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Air Force Master Sergeant Gerry Roadcap
She hits him repeatedly, both end up dead
R.I.P. Louis W. Joy, III — New Hampshire consultant
Charles Hanson provides an update to his story
Tacoma Washington police chief shoots wife before killing himself
Sister tells of long years of abuse David Brame suffered from his wife
North Dakota farmer goes on rampage when officers attempt to serve restraining order
High noon in Lehi, Utah: Former-cop turns violent after wife shacks up with convicted felon
Police link plane crash in Bedford, Indiana, to couple's bitter split
High-school student's affair with female teacher leads to his slaying in Knoxville, Tennessee
Colorado Springs man in hospital after setting himself on fire
Craig, Colorado, miner charged with murder after young, abusive wife's body found
Loveland Colorado father bludgeons process server delivering divorce papers and restraining order to death
Protection order ends with “suicide by cop” at daughter's First Communion
Black Forest, Colorado, man in critical condition after driving into estranged wife's house, setting it ablaze
Last statement of retired Army Sergeant Thomas Ball
Two kinds of bureaucrats and two sets of books
36 million Americans have been arrested for domestic violence
An estimated 72 million men, women, and children end up homeless at some point because of domestic violence laws
Keep your mouth shut and get the job done
Shelters only for “battered” women
Federal funding for a war against men
Time for a new federal government
A legal defense center for men
Live free or die...death is not the worst of evils
Pilot dies after crashing plane into his own home in Payson, Utah
We state elsewhere that men are dangerous. Pushed too far almost any man becomes violent. So lets look at the reaction of men who were driven to the ultimate act of murder or suicide by their wives. We have no doubts that similar murders and suicides happen around the globe every day and every hour.
The first example is from Colorado Springs where an Air Force Master Sergeant killed his popular, but abusive, disk jockey wife after finding she was having an affair with a convicted felon. But we make no pretense that this list is in any sense complete.
The backbone of any military organization is its noncommissioned officers, and Master Sergeant Gerry Roadcap had gone far in the Air Force. After enlisting at age 19 he became a nuclear weapons specialist and progressed rapidly through the ranks.
While serving in Montana he met, and married a vivacious disk jockey. After their marriage, Gerry was transferred to Colorado Springs where he served with Air Force Space Command at Peterson AFB. His wife, Cindy, found a position as a local disk jockey and was widely known and popular with her listening audience.
“Salt of the earth,” and “backbone of America and its Armed Forces” are terms that come to mind to describe Gerry Roadcap. Obviously the government placed its highest faith and trust in this man and had given him a top secret security clearance.
Yet on the morning of August 29, 1999, at about 8 AM, MSgt. Roadcap chased his wife into the yard of their Ellicot home, wielding a garden tool against her. There, in front of neighbors, he strangled her to death. He then dumped her body into their car, sat on top of her, and was driving away when sheriff's deputies, called by the neighbors, caught up to him.
Testimony during his trial suggests that Cindy was a volatile woman who often drank heavily, sometimes used marijuana and cocaine, and occasionally hit, shoved, and otherwise abused her husband. After her death evidence was brought forward that Cindy suffered from borderline personality disorder and that disorder probably accounted for much of her erratic and violent behavior.
Until August 29, 1999, testimony indicates MSgt. Roadcap had never fought back against her attacks.
She had also begun an affair with Steven Maness, an inmate at the maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, who was serving a twelve-year sentence for contract kidnapping. Gerry apparently found love letters to Cindy from Maness in her car. Maness also called her at their home on occasion.
Apparently trouble began that morning with Gerry accosting Cindy about the love letters he had found. As he confronted her, and they argued, Maness called her at their house. After a tense exchange, Gerry hung up on him.
Something then gave him reason to believe Cindy was going to vent her wrath on their 15-month-old daughter and Gerry moved to protect the infant. About then, Maness appears to have called again. At that point, Gerry Roadcap apparently went berserk, picked up a garden tool and attacked his wife, driving her into the yard, where he strangled her.
On October 23, 2000, an El Paso County jury found MSgt. Gerry Roadcap guilty of second-degree murder and he has been sentenced to 27 years in the Colorado state penitentiary.
Until his wife irrational behavior drove him over the edge, MSgt. Roadcap had no criminal record. There is no indication that authorities had ever been called because of domestic disputes. Probably the only law he had previously broken was a traffic violation. Thus, no law or order could have protected her from the consequences of her actions.
Any man can be driven berserk by the irrational behavior of a woman he loves. The human male is a most dangerous animal when aroused.
According to the August 25, 2002, edition of Colorado Springs Gazette, as well as police and court documents Ms. Brooke Campbell had repeatedly hit her boyfriend, Don' el Demayo.
In July 2000, Ms. Campbell pled guilty to hitting Demayo in the face during an argument. For that she was sentenced to 36 weeks of domestic violence counseling and ordered to pay $138 in fines and court costs. She was also sentenced to 30 days in jail, but the judge suspended the sentence.
The couple remained together but apparently the violence continued although Mr. Demayo claimed Brooke only hit him “when asked.” No matter, it is always dangerous to provoke a human male.
On Wednesday, August 22, 2002, Ms. Campbell's 21 st birthday, Demayo shot her in the head, and then turned the gun on himself, leaving both dead.
Though no one could make out what they were saying, neighbors heard muffled sounds of the couple arguing before the blasts that ended their lives early Wednesday.
In Controlling Domestic Violence Against Men we repeatedly make the point that if domestic violence is to be controlled women must learn not to heedlessly provoke the human male. The sad ending to these young lives is a case in point.
On Friday, August 24, 2001, Jo A. Joy, age 39, and wife for twenty years of Louis W. Joy III, age 43, went to the Milford District Court and swore out an affidavit claiming: “I believe Louis poses a very real and credible threat to my safety and to that of our child and to our property...Louis has said to me on numerous occasions, 'I need to do what I need to do.' I have taken that language as a threat both against me and as a threat of suicide.”
As a basis for her fear she stated “Louis owns several firearms...I am terrified that he could harm me or our child as a result.” She also stated she had been subjected to psychological and emotional abuse throughout their relationship of more than twenty years. No incidents of physical abuse were listed or alleged in her affidavit.
According to The Union Leader (September 5, 200, p. A2), Mrs. Joy had consulted with the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Violence for “support and guidance on how to protect herself and daughter,” before filing the restraining order.
As a result of her claims, Jo Joy was given a temporary restraining order that gave her custody of their 8-year-old daughter, Angelica, and possession of their new million-dollar home at 10 High Meadow Lane in Amherst, NH.
Louis Joy was served with the restraining order Friday evening at his home and forced to leave by police officers.
The next morning at 7:23 AM EDT, Louis Joy, a nationally-recognized manufacturing consultant and speaker, author of the book “Frontline Teamwork” that he co-authored with his wife, CEO of Manufacturing Excellence, Inc., and licensed pilot, took off from Nashua Airport in a Socata TB20 Trinidad plane owned by the corporation.
About 18 minutes later he deliberately dove the plane into their home on Meadow Lane in Amherst. Rick Crocker, chief of the Amherst Fire Department said the plane clipped trees before slamming into the second floor from the east. Crocker estimated that the plane was descending at a 45-degree angle when it struck the house. A thousand-gallon propane tank in the yard, as well as the high-octane aviation fuel in the plane's tank exploded on impact.
Louis Joy's body was recovered from the cockpit of the plane, which ended up in the basement of the home, and he was identified from dental records. His wife and daughter were not home at the time of the crash.
After her husband's suicide, Mrs. Joy attempted to have the petition and affidavit she had filed against her husband sealed, allegedly to avoid further damage to her daughter's health and happiness.
Three newspapers then filed a motion to unseal the court records in the case. According to The Union Leader (September 5, 200, p. A2) the 39-year-old mother held an impromptu news conference she arranged in an upstairs hallway at the Milford District Court at the time of the hearing. “Seating herself casually atop a table, Joy explained her first choice was not to resort to attorneys to sort out her domestic discord.” Instead, as noted above, she had called the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Violence for advice. She then filed an affidavit to obtain the restraining order against her husband that appears to have driven him to his spectacular death.
Milford District Court Judge William R. Dressler granted the newspaper's motion to unseal Mrs. Joy's domestic violence petition and affidavit and they are in the public record.
Thanks to Paul M. Clements of Dads Against Discrimination and the New Hampshire chapter of the National Congress For Fathers & Children for obtaining and passing along the newspaper clippings of this tragedy.
The next example is from the United Kingdom. There is no question that this man deserves to be in prison. It s appear that the incest of his wife and son drove him beyond despair and into violence.
Ask yourself who is the “victim” here and who the “perpetrator” ? Perhaps a different approach than hounding this man might have saved her, and many other women's lives. The story has been updated in February 2010 with an email directly from Charles Hanson providing additional details and his current situation.
Telephone: (01727 864257 +44 1727 864257
E-mail: ivorcatt@electromagnetism.demon.co.uk
Web site: www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk
I have acquired the 'Taking Stock' booklet by Stinky and the Home Office Research Study No. 191 on Domestic Violence. It really does stretch the imagination that the general public is misled by the women MP's who are now campaigning to prevent (so-called) violent husbands/partners from having contact with their children. I am a life sentence prisoner convicted of domestic murder. I was exhausted at the time trying to get help, whereas my wife made all kinds of weird and wonderful allegations against me including one that I had made a threat to kill her. I was charged, held in custody and eventually acquitted unanimously by a jury.
It didn't stop there. The aggravations went on even after we divorced. In the end I stabbed her to death. I had reached the end of my tether. No one, even the police, would listen to me; I couldn't afford solicitors' fees to stop her, yet she continued to make allegations and was listened to, especially by social workers.
This prison, the only all lifer prison in Europe, contains mostly domestic murderers like myself. There is a clear history of frustration, anger, confusion and injustice at the way some of us were demonized by social workers, divorce courts, at child custody-access hearings, how some of us lost everything including our self esteem before we committed the ultimate act.
I have recently come across a reference book on psychology written by a Canadian woman psychologist and she referred to a Canadian Government hearing which sought to criminalize those instances where women in child custody/access hearings make bogus allegations of violence and abuse. It is estimated that about 40% of claims are bogus. The details are: 1998 Joint Committee of the Senate and Parliament; 'For the Sake of the Children'; Report of the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access; December 1998; Canadian Publication Services Ottawa. I have written to the Canadian Embassy for details on how to acquire the report.
I believe that this topic is deserving of wider coverage within the context of domestic violence, for it is here that so many men become victims not only of the wife/ex-wife/partner but [also] of the system that generates inequality. Perhaps you could let me know what you think.
HM Prison, Kingston, Milton Rd.,
Please advise whether your letter is confidential. [Wherever and whenever you want to quote me, please feel free to do so. CH, 24 July 2000]
I visited Bernie Downes while he was in prison, (kidnapping his child off to the USA,) but later on he cut off from me, after he came out. I have had occasional letters from people in prison, but the communication fizzles out.
I need the prison dimension now that I edit Ill Eagle, and so you can help me.
Hopefully, Ill Eagle will give you an idea of the kind of area you could help me with. If you clear it, I shall start with a part of your 22june00 letter. However, it would be better if you came up with numbers, even just estimates, to make your assertions more solid.
Ideally, you would become one further member of the network of experts that I have assembled. Whiston is Govt statistics and other statistics, Pelling is amateur lawyer, Yarwood is violence, and so on.
Also, we should plan a questionnaire for the domestic trouble lifers, and get statistics. We should take a long time devising it. Please make initial suggestions for questions.
Tell me if you have access to the Internet. I presume not.
Thank you for your recent letter ....
Kingston Prison was always a domestic lifers prison although a few non-domestic lifers are now creeping in. We domestics are never viewed very favorably by the politically correct psychologists, probation officers etc.
We are expected to undergo Offending Behavior courses and there are specific ones for us, — Relationships, Anger Management, Spouse Homicide, Thinking Skills to name a few.
It matters not that my son from an earlier marriage was having a sexual relationship with my wife, having lost control and stabbed her I am treated like I should have just accepted it and entered therapy implying that there was something wrong with me to have objected, I am now deemed a danger to women by politically correct women probation officers and their ilk. The fact that I had been married 3 times suggests that there is something wrong with me. Who but these liberals made divorce so easy? Who but these want to see the breakdown of family and traditional values and then condemn those like me for being forced to go along with them?
Of course, I regret taking the life of the woman I loved. I can never forget it, and I will be haunted by it for the rest of my life. Life for me and for her parents will never be the same, and I don't need reminders of it. However, the politically correct will not let me forget it. I have to attend dubious courses, where I have serial bereavements.
I do not have the defenses usually and only available to women; for example, PMS, abuse, provocation, the effects of HRT and Prozac. I am expected to cope, and indeed tolerate, what women would get sympathy for. As a domestic lifer I don't have the equivalent of feminist campaigns to free me. I am left with the thought that the male species are indeed the stronger. It is what by implication the feminists seem to perpetuate by holding men like me culpable. The same, however, is not true of the Sarah Thornton's of the world.
Wherever and whenever you want to quote me, please feel free to do so.
I look forward to hearing from you.
P.S. I don't believe that the Home Office or the Prison Service maintain records of wife killers, or as the PC term now applies, 'Partners'. I could be wrong, however. CH
From: charles hanson <charleshanson1@live.co.uk>
Date: Tuesday, 9 February 2010
I came across your website purely by accident and took note of your comments about me to the extent that in your view I deserved to be in prison and that I should have been executed, that my offence was premeditated and so forth.
Firstly, I should start by saying that I'm no longer in prison and was in fact released in July 2009 having served almost 15 years of a life sentence and remain on licence till the day I die.
