A traffic stop on what appeared to be a brown UPS truck in Boulevard on Monday evening revealed 77 unauthorized immigrants stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder inside its hot cargo area.
Five children were found traveling among the overheated group of Mexican nationals, who admitted to being in the U.S. illegally, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in San Diego federal court.
A California Highway Patrol officer pulled the truck over before 5 p.m. because the vehicle had no tags and was weaving on Old Highway 80, about a mile west of Tierra Del Sol Road.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent patrolling the area in an unmarked car passed by the vehicle stop and asked the officer if he’d like assistance.
When the agent approached the truck, he observed it was riding “extremely low” and had what appeared to be fresh paint on the rear. He could also smell body odor and what was described as the pungent smell of a soap commonly used in Mexico.
The truck’s driver, a U.S. citizen who had been placed in the CHP car, said the truck was his and gave permission to search.
When the agent opened the rear doors, he found dozens of people standing inside, sweating excessively, the complaint states.
In an interview with authorities, the driver, Shawn Lee Seiler, admitted to being a human smuggler who was expecting to transport 50 people that evening, the complaint says. He said he was surprised to learn there were 77 inside.
He told investigators he was to be paid $100 for each unauthorized immigrant he transported.
Seiler was arrested on a charge of transporting unauthorized immigrants for financial gain.
A UPS spokesman said the truck was not a real UPS vehicle, and the driver has never worked for the company.
Criminal charges were also lodged against two of the unauthorized immigrants after records checks found they had prior deportations — one on January 9 through San Ysidro and one on May 14, 2015, through El Paso.
The remaining people in the group are being held as material witnesses in the smuggling case.
He looks like he would go crazy over barbecue sauce
“I’ll go to fucking jail over some barbecue sauce!”
That is what Willie Edward Drake, 43, yelled during a tirade last week inside a Waffle House in Georgia after being informed by a employee that the restaurant did not offer his favorite tangy condiment.
According to a Bibb County Sheriff’s Office report, Drake sat down at the Macon eatery’s counter early Tuesday morning and ordered food. Drake subsequently asked for some barbecue sauce.
The Waffle House, however, does not stock barbecue sauce, a revelation that allegedly caused Drake to begin “screaming obscenities and insulting” workers. Drake’s unhinged behavior “caused the employees and customers to fear for their safety,” cops reported.
Officers responding to a 911 call about a disturbance at the Waffle House (seen below) described Drake as “uncooperative and disorderly.” Pictured above, Drake was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
Drake, who gave his address as a hotel near Waffle House, spent several days in the county jail before his release on $390 bond. He is scheduled for a March 1 appearance in Municipal Court.
Illegal Immigration can be stopped if we stop giving free shit away.
U.S. immigration agents raided dozens of 7-Eleven stores before dawn Wednesday and arrested 21 people in the biggest crackdown on a company suspected of hiring undocumented workers since President Donald Trump took office.
Some 98 of the convenience stores nationwide — from Los Angeles to New York — were targeted by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose top official described the raids as a warning to other companies that may have unauthorized employees on their payrolls.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents serve an employment audit notice at a 7-Eleven convenience store Won Jan. 10, 2018, in Los Angeles. Agents said they targeted about 100 7-Eleven stores nationwide Wednesday to open employment audits and interview workers. Chris Carlson / AP“Today’s actions send a strong message to U.S. businesses that hire and employ an illegal workforce,” ICE’s Acting Director Thomas D. Homan said in a statement. “ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable.”
Homan did not say why ICE went after the Irving, Texas-based convenience store chain, which has 60,000 franchises worldwide and is famous for its Slurpee drinks. ICE hit stores in 17 states and Washington, D.C., and gave managers and franchise owners three days to provide the agency with the immigration status of their workers.
Lock Them Up And Deport The SOB’s.
“Businesses that hire illegal workers are a pull factor for illegal immigration, and we are working hard to remove this magnet,” Homan said. “ICE will continue its efforts to protect jobs for American workers by eliminating unfair competitive advantages for companies that exploit illegal immigration.”
