Latest news with #pregnant
CBS News
a day ago
- CBS News
Man convicted of fatally shooting pregnant Amish woman inside Pennsylvania home
A man has been found guilty of murdering a pregnant Amish woman inside her Pennsylvania home last year, authorities said. Shawn Cranston was convicted on Thursday of first-degree murder, second-degree murder of an unborn child, and related charges in connection with the death of 23-year-old Rebekah Byler, the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General said in a news release. A Crawford County jury found Cranston guilty after four days of testimony, the AG's office said. He will be sentenced next month. Shawn Cranston convicted in killing of Rebekah Byler The attorney general's office said Cranson targeted Byler's home for a robbery and killed her after encountering her alone in her home home on Fish Flats Road in Sparta Township on Feb. 26. He slit her throat and shot her, officals said. An autopsy previously showed the 23-year-old victim died of sharp force injuries and a gunshot wound to the head. A pregnant Amish woman was found dead inside her home in Crawford County. (Photo: Provided) "It is hard to fathom conduct more heinous than brutally killing a young expectant mother and her unborn child in her home," Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said in the news release. "Our homes are supposed to be our safe haven — this defendant violated the sanctity of home to commit these truly evil acts." Authorities said investigators tied the man to the crime with key pieces of evidence, including a piece of a glove found at the home with Cranston's DNA on it. Police said during the investigation that Byler's two young children were home at the time of her death. They were not physically harmed. Officials had said Cranston was a truck driver who lived in Corry, about 8 miles from the Byler home.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Washington Post
A truck driver is convicted in the fatal shooting of an Amish woman in her Pennsylvania home
MEADVILLE, Pa. — A jury convicted a 53-year-old truck driver Thursday of shooting to death a pregnant Amish woman inside her rural Pennsylvania home early last year. Shawn Christopher Cranston was charged a few weeks after Rebekah Byler, 23, was found dead in the living room of her rural Spartansburg home.
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
A truck driver is convicted in the fatal shooting of an Amish woman in her Pennsylvania home
A jury convicted a 53-year-old truck driver Thursday of shooting to death a pregnant Amish woman inside her rural Pennsylvania home early last year. Shawn Christopher Cranston was charged a few weeks after Rebekah Byler, 23, was found dead in the living room of her rural Spartansburg home. Cranston was convicted in Crawford County of first-degree murder, second-degree murder of an unborn child and related offenses. He is scheduled for sentencing in late July. 'It is hard to fathom conduct more heinous than brutally killing a young expectant mother and her unborn child in her home,' Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said in an emailed release. 'Our homes are supposed to be our safe haven — this defendant violated the sanctity of home to commit these truly evil acts.' A message seeking comment was left for Cranston's lawyer, Louis W. Emmi. Police have said Byler's children, a 2-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy, were in the home when their mother suffered sharp wounds to her neck and was shot in the head. The boy told investigators a man wearing sneakers had killed his mother. The children were not physically harmed. Members of the area's substantial Amish community attended the trial this week. Investigators have said they began to focus on Cranston within a day of the killing and took several items during a search of his home in Corry, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from Spartansburg. Byler's husband, Andy Byler, said during an earlier court proceeding that the children told him about the crime when he returned home from looking at possible roofing jobs. She had been doing laundry when he left earlier that day. 'I didn't really believe it,' Andy Byler testified last year. 'I walked in and saw her cap laying inside the door.'
The Independent
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
An Israeli woman on her way to give birth was killed in a West Bank attack
Tzeela Gez was on her way to the hospital to bring new life into this world when hers was suddenly cut short. As her husband drove their car through the winding roads of the occupied West Bank late Wednesday, a Palestinian attacker shot at them. Within hours, Gez, nine months pregnant, was dead. Doctors barely saved the life of the baby, who is in serious but stable condition. Israel says it is trying to prevent such attacks by waging a monthslong crackdown on West Bank militants that intensified earlier this year. But the escalating offensive, which has killed hundreds of Palestinians over 19 months, displaced tens of thousands and caused widespread destruction, has ultimately not snuffed out attacks. And the latest bloodshed is only likely to fuel a cycle of violence that has persisted for decades between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel has pledged to find the attacker, who fled the scene, and the military chief of staff, who visited the area Thursday, told troops that the broader operation would continue alongside the manhunt. "We will use all the tools at our disposal and reach the murderers in order to hold them accountable,' Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said, according to a statement from the military, which said it had sealed Palestinian villages in the area of the attack and set up checkpoints. The shooting, especially because the victim was a pregnant mother with three other children, has the potential to ignite vigilante violence against Palestinians by radical Jewish settlers. They regularly storm Palestinian towns and villages, burning and damaging property, in response to such attacks. Marauding settlers are rarely held to account for their actions and Palestinians are left to pick up the pieces of the destruction with little recourse to compensation or assistance from Israeli authorities. 'A mother in her essence' Gez, 37, and her husband Hananel, were residents of Bruchin, a settlement of some 2,900 in the northern West Bank. She worked as a therapist and on her Facebook page, shared developments in her professional life as well as her thoughts on the war in Gaza, the fallen Israeli soldiers and the hostages still held by Hamas. Meital Ben Yosef, head of the settlement's local council, told Israeli Army radio that Gez was 'all mother. A mother in her essence.' 'A couple of parents were driving to the happiest moment that a parent can experience and the wife is killed on the way. It's a horrific incident,' she said. Photos of the car released by the military showed a bullet hole on the passenger side of the windshield and a streak of blood on a back door. Soldiers searched the rugged brush on the sides of the road following the attack, according to video released by the Israeli military. Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas' armed wing, praised the attack as 'heroic' in a video statement Wednesday but stopped short of saying the militant group was behind it. On Thursday, military checkpoints slowed down traffic on roads in the vicinity of the attack, and many Palestinian motorists were at a standstill as they tried to make their journeys, according to video shared on social media. Concern about reprisal attacks The attack sparked outrage and calls for revenge. 'Just as we are flattening Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza, we must flatten the nests of terror in Judea and Samaria,' wrote the Israeli finance minister and a settler firebrand, Bezalel Smotrich, in a post on X, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name. The violence in the West Bank escalated when the war in Gaza erupted with Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel. Israel has staged frequent raids in the territory, especially but not limited to its north, using ground and air power in violence that has killed many militants but also other Palestinians, some of them throwing rocks to protest the incursions as well as others not involved in confrontations. Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, all territories the Palestinians seek for a future independent state. Around 500,000 Jewish settlers now live in about 130 settlements scattered across the West Bank. Much of the international community views settlements as illegal and an obstacle to Palestinian statehood. Israel views the West Bank as its biblical heartland and believes the fate of the settlements should be determined in peace negotiations, which have been moribund for some 15 years. Israel says much of the Palestinian militancy in the West Bank is fueled by Iran and views the fighting there as part of its ongoing multifront wars to secure its borders and prevent a second Oct. 7-style attack. ___ Associated Press writers Jalal Bwaitel in Ramallah, West Bank, and Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut contributed. ___
