Toddler survives fall from third-floor window

Toddler survives fall
from third-floor window

NEW YORK — A toddler who crawled out a third-floor window during his family’s Thanksgiving festivities and fell onto a store roof not only survived — he didn’t even break a bone.

Brandon Priebe said his 14-month-old son, Bradley, tumbled from a bedroom window in his aunt’s Brooklyn apartment Thursday. His relatives said they thought the window was closed.

Bradley fell about 20 feet onto the roof of a music store next door, police said. Priebe told police that his son wasn’t seriously injured in the fall. The boy was in stable condition later Thursday at a local hospital, where no update on his condition was available Friday.

Man entering U.S.
illegally rescues boy

PHOENIX — A 9-year-old boy looking for help after his mother crashed their van in the southern Arizona desert was rescued by a man entering the U.S. illegally, who stayed with him until help arrived the next day, an official said.

The 45-year-old woman, who eventually died while awaiting help, had been driving on a U.S. Forest Service road in a remote area just north of the Mexican border when she lost control of her van on a curve on Thanksgiving, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said.

The van vaulted into a canyon and landed 300 feet from the road, he said. The woman, from Rimrock, north of Phoenix, survived the impact but was pinned inside, Estrada said.

Her son, unhurt but disoriented, crawled out to get help and was found about two hours later by Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26, of Magdalena de Kino in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Unable to pull the mother out, he comforted the boy while they waited for help.

The woman died a short time later.

“He stayed with him, told him that everything was going to be all right,” Estrada said.

‘Girls Gone Wild’ founder
says he was abused in jail

CHICKASHA, Okla. — The millionaire producer of the “Girls Gone Wild” video series has accused guards of abusing him during his brief stay at an Oklahoma jail, a newspaper reported Friday.

Guards at the Grady County Law Enforcement Center denied Joe Francis food and blankets and threatened to strap him naked to a chair for 48 hours, Francis’ attorneys alleged last month in court papers seeking his release on bail in a Florida case, The Oklahoman reported.

Francis, 34, was held at the jail from May 17 to June 4 while being moved from a Florida jail to a federal facility in Reno, Nev., where he is awaiting trial next year on a tax evasion charge.

Grady County officials denied the accusations, telling the newspaper that guards never threatened to strap Francis to a chair, that Francis had an extra blanket he shouldn’t have had confiscated and that his transfer was delayed because his family had somehow found out when he was to have been moved, creating a potential security risk.

Officer charged with DUI
assigned to desk duty

CHICAGO — A police officer charged with drunken driving in a car wreck that killed two men and injured a third was assigned to desk duty pending an internal investigation, a police spokesman said Friday.

John Ardelean, 33, was off duty when he was driving a sport utility vehicle that collided with a sedan carrying three men early Thursday on the city’s North Side, police said.

Ardelean, a five-year veteran of the department, was charged with misdemeanor DUI and failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident, police spokesman John Mirabelli said. Police had originally reported Thursday that Ardelean had been charged with driving left of center.

Congressman alleges
racial profiling in stop

CHICAGO — An Illinois congressman said he was a victim of racial profiling when police gave him a traffic ticket alleging he swerved over the center line.

U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, who is black, said he will go to traffic court to challenge the $75 ticket given to him early Monday by two white officers.

“I’m not one of these people who cry racism,” Davis told The Associated Press on Friday. “I’m a person who believes in hard work and follows the rules.”

Davis, 66, said he was on his way home from co-hosting his Sunday late-night radio talk show, “Talking to the People,” and was driving with three black passengers when he was stopped.

“I know that I had not weaved. I mean, I’m not senile,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “Had I weaved, I would have said ‘I thought I saw a pothole,’ or a snake, or something.”

Associated Press