ST. LOUIS — A former pizza delivery manager accused of abducting two boys pleaded not guilty to 71 charges after waiving his arraignment, his attorney said Tuesday.
Michael Devlin was to be arraigned today on charges of forcible sodomy and kidnapping in the abductions of Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck in a case that drew international attention.
The majority of charges against Devlin are filed in St. Louis County, where authorities say he held Shawn for more than four years after kidnapping him in 2002, and held Ben for four days in January. Shawn was 11 at the time.
Ben was 13 when he disappeared in January just minutes after stepping off his school bus in rural Franklin County. Four days later, a tip led to Devlin’s cramped apartment in Kirkwood, Mo., where both boys were found.
California: Mosque spying suit
Advocacy groups sued the FBI and the Department of Justice on Tuesday for failing to turn over records they requested on surveillance in the Muslim-American community. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleges that the FBI has turned over only four pages of documents to community leaders, despite a Freedom of Information Act request filed more than a year ago. The documents were not related to surveillance.
D.C.: No House seat for D.C.
A bill that would have given District of Columbia residents their first-ever member of Congress died in the Senate on Tuesday, dashing hopes of full voting rights in the nation’s capital after a 206-year wait. Senators voted 57-42, just three votes short of the 60 needed to move the measure forward.
Illinois: Quicker TB treatment
New research gives hope for successfully treating tuberculosis in a few months rather than the six months or more currently needed to beat the contagious lung disease, doctors reported Tuesday in Chicago. Adding the antibiotic moxifloxacin to the usual TB drugs shortened the time to cure to an estimated four months in a study in Brazil, Johns Hopkins University scientists reported. A second study by Hopkins researchers cured mice of TB in 10 weeks instead of the usual six months with moxifloxacin plus the TB drug rifapentine at higher doses.
Texas: Girl dies; mother charged
A 3-year-old who was the youngest of three severely burned sisters died Tuesday, and Haltom City police said her mother, accused of setting the girls on fire, will be charged with capital murder. The girl’s two older sisters, ages 5 and 7, remained hospitalized in Dallas, but their conditions were not being released. Authorities said their mother, Alysha V. Green, 29, put her daughters in a closet, poured gasoline on them and set them on fire Saturday.
Utah: Charges over a brown lawn
A 70-year-old Orem woman arrested in a dispute over her brown lawn pleaded not guilty Tuesday, then stood by as a Los Angeles lawyer waved handcuffs for the cameras outside court. Betty Perry is charged with resisting arrest and failing to maintain her landscaping, both misdemeanors. She was arrested July 6 after failing to give her name to a police officer who visited her home. During a struggle, Perry fell and injured her nose. She spent more than an hour in a holding cell before police released her.
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