Investigators said 30-year-old Toby Allen took the disturbing photos on a cell phone. They finally tracked him down at a house in Palm Bay on Tucson Street (see map), where they arrested Allen and one of his roommates, 26-year-old Paul Rosaci.
Her face is blocked out to protect her identity, but police said it's a 6-year-old girl in the flower print shirt holding a handgun that seems ??? disturbingly large for her small hands. In a second picture, she's pointing the same gun right at the camera with her finger on the trigger.
"It's alarming to us that we had such a young child brandishing a handgun," said Det. Steve Hill, Palm Bay Police Department.
Investigators with the Palm Bay Police Department and the Brevard County Sheriff's Office said Allen took the photos, including two more of himself holding an SKS assault rifle. Detectives said the pictures came from a cell phone stolen from the owner of a local landscaping company where Allen recently worked. Good news, Allen! Looks like you don't face much in the way of jail time if you're mentally retarded!
The owner of the company was able to recover some of his stolen property, including the phone and contacted officers when he discovered the photos. By examining the background in the photos, police determined they were taken at the home on Tucson Street where officers arrested Allen Friday.
A man who still lives there talked to Eyewitness News about the photos Friday. "I thought they were outrageous. I don't know why he did it," the unidentified man said. "I asked him what the hell he was thinking."
Police said the photos aren't enough to charge Allen with child endangerment, but they said the girl is safe and Allen, who has a long criminal history, is charged with being a felon in possession of a weapon. "He indicated he thought it looked funny. He thought it looked cool," said Randy Holliday, Brevard county Sheriff's Office. That's the kind of perception that distinguishes a normal guy from a felon.
Police said they are not identifying the girl in the pictures or her relationship to Allen. Probably his life mentor.
#2
The pali-swine-ians pose their kids with real guns and simulated(?)suicide vests all the time, and the media ses nothing wrong. I don't agree at all with what this jerk did, but it seems even a mediocre attorney should be able to argue it was just a picture of his niece practicing to be ring bearer gun bearer at a wedding...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/07/2008 10:13 Comments ||
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#3
Ok so he stole a cell phone from his boss, fire him, charge him and move on. When my youngest was 5 and my oldest son was 8 we took them to the range and they shot a number of automatic weapons. An M2, yup 100 rounds each, thompson, silenced M4 and 9mm. But the one they love to shoot the most was the .50 cal sniper rifle. I took pictures of of them shooting all the weapons. There is no law against a child holding a weapon, pictures of them holding a weapon, or properly firing one. This dumb jerk stole a cell phone, end of story, the gun story is to hype for the anti gun crowd.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
06/07/2008 22:13 Comments ||
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Jim McKay, the venerable and eloquent sportscaster thrust into the role of telling Americans about the tragedy at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died. He was 86.
McKay died Saturday of natural causes at his farm in Monkton, Md., said son Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports.
The broadcaster who considered horse racing his favorite sport died only hours before Big Brown attempted to win a Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes.
Continued on Page 49
An Israeli rabbi has declared giraffe meat and milk to be kosher, although his pronouncement is unlikely to have observant Jews clamouring to consume the exotic products, a daily reported on Friday.
"The giraffe has all the signs of a ritually pure animal, and the milk forms curds, which strengthened that view," the mass-circulation Yediot Aharonot quoted Rabbi Shlomo Mahfoud as saying.
The rabbi based his ruling on a recent finding by researchers from Bar Ilan University who took a milk sample while treating a giraffe at Ramat Gan safari park near Tel Aviv. They found that the milk forms curds as required under Jewish religious law, a finding confirmed by another research institute, the daily said.
Giraffe meat is also considered ritually pure because the animal has a cloven hoof and chews the cud. "Indeed, the giraffe is kosher for eating," said Mahfoud, who was present when the researchers made their finding.
And tasty when mariated just right ...
Yigal Horowitz, chief veterinary surgeon at the safari park, is not overly worried by the development. "This doesn't mean that tomorrow we are going to drink giraffe milk or eat soup made from giraffe necks," the paper reported him as saying. "After all, this is an animal in danger of extinction."
#3
I could never be Jewish... Lamb - allergic.
Goat - absolutely no interest...
Pork - Yes.... the staff of life.
Lobster crawfish etc... good eats..
Shark, Marlin - mmmm
Giraffe - too cute I will take a pass unless really hungry.
Rabbit - one of the kids loves it.
I have to admit that its not as bad as trying to figure out a meal for one of the kids hindu girlfriends... at least she doesn't have a strict guru... (things like yeast is an animal so nothing with yeast - would never want to deal with that...)
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/07/2008 15:47 Comments ||
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#6
That's ok, 3dc. You can be a Reform Jew -- they allow pretty much anything except atheism and polygamy. ;-) The trailing daughters' adopted grandmother goes straight from Yom Kippur services to lunch at her favourite restaurant, her version of a nothing-past-the-lips fast.
Mr. Wife says he had no idea giraffes were Jewish, the silly man.
#7
Too bad the giraffe is getting attention. a more serious problem:
- whether kosher meat from the Agriproccessing plant in Postville, IA (at which a number of employees have been charged with various crimes, including conspiracy to use illegal immigrants, possession of meth, and sexual abuse) should be boycotted.
