Honeymooner 'Destroyed' AftervHit-and-Run Kills Wife; Suspect Held On $1M Bail

A 35-year-old man is in custody after a car drove onto the crowded Venice Beach boardwalk over the weekend, killing one woman who was on her honeymoon and injuring a dozen. 

NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports.The man who authorities say plowed his car into a crowd of people on the famed Venice Beach boardwalk — killing a woman who was in California on her honeymoon and hurting 11 others — was held Monday on suspicion of murder. The man, Nathan Louis Campbell, turned himself in about an hour after the crash Saturday night and was being held on $1 million bail. At first, he had fled in his car, a dark Dodge Avenger, captured on security camera video.

Sources told the Los Angeles Times that Campbell was from Colorado and was living in his car, and a police source told NBC Los Angeles that he was known to law enforcement in Southern California.

Los Angeles proseuctors planned to review potential charges by Tuesday. Police declined to talk about a motive but said there was no indication of terrorism, or that anyone else was involved.  Witnesses described horror and chaos as the car accelerated through the crowd. Mustafa Balci, who runs a booth that sells Turkish glassware and other items, said it three customers who were lingering over his wares.  Killed was Alice Gruppioni, a 32-year-old Italian newlywed. Christian Casadei, who married her two weeks ago, suffered minor injuries and was at her side when she died, the Italian news agency ANSA said.  

“She was robbed of her life while living her dream visit to California with her husband,” the bride’s aunt, Katia Gruppioni, told NBC Los Angeles in a text message. “Alice was a remarkable young lady making her personal dreams come true.”

A vehicle plowed through a group of people near Venice Beach, Calif., killing a woman, in an incident caught on security video cameras. NBC's Miguel Almaguer reports.

Giuseppe Perrone, the Italian consul general in Los Angeles, who accompanied Casadei to the hospital, quoted him as saying: “We were walking, we were happy, we were on our honeymoon and everything, and suddenly everything changed. I still can’t believe it, and I don’t even remember exactly what happened. It’s all very confusing.”

Gruppioni was the daughter of Valerio Gruppioni, president of one of Italy’s largest makers of radiators and a former president of Bologna FC, one of the top teams in Italian soccer.
Of the 11 injured, all of whom were walking along the boardwalk, one was in critical condition. A witness, Louisa Hodge, told The Associated Press that she people stumbling and bloodied, and “blocks and blocks of people just strewn across the sidewalk.”

Chelsea Alvarez, who was visiting the boardwalk Saturday night, said the scene was “really bad.”
“There was tables, there was people everywhere, blood everywhere,” she said. “There was scattered stuff. It was horrible. It was the ugliest scene I’ve ever seen.”
Alvarez told NBC Los Angeles that her grandmother Linda Alvarez, 75, was among those hit, suffering broken ribs.

The car knocked over two mannequins and an ATM before it started hitting people. The driver turned up a side street, going away from the ocean, and police said the car was found less than two miles away.
The security video shows a man parking a black car along the boardwalk, watching for several minutes and then speeding into the crowd. It shows the car careening around barriers meant to block cars from the pedestrian area.

A member of the Los Angeles City Council, Mike Bonin, told NBC Los Angeles that the barriers are insufficient. He said he would ask the council to install new ones before the end of the year.
The Associated Press and NBC News' Gil Aegerter, Hasani Gittens and Pete Williams contributed to this report.

This story was originally published on Mon Aug 5, 2013 11:07 AM EDT

2 Dead In Shooting During Pa. Township Meeting

NBC News

The Monroe County coroner's office told NBC News two people were killed in a shooting Monday evening in Ross Township, Pa.

By M. Alex Johnson, Staff Writer, NBC News

A gunman opened fire at a town supervisors meeting Monday night north of Pittsburgh, killing at least two people, before he was tackled by a local official and shot with his own weapon, authorities told NBC News. Five other people were injured, including the gunman.
Gunshots were reported at 7:23 p.m. ET at the regular monthly meeting of the Ross Township supervisors in Monroe County, Pa., Jeffrey Strunk, a spokesman for the county coroner's office, told NBC News.

Monroe County Emergency Management Director Guy Miller told NBC Philadelphia that the gunman, who appeared to be "shooting randomly,'' was in state police custody at a local hospital, which was on lockdown.

Chris Reber, a reporter for The Pocono Record who was attending the meeting, told his newspaper that the gunman shot through the wall from another room in the Municipal Building.
Bernie Kozen, executive director of the township's West End Open Space Commission, tackled the gunman and turned the gun onto the man, Reber said.

"I ran out after the first round of shooting. I dropped to the floor. That's what everyone did," Reber said.

"It was automatic, like a string of firecrackers. That's what everyone said.
"Then it stopped and I crawled out the side door."
NBC station WBRE of Wilkes-Barre reported that state troopers had secured a local home and were waiting for a search warrant. Troopers wouldn't confirm whether the home is that of the suspected gunman.

