Louisiana
Louisiana daughter says a medium led her to missing mother’s body as she accuses sheriff of botching investigation
A Louisiana daughter has accused the local sheriff’s office of failing to fully investigate her mother’s death last year after a psychic medium led her to her mom’s half-clothed body in the woods.
The mother of three and grandmother of seven, Theresa Jones, was reported missing on Feb. 2, 2023.
Her oldest daughter Ashley Deese spent hours desperately searching for her 56-year-old mom that day and the next day the Union Parish Sheriff’s Office and a K9 unit spent more time searching for Jones, but she was nowhere to be found.
Three days after she vanished, Deese and her sister Brittany reached out to a psychic medium in Wisconsin who has a large following thanks to her success in helping to find missing people, KNOE reported.
The medium, Carolyn Clapper, talked to the sisters on the phone for 45 minutes, sharing step-by-step, detailed instructions on where to find their mom, Deese said.
“There would be a log, [Jones] kept showing me this pronounced log, a very big log in the woods. It wasn’t just little twigs and sticks, it was a log, a huge one, you know you hit this log is basically what she said, you get to this log and my body will be there. There’s water, I saw a creek,” Clapper told KNOE.
Deese set out into the woods near her mother’s house the next morning and spotted a large log.
“It’s like I envisioned what I had heard on the phone last night, that was the landmark, that was the log. So I immediately got ill, shaky, and sick, and started vomiting,” she said.
Jones was found face down and partially nude in Edmonds Creek. She only had a top on and no bottoms or underwear.
Deese called the sheriff who began investigating but never did a rape test or scraped the woman’s fingernails for possible DNA evidence.
“So there’s a woman deceased facedown in a creek, nude. All she had on was a top, no undergarments, nude. There was no rape kit, no scraping of the fingernails. I’m bothered by that,” Deese said.
Union Parish Sheriff Dusty Gates confirmed that neither test was done on Jones’ body in an interview with KNOE. He told the station that his office could have requested either test but he didn’t know if his office ever requested those tests.
The sheriff’s office reportedly told Deese that there were no signs of disturbance in the area where her mother’s body was found so investigators didn’t feel a rape kit or fingernail scraping was needed. The investigators believe her body was nude from the waist down because her bottoms were pulled off by the force of the water.
“This is an assumption or a guess, it might be a good guess, but nonetheless if there’s no clothes, shouldn’t we find the clothing shouldn’t we prove that, shouldn’t there be science behind these ideas,” Clapper said.
The medical examiner — who also didn’t do those tests — ruled that Jones’ death was accidental. She died drowning, with methamphetamine intoxication a contributing factor in her death, according to the autopsy.
Jones had a large amount of meth in her system at the time of her death but her daughter said she had been sober for 20 years after a cocaine addiction.
“It doesn’t line up, it doesn’t make sense. And if someone can make it make sense, I will sit down and listen,” Deese said.
The incident report says that Deese told deputies that her mom was back on meth and marijuana and suffered from mental illness, but “refuses to take her medication like she is supposed to.”
But Deese said she never said those things.
“I also feel that as soon as it was known that there was drugs involved, and even a history of drugs, I felt like the sobriety didn’t matter. And I feel like since there was drugs involved, it’s just one more off the street,” she said.
She also criticized the sheriff’s office for failing to speak to Clapper who has helped provide info to other law enforcement agencies that helped find missing people in the past. She said Clapper knew things about the condition of her mother’s body and toxicology report before each was revealed.
“Even if they don’t believe in psychics or they’re skeptical, you know, they still follow up on leads, so they’ll still question me if I know too much about a case and they can’t really explain how I would know the details that I know about a case, it’s their job to follow up,” the medium said.
Both she and Deese pleaded with the deputies to speak to Clapper repeatedly.
“For months, for months I tried getting in touch, for months Ashley tried following up with them, lending my name and my contact information. Months have gone by, nearly a year and a half now,” Clapper said.
Jones’ case was closed in August 2023.
But her daughter doesn’t believe her death was an accident.
“I do suspect foul play. I haven’t been proved that it wasn’t. And I will suspect that until I’m proved that it’s not,” Deeves said.
Louisiana
North Carolina man arrested in Okaloosa County for alleged Louisiana mass shooting plan
DESTIN, Fla. — A North Carolina man allegedly headed to do a mass shooting at a large Louisiana festival was arrested in Okaloosa County Wednesday evening.
Federal authorities contacted the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office in regards to the man. The department was told the man would be in the area.
The man’s name has not been shared by authorities.
