Cops: Parents Track Down Daughter's Pimp, Kill Him

Kind of reminds me of this story I just posted about...And this similar  f*cker got what he deserved too.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KTLA) -- A San Francisco couple is accused of allegedly tracking an alleged pimp across California before finally hunting him down and killing him.




Police say the couple, whose teenage daughter was allegedly being pimped by a 22-year old Compton man, shot him to death near Candlestick Park.

Attorneys for Barry Gilton and his longtime girlfriend, Lupe Mercado admit the couple tried to rescue their 17-year old daughter from Calvin Sneed, but say they didn't kill him.




On June 4, Sneed was in San Francisco, driving his Toyota Camry at 2 a.m., when someone shot him with a .40-caliber handgun.



Sneed, an alleged member of the Nutty Block Crips, crashed into a parked car and died a short time later at San Francisco General Hospital.



Authorities believe the pair were also responsible for a shooting last month when someone fired into Sneed's car in North Hollywood.



Gilton and Mercado face charges of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and one count of discharging a firearm at an occupied vehicle.



Gilton was also charged with possession of a firearm as a felon.



Both are being held on $2 million bail.

____________________________

LET THEM GO HOME!

Heroic Father Kills Man Who Molested His Daughter, Gets Away With It

ROOT ROOT ROOT!

Gossip- Deputies in Texas say that they are NOT going to pursue charges against a father who used his bare hands to kill another man after he caught him sexually assaulting his 4-year-old daughter.


According to CNN, during a social gathering last Saturday (Jun 9) at his home in Lavaca County, Texas … the father caught a 47-year-old man — whom he was reportedly “casually acquainted” with — attempting to molest his daughter, who had earlier disappeared inside the home, while other family members were outside tending to horses.

Lavaca County Sheriff Micah Harmon says that when the homeowner caught the acquaintance in the act of molesting his young daughter (after hearing her scream), he reacted by repeatedly punching him in the head and face.



The father claims he heard screaming from the barn and arrived to find the man molesting his daughter.



The father struck the would-be abuser so hard, that he was instantly killed … and he was pronounced dead at the scene by responding paramedics.



The names of the father and daughter haven’t been released in an effort to protect the identity of the 4-year-old victim, who was described by Sheriff Harmon as “okay, besides the obvious mental trauma” of the incident.



Pending the announcement of his death to his family, the name of the pedophile wasn’t released either … but officials say he was a ranch hand from the nearby town of Gonzales.



The Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office says that they will defer the case to a grand jury to decide whether or not charges will be brought against the father, who is being hailed as a hero.



“You have a right to defend your daughter,” Harmon told CNN. “[The girl's father] acted in defense of his third person. Once the investigation is completed we will submit it to the district attorney who then submits it to the grand jury, who will decide if they will indict him.”



Harmon said that the dad was “very remorseful,” and he had no intentions of killing the man.



He was just a father trying to protect his daughter, and he definitely succeeded. (Just in time for Father’s Day, too!)

A preliminary autopsy report indicated that the victim — who definitely got what he deserved — died as the result of “blunt-force head and neck injuries.”

" 'I Just Threw The Frigging Stool' At Gunman"

(CNN) -- As a gunman opened fire inside a cafe in Seattle, a patron jumped into action, twice hitting the shooter with a stool and saving three lives, police said.

The move was hailed by police as a heroic action, but Lawrence Adams, 56, said he was simply keeping a promise.

Adams' brother died in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and afterward he promised himself that if something like that ever happened again, "I would never hide under a table."

He was true to his vow Wednesday when faced with the gunman.

"There's a hero. .... He put his life at risk," Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel told reporters.

Police identified him only as Lawrence when they released details about the incident, but The Seattle Times confirmed his full name and age in Friday's edition.

In an interview with police, Adams said he had glanced at his phone when he heard gunshots, then sprung into action as he saw people scrambling around him.

"I just threw the frigging stool at him, legs first," he said in a statement published on the official Seattle police blog.

Police said his actions allowed three people to escape while a man armed with two handguns attacked.

The shooting left four people dead and one person critically injured inside Cafe Racer, a peaceful coffeehouse in the city's University District. A second shooting, about a half-hour later near downtown Seattle, left a woman dead, authorities said.

