I do a lot of criticizing the police.  So I also like to take the time to point out when they do a fantastic job, like Trooper Nielson of the Louisiana State Police.

He pulled the young man over for speeding, 73 in a 55.

The driver:

• Had no license at all
• No insurance
• It wasn't his car
• Had a roach in the ashtray

The trooper noticed that there were bullet holes in the driver's side of the vehicle.  So he investigated to make sure that this person had permission to be in the vehicle at all.  He still couldn't positively identify him, because he had no license or ID.

The driver also couldn't give his home address, or say exactly where he was going, an automatic red flag for the police.

Trooper Nielson investigated further, to make sure that this vehicle wasn't wanted in any local incidents.  He discovered that the vehicle's owner had been reported missing.  The driver claimed this person had given him permission to drive it.

Meanwhile some random person drives up and says that people in Monroe, another city, are looking for that car and its driver.  He hands Trooper Nielson a phone.  The local sheriffs arrive at some point to assist.

Trooper Nielson follows this investigation step-by-step, eventually popping the trunk to discover the body of Michael, the vehicle's owner.

The driver had been driving around with the dead body in the trunk, speeding, with no license, driver's side all shot up, and smoking weed.  That's more of a cry for help, I think.  He was only missing one of those sovereign citizen homemade license plates.

But that was great work by this police officer all the way throughout.  Terrible tragedy for the victim in this case.  And I can't imagine what the murderer was thinking, honest to God.  What a waste of life all the way around.

I'm glad that the work was done.  That justice was served for these victims.  And most of all, that people are now safe from these vicious predators.  This was really a lot of accomplishment in a short time, and it must be rewarding for their team and the community.

But I'm not able to sit through either press conference, because of the constant use of the phrase "true victims."

The crystal clear message is that other victims deserved whatever they got.

Over and over again, as Sheriff Niehaus repeats that phrase "true victims, these were true victims" because they were such innocent young girls, it underscores exactly why his colleagues put in such little effort to look for my friend Wendy Huggy when she was kidnapped in 1982:  she was a rotten little slut and it was her own fault.  Not a true victim, like an 11-year-old who gets abducted getting off the school bus.

Much less any adult sex worker or drug user.  Or a woman who chose to marry a man.

The police considered Wendy an adult because she was married and pregnant at 16.  She was married because her mother abandoned her at 15.  She was allowed to marry a 27-year-old man in Illinois without her mother present or any parent's signature.  That will never stop blowing my mind.  Then that made her a legal adult.  Which allowed the police to not even look for her.  So she wasn't what this guy would have called a "true victim."

I will admit that I am on one.

But the news has been proving my point, one incident after another.  There must be real changes to the way we deal with misuse of the 911 system.  Americans do not understand how things work.  And the system itself must be restructured as well.

In the above video we see someone attacking a federal Marshal.  He must then be transported by his coworkers, because AMR -- a private company that outsources ambulance services all across America -- doesn't have any crew to send.  The wait time is deemed too long by his coworkers.  So they throw him into a police car and take him to the hospital themselves.

Because he's a federal police officer, they are able to "make a federal case out of it" to the news, so to speak.  But this happens to regular people all the time, all across this country.  They get stabbed, have heart attacks, they die, because people are doing what Mitt Romney told them to do. 

People are calling 911 to use as a taxi service to the emergency room as primary care.  They do it all the time.  They're SWATting people who beat them at Fortnight.  They're Carlee Russell, or that little girl in Florida that I just wrote about.

But really, having AMR run our ambulance services instead of our counties is a problem in and of itself.  Because it puts a corporate middle-man between the people and our public servants, think about it.  As a paramedic I worked for "hospital corporations."  I never took sick time, because I accrued so little.  And I got sick enough to think I would die at least once.  It was easily the most toxic work environment I ever encountered, in every imaginable way.

I'm maintaining this true crime for survivors blog because I know that my perspective is valuable.  I have valuable insights.

