Florida
Delivery driver guilty of killing woman, setting fire
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — An appliance delivery man was convicted Wednesday of beating a 75-year-old woman to death and setting her on fire at her Florida home.
A Palm Beach County circuit judge convicted Jorge Dupre Lachazo, 24, of first-degree murder, burglary and arson following a three-day bench trial, according to court records. He faces a mandatory life sentence at an April 5 hearing.
Dupre Lachazo and another man delivered a washer and dryer purchased from Best Buy to Evelyn Smith Udell’s Boca Raton home in August 2019, officials said. After installing the appliances, the other man went outside and reported hearing screams minutes later. He found the victim on the floor and called 911. Dupre Lachazo drove off in the delivery truck but was later stopped by a responding officer, investigators said.
Police found a rubber mallet used in the attack and a can of paint thinner used to start the fire next to Udell’s body. Prosecutors said both had Dupre Lachazo’s fingerprints on them. Investigators also found that the woman’s wallet had been disturbed, suggesting theft as a motive for the attack.
Defense attorneys didn’t deny that Dupre Lachazo attacked the older woman but argued the slaying wasn’t premeditated or intentional.
Kentucky
Former state trooper sentenced to 8 months in fraud case
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — A former Kentucky State Police lieutenant colonel has been sentenced to eight months in prison for taking ammunition and weapons from the state armory over several years.
Michael Crawford, 58, was sentenced in federal court Wednesday on one count of defrauding the government. Prosecutors said Crawford asked another state trooper to “give him various calibers and gauges of ammunition” multiple times during the conspiracy, which ran from 2014 to 2018, the Herald-Leader reported.
The investigation started in 2017 after state police got a tip that large stashes of police-owned ammunition were being kept in the office basement of former Scott County Coroner John Goble. Goble pleaded guilty in the case was sentenced to one year of home incarceration.
Crawford’s attorney said Wednesday the former trooper was a member of law enforcement for decades and was a “life advertisement for public service.”
Crawford was allowed to self-report to prison in April.
Ohio
Appellate court upholds firing over police shooting posts
CLEVELAND (AP) — A federal appeals court has upheld the firing of an emergency medical services captain who was dismissed over Facebook posts about Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was fatally shot by a white police officer.
Jamie Marquardt argued that the social media posts were protected free speech and that Cleveland violated his rights by firing him in 2016. He has maintained that the posts were added to his Facebook account by someone else. Marquardt later deleted the posts. In one post, Marquardt said that he was glad Tamir Rice was dead.
In their ruling issued Wednesday, the three-judge appellate court acknowledged the many freedoms that the First Amendment guarantees but also noted that “in this unique circumstance, defendants had an overriding interest in preserving the public’s trust in Cleveland EMS’s capacity to serve the public.” On that basis, the panel found the lower court was correct to grant summary judgment to the city and its EMS commissioner.
Rice was playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center in 2014 when a policeman who thought the weapon was real shot and killed him.
Louisiana
Citizen journalist’s lawsuit heard by federal appeals court
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An online citizen journalist from Texas asked federal appeals court judges Wednesday to revive her lawsuit against authorities who her arrested for seeking and obtaining nonpublic information from police — a case that has drawn attention from national media organizations and free speech advocates.
A state judge dismissed the criminal case against Priscilla Villarreal in 2018, saying the law used to arrested her in 2017 was deemed unconstitutionally vague, according to court briefs.
Villarreal, known online as “La Gordiloca,” then filed a lawsuit against the city of Laredo, Webb County and the police officers and prosecutors involved in her arrest. She said she’s entitled to damages because she never should have been arrested for posting information on her Facebook page, “ Lagordiloca News LaredoTx. “
“I had to make the point that it’s not right to get arrested for my freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Villarreal said outside the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals building where arguments were heard Wednesday by the court’s 16 active judges.
Among those on her side in the case are the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists.
“If the First Amendment stands for anything, it is the fundamental truth that the people, and the press on behalf of the people, must be able to ask questions of government officials without fear of harassment, prosecution, or imprisonment,” they say in a brief filed with Texas news outlets and media organizations.
In a competing brief, the state of Texas says the issues are more nuanced and rejects the notion that the woman known as La Gordiloca was arrested for simply asking a question.
Villarreal has not shown that the officials who had her arrested knew there was no probable cause to do so, the Texas brief states. It also says a magistrate judge issued the warrant and “the officers reasonably relied upon the neutral magistrate’s conclusion that there was probable cause to arrest Villarreal for violating a facially valid statute.”
