Monthly Archives: February 2009

Woman says man impersonated police officer to gain entry to her house

Feb. 26, 20097:01 p.m.

A 35-year-old woman testified this morning that a man posed as a police officer as a ruse to attack her inside her Wichita home.

Sedgwick County District Judge Joseph Bribiesca ordered Michael W. Young to stand trial on two counts of aggravated kidnapping, one count of aggravated robbery and one count of attempted rape following a preliminary hearing.

Young, 51, pleaded not guilty.

The woman identified Young in court as the man who blocked her car with his vehicle in her driveway Sept. 5, as she tried to leave with her 3-year-old daughter. She is not being identified because of an Eagle policy not to name potential victims of sex crimes.

She said Young displayed a badge and a gun and told her he had a search warrant to look for a man, who he named, but whom she didn’t know. She testified Young ordered her and her daughter into the house in the 1300 block of North Pershing, and took her to the basement. There, he pulled a gun on her, took her cell phone, threatened her and tried to sexually assault her.

At one point, the woman testified, she thought she was going to die and asked to say good-bye to her daughter.

The woman then said she fought with the man in the basement and the kitchen, where they both reached for knives. She ended up grabbing a pizza cutter and he a butter knife.

The woman said she and her daughter eventually scrambled out of the house. Young, she said, jumped in his car and drove away.

Young’s trial is tentatively set for April 20.

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Federal judge says ‘Twitter is on’

Feb. 23, 20094:33 p.m.

Live coverage of courts in Wichita expanded today, when a federal judge said he will allow me to use Twitter during the trial of six accused gang members.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten told defense counsel that he would allow me to file live posts, via Twitter, from his Wichita courtroom. Twitter is a micro-blogging social network platform that allows users to file and follow short posts of 140 characters or less.

“Twitter is on,” Marten told the lawyers in a brief hearing this afternoon. Marten said he will allow attorneys to file any objections they have for the record.

Marten is tech-savvy, and led efforts to make sure the renovation of the 1932 federal courthouse in Wichita included updates for a wired environment. The courthouse has wireless Internet connections that allow attorneys to access files back at their offices from the courtroom, for example.

I’ve covered several trials, hearings and other proceedings in state court during the past year. But this will be the first time I’ve been allowed to do it in federal court.

Federal court traditionally has tighter rules. For instance, federal courts do not allow cameras, video or audio recording in the courtroom.

“I don’t see this as prejudicial,” Marten said.

Marten will tell jurors not to view news coverage, including the posts on Twitter, which also feed into this blog and accompany related stories on Kansas.com.

Bloggers covered the federal trial of Scooter Libby in Washingon D.C., filing “live updates” while sitting in an adjacent press room in 2007.

A federal judge in Sioux City, Iowa allowed a reporter for the Cedar Rapids, Gazette to live blog a tax fraud trial last year.

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Armed robbery earns men $7, up to nine criminal charges

Feb. 19, 20094:20 p.m.

Four men could face years in prison over an armed robbery that netted them $7 in cash.

The men, ranging in age from 18 to 20, were arrested after Wichita police said four people were held at gunpoint on Dec. 12 in the 2100 block of North Broadway.

Set for preliminary hearing next week on nine criminal charges are Rodolfo Ortiz, 20; Oscar C. Ortiz, 19; Wilson J. Agosto, 19; and Rene W. Ibarra, 18.

Prosecutors said the four men pointed guns at two men and two women and demanded money. They received $7 in cash from one of the women, according to the criminal complaint.

That alone brought one charge of aggravated robbery and three counts of attempted aggravated robbery against each of the men. The minimum prison sentence they could receive for the aggravated robbery charge is 4 1/2 years.

But there’s more.

Police reports say the group also knocked out the windows out of a sport-utility vehicle and two pick-up trucks and took $20 in speakers. Add three counts of criminal damage to property and misdemeanor theft, which could bring another 12 months in jail on each count.

Two of the men, Wilson Agosto and Oscar Ortiz, also had prior convictions as juveniles, which prevented them from carrying handguns. Now, they stand charged with criminal possession of a firearm.

If convicted of all the charges, and sentences run consecutively, the men could face between 12 and 52 years in prison.

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25 random things about covering a capital murder trial

Feb. 18, 20096:04 p.m.