More Than 100 Teens Rescued In Weekend Sex-Trafficking Raids, FBI Says

By Pete Williams and Erin McClam, NBC News

More than 100 teenagers — many of them children from broken homes — were rescued over the weekend in a sex-trafficking crackdown that swept more than 70 cities, the FBI said Monday.
The youngest victim was 13 years old, the agency said.
The sting resulted in the arrest of 159 “pimps” from San Francisco to Miami who were involved in the commercial exploitation of both adults and children, said Ronald Hosko, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

It was the FBI’s largest action to date focusing on the recovery of sexually exploited children, and took law enforcement agencies to streets, motels, casinos and social media platforms, Hosko said. He said he hoped it would focus attention on sex trafficking, “this threat that robs us of our children.”
The pimps preyed in particular on troubled children, authorities said. In some of the cases, they used a popular online classified site, Backpage, to sell the children for sex, authorities said.

“From a parent’s point of view, from a law enforcement professional’s point of view, it would be enough to look through the eyes of these children and think or say, ‘Nobody cares about me,’” Hosko said.

The victims are overwhelmingly girls, and the pimps sometimes entice them with compliments or asking whether they want to make some money. The girls become trapped in a cycle that can involve drugs, physical abuse, even torture, Hosko said.

The sweep was the seventh iteration of Operation Cross Country, part of a partnership begun a decade ago by federal authorities and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to address child prostitution.

The sting, over three days beginning Friday, demonstrate “how many of America’s children are being sold for sex every day, many on the Internet,” said John Ryan, the center’s president and CEO.

Criminal charges against the 159 will include human trafficking, authorities said.

An estimated 240,000 children in the United States are considered at risk of sexual exploitation.

'Most Of The Sex ...Was Consensual': Castro's Blame-the-Victim Act All Too Familiar, Abuse Experts Say

Angelo Merendino / Getty Images

Ariel Castro pleads to Judge Michael Russo during his sentencing on August 1, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Ariel Castro’s words at his sentencing hearing on Thursday are almost jaw-dropping. Given a chance to speak before he was sentenced to life in prison, plus a thousand years for aggravated murder and for holding three young women captive for 11 years, he repeatedly blamed his victims.
He denied he raped and beat Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, claiming instead that they asked him for sex and that his sexual addiction was to blame. He even said the abuse couldn't have been that bad because DeJesus "looks normal." While many onlookers were astonished, abuse experts said they hear that kind of language and justification every day.

NBC News asked them to weigh in on specific comments Castro made:
"Most of the sex that went on in that house, probably all of it, was consensual," Castro said. "These allegations about being forceful on them -- that is totally wrong. Because there was times where they'd even ask me for sex --many times. And I learned that these girls were not virgins. From their testimony to me, they had multiple partners before me, all three of them."

The denial and rationalization comes as no shock to experts on rape and abuse. In fact, they say, it’s typical that men who rape or batter women will deny they did anything wrong, and even that the victim was "asking for it".

“I think it’s actually very typical of an abuser,” says Barbara Paradiso, who directs the center on domestic violence at the University of Colorado-Denver.

"There is a widely held belief that women enjoy rape or that it is 'just sex at the wrong time, in the wrong place'," Rape Crisis of England and Wales says on its website. "Often when a woman is raped she is afraid that she will be killed - rapists often use the threat of killing a woman or her children to ensure her 'submission' and her silence after the attack. Women do not enjoy sexual violence. Victims of murder, robbery and other crimes are never portrayed as enjoying the experience."

"I am not a violent person. I simply kept them there without being able to leave."
“It is not uncommon for offenders to have justified their own behavior, oftentimes to see themselves as a victim,” Paradiso said in a telephone interview. “They often have a sense of righteousness around their behavior, that they had a right to do what they did or it was acceptable to do what they did that they were forced to do what they did because of the victim.”
"I never had a record until I met my children's mother. My son was on there the other day saying how abusive I was but I was never abusive until I met her. And he failed to say that at the end before she passed away that them two weren't even talking.
Castro’s son Anthony has said Castro beat him and his mother, Grimilda “Nilda” Figueroa, who died in 2012.
"What he's saying, that I was a wife beater - that is, that is wrong. This happened because I couldn't get her to quiet down. I would continuous tell her the children are right there, would you please? She would respond, I don't care if the children are there and she would just keep going...the situation would escalate until the point where she would put her hands on me and that's how I reacted, by putting my hands on her."
It’s familiar thinking to Paradiso. "'I had to hit her because she did x, y or z’,” she says. “(They are saying) ‘I had to bring her back into line’ … It doesn’t really surprise me at all that he said what he said. That behavior is completely based on power and control and domination, which our society supports. So I am not surprised that he said that.”

