A 57-year-old man drove his car into a crowd of parade-goers during a Lao New Year Festival celebration in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, on Saturday afternoon, striking multiple pedestrians and sending victims to area hospitals with injuries that officials described as critical.
Todd Landry was arrested and booked into the Iberia Parish jail after Louisiana State Police troopers determined he was impaired. His breath sample registered a blood alcohol concentration of 0.137g%, well above Louisiana's legal limit. He now faces charges of Driving While Impaired (first offense), First-Degree Negligent Injuring on 18 counts, Careless Operation, and Open Container.
Eighteen counts. That means at least 18 people were struck by a man who allegedly got behind the wheel drunk, in broad daylight, and aimed his vehicle into a festive crowd.
The parade was underway near Savannaket Street and Melancon Road in Broussard when Landry's vehicle approached. A young man who witnessed the crash described the moments before impact, according to Breitbart:
"I just simply thought that he was coming to join the parade because the car was kind of nice. He inched closer and closer, revs his engine again, and just plows through everybody. In that moment, my brain just stopped. I just thought, 'Is this actually happening?'"
That account is harrowing. A community gathered to celebrate a cultural tradition, families lining a parade route on a Saturday afternoon, and a man with a BAC nearly twice the legal limit drove straight into them.
The Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office is leading the investigation into the crash and has moved quickly to address public concern about the motive. In a social media post, the office stated that "based on the preliminary investigation, this does not appear to be an intentional act." The investigation remains active, and officials said further information would be released as it becomes available.
Louisiana State Police confirmed the details in a news release, noting that Landry "showed signs of impairment" during the investigation and that troopers ultimately processed the arrest. LSP also asked anyone with photos or videos of the crash to share them with officials.
The distinction between intentional and negligent matters legally, but it offers cold comfort to the families now sitting in hospital waiting rooms. A man too drunk to operate a vehicle killed no one's intention but destroyed an afternoon, and possibly lives, all the same.
The Louisiana Lao New Year Festival released a statement expressing grief over the incident:
"We are profoundly saddened by the news of the incident near the festival grounds."
The organization canceled its music programs Saturday evening. It indicated that if security resources were restored, it would reopen Sunday for religious services only, with vendors remaining open. The festival's cautious, measured response reflects a community trying to hold something together after a senseless act tore through it.
These are the kinds of events that bind communities. Families attend. Children watch parades. Elders gather. The Lao New Year celebration is a cultural and religious tradition, and 18 people paid the price for one man's decision to drink and drive.
There is no policy debate here. No partisan angle to spin. Drunk driving is one of the clearest moral failures a person can commit: a conscious choice to endanger everyone around you. Todd Landry allegedly made that choice on a Saturday afternoon in a parish full of families.
The charges he faces, 18 counts of First-Degree Negligent Injuring among them, suggest the scope of damage was enormous. Some of those struck had critical injuries. The full toll remains unknown as the investigation continues.
Conservatives have long argued that the foundation of a functioning society is personal responsibility. Not government programs. Not awareness campaigns. The individual decision to do the right thing, or the catastrophic consequences when someone refuses. This is what refusal looks like: 18 people on the ground, a festival silenced, and a community asking how a celebration turned into a crime scene.
Landry is charged with DWI as a first offense. Whether that means he has never driven impaired before or simply never been caught before is a question worth asking. The justice system will determine what comes next. But the people of Iberia Parish already know what happened: a man chose a bottle over basic human decency, and 18 of their neighbors are paying for it.
HuffPost published a report claiming the Pentagon "invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel," but that "it's only for Protestants, not Catholics." The outlet's senior politics reporter, Jennifer Bendery, cited a memo from Air Force leadership that read: "Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel."
The implication was clear. The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had deliberately excluded Catholics from worship on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Bendery wrote that Hegseth, whom she called "a far-right evangelical Christian, has tried to infuse his religious views into Pentagon activities.
There was just one problem. Catholics don't celebrate Mass on Good Friday. They never have.
The correction came swiftly, and from every direction. Washington Examiner reporter Salena Zito addressed Bendery directly:
"Catholic here ... we do not celebrate Mass on Good Friday. It is the only day of the year without a Mass, as the church commemorates Jesus' death."
National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cook was less patient:
"Yes. It says that there is no Catholic Mass on Good Friday because Catholics do not do Catholic Mass on Good Friday. Is there literally nobody you could have asked? Not one person? Not even Google?"
"Fox & Friends Weekend" co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy offered a more detailed explanation of what actually happens in Catholic churches on Good Friday. Catholics hold a service, not a Mass, because there is no consecration of the Eucharist on that day. Communion is distributed using hosts consecrated the day before, on Holy Thursday. Worshippers read the Gospel of the Passion of Christ and venerate the cross, as Fox News reports.
Hot Air managing editor Ed Morrissey made the same point, noting that what HuffPost framed as exclusion was simply a matter of terminology:
"FYI: Catholics do not have Mass on Good Friday. It's a service, as there is no transubstantiation. Where communion is offered, it's with previously consecrated hosts. This sounds like a misunderstanding of terms by the sources or the reporters."
"Misunderstanding" may be generous.
A Department of War official told Fox News Digital that Catholic Masses are held on a daily basis at the Pentagon and that religious services are open to all Pentagon employees. In other words, the Pentagon wasn't excluding Catholics from anything. The memo simply noted that the Good Friday service would be Protestant in form, which is exactly what you'd expect when the Catholic Church itself does not hold Mass on that day.
The phrase "No Catholic Mass" wasn't a prohibition. It was a description.
But HuffPost ran with it anyway, constructing an entire narrative around the idea that Hegseth was weaponizing religion inside the Defense Department. The framing required its audience to know nothing about Catholic liturgical practice, and apparently required the same of its reporters and editors.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson pointed to a pattern:
"This person continues to write about Christianity and keeps proving to be completely ignorant of Christianity. Catholics do not celebrate Mass on Good Friday."
