Murders

A 6-year-old boy whose battered body was found on the floor of a South Los Angeles home was the subject of roughly a dozen calls to Los Angeles County's child abuse hotline alleging abuse or neglect, a county official briefed on the case told The Times on Friday. Dae'von Bailey had injuries that suggested blows or other trauma over an extended period of time, said Lt. Vincent Neglia of the LAPD's Abused Child Section.

A onetime Army paratrooper was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for killing a fellow soldier and wounding nearly 20 others in a sniper attack at this North Carolina base more than a decade ago. The sentence had been expected since Sgt. William J. Kreutzer, 39, of Clinton, Md., pleaded guilty earlier this month to one charge of premeditated murder and 18 other charges to avoid a possible death sentence.

For 34 years, the rape and murder of 80-year-old Alice Lewis remained a mystery. There wasn't even a suspect. But five months ago, a routine traffic stop in Los Angeles yielded DNA evidence that police said opened the door for solving the cold case and arresting the alleged killer. This week, Dennis Vasquez, 50, was arrested in the 1975 strangulation of the woman at her Meier Street home in Mar Vista. Because he would have been only 16 at the time of the crime, Vasquez appeared Friday in Juvenile Court in Inglewood.

As he lay dying in London's University College Hospital in November 2006, exiled former KGB and FSB agent Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko was being filmed by documentarian Andrei Nekrasov. He told Nekrasov: "If anything should happen to me, I beg you to show this tape to the whole world." Nekrasov kept the promise he made to his friend, who died three weeks after falling ill from what was later discovered to be radiation poisoning from a lethal dose of Polonium-210 in his tea, believed to have been slipped in during a meeting with two of his former FSB (Russia's modern-day secret police)

Two years ago, Calgary real estate executive Ryan Alexander Jenkins was sentenced to 15 months' probation and ordered to complete domestic violence counseling after hitting his then-girlfriend. But Jenkins came to Los Angeles and was selected as a contestant on the VH1 reality show "Megan Wants a Millionaire," on which wealthy men compete for the love of a young woman. Now Jenkins is wanted in the slaying of his ex-wife, model Jasmine Fiore, and "Megan Wants a Millionaire" has been abruptly pulled off the air by VH1. The case raises questions about how a man with a record of domestic violence got onto a show on which the object is to marry a woman.

After barely a day of deliberation, a Riverside County jury on Wednesday returned a verdict of death for Raymond Lee Oyler for starting the 2006 Esperanza fire in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains that killed five firefighters, destroyed 34 homes and charred more than 41,000 acres. Firefighters and the families of the victims hailed the decision and said it offered a measure of justice for a crime they said had torn a hole in the fabric of their lives.

Before soldiers leave on missions in Iraq or Afghanistan, they often are ordered to do everything in their power to bring their buddies back. "Leave no man behind" is the motto. But does that military ethos apply to soldiers heading out for a rowdy weekend in the United States? That question is being raised at an unusual court-martial on this massive Army base, where a young paratrooper who struggled to bring a combative, drunk soldier back to the barracks has been accused of causing his death.

A military appeals court Tuesday upheld the dismissal of war crimes charges against Marine Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the highest-ranking Marine charged in the 2005 killing of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

To her sister, Angie Zapata was a teenage girl in every sense but the biological one. She spent hours spraying her long hair into compliance with Aqua Net, painting her eyelashes with L'Oreal and her skin with Cover Girl. She combed discount stores for clothes that would emphasize her curves. The effect was stunning. When the 18-year-old visited the store where her older sister, Monica, worked, men would make excuses to hover.

Pale and struggling to hold back tears, a 28-year-old Sunday school teacher appeared in court for the first time Tuesday to face accusations of kidnapping, raping and killing an 8-year-old Central Valley girl. Melissa Huckaby, who was wearing a red prison jumpsuit with her hands and feet cuffed, appeared disoriented when she was ushered into the packed courtroom and faced a wall of TV camera crews, photographers and reporters.