Detective shot and killed after suspects kicked in front door of her home: Police
(NEW YORK) — A detective was shot and killed during a home invasion at her residence in New Jersey, authorities said.
Detective Sgt. Monica Mosley, with the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey, was fatally shot at her home in Bridgeton on Tuesday night, according to police.
Police responded to the home around 10:30 p.m. for a report of “several subjects kicking in a front door at a residence,” the Bridgeton Police Department said in a press release.
Mosley, 51, died at the scene, police said.
An individual who had been treated for a gunshot wound at a hospital in Camden was detained for questioning in connection with the incident, police said. No additional information on the individual was released.
No arrests have been made or charges filed in the case as of Wednesday morning, police said.
Multiple agencies are investigating the deadly shooting, including the State Police Major Crime Bureau, the Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office and the Bridgeton Police Department Criminal Investigation Bureau.
Authorities could be seen on the property of the Bridgeton home on Wednesday.
Mosley began her career at the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office, located in Bridgeton, in 2006 as a paralegal specialist. She became a county detective in 2009, “where she served our community with honor, dignity and respect before her untimely passing,” Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae said in a statement.
Bridgeton Chief of Police Michael Gaimari Sr. said he knew Mosley for most of her career.
“Always loved and admired, so devastating of a loss,” he said in a statement. “Justice will be served and you will always be in our thoughts and prayers.”
Mosley served in several units of the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office, including Trial Teams, the Special Victims Unit, the Community Justice Unit and the Professional Standards Unit, where she was assigned as the unit supervisor, the office said.
“Sergeant Mosley was a constant friend and role model for all those with whom she served and led in the law enforcement community throughout Cumberland County and beyond,” Webb-McRae said. “She will be missed more than words can detail, but she will never be forgotten by her CCPO family.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel who responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, did not violate policy or the law, according to an internal CBP report released on Thursday.
However, the report found responding agents weren’t properly trained for a school shooting event and there were no clear instructions from local agencies on the ground.
CBP personnel including a tactical team from the agency responded to the shooting at the school in 2022, and they ultimately killed the shooter, but not until after a lengthy delay in the response, according to the report.
The fault of the slow response was ultimately placed on local officials who were at the school but didn’t take command of the scene, according to the report.
Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in the Robb Elementary School mass shooting.
“None of the first responders or CBP personnel who were in a position to take action against the assailant had access to an accurate school layout or understanding of where to locate the necessary keys for entry to critical areas of the school, which may have been mitigated by a functioning command and control system,” CBP said in a statement about the report.
Ahead of the report, CBP has taken more than half a dozen steps to address issues with its response to mass casualty events — and the lack of training before the shooting hindered the CBP response, it said.
“The training did not prepare CBP personnel for incidents in which they would be responding to a situation at a school, where an active shooter would be engaged behind a locked door, and where local authorities had not established a command and control framework. It also insufficiently covered using a ballistic shield, legal authorities, leadership responsibilities, and agency interoperability,” according to a press release from the agency.
As a result of the shooting, CBP said it has also corrected several policies. Use-of-force training materials have been distributed to agency personnel across the country, the agency is looking at acquiring more tools to respond to active shooters, and it’s also working on a plan for Congress to clarify federal authorities for responding to mass-casualty situations, according to CBP.
The inability of law enforcement to establish an “identifiable incident management or command and control protocols led to a disorganized response to the Robb Elementary School shooting,” the report found.
“No law enforcement official ever clearly established command at the school during the incident, leading to delays, inaction, and potentially further loss of life,” according to the report.
One Border Patrol agent told internal investigators they “never knew who was in command” of the scene.
At least 188 members of CBP responded to the incident, with 19% being members of the BORTAC team — the equivalent of a CBP SWAT team.
There was also no diagram of the school that was useful for the BORTAC agents to use, according to the report..
The report points to a 40-year-old Border Patrol training manual that had not been updated to accurately reflect the post-9/11 federal law enforcement apparatus under the Department of Homeland Security.