Townhall editor Larry O'Connor widened the lens beyond Bendery herself:
"Anybody here surprised that Jennifer doesn't have a good working understanding of Catholicism? Me neither. But, It IS extraordinary that not one person in the editorial chain has even the slightest knowledge of Catholics."
That's the real indictment. This wasn't a tweet fired off in haste. It was a published report from a senior politics reporter at a national outlet, presumably reviewed by at least one editor. Not a single person in that chain caught the error or bothered to check. A ten-second search would have killed the story before it was written.
RedState writer Bonchie cut to the political motive:
"Catholics do not do Mass on Good Friday. It would be offensive to them to try to hold one. Just incredible how hard the left is trying to cause divisions that don't actually exist."
What followed was arguably worse than the original mistake. Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham noted that despite being corrected by thousands of Catholics online, Bendery refused to acknowledge the error:
"What's wild about the hubris of journalists like this lady at @HuffPost is she has literally THOUSANDS of Catholics correcting her that there is no Catholic mass on Good Friday."
Basham added that Bendery continued to suggest Catholics would be barred from attending the Pentagon's Good Friday service entirely, a claim Basham said she was "quite certain is not true."
HuffPost's parent company BuzzFeed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This episode is small in scale but revealing in kind. It shows what happens when a newsroom's animating purpose is opposition rather than information. If your goal is to catch the Defense Secretary doing something sinister, you'll find sinister things everywhere, including in a routine chapel memo describing a liturgical reality that predates the Pentagon by roughly two thousand years.
The irony is thick. A story meant to expose religious intolerance inside the military was built entirely on religious illiteracy inside a newsroom. The reporters who positioned themselves as defenders of Catholic inclusion didn't understand the first thing about Catholic worship.
Every Catholic in America who has ever attended a Good Friday service knew immediately that this story was nonsense. Every editor at HuffPost apparently did not. The gap between those two groups tells you everything about who these outlets are actually writing for, and it isn't the faithful.
Los Angeles police arrested a 12-year-old on suspicion of murder Thursday in connection with the death of Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, a classmate who was struck in the head with a metal water bottle during an alleged bullying incident at a Reseda school campus in February. The arrest came more than five weeks after Khimberly died, and her family says the tragedy was preventable.
LAPD Officer Charles Miller confirmed the arrest but said he could not release additional information because both the victim and the suspect are juveniles, the Associated Press reported. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said Friday that the case remains under investigation. No formal charges had been announced at the time of the report.
The family's account, laid out in a wrongful-death claim filed last month against the Los Angeles Unified School District, paints a grim picture of institutional failure. Khimberly was walking in a hallway at Reseda Charter High School, which also houses a middle school, on Feb. 17 when she stepped in to defend her older sister, Sharon Zavaleta, from a group of students who had been bullying her. Another student struck Khimberly in the head with a metal water bottle.
What followed was an eight-day ordeal that ended with a child's death.
The family said Khimberly was taken to Valley Presbyterian Hospital after the Feb. 17 attack, where she was evaluated and released the same day. Three days later, her condition deteriorated sharply. She was rushed to UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital, where doctors discovered a severe brain hemorrhage. Khimberly was placed in a medically induced coma and underwent emergency brain surgery.
She did not recover. Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa died on Feb. 25. She was 12 years old.
Her mother, Elma Chuquipa, described the final hours in an interview with a local television station. Fox News reported that Chuquipa told KABC: "My daughter goes and pulls her away, so they don't hit her sister, and that's when [Khimberly] gets hit in the head." She also told the station: "We took her to the emergency room, where she arrived with no vitals."
The family has also raised questions about whether Valley Presbyterian Hospital missed warning signs during the initial evaluation. Robert Glassman, the family's attorney, said the family has not ruled out legal action against the hospital.
The arrest of a single student does not close the book on this case, and the family's attorney has made clear he intends to keep it open. Glassman said in an email Friday that the sisters had been "bullied, harassed and physically attacked for months" at the school and that their mother had reported the incidents to school officials, who he says failed to stop the abuse.
That claim sits at the center of the wrongful-death filing against LAUSD. The district, for its part, offered no defense and no explanation. A spokesperson said only that the district does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.
Glassman framed the arrest as necessary but insufficient. As AP News reported, he stated:
"This arrest is an important step toward accountability, but an arrest alone does not equal justice and does not answer the larger question of how this was allowed to happen in the first place."
He followed that with a pointed demand directed at the adults who were supposed to be in charge of these children's safety:
"The focus cannot stop with one student, there must be a hard look at what the adults in charge knew, when they knew it, and why meaningful action wasn't taken sooner."
Those are questions that deserve answers. A mother says she warned the school. The school apparently did nothing effective. A child is dead. And the district's only public response is a boilerplate refusal to comment.
The Zavaleta Chuquipa family set up a GoFundMe page to help cover expenses. Just The News reported that the family wrote on the page: "As the baby of our family, she brought a special light and joy into our lives."
Khimberly's mother told NBC Los Angeles, as the New York Post reported: "I'm devastated. I'm full of pain, thinking about how I will never see my daughter again."
Meanwhile, the DA's office has said only that the case is under investigation. Whether formal murder charges will be filed against the juvenile suspect, and what form those charges might take given the suspect's age, remains unclear. The Washington Times confirmed the arrest occurred on April 2.
Cases involving children accused of killing other children are mercifully rare, but they raise some of the hardest questions the justice system faces. An eleven-year-old in Pennsylvania was recently charged as an adult in the shooting death of his adoptive father, illustrating just how varied and difficult the legal responses can be when the accused is barely old enough for middle school.
In this case, the family is pursuing accountability on multiple fronts. The wrongful-death claim targets LAUSD directly. Glassman has signaled that Valley Presbyterian Hospital could face legal action as well. And the criminal case against the juvenile suspect is just beginning.
