Georgia
Now-fired teacher accused of sex with 14-year-old ex-student
MACON, Ga. (AP) — A now-fired middle school teacher remains jailed in middle Georgia after investigators said he had sex with a 14-year-old former student.
Charles Jackson was arrested Thursday in Macon by Bibb County sheriff’s deputies and charged with two counts of statutory rape and one count of aggravated child molestation.
WMAZ-TV reports that at least some of the incidents happened at Ballard-Hudson Middle School, where Jackson was this year’s teacher of the year, as well as the baseball coach.
The Bibb County school district said it fired Jackson on Thursday and told parents it is cooperating with the investigation. School officials urged parents to report any concerns regarding their own children.
A magistrate judge ordered Jackson to be held without bail Friday and ordered him to have no contact with the alleged victim or victim’s family. Another hearing where more evidence will be presented will be scheduled later.
Washington
QAnon follower who chased officer on Jan. 6 gets 5 years
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Iowa construction worker and QAnon follower was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when he led a crowd chasing a police officer who diverted rioters away from lawmakers.
Wearing a T-shirt celebrating the conspiracy theory with his arms spread, Douglas Jensen became part of one of the most memorable images from the riot.
As he handed down the sentence, Judge Timothy Kelly said he wasn’t sure Jensen understood the seriousness of a violent attack in which he played a “big role.”
“It snapped our previously unbroken tradition of peaceful transfer of power. We can’t get that back,” Kelly said. “I wish I could say I had evidence you understood this cannot be repeated.”
Jensen was convicted at trial of seven counts, including felony charges that he obstructed Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote and that he assaulted or interfered with police officers during the siege. His sentence also includes three years of supervised release and a $2,000 fine.
He gave a brief statement to the judge, saying that he wanted to return to “being a family man and my normal life before I got involved with politics.”
Jensen scaled a retaining wall and entered through a broken window so he could be one of the first people to storm the Capitol that day, Kelly said. He led a group that chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up a staircase. He would later re-enter the building and scuffle with police.
“Doug Jensen wanted to be the poster boy of the insurrection,” prosecutor Emily Allen said.
Jensen wore a T-shirt with a large “Q” on it because he wanted the conspiracy theory to get credit for what happened that day, his defense attorney Christopher Davis said.
Davis said Jensen’s own “childhood of horrors” influenced his later faith in the baseless belief that former President Donald Trump was secretly fighting against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals.
It also includes the apocalyptic prophesy that “The Storm” was coming and would usher in mass arrests and executions of Trump’s foes, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump would deride that day as lacking courage.
Davis has argued Jensen was dressed as a “walking advertisement for QAnon” and not intending to attack the Capitol. He did not physically hurt people or damage anything inside the Capitol, Davis said, and many friends and family members wrote letters to the judge on his behalf.
Goodman’s quick thinking that day — to divert the rioters away from the Senate and then find backup — avoided “tremendous bloodshed,” Capitol Police Inspector Thomas Lloyd said Friday.
Pence was presiding over the Senate on Jan. 6 as a joint session of Congress was convened to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Before the riot, Trump and his allies spread the falsehood that Pence somehow could have overturned the election results.
Approximately 900 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. More than 400 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanor offenses. Sentences for the rioters have ranged from probation for low-level misdemeanor offenses to 10 years in prison for a man who used a metal flagpole to assault an officer.
Illinois
Chicago cop fired after being tied to disbanded special police unit
CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago police officer has been fired nearly 20 years after being tied to a Chicago Police Department special unit that was disbanded after some of its officers committed home invasions and robberies.
The Chicago Police Board voted 5-1 Thursday to dismiss Officer Thomas Sherry for his alleged actions as a former member of the disgraced Special Operations Section.
Sherry was originally placed on paid desk duty when he and other officers were charged criminally in 2006 for allegedly robbing drug dealers and law-abiding citizens of cash and property.
Sherry’s charges were later dropped, the Chicago Tribune reported.
But Chicago police officials kept him on desk duty for more than a decade, prompting Sherry to sue the city in federal court in 2018, accusing the police department of violating his due process rights by refusing to hold a disciplinary hearing before the Chicago Police Board.
A judge dismissed Sherry’s lawsuit in March 2021, on the grounds that he waited too long to file the complaint.
