Your worst fear.. A BLACK MAN WHO LOVES HIMSELF

Jack Reid, 17, a student at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey took his own life after being bullied by other students

A year after his death a school statement recognizes the failure of the school to protect Jack noting how inaction by teaching staff contributed to his death

School has committed to taking corrective actions including appointing a new dean who will be responsible for dealing with mental health issues 

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources 

An elite New Jersey boarding school has admitted that 'more should have been done' after a student took his own life in his dorm room following a year of bullying by his peers.

Jack Reid, 17, attended The Lawrenceville School, between Trenton and Princeton, where tuition is $76,000 a year. 

He died on April 30, 2022, but in the 12 months leading up to his death he had become the victim of a vicious bullying campaign that consisted of cruel and malicious rumors that labelled him as a campus rapist. 

The rumors were made up by fellow students and were said to Jack both in person and posted anonymously online thereby spreading the story beyond the campus walls.

During a secret Santa gift exchange among his classmates, Jack was given a rape whistle together with a book about how to make friends.

Although school staff were made aware of the bullying, the school has now admitted make an extraordinary admission of failure on the anniversary of Jack's death. 

'There were steps that the School should in hindsight have taken but did not,' the school wrote in a lengthy statement. 

Most damning of all is the fact the school did not make a public or private statement that it had in fact investigated the rape and found the rumors about Jack and the entire story to be completely untrue. 

Neither Jack not his parents were ever told that he had been exonerated over the claims.

The school's officials have now admitted that they were aware of the bullying, but fell short in their obligation to protect him. 

In a frank, honest and heart-wrenching admission the school, which ranks among the nation's top boarding schools, believes Jack's death could have been prevented and stated how 'there also were circumstances in which the involvement of an adult would have made a difference.'  

'As we seek to improve as a community, we have examined our role and take responsibility for what we could have done differently. Lawrenceville's top priority is the physical, social, and emotional health, safety, and wellbeing of our students. We recognize that in Jack's case, we fell tragically short of these expectations,' the statement read. 

'Jack was universally regarded as an extremely kind and good-hearted young man, with an unwavering sense of social and civic responsibility and a bright future. We continue to mourn this loss,' the school wrote in the statement noting how a settlement had been reached with his parents, William and Elizabeth Reid.

The agreement requires the school, which hosts 830 students, to undertake a series of corrective actions, including creating a new dean's position that will focus on mental health issues, with the goal of becoming a model for anti-bullying and student mental health. 

'We feel like we both have life sentences without the possibility of parole,' Jack's mother, Dr. Elizabeth Reid, a clinical psychologist, said to the New York Times.

'The only thing I'd love to change here is to get Jack back. I can't. I do know if he were alive, he would want me — both of us — to try to make something good out of this and honor him in the way he lived his life.'

'We think bullying, with the 1,000 times echo chamber of the internet and everybody knowing, is much more devastating to kids and, in Jack's case, produced a very impulsive act,' dad, William Reid said. 

'He had to escape the pain from the humiliation he was feeling.' 

The school explained how after a student who previously had been disciplined for bullying Jack was expelled for an unrelated violation of school rules, Jack was allowed to return the school but was left largely unsupervised where students gathered.

'Some harsh words were said about Jack,' the school revealed adding that administrators did not notify or check on Jack once he was back on campus.

Later that night, Jack, who was a Dean's list student, took his own life, telling a friend that he could not go through the ordeal again. 

He had a bible in one pocket of his gym shorts, as well as a note directing his parents to a Google document, in which he described his helplessness.  

Carol Robinson | [email protected]

A 23-year-old Birmingham woman has been convicted in the 2021 death of an innocent motorist who was killed during a street racing crash.

A Jefferson County jury found Carmesia Flannigan guilty of reckless manslaughter.

Killed in the March 21, 2021, incident was 52-year-old Brandy Ballard.

Flannigan took the stand in her own defense, saying she didn’t mean to kill anyone.

Ballard, a home health care worker and grandmother of five, was on her way to work just after 6 a.m. that Sunday when authorities say her 2007 Ford Focus was struck by a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro that crossed over the center lane of traffic.

Police and coroner’s officials said investigators believe the Camaro was racing another vehicle at the time of the deadly crash. The crash happened at 6:10 a.m. and Ballard was pronounced dead four minutes later. She was just two blocks from her home.

Flannigan was arrested the day after the deadly accident on charges of murder, leaving the scene of an accident with injury and unlawful possession of a controlled substance. She was released the following day after posting $175,000 bond.

The charges of leaving the scene and possession of drugs were dismissed.

