BOSTON (AP) — She has no doubt what prosecutors say is true: Her step-cousin doused her own children with lighter fluid, slashed their throats and set their apartment on fire. She’s also adamant that Tanicia Goodwin should never again be near the two children, who somehow survived.
But Isis Haraty also knows Goodwin’s encouragement is the main reason Haraty is now attending community college, despite having dropped out of middle school. That’s just as real to Haraty as her anger at Goodwin for the horror of March 18.
“A person isn’t one-dimensional,” said Haraty, 22.
On Thursday, Goodwin’s case is scheduled for a probable cause hearing. Goodwin faces charges including the attempted murders in Salem of her 3-year-old daughter, Erica, and her 8-year-old son, Jamaal, who lived even though Goodwin allegedly cut his throat so deep the boy’s trachea was exposed.
The sickening allegations disgust and baffle those who knew Goodwin.
But Haraty still wants people to know there’s more to Goodwin than the woman with the wild hair and dead eyes photographed during her initial court appearance.
“It’s not ‘Psycho Mom,’” Haraty said. “She’s also my cousin. She’s also my friend. She’s also all these other things, too.”
Goodwin’s attorney, Steven Van Dyke, declined to comment for this story.
Goodwin, 25, never knew her father, and her mother died of natural causes when she was pregnant with Jamaal, said Makeda Haraty, Haraty’s mother and Goodwin’s aunt.
Isis Haraty knew Goodwin best shortly after Jamaal was born, when Goodwin was a teen mother and Haraty was a middle school dropout, so gripped by a fear of crowds she sometimes couldn’t step on a train.
“She felt isolated, I felt isolated and we found solace together,” Haraty said. “We were both like statistics: … ‘Black kids who can’t make it to school.’ But we didn’t want to stay like that.”
Goodwin eventually got her GED, and encouraged Haraty to do the same.
“She was like, ‘You are going to get your (butt) out this house. … You can’t stay in here, the world is out there,’” Haraty said.
“Without her, I would not be in college right now,” added Haraty, who studies English at Bunker Hill Community College.
When Jamaal was about 3, Goodwin gave custody to her cousin, Wayne Cox, who then lived in the same building, so she could continue her schooling. Goodwin petitioned successfully in 2010 to get Jamaal back when Cox planned to move to Georgia, telling the court her life had stabilized.
In fact, things would soon fall apart. Goodwin had moved to Salem after she had Erica in 2008. But Goodwin didn’t have a job, and family members say they heard increasingly less from her.
In May 2011, state social workers were notified after Jamaal told teachers Goodwin hit him, including once so hard in the forehead that his nose bled, prosecutors said in court.
In August, Goodwin received an eviction notice after failing to pay two months’ rent. The case was later settled.
Haraty said she would call Goodwin every few weeks, but Goodwin rarely picked up.
Her cousin Shannon Suttles, who’d had a falling out with Goodwin, reached out around Christmas by texting her a picture of her baby son. Goodwin never acknowledged it.
On March 18, a responding firefighter found Goodwin naked and wet outside her smoking apartment, according to police reports. Jamaal was sitting inside against a wall, covered in lighter fluid and struggling to breathe through the hole in his throat. Erica was bleeding and abandoned on a neighbor’s couch.
Goodwin, meanwhile, walked barefoot to the Salem police station and allegedly told officers she’d hurt her children to protect them. In her cell that night, she continuously repeated, “I’m sorry, my babies,” according to a police report,
Six weeks later, Erica is living with her father and Jamaal is with family members, according to the state Department of Children and Families. Erica is laughing, talking and playing, said Makeda Haraty. She’s more worried about Jamaal, who’s old enough to remember that night.
Jamaal is able to talk and “doing very well,” according to attorney Courtney Linnehan, who’s representing Cox as he tries to regain custody of the boy.
Suttles, 26, thinks her cousin needs treatment more than just incarceration. That doesn’t mean things will be right between them. “I don’t think I could ever forgive that,” she said.
