Lab technician gets 44 years for killing

Lab technician gets 44 years for killing

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

A former animal-research technician was sentenced Friday to 44 years in prison for killing a Yale graduate student days before what was to be her wedding day in 2009. The judge’s decision came after anguished relatives described how their anticipation of a celebration turned to grief as they returned home with her in a coffin. Raymond Clark III, 26, apologized in New Haven Superior Court for strangling 24-year-old Annie Le of Placerville, Calif. Her body was found upside down stuffed in a wall of a research lab Sept. 13, 2009, her wedding day and five days after she was last seen inside the Yale medical building.

Girl dies in fall from Ferris wheel

WILDWOOD, N.J.

An 11-year-old girl on a school trip to a Jersey shore amusement park died Friday when she fell 100 feet from a moving Ferris wheel.

Police Capt. Robert Regalbuto said Abiah Jones of Pleasantville was with her classmates from Pleasant Tech Academy when she fell from the ride at 12:30 p.m.

She was driven to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead about 45 minutes later.

A medical helicopter initially was called for, but paramedics at the scene, seeing how grave the girl’s injuries were, decided not to wait, and took her to the hospital in an ambulance.

A Wildwood police statement said the cause of the fall remains unknown. She fell from the upper half of the ride, about 100 feet.

4 in US linked to E. coli outbreak

ATLANTA

Four people in the U.S. apparently were sickened by the food-poisoning outbreak in Europe, health officials said Friday. Three are hospitalized with a serious complication. All four were in northern Germany in May. Though they didn’t stay at the same hotel or eat at the same restaurants, officials are confident that they were infected with E. coli in that country.

Court lifts ban on graduation prayer

SAN ANTONIO

Public prayer will be allowed at a Texas high school graduation after a federal appeals court on Friday reversed a ban won by an agnostic family that claimed ceremony traditions such as invocations were unconstitutional. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency appeal filed by the Medina Valley Independent School District. Its San Antonio-area high school was ordered by a federal judge earlier this week to forbid students from asking audience members to join in prayer or bow their heads during Saturday’s graduation.

Police: Principal hid camera in restroom

IOWA CITY, Iowa

The principal of an Iowa elementary school admitted that he downloaded child pornography over the course of several months and hid a video camera in the school to get images of young boys using the bathroom, according to court documents filed Friday.

Robert Burke, 43, the principal at Sageville Elementary School just north of Dubuque, was charged with one count of receiving child pornography. A criminal complaint says an FBI agent downloaded eight images child of pornography in April from a computer with an IP address that was traced to Burke’s residence in Dubuque.

At least three of the images involved boys who appeared to be between the age 8 and 10 performing oral sex, according to a court affidavit filed by Robert Larsen, a special agent for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

Associated Press