NOT EVERYONE IS QUALIFIED TO HAVE CHILDREN!!!
Helping children of jailed couple not easy
Privacy concerns limit information about children
May 11, 2011|By Matt Sabo

Gloucester Sheriff’s Department
Not a day goes by that Kathy Taylor doesn’t think about the children of Brian and Shannon Gore, the Hayes couple jailed following the horrific discovery of their starving daughter living in a makeshift cage in a darkened bedroom.

“I just can’t imagine what this little girl has gone through in her short life,” Taylor said.

From employees at the 7-Eleven the Gores visited, not far from the Waterview Mobile Home Park where they lived, to bank tellers and neighbors, people in Gloucester and around Hampton Roads want to help or reach out to the Gores children.

That’s not so easy, however.

The girl, who investigators say is 5 or 6 years old, remains in guarded condition at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk. Information about her is closely guarded since she was first hospitalized on April 28, but her status has been upgraded from guarded to stable.

Karen Mortensen, Gloucester Victim/Witness director for the Commonwealth’s Attorney Office, said financial contributions for the girl aren’t being accepted at the moment. Due to privacy concerns, Mortensen is limited about how much she can share on why money isn’t being accepted on the girl’s behalf.

Mortensen said people who want to help the girl can send donations to CHKD or other organizations.

The infant boy removed from the Gores’ home is in the care of Child Protective Services through the Virginia Department of Social Service’s Gloucester office.

Taylor said she was organizing an effort to accept donations for the foster family caring for the boy. But that was stymied.

Bonnie Longworth, administrative manager for the Gloucester office of the Department of Social Services, said confidentiality rules prevent the office from acknowledging involvement with families it serves.

Anyone who would like to make a donation to the infant boy is encouraged to give to Gloucester organizations such as the Salvation Army, the CHKD thrift store or other groups.

Mortensen said she hopes to have more information about making donations to the children within four weeks.

Until then, people who want to help, such as Taylor, are in a holding pattern. Taylor has a connection to the Gores because every first Saturday night of the month she used to go to Carolina BBQ in Gloucester with her mother and other family members to hear gospel singing.

Shannon Gore used to wait on them.

“I recognized her face,” Taylor said. “I still am completely flabbergasted.”

Taylor said she works with several employees from Gloucester and a common refrain she hears from people when talking about the little girl is that they would take her in a heartbeat, even understanding the physical and emotional issues the girl likely faces.

“There’s a lot of love out there for these children,” Taylor said.

http://articles.dailypress.com/2011-05-11/news/dp-tsq-mid-gore-community-response-0520110511_1_gores-privacy-concerns-infant-boy

(CNN) — A California man pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter with the use of a gun Tuesday in the shooting death of a man who he claimed sexually abused him as a teen, a prosecutor said.

The plea comes less than a week before Aaron Vargas’ first-degree murder trial was supposed to start for the slaying of Darrell McNeill, a neighbor from his childhood and a family friend whom Vargas claims began molesting him when he was 11 years old.

Under the terms of a plea deal, Vargas, now 32, faces anywhere from probation to 10 years in prison for shooting the former Boy Scout leader and local businessman last year in his home in the Northern California community of Fort Bragg.

Lawyers will return to court April 20 to place a statement of facts on the record before Judge Ronald Brown decides on the final sentence.

“There’s some relief that we know we won’t lose him for the rest of his life, but there’s also a lot of anxiety about what the judge is going to do,” said Vargas’ sister, Mindy Galliani.

“I won’t have closure until he’s home,” she added. “But even when he’s home, it’s still not going to be closure. We need to get him into treatment so he can get help. I feel like this is only the beginning.”

Since his arrest, Vargas’ family has waged a tireless campaign to reduce the charges and raise awareness over child sex abuse, earning support from members of the community and giving rise to more sex abuse allegations against McNeill.

McNeill used his position as a Boy Scout troop leader and as active neighborhood father to win the trust of Vargas and other young boys, Galliani said. He took the boys on camping trips or hikes, gave them alcohol or drugs and molested them, Galliani alleged.

The alleged sexual abuse waned as Vargas grew into adulthood, but McNeill continued to call him and visit the home where Vargas lived with his wife and infant daughter. The continued contact drove Vargas to the breaking point, his sister said.

