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From the Los Angeles Times

Fire breaks out near school on Columbine killings anniversary

The Southwest Plaza Mall is evacuated after a small fire erupts in the food court on the 12th anniversary of the Columbine High shootings in Colorado. Authorities find two propane tanks and a pipe bomb.

Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

April 21, 2011

Reporting from Denver

On the 12th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, authorities evacuated a busy mall near the infamous high school Wednesday after extinguishing a small fire in the food court and finding two propane tanks and a pipe bomb.

There was no public evidence tying the act to the 1999 shooting spree at Columbine High School, in which two student gunmen killed 13 people before committing suicide. But the linkage was on the minds of local officials.

"It's hard to ignore that it's an anniversary," said Jacki Kelley, a spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.

The fire at the Southwest Plaza Mall started just before noon. The sheriff's department evacuated the mall, which at its peak has about 10,000 shoppers, after finding the propane tanks and bomb near the fire.

Jefferson County put 25 of its schools on lockdown, allowing people to enter and leave only through one entrance. Columbine High was already closed for the anniversary of the rampage, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before turning their weapons on themselves.

Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the mall Wednesday evening. Investigators were reviewing surveillance tapes to try to determine who started the fire and left the devices.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mall-fire-20110421,0,3068877,print.story

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Plunge in border crossings leaves agents fighting boredom

Arrests of illegal crossers along the Southwest border dropped more than two-thirds from 2000 to 2010, from 1.6 million to 448,000.

by Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

April 21, 2011

Reporting from San Luis, Ariz. -- The border fence ran right in front of Jeff Byerly's post, a straight line of steel that stretched beyond town and deep into the desert. As a U.S. Border Patrol agent on America's front line, Byerly's job was to stop anyone from scaling the barrier. Hours into his midnight shift, his stare was still fixed, but all was quiet.

He pounded energy drinks. He walked around his government vehicle. On the other side of the fence, the bars in the Mexican town of San Luis Rio Colorado closed, and only the sound of a passing car broke the silence. Byerly, 31, switched on his DVD player. Minutes later, a supervisor knocked on the window: The slapstick comedy "Johnny English" was on; Byerly was fast asleep.

Wild foot chases and dust-swirling car pursuits may be the adrenaline-pumping stuff of recruitment efforts, but agents on the U.S.-Mexico border these days have to deal with a more mundane occupational reality: the boredom of guarding a frontier where illegal crossings have dipped to record low levels.

Porous corridors along the 2,000-mile border do remain, mostly in the Tucson area, requiring constant vigilance. But beefed-up enforcement and the job-killing effects of the great recession have combined to reduce the flood of immigrants in many former hot spots to a trickle.

Apprehensions along the Southwest border overall dropped more than two-thirds from 2000 to 2010, from 1.6 million to 448,000, and almost every region has lonely posts where agents sit for hours staring at the barrier, watching the "fence rust" as some put it.

"When the traffic stops … of course it's going to be difficult for the agents to stay interested," said Supervisory Agent Ken Quillin, from the agency's Yuma, Ariz., sector. "I understand guys have a tough time staying awake.... they didn't join the border patrol to sit on an X," Quillin added, using the slang term for line watch duty.

To stay alert, agents are encouraged to walk around or take coffee breaks. Some agents play video games on their mobile phones or read books. There are agents known as "felony sleepers" who intend to slumber — bringing pillows or parking in remote areas — but most dozers are victims of monotony who nod off despite their best efforts to stay awake.

In the agency's San Diego sector, where apprehensions are at their lowest since the early 1970s, a supervisor last year was caught dozing in his parked vehicle by a television news crew. In the agency's busiest region near Tucson, agents have been left glassy-eyed amid a steep drop in activity. "When you go from 700,000 arrests in a sector to 100,000 … of course boredom is going to settle in," said Brandon Judd, president of the local border patrol agents' union, using approximate apprehension figures.

Perhaps no area has more action-starved agents than the Yuma sector, a vast expanse of desert and agricultural fields straddling California and Arizona that shares a 126-mile border with Mexico. In 2005, it was the border's most trampled region, a place where immigrant rushes, called banzai runs, sent hundreds of people into backyards and lettuce fields, and teams of drug smugglers shot across the Colorado River atop sandbag bridges.

