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A man suspected of stabbing a Clark College employee in a random attack was arrested Thursday morning while sleeping in a stolen car parked about a half-mile from campus, police said.

Vancouver police officers were following up on a tip when they arrested Salvador Aguilar as he slept in a car parked at a residence in the 2600 block of St. Johns Boulevard, police said.

Aguilar, 31, is accused of approaching a woman Tuesday and stabbing her in the neck without provocation as she sat outside the Archer Gallery. The woman survived the attack. Police also linked him to another encounter on Monday when a woman sitting in her car in a campus parking lot reported being accosted by a stranger.

Aguilar is being held in the Clark County Jail on charges of first-degree assault and motor vehicle theft, as well as an arrest warrant on separate allegations of burglary, disorderly conduct and malicious mischief in December.

In that incident, Augilar is accused of breaking into a stranger’s home on Northeast 117th Avenue in Vancouver and trashing the place, court records show.

At the time, he told police he had entered the home “because it was cold last night,” saying he was homeless, according to a probable cause affidavit.

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Portland police arrested a woman in Southeast Portland after she allegedly fired at her sister’s partner and instead shot her 15-year-old son as he sat in the back seat of her car on Wednesday.

Domanete A. Guirma, 38, of Portland, faces charges of attempted murder, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment, according to court records.

The shooting happened around 3 a.m. on Southeast 130th Avenue and Sherman Street, where Guirma allegedly confronted her sister’s partner in front of his home. A 17-year-old son and the 15-year-old were with her, as was a friend of the older child, court records said.

Guirma allegedly told police that she brought a gun to scare her sister’s partner, and she was waving it around when she said it “just went off.”

Ring camera footage of the incident recorded Guirma’s 17-year-old son yelling at his mother that she’d just shot his brother.

The boy was seriously injured by what police and court records variously describe as “graze wounds” to the back of his head and undisclosed injuries to his neck, but police said they weren’t life-threatening.

Guirma’s 17-year-old son and his friend drove Guirma and the boy to Adventist Medical Center, court records said.

When officers initially questioned Guirma, she allegedly told them her son had been injured in a drive-by shooting, court records said.

After investigating the scene of the shooting, officers told Guirma about the Ring camera footage. She then acknowledged having a gun but said she didn’t mean to fire it, court documents said.

Court documents also said that police spoke with the man whom Guirma had confronted. He told them that she had fired the gun at him and missed, and that’s when the bullet went through the windshield of her car, striking her son.

Police took Guirma’s children into protective custody when they arrested her. Guirma has a criminal history that includes 2018 convictions for delivering cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, plus 2012 and 2018 convictions for identity theft.

She is scheduled to appear in court on Friday.

©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

State and federal authorities are asking for the public’s assistance in their investigation of an “unlawful poisoning” of wildlife in Wallowa County, the Oregon State Police said in a statement.

Three gray wolves, two golden eagles, a mountain lion and a coyote were poisoned in an Imnaha River drainage area in northeast Oregon in February before officials discovered the poison and removed it, the state police said.

The state police said its Fish & Wildlife Division and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also are investigating the killing of other gray wolves, as well as domestic dogs, in Wallowa County.

Two wolves were poisoned last summer and fall in the Chesnimnus Wildlife Management Unit, and last month a wolf apparently was poisoned in the Wenaha Wildlife Management Unit, officials said.

The Oregon State Police asks anyone with information to call the Turn In Poachers program hotline: 1-800-452-7888. The program offers cash rewards for information leading to an arrest. Calls to the hotline also can remain anonymous.

©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Tumwater is the back-to-back Class 2A defending state high school baseball champion in Washington, winning state titles in 2022 and 2023.

The state tournament begins this week and the T-Birds are hoping to make it a three-peat. But defending the title isn't the mindset this year's group is playing with.

"We're not really defending it — we're attacking it," said shortstop Eddie Marson, who leads the team with a .447 batting average with two doubles, a triple and a team-high 25 RBI.

Tumwater isn't the favorite this spring. The T-Birds enter the tournament as the No. 8 seed, after losing to Columbia River in the 2A District 4 tournament semifinals, before bouncing back with a win over R.A. Long in a loser-out, winner-to-state game.

