News of Doom 2.0

A Brooklyn mother killed her 1-year-old son by squeezing his chest until his ribs broke and then throwing him into his crib, police said last night.

Latifa Bunch, 25, was charged with murder yesterday in the horrific beating death of her son Joziah on Wednesday.

Bunch, who lost custody of her two other children, allegedly brutalized the boy in her Crown Heights apartment, then left him with her 22-year-old boyfriend to pick up a paycheck.

A 26-year-old woman was arrested on charges that she had sex with a 12-year-old boy while they were both living at a domestic violence shelter.

The arrest earlier this month came nearly two months after Tucson police received a report from the boy's mother that a fellow resident at the Brewster Center Domestic Violence Services kissed and had sexual intercourse with her son, according to a police report.

The boy had been staying with his mother at the shelter for about a week when his mother left him Oct. 29 in the care of another resident while she went out, said Tucson police Detective Monica Prieto of the child sexual abuse unit.

That night, the boy and Veronica Bullock were seen kissing on the shelter's playground, the police report said.

The witness told the boy's mother about the kiss and she confronted her son, Prieto said.
According to the police report, the boy told his mother that he did kiss Bullock and that they had sex a few days earlier in the tunnel slide in the shelter's playground.

A Concord man was arrested Christmas Day and accused of abusing his 2-month-old daughter.

According to police reports, the childâ??s mother, Saudi Zamor, called for an ambulance and the baby was taken to Northeast Medical Center. Hospital staff then contacted police.

Patrick Anthony Zamor, 24, has been charged with felony child abuse. He is in the Cabarrus County Jail under a $200,000 bond.

Two other children in the home â?? a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old â?? have been placed in the custody of the Department of Social Services.

"Child abuse is one of the most appalling crimes we see and protecting defenseless children is one of our most important duties," Concord Police Chief Merl Hamilton said. â??Our investigators are to be commended for working together quickly to ensure that the other children in this home are safe and that the father will receive the maximum punishment possible.â??

The infant has life-threatening injuries including a skull fracture and broken arms, legs and ribs. Investigators are still trying to determine exactly what happened to her.

I got a nice dull pair of scissors here with that bastard's name all over 'em.

The body of a nearly decapitated East Harlem woman was found yesterday minutes after she frantically called her mom and said her hotheaded husband was trying to kill her, police and neighbors said.

The panicked mother rushed over to the E. 118th St. apartment, only to discover her daughter lifeless in a pool of blood with so many stab wounds in the neck that her head was almost severed. A bloody kitchen knife lay near the body.

"She's dead! She's dead!" the anguished mom wailed to a 911 operator before collapsing on the sidewalk. Cops identified the victim as Maria Miller, 33, who had three kids of her own and worked as a cashier at a check-cashing outlet.

Armed with a description and a photo, an anti-crime unit from the 25th Precinct picked up the husband, Howard Miller, 47, on 117th St.

Neighbors said the victim had a stormy relationship with her "control freak" husband, and cops said they had come to the couple's home at least twice in the past to investigate "domestic incidents."

Neighbors also said Howard Miller had barged into his wife's workplace yesterday morning and gotten her fired.

But when the mother went in the ground-floor apartment, she found her daughter's body in the living room. A knife that apparently broke from the force of the blow was in the kitchen, cops said.

Miller's young son, who was spared the grisly scene, stood outside, pleading with passersby, "Is my mommy dead? Is my mommy dead?"

A bloodstain could be clearly seen on the white curtains covering the kitchen window.

Just before he was beaten to death, a 3-year-old boy apologized to the woman charged with repeatedly striking him for making noise in the early-morning hours, a neighbor testified at a preliminary hearing yesterday for Alethia McKee.

"I heard, 'You woke me up' and a lot of hitting," said Major Best, a resident of the Tioga apartment building where Quazier Davis was fatally beaten in August.

"The last thing the child said was, 'I apologize for playing with my toys at this hour of the morning,' " Best testified. "He could barely even say it. I was like, 'Somebody's gotta do something.' "

McKee is charged with murder and endangering the welfare of a child. At yesterday's hearing, Municipal Court Judge Nazario Jimenez Jr. ordered her held over for arraignment Jan. 18.

