“Anybody bring a gun to shoot us?” Jones asked, eliciting a smattering of laughs.

But some posting comments on jihadist websites are not laughing, vowing revenge against his church, the Dove World Outreach Center, which had about 30 attendees at its worship service Sunday.

“Now, I wish to bomb myself in this church as revenge for the sake of Allah’s talk,” wrote one person who identified himself as Abu Dujanah, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As area law enforcement form their response, the reporting of Jones’ plans has gone international – from Mumbai to Melbourne, with some media outlets, including the Journal, describing Dove World as a Gainesville “mega-church.”

While city officials are concerned about the effect on Gainesville’s image, they say the more pressing matter is the potential for trouble.

Read full article on The Gainesville Sun’s website.

At some point after April 1, Manuel, 64, will have to report to a federal prison to serve a 21-month term imposed after he pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from a developer, who was working undercover for the FBI.

The term would have been longer had he not already been living on borrowed time.

In 1998, eight years before being elected to the St. Johns County Commission, Manuel became one of some 24,000 Americans with a heart transplant, defense attorney Bill Sheppard said at the sentencing hearing.

Manuel has been battling complications ever since, and Sheppard said that for anyone with a transplant, “your survival rate plummets.”

“To incarcerate this man, quite frankly, I fear is a death sentence,” he said.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Corrigan said he weighed Manuel’s illnesses when making his decision, he felt the sentence balanced the defendant’s medical needs and the need for justice.

“There is no intention on my part to adversely affect Mr. Manuel’s health in any way,” Corrigan said. “But that can’t be the only consideration here.”

The judge said the Federal Bureau of Prisons was equipped to handle Manuel’s ailments, suggesting the former commission chairman might serve his time at the prisons in Rochester, Minn., or Springfield, Mo., where there are more advanced medical facilities.

Sheppard said that in his research, he could not find an inmate in the federal prison system who has had a heart transplant.

“If I were a betting man, I’d bet they don’t,” he said.

Edmond Ross, a spokesman for the prisons bureau, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he was not sure of any inmates who had received transplants.

But, of the roughly 200,000 prisoners in the federal system, there are some on “pretty involved medical regimens, whether it’s for HIV or whatever,” Ross said.

Manuel takes 32 pills a day (at an annual cost between $18,000 and $20,000) and has been diagnosed with melanoma three times, Sheppard said. He carries around a face mask in case he encounters someone with a cold or has to go into a hospital.

On top of his existing conditions, Manuel was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after his arrest.

Sheppard said while he and his client listened to a tape recorded by the FBI informant, Manuel realized something was off.

“It was almost a look of realization on his face,” the attorney said.

Shortly afterward, a psychiatrist made the diagnoses that Manuel was bipolar.

“When you’re up here you’re the king of the hill,” Sheppard said, holding his hand in the air. “It sounds horrible and it is horrible and I’m not trying to explain it. I’m trying to give you a rationale.”

Manuel told the judge his moods have stabilized since he discovered his manic behavior.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the heart in his chest isn’t his own.

“Without beating a dead horse, his predication of his life expectancy is very low,” Sheppard said of Manuel.

A transplant recipient starts off with a 75-percent chance of survival, the attorney said, dropping 4 percent every subsequent year.

That would put Manuel’s chances of making it through this year at less than 50 percent.

Sheppard said after the surgery, his client retired to St. Augustine.

“As Tom told me, ‘I came here to die.’”

A version of this article was printed Jan. 29, 2010, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

In the courthouse hallway, Evans’ wife, Peggy, used her cell phone to call her husband, who hadn’t returned to court after lunch to hear the verdict.

“They found you not guilty,” she said. “Please, please don’t do anything.”

He never got the message.

Minutes before the jury came into the courtroom around 3:45 p.m., Peggy Evans stood alone in the hallway sobbing.

Then a few minutes later, the bailiff announced that the jury had reached a verdict in the case of Evans, 57, a lifelong St. Augustine resident charged with sexually abusing a girl nearly three decades ago.

Evans’ attorney, Curtis Fallgatter of Jacksonville, looked around the courtroom for his client, then called him to tell him to return to court.

About 20 minutes passed before Circuit Judge J. Michael Traynor decided to bring the jury into the courtroom to announce its verdict without Evans.

The jury forewoman passed the decision to the bailiff, who then passed it to judge, who gave it to the clerk.

She read through the case number, the charge, then the verdict: “Not guilty.”

***

The case came down to not whether Evans had sexually abused the victim, but when.

Under the law, there is no statute of limitations on sexual battery on a victim younger than 12.

Specifically, Evans was charged with sexual battery between the summer of 1980 and Jan. 14, 1983, the day before his accuser turned 12.