Outnumbered agents resorted to spinning doughnuts in their vehicles, trying to kick up mini-sandstorms to disorient the hordes. Agents had to prioritize pursuits, focusing on the groups closing in on front lawns. "We were overrun," said agent Jeff Bourne, 34, but "your brain was always working. We were always doing something."

Then double and triple fencing went up. Stadium lighting was installed. Every arrested immigrant, instead of being returned to Mexico, was jailed. Outside town, workers laid steel barriers on previously wide-open borders to block drug-smuggling vehicles from driving through.

From 2005 to 2010, apprehensions of immigrants dropped 95%, from 138,460 to 7,116. Vehicle drive-throughs fell from 2,700 to 21 during the same period. Farmers are now able to plant crops in once-trampled fields. And residents don't find immigrants hiding under their cars anymore.

More than 900 agents, triple the number from 2005, are now stationed in what is one of the slowest sectors along the entire border. On a recent day, Bourne and his partner, Fernando Salazar, rode their patrol bikes through Friendship Park, where immigrants ran through Little League baseball games until the border fence was extended through left field.

They rode through tidy subdivisions where some homeowners provided shelter for people in garages and backyard bunkers until stadium lighting and triple-layer fencing all but sealed a smugglers' enclave in San Luis Rio Colorado.

Years ago in the same area, Bourne said, he helped catch 180 people in one day. Halfway into his recent shift, his crime-stopping efforts consisted of stopping a young man from dropping a soda can in the park. Still, bike patrol, the partners agreed, is a lot better than being stuck in a parked car waiting for action that never comes.

"Sitting in the same spot for eight hours looking at the same thing… it drains you." Salazar said.

Byerly was several hours into his midnight shift at the San Luis Port of Entry in March 2010 when his eyes started getting heavy. Watching the fence at the port was once considered crucial: People would jump over and disappear into nearby truck yards the moment an agent turned his head. But that night there were no immigrants waiting to dash across, no lookouts scouting the area, and no smugglers heaving rocks at his "war wagon" vehicle, its windows fortified with steel grillwork.

"I figured it would be exciting," said Byerly, a former construction worker from Pennsylvania who joined the agency in 2008. "I didn't think it would be as dead as it was."

Byerly finished the energy drinks and put the comedy into his DVD player. (Agents are prohibited from using personal electronic devices while on duty.) "I figured something funny would keep me awake, but I still fell asleep," said Byerly, who was fired because of the incident. Two other agents have also been disciplined for falling asleep on the job, said Derek Hernandez, president of the Yuma sector border patrol union.

Senior officials acknowledge that monotony is a concern. Agents are offered extra training and special details at tactical checkpoints and hot spots in other border regions, they say. Agents are also pulled off the line to do more interior enforcement, including pursuing illegal immigrants at bus stations as far away as Las Vegas.

Agent Rob Lowry, 28, fresh from mixed martial arts training, was on line duty on a recent day when he spotted farmworkers tending a field of lettuce. Illegal immigrants in the past would try to blend in and get trucked to other fields. But not on this morning.

Since joining the agency two years ago, Lowry figures he has arrested 100 immigrants, a total that agents in busier times could once accumulate in one day. Watching lettuce grow doesn't match Lowry's expectations for border duty, but the country still needs him, he said, if only as a deterrent.

"It might be tough on some agents who want to see action," said Lowry. "But as a U.S. citizen, it's comforting to know that [the Yuma-area border] is not crazy with people running around everywhere."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-border-boredom-20110421,0,5794968,print.story

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Mother allegedly hid heroin in teenage son's pants

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies discovered six bags of heroin inside the pants of a 14-year-old in Canyon Country after pulling the boy's mother over in a traffic stop, authorities said Wednesday.

The 31-year-old mother from Lake Los Angeles admitted she hid the plastic bags in her son's pants, authorities said. Her 14-year-old and her other son, who is 11, were released to child protective services after the Monday incident.

Deputies said they also found methamphetamines on the woman.

She told deputies she was a single mother who was transporting the drugs “this one time” to pay the rent, but deputies found evidence indicating she had been selling drugs for some time, authorities said.