"We want to beat the odds this year," said pitcher and infielder Derek Thompson, the team's No. 2 pitcher. "I think the odds are heavily against us, especially since we've gone back-to-back. That's why we think about attacking it. If you think about attacking it, it's more something you're trying to go for, not something you're trying to protect.

"It's almost like we've never won it before."

Leading the charge is Liam Karlson, the team's No. 1 arm. He has pitched 46.1 innings this spring, compiling a 7-0 record with 46 strikeouts and a minuscule .045 earned run average, mixing his fastball, slider and changeup for strikes.

"He's got a three-quarter sidearm delivery, so he gets a lot of movement," said Lyle Overbay, Tumwater's coach and former big-leaguer. Overbay played for eight teams over the course of his 13-year Major League Baseball career. "That changeup just drops off the table, so it's been a really good pitch for him."

Overbay brings an impressive background to the table. When he talks, Tumwater's players listen.

"I just think it's easy to trust him with all the experience he has," Karlson said. "There's never a doubt. Whatever he's saying, it works."

It has worked so far, to the tune of consecutive state titles. Tumwater beat Columbia River 1-0 to win the 2022 title and in another close game, beat Lynden 2-1 last season to win consecutive championships.

Tumwater will open this year's tournament against No. 9 seed Pullman at 1 p.m. on Saturday at Auburn High School. The winner will likely go on to face top-seeded Enumclaw in the quarterfinals, which will be played Saturday night at Auburn. Tumwater already beat Enumclaw this spring in the season opener, 5-2.

Overbay's squad doesn't mind flying under the radar a bit. The T-Birds are still confident they have the pieces in place to win the whole thing.

"I think that people are gonna overlook us a bit," Overbay said. "Not necessarily overlook, but just be like, 'OK, they're not as strong.' I don't agree with that. I just feel like where we are, everybody's got a chance. It's our toughest road, obviously. But I always tell these guys, if we're gonna be the best, we've gotta beat the best."

Marson said he thinks the records and seeds can be thrown out the window when the state tournament begins.

"The whole year, we haven't looked at rankings," he said. "They don't mean anything to us. ... We're going to play our game. No one can stop us if we play our game."

They'll have a calming presence in the dugout in Overbay, who spends most of his time these days shepherding his six kids around to various activities in the family's mega-sized four-row Nissan passenger van. Some former pros think high school sports are beneath them, but not Overbay.

"I just love being around the kids," he said. "At the end of the day, some of them might go to the next level, which is community college or this or that, but for a lot of these kids, it's over after this. I want them to be better humans, more than anything. That was my drive."

Overbay said he has no interest in getting involved with college coaching. He doesn't want to recruit players. He has no interest in transfer portals. He's content just coaching whoever shows up to Tumwater.

"I think it's going to help them later on in life," Overbay said of baseball and its challenges. "It prepared me. Just being a positive influence for these kids is the biggest thing."

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     (c)2024 The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.)

     Visit The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.) at www.TheNewsTribune.com

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A bat captured in a Prosser home this week tested positive for rabies, according to the Benton Franklin Health District.

The district is providing guidance to the person who reported the bat on protective measures they should take.

Due to medical privacy concerns, the health district did not say whether anyone in the house may have come in contact with the bat before it was captured and sent for testing to the Washington state Public Health Laboratories.

The rabies virus has a high death rate in people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But those who have been bitten or scratched by a potentially rabid bat may receive preventive treatment before symptoms appear, according to the CDC. That may include human rabies immune globulin and a series of rabies vaccinations.

In Washington state, bats are the only known carrier of the rabies virus, although infected bats can transmit the virus to other mammals.

The rabid bat in Prosser is the only positive case in Washington state so far this year, but eight bats tested positive for rabies in 2022.

Healthy bats do not attack people, but they will bite if touched, according to the health district.

Any bat found outdoors under unusual circumstances — such as acting sick, staying on the ground or during the day — should be left alone, it said. Pets and children should be kept away.

Usually the bat will leave after nightfall.

If a bat is found indoors, officials need to determine if it could have exposed people to rabies.

The last time a rabid bat was found in Benton County before this week was in 2018.

However, a dead bat found in Walla Walla County in 2023 tested positive for rabies. And in 2013 an 11-month-old girl was treated to prevent rabies after being bitten twice by a rabid bat on her grandparents' Pasco deck.

How to prevent rabies

"Bats are good for our environment and should not be killed unnecessarily," said JoDee Peyton, the health district supervisor for land, use, waste and water.

