Connecticut
Judge dismisses charges against 3 officers accused of mistreating paralyzed prisoner
A Connecticut judge on Friday dismissed criminal charges against three current and former New Haven police officers who were accused of mistreating prisoner Richard “Randy” Cox after he was paralyzed in the back of a police van in 2022.
Judge David Zagaja dropped the cases against Oscar Diaz, Jocelyn Lavandier and Luis Rivera after granting them a probation program that allows charges to be erased from defendants’ records, saying their conduct was not malicious. Two other officers, Betsy Segui and Ronald Pressley, pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor reckless endangerment and received no jail time.
Cox, 40, was left paralyzed from the chest down on June 19, 2022, when the police van, which had no seat belts, braked hard to avoid an accident, sending him head-first into a metal partition while his hands were cuffed behind his back. He had been arrested on charges of threatening a woman with a gun, which were later dismissed.
“I can’t move. I’m going to die like this. Please, please, please help me,” Cox said in the van minutes after being injured, according to police video. He later was found to have broken his neck.
Diaz, who was driving the van, brought Cox to the police department, where officers mocked Cox and accused him of being drunk and faking his injuries, according to surveillance and body-worn camera footage. Officers dragged Cox out of the van and around the police station before placing him in a holding cell before paramedics brought him to a hospital.
Before pulling him out of the van, Lavandier told Cox to move his leg and sit up, according to an internal affairs investigation report. Cox says “I can’t move” and Lavandier says “You’re not even trying.”
New Haven State’s Attorney John P. Doyle Jr.’s office said prosecutors and Cox did not object to the charges being dismissed.
Defense lawyers said that while the officers were sympathetic to what happened to Cox, they did not cause his injuries or make them worse. The three officers whose cases were dismissed were scheduled to go on trial next month.
“We don’t think that there was sufficient evidence to prove her guilt or any wrongdoing,” said Lavandier’s attorney, Dan Ford. “This is a negotiated settlement that avoids the risk of having go through the emotional toll of a trial.”
Rivera’s lawyer, Raymond Hassett, called the decision to charge the officers “unjust and misplaced.”
“The actions of the Police Chief and City Mayor in targeting the officers were a misguided effort to deflect attention from the police department shortcomings in managing the department and ensuring proper protocols were in place and followed,” Hassett said in a statement.
Attorneys for Cox and Diaz did not immediately return phone and email messages Friday. Cox’s lawyer, Louis Rubano, has said Cox and his family hoped the criminal cases would end quickly with plea bargains.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said city officials disagreed with the judge’s decision to dismiss the charges.
“What happened to Randy was tragic and awful,” he said in a statement.
The case drew outrage from civil rights advocates including the NAACP, along with comparisons to the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore. Cox is Black, while all five officers who were arrested are Black or Hispanic. Gray, who also was Black, died in 2015 after he suffered a spinal injury while handcuffed and shackled in a Baltimore police van.
The case also led to reforms at the New Haven police department as well as a statewide seat belt requirement for prisoners.
In 2023, the city of New Haven agreed to settle a lawsuit by Cox for $45 million.
New Haven police fired Segui, Diaz, Lavandier and Rivera for violating police conduct policies, while Pressley retired and avoided an internal investigation. Diaz appealed his firing and got his job back. Segui lost the appeal of her firing, while appeals by Lavandier and Rivera remain pending.
Vienna
Taylor Swift concert attack plot in Austria leads to terrorism charges against 21-year-old man
VIENNA (AP) — Austrian public prosecutors filed terrorism-related charges Monday against a 21-year-old defendant who they say planned to carry out an attack on one of superstar singer Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna in August 2024.
Vienna public prosecutors said in a statement that the unnamed defendant had declared allegiance to the Islamic State group by sharing propaganda material and videos via various messaging services.
Vienna prosecutors also accuse the defendant of having “obtained instructions on the internet for the construction of a shrapnel bomb based on the explosive triacetone triperoxide” typically used by IS, and of having produced a small amount of the explosive.
Prosecutors also say that the defendant had made “several attempts” to buy weapons illegally outside the country and to bring them to Austria.
