Judge gives ex-officer nearly 3 years in Breonna Taylor raid, rebuffs DOJ call for no prison time
Brett Hankison, who fired 10 shots during the raid but didn't hit anyone, was the only officer on the scene charged in the Black woman's death. He is the first person sentenced to prison in the case that rocked the city of Louisville and spawned weeks of street protests over police brutality that year.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings, in sentencing Hankison, said no prison time 'is not appropriate' and would minimize the jury's verdict from November. Jennings said she was 'startled' there weren't more people injured in the raid from Hankison's blind shots.
She sentenced Hankison, 49, to 33 months in prison for the conviction of use of excessive force with three years of supervised probation to follow the prison term. He will not report directly to prison. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons will determine where and when he starts his sentence, Jennings said.
The judge, who presided over two of Hankison's trials, expressed disappointment with a sentencing recommendation by federal prosecutors last week, saying the Justice Department was treating Hankison's actions as 'an inconsequential crime' and said some of its arguments were 'incongruous and inappropriate.'
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who helped Taylor's family secure a $12 million wrongful death settlement against the city of Louisville, had called the department's recommendation 'an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury's decision.'
Crump was at Monday's hearing and said he had hoped for a longer sentence but was 'grateful that (Hankison) is at least going to prison and has to think for those 3 years about Breonna Taylor and that her life mattered.'
Afterward, before a crowd outside the courthouse, Crump sounded a familiar chant: 'Say Her name.' The crowd yelled back: 'Breonna Taylor!' And he and other members of Taylor family's legal team issued a subsequent statement criticizing the Justice Department.
'While today's sentence is not what we had hoped for –– nor does it fully reflect the severity of the harm caused –– it is more than what the Department of Justice sought. That, in itself, is a statement,' the statement said.
Hankison's 10 shots the night of the March 2020 botched drug raid flew through the walls of Taylor's apartment into a neighboring apartment, narrowly missing a neighboring family.
The 26-year-old's death, along with the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sparked racial injustice and police brutality protests nationwide that year.
But the Justice Department, under new leadership since President Donald Trump took office in January, sought no prison time for Hankison, in an abrupt about-face by federal prosecutors after the department spent years prosecuting the former detective. They suggested time already served, which amounted to one day, and three years of supervised probation.
Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, said she was disappointed that the new federal prosecutors assigned to the case were not pushing for a tougher sentence. On many occasions inside the courtroom Monday, lead federal prosecutor Rob Keenan agreed with Hankison's defense attorneys on factors that would decrease Hankison's punishment.
'There was no prosecution in there for us,' Palmer said afterward. 'Brett had his own defense team, I didn't know he got a second one.'
Taylor was shot in her hallway by two officers after her boyfriend fired from inside the apartment, striking an officer in the leg. Neither of the other officers was charged in state or federal court after prosecutors deemed they were justified in returning fire into the apartment. Louisville police used a drug warrant to enter Taylor's apartment, but found no drugs or cash inside.
A separate jury deadlocked on federal charges against Hankison in 2023, and he was acquitted on state charges of wanton endangerment in 2022.
In their recent sentencing memo, federal prosecutors wrote that though Hankison's 'response in these fraught circumstances was unreasonable given the benefit of hindsight, that unreasonable response did not kill or wound Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend, her neighbors, defendant's fellow officers, or anyone else.'
Jennings acknowledged Monday that officers were provoked by Taylor's boyfriend's gunshot but said 'that does not allow officers to then do what they want and then be excused.'
While the hearing was going on, Louisville police arrested four people in front of the courthouse who it said were 'creating confrontation, kicking vehicles, or otherwise creating an unsafe environment.' Authorities didn't list charges against them.
Federal prosecutors had argued that multiple factors — including that Hankison's two other trials ended with no convictions — should greatly reduce the potential punishment. They also argued he would be susceptible to abuse in prison and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The sentencing memorandum was submitted by Harmeet Dhillon, chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and a Trump political appointee who in May moved to cancel settlements with Louisville and Minneapolis that had called for overhauling their police departments.
