Impressive: 'without a doubt the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life'

 Veteran defense lawyers and law enforcement experts have been warning about the potential for overreach since the federal government muscled its way into policing decisions in the nation's capital nearly three weeks ago, reported NPR.

Inside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Monday, those tensions broke into open court.

A federal judge dismissed a weapons case against a man held in the D.C. jail for a week — concluding he was subject to an unlawful search.

"It is without a doubt the most illegal search I've ever seen in my life," U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said from the bench. "I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what has happened. A high school student would know this was an illegal search."

The judge said Torez Riley appeared to have been singled out because he is a Black man who carried a backpack that looked heavy. Law enforcement officers said in court papers they found two weapons in Riley's crossbody bag — after he had previously been convicted on a weapons charge.

The arrest — and the decision to abandon the federal case — come at a time of heightened scrutiny on police and prosecutors in the District of Columbia.

President Trump has ordered National Guard members and federal law enforcement officers to "clean up" the city and crack down on crime. He signed a new executive order on Monday to ensure more people arrested in D.C. face federal charges and are held in pretrial detention "whenever possible."

Newly confirmed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro has directed her prosecutors to seek maximum charges against defendants — and to seek to detain them. And the court system is straining to respond.

Riley, who entered the courtroom wearing a white skullcap and a bright orange jumpsuit, had been scheduled for a detention hearing. Instead, on Monday morning, the U.S. Attorney's Office moved to dismiss the case it lodged against him seven days ago.

"The government has determined that dismissal of this matter is in the interests of justice," prosecutors wrote in court papers.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said Pirro moved to dismiss the charges once she was shown body camera footage of the arrest on Friday.

Judge Faruqui, who spent about a dozen years as a prosecutor in that same office, expressed outrage about the charges.

"We don't just charge people criminally and then say, 'Oops, my bad,'" he said. "I'm at a loss how the U.S. Attorney's Office thought this was an appropriate charge in any court, let alone the federal court."

But Pirro pushed back against Faruqui's comments.

"This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community," Pirro said in a statement to NPR. "The comments he made today are no different than those he makes in other cases involving dangerous criminals."

The judge said he had seven cases on his docket Monday that involved people who had been arrested over the weekend — the most ever, he said.

Faruqui also said "on multiple occasions" over the past two weeks, other judges in the federal courthouse had moved to suppress search warrants, a highly unusual move that makes the warrants inadmissible in court.

"Eyes of the world" are on the city

A day after police took Riley into custody, they arrested an Amazon delivery driver who had come under suspicion for having alcohol in his vehicle. The driver, Mark Bigelow, has been charged in the same federal court with resisting or impeding an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

Another man, Edward Dana, was charged last week with making threats against the president. Dana said he was intoxicated and in the course of other rambling — that included singing in the back of a patrol car — he made remarks about Trump, according to the court docket. Dana was unarmed.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya ordered a mental health assessment and competency screening and ordered Dana released last week.

But prosecutors appealed her ruling. On Monday, Chief Judge James Boasberg held his own hearing — and agreed with the magistrate's decision. He ordered Dana's release, with conditions.

In the Riley case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Helfand declined to describe the changed circumstances but instead spoke for a few moments privately with the judge, while the courtroom husher blocked the sound of the exchange.

Later, the judge said Helfand was not the problem and praised him for having "the dignity and the courtesy" to move to drop the case. But he told Helfand to deliver a message to his superiors — that charging people based on little or unlawfully obtained evidence would hurt public safety, not improve it.

"If the policy now is to charge first and ask questions later, that's not going to work," the judge said. "Arrests stay on people's records. That has consequences."

"Lawlessness cannot come from the government," Judge Faruqui added. "The eyes of the world are on this city right now."

The judge also delivered words of warning to Riley about the danger and harsh consequences of carrying weapons. "Yes, sir," the defendant replied.

Riley will remain in D.C. custody for now. Authorities in Maryland have 72 hours to pick him up for allegedly violating the terms of his supervised release there, for possessing a weapon last week near the grocery store in D.C.'s Union Market neighborhood. The DOJ spokesperson said Riley was being held pursuant to a detainer warrant for Prince George's County in Maryland.

Outside the courtroom, Riley's pregnant wife, Crashawna Williams, said she had missed school and had taken on extra responsibilities for their sons, ages 12, 8 and 3, following Riley's arrest.

"It's put everything on me; it's straining me," she said.

Public defender Elizabeth Mullin said the search and arrest by a combination of D.C.'s Metropolitan Police officers and federal agents was patently unlawful.

"This never should have happened," Mullin said. "He was doing nothing wrong. He was just walking into Trader Joe's to get some food."

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Police use AI to prepare reports, may be cannon fodder for defense attorneys

Police reports sit at the heart of the criminal justice process — officers use them to detail an incident and explain why they took the actions they did, and may later use them to prepare if they have to testify in court, Reported CNN. Reports can also inform prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and the public about the officer’s perspective on what took place. They can influence whether a prosecutor decides to take a case, or whether a judge decides to hold someone without bond, said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University law professor who studies the intersection of technology and policing.

“Police reports are really an accountability mechanism,” Ferguson said. “It’s a justification for state power, for police power.”

For that reason, proponents of Draft One tout the potential for AI to make reports more accurate and comprehensive, in addition to its time-saving benefits. But skeptics worry that any issues with the technology could have major ramifications for people’s lives. At least one state has already passed a law regulating the use of AI-drafted police reports.

Draft One’s rollout also comes amid broader concerns around AI in law enforcement, after experiments elsewhere with facial recognition technology have led to wrongful arrests.

“I do think it’s a growing movement. Like lots of AI, people are looking at how do we update? How do we improve?” Ferguson said of AI police report technology. “There’s a hype level, too, that people are pushing this because there’s money to be made on the technology.”

An efficiency tool for officers

After an officer records an interaction on their body camera, they can request that Draft One create a report. The tool uses the transcript from the body camera footage to create the draft, which begins to appear within seconds of the request. The officer is then prompted to review the draft and fill in additional details before submitting it as final.

Each draft report contains bracketed fill-in-the-blanks that an officer must either complete or delete before it can be submitted. The blank portions are designed to ensure officers read through the drafts to correct potential errors or add missing information.

“It really does have to be the officer’s own report at the end of the day, and they have to sign off as to what happened,” Axon President Josh Isner told CNN.

Draft One uses a modified version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Axon further tested and trained to reduce the likelihood of “hallucinations,” factual errors that AI systems can randomly generate. Axon also says it works with a group of third-party academics, restorative justice advocates and community leaders that provide feedback on how to responsibly develop its technology and mitigate potential biases.

The idea for Draft One came from staffing shortages that Axon’s police department clients were facing, Isner said. In a 2024 survey of more than 1,000 US police agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that agencies were operating at least 10% below their authorized staffing levels on average.