The core failure here is not complicated. A family says it reported months of bullying, harassment, and physical attacks to school officials. Those officials, by the family's account, did not stop it. The earlier reporting on Khimberly's death laid out the same pattern: warnings ignored, a child left vulnerable, and a preventable tragedy.
LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the country. It has layers of administrators, counselors, and safety staff. Yet a 12-year-old girl walked into a school hallway, tried to protect her sister from known bullies, and ended up dead eight days later.
Fox News reported that the family is also pushing for new pediatric head-injury protocols through a proposed measure they call "Khimberly's Act." The details of that proposal were not fully described, but the impulse behind it is clear: the family believes the medical system, like the school system, failed their daughter.
Across the country, communities are grappling with youth violence that seems to outpace the institutions meant to prevent it. In Washington, D.C., the mayor has pushed for a permanent youth curfew in response to rising juvenile crime. The approaches differ, but the underlying problem is the same: adults in positions of authority failing to keep children safe.
The AP noted a separate recent case in Georgia, where a sixth grader named Jada West died after a fight with another student from Mason Creek Middle School broke out at an intersection near her home. The details differ, but the pattern is familiar, school-age children, unresolved conflict, and a fatal outcome.
In Los Angeles, the open questions remain stark. What did Reseda Charter High School officials know about the bullying of the Zavaleta sisters? When did they learn about it? What, if anything, did they do? And why wasn't it enough?
LAUSD has chosen silence. The DA's office has chosen caution. The family has chosen to fight. And Khimberly Zavaleta Chuquipa, the 12-year-old girl who stepped into a hallway to protect her sister, is gone.
When officials in other states have faced similar failures to protect children, the political consequences have been swift and direct. Whether anyone in Los Angeles faces real accountability, beyond a single juvenile arrest, will say a great deal about how seriously this city's leaders take the safety of the children in their care.
A child tried to defend her sister. The adults who should have prevented that moment failed before it ever arrived. An arrest is a start. It is not an answer.
Democrats filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, aiming to kill an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to verified American citizens. The lawsuit, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the Democratic National Committee, and other party organizations, treats the most basic election integrity measure imaginable as an existential constitutional crisis.
The order's mechanism is straightforward. President Trump announced earlier this week that he directed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, along with the Social Security Administration, to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. The Postal Service would then send ballots only to those people.
That's the proposition Democrats are calling tyranny: confirming that voters are who they say they are before mailing them a ballot.
According to The Hill, prominent Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias wrote the complaint, and his language tells you everything about the strategy. This isn't a narrow legal challenge. It's a messaging vehicle dressed in constitutional clothing.
"Our Constitution's Framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power. They recognized the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid."
Absolute power. Menace. Acid corroding self-government. All because the federal government wants to verify that people receiving ballots are, in fact, eligible to vote. Elias also argued in the complaint that the order "seeks to impose radical changes to the manner and conditions under which citizens may cast absentee or mail-in ballots" and that these changes "plainly exceed the President's lawful authority."
Schumer called the executive order "outlandish" and promised a courtroom victory:
"Senate Democrats have led the fight against Donald Trump's voter suppression efforts before and won. We will see him in court and we will beat him again."
Jeffries, for his part, declared that Trump's "unhinged efforts to rip away our rights will not prevail."
Ripping away rights. Voter suppression. Unhinged. The rhetorical escalation is as predictable as it is revealing. None of these statements engages with the substance of the order. Not one Democratic leader quoted in the complaint or in public statements explained why verifying citizenship before mailing a ballot is unreasonable. They skipped the argument entirely and went straight to apocalyptic framing.
Strip away the hysteria, and the executive order does something that most Americans, when asked plainly, would consider common sense. It directs federal agencies to compile a list of verified citizens eligible to vote and limits the Postal Service to sending ballots to those individuals.
This is not a poll tax. It is not a literacy test. It does not prevent a single eligible American from casting a ballot. It prevents ballots from being mailed to people who aren't eligible to receive them. The distinction matters, and Democrats know it, which is why they refuse to engage with it directly.
The left's position on voter verification has become genuinely difficult to articulate without exposing the contradiction at its core. They claim to support secure elections. They claim to oppose fraud. But every single mechanism proposed to verify that voters are citizens, that ballots reach the right people, that rolls are accurate, gets branded as suppression. At some point, the pattern speaks for itself.
Democrats have reason for confidence in the court, and conservatives should be clear-eyed about the terrain. After the president issued an executive order last year seeking to overhaul elections, federal judges ruled it was likely unconstitutional. That history gives the left both a legal precedent and a talking point.
But prior judicial skepticism toward one order does not automatically invalidate a differently constructed one. The question before the courts will be whether the federal government can use existing agency infrastructure to verify citizenship for ballot distribution. That is a narrower and more defensible proposition than a wholesale election overhaul, and it deserves to be adjudicated on its own merits rather than dismissed by reference to a prior ruling.
Democrats and their allies in the press have spent years noting that Trump himself votes by mail. He cast his ballot that way in a Florida special election last month. The implication is supposed to be hypocrisy: he votes by mail but wants to restrict it.
The argument collapses on contact. Trump is a verified U.S. citizen casting a ballot in his state of residence. His executive order would not prevent him, or anyone like him, from voting by mail. It would ensure that the system sending out those ballots knows who is eligible to receive one. The fact that Trump uses mail-in voting and still wants the process verified is not a contradiction. It is the entire point.
Every election cycle, the same dynamic plays out. Republicans propose verification. Democrats call it suppression. The media amplifies the suppression framing. Courts weigh in. And the underlying question never gets answered honestly: why would anyone oppose confirming that ballots go only to eligible voters?
The arguments offered are always procedural or constitutional, never substantive. It's always about executive overreach, or disenfranchisement in the abstract, or the specter of eligible voters somehow falling through the cracks. What it never is, curiously, is a straightforward defense of mailing ballots to unverified recipients.