A lot of the people using this meme have blogged about trivial stuff. My time has been absorbed by the grim reality of the justice system, so that’s what I’ve chosen to write about. Here are thoughts, observations and personal notes that are helping me process the trial I’ve covered the past three weeks — a day after seeing Justin Thurber sentenced to death for killing Jodi Sanderholm:

  • The details I don’t, and won’t, report about the brutality of the crime are the ones that keep me awake at night.
  • There is no way to try to make sense of a senseless crime.
  • Here’s something else that doesn’t make sense. Even after being convicted, under overwhelming evidence , Thurber told a psychologist a version of how he claimed to kill Sanderholm — by stabbing her — that could not be supported by any other physical evidence.
  • Defense attorney Ron Evans gave one of the most stirring closing arguments I’ve ever heard. But even that didn’t convince a jury to spare Thurber’s life.
  • In a country where everyone is guaranteed the right to a legal defense, I have to respect lawyers such as Ron Evans and Tim Frieden, who choose to represent defendants charged with the worst crimes.
  • Cowley County Attorney Chris Smith asked that people remember the Thurber family’s suffering, even after he’d spent two years working to prosecute Thurber. I’ve known Smith for years, and that tells you how compassionate he is.
  • For some, the stress doesn’t stop — assistant Kansas Attorney General Vic Braden will go from prosecuting this case to being deployed to Afghanistan for the Kansas National Guard in April.
  • Cindy Sanderholm, Jodi’s mother, told me she realized that large groups of people had offered support to their family throughout the past two years, but Thurber’s family had little community support.
  • Brian Sanderholm, whose family had been in the news spotlight for two years, thanked reporters after the trial for their sensitivity. It’s something you don’t hear often in my job.
  • Burying myself in my stories is a way to deal with the pain I see in the courtroom.
  • “It’s given me insight into our court system that I hadn’t had before.” Comments like that, from Skyler Lovelace, and others who follow my coverage on Twitter, remind me why my job is important.
  • I woke up with chest pains Tuesday morning, before the verdict, caused by the anxiety of the trial.
  • I was in tears on the drive back to Wichita from Winfield Tuesday, trying to absorb all the emotions I’d experienced.
  • I celebrated my birthday and my wedding anniversary during the trial.
  • I just have to sit in the courtroom and hear words and see pictures. The police are the ones who actually see the crime up close and live with it.
  • I especially have to admire the police who sifted through the waste tank at the lakeside latrine where they retrieved Jodi Sanderholm’s shoes, jacket and belongings. Anyone who’s held their nose while using such a restroom can only imagine the dedication that must take.
  • I wonder how Dave Falletti of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the lead investigator of the case, digests all the brutality he’s seen.
  • The police in Arkansas City, a town of 12,000, showed the same high level of investigative skills as what I’ve seen from Wichita police in similar cases. That speaks well of law enforcement training, no matter what the department’s size.
  • After seeing the pictures of the crime scene and the state of Jodi Sanderholm’s body, I keep asking myself, “What would enrage someone to the point they’d be capable of this?”
  • They were some of the most disturbing crime-scene photos I’d ever seen.
  • I have no doubt Jodi Sanderholm was tortured.
  • After I go through weeks like this, I make sure I have someone to talk to about the worst of it.
  • I hope more testing is done on Thurber’s IQ and mental state before his death sentence is carried out.
  • After a decade of covering capital murder trials, and seeing the violence people are capable of inflicting on each other, I’m still not sure how I feel about the death penalty.
  • There is nothing more sobering than watching 12 people condemn another human being to die.

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Anti-death advocates speak out about Thurber’s sentence

Feb. 17, 20095:27 p.m.

Sue Norton sat with the family of Justin Thurber as a jury said he should receive a death sentence for killing Jodi Sanderholm two years ago.

Norton now lives in Arkansas City but she’s from Oklahoma, where her father and stepmother were killed in January 1990. The man convicted of killing them, Robert Knighton, was executed by lethal injection on May 27, 2003.

“It was 13 years of wondering what would happen next,” Norton said. Then she watched Knighton’s execution.

“I can tell you, the death penalty is not absolution,” she said. “It didn’t bring them back.”

Norton may have gotten a little too involved in the Sanderholm case, Cowley County prosecutor Chris Smith said. Two weeks before the trial, when Thurber offered to plead guilty to killing Sanderholm, her family learned about it from Norton.

“We would have liked to have been able to present this to them and talk to them about it,” Smith said.

Don Anderson of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty also sat through the trial, as he has done in every capital murder trial in the Wichita area since I began covering courts in 2000.

Anderson was adamant that the state should have accepted Thurber’s plea. Afterwards, Anderson released a written statement:

The terrible murder of Jodi Sanderholm was an unspeakable tragedy.

The coalition affirms that life without parole is a sufficiently severe punishment for Justin Thurber that also protects the public.

More of Norton’s comments following the verdict:

(Video/Travis Heying, The Wichita Eagle)

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Thurber trial expected to last two weeks

Feb. 2, 200911:31 p.m.

I’m spending my days for the next couple of weeks in Winfield, covering the capital murder trial of Justin Thurber.

Thurber is accused of raping and killing 19-year-old Jodi Sanderholm on Jan. 5, 2007. He could get the death penalty if convicted.

You can keep up with live coverage of the trial by following my updates via the micro blogging site Twitter on the left side of this page, on widgets connected to stories about the trial on Kansas.com or by following me on Twitter.

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