Louisville police have taken steps that could result in the firing of two detectives connected to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor at her apartment earlier this year.
Detective Joshua Jaynes – who obtained the no-knock warrant on Taylor’s home – and Detective Myles Cosgrove – one of the officers who shot her – have received pretermination letters, media outlets reported on Tuesday.
Jaynes, who was not present at the shooting, received the letter after a Professional Standards Unit investigation found he had violated department procedures for preparation of a search warrant and truthfulness, his attorney said.
The fatal shooting of the 26-year-old black woman in her home sparked months of protests in Louisville alongside national protests over racial injustice and police misconduct.
No officers face charges in relation to Taylor’s killing. One of the officrs involved, Brett Hankison faces a charge of wanton endangerment for firing recklessly into a neighboring apartment. He has pleaded not guilty, and has since been fired.
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Detectives Joshua Jaynes and Myles Cosgrove, who was one of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor, received pretermination letters, media outlets reported on Tuesday
The officers were serving a narcotics warrant on March 13 when they shot Taylor, but no drugs or cash were found in her home
Cosgrove shot Taylor at least three times, killing her, according to an FBI ballistics analysis. He was the second person to enter her home and fired 16 rounds down the hallway
Jaynes has a hearing with interim Chief Yvette Gentry and her staff on Thursday.
‘Detective Jaynes and I will show up for the pretermination hearing to try to convince acting Chief Gentry that this action is unwarranted,’ attorney Thomas Clay told the Courier Journal.
‘Jaynes did nothing wrong,’ Clay added.
Jaynes was not present during the shooting at Taylor’s apartment in Louisville. About 12 hours earlier, he secured a warrant with a ‘no-knock’ clause from a judge.
Gentry wrote: ‘These are extreme violations of our policies, which endangered others.
‘Your actions have brought discredit upon yourself and the department. Your conduct has severely damaged the image our department has established within our community.’
The officers were serving a narcotics warrant on March 13 when they shot Taylor, but no drugs or cash were found in her home.
Cosgrove shot Taylor at least three times, killing her, according to an FBI ballistics analysis. He was the second person to enter her home and fired 16 rounds down the hallway.
Taylor was an emergency medical worker who had settled in for the night when police busted through her door.
Former officer Brett Hankison was charged by a grand jury with wanton endangerment, a low-level felony, for firing into an adjacent apartment where people were present.
Cosgrove and another officer who shot Taylor, according to ballistics evidence, were not charged by the grand jury.
One of those officers was shot by Taylor’s boyfriend during the raid and returned fire.
Taylor’s boyfriend said he thought an intruder was breaking into her apartment.
The two officers who shot Taylor, according to ballistics evidence, were not charged by the grand jury. One of those officers was shot by Taylor’s boyfriend (left) during the raid and returned fire. Taylor’s boyfriend said he thought an intruder was breaking into her apartment
After a year marked by police killings of black men and women and mass civil unrest over racial injustice, some activists have started taking aim at police tactics that can lead to deadly middle-of-the-night raids they say are used overwhelmingly in communities of color.
Rather than waiting for direction from lawmakers, a group of academics, policing experts and activists called Campaign Zero has created model legislation around so-called no-knock warrants they hope will be attractive to cities, states and President-elect Joe Biden, as they work to curtail police tactics that lead to both civilian and officer casualties.
While Biden has said his administration will support criminal justice reforms, it’s unclear where he will focus.
SWAT team and tactical drug raids – in which heavily armed police teams bust down doors – have ballooned from about 3,000 in the early 1980s to more than 60,000 annually in the last few years, mostly because of drugs and drug task forces, according to Peter Kraska, a criminology professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied police raids for decades.
The data includes no-knock and other warrants.
Generally, under the law, police must knock and announce their presence when serving a warrant, meaning they must wait before entering a property.
But with no-knock warrants, officers don’t have to say anything and don’t have to wait. That’s because the warrants are reserved for extraordinarily dangerous moments or if suspects are likely to destroy evidence if they are alerted to officers’ presence, but critics say not always.