If the victim had been 12 or older at the time, the charge would have been lewd and lascivious behavior. And for that offense, the statute of limitations had expired.

The victim, now 38 and living in Virginia, testified that she was in the second grade when she was first abused.

But the defense argued that she told investigators she remembered it starting around the time her mother had breast-implant surgery in November 1984, when she was 13.

The jury found that there was not enough compelling evidence of her age at the time of the abuse and found Evans not guilty.

The victim’s mouth dropped as she heard verdict, she turned to her husband and asked, “Not guilty?”

***

After the jury gave its verdict, the judge thanked them for their service and dismissed them. Shortly afterward, a deputy accompanied them to the elevators when a woman, a friend of the victim, walked by in the opposite direction and said to the jurors, “You’re next.”

The deputy yelled at her and the woman walked away.

***

After the ruling, Peggy Evans passed by the victim, seated with a victim advocate, the victim’s husband and a childhood friend.

Evans tilted her head and gave the four a mocking smile. The four looked at each other, and the victim asked them, “Did you see that?”

Evans walked out of the courtroom, then returned seconds later to hear the judge order deputies to find Evans and bring him to court.

A couple of minutes later, a bailiff told the judge that Evans’ truck was at his house but there was no answer at the door.

Traynor said they could force entry if need be.

“Can you tell them to not let my dog out?” Peggy Evans asked half-jokingly before leaving the courtroom.

About 10 minutes passed, during which the judge said he was considering holding the defendant in contempt of court, when a group of bailiffs barged in and approached the bench.

“Dead body,” one said.

“Dead body?” the judge asked.

***

Deputies arrived at the Evans’ home on Stokes Landing Road at 3:55 p.m., just as a 911 call came in from the residence.

Relatives had gone to the house to tell Evans he needed to go back to the courthouse. Instead, they found him dead at the rear of the house.

Fallgatter, the attorney, and family members stood around the yard along with scores of deputies and investigators.

Teary-eyed, the attorney said he had eaten lunch with Evans at the cafeteria in the Tax Collector’s Office after the court recessed for deliberation.

Evans made no indication he was going to kill himself, Fallgatter said.

But, he said, the five-year process had beaten his client down and he couldn’t handle spending the rest of life in prison, the rest of his life away from Peggy Evans.

***

St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Chuck Mulligan said at the scene that Evans died from a gunshot wound that was apparently self-inflicted.

Mulligan said he did not know what kind of gun was used or whether Evans left any indication he was going to shoot himself.

The prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Dennis Craig, declined to comment.

A statement from Assistant State Attorney Christopher Kelly said: “Regarding the events surrounding the trial of William Evans, we believe it is paramount to respect the privacy of the family at the present time. The events surrounding the trial and today had a profound effect on all involved. The facts of today’s events are still being gathered and it would be premature to comment further.”

***

Prosecutor Craig had the last word in the trial, and his rebuttal left the five women and one man on the jury with the centerpiece of his case: Evans’ “apology letter” that he had apparently written to the victim as part of counseling, eight years before he was charged.

Evans’ wife, daughter, son-in-law, sister and brother sat on the defense side of the courtroom and listened to Craig read the lurid details.

Peggy Evans hung her head.

The victim cried.

Evans took notes, as he had done most of the trial.

The letter, dated April 10, 1996, described how he was “overcome with selfish desires” when he first touched her.

After several years of taking advantage of her nightly fear of what might happen and her youthful ignorance about sex, he promised to stop.

“For a while, I kept my promise.”

Record staff writer Daron Dean contributed to this report. A version of this article was printed Aug. 28, 2009, on Page 1A of both The Florida Times-Union and The St. Augustine Record.

A father wasn’t aware that his 23-month-old daughter was in the back seat of his car when he got home from dropping off his girlfriend, the girl’s mother, at work? It didn’t dawn on him to check her crib? He could doze off without knowing where his baby was?

While investigators are still scrutinizing the facts in Long’s case, his story at face value is a tough sell to anyone who hasn’t been in his spot.

But the unfathomable act — accident or not — of leaving a child in a car to suffer a sweltering death happens more these days than most would care to believe. Still, prosecutors and cops, and at times judges and juries, are left to answer a simple question: Mustn’t someone pay?

***

Between Jan. 1 and July 1 of this year, 13 other children died the same way Arianna Long died — from a 4-month-old in Milwaukee to a 3-year-old in Warwick, R.I.

There are differences in the details — the temperatures outside, the makes and models of the vehicles, the socioeconomic status of their parents. Yet they all died the same tragic death: overheating in a car because an adult forgot them.

Vehicular hyperthermia is a relatively new phenomenon, said Janette Fennell, the founder and president of Kids and Cars, a Kansas-based nonprofit organization that tracks automobile-related pediatric deaths and injuries.

