Ex-Football Player Allegedly Murders Woman, 86, in Sexually Motivated Attack at High School Track

by Christine Pelisek

An 18-year-old former football player is accused of fatally beating an 86-year-old woman in California this week in a sexually-motivated assault after she tried to stop him from allegedly attacking her friend, authorities tell PEOPLE.

Investigators claim Fusako Petrus and her 61-year-old friend were attacked by Neven Glen Butler about 6 a.m. Wednesday as they were walking on the track at Highlands High School outside Sacramento, California.

The “stranger attack” was sexually motivated, Sacramento County sheriff’s Sgt. Tony Turnbull tells PEOPLE.

The friend managed to escape but Petrus was killed, he says.

“There was no rhyme nor reason for this,” he says. “This was an innocent woman going about her day. This guy was just very brazen.”

Butler, the alleged assailant, is a Twin Rivers Unified School District dropout who last attended classes at Highlands High in December, a district spokesperson tells PEOPLE. He was a member of the varsity football team from 2015 to 2016.

He is being held without bail in the Sacramento County Jail after being booked Friday on a murder charge and two counts of assault with attempt to commit rape.

He was already in custody for an unrelated but similar assault on Wednesday of a 92-year-old woman at a local elderly care home, authorities say.

He was arraigned Friday afternoon on those charges. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Petrus’ death and her friend’s assault on Monday, when he will also be formally charged in that case.

It was unclear if he has entered a plea or retained an attorney.

                                  Neven Glen Butler

Attacked While Helping Another

Butler allegedly attacked the 61-year-old victim first, authorities say, and Petrus heard the commotion from a few paces ahead and intervened.

“She turns around and sees her friend being attacked, and she comes to her aid,” Turnbull says, alleging, “Once she comes to her aid, Butler turns his attention on her and ended up assaulting her and inevitably causing the injuries that caused her death.”

Turnbull says that Petrus was wielding a stick but “unfortunately it wasn’t a big walking stick. It was smaller. I don’t know if she hit him, but she had the walking stick in her hand.”

A woman who was exercising nearby witnessed the attack and ran to her car to call 911, Turnbull says.

By the time police arrived, Petrus had died from her injuries. Her friend was treated at the scene and is expected to recover.

Suspect Wasn’t Hiding It’

Turnbull says detectives zeroed in on Butler after the other assault at a care home in Sacramento on Wednesday afternoon.

“He didn’t work there. He had some family members who worked there, and he was visiting,” Turnbull explains.

“[Butler] just got up and, unprovoked, just started physically assaulting the 92-year-old female,” he alleges.

Turnbull says there were witnesses to the attack. “He wasn’t hiding it,” he says. “He just started assaulting her out of nowhere. We were called, and we get there and he is still on the scene and we take him into custody for that assault.”

Butler was arrested without incident and booked at the Sacramento County Jail on felony assault and elder abuse charges.

Turnbull says that after the afternoon assault, it wasn’t a stretch to probe possible links to the earlier attack.

“How often do you have two incidents so close together in time that are very similar?” he says. “He [Butler] also matched the physical description as well” and lived near the track.

Over the next two days, detectives were able to “connect” Butler to the Petrus murder and attack on the other victim, Turnbull says.

A Long Road of Grieving’

In a statement on its website, the school district said officials were “relieved and grateful that authorities have a person of interest in custody,” but “shocked” that Butler was a former student.

“Our immediate concern is with the victims and their families,” the district said. “They face a long road of grieving and will need the support of the entire community. We know you join us in keeping them in our thoughts and prayers.”

Petrus appears to have no living immediate family, and her friends could not immediately be reached by PEOPLE. A neighbor who’d known her for more than 50 years told the Sacramento Bee that she was an avid gardener who enjoyed feeding the squirrels.

“We looked out for each other,” the neighbor, Lloyd Miller, said. “She took out my trash every week for me. She was a Christian and went to church every Sunday.”

