CLEVELAND (AP) -- The father suspected of keeping some of 11 special-needs adopted children in cages says he confined them only to keep them safe and showed off damage to his home he says they caused.
"I felt terrible about it," Michael Gravelle told a reporter and photographer for The Plain Dealer during a tour of his home Sunday. "But it's necessary."
The children were removed from the home last month and sent to foster homes while the adoptions are investigated. The parents have not been charged, and custody hearings are scheduled in the widely publicized case.
The couple previously has not let reporters into their home, about 60 miles southwest of Cleveland near Wakeman. Michael Gravelle said he was tired of his wife, Sharen, being labeled "world's most evil mother."
The Gravelles say they were adopting children nobody else wanted, who had problems such as fetal alcohol syndrome, autism, HIV and pica, an eating disorder that causes children to eat dirt and rocks.
The enclosures where the children slept are about 6 feet in length. The doors could be opened easily and had no locks on them, but a battery-powered alarm would go off when the doors opened, the newspaper said.
They were used as sleeping quarters to prevent the children from hurting themselves with glass or eating medicines, Michael Gravelle said. Every cupboard and shelf was covered with chicken wire for the same reason, he said.
"If you can call these cages, take me to jail right now," Michael Gravelle said. "Right now."
The couple pointed out holes where they said the children had kicked in the walls and gouges in the drywall from their fingernails. Baseboards were soaked with urine stains, and the walls still show marks where the children had smeared their feces.
"We live with this smell," said Sharen Gravelle, who at times broke down in tears. "We love these children."
Prosecutor Russ Leffler alleges that the Gravelles were adopting the children for financial gain. Records show they received $4,265 monthly in adoption subsidies and disability payments when they had eight children in 2001.
"You could not pay me enough to do the things we had to do," Michael Gravelle said. "There is nothing easy about raising these children. We did not abuse them. That's the truth."
The couple's lawer, David Sherman, was not aware of Sunday's tour, the newspaper said.
OAKLAND, Md. (AP) -- An 8-year-old girl killed the first black bear of Maryland's 2005 hunting season, downing the 211-pound adult male with two shots from a .243-caliber rifle about an hour after dawn Monday, the Department of Natural Resources said.
Sierra Stiles was hunting on her family's farm in southern Garrett County, said Paul Peditto, director of the agency's Wildlife and Heritage Division.
Maryland law sets no minimum age limit for hunters, but first-timers must pass a course and show that they can safely handle and shoot a firearm. Sierra scored 98 percent on her safety test, Peditto said.
Six bears were registered by 5 p.m. Monday. State wildlife managers set a quota of 40 to 55 bears for the hunt, which runs through Saturday.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- An El Sobrante man was arraigned for murder Monday after his girlfriend's body was found in the trunk of his car in the Marin Headlands.
Scott Thomas McAlpin, 25, was charged with the murder of Anastasia Melnitchenko, 21, in federal court in San Francisco, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. He did not enter a plea, but was ordered to appear in court for a detention hearing on Oct. 31.
McAlpin was arrested in the Marin Headlands, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, around noon Sunday after National Park Service officers found him vomiting next to his parked car, according to an affidavit.
The officers determined McAlpin was drunk, searched his car and discovered Melnitchenko's body in the trunk. McAlpin tried to flee, but he was apprehended at the scene.
Earlier Sunday, police issued a bulletin that said McAlpin was a possible homicide suspect and had threatened suicide. The bulletin said he told someone he had killed his girlfriend and put her body in his car trunk, according to the affidavit.
McAlpin had a history of domestic violence dating back to March 2002, and a restraining order issued two years ago ordered him to stay away from Melnitchenko. He was previously convicted for multiple felonies against her, including assault with a deadly weapon, stalking, false imprisonment and domestic violence, according to the affidavit.
McAlpin was being tried in federal court because Melnitchenko's body was found on national park land.
VACAVILLE, Calif. (AP) -- A body believed to be a World War II airman, found frozen in the Sierra Nevada, was flown Monday to Hawaii for identification, military officials said.
