Adorable girl, 3, is killed after attending July 4 party with family as cops finally arrest suspect
Honesty Cheadle was taken off life support on Monday, days after she was rushed to the hospital in the early morning hours of July 5, her Great-Uncle Raymond Cheadle told WUSA 9.
She had been in the car around 3am with her father when she was struck in the upper body by the bullet outside his apartment. She was then rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
Larry then carried his little girl up three flights of stairs because he 'didn't know what to do,' her aunt Tonia told the The Washington Post.
The little girl was being dropped after being taken to a cookout party, she told the outlet.
After two days on life support, little Honesty succumbed to her injuries.
'This child didn't bother nobody,' Raymond told WUSA 9. 'She didn't deserve to get hit.'
Raymond said Honesty's parents are in shambles after losing their baby girl, especially the father.
'That baby was his world, the baby's mother was his world,' the great-uncle said. 'And it's just sad y'all took that from them, from us.'
The shooting occurred as striking their car, shattering the window as fireworks rang out nearby.
Charles Rucker, 24, of DC, was arrested on Friday for the shooting and police believe he targeted the family's car, NBC Washington reported.
He fired multiple rounds into the car after approaching and then ran off. The other occupants of the vehicle were unharmed.
'This seemed to be an intended shooting. It was not one where we believe at this time that there were other individuals that were being sought at that time,' Chief of Police Pamela Smith said.
Rucker has been charged with first-degree murder and it is unclear what his relationship to the family is at this time.
'This arrest is a testament to the diligent and hard work of our police officers and detectives that has occurred around the clock over the past week,' Smith said.
The family started a GoFundMe to help pay for funeral expenses.
The little girl was remembered for her 'innocence' and for being 'full of light, personality, and so much promise.'
'We were not prepared for this — emotionally or financially — and are now facing the painful responsibility of laying our baby girl to rest without any insurance in place,' her aunt Tamika Butler wrote.
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The Independent
16 minutes ago
- The Independent
Exclusive: Registered sex offender banned from Spirit Airlines after arrest for groping teenage seatmate
A 65-year-old registered sex offender is facing federal charges for allegedly groping a sleeping teenager on a Spirit Airlines flight. Indiana resident, John Daniel Fowler, later claimed to police that he had merely been reaching down to help right the thermos of the 17-year-old girl in the next seat after it tipped over. Fowler, who pleaded guilty to molesting his step-nephew's girlfriend and is required to register with authorities until November 2033, began the journey with a dust-up at the gate 'due to being charged $100 USD for the size of his luggage,' according to an FBI probable cause affidavit, reviewed by The Independent. 'This incident was not received well by Fowler, who respond[ed] by blurting out that he hoped the plane would crash,' the affidavit states. 'Fowler then apologized and was still allowed to board the aircraft destined to Orlando.' Fowler is now persona non grata with the carrier, a Spirit Airlines spokesperson said Monday. 'Safety is our top priority, and we have zero tolerance for the behavior as alleged,' the spokesperson told The Independent. 'The allegations are serious, and we will provide any necessary assistance to law enforcement in their investigation. Additionally, this individual is no longer welcome on any of our flights.' Fowler does not yet have an attorney listed on the court docket, and was unable to be reached for comment. On July 29, Fowler was on Spirit flight NK 1523 from Indianapolis to Orlando, assigned to an aisle seat, according to the affidavit. In the middle seat was a 17-year-old girl, identified in the affidavit as 'Victim 1.' After takeoff, the affidavit says Victim 1 asked the person seated by the window if she could take a photograph of the view. Fowler then asked Victim 1 if she could send him the photo, and gave her his phone number, the affidavit goes on. During the two-hour-plus flight, Fowler tried to make conversation with Victim 1, but she was not interested and shut him down, the affidavit says. Several times, Victim 1 was forced to physically move Fowler's hand, which kept creeping over to her seat, according to the affidavit. As the plane approached Orlando, Victim 1 was asleep underneath a blanket, and had both feet up on her seat, the affidavit continues. Once the aircraft landed, but before the doors were opened, Victim 1 woke up to find Fowler's hand under her blanket, rubbing her crotch, the affidavit states. Victim 1 screamed until she got the attention of a flight attendant who immediately brought the teen to the front of the plane. Fowler, for his part, was taken to the rear of the aircraft. Once the plane had taxied to the gate, he was questioned by Orlando police, according to the affidavit. 