Army vet gets 17 months for White House intrusion
WASHINGTON — An Army veteran with mental health issues who got over the White House fence and inside the executive mansion was sentenced Tuesday to 17 months in prison, and a judge said that means he’s likely to be released before Christmas.
Omar Gonzalez’s arrest in September was an embarrassment to the Secret Service in particular because officers weren’t able to stop him until he was inside the East Room of the home.
It was one of several Secret Service security breaches that ultimately led to the resignation of agency director Julia Pierson in October.
Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said in sentencing Gonzalez on Tuesday that the White House is often thought of as “the most secure place in the world” but that Gonzalez’s actions showed it was not, at least on that day. Gonzalez, 43, was found carrying a folding knife in his pants pocket, and investigators found hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a machete, knives and several tomahawks in his car, which was parked nearby. Gonzalez told a Secret Service agent after his arrest that he wanted to tell the president that the atmosphere was collapsing.
President Barack Obama and his daughters had just left the White House when Gonzalez got inside. The first lady was not home.
On Tuesday, Gonzalez said he was “sorry for my actions” and told the judge: “I never meant to harm anyone.”
He said he was committed to continuing the mental health treatment he started in jail.
BERKELEY, Calif. — A 21st-birthday party thrown by a group of visiting Irish college students turned tragic early Tuesday when the fifth-floor balcony they were crammed onto collapsed with a sharp crack, spilling them about 50 feet onto the pavement. Six people were killed and seven seriously injured.
Police and fire and building officials were working to figure out why the small balcony broke loose from the stucco apartment house a couple of blocks from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. But one structural engineer said it may have been overloaded if, as city officials said, it was holding 13 people.
Five of the dead were 21-year-olds from Ireland who were in the country on J-1 visas that enable young people to work and travel in the U.S. over the summer, while the sixth victim was from California, authorities said.
Cool, rainy weather hinders hunt for loose killers on Day 11
DANNEMORA, N.Y. — Search teams hindered by cool, rainy weather combed through woods for an 11th day trying to track down two escaped murderers on Tuesday as one official raised doubts the escapees relied solely on a now-jailed prison worker to help them get away after their breakout.
More than 800 law en-