10—Cleveland Daily Banner—Monday, January 4, 2016
www.clevelandbanner.com
Retiring Newtown police chief reflects
NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) —
Michael Kehoe doesn’t want his
37-year
career
with
Connecticut’s Newtown Police
Department defined by one
event, but that’s difficult when
your sleepy suburban town of
28,000 people was the site of
one of the country’s deadliest
school shootings.
The 60-year-old police chief
reflected on his decades of service recently with The Associated
Press as he prepared for his
retirement on Wednesday.
“One small period of time, one
criminal act is what it is,” Kehoe
said about the massacre at
Sandy Hook Elementary School
on Dec. 14, 2012. “Although the
magnitude of Sandy Hook is
quite important, I would say
there were also many other
important events and days in my
career.”
He rattled off accomplishments that could be on any
police officer’s list: busting criminals, teaching children to avoid
drugs, fostering interest in law
enforcement through the police
explorers program and working
to prevent crime.
Kehoe, however, will be most
remembered for leading the
response to the Sandy Hook
shooting that killed 20 firstgraders and six educators and
subsequently calling for bans on
semi-automatic
assault
weapons, like the Bushmaster
AR-15 rifle used by gunman
Adam Lanza.
Kehoe, a married father of two
children now in their 30s, was
among the first officers to enter
the school. The Hartford native,
who was hired by Newtown
police in 1978 and became chief
in 2001, speaks only in vague
terms about what he saw in the
classrooms where the students
and teachers were killed.
“It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s
unimaginable is the best way to
term it,” he said. Responding to
the school that day was “surreal,” he said.
He would later talk to people
close to him about what happened and said he didn’t develop
long-lasting stress problems as
some officers did.
Lanza, 20, who had a history
of mental health problems,
killed his mother at their
Newtown home before shooting
his way into the locked school.
The chaos ended when he killed
himself.
There was an overwhelming
amount of work to be done after
the shooting, Kehoe said. He
and his 45-officer force worked
long hours keeping watch over
the shaken town and trying to
restore a sense of security with
the help of officers from other
towns. Authorities needed to
secure several sites including
the Sandy Hook school, all other
local schools, the Lanza house
and the victims’ funerals.
“You can imagine a community feels very unsafe after an
event like that,” he said. “We
wanted to rebuild the safeness
of the community afterward.”
Kehoe helped coordinate an
outpouring of aid that flooded
the community, including flags
from overseas military bases
that were given to the town and
flown at the police station.
Officers also spent months
doing paperwork for the investigation, which state police and
prosecutors took over.
Kehoe said he first began
thinking of retiring in 2011. He
has no immediate plans for how
he’ll spend his time but is considering consulting work. He’ll
be succeeded by James Viadero,
a Newtown resident and police
chief in nearby Middlebury.
Kehoe believes the town has
rebounded well after the shooting.
“It doesn’t define us at all,” he
said. “In many ways we’re still
the same community we were
before, probably closer-knit and
more compassionate. We know
that time heals. It may not completely heal. But it does heal.”
AP Photo
neWtoWn PoLICe ChIeF Mi chael Kehoe is retiring
Wednesday, after 37 years with the Newtown, Conn., police department. He will be best remembered for leading the response to the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012, that
killed 20 children and six educators.
California houses largest death row
AP Photo
In thIs Photo tAken on Tuesday, a guard stands watch over condemned inmates on death row
at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. With California’s lethal injection protocol in limbo, the
nearly 750 inmates at San Quentin State Prison, the nation’s most populous death row, are more likely
to die from natural causes or suicide than execution. The inmates await a final decision on a proposed
one-drug execution method to replace a three-drug method that a federal judge invalidated in 2006 as a
potentially cruel and unusual punishment.
Pentagon: Hundreds of U.S. military
children sexually abused annually
WASHINGTON (AP) — The children of service members are victims in hundreds of incidents of
sexual abuse each year, according to data the Defense
Department provided exclusively
to The Associated Press.
The abuse of military dependents is committed most often by
male enlisted troops, the data
show, followed by family members.
The figures offer greater insight
into the sexual abuse of children
committed by service members, a
problem of uncertain scale due to
a lack of transparency into the
military’s legal proceedings. With
more than 1 million military
dependents, the number of cases
appears statistically small. But
for a profession that prides itself
on honor and discipline, any
episodes of abuse cast a pall.