Derek N. Benner, another top ICE official, warned that Wednesdays’s raids were “a harbinger of what’s to come.”
“This is what we’re gearing up for this year and what you’re going to see more and more of is these large-scale compliance inspections, just for starters,” Benner, acting head of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, told The Associated Press. “From there, we will look at whether these cases warrant an administrative posture or criminal investigation.”
Benner said they’re not just targeting big companies. “It’s going to be inclusive of everything that we see out there,” he said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents serve an employment audit notice at a 7-Eleven convenience store on Jan. 10, 2018, in Los Angeles. Chris Carlson / APIn its own statement, 7-Eleven said it was aware of the ICE raids and stressed that each franchise is run by “independent business owners” who are “solely responsible for their employees, including deciding who to hire and verifying their eligibility to work in the United States.”
“7-Eleven takes compliance with immigration laws seriously and has terminated the franchise agreements of franchisees convicted of violating these laws,” the statement read.
Trump ran on a promise to crack down and deport undocumented workers. And under him, ICE has reportedly made nearly 40 percent more arrests.
The raids on Wednesday grew out of a 2013 ICE investigation that resulted in charges against nine 7-Eleven franchisees and managers in New York and Virginia who allegedly used more than 25 stolen identities to employ over 100 people who were in the country illegally.
Eight of the accused wound up pleading guilty and were ordered to pay more than $2.6 million in back wages. The ninth was arrested in November.
A Florida man beat his stepson to death for sneaking out of bed to get a cookie — and then forced the boy’s brothers to sleep next to his body all night, according to prosecutors.
Jack Junior Montgomery, 31, of Tampa, was arraigned Monday and held on bond for the murder of 7-year-old Brice Russell, WFLA reports.
Brice’s mother, Donya Shenita Russell, had left him in Montgomery’s care — along with three of his siblings — while she worked a double shift Friday night. The family reportedly was staying at a local hotel.
“While she was out working, (Montgomery) chose to not only physically discipline this child himself, by not only repeatedly punching and throwing him on the ground — but threatening bodily harm upon the two brothers if they did not partake and equally discipline him,” Assistant State Attorney Matthew Smith charged in court.
According to his arrest affidavit, Montgomery told investigators he had been trying to discipline Brice after he got out of bed to eat a cookie.
“(Montgomery) picked him up and flung him as described by the other brothers, helicopter across the hotel room into what’s kind of a cabinet, where he hit head first. And ultimately caused his brain to bleed,” said Smith, noting how this caused the little boy to die within seconds or minutes.
“As if that was not aggravated enough, Mr. Montgomery took the child, put him in bed and had his siblings sleep with him while Brice was dead that entire night.”
Authorities believe Montgomery killed his stepson sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning.
Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies had been called to the family’s hotel room around 1 a.m. Saturday to conduct a welfare check after receiving reports of loud noises, but they never saw or found anything suspicious that would warrant a search, WFTS reports.
Montgomery would later call 911 himself around 10:50 a.m. to report that his stepson was unable to wake up and was not breathing. The boy reportedly was pronounced dead at the scene.
Brice’s brothers told detectives that Montgomery punched the child repeatedly in the face, mouth and stomach with a closed fist before hurling him into the wall. They said he threatened to do the same to them if they didn’t participate in the beatdown.
“Push the kid over here,” a hotel employee reported hearing, according to the arrest affidavit.
“Beat the kid!”
Cops have not released the ages of the other boys.
WFLA reports that Montgomery has a history of domestic violence and battery.
Trump wants ‘Deep State Justice Dept’ to probe Huma Abedin
President Trump on Tuesday suggested the Department of Justice “must finally act?” to investigate longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department last week released emails belonging to her, including some marked classified that were found on her husband’s laptop.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols,” he wrote on Twitter. “She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”
The State Department last Friday released parts of 2,800 emails that belonged to Abedin but were recovered by the FBI on the laptop of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, during an investigation into his sexting with a female high school student.
The discovery of the emails, some marked as classified, prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, that he would reopen the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
He reversed himself two days before the vote, saying nothing of significance had been found in her emails.