It bothers me when I see an analysis, for example, comparing the cases of Jussie Smollett, Rudy Farias, and Carlee Russell.  One of these things is not like the others.  Rudy Farias doesn't belong.  It's simply a false narrative that I find infuriating, whether it's disingenuous or ill-informed.  If anything, they should have Rudy's mother's face in that lineup.

So I would like to take a moment and help people separate the wheat from the chaff when looking at the news about missing people.  This is how we can compare and contrast, do a little critical thinking about the information we're presented with.

WE SHOULD NOT BE TALKING ABOUT ALYSSA NAVARRO AT ALL

I'm not even going to link to any stories about Alyssa Navarro.  You know why?  Because I shouldn't know anything about her.

• Alyssa left a note that made it clear she was running away.  She and her mom were not getting along.
  
• She didn't tell any lies to the police or anyone else.
• While it is good to question whether she was being taken advantage of sexually by an adult, there is no indication of that.  She does seem to have run away on her own, as she said.
• Nobody harmed her and she doesn't need any help.
• This isn't everybody's business.

America has blurred the lines between crime and entertainment.  Gawking at human tragedy is now such a major pastime that there are no boundaries.  Because this special-needs girl disappeared some time ago, now everybody has the right to know everything about it.  Does she need any help?  No.  This case destroys any illusion that the attention paid to kidnapped women has anything to do with helping them.

WARNING:  This video is absolutely horrible to watch.

A woman is seen being dragged by the hair out of a hotel near Rochester, New York.  She's seen putting up the fight of her life against another, larger woman, to no avail.  The desk clerk does nothing but straighten up the items on his desk that have been dislodged, including the phone which he does not apparently use to dial 911.

Once the survivor is dragged past the first set of doors, the first kidnapper in the video is assisted by a man who enters from outside.  The couple then carry the still-struggling survivor outside of the hotel.

NOTE TO CARLEE RUSSELL:  The kidnappers appear oddly unconcerned with potentially leaving wrist marks.  I suspect they may have done more than take pictures of her.

A hotel guest looked out his window when he heard screaming.  He saw the woman being put into the back of a car as it sped away.  Luckily he called 911.

Spectrumlocalnews.com:

“So I just saw a girl being pulled out of the front door of the hotel,” Burkett said. “They dragged her, opened up the backseat and threw her into the car. She actually kicked the backseat open and managed to get halfway out of the car. I really thought she was going to get out of there. But I’m assuming they either grabbed her by the hair or some kind of clothing that she had on her and just held on to her and literally drove off with her halfway out the door.”

The woman was found in the vehicle nine hours later.  I cannot imagine what a terrible nine hours that must have been.  She said she had been with the pair for several months.

The two suspects have pled not guilty, because of course they're not guilty until convicted in a court of law, we all know that.

PROSTITUTION IS A VICTIMLESS CRIME, THEY SAY

My biggest take-away on all of this is that the hotel in question is almost guaranteed to be a hotbed of human trafficking activity, based on the utter nonchalance of the clerk.  He stood right there making sure all of his fucks were intact as that woman fought for her life and temporarily knocked a few of them out of place.

Meanwhile, here's Carlee Russell's mug shot.  Adorable.

Apparently there's a spot near the freeway in Florida, a little homeless camp that you can't see unless you walk through some bushes.

It's behind an area owned by DOT where people can pull over to change tires or whatever they need to do.  It's quite near a residential and shopping area.

The reporters were able to interview a number of men who live there, most of whom were wearing ankle bracelets.  They were all sex offenders.

They said more or less the same thing:  their parole officers had told them to stay back there in the woods, behind the DOT area.  It's probably either a state or county-owned, wooded area that isn't routinely patrolled by law enforcement, in terms of not having them constantly rousted, not having shopkeepers calling on them and so forth.  Because you can't see it unless you walk beyond some bushes that I would never pass through.  It's a more upscale area.  And they have to stay in a county that they can't really afford to live in, because they're on parole.

Of course everybody the reporter interviews, all of the DOT officials are shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover gambling in Casablanca!  But these men are all on ankle monitoring.  So their parole officers know exactly where all of them are, all together in this little camp behind the DOT area where they're all saying they were told to stay.  It's a more upscale area.  And they have to stay in a county that they can't really afford to live in, because they're on parole.

