Driver charged with attempted murder in connection with CarMax dealership crash
A 25-year-old man was charged with attempted murder in connection with a vehicle ramming incident that left several people injured at a Los Angeles-area CarMax dealership, court documents show.
Andrew Arroyo was charged with one count of attempted murder and nine counts of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the Saturday afternoon crash on the 8600 block of S. La Cienega Boulevard in Inglewood, California, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday.
Ten people were hurt in the incident, according to the complaint, which noted that one victim was left comatose due to a brain injury.
It was unclear if Arroyo has retained counsel. An email to the county public defender's office was not immediately returned outside regular business hours Tuesday night.
Of the people injured, one was a CarMax employee who was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries and later released, the company said in a statement Tuesday; it had previously said two of the injured were employees.
The driver was a customer who'd had his vehicle appraised, CarMax said.
"Employees share that they observed his behavior turn suddenly erratic, but they did not perceive it to be related to the appraisal offer,' a company spokesperson told NBC Los Angeles.
Video of the crash showed a silver Subaru backing into the business via a doorway before making a turn and driving out via another doorway.
Police said the driver left the store following the crash and turned himself in to the Los Angeles Police Department at a police academy.
"We want to extend our deepest gratitude to the broader Inglewood community for their outpouring of support during this awful event," CarMax said.
Arroyo was also charged with vandalism and hit-and-run resulting in injury, according to the complaint.
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The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Pussy Riot's founder built a ‘police state' in an LA art gallery. Then the national guard arrived
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the co-founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, was sitting in a replica Russian prison cell in downtown Los Angeles when the police started shutting down the streets around the art museum. Police helicopters hovered overhead. Somewhere, through a loudspeaker, an officer delivered a tinny order to disperse. Tolokonnikova was only three and a half days into what was supposed to be a 'durational performance' reenacting her two years as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But Donald Trump had ordered national guard troops into Los Angeles, over the objections of California's governor, and the protests against immigration raids that Trump wanted to target were happening just a block from the gallery where Tolokonnikova was performing. The Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) hastily decided to shut its doors. But Tolokonnikova, 35, whose political art has left her as a wanted criminal in Russia, chose to continue her performance inside the empty museum. 'Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State,' she posted on Instagram. The situation 'felt like I had entered a wormhole,' Tolokonnikova told the Guardian the next day via email. She wanted to be out on the streets, but she decided to finish her performance while live-streaming audio of the protests outside into her prison cell. It felt important, she wrote, 'not to bend to the whims of Ice or the national guard'. Tolokonnikova was in Los Angeles to display a new performance piece called Police State, which includes a replica Russian prison cell like the ones in which she was incarcerated for nearly two years, including in the notorious penal colony IK-14 in Mordovia. Tolokonnikova had been just 22 when she and two other members of Pussy Riot were convicted of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' for staging an anti-Putin 'Punk Prayer' protest in a Moscow cathedral in early 2012. After her release in late 2013, she kept demonstrating, and kept making art. In 2021, the Russian government labeled her a 'foreign agent'. A recent multimedia performance, Putin's Ashes, which came to Los Angeles in 2023, had landed her on Russia's wanted list, and led to her being arrested in absentia for the crime of 'insulting the religious feelings of believers'. Los Angeles was the latest stop in a series of museum exhibitions that had brought the artist to Berlin and Linz in Austria for a show called Wanted. Police State, which was being performed at the Geffen Contemporary at Moca, had been designed for an audience, with museum visitors peering at her through observation holes in the walls, or following the surveillance video from her cell on gallery screens. It was her first time doing a 'durational' performance, and she had planned to spend hours each day inside the cell creating music, mixing it with leaked audio from Russian prisons, and sewing protest slogans on military shirts, all the while surrounded by a crowd of supportive people outside the fake cell walls. Now, suddenly, she was alone again. A block away, protesters had gathered outside the federal buildings where detained immigrants, including families with small children, were reportedly being held in basements, with little food or water. In her replica cell, Tolokonnikova thought about the Los Angeles mothers and fathers who had just been torn away from their families, people who were 'hard-working breadwinners and caretakers', not violent gang members. She looked at the art decorating her cell's walls, drawings sent by current and former political prisoners in Russia and Belarus, 'people imprisoned for 10, 15, 20 years, simply for being good'. 