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Human skulls linked to missing woman and other possible victims found in New Mexico
Authorities in New Mexico say they discovered at least 10 human skulls in and around a property near the southeastern border, which could include the remains of a woman who’s been missing since 2019.
Investigators found the remains while executing a search warrant for Cecil Villanueva, a man flagged to law enforcement by a local resident in the city of Jal. The resident said he offered Villanueva a ride in his car and proceeded to have “an unsettling encounter” with him, the Lea County Sheriff’s Office said.
The resident, who authorities haven’t named, reported the interaction on Nov. 5. He said Villanueva was carrying two bags and “made alarming statements” as he “discarded objects from the vehicle, some of which appeared to be human bones,” the sheriff’s office said. Investigators uncovered bone fragments during their subsequent search of the area, and a pathologist later confirmed they were in fact human bones. Forensic experts went on to determine the findings included portions of a human skull and jawbone, according to the sheriff.
There is evidence of the remains of between 10 and 20 human skulls on a property in Jal where Villanueva had been staying, which was “associated with rumors of human remains,” the sheriff said. A team of investigators and a forensic anthropologist turned over the remains to the Office of the Medical Investigator in Albuquerque. The medical investigator will analyze and potentially identify them.
🚨PRESS RELEASE🚨
Human Remains Discovered in Ongoing Missing Persons Investigation in Jal, NM
November 12, 2024 – The…
Posted by Lea County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Law enforcement has so far released few details about the case, but they said it “is being closely tied” to the disappearance of a woman named Angela McManes, who went missing in 2019 and lived near the property now under investigation.
“Authorities are working diligently to determine the connection between the remains and McManes, as well as other possible victims,” the sheriff’s office said.
Authorities have not said whether Villanueva has been arrested in this case. The man apparently claims he purchased the skulls online, CBS News affiliate KOSA reported Tuesday. At the time, Lea County Undersheriff Michael Walker told the station authorities were still working to determine whether the skulls they found were real human skulls.
Anyone with information related to the investigation has been asked to contact the Lea County Sheriff’s Office or the county’s local Crime Stoppers line. CBS News reached out to the sheriff’s office for more information but did not immediately hear back.
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A grad student in Michigan received a threatening response during a chat with Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.
In a back-and-forth conversation about the challenges and solutions for aging adults, Google’s Gemini responded with this threatening message:
“This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
The 29-year-old grad student was seeking homework help from the AI chatbot while next to his sister, Sumedha Reddy, who told CBS News they were both “thoroughly freaked out.”
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“I wanted to throw all of my devices out the window. I hadn’t felt panic like that in a long time to be honest,” Reddy said.
“Something slipped through the cracks. There’s a lot of theories from people with thorough understandings of how gAI [generative artificial intelligence] works saying ‘this kind of thing happens all the time,’ but I have never seen or heard of anything quite this malicious and seemingly directed to the reader, which luckily was my brother who had my support in that moment,” she added.
Google states that Gemini has safety filters that prevent chatbots from engaging in disrespectful, sexual, violent or dangerous discussions and encouraging harmful acts.
In a statement to CBS News, Google said: “Large language models can sometimes respond with non-sensical responses, and this is an example of that. This response violated our policies and we’ve taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring.”
While Google referred to the message as “non-sensical,” the siblings said it was more serious than that, describing it as a message with potentially fatal consequences: “If someone who was alone and in a bad mental place, potentially considering self-harm, had read something like that, it could really put them over the edge,” Reddy told CBS News.
It’s not the first time Google’s chatbots have been called out for giving potentially harmful responses to user queries. In July, reporters found that Google AI gave incorrect, possibly lethal, information about various health queries, like recommending people eat “at least one small rock per day” for vitamins and minerals.
Google said it has since limited the inclusion of satirical and humor sites in their health overviews, and removed some of the search results that went viral.
However, Gemini is not the only chatbot known to have returned concerning outputs. The mother of a 14-year-old Florida teen, who died by suicide in February, filed a lawsuit against another AI company, Character.AI, as well as Google, claiming the chatbot encouraged her son to take his life.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has also been known to output errors or confabulations known as “hallucinations.” Experts have highlighted the potential harms of errors in AI systems, from spreading misinformation and propaganda to rewriting history.
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