Parents’ attention spans are increasingly divided, Fennell said.

And, ironically, for safety reasons, young children nowadays most always ride in the back seat, where they’re more likely to be overlooked.

She only knows Long’s case from what she has read. She knows he’s been charged in his child’s death, but she hasn’t drawn any conclusions.

In general, she says, these cases come down to an absent-minded, otherwise-loving parent who made a horrible mistake.

“Every situation has to stand on its own facts, and every case is different,” she said. “I think for me the big turning point is: Was this intentional or was this unintentional?”

***

On Saturday, Long’s girlfriend, parents, sisters, stepbrother, friends, ex-wife and former mother-in-law, among others, stood near the corner of state roads 207 and 312, holding signs supporting Omar and asking for his release.

William Montgomery, Long’s stepfather and the pastor of Deliverance Time Ministries in Jacksonville, said Omar, 30, is a caring and careful parent. Long calls Montgomery every time he is with one of Omar’s children, just to make sure everything’s OK.

“That’s the type of person he was,” Montgomery said.

“He is,” Long’s mother and his wife, Yvette Montgomery, quickly interjected.

“That he is,” her husband said.

Sonya Mackey, of Hastings, and Long were married for a few years, and the couple had a daughter, Jasmine. Now 11, Jasmine stood with Long’s family Saturday as her mother held her sign that read, “My Dad is a good Dad.”

Mackey said that though as a couple they didn’t work out, he was a good father.

“He was the best dad anybody could have,” she said. “He’s a good person.”

***

Lashondia Anderson, Long’s 22-year-old girlfriend and the mother of Arianna and 5-year-old Omar Long Jr., was subdued, quietly holding a sign that read, “I’m Arianna’s mom and I know he loved her!”

Anderson said Long had worked at Harry’s, a downtown seafood restaurant, until the early hours of June 14. He then spent several hours with friends before coming home.

At about 6 a.m. she carried Arianna out to Long’s 2006 Dodge Charger. Like he had many times before, Long drove her to work at Flagler Hospital.

She recalled that during the drive from their St. Augustine South home — only about a mile and a half — Long dozed off at a stoplight. The beeping from his radar detector woke him, and he drove on.

At the hospital, Anderson got out, opened the rear passenger-side door and gave Arianna a kiss.

At about noon, Seritia Montgomery woke up to a quiet house.

She and her husband, William Montgomery Jr., live with Long, her husband’s stepbrother, so she was accustomed to being woken early by the two children.

But she had been able to sleep in that morning. She told police that was unusual, so she went looking for Arianna.
She looked in her crib and around the house. She saw Long asleep on the couch but could not find the child.

She went outside and saw the Charger parked in the driveway with the engine running, according to a police report.

Arianna was sitting atop the center armrest in the back seat, but the doors were locked. She went inside yelling for Long. He ran out and ran back in to get a spare key, she told police.

It was too late. Arianna was blue. She wasn’t breathing.

***

On June 26, Long, with his attorney, walked into the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office to meet with detectives.

That night he was charged with manslaughter and child neglect, both second-degree felonies punishable by 15 years in prison. He was also charged with probation violation.

As of Saturday night, he remained at the county jail on $500,000 bond. (Even if the bond wasn’t set so high, he wouldn’t be able to get out before July 13, when he is scheduled for an arraignment on the probation violation charge.)

So far this year, five children in Florida have died after they were left in cars.

Of those, only two people have been charged: Long and Elizabeth Cuesta, a 39-year-old Miami woman who unintentionally left her 18-month-old son in her truck when she went to work. Cuesta was charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child, a first-degree felony, and was released on $10,000 bond.

In the three other cases, the State Attorney’s Office and detectives are coordinating to determine whether to file charges.

R.J. Larizza, the state attorney for Flagler, Putnam, St. Johns and Volusia counties, said he didn’t have much comment about the case.

He acknowledged that it didn’t appear Long intended to harm his daughter.

“It’s not like someone went out and intentionally shot somebody,” Larizza said. “It’s a terrible tragedy anytime a child dies, and, especially under those types of circumstances, it could have been avoided.”

***

After Long was arrested, a number of comments were posted to the subsequent stories on The Record’s Web site.

One reader wrote: “This man should be locked into a car, and left for as long as it takes for him to die…there is NO EXCUSE for this!!! Even if he is the father, and regrets and mourns his daughter, how could he have not known she was in that car? He should die in exactly the same manner as that poor child did.”

Most comments weren’t so extreme, but many implied Long should be punished.

Fennell, from the Kids and Cars organization, said the lack of empathy is understandable.

“It is so horrific, it’s so unthinkable, that the people that make those comments are trying to distance themselves from thinking this could ever happen to them,” she said. “That is the biggest mistake that people make. Anyone that thinks this can’t happen to them is at the most danger.”

