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Man charged with murder after throwing street sign www.privateofficer.com
Jonathan Hadley, 19, is charged with murder in connection with the death of a driver struck by a thrown street sign on Baldwin County 55 on Saturday.Jonathan Hadley, 19, was charged with murder in connection with the death of a driver killed when a street sign was thrown through his windshield as he was driving on Baldwin County 55, police said today.
Investigators believe that after an argument in a home in the Sweet Gum subdivision, Hadley removed a sign and threw it at a passing car at about 2 a.m Saturday, Cpl. Steve Smith, Alabama State Troopers spokesman, said. The driver, who has not been positively identified, was hit in the face and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Smith said troopers and ABI investigators do not believe that the two men knew each other. “This guy was just riding down the road minding his own business and somebody threw a sign at his car and he died,” Smith said of the victim.
Hadley of Foley was arrested Saturday night and was being held today in the Baldwin County Corrections Center with his bail set at $100,000, according to jail records.
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Ala teacher arrested for being drunk in class www.privateofficer.com
Ala teacher arrested for being drunk in class http://www.privateofficer.com
A Foley Middle School teacher resigned Tuesday after she was charged with being intoxicated during school hours Friday, school officials said.
Barbara Riley-Grissom, 55, was arrested on a public intoxication charge by Foley Police at the school at 3:30 p.m. Friday, according to a police report.
Baldwin County Public Schools spokesman Terry Wilhite said a co-worker noticed that the seventh-grade English teacher appeared to be stumbling, and the co-worker alerted an administrator.
Wilhite said Riley-Grissom was removed from the classroom when school leadership was informed that she might be intoxicated. She was arrested after students were released for the day, according to the police report.
In January 2003, Riley-Grissom’s husband, Andrew L. Riley, drowned while fishing near Fort Morgan.
Riley lost his footing, and the surf pulled him out into the Gulf of Mexico, according to Coast Guard officials.
Riley-Grissom, a Paris, Ill., native, was placed on administrative leave immediately following the arrest and turned in her resignation Tuesday morning, Wilhite said.
“We do not tolerate drugs or alcohol on our campuses,” Wilhite said.
According to school officials, an assistant principal or another administrator will handle Riley-Grissom’s class until a substitute is found.
Riley-Grissom was hired to teach math at Foley Middle in 2000 and began teaching English in 2002, according to school system records.
Before moving to southern Alabama, the Summerdale resident taught in Decatur, Ill., for more than a decade, Wilhite said, citing her personnel record.
Riley-Grissom is the third Baldwin County educator in recent weeks to be placed on administrative leave.
A 34-year-old male teacher at Central Baldwin Middle is under investigation by Robertsdale Police for allegedly sending an inappropriate text message to a 13-year-old female student, and Lance Harbison at Daphne High resigned after district records showed he tried to view inappropriate material on a school computer after hours.
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Local police stepping up internet predator hunts www.privateofficer.com
Local police stepping up internet predator hunts http://www.privateofficer.com
mobile press register
Cpl. Eric Waldrep logs onto the Internet, sets up his online profile as a teenage girl, and waits for predators to take the bait.
They don’t take long.
Quickly, Waldrep finds himself hit with the same query, over and over: ASL — age, sex, location.
Waldrep is an undercover detective with the Foley police, and his turf is the World Wide Web. He’s one of 11 police officers and sheriff’s deputies from southwest Alabama assigned to a task force established this past summer by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Mobile.
He and the others spend their days and nights looking for adults who would have sex with children.
“I wish I could say there’s down time, but there’s not,” said Waldrep, a five-year veteran of the Foley force who previously worked for law enforcement agencies in north Alabama. “It’s mind-blowing.”
The Project Safe Childhood Task Force is informally known as Operation Little Red Riding Hood.
Working from an undisclosed location, and trained by the federal government, the investigators build cases that end up in U.S. District Court. Their efforts have spawned three indictments so far.
A corrections officer from Madison County pleaded guilty last month to traveling to Baldwin County to have sex with a minor, while another man was found guilty of a pair of charges Friday. A third man faces trial in January.
Federal spokesmen and local police say that the task force has helped battle a problem that is far too large for a single local agency. The investigators, serving together part time, can draw on vast federal resources, even benefiting from government experts who scour seized computers.
Even so, prosecutors still find themselves making choices about which suspects pose the greatest threats.
“We’re having to do more triage now just because of the number of cases,” said Maria Murphy, the criminal division chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “If we had 20 lawyers and 100 investigators, we could keep them busy full time.”
Cpl. Jason Hall, a Baldwin County deputy who served on the task force until his recent promotion, said he had no idea what he was in for when he volunteered.