Those numbers fall well-short
of a full picture.
Ages of the offenders and victims, locations of the incidents
and the branch of service that
received the report of sexual
abuse were omitted. The Defense
Department said in a statement
that “information that could
unintentionally uniquely identify
victims was withheld from release
to eliminate possible ‘re-victimization’ of the innocent.”
It’s also unclear how many of
the incidents resulted in legal
action. The cases represent sub-
stantiated occurrences of child
sexual abuse reported to the
Defense Department’s Family
Advocacy Program, which does
not track judicial proceedings,
the department said.
An AP investigation published
in November found more inmates
are in military prisons for child
sex crimes than for any other
offense. But the military’s opaque
justice system keeps the public
from knowing the full extent of
their crimes or how much time
they spend behind bars.
Responding to AP’s findings,
three Democratic senators have
urged Defense Secretary Ash
Carter to lift what they called the
military justice system’s “cloak of
secrecy” and make records from
sex crimes trials readily accessible.
The senators also raised another concern. Cases involving children are not included in the
Defense Department’s annual
report to Congress on sexual
assaults, which focuses primarily
on adult-on-adult incidents, they
said. The senators — Barbara
Boxer of California, Kirsten
Gillibrand of New York and Mazie
Hirono of Hawaii — told Carter in
a Dec. 8 letter they are concerned
the department may be underestimating how many sexual
assaults are occurring in the military.
There were at least 1,584 sub-
stantiated cases of military
dependents being sexually
abused between fiscal years 2010
and 2014, according to the data.
Enlisted service members sexually abused children in 840 cases.
Family members of the victims
accounted for the second largest
category with 332 cases.
Most of the enlisted offenders
were males whose ranks ranged
between E-4 and E-6. In the
Marine Corps and Army, for
example, those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Officers were involved in
49 of the cases. The victims were
overwhelmingly female.
Kathy Robertson, manager of
the Family Advocacy Program,
said in an emailed response to
questions that the incident rates
reflect the U.S. military’s demographics. Most of the cases
involve the E-4 and E-6 ranks
because they are the largest
number of active-duty personnel
and the largest number of parents in the military, she said.
Duplications in the data indicate as many as 160 additional
cases of sexual abuse could have
occurred during the 2010 to 2014
period, involving a child who was
victimized multiple times or a
repeat abuser. The figures also
account only for cases involving
military dependents, which are
the only child victims the department tracks.
Site of San Bernardino attack to reopen today
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP)
— In the offices of the Inland
Regional Center, Christmas did
not come.
Tinsel still festoons cubicles. A
small tree with presents sits
undisturbed. A sign-up sheet to
bring in food remains empty of
names.
The staff was still gearing up
for the holidays on Dec. 2, the
day 14 people were massacred
on the center’s gleaming campus.
Few of its 600 employees have
gone to the office since, other
than a brief visit to gather personal belongings a week after the
terror attack.
On Monday, they return.
While many have continued to
work, visiting the homes of
autistic children and mentally
disabled adults, they haven’t
been together in the place where
everything froze once law
enforcement officers whisked
them away.
Amid the investigation and
cleanup, the campus has been
locked behind a chain link fence
wrapped in green mesh. Within
that perimeter, in one corner, is
a second fence.
It seals the conference center
that San Bernardino County’s
health department was renting
for a holiday luncheon when the
two attackers began their
assault. A county restaurant
inspector targeting his co-workers was joined by his wife in
killing 14 and injuring dozens.
The conference building will
not reopen Monday, and it’s not
clear when it might.
For now, the act of reuniting
elsewhere on campus will be a
huge step forward for Inland
Regional Center staff. They miss
the friendly faces, the hallway
chit chat. They yearn to renew a
sense of stability at an institution unmoored by violence.
“That’s what I’m hear ing from
them: ‘We want to be together
again. We want to be back at
work,’” said Lavinia Johnson, the
center’s executive director.
Sitting for an interview in a
tidy courtyard shaded by two of
the center’s large, red stone
buildings, Johnson and associate executive director Kevin Urtz
reflected on the reopening.
Johnson apologized for tree
debris that has collected in the
absence of caretakers. Several
Japanese maples still clung to
the last of their red leaves.