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CREATORS: The Tragic Abduction and Murder of Etan Patz is Back in the News

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 5, 2025

In 1979, a 6-year-old boy disappeared on his way to his Manhattan school bus stop. Etan Patz's disappearance changed the way people parent, launching the missing and exploited children's movement. Patz was never found.

Thirty-three years later, Pedro Hernandez was arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office with second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.

According to The New York Times, "Hernandez was living in New Jersey when a relative told authorities that he suspected him of killing Etan. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hernandez had a history of sexually abusing a family member, drug use and domestic violence."

This arrest was high-profile. As one of the nation's most infamous child abductions, with an arrest decades after the crime, one would think the police would want to make sure everything was done by the book. Not in New York City.

The police elicited a confession from Hernandez after seven hours of questioning. That isn't particularly unusual, but the confession came before he was administered his Miranda warnings. After he confessed, he was mirandized by the police who had Hernandez repeat his confession on tape, according to court filings.

The New York Times reported, Hernandez's first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury after 18 days of deliberation. The lone holdout said that his primary reason had been Hernandez's initial confession, which to the juror seemed "coerced."

In 2017, a second jury convicted Hernandez on the ninth day of deliberations. The jury foreman later remarked that "deliberations were difficult."

Last month, a federal court granted Hernandez a new trial.

A quarter-century after Patz disappeared, Americans were presented with a list of six crimes that could happen in their local communities. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans expressed the greatest concern for their children being abducted and sexually molested.

Child abductions by strangers have consistently remained a concern for parents. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their families in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found nearly one-in-three U.S. parents with children younger than 18 say they are extremely or very worried about their children being abducted.

Etan's disappearance, the murders of Adam Walsh, Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey ushered in, and fueled, an era of hyper-vigilance for parents. Parents' irrational fear of stranger danger changed the way parents care for their children, and the way children interact with adults and their peers for that matter. Politicians jumped on the stranger danger bandwagon. Starting with former President Ronald Reagan proclaiming the day Etan Patz disappeared, May 25, as National Missing Children's Day, politicians have enacted more and more draconian laws to deal with the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Hernandez's arrest and conviction for killing Etan should have provided some closure for a case that had extraordinary implications. His new trial will open wounds festering for 46 years. The upheaval could have been avoided.

Hernandez was arrested and tried in a cold case based on flimsy evidence devoid of any forensic evidence. Then investigators interviewed Hernandez without advising him of his rights. The police then read him his rights and interviewed him a second time, getting a second taped confession. This tactic flew in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2004.

The Court, in a 5-4 decision, found the second confession inadmissible, particularly when the police strategy was to intentionally undermine the effectiveness of the Miranda warnings. That decision is the key to Hernandez's successful appeal and Etan Patz being back in the news.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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30,000 juveniles are reported missing annually, less than 200 abducted by strangers

It was 1979, and Nils Johnson-Shelton had a lot in common with a classmate named Etan Patz. Both were 6-year-old boys with bowl cuts, the sons of artists living in lofts in SoHo. They rode the same bus to the same elementary school, where they both attended first grade, reported The New York Times.

On the morning of May 25 that year, Etan went missing and was never found. His disappearance not only shocked New York City; it was later credited as the event that forever altered parenting, a word that had only recently entered the lexicon. From that terrible day, the notion that children in America should be left to their own devices — to run with their friends, climb trees, fall down, get up and keep running — changed. Parenting transformed, too, as mothers and fathers grew more intense, more fearful, more riddled with anxiety about threats, real and imagined, that children newly seemed to face.

“Etan’s case is foundational,” said John E. Bischoff III, a vice president at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “It made parents more aware and concerned for their own children’s safety.”

The biggest change Mr. Johnson-Shelton recalls from his childhood was that he no longer rode the bus to school. Instead, he would clamber onto his father’s bike and the two of them would rattle across the cobblestone streets of TriBeCa.

“I was so young that I didn’t put the two together,” he said recently. It never occurred to him that the bike rides were a result of what had happened to Etan. “I just thought it was an awesome thing to do with my dad.”

Last week, after a federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega worker who was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and killing Etan, the case returned to the spotlight, inspiring a new round of conversations about how to raise children.

At Pier 51, a park along the Hudson River not far from the Patz family’s former home, the playground scene was vibrant last week as dozens of children played and their guardians kept vigilant watch. Parents and older siblings moved around their young charges like shadows, ready to jump and save any falling children before their heads hit the bouncy rubber playground floor.

Keshia Gerrits, who is originally from Amsterdam and is living in SoHo, watched her children, ages 4 and 6, run around. She wanted them to feel “a type of independence,” Ms. Gerrits, 34, said. “But only if I’ve got eyes on them.”

Little fear of kidnapping was evident. A sign outside the locked gate to the playground warned that adults were not permitted to enter without a child. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, a number that experts say is unreliable, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their family in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

“I think that phenomenon is somewhat exaggerated,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author of the study.

But in the view of experts like Jessica McCrory Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the lives of American parents and children have changed so drastically since the 1970s that it is impossible to peg such broad cultural shifts on the disappearance of a single boy nearly 50 years ago. People who study parenting culture argue that declining labor unions, rising income inequality, more women in the work force, the defunding of social programs and an increase in competition to win admission to top universities all contributed to a heightened belief among many parents that they alone were responsible for the welfare of their children.

“In the U.S., we put the burden on families, and especially mothers, to D.I.Y. a social safety net to keep their children safe from risk,” said Ms. McCrory Calarco, author of the 2024 book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.”

The ubiquity of smartphones has seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Nonetheless, singular tragedies have proved far more galvanizing than broad socioeconomic trends. Anine Colaire was the mother of two children, ages 8 and 11, living in Portland, Ore., when she learned about the murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who was kidnapped from her home in Petaluma, Calif., in 1993. When relatives from California visited Ms. Colaire’s home, they criticized her for continuing to allow her children to walk to a nearby park and ride their bikes without adult supervision.

“The Polly Klaas case had a huge impact,” said Ms. Colaire, 64, whose children are now adults. “I had some relatives and friends with kids that were just scared to death to let their kids out of their sight.”

For Jennifer Pimentel, it was the abduction and murder in 1995 of 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce in Redland, Fla., that fundamentally changed her family’s approach to child safety. As an 8-year-old in nearby Miami at the time, she remembers that family trips to the mall or to her brother’s baseball practices became terrifying ordeals, as her mother labored to keep her children physically close at all times.

Three decades later, Ms. Pimentel has children of her own, and even though Jimmy’s killer, Juan Carlos Chavez, was executed in 2014 for the crimes, the fear remains. Every time her teenage son or daughter goes to a Starbucks or has a sleepover, Ms. Pimentel, her husband and all their friends demand constant electronic check-ins.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “It’s an unwritten agreement. We just do it.”

This intensive style, sometimes called “helicopter parenting,” was challenged by a different model, “free-range parenting,” in which adults strive to provide a base line of support and protection, while also giving children opportunities to explore, fail and learn on their own.

“I don’t blame parents for being terrified,” said Lenore Skenazy, author of the 2009 book “Free-Range Kids.” “I blame a culture that has gradually taught them that the most responsible way to parent is to basically conjure up Etan every time they’re deciding whether their kid can do anything on their own.”

Over time, the ubiquity of smartphones seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents, as adults who favored either parenting style found themselves using apps like Life360 to keep constant tabs on their children — even as those phones and social media made children more vulnerable to bullies and predators.

As children in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, Vanessa Wyeth and Etan Patz attended each other’s birthday parties. When Etan disappeared, Vanessa and her father walked the neighborhood with Stanley Patz, Etan’s father, distributing fliers and asking for information about the missing boy.

For the next two years, Vanessa was terrified that a stranger would break into her bedroom window as she slept, even though the family lived in an apartment on the 20th floor. In part to help her feel less afraid, her parents moved the family in 1981 to Bangor, Maine, where she enjoyed more freedom to explore, she said.

Her experiences of fear and safety as a child caused her to raise her children, now 16 and 18, with a careful mix of independence and surveillance, Ms. Wyeth said.

“We want to know where our kids are in a way that I didn’t experience as a kid in Maine,” said Ms. Wyeth, 52, who returned to Manhattan and now lives in Chelsea. “But I think that has more to do with having cellphones than it does with having my childhood friend kidnapped.”

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Media challenges constitutionality of Tennessee 'police buffer zone' law

A media coalition, represented by attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is challenging the constitutionality of a new Tennessee law that makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer after being told to stay back in certain situations.

In a federal lawsuit filed this week, seven news organizations — Gannett, Gray Local Media, Nashville Banner, Nexstar Media Group, Scripps Media, Tennessee Lookout, and TEGNA — argue that the law grants law enforcement officers limitless discretion to bar journalists and the public from reporting — for any reason or no reason — on protests and other newsworthy events, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

This is the third lawsuit Reporters Committee attorneys have filed on behalf of news media coalitions challenging so-called police “buffer zone” laws. In Indiana and Louisiana, news outlets won preliminary injunctions prohibiting the states from enforcing nearly identical laws that federal district courts found to be unconstitutionally vague.

“These buffer laws jeopardize reporters’ ability to bring their communities some of the news that matters most — about crime, disaster response, police misconduct, and more,” said Reporters Committee Staff Attorney Grayson Clary, who is representing the media coalition alongside Paul McAdoo, RCFP’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for Tennessee. “When law enforcement pushes the press out of eye and earshot, it’s the public that ultimately loses out.”

Tennessee’s law, which went into effect on July 1, makes it a misdemeanor for journalists and others to approach within 25 feet of an officer while the officer is engaged in official duties at a traffic stop, the scene of an alleged crime, or “an ongoing and immediate threat to public safety” — scenarios broad enough to sweep in most of what officers do in public, from enforcing the law at a public assembly to conducting disaster response. It authorizes officers to order individuals to back up even if they don’t pose a safety risk and are not obstructing law enforcement. And it also does not require officers to accommodate the First Amendment right to report on government activity.

In its lawsuit, the media coalition notes that journalists in Tennessee routinely come into close contact with police officers during the course of their reporting, including at crime scenes and football games. But under the new law, they could be forced to move far enough away from a newsworthy event that they are unable to record audio or video, speak to sources, or simply observe an officer’s actions. 

“With the Act now in effect,” the lawsuit argues, “whenever one of Plaintiffs’ journalists is told to retreat while standing within 25 feet of law enforcement, that reporter is put to a choice between committing a crime or forgoing newsgathering.”

In addition to its First Amendment arguments, the lawsuit alleges that the buffer zone law violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to specify what kinds of behavior by a journalist or other member of the public might prompt an officer to issue an order to stay back.

“This law just gives officers too much discretion to pick and choose who is and isn’t violating the law, to the point where officers are essentially writing the law themselves,” Clary said. 

In Indiana and Louisiana, the district courts focused their decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment arguments, concluding that the laws in those respective states were unconstitutionally vague. 

Both states have appealed the rulings. In Indiana, the appeal is fully briefed, and the parties are awaiting a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In Louisiana, attorneys for both sides are in the process of briefing the case in advance of oral argument, which hasn’t yet been scheduled.

Even as we await the appeals court rulings, the media coalitions’ victories at the district court level appear to be pushing lawmakers toward narrowing the scope of police buffer zone laws. In response to the district court’s opinion in Indiana, for example, state lawmakers passed a new buffer zone statute that only applies if officers in fact have reasonable grounds to believe that an individual threatens to interfere with the performance of their duties. Florida recently adopted a similarly narrower law. 

“The message is getting through,” said Clary, who has helped litigate all three media coalition lawsuits. “I still don’t think those laws are perfect. I think there’s still a risk that they’ll sweep in more legitimate speech and newsgathering than necessary in practice on the ground. But I do think it’s encouraging that outside the courtroom, there’s clearly been a shift towards a narrower and less speech suppressive version of these statutes, even if I wish states weren’t going down this road at all.”

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Texas man charged with capital murder for slipping pregnant woman abortion pill

A North Texas man charged with capital murder this month after he allegedly slipped his girlfriend abortion-inducing medication and caused a miscarriage marks the first time a murder charge has been brought in an abortion-related case in Texas, reported the Texas Tribune.

The case tests a new method for reining in abortion pills — by threatening to prosecute individuals who provide them with the most severe criminal charge — while advancing the longstanding legal provision that defines an embryo as a person, legal experts say. The latter could raise serious implications about the legality of fertility treatments and in other legal realms such as criminal and immigration issues.

“It is shocking to people that the law can be used this way… that this is the extent and result of the more than 20 year old fetal personhood laws,” said Blake Rocap, a Texas attorney who works in abortion rights advocacy and studies pregnancy criminalization. Legal experts say the case will not change Texas laws that prevent women who receive abortions from being prosecuted.

According to an affidavit filed in Tarrant County by the Texas Rangers, 39-year-old Justin Anthony Banta put mifepristone, an abortion-inducing medication, into cookies and a beverage that he then gave to his pregnant girlfriend. Banta had previously asked her to get an abortion, but she said she had wanted to keep the child, according to the affidavit. A day after drinking the beverage, the woman miscarried.

The Texas Rangers did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which must decide whether and how to prosecute the case, has not yet brought its own charges, according to a spokesperson.

Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, a fetus was not considered a person constitutionally. However, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the whole opinion was overruled, including the idea that a fetus does not have the same rights as a person. That did not immediately mean that fetus personhood is established. But, Joanna Grossman, a professor at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, and other experts see Banta’s case as an attempt to move further in that direction.

“The purpose of this has nothing to do with caring whether this woman was victimized, but it's about trying to establish fetal personhood in a more direct way than they've been able to,” said Grossman.

If Banta is convicted and fetal personhood is established in the case, it could complicate a variety of issues, including whether IVF is still legal because it involves destroying unused frozen embryos. Last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are considered children.

