Violence broke out Sunday in Anderson when an 18-year-old man returned home from a gay pride parade and was assaulted by his father.... The teen told deputies that his father “has a problem with him being gay and that is why he hit him with the baseball bat Sunday,” Weymouth said in his report.

Via Towleroad.

Since Savage is on vacation, I'm throwing this up.

An Illinois woman faces at least 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to doping her 6-year-old twin girls with cough syrup and taking nude pictures of them with her boyfriend.

(Thanks, Julia.)

A sign outside a Bait 'n Peaches store in Ruston, Louisiana.

I have no idea what this means. It's inscrutable on so many levels.

Via Tech Master Brian G., who reports that the peaches were delicious.

Brad, as you may have heard, has been at the Stranger for 14 years, ending today. I've been here something more like 14 months. So I don't have as many Brad memories as some of my colleagues, and thanks to the pot, a lot of the Brad memories I do have are hazy at best. But there is one time I can semi-coherently recall hanging out with Brad outside of work.

Grand Archives were playing the Triple Door. I was going because that sort of thing is kind of my beat here (and because, hey, Grand Archives). Brad was going because he knows all those dudes form back in Jesuit school or whatever. So we combined forces to seek out somewhere to drink downtown before the show. After being rebuffed at a few overcrowded yuppie bars, we ended up down at the Alibi Room, drinking bourbon at the bar. We talked about the ladies. We talked about life. We were about go watch Grand Archives. You know, real guy stuff. And it was sweet. I get the feeling that, if I had come around a little earlier, or if Brad was sticking around a little longer, he might've imparted a lot of dudely wisdom upon me. Or at least more bourbon.

Now it's gonna be all ladies and fags around here. Thanks, Brad.

Amanda is formally charged with murder:

Prosecutors investigating the killing in Italy last year of the British student Meredith Kercher today laid formal charges of murder against her American flatmate, Amanda Knox, Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede, a citizen of the Ivory Coast.

A judge in the central Italian city of Perugia must now decide whether they should be put on trial. Because of the gravity of the charges, under Italian law the judge must now arrange a closed-doors preliminary hearing to review the evidence and decide if there is sufficient evidence for an indictment.

This is Amanda months and months before the murder of her roommate, Meredith...

If she is tried, found guilty, and sentenced, this might be her in some sad and sunless cell in the far future...

It would be easier to take conservatives seeking to "protect" marriage seriously if they proposed some sort of penalty for heterosexuals that make a hash of marriage over and over and over again. Perhaps a four-strikes-and-you're-out law?

First things first: You can now be charged with attempted sexual assault in Wisconsin even if your intended victim is dead. In 2006 three young men tried to dig up a body after seeing a picture of the deceased woman—a twenty-year old looker who died in a motorcycle accident—in a local paper. A lower court ruled that the men could not be charged with attempted sexual assault because the law didn't mention necrophilia. But the Wisconsin State Supreme Court disagreed with the lower courts, and reinstated attempted sexual assault charges against the three boys.

Oh, the heartland.

Slog tipper Brie noticed an odd detail in the report:

The men went to the cemetery with shovels, a crowbar, a tarpaulin, and a box of condoms, which the men had purchased that evening on their way to the cemetery.

Why condoms, Brie asks? Considering how few young men seem to think they need to use condoms with living, breathing, ovulating women, it seems odd that these young men would think to purchase a box of condoms on the way to a cemetery. Perhaps these boys know something about embalming fluid that we don't—maybe it burns?—or maybe they were worried about catching the mother of all cooties. Details will, presumably, come out during the trial, so we'll be staying tuned to WISC-TV for complete coverage.

Thad J. Smith was arrested Monday night on charges he shot his three children several times with an air-powered pellet gun in what he later described to police as "good fun." ...

Marengo police arrested Smith Monday night after his ex-wife reported that the couple's children—a 10-year-old girl and twin 9-year-old boys—returned home from a visit with their father sporting numerous welts on their bodies, the police said. When questioned, Smith admitted shooting the children with small, plastic pellets fired from an air-powered gun, Deputy Police Chief Joseph Hallman said.

"He said the children were willing participants," Hallman said. "I don't know if it was some kind of a game with them or what he was doing."

