Category: Cops
I spent three years living in the Alaskan interior when I was a soldier. It was the prettiest place in the world…for about three months in the summer. The coldest it got while I was stationed there was 62 degrees below zero F. Because of the rugged inhospitable nature of the place not a whole lot of folks actually live there, relative to the rest of the country.
Alaska is crawling with tourists during the summer. Tourism is one of the greatest sources of revenue for the state. However, in the winter the Alaskans pretty much have the place to themselves. Back when we called Alaska home there didn’t seem to be a great many old people living permanently in the interior, either. To thrive in the arctic one has to be hearty. The remote and desolate nature of the land tends to attract some fascinating personalities.
Nobody to this day really knows who Albert Johnson really was. It was estimated that he was born between 1890 and 1900 and lived under a pseudonym. In the summer of 1931 Johnson arrived in Fort McPherson, Canada, after making his way down the Peel River. RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) constable Edgar Millen had reason to question the man and later reported that he had a Scandinavian accent. He subsequently described Johnson as clean-shaven, stand-offish, and well-funded.
Johnson plied the Mackenzie River Delta aboard a homebuilt raft before building himself a tiny 8×10-foot cabin on the bank of the Rat River. At the time anyone wishing to trap animals for their fur was required to obtain a trapper’s license from the government. Johnson neglected to do so. A great many outsiders had come to these remote spaces fleeing the destitution of the Great Depression. Native trappers frequently resented their presence in a land they had obviously long considered their own.
In December of 1931 local native trappers reported Johnson to the RCMP alleging that he was deactivating their traps and interfering with their livelihoods. A subsequent investigation determined that these allegations were unsubstantiated. When the natives had called on him in his cabin Johnson had run them off at the point of a gun. The guy apparently just really wanted to be left alone.
The day after Christmas a pair of RCMP constables named Alfred King and Joseph Bernard trekked sixty miles to Johnson’s remote cabin to investigate the allegations. For his part Johnson ignored the lawmen, going so far as to hang a sack across the cabin window so they couldn’t see inside. The two policemen eventually returned home in frustration to obtain a search warrant.
Five days later the two Mounties returned with a warrant along with two other men for backup. Johnson still refused to speak to the cops, so Constable King tried to force his way into the cabin. Johnson shot him through the wooden door for his trouble. The Mountie team successfully evacuated Constable King to Aklavik where he ultimately recovered.
Albert Johnson had by now kicked over an anthill. Like governments everywhere, the one thing they cannot tolerate is insubordination. The Mounties therefore returned again, this time with a nine-man posse, forty-two dogs, and twenty pounds of dynamite. However, Albert Johnson had made good use of the intervening time.
The Mounties surrounded the little cabin and demanded that Johnson come out. When he failed to do so they deployed their explosives. It was so cold the Mounties had to keep the dynamite in their coats to thaw it out.
They threw the dynamite onto the roof of the cabin in an effort at flushing Johnson out. One report held that the roof was slightly damaged. Another claimed that the cabin was pretty much pulverized. Regardless, Johnson now opened fire from within a five-foot dugout he had excavated in the floor of his tiny dwelling.
Johnson and the posse exchanged fire for some fifteen hours, during which, miraculously, no one was hurt. However, it was really cold out. At -40 degrees F the cops were growing weary of this exchange. They retreated once again to Aklavik to regroup. By now word of this tidy little war had filtered out to the World via radio.
On January 14, fully nineteen days after their first quasi-amicable encounter, the Mounties returned yet again only to find that Johnson was gone. Considering they had blown his tiny cabin to hell this really should have come as no surprise. Now with ample resources and manpower the Mounties struck out after the fugitive recluse. Roughly two weeks later on January 30, they caught up to him.
The cops surrounded Johnson in a thicket, and a firefight ensued. Johnson shot Constable Edgar Millen, the officer who had first interviewed him some weeks before, through the heart and killed him. The Mounties present at the time reported that Johnson laughed heartily when he realized he had connected with the law officer. In the resulting chaos the cops retreated and Johnson escaped yet again.
