Just over two months ago, Bishop Charles Blake appointed Dr. David Hall, a midlevel church official, as his “official emissary” to the signing of the Universal Declaration of International Human Rights . The Faith in Human Rights Statement was issued in conjunction with the anniversary of the UDIHR.
The Memphis-based Tri State Defender said Blake’s invitation came at the behest of The Netherlands Queen Beatrix whose nation in 2001 was the first to grant full marriage rights to homosexuals. Queen Beatrix assembled this diverse religious gathering on the 60th anniversary of the document’s signing. And everyone was giddy with ecumenical joy. But peel away the feel good humanism and you are left with a bizarre collusion of world religions and political religionists whose goal is to enact universal law governing humanity and its “rights”. According to the Tri-State Defender:
The meeting took place in the Peace Palace during the International Inter-religious Faith in Human Rights Conference. Sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation and the government of The Netherlands, the event attracted an entourage of 10 supreme authorities of various world religions, political leaders, heads of state, and high-level UN officials.
Invitees were asked to sign the 2008 Faith in Human Rights Statement, which, in essence, pronounces and confirms that true religion, irrespective of religion, gender, race or other distinctions, defends the human rights and fundamental freedoms of every human. [source]
Blake, in a video message aired at the event, could barely conceal his excitement at this opportunity to prove his ecumenical credentials.
“As Presiding Bishop of the Church Of God In Christ, International, it is my great honor and privilege to attach my signature to the 2008 Faith in Human Rights Statement. On behalf our 12,000 plus Church of God in Christ congregations in America and in 60 nations of the world, I endorse and encourage the great ideas and ideals of this document.”
The gospel of inclusion, part II
Im curious about this. Although lauded as a monumental occasion, a historic first, not one slither of it was noted on the COGIC’s main website nor any of its subsidary sites. The Tri-State Defender, an African American newspaper with a regional audience and small circulation, was the only publication to carry the story. Why did COGIC only release the information to this small newspaper? Why not the much larger Commercial Appeal which is arguably COGIC-friendly?
Secondly, Im not that familiar with COGIC polity, but does the Presiding Bishop have that much authority to sign up his entire church up for something like this without approval from the General Assembly? After all this is an indirect endorsement of homosexual marriage. Does COGIC really want to reverse the work of GE Patterson? And incidentally, Patterson did need to approval of the GA to issue its historic marriage proclamation. Read it.
Third, what’s in this package of “great ideas and ideals” that would prompt Bishop Blake to shower it with such glowing praise?
For one, the UDIHR (and its accompanying faith statement) is a mark of achievement for homosexual rights advocates who have pressured the United Nations for years to enshrine gay rights into its official positions. Read carefully. Gays want the UN to “afford same-sex partnerships full protection of the law, equal to marital and other legally recognized mixed-sex partnerships, with regard to pension, inheritance, taxation, social security, custody and adoption, donor insemination and other services, in which discriminatory policies and practices currently exist. Additionally homosexuals want to “stimulate the development of positive images of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people and lifestyles as role models for young people.”
In short, homosexual activists have invested much into the declaration because it would give them broad international leverage against any nation who refused to legislate acceptance of homosexual rights. Armed with the Declaration they could pressure the UN to impose sanctions against such nations. Although the Declaration has no legal power, it nonetheless is a powerful weapon (particularly Article 16) against non-participatory nations.
Calling the general assembly statement a ”powerful victory for the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, the Human Rights Watch gay and lesbian faction said the ”statement confirm[s] that international human rights protections include sexual orientation and gender identity. It is the first time that a statement condemning rights abuses against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people has been presented in the General Assembly.”
The Faith Statement in essence is an extenstion of the UDIHR. What the UDIHR does not address about the religious aspects of human rights, the Faith Statement does. And it follows the same path of securing universal acceptance of homosexual marriage among religious entities.
A snapshot of the antichrist and his false prophet’s world religion
But much more than just an affirmation of basic human rights, the manifesto is a stunning snapshot of what a future one world government and one world religion would look like under the rule of the antichrist. In our opinion this is what characterizes the ecumenical ideology of Bishop Charles Blake. Its dangerous, unbiblical and works against the goals of the kingdom of God.
How could any minister endorse and promote a message of the right to ___________ (fill in the blank)? Should we preach rights or should we preach the message of the kingdom of God? If youre unsure of what that is look here. If you don’t agree with that, let’s try a rewording of the Great Commission to see the effect. Can you imagine Matthew 28: 19-20 rewritten to say this?:
Go into all the world and preach the right to commit sin. Teach them all things that the United Nations has deemed is of human value. Teach them to respect other religions and lifestyles. And most importantly, dont try to change the world, just live in peaceful coexistence with them. Respecting human rights is greater than doctrine or biblical directives. And lo, in return, they’ll respect your religion too. Amen.
You may consider that far fetched but that’s exactly the lie David Hall is pushing with Blake’s approval. “Peace is the way the Lord would want us to live and respect each other’s rights and dignity,” said Hall. “The Human Rights Accord speaks louder than our politics or our religious affiliations. We embraced each other and talked about issues that face humanity.” (our bold)
As you can see the Faith in Human Rights Statement espouses a humanistic “gospel”, contrary to the kingdom of God and its righteousness. It reduces the glory and divinity of our Lord Jesus to the diaprax heresy. It encourages God-less solutions to the issues of humanity, and instead elevates man’s own solution as better than God’s. It arrogantly declares that “true religion” is one where no religion is superior, thus enpowering it to “defend” any ungodly definition of human rights. This is what Charles Blake enthusiastically endorsed.
hall2
hall1hall3Above: (left) David Hall, Blake’s special emissary smoozing with “his holiness” Sri Swami Davananda Saraswati who teaches”vedana” a demonic belief that all humanity is divine, thus there is no need for God or Christ. The center picture is of Hall with Muslim Dr. Al-Shekih (center), a representative of Hawza Al-Najaf. Hawza is a Muslim political organization which has been criticized for religious tyranny inside Iraq.
The right picture is of Hall with “his holiness” Drikung Skyabgon, Chetsang Rinpoche, the supreme head of a variation of Tibetan buddhism. Adherents practice what is termed “Phowa”. The practitioner learns how to expel his/her consciousness or mindstream through the fontanel at the top of the skull at the moment of death. This practice is said to aid the practitioner in remaining aware through the death experience, thus aiding one in attaining enlightenment in the Bardo (the state in between death and the next rebirth).
We are supposed to respect these demonic beliefs and encourage people to remained enslaved to this insanity?
And I heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. (Revelation 18:4,5).
Sunday, July 31, 2011
3 people killed in separate Oakland shootings
07-31) 12:55 PDT Oakland, Calif. (AP) --
Three people are dead after a string of shootings in Oakland late Saturday and early Sunday.
Police say in the first of what appears to be unrelated shootings, a 16-year-old boy was shot several times just before midnight as he stood outside a residence in west Oakland.
The teen died after being taken to Oakland's Highland Hospital.
A 26-year-old woman also died from gunshot wounds after being dropped off at a different hospital around 3 a.m. Sunday.
Then at 3:25 a 21-year-old man was found shot. Police say he died in Highland Hospital a short while later.
The names of the three victims have not been released.
The Oakland Tribune reports that the three killings brought the number of homicides in Oakland this year to 70.
Last year at this time there were 52 homicides in the city.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/07/31/state/n125549D91.DTL#ixzz1TiXeIUYW
Three people are dead after a string of shootings in Oakland late Saturday and early Sunday.
Police say in the first of what appears to be unrelated shootings, a 16-year-old boy was shot several times just before midnight as he stood outside a residence in west Oakland.
The teen died after being taken to Oakland's Highland Hospital.
A 26-year-old woman also died from gunshot wounds after being dropped off at a different hospital around 3 a.m. Sunday.
Then at 3:25 a 21-year-old man was found shot. Police say he died in Highland Hospital a short while later.
The names of the three victims have not been released.
The Oakland Tribune reports that the three killings brought the number of homicides in Oakland this year to 70.
Last year at this time there were 52 homicides in the city.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/07/31/state/n125549D91.DTL#ixzz1TiXeIUYW
Friday, July 29, 2011
Alaska's Loch Ness Monster Is Latest Alleged Sea Serpent Sighting
It has a horse-like head at the end of a long neck, with big eyes and humps on its back. It undulates above the surface for just a moment before diving back underwater -- leaving even the most seasoned sailors scratching their heads.
It sounds like any of the thousands of sea serpent stories, from Scotland's Loch Ness Monster to Lake Champlain's Champ. But this time there's video.
A remarkable piece of footage purportedly shot by a fisherman in Bristol Bay shows what many people believe is Alaska's version of the Loch Ness Monster, reports Discovery News.
WATCH THE ALASKA SEA SERPENT VIDEO:
"These are large animals, swimming up and down and probably propelling itself by the flap of its tail. It's clearly not a whale and not a seal," said scientist Paul Leblond after viewing the video which premiered on this week's edition of the Discovery Channel's "Alaskan Monster Hunt."
"That looks a lot like Cadborosaurus," said Leblond, former head of the department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia.
In the last 200 years, numerous sightings of a Cadborosaurus -- named from Cadboro Bay in British Columbia and the Greek word "saurus" (or lizard) -- have come to light as people claim to see a serpent-like animal, reportedly up to 30 feet long and sometimes showing front and rear flippers. "Caddy," as the animal is nicknamed, is the subject of a book, Cadborosaurus: Survivor From the Deep, co-written by Leblond.
The Cadborosaurus, like most sea serpents reported around the world, is categorized by scientists under the heading of cryptozoology, the study of animals not yet recognized by mainstream science, like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot.
While Caddy has been written off by some as a shark, eel or whale, Leblond disagrees.
"It must be a mammal or a reptile, since it oscillates up and down in a vertical plain, which eliminates sideways-oscillating fish," he said.
Whether Caddy or its Scottish cousin, Nessie, are relatives or even real, remains to be seen -- at least until more compelling visual evidence is presented. Or one of these beasts is actually captured.
Loch Ness Monster... Fact or Fiction?
Legend Of Loch Ness (1976)
10 Signs of a Carnal Church
10 Signs of a Carnal Church
Finding a worldliness free church these days can be disheartening. There are so many crooks and devils pastoring churches these days, it can be a chore finding a service that will meet your needs rather than tickle your fancy. The bible tells us that the Devil can transform himself into an angel of light and his ministers into ministers of unrighteousness. Why in the world would a person desire to be in a church that is full of unrighteousness and carnality? Why not just club, party, and hang out in the world where that stuff belongs? I don’t understand why people even involve the church of God in their wickedness. What is the point? If you are in sin, then why practice sin and claim him?
But we see the church morally declining because of the leaders that are put up by carnal people. It’s not just the Pastors fault, but it’s the people that heap upon themselves these teachers, desiring to live worldly and carnal while claiming the God of our salvation. Let’s explore the 10 signs of a carnal church so that those of you that are really searching for a worship house will not have to sit through multiple takes of foolishness to make a decision. You do not want to expose your family to the umbrella of foolishness that many of these churches are operating under. So, here are the 10 signs of a carnal church:
10. Cash Money Evangelists - When you find out that preachers like the “money cometh man” has visited this church or they are under them in any way, make that your first and last visit! Pastors that want money will bring these thieves in or set themselves under them to be in position to get rich. They will use the pulpit like an Amway presentation and bring in these money stealing evangelist to generate income. This is a trick because while the Pastor gets richer, the people in the church get dumb and poor. Some will prosper because they were already prosperous, but the average person will never get any more than they would have already gotten had they not financed foolishness. Beware, it’s a spiritual pyramid scheme!
9. Financial focus - When you hear about offering and tithes before the offering period, beware. When you keep hearing about blessings, season, harvest, destiny, purpose, breakthrough, and especially FAVOR, then know you are being set up. All these things should pertain to soul winning, but when they are used as financial buzz words, then you know the pastor needs cash. The bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil and anytime money is overly emphasized in a ministry, there is evil following it. So, if they have a space on the visitors card to state your income bracket, proceed to the nearest exit!
8. Bad language - Any pastor that will use profanity in his pulpit is childish! That is one of the most carnal things you will ever see and it speaks volumes of the pastors lifestyle outside of the church. The bible says that if the tongue is out of order, the rest of the body is as well, so, you just got your sign on whether or not this is the person to bring your family under. And if the word for every Sunday is “SEX” then you know something is going on. PG-13 is too high a rating for Sunday morning worship. Why in the world would anyone tolerate a cussing pastor? Are we that desperate for a man to be over us that we would allow him to do what many of us don’t do in front of our own families? What a shame and yet it is happening at an alarming rate.
7. Divorce rate - You can learn a lot about a ministry and what kind of attacks it is experiencing by the number of divorces that are occurring. When people in leadership of a ministry divorce, it’s not the same as lay members divorcing. God hates divorce because it essentially says that people are giving up and not giving him a chance to reconcile them. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, the circumstances may call for divorce based on abuse, or one party not being willing to work it out, but when people just mutually agree that they don’t want each other anymore, then that is what displeases God. And a church that is full of divorced couples is dangerous. Especially when it’s in the leadership and they can’t seem to work out their differences. And you never want to put yourself under a pastor that struggles with marital issues. When a man’s focus is his church rather than his family, beware. He is a hound dog on the prowl, seeking gratification outside his own home! Believe That!!!
6. Sinful Alliances - When the Bishop or Leader of the parent organization of your church is brought in by the pastor, check him out. If he has a bunch of homosexuals flying around with him or he is carnal and devilish, then expect the same from your pastor. A man cannot sit under wickedness long, without being affected by it. Psalms tells us that the wicked walk around freely when the vilest of men are exalted. When men come under foul leaders, they are essentially saying that they would rather position themselves for a position in the organization than protect their church from sinfulness. After all, isn’t being apart of a wicked organization saying that you are in essence in favor of wickedness? Be careful of this double standard. It’s not about the organization in God’s eyes, but it’s about the people that the Pastor is suppose to be caring for.
5. Homosexuals and Lesbians - If you walk into the building and they are everywhere, leave! Any man that attracts homosexuals is a homosexual. Any pastor that allows homosexuals to roam freely in his ministry is probably a homosexual. Any man that defends the gay lifestyle is most likely gay. Any man that has a tolerance for the lifestyle is probably gay. Any man that doesn’t get squeamish when they are surrounded by homosexuals likes the attention. People, why are we playing around with this? Why are we making this a non issue? It’s an obvious problem. Homosexuals will not thrive in a ministry that does not condone them. They will repent and be delivered if the power of God is truly in a ministry. If the leader tolerates their lifestyles and uses their talents without delivering their souls, then he is a pimp and should be avoided. This one should be a no brainer.
4. Club Attire - If the Pastor wears an earring, don’t get out the car! How can you ever have standards in your home and amongst your sons when the very pastor of the church is modeling vanity and showing he is a playa? Also, if people are walking around sexy in church and no one cares, then you know that church is not practicing holiness. I’m not saying that folks have to have crusty lips and nappy hair, but what I’m saying is that, butt cracks, cleavage, and belly buttons should not be outfit accessories! And please, let’s not get on the women and not touch on the men. We see that too often where the women have to look like national geographic natives, but the men can prance around dressed like Superfly! Let’s balance this out and just say, the church is not the club. We must not be intentionally sexy in the house of God. Tight fitting clothes and such just don’t belong in God’s house. God is the focus, so hide your meat!
3. Secular Remakes - If you visit a ministry and they welcome all the single people with Beyonce’s song “single ladies” or they sing “reasons” to the married couples, then you know you are in a den of debauchery. If they had a memerial service for MJ, then you are in punkdom and need to leave! Any church that has to resort to old and new school secular jams to keep people interested is nothing but a bootleg club and they need to start stamping hands. What happened to the “NEW SONG” that David spoke of? Why are people singing the worlds songs in church? The secular artists that wrote them are complaining and they want their songs back on the radio and in the world where they can get paid for them, not in the church. What a shame.
2. Obamania - If you hear about the president every week and your pastor has gone off the deep end trying to weave him into every sermon on a weekly basis, then you know it’s time to go! Our president stands for everything that Christ is against. How in the world do we make him a favorable topic for the church? Shouldn’t we as a church stand against his policy if it conflicts with the Word of God? But we have pastors that have jumped on his band wagon and are using his fame and popularity to generate income and membership. They feel if they keep him the focus, people that support him will support them! And they will always say “now, i don’t agree with all of his policies, but……..praise the Lord for blessing us with a black president!” That’s like saying “I know he is a satanist, but praise God I finally got a date!” I’m telling you, this is a true sign of the times when the president gets more time than Jesus in our pulpits.
1. God said stay! - This is not for the visitors, but this is for those that have seen a moral decline in the church you have been attending. You have seen the pastor embrace the world, carnality, television and movie stars. You have begun to hear more about money than about Jesus. You hear more about the pastors wants and desires than the desires of Jesus! You see the youth partying and hip hopping during the service and it just does not agree with your spirit. Homosexuals are everywhere and no one cares anymore. You are being abused spiritually because you are not giving as much as you are told by the pastor or you are not with the new stuff that’s going on. So, what do you do? You attempt to exercise your GOD GIVEN DOMINION AND RIGHT TO LEAVE. But when you meet with the pastor, he tells you that God said you can’t???? He says that God has told him something that he won’t tell you? In other words, you can’t leave because something bad is going to happen.
Well, this is witchcraft manipulation in the highest degree. When you are afraid to leave, then you know it’s not God. He has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love and………..a sound mind. If the place you are worshiping is not spiritually sound, then that’s the part that is not God and the fear to leave must be rebuked.
Listen people of God. We are in a bad state of the church right now. It’s like the dark ages all over again. People think church is for the sinner and it’s not. Church is the collective body of believers assembling together in a unified manner. Those that practice and condone sinfulness are excluded! Sure many are weak and need strength, but you can’t draw strength from weak leaders! And for this cause many are not going to church anymore and would rather stay home. But God is faithful and I pray that you will make 2010 the year that you step away from that carnal headship and make a move of faith! Step out and seek the face of God for clarity. He will lead you to a wonderful place where the Spirit of God resides and the carnality of men is not. But you must take the step of faith first. Once you move, God will move on your behalf.
2Cor. 11:14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.
Jer. 12:10 Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
2Tim. 3:2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
Matt. 23:23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
Jer. 3:15 And I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.
In His Name,
G. Craige Lewis
Reprobates!
Compromising the Word!
Heady!
VIP Reception after the concert?? For Whom??
Did you see the rostrum? I was at a Youth Congress early last year for COOLJC (Churches of our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith) and Hezekiah was one of the guest speakers.
I had to work the alter so I’m more spiritually vigilant when I’m working. I watch him emotionally molest the youth that were in attendance; he preached that we can find elevation in OURSELVES…I was waiting for him to get to the God part; the Jesus part of the sermon but he did not. He jumps from the pulpit to pew area and started standing on the chairs…. like he was Doug E. Fresh trying to rock the crowd!
My spirit was VEXED and I begin to war. At alter call every gay male in there came RUNNING to the alter like Scarlet Ohara running out of a burning building. NO one was delivered that afternoon. It was painful. I was utterly bothered by the young man with the super pointed shoes and mohawk following him around wiping the sweat off his neck….My God have mercy on us.
I’ll get off my soapbox now.