It was routine for him to be contacted by 50 predators in a shift, with 35 of them wanting to masturbate for him in front of a Web camera, he said.
“I was shocked, absolutely stunned,” Hall said. “Any normal citizen who could sit in front of that computer and see what we see would be horrified. We’ll get online and have eight conversations going at once, four of them with Webcams.”
Investigators said the work can tear emotionally at an officer in a way that burglary or robbery cases do not. That’s one of the reasons why task force leaders like the investigators working together.
“You cannot be bombarded by these images without being affected by it,” said Tommy Loftis, who coordinates task force members on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Mobile Deputy Police Chief James Barber said his department hopes to start its own full-time childhood crimes unit. Until now, he said, police mainly opened investigations when a predator made contact with an actual child.
“The task force is a proactive unit,” he said. “They’re actually going after predators before they can do anything.”
Barber compared the operation to an old-fashioned sting. For example, he said, police have long sent undercover officers to serve as bait to capture purse snatchers.
Baldwin Sheriff Huey “Hoss” Mack Jr. said he worries that his growing county may be especially vulnerable to pedophiles because so many families with young children come for vacations.
He said he appreciates the commitment to prosecute cases in federal court, since some state judges have ruled that Alabama law requires an actual victim, and not simply an undercover officer pretending to be a teen.
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Alabama Pharmacist Charged In Theft Of Drugs www.privateofficer.com
Alabama Pharmacist Charged In Theft Of Drugs http://www.privateofficer.com
al.com
A pharmacist has been charged with stealing thousands of prescription pills from Foley’s South Baldwin Regional Medical Center, where he worked.
Paul R. Lovelace, 56, of Fairhope was charged Thursday with first-degree theft of property. Lovelace is a pharmacist who has sometimes worked at several area drugstores, deputies said.
The Baldwin County Sher iff’s Office was contacted two weeks ago by administrators at the Foley hospital, said Capt. Steve Arthur, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman.
Over the course of a year, 8,940 prescription and nonprescription pills had disappeared from the Foley hospital’s pharmacy, Arthur said. The missing pills were of more than 35 varieties, including the commonly abused painkiller hydrocodone and the anti-anxiety drug alprazolam, known by the brand names Lortab and Xanax, Arthur said.
Investigators connected Lovelace to the pill thefts and obtained arrest and search warrants this week, he said.
Deputies arrived at Lovelace’s Gayfer Avenue apart ment at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday. They knocked, but Lovelace did not come to the door, Arthur said.
“The deputies began surveillance of the apartment. Mr. Lovelace left the apartment about 30 minutes later and got in his car,” Arthur said. The deputies followed him for a while on U.S. 98, then pulled him over and arrested him beside the road, Arthur said.
Investigators then searched Lovelace’s home, where they discovered about 300 pills, Arthur said.
First-degree theft of prop erty is a Class B felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Arthur said that, as the investigation continues, additional charges may be filed.
“We know he formerly worked at Thomas Hospital and has done part-time work at several local pharmacies, so we are looking into whether thefts may have taken place in those places as well,” Arthur said.
Lovelace was taken to the Baldwin County Corrections Center on Thursday afternoon. He was released Thursday night on $7,500 bond, according to jail officials.
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Cheerleading president arrested for stealing funds www.privateofficer.com
Cheerleading president arrested for stealing funds www.privateofficer.com
FOLEY Al. Dec. 13, 2007 — The president of the Foley Youth Cheerleading Association was booked Tuesday on charges that she stole thousands of dollars from the organization, according to investigators.
Brandy Virginia Flowers, 29, of Elberta, is charged with first-degree theft of property, illegal use of a credit card and illegal possession of a credit card, according to jail records. All of the charges are felonies, said Tony Fuqua, Foley police investigator.
Flowers had been president of the group for about four years. Association members told police that their review of the books indicated that since 2006, about $8,500 had come up missing from the group’s checking account, Fuqua said
They came to us when they noticed discrepancies in the account and discrepancies in what she told different people about the money,” Fuqua said. “They found a lot of discrepancies in the check ledgers.”
He said that Flowers confessed to taking about $4,000 but did not say why she had taken the money.
Police Chief David Wilson said investigators believe Flowers used the group’s ATM card and also forged the names of required co-signers on association checks to take money from the organization’s account.
The association is made up of about 60 girls, ages 9 to 14, who cheer at youth sporting events in the south Baldwin area, and their families, Fuqua said. He said that since discovering the loss of money, the organization has added additional safeguards to protect its funds.
Fuqua said the case will be presented to an upcoming grand jury and additional charges could be filed against Flowers. As of Tuesday, she was being held in the Baldwin County Corrections Center on $7,500 bail, according to jail records
