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OGDEN -- As Jeremy Valdes faces the death penalty in a double homicide, he recently e-mailed a letter to the Ogden Utah Standard-Examiner, much to the surprise of lawyers on both sides of the case.
Commenting on a June 25 hearing on a motion to suppress his apparent confession to the murders, Valdes comments on a police officer cousin's testimony against him, calling another officer apparently drunk on the stand, and attacks, mildly, the credibility of his co-defendant Miranda Statler. She is the main witness against him and is already serving a potential 20-year prison term for her guilty pleas in the murder case.
Valdes also faults the Standard-Examiner's coverage, and concludes by casting votes for cartoons under consideration by the paper.
"While I have you here, my friends and I would like to request that you bring back the comics, Pearls Before Swines and Garfield. Thank you."
Valdes assails the testimony of Sgt. Shane Hubbard of the Roy Police Department at the June 25 hearing, which has been continued to Aug. 13: " ... was so impaired that he literally nodded off several times during his very slurred and confusing testimony. There is no way that Judge Di Caria (sic) and the prosecution didn't notice. The reason I'm certain, that his testimony was cut short."
Advised of the letter, Weber County Attorney Dee Smith asked to respond on Hubbard's behalf: "That's ridiculous," Smith said. "He didn't nod off and he certainly wasn't impaired. I'm certain Mr. Valdes is saying that because Sgt. Hubbard's testimony is very damaging to his case."
Smith said he found the statement peculiar because Hubbard wasn't the only officer in the room at the time of Valdes' admissions. He wouldn't comment further.
Like the prosecution, defense attorneys had no idea Valdes was sending the letter, transmitted by e-mail from a relative.
"We, and defense attorneys in general, absolutely do not like clients doing that," Ryan Bushell said. "It hinders what we're trying to do with a case. We want to control what goes out to the press."
Bushell also declined to comment further.
Valdes is currently held without bail in the Weber County Jail.
An 18-year-old woman has been charged with tricking a romantic rival to drive to a Sherburne County, Minnesota lake and then bloodying her with brass-knuckle punches to the head as a crowd watched and someone video-recorded the ambush on a cell phone.
Once that video was analyzed by the U.S. Secret Service, arrests were made of beating suspect Sarah Jean Jarosz of Zimmerman, and alleged accomplice Steven Michael Boyer, 20, of Elk River.
A county computer forensic investigator recovered portions of the video from the phone, which was recorded on March 17 at the public access to Elk Lake in northeastern Sherburne County. That video was sent to the Secret Service, whose experts restored its entirety.
Sheriff Joel Brott said the video was "critical evidence" that helped in Wednesday's arrests more than four months after the beating.
Jarosz and Boyer were both charged Friday with second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon. Boyer is not Jarosz's boyfriend.
According to the criminal complaints against them:
A 19-year-old woman told a sheriff's sergeant that she received text from a male friend's cell phone in the afternoon about seeing a movie together and that they should meet by the Little Elk boat landing.
At the landing, the woman saw several cars and eight or so people standing around. She did not see her friend.
Jarosz approached the woman and asked whether she knew that her friend had a girlfriend. The woman said yes, and Jarosz responded, "I'm his girlfriend."
Jarosz hit the woman in the chest, put on brass knuckles given to her by Boyer and struck the woman three times on the side of the head and twice on the side of her torso. During the beating, Jarosz told the woman that she was the one texting her on her friend's cell phone luring her to the lake.
The bloodied woman went back to her car and got away before a running Jarosz could catch up and land another punch.
Investigators learned that Jarosz got her hands on her boyfriend's cell phone after he left it at her home the night before. She went through it and determined that he had been communicating with the woman.
Jarosz then invited her friends to the lake so they could see her fight the woman.
Multiple witnesses supported the woman's account of being beaten and added that the victim did not fight back but pleaded with Jarosz to stop.
About a month later, Boyer told police that Jarosz let him know about her plot to lure the woman to the lake. He said he provided her with the brass knuckles, which were part of his belt buckle, and drove Jarosz to the lake that afternoon. Boyer also threw away the brass knuckles at Jarosz's orders.
It could be a stunt from a First World War epic - the German fighter plane preparing to swoop in for an air battle to the death.
But while the replica Fokker Eindecker looks like a Hollywood prop, the plane was actually built by amateur pilot Dave Stephens at his home.
The single-seater is one of two self-assembled aircraft that he regularly takes to heights of up to 10,000ft over Essex. Fair enough, perhaps. Until you ask the 41-year- old about the engine powering it.
He enthusiastically points out that the original 1915 model had 'a big old-fashioned rotary engine in the front', while 'the engine in mine is an adapted lawnmower engine'. 'It's 690cc, which is half the size of the engine in the family car parked outside your house.'
The cockpit is open to the air ('when it rains, it doesn't half hurt your face'), the wings are made out of 'a fabric so fine that you could punch a hole in it', the metal fuselage is desperately flimsy and the whole structure weighs just 114 kilos, or 18 stone.
And what does it sound like? A lawnmower, of course. But that takes away none of the romance, insists Mr Stephens. 'When you're flying in the Fokker, it's a feeling unlike any other."
