I was savagely disfigured by my deranged boyfriend: Acid attack victim bravely shows her face
By Nicky Murfitt
Last updated at 10:43 PM on 17th October 2009
With painful honesty, Katie Piper, the former TV presenter tells why she has finally waived her right to anonymity – and reveals the awful events that changed her life for ever
However much she would like to forget them, the details of how she lost her dreams, her identity and very nearly her life will stay with Katie Piper for ever.
They are burned into both her memory and her face. Katie, 26, has remained fearful and anonymous in the 18 months since the man she met on the internet attempted to destroy her, so few will recognise her name.
Courageous: Katie Piper last week wearing her plastic mask. 'I love my life and I have a future', she says
But the facts of the case – the rape, the vengeful boyfriend Daniel Lynch, the cup of industrial-strength sulphuric acid – are all too familiar, a cause of anger and revulsion when they were revealed in court earlier this year.
It was an added cruelty that Katie’s world had revolved around her beauty. She modelled for catalogues and magazines, presented television programmes and had dreamed of a full-time career in the media.
But on March 31, 2008, the old Katie Piper disappeared for ever. The acid, hurled into her face on a busy London street, disfigured her beyond recognition. Some slipped down her throat with further terrible consequences.
‘I could hear someone screaming and screaming and kept wishing they’d be quiet. Then I realised it was me,’ she recalls.
‘I was standing in the street with people walking past me and I could feel my face evaporating. I thought I was on fire as the acid ate at my skin.
‘In one of Danny’s calls he’d told me he’d got a present for me that would change my life for ever. I knew instantly that he was behind it.’
Afterwards, able to communicate only in writing, she gave her parents a note that said: ‘Kill me.’ Yet today, Katie is no longer in despair.
Beauty: Katie before the attack
Still learning to live with her rebuilt features and exhausted by more than 30 operations, she has agreed to waive her anonymity and speak in public. Her fightback will be featured in a Channel 4 documentary this month.
She hopes her bravery will help her regain some confidence. It is also a chance to insist – as she has discovered in the hardest way – that appearance cannot be the measure of human worth.
‘I’m never going to be the old Katie. She’s like a best friend I once had,’ she admits.
‘She’s gone and there’s a different one in her place. I’m not going to be a victim. I’m the woman who got through this. I’m full of life and looking forward to the future.’
At the beginning of last year, Katie was living in London for the first time and enjoying it. She was popular, particularly with men who were drawn to her blonde good looks and petite figure.
Like many young adults, she lived part of her hectic life through the pages of Facebook and it was not unusual for her to receive 80 emails in one day, many from admiring strangers.
Mostly, these were ignored. But when 33-year-old Daniel Lynch, a martial arts enthusiast, emailed Katie to say he’d been following her career, she admits she was instantly attracted.
‘He was wearing a martial arts suit in his picture and I’d been doing some promotional work for martial arts in the UK,’ she explains.
‘We seemed to have a lot in common and, to be honest, looking at his picture, I fancied him.’
A few days later Lynch turned up at a promotional event in Reading where Katie was working.
‘He seemed quite shy and nervous when we first met,’ she says. ‘We just had a nice, normal chat. He was 6ft 4in, quite macho-looking and handsome. I liked what I saw.’
Katie sent him her phone number and when they went on their first date, he met her with flowers and a teddy bear.
‘We liked each other and we had fun,’ she says. ‘He told me on our second date that he loved me. His arm was always around me and even when we were in the car and stopped at traffic lights, he would turn and kiss me.
Jailed for life: Ex-boyfriend Daniel Lynch left, and Stefan Sylvestre
‘He was attentive and showered me with affection. He rang me and emailed me constantly. At one point he’d sent so many messages he blocked my Facebook account. If I’m honest, I was flattered – at least at first.’
She soon got a very different view of her new boyfriend, though. Angered by a trivial slight when he was buying trainers, Lynch had exploded at a shop assistant, leaving Katie to pick up the pieces. This was at the end of March last year.
