(Image Credit: Facebook)(PARKER, Colo.) -- A lesbian couple who claimed they were victims of a hate crime have been arrested after police determined they staged the incidents.
On Oct. 28, Aimee Whitchurch, 37, and Christel Conklin, 29, called police and reported the words “Kill the Gay” were scrawled in red spray paint on the garage door of their Parker, Colo., home.
The next day, the couple told deputies they found a noose hanging on the handle of their front door.
The women told officers they believed the incidents were retaliation from their neighbors and homeowner’s association, who had complained the couple did not pick up after their dogs.
Due to the nature of the crimes, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office worked in tandem with the FBI to investigate. After reviewing witness statements, authorities determined Whitchurch and Conklin had staged the incidents.
Both women are charged with criminal mischief and false reporting. Whitchurch faces an additional charge of forgery.
She told ABC’s Denver affiliate KMGH-TV police were mistaken and vowed to fight the charges.
“This is a fight I started. This is a fight I’m going to finish. This is a fight I’m right on,” she said. “I have every right to live where I want to live.”
ABC News(NEW YORK) -- The mother of missing Tucson girl Isabel Celis led hundreds of people on a candlelight walk for her daughter Friday as questions mounted against her husband, who has been barred from contacting the couple's two children.
"It's tough because we're already under a lot of stress because we don't have Isabel here, so to have more thrown on us, but we're strong and we'll be okay, we'll survive it. We just want her back," Rebecca Celis said.
Sergio Celis, the father of the missing 6-year-old, was told last week by authorities he cannot have contact with the girl's two older brothers, who are now in the custody of their mother.
Child Protective Services officials had visited the family's home in December, but officials declined to discuss the circumstances.
Rebecca Celis said her husband wanted to attend the vigil, but was unable to since one of her sons wanted to be there.
"My husband's a great father who loves his boys, who loves his daughter. He's a great husband, a great father. At the end of the day when she comes home, everybody's questions will be answered," Celis told ABC affiliate KGUN.
Police said the development does not mean that investigators are turning their focus on Sergio Celis in the disappearance of his daughter.
"A voluntary agreement was reached between Child Protective Services and the parents to restrict access or, voluntarily, for Sergio to give some space and distance away from the two older children," Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said.
Isabel Celis was reported missing by her father around 8 a.m. April 21 after her mother left for work and her father went to wake her up.
The girl was not in her room, and a bedroom window was opened with the screen removed, police said.
In a 911 call released last week, Sergio Celis sounds calm as he describes finding that the 6-year-old has disappeared from her bed and tells police he thinks she was abducted.
"I want to report a missing person," Sergio Celis says on one of the two recordings, made the morning of April 21. "My little girl, who is 6 years old – I believe she was abducted from our house."
The second recording is of a call featuring Isabel's 14-year-old brother, Sergio, who later gives the phone to his mother after she returns home from work. Both the boy and his mother are frantic, though the woman seems to control herself when she is asked for specific information about the girl's height and weight, what she was wearing, and her hair and eyes.
Police have searched homes in the family's neighborhood, dug through a nearby landfill and searched waterways and drainage systems in Tucson. More than 1,000 tips have poured in regarding the 6-year-old's disappearance.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(NEWTON COUNTY, Ga.) -- Seven school buses that were headed to Six Flags were involved in a crash Newton County, Georgia, ABC affiliate WSB-TV reports.
The accident occurred on westbound I-20 at mile post 97. There are around 30 or so injuries, according to Georgia DOT spokesman David Spear. Over 200 students from Burke County Middle School in Waynesboro were aboard the buses. Most of the children were uninjured.
Nine children were transported to local hospitals.
Trayvon Martin, 17, was fatally shot by neighborhood watch leader George Zimmerman. (ABC News)(SANFORD, Fla.) -- A closer look at the witness statements and audio testimony taken in the immediate aftermath Trayvon Martin's death provides the first insight into George Zimmerman's behavior after he shot the unarmed teen.
A man listed as witness 13 was one of the first people to approach Zimmerman minutes after the shooting. He saw him bleeding from the back of the head and nose. Zimmerman asked the unidentified man to call his wife for him.
"Let her know what's happening, been involved in a shooting and will be held for questioning," the witness told the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "He was more like, talking like he was having a hard time, looked like he just got his butt whipped ... not like he was in shock, not like, 'I can't believe I just shot someone,' but like, 'Just tell my wife I just shot someone,' like it was nothing."
A woman identified as witness 5 walked out of her home after hearing the altercation to find Zimmerman standing over Martin's body. She said she asked him what was going on and he curtly said just, "Call the police."
The woman told police that Zimmerman, 28, examined Martin's body as he slowly paced back and forth when the police arrived. She watched as they checked the teen's body and turned him over, eventually starting CPR. But he was already dead for five or 10 minutes, she said.
