05-06-2024  6:49 pm   •   PDX and SEA Weather
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4

NORTHWEST NEWS

Safety Lapses Contributed to Patient Assaults at Oregon State Hospital

A federal report says safety lapses at the Oregon State Hospital contributed to recent patient-on-patient assaults. The report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services investigated a recent choking attack and sexual assault, among other incidents. It found that staff didn't always adequately supervise their patients, and that the hospital didn't fully investigate the incidents. In a statement, the hospital said it was dedicated to its patients and working to improve conditions. It has 10 days from receiving the report to submit a plan of correction. The hospital is Oregon's most secure inpatient psychiatric facility

Police Detain Driver Who Accelerated Toward Protesters at Portland State University in Oregon

The Portland Police Bureau said in a written statement late Thursday afternoon that the man was taken to a hospital on a police mental health hold. They did not release his name. The vehicle appeared to accelerate from a stop toward the crowd but braked before it reached anyone. 

Portland Government Will Change On Jan. 1. The City’s Transition Team Explains What We Can Expect.

‘It’s a learning curve that everyone has to be intentional about‘

What Marijuana Reclassification Means for the United States

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is moving toward reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug. The Justice Department proposal would recognize the medical uses of cannabis but wouldn’t legalize it for recreational use. Some advocates for legalized weed say the move doesn't go far enough, while opponents say it goes too far.

NEWS BRIEFS

Legendary Civil Rights Leader Medgar Wiley Evers Receives Presidential Medal of Freedom

Evers family overwhelmed with gratitude after Biden announces highest civilian honor. ...

April 30 is the Registration Deadline for the May Primary Election

Voters can register or update their registration online at OregonVotes.gov until 11:59 p.m. on April 30. ...

Chair Jessica Vega Pederson Releases $3.96 Billion Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2024-2025

Investments will boost shelter and homeless services, tackle the fentanyl crisis, strengthen the safety net and support a...

New Funding Will Invest in Promising Oregon Technology and Science Startups

Today Business Oregon and its Oregon Innovation Council announced a million award to the Portland Seed Fund that will...

Unity in Prayer: Interfaith Vigil and Memorial Service Honoring Youth Affected by Violence

As part of the 2024 National Youth Violence Prevention Week, the Multnomah County Prevention and Health Promotion Community Adolescent...

The FAA investigates after Boeing says workers in South Carolina falsified 787 inspection records

SEATTLE (AP) — The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it has opened an investigation into Boeing after the beleaguered company reported that workers at a South Carolina plant falsified inspection records on certain 787 planes. Boeing said its engineers have determined that misconduct did...

Want to show teachers appreciation? This top school gives them more freedom

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) — When teachers at A.D. Henderson School, one of the top-performing schools in Florida, are asked how they succeed, one answer is universal: They have autonomy. Nationally, most teachers report feeling stressed and overwhelmed at work, according to a Pew...

Defending national champion LSU boosts its postseason hopes with series win against Texas A&M

With two weeks left in the regular season, LSU is scrambling to avoid becoming the third straight defending national champion to miss the NCAA Tournament. The Tigers (31-18, 9-15) won two of three against then-No. 1 Texas A&M to take a giant step over the weekend, but they...

The Bo Nix era begins in Denver, and the Broncos also drafted his top target at Oregon

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) — For the first time in his 17 seasons as a coach, Sean Payton has a rookie quarterback to nurture. Payton's Denver Broncos took Bo Nix in the first round of the NFL draft. The coach then helped out both himself and Nix by moving up to draft his new QB's top...

OPINION

New White House Plan Could Reduce or Eliminate Accumulated Interest for 30 Million Student Loan Borrowers

Multiple recent announcements from the Biden administration offer new hope for the 43.2 million borrowers hoping to get relief from the onerous burden of a collective

Op-Ed: Why MAGA Policies Are Detrimental to Black Communities

NNPA NEWSWIRE – MAGA proponents peddle baseless claims of widespread voter fraud to justify voter suppression tactics that disproportionately target Black voters. From restrictive voter ID laws to purging voter rolls to limiting early voting hours, these...

