Black parents give birth to white baby

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=11908
THE stunned black dad of a newborn, white, baby girl declared last week - "I'm sure she's my kid ... I just don't know why she's blonde."
British Nmachi Ihegboro has amazed genetics experts who say the little girl is not an albino.

Dad Ben, 44, a customer services adviser, admitted: "We both just sat there after the birth staring at her."

Mum Angela, 35, of Woolwich, South London, beamed as she said: "She's beautiful - a miracle baby."

Ben explained how he was so shocked when Nmachi was born, he even joked: "Is she mine?"
He added: "Actually, the first thing I did was look at her and say, 'What the flip?'"
But as the baby's older brother and sister - both black - crowded round the "little miracle" at their home in South London, Ben declared: "Of course she's mine."

Blue-eyed blonde Nmachi, whose name means "Beauty of God" in the Nigerian couple's homeland, has baffled genetics experts because neither Ben nor wife Angela have any mixed-race family history.
Pale genes skipping generations before cropping up again could have explained the baby's appearance.

Ben also stressed: "My wife is true to me. Even if she hadn't been, the baby still wouldn't look like that.
"We both just sat there after the birth staring at her for ages - not saying anything."
Doctors at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup - where Angela, from nearby Woolwich, gave birth - have told the parents Nmachi is definitely no albino.

Ben, who came to Britain with his wife five years ago and works for South Eastern Trains, said: "She doesn't look like an albino child anyway - not like the ones I've seen back in Nigeria or in books. She just looks like a healthy white baby."
He went on: "My mum is a black Nigerian although she has a bit fairer skin than mine.
"But we don't know of any white ancestry. We wondered if it was a genetic twist.
"But even then, what is with the long curly blonde hair?"

Professor Bryan Sykes, head of Human Genetics at Oxford University and Britain's leading expert, yesterday called the birth "extraordinary".
He said: "In mixed race humans, the lighter variant of skin tone may come out in a child - and this can sometimes be startlingly different to the skin of the parents.
"This might be the case where there is a lot of genetic mixing, as in Afro-Caribbean populations. But in Nigeria there is little mixing."

Rome to rule whether St. Louis woman's cure was a miracle

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_791b3e0d-352c-5ac1-aa61-6233a606c579.html
Rachel Lozano didn't die of cancer as the doctors predicted, and she says it's a miracle.

Not a miracle like a last-minute goal or winning the lottery. The real deal: the work of God through the intercession of a saint.

Other Roman Catholics in St. Louis believe, too, and on Friday, the St. Louis Archdiocese officially wrapped up its investigation into the claimed miracle with a prayer service to mark the occasion. Boxes of testimony generated by the investigative tribunal — about 3,000 pages — will be sent to Rome, where the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints will examine the evidence.

Lozano said she doesn't really have to wait. She already knows the answer to how her cancer was cured, and "medicine can't explain it.

"There's just a peacefulness inside me," she said, "whether the church declares it a miracle or not."

She attributes her remarkable recovery to the French priest Blessed William Joseph Chaminade, who lived from 1761 to 1850. If her case is indeed deemed a miracle, the pope could one day canonize Chaminade as a saint.

"I just feel elated to be part of the process," Lozano said Friday before the prayer service.

One miracle has already been attributed to Chaminade's intercession, the curing of a Argentine woman's lung cancer in 1991. The Vatican deemed that a miracle in 1998. Based on that miracle, Pope John Paul II in 2000 beatified Chaminade, a step toward canonization.

Lozano attended Chaminade's beatification in Rome, and that was the foundation of her miraculous recovery, she and others say.

"She was not feeling well at all," said the Rev. James Tobin, the pastor at Lozano's church, Our Lady of the Pillar, who went with her to Rome. "She began entrusting her health to the intercession of Blessed Chaminade."

Lozano had survived several bouts with cancer, and even underwent a stem cell transplant, but in 2002, doctors found a tumor growing near her heart, lungs and spine.