"I do honestly feel that he intended for this kid to die," witness 5 told investigators. "If you're in self defense, shoot him in the leg. He's a 17-year-old, scrawny little kid. You get into a physical fight with him. ... I think the kid was running for help."
Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder for the Feb. 26 killing.
Martin was in Sanford, Fla., while serving a suspension from his Miami school for being caught with an empty marijuana bag. At the time of the shooting, he was staying at the home of his father's girlfriend. An autopsy found THC, the intoxicating chemical in marijuana, was in his system.
At 7:11 that night, Zimmerman, a member of the area's neighborhood watch, had called 911 to report a suspicious teenager. Minutes later, the police dispatcher told Zimmerman to stop follwing Martin. Moments later, Zimmerman got out of his car. That's when the two met and Martin was killed.
Zimmerman has claimed that when he shot the 6-foot, 160-pound teenager he was on his back and Martin was astride him pounding away.
The key problem facing investigators is an 80-second gap between the time Zimmerman hung up with police at 7:15 p.m. and when the first 911 calls from terrified neighbors began flooding in.
A man identified only as witness 6 told investigators that he heard a commotion coming from the walk behind his residence. He witnessed a black male wearing a dark-colored "hoodie" on top of a white or Hispanic male who was yelling for help.
Police said the witness elaborated by saying the black man was mounted on Zimmerman and throwing punches "MMA" style, meaning mixed martial arts style. The witness stated that the man on the ground yelled out for help.
Witness 6 said he was going to call for police when he heard the "pop" of Zimmerman's gun.
"When I looked down, I saw the person that was on top was laying in my grass in a sprawled position," witness said. "Saw another guy with his hands in the air, saying, 'The gun's on the ground, I shot this guy in self-defense.'"
Police said they believe Martin noticed he was being watched and "was in fact running generally in the direction of where he was staying as a guest of the neighborhood."
Multiple witnesses and injuries sustained corroborate Zimmerman's account that he was involved in a serious altercation with Martin, one that police say could have been avoided if he did not leave his car as directed by the 911dispatcher. The investigator said the tragedy was avoidable.
Witness 3 said the timing was terrible.
"I saw the police arrive. And they were literally like 5 seconds too late -- like right after the gun went off. Like, they were literally that, that, that short a distance late," the witness said.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(SAN DIEGO) -- A “likely unavoidable” bird strike was responsible for a helicopter crash that killed two Camp Pendleton Marines in September, according to a Marine Corps investigation.
Capt. Jeffrey Bland, 37, and 1st Lt. Thomas Heitmann, 27, were killed on Sept. 19 when their AH-1W Cobra helicopter collided with a female red-tailed hawk near Fallbrook, Calif.
The bird, which investigators estimated had a 4-foot wingspan and weighed 3 pounds, hit the top of the helicopter and damaged the pitch change link, according to a report obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune through a public records request.
Vibrations in the main rotor caused the helicopter to fall to the ground in three separate pieces, the report stated.
The two Marines were killed on impact, while the wreckage ignited a brush fire that spread over 120 acres.
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images(GREENSBORO, N.C.) -- A North Carolina jury completed its first full day of deliberations without a verdict in the John Edwards' trial Friday, requesting to review pieces of evidence that could help determine the fate of the two time presidential candidate laid low by a mistress and money scandal.
The jury consists of eight men and four women. They include five African Americans, six whites and one person whose background was not clear. A decidedly working-class group, many of the jurors have blue collar backgrounds, including three mechanics, a retired firefighter and a retired railroad engineer.
Though Edwards became a millionaire trial lawyer, his attorneys often spoke of his humble beginnings as the son of a mill worker, perhaps in an attempt to strike a chord with the jury.
Soon after being charged by federal Judge Catherine Eagles, the panel began its deliberations and requested office supplies and copies of evidence pertaining to the checks written by millionaire donor Rachel "Bunny" Mellon.
The two time presidential candidate is charged with using nearly $1 million in donations to hide his mistress Rielle Hunter and their love child during his bid for the 2008 election.
Edwards, 58, could be hit with a prison term as high as 30 years and fined up to $1.5 million if convicted of all the charges, although it is unlikely he would be hit with the most severe penalty.
In closing arguments, Edwards' lawyer Abbe Lowell told the jury that the money to hide his mistress came from Mellon and former campaign treasurer Fred Baron. Both people gave him the money as a gift for his benefit, not as part of his political campaign, Lowell argued. And the money, he said, was used to hide the affair from Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, who was dying of cancer.
"John was a bad husband, but there is not the remotest chance that John did or intended to violate the law," Lowell said.
"If what John did was a crime, we'd better build a lot more court rooms, hire a lot more prosecutors and build a lot more jails," he said.
