National Roundup

Missouri
Assault charge filed against assistant prof

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A University of Missouri assistant professor is charged with misdemeanor assault in connection with a run-in with student journalists during campus protests last November.

Columbia city prosecutor Steve Richey filed the municipal court complaint Monday against 45-year-old Melissa Click.

The assistant professor of communications confronted a student photographer and a student videographer during the protests, calling for “muscle” to help remove them from the protest area.

That day’s demonstrations came after university system’s president and the Columbia campus’ chancellor resigned amid protests over what some saw as indifference to racial issues. The videographer filed a complaint with university police.

Click did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment, and her listed home phone number is not in service.

Illinois
Ex-prosecutor, football star on trial in wife’s 2006 death

A star football player at the University of Illinois, Curtis Lovelace returned to his western Illinois hometown with a law degree, later serving as a prosecutor who held lawbreakers accountable and as the local school board president.

The former team captain and two-time All-Big Ten standout now faces his own day in court on a first-degree murder charge in the killing of his first wife, who died on Valentine’s Day in 2006. Jury selection began Monday in Quincy, Illinois.

Lovelace, 47, has pleaded not guilty to the charge, which came eight and a half years after Cory Lovelace’s death at home. An initial autopsy on the 38-year-old’s body was inconclusive, but subsequent pathology tests of the cremated body and photographic evidence determined that the mother of four died from suffocation.

“Delayed justice is just as important as timely justice,” said Quincy Police Chief Rob Copley, who acknowledged his department “dropped the ball” after the earlier autopsy and a coroner’s jury failed to pinpoint how she died. A Quincy detective took a fresh look at the case in 2014.

A special state prosecutor will argue the case, because Curtis Lovelace spent seven years as an assistant state’s attorney in Adams County. The trial is expected to continue into the first week of February.

Curtis Lovelace had told authorities that he found his wife — whom he claimed had flu-like symptoms for several days — dead in bed after dropping off three of their children at school. An investigator later said Lovelace never called 911 or tried to resuscitate his wife of 13 years. He was arrested as he emerged from his law office to go to lunch.

Lovelace was a three-year starting center on Illini teams led by future NFL quarterback Jeff George and won numerous accolades. Former Illini coach John Mackovic called Lovelace “the brains of the whole (team)” in a 2008 interview with the sports website Rivals.com.

The three-sport star and Quincy High School Hall of Fame member returned to his hometown and married Cory, a former high school classmate. His path to public service began with his 1999 school board election; he’d spend 12 years on the board, eight as president. Lovelace also joined the Illinois Army National Guard in 2009, attaining the rank of captain and serving as a trial defense lawyer for soldiers facing disciplinary actions.

His own defense lawyers and several family members did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. It is not clear whether Lovelace, who has remained in jail since his arrest, will testify in his own defense; he’s not listed among the 10 defense witnesses whose names were submitted to the court in late December.

Lovelace would marry twice more after the death of his first wife. Prosecutors had sought to call his second wife, whom he married in May 2008 in Puerto Rico and divorced in September 2013, to testify, but a judge rejected that request last month.

Curtis and Cory Lovelace’s two youngest children, ages 14 and 17, continue to live with Lovelace’s third wife, according to Cory Lovelace’s mother, Martha Didriksen.

She said she will wait for the trial to unfold before conclusively deciding — at least publicly — that her former son-in-law was to blame for her daughter’s death. If he is guilty, Didriksen said she’s “forgiven him ... Because I had to.”

“Otherwise it eats you alive,” she said.


Wisconsin
Ex-cop pleads guilty to killing Oregon woman

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A former suburban Milwaukee police officer pleaded guilty to killing an Oregon woman and ditching her body in a suitcase along a highway on Monday, the same day his trial was set to begin.

Steven Zelich pleaded guilty in the death of 19-year-old Jenny Gamez, of Cottage Grove, Oregon, whose body was found along a Wisconsin highway in August 2012. Zelich also is accused of killing a woman from Minnesota whose body also was found in a suitcase along the same Wisconsin highway.

Zelich pleaded guilty to first-degree reckless homicide with use of a dangerous weapon and hiding a corpse in the Gamez case, which was filed in Kenosha County, about 40 miles south of Milwaukee.

The former West Allis police officer also is charged with killing 37-year-old Laura Simonson the following year. Authorities allege she died in Minnesota, so charges in her death were filed there.

According to court records and testimony, Zelich met Gamez online and invited her to Wisconsin. He picked her up at the Milwaukee airport and they drove to a Kenosha hotel, where they spent several days. Zelich told investigators they played a sexual game in which he would choke Gamez. On the last day, he lost control and choked Gamez until she died, according to the criminal complaint.

Zelich told investigators that he put Gamez in her suitcase and took it to his West Allis apartment, and then stashed her body in his refrigerator.

Simonson, of Farmington, Minnesota, died in similar circumstances in November 2013. According to court documents, Zelich said he met her online and killed her while playing the same choking game at a hotel in Rochester, Minnesota.

He drove home to Wisconsin with her body and later put both bodies in suitcases in his car’s trunk. When they began to smell, he dumped them on the roadside, where highway workers mowing grass found them in June 2014, according to investigators.

Zelich’s attorney, Jonathan Smith, had declined to discuss his trial strategy.

“It’s been maintained that this was a non-intentional act,” he said ahead of the Monday hearing.