Vargas was under the influence of alcohol the night of February 8, 2009, when he drove to McNeill’s mobile home with a loaded gun and shot him in front of his wife, Mendocino County Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Norman said.

The prosecutor said she consulted with the victim’s family and reached what they thought a jury may have found — that his level of intoxication placed the crime more along the lines of an “emotional decision rather than an intentional first-degree murder.”

Norman said she has received four reports of sexual abuse involving McNeill, which factored into the decision to strike a plea deal even though she could not prove they were true.

“When you have other victims coming forward, that does lend credibility to that scenario,” she said. “These people have written me letters and said this has happened, and I have no way of showing this has happened, but it has been put out there.”

The slaying victim’s wife, who lived next door to Vargas’ family and has known the defendant since he was a child, said she had no reason to doubt his claims of abuse.

“I love this young man and feel he needs counseling more than anything,” McNeill’s wife said in an e-mail. She requested that her name not be published.

“I cannot condone what Aaron has done, but I do understand it. I believe he took the wrong avenue by taking the law into his own hands. Like most of this community, I do not feel he deserves 50 years in prison. Unlike most of this community, I feel he should serve some time, but not much.”

The case, with its suggestions of long-buried secrets, has rocked Fort Bragg, a former logging community that has become a coastal tourist destination. Another longtime Fort Bragg resident has come out publicly with allegations of abuse against McNeill.

“I was a reserved kid, some considered me a loner; I just kind of kept to myself as a kid, and he would play on that,” Todd Rowan said in an interview in March. “He’d give me pot and beer, and he’d get me stoned and a little drunk, and he took advantage of me that way.”

Rowan said the abuse began when he was 15 and continued on and off until he was 19, but the emotional trauma lingered for years, driving him to substance abuse and suicide attempts. He said he brought the allegations to Fort Bragg Police in 2001 but nothing happened.

“All those years, I wanted to forget about and push it away with alcohol because you’re supposed to be a man. And then, when police didn’t do anything, that pushed me even further down the hole.”

Repeated calls for comment to the Fort Bragg Police Department and the Mendocino Sheriff, which handled the investigation of McNeill’s death, were not returned.

Rowan said his ability to stay sober for more than two years braced him for news of McNeill’s death.

“When I got news that he’d been shot, the first thing I thought was, ‘who got him? Somebody got him. Who else did he do it to?’”

McNeill’s second wife, Jenny Cotila, who divorced him in 1980, said she also went to Fort Bragg Police in the 1990s after she was told that her ex-husband had sexually abused her son years ago.

“It could’ve been stopped a long time ago but the police didn’t take me seriously when I reported it because they said the statute of limitations was up by the time I found out what happened to my son,” Cotila said in a phone interview Tuesday.

Cotila said she has long felt indifference toward her ex-husband but worried about the effects of his death and the abuse allegations were having on their children, now adults.

“It’s hard for them to cope because they’re friends with Aaron, they knew him,” said Cotila. “Darrell’s their father and he’s their friend. They’re having a hard time separating their father from the pedophile.”

Members of the community also expressed shock that a “normal” guy like McNeill, a small business owner who installed the blinds in your home after you bought them at his furniture store, was capable of such horrific acts right under their noses.

“Here we have this man, and he’s being the normal, small-town businessman, and he’s following all the cultural paths available and all the norms, so when you have people coming forward and saying this man is doing something to me that’s outside the norm, there’s a tendency to not listen closely or to ignore it,” said Jeff Edwards, a hospital employee who has lived in Fort Bragg most of his life.

“I guess we are to blame in a way, for thinking that this could never happen in our town.”

Eventually, he was sentenced to 9 years in prison.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/06/aaron.vargas.abuse.plea/index.html

CNN — Nine Massachusetts teenagers have been charged with involvement in a months-long campaign of bullying that led to the suicide in January of a 15-year-old girl, a prosecutor said Monday.

Phoebe Prince’s body was found hanging in the stairway leading to her family’s second-floor apartment in South Hadley, Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth D. Scheibel told reporters in the western Massachusetts town of Northampton.

“It appears that Phoebe’s death on January 14 followed a torturous day for her when she was subjected to verbal harassment and physical abuse,” she said.

