Tuesday, July 20, 2004
My creation after problems with posting on myway.com
Today our media is filled with hate, lies, halftruths, untruths, misquotes, miscommunications, theivery, squandry, pork barrel spending, governement wasteful spending, political crooks, political mobsters, mob ties, illegal campaign contributions, S&L ties, Nazi ties, name-calling, mud-slinging, rapes, molestations, degradations, murders, etc.
We, also, have the on-going US-Iraq war, which should have been short and to the point, but is now lengthy and extremely costly, in lives and money. I wanted to post this thread to bring everybody closer to home. Rural America. A story I read this morning that brought tears to my eyes. While our government is pi$$ing away taxpayer money salvaging foreign countries, crime is still running rampant in our own country. As is homelessness, education funding losses, job losses, etc.The immigration into this country is astounding and needs to be curtailed. Everyone needs to band together and tell Georgie Bush, Vincente Fox & Tony Blair and the entire United Nations to sit their pansy a$$es down, "We, the People, are taking our country back!"
Remember all of this when you all head to the polls in November.
Thank you!
We, also, have the on-going US-Iraq war, which should have been short and to the point, but is now lengthy and extremely costly, in lives and money. I wanted to post this thread to bring everybody closer to home. Rural America. A story I read this morning that brought tears to my eyes. While our government is pi$$ing away taxpayer money salvaging foreign countries, crime is still running rampant in our own country. As is homelessness, education funding losses, job losses, etc.The immigration into this country is astounding and needs to be curtailed. Everyone needs to band together and tell Georgie Bush, Vincente Fox & Tony Blair and the entire United Nations to sit their pansy a$$es down, "We, the People, are taking our country back!"
Remember all of this when you all head to the polls in November.
Thank you!
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Now for the story:
Pain from teen's death festers in Kansas town
By ERIC ADLER
The Kansas City Star
ARGONIA, Kan. — For 10 days Carissa Stansbury, sleepless in grief, kept herself from coming to this spot, a lonely railroad crossing on a dirt road beside a still wheat field.
Now, she thought, it was time.
Brown dust settles behind her Pontiac as she steps from the door. Eyes red, a note clasped in her hand, she walks toward a make-shift memorial at the side of the tracks. She sits cross-legged in front of an array of silk flowers, a wooden cross and an Argonia Raiders basketball covered with the names of classmates written in black marker.
This is the rail line where two weeks ago her best friend, 19-year-old Jake Allen — Argonia High School's 2004 valedictorian, a 5-foot-11-inch varsity athlete and, by all accounts, one of the most decent and upbeat teenagers in this community of 530 persons — was found brutally and mysteriously killed.
No one in this cluster of tiny farm towns south of Wichita recalls a case more grisly, more confusing or more certain to cause further pain.
As the investigation winds on, rumors here and in neighboring towns have begun spreading like poisoned groundwater. Gerald Gilkey, Sumner County's 35-year-old sheriff, has refused to disclose any of his findings and has not classified the death as a crime. “Right now, it's being investigated as a death,” he says, “Which means we're trying to find out what happened.”
But in this area where virtually everyone knows everyone else, and where many people are related, fingers are starting to be pointed, names are being named. Tension is increasing.
While Gilkey has many supporters, as the days and weeks pass with no arrest or even information, criticism of the sheriff, who faces a challenger in the August primary, is mounting.
“When the sheriff sits there and tells these kids that they're not sure it's a crime yet, what they hear is that it's a suicide. They think, ‘Don't tell us that a crime didn't happen when we know it did!' ” says Rebecca Salsbery who, living a field away from the crossing, knew nothing of the death until police knocked on her door.
Like so many others, Stansbury is confused. She is angry.
In her mind, none of it makes sense. One moment, around 8 p.m. on July 4th, she is joking with Allen on the telephone. He's hanging out in the bedroom in the finished basement of his parents' home, a prosperous spread with a manicured lawn seven miles east of town.
“Come on out,” she says, cajoling him to join friends to watch fireworks.
No, she says he told her, he was staying home with his family.
A few hours later, at 3:20 a.m. on July 5, investigators stood on the tracks three miles from Allen's home, shining flashlights on the remains of his body.
Allen —alive or dead, no one yet knows — had been on the tracks (some news reports say he was bound with baling wire) before being crushed at 2:55 a.m. beneath a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight roaring west at 60 mph.
Stansbury stands up from the memorial. A freight train blasts by.
