ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — Friday, June 3rd was day three of New York’s gas tax holiday, and we’ve been tracking the prices in six cities and towns across our area. I expected some small differences from station to station in how much their prices dropped. After all, gas prices have been volatile, and a roller coaster in wholesale pricing will ultimately affect what we pay at that pump. But I didn’t expect any station owner choose not to drop his prices at all. One owner told me he’s not budging.
I tracked 13 stations across the area starting with three stations in Rochester, two stations in Gates, a station on the Thruway, two stations in West Henrietta, then east to Pittsford where I stopped at two stations and another in Fairport. I finally ended my 76 mile trek with two stations in Penfield.
Lovely Warren, the embattled mayor of Rochester, N.Y., admitted Monday that she violated campaign finance rules during her 2017 reelection campaign and—as part of her plea deal—will vacate the office by December.
The plea deal will also settle weapons and child endangerment charges she faced, the Democrat & Chronicle reported. She could have faced prison time if she went to trial and was convicted, the paper reported. She did not respond to questions from reporters after the hearing.
In July, Warren and husband Timothy Granison pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from a police raid that allegedly turned up a rifle and pistol, and her 10-year-old daughter alone, in the home they share.
Warren, who was once seen as a promising Democrat, and her two co-defendants each pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of accepting campaign contributions that exceeded legal limits, according to the Monroe County district attorney’s office. She was set to leave office in January after losing in the primary in June to a city councilman. Deputy Mayor James Smith is expected to finish out the remainder of her term.
Jennifer Lewke, a reporter at WHEC, tweeted that Warren admitted in court to “knowingly and willingly accepting excess campaign funds in violation of election law.” She was asked how she wanted to plea, she responded, “Guilty, your honor.”
Warren later took to Facebook to post, “Leaving the past behind and looking forward to a brighter future. Thank you, Rochester. We’ve accomplished a lot together, but in the end, I thank God that I’m able to choose family over everything.”
She had been under heavy criticism for the city’s handling of the suffocation death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died in March 2020, a week after being held by police officers against the pavement until he stopped breathing. Prude had bolted from his brother’s home and shed his clothes during an apparent mental health episode.
Carrie Cohen, her lawyer, called the plea to a misdemeanor– not the initial felony charges–held true to her earlier statement that funds paid to her PAC were not categorized correctly, according to the New York Times.
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“There never was any allegation of theft of any campaign or other funds by the mayor, or anybody else involved in the campaign,” she said.
DETROIT, Mich. — A 6-year-old boy noticed something on the ground while on a family walk in Michigan last month. It turned out to be a mastodon tooth.
Appropriately enough, he found it at the Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve, WDIV reported.
“I just felt something on my foot and I grabbed it up, and it kind of looked like a tooth,” 6-year-old Julian Gagnon said.
At first, they thought it was your standard rock, and given the name of the nature center, maybe even a dinosaur tooth.
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However, after a quick Google search, they realized it belonged to a mastodon.
“At first I thought I was going to get money. I was gonna get a million dollars. So embarrassing right now,” Gagnon said.
But that’s not what happened next.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontologists confirmed the family’s hunch.
RELATED: Field Museum exhibit lets you smell the breath of Sue the T. Rex
Not only that, but that it is a rare discovery.
“Honestly, I’m a little jealous, personally, because mining fossils is something that I wish I could do every day,” said Abby Drake with the U of M Museum of Natural History.
They have a pretty rare exhibit on mastodons and while it is known as the state’s fossil, finding what’s left of them is hard to come by.
“It’s hard to be preserved as a fossil when an animal dies, most of the time it is scavenged,” Drake added.
Gagnon’s dad wanted to throw the tooth back but both the boy and the nature center believe a valuable lesson can be learned from all of this.
RELATED: Farmer discovers new Tyrannosaur species in Canada, one of the oldest of its kind ever found
“The great thing about nature is you never know what you’re going to find and that even if you are an expert, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be the one to find things,” said Amanda Felk, program director at Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve.
That’s what makes this so incredible. Mastodons date back to 12,000 years and this discovery is a nod to both history and the future.
“I really wanted to be an archaeologist, but I think that was a sign that I’m going to be a paleontologist,” Gagnon said.
WINONA COUNTY, Minn. (KTTC) — Blues Traveler, an American Rock band from New Jersey, was involved in a bus accident Thursday morning when they were traveling to Rochester, Minnesota for a concert on Friday night.
The Blues Traveler Facebook page says their bus went off the road and crossed the median.
The crash left them trapped inside the bus before law enforcement and first responders freed them from the bus.
The band and crew sustained minor injuries and have been treated at a local hospital. No other vehicles were involved.
