Rochester officers involved in Daniel Prude's death won’t face charges
Police officers shown on body camera video holding Daniel Prude down naked and handcuffed on a city street last winter until he stopped breathing will not face criminal charges, according to a grand jury decision announced Tuesday.
The 41-year-old Black man’s death last March sparked nightly protests in Rochester, New York, after the video was released nearly six months later, with demonstrators demanding a reckoning for police and city officials.
The state attorney general, Letitia James, whose office took over the prosecution and impaneled a grand jury, said “the criminal justice system is badly in need of reform”.
“While I know that the Prude family, the Rochester community, and communities across the country will rightfully be devastated and disappointed, we have to respect this decision,” James said in a prepared release. “Serious reform is needed, not only at the Rochester police department, but to our criminal justice system as a whole.”
Lawyers for the seven police officers suspended over Prude’s death have said the officers were strictly following their training that night, employing a restraining technique known as “segmenting”. They claimed Prude’s use of PCP, which caused irrational behavior, was “the root cause” of his death.
The video made public on 4 September shows Prude handcuffed and naked with a spit hood over his head as an officer pushes his face against the ground, while another officer presses a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he stopped breathing. He was taken off life support a week later.
The county medical examiner listed the manner of death as homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint” and cited PCP as a contributing factor.
Prude’s family filed a federal lawsuit alleging the police department sought to cover up the true nature of his death.
Officers Troy Taladay, Paul Ricotta, Francisco Santiago, Andrew Specksgoor,
Josiah Harris and Mark Vaughn, along with Sgt Michael Magri, were suspended after Prude’s death became public.
The Democratic mayor, Lovely Warren, fired La’Ron Singletary, the police chief, shortly after the video’s release, while rejecting calls from demonstrators that she resign. Singletary has said in legal papers that Warren told him to lie to support her assertion that she hadn’t learned of Prude’s death until months later, and fired him for his refusal to do so. A city spokesperson said his version of events confirms Warren never saw the video until August.
Warren announced a run for a third term in January and pleaded not guilty in October to an unrelated indictment alleging she broke campaign finance rules and committed fraud. The city’s public integrity office found no ethical lapses by the mayor in a narrow review of Prude’s death.
The city halted its investigation into Prude’s death when James’ office began its own investigation in April. Under New York law, deaths of unarmed people in police custody are typically turned over to the attorney general’s office, rather than handled by local officials.
The wife of the world’s most notorious drug cartel boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has appeared in court charged with helping him run his drug empire from jail, a day after she was arrested at Washington’s international airport.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, a 31-yearold Mexican-American who married the drug kingpin in 2007 after he spotted her in a beauty pageant, is also accused of helping organise her husband’s breathtaking jailbreak in 2015, which involved a mile-long tunnel leading from his prison shower and a motorbike adapted to run on rails from one end to the other.
After a hearing by the Washington DC district court, at which Coronel appeared by video, she was ordered detained without bond, pending trial. Prosecutors had argued she represented a flight risk with access to funds and alleged that the “defendant worked closely with the command and control structure of the drug trafficking organization known as the Sinaloa cartel – most notably with her husband”.
Coronel had apparently believed herself safe enough from prosecution to risk a trip to the US. At her husband’s 2018 New York trial, she was a daily presence in court, chewing gum behind large sunglasses. The trial led to a sentence of life plus 30 years in prison and an order to forfeit more than $12bn. But Coronel claimed to know nothing about the Sinaloa cartel, that was jointly run by her husband, maintaining that the couple had a modest irrigation firm and that El Chapo was just a “humble man” who the media had made “too famous”.
“Emma Coronel is very naive to the American justice system,” said Mike Vigil, the former head of international operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, who pointed out that allegations about her role in the 2015 prison escape had come up in Guzmán’s trial.
“She must have felt very secure and safe that nothing would happen to her.”
She was sufficiently confident of her untouchability to give a television interview in November 2019 drinking sparkling wine on the back of a yacht in Miami to a reality show called Cartel Crew, which mostly consists of relatives of convicted traffickers complaining about feeling judged.
“Sometimes you just want to do what you see other people do. We want to be normal,” Coronel said, and asked advice on setting up a clothing line in her husband’s name.