You allege that my offence was premeditated but if that had been the case and had there been evidence of that and such aggravating features I would still be in prison.
What I did was to carry a weapon to attack my then 22 year old son who had a violent history and one of carrying knives and besides being a loose canon junkie he was having an affair with my wife who just happened to be his step-mother. In the heat of the moment as I went to attack him, my wife shouted at him to run. I then turned my anger on her. That was the evidence against me at my trial.
I had endured over 18 months of aggravation which caused me to be hospitalized for depression and undergoing a number of ECT treatments.
In the end I just snapped after seeing lawyers to see if I might not have my wife served up with a court order to prevent her contacting me.
The lawyer told me it would be a tough call as I was the wrong sex to be granted such an order.
You say that I am of no use to society. Really? The last 3 years of my sentence was spent working with disabled people and even now I work as a volunteer for a prisoner's families organization purely of my own volition. Along the way I have achieved diplomas in mental health care, health psychology, criminology and psychiatry. I am also a columnist for a national prisoner's newspaper and try to get across the message that we all have options in life.
I am not proud of what I did but to find your son sleeping with your wife well..........................
Four days after I was sentenced he committed suicide through a massive overdose of heroin leaving a note that he wanted to be with my wife.
Some people do make ill informed judgments and hold adverse ideas about others often based on no more than selective or the flimsiest of evidence.
For me, no one was listening to me, the various agencies weren't interested and even when my wife thrust a broken bottle into my arm once and f I needed stitches, I covered up for her saying I did it at work. Had I done the same to her and she had reported it I would have been seized by the police. It doesn't quite work like that when the victim is male.
© 2003 The New York Times
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
Tacoma, Washington, April 27, 2003 — The wife of the Tacoma police chief was in critical condition today, a day after her husband shot her in the head in a mall parking lot and then fatally shot himself, the authorities said [she died on May 3, 2003].
The shootings occurred at the Olympic Plaza shopping center in Gig Harbor, a maritime suburb across the Tacoma Narrows, a day after abuse accusations in the couple's divorce case appeared in local papers.
Chief David Brame, 44, was pronounced dead at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Detective Ed Troyer of the Pierce County sheriff's office said. Crystal Brame, 35, remained in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center, according to news reports. Hospital officials would not comment on her condition.
Tacoma's city manager, Ray Corpuz, issued a statement today expressing shock at the shootings, which were witnessed by the couple's children, Haley, 8, and David Jr., 5.
“Right now I' d ask that everyone pray for Crystal Brame and for the future of Haley and David Jr.,” Mr. Corpuz said. “More than anything, their welfare is on my mind.”
The chief and his wife arrived in the parking lot in separate cars, with the couple's children riding with their mother. At one point, the chief took the children to his car, then went back to his wife's car, where the pair engaged in a heated conversation, witnesses told the authorities.
Witnesses reported hearing two quick shots from the parking lot, Detective Troyer said. The children ran toward their mother's car after hearing the shots, he said.
One witness, Dana Mossman, told the The News Tribune of Tacoma, “I heard them say: `Daddy shot Mommy. Daddy hurt Mommy.'”
The children are now in the care of Ms. Brame's mother.
In their divorce case, Crystal Brame had accused her husband of choking her and threatening to kill her, while Chief Brame said that his wife had physically and verbally abused him, according to court records cited by The News Tribune.
Until then, most city officials had been unaware of Chief Brame's conflicts at home, Mayor Bill Baarsma of Tacoma said in an interview today. He recalled how Chief Brame was “beaming” when his wife pinned a star to his chest at his installation ceremony in January 2002 as one of this city's youngest chiefs of police.
Chief Brame “just seemed to be the absolute perfect choice” for the job, Mr. Baarsma said.
The chief had been in the midst of a wrenching departmental audit, Mr. Baarsma said, but his demeanor betrayed little evidence of any deeper problems.
The mayor, who is also chairman of the city's public safety committee, often worked closely with Mr. Brame. He was also Mr. Brame's faculty adviser while a professor at the nearby University of Puget Sound. He remembered the chief as a serious student and one set on advancing himself.
“He rose through the ranks, always finishing at the top,” Mr. Baarsma said. Most people in law enforcement in Tacoma knew Mr. Brame. He was a Tacoma native and a graduate of Lincoln High School in the city's working class East Side neighborhood. Once a uniformed officer, he took pleasure policing the streets where he grew up, Mr. Baarsma said.
Catherine Woodard, an assistant chief, is now acting chief, Mr. Corpuz said. The Gig Harbor Police Department is investigating the shooting, with the help of the Pierce County sheriff's office.
October 20, 2003 — I have put together the story of my brother, deceased Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, before the fatal shootings on Saturday, April 26, 2003.
David was hired as a rookie for the Tacoma Police Department in December of 1981 at 23 years of age. He worked diligently to move up in the ranks reading and studying books for months to test for promotions. David proudly, but humbly became the police chief in January 2002. He thoroughly enjoyed his police career and worked with the officers to better the department. He was a very trustful, honest person and was well liked by everyone who knew him and worked for him. What you saw with David, was what you got. He would work long hours, go home for awhile, and return at shift change in order to meet with the officers and to be a part of their meetings. He also would ride along with the patrol men and women to get to know them individually, which he felt was important. David took pride in his work and also his home life and children.
David met his wife, Crystal, when she was 20 years old and working for the Tacoma Police Department as a prostitute decoy. She later found an office job working for the courts in Tacoma. David and Crystal were married in August of 1991 and Crystal worked for the first three years of their marriage prior to their daughter Haley's birth.
David had concerns about marrying Crystal from the very beginning but went through with it anyway. One incident that was a red flag for David, and our family, was soon after they met she told him of an old boyfriend who had beaten her so badly she had to be hospitalized. That was where the victim role started in their relationship.
Due to continuing conflicts in their eleven year marriage, David and Crystal separated at the end of February 2003, and their divorce was pending. They had marital discord for about eight years that seemed to start after the birth of their daughter, Haley, in December 1994. The up and down mood swings Crystal had were very wearing on their family. David was always the one on an even keel, quiet, calm and very stable. He always said, “I feel like I'm raising three kids.”
Crystal frequently would lash out, scream and yell enough that she would keep David up till after 1:00 AM, not caring that he had to go to work in the morning. He would sometimes go to bed before her and then, in a rage, she would enter the bedroom, turn on the lights and start ranting and raving, keeping him awake for hours. David was not a fighter and never was even as a boy.
David left their home one night to go to our parent's house to get some rest. After he left that night, Crystal called the Gig Harbor police and they came out and took a report. They apparently asked if he had threatened her and she told them no. A report was written but nothing was done. My point is she would take inappropriate steps like that when it was uncalled for, and so minor. Yet she claimed she never told anyone about the “death threats” she accused him of later. I don't think there is any way she would have kept quiet about such threats if they were real, especially since she was so close to her parents.
She practically lived on the telephone. And she told the neighbors, and whoever would listen to her, all kinds of “poor me” stories. When she talked to me on the phone I knew it was going to be an hour conversation, with her controlling it and not giving you a chance to even try to get off the phone. She repeated herself over and over, rambling on and on. It was quite annoying and our whole family went through this experience with her. When we talked, everything she did was a big chore to her, nothing was easy. She made a big deal out of just ordinary daily chores that all mothers do. I often thought she never appreciated being able to be at home with the children and not work.
One time when David was asleep she came into the bedroom and turned the lights on and she held her hands behind her back and then stuck her arms straight out as if she had a gun and pointed it at David. He thought that was very strange. Another time, in the middle of the night when she was pregnant with David Jr., she was crying and upset, sitting in the middle of the bed looking up abortion doctors saying she didn't want to be pregnant. David talked to her about her mental state, but to no avail. This would make her angry and upset, not facing the truth. She was very peculiar and acted as though she never noticed her outbursts.
David owned one gun (not two) and kept it in a locked holster at home. When he got this gun he demonstrated to Crystal the use of it and how careful they had to be because accidents can happen. She transposed what he said to make it look like he was threatening her. She would also pick up stories that David told her regarding his police job and twist them around so as to put herself as the victim somehow and imply that David was the perpetrator.
During their marriage David felt like he never knew what he was going to come home to. He had said when the relationship was “good, it was real good, when it was bad, it was real bad.” Crystal was very extreme, seeming to be obsessed in her actions, checking over and over in Haley's crib when she was a baby, as if looking for something that was not there. It was as though she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was a very stressed, anxious-type person who had a difficult time relaxing. David would try to encourage her to get involved in activities outside of the home, make friends, get a job if she wanted, but there was no way he was going to make her happy. Confronting her and trying to give her options to enable happiness just did not work.
David Jr. was born in 1997 and her bizarre behavior continued. David had told me that when David Jr. was a toddler, and was sick with a fever, he had vomited on the family room carpet. Crystal stood over the baby, screaming, and swearing at him. Unfortunately, this was something she did on a regular basis when the baby was in his crib and would wake up crying from what we were told by David.
In July of 1998, Crystal was on a tangent and started slugging David. She bruised him badly and he had pictures taken of this. He said he stood and did not touch her, which was the way my brother would have been.
It was said that little Crystal couldn't hurt him. Well, she did and the hitting continued several times thereafter. She was also continually badgering him and complaining. Her excuse as to how he got the bruises was that she claimed David hurt himself while lifting weights with barbells, but they didn't own barbells then. After their deaths, we also read where he performed ritualistic self-mutilation on a regular basis. Now how odd is that? She went to great lengths to cover herself.
When Crystal got angry with David two or three years ago she told him that she was going to ruin his career. And she also stated at another time that she could be a good actress. David was always an honest man and it hurt him to think he was married to someone who would lie at the drop of a hat and could be so vengeful.
David came home from work early one day and heard Crystal screaming at the kids. Another time he came home and changed David Jr.'s diaper and his bare bottom was beet red with hand prints on it. She told David that she “almost lost it.” He had real concerns and expressed this to our family and their family physician. David thought maybe it was a hormone imbalance. The doctor was told then about her hitting him and how out of control she was.
She had a hysterectomy a couple of years ago, but her moods never changed. She was in need of serious help for her mental instability. It wasn't just David that was being abused, their little kids went through a lot emotionally and physically. David listened to Crystal last fall (2002) tell Haley, who was almost 8 years old, that the kids were going to laugh at her school pictures because they didn't turn out good. Of course, she had Haley crying and upset. David had to intervene so many times during these outbursts and stop her from being cruel to their kids.
Haley lost a baby tooth last fall and accidentally dropped it and it couldn't be found. Crystal screamed and yelled at little Haley until she was in tears. One night when David tucked David Jr. in bed when he was about three or four, David Jr. said, “good night asshole.” He would call his little cousin a “bastard.” David did not swear, but the kids were being sworn at by their mother. It saddened David to see his two little children being raised by an abusive mother. These are just a few horrible incidents the kids and David had to endure.
At Christmas Crystal would buy expensive suits, shirts, ties, and such for David and he would tell her, “These things don't mean anything to me, Crystal. All I ask is for you to be nice to me and you can have the world.” She didn't get it. Material things were the most important...looking good on the outside. She didn't want to fix what was going on in her head. Birthdays and Christmas' were so out of whack with her and the gift giving. It would take the kids 45 minutes to open their birthday presents. It was so ridiculous it was sickening. Why would a little 5 year old girl need 35 Barbie dolls? David wanted his kids to have everything nice, but not to that extent. Everything was overboard. The normalcy was not there with Crystal.
Crystal also made over 50 long distance phone calls in a two month period up to Canada calling a couple they met in Palm Springs at a resort a couple of years ago. She ran their phone bills up to $400 to $500 for two months. Why would she call a couple that she “barely” knew? She spent a couple of hours roller blading with a man she just met, leaving David at the pool alone. She also spent a couple of hours in the couple's room with them late one night without David. I wonder what she was looking for?
David and I would talk on the telephone on weekends. If Crystal was out of the house at the time, he would tell me if he had to get off the phone real quick it was because Crystal drove up. She would literally feel the phone to see if it was warm to tell if David was using it or not. I thought it was a horrible way for my brother to live. She was very jealous and insecure.
When David went to Quantico, VA last January 2003 for 7 to 10 days, Crystal gave him a card in his suitcase that was very loving. She told him to have a great time, to go sightseeing, say “hi” to George and Barbara Bush, and told him how much her and the kids loved him and were going to miss him. An abused woman does this? I don't think so!
The allegations in the news that when David moved out of the house he'd left a fortune cookie, a newspaper opened to the obituaries, and a book about a wife being murdered by her husband is ludicrous. Crystal was seemingly determined to ruin him one way or another. She was out of control and doomed for trouble. This whole little scenario fits Crystal to a “T.”
We read in the paper that, while David and Crystal were separated, for sixty-one days she never was without one of her family members when out and about until April 26th, the day of the shooting. David and Crystal were together at Haley's school one morning and after leaving Haley in the building, they went to David's car and sat and talked for quite awhile. Why would she sit and talk to him if she was so deathly afraid?
The lies about David threatening to kill Crystal and choke her started after David told her that he was telling his attorney about how abusive she was to the kids. So it was pay back time and she was going to get him good. In retaliation, she started the stories of David choking her three or four times and the supposed death threats. David told us that never occurred, which we believe because she would have had him arrested in a flash. David was not a game player like her. She was so angry with him she was adding more stories to the already strained divorce. The reason no one knew of the threats in the past, is because they didn't happen. David said to me, “She's delusional.” What I questioned was if Crystal had been abused wouldn't she have told her attorney when she filed for divorce in February rather than wait until April when David told of her abuse?
