Gorbachev passed away this evening after 'serious and prolonged illness,' says hospital
Mikhail Gorbachev, whose actions as the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union helped shape the world as we know it today, died after a "serious and long illness" late Tuesday, the state-run TASS news agency reported, citing the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital. He was 91.
His era started in 1985 with the reform of the Soviet system forever known by its Russian name, perestroika, and ended with the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While he was admired in the West for his role in ending the Cold War, he was a divisive figure at home, perceived to have instituted policies that precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the economic chaos and loss of superpower status that followed. Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, to a family of Russian-Ukrainian peasants in the village of Privolnoye, in the southwestern part of Soviet Russia. The village was collectivized under Soviet leader’s Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan that included forced consolidation of small landholdings into state-controlled farms, a process that claimed the lives of millions of peasants throughout the Soviet Union. Both of Gorbachev’s grandfathers were sent to Gulag labor camps during Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s, and his family endured the 1932-33 famine. Those early experiences shaped Gorbachev’s views on Stalinism and the use of violence as means to power, according to his biographer William Taubman. Gorbachev joined the Communist Party while in high school. He won a scholarship to the most prestigious university in the Soviet Union, Moscow State University, where he excelled and graduated from the law faculty with the highest honors. He also met and married the love of his life, Raisa. He attracted the attention of the Politburo in 1974 when, as party boss in the Stavropol region, his construction of the Great Stavropol Canal provided necessary irrigation and produced record crops. In 1978, he joined the ranks of the Soviet ruling elite in Moscow when he was appointed Secretary of the Central Committee. That same year he became the party secretary responsible for agriculture as the collective farming model began to falter. Gorbachev attempted to modernize the Soviet agricultural sector by introducing mechanization. During these years he also traveled to Western Europe in Soviet delegations which continued to expand and shape his views on the world and politics. When Gorbachev was appointed to the top job in 1985, the U.S.S.R. was in economic, social and political decline after the so-called “stagnation” period under Leonid Brezhnev and the short-lived tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. His twin policies of perestroika — rebuilding — and glasnost — openness — aimed to restructure the Soviet system and bring transparency to its politics by loosening state censorship. Gorbachev also sought to shift control from the Politburo to the Soviet people by implementing a democratically elected parliament. He attempted to reform the Soviet centrally-planned economy by allowing state enterprises to determine their output levels based on demand and permitting self-financing. The state would no longer rescue unprofitable enterprises, and control shifted from state to elected workers’ collectives. Most significantly, Gorbachev also allowed foreign investors to enter the Soviet market. His reform efforts were often undermined by bureaucrats within his own party. A fundamental test of the new system came on April 26, 1986, when a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded and caused the world’s worst nuclear accident. It took Gorbachev almost three weeks to address the nation on the disaster, and 20 years later he said it had perhaps been Chernobyl, rather than perestroika, that was the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was in full swing when Gorbachev took power. Five years previously, U.S. President Jimmy Carter had refused to send athletes to the Moscow Olympics or meet with anyone from the Soviet leadership to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Within six years Gorbachev had withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan and acted as middleman between Washington and Baghdad during the Gulf War. Western leaders saw Gorbachev’s leadership as an opportunity to open the Iron Curtain. He visited Britain, France, Germany, Canada and many other countries during his rule. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said in a BBC interview, “I like Mr. Gorbachev. I think we can do business together.” Some praised Gorbachev for watching the peaceful dissolution of the Eastern bloc, while others criticized him for allowing the communist systems in neighboring countries to collapse without any interference. His far-reaching agreements on arms control paved the way for the Paris Charter that ended the Cold War and united Eastern and Western Europe. In Nov. 1989, shortly after Gorbachev’s visit to East Germany, the Berlin wall fell. Gorbachev repeatedly stated that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was never his end goal, but his leadership started a chain reaction that changed the world. In 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for his accomplishments in international relations. At home, however, the loss of the Eastern bloc and Gorbachev’s to sign a new Union Treaty that would refound the U.S.S.R. as a loose confederation, angered many within his own party, turning former allies into enemies. In August 1991, while Gorbachev was on vacation with his family in Crimea, hardline politicians and the military staged a failed coup in Moscow and put him under house arrest. By the time he returned to the capital, Boris Yeltsin had seized the momentum and would become the first president of a new Russia. The Soviet Union didn’t last the year. After his political career ended, Gorbachev established the “Gorbachev Foundation” and continued to lecture and speak out on social, economic, domestic and geopolitical issues. His beloved Raisa, who he described as his closest confidant, died of leukemia in 1999. He is survived by his daughter Irina, and his granddaughters Anastasia and Ksenia.