Finding a worldliness free church these days can be disheartening. There are so many crooks and devils pastoring churches these days, it can be a chore finding a service that will meet your needs rather than tickle your fancy. The bible tells us that the Devil can transform himself into an angel of light and his ministers into ministers of unrighteousness. Why in the world would a person desire to be in a church that is full of unrighteousness and carnality? Why not just club, party, and hang out in the world where that stuff belongs? I don’t understand why people even involve the church of God in their wickedness. What is the point? If you are in sin, then why practice sin and claim him?
But we see the church morally declining because of the leaders that are put up by carnal people. It’s not just the Pastors fault, but it’s the people that heap upon themselves these teachers, desiring to live worldly and carnal while claiming the God of our salvation. Let’s explore the 10 signs of a carnal church so that those of you that are really searching for a worship house will not have to sit through multiple takes of foolishness to make a decision. You do not want to expose your family to the umbrella of foolishness that many of these churches are operating under. So, here are the 10 signs of a carnal church:
10. Cash Money Evangelists - When you find out that preachers like the “money cometh man” has visited this church or they are under them in any way, make that your first and last visit! Pastors that want money will bring these thieves in or set themselves under them to be in position to get rich. They will use the pulpit like an Amway presentation and bring in these money stealing evangelist to generate income. This is a trick because while the Pastor gets richer, the people in the church get dumb and poor. Some will prosper because they were already prosperous, but the average person will never get any more than they would have already gotten had they not financed foolishness. Beware, it’s a spiritual pyramid scheme!
9. Financial focus - When you hear about offering and tithes before the offering period, beware. When you keep hearing about blessings, season, harvest, destiny, purpose, breakthrough, and especially FAVOR, then know you are being set up. All these things should pertain to soul winning, but when they are used as financial buzz words, then you know the pastor needs cash. The bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil and anytime money is overly emphasized in a ministry, there is evil following it. So, if they have a space on the visitors card to state your income bracket, proceed to the nearest exit!
8. Bad language - Any pastor that will use profanity in his pulpit is childish! That is one of the most carnal things you will ever see and it speaks volumes of the pastors lifestyle outside of the church. The bible says that if the tongue is out of order, the rest of the body is as well, so, you just got your sign on whether or not this is the person to bring your family under. And if the word for every Sunday is “SEX” then you know something is going on. PG-13 is too high a rating for Sunday morning worship. Why in the world would anyone tolerate a cussing pastor? Are we that desperate for a man to be over us that we would allow him to do what many of us don’t do in front of our own families? What a shame and yet it is happening at an alarming rate.
7. Divorce rate - You can learn a lot about a ministry and what kind of attacks it is experiencing by the number of divorces that are occurring. When people in leadership of a ministry divorce, it’s not the same as lay members divorcing. God hates divorce because it essentially says that people are giving up and not giving him a chance to reconcile them. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, the circumstances may call for divorce based on abuse, or one party not being willing to work it out, but when people just mutually agree that they don’t want each other anymore, then that is what displeases God. And a church that is full of divorced couples is dangerous. Especially when it’s in the leadership and they can’t seem to work out their differences. And you never want to put yourself under a pastor that struggles with marital issues. When a man’s focus is his church rather than his family, beware. He is a hound dog on the prowl, seeking gratification outside his own home! Believe That!!!
6. Sinful Alliances - When the Bishop or Leader of the parent organization of your church is brought in by the pastor, check him out. If he has a bunch of homosexuals flying around with him or he is carnal and devilish, then expect the same from your pastor. A man cannot sit under wickedness long, without being affected by it. Psalms tells us that the wicked walk around freely when the vilest of men are exalted. When men come under foul leaders, they are essentially saying that they would rather position themselves for a position in the organization than protect their church from sinfulness. After all, isn’t being apart of a wicked organization saying that you are in essence in favor of wickedness? Be careful of this double standard. It’s not about the organization in God’s eyes, but it’s about the people that the Pastor is suppose to be caring for.
5. Homosexuals and Lesbians - If you walk into the building and they are everywhere, leave! Any man that attracts homosexuals is a homosexual. Any pastor that allows homosexuals to roam freely in his ministry is probably a homosexual. Any man that defends the gay lifestyle is most likely gay. Any man that has a tolerance for the lifestyle is probably gay. Any man that doesn’t get squeamish when they are surrounded by homosexuals likes the attention. People, why are we playing around with this? Why are we making this a non issue? It’s an obvious problem. Homosexuals will not thrive in a ministry that does not condone them. They will repent and be delivered if the power of God is truly in a ministry. If the leader tolerates their lifestyles and uses their talents without delivering their souls, then he is a pimp and should be avoided. This one should be a no brainer.
4. Club Attire - If the Pastor wears an earring, don’t get out the car! How can you ever have standards in your home and amongst your sons when the very pastor of the church is modeling vanity and showing he is a playa? Also, if people are walking around sexy in church and no one cares, then you know that church is not practicing holiness. I’m not saying that folks have to have crusty lips and nappy hair, but what I’m saying is that, butt cracks, cleavage, and belly buttons should not be outfit accessories! And please, let’s not get on the women and not touch on the men. We see that too often where the women have to look like national geographic natives, but the men can prance around dressed like Superfly! Let’s balance this out and just say, the church is not the club. We must not be intentionally sexy in the house of God. Tight fitting clothes and such just don’t belong in God’s house. God is the focus, so hide your meat!
3. Secular Remakes - If you visit a ministry and they welcome all the single people with Beyonce’s song “single ladies” or they sing “reasons” to the married couples, then you know you are in a den of debauchery. If they had a memerial service for MJ, then you are in punkdom and need to leave! Any church that has to resort to old and new school secular jams to keep people interested is nothing but a bootleg club and they need to start stamping hands. What happened to the “NEW SONG” that David spoke of? Why are people singing the worlds songs in church? The secular artists that wrote them are complaining and they want their songs back on the radio and in the world where they can get paid for them, not in the church. What a shame.
2. Obamania - If you hear about the president every week and your pastor has gone off the deep end trying to weave him into every sermon on a weekly basis, then you know it’s time to go! Our president stands for everything that Christ is against. How in the world do we make him a favorable topic for the church? Shouldn’t we as a church stand against his policy if it conflicts with the Word of God? But we have pastors that have jumped on his band wagon and are using his fame and popularity to generate income and membership. They feel if they keep him the focus, people that support him will support them! And they will always say “now, i don’t agree with all of his policies, but……..praise the Lord for blessing us with a black president!” That’s like saying “I know he is a satanist, but praise God I finally got a date!” I’m telling you, this is a true sign of the times when the president gets more time than Jesus in our pulpits.
1. God said stay! - This is not for the visitors, but this is for those that have seen a moral decline in the church you have been attending. You have seen the pastor embrace the world, carnality, television and movie stars. You have begun to hear more about money than about Jesus. You hear more about the pastors wants and desires than the desires of Jesus! You see the youth partying and hip hopping during the service and it just does not agree with your spirit. Homosexuals are everywhere and no one cares anymore. You are being abused spiritually because you are not giving as much as you are told by the pastor or you are not with the new stuff that’s going on. So, what do you do? You attempt to exercise your GOD GIVEN DOMINION AND RIGHT TO LEAVE. But when you meet with the pastor, he tells you that God said you can’t???? He says that God has told him something that he won’t tell you? In other words, you can’t leave because something bad is going to happen.
Well, this is witchcraft manipulation in the highest degree. When you are afraid to leave, then you know it’s not God. He has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love and………..a sound mind. If the place you are worshiping is not spiritually sound, then that’s the part that is not God and the fear to leave must be rebuked.
Listen people of God. We are in a bad state of the church right now. It’s like the dark ages all over again. People think church is for the sinner and it’s not. Church is the collective body of believers assembling together in a unified manner. Those that practice and condone sinfulness are excluded! Sure many are weak and need strength, but you can’t draw strength from weak leaders! And for this cause many are not going to church anymore and would rather stay home. But God is faithful and I pray that you will make 2010 the year that you step away from that carnal headship and make a move of faith! Step out and seek the face of God for clarity. He will lead you to a wonderful place where the Spirit of God resides and the carnality of men is not. But you must take the step of faith first. Once you move, God will move on your behalf.
2Cor. 11:14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.
Jer. 12:10 Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
2Tim. 3:2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
Matt. 23:23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
Jer. 3:15 And I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.
In His Name,
G. Craige Lewis
Reprobates!
Compromising the Word!
Heady!
VIP Reception after the concert?? For Whom??
Did you see the rostrum? I was at a Youth Congress early last year for COOLJC (Churches of our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith) and Hezekiah was one of the guest speakers.
I had to work the alter so I’m more spiritually vigilant when I’m working. I watch him emotionally molest the youth that were in attendance; he preached that we can find elevation in OURSELVES…I was waiting for him to get to the God part; the Jesus part of the sermon but he did not. He jumps from the pulpit to pew area and started standing on the chairs…. like he was Doug E. Fresh trying to rock the crowd!
My spirit was VEXED and I begin to war. At alter call every gay male in there came RUNNING to the alter like Scarlet Ohara running out of a burning building. NO one was delivered that afternoon. It was painful. I was utterly bothered by the young man with the super pointed shoes and mohawk following him around wiping the sweat off his neck….My God have mercy on us.
I’ll get off my soapbox now.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Alabama Town’s Failed Pension Is a Warning
WHILE WE R WELL NOT ME CASUE I DONT CARE BUT WHILE SOME OF US R WAITING ON JAY-Z'S THE THRONE OUR WORLD AS WE NOW IT IS TURNING INTO MUSH AND FALLING WHILE WE WORRY ABOUT THE NEW CDS COMING OUT IS ANY OF THESE SO CALLED ARTIST GOING 2 GIVE U A DIME WHEN THIS FALLS APART READ THE PAPER LOOK AT THE NEWS ..THIS WHT UR FAV ARTIST IS NOT TELLING U WHT ABOUT UR HOUSEHOLD HOW R U GONING 2 MAKE IT IF THINGS GET WORSE??WHT ABOUT UR SOUL?? UR LIGHTS ,WATER GAS, ELECTRIC.... WHT ABOUT UR BABIES... THE PLACE WE KNOW AS THE UNITED STATES IS LOOKIN LIKE THIS AN SOME US DONT EVEN C IT
THE POWERS THAT B AND THE POWERS THAT U CANT C PRINCIPALITIES R WORKING 2GETHER 2 BRING THIS PLACE DWN
This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.
It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money.
Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension checks will follow.
So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases; retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up like Prichard.
Driving down Wilson Avenue here — a bleak stretch of shuttered storefronts, with pawn shops and beauty parlors that operate behind barred windows and signs warning of guard dogs — it is hard to see vestiges of the Prichard that was a boom town until the 1960s. The city once had thriving department stores, two theaters and even a zoo. “You couldn’t find a place to park in that city,” recalled Kenneth G. Turner, a retired paramedic whose grandfather pushed for the city’s incorporation in 1925.
The city’s rapid decline began in the 1970s. The growth of other suburbs, white flight and then middle-class flight all took their tolls, and the city’s population shrank by 40 percent to about 27,000 today, from its peak of 45,000. As people left, the city’s tax base dwindled.
Prichard’s pension plan was established by state law during the good times, in 1956, to supplement Social Security. By the standard of other public pension plans, and the six-figure pensions that draw outrage in places like California and New Jersey, it is not especially rich. Its biggest pension came to about $39,000 a year, for a retired fire chief with many years of service. The average retiree got around $12,000 a year. But the plan allowed workers to retire young, in their 50s. And its benefits were sweetened over time by the state legislature, which did not pay for the added benefits.
For many years, the city — like many other cities and states today — knew that its pension plan was underfunded. As recently as 2004, the city hired an actuary, who reported that “the plan is projected to exhaust the assets around 2009, at which time benefits will need to be paid directly from the city’s annual finances.”
The city had already taken the unusual step of reducing pension benefits by 8.5 percent for current retirees, after it declared bankruptcy in 1999, yielding to years of dwindling money, mismanagement and corruption. (A previous mayor was removed from office and found guilty of neglect of duty.) The city paid off its last creditors from the bankruptcy in 2007. But its current mayor, Ronald K. Davis, never complied with an order from the bankruptcy court to begin paying $16.5 million into the pension fund to reduce its shortfall.
A lawyer representing the city, R. Scott Williams, said that the city simply did not have the money. “The reality for Prichard is that if you took money to build the pension up, who’s going to pay the garbage man?” he asked. “Who’s going to pay to run the police department? Who’s going to pay the bill for the street lights? There’s only so much money to go around.”
Workers paid 5.5 percent of their salaries into the pension fund, and the city paid 10.5 percent. But the fund paid out more money than it took in, and by September 2009 there was no longer enough left in the fund to send out the $150,000 worth of monthly checks owed to the retirees. The city stopped paying its pensions. And no one stepped in to enforce the law.
The retirees, who were not unionized, sued. The city tried to block their suit by declaring bankruptcy, but a judge denied the request. The city is appealing. The retirees filed another suit, asking the city to pay at least some of the benefits they are owed. A mediation effort is expected to begin soon. Many retirees say they would accept reduced benefits.
Companies with pension plans are required by federal law to put money behind their promises years in advance, and the government can impose punitive taxes on those that fail to do so, or in some cases even seize their pension funds.
Companies are also required to protect their pension assets. So if a corporate pension fund falls below 60 cents’ worth of assets for every dollar of benefits owed, workers can no longer accrue additional benefits. (Prichard was down to just 33 cents on the dollar in 2003.)
And if a company goes bankrupt, the federal government can take over its pension plan and see that its retirees receive their benefits. Although some retirees receive less than they were promised, no retiree from a federally insured plan in the private sector has come away empty-handed since the federal pension law was enacted in 1974. The law does not cover public sector workers.
Last week several dozen retirees — one using a wheelchair, some with canes — attended the weekly City Council meeting, asking for something before Christmas. Mary Berg, 61, a former assistant city clerk whose mother was once the city’s zookeeper, read them the names of 11 retirees who had died since the checks stopped coming.
“I hope that on Christmas morning, when you are with your families around your Christmas trees, that you remember that most of the retirees will not be opening presents with their families,” she told them.
The budget did not move forward. Mayor Davis was out of town.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted a man from the back row of the folding chairs. The retirees filed out. One woman could not hold back her tears.
After the meeting, Troy Ephriam, a council member who became chairman of the pension fund when it was nearly broke, sat in his office and recalled some of the failed efforts to put more money into the pension fund.
“I think the biggest disappointment I have is that there was not a strong enough effort to put something in there,” he said. “And that’s the reason that it’s hard for me to look these people in the face: because I’m not certain we really gave our all to prevent this.”
THE POWERS THAT B AND THE POWERS THAT U CANT C PRINCIPALITIES R WORKING 2GETHER 2 BRING THIS PLACE DWNThis struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.
It is not just the pensioners who suffer when a pension fund runs dry. If a city tried to follow the law and pay its pensioners with money from its annual operating budget, it would probably have to adopt large tax increases, or make huge service cuts, to come up with the money.
Current city workers could find themselves paying into a pension plan that will not be there for their own retirements. In Prichard, some older workers have delayed retiring, since they cannot afford to give up their paychecks if no pension checks will follow.
So the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Colorado, Minnesota and South Dakota have all taken the unusual step of reducing the benefits they pay their current retirees by cutting cost-of-living increases; retirees in all three states are suing.
No state or city wants to wind up like Prichard.
Driving down Wilson Avenue here — a bleak stretch of shuttered storefronts, with pawn shops and beauty parlors that operate behind barred windows and signs warning of guard dogs — it is hard to see vestiges of the Prichard that was a boom town until the 1960s. The city once had thriving department stores, two theaters and even a zoo. “You couldn’t find a place to park in that city,” recalled Kenneth G. Turner, a retired paramedic whose grandfather pushed for the city’s incorporation in 1925.
The city’s rapid decline began in the 1970s. The growth of other suburbs, white flight and then middle-class flight all took their tolls, and the city’s population shrank by 40 percent to about 27,000 today, from its peak of 45,000. As people left, the city’s tax base dwindled.
Prichard’s pension plan was established by state law during the good times, in 1956, to supplement Social Security. By the standard of other public pension plans, and the six-figure pensions that draw outrage in places like California and New Jersey, it is not especially rich. Its biggest pension came to about $39,000 a year, for a retired fire chief with many years of service. The average retiree got around $12,000 a year. But the plan allowed workers to retire young, in their 50s. And its benefits were sweetened over time by the state legislature, which did not pay for the added benefits.
For many years, the city — like many other cities and states today — knew that its pension plan was underfunded. As recently as 2004, the city hired an actuary, who reported that “the plan is projected to exhaust the assets around 2009, at which time benefits will need to be paid directly from the city’s annual finances.”
The city had already taken the unusual step of reducing pension benefits by 8.5 percent for current retirees, after it declared bankruptcy in 1999, yielding to years of dwindling money, mismanagement and corruption. (A previous mayor was removed from office and found guilty of neglect of duty.) The city paid off its last creditors from the bankruptcy in 2007. But its current mayor, Ronald K. Davis, never complied with an order from the bankruptcy court to begin paying $16.5 million into the pension fund to reduce its shortfall.
A lawyer representing the city, R. Scott Williams, said that the city simply did not have the money. “The reality for Prichard is that if you took money to build the pension up, who’s going to pay the garbage man?” he asked. “Who’s going to pay to run the police department? Who’s going to pay the bill for the street lights? There’s only so much money to go around.”
Workers paid 5.5 percent of their salaries into the pension fund, and the city paid 10.5 percent. But the fund paid out more money than it took in, and by September 2009 there was no longer enough left in the fund to send out the $150,000 worth of monthly checks owed to the retirees. The city stopped paying its pensions. And no one stepped in to enforce the law.
The retirees, who were not unionized, sued. The city tried to block their suit by declaring bankruptcy, but a judge denied the request. The city is appealing. The retirees filed another suit, asking the city to pay at least some of the benefits they are owed. A mediation effort is expected to begin soon. Many retirees say they would accept reduced benefits.
Companies with pension plans are required by federal law to put money behind their promises years in advance, and the government can impose punitive taxes on those that fail to do so, or in some cases even seize their pension funds.
Companies are also required to protect their pension assets. So if a corporate pension fund falls below 60 cents’ worth of assets for every dollar of benefits owed, workers can no longer accrue additional benefits. (Prichard was down to just 33 cents on the dollar in 2003.)
And if a company goes bankrupt, the federal government can take over its pension plan and see that its retirees receive their benefits. Although some retirees receive less than they were promised, no retiree from a federally insured plan in the private sector has come away empty-handed since the federal pension law was enacted in 1974. The law does not cover public sector workers.
Last week several dozen retirees — one using a wheelchair, some with canes — attended the weekly City Council meeting, asking for something before Christmas. Mary Berg, 61, a former assistant city clerk whose mother was once the city’s zookeeper, read them the names of 11 retirees who had died since the checks stopped coming.
“I hope that on Christmas morning, when you are with your families around your Christmas trees, that you remember that most of the retirees will not be opening presents with their families,” she told them.
The budget did not move forward. Mayor Davis was out of town.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted a man from the back row of the folding chairs. The retirees filed out. One woman could not hold back her tears.
After the meeting, Troy Ephriam, a council member who became chairman of the pension fund when it was nearly broke, sat in his office and recalled some of the failed efforts to put more money into the pension fund.
“I think the biggest disappointment I have is that there was not a strong enough effort to put something in there,” he said. “And that’s the reason that it’s hard for me to look these people in the face: because I’m not certain we really gave our all to prevent this.”