Earlier in the day, Prince had been harassed as she studied in the library at South Hadley High School, apparently in the presence of a faculty member and several students, none of whom reported it until after the death, Scheibel said.

Prince, who had recently moved to the area with her family from Ireland, was also harassed as she walked through the halls of the school that day and as she walked on the street toward her home, Scheibel said.

The harassment that day, by one male and two females, “appears to have been motivated by the group’s displeasure with Phoebe’s brief dating relationship with a male student that had ended six weeks earlier,” she said.

But that day’s events were not isolated; they “were the culmination of a nearly three-month campaign of verbally abusive, assaultive behavior and threats of physical harm toward Phoebe on school grounds by several South Hadley students,” Scheibel added.

“Their conduct far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels. The investigation revealed relentless activity directed toward Phoebe designed to humiliate her and to make it impossible for her to remain at school.”

In the indictments, returned Friday but not made public until Monday, the Hampshire County grand jury charged 17-year-old Sean Mulveyhill of South Hadley with statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly.

The indictments charged 18-year-old Austin Renaud of Springfield with statutory rape.

Kayla Narey, 17, of South Hadley, was charged with violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly.

CNN was not able to reach any of the three, none of whom has been taken into custody, according to Scheibel. She did not elaborate on the statutory rape charges.

Charges against another three girls included violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting; two were also charged with stalking.

Three other girls from South Hadley were named in four delinquency complaints from Hampshire Franklin Juvenile Court. Their charges included violation of civil rights with bodily injury resulting, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly, violation of civil rights, criminal harassment and assault by means of a dangerous weapon. One of the juveniles was charged in a separate complaint involving a second victim, Scheibel said.

Though initial news reports blamed Prince’s suicide on cyberbullying, Scheibel said the students’ actions were “primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session.” She said any use of electronic social networks was secondary to “commonly understood bullying methods.”

The bullying of Prince was common knowledge to most of the student body and to certain faculty, staff and administrators, Scheibel said. At least four students and two faculty members had intervened during the harassment, but the school’s code of conduct was inconsistently enforced, she said.

Though the faculty, staff and administrators’ behavior was not deemed criminal, “the actions, or inactions, of some adults at the school are troublesome,” she said.

Scheibel said the Prince family had asked “that the public refrain from vigilantism in favor of allowing the judicial system an opportunity to provide a measure of justice for Phoebe.” CNN was not able to reach the Prince family.

Scheibel said the investigation was continuing and that a 10th person may be charged.

Arraignments will occur “in the near future,” she said.

Several of the students remain in the school. In a statement, South Hadley Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Christine Sweklo said school officials would meet with the district attorney to review any new evidence.

“Once we are able to obtain this information, we will be able to make a more comprehensive statement and possibly take further action against the students still attending South Hadley High School,” she said.

The statutory rape charges could result in penalties of up to life in prison, said Elizabeth Farris, a lawyer in the prosecutor’s office. A conviction on a violation-of-civil-rights charge could result in 10 years in prison; a conviction for criminal harassment up to 2 1/2 years; a conviction for disturbance of school assembly up to one month, she said.

Those 17 and older will be tried as adults in Hampshire County Superior Court. The juveniles will be tried in juvenile court. A juvenile court judge may choose to institute an adult penalty, a combination of adult and juvenile penalties or a juvenile penalty alone, Farris said.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/03/29/massachusetts.bullying.suicide/index.html

Police: As many as 20 present at gang rape outside school dance
October 28, 2009 9:03 a.m. EDT

Richmond, California (CNN) — Investigators say as many as 20 people were involved in or stood and watched the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside a California high school homecoming dance Saturday night.
Police posted a $20,000 reward Tuesday for anyone who comes to them with information that helps arrest and convict those involved in what authorities describe as a 2½-hour assault on the Richmond High School campus in suburban San Francisco.
Two teenage suspects have been jailed, but more arrests, as many as 20 total, are expected, according to a police detective.
“We will be making arrests continually as we develop probable cause,” said Richmond Police Lt. Mark Gagan. “With this number of people implicated in the incident we’re going to be making arrests on an ongoing basis.”

