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Dayton security officer shot and killed www.privateofficer.com
By: Rick McCann
PRIVATE OFFICER NEWS NETWORK
http://www.privateofficer.com
Police say that they responded to a shooting call at the United Foods located at 2141N. Main St Friday night and found that a security officer had been shot.
Police say that they have little information on the shooting but it appears that the security officer was shot and killed outside the store in the parking lot near the front entrance of the store.
Investigators are not sure if there was a confrontation or if someone that the guard knew shot him because of a personal dispute.
Family members have identified the deceased security officer as 41-year-old Charlie Conklin.
Officers are still investigating a motive, and said the gunmen never entered the store.
If you have any information, call crime stoppers at 222-7867.
Security officer injured, students arrested www.privateofficer.com
Rockford School District spokesman Mark Bonne said the after-school fight started between two eighth-grade boys while they were waiting to board their bus.
“Security tried to break up the fight, and she got hit in the face,” Bonne said. “Both juveniles were arrested and taken to the Winnebago County Juvenile Detention Center.”
The charges were not available.
The condition of the security officer was not available, but “One tooth was knocked out,” Bonne said. He also confirmed the officer is being examined at the hospital for a possible broken jaw.
The incident occurred just three days after Superintendent LaVonne Sheffield announced at Tuesday’s School Board meeting that principals at Auburn High School and West Middle School have been reassigned. She also said RESA and Guilford High School have been put “on notice” for possible leadership changes as well.
Sheffield said the changes were made because of academic performance and “incivility among students and staff.”
Sheffield also announced at Tuesday’s board meeting: “We are sweeping the halls in our high schools and middle schools and sending home the handful of chronic truants who roam the building and take others off task. Those students will receive a one-way bus ride and (will be) barred from the building until they attend a re-entry meeting accompanied by a parent.”
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday she made good on that promise.
Over those three days, 128 students were rounded up between the three schools, Bonne said.
Security officer shot in Chattanooga www.privateofficer.com
By: Rick McCann
Private Officer News Network
http://www.privateofficer.com
Police officers were called to a shooting late Friday night and found that a security officer had been shot in a drive-by shooting incident.
According to city police,this happened while the guard, Robert Underwood, was on duty at the city gas pumps at the corner of Park Avenue and E 12th Street.
Underwood told investigators that a white vehicle occupied by two black males and one white male drove up to him around 12:30 a.m. Saturday. The white male passenger then leaned over and shot him and the vehicle pulled off and sped away.
Police said that they have no motive in the shooting and have made no arrests and have no suspects.
Underwood is expected to recover after treatment at Erlanger.
If you have information, it could lead to a $1,000 reward. Call Crime Stoppers at 423-698-3333. Your call can be confidential. Crime Stoppers can assign you a “number” to receive your reward cash so that no one will ever know your name.
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School security guard gets prison for rape of student www.privateofficer.com
John R. Clark, 47, also must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and have 10 years supervision once he is released from prison.
During that time, Kenosha County Circuit Judge Wilbur W. Warren III said, Clark may not contact his victim or her family.
“I’m very, very, very sorry about this. This is my fault. I take responsibility,” Clark said and wept. “…I will have to live with myself for what I have done. Parents and students trusted me. I let them all down.”
Clark, who got credit for nearly 16 months already served, pleaded guilty in September to child enticement and second-degree sexual assault of a child. He faced 40 years in prison.
The victim’s father said no sentence could have been harsh enough for a man who not only violated his then 15-year-old daughter, but also violated the public trust through his position as a school security guard.
“He took a girl who trusted him and physically and sexually abused her, then threatened her family,” the father said. “…He has taken a part of our daughter that can never be replaced.”
The girl, now 16, said she is sickened by flashbacks of her contact with Clark and has been called a “liar” by classmates reluctant to believe her allegations.
“Now everyone knows me as the girl who was sexually assaulted by John Clark,” she said.
The girl said she considered suicide as the criminal case went on and was hospitalized.
Ultimately, she chose to live and try to learn to deal with the trauma of the assaults.
“If I take my life, he would end up winning,” she said.
Defense attorney Loren Keating echoed Clark’s willingness to take responsibility, explaining that Clark did not do so sooner because he could not “get past” assertions that he had threatened the girl with violence; Clark was adamant that no threats were made, Keating said.
Clark was charged in September 2008.
He was accused of assaulting the girl, who was 15 at the time, outside of school five times between April and May 2008.
He also reportedly threatened to kill the student’s family and a friend if she told anyone about their sexual contact.
The abuses reportedly started after the girl added Clark as a friend on the social networking Web site MySpace “as a kind of joke,” the criminal complaint indicates.
Clark reportedly sent the girl provocative messages, whispered in her ear and put snacks in her locker.
