Man Dies In 'Horrible' Accident In Central Park At 43
Man Dies In 'Horrible' Accident In Central Park At 43 originally appeared on The Spun.
Unfortunately for New Yorkers, tragedy struck in Central Park this Wednesday.
According to the New York Police Department, a man riding a bicycle collided with a 41-year-old pedestrian at a crosswalk. The 43-year-old cyclist reportedly struck his head on the curb near 96th Street and East Drive.
The cyclist was brought to Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital to receive immediate treatment for his injuries. However, he was pronounced dead before 7 p.m. ET.
As for the pedestrian, the only injuries reported were minor abrasions to the hand.
ABC 7 News is reporting that the cyclist didn't have a helmet on when the accident occurred.
The police are investigating this incident.
This is the second collision that has taken place at Central Park in just the past four weeks.
In late May, two horse-drawn carriages collided. The horses were not severely injures, but both carriage operators were sent to the hospital.
There was also an incident in early March where a woman on a Citibike struck another person on an e-bike.
From Our Town NY:
A woman on a Citibike was struck by another motorized e-bike near Cleopatra's Needle on the east side of Central Park on March 10 and apparently struck her head and rolled into the gutter, according to a witness.
But in a vivid demonstration of the difficulty in obtaining bike accident records in the city, the NYPD said both an 18-year-old woman and a 34 year-old male were transported by EMS to Weill Cornell.
While the views at Central Park are gorgeous, it's imperative to stay alert at all times.
We hope everyone stays safe this weekend.Man Dies In 'Horrible' Accident In Central Park At 43 first appeared on The Spun on Jun 19, 2025
This story was originally reported by The Spun on Jun 19, 2025, where it first appeared.
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CNN
13 minutes ago
- CNN
Is Travis Decker alive? A fruitless 4-week manhunt has produced ‘no certain evidence'
The area of the rural Cascades near Leavenworth, Washington, is so majestic, they call it the Enchantments. Cold, clear water from the wilderness lakes flows into Icicle Creek, where it rushes over sparkling rocks. But the tranquil beauty that draws campers and hikers from across the country was shattered a month ago by the killings of three little girls just yards from the creek. 'I truly hope that the legacy of the girls' lives in everyone's heart forever. They were incredible,' said their mother, Whitney Decker, at a public memorial service last weekend. Travis Decker, the father of 5-year-old Olivia, 8-year-old Evelyn and 9-year-old Paityn, is charged with murdering his daughters by suffocating them with plastic bags near a makeshift campsite not long after he picked them up from their mother. What was supposed to be a three-hour joint custody visit on May 30 morphed into the discovery of a horrifying crime scene and frustrating manhunt that has now stretched for nearly a month. 'There is nowhere that he's going to be able to go that we don't have units waiting for him,' Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison said in a news conference when the manhunt was still in its first week. 'Eventually he's going to tire. He's going to make a mistake.' But as days have turned to weeks, the roar of helicopter engines is a much less frequent sound over the natural serenity of Icicle Creek, and fewer people are scouring the woods for signs of Decker. 'At this time, there is no certain evidence that Decker remains alive or in this area,' the Kittitas County Sheriff's Office, which is assisting in the manhunt, said in a statement. 'Seemingly strong early leads gave way to less convincing proofs over the last two weeks of searching.' The lack of progress in the massive manhunt is painful for law enforcement, but especially wounding for Decker's ex-wife, Whitney, the mother of the children. 'I can say with all degrees of certainty that both Whitney and myself are very frustrated with the fact that Travis hasn't been found,' Whitney Decker's attorney, Arianna Cozart, told CNN. While officials are quick to say they have not given up on their efforts to find Decker, dead or alive, the combination of natural roadblocks and Decker's own history of spartan living have resulted in an extraordinarily difficult challenge for officers seeking justice for the three little girls. Investigators never thought the search for Decker – an Army veteran with survival training – would be an easy one. By June 2, federal authorities were already being brought into the manhunt. Decker 'frequently engaged in hiking, camping, survival skill practice, hunting and even lived off the grid in the backwoods for approximately 2.5 months on one occasion,' a deputy US Marshal said in a court affidavit. From his time serving in the military – including a tour in Afghanistan – Decker had 'training in navigation, woodland/mountainous terrain, long distance movements, survival and numerous other disciplines needed to be able to flee from the Eastern District of Washington,' the affidavit added. Despite frequently being homeless with movements that were increasingly hard to track, Decker did leave a few electronic breadcrumbs, Whitney Decker told investigators. His Google searches turned up queries for 'how does a person move to Canada' and similar phrases, four days before the kidnapping, the US Marshals said in their court filing. Marshals noted that Decker's campsite was less than a dozen miles from the Pacific Crest Trail, which 'leads directly to Canada,' the affidavit notes. 'We worked with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,' Morrison told CNN. 'They were doing some follow-up on some leads we had up in Canada.' Back in Chelan County, Morrison said both tips and the resources needed for an intense physical search have waned in the past week. 