That Autopsy Can Wait Until Tuesday

UPDATED (7-5-11)--A Marion County Coroner's Office preliminary autopsy finding has ruled out any connection to the disappearances of Dorothy Heard or Lauren Spierer to the female body pulled from Fall Creek over the weekend according to WTHR. The office says the body is that of an African-American woman, no age range provided. Indianapolis police told reporters Sunday evening after the body was recovered that the race or age range of the person could not be ascertained due to advanced stages of decomposition. It's unfortunate the Marion County Coroner's Office made the families wait that long to learn information that should have been learned by yesterday morning.

ORIGINAL POST
A badly decomposed body of a woman was pulled from Fall Creek on Indianapolis' northeastside yesterday evening. Two families of missing persons, the family of missing IU student Lauren Spierer and the family of Noblesville's Dorothy Heard, will have to wait until Tuesday to learn more about the identity of the person pulled from Fall Creek because the Marion Co. Coroner's Office under the leadership of the controversial Chief Forensic Pathologist Dr. Joye Carter can't be bothered until tomorrow. The body was too badly decomposed to determine the person's race. Bloomington police have contacted IMPD to determine whether there is any possible connection to Spierer. Logically, it is more likely to be connected to Heard and not Spierer since it is downstream from where Heard was last seen alive. It may sound far fetched to think Spierer's body could have been dumped on Indianapolis' northeastside, but it's not out of the question if persons of interest just happen to live not far from the location where her body was discovered. Simple dental x-rays of the body pulled from Fall Creek would at least allow police to rule out whether the body found was that of Spierer or Heard, providing answers to these two families who are already distressed enough as it is due to their love one's disappearances, but let's not let any sympathy for them get in the way of our holiday weekend.

UPDATE: The blog, tonygatto.wordpress.com, is reporting that the person who got into an altercation with Spierer's friend, Corey Rossman, the night she went missing is a North Central High School graduate from Indianapolis, Zach Oakes, who is roommates at IU with another North Central High School graduate, Arjun Babu, a person who previously has been singled out about an insensitive post he made on his Twitter account about how to find Spierer. Rossman told police he was struck in the face during the altercation at Smallwood Apartments while he was accompanying Spierer home from Kilroy's Sports Bar. According to Tony Gotto, multiple sources confirm Oakes is the person who came to blows with Rossman on the night in question. Oakes became Facebook friends with Hadar Tamir, Spierer's roommate, near the time Spierer went missing according to the blogger. A source tells me Oakes is related to the prominent Oakes family who owns Business Furniture, Indiana's largest supplier of office furniture and office solutions.

UPDATE II: Fox 59 News confirmed tonight that the Marion Co. Coroner's Office has no intention of doing the autopsy until 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning. That's 36 hours after officials recovered the body from Fall Creek. That's completely inexcusable for a coroner's office in a major city to put off doing an autopsy because it inconveniences the weekend/holiday schedule for Dr. Joye Carter, who was the source of controversy in her previous positions in Houston and Washington, D.C. Sources have told me that Dr. Carter refuses to perform autopsies on weekends or holidays, unlike her predecessors who performed autopsies on weekends when circumstances required their services.

Maybe Strauss-Kahn And Clarence Thomas Should Commiserate

Now that it's quite obvious the alleged rape case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in shambles because it turns out his accuser is a serial liar and a prostitute who was seeking to profit from her tale, another woman, a French novelist, has come forward to claim Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her nearly a decade ago. From Fox News:

But the political scene was hit by a fresh shock when the lawyer for writer Tristane Banon announced she planned to file the complaint in Paris within a day.

Banon came forward after Strauss-Kahn's May 14 arrest in New York to accuse him of wrenching open her bra and trying to unbutton her jeans in 2002. Lawyer David Koubbi said Banon had been dissuaded at the time from filing charges by her mother, a regional councilor in Strauss-Kahn's Socialist party.

Koubbi also had said his client had no intention of pressing charges while the American prosecution was going on because the two cases should be kept separate. Now, Banon is pressing forward, Koubbi told The Associated Press.

