So we knew he could defend himself. In January , just under a year after Medina was arrested the first time, police arrested him again and the district attorney charged him with murder. If convicted, he faced 26 years to life in state prison. According to court papers, Chung said that on the afternoon Sutter was killed, she arrived at the house and honked her car horn for Medina to come out.
Medina met her at her car, and the two walked back to the house. She heard arguing. Medina returned to the bedroom and then left again, Chung said. This time, she heard noises. She testified that she went out into the kitchen. She said Medina agreed, and she grabbed her purse. Ricky had the knife in one hand. Like, from where I was standing, it looked like a poke.
Why the fuck did you do that to me? Medina, according to her testimony, pulled the sword out, and then dropped it. Next, he called After the paramedics arrived, Medina stood outside the house in shock. I believe [someone] hit Josh with the hammer to either knock him out or shut him up.
Ninety percent of our cases are like that. There was no evidence that the hammer was used as a weapon. The weapon used was the sword. In the ensuing months, Kennedy went back to the ranch to collect the dogs. Maybe I had a special, weird attachment to them because I know they saw Josh be killed. Last May, someone reported Kennedy to animal control.
She was cited for hoarding and 60 dogs were taken from her home and the small shelter she ran. She now faces animal abuse charges, which she plans to fight. Right away, the social media thing started. In their opinion, the roles were reversed—Sutter was an attempted murderer and Medina was the hero.
They started fund-raising campaigns to send him money in jail. Further, they lashed out at Kennedy, creating fake social media pages for her, calling her an animal abuser and a porn star. She tells me she posed for Playboy back in the day, but has never done porn.
Consequently, she pulled down her personal social media accounts and retreated from the world. In March, Medina pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and agreed to a six-year sentence. The guaranteed six-year sentence, however, was too good to pass up.
Or [do I] risk spending the rest of my life in prison? It just happened. Also complicating matters: Sutter had a record which, Kennedy notes, could incline a jury against him. He had a DUI arrest from years before, and a battery charge that Kennedy herself brought against him. She tells me the story: She and her brother had an argument.
He left the house and had her credit card in his wallet; she ran after him asking for it, and he threw the wallet at her. He flung it. She called the police, and they arrested him, so he had a record for domestic violence against his own sister. There never would be. A t the sentencing, I meet Kennedy outside the courthouse. The courthouse is in Lancaster, about an hour northeast of L. They wrote victim impact statements to present in court.
After a quick stop in the bathroom, Kennedy rushes out with a little shiver. She has come up from Arizona with her mother. Donald Sutter is quiet. He looks tired. Kennedy tells me that no one really slept last night. Sitting in the front row of the small courtroom, Donald wipes his eyes under his wire-rimmed glasses.
Kennedy, her own eyes wet with tears, puts her arm around him. His mother is in the front row, weeping. Medina enters from a side door, escorted by an officer. His hair is short, he has a dark goatee and wears a yellow prison uniform. He sits next to his lawyers, staring straight ahead. Kennedy has brought childhood photos of her brother to court, and she and her father each give emotional victim impact statements through tears.
Medina, seated, continues to stare straight ahead facing the judge, his back to Sutter. Afterward, the family talks to the small group of reporters and local news cameras gathered outside the courthouse. But his statement is brief. To begin to put this behind them. Kennedy now lives on a quiet street in suburban L.
She welcomes me inside when I come to see her about a week after the sentencing. Her home is bright and airy and smells like candy. She has literature from police forums and the Department of Justice, research on how detectives conduct murder investigations. She and her family are convinced there were flaws in the investigation.
Kennedy has many regrets. She regrets moving Medina to the ranch. She regrets moving her brother to the ranch. She regrets ever having met Medina in the first place. If she does, Kennedy will help. He was quiet, loyal and protective. He loved nature and animals and was happiest at the ranch with the dogs. He lived in an incubator for the first year of his life.
I have to prevent him from having a life. He stole a life. Joshua suffered greatly. Love this Narratively story? Sign up for our Newsletter. Send us a story tip. Follow us. Cocky male monarchs underestimated Queen Amanirenas for her gender, her race, and her disability.
