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Please check out the new site/blog at http://durden.us where all future updates will take place. Thanks!
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From David Petlansky (managing editor of TOTR) Good Afternoon Everyone, First of all, I would like to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for being a part of something that I have a such a strong passion for. Exploring and dissecting news in an effort to illustrate the big picture that haunts me to the rest of the world is something that has always driven me for as long as I can remember. A few months ago, I began this site and as time passed it began to develop quite a following. Last month, we experienced over 20,000 visitors. I have to tell you, to be someone who has always had so much to say, coming from a desperation of wanting to make the world a better place, but having no platform to shout from; I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me that voice. It is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world, and it wouldn't have happened without you. That makes what I am about to say so much harder. It is an extremely bittersweet moment when you realize what you have to do in order to achieve what you want. When you break it down, what you want is usually obtainable, but almost always with a sacrifice. What I want is to live a life I can be proud of. This, coming from a minimalist, must mean my current existence is pretty miserable. That is an understatement. I live in an RV. (I know what you're thinking...Guy runs a conspiracy blog, where else did we think you lived?!) No water. Two working electric outlets. No fridge. No heat or air. It is a place where hope goes to die. Since, I lost my only steady job at a construction company in 2008, I have bounced around aimlessly, simply attempting to get by. It has left me in a very dark corner of the earth. Luckily, nothing makes you realize that you need to do something different like a lengthy stay in a dark corner. It took me a while. I am stubborn and addicted to routine and comfort (even if it isn't comfortable). But I finally realized what I want and what I have to do to make it happen. I want to move to St. Louis, Missouri. Just so you know, I didn't just point at a map with my eyes closed. There are many reasons why Missouri is the place for my wife and I. My best friend and creative partner, Jeff, lives in Missouri. I enjoy being creative independently, but everything I do could only be half as good as it would be if it were completed as a collaboration with Jeff, and that includes this website. We challenge each other in life and in creative projects and it always results in the best outcome. Also, my wife and I have a piss poor social life in Jacksonville and we have evolved into an extended family with Jeff and his children. We sense a feeling of family in Missouri, and we would like to be closer. We worked out a budget and it will take around $2000 to get us to St. Louis and provide some cushion time for starting new jobs. Like I said, I am a minimalist. The sacrifice involves this website. If I continue working on this site as actively as I have been, I am going to rot away in this pathetic existence; And I can't let that happen. I need to dial back the activity on here A LOT. Which pains me very much to admit because we just started building momentum, but it is something that has to be done. I recently lost my job and my wife is our main source of income. If we are going to have the ability to put the money away that is required to get out of here, I am going to need to contribute. And, there is no such thing as 50% when it comes to this material. When I dive into the kind of news and information that Toilet On The Roof offers, it takes over all of my thoughts. So, unfortunately, I have to switch it off temporarily in order to save myself. I must devote my time and energy (especially mental energy) to finding work and saving money. I would like to make this happen as quickly as possible because it gets very hot in that RV starting in July. Our goal is to have the means to get to St. Louis in 90 days. During those 90 days we will be eating the bare minimum, cheapest foods, no extra spending, no leisure activities, all extra money will be going towards our goal. The sooner we get there and begin our balanced life, the sooner I can return to the things I am passionate about, such as developing this website. I am writing this because I like to think that we have developed a relationship, or a bond between writer and reader, and I didn't want to just bail on the good thing we had going without at least leaving a note. I hope that you will keep the page bookmarked and check in every once in a while, I promise to return, a better version of myself. During the 90 days, I will try to post interesting articles whenever I can, but it will not be very often. If you are a contributor, I will still be sure to get your articles posted and shared, and will be in touch with you when the site returns to its fully functional state. Beyond that, I'd just like to thank you once again for making this such a gratifying experience, I appreciate it so much. If you would like to see us off to St. Louis quicker, my friend, Jeff, set up a donate page. Any contributions are greatly appreciated! Thank you. I will see you soon.
