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From the Los Angeles Times

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A troubled mind in Tucson

Classmates and teachers knew something was wrong with Jared Lee Loughner, charged in Saturday's fatal shootings. His behavior had grown increasingly bizarre in recent months.

by Sam Quinones, Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Ashley Powers, Los Angeles Times

January 11, 2011

Reporting from Tucson

On Saturday morning just after 11, the quiet, working-class Tucson neighborhood suddenly filled with sheriff's patrol cars and FBI agents. They quickly cordoned off the North Soledad Avenue home of Amy and Randy Loughner, who were out shopping.

Moments later, the Loughners, unaware, pulled up with groceries in their old white pickup. They parked across the street from their home.

A neighbor, retired gasoline truck driver Wayne Smith, 70, had seen a TV news report about a shooting at a nearby Safeway store. It said the Loughners' son, Jared, was the suspect.

Smith approached the couple.

"I said, 'Guys, I hate to be the one to tell you, but he shot a bunch of people,' " Smith said late Monday afternoon in front of the Loughners' house. Jared's mother, he said, "just come unglued."

As authorities searched the house, said Smith, "We stood right out there and cried for an hour. I'm a softie. A man needs compassion. He's broken up about his son, but also about all those people who died."

As their son appeared in federal court in Phoenix on Monday, the Loughners remained secluded in their home. Jared Lee Loughner has been charged with murder and attempted murder in the rampage that left six dead and 14 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who authorities said was his target.

"They're in there now," Smith said, just after bringing the couple their mail. "They're both in there crying. He's crying and hanging on to me, and she's not even out of bed. He worshipped the boy."

It is not clear what the parents knew of their son's troubles, but it was obvious to his fellow students at Pima Community College in Tucson last spring that something was wrong with Jared Loughner. He often laughed and muttered to himself. When he spoke, he was incoherent or nonsensical. Classmates and professors assumed he was on drugs.

"If you've ever seen someone hallucinate, it was kind of like that," said classmate Lydian Ali, 26. "I never felt threatened by him." But one woman dropped their poetry class partly because Loughner's behavior was so weird, Ali added.

Although many who know him said Loughner did not seem violent, others said he scared them. In recent months, the young man's behavior — both in the classroom and online, where he ranted about the government, U.S. currency and the constitutionality of certain institutions — seemed to be in a downward spiral.

"He had this kind of hysterical laugh. … It was very creepy, very bizarre," said Pima math professor Ben McGahee, who taught Loughner algebra last summer. "He even came out with some kind of random outbursts or remarks: 'How can you deny math instead of accepting it?' " said McGahee, who said he assumed Loughner was high.

After Loughner scrawled "MAYHEM FEST!!!" across a paper, McGahee alerted a counselor.

Loughner still attended class, and his behavior continued to cause alarm. One of his responses to an algebra test question was "eat+sleep+brush teeth=math."

The final straw came when Loughner accused his teacher of violating his 1st Amendment rights. McGahee went to see the dean, who pulled Loughner out of class and later told McGahee, "You don't need to worry about Jared anymore."

That spring, in the poetry class, Loughner seemed more in control. At one point, he surprised the class when he animatedly performed a poem he had written, thumping his chest and even grabbing his crotch for emphasis. The poem, "Meat Head," was about a day in his life — waking up hung over, riding the bus to school, feeling lost at the gym:

"Looking around, the cute women are catching my eye/Probably waiting for their hot boyfriends wandering in the locker room/All the men are in shape with new white tank shirts, basketball shorts, and Nike shoes/Confusing look on my face of no idea what to do … "

Still, many of his interactions with poetry classmates were off-putting. One day, a woman read a poem about having an abortion. "He made a really off-color comment," Ali said. "I remember him saying something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomb out of it."

Another student, Don Coorough, 58, said Loughner had trouble digesting poems that were sad or emotionally complicated.

"I thought he was an emotional cripple," Coorough said. Neither Ali nor Coorough said they found Loughner menacing, just odd.

Between last February and September, according to Pima Community College officials, Loughner caused five disturbances on campus that required police response.

On Sept. 29, there was a breaking point when campus police discovered a YouTube video in which Loughner proclaimed the college "unconstitutional."

(Subsequent Internet statements made by Loughner take issue with U.S. currency not being backed by gold or silver, question whether NASA's Mars Rover was faked, and charge the government with trying to control citizens with grammar. Those seeking a coherent philosophy will probably be frustrated, said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League. "So far, most of his beliefs appear to be the product of his own mind, primarily," he said.)

The night campus police found the YouTube video, officers delivered a letter of suspension to Loughner's home.

School officials said Loughner would be allowed to return to campus only if a mental health professional certified that he did not present a danger to himself or others.

Five days after Thanksgiving, Loughner uploaded a video to YouTube that said "every Pima Community College class is always a scam!" and "The students are attending a torture facility! You know the teachers are con artists?"

The same day, according to federal authorities, he bought a Glock semiautomatic pistol at a sporting goods store.

A private family

Loughner grew up in a working-class neighborhood, where he and his parents live in a cream-colored, one-story brick home.

Randy Loughner used to lay carpet and surface pools, neighbors said. Amy Loughner is a parks manager and has worked for the Pima County Natural Resources Parks and Recreation Department since 1987.

Their next-door neighbor of 30 years, retired equipment mechanic George Gayan, 82, said Jared is an only child. Jared would walk the family dog, but they did not like to share the details of their lives.

"They're like a mountain man," said neighbor Smith. "They want to be alone."

When Randy Loughner wanted to add on to his house, he sought permission, per the city's requirement, from Gayan, who consented. Later, when Gayan asked about the project, Randy Loughner rebuffed him.

"He wanted to keep everything private," Gayan said.

But Jared engaged the neighbors, sometimes to their discomfort. Rachel Evans, 16, recalled seeing Loughner walking in the neighborhood, hunched over, his face obscured by a hooded shirt, mumbling or raising his voice to passersby.

"He was definitely somebody who would make you want to walk forward and not look up," said Evans, who lives on the same street. "He'd mention government or education, something I didn't really understand or want to hear."

He had at least two off-campus legal tangles before his arrest Saturday.

In September 2007, he was cited by the Pima County Sheriff's Department for possession of drug paraphernalia. Court records show that the case was dismissed by the Pima County Attorney's Office in November 2007 after Loughner completed a program that included drug counseling.

In October 2008, he was arrested for allegedly tagging a traffic sign in Marana, north of Tucson, with his moniker — including the letters C and X, which he told police stood for "Christian."

He was released with a citation. He entered a diversion program and paid $500 restitution to the city.

Schoolmates from Tortolita Middle School and Mountain View High School described Loughner as a typical teenage boy — albeit with some nihilistic tendencies — who was trying to find his niche in life.

In high school, friends said, he played in a punk garage band. He also played saxophone in the school band. He loved the bands Rancid and the Misfits and the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. He went to parties and was a fan of University of Arizona football.

