Sheriff Donny Youngblood said in a statement that he has asked the FBI to conduct a parallel investigation into the death of 33-year-old David Sal Silva.

Two cellphones seized from witnesses were taken to the Sacramento office of the FBI earlier Tuesday, Youngblood said.

The sheriff’s department has come under scrutiny for the seizure of the mobile phones by detectives hours after the beating, but Youngblood defended the move, saying they were taken with a warrant as part of the investigation.

“We still have to secure the evidence, especially when the evidence can tell us whether we did it right or wrong,” Youngblood told the Los Angeles Times on Monday.

The sheriff initially asked the Bakersfield Police Department to analyze the video to avoid a conflict of interest, and said the initial police investigation showed that one phone contained video of the beating but the other did not.

David Cohn, an attorney for Silva’s children and parents, said before Youngblood’s FBI announcement that his clients were concerned that the videos, which he has not seen, might be erased or destroyed, either accidentally or on purpose.

“If I’d heard that they’d given them to the FBI, OK,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “But the Bakersfield Police Department, whom they work with on a daily basis? It certainly doesn’t have the look of impartiality.”

Cohn said the Sheriff’s Department went “well beyond a reasonable search” in obtaining the videos, making no effort to ask for copies or voluntary cooperation from the witnesses.

“They held these people hostage for several hours pending the serving of a search warrant. I’ve never heard of that before,” he said.

Melissa Quair said two sheriff’s detectives went to her home to confiscate her boyfriend’s video of the beating, blocking the door to her apartment.

“They used more force than was needed, and I told them that they didn’t have permission to say who could go in or out of my house,” Quair told the Bakersfield Californian.

The detectives later confronted her mother, Maria Melendez, outside her daughter’s home and ordered her to turn over her phone.

“My mom is disabled and has a lot of doctor and medical numbers stored in her phone,” Quair said. “But the detectives didn’t care, and they told my mom to write all her contacts down on a piece of paper, and while she did, they watched her like hawks.”

Silva died May 8. Deputies said he fought them after they approached him about complaints that someone in the area was intoxicated. Six deputies, a sergeant and two California Highway Patrol officers were at the scene. Silva was beaten with batons, stopped breathing and was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Coroner’s officials have not determined the cause of Silva’s death, pending toxicology and other tests.

Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill announced the charges, saying he will seek to try the teen as an adult.

A homicide by assault charge is less serious than manslaughter. It carries up to five years in prison for adults, but penalties can be less for juveniles.

Gill said it became clear in looking at the facts that the teenager’s actions didn’t warrant murder or manslaughter.

“We did not believe we could demonstrate the premeditation or intent to justify those charges,” Gill told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “Those other charges require another type of mental state. We did not believe that type of mental state was present.”

The 17-year-old has been in juvenile detention since April 27 when the incident occurred at a recreational-league soccer match in a Salt Lake City suburb.

Authorities say the teenager was playing goalie when 46-year-old Ricardo Portillo called a penalty on him for pushing an opposing player. The teenager began arguing with Portillo and then struck him in the head.

Charging documents show witnesses say the teenager threw one punch, hitting him in the rear jaw area with a closed fist. Another witness said Portillo was writing notes on his notepad when he was hit.

Portillo was taken to the hospital in fair condition. Hours later, he went into a coma. He never regained consciousness and died Saturday.

Police say hospital staff told them Portillo had hemorrhaging and a traumatic brain injury.

The fact that the teenager is five months away from turning 18, combined with the seriousness of what happened, led Gill to push to have him tried as an adult. A juvenile court judge will ultimately rule on that request.

The chance of the teen’s rehabilitation is minimal, prosecutors said in court documents.

League officials say they hadn’t had any problems with the teenager prior to this incident.

Funeral services are being held Wednesday in Salt Lake City for Portillo, who leaves behind three daughters and four grandchildren.

A wake is scheduled to run from 1 to 7 p.m., followed by a religious service. Both are open to the public.

