Indiana
Judge suspended for hitting someone while a child watched
ENGLISH, Ind. (AP) — The Indiana Supreme Court imposed an interim suspension Thursday on a southern Indiana judge arrested on a felony for hitting someone while a child watched.
The high court acted against Circuit Judge Sabrina Bell of Crawford County after it received a “Notice of Criminal Charges and Request for Suspension” from the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications. The interim suspension with pay was effective immediately.
Indiana State Police arrested Bell on Thursday on a charge of domestic battery in the presence of a child less than 16 years old. The charges stem from an incident that occurred in Crawford County on April 12.
Bell was booked into the Crawford County Jail and has since been released on pre-trial conditions, police said,
Police did not say who Bell battered.
Bell’s interim suspension “remains in effect until further order of the Court or final determination of any disciplinary proceedings, if any, that may arise from the criminal charges,” the Supreme Court said.
The Commission on Judicial Qualifications is the 7-member group that investigates alleged ethical misconduct by judges. Chief Justice Loretta Rush chairs the Commission. The Indiana Supreme Court has final authority over judicial discipline.
Bell served a 30-day suspension in 2019 for her involvement in a downtown Indianapolis fight and double-shooting that followed a night of bar-hopping.
California
DA: Suspects tried to kidnap baby 3 times before succeeding
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The man and the woman charged with kidnapping a 3-month-old baby last month from his Northern California home while his grandmother unloaded groceries tried at least three times to take the child before succeeding, authorities said Thursday.
Yesenia Ramirez, 43, and Jose Portillo, 28, were charged with the April 25 kidnapping of the boy who was taken from the family’s second-floor San Jose apartment, prompting a frantic search by local and federal authorities. The child was found unharmed in Portillo’s home the following day and the two were arrested.
Ramirez and Portillo were charged with three attempted kidnapping counts at a hearing Thursday, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Rebekah Wise said in a statement.
A motive for the kidnapping has not been determined but evidence shows that Ramirez and Portillo tried to abduct the child several times, including one when Portillo posed as a Child Protective Services worker and went to the family’s home, Wise said.
Ramirez’s attorney, Cody Salfen, said she was a friend of the family and had babysat the child several times.
“This is not some random child abduction, and these people are not strangers,” he said.
Salfen said he couldn’t comment on the charges because he has not yet seen the evidence in the case.
“They’ve spent a huge amount of time and resources in evaluating evidence on their end, but without giving the defense an equal opportunity at accessing that evidence so, we can’t really respond to the allegations at this point,” he added.
Wise said Ramirez was at the child’s home when Portillo showed up on March 14 saying he was a social worker and needed to take the child with him. The family decided to call CPS, who stated that they had not sent anyone and Portillo eventually left.
Evidence showed that Ramirez and Portillo plotted that kidnapping attempt, she said.
Portillo’s attorney, Karry Iyama, didn’t immediately return a message Thursday from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Wise said Ramirez and Portillo also planned to kidnap the boy at a local store twice, once on March 28, and again on the morning of the actual kidnapping.
“In the first attempt, they were unable to switch shopping carts in an effort for Portillo to leave the store with” the child, she said. On the second occasion, they were unable to distract the grandmother.
The mother of the baby, Carolina Ayala, said Ramirez befriended the child’s grandmother in church and began spending a lot of time with the family once she was nine months pregnant.
On the day of the kidnapping while his mother was at work, Ramirez had driven the child and his grandmother on a shopping trip and had been communicating with Portillo before he took the baby, police said.
“There are few things more terrifying than someone stealing a child, as if they’re a car or a wallet,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “The more we investigate this case and the more troubling it gets, the more determined we are to prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of the law.”
Massachusetts
Final ex-eBay employee in cyberstalking case pleads guilty
BOSTON (AP) — A former eBay Inc. executive pleaded guilty Thursday to participating in a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included the delivery of live spiders and other disturbing items to their home.
David Harville, eBay’s former director of global resiliency, is the final onetime eBay employee charged in the case to plead guilty. Six others have admitted to their roles in the harassment campaign targeting a Massachusetts couple who publish the newsletter EcommerceBytes, which eBay executives viewed as critical of the company.
The scheme included sending items like a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and books about surviving the loss of a spouse to the couple’s home with the hopes of getting them to stop publishing negative articles about the company, prosecutors say. eBay employees also set up fake social media accounts to send threatening messages to the couple and posted the couple’s home address online.
Harville and others were charged in June 2020 over the plot, which authorities say was orchestrated by members of eBay’s executive leadership team after the newsletter published an article about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers, authorities said.
Another former executive who pleaded guilty last month, James Baugh, held meetings to coordinate the harassment campaign and directed Harville to go with him to Boston to spy on the couple, prosecutors say.
Harville flew to Boston from California and bought tools with a plan to break into the couple’s garage and install a GPS tracker on their car, prosecutors say. Over dinner in Boston, he and Baugh joked about what could be left on the couple’s porch, including a bag of human feces, Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Kosto said.
Harville pleaded guilty during a hearing held via videoconference before a Boston federal court judge. An email seeking comment was sent to his lawyers on Thursday.
The couple, Ina and David Steiner, sued eBay and several employees including former CEO Devin Wenig last summer over what they described as a conspiracy to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them” in order to “stifle their reporting on eBay.”
Wenig was not criminally charged, has denied any knowledge of the harassment campaign, and his lawyers have asked that the Steiners’ claims against him be dismissed. He stepped down as CEO of eBay in 2019.
Plea deal offered for woman in Florida teen’s machete death
MIAMI (AP) — A woman accused of participating in the machete killing of a South Florida teen almost seven years ago is prepared to take a plea deal that would allow her to avoid a life sentence, her attorney told a judge.
Desiray Strickland was 19 when she and four others were arrested following the June 2015 death of 17-year-old Jose Amaya Guardado. Police said he was hacked to death and buried in a shallow grave in Homestead.
“I did not kill that boy, I promise!” Strickland screamed at a Miami-Dade detective in a police interrogation video.
But on Wednesday in Miami, Strickland’s attorney told Circuit Judge Cristina Miranda she plans to plead guilty to conspiracy to murder, which could send her to prison for 15 years, the Miami Herald reported.
“We were hoping to do (the plea deal) today, but some terms were changed and she wanted to discuss them with her mother and father,” attorney Scott Sakin told the Herald.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for late June. Strickland remains in jail.
Strickland and four others were indicted by a grand jury on first-degree murder charges. Prosecutors said they killed Guardado, who was a fellow student at the Homestead Job Corps, a federally run residential school for at-risk youth.
Prosecutors said Strickland’s boyfriend, Kaheem Arbelo, swung the blows that killed Guardado, and in 2017 the state attorney’s office decided to seek the death penalty for him but not the other four defendants.
Police said Strickland and Arbelo had sex in the woods after the boy’s body was buried. And witnesses told detectives that Strickland “complained that she had missed the first series of machete strikes because she had walked away for a few minutes to urinate in the woods,” a arrest report said.
Authorities believe the teen was killed over a debt owed to Arbelo, who was a suspected drug dealer.
Fellow students Jonathan Lucas, Christian Colon and Joseph Michael Cabrera were also charged in Jose’s death, records show.
Arbelo, Lucas and Colon confessed when they were detained in August 2015, police said.
Lucas and Cabrera pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in 2020. Lucas was sentenced to five years in prison and 15 years’ probation. Cabrera received less punishment, the newspaper reported.
Arbelo and Colon have both been detained since August 2015, and are still awaiting trial.
