About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 28, 2018)
6A Friday, December 28, 2018 The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com NATION CALIFORNIA Sheriff: Officer’s killer in US illegally BY OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO - A gunman suspected of killing a Northern Cal ifornia police officer who pulled him over to investigate if he was driving drunk is in the country ille gally, authorities said Thursday. Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson said detectives identi fied the suspect in the slaying of Cpl. Ronil Singh of the small-town New man Police Department but didn’t release his name. The attacker is still on the loose, and he said authorities searching for a second day believe he’s still in the area and is armed and dangerous. “This suspect ... is in our country illegally. He doesn’t belong here. He is a criminal,” Christianson said at a news conference. Authorities are looking for a man seen in surveil lance photos at a conve nience store shortly before Singh was killed Wednesday. Offi cials pleaded for help from the public and said they were follow ing up on several leads. “The sheriff’s office will spare no expense in hunting down this criminal,” said Christianson. Christianson said Singh, a 33-year-old native of Fiji with an infant son, stopped the attacker as part of a DUI investigation and that the officer fired back to try to defend himself. Singh was shot minutes after radioing that he was pulling over a gray pickup truck that had no license plate in Newman, a town of about 10,000 people some 100 miles southeast of San Francisco. Singh died at a hospital. A ground and air search began for the heavyset man pictured at the store with short, dark hair and wearing a silver chain, jeans, dark T-shirt and a dark jacket with white Ecko brand patches on the shoulders. A truck believed to have been the one stopped by Singh was later found in a garage in a mobile home park about 4 miles from the shooting, where law enforcement officers were serving a search war rant, The Modesto Bee reported. Investigators were examining the vehicle, police said. Singh joined the Newman police force in 2011. Earlier in his career, Ronil Singh worked as a deputy with the Merced County Sheriff’s Department. “He was living the American dream,” said Stanislaus County sheriff’s Deputy Royjinder Singh, who is not related to the slain offi cer but knew him. “He loved camp ing, loved hunting, loved fishing, loved his family.” On his Facebook page, Ronil Singh posted pictures on Christmas Eve from a deep-sea fishing trip that produced a big haul of crabs and fish. His profile picture shows him smiling as he stands at a patrol car with a dog — the same photo graph of the officer released by the Sheriff’s Department. Ronil Singh is survived by his wife, Anamika, and a 5-month-old son, authorities said. Singh Despite #MeToo, rape cases still confound police with investigations JEFF BAENEN I Associated Press Sexual assault survivor Sam Gaspardo displays her “HOLD ON” and “to infinity” tattoos on her right arm Dec. 18 in Minneapolis. The “HOLD ON” tattoo is in her mother’s handwriting. It’s to remind Sam to hold on when she’s struggling. Case clearance rate’ fell in 2017 to lowest point since at least 1960s ‘It can make a person so angry. Are women supposed to start wearing body cameras when they’re alone in a room with somebody?’ Sam Gaspardo BY JIM MUSTIAN AND MICHAEL R. SISAK Associated Press NEW YORK - The #MeToo movement is empowering victims of sexual assault to speak up like never before, but what should be a watershed moment for holding assail ants accountable has coin cided with a troubling trend: Police departments in the U.S. are becoming less and less likely to successfully close rape investigations. The so-called “clearance rate” for rape cases fell last year to its lowest point since at least the 1960s, accord ing to FBI data provided to The Associated Press. That nadir may be driven, at least in part, by a greater willing ness by police to correctly classify rape cases and leave them open even when there is little hope of solving them. But experts say it also reflects the fact that not enough resources are being devoted to investigating sex ual assault at a time when more victims are entrusting police with their harrowing experiences. “This is the second-most serious crime in the FBI’s crime index,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, “and it simply doesn’t get the necessary resources from police.” Police successfully closed just 32 percent of rape inves tigations nationwide in 2017, according to the data, rank ing it second only to robbery as the least-solved violent crime. That statistic is down from about 62 percent in 1964, despite advances such as DNA testing. The FBI provided The AP with a dataset of rape statis tics dating back to the early 1960s — a table that includes more complete data than the snapshot the bureau releases each fall. The grim report card has prompted debate among criminal justice experts, with some attributing the falling clearance rate to an antiquated approach to investigations. “You’d figure with all the new technology — and the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual assault know their attacker — the clearance rates would be a lot higher,” said Joseph Giacalone, a former New York City police sergeant who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s almost as if forensics and DNA has let us down,” he said. Experts agree that sexual assault is one of the most confounding crimes police confront. Many investiga tions lack corroborating witnesses and physical evi dence. A significant chunk of complaints are reported months or years after the fact. Researchers believe only a third of rapes are reported at all. Historically, some detec tives also discouraged women from pursuing tough- to-prove charges against boy friends, husbands or close acquaintances. The declin ing clearance rate could mean that investigators in some places are finally clas sifying rape investigations properly, said Kim Lonsway, research director at End Violence Against Women International. Rather than hastily “clearing” certain tough-to- solve cases, she said, some police departments have begun “suspending” them, meaning they remain open indefinitely. That leaves open the possibility there could someday be an arrest. “This may be an indica tor of some positive things,” Lonsway said. The FBI’s clearance num bers provide an incomplete picture of how often rapists are brought to justice. That’s because they also