After the funeral, Portillo’s remains will be returned to his hometown of Guadalajara, Mexico. He moved to Utah from there 17 years ago.

Family members said Portillo loved soccer, and had been working as a referee in different leagues for eight years. His oldest daughter, Johana Portillo, said he had been attacked before by players, even having his legs and ribs broken. Though his daughters begged him to quit, he said he couldn’t give up his passion.

Portillo was a longtime referee, be he was not licensed by the Utah Soccer Referee Committee.

The incident occurred in a game held by La Liga Continental de Futbol, an unaffiliated soccer league created in 2009. The league holds games for children ages 4 to 17 each Saturday at a junior high school field in Taylorsville.

The league president, Mario Vasquez, said earlier this week that the league will hold an adult, co-ed soccer tournament in Portillo’s honor May 25-26. The funds will go to his family.

—

Almost every bone in McCabe’s face was broken, his skull fractured in several places and his nose nowhere close to where it belonged. As he lay on the ground in Rochester, N.Y., the semi-pro player who assaulted him stood over him yelling, “Take that. Take that. This is what I’m all about.”

“I have said since this happened to me that it’s going to happen again,” McCabe said, “and someone is going to get killed.”

Four years later, someone was.

McCabe was sickened when he heard the news that Ricardo Portillo had died Saturday, a week after the youth soccer referee in Utah had been punched in the head by a 17-year-old player angry over a yellow card. Just as Portillo’s family is now pleading for athletes to control their tempers, McCabe has spent the last four years preaching the importance of sportsmanship in and around Rochester.

To limited success.

“There’s no respect for officials now,” McCabe said Monday. “Go look at any game, and they’re yelling at the official. Pick a high school event, and go watch a couple of games. I guarantee you, you’ll see a coach get out of control on the sideline. Or a parent. Or a kid. It’s so rampant.

“What happened in Utah, I knew it was going to happen. It was just a matter of time,” he added. “Whether it was New York state, Massachusetts, Florida, it was going to happen somewhere in this country.”

But the problem isn’t limited to this country.

Several Dutch teens are awaiting trial in the beating death late last year of a volunteer linesman who was working his son’s youth soccer game. In Brazil last month, a referee was kicked in the chest after the final whistle of a third-division match of the Sao Paulo state championship. A referee in Kenya has filed a lawsuit against the national soccer federation, contending he is impotent after a coach grabbed his testicles in protest over a call. A Spanish soccer player was banned for three months last year after throwing a plastic water bottle at a referee. Also last year, a soccer player in New Zealand was banned indefinitely after he punched a referee and broke his jaw.

And at hockey’s Under-18 World Championships in Estonia last month, a Lithuanian player hurled his stick at a referee, hitting him in the upper body.

“Part of this isn’t a sport problem, part of it is a societal problem,” said Dan Gould, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State. “You watch TV, and the trash talking that’s accepted. If you’re famous, you’re almost supposed to get into trouble. Why is everyone infatuated with Lindsay Lohan when she seems like a spoiled brat?”

Added Barry Mano, the founder and president of the National Association of Sports Officials, “We’ve become so loud and so brash. It’s about me and about being in the spotlight. All of those things play out in the games we play.”

Part of the beauty of sports — and youth sports in particular — has always been its power to educate and transform. To instill in athletes skills and values they can use for the rest of their lives, in arenas that don’t have hardwood floors or boundaries outlined in chalk. Talk to any CEO or other successful person, and odds are he or she can trace the lessons they learned about teamwork, fair play, leadership and overcoming challenges back to Little League, Pee-Wee football or some other youth sport.

But just like passing, dribbling and hitting, those skills don’t come with the uniform and the practice schedule. They have to be taught and reinforced by league administrators, coaches and, of course, the parents who signed their kids up for a team in the first place.

“Most Americans really want their kids to learn values through sports. And research has found we can teach kids to be good sports and enhance their moral development through sports if it’s done correctly,” Gould said. “But the big myth is it just happens.”

