Nevada
Man found guilty of killing 2 from Vietnam in a Las Vegas hotel room
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A jury has found a man guilty of breaking into a room at a Las Vegas Strip hotel-casino and robbing and killing two Vietnamese tour leaders in June 2018.
Julius Damiano Deangilo Trotter stood with his lawyers, shaking his head and glancing several times at jurors while the unanimous verdicts were read Tuesday in Clark County District Court, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Trotter, 37, faces a possible death sentence or life in prison following his convictions on charges of murder, burglary and robbery with a weapon. He was convicted in the stabbing deaths of Sang Boi Nghia and Khoung Ba Le Nguyen at the Circus Circus hotel.
The same jury began hearing testimony and evidence Tuesday in the penalty phase of his trial.
Jurors deliberated about three hours after hearing some two weeks of evidence and testimony, the Review-Journal reported.
They learned that Nghia, 38, owned a tour business with her husband in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Nguyen, 30, was Nghia’s employee. Their bodies were found on June 1, 2018, after they did not show up for a tour group trip. Police said hotel employees later determined the door lock on their room didn’t work properly.
Trotter was identified as a suspect in the killings before he and his girlfriend, Itaska Dean, were arrested about a week later, following a police chase in Chino, California.
Trotter was serving five years’ probation at the time after pleading guilty to felony resisting a police officer with a weapon, authorities said. He has been jailed in Las Vegas while awaiting trial, which was postponed several times because of the COVID-19 pandemic and pretrial litigation.
Dean pleaded guilty in California to evading arrest. She was not charged with any crime in the slayings of Nghia and Nguyen, and testified during Trotter’s trial.
Trotter testified last week that a friend who had given him stolen goods to resell in the past gave him items belonging to Nghia and Nguyen, the Review-Journal reported. But prosecutors showed video of Trotter in a hotel elevator with a backpack that police said included a purse, two wallets, a cellphone, jewelry, watches and Vietnamese cash.
Prosecutor Michelle Fleck cast Nghia and Nguyen as “completely innocent people” who did nothing to deserve being killed, the Review-Journal reported.
Defense attorney Lisa Rasmussen argued that forensic evidence was lacking and Trotter’s DNA and fingerprints were not found in the hotel room, the newspaper said.
Florida
Lawsuit claims ICE withheld $300M in bond payments from immigrants
MIAMI (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities illegally kept more than $300 million in bond payments from tens of thousands of low-income immigrant families and U.S. citizens, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept the money for so long that $240 million was transferred to a U.S. Treasury account for unclaimed funds, said Motley Rice LLC, one of the firms that filed the lawsuit in federal court for the Eastern District of New York.
The lawsuit, which addresses longstanding complaints, seeks class-action status for those who paid cash to bail out family members detained by ICE. Motley Rice, a firm that represents clients on a wide variety of class-action lawsuits, said it had been investigating the issue for two years.
Immigration bonds are set by ICE and immigration judges and allow noncitizens who are facing removal proceedings to be released in the U.S. while their cases are decided in court. The average bail payment is $6,000 according to the lawsuit.
Based on information obtained through public records requests and other cases, there are tens of thousands of class members, the lawsuit claims. “The precise number and identification of the class members will be ascertainable from the government’s records,” it says.
Once the immigration case has concluded, family and friends of those detained are entitled to get their money back immediately in some cases or within 60 days in others, according to the online ICE handbook.
ICE, however, “regularly fails to return these funds, even when all conditions have been met and proceedings have concluded,” according to the lawsuit.
ICE declined to comment, saying it does not discuss pending litigation.
The case filed this week is on behalf Douglas Cortez of Uniondale, New York, who posted bond for $10,000 to have his friend released from detention. In August 2023, his friend’s proceedings were dismissed, but more than a year later Cortez has still not received any notice and has not received a refund for the cash deposit he made.
“They have taken thousands of dollars from hardworking immigrant families who deserve to have their money returned,” said Deepak Gupta, an attorney from Gupta Wessler LLP, the other law firm that filed the lawsuit. “We want ICE to fix this system, we want the court to declare that ICE is violating its legal obligations under the contract so that this doesn’t happen to other families again in the future.”
