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The Las Vegas shooting that killed rapper Kenny Clutch as he drove his Maserati also killed a grandfather who loved telling stories about the people he picked up in his cab.
The sister of taxi driver Michael Boldon said today that her brother had been driving a passenger in his taxi when the shooting happened early Thursday morning on glitzy Las Vegas Boulevard.
The rapper's expensive sports car careened out of control after he was shot, slamming into several cars, including Boldon's taxi. The impact caused the cab to burst into flames, killing Boldon and a female passenger. Witnesses said it looked like the car exploded.
"He was a number one guy," Carolyn Jean Trimble, Boldon's sister, told ABC News.
"I looked out my window and I could see one vehicle down here on the corner of the intersection totally engulfed in flames," witness John Lamb told ABC News.
Boldon, 62, and his passenger, who has not yet been identified, were both killed, as was the rapper Kenny Clutch, 27, whose real name was Kenneth Cherry Jr.
Timble said her brother loved driving his taxi around Vegas.
"He came to live with me in Las Vegas last year to help take care of our mother, and the first day he got here he said, 'I have to get a job.' The second day, I came home from work, and he said he got a job," she recalled.
"He says, 'You'll never guess what it is,' and I said, 'what,' and he said, 'taxi cab driver,' and we both fell out laughing," Trimble said. "He loved that job. He never complained. He'd come home and tell me stories about what happened, who he picked up."
Boldon was a single father who raised a 36-year-old son and was a new grandfather. His grandson was named after him, Trimble said.
"Of all the people to take from this earth," she said. "But I guess the Lord needed him."
According to cops, a group of men in a black Range Rover fired on the Maserati as they drove down the boulevard following an argument near the valet area of Aria Hotel and Casino. The shooting occurred at 4:20 a.m.
"Clearly, the suspects in this shooting have no regard for the lives and safety of others," Las Vegas Metropolitan Sheriff Doug Gillespie said at a news conference Thursday.
Gillespie said authorities do not know how many people were in the SUV, but that they are considered armed and dangerous.
A passenger in the Maserati was hit and sustained only a minor injury to his arm. Clutch died at University Medical Center.
Authorities in Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California are all on alert for the black Range Rover.
Clutch's father, Kenneth Cherry Sr., expressed his grief for the loss of his son while speaking with ABC News.
"This is something you never really, really ever want to experience as a parent, to lose a child before you go," he said.
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STILLWATER, Okla. — A student apparently committed suicide before classes started Wednesday at an Oklahoma junior high school, police said.
Police Capt. Randy Dickerson said a school resource officer heard a gunshot shortly before 8 a.m. The student was found dead in a hallway, he said.
"It doesn't appear that anyone else was in danger or threatened," Dickerson said.
The junior high school and a nearby elementary school were locked down and classes canceled for the day, authorities said. The name of the student was not released, pending notification of next of kin.
Kenny Monday told The Associated Press that he'd just dropped off his son, Kennedy, when he heard about the incident. Monday said his son heard the gunshot but did not witness the shooting.
"It's so sad that the kid lost his life, but we're just glad he didn't shoot anyone else," Monday said.
Stillwater Junior High sent a statement to parents saying there had been a "single shooting incident" at the school and that staff and students — eighth and ninth graders — had been moved to a safe location. Parents were told to pick up their children at a nearby shopping center.
"Everyone thought it was a joke at first," ninth-grader Ashlyn Lundholm told the Stillwater NewsPress. "Then I heard people screaming. Then we went to lockdown for 35 to 40 minutes."
Dickerson told the NewsPress that "the hallway was probably full of kids that time of day."
Superintendent Ann Caine said counselors would be available for students.
"It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of a tragic incident at our (school) this morning," Caine said in a letter to parents. "At 7:50 a.m. one of our students died as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. All other students and staff are safe."
Stillwater is located about 70 miles west of Tulsa.
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MADRID (AP) — Officials say 60 people have been injured and 11 arrested when music fans rioted outside a Madrid theater after it closed its doors to avoid exceeding its capacity limits.
City police said thousands of people had turned up at the venue in the hope of attending a free music event hosted by music television channel MTV on Friday night.