'I was thinking of dehumanization and scapegoating as a universal mechanism – applied with heartbreaking ruthlessness both back home and here,' she wrote in the email. 'I was thinking how the western idea that history inevitably moves toward progress is a mirage.' When her performance hours were done, she walked out into the Los Angeles streets for comfort. It was early Sunday evening, and the protests downtown had been going on most of the afternoon. 'People were giving out gas masks, water, and protective glasses,' she wrote. What captured her attention was not moments that would be played and replayed on the news, like Waymo automated vehicles set on fire, or protesters streaming on to the 101 highway. It was the way being at a protest feels: 'That spirit of care and solidarity is precious,' she wrote. 'People were being shot with rubber bullets and burned by tear gas, yet they refused to leave.' On Wednesday, the museum announced that the rest of Tolokonnikova's performance would have to be postponed indefinitely, because of 'ongoing demonstrations and military activity'. 'Every single event I did in Russia was shut down by the cops,' she posted on Instagram, 'and now it's starting to feel a lot like Russia.' Tolokonnikova, who faces immediate arrest if she returns to Russia, is not an optimist. In recent months, she has repeatedly compared her art practice to the musicians who kept playing on the Titanic as the ship went down. 'I think we live in a world that doesn't really belong to us any more,' she told me in an interview the week before her Los Angeles performance began. 'If 15 years ago, I wanted to radically change the world, now I just want to comfort people.' 'I mean, I still wouldn't mind changing the world,' she added. But at the moment, the change she's seeing 'goes in the opposite direction'. Still, Tolokonnikova, 35, does not take her ability to keep making big art installations for granted. 'It's awesome,' she told me in our Los Angeles interview, as she and her collaborators were working on the final touches to her replica prison cell. 'I don't know if victory is the right word, but it's rewarding.' When I walked inside the replica cell, it was bigger and far more detailed than I expected, with battered, blue-painted plaster walls etched with graffiti, a desk for Tolokonnikov's music equipment, and a toilet in the corner that she planned to use during her performance shifts, which would last either six or eight hours. The floor of the cell was dirty, and the observation holes fit into the walls had heavy metal covers that could slide open or closed. There were surveillance cameras all over the cell, even one pointed at the toilet. The Russian prisons where she was incarcerated had 'cameras right above the toilet bowl, which makes no sense for us people who live outside of jails', she said. 'But once you're in, you kind of just know, well, that's what it is.' We talked with the noise of construction around us, and the sharp smell of iron in the air, a sign of the metalwork in progress nearby. Partway through our conversation, the metalworker approached, wheeling the massive cell door, to ask Tolokonnikova about the finish she wanted on the metal. Each of these details mattered to Tolokonnikova. One of her inspirations for the durational prison performance is her friend Marina Abramović, known as 'the grandmother of performance art'. Another is the late conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov, who had meticulously replicated an old, deteriorating Soviet public bathroom and displayed it in a European gallery so western audiences could understand the context of his art. 'It's one of the works that changed my life for ever,' she said. For authenticity, the table in her cell was covered with a garish plastic tablecloth printed with lemons, a 'very post-Soviet thing' that people incarcerated in Russia use 'to recreate this idea of comfort of coziness, in jail'. To more directly connect her performance to other political prisoners still incarcerated in Russia, Tolokonnikova had collected drawings they had made to display in the cell. This was a laborious process, she explained, working with the prisoners' family members and lawyers, and some of the art had not yet arrived. But she was hopeful that displaying Russian prisoners' work in a prestigious American museum might help their cases, even help them get on a prisoner exchange list. Tolokonnikova and another jailed member of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, staged hunger strikes and drew international attention to the conditions in their different prisons. When she was incarcerated in prison colony No 14 in the Russian region of Mordovia, Tolokonnikova was forced to work 16-hour days, seven days a week, sewing uniforms for police officers. The sewing machine she had used in prison had constantly broken down, something she believes was not a coincidence: the prison staff wanted to make her life 'completely impossible'. A decade later, in her reenactment of prison life, Tolokonnikova