You may want to take this phone call!
"New Hampshire, Merrill Lynch reach $400,000 accord" by Kathleen Ronayne, Associated Press December 31, 2014
CONCORD, N.H. — The state on Tuesday announced a $400,000 settlement with Merrill Lynch for calling people who have asked not to be called by telemarketers.
The settlement, handled by the Bureau of Securities Regulation, is the state’s sixth telemarketing-related settlement in recent years. A $750,000 settlement with Edward Jones this year is one of the largest telemarketing-related settlements in history.
‘‘The bureau continues to take a strong stance on telemarketing abuses and, moving forward, will not hesitate to pursue any licensee of our office who fails to follow applicable telemarketing rules,’’ Bureau Deputy Director Jeffrey Spill said.
Thousands of calls from Merrill Lynch, a New York-based financial services company, to New Hampshire residents since 2011 violated telemarketing laws, although it is difficult to track exact numbers, said Adrian LaRochelle, staff attorney for the bureau. Data from the Federal Trade Commission show nearly 1.2 million New Hampshire numbers were on the National Do Not Call Registry this year, the highest number per capita of any state. This year, the trade commission received nearly 15,000 complaints from New Hampshire residents.
As part of the settlement, Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay the state $400,000, stop its illegal activities and provide better supervision and training for its agents making telemarketing calls.
--more--"
At least they faced up to their crimes.
"Facebook post presages murder-suicide in N.H.; Man shoots wife and self in hospital room" by Mark Arsenault, Matt Rocheleau and Jim Kimble, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondents December 30, 2014
DOVER, N.H. — Mark Lavoie’s final Facebook post read like a last will and testament, a suicide note, and an admission to a murder that had not yet happened.
I'm hoping my posts are not reading that way; I'm just going to stop buying the Boston Globe and blogging about it every damn day.
“Please don’t mourn for me,” he wrote early Tuesday, in a post that suggested his wife wanted to die and that he was going to help her. “My spirit will be in a much better place with my soul mate.”
Okay, I won't.
Desperate friends who saw the post phoned the police. They typed plaintive pleas on Lavoie’s Facebook page.
“Mark please don’t.”
“Call me!”
“I’m on my way to his house!!! 20 minutes away,” posted Lavoie’s longtime friend Charlene Wood.
Minutes later, Wood learned from one of Lavoie’s relatives: It was too late.
Lavoie, 50, a parts manager at Portsmouth Ford Lincoln, had allegedly shot dead his wife, a patient in the critical care unit at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, at about 6 a.m. Tuesday.
Then, he apparently took his own life. “It was positively horrific to realize he had actually done it,” Wood said in a Globe interview.
New Hampshire Attorney General Joseph A. Foster confirmed Tuesday afternoon that police had responded to a report of gunshots in the hospital, and that a husband and wife had died in what appeared “to be the result of a murder-suicide.”
It was exactly as Lavoie had predicted in the opening of his post: “I want to start off by saying this is going to be officially ruled a murder/suicide,” he wrote, “when in all actuality it is a double suicide.”
*************
Lavoie’s sister Dorcas Lavoie confirmed to the Associated Press that her brother had shot his wife and himself, and said he did it “out of love.” A woman who answered a phone registered to another close relative told the Globe that the family had no comment.
In the posting on what appears to be his Facebook page, Lavoie claimed his wife wanted to “escape the bipolar demons that have been swirling around in her brain since childhood.” It was unclear why Kathy Lavoie had been hospitalized.
Lavoie suggested that because he had called 911, “she is experiencing the only thing she feared more than her illness . . . life support on a respirator.” He did not elaborate on the 911 call; neighbors said an ambulance visited the Lavoie home Monday.
“I am more than happy to sacrifice my life to fix my doing and join her spirit in a happier place,” Lavoie wrote.
Wow, this is a Lavoie love story full of joy.
The couple had lived in a Cape-style home on Tennyson Avenue, a quiet residential neighborhood lined with modest one- and two-story houses.
Scott Ablett lived two doors away. He said Lavoie and his wife have two daughters, one of whom is about the same age as Ablett’s daughter, who is 21. The family also had a dog, he said.
“They were nice people from what I knew,” he said. “It’s sad. It’s tragic.”
Lavoie’s Facebook post matter-of-factly directed how he wanted his property distributed, and asked that his pets be cared for. I'm hoping this blog will be here forever.
It's my legacy, and I've given the NSA enough rope.
***************
Lavoie’s friend Casey Mitchell was left struggling Tuesday with the death of friend — but Mitchell said he had no indication that the marriage would end in violence.
“They never had any domestic issues at all. There was no drug use. They went to church,” he said. “They were an iconic couple.”
Just before the shooting, Mark Lavoie signed off from social media, forever:
“Well in all the years I’ve been on [Facebook] I never was one for posting any drama,” he wrote. “I was due one.”
“Love you all, peace out!”
I feel the same way about you, dearly beloved readers, although I am not killing anything but this blog through neglect.
--more--"
If anything it is a murder of mercy -- unlike other things.
