12/02/2012
Toddler's mystery death reignites investigation of two other deaths
Rams family via AP Prince McLeod Rams, shown in an undated photograph, who died Oct. 21 during a visit with his father in Virginia, at the age of 15 months. By The Associated Press MANASSAS, Va. — A toddler's death during a visit with his father last month in Virginia is prompting police to also more closely investigate the suicide of the man's mother and the shooting death of a onetime girlfriend in the past decade. Fifteen-month-old Prince McLeod Rams died during a three-hour, unsupervised visit with his father, Joaquin S. Rams of Manassas, police said. Manassas Police spokesman Lowell Nevill said that led police to further probe the 2008 suicide of Joaquin Rams' mother and the 2003 shooting death of his ex-girlfriend Shawn K. Mason. The boy's mother, Hera McLeod, said the system failed to protect the boy after she fought vehemently to prevent the unsupervised visits, which were ordered by a judge in Maryland. Authorities have not yet determined how the boy died, and Rams has not yet been charged with a crime. But McLeod said the unusual confluence of deaths is not easily explained. "Either he's the most unlucky bastard on this planet, or he's a killer," said McLeod, who fled the relationship with her one-time fiance about two weeks after Prince was born. Joaquin Rams did not answer calls to his cellphone. His attorney also did not return calls seeking comment. Hera McLeod said she has been given only a little information about her son's injuries. But she said the hospital called child protective services because of suspicious injuries, including dried blood in his nose and a bruise on his forehead. During a custody hearing for Prince Rams in March, investigators testified Joaquin Rams is a suspect in the killing of Mason, 22, who was shot in the head in her Manassas condo in 2003. In 2008, Rams' mother, Alma Collins, was found dead. Prince William County Police at the time ruled the death a suicide. While Manassas police say all the investigations remain a high priority, Prince William County police spokesman Jonathan Perok said investigators have so far not found anything to indicate Collins' death was not a suicide. But her son Joseph Velez — Joaquin Rams' half brother — said it makes no sense that his mother would have killed herself and said he has been interviewed by police investigating whether his mother's death was a homicide. "My mother in her life never had a history of depression," Velez said. Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com He described his half brother as "a monster," describing how even at age 3, his younger brother attacked him on the head with a hammer he had hidden behind his back as he feigned a request for a kiss. Like Hera McLeod, Velez expressed frustration at police who failed to make a case in the slaying of Shawn Mason. And Alma Collins' sister, Elva Caraballo of Tarpon Springs, Fla., said she tried to tell Prince William County police of her suspicions about Collins' death, but detectives wouldn't return her phone calls. The most recent death occurred Oct. 21, when Hera McLeod turned over her young son to Joaquin Rams. Hera McLeod won custody of the boy in Montgomery County, Md., court. But the judge granted Rams visitation — first supervised, and then unsupervised. McLeod, an intelligence analyst who once was a contestant on the CBS reality competition "The Amazing Race," said she does not understand why the judge ignored her concerns for her son's safety, accompanied by evidence of Joaquin Rams' lack of fitness as a father: his involvement in running an online pornography business; the testimony from the Manassas detective that Rams is a suspect in his ex-girlfriend's killing; and a sexual encounter between Rams, 40, and a woman who said Rams raped her when she was 19. Rams said it was consensual. The Associated Press does not identify people who claim to be victims of sexual assault. In making his custody and visitation rulings, the judge said the suspicions about the deaths of Collins and Mason were no concern to him, describing it as "smoke that's been blown that I can see through." Hera McLeod said she wants to expose what went wrong and led to her son's death. "I knew how bad this could get. ... If the laws are not designed to protect children, then they need to be changed," she wrote about the custody ruling on a blog she maintains. "In my son's case, it appears as though death was the only threshold for denial of visitation." More content from NBCNews.com:
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Cuba prisoner: US should ink no-aggression pact
Peter Kornbluh , right, stands with Alan Gross, in a picture taken on Kornbluh's iPhone by a guard during his visit to the Havana prison where Gross is being held. By Michael Isikoff HAVANA, Cuba — Three years after he was arrested in Havana, jailed American contractor Alan Gross is asking the U.S. government to sign a "non-belligerency pact" with Cuba as a first step toward negotiating his release, according to a Cuba policy analyst who just visited him. Peter Kornbluh, a Cuba specialist at the National Security Archives, a nonprofit research center in Washington, met with Gross for four hours on Wednesday at the military hospital in Havana where the contractor is being held. He said Gross appeared "extremely thin" — he has lost over 100 pounds since his arrest —and dispirited. "He's angry, he's frustrated, he's dejected — and he wants his own government to step up" and negotiate, said Kornbluh. "His message is that the