‘We were two weeks into our relationship and I’d started feeling stifled by his constant calls and emails. I didn’t say anything but I planned to break up with him,’ she says.
If she had known his true background, she would never have been with him in the first place. Lynch, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, with his mother and brother, had convictions for violence and had served a jail sentence for throwing boiling water into the face of another man. But Katie knew none of this.
‘Later on the day of the incident in the shop, when he suggested we make a night of it and stay in a hotel in Bayswater, I agreed,’ she says.
‘It was a Thursday and I had an appointment in town the next day. We went for a meal, shared a bottle of wine and he seemed to be in a good mood again.’
What happened next was terrifying by anyone’s standards. To a young girl from a comfortable home in a South of England market town, it was unimaginable. Lynch raped her in the hotel room before holding her captive for eight hellish hours.
He smashed her head, beat her, threatened to slash her face with a razor and said he would hang her with a belt. Later he claimed to have been high on steroids.
Even now, the details of the rape are hard for Katie to recount. ‘One minute he’d tell me he loved me and the next he was shouting and swearing. His face was so contorted and I knew that I was dealing with a very sick person,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think he was going to let me leave that room alive.
‘The blood from my head wound was everywhere – on the bed, on the carpets, on the bathroom tiles. I told him the maids would be along soon and we had to clear up, otherwise they’d call the police.’
They drove back to Katie’s flat in Golders Green where, to her relief, he agreed to let her out of the car. It was
5pm on Friday.
If her brief affair with Lynch was a dreadful mistake, Katie’s next decision, too, might seem open to question. She decided not to go to the police, gripped by the fear that he would kill her if she put one foot wrong. Nor did she tell the truth to the doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where her head wound was glued.
‘I hated myself and what had happened to me,’ she says. ‘But I was terrified that he would hurt me or someone I loved. I kept thinking that as long as I played along and didn’t make him angry, he’d get fed up.’
Instead, the bombardment of phone calls continued. Lynch was full of apologies, she says, and the following Monday morning begged her to read an email he had written.
So, with her own internet line down, she agreed to leave her flat and walk to an internet cafe.
Katie admits: ‘I was nervous about leaving the flat but thought that I could end this thing if I read the email. The whole time Danny was on the phone to me, making conversation, asking me what I was wearing. I was exhausted so I told him.’
This was how her assailant, directed by Lynch, picked her out.
‘I saw a man in a hooded top walking towards me,’ she says. ‘He was carrying a cup. I assumed he was a beggar so I reached into my bag for some change. He came up close, like he was going to speak, and threw liquid from the cup at my face.
‘The pain was indescribable, but for a split second I remember thinking, “How rude to throw coffee when I was trying to help him.” I could feel my skin and clothes burning off me.’
Losing her vision and disorientated, Katie staggered across Golders Green High Road, dodging in and out of cars to get help. ‘I remember my Ugg boots slipped off and I just left them in the middle of the road,’ she says. ‘I could so easily have been knocked down.’
To make things worse, Katie had to wait more than an hour in agony before ambulance crews were given the all-clear to treat her, because they didn’t know what the substance was and whether there was a risk of her attacker being nearby.
Chillingly, she confides: ‘They zipped me up in a protective suit and I thought it must be a body bag and that I was dead and looking in on the scene around me. All I could hear were voices and I figured I must be in Heaven.’
David Piper, who runs a business, and his wife Diane took one look at their once beautiful daughter in hospital and silently believed she’d be better off dead, as Diane now admits. On one side, Katie’s face had been destroyed as far as the fat layer – the only thing beyond it was bone.
She had lost the sight in her left eye and, because of the damage to her oesophagus, was unable to eat.