Crystal did not have anything to lose making all of the false accusations and David had everything to lose. It was as though she was driving herself to the grave. I do not understand how someone can be so devious and cruel and think they can get away with it. Eventually, liars get caught. And why would she go this far with the stories? Because David never did anything to her in the past except for the shooting on April 26th!
Crystal played yet another victim role of not having any money and being physically abused by David. She had called the police and attorney over minor, made-up stories. So why didn't she call them when she claimed he attempted to choke her? This woman could have had him arrested, moved in with her parents, and been protected if all of this was true. It doesn't take much to see through this.
In David's divorce decree, there are copies of credit card charges that total over $10,000 in the past year, all signed by Crystal from her shopping sprees ($300 here, $500 there, etc.). She went tanning on a regular basis, helped out at the school occasionally, had a beautifully-decorated $300,000 home with custom draperies, Thomas Kincaid paintings, and two new cars. They were all very well dressed in name-brand clothes and they were not purchased at the thrift store either. They had the best money could buy, but it still was not enough. She shopped at Nordstrom's, but tried to portray herself as almost penniless. In December 2002 she bought a beautifully decorated $1,100 Christmas tree. They also had three themed Christmas trees, one for the family room with a ton of snowmen on it, and the other two in the kids' bedrooms with expensive Disney ornaments on them.
She would take pictures of the snowman tree before she took it down after Christmas so she could decorate it in the exact same fashion the following year. This was another “odd, obsessive way” she had. She bought a $900 comforter set for a king size bed that they didn't have and stored it in the closet for the future. Per the TNT she tried to convince storekeepers of her penniless state. Well, why would she shop in a specialty shop in Gig Harbor that was too expensive for her? Someone should have taken pity on her and suggested to her maybe it would be at her best interest not to shop there. There are lots of thrift stores around after all.
Crystal was not only divorcing David, she was brainwashing their kids to think of him as a bad father, gradually pulling them further and further away from him, and was working on bringing down his career. It was very apparent she was coaching Haley and telling her all kinds of lies. That was a very heavy burden David carried and he was backed into a corner by his very own wife. When there are continual lies being made and a person is under the stress of going through a divorce, a man feels devastated losing everything he has worked for and loves.
David talked to her on the phone once while they were separated and she said to him, “Remember when you tried to choke me?” And he replied, “Crystal, you know you're lying.” I believe her family was right there listening and she was playing the poor little victim part again. David also told me after they separated she said to him, “Now I can start wearing fingernail polish again.” David said to me, “I don't know where that came from.” I remember her always wearing bright fingernail polish and lipstick and thick, dark eye shadow. She would even put the dark nail polish on Haley, which was so inappropriate for a little girl.
David was a very good father and his kids were his life. Haley and David Jr. both attended a Christian pre-school and David taught Haley to say grace at mealtime. He tried to provide them with a secure and happy home, taking the time out to read bedtime stories to the kids every night.Crystal never wanted to be a part of that even when the kids were really little. David was the one that would tuck them in at night. He said the kids and him had a ritual of running down the hall each night racing to their bedrooms. He was so proud of Haley's reading abilities and had looked forward to David Jr. starting T-ball this past spring. Of course, this was squashed by Crystal telling him there was no way he was going to participate in any of David Jr.'s T-ball practices and games. She even went so far as to change dentists where David Jr. went because David would always take him and be there for him. So she took it upon herself to take another enjoyment out of David's life. He always encouraged Haley to read and do well in school. The kids were the light of his life and loved them more than anything. It hurt him terribly to see their relationships being ruined due to her insecurities.
When he had the kids on the weekends during the separation, he always made sure they had bubble baths because they never got to do that when the four of them lived together. They were used to Crystal jerking their little arms, pulling them into the shower with her everyday. David would talk to her about the way she would grab Haley's arm. Everything had to be hurry, hurry with her. He wanted it to be relaxing for them and let them be ordinary kids. He would fold out the hide-a-bed and the three of them would camp out and watch TV, which was another treat. If the kids wanted to jump on the bed, he would let them. He wanted them to have a fun, relaxed life like he had as a child. He was a very loyal father with a great sense of humor and enjoyed his family immensely.
When I was with David in April when he had the kids for the weekend, he called her to tell her what time he was bringing the kids to her parents and told her that I was coming along also (this was because he needed someone for a witness due to past problems). I listened to David talk to her on the phone and when he mentioned me going with him she said, “ No, I' m going to call my attorney. I' m going to call my attorney.” David said, “Crystal, it's my sister.” So when he got off the phone with her he told me, “Don't be surprised if the Pierce County Deputies are over there.” And I just said, “This I have to see.” Crystal and I had never had words with each other in the past and we were always cordial even though there were many times I wanted to sit down and have a talk with her and find out where she was coming from. When we arrived at the Security Gate to the housing community Cyrstal's parent's live in, the parents came along with her in two cars, but there were no deputies. All went fairly well though the kids were definitely not happy. David Jr. walked right past Crystal without a hug after not seeing her for four days, and after getting in her car, jumped back out and ran to his dad and said he wanted to go with him. This was pitiful to witness.
Last year my parents went to their home to babysit the kids for awhile. David Jr. was 4 1/2 years old then and for some reason he hit my mom in the chest. She gave him a little swat on the bottom. When David and Crystal returned, Haley told Crystal that my mom spanked David. After this happened and the divorce had started a year later, Crystal was telling everyone (attorney, psychologist, etc.) that my mom had been abusing the kids for years and also, that they went a year without seeing her. There was no truth to that whatsoever. She and the kids were at the family functions during the holidays throughout the years. She told David during the divorce that my mom was never going to see the kids again. He told me that he told her, “We can get the divorce, but I want my mom to see the kids.” This was another problem she started. Of course, I could go into great detail what kind of a mother and grandmother my mom has been, but the best way to describe her is being loyal, loving, and very dedicated to family in the same manner as my father is. They have eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren and there have never been any problems with either of my parents with the grandchildren. Unfortunately to this day, our family has not seen the kids since the tragedy occurred. We have seen the psychologist report (TNT let the world see it as well) and Crystal lied her way through that also and was working on the kids big time to turn them against their grandmother, whom they had always been crazy about. So this is another battle we are dealing with besides grieving the loss of David.
Crystal had such an exaggerated mind. There was another bizarre story she told everyone. David and she went to a gathering of some sort with other police officers and their wives in December 2002. David said she was going around telling everyone that she was being stalked by a man. The story I heard from David was that a family friend of Crystal's apparently came to visit her parents in Gig Harbor about a year or so ago. He had had problems with drugs and had bouts with the law. He had asked about Crystal because he remembered her as a young person and always liked her. Well, come to find out, after this visit he had with her parents, he was put in the Pierce County jail for several months, apparently on drug charges. He was released months later and Crystal was out of control about that. She was bound and determined he was stalking her. Crystal talked to me about it also and I just thought, “How strange. Here we go again with another fabricated story.” She was paranoid and going on and on about this to everyone. David said she going off about nothing. It was really quite embarrassing for him. The victim role was in the works again.
My husband and I would give her a birthday card with $20 in it and she would say, “Oh, now I can buy myself some new tennis shoes. I've had this pair forever.” I would think, “who are you trying to kid?” They had more money than most people I knew.
She was always sick with something. She played the hypochondriac for years. I thought that was strange for being so young. And who went over and helped her when she was sick and the kids were babies? My parents!
About two years ago there was a Tacoma rapist loose. She knew the description of him and his truck, and she called David at work and told him she saw the guy driving in their neighborhood. I thought that was a bit much also. She either was looking for attention all the time or she really believed what she said. Our family recognized her as seeming to have bipolar symptoms, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, lying, very self-centered, and downright unbalanced. We would catch her in lies time and time again.
After the tragedy the Tacoma News Tribune stated that David made Crystal weigh herself everyday and would watch her use the bathroom. I don't believe David had time to deal with such oddness. David did tell us how she would get on the scale almost every day and lean her hands against the wall in order to weigh a little lighter. She was obsessed with her weight and was so concerned about getting fat. She was a very miserable young person who simply did not like herself or her life.
The day of the shootings David had his kids for the weekend and was shopping for bath toys and groceries. Crystal followed his car when she spotted it in the Gig Harbor Shopping Center. I think something was said to him that put him over the edge and both of their lives were taken. She was not afraid of him in anyway or she would never have gotten near him. There was not an ounce of fear in this woman. David was living in the family home for a couple of months alone and Crystal and the kids were living with her parents a few miles away. She would come over with her mother and badger David until finally David contacted his attorney to put a stop to it. She was contacting him, he was not contacting her. She would put their daughter up to calling him and harassing him with questions until it was ridiculous. A woman that is afraid of her estranged husband does not tell him to cut the lawn before he moves out. But that's what Crystal did and, unfortunately, David did it. She also told him that she deserved to be married to a millionaire and live in Canterwood (a prestigious Gig Harbor neighborhood where her parent's live).
The day David moved out of the house, his neighbor came over and talked to him. He told David, “Just between us guys, we know Crystal is loosely wrapped.” When David told me that I said, “Doesn't it make you feel a little better knowing that the neighbors recognize her for what she is?” And he said, “Yes.”
We have an explanation regarding the flowers David sent to Crystal after the alleged choking incidents. David did send her flowers on holidays, but she managed to say he sent them the day after the supposed abuse. Why would she wait until after the separation to go to the florist to find out who sent them to her? Since David sent them to her and they were on their credit card, did she not get the bill in the mail? She was a stay-at-home mom that was home while David was working 10-12 hours a day. Who would get the mail first? H'mmm...I wonder? And would David set himself up to do such a foolish move? Never, he was far too intelligent for that.
We were never surprised when David would tell us some of the odd games she played. It was typical Crystal...we all knew her too well.
I listened to the tape of the phone call Crystal made to her psychologist at 4:35 PM on April 25 th . She claimed she was afraid for her life. I was at David's apartment with my daughter, her husband, David and the kids that evening. Crystal called the kids about 8:30 to tell them goodnight and of course, she had to talk at great lengths to Haley and then had to call back ten minutes later. She sure wasn't afraid to call over there and talk to David to ask to talk to the kids.
I will never be convinced that this woman was afraid of David. There is no way an abused woman would do all the vicious acts that she did. She never thought it would come to this. There are such things as boundaries and I am a firm believer in not pushing people. I was always raised that if you hit someone you might as well expect that person to hit you back. When a person is in an abusive relationship you leave as quickly and cleanly as you can, especially if someone is threatening your life. She had 10 to 12 hours a day alone where she could pack up her things and move out of the house and David would never have known. She had protection all around her, but we know she was exaggerating more absurd stories. She was an actress playing the victim. When this woman wanted to speak up, believe me she could tell anyone off!
David was someone that was dependable in every aspect of his life. My family is terribly hurt and saddened over this tragedy. We have not only lost a son, brother, father, uncle, nephew, and cousin, but the city of Tacoma has lost someone who really cared about our community and had big plans for the Tacoma Police Department. And we have lost the little family that we truly loved. We wish Crystal would have sought treatment for her seemingly out of control serious emotional problems.
Women can be just as vicious as men, if not more so in marital conflicts, and men need the same support regarding domestic violence as women and children receive. David was a strong supporter of domestic violence prevention, yet he was in the middle of his very own abusive marriage. I do not defend the acts that were made on April 26 th , but I do defend David after hearing his agonizing stories throughout their marriage.
Abstracted from article by Ryan Bakken And Tu Uyen Tran, Grand Forks Herald
August 19, 2005, Cavalier, North Dakota — A police officer was shot and two public buildings were set on fire here Friday evening.
The suspect, James Thorlakson, a Hensel, N.D., farmer, was captured about 10:45 PM Friday, about five hours after the incident according to informed sources.
Thorlakson fled after shooting Cavalier Police Chief Ken Wolf and setting the Pembina County courthouse and law enforcement center on fire. The courthouse received extensive damage to the first floor.
The drama started at approximately 4 PM when county officers attempted to serve Thorlakson with a protection order. He reportedly was armed and refused to be served. He then fired on officers and escaped.
He drove the eight miles to Cavalier, where he then set the two fires at about 5:30 PM.
As the dozen firefighters battled the two blazes, gunshots rang out. That was when Chief Wolf was wounded. Wolf was admitted to Altru Hospital Friday evening, where he was reported in stable condition.
“It was quite an ordeal,” said a firefighter who didn't want to be identified.
“He had apparently left the scene and then came back. We had to drop everything and take cover.
“We were hiding behind the trucks. One of our units had three bullet holes in it and another one had one. We were never sure if he was firing at us for trying to stop the fires or firing at the law enforcement officers.”
The firefighter said the blazes were started with cans of gasoline thrown through glass doors into the entryways of the two buildings, located about 50 feet apart. Because it doesn't have a sprinkler system, the historic courthouse suffered major damage. The law enforcement center suffered minor damage and the prisoners had to be relocated.
There apparently was a standoff for several hours before he was captured. The Grand Forks SWAT team and at least one helicopter assisted during the operation. Cavalier residents and businesses were told to lock their doors and stay inside. Road blocks were set up around the courthouse and in two rural areas, including Thorlakson's home.
Reach Bakken at (701) 780-1125, (800) 477-6572, ext. 125; or rbakken@gfherald.com
Abstracted from story by Lisa Rosetta and Mark Eddington, The Salt Lake Tribune
and from story by Tad Walch, Sara Israelsen and Laura Hancock, Deseret Morning News
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
[EJF notes and comments are in blue Courier font.]
