Robberies and Thefts

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      Indian Burglars Return Filmmaker’s Medal

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      Thieves in southern India kept the cash, the gold and most of the silver, but returned to the scene of the crime with one item, and an apology note.When the thieves broke into the country home of a renowned film director in southern India, taking gold, silver and cash, they made a clean getaway. But days later, a small plastic bag appeared outside the house’s gates, stitched shut with thin sticks and containing something wrapped in a white handkerchief.Inside was a medal for a prestigious national award that the director, M. Manikandan, had won in 2021 for one of his films.With it was a brief note handwritten in Tamil, a regional language.“Sir, please forgive us,” the note read. “Your hard work belongs to you alone.”The burglary and partial return, with its small-town intrigue and big-hearted absurdity, could have figured in the kind of movies Mr. Manikandan and other filmmakers in India’s south make.While Bollywood gets much attention and recognition outside the country, some of India’s most endearing and creative films come from its diverse regional cinemas, in languages such as Tamil and Malayalam. Mr. Manikandan broke through with a film about two egg-stealing, slum-dwelling brothers with a single goal — to do whatever it took to taste pizza. The film for which he won the purloined medal, “Kadaisi Vivasayi” or “The Last Farmer,” was a commentary on the difficulties of farming in India. But its surreal twists also laid bare the absurdities of the nation’s bureaucracy.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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      Boyfriend of Bret Easton Ellis Arrested in Hollywood

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      Todd Michael Schultz, the longtime partner of the infamous author, had ambitions to run for office.For nearly 40 years, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis has been chronicling noirish debauchery in best-selling books such as “American Psycho” and “Less Than Zero.” This week, his partner, Todd Michael Schultz, was arrested at the fancy Los Angeles condominium building where the couple lives, and was charged with burglary, according to Abraham Bedoyan, a sergeant at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station.On Tuesday, Sergeant Bedoyan said, management at 818 North Doheny Drive received a phone call from a female resident in distress. The resident said that a man had entered her apartment and was ransacking her things, according to a police report Sergeant Bedoyan read from.The woman reportedly told management that the intruder was “unresponsive” to her requests that he leave her apartment.Building representatives arrived and detained the man, whom Sergeant Bedoyan confirmed to be Mr. Schultz, 37. There is nothing to suggest Mr. Ellis, 59, was associated with the crime, according to Sergeant Bedoyan.An eyewitness outside, who requested anonymity because she did not want to be associated with the story or the case, said that numerous police cars soon arrived. While residents milled about, discussing what had taken place, Mr. Ellis paced the sidewalk seemingly in distress while talking on his cellphone.In a text message on Friday evening, Mr. Ellis said that Mr. Schultz had been having “serious mental health issues exacerbated by drugs.” He said that the episode was nonviolent and that Mr. Schultz, experiencing a psychotic break, walked into an open apartment, believing it to be Mr. Ellis’s.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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      15-Year-Old Arrested in Times Square Shooting That Injured a Tourist

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      The teen, Jesus Alejandro Rivas Figueroa, is accused of firing at a security guard and instead hitting a woman from Brazil.A 15-year-old boy was arrested on Friday, accused of shooting a Brazilian tourist in Times Square the night before and then firing twice at a police officer while fleeing the scene, officials said.The arrest came about an hour after the police said at a news conference that they were seeking the teenager, Jesus Alejandro Rivas Figueroa, in the shooting of the tourist, a 37-year-old woman who was hit once in the leg. Her injury was not life-threatening, and she had left the hospital as of Friday afternoon, the police said.Police officials said the teenager was from Venezuela and had been staying at a Manhattan migrant shelter following his arrival in New York last fall, one person among the tens of thousands of people who have come to the city after crossing into the United States at the southern border.He was taken into custody in Yonkers, officials said. He is also considered a suspect in an armed robbery in the Bronx and a second shooting in Times Square last month, said John Chell, the Police Department’s chief of patrol.Mr. Figueroa, a second 15-year-old and a 16-year-old were trying to steal items from a JD Sports store on Broadway near West 42nd Street at around 7 p.m. Thursday when they were stopped by a female security guard, Chief Chell said at the news conference.Mr. Figueroa pulled out what the chief described as a “very large handgun” and fired at the security guard, striking the tourist in the process. He then ran off, firing at an officer as he went. Given the crowds in the area at the time, officers did not fire back.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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      Aurora, Colo., Pays $1.9 Million to Black Family Wrongly Detained by Police

