is in Alameda County.

The incident began about 1 p.m. Saturday in east Oakland when two motorcycle officers tried to pull over a car for a "fairly routine traffic stop," said Dave Kozicki, the deputy police chief.

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photo: Clockwise from top left: John Hege, Sgt. Daniel Sakai, Sgt. Ervin Romans and Sgt. Mark Dunakin (Oakland Police Dept via Getty Images)

By TMZ Staff

TMZ.com

Howard K. Stern is turning himself in tonight -- he's being arrested and charged, along with two other doctors, for allegedly conspiring to fuel an an addict with prescription drugs -- and the addict was Anna Nicole Smith

Stern and Dr. Sandeep Kapoor (above right) and Khristine Eroshevich are being charged with a total of eight felonies.

According to the L.A. County D.A., the conspiracy counts allege the three defendants conspired to furnish controlled substances to Smith from between July 2004 and January 2007.

Stern and Kapoor were charged with one count of unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance. Eroshevich and Stern were charged with unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance between June 2004 and January 2007.

Kapoor and Eroshevich were each charged with obtaining a prescription for opiates by "fraud, deceit or misrepresentation." They were both also charged with one count of obtaining a prescription for opiates by giving a false name or address.

Kapoor and Stern were also charged with one count of "prescribing, administering or dispensing a controlled substance to an addict." Eroshevich was charged with the same crime for separate prescriptions.

Bail is recommended at $20,000 for each defendant. We know both Stern and Kapoor bailed out Thursday night.

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photo: Booking photos/TMZ.com

By Lincoln Archer and wires


January 6, News.com.au

IN one besieged city, scores of children are dying and those brave enough to try to help them are facing horrific images of human suffering just to do their jobs.
In another city used to the constant threat of attack, a disembodied voice shouts "red colour!, red colour!" and people scramble to take cover.

As some of those in the second city watch the destruction in the first, they tell of their hope that it will ultimately mean something. But they sound resigned to the likelihood that not much will change.

This is how 2009 has started.

"Whoever comes with a head, we check his pulse," a doctor in Gaza told an Associated Press correspondent on the ground as the death toll there passed 500. "If there's no pulse, he's straight to the morgue. If there's no head, well, goodbye." The hospital is running on power from generators after air strikes knocked out its electricity supply. If they fail, dozens more will die as their life support machines switch off.

In the hospital's morgue, where 70 bodies are piled into refrigerators meant to hold 35, blood was reported to be pooling on the floor next to the bodies of three children. Some reports said there were about 100 children among the dead and 20 were killed yesterday alone.

photo: Position ... it looks like a Tianenmen-style standoff, but it's just a tank being directed / AP

By Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

December 1, The Times


The sole Mumbai gunman captured alive has told police he was trained in Pakistan and ordered to “kill until the last breath”, according to a leaked account of his interrogation.

Azam Amir Kasab, 21, a Pakistani national, claimed the terror strikes, which left nearly 200 dead, were intended to kill as many as 5,000 people and that he and his fellow militants were ordered to target whites – especially Britons and Americans. The claims were made in what a police source said was a transcript of his questioning.

Kasab was captured after being shot in the hand by police in a standoff near Chowpatty beach, a popular evening destination for local families, in south Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) on Wednesday night. A policeman and one other terrorist were killed in the same encounter.

Earlier, Kasab and his accomplice had sprayed the concourse of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s main train station, with gunfire, killing indiscriminately. While there, he was caught on camera wielding an automatic rifle.

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photo: Azam Amir Kasab at Mumbai train station - he was the only terrorist captured alive (Getty Images/AFP)

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

September 22, Reuters


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.

The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

Minority Sunni Arabs were driven out of many neighborhoods by Shi'ite militants enraged by the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The bombing, blamed on the Sunni militant group al Qaeda, sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

Some 2 million Iraqis are displaced within Iraq, while 2 million more have sought refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan. Previously religiously mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad became homogenized Sunni or Shi'ite Muslim enclaves.

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photo: An image showing the proportion of change in night-lights in Baghdad between March 2006 and December 2007, released to Reuters on September 19, 2008. (REUTERS/UCLA/Handout)

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

August 4, Reuters


BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai video game distributor halted sales of "Grand Theft Auto" on Monday after a teenager confessed to robbing and murdering a taxi driver while trying to recreate a scene from the controversial game.

"We are sending out requests today to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games," Sakchai Chotikachinda, sales and marketing director of New Era Interactive Media, told Reuters.