Police said that once the theatre was full, scuffles broke out in the street outside and people began throwing bottles. More officers were deployed, including some on horseback, after garbage containers in the neighborhood were set alight.
An emergency service said that no one was badly injured.
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OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Police say a Nevada man who lost his iPad on an airplane used an app called Find My iPad to locate it inside the Oregon home of a flight attendant.
Officers in Oregon City, outside Portland, arrested 43-year-old Wendy Ronelle Dye Friday evening.
The flight attendant for Horizon Air allegedly told officers that a passenger brought her the tablet saying it was found on a seat. She said she never used the iPad and planned to turn it over to airline officials, but police found some of her personal information on it including her husband's birthday.
Arrangements are being made to return the tablet to its owner in Reno. Dye did not immediately respond to a phone message.
A spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, says Dye was suspended.
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ROCK HILL, S.C. — A Rock Hill woman who heard weird noises in her attic discovered an old boyfriend living in there. And he had just been released from jail.
The woman who asked not to be identified said she heard strange noises when she and her five children returned home Saturday. She says the noises increased early Sunday morning and she asked a nephew to check the attic.
He found a man sleeping in a heating unit.
The woman says she had broken off a relationship with the man years ago, though he had done some work on her home about a year ago.
The nephew says the man was able to look through air vents into the woman’s bedroom.
She says the man climbed out of the attic and walked away before police arrived.
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A woman has been arrested after she allegedly shot her husband while the couple argued about the family cat at a home in northwest Harris County Tuesday morning, officials said.
The shooting happened about 7:20 a.m. at the home in the 6700 block of Seaton Valley near Greenfield, said Assistant Chief Deputy Mark Herman of the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office.
Herman said the couple was arguing about their cat when the man picked up the feline and allegedly threatened to hurt it.
The woman grabbed a pistol and allegedly shot her husband in the abdomen, Herman said.
The man, whose name has not been released, was rushed to Northwest hospital, where he was undergoing surgery and was in stable condition.
Herman said the man's wife, whose name has not been released, was taken into custody and charged with aggravated assault.
The cat was not hurt
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A Kentucky woman received jail time after posting a Facebook comment mocking a DUI charge, Patrick Jones reports.
Paula Asher was allegedly drinking and driving when she side-swiped another vehicle and was arrested. She later posted the following comment on Facebook: “My dumb (expletive) got a DUI and hit a car LOL.”
A judge ordered her to take down her Facebook page, and when Asher did not comply, she was held in contempt of court and ordered to spend two days in jail
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GALVESTON — A boy, 5, playing at a recreation center Saturday was pushed to the ground and robbed of a cellphone. Police said an adult was arrested after officers convinced him to return to the scene.
Jerrome Riches Dominick, 22 was charged with robbery, stemming from a Saturday night incident at Wright Cuney Park and Recreation Center, 718 41st St., in Galveston, police Lt. Michael Gray said Monday. Dominick remained jailed Monday on a $25,000 bond.
The boy, who was with his mother, was standing in the playground near the swings when witnesses saw a man approach him shortly after 8 p.m., Gray said.
“The man pushed down the juvenile, stood over him, took his cellphone and fled into Sandpiper Cove apartments,” Gray said.
“One witness gave chase, but he was unable to catch him before he went into one of the apartments.”
Investigating officers reached Dominick by phone, but not the boy’s phone. Dominick came to the park with his mother and girlfriend, Gray said. One of the witnesses knew him by name, Gray said.
The boy didn’t require medical treatment, Gray said.
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LAS COLINAS, El Salvador (AP) — The schoolboys went missing on a Thursday, and it took nearly three weeks for police to discover the mass grave.
On July 11, a police investigator, wearing a ski mask to hide his identity, dug up the dead, the youngest 15. One of the mothers stood weeping as the corpses were pulled out, along with curious traces of food and silverware.
Gen. David Munguia Payes, El Salvador's minister of justice and security, said the killings were the work of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, one of two notorious Salvadoran gangs that regularly visited schoolyards to recruit kids — often by force. The police investigator pointed at the buried remnants of a meal. The MS-13 recruiter, he said, had probably tried to persuade the youths to join the group using the usual method: a big meal with cake and soft drinks.