If it was a game, it was completely one-sided. The children, Hallman said, told police they never fired a shot back at their dad.

A British man who fled the U.S. after his wife and baby daughter were shot to death in their home has been convicted of murdering them....

Prosecutors say Entwistle was in debt and dissatisfied with his sex life when he fatally shot his wife and daughter as they snuggled in bed in their Hopkinton home in 2006.

From the PI...

Federal Way police have arrested a father who said he fell asleep with his 7-month-old boy near a backyard fire pit Saturday night and awoke to find the child burned to death....

The father told police that he fell asleep holding his child while sitting on a bench adjacent to the pit. He said he awoke to find the child missing and went into the house to see if the boy was with his mother, then returned to the pit and discovered the body shortly before midnight.

Could've been worse—he could've had one of them gay dads that talks about bathhouse sex at the kitchen table.

Readers who wonder why I post those distressing "Every Child Deserves a Mother and Father" items might want to check out this ad, which the Family Research Council ran in newspapers in California this weekend:

Yes, yes—every child deserves a mom and a dad. Someone run down to the morgue and tell this kid how very lucky he was to have a mom and a dad.

Ad via JoeMyGod.

A couple accused of tying their 13-year-old son to a tree for two nights to punish him for disobedience has been charged with murder in his death, authorities said Friday.

Brice Brian McMillan, 41, of Macclesfield, told a deputy that the child was being disobedient and was forced to sleep outside Tuesday while tied to a tree, the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office said. The teenager was released Wednesday morning but again tied up that night for bad behavior, authorities said.

The boy was left tied to the tree until the following afternoon when his stepmother found him unresponsive, Sheriff James Knight said in a statement.

So it would appear that Italian men now have to provide proof of erection-obtaining-abilities to a Catholic priest in order to get married in the Church.

An Italian bishop has refused to allow a church wedding for a paraplegic man who was rendered impotent by a crippling automobile accident.

A spokesman for Bishop Lorenzo Chiarinelli of Viterbo explained that although the bride was aware of her fiancé's condition, their union could not be celebrated as a Christian marriage because impotence is grounds for annulment.

The Catholic priesthood: Nice work if you can get it, huh?

Thanks to Slog tipper Griet.

A Loveland man suspected of fatally bludgeoning and stabbing a process server was strangling his children in their home when deputies found him, the Larimer County Sheriff's Office said....

The children, a 10-year-old boy and a girl, 12, were taken to Medical Center of the Rockies, where they remain hospitalized, officials said.

Should straight marriages be legal in Utah?

This morning I read something in the paper about a mother rushing her son to the hospital after the boy fell off some playground equipment and landed on his head. The story said the boy died, and I felt terrible for the mom. Still do, even though there was no playground equipment and no fall and the story now qualifies for an ECDAMF. From the Seattle Times:

Police have arrested the boyfriend of a woman whose 3-year-old son was fatally injured at a Tacoma apartment complex.

Police spokesman Mark Fulghum says the injury occurred Wednesday inside an apartment, not on a playground set as officers were first told.

The 25-year-old man was booked into the Pierce County Jail at 1:30 a.m. today for investigation of second-degree murder. He had a 2004 conviction for assaulting his own son.

The man had been watching his girlfriend's boy while she was at work. When the mother returned she drove her son to St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood where he was declared dead.

A Vancouver couple have been arrested but will not be charged after posting an Internet ad on Craigslist, offering their seven-day-old baby for $10,000, police said Tuesday.

Vancouver police Const. Tim Fanning said he had never heard of such a thing in his 27 years as a police officer.

Ten police officers worked on the case, he said, tracking the Craigslist posting to a west-end apartment.

The father claims the ad was a hoax—but, man, $10,000 for a baby? Anyone that's done an adoption will tell you that 10K for a baby is a steal.

I feel cheated.

I grew up Nazarene (ternt Babdist [Xtians LOVE an-/pro- nunciation!]) in North Central Texas—Texoma, if you will (I had to). Never ONCE did I get a ball or balls from my daddy or anyone else's daddy. Are you there, God? It's My Sense of Entitlement. In fact no dude I knew ever had any purity ball. No one ever takes groups of boys aside, making them vow to hold their load for marriage (or consent???). And that pisses me off.