McKee, 26, who also goes by the name Aulexus Wingate, was a friend of the Davis family who regularly cared for Quazier. The two were so close that the boy called her "Grandma."

Prosecutors said that about 4 a.m. Aug. 23, McKee became furious at Quazier for playing with his toys. They said she began berating the child and struck him with such force that it awakened Best, who lived two doors down the hall.

Best called police, and two officers soon arrived to investigate the disturbance. After entering McKee's apartment, they asked her about the noise.

She explained that her screams were the result of loud sex with her boyfriend, who was also Quazier's maternal grandfather. The officers checked on the boy, who was sitting in a bathtub and appeared fine.

"The mortal wound to the child was internal, and he was sitting upright in the tub with his back to the officers," who could not see any bruising, Assistant District Attorney John Carle said after the hearing.

The officers had received a report of a woman screaming and knew nothing about the child beating, Carle said.

Shortly before 11 the next morning, paramedics were called to a playground at 20th and Estaugh Streets, where Quazier was found limp and unresponsive on the ground.

McKee told police the boy had injured himself in a fall off the jungle gym. But witnesses maintained Quazier had not been playing there, and the playground had padded turf to prevent serious injuries.

An autopsy later revealed that Quazier died from multiple blunt injuries that ruptured his liver and caused abdominal hemorrhaging. In a later interview, Detective Ramon Carrasquillo asked McKee whether she had hit the boy.

"Yes," McKee answered in a statement Carasquillo read aloud in court. "I whipped his ass."

A woman who told police her 2-year-old autistic nephew was abducted has been accused of causing his death by failing to get him medical help and then dumping his body in the Ohio River.

Authorities searched the river at Huntington on Tuesday for the body of Hevin Dakota Jenkins, State Police 1st Sgt. A.L. Cummings said.

The boy's aunt, Tonya Sloan, and her boyfriend, Anthony Milam, were both charged with a count of murder involving the failure to render medical aid to a child.

They were arrested Monday night, hours after she reported that her car had been stolen from the parking lot of a convenience store in Winfield with the boy in the back seat. About 25 minutes after her report, police found the car at a nearby parking lot behind Putnam General Hospital.

The boy had a seizure or other medical emergency at Sloan's home on Dec. 15 and she and Milam allegedly did nothing to help him, according to the criminal complaint. It did not give details.

A Vassalboro man who allegedly poured gasoline around the house and onto two people late Sunday morning, starting a fire that burned the family home, apparently got angry when he was told he should not clean his chain saw in the house, police said Monday.

Kenneth Knox, 48, is being held at Kennebec County Jail in Augusta on $250,000 cash bail. Knox will be arraigned in Waterville District Court today on charges of attempted murder, arson, assault and refusing to submit to arrest.

Sheriff Everett B. Flannery Jr. said Knox's brother-in-law, Timothy Barrett, 57, told Knox to clean the chain saw outside the home on 117 Main St.

Flannery said Knox pulled a coaxial cable out of the wall and began whipping Barrett with it and chasing him around while carrying an ax, before he threw gasoline on the wood stove.

Joan Knox-Barrett, 58, Knox's sister and Barrett's wife, suffered minor burns and was treated on site, Flannery said. Neither Knox nor Barrett suffered injuries. The family dog was killed, he said.

A man accused of using poison to kill his three young children told police he "didn't want the kids to suffer through the divorce," according to court papers filed Thursday.

Jim Junior Nice, 33, was charged Thursday with three counts of first-degree murder. He was ordered held without bail pending a preliminary hearing.

Nice admitted the killings after he was taken into custody, and "appeared despondent over his recent divorce," according to a police affidavit.

He also told police he had taken medications in an attempt to kill himself, the affidavit said.

Fatally poisoned were 6-year-old twins, Justin and Spencer, and a 2-year-old girl, Raquel Anna.

Police discovered the children's bodies Wednesday morning, after someone called the department to request that officers check on Jim Nice, who had failed to show up for work.