"We are also urging video game arcades to pull the games from service," Sakchai said. An 18-year-old high school student, now in custody pending further investigations and a trial, faces death by lethal injection if found guilty of robbing and killing a 54-year-old taxi driver with a knife at the weekend.

Police said the youth, an obsessive player of "Grand Theft Auto", showed no sign of mental problems during questioning and had confessed to committing the crime because of the game.

"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," chief police investigator Veeravit Pipattanasak told Reuters.

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photo: Stacks of the video game "Grand Theft Auto IV" can be seen as they go on sale at a GameStop store in New York April 28, 2008 (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

By LARA JAKES JORDAN and DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press Writers

August 1, Yahoo


WASHINGTON - A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told The Associated Press that another of his brothers, Charles, told him Bruce had committed suicide.

A woman who answered the phone at Charles Ivins' home in Etowah, N.C., refused to wake him and declined to comment on his death. "This is a grieving time," she said.

A woman who answered the phone at Bruce Ivins' home in Frederick declined to comment.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr and FBI Assistant Director John Miller declined to comment on the report.

Henry S. Heine, a scientist who had worked with Ivins on inhalation anthrax research at Fort Detrick, said he and others on their team have testified before a federal grand jury in Washington that has been investigating the anthrax mailings for more than a year.

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photo: FBI and Army scientists began the process of opening an anthrax-laden letter sent to Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, hoping to find clues to help identify the source of germ attacks, December 5, 2001 (FBI/Handout/Files/Reuters)

July 22, The Sydney Herald Morning

He was accused of masterminding massacres that the UN war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history."

Monday's capture of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs and one of the world's most-wanted men, ended a 13-year manhunt for a genocide suspect said to have resorted to elaborate disguises to elude authorities.

The arrest announcement from Serbian President Boris Tadic's office was stunning.

Although authorities had been said to be closing in on General Ratko Mladic, who was also indicted in 1995 for genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Karadzic's whereabouts had been a mystery for years - and many had all but given up hope of him ever being brought to justice.

Karadzic's reported hide-outs included Serbian Orthodox monasteries and refurbished mountain caves in remote eastern Bosnia.

Over the years, newspaper reports said he occasionally disguised himself as a priest by shaving off his silver mane and donning a brown cassock.

With NATO-led peacekeepers under orders to arrest him on sight, associates said he sometimes traveled in ambulances with flashing lights to zip through NATO checkpoints undetected to spend time with his wife, Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic; daughter, Sonja; and son, Aleksandar Sasa, in the Bosnian town of Pale, the wartime Bosnian Serb capital.

But his wife surprised the public in July 2005 when she appealed to her husband to come out of hiding and surrender "for the sake of your family".

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photo: Radovan Karadzic, inset, and victims of the Srebenica massacre pasted on a wall (Reuters)

June 17, CNN

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (AP) -- Police may have ignored a warning years ago that a woman with five dead spouses was trying to hire a hit man to kill one of the men, investigators in North Carolina said Monday.

Authorities charged 76-year-old Betty Neumar last month with one count of solicitation of murder in the July 1986 death of Harold Gentry. Gentry's brother had begged investigators for two decades to take another look at the case.

Stanly County sheriff's investigators believe Neumar tried to hire several people to kill Gentry. Lead detective Scott Williams said Monday his office is looking into the possibility that one of those would-be hit men went to authorities before Gentry's death, but no one took him seriously.

"That's another aspect we're looking into," Williams said, declining to elaborate.

Former Stanly County sheriff Ralph McSwain, who was in office when Gentry was killed, is recovering from a stroke and said he doesn't remember much about the case. He said the sheriff's detective who handled the investigation of the case is dead.

"This was a long time ago," McSwain said. "Could someone have come forward with information before it happened? Sure. I just don't know."

Neumar has been married five times since the 1950s, but each union ended with the death of her husband. Investigators want authorities elsewhere to look into the deaths. Williams said investigators have uncovered a common link among the victims: They all had military experience.

Neumar is being held on $500,000 bond in the Stanly County jail. A clerk in the county clerk of courts office said Monday that Neumar does not yet have an attorney. Her daughter with Harold Gentry, who also lives in Augusta, has declined to comment.

Williams said that detectives believe Harold Gentry was Neumar's fourth husband. She and her third husband, Richard "Dick" Sills, were living in the Florida Keys when he was shot to death in 1965, Williams said. At the time, police said his death was the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But Williams said Neumar was the only person in the room when he died.