Blues Traveler is thanking the Winona Police Department and rescue crew for their help in getting them off the highway safely.
The band is on tour promoting its new album and will perform as scheduled at Mayo Park in Rochester on Friday.
A federal civil rights lawsuit was filed Monday against city and police officials in Rochester, New York, alleging decades of “inhumane” and racist police violence against demonstrators and residents. The lawsuit comes more than a year after Daniel Prude died in police custody, which led to national condemnation of police use of force in the city.
“Simply put, a stunning historical record spanning more than four decades demonstrates that the Rochester Police Department’s use-of-force practices continue to be inhumane, racist, and antithetical to the functioning of a civilized society,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit, filed by a group of lawyers, activists and people who attended protests in the city, alleges that police in Rochester routinely deploy excessive force against minorities, especially during protests, and that department and city officials have let such conduct go largely unpunished. The nearly 100-page document details more than 50 instances of alleged police abuse against people of color, for which the vast majority of officers were never formally disciplined.
As an example of the pattern of alleged conduct, the lawsuit focuses heavily on the use of force against demonstrators, medics, journalists and legal observers who took to the streets in September 2020 to protest Prude’s death.
Prude, a Black man, died last March after he suffered a mental health episode and his family called police for help. At approximately 3:15 a.m. on March 23, Rochester police said they found Prude lying naked in the middle of the street.
No charges for police in Daniel Prude’s death…
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While Prude complied with their orders to lay in his stomach and allowed himself to be handcuffed, he then sat up and started yelling at officers, according to body camera footage of the interaction. Police then put a spit hood over his head and pressed his face into the ground for more than three minutes. Prude eventually became unresponsive, and later died at a hospital.
The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, attributing it to “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint,” as well as “excited delirium” and PCP intoxication. A grand jury declined to charge the officers involved in Prude’s death in February.
The circumstances surrounding Prude’s death did not become public until September 2020, when Prude’s family released body camera footage of the incident at a press conference on September 2. The news sparked immediate outrage and the first protest occurred later that night.
During that protest and the demonstrations in the weeks that followed, the lawsuit alleges that Rochester police used “extreme and unnecessary force” including tear gas, pepper spray, blunt-impact projectiles, pepper balls and other “less-than-lethal” weapons. Over the first three nights of protests, authorities deployed 77 tear gas canisters and 6,100 pepper bullets, the lawsuit says.
“To be blunt, what I’ve witnessed has been nothing short of abject terror, carnage and unwarranted brutalization,” Rochester photojournalist Reynaldo DeGuzman, who attended the protests, said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit, according to CBS affiliate WROC.
Rochester Police use Pepper spray and tear gas as protesters gather in Rochester, New York, on September 5, 2020, on the fourth night of protest following the release of video showing the death of Daniel Prude.
MARANIE R. STAAB/AFP via Getty Images
The lawsuit details dozens of instances of alleged police violence at the protests, including a September 3 incident in which an officer allegedly shot a man in the eye with a pepper ball at “close range,” leaving him permanently blind. Officers are accused of then “intentionally” firing at the medics who attempted to provide aid — despite the medics allegedly wearing bright red jackets identifying who they were.
On September 4, Rochester resembled “a war zone,” with officers “unleashing flash grenades, tear gas, and thousands of pepper balls on the crowd,” the lawsuit said.
That night, police allegedly trapped a group of protesters on a bridge — a tactic commonly known as “kettling” — before attacking them with a number of weapons. “Videos from that night show heavily armored phalanxes of police using pepper balls, 40mm kinetic bullets, tear gas, and batons to assault diverse groups of protesters outfitted only with umbrellas, cardboard boxes, and plastic children’s sleds against the RPD’s military grade arsenal,” the lawsuit says.
“In New York City, for example, which saw thousands of demonstrators take to the streets, NYPD officers fired not one pepper ball,” the lawsuit added. “By contrast, one RPD officer the night of September 4, 2020, fired 148 pepper balls in the span of just twenty minutes.”
Protestors use umbrellas as protection against tear gas launched by Rochester police during a Daniel Prude protest in Rochester, New York, United States on September 5, 2020.
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The lawsuit also accuses city officials of running a “sham internal disciplinary system” and refusing to hold officers who used excessive force either during the protests or in their daily work accountable.
Out of 923 civilian allegations of excessive force between 2001 and 2016, the police chief only sustained 1.7%, the lawsuit says. The strictest penalty administered in those 16 sustained cases “were 6 suspensions, most ranging from 1 to 20 days.”