Deputies arrested her for possession of heroin for sale, transporting heroin, child endangerment and inducing a minor to transport heroin.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/bags-of-heroin.html

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From the New York Times

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Juvenile Killers in Jail for Life Seek a Reprieve

CHARLESTON, Mo. — More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a blowgun to an angry threat with a bow and arrow to the fatal thrust of a hunting knife.

The boy, Quantel Lotts, had spent part of the morning playing with Pokémon cards. He was in seventh grade and not yet five feet tall.

Mr. Lotts is 25 now, and he is in the maximum-security prison here, serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for murder.

The victim's mother, Tammy Lotts, said she lost two children on that November day in 1999. One was a son, Michael Barton, who was 17 when he died. The other was a stepson, Mr. Lotts.

“I don't feel he's guilty,” she said of Mr. Lotts in the living room of her modest St. Louis apartment, growing emotional. “But if he was, he's already done his time. He should be released. Time served. If they think that's too easy, let somebody look over his case.”

As things stand now, though, the law gives Mr. Lotts no hope of ever getting out.

Almost a year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment — but only for crimes that did not involve killings. The decision affected around 130 prisoners convicted of crimes like rape, armed robbery and kidnapping.

Now the inevitable follow-up cases have started to arrive at the Supreme Court. Last month, lawyers for two other prisoners who were 14 when they were involved in murders filed the first petitions urging the justices to extend last's year's decision, Graham v. Florida , to all 13- and 14-year-old offenders.

The Supreme Court has been methodically whittling away at severe sentences. It has banned the death penalty for juvenile offenders, the mentally disabled and those convicted of crimes other than murder. The Graham decision for the first time excluded a class of offenders from a punishment other than death.

This progression suggests it should not be long until the justices decide to address the question posed in the petitions. An extension of the Graham decision to all juvenile offenders would affect about 2,500 prisoners.

Mr. Lotts, a stout man with an easy manner, said he was not reconciled to his sentence. “I understand that I deserve some punishment,” he said. “But to be put here for the rest of my life with no chance, I don't think that's a fair sentence.”

Much of the logic of the Graham decision and the court's 2005 decision banning the death penalty for juvenile offenders, Roper v. Simmons , would seem to apply to the new cases.

The majority opinions in both were written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy , who said teenagers deserved more lenient treatment than adults because they are immature, impulsive, susceptible to peer pressure and able to change for the better over time. Justice Kennedy added that there was an international consensus against sentencing juveniles to life without parole, which he said had been “rejected the world over.”

One factor cuts in the opposite direction. Justice Kennedy relied on what he called a national consensus against the punishment for crimes that did not involve killings. Juvenile offenders were sentenced to life without parole for such nonhomicide crimes, he wrote, in only 12 states and even then rarely.

There does not appear to be such a consensus against life without parole sentences for juveniles who take a life. That may be why opponents of the punishment are focusing for now on killings committed by very young offenders like Mr. Lotts.

That strategy follows the one used in attacking the juvenile death penalty, which the Supreme Court eliminated in two stages, banning it for those under 16 in 1988 and those under 18 in 2005.

Kent S. Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims' rights group, said that categorical approaches were misguided in general and particularly unjustified where murders by young offenders were involved.

“Since I think Graham is wrong,” he said, “extending it to homicides would be wrong squared.”

“Sharp cutoffs by age, where a person's legal status changes suddenly on some birthday, are only a crude approximation of correct policy,” he added. There are around 70 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for homicides committed when they were 14 or younger, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm in Alabama that represents poor people and prisoners.

The effort to extend the Graham decision has so far been unsuccessful in the lower courts. According to a study to be published in The New York University Review of Law and Social Change by Scott Hechinger, a fellow at the Partnership for Children's Rights, 10 courts have decided not to apply Graham to cases involving killings committed by the defendants, and seven others have said the same thing where the defendants were accomplices to murders. Courts have reached differing results, though, where the offense was attempted murder.

All of this suggests that the question left open in Graham may only be answered by the Supreme Court. In March, lawyers with the Equal Justice Initiative asked the justices to hear the two cases raising the question.

One concerns Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas man who was 14 when he and two older youths tried to rob a video store in 1999. One of the other youths shot and killed a store clerk.

The second case involves Evan Miller, an Alabama prisoner who was 14 in 2003 when he and an older youth beat a 52-year-old neighbor and set fire to his home after the three had spent the evening smoking pot and playing drinking games. The neighbor died of smoke inhalation.

