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      ‘Jamaica Mistaica’: Jimmy Buffett Song Inspired After Plane Sprayed by Gunfire

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      In 1996, the police in Jamaica mistook Buffett for a drug smuggler after he landed his seaplane with the singer Bono and others on board and opened fire on it.Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.It’s one of the many tales that have resurfaced after his death on Friday.While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.Also on board the HU-16 Grumman Albatross plane was Bono’s wife, Ali, their two young children, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explainWe had only come for chicken we were not a ganja planeWell, you should have seen their faces when they finally realizedWe were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.He later received an apology from the Jamaican government, according to an MTV News report at the time.“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’” More

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      Woman With ‘Doomsday’ Beliefs Gets Life Without Parole in Her Children’s Deaths

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      In May, Lori Vallow Daybell was convicted in the murders of two of her children and of conspiring to murder her husband’s previous wife in Idaho’s district court.An Idaho judge sentenced Lori Vallow Daybell on Monday to three consecutive terms of life in prison without parole for the murders of two of her children and for conspiring to murder her husband’s former wife in a case that drew national attention for what prosecutors described as her “doomsday” beliefs.Judge Steven Boyce of the Seventh Judicial District said at the sentencing, which was streamed online from a packed Fremont County Courthouse in St. Anthony, Idaho, that Ms. Vallow Daybell “chose the most evil and destructive path possible.”“The most unimaginable type of murder is to have a mother murdering her own children, and that’s exactly what you did,” Judge Boyce said, adding that allowing Ms. Vallow Daybell to serve her terms concurrently “would not serve the interest of justice.”In May 2021, a grand jury indicted Ms. Vallow Daybell, 50, and her husband, Chad Daybell, 54, in connection with the deaths of two of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua Vallow, 7, known as J.J.Before she was sentenced, Ms. Vallow Daybell told the court that she has had “many communications with Jesus Christ” and that because of those communications she knows that her children are “happy and busy in the spirit world.”Rob Wood, the prosecuting attorney, read a statement written by Colby Ryan, Ms. Vallow Daybell’s only surviving child, who said that “Tylee will never have the opportunity to become a mother, wife or have the career she was destined to have,” and that “JJ will never be able to grow and spread his light with this world the way he did.”“My siblings and father deserve so much more than this,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “I want them to be remembered for who they were, and not to be just a spectacle or a headline to the world.”The sentencing followed a jury’s guilty verdict in May in the murders and the conspiracy. Ms. Vallow Daybell had initially been declared not competent to stand trial and was required to undergo psychiatric treatment. The trial in Boise, Idaho, began on April 3 after years of delays.At the start of the trial, prosecutors described Ms. Vallow Daybell as a negligent mother who believed that her “religious mission” took precedence over caring for her children.Ms. Vallow Daybell, according to prosecutors, believed that her children were “zombies” possessed by evil spirits.About 60 witnesses were called by prosecutors to testify, according to Fox 10, a Phoenix news station.Ms. Vallow Daybell pleaded not guilty but did not testify in her own defense, and her lawyers rested their case without calling a single witness, Boise State Public Radio reported. Her lawyers told the judge that they did not believe the state had proved its case. The verdict was streamed online.Ms. Vallow Daybell was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the death of Tammy Daybell, Mr. Daybell’s former wife. Mr. Daybell, who also pleaded not guilty, has been charged with first-degree murder in that case. Mr. Daybell’s trial was set for April 2024.In November 2019, Tylee Ryan and J.J. Vallow were reported missing by J.J.’s grandparents, who had become concerned when they were unable to reach him by phone.Officers with the Rexburg Police Department in Idaho tried to conduct a welfare check and later executed search warrants at the apartment complex where Ms. Vallow Daybell and her husband lived. The authorities said the couple seemed unconcerned with the children’s whereabouts.In February 2020, Ms. Vallow Daybell was arrested in Hawaii on a warrant issued by the authorities in Idaho, after, they said, she had not cooperated with the effort to find the missing children.In June 2020, investigators found human remains buried on Mr. Daybell’s property in Idaho that were later identified as belonging to his wife’s missing children. He was arrested and charged with concealing evidence.At the trial, Detective Ray Hermosillo of the Rexburg Police Department described photographs of the children’s remains. A DNA analyst testified that a hair found stuck to duct tape used to wrap J.J.’s body matched his mother’s, according to The Associated Press.Detective Hermosillo also said at the trial that Tylee’s remains had been burned and packed into a bucket that was buried elsewhere on Mr. Daybell’s property.Both Mr. Daybell and Ms. Vallow Daybell have been in custody since the arrests.In October 2019, Tammy Daybell was found dead in her Idaho home. The authorities had initially said that she appeared to have died of natural causes, but her body was exhumed that December after the authorities began to question the circumstances of her death and its potential connection to the disappearances of Ms. Vallow Daybell’s children.At the start of the trial, prosecutors revealed in court that an autopsy determined that Ms. Daybell died of asphyxiation.The murders were the focus of a Lifetime movie, “Doomsday Mom: The Lori Vallow Story,” and a Netflix documentary series, “Sins of Our Mother.”Michael Levenson More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream Now

