Friday, 5 July 2024

Ohio Jail Accidentally Frees Murder Suspect Because Of Typo


CLEVELAND (AP) — A man awaiting trial on an aggravated murder charge was mistakenly released from a county jail in Ohio this week due to a clerical error, authorities said.

A warrant was issued Tuesday for Amarion Sanders, 22, of Cleveland, who was being held in the Cuyahoga County Jail on $1 million bail. He was mistakenly released Monday after charges were dismissed against a man in an unrelated case, and that defendant’s court case number was somehow entered incorrectly.

Sanders’ trial was due to start Aug. 19. He’s charged with aggravated murder in connection with a September 2023 shooting in Cleveland and has maintained his innocence. His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Numerous county, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Marshall’s Office, are involved in the hunt for Sanders.



Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ap-us-suspect-mistakenly-released_n_667c2f0fe4b05521a7f03faf ... and provided by video-cutter-online.com
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Theodore Roosevelt's Stolen Pocket Watch Returns To His Home After More Than 3 Decades


The silver pocket watch was a prized possession of Theodore Roosevelt, a keepsake given to him by his sister and her husband in 1898 before he became president that would travel with him around the world and end up at Sagamore Hill — his home on Long Island, New York, and now a national historic site.

But in 1987, it went from museum piece to pilfered prize when someone stole it from an unlocked case at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site in Buffalo, New York, where it was on loan.

It was mystery that endured 36 years until it turned up at a Florida auction house last year and was seized by federal agents. On Thursday, it was returned to public display at Sagamore Hill as the National Park Service and the FBI triumphantly announced it was back home during a ceremony featuring Roosevelt’s great-grandson, Tweed Roosevelt.

“This was feel-good news,” Tweed Roosevelt, 82, said Friday in a phone interview. “For me, it kind of felt like almost as if a piece of TR’s spirit being returned to Sagamore Hill, like a little bit of him was coming back. And so I felt that was really cool.”

Growing up, he said he didn’t know about the watch and only learned about it vaguely after it was stolen. He called it “unremarkable” in appearance, but priceless to his great grandfather.

“As it turns out, this isn’t just any old pocket watch,” he said. “It was a watch that TR placed great sentimental value on.”

The mystery of the watch’s disappearance, however, is not fully solved. It is still not clear who stole it and how. The Park Service and FBI only released details of its reappearance this week after an investigation. The agencies did not return messages seeking comment Friday.

Roosevelt, who was president from 1901 to 1909, apparently had the watch with him at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and during future exploits, including wild game hunting in Africa and exploring the Amazon in South America, according to the Park Service.

The watch, made by the now-defunct Waltham Watch Co. in Massachusetts, appears like many pocket watches of its day, with a plain silver exterior and no etchings. But the inside reveals its significance, with engraving that says “THEODORE ROOSEVELT” and “FROM D.R. & C.R.R.,” referring to Roosevelt’s brother-in-law and sister, Douglas Robinson Jr. and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson.

When it showed up last year at Blackwell Auctions in Clearwater, Florida, owner Edwin Bailey was excited by the engraving but skeptical it was real. It had no supporting documents with it, and the general mindset among art dealers and collectors is to verify before getting your hopes up, he said.

Bailey said he did not know the watch was stolen, and the person who brought it to him didn’t know where it came from. He declined to identify the person, saying he never divulges the identities of his consigners. He only would say the person was an art dealer and collector in Buffalo in the 1970s and 1980s.

The collector told Bailey that he received the watch from another man who used to borrow money from him to go “picking” for antiques and other collectibles in the late 1980s. The picker would leave the watch with the collector as collateral, Bailey said.

One day, the picker never showed up to retrieve the watch, and the collector found out that he had died, Bailey said.

“This dealer probably had that thing just squirreled away for 30 years thinking it was just another pocket watch,” Bailey said Friday. “I don’t think that my consigner had a clue about not only where it came from, but he probably didn’t even suspect it was real.”

Bailey said he researched the watch for weeks, pouring through Roosevelt’s writings in online archives, trying to come up with definitive proof it was authentic. He said he found several bits of evidence that made him believe it was. The FBI, Park Service and Sagamore Hill officials would later confirm it was the real deal.

In a note to his sister in May 1898, Roosevelt wrote, “Darling Corinne, You could not have given me a more useful present than the watch; it was exactly what I wished. ... Thank old Douglas for the watch — and for his many, many kindnesses.”

He also mentioned a watch in his 1914 book “Through the Brazilian Wilderness.” Writing about a bayou crossing, he said “One result of the swim, by the way, was that my watch, a veteran of Cuba and Africa, came to an indignant halt.” Bailey believes that was the same watch Roosevelt’s sister and brother-in-law gave him.

Bailey also wrote letters and sent pictures of the watch to various museums, the Sagamore Hill historic site and others, asking if they had any information about it.

Last year, shortly before he was set to put the watch up for auction, Bailey got a visit from several people he thought were interested buyers. Then they pulled out their badges and a warrant. It was the FBI coming to investigate the watch and take possession of it, he said.