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Kohberger's zealous defense fizzles agrees to plea deal

Bryan Kohberger, the man charged in the brutal stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students, has reached a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, according to a letter that prosecutors sent to relatives of the victims, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Kohberger had been set to go on trial on murder charges in August, nearly three years after the killings, which occurred at a residence near the university in Moscow, Idaho. A plea hearing is set for Wednesday.

In a letter to the victims’ families on Monday, prosecutors said that Mr. Kohberger’s defense team asked for a plea offer last week. Under the proposed agreement, which must be approved by the judge in the case, Mr. Kohberger would plead guilty to all charges, face four consecutive life sentences and waive all rights to appeal.

The family of Kaylee Goncalves, one of the victims, criticized the prosecution team for failing to consult with the families. Some of them had worked to change Idaho law to allow the firing squad as a form of capital punishment.

“After more than two years, this is how it concludes, with a secretive deal and a hurried effort to close the case without any input from the victims’ families on the plea’s details,” the Goncalves family said in a statement.

In their letter to the families, prosecutors wrote that the plea deal was “our sincere attempt to seek justice.”

“This agreement ensures that the defendant will be convicted, will spend the rest of his life in prison, and will not be able to put you and other families through the uncertainty of decades of post-conviction appeals,” they wrote. “Your viewpoints weighed heavily in our decision-making process, and we hope that you may come to appreciate why we believe this resolution is in the best interests of justice.”

Prosecutors did not respond to messages seeking comment, nor did lawyers for Mr. Kohberger. The families of the other victims did not comment immediately on the proposed agreement.

Mr. Kohberger, now 30, was a criminology Ph.D. student at Washington State University, about a 20-minute drive from the crime scene. He grew up in Pennsylvania and studied psychology in college. He was arrested in December 2022 at his parents’ home in the Pocono Mountains area of Pennsylvania about six weeks after the killings.

Mr. Kohberger’s defense team tried unsuccessfully for months to undermine key pieces of evidence that investigators collected against him. Prosecutors have said that his DNA was found on a knife sheath recovered at the crime scene, and that records showed he had purchased a knife of a kind matching the sheath in the months before the killings. Video footage showed a car similar to his circling the neighborhood around the time of the deaths.

But investigators have yet to suggest a motive or offer any details on how the victims were chosen.

Mr. Kohberger’s lawyers filed a flurry of motions in recent months, including one trying to bar prosecutors from seeking the death penalty — in part, they said, because Mr. Kohberger had been diagnosed with autism. They unsuccessfully sought a delay in the trial, arguing that their team had not had enough time to comb through the vast amount of evidence in the case. But the judge ordered jury selection to commence on Aug. 4.

Just hours before news of the plea deal on Monday, one of Mr. Kohberger’s lawyers was in court in Pennsylvania, where she successfully argued that two witnesses who knew Mr. Kohberger as a teenager should be forced to testify at trial even though they did not want to.

Mr. Kohberger has been in jail since his arrest. His lawyers have given few hints about what defense they planned to offer, but have said that he was “out driving” on the night of the murders.

In the years before the killings, Mr. Kohberger indicated that he was interested in studying criminals. In a message to a friend in 2018, he wrote that he would like a job “dealing with high-profile offenders.” A few months before the murders, he posted on Reddit asking people who had spent time in prison to describe their “thoughts, emotions and actions from the beginning to end of the crime commission process.”

Investigators have said that the murders happened sometime around 4 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2022. The victims — Ms. Goncalves, 21; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Ethan Chapin, 20 — had spent a typical Saturday night out near the university campus and returned to the house in the early hours of Sunday.

A roommate who survived the attack said she had heard what sounded like crying coming from the room of one of the women. She later told the police that she had opened her door and seen a man with bushy eyebrows in black clothes and a mask. The man left the house and the roommate began texting with another surviving roommate downstairs before taking refuge in her room.

But neither she nor anyone else called the police until more than seven hours later, when a friend came to the house and discovered the body of one of the victims.

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CREATORS: Your Car is Spying on You

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 20, 2025

Most late-model vehicles have the ability to log speed, when and where a vehicle's lights are turned on, which doors are opened and closed at specific locations as well as gear shifts, odometer readings, ignition cycles — and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Preinstalled safety and performance features that car dealers push on consumers can increase a driver's exposure to government surveillance and the likelihood of being the subject of a police investigation.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has extended protections to the privacy of your smartphone, your car has unexpectedly become a safe haven for law enforcement to access your personal information without a warrant.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, protects cell phone location information. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court recognized that location information collected by cell providers creates a "detailed chronicle of a person's physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years."

Subsequent court rulings have clearly established that individuals can maintain an expectation of privacy in information that they provide to third parties. As a result, the police must now get a warrant before obtaining cell phone data.

According to documents reviewed by WIRED Magazine, law enforcement agencies regularly train on how to take advantage of "connected cars."

For instance, the California Highway Patrol trains officers on how to acquire data using a variety of hypothetical scenarios, each describing how vehicle data can be acquired based on the year, make, and model of a vehicle.

When police are focused on a suspect, they will often use a technique known as a "ping" to geographically locate a specific device known to belong to that suspect. A cellphone ping can put a specific person in the area of a cellphone tower at or near a specific time.

However, according to WIRED, when police have a crime scene and no suspect, investigators will rely on a procedure known as a "tower dump," requesting that an Internet Service Provider cast a wider net and identify virtually any devices that have connected to a specific cell tower during a certain period of time. Investigators can examine the data and analyze it contemporaneously with access to storefront surveillance footage, traffic cameras and even doorbell cameras to identify a person or vehicle.

In some instances, a vehicle owner who had not purchased a safety or performance subscription may still be producing data that is being maintained by the manufacturer and ultimately available for review by law enforcement.

Access to personal information goes beyond what police might find when trying to recreate an individual's whereabouts — more alarming is what an individual may voluntarily make available to police.

Plugging into your vehicle is the same as throwing your personal information in the garbage and putting it out on the curb. In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a California case that the Fourth Amendment does not require police obtain a warrant before searching trash containers placed on the curb.

No person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in items left in a public place. "What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection," said the justices. That goes for personal information dumped into a vehicle's data system.

An individual who rents a vehicle and plugs their phone in for directions, or music, or to make a hands-free call may have unwittingly left their personal information in the vehicle. It's like throwing your diary in the trash can. As a result, law enforcement can access that personal, sometimes embarrassing, and maybe even incriminating, information without a warrant.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told WIRED, "It's an ongoing scandal that this kind of surveillance is taking place without people being aware of it, let alone permitting it."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Is there a serial killer in New England?

 Bodies of potential victims found in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island

Speculation about a serial killer in New England is gaining significant traction online – specifically stemming from discussions in a private Facebook group called "New England Serial Killer," reported Fox News.

Members of the Facebook group and social media users on other platforms like TikTok and X are pointing to several recent discoveries of human remains in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island between March and April.

Authorities across all three states have identified remains in New Haven, Groton, Killingly and Norwalk, Connecticut, as well as Framingham and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Foster, Rhode Island.

