By AMBER HUNT • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • June 6, 2009
Barb Rothman put her arms around her husband and her chin on his shoulder as the two stood just feet from the little girl’s crude waterside grave.
The Dundee Township couple had carefully made their way down the slippery, steep hillside leading to the spot — one they had been to before on happier occasions, to fish.
“We had a son killed ourselves,” Fritz Rothman said as his wife’s eyes welled with tears. “We know what it’s like to lose a child. It’s a shame it had to come to this.”
The serene spot is believed to have served for two weeks as 5-year-old Nevaeh Buchanan’s grave after she was abducted May 24 from outside of her Monroe apartment complex.
While autopsy results are still pending, officials with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office reiterated today that they’re tracking down leads to look for a killer.
DNA evidence has been shipped to Michigan State Police in hopes of positively identifying the girl, a sheriff’s official said, because family members said Nevaeh never had her teeth X-rayed for dental comparisons.
The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office had not released the cause of death, saying further testing is needed because there were no outward signs of trauma or other obvious indicators explaining how the girl died.
The girl’s family could ultimately be asked to view the body for visual identification, authorities said.
Since Nevaeh disappeared, a makeshift memorial has grown outside of her Charlotte Arms apartment complex.. Today, that memorial had spread to the spot along the River Raisin off Dixon Road where fishermen discovered a little girl covered in a cement mixture inches from the water.
Passersby prayed at the riverside. Some stayed atop the hill, near the road; others felt compelled to climb down and place flowers near the displaced soil.
“This hits home,” said a tearful Phillip Gibson, 52, of Monroe, who climbed down with a flowered-covered cross to place graveside.
Gibson said his 30-year-old son, Scotty, was shot to death 2 1/2 years ago. Like the Rothmans, he said he sympathizes with Nevaeh’s family.
“I hope they get him,” he said of the culprit. “I wish they’d let me at him, but I guess that should be left up to God.”
That mix of anger and anguish was obvious at Nevaeh’s apartment, too, where the tent covering dozens of stuffed animals and balloons had been adorned with signs advocating the death penalty.
“Majority of this country has it, Michigan needs to have it and they should start with the person(s) responsible for this tragic loss,” the signs read. “Why should this person be allowed to live?”
Cheryl LaPierre, 43, of Monroe said tragedies such as this one will forever affect the whole community.
“I don’t let him go anywhere no more,” she said, motioning to her 8-year-old son, Jimmy Pocock, who placed a teddy bear and stuffed dog in the memorial. “It’s sad.”
Barb Rothman said she hopes some good can come from the loss. She and her husband lost their 2-year-old son Darrell in a car wreck, she said, and take comfort knowing that he’s in “a better place than this world can ever be.”
Added her husband: “It’s a terrible loss, but you have to figure out a way to bring some positive out of the negative.”
Anyone with information about the investigation are being asked to call the Monroe County Sheriff at 734-457-6713.
Disturbing Evidence Found in Case of Missing Michigan 5-Year-Old Nevaeh
Police Find Blood, Pictures of Young Girls Among Evidence in ‘Person of Interest’ Motel Room
A bloody towel, a sharped-edged tool stained with blood and photos of young girls were among the evidence confiscated from the motel room and van of George Kennedy, a “person of interest” in the case of missing Michigan 5-year-old Nevaeh Buchanan, according to news reports.
Monroe County Police spokesman Major Dan Motylinski would not confirm the report by ABC’s Detroit affiliate WXYZ, which saw the warrant, about what was confiscated from Kennedy. Motylinksi told ABCNews.com, however, that “whatever was recovered was sent to the lab.”
Monroe County Sheriff Tilman Crutchfield said Kennedy is one of several persons of interest in the case, and stopped short of calling him a suspect.
“He is strictly that,” Crutchfield said in a press conference today. “We have no arrest solicitations pending. A child is still missing. We are looking in all directions.”
Nevaeh, which is heaven spelled backwards, disappeared Sunday night from a parking lot near the Monroe, Mich., apartment complex where she lived with her mother, Jennifer.
Kennedy, a friend of Nevaeh’s mother and a registered sex offender, was taken into custody on an unrelated parole violation.
In 1998 Kennedy, 39, was charged with a felony for having sex with a girl under 16. That charge was later dismissed, court records show.
In addition to the 1998 charge, court records show that by 2002 Kennedy had been charged with a home invasion and accosting a 13-year-old girl. Kennedy’s former court-appointed lawyer Peter Sickels told ABCNews.com that the charges were combined in a plea deal that allowed him to be released from prison in 2003.