Each time, they did so at their own peril. T he legendary Roman emperor Caesar Augustus was on the Greek island of Samos, preparing for an important expedition to Syria, when he received envoys from the Kingdom of Kush, in present-day Sudan. If you want war, you will need them. For an African queen to give such an ultimatum to the most powerful man in the world would have been considered a serious insult.
After all, Augustus had almost single-handedly transformed Rome from a republic to an empire, and the territory he now reigned over stretched from as far as northern Spain, through to parts of central Europe, and all the way to Egypt. His legions wore bronze breastplates and wielded spears, swords and javelins, all much superior to the hatchets the Kushites carried as weapons.
In addition, Kush had many natural resources — such as gold mines, iron and ivory — that could have enriched the treasuries of Rome, enticing Augustus to attack, even without the insult. He received the bundle of arrows from the envoys and promptly signed a peace treaty. In truth, this was not so much a treaty as it was a surrender. Augustus submitted to all of the demands made by Queen Amanirenas, including that the Romans withdraw from all Kushite territories they had occupied and pledge that they would never again seek to collect taxes or tributes from her kingdom.
K ush was part of a region below Egypt known as Nubia. It was a place where, unlike most of the world at the time, women exercised significant control. In the Nubian valley, worship of the queen of all goddesses, Isis, was paramount, and Nubia had several female rulers during its history.
Queen Amanirenas reigned over Nubia from 40 B. Of great importance was gold, a commodity found in the Nubian deserts and greatly prized by the Egyptians. Her labyrinthine palace, with massive brick-vaulted rooms lined with gold leaf, was a warehouse stocked with great blocks of gold and ivory tusks.
She bartered her treasures for goods from Egypt, including cloth, corn, bronze bowls and glassware. But 10 years into the reign of Amanirenas, the political landscape changed when Augustus seized control of Egypt from the grasp of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. He proclaimed himself emperor and established Egypt as a Roman province.
Before leaving Egypt to continue his quest to seize more territories, Augustus appointed a military colleague named Gaius Cornelius Gallus, a Roman poet and knight whom he had a close relationship with, giving him the title of praefectus Alexandreae et Aegypti , prefect of Alexandria and Egypt. Only a year after the conquest, the Egyptians in the south rebelled against Roman rule, causing Cornelius to lead his forces south to repress the dissidence.
He brought a local ruler there under Roman control, and in return for paying homage to Rome, he gave this dynast the powerful title of tyrannus tyrant. As a sign of intimidation and also his ego, Cornelius had his achievements inscribed on a large stone tablet that was erected in Philae. To publicize his fame, he listed the victories in Latin, Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian.
The monument, dated 16 April 29 B. Queen Amanirenas reluctantly accepted the annexation of a part of her kingdom. Recognizing the military supremacy of the Roman legions, she saw that it was not time to fight yet. Soon after, the Nubians in the annexed regions started complaining about the tyrannus. On the orders of Cornelius, he was imposing increased taxes on the traders who brought goods to the frontier and claiming tax rights over autonomous Nubian communities allied to Kush.
Cornelius, for his part, continued to celebrate his exploits with grandiose monuments. Roman historian Cassius Dio, who lived from to A. These extravagances were not looked upon kindly back in Rome, where the standard directive was to glorify the emperor, not his underlings. The Roman Senate unanimously voted that he should be convicted in the courts, exiled and deprived of his estate. Overwhelmed by his bleak prospects, Cornelius killed himself before the decrees took effect.
B oth during and after the time of Cornelius, the massive Roman Empire kept expanding. This growing footprint made it difficult for Augustus to keep tabs on all corners of his kingdom at the same time — something Queen Amanirenas paid close attention to. In 26 B. Gallus had hardly settled in when the emperor commanded him to undertake a military expedition to Arabia.
While the Roman troops were being removed from Egypt, Queen Amanirenas marshaled her army to liberate her people up north from Roman authority.
Together with King Teriteqas, they commanded an army of 30, warriors from Kush, marching along the mudflats of the Nile and into Egypt. They took the entire Triakontaschoinos region, including Syene, Philae and Elephantine, a terrain of square miles.