“By failing to meaningfully train, supervise, and discipline officers who use excessive force and instead suppressing evidence of officer misconduct and attacking critics of the department, the City has fostered a culture of violence and impunity in its ranks,” the lawsuit says.
In a statement to CBS News, the city said Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren “welcomes” a Department of Justice investigation into the police department, and cited recent reforms the city has implemented, including requiring new officers to live in the city and allowing the mayor to fire officers for cause.
The lawsuit names Rochester city and police officials, as well as hundreds of police officers, as defendants, and seeks monetary damages and the appointment of an independent monitor for the police department, among other requests.
“Absent external enforcement, the system will not change itself: to date, the Department has not fired or disciplined any of the officers known to have engaged in the use of excessive force against Daniel Prude or any of the officers who engaged in blatant displays of force during the September 2020 protests, including those captured on video,” the lawsuit says, adding, “Plaintiffs bring this suit to end the RPD’s decades-long use of violent, unconstitutional force—before more lives, more Black and brown lives, are lost.”
Neither the Rochester Police Department nor the union representing the officers immediately responded to CBS News’ request for comment.
“At the heart of it, we need to place the sanctity of human life at the core of RPD’s [Rochester Police Department] policing philosophy,” said Mayor Lovely Warren said during a virtual press conference.
Warren did not specifically mention the January 29 incident involving the 9-year-old girl, but said it needs to be made clear that officers should not handcuff “juveniles 12 and under unless they present an imminent danger to themselves or others.”
“The current draft doesn’t specify imminent, however, my recommendation would be to change that,” Warren said.
Two body camera videos released by Rochester police show officers restraining the child, putting her in handcuffs and attempting to get her inside the back of a police vehicle as she repeatedly cried and called for her father.
After the girl failed to follow commands to put her feet inside the car, the officers are seen pepper-spraying her. The girl was transported to a local hospital where she was later released, according to Rochester police.
The officers involved have been suspended pending the results of an internal police investigation, the city announced Monday.
Changing the police department culture
On Thursday. Warren broke down the recommendations into 10 categories: accountability, community engagement and programming, data, technology and transparency, fostering a community-oriented culture, officer wellness, police policy, strategies and practices, recruitment, resizing the police department, response to mental health calls and training.
One of Warren’s most important recommendations is for the federal court to update the city’s consent decree, which caps minority representation in the police department to 25%. The consent decree was put into place in the late 1970s, when the city’s community of color only made up a quarter of the population, Warren said.
“Now, as we said earlier, people of color represent well over 50% of the city of Rochester’s population so our consent decree should reflect that,” said Warren, adding that 87% of the city’s officers are White while only 47% of its population is White.
The mayor said she also supports replacing police with social workers to respond to mental health crisis calls, a suggestion made following the death of Daniel Prude last March. In that incident, Rochester police pinned Prude to the ground and placed a hood over his head as he experienced a mental health episode. Prude stopped breathing and died a week later.
Warren ultimately fired the Rochester police chief over Prude’s death and the subsequent delay by police and city officials to release body camera footage.
Warren also offered additional recommendations for police reform, such as petitioning the state to allow Rochester to terminate RPD personnel immediately for malpractices, ban discriminatory enforcement patterns like racial profiling, reduce the size of the department in the next 5-10 years and allocate the resources to other programs and create a civilian public safety interview panel to assess candidates for the RPD.
Warren emphasized that this was a first draft of the recommendations, which will now be looked at by members of the City Council and other community leaders for feedback. The council will vote on the measures at the end of March.
CNN’s Laura Ly, Eric Levenson and Travis Caldwell contributed to this report.
A notice of claim states that the girl’s mother, Elba Pope, will seek damages due to “mental anguish and psychological/emotional distress and trauma” and “physical injury and substantial pain,” as well as coverage for any future required medical treatment and mental health care.
Pope’s daughter ran out of the house in distress because she “was upset about her mother and step-father arguing,” the notice, which CNN obtained from family attorney Lorenzo Napolitano, says.
Pope explicitly accused the officers of “wanton, reckless and malicious” conduct and is claiming “negligence, violation of state and federal constitutional rights, infliction of emotional distress, assault, battery, excessive force, false arrest, (and) false imprisonment,” though she did not limit the scope of the claim to those allegations, the notice says.
Before a person files a lawsuit for damages against a city, New York law requires the plaintiff to prepare and serve a formal notice explaining the nature of the claim.
Pope claims in the notice that she tried to bring her daughter home, but that police “intervened and stopped” her. The notice states that police didn’t tell Pope about the officers’ use of pepper spray and handcuffing or the struggle her daughter had with police officers that was recorded by police body cameras.