Loving and Embracing the Differences in Our Youngest Learners

Yet our responsibility to all parents and society at large means we must do more to share insights, especially with underserved and under-resourced communities. ...

Gallup Finds Black Generational Divide on Affirmative Action

Each spring, many aspiring students and their families begin receiving college acceptance letters and offers of financial aid packages. This year’s college decisions will add yet another consideration: the effects of a 2023 Supreme Court, 6-3 ruling that...

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE NEWS

Challenge to North Carolina's new voter ID requirement goes to trial

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — Trial in a federal lawsuit challenging North Carolina's new voter identification law finally began on Monday, with a civil rights group alleging its photo requirement unlawfully harms Black and Latino voters. The non-jury trial started more than five years...

Congressman partly backtracks his praise of a campus conflict that included racist gestures

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Republican congressman on Monday backtracked on some of his praise for a campus conflict that included a man who made monkey noises and gestures at a Black student who was protesting the Israel-Hamas war. Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia said he understands and...

The family of Irvo Otieno criticizes move to withdraw murder charges against 5 deputies

A Virginia judge has signed off on a prosecutor's request to withdraw charges against five more people in connection with the 2023 death of Irvo Otieno, a young man who was pinned to the floor for about 11 minutes while being admitted to a state psychiatric hospital. Judge Joseph...

ENTERTAINMENT

Ashley Judd speaks out on the right of women to control their bodies and be free from male violence

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Actor Ashley Judd, whose allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein helped spark the #MeToo movement, spoke out Monday on the rights of women and girls to control their own bodies and be free from male violence. A goodwill ambassador for the U.N....

Movie Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are great fun in ‘The Fall Guy’

One of the worst movie sins is when a comedy fails to at least match the natural charisma of its stars. Not all actors are capable of being effortlessly witty without a tightly crafted script and some excellent direction and editing. But Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt seem, at least from afar, adept...

Asian American Literature Festival that was canceled by the Smithsonian in 2023 to be revived

NEW YORK (AP) — A festival celebrating Asian American literary works that was suddenly canceled last year by the Smithsonian Institution is getting resurrected, organizers announced Thursday. The Asian American Literature Festival is making a return, the Asian American Literature...

U.S. & WORLD NEWS

Macron puts trade and Ukraine as top priorities as China's Xi opens European visit in France

PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron held talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Monday that focused...

Lawsuit alleges decades of child sex abuse at Illinois juvenile detention centers statewide

CHICAGO (AP) — Child sexual abuse at Illinois juvenile detention centers was pervasive and systemic for decades,...

Brad Parscale helped Trump win in 2016 using Facebook ads. Now he’s back, and an AI evangelist

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Donald Trump’s former campaign manager looked squarely into the camera and...

Associated Press images of migrants' struggle are recognized with a Pulitzer Prize

NEW YORK (AP) — The images, captured by Associated Press photographers throughout 2023 and recognized Monday...

Biden speaks with Netanyahu as Israelis appear closer to major Rafah offensive

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden again urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against launching an...

Call it Cognac diplomacy. France offered China’s Xi a special drink, in a wink at their trade spat

PARIS (AP) — How do you smooth over trade tensions with the all-powerful leader of economic powerhouse China?...

By Ed Payne CNN




Authorities expect to file charges Wednesday against the three men arrested following the dramatic discovery of a trio of missing women who police say had been held captive for close to a decade.


An administrative judge granted police an extension of the city's usual 36-hour window to charge suspects, giving them until Wednesday evening to charge Ariel Castro, 52, who lived in the home where the women were found, and his brothers, 54-year-old Pedro Castro and 50-year-old Onil Castro, police Det. Jennifer Ciaccia said Tuesday.



Police arrested the three brothers Monday night after one of the women, 27-year-old Amanda Berry, staged a daring escape with the aid of a neighbor. In addition to Berry and a 6-year-old daughter apparently born to her during her captivity, police say Georgina "Gina" DeJesus, 23, and Michelle Knight, 32, also were freed.