Those options looked less viable on Tuesday, after Coronel’s arrest at Washington’s Dulles airport, and her scheduled initial appearance in a courtroom to face charges of “conspiring to knowingly and intentionally distribute” shipments of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.
She was 17 when Guzmán turned up with his entourage to see her win a pageant at the coffee and guava festival in her family’s village of Canelas. She was born in Santa Clara, California, when her mother had been visiting relatives there, but had grown up in rural Mexico.
The affidavit from the FBI special agent Eric McGuire to the Washington DC district court points out that she would have known what she was marrying into, as her father, Inés Coronel Barreras, was a mid-level member of the Sinaloa cartel, designated by the US as a “significant foreign narcotics trafficker” and that her brothers were also in the family business.
“Coronel knows and understands the Sinaloa cartel is the most prolific cartel in Mexico,” McGuire said. “Coronel was aware of multi-ton cocaine shipments, multi-kilo heroin production, multi-ton marijuana shipments, and ton quantity methamphetamine shipments.”
The affidavit also quoted handwritten letters from Guzmán giving instructions to his cartel subordinates, which McGuire said he had obtained from an informant, and which had been delivered by Coronel, with whom Guzmán has nine-year-old twins.
“The twins’ mother will tell you and my children something. Please be alert, compadre. She will explain,” one of the letters said. “The twins’ mother will bring a message to all of you, so that you all see it personally.”
McGuire alleged that while Guzmán was in Altiplano prison in Mexico, Coronel relayed instructions to his sons (from previous marriages) on arranging his escape. They bought a plot of land a mile from the jail in 2014, began putting up a house, but then dug a tunnel towards the prison. Coronel and her brothers-in-law also discussed smuggling a GPS watch to Guzmán so they could guide the tunnel to his cell, accord to the arrest warrant.
In July 2015 he slipped down a hole dug into the floor of his shower and out of the tunnel which was equipped with lighting, ventilation and the motorcycle on rails believed to have been used to haul equipment and excavated earth.
Falko Ernst, the senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group, suggested there was an element of geopolitics behind Coronel’s arrest.
“She’s not a big fish. She’s a narcocelebrity. But in terms of her functions within the Sinaloa scene, she’s not a big player,” Ernst said.
“So this act of detaining her and keeping her in the United States is more a symbolic act. It perpetuates the message that the United States will still be a factor in what we call the ‘war on drugs’ here in Mexico.”
Coronel’s TV appearances and attempts to monetise her husband’s image and build a profile as an influencer were more than just vanity, according to a close observer of the Sinaloa cartel in the city of Culiacán, who said: “She had to work.”
Federal prosecutors argued in a New York court that over a quarter of century, El Chapo had amassed a fortune of at least $12,666,181,704, but despite that remarkably precise figure, efforts to seize the imprisoned kingpin’s assets have so far struggled to make progress.
“Not all of that fortune exists,” said the observer. “El Chapo had money, of course, but not like everyone thought.”
On Tuesday, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, tersely described the arrest “a matter that the United States will decide”.
The president, commony called Amlo, urged US prosecutors to provide details on the case. Amlo also suggested the Coronel case could be linked to a case against Mexico’s former public security secretary Genaro García Luna, who was arrested in Dallas in 2019 on drug trafficking charges and is awaiting trial in the United States.
Amlo has taken a generally gracious tone with the Guzmán family and has refused to speak ill of El Chapo. The president greeted El Chapo’s elderly mother, María Consuelo Loera, in March last year and acknowledged she had requested assistance with obtaining a US visa to visit her son at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
The main lesson from the scandal over his flight to Cancún while Texas froze, Senator Ted Cruz said on Tuesday, is that people should not be “assholes”, and should treat each other with respect.
The Texas Republican, who ran for the presidential nomination in 2016, is known for his caustic and brutal attacks on Democrats and willingness to buck even the appearance of bipartisan cooperation in the Senate in order to achieve his own goals, even by causing a government shutdown.
He was speaking, without discernible irony, today on Ruthless, a podcast which offers “next-generation conservative talk”.
The subject at hand was Cruz’s decision to take his family to warmer climes while his state shivered, and the decision thereafter of an unknown friend to leak the senator’s wife’s text messages to the press.
