Indiana
Woman pleads guilty in house crash that killed 2
HARTFORD CITY, Ind. (AP) — A woman has pleaded guilty to causing a June crash in which her car plowed into a northeastern Indiana home, killing a 74-year-old man and his great-grandson who were sitting on its front porch.
Brandi S. Bare, 46, pleaded guilty to two counts each of causing death when driving while intoxicated, reckless homicide and causing serious bodily injury when driving while intoxicated.
The Montpelier woman also pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count, resisting law enforcement and to being a habitual vehicular substance offender, The Star Press reported.
Prosecutors said Bare was intoxicated on June 2 when her car crashed into a home in Montpelier, a city about 60 miles (96.6 kilometers) northeast of Indianapolis.
The home’s owner, 73-year-old Jerry A. “Jake” Michael, and his 5-year-old great-grandson, Jenson Reynolds, were killed as they were sitting on the home’s front porch with other relatives. The boy’s younger sister and the siblings’ father were injured.
Bare, who pleaded guilty Friday, was scheduled to stand trial this week in Blackford Superior Court.
A judge set her sentencing for Nov. 4. The most serious charges Bare pleaded guilty to — two counts of causing death when driving while intoxicated — both carry maximum 12-year prison terms.
Nevada
Mom gets probation in jail scuffle, driving into schoolgirls
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A mother who was sentenced Monday to probation and mental health treatment for intentionally striking two schoolgirls with her SUV near a Las Vegas-area high school pleaded guilty Tuesday to misdemeanor battery for scuffling with a jail guard while in custody.
Fatima Maria Mitchell, 36, remains jailed pending sentencing Sept. 19 for the August incident at the Clark County Detention Center. Her sentence is expected to be folded in with three years on probation and treatment at a residential behavioral health center in the crash case, said Connor Saphire, her deputy public defender.
Mitchell pleaded guilty in June to felony reckless driving after initially being charged with attempted murder in the March 28 crash near Basic High School in Henderson.
Police said her Chevrolet Tahoe struck a tree, a concrete sign and the two girls, who were treated at a hospital for broken bones.
Mitchell’s defense attorney in the crash case, Roger Bailey, said she looks forward to treatment to “put this incident behind her and move forward with her life.”
Police and prosecutors alleged that Mitchell deliberately drove toward the girls after they fought with her daughter at the 2,400-student campus, where brawls that day resulted in citations for four other students and a separate arrest of a parent.
The incident was among several that raised concerns about campus safety at the nation’s fifth-largest school district.
Pennsylvania
Death penalty trial opens in 2017 fire that killed 3
PITTSBURGH (AP) — A death penalty trial has begun for a man accused of having set a house fire that killed a young child and two women in Pittsburgh 4 1/2 years ago.
Martell Smith, 45, faces three counts of homicide as well as aggravated arson and other charges in the early morning December 2017 blaze in the Homewood neighborhood, which Allegheny County prosecutors say he set after getting into a bar fight with another man.
Police say surveillance images show him buying a gas can and filling it at a gas station, and they say he then drove to the home, doused the three-story brick structure with the gasoline, lit it and drove away. Killed were 21-year-old Shamira Staten, her 4-year-old daughter, Ch’yenne Manning, and 58-year-old Sandra Carter Douglas.
Defense attorney Randall McKinney told jurors Monday the fight was brief and his client had no motive, but police did not look for another suspect, the Tribune-Review reported. He said gasoline was found on his client’s clothing because he filled a gas can at a gas station to take back to his own car, which was low on fuel.
Deputy District Attorney Brian Catanzarite, however, said the fight left Smith with a bloodied face, torn shirt and broken necklace. After the fire, he said, witnesses reported seeing the defendant pacing up and down the street, bragging about what he had done.
Prosecutors said capital punishment would be warranted if Smith is convicted of first-degree murder, citing the fact that the slayings occurred during commission of another felony, that the victims included a child and because of the defendant’s criminal record.
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium against carrying out any death sentences shortly after taking office in 2015. Three people have been executed since the state reinstituted capital punishment four decades ago, the most recent in 1999, but all three had voluntarily given up on appealing their sentences.
Alabama
Teen on trial in slaying of dad, stepmom, 3 siblings
ATHENS, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama youth accused of killing his father, stepmother and three young siblings when he was 14 went on trial Tuesday on capital murder charges.
Prosecutors accuse Mason Sisk of shooting his family to death in their north Alabama home in 2019, saying he told investigators he killed them because he was “fed up” with them. In their opening statements, prosecutors said Sisk told a teacher he wouldn’t be in school the following week and then took a handgun from the home of a family friend to shoot his family, news outlets reported.