“… CBP training on active shooter response procedures did not adequately prepare responding personnel to deal with this situation,” the report states.
(NEW YORK) — A 47-year-old man has been arrested in connection with several improvised explosive devices found on the Hawaiian island of Maui, police said.
Robert Francis Dumaran made his initial appearance in court in Hawaii on Tuesday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Hawaii. Dumaran is charged with possessing an unregistered destructive device and attempting to damage property by means of an explosive, according to an unsealed criminal complaint.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Dumaran’s preliminary hearing is set for Aug. 27. He is being held without bail, the office said.
Authorities said they have been grappling with a series of homemade bombs — described by the FBI as IEDs — found on Maui, hidden in trash cans and elsewhere disguised in baskets. There have been multiple explosions on the island over the past week attributed to the devices, authorities said.
The first IED was discovered on July 23 by Maui Police Department officers responding to a call about a suspicious item close to the Kahului Elementary School. The bomb was made up of explosive powder, a battery and shrapnel. Investigators said they found Dumaran’s fingerprints on “clear packing tape” used to build it.
The unsealed complaint noted that “multiple IEDs” of similar design were detonated along Kaamana Street in Kula, Hawaii, on Aug. 7. Another device exploded on Aug. 8, damaging a passing car, while another was attached to a guardrail before detonating and “caused considerable damage to the guardrail and vicinity,” per the complaint.
The criminal complaint notes that the investigation is still ongoing, and Dumaran may yet face further charges.
Dumaran has been investigated previously, investigators said. The complaint said police searched his home in January 2022 and found custom fireworks, ammunition and other components that could be used to create IEDs. This is when authorities obtained his fingerprints, the complaint said.
Fingerprints and cell-tower data aided the police in their investigation, they said. Dumaran’s cellphone was found to be in the area of the Kahului Elementary School the day the IED there was discovered, as well as close to Kaamana Street days before devices were found there, the complaint said.
The unsealed complaint details Dumaran’s text conversations with an unidentified third party. In them, the defendant allegedly says that he wanted to set off explosions to “make me feel better.”
(LAS VEGAS) — A former Nevada politician was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty on Wednesday of killing journalist Jeff German in September 2022.
As the jury’s foreperson read out the guilty verdict, former Clark County public administrator Robert Telles looked down and shook his head.
Telles was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole after a minimum of 20 years served.
In a press conference after the verdict was announced, Clark County District Attorney Steven Wolfson thanked the jury for their work on the case.
“Today’s verdict should send a message, and that message is a clear message that any attempts to silence the media, or to silence or intimidate a journalist, will not be tolerated,” Wolfson said.
Prosecutors said former Clark County public administrator Robert Telles, 47, stabbed the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter to death after German exposed corruption in his office, destroying both his political career and his marriage. German’s story detailed an allegedly hostile work environment in Telles’ office — including bullying, retaliation and an “inappropriate relationship” between Telles and a staffer — all of which Telles denied.
Telles was arrested days after German was found dead outside his Las Vegas home. Police said DNA evidence found in Telles’ home tied him to the crime scene, and a straw hat and sneakers — which the suspect was seen wearing in surveillance footage — were found cut up in his home. His DNA was also found on German’s hands and fingernails, police said.
He had pleaded not guilty to murder.
In her opening statement, Chief Deputy District Attorney Pamela Weckerly walked through the timeline of the murder and how Telles came to be pinpointed as the suspect.
“In the end, this case isn’t about politics,” Weckerly said. “It’s not about alleged inappropriate relationships. It’s not about who’s a good boss or who’s a good supervisor or favoritism at work — it’s just about murder.”
Telles took the stand in his own trial on Aug. 21, “unequivocally” maintaining his innocence and insisting he was “framed” in a sweeping conspiracy by a real estate company that he said he was investigating for alleged bribery.
