Journalist with a love for new media and old-fashioned reporting
By Emily Babay
The number of rapes reported in D.C. spiked nearly 25 percent in 2010, the largest such increase in the country in a year when most states and the nation as a whole saw a decline.
FBI statistics released Monday show that 187 forcible rapes were reported in the District last year, up from 150 in 2009. That’s a sharp contrast to the 5.5. percent decline nationwide.
Read more: crime, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
The methods they use to get drugs into the United States range from soup packets to suitcases to their own bodies. But many drug smugglers nabbed at local airports have at least one thing in common: They say they turned to the drug trade because of financial hardships.
In court papers, attorneys for drug couriers cite myriad economic woes that befell their clients, leading them to work as drug mules to recoup lost funds. A few of their stories:
Read more: courts, crime, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
These weren’t clams you’d want to serve on the dinner table. The juice boxes weren’t what you’d put in your child’s lunch box. The soup wasn’t what you’d use to nurse yourself back to health. And the statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph definitely weren’t fit for a church.
They’re all methods used by drug smugglers trying to get their contraband into the United States through Washington-area airports, sending couriers on flights with cocaine-stuffed clams, soup packets and statues, or with stomachs full of ingested heroin pellets.
Read more: courts, crime, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
Three years after a government report uncovered that abuse of domestic workers by diplomats was more pervasive than expected, officials and advocates say progress is being made in preventing such cases.
A Government Accountability Office study found 42 likely trafficking cases between 2000 and 2008. Since then, programs have been set up to inform diplomats’ domestic workers about human trafficking before they arrive in the United States and better track abuse allegations.
Read more: courts, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
A maid or nanny alleges that her employer has raped her, taken her passport, made her shovel snow in shorts, refused to pay her or beat her unconscious.
In most cases, this is what would happen next: Police would investigate. If the allegations were true, the employer would face criminal charges and a potential civil lawsuit for emotional and monetary damages.
Unless the employer is a diplomat.
All of those allegations have been made against high-level foreign officials in Washington in recent years. They foreshadowed the sexual assault accusations from a New York hotel maid facing Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now the former chief of the International Monetary Fund. But unlike Strauss-Kahn, D.C.-area diplomats have largely escaped criminal courtrooms and serious consequences.
Read more: courts, enterprise, Uncategorized, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
When Carl Diener was fatally beaten and stabbed on a Clarendon street in 2009, Patti Diener didn’t understand how her tall, strong older brother — a retired government worker who was working at a gym — couldn’t fight off an assailant.
On Monday, she learned part of the reason: Police believe he had two attackers.
Read more: crime, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
Amanda J. Snell was a 20-year-old Navy intelligence specialist and a youth minister at an Alexandria church when she was found dead in her Henderson Hall barracks room in Arlington in July 2009.
More than a year and half later, prosecutors are preparing to charge a former Marine corporal with a violent past in her death, according to Snell’s mother and a law enforcement source.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia says it plans to charge Jorge A. Torrez in the case, Snell’s mother, Cynthia, told The Washington Examiner.
Read more: courts, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
When Kevin Ricks admitted last week that he took sexually explicit photographs and videos of boys in his care for more than three decades, U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride called the former Manassas teacher a “dangerous and serial predator who assaulted scores of young men.” The Ricks case is just one of dozens of child pornography cases in local courts. The number of such cases in the D.C. region has risen dramatically in the past decade.
That’s the result of both the rapid proliferation of online child pornography and a more vigorous effort to apprehend those who produce, distribute and view it.
Read more: courts, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
An Arlington man is accused of threatening to set off bombs around D.C., including in the Metro system, but was caught through messages he sent on Facebook before a plot was developed.
Awais Younis, who also goes by Sundullah “Sunny” Ghilzai as well as Mohhanme Khan, was charged in federal court in Alexandria with making threatening communications.
Younis, who was born in Afghanistan, used Facebook to threaten to set off explosives, according to an affidavit for his arrest by Joseph Lesinski, a special agent with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Read more: courts, Washington Examiner, writing
By Emily Babay
Neighbors of a 2-year-old Falls Church girl had no answers for why the toddler’s grandmother who often baby-sat the child would throw her from a six-story parking garage, killing her.
Fairfax police offered no motive for the actions of 50-year-old Carmela Dela Rosa. But they said they were sure that the child’s death was intentionally caused by Dela Rosa, and charged her with murder.
Angelyn Ogdoc was severely injured after being thrown from a walkway connecting the Tysons Corner Center mall with a parking garage at about 7 p.m. Monday, Fairfax County police said.
Read more: breaking news, crime, Washington Examiner, writing