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photo: Betty Johnson Neumar is shown at her booking. She is charged with hiring a hit man to kill her husband (AP)

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

June 9, NY Times

TOKYO — A 25-year-old man who told the police he was tired of life went on a killing rampage in a popular shopping street in central Tokyo on Sunday, plowing his truck into a crowd of pedestrians before stabbing passers-by with a survival knife. Seven people died and 11 were injured.

The attack took place shortly after noon on a street that had been closed to vehicles for the day in Akihabara, the main district for electronics in Tokyo and a magnet for fans of Japanese anime and manga comics. The killings stunned a country that has long enjoyed low crime rates but where a series of random stabbings have recently occurred.

The police identified the attacker as Tomohiro Kato, who was living by himself in a small apartment in Shizuoka, just west of Tokyo. According to reports in the Japanese news media, Mr. Kato told the police that he had grown tired of life, “hated the world,” and had gone to Akihabara to kill people. “Anyone was O.K.,” he told the police, according to the reports.

Japanese television showed the police holding Mr. Kato on the ground after the attack. He was dressed in a black T-shirt, off-white trousers and jacket, and was wearing sneakers.

The police said the attack began around 12:30 p.m., when Mr. Kato drove a white, two-ton rental truck into the street in a zigzag pattern, hitting several people. He then got out of the truck and began yelling and stabbing passers-by, including a police officer.

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photo: The scene of a stabbing rampage in Akihabara, the main district for electronic goods in Tokyo, was sealed off by the police on Sunday. (Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press)

June 5, BBC News

Seventy people have been arrested in Australia in a nationwide operation to crack down on the use of child pornography on the web.

The arrests followed a six-month investigation by police into paedophile communities online and how they trade pornographic images of children.

The probe was launched after 99 explicit pictures were posted by a hacker on a respected European website.

Over 76 hours, the site had 12 million hits from 150,000 users in 170 nations.

More than 2,800 internet protocol (IP) addresses were traced back to Australia and then identified by police.

Those arrested include a federal policeman and several teachers, reports say.

Chat rooms

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said that investigations were ongoing and there would be more arrests in the coming days.

Investigators had worked both with international partners and state police in what Mr Keelty described as one of Australia's largest single operations against images that show child sex abuse.

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image: Explicit images have been posted on legitimate websites (SPL)

June 2, News.com.au

A MAN killed his wife and stepdaughter and threw them off a lookout in the New South Wales Blue Mountains before asking his teenage son to lie for him, according to court documents.

The 41-year-old man is charged with the murder of his 38-year-old wife and her nine-year-old daughter, whom he reported missing last month.

Two bodies, which are yet to be formally identified, were found by bushwalkers near Echo Point in the Blue Mountains yesterday afternoon.

The man told police he believed the pair left the family home in Blacktown, Sydney, on foot and had not seen them since 8pm on Monday, May 5.

The man did not appear in Blacktown Local Court today, and did not apply for bail, which was formally refused.

He will reappear via video-link on July 21.

Police facts before the court today indicated the man asked his 14-year-old son to tell police he searched the neighbourhood for his wife and stepdaughter for two hours on May 5.

However, the police facts said mobile phone records placed him at the scene where the bodies were dumped.

His son later allegedly told police he had misled them at his father's urging.

The Indian national, an engineer, met his wife on the internet in July 2006.

Both had children from previous marriages - each had a nine-year-old daughter and he also had a 14-year-old son, the police facts stated.

The woman moved to Australia to marry him in May last year.

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photo: Suspected killing ... Echo Point in the Blue Mountains (News.com.au)

May 27, BBC News

Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.

Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children.

After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity said an international watchdog should be created to deal with the issue.

The UN has said it welcomes the report, which it will study closely.

Save the Children said the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

No support

A 13-year-old girl described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home, and left her bleeding, trembling and vomiting on the ground.

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

The report also found that aid workers have been sexually abusing boys and girls.

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photo: UN peacekeepers stand accused of abusing those they are sent to protect (AFP)

May 23, News.com.au

TWO brothers, aged seven and nine, told psychiatrists they slowly, coldly tortured a two-year-old girl to death - a revelation that has Argentines debating whether to do away with a law prohibiting the prosecution of minors for heinous crimes.

Judge Marta Pascual said the children confessed to slaying little neighbour Milagros Belizan in a shantytown south of the capital.

"They understood her pain but it did not move them," Judge Pascualsaid after meeting with psychiatrists who examined the boys. "In some form it gave them pleasure."

