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MADERA COUNTY — The ACLU Foundation of Northern California today filed a lawsuit against Chawanakee Unified School District and Minarets High School administrators on behalf of two students for censoring the students’ speech celebrating their LGBTQ identities in violation of their free speech rights and right to be free of anti-LGBTQ bias in California schools.

Steven Madrid and Mikayla Garaffa, two Minarets High School students, selected quotes for their yearbook senior pages. Although the quotes were generic statements in support of LGBTQ people, the two students received an email from their school’s yearbook advisor rejecting the quotes for being “politically divisive.” Their quotes were:

TULARE - Detectives with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office arrested 52-year-old Dale William Watson of Porterville Tuesday for the murder of eighteen year old Dynasty Alexander. Dynasty’s body was discovered in an orchard near the Elk Bayou Park on the 19700 Block of Hosfield Drive in Tulare. At the location, officers found the body of a female and determined it was county jurisdiction.

The victim had visible signs of strangulation and trauma to the upper torso when her body was found near a Tulare orchard on 3/3/19. Upon completion of the autopsy, the official cause of death was determined to be a single gunshot wound to the upper torso. The investigation is being treated as a homicide. The Tulare County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Detectives were then called to the scene and took over the investigation.

SACRAMENTO -  Kioni M. Dogan, 38, of Stockton, pleaded guilty Tuesday to separate criminal conspiracies to submit false claims for federal income tax refunds and to commit mail fraud in connection with California state unemployment insurance benefits, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced. According to court documents, Dogan and her co-conspirators together illegally sought over $2 million from the California and federal governments with these schemes.

In the tax case, Dogan conspired with her co-defendant Antonia Brasley and others to submit false tax returns to the IRS by obtaining personal identifying information from family, friends, and others, and then submitting returns seeking refunds to which the people listed on the returns were not entitled. To pursue the refunds, false statements were placed on the returns regarding income, withholding from income, and gambling losses, with fraudulent supporting tax forms. From May 2011 through April 2012, Dogan and her co-conspirators sought over $940,000 in fraudulent tax refunds, of which approximately $708,188 were paid out by the IRS.

ATWATER - On Thursday Night and Friday, February 28 and March 1, 2019, officers from the Atwater Police Department, Merced County Sheriff’s STAR team, State Parole and Merced County Probation Department conducted a series of probation and parole compliance checks in various locations in the Atwater/Winton Area. 

During the operation, Atwater Police and the Merced County Sheriff STAR team executed a search warrant in an apartment complex in the 2800 block of Nashua St. in the City of Atwater. During the search officers discovered that one of the occupants of the apartment, Gerardo Torres, 20 years old, an Atwater resident, was in possession of a firearm and ammunition. Officers learned that Torres was a convicted felon and prohibited from possessing a firearm.