The news from doctors was all bad: Surgery would kill her. So would the cancer, in weeks or months, depending on which organ the cancer struck first. No one had survived a recurrence of this cancer after a stem cell transplant.

But she lived weeks, months, a year. Scans showed her tumor, which she named Spanky, wasn't growing as expected.

Eventually a surgeon removed the tumor and found it was dead.

"It was pretty astounding," her oncologist told the Post-Dispatch last year.

The Marianists order of Catholic brothers and priests found Lozano's case compelling and presented her story to the archdiocese as a miracle attributable to Chaminade, the order's founder. An archdiocese tribunal investigated, interviewing Lozano, her family, her doctors, and Tobin, among others.

The tribunal doesn't make a judgment, just gathers evidence. But Monsignor John Shamleffer, judicial vicar who served on the tribunal, said God picked up where doctors couldn't succeed.

"I believe in God's ability to do things we can't do," he said. "I have no reason to believe this is not a miracle."

The tribunal's evidence is now headed to the Vatican. No one knows when a ruling might come from Rome.

"We don't know the end of this process," Brother Michael McAward, secretary general of the Society of Mary, said Friday night. "It may end in the canonization of Father Chaminade. But what we do know is Rachel has been blessed by God with a cure."

Alsip police officer describes robbery, 'guardian angel' neighbor

By Steve Schmadeke, Tribune reporter

2:01 PM CDT, July 2, 2010

Advertisement

Taking cover from the gunfire against a low brick wall, Alsip police Officer Mark Miller watched dazed as brick particles sent flying by the bullets hit his face in what seemed like slow motion.

Less than a minute had passed since Miller chased an armed robbery suspect outside of an Alsip Aldi store on June 26, 2007, and into a residential neighborhood near the library. Children were out riding their bikes and, down the street, playing in a Little League baseball game.

He had been saved already by an Alsip woman who, on her backyard deck handing out Popsicles, shouted a warning — "He's got a gun, he's going to shoot you" — before suspect James Sevier could ambush Miller near a garage.

Now the magazine in his Glock service weapon was empty. As Miller reloaded, Sevier snuck up behind him, pointed a revolver at his head and said, "You're dead, Copper."

Then he pulled the trigger.

"I looked down the barrel of his gun from 4 feet away," Miller said. "It's only by the grace of God that he missed."

It was the type of crime that attracts little publicity — no one was killed, only $2,440 was stolen and the flying bullets damaged property not people. But Miller agreed to share his story, hoping to bring attention to the dangerous work suburban police sometimes do and what he saw as a case of the criminal justice system working as it should.

It was nearly 80 degrees outside when Sevier, then 42, walked into the Aldi store, 12050 S. Pulaski Road, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt around 7 p.m. The Bowen High School dropout asked two employees where the manager was, records show.

When they didn't answer, he pulled out a gun and said, "Do you guys think this is a (expletive) joke?"

This wasn't Sevier's first armed robbery. The Chicago man was sentenced to 20 years in 1984 for a series of armed robberies. During his time in prison, he was certified in "stress and anger management," but the training didn't appear to help much.

The father of four was on parole on federal drug charges when he walked into the south suburban store with a .38-caliber revolver, records show. He came from a religious family but had taken a different path. On his left arm are tattoos of both praying hands and barbed wire, records show.

As Sevier approached with a gun, the manager hit a silent alarm and ran. Sevier caught him outside the store and forced him back inside at gunpoint, taking cash from a safe, drawers and even the manager's pockets before fleeing through a back door near the loading dock.

That's where Miller, then 41, saw him. He had just returned to work after eating dinner with his wife and two children, then 3 and 1, when the armed robbery call came in.

"He looks at me; I yell, 'Police!' and like a jackrabbit, away he goes," Miller said. Sevier didn't run to his getaway car.

"This guy came loaded for bear," Miller said, noting that residents told police Sevier walked through the neighborhood earlier that day. "He went to that backyard intentionally, waiting for me, to ambush me."