Trump fired Comey, who had been heading the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, in May.
The president was also referring to a report on the Daily Caller website on Sunday that said Abedin forwarded sensitive work emails to her private Yahoo account – and some of the messages contained passwords for her government laptop.
The report noted that 500 million Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2014.
Among those indicted by the Department of Justice in March 2017 for the hack was Igor Suschin, a former Russian intelligence agent.
Teenager murders his family members on New Year’s Eve, officials say
A 16-year-old New Jersey boy gunned down his parents, sister and a family friend just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, turning the family home into a bloodbath that his brother and grandfather managed to escape, investigators said Monday.
The teenager shot and killed his father, mother, sister and a family friend who also lived in the Long Branch, N.J., home, Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher J. Gramiccioni said in a statement. Police were called to the home around 11:43 p.m., and the suspect was taken into custody without incident, Gramiccioni said.
“We are confident that this is a domestic incident that is completely isolated,” Gramiccioni said. “It’s a terribly tragic incident.”
The boy’s name was not released because he is a juvenile, but the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office identified the deceased as: Steven Kologi, 44; Linda Kologi, 42; Brittany Kologi, 18; and Mary Schultz, 70. Schultz was identified as a “family acquaintance” by the prosecutor’s office.
The suspect’s brother and grandfather also were at the home at the time of the shooting but were able to escape unharmed, Gramiccioni said during a Monday news conference.
The teenager was believed to have used a Century Arms “semi-automatic assault rifle” to gun down his family members and the family friend, authorities said during a news conference. The gun was legally owned and registered to a family member, Gramiccioni said.
Gramiccioni declined to comment on the suspect’s motive or a possible mental disability when asked by reporters. He did say the attack was an “isolated” domestic incident. Police also said there was no known history of violence at the house.
“The Kologis were very caring, loving people and always looking to do fun things with their kids,” Walter Montelione, Linda Kologi’s cousin, told WCBS-TV. “He was a good kid. He was a little, you know, slow with learning disabilities, but he knows right from wrong.”
Brittany Kologi was a freshman at Stockton University in Galloway Township, N.J., where she studied health sciences, a university spokeswoman confirmed to Fox News.
“We are shocked and saddened by the reports of the death of freshman Brittany Kologi under such tragic circumstances,” Diane D’Amico, a Stockton University spokeswoman said. She added that counseling staff will be on hand for students.
Veronica Mass, 69, told NJ.com that her daughter and Linda Kologi were friends who grew up together. She said she was “stunned” by the shooting.
“They were a close-knit family,” Mass told the publication. “No drugs, no alcohol.”
She also said that the suspected shooter had been home-schooled. He had a hard time keeping up with his peers academically and was picked on by other students, she said.
But, Mass said the suspect “improved dramatically after being home-schooled” and was “outgoing, very friendly. He would tell jokes.”
An older brother of the suspected shooter reportedly posted a touching tribute to his slain family on Instagram, calling his parents “the greatest parents I could ask for.” Steven Kologi Jr. said his parents made sure to provide for their children – with food, a home and at Christmastime – even though “they struggled financially.”
“I cannot even describe the type of people they were so just believe me when I say how great they were,” he said.
As for his sister, the surviving Kologi called her “so beautiful and smart.”
“I just wish I could tell all of them how much they meant to me and how much I truly loved each and every one of them because I didn’t do it enough,” he said.
Jalen Walls went to school with Brittany Kologi and lives a few blocks away from the home. He also told NJ.com that the suspected shooter was cared for by his mother as he required special assistance.
“But he was fully functional and comprehended what we were saying,” Walls said.
In a Facebook tribute, Dave Farmer said he played softball with Steven Kologi and “never had an argument or disagreement since” with him.
‘I’m proud to say publicly that I knew and loved this man unconditionally and always told him when we parted, ‘I love you brotha!!!’” Farmer said.
The teenager could be charged as an adult, officials said.
Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office and the Long Branch Police Department have launched a joint investigation into the murders.
A GoFundMe account has been set up to help with the funeral expenses and has raised nearly $20,000 as of Tuesday morning.
