Latest news with #Wagoner
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Yahoo
Man sentenced for home burglaries targeting Asian families
A man from Seattle—who prosecutors said terrorized Seattle's Asian community with home invasion robberies—was sentenced last Friday. Prosecutors explained that 28-year-old Demarcus Pate was part of a group that targeted the Asian community, particularly the elderly, during the summer of 2023. In some cases, they followed their victims home. In other cases, they approached victims getting out of their cars in their driveways. Pate was charged with a hate crime and confessed. 'This individual pled guilty to not only unlawful possession of a firearm, and two counts of burglary, but also a hate crime for the intentional targeting of Asian households,' Douglas Wagoner with the King County Prosecutor's Office said. The crime spree happened in the summer of 2023, a particularly troubling year for hate crimes involving the Asian community. They were fearful for their safety and had to take extra steps to protect themselves. 'We saw 114 anti-Asian hate crimes charged by our office, and that was the most of any year we have on record,' Wagoner said. Pate eventually pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison. Prosecutors said that when community safety has been violated, and there is evidence of a crime, charges will follow. 'Home invasions, cases that involve burglary, property crimes, or hate crimes, you're going to see King County prosecutors bring those cases to the courtroom and seek justice,' Wagoner said. There are additional cases against other suspects in this case that are ongoing. Defendants are innocent until proven guilty. King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion is working to bring greater accountability for hate crimes this legislative session with HB 1052, which was approved by the Washington State Legislature and is on Gov. Bob Ferguson's desk pending signature. This legislation would allow prosecutors statewide to charge hate crimes motivated 'in whole or in part' because of the defendant's perception of the victim's 'race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, or mental, physical, or sensory disability. "When there is evidence to show that people were victimized by a hate crime – in whole or in part because of a defendant's bias – those perpetrators must be held accountable. Prosecutors need this legal fix to ensure that happens,' King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion said. 'I appreciate the leadership of Rep. Cindy Ryu and Sen. Manka Dhingra to hold people accountable when they act out from a place of hate.' From 2018-April 20, 2025, the KCPAO charged 53 anti-Asian hate crimes after referrals from police investigators. The years with the specific number of anti-Asian hate crimes: 2018: 4 2019: 2 2020: 7 2021: 13 2022: 8 2023: 14 2024: 5
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
Former Greenpeace employee tells jury he emphasized nonviolence at Dakota Access Pipeline protests
Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline camp north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Nov. 30, 2016, outside Cannon Ball, N.D. Greenpeace employees helped winterize the camp and provided training sessions to protesters, but the organization denies encouraging violent tactics. (Photo by) A former Greenpeace employee who trained demonstrators during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests told jurors Tuesday that he never engaged in underhanded efforts to undermine the pipeline. Greenpeace has spent the last two weeks on trial in Morton County District Court related to its involvement in the protests against the pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Thousands of protesters camped in south central North Dakota just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the pipeline now crosses under the Missouri River. The demonstrations were started by tribal members who oppose the pipeline out of the belief that it threatens the tribe's water supply, has harmed sacred cultural sites and infringes on unceded Sioux Nation land. Dakota Access Pipeline developer outlines damage claims, rests case against Greenpeace Pipeline developer Energy Transfer claims that Greenpeace encouraged protesters to cause millions of dollars of damages to the pipeline, and that it deliberately defamed the company in order to get banks to divest. Energy Transfer has held out Navajo activist and former Greenpeace employee Cy Wagoner as a key figure in this plan. Greenpeace hijacked what was otherwise a peaceful and locally led movement, the company claims. Attorneys for Energy Transfer say Greenpeace paid thousands to send Wagoner and others affiliated with the Native activist group Indigenous Peoples Power Project to teach protesters to use tactics including vandalism, trespassing and intimidation to stop the pipeline. Wagoner on Tuesday said none of this is true. He said that he and his fellow trainers were committed to nonviolence, and that their training sessions reflected this. Wagoner said during the trainings, he told attendees to follow the leadership of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and to conduct themselves respectfully at all times. The training included admonitions against using violence, as well as instruction about deescalation tactics, he said. He also said the trainings he and others provided were not Greenpeace's idea. The tribe asked him to come to Standing Rock to educate people about nonviolent protest tactics, he said. Wagoner said he then sought grant money from Greenpeace to support the effort. The grant included money for travel, lodging, food, camping supplies and winter gear, he said. Wagoner said that if Greenpeace hadn't agreed to provide that grant, he and the other trainers would have found other funding. Over the course of the trial, attorneys for Energy Transfer have repeatedly brought up a text that Wagoner sent to a colleague about the nature of the protests. 