Latest news with #Boyce
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A Fatal Tick Bite Caused a Man's Brain to ‘Blow Up'
In 2024, a Massachusetts man was bit by a tick. Days later, he collapsed and was hospitalized. Weeks later, he was dead. Now his family is hoping that their tragedy could help to save other people's lives. As CBS News reports, the family of Kevin Boyce is kicking off the summer season by sharing their heartbreak. In April 2024, Boyce got a tick bite without even realizing it. Within a few days, he began experiencing a number of debilitating symptoms that mimicked the flu, including an extreme headache and vomiting. Not long after that, the 62-year-old collapsed in his home and was rushed to Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was diagnosed with Powassan to the New York State Department of Health, many people who are infected with Powassan virus never develop any symptoms. Those who do develop symptoms usually begin experiencing them within one to four weeks of the bite, with fever, headache, vomiting, confusion, and seizures among the initial symptoms. For more severe cases, the onset of symptoms seems to occur more quickly and can include tremors, paralysis, coma, or death. Powassan can also cause encephalitis and meningitis. Powassan virus is rare, but approximately 10 percent of all cases are fatal. And the number of infections appears to be on the rise. In 2024, the scientific journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection published data that indicated a 'four-fold rise' in the number of cases between 2014 to 2023, compared to 2004 to 2013. In Boyce's case, the disease progressed quickly. Boyce's sister, Erin, explained that Kevin was in the ICU, but ultimately the damage his brain sustained was too much. Just a few weeks after being admitted to the hospital, he passed away.'His brain had blown up so much, from the encephalitis, and he had really bad brain damage,' Erin said of her brother, who left a wife, two sons, and a granddaughter behind. One year later, Boyce's family wants to turn their tragedy into a learning lesson—and a warning for others. 'We just want the public to know what to look for and be wary of ticks,' Erin said, 'especially if you have one on your body.' A Fatal Tick Bite Caused a Man's Brain to 'Blow Up' first appeared on Men's Journal on May 30, 2025
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Could a new appeal prompt Maine's supreme court to reconsider its decision on decades-old child sex abuse cases?
May 29—Sexual abuse survivors in Maine are hoping a new appeal — and a new justice — will tip the scales in their favor, as the state's highest court considers yet again whether people should be able to sue for decades-old claims. Earlier this year, 70-year-old George Eaton of Washington County won a lawsuit against Peter Boyce, 81, who Eaton said sexually abused him in the early 1970s. Eaton won by default because Boyce didn't respond to the complaint, according to court records. Boyce was ordered to pay Eaton $1.1 million on Feb. 26 — a month after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court overturned the 2021 law that made Eaton's lawsuit possible by "reviving" claims previously barred. Maine eliminated its statute of limitations for new claims in 2000, but until the 2021 law change people still couldn't sue for abuse that happened before 1987, Boyce, who now has an attorney, appealed that decision. Now, the same court that overturned the law will be asked to consider the issue again — but with one new justice confirmed in March and two justices who signed a dissenting opinion, some advocates hope the outcome will be different. Eaton's lawyer, Michael Bigos, declined to comment on the case. Boyce's attorney, Jed Davis, did not respond to requests Thursday to discuss the appeal and allegations against his client. Bigos represents more than a dozen people who sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland after the 2021 law passed, and whose cases were at the center of the court's decision. He and Timothy Kenlan said in February that their firm was representing at least 100 people whose claims were made possible by the overturned law, although not everyone had filed a complaint in court. The lawyers asked the high court a couple of weeks after the ruling to reconsider. Bigos recently told lawmakers that request was summarily denied. He told the Legislature's Judiciary Committee that he hopes this appeal will end differently. He cited the court's new composition and the arguments made by the dissenting justices, who "raised issues that we believe are unsolved." He said the court's majority opinion overlooked Mainers' rights to substantive due process under the state constitution, instead favoring principles dating to the 1600s "as a rationale for the majority to declare this unconstitutional." He was testifying on LD 1978, which would allow people to sue governmental entities whose employees sexually abused them as children. (Such employers, including public schools and law enforcement agencies, are immune from most lawsuits. There is no exception for child sexual abuse.) Rep. Ellie Sato, D-Gorham, noticed that the bill would eliminate a statute of limitation for those claims even after the supreme court's ruling in January. "How is this language different from that language, to make sure that the Law Court