Messages of support for the complaint quickly appeared on Banon's Facebook page.

Before Koubbi's announcement, the country was split on whether it wanted him back in public life: two polls showed an almost even division between those who thought he should return, and those who believed his political career was over.

The former IMF chief's re-entry to politics would be a tectonic shift in a campaign already shaken by his arrest on charges of attacking a New York hotel maid. The Socialist had been widely seen as the leading contender in the 2012 election, leading polls in the months before his arrest.

My political views are not at all in line with Strauss-Kahn's socialist views, but people should be a little more than suspect of why accusations are popping up out of the woodwork after it appeared he had a very good chance of winning the presidential election in France over the conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has had to deal with indiscrete comments of a sexual nature made by his wife and former model, Carla Bruni, and whose own administration has been rocked by a recent sex scandal while his country's economy continues to tank like our's.

Speaking of Fox News, its Twitter page has for hours been running a series of messages announcing that President Barack Obama had been assassinated after being shot multiple times in an Iowa restaurant. Fox News says it is the victim of a computer hacker:

Hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets claiming that President Obama had been assassinated. Those reports are incorrect, of course, and the president is spending the July 4 holiday with his family at the White House.

FoxNews.com alerted the U.S. Secret Service, which is declining public comment. Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital, said FoxNews.com is working with Twitter to address the situation as quickly as possible.

"We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts," Misenti said.

FoxNews.com regrets any distress the false tweets may have created.

Connecting The Dots Really Can Explain Things Without Being Conspiratorial

The mindset of today's media is to view each news event only in isolation. They're conditioned to believe that making any connection between two or more events will subject them to derision or scorn for being conspiratorial. It's unfortunate because the causal connection is often both logical and omnipresent. Fellow blogger Fred McCarthy dares make such a logical connecting of the dots in discussing three separate stories in the latest edition of the IBJ. The first story discusses the plight of the Simons' losing NBA franchise, the Indiana Pacers, which recently received a $33.5 million subsidy courtesy of the taxpayers because of the owners' claim the franchise is bleeding cash. The second story discusses a $20 million shortfall the city of Indianapolis faces we're told is due to declining income tax revenues and property tax caps. Finally, the third story discusses the Broad Ripple Parking garage deal where the city has agreed to provide $6.35 million in funding to a private developer.

There is a connection between these news stories because together they represent nothing more than a continuation of long-standing public fiscal policy. It is a policy which makes taxpayer dollars available for back room deals with professional sports and with private developers for proposals approved for the right people by the right people in the current administration. And we use the term "current" because it has apparently carried through administrations of both political parties.

We continue to shovel public funds into the local branch of a dying enterprise. We continue to make deals smelling very much of crony corporate welfare. And we also continue reducing or eliminating ordinary municipal services to which taxpaying individuals are entitled.

Is this really how a "world class" city operates?

Arrest For Contempt Of Police: It Happened In Indianapolis

I misspoke in one of my earlier posts when I said that I didn't believe there were any cases of Indianapolis police arresting a private citizen for video taping their actions during an arrest in progress as we've seen happening increasingly throughout our nation. Sixty-six year-old Willie King was arrested and charged by police for refusing to turn over the video evidence to police. A Marion Superior Court judge acquitted King on charges of disorderly conduct, public intoxication and resisting arrest. WRTV has the story:

An Indianapolis man who was charged after he refused to give police video of an arrest he captured on his cellphone has been acquitted.

Willie King, 66, was standing on his neighbor's property in the 3900 block of North Whittier Place as he recorded officers arresting a man on Feb. 18. 

"I heard the neighbors screaming and hollering about the police. (They said) 'You all get off of him. He's already in handcuffs. Why are you doing this?' " King said. "I just got my camera out, put it on record, walked over to my neighbor's house and stood on his stoop."

Legal expert Joel Schumm told  6News' Joanna Massee he does not believe police have the right to arbitrarily demand citizens' cellphones.

He said recording arrests can help protect citizens and the police by proving what really happened, but suggested those doing the recording defend their rights without using profanity.