'I would not be OK to replicate things that happened there,' he wrote. Wagoner said Tuesday that the message was taken out of context. He said he was referring to challenges to the Indigenous Peoples Power Project faced providing nonviolent direct action training. By the time he first arrived at the camps, he said other groups not affiliated with the Indigenous Peoples Power Project or or Greenpeace were already providing training of their own. North Dakota Supreme Court denies petition to move Greenpeace trial to different court He said he believes that training did not place the same emphasis on nonviolence or safety, though he acknowledged he did not attend any. As a result, demonstrators were putting themselves in danger and getting arrested, he said. Trey Cox, an attorney representing Energy Transfer, questioned Wagoner over whether the trainers encouraged protesters to use lockbox devices — also known as 'sleeping dragons' — to tie themselves to construction equipment and render it unusable. Energy Transfer has placed a considerable amount of emphasis on lockboxes as evidence of the lengths Greenpeace allegedly went to stop the pipeline. Some Greenpeace employees acknowledged during previous testimony that the organization brought lockboxes to the protest camps, though Wagoner said Tuesday he was not aware of this. He said that he never instructed anyone to use the devices. Cox showed Wagoner photos from the protests that appeared to show three other Indigenous Peoples Power Project members using lockboxes, including one who was receiving money from Greenpeace to train protesters. Wagoner said he never used lockboxes and did not encourage others to do so. 'They made decisions on their own,' he said. Greenpeace started presenting its case Monday afternoon. On Tuesday, an attorney representing Greenpeace said the defense could wrap up its case as early as Friday. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
Former Greenpeace employee tells jury he emphasized nonviolence at Dakota Access Pipeline protests
Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline camp north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Nov. 30, 2016, outside Cannon Ball, N.D. Greenpeace employees helped winterize the camp and provided training sessions to protesters, but the organization denies encouraging violent tactics. (Photo by) A former Greenpeace employee who trained demonstrators during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests told jurors Tuesday that he never engaged in underhanded efforts to undermine the pipeline. Greenpeace has spent the last two weeks on trial in Morton County District Court related to its involvement in the protests against the pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Thousands of protesters camped in south central North Dakota just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the pipeline now crosses under the Missouri River. The demonstrations were started by tribal members who oppose the pipeline out of the belief that it threatens the tribe's water supply, has harmed sacred cultural sites and infringes on unceded Sioux Nation land. Dakota Access Pipeline developer outlines damage claims, rests case against Greenpeace Pipeline developer Energy Transfer claims that Greenpeace encouraged protesters to cause millions of dollars of damages to the pipeline, and that it deliberately defamed the company in order to get banks to divest. Energy Transfer has held out Navajo activist and former Greenpeace employee Cy Wagoner as a key figure in this plan. Greenpeace hijacked what was otherwise a peaceful and locally led movement, the company claims. Attorneys for Energy Transfer say Greenpeace paid thousands to send Wagoner and others affiliated with the Native activist group Indigenous Peoples Power Project to teach protesters to use tactics including vandalism, trespassing and intimidation to stop the pipeline. Wagoner on Tuesday said none of this is true. He said that he and his fellow trainers were committed to nonviolence, and that their training sessions reflected this. Wagoner said during the trainings, he told attendees to follow the leadership of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and to conduct themselves respectfully at all times. The training included admonitions against using violence, as well as instruction about deescalation tactics, he said. He also said the trainings he and others provided were not Greenpeace's idea. The tribe asked him to come to Standing Rock to educate people about nonviolent protest tactics, he said. Wagoner said he then sought grant money from Greenpeace to support the effort. The grant included money for travel, lodging, food, camping supplies and winter gear, he said. Wagoner said that if Greenpeace hadn't agreed to provide that grant, he and the other trainers would have found other funding. Over the course of the trial, attorneys for Energy Transfer have repeatedly brought up a text that Wagoner sent to a colleague about the nature of the protests. 'I would not be OK to replicate things that happened there,' he wrote. Wagoner said Tuesday that the message was taken out of context. He said he was referring to challenges to the Indigenous Peoples Power Project faced providing nonviolent direct action training. By the time he first arrived at the camps, he said other groups not affiliated with the Indigenous Peoples Power Project or or Greenpeace were already providing training of their own. North Dakota Supreme Court denies petition to move Greenpeace trial to different court He said he believes that training did not place the same emphasis on nonviolence or safety, though he acknowledged he did not attend any. As a result, demonstrators were putting themselves in danger and getting arrested, he said. Trey Cox, an attorney representing Energy Transfer, questioned Wagoner over whether the trainers encouraged protesters to use lockbox devices — also known as 'sleeping dragons' — to tie themselves to construction equipment and render it unusable. Energy Transfer has placed a considerable amount of emphasis on lockboxes as evidence of the lengths Greenpeace allegedly went to stop the pipeline. Some Greenpeace employees acknowledged during previous testimony that the organization brought lockboxes to the protest camps, though Wagoner said Tuesday he was not aware of this. He said that he never instructed anyone to use the devices. Cox showed Wagoner photos from the protests that appeared to show three other Indigenous Peoples Power Project members using lockboxes, including one who was receiving money from Greenpeace to train protesters. Wagoner said he never used lockboxes and did not encourage others to do so. 