The suspect in both shootings, identified by police as Ian Stawicki, died Wednesday night, several hours after he shot himself in the head as a five-hour police manhunt came to an end.

Witnesses told police the gunman began shooting after an employee at the coffee shop asked him to leave.

Police said that a new piece of evidence investigators viewed Thursday showed the gunman opening fire in the cafe, where patrons were reading books and chatting over coffee.

"One person stands up, looks like he's going to go outside for a minute. At that point the suspect stands up and starts shooting ... and then just goes down the bar. He chases a few people," Pugel said. "At that time he's been hit by the stool, twice. He completes the shooting, puts the guns in his pockets, actually took a hat from one of the victims, put it on his head and walked out."

Stawicki, Adams said, "looked at me like he didn't [care] at all. He just moved towards the rear of the bar instead of dealing with me at all, and I just brushed past him. He was on a mission to kill my friends."

Police said they were shocked by the apparently senseless violence.

"In my almost 30 years in this department I've never seen anything more horrific and callous and cold," Deputy Chief Nick Metz said.

Witnesses described the shootings in several 911 recordings released by police Thursday.



"Someone came in and shot a bunch of people. I'm hiding in the bathroom. We need help right away. ... There's people down all over the place out there," one man calling from Cafe Racer said.

A female caller told dispatchers she saw a gunman assaulting a woman in a parking lot in downtown Seattle, then shooting her, stealing her black Mercedes and running her over as he sped away.

Authorities will continue their investigation into the shootings for several weeks but are "very confident" that Stawicki is the only suspect, Pugel said.

The violence left Seattle reeling Thursday. "Our department and the whole city is just trying to catch its breath" after the shooting, Metz said.



Two of the victims at Cafe Racer were members of a local folk band, God's Favorite Beefcake, according to CNN affiliates. They were found dead at the coffeehouse. A woman and a man died later at a hospital. A fifth person was in critical condition, police said, but was not expected to survive.



The suspect's brother, Andrew Stawicki, told The Seattle Times that Ian Stawicki had long struggled with mental illness, but refused to talk about that or his anger.



"Someone like that is so stubborn, you can't talk to him," he told the newspaper. "It's no surprise to me this happened. We could see this coming. Nothing good is going to come with that much anger inside of you."



A Wednesday night meeting was held in the city's Central District, where Mayor Mike McGinn and police officials discussed a recent spike in violence in Seattle, KOMO reported.



"If violence is a disease, our city is infected," said Paul Patu, of the city's Youth Violence Prevention Council, according to CNN affiliate KCPQ. "When old people are afraid of young people, something is wrong. We have to commit to getting to know each other and stop being strangers."



Seattle, a city of about 600,000, recorded 20 homicides in 2011, according to Police Department statistics. Wednesday's shootings bring 2012's year-to-date total to 21, according to KOMO. Two cases have been cleared, and seven arrests were made.



Two other people have died in random shootings in Seattle in the past month, according to CNN affiliates. In late April, a 21-year-old woman died in an apparently random drive-by shooting near downtown. And a 43-year-old man died last week while driving down the street with his family. Police said the gunman's intended target in that shooting was another person involved in a dispute with the gunman. No arrests have been made in either case.



On Saturday, a bystander was wounded near the city's landmark Space Needle when he was struck by a bullet allegedly fired by a gang member involved in a dispute with another man, according to KIRO.



McGinn acknowledged at a news conference that the violence had shaken the city, KIRO reported.



"It's going to take our political leaders coming together to give our police officers the support and tools they need to do their jobs," he said.

When Liver Donations Go Wrong

(CNN) -- When Ryan Arnold died after donating a piece of his liver to his brother, Chad, his friends and family mourned the loss of a hero who risked his life to save his brother.

The death affected someone else, too -- someone who'd never met the Arnolds. Her name is Laura Fritz, and when she learned about Ryan's death in August in an online television news piece, she was "devastated."

"It hit really close to home," she told CNN. "Because I knew that could have been me."

