Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Around the state

Primate expert's baby monkey taken by robbers

By wire services
Published June 25, 2005

MIAMI - Three masked men in capes stole a baby owl monkey Thursday from the home of a primate expert, police said.

Dr. Sian Evans, director of the DuMond Conservancy for Primates and Tropical Forests at the Monkey Jungle zoological park in Miami, was raising 10-month-old Tulip at her Redlands home.

Male owl monkeys care for their young, but Tulip's father died before her birth and her mother rejected her, Evans said.

Evans awoke around 4:30 a.m. Thursday and bumped into someone pointing a gun at her, police said. Three men wearing white ski masks and black capes took cash, a wallet and cell phone, then forced Evans' husband, Robert Cooper, to free Tulip from a cage in the living room.

"They made me let her go. She ran onto my arm and back. Then they grabbed her with a towel," Cooper said.

Evans said Tulip, who weighs about a pound, would probably try to bite her captors.

Owl monkeys, so named because they sleep by day and play at night, are found in rain forests throughout Central and South America, Evans said.

MIAMI - A civil jury decided Friday that one of the nation's largest outdoor advertisers must pay a family $65.1-million for the electrocution of their 12-year-old boy at a bus stop shelter that was built and wired by the company.

The body of Jorge Luis Cabrera was found Oct. 12, 1998, lying against the shelter. The family's attorneys said he was electrocuted when he stepped on a faulty electrical conduit at the bus stop on a rainy night.

After a day and a half of deliberation, the jury decided Eller Media Co. must pay $4.1-million in compensatory damages and $61-million in punitive damages.

Eller Media and one of its workers were cleared in a 2001 criminal case charging them with the boy's death. They said the boy was likely struck by lightning.

In the criminal trial, Eller Media employees invoked their Fifth Amendment right and didn't testify. But they were forced to testify during the nine-week civil trial.

BONITA SPRINGS - A deputy Tasered an intoxicated 13-year-old girl who was kicking and scratching two hospital nurses, officials said.

The girl, who is 4 feet 9 and weighs 90 pounds, had a blood alcohol level of 0.175 percent and was under the influence of marijuana and the prescription drug Xanax, according to the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

"She was lashing out, kicking and scratching," said sheriff's spokeswoman Ileana LiMarzi. "She was acting like an adult who needed to be restrained. Just because she's 13 doesn't mean she can't harm somebody."

The girl was charged with loitering, disorderly public intoxication, battery by a juvenile on health services personnel, battery on an officer and resisting an officer. She was sent to a juvenile assessment center.

She was walking on a street at 2:50 a.m. Thursday when Deputy Chad Edwards picked her up on the loitering charge. Her mother agreed to have the girl medically cleared at Lee Memorial Hospital before being processed.

JACKSONVILLE - Edward Waters College, a historically black college that lost its accreditation last year in a plagiarism scandal, saw it restored Thursday by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

The accreditation was revoked after officials at the school copied parts of a key accreditation document from two other colleges.

The association said it reinstated Edward Waters because "the college has openly acknowledged the errors it made." It said the revocation had "resulted in significant detriment to the college."

Students at unaccredited schools cannot receive federal financial aid, and other universities and potential employers might not recognize degrees or course credit as valid.

[Last modified June 25, 2005, 00:34:16]