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      Four picks across television, documentary and podcast that do a lot more than rehash what we already know about notorious killers.Decades before true crime crept in from the margins and inundated pop culture, I found a humble paperback buried in the stacks of my parents’ bookshelf about America’s most notorious serial killers. Perhaps inadvisable for a 10 year old, I read and reread about the horrors inflicted by, among others, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. Though I was already aware that terrible things happened in general, this was different: specific, personal and intimately chilling.Lately, and fortunately, the tired approach of centering these monsters by rehashing their personal struggles and the details of their deeds has been falling out of favor. Interest has shifted instead to elevating the stories of those impacted and to understanding the mood of the eras and the societal circumstances in which these crimes took place. This shift was reflected to some degree in July when a man was arrested in the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Profiles of the suspect abounded, but from the start, there was demand for information about the victims as well as scrutiny of the investigation.This is the first in a series of streaming lists about true crime films, shows and podcasts. And while I won’t dwell on these types of murderers in this in the future, the topic does feel like the appropriate place to start. Here are picks across television, documentary and podcast that offer more than the usual glorification of madness.Documentary Mini-Series“Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York”No series in recent memory has so successfully, thoughtfully and deliberately contextualized a serial killing spree like this four-part Max series, based on a book by Elon Green. In the early 1990s, amid the AIDS crisis and rising hate crimes against L.G.B.T.Q. people, gay men were being stalked in Manhattan piano bars — murdered and dismembered, their bodies found discarded around New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But the killer’s identity, almost remarkably, is not front of mind as the episodes proceed.Instead, through interviews with family members, friends, lovers, and members and allies of the queer community, the victims are powerfully, heartbreakingly humanized, while viewers are plunged into the New York City of the time. Instead of simply alluding to the problems of bias and bigotry by those entrusted to solve these crimes, this series boldly addresses the ways in which the New York Police Department and the city’s politicians treated the murdered men, the community as a whole and those pleading for action as second-class citizens. The final episode aired on Sunday.“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer”This four-part Netflix series about the search for Richard Ramirez, who terrorized California with a brutal and unpredictable rampage that lasted just over a year in the mid-1980s, is about much more than who he was and what he did. It’s instead anchored in the recollections of survivors, victims’ families, journalists who worked on the case, and primarily Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, detectives who devoted themselves tirelessly to hunting for Ramirez.While this series, from 2021, doesn’t minimize the horrors of the crimes (be warned, there is crime-scene footage), it, like “Last Call,” conveys an uncanny sense of time and place, highlighting the mentality of the day in the communities affected and the shortcomings of the available technology. Be prepared to be stunned by mistakes made by law enforcement and by political leaders who jeopardized the frantic search.Podcast“This Is Actually Happening,” Episode 259:“What If You Survived a Serial Killer?”I have listened to dozens of episodes of this podcast, in which regular people simply tell the stories of staggering, often wrenching, events that have altered the course of their lives. It epitomizes my favorite format across true crime: stripped-down, no-frills first-person accounts that leave space for the gravity of the story to hit hard. And the stories explored on “This Is Actually Happening” run the gamut, which means there’s a good chance it will make another appearance on this list.This 2022 episode features Jane Boroski, the only known survivor of the Connecticut River Valley killer, whose identity is still unknown. He murdered at least seven women over a decade starting in the late 1970s, but in this podcast, the details of his crimes are put to the side in favor of giving Boroski — who was attacked when she was 22 years old and seven months pregnant, after she’d stopped for a soda on the way home from a county fair — room to discuss who she was before, during and after the attack, and who she is now.Also, thoughtfully, this podcast includes highly specific warnings in the show notes of each episode page to ensure that listeners are aware of what sensitive topics will be discussed.Television“Mindhunter”This gripping and moody Netflix drama — executive-produced by its creator, Joe Penhall, along with David Fincher and Charlize Theron — sadly won’t see a third season, Fincher confirmed this year, but the first two are more than worth the price of admission (that being a slice of your sense of security). Based on the memoir “Mindhunter: Inside the F.B.I.’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” the show dramatizes the creation of the F.B.I.’s real Behavioral Science Unit, where the concept of a serial killer began. And while the central trio of characters — Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), an F.B.I. hostage negotiator increasingly unsettled by the emergence of a disturbing theme; the behavioral-science specialist Bill Tench (Holt McCallany); and the psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) — are fictional, the serial killers that appear are all based on real people, with casting that is eerily true to life.It starts in 1977, with David Berkowitz (Oliver Cooper), who was known as the “Son of Sam,” and moves on to, among others, Ed Kemper, the “Coed Killer” (Cameron Britton, who won an Emmy for the role) and Dennis “B.T.K.” Rader (Sonny Valicenti, still only listed as an A.D.T. serviceman in the credits). The genius of “Mindhunter,” though, is that it’s — as The Times’s TV critic James Poniewozik put it when the first season was released in 2017 — “more academic than sensationalistic,” with the stomach-turning events rarely spelled out in blood, but instead explored through hushed conversations. More