Let me tell you what does happen. There are extra-curricular Sunday school classes and fellowships/pancake breakfasts for men young and old where they teach you how to own the fuck out of your household, own your women (sorry...Honor them!), and own all the riches you deserve because you prayed for them.

Now all of this (minus the pancakes) was totally useless to me because I was/am a homosexual, but you'd think someone would organize balls for us boys who "struggled" with our sexuality. Make us dress up in tails and patent leather slip-ons. Make us vow not to have our first sexual experience at a glory hole in a porn arcade (that experience was a total surprise; I never even knew about glory holes before!). Nope. Instead there were secret (even to the church body) bible studies for combatting, well... the innate (but sinful) desire to have dicks in our faces.

GIVE BOYS THEIR BALLS.

Until then, I'll have to settle for this (And true story—I once kissed the fellow you see on the far right at 2:25; take that, GOD!):

EDIT: Oooooh, MARY. I totally forgot I had this photo. Here's one of those MENZ FUNCTIONS at my old mini-mega-church, First Baptist Church of Wichita Falls. In this image you see a laying-on-of-hands for the former pastor—who once started a campaign to get Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate banned from the public library and who, in a lot of people's opinion, is a BIG OLE QUEEN. The name of this event, mind you, is STEAK AND PRAISE.

Two toddlers have been placed in the care of Suffolk County Child Protective Services after police arrested their parents on drug and endangerment charges.

Suffolk police responded to a Shell Road home around 3 pm May 9 after receiving a tip of possible animal abuse, according to police reports. They discovered a dog locked with its own filth in a small cage, without water, and entered the home.

Inside, they found a 4-year-old boy naked and a 2-year-old boy wearing a dirty diaper. They also found Jeffrey Littlefield, 24, and Heather Littlefield, 23, the boys' parents, apparently under the influence of drugs, along with more than 200 used and uncapped hypodermic needles and "at least one hypodermic needle loaded with drugs," according to a police statement.

Needles were in "virtually every room in the house," the statement added. Also confiscated were two rifles with ammunition, several knives, used glassine bags and other drug paraphernalia, police said.

When Jeffrey Littlefield approached officers, he stumbled to the floor; Heather Littlefield was found unconscious on the bathroom floor, police said.

Via Pam's House Blend.

No, this isn't another depressing "Every Child Deserves..." post. I try to limit those posts to no more than one a week, despite the numerous examples of spectacularly bad opposite-sex parenting that I run across, or alert readers bring to my attention, every damn week. I just wanted to make sure that readers who bitch endlessly about my "Every Child Deserves..." posts catch this quote at the bottom the CNN piece about the decision in California.

Groups saying they were promoting a pro-family agenda had vowed to fight a statewide law allowing same-sex marriage.

"The government should promote and encourage strong families," said Glen Lavy of the Alliance Defense Fund. "The voters realize that defining marriage as one man and one woman is important because the government should not, by design, deny a child both a mother and father."

Gay families can't be strong families—and our children don't deserve the protections of marriage—because every child deserves a mother and a father.

Sigh.

Says Slog tipper Rebecca...

I really can't bear to read the "Every Child Deserves..." items anymore but I think this shows why it's good on you to keep running 'em.

Have Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar—the fundamentalist Christian couple content to have just as many children as God sees fit to grant them (and, as Erica points out, saps see fit to subsidize)—seen this?

Brock University psychologist Anthony Bogaert first reported in 1996 the startling finding that a boy's probability of growing up gay increases by about one-third with each older brother in his family. It's a subtle phenomenon—nearly all boys even in large families still grow up straight—but subsequent research has affirmed that the "fraternal birth order effect" is real....

Bogaert also examined families in which biologically related brothers were raised separately by families after divorce. No matter where the boys were raised—in small or large families—the only factor that showed the elevated chance of growing up gay was having older biological brothers.

By ruling out child-raising factors and ruling in biological factors, Bogaert concluded that the results "support a prenatal origin to sexual orientation development in men.''

I have two older brothers. My boyfriend has one.

The youngest Duggar boy—that would be little Jackson—has nine older brothers. Nine! Michelle Duggar's vagina is less clown car at this stage and more gay bar.

