Midday Roundup: Pastor heads to prison for helping single mother flee country

Sent to prison. The Virginia pastor convicted of helping a woman flee the country with her daughter to keep her away from her former lesbian partner will begin serving his 27-month prison sentence March 22. Mennonite pastor Kenneth Miller was convicted in 2012 but appealed his sentence. A federal judge denied his appeal yesterday, and Miller agreed not to continue fighting the sentence in exchange for prosecutors’ dropping additional charges against him. Miller was convicted of orchestrating the flight of Lisa Miller, no relation, to Central America, where she and her now 13-year-old daughter sought shelter with a Mennonite community. Miller conceived her daughter, Isabella, while in a civil union with Janet Jenkins, who helped parent the child until the couple broke up. Miller became a Christian and moved to keep Jenkins from having contact with Isabella. After a Vermont court ruled Jenkins should have visitation, a ruling upheld by appeals courts in Vermont and Virginia, Miller and the child disappeared. Both remain in hiding.

Trace remains. Search and rescue crews working off the coast of Hawaii have found trace amounts of DNA from the 12 Marines who went missing following a helicopter crash on Jan. 19. After searching for signs of the Marines for more than a week, the Marine Corps declared them dead. The accident happened during a training mission, but investigators have found no sign of the crash site. They still don’t know what caused the choppers to go down. Initial reports indicated they might have collided with each other. Investigators warn what is now a salvage operation could take months to complete. Storms have hampered efforts to locate the wreckage, which could be spread over 40,000 square nautical miles.

Social media danger. The Virginia Tech student charged with killing a 13-year-old girl apparently developed a relationship with the girl via social media weeks before her death. According to a neighbor, Nicole Lovell told some friends she had an 18-year-old boyfriend who went to college, and she planned to sneak out to meet him. David Eisenhower has been charged with felony counts of first-degree murder and abduction. Investigators say Lovell was stabbed and died on Jan. 27. But they have not released more details or offered a motive for the attack. Another Virginia Tech student, Natalie Keepers, has been charged with accessory before the fact to first-degree murder. Investigators initially only accused her of helping to dispose of Lovell’s body, which was found just across the border in North Carolina.

Legislative stalemate. Lawmakers in Indiana decided Tuesday night not to vote on a gay-rights bill intended to patch up the state’s relationship with LGBT advocacy groups who decried last year’s efforts to pass a religious liberty bill. Although the Religious Freedom Restoration Act mirrors a federal statute as well as similar laws in other states, activists labeled it a discriminatory hate bill and eventually forced lawmakers to repeal it. This year’s measure failed to satisfy anyone, with conservatives noting it offered no protections to Christian wedding business owners and LGBT activists faulting it for not including transgender people. Although Republicans who control the state legislature say the measure is dead for this year, activists vowed to keep fighting. “We’ve said from the outset that doing nothing was not an option,” the gay-rights group Freedom Indiana said in a statement. “Today, lawmakers did nothing to help protect LGBT people in our state, but our work is only just beginning.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.