FBI probing suspect's recent conversion to Islam in Oklahoma beheading

from fox


Published September 26, 2014

FoxNews.com

 FBI officials are investigating a beheading at an Oklahoma food distribution center after co-workers said the suspect tried to convert them to Islam after his own recent conversion.

The suspect, Alton Nolen, 30, was recently fired from Vaughan Foods in Moore prior to Thursday’s attack. Moore Police Department Sgt. Jeremy Lewis toldKFOR that Nolen drove to the front of the business and struck a vehicle before walking inside. He then attacked Colleen Hufford, 54, stabbing her several times before severing her head. He also stabbed another woman, 43-year-old Traci Johnson, at the plant.

Lewis said Mark Vaughan, the company’s chief operating officer and a reserve county deputy, shot Nolen as he was stabbing Johnson, who remains hospitalized in stable condition Friday.

“He’s a hero in this situation,” Lewis told the station. “It could have gotten a lot worse.”

Nolen was apparently attacking employees at random, authorities said. The motive for the attack is unclear, but FBI officials confirmed to Fox News that they were assisting the Moore Police Department in investigating Nolen's background and whether his recent conversion to Islam was somehow linked to the crime.

The police department issued a statement saying, "After conducting interviews with Nolen's co-workers, information was obtained that he recently started trying to convert several employees to the Muslim religion. Due to the manner of death and the initial statements of co-workers and other initial information, the Moore Police Department requested the assistance of the FBI in conducting a background investigation on Nolan."

Nolen, according to state corrections records, was convicted in January 2011 of multiple felony drug offenses, assault and battery on a police officer and escape from detention. He was released from prison in March 2013.

Saad Mohammad, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, told NewsOK.com that leaders of the society’s mosque are taking security precautions to protect Muslims who gather there from any potential retaliatory violence.

Mohammad said any anti-Muslim sentiments local residents might have could be heightened due to the beheadings and violence overseas by Islamic State militants.

“They have this ISIS thing on their minds and now this guy has brought it to America,” Mohammad told the website.

Lewis said he does not yet know what charges will be filed against Nolen, adding that police are waiting until he's conscious to arrest him. Authorities said he had no prior connection to either woman.

Moore Police Department officials have released 911 calls from the incident,OKCFox.com reports. During the recording, a caller tells an operator that a person is attacking someone in the building. Several gunshots can be heard in the background at the end of the call. 

A Vaughan spokeswoman said the company was "shocked and deeply saddened" by the attack.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

DNA evidence exonerates two half-brothers convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl

from time.com

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Oklahoma Death Row Inmate Died From Lethal Injection, Not Heart Attack

Updated: Sept. 2, 6:30 p.m.

Two half-brothers who were convicted in the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old North Carolina girl were ordered free Tuesday, after a judge ruled that they had been wrongly imprisoned thanks to newly discovered DNA evidence.

North Carolina Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser overturned the convictions of death-row inmate Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, who had been serving a life sentence. Both men originally confessed to the rape and murder of Sabrina Buie, who was found dead in a soybean field in rural North Carolina.

The ruling comes after an investigation by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission that found no DNA evidence at the crime scene that could be traced back to McCollum or Brown.

But a cigarette found and tested in 2010 contained the DNA of another man, Roscoe Artis, who lived a block away from where the crime took place and is serving a life sentence for another murder and rape within weeks of Buie’s death.

“It’s impossible to put into words what these men have been through and how much they have lost,” said Ken Rose, a lawyer who represents McCollum, in a statement.

McCollum and Brown, both mentally challenged, initially signed statements saying they were responsible for Buie’s death. According to Brown’s defense lawyers, the two signed the statements believing they would go home afterward.

“When Henry gave his confession, he got up to walk out of the interrogation room,” says W. James Payne, a lawyer representing Brown. “He started to walk out the door.”

Both appealed their convictions over the years. In 2006, Brown filed a motion to test the DNA of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene. The results eventually excluded both McCollum and Brown. Several years later, the state’s innocence commission got involved and in July announced that DNA on the cigarette butt actually belonged to Artis.

That led to the scene Tuesday, in which Judge Sasser announced that the convictions for both men were to be overturned.

“I think I was crying harder than Leon,” says Ann Kirby, one of Brown’s lawyers. “To hear the word innocent in a courtroom is the pinnacle for any lawyer. It was history making.”

Both men had been imprisoned for three decades, McCollum being the longest-serving inmate on death row in North Carolina. Brown was on death row for five years until a retrial dismissed his murder charge.

“He always said, ‘They can go to the North Pole, and they’re not going to find anything,’” Kirby says, referring to Brown. “When we heard the verdict, we said, ‘They went to the North Pole.’ And he said, ‘They sure did.’”

Parents Who Took Ill Son Abroad Fight Order to Return to Britain

from nytimes




By KATRIN BENNHOLDSEPT. 1, 2014

LONDON — The wrenching tale of a British boy with a brain tumor and his parents, who were arrested after fleeing the country with him to seek treatment abroad, entered a new phase on Monday as the parents attended an extradition hearing in Madrid and refused to return to Britain.

At the hearing, the judge ordered Brett King, 51, and his wife, Naghemeh, 45, back into custody for a maximum of 72 hours pending further examination of their case, as well as medical feedback from the hospital in Málaga, Spain, where their 5-year-old son, Ashya, is being treated, according to reports in the Spanish news media, citing unnamed judicial sources.

After being told that Ashya would not benefit from proton beam radiation therapy — a cancer treatment not available to brain tumor patients in Britain but sometimes paid for by the National Health Service abroad — the Kings took their son out of the hospital against doctors’ orders on Thursday. They left Britain later that day, taking Ashya and his six siblings along.

A European arrest warrant was then issued by the British police, amid claims that Ashya’s life was in danger if he did not receive specialist medical attention. The family was arrested near Málaga on Saturday. Before the arrest, Mr. King posted a video of himself and Ashya on YouTube, denouncing the police hunt as “ridiculous.”

He said the family believed that proton beam treatment, despite what British doctors had told him, was the best available treatment for his son’s condition, a cancer known as medulloblastoma. They went to Spain, Mr. King said, to sell a house they owned there and to raise money for the treatment in the Czech Republic.

Mr. King said that the treatment his son had received in Southampton had seemed to him like “trial and error,” and that proton beam treatment, which targets brain tumors more directly than general radiation therapy, was recommended for this type of cancer on American, French and Swiss medical websites.

Reacting to the video, University Hospital Southampton said it had offered the family a second opinion and, if warranted, help with organizing treatment abroad. A spokeswoman for the National Health Service said, “Where doctors recommend it, the N.H.S. does fund proton beam therapy, including supporting 99 children last year to travel abroad for treatment.”

The proton therapy is available in only one hospital in Britain, the Clatterbridge Cancer Center in Wirral, and only for patients with rare eye cancers. But its use is reportedly being expanded to hospitals in Manchester and London.

After their parents’ arrest, Ashya’s siblings were not allowed to visit their brother in his hospital room in Málaga, which is reportedly under police guard. But his oldest brother, Danny, 23, told the BBC on Monday that he would get access later in the day.

The hearing on Monday in Madrid was held behind closed doors. The parents have not been charged with any crime under Spanish law. If the British authorities proceed with a formal extradition request, a decision will be made by a different panel of Spanish judges, but most likely not for several weeks.

Raphael Minder contributed reporting from Madrid.