West Virginia
Convicted rapist who escaped from prison using jet ski recaptured
LEWISBURG, W.Va. (AP) — A convicted rapist who authorities say used a jet ski during an escape from an Arkansas prison last year was arrested Tuesday in West Virginia, the U.S. Marshals Service said.
Samuel Paul Hartman, 39, was arrested along with his wife, his mother and his mother’s boyfriend at a hotel in Lewisburg, the Marshals Service said in a news release.
The women are accused of helping Hartman escape in August 2022 from the East Arkansas Regional Unit in Brickeys, 96 miles (155 kilometers) east of Little Rock.
Hartman was on a work detail in a field near the detention facility when a pickup truck with the women inside approached. Several gunshots were fired at a corrections officer from the waiting vehicle as Hartman ran to it. The vehicle fled to two jet skis staged near the Mississippi River not far from the prison, the statement said.
Police have said the abandoned jet skis were found on the Mississippi side of the river and that a witness reported seeing one man and two women riding them.
Investigators later determined that Hartman’s mother had ties to West Virginia. Making the arrests Tuesday were U.S. marshals and officers with the West Virginia State Police, the Lewisburg Police Department and the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Office.
Arrested along with Hartman were his wife, 39-year-old Misty Hartman, his mother, Linda Annette White, 61, and Rodney Trent, 52, identified by the Marshals Service as White’s boyfriend.
Trent faces felony charges of harboring a sex offender and of assisting Hartman and the two women, the Marshals Service said. The service did not say what charges Misty Hartman and White would face.
An Arkansas Department of Corrections spokeswoman said she expected the suspects to be extradited to Arkansas as soon as possible.
Hartman, 39, was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for a rape conviction out of Franklin County, Arkansas.
Connecticut
Man arrested months after finding a bag full of $5,000 in cash in a parking lot
TRUMBULL, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut man says it felt like he won the lottery when he discovered a bag with nearly $5,000 in cash lying in a parking lot. So, he decided to keep it.
Three months later, he has been charged with larceny.
It turns out the bag, which Trumbull Police said was clearly marked with a bank’s insignia and found outside the same bank, contained cash from the town’s tax department. There were also “numerous documents” inside identifying the rightful owner of the cash as the town of Trumbull, police said.
The man, Robert Withington, 56, of Trumbull, contends he didn’t steal the money and didn’t notice anything inside the bag indicating who the owner was.
“It’s not like this was planned out,” Withington told Hearst Connecticut Media. “Everything was in the moment and it was like I hit the lottery. That was it.”
The Associated Press on Tuesday left a message seeking comment on Withington’s business cell phone. Other numbers listed for Withington were no longer in service.
The money went missing on May 30. Police said an employee in the Trumbull Tax Collector’s office couldn’t find the bag after arriving at the bank to make a deposit during regular business hours, according to a police news release. Over the next several months, detectives obtained search warrants, reviewed multiple surveillance videos from local businesses and conducted numerous interviews before learning the bag had been “inadvertently dropped on the ground outside of the bank” and Withington had picked it up.
“I walked out onto the parking lot, saw something on the ground and there was no one around so I picked it up,” Withington told Hearst. “It’s not like I stole something.”
“If I knew I was wrong in the first place, I would have given it right back. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” he added.
When police eventually interviewed Withington, they said he acknowledged being at the bank that day and taking the bag. He told them that he believed “he had no obligation to return the bag to its rightful owner,” according to the release.
Withington, who runs a dog training business, told Hearst he has never had a criminal record and his customers can vouch for his integrity. He was charged Friday with third-degree larceny, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and up to $5,000 in fines. He was released on a promise to appear in court on Sept. 5.
“Anybody who knows me knows all I’m about is generosity,” he said. “After living in this town for 20 years, I’m not looking for trouble.”
Minnesota
Lawsuit accuses university of not doing enough to stop data breach
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A lawsuit filed on behalf of a former student and former employee at the University of Minnesota accuses the university of not doing enough to protect personal information from a recent data breach.
Attorneys for the two plaintiffs said in the lawsuit filed in federal court Friday that the university “was fully capable of preventing” the breach, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Wednesday.
