National Roundup

Florida
Slain woman’s family questions actions of sheriff’s office
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A Florida sheriff’s department has released a heavily redacted report on its response to the disappearance of a college student who was found dead. The young woman’s family says it only reinforces their belief that deputies failed to react quickly enough when she vanished.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Office blacked out much of its four-page report into the Sept. 24 disappearance of Miya Marcano.

“The incident report lacks critical details,” the family’s attorney Daryl Washington said on Sunday. “What we do know is that critical hours were lost and if it hadn’t been for this family’s strength and determination we may still be searching for Miya.”

The 19-year-old’s body was found on Oct. 2, five days after her suspected killer, Armando Caballero, was found dead of an apparent suicide.

The sheriff’s office did not respond to requests for a comment about the allegation that it initially failed to thoroughly investigate Marcano’s disappearance. Sheriff John Mina has said that in the hours after Marcano vanished, deputies didn’t have enough evidence to detain Caballero, and she was likely already dead.

Marcano was a Valencia College student who lived and worked at the same apartment complex where Caballero, 27, was employed as a maintenance worker. Investigators eventually determined that Caballero used a master key to enter Marcano’s apartment.

According to the report, Deputy Samir Paulino arrived at the apartment complex about 9:20 p.m. on Sept. 24 after Marcano’s mother said her daughter had stopped returning text messages and missed her flight home to South Florida.

Paulino spoke to a roommate who said Marcano texted her about 5 p.m. saying she was heading to the airport. The deputy wrote that her bedroom was locked, but he peered through a window and “nothing suspicious stood out to me.”

The deputy apparently then left, but returned because he wrote that someone asked if an object “was on the bed,” the report said. It wasn’t clear who inquired because so much of the report was blacked out.

The deputy returned again at the request of Marcano’s relatives, who had driven to the apartment complex from South Florida, arriving after midnight. Paulino then spoke to Caballero, who told him he had found out “from a mutual friend that Miya is missing,” the deputy wrote.

The deputy noted that Marcano’s relatives said text messages showed Caballero had been stalking her, but he said he was unable to read them.

Washington said the deputy should be fired because his actions fell below national standards.

“Sheriff Mina, in one of his press conferences, stated that Deputy Paulino ‘could not detain Caballero based on a hunch,’ essentially ratifying the conduct of his deputy,” Washington said. “We believe that Deputy Paulino had more than enough evidence to detain Caballero based on the fact that Caballero had full access to Miya’s room, he said that he wanted to date Miya but she declined his advances, he was driving around the Arden Villas at 3 a.m.”

Missouri
Man given 16 life sentences for child sex abuse
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A southwest Missouri man has been sentenced to 16 concurrent life sentences plus 107 years for committing sex crimes against children for more than a decade.

Stephen Turner, 56, of Nevada, was sentenced Friday on 33 felony counts, including statutory rape, forcible rape and use of a child in sexual performance. He was convicted in July, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s office said.

The crimes were committed against at least five children for at least 14 years, according to court records.

Three of the victims told investigators the abuse began when they were as young as 4. Court records said Turner repeatedly abused the children in different homes in Jackson County.

Kansas
Inmates wait months for mental health treatment
LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Inmates with mental health issues are waiting months to get the medication and treatment they need to be deemed competent to assist in their own defense because a state hospital is so overtaxed.

Douglas County Sheriff Jay Armbrister said the situation is so bad that the case of one man with severe mental health issues took six years to make it through the court system.

The man ultimately was sentenced to 16 months — less than a quarter of the amount of time he had been incarcerated, the Lawrence Journal-World reported.

Armbrister said the case encapsulates the “dark underbelly” of the state’s criminal justice system, which he believes fails to properly account for the mental health of those who are held in jail prior to conviction.

A large part of the reason that his case took so long was a significant backlog of inmates ordered to receive mental health treatment at the Larned State Hospital in Pawnee County. The backlog has led to many inmates spending months, if not years, behind bars even though they haven’t been convicted of a crime.

Armbrister said he believes the state must do more to fix the problem.

“I firmly believe the state of Kansas needs to build another state hospital, somewhere in the (Kansas City) metro area,” he said. “Larned is basically being swamped.”

The hospital’s backlog is an issue that affects not only Douglas County, but the entire state.

The state hospital’s waiting list includes 157 male inmates and 14 female inmates, according to data provided by the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, which oversees the hospital.

For the male inmates, the average wait time is 171 days — or close to six months — KDADS spokeswoman Cara Sloan-Ramos told the Journal-World in an email.

But Sloan-Ramos said the hospital is working to provide mobile services for competency treatment. She said it is specifically working with Sedgwick and Shawnee counties — home to Wichita and Topeka, respectively — to identify offenders who meet criteria to receive services in a jail setting rather than at the state hospital.

Whether that option could help Douglas County inmates remains to be seen. One inmate from the county has been on the hospital’s waiting list for almost a full year, but 18 people are still ahead of him.

Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez said the backlog is a longstanding problem that “absolutely negatively impacts the rights” of inmates. She said one of the only options her office has is to dismiss cases, which often is not appropriate.