Connecticut
Previous sexual assault convict sentenced to 50 years for visiting nurse’s murder
A man previously convicted of sexual assault who killed a Connecticut visiting nurse at a halfway house pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced Friday to 50 years in prison in a case that reignited calls for better protections for home health care workers across the country.
Michael Reese, 40, admitted that he killed Joyce Grayson on Oct. 28, 2023, at the home in Willimantic where he was living under electronic monitoring while on probation for stabbing and sexually assaulting another woman in 2006. The prison sentence, which mandates no early release or parole, was part of a plea deal.
Grayson, a 63-year-old mother of six and a nurse for 36 years, had gone to the house to administer medication to Reese, who was on probation after having served more than 14 years in prison for the 2006 attack.
Reese, who wore a tan prison suit and a black face mask, did not speak during the hearing at Danielson Superior Court. His lawyers spoke on his behalf, saying he apologizes to Grayson’s family and is ashamed of what he did.
Grayson’s relatives gave victim impact statements in court, saying the loss of such a beloved family member was devastating and her community lost a person dedicated to helping others.
A lawyer for Grayson’s family, Kelly Reardon, said in a statement that no matter how long Reese’s prison sentence is, they wouldn’t be able to truly heal.
Police responded to the halfway house when Grayson’s daughter reported that her mother had missed several appointments later that morning and she could not reach her. She said a phone location app showed her mother was at Reese’s address, according to an arrest warrant.
Officers arrested Reese as he exited the rear of the house. Inside, they found Grayson dead in the basement and naked from the waist down except for her socks. The medical examiner’s office said she died of compression of the neck and had blunt force injuries. Authorities said there was no DNA evidence of her being sexually assaulted.
In phone calls Reese made in prison that were recorded, he appeared to refer to the murder when he said “it was a robbery gone wrong” and blamed his drug use, according to the arrest warrant.
Reese was charged with murder, felony murder and attempted first-degree sexual assault in April 2024. He had been detained since the day of the killing on drug paraphernalia and larceny charges, with police saying he had a crack cocaine pipe and some of Grayson’s belongings on him when he was arrested.
Her death spurred Connecticut legislators last year to approve a new law aimed at improving safety for home health care workers, including providing grants to employers to fund emergency alert buttons, buddy escort systems, tracking devices and safety training.
It also drew comments and social media posts from industry and worker groups across the country, expressing shock and sadness and calling for greater protections for health care workers from increasing violence.
In a national survey of nearly 1,000 nurses released last year by the National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., more than 80% responded that they had experienced at least one type of workplace violence in 2023. Nearly half of them reported an increase in workplace violence over the previous year.
Grayson’s husband, Ronald Grayson, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against her employer, Elara Caring, its affiliated companies and others. The lawsuit alleges Elara Caring repeatedly ignored workers’ safety concerns about treating dangerous patients, which the company denies. The lawsuit is pending.
In May of last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a proposed $161,000 fine against Elara Caring, saying the company “exposed home healthcare employees to workplace violence from patients who exhibited aggressive behavior and were known to pose a risk to others.”
Dallas-based Elara Caring, which provides home care for more than 60,000 patients in 18 states, said it disputed OSHA’s findings. An Elara spokesperson said the company entered remediation with OSHA and reached a resolution but did not provide details.
An OSHA spokesperson said details of what happened with the fine were not available. Online records indicated that the case is still open.
Elara issued a statement about Reese’s sentencing, saying, “We continue to grieve Joyce’s loss and are grateful the justice system has delivered accountability through this conviction and sentencing.”
Grayson’s family is also seeking permission to sue the state Judicial Branch, which oversees probation, and the Department of Correction for $25 million in connection with their oversight of Reese.
New York
Prosecutors may appeal to US Supreme Court on 1979 missing child Etan Patz case
NEW YORK (AP) — Prosecutors said Friday they might appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to restore a murder conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, a bewildering case that went without an arrest for decades.
A federal appeals court recently overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, the former convenience store clerk who became a suspect over 30 years after the New York City first-grader vanished. The appeals court ordered him freed unless he is retried “within a reasonable period.”
Prosecutors asked the appeals court Friday to hold off sending the case back to a lower-level federal judge to set a retrial date.
“The abduction and murder of Etan Patz is one of the most infamous crimes in recent American history,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office wrote. “This court’s decision unsettles a nearly decade-old conviction that previously was upheld.”