As many as 10 people were involved in the assault in a dimly lighted back alley at the school, while another 10 people watched without calling 911 to report it, police said.
A 1999 California law makes it illegal not to report a witnessed crime against a child, but the law applies only to children 14 and under.
“We do not have the ability to arrest people who witnessed the crime and did nothing,” Gagan said. “The law can be very rigid. We don’t have the authority to make an arrest.”
Charles Ramsey, a member of the Richmond school board, said the school district bears some responsibility for the attack. School administrators and police apparently weren’t watching the area as they should have, Ramsey said.
The school said it would hold a safety meeting for parents and students Wednesday evening to address the assault.
The victim was found unconscious under a bench shortly before midnight Saturday, after police received a call from someone in the area who had overheard people at the assault scene “reminiscing about the incident,” Richmond Police Lt. Mark Gagan said.

The girl was flown by helicopter to a hospital where she was admitted in critical condition. She was in stable condition Tuesday, police said.
Investigators canvassed the community with fliers, which included the reward offer, hoping to identify more suspects Tuesday.
“There is one individual in custody who has made some spontaneous statements that have led me to believe that he is culpable for what happened,” Richmond police Lt. Johan Simon said.
Nineteen-year-old Manuel Ortega, described as a former student at the school, was arrested soon after he fled the scene and will face charges of rape, robbery and kidnapping, police said.
A 15-year-old was later arrested and charged with one count of felony sexual assault. A third teenager was being interviewed, Gagan said.
“Based on witness statements and suspect statements, and also physical evidence, we know that she was raped by at least four suspects committing multiple sex acts,” Gagan said.
“As people announced over time that this was going on, more people came to see, and some actually participated,” Gagan said.
The attack occurred on school grounds as the annual homecoming dance was under way inside the school Saturday night, authorities said.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/27/california.gang.rape.investigation/index.html

Amanda Cunningham said she vividly recalls the day her Uncle Coy raped her.

“I remember I had my purple Little Mermaid shirt on,” she told ABC
News. “He told me to take my clothes off, and I said no, so he took them off me.”

A mother’s decision to protect her family results in murder. She was 9 years old. Coy Hundley was drunk, Amanda said, but that wasn’t unusual. He would rape her again a few months later, she testified in court.

Nearly five years later, in the fall of 2003, Amanda’s mother,
Kimberly Cunningham, finally learned of the alleged attacks. What
happened next was the talk of Knoxville, Tenn., for years.

Kimberly got into her car and drove to the tool company where Hundley worked. She called him out into the parking lot. Cunningham said that she was praying he would deny the rape. Instead, she said Hundley, 39, laughed at her.

“What are you going to do about it?” he allegedly said.

Kimberly shot him five times, reloaded the weapon and fired five more rounds, killing him.

“I’ll never forget him laughing at me,” she testified at trial,
according to court transcripts.

Witnesses said that after Kimberly shot Hundley, she got back into her car, pulled out of the parking lot and up to the road, put her blinker on and calmly drove away.  Forty-five minutes later, she was in the Alcoa, Tenn., Police Department, turning in her nickel-plated revolver and telling police there had been a shooting.

“The person who is a good mother and in control — and I’m a
compassionate person — was completely gone,” Kimberly told ABC News.

“You wouldn’t believe how tiny she was,” Kimberly said, her voice
cracking. “This little thing, she wasn’t more than 42 pounds, and for someone to do such vulgar things to her … there [sic] is simply no words to describe what happened … I just totally lost control.”

On an audiotape of the police interrogation obtained by ABC News,
Kimberly can be heard sobbing. “He raped my baby!” she told police.

In her first trial in April 2005, a Knoxville jury acquitted her of
first degree murder, but deadlocked on second degree murder. In a
second trial in October 2005, the jury acquitted Kimberly of second
degree murder, but found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years in prison, a sentence that was recently reduced on appeal to six months in prison.

“If she hadn’t reloaded that gun,” said Carl Eppolito, a juror from
the second trial, “I would have let her walk.”

For the tight-knit town of Knoxville, nestled in the shadow of the
Smoky Mountains, the case posed the thorniest of questions: What would you do if you believed your child had been raped?

I’ll just let Ya’ll wonder what my answer would be!  Happy Holidays! PL

WARNING: 

MATURE CONTENT.  READER DISCRETION ADVISED! 

Statement of Sheriff Michael J. Brown

Bedford County, Virginia

19 September 2006

Washington, DC 

Prepared for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation

Senator McCain and distinguished members of this committee, thank you for inviting me to testify before you today. 