The issue is that it's not where any of them are stated to be staying on the sex-offender registry.  It's a good ways from their listed address.  And that exists for a very good reason:  so that these guys can't continue to violate everybody else.  Because they're known to have boundary issues.  It's a significant safety problem.

MY OPINION

On the one hand, putting them behind this DOT area is an obvious, all-around failure.  If your daughter is having car trouble, this is where she's going to pull over to wait for you to come help her.  This is not the right place to put the secret creeper village behind the bushes, for God's sake! How did Florida become the serial killer capital of America?

Also, these are still human beings.  And they are allowed to live somewhere.  How about a halfway house?  Like someplace indoors with an address, maybe?  Stop freaking out about drag queens reading books, who are usually not shown to be any problem at all -- how often do you see a drag queen in an ankle monitoring bracelet?  Let's prioritize and focus, Florida.

There's no excuse for not having these homeless sex offenders in some kind of actual halfway housing where they can be (a) monitored and (b) getting therapy for whatever makes them sex offenders in the first place.  Florida has money to spend on all kinds of foolishness, like over $1 million in swamp buggies to search for Brian Laundrie after letting him walk away.

People go to halfway houses for getting out of prison after they rob banks.  I feel like you can let bank robbers go straight back to living with their wives after prison, and put these jokers in the halfway houses.  Just focus and build more halfway houses.  The secret creeper villages are ridiculous.

Here's a case out of my home town that seems like it should be very solvable, for multiple reasons.

NBC Chicago
“She didn’t disappear on her own accord," says a Chicago homicide detective"

Although she wasn't on duty because she had called out sick for the day, pregnant Kierra Coles was last seen on CCTV footage in her USPS uniform.  Her family is contending that it's someone else wearing her clothing. 

Either way, whether it's her or someone stole her uniform, that should involve the federal Postal Police, and bring all sorts of additional resources into play.  It shouldn't be Chicago homicide detectives getting around to it years later.

Also this is most likely not a whodunit.  The man in her life, Josh Simmons, behaved extremely suspiciously, seen accompanying Kierra to an ATM where she made an abnormally large withdrawal of $400 despite normally being very cautious with her spending.

An unidentified man was seen driving back to Kierra's apartment alone, parking and exiting her vehicle through the passenger door for no apparent reason.  Kierra has not been seen since.  It's believed that whatever happened to Kierra happened within a one-hour window. 

Josh subsequently  moved out of the area with the mother of his other children.

So while there are no charges against Josh at this time, the Chicago detective is confident that Kierra didn't leave of her own accord, and that she's not alive.  My hope is that they can use the same sort of cell phone technology that was used to triangulate Rex Heuermann and his alleged victims to track the time and whereabouts of both Josh and KIerra beyond any doubt.

Being a socially marginalized person means I have unpopular opinions.  And this may be another one.

I'm good with having this child arrested.  They didn't taze her.  They didn't and shouldn't beat her up or put her in prison -- despite the blood-boiling fury that every first responder, including me, feels about this sort of thing. 

But what she did was extremely serious and problematic.  This can't become a thing on TikTok.  She must be made to do significant community service, enough to constitute restitution for the amount of helicopter and manpower hours that she wasted.  She needs to be punished in a way that will fuck her entire life over all the way through high school.  She needs to be made an example of.

The way the police in Alabama handled Carlee Russell -- still patiently waiting until she's ready to talk to them -- has made me want to smash bricks with my face. 

The way many people are talking about her, as though it will be okay as long as she just apologizes, makes me want to laugh while this entire country burns to the ground.

