From the New York Daily News:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

Via Cryptogon, where Kevin says, “Maybe I need a Zombie Uprising category.”

From CBS News, 6 October 2006:

Terry Gilliam Sounds Off

Director Of ‘Brazil’ Says Current Events Parallel His Cult Movie

Visionary director Terry Gilliam, whose 1985 film “Brazil” was a classic tale of terrorized citizens crushed by an authoritarian government, is miffed.

“I’m thinking of suing George Bush and Dick Cheney for making the remake of ‘Brazil’ without my approval,” he told a New York screening audience this week. “Their version isn’t as funny, though.”

The 65-year-old native of Minnesota who emigrated to England in the 1960s and helped form the legendary comedy group Monty Python, held dual citizenship for three decades. (He married a British citizen and has three children.) This past year, though, he renounced his U.S. citizenship. He sees the current political scene in America – and its extension into the world – to be scarily similar to the Orwellian nightmare of his cult film.

In the film, government agents arrest suspects in hordes, going so far as to charge them for their interrogation, including the electricity applied to their bodies. Detainees who couldn’t afford the costs of their torture could apply for loans (at favorable interest rates). The machinery of government-sanctioned torture and data collection became a self-sustaining apparatus.

“It is absolutely frightening,” he said of the current political scene. “Homeland Security is just like [the film's] Ministry of Information, because if your job is counter-terrorism, what do you need to keep in business? You need terrorists, and even if they aren’t there, we may have to create new ones. It works very well.”

From The Onion’s AV Club, 11 October 2006:

AVC: Why did you renounce your American citizenship earlier this year?

TG: I thought I’d just simplify my life. I’m getting old. I’m gonna die. I’m not at all happy with what America has been in the last 10 years. [Laughs.] The reality is, when I kick the bucket, American tax authorities assess everything I own in the world—everything I own is outside of America—and then tax me on it, and that would mean my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay the taxes. I didn’t think that was fair on my wife and children.

It seems the prosecution brought a rather flimsy case. Whatever happened that night, there really wasn’t enough to link Bubaris to the killing. That’s what the defense argued, and that’s how the jury decided. Having read all the trial coverage, I would have voted to acquit as well.

George Bubaris

The Newsday piece repeats what made this look so damning:

The Westchester County Court jurors heard a fellow officer testify that Bubaris told him — on the night Perez died — that he’d gone out “hunting” or “looking” for the immigrant. And when word of the death spread, the officer testified, Bubaris told him, “You’re the only one that knows, bro.”

Still seems a rather odd thing to say if the man really had no part in the death, but we can’t know. Flawed though the state’s criminal justice system is, the rules against hearsay and circumstantial evidence are important protections.

It’s likely we’ll never know, now, what happened to Rene Perez that night after making the increasingly-fatal mistake of calling 911 when in need of help. If George Bubaris knows, he’s certainly not saying. And dead men tell no tales.

Related: Cops on the hunt: Do you know where your children are?

Prison?

Mall security?

Or nothing at all?

From WABC-TV, New York:

Mistaken identity police brutality?

[...]

Minter’s video captures police in plain clothes milling around and a helicopter above. They’d apparently been chasing a suspect who crashed his car into the front gate of the boatyard.

Lewis Tacktill, Minter’s boss, says he was across the boatyard and saw everything, including the fleeing suspect.

Sarah: “What was he wearing?”
Tacktill: “He was wearing a red shirt, and my friend was wearing a black shirt. It was kind of obvious. Red and black, two distinctive colors.”

Minter: “And I was wearing this black hoody, and they told me the guy they wanted was wearing a red shirt.”
Sarah: “And you’re saying your ID was in your pocket?”
Minter: “Yep. Right in my pocket. Just like it is now.”

Tacktill: “They said are you armed, he said no. He went down to his knees, and dropped down, and then they cuffed him and started hitting him.“

“So I said I’m not armed,” Minter said. “He cuffed me, and then the one on the right hit me with his pistol.”

“I saw them,” Tacktill said. “They hit him with a gun and then they pulled his hood over his head, and then a guy stomped his head like he was putting out a cigarette butt.”

“I was grinded on, my face hit with a gun, punched in my face and then my hoody pulled over my face,” Minter said.

Sarah: “And he wasn’t resisting?”
Tacktill: “No, he wasn’t resisting at all.”

Sarah: “You weren’t resisting?”
Minter: “Nope, I had no reason to. I was screaming for my boss, ‘Lou! Lou!’”

“I said, ‘That’s our guy that works here at the boatyard,’” Tacktill said. “And after that, they stopped.”

Minter, who says he has no criminal record and wasn’t charged with anything, claims he stood swollen and bloodied at the front of the yard for about half an hour before one of the officers took off the handcuffs.

“Then they just said, ‘Oh, we apologize,’” Tacktill said.

Sarah: “So they just came back and the officer said?”
Minter: “‘I’m sorry, we was looking for somebody that was really dangerous.’”

He says he walked across the street to Peninsula Hospital, where he told staff he’d been hit be a gun in the face and, while waiting to be treated, claims he was approached by one of the Garden City officers who tried to discourage him from filing a brutality complaint.

Minter: “They said if you got parking ticket or you got felonies or any kind of thing like that they could do for me, they would do for me.”
Sarah: “If you didn’t pursue this?”
Minter: “Yes.”

From The New York Times:

This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level.

By 9:30 a.m., New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents had shut down the exhibition, and building workers had quickly covered over the inflammatory title with large sheets of brown paper and blue masking tape. The gallery is across the street from the southern entrance to The New York Times building.

The police officers declined to answer any questions, and at first would not permit reporters to speak with Mr. Arboleda, who was wearing a black T-shirt and making cellphone calls from inside the makeshift gallery.

Later, Mr. Arboleda, who is 27, said in an interview: “It’s art. It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media.” He added, “It’s about the media.”

Mr. Arboleda said the exhibition was to open on Thursday and run all day.

The interview was abruptly ended as Mr. Arboleda was led off to the Midtown South police precinct for what he called an interrogation.

Innocent until proven guilty and all that…

From The Journal News:

Prosecutor: Bubaris spoke of ‘hunting’

A former Mount Kisco police officer accused of killing a homeless immigrant told a fellow officer that he had gone “hunting” for the vagrant and dropped him off on a remote road where he was later found dying, the prosecutor said yesterday during the opening of the homicide trial.

George Bubaris

Exactly how victim Rene Javier Perez sustained his fatal abdominal injury is at the center of the high-profile trial, which will continue Tuesday in Westchester County Court in White Plains.

The prosecution said it will present autopsy evidence that Perez died from blunt-force trauma and that the injury – including a torn mesentary – was so severe that he must have suffered the fatal blow shortly before he was left beside Byram Lake Road in Bedford on April 28, 2007.

The lawyer for 31-year-old defendant George Bubaris, however, said during his opening that Perez, who was drunk, more than likely died from “self-inflicted, accidental” injuries sustained from stumbling hours before Bubaris and two other officers responded to his 911 call from a Mount Kisco laundry.

[...]

Perrone said Bubaris essentially admitted to the crime when he told Officer Edward Dwyer later that night that “I went out hunting or looking for Rene Perez” and “I found him and I took him up or down to Byram Lake Road.”

The next day, back at the police station, as news circulated about the 42-year-old’s death and as the homicide investigation began, Bubaris told Dwyer, “You’re the only one who knows, bro,” Perrone said.