Barbara Laker

2 days ago | inquirer.com | Barbara Laker

Two months after Thomas “TJ” Siderio would have celebrated his 16th birthday, the city agreed to pay his family a $3 million settlement for his death at the hands of a plainclothes Philadelphia police officer in 2022. Siderio was unarmed when he became the youngest person ever fatally shot by a city police officer. In July of last year, the officer, Edsaul Mendoza, was sentenced to eight to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to third-degree murder and possessing an instrument of crime.

2 weeks ago | inquirer.com | Barbara Laker

It was around 4 a.m. Sunday when Lisa Lee woke up to flashing red lights outside her bedroom window in a quiet neighborhood in Moorestown, and thought police had pulled over a drunk driver. But just as the sun was coming up, she knew it was something more. Trucks from every department imaginable pulled up. “There were fire trucks, an ambulance, multiple police cars and other like unmarked tactical trucks,” she said. Curious, she stepped outside to walk her dog near Cove Road and East Oak Drive.

Mar 9, 2025 | inquirer.com | Barbara Laker

A defense attorney and an inmate’s mother have been arrested and charged with smuggling contraband, including drugs, into a Philadelphia prison where it was given to an inmate. Paul DiMaio, 56, of Turnersville, and Tanya Culver, 55, of North Philadelphia, were each charged with one count of providing contraband to an inmate and aiding and abetting, officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said Friday. Just before 11 a.m. on Feb.

Jan 15, 2025 | inquirer.com | Barbara Laker

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is investigating the decades-old murder of 5-year-old Marcus Yates to determine whether one of the two men locked up since 1988 was wrongfully convicted. The Inquirer’s six-part investigative narrative, “The Wrong Man,” published Dec. 10, uncovered evidence that Michael Gaynor was not the gunman or even in the Southwest Philadelphia candy store where a July 1988 shootout between two men took the boy’s life.

Dec 16, 2024 | centredaily.com | Barbara Laker

In summer 1988, two men started blasting guns at each other in a tiny Southwest Philadelphia candy store, killing 5-year-old Marcus Yates and wounding his brother and another boy. His killing enraged the city and put intense pressure on the police department to find the killers. Detectives locked up two men - Michael Gaynor and Ike Johnson - who were later convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole.