MORE Horror from Tracy, California

First, there was this:

Not Guilty Plea Entered In Cantu Murder Case
A northern California woman accused of raping, drugging and murdering her 8-year-old neighbor pleaded not guilty at a hearing Friday.

Melissa Huckaby, 28, is accused of murdering Sandra Cantu, her daughter's playmate, who disappeared on March 27 and whose body was found stuffed in a suitcase in an irrigation pond on April 6.

San Joaquin County Court Judge Linda Lofthus scheduled a preliminary hearing for the case for Sept. 24.

Huckaby, a former Sunday school teacher, is also charged with child endangerment and furnishing a harmful substance. Prosecutors and police say she drugged another 7-year-old girl and a man months before Cantu was murdered. Both survived.

LINK

And now this:

Tortured teen testimony released
A 16-year-old allegedly tortured for a year inside a Tracy home told a grand jury that he escaped because his captors talked about killing him and dumping his body in the Delta.

Afraid for his life, the boy — called Kyle in court papers — fled the Tennis Lane home on Dec. 1 by unlocking himself from the fireplace to which he was chained and using a trampoline to hop over the backyard wall.

After he heard his alleged captors talking on speakerphone about how they planned to cut off his fingers with a meat cleaver, Kyle said he knew then that he had to find a way out.

Husband and wife Michael Schumacher and Kelly Lau were arrested in December along with next-door neighbor Anthony Waiters and a woman named Carén Ramirez who called herself Kyle’s mom. Police said they starved, drugged and beat the boy for as many as 18 months after he fled a Sacramento group home in spring 2007.

The four could spend life in prison if found guilty of the several charges of torture, kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault with caustic chemicals and other forms of abuse.

Kyle told the grand jury that the abuse escalated from slapping and punching to slicing flesh and drawing blood for offenses as minor as forgetting to feed the dog or for taking food to slake his hunger.

Waiters once sliced Kyle’s arm with a steak knife, Kyle said. Ramirez held his arm down and Kyle screamed, the boy alleged. Kyle said that afterwards, the pair poured bleach on his cuts and doctored them with salt and butter before wrapping his arm in a paper towel.

Other times, Ramirez, Lau and Waiters would stick an aluminum baseball bat into the fireplace and brand Kyle’s back, the teen said.

The boy said Schumacher would sometimes punch him in the face until he passed out. Kyle also said he was chained to the fireplace, where he was forced to sleep most nights.

Lau used a belt once to choke him until he lost consciousness, Kyle said. She allegedly strapped a belt around his neck and buckled it. He dropped to the fireplace hearth and his arm fell on the grate while the fire blazed, he said.

“When I first woke up, I didn’t know what happened or anything,” he said. “So then I immediately noticed my arm was, like, discolored and everything, and I was, like, really freaking out, and at first I didn’t feel anything.”

To treat the burn, Kyle said Ramirez would just pour bleach on it. His wounds scabbed over and became infected.

Kyle was allegedly abused nearly every day until he bled, and that’s the only reason he ever got new clothes, he said.

YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT THIS TEEN'S HORROR STORY HERE

Is there something in the water there in Tracy, California? These are true horror stories and according to some odd sounding people who left comments, other people knew it was going on or should have known and they did nothing about it.

What is going on in Tracy?

Another American Idol Controversy

Surprise, Surprise. It wouldn't feel like American Idol unless there was some major scandal going on... I guess. Here is the most pertinent fact: Kris Allen is the American Idol and all the disappointment felt by disappointed Adam Lambert fans (myself included) can't change that one fact. So you get over it, remember that the runners-up in this contest have gone on to huge careers and realize that Adam's probably working on his CD even as you read this.

Be like Adam and wish Kris well and hope for the best for the new Idol.

Now, on to the scandal which it is for certain does not personally involve any actual contestant but does involve unethical and possibly illegal behavior on the part of one major American company and sponsor of the American Idol program. That would be AT&T.

From the Los Angles Times:

Published reports have raised questions whether AT&T, a program sponsor, may have violated "Idol" voting rules at two pre-finale parties thrown for Kris Allen, the Arkansas crooner crowned winner last Wednesday. Partisans of Adam Lambert, the runner-up, have generated stormy online protests about alleged voting improprieties that could have thrown the outcome.

AT&T confirmed that its employees handed out phones to party guests in Arkansas and then offered pointers on how to text votes. The reports said the workers also briefed guests on how to "power-text" multiple votes at once, which would have been a violation of "Idol's" rules.

The fracas has embarrassed AT&T, which has for years gotten repeated shout-outs from "Idol" host Ryan Seacrest in exchange for its paid sponsorship.

In a statement, the company said its workers were "caught up in the enthusiasm of rooting for their hometown contestant."

You can read the rest of the L.A. Times article here.

So AT&T handed out over 1,000 phones and instructions on how to "power text" multiple votes for Kris Allen. And the voting was open for several hours.

One of the comments on this news story mentioned, "Someone with a phone with free service, sending 10 texts at a time, could have send thousands of texts over those four hours."

Another comment: "Sending out 10 at a time? You could do that in five minutes. I have an iPhone, which does not do blanket texts (that I've been able to figure out). It takes less than five seconds to send a text, times four hours, times 10. I'm no math whiz, but I have a calculator. At five seconds per text, that's 12 per minute, times 60 = 720 per hour, x 4 = 2,880 per four hours, x 10 = 28,800. Going at a moderate pace, one person could easily send 30,000 votes."

Another comment: "i just want to say, all the hype about phones messing up, the count/vote was wrong, whatever happened! NOTHING HAPPENED!!! yes Adam had followers but Kris had his followers plus Matt followers started following Kris when he left and Danny G followers started following Kris when he left... so basically KRIS got all of the other votes. The folks following the RB kind of a genre were going to follow that genre, they were not going to switch to rock, so Kris picked up alot of people who were voting for other contestants. Adam only had the rockers who were voting for him and maybe Allison. Leave it alone.. KRIS won and Adam will move on doing something anyways."

And the last comment: "All of this suspicion began not because Adam Lambert fans were grumpy but because Arkansas newspapers and politicians gloated that 38 million votes came from Arkansas--and then the story was withdrawn because: 1) Arkansans realized that this was embarrassing, not something to be proud of; 2) AT&T didn't want to reveal that Idol "voting" is ridiculous--a cash cow for AT&T but not in any way a true representation of American opinion."

The following avatars came from a very entertaining website called, "Vote For the Worst" and they always have great Idol gossip: