Parkour is more than a sport, it’s a lifestyle

By Ruth Moon

July 27, 2010

Thirteen young men huddle on the edge of the playground. One takes off, attempts to vault over a bench and tumbles to the ground amid laughter.

Another hoists himself to the top of the swing set, where he balances along the beam and back-flips off the end.

A third takes a running start, sprints five yards and runs eight feet up the side of a concrete wall, where he flips and lands on his feet.

This is parkour, an obscure but growing sport that uses gymnastic vaults, flips and other superherolike body movements to navigate obstacles.

The sport was born in France in the late 1980s when then-teen David Belle decided to develop a Spider-Man-style activity.

Thanks largely to the Internet, parkour has taken off in the U.S. during the past decade. There’s an MTV show devoted to the sport and a first-person parkour video game called “Mirror’s Edge.”

It even has built a following in Colorado Springs, like the group that gathered recently to practice on obstacles such as the swing sets, benches, baseball dugouts and playground walls of Cottonwood Creek Park.

For some, parkour is almost like a drug — but one they use to stay out of trouble.

“The more experience you get … the less exhilaration you get, because you know you can do it (a stunt), so there isn’t as much adrenaline,” said 17-year-old Dante Grazioli, a Springs resident. “You have to just keep searching for more.”

Springs-area resident Dan Teel organized the weekend event, which swelled the Colorado Springs parkour scene to three times its usual size. Along with three friends in the Springs, the 17-year-old recently spent a week in Los Angeles with a friend who stars in MTV’s “Ultimate Parkour Challenge” show.

The young men are tapping into an international phenomenon. There are more than 350,000 YouTube videos with the word “parkour” in the title, some garnering tens of millions of views.

About 20 people meet regularly in Denver to practice together, said Will Schultz, a trainer at Apex Movement in Englewood, which offers beginner parkour classes for $155. Traceurs do not know how many people do the sport nationally.

Parkour classes are available at some Colorado Springs centers; Aerials Gymnastics held a children’s parkour class in February and will continue to offer it if there is interest, and ArtSports Gymnastics and Dance rents space to another group that teaches parkour, office workers said.

But don’t expect to see parkour taught in area schools any time soon, said Peggy Vigil, who oversees and approves the physical education curriculum for School District 11.

“If you’re jumping over obstacles and walls and things like that, there’s huge liability risks for our school-age kids,” she said.

The danger doesn’t stop enthusiasts like Justin Oakes, who said he would probably be in jail today if he hadn’t discovered parkour. Instead, the 21-year-old was at Cottonwood Creek Park, to which he drove from Oklahoma City for the weekend meet with fellow traceurs. Oakes had a DUI on his record and had been arrested for burglary before he discovered parkour. Now, he hangs out with fellow traceurs, who are usually practicing their moves.

“You get hooked to it — you can’t stop,” said Oakes. “It keeps you out of trouble, that’s for sure.”

Still, Oakes is a reminder of the dangers of parkour. When he landed wrong after a jump off a chest-high wall, he ended up with a broken hand and kneecap, and needed reconstructive surgery for a broken jaw, shattered chin and sinus cavities, and a broken nose.

But the former baseball player is back at the sport; he couldn’t give it up.

“I’ve got nothing else to do. I don’t know anything else anymore,” Oakes said. “Whenever someone asks you to go do something stupid or something, you’re like, ‘No, I’m gonna go do this, I’m gonna go do parkour.’”

Perhaps because of its Internet roots, the sport seems to attract science-fiction fans and computer programmers such as 24-year-old Andy Tran, who now teaches parkour in Alexandria, Va., and has written an article on the demographics of the sport.

“We always seem to start out as the nerdy kids who never really got much sunlight,” Tran said. “We’re big Internet nerds.”

Devoted fans say parkour is more than a sport. It’s a lifestyle, said Schultz, the trainer in Englewood. He describes it as gaining “parkour eyes” and a new respect for your surroundings.

“As soon as you really start training, you stop looking at things as things, and start looking at them as opportunities to create movement,” he said. “If I’m walking downtown, I’ll cross the street to touch a brick wall I think might be extra grippy. That’s just how it is.”

 

‘PARKOUR’ DEFINED
Parkour derives its name from “parcours,” French for “route.” The sport’s practitioners are known as traceurs and traceuses, French for “tracers” — people who find a path around obstacles through a landscape.

Original story posted here.

Digging history

Geology buffs uncover details about Colorado’s mining towns.

