Cops: Laptop Thief Busted After Customer Service Call

(Newser) – Calling customer service for help with your laptop is generally a fine idea, but maybe not if you stole the thing in a home burglary. Police in New Hampshire say they made an arrest on Monday and recovered a computer stolen in February 2013 thanks to that very scenario, reports WMUR. The break came when Apple emailed the original owner and thanked him for calling customer service. Except he hadn't.

Someone else had done so, using the long-gone laptop's serial number as a reference. "It then took us a while to track down the individual who made the phone call, but we were able to put that together and ultimately come up with enough evidence to charge him with the original burglary and recover the computer," says a detective. It might be "the only example of when a broken computer is a good thing," observes the Consumerist.

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Cops: Man Freed After 15 Years Robs Same Store

(Newser) – Christopher Miller robbed the Stride Rite shoe store in Toms River, NJ, in 1999, got caught, and served 15 years in state prison. Police say he became a free man on Friday and celebrated by catching a bus to Toms River and, yes, robbing the same Stride Rite shoe store, reports the Star-Ledger. Though he had 15 years to stew over what went wrong the first time, authorities say this robbery didn't go so well, either. Two employees were so slow in handing over cash that the "agitated" robber grabbed the register drawer himself and fled on foot, reports the Ocean County Signal. (The employees refused to hand over their keys, scotching any hopes for a getaway vehicle.)

They called the cops—the apparent plan was to tie them up in a storage room, as happened in the 1999 robbery, but the employees refused to go—and within minutes, a police K-9 unit tracked down Williams and recovered the stolen $389, reports the Daily Record. Miller is charged with robbery and is being held on $100,000 bond. The 40-year-old is from Tulsa, Okla., and police aren't sure what his connection is to Toms River, besides maybe nostalgia.

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Three Immediate Steps to Take After Discovering a Crime Scene

One of the most alarming and frightening things a person can encounter is to discover a crime scene. Depending on whether or not the crime recently occurred the situation can also be incredibly dangerous. While it is natural to feel shock and panic, your response to discovering the crime scene can make a crucial difference in its outcome. Should you ever find yourself in such a position there are several things to remember. Here are three immediate steps to take upon discovering the scene of a crime.

1. Get To Safety! If you enter a home, apartment, or business to discover evidence of a crime, especially a violent crime, you should exit immediately. Drive to a nearby store or go to a neighbor's home where you are safe in case the perpetrator is still nearby. If there are other people with you make sure that they do the same. Foolhardy attempts to catch the crook will only place more people in jeopardy. Plus, moving around a crime scene will only contaminate or even eliminate forensic evidence.

2. Notify the Authorities. The sooner someone contacts the police the quicker police officers and EMS will be able to respond. First Responders are trained to handle these situations and are better prepared to handle anything which might occur. You should never enter the scene of a crime in advance of the police. Criminals are potentially armed and dangerous and should you be armed when the police arrive, they might mistake you for the intruder. Also if anyone has been injured or killed then dangerous biohazards are present at the scene.

3. Write Down Everything You Remember. As quickly as you and without the input of others, write down everything you can recall about the crime scene. Don't struggle to remember details. Record everything you remember about the scene, both as you approached it and as you found it. Your initial impressions can be valuable to forensic investigators. If there were more than one person present at the time the scene was discovered, each person should write their account independently. Group discussions frequently "invent" details rather than corroborate them.

Once police investigators finish they will release the scene. The injured will be transported for medical care and the deceased removed by the coroner's office. At this point it will be the responsibility of the property owner or family to then restore the crime scene. Fingerprint dust cleanup can be difficult. The presence of blood or body fluids or tissues requires biohazard removal. At this point your best bet is to contact a professional crime scene cleanup company. Most insurance policies cover the expense of crime scene clean up.

By Scott Jemison

Contributor

Because Advanced Bio Treatment was founded by a former police officer and insurance agency owner, we understand the need for caring, competent and dedicated service to our clients. In all our work we make helping others the focus. We understand that our involvement with you happens as a result of some traumatic event in your life. Whether it is a crime scene cleanup, suicide cleanup, or some other tragic event, ABT understands.