Even referees and officials can do a better job, Mano said.

Watch any college basketball game, and odds are you’ll see a coach not only stalking the sideline but coming onto the floor to protest a call. That’s a violation, Mano said, yet it’s almost never called.

“We’ve softened too much by letting bad behavior go escaped [sic],” he said.

It may not seem like much. But add up all the little transgressions that have been overlooked or excused, and sports now has a big problem.

“I really believe in the power of sport for changing people,” Gould said. “But it’s not going to happen if we just hope it happens. We need to train coaches, and the leagues need to be organized and have pretty defined rules of what’s tolerable and what’s not tolerable.

“You also need to recognize good sporting behavior,” he added. “It’s not just about fixing the problem.”

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has developed a “True Sport” campaign to help parents, coaches and administrators return the emphasis in sports to the life lessons that don’t show up in the win-loss column. The program includes educational materials, codes of conduct and good behavior pledges, and the approach is individually tailored for athletes in elementary school, middle school and high school. In the Netherlands, the Dutch FA responded to Richard Nieuwenhuizen’s death with a “Respect” campaign targeted at players of all levels.

And at i9 Sports, sportsmanship is valued so highly there are weekly rewards for it.

The recreational youth league, which has programs in 280 communities in 28 states, designates a specific value of sportsmanship — being a good buddy, humility, leadership — for coaches to emphasize each week. At the end of the week, the player on each team who best exemplified that value gets recognized.

Parents also have to pledge to display good sportsmanship, and not use negative or derogatory language with officials, coaches, other parents or kids. They also pledge to keep fun as the main emphasis of the league.

“We believe there’s great value in competition, healthy competition,” said Frank Fiume, founder and CEO of i9 Sports. “But learning how to win with grace and lose with dignity is key.”

That’s a lesson that’s been ignored for too long, McCabe said, with devastating consequences.

Four years after he was assaulted, McCabe still gets migraine-like headaches every day, has limited hearing in his left ear and has lost his sense of taste and smell. Yet he continues to referee — “I just love doing it so much” — hoping he can instill lessons of sportsmanship with the coaches and players he encounters.

But he wonders if it has any impact. Though his assault was big news in Rochester when it happened and again when his attacker was sentenced to 10 years in prison, McCabe sees the same poisonous behavior everywhere he goes. At a state championship football game he worked recently, one of the coaches complained constantly and threw his clipboard. At a boys lacrosse game, McCabe heard a coach tell one of his players to “bury” an opponent.

“Every time I try to talk to somebody I hit a brick wall,” McCabe said.

“Unless something’s done in this country, it’s going to happen again,” he said. “Until we teach kids how to play and respect officials, it’s going to happen again.”

—

AP Sports Writers Tales Azzoni and Ricardo Zuniga and Associated Press Writer Mike Corder contributed to this report.

A team of investigators is to begin digging on Sunday at Isla Negra, a rocky outcropping on the Pacific Coast where Neruda lived.

But forensic experts say there’s little hope that the exhumation will answer the question of whether one of the greatest poets of the 20th century died of natural causes as was recorded, or if he was poisoned by the military dictatorship as his driver and some others believe.

Judge Mario Carroza approved a request by Chile’s Communist Party for the disinterment, but did not permit the use of independent experts.

Neruda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, was best known for his verses of romantic eroticism, especially the collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” He was also a leftist politician and diplomat and close friend of socialist President Santiago Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the Sept. 11, 1973, coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

In the days after the coup, Neruda’s home in Isla Negra was raided by authorities and a Chilean warship was stationed off the coast, its cannons pointed directly at the house, Araya said. “They’re going to blow us up,” the poet told his driver, then 26 years old.

Neruda, 69 and suffering from prostate cancer, was said to be traumatized by the coup and the persecution and killing of his friends.

RELATED: Neruda foundation supports poet’s exhumation to put mystery of his death to rest

“I write these quick lines for my memories just three days after the indescribable acts that led to the death of my great friend President Allende,” Neruda wrote in the last page of his autobiography: “I Confess I Have Lived.”

