A three-legged dog, left for dead earlier this year in a roadside ditch in Post Falls, was the howling center of attention Saturday at a unique dog show in Coeur d'Alene. The appearance of Tres at Dog Daze of Coeur d'Alene was just a warm-up for the 2-year-old blue tick coonhound.
A day before Spokane Mayor Jim West left on a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored business trip to Washington, D.C., public records show he used his city-owned computer to examine online profiles – some of them sexually explicit – of dozens of young gay men living there. Traveling on to Philadelphia as part of the same trip this spring, the 54-year-old West used his city computer again to check out 82 more profiles of gay men, most of whom were in their 20s, computer records reveal.
Spokane Mayor Jim West used his city computer to view Internet information about a young gay man in Fresno, Calif., while he was there on a government-paid trip for a presidential commission, public records released Thursday suggest. A file on West's computer, identically matching the unique screen name of a young man whose profile is posted at Gay.com, was included among uncontested material released Thursday with the approval of West and his attorneys.
A Superior Court judge in Ritzville will review an inch-thick packet of "highly offensive" pictures and correspondence from gay Internet sites, captured on Spokane Mayor Jim West's computer. At the conclusion of a 90-minute hearing Wednesday, Judge Richard Miller of Adams County said it would be late next week at the earliest before he enters his decision on whether the material captured on West's seized computer should be released under the state's public records law. West doesn't want the public to see the contents.
A federal jury has awarded $1.3 million to a Bonners Ferry woman who claimed she was a victim of child and sexual abuse while being raised by her uncle. Gina M. Spain, who's now 23, filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Idaho against Lowell McMillan, who now lives in DeBorgia, Mont.
A cloak of secrecy was placed Tuesday over the City Council's investigation of alleged "workplace misconduct" by Mayor Jim West. A private investigator, hired with $15,000 in taxpayer money, struck a deal that will allow him to secretly examine the contents of the mayor's city-owned computer, but not publicly discuss the findings.
Spokane Mayor Jim West has no legal basis to prevent a private investigator hired by the City Council from examining the contents of the mayor's City Hall computer, legal documents filed Monday say. The mayor's private attorneys are fighting to block public release of three CDs containing files found on West's computer when it was seized in early May.
Spokane Mayor Jim West's city-owned computer contains 1,800 files – at least half of them photos – that he doesn't want the public to see, according to court papers filed Friday. The files apparently include photos of young men the mayor met on gay Web sites using his city-owned computer, according to documents produced by City Hall. His files of "personal social contacts" also apparently include message exchanges with young men.
For the first time in the United States, federal investigators in Spokane have obtained indictments against eight people accused of operating Internet-based diploma mills, making millions by selling bogus college degrees and "defrauding consumers worldwide." The 40-page indictment accuses the eight of conspiring to commit wire and mail fraud during the past six years as they operated out of businesses in Mead and Hillyard, and a Post Falls office complex.
A Spokane County Superior Court judge had his divorce file in Lincoln County sealed last month from public inspection – a legal maneuver that an open-government expert says is highly unusual and likely unconstitutional. The divorce papers of Superior Court Judge Michael P. Price, represented by Spokane attorney David Crouse, were sealed on Sept. 13 by Lincoln County Superior Court Commissioner Josh Grant.
It was a unique reason for growing more than 1,000 marijuana plants in a barn in northeastern Washington: The elderly couple, both in poor health, desperately needed to pay their medical bills. "They were facing impending financial ruin," defense attorney Beth Bollinger told U.S. District Court Judge Fred Van Sickle at a sentencing hearing Friday for William and Mary Shinners.
A Spokane convenience store owner who sold boxes full of pseudoephedrine pills had "reasonable cause" to believe the drugs were being used to make methamphetamine, a federal appeals court has ruled. Joga Johal should have known the boxes of pseudoephedrine he was selling at his store were going to meth cooks, "not to cure runny noses," the appeals judges said.