'During the interview, Fowler claimed that he reached down to grab Victim 1's thermos, which had fallen over… and when he came back up his arm touched her leg,' the affidavit states. Fowler denied touching the girl's private parts, and maintained he was 'not on any medication or alcohol at the time,' the affidavit says. Officers interviewed Victim 1 as well as the cabin crew at the same time. The FBI, along with a children's forensic examiner, spoke with her on August 1. Fowler was charged the same day with abusive sexual contact aboard an aircraft, which carries up to three years in federal prison; and a potential 10-year enhancement for having committed a new crime while a registered sex offender. The affidavit concludes with a recap of Fowler's November 2023 conviction, citing details from a probable cause affidavit that says he sexually assaulted a sleeping victim in her home. Fowler, who the victim told police was 'her boyfriend's step-dad's brother,' had been staying in the garage on an air mattress, the affidavit states. Her age is unclear. State court records show Fowler was given a two-year suspended sentence, with credit for time served while awaiting trial, and was sentenced to probation. After an undisclosed violation in 2024, GPS location monitoring was added to Fowler's probation terms. In July, a Texas aerospace executive flying American Airlines from Boston to Washington, D.C. was arrested after allegedly masturbating openly while pawing at the passenger seated next to him. (The suspect told police he was 'stretching his arms.') In March, a 55-year-old man was banned permanently from American after his third accusation of mid-flight sexual misconduct. A month before, a traveler sued Alaska Airlines, claiming she had been sexually assaulted by an inebriated passenger. Last year, the FBI issued an alert about sexual assault aboard commercial aircraft, a crime the bureau said was 'on the rise.'
The Sun
17 minutes ago
- The Sun
How brutal Hells Angel leader led gang in deadly riots, rape & rock gig killing…as ex-wife opens up on savage beating
THE roar of Harley-Davidsons and stench of petrol was all it took to announce the Hells Angels were in town. And leading the pack of leather-clad outlaws for decades was hardman Sonny Barger, whose name struck fear into the hearts of even the toughest of bikers. 14 14 As California became gripped with drug-fuelled mania and political instability, Sonny was the man at the head of a group that left a trail of violence everywhere they went. From leading deadly riots, running drugs, and even threatening Keith Richards with a gun, it's little surprise that Sonny and his crew were dubbed 'vikings on acid'. Many now romanticise him as a legend - but the truth is that he presided over a group that carried out gang rapes of teenagers and that committed twisted acts of cruelty without blinking an eye. And ex-wife Noel Black, who says Barger was an "old school charmer" when they met, soon saw his violent side. 'After the first ass kicking, I should have left,' she says. 'He didn't kill me, but I should have just ran.' Now, the life and times of Sonny Barger is told by those who knew him in the documentary Secrets of the Hells Angels, airing tonight on Channel 4. Four months after he was born in 1938, his mother ran off with a bus driver and he was raised by his alcoholic father and sister in the rough port district of Oakland, California. School was attended just to pick fights with his fellow classmates, and at 16 he was expelled for hitting a teacher with a baseball bat. Then he tried the army - but after forging his birth certificate so he could join without parental permission, he was given an honourable discharge just 18 months later. Instead he joined a bike club, popular with other ex-military men, named the Oakland Panthers. Bloodsoaked world of UK's Hells Angels as Mafia-style bikers drag bodies of rivals down streets and stash rocket launchers & uzis for war 'I needed a second family,' Sonny wrote in his autobiography about this time. 'I wanted a group less interested in a wife and 2 ½ kids…and more interested in riding, drag-racing, and raising hell.' But the Panthers were only weekend riders - and Sonny wanted more. Throughout the 50s, the Hells Angels consisted of loosely organized chapters throughout California, with members often unaware that other chapters existed. Forming his own group, the Oakland Hells Angels, in 1957, he made contact with other Hells Angels groups, and when the overall president was sent to prison in 1958, a 20-year old Sonny took the lead. Brutal beatings By the 1960s and Sonny and his now-worldwide gang of outlaw bikers had developed a serious reputation for violence - for good reason. First gaining a criminal record in 1963 for cannabis possession, he was then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 1965, when he forced a pistol into a man's mouth after he criticised the Hells Angels. An unrepentant Sonny later wrote: 'Since the motherf*cker was already shot in the head, I bent him over the pool table and shot him again.' 14 14 14 Though much of his legal income was made from consulting on Hollywood films about bikers, they also took part in robberies, drug running, and harboured white supremacists. In January 1963, the Oakland Hells Angels headquarters was raided by police, with seven members charged with the alleged gang rape of a 29-year-old woman. During the raid, police also found a swastika flag and a picture of Adolph Hitler with the inscription 'Hitler is alive, our buddy.' 