Cruz landed in political hot water while at least 30 Texans died in the cold. Temperatures have now risen but water supplies are still affected by power outages which hit millions because the state energy grid was not prepared for the freeze. Many Texans also face exorbitant bills as power companies seek to profit from the disaster.
Cruz has condemned such corporate behaviour, but on the podcast he defended Texan energy independence, insisting it was a good thing “the feds don’t get to regulate us so well” and saying it kept energy prices down.
He did not go as far as other Texas
Republicans to blame the Green New Deal, a package of progressive policy priorities which are not yet law. But while noting that Texas “produces a lot more wind than California does”, Cruz insisted “the wind turbines froze, that was a big problem, the snow and ice on the solar panels dramatically reduced the ability of solar panels to generate electricity”.
Most experts say renewable energy sources were not a major factor in the Texas blackouts.
“There were also problems with both coal and natural gas production,” Cruz conceded, “and so those drops significantly as well and it was kind of a perfect storm of all of those together”.
Cruz’s most passionate complaint was about how the press treated him and his family in an affair in which he first blamed his young daughters for wanting to go to Cancún, then flew home solo and admitted his mistake.
“Here’s a suggestion,” he said. “Just don’t be assholes. Just, you know, treat each other as human beings, have to some degree some modicum of respect.”
He said his wife Heidi was “pretty pissed” that her messages were leaked, and had been “sort of walking through” the issue with neighbours, attempting to work out who might be responsible.
Cruz said he had “lots of friends who are Democrats” and “in fact one of our friends who are Democrats said yesterday, ‘I can’t believe this. I’m defending the right.’”
He also complained about coverage of his dog, Snowflake, a poodle pictured seemingly alone at his Houston home while the family was in Mexico. Cruz said Snowflake had been “home with a dog sitter and actually the heat and power was back on”.
Cruz reserved special ire for pictures of his wife on the beach in Mexico that were published by the US press.
“The New York Post ran all these pictures of Heidi and her bikini,” he said. “I will tell you that she is pissed.”
Six men and two pregnant women from Cuba have been rescued off the Florida coast after their makeshift styrofoam boat capsized following 16 days at sea, in the latest in a string of incidents involving migrants from the island.
The capsize and interdiction was captured on video on Sunday by authorities, whose rescues of the past few weeks appear to follow a rise in Cuban refugees seeking to reach the United States.
The Martin county sheriff ’s office said it received reports of a distressed vessel floating near the shore in Waveland Beach, north of West Palm Beach, on Sunday after sunset.
A helicopter found the vessel and coordinated with the neighboring county’s sheriff to send first responders. Images shared on Facebook by the Martin county sheriff’s office show the vessel – fashioned from styrofoam and metal rods – taking on a large wave and overturning.
Witnesses told news outlets that the boat was powered by a car engine left uncovered at the bottom of the boat.
All eight aboard were rescued and taken to local hospitals, where they were reported in stable condition. Sheriff’s officials said the eight were now in the custody of federal authorities, who would determine their immigration status.
The Coast Guard said that 114 Cuban migrants were interdicted between October 2019 and September 2020 by the agency and other US law enforcement forces. Since October 2020, more than 90 Cuban migrants have been interdicted, according to the agency.
It was not immediately clear whether the apparent uptick has been due to deteriorating economic conditions in Cuba or some other reason such as migrants expecting changes in immigration policy under the new Democratic administration of Joe Biden.
Just in the past week, the Coast Guard has announced two groups of Cubans were interdicted at sea while traveling in a raft and in a small boat.
On Sunday, the Coast Guard rescued five Cuban men traveling in a raft wrapped with a black tube. They were two miles (3km) south-east of the Lake Worth Inlet, near the Port of Palm Beach.
And last Wednesday, the Coast Guard said, seven Cubans who spent six days at sea were stopped 35 miles (55km) east of West Palm Beach in a 15ft (4.5-meter) vessel made of wood and aluminum that had no motor.
Both groups were repatriated.
The reports follow a rescue earlier this month of three Cubans who capsized and survived 33 days on coconut water, shellfish and rats on a deserted island south of Florida.