Red Ruby
Wind swirls around them, guiding them to clues as the clock ticks and the day goes by. Fortunately for Detective Noone, the wind guides her to a clue that may crack the case after all. A hair, not just any hair because neither Noone nor Leas had red wavy hair. Noone was on task immediately, off to contact the forensic employees to bag the evidence. One step closer to finding their killer. Leas found an earring too that was quickly bagged.
An hour later, the scene was ready for the secondary officer to cross-examine. As they were packing up, Noone noticed Leas's stuff. What looked like evidence bags were hidden into the M-seams of her blazer. Noone called her out on it but Leas couldn't keep her cool.
'Why do we have to find the killer anyway? They're not doing anything wrong: the killer is taking the escaped fugitives off our hands. That's less money we have to pay. The prisons are already overcrowded enough. They're letting out death row prisoners after a quarter of their sentence. So what if the killer is killing them off before they kill an innocent civilian again?'
Noone has never seen this side of her partner before. They have been partners for the longest time. They trained in the academy together, became probational officers together, made detective in their third year together. There was not one thing Noone didn't know about Leas.
READ MORE
'We can't choose who we save, Leas. It's part of the job you signed up for. I don't want to be the one who takes you off this case.'
Leas says nothing, Noone stunned. They had never had a fight like this before. They were thick as thieves, some even said. People were often envious of their bond, but nobody would be envious of this.
Leas storms off, upset and enraged, taking the evidence bags with her.
'Wait! Don't leave like this!'
Noone grabs the back of Leas' jacket, accidentally pulling her hair. Pulling her hand back, she held a blond wig.
Noone looked up.
What she saw was not the Leas she knew but a Leas with red wavy hair…
Tales to Scale focuses on creative engagements between Fighting Words and Deis primary and secondary schools across Ireland. Creative workshops run by Fighting Words offer positive spaces in its centres, in local libraries and classrooms for young people to tell their stories.
Across more than 500 activities in 2024, Fighting Words met 9,352 young people from more than 200 Deis schools through workshops, summer camps, an after-school program called Word Warriors and its Book Project. More than 200 stories have been published at
fightingwords.ie
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
15 hours ago
- Irish Times
Riot police and anti-ICE protesters clash in Los Angeles after immigration raids
Helmeted police in riot gear turned out on Friday evening in a tense confrontation with protesters in downtown Los Angeles , after a day of federal immigration raids in which dozens of people across the city were reported to be taken into custody. Live Reuters video showed Los Angeles Police Department officers lined up on a downtown street wielding batons and what appeared to be tear gas rifles, facing off with demonstrators after authorities had ordered crowds of protesters to disperse around nightfall. Early in the standoff, some protesters hurled chunks of broken concrete toward officers, and police responded by firing volleys of tear gas and pepper spray. Police also fired 'flash-bang' concussion rounds. It was not clear whether there were any immediate arrests. An LAPD spokesperson, Drake Madison, said that police on the scene had declared an unlawful assembly, meaning that those who failed to leave the area were subject to arrest. READ MORE Television news footage earlier in the day showed caravans of unmarked military-style vehicles and vans loaded with uniformed federal agents streaming through Los Angeles streets as part of the immigration enforcement operation. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents targeted several locations, including a Home Depot in the city's Wetlake District, an apparel store in the Fashion District and a clothing warehouse in South Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles City News Service (CNS). Protesters walk the street near the site of a federal immigration raid in Los Angeles on Friday. Federal agents in tactical gear armed with military-style rifles threw flash-bang grenades to disperse an angry crowd as they conducted an immigration raid on a clothing wholesaler. Photograph: Alex Welsh/The New York Times [ What is Trump's new travel ban, and which countries are affected? Opens in new window ] CNS and other local media reported dozens of people were taken into custody during the raids, the latest in a series of such sweeps conducted in a number of cities as part of President Donald Trump's extensive crackdown on illegal immigration. The Republican president has vowed to arrest and deport undocumented migrants in record numbers. The LAPD did not take part in the immigration enforcement action. It was deployed to quell civil unrest after crowds protesting the deportation raids spray-painted anti-ICE slogans on the walls of a federal court building and massed outside a nearby jail where some of the detainees were believed to be held. Impromptu demonstrations had also erupted at some of the raid locations earlier in the day. One organised labour executive, David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union of California (SEIU), was injured and detained by ICE at one site, according to an SEIU statement. [ The immigrant familes fleeing Trump's US: 'I had to pack up my little things and leave. They have painted us as criminals' Opens in new window ] The union said Mr Huerta was arrested 'while exercising his First Amendment right to observe and document law enforcement activity'. No details about the nature or severity of Mr Huerta's injury were given. It was not clear whether he was charged with a crime. ICE did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for information about its enforcement actions or Mr Huerta's detention. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass issued a statement condemning the immigration raids, saying, 'these tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city'. – Reuters
Irish Times
16 hours ago
- Irish Times
The story of Sunny Jacobs was never as straightforward as the media suggested
