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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 71 - December 1, 2009 It was a killer family Thanksgiving holiday...There were no less than 5 separate incidents of familicide this Thanksgiving week: A former Missouri city official previously accused of assaulting his wife was charged Monday with capital murder in the shootings of her and their two teenage daughters in eastern Kansas. AP News story here 
James Kraig Kahler, 46, also was charged with one count of attempted first-degree murder in the shooting of his estranged wife's 89-year-old grandmother and one count of aggravated burglary. Authorities suspect he broke into the grandmother's home near Topeka, where the shootings occurred.
During Kahler's first appearance in Osage County District Court, Judge Phillip Fromme set bail at $10 million and scheduled another hearing for December 10. Kahler, who often went by his middle name Kraig, declined to comment as sheriff's deputies escorted him in handcuffs from jail to the courthouse. He had been scheduled to appear in court in Columbia, Missouri on Wednesday on a domestic assault charge stemming from an altercation with his wife in March that led to the loss of his job as director of Columbia's Water & Light Department. Police say a gunman who killed his young son and injured his wife and other son in northern New Jersey was separated from his wife and had a restraining order issued against him. MSNBC News story here Paterson Police Detective Lieutenant Ronald Humphrey had no details Sunday on why the restraining order was issued against Edelmiro Gonzalez, but says the couple separated earlier this year. He says investigators are still searching for a motive in Saturday's shootings. Gonzalez was shot and killed by an off-duty Paterson police officer, Lieutenant Washington Griffin. Gonzalez's 7-year-old son was killed. His wife and 11-year-old son remain hospitalized in critical but stable condition. Authorities in Florida alerted Michigan authorities to be on the lookout Saturday for a man accused of shooting four relatives to death after a Thanksgiving dinner in South Florida. MSNBC News story here The suspect, Paul Michael Merhige, 35, sought a physician in the Detroit area in the past year, Jupiter Police Sergeant Scott Pascarella said, but he was unsure why he needed the doctor. Merhige is believed to be driving a royal blue 2007 Toyota Camry with a rear spoiler and Florida license plate. He is accused of killing including his pregnant sister and her twin sister, as well as his 6-year-old cousin and 79-year-old aunt. There had been "ongoing resentment" in the family, but investigators weren't sure what specifically prompted Thursday's shooting. A South Carolina man fatally shot his wife and stepson on what was to be the boy's 17th birthday Sunday, in Fountain Inn, deputies said. Fox Carolina news story here Dispatchers got a call about a shooting in the 5500 block of Allen Bridge Road at about 4 a.m. Sunday from a man who said he had shot the two. Gentry O'Neal Chapman, 32, of Fountain Inn, told dispatchers he was in his vehicle and leaving his home and was headed to the Fountain Inn Police Department to turn himself in, which he did, police said. He had two other children, ages 8 and 12, that he took with him to the police department, but they were not harmed, police said. Chapman was being held at Laurens County Detention Center. Four people found dead this week in a suburban Chicago home were the victims of a murder-suicide, a coroner said. CNN News story here A man, a woman and two boys were found dead Wednesday in a house in Addison, Illinois, west of Chicago, according to the DuPage County coroner's office. A statement from the coroner's office identified the four as Thomas Mangiantini, 48, his wife Elizabeth, 46, and the couple's two sons, Angelo, 12, and Thomas, 8. The deaths of Elizabeth Mangiantini and the two children were called homicides in the coroner's report. Thomas Mangiantini's manner of death was ruled a suicide, the report said. For more on why some men kill their families, revisit vol5_iss41 and ABC News story here. Report says Irish bishops and police hid abuse... The Roman Catholic Church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of child sex abuse by priests in Dublin, according to a scathing report (full report here) released Thursday. New York Times new story here 
The cover-ups spanned the tenures of four Dublin archbishops and continued through to the mid-1990s and beyond, even after the church was beginning to admit to its failings and had professed that it was confronting abuse by its priests.
But rather than helping the victims, the church was concerned only with "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets," said the 700-page report, prepared by a group appointed by the Irish government and called the Commission of Investigation Into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. In a statement, the current archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, acknowledged the "revolting story" of abuses that the report detailed, saying, "No words of apology will ever be sufficient." He added, "The report highlights devastating failings of the past." The report is the latest in a series of damning revelations about the church. In May, a report chronicled the sexual, emotional and physical abuse of orphans and foster children over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. The report, which took three years to prepare, focused on the way complaints about abuse by priests had been handled. It looked into the cases of 46 priests who had been the subject of scores of complaints from about 320 children from 1975 to 2004. Of the 46 priests, 11 have pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting children or have been convicted of that crime. The rest are dead or have not been prosecuted. At the same time, the Catholic Church is continuing to support Irish priests accused of child sexual abuse - including five who were convicted. Belfast Telegraph story here Of the 46 priests in the damning Dublin Archdiocesan report, 15 are receiving financial support either directly or indirectly from the diocese. However, the Church has also employed an ex-garda detective to work as a liaison officer with the priests and monitor their behavior. Some 11 of the 46 were members of religious orders, while one belongs to a UK diocese. A further 10 mentioned in the report are dead but as of July 2008 the report found that out of the remainder:
"The men involved receive less financial support than retired priests and less again than working priests of the diocese," she said. "They are asked to cooperate with the Irish Child Protection Service in the diocese which monitors their living arrangements and stability. If they don't cooperate their financial support is cut off. This is the only service of its kind in the country...that we are aware of that works in this manner with people accused." Parenting classes needed... Two people face reckless conduct charges after police said they left their young children in a shopping cart inside a Georgia Wal-Mart while they went shopping. http://www.wsbtv.com/news/21741519/detail.html 
It happened at about 7 a.m. on Black Friday at the Wal-Mart in Commerce in Banks County.
Police said Mario Navarro, 35, and Elias Esmeralda, 31, put a 9-month-old girl and a 9-year-old child in a shopping cart and pushed the cart off to the side inside the Wal-Mart and went shopping. One witness told Channel 2 Action News that Wal-Mart employees paged the parents for more than 45 minutes before they used store surveillance video to track them down. Police said Wal-Mart staff contacted the Banks County Sheriff's Office. Meanwhile, Indianapolis police say they've arrested a truck driver who went drinking at a strip club after leaving his 5-year-old son in his semitrailer watching cartoons. AP News story here An Indianapolis police report says 39-year-old Donald Crawford was arrested on child neglect and public intoxication charges after reporting his truck stolen and son missing. Police said he forgot where he parked. The boy was found watching a television inside the truck's cab. Police said the keys were in the ignition and the doors were unlocked in a high-crime area of Indianapolis. And another man locked his two young sons in the trunk of his car while he ran an errand, Massachusetts police said. AP story here Fall River police allege Michael Monahan put his kids, ages 3 and 6, in the trunk of his Pontiac Trans Am for several minutes Tuesday morning while he went inside a sailing shop. According to court records, Monahan told investigators the boys like to play in the trunk. In other news... 
When Martha Coakley was the Middlesex, Massachusetts district attorney, her office prosecuted the Reverend John J. Geoghan based on an allegation that he squeezed the buttocks of a 10-year-old boy a single time at a public swimming pool. The highly publicized 2002 conviction won Coakley widespread praise for bringing the first successful criminal case against the widely accused pedophile, a priest many had called "Father Jack." Boston Globe news story here But seven years earlier, Coakley, then the head of the Middlesex child abuse unit, had Geoghan in her sights and took a dramatically different approach. Back then, three grade-school brothers told investigators that Geoghan had inappropriately touched them during numerous visits to their Waltham home, and had made lewd telephone calls to them. Rather than prosecute, Coakley agreed to grant Geoghan a year of probation in a closed-door proceeding that received no media attention at all. Because of the deal, Geoghan faced no formal charges and no criminal record. In sanctioning the 1995 probation agreement, Coakley, now the front-runner in a special election for the United States Senate, never pressed the Boston Archdiocese for any prior complaints against Geoghan. Its not clear that the archdiocese would have readily obliged, but it was holding in its files thousands of pages of documents detailing abuse complaints against Geoghan made by dozens of victims dating back to the 1960s.
Massachusetts prosecutors say a J.C. Penney children's department salesman sexually assaulted a boy in a dressing room when the boy's mother stepped away to make a phone call. AP News story here Francisco Wellington Barros-Gomes of Charlton was ordered held on charges of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 and rape of a child with force. The 26-year-old Brazilian was ordered to surrender his passport. A not guilty plea was entered for him. His lawyer says he can't pay the $25,000 cash bail. 
A 19-year-old Detroit man faces third-degree criminal sexual charges after he met a 13-year-old girl online and hid in her bedroom closet for two days, police said. Clickondetroit.com news story here The 13-year-old Detroit girl told police that she met Donald Hunter through Facebook two years ago, and that he then came over on Saturday. She also told police that she had sex with him in her bedroom on the 52000 block of Marseilles on the city's east side and then hid him in her closet. The girl's 32-year-old mother discovered him hiding in there early Monday morning. The mother said she tied him up and called police. "I kept telling him to quit writing to her on Facebook, quit talking to her," said the girl's mother. The suspect's mother defended her son and said, "She responded to him. It's a two-way thing because she is talking back to him." Hunter is expected to be arraigned on the two counts of criminal sexual conduct charges sometime Tuesday. Investigators confirmed with Local 4 that the girl did not previously know Hunter and that the two did form a relationship on Facebook.
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