Metal Prices Go Up, Powerline Wires Go Down

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According to the police spokesman London police issued a warning after two men were seen trying to cut live wires carrying 13,000 volts, reports The Sun.

“This could have easily killed or seriously injured anyone that touched the exposed wire,” said Constable Amy Phillipo.

Base metal prices have jumped in last couple of years. The new prices gave the thieves the motiv to strip live wires for copper. Some of them were caught stealing statues and tombstone fixtures.

“Copper and aluminum prices are now at all time highs,” said Wayne Kummer, co-owner of London Salvage on Egerton Street.

Business news reports say that copper is about $4 a pound, but you can get as much as $3.60 at scrap yards. Also aluminum is going for $1.40 a pound. Dealers will pay about $1 a pound.

Kummer’s company has policies to discourage or catch thieves trying to sell stolen metals or steal from his yard.

“We can usually tell if someone’s stolen it and our people are told to watch for anything new. We don’t let anyone in our yard unless they have a vehicle and we record the licence plate and make of vehicle.” said Kummer to The Sun.

“Stealing copper from an energized electric grid is extremely dangerous, putting the lives of the public, employees and the suspects themselves at serious risk of injury or death from electrocution,” said Constable Amy Phillipo in her interview for the local news.
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Teen charged with his twin death

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The death of Dennis Lewis was shocking enough: The National Honor Society student and marching band member was shot in his bedroom while masked robbers held a gun on his mother in another room.

Then police arrested his identical twin, an advanced placement student also active in their high school band. Authorities are accusing Derris Lewis of taking part in the attack and being an accomplice in his brother’s death, saying his bloody palm print was found in the bedroom where Dennis was killed.

The family, crushed by the death of one twin, is adamant the other is innocent.

“There’s no way, shape or form that my brother was even in that house,” said the boys’ older sister, Diane Lewis, who lives two doors from where the shooting happened. “He would never put my mom in harm’s way whatsoever - she didn’t raise killers or criminals.”

Derris is charged in juvenile court with being an accomplice to aggravated murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping. Because he turned 18 two weeks after the shooting, prosecutors are seeking to have him charged as an adult.

Authorities won’t say what Derris Lewis is accused of doing. They say the motive that night was robbery but won’t elaborate.

“There were multiple people that entered and anyone who entered the premise is an accomplice,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.

Derris Lewis’ public defender, Libby Hall, declined to comment.

The attack happened just after midnight on Jan. 18 in a tough neighborhood of small homes on the city’s north side.

The twins’ mother, April Agee, was asleep on a couch in the front room of her house, the only place she could lie comfortably because of her multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy.

Dennis was asleep in the next room with the door shut. Derris had moved out a few weeks earlier and was staying with his girlfriend elsewhere in the city.

Agee says several men wearing black masks, white shirts and white sneakers entered the house, put a gun to her head, demanded money and asked who else was in the house.

“They kept saying ‘Where’s the money, where’s the money,’ with a .45 up to my head,” Agee recalled at her daughter’s home. She doesn’t know who the men were.

“I couldn’t do nothing but be still. God say ‘Be still,’ and I was, but my son started fighting them,” she said.

Agee, 47, said one of the men kicked Dennis’ bedroom door in and struggled with him. She heard someone yell “He’s too strong,” then the sound of a gun shot.

The family says there was no forced entry. They don’t know if the front door was locked before Dennis and his mother went to bed that night.

The robbers did not take $235 in cash in an envelope in Dennis’ room, money he was saving to visit Florida State University, which he planned to attend.

The family believes police made a mistake with the palm print.

Derris’ prints were in the room because he had lived there until recently, Diane Lewis said.
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3-year-old threw out family savings

A Chinese couple are distraught after their three year old daughter threw their life savings out of the window of their 17th floor flat.

The little girl threw the equivalent of £700 out of the window of their rented apartment in Shenzen while her parents were asleep.

“When I woke up, she wasn’t beside me, and my purse was on the bed, open, and with a thick wad of money missing,” said the mother, Mrs. Huang.

Mrs Huang says she immediately asked her daughter what had happened, but the girl said she didn’t know.

“I looked everywhere, then I noticed there were two notes on the windowsill, and another two on the window sill one floor down,” she added.

The owner of a restaurant on the first floor of the building told her that money had been raining down on to the street, and that passers-by had gone crazy trying to catch it.

Mrs Huang said she spent the whole day in tears as £400 of the money had belonged to other people.

“We’re now hoping for magic, and that the people with our money will bring it back,” she said.

The parents have now installed wire mesh on all of their windows, reports Southern Metropolis News.