Transcript
Speaker: Police body cam footage captured the horrifying moment when a police deputy and stranded driver were sucked into an overflowing storm drain in Pensacola, Florida.
Speaker: The chilling video shows Deputy William Hollingsworth sitting in his vehicle and communicating via his radio while on the scene to help motorists stuck on a flooded highway.
Speaker: A torrential downpour, illuminated red, white, and blue by the lights of his police cruiser, batters the windshield.
Speaker: Hollingsworth exits his car to assist one of the stranded drivers.
Speaker: He would later explain that he had instructed the motorist, presumably named David as heard later in the video, to walk towards him when the motorist was sucked into the storm drain.
Speaker: The deputy waded through the flooded street after him and was subsequently pulled into the pipe as well.
Speaker: The feed goes dark for the next 30 seconds as Hollingsworth's shouts are muffled by the inky black rushing waters.
Speaker: Faint flashes of what may be the officer's flailing limbs can be seen as he tries to find any sort of purchase.
Speaker: The motorist and Hollingsworth were transported close to 100 feet by the rushing floodwaters before being spit out on the opposite side of Highway 98.
Speaker: While gathering his bearings, the deputy calls out for the other man, and they quickly find each other.
Speaker: The two lean on each other as they make their way back across the highway, audibly processing what they just experienced.
Speaker: Can you fucking believe what just happened to us?
Speaker: Deputy Hollingsworth asks.
Speaker: The driver exclaims, I almost died.
Speaker: A short time later, as they recount the experience to other officers,
Speaker: The motorist thanks the deputy, saying, thank you, man, for, like, being there when I came out.
Speaker: When I came out, you were right behind me.
Speaker: Both men survived apparently unscathed, but are very lucky to be alive.
Speaker: A woman in Arkansas recently pleaded not guilty to selling over 20 boxes of stolen human body parts.
Speaker: Candace Chapman Scott, a now former mortuary service person, allegedly sold 20 separate packages of various body parts to self-titled preservation specialist Jeremy Lee Polly of Pennsylvania.
Speaker: Polly's website says he works to produce educational tools through reconditioning retired medical remains.
Speaker: Ms.
Speaker: Scott's former employer provided commercial cremation services to the University of Arkansas's anatomy lab,
Speaker: for cadavers donated for medical research and education.
Speaker: After a scheduled collection from the university's medical school, Scott reached out to Polly through his private Facebook group, Oddities, asking if he knew anyone in the market for an involved and complete brain.
Speaker: With less than 400 members, this page touts itself as a safe way to shop.
Speaker: Polly ended up offering her $1,200 for two brains and a heart, which she shipped to him through the U.S. Postal Service.
Speaker: Over the course of the next nine months, Scott sold Polly lungs, livers, kidneys, hands, breasts, skulls, an ear, an arm, skin, even penises, fetuses, and one whole human head.
Speaker: In total, he sent her $10,975 through numerous PayPal transactions.
Speaker: The unsold remains were cremated and returned to the school, as they should have been in the first place.
Speaker: A press release indicated that police were originally tipped off to these transactions in June 2022.
Speaker: That following July, another report was called in recounting their discovery of human organs and skin being stored in buckets in Polly's basement.
Speaker: After verifying this tip, authorities confiscated all the remains in Polly's possession and intercepted another set of packages.
Speaker: Even after Polly's indictment, his Facebook page still had a listing for a hand in full ribcage
Speaker: purportedly sourced from France.
Speaker: In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for University of Arkansas, Leslie Welch Taylor, said neither the cremation company nor the university had any idea until they were contacted by the FBI regarding these sales.
Speaker: Obviously, Candace Scott was immediately terminated following this revelation.
Speaker: Taylor noted that the FBI is still trying to match the body parts to their cadavers as the embalming process damages DNA.
Speaker: She noted that human bodies are an indispensable aid in the education of medical students.
Speaker: We are extremely respectful of our donors when they're in our care.
Speaker: The university even holds a yearly ceremony in honor of those who donate their remains to further medical research and education.
Speaker: The remains are typically meant to be totally returned to the school once cremated and laid to rest at one of a few contracted local cemeteries or returned to next of kin.
Speaker: Scott was charged with 12 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud,
Speaker: and transportation of stolen property across state lines, while Polly was charged with four counts of receiving stolen property, intent to participate in unlawful activity, and abuse of a corpse.
