He was delivered prematurely after his mother was pinned under a bus

A 3-pound infant who was delivered a month early after his mother was pinned under a bus that was struck by a drunk-driving senior nearly two weeks ago has died. Read more about the baby’s struggle at BET.com/News.

Authorities said that the mother was a member of a strange religious cult

God never raised 1-year-old Javon Thompson from the dead, as Queen Antoinette had promised, so the lifeless body of the starved baby lay in a back room for nearly a week and decomposed, police say. Javon’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon  (above), allegedly denied him food and water for two days because he wouldn’t say “Amen” after meals. She was apparently carrying out a strict edict handed down by Queen Antoinette, the leader of an alleged cult known as 1 Mind Ministries. Go to BET.com/News for more on this story.

Police seek clues to who murdered an Atlanta mother
Investigators and family members in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth continued seeking clues Tuesday to explain why anybody would shoot to death a 40-year-old mother as she waited to pick up her daughter from work. After all, authorities say, the car that was stolen from Genai Coleman Friday night, when she was gunned down outside a Red Lobster restaurant, was an old Dodge; plus, she had no enemies anyone knew about. A stunned Geraldine Brown, who flew to Atlanta from Elkhart, Ind., immediately after hearing that her daughter had been shot, said the car certainly was “nothing worth being killed over,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They had the car, why did they have to shoot her?” Coleman, a single preschool teacher at Montclair Elementary School in DeKalb County, took in and raised three foster daughters (now ages 19, 21 and 23) at her home in Snellville, Ga., the Journal-Constitution reports. “‘Genai’ means “one who loves people,” and she did just that, her mother said.

Detroit’s Kilpatrick has some legal team

If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has to cough up some more cash, gets booted out of office or winds up in jail behind the scandals swirling around him these days, it certainly won’t be due to a lack of legal representation. The Detroit News reports that the embattled city chief, who is “confronting legal challenges on at least six fronts, has assembled a huge team of attorneys to fight an array of civil lawsuits and attempts to remove him from office without compromising job one – defending Kilpatrick on felony charges.” Such a seemingly humongous effort, according to the News, requires at least 17 public and private attorneys. BET.com/News has more on this story. Should Kilpatrick step down, or is there a witch hunt against the mayor?

A Georgia school gets the paddles ready for the fall
To spank or not to spank … that’s the question in Twiggs County, Ga., where principals are breaking out their paddles this fall to deter misbehaving. It won’t be the first time that the school district puts the wood to students who act up. Last year, for example, a second-grader was swatted for throwing pencils, as were others who were deemed too unruly for the standard time-out or other methods of discipline, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. But the policy was rarely used. Teachers and administrators can opt out if they desire, and parents must sign a permission slip to allow their children to be paddled. Read more of what the parents and teachers had to say at BET.com/News.

Souvenir from record hit reaches Cooperstown branded with asterisk.
Barry Bonds’ best baseball’s been branded. But it still made its way into the Cooperstown, N.Y. Hall of Fame after much controversy. Following urban entrepreneur Marc Ecko’s $752,467 purchase of the souvenir from Bonds’ Major League record-breaking 756th home run in a Web auction, Ecko let the public vote to brand the ball with an asterisk, symbolizing Bonds’ widely suspected steroid use. After a back-and-forth this week between the Hall and Ecko, who Bonds called an “idiot,” over whether the ball would be a loan or gift, the Hall’s spokesman Brad Horn announces: “We are very happy to receive the baseball as a donation, and not as a loan. We look forward to adding this ball to our permanent collections.” Bonds has threatened to boycott the Hall of Fame. He was indicted on perjury charges for allegedly lying to a grand jury, in connection with his alleged use of steroids.

A silly game lands a mother in jail
The mother of a 10-year-old boy and a teenage girl has been arrested after allegedly driving a car on which the two youths were “car-surfing” before being thrown off and seriously injured. The names of the victims were not released because of their age. Police say that the boy, who is in critical condition at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, is suffering from serious head trauma; the teen was treated and is now in good condition, police said. “It seems ludicrous that anybody would do that,” said Sgt. Marcus Booth of the San Antonio Police Department. “There’s plenty of room in the car, so we don’t know why she did it. It really looks like poor judgment.” The mother was allegedly driving the car while the youngsters stood on the hood. When she hit the brakes, the kids went flying and rolled into the street, police said. Police say they do not know exactly how fast the woman was driving and noted that she did not appear to be under the influence of alcohol.