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From the Los Angeles Times

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Graffiti on Santa Ana wall threatens governor and president

Graffiti threatening Gov. Jerry Brown and President Obama was discovered Monday on a wall on a busy Santa Ana street, the latest in a spate of similar acts targeting public officials and ethnic and religious groups.

The spray-painted messages were reported just after 7 a.m. in the 3200 block of Greenville Street, near Alton Avenue. Similar threats were scrawled nearby last month.

The messages included racial slurs and stated that both men will “soon die.”

The U.S. Secret Service was notified, as well as the California Highway Patrol, which provides security for the governor, said Santa Ana Police Cmdr. Tammy Franks. No suspects have been identified.

In January, death threats against Brown as well as swastikas and other racist messages targeting blacks, Mexicans and Asians were found on buildings and churches in Anaheim, Brea, Irvine and Santa Ana.

On Feb. 14, Anaheim police arrested Kim Rebar Henry, a 56-year-old Fullerton woman, on suspicion of spray-painting hateful graffiti in that city.

Authorities are trying to determine if any of the incidents are connected.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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O.C. yachting couple among hundreds held by Somalia pirates, official says

The Orange County couple whose boat was hijacked off the coast of Oman are among hundreds of people being held against their will by Somali pirates.

A U.S. Navy spokesman told BBC Africa that Somali pirates currently have about 30 boats and 600 people being held. One pirate told reporters in Africa that the Orange County couple's yacht was headed for the coast of Somalia.

For nearly a decade, Scott and Jean Adam's home has been the 58-foot custom-made sloop.

Although they docked every so often in Marina del Rey to pick up mail and see friends, the couple spent most of their time sailing to far-flung locales such as the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti and New Zealand.

Posting photos and information on their website, they raved about their travels aboard the Quest. "We've decided to ... explore Fiji like petals on a flower," they wrote about their 2007 trip to the South Pacific.

Now, "This is all of our worst nightmares," said Scott Stolnitz, a friend of the couple.

Stolnitz, who with his wife also sails around the world, said he and Scott Adam had previously discussed the dangers of piracy when navigating the Arabian and Red seas.

Scott Adam, 70, had considered shipping the boat to avoid the dangers, a costly option, but decided instead to join a rally of yachts heading to the same place, Stolnitz said.

The couple, however, apparently decided to break off from the Blue Water Rally, which organized and supported the group of boats headed toward the Mediterranean.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/oc-yachting-couple-among-hundreds-held-by-somalia-pirates-official-says.html#more

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Gun safety, Texas-style

A Texas lawmaker's contention that allowing college students and faculty to carry firearms would make them safer is a spectacularly bad idea.

February 22, 2011

When a 19-year-old sophomore named Colton Tooley opened fire with an assault rifle last fall near the UT Tower at the University of Texas, it seemed to some like a horrible rerun: In 1966, the tower was the site of what was then the worst campus shooting in U.S. history, when a sniper firing from the top of the structure killed 14 people. In some states, this kind of history might lead to government action to protect students from gun violence. But not in Texas.

Campuses are currently weapons-free zones in Texas. But the famously gun-friendly state, where many lawmakers carry concealed firearms inside the Capitol building, seems poised to pass a bill to let college students and professors do the same. The bill from Republican state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, which would allow the carrying of concealed weapons on college campuses by those with permits to do so, was passed by the Senate in 2009 but languished in the House. It has a far better chance this time around because more than half the members of the House have signed on as coauthors of a version of the bill.

It isn't very hard to get a concealed-weapons permit in Texas; anyone over 21 who passes a computerized background check and completes a 10-hour course is eligible. Wentworth thinks his bill would actually make college students and faculty safer, because armed students could return fire in the event a crazed gunman started shooting at them. Gun enthusiasts in Texas and other states believe that if students at Virginia Tech had been armed in 2007, they could have stopped Seung-hui Cho's rampage before it ended in the loss of 33 lives. They may even be right, but they're ignoring the other risks posed by gun proliferation.