Vienna public prosecutors plan to proceed with a criminal case against the unnamed suspect in Wiener Neustadt, a town near the Austrian capital.
The spokesperson for the Vienna public prosecutors office confirmed to The Associated Press that the defendant is in custody. Austrian media identified the suspect as Beran A. and said he was arrested in August 2024.
Austrian authorities canceled three planned Taylor Swift shows in Vienna in August 2024 after they said they foiled an apparent plot to target the performances.
The U.S. provided intelligence that fed into the decision to cancel the concerts.
“The United States has an enduring focus on our counterterrorism mission. We work closely with partners all over the world to monitor and disrupt threats. And so as part of that work, the United States did share information with Austrian partners to enable the disruption of a threat to Taylor Swift’s concerts there in Vienna,” then-White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in August 2024.
Georgia
Opening statements held in the trial of a Georgia high school shooting suspect’s father
A man whose teenage son is accused of killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school should be held responsible for providing the weapon despite warnings about alleged threats his son made, a prosecutor said Monday.
The trial of Colin Gray began Monday in one of several cases around the country where prosecutors are trying to hold parents responsible after their children are accused in fatal shootings.
Gray faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of involuntary manslaughter and numerous counts of second-degree cruelty to children related to the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.
“This is not a case about holding parents accountable for what their children do,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in his opening statement. “This case is about this defendant and his actions in allowing a child that he has custody over access to a firearm and ammunition after being warned that that child was going to harm others.”
Prosecutors argue that amounts to cruelty to children, and second-degree murder is defined in Georgia law as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children.
Investigators have said Colt Gray, who was 14 at the time, carefully planned the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school northeast of Atlanta that is attended by 1,900 students.
But Brian Hobbs, an attorney for Colin Gray, said the shooting’s planning and timing “were hidden by Colt Gray from his father. That’s the difference between tragedy and criminal liability. You cannot hold someone criminally responsible for failing to predict what was intentionally hidden from them.”
With a semiautomatic rifle in his book bag, the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, Colt Gray boarded the school bus, investigators said. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the gun and then shot people in a classroom and hallways, they said.
Smith told the jury that Colin Gray’s daughter was in lockdown at her middle school and texted her father that there had been a shooting at the high school. When law enforcement arrived at Gray’s home, he met them in the garage and “without any prompting, he blurts out, ‘I knew it,’” Smith said.
Smith said that in September 2021, Colt Gray used a school computer to search the phrase, “how to kill your dad.” School resource officers were then sent to the home, but it was determined to be a “misunderstanding,” Smith said.
Sixteen months before the shooting, in May 2023, law enforcement acted on a tip from the FBI after a shooting threat was made online concerning an elementary school. The threat was traced to a computer at Gray’s home, Smith said.
Colin Gray was told about the threat and was asked whether his son had access to guns. Gray replied that he and his son “take this school shooting stuff very seriously,” according to Smith. Colt Gray denied that he made the threat and said that his online account had been hacked, Smith said.
That Christmas, Colin Gray gave his son the gun as a gift and continued to buy accessories after that, including “a lot of ammunition,” Smith said.
Colin Gray knew his son was obsessed with school shooters, even having a shrine in his bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, prosecutors have said. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent had testified that the teen’s parents had discussed their son’s fascination with school shooters but decided that it was in a joking context and not a serious issue.
Three weeks before the shooting, Gray received a chilling text from his son: “Whenever something happens, just know the blood is on your hands,” according to Smith.
Colin Gray was also aware his son’s mental health had deteriorated and had sought help from a counseling service weeks before the shooting, an investigator testified.
“We have had a very difficult past couple of years and he needs help. Anger, anxiety, quick to be volatile. I don’t know what to do,” Colin Gray wrote about his son.
But Smith said Colin Gray never followed through on concerns about getting his son admitted to an in-patient facility.
The trial is being held in Winder, in Barrow County, where the shooting happened. The defense asked for a change of venue because of pretrial publicity, and prosecutors agreed. The judge kept the trial in Winder but decided to bring in jurors from nearby Hall County to hear the case. Jurors were selected last week.