doesn't strike it down again?" Sato asked. Bigos said he believes the Legislature still has the right to pass laws that serve their constituents. "It is this practitioner's belief, and many others,' that the Maine judiciary exceeded its authority by impinging on the legislative authority, by declaring that (2021 law) unconstitutional," Bigos said. DEFAULT JUDGMENT Bigos and Davis have until later this summer to file briefs with the court outlining their arguments. In his civil complaint, Eaton said Boyce abused him around July 1970, when Eaton was 15 years old. He said Boyce had hired him to do odd jobs around his workplace at Johnson Bay Marine, according to the complaint. Over the following year, Eaton said he was abused several times in Boyce's home, workplace and on a trip to New York, often after being given alcohol. Eaton said he cut contact with Boyce in 1971 and told his parents what had happened. Now, more than 50 years later, Eaton said he still struggles with the trauma, the shame and betrayal. In awarding damages to Eaton, Superior Court Justice Harold L. Stewart quoted a psychological expert who testified on Eaton's behalf during a hearing Feb. 5, who said Eaton has difficulty trusting others and still experiences a constant "fear of the world." The expert said it's likely Eaton's medical costs for therapy and other treatment will exceed $100,000 in the next 15 years. Stewart wrote on Feb. 26 that he was aware of the high court's decision, but that it's the defendant's responsibility to raise the issue of a statute of limitations. This defendant never responded to the complaint against him. "The incident in this case occurred in 1970," Stewart wrote. "Plaintiff has lived with the effects and trauma of the sexual abuse committed by Defendant for 55 years." 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Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
How a pair of Palos Verdes altar boys grew up to be Soviet spies
Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were childhood friends, altar boys raised in the Catholic pews and prosperous suburbs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. By the mid-1970s, Boyce was angry about the Vietnam War and Watergate. He was a liberal, a stoner and a lover of falcons. Lee, a doctor's adopted son, was a cocaine and heroin pusher who was spiraling into addiction. How they became spies for the Soviet Union is a story emblematic of 1970s Southern California, where the state's massive Cold War aerospace industry collided with its youthful anti-establishment currents. Everyone agrees it should never have been possible. In the summer of 1974, Boyce, a bright but disaffected 21-year-old college dropout, got a job as a clerk at the TRW Defense and Space Systems complex in Redondo Beach. He won entree through the old-boys network: His father, who ran security for an aircraft contractor and was once an FBI agent, had called in a favor. Boyce made $140 a week at the defense plant and held down a second job tending bar. TRW investigators had performed only a perfunctory background check. They skipped his peers, who might have revealed his links to the drug culture and to Lee, who already had multiple drug busts and a serious cocaine habit — the white powder that would inspire his nickname. In "The Falcon and the Snowman," Robert Lindsey's account of the case, the author describes Boyce beginning the day by popping amphetamines and winding down after a shift puffing a joint in the TRW parking lot. Falconry was his biggest passion. "Flying a falcon in exactly the same way that men had done centuries before Christ transplanted Chris into their time," Lindsey wrote. Boyce impressed his bosses and was soon cleared to enter the steel-doored fortress called the "black vault," a classified sanctum where he was exposed to sensitive CIA communications pertaining to America's network of espionage satellites. The satellites eavesdropped on Russian missiles and defense installations. Among the goals was to thwart a surprise nuclear attack. Reading CIA communiques, Boyce didn't like what he saw. Among its other sins, he decided, the U.S. government was deceiving its Australian allies by hiding satellite intelligence it had promised to share and meddling in the country's elections. "I just was in total disagreement with the whole direction of Western society," Boyce told The Times many years later. He attributed his espionage opportunity to "synchronicity," explaining: "How many kids can get a summer job working in an encrypted communications vault?" Soon he made his life's "biggest, dumbest decision." He told his buddy Lee they might sell government secrets to the Soviets. Lee talked his way into the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, where Russians fed him caviar and bought classified documents with the toast, "To peace." Lee's KGB handlers devised protocols. When he wanted to meet, he would tape an X to lampposts at designated intersections around Mexico City. For more than a year, thousands of classified documents flowed from the TRW complex to the Soviets, with Boyce sometimes smuggling them out in potted plants. In exchange, he and Lee received an estimated $70,000. At parties, Lee showed off his miniature Minox camera and bragged that he was engaged in spycraft. In January 1977, desperate for money to finance a heroin deal, he flouted KGB instructions and