'Other agencies that have come out to assist, which we appreciated, clearly have to go back to their home jurisdictions and continue to do what their taxpayers and citizens are requiring of them,' the sheriff said. The Marshals Service is now in charge of the manhunt while local and state authorities focus on examining the evidence they've been able to collect, an arrangement that Whitney Decker believes is not ideal, according to her attorney. One has to ask what law enforcement agencies are most familiar with the surrounding woods and mountains? Certainly not the US Marshals Service,' said Cozart. It's not the first time questions have been raised about how the case has been pursued. The Wenatchee Police Department – the first agency contacted by Whitney Decker – provided information to the Washington State Patrol about Travis Decker's failure to return the girls and the potential for an Amber Alert. The patrol declined to issue one because 'there was no current evidence to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily injury or death,' according to the police affidavit. The following day, when Decker and the girls did not show up to a running event scheduled at a local park, the Washington State Patrol issued an Endangered Missing Person Alert. That placed information about their disappearance on a state website – but did not send a push notification to the public the way an Amber Alert would. The wilderness beauty that draws more than a million visitors to the area each year also makes for an incredibly arduous search. Nearly 90% of the land in Chelan County is publicly owned, and much of that is not directly accessible by road. It is not the first time the dense Okanogan–Wenatchee National Forest has provided cover for a fleeing murder suspect. Five summers ago, Jorge Alcantara Gonzalez was on the run for 23 days – law enforcement officers frequently just minutes behind him in a foot chase – before he was found about 50 miles south of where Decker was last seen. A man walking his dog in the area spotted Alcantara in an empty house, the Seattle Times reported. He was sentenced to 96 months in prison on lesser charges in a plea agreement and remains in state custody. That kind of stroke of fortune is often what solves a missing fugitive case. A Kentucky man accused of shooting at cars on Interstate 75 from a nearby ledge evaded capture for more than a week in the Daniel Boone National Forest. A local couple – Fred and Sheila McCoy – joined the search for Joseph Couch on a whim. 'That started off as a date night, and turned into a six-day journey,' Fred McCoy told CNN. As they livestreamed their search, calling out Couch's name, the McCoys eventually found his decomposed body deep in the woods. He had killed himself. 'Sheila and I don't believe in luck,' McCoy said. 'We believe in being blessed.' The McCoys received a $35,000 reward for finding Couch's remains last fall and said they briefly considered joining the search for Decker, but decided the cross-country trip to an area they are unfamiliar with would not be productive. Like the man they were hunting, the McCoys say they would be surprised if Decker allowed himself to be captured alive. 'Him not being seen in so long makes me think he's no longer with us,' Fred McCoy said. A trail gone cold in a wooded area is not always a sign that the fugitive has completely given up. In one of the most prominent domestic terrorism cases in American history, it was only a sign of further determination. Eric Robert Rudolph, an anti-abortion extremist and White supremacist responsible for four deadly bombings over three years, managed to evade from a massive manhunt for five years by holing up in the woods of western North Carolina near where he grew up. With no bank account, investigators said Rudolph foraged at night for survival, taking cover in darkness and stealing vehicles to bring whatever provisions he could back to his isolated campsite. He also hid 250 pounds of nitroglycerine dynamite. 'Until last week, a part of western North Carolina was literally a hidden minefield,' then-US Attorney David Nahmias said at a news conference after Rudolph's capture. The FBI said Rudolph also managed to survive on his own by finding caves and unoccupied cabins he could use for temporary shelter. 'I think it is very likely that he not only had campsites and caves, but he was also spending some time in those cabins,' said Chris Swecker, former special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Charlotte. 'He knew exactly which cabins he could go into. He had them scouted out way ahead of time.' The capture of Rudolph was another case that turned on being in the right place at the right time. After unsuccessful searches of the woods that involved upwards of 200 agents, a police officer in Murphy, North Carolina, with less than a year on the force spotted Rudolph rummaging through garbage outside a grocery store and stopped him, thinking he had spotted someone planning an ordinary break-in. He gave up without a fight. After being caught, Rudolph confessed to the crimes that killed two people in a plea bargain that took the death penalty off the table. He is serving four life sentences at the 'supermax' prison in Florence, Colorado. Federal investigators never saw evidence that Rudolph was getting help during his crimes or his disappearance, and local authorities say there's no sign that anyone has been working with Travis Decker. 'If there was evidence to show there were additional people there or an unknown subject, we would have known about it, and right now what we're getting back is not showing anything like that,' Morrison said. 'All evidence continues to point to Travis.' But now, with reliable clues pointing to his whereabouts drying up, nearby trails that had been closed for safety reopened and fewer options for intensive searches, investigators hope that someone in the area will have their own unexpected encounter that could end a mystery they've been trying to solve for weeks. 'We'll continue to follow up on every lead that we're getting regarding travels,' said Morrison.' For Whitney Decker, the little girls' mother, getting those answers is critical to her effort to rebuild her life, her attorney said, especially if Travis is still on the run. 'The only message we have for Travis is please do the right thing and turn yourself in,' said Cozart. 'Whitney deserves peace.' CNN's Natasha Chen, Dayna Gainor, Alaa Elassar, Zoe Sottile and Alisha Ebrahimji contributed to this report.