Miller said Petrus had been walking at the school track for at least 40 years.

SOURCE: People.com

How much did United pay Dr. Dao?

By Danny Cevallos, CNN Legal Analyst

(CNN)On Thursday it was announced that United Airlines had reached an undisclosed settlement with Dr. David Dao, the passenger dragged off a flight just a few weeks ago, bloodied and semiconscious, and seen in a video that generated a flood of negative publicity for the airline.

It must have been a kajillion dollars, right? 

Not necessarily.

Although, according to Dao's attorney, he suffered a concussion, a broken nose, injuries to his sinuses requiring surgery and lost two front teeth, the most significant question in terms of assessing damages is whether he will suffer long-term health consequences.

Valuing a plaintiff's injuries is not an exact science. No two cases are identical. If you strip away the disturbing viral video of Dao's ordeal, and evaluate the case strictly by his injuries only, this case might not have had a lot of monetary value for the plaintiff in case of a trial.

What about the embarrassment of being watched by millions of people? Doesn't that have value? It does. In assault cases, a jury can consider the humiliation and indignity suffered by the plaintiff and compensate him. The thing about these damages is that they are uncertain, and hard to value.

In the weeks following the Dao video, there were some who thought Dao should have just gotten off the plane. If some of those voices found their way onto a jury, they might not have awarded Dao much for embarrassment. In fact, some might have foisted some blame onto Dao for not disembarking willingly.

In injury cases like this, quantifiable medical injuries are normally the primary factor in assessing value. Indeed, Dao sustained medical injuries, but the extent of them may not be the kinds that are likely to produce a significant payout.

Broken teeth are certainly painful, but that period of pain could be limited to the time between the injury and when the dentist fixes them. The price of those teeth is also an ascertainable amount. Ten thousand dollars might be a reasonable value of some dental implants, but it's the kind of injury that is largely fixed once the procedure is over. Similarly, a broken nose that heals on its own is painful, but probably not for the rest of one's life.

The real driver in high damage awards in personal injury cases is long-term pain or impairment. For example, herniated discs and torn rotator cuffs are not gruesome, obvious injuries, like broken teeth or noses. Yet, they can lead to long-term treatment and surgeries, permanent disability and a lifetime of pain.

His concussion is probably the injury with the most potential damages—or least. Some concussions are hard to even diagnose. A concussion is considered a mild traumatic brain injury, and it can be associated with impaired cognitive function, headaches, fatigue, depression, anxiety and a host of other symptoms that can last indefinitely.

This is also why personal injury cases normally take a few years to resolve. Assessing the extent of certain injuries requires waiting to see how bad they get, and whether they get any better. That's why Dao's case was unconventional, and not really about the injuries. The parties didn't wait to see how Dao's recovery and treatment defined his injuries over time. They settled within weeks. This case was more about United's public relations headache, than Dao's actual headaches.

Yet, Dao didn't have as much leverage as it may have seemed he did. His injuries alone didn't strike fear in United's lawyers—airlines litigate passenger injuries all the time. Instead, United desperately needed Dao to agree to settle to stop the flurry of bad publicity.

But with each passing day, as United suffered the bad press it wanted to avoid, the amount United would pay to avoid that bad press decreased significantly. Had Dao waited a year, the one thing he had to offer—ending the bad PR—would no longer be worth anything to United. Heck, I have to imagine there were lawyers in United's camp that suggested hunkering down, waiting it out and playing hardball until few remembered the incident—as tends to happen with viral videos.

That's why Dao's attorneys did the right thing in settling quickly. It also indicates that United probably paid well north of a million dollars. Why? Because by settling early, Dao takes a risk by giving up the opportunity to build the value of his case the traditional way: a couple years of medical records documenting the nature and extent of his injury and treatment. The settlement amount had to be a number that Dao felt comfortable accepting, even if his injuries take a turn for the worse in the future.