In Mr. Lotts's case, too, state and federal courts in Missouri have said that his sentence is constitutional. In December, in a different case , the Missouri Supreme Court divided 4-to-3 over the constitutionality of the punishment in a case involving the killing of a St. Louis police officer.

A dissenting judge, Michael A. Wolff, wrote that “juveniles should not be sentenced to die in prison any more than they should be sent to prison to be executed.”

At the prison here, about 130 miles south of St. Louis, Mr. Lotts said he had grown up around drugs and violence, and he acknowledged that he used to have a combustible temper. But he said the years he spent living with his father and Ms. Lotts were good ones.

He and his brother Dorell were inseparable, he recalled, from Ms. Lotts's three boys. The group was sometimes taunted because Quantel and Dorell were black and the other boys were white.

“If you wanted to fight one of us,” he said, “you had to fight all of us.”

He said he recalled very little about assaulting Michael. But he said he knew some things for sure.

“That's my brother,” he said. “Why would I want to kill my brother? That's not what I set out to do. That's not what I meant to do. That's not what I intended to do.”

Tammy Lotts said race figured in her stepson's trial. “They said a black boy stabbed a white boy,” she said. For years, state officials prohibited her from visiting Mr. Lotts, fearing she would try to harm him. “I'm the victim's mother,” she said, shrugging.

At the prison last week, Mr. Lotts was wearing a handsome wedding ring, and it prompted questions. Beaming, he said he had been married just a few weeks before to a woman who had written to him after hearing him interviewed. He pointed to where the ceremony had taken place, a couple of yards away, near the vending machines.

Ms. Lotts attended the wedding, but only after satisfying herself that the bride was a suitable match.

“She's marrying my son,” Ms. Lotts explained.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21juvenile.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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For Threats of Terrorism, Two Words Will Warn

The government's five-color scheme for terrorism alerts has been reduced to two warnings: elevated and imminent.

The color-coded threat level system endured for nearly 10 years despite widespread criticism, if not mockery, of its sometimes perplexing messages to the public. Now the Department of Homeland Security is phasing out the green-blue-yellow-orange-red palette in favor of a system that officials say will convey more information about the threats.

“Say goodbye to orange,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday in announcing the replacement system at Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Ms. Napolitano said the new program, called the national terrorism advisory system, would be put into operation Tuesday. “Elevated” alerts will warn of credible terrorism threats; “imminent” will warn of credible, specific and impending terrorism threats.

The alerts will be “based on specific, credible information about potential terrorist activity” and will include “as many details as we can provide in an unclassified form,” Ms. Napolitano said. They will include a concise summary of a potential threat, a description of the area or type of transportation that could be affected, information about steps the authorities are taking to address any threat and suggestions on how people can be prepared and stay informed.

The alerts will be disseminated through announcements to news organizations and social media sites and will appear on a new Web site, www.dhs.gov/alert .

To avoid a series of “cascading alerts” that can confuse the public, Ms. Napolitano said, each alert issued will expire after two weeks, unless intelligence agencies and the homeland security secretary decide otherwise.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who joined Ms. Napolitano at the news conference Wednesday, said she thought the public had become inured to the color-coded system, “which many people had basically tuned out because it never ended, and you didn't really know what it meant.”

Ms. Napolitano said that the new system would provide more concrete information to the public and that alerts under the new system would rely on more specific indications of danger.

The color-coded system was established by a presidential directive in March 2002 during the administration of George W. Bush and denoted five threat levels with a range of colors from green (low) to red (severe).

Nearly from the beginning, the system was maligned as being too vague. The fact that alerts were rarely accompanied by any specific explanation led some people to wonder whether they were sometimes used for political purposes.

“It really didn't make people more aware or less aware,” said Jim Parker, 46, a lawyer from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who was waiting for a train in the Union Square subway station. “It seemed like the government was putting on a show.”

Edward Mackel, 28, a building supplies salesman from Sunnyside, Queens, said he preferred a system that included information about the nature of a potential threat.

