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Washington Post
4 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Mom accused of murder allegedly made eerie drawing of three kids' faces
Of all the bizarre moments in the 11-year case against Catherine Hoggle, the Maryland woman who is set to appear in court Tuesday afternoon on refiled charges that she killed her two youngest children, one coming into focus is the night she hid in a sprawling complex owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. In new court documents, police say Hoggle slipped into a lobby of the facility in Montgomery County at 7:13 p.m. on Sept. 8, 2014, after an employee who was leaving held the door open for her. Surveillance video recorded her walking slowly — wearing sneakers, jeans, a dark top, and a blank look on her face. Over the preceding 36 hours, authorities allege, she had killed Jacob, 2 and Sarah, 3, whose bodies have never been found, and had plans to use her Chrysler minivan to abduct the children's 5-year-old brother at his school bus stop. Instead, police say, Hoggle, who has a long history of mental illness, abandoned her final step and spent four days largely out of sight in the Germantown area before officers found her walking alone down a road. Investigators retracing her steps found the DOE building surveillance video and several items they say she left behind in a trash can: her wallet, an ID and a sketch depicting a hand throwing away images of a tiny minivan and tiny faces of what appear to be young children. The drawing, which has never been disclosed in court, is described in an application for an arrest warrant that was filed late last month in Montgomery District Court. In four pages, it summarizes authorities' case against Hoggle. Among the allegations: Just hours after her two youngest children disappeared, while Hoggle was at her day treatment program, she told another person: 'I just strangled my kids.' She then made a choking motion with her hands, investigators say, before saying she was joking. None of the assertions have been proved or faced a jury. The Hoggle case has long been stalled — and for three years was dropped — because doctors have repeatedly concluded that Hoggle's mental illness makes her too confused to participate in court proceedings. Prosecutors have long argued she was exaggerating her symptoms to avoid trial. Hoggle's attorney, David Felsen, said Tuesday the new documents are filled with vague descriptions stitched together by police conjecture. 'A great deal of this just seems to be what they think happened,' he said. He also said the way the application for the arrest warrant played out — it was not accepted by a district court commissioner, who instead concluded the case merited two charges of second-degree child abuse — indicated police and prosecutors simply moved the case to what they thought would be a more friendly venue. It went from Maryland's district court system, generally where cases start, to the circuit court system, where grand jury sessions are held. Two days after the commissioner's decision, according to court records and Felsen, prosecutors asked a district court judge to drop that version of the case and presented their findings to a circuit court grand jury, which returned an indictment of two counts of murder. That case is what is being heard in court Tuesday. Prosecutors are expected to argue this afternoon that Hoggle, who was reindicted in the case last week, should continue to be held at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. In such bond-review hearings, prosecutors often reveal details of their cases. Felsen said the new indictment against Hoggle flies in the face of a 2022 ruling by a Montgomery County judge who dropped the original murder charges in the case. That judge cited Maryland law that people deemed mentally unfit for court proceedings cannot be held indefinitely by the criminal system without being tried. Hoggle was eventually released from a maximum security psychiatric hospital and was arrested on Friday. 'We believe that she cannot be held, given she was already held for eight years under a finding of incompetency to stand trial,' Felsen said Tuesday. Montgomery's top prosecutor, John McCarthy, has long vowed to keep the case alive. 'As long as I'm state's attorney,' he said in 2022, 'if she is ever deemed safe enough to be released, and gets out, I will recharge her with two counts of first-degree murder.' In detailing the case against Hoggle, the warrant included many findings that have already come out in previous court filings and hearings. On Sept. 7, 2014, police allege, Hoggle was last seen with Jacob — having driven off with him and returned alone before telling family members she'd dropped him off at a friend's for a sleepover. That night, police allege, she secretly took Sarah. The girl has never been seen again. According to the warrant, investigators consulted with a criminal profiler at the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. 'It was their belief that the children were murdered, likely by strangulation and their bodies were disposed of via an outside trash container,' investigators wrote in the warrant, describing a scenario that matches Hoggle's alleged words and drawing. On the morning of Sept. 8, the children's father, Troy Turner, who had not been around the children the day before and had worked late, took his oldest son to a school bus stop. In their warrant, detectives wrote that 'the suspect returned to the school bus stop in attempt to abduct their last five year old child [but] her plan was interrupted by Troy Turner, thus saving the five year old child's life.' Later that night, she slipped into the DOE building, according to court records, and left it about 4:30 a.m. Hours later, police officials held a news conference disclosing what had quickly become an alarming case that — at least at that point — was a missing persons investigation. The evening after the news conference, Hoggle was reportedly seen getting off a commuter bus in Germantown. She was not captured until three days later. Police originally charged her with neglect and obstruction counts, which were enough to keep her detained. State doctors who evaluated her concluded she was mentally incompetent to stand trial, meaning she would have difficulty understanding court proceedings and communicating with her attorney. She was transferred to the Clifton T. Perkins hospital, a maximum security psychiatric facility. In late 2022, Circuit Judge James Bonifant, citing the five-year law, ordered the charges dropped. But as he did so, Bonifant ordered Hoggle to remain in a psychiatric hospital under Maryland's civil commitment procedures. But last month, on July 23, Hoggle was released from Perkins. That set the stage for authorities' seeking the criminal charges and the indictment, placing Hoggle back into the Montgomery County Correctional Facility and at the court hearing Tuesday afternoon.