Speaker: A 48-year-old Montreal cold case was recently solved thanks to a DNA hit.
Speaker: On the evening of March 29, 1975, Sharon Pryor was abducted while on her way to meet friends at a pizza joint only a few minutes from her home.
Speaker: She was just 16.
Speaker: Around 7 p.m.
Speaker: that night, Sharon had left her home to meet up with a few friends from school, including her boyfriend John.
Speaker: However, her mother Yvonne sensed that something was wrong when Sharon's 1 a.m.
Speaker: curfew came and went with no sign of her.
Speaker: Yvonne's fears were quickly confirmed when she called around to Sharon's friends and learned that she had never made it to the pizza parlor in the first place.
Speaker: Yvonne rushed to the police station to report her daughter missing.
Speaker: The officer on duty attempted to console Mrs. Pryor, assuring her that Sharon had probably just run away.
Speaker: They see it all the time.
Speaker: Yvonne sternly explained to him that Sharon would never do such a thing, and that it made no sense if she left with no money just to close on her back.
Speaker: Yvonne went home to wait by the phone in case her daughter called.
Speaker: On April 1st, a beekeeper went to investigate when he noticed the gate to his hive sitting ajar.
Speaker: He soon came upon the sight of Sharon lying dead in a still frozen field.
Speaker: She was laying in the snow, only wearing her sweater, jacket, shoes, and socks, with a men's shirt tightly wound around her neck.
Speaker: Her pants were tossed into the brush just a few feet away.
Speaker: Investigators would later discover size 8.5 footprints surrounding the body, as well as a set of tire tracks heading away from the scene.
Speaker: Shannon was quickly identified due to the missing persons report her mother had filed a few days prior.
Speaker: The details just get uglier from here.
Speaker: An autopsy revealed that Sharon likely had been deceased for at least 20 hours before she was discovered in the snow.
Speaker: Both sides of her jaw had been fractured, and many of her teeth had been knocked out.
Speaker: A puncture on her face indicated that a tooth had ripped through her cheek during an attack.
Speaker: It was concluded that she had, at one point, been bound with tape due to a residue found on her wrist and in her hair, though none was found at the scene.
Speaker: The medical examiner determined that Sharon had also been sexually assaulted before being asphyxiated with the shirt.
Speaker: The police investigated and exhausted every lead in Sharon's case, but eventually hit a dead end.
Speaker: Although no conclusions could be drawn through DNA at this point in time, investigators wisely collected and preserved samples and evidence in case of future technology.
Speaker: This leads us to just last year, in 2022, when DNA harvested from clothing at the crime scene got a partial match in a genealogical database.
Speaker: The DNA was just able to be narrowed down to the Romine family, but that was enough to get a hit from penal system archives on Franklin Maywood Romine, who had passed away in 1982.
Speaker: Although authorities were unable to get a sample directly from the suspect due to his death 40 years prior,
Speaker: His two living brothers gave DNA samples without hesitation, which all but confirmed Franklin was the killer.
Speaker: Interviews with the brothers also revealed that Romine's shoe size and vehicle at the time of the crime matched the footprints and tire tracks found at the scene.
Speaker: Romine had a long record of prior attacks on women, but had only spent about four years in jail beginning in February 1976.
Speaker: Unfortunately, extradition back to his home state of West Virginia to face the trial that finally put him in jail came just six months after Sharon's murder in Montreal.
Speaker: DNA given by the Romine brothers was enough for Canadian authorities to convince a West Virginia judge to allow the exhumation of Franklin Romine's body, though the Romine family ended up issuing a letter of opposition.
Speaker: It took several weeks to get the results due to the complexity and difficulty of testing DNA that it had spent 40 years six feet under.
Speaker: On May 23, 2023, the results were announced.
Speaker: A perfect match to DNA collected in Sharon's case.
Speaker: Sharon's mother, Yvonne, who is now 85, finally has closure as the last page of Sharon's story has finally been told, almost 50 years later.
Speaker: Recent claims are indicating that extreme famine has led some in North Korea to resort to cannibalism.
Speaker: Recent North Korean defectors reported that severe food shortages amid economic hardship have led citizens to resort to extreme measures.
Speaker: Though it should be known that the family stated they had only heard these stories through the grapevine, it is not the first time rumors of cannibalism have come from the Kim regime.
Speaker: During the country's 1994-1998 famine, rumors of cannibalism were even more prevalent.
