
Friend charged with giving alcohol to underage Pirates fan who fell
Kavan Markwood, 20, tumbled over the railing in right field during an April 30 game against the Chicago Cubs, plummeting 21 feet onto the warning track.
Ethan Kirkwood, 21, was charged Tuesday with two counts of furnishing alcohol to a minor "originating from an incident in which an underage male fell off the outfield wall at PNC Park," according to a Pennsylvania State Police public information release.
Kirkwood has a preliminary hearing scheduled for June 23, according to CNN Sports. The misdemeanor charge carries a fine of up to $1,000 for the first violation.
Hospitalized in critical condition with injuries to his back and neck after the incident, Markwood told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in an interview on May 8 that he had "broken everything."
--Field Level Media
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The Independent
a minute ago
- The Independent
Ranger fired for hanging transgender flag in Yosemite and park visitors may face prosecution
A Yosemite National Park ranger was fired after hanging a pride flag from El Capitan while some visitors face potential prosecution for alleged violations of protest restrictions that have been tightened under President Donald Trump. Shannon 'SJ' Joslin, a ranger and biologist who studies bats, said they hung a 66-foot wide transgender pride flag on the famous climbing wall that looms over the California park's main thoroughfare for about two hours on May 20 before taking it down voluntarily. A termination letter they received last week accused Joslin of 'failing to demonstrate acceptable conduct" in their capacity as a biologist and cited the May demonstration. 'I was really hurting because there were a lot of policies coming from the current administration that target trans people, and I'm nonbinary,' Joslin, 35, told The Associated Press, adding that hanging the flag was a way to 'tell myself ... that we're all safe in national parks.' Joslin said their firing sends the opposite message: "If you're a federal worker and you have any kind of identity that doesn't agree with this current administration, then you must be silent, or you will be eliminated.' Park officials on Tuesday said they were working with the U.S. Justice Department to pursue visitors and workers who violated restrictions on demonstrations at the park that had more than 4 million visitors last year. The agencies "are pursuing administrative action against several Yosemite National Park employees and possible criminal charges against several park visitors who are alleged to have violated federal laws and regulations related to demonstrations," National Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz said. Joslin said a group of seven climbers including two other park rangers hung the flag. The other rangers are on administrative leave pending an investigation, Joslin said. Flags have long been displayed from El Capitan without consequences, said Joanna Citron Day, a former federal attorney who is now with the advocacy group Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility. She said the group is representing Joslin, but there is no pending legal case. On May 21, a day after the flag display, Acting Superintendent Ray McPadden signed a rule prohibiting people from hanging banners, flags or signs larger than 15 square feet in park areas designated as 'wilderness' or 'potential wilderness.' That covers 94% of the park, according to Yosemite's website. Parks officials defend restriction on protests Parks officials said the new restriction on demonstrations was needed to preserve Yosemite's wilderness and protect climbers. 'We take the protection of the park's resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences,' Pawlitz said. It followed a widely publicized instance in February of demonstrators hanging an upside down American flag on El Capitan in the wake of the firing of National Park Service employees by the Trump administration. Among the small group of climbers who helped hang the flag was Pattie Gonia, an environmentalist and drag queen who uses the performance art to raise awareness of conservation issues. For the past five years, Gonia has helped throw a Pride event in Yosemite for park employees and their allies. She said they hung the transgender flag on the granite monolith to drive home the point that being transgender is natural. Trump has limited access to gender-affirming medical treatments, banned trans women from competing in women's sports, removed trans people from the military and changed the federal definition of sex to exclude the concept of gender identity. Gonia called the firing unjust. Joslin said they hung the flag in their free time, as a private citizen. 'SJ is a respected pillar within the Yosemite community, a tireless volunteer who consistently goes above and beyond," Gonia said. Jayson O'Neill with the advocacy group Save Our Parks said Joslin's firing appears aimed at intimidating park employees about expressing their views as the Trump administration pursues broad cuts to the federal workforce. Since Trump took office, the National Park Service has lost approximately 2,500 employees from a workforce that had about 10,000 people, Wade said. The Republican president is proposing a $900 million cut to the agency's budget next year. Parks have First Amendment areas Pawlitz said numerous visitors complained about unauthorized demonstrations on El Capitan earlier in the year. Many parks have designated 'First Amendment areas' where groups 25 or fewer people can protest without a permit. Yosemite has several First Amendment areas, including one in Yosemite Valley, where El Capitan is located. Park service rules on demonstrations have been around for decades and withstood several court challenges, said Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers. He was not aware of any changes in how those rules are enforced under Trump. ___ Associated Press journalist Brittany Peterson contributed reporting from Denver.