#1
If I had a few million to kick around, I would charter buses to take gutter punks, anarchists, skinheads, mental patients, etc. to Denver. Maybe with catering by the Mexican Mafia.
#3
Hmmmm. No mention of water cannons and the East German police's favorite load-- sewage water.
Other alternate loads could be dye (red would be appropriate for this crowd), soap (that alien substance would really put the fear into them), and electricity.
Even with the skies overcast and threatening rain, Khang Nguyen, 18, and Joel Juan, 19, kicked back after school at Alki Beach. "It's just a relaxing way to hang out with friends," Nguyen said of the bonfire crackling in front of them one evening earlier this week.
But Seattle Parks and Recreation might do what even this week's chilly weather couldn't -- douse the long tradition of beach bonfires at Alki and at Golden Gardens. Park department staff is recommending reducing bonfires at the two beaches this summer and possibly banning them altogether next year.
The park board will hear the recommendation Thursday, and the city plans to run public-service announcements and hand out brochures later this month about the effects of bonfires on global warming.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
06/07/2008 00:00 ||
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#2
What a crock of BS! I first roast marshmallows on Alki in about 1959. That beach is always full of driftwood; fire makers do the city a favor.
Concerned about CO2 emissions: blame the Oceans. 99.999% of same come from them.
We are in a post Ice Age period, but mini Ice Ages have been recorded since, as in the early 16th century when London's Thames River froze over for several years in a row. The phenomena that produces same is unknown. Give us another mini, so we can shut up the doom sayers.
#5
If the wood is not burned it will decay. Either way the same heat and the same CO2 will be released - either in an hour or in a few years, but the effect on something as big as the atmosphere is the same. The correct answer is to neither burn it nor leave it to rot, but to sequester it someplace without access to oxygen.
Phone study confirms people are creatures of habit. The idiots here are whoever funded a study that you could figure out for yourself
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who tracked 100,000 people using their cell phone signals confirmed on Wednesday that most human beings are indeed creatures of habit.
Most of us go to work, to school and back home in surprisingly predictable patterns, something the researchers said would be useful in city planning and preparing for emergencies.
"Despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns," Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature. "This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modeling," they added.
They used data collected by a European mobile phone carrier for billing and operational purposes. "It contains the date, time and coordinates of the phone tower routing the communication for each phone call and text message sent or received by 6 million customers," they wrote. Their research was done on 100,000 of those users, who were kept anonymous. Journeys of more than 600 miles were not included.
That would be out of habit ...
Don't be so quick to dismiss this. In 2005 the National Academies of Science recommended that the US Army take the lead in maturing a new discipline called Network Science. Since then there has been a LOT of direct DOD work & funding in this area. Barabasi is one of the leaders in the field. Rantburgers might be interested to know that one application of this new discipline has been to identify, track and interdict terror networks and the spread of ideology. Another application is to help the Army design and predict the behavior of the very complex communications, information and robotics battlefield networks that are beginning to be deployed. A third application is modeling the spread of bioterror or pandemic flu agents.
Barabasi's work is valuable because it establishes a baseline against which to identify anomalous behavior. Where there are anomalies there quite possibly are jihadi networks ....
Oh. Okay. Maybe I won't be so quick to dismiss this.
#4
There are many law enforcement applications for this which will get civil libertarians and Libertarians worked up.
As networked everything proliferates then the concept of privacy and anonymity will disappear.
The best analogy I can think of is, you can stop your friends and neighbours knowing how much money you make, but you don't have that option with the government.
And in case anyone thinks I am agin this. I am completely in favour. Its effect on law enforcement will be as big as DNA.
Before the Burg, I used to comment and submit occasional pieces at Samizdata and this was my favourite topic.
#8
And, lotp, these kind of network studies are why the infamous phone call traffic data that was provided by the phone companies to NSA (or whichever alphabet agency was doing the work) was so important. So important that our enemies had to make sure it was stopped. Even though I am a libertarian I had no problem with that kind of data mining - it was all about patterns and networks, not individuals - individuals would come later, for cause.
#9
I spoke with a cop-friend some years ago at the scene of an accident, he said "There were no witnesses, so we are going to be in the same spot tomorrow at the same time" I asked why?
He said "You'd be surprised how many people are in the same place at the same time every day, such as going to work, school or shopping, tomorrow we'll ask folks if they saw this accident, and probably turn up a witness or two".
Sure enough, going to work the next day I passed him, he waved me on by.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
06/07/2008 15:06 Comments ||
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#10
I spoke with a cop-friend some years ago at the scene of an accident, he said "There were no witnesses, so we are going to be in the same spot tomorrow at the same time" I asked why?
He said "You'd be surprised how many people are in the same place at the same time every day, such as going to work, school or shopping, tomorrow we'll ask folks if they saw this accident, and probably turn up a witness or two".
Sure enough, going to work the next day I passed him, he waved me on by.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
06/07/2008 15:09 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Investigators said 30-year-old Toby Allen took the disturbing photos on a cell phone. They finally tracked him down at a house in Palm Bay on Tucson Street (see map), where they arrested Allen and one of his roommates, 26-year-old Paul Rosaci.
Phone study confirms people are creatures of habit.
