At a press conference on Thursday, Arizona’s top law-enforcement officials announced that they have increased the reward for information about the Serial Street Shooter, saying they urgently need the public’s help to crack the case. The news conference at Phoenix police headquarters included Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, Maricopa County…
The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona’s minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000. Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to…
The Phoenix man who narrowly escaped being killed in July by the Serial Street Shooter doesn’t want his identity revealed. “I’m just an ordinary young man who experienced an extraordinary miracle,” he says with a grin. He may be right about that. On July 11, the unknown assailant, who appears…
Maricopa County’s death-penalty system is plagued by “overzealous” prosecutors and creates a high number of questionable death-penalty cases, according to a new Harvard Law School report. “Too Broken to Fix: Part I: An In-Depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties,” by the school’s Fair Punishment Project, identifies Maricopa as one of…
A Mesa police supervisor was facing termination before he retired last week following his recent conviction for super-extreme DUI, a police spokesman says. Richard “Rick” Van Galder, who had more than 20 years on the force, was stopped in February with his wife, Teresa, a Mesa PD homicide detective, as…
Health officials have issued their second alert of the summer about a microscopic parasite that is spread in feces, can survive in chlorinated pools, and induces a nasty case of infectious diarrhea. The 100 victims officials know about are just the tip of the iceberg, warns Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, medical…
On Thursday, a Maricopa County judge threw out a lawsuit challenging the pending Arizona ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jo Lynn Gentry ruled that the plaintiffs had no legal standing and made no legitimate claims. The ruling appears to clear the way for the initiative,…
Arizona Department of Economic Security Director Tim Jeffries has followed up controversy over his Lady of Lourdes e-mails by sending an e-mail to all DES staff calling out his “haters.” In an e-mail he sent out on Saturday to all 7,000-plus DES employees, the former businessman, whom Governor Doug Ducey…
An employee of the Grand Canyon Lodge at the North Rim faces a detention hearing this morning on a charge that he choked and raped another employee after a dorm party. Jeremy Ean Bird has been held in detention since his August 11 arrest in connection with the assault, which…
The only way Mesa residents will see their police department receive a sorely needed infusion of cash is to approve a sales tax in November that will also fund an Arizona State University campus in downtown Mesa. Mesa leaders and ASU president Michael Crow hope that by putting both the public-safety…
It’s hard to dismiss the possibility that cupping, an ancient medicinal practice involving suction on the skin, has real benefits, after Michael Phelps won his 23rd gold medal on Sunday. Yet only a handful of credible studies back up its advocates’ claims. And its pseudoscientific underpinnings mean that the more questions…
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has given his blessing to the director of the state Department of Economic Security’s use of e-mail to send religious messages to employees. Paul Watkins, the chief counsel of Brnovich’s civil division, wrote in an August 10 e-mail to Madeline Ziegler of the Freedom From…
What a busy week in weed! The Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act (RTMA) has exceeded its signature goal and will be on the November ballot, the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office confirmed on Wednesday. Matt Roberts, spokesman for the office, said the state will likely issue a certification today making the…
If voters approve it in November, the pending ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in Arizona stands to eliminate several felony arrests each day in the city of Phoenix alone. On average, the Phoenix police have arrested more than seven people a day since January 2015 for suspicion…
More than one in 10 deputies working for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office show discriminatory treatment against black and Hispanic people, according to a new Arizona State University study. The public might not be shocked to learn that six-term sheriff Joe Arpaio runs a discriminatory agency. After all, the U.S. Department…
An Arizona woman charged with receiving infant porn said on Monday that it was her teen daughter, not her, who was in communication with a Colorado child-porn suspect. Sarah Cox, 39, of Clarkdale, was charged last week with three counts of knowingly receiving child pornography. As a New Times article…
An Arizona woman has been caught up in the federal investigation into an alleged child pornographer in Colorado. On August 4, authorities charged 39-year-old Sarah Cox of Clarkdale with three counts of knowingly receiving child pornography. The complaint, filed in Arizona U.S. District Court by Homeland Security Investigations, alleges that Cox and Richard Hennis…
The Mesa Police Department has released findings from a months-long project on community engagement, just in time to buoy public confidence in the agency. With one of its officers facing trial for the January 18 killing of an unarmed man, the agency is looking ahead. On Tuesday, in a conference…
The medical-marijuana industry is exploding in Arizona, restrained only by limitations that state and city officials have imposed on it. Nothing exemplifies the potential of this lucrative trade like the numbers the Arizona Department of Health Services reported today on the flood of applications the agency received in July for…
Dark skies on Tuesday afternoon gave way to heavy rain across most of metro Phoenix, hitting the central Phoenix area at about 5 p.m. and making life tough on thousands of commuters. The monsoon storm caused epic flooding across the Valley, reminiscent of a similar deluge two years ago. Vehicles…
Opponents of a ballot measure to legalize marijuana in Arizona threaten a looming catastrophe of liability lawsuits for employers. From the start, Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, an anti-legalization political action committee led by conservative radio show host Seth Leibsohn and Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk, has maintained (see PDF below) that the…
Newly released body-cam video (embedded below) shows Loreal Tsingine brandishing a pair of scissors at Officer Austin Shipley of the Winslow Police Department before he shot her during a confrontation outside a Circle K store on Easter Sunday. The police department has edited the actual shooting out of the March 27 clip. It…
