Tnuza Jamal Hassan was arrested on a single count of arson after starting 8 fires and attempting to kill 33 children.

When many people think about terrorism, bombs are often where the mind goes. Not all terrorists use bombs or even have the skills to do so. In a recent court case against a terror suspect who set fires, the courtroom was stunned as the accused shared she was not successful in killing more simply because she did not know how to make bombs. She stated that the local community was “…lucky I don’t know how to build a bomb.”

The suspect is 19-year-old Muslim Tnuza Jamal Hassan. She was arrested on one count of arson tied to 8 fires set at the St. Paul campus of the St. Catherine’s University. Hassan was enrolled at the college in the fall as a freshman but dropped out shortly after that. She was hoping to kill children at the school to gain national and possibly worldwide attention.

When small fires started to break out all over the campus in Minneapolis, school officials did not have any idea why they were set. There was nothing to indicate these were tied to any particular terrorist group until the story about the suspect began to emerge. Hassan made no efforts to hide the fact this was an attack at the hands of jihad with the intent to kill as many people as possible.

Hassan shared that she set the fires to get revenge for school fires she read about online. She shared that she knew American troops were burning schools in Iraq and Afghanistan, so she felt like she should do the same thing here.

Beyond sharing her reason for the fires, Hassan also shared that she was not happy with the outcomes of the fires. She set a series of 8 small fires and was disappointed that the fires did not kill anyone. It seems she set them to burn the school to the ground and kill as many as possible.

At one point during the arsons, Hassan targeted Saint Mary’s Hall. This is a dorm that also houses a daycare. She was hoping to burn it down and kill both women and children to get more attention. At the time the fire was set there were 33 children and eight adults at risk.

Hassan not only started a fire in a bathroom within Saint Mary’s Hall but also went on to set 7 more fires. The fires were spread out all over campus in the hopes that the sheer number of fires would leave personal pulled so thin they could not put them all out. Her careful planning was set into place to create chaos and try to keep starting more fires as campus workers worked to put the others out.

As each fire was set on campus, officials began to try to see a pattern. They quickly realized they were dealing with a significant threat and worked to stop the fire setting. Police looked at on-campus security cameras and found footage of Hassan setting the fires.

Hassan was arrested the afternoon of the fires in a dorm room. She was brought up on one count of arson even though they confirmed there were a total of 8 fires set. There is no explanation as to why she was only charged with setting one of the fires.

During interviews with police, Hassan made it very clear she intended to kill strangers. She was not setting fires to do property damage; she was out for blood. There are many within the local community that want to know why she was not charged with attempted murder. When she set the fire at Saint Mary’s Hall, she did so to kill as many of the 33 children and eight adults that were there as possible. It would seem logical to charge her with 41 counts of attempted murder as well. In all total, it appears that the suspect has walked away with a bare minimum of charges for a severe terrorist attack.

For those who are dismissing these fires as not being serious, something that the suspect said in court upon her first appearance may change that. It seems the young defendant was not overly sorry for her efforts, in fact very much the opposite. She expressed frustration that her efforts did not end in any deaths. She also shared that the campus was lucky that she did not know how to make bombs as she would have done so. The amateur fires set that day was not what she intended to do, but she did not have the needed skills to carry out a more massive scale attack alone.

Lisa and A.J. Demaree’s decade-long legal ordeal started with, by all accounts, an utterly innocent family moment.

In 2008, the couple took their three daughters, then ages 5, 4 and 1½, on a vacation to San Diego. They snapped more than 100 photos during the trip, like parents do, including several of the girls playing together during bath time. When they returned to their home in Peoria, Ariz., they dropped the camera’s memory stick off at a Walmart for developing.

Within a day, a police detective came knocking.

A Walmart employee had flagged the bath-time photos as pornographic, the detective told the parents. One showed the girls wrapped in towels with their arms around each other; another showed their exposed bottoms.

The Demarees said they were harmless shots of the children goofing around, no different than what you’d expect to find in any family scrapbook. But police and social workers launched a full-blown sex abuse investigation, raiding the couple’s home and putting the girls in protective custody for a month while they interviewed dozens of family members and friends about whether the Demarees were child sex offenders.

When authorities declined to bring charges — judges who reviewed the pictures found they were, in fact, harmless family photos — the couple sued two Child Protective Services employees, among others, alleging constitutional violations.

On Tuesday, after a series of defeats in the case, a federal appeals court affirmed what the Demarees have argued all along: that their children were taken from them for no good reason.