Gupta said that they arrived at the figure of $300 million after carefully reviewing government documents they obtained through FOIA requests and court records.
Ada Salazar, 28, has not received her money after her uncle posted $5,000 in February 2016. She is from El Salvador, was granted legal status in 2021 and now she is ready to join the lawsuit.
“I hope to receive the money back, that is the promise they made,” Salazar, a mother of a 6-year-old and owner of food truck in North Carolina, told The Associated Press.
New York
Prosecutor tells jury of a 9/11-style attack planned by Kenyan
NEW YORK (AP) — A Kenyan man who plotted a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building was training as a commercial pilot in the Philippines when his plans were interrupted, a federal prosecutor told a New York jury Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon Bodansky told a federal jury in Manhattan that Cholo Abdi Abdullah plotted an attack for four years that he hoped to carry out on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.
He said Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in July 2019 in the Philippines on local charges. He was transferred in December 2020 to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism related crimes.
Abdullah underwent training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection before moving to the Philippines in 2017 to begin intensive training for a commercial pilot’s license, the prosecutor said.
Abdullah posed as an aspiring commercial pilot even though his true intention was to locate a building in the United States where he could carry out a suicide attack from the cockpit by slamming his plane into a building, Bodansky told the jury.
He said Abdullah was “planning for four years a 9/11-style attack” only to have it thwarted with his arrest.
The defendant, operating from a Nairobi hotel, used the internet to research how to breach a cockpit door and looked up a 2019 terrorist attack that killed some 21 people, Bodansky said. Among those killed in that attack was an American businessman who survived the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors have said Abdullah also researched information “about the tallest building in a major U.S. city” before he was caught.
Abdullah, who is representing himself and once pleaded not guilty, declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses Tuesday.
In court papers filed prior to the trial, prosecutors told the judge that they understood “through standby counsel that the defendant maintains his position that he ‘wants to merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.’”
The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al-Qaida affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.
If convicted, Abdullah faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison. His trial is expected to last three weeks.
Pennsylvania
Court: City didn’t violate rights of cops fired over offensive Facebook posts
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Philadelphia police department did not violate the First Amendment rights of several officers who were fired or suspended for racist and violent social media posts, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone issued her ruling Monday, just days before the case was set to go to trial. She determined the officers’ posts and comments were “likely to cause significant interference” with the police department and the city’s operations and did not constitute protected speech.
The officers’ social media accounts were included in a database, published in 2019 and known as the Plain View Project, that catalogued thousands of bigoted or violent posts by active-duty and former police officers in several states.
In Philadelphia, nearly 200 officers were disciplined, including 15 who were forced off the job. Most of those who were fired ultimately had their dismissals overturned by an arbitrator and were permitted to return to the force, while some retired. The firing of one officer was upheld by an arbitrator.
Twenty of the disciplined officers eventually filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, asserting the police department had retaliated against them for exercising their First Amendment rights.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in February 2022, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in June 2023, saying the lawsuit had been tossed prematurely. The city then argued that the case should not go to trial and that Bettlestone should determine the outcome, a motion she approved.
In her ruling, Beetlestone described in detail how each officer’s statements could degrade public trust, demean populations they are tasked with protecting, and make the officers unreliable witnesses if called to testify in court cases.
Lawyers for the city and the attorney who represents eight of the officers declined comment on the ruling, while the attorney for the other officers did not respond to a request for comment.
The Facebook posts, all of which were public, were uncovered by a team of researchers who spent two years looking at the personal accounts of police officers from Arizona to Florida. They found officers bashing immigrants and Muslims, promoting racist stereotypes, identifying with right-wing militia groups and, especially, glorifying police brutality.
Man found guilty of killing 2 from Vietnam in a Las Vegas hotel room
LAS VEGAS (AP) — A jury has found a man guilty of breaking into a room at a Las Vegas Strip hotel-casino and robbing and killing two Vietnamese tour leaders in June 2018.
