Investigating Failed Investigations
Investigating Failed Investigations
Who are the real goons of Gilbert? ... Who swatted Rusty? ... And who knows election law better than Elon?
For more than a year, the affluent East Valley town of Gilbert has been terrorized by an increasingly emboldened gang of high school kids calling themselves the Gilbert Goons. If you watch TV news, you’ve probably heard a lot about them recently.
The story went viral after local teen Preston Lord was beat to death outside a house party in October. Or more accurately, it went viral about six weeks after that, when the Republic started connecting the dots between that murder and a string of local assaults — dots that the police hadn’t bothered to connect.
All the teens in Gilbert seemingly knew what happened — the Goons had attacked Lord, as they had attacked so many others, parents and kids told the Republic.
The influential parents of Gilbert were terrified for their kids’ safety and started doing some social media sleuthing connecting the various attacks, identifying the culprits and collecting evidence. It wasn’t that hard — being teenage idiots, the Goons filmed their assaults and bragged about them online. The Republic’s Elena Santa Cruz and Robert Anglen also tracked them online, publishing an extensive exposé in mid-December, complete with video clips and even a hauntingly blasé Snapchat message purportedly posted by a Goon.
"I hit a kid and this kid feel hit his head and then they kicked his head in the ground then i got word he died so idk," the post read, per the Republic.
Not only had police not made any arrests in the homicide at that point, they hadn’t even connected the case to the rash of teenage assaults and fights that had become a pretty regular occurrence at the local In-N-Out Burger or the gang behind the assaults.
The newspaper did that for them.
It’s important to note that there are two police departments in question here: the Gilbert Police Department and the police department in neighboring Queen Creek. Neither seemingly handled the situation flawlessly.
In Queen Creek, where Lord was killed, police were called out to break up the party Lord was at just about an hour before he was attacked. They essentially drove past and said they didn’t see anyone actively breaking the law even though there were reportedly 200 teens there, many uninvited.
In Gilbert, residents had been complaining for more than a year about the same group of kids launching random attacks on other teens, often at the same In-N-Out. The police department had closed several unsolved investigations into random attacks before reopening them after the Republic’s investigation.
Also, police have not said whether they believe the Gilbert Goons killed Lord. But the paper pretty definitively did.
A few hours after the Republic published its report connecting Lord’s death to the Goons’ string of unprovoked attacks, Gilbert Police Chief Michael Soelberg put out a statement saying the department hadn’t heard of the Goons.
“What we know at this time is that Gilbert PD does not have police reports from victims or suspects associating or connecting the named group to any alleged reported criminal activity in our community,” he said.
That quickly changed. Suddenly, the Gilbert PD was hot on the trail of the Goons, reopening old cases and starting new ones as more victims came forward. They’re investigating whether members can be charged as a street gang, which would mean stiffer penalties and the ability to charge those who facilitated the assaults, rather than just those who dealt the blows.
They’re up to nine cases now, Soelberg told the Gilbert Town Council last night, four that they reopened and another five where new victims have come forward.
At the end of the year, police in neighboring Queen Creek, where Lord was killed, announced they were seeking charges against seven people in connection to the death. They still haven’t announced what the charges are or who they want to be charged. County Attorney Rachel Mitchell hasn’t officially charged anyone.
Meanwhile, Gilbert police still haven’t said much about anything. After his brief presentation to the council yesterday, Soelberg once again didn’t take questions from the press.
Feeling the heat of public pressure, the Gilbert Town Council voted last night to form a subcommittee to study teen violence. But many residents are far more interested in a committee to investigate why the police did such a poor job investigating the Goons.
You see, Gilbert is one of the wealthiest cities in Arizona — it’s also an old-school Mormon stronghold where many believe family ties, money and influence can help sweep juvenile misdeeds under the rug. (Just check out the replies to this Gilbert PD tweet.)
We don’t know if that happened. But the Gilbert Town Council has a responsibility to find out why so many of these cases went unsolved, and how an entire police force failed to spot the pattern and connections between the attacks that two newspaper reporters were able to uncover.
Was it incompetence or a coverup? And how will they ensure it won’t happen again?
The politicians aren’t asking those questions — yet. Instead, they offered platitudes about listening and healing and coming together as a community, and how they have “full faith” in their police force to get to the bottom of these cases, if residents will just give police more time to investigate.
Gilbert police have had plenty of time to investigate the Goons’ crime spree. It’s time for the Gilbert Town Council to investigate why the police didn’t investigate the Goons sooner.
A spine of steel: Threats of political violence have ramped up in recent weeks, the Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Patrick Marley report, including an incident after Christmas when someone falsely reported a pipe bomb inside the home of former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. The tactic of falsely reporting to emergency services to trigger a law enforcement response is called swatting, and the government officials who have fallen victim to it often share a common attribute, the Post reported: “They have done or said something that has earned Trump’s ire.”
“You just get kind of hardened by all this,” Bowers told the Post.