Lowell said the real culprit was Edwards' aide Andrew Young who helped hide Hunter. He claimed that Young solicited the money from Mellon and used the scandal to enrich himself. Lowell said Young, who was the prosecution's chief witness, and his wife Cheri would "shame Bonnie and Clyde."
Prosecutor Robert Higdon tried to convince the jury that Edwards was an archly ambitious politician fixated on obtaining a higher office.
"He would deny, deceive and manipulate," Higdon told the jury. "The whole scheme was cooked up to support John Edwards' political ambitions."
Neither Edwards nor Hunter took the stand during the month long trial.
Mary Richardson Kennedy and her son, Conor Kennedy, in 2009. Jason Kempin/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- The body of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, was released by authorities to a funeral home Friday amid a family struggle over burial rights.
The body was released after her estranged husband got a court order directing the Westchester County medical examiner turn over the body to the Clark Associates Funeral Home. Clark Associates has been preparing for a funeral at Kennedy's request.
The Medical Examiner's office had refused to release Kennedy's body to Clark Associates because Mary Kennedy's siblings and her estranged husband's family were fighting over where she would be buried, multiple sources told ABC News.
Clark Associates expects a private wake either Friday night or Saturday morning at one of the family's homes, and then a funeral at 10 a.m. Saturday. The location was not disclosed.
The Kennedys planned to bury her near the Kennedy family's compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on Cape Cod.
Mary Kennedy, 52, died Wednesday of asphyxiation from hanging at her home in Westchester County, N.Y., according to the medical examiner. Kennedy and her husband, Robert Kennedy, Jr., had been separated since 2010 but were not legally divorced.
Mary Kennedy's brothers and sister, however, are planning a sunset memorial Monday night at the Standard Hotel in Manhattan. Mary Kennedy grew up in New Jersey, where her father was a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Her mother lived in Bayonne, N.J., until her death.
"The first task is for Mary's family to take her to her final resting place, with the dignity and love she deserves," her siblings wrote in a statement released today.
None of Mary Kennedy's family returned calls from ABC News for comment on their sister's death. They released the statement to combat what they saw as a mischaracterization of their sister in news reports following her death, they wrote.
"She was generous, thoughtful, with a refined aesthetic, genius organizational abilities, boundless energy, physical stamina, and natural elegance. She laughed a lot. Her enthusiasms were deep. She loved to connect people, with no self-interest, and with great intelligence," the statement read.
Following her death, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., told the New York Times that his estranged wife had been struggling with depression.
"A lot of times I don't know how she made it through the day," Kennedy, Jr., told the newspaper. "She was in a lot of agony for a lot of her life."
The pair had broken up in 2010 and Mary Kennedy faced difficulties with alcohol during the intervening years. She was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and driving under the influence of drugs on two different occasions.
Tunica County Sheriff's Office(TUNICA COUNTY, Miss.) -- The man arrested in connection with two Mississippi highway murders was linked to the crimes after he allegedly kidnapped and raped a woman who managed to get away and contact police.
James D. Willie, 28, was arrested Tuesday morning on rape and aggravated assault charges when Tunica County police responded to an apartment where a disturbance was reported. When they arrived, a woman said that Willie raped her.
Police found a Ruger 9mm, semi-automatic handgun in his possession during the arrest, which investigators later determined matched the weapon used in last week's shootings.
The motive for the alleged shootings were "drugs and robbery," authorities said at a news conference Friday. Cops would not confirm or deny if Willie was under the influence of drugs at the time of the crimes.
Willie was charged with kidnapping, rape, felony possession of a firearm and the murder of Lori Carswell, police said. Charges for the murder of Tom Schlender are still pending.
Authorities initially thought the shooter was posing as a police officer to get people to stop on highways on the northern part of the state, but have since backed away from that theory.
"We can't confirm or deny if the car was already parked, if he ran across her or if he flashed her [with lights] to get her to pull over," Tunica County Sheriff K.C. Hamp said referring to Carswell.
Schlender, 74, from Nebraska, was found in his car on Interstate 55 in Panola County on May 8 about 1:30 a.m. Three days later, Carswell, 48, from Mississippi, was found near her car on Highway 713 in nearby Tunica County about 2:15 a.m.
"We did interview [Willie] last night and in the early morning hours," Hamp said. "He's been cooperative to a certain extent. We didn't get a confession directly, but we got a lot of information."
Schlender's family told ABC News that his wallet was missing. Police will not say whether Carswell was robbed, but said her purse, cell phone and wallet were in her car, but the wallet was empty.
Willie, who has an extensive criminal record, has previously spent eight years in prison for burglary charges.
The fear that a killer was posing as a cop to get his victims to pull over had prompted police in Mississippi to warn motorists to not stop if being flashed by police late at night. Instead, the department advised they call 911 to help decide whether the call behind them was really a police car.