The federal agents were courteous in asking questions, and he told them the story. He said he was glad that the watch is now where it belongs.

“It was exciting,” Bailey said. “I’ve had a small handful of items that I say ‘these are the best things I’ve ever handled.’ I got to hold something that was personally treasured by a prominent American president. … This was Teddy Roosevelt’s watch. This was a Mount Rushmore guy’s personal pocket watch.”



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Arizona's 'Poozeum' Teaches Science Using Fossilized Feces


WILLIAMS, Ariz. (AP) — One way to help tell how a Tyrannosaurus rex digested food is to look at its poop.

Bone fragments in a piece of fossilized excrement at a new museum in northern Arizona — aptly called the Poozeum — are among the tinier bits of evidence that indicate T. rex wasn’t much of a chewer, but rather swallowed whole chunks of prey.

The sample is one of more than 7,000 on display at the museum that opened in May in Williams, a town known for its Wild West shows along Route 66, wildlife attractions and a railway to Grand Canyon National Park.

The Poozeum sign features a bright green T. rex cartoon character sitting on a toilet to grab attention from the buzzing neon lights and muffled 1950s music emanating from other businesses.

Inside, display cases filled with coprolites — fossilized feces from animals that lived millions of years ago — line the walls. They range from minuscule termite droppings to a massive specimen that weighs 20 pounds (9 kilograms).

Poozeum’s president and curator, George Frandsen, bought his first chunk of fossilized feces from a shop in Moab, Utah, when he was 18, he said. He already loved dinosaurs and fossils but had never heard of fossilized poop. From there, his fascination grew.

“It was funny. It was gross,” he said. “But I learned very quickly it could tell us so much about our prehistoric past and how important they are to the fossil record.”

Coprolites aren’t tremendously common but they can make up the majority of fossils found at some sites, and people have learned more and more about them over the past few decades, said Anthony Fiorillo, executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

It can be hard to identify them and in some cases, specimens that appeared to be coprolites — with their pinched ends and striations — were examined further and ultimately reclassified as something else.

“There’s a number of sedimentary processes that can produce an extrusion of soft mud to a different layer,” he said. “So think about your toothpaste, for example. When you squeeze it, there can be some striations on that toothpaste.”

Fossil enthusiast Brandee Reynolds recently visited the museum with her husband after finding it was a short detour from a road trip they had planned.

“I mostly find sharp teeth and things like that,” she said. “I haven’t really found a whole lot of coprolite, but who doesn’t love coprolite?”

A highlight of Frandsen’s collection is a specimen that holds a Guinness World Record for being the largest coprolite left by a carnivorous animal. Measuring more than 2 feet (61 centimeters) long and over 6 inches (15 centimeters) wide, Frandsen said it’s believed to be from a T. rex, given where it was found on a private ranch in South Dakota in 2019.

Frandsen also holds the record for the largest certified coprolite collection of 1,277 pieces, earned in 2015 when it was verified at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, Florida.

His collection now stands at about 8,000 specimens. He doesn’t have the room to display it all in the museum in Williams and features some online.

No need to worry about any smell or germs, Frandsen said. Those evaporated millions of years ago, when the feces were covered with sediment and replaced by minerals, making them rock-hard.

Location, shape, size and other materials like bones or plants can determine if something is a coprolite, but not necessarily which creature deposited it, Fiorillo said.

“I think the majority of us would say, let’s pump the brakes on that and just be happy if we could determine carnivore, herbivore and then look at possibly those food cycles within each of those broad groups,” said Fiorillo, a trained paleontologist and author of books on dinosaurs.

Ideally, Fiorillo said he hopes fossils that are rare and can add to the understanding of the prehistoric world find their way into the public sphere so researchers can use them as they form hypotheses about life long ago.

Like Frandsen, Fiorillo said he was captivated by fossils when he was young. He pointed to private quarries in Wyoming’s Fossil Basin where the public can hunt for fossilized fish, plants and even coprolites. People also can visit a research quarry to learn about paleontology at the nearby Fossil Butte National Monument.

If a child goes home inspired after finding a fossil or seeing one on display at a museum, then that’s awesome, Fiorillo said.

“Maybe they’ll be the next generation,” he said.



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Stingray That Got Pregnant Without A Male Companion Has Died


HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A stingray that got pregnant at a North Carolina aquarium this winter despite not having shared a tank with a male of her species for many years has died.

The Aquarium and Shark Lab in Hendersonville said on Facebook late Sunday that the stingray, Charlotte, died after getting a rare reproductive disease. It didn’t go into further detail.

The aquarium, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, announced in February that Charlotte had gotten pregnant despite not having shared a tank with a male stingray in at least eight years. But it said in late May that she was suffering from a rare reproductive disease and announced in early June that she hadn’t given birth and was no longer pregnant.

The pregnancy was thought to be the result of a type of asexual reproduction called parthenogenesis, in which offspring develop from unfertilized eggs, meaning there is no genetic contribution by a male. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not in mammals. Documented examples have included California condors, Komodo dragons and yellow-bellied water snakes.



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