Every 20 minutes the trains come, day and night, cutting across the fields as they always have. But now the trains that everyone took for granted are an omnipresent reminder of what happened here at the Bluff Street crossing.
Stansbury closes and then opens her eyes. Tears drizzle down her cheeks.
“I just want people to know he didn't do anything wrong,” she says as the train clatters by. “Jake was the greatest guy.”
That makes the death all the more mysterious.
***
The Allen family and their relatives have politely refused to talk to the media. But on Argonia's Main Street, a strip of clapboard shops no more than 200 yards long, people talk about a family that should be nothing but proud.
Joe and Brenda Allen, successful hog and grain farmers of strong Catholic faith, have raised six good children, people say, none better than Jacob Laurent Allen.
“So much promise — gone,” the grandmotherly proprietress of the R&S Furniture and Carpet store says of Allen, then turns away and breaks into tears.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “It's too hard.”
Nearby, for Pat Conklin, who owns the Quilters' Nook and was Allen's school librarian, it is the same.
“I told my husband: I can't stand the sound of that train any more,” she says.
Here was a child who all his life seemed to do everything right. Respectful of adults, he also loved to help small children, playing with them, giving tips on sports. He went to church with his parents.
In his small school (graduating class: 14) he was in the National Honor Society, played tuba in the band and acted in theater. Lean, strong and driven, he played basketball and eight-man football, guided by the words he placed by his name on the weight-room wall:
“The strongest muscle is the heart.”
When his knees went bad in football, Allen worked through three surgeries to come back and play. When at 19, he began developing a receding hairline, he simply laughed and shaved his head.
“He didn't care,” David Simon, one of Allen's best friends, said by telephone. “He thought he looked good with a bald head.”
Even in eighth grade, he didn't despair when he accidentally fell on a stick, jabbed it into one of his eyes and ruined much of his vision. Instead, the surgeries sparked an interest in optometry. This fall, he had planned to go to Northeastern State University in Oklahoma because it offered a doctorate in the field.
“Everybody looked up to him, including me,” Simon says. “He never gave up.”
***
In the absence of answers, people speculate, sometimes in wild ways.
Was his death a horrible accident, a scare prank gone wrong?
Did he stumble upon a methamphetamine drug dealer in his lair?
Did a simple quarrel lead to a horrible end?
On a night before he was killed, Allen's friends say, he was in a nearby town and got into an argument, apparently flirting with someone else's girl.
“There was an altercation,” says Michael Cline, editor of the Conway Springs Star and The Argonia Argosy.
But the thought that a teenage argument might have anything to do with his death is speculation, too. People here are loath to think that anything so trivial could lead to a death.
“None of us wants it to be someone from our town, because we don't have a bad town,” says Dalice Cline, who helps manage the newspaper.
No one — save, perhaps, for Allen's family, the sheriff and the two investigators from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation helping with the case — really knows anything.
Questions hang in the air. Why did he leave his home? When? How? Was he abducted? Did he go on his own? And what happened at the crossing?
To all these questions, Gilkey, the sheriff, responds that rumors are rumors, facts are facts, evidence is evidence.
And not until 100 percent of the evidence is gathered, including forensics from the medical examiner — which Gilkey said may take several weeks — will he speculate on Jake Allen's case, except to say this:
“I'm 100 percent sure it will be solved. I'm not 100 percent sure it will be solved to the public's liking.”
In Argonia, Pat Conklin, the school librarian, knows what Gilkey means. In small towns, everyone is connected.
“If somebody is arrested and gets charged,” she says, “it's going to destroy more than one family.”
Back at the crossing, Stansbury stares at the ground as the train disappears down the track. For a second, she smiles a wan smile, as her mind fills with something Allen's dad told her after the funeral
Hugging Joe Allen and crying in his arms, Stansbury says she told him that she didn't know how she was going to cope. She didn't know if she could ever see the train again, or hear its horn blast, without imagining what her best friend might have suffered.
In his own grief, Allen comforted her, Stansbury says. She says he held her and he told her that everything was going to be OK, and offered words that made her smile.
“I'll tell you what he told me,” Stansbury said. “ ‘Every time we hear the whistle blow, we'll just think of it as Jake saying hello.' ”
To reach Eric Adler, features reporter, call (816) 234-4431 or send e-mail to eadler@kcstar.com.