January 28, 2006 — Up until two years ago, Art Henderson, now 38, appeared to be at the top of his game as a Lehi, Utah, police officer. A former amateur boxer proficient in martial arts he worked on the SWAT team, taught a self-defense class for women, and instructed his fellow officers on when it was appropriate to use force.
Prior to working as a Lehi police officer, Henderson was a correctional deputy with the Utah County Sheriff's Office from September 1998 to July 2000, said Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Darren Gilbert. He worked almost exclusively at the jail.
By 2004, he started to come undone when his wife began an affair with a convicted felon. He was using pain medications while on duty and assaulted a man who was shagging his wife, an incident that led to his termination in July 2004. That assault charge would be the first of three filed against him during the next 18 months.
His wife, Natalie Barnes Henderson, 37, who says he abused and threatened to kill her [no doubt after the mother of his(?) five children started having affairs], later filed for divorce, sparking a bitter custody battle.
Finally, on the streets he once patrolled as a peace officer, Art Henderson snapped the morning of January 27, 2006.
After crashing his Toyota pickup truck into a car driven by his estranged wife, Henderson shot and wounded her boyfriend, Craig Trimble, 35, who was in the passenger seat. He then fired at police officers — his former colleagues — who fired back, striking him in his left knee and foot. Police haven't ruled out the possibility Henderson was attempting to commit suicide via a police shootout.
Henderson is expected to live but likely will face three counts of attempted aggravated murder, charges that could land him in prison for five years to life.
"He went from everything going good for him to a point where he gets in a firefight with us,"
said Lehi Police Chief Chad Smith.
"Everything went to hell in a handcart for him."
According to documents filed in Provo's 4 th District Court, the Hendersons were married April 19, 1990, and have five children together, ages 10, 13, 15, 17 and 19.
Their marriage soured in 2004. Natalie Henderson, now age 37, filed for a divorce from her husband on January 19, 2005. According to documents filed by Art Henderson, her boyfriend Art Trimble was already living with her at the time [in his house with his(?) children].
Less than a month later, Natalie Henderson asked the court for a protective order [no doubt using a victims handbook as a guide] . In it she described an alleged fight in October 2004 at their Lehi home.
"I was in my room...when Art came in [and] grabbed the phone out of my hands and...started grabbing me," she wrote. "I tried to run and he grabbed me and put my head through the wall."
The woman said she then yelled for help and Art Henderson picked up a box of bullets and threw them at her head. "Art then came after me again telling me he was going to kill me." She claimed one of their teenage sons tried to hold her husband back, while the other yelled at his father to stop, she wrote. In another incident about the same time, she said her husband struck her in the chest and arm and threatened to shoot her at her work.
• In December 2003, her husband "took out his gun and held it to my head."
• A similar incident with a death threat occurred in August 2002. “He pulled over right in front of my parents' house and told me he was going to kill me...He told me he was going to kill me right in front of my parents' house,” she wrote. “Art has made many other threats...so many I couldn't possibly remember them all. This has been going on for 14 years.” [No doubt the five kids are the result of repeated marital rapes?]
• In June 2004, Art Henderson kicked and bruised her after she caught him talking on the phone to his girlfriend. [Funny, no other mention of Art having a girlfriend? One would think the press would be after that like flies on cow manure.]
She asked the court to apply the protective order to her boyfriend, Craig Trimble, as well. The order was granted, but two days later she asked 4 th District Judge James R. Taylor to dismiss it, saying she believed that would help her divorce move along.
"Art has promised that we can share joint custody of the children and I can stay in the house with my children. We have also agreed to visitation and that he would continue to stay away from me. I do not feel that I am in any danger from him."
The judge refused to immediately dismiss the protective order, saying the allegations of abuse were "very serious and significant....It is simply incredible that 14 years of that kind of abuse can be resolved in less than 72 hours." But after a hearing on March 2, the judge dismissed the protective order. [Evidently her story was so incredible coming and going that even a judge couldn't believe it.]
In addition to his marital problems, Art Henderson has been prosecuted on at least three misdemeanor assault charges, including domestic assault, during the past two years. One charge accused him of attacking another man on June 26, 2004, and he was convicted by a Utah County Justice Court jury of a class B misdemeanor of simple assault [no mention as to whether this was another of Natalie's boyfriends?]. He was sentenced to pay a $957 fine. That altercation and conviction led then-Lehi Police Chief Chad Smith to fire Henderson.
He allegedly committed another assault January 1, 2005. In that case, according to a Utah County sheriff's deputy, he assaulted another man. The case is pending in Justice Court.
The sheriff's office filed another charge against Henderson on December 18, 2005, this one involving domestic violence.
At 9:31 AM Friday, January 27, 2006, Utah County dispatchers got a frantic call from Craig Trimble stating that Art Henderson was chasing them in his Toyota pickup.
Minutes later, Art Henderson rammed his truck into the back end of Trimble's gray Chrysler Sebring, which Natalie Henderson was driving, at 924 W. 1500 North.
Natalie continued driving east and, as she attempted to turn left into her father's driveway, Art rammed her car broadside, causing it to spin around and face west.
As Art's pickup continued coasting toward the Chrysler, he jumped out and fired eight to 12 rounds with a revolver through her window and past her face, striking Craig Trimble in the leg and abdomen. As Trimble ran toward the house Henderson shot him again in the leg [pity he was such a poor shot].
Trimble managed to flee into the home of Bill West, two doors east of Barnes. [From his extensive criminal record Craig Trimble no doubt has plenty of experience fleeing. Note that he apparently made no attempt to rescue his inamorata.]
Art Henderson then went back to his truck, grabbed a rifle with a scope, and pointed it east toward Lehi police who had just arrived on the scene.
The first officer on the scene Friday was Alma Owens, who "was an officer with Art, and friends with him outside of work, besides. They had been friends before they started working together on the force." Nonetheless, Art Henderson shot at Owens, Lehi Police Sgt. Darren Paul said, putting a rifle bullet hole in the upper right corner of the front windshield of patrol car No. 67. Owens backed out of the line of fire, then confronted Henderson with officers Tim Hunsaker and Dave Boss. Police in at least four patrol cars took position around 1500 North and Trinnaman Lane (see diagram).
Henderson, whom Sgt. Paul described as a "well-trained officer," fired multiple rounds at the officers.
The officers returned fire, hitting him in the knee with a shotgun and the foot with a .40-caliber handgun, Sgt. Paul said. Police did not attempt to spare Henderson, he added, saying the shots in the leg instead of his chest are accounted for by the distance of the shots, which were about a half a block.
Henderson was taken by ambulance to American Fork Hospital. He was released late Friday and booked into jail on suspicion of three counts of aggravated attempted homicide.
Because the incident involved Lehi police officers it will be investigated by Provo police.
After Art Henderson was taken into custody, Gary Barnes, Natalie Henderson's uncle, who witnessed the shooting, pushed her car forward so he could open Natalie Henderson's door and help her out. She was uninjured.
Craig Trimble was flown to LDS Hospital by helicopter and was expected to survive [pity, that].
Craig Trimble, a convicted felon, likely will be part of Lehi police scrutiny. His criminal record dates back 17 years and includes convictions for forgery, theft, drug possession and weapons charges, according to state court records.
At 18, he was charged with burglary in Salt Lake County. A few years later, he racked up several charges for unlawful possession of alcohol in Salt Lake, Iron, and Washington counties. He was charged in 1993 in Salt Lake County with assault on a police officer.
On May 26, 1996, Trimble was sent to prison for theft. He was in and out of prison on parole violations until his release in August 2000, said Utah Department of Corrections spokesman Jack Ford.
Craig Trimble returned to prison in February 2003 on drug and weapons convictions in Salt Lake and Davis counties [After that he apparently began shagging Art Henderson's wife, before moving in with her and her kids.]
A sickening story of a slattern's betrayal of her husband and children for which no penalties will attach to her. After all, in the 21 st Century she is clearly a “victim.” The fact that she has destroyed her husband, apparently a capable police officer before she began her affair, and her five children is of no consequence in today's society. At age 37 one can but speculate whether an FSH test would reveal that Natalie has entered perimenopause, or had a hysterectomy before this tragedy began? Whether there are other mental conditions would be even more speculative but Craig Trimble does not appear much of a catch for a sane woman.
There is the fact that Natalie Henderson has a convicted felon with multiple drug and alcohol convictions living with her five children, ages 10, 13, 15, 17 and 19. One hopes none of these five kids are girls as sexual abuse would then seem a foregone conclusion. Next will come intervention by Child “Protective” Services and the younger kids will be sent to a foster home.
A future for these children involving substance abuse, dropping out of school, teenage pregnancy for any girls in the family, imprisonment, and five wasted lives seems all too probable, and a terrible price to pay because this woman couldn't keep her knees together. Certainly Art Henderson will not be in any position to pay child support so Natalie will probably lose the house and go on welfare.
But, shame on us, we're “blaming the victim.”
MIght not it have made more sense to move this adulteress out of her husband's house and given him sole custody of the five children? Might Art Henderson have then retained his sanity, society would have retained a capable police officer, and the impact of the divorce on the children would have at least been minimized. Instead society will pay for years of incarceration for Art Henderson and Craig Trimble will continue his fornicating ways, unless he goes back to prison as well for some new crime.
Abstracted from various news reports
March 7, 2007 — The cracks in Eric and Beth Johnson's marriage first appeared after their daughter's birth. They grew deeper last summer as Beth Johnson sought a restraining order and divorce amid allegations that her husband had held her at gunpoint in an effort to change her mind.
But even as police cars parked daily outside the couple's Southern Indiana home, few apparently knew how broken the relationship was.
Police believe bitterness over the couple's November divorce led Eric Johnson to deliberately crash the single-engine Cessna he was piloting into his former mother-in-law's house Monday, killing him and his 8-year-old daughter, Emily.
Ever vindictive, Vivian Pace told reporters outside her damaged home yesterday that her daughter, Beth Johnson, reached her husband on his cell phone shortly before the crash. Ms. Pace claimed he told his ex-wife:
“I've got her, and you're not going to get her...That was the only way he could hurt Beth. That was the only way he could get to her.”
Ms. Pace told reporters her daughter could hear Emily in the background saying: “Mommy, come get me, come get me,” and claimed Eric Johnson had been harassing Beth Johnson for months, including buying a house near hers.
Ms. Pace said Eric Johnson threatened her daughter with a gun last summer, while granddaughter Emily was in Iowa with relatives, in an effort to change Beth Johnson's mind about the divorce. Bedford police said they never received a complaint from Beth about the alleged incident.
The couple reportedly met while playing in recreational volleyball leagues and dated for about a year before Eric proposed during a carriage ride in downtown Indianapolis. The couple's relationship began to change after the birth of Emily.
Court records showed Beth Johnson had obtained a restraining order against her husband on July 14, 2006. Bedford police Maj. Dennis Parsley said the order was requested due to “fear of retaliation” during the divorce proceedings. The couple divorced in November after 12 years of marriage and Eric had been moved out of his home under police supervision before the divorce.
“He said he did everything he knew to do to make Beth happy,” longtime neighbor Mary Webb said. Ms. Webb also said police cars were parked outside the home for several weeks last summer. Eric Johnson told her they were there to protect his wife and daughter. “He said, 'I wouldn't hurt her, I wouldn't do that,' and I took his word for it. He didn't seem like that type of person at all.” Ms. Webb also indicated he was “very bitter about the divorce.”
Johnson obtained his pilot's license in November, the same month the couple divorced after 12 years of marriage.
The couple shared custody of Emily, alternating weekends, according to court records. Eric Johnson was supposed to take Emily to school Monday after a week's vacation together in Cancun.
When she didn't arrive, Beth Johnson went to the Bedford Police Department to file a missing person report, unaware of the crash at her mother's home.
Eric Johnson had worked 20 years for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and managed more than 18,000 acres of forest, said Mark Farmer, a department public information officer and “by all accounts he was a good employee, generally well-liked.”
Pastor Paul Neuman of the Calvary Lutheran Church in Bedford said Eric and Emily Johnson were regular attendees at the church, where Eric was a member of the board of trustees and helped with remodeling and landscaping. Johnson and his daughter had attended service Sunday morning and there was “absolutely no indication” anything was wrong, Neuman said.
Andrew Todd Fox of the National Transportation Safety Board declined to say whether Johnson, 47, said anything over the plane's radio before the crash. The Bedford airport has no controller on duty, so no recording was available of any communication, he said. Fox said investigators would look at the plane to see if mechanical failure was a factor but, in the circumstances, that seems very unlikely.
March 13, 2007 — In a tragic twist to an all-too-familiar story, a teenager who had sex with his married, 30-year-old teacher was fatally shot outside the woman's home, and authorities have charged the woman's husband, Eric McLean.
On the evening of March 10, 2007, Eric McLean called police to say an intruder was at the couple's home. About 7 minutes later, Erin McLean called back to say her husband had just shot her lover, Sean Powell, outside in the boy's car.
Eric McLean fled in his car, which was later found at the high school. McLean was arrested Sunday, walking along railroad tracks about 6 miles away, still carrying the suspected murder weapon, a shotgun.
The attorney for Eric McLean, 31, acknowledges that McLean killed Powell. “ So this trial is going to be about what really did happen and why — not who,” attorney Bruce Poston said.
Poston said McLean is in a “state of shock. Like watching a deer caught in the headlights. Literally wondering, 'Have I made a decision that will ruin the rest of my life as well as others?'"
McLean's wife, Erin, had completed half of a one-year teaching internship at West High School, where she met the 18-year-old Sean Powell in the fall of 2006 and quickly began a sexual relationship with him.
