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At 5:30 a.m. a SWAT team pried open the door of a Miami home to arrest a man in a child porn investigation. Three adults walked out, one carrying a small child. Then a man stepped into the doorway holding a pistol with both hands, and deputies opened fire. But the man they killed:
Wasn't the one they came for. That's Christopher Barata, 21, in December 2024, in the Palmetto Estates neighborhood of Miami-Dade County, Florida. The warrant was for his brother, Cristian, 25.
Seconds after the shots, Cristian came out of a room screaming, hands in the air. Both brothers worked for the TSA, the agency that screens passengers at the airport.
The investigation had started in October 2024, when an internet provider tipped off the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that someone at that address was uploading child sexual abuse material.
In the video below you see it from the deputies' bodycams: the door being pried open, the family coming out with a little kid, the pistol in the doorway, the gunfire, and the brother walking out with his hands up.
At headquarters Cristian first refused to talk. An hour later, while deputies were moving him through the building, he asked for the detectives again. Read his rights a second time, he confessed to "watching child pornography on multiple occasions."
He was charged with 15 counts of possession. He's out on bond.
One brother is dead for stepping into a doorway with a gun. The brother they actually came for walked out alive. Did the right person pay for what was happening in that house?
For years a Missouri mom pushed her daughter around in a wheelchair, fed her through a tube, shaved her head and told the world she had leukemia. Charities built them a house. Make-A-Wish sent them to Disney World. Then the mom was found stabbed to death, and police found the daughter:
Walking. On her own two feet, hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin, with a boyfriend she'd met online. That's Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Her mother, Dee Dee, 48, was found dead in her bed in Springfield, Missouri, in June 2015.
The first sign something was wrong came from the family's own Facebook page. A post went up on their shared account: "That B*tch is dead!" Neighbors called the police.
Gypsy was 23. Her mother had told everyone she was much younger. She didn't have leukemia. She didn't have muscular dystrophy. She could walk the whole time. Investigators came to believe Dee Dee had spent Gypsy's entire childhood making her sick and keeping her that way, and that Gypsy had been too afraid to tell anyone.
So she planned a way out. She convinced her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to come to Springfield. While Dee Dee slept, he stabbed her. Gypsy was in the bathroom with her hands over her ears.
In the video below you see the life everyone believed in: the bald little girl smiling for the camera, the wheelchair, the devoted mom at her side, strangers building them a house, the free flights and the photo with Mickey and Minnie. All of it built on a lie.
Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got 10 years. Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and will die in prison. Gypsy walked out on parole in December 2023 and now has millions of followers.
She was a victim for 20 years, and she planned her own mother's murder. Was 10 years too much, or not nearly enough?
Aaron retweeted
Paul Allen gave Bill Gates the idea for Microsoft. Gates gave him 36% of it.
Then Allen got cancer. Still in radiation, he says he heard Gates planning to cut even that “down to almost nothing.”
In the video below, Allen tells 60 Minutes: “They were basically talking about how they were planning to dilute my share down to almost nothing.”
They met at a private school in Seattle. Allen was 15. Gates was 13. They dug through dumpsters for computer code because nobody would give it to them.
In 1974, Allen saw a magazine cover with a new computer called the Altair. He ran to show Gates at Harvard. “This is the computer we’ve been waiting for.”
That idea became Microsoft.
Gates was the sharper businessman. He asked for 60% of the company. Then 64%.
The fights could last for hours. “We’re just screaming at each other for hours,” Allen says.
Then, in 1982, Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. One night, still in treatment, he walked past Gates’s office and heard Gates and Steve Ballmer talking.
He burst in. That night, someone came to his house to apologize. It was Ballmer.
“Bill didn’t come. He sent Steve.”
Allen left Microsoft in 1983. He kept his shares, nearly a third of the company, and later became worth an estimated $40 billion.
In 2009, his cancer came back. This time Gates came to his house, more than once.
“There’s a bond there that can’t be denied.”