By Ruth Moon

August 11, 2010

VICTOR Steve Veatch knew his ancestors settled in the tiny Teller County mining town of Victor, but he didn’t know much else about the community on the south side of Pikes Peak.
So Veatch joined fellow members of the Lake George Gem and Mineral Club to do some digging.

Three hundred hours, $700 and multiple field trips later, Veatch and his club fellows had compiled a historical record of Victor which a local geologist hails as “the best single source” for detailed information on the town.

Veatch presented the research recently at Victor’s Gold Rush Days. His audience of seven watched a slide show outlining the history of this town below Pikes Peak on Battle Mountain — did you know Victor once had 37 saloons, 29 hotels, 18 grocery stores, 16 doctors and a hospital, and was the fifth-largest city in Colorado?

On a personal note, Veatch discovered that his great-grandfather was a gold miner who moved to Victor in the 1890s and mined the Elkton mine.

His grandmother remembers hearing the miners: Each morning as they set off for work, the Welsh- and British-bred men would sing ancient mining songs handed down from families in Europe. And Veatch learned that his grandfather grew up in a mining community in Boulder.

“I have mining heritage on both sides,” he said. “I was genetically predisposed to pursue mining interests.”

After the slide show, the group piled into a bus for a field trip to visit historic mines in the hills above the town.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Laura Moncrief, a genealogist from Divide who came on the tour. “So much of this gets torn down, thrown away, because there was a generation before mine that were more interested in making money and surviving.

“We’re lucky that we have some resources and are interested in this type of thing.”

The two-hour driving tour looped around the American Eagles Scenic Overlook — where a historic mining headframe and other century-old buildings tell Victor’s mining history — and past modern open pit cyanide mining operations to several of the region’s deserted mines, including the Cresson, Vindicator and Independence.

Veatch shared geology and history tidbits at each stop, often enlisting the help of 84-year-old Ed Hunter, a Victor resident who has been in the mining industry since graduating from Colorado School of Mines shortly after World War II.

“To be able to see it like this is just amazing,” Hunter said as he looked at the contrast between buildings from the old Vindicator mine and the modern mining operation. “I started out with … mine cars underground. To go to a 300-ton truck — my god.”

Victor is the second town Veatch and his team have profiled. The team’s first project started two years ago when a resident of Guffey asked Veatch to prepare a slide show on the geology of the unincorporated Park County town. He agreed and recruited fellow club members to help out.

Veatch, a part-time professor at Colorado School of Mines, taught the other project members how to do things like interview and conduct Internet research. Then off they went.

The team collected oral histories from older town residents, scoured newspaper archives for stories from the past and collected old cemetery records. They looked at old photographs and historical Sanborn fire insurance maps. Sanborn started creating detailed drawings of U.S. communities in 1867 that are now considered research tools for historians.

The team also traveled around Guffey examining rock and mineral structures. They even discovered that a spring near Guffey produces radioactive water.

The Guffey project was so popular with the team that it decided to tackle Victor, profiling it last year.

Currently, the team is finishing its third profile, this time examining Alma, a town of about 200 people near Fairplay. Again, they are making discoveries: From newspaper archives, the team uncovered the forgotten town of Timberline, which existed in the late 19th century but isn’t recorded in any history books, Veatch said.

They’ll present the Alma research in late September at Alma Community Church and at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

“I find both of these pieces very well written and accurate,” Tom Huber, a UCCS geography professor who read the Victor and Guffey project abstracts, said in an e-mail. “There is technical detail, but the pieces are both accessible to the intelligent lay person who is interested in these areas.”

Veatch said the experience has taught him a lot more than just Guffey and Victor history. He has learned about Colorado and group projects in the process.

“Not so long ago this was all wilderness, and the only law out here was provided by mining districts and miners,” he said. “It’s also interesting to learn that people from all types of backgrounds can do just about anything they want, if they’re given the right direction and shown how to do it.”

The team plans to continue adding towns to the project. It will profile another town next year, although Veatch isn’t yet sure what town.

“That will come up somehow,” he said. “Somebody will say: ‘Hey, what about this town?’ ”

Original story posted here.

Josh Turner: Just getting warmed up

By Ruth Moon

August 06, 2010

At 32, country music star Josh Turner has already made it by most people’s standards.

The singer/songwriter has sold more than 4 million albums, produced three multi-week No. 1 hits — “Your Man,” “Would You Go With Me” and a single from his latest album, “Why Don’t We Just Dance” — but Turner isn’t done yet.