The health district recommends treating bats with respect, caution and distance and offers these tips:

— Vaccinate pets.

— Do not touch or handle wild animals, especially bats.

— Leave bats alone, even the dead ones. Have your children tell an adult if they find a bat at home, school or with a pet.

— Keep bats out of your living space by bat-proofing your house. Learn how at bit.ly/WAKeepBatsOut.

— Contact the health district at 509-460-4205 if there is a bat indoors or if you have direct contact with a bat so your risk of possible exposure to rabies can be assessed.

— If an animal bite or other possible rabies exposure occurs, wash the wound with soap and water, seek medical care and call the health district.

This story was originally published May 16, 2024, 6:23 PM.

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     (c)2024 Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.)

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A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has been found guilty of attempted online enticement of a minor after traveling to Othello, expecting to have sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Koby Don Williams, 49, of Ellensburg., told his wife in a recorded jailhouse call after he was arrested in July 2022 that he had been working on a human trafficking investigation based on a Drug Enforcement Administration tip.

He planned to meet with a victim to give her a hotline help number, he said, according to court documents.

But a federal jury in Spokane did not believe he was in Othello to help anyone and found him guilty this week.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Wick said in a court document before the trial that representatives of the DEA and other federal agencies confirmed that no case had been referred to Williams, who was then an ICE officer.

Williams responded to a phone number in an ad two hours after it was posted on Craigslist by an undercover Othello detective, according to court documents.

The ad was a purported warning that a 13-year-old "prostitute" was posing in Moses Lake as a 19 year old and gave her phone number.

Williams communicated in text messages with "Rebecca," discussing her age, what she charged for sexual acts and what she was willing to do before he booked a room at the Quality Inn in Othello three days after the ad was posted, according to the documents.

"I am a cop," he texted her, according to court documents. "And I will lose my job by doing this, but I'm not afraid. You know if I make the transaction and proposal that you are in the clear."

Williams was arrested when he arrived at the motel room he had booked. When arresting officers found his Office of Homeland Security badge for his work as an ICE officer, Williams said he was there to "rescue a minor screaming for help on Craigslist."

A search of his car found prescription bottles of pills with directions to take them prior to sexual activity and $4,000 in a credit union envelope.

Williams' sentencing is set for Aug. 14 before U.S. Judge Thomas Rice in Spokane.

"No one is above the law, and as this case demonstrates, the U.S. Attorney's Office is fully committed to vigorously prosecuting those who target the most vulnerable members of our community," said Eastern Washington U.S. Attorney Vanessa Waldref.

"Mr. Williams's conduct stands in stark contrast to the trust we place in federal law enforcement to keep Eastern Washington communities safe and strong," she said.

The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative of the Department of Justice to combat child sexual abuse. The case was investigated by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General and the Othello Police Department.

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     (c)2024 Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.)

     Visit Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.) at www.tri-cityherald.com

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SEATTLE — The Washington state Supreme Court overturned a century-old conviction Thursday of a Yakama tribal member who had been prosecuted for hunting, repudiating the conviction and the body of law upon which it once rested as a "stain on this nation."

The defendant, Jim Wallahee, died decades ago. The family member who continued his case died in 2007. But Jack Fiander, a tribal attorney who represented the family, kept pursuing the case, for more than a quarter-century, trying to get a conviction reversed that he viewed as unjust and demeaning.

The case is part of a yearslong effort by the current state Supreme Court to address institutional racism in the legal system. And the 7-2 decision shows the justices grappling with how best to do so: whether to leave past injustices on the books, powerless but still standing, like a scarlet letter of the nation's shame, or whether to explicitly wipe them away, seeking to ameliorate wounds that have long since scarred over.

Treaties that pre-date the state of Washington, between the United States and Indian tribes, granted the tribes the right to fish in their usual places and to hunt on open and unclaimed land.

But state courts in the 19th and 20th centuries often ignored those treaties, prosecuting tribal members for hunting and fishing that should have been protected.

Wallahee was originally convicted for hunting deer on traditional Yakama tribal grounds in 1924. He appealed his conviction, but in 1927, the state Supreme Court ruled against him, adding insult to injury, as it wrote that the tribe "was not an independent nation nor a sovereign entity of any kind, the Indians being mere occupants of the land."

On Thursday, nearly a century later, the state Supreme Court officially admitted it was wrong.