A student firing back at a gunman in a crowded classroom might pose as much of a risk to his fellow students as the assailant. Police don't like liberal gun-carry laws because they endanger officers and create confusion: When a lot of people are waving guns around at a crime scene, it's impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. College students, many of whom are coming to terms with the pressures of romantic entanglements and academic expectations, also tend to abuse alcohol and drugs. Adding firearms to this volatile mix is a spectacularly bad idea; guns are indeed tools of self-defense, but they're also tools of suicide, accidental shootings, intimidation and murder.

Tooley's only victim was himself. Armed students wouldn't have produced a happier outcome, nor would they have been likely to stop 1966 sniper Charles Whitman. But they could do a lot of damage to themselves and their peers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-texas-20110222,0,2622784,print.story

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Talking terrorism

The House's hearing on Al Qaeda's recruitment of Americans must not become a political show.

by Brian Fishman

February 22, 2011

American counter-terrorism officials are increasingly, and rightly, concerned about Americans joining groups like Al Qaeda. According to a Congressional Research Service report, between Sept. 11, 2001, and May 2009, authorities made arrests in 21 jihadi-related terrorism plots involving people radicalized in the United States. Between May 2009 and November 2010 there were 22 such plots, resulting in two attacks, including the 2009 one at Ft. Hood, Texas. Considering the numbers, it is unsurprising and appropriate that Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to hold hearings in early March on Al Qaeda's recruitment of Americans.

The challenge now is to design a serious hearing that advances Congress' understanding of the threat, provides a basis for more effective counter-terrorism policy and establishes a narrative to counter Al Qaeda's propaganda. Unfortunately, early indications suggest that the hearing is instead shaping up to be a politicized circus. Conservative activists and civil libertarians have jumped to long-established fighting positions — respectively, that there is widespread support for jihadis among American Muslims and that hearings on domestic radicalization are necessarily a McCarthy-like witch hunt.

At this point, the most likely outcome of this hearing is that it will be a pointless political show. The worst-case scenario is that the hearing will actually play into the hands of Al Qaeda recruiters.

No one knows exactly why some people become radicalized and others do not. But charismatic leaders such as American-born Islamic cleric Anwar Awlaki — the most effective Al Qaeda recruiter of Americans — are a consistent theme. The uncomfortable reality is that jihadis use the fear and anger generated by a range of controversial current events to promote their virulent ideological concepts. One issue that Awlaki, based in Yemen, exploits is the specter of a government crackdown on Muslim Americans.

In a March 2010 statement titled "A Call to Jihad," Awlaki argued darkly that "yesterday America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan, and tomorrow it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps. Don't be deceived by the promises of preserving your rights from a government that is right now killing your own brothers and sisters.… The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens!"

The March congressional hearing should be carefully designed not to feed into Awlaki's cynical effort to terrify potential recruits into choosing violence. That means emphasizing the ways that the government can work with Muslim Americans to counter Al Qaeda, rather than labeling wide swaths of that community a threat.

The good news is that Awlaki's pitch fails far more often than it succeeds. The vast majority of Muslims in the United States and around the world have rejected Al Qaeda's violent ideology.

That helps explain why Al Qaeda is killing so many Muslims. According to a study by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, 85% of Al Qaeda's victims around the world between 2004 and 2008 were Muslim. Many American policymakers seem to have accepted Al Qaeda's claim that it acts on behalf of Muslims in general, but the numbers indicate that the group is at war with Muslims as much as it is with the United States.

Such brutality is Al Qaeda's biggest weakness. U.S. counter-terrorism policy should exploit it by cooperating with Muslim Americans and religious groups abroad to publicize Al Qaeda's cruelty and discredit jihadis.

