Northeast
Judge quickly denies request to discard $38 million verdict in New Hampshire youth center abuse case
The judge who oversaw a landmark trial about New Hampshire’s youth detention center has refused to discard the $38 million verdict, saying the facility’s leadership “either knew and didn’t care or didn’t care to learn the truth” about endemic physical and sexual abuse.
A jury earlier this month sided with David Meehan, who alleged he was repeatedly raped, beaten and held in solitary confinement at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s. The attorney general’s office is seeking to drastically reduce the award. While that issue remains unsettled, the state also asked Judge Andrew Schulman to nullify the verdict and issue a judgment in its favor.
CLOSING ARGUMENTS HEARD IN NH YOUTH DETENTION CENTER ABUSE SUIT
In a motion filed Monday, attorneys for the state again argued that Meehan waited too long to sue and that he failed to prove that the state’s negligence led to abuse. Schulman swiftly denied the motion, ruling in less than 24 hours that Meehan’s claims were timely under an exception to the statute of limitations, and that Meehan had proven “beyond doubt” that the state breached its duty of care with respect to staff training, supervision and discipline.
The Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, N.H., stands among trees, Jan. 28, 2020. A New Hampshire jury awarded $38 million to the man who blew the lid off abuse allegations at the state’s youth detention center Friday, May 3, 2024, in a landmark case finding the state’s negligence allowed him to be beaten, raped and held in solitary confinement as a teen. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
According to Schulman, a jury could easily have found that the facility’s leadership “was, at best, willfully blind to entrenched and endemic customs and practices” that included frequent sexual and physical assaults as well as “constant emotional abuse of residents.”
“Maybe there is more to the story, but based on the trial record liability for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty was proven to a geometric certainty,” he wrote.
Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents of what is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades. Charges against one former worker, Frank Davis, were dropped earlier this month after the 82-year-old was found incompetent to stand trial.
Meehan’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial. Over four weeks, his attorneys contended that the state encouraged a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence. The state portrayed Meehan as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and delusional adult lying to get money.
Jurors awarded him $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in enhanced damages, but when asked the number of incidents for which the state was liable, they wrote “one.” That trigged the state’s request to reduce the award under a state law that allows claimants against the state to get a maximum of $475,000 per incident.
Meehan’s lawyers say multiple emails they’ve received from distraught jurors showed the jury misunderstood that question on the jury form. They filed a motion Monday asking Schulman to set aside just the portion of the verdict where jurors wrote “one” incident, allowing the $38 million to stand. As an alternative, the judge could order a new trial only on the number of incidents, or could offer the state the option of agreeing to an increase in the number of incidents, they wrote.
Last week, Schulman denied a request from Meehan’s lawyers to reconvene and poll the jury, but said he was open to other options to address the disputed verdict. A hearing is scheduled for June 24.
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Pennsylvania
10-year-old stabbed Dollar Tree employee during robbery in Pennsylvania, police say
Generic police lights (FOX 9)
A 10-year-old boy who allegedly robbed a Dollar Tree store in Pennsylvania is also accused of stabbing multiple times one of the employees trying to detain him.
Big picture view:
The Swatara Township Police Department reported that its officers were called around 5 p.m. on Monday to the discount store in Harrisburg where they found the boy being held by store employees.
Timeline:
After speaking with witnesses, officers determined that the grade-school-age child went into the store holding a fixed-blade knife, threatened an employee, and told her to give him all the money.
Customs officers use Heimlich maneuver to save choking toddler
The employee’s co-workers jumped in to help her. As they struggled to subdue the boy, he stabbed one of them multiple times, the police department reported. Its statement did not indicate how badly that employee was injured, only saying that medical treatment was needed.
Dig deeper:
The suspect was taken by officers to a detention facility where he was booked on counts of robbery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and possessing an instrument of a crime.
The Source: Information for this article was taken from Swatara Township Police Department. This story was reported from Orlando.
Rhode Island
Three generations killed during driving lesson after car plunges into river
Three generations of a family, including a two-year-old girl, have been killed during a driving lesson after their car plunged into a Rhode Island river.
Police received a report that a car had driven into the Seekonk River in Pawtucket on Sunday evening at the small boat-launching area, The Boston Globe reported.
After hours of searching for the submerged car, authorities pulled it out of the water Monday afternoon. The 45-year-old woman, a 22-year-old woman and the two-year-old girl inside the car were found dead.
Pawtucket resident Josue Gomez told The Globe it was his wife, Floridalma Arceno, their daughter, Linora Sucely Gomez, and their granddaughter, Ana Sofia Garcia Gomez, who were killed in the accident.
Gomez said Arceno was teaching their daughter how to drive with their granddaughter in the car when his wife called him in a panic and said, “‘It won’t brake, it won’t brake.’’

“It was the last thing she said to me,” he said.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves told reporters that a “Good Samaritan riding a jet ski in the vicinity heard the car enter the water and attempted to help,” The Providence Journal reported.
“While this was occurring, another individual called 911, and first responders were on scene within 3 minutes,” Goncalves said.
Gomez said he hurried to the boat ramp Sunday evening, but the car was already submerged.
Police tried to find the car, but suspended the search around 1 a.m. Monday due to poor conditions, according to reports.
The search resumed Monday morning, and by around 2:30 p.m. ET, a tow truck pulled the car out of the water.
“They were good people,” Gomez told The Globe.