'They made decisions on their own,' he said. Greenpeace started presenting its case Monday afternoon. On Tuesday, an attorney representing Greenpeace said the defense could wrap up its case as early as Friday. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Yahoo
Suspect charged for shooting on North Kansas Expressway
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — A 19-year-old has been arrested and charged in connection with Monday's shooting on North Kansas Expressway. According to online court records, Rominn Wagoner has been charged with first-degree assault, unlawful use of a weapon and two counts of armed criminal action. A probable cause statement from the Springfield Police Department says officers were called to a strip mall on North Kansas Expressway at around 1:30 p.m. on Monday, March 3 for reports of shots fired. Officers spoke to the victim, who told SPD he had been in a disturbance with two suspects in the parking lot of a nearby Walmart. Documents say officers observed a gunshot wound to the victim's back left torso and several bullet holes in his vehicle, a gray Audi. Surveillance video from the Walmart store captured two males getting out of a white car as the victim pulled into the parking space directly behind them. According to documents, the victim and the occupants of the white car appeared to be in an argument. Documents say the passenger of the white car, later identified as Wagoner, is seen on video pulling a handgun and firing multiple times at the victim's vehicle as it sped off. Wagoner also fled the area on foot. When police later found the suspects' white Nissan, documents say it was parked outside an unidentified apartment complex. Additional surveillance footage from the complex showed the car pulling in at around 1:39 p.m. and parking. Wagoner is seen getting out of the back seat, according to documents, then disappears from camera view with the juvenile suspect who was driving the vehicle at the time of the shooting. When Wagoner comes back into view of the surveillance camera, documents say he was wearing different clothes than those he was wearing during the incident. Police later arrested Wagoner and spoke with him at the Greene County Jail. According to documents, Wagoner told police the juvenile suspect had driven them to the Walmart parking lot when the victim stopped behind them and started threatening the juvenile. Wagoner also admitted to being armed with a handgun and shooting at the victim because he continued threatening them. Court documents note that SPD had seen Wagoner on surveillance video chasing after the victim's vehicle as it sped away. Documents say Wagoner admitted to changing his clothes and also told SPD the juvenile had picked him up in a neighborhood east of where the incident occurred before driving to the apartment complex. Wagoner is currently being held in the Greene County Jail without bond. Bill Prince, Chief Juvenile Officer, says the juvenile suspect is currently being held pending a detention hearing that is expected to happen by the end of the week. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ethics violation lodged against former CalRecycle director
For lawmakers and lobbyists who worked on ensuring the passage of California's landmark plastic waste law, Rachel Wagoner's abrupt career shift was nothing short of jaw dropping. The former director of CalRecycle — who oversaw, wrote and promoted the single-use plastic legislation known as SB 54 — is now the executive director of the Circular Action Alliance, a coalition of plastic and packaging companies determined to delay, if not derail, the law. And it's not clear her pivot is legal. On Feb. 19, an anonymous whistleblower submitted a formal complaint to California's Fair Political Practices Commission, asking the agency to investigate Wagoner on the grounds that she violated a 'switching sides' ban that prevents former regulators from receiving compensation to work against the state on matters they once oversaw. "It's pretty egregious," said Sean McMorris, transparency, ethics and accountability program manager for California Common Cause, a political watchdog group. "I don't know how else to say it, regardless of whether any laws were broken or not, the public's going to look at that and say, 'What's going on here? This is pretty suspicious.'" Read more: California banned polystyrene. Has the plastic industry spooked the governor into silence? Others say Wagoner was instrumental in pushing for regulations and language she is now calling problematic. "It certainly raises a lot of concerns," said Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), who authored and sponsored the original legislation. Wagoner did not respond to questions from The Times, but in an email exchange from Feb. 12, she did said she was proud of the time she worked for the state government and feels privileged to have been asked to advise companies and to provide "information on SB 54 and California environmental and regulatory laws and processes." She said she does not advocate for the companies she represents in her new role — which include some of the world's largest producers and distributors of plastic packaging, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, Conagra, Procter & Gamble and Target. She said she just provides them with information. Larine Urbina, a spokesperson for the coalition, said the state's political practices commission had not reached out to her organization, and therefore "it wouldn't be appropriate for me to comment at this time." SB 54, the plastic waste law Wagoner helped craft, was designed to reduce single-use plastics and packaging and shift the responsibility of plastic waste to the companies that manufacturer, market or sell those products — and away from the consumer and local jurisdictions. That can be done either by reducing the amount of single-use plastics these companies create and sell, or by manufacturing products that can be recycled or composted. According to one state analysis, 2.9 million tons of single-use plastic and 171.4 billion single-use plastic components were sold, offered for sale or distributed during 2023 in California. Single-use plastics and plastic waste more broadly are considered a growing environmental and health problem. In recent decades, the accumulation of plastic waste has overwhelmed waterways and oceans, sickening marine life and threatening human health. While the bill was signed into law in 2022, regulations designed to govern it had not yet been finalized. For the past two years, stakeholders representing plastic manufacturers and producers, packaging companies, environmental groups and waste haulers have hashed out and negotiated proposed regulations — debating such things as the definition of "producer," or where on food service items the words "reusable" or "refillable" must be displayed. Read more: Trump targets paper straw purchases by federal government — and won't stop there Throughout this period, CalRecycle — which was led by Wagoner until March 2024 — helped guide the discussions and incorporated feedback into several proposed drafts of those rules. For instance, in early June 2022, as the stakeholders were hammering out the first set of regulations, it became apparent that someone — the state or the industry — would periodically need to assess the state's waste infrastructure to ensure material was getting to where it needed to go and was being properly disposed of according to the law. The industry is responsible for meeting those targets — which include, among other requirements, that 65% of all single-use plastic packaging in the state is recycled by 2032. The stakeholders had initially agreed this costly, time- and personnel-intensive evaluation should be conducted by the industry. This would allow the industry to evaluate the assessment as it was being conducted and be responsible for it. But according to sources, Wagoner — who was director of the state agency — decided that responsibility should fall to CalRecycle. Several drafts of the proposed rules and changes were shared with The Times. Now, Wagoner and her industry coalition are complaining that the state is taking too long to do the assessment — which is expected to be completed in January 2026 — and, as a result, she said, it is compromising the ability of her organization to develop a program to meet their targets, which they need to have finalized by April 2026. "This timeline is challenging even under ideal conditions," she said in a Feb. 12 email. "The planning process will have to start without this required data and will be difficult to complete because of this delay." In addition, Wagoner's critics say she oversaw regulation changes that some experts say would have potentially opened the door for certain kinds of chemical recycling technologies — technologies that superheat plastics and turn them into fuel or other kinds of plastics — including one from Eastman Chemical Co., a company that Wagoner began consulting for a few months after she stepped down from CalRecycle. The changes in the regulations — which included wording about hazardous materials — have since been corrected and addressed. On Feb. 7, Eastman Chemical ran a sponsored ad in the Sacramento Bee heralding the benefits of recycling technologies. They also spent $177,500 in the fourth quarter lobbying CalRecycle on the SB 54 regulations. Read more: As global plastic production grows, so does the concentration of microplastics in our brains The Circular Action Alliance and other industry-friendly groups, such as the California Chamber of Commerce, have also been actively lobbying the governor's office since mid-December, urging Newsom to delay finalization. In a Dec. 15 letter to Newsom, the Chamber claimed the new law would cost California consumers more than $300 per year, a number that he said came from the state's own economic analysis. A Times review of that analysis shows just the opposite, however. The state's economists said they anticipated an increase in personal income — starting with a $3 bump in 2024 and climbing to $131 by 2032. In 2020, Wagoner was picked by Newsom to run CalRecycle. Prior to that, she had worked in the governor's office as a senior legislative strategist alongside Ann Patterson — who until Friday was Newsom's Cabinet secretary. Patterson stepped down soon after her husband, Nathan Barankin, became the governor's chief of staff. Wagoner served as CalRecycle director through March 2024, when she resigned, she said, for personal reasons. She became the executive director of the Circular Action Alliance on Dec. 4, after consulting for Eastman Chemical for several months. The Fair Political Practices Commission has not yet determined whether they will conduct an investigation or not. According to a Feb. 25 letter addressed to Wagoner, the former CalRecycle director has until March 11 to provide the agency with information to support her case, at which time, the agency will decide how to proceed. "What happened may not be illegal, and I am not a lawyer, but I don't think the public believes this is how it should work in California," said Heidi Sanborn, director of the National Stewardship Action Council. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
