In the news
■ Carolina Vizcarra, 33, who told Miami police she didn’t want her toddler daughter sleeping on the street, was charged with child abandonment after she asked a stranger — who happened to be an off-duty police officer — to watch the child while she used the restroom at a hospital and then never returned.
■ Scott Harris, 51, of Aubrey, Texas, faces up to five years in prison after being accused of sending a threatening message to a Maryland doctor who is a prominent advocate for covid-19 vaccines, federal prosecutors said.
■ Shannon Bruga, 47, also known as Shannon O’Connor of Los Gatos, Calif., was arrested in Idaho and accused of hosting a series of parties for her son and his friends where she supplied alcohol, encouraged them to binge drink and manipulated them into having sex with intoxicated teenage girls, prosecutors said.
■ Sagal Hussein, 26, of Howard, Wis., faces up to 25 years in prison after being convicted of child neglect and other counts for neglecting her 5-year-old son, who had cerebral palsy and epilepsy, until the child died and then hiding the boy’s body in the trunk of her car.
■ Albert Carter, a police lieutenant in Royal Oak, Mich., said a 50-pound caracal, a large cat native to Africa and the Middle East, escaped from its owner’s garage and is prowling in the neighborhood.
■ Will Lewis, the former sheriff of Greenville County, S.C., convicted in 2019 of pressuring a personal assistant to have sex with him, reported to prison to serve a one-year sentence after the South Carolina Supreme Court refused to hear his latest appeal.
■ Veondre Avery, 22, of Altamonte Springs, Fla., was charged with negligent manslaughter and unsafe firearm storage after a toddler found a loaded handgun in a “Paw Patrol” backpack and fatally shot his mother in the head while she was on a Zoom call for work.
■ Bob MacLean, senior veterinarian at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, said the zoo is “eager” to protect its animals against covid-19 and is vaccinating its great apes, including four gorillas and four orangutans, against the coronavirus.
■ Dermot Shea, New York City’s police commissioner, said: “We have to do better as a society” after a 13-year-old boy wanted for shooting a rival on a Bronx playground in a social media feud was arrested when his mother saw a wanted poster and turned him in at a police station house.