Geek Wire
4 minutes ago
- Geek Wire
Titan sub investigators blame OceanGate for safety lapses and say fatal disaster was ‘preventable'
In a 2017 image, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush is framed by the carbon-composite cylinder that became the hull of the ill-fated Titan submersible. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) In a report issued today, the U.S. Coast Guard panel investigating the loss of OceanGate's Titan submersible and its occupants in 2023 blamed the disaster on a series of safety lapses — and issued recommendations that were aimed at heading off future tragedies. 'This marine casualty and the loss of five lives was preventable,' Jason Neubauer, the chair of the Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation, said in a news release. The 335-page report said the Coast Guard would have referred the CEO and founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate, Stockton Rush, to the Justice Department for criminal investigation if he had survived Titan's catastrophic implosion on June 18, 2023. Rush, who piloted the sub, died instantly during a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, along with four passengers: Titanic expert P.H. Nargeolet, British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood. Dig into the details: Read the full report on the Titan disaster from the Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation After the report's release, the Dawood family said the report confirmed that the deaths were due to 'unregulated behavior, a lack of accountability, and a fundamentally flawed design.' 'No report can alter the heartbreaking outcome, nor fill the immeasurable void left by two cherished members of our family,' the Dawood family said in a statement reported by the BBC. 'We believe that accountability and regulatory change must follow such a catastrophic failure.' In a statement emailed to GeekWire, an OceanGate spokesperson said the company offered its 'deepest condolences to the families of those who died … and to all those impacted by the tragedy.' 'After the tragedy occurred, the company permanently wound down operations and directed its resources fully towards cooperating with the Coast Guard's inquiry through its completion,' the spokesperson said. Bad design, toxic workplace The report faulted OceanGate's initial decision to use a carbon-composite hull that was vulnerable to degradation and sudden collapse. It said that mistake was compounded by inadequate measures to certify, maintain and inspect the sub. The investigators cited other factors as well, including a 'toxic workplace culture at OceanGate,' an inadequate regulatory framework — and an ineffective procedure for dealing with a complaint that a whistleblower filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2018. 'It was a long journey, and OSHA were handed everything,' whistleblower David Lochridge, who was fired from his post OceanGate's director of marine operations five years before the fatal dive, told GeekWire via email in June. 'They let us down.' OceanGate's lapses, and Rush's behind-the-scenes attempts to downplay such lapses, came under the spotlight in a series of hearings conducted by the investigative board last summer — and in follow-up documentaries that were released this year. Publicly, Rush contended that OceanGate's submersible technology was too innovative to fit the mold for the standard certification process, and structured the company to avoid being subject to U.S. regulations. Privately, Rush tried to explain away evidence that Titan's hull might crack under the extreme pressures of the deep ocean, and used legal threats to squelch criticism. OceanGate executed several rounds of dives to the Titanic shipwreck in 2021 and 2022, carrying 'mission specialists' who paid as much as $250,000 to participate in the adventure. During one of the dives in 2022, known as Dive 80, a loud bang was heard as the sub was ascending. At the time, OceanGate's team brushed off concerns, saying the noise was merely due to the sub settling into its carrier platform. But after analyzing the acoustic readings, investigators suspect that the noise was actually an early indication of the hull's delamination and failure. The investigators said that Titan's acoustic monitoring system — which Rush had held up as an innovative early warning system — didn't work as advertised. Nevertheless, 2023's catastrophe might have been avoided if OceanGate had paid closer heed to the acoustic readings and conducted a complete hull inspection back at its Everett headquarters. Instead, OceanGate left the sub open to the elements in a parking lot at its Canadian port. 'The pre-existing delamination caused during Dive 80 was likely exacerbated by cyclic thermal changes on the hull throughout its outdoor fall and winter storage in Newfoundland following the 2022 expedition, combined with continual impact damage from towing the submersible thousands of miles across the North Atlantic in moderate sea conditions,' the report said. Still more damage might have been done during a dive that took place just days before the disaster, when a platform malfunction tilted the sub at a 45-degree angle and upended the passengers. The report said that investigators were unable to pinpoint the exact point of failure for Titan's last dive, but added that the facts strongly suggest the most likely initiating point was 'a loss of structural integrity of the carbon fiber or glue joint within the Titan's cylindrical pressure hull.' Next steps in the Titan saga Investigators made more than a dozen safety recommendations, including restricting the research designations for submersibles, expanding regulatory requirements for all submersibles that are conducting scientific or commercial dives, and requiring Coast Guard documentation for all U.S. submersibles. The report recommends establishing an industry working group to review and update the standards for submersibles, with an eye toward allowing new passenger operations under U.S. regulations while reducing the incentive for operators like OceanGate to 'conduct non-compliant operations.' And it calls for a new agreement between OSHA and the Coast Guard to improve interagency coordination and clarify the protocols for following up on whistleblower reports. It will be up to the Coast Guard, other U.S. government agencies and groups such as the International Maritime Organization to follow through on the recommendations. OceanGate is already facing a lawsuit filed by the family of P.H. Nargeolet, seeking $50 million in damages — and now that the investigative report has come out, more legal action may follow.
Washington Post
5 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Marjorie Taylor Greene calls for George Santos' 7-year sentence to be commuted
It might be hard to find someone to have your back in politics if you get caught lying about your life story, become one of a handful of people ever expelled from Congress and then are thrown into federal prison. But George Santos is no ordinary former politician. In a letter Monday, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene formally came to the aid of the disgraced ex-congressman with a request that his seven-year prison sentence be commuted, arguing that the length of the term represented 'a grave injustice.'