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Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani doctor who championed women’s health and rights and spearheaded the breakthrough action plan adopted by 179 countries at the 1994 United Nations population conference, has died.
Her son Omar Sadik said his mother died of natural causes at her home in New York on Sunday night, four days before her 93rd birthday.
Nafis Sadik joined the UN Population Fund in 1971, became its assistant executive director in 1977, and was appointed executive director in 1987.
She was the first woman to head a major United Nations program that is voluntarily funded.
In June 1990, Perez de Cuellar appointed Sadik to be secretary-general of the fifth UN International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, also known as the Cairo conference.
She became the architect of its groundbreaking program of action which recognised for the first time that women have the right to control their reproductive and sexual health and to choose whether to become pregnant.
At the Beijing women’s conference a year after Cairo, Sadik told delegates: “The first mark of respect for women is support for their reproductive rights.”
“Reproductive rights involve more than the right to reproduce,” she said.
“They involve support for women in activities other than reproduction, infact liberating women from a system of values which insists that reproduction is their only function.”
We are profoundly saddened to learn of the death of Dr. Nafis Sadik, Former @UNFPA Executive Director.
We extend sincere condolences to Dr. Sadik’s family, the people of Pakistan and all who are mourning her loss.
See @Atayeshe’s statement: https://t.co/G86koAVkl2 pic.twitter.com/kKkzlK8l0N
— UNFPA (@UNFPA) August 15, 2022
'Significant contributions'
Natalia Kanem, current executive director of the UN Population Fund, said “millions of girls and young women have grown up knowing that their bodies belong to them, and that their futures are theirs to shape” since Cairo.
After her retirement from the Population Fund in 2000, Sadik served as special adviser to the secretary-general and special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Sadik will be remembered “for her significant contributions to women’s health and rights and population policies and for her tireless efforts to combat HIV/AIDS,” his spokesman said.
Born in Jaunpur in British-ruled India, Nafis Sadik received her medical degree from Dow Medical College in Karachi and began her career working in women’s and children’s wards in Pakistani armed forces hospitals from 1954 to 1963.
The following year she was appointed head of the health section of the government Planning Commission.
In 1966, Sadik joined the Pakistan Central Family Planning Council, the government agency responsible for carrying out the national family planning program. She rose to be its director-general in 1970.
She also served an internship in gynaecology and obstetrics at City Hospital in Baltimore and continued her medical education at Johns Hopkins University.
READ MORE: Women’s Day 2022: Where are we on gender equality?
Source: AP
Jain Anshu, President of Cantor Fitzgerald appears on CNBC's Squawk on the Street at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd. 2020.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anshu Jain, an Indian-born investment banker who rose to the role of co-CEO at Deutsche Bank, died last night after a long battle with cancer, his family announced in a statement Saturday. He was 59 years old.
Jain, who most recently served as the president of Cantor Fitzgerald, earned an MBA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and worked at several financial firms, including Merrill Lynch, before moving to Deutsche Bank. He served as co-CEO from 2012 to 2015.
Jain stepped down from his role at Deutsche before his contract ended after the bank was beset by a string of regulatory issues.
His other positions included a role as an advisor at fintech company SoFi from 2016 to 2017 and as a trustee of British charity Chance to Shine.
"He believed in hard work, meritocracy, operating outside of expectations or conventional boundaries, placing family first, standing by one's roots (having turned away many attempts to Westernize him in an industry that was often homogenous), in speaking 'at the margin' rather than delivering plain facts, in wit and wordplay, in being nonmaterialistic, and in the importance of having broad-bandwidth and being a 'scholar-athlete,'" his family said in a statement.
"We are grateful to the many people who cared for Anshu throughout his life. For us, his legacy is tenacity, honour, and love," the statement said.
Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, also released a statement about Jain's passing.
"Anshu was the consummate professional who brought a wealth of experience and wisdom to his role as President. He will be remembered as an extraordinary leader, partner, and dear friend who will be greatly missed by all of us and by all who knew him," Lutnick said. "On behalf of all our partners and employees, we extend our deepest sympathies to Anshu's family and wish them peace and healing during this difficult time."
