🚀 go-pugleaf

RetroBBS NetNews Server

Inspired by RockSolid Light RIP Retro Guy

Article View: dc.general
Article #6408

Re: Yard ape stuck in chimney for 28 years

#6408
From: Martin.Looter.Kingfish
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 06:19
337 lines
16462 bytes
"Byker" <byker@do~rag.net> wrote:

Bwa_Ha_Ha; the basal, niggerific lifestyle typified!

Now, it needs an improved title.

* - All In Dah Nigger Fambly
* - Black, Like Usun'z
* - The Nigger Bunch (That's the Way We Became the Nigger Bunch)
* - Seven [Dead] Is [Still Not] Enough

> The Boy in the Chimney
> 
> The examiner believed the youth got trapped. The detective suspected
> murder. An answer to part of the mystery left both in disbelief.
> 
> By Hector Becerra, Times Staff Writer
> July 20, 2006
> 
> Inside the chill of the county coroner's office, the detective and the
> forensic anthropologist stood over soot-covered bones arrayed on a metal
> table.
> 
> Over two hours, Elizabeth Miller provided a running dialogue for each
> bone. She picked up one rib after another, studying them for knife
> scrapes. 
> 
> The bones were those of a boy, perhaps 12 to 15 years old, found in the
> chimney of an abandoned building in South Los Angeles. The boy wore
> faded and stained tan jeans and a white shirt, but no shoes.
> 
> "I'm sure if we had a photograph, we'd be able to recognize him," Miller
> said.
> 
> More than once, Los Angeles Police Det. Chris Barling asked: Was he
> killed? 
> 
> There was no sign of trauma, Miller said. No self-defense wounds on the
> finger bones, no scrapes or damage to other bones. The jaw suggested
> major dental work to repair an injury, but that was it.
> 
> That was March 28, 2005, and the homicide detective and the
> anthropologist had hunches, nothing more.
> 
> Miller said she thought the boy sneaked into the chimney and died either
> of starvation or positional asphyxiation. Perhaps the clay pipe of the
> chimney muted his calls for help. Maybe the same pipe carried the smell
> of decay up and out. The remains still gave out a waxy, organic odor,
> which led Miller to believe that he had probably been dead less than
> five years. The boy's two front teeth protruded, and his skull had
> strong African American features.
> 
> "I tend to go with weird accidents more," she said. "I prefer to think
> weird things happen as opposed to somebody killing and dumping a boy
> into a chimney."
> 
> Barling felt differently.
> 
> "Maybe I'm just morbid," he said. "I just had a hunch that it didn't
> make sense it was accidental.. My gut is that we're dealing with a
> murder." 
> 
> The discovery of the skeletal remains at 89th and Main streets in South
> Los Angeles had been a fluke. On March 24, 2005, an 11-year-old girl had
> climbed on the roof of the abandoned halfway house to retrieve a soccer
> ball. 
> 
> The girl peered down into the chimney. She ran to her father and told
> him she had seen a skull.
> 
> In the following days, stories about the discovery ran in local
> newspapers and on the TV news. They focused on Miller's theory: The boy
> was probably a runaway, there a few years.
> 
> No one came forward to identify the remains. No grieving parents called
> or showed up to dare to ask: Could this be my child?
> 
> Barling started pulling missing person's reports going back about five
> years but came up empty.
> 
> That July, forensic artist Marilyn Droz used the boy's skull to draw a
> composite portrait. By then, nearly four months had gone by.
> 
> The sketch prompted another flurry of news reports.
> 
> Donna Theus was sitting in her living room watching the TV news when she
> saw the drawing. She screamed. The boy, Theus said, looked like her
> cousin. She picked up the phone.
> 
> On the other line, 78-year-old Clelia Thompson answered.
> 
> "Babe, did you see that little boy's picture on the TV?" Theus asked her
> aunt. "The little boy they found in the chimney? You know, that could be
> Robert."
> 
> Robert?
> 
> Her boy, Robert Thompson, 14, had been missing since Christmas Eve.
> 
> Of 1977.
> 
> The investigators could not believe the body had been in the chimney 28
> years. The building, a low-slung, fenced-in wreck, for years served as a
> halfway house and had only closed a few years ago. How could a corpse be
> there for so long without anyone noticing?
> 
> Still, the Los Angeles Police Department's missing persons unit sent
> someone to take a DNA swab from Clelia Thompson's mouth.
> 
> Miller, the Los Angeles County coroner's anthropologist, began to
> rethink the circumstances that would have preserved the bones for so
> long, and still retained the smell of decomposition. When she talked to
> other anthropologists and forensic experts, they were befuddled. Their
> best guess was that a combination of odd conditions may have preserved
> the remains. 
> 
> The bones showed signs of superficial charring, suggesting that the