‘I couldn’t see a way back for her,’ says Diane. ‘I couldn’t imagine what sort of future she’d have. Everything she’d hoped for and dreamed of depended on her face and it was gone. The thing that upset me most was when she wrote, “Kill me.” ’
So serious were the injuries that Katie’s surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Mohammad Ali Jawad, resorted to pioneering techniques. In a single operation, the first of its kind ever to be performed, he removed Katie’s entire face, used a skin substitute, Matriderm (which provides a ‘scaffolding’ for grafts), to rebuild its foundations, then grafted skin from her lower back and buttocks on to her face.
After the operation, she was put into an induced coma for 12 days and kept in intensive care. Her weight plummeted to six stone and she had to be fed via a tube in her stomach.
Katie was given police protection even though Lynch and Stefan Sylvestre, now 21 and who threw the acid, had been arrested.
Her determination to recover astonished doctors but it was seven weeks before she knew and saw for herself the extent of the damage.
‘When I held the mirror up I thought someone had given me a broken one or put a silly face on it as a joke,’ she admits.
‘I knew that they’d taken my face away and that it was put somewhere in a bin in the hospital, but in my head I assumed I’d look like the old Katie, just with a few red blotches.
‘I was so embarrassed that people had seen me like this. I wanted to tear the whole thing off and make it go away. There was nothing about me that I recognised. My identity as I knew it had gone.’
Diane gave up her job as a classroom assistant in a primary school to look after her daughter full-time. As well as regular massage at home to keep her damaged skin supple, Katie attends a clinic in southern France that specialises in treating burn-damaged skin.
Eating remains a struggle. Just last week she had another operation to dilate her oesophagus because, every few weeks, scar tissue reforms, narrowing the passage to just a centimetre wide.
It is a measure of her progress that, a few hours later, she sat through a whole meal with her family to celebrate her 26th birthday. ‘I’m usually sick several times throughout a meal and prefer to eat alone,’ she explains.
‘To sit down with my family and friends, eat chicken and have a couple of glasses of wine was such a thrill that I felt I really had something to celebrate.’
The psychological damage has been enormous and it has taken months for Katie to go outside. She keeps all doors and windows locked, is terrified by unexpected callers and is frightened to make hot drinks because of the memories it revives. For months she couldn’t bear to have a shower because of the feeling of liquid moving across her body.
At night she has to wear a balaclava-style mask and a body suit to try to stretch her burned skin and during the day she wears a clear, plastic mask. Pam Warren, who had been terribly burned in the Paddington rail crash and also wore a mask, came to see Katie to advise her.
In May, at Wood Green Crown Court, North London, Lynch and his accomplice Sylvestre were told by the judge that they were ‘the face of pure evil’. Both were jailed for life and Lynch will serve a minimum of 16 years.
But Katie still has nightmares and fears Lynch’s release. When he obtained a phone illegally in jail he used it to post a message on the internet saying how much he missed her. She has now closed all of her social networking accounts.
Katie sounds remarkably well-adjusted despite what she has been through, and is full of praise for her treatment. In particular, she says that the specialist rehabilitation she received should be standard for burns victims.
‘I was fortunate to have a good surgeon and together with the correct aftercare I’ve achieved results that exceeded even my expectations,’ she says. ‘Although, yes, I’ve been scarred for life, I am extremely happy with my new beautiful face.
‘There were times when I was so depressed I wanted to hide from the world. Facing people looking like I do has been a huge ordeal for someone who lived her life to look beautiful. My family have been amazing and without their support and the support of Mr Jawad, I would never have got through this.
‘Now, though, I realise my life before was so superficial. I used to refuse to go out if I had a spot on my face. Now I wish a spot was all I had to worry about. There are people who point and stare. One man even knocked my sun hat off and laughed at me. Those times hurt, but I won’t let them get me down. I’d like to be able to have a husband and family one day. I can’t live a life of regret.’
And what of Lynch? ‘Danny was sick. He may have taken away what was once important to me but, cheesy as it sounds, I am a better person for it. And he couldn’t take away my spirit. I love my life and I know that I have a future now, and it’s a wonderful feeling.’