As a last insult, they lopped off and carried away the head of a statue of Augustus. The Kushite victory did not last long. When the news reached Alexandria, the acting governor Gaius Petronius set out with a cavalry of , plus 10, Roman infantry. By then, the Kushite army had withdrawn to the city of Pselchis. Petronius pursued them, sending envoys ahead to demand the return of the captives. But the envoys were confused.
They found that there was no leader in command of the warriors. By this, they meant no male leader. King Teriteqas had died suddenly of sickness or injury, and they simply could not comprehend that a queen alone ruled the Kushites. The Romans drove them into retreat, and many of the Kushite warriors fled back to the city or into the desert. Some warriors escaped the battlefield by wading out into the Nile. They hoped to make a stand at a defensive position on a small island, but the Romans secured rafts and boats to capture the island and take them prisoner.
This time, the emboldened Romans invaded much deeper into Kushite territory than before. They told him that the Kandake was the ruler in their kingdom. But they also distracted his attention with tales of a male leader. The generals informed Petronius that Akinidad, son of Queen Amanirenas, was based in the northern city of Napata, their ancient capital and holy city, which housed important temples and royal cemeteries.
Unbeknownst to Petronius, this was a ruse, as the Kushite rulers had deliberately left Napata hundreds of years earlier. Petronius confidently marched to Napata, sure that victory there would subdue the Kushites for good. Angered at being misled, he burned the city and rounded up its occupants for transport back to Egypt as slaves.
He had already traveled more than miles from Syene, a distance almost as long as the entire length of Egypt. But Queen Amanirenas and her forces did not share his sense of exhaustion. She counterattacked with vigor, fiercely pursuing the retreating Romans back to the fortified hilltop city of Primis.
The queen herself was a fearsome presence on the battlefield. In one battle, as she clashed with the Romans, an enemy soldier injured the queen, blinding her in one eye. Yet again, these men underestimated Queen Amanirenas.
After her wound healed, she returned to the front line. Losing an eye in battle only made Amanirenas stronger and braver. But her suffering was not over. When her troops reached Dakka in 24 B. She had lost her husband, her eye and now her son. As a leader, many of her warriors had been killed in the fight, her generals and some of her people had been abducted, and her city of Napata sacked and razed.
And still the war was far from over. But now she had but one thing left to fight for: her kingdom. Fueled by grief and anger, the Kandake , now blind in one eye, fought on.
U p until this point, Queen Amanirenas and her troops had been fighting a defensive war, aimed at keeping the Romans from permanently annexing any part of her kingdom. But after the destruction of Napata and the death of Prince Akinidad, they went on the attack. Over the next two years, she fought with all she had to offer. In 22 B. It was a face-off of epic proportions. Based on the geography of Primis, it is nearly certain that the Kushite warriors entirely surrounded Petronius and his men.
However, the Romans had a large array of ballista — ancient canons that, although less deadly than military weapons today, could still fire deadly darts over long distances. This made a frontal assault by Queen Amanirenas nearly impossible; she would have lost countless warriors.
Yet Petronius was surrounded and had no way to escape. A stalemate. Petronius was extremely eager for a ceasefire. And now he was trapped in a hilltop city, with seemingly no way out. Realizing there was no way forward, Petronius urged Queen Amanirenas to meet with Emperor Augustus himself and settle matters. Petronius, surely not appreciating the joke but eager to escape his current predicament, responded by giving them escorts to the Greek island of Samos, where the emperor was preparing for an expedition to Syria.
By sending her envoys and not going personally, Amanirenas showed herself to be superior to the emperor and Rome. She would not deign to travel hundreds of miles just to negotiate; she had people who could do that for her. And the one-eyed queen indeed emerged victorious. The five-year war had cost the Romans many men and lots of money — a continued war with the tenacious Queen Amanirenas was not high on the imperial agenda. At the Treaty of Samos in 21 B. Roman troops evacuated Primis and also ceded the areas in the southern portion of the Thirty-Mile Strip to the Kushites.
They pulled back to Dodekaschoinos, which was established as the new border. Along with his signature on the official treaty, as one more step to appease the Nubian people, Augustus directed his administrators to collaborate with regional priests on the enlargement of a temple at Kalabsha, as well as the erection of another at Dendur.
