Murders Michigan

A 56-year-old man facing possible eviction from a senior housing complex because neighbors had complained about his using coarse language shot and killed two women Tuesday and critically wounded a third at the suburban Detroit building, police said. Kenneth Miller, who police say holed up in his top-floor apartment after firing as many as 20 rounds, was taken into custody when police stormed his room more than three hours after the shooting began.

A man accused of carelessly storing the handgun that authorities say a 6-year-old boy used to kill a classmate must stand trial on an involuntary manslaughter charge, a judge ruled Tuesday. The boy was living with his 8-year-old brother, his 22-year-old uncle and defendant Jamelle James, 19, when he found James' gun and took it to Buell Elementary School, prosecutors said. The boy used it Feb. 29 to fatally shoot first-grade classmate Kayla Rolland, police said. District Judge John L.

With little more than his eyes and nose visible over the witness stand, a 6-year-old boy denied Friday that he shot classmate Kayla Rolland to death and blamed another first-grader. The boy testified at a preliminary hearing for Jamelle James, 19, who is accused of carelessly storing the semiautomatic handgun that the 6-year-old boy found and allegedly used to kill Kayla on Feb. 29. James is charged with involuntary manslaughter; the 6-year-old who testified isn't charged.

A grand jury indicted three men on charges stemming from the February shooting death of a 6-year-old girl at a Mount Morris Township, Mich., school by her first-grade classmate, federal prosecutors said. Grand jurors charged Robert Lee Morris, 19, Jamelle Andre James, 19, and Sir Marcus Winfrey, 22, all of Mount Morris Township, with possessing stolen firearms and being unlawful users of marijuana while in possession of firearms, the U.S. attorney for eastern Michigan said in a statement.

Greeted by teddy bears and extra security, Buell Elementary School children returned to class Monday for the first time since a first-grader was shot to death in a classroom. Children and parents alike expressed fears at first about returning to the school where 6-year-old Kayla Rolland was killed Feb. 29, allegedly by another first-grader. "He was afraid it was going to be him next," Lisa Davidson said of her second-grade son, Tim.

Shootings this week at a grammar school in Michigan and fast-food restaurants in Pennsylvania have prompted lawmakers to renew efforts to break a congressional deadlock on gun legislation. Challenged by President Clinton on NBC-TV's "Today" show, four senior Republican and Democratic lawmakers agreed to meet at the White House on Tuesday. The congressional delegation will include Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.

If ever a week existed that made you want to spit out the bad taste in your mouth, this was it. Two nights of network television were devoted to the grisly 1996 murder of a 6-year-old girl, JonBenet Ramsey, along with daily news coverage of Tuesday's slaying of a 6-year-old girl, Kayla Rolland. The first crime is unsolved. Nobody knows to this day who killed the Ramsey child--nobody except the person or persons responsible. The second case is no mystery.

The 6-year-old boy who allegedly shot and killed his first-grade classmate had been living in a drug-infested flophouse where police found stolen guns and a cache of drugs, authorities said Wednesday. The child had a history of violence at school, his father reported from his jail cell--and did not even have a bed to sleep on.

A first-grade classroom became the latest bloodstained stage in the nation's rash of school shootings Tuesday as a 6-year-old boy pointed a gun at a classmate and then fired. The 6-year-old girl crumpled to the floor, fatally wounded. Officials in this working-class community 60 miles north of Detroit were investigating reports that the two children had quarreled on the playground at Buell Elementary School on Monday. Relatives identified the dead girl as Kayla Rolland.

One of the youngest murderers in U.S. history, a boy who shot a stranger at age 11, was spared life in prison Thursday and sent to a juvenile detention center until he turns 21. Judge Eugene Moore said that the tough 1997 Michigan law that allowed Nathaniel Abraham to be prosecuted as an adult is "fundamentally flawed" and that the boy has a chance of being rehabilitated. He said the case was a wake-up call "that our youth are in trouble."