Powell's mother, who gave him up for adoption a dozen years ago but re-established contact in 2005, said her son acknowledged having an affair with a teacher. Powell “was a great kid, full of life,” Ms. Flynn said. He had taught himself to play guitar and just received his driver's license. His adoptive parents, Scarlett and Jack Powell, had just bought him a car.
But Sean left school on November 20, 2006, and did not return. School officials refuse to explain, citing privacy laws. Ms. Flynn said her son had a substance-abuse problem and went to rehab for less than a month.
Eric's father, Norman McLean described his son, one of his eight children, as “an excellent person,” who was not violent, but he acknowledged that his son “had a lot of burden on him for months now,” referring to his wife's affair.
“Now, I am only talking about myself. But I can personally only take so much,” Norman McLean said. “Everybody has a breaking point and there is only so much you can endure before you get to that place...where you lose control.”
Norman McLean said Eric, once a percussionist in the University of Tennessee marching band, put his own academic career on hold to support his family while his wife, Erin, of 11 years pursued a graduate teaching degree from the University of Tennessee.
Eric McLean has worked as a pizza deliveryman while taking classes at the university and is one semester short of completing a bachelor's degree in music education. A popular performer in local rock 'n' roll bands, he hoped to become a school band director.
Mrs. Erin McLean has moved in with relatives in Nashville with the couple's two young sons, ages 11 and 7. She has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Police say she has hired a lawyer but could not provide a name.
May 14, 2007 — A Colorado Springs man was in critical condition at a Denver hospital Sunday night after setting himself on fire because of a fight with his girlfriend, police said.
Jonathan McKinney, 21, drove to the woman's house in the 1500 block of Laurette Drive about 9 PM on Friday, May 11, 2007. There he doused himself in gasoline, called his girlfriend on the phone and told her to look out the window, then lit himself on fire, police said.
Engulfed in flames, McKinney jumped out of the car and started rolling around on the yard, police said. A neighbor sprayed McKinney with a garden hose.
McKinney suffered second-degree burns over 80 percent of his body, firefighters said. He is being treated at the University of Colorado Hospital and Health Sciences Center.
Court records show McKinney pled guilty to an assault charge in May 2005 and received two years probation.
Abstracted from article by Howard Pankratz, Denver Post
August 27, 2007 — Colorado gold miner, Terry Hankins, appeared infatuated with Cynthia Denise Runnels. Although the 70-year-old Craig gold prospector was 34 years older than Ms. Runnels, he sent letters to the Texas prison where she was serving time for felony “family violence.”
“He apparently corresponded with people in prison because he felt they needed someone to talk to,”
Craig Police Chief Walt Vanatta said.
After Cynthia Runnels was released from prison in July 2006, Hankins tried to persuade her to come to Craig and marry him. “When she got out of prison, he was calling her to convince her to come to Colorado,” her mother, Willie Fay Runnels, said. “She really didn't want to go. I didn't want her to go. He was too old for her.”
Hankins would send Cynthia Runnels money. When she wouldn't move to Colorado, he would send more, her mother said. Eventually, Cynthia moved to Craig and married him.
Now, Terry Hankins is in the Moffat County detention facility, accused of murdering his wife of six months, among other charges.
Cynthia Runnels-Hankins' body was unearthed Saturday near one of Hankins' gold mines, 5 feet below ground, covered with a pile of dirt 12 feet wide at the base and 6 feet high, Craig Police Chief Vanatta said. She had been missing since June.
The body was found 33 miles north of Craig in Moffat County on Bureau of Land Management land. Vanatta said Hankins, who has no criminal record, had mined in Colorado and Wyoming for decades.
Hankins' family was reluctant to talk about him. Pat Hankins, the first of Terry Hankins' three wives, who divorced him in 1980, didn't want to comment on her ex-husband other than to say he has several children. A man believed to be his son declined to comment.
But Runnels-Hankins' family members and investigators say the relationship between the miner and his wife went downhill rapidly after they married in December.
In March, Mr. Hankins went to court seeking a divorce and a temporary restraining order against Runnels-Hankins, alleging domestic abuse. The allegations were similar to two criminal cases filed against her in Texas.
But days later Terry Hankins withdrew the divorce and temporary-restraining-order requests, Chief Vanatta said.
Runnels-Hankins' family members also said things didn't go well in the new marriage.
Cynthia Runnels-Hankins would call home at least three times a day because in Texas she had two children — son Jordan O'Neal, 13, and daughter Tamera Runnels, 11.
She had originally wanted the children to spend the summer in Colorado with her and her new husband, Willie Fay Runnels said, but decided against it because the relationship was deteriorating rapidly.
“He was just so jealous,” she said. “Every time she went somewhere and came home, he'd accuse her (of being unfaithful).”
Eventually, Cynthia made it clear to her family and Hankins that she'd had enough of the marriage and was planning to leave and divorce him, Mrs. Runnels said. The last time her family heard from her was around June 1 st . Officials said Cynthia disappeared June 3, 2007.
For months, Chief Vanatta's officers, assisted by other agencies, searched for Cynthia Runnels-Hankins.
They executed search warrants on the couple's apartment in Craig, on one of Terry Hankins' mining claims near Encampment, Wyoming, and at the mining claim 33 miles from Craig and the adjacent BLM land. The couple's vehicles also were searched.
Chief Vanatta said investigators believe Runnels-Hankins was slain at the couple's Craig apartment. A Human Remains Recovery Dog alerted police to the presence of human fluids in the apartment.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
© 2008 by Kieran Nicholson, The Denver Post
May 29, 2008 — A Loveland man is suspected of fatally bludgeoning and stabbing a process server was strangling his children in their home when deputies found him, the Larimer County Sheriff's Office said.
James Scott Whitler, 45, is being held at the Larimer County Jail on suspicion of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder, according to the sheriff's office.
Deputies were called at about 8 PM Wednesday to Whitler's home in the 4900 block of Otero Avenue and found a man in the home who was “severely” injured, said sheriff's spokeswoman Eloise Campanella in a press release.
Deputies rushed the injured man, Stephen D. Allen, 57, to paramedics, but he died at the scene of his injuries. Allen had been struck 10 to 12 times on the head with a baseball bat and stabbed three times in the abdomen.
Deputies found Whitler in the home “in the act of strangling his two children, and both were unconscious,” Campanella said.
Whitler was Tasered by deputies who arrested him.
The children, a 10-year-old boy and a girl, 12, were taken to Medical Center of the Rockies, where they remain hospitalized, officials said.
Whitler's wife, Lisa, suffered minor injuries during the attacks.
Earlier Wednesday, Lisa Whitler had filed for divorce in Larimer County District Court, and a temporary restraining order was granted against James Whitler, according to court documents.
Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden said today at a news conference that Allen and Lisa Whitler had been to the house earlier in the day and removed a “long gun.” Apparently Allen shouldn't have come back the same day.
Witnesses told investigators James Whitler left a room at the home to gather personal property but returned with a baseball bat and attacked the process server, also stabbing him, the sheriff's office said.
During the attack, Lisa Whitler fled the home and called 911.
On May 17, Lisa Whitler called the sheriff's office about voice messages being left on her phone by her husband. She also complained to investigators about threatening text messages sent to her by her children. Apparently the children were angry with their mother and wanted to stay with their father according to officials.
James Whitler had told sheriff's deputies that “his wife was out of control and that the children did not want to go with her.” Deputies called child-protection services, but no crime was committed, and no charges were filed.
When the couple began to have marital problems at first James Whitler moved out of their tri-level home and had gotten an apartment. But he soon moved back into the house and Lisa moved out and lived with her parents. Apparently she was planning on using the restraining order to force her husband back out of the house.
Abstracted from story by Katie Kerwin McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain News
July 11, 2008 — A coroner's report stated that a knife-wielding father, killed by Denver police at a family party in May, had cocaine, amphetamine and alcohol in his system when officers shot him. The shooting erupted as the family celebrated the First Communion of Odiceo Valencia's daughter.
Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey found that Denver officers were justified in shooting Odiceo Valencia, 45, after he refused to drop a knife and kept moving toward one of the officers.
In the Montbello neighborhood where the shooting occurred, a small memorial marks the spot where Valencia was shot. Plastic flowers adorn a makeshift cross with Valencia's name. A brown balloon reading, “World's Greatest Dad,” is tied to a nearby tree.
Valencia's daughter, Carolina, said her family would not comment on the district attorney's findings. “We don't know what we're going to do yet,” she said and referred inquiries to insurance adjustor and investigator Donald Fymbo.
Fymbo said that he has videotaped testimony from six witnesses disputing the officers' accounts that Valencia remained armed with the knife when he was gunned down.
The shooting enraged Valencia's family and sparked anti-police sentiment in Montbello.
Family members were distraught that they witnessed the shooting and blamed police for inflaming the situation by encouraging Valencia to return to the family home. The officers told investigators they wanted Valencia to return to the house so that paramedics could care for a self-inflicted wound to his wrist.
• Odiceo Valencia's wife had obtained a restraining order against him after months of fights had escalated [Given Odiceo's age, 45, we're guessing his wife is suffering from perimenopause].
• Valencia, who had moved out of the family home, showed up at the church for his daughter's communion and at the party afterward.
• Valencia's son said his dad was drunk and threatened to kill himself then took a butcher knife and sliced open his left wrist.
• Valencia then left the house but kept calling back.
• During one of those phone calls, Valencia's son handed the phone to police, who urged Valencia to return to the home and have paramedics attend to his injuries.
• When Valencia returned, officers Chris Cesarec, Chris Pappas and Tony Bruce said he threatened Cesarec and chased him around a van while holding a knife. Officers tried to subdue him with a taser and pepper balls but said Valencia continued to threaten Cesarec.
• Morrissey found that the officers were justified because they tried to use nonlethal force and Valencia continued to pose a threat.
In his report, Morrissey found that Cesarec kept trying to back away, but Valencia kept moving toward him.
“For reasons known only to Valencia, his suicidal actions and statements prior to police involvement and during the confrontation are consistent with an intention to force the police to shoot him — commonly referred to as 'suicide by cop,'” Morrissey concluded.
Staff writer Hector Gutierrez contributed to this report.
Abstracted from story by Maria St. Louis-Sanchez, Colorado Springs Gazette
November 8, 2010 — William Anthony Gooch, 50, was severely injured Sunday after El Paso County sheriff's deputies say he crashed his car into the Black Forest home of his estranged wife, set the house on fire, and then barricaded himself inside.
Deputy Teresa Murphy said Gooch slammed his car into the house at 16520 Great Smokey Avenue about 11:15 PM on November 7, 2010.
His estranged wife fled the house and called 911.
Deputies said when they arrived Gooch had lit the house on fire and was barricaded inside. He told authorities that he used gasoline to start the blaze.
Murphy said a SWAT team and crisis negotiators tried to talk Gooch into coming outside.
“He was in the home for quite a while before he left through a window, with a weapon,” Deputy Murphy said. She said he fired his gun and the shot went into the ground.
Deputies subdued Gooch with a stun gun and arrested him for first-degree arson, felony menacing, and failure to leave premises upon the request of a peace officer.
Initially he was flown to Memorial Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation, and then to the Anschutz Medical Campus burn unit in Denver due to the extent of his injuries. Hospital officials stated he was in critical condition Monday.
Deputy Murphy said this isn't the first time that Gooch has barricaded himself inside the home. In August 2009, Gooch was arrested after a six-hour standoff. That time he had a gun and was threatening suicide.
According to court records, Gooch's ex-wife filed for restraining orders against him in January and August 2008. She filed for divorce November 2, 2010.
The house, valued at $282,000 by the El Paso County Assessor, burned to its foundation.
A man walks up to the main door of the Keene County, New Hampshire, Courthouse, douses himself with gasoline and lights a match. And everyone wants to know why?
I am due in court the end of the month. The ex-wife's lawyer wants me jailed for back child support. The amount ranges from $2,200 to $3,000 depending on who you ask. Not big money after being separated over ten years and unemployed for the last two. But I do owe it. If I show up for court without the money and the lawyer says jail, then the judge will have the bailiff take me into custody. There really are no surprises on how the system works once you know how it actually works. And it does not work anything like they taught you in high school history or civics class.
I could have made a phone call or two and borrowed the money. But I am done being bullied for being a man. I cannot believe these people in Washington are so stupid to think they can govern Americans with an iron fist. Twenty-five years ago, the federal government declared war on men. It is time now to see how committed they are to their cause.
There are two kinds of bureaucrats you need to know; the ones that say and the ones that do. The bridge between them is something I call The Second Set of Books. I have some figures of the success of their labors. You and I are in these numbers, as well as our spouses and children. But first let me tell you how I ended up in this rabbit hole.
My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four-year-old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.
When I returned hours later, my wife said the police were by and said I could not stay there that night. The next day the police came by my work and arrested me, booked me, and then returned me to work. Later on Peter, the parts manager, asked me if I and the old lady would be able to work this out. I told him no. I could not figure out why she had called the police. And bail condition prevented me from asking her. So I no longer trusted her judgment.
After six months of me not lifting a finger to save this marriage, she filed for divorce. Almost two years after the incident, I was talking with her on the phone. She told me that night she had called a mental health provider we had for one of the kids. Wendy, the counselor told my then wife that if she did not call the police on me, then she too would be arrested.
Suddenly, everything made sense. She is the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about. If both she and I were arrested, what would happen to our three children, ages 7,4 and 1? They would end up in State custody. So my wife called the police on her husband to protect the children. And who was she protecting the kids from? Not her husband, the father of these children. She was protecting them from the State of New Hampshire.