***

The number of hyperthermia cases rose steadily since the mid-1990s, when parents increasingly began putting their children in back seats in response to the spike in air bag-related deaths. According to an Associated Press analysis of more than 300 such cases between 1998 and 2007, charges were filed 49 percent of the time.

Half of those charges had resulted in jail time at the time of the study, but sentences varied depending on who was responsible.

Paid caregivers were charged 84 percent of the time, and 96 percent of those were convicted.

The median sentence was 12 months.

Parents were slightly less likely to be charged than the caregivers, the study found, but the median sentence was considerably higher: 4.5 years.

It also depended on which parent was charged.

Mothers were jailed in 59 percent of cases, while 47 percent of fathers were. Also, the median sentence for mothers was five years but three for dads.

“We follow the whole country,” Fennell said, “and it’s amazing how differently these cases are treated. You can even call it day and night.”

***

Yvette Montgomery, Long’s mother who also is a minister with Deliverance Time, said even some among her family blame her son and want to see him punished.

Tension had been so high that police officers were standing by at Arianna’s funeral.

On the street in front of The Record building Saturday, the family was hoping to get both media attention and the attention of passers-by to tell everyone they could that their boyfriend, brother, son, ex-husband and friend was a good man and a doting father who made a mistake that he will never stop paying for.

“I’m hoping to get to where he’s hearing things other than that he’s just a murderer,” Montgomery said.

As they stood on the side of the road, a man stuck his upper torso out of the passenger-side window of a passing car, held out his fist and yelled, “That’s what I’m talking about,” responding to the dozen or so people holding signs supporting Long.

Montgomery didn’t recognize the man, and she gave a little chuckle at the man’s inflection and demeanor. Still, the support, any support, meant the world.

A version of this article was printed July 5, 2009, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

His remains are in a box placed in the Medical Examiner’s Office.

There have been no grieving family members, no flowers, no wakes. Nothing.

Even if there were a grave and a proper burial, the tombstone would be blank, and the clergyman wouldn’t know whose soul he was blessing.

After more than eight months since a fellow transient came upon the man’s skeleton, investigators still haven’t come up with a name.

The man’s lonesome death is a sobering symbol of just how vulnerable — emotionally and physically — homeless people are.

“We’ve done everything we can possibly think of to identify him,” Kevin Roberts, a St. Johns County sheriff’s detective, said recently.

Detectives interviewed members of the homeless community, an autopsy was conducted, and the man’s bones were sent to the University of Florida for an anthropologist to study.

Transients gave a few names of people who might be missing, the autopsy revealed the man’s death was natural, and the anthropologist narrowed it down to a Hispanic male between the ages of 25 and 35. None of the names panned out, and no one with a similar description has been reported missing.

Usually homeless people carry some form of identification or their fingerprints are in some sort of database, and thus they can usually be identified in a matter of weeks or even days. But to be eight months along and out of options is as distressing as it is perplexing.

“We can’t give them a proper burial; we can’t notify the family,” Roberts said. “We can’t tell them now because we don’t know ourselves.”

‘Scattered about’
In the muggy afternoon of June 24, David Worley was walking along a pathway through a patch of woods east of The St. Augustine Record building on State Road 312. Worley, now 51, was looking for aluminum cans to cash in when an odor struck him. He looked down, saw a smattering of bones and went to get a police officer.

The body was about 50 yards into the woods, just off the pathway that leads to a transient camp. A pair of gray tennis shoes and a Wal-Mart bag containing Bic razor blades and toothpaste were nearby.

The body had been there for several weeks and had become so badly decomposed in the Florida summer that detectives couldn’t tell the sex of the deceased. Maggots were crawling through a hand.

“There were large black feathers from a bird scattered around the remains as if a bird had been feeding on the remains,” a deputy wrote in a police report. “It appeared a large animal also fed on the remains, as they were not intact and were scattered about.”

During the autopsy, the medical examiner found a pin in the man’s left hip. The UF anthropologist examined it and found that it didn’t have a serial number, meaning it was likely inserted before the early 1990s, when prosthetics were first required to carry serial numbers.

Everyday struggle
Renee’ Morris, the executive director of the St. Francis House in Lincolnville, said she has thought about the John Doe every day since he was found in the woods.

Morris said it is difficult to cope with the thought that the organization could have helped him.

She knows “little, tiny St. Francis House cannot solve the homeless problem” and cannot save every homeless person who comes through St. Johns County. Still, John Doe’s death is a reminder to her that, for the county’s homeless, there are a lot of vital programs and services that they can’t access.

For starters, she said, a detoxification clinic would help get them sober.

“That’s a big beginning for a lot of people,” she said.

