Utah medical examiner: Little girl suffered “excruciating pain” before dying from tear to heart

For new readers, visit our previous post on the case of a Burmese Muslim (Rohingya?) refugee, Esar Met, who is charged with the 2008 murder of a 7-year-old Christian (Karen) refugee girl in their Salt Lake City apartment building.

Esar Met in 2012 when he was ordered to stand trial.
http://www.4utah.com/s/d/story/JGtHquvxrE-9U39U45sspQ

This is the latest on the trial that is expected to run until January 24th.  From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Hser Ner Moo suffered more than a dozen painful injuries in the hour before she died, an autopsy revealed, but it was a tear to her heart that sealed the girl’s fate, the state’s chief medical examiner testified Monday.

Dr. Todd Grey took the stand on the fifth day of the trial of Esar Met, a Burmese refugee accused of kidnapping, assaulting and killing the 7-year-old girl in 2008.

He walked the 11-person jury through the child’s injuries, several of which he described as “excruciating.”

Grey ruled that the sum of these injuries caused the child’s death, but noted the wound to the girl’s heart — a tear in the right atrium — was the most lethal.

“This would have been excruciating pain,” Grey said. “This was a homicide, a death due to an intentional action by another person.”

Met, 27, who calmly sat through the graphic testimony Monday morning, is charged in 3rd District Court with first-degree felony child kidnapping and aggravated murder. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Read the rest of the graphic details yourself.

Met had only been placed in the apartment building a month before the murder presumably as a newly arrived refugee from the camps in Thailand.   This murder did not have to happen.

If he is found guilty the cost of his incarceration for life will fall on the taxpayers of Utah.  Every “welcoming” city should be demanding that the US State Department and its contractors—in this case Catholic Charities or the International Rescue Committee (which just last week was begging for the US to admit 12,000 Syrians)—be sure they screen very well the ‘refugees’ they drop-off in your city!

Imagine also what this trial is costing the taxpayers.

Maybe some Member of Congress or Senate could introduce legislation that says when refugees commit crimes the cost is not borne by the local jurisdiction, but by the feds.  Of course that is taxpayer dollars too, but at least it would send a message!

“Advocacy group” tells Congress to bring in 12,000 Syrians THIS year, waive the security rules

Molly Groom (Homeland Security): We are working on developing exemptions from terrorist definitions for Syrians. Photo Aljazeera America

Update January 17th:  The US Conference of Catholic Bishops was there too, they want the US to admit 15,000 ASAP.

It’s not just the Lutherans telling Congress—wahhhhh! we want Syrians, it’s the International Rescue Committee (IRC) the Wall Street Journal calls an “advocacy group” that told Senator Dick Durbin’s Judiciary subcommittee last week that they want to forego security measures and bring ’em (12,000) in NOW!

I’m struck by the label “advocacy group,” generally meaning lobbyists, and am wondering why then we are paying the lobbying group millions of taxpayer dollars to lobby for themselves (they are paid by the head to resettle refugees; of course they always want more!).

Just a reminder you pay the new IRC head honcho, David Miliband, nearly a half million dollars a year to do his job for an “advocacy group.”

And, by the way, these “advocacy groups” have been agitating for all the years we’ve written this blog for the post-911 “material support to terrorism bar” to be removed with just about every group of refugees we bring—it was especially a big rallying cry to get the Iraqis in here.  It did cause the Bush Administration to keep the Iraqi flow slow, but eventually, worn down by these groups and their media lackeys, Bush opened the floodgates (and some terrorists got in!).

As the lobbying groups did at the Senate hearing, they like to throw out the ol’ sandwich story—-golly if you gave a sandwich to a terrorist (even a terrorist on the side of the US) then you were barred from entering the US.  The Iraqi terrorists who did get in were making IEDs not sandwiches!

By the way, these are the same stories (sandwiches) we heard with Iraqis and Burmese.  I think it’s amusing that there are still Iraqis coming in and Burmese too, but the “advocacy groups” (bored perhaps with those refugees) have moved on to the newest coolest refugee group—Syrians—to add to their multi-culty collection of immigrants. Plus I suspect the “Syrian crisis” keeps their organization’s name in the news.

