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Beaten teen imprisoned for two years escapes...

Florida deputies arrested a woman Tuesday and her boyfriend on Thursday on charges of aggravated child abuse and false imprisonment. Tampa Bay ABC Action News story here They say Tailing Gigliotti and Anton Angelo had been keeping a teenage relative locked in a bathroom since 2007.

Investigators say the 17-year-old male went to a neighbor's door asking for help. He had bruises and cuts on his left arm and shoulder, along with cuts and contusions about his head, arms and face.

When deputies arrived, the victim said that he lived with Gigliotti and Angelo, who had been locking him in the bathroom daily since November 2007 and only allowed him out when she was home.

The victim said he had not slept in a regular bed for more than three years and was made to sleep on the floor in the hallway until November 2007, when Gigliotti confined him to sleeping in the bathroom.

The bathroom door was locked from the outside and the window barricaded with plywood so he could not escape.

The victim said that on Sunday, Gigliotti made him strip and tied his hands with packing tape. He said he was beaten with a piece of wood about three feet long and one inch square.

He said he was also beaten with a short section of water hose with metal and plastic ends. The beating caused numerous lacerations and contusions to his head, back, buttocks, left shoulder, forearms and hands.

After the beating, the victim was kept nude and locked inside the bathroom without medical attention for his injuries while Gigliotti went to work.

The power to the bathroom had been turned off at the main panel, leaving him in total darkness. On Monday, he managed to break open the door and go to the neighbor's house for help.

Authorities are still piecing together the boy's history, but they believe Gigliotti is the boy's aunt, and that she brought him from Taiwan to the United States when he was a young child. MSNBC News story here

The teen, whose name was not released because he is an alleged victim of child abuse, told investigators his stepfather was Anthony Gigliotti, who was the Philadelphia Orchestra's principal clarinetist. The stepfather died at age 79 in 2001, before the abuse apparently began.

Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent said the boy seemed to believe the abuse was his fault for minor problems like a messy room. He was also told he'd be deported if he escaped, Nugent said.

The state has placed the boy with a foster family.

"This is just-for the length of time this kid went through this-barbaric," Nugent said.

16-year-old girl found dead in Washington army barracks...

Fort Lewis is reviewing its access policies to the installation as well as barracks visitors policies after two 16-year-old girls were found unconscious in a barracks early Sunday morning. Seattle Post-Intelligencer story here

One girl, who students at Lakes High School said was a sophomore dating a Fort Lewis soldier living on post, was pronounced dead at the scene by a Madigan Army Medical Center doctor.

The other girl remained hospitalized at Madigan Army Medical Center Tuesday in stable condition.

A cause of death will not be known pending the outcome of autopsy tests, which could take some time, Fort Lewis officials said. The victim's identity has not been released.

The incident begged questions from the surrounding community about not only the issue of minors on post, but Fort Lewis's overall security.

"My question is how is security on the base, really," said Charlie Parrez, a bartender who works at a lounge outside the post that is popular with soldiers. "How did two minors get onto Fort Lewis and then get into a barracks?" Parrez said.

Business people outside the post say it is not uncommon for them to see a girl climbing into the trunk of a soldier's car in a parking lot before driving onto the post.

In other news...

As the search for Haleigh Cummings enters its eighth day, authorities are following up on a tip disputing the story of the 17-year-old girlfriend in the case, MyFOXOrlando.com reported. Fox News story here Investigators on Wednesday told the station that they're looking into a report that Misty Croslin, the girlfriend of Haleigh's father Ronald Cummings, was not home when the girl disappeared last Tuesday. The tip is one of 1,200 leads pouring in. The sheriff's office dispatch center is overloaded, and callers are now being referred to Crime Stoppers, Captain Dick Schauland said in a Wednesday news conference, adding that investigators are looking into the report. "We're not prepared to release information about what we're following up on because we're concerned about the safety of this child," Captain Schauland said. Croslin has told different stories to police and the media about the timing of her discovery that Haleigh was gone and where she and the child were in the mobile home the night the little girl vanished. Captain Steve Rose of the Putnam County Sheriff's Office said Tuesday that police are focusing on the timeline Croslin has given them in the case. "We're still working on the timeline, but we're not going to divulge [specifics] at this time," he said. "We feel pretty confident about when the girlfriend last saw Haleigh. That's the timeline we're focusing on." For more on this story see vol7_iss11.

Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski lost a bid on Tuesday to dismiss his 30-year-old conviction for having sex with a minor when a Los Angeles judge refused to consider the request as long as the filmmaker was still a fugitive. Reuters News story here But Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza said he would be willing to reconsider his decision if Polanski, who fled the United States for France in 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with an underage girl, returned to a Los Angeles courtroom by May 7. The 75-year-old director of such films as "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown," has tried to have his guilty plea thrown out on claims that the now-dead judge in the case was improperly coached by a prosecutor. Prosecutors have long maintained that Polanski has no standing to reopen his case while he is a fugitive and Espinoza agreed. But the judge gave Polanski a small victory by suggesting in court that the filmmaker's claims could have merit. "It is hard to contest that some of the conduct portrayed in film on that documentary was misconduct," Espinoza said. Polanski was originally indicted on six charges, including rape, for having sex with a 13-year-old girl after plying her with champagne and drugs. He insisted the sex was consensual but pleaded guilty to a single count of having sex with a minor, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Federal investigators have joined the search for an Arkansas boy who vanished nearly a week ago, and are asking for the public to come forward with any information related to the case. Fox News story here FBI officials have exhausted almost all their leads in the search for 3-year-old Dominick Wesley Arceneaux, whose mother reported him missing from the backyard of their home. An FBI spokesman in Washington told FOX News that they have members from their Child Abduction Rapid Deployment (CARD) Teams in the region. According to the FBI, these teams usually deal with "non-family child abductions, ransom child abductions, and mysterious disappearances of children."

A Maine man with a history of sexual assaults on teenage boys was ordered held by a federal judge yesterday as a sexually dangerous person, making him the first person in the country to be successfully committed by a federal court, according to US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan's office. Boston Globe news story here Jeffrey Shields, a 47-year-old from Bath, was committed under the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, the first law that allows federal commitment for sexually dangerous offenders. US Judge Patti B. Saris issued her ruling after a 10-day trial in September that showed Shields had groped teenage boys on multiple occasions and that he had suffered sexual abuse himself as a child. The judge's ruling means Shields will be held indefinitely under the jurisdiction of the US attorney general's office and receive sexual offender treatment. Once he has undergone treatment, he can petition the court to prove he is no longer a risk to reoffend. Where Shields will be held has yet to be determined.

ABCNews has a piece on extreme childhood phobias. ABC news story here By definition, a phobia is an extreme, life-disrupting fear, but experts say a phobia in a child can pose special challenges that make them harder to detect and perhaps more detrimental. Donna Pincus, a clinical psychologist and director of the Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program at Boston University, said at least part of this fear may be ingrained in the human psyche. Pincus estimated about 2 to 4 percent of children have a clinical level of fear that would warrant treatment.

Yielding to pressure from its users and privacy advocates, Facebook Inc. Tuesday night backed away from controversial changes to its terms of use that some had decried as giving the social network too much leeway with users' personal information. Wall Street Journal story here Just a day after standing by the revisions, the company said it would scrap the new policy and return to its previous terms of service in a notice to its 175 million users on its Web site. The retreat comes after users and privacy professionals raised concerns about changes the company made to its terms of service a few weeks ago but that drew fresh attention from some blogs over the weekend. In particular, Facebook's new policy said that its right to use and modify a users' content did not automatically expire if the user removed the information from the site. Privacy advocates expressed concern that the terms gave Facebook too broad a right over a users' information, going beyond the terms established by other social media sites. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg initially defended the changes in a blog post Monday, saying they were designed merely to clarify issues the old policy didn't adequately address. In particular, Facebook wanted to reflect the fact that content users remove from the site continues to exist if they shared it with other Facebook members. For more details on the content of the changes made see Washington Post blog here.

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