By now things were clearly getting out of hand. The Mounties enlisted the assistance of local trackers as well as the services of Wilfrid “Wop” May, a post-war aviator of some renown. May arrived with his ski-equipped Bellanca airplane to help coordinate the search from the air. The Mounties blocked the only two passes through the Richardson Mountains only to have Johnson scale a peak and escape.
The airplane turned out to be Albert Johnson’s undoing. Johnson was a skilled woodsman who would trek along caribou trails to conceal his footprints. This allowed him to move on the compacted snow quickly without snowshoes. Wop May could see that Johnson only left the track to make camp in the evenings. He coordinated with the ground team via radio and directed them along a river to Johnson’s position. By February 17 the Mounties had their man.
The posse encountered Johnson at a range of roughly two hundred yards. Johnson attempted to run, but he wasn’t wearing his snowshoes and got bogged down. In the resulting exchange of fire one Mountie was badly wounded. The law enforcement officers quickly narrowed the distance and killed Johnson at close range.
One round struck the fugitive in the left side of his pelvis, severing a significant artery. Johnson bled out in short order. Subsequent forensic analysis of his corpse showed him to have a fairly severe case of scoliosis as well as asymmetrical feet, one being markedly larger than the other. Over the course of 33 days, this gimpy little man had trekked 85 miles through the arctic wastes. Throughout the exchange, the only sound the officers had heard Johnson make was when he laughed after shooting Constable Millen.
When officers searched Johnson’s body they discovered $2,000 in American and Canadian currency (about $43,000 in today’s money), a small compass, some gold, a knife, a razor, a few nails, some fish hooks, a dead bird, a dead squirrel, and a few human teeth with gold fillings that they suspected were his own. He also had an ample supply of Beecham’s Pills, a type of laxative commercially available at the time. Despite widely circulating photos of the dead man no one ever determined his identity.
The Guns
Albert Johnson had three firearms on him when he died. They included a cut-down Winchester bolt action .22, a Savage lever-action Model 99F in .30-30, and a sawed-off 16-gauge Iver Johnson shotgun. Though his identity was never definitively established, Johnson was clearly adept at running a gun.
Johnson’s Winchester .22 was likely a Model 04 single shot with the buttstock cut into a pistol grip. Winchester offered a variety of these simple single-shot starter rifles over the first several decades of the 20th century. They would have made solid survival arms for securing small game.
The Savage Model 99F was a radically advanced sporting rifle for its day. Available in sixteen different chamberings, the 99F was a hammerless lever-action design that fed from a six-round rotary magazine. This made the 99F one of the world’s first lever-action rifles that could safely feed spitzer (pointed) bullets. Most rifles sporting tubular magazines can be dangerous if filled with pointed bullets that could inadvertently precipitate an unintentional discharge.
Johnson’s single-shot 16-gauge shotgun was mercilessly pruned into a tiny little handgun. Even in a modest 16-gauge chassis, this thing would have sported some impressive recoil. At under-the-table ranges, however, it would have reliably done the deed.
Ruminations
Why the heck couldn’t they have just left this poor guy alone? He lived in a cabin about the size of a large dinner table some sixty miles from civilization. He clearly just wanted to be by himself. Yet the Canadian government just couldn’t stand it. They had to hunt the man, blow his hand-built cabin to pieces, and eventually shoot him down like a dog. It’s a safe bet that no law enforcement officers would have been harmed had they just given the man some space.
This is a ubiquitous government disease. The US government killed Randy Weaver’s wife and teenaged son over the length of a shotgun barrel. They gave him a $3 million settlement afterward, but that pile of money is likely pretty poor company on a cold winter’s night.
In a representative democracy such as ours, the only reason stuff like this ever happens is if we allow it to. We are never more than one headline away from such a tragedy even today. I love my country, but I distrust my government. Live responsibly, love your neighbors, pay your taxes, and practice responsible citizenship. However, never tolerate government overreach or abuse. The line demarcating freedom and tyranny is indeed fine. If my opinion counts for anything, sometimes I think we may already have a few too many rules.
California gun owners recently won a significant victory from a federal court
judge who declared major parts of the state’s “Unsafe Handgun Act”
unconstitutional because it doesn’t allow newer pistols to be sold in
the state. Don’t party too hardy, as this was likely just the first round.
