A Missouri couple is accused of nearly starving their 1-year-old son to death, allegedly failing to feed the special-needs toddler despite ample food in the home, with the father blaming their failures on smoking pot and “falling asleep.” Braxton Blevins and Emily Katz were taken into custody earlier this week and charged with one count each of child abuse and one count each of child endangerment, records show.

According to a probable cause affidavit, officers with the Carthage Police Department on March 1, 2025, responded to a call from Children’s Mercy Hospital regarding a 1-year-old male juvenile who had been admitted with “severe malnutrition, starvation, recurrent infections, and failure to thrive.”

Medical personnel told authorities the victim had been hospitalized multiple times in his short life for similar conditions.

“In each instance, when placed under hospital-supervised care and fed according to the prescribed protocol, the juvenile gained weight and improved,” the affidavit states. “Hospital staff stated this demonstrated the victim’s medical complications were treatable with proper care and nutrition, which Blevins was trained on and said he was providing.”

Despite the couple claiming that Blevins had been providing their son with proper care at home and following the prescribed feeding plan, officers said they recovered between 10 and 20 unused bags of the victim’s “Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN)” that was stored in the family’s refrigerator. One bag of TPN, required daily, delivers nearly 80% of the child’s required total daily caloric intake.

The bags were administered through a central line feeding tube.

“The presence of excess TPN supplies indicated the juvenile was not receiving the prescribed nutrition,” police wrote.

While hospital staff told authorities that both parents had completed the medical training required to care for their son’s nutrition needs, but said that each subsequent time the victim was hospitalized, neither parent was “consistently unable to explain the home care provided or account for the juvenile’s weight loss and deteriorating condition.”

The hospital’s safety, care, and nurturing team concluded that there was sufficient evidence that the victim was consistently missing feedings and that his repeated hospitalizations were “the result of Blevins’ neglect.”

A 9-year-old boy in Atlanta was nearly shot to death while sleeping in his home over the weekend — with a bullet going through his back and into his leg, where it became lodged “close to a large artery” — during a drive-by shooting that saw his uncle return fire to “defend the family,” the victim’s aunt says.

“I was asleep,” the boy told local Fox affiliate WAGA on Saturday after being discharged from the hospital with the bullet still inside of him. “I was just crying because I was bleeding, and I didn’t know they were gunshots.”

A 42-year-old woman in Missouri will spend a decade behind bars for killing her husband of nine years, shooting him in the back of the head as he slept in their bed because she couldn’t afford to divorce him. Sixteenth Circuit Court Judge Jalilah Otto on Monday ordered Melanie Biggins to serve 10 years in a state correctional facility for the 2022 slaying of Etienne L. McEwan, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.

Biggins was initially arrested in August 2022 and charged with one count each of first-degree murder and armed criminal action, meaning she was facing a potential life sentence. However, her lawyer, public defender Edward S. Berrigan, reached a deal with prosecutors in which she agreed to plead guilty to one count of voluntary manslaughter. In exchange for the plea, the other charges against Biggins were dismissed.

As Law&Crime previously reported, officers with the Kansas City Missouri Police Department at approximately 1 a.m. on Aug. 31, 2022, responded to a reported shooting at a residence in the 1700 block of Gillespie Place.

Upon arriving at the address, first responders encountered the couple’s two young daughters, ages 10 and 11, who were waving their arms to flag down police. They entered the home and went upstairs where they found Biggins administering CPR on her husband, who was “laying on the bed in a pool of blood.” Emergency Medical Services arrived at the scene a short while later and pronounced McEwan dead.

A Georgia man allegedly high on crack was found naked in a stroke patient’s room at an Atlanta hospital in a case of attempted sexual assault of a sleeping patient.

Shamon Pearce, 24, faces charges of aggravated assault, battery and misdemeanor sexual battery in the attack of the 47-year-old woman, online jail booking records show.