“You walk into an airport,” he said. “You see there's an orange alert and of course you want to know why.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21alert.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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New Charges Filed Against Suspect in U.S.S. Cole Bombing

WASHINGTON (AP) — Military prosecutors refiled terrorism and murder charges on Wednesday against the suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the American destroyer Cole, making it the first case to move forward since President Obama ordered military trials to resume at Guantánamo Bay , Cuba. They also requested the death penalty in the case.

The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri , was charged with the planning and preparation for the Cole attack, which blew a hole in the warship, killing 17 sailors and wounding 40.

The charges were referred to the Convening Authority for Military Commissions, which presides over the war crimes tribunals at the American base in Cuba.

Mr. Nashiri previously faced charges in the bombing, but they were dropped in 2009 as the Obama administration revamped the military commission process.

Prosecutors also accused Mr. Nashiri of involvement in the planning and preparation for an attack on a French civilian oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden on Oct. 6, 2002, that killed a member of the crew and caused the release of approximately 90,000 barrels of oil.

Before being transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay in September 2006 for the second time, Mr. Nashiri spent nearly four years inside the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prison system, according to former C.I.A. officials and documents that have been released to the public.

Mr. Nashiri was captured in Dubai in November 2002 and flown to a C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit before being moved to a clandestine C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where he was waterboarded twice.

In December 2002, he was moved again to a C.I.A. prison in Poland and subjected to a series of interrogation techniques that included some not authorized by Justice Department guidelines.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/us/21gitmo.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Roommate Faces Hate-Crime Charges in Rutgers Case

A New Jersey grand jury on Wednesday indicted the roommate of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who killed himself in September, on hate-crime charges in using a webcam to stream Mr. Clementi's romantic encounter with another man on the Internet in the days before the suicide.

The roommate, Dharun Ravi , and another student were initially charged with invasion of privacy. In accusing Mr. Ravi of acting with antigay motives, the indictment exposes him to a potential sentence of at least 5 to 10 years in prison if convicted, as opposed to the probation that would probably have resulted if Mr. Ravi were convicted only on the earlier counts.

The grand jury also charged Mr. Ravi, 19, with a cover-up. The Middlesex County prosecutor's office said he had deleted a Twitter post that alerted others to watch a second encounter Mr. Clementi planned with the man — identified in the indictment only as “M.B.” — and replaced it with a post “intended to mislead the investigation.” Prosecutors said Mr. Ravi had also tried to persuade witnesses not to testify.

The investigation that led to the 15-count indictment proceeded quietly over several months, as Mr. Clementi's suicide focused national attention on the victimization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Public figures including Ellen DeGeneres and President Obama spoke out about the tragedy; New Jersey legislators enacted the nation's toughest law against bullying; and there were calls from many quarters for prosecutors to bring the bias charges.

Legal scholars said the case would be closely watched and could have ripple effects. “Charging this as a bias crime may send a message to prosecutors who are dealing with similar cases in other states about the particularly damaging consequences of this kind of crime,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, director of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

After discovering that his roommate had spied on him, the authorities said, Mr. Clementi, an aspiring violinist from Ridgewood, N.J., jumped from the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22.

Prosecutors said Wednesday that the events that led to the bias-intimidation charges dated from Aug. 6, the day Mr. Ravi learned the name of his future roommate — identified in the indictment as “T.C.,” since invasion of privacy is designated a sexual offense. Later that month, Mr. Ravi used his Twitter account to announce he had found out his roommate was gay.

“The grand jury charged that the invasion of privacy and attempt to invade the privacy of T.C. and M.B. were intended to intimidate them because of their sexual orientation,” prosecutors said in a statement.

Mr. Ravi's co-defendant, Molly Wei , who lived in the same dormitory and was also charged with invasion of privacy, was not indicted. The prosecutor, Bruce J. Kaplan, said in a statement that the case against her remained active but would not be presented to a grand jury “at this time,” suggesting that she could testify against Mr. Ravi.

Prosecutors say Mr. Ravi live-streamed the encounter on Sept. 19.

A Twitter message that day from Mr. Ravi summed up the sequence of events: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

Mr. Ravi was also charged with additional counts of attempted invasion of privacy for trying to carry out a similar live transmission two days later. That attempt was thwarted after Mr. Clementi found the camera aimed at his bed.

