Life sucks, then you die

[samhexum]

Speaking of sad things, there was an actor, a long time ago

 

 

Ah, my late husband... if cellphones had existed back then, I'd have met him. My friend's a cameraman for CNN. He filmed an interview with Jon-Erik promoting COVER UP. He tried to reach me all day, but couldn't. I had to settle for an unedited copy of the tape. It begins with him talking about fate... how there's no sense to worry about things... he didn't look for a reason for why things happen. He mentioned people dying under accidental circumstances as an example.

[Bearofdistinction]

Speaking of sad things, there was an actor, a long time ago, with a similar name as the OP - Jon-Eric Hexum.

 

While playing around on the set of a movie he was making, he accidentally killed himself (at age 26) with a blank gun from the set.

 

He was an extraordinarily handsome man.

 

Here is a little u-tube clip that shows a little about him and his gorgeous looks.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFh6HjRiELM

 

I had such a huge crush on him -== Loved the show VOYAGERS

[gallahadesquire]

Pat Tillman.

 

[samhexum]

Charity Lee was approaching the supermarket checkout when a fellow shopper blocked her path.

 

“I know who you are,” shouted the woman. “You should watch your son be executed, because he is a monster and you raised him!”

 

Drawing on all the strength she could muster, Lee shakily replied: “Ma’am. I don’t know who you are, but you really need to get counseling.”

 

With that, the mother of child-killer Paris Bennett, age 13, abandoned her grocery cart and rushed out.

 

The stranger’s harsh judgment only added to her agony: In a shocking twist, her son’s victim was Lee’s 4-year-old daughter, Ella.

 

Paris had stabbed his half-sister to death in cold blood with a kitchen knife.

 

‘I have forgiven Paris for what he did, but it’s an ongoing process.’

 

“There have been other moments like that,” Lee tells The Post of the 2007 incident in the Abilene, Texas, store, “But people often have one opinion at first, and then change it once they’ve talked to me and offer compassion.”

 

The 44-year-old’s powerful story of grief, love, fear and forgiveness is featured in the documentary “The Family I Had,” airing on Investigation Discovery Thursday at 9 p.m.

 

It examines Lee’s conflicted emotions as she struggles to come to terms with the catastrophe that tore apart her life 10 years ago.

 

A prison-rights activist, she keeps Ella’s memory alive while frequently visiting her now-24-year-old son in jail. He is serving a 40-year sentence (the maximum in Texas for a juvenile for murder) and will be eligible for parole in 2027.

 

“I have forgiven Paris for what he did, but it’s an ongoing process,” explains Lee. “If he was free [from captivity] I would be frightened of him.

 

“The fact that he is incarcerated gives me peace of mind, but I worry about his own safety.”

 

It was about 12:30 a.m. on Feb. 5, 2007 that Lee was met by cops at a Buffalo Wild Wings near Abilene where she worked as a waitress.

 

“[The police] told me that my daughter had been hurt,” she recalls in the film. “And I was saying: ‘you need to take me to Ella now’ and they were like: ‘You can’t go … she’s dead.’

 

“And that made no sense, because I knew that I’d left her at home with a baby sitter and her brother, so I said, ‘Is my son OK?’ And they said, ‘We have him.’ … That’s when everything stopped making sense.”

 

Sometime around 10 p.m., Paris, an unusually gifted child with an IQ of 141, had convinced the baby sitter she could go home. It was after that, according to detectives, that he grabbed a knife and entered the room where Ella was sleeping.

 

He proceeded to beat, choke and stab his little sister 17 times.

 

Next, the boy spent six minutes calling a school friend before waiting two minutes and phoning 911 to report the murder.

 

“He pretended to follow the dispatcher’s directions and do CPR,” says Lee. “But that was all a lie.” Cops found no evidence of attempted first aid.

At first, Paris claimed he suffered a vivid hallucination in which an inflamed, demonic version of Ella was laughing maniacally at him. But he later described how he had awakened that morning wanting to kill someone.