“My ultimate goal is the Country Music Hall of Fame,” Turner said. “I have a lot of years ahead of me that I need to work, and there’s a lot of things I want to accomplish.”

Luckily for Colorado Springs residents, the artist’s list of things to accomplish includes a concert stop at the Pikes Peak Center today, where fans will be able to hear the gravelly voiced musician live.

Turner said he’s looking forward to playing here (and he insists he doesn’t say that about every city he visits).

“There’s a lot of great country music fans out there,” he said of Colorado. “It’s a beautiful area; we just always have a great time playing out there.”

Despite the star’s success in the music biz, he still seems down-to-earth as he jokes about the challenges of turning stories into songs and talks about coping with tough times through his music.

Question: How did you get into music as a career?

Answer: It all started when I met a small publisher here in town (Nashville) named Jody Williams, and he gave me a publishing deal and took me around to MCA Records. … I played three songs and they decided to sign me, and next year will be 10 years that I’ve been signed there.

Q: I’m always curious when I talk to musicians about how you go about writing songs and how that process works for you.

A: I’m still trying to figure that out. Songwriting is something that’s not easy, I don’t care what anybody says. You really have to put yourself in a place to allow yourself to be inspired or to be moved by an idea or a story. … I’ve had a lot of songs just seem like they write themselves, like they need to come out and you just write the words down on paper and they just keep going and everything fits. It’s a great feeling.

That’s the best possible scenario, where songs pretty much write themselves. But then there are other songs that you have to work at a little bit. There are songs I’ve written in the past that I believed in, but they just didn’t come easy, so I just had to keep working at them. Finally, they came together, and I’m glad I stuck it out.

Q: How do you know when a song is done, when it’s finished?

A: It’s just an inner feeling, an inner thought formation. You feel when it’s done. It’s hard to describe, but you can just tell. It’s kind of like when you’re cleaning the house. You could keep going for another couple of hours, but you know when that time has come to quit cleaning. You know what I mean? That’s kind of the way it is with a song. You could keep working at it if you wanted to, but you’d probably be wasting your time or probably be screwing it up or whatever. You just kind of know when there’s nothing more that needs to be done with it.

Q: What’s your favorite song you haven’t written or performed or recorded?

A: This song that I’m about to tell you is a song that I never answered this question with. And it’s not so much something that I would record myself, but as far as melody and the craft of lyrics and chord progressions and just artistic ingredients … I heard this song again last night, and it’s a song called “Misery and Gin.” When I was sitting there listening to this song, it just made me realize just how great of a song it was. It kinda gave life to heartache and pain, and, like I say, the melody and the chord progressions — it just all felt so natural. It’s just a good song to use as an example of how to tell a story.

Q: “Why Don’t We Just Dance” has been a hit for four weeks, and one review I read said you were attracted to the song’s ability to create an escapist, happy mood in the middle of difficult times.

A: I think music in general has been a form of escapism for people for a long, long time. Dating back to the dawn of time, I think people have used music to express themselves; they’ve used it to communicate with each other, but they’ve also used it to take their mind off the troubles they’re going through.

So “Why Don’t We Just Dance” is definitely one of those songs that brings people together; it makes people want to dance together, it makes people want to talk about the important things in life and forget about all the bad stuff going on in the world.

Q: What is your goal in music? You said you want people to talk about the important issues — in your music, what are you trying to get people to think?

A: I never want people to feel worse about themselves or their life after they listen to a Josh Turner record. I want them to listen to my record and say, “You know what, life isn’t so bad, after all. And I just need to look on the bright side of things, and this song really makes me feel good, and you know, I need to dance. I need to quit worrying about all this other stuff and just concentrate on the good things in life.”

—

Original story posted here.

WWII vet recalls POW camp

By Ruth Moon

When Arthur Goss thinks about American flags, one in particular stands out to him.

He saw it on a spring day in 1945 at Stalag 7A — Germany’s largest prison camp and home to 130,000 Allied prisoners of war — where Goss was held as a POW during World War II.

The flag was hand-stitched by a skinny lieutenant POW, Goss said, who hid it in his sheets until April 29, 1945, when American troops finally arrived to liberate the camp, located about 20 miles northeast of Munich.

Goss, 88, vividly recalled Monday how the lieutenant pulled out the flag, shimmied up the pole and replaced the German flag with the American stars and stripes.