Krysta Bunch, 21, said their high school crowd was a "random group of people." She remembered his punk band performing in front of a mosh pit during a homecoming celebration their sophomore year.

"He seemed like he was the quiet type; he didn't like politics at all," Bunch said.

Lela Chavis, 22, described Loughner as considerate, someone who filled her in on schoolwork if she got sick. Recently, she said, he changed his appearance, opting to cut his curly brown hair and dress more "mature."

"I would say obviously in the past couple months something had changed about him," she said. "In a sense, he was growing up. At least that's what I thought."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-shooting-loughner-20110111,0,2640888,print.story

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Identifying the violent mentally ill is a challenge, experts say

Shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner showed signs of apparent mental illness, professionals say, but it's not always possible to predict if someone will become violent. And in Arizona, budget cuts have severely taxed mental health services.

by Melissa Healy and Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

January 11, 2011

In the best of times and most favorable of circumstances, it's tricky business to identify whether a person who is mentally ill might become violent, so that those in his path can be protected from potential harm and he can get the treatment he needs.

But with community mental health services stretched taut by budget cuts and growing need, these are not the best of times, say many experts at the intersection of mental health and public safety. Nor were circumstances ideal to single out Jared Lee Loughner — the suspect in Saturday's Tucson shooting rampage — as a clear-cut case of someone about to become violent.

Loughner's increasingly bizarre and mistrustful pronouncements, combined with his age — 22 — suggest to many mental health professionals a flowering of mental illness marked by delusional thinking. People diagnosed with schizophrenia, for instance, most often begin showing signs of the illness in their late teens or early 20s, when they suffer episodes of hallucinations and become preoccupied with delusions — for instance, of persecution or conspiracy.

Loughner's apparent embrace of notions such as mind control, a new currency and "conscience dreaming" — all mentioned in a YouTube posting he reportedly made — speak to a troubled mind but reveal little actual propensity for violence, said Dr. Mark A. Kalish, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at UC San Diego.

The mentally ill, Kalish noted, are no more likely to engage in violent behavior than members of the general population.

Nonetheless, the shooting has already stirred debate about how to protect the public from violence perpetrated by some among the mentally ill.

Some activists, citing Loughner's apparent early signs of instability, suggest that state laws need to be broadened to allow involuntary commitment of the potentially violent mentally ill. Most states require that a mental health professional find an individual not only to be severely disabled by mental illness but also to be an imminent danger to himself or others before allowing involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility.

Others, including many mental health professionals, just as forcefully note that no laws will ensure safety from the violent mentally ill unless state and community mental health services are in place to find them and treat them.

"It isn't that we don't know how to get people to help. We're just not doing it," said Robert Bernstein, executive director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington.

"Community-based programs are so underfunded they don't have the resources to respond appropriately" to evidence that a person may be teetering on the edge of violence, he added. "Every day, people with mental illness are failing to receive services, and every day, people experience preventable crises — are taken to the emergency room or arrested and jailed."

In many ways, Arizona provides the perfect venue for a new round of debate on violence and mental illness.

In recent years, the state has relaxed the standards that must be satisfied for the involuntary commitment and treatment of the mentally ill. Its laws are now looser than California's, for example.

Officials in Arizona would have had the latitude to commit Loughner to involuntary psychiatric treatment only by showing that he was "persistently and acutely disabled" by mental illness, said Brian Stettin of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va. The center has strongly lobbied for laws that would make it easier to commit people to psychiatric care against their wishes.

In California, by contrast, officials would have to show "grave" disability and also make a persuasive case that the person posed a danger to himself or others.

In Loughner's case, the process could have been set in motion if someone — perhaps administrators from Pima Community College — had called a county hotline and prompted the dispatch of a mobile crisis outreach team. Such a team could have urged Loughner to accept care, or evaluated whether care needed to be imposed upon him against his wishes, Stettin said.

But at the same time, Arizona's budget crisis — among the worst in the nation — has prompted deep cuts in community mental health services. According to Tim Schmaltz, chief executive of Protecting Arizona's Family Coalition, some 14,000 residents who earn too much to receive Medicaid have lost access to all mental health services, except medications, in the budget cuts.

"You don't want to be seriously mentally ill in Arizona, unless you're very poor or very sick," Schmaltz said.

Money and law aside, gauging someone's likelihood of acting aggressively requires skill, patience and a bit of timing, experts said.

"When it comes to long-term predictions of risk for violence, all bets are off," said Dr. Steven E. Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist who consults with the Phoenix Police Department and teaches psychiatry at the University of Arizona School of Medicine.

A skilled mental health professional may have better luck at predicting a person's likelihood of acting violently in the near term, Pitt said. But "the assessment is only as good as the information that is being shared with you and that is at your disposal, coupled with your clinical judgment," he added.

And for Jared Lee Loughner, who appeared to have been growing increasingly mistrustful, that information may have been both scant and ambiguous.

Among the red flags a forensic psychiatrist might look for to predict violence are extensive substance abuse, gun ownership, whether a person has a specific target in mind and whether he or she has thought through details of an attack, Kalish said.

But, said Pitt, although these are useful signposts to psychiatrists who are trained in such evaluations, a checklist of the risk factors for violent behaviors will draw in too many people unnecessarily.

"There are thousands who satisfy those conditions, but the majority will never engage in a violent act," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-mental-health-20110111,0,4753184,print.story

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At least three drug groups are fighting for control in Acapulco, Mexico

January 10, 2011

With a weekend death toll of more than 30 victims, including 15 who were found decapitated, the Mexican resort city of Acapulco is facing its most gruesome levels of drug-related violence since the start of the drug war in 2006. Authorities in Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located, said that in all 31 people died violently in or around the city on Saturday and Sunday (link in Spanish).

Reports said decapitated bodies were found with messages indicating that the killings were ordered by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel and Mexico's most-wanted man.

If Sinaloa hit men are indeed active in the Acapulco area, it would suggest a likely escalation in future violence for a city that has seen drug-related killings soar since the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the capo who had controlled the valuable trafficking port.

Beltrán Leyva was killed in an operation led by the Mexican navy in December 2009. Like previous deaths or captures of high-profile drug lords, the sudden absence of a criminal figurehead in the region resulted in a scramble for control among splintering or rival groups. (The same phenomenon, for example, occurred in the Tijuana border area after the deaths or captures of capos in the Arellano Felix cartel.)

In this case, Beltrán Leyva's death was believed to have spurred Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez to step in briefly as leader before Valdez was captured in August 2010. (He entered federal custody and possible extradition to the United States with a now-famous smirk.) His father-in-law Carlos "The Cowboy" Montemayor reportedly took his place, but he also was captured, in November in Mexico City.