‘There has been an historic issuance of no-knock warrants for inappropriate purposes, basically for fishing expeditions for drug evidence,’ said Kraska, who helped Campaign Zero write its recommendations.
‘There are very few situations where Timothy McVeigh is standing behind that door when it gets knocked down.’ McVeigh carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
The group is now working with 37 cities and states to introduce legislation on no-knock warrants.
A bill filed earlier this month in New York by Sen James Sanders, D-New York City, is among the first to include all 15 of the campaign’s recommendations.
Sanders said Taylor’s death brought the practice to people’s attention, but his district has its own examples of dangerously executed raids.
American Airlines Flight 718, a Boeing 737 Max, takes off Tuesday from Miami International Airport on its way to New York — the plane’s first commercial flight in the U.S. since it was allowed to return to service. The 737 Max was grounded worldwide after two crashes due to a faulty flight system.
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American Airlines Flight 718, a Boeing 737 Max, takes off Tuesday from Miami International Airport on its way to New York — the plane’s first commercial flight in the U.S. since it was allowed to return to service. The 737 Max was grounded worldwide after two crashes due to a faulty flight system.
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A Boeing 737 Max carried paying passengers on a U.S. flight Tuesday for the first time since March 2019 as American Airlines put the aircraft back in service. The planes had been grounded worldwide after two deadly crashes highlighted safety problems.
American Flight 718 took off from Miami around 10:40 a.m., heading to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, according to the aviation tracking site Flightradar24.com. The plane landed ahead of schedule, shortly after 1 p.m.
The airline is the first U.S. carrier to return Boeing’s jetliner to passenger use — a move it announced in November when the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the way for the 737 Max to return to commercial flight. In response to the FAA move, airlines in Brazil and Mexico put the plane back into service earlier this month.
The jet was grounded for some 20 months after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed a total of 346 people. Investigators found that the pilots of both jets were unable to control them shortly after takeoff as a flawed flight control system forced the nose of the 737 Max back down toward the ground.
American said it will accommodate any passengers who are worried about flying on the aircraft.
“If a customer doesn’t want to fly on a 737 MAX aircraft, they won’t have to,” the airline said. It’s offering reluctant passengers several other options, such as rebooking on the next flight without a fee, changing their itinerary to another airport – or simply canceling their trip in exchange for credit toward future travel.
Boeing has admitted knowing about problems with the 737 Max before deadly crashes brought the aircraft’s safety issues to light. A recent congressional report faulted both the aviation company and the FAA for playing “instrumental and causative roles” in disasters that killed hundreds of people. Boeing was called out for making technical and management mistakes, while the FAA was criticized for botching its oversight duties.
Southwest, another U.S. airline with a large fleet of 737 Max jets, said on Tuesday that it’s still holding off.
“The Max has not been added to our schedule for 2021 yet, so we don’t have details regarding where it will fly initially once it returns to service,” a Southwest representative told NPR.
For the next several days, American will use the 737 Max for two flights each day, providing round-trip service between Miami and New York City. Starting next week, more aircraft will gradually be added to the schedule.
“We are taking a phased approach to return the Boeing 737 Max to service,” the airline said in a note to NPR.
American said it will build up to as many as 38 departures each day through mid-February. After that date, it plans to use the 737 Max for up to 91 daily departures.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The vulnerability of the telecommunications system in Nashville and beyond became clear Christmas Day when AT&T’s central office in downtown became the site of a bombing.
Mayor John Cooper called the blast on Second Avenue an attack on infrastructure. The effects of that attack are sure to ripple through the region for weeks, as the telecom giant scrambles to restore services while maintaining the integrity of an active investigation site teeming with federal agents.
State and local officials and experts say the fact that a multistate region could be brought to its knees by a single bombing is a “wake-up call,” exposing vulnerabilities many didn’t know existed and predicting it would lead to intense conversations about the future.
The bombing and the damage to the AT&T office was a “single-point of failure,” said Douglas Schmidt, the Cornelius Vanderbilt professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University.
