WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio is expected to testify on Thursday at the trial of a retired Washington, D.C., police officer accused of leaking confidential information to the far-right extremist group leader after Tarrio and other Proud Boys burned a stolen Black Lives Matter banner.
Attorneys for former Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Shane Lamond plan to call Tarrio as their first defense witness for Lamond’s federal trial on charges that he obstructed justice and made false statements about his communications with Tarrio.
Justice Department prosecutors rested their case against Lamond on Wednesday.
Tarrio is serving a 22-year prison sentence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters. A jury convicted him and other Proud Boys leaders of seditious conspiracy for a plot to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 election.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will decide the case against Lamond after hearing testimony without a jury.
On Monday, the judge said Tarrio was waiting for the outcome of last month’s presidential election before deciding whether to testify at Lamond’s trial. President-elect Trump, who repeatedly has vowed to pardon people convicted of Capitol riot charges, suggested he would consider pardoning Tarrio.
Tarrio was sentenced to more than five months in jail for burning the banner that was stolen in December 2020 from a historic Black church in downtown Washington, and for bringing two high-capacity firearm magazines into the district.
Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before the Jan. 6 siege. The Miami resident wasn’t at the Capitol when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building and interrupted the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
During the trial’s opening statements on Monday, a prosecutor said Lamond was a “Proud Boys sympathizer” who warned Tarrio about his impending arrest for the banner’s destruction and later lied to investigators about their communications.
Lamond, who met Tarrio in 2019, had supervised the intelligence branch of the police department’s Homeland Security Bureau. He was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys when they came to Washington.
Lamond’s indictment accuses him of lying to and misleading federal investigators when they questioned him in June 2021 about his contacts with Tarrio.
One of the government’s last witnesses was acting MPD Capt. Nicole Copeland, who supervised the police investigation of the banner burning. Copeland testified on Wednesday that it would have helped investigators to know that Tarrio had privately confessed to Lamond. The Proud Boys leader also publicly admitted on social media and on a podcast that he had burned the banner.
Lamond, of Stafford, Virginia, was arrested in May 2023. He retired from the police department that same month.
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A Texas jury on Wednesday sentenced a man to death for killing and dismembering three people whose bodies were found in a burning dumpster in Fort Worth in 2021.
The Tarrant County jury found Jason Thornburg, 44, guilty of capital murder last month in the deaths of David Lueras, 42, Lauren Phillips, 34, and Maricruz Mathis, 33. According to his arrest warrant, Thornburg confessed to police about the killings.
“He is evil,” prosecutor Amy Allin told jurors.
According to Thornburg’s arrest warrant, he also told police he had killed his roommate and girlfriend.
The roommate, Mark Jewell, 61, was found dead in a house fire earlier that year. Thornburg’s girlfriend, Tanya Begay, a Navajo woman from Gallup, New Mexico, went missing after taking a trip to Arizona with Thornburg in 2017.
He told officers he had in-depth knowledge of the Bible and believed he was being called to “commit sacrifices,” according to the arrest warrant.
Thornburg’s attorneys had argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
ALPINE, Texas (AP) — Three U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Cavazos, Texas, have been arrested on human smuggling charges, U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza for the Western District of Texas said Thursday
Soldiers Emilio Mendoza Lopez, Angel Palma, 20, and Enrique Jauregui, 25, were arrested after a vehicle allegedly driven by Palma and carrying Mendoza Lopez, a Mexican national and two Guatemalan nationals was stopped Nov. 27 by law enforcement in Presidio along the border with Mexico, about 500 miles (805 kilometers) southwest of Dallas.
Mike Lahrman, a spokesman for Esparza, said he did not know the soldier’s ranks or whether action had been taken against them by the military. A spokesman for Fort Cavazos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Mendoza Lopez and Palma allegedly traveled from Fort Cavazos to Presidio for the purpose of picking up and transporting undocumented noncitizens,” Esparza said in a statement.
“Jauregui is alleged to be the recruiter and facilitator of the human smuggling conspiracy,” according to Esparza. “Data extracted from Palma’s phone through a search warrant revealed messages between the three soldiers indicating collaboration in the smuggling operation.”
Mendoza Lopez was arrested at the scene of the Nov. 27 traffic stop while Palma, who prosecutors said fled the scene of the traffic stop, and Jauregui were arrested Tuesday at Fort Cavazos, about 125 miles (201 kilometers) south of Dallas, Lahrman said.