The violence currently gripping Acapulco is now due to a turf war among three groups, two of which have emerged only in the last year, according to the weekly news magazine Proceso. In an extended article on the climate in Acapulco that appeared in mid-December, the magazine said those players were: first, a branch of the Beltrán Leyva organization under Hector Beltrán Leyva, or "The H"; the new "south Pacific cartel," believed to have been founded by Valdez; and another offshoot group calling itself the "independent cartel of Acapulco."

At stake is control over Acapulco's port, on Mexico's southern Pacific coast. The bay offers a direct maritime route to the coasts of Colombia and Peru, the world's largest cocaine producers. The organization that controls the port and Guerrero state also would control trafficking routes through Morelos state to the north, where the city of Cuernavaca is located.

Residents and officials quoted in the Proceso story described terrifying tactics on the part of the organized-crime groups battling over control of Acapulco. Pedestrians and motorists have been stopped or pulled from their vehicles at gunpoint by masked men. Extortion is rampant in the tourism-dependent city. Forensic investigators tell of bodies mutilated with acts that they have no technical terms to accurately describe, such as decapitated human heads discovered without skin or hair.

Fighting has erupted along or near Acapulco's main coastal tourist drag in isolated incidents, but local officials are emphasizing that tourists are not generally targeted by organized-crime groups. Over the New Year's holiday, President Felipe Calderón and his family vacationed not far from the port, at a Mexican air force base at Pie de la Cuesta (link in Spanish).

Despite the drug violence in Mexico, foreign and national tourism overall is on the upswing. Here are more details in the Los Angeles Times.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2011/01/acapulco-drug-violence-sinaloa-beltran-leyva-gangs.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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Anonymous tipster who provided video of attacks on severely disabled women meets with detectives

January 10, 2011

The anonymous tipster who unleashed an investigation into the sexual abuse of at least 10 severely disabled women by handing over more than 100 hours of video of the attacks met with Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives over the weekend, sheriff's officials said Monday.

The informant, who was not identified by detectives because he feared for his safety, told sheriff's detectives that he was given a desktop computer by a drug addict and "asked to clean the hard drive," sheriff's detectives said in a statement.

The overwhelming amount of news coverage and public outrage encouraged him to step forward. The only thing he has asked is that his identity remain confidential. "We will of course respect his request," said Det. Sgt. Dan Scott of the sheriff's Special Victims Bureau.

The interview came hours after sheriff's officials announced they had arrested one man -- and located a second in state prison -- believed to be part of a group who allegedly filmed and sexually assaulted the severely disabled women.

Unaware of the subject matter, the informant began watching the footage and was "deeply disturbed by the videos and said what he saw made him sick," according to the statement released by detectives.

The man copied the videos onto 11 discs and sent them anonymously to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, along with an anonymous note, detectives said.

"We are very grateful to this man and are confident the public is too," said Det. Dan Scott of the sheriff's Special Victims Bureau. "He did the right thing by providing the footage to us and an explanation note. When we reached out to him through the news media and asked for him to help us, he responded and helped us."

Sheriff's officials said they had received more than 50 different tips since they released the images of at least eight suspects allegedly involved in the assaults, which are believed to have taken place between 2007 and 2009.

"We've had an overwhelming response of quality information that has reached the detectives and is keeping them very, very busy," said Capt. Mike Parker of the sheriff's Headquarters Bureau. "They're not getting any sleep. Please keep the calls and tips coming. This is exactly what we wanted."

Hoping the public could help identify the suspects, sheriff's officials released still images and composite drawings of at least eight men suspected in attacks on 10 of the disabled women.

Ernie Lloyd, 27, of Los Angeles was arrested Saturday after he turned himself in to Los Angeles police in Hollywood, Parker said. Lloyd is the man described as "Suspect #1" in images released Thursday by the Sheriff's Department.

Lloyd is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail after being arrested on suspicion of rape of a person with disabilities.

Bert Hicks of Los Angeles, currently serving a sentence in Tehachapi state prison until 2012, was identified by an LAPD detective who handled a previous case in which Hicks was convicted of lewd and lascivious acts on a dependent adult. Sheriff's officials say he is Suspect #4 in the images released last week.

The investigation began in March when a package was left at sheriff’s headquarters with 100 hours of video footage showing severely disabled women, many in diapers, being sexually assaulted by unknown men.

The attacks on the women, ages 20 to 40, appeared to have taken place at residential care centers from 2007 to 2009, authorities said, and most of the attackers are believed to be employees.

Although authorities were confident the scenes were shot in residential care facilities, it was unclear if they were in Los Angeles County. Much of the footage is so grainy that only the faces of four of the estimated 10 men could be seen.

Although sheriff's officials cautioned that they are in the early stages of their investigation, Parker said they believe the assault allegedly involving Lloyd took place at a Los Angeles facility.

The booking photo of Suspect #1 Ernie Lloyd has also been provided with this update. The investigation involving Suspect Lloyd is continuing, as are many other investigative leads on several cases.

Suspect #4, Bert Hicks, is serving a sentence in state prison and is due to be released in 2012. He has not been arrested by the Sheriff's Department and therefore there is no booking photo for him. His case is under active investigation by the Sheriff's Department and LAPD.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/01/sheriffs-detectives-meet-with-tipster-who-provided-video-of-attacks-on-severely-disabled-women.html

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OPINION

Cause and effect and Tucson

As with the recent fish and bird die-offs, humans want a grand, overarching explanation for the shooting rampage.

by Michael Shermer

January 11, 2011

The news media once again scrambled this past week to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events. We saw this impulse in the rush to explain the tragic murder of six people at a shopping center in Tucson. And we saw it in the rush of stories about mass die-offs of birds and fish across the country.

In the case of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, attention has turned to the motives of the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, whose political ramblings about returning to the gold standard and about excessive control by the government have sent the news media searching for answers in the vitriol of right-wing talk radio, the rhetoric of the "tea party" movement, and the bellicose divide between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.

The mass die-offs of fish and birds have spurred a number of deep causal theories, including suggestions that the apocalypse is near and that secret government experiments are to blame.

We live in a causal universe, so all effects do have causes, but before we turn to grand, overarching causal theories such as political rhetoric or government experiments, we must always remember the clustering effect of randomness and how our brains tend to look for and find meaningful patterns even where none exist. Toss a handful of pennies into the air and you will notice that they do not land randomly on the ground. They cluster into apparently non-random patterns in which some are closer and others are farther apart. There is nothing inherently hidden in such a clustering effect — no concealed forces under the ground causes the pennies to fall as they do. It's just chance. But our brains abhor randomness and seek meaning.

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that about 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia, and that more than 25% of us have some kind of diagnosable mental disorder. This means that about 3 million people with psychosis are walking among us, as well as tens of millions more whose mental health is askew in some way. And many of those who need treatment aren't receiving it. Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable.