The prosecutor's office said Mr. Ravi, who remains free on $25,000 bail, would be arraigned in coming days, but no date had been set. Mr. Ravi and Ms. Wei withdrew from Rutgers last fall; their lawyers did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

Mr. Clementi's parents, Joseph and Jane Clementi, who said last month in a statement that they were not seeking “harsh punishment” for the defendants, responded to the new charges with their most forceful words to date.

“The grand jury indictment spells out cold and calculated acts against our son Tyler by his former college roommate,” they said in a new statement. “If these facts are true, as they appear to be, then it is important for our criminal justice system to establish clear accountability under the law.”

Their lawyer, Paul Mainardi, emphasized that the charges did not relate to the death. “The point is that it shouldn't take a suicide for charges like this to be brought,” Mr. Mainardi said.

New Jersey's attorney general, Paula T. Dow, called the indictment “an important step in this heartbreaking case.” Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality , a gay-rights advocacy group, said “potential bullies will now think harder before demolishing another student's life.”

On the Busch campus at Rutgers, where Mr. Ravi and Mr. Clementi had lived, students offered differing views of the bias charges. “There was no sex tape; it was more like he just peeked into the room,” Enrico Cabreto, 19, a freshman, said. “He's only being indicted because of all the publicity.”

Daniel Granda, 18, also a freshman, disagreed. “He didn't make him jump, but by doing what he did, he set the stage for what happened next,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/nyregion/rutgers-roommate-faces-hate-crime-charges-in-spying-suicide.html

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Seath Jackson, 15, Lured to House, Killed, Burned by Ex-Girlfriend, Other Teens, Police Say

A group of older teens and an ex-girlfriend lured a 15-year-old boy to a Florida house, where they carried out a plan by beating him, shooting him dead and burning his body, police said.

The fatal attack on Seath Jackson occurred Sunday at a house in Summerfield, Fla., police believe. Now, four suspects 18 or younger and a 20-year-old are being charged with first-degree murder, and a 37-year-old man is being charged with accessory to murder.

"It's an unimaginable act -- the idea that six people would come together and carry out to kill a 15-year-old," Marion County Police Officer Judge Cochran said. "That's a plot that you just don't expect to see in your next day's newspaper. It's just not something expected in the community."

According to Marion County Police, Jackson's mother reported him missing and as a possible runaway on Monday.

But on Tuesday, Tracy Wright, the mother of Jackson's ex-girlfriend, Amber Wright, contacted police and told them her son, Kyle Hooper, 16, personally witnessed Jackson's murder.

During questioning, police said, Hooper claimed that the people inside the home were involved in the planning and luring of Jackson into the home where the murder took place.

Hooper allegedly told police that on Sunday, he, Wright, Michael Bargo, 18, Charlie Ely, 18, and Justin Soto, 20, were at Ely's residence when Bargo started to speak of his hatred for Jackson. The conversation then turned into a plan to lure Jackson into the residence so that Bargo could kill him with the assistance of the other people.

According to police reports, Ely and Wright planned to leave the residence and meet with Jackson to lure him to the home. When Jackson arrived, Soto and Hooper hit him in the head with wooden objects, the report alleged, and Michael Bargo then shot Jackson several times.

Police believe the group burned Jackson's body outside the home in a fire that already had been started as a part of the plan. A sixth person, James Havens, 37, admitted to helping dispose of Jackson's body, police said. Havens is Hooper and Wright's stepfather, according to published reports.

According to police reports, all six suspects have admitted involvement in the killing.

A public battle between Jackson and Amber Wright began on Facebook on April 8, when Wright responded to one of Jackson's status updates.

Wright wrote on Jackson's page: "I got so tired of you treating me like I was nothing. If you're so perfect, why don't you get over your jealousy and get a new girl you can hurt. ... You know I cared deeply about you. I stuck with you through a lot of stuff. ... It takes a real man to accept the fact he got broken up with."

Jackson responded to Wright: "We both need to just let all of this go. Yeah we split, yeah it hurt, but I'm over it. I'm just not going to let Mike have his cake and eat it too."

Several friends posted Facebook status updates in honor of Jackson's death, with one saying, "RIP Seath, You were such a cute, sweet kid. Well all miss you buddy. I'm so sorry for what they did." Another classmate of Jackson's wrote, "It makes me sick that I went to school with some of them."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/seath-jackson-15-lured-house-killed-burned-girlfriend/story?id=13422887

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