Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: “He had a law school exam,” said Christiane Roussell, a lawyer in Los Angeles who grew up with Mr. Woodard in Ladera Heights. The police said he had no return ticket. 
  
 Mr. Woodard, 31, was the scion of a successful family in California. His life had been a blend of achievement and puzzling setbacks that included at least 20 arrests, mostly in California, the police said. 
  
 His relatives were entrepreneurs, lawyers and trailblazers; his grandfather, Leonard Woods, was a celebrated drag racer. His mother, Sandra Wellington, ran a once-successful mortgage business, and sent him to private Episcopal schools in Los Angeles and North Hollywood. 
  
 This summer, California authorities revoked her company’s license to lend or service mortgages, citing violations of the state financial code. 
  
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 Mr. Woodard was a promising student who played varsity basketball in high school at Campbell Hall, and always dressed impeccably, his relatives and friends said. At the time, he was in the local chapter of Jack and Jill of America — a national, invitation-only society of middle- and upper-class black families. Those years, friends said, children from the club could be found poolside at parties at his family’s home. 
  
 That background, and his gregarious nature, made him a fixture on the party and club scene in Los Angeles, his friends said. He drove a Range Rover in college at Loyola Marymount University, but, as one friend said, “his personality was his bling.” This month, he had his eye on a Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG that he hoped to buy, a cousin said. 
  
 As a partyer and promoter, Mr. Woodard made himself a part of a world of expensive alcohol and private tables where, friends said, people with elite pedigrees rubbed elbows with stars and professional athletes — as well as with a rougher crowd. 
  
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 Several friends in Los Angeles said that in recent years he had been sliding into the darker side of club life. 
  
 “I know him as a good person,” said Dennis Christopher White, 32, a friend of Mr. Woodard’s for about 10 years, who met him playing basketball in Los Angeles. “He’s like a brother or a cousin to me. He’s very humble.” 
  
 But as Mr. White married and pursued a career in government work, he saw less of Mr. Woodard, who continued his busy presence in the city’s night-life scene. 
  
 “You never know who he meets,” Mr. White said. “I didn’t get a chance to know that part of him.” 
  
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 Mr. Woodard’s mother, Ms. Wellington, 56, said she believed that all of his arrests came when he was a juvenile, but court records clearly indicated that he had more recent arrests and misdemeanor convictions. 
  
 In 2009, for example, Mr. Woodard was arrested on robbery charges in Hermosa Beach, a Los Angeles suburb, after he struggled with a supermarket guard who tried to stop him from stealing several bottles of wine. The police said he fled in a car, hit two other cars, abandoned his car, hailed a cab and fled. 
  
 He had a court date in Los Angeles in January on a charge of cocaine possession. 
  
 Mr. Woodard had hosted several dozen guests at a party at his condo in Playa Vista on Saturday night to watch the boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Marquez. His last message on Facebook, posted from Los Angeles at 12:41 a.m. on Sunday after Marquez’s surprising early-round knockout of Pacquiao: “The fix was in tonight.” 
  
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 He flew to New York and got a room at 6 Columbus, a hotel just blocks from the spot where he was killed. A friend in New York, who gave his name only as Earl, said Mr. Woodard had a girlfriend in the city, but added that his activities were often mysterious: “He lived a little Batman-ish — a little secretive.” 
  
 Mr. Woodard had three telephones, two on him at the time of the shooting and another in his luggage, said the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. He said the police had not identified the plate number on the getaway vehicle, but said a similar sedan had been seen leaving Manhattan via the Queens-Midtown Tunnel at 2:15 p.m., roughly 20 minutes after the killing. 
  
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 The gunshot left a single shell on the Midtown pavement. 
  
 Mr. Woodard’s mother said that her son, who had a 4 1/2-year-old daughter, had planned to stay in New York City for two days to visit a friend. He asked her to pick him up at Los Angeles International Airport at 5 p.m. Pacific time on Monday and she agreed to do so, she said. 
  
 “I don’t know what happened,” she said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “We don’t know why anyone would harm him. We have no idea. He didn’t have any enemies. Not one. He liked to tell jokes. He liked to have his friends over to entertain.” 
  
 Mr. Woodard had checked out of his hotel about 45 minutes before he was killed, Mr. Kelly said in a news conference on Tuesday. It was possible, he added, that Mr. Woodard was lured out of the hotel. 
  
 A surveillance video captured the shooting and the getaway vehicle, a Lincoln MKX, but not its license plate. 
  
 “It was very brazen,” Mr. Kelly said. “There were a lot of people in that general area. Obviously, a lot of cameras in New York City. So you could characterize it as either being brazen or being foolhardy. We’ll see.” 
  
 The police later matched the gun used to kill Mr. Woodard to a shooting on Nov. 22, 2009, at a residence at St. Albans, Queens, in which two men fired at least 12 shots, piercing windows and the siding of the house. There were seven people inside, but no one was injured, and there were no arrests, the police said. 
  
 There was no known motive for that shooting, just as in this case. 
  
 A cousin of Mr. Woodard’s, Anthony Woodard, 50, said Brandon’s mother had not been able to accept the fact that her son was dead. 
  
 “The only thing she keeps saying is, ‘When is he coming home? When is my son coming home?’ and we have to tell her, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ She does not want to sleep until her son comes home.” 
  
 He added: “This is far beyond anyone’s imagination. That’s her only child.” ||||| The NYPD yesterday released a dramatic series of surveillance photos that show a killer about to gun down his unsuspecting target on a busy Midtown street. 
  