> chimney had been used just enough to stain the remains. This may have
> helped preserve them.
> 
> Months passed. Then, on Dec. 28, 2005, a lab in Sacramento came back
> with the DNA test results. The boy in the chimney was Robert Thompson.
> 
> Det. Barling now had a name, and identities tell stories.
> 
> Barling, 44, a 20-year LAPD veteran, had been the lead detective on 150
> cases since becoming a homicide investigator in 1993. His mind raced
> with questions. Who was last with this boy? Was he trying to burglarize
> the building or playing a game of hide-and-seek? Could he have been
> trying to recover a ball, much like the little girl who had found his
> remains? 
> 
> The abandoned building was only blocks from Robert Thompson's home.
> Where were the shoes? Did the boy walk there in his bare feet? Or was he
> carried there?
> 
> Barling drew up a basic profile of the boy in the chimney.
> 
> Loved ones described Robert Thompson as sweet tempered though
> occasionally mischievous. He liked to run barefoot around the house. He
> especially enjoyed playing with his other two young brothers, Clinton
> and Smith. Though Robert was the third-youngest of Clelia Thompson's
> children, in many ways he demanded the most attention.
> 
> Robert was 14, but social workers had diagnosed his IQ as that of a
> 6-year-old.
> 
> From at least age 4, according to hospital records, Robert suffered from
> grand mal seizures. If he did not take his medication, he could have as
> many as three a day. In 1974, a seizure caused him to black out and fall
> into a swimming pool. He almost drowned before a sister pulled him out.
> 
> One year later, Robert fell on his face after suffering another seizure,
> necessitating dental surgery. It was this work that anthropologist
> Miller would observe nearly three decades later.
> 
> Barling remained doubtful that Robert died accidentally. As he delved
> into the boy's family history, he found it was heaped with tales of
> trauma, tragedy and bad luck that were excessive even by the standards
> of a tough South Los Angeles neighborhood.
> 
> Barling decided it was time for a longer conversation with the boy's
> mother. 
> 
> Barling sat down with Clelia Thompson at her cramped home in the back of
> a duplex on East 94th Street. It was clear to him that she had harbored
> a dark conviction for decades about what had happened to her son. She
> was certain that he had not run away, that someone had taken and killed
> him. The only thing she didn't seem to know in her heart was where her
> boy's remains were. 
> 
> "You don't want to ever face none of your children are dead," Thompson
> said in an interview. "But it's worse when they're just gone. You can't
> even face it."
> 
> Thompson is thin with toned arms despite her age. She sometimes keeps a
> pack of Kool cigarettes in her well-worn white and green apron, and
> during the summer, a jar of buttermilk nearby to fend off the heat.
> 
> Her recollection of exact dates is fuzzy, she admits. She keeps death
> certificates stored away in a trunk. All seven, for all the children she
> lost.
> 
> She lost one daughter when the girl was only a baby. Then she lost six
> of her nine remaining children. Only one, Shirley, died of natural
> causes. 
> 
> Rose, 30, and Benny, 34, were stabbed to death by former partners.
> Clinton, 20, and Smith, 19, the two youngest, each committed suicide.
> 
> "It was one right after another. Every year there was a death," Thompson
> said. "But it began with Robert."
> 
> It was a rainy Christmas Eve. The whole family had gathered at home for
> the holiday - along with an outsider.
> 
> His name was Theodore Van Smith. Theodoric, as he was often called, was
> the former boyfriend of Robert's sister, Rose Ann.
> 
> They had a boy together, but the relationship had soured.
> 
> Theodoric Smith was not especially welcomed. But he had a way with the
> youngest children, Thompson said. He would offer them hamburgers and
> drinks, and sometimes take them away for short spells.
> 
> Some family members said they always heard that Robert stormed off in a
> fit of anger because he thought he wasn't getting a bicycle for
> Christmas. 
> 
> Clelia Thompson said that wasn't right.
> 
> Robert disappeared in the morning, and the family assumed he would
> return. His shoes were left behind. By the afternoon, they had started
> searching the neighborhood. They even searched the building where
> Robert's remains would be found 28 years later. It didn't occur to them
> to look in the chimney. "We looked for him all Christmas Day," Thompson
> said. "No Robert." 
> 
> The LAPD searched an extensive area door to door. TV newscasts aired
> reports about the missing boy.
> 
> Almost unnoticed that day, Thompson said, was that after Robert
> disappeared, so did Theodoric. He was not seen the rest of the day.
> 