Neruda planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship. A day before he planned to leave, he was taken by ambulance to the Santa Maria clinic, where he was being treated for cancer and other ailments.

Officially, Neruda died there on Sept. 23 from natural causes related to the emotional trauma of the coup. But suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in the death have lingered long after Chile returned to a democracy in 1990.

Former President Eduardo Frei Montalva died at the same clinic nine years later. Although doctors listed the cause of his 1982 death as septic shock from stomach hernia surgery, an investigation almost three decades later showed that the vocal opponent of the Pinochet regime had been slowly poisoned to death.

Araya said he believes that agents of the dictatorship injected poison into Neruda’s stomach at the clinic. “Our mistake was leaving Neruda by himself on Sept. 23. If he hadn’t been left alone, they wouldn’t have killed him,” Araya told The Associated Press.

But the Pablo Neruda Foundation that manages the poet’s estate rejected Araya’s allegation and the Communist Party to which he belonged long declined to make an issue of it.

Araya said party officials finally paid attention when he gave an interview to a Mexican magazine in May 2011 that created an international uproar.

Proving Araya’s theory will be daunting.

Neruda’s remains have been buried for years in soil that receives intense coastal humidity. Once they are exhumed, investigators will then have to work with what experts say is outdated technology and equipment.

“No big or false hope should be made about the exhumation and the analysis of the remains of Neruda yielding a cause of death” said Dr. Luis Ravanal, a forensic specialist.

Chile’s legal medicine laboratory “lacks basic equipment for the analysis of toxics and drugs that even the most modest labs own,” he said. “Technically there’s a big limitation; there is no sophisticated equipment to detect other substances, so they’ll invariably have to seek other labs.”

Ravanal also said that Chile lacks expertise in analyzing bone remains.

Chilean Communist Party lawyer Eduardo Contreras, who is overseeing the exhumation, said he was disappointed that outside experts were not allowed.

“There’s no ill doing or trickery, but I think this not rigorous enough,” Contreras said.

Mexico’s ambassador to Chile at the time, Gonzalo Martinez Corbala, had arranged to send the poet into exile after the coup and the poet sent Araya to Isla Negra to collect some clothes, books, cash and the original manuscript for his autobiography before leaving for Mexico.

Martinez said he saw the poet at the hospital on a day before he died. “He seemed normal to me … nothing could make you think that he was going to die,” he recalled.

On Sept. 23, Martinez was ready to take Neruda to the airport, where a DC-8 airplane waited with more than 100 exiles aboard. But at the last minute, the poet decided to postpone his departure by 24 hours. Those aboard agreed to wait on the plane, afraid that if they got off they would be arrested by Chilean authorities.

Araya thinks the delay might have cost Neruda his life.

“Neruda calls us at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday the 23th … and says: ‘Come quickly because I was sleeping and a doctor gave me a shot in the gut, I’m in a lot of pain and I’m boiling!’ Araya said.

The driver said that when he arrived at the clinic, Neruda had a high fever and a nurse told him that a doctor named Sergio Draper ordered a shot of dipyrone to bring the temperature down.

But Contreras, the Communist Party lawyer, said that Draper has testified that he left the clinic before that and “Neruda was left in the hands of a doctor with a surname Price, whose existence has not been able to be confirmed by anyone.”

Chile’s investigative police, the local equivalent of the FBI, searched through yearbooks of medicine graduates, but never found one named Price.

When Araya left the clinic to buy medicine for Neruda, he was seized by four men who beat him, shot him in a leg and took him to Chile’s national stadium, where many leftists were held, tortured and killed during the dictatorship.

The driver was later released with help from Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, an outspoken human rights defender, and he fled into exile.

Araya gave Neruda’s autobiography to Martinez, who kept the manuscript for many years at his home in Mexico. Neruda’s widow fled to Mexico with other exiles in the plane that had been readied for the poet.