Allen died in 2018. Gates wrote that personal computing would not have existed without him.
The case for Gates: Allen was stepping back. Gates was the one working nights and building the company, and Allen still left with a fortune.
The case for Allen: the idea was his, he was sick, and his best friend was talking about his shares instead of his health.
One friend had cancer. The other had a plan for his stock.
So was Bill Gates protecting Microsoft, or betraying his best friend?
A 12-year-old boy climbed out a window in Utah and knocked on doors until a stranger finally answered. He was skin and bones, with bloody duct tape around his ankles. His mom had millions of followers on YouTube as a parenting expert. When the neighbor asked about his wounds, the boy said:
That they were his fault. That's Ruby Franke's son, on August 30, 2023, in Ivins, Utah. The neighbor gave him pretzels and candy and called 911: "He's emaciated. He's got tape around his legs. He's hungry and he's thirsty."
Police went straight to the house he'd escaped from, a multimillion-dollar home owned by Ruby's business partner, a counselor named Jodi Hildebrandt. Inside they found his little sister sitting motionless in a closet, starved and too terrified to move. Paramedics who saw her were moved to tears.
Ruby ran a family channel called "8 Passengers," where she gave parenting advice to millions. For months she and Hildebrandt had been starving both kids, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and sometimes locking them in a concrete bunker in the basement.
The prosecutor said they packed cayenne pepper and honey into the boy's open wounds, wrapped them in plastic and duct tape, and then tied him up again. In her journal Ruby wrote that her son was possessed by the devil, and justified starving him with one line: "I will not feed a demon."
In the video below you see the police bodycam from that day: officers searching the house, the little girl in the closet, and Ruby being arrested, looking more annoyed than afraid.
Both women pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated child abuse and were sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. Ruby's first hearing before the parole board is scheduled for next month.
She taught millions of parents how to raise their kids. Should she ever walk free again?
Aaron retweeted
Bibi Jones was 19 when, she says, an agent took her to bars after Diamondbacks games and introduced her to baseball players. Over 10 in one year. He was using her to sign clients. A year later she posted photos with a shirtless Gronk, and Gronk had to apologize to his owner.
In October 2011 the photos came out: Rob Gronkowski shirtless, Bibi in his Patriots jersey. She was 20 and already working in adult films. The pictures went viral, and Gronk had to go explain himself to the owner of the team.
Then she went on Boston sports radio, and the story went somewhere nobody expected. Back in 2010, she said, when she was still a teenager in Arizona, an agent would "kind of use me to get baseball players to sign him as an agent." How many players? "Over 10." All in 2010. Did they sign with him? She believed "a couple" did. Was she paid? She said no.
And Gronk? She swore nothing had happened between them. "I really, really, really wish it would have happened," she said. The agent refused to comment. Gronk said he never meant to hurt the team's reputation. The story moved on.
Nine months later she sat in front of a webcam in her kitchen and read a page from The Power of Now out loud. Then she started crying. "I was promised a lot of things whenever I got in that industry," she said. "Nothing's happened. I can't do it anymore. I'm only 20 years old. And the earlier I get out of this industry, the better it's going to be." The video has almost 900,000 views.
Two months later she posted another photo with Gronk from the same day. Topless this time. By February 2013 she was back to performing.
Half the internet says she chased athletes for clout and cried when the clout ran out. The other half says a grown man in the sports business passed a teenager around after ballgames to land clients. Almost nobody remembers the agent. Gronk got a meeting with Kraft. She got a crying video. He got "no comment."
The players got contracts. She got a reputation.
Was Bibi Jones a clout chaser who went after athletes, or a teenager the sports business used as bait?
Aaron retweeted
Christopher Reeve was 42 when a horse threw him and broke his neck. The man who played Superman couldn't move or breathe on his own. He told his wife maybe they should just let him die. She answered in seven words. He lived nine more years. She outlived him by less than two.