According to National Audubon Society biologist Melanie Driscoll, about 5 billion birds die each year in the United States from a variety of causes. Because of the clustering effect of randomness, it is inevitable that some of those billions of birds will die in apparent non-random clusters. The 5,000 red-winged blackbirds that died in Arkansas, for example, looks like an ominous cluster when scattered about the ground, but there are more than 200 million red-winged blackbirds in the United Sates, and, according to Driscoll, they fly in flocks of 100,000 to 2 million. Although 5,000 birds falling dead out of the sky sounds positively apocalyptic, it represents a scant .000025% of the total population.

Of course there are specific causes for specific events. We will, in time, learn of the particular personal and social conditions behind the heinous act Loughner allegedly committed. And biologists are already identifying the causes of each fish and bird die-off. The Arkansas blackbirds, for example, died during a New Year's Eve fireworks display, which may have been a contributing factor.

Driscoll notes that the birds "cannot see well in the dark, and we know they were seen crashing into buildings and cars and poles. Necropsies show blunt-force trauma to brain and breast." Others died near power lines that are thin and hard to see at night. The American Bird Conservancy notes that of the 5 billion annual bird deaths, about 1 billion birds are killed each year in collisions with buildings, communication towers, windmills and other human-made structures. We just never hear about them unless such deaths happen in clusters and are reported in the media, thereby triggering a type of mass hysteria that leads to conspiratorial thinking and what I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

Patternicity is what our brains do. We can't help it. We see those clusters of events and naturally seek out deep causal meaning in some grand, overarching theory. But as often as not, events in life turn on chance, randomness and statistical probabilities that are largely beyond our control. So calls for "an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics" — such as that just issued by MoveOn.org — may make us feel better, but they will do nothing to alter the inevitability of such one-off events in the future.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shermer-arizona-shooting-20110111,0,7597506,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Shooting Suspect Waives Bail and Is Ruled ‘a Danger’

by MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Jared L. Loughner, his head shaved bare and his hands and feet in restraints, was led Monday into a federal courtroom, where he agreed not to contest his continued imprisonment but offered no hint of how he would respond to the murder and attempted murder charges linking him to the Tucson shootings that left six dead and 14 injured.

“Yes, I am Jared Lee Loughner,” he told Magistrate Judge Lawrence O. Anderson, staring blankly ahead with his lawyer, Judy Clarke, a veteran public defender, at his side. The defendant, a 22-year-old college dropout, was wide-eyed and had a wound to his right temple. At the defense table, his eyes darted back and forth and his mouth curled up at one point into a quick smile.

Ms. Clarke signaled that she intended to push for the case to be handled by an out-of-state judge, since one of the victims her client is accused of killing was Judge John M. Roll of Federal District Court in Tucson. Already, all the federal judges in Tucson have recused themselves. As some of Judge Roll’s friends and colleagues looked on, Ms. Clarke said she had “great concern” about any Arizona judges or prosecutors handling the case.

Mr. Loughner (pronounced LOF-ner) faces two federal murder charges and three attempted murder charges in an attack that prosecutors described as an attempt to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, who was struck in the head by a single bullet but survived.

Mr. Loughner, dressed in beige prison garb, a white T-shirt and blue slip-on shoes, agreed not to challenge his continued detention without bail after Wallace H. Kleindienst, a federal prosecutor, labeled him a danger and a flight risk. That prompted the judge to quickly rule, based on the serious charges, that Mr. Loughner was “a danger to the community” and ought to be held without bail.

“Good luck to you, Mr. Loughner,” Judge Anderson said as the defendant, who could face the death penalty if convicted, received a pat on the back from Ms. Clarke and was led away by security officers.

Ms. Giffords remained in critical condition on Monday after surviving a single gunshot to the head fired at point-blank range at a gathering Saturday morning with constituents outside a supermarket in Tucson.

Doctors said they were increasingly optimistic because Ms. Giffords continued to follow simple commands and there had been no additional swelling in her brain. Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., chief of neurosurgery at University Medical Center in Tucson, cautioned that swelling in cases like this could last days.

“At this stage in the game, no change is good,” Dr. Lemole said.

Doctors removed nearly half of Ms. Giffords’s skull to prevent damage to her brain caused by swelling. While she has remained under sedation, hospital officials corrected earlier statements that she had been in a medically induced coma.

An outpouring of grief has been on display around the country. In Washington, President Obama stood with his wife, their heads bowed, overlooking the South Lawn of the White House at 11 a.m. as a single bell tolled to honor the wounded and the dead. On the steps of the East Front of the Capitol, hundreds of Congressional aides gathered to observe the moment.

“Obviously all of us are still grieving and in shock from the tragedy that took place,” Mr. Obama said in the Oval Office, where he was meeting on Monday with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

“Gabby Giffords and others are still fighting to recover,” said Mr. Obama, who is planning a trip to Tucson on Wednesday to meet with victims and their families and offer his first extensive public remarks since the shooting. “Families are still absorbing the enormity of their losses.”

At the start of the State Legislature’s session in Phoenix on Monday, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, decided to scrap the traditional annual address laying out her legislative agenda and instead honor the dead and call upon people across the state to pray.

“Arizona is in pain, yes,” Ms. Brewer said. “Our grief is profound. We are yet in the first hours of our sorrow, but we have not been brought down. We will never be brought down.”

Meanwhile, new details emerged about the suspect’s actions before the shooting, which was carried out with a Glock 19, a medium-size, 9 millimeter semiautomatic pistol.

In September, Mr. Loughner filled out paperwork to have his record expunged on a 2007 drug paraphernalia charge. Although he did not need to bother — he had completed a diversion program so the charge was never actually on his record — the incident stuck in the mind of Judge José Luis Castillo of Pima County Consolidated Justice Court.

It was unusual, for one thing, the judge said, that anyone knew how to go about filling out such forms. And the judge’s review of the court record showed that Mr. Loughner had completed the diversion program in 2007 in almost record time and had been very polite, with nothing to indicate the kind of behavior that was to come.

“It definitely crossed my mind,” the judge said, that Mr. Loughner was making the request only because he was worried that the drug paraphernalia charge would prevent him from buying a weapon.

Kim Janes, manager of the Pima Animal Care Center in Tucson, said in an interview that Mr. Loughner volunteered at the facility in January and February last year as a dog walker. In his application, Mr. Loughner wrote that he was interested in volunteering at the center for “community service, fun, reference and experience.”

But after about two months, Mr. Janes said, even though Mr. Loughner had been told not to walk any dogs in an area of the kennel where parvovirus had been detected, he did not appear to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

“He did not seem to understand why this was important and how deadly the virus could be for dogs. He never really acknowledged our concerns,” Mr. Janes said. “We were concerned about him not following the rules that the supervisor had passed on to him and we told him not to return until he was willing to abide by our rules.”

That was the last the center saw of him.

In his application, filled out in late November 2009, Mr. Loughner said he was a student at Pima Community College with an intended major in liberal arts, Mr. Janes said.

He also said in his application that he had worked for an Eddie Bauer store in Tucson from October 2008 to November 2009.

