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Man Charged With Pushing a Capitol Police Officer Over a Ledge on Jan. 6

Published

2 years ago

March 11, 2022

A New York man was arrested on Wednesday and charged with shoving a Capitol Police officer over a ledge on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters disrupted Congress because it was certifying the 2020 election outcomes, prosecutors mentioned.

The F.B.I. mentioned that it had recognized the person, Ralph Joseph Celentano III of Broad Channel, Queens, from a photograph on Fb and Instagram that confirmed him attending a fund-raiser for a sea turtle basis in March 2018.

Witnesses recognized him in a gaggle of about 20 folks within the picture and advised investigators that Mr. Celentano had attended the fund-raiser for the Jenny Albert Sea Turtle Basis along with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, courtroom paperwork mentioned.

Mr. Celentano, 54, was arrested in Broad Channel and charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers; civil dysfunction; participating in bodily violence in a restricted constructing or grounds; and associated offenses, prosecutors mentioned.

After an preliminary look in U.S. District Court docket for the Japanese District of New York, he was launched on a $50,000 bond and ordered to avoid Washington until he’s going to courtroom, a spokesman for the U.S. lawyer’s workplace for the Japanese District of New York mentioned.

Mr. Celentanto’s lawyer, Marissa Sherman, declined to touch upon the costs on Thursday.

Greater than 775 folks have been arrested in reference to the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, on expenses that vary from trespassing to seditious conspiracy. Greater than 200 have pleaded responsible.

On Tuesday, a federal jury convicted the primary individual accused within the riot to go on trial, discovering Man Wesley Reffitt, an oil-field employee from Wylie, Texas, responsible on 5 counts, together with coming into and remaining in a restricted constructing or grounds with a firearm.

On Jan. 6, 2021, safety cameras and movies captured photos of Mr. Celentano collaborating within the riot, with longer hair, a two-toned jacket, a flag and a folding chair affixed to his backpack that made him “distinctive within the crowd,” courtroom papers mentioned.

One video confirmed him on the west terrace of the Capitol, the place he approached a uniformed Capitol Police officer from behind and pushed the officer, inflicting him to fall over a ledge onto a terrace under, courtroom papers mentioned.

The officer, who was recognized in courtroom papers solely as Okay.E., later recalled being “blindsided” from behind in a “football-type deal with,” prosecutors mentioned. The officer mentioned that after he fell, his principal concern was standing up so he wouldn’t be “stomped on.”

An Iraq Warfare veteran, he recalled pondering, “I didn’t survive a conflict to exit like this,” prosecutors mentioned.

The officer advised investigators that he was in all probability injured throughout the fall, however that he had “a lot adrenaline at the moment that he couldn’t ensure,” courtroom papers mentioned. Though he discovered bumps and bruises on his physique, he didn’t search medical consideration.

Physique-camera movies from the Metropolitan Police Division of Washington confirmed Mr. Celentano participating in a number of different “bodily altercations” with officers on the grounds of the Capitol, courtroom papers mentioned.

In an effort to determine the one who had shoved the officer, the F.B.I. launched a photograph from the riot.

The bureau mentioned it then acquired data that helped investigators determine the person who was in that picture as the identical man who was in a photograph on Instagram and Fb taken on the fund-raiser for the ocean turtle basis on March 31, 2018, in Broad Channel.

Investigators then collected E-ZPass data and New York license plate reader knowledge from Mr. Celentano’s feminine companion, which confirmed that her automobile had left Broad Channel at about 3 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and returned the following night at about 7:30 p.m., prosecutors mentioned.

News

Mass shooting at Rochester Hills splash pad: Everything we know

Published

3 mins ago

June 16, 2024

Press Room

Mass shooting at Rochester Hills splash pad: Everything we know

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich. – Nine people were injured, including two children, when a man opened fire at a splash pad in Oakland County on Saturday.

When did the shooting happen?

The shooting happened just after 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 15.

Where did the shooting happen?

The shooting happened at the Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad at 1585 E. Auburn Road in Rochester Hills.

What do we know about the shooting?

Police said the shooter drove to the splash pad, parked, and started firing once he was out of his car from the base of the steps that lead to the splash pad. He walked up the steps, reloaded, and continued shooting from the top of the steps in the splash pad area.