 

Says Lee: “Ella was an easy target — predators don’t ever pick on anybody bigger than themselves.”

 

Paris told investigators that his original plan was to murder Ella before lying in wait for his mother and stabbing her when she returned from work. “He said the first reason he didn’t go ahead with it was because it was a lot harder to kill someone than he thought,” says Lee. “The second reason was the realization if he’d killed me, I only would have suffered for five, 10, 15 minutes. But, if he left me alive [without Ella], I would suffer for the rest of my life.”

 

One of Paris’s motives was punishing his mother. A former heroin addict who kicked drugs shortly before conceiving her son, she’d relapsed on cocaine when he was 9 and Ella was 2. This followed a decade of sobriety for Lee. Paris claimed she had put her habit before him.

 

“The only regret I’ve ever had about my own personal behavior is my relapse,” says Lee, who has not abused narcotics since Ella’s death. “The fact is, it made him angry and he chose to handle it that way [by killing Ella].

 

“It’s just another indication that he is a sociopath. I don’t regret how I’ve handled Paris, I feel like I’ve been true to myself and followed the right path.”

 

Her son was given the “sociopath” tag in 2009 by a psychiatrist Lee hired when he was held at a juvenile detention center. He confessed to having had homicidal thoughts since the age of 8, often expressing them through violent and disturbing drawings.

 

Since becoming an adult, Paris has refused further psychological evaluations. In a jailhouse interview behind glass in “The Family I Once Had,” he tells directors Carlye Rubin and Katie Green: “I chose to do my crime and I take full responsibility for my crime. And I wouldn’t say there was a predisposition to what happened.

 

“I’m not insane and I don’t suffer from any mental illness.”

 

‘I am not going to be that parent who abandons their kid.’

 

While Lee describes him as “manipulative” and “narcissistic,” she is quick to explain how her maternal instinct means she puts her love for her son above her anger.

 

“I sometimes have to say to myself [during visits]: ‘Okay, Charity, take a breath, you know how Paris is wired,’ ” she says. “But I am not going to be that parent who abandons their kid.”

 

In 2012, the single stay-at-home mom became pregnant with a third child, Phoenix, now 4. She was delighted to at last be given a new hope.

 

The pair now lives in Savannah, Ga., and Lee goes to see Paris in the Lone Star State for four-hour stretches as often as she can. She is grateful that prison rules ban him from having visitors under age 17. “Texas won’t allow him to see Phoenix because he killed a child.

 

“If Paris wasn’t in prison or was able to meet Phoenix, I would have to do a lot more soul-searching.”

 

Mercifully, the soul-searching is helping Lee cope with the devastating loss of Ella, whom she describes as “extroverted, very outspoken and very smart.”

 

Butterflies became Ella’s symbol after her preschool teachers gave her mother a remarkable picture she had painted of the insect. A friend also found a butterfly brooch in Lee’s backyard on the day she finally returned to the house where the murder took place.

 

Ever since then, Lee associates butterflies with the presence of her daughter.

 

“That’s her thing, I guess,” adds Lee, who has a collection of butterfly tattoos.

 

In 2011, the grieving mom founded the nonprofit ELLA Foundation — an acronym for Empathy, Love, Lessons and Action — which assists people involved in the criminal-justice system and those affected by trauma.

 

“On the night that Ella died, I vowed to do something meaningful in her memory,” concludes Lee. “It also gave me a place to direct my rage, other than at my child.”

 

Through all this, she is also a loving mother to Phoenix who, she says, gave her “joy, life and happiness again.”

 

“Because I was living with the dead, I was barely living,” adds Lee. “Phoenix really brought me back into the moment.”

[caliguy]

This is why I never watch the news.

[samhexum]

You really can’t take it with you.

 

For a lottery jackpot winner, Donald Savastano had the worst luck. Weeks after winning $1 million in a scratch-off game, the self-employed carpenter died.

 

Until he cashed in on his new-found riches, Savastano, 51, was unable to afford health insurance. When Sevastano finally made it to the doctor, he got the worst news imaginable. He had stage four cancer.