Correction: This article has been updated to delete a reference to Ajit Jain, who is not related to Anshu Jain.
Olivia Newton-John, a British Australian pop star who dominated the pop culture of an era, has died after repeated treatments for cancer, her husband announced Monday. She was 73.
"Dame Olivia Newton-John (73) passed away peacefully at her Ranch in Southern California this morning, surrounded by family and friends," John Easterling, her husband, announced on her official Facebook page. "We ask that everyone please respect the family's privacy during this very difficult time."
"Olivia has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer. Her healing inspiration and pioneering experience with plant medicine continues with the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, dedicated to researching plant medicine and cancer."
In the late '70s and early '80s, Newton-John was one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world. She stole hearts in the 1978 blockbuster "Grease" and dominated the charts with songs like the 1981 hit "Physical," which was the No. 1 single of that decade, according to Billboard.
She is credited with selling more than 100 million records over the course of a five-decade career.
In more recent years, however, Newton-John became best known as an advocate for breast cancer survivors, being one herself since first her first diagnosis in 1992.
"I think, you know, what you think creates your reality. So it's a decision. You have to make that decision," she told the "TODAY" show in March 2019. "You can be a victim, or you can be a winner and enjoy your life."
By all accounts, Newton-John lived a winning life.
Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, in 1948 to a father, Brin, who was both a World War II hero with British military intelligence and a professor of German literature, and a mother, Irene, whose own father, physicist Max Born, would win a Nobel Prize six years later. But from an early age, it seemed she was not destined to follow into the family business of academia.
After her father took a job at a college in Australia, the family moved to Melbourne when Newton-John was 5. Just a few years later, she won a talent contest on one of the country's most popular television shows, "Sing, Sing, Sing." By the time she was 15, she had formed an all-girl group and later partnered with her friend Pat Carroll for the pop duo Pat & Olivia.
But it would be as a solo artist, starting in 1966, that Newton-John would hit her true potential. She broke through on this side of the Pacific with her third solo album, "Let Me Be There," in 1973, with the title track earning the singer her first Grammy Award, for best female country performance. Newton-John would score her first No. 1 and her next two Grammys a year later with the country ballad "I Honestly Love You."
So when "Grease" director Randal Kleiser was looking to cast the role of Sandy, a straight-laced Australian student who falls in love with a greaser and ultimately becomes one herself, he at least knew his first choice could sing, whether or not Newton-John could act opposite the red-hot John Travolta, who was fresh off "Saturday Night Fever."
"Olivia Newton-John was our first choice for the part of Sandy, but she had a few concerns," Kleiser recalled by email. "She had had a bad experience on an English film and didn't want to repeat it."
"(At 29 years old) she wasn't sure she would look the part of a 17-year-old and wanted to make sure she and John looked like they could be contemporaries," Kleiser said. "He was a bit younger (at 23). She asked to have a screen test so she could see how she would come across and feel how the chemistry would be between she and John and myself."
Fortunately, the test worked well enough to convince her that she could handle the part.
"She embodied the character in the beginning of the film, and we all hoped she could pull off the sexy vixen at the end," Kleiser said. "We couldn't have been more thrilled by the final result."
That final result proved to be a blockbuster.
Her follow-up, the sci-fi, disco musical "Xanadu," didn't fare nearly as well.
At least something good came of that role: She married co-star Matt Lattanzi in 1984. Two years later, the couple welcomed a daughter, Chloe Rose. But they separated after 11 years of marriage, in 1995.
Newton-John seemed to give up on Hollywood after the 1983 fantasy romance "Two of a Kind" reunited her on screen with Travolta, but it had none of the magic their last collaboration did.
The film disappointment didn't matter much: In the early '80s, Newton-John was busy having plenty of success in the music business. She notched her biggest hit with the song "Physical" in November 1981. Actually, it was the entire industry's biggest hit of that decade, according to a Billboard ranking, and held its top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 consecutive weeks.
Movies and music took an eventual backseat to motherhood and medical issues.
Newton-John began to become an advocate for cancer research in 1991, after the tragic death of her best friend's daughter from a rare childhood form of the disease. But it became an even more personal cause a year later, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time.
After going into remission, cancer returned two more times, in 2013 and 2017.
