This is a bittersweet ending, if not a happy one.  Recall that Alicia Navarro is the young woman who came forward during the media circus around Rudy Farias' re-emergence from not being kidnapped, to say that she was also fine and not kidnapped.

The way Navarro's story was reported led me to believe that she had left voluntarily and been self-sufficient the whole time, perhaps working and staying with other peers not much older than herself.  I would have been capable of something along those lines at her age.  That sounded plausible to me.  I accepted, or perhaps assumed, that an investigation had been done.

I subsequently learned that Alicia was very much not capable of anything like that at 14.  A special-needs girl, Alicia could not manage her own life, while I was basically fending for myself.

What didn't come out until much later was that Alicia had been staying with an adult man for four years, Edmund Davis.  Fortunately the police did follow up on this.

KRTV:

"Dozens of images of suspected child sex abuse material were located on the device, confirmed to belong to Davis. Following their protocols, Glendale police selected ten images from those found and brought them to medical experts. The review determined the individuals depicted to be under the age of 13, with two images of children under the age of 5."

As a survivor it's very obvious to me that Alicia was groomed and lured away from her home.  She's too young and inexperienced to understand that he doesn't like her for herself.  He likes her because she looks so very young and small, and she's so easily manipulated.  He has nothing to offer her but some craphole apartment in Montana.  He can't get a woman his own age, is why he's allegedly fixated on children.

So I'm glad that she's been returned to her own life without this guy.  Glad that he's been discovered, one more alleged pedo off the internet.  It saddens me that she doesn't see, and may never see, what happened to her there, how badly she undersold herself with this scumbag.

This video, the whole story, is completely insane.

The headline reads, "Sex offender killed in shootout with Dallas Police."  And yes, that does happen in this video. 

But when they send a drone over to investigate the vehicle, they discover that he has a woman handcuffed to the back seat.  Can you imagine the horror of being kidnapped in the first place, then placed in the middle of a shootout in this way?

She apparently got into his vehicle voluntarily, but was then put into the back seat and handcuffed, before he was observed by undercover cops who noted the vehicle as stolen.  This was apparently the night he was letting all of his criminal flags fly at once, his swan song, which ended with suicide by cop.  I'm glad the woman made it through the shower of bullets okay.

This sickens me. 

From NBCDFW5:

"[Brad] Cox, who has a history of disciplinary problems, testified last week at the hearing he believes his use of force was justified because he feared for his life and acted to keep others safe. He said news media reports misconstrued what happened. Cox told the judge during the hearing that he “could not and would not have done anything differently.”

“I don’t ever leave the house wanting to fight anybody ever,” Cox said at the hearing. “I was put in a situation that I had no choice.”

Well, I call bullshit.  He definitely had a choice.  There's nothing in your paramedic training about using your MMA training on anybody, at all. 

Paramedics have a duty to ensure "scene safety" for themselves and their partners before they engage anyone.  So if Brad Cox thought he was in a life-threatening situation, or anyone needed protecting, he was supposed to get back in his ambulance and drive away, and let the big, scary police officers handle it with their guns. You run away, park somewhere safe, and let the police call you back when the area is secure. That's legit how paramedics are taught to handle unsafe people and situations, by protocol, in every part of America.  It's called "staging," look that shit up.  Failure to ensure "scene safety for my partner and me" and run away in your ambulance if it's not met, will automatically fail you in every single paramedic test scenario.  Or, even easier than researching staging and scene safety, just look at the photograph of him kicking the seated, handcuffed guy, which is self-explanatory.  I imagine the judge was pressured by the firefighters' union, because Cox had 19 years in on the job.

Brad Cox is a bully and a punk.   I hate knowing that he works as a firefighter, much less a paramedic.  This is not the person you want responding to your family's emergency. 

I had patients grab at my breasts and crotch while I was on calls, and I didn't assault them.  I swatted their hands away and kept working, just like my other female coworkers routinely did.  I had been advised that any actions beyond that would be career-ending, especially reporting them.  So Brad Cox doesn't have a leg to stand on or an ass to sit on IMHO.  Garbage man.

Luckily the girl, who was grabbed from a gas station, made good her escape.

Another day, another (alleged) Holtzclaw.

Plea bargaining is a thing of the devil, as I explained in my review of Diana Rickard's book The New True.  On the one hand, it allows the state to arm-twist defendants of lesser means into accepting guilt for crimes they didn't commit.  And on the other hand, it allows very guilty people whom the state favors to get wrist-slapped.