'The way we were depicted, we were like Vikings on acid, raping our way across sunny California on motorcycles forged in the furnaces of hell', he wrote. One of the most infamous nights of mayhem happened at a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969. Offered free beer in exchange for providing security, the crowd got restless as the Stones failed to appear on stage. Fights broke out, the bikers beat the crowd with pool cues, and one frightened fan - Meredith Hunter - was knifed to death with the assailant, Alan Passaro, getting away with it on grounds of self-defence. '[They] were out of it on bad acid and cheap wine, and they were just looking for trouble,' remembered Keith Richards. 'Somebody knocked their bikes over and the next minute this black kid got scared, pulls a gun, and they did him'. To many, it was the day that the peace of love of the 1960s died. Sonny and his bikers for their part blamed the Stones for coming on late And not even being a member of one of the biggest bands in the world would keep you safe from Sonny's wrath. 'I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar, or he was dead', Sonny remembered. 'Altamont may have been some big catastrophe to the hippies, but it was just another Hells Angels event to me.' 14 Misogynistic violence Though the Angels were a lawless rabble, they maintained a strict code of honour within themselves. Disloyalty meant death - as Paul 'German' Ingalls found out in 1968. After being found guilty of stealing Sonny's valuable coin collection by an internal Hells Angels 'court', Ingalls was forced to consume barbiturates until he suffered an overdose. Equally brutal were the Hells Angels' sexual crimes, with wives and girlfriends seen as the 'property' of the men. Sonny's first wife, Elsie Mae, had died of an embolism in 1967 after a (then illegal) abortion, and he split with his second wife, Sharon, in 1996. Three years later he married Beth Noel Black, but this came to an end in 2003 after Sonny attacked her so ferociously she found herself hospitalised. 14 14 14 14 'I loved Sonny so much, but marriages sometimes are bad, and sometimes if you hang around tough people things happen to you,' she said. 'He would get aggressive with it. After the first ass kicking, I should have left.' During one outburst, Sonny kicked her in the back, causing it to break in three places and leaving her with a lacerated spleen. He called 911, and can be heard admitting that he had beaten his wife her so badly she was "paralysed and cannot move". He claimed she had pulled a gun on him, in a row over a mistress, but despite being convicted for aggravated assault he spent only eight days in jail for this crime. Justice served Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sonny and his Hells Angels had a complicated relationship with the police as they expanded the club into an international organisation. In 1972, Oakland sergeant Ted Hilliard testified that he had accepted guns, dynamite and grenades from Sonny in return for the release of Hells Angels members from prison, as the police wished to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Black Panthers and Marxist groups. Sonny was keen to go further - offering 'to deliver the bagged body of a leftist for every Angel released from jail' - but this was refused. By now, Sonny had developed a serious cocaine addiction and funded this by selling heroin, and Hells Angels chapters around the country practically controlled the entire market for meth. When police raided his home in December 1972, they found eight guns throughout his house and even a human skull on his dresser that to this day remains unidentified. He was finally convicted in 1973 for possession of heroin and firearms. 14 14 Sentenced to ten years, he served only four and a half, running the Hells Angels from his cell and marrying his second wife, Sharon, there. Thanks to his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, Sonny contracted throat cancer in 1983. This led him to become a public anti-smoking advocate, even saying: "Want to be a rebel? Don't smoke as the rest of the world." Having his vocal cords removed didn't stop him from being convicted in 1988 for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of rival club the Outlaws, though he insisted he was merely the victim of entrapment by the FBI. In total, Sonny spent 13 years in prison throughout his life. By the 2000s, he had stepped away from his public leadership of the gang, though in 2002 he tried to organise a peace conference when warfare between the Hells Angels and Mongols gang exploded. However, this conference was cancelled after a mass riot in Laughlin, Nevada, between bitter rivals left three dead and dozens injured. Hells Angels members swarmed a casino, with CCTV capturing the moment bullets whizzed around slot machines. One Mongol member was stabbed to death and two Hells Angels members died from gunshots. He married his fourth wife, Zorana, in 2005, and spent the final portion of his life contributing to books about biker life, as well as appearing on the TV drama Sons of Anarchy. Following a short battle with liver cancer, Sonny passed away in 2022 at the age of 83 - but left a legacy that will be forever part of the story of 20th century America.