In the Taylor case, three other ex-Louisville police officers have been charged with crafting a falsified warrant, but have not gone to trial. None were at the scene when Taylor was shot. The warrant used to enter her apartment was one of five issued that night in search of evidence on an alleged drug dealer that Taylor once had an association with.
Lovan writes for the Associated Press.
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Boston Globe
4 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘It's not an education agency': Advocates slam school use of the court for student truancy
Advertisement From 2022 through 2025, schools asked the courts to intervene in truancy cases 5,400 times. In all, there was a 13 percent increase in districts using the court process from the 2022 to 2024 school years, according to a recent report from The proceedings don't carry fines, come with criminal charges, or threaten parents with arrest, as is done in other states. But they do haul families into often bleak juvenile court scenes, where other minors face criminal offenses and parental rights are terminated. Families might also be assigned a probation officer to help connect children and parents with support services. Child advocates said the court system is not the proper avenue to deal with truancies. It's a mistake to push families into court to solve absenteeism, they said, and they worry bringing students before judges only pushes students, especially those who are high risk, into the criminal system. Advertisement 'It's not an education agency,' Francine Sherman, a clinical professor emerita at Boston College Law School, where she founded and led its Juvenile Rights Advocacy Program, said of the court system. 'The court simply doesn't have the tools to address this particular problem.' School leaders agree courts are not their first choice to resolve truancy issues, and said they first try to help connect children and families with services such as education help and clinical mental health care. But in extreme cases, schools may need the assistance of the courts to resolve truancy cases, said Mary Bourque, a former Chelsea superintendent who serves as the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. 'This is about the parent and guardians, and making sure that the parent or guardian is getting [their child] to school,' she said. 'Sometimes you do need leverage with the parent or guardian.' The court petitions, referred to as Child Requiring Assistance filings, are intended to to help connect families with services such as educational assistance and mental health programs. They can be filed by schools, police, or families. Students are considered truant when they 'willfully fail' to attend school for more than eight days in a quarter. Under state law, Conley said her B-average student had never been in trouble, yet she watched as her daughter suddenly stood before a judge, had to be represented by a lawyer, and was assigned a probation officer. Advertisement 'For her to have to go from never getting in trouble in school to that, it was traumatizing,' Conley said. Experts and education advocates agree absenteeism harms students' abilities to learn. In Massachusetts, chronic absenteeism rates remain 50 percent higher than before the pandemic. To appear before a judge for truancy, students often miss school to be brought to court. Many of the cases involve children with special needs. The petitions also disproportionately involve Black and Latino students, the child advocate's office said in its report. The danger, advocates argue, is that these court filings — which do not allege criminal behavior — can create issues for children such as post-traumatic stress disorder and negative emotional well-being, 'Not only is it traumatizing, it has clearly very adverse consequences for children,' said Jay Blitzman, a retired juvenile court judge who spent more than two decades on the bench before retiring in 2020. 'Going to courts to address these issues is not the preferred thing to do.' From Blitzman's experience, 'many of the truancy cases' that came before him appeared to involve children who did not receive appropriate school services for their disabilities and special needs. The state's Office of the Child Advocate, established by the Legislature to ensure children receive appropriate services, reviewed truancy court data Advertisement Among those calling for reform is state Senator Robyn Kennedy, a Worcester Democrat, who filed legislation this year to change the current law. The proposal includes measures such as barring children under age 12 from being involved with Child Requiring Assistance petitions, plus expanding the role of the state's existing network of family resource centers, including a requirement schools refer families to one of those centers before filing a petition with a court. Bourque, with the state school superintendent association, said a better solution to districts filing court actions is for the state to expand the number of its School administrators in some of the state's largest districts, including Boston, Worcester, Brockton, Lawrence, and Chelsea, said they typically pursue truancy cases only when other measures fail to connect children and families with support services. Such services include conducting special education evaluationsand mental health assessments, and sending letters to parents and guardians. 