In the last pages of the autobiography, Neruda characterized Allende’s death as a murder.

Neruda wrote that Allende “was buried secretly; only his widow was allowed to accompany that immortal cadaver… that glorious figure was shattered by the bullets of Chile’s soldiers, who once again had betrayed Chile.”

Violence broke out between protesters and police during a student march in the capital of Chile. Police used a water cannon and tear gas against the crow of students who are calling for education reforms. A Mexican weightlifter who won a gold medal in Sydney died of a heart attack today according to Mexico’s Olympic Committee. Soraya Jimenez was 35 years old and was battling various health problems over the years. Authorities in the Dominican Republic seized nearly two tons of cocaine, the largest drug haul for authorities there this year. The cocaine is estimated to be worth more than 20 million dollars according to authorities. And more than 30 actors gathered on the shores of a river in Lima Peru on Thursday to re-enact the baptism of Jesus Christ. This was the 34rd straight year the bearded actor played the role during Holy Week celebrations.

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit Oaxaca Mexico today. The quake was felt in Mexico City, causing building to sway and thousands fleeing into the streets. At least two men were killed and 15 others were injured during an amateur bullfight festival in Colombia. The festival is known for its heavy-drinking and high number of injuries. The U.S. and Mexico are preparing to face off tonight in a crucial qualifying game for the 2014 world cup. The match will be in Mexico’s home field where Mexico has lost only one out of seventy-five games played at home against the U.S. And it may sound like something out of a movie, but scientists confirmed the discovery of a two-headed shark in the Gulf of Mexico. They said that the shark indeed has two heads and is not conjoined twins.

Huseyin Capkin contradicted a statement by the interior minister who had said the suspect was detained at the border as he entered Turkey.

Istanbul Governor Avni Mutlu says the suspect has confessed to killing Sarai Sierra, whose body was found in Istanbul on Feb. 2, days after she was reported missing during a solo vacation. Authorities say she died of a blow to the head.

A video reportedly recorded in Syria, and posted on Hurriyet newspaper’s website, shows the purported suspect saying he was under the influence of paint thinner during the incident.

Turkish news reports have described him as a homeless scrap paper collector.

RELATED: Mom of missing woman in Turkey talks about her loss

When my grandmother died last week, I struggled with how to tell Adi about it. Our pediatrician said that kids don’t understand the permanence of death until they’re six or seven, but I felt I owed Adi some kind of explanation as to why someone who used to play with her, someone who Adi knew was in her family, wasn’t there anymore.

This wasn’t the first time someone in the family has died since Adi was born. My mother in law died only six months ago — but she lived in Colorado. While Adi had met her and knew of her existence, her absence didn’t register. At Adi’s age, airplane rides are more exciting than anyone we might see when we land. I explained her death to Adi more as an explanation as to why my husband was crying. Even then I didn’t really mention death, just that daddy was sad because he couldn’t see or talk to someone he loved anymore.

But the death of my grandmother, Adi’s great-grandmother,  isn’t just my loss, it’s Adi’s loss too. The explanation I ended up giving was that great-grandma had to go to heaven and that even though we couldn’t go to her house and see her anymore doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.

This explanation worked until a couple of days ago, when we took Adi to the zoo. We used to have a pet degu (it’s like a large Chilean mouse) that Adi liked. When it died of old age, I gave Adi a similar explanation. The degu had to go to heaven but he loves you. The zoo happened to have degus and even though our degu died months ago, Adi noticed them and was very happy to see “her degu” again. Since I told Adi that the degu went to heaven, she is now under the impression that heaven is the Mouse House at the Bronx Zoo. I hope she isn’t expecting to see my grandmother running around in an enclosure next time we go.

To add to the confusion, since we’re Jewish, I had to explain why my mom’s house was packed with people bringing food, why the rabbi kept talking, and why everything was happening all at once. Jews do things quickly. It’s only one week later and  everything all finished and it’s back to business as usual. Adi had a very overwhelming and very over-stimulating week. It’s been a challenge to get her back on her normal schedule.

