Michigan man killed cop and himself

  Eyewitness NewsWEST BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- A businessman who gunned down a police officer at his suburban Detroit home held authorities at bay for hours with an arsenal of high-powered rifles and other weapons before finally killing himself, officials said Tuesday.

Officers were responding to a report of a possible suicide attempt Sunday night at the home in West Bloomfield Township when Ricky Coley shot Officer Pat O'Rourke, authorities said. About 15 families were evacuated from nearby homes during the subsequent 20-hour standoff that ended when Coley was found dead in his bed Monday evening.

More than 1,000 people attend a memorial vigil for O'Rourke outside the township police headquarters Tuesday night.

Sheriff Michael Bouchard told reporters Tuesday that the standoff lasted so long because relatives had warned investigators about his weapons, and because of a barrage of gunfire from Coley.

"It appeared to be just a battle mindset," Bouchard said. "He had the firepower. He had barricaded windows and covered doors. And the way he was firing - probably because part of his military background - he knew the best way to fire and not be spotted by a sniper."

Coley, a military veteran, had "a fully automatic Uzi" in addition to high-powered rifles, handguns, knives, a bullet-resistant vest and protective goggles, Bouchard said.

Coley, 50, was recently divorced and had been ordered to leave the home by Monday. He also faced financial and legal turmoil, including a lawsuit from federal authorities accusing him of mishandling employee's insurance funds. West Bloomfield Township police said they had also been called to Coley's home about a month ago because he was reportedly suicidal.

He killed himself with a gunshot to the mouth, according to a report released Tuesday by Dr. Cheryl Loewe of the Oakland County medical examiner's office.

Coley owned CNC Holdings, a private equity firm that bought 51 percent interest in Translogic Auto Carriers in 2008. Translogic, an 8-year-old company based in the Michigan Thumb-area town of Bad Axe, hauled new vehicles from automakers to dealerships. It had more than 200 drivers and employed dozens of others in the community.

Coley, who had worked for Ford Motor Co. and General Motors, believed he knew what automakers needed, said business partner Lyn Tetreau, who owned the other 49 percent of Translogic.

"Coley wanted to be involved in everything," Tetreau, 45, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "I was the minority owner. He was the majority. He demanded more so than suggested what we do. Coley and I had a totally different direction. We did a lot of bumping heads."

Tetreau said Coley fired him twice as company president, leading Tetreau to go to court so he could stay in charge of operations.

The U.S. auto industry was collapsing and the nation was in the Great Recession. By 2010, Translogic had filed for bankruptcy, despite Tetreau's putting about a $1 million of his own money into the company.

But Coley appeared to be making money off Translogic even when bills weren't being paid, Tetreau said.

"He put himself on a huge salary, working a couple of days each week while barking out orders," Tetreau said. "Coley was trying to leverage as much capital as he could for himself. Myself and the staff became puppets, and he was pulling the strings."

The U.S. Labor Department recently filed a lawsuit accusing Coley of mishandling money meant to cover employee insurance. The lawsuit says Coley also transferred $342,000 from Translogic to himself or his affiliates.

Tetreau said that was just one factor in Coley's troubles.

"I don't believe what has taken place with Coley was based on his life at Translogic," Tetreau said. "I think he had financial troubles and couldn't get his hands on much cash and was not being able to control his personal life."

Coley had lost his home as part of a divorce judgment. His ex-wife, Deniece Coley, also was to receive $190 each week in child support for their 7-year-old son. They were married in 1998 and separated June 12, when Deniece Coley moved out.

In filing for divorce, she claimed Ricky Coley was "at fault for the breakdown of the marriage due to his infidelity, physical, mental, emotional and psychological abuse." She said he had attacked her on two occasions.

Deniece Coley could not be reached for comment Tuesday. A man who answered the phone at a number listed for her in the divorce filing declined comment before hanging up.

Residents who live in the upscale neighborhood where the standoff happened were back home Tuesday.

Jeannie Zimbalatti pointed to a bullet hole in one of her bedrooms. She said her family was "trying to reconcile how we knew Rick to what we were seeing on TV."

"We were unaware of what was transpiring in his personal life," she said. "I'd had conversations with him about his business, and we knew things were tough. But there were no signs of any of this coming. He was an incredibly nice person to us."

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Police believe Neo-Nazi killed 4, himself in Ariz.