The body of a young man -- blond, apparently fit, and still wearing his Army uniform -- was discovered mostly encased in a glacier in Kings Canyon National Park earlier this month. The body was airlifted to the coroner's office in Fresno County on Wednesday, where it was slowly thawed.
On Monday morning, the body was flown out of Travis Air Force Base to Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu where it will be examined at the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies the remains of lost soldiers, said 2nd Lt. Lindsey Hahn, a Travis spokeswoman.
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) -- A man charged in a traffic accident that killed three Washington State University students has been captured in Ireland, four years after he fled to avoid his trial.
Frederick Russell, 27, was arrested Sunday by the Irish National Police at a store where he worked in Dublin, U.S. Marshal Michael Kline said. He was working under the alias of David Carroll, Kline said.
The extradition process has already begun but could be lengthy, said Whitman County Deputy Prosecutor Carol LaVerne.
The Marshals Service received a tip about Russell last January, after he was placed on the agency's 15 most-wanted list. After verifying the tip, U.S. officials prepared an extradition request and then had to wait for Irish officials to process the request and for a judge there to sign an arrest warrant, Kline said.
"The last nine months have been nerve-wracking," Kline said. "We knew one leak could have caused Frederick Russell to flee and disappear again."
Prosecutors say Russell was driving an SUV that struck three other cars as it tried to pass vehicles the night of June 4, 2001, between the college towns of Pullman, Wash., and Moscow, Idaho.
Russell was charged with vehicular homicide and vehicular assault, and a test showed his blood-alcohol content was 0.12 percent, higher than the legal limit.
Prosecutors say Russell sold some of his collection of baseball cards, took $1,300 from his father's bank account and fled three days before his trial was scheduled to begin.
In a letter to his father and local newspapers after he left, Russell wrote: "Since the first day after the tragic accident, horrible things have been printed about me. Now people are so enraged that they would rather see me dead than receive a fair trial."
Russell's father, former head of Washington State's criminal-justice program and a former prosecutor, paid his son's $5,000 bail after the accident but has denied knowing his son planned to flee.
Gregory Russell, now director of the Criminology Department at Arkansas State University, did not immediately return a call seeking comment Monday. In the past, he has urged his son to come home and face the charges.
QUITO, Ecuador (AP) -- The eruption of a volcano on the largest of the Galapagos Islands is not a threat to villagers or to the remote archipelago's unique flora and fauna, including the famed giant tortoises, officials said Monday.
Pablo Gordillo, mayor of Puerto Villamil, a village of 2,000 people on seahorse-shaped Isabela, said there was no danger two days after the mile-high Sierra Negra volcano began erupting.
Gordillo said there were no groups of the giant tortoises in the path of the lava flow. He said there was "at most iguanas," which can easily escape the flow.
Washington Tapia, director of the Galapagos National Park, agreed.
"The tortoise and iguana populations in the area are not threatened," he said by telephone. "The rivers of lava that on Saturday were flowing toward the sea are no longer flowing."
Tapia said park rangers had overflown the volcano and observed that the lava was flowing from a fissure at the top of the volcano back into the interior.
He said no one has been evacuated, including people from outlying farms near the volcano.
"We have opened an observation post near the site for tourists so that visitors can observe this natural spectacle," he said.
The Galapagos Islands, located 625 miles off Ecuador's Pacific coast, were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 for their exotic wildlife such as marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies. The islands' rich biodiversity inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- An elderly woman on her way to a doctor appointment smashed her car into the hospital's lobby, sending five women to the emergency room, police said.
The 87-year-old driver, Ruth Otto, of Mandan, also was injured when she sideswiped the building and a car before cruising through a glass wall, Bismarck Police officer Dave Horner said.
"It was total chaos," Horner said. "There were so many people there that we didn't know who had been hit and injured, or who the witnesses were."
He said it was fortunate that so many doctors and nurses were nearby.
Medcenter One spokesman Chuck Bartholomay said two women were in serious condition and one was stable. He said three women, including a coffee stand worker, were treated and released.
Horner said it was unlikely any charges would be filed against the driver.