Pain from teen's death festers in Kansas town
By ERIC ADLER
The Kansas City Star
ARGONIA, Kan. — For 10 days Carissa Stansbury, sleepless in grief, kept herself from coming to this spot, a lonely railroad crossing on a dirt road beside a still wheat field.
Now, she thought, it was time.
Brown dust settles behind her Pontiac as she steps from the door. Eyes red, a note clasped in her hand, she walks toward a make-shift memorial at the side of the tracks. She sits cross-legged in front of an array of silk flowers, a wooden cross and an Argonia Raiders basketball covered with the names of classmates written in black marker.
This is the rail line where two weeks ago her best friend, 19-year-old Jake Allen — Argonia High School's 2004 valedictorian, a 5-foot-11-inch varsity athlete and, by all accounts, one of the most decent and upbeat teenagers in this community of 530 persons — was found brutally and mysteriously killed.
No one in this cluster of tiny farm towns south of Wichita recalls a case more grisly, more confusing or more certain to cause further pain.
As the investigation winds on, rumors here and in neighboring towns have begun spreading like poisoned groundwater. Gerald Gilkey, Sumner County's 35-year-old sheriff, has refused to disclose any of his findings and has not classified the death as a crime. “Right now, it's being investigated as a death,” he says, “Which means we're trying to find out what happened.”
But in this area where virtually everyone knows everyone else, and where many people are related, fingers are starting to be pointed, names are being named. Tension is increasing.
While Gilkey has many supporters, as the days and weeks pass with no arrest or even information, criticism of the sheriff, who faces a challenger in the August primary, is mounting.
“When the sheriff sits there and tells these kids that they're not sure it's a crime yet, what they hear is that it's a suicide. They think, ‘Don't tell us that a crime didn't happen when we know it did!' ” says Rebecca Salsbery who, living a field away from the crossing, knew nothing of the death until police knocked on her door.
Like so many others, Stansbury is confused. She is angry.
In her mind, none of it makes sense. One moment, around 8 p.m. on July 4th, she is joking with Allen on the telephone. He's hanging out in the bedroom in the finished basement of his parents' home, a prosperous spread with a manicured lawn seven miles east of town.
“Come on out,” she says, cajoling him to join friends to watch fireworks.
No, she says he told her, he was staying home with his family.
A few hours later, at 3:20 a.m. on July 5, investigators stood on the tracks three miles from Allen's home, shining flashlights on the remains of his body.
Allen —alive or dead, no one yet knows — had been on the tracks (some news reports say he was bound with baling wire) before being crushed at 2:55 a.m. beneath a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight roaring west at 60 mph.
Stansbury stands up from the memorial. A freight train blasts by.
Every 20 minutes the trains come, day and night, cutting across the fields as they always have. But now the trains that everyone took for granted are an omnipresent reminder of what happened here at the Bluff Street crossing.
Stansbury closes and then opens her eyes. Tears drizzle down her cheeks.
“I just want people to know he didn't do anything wrong,” she says as the train clatters by. “Jake was the greatest guy.”
That makes the death all the more mysterious.
***
The Allen family and their relatives have politely refused to talk to the media. But on Argonia's Main Street, a strip of clapboard shops no more than 200 yards long, people talk about a family that should be nothing but proud.
Joe and Brenda Allen, successful hog and grain farmers of strong Catholic faith, have raised six good children, people say, none better than Jacob Laurent Allen.
“So much promise — gone,” the grandmotherly proprietress of the R&S Furniture and Carpet store says of Allen, then turns away and breaks into tears.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “It's too hard.”
Nearby, for Pat Conklin, who owns the Quilters' Nook and was Allen's school librarian, it is the same.
“I told my husband: I can't stand the sound of that train any more,” she says.
Here was a child who all his life seemed to do everything right. Respectful of adults, he also loved to help small children, playing with them, giving tips on sports. He went to church with his parents.
In his small school (graduating class: 14) he was in the National Honor Society, played tuba in the band and acted in theater. Lean, strong and driven, he played basketball and eight-man football, guided by the words he placed by his name on the weight-room wall:
“The strongest muscle is the heart.”
When his knees went bad in football, Allen worked through three surgeries to come back and play. When at 19, he began developing a receding hairline, he simply laughed and shaved his head.
“He didn't care,” David Simon, one of Allen's best friends, said by telephone. “He thought he looked good with a bald head.”