The incident happened on Sept. 27 at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, police said. Nurses initially spotted Pearce smoking from a crack pipe in an elevator before he entered the room of a patient recovering from a stroke, reported Michael Seiden, with Atlanta’s ABC affiliate WSB, citing the police incident report.

A man hit a woman over 100 times, shot her in the stomach, bound her with zip ties, gagged her and taped a plastic bag around her head before covering her body with a sleeping bag. He then put the body it the car and crashed into a pole.

Cops in Alaska made the grisly discovery in 2016 and charged Benjamin Wilkins with murder. On Wednesday, a judge sentenced Wilkins, now 43, to 75 years behind bars.

Anchorage police on June 27, 2016, responded to the traffic crash in the 2800 block of Debarr Road near Alaska Regional Hospital. Cops quickly realized Wilkins was impaired. As they were waiting for the tow truck, they saw what appeared to be a passenger under a sleeping bag and found the body of 30-year-old Jacqueline Goodwin. She had plier marks and bruises throughout her body and her teeth were broken, the Juneau Empire reported at the time. The medical examiner determined the cause of death was from asphyxiation, blunt force trauma and gunshot wound to her stomach, the outlet reported.

The government witness known in court documents as “Trump Employee 5” and now known publicly to be longtime former Mar-a-Lago valet Brian Butler shed more light on what went on behind closed doors when he sat for interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office and testified before the grand jury that went on to indict the former president.

Revealing that he met with special counsel Jack Smith’s office up to five times over a period of months, Butler told NBC News that the grand jury setting was a “dark” closet-like room filled with roughly 20 grand jurors. Prosecutors “were interested in everything” he had to say during interviews, Butler added.

That may not have been the case for at least one of the grand jurors, however. Butler said he “could see their eyes shut.”

Butler also appeared Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber,” where he revealed that he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but will not do so in 2024.

The erstwhile Mar-a-Lago employee of two decades, as he said in his first public interview with CNN, stated his belief that Trump wanted surveillance video deleted because he knew he wasn’t supposed to have national defense information and knew that the Presidential Records Act didn’t protect him.

“The way I see it, if these were his personal documents or he’s allowed to have these by the PRA, why would you need to ask questions about video footage?” Butler asked. “Why would you possibly move the documents when they are coming to retrieve them. To me, it just doesn’t make any sense. On top of that, why would you put two low-level employees in the position they’re in if he you did nothing wrong and these were your personal documents?”

Pressed as to whether he had witnessed “part of a cover-up,” Butler said: “I think it’s very possible.”

“From what I saw, the questions — why would they ask about video footage, how long it’s deleted for?” Butler asked. “Those are conversations Carlos [De Oliveira] told me he was asked with finding out prior to Walt [Nauta]’s arrival on a secret trip.”

Here, Butler was recounting the details as they appeared in the indictment.

Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira on June 25, 2022, allegedly told Trump Employee 5 that valet Walt Nauta was en route from Bedminster, N.J., to Mar-a-Lago but asked the witness not to tell anyone about the “secret” trip that related to surveillance camera footage.

“DE OLIVEIRA also told Trump Employee 5 that NAUTA wanted DE OLIVEIRA to talk to Trump Employee 4 to see how long camera footage was stored,” the indictment said. “Shortly after arriving in Palm Beach on the evening of June 25, NAUTA went to The Mar-a-Lago Club and met with DE OLIVEIRA at 5:46 p.m. At The Mar-a-Lago Club, NAUTA and DE OLIVEIRA went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

Two days later, De Oliveira told another employee — “Trump Employee 4” — that “the boss” wanted the video footage server deleted, the indictment further alleged.

On CNN, Butler recalled helping Nauta load boxes of documents onto a Trump plane headed for New Jersey, documents the witness said he later realized “were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes.” Before he left Trump’s employ and became a witness for the prosecution, Butler counted De Oliveira as one of his “best friends.” Now, he said, they don’t talk anymore.

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