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      Las Vegas Police Search Home in Investigation of Tupac Shakur’s Murder

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      Nearly three decades after the rapper was killed in a drive-by shooting after leaving a boxing match, the police said that they had searched a home in Henderson, Nev.The Las Vegas police have executed a search warrant in connection with the fatal drive-by shooting of the rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996, the department said Tuesday, reinvigorating the investigation into the unsolved death of a mythic figure in hip-hop.Shakur, who sold millions of albums and had reached No. 1 on the charts, was shot as he was leaving a Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon prizefight in Las Vegas when a Cadillac pulled up alongside the BMW he was riding in. He died less than a week later at the age of 25.The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement that it had served the search warrant in Henderson, Nev., a city outside of Las Vegas, on Monday. It declined to comment further.Shakur’s “All Eyez on Me” was one of the first double albums in hip-hop. He began acting onscreen in the early ’90s, starring as the male lead opposite Janet Jackson in John Singleton’s 1993 romantic drama “Poetic Justice.” When he died, the critic Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times that he had “described gangsterism as a vicious cycle, a grimly inevitable response to racism, ghetto poverty and police brutality.”His murder has been the speculation of books, documentaries, television series and films. For some, the failure to charge anyone for Shakur’s killing — as well as for the fatal shooting of the Notorious B.I.G. six months later — became signs of institutional failure, prompting calls for the police to revisit the case.Shakur, who was one of the most popular rappers in the world when he was killed, saw his legend grow after his death, as dozens of posthumous albums, books, documentaries and films were released. There was even a concert featuring a Tupac Shakur hologram. In 2017 he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Part of the investigation over the years has included a brawl involving Shakur and his entourage at the MGM Grand hotel after the boxing match. But in more than 25 years, no arrests have been made. The police department has cited a lack of cooperation from people close to Shakur as a reason for the stalled investigation. More

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      ‘Rust’ Armorer Transferred Narcotics on Day of Shooting, Prosecutor Says