Deputies found the man at a Destin Hotel. They took him into custody as a “fugitive from justice.”
The man will be extradited to Louisiana to face state charges, deputies say.
Louisiana
Mom whose 3 children were killed in Louisiana mass shooting still has bullet lodged in face — and sometimes thinks kids are alive
The mother of three of the eight children massacred by deranged Army veteran dad Shamar Elkins in Louisiana still has a bullet lodged in her head and is struggling with her memory — sometimes believing her kids are still alive, according to a relative.
Christina Snow, the girlfriend of 31-year-old Shamar Elkins, was shot in the face early Sunday when the former National Guardsman went on a shooting rampage at two nearby homes in Shreveport.
Three of Snow’s children she shared with Elkins — Braylon Snow, 5, Khedarrion Snow, 6, and Sariahh Snow, 11 — were killed in their home.
Elkins fired a bullet through Snow’s nose which is lodged in her head, and doctors aren’t ready to risk surgery, according to her cousin Jamarckus Snow.
The mom is now dealing with heartbreaking memory loss about the fate of her kids.
“One day, she’ll remember they’re dead. I heard yesterday she woke up and was like, ‘I got to get my kids ready for school.’ She’ll lose memory of what happened,” he told NBC News.
“One day, she’ll know, and the next day, she’s thinking her kids is still there.”
Follow the latest updates on the Louisiana father who killed 8 children in Shreveport shooting:
Elkins fatally shot his seven children — the three he shared with Snow and his four daughters with his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh: Jayla Elkins, 3, Shayla Elkins, 5, Kayla Pugh, 6, and Layla Pugh, 7.
He also killed Mar’Kaydon Pugh, 10, the son of his wife’s sister, who was staying at their house.
The vet turned his gun on Pugh and Snow, too, severely wounding both women, who are still in the hospital.
Elkins shot himself in the driveway of his former military mentor as law enforcement closed in.
The motive for the shooting remains unclear, but Elkins was suffering from mental health issues and was scheduled to appear in court on Monday after Pugh asked him for a divorce.
Louisiana
Federal appeals court upholds Texas’ Ten Commandments law. What does it mean for Louisiana?
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a Texas law requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, just weeks after the same court allowed a similar Louisiana law to take effect.
A majority of judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’ law, which is nearly identical to Louisiana’s, is constitutional and does not violate students’ religious freedom. In February, the court lifted an injunction on Louisiana’s law, which cleared schools to put up the posters, but the judges said it was too early to rule on that law’s constitutionality.
Tuesday’s ruling could bode well for Louisiana’s law if it eventually returns to the 5th Circuit, considered the country’s most conservative federal court of appeals.
In their majority opinion, the judges rejected the argument that posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms would pressure students to honor the biblical mandates or adopt particular beliefs.
“To plaintiffs, merely exposing children to religious language is enough to make the displays engines of coercive indoctrination. We disagree,” the majority wrote about the Texas law, known as S.B. 10. A minority of the court’s active judges dissented.
Even though Tuesday’s ruling only addressed the Texas case, defenders of Louisiana’s legislation celebrated it as a victory. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the 5th Circuit’s argument in upholding Texas’ law was identical to the one Louisiana made in defense of its law.
“Our law clearly was always constitutional,” she posted on X, “and I am grateful that the Fifth Circuit has now definitively agreed with us.”
Louisiana’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed the law in 2024, which requires all public K-12 schools and colleges to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. A group of parents quickly challenged the law in court, and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that stopped the state from enforcing the law.
In February, the 5th Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision, saying it had been premature to block the law before it took effect. The judges said they could not rule on the law’s constitutionality before seeing how it played out in schools.
But in the case of Texas’ law, which that state’s Republican-led Legislature passed in 2025, the court did rule on the merits.
Rejecting arguments made by attorneys for the Texas families who challenged the law, the 5th Circuit majority said that requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments does not amount to the government endorsing a particular religion, which the U.S. Constitution forbids. The law also does not impose religious beliefs on students, the judges wrote.
“As noted, S.B. 10 authorizes no religious instruction and gives teachers no license to contradict children’s religious beliefs (or their parents’),” the majority opinion says. “No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin.”
The Texas families were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serving as pro bono counsel. The same groups, including Louisiana’s ACLU chapter, represented the Louisiana families.
In a statement Tuesday, the organizations said they are “extremely disappointed” by the 5th Circuit’s ruling, adding that they expect to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction,” the groups said. “This decision tramples those rights.”
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