appeared unannounced outside the Soviet Embassy. Mexican police thought he looked suspicious and arrested him. He held an envelope with filmstrips documenting a U.S. satellite project called Pyramider. Under questioning, Lee revealed the name of his co-conspirator and childhood friend, who soon was also under arrest. Boyce had just returned from a hawk-trapping trip in the mountains. The espionage trials of the two men presented special challenges for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. The Carter administration was ready to pull the plug on the case if it meant airing too many secrets, but a strategy was devised: Prosecutors would focus on the Pyramider documents, which involved a system that never actually got off the ground. Joel Levine, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Boyce and Lee, said only a fraction of what they sold to the Soviets ever came out at trial. "I was told these other projects should not be revealed. It's too costly to our government, and you can't base a prosecution on them either in whole or in part," Levine said in a recent interview. "You just gotta stay away from it." For federal prosecutors in L.A., hanging over the case was the memory of a recent humiliation: the collapse of the Pentagon Papers trial, as a result of the Nixon administration's attempt to bribe the presiding judge with a job. It had caught prosecutors by surprise. "We were afraid it would ruin our reputation forever if something like that were to happen," Levine said. "So we made it very, very clear right from the get-go that if we smelled something like that was afoot, we would walk into court and have the case dismissed on our own." The defendants had sharply different motives. Lee was in it for the money, Richard Stilz, one of the prosecutors, said in a recent interview. But "Boyce was totally ideology. He wanted to damage the United States government," Stilz said. "He just hated this country, period." The defendants got separate trials. A rift that had been growing between them deepened with their mutually hostile defenses. Lee's defense: Boyce had led him to believe he was working for the CIA, feeding misinformation to the Russians. Jurors convicted Lee of espionage, nonetheless, and a judge gave him a life term. Boyce's defense: Lee had blackmailed him into espionage by threatening to expose a letter he had written, while stoned on hashish, alleging secret knowledge of CIA malfeasance. Jurors convicted Boyce as well, and a judge gave him 40 years. In January 1980, at a federal prison in Lompoc, Boyce hid in a drainpipe and sprinted to freedom over a fence. He was on the run for 19 months. He robbed banks in the Pacific Northwest until federal agents caught him outside a burger joint in Washington state. He was convicted of bank robbery and got 28 more years. In 1985, the same year a popular film adaptation of "The Falcon and the Snowman" was released, Boyce testified on Capitol Hill about the despair attending a life of espionage. "There was no thrill," he said. "There was only depression, and a hopeless enslavement to an inhuman, uncaring foreign bureaucracy.... No American who has gone to the KGB has not come to regret it." He spoke of how easily he had been allowed to access classified material at TRW. "Security was a joke," he said, describing regular Bacardi-fueled parties in the black vault. "We used the code destruction blender for making banana daiquiris and mai tais." Cait Mills was working as a paralegal in San Diego when she read the Lindsey book and became fascinated by the case. She thought Lee had been unfairly maligned, and she spent the next two decades fighting to win him parole. She got letters of support from the prosecutors and the sentencing judge attesting that Lee had made strides toward rehabilitation. He had taken classes in prison and become a dental technician. He won parole in 1998. She turned her attention to freeing Boyce, with whom she fell in love. She wrote to the Russians and asked how much value there had been in the stolen TRW documents and received a fax claiming it was useless. He got out in 2002, and they married. They later divorced but remain close. Both live in central Oregon. Stilz maintains the damage to America was "enormous." "In a murder case, you have one victim and a person dies," Stilz said. "In an espionage case, the whole country is a victim. We were so far advanced over the Russians in spy satellite technology. They leveled the playing field. That's probably the most important point." He gives no credence to the Russian government's claim that it derived no value from the secret information. "Of course they'd say that," Stilz said. "What do you think they'd say? 'Oh yeah, it allowed us to catch up with the United States in terms of spying.' They're not gonna say that." Cait Mills Boyce said that Boyce and Lee, childhood best friends, no longer speak, and that the silence between them wounds Boyce. "He said, 'I love that man; I always loved him. He was my best friend.' It hurt him so badly." She said Boyce, now in his 70s, lives a solitary life and immerses himself in the world of falconry. "His entire life, and I kid you not, is falconry," she said. "He will die with a falcon on his arm." Part of what pushed him into the world of espionage, she thinks, was the challenge. "I think his uncommon smarts led him down a whimsical path that ended up being a disastrous path, not just for him but for everybody involved," she said. 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.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