“(Deputy district attorney) Misty Reynolds and I felt like we had a strong case for extreme indifference murder, but the jury chose to convict of a lesser charge and we respect the jury’s verdict,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Joe L. Roberts.

At the time of her initial arrest, she was already awaiting trial on a first-degree domestic violence charge from earlier in the year and a burglary charge from 2020.

Following her release from jail after her initial arrest, Flannigan posted two separate Facebook Live videos laced with expletives blaming Ballard for the crash.

“That old ass lady swerved in my lane,’’ Flannigan said on the video. The videos were deleted from Facebook but were posted to YouTube and has had thousands of views.

Once her bond was revoked, Flannigan was taken into custody in April. She was captured in Atlanta by U.S. Marshals and extradited to Alabama.

Flannigan has been held in the Jefferson County Jail since her April 13, 2021, arrest.

A sentencing date has been set before Judge Pulliam for Nov. 28.

BY PENELOPE GREEN NEW YORK TIMES

In the winter of 2003, Norah Vincent, a 35-year-old journalist, began to practice passing as a man.

With the help of a makeup artist, she learned to simulate stubble by snipping bits of wool and painting them on her chin. She wore her hair, already short, cut in a flattop and bought rectangular framed glasses, to accentuate the angles of her face. She weight-trained to build up the muscles in her chest and back, bound her breasts with a too-small sports bra and wore a jock strap stuffed with a soft prosthetic penis.

She trained for months at the Julliard School in New York with a vocal coach, who taught her to deepen her voice and slow it down, to lean back as she spoke rather than leaning in, and to use her breath more efficiently. Then she ventured out to live as a man for 18 months, calling herself Ned, and to chronicle the experience.

She did so in "Self-Made Man," and when the book came out in 2006, it was a nearly instant bestseller. It made Vincent a media darling; she appeared on "20/20" and on "The Colbert Report," where she and Stephen Colbert teased each other about football and penis size.

But the book was no joke. It was a nuanced and thoughtful work. It drew comparisons to "Black Like Me," white journalist John Howard Griffin's 1961 book about his experiences passing as a Black man in the segregated Deep South. David Kamp, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Vincent's book "rich and audacious."

Vincent died July 6 at a clinic in Switzerland. She was 53. Her death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed Thursday by Justine Hardy, a friend. The death, she said, was medically assisted, or what is known as a voluntary assisted death.

Vincent was a lesbian. She was not transgender or gender-fluid. She was, however, interested in gender and identity. As a freelance contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice and The Advocate, she had written essays on those topics that inflamed some readers.

In her year and a half living as Ned, Vincent put him in a number of stereotypical, hypermasculine situations. He joined a blue-collar bowling league, although he was a terrible bowler. (His teammates were kind and cheered him on; they thought he was gay, Vincent learned later, because they thought he bowled like a girl.)

He spent weeks in a monastery with cloistered monks. He went to strip clubs and dated women, although he was rebuffed more often than not in singles bars. He worked in sales, hustling coupon books and other low-margin products door-todoor with fellow salesmen who, with their cartoon bravado, seemed drawn from the 1983 David Mamet play "Glengarry Glen Ross."

Finally, at an Iron John retreat, a therapeutic masculinity workshop – think drum circles and hero archetypes – modeled on the work of men's movement author Robert Bly, Ned began to lose it. Being Ned had worn Vincent down; she felt alienated and dissociated, and after the retreat she checked herself into a hospital for depression.

She was suffering, she wrote, for the same reason that many of the men she met were suffering: Their assigned gender roles, she found, were suffocating them and alienating them from themselves.

Norah Mary Vincent was born Sept. 20, 1968, in Detroit. Her mother, Juliet (Randall) Ford, was an actor; her father, Robert Vincent, was a lawyer for the Ford Motor Co. The youngest of three, Vincent grew up in Detroit and London, where her father was posted for a while.

She studied philosophy at Williams College in Massachusetts, where at 21 she realized she was a lesbian, she told the Times in 2001, when her contrarian freelance columns began drawing fire. She spent 11 years as a graduate student in philosophy at Boston College and worked as an assistant editor at the Free Press, a publishing house that before it folded in 2012 put out books on religion and social science and had, in the 1980s, a neoconservative bent. Vincent's first work of fiction was "Thy Neighbor" (2012), a dark, comic thriller about an unemployed alcoholic writer who begins spying on his neighbors while trying to solve the mystery of his parents' murder-suicide: voyeurism as a means to self-knowledge.

Editor's Note: This initial version of this article incorrectly referred to Robin Niceta as a social worker, rather than a child protective caseworker. Her job description has been corrected throughout the article.

