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BALTIMORE (AP)
The driver killed in a violent confrontation at a National Security Agency gate identified as transgender and was a sex worker in Baltimore, according to a friend.
Ricky Shawatza Hall, 27, was killed Monday when NSA police opened fire on a stolen car that then crashed into a police vehicle. A passenger was wounded, as was an officer.
Kayla Brooks, who works at a transgender outreach program in Baltimore, said Hall went by the name Mya, and that she last saw her on Sunday. Brooks says Hall "seemed high and was looking for a date" while walking up and down a Baltimore strip knows as a hotspot for sex work.
Court documents show Hall had a criminal record. In 2013, she was charged after she assaulted a woman and stole a bottle of methadone from her pocket. Hall had been wearing a yellow dress at the time of the assault, the documents show. In 2014, Hall was charged with robbery after stealing a vest and skirt from a Baltimore clothing store.
On Monday, police determined that Hall and her passenger were driving the SUV of a 60-year-old Baltimore man, who told investigators he had picked up the two strangers in Baltimore and brought them to a Howard County motel.
GEIR MOULSON, Associated Press
DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press
Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz appeared happy and healthy to acquaintances, but a picture emerged Friday of a man who hid evidence of an illness from his employers — including a torn-up doctor's note that would have kept him off work the day authorities say he crashed Flight 9525 into an Alpine mountainside.
As German prosecutors sought to piece together the puzzle of why Lubitz locked his captain out of the cockpit and crashed the Airbus A320, police in the French Alps toiled to retrieve the shattered remains of the 150 people killed in Tuesday's crash.
Searches conducted at Lubitz's homes in Duesseldorf and in the town of Montabaur turned up documents pointing to "an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment," but no suicide note was found, said Ralf Herrenbrueck, a spokesman for the Duesseldorf prosecutors' office.
They included ripped-up sick notes covering the day of the crash, which "support the current preliminary assessment that the deceased hid his illness from his employer and colleagues," Herrenbrueck said in a statement.
Doctors commonly issue employees in Germany with such notes excusing them from work, even for minor illnesses, and workers hand them to their employers. Doctors are obliged to abide by medical secrecy unless their patient explicitly tells them he or she plans to commit an act of violence.
COLLEEN BARRY, Associated Press
FRANCES D'EMILIO, Associated Press
Italy's highest court overturned the murder conviction against Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Friday, bringing to a definitive end the high-profile case that captivated people on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Finished!" Knox's lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova exulted after the decision was read out. "It couldn't be better than this."
The decision by the supreme Court of Cassation is the final ruling in the case, ending the long legal battle waged by Knox and Italian co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito. Both Knox, who was awaiting the verdict in her hometown of Seattle, and Sollecito have long maintained their innocence in the death of British student Meredith Kercher.
The supreme Court of Cassation overturned last year's convictions by a Florence appeals court, and declined to order another trial. The decision means the judges, after thoroughly examining the case, concluded that a conviction could not be supported by the evidence.
Their reasoning will be released within 90 days.
The case has aroused strong interest in three countries for its explosive mix of young love, murder and flip-flop decisions by Italian courts.
Kercher, 21, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in the apartment that she shared with Knox and two other students. Her throat was slashed and she had been sexually assaulted.
Knox and Sollecito were arrested a few days later. Eventually another man, Rudy Guede from Ivory Coast, was arrested, tried and convicted of the murder in a separate trial and is serving a 16-year sentence.
The couple maintained their innocence, insisting that they had spent the evening together at Sollecito's place watching a movie, smoking marijuana and making love.
Knox and Sollecito were initially convicted by a Perugia court in 2009, then acquitted and freed in 2011, and then convicted again in 2014 in Florence after the Cassation court overturned the acquittals and ordered a new appeals trial.
That Florence appeals conviction was overturned Friday.