Month: February 2023

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Jimmy Cherizier zips through Haiti’s capital on the back of a motorcycle, flanked by young men wielding black and leopard print masks and automatic weapons. As the pack of bikes flies by graffiti reading “Mafia boss” in Creole, street vendors selling vegetables, meats and old clothes on the curb cast their eyes to the ground or peer curiously. Cherizier, best known by his childhood nickname Barbecue, has become the most recognized name in Haiti. And here in his territory, enveloped by the tin-roofed homes and bustling streets of the informal settlement La Saline, he is the law. Internationally, he’s known as Haiti’s most powerful and feared gang leader, sanctioned by the United Nations for “serious human rights abuses,” and the man behind a fuel block...

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Police in rural southwest Oregon were on high alert: A man with a history of kidnapping and torturing women in two states was on the run in their territory. When a tip came in from a cab company that had given him a ride, they went house-to-house to check on residents. Peering through a window of one home, they found a gruesome scene: the bodies of two men who had been beaten to death. The discovery Tuesday near Grants Pass, Oregon, was a bloody link in a chain of dramatic events that ended hours later with the suicide of the wanted man, 36-year-old bartender Benjamin Obadiah Foster. The finale, played out on a normally quiet residential street in Grants Pass, marked an end to the largest manhunt in the state in recent memory and brought relief to terrified residents i...