Three sets of human remains have been identified. New Haven police identified remains discovered on March 21 as Denise Leary, a formerly missing 59-year-old mother of two. Norwalk police also identified the remains of 35-year-old Paige Fannon of West Islip, New York, on March 6. Her remains were found in a swiftly moving Norwalk River after heavy rainfall the night before.

Rhode Island State Police identified remains found in a wooded area of Foster as 56-year-old Michele Romano, who had been missing since August 2024.Their causes of death have not been released as of Tuesday.

"There is no information at this time suggesting any connection to similar remains discoveries, and there is also no known threat to the public at this time," Connecticut State Police said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

CTSP further told police that troopers responded to Woodward Street in Killingly on April 9 regarding the discovery of possible human remains. Police later confirmed the remains, which have yet to be identified, and said there is no known threat to the public.

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Pennsylvania governor and family attacked by man with Molotov cocktails and hammer

A Harrisburg man walked an hour from his home with gasoline-filled beer bottles and a hammer before setting fire to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official state residence early Sunday, then fled the scene and later turned himself in, reported The Associated Press.

The suspect, 38-year-old Cody Balmer, allegedly confessed during a police interview and said if he had confronted Shapiro inside the historic Susquehanna riverfront residence, he would have beaten the governor with the hammer, court records released Monday state.

Balmer was charged with attempted criminal homicide, arson, burglary, terrorism, and other offenses, according to the criminal complaint obtained by Spotlight PA. Court records state Balmer was fueled by “hatred” towards Shapiro, though it does not elaborate on the reason for those feelings.

The attack came during the Jewish holiday of Passover, just after Shapiro had held a Seder in his residence with family and guests.

Of the possibility that Balmer’s arson could have been a hate crime, Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo told Spotlight PA, “It's something we’d look at — we’re not there yet. We haven’t made a determination, but we’re looking at that because of the timing.”

Balmer was initially scheduled to be arraigned Monday, but a spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police said in a statement that “due to a medical event not connected to this incident or his arrest, Balmer was transported to an area hospital where he is currently receiving treatment.”

According to the State Police, he remains under their supervision and will be arraigned when he is released from the hospital.

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Idaho police shot nonverbal, autistic, intellectually disabled juvenile with cerebral palsy nine-times resulting in leg amputation

Dozens of protestors gathered outside the Pocatello Police Department following an officer-involved shooting, according to EastIdahoNews.com.

Their signs read “Bloody Hands, Dirty Cowards,” “Do Better PPD,” “Hold PPD accountable” and “What are Tasers for?”

The protest comes after a teen identified as 17-year-old Victor Perez was repeatedly shot by multiple police officers April 5, 2025 near the 700 block of North Harrison Avenue. Video of the shooting was widely circulated on social media.

The family tells EastIdahoNews.com that Perez has cerebral palsy.

Idaho police officers opened fire from behind a chain-link fence just seconds after exiting their patrol cars and critically wounded a teenage boy — described by his family as nonverbal, autistic and intellectually disabled — as he stepped toward them with a knife, video from a witness shows.

Seventeen-year-old Perez, remained hospitalized in critical condition after having nine bullets removed from his body and having his leg amputated, Ana Vazquez, his aunt, told The Associated Press. Doctors were planning tests on his brain activity.

The video, sent to EastIdahoNews.com by multiple people, shows Perez lying on the ground outside of a home in the front yard. He appears to be holding a knife or some other object and is arguing with a woman, who attempts to get the item from the Perez’s hands.

A neighbor filming the incident is on the phone with a police dispatcher and says Perez, who was on the ground, was hit in the head by a log. Police arrived at the scene at 5:25 p.m., according to a police news release, and four officers get out of their vehicles with guns drawn.

Video shows them yelling at Perez and telling him to drop his weapon. The officers were in front of a chainlink fence and not in the yard. Perez appears to stand up and move toward the officers, who then fire multiple shots.

“Immediate life-saving measures” were performed before Perez was taken to Portneuf Medical Center, according to the news release.

It’s unclear what led to the situation in the front yard, but many say police were too aggressive in their response to the situation.

The Pocatello Police Department remained quiet Sunday and did not release any updates about the shooting. EastIdahoNews.com requested additional information from the department and the city’s public information officer, but our messages were not returned.

The shooting is under investigation by the East Idaho Critical Incident Task Force. Police have asked for public’s patience as the investigation unfolds.

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CREATORS: Police Can Lie to a Suspect to Get a Confession

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
April 1, 2025

In 1969, Martin Frazier and an accomplice were convicted in Oregon of second-degree murder.

During an interview with police, "the officer questioning (Frazier) told him, falsely, that (his accomplice) had been brought in and that he had confessed." That was a lie. Frazier was still reluctant to talk, but when the officer persisted Frazier "began to spill out his story."

Frazier's case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Frazier argued that his confession was involuntary because the police lied to him about his accomplice's confession. Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the majority, ruled "The fact that the police misrepresented the statements that (the accomplice) had made is, while relevant, insufficient, in our view, to make this otherwise voluntary confession inadmissible."

The Frazier decision provided a precedent for a confession being voluntary, even though deceptive police tactics were used. Police departments have run with the decision ever since and haven't looked back.

According to the Cato Institute, police routinely employ a variety of manipulative practices, including lying about the existence of incriminating evidence like DNA, fingerprints or an accomplice's confession. Police also falsely imply leniency in exchange for "taking responsibility."

These techniques are core components of interrogations across the country. Deception is taught as a fundamental police training technique, tolerated by judges and considered a widely accepted law enforcement practice. The upside for police is the streamlining of investigations — a confession is often the end of an interrogation and the end of an investigation for that matter.

The downside is that the use of deceptive interrogation techniques significantly increases the risk of false confessions. The psychological pressure and manipulation inherent in deceptive interrogation tactics can induce even an innocent suspect to admit to a crime.

When faced with repeated assertions that incontrovertible evidence exists to secure a conviction — such as an eyewitness — some suspects begin to doubt their recollections, reported the Cato Institute.

Saul Kassin, professor emeritus of psychology at Williams College wrote in Time Magazine in December of 2022, "Within the scientific community, proof of the risk posed by the false evidence ploy is beyond dispute. Basic psychology research in a multitude of venues shows that misinformation can alter people's visual perceptions, beliefs, emotions, physiological states, memories, and the decisions they make."

Policymakers should question the role deception plays in criminal investigations and consider policies to limit its pervasiveness.

Ironically, Oregon recently became one of the first states in the country to ban police deception during the interrogation of juvenile suspects.

While juveniles and people with cognitive deficits or mental illnesses are particularly vulnerable when it comes to deceptive interrogation techniques, it is important to also understand that capable adults without any limitations regularly provide false confessions.

A person might falsely confess due to stress, exhaustion, confusion, feelings of hopelessness and inevitability, fear of harsher punishment for a failure to confess, substance use, mental health problems or a history of trauma due to sexual abuse or domestic violence.