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday accusing a man and woman of training the woman's child to be a dominatrix, selling her sexual services and photographing some of the acts....

Todd B. Barkau, 35, of New York state, and the 44-year-old mother were charged in the seven-count indictment. They once lived together in Blue Springs, Mo., where the sex business was allegedly run.... The indictment says Barkau began training the girl in 2000 when she was 12, and forced her to engage in sex acts with him and with other men. According to the indictment, he also had the girl watch pornography on the Internet as a teaching tool.

Barkau is accused of creating a business out of the couple's Missouri home when the girl was 14 and marketing her as a 19-to-20-year-old dominatrix on the Internet for about two years.

The mother is charged with encouraging and participating in the venture, the indictment says.

That experience had to traumatizing for this child—now a 20 year-old woman—but just imagine how much more traumatizing it would have been if the child hadn't have had a male and a female role model in the home.

Thanks to Slog tipper Corinne.

UPDATE:

Oh, kids. I get sent so many links to stories like this one, and I post so very, very few of them. They really have to rise to the level of blah blah blah. And the anti-gay ranters that insist that every child deserves a mother and a father aren't just arguing for kids to remain with their biological parents. They argue that, in those tragic instances when a kid child can't be raised by one or both of his or her biological parents, that child absolutely, positively, GOD ALMIGHTY, just hasta be placed in a household with one male and one female role model. If that doesn't happen—if a child is placed with, say, a pair of fit, sane, screened, home-studied, and qualified same-sex parents—why, that's as good as child abuse.

I'm sorry that these posts annoy some readers. You are free to play spot the header and scroll on by. But the debate over same-sex parents rages just below, it seems, whatever pitch or tone is required for many straight people to hear it. "Yeah, yeah—we get it, Dan! Enough already!" Yeah, yeah—I get it, it's annoying. It's supposed to be. And these posts will cease when the smearing of same-sex parents ceases or is met with howls of outrage from all quarters.

Kids, mom lived with 90-year-old's corpse for weeks in Wis.

Two children and their mother lived for about two months with the decaying body of a 90-year-old woman on the toilet of their home's only bathroom, on the advice of a religious "superior" who claimed the corpse would come back to life, authorities said Friday.

The children—a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy—cried hysterically Wednesday after a deputy who came to their Necedah home looking for Magdeline Alvina Middlesworth ordered them out because of the stench from her body....

When Deputy Leigh Neville-Neil arrived at the house, she encountered Lewis, also known as Sister Mary Bernadett, the complaint said. Lewis, 35, initially refused to allow the deputy to check on Middlesworth, telling her that Middlesworth was on vacation and saying she had to check with her "superior" first.

But she eventually let the deputy in. The house smelled of incense and burned wood, and had religious materials everywhere and hymns playing on the stereo, according to the complaint. When the deputy opened the last closed door, she smelled "decaying matter" and noticed something piled on what appeared to be a toilet. Lewis told her it was Middlesworth's body, the complaint said.

Lewis told the deputy that Middlesworth had died about two months earlier, but that God told her Middlesworth would come to life if she prayed hard enough. She said she couldn't say anything more until she spoke with her "superior"—Bushey, 57, also known as Bishop John Peter Bushey.

They really are coming for your birth control pills—seriously.

June 7 marks the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. This was the first of many decisions that led to the culture of death we live in today. On that day in 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Griswold v. Connecticut case, it set a legal precedent for claiming that the Constitution grants women the right to privacy in matters of sexual practice. This meant that Connecticut and the rest of the United States could not stop a married woman from obtaining birth control pills.

Yes, the country went to shit when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that women had a right to privacy "in matters of sexual practice." Every sensible person knows, of course, that sexually-active women cede all their rights to privacy, sexual or otherwise. Those aren't her reproductive organs; that's a SRO hotel for a fetus.

La la la. The religious right is seeking to redefine birth control as abortion, and they want to end your right to access both or either. Time to fight back.

By asking straight people to sacrifice something to protect the sacred sanctity of the institution of marriage.

