superintelligentone
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Multiple murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/g...n_n_892715.html
Former First Lady Betty Ford has passed away.
She made her battles with Breast Cancer, Addiction to Prescription Drugs and Alcoholism public in an age when no one talked about the then taboo topics.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/08/betty.ford.dies/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/g...n_n_892715.html
Grand Rapids Shooting: Suspect In Michigan Rampage Commits Suicide
By TOM COYNE and JOHN FLESHER
July 8/, 2011 02:46 PM ET
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- An ex-convict who went on a deadly shooting spree in western Michigan targeted two ex-girlfriends, fatally shooting both of them and five members of their families, including his own 12-year-old daughter, police said Friday.
At the start of his hours-long rampage, Rodrick Shonte Dantzler tracked down his daughter and her mother and killed them, along with the mother's own parents. He then went to a different house and killed another former girlfriend, plus her sister and 10-year-old niece.
Dantzler "went out hunting" his victims, Grand Rapids Police Chief Kevin Belk said. He said the gunman used cocaine and alcohol on the day of the slayings.
The 34-year-old former prison inmate began the spree Thursday afternoon before leading police on a high-speed chase through downtown Grand Rapids. He crashed his car and took several hostages in a stranger's home, then killed himself with a shot to the head late that night.
Investigators did not know what triggered the attack, but the police chief said Dantzler appeared to be "mentally unstable."
"I don't have a clinical diagnosis," Belk said. "Clearly he was a very troubled individual."
Records show Dantzler was sentenced in 2000 to three- to 10-years in state prison for assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder. He was paroled in May 2003 and discharged from parole in May 2005. A spokesman for the prison system said Dantzler had not been under state supervision since then.
After getting a 911 call that a man had acknowledged killing several people, police went to Dantzler's home, but he wasn't there.
Authorities soon got a call from a woman who said her relatives had been shot. Next came a call about someone finding four gunshot victims at another house.
Officers found three bodies in a home on Plainfield Avenue. An hour later, they discovered the other four across town in a house on a cul-de-sac called Brynell Court.
"It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were," Belk said. "You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples' lives."
While police were investigating the slayings, Belk said, officers received a report of a "road rage" shooting.
Dantzler had apparently shot at a man through the rear window of the vehicle he was driving. Police spotted him, and began a chase that included Dantzler crashing into a patrol car downtown and exchanging gunfire with officers. A female bystander was shot in the shoulder.
Karissa Swanson, 18, said her mother was the woman who was shot, and that she had known Dantzler for many years.
Swanson said her mother, 35-year-old April Swanson, was driving and chatting on her cellphone when Dantzler suddenly pulled up beside her.
"My mom turned her head and he was right there, yelling her name, like, `April, April, I gotta talk, I gotta talk to you,'" Swanson said. "So my mom hung up the phone and called the police and was like, `He's right next to me.'"
The daughter said Dantzler chased her mother until they got caught at a stoplight, when he shot at her car.
Pickup driver Robert Poore, who also was shot during the chase, told police that the bullet ricocheted off a titanium plate that had been inserted in his nose during cancer treatment when he was a child, according to WOOD-TV. Poore suffered only minor injuries.
Dantzler drove a sport utility vehicle north from downtown and onto Interstate 96, crossing a grassy median and heading the wrong way down the highway while more than a dozen squad cars pursued him.
He eventually crashed the vehicle while driving down an embankment into a wooded area.
Dantzler then made his way toward a nearby home, firing several shots as he forced his way inside and took hostages he did not know, police said. Dozens of officers with guns drawn cordoned off the neighborhood in the northern part of the city.
That was around 7:30 p.m. Over the next five hours, Dantzler alternately threatened to shoot the hostages and pleaded with police to take him out, even asking negotiators whether there were snipers outside the home and where he should stand. He sometimes fired his gun at officers and inside the home, Belk said.
Belk said police weren't aware there was a third person in the house until the first hostage came out and informed them. He said she was a house-sitter who was about to leave when Dantzler burst in and she hid in a closet. She came out when Dantzler became agitated because the man inside was hard of hearing and they were having trouble communicating.
"She placed herself in more harm by exposing herself," Belk said.
He said the police actually used the hostages as go-betweens to talk to the gunman, and that after the hostages were released Thursday night they were doing "amazingly well."