Judge dismisses charges against 3 officers accused of mistreating paralyzed prisoner
A Connecticut judge on Friday dismissed criminal charges against three current and former New Haven police officers who were accused of mistreating prisoner Richard “Randy” Cox after he was paralyzed in the back of a police van in 2022.
Judge David Zagaja dropped the cases against Oscar Diaz, Jocelyn Lavandier and Luis Rivera after granting them a probation program that allows charges to be erased from defendants’ records, saying their conduct was not malicious. Two other officers, Betsy Segui and Ronald Pressley, pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor reckless endangerment and received no jail time.
Cox, 40, was left paralyzed from the chest down on June 19, 2022, when the police van, which had no seat belts, braked hard to avoid an accident, sending him head-first into a metal partition while his hands were cuffed behind his back. He had been arrested on charges of threatening a woman with a gun, which were later dismissed.
“I can’t move. I’m going to die like this. Please, please, please help me,” Cox said in the van minutes after being injured, according to police video. He later was found to have broken his neck.
Diaz, who was driving the van, brought Cox to the police department, where officers mocked Cox and accused him of being drunk and faking his injuries, according to surveillance and body-worn camera footage. Officers dragged Cox out of the van and around the police station before placing him in a holding cell before paramedics brought him to a hospital.
Before pulling him out of the van, Lavandier told Cox to move his leg and sit up, according to an internal affairs investigation report. Cox says “I can’t move” and Lavandier says “You’re not even trying.”
New Haven State’s Attorney John P. Doyle Jr.’s office said prosecutors and Cox did not object to the charges being dismissed.
Defense lawyers said that while the officers were sympathetic to what happened to Cox, they did not cause his injuries or make them worse. The three officers whose cases were dismissed were scheduled to go on trial next month.
“We don’t think that there was sufficient evidence to prove her guilt or any wrongdoing,” said Lavandier’s attorney, Dan Ford. “This is a negotiated settlement that avoids the risk of having go through the emotional toll of a trial.”
Rivera’s lawyer, Raymond Hassett, called the decision to charge the officers “unjust and misplaced.”
“The actions of the Police Chief and City Mayor in targeting the officers were a misguided effort to deflect attention from the police department shortcomings in managing the department and ensuring proper protocols were in place and followed,” Hassett said in a statement.
Attorneys for Cox and Diaz did not immediately return phone and email messages Friday. Cox’s lawyer, Louis Rubano, has said Cox and his family hoped the criminal cases would end quickly with plea bargains.
New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said city officials disagreed with the judge’s decision to dismiss the charges.
“What happened to Randy was tragic and awful,” he said in a statement.
The case drew outrage from civil rights advocates including the NAACP, along with comparisons to the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore. Cox is Black, while all five officers who were arrested are Black or Hispanic. Gray, who also was Black, died in 2015 after he suffered a spinal injury while handcuffed and shackled in a Baltimore police van.
The case also led to reforms at the New Haven police department as well as a statewide seat belt requirement for prisoners.
In 2023, the city of New Haven agreed to settle a lawsuit by Cox for $45 million.
New Haven police fired Segui, Diaz, Lavandier and Rivera for violating police conduct policies, while Pressley retired and avoided an internal investigation. Diaz appealed his firing and got his job back. Segui lost the appeal of her firing, while appeals by Lavandier and Rivera remain pending.
Vienna
Taylor Swift concert attack plot in Austria leads to terrorism charges against 21-year-old man
VIENNA (AP) — Austrian public prosecutors filed terrorism-related charges Monday against a 21-year-old defendant who they say planned to carry out an attack on one of superstar singer Taylor Swift’s concerts in Vienna in August 2024.
Vienna public prosecutors said in a statement that the unnamed defendant had declared allegiance to the Islamic State group by sharing propaganda material and videos via various messaging services.
Vienna prosecutors also accuse the defendant of having “obtained instructions on the internet for the construction of a shrapnel bomb based on the explosive triacetone triperoxide” typically used by IS, and of having produced a small amount of the explosive.
Prosecutors also say that the defendant had made “several attempts” to buy weapons illegally outside the country and to bring them to Austria.
Vienna public prosecutors plan to proceed with a criminal case against the unnamed suspect in Wiener Neustadt, a town near the Austrian capital.