How a pair of Palos Verdes altar boys grew up to be Soviet spies
Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were childhood friends, altar boys raised in the Catholic pews and prosperous suburbs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. By the mid-1970s, Boyce was angry about the Vietnam War and Watergate. He was a liberal, a stoner and a lover of falcons. Lee, a doctor's adopted son, was a cocaine and heroin pusher who was spiraling into addiction. How they became spies for the Soviet Union is a story emblematic of 1970s Southern California, where the state's massive Cold War aerospace industry collided with its youthful anti-establishment currents. Everyone agrees it should never have been possible. In the summer of 1974, Boyce, a bright but disaffected 21-year-old college dropout, got a job as a clerk at the TRW Defense and Space Systems complex in Redondo Beach. He won entree through the old-boys network: His father, who ran security for an aircraft contractor and was once an FBI agent, had called in a favor. Boyce made $140 a week at the defense plant and held down a second job tending bar. TRW investigators had performed only a perfunctory background check. They skipped his peers, who might have revealed his links to the drug culture and to Lee, who already had multiple drug busts and a serious cocaine habit — the white powder that would inspire his nickname. In 'The Falcon and the Snowman,' Robert Lindsey's account of the case, the author describes Boyce beginning the day by popping amphetamines and winding down after a shift puffing a joint in the TRW parking lot. Falconry was his biggest passion. 'Flying a falcon in exactly the same way that men had done centuries before Christ transplanted Chris into their time,' Lindsey wrote. Boyce impressed his bosses and was soon cleared to enter the steel-doored fortress called the 'black vault,' a classified sanctum where he was exposed to sensitive CIA communications pertaining to America's network of espionage satellites. The satellites eavesdropped on Russian missiles and defense installations. Among the goals was to thwart a surprise nuclear attack. Reading CIA communiques, Boyce didn't like what he saw. Among its other sins, he decided, the U.S. government was deceiving its Australian allies by hiding satellite intelligence it had promised to share and meddling in the country's elections. 'I just was in total disagreement with the whole direction of Western society,' Boyce told The Times many years later. He attributed his espionage opportunity to 'synchronicity,' explaining: 'How many kids can get a summer job working in an encrypted communications vault?' Soon he made his life's 'biggest, dumbest decision.' He told his buddy Lee they might sell government secrets to the Soviets. Lee talked his way into the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, where Russians fed him caviar and bought classified documents with the toast, 'To peace.' Lee's KGB handlers devised protocols. When he wanted to meet, he would tape an X to lampposts at designated intersections around Mexico City. For more than a year, thousands of classified documents flowed from the TRW complex to the Soviets, with Boyce sometimes smuggling them out in potted plants. In exchange, he and Lee received an estimated $70,000. At parties, Lee showed off his miniature Minox camera and bragged that he was engaged in spycraft. In January 1977, desperate for money to finance a heroin deal, he flouted KGB instructions and appeared unannounced outside the Soviet Embassy. Mexican police thought he looked suspicious and arrested him. He held an envelope with filmstrips documenting a U.S. satellite project called Pyramider. Under questioning, Lee revealed the name of his co-conspirator and childhood friend, who soon was also under arrest. Boyce had just returned from a hawk-trapping trip in the mountains. The espionage trials of the two men presented special challenges for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. The Carter administration was ready to pull the plug on the case if it meant airing too many secrets, but a strategy was devised: Prosecutors would focus on the Pyramider documents, which involved a system that never actually got off the ground. Joel Levine, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Boyce and Lee, said only a fraction of what they sold to the Soviets ever came out at trial. 'I was told these other projects should not be revealed. It's too costly to our government, and you can't base a prosecution on them either in whole or in part,' Levine said in a recent interview. 'You just gotta stay away from it.' For federal prosecutors in L.A., hanging over the case was the memory of a recent humiliation: the collapse of the Pentagon Papers trial, as a result of the Nixon administration's attempt to bribe the presiding judge with a job. It had caught prosecutors by surprise. 'We were afraid it would ruin our reputation forever if something like that were to happen,' Levine said. 