"I think if a citizen says, 'Yes, I've taped this. If you want to get this, here's my name and phone number. You can pursue a legal process to get it in the future,' I think that's fine," Schumm said.

King said he's upset he was arrested and had to go before a judge. He said he feels anything but protected.

"I had the camera out. I wanted the police to see, if you're doing anything wrong, stop. I wasn't glory hunting or nothing," he said. "There's something wrong with the system."

Indianapolis Police Chief Paul Ciesielski confirmed an internal investigation is under way concerning the incident. The findings will be presented to the Citizens' Police Complaint Board for review.

"Heck Of A Deal" Says Ballard's Bag Man On His New Parking Garage

As a Turkish immigrant to this country, Ersal Ozdemir learned very quickly that the easiest way to succeed in business in Indianapolis was to spread as much money around to the politicians as you could borrow or spare and set up a minority-owned business as cover. The politicians you reward, in exchange, will pass out tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to you for a relatively small investment. Not surprisingly, Ozdemir, who is Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard's own version of Barack Obama's and Rod Blagoyevich's Tony Rezko of Chicago political fixer infamy, says you should be happy that Ballard only gave him $6.35 million to develop a new parking garage in Broad Ripple that he will own and from which only he will derive the economic rewards. From the IBJ's Cory Schouten:

Ozdemir says the deal is a great value for the city, which gets to fix Broad Ripple's parking problem, clean up the area, add to the tax base and open a new, rent-free police substation. The police facility was a last-minute sweetener sought by the city.

"I think it's a heck of a deal," Ozdemir said. "We're spending a lot of time and money developing this project. Do we want to take money? Sure. We won't make the same profit as a private deal, but ther are intangible values for us here."

"We won't make the same profit as a private deal," Ersal claims. Yeah, right. Those are fighting words to taxpayers in this town who are fed up with being totally screwed over by our crooked politicians who think they have a license to hand out our hard-earned taxpayers to every sleazeball who comes along that's willing to stuff their political coffers and finance their overseas junkets. Is this one of the deals you and Greg hatched on that useless European junket to celebrate Greg's birthday, Ersal? What's Paul Okeson's commission for scoring this deal? A million bucks? "The developer and city officials said political contributions were not a factor," Schouten writes. "Ozdemir has given more than $25,000 to Ballard." "In 2009, he hired Ballard's chief of staff, Paul Okeson, as Keystone's vice president of business development." That's all you need to know folks. That's how so-called "civic leaders" get ahead in business in Indianapolis.

See my earlier posts here and here on this outrageous fleecing of the Indianapolis taxpayers. Fellow blogger Pat Andrews has more on the greed and corruption that is the Ballard administration here.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention one of the other lead stories in the IBJ's latest edition, "Shrinking revenue puts mayor in hot seat." Yep, the city is short about $20 million because that 65% increase in the income tax increase for which Bart Peterson sacrificed his political career to make room for Benedict Arnold a/k/a Greg Ballard isn't bringing in enough money. Naturally, the CIB, which was on the verge of insolvency is so flush with cash it has plenty of money to spare for the billionaire Simons' losing NBA franchise. The article also tries to lay the blame on property tax caps, but that's a bullshit lie. Greg Ballard and his thieving friends are confiscating hundreds of millions of dollars annually from other units of goverment and depositing the money into TIF Funds that operate like slush funds from which money can be found on demand to hand out to billionaire sports team owners and fat cat political contributors for their private development projects. If you're fed up with this crap, you need to show up at public meetings and get in these politicians faces and make them fear you. Let them know you've had it. Most importantly, go vote and throw their asses out of office and hold their successors similarly accountable.

Star Questions Police Investigation Of Lauren Spierers

It's a display of what has become too much of a rarity at the Indianapolis Star, but reporter Robert King has an excellent story today about the missing person case of IU student Lauren Spierers entitled, "4 Weeks, No Answers." King raises a number of questions about police handling of the case, including contamination of the crime scene with hundreds of volunteer searchers, failure to interview potential witnesses timely or at all in some cases, waiting too long to ask for the assistance of the State Police and waiting too long in general to do the obvious.