If I had an ace legal researcher and a huge budget, I'd do a whole series of books about how plea bargaining is used to whitewash police sexual assault in America, as I demonstrated in that same book review I mentioned above.

Today's defendant, former officer Patrick Heron of Philadelphia, is getting 15-40 years, significantly more than a wrist slap.  But it's nothing compared to the 1,300 years he was facing.  He was running loose like a goose for years, Holtzclawing the most vulnerable girls he encountered on duty.  Almost as if nobody cared what he did sexually while in uniform, even to underage girls.

"A former Philadelphia police officer pleaded guilty on Friday to dozens of sex crimes involving young women and was sentenced to 15 to 40 years in state prison.

Patrick Heron, 54, reached an agreement with prosecutors ahead of a trial on more than 200 criminal offenses — including child sex assault and kidnapping — which occurred from 2005 to 2022.
The disgraced cop retired from the Philadelphia Police Department in 2019 after working there from 1995 to 2008 and then from 2010 to 2019. He was initially arrested in September 2022 for offenses related to unlawful sexual contact with young girls, photography depicting sex acts with young girls, and retaliation and harassment against victims and witnesses.

In June 2023, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office said Heron had been “re-arrested on 233 new counts,” including kidnapping, sexual assault, child sexual abuse and institutional sexual assault.

Investigators said he targeted vulnerable victims — including girls who struggled with drug addiction, had run away from home or had been arrested — and often sexually assaulted them while wearing his uniform and in the back of his patrol vehicle."

He was facing up to 1,300 years if convicted on all counts.  Of course it's framed as a win for the survivors, who now don't have to face the brutality of a trial.  There's never any talk of making the justice system more fair for survivors of rape, only having us be glad for whatever crumbs of justice we get, years later.

As we saw with Pablo Cano, don't be surprised if he doesn't serve a fraction of that 15-40 years.  He'll skip freely out the door, watch and see.

I'm covering this mostly because it's such a classic thing to happen in Long Beach.  Also because I appreciate the older guy who stepped up.

I used to go to the gym not far from here, on Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach.  That's downtown, near City Hall, the Courthouse, and the Main Library. 

Fun fact:  Not long after opening the newly constructed Billie Jean King Main Library downtown, they had to make its services "to-go only" for the safety of library staff.  The many homeless people who congregated on the steps had become more volatile than usual.  Long Beach had a series of stabbing sprees.  There must have been other issues at the library itself.  But it was fun having that giant, newly minted library open to the public while it lasted.

Part of the problem is that the library itself (around the corner from where the instant assault occurred) is across the street from the end of the Blue Line.  Everyone is forced off of the train for cleaning.

People can enter the trains for free on the LA Metro.  It's on the honor system, where you're meant to pay on a card, and then the police come around and spot check.  If you haven't paid, they give you a $250 ticket.  This is not a deterrent for homeless people, who get on the trains to sleep.  Then they get shoved off the trains at the end of the line, across the street from the main library in Long Beach, so the employees can hose everything down.  Now you know.

Thank God for these neighbors.  A man saw a woman being shouted at and brought into a garage with both of her eyes blacked so she couldn't see out of them.  For whatever reason he told his wife instead of calling the police.  But she called.

It took the police quite a while to get into the garage.  I have to wonder how terrifying that was for the hostage, to hear them out there laughing and joking, seemingly in no big hurry to get her out.  It's really a wonder the kidnapper didn't kill her.

Fox News has more information here, including more about her injuries.  That's actually my biggest concern about the way she's being treated, that she needs spinal immobilization based on obvious head injuries.

But this is what really, really annoys me about America, from the above link:

"Mozingo has a lengthy rap sheet that includes prison time for abduction in 2011, 2014 and 2019. 

He also held a woman at knifepoint in a Walmart bathroom in 2017, according to records. "

You can abduct a lot of different women in America and still be free to abduct and terrorize someone else.  Consider this guy's arrest record, the fact that he beat this woman with a baseball bat, doused her in gasoline, and threatened her life for days while holding her captive.  Then go read the YouTube comments on the recent case of the woman who molested a 15-year-old boy and got probation-only, where men are convinced that violence against women gets swiftly and harshly punished.  Mozingo did a lot of violence without the justice system putting any meaningful stop to him.