  AMANDA LEE MYERSGILBERT, Ariz. -- Many considered Jason Todd Ready to be the most high-profile neo-Nazi in Arizona. He led groups of heavily armed civilians into the desert to look for illegal immigrants as he repeatedly tried to win public office.

But Ready's beliefs and actions got so extreme, including statements that land mines would be a good way to stop border crossers, that the state's most conservative politicians distanced themselves from him.

Unwelcome among Republicans, Ready ran for sheriff in January as a Democrat. He continued to lead immigration patrols and posted Facebook updates, but there was little to suggest his personal life was in turmoil.

On Wednesday, police said, Ready, a burly 39-year-old who went by "JT," shot and killed four people, including a 16-month-old girl, in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert where he lived. He then turned the gun on himself.

The dead included Lisa Lynn Mederos, 47, who was Ready's girlfriend; her daughter Amber Nieve Mederos, 23; and Amber's boyfriend, Jim Franklin Hiott, 24. The child was found alive but was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Gilbert police Sgt. Bill Balafas said a woman believed to be Lisa Mederos called 911 around 1 p.m. Wednesday asking for the police to come to the house. Not long after, the operator heard shots fired and the line went dead.

Shortly after that, a teenager in the house who heard arguing followed by gunshots found the bodies and called 911 on a separate line.

Balafas said all the evidence suggests a domestic dispute but investigators aren't sure what triggered it.

He said Gilbert police have gone to the Mederos home five times since 2009, most recently in February, when Lisa Mederos called to report that Ready had choked her in August 2011.

Balafas said there was not enough evidence to make an arrest, and no charges were filed. It was unclear why Mederos would have waited six months to make the call.

The other times police responded to the home included a suicide threat by Amber Mederos in November 2009 and a suspicious activity report filed by Ready, Balafas said.

The killings and Ready's involvement stunned members of his group, the U.S. Border Guard.

"Our sympathies go out to all of his family and friends during this time of unbelievable grief and pain," according to a statement posted on its website. "God bless you, J.T. You will be fiercely missed."

Harry Hughes, a regional director for the National Socialist Movement who went out on patrols with Ready, said the shooting was "completely out of character" for Ready.

"And I'm going to not speculate or make any conclusions. I'm going to let the investigation go take its course," Hughes said. "But I have a real hard time believing that JT Ready could actually shoot and kill a child."

Anti-hate groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have for years tracked Ready. "JT Ready was a violent thug who typifies the very worst element in the American nativist movement," said the SPLC's Mark Potok.

According to an SPLC profile on its website, Ready was court-martialed twice in 1996 while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, the first time after being gone for eight days without permission.

The center said Ready was demoted to private after the absence and jailed for three months, and then later that year was court-martialed again for conspiracy, assault and wrongful solicitation and advice. He was found guilty, spent six months in detention and was discharged for bad conduct, the center said.

The Marine Corps was trying to confirm the center's information.

Ready's ex-wife, Arline Lindgren, knew that he had started associating with white supremacist groups when they were married in the late 1990s, said her brother, Adam Lindgren. The couple divorced in 2003.

Lindgren said he got into a few arguments with Ready but they were never violent. He said Ready had a temper, but "not a violent temper, that I was aware of." He said he never saw Ready be violent toward anybody.

Ready was "very, very opinionated. He would argue with you until ... well, just keep arguing with you," he said.

Ready was a member of the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, whose members promote white separatism, dress like Nazis and display swastikas. It believes only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be American citizens and that everyone who isn't white should leave the country "peacefully or by force."

Ready first tried to get into politics in 2004, when he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Arizona House. In 2006, he lost a run for Mesa City Council but was later elected as a Republican precinct committeeman.

He didn't run for re-election in 2008 after three Republican congressmen wrote a letter to a GOP county chairman asking for his removal because of his neo-Nazi ties. They said Ready was sullying the party's image. They said he was a featured speaker at a neo-Nazi conference in Omaha, Neb., in September 2007 and distributed racist and anti-Semitic literature at a GOP meeting.

Trying to distance himself from the movement, Ready told The Arizona Republic in 2010 that he left the group. Potok said the move was "merely for cosmetic reasons." Ready was also running his desert operations targeting illegal immigrants, one of which was featured on the National Socialist Movement's website as recently as January. Some of the photos on the website match ones posted to his Facebook page.