Not a word in this story though about the truly persecuted Christian Syrians.  That would not be politically correct for even the supposedly religious refugee contractors.

Here is reporter Miriam Jordan at the Wall Street Journal this past week:

U.S. plans to resettle thousands of Syrians displaced by their country’s civil war could hinge on those refugees receiving exemptions from laws aimed at preventing terrorists from entering the country.

A U.S. official stated publicly for the first time this week that some of the 30,000 especially vulnerable Syrians the United Nations hopes to resettle by the end of 2014 will be referred to the U.S. for resettlement.

[….]

The U.S. has not set a specific target for how many refugees it will resettle. But at a Senate hearing Tuesday, State Department Assistant Secretary Anne Richard said, “We expect to accept referrals for several thousand Syrian refugees in 2014.”

[….]

Molly Groom, acting deputy secretary for the Office of Immigration and Border Security at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged that “broad definitions” of terrorist activity under U.S. law were “often a hurdle to resettling otherwise eligible refugees who pose no security threat.” She said agencies were consulting to develop exemptions for the Syrians.

Human Rights First is an “advocacy group” but the International Refugee Committee is a quasi-government agency, a federal contractor***, due to the large portion of its budget you pay!

Anwen Hughes, a lawyer at Human Rights First who has studied the laws’ impact, said that the government has been “reactive, slow,” about giving exemptions up to now, and urged a swifter process, given the magnitude of the Syrian crisis.

The advocacy group has called on the U.S. to work to resettle 15,000 Syrians a year. The International Rescue Committee, another advocacy organization, is pressing the U.S. to set a goal of 12,000 Syrian refugees this year.

When they say “this year” they mean this fiscal year—FY2014—that began October 1, 2013.   And, because the economy is still so weak, it means they will be brought in with poor job prospects and join the ever-expanding welfare rolls.

***If you are seeing this list of contractors for the first time, don’t be fooled by the title—Voluntary Agencies—that is such a joke implying they are doing their resettlement out of private charity and the goodness of their hearts.  It isn’t so.  They could not exist without the millions and millions of tax dollars they each get from the US State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement to bring refugees to your cities and towns.

Photo is from Aljazeera America which must obviously have covered the hearing.

Utah murder might not have happened if US State Department had not placed Burmese Muslim in Christian apartment

Why are we resettling so many Muslims?  Why any Muslims at all?

It ultimately falls on the US State Department to have some understanding of Muslim/Christian tensions among the refugees they resettle in America even if it was Catholic Community Services or the International Rescue Committee (federal contractors in Utah) who ultimately placed Muslim Esar Met in the middle of a Burmese Christian Karen group of refugees.  We learned from the extensive reporting of former Salt Lake Tribune reporter Julia Lyon that the two (the alleged murderer and his young victim) were in separate parts of the camp in Thailand—but “America made them neighbors.”

The girl who loved pink, Hser Ner Moo.

I could hardly sleep last night after reviewing some articles on the on-going murder trial of 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo.  It is a terrible shame this “epic tragedy” is not being covered by the national news media.

I know it’s not covered because Met is a Muslim and because the average TV news outlet, even conservative ones, cannot bring itself to show the dark side of refugee resettlement where most viewers want only to feel warm and fuzzy feelings about the bright future we supposedly offer tens of thousands of third-worlders every year.

Here is a pretty good editorial at the Salt Lake Tribune, with this section (below) catching my attention.  Who are these people?

I’ve found that until a crisis occurs, most residents of “welcoming” cities have no clue they have “welcomed” so many refugees into their community.  And, that is because the State Department and its contractors operate secretively. By law they are supposed to “consult” with political leaders, but you know how that goes, some fearful ‘leaders’ are informed but keep their mouths shut for fear of being labeled racists/xenophobes should they question the feds’ wisdom.