DO WE NOT C THE DARK CLOUDS OVER US MONEY SYSTEM IS FALLING
Detroit to set services by neighborhood condition WHT ITS THAT BAD WHERR NOW U CANT EVEN GIVE SERVICES OUT 2 EVERYONE NOW U HAVE 2 CHOSE WHO GETS HELP WELL DOES THAT MEAN CERTIAN NEIGBORHOODS WILL DYE OUT WILL THEY TELL US WILL THEY CUT CERTIAN PLACES OFF FROM THE REST 2 SAVE THE MORE SO CALL THRIVING POPULATION / SCARY STUFF
DETROIT - Detroit neighborhoods with more people and a better chance of survival will receive different levels of city services than more blighted areas under a plan unveiled Wednesday that some residents fear may pit them against each other for scarce resources.
Mayor Dave Bing released details from his Detroit Works Project, calling the changes a "short-term intervention" necessary because the city, with limited financial resources, a $155 million budget deficit and a dwindling population, was spread dangerously thin.
"Our focus is going to be on the people in the neighborhoods," Bing said. "We can effect real change and improve neighborhoods."
Bing's plan isn't about shrinking Detroit —the boundaries of the 139-square-mile city aren't receding. The plan also backs away from forcing the redistribution of what's left of the population into areas where people still live and where the houses aren't on the verge of caving in. Many residents had strongly opposed that idea.
"We will not force anybody to move," Bing said. "We want people to move into the areas that are going to grow; where we have the amenities, the density."
He stressed that police, fire and emergency medical service will be at the same levels in all neighborhoods.
Detroit's population of about 713,000 is down about 200,000 from 10 years ago, according to U.S. Census figures, and has fallen more than 1 million since 1950. Some areas have fewer occupied homes than vacant ones.
Bing's administration has worked with community leaders for months on the effort, in which neighborhoods have been classified as steady, transitional or distressed. It comes as entrenched companies and foundations are trying hard to lure newcomers into downtown and Midtown — two more stable neighborhoods — to rebuild the population base.
Neighborhoods identified as steady have the highest housing prices in Detroit and homes that are in good condition. Neighborhoods termed transitional have a mix of rental and owner-occupied homes and are in various stages of decline. Distressed neighborhoods have been in long-term decline and have high vacancy rates.
Under Bing's plan, more attention would be paid to demolishing vacant houses, enhancing vacant lots and improving recreation services in distressed neighborhoods. Transitional neighborhoods would get more services in regard to demolitions, boarding up vacant structures, road improvement, and water and sewerage treatments.
Things like tree trimming, attracting businesses, code enforcement and public lighting will get more attention in the city's best neighborhoods.
To Dennis Talbert, Bing's plan "does not necessarily bode well" for his Brightmoor neighborhood on Detroit's west and northwest sides.
"It won't get any services," he said.
A better plan, Talbert said, would have been possibly closing down neighborhoods like his own.
"He has tip-toed around it," Talbert said of Bing. "Leadership says ... we have to take bold steps. It's not going to be right-sized now. It's going to be neglected."
Bing said the changes will be implemented in the next two weeks, and one neighborhood from each level will receive particular scrutiny and be evaluated in six months to gauge the successes of the new strategy.
"I think he should focus on the good and the bad," said 44-year-old Lisa Simon, who lives on the city's west side. "Treat us equal. We're the same."
Simon said the grass growing on lots in her neighborhood resembles a "cornfield," and tires dumped in alleys are slow to be removed.
Some targeted neighborhoods are doing better, though. Online retail mortgage lender Quicken Loans and four other employers announced an incentive program this week under which 16,000 employees at the Detroit-based companies will be offered $4 million in loans and rent subsidies to move in or near the city's downtown.
"This is all real," said Daniel J. Loepp, president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, one of the companies involved. "This isn't all rhetoric. It's action. I can sense in talking to people that people sense that, too."
The effort followed a similar move earlier this year in Midtown by the Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State University and Henry Ford Health System. Midtown, anchored by those facilities and cultural institutions like the Detroit Institute of Arts, has seen retail growth and people moving into the area.
Whole Foods Market Inc. plans to open its first store in Detroit in the Midtown neighborhood, which would make it the only national grocery chain operating in the city limits. The 20,000-square-foot supermarket, slated to open in 2013, will employ about 75 people, Whole Foods executive operations coordinator Red Elk Banks told The Associated Press. The company planned to formally announce the move later Wednesday.
Whole Foods and city officials began discussions in 2007 to bring a store to Detroit. Talks regarding the Midtown site got under way last year, Banks said. The supermarket likely will not look much different than other Whole Foods stores and offer the same products, Banks added.
"We have cultivated relationships with Michigan growers and we want to expand that to Detroit growers," he said. "We feel this is the right time for us to make the jump into Detroit. It's the focus on the food economy that has driven us to select Detroit. We feel Detroit deserves the best that Whole Foods has to offer."
Such programs aim to rebuild the city's residential base. A 2010 survey found Detroit had 33,000 vacant houses and scores of empty, weed-filled and trash-cluttered lots.
"He's got his hands full," Loepp said of Bing. "The land mass of Detroit is unmanageable."
Using federal funds, about 3,000 abandoned houses have been torn down over the past 12 months. Bing has promised to demolish another 3,000 over the next year.
Bob Gregory, senior vice president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership that works to develop initiatives to strengthen the city's downtown, said there has been momentum despite the economic downturn, and it must continue.
"The neighborhoods of the city are very important to the overall direction and growth of Detroit," Gregory said.
DETROIT - Detroit neighborhoods with more people and a better chance of survival will receive different levels of city services than more blighted areas under a plan unveiled Wednesday that some residents fear may pit them against each other for scarce resources.
Mayor Dave Bing released details from his Detroit Works Project, calling the changes a "short-term intervention" necessary because the city, with limited financial resources, a $155 million budget deficit and a dwindling population, was spread dangerously thin.
"Our focus is going to be on the people in the neighborhoods," Bing said. "We can effect real change and improve neighborhoods."
Bing's plan isn't about shrinking Detroit —the boundaries of the 139-square-mile city aren't receding. The plan also backs away from forcing the redistribution of what's left of the population into areas where people still live and where the houses aren't on the verge of caving in. Many residents had strongly opposed that idea.
"We will not force anybody to move," Bing said. "We want people to move into the areas that are going to grow; where we have the amenities, the density."
He stressed that police, fire and emergency medical service will be at the same levels in all neighborhoods.
Detroit's population of about 713,000 is down about 200,000 from 10 years ago, according to U.S. Census figures, and has fallen more than 1 million since 1950. Some areas have fewer occupied homes than vacant ones.
Bing's administration has worked with community leaders for months on the effort, in which neighborhoods have been classified as steady, transitional or distressed. It comes as entrenched companies and foundations are trying hard to lure newcomers into downtown and Midtown — two more stable neighborhoods — to rebuild the population base.
Neighborhoods identified as steady have the highest housing prices in Detroit and homes that are in good condition. Neighborhoods termed transitional have a mix of rental and owner-occupied homes and are in various stages of decline. Distressed neighborhoods have been in long-term decline and have high vacancy rates.
Under Bing's plan, more attention would be paid to demolishing vacant houses, enhancing vacant lots and improving recreation services in distressed neighborhoods. Transitional neighborhoods would get more services in regard to demolitions, boarding up vacant structures, road improvement, and water and sewerage treatments.
Things like tree trimming, attracting businesses, code enforcement and public lighting will get more attention in the city's best neighborhoods.
To Dennis Talbert, Bing's plan "does not necessarily bode well" for his Brightmoor neighborhood on Detroit's west and northwest sides.
"It won't get any services," he said.
A better plan, Talbert said, would have been possibly closing down neighborhoods like his own.
"He has tip-toed around it," Talbert said of Bing. "Leadership says ... we have to take bold steps. It's not going to be right-sized now. It's going to be neglected."
Bing said the changes will be implemented in the next two weeks, and one neighborhood from each level will receive particular scrutiny and be evaluated in six months to gauge the successes of the new strategy.
"I think he should focus on the good and the bad," said 44-year-old Lisa Simon, who lives on the city's west side. "Treat us equal. We're the same."
Simon said the grass growing on lots in her neighborhood resembles a "cornfield," and tires dumped in alleys are slow to be removed.
Some targeted neighborhoods are doing better, though. Online retail mortgage lender Quicken Loans and four other employers announced an incentive program this week under which 16,000 employees at the Detroit-based companies will be offered $4 million in loans and rent subsidies to move in or near the city's downtown.
"This is all real," said Daniel J. Loepp, president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, one of the companies involved. "This isn't all rhetoric. It's action. I can sense in talking to people that people sense that, too."
The effort followed a similar move earlier this year in Midtown by the Detroit Medical Center, Wayne State University and Henry Ford Health System. Midtown, anchored by those facilities and cultural institutions like the Detroit Institute of Arts, has seen retail growth and people moving into the area.
Whole Foods Market Inc. plans to open its first store in Detroit in the Midtown neighborhood, which would make it the only national grocery chain operating in the city limits. The 20,000-square-foot supermarket, slated to open in 2013, will employ about 75 people, Whole Foods executive operations coordinator Red Elk Banks told The Associated Press. The company planned to formally announce the move later Wednesday.
Whole Foods and city officials began discussions in 2007 to bring a store to Detroit. Talks regarding the Midtown site got under way last year, Banks said. The supermarket likely will not look much different than other Whole Foods stores and offer the same products, Banks added.
"We have cultivated relationships with Michigan growers and we want to expand that to Detroit growers," he said. "We feel this is the right time for us to make the jump into Detroit. It's the focus on the food economy that has driven us to select Detroit. We feel Detroit deserves the best that Whole Foods has to offer."
Such programs aim to rebuild the city's residential base. A 2010 survey found Detroit had 33,000 vacant houses and scores of empty, weed-filled and trash-cluttered lots.
"He's got his hands full," Loepp said of Bing. "The land mass of Detroit is unmanageable."
Using federal funds, about 3,000 abandoned houses have been torn down over the past 12 months. Bing has promised to demolish another 3,000 over the next year.
Bob Gregory, senior vice president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership that works to develop initiatives to strengthen the city's downtown, said there has been momentum despite the economic downturn, and it must continue.
"The neighborhoods of the city are very important to the overall direction and growth of Detroit," Gregory said.
LET THE PEOPLE VOTE1111
NEW YORK – Christians were among the thousands of New Yorkers that protested the new gaymarriage law Sunday in a massive rally that spanned across four cities.
Protesters gathered at rallies held in Manhattan, Albany, Rochester and Buffalo demanding that state lawmakers put the gay marriage issue before voters by placing it on a statewide referendum. All four rallies kicked off at 3 p.m. and were streamed live on the “Let the People Vote” website.
“Let the people vote!” the crowds in all four cities chanted.
The “Let the People Vote!” rallies, organized by National Organization for Marriage, were timed to coincide with the first day the gay marriage law takes effect in New York. Before and during the protest, hundreds of same-sex couples lined outside city marriage bureaus in New York City and throughout the state for a chance to marry.
In Midtown Manhattan, thousands rallied outside Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New York City office then marched down 3rd Ave. in a line that spanned over several city blocks. Hector A. Chiesa, president of Radio Vision Cristiana 1330 AM, one of the largest Christian Spanish radio stations in New York, estimated that over 10,000 people showed up for the rally in Manhattan.
Christian protesters in the Manhattan rally were seen praying aloud before the procession began. A group of Hispanic Christians sang hymns and held their Bibles as they made their way down the street.
“Let the People Vote!” rallies in the other three cities had at least one Christian speaker address the crowd. Many protesters responded with “Amen” as several speakers led them in prayer to overturn the gay marriage law.
In Buffalo, the Rev. William Gillison, pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, expressed his outrage at New York lawmakers who voted to legalize gay marriage.
“A handful of legislators paid no attention to millions of New Yorkers,” said Gillison, standing outside Buffalo City Hall. “We are upset because you violated our law that is older and greater than New York.”
The black pastor also criticized the religious exemptions in the gay marriage bill that are supposed to protect churches from being punished by the government or sued by same-sex couples if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
“You say that the church now has special protections. Before you voted, we didn’t need special protections. We were already protected by the existing law,” said Gillison, who was cheered on by the crowd throughout his speech.
At the Rochester rally outside Liberty Pole, speakers blasted the new law, saying it went against the biblical definition of marriage.
Unlike other states like California, New York does not allow the people to directly petition to put the gay marriage issue on a ballot referendum. In order for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to get on the ballot, a simple majority in both the state House and Senate needs to vote to put the issue before 20 million New Yorkers.
Despite polls saying that a majority of New Yorkers support same-sex marriage, opponents of gay marriage say they are confident the people will uphold traditional marriage if they are allowed a vote. No state has ever approved gay marriage when the issue was put before voters.
One main objective of Sunday’s rallies is to initiate a movement against lawmakers who voted in favor of gay marriage. Traditional marriage supporters said they hope to vote those lawmakers out of office in the 2012 election so that they can get the issue on the ballot by 2015 or 2016.
In Albany, speakers urged protesters to remain vigilant about the gay marriage issue and also encouraged “people who love God” to run for office.
Those who joined in the rallies Sunday were encouraged to text “NYVOTE” to 96362 in order to receive updates on upcoming events and protests opposing gay marriage.
Rally speakers told protesters that they want to start a “movement” to fight gay marriage rather than limit the protest to a one-day event.
Protesters gathered at rallies held in Manhattan, Albany, Rochester and Buffalo demanding that state lawmakers put the gay marriage issue before voters by placing it on a statewide referendum. All four rallies kicked off at 3 p.m. and were streamed live on the “Let the People Vote” website.
“Let the people vote!” the crowds in all four cities chanted.
The “Let the People Vote!” rallies, organized by National Organization for Marriage, were timed to coincide with the first day the gay marriage law takes effect in New York. Before and during the protest, hundreds of same-sex couples lined outside city marriage bureaus in New York City and throughout the state for a chance to marry.
In Midtown Manhattan, thousands rallied outside Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s New York City office then marched down 3rd Ave. in a line that spanned over several city blocks. Hector A. Chiesa, president of Radio Vision Cristiana 1330 AM, one of the largest Christian Spanish radio stations in New York, estimated that over 10,000 people showed up for the rally in Manhattan.
Christian protesters in the Manhattan rally were seen praying aloud before the procession began. A group of Hispanic Christians sang hymns and held their Bibles as they made their way down the street.
“Let the People Vote!” rallies in the other three cities had at least one Christian speaker address the crowd. Many protesters responded with “Amen” as several speakers led them in prayer to overturn the gay marriage law.
In Buffalo, the Rev. William Gillison, pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, expressed his outrage at New York lawmakers who voted to legalize gay marriage.
“A handful of legislators paid no attention to millions of New Yorkers,” said Gillison, standing outside Buffalo City Hall. “We are upset because you violated our law that is older and greater than New York.”
The black pastor also criticized the religious exemptions in the gay marriage bill that are supposed to protect churches from being punished by the government or sued by same-sex couples if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
“You say that the church now has special protections. Before you voted, we didn’t need special protections. We were already protected by the existing law,” said Gillison, who was cheered on by the crowd throughout his speech.
At the Rochester rally outside Liberty Pole, speakers blasted the new law, saying it went against the biblical definition of marriage.
Unlike other states like California, New York does not allow the people to directly petition to put the gay marriage issue on a ballot referendum. In order for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to get on the ballot, a simple majority in both the state House and Senate needs to vote to put the issue before 20 million New Yorkers.
Despite polls saying that a majority of New Yorkers support same-sex marriage, opponents of gay marriage say they are confident the people will uphold traditional marriage if they are allowed a vote. No state has ever approved gay marriage when the issue was put before voters.
One main objective of Sunday’s rallies is to initiate a movement against lawmakers who voted in favor of gay marriage. Traditional marriage supporters said they hope to vote those lawmakers out of office in the 2012 election so that they can get the issue on the ballot by 2015 or 2016.
In Albany, speakers urged protesters to remain vigilant about the gay marriage issue and also encouraged “people who love God” to run for office.
Those who joined in the rallies Sunday were encouraged to text “NYVOTE” to 96362 in order to receive updates on upcoming events and protests opposing gay marriage.
Rally speakers told protesters that they want to start a “movement” to fight gay marriage rather than limit the protest to a one-day event.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
666 ~ RFID Microchip
God warned us through His holy word about the incoming Anti Christ that will appear in the last days. Revelation 13:7 ~ And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindred, and tongues, and nations.
666
The Anti-Christ will rule the whole earth, and all governments, kings, prime ministers and presidents will submit to his power. This might start World War 3.
The Anti Christ will implement one monetary system, one government system, one identification system. . The bible mentioned 666 as the number of Anti Christ’s mark. Take note this is not the actual ”666″ mark but rather a number of Anti Christ’s mark. So 666 is the decoded value of Anti Christ’s mark. On my next post, I will discuss more about the Anti Christ’s mark and who is the Anti Christ.
Revelation 13:16 ~ And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
Revelation 13:17 ~ And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:18 ~ Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
The Anti Christ will execute his supreme power very soon, that no one will able to buy or sell without his mark “666″ as mentioned in the bible. Imagine no one will allowed to travel without the passport and 666. No one will allowed to buy from the department store without the mark of 666. No will permit to hospitals without this mark.
What will happened if you have the marked of the 666
The bible says so clear that anyone who will accept the mark of 666 will be thrown in the Lake of Fire. You lost your own soul even if you accept Christ you will be thrown in hell with the Anti-Christ. This is what the bible say
So be wise and do not be deceived. Satan is so wise, he is a great deceiver, he has been deceiving since from the beginning. His plans about the marking of 666 were already planned since before Christ was born. But thank GOD because it was revealed to us through his holy prophets and apostles. No one can stop the marking of 666 because it was mentioned in the bible.
RFID Microchip 666
RFID Microchip 666This is the RFID (radio frequency identification) microchip, before it was used as a tracking device to track lost animals. Soon it will become the World’s unified ID system. This is designed to implant inside man’s right hand or forehead. It is so small ,just a slight bigger from a single rice grain. RFID will contain all your personal information including your thumb mark, bank detail, birth certificate and more.
It was already implemented from some establishments specially in Europe and some parts of US as replacement to passport.
Governments from the all nation will soon required all people to have this as a counter measure to prevent kidnapping as the microchip has a built in GPS that allows authorities to trace the kidnapped ones and to prevent terrorism. Everyone is under control and can be tracked via satellite orbitting around the world.
RFID Microchip is 666, a mark of the anti Christ
If you are a wise christian, you should be aware from all works of the devil either obvious or silent moves. If you are ignorant from the word of GOD, you will find this 666 stuff a waste of time and non sense.
The works of Satan is so planned, he dictate people to do kidnapping, harassment, terrorism so he can show the help of the GPS features of the microchip. The implanting of this chip is placed at the forehead and in the right hand just like the bible said. The RFID microchip obviously reveal itself as a mark of 666. Soon no one will able to buy or sell without this chip.
This post served as a warning, PLEASE do not accept implanting of this microchip by any means. Served the LORD with fear and trembling. As a Christian our hope is the 2nd coming of JESUS CHRIST!, Before the worst marking of 666 will happened, faithful serving Christian will be transformed into a glorious body, in the twinkling of an eye God will liftup us from the sky to be with Him on his 2nd coming.