Saying the situation presents “substantial legal questions,” prosecutors wrote that they were determining whether to file a petition to the Supreme Court this fall.
Hernandez’s lawyers said they would oppose prosecutors’ request to put the case on hold while they contemplate an appeal.
“We don’t believe there is any basis to ask the Supreme Court to revisit –- let alone reverse” the appellate court ruling, said one of Hernandez’s attorneys, Edward Diskant.
Hernandez already has been tried twice — his 2017 conviction came after a prior jury couldn’t reach a verdict.
Now 64, he has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Etan disappeared while walking little more than a block to his school bus stop. He became one of the first missing children pictured on milk cartons, and his anguished parents helped reshape how American law enforcement agencies responded to missing-child cases. Other parents, meanwhile, became more protective of children over the years after Etan’s case and others.
No trace of Etan was ever found. After many years, his parents eventually had him declared legally dead.
Investigators scoured the city, and even overseas, for leads. But no arrests were made until 2012, when police got a tip that Hernandez — who worked in Etan’s neighborhood when the boy was last seen — had made remarks in the ensuing years about having harmed or killed a child in New York.
Hernandez then told police that he had offered Etan a soda to lure him into the basement of the shop where Hernandez worked. The suspect said he then choked the boy and put him, still alive, in a box and left it with curbside trash.
Hernandez’s lawyers say he confessed falsely because of a mental illness that sometimes made him hallucinate. The attorneys emphasized that the admission came after police questioned him for seven hours without reading him his rights or recording the interview. Hernandez then repeated his confession on tape, at least twice.
The trials happened in a New York state court, but the Hernandez appeal eventually wound up in federal court.
“The high cost of federally invalidating a state-court conviction is especially pronounced in this case,” prosecutors wrote.
At issue was the state trial judge’s response to jurors’ questions about whether they had to disregard the recorded confessions if they found the first, unrecorded one was invalid.
The judge said no. The appeals court said the jury should have gotten a more thorough explanation of its options, which could have included disregarding all of the confessions.
Prosecutors argue that the confessions were freely given, and that the appeals court inappropriately applied a federal legal rule when assessing the state court’s handling of the jury note.
Hawaii
Commercial fishing in Pacific nature area is halted after a judge blocks a Trump order
HONOLULU (AP) — Commercial fishing that recently resumed in a vast protected area of the Pacific Ocean must halt once again, after a judge in Hawaii sided this week with environmentalists challenging a Trump administration rollback of federal ocean protections.
The remote Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument is home to turtles, marine mammals and seabirds, which environmental groups say will get snagged by longline fishing, an industrial method involving baited hooks from lines 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) or longer.
President Donald Trump’s executive order to allow this and other types of commercial fishing in part of the monument changed regulations without providing a process for public comment and rulemaking and stripped core protections from the monument, the groups argued in a lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Micah W. J. Smith granted a motion by the environmentalists on Friday. The ruling means boats catching fish for sale will need to immediately cease fishing in waters between 50 and 200 nautical miles (93 kilometers to 370 kilometers) around Johnston Atoll, Jarvis Island and Wake Island, said Earthjustice, an environmental law organization representing the plaintiffs.
U.S. Justice Department attorneys representing the government did not immediately return an email message seeking comment on Saturday.
Trump has said the U.S. should be “the world’s dominant seafood leader,” and on the same day of his April executive order, he issued another one seeking to boost commercial fishing by peeling back regulations and opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.
President George W. Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It consists of about 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) in the remote central Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014.
Soon after Trump’s executive order, the National Marine Fisheries Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them the green light to fish commercially in the monument’s boundaries, Earthjustice’s lawsuit says. Fishing resumed within days, the group said.
Government attorneys say the fisheries service’s letter merely notified commercial fishers of a change that had already taken place through Trump’s authority to remove the prohibition on commercial fishing in certain areas.
Earthjustice challenged that letter, and by granting the motion in their favor, the federal judge found the government had chosen not to defend its letter on the merits and forfeited that argument. Smith also ruled against the government’s other defenses, that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the letter and that the court lacked jurisdiction over the matter.
David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said Smith’s ruling requires the government to go through a process to determine what kind of fishing, and under what conditions, can happen in monument waters in a way that wouldn’t destroy the area.
Members of Hawaii’s longline fishing industry say they have made numerous gear adjustments and changes over the years, such as circle hooks, to avoid that.
The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion would also harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.