> "But nobody hardly noticed because everybody was concerned for Robert,"
> Clelia Thompson said.
> 
> Barling reviewed the LAPD's old missing person's case on Robert. It
> showed that for the first eight years after his disappearance, the trail
> was cold. 
> 
> But that changed Feb. 23, 1985.
> 
> In the darkness of the early morning, Clelia Thompson walked briskly
> down a hallway of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. Before she
> got to his room, she could hear the peel of her youngest child's
> screams. 
> 
> "All I could hear was my child hollering, 'Momma, Theodoric killed
> Robert! Momma, Theodoric killed Robert! He told me he killed Robert!'"
> 
> Laying on the bed was the bloody form of 12-year-old Smith Thompson.
> Tire marks streaked across his chest and his forehead. He was in intense
> pain. 
> 
> According to police, Theodoric Smith had driven Smith Thompson to a dark
> alley and raped him in the car. A subsequent police report quoted Smith
> as saying Theodoric told him: "If you don't make me feel good, I am
> going to kill you just like I killed your brother Robert."
> 
> Theodoric eventually threw the boy out of the car and ran over him.
> 
> Two months later, Theodoric Smith pleaded guilty to five felony counts,
> including the rape of a child and attempted murder. He was sentenced to
> 30 years in state prison.
> 
> Before he was convicted, LAPD Det. Ramiro Argamaniz asked him about
> Robert's disappearance. "Suspect did not cop out to the crime, but he
> did hint at possibility of his involvement and he did mention his
> backyard," his report said.
> 
> Police dug up the backyard of Theodoric Smith's parent's home but found
> only dog remains.
> 
> The case of Robert Thompson again grew cold until 1997, when Det. Debra
> Kane of the department's missing person's unit took an interest.
> 
> Barling, reading the old case files, found Kane to be something of a
> kindred spirit. Like him, Kane felt in her gut that she was dealing with
> a homicide case. "Even juvenile runaways turn up eventually. They make
> phone calls home," Kane said in an interview, explaining her suspicions.
> "Somewhere, someone has seen this person or that person.
> 
> "This kid just disappeared."
> 
> Kane asked Dr. Kris Mohandie, then head of the LAPD's behavioral science
> unit, if he could go to Calipatria State Prison, about 150 miles east of
> San Diego, to interview Theodoric Smith. "What we really wanted to
> know," Kane said, "is where the bones were buried."
> 
> Aided by a prison psychiatrist, Mohandie interviewed Theodoric Smith for
> several hours. Mohandie reported that Smith was manipulative and
> obsessed with "sexual matters, body parts, and missing body parts."
> 
> "The inmate clearly fits the profile of a sexual predator whose
> preferential target is minor males," Mohandie wrote. He and the prison
> psychiatrist concluded that Smith "would be capable of the probable
> murder and disappearance of Robert Thompson."
> 
> But they didn't get a confession from Theodoric Smith.
> 
> Barling found himself in the same place where Kane left off nine years
> earlier, no closer to proving Robert Thompson had been murdered.
> 
> Theodoric Smith was paroled from prison in 2000 but shortly after that
> was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital in Central California.
> 
> In an phone interview with The Times from the hospital, Smith, now 47,
> said he remembered Robert going missing but denied he had any
> involvement. 
> 
> "No, I had nothing to do with it, sir," he said. "If they had anything
> on me, I'm pretty sure they would come and read me my Miranda rights."
> 
> Barling said he plans to make the trip up north to the mental hospital
> sometime in the fall to talk to Smith.
> 
> "Even if I got a full-blown confession from him, I have to compare that
> to his mental state," Barling said. "Am I just getting a confession from
> someone who is completely insane?"
> 
> For now, Barling said, he plans to make it a goal to keep Theodoric
> Smith in the mental institution.
> 
> "I think this is a homicide," he said. "My problem is, can I prove it?"
> 
> On Feb. 8, Clelia Thompson finally laid her son Robert to rest. She
> could not afford to bury his remains, so she had them cremated. The
> family had a small ceremony at the House of Winston Mortuary.
> 
> Two pictures of Robert greeted well-wishers. One showed him sitting at a
> bus stop, a large textbook on his lap as the boy stared away. It was the
> photograph that was circulated 28 years ago after he was reported
> missing. 
> 
> The other was the forensic drawing done for the coroner - the only
> close-up rendering they had for the ceremony.
> 
> Clelia Thompson calls the funeral of her boy "the day of the closure."
> 
> "You have to deal with what you have to deal with, ain't no other way,"
> she said. "And I just try to put it behind me. I did put it behind me,
> for a little while."