Isis Haraty hopes to talk to Goodwin, to find out how she could do what she allegedly did.
Still, Haraty admits, “I’m afraid of the answer.”
GREENLAND, N.H. (AP) — Mourners have gathered for a memorial in honor of a New Hampshire police chief who was shot to death days before retiring.
Greenland police Chief Michael Maloney was trying to serve a search warrant Thursday night when a suspect opened fire, killing him and wounding four officers.
Other community leaders and residents congregated Saturday at a school. Maloney was remembered as active in the community. Selectman John Vitale says he always left a gathering with a chuckle and a handshake.
Others who didn’t know him say they came out in support of the community.
Rev. Robert Fellows, pastor of the Greenland Community Congregational Church, says he led a prayer and moment of silence at the meeting. Fellows sees the meeting as a “coming together” for the town.
BOSTON (AP) — Even at a sturdy 70 tons, the North Atlantic right whale is no match for the huge ships that cross its path carrying cargo, passengers and the threat of lethal collisions.
Now, a new app for the iPad or iPhone aims to help mariners avoid the rare whales so they don’t strike them.
The Whale Alert app takes information from underwater microphones to locate the whales in real time, which helps ships in New England waters avoid the species’ estimated 550 remaining whales.
The app also uses the GPS feature on iPads or iPhones to alert mariners if they’re entering areas where right whales were spotted, or are known to frequent, along their migratory route from Florida to Maine. Those zones have mandatory or voluntary speed restrictions.
Preventing even one fatal ship strike can have a lasting effect on the right whale population.
“Right whales are being run over by large ships and killed, but we can save them,” said Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which led the app’s development.
The North Atlantic right whale was hunted to near extinction in the late 18th century and has struggled since.
The animal, which can grow to 55 feet in length, is vulnerable to ship strikes because it can be difficult to see as it feeds on plankton slicks near the surface. It’s also oblivious to its surroundings while eating.
Since the 1970s, an average of two North Atlantic right whales have been killed annually by ship strikes, though there has been one death in each of the past two years, said Greg Silber, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
After an increase in strikes in the mid-2000s, a host of measures were adopted to protect the whale.
For instance, vessels longer than 65 feet must slow to 10 knots in areas the whales frequent during certain seasons. Violators have been fined as much as $92,000.
Mariners are also asked to voluntarily slow down in zones where right whales were recently spotted. And any vessel greater than 300 gross tons must report to NOAA when they enter designated right whale areas up and down the East Coast.
Whale Alert aims to make it easier for navigators to be aware of the various whale restrictions.
Previously, ships often received that information via clunky technologies such as fax machines, VHF transmission, or not at all because their equipment was outdated.
But vessels with the app are alerted when they enter areas with right whale restrictions (with a whale song sound effect), and mariners can click on the iPad to find out the specific regulations.
For now, the app can only locate the whales’ real-time location off New England because it’s the only region where special acoustic buoys are installed.
The 13 buoys, placed along a shipping lane into Boston Harbor and in Cape Cod Bay, can detect the right whales within a five-mile radius by listening for their distinctive songs.
Once a whale’s presence has been confirmed, its location appears on the app’s digital nautical chart and the captain knows to be vigilant in that area.
“The whales now have a voice,” said Christopher Clark, a Cornell University scientist who led development of the acoustic monitoring system and worked on the app. “We are eavesdropping on the social network of whales.”
The multimillion-dollar acoustic system has been in operation for several years. But before the app, when Cornell researchers confirmed a right whale had been detected, they had let any liquefied natural gas tankers in the area know by phone, Clark said. Now, vessels from container ships to pleasure boats can know quickly through the app.
The app is free, but the cost for vessels is about $600 to $700 for the iPad and the equipment to receive the needed wireless signal.
The app cost about $100,000 to develop, said Brad Winney of Delray Beach, Fla.-based EarthNC Mobile, which did the technical work on it.