Police have received more than 200 tips about the missing girl, and hundreds of volunteers joined police and FBI agents to search for Nevaeh.
Police searched a nearby quarry with divers, sonar equipment and cadaver dogs, Crutchfield said.
“We are continuing to search,” Motylinski said. “We are following all leads.”
Investigators have checked all 180 units of the apartment complex where the girl lived and all residents there have been interviewed, Crutchfield said. Police plan to return to the complex to search again.
Standing with Nevaeh’s father, Shane Hinojosa, her grandmother, Sherry Buchanan, spoke to reporters Wednesday outside the girl’s apartment building. She clutched some of Nevaeh’s toys as she spoke.
“I know she’s missing all her animals,” Buchanan said.
FACT: Mother knew these “friends” were child molesters and she met them at probation. Knowing these creeps were child predators she allowed them into her home, life, and around her innocent daughter.
Sadly, millions of parents who know child predators and are aware they are predators, allow the predator into their home and access to their children.
Lock all of them up!!!!
And if our laws were for our children and families, these 2 “persons of interest” would still be in prison and neveah would be home safe.
So sad!!!
Rosey
Monday, June 1, 2009
Monroe cops seek more witnesses in search for Nevaeh
Tanveer Ali / The Detroit News
Monroe — Authorities are looking for witnesses who may have been driving a green box-styled minivan parked in the Hollywood School parking lot May 24, the evening 5-year-old Nevaeh Buchanan went missing.
Monroe County Sheriff Tilman Crutchman also said today that two boys playing at the school’s playground that night have been found and questioned over the weekend as witnesses.
The search for Nevaeh, which began after she went missing while playing in her apartment complex parking lot, is entering its eight day. Crutchfield said a 100-person task force has received more than 800 tips. He acknowledged a tip was being checked out in the Columbus, Ohio area, but would not comment on the details or significance of that tip.
“We’d like to recover her safe and well,” Crutchfield said. “Everyday that we gain information that she is not harmed … is a good day for us.”
Meanwhile, police arrested 64-year-old James Easter, one of three named persons of interest, on unrelated arson charges over the weekend. An arraignment is scheduled in Monroe’s 1st District Court this afternoon.
Police searched Easter’s home Sunday and dug up the backyard of his property after receiving a tip. Boxes of evidence were taken to the Michigan State Crime Lab.
Crutchfield denied reports that Easter confessed to kidnapping Nevaeh.
Two other men, both sex offenders and associates of Nevaeh’s mother Jennifer Buchanan, already have been named as persons of interest: George Kennedy and Roy Lee Smith.
Meanwhile, blood on a knife confiscated from Kennedy, described as a boyfriend of Nevaeh’s mother, was not a match for the girl. Nevaeh went missing about 6:30 p.m. May 24 from the apartment complex where she lived. Hundreds of volunteers have searched the area, including quarries and woods, looking for clues in the case.
Crutchfield said the task force — composed of his office, Monroe City Police, the Michigan State Police and the FBI — continues to look at those who know Nevaeh and strangers as the potential kidnappers.
“We’re working on the presumption that it could be either,” Crutchfield said. “If we knew who the perpetrator was, we probably would have arrested them.”
A POEM FOR CHILDREN WRITTEN BY A CHILD:
What Rights do I have?
Don’t I have the right to see the morning sun?
And the right to play,
Don’t I have the right to live my life
And enjoy each day?
Don’t I have the right?
To see my family and friends
Is it your choice to make?
Of when that moment will end?
Don’t I have the right?
To feel the sand beneath my feet
Or was the only right in your eye
Was to be buried four feet?
Don’t I have the right?
To go to school
And learn to right my name,
Or was the only right I have
Too feel humiliation and pain.
Don’t I have the right?
To wish upon a star
Or the right to have
my dreams take me far?
Don’t I have the right?
To chase the ocean as it runs away
Or is it your right
To choose if on earth I get to stay?
Did you have the right?
To send me to Heaven up above?
But most of all,
Don’t I have a right to be loved?
Who ever says child abuse doesn’t Kill,
Is Sadly Mistaken
God Bless this poor angel.
Her mother obviously has no sense because anyone with more then 3 brain cells would realize that socializing with known sex offenders is a BAD IDEA!
When will the POS parents wake up and realize the harmful situations they are putting their children in.
These children are victims of their circumstances and have no say in what happens to them.
This is why Nxzmary’s Soldiers is so badly needed, we must be the voice for the voiceless!