Nice answered the door when the officers knocked. When asked if he was OK, the man "hung his head, put his hand over his mouth, and shook his head no and replied, 'No I'm not,'" the affidavit said.

Nice opened the door wider, fell to the ground and began mumbling. Officers then spotted the three bodies lying on the living room floor.

Authorities said a 13-year-old Arkansas boy was exposed to HIV when he was allegedly raped by a 42-year-old woman in his own home.

When they arrived they found two men arguing with a woman named Donna Sue Mars. However, during subsequent interviews, police said one of the men said Mars had sex with his 13-year-old son, Fort Smith, Ark., television station KHBS reported.

Officers confirmed that the boy said Mars forced him to have oral sex.

They later discovered she is infected with HIV, and it's a crime for somebody infected with the virus to expose someone else knowingly.

Mars' relationship to the boy is unknown. However, police said the age difference between her and the alleged victim is enough to charge her with rape.

"The woman was indicating that the juvenile was a consenting member, and the juvenile was indicating he was not -- that she somewhat forced herself on him," said Benton County deputy Doug Gay.

Police said the woman was charged with rape and with exposing another person to HIV, which is also a felony. If convicted, she could face a life sentence. Mars is out of jail on $25,000 bond.

Home for Christmas after nearly a year in the Middle East, Navy Reservist Paul Berkley was making up for lost time with his family.

He arrived Wednesday, in time to hear his 18-year-old son, Zeke, sing the national anthem with his high school chorus. On Friday, he and 16-year-old stepdaughter Becky ate pizza, watched movies and danced.

By Sunday, the 46-year-old sailor was dead, shot once in the head during a walk in the park with his wife, Monique. She now stands charged with his slaying, along with two men -- her alleged teenage lover and her stepdaughter's boyfriend.

Monique Berkley, 26, was ordered jailed without bond. Andrew Canty, the man who moved in with her during her husband's deployment, and Latwon Johnson, both 18, also were denied bond. They were in the process of being assigned public defenders.

The shooting occurred early Sunday morning, four days after Berkley returned from Bahrain for Christmas break.

A breathless Monique Berkley, bleeding from a gunshot wound to her left shoulder, called for help on her cell phone at 2:57 a.m., saying the couple had been attacked by two unseen men. Paul Berkley's gurgling, tortured breathing could clearly be heard on a 15-minute 911 tape.

Her screams led police down a wooded path, where they found her bent over her husband, who died in a hospital later that day.

Police would not release details of the case. But a picture is emerging of a marriage on the rocks.

A 4-year-old boy fatally shot himself in the head with a gun he found at home in a bedroom closet, authorities said.

Jovan Mitchell was playing with his 5-year-old cousin Sunday when he shot himself with the 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, Hillsborough County sheriff's investigators said.

Investigators on Monday were still trying to determine who owned the gun and how the child got access to it, sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter said. She would not discuss details.

A 9-year-old girl accidentally shot and killed her 13-year-old brother while playing with a semiautomatic handgun that she found in her parents' bedroom, according to police in this Chicago suburb.

The shooting was unintentional, but the parents might face charges for not having a trigger lock on the weapon, authorities said.

Authorities said the mother of the children had left the house for about a half-hour to visit a sick relative and the father was at work Friday when the children found the loaded, unlocked .380-caliber pistol on a bookshelf built into a headboard.

A short time later, while playing with her brother, the 4th-grade girl apparently pulled the trigger accidentally, striking him once in the chest. He died a short time later at a hospital.

Although it is legal to possess a handgun in Riverdale, police said no one in the house had the proper state firearm owner's identification card.

West First Avenue in West Deptford had been a relatively quiet dead-end street until about two years ago.

Then one day a flatbed truck with a steel shipping container rolled up the block, stopped at a blue rancher, and deposited the box in the backyard.

Neighbors thought Jerome L. Wigmore Jr., a drywall contractor who lived there with his wife, Betty, and mother-in-law, Alice Boozer, was using the container to store his work equipment.

"I thought, 'Hey, that's a pretty good idea for a tool shed,' " Kenneth Koen said last week. "I didn't know it was going to end up being a chamber of horrors."