“No 9-year-old should be handcuffed. No 9-year-old should be pepper-sprayed. No one’s humanity should be dismissed because of a badge. No human should be treated like this,” Napolitano said in a statement. “Reform is needed. Reform can come, but only if we are willing to listen to this little girl crying out for the protection that she didn’t receive from the Rochester Police.”
One officer involved has been suspended and two were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation, a Tuesday statement from Rochester Chief of Police Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said. Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren condemned the incident on Monday, calling it “simply horrible.”
CNN has reached out to the Rochester Police Department and the mayor for comment on the notice of claim.
Family trouble call
The officers responded to what police called a report of “family trouble” and the ensuing encounter has been sharply criticized by city and state officials. The incident has led to protests in the community.
Two body camera videos of the January 29 encounter show officers restraining the child, putting her in handcuffs and attempting to get her inside the back of a police vehicle as she repeatedly cries and calls for her father.
At one point, one officer says, “You’re acting like a child.”
“I am a child!” the girl responds.
A female officer is seen talking to the girl later in the video, eventually saying, “This is your last chance, otherwise pepper spray’s going in your eyeballs.” About a minute later, another officer can be heard saying, “Just spray her at this point.” The female officer is seen shaking a can that appears to be pepper spray and the child continues to scream.
The girl was transported to Rochester General Hospital and later released, according to police.
The incident has been compared to the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died in March after Rochester police pinned him to the ground and placed a hood over his head as he experienced a mental health crisis.
The police body camera footage of that incident, released in August after city officials intentionally delayed its release, led to protests over the police’s treatment of Black people and those experiencing mental health crises. Warren later fired the police chief, saying there was a “pervasive problem” in the police department.
At a news conference Sunday, Herriott-Sullivan said the treatment of the girl was not acceptable.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9-year-old to have to be pepper-sprayed is OK. It’s not,” she said. “I don’t see that as who we are as a department, and we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen.”
Warren said the girl reminded her of her own young daughter.
Monday, New York state Sen. Samra Brouk and Assemblyman Demond Meeks, both Democrats, introduced legislation that would prohibit police use of chemical agents against minors in the state, according to a statement.
“The harrowing experience endured by a nine-year-old girl in our community — including being handcuffed and pepper sprayed — should never happen to another child,” Brouk said in a statement. “This legislation will ensure that when a child is in crisis, they will never again be met with such violence in the form of pepper spray or other chemical irritants.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James tweeted Monday that her office is looking into the incident as well. She called the incident “deeply disturbing and wholly unacceptable.”
Police have not identified the officers involved in the incident or the child.
CNN has not been able to verify with authorities or family members the race of the 9-year-old.
CNN’s Ray Sanchez, Mirna Alsharif, Laura James, Eric Levenson, Saffeya Ahmed, Sarah Jorgensen, Jessica Prater, Kristina Sgueglia and Hollie Silverman contributed to this report.
Newly released bodycam videos show Rochester cops pepper-spraying a 9-year-old girl in the upstate New York city.
Footage from one video shot during a family dispute on Friday shows the distraught youngster running from police, then dropping to the snow-covered ground as a cop tries to bring her back.
“I want my dad,” the girl screams in a second video. “I ain’t going nowhere. I want my dad… I’m not getting in no car until I see my dad.”
“Stop,” an officer says.
“Wait, can I just please get the snow off of me,” she yells. “I want my dad. Wait, I just want to see my dad, please. For the last time…. I demand.”
“Stop or you’re going to get yourself hurt,” a cop responds at one point during the lengthy ordeal.
A female officer is heard telling the girl she’ll find her father, but asks her to get inside the police car to stay warm — only to have the girl start screaming again.
“Just spray her at this point,” one cop finally says, and is seen spraying the girl.
“Please wipe my eyes,” the girl screams. “Wipe my eyes, please.”
The footage was released Sunday after a city press conference, during which Rochester Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson said the girl was suicidal.
“She indicated she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mom,” he said, according to a report in the Democrat & Chronicle.
Nine police cars responded to the call, police said.
The girl’s mother, who was also not identified, is seen in the footage arguing with her daughter, who becomes increasingly agitated while her mother berates her.
The woman is also seen cursing at passing motorists.
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9-year-old to have to be pepper-sprayed is OK,” Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said Sunday. “It’s not.”
A female officer is heard telling the girl she’ll find her father, but asks her to get inside the police car to stay warm.
“I don’t see that as who we are as a department,” the chief said. “And we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen.”
Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said she was disturbed by the video.
“I’m very concerned about how this young girl was handled by our police department,” Warren said during the press conference. “It is clear from the video we need to do more in support of our children and families.”