The three women disappeared from the same Cleveland street -- Lorain Avenue -- between 2002 and 2004.



The Castro brothers had not been questioned by police as of Tuesday night, Ciaccia said.



Meanwhile, the women were reuniting with family members they had not seen in nearly 10 years.



"I love you honey, thank God," Berry's tearful grandmother Fern Gentry could be heard telling the young woman in a telephone call recorded by CNN affiliate WJHL. "... I've thought about you all this time. I never forgot about you."



Berry sounded upbeat -- telling Gentry that she felt "fine" and that the 6-year-old girl also rescued Monday from the Cleveland home is indeed her own.



At the home of 23-year-old Georgina "Gina" DeJesus, balloons dotted the front yard. Also present: a sign that was first hung on a fence outside the home when Gina was first reported missing nine years ago.



Her 32-year-old sister, Mayra DeJesus, told CNN's Poppy Harlow Tuesday that Gina -- for all the hell she's gone through -- is in "good spirits."



DeJesus spent the day with family, who didn't focus on what she'd gone through but more on lifting her up, her sister said.



Fewer details have emerged about Knight.



Her mother, Barbara Knight, told NBC Wednesday that she had not yet spoken to her daughter, but believed that her sons -- Michelle's brothers -- had.



"She's probably angry at the world because she thought she would never be found but thank God that somebody did," Knight told NBC.



When asked what she would say to her daughter, she said, "I love you and I missed you all this time."



Police say Berry, Knight and DeJesus were being held in a home just three miles from the area where they were abducted.



They escaped after Berry broke out the bottom of a screen door and called for help Monday evening, startling neighbor Charles Ramsey, who came over and helped kick in the door.



"I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years," the 27-year-old woman said in a frantic 911 call. "And I'm here. I'm free now."



Some neighbors of Ariel Castro spent Tuesday second-guessing themselves, questioning why they hadn't noticed signs earlier and if they could have prevented the horrors.



"This is a heartbreaking moment for us, because I'm always out there (and) I've heard nothing," said Daniel Marti, who's known Ariel Castro since junior high school and lived near him for some 22 years.



"... To us, it was like nothing was happening. But yet it was happening, right in front of our face and we didn't even know."



'He didn't want nobody back there'



The predominantly Latino neighborhood, made up mostly of two-story frame homes, sits within sight of downtown. The gentrification that has spiffed up districts on either end hasn't extended to the blocks around Castro's home, where a number of houses are boarded up. But the churches in the neighborhood still ring the bells in their steeples, and the neighbors say they look out for one another.



Authorities and several neighbors say they had no prior indication anything suspicious was going on at the nondescript home on Seymour Avenue, where a Puerto Rican flag hung from the porch.



But after Monday's discovery, they reflected back and noticed things that, in retrospect, might have signaled something awry.



Marti, for one, asked himself why he didn't question why Castro -- who, he thought, lived alone -- would return each day with bags of McDonald's food, or who would watch the little girl he occasionally took outside. He also recalled how Castro seemed to steer him away from the house when they talked: "Now that I think of it, he didn't want nobody back there."



Another neighbor, Israel Lugo, said he saw Castro at the park Sunday with a little girl and asked who she was: "He said it was his girlfriend's daughter."



Lugo said his sister got a bad vibe from the house and asked him not to let the children play unsupervised nearby. He said he heard yelling in the house in November 2011 and called police to investigate, but they left after no one answered the door.



And Nina Samoylicz, who lives nearby, said she called police about two years ago after spotting a naked woman in the backyard of Castro's house. Samoylicz said when she called out to the woman, a man told the woman to get in the house, then ran in himself.



"She was just walking around and naked," Samoylicz said. "We thought that was weird. We thought it was funny at first, and then we thought that was weird, so we called the cops. They thought we was playing, joking, they didn't believe us."



She said she had also seen tarps covering the backyard.