African Child 'Witches' Withstand Brutal Abuse by Churches
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Nigeria — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.
His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.
A month later, he died.
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of "witch children" reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.
Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
"It is an outrage what they are allowing to take place in the name of Christianity," said Gary Foxcroft, head of nonprofit Stepping Stones Nigeria.
For their part, the families are often extremely poor, and sometimes even relieved to have one less mouth to feed. Poverty, conflict and poor education lay the foundation for accusations, which are then triggered by the death of a relative, the loss of a job or the denunciation of a pastor on the make, said Martin Dawes, a spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund.
"When communities come under pressure, they look for scapegoats," he said. "It plays into traditional beliefs that someone is responsible for a negative change ... and children are defenseless."
The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria's 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire.
Nigeria is one of the heartlands of abuse, but hardly the only one: the United Nations Children's Fund says tens of thousands of children have been targeted throughout Africa.
Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected "witch children." Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner's material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.
"Poverty must catch fire," insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo's main streets.
"Where little shots become big shots in a short time," promises the Winner's Chapel down the road.
"Pray your way to riches," advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.
It's hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.
Nwanaokwo said he knew the pastor who accused him only as Pastor King. Mount Zion Lighthouse in Nigeria at first confirmed that a Pastor King worked for them, then denied that they knew any such person.
Bishop A.D. Ayakndue, the head of the church in Nigeria, said pastors were encouraged to pray about witchcraft, but not to abuse children.
"We pray over that problem (of witchcraft) very powerfully," he said. "But we can never hurt a child."
The Nigerian church is a branch of a Californian church by the same name. But the California church says it lost touch with its Nigerian offshoots several years ago.
"I had no idea," said church elder Carrie King by phone from Tracy, Calif. "I knew people believed in witchcraft over there but we believe in the power of prayer, not physically harming people."
The Mount Zion Lighthouse — also named by three other families as the accuser of their children — is part of the powerful Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria. The Fellowship's president, Ayo Oritsejafor, said the Fellowship was the fastest-growing religious group in Nigeria, with more than 30 million members.
"We have grown so much in the past few years we cannot keep an eye on everybody," he explained.
But Foxcroft, the head of Stepping Stones, said if the organization was able to collect membership fees, it could also police its members better. He had already written to the organization twice to alert it to the abuse, he said. He suggested the fellowship ask members to sign forms denouncing abuse or hold meetings to educate pastors about the new child rights law in the state of Akwa Ibom, which makes it illegal to denounce children as witches. Similar laws and education were needed in other states, he said.
Sam Itauma of the Children's Rights and Rehabilitation Network said it is the most vulnerable children — the orphaned, sick, disabled or poor — who are most often denounced. In Nwanaokwo's case, his poor father and dead mother made him an easy target.
"Even churches who didn't use to 'find' child witches are being forced into it by the competition," said Itauma. "They are seen as spiritually powerful because they can detect witchcraft and the parents may even pay them money for an exorcism."
That's what Margaret Eyekang did when her 8-year-old daughter Abigail was accused by a "prophet" from the Apostolic Church, because the girl liked to sleep outside on hot nights — interpreted as meaning she might be flying off to join a coven. A series of exorcisms cost Eyekang eight months' wages, or US$270. The payments bankrupted her.
Neighbors also attacked her daughter.
"They beat her with sticks and asked me why I was bringing them a witch child," she said. A relative offered Eyekang floor space but Abigail was not welcome and had to sleep in the streets.
Members of two other families said pastors from the Apostolic Church had accused their children of witchcraft, but asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
The Nigeria Apostolic Church refused repeated requests made by phone, e-mail and in person for comment.
At first glance, there's nothing unusual about the laughing, grubby kids playing hopscotch or reading from a tattered Dick and Jane book by the graffiti-scrawled cinderblock house. But this is where children like Abigail end up after being labeled witches by churches and abandoned or tortured by their families.