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      A new charge of evidence tampering was announced as a departing investigator accused the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office of “reprehensible and unprofessional” conduct.The original armorer on the film “Rust,” who was charged with involuntary manslaughter after a gun that was loaded with live ammunition fired on the set and killed the cinematographer, will face an additional charge of evidence tampering related to narcotics, a special prosecutor in the case said Thursday.The new charge against the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, “relates to the transfer of narcotics to another person” on Oct. 21, 2021, the day of the shooting, “with the intent to prevent criminal prosecution,” the prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, said in a statement. A lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said that she intended to plead not guilty to both the evidence tampering and the involuntary manslaughter charges.The additional charge was announced as tensions between prosecutors and the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office over the case began to spill into public view. An investigator who was removed from the case after working on it for months for the district attorney’s office sharply criticized the sheriff’s office earlier this week in an email to prosecutors.“The conduct of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office during and after their initial investigation is reprehensible and unprofessional to a degree I still have no words for,” the investigator, Robert Shilling, wrote in the email he sent Tuesday. “Not I or 200 more proficient investigators than I can/could clean up the mess delivered to your office in October 2022 (1 year since the initial incident … inexcusable).”Mr. Shilling declined to elaborate on the email on Thursday, writing that he was bound by a nondisclosure agreement. Juan Rios, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, declined to comment on the criticism.Mr. Shilling, an independent contractor for the district attorney’s office who has reported to Ms. Morrissey in recent months, had made the criticism in a note in which he addressed a decision to take him off the case and submitted a notice to terminate his own contract. The email was provided to The New York Times on Thursday in response to a public records inquiry.The case has faced numerous complications since a gun that the actor Alec Baldwin was practicing with on the set of “Rust” went off in 2021, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director, Joel Souza.The original prosecution team initially charged Mr. Baldwin with involuntary manslaughter. But that charge was later dropped after a new team reviewed evidence suggesting that the gun he was practicing with had been modified. The special prosecutor who initially helped lead the case had stepped down after her appointment was challenged on legal grounds, and the district attorney in charge of the case, Mary Carmack-Altwies, then stepped back and appointed Ms. Morrissey and Jason Lewis as new special prosecutors.The email from Mr. Shilling, the former chief of the New Mexico State Police, was sent to Ms. Morrissey, Ms. Carmack-Altwies, another member of the district attorney’s office and, improbably, to Jason Bowles, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed. (Mr. Shilling said he had sent the note to Mr. Bowles by mistake because he has the same first name as one of his supervisors. He called his email “unprofessional,” noting that “the victim deserved better.”)On Thursday, Mr. Bowles said in a statement that the announcement of the additional charge after 20 months of investigation with no prior notice to his client was “shocking,” and noted that it came on the heels of the state’s lead investigator “raising serious concerns about the investigation in an email.”“This stinks to high heaven,” Mr. Bowles said.Of the narcotics allegation, Mr. Bowles said in the statement that he hadn’t seen any facts or witnesses statements backing it.Mr. Bowles called the email exchange “beyond troubling” in court papers he filed Thursday afternoon to bolster his request that the case be dismissed, saying that he was concerned that he had initially been asked to erase the erroneously sent email. He asked the judge to require that Mr. Shilling and the prosecutors produce all communications between them.In her statement, Ms. Morrissey defended the integrity of law enforcement’s investigation, writing, “We disagree with Mr. Shilling’s evaluation that any gaps in the investigation conducted by the Santa Fe County Sheriff could not be cured and we are diligently working with the sheriff’s department and our own investigative team to conduct any necessary follow-up that we, as special prosecutors, deem necessary.” More