“That’s the Achilles’ heel. The weak link,” he said. “When one thing goes wrong and everything comes crashing down.”
Now, the Tennessee Emergency Communications Board has called a special meeting for next week to address the “impact to 911 operations as a result of the bombing in downtown Nashville,” according to a public notice of the meeting set for Monday.
While still piecing together a motive, investigators Monday said suspected bomber Anthony Quinn Warner sought “more destruction than death.”
He parked an RV outside the nondescript windowless red-brick building on the historic district, which houses a facility that includes connection points for regional internet and wireless communications.
Flames broke out in the building and 3 feet of water pooled in the basement. Temporary battery power kept services intact in the hours following the explosion, but fire and flooding damaged backup power generators to power those batteries.
The disruption brought communications in the region, from Georgia to Kentucky, to a halt, affecting 911 call centers, hospitals, the Nashville airport, government offices and individual mobile users. Issues with credit card devices hamstrung businesses big and small.
AT&T reported Monday morning that the majority of services in Nashville had been restored through a combination of fixes, including generator repairs and a temporary network set up at Nissan Stadium.
“Having a critical facility in a major metropolitan area next to a street without any other protections than a thick wall is crazy,” Schmidt said.
“The silver lining here is nobody was killed,” he said. “But this is a wake up call that, if people treat it right, will help with future situations and be better prepared.”
‘Our systems are not redundant enough’
When the situation settles down, state Sen. Paul Bailey, R-Sparta, who most recently served as chairman of the Senate commerce committee, hopes the Tennessee legislature can hear from AT&T representatives about what type of plan they’re implementing to prevent this type of outcome if another similar disaster occurs.
“They need to have better redundancies in place,” Bailey said, referring to AT&T’s backup systems to prevent widespread outages. “It’s just very concerning that we have 911 centers go down. Lots of emergency services losing communications. That’s really concerning to me.”
Nashville Metro Council member Freddie O’Connell, who represents the downtown area, said the city must also follow up on how to create more redundancy in critical communication systems in the aftermath of the bombing.
“How does a city as a whole function if we go through something like this again or a natural disaster?” he said. “We learned our systems are not redundant enough when one major provider goes offline.”
Police officers on the scene Friday were issued burner phones, according to Metro police spokesperson Don Aaron. Nashville’s police department uses FirstNet network, a priority network for first responders to use on existing AT&T cell towers for voice and data.
Nashville’s 911 line remained operational but officials were without access to administrative phone lines through Friday evening, according to Stephen Martini, director of the Nashville Department of Emergency Communications.
In the absence of non-emergency phone lines, residents were encouraged to request services through hubNashville online, which officials monitored for a three-day period.
Martini said communications to emergency personnel via radio was never impacted over the weekend.
He declined to share details on how the department remained operational, citing sensitive public safety information, but said a redundancy plan, dubbed the PACE method (Primary, Alternate, Contingent, Emergency), was in place.
Nashville’s director of information and technology services, Keith Durbin, said Verizon phones had to be driven to some staff on Christmas Day.
“This was one of the worst case scenarios that happened,” Durbin said. “… To have (AT&T)completely taken out … was even broader impact than we thought.”
Luckily, he said, none of the city’s “internal network backbone” was affected, with issues primarily coming from smaller Metro facilities. Some were continuing to experience issues Monday, including the Davidson County Clerk’s office.
The city was able to switch from AT&T to a secondary internet carrier Friday. But the city doesn’t have a backup for phone services. It’s something officials have considered in recent years.
Those talks, Durbin said, will be revived after the bombing. He said he’s confident it’ll now get wide support.
Bailey said he heard from 911 center directors in his district reporting outages nearly 100 miles away from Nashville. Residents in the area received reverse emergency calls to inform them not to dial 911, but instead to use another phone number to get in touch with dispatchers.
And then there were the retail stores, pharmacies, businesses and hospitals that were impacted, he said.
He credits AT&T for working quickly to restore service. But he said it’s concerning that one incident could wipe out so much of the region’s communications capability.