'In VERY rare occasions do we consider judicial intervention,' Chelsea Superintendent Almi Guajardo Abeyta said in an email. 'We do everything possible to avoid it.' The 6,100-student district filed 123 Child Requiring Assistance petitions in truancy cases from 2022-2025, but was able to reduce its rate by 44 percent to 25 in the 2024-25 school year, progress Conley said more districts should be making. In Chelsea, administrators attribute the decline in court filings to a focus on family engagement as a priority for the district, Abeyta said. Advertisement The district has more than doubled its number of family liaisons, social workers, and counselors. And it has launched a Navigator program for students with chronic absenteeism or other needs, which pairs them with a teacher, social worker, or other district staff member, she said. 'We believe that parents are our partners and do our best to work with families,' she said. Conley, whose daughter appeared in court, said the Acton-Boxborough district's decision to push the truancy case to court was a breach of trust. The March 2024 court hearing ended with an 'informal assistance agreement' signed by her daughter, her probation officer, and the judge, according to a copy reviewed by the Globe. The girl agreed to terms that required her to attend school, participate in tutoring, and cooperate with therapeutic services. About two months after the hearing, the girl's school notified the girl's probation officer and attorney it had received enough information 'to drop the CRA,' according to a brief email viewed by the Globe sent by a school vice principal. It was unclear what led to the decision. Peter Light, the district's superintendent, declined to answer Globe questions, citing student privacy laws. Conley said her family has since moved from Massachusetts. Schools need to do more to provide services for children with disabilities, she said. 'If these kids were given the tools needed to properly learn, most of these cases could go away completely,' Conley said. John Hilliard can be reached at
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
In America's hardest-fought congressional district, voters agree: Release the Epstein files
LOS BANOS, Calif. — When it comes to President Trump, Angie Zamora and Phaidra Medeiros agree on very little. Zamora, a 36-year-old Army veteran, has nothing good to say. 'The laws. All the rights taken away from women. The stuff with ICE,' Zamora said, ticking off her frustrations as she stopped outside the post office in the Central Valley community of Los Banos. 'Why are they going after people working on farms when they're supposed to be chasing violent criminals?' Medeiros, by contrast, is delighted Trump replaced Joe Biden. 'He wasn't mentally fit,' Medeiros said of the elderly ex-president. 'There was something wrong with him from the very beginning.' Despite all that, the two do share one belief: Both say the government should cough up every last bit of information it has on Jeffrey Epstein, his sordid misdeeds and the powerful associates who moved in his aberrant orbit. Trump 'did his whole campaign on releasing the Epstein files,' Zamora said. 'And now he's trying to change the subject. 'Oh, it's a 'hoax' ... 'Oh, you guys are still talking about that creep?' And yet there's pictures throughout the years of him with that creep.' Medeiros, 56, echoed the sentiment. Trump and his fellow Republicans 'put themselves into this predicament because they kept talking constantly' about the urgency of unsealing records in Epstein's sex-trafficking case — until they took control of the Justice Department and the rest of Washington. 'Now,' she said, 'they're backpedaling.' Medeiros paused outside the engineering firm where she works in the Central Valley, in Newman, on a tree-lined street adorned with star-spangled banners honoring local servicemen and women. 'Obviously there were minors involved' in Epstein's crimes, she said, and if Trump is somehow implicated 'then he needs to go down as well.' Years after being found dead in a Manhattan prison cell — killed by his own hand, according to authorities — Epstein appears to have done the near-impossible in this deeply riven nation. He's united Democrats, Republicans and independents around a call to reveal, once and for all, everything that's known about his case. 