Some of the judges hearing the case Wednesday asked questions about that point.
“Wouldn’t judges know more than police officers do?” Judge Catharina Haynes asked Villarreal’s lawyer, J.T. Morris, who said police and prosecutors had no probable cause to investigate or seek the warrant in the first place.
The law, according to court records, defines the criminal “misuse of official information” as using information that “has not been made public ... with intent to obtain a benefit or with intent to harm or defraud another.” Authorities had argued that Villarreal could benefit from using the information — the identities of a person who killed himself and a family involved in a car accident — to gain fame on her Facebook page.
A 5th Circuit panel revived Villarreal’s lawsuit in a 2-1 decision in November 2021. But the full court vacated that ruling, deciding to grant Wednesday’s rehearing before all 16 active judges. In that decision, Judge James Ho wrote that Villarreal’s arrest was “an obvious violation of the Constitution.”
Ho questioned lawyers for Texas and Laredo on Wednesday about scenarios in which seeking information from public officials can be criminalized.
Minnesota
Woman pleads guilty to leaving newborn to die
RED WING, Minn. (AP) — A Minnesota woman admitted in a guilty plea Wednesday that she left her newborn baby boy to die on the banks of the Mississippi River in 2003.
Jennifer Matter, 50, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the baby’s death. She will be sentenced April 28.
Matter was arrested May 10, 2022, at her home in Belvidere Township outside Red Wing.
Prosecutors have said DNA evidence also links Matter to a baby girl found dead by the Mississippi in 1999. Matter has not been charged in that case.
Teenagers found the baby boy’s body Dec. 7, 2003, in Frontenac on the shore of Lake Pepin, a body of water on the Mississippi River.
KMSP-TV reported that a coroner determined the baby’s death was a homicide, but his cause of death was undetermined.
“I left (the baby) on the beach, walked away, got into my car, and drove away with no intention of returning,” Matter said in the plea agreement.
According to the criminal complaint, Matter said she hoped someone who lived nearby would find him alive.
Investigators said DNA samples tied both infants to Matter by a genealogy search that led to potential relatives in Goodhue County.
Mississippi
‘Aryan Circle’ members imprisoned for trying to kill fellow inmate
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Two people who were members of a white supremacist prison gang were sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for their role in the attempted killing of an inmate while they were incarcerated at a Mississippi prison, federal prosecutors said.
In 2017, Aaron Rentfrow, an Indiana man, is alleged to have beaten and stabbed someone at a U.S. Penitentiary in Yazoo City, Mississippi to earn membership into the Aryan Circle. William Glenn Chunn, of Texas, who was one of the gang’s five highest-ranking leaders in the nation, ordered the attack because he believed the victim was homosexual, according to a Justice Department news release.
The victim suffered severe injuries from the attack.
Prosecutors said the Aryan Circle is a “race-based and violent prison gang with members operating throughout the country, both inside and outside of prisons.”
Chunn and Rentfrow were convicted Oct. 3 in the attempted killing. Chunn was previously convicted in a Texas federal court of racketeering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison for separate crimes.
Chunn’s attorney, Sidney Lampton, declined to comment on his behalf. An attorney for Rentfrow could not immediately be reached for comment.
Rhode Island
Woman gets over 6 years in prison for role in romance scams
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A Texas woman who played a role in internet romance scams that cheated victims out of a total of about $2.6 million was sentenced to over six years in prison on federal fraud and conspiracy charges Wednesday.
Dominique Golden, 31, of Houston, personally collected nearly $1.3 million in cash, checks, money orders and wire transfers from people across the U.S. in 2018 that was deposited into bank accounts opened under the names of fake people and businesses that she controlled, prosecutors in Rhode Island said. She pleaded guilty in September to wire fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
Her sentence will be served concurrently with a nearly 4 1/2-year sentence she began in 2020 in Georgia on an unrelated conspiracy conviction. Her attorney asked that she not serve additional time, saying that she has cooperated with authorities and is remorseful.
Golden’s alleged accomplices contacted victims via online dating sites, Facebook and “Words with Friends,” cultivated the relationships and convinced the victims that they needed money, prosecutors said. The victims were in Rhode Island, New York, Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina, Missouri and Florida.
Golden was aware that other members of the conspiracy contacted the victims for the sole purpose of perpetrating the scam, prosecutors said.
Under her plea agreement that she return the money, Golden will forfeit assets derived from her criminal conduct, including two luxury cars, three handguns, three Rolex watches and a gold chain with a diamond coin pendant, prosecutors said.
