California: Family mourns slain son who lived as a girl

Hundreds of people Friday filed somberly past the open casket of Eddie “Gwen” Araujo, whose family presented him the way he lived: as a woman.

Long, black hair spilled across the casket. A metallic manicure gleamed from fingerless, black lace gloves.

Araujo, 17, was beaten and strangled Oct. 3 at a house party. Police say three men attacked him after discovering the beautiful teen they knew as Lida was biologically male.

“Angels don’t have a gender and he’s my angel now. I know that he’s safe somewhere where no one can hurt him,” said Araujo’s mother, Sylvia Guerrero, speaking to an overflow crowd of more than 700 mourners at St. Edward’s Church.

Araujo’s body was found two weeks after the teen’s disappearance when one of the men accused of killing him led officers to a shallow grave in the Sierra foothills about 150 miles east of San Francisco.

Jaron Nabors, 19, Jose Merel and Michael William Magidson, both 22, face charges of murder as a hate crime and are being held without bail.

Washington, D.C.: Two deer burst through McDonald’s window

Customers at a McDonald’s in the nation’s capital got a shock Friday when two deer jumped through the restaurant window.

The animals shattered the glass about 11 a.m. and ran through the fast-food restaurant, about a mile and a half north of the Capitol.

When animal control officers arrived, one deer was trapped in the restaurant. The other had jumped back through the window and was found in an adjacent field.

Peggy Keller, chief of animal disease prevention with the District of Columbia Department of Health, said authorities didn’t know where the deer originated.

“There are no really heavily wooded areas” nearby, Keller said. “But the area where one deer was hiding was fully able to support them there was lots of vegetation, there was water.”

Four customers suffered minor injuries. Both deer were severely injured and had to be euthanized. Crews searched the field for other deer, but none were found.

Keller said District animal control officers usually handle about 10 calls a year concerning deer.

New Jersey: Police officer charged in Internet sex case

A decorated police officer was charged with using the Internet to seek sexual encounters with children.

A grand jury Thursday indicted Cpl. James R. Davis, 42, on charges of child endangerment, attempted sexual assault and official misconduct.

Davis is a 16-year veteran who twice received distinguished service medals. In his job, he also visited schools dressed as McGruff the Crime Dog.

The Holmdel department suspended Davis without pay.

Attorney Norman Hobbie said Davis planned to plead innocent at his arraignment. “We’re hopeful he’s going to be exonerated,” Hobbie said.

E-mails and a phone call with a patrol car siren heard in the background were sent to a detective posing as a 13-year-old girl, prosecutor Kevin Clark said.

Florida: Former professor guilty of attempted seduction

A former professor at the University of Central Florida has been found guilty of attempting to seduce a 12-year-old girl.

Jurors needed about two hours Thursday to decide that Madjid Belkerdid, 49, knew his partner in online explicit chat sessions was underage. Belkerdid, who will remain at Seminole County Jail without bond until his Dec. 2 sentencing, faces up to five years in prison.

During closing arguments, defense attorney Arthur Baron said Belkerdid believed an adult was behind the lusty conversation. Baron also suggested computer evidence had been tampered with.

In a conversation that was taped and played for jurors on the opening day of the trial, the girl tells Belkerdid that she was 13 and asked him if that mattered. Belkerdid went ahead with plans to meet the girl in a park, where he was arrested by police.

Belkerdid, an electrical engineering professor, resigned from UCF shortly after his 1999 arrest.

Georgia: Educators imprisoned for running drug ring

An assistant principal and his wife, a teacher, were sentenced to several years in prison for running an Ecstasy and steroid ring in Georgia, Florida and Louisiana.

The ring’s distributors were people in their 20s whom Reuben “Wes” Harrison knew during his time as a baseball coach, prosecutors said.

Between 1999 and their arrests in May 2001, Harrison and his wife distributed more than 68,000 Ecstasy tablets, prosecutors said.

Harrison, 54, was sentenced Thursday to nearly 13 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and one count of selling narcotics.

Anastasia “Stacey” Knight Harrison, 35, was sentenced to five years in prison. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute narcotics.

Harrison was an assistant principal in Macon County before he resigned earlier this year. His wife was a third-grade teacher in Bibb County. She was fired the day of her guilty plea and had been on leave since her arrest.

New York: Federal judge orders deportation for ex-Nazi

A federal judge has ordered the deportation of a 79-year-old man who served as an armed guard at slave-labor camps during World War II, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

U.S. Immigration Judge Mirlande Tadal ruled Thursday that Mykola Wasylyk, 79, should be deported to Ukraine, the former Soviet republic he considers his native country.

Wasylyk guarded prisoners at the Trawniki and Budzyn forced labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland from April 1943 to November 1943, Tadal said.

The purpose of the camps was to incarcerate and kill people because of their Jewish heritage and to subject prisoners to “inhumane treatment, including physical abuse and death,” Tadal wrote in her decision. As a guard, Wasylyk prevented prisoners from escaping, she said.

Wasylyk entered the United States in 1949 using a visa obtained in Germany and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.