That's good for him, but not an indication of what other plaintiffs might get if they file cases against airlines. Dao's case is one-in-a-million. For the rest of the would-be plaintiffs out there, United will probably see you in court.

SOURCE: edition.cnn.com

From Gandhi to guns: An Indian woman explores the NRA convention

By Moni Basu, CNN

  The author, an Indian-American, visiting her first NRA convention on Friday.

Atlanta (CNN)Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.

My childhood in India was steeped in ahimsa, the tenet of nonviolence toward all living things.

The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.

I grew up not knowing a single gun owner, and even today India has one of the strictest gun laws on the planet. Few Indians buy and keep firearms at home, and gun violence is nowhere near the problem it is in the United States. An American is 12 times more likely than an Indian to be killed by a firearm, according to a recent study.

It's no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America's "love affair" with guns.

I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans' defense of gun rights.

I admit I do not fully understand it myself, despite having become an American citizen nearly a decade ago. So when I learn the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention here in Atlanta, right next to the CNN Center, I decide to go and find out more.

My eyes open wide inside the vast and cavernous Georgia World Congress Center. I take in countless exhibits by the firearms industry and even check out a few guns. Among them are the Mossberg Blaze .22 semiautomatic Rimfire Rifle and an FN 509 semi-automatic 9mm pistol.

I've never had the desire to own a gun. I try hard to experience the excitement of others who are admiring these products.

Around me are 80,000 of America's fiercest patriots and defenders of guns. Many are wearing American flag attire and T-shirts with slogans like: "Veterans before refugees" and "God loves guns."

Few people here look like me. Most appear to be white and male. Many view the media, including my employer, with disdain -- and they do not hesitate to let me know.

I walk around with some trepidation, but I'm determined to strike up conversations. I begin with this question: "Why do you want to own an object that can kill another human being?"

The answers are varied, but they center on three main themes: freedom, self-defense and sport. The first type of response is rooted in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which allows for the ownership of more than 300 million guns in America. How many other countries have the right to bear arms written into their very foundation? It's unique and because of that, foreigners often have trouble grasping it.

I meet Chris Styskal at a booth set up by the NRA Wine Club. Yes, a wine club for the almost 5 million members of the organization.

"Eat, sleep, go fishing. Drink, sleep, go shooting. In that order," Styskal jokes.

But then we get into serious talk. Gun ownership, he tells me, has its roots in the birth of this country.

"George Washington's army fought off the British with rifles," he says. "They overthrew an oppressive government."

His statement gives me pause. The gun laws in India stem from colonial rule, when the British aimed to quell their subjects by disarming them. Perhaps my Indian compatriots should consider the right to own guns from this perspective.

Styskal, 41, earned a degree in psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and tells me the prevailing belief that gun owners are not educated is simply wrong. He owns a collection of rifles and pistols at his home in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, and last year he fired 100 rounds every week at a shooting range.

He says the Second Amendment is about much more than the right to bear arms. It's about freedom.

"We don't want any government telling us what we can and cannot do."

It's a thought echoed by Brickell "Brooke" Clark, otherwise known as the American Gun Chic. She has a website by that name and also a YouTube channel. Both are bathed in hues of pink and dedicated to her recently formed passion for guns.

I introduce myself to Clark as we await President Donald Trump's arrival at the convention. The darkened room is booming with NRA clips bashing everyone from Hillary Clinton to George Clooney.

"What would you tell my friends in India who say Americans are infatuated with guns?"

"I wouldn't say Americans have an obsession with guns," Clark says. "We have an obsession with being free."

I ask what the Second Amendment means to her.

"It means I can live my life without anyone overpowering me," she says. "It makes me equal with everyone else."

The great equalizer. I never thought of the Second Amendment in that way.

Self-protection, I discover, is a huge reason many Americans own firearms.