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      in Television

      Ex-Member of Menudo Says He Was Raped by Father of the Menendez Brothers

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      The allegation, made in a forthcoming docuseries, resembles the claims of abuse by the brothers, who were convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents.It was a gripping case that was one of the first to draw a daily national audience to a televised criminal trial. Two affluent young men were charged three decades ago with murdering their parents by marching into the den of their Beverly Hills mansion with shotguns and unloading more than a dozen rounds on their mother and father while they sat on the couch.Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted in 1996 of murdering their mother, Mary Louise, a former beauty queen who went by Kitty, and their father, Jose, a music executive, despite defense arguments that the brothers had been sexually molested for years by their father, and had killed out of fear.Now, Roy Rosselló, a former member of Menudo, the boy band of the 1980s that became a global sensation, is coming forward with an allegation that he was sexually assaulted as a teenager by Jose Menendez.The assertion was aired on Tuesday in a segment on the “Today” show that outlined some of the findings of a three-part docuseries scheduled to air on Peacock, the streaming service from NBCUniversal, beginning on May 2. The series, “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” based on reporting by the journalists Robert Rand and Nery Ynclan, is largely focused on Mr. Rosselló. He describes an encounter with Mr. Menendez but also recounts separate incidents of sexual abuse that he says were inflicted on him by one of Menudo’s former managers when he sang as part of the group.“I know what he did to me in his house,” Mr. Rosselló says of Mr. Menendez in the clip of the docuseries that aired on “Today.”It is unclear what impact, if any, Mr. Rosselló’s account will have on efforts by defense lawyers to secure a new trial for the brothers, whose prior appeals have been denied.The credibility of the brothers’ account, and the admissibility of defense arguments that pointed to sex abuse as a mitigating factor in the case, was central to the criminal trials that unfolded after the discovery of the murders in 1989. The first prosecution, which began in 1993, ended with two hung juries and mistrials. When the brothers were retried together two years later, they were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain.The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the cases in the 1990s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Tuesday morning.The “Today” report previewed interviews with Mr. Rosselló in which he is said to describe a visit to the Menendez home in New Jersey when he was 14 — a visit during which he says Jose Menendez drugged and raped him.“That’s the man here that raped me,” he says in a clip of the docuseries, pointing to Mr. Menendez in a photo. “That’s the pedophile.”He is also heard saying, “It’s time for the world to know the truth.”Roy Rosselló, a former member of the singing group Menudo, has accused Jose Menendez, the father of Erik and Lyle Menendez, of sexually assaulting him when he was 14.via PeacockMr. Menendez was affiliated with Menudo because he had signed the group as an executive of RCA Records.Mr. Rosselló has previously described being sexually abused as part of Menudo. Others have also said they were verbally, physically, emotionally and sexually abused as part of the band in the four-part HBO Max docuseries “Menudo: Forever Young.” No one has ever been criminally charged in connection to the allegations.One of Kitty Menendez’s brothers, Milton Andersen, 88, used an expletive to describe Mr. Rosselló’s allegation as flatly false and said the Menendez brothers should not be set free.Mr. Andersen said his brother-in-law was not a sexual predator and objected to the idea that the new accusation could in any way lead to Lyle and Erik having their case re-examined.“They do not deserve to walk on the face of this earth after killing my sister and my brother-in-law,” he said.The Menendez murders drew wide public attention, in part because the brothers had been children of affluence. Lyle was attending Princeton at the time of the killings. Erik was pursuing a career in professional tennis. Prosecutors presented them as coldblooded killers, interested in getting unfettered access to their parents’ $14 million estate.Jose Menendez was shot five times, including once in the back of the head. By the brothers’ own testimony, after they had discharged several rounds, Lyle went to his car, reloaded his 12-gauge shotgun, and pushed the muzzle of his gun to his mother’s cheek and shot her again.The police initially believed that the slayings were tied to the Mafia. But investigators turned their attention to Lyle, who was 22 at the time of his arrest, and Erik, 19, after the brothers bought Rolex watches, condominiums, sports cars and other items in the months after the murders.Though they initially denied any role in the killings, they became primary suspects after the discovery of taped recordings of conversations the brothers had with their psychologist in which the brothers explained what had led them to kill their parents.As the first trial neared, the brothers’ defense lawyers came forward with their own explanation for the crimes: that Lyle had confronted his father about the family’s sex abuse secrets, that his father had become enraged and threatening, and that the brothers had killed out of concern for their lives.The defense argued that the murder charges should be reduced to manslaughter because the defendants had honestly, if incorrectly, believed that their lives were imminently threatened.The trials, which played out on Court TV, ushered in a new era of televised courtroom drama. At least some jurors in the first set of trials believed the brothers, who had movingly testified of the abuse they suffered. The testimony left the jurors split between manslaughter and murder verdicts and contributed to the impasse that led to the mistrials.When another jury convened to decide the brothers’ fate, the circumstances had changed. The judge banned cameras in court and severely restricted witness testimony and evidence related to Jose Menendez’s parenting. Prosecutors, who had let the brothers’ molestation accusations go unchallenged at the first trials, went right at Erik Menendez when he took the stand, seeding doubt about whether the abuse had happened at all.“Can you give us the name of one eyewitness to any of the sexual assaults that took place in that home,” the lead prosecutor, David Conn, repeatedly asked Erik Menendez, as he ticked through the places the brothers had lived.According to transcripts of the testimony, Mr. Menendez kept repeating the same answer: “No.”The defense also did not present at trial anyone beyond the brothers who described Mr. Menendez as a sexual predator.As the trial wound to a close, the judge, Stanley M. Weisberg, ruled that the “abuse excuse” argument could not be used at all. The ruling essentially forced jurors to decide between letting the brothers off entirely, or convicting them of murder.They did the latter.“We did think there was psychological abuse to some extent. I think most of us believed that,” one juror, Lesley Hillings, told The Los Angeles Times afterward. “Sexual abuse? I don’t think we’ll ever know if that’s true or not.”Legal experts said that even with the new allegation brought by Mr. Rosselló, the lawyers defending the Menendez brothers would face an uphill battle if they sought to have the case re-examined.Laurie L. Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who provided legal analysis of the Menendez case in the 1990s, said Mr. Rosselló’s information might come “too little, too late.”“In the end, in the second trial, the jury just didn’t believe them,” Professor Levenson said of the brothers and their sex abuse allegations.Mr. Rosselló’s account “could be something you could file with the court and claim that it’s newly discovered evidence and that it would have made a difference in the case,” she added. “But they will have the burden to show that.”In the segment aired by “Today,” Alan Jackson, a criminal defense lawyer, agreed that the brothers had “a big mountain to climb.” Still, he said the assertion brought forward by Mr. Rosselló provided the brothers a “glimmer of hope.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Prosecutor Behind ‘Rust’ Charges Steps Aside, Appointing Replacements