Earlier this week the state legislature in Pennsylvania was preparing to place an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Pennsylvania state constitution before voters in that state. Then a state senator, Vincent Fumo (D-Philadelphia), introduced an amendment-to-the-amendment that wound up sinking PA's proposed anti-gay marriage amendment.

His amendment would "outlaw the dissolution of most marriages in Pennsylvania," he said in a news release. That would mean there would be few legal ways for the divorce of a married couple, a man and a woman.

Mr. Fumo, who leaves the Senate on Nov. 30, said the stated goal of Senate Bill 1250 is to "protect the sanctity of the marital institution" by defining a legal marriage as only between one man and one woman.

The next logical step, according to Mr. Fumo, is to also outlaw divorces...

The state senate in Pennsylvania is controlled by Republicans, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette reports that Fumo's amendment didn't have a chance. But Fumo's amendment would have to be debated, and PA's family values crusaders didn't want to engage in a debate about divorce—currently a purely heterosexual institution in PA—and how straight divorce undermines the totally sacred sanctity of the institution of marriage. It's way easier for sanctimonious lawmakers to point their ring fingers at same-sex marriage, which is currently illegal in PA (if not unconstitutional), and blame people that have done no harm to the sacred sanctity of the institution of marriage for all the damage done by heterosexuals.

You know, folks behind anti-gay marriage amendments like to accuse gay people of seeking to "redefine marriage." But, as I wrote in The Commitment, it's actually straight people that have redefined marriage (mostly in good ways—women are no longer property, for instance). But here's another straight redefinition of marriage to add to the list: An institution that most straight people weren't interested in defending until one day they realized they might have to share it.

Three children were taken into protective custody after their parents passed out drunk in a hotel reception [area] during a holiday in the Algarve.

The children, aged one, two and six, were taken to a children's home on Friday.... The police were called shortly after the couple returned to the Aparthotel Mourabel in Vilamoura at around 10pm. A barman at the hotel, who did not want to be named, said: "The husband collapsed in the hotel reception while his wife staggered into the bar with her children and fell into a chair."

The hotel manager said: "She was struggling with the pushchair, swaying from side to side. The six-year-old boy was pushing the other buggy with the two-year-old in it....

"We tried to wake her, we tried to put some water on her face and head to wake her but she was very, very bad. She started to be sick every minute." ... Dr Luis Villas-Boas, director of the home in Faro where the children were taken, said: "It's normal for a couple for one to drink while the other doesn't. The problem here is that they were both passed out. It was extreme neglect and abandonment."

...and a grandfather.

Authorities in Austria are trying to piece together the details of how a 73-year-old man managed to keep his daughter imprisoned in a windowless cellar for 24 years while he repeatedly raped her and fathered her seven children.

Police said the 42-year-old woman, identified only as Elisabeth F, told them her father, Josef, had lured her into the basement of the block where the family lived in Amstetten, north-west Austria, on August 24 1984, and allegedly drugged and handcuffed her before locking her up in the dungeon. A police spokesman said she was "psychologically extremely disturbed", but her version of events was "completely believable".

The father was in custody last night.

A Seattle man has been charged with second-degree murder, accused of repeatedly stabbing his wife with a 13-inch barbecue fork in front of their two young children....

Debra Lynn Bonilla, 38, suffered at least a dozen stab wounds, including one to her heart, in the attack at her Beacon Hill home. Despite the efforts of the staff at Harborview Medical Center, she died several hours after the attack. She had five children, three from a previous marriage.

Juan Carlos Bonilla was ordered held in the King County Jail on $1 million bail. He will be arraigned May 6.... In 2001, when the couple lived in Alaska, Bonilla allegedly beat his then-pregnant wife so badly, he broke her nose. He also allegedly threatened to stab her to death.

Royce Lee Love, 24, of Vallejo was found dead of a gunshot wound inside a home on the 700 block of Virginia Street at about 2:55 p.m. Sunday, said Vallejo police Detective Joe McCarthy.

Vallejo police interviewed a number of witnesses and arrested Love's girlfriend, Jamie Elkins, 20, of Vallejo on suspicion of murder, McCarthy said.

The couple have been involved in at least one previous domestic-violence incident, and last year, Solano County sued Love for failing to pay child support for their son, now 15 months old, court records show.