At two, Adi isn’t going to remember this in the long term. There’s no need to scare her about death.

Adi also hasn’t been to the cemetery yet. She’s been there before, when we all went on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death, but she was only an infant when he passed and doesn’t remember him. To her the cemetery visit was just a bunch of people standing around staring at a gray square of concrete with a name on it. She actually spent most of her time there trying to steal the stuff people left as mementos on other graves. There were a lot of golf balls. I tried to return them all.

Apologies to any of our dearly departed who were left with the wrong golf ball. It’s hard to tell a toddler who just sat through a long car ride that she can’t play with a bunch of balls laying around on the ground.

When I do take her to the cemetery I’m not sure what I’m going to tell her. Maybe something along the lines of “this is where we can go to remember great-grandma”? Great-grandma is in that hole now and she’s not coming out is probably not a good thing to say. I’ll figure it out I guess.

P.S. My grandmother, Sarah Vortreflich Samith, was amazing. She was a chicken farmer turned union organizer turned stock market expert. She played blackjack, could hold her scotch better than you, and didn’t take crap from anyone. RIP.

Rachel Figueroa-Levin is a soapmaker, cofounder and educator at Urban Babywearing, a hyperlocal Inwood blogger and organizer, a political/life/religion/parenting satirist, and all around trouble maker.  She is also the creator of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Spanish-speaking alter ego @elbloombito.  You can reach her via twitter @Jewyorican. 

According to Venezuela’s constitution, if the president relinquishes power because of his physical inability to perform his duties, this is considered an “absolute absence,” which a medical committee has to certify. However, because the president has died, the constitution mandates that new elections take place within 30 days. Venezuela’s constitution specifies that the speaker of the National Assembly, currently Diosdado Cabello, should assume the interim presidency if a president can’t be sworn in. But Foreign Minister Elias Jaua announced one of Chavez’s final wishes late Tuesday,Vice President Nicolás Maduro would assume power until elections can be held in 30 days and a new president resumes his term.

Many expect Maduro to win the election, as he is who Chávez designated as his political successor, against Henrique Capriles Radonski — the governor who lost to Chávez in the October presidential election, but no one can know what the transition will hold for sure just yet.

RELATED: Hugo Chavez confirmed dead

Earlier today, Maduro announced the expulsion of U.S. diplomat, David del Monaco — ordering him leave the country in 24 hours. He said a letter has been delivered to the U.S. embassy in Caracas.

According to the Associated Press, Maduro accused del Monaco of meeting with military officers and planning to destabilize the country. Embassy spokesman, Greg Adams, had no immediate comment.

A long-lasting goal of Chávez had been to lessen Venezuela’s influence on the U.S. – the fourth-largest foreign oil supplier to the United States. He led Venezuela into socialism, and in his effort to help the poor, was known for spending hours at a time on television lecturing to his people.

He hasn’t been seen in public since his December surgery, even though his second term began on January 10 — leaving his Venezuelan people without a leader.

RELATED: Analysis: Chavistas begin search for Latin America’s next ‘Comandante’

“In regimes that are so person-based, the moment that the person on which everything hangs is removed, the entire foundation becomes very weak because there was nothing else supporting this other than this figure,” said Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst College, to the New York Times.

But even though the airwaves have been quiet without him speaking in his charismatic way, his people for now, are hanging onto his revolutionary dream chanting, “Chavez vive, la lucha sigue!” in the streets of Caracas.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court Chief, Luisa Estella Morales, went on Venezuelan television a few hours after the president’s death and asked the country, “to trust the institutions, and its judicial powers.”

Will the horse keep galloping left? Only time will tell.

RELATED: [PHOTOS] Hugo Chavez dies: A look through the years from his rise to power to his death

Recorded by Bishop Ricardo Ramirez in Mesilla, NM.

His grandmother’s funeral was the first he performed as a bishop. The story begins in 1981 in San Antonio, TX.