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      The involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin has suffered setbacks, and now the district attorney has withdrawn from the case and named two special prosecutors.The district attorney who brought involuntary manslaughter charges against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the “Rust” film set in New Mexico is stepping away from the case, her office announced Wednesday, as she named two new special prosecutors to handle the case.The district attorney of Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, had been the face of the prosecution since the beginning. But in recent weeks the case has faced a couple of setbacks: Prosecutors downgraded the charges Mr. Baldwin faces after his lawyers noted that the law he was initially charged under was not passed until after the fatal shooting, and the special prosecutor who was originally named to help with the case, Andrea Reeb, decided to step down after her appointment was challenged in court.The appointment of Ms. Reeb was initially challenged by lawyers for Mr. Baldwin, who argued that it violated the New Mexico Constitution for her to serve as a special prosecutor and a New Mexico legislator at the same time. (She was also an elected member of the state’s House of Representatives.)A lawyer for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the original armorer on the film “Rust,” who was also charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal Oct. 21, 2021, shooting of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, then raised another issue.The lawyer, Jason Bowles, argued that if Ms. Carmack-Altwies — who had said she needed help prosecuting such a high-profile case — wanted to appoint a new special prosecutor, the law required her to recuse herself from the case entirely. The judge hearing the case agreed, and Ms. Carmack-Altwies was left with the choice to either hire legal help and stay on the case or step back from it and let a new special prosecutor act.She chose to step back, announcing on Wednesday that she would be appointing two New Mexico lawyers, Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis, as special prosecutors.“My responsibility to the people of the First Judicial District is greater than any one case, which is why I have chosen to appoint a special prosecutor in the ‘Rust’ case,” Ms. Carmack-Altwies said in a statement. “Kari Morrissey and Jason Lewis will unflinchingly pursue justice in the death of Halyna Hutchins.”Now, the case will move forward without either of the prosecutors who made the decision to charge Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed with involuntary manslaughter, and who reached a plea deal with Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who had oversight of safety on set. More