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
'Deceit, dishonesty, betrayal': The wrongful conviction that haunted Johnnie Cochran
He was an uncommonly dangerous man, in the FBI's eyes, a combat-toughened killer who had returned from Vietnam to wage war on the Establishment. "We are going to drive the pigs out of the community,' Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, the 21-year-old leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, told a reporter in 1970. Pratt was stout, compact and level-eyed, with a raspy drawl bespeaking his childhood on the Louisiana bayou. He envisioned a violent end at the hands of police, whom he cast as an occupying army in African American neighborhoods. "The next time you see me, I might be dead.' When he went on trial in 1972 — on charges he murdered a white schoolteacher, execution-style, during a robbery — he insisted he was being framed. His defense attorney, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., initially dismissed Pratt's talk as paranoia. But Cochran would later describe the case as 'a twilight zone of deceit, dishonesty, betrayal and official corruption.' Pratt's conviction kept him behind bars for 27 years, and the case haunted Cochran, who believed Pratt was innocent and who had made a mistake at trial that prosecutors skillfully exploited. In the authorities' war against perceived subversives, it would be years before it became clear how brazenly they had cheated. 'It looked on the surface like a really straightforward murder case,' said Stuart Hanlon, now 76, the radical San Francisco defense attorney who took up Pratt's appeal as a law student and pursued it doggedly for decades. The victim was Caroline Olsen, 27, who was with her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968 when a pair of gunmen approached demanding money. The men ordered the couple to lie face down, then began opening fire. She was fatally wounded; her husband was struck but survived. The robbers got $18. The investigation stalled, and Pratt was not a suspect until 1970, when Julius "Julio' Butler, a beautician and former police officer, implicated him. Butler had been a Panther himself, and had resented Pratt's elevation as Los Angeles leader. The state's star witness, Butler testified that Pratt had dropped by his beauty shop and announced he was going on a 'mission' and later pointed to an article about the Santa Monica shooting to confirm it was his doing. Cochran asked Butler if he had ever been a police informant. Butler flatly denied it. Devastatingly for the defense, Olsen's widower pointed to the defendant and said: "That's the man who murdered my wife.' Cochran argued against the reliability of cross-racial witness identification, particularly under conditions of stress, and put on the stand a witness who had seen Pratt in the Bay Area around the time of the killing. He also put on Pratt, who had been decorated for heroism during two tours in Vietnam with the Army, and who showed what Cochran called a 'soldier's contempt' for whomever shot the helpless Olsen in the back. Cochran thought it was a winnable case, but he introduced an exhibit that backfired terribly. It was a Polaroid, given to him by Pratt's brother, who insisted it had been taken a week after the shooting. It showed Pratt with a beard, which contradicted the widower's initial description of the shooter as "a clean-shaven black man.' Prosecutors countered with a Polaroid employee who said the film had not even been manufactured until five months after the crime, a blow to the defense's credibility that left jurors doubting Pratt's other claims. It took jurors 10 days to find him guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence was 25 years to life. "You're wrong. I didn't kill that woman,' Pratt erupted. "You racist dogs.' Pratt spent the next eight years in solitary confinement. He was shuttled among prisons, and eventually allowed conjugal visits; his wife gave birth to two children. At a series of unsuccessful parole hearings, the panel waited for him to say he was sorry. He insisted he hadn't done it. 'The last person I killed,' he would say, 'was in Vietnam.' There was much the authorities had not shared with Pratt's defense team. They did not reveal that Olsen's widower had previously identified another man as the shooter. (The man had been in jail at the time and could not have done it.) Nor did they reveal the scope of the star witness' work as an informant for law enforcement officials. Based on FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Pratt's lawyers pieced together a picture of Butler's intimate involvement with the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County district attorney's office in dozens of cases. To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Panthers had been the most dangerous group in the country, homegrown terrorists with stockpiles of weapons and alarming Maoist rhetoric. His secret COINTELPRO program was a campaign of spying, wiretaps and sabotage aimed at crushing perceived subversives and thwarting 'the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.' 'Geronimo was targeted by the FBI because he was a natural leader,' Hanlon said. As Hanlon pieced together documents, it became clear that Butler had been helping. Rejecting appeal after appeal, however, courts ruled that Butler had not been an informant — he had been 'a contact and nothing more,' according to one judge — and that Pratt did not deserve a new trial. He was still considered dangerous. 