One of the criticisms leveled by civil libertarians against the hearing is that it will alienate Muslim Americans by singling them out for investigation rather than exploring the range of domestic terrorism threats, from right-wing militias to radical environmentalists. This is a fair point: domestically radicalized right-wing terrorists have killed more Americans than domestically radicalized jihadis. Nonetheless, the factors that lead to jihadi and right-wing violence seem so different that they demand separate hearings, if only for intellectual clarity.

The radicalization and ideological nexus between jihadi and right-wing terrorism may be tenuous, but the two trends do share important tactical similarities that are worth congressional attention. Both the jihadi 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the right-wing 1996 Oklahoma City bombing utilized explosives based on ammonium nitrate fertilizer. And U.S. law enforcement and intelligence personnel worry about simple attacks using firearms, like the one that paralyzed Mumbai in 2008. There is actually a long lineage of inadvertent information transfer from right-wing militias to jihadis: One of the earliest Internet-based Al Qaeda technical manuals, the Encyclopedia of Preparation for Jihad, included a gigantic amount of data, including jihadi-produced documents, translated U.S. Army Field Manuals and a range of right-wing and militia weapons information.

Nine years after 9/11, the United States should be doing better against Al Qaeda. We should have a clear-eyed understanding of what Al Qaeda is and, critically, what it is not. We should understand that jihadis are a danger in the United States but that they threaten, rather than represent, the Muslim American community. We should have learned how to use Al Qaeda's tendency for violence to discredit it. We should be able to discuss Al Qaeda without feeding its recruiting pitches. The King hearing would be a good opportunity to make up for lost time.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-fishman-radical-plots-20110222,0,251833,print.story

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From the New York Times

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A Risky Trip Leads to Stardom and Sanctuary

A Honduran teenager gained fame as the star of a documentary film that showed the dangers faced by children who ride across Mexico atop freight trains to cross illegally to the United States. But the boy, Kevin Casasola, rode the trains again, and now he has been granted asylum in the United States, his lawyer said on Monday.

The documentary, “Which Way Home,” directed by Rebecca Cammisa, won an Emmy award for HBO last year and was nominated for an Oscar. Ms. Cammisa took her cameras onto the lurching trains, filming a cohort of children riding north as they dodged tunnels, trees and criminal predators, fighting loneliness and hunger. It tells of several children who died or disappeared along the way.

Kevin, who was 14 in the film, was its most appealing protagonist, with his daring clowning on freight car roofs and his determination to make it to the United States to find work so he could send money back to his mother. During the filming he was detained by American border agents and deported to Honduras. The documentary showed the desolation and need that drove him to leave his home village in the first place.

The documentary drew an outpouring of concern for the children to its Facebook page. Some Americans offered to adopt Kevin, although his mother figured prominently in the film and in his motives for riding the trains.

In Mexico, the impact was even greater, and Kevin became something of a legend. Ms. Cammisa sent the film to rural villages as a warning to restless teenagers that they should not attempt a similar trip. The country's first lady, Margarita Zavala, helped distribute it, and during a state visit to Washington last May, she said that Mexican babies were being named Kevin as a result of its popularity.

Ms. Cammisa said she tried to persuade Kevin to stay in Honduras, using donations raised by the film to pay for him to take a course in mobile phone repair.

But last July, she said in an interview, Kevin called her from a detention center in California. After a two-month journey on the trains, he had crossed the border and was doing farm work near El Centro. He had been arrested by the local police, who suspected he was an illegal immigrant.

Contacted by Ms. Cammisa, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a private charity, found a volunteer lawyer, Raed Gonzalez of Houston. An asylum petition he presented for Kevin was granted by an immigration judge in January.

Since asylum proceedings are confidential, Mr. Gonzalez said he could not reveal the threat that was the basis for Kevin's claim that he could not safely return to Honduras. The film provides a possible clue, showing a violent stepfather who spoke bluntly of his loathing for the boy.

Kevin, now 17, is in a shelter for minors in Houston, Mr. Gonzalez said, happy to be living legally in the United States. He is studying English and will go back to school, and eventually he will be placed in foster care. He has had a haircut, Mr. Gonzalez said, newly mindful of his image. Shelter authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed.

Border Patrol figures show that agents detained about 18,000 unaccompanied children crossing illegally into the United States in 2009. Most were sent back. Mr. Gonzalez said successful asylum claims like Kevin Casasola's were rare.

Ms. Cammisa said that Kevin's story showed the magnetic lure of the United States for many Mexican and Central American children. “Kevin was raised with an inner dialogue about coming to the U.S.,” she said. “His mother urged him to help his family.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22immigration.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

A Families-First Approach to Foster Care

It's difficult to change systems even when they are widely acknowledged to be broken. That's the situation facing the nation's foster care system. According to the government's most recent estimate, there were roughly 424,000 young people in foster care as of Sept. 30, 2009. Each year, about 30,000 of them turn 18 (or 21 in some states) and “age out” of foster care. What happens to them?

The results are not encouraging, according to a major study published in 2010. Although there are many wonderful foster parents and many foster care alumni who overcome tough odds, most struggle to live successfully as adults. By age 23 or 24, fewer than half of the former foster care youths in the study were working. Close to a quarter had no high school diploma or equivalency degree and only 6 percent had completed a two- or four-year post-secondary degree. Nearly 60 percent of males had been convicted of a crime and 77 percent of females had been pregnant.

When you are dealing with complicated social, emotional and mental health problems, there are no easy answers. But today there is a promising alternative to foster care that is gaining traction — although it faces an uphill battle because it represents a departure from long-held assumptions in our child welfare system. The idea is to help youths return to their original families wherever it is possible to do so safely by providing their parents, or in some cases other relatives, with an extensive array of in-home support services.

This approach may seem counterintuitive, given that child welfare agencies intervene when courts deem parents unfit to care for their children. However, evidence indicates that intensive in-home services can bring substantial changes in families — and produce more successful outcomes than out-of-home models like foster homes or institutional care. (The average foster care youth goes through more than three placement changes and 65 percent experience seven or more school changes (pdf). About a quarter suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, up to twice the rate for U.S. war veterans.)

One of the leading practitioners of the family-services approach is a Memphis-based organization called Youth Villages, which works in 11 states and the District of Columbia, focusing on kids who have serious emotional and behavioral problems. Youth Villages has provided more than 20,000 youths and their families with intensive in-home services to reunite families or prevent children from being placed in foster care. It works in tandem with child welfare, mental health and juvenile justice systems.

Youth Villages monitors outcomes for every child it serves and allows independent researchers access to its data. The organization reports that, two years after completing its in-home programs, 83 percent of youths served were living successfully in families, 85 percent were in school or had gained a high school or equivalency degree, and 82 percent reported no trouble with the law. Moreover, these services are less expensive than out-of-home care. In Massachusetts, for example, the average cost for Youth Villages' four- to six-month Intercept program, which currently has a 78 percent success rate in the state, is $18,000 per youth. By contrast, one youth in residential care can costs the state more than $125,000 per year (the average length of a stay) — and the success rate is about 40 percent.

Youth Villages was established in 1986 to operate residential treatment centers for youth involved in Tennessee's juvenile justice and child welfare systems. But in the late 1980s, Patrick W. Lawler, Youth Villages' chief executive, began questioning whether they were actually helping the youth they were serving. Like most people in his field, Lawler assumed that residential treatment was the way to go. “When a child comes into juvenile court, the records show all the problems with the family as well as the child,” he recalled. “You deduce that the family is the problem. Get the kid out of the family, the kid will be better. It didn't work out that way.”

From time to time, Lawler would run into family members of young people he had worked with. “I'd say, ‘How's Thomas doing? Or how's Charlotte doing?' ” he recalled. Most of the time he heard, “Not so good.” He'd be told that foster children had dropped out of school, gotten pregnant, or gotten arrested. Some kids were homeless or on drugs; some had committed suicide. “It started wearing on me a little,” he said.