The four-week search for missing Indiana University student Lauren Spierer has employed riders on horseback, search dogs, divers, helicopters and an army of more than 1,000 civilian volunteers.

But after nearly a month, it has failed to answer an essential question: What happened?

The Bloomington Police Department has offered a scant timeline of Spierer's movements in the early morning hours of June 3. During more than a dozen news conferences, police officials have taken few questions.

Nearly a month after a friend reported last seeing Spierer rounding a corner at 11th Street and College Avenue, police haven't said whether they think Spierer is alive or dead. They haven't acknowledged whether they have suspects in a crime. Or if they are close to an arrest.

Into the vacuum of information, a sizable pack of journalists from Indiana and New York, the Spierers' home state, have strode in, trying through interviews with Spierer's friends and their attorneys to put some paint on a blank canvas.

Meanwhile, a cottage industry of Internet sages and bloggers has arisen to push pet theories, accuse key figures and generally speculate about what's happening.

To my surprise, King's story hones in on one of the persons of interest about whom there has been much speculation on Internet blogs and because he was quick to hire the state's most prominent criminal defense attorney, James Voyles.

Jay Rosenbaum, the man who, according to a friend of Spierer's, was among the last to see her, has been singled out in the blogosphere for not helping police. There's even a website, jay rosenbaumneedstotalk.wordpress .com. His attorney, former Mike Tyson counsel Jim Voyles, issued a statement this week saying his client has cooperated with police and submitted results from a lie detector test, though he wouldn't discuss the nature of the questions or who asked them.

On the troubling way police have gone about their investigation, King turns to a retired state police investigator, Jim White:

There are more unknowns than knowns," White said, "and part of that is because law enforcement hasn't been forthcoming. Most of the police officers I still associate with think there's a lot more to this story than what we are getting through the media."

White is critical of aspects of the dearth of information made public, the use of volunteer searchers who have been "traipsing" through potential crime scene areas, the wait before involving the State Police -- nine days after the disappearance -- and the prominent role Spierer's parents have played in the investigation.

"I think we all feel sorry for the family, but this is a police matter," White said. "The family had people searching all over town, and in fact what they did was contaminate a crime scene."

 I would like to question White what role, if any, he had in the Indiana State Police investigation into the disappearance and grisly discovery of a west-central Indiana woman, Mary Beth Grismore, more than three decades ago. Prominent political persons, including Sen. Birch Bayh, were among those who investigators learned had been involved with her during the last days she was known to be alive and no serious attempt was ever made to discover how she wound up stuffed in the trunk of her car at a motel parking lot nearing the Columbus, Ohio airport. The Indiana State Police don't even have her case listed on their website as a cold case file, a fact a police spokesman told me was simply due to an oversight during a revamping of the department's website. Nearly two months after I raised the question, the omission has still not been corrected. Her case is listed on the state of Ohio's cold case list, even though all investigatory leads led them right back to Indiana. No, the Indiana State Police have no intention of trying to discover who actually murdered Mary Beth Grismore. Let's hope Indiana police are truly interested in solving the disappearance case of Lauren Spierers.

I've mentioned this website before, but I'll mention it again. If you're really interested in staying on top of all the rumors and gossip pertaining to the Spierers' case, check out tonygatto.wordpress.com. His latest post wonders aloud about this insensitive twitter post on June 11 by IU student Arjun Babu, an Indianapolis man tied to Spierers and several of her friends:

Was Strauss-Kahn Framed?

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a leading candidate to become president of France in 2012 when New York authorities arrested him and charged him with raping a chambermaid at a luxury midtown New York hotel. Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF, had checked out of the hotel and boarded an Air France  plane at New York's Kennedy Airport for a return flight to Paris when New York Police pulled him from the plane to book him on the charges. The hotel maid, who is Muslim, is in the U.S. as an asylum seeker. The New York Times exclusively learned that the New York District Attorney's case against Strauss-Kahn, who is Jewish, had fallen apart after his accuser's credibility had been called into question, leading to his release:

The development represented a stunning reversal in a case that reshaped the French political landscape and sparked debate about morals, the treatment of women and the American justice system. Prosecutors said they still believed Mr. Strauss-Kahn had forced the woman into sex, but that inconsistencies in her past and account of the moments following the incident could make it hard for jurors to believe her . . .