was planning to again sew military-style uniforms on a battered old sewing machine, but this time she would be embellishing them with 'some simple words that mean something to me like exiled or voided, cancelled, expelled, alien – how I feel these days''. She would trim some of the uniforms with lace, she added, 'because I always like to add some cuteness'. The lives of Russian dissidents are not easy, and becoming a prominent Putin critic, as Tolokonnikova has done, is dangerous, even after dissidents have left Russia. One of the art works in Tolokonnikova's Los Angeles exhibit is a candy machine labeled with the different poisons that have been used to murder enemies of the Russian state: Polonium 210 Isotope, Thallium, Sarin. On certain subjects, Tolokonnikovia can be laconic, even dismissive. Asked about how she was preparing to protect her mental health while reenacting her imprisonment in Los Angeles, she said she had not really made any plans. 'Self-care is not my strong suit. I'm just like: I don't have time for this.' When it came to performance, she said, Ambramović had told her several years ago that 'once you commit to an idea, it basically negates all the fear' and that 'if you believe that the particular artistic idea that you chose is good enough, then you just kind of don't care about physical safety, or emotional safety'. 'I'm sure it's gonna be triggering as fuck at some points for me to sit there,' she added. 'But do I care? No. Because I think the work has to be done, and I'll deal with it later.' Tolokonnika's punk aesthetic is not something she adopts for performances. She told me cheerfully about almost getting blown up by pyrotechnics at a recent unauthorized concert, and praised the work of LA's Dead City Punx, a hardcore punk band and one of her planned collaborators in Los Angeles. 'One thing that I just don't vibe with in modern American society – there's an entire thing about safety. And I've lived my life in a way that safety was the last thing that I would care about,' she said. 'This is a thing I think about a lot lately. We need to be less safe, be ready to offend ourselves and other people. Otherwise, Maga people are just going to keep winning, because they're not afraid.' Tolokonnikova told me she had hoped that people would come to her Moca exhibit with their children. 'I've always been obsessed with building a version of Disneyland, but much more radical and grim,' she said. She had worked with Banksy on Dismaland, the artist's 2015 dark Disney satire, but she's still thinking about the possibilities of a more revolutionary theme park. 'It's just a giant waste of time and money the way that Disneyland looks now. It just doesn't accomplish anything,' she said. Imagine, she suggested, if the animatronic characters of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride were instead a way for kids 'to learn the history of the feminist movement'. 'So instead of pirates doing this,' she said, jerking her arms, 'it could be like, you're a suffragette being arrested.' 'Obviously, I don't have a budget to build Disneyland,' she added. 'But it was a dream of mine for ever.' Police State had been scheduled to run through June 13, with a final performance by Pussy Riot Siberia, Tolokonnikova's new performance collective, to close it out. Now, it is postponed to an unknown date in the future. 'I guess the National Guard will be performing POLICE STATE instead of me this week,' Tolokonnikova wrote on Instagram.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
The rise of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's hardline immigration policy
With Los Angeles convulsed by confrontation between pro-migrant protesters and military units dispatched by Donald Trump, no figure apart from the president has loomed larger than Stephen Miller. As the man in the Oval Office, it is Trump who has absorbed the accusations of authoritarianism for usurping the powers of California's government after deploying 4,000 national guard troops and 700 active marines on to the streets of a city that is home to more undocumented immigrants than any other in the US. Behind the scenes, however, this has been the apogee of Miller's power – and an episode that illuminated his power in a White House where his influence far outstrips his misleadingly modest title of deputy chief of staff. Miller, 39, may have been the true catalyst for the volatile scenes that played out over several days in the city of his birth. As the long-term architect of Trump's years-long effort to reinvent US immigration policy, he has pressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to intensify efforts to arrest migrants as deportation figures fell far short of pre-election promises. At a meeting at Ice's Washington headquarters last month, Miller ordered them to skip the usual practice of compiling lists of suspected illegal migrants and instead target Home Depot, where day laborers gather for short-term hire, and 7-Eleven stores, to carry out mass arrests, the Wall Street Journal reported. Ice would aim for a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day, he told Fox News – a figure exceeding previous estimates, based on assumptions that those with criminal records would be prioritised. It also seemed to raise the risk of mistakes and wrongful arrests. Accordingly, Ice has drastically stepped up its arrest rate – and broadened the profile of