Four living liver donors have died in the United States since 1999, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, including Arnold and another patient who died earlier this year at the Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts. About 38% of liver donors have some kind of complication, according to the Adult-to-Adult Living Donor Liver Transplantation Cohort Study, a project to disseminate information about living donor liver transplants. Some experts think some of these deaths and complications could have been prevented if there was a change the way hospitals exchanged information about complications with organ donations.

Like Ryan Arnold, Laura was young and feeling great when she gave away part of her liver. Both had surgery at the University of Colorado Medical Center, one of the world's most respected transplant centers.

In Laura's case, it was her mother, Jane Fritz, who had a debilitating liver disease and needed a transplant. Laura was 26 and her mother 59 when Laura had 60% of her liver surgically removed and given to her mother on September 30, 2009, less than a year before Ryan Arnold had the same surgery.

At first, everything seemed fine. The surgery went well, and both were discharged from the hospital without complications.

When Laura Fritz got home, everything changed.

"I realized I wasn't doing as well as I was supposed to be doing," she remembered. "I wasn't eating anything. I wasn't keeping anything down, fluids or anything."

Jane Fritz took her daughter back to the hospital, where doctors admitted her and diagnosed a small bowel obstruction, which meant a section of her intestines was blocked. After three days of treatment in the hospital, she was able to eat and move her bowels, and she was discharged.

Back at her home in Denver once more, Laura again started to feel ill, and three days later, she went back to the hospital.

"I was really pale. My lips were turning blue, and they couldn't find a blood pressure on me," she said. "My body was just shutting down. ... No one at the hospital said I was going into organ failure, but my mom's a nurse, and she put two and two together."

Laura was rushed to surgery. Afterward, the doctors told her parents that Laura had a hole in her intestines, a medical emergency because if the hole isn't repaired in time, bacteria inside the intestines leak out and cause deadly infections.

Laura fought for her life in the intensive care unit, and she spent the next 36 days in the hospital.

"There was a time when the doctors came to [my mother] and my father and said if this infection doesn't clear up within 24 hours, I'm not going to make it," she said. "They went to the chapel and prayed."

Laura recovered completely, and she hopes doctors learn from her complication and from Ryan Arnold's death, which happened about 10 months apart.

She added that she'd donate to her mother again in a heartbeat.

"It was a terrible, terrible situation, but what came out of it is my mom is alive, and I'm alive," she said.

Surgeon: "A devastating feeling"

Laura Fritz and Ryan Arnold had the same surgeon: Dr. Igal Kam, chief of the division of transplant surgery at the University of Colorado.

In the past 22 years, the University of Colorado Hospital has performed 142 living liver surgeries, and Kam says he's been the surgeon for nearly all of them. Out of those 142 surgeries, there's been one death -- Ryan Arnold's -- and three major complications, including Laura's.

He says Arnold's death and Fritz's complications are unrelated. Ryan Arnold was fine after surgery, and he was up and walking around just two days later.

"I checked on him personally at 8 o'clock on the third evening after his surgery, and everyone said he was doing great," Kam said.

Then at midnight, he said, he received a call saying Arnold needed to be resuscitated.

"By that time, he was already dead," Kam said. "He went to sleep and never woke up."

After Arnold's death, the University of Colorado issued a statement saying it was conducting a "thorough review" of his case.

Kam said Laura Fritz's complication was ultimately caused by a pre-existing condition that was impossible to detect before the surgery.

In her case, he said, one loop of her intestines "kinked on itself" and stuck to another loop of her intestines, and this adhesion caused swelling, which caused the hole in her intestines.

Sometimes in abdominal surgery, a surgical instrument can poke a hole in the intestines, but that wasn't the case with Fritz, Kam said. He said the hole was in a section of the intestines far from her surgical site. Plus, he said, the pathologist who looked at the adhesion after it was removed reported that it was chronic and existed before the surgery.

Kam says he gets a "devastating feeling" whenever there's a major complication or death of a living liver donor.

"I don't wish anybody, good friends or enemies, to have this type of feeling," he said. "It's hard to live with."

He said Arnold's death hit him especially hard.

"I've lived with it every day, every minute of my life, since then," he said.