He fired 28 shots randomly into the crowded splash pad, according to police. He reloaded multiple times and is believed to have been firing with two handguns.

Some victims were shot while trying to run from the scene. The shooter fled the scene before police arrived.

What do we know about the police response?

A Oakland County sergeant arrived to the scene within minutes of the shooting being called into 911. The department uses Live 911, which allows deputies on the road to hear calls as they come into 911 before they are even dispatched out to officers.

The sergeant heard the call over the radio and sped to the splash pad, where he was there within two minutes and began helping victims by applying tourniquets and offering support.

Who are the victims?

Micayla and Eric Coughlin from Rochester Hills had only just arrived to the splash pad with their two daughters when they heard gunfire, according to a GoFundMe page set up by a friend of the family. The each grabbed a child to protect them. The children were uninjured but the couple was shot a total of 7 times.

According to the sheriff’s office, in total, nine people were shot. Officials said a 39-year-old woman and her two sons were shot. The woman was in critical condition, her 8-year-old son was in critical condition, and her 4-year-old son was in stable condition.

The other victims include a 30-year-old woman, 30-year-old man, 37-year-old woman, 39-year-old woman, 40-year-old man, and a 78-year-old man.

What do we know about the shooter?

The shooter has been identified as Michael William Nash, 42, from Shelby Township.

Police recovered a 9mm handgun at the splash pad, which was registered to the shooter. They located him at a mobile home park in Shelby Township where he killed himself hours after the shooting. Police said they believed the shooter lived with his mother, who was not home at the time.

What have we learned about the investigation?

Police are still investigating why the man decided to open fire on random strangers. They have not located a note, manifesto, or other evidence that offers an explanation. The investigation will include putting together a timeline of what he did leading up to and after the shooting.

A rifle was discovered in the home where the shooter was found dead. Oakland County sheriff Michael Bouchard said, “Because we had quick containment on him, that if he had planned to do anything else — and it wouldn’t surprise me because having that on the kitchen table is not an everyday activity — that there was probably something else, a second chapter potentially.”

Bouchard said police had no previous contact with the shooter and he did not have a criminal record. Bouchard said family has indicated that the shooter may have been experiencing some “mental health challenges.”

“We have some information that obviously we’re gonna run down that came from family that said he had been struggling recently and had been walking about the house with a gun and had some paranoid thoughts. We haven’t fleshed that out yet and that’s obviously something that is gonna be part of this investigation but we’d also encourage people, look, if someone is struggling with very severe mental health challenge and they have weapons in their hand that’s a good time to loop in mental health professionals and certainly public safety. We really need to be in front of so many of these tragedies rather than hear about it after. Almost every one of these things I’ve analyzed, and I’ve analyzed active shooters going back 25 years, have a very clear component that if somebody shared information it could have been interrupted,” Bouchard said.

In February of this year, Michigan enacted new gun laws that included an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) law. The ERPO law allows the courts to temporarily prevent people deemed a risk to themselves or others from having or buying firearms.

A spouse, former spouse, partner, former partner, family member, roommate, guardian, law enforcement officer, or healthcare provider can petition the court to have a person’s firearms temporarily removed if they are deemed to be a risk.

—> More: Michigan’s red flag gun laws: What to do if you believe someone is a danger to themselves or others

Resources available for residents

The Rochester Hills Department of Public Services building will now serve as a Family Assistance Center. Anyone who feels they need help is encouraged to speak with someone. You do not need an appointment to access resources at the Family Assistance Center. Therapists will be available Monday through Friday from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. at 511 E Auburn Road.

If you are unable to make it out to the Family Assistance Center, you can contact the nurse on call at 800-848-5533. They are available Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m.

News

John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

Published

6 hours ago

June 16, 2024

Press Room

John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

John Everett Benson, a master stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.

His son Christopher said he died in a hospital but did not specify the cause.

Mr. Benson practiced the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock; slate was his preferred medium. He did so, precisely and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had before him, working out of an atelier in Newport called the John Stevens Shop. Founded in 1705, it is one of the oldest continuously run businesses in the country.

The art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, the brief span of a life, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months.