Even more troubling is the fact that judges and juries often take confessions at face value. Confessions are often not critically scrutinized. The Innocence Project suggests regulating techniques and methods employed in the interrogation room.

For instance, policymakers should limit the length of interrogations, as research shows the reliability of statements after two hours of sustained interrogation decreases. Policymakers should also implement trauma-informed interviewing methods, which not only protect victims of emotional, physical and sexual violence, but also improve the reliability of statements made by suspects of crime.

In addition, interrogations from start to finish should be recorded. Currently, 30 states and the District of Columbia mandate the recording of interrogations, either by statute or court action.

In some states — California, Connecticut and New York — legislative proposals mandating an assessment of reliability for all confessions before admission at trial are currently pending.

These measures are meaningful attempts to reduce false confessions, but there is still a long way to go.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Judge blocks law requiring 25-foot buffer zone for working police

 A federal judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of a state law, approved last year, that creates a buffer zone around police, making it a criminal offense to come within 25 feet of a working officer after being ordered to step back, reported the Louisiana Illuminator.

The preliminary injunction was issued Friday in response to a lawsuit filed in July by six media companies, including Verite News’ parent company Deep South Today, asking for the law to be blocked.

The media groups — represented by the Washington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Louisiana attorneys Scott Sternberg and Marcia Suzanne Montero — say the law could interfere with journalists’ First Amendment rights to cover police actions and expose police misconduct. They also argue the law is unconstitutionally vague, allowing police to invoke the buffer arbitrarily.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who is a defendant in the suit, contends that the law is a common-sense public safety measure that will protect police officers while they are on the job. In a December court hearing, attorneys representing Murrill also argued that the media groups’ suit is based on purely hypothetical grounds, as the law has yet to be enforced since it took effect in August.

But in his ruling, Judge John deGravelles of Louisiana’s Middle District, said the threat to newsgathering warrants immediate action.

“Plaintiffs’ journalists are regularly within 25 feet of peace officers, and now face the threat of arrest and prosecution if an order to retreat is given,” deGravelles wrote. “The distance required is likely to impede Plaintiffs’ non-obstructive newsgathering. … Therefore, the Act has a chilling effect on Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights,” even if it has not yet been enforced.”

DeGravelles, a federal court appointee of former President Barack Obama, also agreed with the plaintiffs that the law is overly vague.

“Here, while the Act clearly states that an officer can enforce a 25-foot buffer zone, it lacks any standard by which an officer may issue an order to stand back or retreat,” the judge wrote.

Louisiana is one of several states that have passed police buffer zone laws. Similar laws in Arizona and Indiana have faced legal challenges on constitutional grounds. The Arizona law was struck down in 2022. The Indiana law has faced two separate challenges. In one case, the law was upheld. In another, it was struck down.

The  preliminary injunction will be effective while the case is pending. The plaintiffs’ ultimate goal is a permanent block on the law.

In a statement, Murrill said she had not seen the ruling yet but would “continue to defend the law.”

“We think it is a reasonable time, place and manner restriction from obstructing and interfering with working police,” Murrill said. “We are trying to protect the public. This is a reasonable law.”

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Alleged CEO assassin remains in PA prison fighting extradition

Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, is fighting extradition to New York, and will remain in custody in Pennsylvania, reported the Pennsylvania Capital Star. 

Mangione, 26, was charged late Monday in Manhattan with second-degree murder, forgery and three gun charges. He was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona on Monday and was arraigned Monday evening at the Blair County Courthouse in Hollidaysburg on charges of carrying a firearm without a license, forgery, records or identification tampering, possession of instruments of crime and presenting false identification to law enforcement. 

Police said they found a 3D-printed pistol loaded with nine rounds of 9 mm ammunition and a loose hollow-point round in Mangione’s backpack. The gun was with a silencer that had also been 3D printed, police said.

Blair County Common Pleas Judge David Consiglio ordered Mangione held without bail at SCI-Huntingdon pending an extradition hearing. The Associated Press reported that Mangione shouted about an “insult to the intelligence of the American people” as he arrived at the courthouse on Tuesday.

Thompson, 50, was shot and killed outside a New York City hotel on Dec. 4. He had been CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurance providers, for nearly three years.

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Mangino discusses school threats on WFMJ-TV21 Weekend Today

Watch my interview on WFMJ-TV21 about the wave of school threats in the area with the return to the classrooms.

 

To watch the interview CLICK HERE and scroll to "Wave of School Threats"

Games Police Play, The Pervasive Role of Deceit in American Policing

While at times an effective tool, deception is ethically dubious and can result in severe negative consequences for suspects

Sanctioned by the courts and taught in police manuals, deceptive tactics are employed by virtually every police department across the country, according to a new report by the Cato Institute. Officers seeking to elicit a confession will routinely lie to suspects about the evidence and make statements that imply leniency. While effective at times, deception is ethically dubious and can result in severe consequences for suspects. The United States is an outlier in allowing police to deceive suspects, as the practice is prohibited or highly restricted in most peer nations, including England, France, Germany, and Japan.

First, deceptive interrogation tactics frequently induce false confessions, which are a leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Further, the acceptability of lying to suspects during interrogations seems to encourage deception in other, more troubling contexts. Research shows that testimonial lies, such as perjury in court and falsifying police reports, are commonly employed by officers to secure convictions and circumvent constitutional protections. While such practices remain illegal, testimonial lies are rarely identified or punished. As a result, the justifications and skills cultivated through deceiving suspects in interrogations naturally bleed over into other police work.

Ultimately, the pervasiveness of police deception undermines the integrity and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. It leads to wrongful convictions, weakens civil liberties, and erodes public trust in law enforcement. While there are difficult trade-offs in regulating police deception, its negative consequences require policy responses. Contrary to contentions that deceit is a necessary tool of law enforcement, experiences in other nations suggest that restricting police deception does not hamper criminal investigations. Policymakers should consider measures to curtail police deception, such as requiring that interrogations be recorded, banning or limiting certain deceptive tactics, and increasing judicial scrutiny of interrogation practices.

Introduction

In interrogating a suspect, police often seek to extract an admission of guilt. Officers have found that deceit can be a remarkably effective tool in eliciting confessions from even the most hardened suspects. Since the Supreme Court has put few limits on the practice, the varieties of deceptive techniques police may use are limited chiefly by officers’ ingenuity.1 Officers learn deceptive techniques from interrogation manuals and rely heavily on these practices, often to the exclusion of using other strategies.2

While at times an effective tool, deception is ethically dubious and can result in severe negative consequences for suspects. First, deceptive tactics have been shown to frequently result in false confessions, which are a leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Additionally, training and encouraging officers to lie to suspects during interrogations likely promotes an unduly permissive attitude toward deceitful behavior that carries over into testimonial lying. This includes perjury in court, lying on warrant applications, and falsifying police reports. While lying to suspects in theory (though not always in practice) pursues the truth, testimonial lying subverts justice by creating a false record meant to deceive authorities and courts. Yet from the officer’s perspective, the goal of each type of lie is generally the same: achieving criminal convictions.

Research shows that testimonial lies told by police are commonplace, routinely used to circumvent constitutional protections, and rarely punished due to systemic biases and close relationships between prosecutors, judges, and police. Since officers rarely face consequences for their testimonial lies, the justification for lying and the deceitful skills learned in interrogations naturally spill over to other policing contexts where prevarication remains illegal.

Policymakers may face difficult trade-offs in regulating police deception, but its negative consequences nonetheless require policy responses designed to promote justice, protect civil liberties, and maintain public trust in law enforcement.

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Louisiana enacts "buffer" law insulating police from community observation

A Louisiana law will go into effect making it a misdemeanor for anyone, including journalists, to be within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer if the officer orders them back, according to ProPublica. These new laws, known as "Buffer" laws, are rare but gaining traction.

Karen Savage was working for a news site focused on juvenile justice issues on the second day of the demonstrations in July 2016 when she photographed officers putting a Black man in a chokehold as they detained him. Cherri Foytlin, who was working for a small newspaper and a community media project, said she was within 4 feet when she photographed officers violently dragging a Black man off private property and arresting him.

Foytlin and Savage said they are hesitant to cover protests in Louisiana now that they could face criminal charges if they’re too close to an officer. “I was thinking about how far exactly 25 feet is, and, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to be whatever the officer wants it to be,” Savage said. “And if it doesn’t get to court, it won’t matter because they will have accomplished what they wanted, which was to get the cameras away.”

A coalition of media companies representing a couple dozen Louisiana news outlets, including Verite News, filed suit against Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, State Police Superintendent Robert Hodges and East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III, alleging the law violates the First Amendment.

In a statement provided Thursday, Murrill said the law ensures law enforcement officers can do their jobs without being threatened or impeded by others. She said she looks forward to “defending this reasonable response to documented interference with law enforcement.” State Police spokesperson Capt. Nick Manale declined to comment on the suit; a representative for Moore did not respond to a request for comment.

Police buffer laws, as they are commonly known, are relatively new; Louisiana is the fourth state to enact one. Although those states already prohibit interfering with police officers, supporters say buffer laws are necessary to protect police from distrustful, aggressive bystanders. And with advances in cellphone cameras, including zoom lenses, supporters say there’s no need to get close to officers in order to record their activities.

“There’s really nothing within a 25-feet span that someone couldn’t pick up on video,” Rep. Bryan Fontenot, R-Thibodaux, the sponsor of Louisiana’s bill and a former law enforcement officer, said during a legislative hearing this year. At the same time, he said, “that person can’t spit in my face when I’m making an arrest.” (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Foytlin disagreed. “You can’t even get an officer’s badge number at 25 feet. So there’s no way to hold anyone accountable.”

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NRA concocted plan to conceal luxury expenses by chief executive

At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. 

The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.

Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.

During the meeting, which took place in the Alexandria, Virginia, office of PR firm Ackerman McQueen, executives agreed that Ackerman would issue a Platinum American Express card to Tyler Schropp, the new head of the NRA’s nascent advancement division, which was responsible for bringing in high-dollar contributions from wealthy donors. Ackerman would then cover the card’s charges and bill them back to the NRA under nondescript invoices.

“It’s really the limo services and the hotels that I worry about,” William Winkler, Ackerman’s chief financial officer, said. “He’s going to need it for the hotels especially.”

The use of the Ackerman American Express card, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ expert witness on nonprofits, skirted internal controls that existed to ensure proper disclosure and regulatory compliance and to prevent “fraud and abuse” at the nonprofit. As a result, outside of a tiny group of NRA insiders, everyone was in the dark about years of charges by Schropp — who is still the head of the nonprofit’s advancement division — for luxury accommodations, including regular sojourns to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. The NRA, in response, said the report was “rife with inadmissible factual narratives, impermissible interpretations and inferences, and improper factual and legal conclusions.”

James’ investigation into the NRA began in 2019, after The Trace, in partnership with The New Yorker, and later with ProPublica, reported on internal accounting documents that indicated a culture of self-dealing at the gun-rights group. In 2020, James sued the NRA and LaPierre, who presided over the organization for three decades, over claims of using nonprofit resources for personal enrichment, luxury travel and bloated contracts for insiders, allegations that the parties deny. The attorney general is seeking financial restitution from the defendants and was until last week petitioning for LaPierre’s removal, which was preempted on Friday when LaPierre announced he would resign at the end of January.

The attorney general’s office was unaware of the audio until it was contacted by The Trace and ProPublica and did not respond to a request for comment.

Ackerman McQueen and Winkler declined to comment. None of the other individuals mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment. The gun-rights group’s attorney, William A. Brewer III, said in an email: “The tape has not been authenticated by the NRA but, if real, we are shocked by its content. The suggested contents would confirm what the NRA has said all along: there were certain ‘insiders’ and vendors who took advantage of the Association. If true, it is an example of a shadowy business arrangement — one that was not brought to the attention of the NRA board.”

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Today marks the 60th anniversary of the most infamous crime of the 20th Century

Just minutes after President John F. Kennedy was fatally shot as his motorcade rolled through downtown Dallas, Associated Press reporter Peggy Simpson rushed to the scene and immediately attached herself to the police officers who had converged on the building from which a sniper's bullets had been fired, reported ABC News.

“I was sort of under their armpit,” Simpson said, noting that every time she was able to get any information from them, she would rush to a pay phone to call her editors, and then “go back to the cops.”

Simpson, now 84, is among the last surviving witnesses who are sharing their stories as the nation marks the 60th anniversary of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination on Wednesday.

“A tangible link to the past is going to be lost when the last voices from that time period are gone,” said Stephen Fagin, curator at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which tells the story of the assassination from the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald's sniper's perch was found.

“So many of the voices that were here, even 10 years ago, to share their memories — law enforcement officials, reporters, eyewitnesses — so many of those folks have passed away," he said.

Simpson, former U.S. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill and others are featured in “JFK: One Day in America,” a three-part series from National Geographic released this month that pairs their recollections with archival footage, some of which has been colorized for the first time. Director Ella Wright said that hearing from those who were there helps tell the “behind the scenes” story that augments archival footage.

“We wanted people to really understand what it felt like to be back there and to experience the emotional impact of those events,” Wright said.

People still flock to Dealey Plaza, which the presidential motorcade was passing through when Kennedy was killed.

“The assassination certainly defined a generation," Fagin said. “For those people who lived through it and came of age in the 1960s, it represented a significant shift in American culture.”

On the day of the assassination, Simpson had originally been assigned to attend an evening fundraising dinner for Kennedy in Austin. With time on her hands before she needed to leave Dallas, she was sent to watch the presidential motorcade, but she wasn't near Dealey Plaza.

Simpson had no idea that anything out of the ordinary had happened until she arrived at The Dallas Times Herald's building where the AP's office was located. Stepping off an elevator, she heard a newspaper receptionist say, “All we know is that the president has been shot," and then heard the paper's editor briefing the staff.