After Arnold's death, the University of Colorado stopped doing liver transplants that involved living donors, but it expects to start up again in the next few weeks with new procedures for monitoring patients after the surgery, Kam said. Velvet Kelm, a spokeswoman for Ryan Arnold's widow, Shannon Arnold, declined comment when asked if they planned legal action.

When a donor has a complication, the hospital is expected to do its own investigation and report to the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which oversees transplants for the federal government.

"This isn't acceptable," says Dr. Lloyd Ratner, director of renal and pancreatic transplant surgery at Columbia University.

"Never in a million years would we say to BP, 'Oh, you had an oil spill in the Gulf, why don't you do your own investigation and just tell us about it?' " he said. "That would be just crazy. It's not acceptable in other industries to do that, so why is it acceptable in ours?"

In an article published recently in the American Journal of Transplantation, Ratner said that a national living donor death task force should be established to systematically review organ donor deaths, and that these findings should be disseminated to all hospitals that perform live donor transplants.

He says that right now, the lessons a hospital learns from the death of a donor are not disseminated to other hospitals, and that surgeons tend to learn from one another based on "serendipity."

For example, in 2006, he and colleagues from another hospital were having lunch when they started discussing patients who'd died, or had severe complications, when a certain type of surgical clip was used. He said the clip would fall off the stump of a renal artery after the kidney had been removed from the donor.

They published their observations in a medical journal, and the major manufacturer of the clips alerted hospitals to stop using them for kidney donors.

"We found a suboptimal surgical technique, but it never would have happened if we hadn't just gotten interested in this and started to talk about it," he said. "There should be a system for reporting these problems and learning from each other."

UNOS told CNN that its Operations and Safety Committee recently advocated a process similar to the one that Ratner suggested in his article, but it might not be adopted.

"While promising, we must weigh procedural and legal issues in determining whether and how to develop such a system," according to a statement from UNOS.

Transplant centers are required to inform UNOS when they've had a death or major complication, but UNOS doesn't share that information with the public, which means patients can't look up a hospital's transplant safety record.

Donna Luebke, a registered nurse who donated a kidney to her sister and once served on the board of UNOS, says the organization ought to share that information with the public.

Donors can make a fully informed decision only "if all the data is out there, and we don't have that data," she said.

In a statement to CNN, UNOS emphasized that serious complications and deaths are rare, and that "through data collection and the input of many who have personal experience with living donation, we will do our utmost to minimize risks for future potential donors."

Witness: Motorists Heroically Pulled 2 From Burning Car

FAIRFIELD - A woman who witnessed a devastating car fire on I-95 in Fairfield over the weekend says she was overwhelmed by the incredible acts of heroism she saw as fellow motorists freed two people trapped by smoke and flames.

Gloria Raymond says about 20 people braved the fire as they tried to get to the couple trapped inside the car.

Raymond says a group of men grabbed the 63-year-old driver who told them his wife was still in the vehicle. She says one of the men then went to the car and pulled her out through the back passenger-side door.

The victim’s wife, 67-year-old Mary Hughes, later died from her injuries.

Samaritan Recounts Dramatic Kidnapping Rescue

ABC News- The good Samaritan who rescued an 8-year-old California girl from an alleged kidnapping after a dramatic car chase said today he was afraid for a second -- until he saw the terrified girl's face in the suspect's car.

"The second time I reached him, the way he acted -- yes, I was, for a split second I was nervous until I saw the little girl and all fear was out the window after that," Fresno, Calif., resident Victor Perez told "Good Morning America." "I didn't have no fear. I wasn't thinking of me no more. I was just thinking we need to get that little girl to safety.

"I wasn't going to give up. ... I couldn't give up," said the unemployed construction worker.

The girl was playing with friends outside her house in Fresno early Monday evening, when police say Gregorio Gonzales tried to lure the girls into a pickup truck.

The children ran, but Gonzales allegedly grabbed one of the girls and sped away. Her mother chased after the truck, but it was too late.

A statewide Amber Alert was issued, and more than 100 officers immediately went on the hunt, searching for the truck, which was captured on surveillance video at a nearby intersection.

Perez said he saw the alert and was astonished how close the alleged crime happened to his home. When he went outside, he said his cousin spotted the truck down the street.