Morris, who has been planning to build a bigger, one-stop center to service the homeless population, said there is also a need for more housing and more general medical care.

“That’s what we’re moving toward,” she said, “so that man doesn’t have to die in the woods by himself.”

Some detractors have said the center could serve as a magnet, bringing more homeless to the county.

“People say, ‘Build it and they will come,’” she said. “Well, honey, they’re already here.”

The 2008 homelessness study from the Florida Department of Children and Families estimated there were 1,238 homeless people in St. Johns County, roughly half of the homeless population in Duval County.

In the meantime, Morris said, “You wonder who’s going to be next.”

‘Nobody to miss ‘em’
The man’s clothes were gathered up along with his bones and were submitted as evidence.

The medical examiner cataloged what he had on: Puritan brand shorts, possibly gray or tan, size small; red plaid boxer shorts, size medium; and a T-shirt, size unknown, with “COLLEGE” across the chest, similar to the sweater John Belushi wore in the 1978 film “Animal House.”

Like the man’s bones at the Medical Examiner’s Office, the clothes are undisturbed in an evidence room at the Sheriff’s Office.

Roberts and his fellow detectives have changed the man’s case to “inactive.” He said there’s little else they can do but wait and hope someone will realize the man is missing and set out to find him. Until then, it’s almost like he never existed.

“It’s a tough life, for a lack of better way of putting it — then ultimately to pass and nobody to miss ‘em.”

A version of this article was printed March 11, 2009, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

He punched her in the face two or three times, knocking her out, then choked her until he heard a “pop” in her throat. Then he let go.

“I had no control and when I was — when I was swinging, it was not me, it was — it’s not the Ben I’ve ever known, it was not me,” he said, according to the 121-page transcript of Lightsey’s confession that was released Friday. “It’s not the Ben that my wife knew, it’s not the Ben anybody in this world knows, because I’ve never seen him before.”

He checked her pulse and found nothing. He stood, looked around and made sure no one had seen what he had done.

Because her head was bloody, he put her in the bed of the truck. Then he drove off.

A boater found her body in the St. Augustine Inlet about 3 p.m. the next day, some 15 hours after her husband and father of her two children took her life and threw her body into the ocean off Vilano Beach.

He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Feb. 10 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He is currently at the prison in Lake Butler.

The story began on Nov. 8, when Ben, now 31, and Melissa attended a wedding and the reception at A1A Ale Works.

He drank wine and she drank wine and cosmopolitans. They were “relaxing,” he said, having a good time. She’d mingle with friends and come back, sit on his lap and they’d kiss.

Later, though, he got a feeling that his wife might be doing drugs with her friends. He had told his wife that for the sake of their kids, they can’t mess with that stuff.

He watched her go into the bathroom with a friend. He followed them in and could hear noises in the stall on the left. He opened the door and saw them with cocaine, grabbed his wife by the hair and dragged her out of the bathroom, out of the restaurant and into his truck.

“She was crying, because — you know, and I was furious,” Lightsey told detectives.

As they got closer to their home on North Horseshoe Road, Melissa was “pulling on me or something with this shoulder and I reached over and I hit her with the back of my hand.”

She jumped into the backseat or he forced her into it. He couldn’t remember which.

He pulled into the driveway and the rage took hold.

A previous history
At least one other woman had known the angry Ben who killed his wife.

In 2004, his girlfriend filed for a restraining order against him after he’d dragged her out of his house by her hair and spit Sprite in her face, court records showed. He later called and threatened to kill her and her new boyfriend.

“I am in fear of my life from this crazy man,” the woman wrote.

Melissa’s friends and family said there were no signs the couple had a violent relationship, but they said Ben could be controlling and mentally abusive.

The night of Melissa’s death, he held her lifeless body in the water and talked to her:

“I probably held her for probably 10 or 12 minutes and talked to her and just told her goodbye and told her I know she’s in heaven and I know her spirit’s already left her body, but I wanted to hold on to her anyway.”

He got back into his truck and drove to his parents’ house on State Road 16. He told his father, Glenn Lightsey, he had done “something wrong” and needed money, that they wouldn’t see him for a couple of years.

He planned to go to Cuba or somewhere, he later told detectives.

“At that point I probably would have hung myself from a tree somewhere,” he said.

While being held at the St. Johns County jail following his arrest Nov. 18, he tried to hang himself with a towel on four occasions.

The cover-up
Ben, fighting grief, later asked detectives if they were pursuing charges against his father, who took him to see an attorney that morning and later called the Sheriff’s Office to report Melissa missing.

Ben said he did not tell his father what he had done. He’d said they’d gotten into a fight at Surfside Park and he didn’t know what happened to her.