Superman made him a household name in 1978. He was paid $250,000 for the first film and about $1 million each for Superman III and IV. He was 6'4", an athlete, a pilot, a sailor and a serious horseman. He had trained at Juilliard, where his classmate and best friend was Robin Williams.
On May 27, 1995, he rode in a cross-country competition in Culpeper, Virginia. At the third jump his horse stopped dead. Reeve flew over its head, landed on his head and shattered the top two vertebrae in his neck. He was paralyzed from the neck down and could not breathe without a ventilator.
His care was expected to cost around $400,000 a year. Lying in the hospital, unable to move, he told his wife Dana that maybe it wasn't worth everyone's trouble, and that he should be allowed to go. She looked at him and said: "You're still you, and I love you."
He later told Barbara Walters that the thought disappeared when his kids walked into the room, and it never came back. One of the first times he laughed again was when Robin Williams burst into his room in scrubs and a thick accent, pretending to be a crazy Russian doctor who had come to examine him.
He spent the next nine years fighting for spinal cord research, raising money, testifying before Congress and learning to move one finger at a time. He died on October 10, 2004. He was 52. Seventeen months later Dana, who had never smoked, died of lung cancer. She was 44. Their son Will was 13.
Half the internet calls Christopher Reeve the real Superman. The other half says Dana was the real hero of the story. Almost nobody talks about the fact that she was 34, with a 3-year-old son, when she chose to answer "let me die" with "I love you."
He played a man who could fly. The bravest thing he ever did was stay in a bed he couldn't leave.
Is this what real love looks like, or is that kind of love simply gone today?
Four friends took mushrooms at a home in Arizona. One of them shot and stabbed a man in the back house, then went out to his trailer and attacked a woman there. While he was gone, the third woman found a rifle in a bedroom closet and:
Hid it where he would never find it. He came back for her anyway, stabbing her and beating her with his gun. That's Brett Eschliman, 28, in Gilbert, Arizona, on Saturday, August 1, 2026, just before 11 p.m.
At 10:50 the first 911 call came in from a woman who could hear screaming on the phone. A minute later another caller said someone had killed her boyfriend, and the line cut out. Officers arrived about four minutes later to broken windows, a shattered sliding glass door and a woman screaming for help.
Two officers met Eschliman at the broken door and ordered him to the ground. He lunged at one of them, swiped at his rifle and backed into the bedroom where the screaming was coming from. The same bedroom. The same closet.
In the video below, an officer follows him in. Eschliman steps out of a blind spot with a long metal object and swings at the officer's head and neck. Two rounds from the officer's rifle. Both hit.
He was pronounced dead at 11:24 p.m. The man in the back house died at the scene. The woman in the trailer, shot and stabbed more than a dozen times, died at the hospital. The woman who hid the rifle survived, and she was also one of the people who called 911.
She had a rifle in her hands and a killer coming back for her. Would you have hidden it, or used it?
Minutes after Georgia cops woke him up passed out at the wheel of his lifted Silverado, he was doing 90 mph on the wrong side of the road, passing cars head-on on blind curves with troopers and deputies behind him. When a trooper finally spun his truck off the road, he:
Jumped out and ran, with a Taser pointed right at him. That's February 5, 2024, in Hall County, Georgia. It took a trooper and three deputies to get him on the ground and keep him there.
Oakwood officers had found him slumped over on Bolding Road around 1 p.m. The moment they woke him, he took off so fast they lost him and called off the chase. A Georgia State Patrol trooper spotted the silver Silverado minutes later in the wrong lanes. Two officers tried to box him in, and he swerved onto the shoulder and kept going.
In the video below you see the chase from a trooper's dashcam: the truck crossing the double yellow on blind curves, cars coming the other way, patrol units stacking up behind it, and the PIT on Pine Vale Road that sends it spinning off the road.
Inside the truck they found an oxycodone bottle with his name on it and five pills left. He refused a blood test and was booked into the Hall County Jail.
He could have killed someone on any one of those curves. Should police have let him go once they lost him, or was the PIT the only option left?
Aaron retweeted
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