Police, Deaths | featured news

The FBI says that 72 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty last year, up from 56 the year before. An additional 53 officers died in accidents, and 54,774 officers were assaulted in the line of duty. The average age of officers killed in the line of duty was 38.

At least 14 people were killed on Monday and many more were injured in a stampede during a Hindu festival in the Indian city of Patna, police said. Among the casualties were many children and women, who had come to the banks of the River Ganges in the eastern Indian state of Bihar to enjoy Chhath, the biggest Hindu festival in the state.

The son of Bernard Madoff's longtime accountant, who himself pleaded guilty to securities fraud in the scandal centered on the disgraced financier, has committed suicide in central Ohio, authorities said. Jeremy Friehling, 23, was found dead at his apartment of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday in Columbus, where he was a second-year student at Ohio State's medical school, police there said.

Police in Belize are looking for the founder of the software company McAfee Inc. to question him about the death of another U.S. citizen, his neighbor in an island town on the Caribbean....

A mother returned home to her luxury apartment building near Central Park on Thursday to find two of her small children stabbed to death in a bathtub and their nanny, with self-inflicted stab wounds, lying near them, police said.

Police say a costumed 9-year-old girl was accidentally shot outside a western Pennsylvania home during a Halloween party by a relative who thought she was a skunk. New Sewickley Township police say the girl was over a hillside and wearing a black costume and a black hat with a white tassel. Chief Ronald Leindecker told the Beaver County Times that a male relative mistook her for a skunk and fired a shotgun, hitting her in the shoulder, arm, back and neck Saturday night.

Two off-duty Florida law-enforcement officers fatally shot an armed, naked woman who confronted them at a social gathering Saturday, authorities said. The shooting occurred at about 1:15 p.m. Saturday in Hernando County, north of Tampa. The county sheriff's office said in a news release that the men were approached by an "armed, naked and irrational female." The news release does not identify the weapon, but it says "one or both of the law enforcement officers fired their weapons, striking the female." She died at the scene.

Five people were found dead in a neighborhood bar where a fire broke out early Wednesday, and police think the blaze was set to cover up their slayings. The fire at Fero's Bar & Grill was reported around closing time at 2 a.m., Police Chief Robert White said.

Authorities on Friday identified the body of a man who was found entombed in concrete in the backyard of a northeast Georgia home. The man has been identified as Sean Dugas, 30, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation medical examiner's office. The body was found Monday encased in a plastic storage container filled with concrete.

A popular fifth-grade teacher fatally shot a masked teenager in self-defense outside his neighbor's house during what appeared to be an attempted late-night burglary, then discovered the teen was his son, state police said.