When they resisted, he said, they were stabbed to death.
Six months after El Salvador brokered an historic truce between two rival gangs to curb the nation's daunting homicide rate, officials are split over whether the truce actually works. In March, MS-13 and its rival, Barrio 18, vowed to end the killings and the forced recruitments in exchange for better conditions for incarcerated gang leaders, who run their operations from behind bars. The government transferred 30 bosses of each gang from the maximum security Zacatecoluca prison, nicknamed "Zacatraz," to ordinary jails, where they would impart orders to their minions on the street, purportedly to stick with the truce.
The gangs, which also operate in Guatemala and Honduras, are seeking truce talks in those countries as well.
But Carlos Ponce, an expert on crime for the Salvadoran Attorney General's Office, says the truce is a sham.
"It's all a lie, the gangs continue to operate, people continue getting killed, people keep disappearing and the gangs get stronger and stronger," he said.
The Security and Justice Ministry reports that murders in the first eight months of 2012 are already down more than 30 percent, to 1,894. For the most part, the national medical examiner's office confirms those numbers, but the two agencies disagree on how many people are disappearing. The security ministry says 335 disappeared in the first half of the year; the legal medicine institute says the number is 1,279.
"These figures are very strange," Ponce said. "They say the murders are going down, they deny the disappearances, but the case of these five students is evidence that everything is still going on. It is very likely that the gangs are adopting new ways to operate." Instead of leaving their victims in plain sight, he said, they are hiding them.
The justice ministry denies that claim, saying its figures are based on investigated disappearances, whereas the medical examiner's office is counting all reports of missing people, many of which are not verified.
"Overall we haven't had an increase. We cannot maintain strict control of the people who are registered as missing because families do not remove their reports when people reappear," Munguia Payes said.
An estimated 50,000 Salvadorans belong to the street gangs that have terrified citizens and left this small Central American nation of 6 million with one of the world's highest murder rates, behind neighboring Honduras. Though meant to stem that violence, the truce does not apply to kidnappings, extortion or drug sales, the core of the criminals' business.
"I think that the truce is a real farce," said Max Manwaring, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. "The gangs hold all the cards, and they've been operating out of the jails for years. The jails have become graduate schools for gang members, and the government is simply grasping at straws."
Like others tracking El Salvador's truce experiment, Manwaring doubts the homicide figures.
"There is no way to count them. No way. There are many places government officials simply cannot go to investigate murders because the gangs control the territory."
The truce was mediated by Raul Mijango, a guerrilla in El Salvador's 12-year civil war, then a lawmaker. Speaking to the AP, he said: "Some groups are trying to make the truce look bad, they are killing gang members to create conflicts between the gangs. Saying that the number of disappeared has increased is an argument by those who want to see the truce fail."
Salvadoran security officials have been powerless to contain the violence fueled by gangs, which formed in the jails of California and spread to Central America as their members were deported by the U.S.
In El Salvador, police say, about 10,000 members of Barrio 18 and MS-13 are in jail. The rest are on the streets, and maintain strict control over poor neighborhoods across the country, including inside the nearby town of Las Colinas, where the five boys were found.
In Mejicanos, just outside the capital of San Salvador, Graffiti announces that MS-13 is "the power." Whoever enters must abide by its laws. Rival gangs stay out and police only venture there with elite units and at night.
Once a person enters, gang members come out of their hideouts. Those they recognize are allowed through. Strangers are surrounded, searched, interrogated — then ordered to pay up to move on.
"In order to sell their products, storekeepers must pay a monthly fee. If they do it they survive, but they are always being watched," said Juan Escobar, a soft drink vendor. "If they want their soft drinks you hand them over, or else they get angry."
Neighbors say murders are fewer but fear still rules the streets.
"Yes, it's true that murders have gone down, but we wonder how long the truce will last," said Domitila Martinez, 53, a street vendor in Quezaltepeque, one of the areas with heavier gang activity, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) northeast of San Salvador.
"I can't talk too much, they might kill me, you don't know how they are. We the civilians who find ourselves trapped between the gangs, we have learned to survive."