But Sgt. Sammy Morris, a Cleveland police spokesman, told CNN that the department had no record of a 911 call reporting a naked woman at Castro's address.



In fact, authorities never had any indications that the women were being held in the home or that anything suspicious was going on there, Cleveland Public Safety Director Martin Flask said. Neighbors had not provided any tips, he added.



Police had visited the home twice, authorities said Tuesday, once after Castro called about a fight in the street and another time to investigate Castro -- a former school bus driver -- on an unrelated incident involving a child who had been left on a bus.



The 2004 incident was the first of four exhibitions of "bad judgment" that led to Castro's November firing by Cleveland's school district, according to records released Tuesday night.



"He previously had been suspended for 60 days for leaving a child on a bus; 60 days for making an illegal U-turn in rush hour traffic with a bus load of students, and last school year for using the bus to do his grocery shopping," the letter recommending his dismissal states. His firing came after he had left his bus unattended outside a school after his preschool routes had been canceled, without notifying his dispatcher or depot.



Tito DeJesus, a bandmate of Castro's, said he had been inside the bass player's home once, about two years ago, to help deliver a washer and dryer he'd sold to the suspect and saw "a normal environment." DeJesus said he isn't related to the rescued Gina DeJesus but had known the family for years.



"It didn't seem to be a place where women were being held against their will," he said. "Of course, mind you, I didn't go throughout the entire house. I was just at the beginning of the house, in the living room, but it seemed normal."



 



Finally free



Berry was last seen after finishing her shift at a Burger King in Cleveland on April 21, 2003. It was the eve of her 17th birthday. DeJesus disappeared nearly a year later, on April 2, 2004. She was 14.



Knight vanished on August 22, 2002. She never returned after going to a neighborhood store to use a pay phone, cousin Brenda Dinickle told CNN's Zoraida Sambolin.



The family reported her missing the next day, Flask said. She was 21.



Dinickle described her cousin as mentally challenged.



"She had a mind of a child. She was slow," Dinickle said.



Nicknamed "Shorty," because of her diminutive 4-foot, 7-inch stature, the family thought Knight might be with the brother of a brother-in-law, but had no phone number to contact him.



News of her discovery came as a shock to brother Freddie Knight, who didn't know she was missing until he saw the story on TV.



"I was freaking happy as hell, because I didn't know my sister was kidnapped," he said. "My mom never tells me anything."



Knight said their mom, who now lives in Naples, Florida, kicked him out of the house when he was 14 and they remain estranged.



CNN not could immediately confirm the details of Knight's account.



Knight said he met with his sister at the hospital and gave her a hug, saying the ordeal had left her traumatized.



"I hugged her because she wanted a hug," he said. "My sister is going to move on, forget the past ... , leave it behind, start anew."



The three women and the child were released Tuesday from the hospital where they had been taken for evaluations, a spokeswoman said. Cleveland's Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said all four appeared to be in good condition, if in need of a good meal.



'We're hoping for a miracle'



Investigators had previously speculated that the disappearances of Berry, DeJesus and another girl, 14-year-old Ashley Summers, may have been connected. Summers' family last saw her in July 2007, when she was 14.



"We did in fact believe there was an association between the Berry case and the DeJesus case as well as the Summers case," said former FBI agent Jennifer Eakin. Eakin is now a case manager at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which in 2008 held a comprehensive review of the cases with the FBI and Cleveland police.



Now the Summers family is hoping that the Cleveland investigation will yield information about Ashley, her aunt, Debra Summers, said.



"We're hoping for a miracle," she said.



Vicki Anderson, the spokeswoman for the Cleveland FBI office, said investigators will question the three women found Monday in the hope that they know something about Summers' disappearance.



 



CNN's Zoraida Sambolin reported from Cleveland and Ed Payne reported and wrote in Atlanta. Matt Smith, Greg Botelho, Michael Pearson, Tory Dunnan, Martin Savidge, Jason Hanna, Josh Levs, Steve Almasy, Laura Ly and Rande Iaboni also contributed to this report.

The Skanner Foundation's 38th Annual MLK Breakfast