If you’ve never bought a handgun in California, good for you because the state law has been a train wreck, at least until recently when a federal judge struck down provisions in the law he found unconstitutional.
In the process, Judge Cormac J. Carney granted a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs but granted a 14-day grace period during which the state could appeal the ruling. By the time you read this, the appeal should be in the works.
But Judge Carney’s 22-page ruling contained some gems, and he was blunt about the problems with a handgun “roster” law that has plagued Golden State gun owners for years. As any California can attest, the law has prevented new pistols from being marketed in the state unless they meet some strict standards which, upon reflection, seem deliberately engineered to keep new handgun models out, and perhaps ultimately eliminate handguns altogether.
Hang on while we take you through the word salad of California’s handgun ownership (prevention) law. “UHA” refers to the state law, known as the “Unsafe Handgun Act.” “CLI” refers to “chamber loaded indicator.” And, finally, MDM refers to “magazine disconnect mechanism.” Got it? Good, because here’s a bit of Judge Carney’s wisdom:
“Californians have the constitutional right to acquire and use state-of-the-art handguns to protect themselves,” Judge Carney observed. “They should not be forced to settle for decade-old models of handguns to ensure that they remain safe inside or outside the home. But unfortunately, the UHA’s CLI, MDM, and microstamping requirements do exactly that.
“California’s Unsafe Handgun Act (the “UHA”) seeks to prevent accidental discharges by requiring handguns to have particular safety features,” the judge acknowledged. “First, the UHA requires certain handguns to have a chamber load indicator (“CLI”), which is a device that indicates whether a handgun is loaded.
“Second,” he explained, “the UHA requires certain handguns to have a magazine disconnect mechanism (“MDM”), which prevents a handgun from being fired if the magazine is not fully inserted.
“Third,” Judge Carney concluded, “the UHA requires certain handguns to have the ability to transfer microscopic characters representing the handgun’s make, model, and serial number onto shell casings when the handgun is fired, commonly referred to as microstamping capability. No handgun available in the world has all three of these features.” Right, we’re talking about “microstamping,” and as noted by the judge, “The microstamping requirement has prevented any new handgun models from being added to the Roster since May 2013.”
Who Is Judge Carney?
Cormac Joseph Carney was chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California until he stepped down in 2020 over an incident involving alleged insensitive remarks to Kiry Gray, clerk of the Court.
He was born in Detroit in 1959, but was raised in Long Beach, Calif., graduating from high school there and going on to UCLA, where he played wide receiver for the Bruins football team. He practiced law in Los Angeles and was appointed to the California Superior Court. From there, he was nominated to the federal district court by former President George W. Bush and was confirmed by the Senate in April 2003.
He and his wife have three children, according to an online biography.
Enter the Double Standard
If it weren’t for double standards, California anti-gunners would have no standards at all.
To the point: In Judge Carney’s ruling, he notes, “The UHA’s prohibition on sales of ‘unsafe’ handguns is subject to exceptions as well. It does not apply to sales to law enforcement personnel, personnel from agencies including the California Highway Patrol, the Department of Justice, the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, and the district attorney’s office, or any member of the military.”
He later adds, “if Off-Roster firearms were truly unsafe, California would not allow law enforcement to use them in the line of duty, when the stakes are highest. But the substantial majority of California’s law enforcement officers use Off-Roster handguns in the line of duty.”
And he points to another inconsistency in California bureaucratic reasoning when he notes, “The government argues that the balance of the equities weighs in its favor because an injunction would ‘permit unsafe handguns to be sold in California prior to trial, creating public safety risks.’
But the government’s safety concern rings hollow. Every single semiautomatic handgun available for sale in California at this time is a grandfathered handgun—one the government ostensibly considers ‘unsafe.’ 800 of 832 handguns on the Roster today lack CLI and MDM features. The government cannot credibly argue that handguns without CLI, MDM, and microstamping features pose unacceptable public safety risks when virtually all of the handguns available on the Roster and sold in California today lack those features.”
Can you say “oops?”
California attorney Chuck Michel is also president of the California
Rifle & Pistol Association. (Image courtesy Chuck Michel
Wise Counsel
Enter Chuck Michel, a California attorney with years of experience dealing with, and challenging, state gun control laws. With all the laws facing gun owners, Michel has had lots of practice.
The day Judge Carney handed down his ruling, I traded email with Michel, who also happens to be president of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, one of the plaintiffs in the case. His summation of the ruling was unsympathetic to the state.
“For decades this ‘roster’ law has deprived law-abiding citizens of the right to choose a handgun appropriate for their individual needs,” he observed about the Carney ruling. “The loaded chamber indicator, magazine disconnect, and microstamping requirements were impossible to satisfy, so the number of different models of approved handguns available to buy dropped to barely 200.
“And,” he added, “that’s how the politicians who would love to ban handguns entirely wanted it. If we can hold on to this great Second Amendment win, people will be able to choose from among thousands of the latest, greatest, and safest handguns made today.”
I’ve known Michel for about 20 years, and he earned this win, along with every Californian who has ever been victimized by the state handgun laws. Hopefully, the good guys will prevail.
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb wants Republicans to block funding for the ATF until Democrats and Biden administration bureaucrats show some respect for the Second Amendment.
CCRKBA Says Unfund ATF
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms recently did something to raise eyebrows. The group called on congressional Republicans to block funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
There’s a condition, of course. CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said money should be held up “until Democrats and federal bureaucrats publicly recognize Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, and stop their attacks on legal gun ownership.”
“We’ve seen attacks on Second Amendment rights under previous Democrat presidents,” Gottlieb said in a news release, “but the Biden administration has pulled out all the stops. Joe Biden has publicly declared his desire to ban modern semiautomatic rifles and 9mm pistols, the most popular firearms in the nation.
Millions of honest citizens own semiautomatic rifles for all kinds of uses, including home defense, competition, predator control, recreational shooting and hunting, and they have never harmed anyone. Likewise, millions of men and women own and use 9mm pistols for personal and home protection, training, target shooting, competition, business protection, and other legitimate uses.
“But under Joe Biden,” he continued, “the ATF has been weaponized against law-abiding citizens, and his budget proposal includes $1.9 billion for the agency to expand operations and increase regulation of the firearms industry.
“Clearly,” Gottlieb said, “Biden and the Democrats have decided that American gun owners are their enemy.”
Obviously, I liked the guns.
Perhaps my favorite, based purely on aesthetics, was the pepperbox revolver. If you’re unfamiliar with it, think of a Gatling gun in your hand and you’ve got a good idea of what it looked like, though the operation was very, very different.
The guns aren’t really a thing in this day and age, yet apparently, you can still get arrested for having one in California.
Just after 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, officials with the Redding Police Department said their officers were called to the Burger King off of Eureka Way for a report of a man seen walking around with a handgun on his bag. Officers said they responded to the area and contacted the suspect, identified as Ryan Battles.
After searching Battles’s bag, police said they found an antique black-powdered pepperbox revolver, black powder and iron pellets.
Of course, the media called it a “musket-style pistol,” which makes little sense.
Battles was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.
Now, with all that said, yes, there is more to the story. For one thing, police believe Battles stole the gun in the first place. Apparently, he’s not much of a history buff or something. Either way, if the gun is in fact stolen, I’m all for putting Battles under the jail, metaphorically, of course.
I cannot abide a thief, but especially not a gun thief.
Yet I can’t help but chuckle about someone ultimately being arrested for carrying an 18th-century revolver, something not that different from what anti-gunners routinely tell us the Second Amendment is really protecting.
Again, Battles isn’t actually charged with having a stolen gun. They just think it’s stolen. While they’re probably right, they still arrested a man for carrying an antique, muzzle-loaded revolver that apparently wasn’t even loaded.
Only in California.
OK, not just in California, of course, but you know what I mean.
Still, if they believe it to be legitimately stolen, they need evidence that it wasn’t his gun. I don’t know that they have that, which also means it’s possible that Battles is innocent of that accusation.
Either way, though, this looks like it could be a surprisingly interesting case. I clicked on it because the headline looked weird and I’m a fan of pepperbox pistols, so seeing the picture made it obvious that I’d talk about this one.
