Ohio
Evidence seized from home of man charged in shooting spree
CLEVELAND (AP) — Authorities seized evidence from the home of a man charged in a downtown Cleveland mass shooting over the weekend that wounded nine people, though the motive for the attack remained unclear Wednesday.
Federal marshals and city police arrested Jaylon Jennings, 25, of Lorain, without incident at a home in that Cleveland suburb at around 3:45 p.m. Tuesday. A search warrant was then executed at Jennings’ home and items were seized, but authorities didn’t disclose further details.
Jennings is due to make an initial court appearance Thursday in Cleveland Municipal Court, and it wasn’t clear Wednesday if he had retained a lawyer. He’s charged with attempted murder, and additional charges are expected.
Cleveland police Chief Wayne Drummond said Jennings is believed to have opened fire on a group of people who were standing outside a bar in the downtown Warehouse District shortly before 2:30 a.m. Sunday as the clubs were closing.
Seven men and two women between the ages of 23 to 38 were struck. One man’s wounds were serious, but none of the victims’ injuries are considered life-threatening, authorities said. Two of the victims have been released from the hospital, while the others are still being treated.
Police allege in an arrest warrant filed Tuesday that the shooting occurred after Jennings saw several people inside one of the bars and retrieved a firearm from the trunk of his vehicle in a parking lot across the street. He then fired into the crowd despite police officers being nearby, according to authorities.
Authorities said Tuesday that they were still searching for the gun and were trying to determine the motive for the shooting and whether anyone else was involved.
Mayor Justin Bibb said the suspect was arrested 61 hours after the shooting as a result of video evidence and other information obtained by police. He also cited cooperation among law enforcement and a $50,000 reward posted by Cleveland business and restaurant owner Bobby George.
Kansas
Woman, 76, sues hospital, alleges sexual assault
A man has been charged with rape and other crimes in a series of sexual assaults on patients in a Kansas hospital, and a 76-year-old woman who says she was among his victims has blamed negligence and carelessness by the facility.
The woman filed a lawsuit Monday against Ascension Via Christi Hospital in Wichita seeking in excess of $75,000.
Miguel Rodela, 28, was charged last month with multiple counts of rape, attempted rape and battery, and is jailed on $250,000 bond. Rodela, who was neither a patient nor a hospital employee, was apprehended in the pre-dawn hours of June 15 after fighting with security guards. His attorney in the public defender’s office declined to comment.
The 76-year-old woman said she awoke around 1 a.m. that day to a man manipulating her catheter. She told police she assumed he was fixing it but noticing he was wearing no gloves or medical attire, she told him to find someone else to fix the catheter, according to the probable cause affidavit.
A nurse walked into the room, but when the man said he was a nursing student, the nurse left without questioning him. Soon after, the patient hit a call button to get the nurse to return and the man left. Security was summoned and the woman reported: “He violated me.”
The lawsuit notes that Rodel was in the patient’s room for more than 20 minutes.
“No patient should ever have to face such a violation of their dignity and safety, let alone in a hospital setting,” her attorney, Matt Dwyer, at Hutton & Hutton Law Firm, said in a written statement.
But that wasn’t the end, court records show. The security officer had just started checking surveillance video when he was alerted to another assault on the seventh floor. A nurse technician there found Rodela embracing an 82-year-old woman, his hands under the blankets. The patient said the man had kissed her on the mouth, according to the affidavit.
Soon after that, a security officer on the sixth floor spotted Rodela on top of a 47-year-old patient, lifting up her shirt. The patient had a traumatic brain injury that rendered her unable to speak and Rodela told a nurse he was her relative, although she was skeptical, according to the affidavit.
Under questioning, Rodela told police he had been drinking and having sexual fantasies about hospitalized patients. He said he entered the hospital through a door behind an employee, and that he came into contact with at least three patients. He said he rubbed and kissed them until they woke up, the affidavit said.
The hospital said in a written statement that it is reviewing its security procedures but declined to comment on the litigation.
The lawsuit notes that unionized nurses from the hospital held a one-day strike less than two weeks after the sexual assaults, identifying safety as one of their main concerns.
New York
Trump can be held liable in writer’s defamation lawsuit
NEW YORK (AP) — The Justice Department on Tuesday said that Donald Trump can be held personally liable for remarks he made about a woman who accused him of rape — a reversal of its position that Trump was protected because he was president when he made the remarks.
In a letter filed with the judge presiding over a defamation lawsuit that columnist E. Jean Carroll brought in Manhattan federal court in 2020, the department says it no longer has “a sufficient basis” to conclude that Trump was motivated in his statements about Carroll’s claims by more than an insignificant desire to serve the United States.