Because that argument can't survive daylight.
Schumer promises a court victory. Jeffries promises resistance. Elias promises constitutional grandeur. What none of them promise is a better system for making sure that only eligible citizens receive and cast ballots. That silence is the tell. They are not fighting for voting rights. They are fighting against verification. Those are not the same thing, no matter how many times they pretend otherwise.
Lindsey Buckingham, the 76-year-old rock guitarist best known for his decades with Fleetwood Mac, was attacked while arriving for an appointment in Santa Monica on Wednesday. A woman hurled an unidentified substance at Buckingham as he entered the building, then fled the scene.
Buckingham is said not to have been injured in the attack. The LAPD's Threat Management Unit confirmed it is investigating, and law enforcement sources indicate an arrest is expected soon, with a suspect already identified.
The incident is alarming on its own. It becomes something else entirely when you learn what Buckingham has been dealing with for years.
More than a year before Wednesday's attack, Buckingham was granted a five-year permanent restraining order against a 53-year-old woman identified only as Michelle. A judge extended a previous temporary order, requiring Michelle to remain at least 100 yards away from Buckingham, his wife Kristen, and their son William, and to refrain from threatening, harassing, or contacting the musician in any way.
According to Buckingham's court testimony, the harassment began around 2021, when Michelle allegedly acquired the business phone number of his wife, Kristen, and began calling her. The messages escalated. Buckingham told the court Michelle was "leaving long drawn-out messages that included the claim that she was my child and threats to kill my family and me."
Buckingham insisted in his testimony that he was not Michelle's father and that she was not known to him personally at all. He said Michelle blamed him for facial deformities she apparently suffered as a child and demanded money.
Police instructed Michelle to cease contacting the Buckingham family in 2022. She reportedly returned in 2024, leaving a collage outside his house. At a hearing in December 2024, Buckingham showed the judge a picture Michelle had taken outside his home and played an unmarked audio clip.
The stalking campaign allegedly included a fabricated emergency. Buckingham testified that police arrived at his home, woke him, and handcuffed him after a 911 call warned that his son William "was at the house intending to hurt himself." Officers reportedly searched the property for 20 minutes before uncuffing Buckingham.
Buckingham told the court the call was a weapon aimed at his family:
"I now know that the 911 call was traced to [Michelle's] phone and was the latest in an unabated pattern of harassment and threatening acts against my family and me."
The court apparently agreed. The permanent restraining order was granted. And yet, here we are.
There has been no public indication from authorities that Michelle was the woman who assaulted Buckingham on Wednesday. The LAPD stated it "is working with the Santa Monica Police Department to investigate this incident" and declined further comment to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.
But the broader picture is hard to ignore. A man obtained a restraining order. A court set clear boundaries. Law enforcement was involved at multiple stages. And someone still walked up to Buckingham and doused him with an unknown substance in broad daylight.
This is the reality that restraining orders, by their nature, cannot fully solve. They are pieces of paper that rely on compliance from people who have already demonstrated they will not comply. Courts issue them. Judges sign them. And the person on the receiving end is left hoping the document carries more weight than obsession.
Celebrity stalking cases get attention. Buckingham does because of his stature as one of rock's most recognizable guitarists, the man who joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975 and enlisted his then-lover Stevie Nicks to the band, helping propel them into one of the best-selling acts in music history. But the dynamic he describes, escalating contact, false claims of kinship, threats against family members, weaponized emergency calls, plays out in courtrooms across the country for people who will never make a headline.
Law enforcement sources say an arrest is expected soon. That would be welcome, and overdue if the suspect turns out to be someone already bound by a court order to stay away.
Buckingham, born in California's Bay Area in 1949, has navigated a career defined by turbulence: his split with Nicks in 1976, his departure from Fleetwood Mac in 1987, his return a decade later, and his firing in 2018. He has survived all of it. He survived Wednesday, too, physically unharmed.
But no one should have to survive an appointment in Santa Monica.
Francis J. Kearse III, a 43-year-old emergency medicine specialist in Ohio, was found dead from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound just before 6 p.m. on March 27 in the 5400 block of Howe Road in Trenton, a rural city halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati. He was due in court for his arraignment in Hamilton County on Tuesday.
He never made it. The charges he was facing tell you why.
The doctor had been indicted by a grand jury on charges including compelling prostitution, compelling prostitution involving a minor, trafficking in persons, and importuning. The accusations centered on his alleged exploitation of a 16-year-old girl, whom he reportedly paid with two vape pens and $15 in exchange for sex.
According to the investigation reported by the New York Post, Kearse used Snapchat to talk to young girls, marketing himself as a "sugar daddy." He sent gift cards to at least one 16-year-old before urging "some kinda payback," leading to the two meeting up in October in what officials called "sexual activity for hire."
Let that sit for a moment. A licensed physician, entrusted with emergency medical care, allegedly spent his off-hours trolling social media for minors. The currency of the transaction tells its own story. Vape pens. Fifteen dollars. Gift cards. This wasn't some ambiguous situation. It was a grown man leveraging the most trivial goods imaginable to exploit a child.
The age of consent in Ohio is 16, but the charges Kearse faced went well beyond the question of statutory age. Compelling prostitution, trafficking in persons: these are among the most serious offenses in Ohio's criminal code, and they exist precisely because the law recognizes that exchanging money or goods for sex with a minor is predatory regardless of consent thresholds.
Kearse was arrested on March 11 but released on his own recognizance bond. He was ordered to stay off social media as part of his bond conditions, and he remained free up to his death.
A man indicted on human trafficking and prostitution charges involving a minor walked out of custody without posting a dime. Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Christopher McDowell, upon learning of the cashless bond, ordered Kearse to be re-arrested. By then, it was too late.
McDowell addressed the court Tuesday morning after Kearse's death was announced:
"(He) escaped justice the hard way."