Non serious Christians and all self proclaimed Christians who go to church but still doing ungodly things like: womanizing, watching pornographic films, doing adultery, committing murder, lies , stealing, having sex with partners outside marriage, shoplifting and etc.. will be LEFT BEHIND. Your chance is only 1% to the point of death for not accepting the mark of 666.
Lets get serious with the LORD while His face can be found. Accept the LORD JESUS CHRIST as your SAVIOUR! Please pray this short prayer, this WILL SAVE you:
Dearest LORD JESUS,
I am so sorry for all the sins I have done, please help me to serve you before its too late.
Cleans me from all my sins.
I accept you JESUS CHRIST as my personal Savior, my LORD and my GOD! Please save me from the marking of the 666. Please lead me to the right church where I can served you. Please dearest JESUS guide me to the whole truth and to the right way. Please manifest in my life
IN JESUS NAME I Pray, AMEN!
666
The Anti-Christ will rule the whole earth, and all governments, kings, prime ministers and presidents will submit to his power. This might start World War 3.
The Anti Christ will implement one monetary system, one government system, one identification system. . The bible mentioned 666 as the number of Anti Christ’s mark. Take note this is not the actual ”666″ mark but rather a number of Anti Christ’s mark. So 666 is the decoded value of Anti Christ’s mark. On my next post, I will discuss more about the Anti Christ’s mark and who is the Anti Christ.
Revelation 13:16 ~ And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
Revelation 13:17 ~ And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Revelation 13:18 ~ Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
The Anti Christ will execute his supreme power very soon, that no one will able to buy or sell without his mark “666″ as mentioned in the bible. Imagine no one will allowed to travel without the passport and 666. No one will allowed to buy from the department store without the mark of 666. No will permit to hospitals without this mark.
What will happened if you have the marked of the 666
The bible says so clear that anyone who will accept the mark of 666 will be thrown in the Lake of Fire. You lost your own soul even if you accept Christ you will be thrown in hell with the Anti-Christ. This is what the bible say
So be wise and do not be deceived. Satan is so wise, he is a great deceiver, he has been deceiving since from the beginning. His plans about the marking of 666 were already planned since before Christ was born. But thank GOD because it was revealed to us through his holy prophets and apostles. No one can stop the marking of 666 because it was mentioned in the bible.
RFID Microchip 666
RFID Microchip 666This is the RFID (radio frequency identification) microchip, before it was used as a tracking device to track lost animals. Soon it will become the World’s unified ID system. This is designed to implant inside man’s right hand or forehead. It is so small ,just a slight bigger from a single rice grain. RFID will contain all your personal information including your thumb mark, bank detail, birth certificate and more.
It was already implemented from some establishments specially in Europe and some parts of US as replacement to passport.
Governments from the all nation will soon required all people to have this as a counter measure to prevent kidnapping as the microchip has a built in GPS that allows authorities to trace the kidnapped ones and to prevent terrorism. Everyone is under control and can be tracked via satellite orbitting around the world.
RFID Microchip is 666, a mark of the anti Christ
If you are a wise christian, you should be aware from all works of the devil either obvious or silent moves. If you are ignorant from the word of GOD, you will find this 666 stuff a waste of time and non sense.
The works of Satan is so planned, he dictate people to do kidnapping, harassment, terrorism so he can show the help of the GPS features of the microchip. The implanting of this chip is placed at the forehead and in the right hand just like the bible said. The RFID microchip obviously reveal itself as a mark of 666. Soon no one will able to buy or sell without this chip.
This post served as a warning, PLEASE do not accept implanting of this microchip by any means. Served the LORD with fear and trembling. As a Christian our hope is the 2nd coming of JESUS CHRIST!, Before the worst marking of 666 will happened, faithful serving Christian will be transformed into a glorious body, in the twinkling of an eye God will liftup us from the sky to be with Him on his 2nd coming.
Non serious Christians and all self proclaimed Christians who go to church but still doing ungodly things like: womanizing, watching pornographic films, doing adultery, committing murder, lies , stealing, having sex with partners outside marriage, shoplifting and etc.. will be LEFT BEHIND. Your chance is only 1% to the point of death for not accepting the mark of 666.
Lets get serious with the LORD while His face can be found. Accept the LORD JESUS CHRIST as your SAVIOUR! Please pray this short prayer, this WILL SAVE you:
Dearest LORD JESUS,
I am so sorry for all the sins I have done, please help me to serve you before its too late.
Cleans me from all my sins.
I accept you JESUS CHRIST as my personal Savior, my LORD and my GOD! Please save me from the marking of the 666. Please lead me to the right church where I can served you. Please dearest JESUS guide me to the whole truth and to the right way. Please manifest in my life
IN JESUS NAME I Pray, AMEN!
Angelica Testimony wht do u believe????
I have just read about this story, and I want to share this to you my readers, I know most of you has already knew about this. Its about the story of Angelica Zambrano, an 18 years old Christian girl from El Empalme, Ecuador claimed to have an extraordinary experience with the LORD. She was died for 23hours, according to this girl she was sent from HELL and HEAVEN by the LORD to become a living witness of how true are spiritual things.
One day of August, Angelica was invited by her mother to join them in their 15days fasting. During their fasting, Angelica prayed for something. She asked God to show her the heaven. She wants to see how beautiful is heaven. She quoted the verse from Jeremiah 33:3 that states: “Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
The month of August has passed, then one day in November, one messenger from the LORD came and said:
May the LORD Bless you… I am here to bring you a message from GOD. You must prepare yourself, because the LORD will show you great and might things which you do not know. He is going to show you HEAVEN and HELL because you have been asking, from Jeremiah 33:3″. Angelica was amazed because she didnt tell anyone about her special prayer request from GOD. So she asked the messenger: How did you know?. He respond: The same GOD that you server and praise, that very same GOD I also praise told me everything.
Both of them praise GOD, and some sisters from their church ,and others from their family join them praying. As they praise the LORD, Angelica started to see a vision. She saw the heavens opened and two angels are coming down. The messenger told Angelica to ask the two angels why they are here.
The angels were beautiful and tall, with glorious wings, they wore crystal sandals and holy garments.
Angelica ask the angels, Why are you here?. The angels replied: We are here because we have a task to carry out. We are here because you must visit Heaven and Hell and we will not leave until all of this comes to pass.
The messenger told Angelica that she will die for 23 hours but GOD will restore her life after this.
Death of Angelica Zambrano
Several days passed. Angelica and her family were praying. But she felt something bad from her body. She prayed so hard, until she a vision of heaven. The heavens were opened and she saw millions of angels singing. And she saw a very bright shine of light, 10,000 times brighter than the sun. Angelica has lost her strength, but her family continued praying for her. Angelica stopped from breathing and die.
Angelica heard a beautiful voice that sound like a thunder that says: Fear not, Daughter, for I am Jehovah, Your God, and I have come here to show you what I have promised you. Arise, for I am Jehovah, who holds you by your right hand and tells you, Fear not, I will help you. Angelica’s spirit arose, and saw her body dead. She wants to get back but she can’t. She saw the LORD’s glory: A muscular man, with a golden vest from His chest that read. KING OF KINGS and LORD OF LORDS.
The LORD was wearing a shiny golden sandals. He was so perfect, his face was covered a very bright light.
Angelica Zambrano goes to HELL
The LORD brings Angelica to hell. It was so dark, and she was so afraid. The LORD says: Fear not for I am with you . The LORD gave Angelica a pencil and a large binder with blank sheets of paper. The LORD told her to write down anything she will see. This is the beginning of Angelica’s journey to hell and heaven. Please do watch the attached youtube video from this post. Listen how Angelica died for 23 hours. Listen to her testimony.
One day of August, Angelica was invited by her mother to join them in their 15days fasting. During their fasting, Angelica prayed for something. She asked God to show her the heaven. She wants to see how beautiful is heaven. She quoted the verse from Jeremiah 33:3 that states: “Call to Me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”
The month of August has passed, then one day in November, one messenger from the LORD came and said:
May the LORD Bless you… I am here to bring you a message from GOD. You must prepare yourself, because the LORD will show you great and might things which you do not know. He is going to show you HEAVEN and HELL because you have been asking, from Jeremiah 33:3″. Angelica was amazed because she didnt tell anyone about her special prayer request from GOD. So she asked the messenger: How did you know?. He respond: The same GOD that you server and praise, that very same GOD I also praise told me everything.
Both of them praise GOD, and some sisters from their church ,and others from their family join them praying. As they praise the LORD, Angelica started to see a vision. She saw the heavens opened and two angels are coming down. The messenger told Angelica to ask the two angels why they are here.
The angels were beautiful and tall, with glorious wings, they wore crystal sandals and holy garments.
Angelica ask the angels, Why are you here?. The angels replied: We are here because we have a task to carry out. We are here because you must visit Heaven and Hell and we will not leave until all of this comes to pass.
The messenger told Angelica that she will die for 23 hours but GOD will restore her life after this.
Death of Angelica Zambrano
Several days passed. Angelica and her family were praying. But she felt something bad from her body. She prayed so hard, until she a vision of heaven. The heavens were opened and she saw millions of angels singing. And she saw a very bright shine of light, 10,000 times brighter than the sun. Angelica has lost her strength, but her family continued praying for her. Angelica stopped from breathing and die.
Angelica heard a beautiful voice that sound like a thunder that says: Fear not, Daughter, for I am Jehovah, Your God, and I have come here to show you what I have promised you. Arise, for I am Jehovah, who holds you by your right hand and tells you, Fear not, I will help you. Angelica’s spirit arose, and saw her body dead. She wants to get back but she can’t. She saw the LORD’s glory: A muscular man, with a golden vest from His chest that read. KING OF KINGS and LORD OF LORDS.
The LORD was wearing a shiny golden sandals. He was so perfect, his face was covered a very bright light.
Angelica Zambrano goes to HELL
The LORD brings Angelica to hell. It was so dark, and she was so afraid. The LORD says: Fear not for I am with you . The LORD gave Angelica a pencil and a large binder with blank sheets of paper. The LORD told her to write down anything she will see. This is the beginning of Angelica’s journey to hell and heaven. Please do watch the attached youtube video from this post. Listen how Angelica died for 23 hours. Listen to her testimony.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Stockton, California Birthday Shooting: 15-Year-Old Dead, 8 Wounded At Backyard Party
STOCKTON, Calif. -- Police in Stockton, Calif., say a 15-year-old boy has died and eight people wounded in a shooting at a backyard birthday party.
Police say at least one person in an adjoining backyard opened fire on a group of people attending the party around 11 p.m. Saturday. Police Lt. Jim Pickens says the teen died in a hospital Sunday.
Eight other people hit by gunfire included six adult males, one adult female and a male juvenile. Their conditions are not known.
Pickens says detectives have determined that a neighbor was not responsible for the shooting, but rather a gunman, or gunmen, who went into the backyard and opened fire.
No arrests have been made, and police have not determined a motive.
Police say at least one person in an adjoining backyard opened fire on a group of people attending the party around 11 p.m. Saturday. Police Lt. Jim Pickens says the teen died in a hospital Sunday.
Eight other people hit by gunfire included six adult males, one adult female and a male juvenile. Their conditions are not known.
Pickens says detectives have determined that a neighbor was not responsible for the shooting, but rather a gunman, or gunmen, who went into the backyard and opened fire.
No arrests have been made, and police have not determined a motive.
Dallas PD Takes a Walk on the DarkSide and Discovers, Why, That Ain't No Church
According to the Dallas City Attorney's Office, a self-proclaimed church near Northwest Highway and Webb Chapel Road is anything but. Says a complaint filed today in advance of a late-afternoon hearing, whatever Glen Hudson says he's operating at 3027 W. Northwest Highway, not far from where all those Bachman Lake-area strip clubs used to undress, is actually a light-night dance club -- and an alleged crime scene filled with a smorgasbord of illegal drugs and grown men having sex with underage girls. Which is why the club's manager -- a man who goes by the moniker Tommy Gunn -- was taken to Lew Sterrett earlier this week and given a $75,000 bond.
In a letter to the city, Hudson claimed he was an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church -- a religious organization that provides online ordination. Hudson claimed that business, as a religious establishment, was exempt from Dallas land use regulations. To which city attorneys said: Um, no.
According to Melissa Miles, deputy chief of code compliance in the CAO, the city was getting plenty of complaints about the place, known as DarkSide After Hours -- which, according to its website, has now "been deemed too krunk to be locked into one location." At which point the Dallas Police Department went undercover and discovered that clubgoers were continuously offered a buffet of drugs including ketamine, LSD, MDMA, Ecstasy, mushrooms, morphine, and marijuana, according to the city's petition for a restraining order limiting the venue's hours of operations. Detectives say they sure as hell didn't observe religious services during any of their four visits, but they did manage to make 15 drug buys.
The petition, which you'll find below, calls the property a "common nuisance, specifically, as a place to which persons habitually go for delivery, possession, or use of a controlled substance." Says Miles, look, don't pretend it's anything other than what it is: "a dance club, a rave." A hearing was scheduled for late this afternoon, when the city will ask a judge to issue a restraining order "on an emergency basis" that will restrict the establishment's hours of operation to daytime periods that Miles says "would be perfectly fine for a church." If this were a church. Which it isn't.
The temporary restraining order would limit the facility's hours to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and would require that people younger than 21 years old be accompanied by a parent or guardian. If the judge grants the city's request, "It will effectively shut them down" as a club, Miles says.
The City Attorney's Office is only handling the civil matters -- the late-night parties without proper zoning permits. But DarkSide, says the DPD, may have had an even darker side: According to the city, Thomas Eppelsheimer (or "Tommy Gunn") was arrested Monday for sexual indecency and performance with a minor. Eppelsheimer allegedly supplied drugs to minor females at the club and "sexually assaulted one or more of them at the property," per the petition that follows.
In a letter to the city, Hudson claimed he was an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church -- a religious organization that provides online ordination. Hudson claimed that business, as a religious establishment, was exempt from Dallas land use regulations. To which city attorneys said: Um, no.
According to Melissa Miles, deputy chief of code compliance in the CAO, the city was getting plenty of complaints about the place, known as DarkSide After Hours -- which, according to its website, has now "been deemed too krunk to be locked into one location." At which point the Dallas Police Department went undercover and discovered that clubgoers were continuously offered a buffet of drugs including ketamine, LSD, MDMA, Ecstasy, mushrooms, morphine, and marijuana, according to the city's petition for a restraining order limiting the venue's hours of operations. Detectives say they sure as hell didn't observe religious services during any of their four visits, but they did manage to make 15 drug buys.
The petition, which you'll find below, calls the property a "common nuisance, specifically, as a place to which persons habitually go for delivery, possession, or use of a controlled substance." Says Miles, look, don't pretend it's anything other than what it is: "a dance club, a rave." A hearing was scheduled for late this afternoon, when the city will ask a judge to issue a restraining order "on an emergency basis" that will restrict the establishment's hours of operation to daytime periods that Miles says "would be perfectly fine for a church." If this were a church. Which it isn't.
The temporary restraining order would limit the facility's hours to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and would require that people younger than 21 years old be accompanied by a parent or guardian. If the judge grants the city's request, "It will effectively shut them down" as a club, Miles says.
The City Attorney's Office is only handling the civil matters -- the late-night parties without proper zoning permits. But DarkSide, says the DPD, may have had an even darker side: According to the city, Thomas Eppelsheimer (or "Tommy Gunn") was arrested Monday for sexual indecency and performance with a minor. Eppelsheimer allegedly supplied drugs to minor females at the club and "sexually assaulted one or more of them at the property," per the petition that follows.
Amy Winehouse dead
Amy Winehouse (Pic:PA) Amy Winehouse (Pic:PA)
TRAGIC Amy Winehouse was found dead yesterday aged just 27. Her death followed a binge on ecstasy and booze, we can reveal.
Advertisement >>
The troubled singer, who spent years battling heroin and drink addictions, is believed to have been found slumped at home by her bodyguard. But she was already “beyond help” by the time ambulance crews and police arrived. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
At 8.45pm a private ambulance arrived at the house and five minutes later Amy was brought out in a body bag.
Last night her heartbroken mother said she believed her daughter’s death had been “only a matter of time” when they met just 24 hours before she died.
“She seemed out of it. But her passing so suddenly still hasn’t hit me,” said Janis Winehouse, who will now always remember how Amy said, ‘I love you mum’ at the end of an enjoyable day together.
Police forensic officers at Amy Winehouse's North London Home (pic: AP)
“They are the words I will always treasure,” said Janis. “I’m glad I saw her when I did.”
On hearing the news, Amy’s distraught father Mitch Winehouse wept: “This isn’t real. I’m completely devastated.
Speaking from New York, the taxi driver and part-time singer said: “I’m getting the next plane back. I’m coming home. I have to be with Amy.
“I can’t crack up for her sake. My family need me. I’m devastated, it’s such a shock.”
Last night a neighbour told how he heard noises from Amy’s home on Saturday afternoon.
“At about 3.30am I heard crying from next door... terrible crying like somebody mourning.The ambulances and police cars arrived shortly after that.”
Amy Winehouse receives a Nationwide Mercury Prize in September 2007 (pic: Rex)
Police described Amy’s death as “unexplained”. But friends who have seen her over the last few weeks say she had hit the self-destruct button over the last two days in wild drinking sessions around Camden, North London.
A friend said: “She has spent the last seven days on a massive bender and people were saying she’s going to drink herself to death.”
Friends who were with her believe she died from a “bad” ecstasy pill combined with huge amounts of alcohol and the fact she suffered from emphysema.
Tribute near Amy Winehouse's home in North London (pic: Getty)
One friend partying with her over the last weeks said: “It was an ecstasy overdose. She could do cocaine until the cows come home. But this was obviously a dodgy pill.”
That was backed up by MTV producer Danny Panthaki, who claimed: “My friend’s boyfriend is a policeman, and he’s the one who found Amy Winehouse dead. Overdosed on ecstasy.”
There were tributes last night from some of music’s biggest names. Sir Elton John said: “She was one of the most seminal artists this country has ever produced.”
Lady Gaga wrote on twitter: “RIP to the amazing #amywinehouse. Such a talented singer.” Mark Ronson, who produced her multi-million selling Back To Back album, said: “She was my musical soulmate and likea sister to me. This is one of the saddest days of my life.”
Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, who was with Amy earlier in the week, said: “It’s a very sad loss of a very good friend.” Kate Moss said on twitter: “RIP Amy Winehouse, So upset, my heart goes out to her, sad to see such talent vanish from the world.” Lily Allen said: “Its just beyond sad, there’s nothing else to say. She was such a lost soul, may she rest in peace.”
Rihanna said on Twitter: “Dear God have mercy!!! I am SICK about this right now! Dear Amy.”
Ex Premier Gordon’s wife Sarah Brown said on Twitter: “Sad, sad news of Amy Winehouse – great talent, extraordinary voice, and tragic death.”
US singer LeAnn Rimes wrote: “RIP Amy Winehouse. So sad to see such a talent gone.”
Chris Goodman, a spokesman for Amy’s management, said: “We are all shocked and devastated.”
The star made her last public appearance on Wednesday with goddaughter Dione Broomfield at the iTunes festival at Camden Roundhouse. And we can reveal how on the night before she died Amy spent an hour on the phone to best friend Kelly Osbourne, who said: “I was speaking to her last night, she seemed absolutely fine, I don’t understand how this could have happened.”
However another friend said: “There was always a danger of something like this. Her drinking is totally out of control. She’s constantly out of control on vodka. She’d drink bottle after bottle and mixing those quantities with drugs is lethal.”
