1 Apr 2024

St. Paul girl, 13, told police she was playing with gun, didn’t know it was loaded when she shot boy, 11

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Children were playing with guns at a St. Paul apartment when one went off and an 11-year-old was shot in the face, according to charges filed Monday.

Paramedics took the boy to the hospital with a life-threatening injury and he underwent surgery.

The Ramsey County attorney’s office charged Martinez Castillo Lloyd, 34, with negligent storage of firearms and possession of a firearm by a person convicted of a crime of violence.

The criminal complaint gave the following information from police and prosecutors:

Two of Lloyd’s children were among a group of young people who are all friends, and some who are relatives, who were hanging out Friday night.

Officers responded to the Frogtown apartment building where Lloyd lives on Friday on a report of a shooting. They arrived about 8:55 p.m. to apartments on Pierce Butler Route and Victoria Street and “a chaotic scene” with numerous juveniles, where they found the 11-year-old lying at the top of the stairs inside the building.

Several juveniles said a girl picked up a firearm and said, “I won’t shoot him” before shooting the boy in the head and running away.

Police determined the 13-year-old girl lives on Charles Avenue and arrested her in the 100 block of Charles Avenue. As police were taking her into custody, she said, “I accidently shot somebody” and “I didn’t know the gun was loaded.” Police arrested her on suspicion of assault.

St. Paul police presented an investigation involving the teen to the county attorney’s office for review. Because of her age, the county attorney’s office said they couldn’t release information about whether she is charged.

Generally, information about juveniles is public if they are 16 and older and charged with a felony, or if they are younger and certified to stand trial as an adult.

Kids played with same guns previously

Lloyd said he lives at the apartment alone. Two of his children, who don’t reside with him but visit frequently, and a group of five other children ranging from 10 to 13 years old arrived about 8:20 p.m. Friday to the apartment.

Lloyd left about 8:50 p.m. to go to a store. His son and niece went into Lloyd’s bedroom and retrieved firearms, with his son grabbing a 9mm handgun and his niece a .357 revolver. They started waving the guns around.

The 13-year-old told police she last played with the firearms the previous weekend and she assumed they were unloaded as they usually were. She said she didn’t know how to open the revolver to check if it was loaded.

The gun went off and the 11-year-old was shot. He fell down in the bedroom, and the other children carried him to the kitchen to give him some water and then tried walking him outside the apartment, which is where he collapsed and police arrived.

“The firearms are kept in a higher up unlocked drawer in a closet that the juveniles can easily reach,” the complaint said.

Two children said they’d played with them a dozen times the last year, generally when Lloyd wasn’t around, and the guns were usually unloaded.

Lloyd told police he previously saw the children playing with the firearms and told them to put them back.

He said he has two firearms, which he kept “in a cabinet high up.” He said he usually took the bullets out of them. He also said his children and the 13-year-old had probably seen him handling the firearms. He said he didn’t use the guns and only kept them for protection.

Police found the revolver under the cushions of a couch in the living room. The 9mm was loaded and the safety was on.

Lloyd is not eligible to possess firearms because he has a prior conviction for third-degree sale of a controlled substance, stemming from a 2010 case, which state law defines as a crime of violence.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Friday’s “tragedy is a painful reminder of the need to safely and securely store guns out of the reach of children.” His office has been funding gun locks since 2016 that are available for free to the community.

The program’s goal is “to expand awareness of the critical need to lock and secure firearms and provide free gun locks to Ramsey County residents through libraries and community centers,” Choi said in a Monday statement, urging gun owners to go to the Ramsey County Gun Safety Initiative website “and take steps to ensure responsible gun ownership so we can prevent future tragedies in our community.”

Lloyd is jailed and is due to make his first court appearance in the case Tuesday. An attorney wasn’t listed for him in the court file as of Monday afternoon.

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1 Apr 2024

Barbara Rush, actor who co-starred with Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman among others, dies at 97

by admin | posted in: Politics | 0

By BOB THOMAS (AP Entertainment Writer)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Barbara Rush, a popular leading actor in the 1950 and 1960s who co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and other top film performers and later had a thriving TV career, has died. She was 97.

Rush’s death was announced by her daughter, Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan, who posted on Instagram that her mother died on Easter Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available.

Cowan praised her mother as “among the last of ”Old Hollywood Royalty” and called herself her mother’s “biggest fan.”

Spotted in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse, Rush was given a contract at Paramount Studios in 1950 and made her film debut that same year with a small role in “The Goldbergs,” based on the radio and TV series of the same name.

She would leave Paramount soon after, however, going to work for Universal International and later 20th Century Fox.

“Paramount wasn’t geared for developing new talent,” she recalled in 1954. “Every time a good role came along, they tried to borrow Elizabeth Taylor.”

Rush went on to appear in a wide range of films. She starred opposite Rock Hudson in “Captain Lightfoot” and in Douglas Sirk’s acclaimed remake of “Magnificent Obsession,” Audie Murphy in “World in My Corner” and Richard Carlson in the 3-D science-fiction classic “It Came From Outer Space,” for which she received a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.

Other film credits included the Nicholas Ray classic “Bigger Than Life”; “The Young Lions,” with Marlon Brando, Dean Martin and Montgomery Clift and “The Young Philadelphians” with Newman. She made two films with Sinatra, “Come Blow Your Horn” and the Rat Pack spoof “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” which also featured Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

Rush, who had made TV guest appearances for years, recalled fully making the transition as she approached middle age.