That is one way to describe it. Another is that the system gave a man accused of trafficking a teenager every opportunity to avoid accountability, and he took the most permanent one available.
The decision to release Kearse on his own recognizance deserves real scrutiny. This was not a low-level offense. The charges included trafficking in persons. The victim was a child. And the mechanism of the alleged crime, social media, meant the defendant's access to future victims was as close as his phone.
Ordering him off social media while releasing him without bail is the judicial equivalent of telling a bank robber to please avoid banks. The restriction only works if someone enforces it, and between March 11 and March 27, no one did in any way that mattered.
Butler County Prosecutor Mike Gmoser confirmed the timeline was razor-thin:
"We had just received the investigation from law enforcement to proceed and were almost immediately notified of the death."
Kearse was also facing charges in Butler County at the time of his death, meaning multiple jurisdictions were closing in simultaneously. The walls were coming in. He chose not to face them.
There is no satisfying ending here. The victim, a 16-year-old girl whose name has been kept out of public reporting, will never see her alleged abuser answer for what he did. There will be no trial, no verdict, no sentence. Whatever closure the legal process might have offered has been erased.
That absence matters. It matters for the victim. It matters for any other girls Kearse may have contacted through Snapchat whose stories haven't surfaced yet. And it matters for a justice system that, at the critical moment, chose leniency for a man accused of buying a child's body for the price of a gas station transaction.
Judges across the country continue to treat bond decisions as administrative formalities rather than public safety determinations. The default posture of release, even for defendants facing trafficking charges, reflects a system more concerned with appearing fair to the accused than with protecting the people they are accused of harming.
Francis Kearse is beyond the reach of any courtroom now. The question worth asking isn't about him anymore. It's about the next defendant facing charges this serious who walks out on a handshake. And whether anyone will fix the gap before it costs someone else.
Nicole Daedone, the 58-year-old founder of the San Francisco-based "orgasmic meditation" company OneTaste, was sentenced Monday to nine years in federal prison after a Brooklyn jury convicted her of grooming workers and members to have sex with clients and investors. Judge Diane Gujarati ordered Daedone to forfeit $12 million and pay roughly $890,000 in restitution to seven victims, the New York Post reported.
Former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz was sentenced Monday afternoon to six and a half years for her role in the same conspiracy. Nine former OneTaste employees took the stand during trial. Their testimony painted a picture of a company that operated like a cult, one where workers were manipulated into performing sexual acts and forced to labor for little to no pay for more than a decade.
Federal prosecutors had asked for 20 years. They got less than half. But the sentence Gujarati handed down still carries a blunt message: wrap exploitation in the language of wellness and empowerment, and a federal court will still call it what it is.
Gujarati left no room for the spiritual gloss that OneTaste and its defenders tried to apply. She told the courtroom that Daedone "took actions that stripped victims of their dignity" and that "she does not appear to be remorseful."
Then she went further, dismantling the company's carefully cultivated mystique:
"What she was doing wasn't about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension. It wasn't a game or a show. It wasn't Harry Potter or the Matrix. It was criminal."
When given the chance to address the court before sentencing, Daedone, standing in a beige jail jumpsuit, declined. "No, thank you," she said. That was it.
The contrast between a defendant who had nothing to say and a courtroom full of people living with the consequences of her decisions told its own story. The broader pattern of powerful figures facing accountability for the exploitation of vulnerable people has become a recurring theme in recent years, as seen in Ghislaine Maxwell's refusal to testify before House Oversight without a clemency deal.
Federal prosecutors laid out the mechanics of Daedone's operation in their sentencing request. They accused her of recruiting victims who had suffered past traumas by claiming she could help fix their sexual suffering. Once inside the organization, those recruits found something very different from healing.
Prosecutors said Daedone and Cherwitz used economic pressure, psychological manipulation, intimidation, and sexual coercion to force followers into sex acts they found uncomfortable or repulsive, including with prospective investors or clients, the Washington Times reported.
One detail from the prosecution's filing stands out for its sheer cruelty. Prosecutors said the company enlisted an employee identified as a rape victim to "reenact" the incident before a crowd for a so-called taboo course. The employee performed oral sex on a partner while being told "I love you", the same words her real rapist had used.
That is not therapy. That is not wellness. That is the systematic re-traumatization of a vulnerable person for the benefit of a business.
U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella put it plainly after the sentencing, as AP News reported:
"Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation and it is a crime that causes harm to vulnerable victims."
Prosecutors framed the entire enterprise in a single line from their court filing: "Hers was a crime of exploitation masquerading as empowerment."
One former employee, identified only as Michal, who asked that her last name not be published, told the court that her time at OneTaste left her in financial ruin and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I trusted Nicole... in reality, I fell into Nicole's trap. I was a perfect target because I was a vulnerable woman looking to improve my life."
Michal's account was not unique. Nine former employees testified during the trial. They described years of coercion, manipulation, and unpaid or barely paid labor, all wrapped in the language of personal growth and sexual liberation. The financial harm alone stretched across more than a decade.
The case of OneTaste joins a broader pattern of powerful individuals and networks exploiting the vulnerable while shielding themselves behind wealth and influence. Ongoing investigations into the Epstein case have raised similar questions about how long such operations can persist before anyone is held to account.
Daedone's lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, pushed back on the severity of the case. She noted that none of the accusers described being the victim of physical violence, and that Daedone was charged and convicted only of forced labor conspiracy, not sex trafficking or sexual assault.
"There are still many people today who see Nicole Daedone as a transformative force."
That claim had some backing, at least on paper. More than 200 people submitted letters to the court before sentencing. More than two dozen members of OneTaste attended the hearing.
Among the letter-writers was Van Jones, the CNN correspondent and former adviser to President Barack Obama, who described Daedone as "a woman of uncommon wisdom, grace and moral courage." The company had also once gained an endorsement from Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop website.