So Youth Villages started doing follow up phone calls every summer to see what had happened to the youths who had been discharged the year before. About half had bad outcomes. Lawler's response was to work with his staff to improve their counseling. They created a new school and beefed up the recreation program. “But year after year, we kept making those phone calls and the data kept coming back the same,” he said.

In 1993, he hired a graduate who had completed an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt University named Lee Rone to conduct research. He chose Rone because he had good analytic skills but knew nothing about children's services. “We wanted somebody who had fresh eyes,” Lawler said. “We called him ‘the blank slate.' ” Rone set out to interview a range of experts in child welfare asking them which services they thought were most badly needed. After 126 interviews, the top response was “intensive in-home family services.”

“We had no idea what that was,” Lawler recalled.

They did some digging and through a chain of leads they were connected with a group of researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina, who had recently developed a treatment model called Multisystemic Therapy (MST), which had shown promise dealing with chronic and violent juvenile offenders. (MST has since been repeatedly validated in rigorous studies as superior to standard services.)

The key to MST was that it focused on helping youth in the context of their families, schools and communities. In particular, it worked to strengthen families, not replace them. Youth Villages began using MST with 12- to 17-year-olds who displayed anti-social behaviors. Over time, the results got better. It then developed another program, Intercept, which was focused on getting children at all ages in the child welfare system safely reunited with family members, while preventing children at risk from falling into state custody.

In both cases, they would identify problems that needed to be addressed within families — mental health issues, substance abuse, undiagnosed depression, behavioral issues — and develop a viable placement plan, in conjunction with child welfare advocates and the courts. That might mean assisting parents or identifying and supporting relatives who could step in as caregivers. Counselors would do everything from help caregivers learn to manage their medication, parent effectively (be consistent, enforce rules, offer praise) or enlist support from schools and people in the community.

Today, Youth Villages has 2,300 employees and is one of the largest providers of child welfare services in Tennessee. It has a variety of programs but it's best known for its in-home services, which have garnered praise from the White House. The model is radically different from the prevailing child welfare approach. Its counselors each serve four to five youths rather than 30 to 40. They work in teams with clinical consultants. They are on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They make a minimum of three home visits a week and sometimes as many as six or seven. They visit clients at work during lunch hours, or at home early in the morning, in the evening, or on weekends if necessary.

Youth Villages' results are challenging the prevailing notion that states can do better than vulnerable families at raising children. “I don't know who came up with this idea many years ago that to fix a child, it was best to take the child out of the home and put him in a foster home, a group home, or a residential treatment facility,” says Lawler. “For a few months it's tolerable and in many cases necessary. But for a child to grow up in the system is terrible. Unfortunately that's been the protocol for decades now.”

The problem is that most child welfare agencies are not oriented around returning children to permanent families — and their funding does not lead them to prioritize this goal. Money intended for out-of-home care doesn't follow the child home. In fact, the federal government dedicates much more money to out-of-home care than it does to programs that provide flexible in-home services like Youth Villages. Large institutional care providers don't get paid by the government for successful youth outcomes; they get paid to fill beds. Some entrenched interests have even fought to keep Youth Villages from working in their states.

The innovations that Youth Villages has helped advance show how other social service organizations might improve outcomes, as well. At the top of the list is Youth Villages' rigorous attention to data and its willingness to invest in strengthening families — even when the conventional wisdom held that families were the problem.