Even in eighth grade, he didn't despair when he accidentally fell on a stick, jabbed it into one of his eyes and ruined much of his vision. Instead, the surgeries sparked an interest in optometry. This fall, he had planned to go to Northeastern State University in Oklahoma because it offered a doctorate in the field.
“Everybody looked up to him, including me,” Simon says. “He never gave up.”
***
In the absence of answers, people speculate, sometimes in wild ways.
Was his death a horrible accident, a scare prank gone wrong?
Did he stumble upon a methamphetamine drug dealer in his lair?
Did a simple quarrel lead to a horrible end?
On a night before he was killed, Allen's friends say, he was in a nearby town and got into an argument, apparently flirting with someone else's girl.
“There was an altercation,” says Michael Cline, editor of the Conway Springs Star and The Argonia Argosy.
But the thought that a teenage argument might have anything to do with his death is speculation, too. People here are loath to think that anything so trivial could lead to a death.
“None of us wants it to be someone from our town, because we don't have a bad town,” says Dalice Cline, who helps manage the newspaper.
No one — save, perhaps, for Allen's family, the sheriff and the two investigators from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation helping with the case — really knows anything.
Questions hang in the air. Why did he leave his home? When? How? Was he abducted? Did he go on his own? And what happened at the crossing?
To all these questions, Gilkey, the sheriff, responds that rumors are rumors, facts are facts, evidence is evidence.
And not until 100 percent of the evidence is gathered, including forensics from the medical examiner — which Gilkey said may take several weeks — will he speculate on Jake Allen's case, except to say this:
“I'm 100 percent sure it will be solved. I'm not 100 percent sure it will be solved to the public's liking.”
In Argonia, Pat Conklin, the school librarian, knows what Gilkey means. In small towns, everyone is connected.
“If somebody is arrested and gets charged,” she says, “it's going to destroy more than one family.”
Back at the crossing, Stansbury stares at the ground as the train disappears down the track. For a second, she smiles a wan smile, as her mind fills with something Allen's dad told her after the funeral
Hugging Joe Allen and crying in his arms, Stansbury says she told him that she didn't know how she was going to cope. She didn't know if she could ever see the train again, or hear its horn blast, without imagining what her best friend might have suffered.
In his own grief, Allen comforted her, Stansbury says. She says he held her and he told her that everything was going to be OK, and offered words that made her smile.
“I'll tell you what he told me,” Stansbury said. “ ‘Every time we hear the whistle blow, we'll just think of it as Jake saying hello.' ”
To reach Eric Adler, features reporter, call (816) 234-4431 or send e-mail to eadler@kcstar.com.
Yet another example of problems in our country:
5 Die After Being Set on Fire in Seattle
By JIM COUR
.c The Associated Press
SEATTLE (AP) - A man doused his girlfriend and her three small children with gasoline inside a car and set them on fire early Wednesday as he drove, authorities said. All five died after the car crashed in flames.
Residents reported hearing the crash and seeing two adults engulfed in flames, stumbling across a road near Bonney Lake, a small town east of Tacoma. Firefighters found the bodies of the three children, a girl and two boys, in the back of the burned car.
Antigone Monique Allen, 18, who had recently filed an assault complaint against the 24-year-old man, survived for nearly eight hours at a Seattle hospital, sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer said. She managed to tell investigators and family what happened before she died.
Laveda Allen said her sister had gone out the previous evening with her estranged boyfriend, identified as Genario Garcia.
Garcia snorted cocaine while they were out Tuesday night and the two began arguing, Laveda Allen said. Antigone - ``Mona'' to her family and friends - demanded that he take her home.
They stopped at a gas station, and, because she had been dozing, she didn't notice right away that he had filled a container with gasoline and placed it in the back seat, Laveda Allen said.
They drove along back roads before Garcia pulled a gun and pointed it at Antigone Allen's head. He grabbed the container and splashed gasoline on the children, Antigone and himself, Laveda Allen said.
He flicked a lighter and the car erupted, left the road and flipped over.
The two adults stumbled from the wreck, and Garcia, who had two guns with him, began shooting. Neighbors said he fired four or five shots. Troyer said an autopsy would be needed to determine whether any of the bullets hit Antigone Allen. Autopsies for the all the victims were scheduled Thursday.
Lisa Hansen, who lives nearby, said she heard the crash and drove down the road to see if she could help. She and a friend of her sons heard a voice in the pasture screaming: ``Help! Help! Help me, please!''