Celebrity endorsements do not age well when a federal jury returns a guilty verdict. And the fact that prominent media figures and lifestyle brands lent their credibility to OneTaste raises its own uncomfortable questions about the vetting standards of the wellness industry. Congressional scrutiny of powerful networks that evade accountability has intensified in recent years, as reflected in the House panel's push for contempt charges in the Epstein investigation.
OneTaste has since been rebranded as the Institute of OM. Its current CEO, Anjuli Ayer, attended the sentencing hearing and spoke to reporters outside the courthouse.
"This is a terrifying day for freedom. Once persuasion becomes a crime, anyone can be a defendant, and anyone can be a victim. We must correct the record or everyone will suffer."
Ayer's framing, that the conviction threatens free speech and persuasion, is worth examining. A federal jury heard weeks of testimony from nine former employees. It weighed the evidence. It convicted. A judge reviewed the record and imposed a substantial sentence along with $12 million in forfeiture and nearly $900,000 in restitution. Calling that outcome a threat to "freedom" is a remarkable repackaging of a forced labor conviction.
Bonjean's narrower legal point, that the conviction was for forced labor conspiracy, not sex trafficking, is technically accurate. But the distinction offers cold comfort to the women who testified that they were coerced into sexual acts with clients and investors, worked for years without real pay, and emerged with PTSD and shattered finances.
The wellness industry has long operated in a gray zone where charismatic leaders can build enormous followings with minimal oversight. OneTaste thrived in that space. It attracted celebrity endorsements, media coverage, and paying members. The growing public demand for accountability when powerful figures face scrutiny for their conduct reflects a broader shift in how these cases are treated.
Nine years is less than the 20 prosecutors sought. But it is a serious federal sentence for a forced labor conspiracy conviction. Combined with $12 million in forfeiture and restitution to seven victims totaling about $890,000, the financial consequences are substantial.
Cherwitz's six-and-a-half-year sentence signals that the court viewed the former sales director as more than a passive participant. Former employees testified that both women ran the business like a cult and manipulated workers into performing sexual acts.
Daedone sold OneTaste at some point before her conviction, and the company continues to operate under its new name. The question of whether the organization's culture has actually changed, or merely its branding, remains open.
Judge Gujarati's language at sentencing left little ambiguity about how the court viewed the operation. She rejected every attempt to cast the enterprise as spiritual practice, alternative therapy, or anything other than what the jury found it to be: a criminal conspiracy that stripped vulnerable people of their dignity and their labor.
When exploitation wears the mask of enlightenment, the people who pay the price are always the ones who showed up looking for help. The court, at least, saw through it.
Karla Faye Tucker killed two people with a pickaxe in 1983, told police the act sexually aroused her, then spent fourteen years on death row reinventing herself as a born-again Christian. A retired FBI agent says the confession that haunted the public never stopped haunting investigators either.
Candice DeLong, a retired FBI agent, criminal profiler, and host of the true-crime podcast "Killer Psyche," recently explored Tucker's case in what she called "The Death Row Convert," examining how Tucker's jailhouse conversion to Christianity divided the nation. In comments to Fox News Digital and on her podcast, DeLong laid out a case study in how childhood destruction, drug abuse, and a single grotesque admission can chart the course from crime to execution chamber.
According to the New York Post, Tucker, a Houston, Texas, native, was convicted of her role in the 1983 murders of Jerry Lynn Dean, 27, and Deborah Thornton, 32. Tucker and her then-boyfriend, Daniel Ryan Garrett, broke into Dean's apartment intending to steal motorcycle parts. Dean had reportedly angered Tucker over a dispute involving a motorcycle. Thornton, who had met Dean earlier that evening, was also present.
Both were killed. Tucker later admitted to participating in both killings.
Then came the detail that would follow her to the death chamber. Tucker told police she experienced sexual arousal during the attack, statements she later appeared to distance herself from. DeLong told Fox News Digital that this admission destroyed any hope Tucker might have had:
"Karla was doomed from the beginning, once people found out what she did. And the worst thing she did, and she did not help herself by telling people this, that she had an orgasm when she was killing, while she was stabbing someone."
Tucker's defense attorney argued she was intoxicated during the crime, but she was found guilty of capital murder. Garrett was also sentenced to death but died in prison in 1993 from complications related to hepatitis.
DeLong spent considerable time tracing the roots of Tucker's violence. The picture she drew was grim but deliberate, the kind of case study profilers use to explain, though never excuse, what comes later.
"Karla Faye Tucker had a pretty sad and horrible childhood. Her family broke up, and her mother became a sex worker. Now she's got three young girls at home, teenage girls at home. And the mother's doing drugs. Karla Faye starts using drugs at a very young age."
DeLong pointed to neuroscience research suggesting that drug and alcohol use in undeveloped brains, which scientists say are not fully mature until the mid-20s, can create lasting psychological damage, including a propensity for violence toward others and suicidal behavior.
"There was a lot of neglect. When mom was around, she partied with her daughter. One of the things that we know can happen — drugs, alcohol and marijuana in an undeveloped brain — can create a psychological situation where, when that child or adolescent is an adult, they may have a violent streak, violence toward others and frequently suicidal behavior. We see that as well."
None of this, in DeLong's telling, amounts to an excuse. It amounts to a map. She questioned how any child could emerge intact from the environment Tucker grew up in:
"How was a kid supposed to grow up normal when the mother is buying, providing and sharing her drugs that she gets from money through sex with strangers? How is a kid — a girl, a teenage girl — supposed to deal with that and come out OK on the other side, meaning the other side of childhood?"
Her conclusion was blunt:
"Karla never stood a chance, a chance of having a normal life, in my opinion. She didn't get what she needed, and she got a lot of bad stuff from someone who was supposed to take care of her."