Youth Villages' work also shows the value of governments experimenting with social organizations who have innovative delivery models. Unfortunately, without the public-interest lawsuit filed by Children's Rights, and the subsequent court oversight, it's doubtful that the state government would have gotten as serious about improving services as it did. Finally, of course, like any successful organization, Youth Village is only as good as its execution — and that hinges on a motivated, well-managed workforce armed with good research. All of these things are worth noting. But above all, Youth Villages' successes grew out of Lawler's and his staff's unusual willingness to examine their own performance unmercifully and to conclude that, despite their best efforts, they were failing. That's tough to do. But it's often the first step in real change.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/a-families-first-approach-to-foster-care/?pagemode=print

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From Google News

Manhunt escalates for suspect in slaying, elderly couple's disappearance

COLERAIN TWP., Hamilton County — A week ago, Samuel Littleton II was a foundry worker with his own home and a longtime girlfriend. On Monday, he was the subject of a nationwide manhunt in the slaying of his girlfriend's daughter and the disappearance of an elderly couple.

A fractured portrait of Littleton, 37, continued to emerge Monday as authorities seeking possible clues to Littleton's and the couple's whereabouts dug through mounds of garbage at a Cincinnati-area landfill.

Littleton has been charged with the slaying of Tiffany L. Brown, 26, in Bellefontaine. He disappeared Wednesday, a day before Brown's partially clothed and stabbed body was found in the basement of the home he owns.

Wednesday is also when Richard Russell, 84, and his wife, Gladis Russell, 85, disappeared from their Logan County home, along with their car. Littleton knows the Russells, having purchased his home from them. Investigators found a piece of paper bearing Littleton's name and cell phone number inside their home.

Born in West Virginia, Littleton grew up in Logan County. He has a criminal record that includes drug and traffic violations, but nothing violent.

Littleton's ex-wife, Tammy Queen, told WHIO-TV that he had a violent streak and was obsessed with knives while they were married. She believes Littleton could be in a remote area of West Virginia where his father lives. Authorities are contacting Littleton's friends and relatives in West Virginia and Tennessee.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/crime/manhunt-escalates-for-suspect-in-slaying-elderly-couples-disappearance-1087569.html

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Stepmom charged in disabled girl's killing

HICKORY — More than four months after a 10-year-old disabled girl disappeared, her jailed stepmother was charged with murdering her with the indictment coming the same day authorities revealed that they haven't been able to find the dismembered girl's head.

Elisa Baker, 42, was charged with second-degree murder Monday and authorities said she desecrated Zahra Baker's remains to cover up the slaying. Zahra's death was caused by "undetermined homicidal violence," medical examiners said in documents.

An autopsy was done even though authorities haven't recovered many bones, most notably the girl's skull, months after she was reported missing. Several bones showed cutting tool marks consistent with dismemberment. The revelation of the missing skull came in documents released by the state's chief medical examiner shortly after officials in western North Carolina held a news conference about the charge against Baker.

Prosecutor James Gaither Jr. said at the news conference that there was no credible evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in Zahra's slaying. Hickory Police Chief Tom Adkins called the murder charge "a milestone of holding someone accountable that members of team Zahra have been working toward since the first words spoken on that 911 call."

Attorneys for Elisa Baker did not return calls seeking comment Monday.

Investigators would continue to pursue leads until the trial begins, Adkins said.

Documents show that police learned months ago that the girl was dismembered after she died. The lack of a head may help to explain the absence of an exact cause of death — and why it took four months for a charge.

Warrants in the case have indicated that Elisa Baker at one point was providing police information about what happened to Zahra's body. The warrants have never revealed how Zahra, who was reported missing Oct. 9 but was last seen weeks earlier, may have died.

Police eventually found the girl's remains in different places around western North Carolina, and Elisa Baker told authorities that she had been dismembered, according to warrants. Elisa Baker has been jailed since the weekend Zahra disappeared, charged with obstructing justice in the investigation by writing a fake ransom note that was found when the girl was reporting missing.

The second-degree indictment cites aggravating factors, saying Elisa Baker had a history of physically, verbally and psychologically abusing Zahra, who used a prosthetic leg and hearing aids after being stricken with cancer.