The Kushite forces lent no such fealty to the Roman idols. While the war had been long and bloody, the Kushites were now free. Queen Amanirenas spared her people centuries of domination by withstanding conquest. Unlike so many other kingdoms across Europe, Africa and Asia, she neither ceded her territory nor paid any tribute to Rome. Her kingdom was hers, and hers alone. After the Roman War, Amanirenas dedicated herself to rebuilding the kingdom and making life better for her people.
She never remarried. She died in 10 B. The full extent of how she humiliated the Romans has yet to be disclosed, since the Kushite account of the war, written in the Meroitic script, has not been fully decoded. We may yet learn more about the fierce one-eyed warrior queen who triumphed over the Roman empire, battling her way to an unprecedented peace treaty, not resting until she defended her people and secured one of the best deals in history.
Sign up for our monthly Hidden History newsletter for more great stories of the unsung humans who shaped our world. Then I found out why. T he first thing I can recall clearly was sitting in a hospital room in the dark. I realized the left side of my face was numb. Hanging on the wall in front of me was a television, but there was something wrong with it too. A ghostly copy was superimposed over the standard set; it was rotated at roughly a degree angle and faded away into the burnt cream walls.
Is the TV the problem, or is it me? My mother and a nurse wearing scrubs entered from the left, a disorienting place outside of my field of vision. Why was she so nonchalant? Considering the haphazard inventory I had just taken, I probably should have demanded answers or cursed a bit.
Raised some hell. When I was young, my mother always went on, at length, about the difficulties of raising my prone-to-tantrums, bang-his-head-on-the-concrete-when-angry older brother. And calm. And you never complain. I wanted to ask her what was happening — and where I was. Fairly young — my age, by the look of him — his youth was accentuated by a clean-shaven chin under full, feminine lips and a baseball cap perched precariously on his head, above his boyish face.
He had the look of a perpetually surprised toddler, lips slightly parted in wonder and curiosity. The physical therapist, a blonde woman with chin-length hair, stepped in from stage right, clipboard in hand and a laminated badge dangling from a lanyard around her neck. When she entered, the nurse left, not wanting to crowd the room. The physical therapist pushed a rolling walker to the edge of my bed and beckoned me to rise.
My initial movements were the stop-motion stutter of a crude animation. And missed. I tried again. Yeah, I was wrong. Everything, including myself, felt familiar yet foreign, an already-read book revisited accidentally.
The therapist led me down a long hallway lined with other rooms and other patients. Every few feet, the therapist paused and waited for me to inch toward her, patiently watching with a fixed smile for the stop-motion hermit crab to scuttle closer. A death rattle that made syllables and managed to form words. Her back, still facing me, seemed crystallized in position.
Finally, she turned and looked at me for a long moment. When the elevator doors dinged close, she took a deep breath and sighed. L uckily, my memories started to stick after that disconcerting moment with the TV. I started receiving various stories about what had happened. Some true, some, I would eventually come to realize, fiction. Him divulging he was my boyfriend … it felt familiar.
How many times had this happened? Stanley cocked his head to the side like a confused dog and considered my question — or at least, I figured he was considering it. Maybe he was worried about me.
Maybe my well-being concerned him. But I remembered that detail and I knew I knew him. In what capacity? Stanley let out a huff of air in exasperation. He shook his head in exaggerated impatience, rolling his eyes. It came back to me early on, distinctly, that he had never wanted to be my boyfriend before this.
My skepticism remained even as my memory wavered. Yet, he showed up each day, and I began to believe him when he said his feelings had changed.
Other friends of mine who came to see me in the hospital were wary of Stanley, but his insistence on his right to be there and his role in my life stifled any objections that even my best friend, Sam, thought to make.
My mother and I had always communicated infrequently about my romantic endeavors. Later, she said I seemed like I wanted him there. With no memory of the original conversation, I believed him, but I felt overwhelmed.
So he got a recruiting job and a room nearby. Instead of walking away or going inside, I just stood and watched him stutter as his face flushed until he finally formulated words. And boy, what words they were. Incapable of speaking, I retreated through the sliding glass door into the kitchen. All of the words I wanted to say slithered through my mind, broken, disconnected. But nothing came from me.