those targeted. The results have been plain to see. As demonstrators took to the streets, Miller promptly raised the stakes by accusing them of an 'insurrection'. Amid the hullabaloo and expressions of outrage, Miller may allowed himself a quiet smile of satisfaction over sticking it to the city of his birth – in many ways emblematic of the progressive cultural trends despised by Trump's 'make America great again' (Maga) followers but a place where his own hardline anti-immigrant views had long provoked derision. The son of affluent Jewish parents, Miller's evolution into a race-baiting provocateur took shape in the upscale suburb of Santa Monica, where he gained notoriety as an incendiary agitator at the eponymous local high school. Video footage purportedly from the period and circulated on social media shows a bearded Miller stridently voicing his disdainful view of school janitorial staff 'Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do this,' he shouts into a microphone. The gross statement seems to have been representative of a broader canvas of toxic ideas, with racism at its core. In Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, to date the only biography published on Miller, author Jean Guerrero recounts one episode from the future political operative's adolescence, when he suddenly ditched a close friend, Jason Islas, on the grounds of his ethnicity. 'The conversation was remarkably calm,' Islas, a Mexican American, is quoted saying. 'He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.' An article he wrote as a 16-year-old for a local website expresses contempt for fellow students of Hispanic origin. 'When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills,' Miller wrote on the Surfsantamonica site. 'There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.' The school, he added, was one where 'Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome' – a view reflecting the then recentness of the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaida and also Miller's increasing focus on Muslims. Miller's indulgence in far-right ideas continued during his college years at Duke University in North Carolina, where he associated with white nationalist thinkers and groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he worked with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which it defined as a 'an anti-Muslim hate group', and also with Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader who popularized the term 'alt-right' to describe groups that defined themselves through a white racial identity. After graduating, Miller moved to Washington to work in Congress, serving first as a press secretary to Michele Bachmann, then a Republican representative for Minnesota, before moving to work for Jeff Sessions, at the time a rightwing Alabama senator who later became Trump's first attorney general. It was in the latter role that his reputation as an avatar of extreme anti-immigrant agitprop became established. In 2013, helped by Miller, Sessions torpedoed a bipartisan piece of legislation that was intended to pave the way for immigration for undocumented migrants. To help sink the bill, Miller used Breitbart News, a rightwing website then headed by Steve Bannon. It would prove to be a fateful connection. The Breitbert connection also shone further light on Miller's views on race and immigration, as revealed in emails he sent to editors and reporters. They showed a preoccupation with the 1924 Immigration Act, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, which severely restricted immigration to the US from certain parts of the world on what observers say were racial and eugenics grounds. Hitler subsequently praised the legislation as a model for Germany in Mein Kampf. After Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 - creating scandalizing headlines by demonizing Mexican immigrants as 'drug dealers, criminals and rapists', Miller took a leave of absence from Sessions' Senate office to work for him. On the recommendation of Bannon, by then Trump's campaign chief, he was installed as a speech writer, chiefly because of his focus on immigration, which had become the candidate's own signature issue. It enabled Miller to showcase his ability to channel Trump's inner self. The pair have politically inseparable ever since. Miller wrote Trump's dystopian 'American carnage' speech for his first inauguration in January 2017. As a senior policy adviser in the first Trump administration, it was Miller who was behind some of its most notorious policy initiatives. These included the so-called 'Muslim ban' on travellers from seven majority-Muslim countries and the practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border. His growing notoriety as an anti-immigration extremist drew criticism from his own relatives. In 2018, his maternal uncle, David Glosser, branded him a 'hypocrite' for ignoring the memory of his ancestors, who fled antisemitic pogroms in tsarist Russia. 