An eleventh-hour deal resolved a multimillion-dollar discrimination lawsuit filed by a former Spokane bank executive against her former employer. Heidi Stanley settled with both Sterling Bank and Wall Street investment firm Sandler O’Neill + Partners before jurors were to hear closing arguments in the civil lawsuit, her attorney said Monday.
Spokane police are keeping an eye on a longtime problem park downtown. Downtown officers are able to watch a live feed of a surveillance camera overlooking the Under the Freeway Skate Park at 400 S. McClellan Road, a property that has drawn much public attention because of its reputation as a haven for crime.
An 18-year-old who stabbed another man in the head repeatedly outside a downtown homeless shelter in August pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity on Thursday. David N. Vincent, who was 17 at the time of the attack, will be indefinitely committed at Eastern State Hospital.
Wildlife officials are searching for a cougar that they believe attacked a horse that later had to be euthanized near Deer Lake on Tuesday night. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife responded to a home off North Deer Lake Road shortly after 6 p.m., where they found a horse with severe front leg injuries, said Fish and Wildlife Sgt. Pam Taylor.
The criminal saga of a Spokane developer, his ex-wife and his girlfriend ended Tuesday when a U.S. District Court judge sentenced Kimberly Jeffreys to 90 days of home confinement. The ruling completes the case of fraud, theft, money laundering and conspiracies that jailed Greg Jeffreys, his now ex-wife Kimberly Jeffreys and his girlfriend Shannon Stiltner in January 2013. Prosecutors tied the married couple and Stiltner to numerous real estate schemes around town, including fraudulent investments in the redevelopment of the Ridpath Hotel and theft tied to the construction of a military facility off U.S. Highway 2.
A 33-year-old man will spend the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to aggravated murder Tuesday. Juan Sifuentez pleaded guilty to robbery, kidnapping and murder charges in the stabbing and beating death of 51-year-old Latanya C. Chapin. His plea came just a little more than three months after Chapin’s body was discovered in the trunk of her car on the South Hill, and Sifuentez was arrested.
Spokane police have given away about a hundred steering wheel locks to drivers who own the most-stolen cars in a city notorious for auto theft. The program has been “extremely successful,” police spokeswoman Monique Cotton said. The department will continue to hand out the rest of the 250 Club devices bought using a state grant.
Kimberly Jeffreys, ex-wife of imprisoned developer Greg Jeffreys, will not step foot in a federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud earlier this year, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Juan Sifuentez will spend the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree aggravated murder in the beating and stabbing death of Latanya Chapin, 51, earlier this year.
If Priest Lake native Scott Moore were alive today, he’d be tending asparagus in his railroad-tie-bordered garden, his wife, Darcie Humphrey Moore, said Monday. “It takes three seasons to grow asparagus, and he’d just planted that,” said Humphrey Moore. “For some reason it hasn’t come up, and I’m kind of OK with that. That would be kind of sad, too.”
Sharon Anderson looked out the window of her South Hill home Monday afternoon to see a plume of smoke rising from the woods just beyond her deck. “I yelled ‘Fire!’ and I ran out, and he ran out to call 911,” Anderson said from her deck Monday evening along High Drive, motioning to her husband, Mark.
Admitted Ponzi scheme artist Doris Nelson has lost her shot at a redo in federal court. Facing a potential prison sentence that would keep her in prison for life, the former payday loan store owner asked to withdraw her guilty plea to 110 federal crimes including money laundering, wire fraud and mail fraud.
Though marijuana is now legal in Washington for recreational and medical use, courts continue to grant law enforcement wide leeway in using the presence of pot to search property. A series of recent court rulings keeps the bar low for officers to search a location where they suspect marijuana is being smoked or grown. Washington judges have repeatedly said investigators don’t need to provide evidence a suspect is violating state marijuana laws when asking for a search warrant – only that the drug is present.
A Kettle Falls houseboat owner will pay a $100 fine for excessive noise as part of a deal to avoid another federal trial in a case where a National Park Service ranger shot another man on the boat in September 2013. Michael Sublie agreed to the fine Monday that will keep him out of jail and, if he avoids a criminal conviction for the next six months, erase all charges in the Sept. 14 confrontation. Prosecutors initially charged Sublie with interfering with the duties of a federal agent and disobeying posted noise rules at the Kettle River Campground during what witnesses described as an end-of-the-summer party.
Taxpayers will have to dole out more than $220,000 to defense attorneys and expert witnesses who helped Gail Gerlach beat a manslaughter charge in an April trial. A jury acquitted Gerlach of criminal wrongdoing after he fired a single shot that struck Brendon Kaluza-Graham in the back of the head.
The houseboat owner facing charges of assaulting a federal law enforcement officer agreed to a deal Monday that will keep him out of jail and order a $100 fine for excessive noise.
As street basketball fans descended upon downtown Spokane last month for the annual Hoopfest festivities, a different class of gamer was flicking joysticks for real cash across town. Chris Hardin, known as Praxis to his fellow “Super Smash Bros.” gamers, sat next to team partner Ben Marks in a pivotal late-round match at the Black Wolf Gaming Center in Spokane Valley. More than a hundred bucks was on the line for the victors in a “doubles” match of the decade-old Nintendo video game, which pits members of the Japanese company’s massive character stable against each other in a king-of-the-hill style slugfest.
Candidates for Stevens County elected office addressed the token issues in the overwhelmingly conservative area at a forum this week: gun rights, property rights and the alleged overreach of the federal government. Missing was discussion of two of the candidates’ criminal past and two District Court judge hopefuls locked in a bitter campaign.
A Spokane County Sheriff’s deputy was fired this week after he billed a local business for work he didn’t do, Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said Tuesday. Deputy Charles “Chuck” Sciortino left his post at Best Buy on Black Friday to work patrol but billed the store for a full 12-hour shift, Knezovich said.
Whitman County’s longtime assessor is in federal court in Spokane this week, fighting a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by an employee. Joe Reynolds, who has served as assessor in Whitman County since 1991, described his office as “loose” and that employees “talked nasty at times,” according to court filings. Yet Brenda Arthur, who started working for the office in 2000, says Reynolds crossed the line, touching her inappropriately and making several sexually explicit remarks during the past several years. The alleged harassment prompted Arthur to request time off and to seek medical help for physical and emotional distress.
The gun in Stephen Corkery’s hand when he allegedly robbed several Spokane businesses and walked into a fatal standoff on West Grace Avenue in March was fake, investigators say. The alleged crimes, and the consequences, were very real.
One of the employment opportunities Spokane’s first legal pot purchaser said he’d lost as a result of his fame has been reinstated, a company official said. Mike Boyer, first in line to buy legal recreational marijuana at a Spokane retailer earlier this week, posted online he’d lost a security job Wednesday and later said he’d also been forced out of his part-time temp employment with LaborReady, a Tacoma-based firm.