Previous sexual assault convict sentenced to 50 years for visiting nurse’s murder
A man previously convicted of sexual assault who killed a Connecticut visiting nurse at a halfway house pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced Friday to 50 years in prison in a case that reignited calls for better protections for home health care workers across the country.
Michael Reese, 40, admitted that he killed Joyce Grayson on Oct. 28, 2023, at the home in Willimantic where he was living under electronic monitoring while on probation for stabbing and sexually assaulting another woman in 2006. The prison sentence, which mandates no early release or parole, was part of a plea deal.
Grayson, a 63-year-old mother of six and a nurse for 36 years, had gone to the house to administer medication to Reese, who was on probation after having served more than 14 years in prison for the 2006 attack.
Reese, who wore a tan prison suit and a black face mask, did not speak during the hearing at Danielson Superior Court. His lawyers spoke on his behalf, saying he apologizes to Grayson’s family and is ashamed of what he did.
Grayson’s relatives gave victim impact statements in court, saying the loss of such a beloved family member was devastating and her community lost a person dedicated to helping others.
A lawyer for Grayson’s family, Kelly Reardon, said in a statement that no matter how long Reese’s prison sentence is, they wouldn’t be able to truly heal.
Police responded to the halfway house when Grayson’s daughter reported that her mother had missed several appointments later that morning and she could not reach her. She said a phone location app showed her mother was at Reese’s address, according to an arrest warrant.
Officers arrested Reese as he exited the rear of the house. Inside, they found Grayson dead in the basement and naked from the waist down except for her socks. The medical examiner’s office said she died of compression of the neck and had blunt force injuries. Authorities said there was no DNA evidence of her being sexually assaulted.
In phone calls Reese made in prison that were recorded, he appeared to refer to the murder when he said “it was a robbery gone wrong” and blamed his drug use, according to the arrest warrant.
Reese was charged with murder, felony murder and attempted first-degree sexual assault in April 2024. He had been detained since the day of the killing on drug paraphernalia and larceny charges, with police saying he had a crack cocaine pipe and some of Grayson’s belongings on him when he was arrested.
Her death spurred Connecticut legislators last year to approve a new law aimed at improving safety for home health care workers, including providing grants to employers to fund emergency alert buttons, buddy escort systems, tracking devices and safety training.
It also drew comments and social media posts from industry and worker groups across the country, expressing shock and sadness and calling for greater protections for health care workers from increasing violence.
In a national survey of nearly 1,000 nurses released last year by the National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., more than 80% responded that they had experienced at least one type of workplace violence in 2023. Nearly half of them reported an increase in workplace violence over the previous year.
Grayson’s husband, Ronald Grayson, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against her employer, Elara Caring, its affiliated companies and others. The lawsuit alleges Elara Caring repeatedly ignored workers’ safety concerns about treating dangerous patients, which the company denies. The lawsuit is pending.
In May of last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a proposed $161,000 fine against Elara Caring, saying the company “exposed home healthcare employees to workplace violence from patients who exhibited aggressive behavior and were known to pose a risk to others.”
Dallas-based Elara Caring, which provides home care for more than 60,000 patients in 18 states, said it disputed OSHA’s findings. An Elara spokesperson said the company entered remediation with OSHA and reached a resolution but did not provide details.
An OSHA spokesperson said details of what happened with the fine were not available. Online records indicated that the case is still open.
Elara issued a statement about Reese’s sentencing, saying, “We continue to grieve Joyce’s loss and are grateful the justice system has delivered accountability through this conviction and sentencing.”
Grayson’s family is also seeking permission to sue the state Judicial Branch, which oversees probation, and the Department of Correction for $25 million in connection with their oversight of Reese.
New York
Prosecutors may appeal to US Supreme Court on 1979 missing child Etan Patz case
NEW YORK (AP) — Prosecutors said Friday they might appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to restore a murder conviction in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, a bewildering case that went without an arrest for decades.
A federal appeals court recently overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, the former convenience store clerk who became a suspect over 30 years after the New York City first-grader vanished. The appeals court ordered him freed unless he is retried “within a reasonable period.”
Prosecutors asked the appeals court Friday to hold off sending the case back to a lower-level federal judge to set a retrial date.
“The abduction and murder of Etan Patz is one of the most infamous crimes in recent American history,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office wrote. “This court’s decision unsettles a nearly decade-old conviction that previously was upheld.”
Saying the situation presents “substantial legal questions,” prosecutors wrote that they were determining whether to file a petition to the Supreme Court this fall.
