NEW YORK — Detectives solved the decades-old mystery of “Baby Hope,” a little girl whose body was discovered inside a picnic cooler beside a Manhattan highway in 1991, and arrested a cousin of the child Saturday after he admitted he sexually assaulted and smothered her, police said.
Police make arrest
in death of ‘Baby Hope,’ 22 years after discovery of child’s body in NYC
NEW YORK — Detectives solved the decades-old mystery of “Baby Hope,” a little girl whose body was discovered inside a picnic cooler beside a Manhattan highway in 1991, and arrested a cousin of the child Saturday after he admitted he sexually assaulted and smothered her, police said.
Conrado Juarez, 52, was arrested on a murder charge and was awaiting arraignment, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. He was 30 at the time of the girl’s death.
It wasn’t clear whether Juarez had a lawyer. Police said he lived in the Bronx, but that the family had been living in Queens at the time of the killing. They also said Juarez claimed that a relative helped him dispose of the girl’s body.
Anjelica Castillo’s naked, malnourished corpse was discovered on July 23, 1991, beside the Henry Hudson Parkway. Detectives thought she might have been suffocated but had few other clues as to what happened.
The case became an obsession for some investigators. Hundreds of people attended a funeral for the unknown girl in 1993. Her body was exhumed for DNA testing in 2007, and then again in 2011.
Disclosures
of government surveillance prompt widespread backlash
SAN JOSE, Calif. — From Silicon Valley to the South Pacific, counterattacks to revelations of widespread National Security Agency surveillance are taking shape, from a surge of new encrypted email programs to technology that sprinkles the Internet with red flag terms to confuse would-be snoops.
Policymakers, privacy advocates and political leaders around the world have been outraged at the near weekly disclosures from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that expose sweeping U.S. government surveillance programs.
“Until this summer, people didn’t know anything about the NSA,” said Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University co-director Amy Zegart. “Their own secrecy has come back to bite them.”
Activists are fighting back with high-tech civil disobedience, entrepreneurs want to cash in on privacy concerns, Internet users want to keep snoops out of their computers and lawmakers want to establish stricter parameters.
Some of the tactics are more effective than others. For example, Flagger, a program that adds words like “blow up” and “pressure cooker” to web addresses that users visit, is probably more of a political statement than actually confounding intelligence agents.
Police: 5 shot at Hmong festival in Tulsa, Okla.
TULSA, Okla. — A police helicopter that happened to be near a Tulsa events center Saturday night when a gunman shot and wounded five people at a Hmong New Year’s festival spotted a suspicious vehicle driving away from the scene, which eventually led to the arrest of two suspects, authorities said.
Police Capt. Mike Williams said both suspects, like those celebrating inside the Green Country Event Center, are Hmong — an Asian ethnic group mainly from Laos. He said investigators hadn’t determined a motive for the attack, but that both men would be charged.
Five people, all of them Hmong, were wounded in the attack and taken to hospitals. Two had been shot in the torso and the other three were shot in the arms or legs, Williams said. He said one of the people shot in the torso was in critical condition, and another victim could lose a leg.
The suspects were arrested shortly after the attack, which happened at around 8 p.m. A police helicopter that was in the area spotted a car driving away from the scene with its headlights off and notified officers on the ground, who pulled it over.
By wire sources