According to police, Wigmore held at least two women captive in the padlocked container, which he had turned into living quarters complete with air-conditioning units.

The women were kept on a raised platform bed in a secret back compartment in the container, guarded by a pit bull named Snow, police said.

"When he left, he locked the women inside so they couldn't get out," West Deptford Police Chief James Mehaffey said in an interview this month. "They couldn't get down off the bed to get out. If they got down, the dog got them."

During days-long captivity, Wigmore sexually assaulted and tortured his victims, burning one woman's leg with a blowtorch and punching her in the chest in July, according to prosecutors and police.

Boozer, who owns the house, said that she saw her son-in-law with small "blowtorch canisters" but that he told her they were for a heater in the container. Although Boozer acknowledged that Wigmore - who has a history of felony convictions and had become a white supremacist in prison - could be violent at times, she said that she was not quite convinced he was capable of torturing women and that she was suspicious of their stories.

Wigmore, 36, is charged with aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping and criminal restraint, in addition to drug offenses for allegedly selling cocaine out of the windowless 8-by-20-foot gray cargo box.

The unidentified victims are black women whom Wigmore picked up off Camden's streets, police said.

Relatives and neighbors described Wigmore as a menacing presence who zoomed up and down the block on a dirt bike with a plate that read "666" - a number associated with the devil - and yelled racial slurs at black children in the neighborhood.

Neighbors nicknamed him "Psycho Jerry" or referred to him simply as "the Menace." He beat his dog with his fist and accused neighbors of "spying" on him, residents said. He recently "head-butted" Boozer, giving his 75-year-old mother-in-law a black eye, Mehaffey said. By all accounts, Wigmore was, as one person on the block put it, "the neighborhood terrorist."

His head is shaved bald; his forearms and the back of his neck are adorned with swastika tattoos. He once hung a Nazi flag from the doorway of the container and used a Confederate flag as a curtain in a front bedroom window.

On Oct. 27, a police SWAT team broke into the container with a bolt cutter during a drug bust and found a 27-year-old Camden woman inside. Police said that the woman, whom they did not expect to find, had been in the steel box for nearly two weeks.

Detectives arrested Wigmore after a two-month investigation. During the October raid, police found a "substantial" amount of drugs inside the container, as well as the captive woman.

Like Boozer, neighbors said they thought the women they saw entering the container were free to leave, though there were signs suggesting otherwise.

In two incidents, during the summer or early fall, Koen said, half-dressed women came "screaming" from Wigmore's property, ranting about an attack dog and waking neighbors in the middle of the night.

One woman ran by Koen's house carrying her bra and underpants. She dropped the underpants on Koen's driveway apron, he said.

"The next day, I picked them up with a stick and threw them back on Jerry's property," Koen said.

Ann Booth, who lives next door to Wigmore, said she, too, heard a woman screaming one night when the weather was warm and her windows were open.

"My husband and I both sat straight up in the bed," Booth said. Lope said she and her husband were jolted awake about 5:30 one October morning by a woman, dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, yelling on their front lawn.

"She was screaming, 'Somebody help me. He's trying to hurt me. He's trying to sic the dog on me,' " Lope recalled.

Lope's husband called the police, but the woman took off before they arrived, she said.

Mehaffey said police responded at least once to a report of a woman screaming - the incident was just one of an assortment of 911 calls and complaints involving Wigmore.

After Wigmore's arrest, a 31-year-old woman from Monroe Township came forward and told police that he had imprisoned her in the container for a few days in mid-July.

During a bail hearing last month, Assistant Prosecutor Audrey Curwin said Wigmore had picked up the woman in Camden. She went willingly into his car. Once she was inside, he knocked her out with a punch, Curwin said, and she woke up in the container. He punched her in the chest and burned her twice with a blowtorch, then blindfolded her and dropped her off on a street somewhere, Curwin said.

A few days after Wigmore's arrest, Boozer posted $75,000 bail for him, putting $8,000 on her credit card and using her house as collateral, though police rearrested him hours after his release on new charges. Boozer said she did it because he threatened her daughter during phone calls from jail and she feared what would happen if she didn't.