Amid a mostly storybook life came a plot twist only slightly more believable than "Xanadu": Tragedy seemed to strike when her boyfriend of nine years, Patrick McDermott, then 48, went missing and was presumed dead after failing to return from a fishing trip off the coast of California in 2005. But his final fate is shrouded in mystery after a private investigator hired by NBC's "Dateline" claimed to have found evidence that McDermott faked his own death to evade debts and start a new life in Mexico.
"I mean it's human to wonder. But you know ... those are the things in life you have to accept and let go," Newton-John told Australia's version of "60 Minutes" in 2016.
By that time, Newton-John had indeed let go and moved on, marrying American businessman John Easterling in an Incan ceremony on a mountaintop outside of Peru in 2008. The singer has credited her husband, who founded Amazon Herb Company, purveyors of botanical supplements, with helping turn her on to medical marijuana as a treatment for cancer.
Living with the disease, she repeatedly said, had given her perspective.
"We're all going to die. That's probably the hardest thing to accept as a human being," Newton-John told "TODAY" in March 2019. "I'm 70 and I've had the most amazing life, and I have extra time. So whatever that is, I'm grateful for it."
In addition to "Magnum, P.I.," the Los Angeles native played the role of Coach Ricketts in the 1990s sitcom "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper."
He also appeared on "Sanford and Son," "Love Boat," "Kojak," "The Rockford Files," "Starsky and Hutch" and dozens of other TV series.
LOS ANGELES -- Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, whose dulcet tones provided the soundtrack of summer while entertaining and informing Dodgers fans in Brooklyn and Los Angeles for 67 years, died Tuesday night. He was 94.
Scully died at his home in the Hidden Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, according to the team after being informed by family members. No cause of death was provided.
“He was the best there ever was,” pitcher Clayton Kershaw said after the Dodgers game in San Francisco. “Just such a special man. I’m grateful and thankful I got to know him as well as I did.”
As the longest tenured broadcaster with a single team in pro sports history, Scully saw it all and called it all. He began in the 1950s era of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, on to the 1960s with Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, into the 1970s with Steve Garvey and Don Sutton, and through the 1980s with Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela. In the 1990s, it was Mike Piazza and Hideo Nomo, followed by Kershaw, Manny Ramirez and Yasiel Puig in the 21st century.
“You gave me my Wild Horse name. You gave me love. You hugged me like a father,” tweeted Puig, the talented Cuban-born outfielder who burned brightly upon his Dodgers debut in 2013. “I will never forget you, my heart is broken.”
The Dodgers changed players, managers, executives, owners — and even coasts — but Scully and his soothing, insightful style remained a constant for the fans.
He opened broadcasts with the familiar greeting, “Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you wherever you may be.”
Ever gracious both in person and on the air, Scully considered himself merely a conduit between the game and the fans.
After the Dodgers' 9-5 win, the Giants posted a Scully tribute on the videoboard.
"There’s not a better storyteller and I think everyone considers him family,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “He was in our living rooms for many generations. He lived a fantastic life, a legacy that will live on forever.”
Although he was paid by the Dodgers, Scully was unafraid to criticize a bad play or a manager’s decision, or praise an opponent while spinning stories against a backdrop of routine plays and noteworthy achievements. He always said he wanted to see things with his eyes, not his heart.
“We have lost an icon," team president and CEO Stan Kasten said. "His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever.”
Vincent Edward Scully was born Nov. 29, 1927, in the Bronx. He was the son of a silk salesman who died of pneumonia when Scully was 7. His mother moved the family to Brooklyn, where the red-haired, blue-eyed Scully grew up playing stickball in the streets.
As a child, Scully would grab a pillow, put it under the family’s four-legged radio and lay his head directly under the speaker to hear whatever college football game was on the air. With a snack of saltine crackers and a glass of milk nearby, the boy was transfixed by the crowd’s roar that raised goosebumps. He thought he’d like to call the action himself.
Scully, who played outfield for two years on the Fordham University baseball team, began his career by working baseball, football and basketball games for the university’s radio station.
At age 22, he was hired by a CBS radio affiliate in Washington, D.C.
He soon joined Hall of Famer Red Barber and Connie Desmond in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio and television booths. In 1953, at age 25, Scully became the youngest person to broadcast a World Series game, a mark that still stands.
He moved west with the Dodgers in 1958. Scully called three perfect games — Don Larsen in the 1956 World Series, Sandy Koufax in 1965 and Dennis Martinez in 1991 — and 18 no-hitters.