This is the line that true-crime analysis walks constantly, and it is a line that matters in a culture increasingly eager to blur it. Understanding the mechanics of how a killer is made does not obligate society to forgive the killing. A conservative framework recognizes both realities simultaneously: broken homes and absent parents produce damaged people, and damaged people who murder still owe a debt to justice.
The left often treats these origin stories as arguments against accountability. If the system failed her, the reasoning goes, then the system has no standing to punish her. That logic collapses the moment you remember Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton, who did not get a second chance at life, regardless of what failed Karla Faye Tucker.
After arriving at the Texas State Penitentiary in 1984, Tucker identified herself as a born-again Christian. In death row interviews, she appeared soft-spoken as she pleaded for mercy. Her case drew significant support for clemency, including from religious leaders and public figures.
DeLong was skeptical:
"She found God, she found Jesus, so the thought among her supporters was 'spare her.' The thing about finding God, though — I don't think so. A lot of prisoners find God and become religious in prison, yes, but not as soon as the handcuffs go on. So it does make me question."
On her podcast, DeLong offered a more nuanced take, acknowledging that prison may have genuinely helped Tucker in ways freedom never could:
"Prison is exactly where she belonged for obvious reasons. Karla needed to be contained, monitored, regimented, and above all, drug-free. Finding God helped her reconstruct her identity and separate her new self from her old murderous self. It helped her find stability after a life filled with instability and chaos."
But DeLong quickly added the counterweight:
"There could be many reasons why Karla found God in prison. Many people do. We come across many killers who make the same claims. But with Karla, she eventually had masses of people across the country rooting for her."
That last observation cuts to something deeper than one case. The American public has a recurring weakness for redemption narratives, especially when the killer is articulate, remorseful, and, frankly, female. Tucker's soft-spoken death row interviews generated a sympathy that a male killer with the same crime and the same confession would almost certainly never have received. The double standard is worth naming.
Tucker was executed in 1998 at age 38, becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. DeLong framed the public's reaction to Tucker not as bloodlust but as a rational response to something deeply disturbing:
"It raises the thought of, 'If she could do that once, could she do it again? What if she got out?' I'm not saying she deserved the death penalty or not. It would have been fine with me for her to spend the rest of her life in prison. But we, as members of society, when we are so repulsed by what someone not only did but then brags about it, we just want it gone. We want them gone. We want the memory gone. And how do you do that? The 'Death Chamber.'"
DeLong did not shy away from her own assessment of the risk Tucker posed. Even with the religious conversion, even with the soft-spoken interviews, she believed the threat was real:
"Regarding Karla, there's no reason to believe, based on what she did, that there was any place in society that could be safe from her other than a jail cell or a prison cell. If I had to roll the dice, I'd say if she had not been convicted and was released, or if she escaped, she would've been involved in sex, drugs and violence very quickly."
On her podcast, DeLong delivered perhaps the sharpest summary of all:
"But as I see it, Karla Faye Tucker was everybody's worst nightmare. She was a hedonist who lived a life of drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and, above all, violence."
"She was a woman who sexually enjoyed killing another person, and she was proud of it. Juries are afraid of people like Karla. They not only want them contained, but they want them gone forever from the face of this Earth and from our collective consciousness."
The Karla Faye Tucker case endures not because of its gore but because of the questions it forces. Can a person be genuinely transformed in prison? Does transformation matter once the crime crosses a certain threshold? And who gets to decide?
Conservatives have long argued that the justice system exists to protect the innocent, not to rehabilitate the guilty at the innocent's expense. Tucker's case is Exhibit A. A woman who confessed to sexual pleasure during a double pickaxe murder managed, through fourteen years of good behavior and religious devotion, to convince a meaningful segment of the public that she deserved mercy. The victims' families got no such campaign.
DeLong's analysis, rooted in decades of profiling killers, reinforces a truth that sentimentality often obscures: understanding why someone became a monster does not make them less of one. Tucker's childhood was a catastrophe. Her crimes were still her own. The justice system weighed both and acted.
Two people went to sleep in a Houston apartment in 1983 and never woke up. Forty-plus years later, we are still talking about their killers' feelings.
Volusia County Sheriff's Office deputies found a convicted child killer kicking back on the Daytona Beach seawall, swigging booze alongside spring breakers, during a routine public nuisance sweep over the weekend. Anthony Grove, 45, was wanted in Ohio for violating his parole after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child.
He wasn't hiding. He wasn't running. He was sitting on the sand with a whiskey bottle, playing it cool.
Grove now faces Florida charges for failing to register as a convicted felon and two counts of drug possession after deputies allegedly found a THC weed pen in his backpack. He is currently in custody pending extradition back to Ohio.
Deputies initially approached Grove and another man who was drinking on the seawall. What began as a minor public nuisance contact quickly escalated when a background check revealed Grove's outstanding warrant from Ohio, which flagged him as dangerous and possibly armed, as New York Post reports.
Bodycam footage captured the exchange between Volusia County Chief Deputy Brian Henderson and Grove. When Henderson questioned Grove about why he was wanted, Grove apparently tried to soften the story, suggesting his child's death was an accident. Henderson pressed him.
"You made it sound like your kid – it was a car accident?"
It wasn't. In February 2015, Grove threw a coffee mug at his baby's mother and hit the little boy in the head instead, according to a report citing ABC News 5. The child died. Grove pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child.
Henderson's response was direct: "Go sit in the car."
Grove, for his part, seemed to understand the moment. "It's over, bro," he told deputies.
Henderson used the arrest to make a broader point about policing philosophy, one that resonates well beyond the Volusia County shoreline.
"This is why we said the little things matter – you enforce the small public nuisance crimes and here we are, we find a guy that's sitting up on the seawall, drinking booze…This is the kind of people we don't need on our beach, we don't need in our community and I'm glad we could get him off the sand."
This is broken-windows policing in action. The idea that enforcing minor infractions catches bigger fish has been mocked and maligned by progressive criminal justice reformers for years. They call it over-policing. They call it harassment. They call it a pretext for targeting marginalized communities.