There's a scar above Jane's shy smile: her mother tried to saw off the top of her skull after a pastor denounced her and repeated exorcisms costing a total of $60 didn't cure her of witchcraft. Mary, 15, is just beginning to think about boys and how they will look at the scar tissue on her face caused when her mother doused her in caustic soda. Twelve-year-old Rachel dreamed of being a banker but instead was chained up by her pastor, starved and beaten with sticks repeatedly; her uncle paid him $60 for the exorcism.
Israel's cousin tried to bury him alive, Nwaekwa's father drove a nail through her head, and sweet-tempered Jerry — all knees, elbows and toothy grin — was beaten by his pastor, starved, made to eat cement and then set on fire by his father as his pastor's wife cheered it on.
The children at the home run by Itauma's organization have been mutilated as casually as the praying mantises they play with. Home officials asked for the children's last names not to be used to protect them from retaliation.
The home was founded in 2003 with seven children; it now has 120 to 200 at any given time as children are reconciled with their families and new victims arrive.
Helen Ukpabio is one of the few evangelists publicly linked to the denunciation of child witches. She heads the enormous Liberty Gospel church in Calabar, where Nwanaokwo used to live. Ukpabio makes and distributes popular books and DVDs on witchcraft; in one film, a group of child witches pull out a man's eyeballs. In another book, she advises that 60 percent of the inability to bear children is caused by witchcraft.
In an interview with the AP, Ukpabio is accompanied by her lawyer, church officials and personal film crew.
"Witchcraft is real," Ukpabio insisted, before denouncing the physical abuse of children. Ukpabio says she performs non-abusive exorcisms for free and was not aware of or responsible for any misinterpretation of her materials.
"I don't know about that," she declared.
However, she then acknowledged that she had seen a pastor from the Apostolic Church break a girl's jaw during an exorcism. Ukpabio said she prayed over her that night and cast out the demon. She did not respond to questions on whether she took the girl to hospital or complained about the injury to church authorities.
After activists publicly identified Liberty Gospel as denouncing "child witches," armed police arrived at Itauma's home accompanied by a church lawyer. Three children were injured in the fracas. Itauma asked that other churches identified by children not be named to protect their victims.
"We cannot afford to make enemies of all the churches around here," he said. "But we know the vast majority of them are involved in the abuse even if their headquarters aren't aware."
Just mentioning the name of a church is enough to frighten a group of bubbly children at the home.
"Please stop the pastors who hurt us," said Jerry quietly, touching the scars on his face. "I believe in God and God knows I am not a witch."
California Rights Group Wants Target to Pull 'Illegal Alien' Halloween Costume
Saturday, October 17, 2009
LOS ANGELES — A Southern California immigrant rights group on Friday asked the Target store chain and a costume company to stop selling an "illegal alien" Halloween costume it said is offensive to immigrants.
The costume
features the mask of an alien with a green card and an orange jumpsuit with "illegal alien" written across the front.
Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, wrote e-mails to Minneapolis-based Target and Wisconsin-based BuySeasons, Inc. calling the costume "distasteful, mean-spirited, and ignorant of social stigmas and current debate on immigration reform."
The group said it also planned to send letters to other companies that are selling the costume.
Target is removing the costume from the site after receiving several complaints, company spokesman Joshua Thomas said Friday. The store never intended to sell the outfit but included it in its online offerings by mistake, he said.
An e-mail to BuySeasons, Inc. wasn't immediately returned Friday.
Bridge ‘suicide’ girl may have been dragged to her death by friend: Sad teenager ‘canvassed other girls to go with her’
By Patricia Kane
Last updated at 10:06 AM on 18th October 2009
A teenage girl who died in an apparent double suicide pact may have been dragged reluctantly to her death off a bridge.
Close relatives of Georgia Rowe, 14, say they have been told by police that following initial inquiries they no longer believe she took her own life.
