US Crime News

Florida Woman Accused of Assault After Pulling Knife Over Slice of Pizza

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Florida Woman Accused of Assault After Pulling Knife Over Slice of Pizza
De’Erica Cooks, 22, was charged on July 16 with aggravated assault. (St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office)
Tom Ozimek
7/21/2019
Updated:
7/21/2019
A Florida woman was arrested after trying to attack another woman with a knife when she was denied a slice of pizza, the St. Augustine Record reported.

De’Erica Cooks, 22, was accused on July 16 of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill.

The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was cited in the report as saying that Cooks became angry after another woman refused to give her a pizza slice. Authorities said Cooks brandished a steak knife while telling the woman “I’m going to cut you.”

Cooks allegedly tried to attack the woman, who told authorities she was afraid she would die.

A man in the residence managed to wrest the knife away from Cooks, but she grabbed another knife.

As of Saturday, Cooks was being held on a $1,500 bond.

Bizarre Oregon Break-In

In other bizarre crime news, police in Oregon said a man broke into a Gresham home with his cat “Spaghetti,” before performing several odd acts including dressing in a woman’s Christmas onesie.
The man also allegedly brewed up some coffee during the July 7 intrusion into the house, KOIN 6 News reported, ate a cupcake, and drank some beer.

“This is my first house, this is my actual property and someone came in and I guess couldn’t figure out how to open a door and kicked a hole in the wall to crawl through to kick a hole in the closet, and then go make themselves a cup of coffee?” homeowner Timothy Smith told KOIN 6 News. “It blows my mind. It really, really does.”

According to Fox 12 Oregon, police responded to a call shortly before 4 p.m. Sunday regarding a possible burglary in progress.
The homeowners were cited by KATU as saying that when they returned to their house on Sunday afternoon, they heard something moving around in their crawl space. The couple said when they looked inside, they saw a cat wearing a shirt. They also heard sounds leading them to suspect someone else was in the crawl space and called 911.

When officers arrived, a man wearing the owner’s onesie came out from the crawl space, the report said. The homeowner told KOIN 6 News that the suspect “took off all his clothes and tossed them in the washer and dryer” before dressing himself in his fiancee’s pajamas, which were “like a zip-up, it’s got little snowball things that bounce off of it.”

The suspect has been identified as 38-year-old Ryan Bishop, CBS Austin reported. He was booked in the Multnomah County Jail on charges of first-degree burglary, first-degree criminal mischief, and third-degree theft.

The cat initially refused to come out of the crawl space, prompting Animal Control to respond to the scene. KOIN 6 News reporter Amy Frazier later posted a video of the cat, writing, “Spaghetti the cat is now safe after bizarre Gresham burglary!”

Smith told KOIN 6 News he and his fiancee hadn’t yet settled into their new home when “someone came in and ruined the sanctity of my own home before I was even moved in.”

He added that his fiancee doesn’t feel safe in the residence and he feels “like a part of my soul has kind of been destroyed.”

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
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The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend.

Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.