A former Colorado child protection caseworker faces charges on accusations that she filed a false report of child abuse against an elected official — and now, a new lawsuit alleges she tried to take away the children of women who resisted her sexual advances.

Robin Niceta, 40, faces a felony charge of retaliation against an elected official, as well as a misdemeanor charge of making a false report of child abuse as a mandatory reporter. Police say that the alleged offenses happened when Niceta worked in the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services.

According to a criminal complaint, Niceta called the Department of Human Services anonymously to report that a local councilwoman, Danielle Jurinsky, sexually abused her own son in the presence of her employees.

The criminal complaint alleges that Niceta used a personal phone to make the call, and that authorities investigated the case and found that the allegations were untrue.

Authorities believe that Niceta made the call after Jurinsky appeared on a local radio show and called for the firing of the Aurora Police Chief, who was Niceta's girlfriend at the time.

After the allegations were made, Niceta resigned from her job. She has been released from jail on $4,000 bond and has not yet entered a plea.

But things have gotten worse for Niceta. After Jurinsky filed a civil lawsuit against Niceta and the Arapahoe County Department of Human Services, several other women came forward, alleging that Niceta, when a county child protective caseworker, would lure them in, make sexual advances towards them, and when the advances were rejected, Niceta would try to take their children away.

The attorney for Jurinsky has filed documents asking for a class-action suit for "well over 40 persons" whose families were affected by Niceta's alleged actions.

According to the lawsuit, which was obtained by PEOPLE, all the alleged victims "experienced nearly identical conduct, including being investigated based on false allegations ... and being subject to Defendants' unconstitutional attempts to separate her from her child."

In an interview with KDVR-TV, attorney Elliott Singer alleged that one of his clients recounted that she had a troubling interaction with Niceta.

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Niceta gave her personal cell phone number to the mother who was the target of a child protection investigation "and asked her to come to her personal residence," Singer alleged.

"When she arrived there, Niceta invited the target of this investigation into her house, offering her an alcoholic beverage. Once she declined what was clearly sexual advances, Niceta essentially turned on her and did everything in her power to make sure the child was permanently removed," alleged Singer.

After the latest allegations, the Colorado Department of Human Services issued a statement to ABC-7, saying that it is "conducting an evaluation of potential fraud and child safety concerns related to activities by a former social caseworker." That investigation is ongoing.

A New York City taxi driver was killed after he was brutally beat up by multiple assailants who tried to rob him.

Kutin Gyimah, 52, died after a group of five teenagers and young adults attacked him in a playground in the Rockaways early last Saturday morning.

Police identified Gyimah as a yellow cab minivan driver. He was reportedly dropping off the five assailants near the park when they tried to rob him.

Surveillance footage shows Gyimah catching up with the group outside near the playground after the attempted robbery. Gyimah confronts the group, who turn and begin beating him up.

Five assailants can be seen beating up Gyimah in the video – two boys in their early 20s and three teenage girls, police said.

Police named one suspect, Austin Amos, 20, who they believe killed Gyimah when he threw him to the ground.

In the video, Amos appears to throw a punch at Gyimah, which knocks him off his feet. The back of his head then hits the ground.

The deadly fight happened around 6.20am near the Arverne Playground.

When first responders got to the scene, they found Gyimah lying on the ground with trauma to his head. He was taken by paramedics to St Johns Hospital in Far Rockaway where he was pronounced dead.

Gyimah was identified as a father of four who lived in the Bronx. Gyimah’s kids are aged 8, 7, 5 and 3.

A GoFundMe was set up to help pay for Gyimah’s funeral expenses, as well as support his four children’s living and educational expenses.

‘All through the worst days of the pandemic he was one of the few who still drove a cab continuously to provide support for our city and its citizens,’ the organizers wrote.

OXFORD, Ga. (CBS46) - A couple in Oxford was arrested after detectives uncovered they produced homemade child sexual abuse material with “at least one child who lived in their home.”

Detectives tell CBS46 News that they executed a search warrant on July 27 at 813 St. Regis Way in Oxford after they received a tip about an individual who “may have been downloading child sexual abuse material.”

Officials confirmed to CBS46 News they identified Zachary Zulock and William Zulock as the men who allegedly committed sexually abusive acts and documented it on videos.

Detectives say they collected evidence confirming the two adoptive fathers of a sibling pair living at the Oxford home engaged in sexually abusive acts and videos.

They each face pending aggravated child molestation and sexual exploitation of children charges.

The Walton County’s Division of Family and Child Services office has been notified about the need for emergency protective placement of the two young children.

Officials say the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, digital forensic investigators and special agents provided operational support and analytics in this case.

The children, officials say, are in custody and safe.

This is an active investigation.