 

"I was hoping that the money was maybe going to save his life," Danielle Scott, who works at the store where he bought the winning ticket, told WABC-TV.

 

"He was self-employed. He didn't have insurance, he hadn't been feeling good for a while, I guess, and when he got the money he went into the doctor."

 

Savastano died Friday, 23 days after he won the lottery. Funeral services were held Wednesday in Oneonta.

 

Savastano, a Queens native who grew up in Long Island, was living upstate in Sidney when he played the New York Lottery's "Merry Millionaire" game and won $1 million.

 

He received a $661,800 lump sum payment.

 

"This is going change our lives, to tell you the truth," Savastano said when he picked up his winnings. "I'm probably going to go get a new truck and I don't know probably go on vacation,"

 

Savastano lived with his longtime girlfriend Julie Wheeler, and helped raise her sons. After his big win, Savastano began to see a bright future.

 

“I didn’t really have a plan for retirement,” Savastano told the lottery officials in an interview at the time. “The money will help with that.”

 

Savastano had told state lottery officials he was driving home from work Dec. 9 when he stopped at a gas station in Masonville and bought the game.

 

“I buy scratch-off tickets pretty regularly but I don’t normally play the holiday tickets,” Savastano told Lottery officials. “I saw the Merry Millionaire ticket and figured, ‘Why not?’

[samhexum]

Zelma Haskell had been married to her husband, Irwin, for more than 50 years, and when he died in 2003, she was lost.

 

“He was everything to me,” she said in a recent interview, looking back over the years that followed his death — years of practically unfathomable loss and theft hidden behind the smile of a friend — to the place where it all began.

 

She was 71 years old, a lunchtime regular at the Arch Diner near her home in Canarsie, Brooklyn. The Ralph Avenue eatery was a throwback classic of the form, shot through with neon piping above the counter. She had gone with her husband, and later she often ate alone.

 

Around the time she became a widow, she met a waitress there named Alicia Legall. They hit it off right away, and Ms. Haskell began seeking her out when she went to the diner so she could sit at one of her tables.

 

“Pretty, and so sweet,” Ms. Haskell, now 85, recalled. “I liked her immediately.”

 

Ms. Haskell had two children, a son in New Jersey and a daughter on Staten Island. Her daughter was mentally disabled and required regular care and financial support.

 

“What I wanted to do with my real daughter was difficult,” she said. Ms. Legall, in her 30s, was just a little younger than her own children. “I was so happy. I had a new daughter,” she said. “She started to call me ‘Mommy.’”

 

Ms. Legall, from Trinidad and Tobago, had been a waitress since she was 13, she wrote on her LinkedIn page. “I love making people especially young children and elderly happy with food and a smile!” she wrote.

 

The two women spent more and more time together outside the diner. “She started taking me food shopping and different places,” Ms. Haskell said. “I ended up buying her a car, a very nice used car.”

 

Ms. Legall became a guest at family events, bringing her own young children along, and pictures of her family hung in Ms. Haskell’s home.

 

“At first, she brought a lot of joy into my life,” Ms. Haskell said.

 

But she also took. The women had visited Ms. Haskell’s HSBC Bank branch on Ralph several times, and Ms. Legall had access to Ms. Haskell’s account information. At some point several years ago, she told Ms. Haskell that she had taken money that had been in a savings account that had belonged to Mr. Haskell. She needed it to pay a debt, she said.

 

“It sounded like maybe she’d give it back to me,” Ms. Haskell said. “I was so naïve.”

 

The incident had no impact on their bond. “I’m still ‘Mommy,’” Ms. Haskell said. “I saw her a lot.” The two visited nearby restaurants and took selfies that Ms. Legall posted online.

 

In 2013, Ms. Haskell’s last surviving sister, Marcy, died in Florida. Ms. Legall traveled with her for the funeral. “She helped me on the airplane,” Ms. Haskell recalled. “It was like a little vacation for her.”