Thankfully the woman, Chloe Jones, survived this ordeal.  The Akron PD does a high volume of high-acuity calls to be sure.  But it is stunning to see how utterly unbothered they were by Jones' predicament.

This is a perfect example of why I'm in the world and not of it anymore.

ANDREW CUOMO SLAMS 'CANCEL CULTURE ON STEROIDS' FOR HIS DOWNFALL
"The former New York governor told Bill Maher he felt Joe Biden should have given him more support against sexual harassment claims, given he had faced similar allegations."

1. I grew up reading Mike Royko every morning, before "_____ slams/guts/eviscerates ______" was a headline format. 
2. Why anyone has ever cared what the original nepo baby, Bill Maher, said about anything, or thought of him as anything but a bridge from William F. Buckley to the alt-right, is beyond me.
   
3. This entire concept is like a nesting doll of shitty men, as if decency or women's perspectives didn't exist at all.  All this conversation lacks is Jimmy Kimmel -- not America's sweetheart from late night, but the one who used to host The Man Show.  He often slams and eviscerates on The Daily Beast too.  Kimmel was one of Biden's biggest defenders against Don Jr, about the hair-sniffing, which I couldn't avoid noticing no matter how hard I tried at the time.  The whole thing was one of the circles of the inferno, maybe the third or fourth, for me personally.
   

Once we get inside the conversation, nothing Cuomo says disappoints.  I could go on and on, but it's just him really laying bare the pure hypocrisy and rape culture of the Biden administration and entire Democratic Party, doing my work for me.

The fact is that Joe Biden's sexual misconduct got less investigation than Brett Kavanaugh's.  America didn't want that.  The #MeToo Movement got shut back down, un-coopted, for reasons that I won't go into here.  I'm a close observer of all of this as you may note from my blog.

But the Biden-Harris campaign supporters came after me guns blazing when I complained about the hair sniffing.  I've never voted Republican and never will.  But I got accused of every ridiculous thing, and called a liar and much worse.  I recognized "vote blue no matter who" for "take whatever I cram down your throat -- or else."

For the record, Tara Reade's claim sounds perfectly valid to me.  Her complaint was never investigated; SHE was investigated.  Reade, her personal and political history, her blogging, all of that was investigated and attacked by professional feminists who later got cushy gigs on MSNBC.  But nobody has ever explained to me why Biden sniffs hair. He refused to apologize, then made jokes about it.  Also Reade may well be a right winger and nutty as squirrel poop, and also, her complaint may be valid.  I have no reason to think he didn't do exactly what she said.

Make no mistake, I did vote for Biden in 2020 despite my "never Biden" position.  That position was based on the many, many videos I have seen of him violating the sexual boundaries of women and young girls, even on one occasion a swaddled infant.  Worse yet, he's never answered for any of it.  He's never so much as explained why he does the hair sniffing if it's not a fetish -- which I'm saying it obviously  is -- much less apologize for it.  He's been a complete asshole about all of it.  And his supporters have been as abusive and dishonest about it as humanly possible to me personally. 

I got pressured into voting for the blue rapist over the red one last time.  Next time I'm not voting for water over fire, I'm staying home and letting it burn.  Keep calling me a liar, it's fine.  Hell hath no something something whatever.

The #MeToo Movement (not the real one, but the co-opted media heyday of 2019) was full of people I'd never heard of, being brought to task for things they did long ago.  Here is another one.  Better late than never.

After reading up a bit, he sounds terrible.  And he looks like the actual cryptkeeper.  His face is a jump scare, like a ghoul that rapes you in your nightmares with his stringy white ghost hair.

He was convicted on four counts of sexual assault, as discussed in the linked video.  His son was influential in speaking against him.  I feel bad for such family members.  There's usually nothing they can do about it other than what he apparently did.

But I also was personally struck by the comments of the survivors.  They mentioned how unfair it is, that he's just gone on about his business, living in wealth and privilege the whole time, while they've suffered constantly.  And they still have to pay for the rest of their lives.

I know this feeling.  My mom really did me dastardly wrong, and got away with blaming me.  Very much like these women, I was forced to keep quiet and accept being blamed for the crimes against me for many, many years.  And she kept all the money, too. 

But you just have to let go of all of that and be happy with the days that you have.  Because that's winning. 

You got him convicted.  He spends the rest of his days in prison, like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein  :)  He's a baloney sandwich guy now.  You get to do arts and crafts with the children that you love, or whatever relaxes yourself.