The university declined comment on the lawsuit but spokesperson Jake Ricker told the newspaper in an email that the safety and privacy of everyone in the university community is a top priority.
After being questioned by the Star Tribune, the university acknowledged last week that it learned July 21 “that an unauthorized party claimed to possess sensitive data allegedly taken from the University’s systems.”
The university did not specify how it learned of the issue. But also on July 21, the Cyber Express, a news site focused on cybersecurity, posted a story about a hacker’s claims to have accessed about 7 million Social Security numbers dating to 1989.
The report said the hacker gained access to the university’s data warehouse to analyze the effects of affirmative action following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting the consideration of race in college admissions. The report did not say whether the hacker made demands of the university.
“First, you have to determine somebody claims something, but is there evidence that it actually is true?” the university’s interim president, Jeff Ettinger, told the Star Tribune last week.
The FBI and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are investigating.
Connecticut
Former death row inmate pleads guilty to murder
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A former death row inmate in Connecticut, whose conviction was overturned in 2020, has pleaded guilty to a murder charge and been sentenced to 46 1/2 years in prison.
Lazale Ashby, 38, entered his plea Monday as a part of an agreement with the prosecutor and the family of his victim, 21-year-old Elizabeth Garcia, his attorney, Joe Lopez, said Tuesday.
Garcia was strangled inside her Hartford apartment in 2002 as her 2-year-old daughter watched television in a neighbor’s apartment, prosecutors said.
This is the third time Lazale Ashby has been sentenced for killing Garcia. He was originally convicted of multiple charges including capital felony, sexual assault and kidnapping and sentenced to death in 2008. He was resentenced to life in prison in 2016 after Connecticut abolished the death penalty.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Ashby in 2020 after finding his rights were violated during his original trial when the judge allowed testimony from another inmate who said Ashby made admissions about the crime in prison.
Lopez said Ashby denied he sexually assaulted or kidnapped Garcia.
“He takes full responsibility for the murder,” Lopez said. “Forty-six and a half years is obviously not a walk in the park.”
Ashby is also serving a 25-year sentence in another case — for murder in the fatal shooting of Nahshon Cohen, 22, on Sept. 1, 2003.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Geoff Dittberner, who studied at the university and worked as a government relations office assistant there; and Mary Wint, who worked as a university nutrition educator for about 20 years and was a patient of its health care system. Attorneys are seeking class-action status.
The lawsuit accuses the university of violating the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. It does not specify how much money the pair are seeking.
Georgia
Only defendant in election indictment to spend time in jail released on bond
ATLANTA (AP) — The only person who spent time behind bars as a result of the sweeping indictment related to efforts to overturn then-President Donald Trump ‘s 2020 election loss in Georgia was released from jail Wednesday after he was granted bond a day earlier.
A lawyer for Harrison William Prescott Floyd on Tuesday negotiated a $100,000 bond with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Floyd was charged along with Trump and 17 others in an indictment that accuses them all of illegally conspiring to subvert the will of Georgia voters who had chosen Democrat Joe Biden over the Republican incumbent in the presidential election.
Lawyers for Trump and the other defendants had all negotiated bonds before their clients surrendered at the Fulton County Jail by the deadline last Friday. Floyd had turned himself in Thursday without first having a bond and, therefore, had to remain in jail. A judge denied him bond during a hearing Friday, saying the issue would be addressed by the judge assigned to the case.
Floyd is charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, conspiring to commit false statements and illegally influencing a witness. The charges are rooted in harassment of Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County election worker who had been falsely accused of election fraud by Trump. Floyd took part in a Jan. 4, 2020, conversation in which Freeman was told she “needed protection” and was pressured to make false statements about election fraud, the indictment says.
In addition to the Georgia charges, federal court records show Floyd, identified as a former U.S. Marine who’s active with the group Black Voices for Trump, was also arrested three months ago in Maryland on a federal warrant that accuses him of aggressively confronting two FBI agents sent to serve him with a grand jury subpoena.
An agent’s affidavit filed in U.S. District Court says Floyd screamed, cursed and jabbed a finger in one FBI agent’s face and twice chest-bumped the agent in a stairwell. It says Floyd backed down only when the second agent opened his suit coat to reveal his holstered gun.