Editor Terry Orme:

The murder of the friendly girl who loved to dress in pink appeared, at first, to be a straightforward crime story. But it soon became much more, a window into a community in the Salt Lake Valley that most of us didn’t know existed. Who are these people who live in the South Parc apartments? Where did they come from? What is their story?

To find out, former Tribune reporter Julia Lyon, with a grant from the International Reporting Project, traveled to Southeast Asia, and the refugee camps in Thailand, where Hser Ner Moo was born, and where her family and Esar Met’s family lived before coming to Utah. Lyon’s prize-winning report is available at sltrib.com.

[….]

Their lives would intersect in South Salt Lake amid a small refugee community.

Then here is the news account from the trial on Wednesday. 

You can read about details of the case and the weeping parents as they took the witness stand, but here is the section I found most telling and why I say the US State Department should never have allowed Met to be placed in this living situation.   In court, Met’s attorneys are trying to pin the murder on Met’s Karen roommates (with whom he “had been assigned to live” a month earlier) or we would not likely even hear about the religious/ethnic tension going on.

Reporter Marissa Lang:

The child’s oldest brother Ker Ker Po told jurors that he knew the men in Apartment 472. He went over there to drink beer and watch movies. They were his friends.

But Ker Ker Po never met the man who lived downstairs. He saw him once, briefly, but he didn’t care to speak to him, he said, because he knew him to be a Muslim man of Indian origin.

Met’s people are different, Ker Ker Po said. They speak different languages and practice different religions. They don’t share customs. They don’t mingle.

Met, who had also been living in a Burmese refugee camp in Thailand before moving to the U.S., arrived in the apartment about a month before the slaying. The other men had been there much longer.

Defense attorneys painted a picture of Met’s relationship with his four roommates as cold — stemming from their negative perception of his ethnic background.

Hser Ner Moo’s parents said they didn’t know their daughter ever went to the apartment to play with Met. The father typically did not allow her to enter the homes of others — particularly those who were not ethnic Karen.

I’m not beating around the bush!  The way one makes sure there are no more “epic tragedies” like this one—don’t resettle any more Muslim ‘refugees’ from anywhere.  Why bring the problems from most areas of the world—Africa, the Middle East, Asia—to be replayed in America?  And, if you argue that Met was just a mentally impaired man, then why are we bringing those now too?

For new readers, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops testified to the US State Department in May that they wanted to see more Burmese Muslim Rohingya resettlement in America.  Why?  Aren’t there enough destitute and persecuted Christians for the Catholics to care for?

An afterthought:  Somalis protesting in Maine, that was the Catholic church too.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: all Syrians should have access to resettlement in US

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA) told a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee*** just that earlier this week according to Ekklesia.

They want the US government to find a peaceful diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war and they say they are sending needed supplies to refugees.  That is all wonderful.  We would expect that of them as a Christian charity.

However, they also told the Senators this:

All vulnerable Syrian refugees should have access to the US resettlement program.

If by “vulnerable” they mean Christians, that is one thing.  But, it never means only the Christians or they would say it!  Thousands (tens of thousands!) of Muslim Syrians are hoping to get the opportunity to move to the US and Western Europe (where we see them breaking in every day!).

Here is the opening of the account at Ekklesia:

Evangelical Lutherans are asking the US government to take additional measures to meet the immediate needs of Syrian refugees.

In an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) ‘Statement for the Record’ – submitted to a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in advance of a 7 January 2014 hearing about the Syrian refugee crisis – Lutherans have said that the “most vulnerable Syrian refugees should be resettled in the United States” and that, in continued partnership with the international community, US diplomatic efforts should be increased to bring about peace in Syria.

Then this (below) doesn’t make any sense to me.  They want to bring refugees to America and elsewhere AND preserve their right to return when peace comes.  Then why not propose this:  have a temporary program where they must all return to Syria when the conflict is over.  But, you know, and I know most will never return.  And, preserving a place for religious minorities is a pipe dream as we see the Middle East increasingly being populated by Muslims (with the tiny Israeli oasis).