The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Idaho students' killer had reputation for being sexist and creepy, records reveal
Bryan Kohberger developed a reputation for being sexist and creepy while attending a criminal justice program in the months before he killed four University of Idaho students in 2022, fellow grad students told investigators. His behavior was so problematic that one Washington State University faculty member told co-workers that if he ever became a professor, he would probably stalk or sexually abuse his future students, according to the documents. She urged her co-workers to cut Kohberger's funding to remove him from the program. 'He is smart enough that in four years we will have to give him a PhD,' the woman told her colleagues, according to the report from Idaho state police detective Ryan O'Harra. She continued: 'Mark my word, I work with predators, if we give him a PhD, that's the guy [in] many years when he is a professor, we will hear is harassing, stalking, and sexually abusing … his students at wherever university.' Summaries of the interviews with students and instructors at Washington State University were included among more than 550 pages of investigation documents released by Idaho state police in recent days in response to public record requests. Kohberger was sentenced to life in prison without parole in July for the stabbing murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin at a rental home near the Moscow, Idaho, campus early on 13 November 2022. The WSU faculty member told investigators that Kohberger would sometimes go into an office where several female grad students worked, physically blocking the door. Sometimes, she would hear one of the women say, 'I really need to get out of here,' so she would intercede by going into the office to allow the student to leave. The faculty member believed Kohberger was stalking people. She told police that someone had reportedly broken into a female graduate student's apartment in September or October, stealing perfume and underwear. An unnamed PhD student who was in the same program as Kohberger told police that he enjoyed conflict, was disparaging toward women and that he especially liked to talk about sexual burglary – his field of study. Some people in the department thought he was a possible future rapist and speculated that he might be an 'incel', or involuntary celibate, she told the officer. About three weeks after the murders, Kohberger told the PhD student that whoever had committed the crimes 'must have been pretty good', Idaho state police detective Sgt Michael Van Leuven wrote in a report. Kohberger also told the woman that the murders might have been a 'one and done type thing, Van Leuven wrote. The woman 'said she had never met anyone who acted in such a condescending manner and wondered why people in power in the department did not address his behavior', Van Leuven wrote. 'The way he spoke to females in the department was unsettling to them.' One instructor told police that she was assigned to work with Kohberger on his doctoral program. In late August 2022, she said she began receiving complaints about him from students and staff in the criminal justice program. The instructor told police that she spent 'a lot of time' speaking about Kohberger during disciplinary meetings. 'The meetings focused around Kohberger's interactions with fellow post-graduate students, in and out of the classroom, along with his behavior around some of the criminal justice professors,' according to an investigator's report. The school got nine separate complaints from faculty members, administration staffers and other students about his 'rude and belittling behavior toward women', Idaho state police detective Sean Prosser wrote in a report. In response, the school held a mandatory training class for all graduate students about behavior expectations. Many of Kohberger's fellow students and instructors at WSU did not suspect his involvement in the killings, according to the police reports. But at least one fellow student noticed his behavior changed after the murders. The student said Kohberger frequently used his phone before the killings – but stopped bringing his cellphone to class after the murders. He also appeared more disheveled in the weeks after the killings, the student told police, and she thought it was odd that he never participated in conversations about the Moscow deaths. She eventually called a police tip line to report that she had seen Kohberger with bloody knuckles just before the killings and his hand looked like he had been hitting something.

