Bill Morlin

There was insufficient evidence to charge 19-year-old Timothy Lee Jacobs with this summer's arson that caused $20 million in damage to Whitley Fuel and surrounding businesses in northeast Spokane, Prosecutor Steve Tucker said Friday. Jacobs was arrested Monday and booked into jail by Capt. Kevin Smathers and Lt. Gregg McClatchey, arson investigators and commissioned law enforcement officers with the Spokane Fire Department.

Attorneys for a teenage girl who alleges she was raped in a Spokane fire station by an on-duty firefighter are scheduled to begin taking sworn depositions this week from various city officials and employees. Mayor Dennis Hession and ex-deputy Mayor Jack Lynch are expected to be among those officials asked questions under oath about the firehouse-sex scandal by attorneys J. Scott Miller and Greg Devlin.

A woman who once attempted to send a bottle of Coca Cola containing cyanide to U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy will remain in the Spokane County Jail over the weekend after being arrested by a fugitive task force. Tashala Hayman, who recently lived in Billings, will remain in custody until U.S. Magistrate Judge Cynthia Imbrogno determines whether the defendant is mentally competent to participate in a hearing on whether she should be returned to Montana.

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether a Spokane felon, caught with heroin and a firearm in 2003, should have been sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in federal prison as an "armed career criminal" because of prior prison terms for drug possession. The nation's highest court announced Tuesday it will review the sentence given to Gino Gonzaga Rodriquez because of conflicting rulings on similar legal issues by four circuit appeals courts.

Former Airway Heights Mayor Dale Perry testified Monday that he was repaying a $3,000 personal loan from another ex-city mayor at the same time he got another loan from Spokane Raceway Park operator Orville Moe. The loan Perry got from former Airway Heights Mayor Joe Martella was interest-free, compared to 12 percent interest Moe charged for an $18,000 loan in 2002, Perry told a U.S. District Court jury that is hearing a federal bribery case brought against Moe.

The daughter of Orville Moe, given immunity from federal prosecution, told a U.S. District Court jury Friday that it wasn't her signature on most of the checks the mayor of Airway Heights wrote to repay an $18,000 loan in 2002. The checks written by then-Mayor Dale Perry were made out to Moe's daughter, who testified that she actually only signed two of the checks before they and others that followed were deposited into Orville Moe's bank account.

The former chairman of the Constitution Party of Montana faces newly filed federal charges accusing him of falsely claiming to be a decorated Vietnam War veteran while seeking treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Spokane. Michael D. Heit, who now lives in Harrington in Lincoln County, is scheduled to appear today in U.S. District Court to enter a plea to a two-count criminal information filed Monday by Assistant U.S. Attorney George Jacobs.

Scheduling problems prompted federal Judge Edward Shea to postpone Monday's scheduled start of the public corruption trial of Orville Moe, the former operator of Spokane Raceway Park. The U.S. District Court trial now is set to begin Thursday morning.

The son of Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession has been hired by American Medical Response, the ambulance company that is a defendant in a pending class-action lawsuit for allegedly overbilling more than 20,000 city residents in the last decade. Patrick Hession is working as a paramedic in Spokane, where AMR has an exclusive contract to provide ambulance service within the city, AMR regional manager Art McKiernan confirmed Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert Whaley refused Monday to accept a guilty plea from a man who previously admitted killing another man in April 1991 on the Colville Indian Reservation. James H. Gallaher Jr. was indicted by a federal grand jury in December 2005 even though the body of Edwin "Eddy" Pooler was never found on the 1.4 million-acre reservation in northeastern Washington.

It was an experience Tom said he can't forget. There were times he thought he might die.

Second District Judge John Stegner took under advisement Thursday a decision whether to release several hundred pages of on-the-job e-mails, some with sexually explicit attachments, between former Kootenai County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Rick Baughman and three female co-workers. In a similar case, Stegner ruled in July 2005 that e-mail exchanges, using county computers, between Kootenai County Prosecutor Bill Douglas and Marina Kalani, who headed the county juvenile court drug program, were public records. The Idaho Supreme Court upheld Stegner's ruling, and the Douglas-Kalani e-mails were released last month.

Four felony voyeurism charges were filed Tuesday against a former guard accused of using high-power security cameras on top of the U.S. Courthouse complex in downtown Spokane to peep inside bedrooms of a condominium and hotel. Darin Earl Wanless used the government-owned rooftop cameras to watch women undress in the West 809 condominiums at Main and Lincoln and the Davenport Hotel, a block away from the courthouse at Sprague and Lincoln, court documents say.

A Spokane man caught last year with 166 grams of pure methamphetamine will spend the next 14 years in federal prison. Troy Edward Klein, 36, was sentenced Monday by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Whaley.

A former Canadian union official was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Spokane to serve eight years in a U.S. prison for attempting to smuggle an estimated $4 million worth of cocaine from the United States into Canada. Perley Edmund Holmes, 50, was sentenced Monday evening by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Whaley after earlier pleading guilty to a charge of possession with intent to distribute cocaine.

A 48-year-old man wrongly arrested by Spokane police on Valentine's Day for cyber stalking has filed a $78,160 damage claim against the city, officials confirmed Thursday. Dean Dunn was arrested and booked into jail for a crime – making Internet threats – that police detectives later concluded was committed by a 13-year-old girl who lives elsewhere and isn't related to him.