ЦІКАВЕ

Authorities on Friday identified those missing or killed in a southeast Alaska landslide this week as five family members and their neighbor, a commercial fisherman who made a longshot bid for the state’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

Timothy Heller, 44, and Beth Heller, 36 — plus their children Mara, 16; Derek, 12; and Kara, 11 — were at home Monday night when the landslide struck near the island community of Wrangell. Search crews found the bodies of the parents and the oldest child late Monday or early Tuesday; the younger children remain missing, as does neighbor Otto Florschutz, 65, the Alaska Department of Public Safety said in an emailed statement.

Florschutz’s wife survived.

Florschutz, a Republican, was one of 48 candidates who entered the race to fill the vacant congressional seat. He received 193 votes out of nearly 162,000 cast.

In a candidate statement provided to the Anchorage Daily News back then, Florschutz said he was known for his ability to forge consensus.

“As a 42-year commercial fisherman, I have worn many hats,” he said. “Besides catching fish, I have served in community elected positions, done boat repair, mechanics, welding, carpentry, business and much more.”

Beth Heller served on the Wrangell School Board from 2019 to 2020 after several years on the district’s parent advisory committee.

The Hellers ran a construction company called Heller High Water, said Tyla Nelson, who described herself as Beth Heller’s best friend since high school. Beth and Timothy both grew up in Wrangell and married in August 2010, Nelson said.

Nelson sobbed as she described her friend as a “fantastic human.”

“And she was a wonderful mother,” she said. “She did everything for those babies.”

The slide tore down a swath of evergreen trees from the top of the mountain above the community to the ocean, striking three homes and burying a highway near the island community of Wrangell, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Alaska’s state capital, Juneau. One of the homes was unoccupied.

The slide — estimated to be 137 meters (450 feet) wide — occurred during heavy rainfall and high winds.
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About 200 wild horses roam free in a western North Dakota national park, but that number could shrink as the National Park Service is expected to decide next year whether it will eliminate that population.

Advocates fear a predetermined outcome that will remove the beloved animals from Theodore Roosevelt National Park. An extended public comment period ends Friday on the recent environmental assessment of the park’s three proposals: reduce the horse population quickly, reduce it gradually or take no immediate action.

The horses have some powerful allies — including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven — while advocates are pulling out all the stops to see that the animals stay. Park officials say they want to hear from the public.

The horses are popular with park visitors, who often see and photograph them along the park’s scenic road and hiking trails through the rugged Badlands.

Evaluating whether the horses belong in the park has “been a long time in coming, and it realigns us with our overarching policies to remove non-native species from parks whenever they pose a potential risk to resources,” said Jenny Powers, a wildlife veterinarian who leads the wildlife health program for the National Park Service.

“This isn’t an easy decision for us, but it is one that is directly called for by our mission and mandates,” she told The Associated Press last month.

One of the horses’ biggest advocates fears park officials have already decided to oust the horses. Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates President Chris Kman cites several alternatives for keeping horses that park officials considered but dismissed in the recent environmental assessment.

In the document, the Park Service said those alternatives wouldn’t be “in alignment with NPS priorities to maintain the native prairie ecosystem” and wouldn’t address the animals’ impacts, among its reasons.

Kman said she is “optimistic that we will ultimately win this fight. I don’t have any faith that the park will do the right thing and keep the horses in the park.”

Even if the horses ultimately stay, Park Superintendent Angie Richman said they would have to be reduced to 35-60 animals under a 1978 environmental assessment. The ongoing process is part of the park’s proposed management plan for “livestock,” a term the horses’ allies reject.

Wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park in its early years. They were eventually kept as a historic demonstration herd after years of efforts to eradicate them, according to Castle McLaughlin, who researched the horses’ history in the 1980s as a graduate student working for the Park Service in North Dakota.

Wild horse advocates would like the park to conduct a greater environmental review, and want to ultimately see a genetically viable herd of at least 150 horses maintained.

A vast majority of previous public comments opposed removal of the horses, making it “really difficult to understand why the government would choose to take them away from the American people,” said Grace Kuhn, communications director for the American Wild Horse Campaign.

The wild horses “have a right to be in the national park” and align with Roosevelt’s sentiment to preserve cultural resources for future generations, she said.

“Essentially, the Park Service by implementing a plan to either eradicate them quickly or eradicate them slowly, they’re thumbing their noses at the American public and their mission,” Kuhn said last month.

Burgum in January offered state collaboration for keeping the horses in the park. His office and park officials have discussed options for the horses. State management or assistance in managing the horses in the park are options North Dakota would consider; relocation is not, spokesperson for the governor’s office Mike Nowatzki said Monday.

Park officials “are certainly willing to work with the governor and the state to find a good outcome,” Park Superintendent Richman said last month, adding that the park was working with the governor on “a lot of different options.”

“It would be premature to share pre-decisional discussions at this time,” she said Wednesday.

Sen. Hoeven has worked on negotiations with park officials, and included legislation in the U.S. Interior Department’s appropriations bill to preserve the horses. “If that doesn’t get it done,” he would pursue further legislation, he said last month.

“My objective is to keep horses in the park,” Hoeven said.

The park’s ultimate decision also will affect nine longhorn cattle in the park’s North Unit. All of the horses are in the park’s South Unit.
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Though it’s no longer the homicide capital of the United States, the nation’s capital is witnessing a multiyear spike in the number of homicides but solving far fewer of them.

And for families of the victims, the issue of unsolved killings cuts deep.

Asiyah Timimi’s husband, Aqueel, was stabbed in a dispute in January 2021 and died several days later. “You just don’t feel safe until they’re caught,” Timimi said. “I could be walking past the person that killed my husband.”

Natalia Mitchell wants justice for her son Morris, who was fatally shot in March 2022, and closure for herself. A successful arrest of her son’s killer, she said, “doesn’t bring Morris back, but it would help.”

The percentage of homicides that are solved by the Metropolitan Police Department has declined sharply in 2023, leaving the city on track to record its lowest so-called “clearance rate” or “closure rate” in more than 15 years.

As of Nov. 13, only 75 of the 244 homicides committed this year have been solved by police. Factoring in the 33 prior-year homicides cleared thus far in 2023, the overall closure rate stands at around 45%. That would be the lowest rate dating back at least to 2007, according to statistics provided by the MPD.

Nationally, the average clearance rate tends to hover between 50% and 60%, said Rick Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

A low closure rate, particularly on homicides, can erode police morale and community trust in the police and lessen the public cooperation between citizens and police that is vital for many investigations, said Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst supervisor with the New York Police Department.

“That whole process can kind of spiral down, where the community doesn’t trust the police that much anymore or there’s a lack of faith,” he said. “There’s much less cooperation between the community and the police. And once the police see a lack of cooperation from the community, some of them will kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Why should we care when no one in the community wants to help?'”

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Lyndsey Appiah acknowledged that closure represents “some sense of justice for victims.”

In addition, she said, “The surety of consequence is a deterrent to crime. So it’s important that we are, as quickly as possible, closing cases and solving cases.”

The drop in homicide closures is just part of a complicated public safety crisis facing the nation’s capital. Appiah, in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee this year, flatly acknowledged the scope of the problem.

“Oxford defines a crisis as a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger,” she testified. “So I would say there is a crisis.”

Homicides in Washington are up 33% this year over last year. Violent crimes involving juveniles also are rising steadily, as are carjackings, with a U.S. congressman and a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates among the recent victims.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Appiah cited police staffing issues and difficulties with crime scene analysis among the potential factors impacting the clearance rate.

It’s at around 3,300 officers this year — down from 3,800 in 2020.

The MPD is at around 3,300 officers this year, down from 3,800 officers since 2020 — a decrease of 500 over three years. Police union officials have publicly blamed the D.C. Council for what they say are anti-police policies that have driven away officers and stifled recruiting efforts. The mayor, however, wants to get the number of officers up to 4,000.

D.C.’s crime lab, the Department of Forensic Science, also lost its accreditation in spring 2021 over allegations of flaws in its analysis. Appiah said the lab hopes to regain its accreditation early next year; in the meantime, the city is outsourcing its crime scene analysis, a process that consumes time and money, she said.

Appiah said that 10 months into the year is too soon to judge the success of homicide investigations that can take months or years. And, in fairness, the MPD just arrested a man in late October for a killing that took place in 2009. In cases like that, the arrest counts as part of this year’s clearance rate.

But with just a few weeks left in the year, it would take a remarkable run of successful arrests to prevent 2023 from having the lowest homicide clearance rate in more than 15 years.

The impact of these unsolved killings can have a corrosive effect in multiple directions.

“It devastates the Black family, and it can devastate the police department,” said Ronald Moten, a community activist who, in his youth, spent time in federal prison on drug charges. “It always gives the family some sense of relief if there’s a closure. It doesn’t help you heal by itself, but it’s part of the healing process.”

Moten’s half-brother was slain in 1991, during the period when homicides in D.C. regularly exceeded 400 per year. The case was never solved.

“It hurts because you feel like somebody’s gotten away with killing your child with no consequences,” Moten said. “That’s painful. You want closure, and you want somebody to be held accountable.”

Preventing that negative cycle from becoming entrenched is one of the city’s top priorities. To close cases, police need residents to help uproot violent criminals from their communities, said Appiah, the deputy mayor.

“We need their help. And they need to trust that if they come forward with information and help us, that it will move towards accountability,” she said. “If they provide us tips on someone engaged in a shooting and then that person is just back in the community, they will not trust MPD in the same way. … We need the community to help us close cases, and then we need the rest of the system to work to help keep them safe.”

Timimi, whose son Khalil was shot outside of Washington in neighboring Prince Georges County in Maryland about six weeks after her husband was stabbed, now cares for her paralyzed son and runs a charitable organization teaching modern life skills to urban youths.

She said she fears a return to the days when Washington routinely led the nation in per-capita killings. Two of her former neighbors have lost children to gun violence in recent years, and in 2021 her godson was caught in a crossfire and killed while he was home from college because of the national COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, I remember going to a funeral every week,” she said. “And when it’s unsolved, you just feel like they’ve forgotten you.”
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Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed “life-saving measures” before the inmate, whom it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation.

No employees were injured, and the FBI was notified, the Bureau of Prisons said. Visiting at the facility, which has about 380 inmates, has been suspended.

Messages seeking comment were left with Chauvin’s lawyers and the FBI. 

Chauvin’s stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the past five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida.

It is also the second major incident at the Tucson federal prison in a little over a year. In November 2022, an inmate at the facility’s low-security prison camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate shouldn’t have had, misfired and no one was hurt.

Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22½-year state sentence for second-degree murder.

Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of the general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he’d be a target. In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement “largely for his own protection,” Nelson wrote in court papers last year.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chauvin’s appeal of his murder conviction. Separately, Chauvin is making a longshot bid to overturn his federal guilty plea, claiming new evidence shows he didn’t cause Floyd’s death.

Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for 9½ minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of “I can’t breathe.” His death touched off protests worldwide, some of which turned violent, and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism.

Three other former officers who were at the scene received lesser state and federal sentences for their roles in Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s stabbing comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s jail suicide in 2019. 
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Cuban and Haitian migrants are increasingly taking chartered flights to Nicaragua from where they seek to travel overland to the United States, prompting Washington to impose sanctions this week on the operators of the aircraft.

Irma Perez, a 28-year-old Cuban, told AFP she arrived in the Nicaraguan capital Managua last month aboard a charter flight run by Mexican aviation firm Viva Aerobus.

“We had a 45-minute layover in Cancun (Mexico) without disembarking, and then came to Managua,” she said.

Perez was speaking from Mexico, after she, her husband and 1-year-old son traveled there overland with the help of a smuggler. The family plans to head toward the United States.

Several Cuban migrants told AFP they had traveled with the same company on flights chartered by small travel agencies.

Viva Aerobus, which does not advertise fights between Cuba and Nicaragua on its website, did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.

Perez said she and her husband paid $1,250 each for their tickets, and $350 for that of her son. The smuggler cost them another $2,100.

‘New phenomenon’

The use of charter flights to aid migrants in getting to their dream destination “is a relatively new phenomenon,” said Manuel Orozco, a director of migration issues at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

The Central American country of Nicaragua has not required visas for Cubans since November 2021.

Since then, a record 421,000 Cubans have entered the United States, according to official figures from Washington.

In April, the U.S. began deporting Cubans with the first flight leaving April 24 after a two-year pause.

Two other Central American nations, Panama and Costa Rica, imposed a transit visa on Cubans in 2022 to tackle the influx of migrants.

A report by the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank said that an average of 50 charter flights a month traveled between Havana and Managua between January and October 2023.

Meanwhile flights between Haiti and Nicaragua quadrupled in the past three months.

“Nicaragua was a bridge for almost 100,000 people,” seeking to migrate, since January, according to the report.

Orozco believes that airline operators and Nicaraguan airport authorities made “an economic calculation” for their “mutual benefit.”

US sanctions

Advertisements abound on Facebook: “Tickets available Havana-Nicaragua … prices for families, charter and regular flights,” read one.

At the beginning of November, Brian Nichols, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, expressed concern about the dramatic increase in these flights.

“No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

On Tuesday, Washington announced it would restrict visas for those in charge of the aviation companies.

Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told journalists that the number of flights has begun to decrease.

Mexico began requiring an airport transit visa for Cubans in late October.

A taxi driver from Managua, who consults the airport website every day for his work, told AFP on condition of anonymity that he had noticed the number of planes carrying migrants had dropped from “22 to 23 daily” to six.
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