Hernandez’s lawyers said they would oppose prosecutors’ request to put the case on hold while they contemplate an appeal.
“We don’t believe there is any basis to ask the Supreme Court to revisit –- let alone reverse” the appellate court ruling, said one of Hernandez’s attorneys, Edward Diskant.
Hernandez already has been tried twice — his 2017 conviction came after a prior jury couldn’t reach a verdict.
Now 64, he has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Etan disappeared while walking little more than a block to his school bus stop. He became one of the first missing children pictured on milk cartons, and his anguished parents helped reshape how American law enforcement agencies responded to missing-child cases. Other parents, meanwhile, became more protective of children over the years after Etan’s case and others.
No trace of Etan was ever found. After many years, his parents eventually had him declared legally dead.
Investigators scoured the city, and even overseas, for leads. But no arrests were made until 2012, when police got a tip that Hernandez — who worked in Etan’s neighborhood when the boy was last seen — had made remarks in the ensuing years about having harmed or killed a child in New York.
Hernandez then told police that he had offered Etan a soda to lure him into the basement of the shop where Hernandez worked. The suspect said he then choked the boy and put him, still alive, in a box and left it with curbside trash.
Hernandez’s lawyers say he confessed falsely because of a mental illness that sometimes made him hallucinate. The attorneys emphasized that the admission came after police questioned him for seven hours without reading him his rights or recording the interview. Hernandez then repeated his confession on tape, at least twice.
The trials happened in a New York state court, but the Hernandez appeal eventually wound up in federal court.
“The high cost of federally invalidating a state-court conviction is especially pronounced in this case,” prosecutors wrote.
At issue was the state trial judge’s response to jurors’ questions about whether they had to disregard the recorded confessions if they found the first, unrecorded one was invalid.
The judge said no. The appeals court said the jury should have gotten a more thorough explanation of its options, which could have included disregarding all of the confessions.
Prosecutors argue that the confessions were freely given, and that the appeals court inappropriately applied a federal legal rule when assessing the state court’s handling of the jury note.
Hawaii
Commercial fishing in Pacific nature area is halted after a judge blocks a Trump order
HONOLULU (AP) — Commercial fishing that recently resumed in a vast protected area of the Pacific Ocean must halt once again, after a judge in Hawaii sided this week with environmentalists challenging a Trump administration rollback of federal ocean protections.
The remote Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument is home to turtles, marine mammals and seabirds, which environmental groups say will get snagged by longline fishing, an industrial method involving baited hooks from lines 60 miles (about 100 kilometers) or longer.
President Donald Trump’s executive order to allow this and other types of commercial fishing in part of the monument changed regulations without providing a process for public comment and rulemaking and stripped core protections from the monument, the groups argued in a lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Micah W. J. Smith granted a motion by the environmentalists on Friday. The ruling means boats catching fish for sale will need to immediately cease fishing in waters between 50 and 200 nautical miles (93 kilometers to 370 kilometers) around Johnston Atoll, Jarvis Island and Wake Island, said Earthjustice, an environmental law organization representing the plaintiffs.
U.S. Justice Department attorneys representing the government did not immediately return an email message seeking comment on Saturday.
Trump has said the U.S. should be “the world’s dominant seafood leader,” and on the same day of his April executive order, he issued another one seeking to boost commercial fishing by peeling back regulations and opening up harvesting in previously protected areas.
President George W. Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It consists of about 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) in the remote central Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii. President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014.
Soon after Trump’s executive order, the National Marine Fisheries Service sent a letter to fishing permit holders giving them the green light to fish commercially in the monument’s boundaries, Earthjustice’s lawsuit says. Fishing resumed within days, the group said.
Government attorneys say the fisheries service’s letter merely notified commercial fishers of a change that had already taken place through Trump’s authority to remove the prohibition on commercial fishing in certain areas.
Earthjustice challenged that letter, and by granting the motion in their favor, the federal judge found the government had chosen not to defend its letter on the merits and forfeited that argument. Smith also ruled against the government’s other defenses, that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the letter and that the court lacked jurisdiction over the matter.
David Henkin, an Earthjustice attorney, said Smith’s ruling requires the government to go through a process to determine what kind of fishing, and under what conditions, can happen in monument waters in a way that wouldn’t destroy the area.
Members of Hawaii’s longline fishing industry say they have made numerous gear adjustments and changes over the years, such as circle hooks, to avoid that.
The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion would also harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.