The housekeeper admitted to prosecutors that she lied about what happened after the episode on the 28th floor of the hotel. She had initially said that after being attacked, she had waited in a hallway until Mr. Strauss-Kahn left the room; she now admits that after the episode, she cleaned a nearby room, then returned to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite to clean there. Only after that did she report to her supervisor that she had been attacked.

Prosecutors disclosed that the woman had admitted lying in her application for asylum from Guinea; according to the letter, she “fabricated the statement with the assistance of a male who provided her with a cassette recording” that she memorized. She also said that her claim that she had been the victim of a gang rape in Guinea was also a lie.

The woman also acknowledged that she had misrepresented her income to qualify for her housing, and had declared a friend’s child — in addition to her own daughter — as a dependent on tax returns to increase her tax refund.

Mr. Thompson, the woman’s lawyer, gave a lengthy retort outside the courtroom in which he conceded problems with her credibility, but insisted that she was still the victim of an attack, saying that her version of events has never wavered. He said some evidence, like bruising she had sustained, was consistent with a nonconsensual encounter. And he said her decision to clean a room was consistent with someone who was confused and upset in the wake of an attack . . .  

The prosecutors’ letter did not include all of what their investigators had learned about the woman. According to two law enforcement officials familiar with the prosecutors’ inquiry, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends . . . .

Prior to his arrest, Strauss-Kahn had predicted his enemies might seek to frame him. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin soon after Strauss-Kahn's arrest claimed the prospective French presidential candidate had been the victim of a U.S. conspiracy. “It’s hard for me to evaluate the hidden political motives but I cannot believe that it looks the way it was initially introduced," Putin was quoted as saying. "It doesn’t sit right in my head." A Russian intelligence report prepared for Putin reportedly claimed Strauss-Kahn had become increasingly concerned about the U.S. government's ability to deliver 191.3 tons of gold to the IMF under the terms of a 1978 agreement that were to be sold to fund Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) as an alternative to reserve currencies. The Russian intelligence report claimed Strauss-Kahn had raised concerns with officials of the Obama administration and had recently been tipped off by an informant within the CIA who claimed all of America's gold reserves stored at Fort Knox, Kentucky were missing.

It should be noted that U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate, has raised his own concerns about America's gold reserves. He has unsuccessfully pursued congressional efforts to require an audit be conducted to determine the amount of gold reserves being held at Fort Knox. “If there was no question about the gold being there, you think they would be anxious to prove gold is there,” Paul told Kitco News. “Our Federal Reserve admits to nothing, and they should prove all the gold is there. There is a reason to be suspicious and even if you are not suspicious why wouldn’t you have an audit?" Failing in his effort to get an audit of the gold reserves, Paul suggested the U.S. should put them up for sale to help close the nation's huge budget deficit given the record high prices of gold. “Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.”

There is said to be a delivery of gold to China in 2009 that originated from the gold reserves at Ft. Knox that turned out to be fake. After discovering the gold bars were fake, the Chinese government ordered an investigation and determined the U.S. was responsible. The fake gold bars were reportedly manufacturing by a sophisticated U.S. refiner during the Clinton administration and shipped to Ft. Knox. A top executive of the New York Mercantile Exchange, which would have had records of the fake gold bars in question, faced an investigation by the New York District Attorney's Office in 2004. The executive under investigation, Stuart Smith, took a leave of absence from the exchange after the investigation was launched never to be heard from again.