“This affected our entire Southeast region,” Bailey said. “There were multiple states that had issues because of this.”
But as for whether the Tennessee General Assembly wields much power to compel action from AT&T, “the short answer is no, we don’t,” Bailey said.
The state’s Public Utility Commission, a five-member board consisting of political appointees, also has limited ability to regulate for-profit communications companies. Much of that would be a federal issue, Bailey noted.
State and hospitals face outages
The city wasn’t alone in experiencing communication outages.
The Tennessee General Assembly, which has offices adjoining the Capitol downtown, also had outages over the weekend. The email system was down for a portion of the day Saturday, and staff were told to work from home Monday after the building experienced phone outages until Sunday evening.
State government office buildings remained closed Monday due to safety hazards that the outages continued to pose, said Lola Potter, spokesperson for the Department of Finance and Administration.
Fire and safety alarm systems in state buildings in Nashville still weren’t fully functioning.
Other state services were impacted over the weekend, though state employees found workarounds and alerted authorities in some situations, such as with reporting child abuse.
“Obviously we were concerned about it, but we took precautions by reaching out to law enforcement,” said Jennifer Donnals, chief of staff for the Department of Children’s Services.
A state web form and app that field child abuse reports remained in service, Donnals said, and staff in different regions also alerted major children’s hospitals around the state to the hotline being down.
The timing of the disruptions occurring on a weekend – and a holiday weekend at that – meant the agency would likely have been receiving fewer complaints than on weekdays anyway.
Meanwhile, hospitals in the region have also had to work around outages since the weekend, mostly stemming from their landline phone systems going down and being unable to receiving incoming calls.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center reported it was back in service by late Monday afternoon, while TriStar Centennial Medical Center was experiencing some intermittent outages.
Both hospitals had to set up new, temporary phone numbers for people to call, according to spokespeople for both hospital systems
Health records and other IT infrastructure needed to care for patients were not affected at Vanderbilt, nor were employees’ ability to make internal calls within the hospital.
There were remaining limitations to flight corridors in and out of the Nashville International Airport on Monday, but it did not have a significant impact on flight departures and arrivals, according to Tom Jurkovich, vice president of communications and public affairs for the airport.
Flights were grounded at Nashville Airport on Christmas afternoon due to telecommunication issues stemming from the explosion. Jurkovich estimated up to 45 of 116 flights scheduled for departure that day were delayed.
“Negotiate a better Bill, or get better leaders, NOW! Senate should not approve NDAA until fixed!!!” Trump added, referring to the bill by its title, the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual measure authorizing funds for everything from overseas military operations to pay increases for service members.
“Routine E.R. care is being slowed,” Mr. Newsom said. “The impact of this pandemic is being felt on the entire hospital system, and could impact each and every one of us — God forbid.”
California has in recent weeks become the epicenter of the pandemic, with more than two million confirmed virus cases, and 24,331 deaths, according to a New York Times database.
Intensive care units have been at or near capacity for weeks in Southern California and the Central Valley. Doctors and nurses have been forced to treat patients in lobbies and hallways. Tents have been erected to serve as waiting rooms, and in some cases, as field hospitals.
And even if most health care providers hadn’t formally begun rationing care, experts have said that full hospitals will probably result in fewer people seeking care they need, which is most likely already causing more deaths.
The current tidal wave of infections in the state, the nation’s most populous, started rising before Thanksgiving. As case numbers continued to skyrocket early this month, state leaders announced a plan for regional stay-at-home orders tied to intensive care unit capacity.
Gardner, the sister of Democrat Stacey Abrams, ruled that the voter challenges violated federal laws protecting voting rights.
Systemic removals of voters are barred within 90 days of a federal election, according to the National Voter Registration Act. In addition, voters can’t be removed until they’ve been notified and then don’t vote in two federal election cycles.
Gardner ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, Majority Forward, a nonprofit organization that supports voter registration efforts represented by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias.
“Republicans tried to disenfranchise over 300,000 Georgia voters. This victory means 4,000 voters in two counties are protected,” Elias wrote on Twitter. “We continue to monitor how other Georgia counties respond to the suppression scheme. Where necessary, we will sue and we will win.”
