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Yahoo
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- Yahoo
1 found dead after house fire in Ajax late Friday night
One person is dead after a house fire in Ajax. Durham police say they responded to a home in the area of Taunton Road East and Salem Road North at 11:10 p.m. Friday night. They were investigating reports of a man who was armed and threatening members of his family. Upon arrival, Durham police reported an active fire in the home. Police and Ajax Fire removed "several" people from the home and evacuated neighbouring residences. One person was found dead in the residence. It's not immediately clear if that was the armed man. There are no outstanding suspects. The Ontario Fire Marshal is conducting the investigation.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Friends of Idaho Murder Victims Explain Why They Waited Hours to Call 911 in New Documentary
Friends of the two roommates who were home at the time four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their off-campus home in 2022 explained why the surviving roommates didn't immediately call 911 in a new documentary. "One Night in Idaho," a Prime Video docuseries which premiered on July 11, features interviews with family members and friends of the four victims: Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. Hunter Johnson, Emily Alandt and Josie Lauteren, three friends of the victims, shared how they were called to the house hours after the murders by Dylan Mortensen and Bethany Funke, who lived at the residence and were home at the time of the slayings. Officials have said the murders took place between 4 a.m. and 4:20 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022, and a 911 call came in around 11:58 a.m. that morning. 'I think it's very important for everybody to know that 'What if?' doesn't matter, because if they had known what was going on it would have been too late anyways,' Alandt said, speaking about Mortensen and Funke in the documentary. Johnson, Alandt's boyfriend, said that when he woke up in the morning on Nov. 13, 2022, "It started off like any normal day." He explained he had slept over at Alandt's apartment, which was down the road from the home where Mogen, Goncalves, Kernodle and Chapin were found dead. Alandt explained that Mortensen, one of the surviving roommates, had called her, asking them to come over. "She was like, 'Something weird happened last night. I don't really know if I was dreaming or not, but I'm really scared. Can you come check out the house?'" Alandt said. Mortensen told her that she was in the basement with her other roommate Bethany Funke, and that they had called Kernodle a few times, but she wasn't answering. "I was like, 'Ha, ha, sure. Should I bring my pepper spray?' Not thinking anything of it," Alandt said. Alandt's roommate Lauteren said Mortensen had called them to come over before after she had heard weird noises. "She's called us before and been like, 'Oh, I'm scared. Can you bring your boyfriends over?' But it was never anything serious, it was just like, a pan fell — like, actually nothing," Lauteren said. "Because it's Moscow." Alandt said she didn't think the request was urgent, so they started walking to the house. "When we got there, Dylan and Bethany had exited the house. They looked frightened just kind of like, hands on their mouth, like, I don't know what's going on, type (of) thing," Alandt said. "When I was going up the stairs, Hunter Johnson was already in the house. We were just a bit behind." "As soon as I stepped in the house, I was like, 'Oh, something is so not right.' Like, you could feel it almost," Lauteren said. Once Lauteren entered the home, she was quickly pushed out, and Johnson told them to call 911 after he saw what was upstairs. "Hunter had enough courage to tell them to call the police for not a real reason," Alandt explained. "He worded it very nicely. He said, 'Tell him there's an unconscious person.' Hunter saved all of us extreme trauma by not letting us know anything." Mortensen was the one who called 911, Lauteren said. "I had to take the phone from her because she was so completely hysterical," Lauteren said. "They're like 'What's the address, what's the address, what's the address?' and I was like, '1122 King Road.'' "I think that's when Hunter looked at me, and he was shaking his head," Lauteren added. "He was like, 'They didn't have a pulse.' And I mean, even when he said they had no pulse, I still was like, 'Oh, the paramedics are gonna come and revive them." Mortensen and Funke did not participate in the documentary, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News. Mortensen told investigators she woke up around 4 a.m. when she heard noise from upstairs, according to a probable cause affidavit released in 2023. She later opened her bedroom door and saw a man with bushy eyebrows walking toward a sliding glass door in the home, and locked herself in her room after seeing the man, according to the affidavit. Text messages and phone call records between the roommates on the night of the murders were released in court documents earlier this year, and showed Mortensen later went to Funke's room in the basement of the home around 4:20 a.m. The three friends in the docuseries cited shock and trauma response as reasons why it took hours for the call to be placed. 'It wasn't until the morning that (Mortensen) realized, holy s---, that couldn't have been a dream,' Alandt said. 'And that's when I got my phone call from her, they hadn't even gone upstairs or anything, she just called and said, 'Something weird happened, I thought it was a dream, I'm not quite sure anymore. I tried to call everybody to wake them up and no one's answering.' And I was like, 'OK, I'll come over.'' The 911 call came in around 11:58 a.m., police have said. 'Something happened in our house. We don't know what,' the 911 caller said, according to a transcript of the call. Bryan Kohberger was arrested about six weeks after the killings and was later charged with the murder of Goncalves, Mogen, Kernodle and Chapin. Kohberger pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and one count of felony burglary on July 2, and he is scheduled to be sentenced on July 23, where he faces up to life in prison. This article was originally published on