Julius Damiano Deangilo Trotter stood with his lawyers, shaking his head and glancing several times at jurors while the unanimous verdicts were read Tuesday in Clark County District Court, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Trotter, 37, faces a possible death sentence or life in prison following his convictions on charges of murder, burglary and robbery with a weapon. He was convicted in the stabbing deaths of Sang Boi Nghia and Khoung Ba Le Nguyen at the Circus Circus hotel.
The same jury began hearing testimony and evidence Tuesday in the penalty phase of his trial.
Jurors deliberated about three hours after hearing some two weeks of evidence and testimony, the Review-Journal reported.
They learned that Nghia, 38, owned a tour business with her husband in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Nguyen, 30, was Nghia’s employee. Their bodies were found on June 1, 2018, after they did not show up for a tour group trip. Police said hotel employees later determined the door lock on their room didn’t work properly.
Trotter was identified as a suspect in the killings before he and his girlfriend, Itaska Dean, were arrested about a week later, following a police chase in Chino, California.
Trotter was serving five years’ probation at the time after pleading guilty to felony resisting a police officer with a weapon, authorities said. He has been jailed in Las Vegas while awaiting trial, which was postponed several times because of the COVID-19 pandemic and pretrial litigation.
Dean pleaded guilty in California to evading arrest. She was not charged with any crime in the slayings of Nghia and Nguyen, and testified during Trotter’s trial.
Trotter testified last week that a friend who had given him stolen goods to resell in the past gave him items belonging to Nghia and Nguyen, the Review-Journal reported. But prosecutors showed video of Trotter in a hotel elevator with a backpack that police said included a purse, two wallets, a cellphone, jewelry, watches and Vietnamese cash.
Prosecutor Michelle Fleck cast Nghia and Nguyen as “completely innocent people” who did nothing to deserve being killed, the Review-Journal reported.
Defense attorney Lisa Rasmussen argued that forensic evidence was lacking and Trotter’s DNA and fingerprints were not found in the hotel room, the newspaper said.
Florida
Lawsuit claims ICE withheld $300M in bond payments from immigrants
MIAMI (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities illegally kept more than $300 million in bond payments from tens of thousands of low-income immigrant families and U.S. citizens, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept the money for so long that $240 million was transferred to a U.S. Treasury account for unclaimed funds, said Motley Rice LLC, one of the firms that filed the lawsuit in federal court for the Eastern District of New York.
The lawsuit, which addresses longstanding complaints, seeks class-action status for those who paid cash to bail out family members detained by ICE. Motley Rice, a firm that represents clients on a wide variety of class-action lawsuits, said it had been investigating the issue for two years.
Immigration bonds are set by ICE and immigration judges and allow noncitizens who are facing removal proceedings to be released in the U.S. while their cases are decided in court. The average bail payment is $6,000 according to the lawsuit.
Based on information obtained through public records requests and other cases, there are tens of thousands of class members, the lawsuit claims. “The precise number and identification of the class members will be ascertainable from the government’s records,” it says.
Once the immigration case has concluded, family and friends of those detained are entitled to get their money back immediately in some cases or within 60 days in others, according to the online ICE handbook.
ICE, however, “regularly fails to return these funds, even when all conditions have been met and proceedings have concluded,” according to the lawsuit.
ICE declined to comment, saying it does not discuss pending litigation.
The case filed this week is on behalf Douglas Cortez of Uniondale, New York, who posted bond for $10,000 to have his friend released from detention. In August 2023, his friend’s proceedings were dismissed, but more than a year later Cortez has still not received any notice and has not received a refund for the cash deposit he made.
“They have taken thousands of dollars from hardworking immigrant families who deserve to have their money returned,” said Deepak Gupta, an attorney from Gupta Wessler LLP, the other law firm that filed the lawsuit. “We want ICE to fix this system, we want the court to declare that ICE is violating its legal obligations under the contract so that this doesn’t happen to other families again in the future.”
Gupta said that they arrived at the figure of $300 million after carefully reviewing government documents they obtained through FOIA requests and court records.