They include images of Ready and other members wearing head-to-toe camouflage gear, helmets and boots, and carrying high-powered guns during a weekend operation ending Jan. 29. The group claimed to help the U.S. Border Patrol apprehend one illegal immigrant.

"Some of us have our fingers on the triggers," Ready wrote in a post on a website for his group. "Soap box. Ballot Box. Ammo box. These were given to us by our founding fathers and mothers. We have just about depleted the first two options."

Police found six military-issue 40 mm grenades inside the Mederos home, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent Tom Mangan said Thursday. The grenades require a launcher, and Mangan said authorities did not find one.

Hughes defended Ready's desert operations, saying the primary focus of his group was to find and report drug smuggling.

"And from time to time, we would find human smuggling. We would find stranded motorists. We would find illegal aliens that were stuck out in the desert without water," he said. "We actually saved about two dozen lives out there the last two years - people who would be dead today if we hadn't come across them," he said.

In January, Ready announced that he wanted to become sheriff in Pinal County, a sprawling area southeast of Phoenix that includes large swaths of desert that serve as a corridor for human and drug smugglers. Ready listed himself as a Democrat in his paperwork, and most considered his chances of being elected laughable. They speculated that he wanted some media attention.

At the time, Joe Robison, chair of the Pinal County Democrats, said Ready was too much of an extremist to get elected. "I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting him elected," Robison said.

Former Arizona Rep. Russell Pearce, the chief architect of some of the state's tough legislation against illegal immigrants, was once Ready's political ally and friend, but said in a statement that he distanced himself after learning of Ready's ties to white supremacists.

"At some point in time, darkness took his life over," Pearce said.

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Corzine distances himself from firm's downfall

  By DANIEL WAGNER and MARCY GORDONWASHINGTON -- Summoned by Congress, Jon Corzine embraced a bold strategy Thursday to distance himself from MF Global's fall and $1.2 billion in missing clients' money: Answer each question. Be courteous. And don't huddle with your lawyer before replying.

He said very little. Nevertheless, it was a risky strategy, even for a risk-taking financial executive. Anything Corzine might say could be used against him in a courtroom, should he ever be charged in the MF Global case.

Yet the former CEO of the securities firm never declined to answer questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The one-time senator and New Jersey governor was subpoenaed by his former colleagues to explain how MF Global collapsed just over a month ago in the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. It's the first time in more than 100 years that Congress has subpoenaed a former senator to testify, according to Senate historian Don Ritchie.

Looking strained and speaking hoarsely during nearly three hours of testimony, Corzine said he never intended to break rules that require firms to safeguard client funds. He said he doesn't know what happened to the missing money, but added that customers' losses weigh on his mind "every day, every hour."

He said several times that he did not become aware of the shortfall in client accounts until Oct. 30, one day before MF Global filed for bankruptcy following its disastrous bets on European debt.

"I'm not in a position, given the number of transactions, to know anything specific about the movement of any specific funds," said Corzine, who took over as CEO more than a year and a half ago.

In his testimony to the House Agriculture Committee, Corzine sought to deflect blame for the company's collapse, arguing that he inherited a firm already doomed by his predecessors' bad financial decisions.

Legal experts said they were surprised by Corzine's decision to answer each question, however vaguely, given the legal risks. The FBI and federal regulators are investigating MF Global.

It's hard to see how the testimony will benefit Corzine, said Robert Mintz, a defense attorney in Newark, N.J., who specializes in white-collar cases.

Mintz said Corzine's answers leave him open to "a barrage of questions about facts and circumstances that will no doubt be the subject of review by prosecutors and regulators."

Two other congressional panels have also voted to subpoena Corzine.

His testimony provided his first public comments since the firm's spectacular collapse. A lawyer who handles white-collar criminal cases accompanied Corzine and sat behind him during the hearing. But Corzine never turned to seek his advice.

The hearing wasn't particularly confrontational, though a few members expressed disbelief that Corzine could be so detached as CEO.

Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., told him it strained belief "for you to sit there and say ... you know nothing about" the missing customer money. A lot of farmers in Georgia need to know, Scott said. "The key to this is you. You're the CEO."

Corzine said he was confident that others at MF Global were checking daily to ensure that the firm's money and clients' fund were being kept separate.

"I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date," he said.

He said MF Global toppled, in part, because of a large quarterly loss caused by his predecessors' accounting moves. Rating agencies responded to the loss by downgrading the firm's credit rating, which panicked investors and trading partners.