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      Three Convicted in 2018 Murder of Rapper XXXTentacion

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      After more than 27 hours of deliberation, a Florida jury found three men guilty of killing the rising rapper during a robbery in the parking lot of a motorcycle shop.Nearly five years after the killing of the rising rap star XXXTentacion, who was fatally shot in broad daylight during a 2018 robbery just as his polarizing career was exploding, a jury in Florida on Monday ended more than a week of deliberations when it found three men guilty of first-degree murder in the case.Prosecutors said that Michael Boatwright, 28, and Trayvon Newsome, 24, were the gunmen that June afternoon, with Boatwright firing the fatal shot during a struggle over money. The third man convicted, Dedrick Williams, 26, was said to be the getaway driver and mastermind behind the robbery.All three face mandatory life sentences; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty in the case, which was tried at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.Surveillance video played in court showed the rapper’s BMW being blocked by an S.U.V. as he tried to leave a motor sports store in Deerfield Beach, Fla., leading to a confrontation with two masked assailants, who escaped with $50,000 in cash.The trial turned largely on the jury’s interpretation of testimony from a fourth man present that day, Robert Allen, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last year and testified against his alleged co-conspirators. The Broward County prosecutors also relied on surveillance video from the store that showed two of the men inside, seemingly observing XXXTentacion (born Jahseh Onfroy), as well as cellphone and Bluetooth data tying the men to the location and the S.U.V.XXXTentacion onstage in 2017. The rising rapper was shot and killed during a robbery in 2018.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service and Getty ImagesThe evidence also included videos that prosecutors said showed the defendants dancing and posing with cash hours after the killing.During more than 27 hours of deliberations across eight days, jurors had asked to review more than 1,000 text messages, along with photos and videos, seized from the cellphones of two of the defendants, including a picture of a news story about the shooting.Defense lawyers for Boatwright, Newsome and Williams, who were tried together, argued that DNA evidence failed to link them to the shooting. (The jury was asked to decide separately on each man’s guilt or innocence, and could have convicted just one or two of those accused.)The defense pointed vaguely to other theories of the crime — including behind-the-scenes wrangling that attempted to include information about XXXTentacion’s online beef with the megastar Drake, who fought successfully to avoid being deposed in the case. They also said that Allen, who had previous felony convictions, was an unreliable witness.“Plans hatched in hell do not have angels for witnesses,” Pascale Achille, the lead prosecutor, said in her rebuttal after closing arguments.The foursome had been planning to commit robberies that day, prosecutors argued, when they happened upon XXXTentacion at the motorcycle shop, where they had hoped to buy a mask. After confirming the musician’s identity inside, the men then waited for him in the parking lot and pulled in front of his car, allowing the two gunmen to attack, their faces covered. A passenger riding with XXXTentacion fled, and a scuffle over the rapper’s Louis Vuitton bag containing the $50,000 ended when Boatwright shot the rapper, prosecutors said.XXXTentacion, 20, a singer, songwriter and rapper who blended genres and first took off on the streaming platform SoundCloud, was high up on the roller coaster of viral fame when he was killed.In the 18 months before the shooting, he had gone from a little-known, troubled teenager making music in his bedroom to the top of the Billboard chart thanks to the success of his anarchic breakout single, “Look at Me!,” and a follow-up album, “?,” which debuted at No. 1.At the same time, he was awaiting trial on charges of battery, false imprisonment and witness tampering stemming from the alleged violent assault of a former girlfriend.“If I’m going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy, or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life, regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me,” the rapper said in a video posted to social media before his death.Since his killing, XXXTentacion — whose striking visage has been absorbed into modern hip-hop’s iconography — has been the subject of a documentary, “Look at Me,” and been featured on albums by Kanye West and Lil Wayne, in addition to the posthumous music released in his name. More