“It was not only the tanks that created the cheering – it was seeing this kid put that flag up,” Goss said. “It’s just something that remains in you – thank God you can protect your flag.”

Goss was reminded of the day while attending a Flag Day ceremony at the Pioneers Museum in downtown Colorado Springs. The ceremony, which honored military veterans and POWs, included the unveiling of another unique flag, which will become part of a new POW exhibit opening July 17 at the museum.

The flag put on exhibit Monday was sewn by Germans at Stalag Luft III, the first POW camp where Goss was a prisoner. The POW camp for airmen was located in Poland about 100 miles southeast of Berlin. This flag was used in ritual traditions such as military burials.

“Our flag is a symbol of national pride,” city councilmember Jan Martin said at the ceremony. “It’s so important today to stop and remember.”

And Goss has many memories.

A former Air Force lieutenant and pilot, Goss’s plane was shot down Aug. 15, 1944. Of the 13 planes in Goss’s mission, 11 were shot down; his plane exploded in midair, and Germans from a nearby town were waiting with pitchforks when he hit the ground.

Goss gave his heavy pilot’s shoes to a young girl so he could run, and the girl stayed by his side, which he says stopped them from shooting him and saved his life.

He was taken to Stalag Luft III, the prison camp featured in the movie “The Great Escape,” and was transferred from there to Stalag 7A with the other POWs when Russian troops began to close in on the camp.

Goss remembers eating dandelion greens and potato skins to keep from starving; while at the camp, his weight dropped from 175 to 135 pounds. The American prisoners had to use ditches in the center of camp as toilets.

He was a prisoner of war until Gen. George Patton’s army rolled through at the end of the following April.

Goss settled in Colorado Springs in 1974 when he retired from the Air Force. He donated some of his wartime memorabilia to the Air Force Academy, which is loaning the items to the Pioneer Museum for the year-long exhibit.

The flag Goss helped unveil will be on display at the museum this week, along with two other flags used to facilitate a surrender during the war.

The rest of the exhibit will feature war memorabilia – such as a set of German killing knives from Goss – along with stories from prisoners of war.

“It’s only recently these World War II vets are willing to talk, and we’re losing them at such a high rate that it’s important to collect their stories,” said Matt Mayberry, director of the Pioneers Museum. “It’s important that the current generation hear them, to use these lessons for the future.”

Goss said he has almost forgotten many of his experiences – but the memories never quite disappear. Some of the men in his airplane died, and he often wonders if he could have saved them.

“You think back on experiences like that, you worry about it. You worry about what happened,” he said. “Freedom isn’t free – you have to earn it. You see that once you’re a POW.”

Original story posted here.

Built to Last

Ed Martin has been crafting handmade boots for 70-plus years.

August 30, 2010

RUTH MOON

The Gazette

From the highway, Ed Martin’s house is just a bump in a cornfield east of the Fort Lyon prison.

It’s not until an apron-clad Martin opens the door of his workshop — a 1920s-era ranch house his aunt passed on — that piles of leather and old tools hint at his profession.

It’s the shed, though, that gives it away.

The old, rundown boxcar behind Martin’s shop is filled with rows and rows — about $20,000 worth — of foot-shape molds called lasts, the foundations of handmade boots.

“Every pair is different — you put yourself into every pair,” Martin said of his boots. “I’ve made a living, but nothing spectacular. But I love what I do.”

The last is the most important part of the boot, Martin says. He uses one of his 400 pairs of lasts to shape the body of every boot he makes.

Each pair of finished cowboy boots is unique.

Some, like the two pairs sitting by his front door, are elegantly simple, tan ostrich or chocolate alligator with little ornamentation.

Some are elaborate, richly ornamented, with flower and leaf cutouts in yellows and blues and rows of decorative topstitching, which Martin freehands row by row on an old sewing machine.

Martin is one of seven bootmakers in Colorado and about 250 professional bootmakers in the U.S., said Dave Hutchings, a bootmaker in Thornton on the board of the national Boot & Saddle Makers Trade Show Roundup held in Wichita Falls, Texas, each year.

“You could put Ed’s boots next to any other bootmaker’s, and his boots would be different,” Hutchings said. “He’d be right there at the top with some of the top custom bootmakers around the world or around the country.”

Martin’s boots sell for upwards of $900. Some are far more expensive; he has one pair of alligator hides, good for one pair of boots, that cost him $1,000.

Martin is about 5 feet 8 inches tall, with black-rimmed glasses, short white hair and, yes, he’s wearing cowboy boots (half-quill ostrich) under faded, boot-cut jeans.

He looks fit and trim even at 82 — evidence that he was bred from cowboy stock. His grandfather was a sheriff, and his father was a bootmaker in Amarillo, Texas. Ed’s two brothers also joined the bootmaking business. One died, but his brother Vern Martin still lives in Amarillo and makes boots at age 87.

Martin’s leathery hands are gentle as he pulls pieces of animal hide from bins in a bedroom of the house.

It’s not the drab, uniform leather selection you might expect if you’ve visited any run-of-the-mill boot shack.

He has ostrich hide, lizard, alligator, calfskin, kangaroo, eel, horn-back lizard and stingray in a rainbow of colors — royal blue, magenta, cherry red and every shade of brown imaginable.

As he walks around the workshop, past old heavy-duty sewing machines, leather scraps and spools of thread, Martin describes the bootmaking process. The process is peppered with words like “last,” “tongue,” “border” and “quarter-box toe.”

He first measures the foot, then cuts leather parts using thick blue metal cookie-cutter shapes and a high-pressure machine that pinches the cutter onto the leather. Then he starts cutting and stitching decorations.

“Everything I do, I want it to be fresh and the best I can do,” he said. “I feel like I’m making a better boot today then I ever have before, even when I was 60 or 70.”

Martin dropped out of fifth grade in the 1940s to help support the family when his father left. He worked as a shoe repairman for $3 a week, and was later hired by Engerton’s Boot and Saddle Co., where he worked for $25 a week.

Back when Martin was learning the trade, Amarillo was a national center for bootmaking, and there were bootmakers on practically every corner.

“Somebody would say ‘Boy, I’d take a pair of them and have them tomorrow,’ and this bootmaker would look at the other and grin,” Martin said. “They’d work half the night, mainly all night, two of them, making this guy a pair of boots, just for the heck of it.”

In his prime, Martin made two pairs of boots a week. Business is slow these days, so he doesn’t work as speedily. But he still makes boots for customers all over the country; one man who works in the wine business in California flies out to see Martin and place orders.

He also won first place for “best dress boot” at 2001’s Boot & Saddle Maker Roundup in Brownwood, Texas.

Bootmakers are close with their trade secrets, and he learned the tricks of the trade by being quick on his feet and spying out the actions of his fellow bootmakers.

And some bootmaking tips stay in the family. An intricate, scrolling border pattern that Martin uses to finish the tops of some boots has been in his family and shared among the brothers for decades. He uses a lasting tool his father used that was made in Sweden in the 1800s.

He’s not quite so secretive. Martin has had a few students over the years, including Suzanne Watson.

Watson, a bootmaker in Paonia, sold her house about 10 years ago to move and learn bootmaking. She traveled to Missouri and Oklahoma for classes but was unhappy with all of her teachers until someone recommended Martin.

She said Martin is a perfectionist and can be cranky, but is a great teacher who is now a mentor and friend.

Martin moved from Amarillo to Boulder in 1964, then to Firestone. The widower settled in Fort Lyon almost a decade ago, when he sold his shop to retire from bootmaking.

“I thought it was time … I didn’t think I would make any more boots,” he said.

But that didn’t last long.

“I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “I had to get back.”

So he is back, as E.P. Martin Boots, working away on this deserted stretch of U.S. Highway 50.

Even after decades of experience, Martin says a prayer to the “boot god” every time he cuts a piece of leather. Each new pair is a challenge, his student Watson agreed.

“You’re looking at that last, you’re looking at the measurements you took, and there’s so many feet that are so different,” Watson said.

“You have to stick by what you’ve learned and stick by your measurements and trust that, and trust the last that you have.”

Original story here.

Woman charged with murder in Monument girl’s death

August 04, 2010 3:18 PM

RUTH MOON

The Gazette

A 9-year-old girl whose decomposed body was found in the basement of a Monument home in May had been beaten with a belt for soiling herself and then allowed to linger near death for two days before possibly being buried alive, an arrest affidavit states.

Monique Lynch was charged Wednesday with first-degree murder in the death of Genesis Sims. Lynch faces a possible life sentence.

Lynch and the girl’s father, Hanif Sims, were arrested in early July after months on the run. Both initially were accused of child abuse resulting in death.