NBC News:
An 11-year-old Florida girl was arrested after falsely texting authorities that her friend was kidnapped by an armed man. She later confessed the prank was part of a YouTube challenge.
The girl texted 911 Wednesday morning to say her friend, 14, was abducted by “an armed male driving a white van on South I-95 in Oak Hill,” the Volusia Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The girl said she was following the van in a blue Jeep. NBC News is not identifying the 11-year-old because she is a minor.
A dispatcher to the sheriff's communication advised the sheriff's office at 9:45 a.m. of a “suspicious incident reported by text message.” 
The 11-year-old then texted updates for the next hour and a half — describing the male suspect and saying he had a gun. 
Deputies responded along with help from the sheriff's office aviation unit and officers from Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach and Port Orange to search for the suspect vehicle — but no van was found. 
At about 10:30 a.m., deputies tracked the cellphone that was texting 911 to a home in Port Orange. Once at the home, they spoke with the girl's father, who said she was inside with her family.
“As deputies approached the girl, she was holding her cell phone, which was ringing as she walked out to meet the deputies. When answered, Volusia Sheriff’s Dispatch was on the line and deputies verified they were on scene,” the sheriff's office said.
She told deputies she was inspired to prank 911 through a "YouTube challenge" and thought it "would be funny."

The child was charged with making a false police report concerning the use of a firearm in a violent manner, a felony, and misuse of 911, a misdemeanor. 
The sheriff's office shared a snippet of body camera footage showing the girl with her hands cuffed behind her back, with her face blurred. In the clip, the girl says shakily: “I’m not going to do this again.”
She was transported to the Family Resource Center for processing then transferred to the Volusia Regional Juvenile Detention Center, officials said. It's not immediately clear if she has a lawyer.
Sheriff Mike Chitwood condemned the prank as “dangerous,” and warned parents on the importance of monitoring their kids’ social media use. 
“We’re going to investigate every incident but today it wasted valuable resources that might have helped someone else who legitimately needed our help," he said.

Great news today.  Sergio Garcia, the suspect -- who is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- in a string of horrific crimes against women, is in custody. 

I have never been to prison or even jail.  But based on what I have heard from people with real-world knowledge, this guy is screwed worse than a chomo.  Regular citizens want to kill him, much less the prison population.  People sit in prison missing their grandmas' funerals all the time.  I can't imagine how the authorities will protect him. 

This was a great press conference -- the part that was available in English-language outlets.  There wasn't the customary 20 minutes of mutual self-praise amongst agencies.  And I could see that the various agencies had taken the matter very, very seriously.  If only the English-speaking media reciprocated. 

But I only found it on one outlet, and they chopped it in the middle.

That isn't a broken system.  It's a system that reflects the ethos of its creators and the violence against women that they demand as entertainment.  A&E will eventually cover it. I will look for more on this in Spanish tomorrow.

TL/DR:  Sergio Garcia allegedly committed a series of violent robbery/sexual assaults on women young and old on the streets of Los Angeles, documented from at least July 10, 2023 forward.  The subject on two occasions attacked random victims, minutes apart.  Two of the most-serious attacks happened within half an hour of each other.  He returned to the home of one woman the next day to steal her car.  One of the elderly women almost died. 

Because of ample CCTV evidence, police were able to develop a suspect profile and name Sergio Garcia, 21.  They tracked him down to Tijuana, Mexico, where the US Marshals apprehended him.  He was expedited and is in custody in California at this time.

I'm pleased, thrilled actually, at the amount of elbow grease that went into (a) putting this series of crimes together, like taking it seriously even though the first few were younger women who weren't seriously injured; (b) culling the CCTV footage to connect all of the cases and develop a suspect profile; and (c) locate him in TJ and expedite him with lightning speed.  :D  Barkeep, a round of donuts on me.

Side note:  ABC News was the only outlet that had this press conference available at all in English, at least that I could find.  And they chose to cut it off arbitrarily, before someone in a blue shirt spoke, and go to the other news.  Absolutely infuriating.  I'm disgusted at the limited coverage in general.  A&E will eventually do an episode on it.

Other side note:  I'm wondering if the California prison system may have limited the availability of this content within its walls, like an in-house version of child-safe, in an attempt to protect his life. 

The LA Times has more information on the crime spree itself.  In the press conference it was noted that although July 10 is where law enforcement picked up the trail, it is very unlikely to be this subject's first day of violence against women.  There are undoubtedly other injured parties out there.