Yvonne Shepard, 46, was supposed to meet her family that night for her father's birthday dinner at her favorite restaurant, but at the last minute she decided not to go. Instead, she was on her deck serving Popsicles to her young daughter and several neighborhood kids when she saw a man with a gun.

"I've been saying since the day it happened — this was all God's plan. We were all placed there at just the right time," said Shepard, a worker at the Nabisco plant in Chicago.

Shepard's cousin, a Chicago police detective, had been shot in the stomach while trying to arrest a murder suspect years ago, she said. And she didn't want the children to see someone killed.

She saw Sevier with his gun in the air about to ambush Miller, who was holding his gun at his side, at her neighbor's garage. So she screamed the warning.

Both men froze, and Sevier turned to look at Shepard for an instant — just long enough for Miller to run for cover. "(I was thinking) what the hell are you looking at me for?" Shepard said.

"Fortunately I had a guardian angel in Yvonne Shepard," Miller said. "She could've just simply grabbed her kids and ran.

"Had she not said something, I would've taken it to the back of my head. It's because of her that I was able to go home that night and see my kids again."

Shepard doesn't feel like a hero. "It was just my big mouth," she said.

Sevier stuck his gun around the garage wall and fired, with Miller returning fire. Alsip Officers James Portincaso and James Tyszko ran toward the gunfire as Shepard led the children to cover in her basement.

Portincaso ordered Sevier to the ground. The robbery suspect started to go down — then yelled, "(Expletive) you, cop!" and opened fire, striking the ground next to Portincaso. Sevier then opened fire at Miller, who was already out of bullets.

Miller kept his eyes on the spot where he thought Sevier was hiding as he reloaded. He was wrong — and says Sevier likely would have killed him if he hadn't first shouted, "You're dead, Copper," giving Miller an instant to duck through an open gate along the brick wall.

"I run into the backyard, I turn around," Miller said. "I'm thinking this is the OK Corral. It's going to be who hits who first. I've got no cover now."

Instead, Sevier decided to run east toward the getaway car — a white 1997 Chrysler Cirrus sedan parked at 119th Street and Pulaski. After a short pursuit, the car crashed into a Merrionette Park squad car in a Jewel parking lot.

Investigators found nearly 30 rounds had been fired during the incident. All five rounds in Sevier's Taurus revolver were spent, but investigators were not sure how many times he actually fired.

There was one bullet in Shepard's pool and two in her home, including one that was stuck near a chair where she had been sitting seconds before the shooting started.

Around 1 a.m. that night, Shepard's husband told her there was an officer at the door. It was Miller.

"We just hugged," Shepard said. "He said, 'Thank you so much; my name is Mark.' We talked and then we cried. He was a new dad. It was really an emotional moment."

At one point during the nearly three years it took to bring the case to trial, defense attorneys made an offer: Sevier would plead guilty to the armed robbery in exchange for the attempted murder charges being dropped, Miller said. Prosecutors took the offer to the three officers who had been under fire.

"I said, 'No way,'" Miller said. "I know how the system works; if he gets 25 (years) … he'll be out in six. This guy is going to kill somebody — he's not going to stop."

But Miller questioned the wisdom of his decision in March. After a three-day trial, jurors deliberated for less than two hours before reaching a verdict.

He and other Alsip police officers nervously returned to Judge Joseph Hynes' courtroom in Markham to hear the outcome.

When Miller heard jurors reached a not guilty verdict for the attempted murder of Portincaso, he felt "instantly sick … like I got kicked in the you-know-where."

The feeling lifted after jurors returned guilty verdicts for armed robbery and the attempted murder of Miller. He said Sevier turned to his attorney and shrugged.

"It was a joke to him; that's all it was," Miller said.

Judge Hynes had seen enough. The Bible college correspondence classes Sevier had been taking since his arrest didn't outweigh his years of criminal activity.

Last month, Hynes handed down a 110-year sentence.

"I feel that society is a lot safer now without him out on the street," Miller said.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/southsouthwest/ct-met-0702-alsip-cop-survival-20100702,0,2716620,print.story