But, that morning Glenn stopped his truck near a Dumpster, Ben said. Ben got out and put his socks and shirt into a cereal box and threw it into the Dumpster.

A deputy who responded to Surfside at about 7 a.m. to take the missing person’s report smelled alcohol on Ben and told him he had better write down what he could remember so he didn’t forget it.

Later, investigators found a handwritten note in Ben’s truck detailing the story he fabricated for police.

At Ben’s sentencing, his attorney, Patrick Canan of St. Augustine, told the judge that Ben hoped to speak with his wife’s family. Ben wanted to tell them how sorry he was, Canan said, but that meeting has not happened.

He said it was obvious from the beginning that his client was guilty of something, but added that Ben might have faced a manslaughter charge had he not tried to cover his tracks like he did that morning.

“That wasn’t coming from his heart, that was coming from his brain,” Canan said, “and all of that, it was a poor attempt at covering up the facts, and all of that ended up harming him in the end.”

The aftermath
Ben and Melissa’s young children, Sunny, 3, and Zane, 16 months, are in the custody of Ben’s parents.

Ben will have to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence — 21 years and three months — before he can see them outside of a prison gate.

Even after he gets out, though, he will probably always replay that night in his head.

“I wish to God to this day that I had got a DUI or I had hit a light pole,” Ben told the detectives. “I wish to God I had hit a light pole, I had run off the bridge, I had done something. I wish something would have happened to keep me from driving home that night. I wished I had hit a cop car. I wished I had hit a pole and went flying through the windshield and died. I wish what did happen didn’t happen.”

A version of this article was printed Feb. 22, 2009, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

A producer removed the earpiece from Sheffield’s ear, and then she broke down into her sister’s arms.

She seemed to say the words, “Where is she?” If she didn’t say them, they were undoubtedly on her mind.

Sheffield’s 5-year-old daughter, Haleigh Ann-Marie Cummings, was reported missing Tuesday morning from her father’s home here, an unincorporated hamlet about 10 miles south of Palatka.

Less than 12 hours after Haleigh went missing, a memorial was held in Orlando for Caylee Marie Anthony, the slain 3-year-old whose mother has been charged with first-degree murder.

Caylee’s case has been national news since she was reported missing in June. By Thursday, Haleigh’s story also had garnered nationwide attention, giving Sheffield, a 23-year-old from Glen St. Mary in Baker County, an outlet to show her daughter’s picture to the world but denying her a moment to be alone with her thoughts.

About 20 television-satellite trucks and scores of reporters, photographers, cameramen and producers — from as far away as South Florida and Atlanta — assembled on a lot not far from where Haleigh lives with her father, Ronald Cummings, waiting for any kind of update from authorities. (By press time nothing had changed; Haleigh was still missing.)

Putnam County Sheriff’s Office Capt. Steve Rose walked between the rows of vehicles Thursday afternoon, dispelling a rumor that a sex offender had confessed to kidnapping the girl.

Rose, whose charge it is to deal with members of the media, said he has fielded calls from all of the major television networks. Earlier, the sheriff made appearances on a number of the morning shows.

Sheffield’s 21-year-old sister, Sarah Sheffield, and her mother, Marie Griffis, walked with her between the trucks after the Fox interview when they were stopped by a West Palm Beach-based TV news crew.

Sarah Sheffield asked that they not ask about the past between her sister and Cummings, as some already had.

“We’re not concerned about what has happened,” Sheffield said. “We’re just concerned about getting Haleigh back.”

She understood why reporters would ask about custodial or abuse issues but said those things would not help find the girl.

She wore a button with Haleigh’s picture on her tank top. Her sister wore three on her green shirt.

Norman Lewis, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Florida, said the attention news gatherers and news consumers give to stories such as Caylee’s death or Haleigh’s disappearance is an understandable extension of “all of our fears as parents.”

While the “presence of journalists may, on the surface, seem unseemly,” they play an important role, gathering information and getting it out to the public, Lewis said.

But that role of telling a story can flirt with becoming a menace.

After studying the Virginia Tech community’s reaction to the media’s presence in the wake of the 2007 campus massacre, Lewis found a universal sense among students and residents that they couldn’t wait until the throng of reporters and cameras left town.

In the hours after the bloodshed, a TV crew tracked down a victim at a hospital to get an interview. After that first one, he spent several hours talking with reporters, telling his story of being shot over and over.

CNN commentator Nancy Grace conducted interviews with Crystal Sheffield and Griffis, her mother, during the course of her show Thursday night, hours after they told the same story to Fox.

Instead of asking victims to repeatedly talk about the horror they’re living in, Lewis said, media outlets should assign a pool reporter and share the footage so to not burden the family.

“It can create an atmosphere that infringes and impinges upon that healing process,” Lewis said.