David Petlansky From The Daily Beast Multiple U.S. officials tell Eli Lake the scary truth: in many cases, we simply don’t know. Plus: irregular militias loyal to Assad have reportedly been training in how to use them. As the White House mulls whether Syria has crossed President Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, the U.S. military and intelligence community are quietly acknowledging that the United States does not know where many of those weapons are located. The judgment comes from top U.S. military commanders and is supported by recent intelligence community assessments, according to three U.S. officials who work closely on Syrian intelligence matters. At the heart of the concern is that the Syrian military has transferred more and more of its stock of sarin and mustard gas from storage sites to trucks where they are being moved around the country. While U.S. intelligence agencies first saw reports that Syria was moving the weapons last year, the process has accelerated since December, according to these officials. Also worrisome, said two of the officials, is intelligence from late last year that says the Syrian Scientific Research Center—an entity responsible for Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile—has begun to train irregular militias loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in how to use the chemical munitions. The assessment that Syria is moving large amounts of its chemical weapons around the country on trucks means that if Obama wanted to send in U.S. soldiers to secure Syria’s stockpiles, his top generals and intelligence analysts doubt such a mission would have much success, according to the three officials. “We’ve lost track of lots of this stuff,” one U.S. official told The Daily Beast. “We just don’t know where a lot of it is.” The large-scale movement of weapons, if it is in fact occurring, would violate one of Obama’s earliest declared red lines concerning Syria. Last August he said, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of weapons moving around or being utilized.” The recent assertions from U.S. officials build on statements made last month by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. After being asked by Sen. John McCain on April 17 if he had confidence that the United States could secure the stocks of chemical weapons in Syria, Dempsey initially expressed vague confidence. But after McCain pressed him on this point, he could not give the assurance McCain wanted: “Not as I sit here today,” he said, “simply because they have been moving it, and the number of sites is quite numerous.” A week earlier, Clapper had also told Congress that he did not know if the United States could secure Syria’s chemical weapons. “It would be very, very situational dependent to render an assessment on how well we could secure any or all of the facilities in Syria,” he said. These remarks struck a different tone from the one top Obama officials had put forward last year. Leon Panetta, Obama’s last secretary of defense, acknowledged in September that there had been “limited movement” of chemical munitions, but he said that “the major sites still remain in place.” Meanwhile, not all U.S. officials agree with the worrisome intelligence assessments recently relayed by the three officials. “Any effort to secure Syria’s chemical-weapons would be complex, but we have good visibility on Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and are constantly monitoring for any sign of movement,” a White House official told The Daily Beast late Wednesday. “We believe that the stockpiles are secure.” (A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment for this story Wednesday.) But other U.S. officials said one of the problems in tracking the chemical stocks in Syria once they were loaded onto trucks was finding out where those trucks were headed. One official said U.S. spy satellites in November picked up clear photographic evidence of trucks being loaded at known chemical-weapons storage sites outside Damascus. But this official also said the satellite did not track the movement of the trucks in the country. “You have to remember that satellites are not unmanned aerial vehicles,” this official said. “We saw the trucks being loaded, but we did not see where they went.” Meanwhile, the intelligence assessment that irregular militias are being trained in chemical warfare presents another problem—in part because the intelligence community had launched an ambitious plan to communicate directly with the midlevel Syrian officers in charge of chemical weapons to dissuade these officers from launching a chemical attack. “We don’t know much about who the loyalists are,” the U.S. official said. From Reuters The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said. Among those was suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011. The increase in names is due in part to security agencies using the system more in the wake of the failed 2009 attack on a plane by "underpants bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit. Intelligence and law enforcement officials acknowledged in Congress that they had missed clues to that attack despite Abdulmutallab's name appearing in the main database, known as TIDE. Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a "watchlist" but instead is a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world. The "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" is a master database which agencies use to build other catalogs of possible terrorists, like the "no-fly" list which prevents people who feature on it from boarding airplanes. The official familiar with the latest statistics said that even though the number of TIDE entries has grown substantially, this does not mean that the data is less manageable as intelligence agencies have gotten better at figuring how to extract information from the oceans of data. However, Karen Greenberg, an expert in counter-terrorism policy at Fordham University, questioned whether the growth in the database's size made it easier for officials to spot threats before they materialize. "What you want is more focus, not less focus. It can't be just about quantity. It has to be about specificity," she said. The vast size of TIDE came into the spotlight in the wake of the bombing late last month of the Boston Marathon. U.S. officials now acknowledge that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's name was entered into TIDE by the CIA in the autumn of 2011, after the U.S. spy agency received a request from Russian authorities to investigate him for suspected radical Islamist activities. The CIA also entered the name of Tsarnaev's mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva's, into the TIDE database. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with authorities in the days following the Boston bombing and his younger brother Dzhokhar was captured by police. From 60 Minutes Street gangs had become so intimidating in Springfield that citizens stopped calling the police on them. And no wonder: gangs were so strong that motorcycle-riding members once cruised a neighborhood with military-style assault rifles strapped to their backs in a show of force. But crime in the gang-infested areas of the Massachusetts city has begun to drop after law enforcement started using a military-style approach of its own. As Lesley Stahl reports, counterinsurgency methods used in overseas conflicts are being employed in Springfield to take the streets back from the gangs. Stahl's report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, May 5 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Massachusetts State Trooper Mike Cutone realized that the methods of the insurgents he combated as a Green Beret in Iraq were similar to those used by the Springfield gangs. "Insurgents and gang members both want to operate in a failed area," he tells Stahl, referring to the breakdown in cooperation between the citizens and authorities. "They know they can live off the passive support of the community, where the community is not going to call or engage the local police," says Cutone. So he helped form an anti-gang unit of troopers who work with the Springfield Police Department employing tactics right out of his old military manual. Key to the strategy in the old New England town -- just like in Baghdad or Basra -- was re-engaging the citizens and making them allies instead of impediments. "We're using the other 99 percent of the population that live there. Winning them over," says Cutone. "They become our eyes and ears ...floodgates have opened for criminal information that we can go after now." It was the right approach, especially for the city's drug-plagued North End. Says Springfield Deputy Police Chief John Barbieri, "Going door to door. Organizing the neighborhood into a collaboration to report crime, to get involved in solving their own problems...that was exactly the kind of program I needed for this neighborhood." A centerpiece of the program is a weekly community meeting, just like the village elders meetings Cutone and his fellow Green Berets conducted in Iraq. Citizens of the North End are now passing on information from many sources in the community to law enforcement. And the counterinsurgency team is working to reduce gang membership by providing help, such as jobs, for at-risk youth or gang members who want to go straight. The program has been aided by Harvard Professor Kit Parker, who is also a Major in the U.S. Army. He had his engineering class at Harvard study the impacts of the counterinsurgency techniques and develop new intelligence software for the police. Based on information gleaned from the counterinsurgency tactics and from sophisticated computer analysis of the gangs' social networks, the state and local police also conduct raids and make arrests. Stahl and 60 Minutes cameras accompanied the team on a night-time raid of a suspected drug house. Springfield police say violent crime in the targeted areas of Springfield fell 25 percent last year, while drug offenses have dropped 50 percent. From Cnet Designed as Android source code, Winky allows Google Glass owners with some programming savvy to take pictures with just a wink of the eye. The next Google Glass owner who winks at you may actually be taking your picture. New code cooked up by Google Glass developer Mike DiGiovanni enables the wink gesture in the high-tech specs. Dubbed Winky, the feature can even be used to snap a photo when the screen is turned off. As a result, Winky eliminates the need to issue a voice command or tap a button to take a picture. Google Glass users who want to try out a few winks will need some development skills of their own. DiGiovanni has released Winky as pure Android source code, according to his Google+ post, which means it needs to be compiled and run as an APK (application package file). The current Google Glass Explorer Edition is geared toward developers, so DiGiovanni figures that most of them will know how to do this. Google Glass owners can download the source code through DiGiovanni's GitHub site. After creating and running the APK, Glass users need only calibrate and then activate Winky to start winking away. DiGiovanni's code taps into a wink option spotted recently by Reddit user fodawim in the MyGlass companion app for Google Glass. Developers and other pioneers have been able to snag the Google Glass Explorer Edition by shelling out $1,500. A version for regular consumers is slated to launch sometime next year, with the price tag expected to be lower. From The Palm Beach Post Palm Beach County sheriff gets $1 million for violence prevention unit amid questions about civil liberties, care for mentally ill Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf. Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed. The goal will be avoiding crime — and making sure law enforcement knows about potential powder kegs before tragedies occur, Bradshaw said. But the earmark, which is a one-time-only funding provision, provoked a debate Monday among mental health advocates and providers about the balance between civil liberties, privacy and protecting the public. Bradshaw said his proposal is a first-of-its-kind in the nation, and he hopes it will become a model for the rest of the state like his gang prevention and pill-mill units. “Every single incident, whether it’s Newtown, that movie theater, or the guy who spouts off at work and then goes home and kills his wife and two kids — in every single case, there were people who said they knew ahead of time that there was a problem,” Bradshaw said. “If the neighbor of the mom in Newtown had called somebody, this might have saved 25 kids’ lives.” Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others. The goal won’t be to arrest troubled people but to get them help before there’s violence, Bradshaw said. As a side benefit, law enforcement will have needed information to keep a close eye on things. “We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’ ” That’s enough for Senate budget chief Joe Negron, R-Stuart, who helped push through the funding last weekend. He said he met with Bradshaw about the program and “got assurances from the sheriff that this is going to be done in a way that respects people’s autonomy and privacy, and that he makes sure to protect against people making false claims.” Mental health advocates, however, worry about a potential new source of stigma, and the potential for erosion of the civil rights of people with mental illnesses. “How are they possibly going to watch everybody who makes a comment like that? It’s subjective,” said Liz Downey, executive director of the Palm Beach County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “We don’t want to take away people’s civil liberties just because people aren’t behaving the way we think they should be.” Bradshaw acknowledged the risk that anyone in a messy divorce or in a dispute with a neighbor could abuse the hotline. But, he said, he’s confident that his trained professionals will know how to sort out fact from fiction. “We know how to sift through frivolous complaints,” he said. The proposal still needs the blessing of Gov. Rick Scott, who has line-item veto authority. But if it goes forward, Palm Beach County’s already stretched mental health and substance abuse providers could find themselves even busier. There is no ready source of funds once the $1 million runs its course, as there hasn’t been an increase to community mental health funding in many years. “Our community agencies throughout the state don’t have the funds to meet the needs they have currently,” said Bob Sharpe, CEO of the Florida Council for Community Mental Health. “It sounds like it could work, but with no new funding we’d have to find it within existing resources.” If Bradshaw’s teams can keep people out of crisis units and promote early intervention, that has the potential to save money, said Ann Berner, CEO of the Southeast Florida Behavioral Health Network, which manages mental health care payments for the state. To be successful, however, there will have to be close coordination with the mental health providers, she said. For example, the county already pays for mobile crisis response teams at two nonprofit mental health providers, a service that includes a 24-hour crisis call center. They, too, are trained to de-escalate conflicts and refer troubled people to care. Which ones will respond when there’s a call from a school or a home? That will have to be clarified. Also, after troubled people are identified by Bradshaw’s teams, then what? Who will pay for their care? The state? Medicaid? The county? The Palm Beach County Public Defender has a good program to ensure qualified people apply for the Social Security and Medicaid benefits they may need, she said. Some high-level conversations have started, but more are needed, Berner added. “I think that would be an area we really need to collaborate on, and soon,” she said. The $1 million Bradshaw won represents a third of what he had sought from the Legislature, but it’s a 10-fold bump from what was originally earmarked before House and Senate budget leaders finalized the state’s $74 billion budget over the weekend. Poll: 29% of Registered Voters Believe Armed Revolution Might Be Necessary in Next Few Years5/3/2013 From CNS News Twenty-nine percent of registered voters think that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years in order to protect liberties, according to a Public Mind poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University. The poll, which surveyed 863 registered voters and had a margin of error of +/-3.4, focused on both gun control and the possibility of a need for an armed revolution in the United States to protect liberty. The survey asked whether respondents agreed, disagreed, neither agreed nor disagreed or did not know or refused to respond to the statement: "In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties" Twenty-nine percent said they agreed, 47 percent said they disagreed, 18 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed, 5 percent said they were unsure, and 1 percent refused to respond. Results of the poll show that those who believe a revolution might be necessary differ greatly along party lines:
Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and analyst for the poll, says: "The differences in views of gun legislation are really a function of differences in what people believe guns are for. If you truly believe an armed revolution is possible in the near future, you need weapons and you're going to be wary about government efforts to take them away." The poll was conducted nationally between April 22 and April 28, 2013. Intro By David Petlansky: By Gwynedd Stuart (Of Folio Weekly, Jacksonville FL) Printed July 28th, 2009 Dan McKinzy was up against a deadline. He'd promised to finish the job two nights earlier, but had been unable to go through with it. Although he was fearful of disappointing the guy who'd hired him, he'd ditched the gear he'd been given - black clothing, a knife, a dark-brown ski-mask - and explained that the scene had just been "too hot." There'd been too many people around, he said, possibly even police. Mckinzy was, without contention, a criminal. His substantial rap sheet included arrests in both Duval and Nassau counties for domestic violence and myriad instances of drug possession and sales. But he wasn't a murderer - yet. The question facing him: Was he willing to become one? On the evening of Friday, April 18, 2008, McKinzy later told investigators in deposition,he stood by a vast dirt lot along a rural stretch of Beaver Street with chillingly precise instructions. He'd been told to walk through the lot, doing his best to conceal himself behind the construction equipment and piles of drainage pipes. After he'd changed into the black clothes and waited for darkness to envelop the neighborhood, McKinzy was to make his way toward a tidy home just beyond a corpse of trees and brush on the other side of the lot. There, he'd lie belly-down in a drainage swale in the front yard, knife in hand, and wait for a man whom he knew only as David to arrive with his girlfriend. Once the couple pulled into the driveway and exited their vehicle - he had a photo of the two so he'd be clear on his targets - he would rob them of their wallets and cell phones (so they couldn't call the police), subdue the girl if necessary, and stab David to death. The three most important instructions: Make it look like a robbery, don't kill or even hurt the girl, and make sure David is dead. McKinzy took cover in a length of corrugated plastic culvert piping and removed his sage-green polo shirt and khaki pants. He put on a pair of black pants, a black T-shirt, and black high-top sneakers he'd brought with him in a navy blue duffle bag. He'd polished off about a gram of cocaine that day, part of his payment for killing David. Other than the drugs - with which he'd been provided throughout the previous week while he and his co-conspirators staked out the West Jacksonville home - he was given a meager $260 in cash. McKinzy emerged from the pipe leaving behind his clothing, the empty bag, even his wallet, and waited in a wooded area for the sun to go down, knowing all the while, or so he'd later say, that he couldn't go through with it. He didn't even know David or "the girl," he would tell police, and they'd never done anything to him. Still, he waited there in the dark, chilly woods, getting eaten by bugs, for a long time. He wanted to at least prove that he tried - that he'd at least "put forth an effort" to make the hit. David Petlansky isn't the likeliest target of a murder-for-hire. He's soft spoken, not wealthy or powerful; he's generally innocuous, save, perhaps, the controversial independent films he writes and directs (His most recent offering, 2007's "Tomorrow Mourning," targets the hypocrisy of Christianity, and features the rape of a prostitute by a Christian missionary, among other doctrinal trespasses.) By the same token, Steven Bozemen isn't the kind of guy you'd expect to arrange a hit. An avid golfer and former high school athlete, Bozeman is the wealthy son of a successful local business owner. He's conventionally handsome, indisputably privileged, and the last person his friends or coworkers would suspect of attempting to kill someone. Bozeman and Petlansky are virtual strangers. They met just once, during the winter of 2007, when Petlansky's best friend Angela Sanders (now Angela Petlansky) was dating Bozeman. The meeting was unremarkable. The only detail Petlansky remembers from the encounter is that he hugged Bozeman. "I was in a really hugging point in my life at that time," he recalls. "I hugged everybody." Just four months later, according to police, Bozeman would hire Dan McKinzy, a common criminal he was introduced to by a mutual friend James Lewis, to endPetlansky's life. In the interim, Angela had broken up with longtime boyfriend Bozeman and taken up with reliable best friend Petlansky. On April 18, 2008, about a month after they started dating, Petlansky and Angela were engaged. (They married on February 21st, 2009) As it happens, that was also the night David was supposed to die. The fact that the couple came so close to becoming victims of an incredibly violent crime has darkened their otherwise sunny relationship. The sheer creepiness of the attempted hit is compounded by real fear. Bozeman, who pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a capital felony last month, spent only about five weeks in jail