That came after several disciplinary charges were filed against Sherry in November 2020 on behalf of police Superintendent David Brown.
Those charges allege that Sherry and other officers with the special police unit searched an apartment without a warrant on July 27, 2004. and confiscated drugs. The same day, Sherry and the officers searched another home without a warrant, the charges state.
Sherry then allegedly submitted false reports about the searches and recovery of narcotics.
Georgia
Shootings: White man pleads guilty to hate crime
ATLANTA (AP) — A suburban Atlanta man has pleaded guilty to a hate crime after officials say he shot into two convenience stores in 2021, targeting Black people and those of Arab descent.
Larry Edward Foxworth, a 48-year-old Jonesboro resident, pleaded guilty in Atlanta on Friday to committing a hate crime and firing a gun during a violent crime. No one in the stores was injured in the shootings.
Foxworth and prosecutors agreed under the plea to recommend a sentence of 20 to 25 years to U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen. The judge is scheduled to sentence Foxworth on March 16. The gun charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, and both charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Prosecutors said that Foxworth fired multiple rounds from a Glock pistol through a window and a door of a gas station on a main thoroughfare in the predominantly Black suburb of Clayton County at 2:35 a.m. on July 30, 2021. Then prosecutors say that Foxworth went around the corner to fire multiple shots again into a different gas station. Both stores were open and had people inside when Foxworth fired the shots, but no one was injured.
Clayton County police arrested Foxworth shortly after the second attack. Foxworth confessed to police that he was trying to kill Black and Arab people, saying that he is a white supremacist. Foxworth’s defense attorney tried to have those statements suppressed before his plea.
Foxworth was indicted on four counts in May.
“No one should have to live in fear of being targeted for deadly violence because they are Black or Arab American,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “This defendant, who professed support for a white supremacist organization, is being held accountable for an abhorrent act of violence motivated by race and national origin.”
West Virginia
Former school counselor sentenced for child pornography
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A former elementary school counselor in West Virginia who admitted to possessing child pornography and posing as an 18-year-old on social media to communicate with girls was sentenced to 25 years in prison Monday.
Federal prosecutors said that beginning in January 2020, Todd C. Roatsey of Elkview persuaded two girls to record and send him numerous sexually explicit videos, and he reciprocated.
Roatsey also used his Snapchat account to communicate with girls he knew through his position as a Pinch Elementary School counselor in Kanawha County. He received numerous videos of girls performing dance routines wearing only sports bras and shorts, prosecutors said.
Roatsey, 43, also admitted to possessing and distributing child pornography through a variety of media, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in June to attempted production of child pornography and attempted enticement of a minor.
Within hours of Homeland Security investigators executing a search warrant at his residence and seizing numerous electronic devices in October 2021, Roatsey deleted his Snapchat account, making various records inaccessible to law enforcement, prosecutors said.
“As an elementary school counselor, Roatsey intentionally placed himself in a position of trust over the kinds of children to whom he was sexually attracted,” U.S. Attorney Will Thompson said in a statement. “In our communities, schools are the only constant for a lot of children. A lot of the time, school is the safe place. The fact that Mr. Roatsey made this not a safe place was, I find, to be very horrific.”
Illinois
Business exec sentenced for bilking hospitals seeking masks
CHICAGO (AP) — A federal judge sentenced a suburban Chicago businessman on Monday to nearly five years in prison on charges that he swindled two hospitals that had sought coveted protective face masks in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dennis W. Haggerty Jr. of Burr Ridge pleaded guilty in March to wire fraud and money laundering charges for taking more than $2.5 million from hospitals in Chicago and Iowa.
Haggerty spent much of that money on personal credit cards and luxury cars without delivering the million N95 masks that his biotechnology company At Diagnostics Inc. promised to Northwestern Memorial Healthcare in Chicago and University of Iowa Medical Center, according to federal prosecutors.
Haggerty briefly apologized during Monday’s court hearing for his actions, which he said were done “hastily,” the Chicago Tribune reported.
U.S. District Judge John Kness, however, ordered a 57-month prison term for Haggerty and that he repay the nearly $2 million he still owes to the two hospitals.
The judge said he found Haggerty’s behavior, which included the creation of phony billing records and repeated attempts to blame the fraud on two business partners, “really nothing short of contemptible.”
“This was you taking advantage of a very bad time in this country for your own benefit,” Kness said.