According to the statement the ELCA, along with Lutheran partners worldwide, “plan to continue to assist as we are able to serve our neighbour in need. It is our hope that, as the subcommittee continues to deliberate, that the U.S. government will prioritise this significant humanitarian situation and make every reasonable effort to ensure that the most vulnerable Syrian refugees are identified and served in order to alleviate, to some degree, the magnitude of the refugee crisis being experienced by Syria’s neighbours; this while ensuring that resettlement does not diminish [for] Syria’s ethnic and religious communities the opportunity to fully repatriate and flourish once peace comes.”

*** This must be the hearing that inspired Senator Ted Cruz to jump on the bring-them-to-America bandwagon.

By the way, we never did make a category for Syrian refugees (should have!), however, use the tag ‘Syrian refugees’ for our extensive list of posts on the topic.

Utah refugee trial opens with paramedic describing “horror scene”

Esar Met in the courtroom yesterday in Salt Lake City showed no emotion as translators kept him informed. http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/57363092-219/met-girl-police-trial.html.csp

Yesterday we reported that jury selection had begun in the trial of a Burmese refugee accused of raping and murdering a 7-year-old fellow refugee in 2008.

From KSL.com (Utah):

SALT LAKE CITY — Paramedic Andrew Maurer well remembers being led into a South Salt Lake basement where the body of 7-year-old missing girl had just been found.

“It was spooky that night,” he testified Tuesday, noting the dark basement and all the flashes going off from police investigators taking pictures. “It just looked like a horror scene to me.”

Maurer was one of 10 people who testified on the first day of the murder trial of Esar Met, which began nearly six years after the body of young Hser Ner Moo was found in Met’s basement bathroom.

Met, 26, is charged with aggravated murder and child kidnapping, first-degree felonies, in the March 31, 2008, death of the Burmese refugee girl. Her disappearance sparked a wide search effort, leading to the discovery of her body the next day.

Maurer and former South Salt Lake Fire Capt. Paul Rasmussen were called by police to the basement of Met’s apartment to confirm what detectives already suspected, that the little girl was dead.

“I observed a body that was in the bottom of a shower area. I was taken back by what I saw,” Rasmussen testified. “She had a lot of blood all over her.”

Hser’s hair was matted with blood. Rasmussen bent down to touch her skin and try to move her leg, and found she was “very, very cold.” Rigor mortis had already set in.

“I saw the girl in the bottom of the shower stall, curled up, face down, her head was away from us,” Maurer testified. “I could see that (her left arm) was bent back, broken.”

The testimony of the paramedics describing the gruesome crime scene was accompanied by graphic photos that were shown to the jury.

One of the things the defense is arguing is that Esar Met and the girl were friends and thus her DNA might have already been on his clothes (yeh, right!).  However, when you watch the news clip associated with this story, note that Met had only arrived at the apartment complex a month before, so one wonders how close a “friendship” this could have been.

I would love to know which resettlement contractor placed him, a Muslim, in a building housing Christian Karen people.  Do you think the contractor learned any lessons?

The murder happened in 2008, but the trial was delayed (and the death penalty removed) due to an “extreme language barrier”:

Though the girl was killed in March 2008, the case has stalled due to language barriers and the Burmese man’s struggles to understand the court process. Translators are being rotated during the court hearings, constantly interpreting to Met what others are saying. Several times during Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys were asked to slow down while questioning witnesses so the translator could relate everything to Met. Met wore a set of headphones as the interpreters spoke softly into a microphone so he could hear.

Because of the extreme language barrier the case has presented, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill decided not to seek the death penalty in the case.

We will keep you posted as the trial progresses.  Don’t hold your breath for any reference to the alleged murderer’s religion (is he a Rohingya Muslim?).

See this line in the Salt Lake Tribune report:

But defense attorneys painted a picture of Met’s relationship with his four roommates as cold — stemming from their being from different ethnic groups.

They just can’t say the ‘M’ word!