Little Milagros disappeared from her home in the poverty-stricken Almirante Brown neighbourhood on Sunday. Her family found her body in a vacant lot 10 blocks away.

She had been stripped naked, beaten and strangled with telephone cord that was found wrapped around her neck.

Argentine law prohibits the prosecution of anyone under 18 years old.

Instead, such juveniles are generally held in youth homes until they reach 18, when they are released without further punishment.

Sunday's killing has many Argentines calling for much harsher punishments - including prosecuting them once they turn 18.

"But if it were up to the people living in the shantytown where that little girl was murdered, they would kill the two boys," lawyer Gregorio Badeni said.

Other Argentines disagreed that child killers should be tried like adults.

"These two boys are victims just like the poor girl they killed," family psychologist Cristina Castillo said.

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photo: Nation shocked ... two boys have explained to psychiatrists how they killed two-year-old Milagros Belizan / AP

Police say locals accused women and men of ‘bewitching’ their children

May 22, MSNBC

NAIROBI, Kenya - A group of up to 300 young men have burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya — in some cases slitting their victims' throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.

The gang moved from home to home through two villages, identifying their victims by using a list with names of suspected witches and wizards and the kind of spells they were believed to have cast on the community, said Ben Makori, a local councilor.

"The villagers are complaining that the (suspected) wizards and witches are making the bright children in the community dumb.... These (suspected) witches are not doing good things to us," Makori told The Associated Press on the phone.

Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said the gang hunted down the eight women and three men in the western Kenya villages of Kekoro and Matembe. Most of the victims were between 70 and 90 years old, Owino said.

Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu said the gang hunted down their victims Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Victims slashed or clubbed

In some cases the gang pulled the victims out of their homes, slit their throats or clubbed them to death, said a police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The victims were then thrown back into their homes, which the gang had already set on fire, the officer said. He said 36 houses were burned.

Another police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, said the body of a victim burned to death in her house was, "reduced to something so small, you cannot tell which is the leg and which is the arm."

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photo: Residents of the western Kenyan village of Nyakeo peep through the window of a house where a person was killed by villagers on suspicion of being involved in witchcraft activities. (AFP - Getty Images)

May 14, Sydney Morning Herald

Child traffickers are targeting the youngest and most vulnerable survivors of Burma's catastrophic cyclone and two suspects have already been arrested, the UN said.

The children, among up to two million people struggling to survive without enough clean water, food or shelter in the aftermath of the storm, were approached last week in the main city Rangoon, it said.

"A broker came to a shelter and tried to recruit children," said UNICEF's chief child protection officer in Burma, Anne-Claire Dufay.

"There was an intervention. The police intervened and made arrests," she told AFP.

Dufay said children who had been separated from their parents, and who were possibly orphans, were now facing the threat of violence on top of the everyday struggle to find enough food and water.

"There are concerns for children in camps," she said, adding that sleeping spaces and toilets should be well lit and safe for women and youngsters, to reduce the risk of harm in camps that can become crowded and tense.

Katy Barnett, Save the Children's child protection adviser in Rangoon, said the organisation was aware of the report of the arrests and expected more trafficking problems as the crisis develops.

"It's something which agencies have been expecting. It's an absolute standard thing in the fallout of an emergency like this," Barnett told AFP.

"Traffickers can easily get hold of unaccompanied or separated children and tell them they'll lead a better life or be safe."

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photo: In danger .... child victims of the cyclone are targets for traffickers (AFP)

May 8, Sydney Morning Herald

The Austrian man accused of keeping his daughter as a sex slave for 24 years has claimed credit for saving the life of one of the children produced by the incestuous relationship.

Local newspapers have published excerpts of Josef Fritzl's interviews with police, after they were supplied by his lawyer.

In them, the 73-year-old insists he is "no monster", claimed credit for having saved the life of his daughter and added: "I could have killed them all. Then there would have been no trace. No-one would have found me out."

Nineteen-year-old Kerstin, who was born in the cramped dungeon where Fritzl held his daughter prisoner and was never allowed out, was rushed to hospital on April 19 with multiple organ failure, which doctors suggest could be a result of her incarceration.

She has since been in an artificially-induced coma and put on a life-support machine.

It was Kerstin's hospitalisation that triggered the events which led to the discovery of the shocking abuse case. But Fritzl said: "If it weren't for me, Kerstin wouldn't be alive today."

He added: "It was me who made sure she was taken to hospital."