The Independent has reached out to the Pawtucket Police Department and the Rhode Island Office of the State Medical Examiners for comment.
Authorities called it a “tragic accident,” and said there were no indications of foul play, according to reports.
“Preliminary findings suggest the vehicle was in proper working order,” Pawtucket Detective Sergeant Paul Trout said in an email to The Globe.
Pawtucket Mayor Donald R. Grebien called the incident a “heartbreaking tragedy” in a statement shared with the media.
“Our community mourns alongside them, and we want them to know they are not alone during this unimaginable time,” Grebien said.
Vermont
She moved from Paris to Vermont and found her ‘dream job’ opening a bakery – The Boston Globe
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Shelley MacDonald and her husband, both Canadian citizens, had been living in Paris for over a decade when the pandemic hit. She’d been selling baked goods and hosting a dinner club called Paris Bread in their apartment. She wanted to open a business in the United States, where she could operate in English. It was time to leave, except that, at the moment, only American passport holders could fly into the United States.
With ingenuity and grit, the couple discovered a visa for foreign entrepreneurs and secured one from the American Embassy the day it reopened after lockdown. Once their passports were stamped, they had 30 days to fly out and move everything they owned to this picturesque college town.
Since 2022, MacDonald has run Belleville Bakery & Catering near City Hall in Burlington, Vt., down the street from the University of Vermont. She’s training staff, including students, and offering confections you might see in a Parisian patisserie, most not as fancy. She has different varieties of all-butter croissants, cinnamon snails and feta-garlic snails made with croissant trimmings, tempting lunch items such as bacon cheddar quiche and tuna sandwiches with smoked Gouda on homemade onions buns, and dinners such as lasagna, rigatoni, and chicken pot pie to take home.
“I think the town is adorable with kind people who help you when you don’t need to be helped,” says MacDonald, sitting in the bright bakery. “There’s something very special about Vermont.”
She and her husband — the hyperrealist painter André Beaulieu — picked Burlington because they had visited often when they lived in his hometown, Montreal. “The real reason is so that I could open a business in English,” she told her 48,000 Instagram followers, “so that I could function in my native language, for all of the reading and writing and dealing with lawyers and accountants and plumbers that you need to do when you own a business.”
MacDonald describes their new situation as “the best of both possible worlds, where I get to live in English in a really cute space, and he gets to live with me in English in a really cute space and he’s really close to home.” She describes her business as her “dream job.”
The 100-year-old building whose storefront she renovated is large and airy, with bakers in the kitchen in full view making croissant and brioche doughs, prepping cookie batters and galette pastry.

MacDonald moves quickly, laughs easily, and greets customers warmly. “People come into a bakery looking for a treat and some kind of care,” she says. When you’ve finished eating, you don’t have to take your plates and cups to various bins for recycle and trash. That system horrifies her. “No bussing,” she says. “We take care of you.”
Her clientele skews older, she has noticed, and they’re looking for somewhere to go. “The demand is enormous,” she says. She describes her personality as “Shelley takes care of people.” Remembering her days running an underground restaurant, MacDonald now offers twice-monthly Sunday brunches and dinners, both served at a long table farmhouse-style so everyone talks to their neighbors.
MacDonald, who is willing to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, also has a successful mail-order arm to send cookies across the country. They’re thick and perfectly round in flavors such as orange gingersnap, pistachio chocolate, and lemon pistachio shortbread.
She also gives classes in the bakery and writes a weekly newsletter, which she snail-mails for free. “People are lonely,” she says. They want to receive real mail.

Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, MacDonald, 59, also lived in Vancouver. She met Beaulieu in Montreal. His large, striking artworks hang in the bakery.
In order to get a US E-2 Investor Visa, they had to invest $15,000 in a new US company (some applicants invest considerably more) and have secured premises in the destination city. Sight-unseen, they rented a painting studio in The Soda Plant in Burlington for Beaulieu, which qualified them.
The bakery’s name is the English version of Beaulieu’s surname. Beaulieu means “beautiful place,” she says. Belleville, which means “beautiful city,” is easier for Americans to spell.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, who happened to be there when I was — she said she stops by often since her office is so close — describes the bakery as “loveliness in this corner. [MacDonald] draws people into this community.”

The bakery has become known for its I am Proud of Me Banana Cake. It’s really banana bread, but when MacDonald made it in France, customers wondered why it was called bread.
When you buy one, MacDonald asks you what you’re proud of. She’s heard many comments, mostly emotional. One woman in her 20s was going to drive on the highway for the first time, someone else was excited to have completed exams. Then a man came in to say he was proud of his wife for finishing chemo.
“She’d been planning this cake during her treatment,” MacDonald told a local TV reporter who did a segment on her. Donations started coming in so other cancer patients at the local hospital could get a banana cake; MacDonald also sends cakes to a palliative care center and a teen drop-in center.
Those efforts came to the attention of a program director at the University of Vermont, who called MacDonald in the middle of Vermont’s dark, cold February winter. The administrator was running a mental health day for freshmen. She bought 100 banana cakes from MacDonald and asked her to come and hand them out.
The line was an hour long. Students waited patiently, not just to get an I am Proud of Me Banana Cake, but also for a moment to tell MacDonald what was on their mind.
Belleville Bakery & Catering, 217 College St., Burlington, Vt., www.bellevillevt.com
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com.
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