The spokesperson for the Vienna public prosecutors office confirmed to The Associated Press that the defendant is in custody. Austrian media identified the suspect as Beran A. and said he was arrested in August 2024.
Austrian authorities canceled three planned Taylor Swift shows in Vienna in August 2024 after they said they foiled an apparent plot to target the performances.
The U.S. provided intelligence that fed into the decision to cancel the concerts.
“The United States has an enduring focus on our counterterrorism mission. We work closely with partners all over the world to monitor and disrupt threats. And so as part of that work, the United States did share information with Austrian partners to enable the disruption of a threat to Taylor Swift’s concerts there in Vienna,” then-White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in August 2024.
Georgia
Opening statements held in the trial of a Georgia high school shooting suspect’s father
A man whose teenage son is accused of killing two students and two teachers at a Georgia high school should be held responsible for providing the weapon despite warnings about alleged threats his son made, a prosecutor said Monday.
The trial of Colin Gray began Monday in one of several cases around the country where prosecutors are trying to hold parents responsible after their children are accused in fatal shootings.
Gray faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of involuntary manslaughter and numerous counts of second-degree cruelty to children related to the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder.
“This is not a case about holding parents accountable for what their children do,” Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith said in his opening statement. “This case is about this defendant and his actions in allowing a child that he has custody over access to a firearm and ammunition after being warned that that child was going to harm others.”
Prosecutors argue that amounts to cruelty to children, and second-degree murder is defined in Georgia law as causing the death of a child by committing the crime of cruelty to children.
Investigators have said Colt Gray, who was 14 at the time, carefully planned the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at the school northeast of Atlanta that is attended by 1,900 students.
But Brian Hobbs, an attorney for Colin Gray, said the shooting’s planning and timing “were hidden by Colt Gray from his father. That’s the difference between tragedy and criminal liability. You cannot hold someone criminally responsible for failing to predict what was intentionally hidden from them.”
With a semiautomatic rifle in his book bag, the barrel sticking out and wrapped in poster board, Colt Gray boarded the school bus, investigators said. He left his second-period class and emerged from a bathroom with the gun and then shot people in a classroom and hallways, they said.
Smith told the jury that Colin Gray’s daughter was in lockdown at her middle school and texted her father that there had been a shooting at the high school. When law enforcement arrived at Gray’s home, he met them in the garage and “without any prompting, he blurts out, ‘I knew it,’” Smith said.
Smith said that in September 2021, Colt Gray used a school computer to search the phrase, “how to kill your dad.” School resource officers were then sent to the home, but it was determined to be a “misunderstanding,” Smith said.
Sixteen months before the shooting, in May 2023, law enforcement acted on a tip from the FBI after a shooting threat was made online concerning an elementary school. The threat was traced to a computer at Gray’s home, Smith said.
Colin Gray was told about the threat and was asked whether his son had access to guns. Gray replied that he and his son “take this school shooting stuff very seriously,” according to Smith. Colt Gray denied that he made the threat and said that his online account had been hacked, Smith said.
That Christmas, Colin Gray gave his son the gun as a gift and continued to buy accessories after that, including “a lot of ammunition,” Smith said.
Colin Gray knew his son was obsessed with school shooters, even having a shrine in his bedroom to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, prosecutors have said. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent had testified that the teen’s parents had discussed their son’s fascination with school shooters but decided that it was in a joking context and not a serious issue.
Three weeks before the shooting, Gray received a chilling text from his son: “Whenever something happens, just know the blood is on your hands,” according to Smith.
Colin Gray was also aware his son’s mental health had deteriorated and had sought help from a counseling service weeks before the shooting, an investigator testified.
“We have had a very difficult past couple of years and he needs help. Anger, anxiety, quick to be volatile. I don’t know what to do,” Colin Gray wrote about his son.
But Smith said Colin Gray never followed through on concerns about getting his son admitted to an in-patient facility.
The trial is being held in Winder, in Barrow County, where the shooting happened. The defense asked for a change of venue because of pretrial publicity, and prosecutors agreed. The judge kept the trial in Winder but decided to bring in jurors from nearby Hall County to hear the case. Jurors were selected last week.
