Taped Child Rape Case; Hamburger Recall; Memphis Student Shot
HEIDI COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everybody. You are in the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Heidi Collins. Watch events coming into the NEWSROOM live on Monday October 1st. Here's what's on the rundown. Nevada police trying to find a man accused in the videotaped rape of a 3-year-old girl. His former girlfriend speaking out this morning. Pass on the patty. Millions of pounds of frozen hamburger facing recall today. And they followed Latino laborers in New Orleans. Now one community wants the taco trucks to hit the road. "Uncovering America" in the NEWSROOM. Revelations this morning about an accused child rapist. Police say Chester Stiles videotaped a brutal attack on a 3-year-old. The little girl, now 7, is safe. The manhunt for Stiles, though, still on. Dan Simon live now from Las Vegas with the latest on this. Dan, I know you talked with Stiles' former girlfriend.</s>DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Heidi. The woman we talked to, her name is Tina Allen. And she says she's actually the reason why Chester Stiles came to even know this little girl. She said she never saw Stiles act inappropriately around children. Nonetheless, she says she feels a tremendous amount of guilt, what happened. Let me explain how this relationship came to be. Allen says two of her children shared an apartment, and also living in that apartment was this little girl and her mother. She says that this man, Chester Stiles, was very much a father figure to the family. This is how she described him.</s>TINA ALLEN, SUSPECT'S FMR. GIRLFRIEND: He said he had been in the Navy and, you know, I was looking for a strong guy to represent to my sons what I thought they needed to be.</s>SIMON: Well, obviously, you can imagine what's going through Tina Allen's mind today. Let me explain what's happening today. Obviously, there is a tremendous manhunt going on. The Las Vegas police looking for Chester Stiles. Chester Stiles, according to Tina Allen, showed up at Tina Allen's house last week. He apparently came for a friendly chat. She says she didn't notice any strange behavior coming from him. He didn't appear to be nervous in any way, but this was before he was named a suspect in this case. But one thing she did note, his hair, Heidi, appeared to be much longer and he also appeared to have put on a lot of weight and a lot of muscle -- Heidi.</s>COLLINS: Yes. What about, Dan, the man who turned that tape over to police in the first place? His name, Darren Tuck. He turned himself in, correct?</s>SIMON: He turned himself in over the weekend. Obviously, a strange case there. He says he basically found this tape in the desert some time ago and just decided to turn it in. Obviously, authorities are suspicious of his story. They wanted to talk to him again, debrief him and see if there may be a connection between him and Chester Stiles -- Heidi.</s>COLLINS: All right. CNN's Dan Simon working this story for us. All right, Dan. Thank you. We want to move on now to the very latest with the weather situation. Jacqui Jeras is following all of this for us and joins us now.</s>COLLINS: A major hamburger recall to tell you about. Nearly 22 million pounds of frozen meat pulled. Possibly E. coli illnesses now in eight different states. CNN's Jim Acosta is following the story for us. He's joining us live from New York now. Jim, you're at a grocery store there, as we can see behind you. How much is this really affecting consumers?</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's affecting consumers big time, Heidi. Many supermarkets didn't start pulling these Topps frozen hamburgers until they heard about this recall over the weekend. But Topps may have known about this potential contamination for weeks. The recall was announced last week, but it was expanded over the weekend, prompting stores nationwide to start clearing their inventories of this product. But a south Florida girl says she was sickened and sent to the hospital and nearly died after eating a Topps frozen hamburger that her family bought at a Wal-Mart store a month and a half ago.</s>SAMANTHA SAFRANEK, FMR. PATIENT: In the back of my mind, I had that question, if I was going to make it.</s>ANNA SAFRANEK, SAMANTHA'S MOTHER: It just wasn't fair that, you know, a kid eats a hamburger and ends up almost dying.</s>ACOSTA: And federal safety, federal food safety investigators, are now looking into contamination cases, sicknesses resulting from contamination in about eight states. And as a matter of fact, at this store we're standing at this morning, we found some of those Topps frozen hamburgers still on the store shelves bearing the USDA number that is being mentioned in this recall. And we notified store management here and they had to pull those burgers off the shelves very quickly, before customers came in and started buying them -- Heidi.