He also was on the air when Don Drysdale set his scoreless innings streak of 58 2/3 innings in 1968 and again when Hershiser broke the record with 59 consecutive scoreless innings 20 years later.
When Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s record in 1974, it was against the Dodgers and, of course, Scully called it.
“A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol,” Scully told listeners. “What a marvelous moment for baseball.”
Scully credited the birth of the transistor radio as “the greatest single break” of his career. Fans had trouble recognizing the lesser players during the Dodgers’ first four years in the vast Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
“They were 70 or so odd rows away from the action,” he said in 2016. “They brought the radio to find out about all the other players and to see what they were trying to see down on the field.”
That habit carried over when the team moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962. Fans held radios to their ears, and those not present listened from home or the car, allowing Scully to connect generations of families with his words.
He often said it was best to describe a big play quickly and then be quiet so fans could listen to the pandemonium. After Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, Scully went silent for 38 seconds before talking again. He was similarly silent for a time after Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that year, and also had the stadium’s press box named for him in 2001. The street leading to Dodger Stadium’s main gate was named in his honor in 2016.
That same year he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
“God has been so good to me to allow me to do what I’m doing,” Scully, a devout Catholic who attended mass on Sundays before heading to the ballpark, said before retiring. “A childhood dream that came to pass and then giving me 67 years to enjoy every minute of it. That’s a pretty large thanksgiving day for me.”
In addition to being the voice of the Dodgers, Scully called play-by-play for NFL games and PGA Tour events as well as calling 25 World Series and 12 All-Star Games. He was NBC’s lead baseball announcer from 1983-89.
While being one of the most widely heard broadcasters in the nation, Scully was an intensely private man. Once the baseball season ended, he would disappear. He rarely did personal appearances or sports talk shows. He preferred spending time with his family.
In 1972, his first wife, Joan, died of an accidental overdose of medicine. He was left with three young children. Two years later, he met the woman who would become his second wife, Sandra, a secretary for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. She had two young children from a previous marriage, and they combined their families into what Scully once called “my own Brady Bunch.”
He said he realized time was the most precious thing in the world and that he wanted to use his time to spend with his loved ones. In the early 1960s, Scully quit smoking with the help of his family. In the shirt pocket where he kept a pack of cigarettes, Scully stuck a family photo. Whenever he felt like he needed a smoke, he pulled out the photo to remind him why he quit. Eight months later, Scully never smoked again.
After retiring in 2016, Scully made just a handful of appearances at Dodger Stadium and his sweet voice was heard narrating an occasional video played during games. Mostly, he was content to stay close to home.
“I just want to be remembered as a good man, an honest man, and one who lived up to his own beliefs,” he said in 2016.
In 2020, Scully auctioned off years of his personal memorabilia, which raised over $2 million. A portion of it was donated to UCLA for ALS research.
He was preceded in death by his second wife, Sandra. She died of complications of ALS at age 76 in 2021. The couple, who were married 47 years, had daughter Catherine together.
Scully’s other children are Kelly, Erin, Todd and Kevin. A son, Michael, died in a helicopter crash in 1994.
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Former Associated Press staffer Stan Miller contributed biographical information to this report.
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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP—Sport
Nichols died from natural causes, he said.
Nichols portrayed communications officer Lt. Nyota Uhura in the "Star Trek" TV series and many of its film offshoots.
When "Star Trek" began in 1966, Nichols was a television rarity: a Black woman in a notable role on a prime-time television series. There had been African-American women on TV before, but they often played domestic workers and had small roles; Nichols' Uhura was an integral part of the multicultural "Star Trek" crew.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called it "the first non-stereotypical role portrayed by a Black woman in television history."
After "Trek's" three-season run, Nichols dedicated herself to the space program. She helped NASA in making the agency more diverse, helping to recruit astronauts Sally Ride, Judith Resnik and Guion Bluford, among others.
George Takei, who portrayed the USS Enterprise's helmsman Hikaru Sulu, posted a touching tribute to his co-star.
"We lived long and prospered together," he added with a photo of the pair making the iconic Vulcan salute.
Nichols was born Grace Dell Nichols near Chicago in 1932. (Unhappy with Grace, she took the name Nichelle when she was a teenager.) Her grandfather was a White Southerner who married a Black woman, causing a rift in his family.
She moved to Los Angeles in the early '60s and landed a role in a Gene Roddenberry series, "The Lieutenant." A number of "Star Trek" veterans, including Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig and Majel Barrett, also worked on the show.