I will leave you with this accounting of the crimes in question, pasted from the LA Times article linked above.  Best wishes to all of the injured parties.  Great thanks to the law enforcement people who worked so hard on this.

• Luna said the search for Garcia began after he allegedly assaulted a 67-year-old woman at around 6:15 a.m. July 15 in the yard of her East Los Angeles home. Investigators working with colleagues from the Los Angeles Police Department determined it was one in a string of attacks on women in the L.A. area.
• Garcia approached the victim from behind, pulled her hair and threw her to the ground, where he repeatedly punched her in the face, officials said. Garcia was startled when a neighbor began to yell at him, they said, but continued to punch the woman two more times before he rode away on a bicycle.
• Luna said that, within 72 hours, East L.A. detectives had learned of two similar attacks inside the city limits with a suspect who matched Garcia’s description. By July 18, he had been identified as the alleged perpetrator.
• The sheriff said Garcia was suspected of assaulting and robbing an 84-year-old woman in the 5200 block of Via Corona Street in East Los Angeles about 30 minutes after the assault on the woman in her yard. In the second case, he allegedly stole the woman’s car keys.
• On July 16, the next morning, Luna said Garcia returned and stole the car and, shortly after, crashed it near the 10 Freeway and Western Avenue.
• A third woman, age 55, came forward after seeing the department’s public outreach on the suspect and reported that she had been assaulted, also in East Los Angeles, on July 10 at 6:45 a.m. in the 1200 block of South Woods Avenue. Charges have been filed so far in those incidents.
• Luna said a fourth possible victim in the sheriff’s territory came forward just two hours before Wednesday’s news conference announcing Garcia’s arrest.
• LAPD Chief Michel Moore said his department had at least four separate assaults in which Garcia was a suspect — one on July 10, another on July 11 and two more on July 15. Moore said he believed Garcia could be responsible for other attacks: “We have likely only identified a small sampling of his activities.”
• According to the police chief, the string of attacks began July 10 when a man matching Garcia’s description followed a woman as she walked under the 110 Freeway near Olympic Boulevard and L.A. Live Way and attempted to sexually assault her.
• Moore said Garcia was also suspected in an attack near Chick Hearn Court and Georgia Street in downtown Los Angeles on July 11. Garcia allegedly slapped a woman on her backside and sexually assaulted her, he said.
• On July 15, about three hours after the East L.A. assault on the 67-year-old woman, Garcia allegedly approached a woman who was walking home from church in the 1300 block of South Alvarado Street, hit her in the face multiple times, knocking her unconscious, and robbed her.
• Minutes later, in the 1300 block of South Burlington Avenue, Moore said, he allegedly grabbed a woman who was rummaging through the trunk of her car and sexually assaulted her.

WARNING:  This video is horrifying and heartbreaking.

  Six children were found with several dogs in a hotel room in Las Vegas.  The father believed he had beaten an 11-year-old boy to death.  He then locked him in a dog cage with another child and left them there!

It's not clear how the parents came to be in police custody.  But when the police arrived at the hotel to check on the children, they were afraid to open the door.  Their father had told them never to open it for strangers.  They tried to convince the police they were fine, even though their father thought one of the children had died from the beating.  The female police officer, with her calm, soothing, voice, wasn't able to convince them.  Eventually a maintenance man did.

Fortunately the children survived.  But no child should ever have to endure this.  There is absolutely no excuse.

Unfortunately I'm afraid for the future of these children.  I'm reminded of the Turpin children, who escaped their house of brutality and starvation.  They were sent into foster care where they endured more of the same.

I don't know what became of the children of Gloria Williams from Texas, who allowed her boyfriend to beat her special-needs child, Kendrick Lee, to death.  She then left all of the children to starve in an apartment with no electricity while Kendrick's corpse decomposed.  Those children went to foster care.  Me of little faith, I hate not knowing their outcome.

God bless little Kendrick Lee, America's sweetheart.  I hope these children get to a better place, and soon.  I wish I could bring them all home with me.