For the inscriptions for the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s, he averaged an hour and a half carving each letter, some of which are nearly a foot tall. He and his team at the time, two young carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months completing the painstaking work.

He carved the words on the pedestal that supports Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he also carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Center. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are where lapidary artists show off their chops, their calligraphic feats and flourishes — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He also worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, Yale University and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.

Mr. Benson, who was known as Fud, was 25 when began his first major commission: to mark John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery and carve selections from his speeches onto a low wall made from seven granite blocks. (He changed into clean bell bottoms when Jackie Kennedy came to the shop in Newport to approve his design.)

Stone carvers on public sites invariably draw a crowd. And, inevitably, someone will ask, “What if you make a mistake?” As Mr. Benson, Mr. Hegnauer and Mr. Roberts worked at another site, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, onlookers asked and asked, so much so that Mr. Benson requested that a flyer be made to put an end to the incessant questioning.

Q: What happens if they make a mistake?

A: Don’t worry, they won’t.

“Why go to all this kind of trouble to get a name on a building?” Mr. Benson said in “Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter” (1979), a documentary about his work made by Frank Muhly. “Why carve it into the stone? Why carve it in this particular fashion?” He added: “There’s a tremendous emotional appeal about a carved letter. It partakes of the substance of the building. And of the carved letters, this particular style” — Mr. Benson favored what is known as a V-cut — “shows very clearly that the letter is made of the same stuff as the building itself. There are lots easier ways to do it, let me tell you.”

John Everett Benson was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Newport, R.I., one of three children, and grew up in an 18th-century clapboard house overlooking Narragansett Bay. His mother, Esther Fisher (Smith) Benson, known as Fisher, was a Philadelphia-born Quaker who used “plain speech” at home, deploying “thee,” “thy” and “thine” for “you,” “your” and “yours.”

His father, John Howard Benson, was an artist who had become enamored of the stone carver’s art. He bought the John Stevens Shop with a $1,200 loan in 1927, when he was 26, and began to revive its business.

The elder Mr. Benson was, like his son, a polymath skilled at calligraphy and carving, and he elevated the practice, reaching back to the Roman tradition of carving large, elegant capital letters designed first with a brush and ink on paper. In his time he was known as the country’s finest stone carver, and he worked on many commissions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a professor.

Fud was 15 when he began apprenticing in the shop, and his first commissions were gravestones for two clients’ pets. He was 16 when his father died of a heart attack in 1956. His mother ran the business while he studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he took over the shop after he graduated in 1961.

Mr. Benson was eloquent, erudite and prone to grand gestures. He was agile enough to perform a Fred Astaire chair trick — stepping from seat to chair back in a graceful arc — though he sometimes overestimated his abilities. During a youthful fascination with firearms, he shot himself in the leg. He was better on the fiddle, and played traditional Irish music and sea chanteys with a local band, the Reprobates, in Newport’s bars.

In addition to his son Christopher, a painter, Mr. Benson is survived by his wife, Karen Augeri Benson, a lawyer, whom he married in 1988; another son, Nick, a stone carver; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ruth Furgiuele in 1959 ended in divorce in the early 1970s. Mr. Benson’s older brother, Thomas, a sculptor and art and antiques restorer who died in 1987, was a founder of the Newport Museum of Yachting. His younger brother, Richard, known as Chip, a noted photographer and printer, died in 2017.

Mr. Benson’s last monumental work was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, designed by Lawrence Halprin as a series of outdoor “rooms” made from red South Dakota granite onto which Mr. Benson carved the president’s notable quotations and speeches, including the “Four Freedoms” speech.

In 1993, Mr. Benson turned the business over to his son Nick and returned to sculpture. Like his father, Nick began his apprenticeship at age 15. His father’s praise was hard won, Nick recalled, and was delivered sort of sideways: “Well, Jesus,” he might say, “it doesn’t look like you need me.”

Nick Benson carved the World War II, Martin Luther King and Dwight D. Eisenhower memorials in Washington, and he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2010 for preserving the art of hand letter carving.