When Roddenberry was creating "Trek," he remembered Nichols. She was in Europe when she got the call.
Uhura wasn't in the original script, and Nichols was responsible for the name. She was reading a book called "Uhuru" -- "freedom" in Swahili -- and suggested her character take the name. Roddenberry thought it was too harsh.
"I said, 'Well, why don't you do an alteration of it, soften the end with an 'A,' and it'll be Uhura?' " she recalled. "He said, 'That's it, that's your name! You named it; it's yours.' "
Nichols is survived by her son, Kyle Johnson.
A convict whose violent beating by prison guards was caught on video and led to a mass outcry over prison torture in Russia has died from double pneumonia, his mother told independent media Monday.
Video of Yevgeny Makarov's torture northeast of Moscow was leaked in 2018, prompting a series of investigations across Russian correctional facilities and a government promise to crack down on prison torture.
Makarov was 29 at the time of his death from double pneumonia in a hospital bed, his mother Tatiana Shishova told the Mozhem Obyasnit Telegram news channel.
At least three hospitals were unable to provide adequate medical care for blood clots that had formed in his vessels from violent beatings in prison.
Eleven former guards were convicted on charges of abuse of power and jailed for up to four years, while senior prison officials escaped prosecution.
A series of prison torture leaks has followed Makarov's explosive video in the years since.
Torture and sexual violence inflicted on inmates have long been systemic in Russia's vast penitentiary system, prison monitors say, but the videos have cast new light on such abuses.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Daniel J. Palmer III had long been considered the key suspect in a brutal attack that left his sister comatose two years ago. But the case remained dormant — until she awakened last month.
Able to speak only a word at a time after coming out of a coma, Wanda Palmer identified her brother — with whom she had a violent past — as her attacker. Daniel Palmer was arrested on July 15.
Less than a week later, he was dead, likely bringing a close to a highly unusual case in which the investigation was stalled by a lack of evidence.
For now, there are two mysteries: a detainee's death, and an assault without a publicly disclosed motive.
Daniel Palmer was pronounced dead Thursday at a Charleston hospital, a day after he was taken there following an evaluation by jail medical staff, the state Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Division of Corrections, said in a news release.
The statement didn't indicate a cause of death and a spokeswoman for Department of Health and Human Resources, which oversees the state medical examiner's office, said state law only allows the agency to release autopsy information to relatives and law enforcement.
Palmer, 55, of Cottageville, was uncooperative while in custody and during booking procedures at the South Central Regional Jail, where he was taken after being charged with the attempted murder and malicious wounding of his sister, the statement said.
Wanda Palmer was in a coma in a nursing home for two years. She was found unconscious with serious head injuries at her home in Jackson County on June 10, 2020.
Daniel Palmer had been identified as a suspect, but up until the time she emerged from the coma, investigators did not have enough evidence to file charges, court documents said.
“Due to a previous violent history between Wanda Palmer and her brother Daniel Palmer, investigators initially considered Daniel a suspect in the assault," according to a criminal complaint filed in Jackson County Magistrate Court.
Investigators interviewed Daniel, who denied involvement in the attack, saying he had not been to his sister's home in days. Later, a witness told investigators he saw Daniel in the front doorway at Wanda Palmer's trailer on the night she was assaulted.
On June 27, more than two years after the attack, a deputy received a call from a protective services worker who said she had started to speak single words and seemed to respond when questioned.
On July 12, deputies drove to Genesis Healthcare in New Martinsville to speak with Wanda Palmer. Deputy Julia Bowen “entered Wanda's room alone and began speaking with her,” the complaint said. “Bowen asked opened ended questions of Wanda. Wanda indicated (that) she recalled living in her trailer near her mother's place. She indicated that she recalled being hurt there. She made mention of her head.”
Wanda Palmer said the person who injured her was her brother and she identified him as Daniel. When asked during the interview the reason behind the assault, “Wanda stated that he was mean,” according to the complaint.
Wanda Palmer ”appeared oriented to her situation. Her answers to questions were coherent and relevant. She asked for prayer."
Daniel Palmer was being held on a $500,000 bond. He was so combative when he was arrested that it took hours to get him to cooperate with authorities for an arraignment, which required a magistrate to leave a courthouse and come to the Jackson County sheriff’s office, WCHS-TV reported.
Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellinger was out of his office and unavailable for comment Friday.
