An eighth-grade student brought a gun to school on Thursday and committed suicide, according to officials.
Fire department officials told reporters that the student died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, reportedly in a bathroom, at the Southgate school early Thursday morning.
Davidson Middle School officials put the school on lockdown and contacted parents around 9:15 a.m. to pick up their children, saying at first that the school had a "police situation." WXYZ officials said that some children looked "visibly upset" when exiting the school. According to WDIV, Southgate Schools Superintendent William Grusecki said the boy did leave a note.
Michigan Department of Education Jan Ellis, said Thursday that it is rare for a suicide to occur inside a public school and added she wasn't sure one had ever occurred in MIchigan before Thursday, according to the Detroit News.
In Detroit, a seven-year-old boy died as a result of an alleged suicide last May. UPDATE 4:05PM: According to the Detroit News, the 14-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a .40 caliber Glock before classes started at 8 a.m. The News said he was found by another student in the school. The victim was transported to a local hospital, where he later died.
The student's name was not released by school officials or police.
The Detroit Free Press interviewed students, who said the boy was friendly and well-liked at Davidson Middle School. The report quoted an official at Southgate Community School District who said the gun used by the student may have belonged to a family member. There are no metal detectors at the middle school.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A sign at the Birmingham airport fell on a family Friday, killing a 10-year boy and injuring other family members.
Deputy Coroner Derrick Perryman said 10-year-old Luke Bresette was pronounced dead at Children's of Alabama. Two other children were being treated there, and the mother, Heather Bresette, was taken to University Hospital, where spokeswoman Nicole Wyatt said she was in critical condition. The coroner's office and the hospital did not disclose the family's hometown.
Firefighters estimated the arrival-departure sign weighed 300 to 400 pounds.
Albert Osorio, 46, of Birmingham told al.com that he was close by when the sign fell. He said a loud boom was followed by screams from the family and witnesses. Then he and five other passers-by lifted off the sign.
"The whole thing flipped down on those kids. It took all of us here to stand it up," he said.
Airport spokeswoman Toni Herrera-Bast said officials aren't sure how the sign fell. She said it happened about 1:30 p.m. Friday in a pre-security area of the airport. The airport continued operating while rescue workers tended to the family.
The airport completed the first phase of a more than $201 million modernization effort and opened newly renovated concourses last week.
TSA officials say airport crews are checking all of the other flight information signs to make sure they are secure. The workers have also placed barricades around all of the flight signs to keep passengers from getting too close to them, MyFoxAl.com reported.
A spokesperson for the airport, Toni Herrera-Bast, said airport officials don't know why the board fell, but they will investigate the matter.
Herrera-Bast said the airport was never closed to the public during the incident and all flights are still going on as normal.
Birmingham's Mayor William Bell released a statement about the incident, saying he has offered the city's "full support to the Airport Authority as they investigate what has occurred this afternoon."
Mayor Bell said he has asked the public safety staff to "assist this family in their time of need in any way possible as they grapple with what has happened."
The mother of a 13-month-old boy who was fatally shot in his stroller during a botched robbery Thursday said one the of suspects threatened to kill her baby moments before the boy was fatally shot.
"He asked me for money and I said I didn't have it," Sherry West, the boy’s mom, told The Associated Press Friday from her apartment, which was scattered with her son's toys and movies. "When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They're expensive. And he kept asking and I just said `I don't have it.' And he said, `Do you want me to kill your baby?' And I said, `No, don't kill my baby!"'
A pair of teenagers was arrested Friday in the most recent shooting. West had just been to the post office a few blocks from her apartment Thursday morning and was pushing her son, Antonio, in his stroller while they walked past gnarled oak trees and blooming azaleas in the coastal city of Brunswick.
West said a tall, skinny teenager, accompanied by a smaller boy, asked her for money.
"He asked me for money and I said I didn't have it," she told The Associated Press on Friday from her apartment, which was scattered with her son's toys and movies.
"When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They're expensive. And he kept asking and I just said `I don't have it.' And he said, `Do you want me to kill your baby?' And I said, `No, don't kill my baby!'"
One of the teens fired four shots, grazing West's ear and striking her in the leg, before he walked around to the stroller and shot the baby in the face.
