THE LACONIA DAILY SUN, Friday, October 14, 2011— Page 3
Report finds there’s dearth Attorney General reports young Concord wife’s of programs for female request for divorce triggered murder-suicide and loving and angry and abusive. A week before CONCORD (AP) — The man who shot his wife to inmates in New Hampshire death the shooting, one friend told investigators, Sarah in front of her two young daughters over the
CONCORD (AP) — A New Hampshire civil rights advisory committee says the state’s female prisoners are deprived of programs and facilities afforded their male counterparts. The committee’s two-year study concludes that the approximately 130 women housed in a converted county jail in Goffstown live in cramped quarters and have limited training and recreation opportunities. Corrections Department spokesman Jeffrey Lyons says there are disparities and the department unsuccessfully sought funds during the past three budget cycles to build a women’s prison. Lyons said the department has improved mental health treatment and educational opportunities for female inmates in recent years. The committee’s findings mirror those in a similar study in 2004. Lyons said his department since the 2004 report has hired full-time mental health providers for female prisoners and opened a halfway house exclusively for women. The women are incarcerated in the former Hillsborough County House of Corrections, which the state leases from the county. The summary of the advisory report describes it as a “cramped, antiquated and ill-equipped” facility. Lyons doesn’t disagree. “We are limited to the confines of a small, outdated facility that was converted into a prison from a closed county jail with very little programming space,” Lyons said. “It is past time for the state to take immediate steps to close the Goffstown prison and provide a facility that eliminates the inexcusable disparities that exist between the treatment of men and women in the state’s correctional system,” said Jordan Budd, who chairs the advisory committee. Male prisoners are incarcerated at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord and the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin. Committee members toured prison facilities and interviewed prisoners and correctional officers during the course of their study. The full report by the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will be released Monday.
Man struck by Amtrak train in Dover dies
DOVER (AP) — A 50-year-old New Hampshire man who was struck by an Amtrak Downeaster train in Dover has died. Dover police Lt. Brant Dolleman says the southbound train tried to stop but couldn’t before striking the man just north of the Washington Street overpass at 2 p.m. Thursday. He says the Dover man was alive at the scene but died minutes after arriving at a hospital. Dolleman says it’s dangerous but not uncommon for pedestrians to use the tracks as a shortcut. Police and Amtrak officials are investigating the man’s death. The train makes five trips daily between Portland, Maine, and Boston. It was delayed in Dover for an hour.
summer and then turned the gun on himself was reeling from her decision to divorce him, according to a New Hampshire Attorney General’s office report released Thursday. Twenty-two-year-old Matthew Balch shot his 25-year-old wife, Sarah, in the driveway of their home June 14 and then killed himself. The final report found that Balch’s mother had tried to protect Sarah by driving a pick-up truck between the two but Matthew Balch, swearing and toting a rifle, walked behind the truck and shot his wife in the head. The five-page report paints a picture of a relationship in rapid decline and an abusive man threatening murder and suicide if his wife left him. In the weeks before the shootings, friends said their arguments became more heated. Investigators say their text messages vacillated between warm
said Matthew threatened to choke her to death if she left him for someone else. After a weekend when his wife spent more time out with friends than home and told Balch she wanted a divorce, he tried to win her back, the report said. On June 13 — the day before the shootings — he sent his wife roses at work and cleaned up the house but she did not come home. He loaded Sarah’s fiveyear-old daughter from a previous relationship and their two-year-old daughter into his truck and drove around the city looking for her. Sarah Balch did not answer his many calls to her cellphone. He called his mother at 11 p.m. to see if she knew where Sarah was. Diane Balch told her son the children needed to be home in bed. He returned home and, after the girls were asleep, resumed his search for Sarah. He again called his see MURDER-SUICIDE page 9
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama said Thursday that officials at the “highest levels” of the Iranian government must be held accountable for a brazen and bizarre plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil, insisting leaders of the world will believe the U.S. case without dispute once they absorb the details. U.S. officials, meanwhile, confirmed the Obama administration has had direct contact with Iran over the allegations. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, met with Iranian officials at Iran’s mission to the U.N. on Wednesday — a highly unusual contact for two countries that do not have diplomatic relations.
Obama would not say whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, knew of the alleged plan. Yet he called it part of a pattern of “dangerous and reckless behavior” by the Iranian government and said people within that government were aware of a murder-for-hire plot. The U.S. considers it an attempted act of terrorism. “We believe that even if at the highest levels there was not detailed operational knowledge, there has to be accountability with respect to anybody in the Iranian government engaging in this kind of activity,” Obama said in a news conference tied to the see IRAN PLOT page 6
Obama blames plot to kill Saudi diplomat on Iran