The police sergeant Freyer screwed this up from the get go. When I got the Court Complaint form the box was checked that said Domestic Violence Related. I could not believe that slapping your child was domestic violence. So I looked up the law. Minor custodial children are exempted. Apparently, 93% of American parents still spank, slap or pinch their children. To this day I still wonder if Freyer would have made this arrest if it had been the mother that had slapped the child.
Labeling someone's action as domestic violence in American in the 21 st century is akin to labeling someone a Jew in Germany in the 1930's. The entire legal weight of the state is coming down on him. But I consider myself lucky. My family was destroyed. But that poor bastard in Germany had his family literally annihilated.
Arrests are mandatory for the police in New Hampshire for domestic violence. That is not law. That is police department policy. Laws come from the Legislature and the Governor's office together. God only knows where these policies come from. The State's Attorney General also has a mandatory arrest protocol for domestic violence. I call these policies, procedures and protocols The Second Set of Books. You never cover the Second Set of Books your junior year in high school. That because we are not suppose to have a Second Set of Books. This is America — we have the rule of law.
I am a regular guy, a coffee and cheeseburger type of fellow. As remarkable as my life has been, I figure that what happens to me must be happening to others as well. I was 48 years old when I got arrested here for my first time. So I went looking for the arrest numbers for domestic violence, this new group that I had unwilling joined. I could not find anything. So I wrote the U.S. Dept. of Justice in Washington. They wrote back that they did not keep track of domestic violence arrests. The FBI keeps track of all other crimes. How come not domestic violence? I thought some low level clerk was blowing me off.
At the time, I had mailing addresses in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. So I wrote to all six Congressional offices, the two Senators from each state and the two Congressman. They like doing favors for constituents hoping you will favorably remember their name in the voting booth. All six offices reported back the same thing. They do not know how many arrests for domestic violence have been made. I immediately knew something was wrong. And I also knew this was not going to be good.
Improvise, adapt and overcome. The Army teaches that to every soldier it trains. They say that no battle plan survives the first five minutes of combat. So your people on the ground had better be able to think for themselves. Taking casualties in war is just an occupational hazard. Taking casualties and not accomplishing your mission is a disaster. After 21 years of Army service, I am pretty good at improvising.
The first thing I found was a study not of domestic violence arrests but of domestic violence injuries for 18 unnamed states and the D.C. in the year 2000. In the study 51% of the injuries were “no injuries.” So I knew I had a study of police reports. Who else but a police officer would record no injuries? I populated that out to the 50 states and came up with 874,000 arrest in the year 2000.
I had originally populated the number back to 1994 when the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was enacted into law. I would later find out these arrests stated with the U.S. Attorney General's Task Force of Domestic Violence ten years earlier in 1984. As individual states data became available for various years and states, I would incorporate them in to my informal study. The number I have now in 2011 is 36 million adults have been arrested for domestic violence. I have a gut feeling this number could be as high as 55 million. But I only have data to 36 million. So 36 million it stays. And there is a really cool trick you can do once you have this number. You can find out how many American men. women and children ended up homeless because of these arrests. [Misdemeanor domestic violence arrests in Colorado from 1999 forward are tabulated in Table 69 and Table 70. That extrapolates to ~1.5 million arrests per year nationally, in rough agreement with Sergeant Bell's tabulation.]
Most of the domestic violence statistics I have seen break down with 75% male and 25% female being arrested. So I am going to use the male pronoun for the one arrested spouse and the female pronoun for the victim spouse. That should make the domestic violence feminists ecstatic — man bad, woman good. But that is okay because that is probably the last nice thing I am going to do for them today.
When then a man is arrested for domestic violence, one of two things can happen. If they are only dating and have separate apartments, then he can head home. But if they are living together, then this fellow has a real problem. Bail conditions and then a possible protective or restraining order prevent him from being with her. So he needs to find a new place to live, at least until the charges are resolved. The King of his Castle is no longer allowed into his castle. A feminist name Pence who wrote that was absolutely giddy at that outcome. So he can get his own place if he has enough money. Or he can move in with his mother, his sister or another relative. He might have a girl friend who would let him stay with her. And if none of this is possible, well then I guess he is sleeping in his car down by the river.
If he has minor children, money will soon turn into an issue. Most men I know do not mind paying child support. They want their kids to have food on their plates, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads. But it does stress that man's finances. Child support is usually 33% of the man's gross income. Withholding for taxes, social security and health insurance can range up to 28% of his gross paycheck. So a man making $500 a week gross has only $825 monthly left over after withholding and child support. That is not enough money for an apartment here in Central Massachusetts. That does not include other expenses like heating, electric, gas, groceries, telephone, cable, car payment and car insurance. So he is in a financial hole. Estimates of homeless men run 82% to 94%. I am going to round that down to 80%.
After the King has left his castle, his wife runs into a problem. She was used to getting his whole paycheck for the household. Now she get a third for child support. Figure they both work and made the same money, her budget went from 100% down to 66%. If she was running the house on $3,045. a month when the King was home, now without him she only has $2,220. Most households in America cannot withstand a 27% hit on the household account. She'll juggle the bills but eventually most wives figure out that they can pay all the smaller bills if they just does not pay the big bill. That would be the rent or the mortgage. So six to nine months after the King is out of the castle, the Queen, the Princes and the Princesses are also on the street. Domestic violence feminists state that 50% of victim spouses of domestic violence end up homeless at some time in their lives.
The last group of homeless from these arrests are children. The domestic violence feminists state that 70% of domestic violence couple have children. So 50% female times 70% children equals 35%. But children is plural. So we will double to 70%.
Men are 0.8, women are 0.5, and children are 0.7 for a grand total of 2.0 homeless Americans for every domestic violence arrest. Multiply that by 36 million and you get 72 million men, women and children ending up homeless at some point in their lives over the last 25 years because of these domestic violence arrests.
That is a really large number even by Washington standards. That is almost 25% of the entire population of the U.S. using 2010 census figures. Which begs the question, did these homeless people contribute to this latest economic meltdown, or did they cause it? Because if they did cause it then the recovery will not be measured in months or years but in decades.
Some of the boys in the Father's Movement think Congress might have shot themselves in the foot over this one. Personally, I think they shot themselves some place anatomically higher. No wonder the Speaker of the House is always crying. The Dummies on the Potomac.
Twenty-five years ago the federal government started pushing these arrests on state's legal systems. Now, we have an economy on the ropes. They have thrown a huge amount of money at banks, big business, and local and state's government. And we are still in the mud. But no economist either at the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, universities, or think tanks are even looking at the impact of all these broken families. If that 36 million arrest is correct, then 72 million men and women, have been thrown out of the middle class into subsistence living. Or is the number 55 million and 110 million? No one knows and no one is even looking. But why should they look? According to the Attorney General, we do not know how many arrests we have made.
And if the Tea Party is any indication, insurrection is brewing in the land. Just a coincidence? Not likely. This is what happens when the government wipes out the middle class.
The idea for these arrests came from something called the Minneapolis Police Experiment (MPE) of 1981-82. In the experiment police offices were given pads with one of three words written on them; counsel, send, or arrest. Counsel meant the officer was to try to mediate the couple's spat. Send was to send one of the spouses out of the house for eight hours as a cooling off period. Arrest was arrest one of the two spouses. The officer was to do as the top paper on the pad said to do. The experiment was set up by the Police Foundation and Lawrence W. Sherman was the lead researcher. The results show counseling resulted in a future assault in 24% cases, send was 19%, and the arrest option resulted in a future assault in only 10% of the cases. Perhaps a cheap way of cutting down future domestic violence.
In 1984 The U. S. Attorney General's Task Force of Domestic Violence recommended arrest as the primary weapon in domestic violence assault. Lawrence W. Sherman recommend not using the arrests because the MPE was just one study and it could be wrong. They ignored him. And by 1992, 93% of the police departments in the nation had adopted some form of mandatory arrest in domestic violence cases.
But by 1992 five more addition studies similar to the MPE became available. Lawrence W. Sherman reviewed all five studies. Then once again he wrote that the police should not use arrest. In two of the five studies, they found the same result as they did in the MPE, that an arrest cut down the odds of a future assault. But in the other three studies an arrest actually increased the odds of a future assault. So arresting someone in a domestic violence situation to cut down on future assaults did not work any better than just flipping a coin. I do not know if Lawrence W. Sherman is still alive. But fortunately he wrote a book call Policing Domestic Violence that was published in 1992.
So we have 800,000 American police officers arresting one in every six adults in the country and throwing 25% of the men, women and children out on the streets in an effort to enforce a policy that they knew did not work back in1992. And I had always assumed that you needed a man to really screw something up. Oh well, there goes another glass ceiling.
Why would they push an arrest policy that does not work? There are two schools of thought on the reason why. The first comes from Lawrence W. Sherman. He calls it the Law of Just Desserts. Revenge for slights and offenses, real or imagined. I am sure there are some that would argue that women are not vengeful. But what is that old saying? Hell hath no fury...
The second idea comes from the mother of the second wave of feminism. I do speak of the brilliant Betty Friedan. In the Epilogue Chapter of the 20th Anniversary Edition of her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty relayed why she resigned as the first president of the National Organization of Women in 1970. Betty wrote that she, “...was unable to openly fight the man haters and unwilling to front for them any more.” So man-hating bigots not only existed 40 years ago, they were also grabbing power. Now Washington is funding them. Makes you wonder what bigots they will fund next. Maybe the Klan?
Feminists had always claimed that when women took over, we would have a kinder, gentler, more nurturing world. After 36 million arrests and 72 million evictions what we got was Joe Stalin.
The third wave of feminists do not like to call themselves feminists. The word feminist could be perceived as gender oppression. These third wave of whatever-we-call-you got that right. The treachery of our legal system over the last 25 years may end up giving all feminists a bad name. Which would make us as bigoted as the man-hating feminists who got us into this mess to begin with.
So let us talk about those bureaucrats that do. These are the ones that actually carry out the evil deeds. I like call them the do-bies.
Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors, and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books — the Constitution, the general laws or statutes, and the court rulings sometimes called Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is their collection of the policy, procedures, and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright. And do not bother trying to argue with me that there is no Second Set of Books. I have my own copies at home. Or at least a good hunk of the important parts of it.
I got my Second Set of Books when I sued the Jaffrey, New hampshire, police department. Under the discovery rule, I would write them with the material I wanted and it would arrive in the mail a few weeks later.
• I got the Police Academy Training Manual.
• I got the Department's Policy and Procedure Manual.
• I got the no-drop protocol that the attorney general sent to all his or her prosecutors.
• I even got the domestic violence protocols for the court system, one hundred pages worth.
Once you read this material, then you will know what the police, prosecutors and judges will do. They are completely predictable once you know what set of books they are using.
The police academy training manual states that an arrest in a domestic violence call is the preferred response. They cite the Minneapolis Police Experiment (MPE) as its justification. But the author of the MPE, Lawrence Sherman, said do not use arrest because five follow up studies show that it did not work. The would be a violation of the 4 th Amendment in the First Set of Books against unreasonable search and seizure. Then there is that whole issue of whether the police have the right to arrest for any reason other than they believe a crime was committed.
The Jaffrey Police Department Policy and Procedures Manual states that if a wife says she does not want her husband arrested, the police are to ignore her, arrest the husband, and get with the prosecutor to see what they can work out. In other words, make the arrest and then see if you can Mickey Mouse it. The wife is eligible for spousal immunity. If she invokes it, then no statement she makes, written or oral, are admissible because she cannot be cross examined about it under oath. (Did you say that? What did you mean when you said that?) With no statements the police have no probable cause in most cases to make an arrest. Also a violation of the 4 th Amendment in the First Set of Books.
The actor Nickolas Cage was drunk in New Orleans with his wife. Everyone else is drunk in New Orleans, so why should Nick be any different. He and his wife were arguing over which house they rented for their stay. Nick grab his wife's arm and started to lead her to his house. The police arrested Nick for domestic violence. His wife was stunned. That was not domestic violence. “Nothing we can do,” the police explained to her. “Just following orders.”
That is an accurate explanation for victims, even if they do not think of themselves as victims. The police have a zero tolerance towards any physical contact. Things might get worse in the future is the feminist logic for this present iron fist approach to domestic relations. I would have to agree with them. After all the arrests, poverty, homelessness, and misery, I can assure you-things are going to get worse.
But that nothing we can do, just following orders the officers explain, always sounds so timid and lame. The police need to punch their explanation up a bit, make it more authoritarian. And there is a quick, low cost way of doing it. The police officers only need to say it in its original German.
The state Constitution in New Hampshire said the prosecutors job is to promote justice. The Attorney General protocols said that domestic violence cases are no-drop cases. (Unless, of course, they take the Deal. Continue the case for a year, go to counseling, and everything falls off the books after the year. They did after all find some way of getting rid of all these cases.)
The Attorney General can hire, fire, layoff, promote, demote, commend or award bonuses. The constitution is some old, quaint, dusty document up in the Statehouse some where. So which one do you think is going to get obeyed?
Prosecutors are funny. Some, maybe most, have egos the size of Cape Cod. But of the three, police, prosecutor and judges, prosecutors have the least protection. Michael Nifong, the prosecutor in the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, was fired, disbarred, convicted of a crime, and actually jailed for trying to enforce the no-drop prosecution protocol for sexual assault in the Duke case.
The prosecutor in my criminal case fared a little better. I filed a complaint with his boss for summoning my two daughters, ages 7 and 4, to court. I had already conceded that the facts were not in dispute. The trial would be about the law. No witnesses were needed, much less a couple of toddlers. He still summoned them. (The Second Set of Books tells the prosecutors to get a sympathetic face in front of the judge or jury. What's more sympathetic than toddlers.) The prosecutor could not refute my allegation because I enclosed a copy of the trial transcript. I had to pay for the transcript. When the prosecutor read it, he gave his two weeks notice and then blew town. That transcript was the best $46 I had ever spent in this life.