Change of address lists are unreliable sources for challenging voter eligibility, according to the plaintiffs. Voters who temporarily forward their mail, including members of the military and caregivers, are still allowed to participate in Georgia elections. In addition, voters may have moved back to Georgia.
Gardner’s ruling protected the registrations of 4,033 voters in Muscogee County and 152 voters in Ben Hill county.
The largest remaining challenge to Georgia voter eligibility is pending in Forsyth County, where the elections board found probable cause to contest the residency of over 5,000 voters based on a request by state Rep. Marc Morris, a Republican from Cumming.
Under Senate rules, McConnell could still force a vote on the veto override by invoking “cloture,” which requires 60 votes. But that would take extra time, as the liberal magazine American Prospect noted, because McConnell won’t have enough senators in D.C. on Tuesday for such a move.
Reaction from Lisa Boothe, Jason Riley and Charles Lane on the ‘Special Report’ All-Star Panel
The House of Representatives on Monday voted to override President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, a critical defense policy bill.
In order to override Trump’s veto, two-thirds of the chamber needed to vote against it.
The vote count came to 322-87.
The Senate is scheduled to take up the same vote this week on the $740 billion bipartisan defense bill, which has passed each year dating back to 1961, according to Reuters.
In a statement issued after the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the bipartisan legislation would become law “despite the president’s dangerous sabotage efforts.”
“The President must end his eleventh-hour campaign of chaos, and stop using his final moments in office to obstruct bipartisan and bicameral action to protect our military and defend our security,” Pelosi’s statement read.
The bill contains a 3% pay raise for the U.S. military, as well as funding for national security programs.
Trump vetoed the NDAA last week, after warning he would do so if it didn’t repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which shields big technology companies from liability for controversial content posted to their websites by third parties.
Trump also disagreed with provisions to rename military installations bearing the names of Confederate generals.
During his final weeks in office, Trump has created some resistance for lawmakers. Last week he also refused to sign on to a government spending package that included $900 billion worth of coronavirus relief, before reluctantly doing so on Sunday.
Splitting with members of his own party, he has continued to insist that lawmakers increase direct payments to American households to $2,000, from the $600 provided by the legislation.
The House passed a measure to increase those payments on Monday night, but it is unclear whether it will pass the GOP-controlled Senate.
And last week, during an event at which Mr. Biden criticized President Trump for playing down the Russian hacking of the federal government and private companies, Mr. Biden said, “The Defense Department won’t even brief us on many things.” The department responded by calling that claim “patently false.”
After Mr. Trump’s postelection firing of Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and a purge of the department’s senior leadership, the Pentagon was put under the political control of several Trump loyalists, including Kashyap Patel, Mr. Miller’s chief of staff, who is best known for his efforts to discredit the Russia investigation when he was a Republican congressional aide.
But even as Mr. Biden complained on Monday about a lack of cooperation from some political appointees in the Trump administration, he also offered praise for career federal government employees who have worked with members of his transition. “For some agencies, our teams received exemplary cooperation from the career staff,” he said.
Mr. Biden also offered a downbeat assessment of the toll that four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency had taken on the country’s national security apparatus.
“The truth is, many of the agencies that are critical to our security have incurred enormous damage,” the president-elect said. “Many of them have been hollowed out — in personnel, capacity and in morale.”
Mr. Biden has emphasized a promise to rebuild alliances and restore the United States’ standing in the world, and he has already named most of his top foreign policy and national security officials — though he has yet to announce his choice to lead the C.I.A.
Demonstrators held up signs at Brooklyn Housing court during a “No Evictions, No Police” national day of action in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
ALBANY, N.Y. — A sweeping eviction ban that advanced in the New York State Legislature on Monday has led to pushback from landlord groups asserting that the measure will hurt struggling property owners, while tenant advocates warned that it’s only a temporary fix.