Bartholomay did not have an estimate for damage to the hospital.
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) -- A judge awarded $3 million to a Sheriff's Department counselor who claimed a weekly newspaper group libeled her in articles about her relationship with the sheriff.
San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Christopher Warner ruled Friday in favor of independent contractor Nancy Bohl in her case against Ray Pryke, publisher of Victorville-based Valley Wide Newspapers.
Warner found that testimony from an Oct. 6 default hearing showed published stories caused Bohl "severe emotional distress, mortification and humiliation."
Valley Wide printed a series of stories in 2000 about Bohl's business, The Counseling Team, and her relationship with Sheriff Gary Penrod, who was dating Bohl at the time. They have since married.
One article alleged that Bohl got her counseling contract because of the relationship. Another story said confidential information given to Bohl by deputies made its way to members of the department's command staff.
The articles ran in the Hesperia Resorter, Apple Valley News and Adelanto Bulletin, all published by Valley Wide. The weekly papers have a combined circulation of 20,000.
In 2002, Warner ordered Pryke and Mark Gutglueck, the reporter who wrote the stories, to name their sources for the stories. Gutglueck divulged his sources, but Pryke did not. He said he misunderstood the order.
On Friday, Warner ordered Pryke to pay Bohl $1 million in punitive damages, $750,000 in emotional distress damages, $750,000 for injury to her reputation and $500,000 in economic damages.
"It's obvious from the judge's ruling that these articles caused serious damage," said John Rowell, Bohl's attorney. "Nancy ... hopes the publisher will have more thought before bringing or publishing such false applications on others."
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Spirit, the mountaineering rover that successfully scaled a Martian hill this summer, is searching for flatter ground.
After two months at the summit of Husband Hill, the six-wheeled rover is making its descent toward a basin to the south where it will explore an outcrop dubbed "home plate" because from orbit the terrain looks like home on a baseball diamond.
The solar-powered Spirit's yearlong climb to the peak marked a major feat for the rover, which along with its twin, Opportunity, landed on opposite ends of the Red Planet in 2004 in search of evidence of the past history of water on the cold, dusty planet.
Last month, scientists released the first full-color panoramic photo of the landscape taken by Spirit from the 270-foot-high summit -- about the height of the Statue of Liberty. It shows the rover's distinct tracks in the dust, flat plains of the surrounding Gusev Crater region and distant plateaus on the crater rim.
Since reaching the hilltop in late August, Spirit has been busy snapping pictures, studying rocks and using its robotic arm to sift the soil to determine how the hill formed. The leading theory is that Husband Hill became uplifted as a result of crater impact.
Mission scientists say a comparison of the summit rocks reveal similar geologic features to those found on the side of the hill. In both cases, the rock makeup reveal they have been altered by water.
In a twist, Spirit recently uncovered a new set of rocks at the summit that scientists have never seen before. The rocks were made of basalt, a volcanic material, but its composition differs from the basaltic rocks found in the Martian plains, said principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
It will take about two months for Spirit to completely climb down Husband Hill, which is part of the Columbia Hills range in the Gusev crater region. Husband Hill is named after Rick Husband, the astronaut commander of the space shuttle Columbia that disintegrated as it attempted to return to Earth in 2003.
Scientists poring over elevation maps produced by the rover's panoramic camera indicate the descent should be safe for the robotic geologist. Spirit will traverse across ridge lines toward the inner basin and finally to "home plate."
Meanwhile, Opportunity was in good health again after recovering from a recent computer glitch while surveying the Meridiani Planum region.
Opportunity is exploring the northern rim of Erebus Crater, the largest crater between already-explored Endurance Crater and its next destination, Victoria Crater.
The rovers, operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, have long outlasted their primary, three-month missions.
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Juan Carlos Garcia was a loyal family man, at least as federal police tell it. They said Monday that Garcia turned his brothers into a feared kidnapping gang and finally fell into the hands of police while taking his cancer-stricken mother to the doctor.
The federal Attorney General's Office said in a news release that Garcia was the head of the group known as "Los Montante" -- for his mother's family name -- and it said he acknowledged involvement in six homicides and 28 kidnappings over the past two years in the greater Mexico City area.