While his is an extreme case, experts say the pattern is anything but rare.

“I was taken aback [by Castro's statements] but at the same time not shocked by it,” says Jennifer Marsh, vice president of victim services for RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. “It’s somebody who was not willing to accept that what they did was wrong and who may have convinced themselves that what they are doing is not wrong or justified. It read like the way that a perpetrator thinks.”
According to RAINN, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States every two minutes, and only three out of every 100 rapists ever spends any time in jail.

“This is something we work on every day,” says Marsh. The group operates telephone and online hotlines at the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org)

"Perpetrators are particularly adept at manipulating and controlling their victims," Walsh said.
"I just wanted to clear the record that I am not a monster. I did not prey on them  ... I just acted on my sexual instincts because of my sexual addiction. And god as my witness, I never beat these women like they're trying to say I did. I never tortured them."      
              
Abusers will often try to cast themselves as the victim, says Kim Wiley, a former victim advocate at the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence who is now researching gender-based violence at Florida State University.

“Batterers often call crisis hotlines to gather information about victim services in order to stay one step ahead of the victim,” Wiley says. “They also may call to establish themselves as the ‘victim’ on the record in order to sabotage the victim’s access to these helping systems. They use the systems in place as tools to hurt the victim.”

And they’ll try to argue that they didn’t really hurt their victims, all the experts agree.
"I see Gina (DeJesus) through the media and she looks normal. She acts normal. A person that's been tortured does not act normal. They'd act withdrawn and everything. On the contrary, she's happy. Victims aren't happy."

“One of the things we often say is that it’s almost like there is a batterer handbook and a sex offender handbook as well,” says Zoe Flowers, a former domestic violence counselor who has written a play about this issue, “From Ashes to Angel’s Dust: A Journey Through Womanhood”. "They have the same root causes. It doesn’t really surprise me at all that he said what he said. That behavior is completely based on power and control and domination, which our society supports.”

But the experts agree it’s possible to work to prevent the type of thinking that underlies the skewed thinking of abusive men. “There are lots of organizations across the country that are having real conversations and doing real work around healthy masculinity, healthy ways of being in the world,” says Flowers.
They include groups like Men Can Stop Rape and A Call To Men, both of which have been praised by the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women.

"Until society decides this is unacceptable, it will continue to happen," says Flowers. "People really have to move from colluding with battering behavior. They have to interrupt the silence."

Edward Snowden Granted Temporary Asylum In Russia

NBC's Jim Maceda talks about the one year asylum the NSA leaker was given from Russia.

By Jim Maceda and Alastair Jamieson, NBC News

MOSCOW, Russia - NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and has left the Moscow airport where he had been stranded for more than a month, his lawyer said Thursday.
An airport representative told Reuters that the former intelligence contractor had already crossed through the immigration line and left the airport.
Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said he wouldn't disclose the 30-year-old fugitive's whereabouts for security reasons.
“He is the most wanted man on planet Earth. What do you think he is going to do? He has to think about his personal security. I cannot tell you where he is going,” Kucherena told Reuters.

“I put him in a taxi 15 to 20 minutes ago and gave him his certificate on getting refugee status in the Russian Federation,” he said. “He can live wherever he wants in Russia. It's his personal choice.”

WikiLeaks posted on Twitter that Snowden had been granted asylum in Russia for a year.

"We would like to thank the Russian people and all those others who have helped to protect Mr. Snowden," it said in a tweet."We have won the battle -- now the war."

Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Snowden was “a fugitive who belongs in a United States courtroom, not a free man deserving of asylum in Russia.”  “Regardless of the fact that Russia is granting asylum for one year, this action is a setback to U.S.-Russia relations,” he said.  “Edward Snowden will potentially do great damage to U.S. national security interests and the information he is leaking could aid terrorists and others around the world who want to do real harm to our country. Russia must return Snowden to face trial at home.”

Marie Harf, a State Department deputy spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday that Snowden was “not a human rights activist.”
“He’s not a dissident. He’s been accused of leaking classified information, has been charged with three very serious felony counts, and must be, should be, returned to the United States to face a free and fair trial as soon as possible,” she said at the daily briefing.
“We are working through law enforcement channels with the Russian government to make the point that Mr. Snowden is wanted on serious felony charges and needs to be returned to the United States.”
But Harf added that the U.S. had also “made the point that we don’t want this issue to have a hugely negative impact on our bilateral relationship.”
A senior Kremlin official, Yuri Ushakov, told Reuters that he doubted ties between Russia and the United States would suffer because of the “relatively insignificant” Snowden case.
“Our president has ... expressed hope many times that this will not affect the character of our relations,” he told reporters, saying there was no sign that U.S. President Barack Obama would cancel a planned visit to Moscow in September.