Details: The bill would halt evictions and foreclosures across the state for 60 days, and allow tenants and mortgagers who have lost jobs or income due to the pandemic to submit financial hardship declarations that would halt those proceedings until May 1. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday he would sign the legislation.
The Democratic-run state Senate passed it by a nearly party line vote in the afternoon, and the Assembly, which Democrats also control, was poised to do the same later in the day.
The measure comes as the state grapples with what is likely to be billions of dollars in back rent owed by tenants financially hurt by the pandemic. The National Council of State Housing Agencies commissioned a report earlier this year estimating that New York could face a rent shortfall of as much as $3.4 billion by January.
Tenant advocates have been pushing for a broad moratorium for months, warning of a wave of evictions when existing protections were slated to run out in January. Several housing groups lauded the bill’s passage, while calling for the Legislature to pass substantial rental relief or forgiveness in the coming months. Landlord groups, meanwhile, say their members can’t swallow months of missed rent payments and note that many property owners are struggling to keep up with real estate taxes and utility bills.
The measure contains some benefits for small landlords — those who own 10 or fewer units would be able to access protections against foreclosure and tax lien sales. But landlord groups say the measure covers too broad a swath of tenants and could amount to a rent holiday for tenants who do have the means to pay.
The debate: Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group, called the measure a “stall tactic.”
“No renter facing financial hardship should be evicted during a pandemic, but the cost of providing free housing cannot be fully borne by property owners,” he said in a statement. “If renters interpret this bill as a justification to not pay rent the damage to our economy and local budgets will be immense.”
Joseph Strasburg, head of the Rent Stabilization Association, another landlord group, argued the measure would benefit many tenants who don’t need assistance, noting the “financial hardship declaration” that tenants could submit does not require proof of economic hardship.
Members of the Republican minorities in both houses raised similar concerns about the breadth of the bill.
“I just have a fear that because [tenants] don’t need a lot of documentation, they don’t need to really prove that they’re unemployed or that they have any of these things or conditions,” said state Sen. Betty Little (R-Queensbury).
Assemblymember Brian Manktelow (R-Lyons) said the existing rent moratorium has given his constituents opportunities to abuse the system, and that has helped the pandemic spread.
“They’re going places to buy large televisions, new cars, socializing, that’s part of the reason there’s a large spread,” he said. “I’ve seen it [and] I’ve watched it.”
State Sen. Brian Kavanagh (D-Manhattan), chair of the housing committee, said the bill is “not a rent holiday” and noted it would be against the law for a tenant and others covered under the measure to sign a hardship declaration that contains false information.
“The problem we are facing in New York is that we believe that there are about 1 million tenant households that are behind on their rent,” Kavanagh said at a committee meeting on Monday. “Any process that purported to adjudicate which of those folks have a hardship and which do not, we concluded in the drafting of this bill would be ineffective.”
What’s next: Legislators said the extended ban gives them time to create a more expansive rental assistance program and to distribute relief funds. An existing $100 million rent relief program was approved over the summer, but less than half of that money has been distributed thus far. New York will get additional rental assistance funds under the latest federal stimulus package.
Tenant groups praised the state measure but urged further action.
“This bill is only a temporary solution to the urgent housing crisis we find ourselves in,” the Housing Justice for All coalition said in a statement. “In order to prevent massive economic disaster, our legislature must clear the back rent owed by New Yorkers and create a hardship fund for small landlords struggling to keep their buildings safe and afloat.”
Judith Goldiner, a lead attorney at the Legal Aid Society, said lawmakers must “remain open to enhancing this legislation if we find ourselves still severely mired in the pandemic come May.”
WARSAW, Mo. (KY3) – The parents of a 4-year-old Missouri girl allegedly killed by neighbors to remove a “demon” pleaded not guilty Monday to charges connected to the case.
Mary S. Mast, 29, and James A. Mast, 28, both of Lincoln, Missouri, were charged Thursday with felony child endangerment resulting in death and are jailed without bond. They don’t yet have attorneys.
During their arraignments Monday, Associate Judge Mark Brandon Pilley also denied the couple’s request to attend the girl’s funeral, according to online court records. A bond hearing was scheduled for Jan. 5.