Last night, Georgia’s aunt, Tanya Rowe, who raised her from a baby, said she felt comforted by the news that she had not meant to die along with Niamh Lafferty, 15.
Tragic teens: Niamh Lafferty (left), and Georgia Rowe (right), who died after plunging from the Erskine Bridge near Glasgow
Both girls fell 125ft from the Erskine Bridge near Glasgow into the River Clyde earlier this month.
Tanya said: ‘The police have told me Georgia did not commit suicide. They have hundreds of interviews to do but apparently Niamh was openly canvassing people to go with her.
‘They said it’s a major investigation now, tantamount to a murder inquiry, and is being treated at the highest level.’
The news comes as Georgia’s family prepare to bury her tomorrow in the Ayrshire village of Sorn, where she spent most of her life.
Hundreds of mourners are expected to attend the funeral of the teenager, who was originally from Hull. Both girls were temporary residents at a children’s home in Bishopton, Renfrewshire, and had left without authorisation.
Their families have struggled to deal with the horror of their final moments. Two inquiries are already under way to establish how Niamh and Georgia, who were among six girls staying in the open unit of the Good Shepherd residential care home, were able to embark on their tragic last journey so easily.
Last week, the Care Commission revealed there had been 232 cases of girls absconding last year from the home – a former convent until the Seventies, which also has a secure unit and provides day places to those in care homes and foster care.
Strathclyde Police have continued carrying out extensive inquiries since the teenagers’ deaths because an inquest is likely to be held at a later date.
They have studied CCTV images from the bridge and it is believed reached their conclusion after examining the evidence.
Suicide spot: The notorious Erskine Bridge near Glasgow
Georgia’s iPod has also been retained by detectives, who want to check the photographs and voice recordings it contains.
This newspaper has learned that in the hour before the tragedy, the teenagers at the centre – all in their pyjamas and ready to watch The X Factor on television that Sunday night – were approached by Niamh.
But it was Georgia, who had just spent a happy afternoon with Tanya and a close family friend before being dropped back at the centre, who finally agreed to go with her.
Mrs Rowe said: ‘Georgia always wanted to fit in. She’s agreed to go with her because the drama of it would have appealed to her. I think she accompanied Niamh to the bridge and didn’t think she would really jump off.’
Both girls died instantly when they fell into the River Clyde from the busy road bridge, a notorious suicide spot.
Horrified motorists have described how they saw them sitting on the railings around 9pm and waving excitedly at traffic before linking arms and tumbling backwards together.
Last night, a source close to the inquiry said that it had become apparent that Niamh had a history of self-harming and was still grieving following the death of her 16-year-old boyfriend from a drugs overdose eight months earlier.
She had made no secret that she was contemplating suicide.
The source said: ‘Officers discovered that Niamh was openly canvassing for girls to go with her.
‘The inquiry has been ramped up because of this. Police now plan to interview dozens of people, including girls at the school, who were with Niamh and Georgia before this happened.
‘It looks as if Georgia unfortunately went along with Niamh to keep her company that night and ended up losing her own life too.’
Niamh was buried last Tuesday with 250 mourners in attendance in her home town of Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire.
Georgia will be buried in Sorn, where her older brother, Christopher, 26, and sister, Evie, 16, still live with Tanya who adopted them as young children.
Last night, a spokesman for Strathclyde Police said: ‘Police inquiries are continuing. However, at this stage, there is nothing to suggest that there are any suspicious circumstances surrounding the deaths.’
Yesterday further calls were made to improve security at the bridge after a man jumped to his death on Friday night at the same spot where the girls died.
Police said they were treating the incident as suicide and were trying to trace the family of the victim, who has not yet been named.
Neighbors Thought Dead Man Was Halloween Display
Saturday, October 17, 2009
LOS ANGELES — Residents of a Southern California apartment complex say they saw a lifeless body slumped on a neighbor's patio, but didn't call police because they thought it was part of a Halloween display.
Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead since Monday.
Cameraman Austin Raishbrook, owner of RMG News, told the Los Angeles Times he was at the scene in Marina del Rey Thursday when authorities arrived. The 75-year-old Zayed was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment with a single gunshot wound to the eye.
A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department investigator says the case is an "apparent suicide."
Raishbrook says neighbors told him they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy."
Suit: Nursing Home Allowed Cancer to Rot Off Man's Body Part
Sunday, October 18, 2009
EVERETT, Wash. — A lawsuit has been filed against a Washington state nursing home accused of neglecting a 97-year-old man's penile infection.
The lawsuit from the man's son, filed Wednesday in Snohomish County Superior Court, says the father was taken to an emergency room, where doctors discovered his penis had decayed, leaving only a gaping wound. He died 18 days later, in March 2008.
Everett Rehabilitation and Care Center administrator Elizabeth Loyet told The Everett Herald she could not discuss the allegations because of federal privacy laws.
The lawsuit cites an investigation by the state Department of Social and Health Services, which shows the nurse told a manager in November 2007 that the man had a wound on his penis. The records say the manager forgot about the report.
Murder suspect Amanda Knox's parents claim she was beaten by police
By Nick Pisa In Rome
Last updated at 10:54 PM on 17th October 2009
Murder suspect Amanda Knox's parents are convinced she will be cleared of the brutal sex killing of British student Meredith Kercher.
Curt Knox and Edda Mellas were interviewed on CNN's Larry King Live show and dismissed last week's decision by the trial judge to reject a request for an independent review of DNA evidence.
They insist their daughter's involvement is simply a 'huge mistake'.
Mr Knox said his daughter had been psychologically and physically abused by police during questioning - a claim that has been denied by detectives.
Meredith, 21, was found semi naked and with her throat cut in the bedroom of the house she shared with American Knox, 22, and the court has heard she was killed after refusing to take part in a drug fuelled sex game.
Knox is jointly charged with her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 25, with murder. The case, which began last January is due to end in December, two years after Meredith's murder.
Edda, Knox's mother, told Larry King:''We asked for the independent review because we were sure that anybody [who] independently looked at it would support our position.
'Now, maybe the court decided that they don't even need that support. That our arguments have already been good enough.'
Knox's defence lawyers had asked the court for an independent review of the evidence because they insist the DNA evidence shown in court has been contaminated and the results are wrong.
Amanda Knox is on trial for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher
Prosecutors say a 30cm black handled kitchen knife has Knox's DNA on the handle and Kercher's DNA on the blade but the defence says the findings are too low and cannot be used as evidence to convict.
Mr Knox said: 'I believe that there was a huge mistake made very, very early on by, you know, having a - literally a 'case closed', you know, presentation by the police over there.
'When they found out that Rudy Guede (convicted of murder in October 2008) actually did it they were too far into it and they have been pressing it ever since.
'Between Meredith's body being found and Amanda's arrest 90 hours passed and Amanda was questioned for 41 of those hours, the last part was a 14 hour interrogation where she was subjected to physiological and physical abuse, she was hit.'
Knox's boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito has also been charged with murder and Rudy Guede has already been convicted of the crime
Mr Knox added: 'We have to believe that what they're hearing in court - and it's so clear that she had nothing to do with it - then they'll come out with the right answer. I mean, that's - that's what we have to believe.'
Meredith, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was a Leeds University student and was in Perugia as part of her European Studies degree, she had only been in Italy for two months before she was murdered in November 2007.
The trial is set to resume in November with closing arguments from the prosecution and defence and judge Giancarlo Massei will give his verdict in early December.
Knox, from Seattle and Sollecito, from Bari, have been in custody since the murder which has surprised many as other high profile murder suspects in Italy since the killing have been granted bail.
Officials says that the fact Knox is American has been crucial in denying her applications to be freed during the trial as authorities fear she will flee the country.