In every photo taken of her, Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs appears eager to live up to a childhood nickname that otherwise might have seemed perversely ill-suited to the arc of her life. Yes, I've had my troubles, the broad smile she wears in every photograph projects, but look at me now. I'm at peace. And all the evidence suggests that she had indeed found solace in Connemara, until her body – and that of her 31-year-old carer Kevin Kelly – was pulled from an inferno in her home last weekend. The circumstances of her life made those of her death all the more tragic. Jacobs spent 16 years in prison for a crime she didn't commit, five on death row. Her co-accused, Jesse Tafero, died in a horrific botched execution. [ The life and tragic death of Sunny Jacobs: how a US death row survivor ended up in Connemara Opens in new window ] What happened on the morning in 1976 that determined the course of her life was this. Or what happened was something like this – maybe. Nearly 50 years on, the details are still murky, obscured by the heat of the moment, conflicts of motive and narrative, confusing forensic evidence, the unreliable nature of human recall and the passage of time. READ MORE Sunny Jacobs, then 28, was sleeping in the back of a car parked up at a rest stop in Florida, a bag containing pink pyjamas at her feet and two small children at her side: Eric was nine; Tina just 10 months. In the front were two men: Tafero, her boyfriend and father of her baby, and another man, Walter Rhodes. A state trooper – accompanied by a friend, a Canadian police officer – came to do a routine check. One spotted a gun in the car – there were several, it would later emerge. Gunfire broke out – it was never clear how it started – and both police officers were killed. Rhodes was the only one who tested positive for gunpowder residue. He agreed to testify against Jacobs and Tafero in return for a life sentence. Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death by 'Maximum Dan' Futch, a judge who kept a replica electric chair on his desk. The same US news outlets that had gorged on Jacobs when she was on trial just as enthusiastically redeemed her after she was freed on a plea deal in 1992. Originally she had been portrayed as the Bonnie to Tafero's Clyde. Now she became a vegetarian hippie who simply found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that her parents died in a plane crash while she was still in prison. Death in Connemara: who was Sunny Jacobs? Listen | 18:42 She went on to campaign against the death penalty and to marry another former death row inmate, Peter Pringle. They moved to Connemara where they sometimes had exonerated inmates come to stay. There have been documentaries, a stage play, books, interviews, even a Vows column in The New York Times. As journalist turned private investigator Ellen McGarrahan discovered, when she set out to write a book on it , there is no absolute truth about any of the events of February 1976, least of all the question of who Jacobs was. She had many advantages in life – loving parents, material comforts – but a series of bad choices saw her end up on the run with her drug-dealing boyfriend in a car packed with drugs, weapons and two children. Her life is a reminder that we should be wary when presented with stories of women – and particularly women accused of high-profile crimes – who are rendered in black and white, all good or all bad. Jacobs wasn't Bonnie – but neither was she just a hapless hippie who stumbled into a bad situation. McGarrahan suggests the gunfire started with a taser shot from the back seat, where Jacobs and the children were huddled. In the search for a definitive set of facts, broader truths were overlooked. One of those was perhaps best expressed by Jacobs herself. The only facts that actually matter are that two people died and 'the system was misused and as a result countless people were victimised. And someone may have been put to death who was innocent, or at least was entitled to a new trial.' If there are lessons to be gleaned from the life and awful death of Jacobs, one is about the unspeakable cruelty of that system. McGarrahan became haunted by the story after she witnessed Tafero's execution in May 1990. The description in her book is so distressing that I decided not to include it here. But then I read that US president Donald Trump intends to forcefully pursue new death sentences, particularly against migrants. And so here is what McGarrahan saw. 'His scalp caught fire. Flames blazed from his head, arcing birch orange with tails of dark smoke. A gigantic buzzing sound filled the chamber ... In the chair, Jesse Tafero clenched his fists as he slammed upwards and back. He is breathing, I wrote on my yellow notepad. ... Breath. His chest heaving. The – the buzzing again. Flames. Smoke. His head nods. His head is nodding. He is breathing ... It took seven minutes and three jolts before he was finally declared dead.' Jacobs never forgot that this could have been her fate; the fact that the flames came for her in the end is the cruellest conceivable irony. In the final analysis, her story is a reminder about how ready we are to render women as either the evil witch or Snow White, with no room for the grey areas in between. It is about how you don't have to be blameless to deserve a chance of a happy ending. And it is about redemption. ' Life turned out beautifully ,' Pringle told The Guardian in 2013. While they could be forgiven for glossing over some of the details of their lives, that – for a period at least – was the unvarnished truth.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Mistakenly deported man Abrego Garcia brought back to US to face criminal charges
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration , is on his way back to the US to face criminal charges, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday. Abrego Garcia will face charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the US, ABC reported earlier. The report said the charges had been filed under seal in Tennessee last month, well after Abrego Garcia's March 15th deportation. His lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador despite an immigration judge's 2019 order granting him protection from deportation to the country after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned there, court records show. READ MORE Critics of president Donald Trump pointed to the erroneous deportation as an example of the excesses of the Republican president's aggressive approach to stepping up deportations. [ Kilmar Abrego Garcia: The story of the 'mistakenly deported Maryland man' Opens in new window ] Officials countered by alleging that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His lawyers have denied that he was a member of the gang and said he had not been charged with or convicted of any crime. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Photograph: Murray Osorio PLLC via AP His case has also become a flash point for escalating tensions between the executive branch and the judiciary , which has ruled against a number of Trump's policies. The US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, with liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his 'warrantless arrest'. US District Court judge Paula Xinis has since opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information. – Reuters