Just two days ago neighbours said they saw her arrive in a cab with Big Brother star Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace. She collapsed when she got out of the taxi and had to be carried inside.
Soon after her death, police cordoned off the area, aiming to question everyone who had been in and out in the last few days. Around 150 fans gathered and Amy’s distraught boyfriend Reg Traviss also arrived.
Amy’s bodyguard Ray Grange was being questioned as a witness. He is believed to have found the body and raised the alarm.
In May she had admitted herself to The Priory clinic in South West London and was pictured swigging a bottle of vodka. Just weeks later her European tour was cancelled after a shambolic performance in Belgrade when she was booed offstage.
Only hours before her body was discovered her management team released a statement calling off the tour indefinitely and saying Amy was “withdrawing from all scheduled performances”.
Last night it was revealed that in line with Jewish tradition, Amy’s funeral could be held today if police are satisfied with the results of their post-mortem examination.
Amy’s death puts her in the infamous “27 Club” of drink- and drug-troubled rock stars who all died at the same age. She joins Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin
TRAGIC Amy Winehouse was found dead yesterday aged just 27. Her death followed a binge on ecstasy and booze, we can reveal.
Advertisement >>
The troubled singer, who spent years battling heroin and drink addictions, is believed to have been found slumped at home by her bodyguard. But she was already “beyond help” by the time ambulance crews and police arrived. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
At 8.45pm a private ambulance arrived at the house and five minutes later Amy was brought out in a body bag.
Last night her heartbroken mother said she believed her daughter’s death had been “only a matter of time” when they met just 24 hours before she died.
“She seemed out of it. But her passing so suddenly still hasn’t hit me,” said Janis Winehouse, who will now always remember how Amy said, ‘I love you mum’ at the end of an enjoyable day together.
Police forensic officers at Amy Winehouse's North London Home (pic: AP)
“They are the words I will always treasure,” said Janis. “I’m glad I saw her when I did.”
On hearing the news, Amy’s distraught father Mitch Winehouse wept: “This isn’t real. I’m completely devastated.
Speaking from New York, the taxi driver and part-time singer said: “I’m getting the next plane back. I’m coming home. I have to be with Amy.
“I can’t crack up for her sake. My family need me. I’m devastated, it’s such a shock.”
Last night a neighbour told how he heard noises from Amy’s home on Saturday afternoon.
“At about 3.30am I heard crying from next door... terrible crying like somebody mourning.The ambulances and police cars arrived shortly after that.”
Amy Winehouse receives a Nationwide Mercury Prize in September 2007 (pic: Rex)
Police described Amy’s death as “unexplained”. But friends who have seen her over the last few weeks say she had hit the self-destruct button over the last two days in wild drinking sessions around Camden, North London.
A friend said: “She has spent the last seven days on a massive bender and people were saying she’s going to drink herself to death.”
Friends who were with her believe she died from a “bad” ecstasy pill combined with huge amounts of alcohol and the fact she suffered from emphysema.
Tribute near Amy Winehouse's home in North London (pic: Getty)
One friend partying with her over the last weeks said: “It was an ecstasy overdose. She could do cocaine until the cows come home. But this was obviously a dodgy pill.”
That was backed up by MTV producer Danny Panthaki, who claimed: “My friend’s boyfriend is a policeman, and he’s the one who found Amy Winehouse dead. Overdosed on ecstasy.”
There were tributes last night from some of music’s biggest names. Sir Elton John said: “She was one of the most seminal artists this country has ever produced.”
Lady Gaga wrote on twitter: “RIP to the amazing #amywinehouse. Such a talented singer.” Mark Ronson, who produced her multi-million selling Back To Back album, said: “She was my musical soulmate and likea sister to me. This is one of the saddest days of my life.”
Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, who was with Amy earlier in the week, said: “It’s a very sad loss of a very good friend.” Kate Moss said on twitter: “RIP Amy Winehouse, So upset, my heart goes out to her, sad to see such talent vanish from the world.” Lily Allen said: “Its just beyond sad, there’s nothing else to say. She was such a lost soul, may she rest in peace.”
Rihanna said on Twitter: “Dear God have mercy!!! I am SICK about this right now! Dear Amy.”
Ex Premier Gordon’s wife Sarah Brown said on Twitter: “Sad, sad news of Amy Winehouse – great talent, extraordinary voice, and tragic death.”
US singer LeAnn Rimes wrote: “RIP Amy Winehouse. So sad to see such a talent gone.”
Chris Goodman, a spokesman for Amy’s management, said: “We are all shocked and devastated.”
The star made her last public appearance on Wednesday with goddaughter Dione Broomfield at the iTunes festival at Camden Roundhouse. And we can reveal how on the night before she died Amy spent an hour on the phone to best friend Kelly Osbourne, who said: “I was speaking to her last night, she seemed absolutely fine, I don’t understand how this could have happened.”
However another friend said: “There was always a danger of something like this. Her drinking is totally out of control. She’s constantly out of control on vodka. She’d drink bottle after bottle and mixing those quantities with drugs is lethal.”
Just two days ago neighbours said they saw her arrive in a cab with Big Brother star Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace. She collapsed when she got out of the taxi and had to be carried inside.
Soon after her death, police cordoned off the area, aiming to question everyone who had been in and out in the last few days. Around 150 fans gathered and Amy’s distraught boyfriend Reg Traviss also arrived.
Amy’s bodyguard Ray Grange was being questioned as a witness. He is believed to have found the body and raised the alarm.
In May she had admitted herself to The Priory clinic in South West London and was pictured swigging a bottle of vodka. Just weeks later her European tour was cancelled after a shambolic performance in Belgrade when she was booed offstage.
Only hours before her body was discovered her management team released a statement calling off the tour indefinitely and saying Amy was “withdrawing from all scheduled performances”.
Last night it was revealed that in line with Jewish tradition, Amy’s funeral could be held today if police are satisfied with the results of their post-mortem examination.
Amy’s death puts her in the infamous “27 Club” of drink- and drug-troubled rock stars who all died at the same age. She joins Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Amy Winehouse found dead, aged 27
Singer Amy Winehouse, 27, has been found dead at her home, the Press Association has reported.
Last month, the north Londoner pulled out of her European tour after she was jeered at her comeback gig in Serbia for appearing too drunk to perform.
For 90 minutes, she mumbled through parts of songs and at times left the stage - leaving her band to fill in.
The troubled singer had a long battle with drink and drugs which overshadowed her musical career in recent years.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed that a 27-year-old woman had died in Camden and that the cause of death was as yet unexplained.
London Ambulance Service had been called to the flat at 1554 BST and sent two ambulances but the woman died, it said.
Winehouse had won widespread acclaim, aged 20, with her 2003 debut album, Frank.
But it was 2006's Back to Black which brought her worldwide stardom, winning five Grammy Awards.
Last month, the north Londoner pulled out of her European tour after she was jeered at her comeback gig in Serbia for appearing too drunk to perform.
For 90 minutes, she mumbled through parts of songs and at times left the stage - leaving her band to fill in.
The troubled singer had a long battle with drink and drugs which overshadowed her musical career in recent years.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed that a 27-year-old woman had died in Camden and that the cause of death was as yet unexplained.
London Ambulance Service had been called to the flat at 1554 BST and sent two ambulances but the woman died, it said.
Winehouse had won widespread acclaim, aged 20, with her 2003 debut album, Frank.
But it was 2006's Back to Black which brought her worldwide stardom, winning five Grammy Awards.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
"17-YEAR OLD-UNSOLVED MURDER MYSTERY"
They were both in their late teens. They both lived in a squalid little street in the city. And within a year, they were both dead.
It was around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, December 15, 1994, that the phone rang at the East La Penitence Police Station and an anonymous caller said: “The body of a woman on the ‘dump’ (playground) at the Multilateral School” The caller then hung up.
On receiving the message, a detective from the station hurried to the school, which was a short distance from the station. He summoned the school’s caretaker, and the two men began to scour the playground, which was overrun with tall grass. Within minutes, they had found the nude body of a girl lying among a clump of bushes.
Word quickly got around about the discovery, and the playground was soon crammed with people, eager to get a glimpse of the body. Unfortunately, the detective was unable to control the crowd, which trampled any forensic evidence that might have been there.
What lay on the ground was not a sight for the squeamish. The body of a teenage girl of mixed ancestry was lying facedown on the grass. Her hands and feet were tightly bound. The victim’s tongue protruded and a sock was knotted around her face in the vicinity of her nostrils. A Ziploc bag, containing some clothing, was near the corpse.
An autopsy conducted next day by forensic pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo confirmed that the girl had been subjected to a slow and painful death.
Not only had she been raped and sodomized, but the teen’s attackers had also stuffed a plastic bag down her throat while she was still alive. She had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument and there were abrasions on her breasts and back. Detectives surmised that she had been slain the previous night while walking through the play field which served as a shortcut to Stevedore Housing Scheme and Tucville.
A squatter living on a dam near the school recalled hearing screams coming from the vicinity of the playground at around 9.00 p.m. on December 14.
Usually, when a corpse is found, wailing relatives would turn up at the scene or at the mortuary to claim the body. But although persons from as far away as Buxton and Linden came to view the corpse at the mortuary, no one came forward to claim the ‘mystery girl.’ Acting on information, detectives detained two cobblers from Bourda Market, but found nothing to link them to the killing. On Saturday, December 17, 1994, the still-unidentified victim was given a pauper’s burial. One week later, on December 24, in a desperate attempt to have her identified, police, led by Crime Chief Winston Felix, allowed an artist to sketch a likeness of the victim from a photo that was taken of her distorted face.
The photograph was published in the Guyana Chronicle, but Christmas came and went without anyone identifying the ‘mystery girl’.
However, while the case appeared to be all but forgotten, the staff from a small fortnightly newspaper, the Guyana Guardian, was quietly working on the case.
Finally, on Thursday, February 2, 1995, the Guardian, run by journalist Nills Campbell, revealed that they had identified the victim.
She was Beatrice Bobb, a 14-year-old who had lived in one of the small shacks that a group of squatters had set up behind what is now the Water Street Arcade. .
Beatrice had lived with her mother and stepfather in a plywood and plastic structure that barely had enough sleeping space for the three.
Her mother, Joan Davis, would later tell me that Beatrice began using drugs at the age of 12 and would often beg in the streets.
According to her, someone had informed her that Beatrice was the murdered ‘mystery girl.’ But she said that police had already buried the corpse by the time that she was preparing to come forward to identity it.
However, police had kept the clothing found near the body and Ms. Davis managed to identify a brown skirt as one that a friend had given her daughter.
According to the Guardian’s story, Beatrice and another girl were walking along Mandela Avenue one night when they were attacked by a group of young men. There are reports that the girls had just left a ‘bubble session’ when they were attacked.
The friend barely managed to escape. Beatrice was not so fortunate. The Guardian reported that the girls were familiar with their attackers.
Mr. Campbell alleged that after receiving the information, he contacted a very senior police official, indicating that he had information that would help the police to solve the crime. However, he said that the official never attempted to contact him.
Detectives visited the home of the now-identified victim and questioned her mother. They also took two young men and a woman into custody. But by then the trail had gone cold and the persons who had killed Beatrice Bobb were never caught. Again, interest in the murder waned.
But then on Saturday, October 28, 1995, the body of another young woman was found in the area of the Lamaha Conservancy near North Ruimveldt Housing Scheme. The victim had been strangled with her own dress. The day after the body was discovered, a young woman visited the Le Repentir mortuary to view the corpse. She identified the victim as her friend, 19-year-old Joy Douglas.
She recalled that Joy had followed a young man to the backdam to pick jamoon, but had not returned.
A police inspector who headed the investigation became intrigued when he learnt that Joy Douglas had lived in the same squatting area as Beatrice Bobb. He had also investigated the Beatrice Bobb murder, and he wondered if the two were connected.
Joy Douglas had run away from home at the age of 16. At one point, she had lived in an abandoned house with other runaway girls. She had eventually moved to the squatting community. By 17 she was a mother and lived in a shipping container with her baby daughter who eventually died.
A few days after Douglas’s body was identified, police took four young men, including a former soldier, into custody.
The former soldier was eventually charged with Douglas’s murder. But the case never made it past the preliminary inquiry stage. There was just too little evidence to incriminate the accused, and he was eventually released.
Today, if you pass the area where Beatrice Bobb and Joy Douglas lived, you will find no trace of those tiny plywood and plastic shacks. Nobody around there remembers the two girls. It is as if the two victims, and the ‘ghetto’ they once called home, had never, ever existed.
It was around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, December 15, 1994, that the phone rang at the East La Penitence Police Station and an anonymous caller said: “The body of a woman on the ‘dump’ (playground) at the Multilateral School” The caller then hung up.
On receiving the message, a detective from the station hurried to the school, which was a short distance from the station. He summoned the school’s caretaker, and the two men began to scour the playground, which was overrun with tall grass. Within minutes, they had found the nude body of a girl lying among a clump of bushes.
Word quickly got around about the discovery, and the playground was soon crammed with people, eager to get a glimpse of the body. Unfortunately, the detective was unable to control the crowd, which trampled any forensic evidence that might have been there.
What lay on the ground was not a sight for the squeamish. The body of a teenage girl of mixed ancestry was lying facedown on the grass. Her hands and feet were tightly bound. The victim’s tongue protruded and a sock was knotted around her face in the vicinity of her nostrils. A Ziploc bag, containing some clothing, was near the corpse.
An autopsy conducted next day by forensic pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo confirmed that the girl had been subjected to a slow and painful death.
Not only had she been raped and sodomized, but the teen’s attackers had also stuffed a plastic bag down her throat while she was still alive. She had been struck in the face with a blunt instrument and there were abrasions on her breasts and back. Detectives surmised that she had been slain the previous night while walking through the play field which served as a shortcut to Stevedore Housing Scheme and Tucville.
A squatter living on a dam near the school recalled hearing screams coming from the vicinity of the playground at around 9.00 p.m. on December 14.
Usually, when a corpse is found, wailing relatives would turn up at the scene or at the mortuary to claim the body. But although persons from as far away as Buxton and Linden came to view the corpse at the mortuary, no one came forward to claim the ‘mystery girl.’ Acting on information, detectives detained two cobblers from Bourda Market, but found nothing to link them to the killing. On Saturday, December 17, 1994, the still-unidentified victim was given a pauper’s burial. One week later, on December 24, in a desperate attempt to have her identified, police, led by Crime Chief Winston Felix, allowed an artist to sketch a likeness of the victim from a photo that was taken of her distorted face.
The photograph was published in the Guyana Chronicle, but Christmas came and went without anyone identifying the ‘mystery girl’.
However, while the case appeared to be all but forgotten, the staff from a small fortnightly newspaper, the Guyana Guardian, was quietly working on the case.
Finally, on Thursday, February 2, 1995, the Guardian, run by journalist Nills Campbell, revealed that they had identified the victim.
She was Beatrice Bobb, a 14-year-old who had lived in one of the small shacks that a group of squatters had set up behind what is now the Water Street Arcade. .
Beatrice had lived with her mother and stepfather in a plywood and plastic structure that barely had enough sleeping space for the three.
Her mother, Joan Davis, would later tell me that Beatrice began using drugs at the age of 12 and would often beg in the streets.
According to her, someone had informed her that Beatrice was the murdered ‘mystery girl.’ But she said that police had already buried the corpse by the time that she was preparing to come forward to identity it.
However, police had kept the clothing found near the body and Ms. Davis managed to identify a brown skirt as one that a friend had given her daughter.
According to the Guardian’s story, Beatrice and another girl were walking along Mandela Avenue one night when they were attacked by a group of young men. There are reports that the girls had just left a ‘bubble session’ when they were attacked.
The friend barely managed to escape. Beatrice was not so fortunate. The Guardian reported that the girls were familiar with their attackers.
Mr. Campbell alleged that after receiving the information, he contacted a very senior police official, indicating that he had information that would help the police to solve the crime. However, he said that the official never attempted to contact him.
Detectives visited the home of the now-identified victim and questioned her mother. They also took two young men and a woman into custody. But by then the trail had gone cold and the persons who had killed Beatrice Bobb were never caught. Again, interest in the murder waned.
But then on Saturday, October 28, 1995, the body of another young woman was found in the area of the Lamaha Conservancy near North Ruimveldt Housing Scheme. The victim had been strangled with her own dress. The day after the body was discovered, a young woman visited the Le Repentir mortuary to view the corpse. She identified the victim as her friend, 19-year-old Joy Douglas.
She recalled that Joy had followed a young man to the backdam to pick jamoon, but had not returned.
A police inspector who headed the investigation became intrigued when he learnt that Joy Douglas had lived in the same squatting area as Beatrice Bobb. He had also investigated the Beatrice Bobb murder, and he wondered if the two were connected.
Joy Douglas had run away from home at the age of 16. At one point, she had lived in an abandoned house with other runaway girls. She had eventually moved to the squatting community. By 17 she was a mother and lived in a shipping container with her baby daughter who eventually died.
A few days after Douglas’s body was identified, police took four young men, including a former soldier, into custody.
The former soldier was eventually charged with Douglas’s murder. But the case never made it past the preliminary inquiry stage. There was just too little evidence to incriminate the accused, and he was eventually released.
Today, if you pass the area where Beatrice Bobb and Joy Douglas lived, you will find no trace of those tiny plywood and plastic shacks. Nobody around there remembers the two girls. It is as if the two victims, and the ‘ghetto’ they once called home, had never, ever existed.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
As a Motown wonder boy, Lawrence Horn lived like a prince, but by age 52 he was just another music-biz pauper. Police say Horn missed the good life so badly that he hired an assassin to murder his own family for millions in insurance money.
On the night of March 2, 1993, Lawrence T. Horn was watching TV in his Hollywood apartment. The 52-year-old free-lance music engineer hadn't had much work lately, and even though his $545-a-month rent was cheap by L.A. standards, it was still a struggle to find the money every month. He was getting by as a part-time consultant repairing home computers in the cramped one-bedroom bungalow that seemed as bleak as his future.
Not far from Horn's run-down neighborhood, the gleaming Motown headquarters towered over chic Sunset Boulevard. Horn had spent nearly his entire professional career working for Motown in L.A. and Detroit. As a gifted young recording engineer, he had helped create the “Sound of Young America” that swept the nation in the '60s. “L.T.,” as he was known, was a whiz kid with a knack for anything mechanical or electronic. Among the first hires Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. made, Horn was one of the technicians who manned the studio recording machine that captured for all time the classic hits by Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the other demigods in the Motown pantheon.
It was more calling than job. Though barely in his 20s, Horn ran the control room at “Hitsville U.S.A.,” Motown's original Detroit headquarters. There were heady, late-night sessions, when the house band—a former jazz combo called the Funk Brothers—laid down the beat that eventually pulsed from car radios and jukeboxes everywhere.
“He was experimenting, he was exploring,” recalls his first wife, Juana Royster, who often attended the recording sessions. “He loved what he did—he really loved it.”
Horn might not have appeared on the covers of any magazines, but his behind-the-scenes role suited him fine. Hell, he and Gordy both knew how important he was to the Motown Sound, and that was all that mattered. And besides, the money was good—damn good. A Porsche, fancy threads, a nice house—it was the sort of lifestyle he'd always dreamed of. He may not have had a high profile, but L.T. was living large.
But all that was years ago. Before Motown relocated to Los Angeles, before the music business changed and the hits stopped, and before Gordy sold—some say sold out—the family business to show-biz conglomerate MCA. Before Horn lost his last job at Motown—as a lowly tape librarian—in 1990.