Some cruise lines and other vessels have committed to the app, but its effectiveness depends on broad use.
“This is no good, unless the maritime community knows it exists,” said Dave Wiley of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, who worked on the app.
Besides holding a press unveiling this past week at the Boston Fish Pier, agencies and individuals are talking up the app to contacts in the maritime industry.
Kathy Metcalf of the Chamber of Shipping of America, a shipping industry group that wasn’t involved in the project, called the app fantastic, and said she “can’t imagine a reason” why any mariner or boat owner wouldn’t want it.
The cost is “beans,” Metcalf said, and the benefits are substantial. By locating where whales are, and detailing any restrictions in effect to protect the animals, the app enhances a mariner’s general awareness of the situation at sea, she said.
“If you don’t want that, you’ve got problems,” Metcalf said. “No one on a ship wants to hit anything in the water, whale or otherwise.”
BOSTON (AP) — The Massachusetts utility NStar has agreed to buy power from the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind farm for more than double what electricity from conventional sources is projected to cost during the 15-year term of the deal.
The contract filed with state regulators on Friday totals about $1.6 billion, assuming the project obtains hoped-for tax credits. According to estimates in the contract, that’s $940 million above the market price of conventional electricity during that period.
Critics of Cape Wind, which aims to be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, have long said its power is far too costly. The NStar contract is more evidence state ratepayers will be “gouged” by the 130-turbine project, which would be located 5 miles off Cape Cod in Nantucket Sound, said Audra Parker, president of the anti-Cape Wind group the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.
“It’s hard to imagine that the state could have forced a more expensive and burdensome agreement on Massachusetts households, municipalities and businesses,” she said.
But state regulators have said, and the state’s highest court agreed, that the project is worth the cost because of various benefits, such as local jobs, cleaner air and a reliable renewable power source near a busy coastline. Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers said the NStar deal’s above-market price doesn’t change that.
NStar says the deal will add $1.08 to the monthly bill of the average residential customer.
NStar spokeswoman Caroline Pretyman said Cape Wind is worth the price because the utility must buy renewable power from a diverse mix of sources, including offshore wind, or it won’t meet state requirements to obtain increasing amounts of green energy.
“We recognize that there is a cost associated with renewable energy, but we see it as an investment in the state’s clean energy future,” she said.
Cape Wind was first proposed in 2001, but the $2.6 billion project has struggled with stiff resistance from people who oppose its location in the Sound, an area of the Atlantic Ocean important for some protected wildlife species. The project is still looking for financing.
The contract with NStar for 27.5 percent of its projected power output, combined with an earlier deal with the utility National Grid for 50 percent of its output, means Cape Wind has guaranteed customers for the bulk of its power, which it believes will attract investors.
The pricing on the NStar deal is identical to the earlier National Grid deal. Cape Wind’s power starts at 19.3 cents per kilowatt hour in 2014, when Cape Wind believes it will begin producing power, and goes up 3.5 percent annually.
But the price could end up higher. If Congress doesn’t renew the so-called “production tax credit” or the “investment tax credit,” the power starts at 21.9 cents per kilowatt hour and the overall contract price rises to $1.8 billion.
It’s extremely unlikely the tax credits will be renewed this year, given the current push for frugality in Washington, Parker said. But Rodgers said Cape Wind hasn’t ruled them out.
“Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen this time,” he said.
The NStar deal also highlights how falling natural gas prices have made Cape Wind’s power relatively more expensive.
When National Grid struck its deal with Cape Wind in 2010, that contract was 82 percent above the projected market price for conventional energy. But prices have fallen so much in two years that the NStar deal for Cape Wind power, assuming the tax credits are preserved, is 137 percent higher than market projections for conventional power.
Rodgers said dropping natural gas prices may make Cape Wind look more expensive now but in the long run adding zero-cost, renewable power like offshore wind to the mix will be good for customers.
“Cape Wind is going to help them and not hurt them,” he said.