Sims still faces that charge along with concealing a body and tampering with evidence and faces up to 51 years in prison. Lynch also has been charged with child abuse resulting in death, concealing a body and tampering with evidence.

The cause of the girl’s death has not been determined, but if it is eventually ruled a homicide, it could be the first ever in Monument, authorities have said.

According to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office arrest affidavit, Monique Lynch allegedly beat Genesis with a belt because the girl had soiled herself, then the couple let her linger for two days without getting her medical help. Genesis may have still been alive when Sims and Lynch placed her in a plastic bag and buried her in the basement, the affidavit states.

The affidavit gave the following account of Genesis’ death:

“Hanif Sims told sheriff’s Detective (Ralph) Losasso that on the day of her death, Genesis had soiled herself and Monique Lynch became upset and began beating her with a belt. Hanif said he told Monique to stop, she had disciplined Genesis enough.

“Monique then took Genesis upstairs to clean her up.”

Sims then left to buy cigarettes returning about a half hour later to find Lynch in the bathroom with Genesis in the tub.

“Hanif Sims said Monique Lynch was yelling at Genesis, telling her to get her ass up and quit faking. Hanif said he picked Genesis up and took her to the bed and gave her mouth to mouth because she didn’t seem to be breathing. Hanif said it appeared Genesis was breathing, but shallow.

“According to Hanif Sims, he told Monique to call 911, but that Monique told him no because she was wanted on a warrant for her arrest and she was pregnant with another child and could not afford to go to jail. Hanif admitted to detectives that he believed that if medical had responded when they should have called, Genesis would be alive today.”

Hanif told the detective that he and Lynch stayed in a bedroom with a shallow-breathing Genesis for two days before placing her in a  bag, digging a hole and burying her, the affidavit stated.

Lynch and Sims are each being held in the El Paso County jail on $500,000 bond. Kathleen Walsh, spokesperson for the 4th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, said prosecutors will be requesting that Lynch be held without bond. Their next court date is Aug 12.

The couple was arrested in Henderson, Nev., after months on the run and brought back to Colorado in early July.

Genesis’ remains were found May 14 by construction workers renovating the town home in the 700 block of Century Place in Monument where Sims and Lynch and two children had lived.

The girl’s identity was determined by DNA tests and authorities in several states, including California and the couple’s home state of New Jersey, began searching for them.

According to Lewis-Palmer School District 38 records, Genesis was enrolled in the second grade for about six weeks, but was removed to be home-schooled.

After moving out of the Monument town home, Lynch and Sims are believed to have gone to California, where they lived at the Union Rescue Mission homeless shelter in Los Angeles from March until December.

A few days before they were caught, News Channel 13 reported that the couple contacted the station and denied killing Genesis, claiming they had found her lifeless in the bathtub and buried her in the basement.

When Genesis’ body was discovered in mid-May, news of Monique Lynch’s possible involvement came as a shock to her sister, Cassandra Lynch.

“We know her and it’s very hard for us to accept what the media is saying about her,” Cassandra Lynch said. “She could not hurt a child, she just couldn’t. It’s not in her.”

Cassandra Lynch said her sister, formerly of Newark, N.J., has been with Sims for about three years, though the two never married while living in New Jersey.

They both had children when their relationship began, and eventually had a child together after moving away from Colorado.

Monique Lynch entered the relationship with a son, Davon, who is now about 13. Hanif had Genesis, whose mother, Jopetia Garretson, still lives in New Jersey.

They moved to Colorado around December 2008, she said, to “start a new life and give her son a better chance of growing up because things in the neighborhood were getting out of control and too violent,” Cassandra Lynch said.

While living at the homeless shelter in Los Angeles, Monique Lynch was featured in a promotional video for the shelter holding her and Sims’ newborn son. Both the older son and infant were left with friends and then placed with relatives after the couple left the homeless shelter and went on the run.

“The only thing I have to say is I’m hurting right now,” Garretson said Wednesday. “I was expecting that they would be saying that about her (Genesis’) dad right away, not so much her (Lynch).”

“If they say she’s guilty of that, then I have to go by that,” Garretson said. “But I think they both have something to do with it one way or another.”

Garretson said she still hasn’t received Genesis’ body and wants it back soon.

“I don’t think it’s right for them to be holding on to her like that, I don’t think it’s right,” she said. “Me and her sisters have to suffer because we can’t have her.”

I reported and wrote this breaking news story under deadline.

Original article here. Story picked up by Associated Press and ran on Huffington Post.