By 1993, the dream was over for all too many figures from Motown's past, from the biggest stars to the humblest peons. For a few, there were even worse fates than Horn's. Marvin Gaye had been dead a decade, slain by his father. Bassist James Jamerson, the genius behind the signature Motown groove, had succumbed to years of guzzling his favorite Greek brandy. Former Temptation David Ruffin had fatally OD'd in a crack house. And the previous summer, Mary Wells, Motown's first female star, had died in poverty after a long bout with cancer, her medical bills paid only by the charity of sympathetic superstars like Bruce Springsteen.
The only person helping Horn with his bills was his live-in girlfriend, who worked at a bank. Some of his obligations were piling up—he owed his ex-wife $16,000 in overdue child support. Horn was an unemployed has-been—just another stubborn moth hanging around in the Tinseltown glare. The man who mixed “My Girl” had become a soul age dinosaur in the era of gangsta rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. He still had his white '76 Cadillac, but there was not much else to show for his long career in the big time.
Horn was still ostensibly in the biz as a free-lance engineer, but the only recording that he'd been doing lately was with his video camera.
That's what he was doing on the night of March 2—filming a quiet evening at home. The amateur cinematographer set the cozy scene: a panning shot of the cluttered apartment, a TV showing a documentary on jazz great Miles Davis, Horn's girlfriend sitting on the couch, and finally, Horn himself stepping into the frame for a nice video-cam self-portrait. He even made sure to zoom in on the date and time flashing on the TV screen: 11:03 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, March 2, 1995.
Prosecutors claim that this footage was no mere contender for America's Dullest Home Video, but a meticulously staged alibi.
At roughly the same time, 3,000 miles across the country in an upscale Washington, D.C., suburb, Horn's ex-wife, 44, and his 8-year-old invalid son were murdered “with icy dispatch,” as the prosecutor described it, along with the boy's 38-year-old overnight nurse, Janice Roberts Saunders.
The killer broke into the $355,000 house in the Layhill section of Silver Spring, Md., and gunned down Mildred Horn, who was apparently caught by surprise at the foot of the stairs. Then he burst into the first-floor nursery and shot Saunders as she watched over Trevor's crib: She was still in her rocking chair, also apparently caught unawares.
Both women were shot in the eyes at close range with a .22-caliber rifle.
Their bodies lay sprawled in the immaculately furnished home, bloody remains of a shattered domesticity. Mildred Horn was murdered in her nightgown, her hair curlers strewn on the bare floor like a bad roll of the dice. Saunders lay in a sweat shirt and slacks next to the crib. Her cold hands still clutched sewing needles, and an unfinished quilt for her own 4-year-old son lay on a nearby couch. Blood from her wounds seeped through the nursery floor and pooled in the basement below.
The murder scene was described by more than one investigator as among the most horrific they'd ever seen. But these women's final awful moments were mercifully brief compared with Trevor Horn's death.
As a 13-month-old, Trevor had been rendered a severely brain-damaged quadriplegic after a hospital mishap. Doctors warned that the semicomatose boy probably didn't have long to live, but over the years Trevor's condition improved, due mostly to the constant care of his mother and nurses. By the time he was 8 years old, he was able to breathe on his own, say a few words, and even attend school. Trevor still required round-the-clock care and a respirator to help him get enough oxygen, but these were minor impediments compared to the victory he'd won just by surviving.
A malicious pair of gloved hands changed all that.
The murderer went to the crib where Trev or lay asleep. He loomed over the child, who was likely oblivious to the shots that had just killed his mother and nurse. The killer decided to take a hands-on approach to his last victim and yanked the tracheotomy tube from the respirator machine. Then he plugged the open end of the tube with one hand and sealed the boy's mouth and nose with the other. He held and held and held until the tiny body went limp.
After years of a day-to-day battle for survival, Trevor Horn's life leaked out in a matter of minutes. Not that he didn't put up a fight: The autopsy showed that his heart, lungs, and left eye were speckled with the pinpoint bleeding that occurs with a violent, desperate attempt to breathe during asphyxiation. According to a medical examiner, Trevor gasped for air in a doomed struggle against the assailant's death grip; he eventually suffocated.
Trevor's pajama-swaddled body was found that morning as silent and still as the menagerie of stuffed animals that crowded his crib. The medical monitor continued to ring, a distress alarm marking every missed breath. The incessant, obnoxious beep-beep-beep-beep-beep only amplified the juxtaposition of the child's corpse and the now-useless ventilator still keeping watch like a faithful family pet. In a phone call later retrieved by police from an answering-machine tape, the killer said that the noise had distracted him; otherwise, he might have taken photos of his handiwork.
Every day, there are gunslayings of the vicious kind that killed Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders. In the world of American-style homicide, this is a dime-a-dozen, routine murder. All it takes is someone with a cold heart and a handful of bullets who is willing to pull the trigger.
But it takes a rare sort of killer to strangle a helpless, disabled child to death.
Last week, a Montgomery County jury convicted a 47-year-old Detroit man for the triple murder. A self-described minister and spiritual adviser, James Edward Perry is also a street hustler who conducted his business affairs from corner bars and a shady storefront operation called “Mr. Money.” He is now a convicted murderer, who has been sentenced to die by lethal injection.
What was this Detroit hustler doing in a quiet D.C. suburb, killing three people he apparently didn't even know? Perry tried to make the murder scene look like a bungled burglary. He overturned some bookcases and a couch, but he didn't take any valuables. In fact, police ruled out robbery shortly after arriving on the scene. Whoever entered the home that night had murderous intent from the get-go.
As it turned out, Perry's booty was supposed to be a lot more than some jewelry and credit cards. He was a hit man, hired to kill for a fee, which prosecutors said was in the thousands of dollars.
Authorities say that Perry's employer was Lawrence Horn. Using his talent as a behind-the-scenes engineer—the same skills that helped create some of the most joyous pop music ever recorded—Horn allegedly orchestrated this hit from a very great distance. Prosecutors suggested it was the most heinous crime ever committed in Montgomery County: One simply called the case “evil” and dubbed Horn “a conniving, sniveling coward if there ever was one.”
“Trevor Horn died because his father hired this man—James Perry—to do what nature would not so quickly do,” said Montgomery County prosecutor Teresa Whalen during Perry's Rockville-based trial, which was attended faithfully by the relatives of Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders. “Lawrence Horn and James Perry devised this diabolical plot, this ruthless conspiracy, almost one whole year before Perry actually carried through with the plan.”
Trevor meant a lot to Lawrence Horn, say authorities—not as a cherished son, but as an invalid worth nearly $2 million from a settlement for Trevor's hospital mishap. With both Trevor and Mildred Horn dead, Lawrence Horn stood to inherit the money. It was only after Horn tried to claim the money—and after Perry kept pestering his alleged boss by phone for his payoff—that authorities amassed enough evidence to arrest the men.
Like the alleged plot, the investigation took more than a year—the most exhaustive and intensive in Montgomery County Police Department history. The legal proceedings have already lasted an additional year, with Horn's trial scheduled for January. In both cases, prosecutors have sought the death penalty: If convicted, Horn—like Perry—could face execution by lethal injection.
Montgomery County State's Attorney Andrew Sonner has likened the complex case—which boasts more than 7,000 pages of documents—to a Victorian murder mystery. In its essence, though, it couldn't be more modern-day American.
Horn's motive, prosecutors say, was simple: He killed his wife and son for money.
Money can't buy everything it's true
But what it can't buy I can't use.
—“Money (That's What I Want)”< p=""> <>
When he met Mildred Maree in 1972, Lawrence Horn was 30,000 feet in the air, flying first-class. His career was soaring as well. At 32, he'd been at the top of the music business for nearly a decade, living the good life of unlimited expense accounts.
The baker's son from west Detroit had come a long way. When he graduated from the city's renowned Cass Technical High School in the late '50s, Horn didn't have many job prospects. So he did what a lot of young black men of modest means—including a shy D.C. teen named Marvin Gaye—did to get a start: He joined the armed forces.
As an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy, Horn wasn't particularly keen on a military life. Rather than gunning for petty officer, he launched his music career—but not as a performer like his mother Pauline, a former jazz dancer. Instead, he made his name as “L.T.—Your Man With the Plan,” a hot disc jockey spinning Sam Cooke and Ray Charles records on a radio station aboard an aircraft carrier. In the meantime, he got a chance to develop his talent as an electronics engineer.
In late '62, Horn got his discharge and went back home to Detroit. He was just another ex-serviceman looking for work, but his musical savvy and technical skills impressed Berry Gordy, a young entrepreneur and family friend who was starting a record company in a house in the neighborhood. The address was 2648 West Grand Blvd.; it would soon become the headquarters of the most successful black-owned label of all time: Motown.
At the outset, Motown was a modest, family-run operation, and the 22-year-old Horn took a job as a $50-a-week technician. As Motown's first full-time engineer, Horn was soon recording and mixing classics by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, and the Supremes.
“Just as the personalities of the musicians helped shape Motown's music, the peculiarities of Hitsville were also crucial to the Motown Sound,” wrote Nelson George in his definitive history of Motown, Where Did Our Love Go?. “Engineers Mike McLain and Lawrence Horn, along with Brian Holland and some of the other producers, had, through trial and error, built the original three-track recording machine into an eight-track by the mid-sixties.”
These were truly Motown's glory days, when any session could produce a million-selling smash. Horn served as chief mixing technician on the Temptations' “My Girl,” the hit that ruled the charts for 13 weeks in early 1965.
One night later that year, Horn and Gordy co-produced what remains the raunchiest, funkiest song that Motown ever released, “Shotgun,” by Junior Walker and the All Stars. One of the only records for which Horn got credit as producer, it was an anarchic assault of undiluted R&B spearheaded by Walker's screaming sax and ad-libbed lyric: “Shoot 'em 'fore he run now.” Decades later, it was the lone Motown tune hip enough to make it onto the soundtrack of Spike Lee's Malcolm X. A party record for the ages, the smash hit was also notable for the startling shotgun-blast sound effect that kicks off the raucous music.
“Engineers are often some of the most important yet overlooked factors in a record's success,” wrote Gordy in his 1995 autobiography, To Be Loved, describing his sound crew. “From those early days when Lawrence Horn had to handle most of the recording and mixing, we had been fortunate to build one of the best engineering teams in the business.”
A well-read man whose tastes ranged from jazz to classical, Horn didn't need the charm school that Gordy had set up to polish his stars, many of whom hailed from the roughest neighborhoods of the Detroit ghetto. Like Gordy, Horn came from the city's black middle class, and he cut an impressive figure. He certainly impressed Juana Royster, Motown's receptionist and switchboard operator, who still recalls the day when the tall, handsome Horn first came to the Hitsville office for his job interview. “He was brilliant and whimsical and fun-loving, with a real flair about him,” says Royster.
In 1965, Horn and Royster got married, and the newlyweds settled in a two-bedroom house near the Motown headquarters. By now, Royster had left Motown to attend Wayne State University, and Horn helped her with her studies. The young couple often stayed up late discussing books Horn had read—all sorts of authors who weren't even part of Royster's curriculum—-Socrates, Khalil Gibran, and obscure Indian philosophers.
“Lawrence really loved learning—that was one of the things I dearly loved about him,” says Royster. “He read everything—electronics, philosophy, everything....He had a very extensive vocabulary, and he had a command of that vocabulary.”
“He was very, very creative,” she recalls. “It'd be 3 a.m., and he'd say, "Let's go down to the studio,' and I'd go down and watch him mix and remix songs all night long. I'm telling you, he really loved what he did.”
Despite the relish with which Royster speaks of her life with Horn, their marriage lasted barely a year. Now a college administrator in Seattle, she won't elaborate on what doomed their short-lived relationship—only that she and Horn agreed to an amicable divorce and remained friends even after Horn remarried.
Royster says she was flabbergasted when she first heard of the charges against Horn: “I just can't fathom it. He loved his children,” she says. “It's just hard for me to get that into my head—I did not know him that way.”
The disintegration of Horn's first marriage in 1966 didn't seem to cramp his career. He was by now a bona fide Motown veteran, hooked on the sweet taste of success. For a young black man who'd come of age before the civil rights movement, the scenario seemed almost too good to be true, like some sort of wild dream: “We were making so much money then, the situation was just crazy,” Horn later said in an interview with the Washington Post in the spring of 1993, a few weeks after the murders.
In 1972, though, Horn got a dose of hard reality—and intimations of his own mortality—when he was badly shaken by a serious car accident. In the interview with the Post, he told of his Porsche sliding off an icy Detroit highway and flipping into a ditch: His prized sports car was completely demolished. Horn survived the wreck without a scratch, and he apparently believed that it was divine providence that he met his second wife shortly thereafter.
A 22-year-old flight attendant for American Airlines, Mildred “Millie” Maree was one of 14 children raised on a farm in tiny Walterboro, S.C. As a girl, dreams of her future career were stoked by the glamorous, exotic tales from modern romance novels and magazines. “She read a story about a woman who was an airline stewardess [who] had all these adventures and met all these interesting people, and Millie decided she wanted to become an airline stewardess,” her sister Gloria Maree testified at the trial. It was apparently one of those rare instances when reality matches the fantasy: According to Gloria Maree, Millie—with her knack for making people feel comfortable and cared for—found the perfect job. “She was like a flower,” Maree testified, “and when she was working she came into full bloom.”
Horn thought he'd found his guardian angel in the sweet-natured Southern country girl: Why else, he figured, would their chance meeting in the sky have occurred so close to his near-death experience? In turn, Millie was smitten with the suave Horn, who wined and dined her in a jet-setting courtship that alternated between his Detroit digs and her home in southern California.
They married one weekend, on Aug. 20, 1973, in Las Vegas. As much as Horn apparently believed God arranged their meeting, the union brought mostly grief and unhappiness to both husband and wife.
In the first years of marriage, the Horns bought a home and resided in San Diego, where Millie continued working for American Airlines. But Lawrence remained loyal to Motown, which had moved its operation to the West Coast; he rented his own apartment in Los Angeles, where he lived during the work week. In 1974, the couple had a child, Tiffani, but it was a stormy marriage, with frequent arguments and as many reconciliations.
By 1979, the Horns were experiencing “serious marital difficulties,” according to court papers. The troubled couple agreed that Millie and Tiffani would relocate to the Washington, D.C., area to live near Millie's relatives, who could help raise Tiffani. Horn and his wife were now 3,000 miles apart, but they still met for occasional liaisons when Millie worked flights to the West Coast.
On Aug. 8, 1984, Millie gave birth to twins, Trevor and Tamielle, three months prematurely. After four weeks in a D.C. hospital, Tamielle moved with her mother into the Silver Spring home of Millie's sister.
But Tamielle's twin had a rougher time. Born with underdeveloped lungs, Trevor spent his first three months hospital-bound; he had bronchopulmonary dysplasia and required a life-support system to assist his breathing. Though his health steadily improved, he still needed frequent visits to the hospital.
Things took a turn from bad to worse on Sept. 16, 1985, at Children's Hospital National Medical Center. Trevor's tracheotomy tube was accidentally disconnected, and it took hospital workers more than an hour to get it back in place. The lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage, rendering the 13-month-old a severe spastic quadriplegic. He was unable to use his limbs, talk, or perform even the most basic functions. Doctors didn't give him long to live.
Trevor Horn would eventually overcome this dire prognosis and not only survive but regain his sight, develop some ability to speak, and even attend school. The more immediate casualty from the hospital mishap was the Horns' marriage. The unstable relationship simply couldn't bear the weight of the tragedy. Horn later told the Post that Millie already blamed him for Trevor's health problems, claiming that the stress of their stormy marriage caused the premature births in the first place. The accident that destroyed Trevor's chance at a normal life did nothing to reconcile Millie to her estranged husband: “That situation broke the back,” Lawrence Horn told the Post. “She found a way that it was really my fault. She said I was a curse on her life.”
Ultimately, the couple divorced in 1987. They were awarded joint custody of the children, but the children remained with their mother, while Horn continued to live in an apartment in Los Angeles. He was ordered to pay $650 a month in child support.
If Millie blamed her husband for the sour turn their lives had taken, Horn took out his frustration on his disabled son, say family members, mostly by ignoring the boy. After the murders, Tiffani Maree Horn, now a student at Howard University, told police that her father didn't seem to care about Trevor: “Tiffani stated that she had never seen her father hold Trevor, exhibit any affection toward him, or pay attention to him,” according to court papers. “He told her that Trevor could never be a real son to him because of his physical and mental disabilities.”
Even though Horn had joint custody, he rarely saw Trevor. In fact, he didn't see either Trevor or Tamielle from their second to fourth birthdays, according to court records.
In stark contrast to Horn's virtual abandonment of his son, Millie's extended family (including relatives in Maryland and New Jersey) doted on “Tricky Trevor,” or “Little Trooper,” as the boy was affectionately nicknamed. For his part, Trevor called himself “Or,” the syllable of his name he was able to speak, and he took after his father in at least one trait: “He truly enjoyed music,” said Millie's sister Marilyn Farmer at the trial. “He had certain favorites like "Disco Duck,' and he would sing along with the music and he would dance in his crib.”
Horn may not have considered Trevor a “real son,” as Tiffani put it, but he was willing to accept his share of the money that came from the successful malpractice suit against the hospital. In 1988, the Horns filed a federal court lawsuit against Children's Hospital for negligence in causing Trevor's injuries. The family won a $2-million settlement, with most of the money awarded to Trevor to cover his medical care through the year 2003.
But both parents nabbed a healthy cut for themselves. In the spring of 1990, Millie received a tax-free payment of $250,000 and Lawrence Horn got a cool $125,000. Millie used her money to buy a $355,000 home for her family on North Gate Drive in the upscale Layhill section of Silver Spring. It was just a few doors down from the house where her sister, Vivian Rice, lived with her husband.
For Horn, the money couldn't have come at a better time. After a dismal decade, his music career had hit an all-time low. He'd just lost his final job—a $28,000-a-year gig as a tape librarian—with Motown, which laid off hundreds of workers in 1990. He had already seen the end coming, though: Two years before, Gordy had sold the former family operation to MCA for $61 million.
Unemployed and without job prospects, Horn was thousands of dollars behind in his child support payments, so his share of the settlement money was like a godsend. Of course, Millie had received twice as much, but after all, she did have to look after the kids.
By 1992, though, the $125,000 had run out. According to court papers, Horn was “financially desperate.” He still owed on his overdue child support—he hadn't exactly been throwing money to the twins—and he'd had no luck regaining a foothold in the music business. He had even been forced to borrow thousands of dollars from his mother.
His thoughts allegedly turned to that $1.7 million that was just sitting there in the trust fund—all for Trevor.
According to authorities, Horn was aware that Millie's employment insurance (she still worked for American Airlines) covered the cost of Trevor's medical care only until March '93. Millie intended to use Trevor's trust fund for his care thereafter. Trevor's nursing care costs alone totaled $1,178 a month, not to mention all the related medical expenses—which had averaged $250,000 a year, according to court papers.
Tiffani Horn later told police that her father became “obsessed” with the civil settlement awarded to Trevor. All that money for that little boy hooked to a machine, just lying there in that big house with his mom and round-the-clock nurses. And none for Lawrence Horn, who could barely pay his rent without help from his girlfriend.