"The marketplace lost confidence in our firm," he said.

He disputed media reports that he personally pushed the company to make big, doomed bets on risky European debt using too much borrowed money.

He said he made the high-stakes bets only after discussions with company executives who traded European debt long before he arrived.

And he said he reduced MF Global's investment risks in some ways.

Some outside experts challenged some of his assertions.

Janet Tavakoli, an expert on the transactions MF Global specialized in, said Corzine's remarks seemed to divert attention from the firm's fundamental flaw under his leadership: It lacked the cash to cover its bets after investors started to fear that a major European nation would default.

"His entire testimony looks like a very skilled way to try to detract from that key issue," said Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance.

Lawmakers have heard from farmers, ranchers and small-business owners who are missing money deposited with the firm. Agricultural businesses use brokerage firms to help reduce their risks in an industry vulnerable to swings in oil, corn and other commodity prices.

A Democrat, Corzine represented New Jersey in the Senate from 2001 through 2005. He later served a single four-year term as governor, losing a re-election bid in 2009. Before entering politics, he was CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Corzine became CEO of MF Global in March last year, succeeding Bernard Dan, who resigned. Dan, a former CEO of the Chicago Board of Trade, was later named president of Sun Holdings LLC, a Chicago-based proprietary trading firm.

Several class-action lawsuits on behalf of shareholders have been filed against Corzine and three other top executives, accusing the firm and its leaders of making false statements about MF Global's stability.

Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law, said lawyers typically advise clients in Corzine's situation not to answer questions.

"When you answer a full day's worth of questions, you're committing yourself to a story that could come back to haunt you," Gillers said.

Mintz added: "It only makes sense if your answers can satisfy those posing the questions. Short of that, the risks far outweigh the benefits."

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Samantha Bomkamp contributed to this report from New York.

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Michigan man kills 7, including his kids, then himself

  By TOM COYNE and JOHN FLESHERGRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Hours after the shooting stopped, a car chase ended and a gunman wanted for killing seven people took three hostages, Michigan authorities still hoped that the suspect might surrender without another death.

Police in Grand Rapids tried to talk an agitated Rodrick Shonte Dantzler into giving up late Thursday. They said his thoughts seemed to swing between surrender and asking officers to shoot him.

"He was talking about coming out, giving himself up," Police Chief Kevin Belk said. "He decided at the last moment to fire the gun."

The 34-year-old ex-convict from Grand Rapids killed himself with a single shot to the head, ending the standoff with his hostages unharmed. But authorities say Dantzler left behind a pair of bloody crime scenes - the result of an unexplained rampage in which he killed his daughter, an ex-girlfriend and five others, including a second child who police couldn't immediately identify.

"It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were," Belk said. "You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples' lives."

The names of the dead were not immediately released. Autopsies were scheduled for Friday.

Records show that Dantzler was released from state prison in 2005, after serving time for assault less than murder. A spokesman for the prison system said Dantzler had not been under state supervision since then.

Police initially got a 911 call early Thursday afternoon from someone saying that a man had admitted to killing three people, Belk said. Police went to Dantzler's home, but he wasn't there and officers couldn't find him.

It wasn't long before authorities got a call from a woman who said her relatives had been shot. Next came a call about someone finding four gunshot victims at another house.

Officers soon found three bodies in a home on Plainfield Avenue.

An hour later, they discovered the other four across town in a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac called Brynell Court.

Two of the dead were children.

Kyle Gietzen lives with his wife a few blocks from the home where three bodies were found. He was nearby and saw five to six officers trying to break in the front door, while several others went to the back door. He said he didn't know what had happened until later.

"I had no idea anybody had been shot," he said. "I just thought it was a drug sting or something. It's awful."

Another neighbor, Sandra Powney, lives across the street from one of the homes and said she had seen Dantzler at the ranch house, where a couple has lived for more than 20 years with two adult daughters. Powney said she had been at home all day and did not realize anyone had been killed until police arrived at the cul-de-sac in the midafternoon.

"For a while we couldn't come outside," she said. "They didn't know if there was someone still inside the house."

Lisa Schenden lives with her husband and their children two blocks from the home where four people were killed. She said the homeowners are a couple whose daughter has a daughter with the suspect. She didn't hear the shooting either, but she saw the suspect and his daughter drive up to the house earlier in the day.