Previously, the department had agreed with Trump’s attorneys that he was protected from the lawsuit by the Westfall Act, which provides federal employees absolute immunity from lawsuits brought over conduct occurring within the scope of their employment.
In May, a jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after concluding that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 at a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store and then defamed her last fall with comments he made about her and her claims. While the jury concluded Trump sexually abused Carroll, it rejected her rape claim.
The trial resulted from a lawsuit Carroll brought last November after New York state temporarily allowed victims of sexual abuse to make civil claims for attacks that occurred even decades earlier.
In the government’s letter, U.S. lawyers cited the jury’s verdict, Trump’s October deposition and new claims Carroll has since made that Trump defamed her again with comments he made during a CNN town hall a day after the verdict.
The letter gives fresh fuel to Carroll’s original defamation lawsuit, which had been delayed by appeals over whether Trump could be held liable for statements he made while president.
The original claims are scheduled for trial next January and stem from comments Trump made in 2019 after Carroll first went public with her claims about being sexually attacked by Trump in a memoir.
Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, welcomed the DOJ submission, saying it was one of the “last obstacles” to the lawsuit reaching trial.
“We are grateful that the Department of Justice has reconsidered its position,” she said in a statement. “We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will, and spite, and not as President of the United States.”
Lawyers for Trump did not immediately comment.
Earlier in the day, Carroll’s lawyers filed papers challenging a counterclaim in the defamation lawsuit by Trump’s lawyers who maintained that Carroll had defamed him with comments she made after the May verdict — in part because she repeated statements that he had raped her.
The lawyers wrote that his counterclaim was “nothing more than his latest effort to spin his loss at trial.”
They said the sexual abuse Trump was found liable for was equivalent to rape under some criminal statutes and would require him to register for the rest of his life as a sex offender if it had been a criminal claim.
New Mexico
Jury awards $485 million in damages in case of girl sexually assaulted
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A jury has awarded $485 million in damages in a civil case brought on behalf of an 8-year-old girl who was repeatedly sexually assaulted in a New Mexico foster care program.
The verdict came late Friday after Rio Arriba County jurors heard nearly two weeks of testimony that focused in part on allegations of corporate negligence.
The program allegedly placed the girl in the home of a foster parent despite knowing that he had been accused of sexual assault, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in 2019. It was one of more than a half-dozen cases arising from sexual assaults of children in the program.
Clarence Garcia, 66, pleaded guilty in January to seven counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor and was sentenced to up to 20 years of probation. Court records show Garcia was accused of sexually abusing six children under his care over six years.
In April, probation officers found that Garcia allegedly violated his probation after they searched his property and found bags of stuffed animals, a yoga book “with young children in suggestive poses” and accessories for firearms.
He faces an Aug. 3 sentencing hearing that could send him to prison for up to 42 years.
The jury awarded $80 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages against Acadia Healthcare, the operator of a now-defunct licensed residential treatment facility in New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Acadia said in an email that the victim was not in the direct care of any facility operated by the company but was in a treatment foster care program managed by Familyworks, a nonprofit.
Familyworks and defunct Acadia subsidiary Youth and Family Centered Services of New Mexico Inc. will pay $75 million apiece with $5 million in punitive damages connected to Garcia’s conduct.
“I think the jury’s award and verdict show the little girl she is valued and that what happened to her shouldn’t have happened,” Josh Conaway, an attorney who represented the child told the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The state Children, Youth and Families Department revoked a license for Acadia-owned Desert Hills in 2019 amid reports of sexual abuse and violence at the residential treatment facility, which served children with intellectual and developmental disabilities as well as behavioral issues.
The state had ordered the Albuquerque center’s operators to shut it down. Desert Hills had run Familyworks, Conaway said.
Missouri
Man sentenced to 9 years for raping detainee at rest stop during transit
JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) — A man has been sentenced to nine years in prison for raping a Washington detainee at a Missouri rest stop while transporting her to a Minnesota jail, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
The department said Rogeric Hankins, 37, transported inmates who were arrested on out-of-state warrants as part of his job as a private prisoner transporter at Inmate Services Corporation.
Prosecutors said Hankins picked up a pretrial detainee from an Olympia, Washington, jail in March 2020 to take her to St. Paul, Minnesota. On the way, he stopped at a Joplin, Missouri, rest stop where prosecutors said he forced the detainee into a bathroom stall and raped her.
Hankins’ public defenders did not immediately respond to email and phone requests for comment Tuesday.
“The defendant sexually abused and violently assaulted a woman in his custody, exploiting his authority and depriving this survivor of her constitutional right to bodily integrity,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.