Prosecutors allege that Horn began to imagine how things would change if Trevor and his mother were to somehow die—if that were to happen, the money would go to Horn. The nagging question was how. How?
Horn took a trip to his old stomping grounds in Detroit, but he wasn't going back to the Motor City for nostalgic reasons, according to prosecutors. He needed some help, he allegedly told friends there, with a “problem” he had in Maryland.
Some people would say that a hit man is an emotionless, cold-blooded killing machine....On the contrary, a hit man has a wide range of feelings. He may be excruciatingly tender towards his woman. He may be extremely compassionate towards the elderly or disabled. He may have a strong aversion to the useless killing of wildlife. He may even be religious in his own way. What the professional lacks is remorse. He feels no guilt.
<="" p="">
The business card, emblazoned with a moon-and-star emblem and a design of a walking cane, reads:
The House of Wisdom
Dr. J. Perry
Cold Reader
Case-Buster
Spiritual Adviser
By Appointment Only
During Horn's early 1992 visit to Detroit, his cousin, Thomas Turner, gave him a card and told him to call Dr. Perry. Maybe the “case buster” could help with Horn's problem, Turner testified (under a promise of immunity from prosecution) at the Perry trial.
A self-professed minister, “Dr.” James Perry is also an ex-jailbird who twice did hard time in the '70s for armed robbery—one incident included shooting a Michigan state trooper. Turner and Perry met when they were in prison together. It was Perry's qualification as an experienced gunman—someone unafraid to pull the trigger—police claim, that led Horn to hire Perry as an assassin to kill his wife and son: The former DJ once known as “L.T.—Your Man With the Plan” had found someone to carry out his dark design.
The defense argued that Perry was a religious family man who traveled around attending to his far-flung flock. “James Perry is a father and a grandfather,” Perry's lawyer Roger Galvin told the jury at the trial. “He's a spiritual minister. He's got people that he ministers to all over the country.”
Whether or not Perry is a true man of God, he had no experience as a hired assassin. To bone up on the subject, he studied a book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, published by the Paladin Press in Colorado. (Perry must have badly needed the money that a successful hit promised, though: The check he used to purchase the paperback later bounced, testified a Paladin employee.)
Penned by so-called “expert assassin and bodyguard” (and obviously pseudonymous) Rex Feral, Hit Man's chilling, hard-boiled prose gives step-by-step instructions on how to execute someone for money—and get away with it.
Prosecutors say Perry used Hit Man as a “blueprint” for the killings. All of his major moves in the crime are recommended in the 138-page manual, down to the type of weapon and the modus operandi.
“A hit man without a gun is like a carpenter without a hammer,” notes Hit Man. “The AR-7 rifle is recommended because it is both inexpensive and accurate.”
Perry used an AR-7 rifle that police later recovered in pieces from in a roadside ditch. The serial number had been filed off, and Perry had also tampered with the inside of the barrel.
“Use a rifle with a good scope and silencer and aim for the head—preferably the eye sockets if you are a sharpshooter. Many people have been shot repeatedly, even in the head, and survived to tell about it,” Hit Man recommends.
Proving himself an excellent marksman for a first-time hit man, Perry shot Millie Horn three times in the head, including two blasts to her left eye. The killer shot Janice Saunders twice in the head, including one bullet to her left eye.
“Close kills enable you to determine right away if you have successfully fulfilled your part of the contract; distant shots may mean waiting around to read the morning papers.”
Perry didn't have to hang around. Following the book's advice, he used a rental car, paid cash at the motel where he stayed, left no witnesses, messed up the house to make it look like a robbery, discarded the gun, and quickly got out of town; all in all, nearly two dozen points of similarity between Hit Man's instructions and the actual murder.
Hit Man doesn't offer instructions on how to suffocate a disabled child. To perform that deed, Perry apparently had to improvise.
The prosecution's case against Perry was entirely circumstantial. There were no survivors, and thus no eyewitnesses. Police found no bloody gloves at the scene, no fingerprints or shoe marks, no hair or even clothing fibers that matched Perry's, “not a single shred of evidence,” according to defense lawyer Galvin.
After the prosecution's daunting four-week argument (boasting more than 3,000 hours of police work), and testimony from Horn's now-grown daughter, the defense rested after barely four hours. Johnnie Cochran was nowhere in sight: All Perry had was a court-appointed attorney arguing a bad set of facts, and the jury decided in a short amount of time that Perry's guilt was open and shut. All that remains to be decided is whether Perry will die for making the hit.
But behind the Perry conviction looms the figure of Lawrence Horn, whom Galvin characterized as “the gray eminence hovering over the trial.”
Indeed, without Horn, Perry not only didn't have a murder to commit, he didn't have the necessary information to pull off the job. Lawrence Horn was the alleged mastermind who did all the homework. For Horn, the sheer logistics of the alleged plot must have presented a massive practical challenge: He's in L.A. His hit man's in Detroit. The targets are in Maryland. There would have to be all sorts of reconnaissance missions, which authorities say both men undertook in the form of trips to the Silver Spring area.
Authorities say the year-long association between Perry and Horn—including hundreds of pay-phone calls and several money exchanges chronicled in a staggering 7,000 pages—prove a murder-for-hire conspiracy. The police version of the events paints a portrait of cross-country phone calls and intricate planning.
In the summer of '92, on a visit to Maryland for child support proceedings, Horn vid eotaped the outside of Millie's house as he sat in his parked rental van waiting for his daughter Tamielle. He also recorded the route from the National Mall to the house on North Gate Drive. Horn later asked his daughter Tiffani to videotape the interior of the spacious house—a request she refused—but she did agree to film Trevor's nursery. Horn allegedly designed a map of the Layhill subdivision with X's at the locations of Millie's and her sister's houses.
For his part, Perry dutifully awaited his instructions, hanging out at his Detroit storefront business, Mr. Money, and a local bar, Francelle's. Authorities say that Horn and Perry always used pay phones to contact each other, and that both used a calling card that belonged to a friend of Horn's. Prosecutors also claim that Perry accepted frequent cash payments—the sort of expense money discussed in detail in Hit Man—sent via Western Union by Horn, who allegedly used the alias “George Shaw” and the address 2562 Sunset Blvd.: the Motown building.
Authorities say that Horn took the name George Shaw from a local death notice on the July 1992 Los Angeles Times obituary page that also reported the death of singing legend Mary Wells. Whether the references to his former employer were just inside jokes or wishful fantasies for Horn, Motown was still very much on his mind.
Perry followed Hit Man nearly to the letter, but he made two major mistakes, according to prosecutors: When he checked into a Day's Inn in Rockville after midnight on March 3, Perry paid cash to avoid revealing his identity, as Hit Man recommends. But the clerk asked for ID anyway, and made a Xerox copy of Perry's driver's license.
His murderous deed done, Perry made a phone call from a pay phone beside the motel to Horn's apartment in Hollywood. At 6 a.m., Perry checked out of the motel, which is just a few miles from Millie Horn's house in Silver Spring. Then he stopped at a Denny's restaurant in Gaithersburg, where he used a pay phone to again call Horn.
The brief stay at the motel and the early morning calls were enough for authorities to connect the hit man to his alleged boss while Perry was in the vicinity of the murder site, and to begin building their case.
In the weeks after the deaths of his son and ex-wife, Horn filed court papers to stake his claim to Trevor's $1.7-million trust fund. But Millie's sister Vivian Rice filed a civil suit to block Horn's claim to the estate. Perry grew increasingly frustrated with the delays and made repeated phone calls to Horn, allegedly demanding payment. The frantic crisscross of calls helped convince authorities that they were on the right trail.
The civil suit is pending, awaiting the outcome of Horn's trial.
Meanwhile, Horn is being held without bond at the Montgomery County Detention Center. His immediate family has stood behind him since his arrest: His mother Pauline Horn testified that the video that Tiffani filmed of Trevor in his nursery was meant for her—a grandmother who hadn't seen her beloved grandson in too long. His girlfriend Shiri Bogan, a regal, middle-aged woman, testified that she had never even heard the name James Perry, and that Horn videotaped on a daily basis.
A lifelong friend also maintains Horn's innocence: “I know how he feels about money and I know how he felt about his son,” says the Detroit businessman, who wants to remain anonymous. “He didn't care about money. I don't give a damn what they say.”
Like everyone else involved in the pending case, Horn is unavailable for comment. But in April '93, just weeks after the murder and a year before his arrest, he maintained his innocence in an interview with the Washington Post: “For me to do that, I would be dead now,” he said. “I would not be living on, because what would be the point? I would be a monster.”
Authorities suggest Horn hired a monster to do what he wanted done, but could not do himself. That way, he wouldn't have to actually pull the trigger and watch his ex-wife crumple to the floor, her eyes blown out. He wouldn't have to gun down Janice Saunders as she sat quilting and watching over his son—a chore that he had never taken the time to do. And he wouldn't have to suffocate his own child and witness his son's terrible last moments.
By hiring someone to carry out the executions, he could stay in the background and leave the focus on someone else, just as he had done all those years as an engineer in the music business. At his trial in January, prosecutors will try to make sure that Lawrence Horn finally gets the credit he deserves.
Not far from Horn's run-down neighborhood, the gleaming Motown headquarters towered over chic Sunset Boulevard. Horn had spent nearly his entire professional career working for Motown in L.A. and Detroit. As a gifted young recording engineer, he had helped create the “Sound of Young America” that swept the nation in the '60s. “L.T.,” as he was known, was a whiz kid with a knack for anything mechanical or electronic. Among the first hires Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. made, Horn was one of the technicians who manned the studio recording machine that captured for all time the classic hits by Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and the other demigods in the Motown pantheon.
It was more calling than job. Though barely in his 20s, Horn ran the control room at “Hitsville U.S.A.,” Motown's original Detroit headquarters. There were heady, late-night sessions, when the house band—a former jazz combo called the Funk Brothers—laid down the beat that eventually pulsed from car radios and jukeboxes everywhere.
“He was experimenting, he was exploring,” recalls his first wife, Juana Royster, who often attended the recording sessions. “He loved what he did—he really loved it.”
Horn might not have appeared on the covers of any magazines, but his behind-the-scenes role suited him fine. Hell, he and Gordy both knew how important he was to the Motown Sound, and that was all that mattered. And besides, the money was good—damn good. A Porsche, fancy threads, a nice house—it was the sort of lifestyle he'd always dreamed of. He may not have had a high profile, but L.T. was living large.
But all that was years ago. Before Motown relocated to Los Angeles, before the music business changed and the hits stopped, and before Gordy sold—some say sold out—the family business to show-biz conglomerate MCA. Before Horn lost his last job at Motown—as a lowly tape librarian—in 1990.
By 1993, the dream was over for all too many figures from Motown's past, from the biggest stars to the humblest peons. For a few, there were even worse fates than Horn's. Marvin Gaye had been dead a decade, slain by his father. Bassist James Jamerson, the genius behind the signature Motown groove, had succumbed to years of guzzling his favorite Greek brandy. Former Temptation David Ruffin had fatally OD'd in a crack house. And the previous summer, Mary Wells, Motown's first female star, had died in poverty after a long bout with cancer, her medical bills paid only by the charity of sympathetic superstars like Bruce Springsteen.
The only person helping Horn with his bills was his live-in girlfriend, who worked at a bank. Some of his obligations were piling up—he owed his ex-wife $16,000 in overdue child support. Horn was an unemployed has-been—just another stubborn moth hanging around in the Tinseltown glare. The man who mixed “My Girl” had become a soul age dinosaur in the era of gangsta rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg. He still had his white '76 Cadillac, but there was not much else to show for his long career in the big time.
Horn was still ostensibly in the biz as a free-lance engineer, but the only recording that he'd been doing lately was with his video camera.
That's what he was doing on the night of March 2—filming a quiet evening at home. The amateur cinematographer set the cozy scene: a panning shot of the cluttered apartment, a TV showing a documentary on jazz great Miles Davis, Horn's girlfriend sitting on the couch, and finally, Horn himself stepping into the frame for a nice video-cam self-portrait. He even made sure to zoom in on the date and time flashing on the TV screen: 11:03 p.m., Pacific Standard Time, March 2, 1995.
Prosecutors claim that this footage was no mere contender for America's Dullest Home Video, but a meticulously staged alibi.
At roughly the same time, 3,000 miles across the country in an upscale Washington, D.C., suburb, Horn's ex-wife, 44, and his 8-year-old invalid son were murdered “with icy dispatch,” as the prosecutor described it, along with the boy's 38-year-old overnight nurse, Janice Roberts Saunders.
The killer broke into the $355,000 house in the Layhill section of Silver Spring, Md., and gunned down Mildred Horn, who was apparently caught by surprise at the foot of the stairs. Then he burst into the first-floor nursery and shot Saunders as she watched over Trevor's crib: She was still in her rocking chair, also apparently caught unawares.
Both women were shot in the eyes at close range with a .22-caliber rifle.
Their bodies lay sprawled in the immaculately furnished home, bloody remains of a shattered domesticity. Mildred Horn was murdered in her nightgown, her hair curlers strewn on the bare floor like a bad roll of the dice. Saunders lay in a sweat shirt and slacks next to the crib. Her cold hands still clutched sewing needles, and an unfinished quilt for her own 4-year-old son lay on a nearby couch. Blood from her wounds seeped through the nursery floor and pooled in the basement below.
The murder scene was described by more than one investigator as among the most horrific they'd ever seen. But these women's final awful moments were mercifully brief compared with Trevor Horn's death.
As a 13-month-old, Trevor had been rendered a severely brain-damaged quadriplegic after a hospital mishap. Doctors warned that the semicomatose boy probably didn't have long to live, but over the years Trevor's condition improved, due mostly to the constant care of his mother and nurses. By the time he was 8 years old, he was able to breathe on his own, say a few words, and even attend school. Trevor still required round-the-clock care and a respirator to help him get enough oxygen, but these were minor impediments compared to the victory he'd won just by surviving.
A malicious pair of gloved hands changed all that.
The murderer went to the crib where Trev or lay asleep. He loomed over the child, who was likely oblivious to the shots that had just killed his mother and nurse. The killer decided to take a hands-on approach to his last victim and yanked the tracheotomy tube from the respirator machine. Then he plugged the open end of the tube with one hand and sealed the boy's mouth and nose with the other. He held and held and held until the tiny body went limp.
After years of a day-to-day battle for survival, Trevor Horn's life leaked out in a matter of minutes. Not that he didn't put up a fight: The autopsy showed that his heart, lungs, and left eye were speckled with the pinpoint bleeding that occurs with a violent, desperate attempt to breathe during asphyxiation. According to a medical examiner, Trevor gasped for air in a doomed struggle against the assailant's death grip; he eventually suffocated.
Trevor's pajama-swaddled body was found that morning as silent and still as the menagerie of stuffed animals that crowded his crib. The medical monitor continued to ring, a distress alarm marking every missed breath. The incessant, obnoxious beep-beep-beep-beep-beep only amplified the juxtaposition of the child's corpse and the now-useless ventilator still keeping watch like a faithful family pet. In a phone call later retrieved by police from an answering-machine tape, the killer said that the noise had distracted him; otherwise, he might have taken photos of his handiwork.
Every day, there are gunslayings of the vicious kind that killed Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders. In the world of American-style homicide, this is a dime-a-dozen, routine murder. All it takes is someone with a cold heart and a handful of bullets who is willing to pull the trigger.
But it takes a rare sort of killer to strangle a helpless, disabled child to death.
Last week, a Montgomery County jury convicted a 47-year-old Detroit man for the triple murder. A self-described minister and spiritual adviser, James Edward Perry is also a street hustler who conducted his business affairs from corner bars and a shady storefront operation called “Mr. Money.” He is now a convicted murderer, who has been sentenced to die by lethal injection.
What was this Detroit hustler doing in a quiet D.C. suburb, killing three people he apparently didn't even know? Perry tried to make the murder scene look like a bungled burglary. He overturned some bookcases and a couch, but he didn't take any valuables. In fact, police ruled out robbery shortly after arriving on the scene. Whoever entered the home that night had murderous intent from the get-go.
As it turned out, Perry's booty was supposed to be a lot more than some jewelry and credit cards. He was a hit man, hired to kill for a fee, which prosecutors said was in the thousands of dollars.
Authorities say that Perry's employer was Lawrence Horn. Using his talent as a behind-the-scenes engineer—the same skills that helped create some of the most joyous pop music ever recorded—Horn allegedly orchestrated this hit from a very great distance. Prosecutors suggested it was the most heinous crime ever committed in Montgomery County: One simply called the case “evil” and dubbed Horn “a conniving, sniveling coward if there ever was one.”
“Trevor Horn died because his father hired this man—James Perry—to do what nature would not so quickly do,” said Montgomery County prosecutor Teresa Whalen during Perry's Rockville-based trial, which was attended faithfully by the relatives of Mildred Horn and Janice Saunders. “Lawrence Horn and James Perry devised this diabolical plot, this ruthless conspiracy, almost one whole year before Perry actually carried through with the plan.”
Trevor meant a lot to Lawrence Horn, say authorities—not as a cherished son, but as an invalid worth nearly $2 million from a settlement for Trevor's hospital mishap. With both Trevor and Mildred Horn dead, Lawrence Horn stood to inherit the money. It was only after Horn tried to claim the money—and after Perry kept pestering his alleged boss by phone for his payoff—that authorities amassed enough evidence to arrest the men.
Like the alleged plot, the investigation took more than a year—the most exhaustive and intensive in Montgomery County Police Department history. The legal proceedings have already lasted an additional year, with Horn's trial scheduled for January. In both cases, prosecutors have sought the death penalty: If convicted, Horn—like Perry—could face execution by lethal injection.
Montgomery County State's Attorney Andrew Sonner has likened the complex case—which boasts more than 7,000 pages of documents—to a Victorian murder mystery. In its essence, though, it couldn't be more modern-day American.
Horn's motive, prosecutors say, was simple: He killed his wife and son for money.
Money can't buy everything it's true
But what it can't buy I can't use.
—“Money (That's What I Want)”< p=""> <>
When he met Mildred Maree in 1972, Lawrence Horn was 30,000 feet in the air, flying first-class. His career was soaring as well. At 32, he'd been at the top of the music business for nearly a decade, living the good life of unlimited expense accounts.
The baker's son from west Detroit had come a long way. When he graduated from the city's renowned Cass Technical High School in the late '50s, Horn didn't have many job prospects. So he did what a lot of young black men of modest means—including a shy D.C. teen named Marvin Gaye—did to get a start: He joined the armed forces.
As an enlisted man in the U.S. Navy, Horn wasn't particularly keen on a military life. Rather than gunning for petty officer, he launched his music career—but not as a performer like his mother Pauline, a former jazz dancer. Instead, he made his name as “L.T.—Your Man With the Plan,” a hot disc jockey spinning Sam Cooke and Ray Charles records on a radio station aboard an aircraft carrier. In the meantime, he got a chance to develop his talent as an electronics engineer.
In late '62, Horn got his discharge and went back home to Detroit. He was just another ex-serviceman looking for work, but his musical savvy and technical skills impressed Berry Gordy, a young entrepreneur and family friend who was starting a record company in a house in the neighborhood. The address was 2648 West Grand Blvd.; it would soon become the headquarters of the most successful black-owned label of all time: Motown.
At the outset, Motown was a modest, family-run operation, and the 22-year-old Horn took a job as a $50-a-week technician. As Motown's first full-time engineer, Horn was soon recording and mixing classics by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, and the Supremes.