A former police officer in Spokane and Coeur d'Alene was convicted Monday in U.S. District Court of starting a fire that heavily damaged his Spokane Valley nightclub last year. Kelly L. Falcon faces a minimum of five years in federal prison for malicious use of fire to damage property used in interstate commerce.
The city-owned computer used by Spokane Mayor Jim West has been returned to him for continued use, allowing automatic obliteration of deleted files on the device's disk drive. Those files could include e-mail, images, documents or Web site addresses.
KITTITAS, Wash. – It's been one year since 11-year-old Cody Haynes mysteriously vanished from his family's apartment in this central Washington farming community. A faded flier of the missing boy is still posted on the glass front door of the Kittitas City Hall, but inside, behind his desk last week, Police Chief Steve Dunnagan said he's stumped, without answers.
The North Idaho home and former national headquarters of the Aryan Nations will be sold at public auction next week – another indicator, experts say, of the decline of the white supremacy group in the region. With one exception, this summer was the first time in a quarter century that there wasn't an Aryan Nations World Congress in North Idaho and an accompanying, highly disruptive parade of racists through downtown Coeur d'Alene.
Spokane Mayor Jim West has taken legal steps to prevent the public from seeing what is on the hard drives of his city-owned computers. While two of West's attorneys were arguing before the state Supreme Court Wednesday, another was filing paperwork in Spokane County Superior Court to temporarily block the city attorney's office from releasing copies of the mayor's computer hard drives or disks.
Eight people, including four from Plummer, Idaho, are named in an 88-count federal racketeering indictment returned Wednesday as part of a four-year investigation into the sales of contraband cigarettes. The tax loss to the state of Washington associated with the case is more than $56 million, said Jim McDevitt, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.
Foreign nationals, including potential terrorists, could legally gain entry into the United States with fraudulent degrees purchased from Spokane-based diploma mills, documents made public Monday reveal. Half the "degrees" sold by Saint Regis University and other diploma mills were sold to overseas purchasers, a majority of which were for "students" from Saudi Arabia, the documents say.
A task force of federal and state agents, investigating one of the biggest diploma mill schemes in the United States, served search warrants Thursday in Spokane, Post Falls and Arizona. The search warrants are part of an eight-month investigation that is building a criminal case against Dixie and Steve Randock of Colbert, who are believed to be the masterminds behind the bogus college degree operation.
A Coeur d'Alene man recently kicked out of the U.S. Army has been arrested in Spokane for allegedly plotting to kill a Spokane County sheriff's sergeant and his girlfriend after setting off pipe bombs in a terrorism diversion plot. The plot that Brian Dean Simmons confessed to hatching was never fully carried out, but a pipe bomb he admitted making was found in January under a police car parked near the Public Safety Building, court documents say.
Within days of his arrest last month, North Idaho multiple-murder suspect Joseph Edward Duncan III implicated himself in the 1996 deaths of two Seattle girls during a conversation with FBI agents. "He was talking and telling stories," a Justice Department source said Wednesday in describing the interview FBI agents had with Duncan in Coeur d'Alene shortly after his arrest July 2.
FBI agents have searched the home of Spokane Mayor Jim West, seizing his computers and related files as part of a public corruption investigation, according to U.S. District Court documents filed Friday. The FBI obtained the federal warrant to search West's home after convincing a federal judge there is probable cause to believe a federal crime has been committed.
A man who assaulted a federal officer, then led police on a high-speed chase through downtown Spokane after being shot in the face in early 2004 will be spending 10 years in prison. John A. Grace, a 33-year-old member of a Long Beach, Calif., street gang, was sentenced to prison Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Fred Van Sickle.
An East Wenatchee chiropractor who has battled the IRS for the past five years, claiming he is a "sovereign citizen" and immune from federal taxes, has been convicted in Spokane of failing to file income tax returns. Biffer A. Wellendorf, a 50-year-old self-described "constitutionalist," was convicted by Senior Judge Justin Quackenbush in a non-jury trial that ended Wednesday in U.S. District Court.