Because those legal marriages seem to end in tears quite pretty frequently...

A Yemeni court ordered the marriage of an eight-year-old girl terminated on Tuesday because she had not reached puberty.

The court also ordered the child's family to pay about $250 in compensation to the 30-year-old ex-husband.

I don't like to post more than one or two "Every Child..." posts a week—I know they traumatize folks (I find them traumatizing myself)—but I feel compelled to toss this one up.

The boyfriend of an 18-year-old Massachusetts woman shot and killed over the weekend on the side of a Bronx road was charged Tuesday morning in connection with her murder, accused of recruiting his cousin to kill the woman in a staged robbery of the couple, the police said.

Investigators believe that Carlos Cruz, 36, arranged with his cousin to meet him and his girlfriend, Chelsea M. Frazier, also of Massachusetts, in a secluded section of the Castle Hill neighborhood in the Bronx on Sunday afternoon to murder Ms. Frazier, as Mr. Cruz sat beside her in their car and the couple’s infant son sat in the back seat.

I shall now give "Every Child..." a rest, demonstrating my typical restraint. Yes, my restraint—I could fill Slog every day with dozens of posts like this one.

A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday. On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

A 2-year-old girl died after being beaten with a video game controller by her mother's boyfriend, police said Tuesday. Darisabel Baez's mother overheard the beating Sunday but did nothing until she realized the girl was unconscious, police said.

The girl was pronounced dead late Monday at Hershey Medical Center, police Lt. Ron Camacho said.

"The sounds of the mom screaming. Just screaming and you knew," said Delorme, her voice breaking.... Police were still on the scene yesterday in Merritt, B.C., with the bodies of the three children inside.

Their mother came home Sunday afternoon to find the bodies of Kaitlynne, 10, and her brothers Max, 7, and Cordon, 5, all dead, after leaving them in the care of their father, Allan Dwayne Schoenborn, 40.

Police are still searching for Schoenborn, who is the suspect in the fatal stabbings of the three children, and believe he may be hiding in the bush near Merritt, about 270 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

Oh. My. God.

John and Jenny Deaves, 61 and 39, respectively, met each other later as adults, fell in love, and ended up making eight-month-old daughter/granddaughter named Celeste. Because that is illegal, they're being watched by police, and decided to tell their story to Australian TV in a plea to just get everyone off their backs. But then it turned out that they were lying...

Unfortunately the Deaves weren't lying about being father and daughter and having one kid together. They had... two kids. You can read about the whole horrifying thing here.

The mess in Zimbabwe has kept me up all night. I need this moment of South African clarity:
The design is by Bongiwe Walaza.

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday.

Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday.... Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness.

The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said. They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said.

The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.

A former bank executive facing trial for embezzlement beat to death his wife and the couple's four adopted children before killing himself by ramming his car into a highway sign post, police said on Tuesday.

Investigators in Iowa City provided details of the tragedy which came to light on Monday when the bodies of Sheryl Sueppel, 42, and the couple's children ranging in age from 3 to 10 were found in their house on a quiet suburban street.

Police Chief Samuel Hargadine said Sueppel left a written note and other messages behind which indicated that he killed his wife first and then the children. A baseball bat may have been used in the beatings....

The children had been adopted from Asia, with one of them only recently joining the family.

Amanda Kay can paint you a picture of your child with Christ, if you like. Or you can cut out the middleman (but not the benign cyst) and arrange for your child to meet Jesus personally.

Prosecutors are reviewing the death of a 15-month-old girl a medical examiner says could have been saved if she had been treated with antibiotics. The Oregonian quoted Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner, as saying that Ava Worthington died March 2 at home from bacterial bronchial pneumonia and infection.

He said both conditions could have been prevented or treated with antibiotics, and the child's breathing was further compromised by a benign cyst that had never been medically addressed and could have been removed from her neck, The Oregonian reported Saturday....

If prosecuted, the paper said, Ava Worthington's parents would be the first members of Oregon City's Followers of Christ, a fundamentalist Christian denomination, to face charges for failing to seek medical treatment for a gravely ill child.... According to church tradition, when [Followers of Christ] become ill, fellow worshippers pray and anoint them with oil. Former members say those who seek modern medical remedies are ostracized.