SALEM, Mass. (AP) — A mother accused of slashing her children’s throats and setting fire to the family’s apartment had removed the unit’s inside doorknob, sealed vents, covered sprinklers and disabled the smoke alarm, prosecutors said Monday at the woman’s arraignment.
Tanicia Goodwin was ordered held without bail pending an appearance in court next week. A judge will then decide if she’s eligible for bail on two counts of assault with intent to murder, two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and arson.
The 25-year-old Goodwin didn’t enter a plea.
She held her head low and didn’t speak in court other than to answer in the affirmative when the judge asked if she needed a court-appointed lawyer.
Firefighters responding to reports of a fire on the seventh floor of the Salem Heights apartment complex at about 9:15 p.m. Sunday found Goodwin and her 3-year-old daughter, Erica, in a neighbor’s apartment. The girl had a laceration to her neck, and Goodwin was also suffering from what was described in court as a “superficial” wound to her neck.
Goodwin’s 8-year-old son, Jamal, was found inside the family’s apartment with a neck wound so deep his trachea was exposed, Assistant District Attorney Melissa Woodard said. He was also covered in lighter fluid.
Both children were flown to Children’s Hospital Boston in critical condition.
According to the police report, Goodwin went to the police station on her own where she smashed a display case and collapsed on the floor. She was sobbing and holding her head and appeared to have soot on her hands. She asked for a cigarette, but police wouldn’t give her one because she also had lighter fluid on her clothes.
Later, she took off all her clothes in an interview room, according to the report.
Goodwin told police: “I did what I had to do to protect my children,” the prosecutor said, but there was no indication that anyone else was involved.
“I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be alive,” Goodwin told police, according to prosecutors.
She said later: “I just want to protect my babies. Mama loves you. You know I love you guys so much. Mama loves you. I wish I were with you right now. I just wanted to protect them. I’m so sorry, Erica, Jamal.”
When she asked a police officer if her children were OK, she was told they were taken to the hospital. She replied, “Thank you, God. Please keep them alive. I love my children. I just wanted to protect them,” according to the report.
There was no indication of drug or alcohol use, Woodard said.
No possible motive was disclosed by either the prosecutor or Goodwin’s lawyer.
CLEVELAND (AP) — The Vatican has taken the extraordinary step of overruling the closing of 13 parishes by the Cleveland Diocese, a lawyer who fought the cutbacks said Wednesday.
The move represents a rare instance in which Rome has reversed a U.S. bishop on the shutdown of churches.
The Vatican office known as the Congregation for the Clergy ruled last week that Bishop Richard Lennon failed to follow church law and procedure in the closings three years ago, attorney Peter Borre told The Associated Press.
The 13 churches were among 50 shut down or merged by Lennon, who said the eight-county diocese could no longer afford to keep them open because of declining numbers of parishioners and a shortage of priests.
Many of the 13 parishes are in poor, inner-city Cleveland neighborhoods. Some were founded by Irish, Hungarian or Polish immigrants but are now in sections of the city that are heavily black and non-Catholic.
Parishioners, many of them second- and third-generation members of the churches, challenged some of the closings, staged sit-ins and other protests and even created a breakaway congregation.
Lennon received documents on the case Wednesday from the Vatican but had not yet reviewed them and could not confirm their contents or otherwise comment on them, spokesman Robert Tayek said.
The bishop can appeal to the Vatican’s high court. It was not clear whether he could simply restart the process, follow the correct procedure and close the churches all over again. Nor was it clear how big a financial burden the churches would be if the bishop were forced to keep them open. However, the diocese said in its most recent annual report that its finances are “robust.”
From time to time, the Vatican has intervened on behalf of parishioners trying to save their churches, but Borre said this was the first actual reversal by the Congregation for the Clergy that he could recall over the past two decades.
“The Vatican seems to be reminding us that there’re people involved here and people’s spiritual lives,” said the Rev. Patrick Lagges, a canon lawyer at the Archdiocese of Chicago.