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Karen Read lands lucrative book deal while witnesses face continued harassment after acquittal
EXCLUSIVE IMAGES: Life is moving on for all the key players except John O'Keefe's family after a Massachusetts jury found his former girlfriend Karen Read not guilty of all homicide-related charges in his death outside a midnight house party during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022. O'Keefe's niece and nephew, who he took in after their parents died, are orphaned for a second time. Read has a book deal – and a TV series about her saga in the works. But she's also facing a wrongful death lawsuit, which requires a lesser standard of guilt to hold her liable. Her civil team filed a motion to dismiss earlier this week. An outside investigation by the FBI found no alternate suspects and dispelled allegations of corruption leveled at local and state police. But prosecutors and investigators who led the case are facing a reckoning. The Albert family, former owners of the property where Read and two other women found O'Keefe dead under a sheet of snow, just celebrated a wedding. Jennifer McCabe, a key witness in both of Read's trials and one of the women with Read that morning, is the new bride's aunt. At the wedding, attendees pitched in to hire private security after Read's supporters allegedly circulated the venue online. Local police made their presence known, too. A marked SUV was parked at the foot of the church steps. Kerry Roberts, a friend of O'Keefe's who was also present with McCabe and Read when they found his body, told Fox News Digital she is among the witnesses facing an ongoing harassment campaign, along with the Alberts, the McCabes and O'Keefe's immediate family. "I don't know why they're making Jen McCabe a villain," she said in a phone interview. "All she did was answer the same phone call I did. Karen called her. She didn't call Karen. It's so stupid and bizarre." The victim's mother, Peggy O'Keefe, is dealing with harassment of her own, including a woman seen dancing on video at the foot of her driveway after Read's acquittal. Roberts said the Norfolk District Attorney's Office told her to stop contacting their witness advocate after the trial, even as strangers continue to throw things at her house, call her family "murderers" in the supermarket and mock her children. "We put our a--es on the line for three and a half years, two trials, to help the state of Massachusetts, and you're not going to help us when we're being harassed?" she said. "It's not worth it to put my family through ever again, and not be protected at all. It's sick. It's absolutely sick." There's an ongoing witness intimidation case against Aidan Kearney, a Canton blogger who goes by the name Turtleboy, but while Roberts is not one of his alleged victims, she says she faces rude comments and other harassment from random members of the community. After baseball games, kids on the team opposing her son might tell him "Free Karen Read" while lining up to shake hands, she said. She filed a complaint against her mailman, who allegedly muttered a vulgarity into her doorbell camera when he saw a "Justice for John O'Keefe" sign at her house. Now someone else delivers her letters. "My message to people is don't ever be a witness," she said. "If this happens to you, you're not gonna be protected at all." Read's lead defense lawyer Alan Jackson returned to Los Angeles in time for the Fourth of July holiday, where he was seen cruising in a Shelby Cobra replica – powered by a 351 Stroker he described as "a fire-breathing dragon." "[It's] taking a while to come down," he told Fox News Digital. "But I'm slowly getting back into my rhythm." He already has another deadly crash case lined up – the defense of Fraser Bohm, a 22-year-old from Malibu facing four counts of murder in a high-speed wreck that killed four sorority girls from Pepperdine University in October 2023. SIGN UP TO GET TRUE CRIME NEWSLETTER Bohm is due back in court next month after Jackson asked for more time to prep a defense for his new client. Michael Proctor, a former homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police, lost his job but may still resurface in the upcoming murder trial of Brian Walshe – who is accused of killing his wife Ana outside Boston. Her remains have not been found. Proctor worked that case, too, and Walshe's lawyers have argued his presence tainted the investigation. That trial is scheduled to kick off in October. State police fired Proctor after he sent lewd texts about Read to his friends – officially faulting him for sharing law enforcement sensitive information with civilians – and for drinking on the job. His former supervisor, Yuri Bukhenik, was also reassigned in the wake of Read's second trial out of the homicide unit in Norfolk County and to an administrative post in Boston, according to Boston 25. Read's defense alleged a cover-up by state and local police, alternately insinuating they got lazy in the investigation and failed to do a thorough job or outright framed her. Hank Brennan, the high-powered defense attorney hired as a special prosecutor to lead Read's second trial, reportedly raked in more than $550,000 for his work, according to the Boston Herald. That's a reasonable sum for a private lawyer, said retired Massachusetts judge and Boston College law professor Jack Lu, but also much more than a deputy district attorney on the state payroll would have made: "Probably $130,000 annually." Brennan put in long days and likely worked through weekends, while keeping his private practice open at the same time, he added. And while in a rare public statement he slammed the prevalence of witness intimidation and apologized for not securing a conviction, O'Keefe's supporters indicated they appreciate his work on the case. "The jury pool was completely tainted is all I can say," Roberts told Fox News Digital. "Hank did so much work. He was a genius. He really was. Nobody could've gotten it done. Which is wicked sad."