Then a convicted child killer turns up on a public beach surrounded by college kids, and the only reason anyone noticed was because deputies bothered to enforce open container laws.
Consider what happens in jurisdictions that have adopted the opposite approach. Cities that stopped enforcing quality-of-life offenses didn't become more equitable. They became more dangerous. Public spaces filled with people who had no business being there unchecked: fugitives, parole violators, predators who thrive in environments where nobody asks questions.
Grove's parole agreement required him to obtain a written travel permit before crossing state lines. He didn't bother. Ohio issued a warrant for his arrest on Oct. 29, 2025. And yet there he sat, months later, drinking whiskey on a crowded Florida beach during one of the busiest weeks of the year.
Without that sweep, he stays invisible.
The gap between Grove's Ohio warrant and his Daytona Beach arrest raises an uncomfortable question: how many parole violators with violent histories are floating around the country right now, untracked and unbothered?
The parole system is supposed to function as a leash. A man who killed a child gets released, and the condition of that release is accountability: check in, stay put, get permission before you move. Grove ignored every one of those conditions. The system's response was to issue a warrant and wait.
It took a Florida sheriff's office running a spring break enforcement operation to do what Ohio's parole infrastructure couldn't.
There's a lesson here that goes beyond one arrest. Proactive policing works. It works not because every open container citation leads to a fugitive, but because the posture of enforcement creates an environment where people who are hiding something get found. The alternative, the hands-off, look-the-other-way model championed by reform prosecutors from San Francisco to Philadelphia, creates the opposite. It creates cover.
Somewhere in the details of this story, it's easy to lose the gravity of why Grove was wanted in the first place. A child is dead. A little boy was struck in the head during a domestic assault and never recovered. The man responsible pleaded guilty, served whatever time Ohio deemed sufficient, and then walked away from every obligation that came with his release.
He ended up on a beach, surrounded by young people on vacation, acting as though none of it ever happened. Henderson described Grove's demeanor as taking "it real cool."
The Volusia County Sheriff's Office didn't let him stay cool for long. That matters more than any policy debate about policing philosophy. A dangerous man was found because someone bothered to look.
Valerie Bertinelli wants you to know her breasts are "deformed," and she's decided she'd rather laugh about it than hide from it. Fox News reported that the 65-year-old actress laid bare the physical toll of decades-old breast implants during a conversation with Drew Barrymore, tying it to her new memoir, "Getting Naked."
Four surgeries in 2024. A fever of 104 degrees. An infection so severe that her breast "started to cave in on itself." And still, at least one more procedure to go.
It's a jarring story, told with the kind of self-deprecating honesty that's become rare in a celebrity culture obsessed with curating perfection.
Bertinelli first got breast implants in the late 1980s. She wrote in her memoir that she always hated her naturally small breasts and wanted a modest change, but she ended up with results more dramatic than she intended. For decades, she kept them hidden rather than displayed.
"After I got the implants, I never put them on display. I tried to hide them even, embarrassed that I had done it."
The trouble escalated after Bertinelli suffered a bad fall at some unspecified point before 2024, leading to surgery to remove the old implants and replace them with smaller ones. About one week after that replacement surgery, things went wrong: discoloration, swelling, dizziness, and a dangerous fever.
In an interview with People magazine earlier this month, Bertinelli described the moment her doctor saw the damage:
"The look on my doctor's face when he finally saw me made me think 'Oh s---' I guess I should have come in earlier.' And he took everything out [the implant and the surrounding tissues] and then my breast became infected and started to cave in on itself. It became a crater."
Four surgeries in a single year. And the saga isn't over.
What stands out about Bertinelli's approach is her refusal to treat this as a tragedy requiring a solemn press tour. She cracked jokes. She pointed to her cats, Henry, Batman, and Luna, and told People they're the only ones looking at her body anyway.
"I have to have one more surgery to even them out. Me and these guys are the only ones looking at my boobs anyways, but I don't care because I can't see without my glasses on ... I'll have to date somebody who can't see."
During her conversation with Barrymore, Bertinelli recounted showing the damage and watching Barrymore's reaction shift from casual curiosity to genuine shock. Barrymore had initially asked how bad it could really be. Bertinelli mimicked her eventual response: "Oh yeah, that's bad."
Barrymore, to her credit, pivoted to problem-solving. "And then I proceeded to be like, here's what we can do," Barrymore said.
Bertinelli summed up the exchange with warmth: "I love her honesty. It's like, I can trust this woman."
There's a reason this story resonates beyond celebrity gossip. Bertinelli got implants in an era when cosmetic surgery was already being marketed as a path to confidence, and the decades since have only intensified that pressure. Social media has supercharged it. Filters, influencer endorsements, and an entire industry built on the premise that your body is a problem waiting for a product.
What rarely makes the highlight reel is this part: the complications, the revisions, the infections, the decades of discomfort that follow a decision made at a moment of insecurity. Bertinelli got implants because she hated her body. She spent years embarrassed that she'd done it. And now she's dealing with the physical wreckage of a choice the culture told her was empowering.
None of this is an argument for government regulation or moral panic. It's simpler than that. The cultural machinery that tells young women their bodies need fixing rarely sticks around for the consequences. Bertinelli, at 65, is doing something useful by being blunt about what the brochure left out.
She closed her public remarks the way she's handled the whole ordeal, with a joke that barely conceals the weight underneath:
"Anyway, those were my boobs. Anybody want to date me? It was so serious I just had to find the humor in it."
When Barrymore reminded her, she said she wasn't dating, adding a hopeful "yet," Bertinelli didn't argue the point. She'd already said the quiet part out loud: "My boobs suck, but I'm not dating, so it doesn't matter."
Sometimes the bravest thing a public figure can do is stop performing and just tell the truth. Bertinelli did that. The culture that sold her the implants in the first place could stand to listen.