Ada Salazar, 28, has not received her money after her uncle posted $5,000 in February 2016. She is from El Salvador, was granted legal status in 2021 and now she is ready to join the lawsuit.
“I hope to receive the money back, that is the promise they made,” Salazar, a mother of a 6-year-old and owner of food truck in North Carolina, told The Associated Press.
New York
Prosecutor tells jury of a 9/11-style attack planned by Kenyan
NEW YORK (AP) — A Kenyan man who plotted a 9/11-style attack on a U.S. building was training as a commercial pilot in the Philippines when his plans were interrupted, a federal prosecutor told a New York jury Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jon Bodansky told a federal jury in Manhattan that Cholo Abdi Abdullah plotted an attack for four years that he hoped to carry out on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab.
He said Abdullah was almost finished with his two-year pilot training when he was arrested in July 2019 in the Philippines on local charges. He was transferred in December 2020 to U.S. law enforcement authorities, who charged him with terrorism related crimes.
Abdullah underwent training in explosives and how to operate in secret and avoid detection before moving to the Philippines in 2017 to begin intensive training for a commercial pilot’s license, the prosecutor said.
Abdullah posed as an aspiring commercial pilot even though his true intention was to locate a building in the United States where he could carry out a suicide attack from the cockpit by slamming his plane into a building, Bodansky told the jury.
He said Abdullah was “planning for four years a 9/11-style attack” only to have it thwarted with his arrest.
The defendant, operating from a Nairobi hotel, used the internet to research how to breach a cockpit door and looked up a 2019 terrorist attack that killed some 21 people, Bodansky said. Among those killed in that attack was an American businessman who survived the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors have said Abdullah also researched information “about the tallest building in a major U.S. city” before he was caught.
Abdullah, who is representing himself and once pleaded not guilty, declined to give an opening statement and did not actively participate in questioning witnesses Tuesday.
In court papers filed prior to the trial, prosecutors told the judge that they understood “through standby counsel that the defendant maintains his position that he ‘wants to merely sit passively during the trial, not oppose the prosecution and whatever the outcome, he would accept the outcome because he does not believe that this is a legitimate system.’”
The State Department in 2008 designated al-Shabab, which means “the youth” in Arabic, as a foreign terrorist organization. The militant group is an al-Qaida affiliate that has fought to establish an Islamic state in Somalia based on Shariah law.
If convicted, Abdullah faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison. His trial is expected to last three weeks.
Pennsylvania
Court: City didn’t violate rights of cops fired over offensive Facebook posts
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Philadelphia police department did not violate the First Amendment rights of several officers who were fired or suspended for racist and violent social media posts, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone issued her ruling Monday, just days before the case was set to go to trial. She determined the officers’ posts and comments were “likely to cause significant interference” with the police department and the city’s operations and did not constitute protected speech.
The officers’ social media accounts were included in a database, published in 2019 and known as the Plain View Project, that catalogued thousands of bigoted or violent posts by active-duty and former police officers in several states.
In Philadelphia, nearly 200 officers were disciplined, including 15 who were forced off the job. Most of those who were fired ultimately had their dismissals overturned by an arbitrator and were permitted to return to the force, while some retired. The firing of one officer was upheld by an arbitrator.
Twenty of the disciplined officers eventually filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, asserting the police department had retaliated against them for exercising their First Amendment rights.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in February 2022, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision in June 2023, saying the lawsuit had been tossed prematurely. The city then argued that the case should not go to trial and that Bettlestone should determine the outcome, a motion she approved.
In her ruling, Beetlestone described in detail how each officer’s statements could degrade public trust, demean populations they are tasked with protecting, and make the officers unreliable witnesses if called to testify in court cases.
Lawyers for the city and the attorney who represents eight of the officers declined comment on the ruling, while the attorney for the other officers did not respond to a request for comment.
The Facebook posts, all of which were public, were uncovered by a team of researchers who spent two years looking at the personal accounts of police officers from Arizona to Florida. They found officers bashing immigrants and Muslims, promoting racist stereotypes, identifying with right-wing militia groups and, especially, glorifying police brutality.