Over all, Mr. Janes said, referring to Saturday’s shooting, “It is very disconcerting that someone who showed compassion for innocent animals would do what he did to human beings.”

Even before Mr. Loughner’s court appearance, the prosecutor in Pima County, where the rampage took place, vowed to pursue state murder charges against him as well.

In addition to the judge and the congresswoman, three Congressional aides were shot, including one who died. Four bystanders were also killed and 11 others were injured, prompting Barbara LaWall, the Pima County attorney, to vow that she would “definitely pursue charges on behalf of the nonfederal victims.”

County lawyers were still researching whether state and federal cases could proceed concurrently or whether her office would wait until federal prosecutors had finished their case. The state has no deadline, Ms. LaWall said, to bring the matter before a grand jury because Mr. Loughner is in federal custody, not in state custody.

“This is not just a professional matter for me but a personal one since I knew many of these victims,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11giffords.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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A Place on the Sex-Offender Registry for a Crime That May Be Off the Books

by ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON

William S. MacDonald has been living in a homeless shelter and in his truck in Asheville, N.C. He would rather be with his wife, Carolynn, who has a place nearby, but the couple says he has been hounded from their last several homes because he is a registered sex offender.

It is often hard for sex offenders to find a place to live. But Mr. MacDonald, 54, says his case is particularly galling.

“I was charged with a crime that is not on the books anymore,” he said.

Mr. MacDonald’s crime was having oral sex, which is a violation of a Virginia law forbidding “crimes against nature.” Such statutes, which criminalize oral and anal sex, are also called sodomy laws.

The Supreme Court struck down Texas’s sodomy law in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, and most people understood that ruling to apply to the 12 other states, including Virginia, that still had sodomy laws on their books.

Among those people was Virginia’s attorney general, Jerry W. Kilgore. In an interview with The Washington Post the day the Lawrence decision was issued, the paper said, Mr. Kilgore “expressed disappointment with the ruling, which he said invalidates a state statute banning oral and anal sex between consenting gay and heterosexual couples.”

Last month, Mr. MacDonald’s lawyers asked the United States Supreme Court to hear his case and decide whether the Virginia law still stands after Lawrence.

The details of Mr. MacDonald’s case are icky, which may explain why prosecutors pursued it.

From 2002 to 2004, Mr. MacDonald had oral and vaginal sex with two young women, one 16 and the other 17, prosecutors alleged. He was in his mid-40s. All three worked at a volunteer fire department, and to hear Mr. MacDonald and his wife tell it, the charges were false and the product of a complicated vendetta.

The women, though, described a number of encounters in detail. They said all of the sex was consensual.

A judge convicted Mr. MacDonald in 2005 of four violations of the sodomy law and sentenced him to 20 years, with 17 of them suspended.

The factual dispute over whether the sexual activities occurred no longer matters. If Mr. MacDonald is to get help from the courts, it will not be because he did not do what he was convicted of doing. It will be because what he did was not a crime.

The age of consent in Virginia is 15, and any sort of sex with someone under that age is statutory rape, a felony. It can also be a crime, but only a misdemeanor, for an adult to have intercourse with someone 15 to 17, if it “contributes to the delinquency of a minor.”

Mr. MacDonald was sentenced to an additional year on that last misdemeanor charge, based on vaginal sex. He is not challenging that law, which is surely constitutional and does not require sex-offender registration.

Even though he has served his time, Mr. MacDonald is challenging his felony convictions under the sodomy law, and he has lost in every court so far. The judges who ruled against him said the law survived the Lawrence decision at least in part. They pointed to a sentence in the decision that said “the present case does not involve minors.”

The legal question in Mr. MacDonald’s appeal to the Supreme Court is whether that sentence means Virginia may continue using its general sodomy law in cases involving minors or whether it must enact a new, focused law if it wants to punish sex between adults and minors.

There is little question that the Virginia could address conduct like Mr. MacDonald’s directly. It could, for instance, raise the age of consent from 15, forbidding all kinds of sexual activity between adults and minors.

It is less clear that it could single out oral sex between adults and minors for harsher punishment than vaginal sex. The California Supreme Court in 2006 said that raised equal protection problems.

As things stand now in Virginia, its general sodomy law, which says nothing about minors, may apply only to sex involving minors. Under the law as interpreted by the Virginia courts, moreover, it seems to be a felony in Virginia for two teenagers to engage in common sexual activities. Gay teenagers would appear to be particularly vulnerable to prosecution.

The possibility of prosecuting teenagers is not fanciful. In 2007, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a teenager for having oral sex with his girlfriend under a general sodomy law barring what it called “the crime against nature, with mankind or beast.” The couple had also had intercourse, but that was legal.

“This bifurcation leads to a seemingly absurd result,” Daniel Allender wrote in The Duke Law Journal in 2009. “Two minors may lawfully have vaginal intercourse, but they are felons if they have oral sex until reaching maturity.”

That means, Mr. Allender wrote, based on studies of teenage sexual activity, that “nearly half of the teenagers in North Carolina and Virginia are felons.”

Carolynn E. MacDonald met her future husband in 1999. They are both military veterans, with 47 years of service between them.

She has stood by him through the prosecution, the prison time and the aftermath, and she has learned some law along the way. She said she had some early doubts about her husband’s innocence but is now convinced he was set up.

“Regardless, however,” she said, “the statute is invalid. In June of 2003, all sodomy laws were invalidated on their face.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11bar.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

A Flood Tide of Murder

by BOB HERBERT

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse. The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum, and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it. But that’s the easy part.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads. We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely violent society. The vitriol that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric, most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad contributing factors in a society saturated in blood.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed. That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century. This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children, ought to make our knees go weak. But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.

The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.

On Saturday, the victims happened to be a respected congresswoman, a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a number of others gathered at the kind of civic event that is supposed to define a successful democracy. But there are endless horror stories. In April 2007, 32 students and faculty members at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute were shot to death and 17 others were wounded by a student armed with a pair of semiautomatic weapons.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh in 2009, I came upon a gray-haired woman shivering on a stone step in a residential neighborhood. “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops,” she whispered. Three police officers had been shot and killed by her 22-year-old grandson, who was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment, and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

Ordinary citizens interested in a more sane and civilized society would have to insist that their elected representatives take meaningful steps to stem the violence. And they would have to demand, as well, that the government bring an end to the wars overseas, with their terrible human toll, because the wars are part of the same crippling pathology.

Without those very tough steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will most assuredly continue.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Gabrielle Giffords story is big for the time being, but so were Columbine and Oklahoma City. And so was the anti-white killing spree of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo that took 10 lives in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in October 2002. But no amount of killing has prompted any real remedial action.

For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners. The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it. The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/opinion/11herbert.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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Funeral pickets to be met by 'angels'

by CNN

(Video on site)

They're planning an "angel action" -- with 8- by 10-foot "angel wings" worn by participants and used to shield mourners from pickets. The actions were created by Coloradan Romaine Patterson, who was shocked to find the Topeka church and its neon signs outside the 1999 funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a young gay man beaten and left on a fence to die in Laramie, Wyoming.