But there are a lot of layers to this one that hasn’t really been uncovered as of this writing. I’d say it’ll be interesting to see how all of this shakes out, but it’s California. Even if the gun belonged to Battles lawfully, he’s still getting prosecuted for not having a carry permit at a minimum. As such, we know how it will ultimately shake out. It should still be pretty fascinating to watch in that trainwreck kind of way.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) released data on guns used in crimes from 2017 to 2021, including the ages of those who originally purchased the guns, in its first report on firearms in 20 years.
The ATF calls guns used in crimes “crime guns”, and more than half the time, the person who originally bought the weapon was not the person using it during the crime, according to the data. Oftentimes, the gun purchaser and the criminal using the gun didn’t know each other.
More than 1 million firearms were reported stolen from 2017 to 2021, according to the ATF.
In Nashville, 269 guns have been stolen from cars so far this year, according to the Metro Nashville Police Department. There is some concern those firearms could be used to commit future crimes.
Community activist Clemmie Greenlee, founder and CEO of Mothers Over Murder, told News 2 that statistic is worrisome.
“If I have allowed my gun to be somewhere unsafe and someone got ahold of it, a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, and they went and committed a crime, I’m just as guilty as they are,” Greenlee said.
In addition, the ATF found 3% more guns used in crimes from 2019 to 2020 were originally purchased by people ages 18 to 24. During that same time, 5% fewer guns purchased by 35-year-olds and up were used in crimes, the data showed.
Regardless of the age of the gun purchaser, if a firearm gets into the wrong hands, it can contribute to the gun violence problem, which Dr. Kelsey Gastineau, a Vanderbilt pediatric hospitalist, considers a public health crisis.
“Firearms are the leading cause of death for our kids in Tennessee and the United States, so wherever the firearm is coming from is a huge issue,” Gastineau said. “When we’re thinking about firearms that come from, (if they’re) stolen, whether they come from vehicles or things like that, we need to think about solutions that will work to help reduce those, because those will eventually reduce injuries for children and teens in this state.”
Greenlee told News 2 she wants to see the gun-purchasing age requirement increase. In addition, she is advocating against a bill she said would loosen gun restrictions.
“You think the data is speaking now; we’re going to be in trouble,” Greenlee said. “I always call it a bloody summer; it’s going to be a triple bloody summer if we don’t get ahold of these guns.”
In addition, the ATF has seen a new problem over the years involving privately made firearms, or ghost guns, which cannot be traced. According to the feds, ghost guns are being used more often in crimes.
To read the full report from the ATF, click here.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta released a report on Monday showing a slight reduction in the number of people who need to have their legal weapons taken away because they’ve either been convicted of certain crimes or have some sort of restraining order against them.
The program is part of California’s Armed and Prohibited Persons System (also known as APPS), which has been tracking firearm owners since 2006 who are prevented from having them because they were convicted of a felony, certain misdemeanors, have a restraining order against them or had a mental health triggering event.
California is the only state in the country with this kind of system.
The California Department of Justice’s 2022 report showed the number of people on the backlog dropped by about 3% compared to 2021, with now 23,869 people on the list of people that should have their weapons taken away. More than 9,200 of those cases are considered active, while the rest are considered “pending”, which the DOJ defines as cases in which agents have exhausted all leads or have determined the person is no longer within the state’s jurisdiction.
“Last year our team knocked on more doors than ever before in the history of the APPS program,” Bonta said, noting special agents made 24,000 contacts in 2022. Bonta said more people were removed from the apps list than added that year.
The report shows special agents seized 1,437 guns, 64% of which were known through APPS, while 36% were firearms that weren’t tracked in the database or illegal. Most of the weapons recovered are handguns, but the Department of Justice investigators noted long guns, ghost guns, and assault weapons have been found. A grenade launcher was displayed in Monday’s presentation.
Bonta said several efforts are underway to address the issues that have plagued the program for years, which were at the center of a legislative hearing in January. Primarily, Bonta wants to permanently fund a requirement for courts to confiscate the weapons at the time a firearm owner is convicted of a crime, and fund a similar program with those met with a restraining order.
