Month: August 2022

A specially appointed prosecutor announced that no charges will be pursued against the two white Atlanta police officers who clashed with Rayshard Brooks during a 2020 encounter, ending with the 27-year-old black man’s fatal shooting. Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, believes that Officer Garrett Rolfe – who shot and killed Brooks in June 2020 — acted appropriately. Skandalakis also said the second officer involved in the encounter, Officer Devin Brosnan, will not be charged.

Police responded on June 12, 2020, to complaints of a man sleeping in a car in the drive-thru lane of a Wendy’s restaurant. Police body camera video shows the two officers having a calm conversation with Brooks for nearly 40 minutes before telling Brooks he’d had too much to drink to be driving and attempted to arrest him.  Brooks resisted arrest, and in a struggle caught on dash camera video, Brooks is seen grabbing a Taser from one of the officers and fleeing, while firing at Rolfe. Rolfe fired his gun in return, with an autopsy finding that Brooks was shot twice in the back.

Skandalakis and former Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, who was co-counsel in the case, spent about an hour during the news conference on Tuesday walking through the details of the encounter between Brooks and the two officers. Porter showed still images taken from videos to break down what happened once things turned violent.

Rolfe was fired a day after the shooting, but his dismissal was overturned in May 2021 by the Atlanta Civil Service Board. Five days after Brooks was killed, then-Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard announced warrants had been taken out against Rolfe and Brosnan, with charges against Rolfe including felony murder, aggravated assault and violation of his oath. Brosnan was charged with aggravated assault and violating his oath. Skandalakis said Tuesday that he would file paperwork to dismiss those warrants.

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The Placer County Sheriff’s office said in a statement on Tuesday that the body found inside a submerged car in Northern California on Sunday has been confirmed to be missing teen Kiely Rodni, who disappeared at a campground party in the area about three weeks ago. Authorities and volunteers had been searching for the 16-year-old Rodni and her car since she was last seen at the Prosser Family Campground around 12:30 a.m. on August 6th.

According to Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon, the volunteer dive group Adventures with Purpose found Rodni’s car submerged in the Prosser Creek Reservoir (located about 17 miles north of Lake Tahoe and 36 miles from Reno, Nevada) a little more than half an hour into their search. The volunteer dive team, which has more than 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube, typically takes on cold cases, not active investigations. The group has helped solve 23 missing person cold cases since 2019.

The Placer County Sheriff’s office said Tuesday that Kiely’s cause and manner of death were not released, and the investigation into her death is still ongoing. Their statement read: “The Placer County Sheriff’s Office and the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office are in communication with Kiely’s family and offer our deepest condolences to them during this extremely difficult time.”

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On Monday, former President Donald Trump filed a motion (which can be read in full here) in a Florida court, requesting a third party to review materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago home by the Justice Department earlier this month. Trump’s lawyers called for an injunction preventing the government from further reviewing the seized materials until a “special master” is appointed to the case.  Trump’s attorneys also argued that his constitutional rights were violated by the search and that privileged materials may have been seized.

The filing requested a more detailed receipt of what was removed from Mar-a-Lago during the search, and further requests that the judge issue an order to have the Justice Department return any item seized from the Palm Beach, Fla., resident that “was not within the scope of the search warrant.”

On Aug. 8, FBI agents seized 11 boxes of documents, including at least one set of papers that had been categorized as top secret, classified or sensitive as part of an investigation seeking to determine whether Trump brought highly secret information about the U.S. nuclear arsenal to his Florida home.

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The Atlanta Police Department confirmed that two people were killed and another was wounded in two shootings in the Midtown area of Atlanta on Monday.

Atlanta’s interim Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told reporters that a suspect was taken into custody hours later at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport after police received information she had transported herself there. Police recovered the handgun believed to have been used in the shootings at the airport, Schierbaum said, and the airport’s security was “never compromised.” Schierbaum didn’t provide details about a possible motive, but investigators believe the victims were likely targeted. The chief said:  “We do not believe these were random acts of violence.”

Officers responded to a report of a shooting at approximately 1:45 p.m. and found two people wounded. While responding to that scene, officers received a call that a person had been shot nearby; officers found another wounded victim, who was taken to a hospital and died, the department said. The condition of the surviving victim wasn’t immediately known.

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