“The social workers did not have reasonable cause to believe the children were at risk of serious bodily harm or molestation,” a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit wrote. “Therefore, viewing the record most favorably to the Demarees, the defendants acted unconstitutionally in taking the three children away from home without judicial authorization.”

The decision, which came nearly 10 years after the parents’ initial encounter with police, revived the case against the two social workers after a lower court dismissed it in 2014. That court ruled that the social workers, as employees of the Arizona government, were entitled to “qualified immunity,” meaning they were protected from liability in lawsuits arising from their professional duties.

But the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit panel disagreed, ruling in a 47-page opinion that the social workers presented no evidence that the children were in danger of being abused.

“The risk identified by the defendants did not include taking photos of a nude child in an exploitative situation and distributing them, because there was no allegation or indication that A.J. and Lisa had distributed, or were likely in the future to distribute, nude pictures of their children to anyone,” the three-judge panel wrote. “Nor did the identified risk include taking photos of a nude child engaging in sexual conduct, because there was no allegation A.J. and Lisa had ever taken, or were likely to take, photos of their children engaging in sexual conduct.”

“And the risk was not that the Demarees would see their own children, ages five, four, and one-and-a-half, nude, including their genitalia,” the judges added, “as caring for children of those ages necessitates doing so.”

The lawsuit originally named as defendants the detective, Walmart, the state attorney general and the town of Peoria. The detective settled with the parents and the other parties were dismissed during earlier proceedings.

A shocking amount of child pornography changes hands every day in the dark corners of the Internet and whatever other channels pedophiles use to traffic sexually exploitative images of minors, as evidenced by the steady drum beat of arrests and sting operations by law enforcement. “Rarely a week goes by,” the FBI wrote in a memo last year, “that a child pornographer is not charged or sentenced for federal crimes related to the sexual exploitation of children.”

The growth of social networks and photo- and video-sharing sites has facilitated the trade of child pornography, and offenders have found increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid detection, according to the Department of Justice. For obvious reasons, authorities take a zero-tolerance approach.

The drawback, of course, is that people like Lisa and A.J. Demaree get caught up in the dragnet. As Lisa Belkin, a former New York Times parenting blogger, wrote of the couple’s case: “The downside of society’s increased awareness that bad things happen to children is an increased tendency to see those bad things everywhere.”

When the detective showed up at the couple’s door in August 2008, he brought photocopies of the bath-time photos and pressed the parents about them, according to court documents. One showed the three girls lying on a towel with their bare backsides visible.

“Obviously you’re not going to share it with anybody, I would hope,” the detective said, according to court documents.

“No, absolutely not!” A.J. Demaree responded.

The 9th Circuit noted that neither that picture nor any other portrayed the children in a sexually suggestive manner or showed their genitalia frontally.

After questioning the parents, police took the children in for interviews and medical exams to look for signs of sexual abuse. While the exams were being conducted, they got a search warrant and raided the couple’s home, seizing computers, cellphones, undeveloped film and other materials relevant to a child pornography probe, the court wrote.

“It was a nightmare, it was unbelievable,” Lisa Demaree said through tears in an interview with ABC News a year after the raid. “I was in so much disbelief. I started to hyperventilate. I tried to breathe it out.”

The children’s exams came back normal, showing no signs of abuse, and the girls were returned to their parents.

But toward the end of the search of the couple’s house, a Child Protective Services investigator showed up and discussed the case with police. Anticipating child exploitation charges to be brought, she decided to take the children into emergency temporary custody. Though she lacked a court order or warrant, her supervisor approved the decision. The two older children were driven to one foster home, the 18-month-old to another, according to court documents. Eventually, they were moved to their grandparents’ house.

Police interviewed about three dozen friends, family members and co-workers of the Demarees in the course of their sex-abuse investigation, according to the lawsuit. The Demarees also underwent psychological evaluation, according to ABC News. After a month, their daughters were returned to them.

The parents were not arrested or charged with any crimes, and a juvenile court never adjudicated the girls abused or neglected, as the appeals court ruling stated. But Lisa was suspended from her job at a school for a year, and the couple’s names were included on a sex offender registry, according to ABC News.

“As crazy as it may seem,” Lisa Demaree told the network, “what you may think are the most beautiful innocent pictures of your children may be seen as something completely different and completely perverted.”

(The Washington Post)

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- The former sports doctor who admitted molesting some of the nation's top gymnasts for years under the guise of medical treatment was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison by a judge who proudly told him, ''I just signed your death warrant.''

The sentence capped a remarkable seven-day hearing in which more than 150 women and girls offered statements about being abused by Larry Nassar, a physician who was renowned for treating athletes at the sport's highest levels. Many confronted him face to face in the Michigan courtroom.