before being released on $10,000 bond. His freedom has left the Petlanskys afraid for their safety and doubtful of the competency of the criminal justice system. Their anxiety has intensified as Bozeman's sentencing hearing approaches. (Initially scheduled for the week of July 20, it was postponed to Aug. 3, the Petlanskys were told, because the wife of one of Bozeman's attorneys was having a child.) The couple got a permanent injunction against Bozeman just days after they learned of the murder plot, but the document has failed to mitigate their feeling of powerlessness. "What are going to do?" wonders Angela. "Wave a piece of paper at him?" Bozeman hasn't made any attempt to contact the Petlanskys during the year and several months he's been out of jail, but David hasn't let his guard down. "[My brother] let me borrow his gun, just in case," says Petlansky, referring to handgun he keeps at his couple's Riverside apartment. "The [hearing] is coming up, and he knows he is going to jail now for something that he didn't get to finish doing." The sense of dread is so acute that Angela sometimes wishes for something awful to happen just to motivate the legal system to act. "At this point I would almost rather be murdered," she says, point-blank, "[Then] they'd actually do something, and we wouldn't have to live paranoid forever." In a deposition taken in March of this year, James Lewis swears he didn't introduce Bozeman to Dan McKinzy with any ill intent. Sure, he knew that Bozeman, a high school friend, wanted his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend dead, but Lewis insists it was pure coincidence that a criminal-for-hire like McKinzy was around on the April afternoon he and Bozeman planned to have lunch together. Both Lewis and Bozeman attendedHilliard High School in the early aughts (Lewis is a year younger than now-25-year-old Bozeman) They played on the basketball team together, but had fallen out of touch after graduation. Lewis - who worked as a logger, admittedly to meet customers for his primary venture as a drug dealer - said hadn't heard from Bozeman in years. But in April '08, he got a call from another high school friend, Marcus McCullough, informing him that Bozeman needed to get in touch with him. According to Lewis,Bozeman visited his Hilliard home that very day, and after some small talk, said he was going to get "straight to the point." The point, Lewis told police, was thatBozeman wanted David Petlansky dead. Lewis says he declined to assist in committing the murder, explaining that he had a wife and child to worry about. Still, the two men agreed to meet for lunch another day. It was during one of several subsequent luncheons that Lewis introduced Bozeman to McKinzy. According to a statementMcKinzy made to police on April 20, 2008, Lewis contacted him and said that he had a "job lined up" for him. Incidentally, McKinzy had an interview scheduled at a local Wendy's, but figured whatever "job" Lewis had for him would pay better and faster. In the car that day, either en route to or returning from lunch, McKinzy says Bozeman told him what he wanted. "He needed me to off somebody ass and do him in and...I'll be tooken [sic] cafe of." Under the terms of their original agreement, McKinzy would receive $500 in cash and a bus ticket to New York. According to McKinzy, the three men spent several days casing the area, presumably deciding at which residence the hit would take place. Petlansky had recently moved back from Missouri and was staying at his mother's house west of downtown Jacksonville. At the time, he and Angela stayed there relatively often. The home was close to Bozeman's father's roofing company (All Around Roofing), which served as something of an unofficial headquarters for the conspirators. The first time McKinzy attempted to make the hit - on a Wednesday, he says - he went to theBozeman's business to pick up a knife, the ski mask and some dark clothing. He also says Bozeman printed two photographs from the computer, one of David alone, the other ofDavid and Angela together. When McKinzy failed to commit the murder that night, Friday became the "deadline." So they wouldn't be seen in Bozeman's vehicle, Lewis arranged an exchange, and that three men loaded into Lewis' wife's car that Friday. Of being dropped off at the lot that evening, McKinzy recalls, "[Bozeman] told me he'll be back to check on me from time to time...he would bring me a little something to eat and snack on, you know, whatnot if I needed it. Just get it done. It got to be done, and tonight was the deadline. That was the deadline." It was around midnight when McKinzy says he got cold feet - again - and emerged from the woods. He tossed the ski mask in a dumpster behind a nearby convenience store, found a payphone and called Lewis to come pick him up. When they arrived back at Lewis' Hilliard apartment,McKinzy headed home on foot and attempted to go to sleep. Instead, he was plagued by worry. He later told police, "I felt like something was going to happen to me or to Lewis, you know? This was dead-line and now it's on us." Scared and likely exhausted, McKinzy phoned the Nassau County Sheriff's Office and admitted to having information about a murder that was to take place in Duval County. Just as day was breaking, that Saturday morning, he was picked up by Nassau County officers and taken in for questioning. After telling police everything he knew, McKinzy agreed to help officers take Bozeman down. As police listened in, McKinzy phoned Bozeman and arranged for one last meeting so they could discuss the murder. McKinzy was set