Daily Mail
32 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Wife, 55, fatally shoots husband after argument over changing their open marriage agreement
A Georgia woman will spend the rest of her life behind bars after she drunkenly shot and killed her husband amid a dispute over their open marriage. Cheryl Howell Coe, 55, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the June 2021 shooting of Luther 'Luke' Coe III, 48, inside their home, the Newnan Times-Herald reports. Officials with the Cowetta County Sheriff's Office have said they responded at around 7.30pm on June 23, 2021 moments after Cheryl reported that she shot her husband when she mistook him for an intruder. In body camera footage from the scene, Cheryl told deputies she drank four or five ciders while her husband worked in a detached garage, before she ultimately took a Klonopin and went to bed. She said she was woken up a short time later to an unknown person entering her bedroom, which prompted her to grab her pistol from the nightstand. 'I was just trying to protect myself,' Cheryl said in the body camera footage, which was played at her week-long retrial this month. She went on to claim she did not realize the person entering the room was her husband until he said, 'Cheryl, you shot me.' By the time deputies arrived on the scene, Cheryl was seen applying pressure on her husband's wound as he told authorities, 'I can't breathe.' He was then rushed to the hospital, but soon succumbed to his injuries. Cheryl's story quickly fell apart, however, when the medical examiner found that Luther had suffered from a contact bullet wound - meaning the rifle was pressed against his body and was not fired from a distance as his wife had claimed. Investigators then also uncovered lengthy text message exchanges between the husband and wife in which they appeared to have some issues with their open marriage in the days leading up to the fatal shooting. According to the messages, Cheryl had asked Luther for permission to see another man later in the week. Luther replied by asking his wife if she was planning on seeing another man as well, to which she replied that she could - ending her message with 'lol,' the Times-Herald reports. Luther then replied that her response 'turned his stomach,' at which point Cheryl proposed ending the open marriage - saying she believed it was the cause of their marital issues. But Luther apparently wanted to keep the open marriage going, and they established more ground rules. Other text messages detailed another dispute between the husband and wife, with her accusing him of telling a friend about their private disagreements. Luther became enraged by the accusation and told his wife he needed some time to himself, prosecutors argued. Finally, on the day of the shooting, Cheryl said Luther informed her he was ready to talk. But when she returned home from work that night, her husband and his son were still in the detached workshop on their property and so Cheryl decided to retire to the back porch, where she downed several hard ciders. She said Luther never came back and after an hour on the porch, she went to bed. When the door then swung open, Cheryl said she fired two shots, aiming at the ceiling and behind the television, in hopes that the gunfire would alert her husband in the workshop. But when Cheryl was later confronted by the fact that she called 911 just 11 minutes after she claimed she went to bed, the defendant changed her story and admitted she knew it was Luther entering the room. She claimed she could hear his 'thunderous footsteps' and yelling before he entered their bedroom, where she said Luther told her to 'get her ass out of bed' and dragged her from the mattress. 'I just wanted to be left alone and he wasn't having it,' Cheryl told police. 'He was dragging me out of bed.' When Luther then briefly left the room, Cheryl said she grabbed her pistol and fired a warning shot, which made him 'angry and aggressive,' at which point she fired a second shot to scare him off. 'I wasn't trying to hit him,' she insisted. Cheryl also told police about her and her husband's BDSM practices, saying she was the 'submissive' one but arguing Luther's behavior that night was 'different.' Taking the stand at her trial, Cheryl reiterated her self-defense claims as she described how her husband had become more aggressive with her. She said he once pulled her leg out from under her as she walked down the porch stairs, causing her to suffer a tear in her buttocks and an indentation that required surgery to fully heal. Cheryl also said their BDSM practices became more violent, even though she asked him to stop. 'I didn't enjoy the pain,' she testified. 'He would coerce me and tell me I was doing this for him and [it] made him happy.' On the night of the murder, Cheryl said Luther began to charge at her when she fired the second shot. 'I never told anyone anything about the bad parts of our relationship,' she claimed. 'Luke had a great reputation and [I] did everything I could to protect it.' The 48-year-old had his own business, Platinum Demolition & Grading LLC and had served in the United States Army, according to his obituary. But during closing arguments, prosecutor Laura Lukat focused on Cheryl's changing stories - and argued that even if her justification for shooting her husband were true, it did not justify the use of deadly force. 'She brought a gun to a verbal spat,' Lukat said. 'She brought a gun to a situation that might have ended with one of them staying at a friend's.' Cheryl was ultimately found guilty on all the charges against her - one count of malice murder, one count of felony murder and one count of aggravated assault.