“Just as the personalities of the musicians helped shape Motown's music, the peculiarities of Hitsville were also crucial to the Motown Sound,” wrote Nelson George in his definitive history of Motown, Where Did Our Love Go?. “Engineers Mike McLain and Lawrence Horn, along with Brian Holland and some of the other producers, had, through trial and error, built the original three-track recording machine into an eight-track by the mid-sixties.”
These were truly Motown's glory days, when any session could produce a million-selling smash. Horn served as chief mixing technician on the Temptations' “My Girl,” the hit that ruled the charts for 13 weeks in early 1965.
One night later that year, Horn and Gordy co-produced what remains the raunchiest, funkiest song that Motown ever released, “Shotgun,” by Junior Walker and the All Stars. One of the only records for which Horn got credit as producer, it was an anarchic assault of undiluted R&B spearheaded by Walker's screaming sax and ad-libbed lyric: “Shoot 'em 'fore he run now.” Decades later, it was the lone Motown tune hip enough to make it onto the soundtrack of Spike Lee's Malcolm X. A party record for the ages, the smash hit was also notable for the startling shotgun-blast sound effect that kicks off the raucous music.
“Engineers are often some of the most important yet overlooked factors in a record's success,” wrote Gordy in his 1995 autobiography, To Be Loved, describing his sound crew. “From those early days when Lawrence Horn had to handle most of the recording and mixing, we had been fortunate to build one of the best engineering teams in the business.”
A well-read man whose tastes ranged from jazz to classical, Horn didn't need the charm school that Gordy had set up to polish his stars, many of whom hailed from the roughest neighborhoods of the Detroit ghetto. Like Gordy, Horn came from the city's black middle class, and he cut an impressive figure. He certainly impressed Juana Royster, Motown's receptionist and switchboard operator, who still recalls the day when the tall, handsome Horn first came to the Hitsville office for his job interview. “He was brilliant and whimsical and fun-loving, with a real flair about him,” says Royster.
In 1965, Horn and Royster got married, and the newlyweds settled in a two-bedroom house near the Motown headquarters. By now, Royster had left Motown to attend Wayne State University, and Horn helped her with her studies. The young couple often stayed up late discussing books Horn had read—all sorts of authors who weren't even part of Royster's curriculum—-Socrates, Khalil Gibran, and obscure Indian philosophers.
“Lawrence really loved learning—that was one of the things I dearly loved about him,” says Royster. “He read everything—electronics, philosophy, everything....He had a very extensive vocabulary, and he had a command of that vocabulary.”
“He was very, very creative,” she recalls. “It'd be 3 a.m., and he'd say, "Let's go down to the studio,' and I'd go down and watch him mix and remix songs all night long. I'm telling you, he really loved what he did.”
Despite the relish with which Royster speaks of her life with Horn, their marriage lasted barely a year. Now a college administrator in Seattle, she won't elaborate on what doomed their short-lived relationship—only that she and Horn agreed to an amicable divorce and remained friends even after Horn remarried.
Royster says she was flabbergasted when she first heard of the charges against Horn: “I just can't fathom it. He loved his children,” she says. “It's just hard for me to get that into my head—I did not know him that way.”
The disintegration of Horn's first marriage in 1966 didn't seem to cramp his career. He was by now a bona fide Motown veteran, hooked on the sweet taste of success. For a young black man who'd come of age before the civil rights movement, the scenario seemed almost too good to be true, like some sort of wild dream: “We were making so much money then, the situation was just crazy,” Horn later said in an interview with the Washington Post in the spring of 1993, a few weeks after the murders.
In 1972, though, Horn got a dose of hard reality—and intimations of his own mortality—when he was badly shaken by a serious car accident. In the interview with the Post, he told of his Porsche sliding off an icy Detroit highway and flipping into a ditch: His prized sports car was completely demolished. Horn survived the wreck without a scratch, and he apparently believed that it was divine providence that he met his second wife shortly thereafter.
A 22-year-old flight attendant for American Airlines, Mildred “Millie” Maree was one of 14 children raised on a farm in tiny Walterboro, S.C. As a girl, dreams of her future career were stoked by the glamorous, exotic tales from modern romance novels and magazines. “She read a story about a woman who was an airline stewardess [who] had all these adventures and met all these interesting people, and Millie decided she wanted to become an airline stewardess,” her sister Gloria Maree testified at the trial. It was apparently one of those rare instances when reality matches the fantasy: According to Gloria Maree, Millie—with her knack for making people feel comfortable and cared for—found the perfect job. “She was like a flower,” Maree testified, “and when she was working she came into full bloom.”
Horn thought he'd found his guardian angel in the sweet-natured Southern country girl: Why else, he figured, would their chance meeting in the sky have occurred so close to his near-death experience? In turn, Millie was smitten with the suave Horn, who wined and dined her in a jet-setting courtship that alternated between his Detroit digs and her home in southern California.
They married one weekend, on Aug. 20, 1973, in Las Vegas. As much as Horn apparently believed God arranged their meeting, the union brought mostly grief and unhappiness to both husband and wife.
In the first years of marriage, the Horns bought a home and resided in San Diego, where Millie continued working for American Airlines. But Lawrence remained loyal to Motown, which had moved its operation to the West Coast; he rented his own apartment in Los Angeles, where he lived during the work week. In 1974, the couple had a child, Tiffani, but it was a stormy marriage, with frequent arguments and as many reconciliations.
By 1979, the Horns were experiencing “serious marital difficulties,” according to court papers. The troubled couple agreed that Millie and Tiffani would relocate to the Washington, D.C., area to live near Millie's relatives, who could help raise Tiffani. Horn and his wife were now 3,000 miles apart, but they still met for occasional liaisons when Millie worked flights to the West Coast.
On Aug. 8, 1984, Millie gave birth to twins, Trevor and Tamielle, three months prematurely. After four weeks in a D.C. hospital, Tamielle moved with her mother into the Silver Spring home of Millie's sister.
But Tamielle's twin had a rougher time. Born with underdeveloped lungs, Trevor spent his first three months hospital-bound; he had bronchopulmonary dysplasia and required a life-support system to assist his breathing. Though his health steadily improved, he still needed frequent visits to the hospital.
Things took a turn from bad to worse on Sept. 16, 1985, at Children's Hospital National Medical Center. Trevor's tracheotomy tube was accidentally disconnected, and it took hospital workers more than an hour to get it back in place. The lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage, rendering the 13-month-old a severe spastic quadriplegic. He was unable to use his limbs, talk, or perform even the most basic functions. Doctors didn't give him long to live.
Trevor Horn would eventually overcome this dire prognosis and not only survive but regain his sight, develop some ability to speak, and even attend school. The more immediate casualty from the hospital mishap was the Horns' marriage. The unstable relationship simply couldn't bear the weight of the tragedy. Horn later told the Post that Millie already blamed him for Trevor's health problems, claiming that the stress of their stormy marriage caused the premature births in the first place. The accident that destroyed Trevor's chance at a normal life did nothing to reconcile Millie to her estranged husband: “That situation broke the back,” Lawrence Horn told the Post. “She found a way that it was really my fault. She said I was a curse on her life.”
Ultimately, the couple divorced in 1987. They were awarded joint custody of the children, but the children remained with their mother, while Horn continued to live in an apartment in Los Angeles. He was ordered to pay $650 a month in child support.
If Millie blamed her husband for the sour turn their lives had taken, Horn took out his frustration on his disabled son, say family members, mostly by ignoring the boy. After the murders, Tiffani Maree Horn, now a student at Howard University, told police that her father didn't seem to care about Trevor: “Tiffani stated that she had never seen her father hold Trevor, exhibit any affection toward him, or pay attention to him,” according to court papers. “He told her that Trevor could never be a real son to him because of his physical and mental disabilities.”
Even though Horn had joint custody, he rarely saw Trevor. In fact, he didn't see either Trevor or Tamielle from their second to fourth birthdays, according to court records.
In stark contrast to Horn's virtual abandonment of his son, Millie's extended family (including relatives in Maryland and New Jersey) doted on “Tricky Trevor,” or “Little Trooper,” as the boy was affectionately nicknamed. For his part, Trevor called himself “Or,” the syllable of his name he was able to speak, and he took after his father in at least one trait: “He truly enjoyed music,” said Millie's sister Marilyn Farmer at the trial. “He had certain favorites like "Disco Duck,' and he would sing along with the music and he would dance in his crib.”
Horn may not have considered Trevor a “real son,” as Tiffani put it, but he was willing to accept his share of the money that came from the successful malpractice suit against the hospital. In 1988, the Horns filed a federal court lawsuit against Children's Hospital for negligence in causing Trevor's injuries. The family won a $2-million settlement, with most of the money awarded to Trevor to cover his medical care through the year 2003.
But both parents nabbed a healthy cut for themselves. In the spring of 1990, Millie received a tax-free payment of $250,000 and Lawrence Horn got a cool $125,000. Millie used her money to buy a $355,000 home for her family on North Gate Drive in the upscale Layhill section of Silver Spring. It was just a few doors down from the house where her sister, Vivian Rice, lived with her husband.
For Horn, the money couldn't have come at a better time. After a dismal decade, his music career had hit an all-time low. He'd just lost his final job—a $28,000-a-year gig as a tape librarian—with Motown, which laid off hundreds of workers in 1990. He had already seen the end coming, though: Two years before, Gordy had sold the former family operation to MCA for $61 million.
Unemployed and without job prospects, Horn was thousands of dollars behind in his child support payments, so his share of the settlement money was like a godsend. Of course, Millie had received twice as much, but after all, she did have to look after the kids.
By 1992, though, the $125,000 had run out. According to court papers, Horn was “financially desperate.” He still owed on his overdue child support—he hadn't exactly been throwing money to the twins—and he'd had no luck regaining a foothold in the music business. He had even been forced to borrow thousands of dollars from his mother.
His thoughts allegedly turned to that $1.7 million that was just sitting there in the trust fund—all for Trevor.
According to authorities, Horn was aware that Millie's employment insurance (she still worked for American Airlines) covered the cost of Trevor's medical care only until March '93. Millie intended to use Trevor's trust fund for his care thereafter. Trevor's nursing care costs alone totaled $1,178 a month, not to mention all the related medical expenses—which had averaged $250,000 a year, according to court papers.
Tiffani Horn later told police that her father became “obsessed” with the civil settlement awarded to Trevor. All that money for that little boy hooked to a machine, just lying there in that big house with his mom and round-the-clock nurses. And none for Lawrence Horn, who could barely pay his rent without help from his girlfriend.
Prosecutors allege that Horn began to imagine how things would change if Trevor and his mother were to somehow die—if that were to happen, the money would go to Horn. The nagging question was how. How?
Horn took a trip to his old stomping grounds in Detroit, but he wasn't going back to the Motor City for nostalgic reasons, according to prosecutors. He needed some help, he allegedly told friends there, with a “problem” he had in Maryland.
Some people would say that a hit man is an emotionless, cold-blooded killing machine....On the contrary, a hit man has a wide range of feelings. He may be excruciatingly tender towards his woman. He may be extremely compassionate towards the elderly or disabled. He may have a strong aversion to the useless killing of wildlife. He may even be religious in his own way. What the professional lacks is remorse. He feels no guilt.
<="" p="">
The business card, emblazoned with a moon-and-star emblem and a design of a walking cane, reads:
The House of Wisdom
Dr. J. Perry
Cold Reader
Case-Buster
Spiritual Adviser
By Appointment Only
During Horn's early 1992 visit to Detroit, his cousin, Thomas Turner, gave him a card and told him to call Dr. Perry. Maybe the “case buster” could help with Horn's problem, Turner testified (under a promise of immunity from prosecution) at the Perry trial.
A self-professed minister, “Dr.” James Perry is also an ex-jailbird who twice did hard time in the '70s for armed robbery—one incident included shooting a Michigan state trooper. Turner and Perry met when they were in prison together. It was Perry's qualification as an experienced gunman—someone unafraid to pull the trigger—police claim, that led Horn to hire Perry as an assassin to kill his wife and son: The former DJ once known as “L.T.—Your Man With the Plan” had found someone to carry out his dark design.
The defense argued that Perry was a religious family man who traveled around attending to his far-flung flock. “James Perry is a father and a grandfather,” Perry's lawyer Roger Galvin told the jury at the trial. “He's a spiritual minister. He's got people that he ministers to all over the country.”
Whether or not Perry is a true man of God, he had no experience as a hired assassin. To bone up on the subject, he studied a book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, published by the Paladin Press in Colorado. (Perry must have badly needed the money that a successful hit promised, though: The check he used to purchase the paperback later bounced, testified a Paladin employee.)
Penned by so-called “expert assassin and bodyguard” (and obviously pseudonymous) Rex Feral, Hit Man's chilling, hard-boiled prose gives step-by-step instructions on how to execute someone for money—and get away with it.
Prosecutors say Perry used Hit Man as a “blueprint” for the killings. All of his major moves in the crime are recommended in the 138-page manual, down to the type of weapon and the modus operandi.
“A hit man without a gun is like a carpenter without a hammer,” notes Hit Man. “The AR-7 rifle is recommended because it is both inexpensive and accurate.”
Perry used an AR-7 rifle that police later recovered in pieces from in a roadside ditch. The serial number had been filed off, and Perry had also tampered with the inside of the barrel.
“Use a rifle with a good scope and silencer and aim for the head—preferably the eye sockets if you are a sharpshooter. Many people have been shot repeatedly, even in the head, and survived to tell about it,” Hit Man recommends.
Proving himself an excellent marksman for a first-time hit man, Perry shot Millie Horn three times in the head, including two blasts to her left eye. The killer shot Janice Saunders twice in the head, including one bullet to her left eye.
“Close kills enable you to determine right away if you have successfully fulfilled your part of the contract; distant shots may mean waiting around to read the morning papers.”
Perry didn't have to hang around. Following the book's advice, he used a rental car, paid cash at the motel where he stayed, left no witnesses, messed up the house to make it look like a robbery, discarded the gun, and quickly got out of town; all in all, nearly two dozen points of similarity between Hit Man's instructions and the actual murder.
Hit Man doesn't offer instructions on how to suffocate a disabled child. To perform that deed, Perry apparently had to improvise.
The prosecution's case against Perry was entirely circumstantial. There were no survivors, and thus no eyewitnesses. Police found no bloody gloves at the scene, no fingerprints or shoe marks, no hair or even clothing fibers that matched Perry's, “not a single shred of evidence,” according to defense lawyer Galvin.
After the prosecution's daunting four-week argument (boasting more than 3,000 hours of police work), and testimony from Horn's now-grown daughter, the defense rested after barely four hours. Johnnie Cochran was nowhere in sight: All Perry had was a court-appointed attorney arguing a bad set of facts, and the jury decided in a short amount of time that Perry's guilt was open and shut. All that remains to be decided is whether Perry will die for making the hit.
But behind the Perry conviction looms the figure of Lawrence Horn, whom Galvin characterized as “the gray eminence hovering over the trial.”
Indeed, without Horn, Perry not only didn't have a murder to commit, he didn't have the necessary information to pull off the job. Lawrence Horn was the alleged mastermind who did all the homework. For Horn, the sheer logistics of the alleged plot must have presented a massive practical challenge: He's in L.A. His hit man's in Detroit. The targets are in Maryland. There would have to be all sorts of reconnaissance missions, which authorities say both men undertook in the form of trips to the Silver Spring area.
Authorities say the year-long association between Perry and Horn—including hundreds of pay-phone calls and several money exchanges chronicled in a staggering 7,000 pages—prove a murder-for-hire conspiracy. The police version of the events paints a portrait of cross-country phone calls and intricate planning.
In the summer of '92, on a visit to Maryland for child support proceedings, Horn vid eotaped the outside of Millie's house as he sat in his parked rental van waiting for his daughter Tamielle. He also recorded the route from the National Mall to the house on North Gate Drive. Horn later asked his daughter Tiffani to videotape the interior of the spacious house—a request she refused—but she did agree to film Trevor's nursery. Horn allegedly designed a map of the Layhill subdivision with X's at the locations of Millie's and her sister's houses.
For his part, Perry dutifully awaited his instructions, hanging out at his Detroit storefront business, Mr. Money, and a local bar, Francelle's. Authorities say that Horn and Perry always used pay phones to contact each other, and that both used a calling card that belonged to a friend of Horn's. Prosecutors also claim that Perry accepted frequent cash payments—the sort of expense money discussed in detail in Hit Man—sent via Western Union by Horn, who allegedly used the alias “George Shaw” and the address 2562 Sunset Blvd.: the Motown building.
Authorities say that Horn took the name George Shaw from a local death notice on the July 1992 Los Angeles Times obituary page that also reported the death of singing legend Mary Wells. Whether the references to his former employer were just inside jokes or wishful fantasies for Horn, Motown was still very much on his mind.
Perry followed Hit Man nearly to the letter, but he made two major mistakes, according to prosecutors: When he checked into a Day's Inn in Rockville after midnight on March 3, Perry paid cash to avoid revealing his identity, as Hit Man recommends. But the clerk asked for ID anyway, and made a Xerox copy of Perry's driver's license.
His murderous deed done, Perry made a phone call from a pay phone beside the motel to Horn's apartment in Hollywood. At 6 a.m., Perry checked out of the motel, which is just a few miles from Millie Horn's house in Silver Spring. Then he stopped at a Denny's restaurant in Gaithersburg, where he used a pay phone to again call Horn.
The brief stay at the motel and the early morning calls were enough for authorities to connect the hit man to his alleged boss while Perry was in the vicinity of the murder site, and to begin building their case.
In the weeks after the deaths of his son and ex-wife, Horn filed court papers to stake his claim to Trevor's $1.7-million trust fund. But Millie's sister Vivian Rice filed a civil suit to block Horn's claim to the estate. Perry grew increasingly frustrated with the delays and made repeated phone calls to Horn, allegedly demanding payment. The frantic crisscross of calls helped convince authorities that they were on the right trail.
The civil suit is pending, awaiting the outcome of Horn's trial.
Meanwhile, Horn is being held without bond at the Montgomery County Detention Center. His immediate family has stood behind him since his arrest: His mother Pauline Horn testified that the video that Tiffani filmed of Trevor in his nursery was meant for her—a grandmother who hadn't seen her beloved grandson in too long. His girlfriend Shiri Bogan, a regal, middle-aged woman, testified that she had never even heard the name James Perry, and that Horn videotaped on a daily basis.
A lifelong friend also maintains Horn's innocence: “I know how he feels about money and I know how he felt about his son,” says the Detroit businessman, who wants to remain anonymous. “He didn't care about money. I don't give a damn what they say.”
Like everyone else involved in the pending case, Horn is unavailable for comment. But in April '93, just weeks after the murder and a year before his arrest, he maintained his innocence in an interview with the Washington Post: “For me to do that, I would be dead now,” he said. “I would not be living on, because what would be the point? I would be a monster.”
Authorities suggest Horn hired a monster to do what he wanted done, but could not do himself. That way, he wouldn't have to actually pull the trigger and watch his ex-wife crumple to the floor, her eyes blown out. He wouldn't have to gun down Janice Saunders as she sat quilting and watching over his son—a chore that he had never taken the time to do. And he wouldn't have to suffocate his own child and witness his son's terrible last moments.
By hiring someone to carry out the executions, he could stay in the background and leave the focus on someone else, just as he had done all those years as an engineer in the music business. At his trial in January, prosecutors will try to make sure that Lawrence Horn finally gets the credit he deserves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)