Mexico's Federal Agency of Investigation had found medical prescriptions for Garcia's mother during searches of houses allegedly used by the group and caught him on Friday outside the office of one of the doctors treating her for cancer.
The attorney general's office said that Garcia, 27, told investigators he had entered the kidnapping business after getting to know several kidnappers while held at a prison east of Mexico City in 1998 for robbery with violence.
He is accused of organizing a gang, made up largely of his brothers Julio, Jose, Fernando, Hugo, Omar, Alan and Cristian that allegedly carried out at least 28 kidnappings and killed six people.
The agency said Garcia oversaw negotiations, collected ransoms and chose victims "almost at random," picking people with a luxurious car and fine clothing. The victims, it said, were held in cages at houses in and around Mexico City. Several were shopkeepers at Mexico City's wholesale produce market.
Alleged victims included a 26-year old housewife held for 44 days in 2003, a 53-year-old businessman who spent 107 days as a captive in 2004 and a 17-year-old student held for 19 days in 2004.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- At first, the family thought their daughter was hallucinating when she told them that a python had stuck its head out of the toilet.
But after deciding to investigate for themselves, they too saw the 8-foot yellow and black python peering from inside the traditional squat toilet, The Star newspaper reported Monday.
Firefighters later trapped the python at the home in southern Johor Bahru city and released it into a nearby jungle, the report said.
Firefighters were not immediately available for comment, and it was unclear how the snake slithered into the toilet.
URBANA, Ill. (AP) -- A new calendar called "Big Brains" will feature artistically enhanced brain scans of University of Illinois campus administrators, faculty, staff and students.
"It's a mix of being somewhat whimsical, with a nod to science and the things we do on this campus," said Tracey Wszalek, associate director of the Beckman Institute's Biomedical Imaging Center.
The images for each individual will highlight a particular brain region or function that each person uses in his or her job.
The brain image of university President B. Joseph White's assistant will emphasize an area of the brain used for multitasking.
The scan of Chancellor Richard Herman's brain will feature blood vessels to illustrate how he is connected to all areas of the campus.
And the illustration for a food science professor will consist of layered images of her brain arranged in the shape of the food pyramid.
Wszalek said all the calendar models were enthusiastic about the project.
"They are like kids in a candy shop because we let them take a picture home," she said. "Everyone loves a picture of their brain."
The calendar is expected to be in bookstores around Thanksgiving.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A worker found a wallet that was stolen from a serviceman 43 years ago in a bus station.
Robert Gibson, who had been in the Air Force, got a call about the wallet Thursday.
"Before he could even say a word, I said, 'You found my wallet,"' said Gibson, 70, of Linwood, N.C. "How it got where (it was found) I don't know."
Gibson stopped in Pittsburgh while returning from serving almost a year and half in Germany as a staff sergeant repairing airplanes. He had decided to take a hot shower before boarding his bus to Clarksburg, W.Va., in 1962.
LeRoy Fillmore, an asbestos removal technician, found the wallet Wednesday in the former Greyhound station, which is being demolished.
After noticing an Air Force identification card, Fillmore called an Army recruiting office, where Capt. Jason Hearn was able to track down Gibson.
Gibson was happy to have his wallet back, even though it was empty of the $300 he had.
"I want it for sentimental reasons," he said. "It's not every hip 'n' stitch that someone finds the wallet they lost 40 years ago."
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- A photographer who collected money for portraits of Kanawha County sheriff's deputies but never delivered the pictures has been charged with obtaining money under false pretenses, authorities said.
Joseph Mandeville, 55, was arrested Thursday on two counts. He was released on a $10,000 personal recognizance bond.
The sheriff's department hires a photographer every few years to take pictures of the entire staff and individual employees. Deputies also can buy photo packages, said Lt. Sean Crosier.
Last October the department hired Mandeville and his business, Photo Art Studio. He sold photo packages to 11 deputies and was paid $465, Crosier said. The department contacted Crosier several times over the last year about the pictures before filing charges.
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