'So we made it very, very clear right from the get-go that if we smelled something like that was afoot, we would walk into court and have the case dismissed on our own.' The defendants had sharply different motives. Lee was in it for the money, Richard Stilz, one of the prosecutors, said in a recent interview. But 'Boyce was totally ideology. He wanted to damage the United States government,' Stilz said. 'He just hated this country, period.' The defendants got separate trials. A rift that had been growing between them deepened with their mutually hostile defenses. Lee's defense: Boyce had led him to believe he was working for the CIA, feeding misinformation to the Russians. Jurors convicted Lee of espionage, nonetheless, and a judge gave him a life term. Boyce's defense: Lee had blackmailed him into espionage by threatening to expose a letter he had written, while stoned on hashish, alleging secret knowledge of CIA malfeasance. Jurors convicted Boyce as well, and a judge gave him 40 years. In January 1980, at a federal prison in Lompoc, Boyce hid in a drainpipe and sprinted to freedom over a fence. He was on the run for 19 months. He robbed banks in the Pacific Northwest until federal agents caught him outside a burger joint in Washington state. He was convicted of bank robbery and got 28 more years. In 1985, the same year a popular film adaptation of 'The Falcon and the Snowman' was released, Boyce testified on Capitol Hill about the despair attending a life of espionage. 'There was no thrill,' he said. 'There was only depression, and a hopeless enslavement to an inhuman, uncaring foreign bureaucracy.... No American who has gone to the KGB has not come to regret it.' He spoke of how easily he had been allowed to access classified material at TRW. 'Security was a joke,' he said, describing regular Bacardi-fueled parties in the black vault. 'We used the code destruction blender for making banana daiquiris and mai tais.' Cait Mills was working as a paralegal in San Diego when she read the Lindsey book and became fascinated by the case. She thought Lee had been unfairly maligned, and she spent the next two decades fighting to win him parole. She got letters of support from the prosecutors and the sentencing judge attesting that Lee had made strides toward rehabilitation. He had taken classes in prison and become a dental technician. He won parole in 1998. She turned her attention to freeing Boyce, with whom she fell in love. She wrote to the Russians and asked how much value there had been in the stolen TRW documents and received a fax claiming it was useless. He got out in 2002, and they married. They later divorced but remain close. Both live in central Oregon. Stilz maintains the damage to America was 'enormous.' 'In a murder case, you have one victim and a person dies,' Stilz said. 'In an espionage case, the whole country is a victim. We were so far advanced over the Russians in spy satellite technology. They leveled the playing field. That's probably the most important point.' He gives no credence to the Russian government's claim that it derived no value from the secret information. 'Of course they'd say that,' Stilz said. 'What do you think they'd say? 'Oh yeah, it allowed us to catch up with the United States in terms of spying.' They're not gonna say that.' Cait Mills Boyce said that Boyce and Lee, childhood best friends, no longer speak, and that the silence between them wounds Boyce. 'He said, 'I love that man; I always loved him. He was my best friend.' It hurt him so badly.' She said Boyce, now in his 70s, lives a solitary life and immerses himself in the world of falconry. 'His entire life, and I kid you not, is falconry,' she said. 'He will die with a falcon on his arm.' Part of what pushed him into the world of espionage, she thinks, was the challenge. 'I think his uncommon smarts led him down a whimsical path that ended up being a disastrous path, not just for him but for everybody involved,' she said.
Express Tribune
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Dove Cameron pays tribute to Cameron Boyce on his 26th birthday
On what would have been Cameron Boyce's 26th birthday, Dove Cameron and fellow Descendants cast members paid tribute to the late Disney star, who passed away in 2019 due to epilepsy complications. Cameron Boyce died at age 20 after suffering a seizure in his sleep. On Wednesday, May 28, Dove Cameron honored her close friend and former co-star by posting a series of black-and-white photos on Instagram. Her caption read, 'I still feel you all the time. catch you in the next life. happy birthday. i love you.' The post included touching images of the two embracing, a tattoo Dove got in his honor (a firearm with roses, symbolizing Boyce's anti-gun violence advocacy), and a group photo with Descendants co-stars Sofia Carson and Booboo Stewart. Carson also shared a tribute, featuring a photo of Boyce mid-dance with the caption, 'Keep dancing in heaven, my Cam. Earth could never be the same without you.' Stewart posted a Story saying, 'Love you always, happy birthday,' over a nostalgic image of them sharing a milkshake. Director Kenny Ortega, who worked closely with Boyce on the Descendants films, wrote a heartfelt message praising Boyce's light and legacy, encouraging fans to support the Cameron Boyce Foundation. The organization focuses on using the arts for positive change and raising awareness about SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy). Cameron Boyce's memory continues to inspire through the foundation's mission and the ongoing love from those who knew and admired him.
