A Crime of Passion and Tragedy

March 05, 2008

In what appears to be a crime of passion fueled by jealousy, pretty 22-year-old Spc. Ivette Gonzalez Davila, a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, has been arrested on allegations that she killed two fellow soldiers, a man and a woman, and then took the married couple’s six-month-old baby back to the barracks with her. The victims, Timothy and Randi Miller, ages 27 and 25, respectively, were killed in their off-base home in the community of Parkland, Washington, sometime Saturday evening, March 1, 2008, according to reports by The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

According to Ed Murphy, a Pierce County, Washington deputy prosecutor, Davila purportedly told another soldier that "Randi Miller was in a relationship with Davila’s ex-boyfriend, another soldier, who had apparently chosen Randi Miller over Davila." Davila, a specialist in the I Corps and a member of the Fort Lewis color guard, is expected to be charged with the killings on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. If charged with aggravated murder and kidnapping, Davila, originally from Bakersfield, California, could face the death penalty.

According to published reports, Davila had posted messages on the victims’ MySpace pages earlier in February 2008 in which she had indicated that she was coming to their home to visit. The postings, police allege, indicate that she knew both of the victims, both of whom were sergeants and had done tours of duty in Iraq. Timothy Miller, originally from Gardnerville, Nevada, had been in the Army for 10 years, and had been making plans to join up with the Nevada State Police following his military service. Those who knew the couple said that both appeared very loving, and that both lived for their daughter. They were described as a hard-working couple, and very reliable. Family members discounted the possibility that Randi Miller had been having an affair, as Davila had apparently believed.

"They had a beautiful marriage," Randi’s father told reporters...

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Xbox Baby-Killer

March 03, 2008

When Microsoft Corporation came out with the Xbox they most assuredly wanted, of course, its users to become enthralled with their video games system. However, they didn’t expect users of the system to become so engrossed in the video games that they would lose all sense of parental judgment and control. But that’s what apparently happened when one man, who spent several hours each day playing video games, became enraged when his 17-month-old daughter pulled his Xbox down onto the floor.

According to the prosecutor, 27-year-old Tyrone Spellman, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who also answers to the name Anwar Salahuddin, played video games six to seven hours per day. On the day in question in September 2006, while the child’s pregnant mother, 21-year-old Mia Turman, slept in another room, the child, Alayiah, pulled at the cords to the Xbox while her father played a video game, eventually causing the game console to fall. Spellman, apparently angered over the mishap, allegedly punched his daughter about the face and head and cracked her skull in several places. He fled the house after the beating.

When Turman awoke she called paramedics to their home because she discovered that Alayiah was not breathing. The child was taken by ambulance to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 12:37 p.m. An autopsy subsequently revealed that, in addition to the cracked skull, the child had suffered a broken arm approximately two weeks earlier—an injury that social workers had failed to notice during a visit to the home in August 2006.

A day after his arrest, Spellman allegedly confessed to the police. Initially charged with murder, endangering the welfare of a child and possessing an instrument of crime, Spellman was in jail during the birth of his second child, also a girl, who would never meet the sister that her father had beaten to death. The second child was promptly removed from the mother’s custody by city social workers...

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