'He's dead now, but if people were involved they should be prosecuted,' said Joe Toscano, a 69-year-old Los Banos retiree and unaffiliated voter who last year supported Trump's return to the White House. 'Bring it all out there. Make it public.' California's 13th Congressional District, where Zamora, Medeiros and Toscano all live, is arguably the most closely fought political terrain in America. Sprawling through California's midriff, from the far reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area to the southern edge of the San Joaquin Valley, it's farm country: Flat, fertile and crossed-hatched with canals, rail lines and thruways with utilitarian names such as Road No. 32 and Avenue 18½. The myriad small towns are brief interludes amid the dairy and poultry farms and lush carpeting of vegetables, fruit and nut trees that stretch to the hazy-brown horizon. The most populous city, Merced, has fewer than 100,000 residents. (Modesto, with a population of around 220,000, is split between the 5th and 13th districts.) Democratic Rep. Adam Gray was elected in November in the closest House race in the country, beating the Republican incumbent, John Duarte, by 187 votes out of nearly 211,000 cast. The squeaker was a rematch and nearly a rerun. Two years prior, Duarte defeated Gray by fewer than 600 votes out of nearly 134,000 cast. Not surprisingly, both parties have made the 13th District a top target in 2026; handicappers rate the contest a toss-up, even as the field sorts itself out. (Duarte has said he would not run again.) The midterm election is a long way off, so it's impossible to say how the Epstein controversy will play out politically. But there is, at the least, a baseline expectation of transparency, a view that was repeatedly expressed in conversations with three dozen voters across the district. Zachery Ramos, a 25-year-old independent, is the founder of the Gustine Traveling Library, which promotes learning and literacy throughout the Central Valley. Its storefront, painted with polka dots and decorated with giant butterflies, sits like a cheery oasis in Gustine's four-block downtown, a riot of green spilling from the planter boxes out front. Inside, the walls were filled with commendations and newspaper clippings celebrating Ramos' good works. As a nonprofit, he said, 'we have to have everything out there. All the books. Everything.' Epstein, he suggested, should be treated no differently. 'When it comes to something as serious as that, with what may or may not have taken place on his private island, with his girlfriend' — convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell — 'I do think it should all be out in the open,' Ramos said. 'If you're not afraid of your name being in [the files], especially when you're dealing with minors being assaulted, it should 100% be made public.' Ed, a 42-year-old Democrat who manages a warehouse operation in Patterson, noted that Trump released the government's long-secret files on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., even though King's family objected. (Like several of those interviewed, he declined to give his last name, to avoid being hassled by readers who don't like what he had to say.) Why, Ed wondered, shouldn't the Epstein files come to light? 'It wasn't just Trump,' he said. 'It was a lot of Republicans in Congress that said, 'Hey, we want to get these files out there.' And I believe if Kamala [Harris] had won, they would be beating her down, demanding she do so.' He smacked a fist in his palm, to emphasize the point. Sue, a Madera Republican and no fan of Trump, expressed her feelings in staccato bursts of fury. 'Apparently the women years ago said who was doing what, but nobody listens to the women,' said the 75-year-old retiree. 'Release it all! Absolutely! You play, you pay, buddy.' Even those who dismissed the importance of Epstein and his crimes said the government should hold nothing back — if only to erase doubts and lay the issue to rest. Epstein 'is gone and I don't really care if they release the files or not,' said Diane Nunes, a 74-year-old Republican who keeps the books for her family farm, which lies halfway between Los Banos and Gustine. 'But they probably should, because a lot of people are waiting for that.' Patrick, a construction contractor, was more worked up about 'pretty boy' Gavin Newsom and 'Nazi Pelosi' — 'yes, that's what I call her' — than anything that might be lurking in the Epstein files. 'When the cat is dead, you don't pick it up and pet it. Right?' He motioned to the pavement, baking as the temperature in Patterson climbed into the low 90s. 'It's over with,' the 61-year-old Republican said of Epstein and his villainy. 'Move on.' At least, that would be his preference. But to 'shut everybody up, absolutely, yeah, they should release them,' Patrick said. 'Otherwise, we're all going to be speculating forever.' Or at least until the polls close in November 2026.