As he spoke, he encroached on my space, stepping forward until his face was less than a few inches from mine. His hands still flapped in the air to either side; I think he may have wanted to grab me by the shoulders but refrained. Stanley pulled his hands back, made a noise that sounded like a mixture of an exasperated moan and a frustrated yelp. All I heard next was the gate slamming behind him. All of the out-of-town transfer students over the age of 22 were corralled on the first floor of the transfer dorm.
That dorm became a haven for all of us who had spent our post-high school years not attending college. But we had finally pulled together those community college units to gain admittance to a four-year school. And by God, we were celebrating. Everyone except me. Stationed at the school-supplied prefab wooden desk underneath my bunk bed sans bottom bunk, I was drinking whiskey and playing music from a USB-connected speaker.
Among the gyrating bodies, a short guy in a blue baseball cap, brim pushed up jauntily, slid forward with an elbow pointing at me. He looked too young to be drinking. Later, Stanley would divulge his first impression of me: feet up on my desk, pugging whiskey straight from the bottle and ranting to him about Tom Waits. He thought I was a bitch. And I would tell him that I thought he was a disrespectful asshole. Before we slept together, Stanley spent all of his time with me and stopped seeing all of the other women he had been involved with.
At the end of that year in the transfer dorm together, we all dispersed. But sure enough, he ended up in a sublet off of Laurel Street and would rap on my window from the front porch, softening his big brown eyes when I pulled back the blinds to see who it could be. One day, Stanley, now sitting by that window at the computer chair and desk my sublet provided, broached a conversation we had never touched upon before, one I always avoided with everyone: acquaintances, bar patrons, friends — whatever Stanley was.
I stopped listening after his initial question. A wood frame painted white housed a run-of-the-mill mattress, neither soft nor hard. Stanley peered into my eyes incredulously, daring me to confirm what I could see him working out in his mind.
So I did. And I said it for the first time in nearly 10 years. Maybe ask if I wanted a drink? Oh, God, I wanted a drink. Hmm, new to the area — no.
I heard the words, I understood them, but none of them stuck with me. Your eyes water because everything feels overexposed and lacks detail. And then he kissed me gently and we had sex, on a mattress that could have been hard or soft or just fine. And I understood because, I felt, who would want to be with me? In the months after I left the hospital, my memory slowly but surely came back to me. I remembered all of this, about how I met Stanley and what our relationship was like before the accident.
But I still had some questions. Some missing pieces — like how I could have let any of this happen. How could I tell you what Stanley had done? This conversation with Cassie took place before I fell out of the tree, and it came back to me as I gradually regained my memory. It happened on Memorial Day Weekend when we all still lived in the transfer dorms, she said. They left before I returned from — where had I been? Drunk somewhere. Like always. Cassie described a beach bonfire. But then she and Stanley had run into the woods to find firewood.
She described Stanley slinging his arm around her neck, the same way he did to me. It was when she fell down that things changed. She described them losing balance and toppling over a log. With him. Things you buy through our links may earn New York a commission. Ricardo Medina, Jr. Last year, the year-old — who played Red Lion Wild Force Ranger in , and has been in a variety of Power Rangers productions since — was picked up for allegedly running his roommate Josh through the abdomen multiple times with a sword.
Medina was never charged, owing to a lack of evidence, after his attorneys claimed he had been defending himself and his girlfriend in his Green Valley home.
On Thursday, this Chekhov-with-jumpsuits plot continued as Medina was hauled back into jail , facing a murder charge and a life sentence for the stabbing.
The ranks of former Power Rangers already include at least one convicted murderer. In , Skylar Deleon , who as a year-old appeared on the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series, drowned an elderly couple after posing as a potential buyer of of their yacht, the Well Deserved.
Deleon was sentenced to death in , as was a co-conspirator named — as if this story were not strange enough — John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
In a far smaller post — Power Rangers misstep, the original Black Ranger, Walter Jones , was arrested for drunk driving in The original Yellow Ranger, Thuy Trang who was Vietnamese-American; the suits used to be race-coordinated by color , was killed in a car accident at 27 in It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago.
Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. By James Queally Staff Writer. He faces up to six years in state prison when he is sentenced this month, prosecutors said. James Queally. Follow Us twitter instagram email facebook. Subscribers Are Reading.
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