'If he chooses to set up a revolutionary organization upon his release from prison, it would certainly be easy for him to do so,' a prosecutor said at one parole hearing. 'He does have this network out there.' When defense lawyers brought their evidence to then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in 1993, they presented it as a chance to undo the injustice his predecessors had sanctioned two decades earlier. But Garcetti's review dragged on for years, and the attorneys turned again to the courts. This time, the courts granted a hearing. Because the L.A. County Superior Court bench was recused — the original prosecutor was now an L.A. County judge and a probable witness — the case was transferred to Orange County Superior Court. For Pratt's supporters, this provoked a chill. What hope did they have in a staunchly conservative county? But Judge Everett Dickey surprised them. "It's clear that this is not a typical case," Dickey said. "It cries out for resolution.' This time, Pratt's team was armed with evidence never heard at the original trial. They had the testimony of a retired FBI agent who supported Pratt's claim that he had been in Oakland during the killing. They knew that the D.A.'s office had allowed Butler to plead no contest to four felonies in exchange for probation, around the time he testified against Pratt. And they had an index card, recently discovered by one of Garcetti's investigators in the office files, that listed Butler as a D.A. informant. It was filed under B; it had been there all along. "It had never been turned over to the defense. How could they have not turned this over?' Garcetti said in a recent interview. 'I couldn't find anyone who would fess up to the fact that, 'Yeah, we had that document in the files.'' Still, Garcetti's prosecutors downplayed the card's importance. Butler was not an informant, they argued vehemently, but merely a 'source.' In late 1996, Cochran finally got a chance to confront Butler. He had waited years. Butler had become an attorney and an official at a prominent Los Angeles church. He insisted he had been merely a 'liaison' between law enforcement and the Panthers. Cochran asked him his definition of informant. He admitted he had told the FBI that Pratt had a submachine gun. He said his definition of an informant was someone who supplied accurate information. "So under your own definition, you were informing to the FBI?" Cochran asked. "You could say that," Butler said. Dickey threw out Pratt's conviction, concluding that Butler had lied and that prosecutors had hidden evidence that could have led to Pratt's acquittal. Pratt was released on bail in June 1997, to the cheers of his supporters. "The greatest moment of my legal career,' Cochran called it. Pratt flew home to Morgan City, La., 'to see my mama and my homefolks,' he said. "It wasn't easy getting here.' He said he wanted to hear rain on the tin roof of his childhood home. Pratt's legal ordeal was not over, however. Garcetti appealed, saying he had found no evidence pointing to Pratt's innocence. He did not drop the case until an appeals court sided with Pratt in February 1999. The following year, Pratt won $4.5 million in a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the city of L.A. and the FBI. He bought a farmhouse in Imbaseni, Tanzania, where he enjoyed the companionship of Pete O'Neal, a former Black Panther who had fled the U.S. in 1970. O'Neal found him dead at home in May 2011. Pratt had been hospitalized with high blood pressure, a condition that had plagued him for years, but had torn out his IVs and gone home. He hated confinement. He was 63. "We always say, 'The system works,' but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a band of lawyers fought the system. The system doesn't work by itself,' said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped with Pratt's appeal. "They took away half of his life. And they couldn't break him.' So, who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes the killers were other Black Panthers — a pair of heroin addicts known to feed their habit with armed robbery. They died violently in the 1970s, one by gunfire, the other impaled on a fence during a burglary. In a recent interview, Garcetti, one of the defense team's primary antagonists for years, said that his views on the case have evolved. In retrospect, he regrets fighting to keep it alive. "He was more likely framed than he was the person who actually committed the crime,' Garcetti said. Since leaving office, he said, he has learned more about the U.S. government's tactics against disfavored groups in the 1960s and '70s. 'I have read enough to know the FBI, from the top down, were working to isolate any quote-unquote leader in the Black Panther movement, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that they went after people who really hadn't committed a crime that they were bent on removing from the scene." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Associated Press
22 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Biden pays respects as former Minnesota House Speaker Hortman, killed in shooting, lies in state