If it wasn't a police car, the cops would send help.
Willie is being held in jail without bond and is expected to make his first court appearance on Monday.
iStockphoto/Thinkstock(HOUSTON) -- It’s graduation day -- a day that’s getting quite familiar to Marc and Beverly Ostrofsky of Houston.
Friday, they’ll attend two graduation ceremonies, one for their daughter Shelly, 22, from Washington University in St. Louis and another for their daughter, Mary Grace, 18, from Kincaid High School. Mary Grace will head to Boston University. Kelly, 22, graduated last Sunday from Duke University. Tracy, 20, is a sophomore at University of Denver. The oldest, Maddy, 23, graduated from Berklee College of Music last year.
So what’s the cost of putting five daughters through college? Ostrofsky told ABC News $60,000 to $70,000 a year, “easy -- that’s really conservative,” Beverly Ostrofsky said.
In total, the family will spend about $1.5 million on college after taxes and that’s not including graduate school. One daughter informed Marc that she now wants to seek her PhD. Marc is the best-selling author of Get Rich Click, and a multi-millionaire from Internet businesses.
“We’re fortunate that we can take care of it,” Beverly said. “We decided a long time ago we didn’t want the girls to take out college loans, so that was our commitment to them.”
Marc and Beverly married five years ago, blending their respective daughters into one big family of college-ready girls and creating a prime illustration of the rising cost of college for families with multiple children. The Ostrofsky family said their advice to parents is to start planning and saving from the day children are born.
Beverly said they wanted their daughters to have a choice of where they wanted to go to college, but having their children spread throughout the U.S. created another expense -- flying all of them home for holidays and visits. Just this week, Marc flew to North Carolina for Kelly’s graduation, then to St. Louis for Shelly’s graduation and hopes to make it back just in time to Houston for Mary Grace’s graduation Friday night.
Though the greatest expense is room and board, the family also picks up the tab for many other miscellaneous expenses such as food, clothing and three of the girls have cars.
“I’ve got five daughters so let’s put a separate line item for shoes,” Marc said. “At one point we had four different colleges going at the same time. It’s a little bit hectic.” Marc added he also picks up the cost of other activities such as sorority participation and athletics such as snowboarding.
With the last child leaving home for college, Marc says he and Beverly are going to “take a breather.”
“It’s like wipe the sweat off the brow now -- it’s time think about what can mom and dad do,” he said.
USHHS(WASHINGTON) -- Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius barely got out two sentences Friday before a protester at the Georgetown University Public Policy Commencement sprung to his feet calling her a “murderer.”
The audience began booing the protester to drown out his cries, making the rest of his outburst inaudible.
Sebelius, however, barely missed a beat. After her initial surprise she continued her talk, saying “having spent my entire life in public service," drawing laughter from the audience, which was clearly on her side.
After he was escorted out, the same protester could be heard running up the hall outside the auditorium and attempting to reenter. All while screaming what sounded like “Judah,” probably in reference to Genesis 38, where Judah orders a woman to be burned to death, despite the fact she was three months pregnant.
Debate from Sebelius stemmed from her speaking at a Catholic and Jesuit university after the March 14 “statement on religious freedom and HHS mandate” which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) strongly opposed.
In a statement from the university president, John DeGioia, said the invitation is not a “challenge” to the USCCB, as some interpreted it to be.
Clarifying that the invitation came prior to the January 20 announcement by the Obama administration of modifications to healthcare regulations, and that her “presence on our campus should not be viewed as an endorsement of her views” and that the university “disassociates itself from any positions that are in conflict with traditional church teachings.”
The Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative watchdog group, and their President Patrick J. Reilly, however, condemned the choice and urged the president to “withdraw the invitation” and called the move to invite her “scandalous and outrageous.”
They also sent an online petition with more than 25,000 signatures to DeGioia, which according to their blog “is part of CNS’ ongoing efforts to promote a renewal of Catholic identity in Catholic institutions of higher learning.”
The students selected the secretary in the “spirit” of her experience and career in public policy.
“We expect that her remarks will not be a political statement, but will reflect the experiences she has had throughout her life in public service,” a student letter to the president explained.
The faculty of the public policy institute also issued a letter to the president Thursday saying the university “cannot permit outside protests to dictate who will and will not be allowed to address out community” and that “speech should be answered by speech, not by efforts to shut down discussion and free exchange.”
The five or six protesters outside the commencement held signs stating “Abortion is Murder.”
Sebelius drew off her own experiences and offered the new graduates two key pieces of advice.
Her first “hope” was to “always hold on to your commitment to work for the common good. If you let that focus guide you, you will never go off course,” she said.
While her second piece of advice was to not “wait.”
“Go ahead and do it yourself -- because if you don’t, it might never happen,” she said.