United States and Cuba have to sit down and have a dialogue without preconditions. … He told me that the first meeting should result in a non-belligerency pact being signed between the United States and Cuba." Gross' comments appear to represent a new tack in an aggressive public relations campaign to win his freedom. His supporters have planned a candlelight vigil outside the Cuban interests section in Washington D.C., on Sunday and the U.S. Senate is poised to take up a resolution Monday demanding his release, Gross' wife, Judy, has also become increasingly critical of the U.S. government for not doing more to demand that her 63-year-old husband be allowed to return home. Jose Luis Magana / AP Judy Gross at her home in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 29. "He feels like a soldier in the field left to die," she said at a press conference in Washington last week. Gross, who worked for an Agency for International Development contractor, was arrested by the Cubans on Dec. 3, 2009, and accused of smuggling sophisticated satellite and other telecommunications equipment into the country to give to the island's tiny Jewish community. Gross has said he was only trying to increase Internet access in Cuba. But he was convicted by a Cuban court in March of last year for crimes "against the independence and territorial integrity of the state" and sentenced to 15 years. Related coverage Cuba pushes swap: its spies jailed in US for American contractor held in Havana Slideshow: Castro through the years Last month, Gross and his wife filed a $60 million lawsuit against the U.S. government and the contractor he was working for, Development Alternatives, charging he was used as a "pawn" in a U.S. government program to change the Castro regime and never advised about the dangers he faced bringing high tech satellite transmission equipment into Cuba. (The State Department, of which AID is a part and which has repeatedly called for Gross' release, declined comment. Development Alternatives has released a statement saying it has "no higher priority" than bringing Gross home.) In what could be the setting for a gripping thriller, Cuba and the U.S. are reportedly locked in a standoff this weekend, with the fate of an American contractor hanging in the balance. NBC's Michael Isikoff reports. Kornbluh, who was advocated closer U.S.-Cuba dialogue, was in Havana last week to attend a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. He was granted permission to visit Gross by Cuban officials. (The Cubans so far have denied all news media requests to meet with him.) He said Gross was most upset about being unable to return home to see members of his family who are ill, especially his 90-year-old mother in Texas who has cancer. Keystone / Getty Images Ever since U.S.-backed Cuban President Fulgencio Batista was forced from power by rebels led by Fidel Castro in 1958, the relationship between the two nations has been fraught with difficulties. "He really wants to see his mother, who is quite old and infirm," said Kornbluh. When Kornbluh had his photo taken with Gross, the contractor held up a photo that read: "Hi Mom." When he asked Gross what he wanted to get out of the lawsuit, the contractor replied: "I want to see my wife and I want to see my mother." To accomplish that, Gross is seeking to nudge the Obama administration, according to Kornbluh. Gross knows that his freedom "is going to depend on his government negotiating in good faith with the Cubans," said Kornbluh. "His message to Barack Obama is: I'm fired up and ready to go. Where are you at this moment?" Michael Isikoff is NBC News' national investigative correspondent; NBC News producer Mary Murray also contributed to this report. More from Open Channel:
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Florida guide uses hunting as rustic therapy for combat veterans
By Bill Briggs Courtesy John Bennett John Bennett, shot by a sniper while serving with the Army in Iraq, is one of many wounded veterans to go hunting with the Sportsmen's Foundation for Military Families. He bagged a nine-foot alligator in Florida. In the swamps and river bottoms near his Florida ranch, outfitter Danny SantAngelo has spent 20 years guiding veterans — some without arms, legs or sight — back to soothingly familiar country: in the field, stalking live prey, armed with weapons. Often, such group hunting excursions were contract jobs that SantAngelo accepted from what he calls "these big, million-dollar-a-year projects for wounded soldiers." "They take these soldiers and veterans, gather them up from different areas, and take them to a facility like mine where we'd house them, host them and hunt them for a few days," SantAngelo said. "A bunch of soldiers getting together in a camp again, sitting in the woods with guns, and maybe a lot of them even drink too much, so to say. And at the end, they'd high-five each other, hoot and holler and pull out of here. "We've always donated 100 percent of our services to help these groups. And, of course, I never said no. I always said yes, and did it." For SantAngelo, however, that changed three years ago when, during one outing, he spotted a veteran hunter with tears in his eyes. "He was having a tough time. He confessed to me he couldn't believe he'd been so selfish and had come. He'd been gone several years on tours, fighting in combat. He'd only been home a couple of months. But now he was off again with a bunch of soldiers, sitting around this campfire," SantAngelo said. "He'd felt like he'd walked off and left his family all over