 

Four more years passed this way. Then Ms. Haskell’s son, Lloyd, a physician, received a certified letter that stunned him. A bank was going to foreclose on his mother’s home because she was not paying fees related to a reverse mortgage for $424,000.

 

Reverse mortgage? His mother lived comfortably within her means. She didn’t travel or buy expensive clothes. A splurge for her was adding to her extensive collection of dolls. What did she need $400,000 for?

 

He asked her. She said she had taken out the money for Ms. Legall, who needed it to pay another debt. Mr. Haskell, mad at himself for believing Ms. Legall was looking after his mother, went to the police and was referred to financial-crimes detectives. They opened a case and discovered the scope of the fraud and loss.

 

The theft began immediately after the women met, the police said.

 

Ms. Legall forged and cashed 75 checks totaling more than $200,000. She opened several credit cards and ran up an eclectic range of charges to Apple, JetBlue, Victoria’s Secret, and clubs and restaurants in Miami.

 

In addition, Ms. Legall bet heavily on horse races. She racked up expenses in New York Racing Association buffets and bars, at Belmont Park, and online at betting sites like TwinSpires at Churchill Downs.

 

“It appears she had a gambling issue,” Detective Jackson Todd said in an interview. “She bet on horses a lot.”

 

Detectives arrested Ms. Legall on Oct. 17 at her home on East 55th Street in Flatlands, Brooklyn. She denied any wrongdoing, telling the police that Ms. Haskell gave her a credit card for errands and shopping, and that she repaid her for any personal purchases, according to a summary of her statements to the police.

 

She said the reverse mortgage had been Ms. Haskell’s idea. “She wanted to give Alicia and her family money,” the police said Ms. Legall told detectives. She said she was expecting a $700,000 settlement from a civil matter and $60,000 on a “race horse transaction.”

 

Ms. Legall was indicted in Brooklyn on charges of grand larceny and forgery. The indictment accused her of stealing more than $470,000 from Ms. Haskell.

 

“Over the course of several years, Legall became a trusted confident and gained access to the woman’s personal information, including her date of birth, Brooklyn residential address, Social Security number and bank and credit card information,” the indictment states.

 

On April 25, Ms. Legall pleaded guilty to grand larceny. She was sentenced this month to three to nine years in prison. She lived in the house in Flatlands with a man and two of her teenage children; they declined to comment, as did her lawyer.

 

The news came as a shock to her colleagues at the Arch Diner. “She was a good waitress,” said Louie Leonidou, an owner. He remembered the two women together. “Even after she quit as a waitress, she would come in as a customer, with her,” he said.

 

In the fallout of the reverse mortgage, Ms. Haskell lost her home of 46 years. Her family is fighting in the courts to get it back, but her future there is far from certain. She is crippled by arthritis and could not climb her own front steps. She has lived in a cramped room at a Staten Island rehabilitation center for about a year.

 

“My house was all paid for,” she said. “I was a mess.”

 

She was asked if she had a photo someplace of her and Ms. Legall together. She reached for her purse and pulled out a snapshot, wrinkled and worn, of the two women smiling at the camera. After everything that happened, why would she still carry this picture around?

 

She sighed and answered with a shrug: “The memories.”

[samhexum]

4 in group of teens pushing stalled car killed when SUV slams into them

 

A night of teenage fun turned into tragedy on a rural road in Indiana.

 

Four teens, who were attending a slumber party, were killed and four others were injured when an SUV plowed into them while they were pushing a woman's stalled car.

 

It happened Saturday night when a Chevy Suburban driven by Cara Selby broke down just a block away from her home in Cortland, Indiana, officials said.

 

Selby was throwing a slumber party for her daughter. When the teens at the sleepover came out to help push Selby's car back home, another vehicle hit them from behind, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department said.

 

Killed were: Nevaeh Law, 14; Jenna A. Helton, 14; Brittany Watson, 15; and Martin Martinez, 16.

 

Four others were hurt, including Selby's daughter.

 

The crash is still under investigation and the driver of the SUV -- a 24-year-old woman -- hasn't yet been charged, the sheriff's department told CNN.