Seventeen-year-old De'Marquis Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said. It wasn't immediately clear whether the boys had attorneys.
Police announced the arrest Friday afternoon after combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods searching for the pair. The chief said the motive of the "horrendous act" was still under investigation and the weapon had not been found.
"I feel glad that justice will be served," West said. "It's not something I'm going to live with very well. I'm just glad they caught him."
West said detectives showed her mugshots of about 24 young men. She pointed to one, saying he looked like the gunman.
"After I picked him, they said they had him in custody," West said. "It looked just like him. So I think we got our man."
West said she thought the other suspect looked much younger: "That little boy did not look 14."
The slaying happened around the corner from West's apartment in the city's Old Town historic district. It's a street lined with grand Victorian homes from the late 1800s. Most have been neatly restored by their owners. Others, with faded and flaking paint, have been divided into rental units like the apartment West shared with her son. The slain boy's father, Luis Santiago, lives in a house across the street.
A neighbor dropped off a fruit basket and then a hot pot of coffee Friday as a friend from the post office dropped by to comfort West.
Santiago came and went. At one point he scooped up an armload of his son's stuffed animals, saying he wanted to take them home with him. He talked about Antonio's first birthday on Feb. 5 and how they had tried different party hats on the boy.
"He's all right," Santiago told the boy's mother, trying to smile. "He's potty training upstairs in heaven."
West said her son was walking well on his own and eight of his teeth had come in. But she also mourned the milestones that will never come, like Antonio's first day at school.
"I'm always going to wonder what his first word would be," West said.
Beverly Anderson, whose husband owns the property where West has lived for several years, said she was stunned by the violence in what's generally known as a safe neighborhood where children walk to school and families are frequently outdoors.
Jonathan Mayes and his wife were out walking their dogs Friday, right past the crime scene, and said they've never felt nervous about being out after dark.
"What is so mind-numbing about this is we don't have this kind of stuff happen here," Mayes said.
It's not the mother's first loss of a child to violence. West said her 18-year-old son, Shaun Glassey, was killed in New Jersey in 2008. She still has a newspaper clipping from the time.
Glassey was killed with a steak knife in March 2008 during an attack involving several other teens on a dark street corner in Gloucester County, N.J., according to news reports from the time.
"He and some other boys were going to ambush a kid," Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County prosecutor's office, told the AP Friday.
Glassey was armed with a knife, but the 17-year-old target of the attack was able to get the knife away from him "and Glassey ended up on the wrong end of the knife," Weisenfeld recalled.
Prosecutors decided the 17-year-old would not be charged because they determined that he acted in self-defense.
Sabrina Elkins, the sister of the older suspect in the Georgia baby's slaying, said Friday evening that she believed her brother was innocent of the charges. She didn't know whether he had a lawyer.
"He couldn't have done that to a little baby," she told AP. "My brother has a good heart."
She said that her brother had been living in Atlanta, and only returned to Brunswick a few months ago. Typically, he would come by her house in the morning and they'd go to breakfast. But Friday morning, police came to her door as her brother was approaching along the sidewalk.
"The police came pointing a Taser at him, telling him to get on the ground," she recalled by phone. "He said, `What are you getting me for? Can you tell me what I did?'"
The man who led Texas authorities on a 100 mph car chase and may be linked to two Colorado murders, including that of Department of Corrections director Tom Clements, has been identified.
Authorities say that that Ebel is hooked up to equipment for organ harvesting, and is brain dead.
"We don't know yet exactly whether this is the guy," Gov. John Hickenlooper told reporters Thursday afternoon. "There's some indication. I hope it is."
Citing budget concerns and falling enrollment, Chicago Public Schools officials announced Thursday they plan to close 54 schools next year and shut down 61 school buildings -- the largest single wave of school closures in U.S. history.
For months, looming closures seemed inevitable. After a teachers union strike last fall concluded with anexpensive contract, observers wereleft without a doubtthat the only way the cash-strapped district could afford it was to shut down schools and fire the teachers who worked there.
Since the September strike, Chicago hired a new CEO for its schools, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a veteran of closures in cities like Detroit. The district held hearings with parents about the fates of their children. Rumors flew about how many and which schools would be axed, with some predicting as many as 129 could close.