Outside of the subdivision, the Sheffield family gathered near a white fence with supporters and police staff. A stuffed Mickey Mouse was propped against the fence under a sign that read, “Our prayers are with you Haleigh.”

Above the fence, antennae from a number of the satellite trucks were visible, beaming Haleigh’s face into millions of American homes.

“We just want to get her back,” Sarah Sheffield said as her sister, mother and father started to walk away, toward the next interview.

A version of this article was printed Feb. 13, 2009, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

At noon a TV commentator chimed in over the sound of a cello and said of Obama: “He is now the president of the United States.” Obama had not yet taken the oath of office, but President George W. Bush’s term had ended, as per the 20th Amendment to the Constitution.

On the Plaza de la Constitucion the crowd erupted at the news.

Louise Williams sat in a folding chair and wore a wide smile and damp eyes and shook her head as if in disbelief.

Williams, who has lived in St. Augustine since she was 5, later said she didn’t think she would see the day when a black man would take the helm of the nation. Not after witnessing the Civil Rights struggle in her hometown. Not after being spat upon as she walked around that very plaza some four decades ago.

“Never. Never. Never,” she said. Even on Monday she had doubts it would really happen.

But it did.

While Obama indirectly derided the Bush administration in his speech, there was not a lot of policy talk on the plaza.

There were a few groans when the Rev. Rick Warren was announced to give the invocation and quite a bit of applause when Obama mentioned a renewed dedication to science. Still, the crowd mostly appeared to be appreciating the moment.

Sam Aintablian watched the ceremony from the student center at Flagler College, where he is a senior studying sport management.

The 21-year-old Pasadena, Calif., native wore a black T-shirt adorned with Obama’s face and carried Tuesday’s edition of USA Today with a banner headline declaring, “Obama takes power.” Aintablian said he thought about his grandmother in California and was thankful she lived to witness the occasion.

John Young, an assistant professor of history at Flagler, spent his lunch break watching Obama speak with his wife, Alicia, a stay-at-home mom, and their four children.

Alicia Young said while she was happy her children could get a glimpse of the historic transfer of power, she was mostly hopeful that at some point, when her children are older, they won’t give a second thought about the magnitude of the election of a black president.

Herman Lewis, a 54-year-old Hastings resident and a patient-care technician at Flagler Hospital, brought two of his younger children downtown. Like Young, Lewis said he wants his children to take away something from Obama’s victory, mainly the belief that they can do anything. If the son of an African immigrant father who was raised by a single, poor mother and his grandparents, then anyone can do anything.

Now, he said, race can’t be a deterrent for them because racial barriers don’t exist like they did, when slaves were sold at the market or police needed to be present when St. Augustine Beach was integrated.

“It’s not the black race or the white race,” Lewis said. “It’s the human race.”

A version of this article was printed Jan. 21, 2009, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

On Friday, she started planning. The news that Mark Dean Aldridge had been sent back had been a long time coming for Jordan.

“We can finally say now that we have a little bit of closure,” she said. “As much as we could get.”

She plans to extend an invitation to the whole community for the family’s celebration.

Just in time for Christmas, Mark Dean Aldridge arrived at the state prison in Pearl, Miss., on Sunday to be processed into the state’s prison system one more time.

In October, Aldridge confessed to killing Eva Lewis — Jordan’s mother and a St. Augustine gas station clerk. He reportedly had hoped to serve his time in Florida rather than his then-residence, Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, where inmates live without air-conditioning and are required to work on its farm.

Those hopes died Dec. 12, when a St. Johns County court judge sentenced him to life in prison in Florida — but only after he finishes his sentence in Mississippi, set to end on April 8, 2156, three months after his 199th birthday.

Lewis, 59, had worked at the station for more than 16 years and was working alone when Aldridge entered the store the morning of Nov. 27, 2001.

He shot her in a storage room (though he contends he tripped and accidentally fired the gun) before leaving with about $200 from the register.

He was arrested in Kansas less than a week later on unrelated charges.

Steven Jordan, one of Sandra Jordan’s older brothers, said he “couldn’t be more happy” after she told him that Aldridge had been shipped back.

In 2005, two men were wrongfully accused of killing Lewis and spent 18 months in the St. Johns County jail before the charges were dropped.

Other than that 530-day span, Lewis’ children had spent the past seven years not knowing who shot and killed their mother that morning. That was until Aldridge stepped forward, apparently hoping to be rewarded for his candor.

In the end, his confession was all for naught — at least for himself.

“It kind of puts your mind at ease to some point,” Steven Jordan said. “It won’t bring her back, but at least we know.”

As for Aldridge, knowing that he will likely die in a Mississippi prison gives Jordan about as much satisfaction as possible.

“He’s got to answer one more time yet,” he said. “That will be the most gratifying to me.”