It apparently was not the first time Clark had crossed the line with a student, prosecutor Michael Graveley said.
In 2007, another female student reported that Clark had been sexually inappropriate in speaking and dealing with her.
Clark was disciplined in January 2008 and ordered not to talk to female students, Graveley said.
Within three months, the contact with the 15-year-old student began.
Keating cited a history of mental illness, which included electroshock therapy, as well as Clark’s history of drug and alcohol abuse and classification as a “slow learner” as a child in explaining Clark’s mindset.
The personal history did not excuse Clark’s behavior, but helped explain how Clark “left his own body, left his own personality” and crossed the line with a student, Keating said.
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College student comes to the aid of fallen officer www.privateofficer.com
Taylor Kowalski was running late to class. The Eastlake senior and Running Start student at Bellevue College had overset her alarm clock and was hustling to her early morning English class. Kowalski was kicking herself for being late for the first time in over five weeks, an accomplishment a non-morning person could be proud of.
Suddenly her focus shifted to concern and then action as she witnessed the collapse of campus police officer James McClung at around 6:40 a.m. Nov. 7.
Wearing a thick yellow jacket that read Security across the back, McClung stopped in his tracks, yelled and then fell to the ground, not moving.
Kowalski jumped into action and ran to the man laying unconscious on the cold cement.
“When I heard the yell, it didn’t register at first that it came from him,” Kowalski said. “I thought maybe someone had hit him and run off. I knew something was wrong so I instinctively ran to him.”
When Kowalski reached McClung, she quickly turned him over so he could breath and dialed 9-1-1. She held McClung’s hand and spoke to him as she described his condition to the paramedics on the phone and attempted to give them directions to her location.
“All I could think was if this was me, I would want someone near me, talking me through it whether I could hear them or not,” she said. “I was trying to give the paramedics our location all while trying to talk to talk calmly to (McClung). The location we were at on campus was far from the main road and was difficult to describe the exact location.”
Kowalski could see emergency lights flashing in the distance as the paramedics tried to find her.
“I felt like so much time passed. I watched to make sure his chest was moving up and down and I noticed that his hands got really cold, really fast,” she explained. “It’s scary to think if I had been on time that day, no one would have been around to help him. I believe it happened for a reason.”
McClung had spent more than two decades as a Colorado State Trooper and Bellevue College campus cop. The 70 year old was wrapping up his graveyard shift when he collapsed. The family said doctors are still somewhat unsure as to what caused McClung to lose consciousness and fall. He was released from the hospital later that day and is recovering at home, according to his family.
McClung’s wife called Kowalski several days after the incident to thank her for heroic act.
“The feedback that I got from the school and family was that, had I not been there and had not acted so quickly, the man probably would not have lived,” Kowalski said. “I stepped aside when the paramedics arrived and let them do their job. There were quite a few firefighters and medics on the scene and they got out and shook my hand one by one. To be called a hero by the men and women who are everyday heros was a huge honor.”
Kowalski plans to study journalism and, because of this experience, plans to pursue an EMT certification as well.
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Police issue summons to apartments for no security www.privateofficer.com
Jersey City police have issued Paulus Hook Towers a summons carrying a fine of up to $1,200, alleging there was no security guard at the site when Jacqueline Reyes, 27, was killed and her 9-month-old infant was stabbed multiple times on Dec. 8, officials said.“We have lived under fear too long,” said tenant leader Margaret Brown yesterday of security at the 23-story, 310-unit building at 100 Montgomery St. “I’m so appreciative of the concern. I’m just so sorry because we have been sending management letters and they totally ignored them.”
Police responded to the building around noon on Dec. 8 after Reyes was found stabbed to death in her ninth-floor apartment. Beside her was her son Ivan Reyes Jr., who was stabbed nearly a dozen times.
Police tried to contact building security but could find no guard, and that led to an investigation and the summons issued yesterday, police spokesman Stan Eason said.
Eason said police will issue an additional summons on each day there is a similar violation in the building.
A 1989 city ordinance requires a uniformed guard to be present round-the-clock, seven days a week, in any building with more than 100 apartments. Paulus Hook Towers has more than 300 units.
Martey Williams, 41, has been charged in the deadly assault and surveillance video shows he entered the building at about 8 a.m. on Dec. 8, officials said. Management told residents he was admitted by a resident.
“This is more than a wake-up call, and we have to accomplish something because enough is enough,” said Hector Gutierrez, who was among 150 angry and frightened residents at an emergency tenants meeting Tuesday night.
Also at the meeting was Gloria Martinez Correa, who spent months hospitalized after a man dragged her into a building stairwell and beat her with a metal rod, fracturing her skull. Her attacker was never caught.
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Security officer helps police nab bank robber www.privateofficer.com
By: Rick McCann
Private Officer News Network
http://www.privateofficer.com
A man was arrested Thursday afternoon on suspicion of robbing a bank located inside a grocery store in the Broadmoor area.