up with a wire and placed in a covert vehicle. Folio was unable to listen to the recordings because, according to the State Attorney's Office, they constitute "active criminal investigative and intelligence information," but according to investigating officers, Bozeman made sever sufficiently incriminating statements and was arrested on the spot. Bozeman would later claim that he wasn't being serious - according to a police report, he said he was "just playing" about wanting McKinzy to kill David Petlansky. But McKinzy's testimony tells a different story. Of Bozeman's demeanor the night of the takedown,McKinzy told investigators, "It was like he was ready to get it over with and out of the way...it was like he was imagining it being done as he was speaking of it." According to police, when they asked Bozeman on the night of his arrest why he'd involve himself in something like this, he mumbled "I am just stupid." Asked to repeat himself more clearly, he said more loudly, "I am just stupid." (Bozeman, through his attorney Henry Coxe, declined to comment for this article.) During his relatively brief detention in the Duval County jail, Bozeman applied to have his bail reduced from the $500,000 originally set (it was dropped to $10,000), a request he backed with 35 letters attesting to his good character. The letters - written by relatives,friends, former teachers, bosses, and pastors - paint Bozeman as a model employee, a devout Christian and generally good guy. Tim Spangler, the director of a golf course where Bozeman once worked as assistant golf pro, wrote, "Actions written on the police report are not the Steven Bozeman I've known for three years...he is a man of truth, character, honesty and compassion. He would not harm a fly, let alone a person." Friend Michael Wenzel said that Bozeman "did not believe in living life in a way that was contrary to God's word." Several letters excuse Bozeman's actions as resulting from extreme heartbreak. He and Angela were together for more than four years before she ended their relationship in February of last year. She andPetlansky began seriously dating only about a month later. Susan Winters, a teacher at Hilliard Middle-Senior High School and a friend of Bozeman's mother, wrote, "I have never seen that side of him, and I am genuinely convinced that his actions were not the actions of that Steven I know, but rather one that was in a heartache that most of us will never know." His cousin Natasha De Grave said, "I would like to say that we all make mistakes in life, especially when the heartache involved is so monumental." Angela isn't convinced that heartache alone led to the murder plot. During the course of their relationship, she was exposed to a less becoming side of Bozeman. She describes him as spoiled, verbally abusive, someone who would go to great lengths to get his way. "I want to say he [did this because he] just missed me so badly, but that's not it," she says. "He's extremely spoiled, and he just didn't get his way. He's going to find a way to get his way regardless. That's how he was. I was, like, his property." Angela thinks Bozeman honestly believed that if Petlansky were dead, she'd come running back to him. (James Lewis suggested something similar in his testimony, saying that Bozeman was under the impression that he and Angela would reconcile if Petlansky was gone.) The very thought turns Petlansky's stomach. "[I'm sure] he would have shown up at the hospital to see her with a big bouquet of flowers, all dressed up, tickets to something," he speculates, "Like, everything would be all right. Like nothing happened and [Angela] wouldn't wonder." Even before someone was hired to kill him, David Petlansky was the type of person who was hyper-conscious of his own mortality. The crime has obviously exacerbated that. David andAngela say they've both become paranoid and fearful, and they resent the fact that Bozeman appears to have been able to return to life as usual. He continues to work for his father (the Petlanskys occasionally see him driving around), and his Facebook page shows a tall, tan and handsome Bozeman smiling broadly and posing with friends outside what appears to be a nightclub. Eerily, Bozeman lists his favorite quote on that site as, "Life is short, live everyday like its your last!" As forPetlansky, he lost the job he had at the time - a steady, well-paying gig at a construction company - because he was constantly making and receiving phone calls to ensure Bozeman was still locked up. And both Angela and David are fixated on what-ifs - endless questions about how the near-crime might've happened, and what the results would have been if McKinzy hadn't balked. Unfortunately, neither have been able to express these impressions in any meaningful way. The Petlanskys have never given statements to the police, and they've never sat for depositions. Nobody even asked them to. From a legal standpoint, their participation isn't necessary. Police didn't need information from them to make an arrest, and it wouldn't help the defense - which is responsible for deciding which witnesses will be deposed - to take statements from them. Bozeman, who was originally charged with premeditated first-degree murder and criminal attempt to commit a capital felony, agreed to avoid trial and plead instead. And since the defense isn't going to fight the charges in court, the Petlanskys are, in a strange way, irrelevant. About the only time the couple has been involved in the narrative of the crime was when police told the Petlansky's of the plot on David's life. That visit remains a