"We want to surround them, in a nonviolent way, to say that our community is united," Gilmer said. "We're a peaceful haven.

"You don't mess with Tucson," said Gilmer, 26, who described it as "a little dot of blue in a sea of red."

But political persuasions don't matter, she said. Republicans, Democrats, independents, right, left and center -- they've all offered their support. Forty-two people have signed up on a Facebook page called "Build Angel Wings for the Westboro Funeral Counter-Protest and Meeting," and more than 4,500 have signed up on another page to "Show Support for the Families of the Tucson Shooting Victims."

"People, businesses, they're all donating material and money to build the angel wings," said Gilmer, who is helping organize the action. She added they're donating to a fund created to help pay for services for the shooting victims.

Chelsea Cohen, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Arizona who launched the "Show Support" Facebook page, said she never expected such a response.

"Once I heard that the Westboro Baptist Church was coming, I felt like something should be done to show support for the families," she said. "I don't have any experience in organizing these things. I thought I might get 50 to 100 people."

Cohen said she thinks many of the 4,500 people who've signed up on the Facebook page will be there "in spirit" Thursday when mourners gather for the funeral of Christina Taylor Green, who was born on September 11, 2001. But she added, Tucson is an active town, and the response isn't likely to be small.

"This isn't a counterprotest," she said. "We wanted it to show support for the families and to show that Tucson is there with love and support."

They don't want to interfere with the funeral in any way, Cohen said.

"We plan on being completely silent, and we're asking people not to bring signs or make comments about the Westboro Baptist Church," she said.

The angels will be doing the same thing.

"We're going to silently stand there so people can mourn the death of a 9-year-old girl who died in a senseless tragedy," Gilmer said.

Cohen said several groups are planning to be at the funeral to show their support, and there is an effort afoot to bring them all together "into one group so we can all be on the same page."

"I hope that everyone there can convey the peaceful message that we want to convey, she said

And if the church pickets persist, the silent supporters will be on hand for the funerals of U.S. District Judge John Roll, Gabriel Zimmerman, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin Stoddard and Phyllis Schneck, the other five victims of Saturday's shooting. Giffords, who was shot in the head and is in critical condition, and 13 other people were wounded.

Westboro Baptist Church, founded by its spiritual leader, Fred Phelps, and run mostly by family members, did not respond to a request for an interview in time for this article. But a flier released by the church about the picket targets the Roman Catholic Church because Christina and her family were members.

"God hates Catholics!" the flier, posted on the church's "God Hates Fags" website, says. "God calls your religion 'vain,' as it's empty of His truth; you worship idols!"

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/01/11/arizona.funeral.westboro/?hpt=C2

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From the White House

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(Video on site)

Remarks by President Obama and President Sarkozy of France after Bilateral Meeting in Oval Office

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We'll, I’m very grateful to have my dear friend, Nicolas Sarkozy, here. And I think Nicolas has agreed that at the top I want to just make a few comments about the situation in Tucson, Arizona.

Obviously all of us are still grieving and in shock from the tragedy that took place. Gabby Giffords and others are still fighting to recover. Families are still absorbing the enormity of their losses. We have a criminal investigation that is ongoing and charges that no doubt will be brought against the perpetrator of this heinous crime.

I think it’s important for us to also focus, though, on the extraordinary courage that was shown during the course of these events: a 20-year-old college student who ran into the line of fire to rescue his boss; a wounded woman who helped secure the ammunition that might have caused even more damage; the citizens who wrestled down the gunman. Part of what I think that speaks to is the best of America, even in the face of such mindless violence.

And so, in the coming days we're going to have a lot of time to reflect. Right now, the main thing we're doing is to offer our thoughts and prayers to those who’ve been impacted, making sure that we're joining together and pulling together as a country. And as President of the United States, but also as a father, obviously I'm spending a lot of time just thinking about the families and reaching out to them.

Now, I want to say to Nicolas that I want to offer my condolences to his countrymen as well. They just recently had two French citizens who were kidnapped in Niger. It points to the challenge of terrorism that we jointly share, and this is just one more area in which cooperation between France and the United States is so critical.

We don’t have a stronger friend and a stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people. We have cooperated over the last several years on dealing with a global economic crisis, dealing with the challenges of terrorism, dealing with a range of geopolitical issues from the Middle East to Iran to Afghanistan. And I’ve always found Nicolas to be an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend to the American people, as well as a leader on the world stage.

We spent the initial part of this meeting discussing the G8 and G20 agenda, because both in France and the United States and around the world, although we are in the process of healing and recovery from the disastrous recession that we went through, we’re not yet where we want to be. Too many people are still out of work. Too many businesses are still having problems getting financing. There’s still too many imbalances in the world economy that are inhibiting the prospects of growth.

And so in our discussions, with the French in the lead both at the G8 and the G20 this year, we discussed how we can coordinate our agendas to make sure that we are as productive as possible in delivering the kinds of reforms and follow-through that will result in prosperity for peoples around the globe.

After this brief press appearance we’re going to be having lunch, and during that time we’ll be discussing issues in which there has been extraordinarily close collaboration. Obviously the French are one of our strongest allies -- a NATO ally; they are key members of ISAF. French troops have been sacrificing alongside Americans in uniform in Afghanistan. And we are very grateful for those sacrifices. So we will be discussing our strategies there, building off of the discussions we had in Lisbon.

We’re also going to be discussing issues like Iran and the impact that sanctions are currently having on their nuclear program, and our hope that we can resolve this issue diplomatically. But we will be building on our shared resolve to assure that we’re not seeing nuclear weapons in Iran.

We’ll discuss the Middle East, where Nicolas and I share a deep and abiding belief in the need for two states standing side by side in peace and security.

We’ll be discussing issues like Cote d’Ivoire, where democracy is being threatened at this moment and where France has extraordinary historical ties and has shown great leadership; Sudan, where a referendum is taking place this weekend in which so much is at stake in preventing outbreaks of violence that could end up devastating the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but also where there’s a prospect of a peaceful transition that could result in a better life for people in both the north and the south of Sudan.

We’ll also finally be discussing Lebanon where I think we are all deeply concerned with the special tribunal there and making sure that justice is appropriately served.

So I just want to say how much I appreciate not only Nicolas’s friendship but also his leadership. And I also want to point out that the last time that Nicolas and his lovely wife Carla were here we sent them to Ben’s Chili Bowl. I can’t say that half-smokes will be on the menu here at the White House -- the First Lady is having lunch with Carla while Nicolas and I have a working lunch -- but I hope you find the hospitality outstanding nevertheless.

And on behalf of the American people, we want to again express our friendship to the French people and wish everybody in your country a happy new year.

PRESIDENT SARKOZY: (As translated.) I, first of all, want to say to the American people how deeply moved and upset the French people have been at your loss and tragedy.