There is a name for what happens when a bureaucrat is destroyed by the First Set of Books for attempting to enforce the Second Set of Books. It is called the Abu Ghraib Syndrome. The people within the law enforcement community no longer seem to know the difference between the law, with its checks and balances, and the policies, procedure and protocols that constitute The Second Set of Books. In some cases you do not even know who wrote the policy, procedure, or protocol. It could have been the local high school gym teacher for all anyone knows. Many of these bureaucrats are eventually going to learn the difference between the First and the Second Set of Books. And my guess is that many of them are going to learn it the hard way. Because the only checks and balances in The Second Set of Books is The First Set of Books.
Judges routinely use our children as bargaining chips. Get the adult into counseling, continue the case for a year, and then drop it. This will open up the docket for the new arrests coming in next week. These judges that use our children are not honorable. Which is why I never use the term “Your Honor” any more. I just call them judge.
Alex Baldwin, the actor, wrote that you have never seen a coward until you have seen a Los Angeles County judge. I call my judges — Sullivan, Arnold and even Runyon — cowards, too. When I first started observing them, nothing made sense. Arnold was completely infuriated when he was maneuvered into ruling not guilty. He verbally went up and down me so many times I lost count. What was the big deal? If I was not guilty just say so and then we could all go home. But that was back in the days before I knew about The Second Set of Books.
I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim — the other was the witness. After being found not guilty I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge, Sullivan, decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite. I told the judge that the decision on whether these two girls had a father or a fatherless childhood was not leaving this courthouse. There would be a couple of reason for that decision.
First, by then I knew of the Second Set of Books. As much as I had prayed for the return of my children, I knew that this counseling might get thrown in the way. Judges are addicted to counseling like a meth-head is addicted to crystal meth. Sullivan wrote in the divorce decree that he envisioned only one or two meetings with the counselor. There is no counseling done in the first meeting or two. It is intake — who's the players and what are the issues. But Sullivan was not interested in counseling. He merely wanted to unload the decision out of habit. And if we do not shut them down now, they will be doing it to our kids twenty years from now when they have little ones running around the house.
Second, just exactly where does the buck stop with our legal system? Police have to make an arrest. The prosecutor has to pursue the case. Judges now also walk away without rendering a verdict, and passing the buck does not constitute a decision. Can those mental health counselors slide the decision over to someone else? Just where does this end? Who is responsible? Who is accountable?
The mental health crowd is the third reason I said no. Some people think they are geniuses with their Masters and PhD's. Others think they are so wacky that they call them fruit loops. Well, I have a third name for them. Suckers. They did not get hired for their medical ability. They got hired because they were willing to take these cases off the judge's hands. Which has done nothing for the credibility of their profession. We are not here to help — we are here to unload. And they created a liability that did not previously exist. If a judge releases a defendant and he goes and kills someone, that judge or the judiciary cannot be sued. But a mental health worker, and their employer certainly can be held liable. Our judiciary is now using the mental health field like a ten dollar whore.
I sued Monadnock Family Services to make them go away. I told their lawyer Byron that they were a legitimate target for men. We settled for no money. They would have nothing to do with this reconciliation. The counselor was released. And they would no longer get involved in any domestic violence cases.
Every time we ended back in court over whatever squabbles, I would ask Judge Sullivan for my children back. The decision belongs to the counselors he would tell me. But he knew he had screwed up. I could see it in his face. But he would not fix it. He would not step out of that box those domestic violence/sexual assault advocates had built for him. After five years, he retired to a part time position at the Littleton courthouse 120 miles away.
So when guys like Alex Baldwin and I call judges cowards, we have legitimate reasons for doing so. It is not good for judges to be called coward. It is unlikely that it is good for the rest of us.
I do not claim to have all The Second Set of Books. I know of one book that I do not have. And I would have love to read that one. That would be the seminar that the domestic violence and sexual assault advocates put on periodically for legal personnel including judges. These advocates are camped outside every state, not federal, courthouse in America. The U.S. Department of Justice provides 50-100% of their funding depending on the program. They have three day seminars at resorts where everything is paid for except the liquor. Judges in New Hampshire are ordered to attend. Neither Sullivan or Arnold would confirm or deny they had attended. They actually said nothing. It must be like the Masons where they will not say anything about the organization until you show them the secret hand sign.
Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis once wrote that the best description of a judge is the impartial guardian of the rule of law. How does three days of wine, women, and song contribute to impartiality? It does not. So it should not have been any surprise that they would not answer me. After all, they were not on trial. I was. But they are going to be. They were supposed to protect the rule of law, not collaborate in its demise. They have failed miserably.
A guardian ad litem (GAL) is an attorney appointed for a child. The attorney, or GAL, solely represents the child. I got one when I was first separated to get a neutral pair of eyes and ears on the family. I was disappointed in his findings.
A few years later, another guardian was appointed for one of the kids. A regular report filed with the Court painted me as some sort violent psychopath. I thought that was uncalled for seeing as we had never met. It started a flurry of nasty letters between us until we both came to the conclusion that this was not about us. We ended on a friendly note.
At a Court hearing later on I approached him. I asked him if he had had any domestic violence training. He said yes, that it was required to become certified as a guardian ad litem. Another chapter for The Second Set of Books that I never managed to acquire. So men, if you were thinking about getting a guardian ad litem for an unbiased assessment, then you should ask for the domestic violence material that certified the guardian. And do not worry that you are not sure what you are looking for. It will stand right out.
There are more sections of The Second Set of Books. Medical personnel are supposed to report suspected domestic violence. The college professor Angela Davis has a story of a Latino couple in California getting in trouble feeding the dog his liver for dinner. Mental health employees are also required. Think of Wendy threatening our kids with foster care. Teachers, day care providers, the list just goes on and on. The East German secret police, the Stazi, had 25% of the population on record as informers. The United States is not that high yet, but we are still growing.
These people-police, prosecutors and judges-are supposed to protect us. They are checks and balances to prevent injustice. That is why we spend so much money on police training. But if the police screw it up, the prosecutor can catch it. If the prosecutor misses it then the judge can step in to fix it. But if all three have been compromised, then what does one need to do to get justice? Go to the appeals court or the Supreme Court? That seem a little ridiculous particularly when the zero tolerance has arrests for something as trivial as touching.
On one hand we have the law. On the other hand we have what we are really going to do — the policies, procedures and protocols. The rule of law is dead. Now we have 50 states with legal systems as good as any third-world banana republic. Men are demonized and the women and children end up suffering as well.
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. The Second Set of Books originated in Washington. But the dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors, and judges. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out.
In the last 25 years they have arrested one in six adults in this country and forced 25% of the men, women, and children into homelessness. In 50 years it will be one in three adults arrested and 50% of the men, women and children ending up homeless. Most of our kids will live to the age of 68-years old. As bad as it was for you, your children will have twice the odds of it happening to them.
Some of you will say that 50% homelessness sounds absurd. But 25% is absurd and that is already here. There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy-feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of FEMA trailers. If they still do not get the message, then burn down the trailers.
The easiest way of burning a building is with the Molotov cocktail. It was invented by the Finns when the Soviets invaded in 1939. You fill a bottle with gasoline and stuff a rag in the end for a wick. You light the wick and throw bottle, It shatters on impact spraying gas everywhere and the wick ignites the gas. Simple, readily available, and effective. And only two things to remember.
First, use a glass bottle. Thinner glass is better than thicker glass. You want it to shatter on impact. When I was teaching a kid at the high school on the West Side of Worcester, Massachusetts. threw a Molotov cocktail into his school. Fortunately, he used a plastic bottle. It burned about three square inches of carpeting. I had to laugh when I said to myself, “Thank God for dumb kids.”
Second, you need to tie the rag to the bottle. Nothing worse that throwing a Molotov cocktail, landing where you wanted it, and having it shatter perfectly. Then you noticed the wick had fallen out on the way to the target. No wick-no fire.
Some of these building will have brick faces and metal roofs. Just break a window and throw the Molotov cocktail inside. Carpets, furniture, computer plastic, even paint on the walls will burn. It is okay if the sprinkler goes off. I wonder if you can get hip waders over a gun belt?
We had a kid in my hometown that burned down the old junior high school. He walked up to the front door one night with a can of lighter fluid. The applicator on the end squirts the lighter fluid out. He squirted under the door and along the seams and lit a match. The kid took out the entire old part of the building. Why are kids so competent when it is something they should not be doing?
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
Now, nobody wants to get killed. But let us look at your life. You are broke after paying child support. She and the kids are not doing any better. None of you are middle class any more. You have no say in the kids education, their health treatment, you may not even have visitation with your sons and daughters. And everything you thought you knew to be true — the rule of law, the sanctity of the of the family, the belief that government was there to nurture your brood-all turned out to be a lie. Face it boys, we are no longer fathers. We are just piggy banks.
So you are not losing anything by picking up the Molotov cocktail. It may be too late for us. But without something changing, your kids will have double the odds of it happening to them. That will knock them out of the middle class again, providing they ever get back in. And their kids, your grandchildren, will end up damaged goods before it is over. So it is okay to run. You just need to turn around and run at them. They are no way as imposing as they seem. They only do what they do for a paycheck.
Television would make us believe that people get arrested because of fingerprints, DNA, facial recognition, and instruments that can tell where a substance was made and here is the local distributor. It is Hollywood crap. Most of the people in prison are there for one key reason. They could not keep their mouths shut. They told someone. That someone told others. The cops hear it and start looking at them for a suspect. That how it works in real life.
This need to confess seems to be primeval. Just human nature. But if you cannot keep a secret, do not expect the one you tell to keep their mouth shut. There is only three people I know for certain they will keep their mouths shut. That would be Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, New Hampshire. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out
Some where along the line I picked up the crazy notion that it is better to be dead as a free man than to live as a serf. The government needs to be a little more careful about what they teach in our schools. [New Hampshire's state motto is Live Free Or Die]
And bring a can of spray paint to these fires. Paint the word COLLABORATORS (two L's with an S on the end) on the building before you burn it. Maybe we can shame them back to the rule of law. And we do want the police to know exactly who burned the building. Then the police can start interviewing the usually suspects, all 36 million of us.
We have covered the do-bies. Now let us look at the bureaucrats that say-ers.
The Second Set of Books originated in Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) which is part of the United States Department of Justice. Some of these policies, procedures and protocol were developed locally. But the local results would be sent up to OVW and, if approved, they would disperse it out to all 50 states. They are smart, clever, bigoted, and able to lie as well as any politician that ever called Washington home. In other words, they have now become Washington insiders.
But what makes them so unique is their anger towards men, any man. They are so twisted in their hatred of men that they are positively scary. And it is not what they are doing to men that makes them frightening. You would expect that. No, it is what they are doing to the women and children that makes them so twisted.
When the Pentagon drops a bomb on innocent civilians the military calls it Collateral Damage. It sounds better than, “Yeah, we killed a bunch of women and children.” Those poor, innocent, stupid civilians have always been caught in the middle since the time we were fighting with rocks. Your wife and kids are Collateral Damage in the war against you, the man in the family. For 25 years these feminists at OVAW have been willing to sacrifice the women and children to get you. And they cannot claim ignorance about what they are doing. Under the VAWA the federal government is funding at least 1,800 homeless shelters. As long as the Office of Violence Against Women exists in the U.S. Department Justice, no American man, woman, or child will be safe in their own home.
If you ask these feminists why are the shelters all full, they will not say because of all the arrests. The shelters are full because of men. But they knew from the beginning that this was not a man bad/woman good thing. The year was 1976. Two things would happen that year.
First, someone at the U.S. Department of Justice decided to count the dead bodies. In 1975 there were 1522 women killed in domestic violence. And for men killed in 1975? The dead for men was 1506. Statistically equal as a friend tells me.
If you had asked me before the study, I would have assumed that women were getting the worst of it. But I would be looking at it by genders. What I should have been looking at was species, homo sapiens, human beings. Men are human — women are human. Being the same species you would expect the same results from both genders. And that is exactly what the dead bodies told us.
The second thing that happened in 1976 was the first domestic violence survey was released. It was so new at the time that they called it family violence. Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire and Richard Gelles from a school in Rhode Island were the researchers. They did not find two perpetrators of domestic violence, but three. Men initiated violence 25.7% of the time, women 25.2%, and the other 49.1% was the two going after each at the same time. These two people going after each other at the same time is well recognized in law. The law in New Hampshire calls that mutual combat. Men are human. Women are human. And once again we found both genders acting in the same manner.
So how did we end up with the theory of man bad/woman good that the government at all levels is using? The feminist writer Susan Brownmiller wrote In Our Time that, “...the way you get funding and church donations is to talk about the pure victims. If you talk about the impurity of the victim, the sympathy vanishes.” If women get to be good then men get what is left — bad. Man bad/woman good was originally a fund-raising technique. After 35 years, it has turned into official government dogma at all levels, from the local cop on the beat to the White House. Men need to be punished, restrained, and retrained. Your wives and children are, unfortunately, just collateral damage in this effort to punish men. So you were not dreaming it. There really is a government pogrom against men.
When a man batters or kills, there is no excuse. When a woman commits the same act, there is nothing but excuses. Simple though inaccurate. But there is one redeeming aspect to men being demonized. Now we men can act like devils. And we do not even need to apologize for it. Men are going to start acting just like they made us out to be. As an old high school semi-punk I can assure you boys of one thing. This is going to be fun. You guys are going to end up laughing like hyenas.