Suspect Sought After Easton Diamond Caper

Credit: Central Ohio Crime Stoppers

By: Andy Long | NBC4
Published: March 11, 2012 Updated: March 11, 2012 - 6:05 AM »  Comments | Post a Comment COLUMBUS, Ohio --

Columbus police and Central Ohio Crime Stoppers are looking for a woman accused of stealing diamonds worth more than $20,000.

According to Crime Stoppers, a woman entered the Andrews Jewelers located at 4049 The Strand East at Easton Town Center shortly before 8:50 p.m. on January 30.

Once inside, Crime Stoppers said that the woman spoke to the clerk about investing in jewelry and asked to look at some diamonds.

While the clerk was away from the counter, Crime Stoppers said that the woman grabbed two one-carat diamonds valued at around $20,000 and ran out the front door.

She was seen running westbound from the store and getting in a dark colored Chevrolet Bronco or Tahoe.

The suspect was described as a white female in her late 20s or early 30s. She stood between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 4 inches tall. She weighed around 120 pounds.

She had brown straight medium length hair. She was wearing a white colored knit sweater and jeans with an overcoat.

Central Ohio Crime Stoppers has posted a reward of up to $2,000 for any information received by March 21, 2012, leading to the arrest and/or indictment of the persons responsible for this crime. 

Anyone with information about this crime is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 614-461-TIPS (8477) or go to  www.stopcrime.org and email your tip. You can text a tip to “CRIMES” 274637, key word CMH. 

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Houston crime reporter Bardwell dies after cancer battle

Houston crime reporter S.K. Bardwell, who was called the "Queen of the Scene" by colleagues and remembered for her tireless work on behalf of the disenfranchised, died Friday after a six-month battle with lung cancer. She was 57.

"She treated people on the street the way you would treat people at a corporate office," former Chronicle reporter Peggy O'Hare remembered. "Susan was the real deal. She was a crime reporter to the core of her soul - someone who would walk into tough neighborhoods without fear, knock on doors and get the real story."

Bardwell was revered for compiling a database of possible Houston serial killers and was consulted frequently by law enforcement. She was honored as an advocate for crime victims and their families.

At the now-defunct Houston Post, Bardwell regularly competed against the rival Chronicle on crime stories. For a year, then-Chronicle reporter Lisa Teachey battled her.

"She always won," recalled Teachey, now a Harris County District Court staff attorney. Bardwell later became her mentor at the Chronicle. "She was tough and gritty, but she was compassionate … because she knew these were real people caught in awful circumstances."

Susan Kathleen Bardwell was born on July 9, 1954, in Tulsa, Okla., to Pat and Billie Miller and grew up in the nearby Turley community.

She adopted the byline S.K. Bardwell in honor of her mother - using the family matriarch's maiden name after she died - and to gain an advantage with readers, said Micheal Boddy, her husband of 36 years.

"In a strange way it gave her a little more credibility with her audience, sad to say," he said. "It really unhinged people to realize they were getting their butts kicked by a woman."

After working as a bartender and in the fiberglass business with Boddy, she became a journalist upon graduation from Brazosport College. She cut her teeth at the Angleton Times and The Facts before becoming a Houston Post reporter in 1988. She joined the Chronicle in 1993.

Boddy recalled that his wife once responded to a deadly house explosion and saw a man a few blocks away carrying a gasoline can.

"She drove into the alley and confronted him and he pulled a knife on her," he said. "She did manage to calm the guy down and kept him talking. He wouldn't admit that he had actually done it himself, but he did tell her how the arson was done and how it killed the people."

Bardwell left the Chronicle in 2005 to help her husband start a short-lived community newspaper. She also was an accomplished gardener, self-taught knitter and amateur painter.

"Susan … never stopped learning," Boddy said. "She went from being a junior high school dropout to becoming one of the premier police reporters in the United States."

Bardwell is survived by Boddy, sons Sean and Eric, two grandsons, a sister and a brother.

A private service is scheduled next month for relatives and friends.

cindy.george@chron.com twitter.com/cindylgeorge

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Westerville Intersection Reopens After Suspicious-Package Investigation

Credit: NBC 4

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By: Donna Willis
Published: September 09, 2011
Updated: September 09, 2011 - 6:27 PM »  Comments | Post a Comment

WESTERVILLE, Ohio -- An intersection reopens and evacuations end after a suspicious-package investigation Friday evening.

Westerville fire and police responded to investigate a suspicious package, and the intersection of South State Street (state Route 3) and West Park Street was closed.

Authorities closed the intersection shortly before 5 p.m. Friday. The intersection was reopened before 6:30 p.m.

Columbus fire's bomb squad as well as the Ohio State Highway Patrol also was called to the scene.

Two homes were evacuated as a safety precaution.

Authorities said in a release Friday night that a suspicious package was reportedly thrown into the street in front of Hanby Elementary School on S. State Street.  

A subject was detained for questioning after witnesses reported seeing this person throw the package in the area it was found. Investigators have verified the subject’s claim that the package was picked up from the street and tossed onto the sidewalk to clear the street.

The package was found to contain no threat or contraband. The subject has been released from detention.

Investigators later learned that the package was a lunch bag that had been dropped from a school bus onto the street by a student.

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How to Preserve a Crime Scene After a Digital Crime

PDA, Mobiles Phones, Digital diaries, Tablet PC, Laptops and obviously Desktop Computers are now an important part of our daily life. These digital instruments are also sign of our expert life style. In short our daily work could be very difficult to perform without these devices but these devices also create problems for us like, insecurity of our personal data. Hackers can exploit your data. You can be victim of digital crime at any time and your data is always at stake. It can be harmful for yourself and for your organization.

Usually an organization suffers from digital crime when they fired a person from a job. Employee could copy critical data or delete data from your server or any computer or he/she can clock a logic bomb which can destroy data after he/she left the organization. Usually victims do not take any action for digital crime because of less knowledge of digital crime investigation. People think no one can grab these criminals and cannot follow the trails but this is totally a wrong approach.

A digital crime investigator can easily trace digital finger prints if crime scene is preserved. After the crime we have to care about the electronic evidences which a criminal left on criminal scene. It is very important to preserve environment of crime scene otherwise we shall lose digital finger prints and trails. These trails can guide us to reach criminal or trace the exact person who perform crime.

Today here we shall talk about the preserve crime scene after crime and how we can collect some electronic evidence and trails of digital finger prints to start an investigation. In collection of evidence we have to care about many things. For collection of evidence you have not to be an expert but you know the basic of computer, mean how to use internet, basic applications and operating system. I want to share some of my experience with you and that will be beneficial for you in future to protect you from a digital crime or help to collect evidences from crime scene.

So we start here and assume a scene after a digital crime. Digital crime can happen by an employee. Assume your employee has been deleted your data from your server. In this situation we have to check many things like. Who have access and rights for server? Who is responsible for data backup? Is any backup available? If you have backup then situation is in your favor and you can copy your data from backup. So keep backup daily of your data.

Steps you have to follow for preserve a crime scene:

1.Preserve your crime scene, never remove any physical installations.

2.Disconnects your server or servers from network.

3.Never remove or install any software on server or any other PC.

4.Check and make list of granted users and administrators.

5.Check who is responsible for your file server backup and how frequently admin took backup.

6.Check list of installed software and antivirus update. Data can removed or effect by any virus too.

7.Try to get exact time of crime if possible.

8.Check that how many users was login on server that time.

9.Preserve and list all DVDs/CDs/Floppy Disk/Flash Disk or any other removable device you found on crime scene.

10.Never try to copy or delete anything from effected disk because this can make difficult of impossible the process of data recovery.

Above mention exercise can help a lot to a forensic expert for collection of digital prints and trails and lead him to find digital criminal.

IN HIS OWN WORDS | Yoav Potash Shares a Scene from “Crime After Crime”

An image from Yoav Potash's "Crime After Crime."

In Yoav Potash’s first full-length feature documentary, “Crime After Crime,” the filmmaker went to great lengths to follow the epic legal battle to free Deborah Peagler. To gain access to the maximum-security prison in Chowchilla, California where Peagler was incarcerated, he used a two-pronged approach; first he embedded himself with Peagler’s pro-bono attorneys as her official legal videographer, and second, he made an entirely separate documentary about the rehabilitative programs at the prison – a project that acted as a sort of Trojan horse to surreptitiously transport Potash and his crew inside the prison gates.