surreal memory. The couple was watching "The Holiday" in the family room at David's mom's house when a uniformed officer knocked on the door. David's first thought was that his brother was in trouble for underage drinking or that a neighbor had smelled him smoking pot on the back porch earlier that evening. Then the officer asked, "Do you know a Steven Bozeman?" Angela's first thought was that Bozeman had killed himself. Bracing themselves, David and Angela sat down in chairs on the front porch. The officer squatted in front of them and explained matter-of-factly that the previous night, Bozeman had arranged to have Petlansky killed. After the initial shock, a morbidly curiousPetlansky couldn't resist asking the officer how much money had changed hands for his killing. "The cop couldn't even stop laughing when he told me is was $260," Petlansky says. "[McKinzy] had $260 in his pocket." Since that night, however, they've been all but shut out from the process. "It's like he tried to kill somebody who wasn't us," saysAngela. David Petlansky attempted to inject himself into the process by attending all of Bozeman's hearings in order to affix a victim's face to Bozeman's crime. He was told by a prosecutor that there wasn't any point in his taking off work to attend the hearings, but Petlansky disagrees. "Early on, [one of the detectives] said we needed to make this important to us,"Petlansky says. "He said that's the only way anything would happen with it. He said they have evidence to put [Bozeman] in jail, but he's a first-time offender, and his dad has a lot of money, so it's going to be really difficult." Although the couple hasn't been able to actively participate in the case, they recently had the opportunity to listen to the recording police made of Bozeman talking to McKinzy. Petlansky said it's difficult, even hearing Bozeman say it aloud, to believe that it's his murder being discussed. "I didn't feel like I was listening to somebody plot my death," explains Petlansky. "It was almost like listening to a radio show." Both David and Angela are preparing statements to make at Bozeman's sentencing hearing. They expect it will be cathartic to finally have a chance to say their piece, but they're also bracing for disappointment. Sentencing guidelines allow as much as 30 years in prison, but because Bozeman's a first-time offender and has the luxury of high-priced representation, he'll likely serve the minimum four-year sentence, if that. Dan McKinzy is currently in prison on unrelated drug charges, but hasn't been charged for his role in thePetlansky hit. James Lewis, who wound up in jail for driving on a suspended license, the Saturday McKinzy went to police, was also never charged. David Petlansky finds it unsettling that a crime of such brutal intent can disappear so easily from the criminal justice system. But he's weary of weighing what-ifs. Whatever happens in court next month, he, too, will be glad when it's finally over. "It's just a relief at this point," he says. "All I've wanted is a cap on this entire situation just to move on." Story Update: Steven Bozeman ended up spending less than 3 years in prison for a murder he attempted to have carried out at least 3 times. He is currently engaged to be married. [May 2013] From Infowars Video footage from the scene of the shootout with the alleged Boston bombers appears to contain audio of the suspects screaming out, “We didn’t do it!” as police fire on the two brothers. Although by no means clear, the words below appear to be shouted by the suspects as they come under police gunfire.
- 24 seconds: “chill out” - 26 seconds: “chill out”, “chill out” - 31 seconds: “chill out” - 37 seconds: “we didnt do it” - 41 seconds: “we didnt do it” - 45 seconds: “we didnt do it” - 1 minute 9 seconds: “hey officer” Despite being described as a “shootout,” the audio suggests that shots are only being fired in one direction by police and that the brothers are not returning fire at this point in the exchange. The tape offers little proof as to the Tasrnaev brother’s guilt, but it follows a number of other intriguing caveats which some have offered as evidence that the suspects were framed and had no actual involvement in the bombings. - A Facebook post attributed to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev although not authenticated reads, “This will be the last message before the police get me. I never done it. They set me up. Father please forgive me. I am sorry it has come to this.” - The suspects’ mother Zubeidat Tsarnaeva continues to insist that her sons are innocent, telling the Associated Press, “It’s all lies and hypocrisy.” - Tsarnaeva also claims that the FBI “were controlling his every step,” referring to Tamerlan Tasrnaev, and that both the FBI and the CIA were following the brothers since 2011. - The aunt of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, claims that the footage which emerged of police arresting a naked uninjured man was her nephew, contradicting the official narrative that Tsarnaev was critically injured in a shootout and suggesting he may have been killed while in custody. - Eyewitnesses to the shootout contradict claims by authorities that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ran over his own brother in a car, stating instead that he was run over by police. - Despite numerous images of other suspects with large black backpacks at the scene of the bombings, the FBI insisted that these photos not be deemed credible and that the Tasrnaev brothers were the only possible culprits. |
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