Wesley Brownlee was on a mission, says Stockton, California, Police Chief Stanley McFadden, “he was out hunting” when he was arrested before the sun rose, October 15, 2022.
For McFadden and his team, it was the end of a year-long investigation of what seemed to be a serial killer.
A gunman had been killing people in Stockton the past year; seven shootings, six fatal, all linked by ballistics and video evidence.
Juan Vasquez Serrano, 39, was the first to fall. He was shot multiple times in Oakland at about 4:15 a.m. on April 10, 2021.
Like Juan, all of those killed were all men.
One woman who was shot survived. She, and the men, were all attacked within a few miles of each other.
Beyond that, was there a common denominator that the victims all had in common? Well, several were homeless, and five were Latino. But that’s all.
The killer was caught on video at several crime scenes. Still, McFadden says investigators didn’t have a single solid lead and, indeed, no suspects until community leaders convinced residents to come forward with information.
From there, it was “old-fashioned police work,” McFadden says, that led his team to Brownlee.
After receiving several solid tips, officers started by staking out the suspect at his home. On the morning of October 15, a team followed Brownlee as he drove away from his house at about 2. a.m.
Brownlee drove through parks, and areas with little street lighting, stopping, looking around, and then moving again.
McFadden is convinced Brownlee was looking for his next victim when he was arrested. But the chief has not said yet what might have motivated Brownlee to pull the trigger so many times.
Brownlee is expected to make his first court appearance on October 18, 2022.
The teacher’s got a “kill list.”
(Not this teacher!)
The world must be spinning out of control. That’s all I could think of when I heard about what has to be the most incredible and shocking true crime story I have heard in a while.
Quite simply, a fifth-grade school teacher writes a “kill list.” And she shows it to one of her students, a girl named Portia Jones.
“She said she wanted to choke us and kill herself,” Portia says. Now the teacher, although Portia’s name was on the list of those whom the teacher wanted to kill, the little girl’s name, the teacher said, was toward the bottom of the list.
So she wouldn’t be one of the first to die.
Little Portia was not reassured by that, so she did exactly what she should have done. Portia ran to her counselor and the principal of St. Stanislaus School in East Chicago, Illinois, and told them about the kill list.
School officials immediately talked to the teacher, Angelica Carrasquillo-Torres, and she said Portia had told the truth. Angelica admitted to having a list of teachers and students she wanted to kill.
Then, school officials did exactly what they should not have done. They sent the teacher home and told her not to come back until a full investigation was completed.
“They should have never let her walk out them doors,” Portia’s father, Quiannis Jones says. “They should’ve called the police right then and there. That’s a threat on the school.”
The cops were not notified of this for another four hours.
The Lake County Prosecutor’s Office issued an emergency detention order that evening. Angelica was taken into custody the following day. As this was written, East Chicago police said the investigation was ongoing.
But still…what a shocking true crime story. Did you ever think you’d read about an elementary school teacher with a kill list?
Teachers and sex crimes
While we are thinking of teachers who are more than just creepy, there is the case of Eugene Pratt, a 57-year-old former principal, elementary school teacher, and coach. Eugene taught at-risk children in many Michigan public schools.
He’s charged with first-degree criminal sexual assault involving at least 15 boys and young adult men.
Now, remember, he has not yet been convicted. However, Eugene is just one of many teachers and school officials accused of sex crimes this year.
Fox News Digital discovers the shocking true crime news that in 2022, 269 of America’s educators were arrested for suspected sex crimes involving children.
The study covers January 1 to September 30, 2022. So that works out to about one teacher or school administrator, like a principal, arrested daily.
At least 199 of the arrested involved alleged crimes against students.
The charges range from grooming to raping underage students, according to the story published in the New York Post.
“The number of teachers arrested for child sex abuse is just the tip of the iceberg — much as it was for the Catholic Church prior to widespread exposure and investigation in the early 2000s,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The best available academic research, published by the Department of Education, suggests that nearly 10% of public school students suffer from physical abuse between kindergarten and twelfth grade.”
“According to that research, the scale of sexual abuse in the public schools is nearly 100 times greater than that of the Catholic Church,” he said. “The question for critics who seek to downplay the extent of public school sexual abuse is this: How many arrests need to happen before you consider it a problem? How many children need to be sexually abused by teachers before you consider it a crisis?”
January 14, 1927 — A.J. Mathis, a wealthy, elderly chicken rancher is missing. One of the last of the cowboy sheriffs, Jim McDonald, is convinced A.J. is dead, murdered. And McDonald says he knows who did it and vows to “prove it on her.”
McDonald’s leading, and only, suspect is a former salon singer and prostitute, Eva Dugan. Short, stocky, and plain, Eva takes off with a younger man in A.J.’s Dodge Coupe. They drive from Arizona to Texas, before Eva makes her way to White Plains, New York.
While she’s on the run, her young friend, Jack, vanishes. And A.J.’s skeleton is discovered buried in a shallow grave.
After she’s captured, Eva proclaims her innocence, but is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Eva says if she was more attractive, if she was a “flapper” she would not have been convicted and certainly would not have been sentenced to death by hanging.
A movement grows among people opposed to capital punishment to spare Eva’s life. They fail, and Eva walks to the gallows, all the while proclaiming her innocence.
What happens next changes the way Arizona treated those sentenced to death for capital crimes. Never again will anyone hang for murder in Arizona because of what happens the day Eva Dugan dies.