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A Compton family endured two killings in just eight months. Why justice is so elusive
Jessica Carter is tired of being resilient. After her brother, Richard Ware, 48, was stabbed to death outside a Los Feliz homeless shelter last month, it fell to her to hold their extended family together. Just eight months prior, another relative — her 36-year-old nephew, Jesse Darjean — was gunned down around the block from his childhood home in Compton. His slaying remains unsolved. Across L.A. County and around the country, murder rates are falling to lows not seen since the late 1960s. Yet clearance rates — a measure of how often police solve cases — have remained relatively steady. In other words: Even with fewer homicides to investigate, authorities have been unable to bring more murderers to justice. Police data show killings of Black and Latino people are still less likely to be solved than those of white or Asian victims. Carter's hometown of Compton is still crawling out from under its reputation as a national epicenter for gang violence. But for all of its continued struggles, violent crime — especially killings — has plummeted. When the gang wars peaked in 1991, there were 87 homicides. Last year, there were 18, including Darjean's fatal shooting on Oct. 24. The way Carter sees it, the killers who took her brother and nephew are both getting away with it — but for different reasons. In Darjean's shooting, there are no known suspects, witnesses or motive. But the man who stabbed Ware is known to authorities. The L.A. County district attorney's office declined to file charges against him, finding evidence of self-defense, according to a memo released to The Times. Ware's sister and other relatives dispute the D.A.'s decision, claiming authorities have failed to fully investigate. 'The system failed him,' Carter said. In the absence of arrests and charges, Carter and her family have simmered with rage, grief and frustration. With digital footprints, DNA testing and more resources than ever available to police, how is it that the people who took their loved ones are still walking free? In Darjean's case, the investigation is led by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which has patrolled Compton since 2000, when the city disbanded its own Police Department. Leads appear to be scarce. His body was found in the back seat of his car, which had been riddled with bullets. A father of three, he had just gotten home late at night from one of his jobs as a security guard. To Sherrina Lewis, his mother, it seemed the world was quick to forget and move on. News outlets largely ignored the shooting. Social media sensationalized it. She couldn't resist reading some of the comments online, speculating about whether her son was killed by someone he knew or because of his race or a gang affiliation. But, Darjean was no gangster, she says. True, there had been rumors around the neighborhood about escalating conflict between the Cedar Block Pirus, a Black gang, and their Latino rivals. But if anything, Lewis said, her son was targeted in a classic case of wrong place, wrong time. When homicide detectives began knocking on doors for answers, her former neighbors claimed not to have seen anything. For Lewis, it felt like betrayal — many of those neighbors had watched Darjean grow up with their kids. 'Each and every day I have to ask God to lift the hardness in my heart, because I'm angry,' Lewis said. 'They're not gonna make my son no cold case, I promise you that.' Lewis nearly lost Darjean once before, at the moment of his birth. He and his twin brother were born three months early, and doctors warned that Darjean was the less likely of the two to survive. He suffered from respiratory problems, which left him dependent on a breathing machine. The prognosis was bleak. Doctors asked her for 'a name for his death certificate' in case he died en route to a hospital in Long Beach. Picking 'Jesse' on the spot was agony, she said. In the end, Darjean was the twin who survived. Shy as a child, he had grown up to be outgoing and witty, a person who loved to cook soul food and make dance videos with his sister and post them on Instagram. While his siblings all moved away as they got older, Darjean insisted on staying put. Compton was home, through and through, he used to tell his mother. He wasn't blind to the gang violence, but he came to know a different side of the city, one that represented Black joy and resilience — a side he saw captured in Kendrick Lamar's music video for the Grammy-winning 'Not Like Us.' When his niece ran for Miss Teen Compton, Darjean advocated on her behalf by taking out a full-page ad in the local newspaper that proclaimed: 'Compton is the best city on Earth.' But Darjean knew the pain of losing loved ones. His friend Montae Talbert was killed late one night in 2011 in a drive-by shooting outside an Inglewood liquor store. Talbert, known as M-Bone, was a member of the rap group Cali Swag District, the group behind the viral rap dance the 'Dougie.' Around the same time, the mother of Darjean's oldest daughter was gunned down in Compton. A few years later, another uncle, Terry Carter, a businessman who built classic lowrider cars and started a record label with Ice Cube, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by rap impresario Marion 'Suge' Knight. After Darjean's funeral, which Lewis said drew more than 1,000 people, she returned to the scene of the shooting: Brazil Street, right off Wilmington Avenue, on a modest block of stucco and wood-frame homes. With the bravado of an angry, grieving mother, she began going door-to-door in her old neighborhood, seeking answers. She wanted to show anyone who was watching that she wouldn't be intimidated into silence. When she confronted one of Darjean's close childhood friends about what happened, he swore he didn't know anything. She didn't believe him. 