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    Georgia Man Charged With 1985 Murders of Couple in Church

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    Erik Sparre was arrested earlier this week, more than two decades after Dennis Perry was wrongly sent to prison for the crime.Nearly 40 years after Harold and Thelma Swain were shot to death in a small church in Camden County, Ga., and after a man was wrongly sent to prison for two decades over the crime, the authorities arrested another man who they believe murdered the Swains.The man, Erik Kristensen Sparre, 61, of Waynesville, Ga., was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault in the 1985 deaths of the Swains, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on Monday.Dennis Perry, who is now 62, was convicted of two counts of homicide in 2003 but he was released in 2020 after his conviction was overturned, in part because reporting by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cast doubt on an alibi that Mr. Sparre had used when he was investigated after the killings.Mr. Sparre was arrested in Waynesville, about 90 miles south of Savannah, at a store near his home without incident, according to the Bureau of Investigation. He was booked into the Camden County Jail. The Bureau of Investigation declined to comment further.After a Bible study session in 1985, Harold Swain, 66, and Thelma Swain, 63, a married couple, were killed in the vestibule of the Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Waverly, Ga., about 14 miles southeast of Waynesville.Investigators contacted Mr. Perry after receiving a tip, learned that he had been working hundreds of miles away in the Atlanta area around the time of the killings, and cleared him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Car Found in Georgia Pond May Be That of a New York Couple Missing Since 1980

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      The Romers, of Scarsdale, N.Y., disappeared from a Georgia hotel. Divers who seek to solve cold cases found a vehicle similar to theirs in a pond. They also found bones.Charles Romer, a retired oil company executive from Scarsdale, N.Y., and his wife, Catherine, were driving back from their winter home in Florida in the spring of 1980 when they stopped at a Holiday Inn in Georgia.Later, the police would find their belongings unpacked in a room at the hotel, along with a half-full bottle of Scotch and some glasses. The bed was turned down. But the couple — and their late-model black Lincoln Continental — were nowhere to be found.For decades, the disappearance was shrouded in mystery, as relatives of the couple searched for answers. The police long suspected that the couple may have been killed in a brutal robbery, as Ms. Romer, a beloved socialite, had a considerable amount of valuable jewelry with her.Last week, the first big break came in the four-decade case, after volunteer divers visited Brunswick, Ga., a coastal town about 75 miles south of Savannah, and found a car similar to that of the Romers at the bottom of a pond near their hotel.The divers — who use sonar equipment to find submerged vehicles as part of an effort to find missing people — had seen the Romer case on a map of unsolved cases involving people who had disappeared with their cars. On Friday, they started scanning every body of water within several miles of the hotel where the couple had disappeared. In a 10-foot-deep pond near a parking lot of what is today the Royal Inn, they said, they found a vehicle with characteristics that matched that of the Romers — and in it human bones.“It came out of the blue,” said Lawton J. Dodd, a spokesman for the Glynn County Police Department in Georgia. “It’s a cold case that is not a cold case any longer,” he said. “The investigation’s reopened.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Paterson, Former New York Governor, Is Attacked in Manhattan

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      Mr. Paterson and his stepson suffered minor injuries in a street attack on Friday. The former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault, the police said.The former governor of New York, David A. Paterson, and his stepson were injured in an assault on a Manhattan street on Friday evening, the Police Department said.Mr. Paterson, 70, and his stepson, Anthony Sliwa, 20, were walking in the Upper East Side at about 8:30 p.m. when they were attacked after a verbal altercation with five people, according to the police.Mr. Paterson suffered minor injuries to his face and body, while Mr. Sliwa received minor injuries to his face, the police said. Both were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in stable condition.A spokesman for the Police Department said the former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault.The former governor and Mr. Sliwa had been on a walk near their home when they encountered the five people, Sean Darcy, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said in a statement on Friday night. Mr. Sliwa had had “a previous interaction” with the five people, Mr. Darcy added, though details of that interaction were not immediately clear.Mr. Sliwa is the son of Curtis Sliwa, a former Republican mayoral candidate and the founder of the Guardian Angels, an anti-crime group.Mr. Paterson and his stepson were sent home from the hospital early on Saturday, Mr. Darcy said. They had been taken to the hospital as a precaution, he said, after “both suffered some injuries but were able to fight off their attackers.”They filed a police report, he said.“The governor’s only request is that people refrain from attempting to use an unfortunate act of violence for their own personal or political gain,” Mr. Darcy said on Saturday, adding that Mr. Paterson and his wife, Mary Alexander Paterson, were thankful for “the outpouring of support they have received from people across all spectrums.”The police said they were still looking for the five people suspected in the assault.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesThe five people, who were not identified, fled on foot along Second Avenue after the assault, and the police said they were still being sought. Several of them appeared to be teenagers, according to footage circulated online by the Police Department.Mr. Paterson, the 55th governor of New York and the first Black person to hold the office, served from 2008 to 2010.He rose to the position during a tumultuous time: His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned in 2008 after being linked to a high-end prostitution ring. Mr. Paterson, then the lieutenant governor, took over after Mr. Spitzer resigned.Mr. Paterson, a Democrat who served for two decades in the State Senate, weathered his own scandals and a state budget ravaged by recession. He did not seek re-election after completing his term as governor. More

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      Walz Spoke of Gun Violence Affecting His Son. Here’s an Account of the Shooting.