"I had a split-second decision to decide to call 911 or go after it," Perez said. "I decided to go after it while my cousin was dialing 911. I took a chance to go and ask a question to see if that was the man that we're looking for."

After several attempts to pull the man over, Perez was eventually able to cut off the other driver at which point he apparently released the little girl.

"She wasn't hurt. She was frightened -- very, very shaky," Perez said. "She just kept saying she was scared."

A few hours later, police arrested Gonzales, a 24-year-old known gang member who was already on felony probation. Authorities say Gonzales had also exposed himself to two other young girls earlier that day.

Without Perez's action, Fresno police chief Jerry Dyer said the girl could've vanished forever.

"If not for obviously Victor being as brave as he is, we may have never recovered her," Dyer said.

Gonzales allegedly held the girl for 11 terrifying hours. He is being charged with kidnapping and sexual assault.

Dyer said he was in the hospital when the young victim was reunited with her mother.

"It was very emotional," he said. "That was the highlight of my career to see the joy that was in both of their eyes... Just to know that we were a part of that."

The girl is now recovering, and on their home today, her family hung messages of thanks.

"Thank you, Fresno Police Department," a sign read.

Perez said he was thankful for the opportunity to help a little girl in danger.

"It happens so close all the time and sometimes you can't do nothing about it," he said. "But when you have the opportunity, you take action. That's what I tried to do.

ABC News has removed the identity of the girl who was kidnapped because police say she was sexually assaulted and ABC News does not identify sex crime victims.

Dog Risks Life In Rescue

R.I.P. Dominick Dunne

Newsday- Author, journalist Dominick Dunne dead at 83

Author and journalist Dominick Dunne, gadfly of the celebrity courtroom and diarist of celebrity excess, died Wednesday in Manhattan after a battle with bladder cancer, according to his son, actor-producer Griffin Dunne. He was 83.

During his decades-long career covering high-profile murders, profiling the famous and mingling with high society, Dunne became something of a journalistic-literary enigma, whose persona bristled with righteous indignation, while wielding the kind of lofty connections, aerial perspective and undiluted opinions that made him a combination Walter Winchell and Marcel Proust.

As fate would have it, Dunne's death fell on the same day as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's. Dunne had crossed paths with the Kennedy family several times during his career, and with dramatic repercussions.

A onetime intimate of Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, Dunne had revived interest in the 1975 Martha Moxley murder through his novel "A Season in Purgatory" and was instrumental in helping make the case against another Kennedy in-law, Michael Skakel, who was eventually convicted of the crime. Dunne also covered the William Kennedy Smith rape case in 1991 for Vanity Fair, the magazine with which he was associated for many years.

Dunne, brother of author John Gregory Dunne and brother-in-law of Joan Didion, was born in 1925 in Hartford, Conn., to a wealthy Irish Catholic family. He served in the Army during World War II, winning the Bronze Star for heroism in 1944 after carrying two wounded men to safety at the Battle of Merz, in Feisberg, Germany. He later wrote, "Winning a medal was the only thing I can ever remember doing that won any admiration from my father." He graduated from Williams College in 1949.

Dunne was a novelist ("The Two Mrs. Grenvilles"), a film producer ("Ash Wednesday"), a TV executive and amateur prosecutor - Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skakel's cousin, told New York magazine in 1993 that Dunne was a "pathetic creature" and had persecuted Skakel for his own aggrandizement. For his part, Dunne's motivation in pursuing the Moxley murder stemmed in part from the fact that Martha Moxley was killed Oct. 30 - seven years to the date before his own daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, would be killed by an ex-boyfriend on her porch in West Hollywood.

Dunne's account of the trial of the man accused of Dominique's murder was his first article for Vanity Fair, which he joined in 1984 as a contributing editor and where he was named special correspondent in 1993. His coverage of the trials of O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Skakel, Kennedy Smith, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, were unorthodox and decidedly unobjective. In 2005, Gary Condit won an undisclosed amount of money from Dunne, who had to apologize, after having implicated Condit in the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy, with whom he had been having an affair. In November 2006, he was sued again by Condit for comments made on CNN, but that suit was tossed out.