Queen of fake news: A far-right activist’s hidden camera sting-like video that falsely characterizes Phoenix’s Welcome Center for asylum seekers as a "secret migrant facility" has led to increased threats against staff and asylum seekers at the center, the Republic’s Daniel Gonzalez reports. Kari Lake reposted the video on Twitter, where it amassed over 3.5 million views.
There’s a theme here: Arizona’s universities are grappling with campus safety and free speech issues after a series of speech-related expulsions and politically fueled acts of violence, per the Republic’s Sasha Hupka. Universities are increasingly tense environments heading into the election year, and some faculty want stronger codes of conduct and threat management in the face of increasing online and real-life threats and harassment. And some want to ban Turning Point USA, which compiles a "Professor Watchlist” of professors the group says “discriminate against conservative students.” That list included a queer writing instructor who was confronted and knocked to the ground by Turning Point activists last year. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers want to cut public universities’ funding for silencing conservative voices.
You’re (not really) fired!: Our sister newsletter the Tucson Agenda broke the news that despite being fired over a $240 million miscalculation leading to financial calamity at the University of Arizona, Chief Financial Officer Lisa Rulney is still working for the university, and she’s still making a cushy $500,000 salary. Meanwhile, the UA settled a legal case with the family of professor Thomas Meixner, who was shot several times on campus in October 2022, AZFamily reports. The UA said in a press release the agreement involves “a monetary settlement for the family, and non-monetary commitments that affirm the university’s continuing support for the well-being of those most affected by these events.”
Radiation lasts longer than funding: The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act that has paid many Arizonans who’ve developed illnesses from likely radiation exposure is set to expire in July without an extension, the Arizona Mirror’s Shondiin Silversmith writes. Plans to expand and extend the program were cut from a defense spending bill in December, along with extending coverage to hundreds of members of the Navajo Nation who were exposed to uranium mining in the mid-20th century.
Plundering the Picasso: Scottsdale police caught someone on the roof of the American Fine Art Gallery trying to steal seven pieces of art collectively valued at $250,000, 12News’ Kyra O’Connor and Colleen Sikora report. Some of the artworks were Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol pieces. Also, in the name of preserving history, the Department of the Interior is funding a $3.7 million oral history project to document the stories of Indigenous children who attended federal boarding schools, Cronkite News’ Ellie Willard writes.
If you’d like to donate a Picasso, we can find a way to facilitate that. Or just click the button to support local news.
ASUnaffordable: Booming housing costs are compounding increasing college tuition, including a tripling of costs for the high end of Arizona State University’s dorms. On KJZZ’s “The Show,” Lauren Gilger spoke to Wall Street Journal reporter Melissa Korn about her reporting on how ASU brings in millions by leasing to private developers who get a share of rental revenues, incentivizing them to drive up the price.
Sweat strategy: Gov. Katie Hobbs’ Resiliency Office is working on the state’s first extreme heat preparedness plan with Arizona State University after last year’s record-breaking temperatures, 12News’ Jen Wahl reports. The plan will involve all the state’s agencies after Hobbs’ executive order last August to establish an interagency resiliency forum to come up with the plan. You can weigh in with your ideas here.
Missiles, rain or shine: Tucson-based Raytheon landed a $345 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to make 1,500 missiles that can hit moving targets in precarious weather conditions, the Phoenix Business Journal’s Jeff Gifford reports. The StormBreaker missiles are already in use by the U.S. Navy, and Raytheon President of Air Power Paul Ferraro called the missiles “the leading network enabled weapon across the Department of Defense.”
Every Arizonan who understands election law got the chance to dunk on Twitter’s Chief Troll Officer Elon Musk this week after the increasingly erratic tech mogul claimed Arizona doesn’t require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.
Let’s just set aside the fact that the world’s richest man is retweeting a Crypto bro whose friend sent him a random form from Arizona that he thinks proves election fraud.
The funny thing is he’s technically right.
But he’s wrong for all the important reasons.
No state requires proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, including Arizona.
Arizona does, however, require proof of citizenship to vote in a state election. And we’re one of the only states to do so.
Arizona voters approved that proof-of-citizenship requirement in Prop 200 from 2004 amid Arizona’s growing anti-immigrant sentiment of the time. It went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually ruled that Arizona couldn’t demand more proof than the federal government did to register to vote in a federal election.
So Arizona found a workaround.
In 2013, Secretary of State Ken Bennett and Attorney General Tom Horne decided to create a new category of “federal-only” voters. (If those names sound familiar, it’s because time is a circle!)
To this day, people who use the federal voter registration form that doesn’t require additional proof of citizenship can’t vote in state elections unless the MVD can confirm they’re citizens.
Then in 2022, Arizona passed almost the exact same law that the Supreme Court shot down in 2013, arguing new justices may see the issue differently. The Department of Justice sued, so we’ll find out eventually! (Did we mention time is a circle?)
Anyway, not surprisingly, the dunks did not shame Musk into retracting or editing his tweet.