''It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable,'' Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.

Nassar's actions were ''precise, calculated, manipulative, devious, despicable,'' she said.

When the hearing ended, the courtroom broke into applause. Victims and prosecutors embraced at the conclusion of the grueling 16-month case.

But the anguish of the past week will have little, if any, practical effect on Nassar's fate. Before serving the Michigan sentence, the 54-year-old must first serve a 60-year federal sentence for child pornography crimes. With credit for good behavior, he could complete that sentence in about 55 years. By then, he would be more than 100 years old if still alive.

He is also scheduled to be sentenced next week on more assault convictions in Eaton County, Michigan.

A prosecutor called Nassar ''possibly the most prolific serial child sex abuser in history'' and said competitive gymnastics provided the ''perfect place'' for his crimes because victims saw him as a ''god.''

Prosecutor Angela Povilaitis also said Nassar ''perfected a built-in excuse and defense'' as a doctor, even though he was ''performing hocus-pocus medicine.''

''It takes some kind of sick perversion to not only assault a child but to do so with her parent in the room, to do so while a lineup of eager young gymnasts waited,'' Povilaitis said.

She urged people to believe young victims of sexual abuse no matter who they accuse and praised journalists, including those at the Indianapolis Star. The newspaper's 2016 investigation of how the sport's governing body handled sexual abuse allegations against coaches prompted a former gymnast to alert the paper to Nassar.

Although Nassar's work with gymnasts received the most attention, the allegations against him spanned more than a dozen sports over 25 years.

At one point, Nassar turned to the courtroom gallery to make a brief statement, saying that the victims' accounts had ''shaken me to my core.'' He said ''no words'' can describe how sorry he is.

''I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days'' he said as many of his accusers wept.

The judge then read from a letter that Nassar had written to her that raised questions about whether he was truly remorseful. The victims who packed the courtroom gasped as they heard passages that included ''Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned'' and another in which Nassar said the ''stories'' about him were fabricated.

He also defended his actions with the athletes as ''medical, not sexual.''

''I was a good doctor because my treatment worked, and those patients that are now speaking out were the same ones that praised and came back over and over, and referred family and friends to see me,'' Nassar wrote.

One of the first athletes to publicly accuse Nassar of sexual assault was the last victim to offer a statement at the hearing.

Rachael Denhollander is a Kentucky lawyer who stepped forward in 2016 after the sport's governing body, USA Gymnastics, was accused of mishandling sexual assault complaints. She said Nassar groped and fondled her when she was a 15-year-old gymnast in Michigan.

Denhollander's statements to Michigan State University police put the criminal investigation in high gear in 2016.

''You have become a man ruled by selfish and perverted desires,'' she told Nassar, who worked at the university and USA Gymnastics, which also trains Olympians.

Hours after the sentencing, MSU President Lou Anna Simon said she was resigning amid mounting pressure over the way the university handled the Nassar case. That came shortly after Michigan lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for a nonbinding House resolution that sought her removal over allegations that the school missed chances to stop Nassar.

In her resignation letter, Simon said as tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable. She acknowledged she was a natural focus of the anger as president.

Simon, who earned her doctorate at Michigan State in 1974, was promoted to school president in 2005.

Nassar pleaded guilty to assaulting seven people in the Lansing area, including in the basement of his home and at his campus office. But the sentencing hearing was open to anyone who said they were a victim.

Accusers said he would use his ungloved hands to penetrate them, often without explanation, while they were on a table seeking help for various injuries.

The accusers, many of whom were children, said they trusted Nassar and were in denial about what was happening or were afraid to speak up. He sometimes used a sheet or his body to block the view of any parent in the room.

Several elite former gymnasts talked about how Nassar won their allegiance with candy, Olympic trinkets and encouraging words while they were under constant scrutiny from demanding coaches.

The judge praised the victims who appeared in her court, calling them ''sister survivors.'' The women included Olympians Aly Raisman, Jordyn Wieber and McKayla Maroney.

The judge also called for a broader investigation into how the abuse was allowed to go on for so long. She said justice ''requires more'' than what she can do.

The CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee soon announced an independent inquiry. Scott Blackmun said the third-party investigation will attempt to determine ''who knew what and when.''

Brooke Hylek, a gymnast who plans to compete in college, heaped scorn on Nassar.

''I cannot believe I ever trusted you, and I will never forgive you,'' she said Tuesday. ''I'm happy you will be spending the rest of your life in prison. Enjoy hell by the way.''

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Associated Press Writer Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report. AP Sports Writer Larry Lage in East Lansing also contributed.


(Yahoo)