Take Chloe Morris. She was born in Atlanta to Filipino parents; on this day, she's brought her mother along to hear Trump, the first sitting President to speak at an NRA convention since Ronald Reagan.

Morris is 35, petite and soft-spoken, but she's fierce about her opinions on guns.

"I'm 5 feet tall and 100 pounds," she tells me. "I cannot wait for a cop to come save me when I am threatened with rape or death."

Morris was once opposed to guns. "Extremely opposed," she says.

She earned a master's degree in criminal justice from Georgia State University. "I know the law," she says. "For me guns were not the answer."

But a few years ago, a dear friend was assaulted in her own home in an upscale Atlanta subdivision. The incident struck fear in Morris. She would never let herself become a victim.

She took shooting classes and became a Glock instructor. "I teach for free. I want women to be safe.

"I own 10 guns. I have a 14-year-old son. I started teaching him to shoot when he was 5. I'm a lifetime member of the NRA."

She pauses, and her next sentence surprises me.

"I don't think I can even kill another person -- except when my life is in danger."

In a way, I understand her position. My first real exposure to guns came after I embedded with the US Army and Marines to report the Iraq War. As a journalist I never carried a weapon, though soldiers coaxed me to learn how to shoot an M16. My conversation with Morris reminded me of a night when we came under threat, and the platoon sergeant placed a 9mm pistol on my Humvee seat. I refused to take it but knew instantly what he was trying to tell me. What if I were the last one alive? How would I save myself?

Luckily, we were safe that night. But I've always wondered how I might have acted under a dreadful scenario.

Other NRA members I speak with also tell me they don't trust the police to arrive in time when they are in danger. Scott Long, 55, lives out in the country in Piketon, Ohio -- 25 miles away from the county sheriff.

"The police can't be there all the time," he says, looking at his wife, DeeDee, and their three young children, whom he's brought along to the convention for a mini family vacation. Their son Brody, 9, has been shooting at the pellet range and is excited about his first 20-gauge shotgun.

"Where we live, we can shoot in our backyard," says Long, who owns 25 guns and is enjoying checking out all the shiny new weapons exhibited here.

Such remoteness, too, is alien to me. I grew up in a city that now brims with some 16 million people on a working day. Firing guns in my grandfather's garden would not have been a good thing. I think about all the space we have in America. So many of us live far from other human beings. Like the Long family. Perhaps isolation adds to the need to own guns.

I move forward in my quest to know more.

I hear gun proponents express a dislike for big government. They stress individual liberties over the collective. For people who live in more socialist countries, it's another obstacle to understanding American gun culture.

Near a stairway emblazoned with a giant Beretta, I speak with Derrick Adams. He's a 32-year-old electric lineman from Nottingham, Pennsylvania. He describes himself as part black, part Puerto Rican and part Caucasian.

"How many guns do you own?" I ask.

"Not enough," he replies.

He picked up his first Glock when he was 22, and his first shot shattered a whole bunch of stereotypes.

"People look at guns as this evil tool whose job it is to kill," he says. "They're not at all that. They are about protection."

Adams believes that if all law-abiding citizens were armed, crime would drastically go down. He tells me that Chicago would not have such a high gun homicide rate if good folks in the inner cities were armed to fight "thugs and gangs."

"Stop looking to government to help us. They are not our parents," Adams says.

Liberals in America who want more gun control, says Adams, want to keep minorities and poor people dependent on government. Gun control started after slavery ended and was a way to keep black people disarmed, he says.

"You idiots," Adams says, referring to all people of color. "It was invented to suppress you."

He looks at me as though to say: You should know better.

Again, I think of colonialism in my homeland and how the British passed strict gun control to keep Indians from rising up.

Fighting tyranny and oppression is something Jaasiel Rubeck considers, too. The 29-year-old wife and mother from Columbus, Ohio, immigrated to this country from her native Venezuela when she was 6. People who live under authoritarian regimes should all understand the need to own a gun, she tells me.