“There used to be this terrible Sahara Desert between 40 and 60 when you went from ingenue to old lady,” she remarked in 1962. “You either didn’t work or you pretended you were 20.”

Instead, Rush took on roles in such series as “Peyton Place,” “All My Children,” “The New Dick Van Dyke Show” and “7th Heaven.”

“I’m one of those kinds of people who will perform the minute you open the refrigerator door and the light goes on,” she cracked in a 1997 interview.

Her first play was the road company version of “Forty Carats,” a comedy that had been a hit in New York. The director, Abe Burrows, helped her with comedic acting.

“It was very, very difficult for me to learn timing at first, especially the business of waiting for a laugh,” she remarked in 1970. But she learned, and the show lasted a year in Chicago and months more on the road.

She went on to appear in such tours as “Same Time, Next Year,” “Father’s Day,” “Steel Magnolias” and her solo show, “A Woman of Independent Means.”

Born in Denver, Rush spent her first 10 years on the move while her father, a mining company lawyer, was assigned from town to town. The family finally settled in Santa Barbara, California, where young Barbara played a mythical dryad in a school play and fell in love with acting.

She pursued drama at the University of California, Berkeley, then won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts College.

Rush was married and divorced three times — to screen star Jeffrey Hunter, Hollywood publicity executive Warren Cowan and sculptor James Gruzalski.

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Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary. AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report from New York.

1 Apr 2024

Cargo ship’s owner and manager seek to limit legal liability for deadly bridge disaster in Baltimore

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By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and REBECCA BOONE (Associated Press)

The owner and manager of a cargo ship that rammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge before it collapsed last week filed a court petition Monday seeking to limit their legal liability for the deadly disaster.

The companies’ “limitation of liability” petition is a routine but important procedure for cases litigated under U.S. maritime law. A federal court in Maryland ultimately decides who is responsible — and how much they owe — for what could become one of the costliest catastrophes of its kind.

Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd. owns the Dali, the vessel that lost power before it slammed into the bridge early last Tuesday. Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., also based in Singapore, is the ship’s manager.

Their joint filing seeks to cap the companies’ liability at roughly $43.6 million. It estimates that the vessel itself is valued at up to $90 million and was carrying freight worth over $1.1 million in income for the companies. The estimate also deducts two major expenses: at least $28 million in repair costs and at least $19.5 million in salvage costs.

The companies filed under a pre-Civil War provision of an 1851 maritime law that allows them to seek to limit their liability to the value of the vessel’s remains after a casualty. It’s a mechanism that has been employed as a defense in many of the most notable maritime disasters, said James Mercante, a New York City-based attorney with over 30 years of experience in maritime law.

“This is the first step in the process,” Mercante said. “Now all claims must be filed in this proceeding.”

A report from credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS predicts the bridge collapse could become the most expensive marine insured loss in history, surpassing the record of about $1.5 billion held by the 2012 shipwreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off Italy. Morningstar DBRS estimates total insured losses for the Baltimore disaster could be $2 billion to $4 billion.

Eight people were working on the highway bridge — a 1.6-mile span over the Patapsco River — when it collapsed. Two were rescued. The bodies of two more were recovered. Four remain missing and are presumed dead.

The wreckage closed the Port of Baltimore, a major shipping port, potentially costing the area’s economy hundreds millions of dollars in lost labor income alone over the next month.

Experts say the cost to rebuild the collapsed bridge could be at least $400 million or as much as twice that, though much will depend on the new design.

The amount of money families can generally be awarded for wrongful death claims in maritime law cases is subject to several factors, including how much the person would have likely provided in financial support to their family if they had not died, funeral expenses.

Generally, wrongful death damages may also include things like funeral expenses and the “loss of nurture,” which is essentially the monetary value assigned to whatever more, spiritual or practical guidance the victim would have been able to provide to their children.

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Associated Press writer Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

1 Apr 2024

National public lands group to hold annual gathering in Minnesota

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One of the nation’s fastest-growing conservation groups is holding its annual gathering in Minnesota for the first time.

Tickets for the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Rendezvous 2024, set for April 18-20 at the Minneapolis Convention Center, are on sale.

The event is held annually to “celebrate the organization’s focus on access to public lands and waters, conservation action and on-the-ground stewardship to restore the special places sought by hunters and anglers.”

The event is open to the public and “welcomes outdoor enthusiasts who share a passion for public lands and the outdoors.”

It’s the first time the event has been held outside the Mountain West and comes as the group celebrates its 20th anniversary.

“We are excited to start bringing the Rendezvous experience to the BHA community across North America, this time to the Minnesota Heartland,” Patrick Berry, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Rendezvous highlights our commitment to engage and celebrate the conservation-minded hunters and anglers who embody the BHA ethos.”

The group will be joined by corporate partners such as Benchmade, Filson, Jetboil, NRS and Rep Your Water, among many other outdoor brands and organizations.

Featured guests will include Ryan Callaghan, director of conservation for the “MeatEater” podcast, celebrity and vice chair of the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers board. Randy Newberg, hunter, public lands advocate and host of the hunting show “Fresh Tracks,” will also make an appearance.

The event includes a “field-to-table dinner;” wild game cook-off competition; hunting, angling and outdoor seminars; and panels and demonstrations, including a turkey calling competition.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers organized “ to ensure North America’s outdoor heritage of hunting and fishing in a natural setting, through education and work on behalf of wild public lands, waters and wildlife.” The nonprofit group has about 40,000 members across North America, including an active Minnesota state chapter.

For more information and a link to buy tickets, go to backcountryhunters.org.

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