Mendoza Lopez’s attorney, Shane Chriesman, said he is awaiting more information, known as discovery, from prosecutors on the charge.
“Once I get discovery and have a chance to assess the case we’ll develop a plan of attack” and will try to get a bond set for Mendoza Lopez, who is currently jailed without bail, Chriesman said.
No attorneys are listed in jail records who could speak for Palma and Jauregui, who are awaiting their first court appearance on Friday, according to Esparza.
THOMSON, Ga. (AP) — The mayor of a small Georgia town is back in charge after a jury acquitted him of charges that he intentionally left a bottle of gin in a ditch for a state prison work crew.
McDuffie County jurors on Tuesday found Thomson Mayor Benjamin “Benji” Cranford not guilty of furnishing prohibited items to inmates and attempting to commit a felony.
Cranford was later suspended by Gov. Brian Kemp, but his acquittal restores him to office and entitles him to back pay.
No one disputes that Cranford bought a bottle of Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin from a liquor store on the afternoon of June 3 and then drove directly across a road and dropped the bottle in the ditch. But while prosecutors alleged the deposit was an intentional act, Cranford’s defense lawyers suggested that the bottle fell out of Cranford’s white SUV after he opened the door while fiddling with his Bluetooth wireless connection.
Testifying in his own defense, WRDW-TV reports that Cranford told jurors he doesn’t remember what happened. He said he probably put one of the two bottles of liquor he purchased in the cupholder in the driver’s side door.
Cranford said he had probably opened and closed his car door to reconnect the Bluetooth, but said he didn’t remember why he drove across the road to do so.
Although there are other ways to reset the connection, Cranford testified that he is “not tech savvy” and had always done so by opening and closing his SUV’s door.
“That’s the way I’ve always done it,” Cranford testified. “If that’s the right way or the wrong way, you tell me.”
Cranford testified he was buying gin because a friend told him it would prevent him from getting malaria. The quinine included in tonic water, which is often mixed with gin, can prevent the mosquito-borne disease.
Cranford said he knew no one on the work crew from the Jefferson County Correctional Institution and had no reason to buy alcohol for people he didn’t know.
Prosecutors, though, argued that Cranford knew what he was doing.
“We don’t know if there was a specific target for the alcohol — if it was for one person or all of the inmates,” Assistant District Attorney Terry Lloyd told jurors, according to WRDW-TV. “But what is clear is his intent to leave the alcohol in the ditch for the inmates.”
Alvin James, who was driving the inmate work crew bus, testified that passersby have tossed cigarettes, vapes and marijuana to inmates working in roadside cleanup crews before, so he watches carefully. Surveillance video from the liquor store shows Cranford entering and exiting the store, driving across the road, and then driving away, shortly before James pulls up in the bus and emerges to lean over the roadside ditch.
James testified that he found the bottle and photographed it, and when Cranford drove back by, photographed Cranford’s license plate. That started the police investigation that led to Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents marching a handcuffed Cranford out of Thomson City Hall before television cameras.
MIAMI (AP) — One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a key operator of the Medellin cocaine cartel has been released from a U.S. prison and is expected to be deported back home.
Records from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons show Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was released Tuesday after completing 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine started flooding the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, to the point that in 1987 they were included in the Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires. Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar.
Although somewhat faded from memory as the center of the drug trade shifted from Colombia to Mexico, he resurfaced in the hit Netflix series “Narcos” true to form as the youngest son of an elite Medellin family into ranching and horse breeding that cut a sharp contrast with Escobar, who came from more humble roots.
Ochoa was first indicted in the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Drug Enforcement Administration informant Barry Seal — whose life was popularized in the 2017 film “American Made” starring Tom Cruise.
He was initially arrested in 1990 in Colombia under a government program promising drug kingpins would not be extradited to the U.S. At the time, he was on the U.S. list of the “Dozen Most Wanted” Colombia drug lords.
Ochoa was arrested again and extradited to the U.S. in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami naming him and more than 40 people as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy. Of those, Ochoa was the only one who opted to go to trial, resulting in his conviction and the 30-year sentence. The other defendants got much lighter prison terms because most of them cooperated with the government.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illicit drug proceeds and he expects that Ochoa will have a welcome return home.
Richard Klugh, a Miami-based attorney for Ochoa, declined to comment.
But in years of litigation, he argued unsuccessfully that his client deserved to be released early because his sentence far exceeded what was appropriate for the amount of seized cocaine that authorities could attribute to Ochoa.