And I also want to thank President Obama for his expression of solidarity to the French people in light of the loss that we have felt at the cowardly killing of two young Frenchmen who were killed in a barbaric fashion by terrorists.

Both the U.S. and France are determined to stand firm as allies on this issue of terrorism. Both of us believe that any show of weakness would be culpable. We have no choice but to go after these terrorists wherever they may be. When values as fundamental as those we cherish are being challenged, democracies cannot afford to give in. They must -- they must -- combat.

With the American President, we talked about the future of the G20, and I said to him in very clear terms that we wish to work hand in glove, France and the United States, on these issues.

We are in the 21st century, and we need new ideas for this new century. And with President Obama, we are determined to forge ahead, come up with these new ideas for the greater benefit of the peoples of the world, for their prosperity and for the stability of this world of ours.

I’ve always been a great friend, a tremendous friend of the United States, and I know how important a role the U.S. plays in the world, how important the U.S. dollar is as the world’s number one currency. And with Barack Obama, we are determined to propose new ideas to get things moving, both within the framework of the G8 and the G20.

And our teams are going to be working very hard together to come up with common papers and common positions on the issues which are of interest and which come within the agreement of the G20, such as the matter of currencies, of commodity prices, and all that needs to be done in order to reduce the current and present imbalances.

Lastly, I want to thank Barack Obama, my host, for his show of leadership, and also point out that something that has always struck me about him, is his ability to get to the fundamentals, the root of issues, the root causes of things. I appreciate his openness, the way he speaks very frankly about things with me. And I am convinced, ladies and gentlemen, that in 2011, we will be able to come up with the structural solutions that will enable us to settle or at least to tackle the world’s imbalances and problems.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you, everybody.

Q Will you go to Tucson, Mr. President?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We’re in close consultations with the families who have suffered these losses, as well as Governor Brewer, congressional leadership. There is no doubt that we will establish some mechanism, memorial, during the course of the next several days. And when we have that, we will announce it.

But I think it’s going to be important, I think, for the country as a whole, as well as the people of Arizona, to feel as if we are speaking directly to our sense of loss, but also speaking to our hopes for the future and how out of this tragedy we can come together as a stronger nation.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/10/president-obama-tucson-grief-courage

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From ICE

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ICE arrest 4 in Phoenix weapons smuggling case

PHOENIX - A Tempe man accused of running a weapons smuggling ring in Arizona was arrested along with three of his co-conspirators Thursday in a joint operation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Edward Hossa, 54, is facing federal charges for fraudulently purchasing a variety of firearms from licensed dealers in Glendale, Apache Junction and Mesa, Ariz., from July through November of 2010. Hossa is also charged with illegally attempting to export the weapons to Mexico and with being an unlicensed dealer of firearms.

"Weapons traffickers seek profits built on the bloodshed in Mexico," said Matt Allen, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Arizona. "ICE is standing firm with our partners from the ATF and the U.S. Attorney's Office to stop the flow of weapons south of the border."

Luis Gabriel Valenzuela, 36, of Phoenix; Jeremy Ray Hossa, 36, of Tempe; and Lynda Marie Yarrow, 26, of Tempe are each facing charges of fraudulently purchasing firearms on Edward Hossa's behalf.

"Weapon smuggling rings fuel the violence south of the border," said U.S. Attorney Dennis K. Burke. "Straw purchasers disregard the consequences for the allure of the quick cash. They can't claim ignorance to their direct contribution to the bloodshed. These arrests are proof that our office along with ICE and ATF are committed to shutting down these organizations and interdicting southbound weapons."

According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, Edward Hossa induced the three other suspects to act as "straw purchasers" of firearms. Valenzuela is accused of buying five handguns in July and November at two different stores in Glendale. Though Valenzuela claimed he was buying the weapons for himself, he is accused of buying them for Edward Hossa. Both Jeremy Ray Hossa and Yarrow face similar charges: Hossa for four rifles and one handgun purchased in Apache Junction in September and Yarrow for two handguns purchased in Mesa in November.

HSI and ATF agents arrested the suspects while serving six federal search warrants in the Phoenix metropolitan area at properties related to the case.

"This investigation is further proof of the relentless efforts by Mexican drug cartels to illegally acquire large quantities of firearms in the U.S. for use in the ongoing Mexican drug war," said Bill Newell, Special Agent in Charge of the ATF Phoenix Field Division. "This investigation is also further proof that the 'straw purchase' of firearms continues to be a significant problem. Those individuals that knowingly falsify ATF firearms forms to supply Mexican drug cartels with firearms have as much blood on their hands as the criminals that use them."

A criminal complaint is simply the method by which a person is charged with criminal activity and raises no inference of guilt. An individual is presumed innocent until competent evidence is presented to a jury that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1101/110107phoenix.htm

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"America's Most Wanted" suspect apprehended by ICE at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut

HARTFORD, Conn. - On Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents captured an individual at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Conn., who was recently profiled on "America's Most Wanted."

An Soon Kim, 52, was arrested by ICE HSI special agents based in Hartford. She was arrested at the Mohegan Sun Casino pursuant to an active arrest warrant. Kim is wanted for engaging in a wide-ranging human trafficking ring operating throughout the northeastern United States.

Kim has been charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York with crimes including conspiracy to engage in human trafficking, conspiracy to engage in interstate transportation of women for the purpose of prostitution and interstate transportation of women for the purpose of prostitution, conspiracy to transport illegal aliens and transportation of illegal aliens, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

On Friday, ICE HSI special agents received information that Kim was present at the Mohegan Sun Casino. Kim was taken into custody directly from the casino floor and subsequently admitted her identity to the arresting officers. Kim was also in possession of $17,045 at the time of her arrest. Kim's apprehension was the result of a joint investigation conducted by agents and detectives of ICE HSI and the Connecticut State Police Casino Unit.

Kim made her initial appearance today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna F. Martinez in Hartford, where Kim waived her right to hearings. She will be transferred back to New York to face charges from the 2006 complaint.

"I am pleased that my agents in Hartford were able to apprehend this fugitive," said Bruce M. Foucart, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Boston. Foucart oversee ICE HSI throughout New England. "This is a clear example of the exemplary partnerships ICE HSI has here in Connecticut. Working with our law enforcement partners, which include the Connecticut State Police Casino Unit and the Mohegan Sun Casino authorities, we were able to track down this fugitive who will face charges in New York."

Earlier this month, President Obama announced that January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. "Human trafficking is a global travesty that takes many forms. Whether forced labor or sexual trafficking, child soldiering or involuntary domestic servitude, these abuses are an affront to our national conscience, and to our values as Americans and human beings," said President Obama. "There is no one type of victim -- men and women, adults and children are all vulnerable. From every corner of our Nation to every part of the globe, we must stand firm in defense of freedom and bear witness for those exploited by modern slavery."