----------
Know the man, not the myth [be free at last]!
http://www.martinlutherking.org/
Technical Details
Message-ID: <Xns980A54BB31B58MLKreprobate@216.196.97.136>
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local02.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail
References: <oXSvg.2472$bP5.2242@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>

Show Full Headers
Complete Article Headers
X-Google-Thread: 101049,1079f291d200449b,start
X-Google-Thread: 1078ec,e4584e90a800226a
X-Google-Thread: 10a942,1079f291d200449b,start
X-Google-Thread: 10675b,1079f291d200449b,start
X-Google-Thread: 10e835,1079f291d200449b,start
X-Google-Attributes: gid101049,gid1078ec,gid10a942,gid10675b,gid10e835,public
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local02.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail
NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:19:43 -0500
Newsgroups: dc.general,soc.culture.african.american,alt.california,nyc.general,chi.general
Subject: Re: Yard ape stuck in chimney for 28 years
From: Martin.Looter.Kingfish@Commie.Whoremonger.Plagiarists.edu
References: <oXSvg.2472$bP5.2242@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>
Organization: Michael (MLK) King was promoted by Pinko Jew$ and KGB funding!
Message-ID: <Xns980A54BB31B58MLKreprobate@216.196.97.136>
User-Agent: Xnews/5.03.24
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:19:43 -0500
Lines: 338
NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.1.109.94
X-Trace: sv3-MEeY4Z4tK1loAnAdI6FjStU/tDn/cDlWRdzAPbpKbwst24sVByIOujQSEDpFd5dycD12+LnyCLtpF1v!OlnBs72/rf5RI36qJmXpc0EAinjXm8t5grZRHBIvBywRgSTxrwcDtK90kkQstD6iIzptc+weV1fw!5WI3Gw==
X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net
X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
X-Postfilter: 1.3.32