Dunne profiled numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Among his credits as a producer were the TV series "Adventures in Paradise" and "The Boys in the Band," the pioneering drama about gay life. Two of his films, "The Panic in Needle Park" and "Play It As It Lays," were written or co-written by his brother John and Didion. But it is for his work covering the intersection of culture and crime that Dunne will likely be best remembered.

He is survived by his two sons, Griffin and Alexander. Their mother, Ellen, who was divorced from Dunne, died in 1997.

Man Goes from Heroic Husband to Hammer-Wielding Wife Killer

BRYCEVILLE, Florida (CNN) -- Michael Ratley was known as a hero.

In December 2006, Ratley carried his 2-week-old son, Aiden, and his wife, Effie Ratley, 29, from the flames as fire engulfed their Bryceville, Florida, trailer.

Days after the fire, a teary-eyed Ratley told local media that love drove him to save their lives. "I might have lost everything physical, but I've still got my two most precious things," Michael Ratley told CNN affiliate WJXT-TV at the time.

A month later, Effie Ratley was dead, bludgeoned with a hammer in a bedroom of her in-laws' home, not far from the trailer's ashes on a dirt road marked only with a black arrow on a wooden sign.

The man who was hailed as a hero for saving his wife was convicted in July of murdering her.

On Tuesday, a Nassau County Court jury in Yulee, Florida, said he should spend the rest of his life in prison for the crime. Judge Circuit Judge Robert Foster sentenced the 25-year-old to life without possibility of parole.

What changed a heroic husband into a hammer-wielding wife killer?

During the trial, no motive was offered.

On January 27, 2007, with his parents downstairs watching TV with the door shut and his infant son in the other room, prosecutors said, Ratley put on a pair of thick black gloves, grabbed a heavy-duty hammer and went into the bedroom where his wife was lying down after taking some medication. He lifted the hammer and "savagely and brutally beat her on the head over and over" -- at least seven times, said Assistant State Attorney Bernie de la Rionda.

During the trial, Ratley said he had nothing to do with the slaying. His defense lawyers argued that an intruder, who Ratley alleged attacked him in the barn the night before, was the culprit. But prosecutors said that was part of Ratley's plan, setting up for a scenario in which an intruder killed his wife by cutting the wire on their window.

Testifying on Tuesday, his friends and family spoke of him as a church-going, gentle man who always went out of his way to help others -- the elderly at a nursing home, a neighbor whose husband was slain and sick family members.

"He has always been a caring, nonviolent person," said his mother, Cindy Ratley. "He'd give you the shirt off his back." Cindy Ratley said it had been her dream to have her close-knit family living together on her secluded 20 acres.

Witnesses for Ratley tried in court to give a picture of the son, grandson, and friend they said he had always been, with the defense calling the murder a "single, horrible snapshot" in Ratley's overwhelmingly positive life. They urged the jury to give Ratley's son a chance to know his father, one who cares and loves deeply for him, they said.

As his mother and others left the witness stand in the packed and divided courtroom, they each told Ratley they stood behind him and loved him. As they walked back to sit down, many mouthed, "I love you."

The prosecutors argued Ratley's character couldn't be clearer, based on his actions. "Unfortunately, the best example we have of his character is in what he did. This shows his best character," de la Rionda said, showing the jurors gruesome photos of Effie Ratley's injuries.

De la Rionda disputed the description of Ratley as a wonderful father. "This loving father had no problem whatsoever -- a short distance from his son -- exterminating the life of his son's mother," he said.

Michael Ratley met Effie Williams when she was having car trouble. He offered to buy a new tire for her and change it.

Effie Ratley, who enjoyed listening to '50s music and watching black-and-white movies, was thrilled when she and her husband had their baby, her family told the court Tuesday.

"Her son was her pride and joy," said her stepmother, Joy Williams, wearing a purple and pink "Justice for Effie" bracelet. "But she never knew more than six weeks of her motherhood dreams."

By all accounts, the Ratleys' relationship had its rocky points. They were married, separated and remarried.

Michael Ratley's family said that the first time the couple got married, they were worried he wasn't mature enough, that he needed to grow up, and they said the couple definitely had growing pains.

"He didn't know if he could love her enough, because he only wanted the best for her," Donna Stanley said, talking about her nephew.