</s>COLLINS: All right. CNN's Dan Simon following this recall for us. It is an awful big one, that's for sure. All right, Dan. Thank you. Want to get you directly now to this story that we've been following this morning. At the University of Memphis, there has been a deadly shooting. It happened last night. We want to get directly out to Brian Heap with our affiliate WPTY. He's joining us from campus. Brian, what do we know this morning?</s>BRIAN HEAP, REPORTER, WPTY: Well, Heidi, they're still looking for the shooter. At this point, police, if they have any information about the shooter, they aren't sharing it with us. We know that they interviewed several people last night. But as far as whether or not they were able to get any information that would lead them in the direction of the shooter, like I said, if police have it, they certainly aren't passing it on to us at this time. I'll tell you where we are right now. We're on the University of Memphis campus, which is pretty centrally located in the city of Memphis. Right back here on this corner, about four trees in, is where this all came to an end last night. Police tell us that the man who was shot was shot at a dorm, then got inside his car, drove himself, presumably to try to get some help, and then ended up crashing into one of those trees over there, the one that's missing all that bark if you can see that. Police, again, tell us they don't really have a whole lot of information about what led up to this shooting. They're trying to get all those details sorted out. We know that immediately after police realized they had a murder on their hands, they went into what's called a lockdown mode here on campus. And I'm told by the University of Memphis police that's really sort of a new concept for them and for a lot of campuses, college campuses, in light of what happened at Virginia Tech earlier this year.</s>COLLINS: Hey, Brian, you know, we've seen some of these reports here as well. And a couple of them are saying that this, at least so far, according to police, does not look like a random shooting. Any more information out there that you can give us on that?</s>HEAP: Yes, that's basically what I heard as well. It appears that the young man who was shot was a target in this particular case. And again, police immediately went into that lockdown situation. I never got any impression from police that they felt as though there was any other immediate danger on campus, that this shooter might still be out there, perhaps going to target other people as we saw at Virginia Tech a few months ago. But right now, it appears this was not a random crime, just a targeted person, and it's the only incident that we know of at this time.</s>COLLINS: All right. Well, we know you'll be following it. Let us know if anything should change out there. Brian Heap with our affiliate WPTY. Thank you, Brian. A family mourning a mother and wanting to know how she died in police custody. Police say Carol Anne Gotbaum was arrested Friday at the Phoenix airport. A US Airways spokesman said Gotbaum was bumped from a flight for being late to the gate, then became extremely angry. Police handcuffed her and took her to a holding room. While she was there, police say she may have tried to get out of the handcuffs and accidentally strangled herself. Gotbaum's stepmother-in-law is New York City public advocate Betsy Gotbaum. She spoke to reporters yesterday.</s>BETSY GOTBAUM, VICTIM'S STEPMOTHER-IN-LAW: Carol was a wonderful, wonderful person. She was a wonderful mother. She was sweet and kind and loving. At this moment, we are awaiting the results of the investigation. We don't know any more than has been reported in the press. This is obviously very, very difficult for us. We are dealing with it as best we can. My number one focus is those children and my stepson.</s>COLLINS: An autopsy is scheduled for today, but it could be up to 90 days before the results are released. Rescuers challenged. First the crew had to find the downed plane, then they had to decide how to get the occupants down. The plane crashed in a tree just short of a runway at the Franklin, Virginia, airport. But because it was in a swampy, forested area, as you can see there, the plane was hard to locate and then even harder to reach. The pilot and passenger spent more than six hours suspended in the tree. Climbers went up separate trees and secured the plane with ropes before getting the two men off. They suffered only minor injuries. Lucky for them. Boy. A noose around the neck of a young child, part of an elementary school lesson on lynchings? Investigation ahead. And passport now required. Delayed security rules delayed no more. It will take effect today. Will they change the way you travel? And escape from Myanmar. An eyewitness to the crackdown now offering a first-hand account of what's happening in the secretive Asian nation. And a volcano on an island in the Red Sea lights up the sky. The update and the search for the missing.