National Roundup

New York
Christine Blasey Ford to release memoir in 2024
NEW YORK (AP) — The California professor who testified that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her while they were in high school has written a memoir. Christine Blasey’s Ford’s “One Way Back” is scheduled for publication next March.

According to St. Martin’s Press, she will share “riveting new details about the lead-up” to her testimony in 2018; “its overwhelming aftermath,” when she allegedly received death threats and was unable to live at her home; and “how people unknown to her around the world restored her faith in humanity.”

Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University and the Stanford University School of Medicine, made headlines when she told the Senate Judiciary Committee about a party she and Kavanaugh attended in the early 1980s. She alleged that he cornered her in a bedroom, pinned her on a bed and tried to take off her clothes, while pressing his hand over her mouth. She fled after a friend of his jumped on the bed and knocked them over.

Her emotional testimony left even some Republicans wondering if Kavanaugh, nominated

by President Donald Trump to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, would have enough votes in a Senate where the GOP held just a 51-49 majority. Kavanaugh, who furiously denied her allegations and allegations by two other women, was approved 50-48.

“I never thought of myself as a survivor, a whistleblower, or an activist before the events in 2018,” Ford said in a statement issued Wednesday through St. Martin’s. “But now, what I and this book can offer is a call to all the other people who might not have chosen those roles for themselves, but who choose to do what’s right. Sometimes you don’t speak out because you are a natural disrupter. You do it to cause a ripple that might one day become a wave.”

New York
Video shows white deputy fatally shooting 2 Black teens in fleeing car
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York’s attorney general released video Tuesday of a county sheriff’s deputy fatally shooting two Black teenagers in a fleeing car, raising questions about whether the officer needed to use deadly force to avoid being run over.

Attorney General Letitia James released the video as part of her office’s investigation into the fatal shooting last Wednesday of Dhal Apet, 17, and Lueth Mo, 15, by an Onondaga County Sheriff’s deputy. Deputy John Rosello was investigating a smoke shop burglary in the Syracuse area that morning and had responded to a call about people seen transferring items between two vehicles.

Rosello did not activate his body camera before the confrontation. But video shot by a surveillance camera across the street shows the deputy’s SUV speed into a small parking lot and use its front bumper to pin one of the cars against a row of tall bushes. The deputy gets out of his SUV and stands for just a moment in front of the car in which Apet and Mo were riding as it backs into the bushes, in an apparent attempt to escape.

With his gun drawn, Rosello then steps backward and to the side, retreating quickly as the car starts to move forward.

The deputy keeps his gun pointed at the car as it drives past him and accelerates away. It is unclear from the video when he starts firing and when he stops. The video has no audio and captures the scene at a distance.

Onondaga County Sheriff Tobias Shelley said at a news conference last Wednesday that the person driving the car was trying to run the deputy over. He said video from a resident showed the deputy was caught in a narrow space and that he had “nowhere to flee to.”

The video released by the attorney general doesn’t appear to show the deputy, who is white, trapped or unable to get away. He isn’t struck by the vehicle, though it passes close by him.

“These two teenagers should still be alive,” New York Civil Liberties Union assistant field director Deka Dancil said in a prepared statement. “It is clear from the footage that the officer needlessly escalated to fatal force, and did so with a rapidity that is too readily deployed against young Black New Yorkers.”

The sheriff stuck by his deputy.

“As I stated then and will again, I support Deputy Rosello,” he said in a prepared statement. “I also support our legal process in this country.”

He added that his office will continue to cooperate with the attorney general’s office “in any way we can.”

New York’s attorney general investigates all killings by law enforcement officers.

The NYCLU said the investigation should look into why the deputy failed to record the interaction.

The shooting came after a series of thefts in the area, starting with two vehicles stolen the night before in Syracuse. Those vehicles were linked to two subsequent smoke shop robberies early Wednesday in Oneida and suburban Syracuse.

The second vehicle at the scene drove off as Rosello arrived.

Apet and Mo were found dead in a car on a Syracuse street, more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) away. A third person believed to have been in the car when the teens were shot fled and has not been publicly identified.

California
Serial killer and former police officer dies on death row
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. (AP) — A former California police officer turned serial killer who was on death row after being convicted of murdering six people in the 1980s has died of natural causes, authorities said.

Anthony Sully, 79, died Friday at a medical facility outside the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he had been housed for decades, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The Marin County Coroner’s Office will determine Sully’s official cause of death, the department said in a news release Monday.

Sully was sentenced to death in June 1986 for the slayings of Kathryn Barrett, 24; Barbara Searcy, 22; Gloria Jean Fravel, 24; Brendan Oakden, 19; Michael Thomas, 24; and Phyllis Melendez, 20.

The victims were beaten, stabbed and shot inside an electrical supply warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983. Three of the bodies were found stuffed into barrels dumped at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Detectives found his fingerprints on some of the bodies.

Sully was a Bay Area police officer from 1966 to 1974.

He maintained at his sentencing that he did not get a fair trial, telling the judge, “I am not a monster, not a maniac, not subhuman,” according to the Mercury News, citing news accounts at the time.

Another death row inmate, 71-year-old Ronald L. Sanders, died Tuesday of natural causes at California Medical Facility in Vacaville, corrections officials said. Sanders was sentenced to death in March 1982 for the murder of Janice Dishroon Allen, 29.