The plan appears to have worked.  “Crime After Crime” has earned numerous top festival awards and garnered some great notices following its world premiere at Sundance. Below, find an exclusive scene from the film and Potash’s thoughts on the process.

The Scene

The sequence that I’ve chosen for indieWIRE shows how Deborah Peagler’s case began to transform — from a private legal brief quietly argued by her two attorneys — into a public battle waged on front page headlines, in TV news reports, and in the court of public opinion.

To provide some context, I’ve started this excerpt at the end of a previous scene, where attorney Joshua Safran stands at a whiteboard, laying out the legal strategy five years into the case. The shot is literally a “back to the drawing board” moment – half an hour earlier in the film (at the start of the film’s second act) we saw Joshua at this same whiteboard, outlining the uphill battle he envisioned for winning his client’s freedom when he began working on the case in 2002. 

The whiteboard motif emerged from workshopping the film with test audiences. Throughout the five and a half years of making this film, we held work-in-progress screenings to help me determine which scenes were working, and to identify scenes where audiences weren’t connecting with what we had. (We also used these events as opportunities to fundraise for the film). In early cuts, the legal process confused some audience members, so I went back and asked Joshua to stand in front of a white board and diagram the strategy in plain English. We tested it out at our next rough cut screening and audiences really loved it, so coming back to the whiteboard for a reorientation when the case began to escalate was a natural extension of the motif.

We then insert a timeline graphic, another motif element of the film that is repeated as Debbie and her lawyers push through year after year of their saga.  A news clip from Oakland’s KTVU Fox-2 News does a nice job of quickly contrasting the lawyers’ current efforts with their original concept of what they imagined would be an open-and-shut case, and once we cut to footage of an outdoor concert where Speech of Arrested Development is talking about Deborah’s plight to a crowd of thousands, it’s clear that her case is getting bigger than anyone ever imagined.

The series of shots that follows shows Arrested Development taking their interest in Deborah’s case several steps further, as they enter the prison to meet her and sing with her and the prison choir she’s directed for over 15 years.  It was my idea to see if some musicians might take an interest in Deborah’s plight, and to their credit, Arrested Development went well out of their way to participate once I brought the idea to them through music producer Jamie Catto, who is, as the saying goes, a friend of a friend.

The scene that follows, in which we intercut their live performance of the song “None of Us Are Free,” gives the audience a short break from the distressing details of Deborah’s legal battle.  And at this point in the film, I believe the audience is glad to have that break from “the brain” of the movie and to have a moment to return to “its heart.” We come back to Deborah’s character to see how she holds her head high and inspires others, even as she waits and struggles for her freedom.

While neither Speech nor Deborah are legal experts, at this point in the film we have already heard from the experts and the case for Deborah’s freedom has been made.  While additional evidence will be discovered and brought to light in subsequent scenes, this scene is foreshadowing the possibility that it may be the court of public opinion – rather than the Los Angeles Superior Court – that can set Deborah free.

Afterthoughts

Initially, I began production of this project simply because of my attraction to the high-stakes storyline and all three main characters: Debbie and her attorneys Joshua and Nadia. Over time, however, working on the film has transformed me into a vocal advocate for all victims of domestic violence, especially those who would otherwise be forgotten and denied justice.

This is why, alongside the release of the film, I am working to create change through DEBBIE’S CAMPAIGN, a nonprofit project that partners the film with dozens of domestic violence prevention organizations, bar associations, womens’ groups, law schools, and other institutions.  Our aim is to create real change in ending domestic violence and wrongful incarceration.

We’re thrilled to have the support of the Oprah Winfrey Network for the film and for this effort, and I believe that the combined power of the box office release of the film, our upcoming national TV broadcast in November, our eventual home video release as part of the OWN Documentary Club, and our partnerships with national, state, and community organizations can fulfill Deborah’s vision.  It is simply that her story be told in order to make sure that others do not suffer the abuse and injustices that she did.  It’s something I’m fully dedicated to now, and when you see the film, I think you will understand why.

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