The defense, which lost a challenge to prevent jurors from hearing about Sisk’s statements to police, argued that the boy didn’t have a plan to kill or any firearms experience.
Sisk, now 17, was charged as an adult with multiple counts of capital murder, but he can’t be sentenced to death if convicted because of his age at the time of the slayings.
John Wayne Sisk, 38, and Mary Sisk, 35, were found dead in their home in Elkmont on Sept. 2, 2019, along with their three children — 6-year-old Kane, 4-year-old Aurora and 6-month-old Colson. All had been killed with gunshots to the head, authorities said.
Authorities said Mason Sisk initially told police he was in the basement playing video games when he heard gunshots and ran outside to see a vehicle pulling away, but he later told investigators he’d killed the five.
A recording played during a pretrial hearing showed the youth told investigators about a possible motive for the killings.
“Yeah, they argue a lot, and I got fed up with it,” Sisk said in the recording. “And the kids were going through a lot.”
The defense has claimed Sisk only repeated to detectives what they had told him.
Prosecutors argued that Sisk had anger control issues and had threatened the entire family. In court documents filed earlier this year, prosecutors alleged Sisk previously put peanut butter in his stepmother’s coffee in an attempt to poison the woman, who had severe peanut allergies.
Iowa
Teen who killed rapist sentenced, ordered to pay $150K
A teenage human trafficking victim who was initially charged with first-degree murder after she stabbed her accused rapist to death was sentenced Tuesday in an Iowa court to five years of closely supervised probation and ordered to pay $150,000 restitution to the man’s family.
Pieper Lewis, 17, was sentenced Tuesday after she pleaded last year to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury in the June 2020 killing of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks of Des Moines. Both charges were punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Polk County District judge David M. Porter on Tuesday deferred those prison sentences, meaning that if Lewis violates any portion of her probation, she could be sent to prison to serve that 20-year term.
As for being required to pay the estate of her rapist, “this court is presented with no other option,” Porter said, noting the restitution is mandatory under Iowa law that has been upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court.
Lewis was 15 when she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment. Officials have said Lewis was a runaway who was seeking to escape an abusive life with her adopted mother and was sleeping in the hallways of a Des Moines apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in before forcibly trafficking her to other men for sex.
Lewis said one of those men was Brooks and that he had raped her multiple times in the weeks before his death. She recounted being forced at knifepoint by the 28-year-old man to go with Brooks to his apartment for sex. She told officials that after Brooks had raped her yet again, she grabbed a knife from a bedside table and stabbed Brooks in a fit of rage.
Police and prosecutors have not disputed that Lewis was sexually assaulted and trafficked. But prosecutors have argued that Brooks was asleep at the time he was stabbed and not an immediate danger to Lewis.
Iowa is not among the dozens of states that have a so-called safe harbor law that gives trafficking victims at least some level of criminal immunity.
Lewis, who earned her GED while being held in juvenile detention, acknowledged in a statement prior to her sentencing that she struggled with the structure of her detention, including “why I was treated like fragile glass” or wasn’t allowed to communicate with her friends or family.
“My spirit has been burned, but still glows through the flames,” she read from a statement she had prepared. “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”
“I am a survivor,” she added.
The Associated Press does not typically name victims of sexual assault, but Lewis agreed to have her name used previously in stories about her case.
Prosecutors took issue with Lewis calling herself a victim in the case and said she failed to take responsibility for stabbing Brooks and “leaving his kids without a father.”
The judge peppered Lewis with repeated requests to explain what poor choices she made that led up to Brooks’ stabbing and expressed concern that she sometimes did not want to follow rules set for her in juvenile lockup.
“The next five years of your life will be full of rules you disagree with, I’m sure of it,” Porter said. He later added, “This is the second chance that you’ve asked for. You don’t get a third.”
Karl Schilling with the Iowa Organization for Victim Assistance said a bill to create a safe harbor law for trafficking victims passed the Iowa House earlier this year, but stalled in the Senate under concerns from law enforcement groups that it was too broad.
“There was a working group established to iron out the issues,” Shilling said. “Hopefully it will be taken up again next year.”
Iowa does have an affirmative defense law that gives some leeway to victims of crime if the victim committed the violation “under compulsion by another’s threat of serious injury, provided that the defendant reasonably believed that such injury was imminent.”
Prosecutors argued Tuesday that Lewis waived that affirmative defense when she pleaded guilty to manslaughter and willful injury.