My name is Mike Brown; I am the Sheriff of Bedford County, VA, home of the National D-Day Memorial. I am a retired federal agent with 42 years of law enforcement experience on a local, national and international level.   Since 1998, I have directed a Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.or, to shorten that a bit.an ICAC Task Force named Operation Blue Ridge Thunder. Our task force is responsible for Virginia and West Virginia, with the exception of five counties in Northern Virginia which are ably protected by the Virginia State Police ICAC Task Force. 

I will not take up your time, nor my allotted time, by giving you a lot of statistics. your staffers are quite capable of researching this subject and providing you with reams and reams of stats, charts and graphs about children and the Internet, porn and the Internet, sexual solicitation over the Internet, unwanted exposure to sexual material, etc. You asked that I address what, if any, appropriate controls might be placed on child pornography on the Internet, and how the government can help. 

First, let me give you an idea of what goes on in this cesspool of child porn on the Internet.what we hear and a description of what we see.

On any given day an ICAC Task Force Investigator, assigned to any of the 46 task forces, will view the following:  

The investigators are looking at a young female, as young as 3 to 4 years of age (the images can be either digital images or videos). there is a look of stark fear on her face. She is being forced to perform any number of graphic sexual acts with an adult male or males.oral sex, vaginal sex, anal sex; many of the images have another adult male ejaculating on this young girl, most of the time on her face. Image after image.video after video.hundreds of thousands of them!  

Parry Aftab, Cyber-Lawyer described the scene best, and I paraphrase:   “In most of the videos the cameraman has the young female facing the camera. All of her, and his, genitalia are graphically displayed in the video.close up, wide angle, overhead, side.a flash or special lighting is clearly being used and shone in her face to illuminate the graphic rape. The little girl was not only being painfully molested, she was forced to bear the additional humiliation of being filmed at the same time. Unable to stop the rape, she did the only thing she could do to protect herself: She shut her eyes. Most parents understand this gesture. When our children are very young, they think that by closing their eyes they become invisible. They stand in front of us, thinking that if they can’t see us, we can’t see them. “Mommy, can you see me?” is the game of the day, and we all pretend that we can’t.  We call out to them, “Where are you? We can’t see you!” pretending to look everywhere for them. The game ends with lots of giggling, tickling, laughter, and hugs. This little girl’s attempt to be invisible would end very differently”..  

ICAC Task Force investigators, and other investigators working in local, state and federal cyber units, see these images every day.it use to be just (forgive me, how do I say .just.) one dimensional images, now it’s video.streams and if you look hard enough it can be live .stream. video. One of the most sought-after videos at this time is one of an adult male attempting to sexually penetrate what appears to be a 2 to 3 year old female. He removes her diaper at the start of the video. Investigator O.Neal mentions this in his recorded comments to this committee.   

There is a 40 second video clip, according to Department R, Russian Police (Unit in charge of hi-tech crimes), where two sexual predators have sex  with  a young girl  (10/12  years old?) after which they stab her, cut off her ears and smash her face to a bloody pulp. This clip, as reported by the Russian police, was first  noticed  by the US authorities. US police experts assert that the video footage represents real activity, not imitation.

Our investigators routinely pose as children, young teens, and like minded adults, in chat rooms on the Internet. Posing as a child they simply place their profile in the chat room, usually a 12, 13, 14 year old female.and then just sit back and wait. In a nana second they begin to be .hit. on by the sexual predator surfing the web for his next victim. Sometimes the predator takes his time and tries to schmooze his way in. More often that not, they simply open the conversation with, .What are you wearing, how big are your breasts (and I.m being polite), do you want to have sex, if I send you a video cam would you masturbate for me, would you like to see me masturbate, how far have you and your boyfriend gone.oral sex, anal sex, vaginal sex, are you a virgin, do you like to perform oral sex, how big is your boy friend.s penis, would you like to have sex with a real man with abig penis, would you like for someone to urinate/defecate on you.. andthen offers or just sends porn pictures.sometimes adult, often child. 

When posing as a like minded adult they are often engaged by parents or care-takers wanting them to share in the abuse, and or sexual exploitation of children in their care. These care takers and parents are often the persons responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of the horrific pictures and videos available on the web today.

END