A version of this article was printed Dec. 27, 2008, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.

His young life, mired in the St. Augustine drug scene and marred by drug addictions, should have ended on Oct. 3 at the Lil’ Champ gas station just south of the airport, when a U.S. marshal fired three rounds from his Glock 22 at him, hitting Stanton right below his right eye.

And Stanton would be dead had it not been for a freak coincidence from three years earlier, when he was jumped in Lincolnville, a few blocks from his home.

A man approached him, asked for $5, and when Stanton, 17 at the time, said he didn’t have any money, the man attacked.

Several bones in face were broken, and surgeons had to put in a metal plate into the right side of his face — the exact spot the marshal’s bullet hit would hit three years later. If not for that, he would have been killed.

Whether Stanton, who was unarmed and didn’t have a violent record, deserved to be shot — thus, die — that night is less certain.

***

As with a majority of police-involved shootings in the state, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was called upon to investigate.

Two weeks ago the department released its findings, ruling the shooting justified.

According to interviews with the officers included in a summary of the investigation, Deputy Marshal Scotty Cargile was standing 10 feet in front of Stanton’s bumper as it hit the patrol car.

Cargile said he then saw Stanton put the car in drive and accelerated forward in his “immediate direction.”

He could not retreat, he said, because the gas-pump island was “obstructing safe passage.”

“Cargile did not have an option to use less-lethal force to stop the immediate threat that Stanton posed,” the report stated.

He fired three times.

Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police violence and pursuits, said without knowing exactly what happened it is difficult to say whether the shooting truly was justified.

“The question is, was this guy a threat?” Alpert said.

“If he’s an objectionably reasonable threat to the officer’s life, they’re justified in taking his,” he said. But if he’s not, “deadly force would not be justified.”

The fact that Stanton was not armed does not remove him from any culpability if, in fact, his Buick was heading right for a police officer who had no outlet, save for his gun, he said.

But Stanton has said he didn’t put the car in drive and wasn’t accelerating toward any officers.

He told FDLE investigators that he put the vehicle into reverse to flee the parking lot after he saw the marshals.

“Stanton did not look behind him as he was backing up,” the report stated.

No mention of whether Stanton put the car in drive was made in the summary of his interview, which was shorter than any of the summaries of the interviews with the officers involved or with the civilians who were there.

Alpert said in these kinds of investigations, a “blue shield can go up,” meaning the police will protect their own. He by no means suggested that was true in this case.

But a way to avoid the “blue shield” — or the perception of one — is to assemble panels of police and civilians to review police-involved shootings, he said.

“Everyone needs oversight.”

***

In Stanton’s early teens, he got involved in drugs, a harbinger of what was to come years later, at least according to Alpert’s research that showed 90 percent of shooting deaths, police-involved or not, are related to drugs and gangs.

“If you’re not involved in gangs and drugs your chances of being shot are very small,” Alpert said.

Stanton was arrested and locked up for a year in a juvenile detention center in the Panhandle. He got his GED there, and when he got out he no longer needed school. His mother, Sue Ellen Stanton, said that was a mistake, as he was too young to get a decent job.

He was essentially a full-time truant.

Stanton said she knows her son has his made his fair share of mistakes, too.

And it was those mistakes that led to the point when, on Oct. 3, a fugitive taskforce assembled to bring him in. There were warrants for his arrest on charges of sale of cocaine, violating probation and aggravated assault.

But despite his transgressions, she believes her son is a good, if wayward, person who didn’t deserve to be killed that night.

“He is very grateful to God to be alive,” she said, “and he knows that if he had not been mugged when he was 17 years old he would not be.”

***

On Dec. 11 Stanton was in a St. Johns County courtroom for his sentencing hearing.

Like the shooting itself, it could have been much worse.

He was given five years in a plea deal in which he pleaded no contest to sale of cocaine, fleeing police, violating probation and criminal mischief and not guilty to aggravated assault on a police officer.

“I made a lot of poor decisions in my life,” he told the judge, saying he was high on ecstasy that night. “But on the aggravated assault, I didn’t know there was an officer behind me. If I did I wouldn’t have put the car in reverse and backed up.”

Still, he said, he should have turned himself in knowing that there were warrants for his arrest.

“I’d like to apologize for it, and God opened up my eyes,” he said. “I got shot for it and they say they lost me three times on the way to the hospital. And it’s time for me take some changes.”

At the sentencing, his attorney, Mark S. Barnett, of Jacksonville, said, “Andrew, it’s time to grow up. Do you think you’re going to do that?”

“Yes, sir,” Stanton replied, knowing he should be dead, a fact that might ultimately save his life.

A version of this article was printed Dec. 21, 2008, on Page 1A of The St. Augustine Record.