• Tiffany Sellers, the first municipal judge of the new city of South Fulton, Ga., was fired from the $135,000-per-year post by the City Council after she was accused of bullying workers and approving the filming of a reality TV show in her courtroom.
• Cole Johnson, Tyler Kelley, Casey Sanders and Craig Vasquez, all police officers in Des Moines, Iowa, are being praised for catching three children, including a baby, dropped by their mother from a third-story window of a burning apartment building.
• Nathan Hawkins, owner of a Texas snake-removal company, after a homeowner in Albany reported seeing "a few snakes" in the crawl space and workers pulled 45 rattlesnakes from under the house, said that people will see more snakes this spring because of habitat loss.
• Kevin Schmoll, police chief of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in East St. Louis, said officers are investigating a report from a Head Start pre-school that a teacher forced children to stand naked in a closet with the door open as punishment for misbehaving.
• Laverne Simpson, a Mississippi judge, threw out negligent homicide and child neglect charges against Jenea Payne, saying there wasn't enough evidence to find Payne at fault after two of her three children drowned when she left them in a locked car that rolled into a creek.
• Catherine Vandermaesen, 65, of Ojai, Calif., faces elder abuse and animal neglect charges after sheriff's deputies said they found her 96-year-old father and multiple pets living in a home stinking of feces and infested with up to 700 rats.
• Giselle Perez, 20, of Oklahoma City, incarcerated for two weeks after a traffic stop turned up an outdated 2015 arrest warrant on a juvenile theft charge that had been dismissed, said she never went to court and that she lost her job while she was jailed.
• Jessica Jauch, cleared of drug charges after she was jailed for 96 days in 2012 and never saw a judge, was awarded $250,000 in damages by a federal jury after a judge found Choctaw County, Miss., Sheriff Cloyd Halford and the county liable for her "unjust" detention.
• Khari Manzini, a police officer in Woodbridge, N.J., said his training in autism response kicked in when he helped a 12-year-old autistic boy find his teddy bear after the youth called 911 to report that the stuffed animal named Freddy was missing.
A Section on 03/21/2019