Police were notified that a man, later identified as Stephen Templeton, 36, allegedly robbed U.S. Bank inside King Soopers at 815 Cheyenne Meadows Road, according to the Colorado Springs police.
A security officer on duty at the store said that he followed the man out of the store and kept him in sight until police arrived.
Officers took Templeton into custody without incident and he was transported to the county jail.
Templeton has been charged with bank robbery and is being held on an unspecified bond amount pending a court appearance.
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Mall security raids kiosk, confiscates t-shirts www.privateofficer.com
The design was one of three on T-shirts that were confiscated from a kiosk in Town East Mall after complaints. Half an hour after the raid, a half-dozen Pleasant Grove business owners gathered at the Southeast Dallas Chamber of Commerce and celebrated a medium-size victory.
In the center of the room, draped across the back of a chair like a pelt, was one of the vanquished T-shirts:
“Welcome to Pleasant Grove,” it read – below a silkscreen image of a man tossing a body into the trunk of an old Buick.
Like everyone in the room, Pleasant Grove pawnshop owner Joy Vosburg praised the Mesquite mall’s quick action.
“It’s fantastic,” she said. “I don’t think any city should be portrayed like that.”
Vosburg had first spotted the T-shirts during a Monday evening shopping trip.
“It was horrible,” she recalled. “I would have bought them just to get rid of them. But I didn’t want to give them money.”
Instead, she said, she asked the clerk: “How can you sell those?”
“She just looked at me and said, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ “
What’s wrong with it, Vosburg said, is that it perpetuates a violent stereotype of Pleasant Grove – a blue-collar neighborhood in the heart of southeastern Dallas – that the chamber has been working overtime to abolish.
In October, it kicked off a rebranding campaign, including “GroveFest” and “Hands Across the Grove,” when residents linked hands along South Buckner Boulevard.
The chamber will even move out of its old digs above the Diaper Store in a neighborhood strip mall and into the brand-new Eastfield College branch up the road.
“We’re doing so much trying to get Pleasant Grove built back,” Vosburg said. “And then to walk into the mall and see that.”
Vosburg complained about the shirts to the chamber’s chairman the day after she saw them. The chairman complained to mall officials, and that afternoon they told the kiosk vendor to shelve the shirts.
On Wednesday, the T-shirts had been concealed under their more innocuous brethren. A second style that read, “Pleasant Grove. Only the strong survive,” was curtained off behind “World’s Greatest Dad.”
A style that read “Pleasant Grove,” with the L and R transformed into pistols, was also hidden. The clerk refused to sell any shirts to a reporter.
A different clerk was working on Thursday morning when Vosburg returned to the kiosk, having decided it was worth giving $36 to the other side for evidence of the offense.
About an hour after the mall learned of the sale, security and management personnel surrounded the kiosk, riffling through every shelf and peeking behind every hanger.
The clerk, who said she had not known about the warning, mostly ignored the raid. She stared serenely into her till as mall staff filled a cardboard box with the contraband.
“They’ve all been confiscated,” the mall’s community-relations director, Debbie Screws, said afterward.
She said she did not know who designed the shirts, as did the kiosk vendors.
Screws said the kiosk owner could pick up the confiscated shirts later but probably would have to pay a fine.
That’s a light sentence, given Dallas’ history with shirt scandals.
Four years ago, a kiosk vendor was kicked out of Valley View Center for selling a shirt with a nearly identical image – another body in a trunk, in a slightly different style.
“Welcome to Oak Cliff,” it read.
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Former security guard guilty in murder trial www.privateofficer.com
The verdict caps a lengthy legal saga that began when Raymond Lee Jennings first reported finding Michelle O’Keefe’s body during a routine patrol in the parking lot on Feb. 22, 2000. Investigators arrived to find the victim, a student at Antelope Valley College, slumped in the front seat of her electric-blue Mustang, her body riddled with bullets.
Authorities soon grew suspicious of the security guard, but had little physical evidence tying him to the killing. Instead, investigators and prosecutors built a case against Jennings, now 35, based almost solely on circumstantial evidence.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Blake argued that Jennings was betrayed by his own words during a series of statements he gave to detectives and in a deposition in a civil lawsuit brought by the victim’s parents. The prosecutor said that Jennings gave inconsistent accounts about the night of the killing and revealed details that only the killer would know, such as the order of the shots fired.
Jennings, however, insisted he was innocent, and his attorneys noted that the Iraq war veteran had no criminal record. The lawyers said their client was only speculating when he talked to detectives and said he inaccurately described one of the victim’s wounds as a gunshot. Medical experts concluded the injury was caused by a blow to the head.
Jennings is expected to be sentenced to 40 years to life in prison on Jan. 22.