On Thursday, news of the final closure list began to trickle out. The day had come, a week before the district's April 1 deadline. Byrd-Bennett announced on local television that CPS would close 54 elementary schools, name six for "turnarounds" and send 11 schools to share buildings with others.
As the news dribbled in through aldermen and school officials themselves earlier Thursday, many angry Chicagoans were searching for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's former chief of staff, who waged his mayoral campaign on promises of education reform. DNAInfo Chicago reportedEmanuel was on vacation with his family.
Chicago Teacher’s Union President Karen Lewis blasted Emanuel’s absence.
“Our mayor, who is away on a ski trip, drops this information a week before spring break,” Lewis said during a Thursday afternoon press conference outside Mahaila Jackson Elementary School in the city’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. “What’s their spring break going to look like?”
Lewis went on to call the mayor’s actions “cowardly” and likened them to bullying. "He should be ashamed of himself," she said, drawing a chorus of “amens” and whoops from students in the crowd.
In a phone interview, CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey told The Huffington Post to expect a tumultuous spring from the teachers union. "We're going to do any and all nonviolent forms of protest we have at our disposal including legislative and legal," to protest the school closures, he said. "Also direct actions like sit-ins to try to stop this disastrous policy."
While districts across the country have faced waves of closures, those in Chicago hit doubly close to home for the Obama administration; in addition to the Emanuel connection, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan formerly served as CEO of the district.
“When, where, why and how to close schools are local questions that are never easy. No educator ever wakes up in the morning wanting to close a school," Duncan said in a Thursday statement provided to HuffPost. "On the local level, real considerations about budgets, resources, and declining enrollment have to be balanced against real impacts on the community. Closing a school is a difficult but sometimes necessary decision, and districts and local leaders should strive for a transparent process that listens to community input and offers better educational options for affected families."
Chicago district officials have argued that dwindling population in some predominantly black neighborhoods has created an "underutilization crisis" where schools are operating way below their capacity. Keeping these buildings open, they said, is waste of resources. CPS says the closures could save $500,000 to $800,000 per school.
To soften the blow for students at closing schools,the district said it is adding13 new special science programs, five International Baccalaureate programs, air conditioning and fine arts classes in 19 of the schools where these students will be sent.
CPS parents reacted with outrage at the news, even those whose children's schools were saved from the chopping block.
Jennie Biggs, who has three children at Mark Sheridan Math & Science Academy in Bridgeport, called the district's decision "unbelievable."
"School is their second home," said Biggs, 40. "It's where they feel most comfortable. To lose that sense of belonging and that sense of community must be a traumatic event for a child."
Biggs attended three ofthe volatile community engagement meetingsheld by the district earlier this year, where she said parents worried students assigned to new schools will be forced to cross into unfamiliar territory.
"Parent after parent after parent talked about safety concerns," Biggs said. "For me, that's my number one concern: How do we keep the kids safe?"
To simulate the effects a school change would have, one parent walked from Libby Elementary to Sherman Elementary in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, Biggs said, passing seven abandoned buildings along the way. The trek took 27 minutes.
"That's what will be the daily experience for kids who are displaced," said Biggs. She added the district will likely see a spike in truancy numbers as parents struggle to get their kids to a new school.
MEIKHTILA, Myanmar — Mobs set fire to Muslim homes and mosques in frenzied sectarian rioting in a town in central Myanmar, leaving at least 20 people dead and more than 6,000 homeless amid growing fears Friday that the latest bout of Muslim-Buddhist bloodshed could spread.
In an acknowledgement of the seriousness of the situation, President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in Meikhtila in an announcement broadcast on state television Friday afternoon. The declaration allows the military to take over administrative functions in and around the town.
The government's struggle to contain the unrest is proving another major challenge for Thein Sein's reformist administration as it attempts to chart a path to democracy after nearly half a century of military rule that once crushed all dissent.
The scenes in Meikhtila, where homes and at least five mosques have been torched by angry mobs, were reminiscent of sectarian violence between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya that shook western Rakhine state last year, killing hundreds of people and driving more than 100,000 from their homes.
The clashes in Meikhtila – which was tense but calm Friday – are the first reported in central Myanmar since then.