 Brandon Lincoln Woodard, 31, had just checked out of the swank 6 Columbus hotel near Columbus Circle when he was followed by the assassin on West 58th Street and killed near Seventh Avenue Monday afternoon. 
  
 The assassin escaped in a getaway car. Cops early this morning were questioning the couple who rented the car, The Post has learned, although investigators don’t believe they were driving it — but they are looking at the possibility they may have loaned it to someone who then used it in the crime. 
  
 Earlier on that fateful day, the law student appeared nervous as he had what turned out to be his final breakfast, at the La Parisienne diner. 
  
 “He ate breakfast at the counter but he was always looking over his shoulder,” said cashier Dimitrios Drimalitis, 61. “He looked scared and afraid of something.” 
  
 Woodard returned to his hotel and then left at 1:15 p.m., possibly lured away by the killer and drawn into a trap, said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. 
  
 “It’s certainly a distinct possibility,” Kelly said. “We are looking into that.” 
  
 Cops said Woodard was killed with a weapon that ballistics determined was also used in a 2009 shooting in which two men riddled a St. Albans, Queens, house with bullets. No one was hit. 
  
 “They never found out who did it’’ or why, said Eshe Warner, 24, whose late grandmother, Iris Warner, owned the home at the time. 
  
 “They just shot at the house — no one ever came in.’’ 
  
 NYPD detectives went to Woodard’s hometown of Los Angeles yesterday as cops zeroed in on drugs as a possible motive. 
  
 “Because of his extensive criminal record, we’re looking into the possibility it was drug-related,’’ a police source said of the shooting. “We’re also looking into his ties to the entertainment industry. He ran a small promoting business, and the address comes back to his home. We’re looking to see who his clients were.” 
  
 A search of Woodard’s hotel room yesterday came up empty, a source said. After checking out of the hotel, the victim left his duffel bag at the front desk. He was supposed to return for it. 
  
 Police were examining the cellphone Woodard was using, apparently texting, just as he was shot. 
  
 Woodard arrived alone in New York on Sunday with a one-way airline ticket. He had dinner that night with a female pal he met six months ago in LA, she told cops. 
  
 Woodard, the father of a 5-year-old girl, last spoke to relatives Sunday, when he called his mother to say he’d be back in LA the next day. 
  
 “I’m hurt right now,” said the victim’s stepfather, Rod Wellington, speaking on behalf of the mother, who was too shaken to talk. “This is devastating.” 
  
 Woodard was one day away from a law-school semester final at the University of West Los Angeles, where he was a second-year student. He had a bachelor’s in business from Loyola Marymount University in LA. 
  
 Woodard was a hard-partying club promoter who often entertained at all hours of the night, said neighbors. He was frequently the subject of noise complaints over blaring hip-hop music. 
  
 He was charged with cocaine possession in California in June and had 20 prior arrests, for drugs, robbery, petit theft and leaving the scene of an accident. 
  
 Woodard pleaded not guilty on the coke rap, and was scheduled to be back in court next month. 
  
 In 2009, he was sentenced to three years’ probation after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor charge of hit-and-run driving in Torrance, in Los Angeles County. 
  
 In 2008, he stole items from two upscale markets in Beverly Hills and was slapped with a nine-day jail sentence and 200 hours of community service on two misdemeanor charges of grand theft. 
  
 Woodard also once claimed he was roughed up by bodyguards working for R&B superstar Usher. 
  
 His family said he had not had a formal job since starting law school — although he worked with his mother, Sandra McBeth-Reynolds, at her mortgage firm. 
  
 The firm, LA-based United International Mortgage, has been targeted by lawsuits for alleged fraud, breach of contract and collections. 
  
 “The number of people they burned, and people who lost their homes, is huge — their enemies list is huge,” Tonya Pinkins, a Tony Award-winning Broadway actress, told the Hollywood Web site showbiz411.com. 
  
 Pinkins — a former actress on the TV soap “All My Children,’’ who is the ex-partner of McBeth-Reynolds’ current husband, Wellington, said “she would sell properties to Brandon and then he would default on them.’’ 
  
 Additional reporting by Frank Rosario, Jamie Schram, Pedro Oliveira Jr, Helen Kumari, Jennifer Bain and Genevieve Wong |||||
Student:
It was a shooting that made waves: A Los Angeles man visiting New York was gunned down in broad daylight on a busy Midtown Manhattan street Monday. Police are piecing together a portrait of the victim and the crime, and the picture that's emerging is a complex one. The latest, per the New York Post and New York Times: The victim, Brandon Lincoln Woodard, 31, was known as a club promoter who liked to party and who had 20 arrests on his record, some of them drug-related ... but he also happened to be in law school at the University of West Los Angeles, and had an upcoming final. He flew to NYC on a one-way ticket Sunday, and reportedly planned to fly back to LA on Monday; he had asked his mother to pick him up from the airport at 8pm ET ... but he left his bag at the front desk when he exited the hotel just after 1pm, apparently intending to return. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says Woodard had three phones with him; one in his bag and two on him. Hours before his death, Woodard "looked scared and afraid of something" while eating breakfast at a nearby diner, the cashier recalls. "He was always looking over his shoulder" while eating. Surveillance video shows the killer waited for him for 20 minutes outside his hotel. When Woodard finally exited, he appears to have looked at the hooded shooter before turning around and continuing to text. The assailant shot him in the head from close behind before being whisked away by a getaway driver. Kelly says it's possible Woodard was lured out of his hotel. Police don't think the couple who rented the getaway car were involved, though they may have loaned the car to someone who was. The gun had also been used in an unsolved 2009 shooting in Queens.