'I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family's life in this country,' Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote in Politico. Miller cared little for such sentimentality. After Trump's defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Miller stuck with the former president – even while his political future initially looked doomed in the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 attack by his supporters on the US Capitol. Consequently, he grew ever more powerful in Trump's inner circle. He may have earned extra kudos by declining to exploit their relationship to win lucrative consulting contracts, instead setting up a non-profit, the America First Legal foundation. Meanwhile, he immersed himself in studying how to overcome the hurdles that stymied Trump's agenda during his first presidency. The outcome has been apparent in the blizzard of executive orders druing the restored president's first months back in the White House. Miller purposely sought to 'flood the zone' in a manner that would overwhelm the capacity of the courts – or the media – to respond. No order was more quintessentially Miller's than that issued on the day of Trump's second inauguration on 20 January, which attempted to cancel birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants. The order was challenged in the courts and is now with the supreme court after the administration challenged the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions supporting a right that is guaranteed in the US constitution. Miller's anti-immigrant zeal has at times exceeded even that of Trump. According to the New York Times, the president told a campaign meeting last year that if it was up to Miller, there would only be 100 million people living in the US – and all of them would look like Miller. The bond between the two men has grown to such an extent that Miller has been dubbed 'the president's id' in some circles. 'He has been for a while. It's just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it,' an unnamed former Trump adviser told NBC. Others have called him 'the most consequential' White House official since Dick Cheney, who exercised vast influence as vice-president under George W Bush. Critics cast Miller as the root of all evil in Trump's White House. 'Stephen Miller is responsible for all the bad things happening in the United States,' NBC quoted Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic senator for New Mexico, as saying. Miller's exalted place at Trump's side was illustrated during the recent Signalgate episode – as revealed by the Atlantic, whose editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently invited into a government chat group to discuss airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen, whose missile attacks on Israel threatened Suez canal shipping routes. When JD Vance questioned the strikes – asking whether Trump 'is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe' – Miller unambiguously slapped the vice-president down. 'As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,' Miller said, according to the transcript. The clearest testimony to Miller's status has come from Trump himself. Asked by Kristen Welker, the moderator of NBC's Meet the Press, about speculation that Miller might become national security adviser, a usually influential White House post currently filled, albeit temporarily, by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after the previous incumbent, Mike Waltz, was fired. 'Stephen is much higher on the totem pole than that,' Trump replied. The result is that Miller's presence is detectable in all policy areas, including at the state department, where he succeeded in having his ally, Christopher Landau, installed as Rubio's deputy. The goal is to control the flow of foreigners entering the United States, insiders have told the Guardian. At the state department, Landau has become an important liaison to officials in the consular affairs section, which has been put under the leadership of a conservative coterie of diplomats and reoriented toward policing migration. Officials from the state department have joined FBI agents on recent Ice raids aimed at tracking down unregistered migrants. Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, laments that Miller's rising star means he can 'use the powers of the federal government to unleash his fascist worldview'. '[That view] has now been transformed into the main political policy and aim of Donald Trump's presidency,' said Setmayer, who now heads the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee. 'The demagoguery of immigration has long been at the centre of Donald Trump's political rise, and Stephen Miller's desire to make America whiter and less diverse, married with the power of the presidency without guardrails, is incredibly dangerous and should concern every American who believes in the rule of law.' Andrew Roth and David Smith contributed reporting
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
‘No Kings' protests span 2,000 locations across the US
Nationwide 'No Kings' demonstrations spanned 2,000 locations, protesting against President Trump and his administration. Protests were largely peaceful, but clashes with police were reported in some areas, including downtown Los Angeles, where tear gas was used to disperse crowds. In San Francisco and Virginia, drivers struck protesters, with police investigating the incidents as possible intentional acts. Law enforcement officials in Texas evacuated the state capitol in Austin following a 'credible threat' to lawmakers attending the protests. Demonstrations took place in numerous cities, including West Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and New York, with speakers like Rep. Jamie Raskin and Martin Luther King Jr's eldest son addressing crowds.