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Former President Joe Biden joined thousands of mourners Friday as former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman lay in state in the Minnesota Capitol rotunda while the man charged with killing her and her husband, and wounding a state senator and his wife, made a brief court appearance in a suicide prevention suit. Hortman, a Democrat, is the first woman and one of fewer than 20 Minnesotans accorded the honor. She lay in state with her husband, Mark, and their golden retriever, Gilbert. Her husband was also killed in the June 14 attack, and Gilbert was seriously wounded and had to be euthanized. It was the first time a couple has lain in state at the Capitol, and the first time for a dog. The scene at the Capitol The Hortmans' caskets and the dog's urn were arranged in the center of the rotunda, under the Capitol dome, with law enforcement officers keeping watch on either side as thousands of people who lined up filed by. Many fought back tears as they left. Among the first to pay their respects were Gov. Tim Walz, who has called Hortman his closest political ally, and his wife, Gwen. Biden, a Catholic, visited later in the afternoon, walking up to the velvet rope in front of the caskets, making the sign of the cross, and spending a few moments by himself in silence. He then took a knee briefly, got up, made the sign of the cross again, and walked off to greet people waiting in the wings of the rotunda. Biden will attend the funeral, a spokesperson said. So will former Vice President Kamala Harris, though neither is expected to speak. Harris expressed her condolences earlier this week to Hortman's adult children, and spoke with Walz, her running mate on the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, who extended an invitation on behalf of the Hortman family, her office said. Lisa Greene, who lives in Brooklyn Park like Hortman did, but in a different House district, said she came to the Capitol because she had so much respect for the former speaker. 'She was just amazing. Amazing woman. 'And I was just so proud that she represented the city that I lived in,' Greene said in a voice choked with emotion. 'She was such a leader. She could bring people together. She was so accessible. I mean, she was friendly, you could talk to her.' But, she went on to say admiringly, Hortman was also 'a boss. She just knew what she was doing and she could just make things happen.' A hearing takes a twist The man accused of killing the Hortmans and wounding another Democratic lawmaker and his wife made a short court appearance Friday to face charges for what the chief federal prosecutor for Minnesota has called 'a political assassination.' Vance Boelter, 57, of Green Isle, surrendered near his home the night of June 15 after what authorities have called the largest search in Minnesota history. An unshaven Boelter was brought in wearing just a green padded suicide prevention suit and orange slippers. Federal defender Manny Atwal asked Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko to continue the hearing until Thursday. She said Boelter has been sleep deprived while on suicide watch in the Sherburne County Jail, and that it has been difficult to communicate with him as a result. 'Your honor, I haven't really slept in about 12 to 14 days,' Boelter told the judge. And he denied being suicidal. 'I've never been suicidal and I am not suicidal now.' Atwal told the court that Boelter had been in what's known as a 'Gumby suit,' without undergarments, ever since his transfer to the jail after his first court appearance on June 16. She said the lights are on in his area 24 hours a day, doors slam frequently, the inmate in the next cell spreads feces on the walls, and the smell drifts to Boelter's cell. The attorney said transferring him to segregation instead, and giving him a normal jail uniform, would let him get some sleep, restore some dignity, and let him communicate better. The judge agreed. Prosecutors did not object to the delay and said they also had concerns about the jail conditions. The acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joseph Thompson, told reporters afterward that he did not think Boelter had attempted to kill himself. The case continues Boelter did not enter a plea. Prosecutors need to secure a grand jury indictment first, before his arraignment, which is when a plea is normally entered. According to the federal complaint, police video shows Boelter outside the Hortmans' home and captures the sound of gunfire. And it says security video shows Boelter approaching the front doors of two other lawmakers' homes dressed as a police officer. His lawyers have declined to comment on the charges, which could carry the federal death penalty. Thompson said last week that no decision has been made. Minnesota abolished its death penalty in 1911. The Death Penalty Information Center says a federal death penalty case hasn't been prosecuted in Minnesota in the modern era, as best as it can tell. Boelter also faces separate murder and attempted murder charges in state court that could carry life without parole, assuming that county prosecutors get their own indictment for first-degree murder. But federal authorities intend to use their power to try Boelter first. Other victims and alleged targets Authorities say Boelter shot and wounded Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, at their home in Champlin before shooting and killing the Hortmans in their home in the northern Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, a few miles away.