"Just last night, my kids went over there swimming, and I went over with them," she said.

While police were investigating the seven homicides, Belk said police received a report of a "road rage" shooting.

Dantzler had apparently shot at a man through the rear window of the vehicle he was driving. Police spotted him, and began a chase that included Dantzler crashing into a patrol car in the city's downtown and exchanging gunfire with officers, during which a female bystander was shot in the shoulder.

Danztler drove a sport utility vehicle north from downtown and onto Interstate 96, crossing a grassy median and heading the wrong way down the highway while more than a dozen squad cars pursued him. Belk said he crashed the vehicle while driving down an embankment into a wooded area of the highway, which remained closed hours later.

"I look in my rearview mirror and see this big white SUV coming up behind me," said Carrie Colacchio, who lives a little more than a mile away from where Dantzler later took his three hostages. "The only way to get out of it was to push the gas pedal."

Colacchio said she couldn't turn off the road or slow down or go any other way, and she reached about 85 mph.

"I almost got smacked," she said. "I had to go up on the curb."

From the highway, Dantzler made his way toward a nearby single-family home, firing several shots as he forced his way inside and took hostages he did not know, police said. Dozens of officers with guns drawn cordoned off the neighborhood, near a small lake in the northern part of the city, as authorities shut down nearby Interstate 96.

That was around 7:30 p.m. During the next five hours, Dantzler fired sporadically at officers and inside the house. He vacillated between threatening to shoot the hostages and pleading with police to take him out, even asking negotiators whether there were snipers outside the home and where he should stand, Belk said.

"The suspect fired at our officers many times throughout the night," he said. "Even in the home, there was an exchange of gunfire. He fired as they made entry to the house."

Officers had gone inside to protect the hostages, and remained in the house throughout the negotiations with Dantzler. He changed course after several hours and asked how he could surrender. Belk said officers were talking with him about how to turn himself in when they heard the gunshot.

"Obviously, we're extremely disappointed at the outcome," Belk said. "We would much rather have had the suspect surrender and have him in custody."

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Associated Press writers Kathy Barks Hoffman in Grand Rapids, and Corey Williams and David N. Goodman in Detroit contributed to this report.

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Man who called himself a Rockefeller due in court

  Eyewitness NewsALHAMBRA, Calif. -- A German immigrant who masqueraded as a member of the famous Rockefeller family will appear in court on charges that he murdered his Southern California landlord more than a quarter century ago and then fled the state.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is scheduled to be arraigned Friday morning in Los Angeles Superior Court in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles.

Prosecutors believe he murdered Jonathan Sohus, who disappeared along with his wife Linda in 1985. Gerhartsreiter rented the couple's guesthouse in wealthy enclave of San Marino, northeast of Los Angeles, and left town soon after they vanished.

He plans to plead not guilty, his lawyers have said.

Gerhartsreiter was already serving a prison term in Massachusetts following a 2009 conviction in the kidnapping of his 7-year-old daughter.

At the time arrest in Baltimore in August 2008, Gerhartsreiter had been living under the Rockefeller name. He was convicted of snatching his daughter from a Boston street in an elaborately planned kidnapping in which he hired two people to drive them to New York.

Detectives in California had long considered Gerhartsreiter a person of interest in the death of 27-year-old Sohus, a former landlord who mysteriously disappeared with his wife, Linda, in 1985 at the same time a man using the name Christopher Chichester was staying in a guest house on their property.

The man who called himself Chichester had quickly ingratiated himself into the community and told people he was a British aristocrat. Over the years, Gerhartsreiter has morphed identities many times, telling people he was a physicist, an art collector, a ship captain and a financial adviser who renegotiated debt for small countries At his kidnapping trial, prosecutors said Gerhartsreiter used aliases to move in wealthy circles in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. His strange story has become the subject of a TV movie.

Skeletal remains were found in the backyard of the Sohus's home in 1994 when new owners were excavating for a swimming pool. Those bones were thought to belong to Jonathan Sohus. His wife is still missing Gerhartsreiter arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Because of the notoriety of his case, he is being kept away from the general jail population.

Gerhartsreiter's lawyers claimed during the 2009 trial that he was suffering from a delusional disorder and was legally insane when he snatched his daughter during a supervised visit in Boston following a bitter divorce from his wife. Prosecutors portrayed him as a master manipulator who used multiple aliases and told elaborate lies about his past.

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