'He just broke down crying. I can tell it was eating him up,' Lewis said. The L.A. County Sheriff's Department did not respond to multiple inquires about Darjean's case. On some level, Lewis understands the hesitancy. Fear of gang retaliation and distrust of law enforcement still hangs over the west Compton neighborhood. After raising her six children there, in 2006 she sold their family home of 50 years and moved to Palmdale because she didn't want her 'kids to become accustomed to death.' For her, she said, the final straw was the discovery of a body 'propped up' on her neighbor's fence. Like generations of Black women before her, Lewis is faced with enormous pressure to carry their family's burden. Possessing a superhuman-like will to overcome adversity is celebrated by society with terms such as 'Black Girl Magic' and 'Strong Black Woman,' said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University. But such unrealistic expectations not only strip Black women of their innocence from an early age, but also contribute to higher pregnancy-related death rates and other bad health outcomes, she said. 'A lot of times people expect Black women to take care of it,' Bentley-Edwards said in an interview. Instead of romanticizing the struggle, she said, there should be 'tangible support like housing or employment' and other resources. But experts say safety nets are at risk, particularly after the Trump administration in April terminated roughly $811 million in public safety grants for L.A. and other major cities. As a result, federal funds for victim services programs, which offer counseling and other resources, have been slashed. Lewis never thought she'd be in a position to need such help. 'The funny thing is, we're from Compton born and raised, but we were not a statistic until my son was murdered,' she said. 'My kids had a two-parent household. We both had jobs. We weren't doing welfare: I worked every day.' Months of waiting on an arrest in Darjean's death led Carter, his aunt, into a 'dark place.' She ended up taking a spiritual retreat into the mountains of Nigeria. She was still working through the feelings of anger and guilt when she learned her brother, Ware, had been fatally stabbed on July 5. She described the days and weeks that followed as a teary blur. Coming from a family of nurses taught her how to push aside her own grief and forge on, but she was left wondering how much more she could endure. Ware, who went by Duke, was his family's unofficial historian, setting out to map out their sprawling Portuguese and Creole roots and scouring the internet for long-lost relatives. He used to brag all the time about his daughter, who had graduated from nursing school and moved back to the L.A. area to work at a pediatric intensive care unit on the Westside. He used to joke that for all of his shortcomings as a father, he had at least gotten one thing right. In recent months, though, Ware's life had started to spiral. His diabetes had gotten worse, and a back injury left him unable to continue in his job as a long-haul truck driver. Relatives worried he was hiding a drug addiction from them. He had adopted a bull mastiff puppy named Nala. She used to follow him everywhere, usually trotting a few steps behind without a leash. Even when he was having trouble making ends meet, he always 'spoiled her,' his family said. For a few months, he lived out of a van one of his sisters bought for him. He then landed at a shelter, a hangar-style structure on the edge of Griffith Park. He and Nala were kicked out after a short time, but he still frequented the area, and it's where L.A. County authorities said the fight that ended in his killing began. Prosecutors said in a memo that surveillance video showed Ware and his dog chasing another man into a parking lot across the street from the shelter. The two men, the D.A.'s memo said, had been involved in an ongoing dispute, possibly over a woman. According to the memo, the man said he'd been carrying a knife because of a previous altercation in which Ware ordered his dog to attack. On the day of the stabbing, the man said, Ware had shown up with Nala at the shelter, looking for a confrontation. After the fight, responding officers found Ware suffering from a deep wound to his chest, Nala with several lacerations and the suspect hiding in a nearby porta-potty. His clothes had been torn off, and he was bleeding profusely from several severe dog bites, the memo said. Prosecutors said witnesses corroborated the man's story that Ware had been the aggressor, in addition to the video footage. Ware's family says that account contradicts what they heard from other residents, who claimed Ware was the one defending himself after the other man attacked him with a vodka bottle. In the meantime, they are working to secure Nala's release from the pound, where she has been nursing her injuries. On July 8, Carter organized a candlelight vigil for her brother outside the shelter where the killing happened. That morning, she said, she cried in the shower before steeling herself so she could run out to a Dollar Tree store to pick up some balloons. When she got to the vigil, Lewis made her way around, greeting the swarm of relatives holding homemade signs and chanting Ware's name. After a final prayer, the group released balloons, most of which floated upward with the evening's lazy breeze. Some, though, got caught in the branches of a large tree nearby. A smile finally crossed Carter's face as she pointed up to them. She took it as a sign from Ware, as though he was saying a last goodbye before he departed to heaven. 'He's trying to hang on,' she said.
