According to a confession he gave police, Sanford captured a 7th grade girl on her way home from a supermarket and brought her to an abandoned home. After failing to rape her, he beat the girl to death.

Sanford was a registered Level 3 sex offender, the category deemed most likely to reoffend. So he was fitted with GPS, but why didn’t the GPS precaution prevent this tragedy?

A few reasons. First, it was a passive GPS, in which parole officers merely check coordinates after the fact. That GPS data successfully led to Sanford’s eventual police confession, but it didn’t prevent anything. And even active GPS, one read in realtime, would require someone actually checking the data and reasoning what a registered sex offender hanging around in an abandoned building might imply.

A million things could probably have occurred differently to prevent this tragedy, but I can’t help but worry that technological catch phrases like “GPS” lull us into a false sense of security, while computers gather meaningless data of infinitely meaningful events. [CNN]

The news stunned a student population still reeling from the mass shootings that happened in 2007.

Xin Yang, a Beijing native, had met her accused attacker, 25-year-old Haiyang Zhu, through the 500-strong Chinese community at VTech. The two attended several functions together, and he was listed on her emergency contacts. But on Wednesday, seemingly apropos of nothing, he pulled out a kitchen knife in a cafe at the Graduate Life Center.

Witnesses said the two had not been arguing before the attack, and that there hadn’t been previous signs of trouble between them.

Zhu has been charged with first-degree murder. After the arrest, the campus alert system put in place after Seung-Hui Cho’s shootings sent out a notice to about 30,000 subscribers. [AP]

The AP reports that this Malaysian man was punched and stabbed because he refused to share the microphone and was hogging the stage. Of all the things to make a stand over, your right to belt out a Pussycat Dolls tune is not one of the ones we recommend. This has been a Giz Tech Tip. [Boston]

In her first declaration, Kaoru explained that her son Koki disappeared in the park:

I brought Koki to the park after he came back from school shortly after 3 p.m. He went missing while I was in a restroom that is about 20 meters away from large play equipment in the athletic playground area of the park.

The police conducted a search using the GPS in Koki’s mobile–which also has the strap that the police thinks is the crime weapon–finally finding the body, which the mother refused to see. After further questioning, she admitted she was the killer. [Mainichi and Yomiuri via Tokyomango]

The subtle surprise is a woman’s blood-curdling scream, which is accompanied by the music from Psycho. The ruckus starts up when someone enters the bathroom courtesy of a AA battery-powered motion sensor and a speaker. It’s US$20, which isn’t too bad considering your guests will probably take a knife to it themselves after the gag gets old. [Things You Never Knew Existed via OhGizmo]

He and his family drove off from a minimum security prison (Driving out of prison? Yeah, that security sounds pretty minimal). He went for some cash and a change of clothes. Then things got ugly.

A teenage girl was shot in the neck and a baby was found unhurt in a car seat inside the vehicle where the three bodies were found, Arapahoe County undersheriff Mark Campbell said. The relationship between the girl, baby and the escaped convict wasn’t immediately clear.

The bodies of “Spam King” Edward “Eddie” Davidson, his wife, and 3-year-old daughter were found in an SUV parked in a farmhouse driveway in a rural part of Bennett, about 25 miles east of Denver. Authorities said Davidson was the apparent gunman.

At least he left the baby alone. But really, stories don’t get much worse than this. As if you needed a reason to hate spammers any more. [MSNBC via Geekologie]

The Akihabara district is known to gadget lovers the world over as Japan’s gizmodic heart. Today, though, a 25-year-old man named Tomohiro Kato allegedly drove his rented van into a crowd of people, then jumped out stabbing more people, including those he’d already hit with the vehicle. Reuters says that among the reported dead were six men aged 19 to 74—one who may have died from a heart attack—as well as a 21-year-old woman.
[Story and photo gallery at Reuters]
[Murky video and additional pics and maps at BBC]
[More local details at AP Japan]

The surreal mistake happened because the ex-husband’s mobile phone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologise and was greeted by the father, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, Ramazan found Emine and killed her with another knife. He later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it’s not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localisation of mobile phones in Turkey is causing “serious problems” when it comes to certain “delicate words” in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localisation of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Alternatively, the press could ask for banning knives from the homes of demonstrably stupid people. [Hurriyet—in Turkish]

As the news report states, the mother is conflicted as how best to deal with the situation. “Melissa has dilemma, this Elmo is her son’s favourite toy…[but it wants to kill him].” [TBO via gearlog]