Two social services agencies said Monday they investigated reports just months before Zahra was killed that she was being improperly treated. Officials in Caldwell and Catawba Counties said investigators interviewed each family member in those cases but closed each one by concluding that there was no evidence of maltreatment or child safety issues.

The reports included allegations of improper discipline, improper care and an injurious environment.

Elisa Baker has claimed that her husband, Adam Baker, dismembered the body. Adam Baker has denied that, something he reiterated in an interview Monday with WBTV. He also told the station that he's "grateful" for how the investigators handled the case.

The warrant also said cell phone records indicate Adam Baker was not in the locations where Zahra's remains were found on the day Elisa Baker indicated, but that cell phone records showed she was in those places.

Elisa Baker led a nomadic life, with dozens of different addresses over a seven-year period. She was also married seven times and was wed to more than one man on several occasions. She met Adam Baker, seven years her junior, on a website where users create three-dimensional characters to represent themselves.

Adam Baker is free on bond, facing numerous charges not related to his daughter. He moved to North Carolina with Zahra from Australia after meeting Elisa online.

http://www.jdnews.com/news/charged-88148-disabled-girl.html

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Zahra Baker case timeline

Oct. 9: Adam Baker calls 911 to report his daughter, Zahra, missing. Police issue Amber Alert to search for kidnappers.

Oct.10: Zahra's stepmother, Elisa Baker, is charged with obstruction of justice after police say she admitted writing a phony ransom note. The search for Zahra continues.

Oct. 25: Elisa Baker leads investigators to three sites where some of Zahra's body parts had been discarded, court documents say. Police go on to recover the gel liner from Zahra's prosthetic leg and some skeletal remains.

Nov. 12: Police announce that test results confirm a bone they recovered was Zahra's.

Feb. 21: Elisa Baker is charged with second-degree murder. Social services acknowledge investigating the Bakers previously on four complaints of mistreating Zahra but found no evidence and closed the cases. Zahra's autopsy is released and declares the cause of her death as "undetermined homicidal violence."

Pennsylvania Judge Convicted in Alleged 'Kids for Cash' Scheme

Judge Mark Ciavarella Could Face Over 10 Years in Prison for Racketeering

Prosecutors say former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella used children as pawns, locking them up unjustly in a plot to get rich. Ciavarella is accused of taking nearly $1 million in kickbacks from owners of private detention centers in exchange for placing juvenile defendants at their facilities, often for minor crimes. Ciavarella claims that the payment he received from a developer of the PA Child Care facility was legal and denies that he ever incarcerated kids for money.

"Absolutely never took a dime to send a kid anywhere," said Ciavarella.

Ciavarella, 61, was found guilty of 12 out of 39 charges on Friday, including racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy, in connection with the nearly $1 million payment from Robert Mericle, the developer of the PA Child Care center. He plans to appeal. Ciavarella was acquitted on charges of bribery and extortion in relation to additional payments from the center's builder and owner.

Families complain of Ciavarella's rapid-fire brand of justice and trials that lasted only minutes with even first-time offenders sent to detention centers.

In one reported case, Ciavarella sentenced a child to two years for joyriding in his mom's car. In another, he sentenced a college-bound high school girl to three months in juvenile detention for creating a website that made fun of her assistant principal. Some of the kids he ordered locked up were as young as 10.

"The numbers of children going into placement in Luzerne County tended to be two to three times higher than in other counties," said Marsha Levick, deputy director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia.

Mom Confronts Convicted Judge After Verdict

Though most of the affected youth have already served their time, many parents were outraged by Ciavarella's sentence, including Sandy Fonzo, who could not contain her anger.

Fonzo's son Edward Kenzakoski was sentenced by Ciavarella to juvenile detention in 2003 for possession of drug paraphernalia. Fonzo said her 17-year-old son had no prior record when he landed in Ciavarella's courtroom. She claims Kenzakoski never recovered from the months he served behind bars and years later, at 23, he killed himself.