again. Well, I began to see that for these guys, there's really no benefit afterward." As large, organized hunting trips for veterans proliferate in popularity, SantAngelo is changing the rules, at least in his corner of the swamp. He's launched the Sportsmen's Foundation for Military Families, escorting combat veterans — and their spouses, children, parents or siblings — onto land he leases for hunting to spend a few days, as he sees it, of badly needed family bonding. He's executing his mission, he said, on a sparse, nonprofit budget, guiding one family per week. His two-person operation — it's just SantAngelo and his wife, Carla — is headquartered on their ranch along the Kissimmee River in central Florida, about 30 miles north of Lake Okeechobee. "You don't come here with a couple of war buddies. You come here to be with your family," SantAngelo said. "We try to support the people who suffered back home while their hero was away. "So many of these vets go on different hunting trips all over the country. But I see a lot of bad things going on out there through these big nonprofit groups," SantAngelo said. "A lot of these guys are on medications (for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). They get there with a group of guys they don't even know. They go to drinking while on medications. Not good. So you have veterans researching all these free hunting trips that are out there for them. But those trips have nothing to do with their families. And what do they really get out of that? They go home and have all the same problems." Iraq veteran John Bennett, 41, has been on several of those group-hunting expeditions, despite using a wheelchair since a sniper shot him in 2005 while he was on patrol north of Baghdad, acknowledging: "Those trips are wonderful, don't get me wrong." But two years ago, Bennett personally saw SantAngelo's vision: hunting plus family may equal better days. He headed to Florida to track alligators at night with one of SantAngelo's hired guides. For that visit, Bennett had hoped to bring his daughter, but she couldn't attend. Instead, Bennett spent time with another veteran and his family, he said, riding in a pontoon boat, armed with a bow and arrows, searching for his intended catch. Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News. "It's really neat to be able to include your family, especially your kids, so they can see that dad can get out there and still do the things he used to do," said Bennett, who bagged a nine-foot gator. SantAngelo later shipped him the meat. (If a veteran-client's spouse or children prefer not to hunt, they can fish or canoe or ride horses while at SantAngelo's ranch.) "The military was such a big part of my life," added Bennett, a former infantry soldier who joined the Montana Army National Guard in 1991. He lives in Cascade, Mont. "Even if I had not been a hunter before, just knowing that I could still shoot a firearm and not be completely freaked out by it was good." Indeed, SantAngelo contends hunting and fishing can serve as a form of rustic therapy for combat veterans from all wars, a return to some of the tactics and tools they once knew intimately, but now utilized in a safe, quiet environment. For that reason, SantAngelo's foundation foots the bill to bring in and then guide ex-military members with an array of devastating wounds. Blind veterans who come to his ranch use a double-stocked rifle, sharing the weapon with a guide who — when the prey is in the scope — whispers to inch the barrel slightly up or down, left or right, then instructs the best moment to squeeze the trigger. Veterans without arms can blow into a special tube, which actives the trigger of a rifle. Veterans without full use of extremities use laptops and joysticks to aim their weapons and fire at wild boar, alligators, coyotes and turkeys. SantAngelo also takes his clients on the river to fish for trophy bass. Meshing outdoors sports with the tricky transition from the battlefield to home front is a concept the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also has adopted. VA officials have seen the same behaviors SantAngelo has witnessed: that many large hunts arranged for veterans morph into drinking parties and families are never invited. "He's exactly right," said Jose Llamas, the community and public affairs officer for the VA's National Veterans Sports Programs. "These other organizations put on weekend trips where it's hunting, camping, fishing. But it's drinking, and there's no follow-up at the end." In addition to hosting adaptive sports summits across the country where family members are encouraged to join disabled veterans in surfing, cycling, skiing, fishing and target shooting, VA recreational therapists — via various VA medical centers — routinely take local veterans fishing, Llamas said. "Hunting is not one of those things you can do in every community," he added. "But from our Paralympic grant program, we just gave $25,000 to a VA hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., to get the equipment needed to take the (disabled) veterans out hunting. "What we do is incorporate (hunting, fishing and other sports) into the health-life plan of the veteran," Llamas said. "The secretary of the VA, Eric Shinseki, is very adamant about this being not just one weekend out of the year, not a vacation, but a step in the right direction of the veteran becoming more productive in the community by living a healthy lifestyle, by being an example to other veterans." More content from NBCNews.com:
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