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South Carolina man convicted of turtle smuggling charged with turtle abuse in Georgia_我的网站

A |     MACON, Ga. -- A South Carolina man previously convicted of smuggling protected turtles between the United States and Hong Kong faces new allegations of turtle-related crimes in Georgia. Bibb County sheriff's deputies arrested and jailed Steven Verren Baker, 43, of Holly Hill, South Carolina, on Tuesday and charged him with 15 felony counts of aggravated cruelty to animals.No lawyer was listed in Georgia court records for Baker, who remained jailed Friday with bail set at $8,250. His South Carolina lawyer has since died.Deputies were responding to a call about an abandoned dog in Macon when they noticed turtles being held in a basin nestled in a pile of trash, WMAZ-TV reports. They wrote in an incident report that a woman identified as Baker's mother told deputies that Baker had left the turtles with her about two months ago. The mother agreed to hand the turtles over to deputies, saying she had been unable to get her son to retrieve them.A veterinarian said the turtles were suffering from long-term malnutrition, bacterial and fungal infections, sepsis and shell deformities.The turtles included 11 rare albino red-eared sliders, one brown red-eared slider and two pink-bellied side necks. There was also a Chinese golden thread turtle, which is considered endangered in the wild, but is legal to breed in captivity.Baker pleaded guilty in 2018 to one count of conspiracy to smuggle wildlife in federal court in South Carolina after postal inspectors at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York found 46 turtles concealed among noodles and candy in four packages in early 2016. The turtles would be placed in socks and shipped through the mail in boxes labeled “snacks.”Five other men pleaded guilty in the South Carolina court case, but officials described Baker as the ringleader. Federal officials say Baker was sending turtles from the United States to Hong Kong, as well as receiving turtles from Hong Kong. It's illegal to trade turtles abroad without a permit when they are protected by a treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.Baker served more than two years in federal prison, followed by two years of supervised release that ended in April 2022.Baker was also ordered to forfeit $263,225, which is what officials said the turtles were worth.。    The cell phones, tablets, and laptops left behind by veterans who died by suicide may offer insight that could help prevent future military suicides, according to a nonprofit dedicated to analyzing the data from the devices.Stop Soldier Suicide collects the technology as part of its initiative, "The Black Box Project," which is named after the black boxes found on planes that help determine the cause of aviation incidents."If we could gather novel data from those that have died by suicide, we might be able to recreate the last year of life," Stop Soldier Suicide CEO Chris Ford told ABC News.Veterans are 57% more at risk for suicide than non-military adults and around 6,000 veterans die by suicide each year, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs."I think we can prevent needless suffering and a ton of loss of life," Ford said.That kind of loss is something David McDaniel, whose son Connor died by suicide at the age of 26, knows all too well.Connor McDaniel joined the Army after high school, and, according to David, he appeared upbeat during his deployment to Afghanistan, where he was assigned to protect local villages from the Taliban."Some of his Army buddies told me that he was making them laugh while they were being shelled in Afghanistan," David McDaniel told ABC News.But it wasn't long after Connor came home that David McDaniel says he sensed a shift in his son's behavior to include "more anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of gloominess."On Sept. 1, 2021, David says his son entered a wooded area with a firearm."I start screaming his name as I'm walking up the field. And just then the police, the sheriff's department shows up and they tell me to come back down," McDaniel said.He followed their direction, but on the car ride home, an officer called him and said Connor was dead after he fired upon sheriff's deputies and the deputies returned fire and killed him.Connor's death was determined to be a suicide. The district attorney's office concluded that the officers' actions were justified.While grappling with his son's death, David McDaniel was immediately drawn to the Black Box Project, which uses forensic software to unlock and comb through service members' devices provided by their loved ones to review their activity in the weeks leading up to their suicides.McDaniel works in the tech field and says if the project can find repeated patterns in online searches, they may be able to help others to prevent suicides.For instance, McDaniel says his son searched for SGLI, Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance, before his death. If a veteran were to make a similar search and look up "suicide" in the future, for example, McDaniel suggests it could trigger an ad for Stop Soldier Suicide to pop up and provide resources in the search results.Ford says the nonprofit uses machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, to analyze texts and notes in order to determine sentiment or emotional tone, such as anger or desperation. He says they can also track phone usage of the deceased veterans to monitor their past sleep cycles and trace their past geo-locations."Machines can go through computations a lot faster than humans, and they can find signals that we often miss," Ford said.Since launching the Black Box Project in April 2020, Stop Soldier Suicide has received over 100 devices, Ford said. So far, he says they're seeing three patterns before most of these suicides: more anger, different sleep patterns, and social isolation.Ford's team includes Ph.D.s in clinical psychology and suicide researchers. A scientific advisory committee helps steer where and what to look for on the devices.The findings are still preliminary, according to the nonprofit, but one goal is to help the organization decide where, when, and how to target their own mental health resources, like adding more hotline staff at certain hours and ensuring calls are picked up overnight.When asked about privacy concerns of collecting data, Ford said it's something they think about daily."We don't resell the data. We don't push it out to others. We use it for our own research purposes so that we can best understand risk and then give those devices back to those families intact," Ford said.Current privacy laws do not carry on past death, meaning the next of kin typically gains new authority.Petra Oxford-Jackson, whose veteran husband Anthony died by suicide, says she gave his phone to the organization with the possibility it could save even one life."I truly believe he would have been okay with it, and it's a hard thing for a survivor to give up something so personal as his cell phone," Oxford-Jackson told ABC News.The Black Box Project received $3 million in funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs earlier this year.If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for free, confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.。

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