The couple’s other children, a 2-year-old son and an infant, were placed in protective custody, Benton County Sheriff Eric Knox said in a news release.
The girl was found dead at the family home on Dec. 20. Knox said she had been severely beaten and dunked in an icy pond as part of what appeared to be a “religious-type episode.”
Across-the-road neighbors Ethan Mast, 35, and Kourtney Aumen, 21, were charged last week with second-degree murder and other offenses. Both are jailed without bond. Ethan Mast is not believed to be related to James and Mary Mast, Knox said.
Both families attend the same church, but Knox said that the actions involving the girl are not condoned by the church, which he declined to name.
“The investigation done so far indicates that this is an isolated incident and NOT the actions of a cult,” Knox wrote in a news release on the department’s Facebook page.
A probable cause statement from Benton County Sgt. Chris Wilson said the girl was already dead and had “severe purple bruising” over her body, along with ruptured blisters, when he was called to the home.
Knox said the girl’s parents also had been beaten along with the 2-year-old. The infant was unharmed.
James Mast told investigators he and his wife observed the beating of their daughter but were told they would be beaten or shot if they tried to intervene.
Still, Wilson asked James Mast “how he could let people do this to his family and he stated they were told (his wife) had a ‘Demon’ inside her and her children would end up just like her if it was not taken care of,” Wilson wrote in the probable cause statement.
Ethan Mast told investigators that he and Aumen used a leather belt to beat the girl on Dec. 19, the statement said. She was then taken to a pond behind the home where she was “dunked” in the water on a day when high temperatures were in the 40s.
Ethan Mast said everyone then returned to the victims’ home. It wasn’t clear when the child died.
Nearly as soon as the COVID-19 vaccine was made available in California, accounts started emerging of people skipping the priority line ahead of front-line workers and long-term care residents.
Most recently, a 33-year-old Disney employee revealed on Facebook that she received the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine through a relative with connections to Redlands Community Hospital.
Even though state officials have warned that jumping ahead could lead to sanctions, the state guidance allows for exceptions and it appears that some people are aggressively taking advantage of it.
Hospital officials at Redlands Hospital confirmed that it administered the vaccine to several nonfront-line workers, but only because extra doses were leftover after front-line workers had received the vaccine, they said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pictured on Dec. 10, led her chamber in a vote to override President Trump’s veto of the annual defense bill on Monday.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pictured on Dec. 10, led her chamber in a vote to override President Trump’s veto of the annual defense bill on Monday.
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The House voted on Monday to overturn President Trump’s veto of the gargantuan annual defense authorization bill.
The vote, 322-87, was a highly unusual response to a highly unusual move by a president in rejecting the legislation, which sets policies and establishes other priorities every year for the military services.
The Senate’s next moves on the matter are still uncertain, but senators were set to return to Washington on Tuesday.
The political popularity of the military typically means the National Defense Authorization Act has a high likelihood of passage and becomes one of the last vehicles of the year for compromise and enactment.
Trump, however, opposes aspects of the bill that would rename military bases named for Confederate figures, and he also was angry that Democrats in Congress didn’t agree to a bargain in which they’d lift some legal protections for tech companies.
Trump says U.S. military facilities should continue to carry the names of men such as Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg. Separately, the president and some supporters claim Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are biased against conservatives.
A few Republicans in Congress have joined with Trump, but many leaders said they intended to support the override of his veto. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., meanwhile, had called Trump’s veto “an act of staggering recklessness.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., called on his colleagues to vote in favor of the legislation again in debate Monday afternoon.
“It is enormously important we pass this bill. We did it once. Let’s just do it one more time, and then we can all go home for the year,” he said.
Smith concluded his remarks by noting that the Armed Services Committee “is the most bipartisan committee in Congress.”
“That’s not an easy thing to achieve. We have a lot of things we passionately disagree about in this body, and we should. But on the armed services bill, we manage to come together. It’s not always easy, but we get it done. I think it is enormously important we let the country know that that process hasn’t died.”
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