SAN DIEGO
Autopsy report released
A Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a mother of five after she hit him with her vehicle fired his gun 10 times from the hood of her car as he tried to get the woman to stop, according to an autopsy report released Thursday. Valeria Tachiquin Alvarado, 32, suffered 14 gunshot wounds to her upper body, the San Diego County Medical Examiner said. Some bullets may have caused more than one wound. The autopsy determined the Sept. 28 death was a homicide and lists multiple gunshot wounds as the cause. Alvarado fled a friend’s apartment when agents came with an arrest warrant for someone else, according to the autopsy. Her blood tested positive for methamphetamine.
OAKLAND, CALIF.
Police avoid takeover
City officials have agreed to relinquish broad power over the embattled Oakland Police Department to a court-appointed director to avert what would be an unprecedented federal takeover. As part of a tentative deal, the compliance director could seek approval from a judge to fire the police chief. U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson could approve the deal at a hearing next week. He demanded last month that the parties reach some sort of agreement now that a decade has passed since a federal judge ordered reforms to settle a police brutality lawsuit.
NEW YORK
City settles abuse suit
New York City will pay $9.7 million to settle a lawsuit by 10 disabled people who were fraudulently adopted by a woman and claimed they were repeatedly abused, starved and imprisoned in a “house of horrors,” city officials announced Thursday. The lawsuit was filed in 2009 in Brooklyn federal court on behalf of the children whom Judith Leekin, 67, adopted over an eight-year period ending in 1996. The suit charged that Leekin was able to carry out a scam in which she fraudulently collected $1.68 million in adoption subsidies because the city’s Administration for Children’s Services didn’t do its job. Leekin was sentenced in 2009 in Florida state court to 20 years in prison. She also was sentenced in New York to 11 years in federal prison for fraud.
Compiled from wire reports.