Police say the retired electrician has admitted that he locked away his daughter Elisabeth, now 42, when she was just 18 and repeatedly raped her, forcing her to bear seven children in all.

Three children remained incarcerated with their mother, three were legally adopted by Fritzl and taken to live as his "grandchildren" in the family home upstairs. The seventh child died shortly after birth.

The case has sparked widespread calls for tougher punishment for rapists and paedophiles.

Meanwhile, the town of Amstetten, now world-famous as a result of the case, today staged a rally in support of the victims.

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photo: Austria's house of horrors ... Elisabeth Fritzl, her father Josef, and the basement where she was kept. (SMH)

May 6, CNN

PARIS, France -- Interpol has launched a global appeal to identify a man who is pictured sexually abusing young boys in hundreds of images on the Internet.

Tuesday's appeal is the second time that Interpol -- an organization that facilitates global cooperation among police agencies -- has asked for the public's help in identifying a suspected pedophile. The first time, last October, led to an arrest ten days later.

The man is featured in 100 photographs sexually abusing at least three boys between the ages of six and 10, Interpol said.

The suspect in the latest case is a white man, shown with gray, thinning hair in six photos released by Interpol.

He appears to be in his late 40s or early 50s in the images. Interpol said that despite two years of investigations, it and other police agencies have so far been unable to determine his identity, nationality or whereabouts.

Interpol posted six photos of the suspect on its Web site.

The pictures came to light in 2006, when Norwegian authorities discovered them in the possession of a man they arrested.

"While these images were only discovered two years ago, we believe the photographs were taken between April 2000 and May 2001, so clearly this man will be older than he appears in the pictures," Kristin Kvigne, assistant director of Interpol's Trafficking in Human Beings unit, said in a news release.

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photo: Interpol has launched a global appeal to find this man, accused of abusing young boys (By Interpol)

May 5, CNN

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana (AP) -- A pregnant bank teller who lost the twins she was carrying after being shot during a holdup choked back tears Saturday as she recalled lying on the bank's floor, bleeding and pleading for help, as the gunman demanded money from her co-workers.

Katherin Shuffield, 30, said the masked gunman jumped over her teller station and shot her once in the abdomen April 22 just after the Huntington Bank branch had opened for the day.

As she lay bleeding on the floor, she said the gunman, who remains at large, refused to let her co-workers call 911 to get her medical assistance.

"I said, 'Please help me! He shot me, he shot me! My babies!' He didn't let anybody do anything because he was more worried about taking the money," Shuffield said during a news conference at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis.

Two days after the shooting, Shuffield, who was five months pregnant, lost her twin girls. She remains hospitalized with an infection created by the bullet that passed through her abdomen.

Her husband, Jason, pushed her in a wheelchair Saturday to a media room where she spent 20 minutes recounting her ordeal and the heartbreak of losing their twins after a pregnancy that had recently become easier after a difficult first three months.

Katherin Shuffield said that she started working at the bank branch in March 2007 and that since then it had been robbed three times, including the April 22 holdup.

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photo: Katherin Shuffield was five months pregnant with twins before being shot in Indianapolis, Indiana (AP)

April 30, CNN

FLORENCE, South Carolina (AP) -- A teen accused of plotting to blow up his high school told police that he wanted to die, go to heaven and kill Jesus, federal authorities said Tuesday.

Prosecutors argued in a federal courtroom that the statements are an indication that 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger needs a psychological evaluation.

The straight-A Chesterfield High School senior was arrested April 19 and faces several state and federal charges, including attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. That charge carries a possible life sentence if he is convicted.

"His conduct is bizarre," prosecutor Buddy Bethea told Judge Thomas Rogers III, who did not immediately issue a ruling. "I think it screams out in his conduct that he be evaluated."

Defense attorney Bill Nettles said the request was premature, and that Schallenberger was competent to help in his defense.

Prosecutors want Schallenberger, currently at Chesterfield County jail, moved to a federal facility because they think he may try to commit suicide. His journal writings have become increasingly violent over the past year, prosecutor Rose Mary Parham said.

An agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives testified that the teen told a sheriff he wanted to die after his arrest.

"He said death was better than life," Craig Townsend said. "He told the sheriff he wanted to die and go to heaven and once he got there, he wanted to kill Jesus."

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photo: Ryan Schallenberger, 18, is cooperating with the bomb plot investigation, police say (AP Photo/Via Chesterfield County Sheriff's Dept)