THIS ARTICLE IS THE REASON WHY THE NIXZMARY BROWN LAW NATIONWIDE IS ESSENTIAL AND MUST PASS. Leniency offers more dead children, and if one believes an abuser/molester deserves a second chance, lets see how you would feel if your child were murdered by an animal who was given a second chance.
West Virginia
Man convicted in baby’s death sentenced to life
By RICHARD F. BELISLE
June 8, 2009
richardb@herald-mail.com
CHARLES TOWN, W.VA. — A Jefferson County judge on Monday, following tearful pleas from the mother and other relatives of 2-month-old Colton Lee James, sentenced Michael Todd Cox, the tot’s convicted killer, to life in prison.
Cox, 41, of Germantown, Md., was sentenced to life with mercy under West Virginia’s three-strikes rule.
He was convicted by a Jefferson County jury in March of child abuse by a custodian causing the death of Colton in December 2007.
Cox became eligible for the stronger sentence because of prior convictions in Maryland. Among them was a manslaughter conviction in 1992, in a case similar to Colton’s, that caused the death of 11-month-old Amber Koehler. Like Colton, Amber died from blunt-force trauma to the head while in Cox’s care.
Colton’s mother, Kathy James Carper, in an impassioned plea, told Judge David H. Sanders Monday that her son “didn’t deserve this. I’d like some answers, closure for my son,” she said, stopping often to compose herself.
“I’d like that man (Cox) to spend the rest of his life in jail so he won’t be able to put another family through what he put my family through. My baby would have been 20 months old last Thursday,” Carper said.
Melinda Moser, Amber’s mother, told the judge that she too has had to deal with the pain of the loss of her baby and “unanswered questions after 16 years. He (Cox) took my baby’s life. He should never be near another child again.”
Carper and Moser had been romantically involved with Cox at the time their babies died, according to witnesses Monday.
Brandon “Brandy” Sims, assistant Jefferson County prosecutor, called the babies’ deaths the “most heinous” crimes. In both cases the victims were “innocent, defenseless children” who suffered massive head injuries in the few short hours they were left with Cox, she said in arguing for the stronger sentence.
Sims called Rebecca James-Muth, who read a letter on behalf of Colton’s family, asking for a life sentence for Cox.
“It would be so easy to wish revenge from the nightmare we have endured since Colton’s death. The nightmare is with Colton’s mommy, from the time she first wakes up and realizes that instead of being greeted with the blessed sound of hungry cries or cooing smiles, she’ll have only silence.
“There are many extended family members and close family friends who also grieve the loss of this precious little boy,” James-Muth read from her letter.
“For whatever reason, when Michael Cox becomes responsible for small children, even for short periods of time, tragedy strikes. It’s important that Michael Cox spend the rest of his life behind bars,” James-Muth read.
Conviction on Colton’s death, without the prior convictions, could have netted Cox a 10- to 40-year prison term with parole eligibility in 10 years.
Life with mercy means he won’t be eligible for parole for 15 years with no guarantee he will ever get out of prison. One court official said Monday it’s unlikely Cox will get parole.
In addition to Amber’s death, Sims noted two prior Maryland convictions against Cox, for burglary and assault, either of which validates the state’s three-strikes rule.
When it was his turn to address the court, Cox expressed “his deepest sympathy” to the family for the “tragic loss of one of God’s children.” In the next breath, he proclaimed his “absolute innocence,” saying he was “disturbed to understand what truly happened that day.”
Cox said when he last saw Colton, the baby was alive and awake, and had no sign of trauma.
In a related incident Monday, officers removed Elizabeth Christine Hottel from the courtroom in handcuffs following Cox’s sentencing after she aggressively approached Colton’s family members as they were walking out.
Hottel, 28, of 209 Vista Court, Charles Town, was charged with contempt of court and disorderly conduct, police said.
As I watch a news channel discussing the Nevaeh murder, a woman called into the show and made a statement/question which I find to be one of the SMARTEST comments made on television. She wants to know “Why are our politicians, lobbyist, and judges NOT fighting harder for the children? Why aren’t molesters, for a first time offense, spend life in prison and those who murder a child, receive the death penalty?
Then a clinical psychologist made a follow up comment stating “It’s highly unlikely a child molester can be rehabilitated and that molesters WILL repeat child molestation.
I completely agree with this woman’s and clinical psychologist’s view. So why aren’t our politicians and lobbyist making change for our children, community, and family? After all, “We The People” ask that our children no longer live in fear of the bad man and bad woman. It’s just that simple!!!
Rosey