The money funded under the VAWA is split in two when it leaves the Treasury. Part goes the Health and Human Services to fund these domestic violence homeless shelters. If that 36 million number is correct, and it is all that we have, then the 1.44 million arrests a year will be made, producing 2.88 million homeless Americans each year. Women and children constitute 60% of these homeless people, 1.7 million Americans a year. Shutting down these shelters would be cruel. What would these women and children do then? Go live under a bridge. No, we are stuck with these shelters for a while. But there is one thing that Congress needs to fix when they fund them again.
These shelters do not allow men on the property let alone inside the residences. Why is it against the law to use federal money on organizations that discriminate against blacks, Jews, gays, or even women, but it is okay to do so against men? Men contributed half that tax money. Eight years ago a man in California fled with his children after the police warned him to get out after they had arrested the wife and mother. None of the shelters would take him and the kids in because he was a man. I wonder if this would survive a legal gender discrimination challenge in a federal court?
A society without men is freakier than a world without blacks or Jews. That is not to say blacks or Jews are any less worthy. It just that there are more men in the world than blacks or Jews even if you combined them. If these feminist had to deal with men on a regular basis, then maybe the country would not be in the pickle we are in now.
There is a third reason to end this discrimination, something of a more practical nature. Apparently, some women like to have sex with men. But men are barred from the property. Suddenly, that 15-year-old boy two doors down starts looking real good. It might even be fun breaking in this new meat. So this woman, driven into insolvency by the push for domestic violence arrests, now finds herself charged as a pedophile because someone barred men from her world. With domestic violence advocates as friends, who needs enemies.
This shelters came up with a novel approach to fixing the pedophile problem. Male children over the age of thirteen are barred from staying there. Too troublesome. The family broke up when the father was thrown out of the house. Now a second break up is happening with the teenage boys. Perhaps a relative has one bed available. Maybe the family of a high school friend would take him in their home. If neither option works then that is okay. He can move in with his father. Then they will both be sleeping in the car down by the river.
Children of these parents also suffer. They used to have their own bedroom in a safe town with good schools. First they have a shelter, then Section 8 public housing. An urban school. Maybe good-maybe not. Kids learn how to be tough in an urban environment. The kids might go bad or they could come out just fine. But there will be no clunky car as a teenager. There will be no saving fund for college. There will be no monetary gift to use as a down payment for a starter home. This tradition of the older generation giving the younger generation a financial leg up has been ruin due to the older generation's lack of money. Financially, the older generation is merely treading water. It will take generations after these present two generations to repair the economic damage to these families.
So we are stuck with funding these shelters for a while. These women and children have no place left to go. Some of you guys may think that these feminists caused the problem and then created the solution. But homeless shelters are not a solution. They are just barely a band aid.
The remaining money under VAWA goes to the United States Department of Justice for the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW). As long as OVW exists then the government is at war with men. As long as there is a pogrom against men, then women and children are going to end up as collateral damage. So there is no need for discussion about OVW going. The only thing we need to figure out is which of the two ways we can use to get rid of them — the easy way or the hard way.
And boys, do not try to burn down Washington's Department. of Justice Building in an effort to get rid of the Office of Violence Against Women. Their offices are over at N Street.
The easy way is using Congress. The VAWA comes up for funding every five to seven years. Next time it comes up, Congress votes no and everyone at the OVW gets a pink slip in late September. Nice and simple, except nothing is simple in Washington. We, the people out here in the sticks, do not always know what the dynamics are in Washington. There might be one method of getting Congress on course. Have Congress demand that the Attorney General get, and release the arrests figures. Or have the President order it. He is usually fearless after he makes up his mind. And this is too large and too well known to continue the Washington plausible deniable routine. Then they will know how much trouble they are in because of these arrests.
There are 220 million adults 18 or older in this country of both sexes. If my figure of 36 million is correct, then that is 16.4% of the adults have been arrested. It could be as high as 55 million or 25%. It might be as low as 22 million, or 10%. Whatever the number there are two things that Congress should know. First, is the fellow who discovered the arrests in Minneapolis back in 1992 said do not use it because it does not work. And second, the people arrested now constitute a Fifth Column here in the United States. Our loyalty to Washington is gone. But what did these geniuses on the Potomac expect? They have harmed our children. If they think Al Qaeda is a pain in the ass, wait to they see what Americans can do once their fuse is lit.
I am certain the Attorney General will sit for months on the request for the number of domestic violence arrests. Then he will explain that they do not readily have the number and that some sort of Manhattan Project effort will be needed in time and money. Nonsense. When Washington started these arrests in 1984 over 6.3 million personal computers were sold here in the U.S. That figure does not include all the mini's, midi's and mainframe computers sold that year. There is no way they can pretend that this data does not exist in electronic storage. A request to Ohio for the arrests 1984-2010 would tie up a state clerk for an hour, including their 15 minute coffee break. Time for the truth boys and girls. Because this is not going away. [Misdemeanor domestic violence arrests in Colorado from 1999 forward are tabulated in Table 69 and Table 70. That extrapolates to ~1.5 million arrests per year nationally.]
The hard way is more time consuming, costs more money and is full of headaches. Because the only way of removing a department from the federal government without the consent of Congress is to take out the entire federal government.
The first time I heard that, I said that is ridiculous. We cannot run this country without a federal government. But we will replace the old government with something new and improved. The new government would honor the debts incurred by the old government. There are a lot of useful reasons for starting with a clean slate.
The bipartisan debt commission released their recommendation for cleaning up the $14 trillion we have borrowed over the years. Convention wisdom has it that Congress has no stomach for any of the recommendations.
But a new government could install those recommendation on day one. Three years later, most Americans will not remember that anything is different. The old government laid off its employees when it closed. The new government is hiring. But instead of 65,000 employees at the Department of Education, the new government is only hiring 45,000. Instead of an average federal wage of $70,000 a year, the new average will be $52,000. The new government will have to write a tax code. Everyone pays 15% with no deductions. How many IRS employees could you get rid of if there were no more deductions? Anything is possible with a new government.
Normally overthrowing an elected government is considered treason. Treason is punishable by death here in the United States. But there is one way of overthrowing the government. That is through the ballot box. Then it is not treason but democracy. Allegedly, Washington is in favor of democracy, particularly if their candidate wins.
There is no legal mechanism in the Constitution or the Federal code of the United States for dissolving the government of the United States. So that is what we need first. Congress would need to write it. We get them to do it through the ballot initiative. [Here he appears to overlook Article V of the Constitution which states “Amendments may be proposed by either two-thirds of both houses of the United States Congress or by a national convention. This convention can be assembled at the request of the legislatures of at least two-thirds of the several states.” So two-thirds of the states could conceivably call for a constitutional convention.]
A ballot initiative is when enough registered voters sign a petition to get a question on the ballot for the next election. The following would be a sample of what the question would look like in New Hampshire.
“That all elected representatives from the state of New Hampshire to both houses of the United States Congress are to propose and advance a bill that would set up a legal mechanism to dissolve the United States government should the people decide to do so in a general election by a simple majority.”
If this initiative passes in all 50 states then Congress will be stuck. They will have to write the law to dissolve. If they do not I suspect within ten years they will be standing in a stairwell at the British or French embassy with a suitcase in hand waiting to get to a rooftop helicopter. I doubt if they will be thinking about the humiliation of being thrown out of the country. They will be far too busy worrying about what will happen if the mob gets their hands on them.
Washington has not got a friend in the world. Even the British and Israelis loathe them now. Kind of a bad time to be losing domestic support. And what have they done over the last 25 years? They have wiped out the middle class pandering to a special interest group of bigots. And in typical Washington fashion, they did not even know they did it.
This Ivy League inbreeding in Washington has produced an elite that knows what best. Everyone else — husbands, wives, police officers, prosecutors, judges, attorney generals and guardian ad litems — are to shut up and do what they are told. The rule of law is gone, replaced by the policies, procedures, and protocols of The Second Set of Books. Which means the federal government will be going shortly. For the government being unable to deliver the rule of law is like an auto mechanic who claims he does not know how to change the engine oil. A certain minimum competency is required. So it looks like the parents of the Washington elite were right. One can be too smart for their own good.
Betty Friedan wrote that the feminist revolution, like any revolution, would have its excesses. Losing the rule of law is too great to call it a mere excess. It is a catastrophe. It is the heart, mind and soul between the people and their government. These feelings of betrayal by losing it may be permanent. I have 21 years of Army service going back to the Vietnam War. My loyalty to the government should be a given. It is gone. I am certain it will never return regardless of how long I might have lived.
It was another woman that lead us in to this decision to clean house inside the Washington Beltway. Something she taught us fifty years ago. You simply look at those folks in Washington and then ask yourself the old Ann Landers question, “Am I better off with them, or without them? Are my children better off with them, or without them?” They are sinking like stones.
Washington, District of Columbia, was chosen as the capital because it was the geographical center of the original Thirteen Colonies. Today, the geographical center of the country is just west of St. Louis Missouri. The new government can set the capital anywhere in the United States it wants. Imagine how many rodents, insects, and parasites they could lose by moving 1,500 miles west.
Whether you replace the federal government or not, men are still going to need a legal defense center for men. Something like the NAACP used to get black people their rights. The only checks and balances in the Second Set of Books is the First Set of Books. Which means lawsuits. Now I know you guys are broke. Some of you have had your wives and kids thrown into homelessness. So I completely understand when you tell me that you are broke. But if everyone who has been arrested throws in $10 a year then the legal defense center will have a war chest of $360 million. You can buy a whole bunch of lawsuit with that kind of money. [Dues for the Equal Justice Foundation are $25/year.]
The Ball family has been supplying sergeants to the Army since at least the Revolutionary War. Elijah Ball served as a sergeant in Cushing's Regiment at the Battle of Bennington. His commanding officer was a general from New Hampshire with the name of John Stark. General Stark was a clever warrior. He was responsible for the bulk of the heavy casualties the British suffered at their victory at Bunker Hill. His orderly, fighting withdrawal allowed the other units on the hill to not only retreat but collect their wounded on the way out.
General Stark would repeat this performance on three hill tops outside the village of Bennington, Vermont, one hot August day in 1777. At the end of the battle, the British lost over 900 men killed or captured. The Colonists suffered 30 dead. Two months later, the depleted British army would surrender at Saratoga. That victory at Saratoga would bring the French into the war. John Stark was the most competent general this country ever produced. For that reason alone his men loved him.
But as brilliant as he was on the battlefield, General Stark would become even more famous for something he said. In 1809 the veterans of Bennington decided to have one last reunion. A delegation called on the General with his invitation. But the General was old and frail. He could not attend. But he did send a message, “You tell the boys I said live free or die. That death is not the worst of evils.” Since 1945 the State of New Hampshire has stamped Live Free or Die on every pen, coffee mug, license plate, and highway sign that they have gotten their hands on.
I think the General and his sergeant would be pleased that his words have elevated from the novelties and bric-a-brac to something more dignified like a courthouse door. Neither of them would give a second thought to the mess left over after the fire was extinguished. War has always been a grim business. Civil wars are usually worse.
But they would be troubled by the new enemy. Oh, they understood when a government betrays it people. They took up arms against the superpower of their day to get relief for their grievances. But the enemy we face now is the government that these men birthed at places like Bennington, Saratoga, and Bunker Hill. Government is no different than the food in a refrigerator. Given enough time both will go bad.
The smartest person I knew in this life was my mother. Perhaps that is true of all of us. Maybe I just got lucky. She was a nurse by trade. She worked in a time when Western medicine made that final transition from butchery to science. But it would not be her nursing skills that made her extraordinary. No, it would be this one incredible knack she had that I had only modest success at mimicking in my life. If she had something important to say to you, she would say it and then never mention it again. She would talk about it if you raised the issue. But she never mentioned it twice on her own. And, oddly, you always heard her.
But she did have one favorite saying. I must have heard in a thousand times in the eighteen years I lived under her roof. It always came at the end of the conversation as she peeled away to see if it was time for Perry Mason or Lawrence Welk. She would turn her head to the side, and over her shoulder she would say, “And the only thing you really have in this world is your family.” Now, thanks to the United States Government, neither we nor our children have that.
. I have three things to say to my children. First, Daddy loves you. Second, you are my three most favorite people in the world. And last, that you are to stick together no matter how old you get or how far apart you live. Because it is like Grandma always said.
On July 10, 2011, Mark Arsenault of the Boston Globe published an epilogue providing additional details about Sgt. Tom Ball's tragic journey through the halls of American “justice.”
Abstracted from article by Linda Williams and Ashley Kewish, KSL TV
August 13, 2018
— Police arrested Duane Youd about 7:30 PM on Sunday, August 12
th
following a domestic dispute in American Fork Canyon in which his booking photo suggests he was scratched and beaten. He was released from the Utah County Jail on bail, then followed procedure in requesting a police escort to retrieve belongings from his home at 584 E. Canyon Road about midnight.
A short time later Mr. Youd flew a Cessna 525 citation jet belonging to a company he had worked for from the Spanish Fork airport and crashed it into his home about 2:30 AM.
The plane flew underneath nearby power lines and clipped the corner of a garage across the street as it crashed. The plane and the house caught fire, but the flames were extinguished.
Duane Youd, the sole occupant of the plane, died on scene, but his wife and a juvenile inside the home escaped safely.
On a recording from Broadcastify, an emergency dispatcher told first responders about a phone call from the son of the homeowner saying everyone was out of the house. The caller confirmed it was an airplane that crashed and “advised (that) his stepfather, Duane Youd, flew the aircraft into the home purposefully.”
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