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      At Tuesday’s debate, Gov. Tim Walz said that his son, Gus Walz, witnessed a shooting at a community center. A volleyball coach said Gus helped other young players to safety.Gov. Tim Walz has spoken before of a shooting last year at a recreation center in St. Paul, Minn., that he said had an impact on his teenage son, Gus. But in the vice-presidential debate with Senator JD Vance of Ohio on Tuesday night, Mr. Walz went further in saying that his son witnessed the shooting, which left one teenager seriously wounded.On Wednesday, a volleyball coach who played a central role in the response that day described what he, Gus and others experienced in the frightening moments after they had heard gunfire outside.The coach, David Albornoz, said he ran to investigate, while Gus, a team captain and an assistant coach on a boys’ volleyball team, helped guide young people in the gym to a safe location when many thought a mass shooting was occurring.“We heard the gunshots,” Mr. Albornoz said. “You hear the screaming. I had no more information than what I gathered.”The shooting, which was propelled into the national spotlight when Mr. Walz and Mr. Vance discussed how they would address gun violence in the country, was widely reported in St. Paul at the time. It took place in January 2023 outside the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center, part of the Oxford Community Center, one of the largest and busiest facilities in the city’s parks and recreation system. It is also across the street from Central High School, where Gus is a student.According to several court documents, the 16-year-old victim, JuVaughn Turner, and some of his friends were outside when a young woman got into a dispute with an employee at the recreation center, Exavir Binford.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Twists Harris’s Position on Fentanyl After She Called for a Border Crackdown

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      When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border on Friday, she called fentanyl a “scourge on our country” and said that as president she would “make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”Ms. Harris pledged to give more resources to law enforcement officials on the front lines, including additional personnel and machines that can detect fentanyl in vehicles. And she said she would take aim at the “global fentanyl supply chain,” vowing to “double the resources for the Department of Justice to extradite and prosecute transnational criminal organizations and the cartels.”But that was not how her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, characterized her position on Sunday at a rally in Erie, Pa., where he made a false accusation against Ms. Harris that seemed intended to play on the fears and traumas of voters in communities that have been ravaged by fentanyl.“She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Mr. Trump said during a speech that stretched for 109 minutes. It was the second straight day that Mr. Trump had amplified the same false claim about Ms. Harris; he did so on Saturday in Wisconsin.The former president did not offer context for his remarks, but his campaign pointed to an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire that Ms. Harris had filled out in 2019 during her unsuccessful candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.A question asking if Ms. Harris supported the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use appeared to be checked “yes.” Ms. Harris wrote that it was “long past time that we changed our outdated and discriminatory criminalization of marijuana” and said that she favored treating drug addiction as a public health issue, focusing on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Answer to Harris’s Border Trip: Calling Her ‘Mentally Disabled’

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      The day after Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border and pledged to crack down on asylum and beef up security, former President Donald J. Trump unleashed a string of sharply personal attacks on her at a rally on Saturday, expressing contempt for her intelligence and calling her “mentally disabled.”In a dark, often rambling speech lasting longer than an hour, Mr. Trump — whose advisers have urged him to focus on policy issues rather than on personal jabs — notably escalated his attacks against Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump, who has often questioned President Biden’s mental abilities, told supporters at a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wis., that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.”Mr. Trump then tied Ms. Harris to the Biden administration’s border policies, adding, “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.” Later, he criticized her remarks at the border on Friday as “bullshit.”It was a startling series of broadsides in the midst of a presidential campaign, even for a candidate who seems to delight in offensive remarks. Mr. Trump’s speech in Prairie du Chien, a town of about 5,000 people along the Mississippi River, was meant to serve as a response to Ms. Harris’s border visit, in Douglas, Ariz., where she promised to crack down on asylum and called for tougher punishments against those who cross the border illegally. Those positions, an attempt to address a political vulnerability, made up the core of one of the toughest speeches on immigration and border policy that a Democrat has made in a generation.But Mr. Trump, who stood surrounded by posters of undocumented immigrants accused of violent crimes, attacked Ms. Harris for being a political opportunist. And he claimed that she bore responsibility for migrants who have come into the country illegally and committed crimes.“She is a disaster,” Mr. Trump said. “And she is not ever going to do anything for the border, and she didn’t even want to get tough now, except her poll numbers were tanking.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NYPD Unwilling to Impose Discipline for Stop and Frisk, Report Says

