News from around the state at noon
Published 12:27 pm Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The latest early afternoon reports from across the state:
Decatur grandmother shoots intruder
DECATUR (AP) — Police here say 69-year-old Ethel Jones shot Michael O’Neal Bynum, 18, in the abdomen when she said she found him inside her bedroom. Bynum lived less than 200 yards from Jones, but she said she didn’t know him.
Jones said she sleeps with her gun under a pillow next to her. She said she was going to the bathroom shortly before 3 a.m. Monday when she thought she heard someone at her back door and then her front door. She grabbed her gun as a precaution and came out of the bathroom to find someone in her bedroom with a pen light.
“I shot three times, and he ran away bleeding,” she said.
Jones said she called 911.
Former Hale County official pleas guilty in vote case
GREENSBORO (AP) — Former Hale County Circuit Clerk Gay Nell Tinker has pleaded guilty to five counts of illegal absentee balloting.
In exchange for the plea on Tuesday to the misdemeanor charge, prosecutors dropped 13 felony charges related to voter fraud.
Tinker was arrested in March 2008 after an investigation that included the election of Tinker’s ex-husband, state Sen. Bobby Singleton, in 2004.
A jury for Tinker’s trial was struck Monday, and the prosecution and defense had been slated to deliver opening statements.
Man detained in Amsterdam was living in Tuscaloosa
MONTGOMERY (AP) — One of the two men arrested in Amsterdam over suspicious luggage has been living in Tuscaloosa.
Alabama’s homeland security director, Jim Walker, says Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi had been living in Tuscaloosa for about three months and working at a convenience store. He says there had been nothing to bring al Soofi to the attention of Alabama authorities.
Al Soofi began his flight in Birmingham, where his luggage first raised suspicions. Workers with the Transportation Security Administration checked it and cleared him to board.
A U.S. government official says the FBI’s investigation shows al Soofi and the other man didn’t know each other and it’s unlikely they were on a test run for a future terror attack.