Rubeck's words remind me of a friend from Iraq who wished she could own a gun during Saddam Hussein's rule. After he was overthrown, she slept with an AK-47 under her pillow at the height of the insurgency. She has always spoken of her love-hate relationship with guns. She wants to protect her family, but she is tired of the eternal violence plaguing her land. She wishes now that every gun would disappear from Iraq.

What I hear from speakers at the NRA convention, though, is that a peaceful world is a utopian fantasy -- and that the need for guns will always exist.

"The NRA saved the soul of America," says Chris Cox, the executive director of the organization.

I leave the convention trying to reconcile what I've gathered on this day with the philosophy of nonviolence with which I was raised. I am not certain that vast cultural differences can be bridged in a few hours, but I am glad I got a glimpse into the world of guns. I have much to consider.

SOURCE:edition.cnn.com

Politics: Trump now agrees with the majority of Americans: He wasn’t ready to be president

by Philip Bump

In an interview on April 27, President Trump said he misses aspects of his life before the presidency and that he thought being president "would be easier."(Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)

Donald Trump spent a great portion of 2016 insisting that being president would be easy — at least for him. HuffPost compiled a number of examples of him dismissing the problems that accompany the job as being easily dispatched. Building a wall on the border with Mexico is easy. Beating Hillary Clinton would be easy. Renegotiating the Iran deal would be easy. Paying down the national debt would be easy. Acting presidential? Easy.

To a reporter from Reuters this week, though, Trump had a slightly different assessment of the presidency.

“I love my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life,” Trump said. “I thought it would be easier. I thought it was more of a … I’m a details-oriented person. I think you’d say that, but I do miss my old life. I like to work so that’s not a problem but this is actually more work.”

It wasn’t the first time that Trump copped to the job being trickier than he anticipated. In November, NBC News reported that Trump had told former House speaker Newt Gingrich that “This is really a bigger job than I thought.” (Gingrich’s response? “…good. He should think that.”) Then there are individual issues. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he said at one point. At another, he revealed that it took a conversation with the president of China to realize that the situation on the Korean peninsula was “not so easy.”

There’s an element of surprise in Trump’s comments, a hint of bafflement that having responsibility for the welfare of 320 million people entwined in a global economy and international relationships might end up being trickier than running a real estate and branding shop from midtown Manhattan. One group that probably wasn’t surprised that Trump wasn’t prepared? The majority of Americans.

At no point over the course of the 2016 campaign did a majority of Americans think that Trump was qualified for the job of the presidency. Polling from The Post and ABC News shows that views of Trump as unqualified dominated throughout the campaign. The only group that consistently viewed him as qualified to hold the position were the working-class white voters that constituted the core of his support from early in his candidacy.

More to the point, polling from CBS News showed that, consistently, Trump was viewed as unprepared for the job. In June, July and September — before, during and after Trump began making his general election case — the majority of Americans thought he wasn’t ready to hold the nation’s highest position.

Asked by CNN and its polling partner ORC, most Americans viewed Clinton as more prepared than Trump by a wide margin, including among Democrats and independents. A much greater number of Republicans were willing to call Clinton more qualified than Democrats were Trump.

Put simply: The majority of Americans didn’t think Trump was ready to be president of the United States. Based on his comments about the job being bigger or harder than he thought, that it is more work, it seems safe to say that Trump has also now come to believe that he wasn’t prepared for the office.

On at least one point, though, he continues to be convincing himself that he’s up to the task. In the middle of his interview with Reuters, Trump paused to pass out copies of a map he had on hand. The map showed the United States, colored with the results of the 2016 election. “It’s pretty good, right?” he asked the Reuters team.

Beating Clinton, as it turned out, was indeed easier than most people had expected.

President Trump gives a thumbs up as he walks to the White House on March 19 after arriving on Marine One. (AP)

SOURCE: Washingtonpost.com