She raced to the AP office in time to watch over the bureau chief's shoulder as he filed the news to the world, and then ran out to the Texas School Book Depository to track down more information.

Later, at police headquarters, she said, she witnessed “just a wild, crazy chaotic, unfathomable scene.” Reporters had filled the hallways where an officer walked through with Lee Harvey Oswald 's rifle held aloft. The suspect's mother and wife arrived, and at one point authorities held a news conference where Oswald was asked questions by reporters.

“I was just with a great mass of other reporters, just trying to find any bit of information,” she said.

Two days later, Simpson was covering Oswald's transfer from police headquarters to the county jail, when nightclub owner Jack Ruby burst forth from a gaggle of news reporters and shot the suspect dead.

As police officers wrestled with Ruby on the floor, Simpson rushed to a nearby bank of phones “and started dictating everything I saw to the AP editors,” she said. In that moment, she was just thinking about getting out the news.

“As an AP reporter, you just go for the phone, you can’t process anything at that point,” she said.

Simpson said she must have heard the gunshot but she can’t remember it.

“Probably Ruby was 2 or 3 feet away from me but I didn’t know him, didn’t see him, didn’t see him come out from the crowd of reporters,” she said.

Simpson's recollections are included in an oral history collection at the Sixth Floor Museum that now includes about 2,500 recordings, according to Fagin.

The museum curator said Simpson is “a terrific example of somebody who was just where the action was that weekend and got caught up in truly historic events while simply doing her job as a professional journalist."

Fagin said oral histories are still being recorded. Many of the more recent ones have been with people who were children in the '60s and remembered hearing about the assassination while at school.

“It's a race against time really to try to capture these recollections,” Fagin said.

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Pennsylvania prison escapee not new to life as a fugitive

Danilo  Cavalcante is now the subject of an escalating manhunt in the Pennsylvania countryside, where hundreds of police officers have been scouring the wooded terrain and farmland for almost two weeks, since he clambered out of the Chester County Prison on Aug. 31.

He was being held there for the murder of his former girlfriend, Déborah Evangelista Brandão, in April 2021. After killing her, Mr. Cavalcante had tried to flee, making it as far as Virginia before he was caught and sent to jail, reported The New York Times. 

He was convicted and sentenced this August, and just days before beginning a life sentence in a Pennsylvania state prison, he made his next attempt to get away.

After more than a week of hiding out in the quiet communities south of the jail, he slipped through a perimeter set by law enforcement and stole a delivery van over the weekend. On Saturday night Mr. Cavalcante was seen on a doorbell camera miles away. Police are now searching an area deeper in the Pennsylvania countryside, where he abandoned the van, apparently after it ran out of gas.

On Monday, officials told reporters that Mr. Cavalcante’s recent movements had changed the nature of the search. They urged people in the area to be vigilant and warned of consequences for anyone who helped him. They said that Mr. Cavalcante’s sister, who lived nearby, “chose not to assist” the authorities in the manhunt, and as she had overstayed her visa, is in the process of being deported.

But the thrust of the officials’ remarks was unmistakable: this search would likely take a while. “Now we’re planning for the long game,” said Robert Clark, a supervisory deputy United States marshal.

Neither of his attempted escapes in the U.S. was the first time he had been on the run and proven maddeningly difficult to apprehend.

He vanished from the remote stretch of northern Brazil, too, after Mr. Moreira was shot and killed in 2017, allegedly over an unsettled debt. State prosecutors said an arrest warrant against him was issued on Nov. 21, 2017.

The first time Mr. Cavalcante escaped justice, he found refuge in the rural outskirts of Figueirópolis, a town of about 5,000 people tucked deep in the Brazilian state of Tocantins. After fleeing the crime scene, he hid out on a ranch less than an hour outside town, according to local residents.

“Once you get out,” said Kelton Meneses, a priest in Figueirópolis, “it’s just ranches and bush beyond here. It’s not hard to disappear.”

Mr. Cavalcante was at ease in the Brazilian outback, said Raimundo Campos dos Santos, a longtime resident of the area. “When you’re used to the ranch, you know how to hide. He spent a lot of time in the bush.”

Mr. Cavalcante had moved to this region just over a year before the murder, arriving with his mother and brother from the neighboring state of Maranhão, according to four residents.

He worked on a nearby ranch called Mula Preta, managing livestock and machinery. His family bought a plot of land in a rural community next door, where they raised cattle and horses.

“They were hardworking people,” said Mr. Campos, who lives in the same community, which stretches across 12,000 acres. “A humble lot.”

The family’s farm sits on a remote corner of the rural settlement, reachable by a steep, rocky road. On a recent visit, barbed wire circled a modest farmhouse with a red-tiled roof. On the porch, saddles hung from hooks and a hammock swung in the shade. About a half dozen chickens and four pit bulls roamed around the dusty front yard. Vultures flew overhead.

Aroaldo Cavalcante, the fugitive’s brother, still lives on the ranch, according to neighbors. On Sunday afternoon he did not emerge from the farmhouse, and did not respond to text messages requesting an interview.

 “Nobody really knew these people well,” said Darci Gomes Neve, 75, a neighbor who has lived in the area for two decades. “Danilo didn’t stay long. He took off; nobody heard from him again.”

But when he arrived in the area, he struck up a fast, unlikely friendship with Mr. Moreira, a popular figure in town.

“He was sweet,” said Mr. Feitosa of Mr. Moreira. “He talked to everyone. He liked to dance and to joke around.” Mr. Cavalcante was quieter. “He kept to himself, didn’t talk much,” Mr. Feitosa said. “He didn’t look you in the eye.”

Even before Mr. Moreira’s death, Mr. Cavalcante was feared by some around town.

“He had this reputation that he kept a lot of guns at home,” said Carlos Humberto Jacob, a friend of Mr. Moreira’s who knew Mr. Cavalcante. “People used to say he had heavy weapons at the ranch.”

The friendship between the two men apparently soured when Mr. Cavalcante lent a car to Mr. Moreira, who allegedly damaged the vehicle and never paid for repairs, according to police.

Mr. Cavalcante then began to send death threats to Mr. Moreira, said Mr. Moreira’s sister Dayane. “He kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you.’”

In November 2017, Mr. Cavalcante went to the square to confront Mr. Moreira, who had moved to a different city but had returned home to pick up a new driver’s license.

After the fatal encounter, Mr. Cavalcante allegedly hid out in the region for several weeks before leaving Brazil under a false identity. He has been considered a fugitive in Brazil since 2017, according to authorities in Tocantins.

As the manhunt in Pennsylvania intensifies, residents of the Brazilian town from which he vanished six years ago are also reeling, said Maria Cardoso, a retired schoolteacher who taught Mr. Moreira and is close to his family.

“It’s like a wound that was healing,” Ms. Cardoso said. “Now, it’s all coming back. People are shaken. People are scared.”

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