Aggravation of Preexisting Injuries

Children sitting in a classroom with large cockroaches on their faces, and participating in bondage style sexual activities - these were just some the photographic images that Los Angeles sex abuse lawyers have now learned were taken by a teacher in Los Angeles.

The teacher, Mark Berndt was a former teacher at the Miramonte Elementary School, a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school is in a poor neighborhood in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. Berndt has been arrested at his home in Torrance, and has been charged with child sex abuse crimes. He is being held on a $2.3 million bail.

According to the investigators, they were first alerted to the abuse when a film processor turned over close to 40 photographs depicting children in different horrifying, abusive situations. Investigators then began the probe which led to the arrest of Berndt, a 30-year veteran of the Miramonte Elementary School.

Investigations of his classroom turned up more than 390 photographs of children in varying positions. In some of the photographs, Berndt is depicted sitting with his arm around the children, or having his hand on their mouths.

In other pictures, girls are shown with a spoon containing what is later found to be semen, held near their lips. Investigators have interviewed many of the children who were allegedly abused, and they have confirmed that they were forced to drink something from plastic spoons. DNA tests on containers retrieved from the classroom have found that these contained semen. The children were also made to ingest semen on cookies.

Many of the children who are believed to have been abused came from other classes. Investigators believe that Berndt would seek out children during recess hour or lunch hour, when he would lure children from other classes into his classroom.

A team of researchers has developed a computer game that is designed to entertain children and educate them about the right way to behave around dogs. Children are some of the most frequent victims of dog bites in the United States, and Los Angeles dog bite lawyers are hopeful that using computer software like this can help inculcate safe practices among children. However, the researchers found limited success in helping children translate what they had learned in the game into real-world environments.

The software program called The Blue Dog has been developed by a nonprofit organization called the Blue Dog Trust. The game consists of a number of animated scenarios, in which children can choose different actions. For instance, the child can choose whether to play with a dog that is eating. If the child makes the wrong choice in the game, the animated dog snarls or growls.

Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham wanted to analyze how successful the program was in encouraging safe behavior around dogs. They recruited a total of 76 children. The children were between 3 and 5 years old. The children were given 3 tasks. They were exposed to animated dogs in different situations, and asked questions about how they would react to the dog in each case. Then there was make-believe play using a doll house and dolls. Finally, the children were taken into another room, where there was a real dog. They were rated on their reactions and their behaviors around the dog. They were then given the Blue Dog Software, and were told to use the program often. After 3 weeks, the children came back to the lab, and were put through the same steps again.

The results after the 3 weeks were mixed. The researchers found that the children did learn the right behaviors around dogs after using the software program. However, they were unable to transfer the same safe behaviors to the real environment. In other words, they were unable to practice in the real world, what they had learned on the software program. It appears that the program needs some modifications that encourage a practical application of these learned behaviors.

Soon after a severe brain injury, the damaged brain suffers from depolarizations, or ‘brain tsunamis’ that result in an increase in the real and severity of the injury, and contribute to poor patient outcomes. Patients with a severe brain injury may, therefore, be helped through treatments that can help block these ‘tsunamis’ as they occur. A new study confirms this phenomenon, and aims to lay the groundwork for the development of treatments to prevent depolarizations.

Previous studies have indicated to Los Angeles brain injury lawyers that a person who suffers a serious head injury may suffer from a phenomenon called cortical spreading depolarization. Short-circuiting in the nerve cells of the brain, which are responsible for storing of electrical and chemical energy, can lead to the malfunctioning and short-circuiting of other cells in the brain. The resulting effect is a tsunami-like phenomenon that can damage brain tissues, and reduce the chances of a full recovery for the patient. This effect intensifies the impact of the injury, and leads to a poor patient outcome.

Researchers from the United Kingdom and the US studied 103 patients who required brain surgery after suffering a head injury. During the surgery, the researchers attached a strip of electrodes near the area of the brain that had suffered the injury. They found that out of the 103 patients in the study, 58% suffered these brain tsunamis.

The researchers have now confirmed that these depolarizations severely impact the person's ability to recover after z brain injury. They believe that this evidence can be used to develop treatments to block the appearance of these depolarizations. If researchers can come up with a way to block these killer waves in the brain in the days after an injury, they can help limit the severity of the brain injury and its long-term impact. Patient outcomes could be improved substantially.