ICE is attacking these types of crimes on several fronts. The agency encourages the public to recognize and report human trafficking crimes through its Hidden in Plain Sight public outreach campaign. The campaign included widespread distribution of posters, billboards and transit shelter signs. ICE is taking a global strategy, working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international partners hosting meetings, coordinating efforts and sharing information to dismantle human trafficking organizations that bring such desperation to the people they ensnare.

ICE's Victims Assistance Program helps to coordinate services in support of human trafficking victims. In April 2009, ICE was recognized for its commitment to assisting victims of crime with a Federal Service Award from the U.S. Department of Justice National Crime Victims' Service Awards program.

http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1101/110110hartford.htm

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From the DEA

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Lead Defendant in Massive Gang Case Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Wide-Ranging Drug Trafficking Activities

JAN 06 - LOS ANGELES – The lead defendant in a federal RICO indictment that was brought as part of the nation’s largest-ever gang sweep was sentenced today to 30 years in federal prison for helping coordinate the racketeering activities of the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens street gang and distributing large quantities of narcotics.

George Manuel Flores, also known as Boxer, 43, was sentenced by United States District Judge Dale S. Fischer, who is presiding over the 57-defendant racketeering indictment that was the centerpiece of “Operation Knock Out” in 2009.

Flores was the lead defendant in the RICO indictment, a longtime member of the Hawaiian Gardens gang, and a sometimes “shot-caller” who was able to issue orders to other gang members and collect “taxes” from drug dealers.

Flores pleaded guilty on March 26, 2010 to five counts: racketeering conspiracy; conspiracy to distribute and possess with the intent to distribute crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana; two counts of possession with the intent to distribute heroin; and being a felon in possession of ammunition.

In court documents filed in relation to today’s sentencing hearing, prosecutors pointed out that Flores was a longtime drug dealer, who was “a blight” on the city of Hawaiian Gardens. For over a decade, [Flores] ran what are fairly described as several illegal drug ‘supermarkets’ from houses in Hawaiian Gardens that were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at which his customers could buy the drug of their choice.”

In relation to the narcotics conspiracy count to which he pleaded guilty, Flores specifically admitted that he was responsible for the distribution of more than 30 kilograms of heroin, more than 4.5 kilograms of crack cocaine, more than 1.5 kilograms of pure methamphetamine, more than 15 kilograms of narcotics that contained methamphetamine, and more than 100 kilograms of marijuana.

Operation Knock Out was an investigation into Varrio Hawaiian Gardens conducted by the Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Task Force, which is comprised of agents and officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations; and IRS - Criminal Investigation.

Timothy J. Landrum, DEA Special Agent in Charge in Los Angeles stated, “Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that DEA will to continue to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure that those responsible for propagating violence and distress in our neighborhoods are brought to justice.”

“Mr. Flores was a leader in a criminal enterprise that tormented the City of Hawaiian Gardens for decades,” said United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. “The law-abiding residents of Hawaiian Gardens deserve safe neighborhoods, and this prosecution will go a long way toward restoring order to a community that was once under the thumb of criminal thugs and drug dealers.”

The racketeering case of United States v. Flores, et al. was one of seven multi-defendant indictments issued by federal grand juries. During Operation Knock Out, authorities seized approximately 33 pounds of methamphetamine, additionally quantities of other narcotics and approximately 125 firearms.

“This is a perfect example of how federal laws can be used to impact gang crime,” said John A. Torres, Special Agent in Charge of the ATF Los Angeles Field Division. “Flores’ sentencing today in federal court is the final nail in the coffin for these gang members who prey on the weak and defenseless. The neighborhood of Hawaiian Gardens is much safer with Flores in prison for a long, long time.”

The investigation into the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens (VHG) gang began after the fatal shooting of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Jerry Ortiz, who was gunned down on June 24, 2005 by a gang member he was attempting to arrest on suspicion of shooting an African-American man. While the gang member, Jose Orozco, was quickly apprehended and currently sits on death row, the shooting of Deputy Ortiz sparked an investigation that culminated with two takedowns in 2009 that saw approximately 170 gang members and associates being taken into custody on federal charges (See: http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2009/065.html and http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2009/081.html).

Steven Martinez, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI in Los Angeles, said: “The prosecution of VHG members ensures they no longer pose a threat to residents of the Hawaiian Gardens community, in which Flores and his gang associates formerly thrived. The prosecution also renders justice for the family of Deputy Jerry Ortiz, whose senseless death was not forgotten.”

Some defendants charged as a result of the investigation are awaiting trial, but many have pleaded guilty, with sentences as long as nearly 25 years in prison are being imposed. Some of the significant sentences include:

Marcos Romero, also known as Tortas, 45, was sentenced on November 22, 2010 to 291 months in prison, which is running consecutively to a nearly four-year sentence he has already served on a federal immigration charge. According to sentencing papers filed by the government, Romero was one of the primary wholesalers of narcotics to the Hawaiian Gardens gang members.

Brian Viramontes, also known as Looney, 36, was sentenced on September 13, 2010 to 210 months in federal prison. Viramontes, who was a shot caller in the gang, pleaded guilty to distributing methamphetamine and possessing a firearm in relation to his drug trafficking activities (see: http://www.atf.gov/press/releases/2010/09/091410-la-varrio-hawaiian-gardens-member-sentenced-on-drugs-firearms.html ).

Edward Solarzano, also known as Little Turtle, 32, was sentenced on November 29, 2010 to 188 months in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering conspiracy and drug trafficking conspiracy.

Frank Wayne Henley, also known as Spanky, 40, was sentenced on November 1, 2010 to 262 months in prison. According to court documents, Henley is a member of the Nazi Low Riders, who supplied members of the Hawaiian Gardens gang with methamphetamine and heroin.

Operation Knock Out was an investigation into Varrio Hawaiian Gardens conducted by the Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Task Force, which is comprised of agents and officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations; and IRS - Criminal Investigation.

Timothy J. Landrum, DEA Special Agent in Charge in Los Angeles stated, “Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that DEA will to continue to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure that those responsible for propagating violence and distress in our neighborhoods are brought to justice.”

Leslie P. DeMarco, Special Agent in Charge of IRS - Criminal Investigation’s Los Angeles Field Office, stated: “Today’s sentencing of Varrio Hawaiian Gardens’ gang member George Flores to 30 years in federal prison demonstrates that crime does not pay. Flores’ sentencing brings to a close this chapter in the history of the community of Hawaiian Gardens and is representative of the successful implementation of federal laws in the investigation and prosecution of gang crime.”

Claude Arnold, Special Agent in Charge for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles, said: “The 30-year sentence for Mr. Flores should serve as a stern warning about the consequences awaiting gang members whose actions breed fear and violence in our communities. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations will continue to work closely with its federal and local law enforcement counterparts to attack and dismantle these dangerous criminal organizations and see that those involved are brought to justice.”

http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/2011/la010911.html

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