Mr. Benson’s headstones were his bread and butter. His orders, from a who’s who of Americans, were backlogged for months and even years. He made Tennessee Williams’s headstone out of pink Tennessee marble, as he did for George Balanchine. Lillian Hellman’s, a flat slate marker on Martha’s Vineyard, is engraved with the years of her birth and death and is embellished with a delicate feather quill. (Curiously, he ended up carving the gravestone of Ms. Hellman’s nemesis, Mary McCarthy, when she died in 1989, five years later.)

Jean Stafford declared in an article for The New York Times in 1971 that she had ordered hers ahead of time, “because I knew they would make me something beautiful.” (She died eight years later.) Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, ordered hers in 1999, when she commissioned one for her husband, the philanthropist Paul Mellon, who died that year. She kept hers in her library in Virginia until her own death in 2014.

“They’re simple, well-established objects,” Mr. Benson told the writer Philip Kopper in 1977. “All you can do is try to make the lettering as beautiful as you can. And that’s a darlin’ way to spend a day or two.”

News

French leftists move to shore up alliance ahead of snap elections

Published

7 hours ago

June 16, 2024

Press Room

French leftists move to shore up alliance ahead of snap elections

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Leaders of France’s leftwing New Popular Front moved to shore up their new alliance for forthcoming snap elections after it was rocked by a far-left party purge of moderates.

Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon enraged colleagues and the leaders of other parties late on Friday when he removed several of his critics and proponents of the alliance from his party’s list of candidates.

He included in the list Adrien Quatennens, a protégé and controversial MP from Mélenchon’s France Insoumise — France Unbowed, or LFI — party, who has a conviction for domestic violence, prompting a furious reaction from other NPF leaders.

On Saturday, Mélenchon was defiant about his purge, telling news outlet 20minutes.fr that “political coherence and loyalty in the left’s largest parliamentary group are imperative for governing”.

But on Sunday, Quatennens withdrew his candidacy in what appeared to signal a partial retreat by Mélenchon.

Mélenchon, a deeply polarising politician, suggested he would not insist on becoming prime minister if the left emerged from the election with the most seats. A Mélenchon premiership would be a troubling prospect for the other left parties and many voters.

Adrien Quatennens has withdrawn from the election after his inclusion on France Insoumise’s list of candidates prompted a furious reaction © Adrien Quatennens Youtube Channel/AFP via Getty Images

“If you don’t think I should be prime minister, I won’t,” he told France TV, addressing his NPF comrades.

The creation of a united leftwing front is a crucial development in the run-up to the elections on June 30 and July 7. It could seriously harm the prospects of candidates for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance by making it much harder for them to qualify for the second-round run-off.

The leftwing parties are deeply divided on the economy, EU policy and Ukraine, but have buried their differences to maximise their chances against Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National.

They have united behind a joint programme with a radical tax-and-spend agenda, adding to investors’ jitters ahead of the election. Mélenchon said the left’s programme envisaged tax rises worth €123bn a year.

In a sign of the commitment to the new alliance — which spans Eurosceptic far-left populists and pro-EU social democrats — former socialist president François Hollande said he would run for parliament as an NPF candidate.

However, Mélenchon’s purge of his party just hours after the New Popular Front’s campaign launch created serious strains within the alliance. Olivier Faure, the socialist chief, called it “scandalous”.

“It’s totally petty, small of him, settling scores when the challenge now is to prevent the far right from taking power,” Alexis Corbières, one of the MPs removed as a candidate, told France Info.

Another, Raquel Garrido, posted on X: “Shame on you, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is sabotage. But I can do better. We can do better.”

Political parties are scrambling to assemble their lists of candidates for the election before the deadline of 18.00 on Sunday.

Hollande’s candidacy in his home region of Corrèze took his colleagues by surprise. If elected, Hollande would become only the second former head of state to take a seat in the National Assembly since the start of France’s fifth republic. The other was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

Hollande said it was “an exceptional decision for an exceptional situation”, given that the far right is closer to power than at any moment since France’s liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.

To salvage as many seats as possible, Macron’s centrist alliance is trying to strike reciprocal local deals not to stand against each other with centre-right candidates that refuse to back RN.

The centre-right Les Républicains party is also in disarray after its leader Éric Ciotti unilaterally agreed an alliance with the far right

Furious colleagues on the party’s executive unanimously voted to expel Ciotti, but the decision was overturned by a Paris court on Friday night, leaving it unclear who was in charge of the list of candidates.