Troubles began Wednesday after an argument broke out between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers. A Buddhist monk was among the first killed, inflaming tensions that led a Buddhist mob to rampage through a Muslim neighborhood.
Violence continued Thursday, and by Friday, Win Htein, a local lawmaker from the opposition National League for Democracy, said he had counted at least 20 bodies. He said 1,200 Muslim families – at least 6,000 people – have fled their homes and taken refuge at a stadium and a police station.
On Friday, police seized knives, swords, hammers and sticks from young men in the streets and detained scores of looters.
Fires set to Muslim homes continued to burn, but angry Buddhist residents and monks prevented authorities from putting out the blazes.
It was difficult to determine the extent of destruction in the town because residents were too afraid to walk the streets and were sheltering in monasteries or other locations away from the violence.
"We don't feel safe and we have now moved inside a monastery," said Sein Shwe, a shop owner. "The situation is unpredictable and dangerous."
Some monks accosted and threatened journalists trying to cover the unrest, at one point trying to drag a group of several out of a van. One monk, whose faced was covered, shoved a foot-long dagger at the neck of an Associated Press photographer and demanded his camera. The photographer defused the situation by handing over his camera's memory card.
The group of nine journalists took refuge in a monastery and stayed there until a police unit was able to escort them to safety.
The U.N. secretary-general's special adviser to Myanmar, Vijay Nambiar, issued a statement expressing "deep sorrow at the tragic loss of lives and destruction."
He said religious and community leaders to must "publicly call on their followers to abjure violence, respect the law and promote peace."
The U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, Derek Mitchell, also said he was "deeply concerned about reports of violence and widespread property damage in Meikhtila."
Meikhtila is about 550 kilometers (340 miles) north of the main city of Yangon with a population of about 100,000 people, of which about a third are Muslims, Win Htein said. He said before this week's violence there were 17 mosques.
There was no apparent direct connection between the Meikhtila violence and that last year in Rakhine state. Rakhine Buddhists allege that Rohingya are mostly illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. The Muslim population of Meikhtila is believed to be mostly of Indian origin, and although religious tensions are longstanding, the incident sparking the violence seemed to be a small and isolated dispute.
Occasional isolated violence involving Myanmar's majority Buddhist and minority Muslim communities has occurred for decades.
Under the military governments that ruled Myanmar from 1962 until 2011, ethnic and religious unrest was typically hushed up, an approach made easier in pre-Internet days, when there was a state monopoly on daily newspapers, radio and television, backed by tough censorship of other media.
But since an elected, though still military-backed, government took power in 2011, people have been using the Internet and social media in increasing numbers, and the press has been unshackled, with censorship mostly dropped and privately owned daily newspapers expected to hit the streets in the next few months.
The government of Thein Sein is constrained from using open force to quell unrest because it needs foreign approval in order to woo aid and investment. The previous military junta had no such compunctions about using force, and was ostracized by the international community for its human rights abuses.
Philadelphia police have arrested a French national after he allegedly posed as an airline pilot and gained access to the cockpit on a US Airways flight Wednesday.
MyFoxPhilly.com reports that 61-year-old Philippe Jernnard is accused of impersonating a pilot while boarding the Florida-bound flight at Philadelphia International Airport.
After being a denied a seat in business class Jernnard allegedly boarded the plane and told the flight crew he was a pilot with Air France, according to the report.
"He had an Air France shirt. He had an Air France bag. He had some identification that looked like he was a crew member from Air France," Philadelphia police Capt. Michael Murphy told the station.
Jernnard reportedly ended up in the cockpit jumpseat behind the captain but was escorted off the plane after when he failed to produce proper credentials, police told the station.
No passengers were in danger and the flight took off on time, according the the report. The FBI has launched an investigation into the incident.
Jernnard is charged with criminal trespass, forgery-alter writing, tampering with records, false impression and providing false identification to law enforcement, the report states. He is being held with bail set at $1 million.
A US Airways spokesperson directed questions from MyFoxPhilly.com to the FBI, which is now leading the investigation
that he was close by when the sign fell. He said a loud boom was followed by screams from the family and witnesses. Then he and five other passers-by lifted off the sign.