Daily Mail
17 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Wealthy Boston neighborhood faces uptick in drug-related incidents
Residents of Boston's ritziest and best-known neighborhood are fuming at the city's Democratic mayor - blaming her policies for rampant open-air drug use in the upscale area. Beacon Hill, known for its preserved early 19th century brownstones and cobblestone roads famously saved from the wrecking ball, is now facing a new crisis: an alarming uptick in drug-related incidents. Infuriated locals have laid blame squarely with Mayor Michelle Wu, who launched an initiative to hand out free crack pipes, syringes, and other drug paraphernalia to addicts on the streets in 2022. While Wu's administration has pitched this controversial policy as 'harm reduction,' critics have countered that all she's done is increase the permissiveness of open-air drug use in Boston. 'What in God's name are they doing?' Michael Flaherty, who then served as Boston's at-large city councilor and the public safety chair, told the Boston Herald in 2022. 'This flies in the face of everything we have been trying to do to clean Mass and Cass up.' The intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard in Newmarket, known as 'Mass and Cass,' is notorious for open-air drug usage. The mayor has tried to clear out the crime-ridden area dubbed 'Methadone Mile' by trying to take down tent encampments. But instead of isolating the drug crisis, it has amplified and spread - further plaguing the historic Massachusetts city. Residents from across Boston have complained that the Mass and Cass crackdown has led to 'out of control' spillover into their neighborhoods. The streets of once-pristine communities have been littered with dangerous needles. A clean-up crew supported by the Newmarket Business Improvement District has estimated they pick up about 1,000 needles a day across Boston. Beacon Hill, where the median housing price is $2.8million, is just one of the areas feeling the burn. 'WOW: Beacon Hill, Boston's wealthiest neighborhood, now has open-air drug use on full display,' a fed-up Bostonian wrote on a Facebook community page on Sunday. He shared a photo sent in by 'stunned resident' of a man slumped over, apparently on drugs, in a wheelchair with an umbrella over his shoulders on a street corner. 'Even Beacon Hill liberals are fed up with Wu,' the social media user asserted. On social media, people have expressed disbelief with the jaw-dropping photo and pointed to Wu's lackluster efforts. 'Truly unbelievable how anyone, regardless of political affiliation, allows this kind of [expletive] to happen,' one man wrote on X. 'Super sad to see Boston slowly turning into SF or Portland, OR. Let's hope the wealthy in Beacon Hill raise a stink about it and get rid of Wu.' 'Her free needle plan is working well; they dump them everywhere, as a free supply Wu's progressive ways are slowly bringing the city down,' another chimed in. While the photo sparked a recent uproar, Beacon Hill residents have been noticing drug-related litter and people shooting up on the streets for years. Katherine Kennedy, a Beacon Hill mother-of-two, described to the Boston Herald how the area had changed for the worse last September. 'I pass discarded needles as I walk my five-year-old to her public school every day,' Kennedy said. 'Having to keep needles away from my kids as I walk them to preschool is unacceptable.' Beacon Hill, an area that generally votes blue, has long been considered one of the safest places to live in Boston. But with the rapidly expanding substance abuse epidemic, the well-off Bostonians who live there are concerned for the area's future. Boston Public Health Commissioner Bisola Ojikutu, who worked with Wu to launch the original 2022 initiative to address the drug crisis, recently admitted the plan must be reevaluated. 'It feels as though very little that any of us are doing to combat this drug use epidemic is actually working,' Ojikutu said at a South End community meeting at the end of June, the Boston Herald reported. Boston's South End embodies neighborhoods including Back Bay, Roxbury and Bay Village. Ojikutu's remark came in response to a horrifying incident in South Boston, when a four-year-old boy stepped on a hypodermic needle in a city park last month. Mason Flynn-Bradford, who was pricked by the paraphernalia during a family party.
