Teens charged in murder of gay principal
The Washington Examiner reports Maryland county police have charged three teenagers in the murder of gay Washington, D. C., middle-school principal Brian Betts last month.
Montgomery County police claim Sharif Lau Lancaster, Dontra Q. Gray and Alante Saunders, all 18, got themselves invited to Betts’ Silver Spring home through Adam4Adam, a Web site catering to gay men.
Betts’ body was found April 15 after he didn’t show up to work at the Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson. The 42-year-old had been shot in the back, but there was no sign of forced entry.
Lancaster’s mother has been charged with using Betts’ stolen credit cards at a supermarket the day after his body was found.
At a hearing May 4, all three teens were ordered held without bond.
Chicago Free Press folds
Advocate.com reports the Chicago Free Press, one of the city’s two major LGBT newspapers, has ceased publication.
The Free Press showed signs of trouble in December, when several staff members walked out because they had not been paid. However, publisher David Costanzo said managing editor Kerrie Kennedy and the remaining staff continued producing the publication.
But Kennedy said May 3 that Costanzo was ill and no longer funding the paper. The April 29 issue was not published, and there will be no further issues, she added.
The Free Press was started in 1999 by employees who had left Chicago’s Windy City Times.
Voice actor fired for insulting Tea Party
The Huffington Post reports Lance Baxter, otherwise known as “D.C. Douglas” and best recognized for voiceover work on GEICO commercials, has been fired by the insurance company after leaving a voicemail for Tea Party group FreedomWorks.
Baxter asked in his voicemail what “the percentage of people that are mentally retarded who are working for FreedomWorks and who are following it.”
Baxter also questioned how FreedomWorks will “spin it when one of your members does actually kill somebody, wondering if you’ve got a PR spinning routine planned for that or are you just gonna take it when it happens.”
Baxter has since acknowledged that such a move was “stupid,” but said he was impassioned by the “slurs the Tea Party crowd angrily yelled at Barney Frank” during the climax of health-care reform.
— Larry Nichols