Assm. Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale, said the DOJ’s report was mixed news.
“I think we’d have much greater reduction if we were a little bit smarter in how we’re implementing this,” he said.
Lackey recently went on an APPS ride along, where he saw first-hand how tedious the process is. He said he supports Bonta’s efforts to make the system more efficient, including an update to the old technology and the numerous databases it requires.
“They’ve got my complete support for that undertaking because what’s the cost of a life? This should be a priority,” Lackey said.
The heroes who terminated the gunman at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee last week are speaking out.
Officer Rex Engelbert of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department led the charge.
Upon entry, it took him approximately 2 minutes and 15 seconds to engage the 28-year-old shooter.
“I really had no business being where I was,” Engelbert said after he responded to the call of an “active shooter” while en route to the Police Academy for routine administrative tasks.
“You can call it fate or God or whatever you want. I can’t count on my hands the irregularities that put me in that position when the call for service went out for an active deadly aggressor at a school,” he said.
Engelbert was joined by Detective Sgt. Jeff Mathes. The two men had never met before. But along with several others, they answered the call to go inside the private Christian school to stop the shooter.
“I had never seen Rex in my life,” Mathes explained, as reported by WSMV. “When we got there, he had already unlocked the door. Not knowing what I was going into, I walked through that door without hesitation.”
The responding officers immediately ran toward the gunfire.
“I looked for the nearest staircase I could find, because I could tell [the gunfire] was above my head,” said Englebert, who added, “I couldn’t get to it fast enough.”
Police Chief John Drake applauded the actions of his men.
“They did what we were trained to do,” Drake said. “They got prepared and went right in – knowing that every moment wasted could cost lives.”
“Their efforts also saved lives,” he continued. “They were able to protect these kids as well.”
“No one ever said it would be easy,” Drake said. “But they said it would be worth it. I’m totally proud of my men for what they did.”
(The Manhattan DA’s office run buy Alvin Bragg U-turned on Sunday by saying it would not charge a garage security guard who shot a suspected thief on Saturday.)
A Manhattan parking garage attendant who was shot twice while confronting an alleged thief — then wrestled the gun away and opened fire on the suspect — has been charged with attempted murder, police said.
The overnight worker, identified by cops as Moussa Diarra, 57, was also hit with assault and criminal possession of a weapon charge in the Saturday incident, which unfolded around 5:30 a.m. as the attendant saw a man peering into cars on the second floor of the West 31st Street garage, the sources said.
Believing the man was stealing, the attendant brought him outside and asked what was inside his bag.
Instead of cooperating, the man pulled out a gun, the sources said.
Diarra tried to grab for the weapon, and it went off — leaving him shot in the stomach and grazed in the ear by a bullet before he turned the firearm on the would-be thief and shot him in the chest, sources said.
The suspected thief, identified as Charles Rhodie, 59, was also charged with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon, as well as burglary, police said late Saturday.
While police hit Diarra with attempted murder, it wasn’t immediately clear if prosecutors would follow through with the charge.
The initial charges against Diarra sparked outrage — and recalled the case of Manhattan bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was charged with murder after a fatal July 1 confrontation in his store with an angry customer who came behind his counter and accosted him.
Family friend Mariame Diarra, who is not related to the attendant, slammed the decision to hit the married dad of two with charges.
“That’s self-defense. The guy tried to rob his business,” she told The Post. “He’s there for security. That’s literally his job, to defend his business. … He takes his job seriously. … Attempted murder charge has no place there. He [robber] came to find him at his job with his gun, he [Diarra] has to defend himself.”
An individual who works nearby the garage, which is across from Moynihan Train Station, was also incredulous.
“You are kidding. That’s an April Fool Day joke, right?” the worker asked of the charges against Diarra, adding, “How can a hardworking man get arrested for defending himself?”
Alba spent six days in Rikers before Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped the controversial murder charge amid intense public pressure to do so.
One cop who heard of the attempted-murder charge against the parking garage worker snarled, “People like Alvin Bragg have made this city unsafe, and this worker is a victim defending himself.”
What do you think? Post a comment.
Moussa and Rhodie, who both live in Manhattan, were taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition after the incident, authorities said.