“Somebody framed me for this, and I believe that it is Compass Realty, and I believe it’s for the work that I’ve done against them,” Telles told the court.
In a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in January, Compass Realty owner Takumba Britt denied Telles’ conspiracy claims, calling him a “desperate man who has been charged with violently murdering a beloved local journalist” who would “do and say anything to escape answering for this charge.”
Wolfson also hit back against Telles’ conspiracy claims after the jury announced its verdict.
“There was no conspiracy,” Wolfson said. “The only conspiracy was between him and his evil mind.”
When police took Telles into custody, he had what they said were non-life-threatening, self-inflicted stab wounds. His defense attorney, Robert Draskovich, said the suicide attempt was not out of guilt, but because Telles’ “life was coming apart.”
Draskovich echoed Telles’ claims of a conspiracy against him, saying in his opening statement the “old guard” in the public administrator’s office had been upset by Telles’ efforts to root out internal corruption. He also claimed that, because of German’s track record of investigating corrupt figures, there were other people who may have wanted him dead.
“There were others that had far more motive to make it look like [Telles] was the killer, and to conduct this killing because Jeff German was a good reporter — he would ultimately get to what the truth was,” Draskovich said.
Ahead of sentencing on Wednesday, German’s three siblings addressed the court, speaking about what their oldest brother meant to them.
“Jeff was our leader — he was the older brother we all leaned on,” his brother, Jay German, said.
The siblings remembered him as a “wonderful” uncle, a “fearless” journalist and a lover of football and sitcoms.
His sister, Jill Zwerg, who said German was “like a second father,” recalled how he bought a whole round of champagne for the bar when she told me she’d gotten engaged.
“He’s so deeply missed every day,” Zwerg said through tears.
Telles’ wife and ex-wife also spoke, tearfully asking the jury not to sentence him to life in prison without parole.
“I would love at some point to give my children the chance to have their father back,” his wife, Mary Ann Ismael, said.
Telles wept as his mother, Rosalinda Anaya, took the stand.
“I accept the verdict, but if you could — please — give my son the chance of parole,” Anaya said. “His family is still very young and I would like for him to someday be back with them again.”
Before sending the jury off to deliberate on sentencing, Draskovich urged jurors not to hand down a life sentence.
“Give him the opportunity — give his children the opportunity — decades from now, to have their father back,” Draskovich said.
But prosecutors argued a life sentence — either with or without parole — was necessary in such a case. Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Hamner said Telles “decided to be judge, jury, and literally executioner” of German “because he simply wasn’t happy about what was being written about him.”
“When you think about the situation he was in, the world wasn’t going to end. He simply lost an election,” Hamner said. “The way Robert Telles chose to handle this was devastating, and it was his choice and his choice alone.”
German was the only journalist killed in the United States in 2022, with a total of at least 67 journalists killed worldwide that year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo previously described the case against Telles as “unusual,” and said that “the killing of a journalist is particularly troublesome.”
“It is troublesome because it is a journalist. And we expect journalism to be open and transparent and the watchdog for government,” Lombardo said. “And when people take it upon themselves to create harm associated with that profession, I think it’s very important we put all eyes on and address the case appropriately such as we did in this case.”
In a statement published by the paper, Las Vegas Review-Journal executive editor Glenn Cook praised the verdict “as a measure of justice” for German, as well as for “slain journalists all over the world.”
“Jeff was killed for doing the kind of work in which he took great pride: His reporting held an elected official accountable for bad behavior and empowered voters to choose someone else for the job,” Cook wrote. “Robert Telles could have joined the long line of publicly shamed Nevada politicians who’ve gone on with their lives, out of the spotlight or back in it. Instead, he carried out a premeditated revenge killing with terrifying savagery.”
“Let’s also remember that this community has lost much more than a trusted journalist,” Cook added. “Jeff was a good man who left behind a family who loved him and friends who cherished him. His murder remains an outrage. He is missed.”