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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 36 - June 10, 2009 Nevaeh's case becomes top priority for Michigan crime lab...The search for Nevaeh Buchanan officially ended Tuesday as the Michigan State Police crime lab in Northville positively identified the body found last week in a shallow grave as the missing 5-year-old Monroe girl. Detroit Free Press news story here 
DNA testing results concluded that Nevaeh indeed was found by fishermen Thursday beneath a layer of concrete along the River Raisin in Raisinville Township, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office said Tuesday afternoon.
Investigators did not release a cause of death, nor is anyone in custody. The girl disappeared May 24 from her apartment complex. Though Sheriff Tilman Crutchfield said Friday that the girl found near the river likely was Nevaeh, family members held out hope the girl might still be alive. Cathy DeWilde, Nevaeh's great-aunt, said the news devastated her sister Sherry Buchanan, who is Nevaeh's grandmother and her legal custodian. "I knew it, and my husband knew it, but I couldn't get it across to my sister because she raised the baby," said DeWilde, 55, of Monroe. "I was just praying to the Lord that they'd send someone to find the body so we could bring her home." The funeral at noon Saturday is open to the public at Stewart Road Christian Ministries, 1199 Stewart Road, Monroe. Meanwhile, the death has earned the dubious honor of being priority No. 1 for State Police forensic analysts. Captain Michael Thomas, director of the State Police forensic division, said Nevaeh's case leapfrogged thousands of others backlogged for months - hundreds of them homicides - because of its "sensitive nature." "There's someone out there who might have killed a little girl," Thomas said. "She is the top priority." Earlier this weekend, as investigators awaited test results on the child's body found by a southeastern Michigan river, the mother of the missing 5-year-old girl says she was "completely innocent." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525333,00.html Jennifer Buchanan told the Detroit Free Press she "didn't have anything to do with" her daughter's disappearance and doesn't know who would want to harm her child. Buchanan's mother got custody of Nevaeh after Buchanan was found guilty of breaking into homes to support a drug habit. The three were sharing an apartment in Monroe, Michigan. Meanwhile, 5-year-old Nevaeh's mother defended herself Monday night during a contentious interview with CNN's Nancy Grace. Detroit Free Press news story here Jennifer Buchanan, of Monroe, repeated what she told the Free Press for a Sunday story - that she had nothing to do with her daughter's disappearance. Grace grilled Buchanan on exposing her daughters to men she knew to be sex offenders. For more on this story see also vol7_iss35. In other news... 
A decision of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals released today holds, for the first time, that under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure a child victim of sexual assault may testify via closed-circuit television in a civil trial against her attacker. belt.appeal.pdf In Parkhurst v. Tabor, a young girl (through her mother and adoptive father) sued her biological father, Chad Belt, in an Arkansas federal court, alleging that he repeatedly raped her between the ages of 7 and 9. After hearing the evidence, a jury awarded H.P. (as the girl is known in court papers) $250,000 in compensatory damages and $750,000 in punitive damages against Belt. She also brought an action against local prosecutors premised on the Equal Protection clause, because those prosecutors refused to pursue a criminal case against Belt due to a policy of treating incestuous rapes less seriously than other sexual assaults. That part of her claims, however, was dismissed by the district court. Both Belt and H.P. appealed. The gist of Belt's appeal was that his right to due process was violated because the young H.P. was allowed to testify via closed-circuit T.V.
Queen Latifah has spoken for the first time about being a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Fox News story here The rapper-turned-actress says a teenage babysitter preyed upon her, leaving her unable to form relationships as an adult. Latifah, 39, told Essence magazine: "He violated me. "I never told anybody. I just buried it as deeply as I could and kept people at an arm's length never really let a person get too close to me. "I could have been married years ago, but I had a commitment issue."
NBC News video reports new information about sleep- deprived teens being more suicidal. MSNBC News video story here For more on teen suicide issues see eGuide/teen suicide. 
The jury weighing the fate of the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller has started the third day of deliberations without reaching a verdict in the closely watched parental kidnapping trial. On Monday, the Suffolk Superior Court jury, at its request, received a laptop in the morning to play a DVD of 14 minutes of an interview the defendant gave to authorities after his arrest last summer in Baltimore. Boston Globe story here The jury also will be able to listen to another exhibit -a 911 call made by Howard Yaffe, a clinical social worker who was supervising Rockefeller's visit with his 7-year-old daughter, Reigh, when the defendant abducted her on a Back Bay street. "A daughter was just kidnapped by her father," Yaffe said in a composed voice, in a tape recording of the 911 call played for the jury shortly after the trial started two weeks ago. "I was walking down the street. He knocked me over and ran off in the car." For more on this story see vol7_iss35.
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