Speaker: a former North Korean national who would sometimes return to her hometown with food and supplies from China, said that one woman ate her own toddler due to hunger.
Speaker: In the 1998 interview with the Associated Press, representatives of Doctors Without Borders shared similar reports, like one from a North Korean refugee who said he witnessed his neighbor eat their own daughter.
Speaker: The Atlantic also substantiated additional reports from 2003 and 2013.
Speaker: In response to reports in 2003, the United Nations World Food Program requested access to markets where human meats were allegedly being traded, but they were denied by the North Korean government due to security reasons.
Speaker: Though the state has surprisingly admitted to some food supply issues, the North Korean Central News Agency was cleared a statement that they believe claims of this kind are unsubstantiated and only serve to
Speaker: encourage unscrupulous reporting of hearsay and tall tales about North Korea as actual news.
Speaker: It can be impossible to truly authenticate claims of what is happening in North Korea, but we can be certain that while government officials are stuffing themselves with popcorn and champagne at lavish parties, that the common people are in immediate need of aid.
Speaker: If cannibalism is truly occurring in this country, then it has been provoked by the desperation of extreme famine.
Speaker: A new study has determined that wild dogs living within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone showed significant genetic differences from groups who reside just outside of the zone, suggesting that they have undergone rapid evolution due to exposure to radiation from the now-defunct power plant.
Speaker: The Chernobyl disaster occurred on April 26, 1986, when a nuclear reactor in Ukraine, which at the time was a Soviet state,
Speaker: erupted, sending a cloud of radioactive contaminants over parts of Europe and the USSR.
Speaker: The emergency response and subsequent cleanup cost the equivalent of about 68 billion USD today and required a workforce of over 500,000 people.
Speaker: The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or CEZ, was created 36 hours after the initial crisis with a radius of 10 kilometers.
Speaker: This was later expanded to 30 kilometers with 49,000 people and then an additional 38,000 being evacuated respectively.
Speaker: Animals living within the CEZ have been a point of scientific inquiry for many years.
Speaker: Studies have focused on bacteria, birds, rodents, and frogs, among others.
Speaker: A 2016 study discovered that eastern tree frogs within the exclusion zone were generally found to be black in color, while their counterparts in the rest of Eurasia are usually green.
Speaker: Researchers hypothesized that these frogs mutated to have an increased skin pigment in order to protect from the surrounding radiation.
Speaker: Per their published findings, dark coloration is known to protect against different sources of radiation by neutralizing free radicals and reducing DNA damage.
Speaker: And particularly melanin pigmentation has been proposed as a buffering mechanism against ionizing radiation.
Speaker: They also found that there was a positive connotation between the frog skin pigment in proximity to the blast zone where contamination was the highest.
Speaker: They specified that the frogs with the most melanin were found where radiation contamination was the highest during the incident, not where radiation levels are currently the highest.
Speaker: These findings led scientists to wonder if other animals, namely the wild dogs living in the area, underwent a similar mutation.
Speaker: Despite previous studies of Chernobyl's fauna, not much was known about the community of feral dogs in the area until a recent study sought to dive deeper into their DNA.
Speaker: These dogs, some of which are thought to be descendants of pets abandoned in the evacuation, have been successful in expanding their population since the disaster despite extreme conditions, which piqued the interest of scientists from North Carolina State.
Speaker: This new study discovered genetic evidence that suggests these dogs have also adapted due to radiation exposure.
Speaker: DNA of 302 wild dogs was sampled and compared to a similar number from an adjacent population and found distinctive differences.
Speaker: The scientists said that what they called environmental stressors likely produced genetic shifts that contrasted those of the wild dog population just 10 miles away in the city of Chernobyl.
Speaker: They found that these mutations especially involve genes that are related to DNA repair, immune system response, and other factors relative to protecting them from environmental contamination.
Speaker: Although there are some factors like inbreeding whose effects on mutations also need to be considered, this study has established groundwork for future scientific research and understanding.
Speaker: Lead scientist Megan Dillon stated that this work in future studies with these canine populations
Speaker: will advance our broader understanding on the genetic effects of prolonged exposures to both radiation and non-radiation toxic exposures, and the findings potentially more broadly applicable to the adverse health effects of other environmental nuclear and non-nuclear disasters in both animals and humans.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
Speaker: If you happen to hear some jingles in the background, that's just my furry assistant who heard I was doing a story about dogs and I guess thought he should be involved.
Speaker: I know, I know, I know, I know.