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      The department’s discipline for illegal street detentions is lax at every level, according to an extraordinary review ordered by a federal judge.At every level, the New York Police Department has failed to punish officers who have violated the rights of people stopped on the street, according to a new report — a failure that reaches all the way to the top of the force.The report, the most comprehensive independent review of discipline since a landmark court decision in 2013, found that police commissioners during the past decade have routinely reduced discipline recommended for officers found to have wrongly stopped, questioned and frisked people, undermining efforts to curb unconstitutional abuses. The report, by James Yates, a retired New York State judge, was ordered by Judge Analisa Torres of Manhattan federal court and made public on Monday.Mr. Yates was assigned by the court to conduct a “granular, step-by-step analysis” of the department’s policies and discipline governing stop and frisk, a tactic of detaining people on the street that was being used disproportionately against Black and Latino New Yorkers.The 503-page document that resulted paints a picture of an agency unwilling to impose discipline on an abusive practice that has prompted criticism that the department oppresses many New Yorkers.The commissioners “demonstrated an inordinate willingness to excuse illegal stops, frisks and searches in the name of ‘good faith’ or ‘lack of malintention,’ relegating constitutional adherence to a lesser rung of discipline,” Mr. Yates writes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eagles Players Feared Crime in Brazil. Is Philadelphia More Dangerous?

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      Some N.F.L. players called Brazil dangerous ahead of the league’s first game in South America on Friday. Statistics show their home city is deadlier.“I do not want to go to Brazil.”To National Football League executives, who have worked for years to bring Friday night’s opening-weekend game to Brazil, the comment from Philadelphia Eagles player Darius Slay on his podcast last week had already gotten off to a bad start.Then it got worse.“They already told us not to leave the hotel,” he continued. “The crime rate is crazy. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, N.F.L., why do you all want to send us somewhere with a crime rate this high?”He had told his family to stay home, he added, and hoped he would make it home safely. Because “boy, they’re talking about it is crazy down there.”Slay was not the only Eagles player concerned. AJ Brown, a wide receiver, told reporters he planned to stay in his hotel room after the team had given players a long list of “don’t do’s” for Brazil. The list included “a lot, honestly,” he said. “Even as simple as just walking down the street with your phone in your hand.”What the Eagles staff apparently did not mention: Philadelphia is far deadlier than São Paulo.Last year, São Paulo registered 4.2 murders per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in Brazil. In Philadelphia, the murder rate was six times as high, at 26.1 per 100,000 people, even surpassing the murder rate of 23.1 across Brazil, according to the Homicide Monitor, a database of government statistics from the Igarapé Institute, a research institute that studies security.Philadelphia Eagles players arriving at São Paulo International airport on Wednesday. The team was reportedly given a long list of “don’t do’s” for Brazil.Andre Penner/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      German Prosecutors Say They Suspect Terrorist Link in Festival Stabbings

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      The police say they have arrested a man they believe killed three people and wounded eight others at a festival in the town of Solingen, in western Germany.An attack on a crowd by a man armed with a large knife at a festival that left three dead and eight wounded in the city of Solingen, in western Germany, is being treated as terrorism, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Sunday.The suspect is a 26-year-old man from Syria who was living in a refugee residence only a few hundred meters from where the attack took place, the police said on Sunday. The man, wearing bloodstained clothes, approached a police car and gave himself up after 11 p.m. Saturday, the police said.In the attack on Friday night, the assailant aimed for his victims’ necks to inflict as much damage as possible, the police said.Besides planning to bring murder and attempted murder charges in the case against the man, the federal prosecutor is looking into whether he was a member of a foreign terrorist organization, Ines Peterson, a spokeswoman for the office, said on Sunday in an emailed statement.The Islamic State extremist group praised the attacker as a “soldier of the Islamic state,” but it was unclear whether the group had any connection to this particular attack.The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has campaigned largely on an anti-foreigner platform and is poised to make significant gains in three state elections next month, jumped on the news. Even before the identity of the attacker was confirmed by the police, one of its leaders called for changes to “migration and security policy.”The authorities had earlier arrested two people who were later determined unlikely to have been the actual attackers, Herbert Reul, the state interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Solingen is, said in an interview on Saturday with a German broadcaster, ARD.A 15-year-old boy, who was arrested early Saturday, is being investigated for not having alerted the police when he learned about imminent plans to attack, prosecutors said. A man arrested by a heavily armed police unit on Saturday evening in the refugee housing facility where the main suspect also lived is being treated as a witness, the police and Mr. Reul said.On Saturday, Solingen’s mayor, the state governor and other political leaders gathered on a downtown square several hundred yards from where the attack took place to mourn the victims. It was an eerie repeat of a similar impromptu service held in Mannheim, another town in western Germany, where only three months ago an Afghan refugee attacked an anti-immigrant rally with a knife and killed a police officer trying to intervene.On Sunday, which was supposed to be the final day of a festival celebrating a city best known for making knives and scissors, a group of mourners met at a service held in a church next to the site of the attack. More