"Do you remember me? Do you remember me? Do you remember my son? He was an all-star wrestler and he's gone," Fonzo screamed to Ciavarella as he exited the courthouse Friday.

Ciavarella remains free until sentencing. Fonzo said she expected to see Ciavarella carted off in handcuffs as the former judge often did to juveniles he sentenced.

Ciavarella is expected to get a minimum prison sentence of 12 years behind bars, according to prosecutors. To Fonzo, that is not justice.

"You know what he told everybody in court? They need to be held accountable for their actions," she yelled to Ciavarella Friday. "You need to be!!"

The case of alleged corruption first shocked Luzerne County residents in January 2009 when federal prosecutors announced that the respected county judges Ciavarella and Michael Conahan had pleaded guilty to tax evasion and honest services fraud. However, the plea deal and relatively light sentence were later rejected by a federal judge who ruled that Ciavarella had failed to accept responsibility for the crimes.

Wilkes-Barre residents exploded with anger when they heard that men they elected, and trusted to judge their children, had allegedly profited from their incarceration.

Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy on July 23, 2010. He faces up to 20 years, but has not yet been sentenced.

Teens Sentenced by Ciavarella Speak Out

Eric Stefanski had never been in trouble before he found himself in front of Ciavarella, who took office in 1996.

"I was 12 years old when I got locked up. I had no clue what to say when he asked me how do I plead," Stefanski told "20/20" correspondent Jim Avila in a March 2009 report. "I was 12 years old. I didn't know too much about the court system."

Stefanski went joyriding with his mom's car and ran over a barrier, smashing the undercarriage. No one was hurt, not even Stefanski, but in order to get his insurance to pay for the damage, his mom, Linda Donovan, had to file a police report. Donovan even thought an appearance before a judge would be good for her son and give him a little scare. She wasn't prepared for what happened when Eric came before Ciavarella.

"He read me my charges and said, 'How do you plead?' And I didn't know what to say, so I looked at my mom, and I guess she didn't know I was looking, and I said, 'Guilty,'" Stefanski recalled. "That's when I turned around, I looked at my mom and she started crying."

Stefanski was locked up for two years. He was not represented by an attorney, his mom said, because she didn't think he needed one.

"His first offense, he's so young, I just didn't think that it was necessary," Donovan said.

Juvenile Justice Exposed

It's not supposed to be like this in juvenile court, where incarceration is considered the last resort, legal experts said. But Levick told ABC News she saw a disturbing trend inside Ciavarella's courtroom.

Levick claimed the kids going into placement in Luzerne Country tended to be two to three times higher than other countries and the kids were being locked up for minor infractions. "A child who shoplifted a $4 bottle of nutmeg," she said. "A child who was charged with conspiracy to shoplift because he was present when his friend was shoplifting. A child who put up a MySpace page, taunting her school administrator.

"I think what we have here in Luzerne County is probably the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the American legal system," Levick said.

Levick turned her findings over to the FBI, and the outcome rocked the Pennsylvania justice system.

Ciavarella and Conahan allegedly devised a plot to use their positions as judges to pad their pockets. They shut down the old county-run juvenile detention center by first refusing to send kids there and, then, by cutting off funds, choking it out of existence.

They then allegedly replaced the facility with a cash cow -- a privately owned lockup built by the judges' cronies -- and forged a deal for the county to pay $58 million for a 10-year period for its use. At the time, Conahan was serving as president judge of the Luzerne County Common Pleas Court, a position that allowed him to control the county-court budget. Ciavarella was the Luzerne County juvenile court judge.

In the judges' original plea deal, they admitted that they took more than $2.6 million in payoffs from the private youth detention center between 2003 and 2006.

Prosecutors said the judges attempted to hide their income from the scheme by creating false records and routing payments through intermediaries. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court removed them from their duties after federal prosecutors filed charges Jan. 26, 2009.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/mark-ciavarella-pa-juvenile-court-judge-convicted-alleged/story?id=12965182

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