Effie Ratley's father, Duane Williams, cried on the stand Tuesday as he talked about his only daughter. His voice quivered as he tried to explain how he feels her loss each day.

"She's the first thing I think about in the morning when I wake up," he said, his voice wavering. "And the last thing before I go to bed."

Neither Effie or Michael Ratley's families wanted to speak about the sentencing after the hearing, but de la Rionda said Effie's family was pleased with the result.

"They were always hoping for [the] death [penalty], but they're happy he's going to get life and he's not going to be able to get out," de le Rionda said. "He's going to die in prison."

While the announcement of the sentence, which spared him from death, was greeted with a pronounced "Yes!" from Michael Ratley's family inside court, the gravity of the situation seemed to hit during a short recess. His grandmother began sobbing. Family members comforted her until Cindy Ratley sat down next to her. The two cried and embraced for a couple of minutes. Michael Ratley looked over, saw his grandmother upset, and he, too, began to cry.

Pizza Delivery Man Is A Hero!

SEVIERVILLE, Tenn. - Chris Turner normally wouldn't drive 30 miles into the remote Tennessee mountains just to deliver a pizza.

The one time he did, he came upon a scene that drained the color from his face and made him "numb from head to toe" — a woman with her hands tied, silently begging him to call 911.

It was no joke, and Turner, 32, rushed to a nearby house and made that call. Police say the woman was whisked away from the Atlanta neighborhood she was jogging in by a man who frequented her business. Authorities say he raped her and held her captive inside a cabin. The 24-year-old woman was rescued by Sevier County deputies Tuesday evening because of Turner's quick thinking.

Turner told The Associated Press on Friday that he noticed the woman pop up from a couch while her abductor signed the credit card slip.

"While I was standing in the door all you could see was the back of the couch," Turner said. "And then she popped over the back of the couch and showed me that her hands were bound. And she was just mouthing, 'Please call 911.'"

Turner at first thought it was a joke. "When I realized what was going on, I went numb from head to toe and turned pale white," he said.

Turner tried to look calm. "Have a nice day. Enjoy your food," he told the suspect. Then he rushed back to his van, where his wife was waiting behind the wheel. "Go, go, go!" he told her.

The cabin was out of cell phone range. So they drove to a nearby house and called police. They waited to make sure the suspect didn't flee. Then Turner stayed to see the man arrested and the victim taken away in an ambulance. "I wanted to make sure she was OK," he said.

The woman told authorities she was jogging near her home in Atlanta about 11:50 a.m. Tuesday when a frequent customer at a restaurant and bar owned by the woman and her husband asked her to see his new car. She got into the vehicle, which turned out to be a rental, and was immediately tied up.

She told police the suspect drove her more than 200 miles to the cabin in Tennessee and raped her. The Associated Press does not identify alleged sexual assault victims.

Police arrested David J. Jansen, 46, of Snellville, Ga., without a struggle on charges of aggravated kidnapping and rape, Sheriff Ron Seals said in a statement. He was released on $800,000 bond late Thursday. His attorney, Donald Bosch of Knoxville, had no comment Friday.

Capt. Jeff McCarter refused to discuss the case Friday. But he earlier told The Mountain Press newspaper that officials believe the woman was in imminent danger.

The victim and her husband visited Turner at Capelli's Pizza and Subs in Gatlinburg before heading home Wednesday. "She was just thanking me ... for trusting her," Turner said. "She said he was going to kill her ... after he got done with her."

Turner's boss, John Henry, said the cabin was about 30 miles from his pizza shop.

"We usually don't go out that far," he said. "But he said, 'Yeah, I will take it.' It was just luck. For her, it was."

This Day In History

Apr 13 1970
56 hours and 205,000 miles from planet Earth, the crew aboard Apollo 13 hears "a pretty loud bang" when oxygen tank number two spontaneously explodes. Astronaut Jack Swigert informs Mission Control in Houston: "Hey, we've got a problem here." Miraculously, the crew manages to return home in their crippled spacecraft.

Apr 13 1982

David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young is arrested while freebasing cocaine and for illegal possession of a .45 handgun. Sentence: 5 years.