The cutbacks, which left the Cleveland Diocese with 174 parishes in all, were prompted in part by the drop in the city’s population as people moved to the suburbs — a phenomenon that has also led to church closings in such cities as Detroit, Philadelphia and Boston.
Cleveland’s population has fallen 17 percent to just under 400,000 since 2000, and the number of Catholics in the diocese has declined from 797,000 to 710,000 since 2007.
Borre said that he received the rulings from Rome on three closings and that he learned that 10 others had also been overturned. In invalidating the closings, the Vatican cited such reasons as the bishop’s failure to consult his priest advisers and to issue a formal decree.
The diocese has begun selling its closed churches, with some bought by other denominations, charter schools and a drug rehab center, and has netted more than $19 million on 26 of them so far. But the sale of churches was put on hold in cases where the closings were challenged.
Parish and school closings have been a contentious issue in America’s Catholic dioceses for decades, prompted by a shift in population from cities to suburbs and from the Northeast to the Sunbelt, as well as by declining Mass attendance, a priest shortage and financial pressures.
In the past decade, as the child-molestation crisis eroded trust in the bishops, American Catholics have increasingly challenged decisions by local church leaders to merge or shut parishes, whether through appeals to the Vatican or demonstrations. Many of those appeals are still pending.
Jule Rice, a non-Catholic whose house faces the back fence of Cleveland’s St. Barbara, said the church was an anchor in the neighborhood, once populated by Polish-Americans who worked at the steel plant down the hill.
“The church does more than services,” she said. “With the meals and the counseling, especially for marriage and pre-marriage, all that stuff, and youth in trouble — very, very, important in an urban setting like this, with all the negative influences.”
The shut-down Cleveland churches have been locked up, and in some cases have begun to show signs of disrepair. The wrought iron “St. Barbara” sign above the door is rusting, the first-floor windows on the parish house next door are boarded up, and the parking lot is padlocked.
___
Jay Lindsay reported from Boston. AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll in New York and Associated Press Writer JoAnne Viviano in Columbus also contributed to this report.
This 2007 photo provided by Isis Haraty shows her step-cousin Tanicia Goodwin hugging Tanicia'a infant son Jamaal. Tanicia Goodwin was charged with slashing the throats of 8-year-old Jamaal and his younger sister, and deliberately setting her apartment on fire Sunday, March 18, 2012, in Salem, Mass. Both children survived. Goodwins case is scheduled for a probable cause hearing Thursday, May 3, 2012. (AP Photo/Isis Haraty)(Credit: AP) 
Addie Delisle lights her candle during a vigil for slain Police chief Michael Maloney, Friday, April 13, 2012 in Greenland, N.H. Maloney was trying to serve a search warrant Thursday night when a suspect opened fire, killing the 48-year-old chief, injuring four officers from other departments, and plunging the southeastern New Hampshire community of Greenland into a grief that residents say they won't soon get over.(AP Photo/Jim Cole)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - In this April 10, 2008 file photo, a North Atlantic right whale dives in Cape Cod Bay near Provincetown, Mass. The International Fund for Animal Welfare led the development of a new Whale Alert app for iPhones and iPads, which uses information from underwater microphones off the coast of New England to help mariners avoid striking the mammals. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)(Credit: AP) 
St. Peter Church in Cleveland is see Wednesday March 7, 2012. The Vatican has taken the extraordinary step of overruling the closing of 13 U.S. parishes, a lawyer who fought the cutbacks said Wednesday. The move represents a rare instance in which Rome has reversed a U.S. bishop on the shutdown of churches. The Congregation of the Clergy ruled last week that Bishop Richard Lennon of the Cleveland Diocese had failed to follow procedure in the closings three years ago, attorney Peter Borre said. St. Peter Church is one of the churches effected by the decision. (AP Photo/Tom Sheeran)(Credit: AP) 