Interestingly, the New York District Attorney who brought the charges against Strauss-Kahn is Cyrus Vance, Jr., the son of former Carter administration Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The senior Vance served as U.S. Secretary of State when the original 1978 IMF agreement requiring the delivery of gold was inked. He resigned the Carter administration in protest after President Carter authorized a secret mission into Iran in 1979 to free Americans who were taken hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran after radical Muslims allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini stormed the embassy grounds. Vance, who had spent months attempting to negotiate the release of the 53 hostages, tendered his resignation before learning the mission had failed. The younger Vance came under fire recently when he failed to secure charges against two Muslim terrorists accused of plotting to bomb the largest Manhattan synagogue. He now has egg on his face big time with this badly-botched case against Strauss-Kahn. It is incredible that he would not have checked out the veracity of a person making such salacious allegations against a high-ranking official.

Can you imagine if the Russians had arrested Barack Obama on trumped up charges during his visit to that country with other U.S. Senators prior to his run for president. The Russians did, incidentally, detain then-Sen. Obama and Sen. Richard Lugar for several hours during their visit to the country in 2005 while Russian officials searched their airplane and examined their passports. The reason for their detention has never been explained by the government or the two men.

Indiana Supreme Court Strikes Blow To Designated Driver Program

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk" is the message urged by public interest ads against impaired driving, but having a designated driver may not prevent you from being charged with public intoxication while sitting in a car your sober friend is driving according to the Indiana Supreme Court. A Star editorial today has a spot-on reaction to this latest troubling decision by our state's high court:

So a person walks into a bar, drains a couple of drinks and then, understanding that he's past the point of intoxication, asks a friend to drive him home.

Is that person, riding in the passenger seat, still at risk of criminal charges merely because he's had too much to drink?

Common sense would say no. The person did what society (and the law) compels him to do -- allow a designated driver to assist him.

But the Indiana Supreme Court, in its second peculiar ruling in recent weeks, says that a person can still be charged with public intoxication while riding in a vehicle, even if he or she commits no other illegal act.

Here are the (undisputed) facts of the case: Brenda Moore consumed two "tall" cans of beer on the evening of Dec. 5, 2008, at her sister's house. An acquaintance asked Moore if she would drive him to another location. She declined, saying that she had been drinking but offered to let him drive her car if he had a license. Moore rode along in the passenger seat. An Indianapolis Metropolitan Police officer pulled over the car on East 13th Street because the vehicle's license plate light was out. The officer found that the driver did not, in fact, have a license. He also noticed that Moore had bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. She admitted she had been drinking, and Moore was charged and later convicted of public intoxication. On appeal, the conviction was overturned.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brent Dickson restored the conviction and dismissed Moore's argument that she caused no public harm or annoyance and that she complied with public service admonishments not to drink and drive. Dickson asserted that the court was simply applying the law as written.

But judges shouldn't adhere so closely to the letter of the law that common sense and wisdom are squeezed out. As Justice Robert Rucker noted in dissent, "Moore should not suffer a criminal penalty for taking the responsible action of allowing a sober friend to drive her car while she was too intoxicated to do so.''

Last month, in a case that sparked justified outrage, the court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not give citizens the "right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers."

The Indiana Supreme Court is a normally thoughtful safeguard against extremes on either side of the legal and political spectrums. It's erred badly twice of late, however.

Brenda Moore should not have been punished for trying to do the right thing.

Fellow blogger Paul Ogden has his own take on the decision here.

Family Of Missing Morgan Smith Plan To File Racism Complaint

Fox 59 News reports that the family of Morgan Smith, who was last seen on May 18, plan to file a complaint against the Plainfield Police Department claiming racism has played a role in efforts to solve his disappearance.

The complaint will be filed with the Civil Rights Commission, the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Greater Indianapolis NAACP and the Indianapolis Urban League.

Ann and Carl Smith will arrive at the Indiana Government Center at 1 p.m. Friday to file a complaint with the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. They believe the color of their son's skin is why his case has not gotten the same resources and attention as other cases.

"There is the lady in Noblesville [Dorothy Heard] who is missing, there is Lauren [Lauren Spierer], and obviously, they are white females. Morgan is black and a man. The things that are being done for them are not being done for him," said Ann Smith