Under the truce agreement, gang leaders imprisoned with their members can receive "intimate visits" in jail, have plasma TVs in the cells and communicate freely with the outside world.
Joel Nehemias Escalante Quevedo, aka La Rata ("The Rat"), is one of the leaders of Barrio 18 and was interviewed by the AP in the Quezaltepeque jail in San Salvador. He said the idea of the truce arose after 13 people were killed when gang members from MS-13 opened fire on a bus and then torched it.
The violence was getting out of hand, he said, "because our people were running around uncontrolled in the streets."
Reports about the truce in El Salvador led Barrio 18, which operates in both Guatemala and Honduras, to contact its peers in El Salvador with the intention of getting a similar deal.
"What they did in El Salvador is good and we are looking at it like a mirror," said a gang member inside a high-security prison in Tegucigalpa. He asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.
Critics of the truce say their interest is not surprising, because it allows the gangs to consolidate their power inside the prisons.
Shortly after agreeing to the truce, the gangs declared schools "peace zones" and vowed to stop recruiting there.
Oscar Luna, Attorney General for Human Rights, said student killings are down. Up until June 22, the National Civil Police reported 41 students murdered, compared to 74 over the same period in 2011.
"Violence still affects society on an alarming level, particularly children, adolescents and young adults," Luna said.
Salvadoran law forbids publishing the names of underage victims of violence, so the boys found in the mass grave were identified by first and middle name only: Kevin Alexis, 15; Jonathan Alexander, 16; Jose Roberto,16; Fernando Alexander, 18; and Jonathan B, 18.
The latter two were brothers and were last seen leaving the Union Centroamericana School in the afternoon in a crowded area of the Santa Tecla neighborhood, on the western outskirts of the capital, officials say.
The multiple stab wounds on their hands and arms suggest they tried to defend themselves, said Jose Miguel Fortin, director of the Institute of Legal Medicine.
The autopsy also determined that the victims had suffered blows to their necks, heads and bodies, the official said.
"I never thought my son would end up this way," wept a mother, as she sat next to the mass grave on a low hill. "I had big plans for my son, he was going to study and have a better life. I never had problems, he was a good kid."
She refused to give her name for fear of reprisals from the gang.
"I don't understand these people," she said. "They are savages
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There was a frightening scene just before halftime of Tulane's game at Tulsa, when Tulane safety Devon Walker stopped breathing after a hard hit and had to be revived with CPR.
Fox Sports reported Walker stopped breathing on the field. Walker left the stadium in an ambulance. KTUL-TV reported that Walker suffered a broken neck and a collapsed lung, and a tracheotomy was performed.
Walker has a cervical spine fracture, and he is immobilized. The New Orleans Times-Picayune said Walker will undergo surgery in the next couple days. On Saturday night, it also reported that Walker had some feeling in his arms and legs but Tulane team Dr. Greg Stewart said the long-term possibility of paralysis from the neck injury is not known yet.
"I think it's unknown," Stewart said. "We talked to the (team) tonight about it and the reality is you don't know for 24 to 48 hours. It doesn't matter how they present. You do that 24-48 hours before you really know what is going on. … That's what I told the guys is what we know is that we don't know and anyone who comes out and tells you that they do know — they don't know. The reality of where we are right now is saying our prayers and sitting and waiting."
Walker was attempting to tackle Tulsa H-back Willie Carter when he and teammate Julius Warmsley, a defensive tackle pursuing the play downfield, crashed into each other helmet-to-helmet. The Associated Press spoke to Walker's brother Raynard, who said their mother was watching the game on television when the injury happened.

The scary moment caused a hush over the stadium and national concern about Walker's health and well-being.
"He was conscious and he never completely lost consciousness. He was breathing, and I think the emergency response from Danny Taylor, our head trainer, was superb as he stabilized him. It went as well as it could go," Dr. Savoie said. "There are always concerns about stability, but he is stable right now and he was stable when we transported him. I do not think based on the information that I have that his life was ever in danger or at risk. I think the medical staff, both our Tulane trainers and Tulsa medical team did a fantastic job stabilizing this young man with a severe injury."
Thoughts and prayers go out to Walker, his family and