"But no doubt as with anything when the incident settles down, no doubt they're going to be a lot more traumatized today I think perhaps than during the event," Belk said.
Authorities identified the dead as: 29-year-old Jennifer Marie Heeren, an ex-girlfriend; 12-year-old Kamrie Deann Heeren-Dantzler, Dantzler's daughter; 52-year-old Rebecca Lynn Heeren, Jennifer Heeren's mother; 51-year-old Thomas Heeren, her father; 23-year-old Kimberlee Ann Emkens, a woman Dantzler had previously dated; 27-year-old Amanda Renee Emkens, Kimberlee Emkens' sister; and 10-year-old Marissa Lynn Emkens, Amanda Emkens' daughter.
Former First Lady Betty Ford has passed away.
She made her battles with Breast Cancer, Addiction to Prescription Drugs and Alcoholism public in an age when no one talked about the then taboo topics.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/08/betty.ford.dies/
Former first lady Betty Ford dies at the age of 93
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 8, 2011 11:11 p.m. EDT
(CNN) -- Betty Ford, the widow of late President Gerald Ford and a co-founder of an eponymous addiction center in California, has died at the age of 93, according to the director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum.
Ford died Friday evening with family at her bedside, according to a family member.
Elaine Didier, the director of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, museum, confirmed Ford's death to CNN.
No other details were immediately available. The family is expected to release a statement later Friday or Saturday, Didier said.
Condolences began pouring in soon after news broke about her death.
President Barack Obama remembered the former first lady as a "powerful advocate for women's health and women's rights" and someone who "helped reduce the social stigma surrounding addiction." His predecessor, George W. Bush, added that "because of her leadership, many lives were saved."
Some of the many others offering praise and sympathy included Nancy Reagan (calling Ford "an inspiration), and former presidents George H. W. Bush (describing her as a "wonderful wife and mother, a great friend and a courageous first lady) and Jimmy Carter (saying she was "a close personal friend" and "a remarkable political spouse.")
Born Elizabeth Anne Bloomer in Chicago, she grew up in Grand Rapids. At the age of 21, five after her father had passed away, she moved to New York City to work as a dancer and model before. She returned to the Midwest two years later.
One year after divorcing William Warren after five years of marriage, she wed Gerald Ford -- a former star football player at the University of Michigan, decorated U.S. Navy veteran and budding Republican politician -- in 1948. That year, the woman now known as Betty Ford campaigned with her new husband on his successful campaign to become a U.S. congressman from Michigan. She gave birth to three sons and a daughter over the course of their 58-year marriage.
he family moved to Washington, where Gerald Ford served in the Capitol for 25 years prior to his being tapped in 1973 as then-President Richard Nixon's vice president in place of Spiro T. Agnew.
Just over 10 months later, Betty Ford became first lady when her husband was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States. Gerald Ford took office after Nixon resigned in the wake of his impeachment following the crisis and cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
Betty Ford soon made headlines, holding press conferences and publicly discussing her diagnosis with breast cancer. The first lady talked about abortion, pre-marital sex and equal rights in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" in 1975 -- the same year Newsweek named her its "Woman of the Year." According to the Ford library and museum's website, her candidness initially drew some criticism, but in a short time, 75% of Americans approved of her in public opinion polls.
But in 1978, just over one year after leaving the White House after her husband lost his campaign to remain president, Ford made headlines of a different kind. She entered the Long Beach Naval Hospital to be treated for alcohol and prescription painkiller abuse.
That same year, she published the first of two autobiographies, entitled "The Times of My Life." Ford would go on to become a high-profile example of someone who battled substance abuse issues, as well as a tireless advocate for drug and alcohol treatment.
"My addiction was a combination of alcohol and the prescription drugs that ... both were a part of my life, but they did not become a problem until they overrode my common sense," Ford told CNN's Larry King in 2003. "I didn't know what was happening, I just knew that I felt great and the pain was gone."
Her work paid dividends in October 1982 when, along with Leonard Firestone, she opened the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California. To this day, the center remains one of the most well-known and respected places nationwide for treatment of alcoholism and other drug dependencies.
Ford also fought to promote awareness and research on breast cancer, with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation eventually naming an award in her honor.
She earned numerous honors over her life, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and the Congressional Gold Medal eight years later.
Gerald Ford died on December 26, 2006, at the couple's home in Rancho Mirage. He was 93.