include “exceptional clearances,” where police close an inves tigation without charging anyone, for reasons beyond the department’s control. That could be because a vic tim stopped cooperating or the suspect died or is incar cerated in another state, among other reasons. The figures do not spec ify the percentage of rape cases that are exception ally cleared compared with those resulting in arrests, but state data can fill out the pic ture in some places. In Detroit, for instance, police investigated 664 reported rapes last year but made just 44 arrests, according to Michigan data. Another 15 cases were closed for other reasons. That would give Detroit a clearance rate of 8.9 percent, even though only 6.6 percent of reported rapes resulted in an arrest. Sam Gaspardo said when she reported in 2011 that she had been sexually assaulted, police in Woodbury, Min nesota, lacked a sense of urgency. Investigators in the St. Paul suburb expressed frustration that she delayed reporting the attack for more than a year and couldn’t recall the precise date. One time, when she phoned to follow up her case, she was put on hold indefinitely. “To me, it felt like it was invalidated,” Gaspardo said. “I was just completely dismissed.” Woodbury Police Cmdr. Steve Wills acknowledged Gaspardo’s complaint fell through the cracks and was not investigated for years, something he called “a sys tem failure.” “Obviously, we own that,” Wills said. Wills said authorities have “no reason not to believe” Gaspardo but decided a few weeks ago they could not prove her alleged attacker had forced her into intercourse. He acknowledged police would have been in a far bet ter position to investigate the case had they begun looking into the matter immediately. “It can make a person so angry,” Gaspardo said. “Are women supposed to start wearing body cameras when they’re alone in a room with somebody?” Many police sex assault units have heavy work loads and insufficient staff ing, said Kevin Strom, the director of RTI Interna tional’s Center for Policing Research & Investigative Science, a research center based in North Carolina. “I think that has a major impact in terms of influ encing the ability of law enforcement to successfully clear these cases,” he said. The clearance rate in rape cases dropped steadily in the 1960s, plateaued at nearly 50 percent through most of the 70s, 80s and 90s, then began a steady yearly decline that persisted through last year, according to the statistics collected by the FBI. abersham treat Assisted Care Community Now Offers a New Assisted Living Home Located 258 Park Ave Baldwin GA The uite Life Come by for a visit. Prebook one of our new rooms that you can make your very own. www.habershamretreat.com Call us @ 706-499-6842 Boston Marathon bomber’s lawyers want death sentence tossed BY ALANNA DURKIN RICHER Associated Press BOSTON — Attorneys for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told a federal appeals court Thurs day that his convictions or death sentence should be tossed because the judge refused to move the case out of the city where the bombs exploded, making it impossible for him to get a fair trial. In a 500-page brief filed in the 1st U.S. District Court of Appeals, Tsarnaev’s legal team outlined a host of other problems with his 2015 trial, including issues with jurors, certain testimony from surviving victims and the defense’s inability to tell jurors about links between Tsar naev’s brother and an unsolved triple killing in 2011. The lawyers argued the trial court’s “first fundamen tal error” was denying the defense’s repeated requests to move the case out of a city that was “traumatized by the bombings, ordered to shelter in place during the man hunt, saturated by prejudicial publicity and united in the Boston Strong movement.” “Tsarnaev stood accused of notorious crimes. The bombings were the subject of constant and widespread publicity, which included coverage of matters that would never be admitted at trial,” the lawyers wrote. “Virtu ally every single prospective juror was familiar with that publicity, had been personally affected by the crimes and their aftermath, and thus had formed negative, entrenched preconceptions about Tsarnaev’s guilt and the appropriate sentence,” they said. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death just over two years after he and his brother set off two shrapnel-packed, pressure-cooker bombs near the Boston Marathon’s fin ish line on April 15,2013, killing three people and wound ing more than 260. He was convicted of all 30 charges against him, includ ing conspiracy and use of weapon of mass destruction, after a months-long trial in which his attorneys admit ted he and his older brother carried out the attack. The defense had sought to portray Tsarnaev as an impression able teenager who was lured by his brother into partici pating in the deadly plot. Tsarnaev, now 25, is behind bars at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. His 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in a gunbattle with police a few days after the bombing. Male Disney worker claims harassment by female supervisor ORLANDO, Fla. — A middle-aged male former labor analyst at Disney Cruise Line claims his younger female manager created a hostile work environment by bullying him about his age, bragging about sleeping with married men in the office and passing him over for promotions, according to a federal lawsuit. Anthony McHugh claims in the lawsuit filed last month that his former female manager discriminated against him because of his sex and age, a scenario legal experts say is rare given the genders of the employee and supervisor. The unidentified female supervisor called McHugh a “stuffy old fart” in front of staff, moved his office to a windowless space, wouldn’t provide him with an iPhone or tablet like she did for staff younger than 40 and passed him over for promotions even though he says he was more senior and qualified, the lawsuit said. Disney Cruise Line said in a statement that the claims in the lawsuit are without merit and “we will respond to them in court.” The Florida-headquartered cruise line is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co. and operates four ships. McHugh’s attorney, John Zielinksi, said they wouldn’t comment for the time as the lawsuit is being litigated. The lawsuit doesn’t say how old the supervisor or McHugh were, other than McHugh was older than 40 and the man ager was younger than 40. Zielinski didn’t respond to an email asking his client’s age. 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