They saw the woman standing, with her shirt burned off, but Hansen could not get to her because an electrified horse fence was between them. According to Hansen, the woman was screaming in pain, saying, ``He did it! He did this on purpose!''
Laveda Allen said doctors told her sister had burns over 85 percent of her body.
``She said she wanted to be with her babies. She wasn't angry. She knew she was going to die, and she was willing to go, but she wanted to say bye,'' she said.
Troyer said Allen had recently filed an assault complaint, and a deputy was assigned to the case, but the woman failed to follow through.
``They were in the process of getting back together or breaking up, off and on,'' the detective said. The woman's relatives indicated there had been ``some unreported domestic violence,'' Troyer said.
Laveda Allen said she wasn't upset with Garcia, who she said was the father of her sister's children - Christine Allen-Garcia, 2 1/2; and two boys, Kristian Allen-Garcia, 1 1/2, and 8-month-old Adam Allen-Garcia.
``He was a good person,'' she said. ``He was an illegal immigrant here, but he was a hard worker and tried to do what he had to do to make it.
``He just went over the deep end. He probably just loved her too much. He didn't want to see his kids being taken care of by another man.''
The family is planning to bury her and the three children on Saturday, which would have been Antigone Allen's 19th birthday.
07/15/04 00:42 EDT
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5 Die After Being Set on Fire in Seattle
By JIM COUR
.c The Associated Press
SEATTLE (AP) - A man doused his girlfriend and her three small children with gasoline inside a car and set them on fire early Wednesday as he drove, authorities said. All five died after the car crashed in flames.
Residents reported hearing the crash and seeing two adults engulfed in flames, stumbling across a road near Bonney Lake, a small town east of Tacoma. Firefighters found the bodies of the three children, a girl and two boys, in the back of the burned car.
Antigone Monique Allen, 18, who had recently filed an assault complaint against the 24-year-old man, survived for nearly eight hours at a Seattle hospital, sheriff's Detective Ed Troyer said. She managed to tell investigators and family what happened before she died.
Laveda Allen said her sister had gone out the previous evening with her estranged boyfriend, identified as Genario Garcia.
Garcia snorted cocaine while they were out Tuesday night and the two began arguing, Laveda Allen said. Antigone - ``Mona'' to her family and friends - demanded that he take her home.
They stopped at a gas station, and, because she had been dozing, she didn't notice right away that he had filled a container with gasoline and placed it in the back seat, Laveda Allen said.
They drove along back roads before Garcia pulled a gun and pointed it at Antigone Allen's head. He grabbed the container and splashed gasoline on the children, Antigone and himself, Laveda Allen said.
He flicked a lighter and the car erupted, left the road and flipped over.
The two adults stumbled from the wreck, and Garcia, who had two guns with him, began shooting. Neighbors said he fired four or five shots. Troyer said an autopsy would be needed to determine whether any of the bullets hit Antigone Allen. Autopsies for the all the victims were scheduled Thursday.
Lisa Hansen, who lives nearby, said she heard the crash and drove down the road to see if she could help. She and a friend of her sons heard a voice in the pasture screaming: ``Help! Help! Help me, please!''
They saw the woman standing, with her shirt burned off, but Hansen could not get to her because an electrified horse fence was between them. According to Hansen, the woman was screaming in pain, saying, ``He did it! He did this on purpose!''
Laveda Allen said doctors told her sister had burns over 85 percent of her body.
``She said she wanted to be with her babies. She wasn't angry. She knew she was going to die, and she was willing to go, but she wanted to say bye,'' she said.
Troyer said Allen had recently filed an assault complaint, and a deputy was assigned to the case, but the woman failed to follow through.
``They were in the process of getting back together or breaking up, off and on,'' the detective said. The woman's relatives indicated there had been ``some unreported domestic violence,'' Troyer said.
Laveda Allen said she wasn't upset with Garcia, who she said was the father of her sister's children - Christine Allen-Garcia, 2 1/2; and two boys, Kristian Allen-Garcia, 1 1/2, and 8-month-old Adam Allen-Garcia.
``He was a good person,'' she said. ``He was an illegal immigrant here, but he was a hard worker and tried to do what he had to do to make it.
``He just went over the deep end. He probably just loved her too much. He didn't want to see his kids being taken care of by another man.''
The family is planning to bury her and the three children on Saturday, which would have been Antigone Allen's 19th birthday.
07/15/04 00:42 EDT
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