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      The family of five was stopped at gunpoint in 2020 by officers in Aurora, Colo., who mistook their S.U.V. for a stolen vehicle.Five members of a Black family who were wrongfully detained at gunpoint in Aurora, Colo., in 2020 by police officers who mistook their S.U.V. for a vehicle that had been stolen received $1.9 million to settle their lawsuit against the city, the family’s lawyer said Monday.The family — Brittney Gilliam, 29 at the time, her daughter, who was 6, sister, who was 12, and two nieces, 17 and 14 at the time — had gone to get their nails done when Aurora Police Department officers ordered them to lie on the ground and handcuffed two of the girls, the authorities said at the time.A widely shared video of the episode showed four children lying on the ground in a parking lot, crying and screaming as several officers stood over them, sparking further outrage over a department already mired in controversy over the 2019 death of a Black man and its use of excessive force.The settlement was reached several months ago but remained confidential because there are children involved, David Lane, the lawyer, said by phone Monday. It is divided equally among Ms. Gilliam, her nieces, sister and daughter, he added, noting that the younger children will need to wait until they turn 18 to be able to access their share.The settlement, Mr. Lane said, both helped to avoid re-traumatizing the children in a deposition or trial, and to bring attention to the costly nature of settling similar cases — which the city has done several times in recent years following accusations that its police officers had used excessive force.From 2003 to 2018, the city settled at least 11 police brutality cases for a total of $4.6 million, according to the A.C.L.U. of Colorado. In 2021, the city agreed to pay $15 million to the family of Elijah McLain to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit over the police confrontation in 2019 that ended his life.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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      Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan

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      “What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.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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      The Sunday Read: ‘The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyOf all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Pieces of Jackie Robinson Statue Are Found Burning in Kansas Park

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      The life-size bronze tribute to the legendary baseball player who broke the color barrier was stolen from a different park last week. What was left of it “is beyond repair,” officials said.Parts of a life-size bronze statue that celebrated the legacy of the legendary baseball player and civil rights figure Jackie Robinson were found dismantled and burned early Tuesday after it had been stolen from a Kansas park last week, the authorities said.Remnants of the statue were found after a city worker reported a fire in a trash can at Garvey Park in Wichita at around 8:38 a.m., Andrew Ford, a police spokesman, said in a statement.The Wichita Fire Department responded and, “while assessing the damage, they found pieces of the Jackie Robinson statue that had been stolen.”The Fire Department immediately notified the police, who collected the pieces at the scene, he said, noting that “unfortunately, the statue is beyond repair.”The police are continuing to investigate, Mr. Ford said, and they have “already interviewed over 100 people.” The department is also looking into how the statue was dismantled and how the pieces ended up at the location of the fire. Mr. Ford had previously said that the motive for the theft of the monument was not known.Additionally, the Fire Department’s arson investigators are looking into the trash can fire, he said. In a statement posted on Facebook, the department said that “additional parts of the statue have not been recovered at this time.”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?  More

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      Arkansas Authorities Capture Second Escaped Inmate

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      Jatonia Bryant, 23, had been held at a jail in Pine Bluff, Ark., on a capital murder charge before he and another inmate fled last week, the authorities said. The other escapee was caught Thursday.The authorities in Arkansas on Monday captured a capital murder suspect who had escaped from a local jail with another inmate, ending a weeklong manhunt.Officers conducting surveillance in Pine Bluff, Ark., just after 11 a.m. saw the suspect, Jatonia Bryant, 23, walking down a street wearing clothes that matched a description that had been provided to the law enforcement authorities and arrested him “without incident,” the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.Mr. Bryant, who is charged with capital murder in the shooting death of a man last year, and Noah Roush, 22, were discovered missing on Jan. 22 from the W.C. “Dub” Brassell Adult Detention Center in Pine Bluff, roughly 40 miles southeast of Little Rock, after a daring escape that involved bursting through holes they had made in the facility’s ceiling and roof, according to the sheriff’s office.On Thursday, officers caught Mr. Roush near an abandoned home in Pine Bluff where he had reportedly been seen. Mr. Roush had been held at the jail on burglary and theft charges.Mr. Bryant had remained at large, though the authorities expressed confidence last week that he was hiding out somewhere in the city of nearly 40,000 people.Escape charges were pending against both men on Monday, the authorities said.“Our investigators will continue to work bringing criminal charges against all the people who assisted Roush and Bryant in evading apprehension,” read the sheriff’s news release.Jatonia Bryant following his arrest on Monday morning in Pine Bluff, Ark.Captain Yohance Brunson/Jefferson County Sheriff’s OfficeThe authorities also revealed on Monday that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Roush had fled about 36 hours before jail staff members noticed that they were gone because they had earlier failed to take an accurate head count.The Jefferson County sheriff, Lafayette Woods Jr., also suggested that flaws in the design and structure of the jail had allowed the pair to break free, saying that the episode would serve as a “catalyst for further capital improvements” to the jail.Last week, Maj. John Bean, a sheriff’s office spokesman, said that surveillance footage showed the two men had worked together to make a hole in the ceiling above a shower stall and escape.Sheriff Woods added that the facility, which opened in 2007 with 310 beds to alleviate overcrowded jails in the county, faced staffing shortages and was down to 20 guards from a previous high of 48. More