The plan for Monday morning
is, after a welcome and some food
in the lounges, to do what social
workers and counselors do best
— sit and talk.
“Just be together again,”
Johnson said, “share where
they’re at.”
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. (AP) —
With executions on hold in
California and a death penalty
appeals process that can take
years, many inmates on the
nation’s largest death row say
they spend little time worrying
about the lethal injection that
may one day kill them.
“It’s almost like it’s not even a
real punishment for a lot of people,” said Charles Crawford at
San Quentin State Prison,
where the vast majority of the
state’s nearly 750 condemned
inmates are held.
Crawford, who has been at
San Quentin since 2002 for
killing two people, spoke during
a rare tour by prison officials of
death row and the death chamber, with its sea green gurney
where executions by lethal
injection would take place if
they resumed.
The tour on Tuesday came as
the state considers a one-drug
execution protocol to replace a
three-drug method that a federal judge invalidated in 2006 as a
potentially cruel and unusual
punishment.
Voters in 2016 may also get a
chance to weigh in on competing
death penalty measures — one
would scrap capital punishment, and the other would
speed up executions by providing inmates with more appellate
lawyers and faster appeals.
“By the time they get to me,
I’m going to be dead anyway,”
said Charles Case, 75, who
killed two people at a bar during
a robbery.
Case was alone in a cell
behind a mesh door in the
musty, five-tier East Block,
where most death row inmates
are housed. Many of the cells
were dark, their occupants quietly lying on their beds. A sign
outside Case’s cell indicated his
“kosher” meal preference.
Since 1978, California has
executed 13 people. More than
90 other inmates have died of
natural causes or suicide,
according to prison officials. The
10th anniversary of the state’s
last execution is Jan. 17.
Case described San Quentin
as the “worst place he’s ever
been,” and said after 19 years
there, he was ready to die.
“Don’t abolish the death
penalty, fix it,” he said, sitting
on an overturned white bucket
while typing a letter to his attorney.
A few cells down, Richard
Hirschfield, said he, too, would
likely die before his execution.
Hirschfield was convicted in
2012 of kidnapping and murdering 18-year-old college
sweethearts
and
sexually
assaulting the woman. He is in
his late 60s and said he is diabetic.
East Block inmates receive a
minimum of 10 hours of recreation time a week in a yard that
includes heavy bags and basketball courts, San Quentin
spokesman Lt. Sam Robinson
said. They can also communicate with neighboring inmates.
Hirschfield said he elects to
spend his days in his cell and
keep to himself. He grabbed his
cell bars and pulled himself up
from his bed, demonstrating one
of the exercises he said he does
to try to stay fit.
“It’s enough for an old man,”
he said.
Inmates described their lives
as monotonous, spent reading
or watching the news or other
programs on small televisions
that prison officials say must be
purchased. Most said they were
innocent and declined to talk
about their convictions.
Raul Sarinana, 48, makes
pencil drawings and proudly
displayed a card with a puppy
holding a rose in its mouth
inside a giant heart. The card
said, “Thinking of You.”
Sarinana and his wife were
convicted in 2009 of torturing
and murdering their 11-year-old
nephew.
He said he made the card for
another inmate who wanted to
send it to family. He exchanges
his drawings for pencils and
other supplies. “I do my drawings to get through my day,” he
said. “I don’t think about tomorrow.”
The best behaved inmates at
San Quentin are in the North
Segregation unit, where they get
to spend more time out of their
cells than other condemned
inmates, Robinson said.
Scott Peterson, among San
Quentin’s most famous inmates,
was inside a caged outdoor basketball court at the unit. He
turned his back to reporters and
declined to be interviewed, saying he wasn’t interested, “thank
you.”
Peterson was convicted of
killing his wife Laci, who was 8
months pregnant with their son,
and dumping her body in San
Francisco Bay on Christmas Eve
2002. He has maintained his
innocence.
Steve Livaditis, 51, another
condemned inmate, shot a basketball near Peterson. He pleaded guilty to three counts of murder in a 1986 robbery at a
Beverly Hills jewelry shop and
said he accepts his fate.
“Whatever the outcome is, I’m
going to assume it’s God’s will,”
he said. He later added, “I wish I
had not done what I did, but
there’s no way to go back now.”
SAVE
YOUR OLD
NEWSPAPERS
FOR
RECYCLING
Cleveland
Daily Banner