Fort Hood gunman rests case without witnesses, testimony
FORT HOOD, Texas — The Army psychiatrist who fatally shot 13 people at Fort Hood decided not to present any evidence during his trial’s penalty phase on Tuesday even though jurors are deciding whether to sentence him to death.
Maj. Nidal Hasan rested his case without calling witnesses or testifying to counter the emotional testimony from victims’ relatives, who talked of eerily quiet homes, lost futures, alcoholism and the unmatched fear of hearing a knock on their front door.
Prosecutors hope the testimony helps convince jurors to hand down a rare military death sentence against Hasan, who was convicted last week for the 2009 attack that also wounded more than 30 people at the Texas military base.
The judge dismissed jurors after Hasan declined to put up a defense. But she then asked Hasan more than two dozen questions in rapid fire, affirming that he knew what he was doing. His answers were succinct and just as rapid.
“It is my personal decision,” he said. “It is free and voluntary.”
Bail set at $3M for 2nd teen charged in WWII vet’s fatal beating
SPOKANE, Wash. — Bail was set at $3 million Tuesday for a 16-year-old boy who is charged with killing a World War II veteran and contends the man was beaten to death because he shorted the teen and another boy on a sale of crack cocaine.
The allegation was sharply rebutted by friends of Delbert Belton, the 88-year-old veteran known as “Shorty.”
“Shorty never did no drugs,” said Ted Denison, a friend who added that the defendants were “smearing his name.”
The drug-dealing claim is in a letter police found after they arrested Kenan Adams-Kinard early Monday morning, Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Larry Haskell said during Tuesday’s court hearing.
Haskell said the letter contends that Adams-Kinard and Demetrius L. Glenn, 16, were buying crack cocaine from Belton when the attack occurred Aug. 21.
That notion was scoffed at by family members and friends of Belton, who was known as Shorty because he was little more than 5 feet tall.
New photos of Boston Marathon bombing suspect released
BOSTON — Dramatic new photos show the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, his face bloodied, climbing out of a boat in a suburban backyard as heavily armed police officers wait for him to drop to the ground.
The images were among those a state police officer provided last month to Boston Magazine, which published some then and more on Tuesday.
Sgt. Sean Murphy took photos the April night police cornered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a dry-docked boat in Watertown, just outside Boston. He wasn’t authorized to release the photos but said he was angry about a Rolling Stone magazine cover he felt glamorized Tsarnaev.
The new photos include more shots of Tsarnaev coming out of the boat, his head bloody and a red laser trained on his head.
They also show him dropping to the ground, where officers and medical personnel rushed to treat him. Other photos show tense federal, state and local police officials meeting in a command center and SWAT teams gathering in the streets earlier in the day.
The surgeon who treated Tsarnaev after his capture said he had been shot through the face and had a fractured skull, among other injuries. Tsarnaev was wounded during a confrontation with police a day after authorities released photos of him and his older brother as suspects in the deadly April 15 marathon bombing.
By wire sources