"Today we reject the harmful logic that underpins his wrongful conviction and recognize that Mr. Wallahee had a clear and enforceable treaty right to hunt that deer," Chief Justice Steven González wrote for the majority. "Mr. Wallahee's conviction was incorrect on the law, harmful, and an injustice. Our nation's history is rife with such injustices."

González has previously cited the case as among the worst decisions in the history of the state Supreme Court.

The court's 1927 opinion, González wrote, advanced "centuries worth of harmful tropes about Native Americans" and comes from a body of law used to justify federal laws removing Indians from their lands and later breaking up their reservations.

"Removal, allotment, and Jim Wallahee's conviction all stem from the belief that Native Americans lack basic human and equal rights and therefore treaties with them may be disregarded," González wrote. "We have a duty to explicitly repudiate that belief and to disavow our opinions that reflected that belief. We do so today."

The court's efforts to address racial injustice led all nine justices to sign a 2020 open letter to the legal community, calling on judges and lawyers to "ask ourselves how we may work together to eradicate racism."

Since then, the court has ruled, repeatedly, that the nation and the legal system's history of racism must be taken into account in legal proceedings, from police stops to prosecutorial questioning to jury selection to civil litigation.

The court has gone out of its way to right old wrongs — tossing out a century-old Indian fishing conviction and a decades-old decision that had allowed racial segregation in cemeteries.

Unlike many of those decisions, however, Thursday's was not unanimous.

Justice Barbara Madsen, in dissent, wrote that while the original ruling in Wallahee's case used discriminatory language and is a "historical injustice," its legal framework has already been overturned and Wallahee's estate lacks legal standing to have the conviction overturned.

"I agree with the majority that Wallahee is wrong on the law," wrote Madsen, joined by Justice Debra Stephens. "However, whether a decision should be overruled is decided within the context of a live controversy."

The case was before the Supreme Court largely due to the efforts of one man. Fiander first noticed Wallahee's conviction in the late 1990s. He asked Kittitas County Superior Court, where the conviction first happened, to overturn it, but was told it didn't have the authority.

In 2005, he asked the state Supreme Court, but was told essentially the same thing.

But in 2014, the Legislature passed a law explicitly giving judges the power to overturn old Indian fishing convictions that contradicted treaty agreements. So Fiander went back to work. He got fishing convictions, both more than a century old, overturned for two Yakama tribal members.

(The dissent argued, in part, that Wallahee's estate lacked legal standing because the 2014 law applies only to old Indian fishing convictions, not hunting convictions.)

And Fiander went back to the Supreme Court with Wallahee's case.

Fiander, a self-described "small town, country lawyer" who works out of the trunk of his car, got the court's ruling Thursday morning, while he was driving to see a client. He pulled over into a Burger King parking lot to read it, a quarter-century after he'd begun trying to get it overturned.

"It was on my bucket list," he said.

"I guess my feeling on it," Fiander, 71, a member of the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe, paused, for about 15 seconds.

He explained: "Between sentences, you can go out and have a cup of coffee and I'd still be answering your question, it's just how I talk."

"I don't think it's been a long time or that I've been working on it a long time," he said. "It kind of disturbs me when I hear the treaties characterized as though they are like ancient documents. It wasn't that long ago when those promises were made, you know, because when I look back on my life, as you probably look back on yours, it seems so short. But if I put two of my lifetimes together, back to back, you'd be right back at the time of the treaty. You know, the state of Washington is kind of a young place."

"For me, you know, rather than elation, it's like now this one is checked off and let's go to the next case," he said.

The justices, in Wallahee's case, agreed that the prior decision was wrong, but disagreed on the best way to address the mistake.

The dissent argued that vacating the conviction, which no longer carried the force of law, only amounted to "wiping away the discomfort and shame of past decisions."

"Removing all trace of the offensive language and tropes in Wallahee salves the shame of discrimination by erasing that shame. It does not eradicate it," Madsen wrote. "Allowing the case to exist (disavowed and without authority) helps ensure that future generations can see the documented history of discrimination and disenfranchisement of a people. It is our history. We cannot forget it."

But González, for the majority, argued "there is a difference between erasing history and redressing harm."

"This court's wrongful decision can be characterized as an instructive feature of the past only by those who do not feel its sting in the present," he wrote. "Today we take a step toward reconciliation."

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