Category: CNN Regional

By Chierstin Roth

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    DENVER (KCNC) — K-9 unit police dogs with Colorado’s law enforcement agencies work hard to keep our communities safe. But that also means a lot of wear and tear on their bodies. One group is stepping in to help keep them healthy and prolong their careers.

BOLO is a recently retired police dog with the Denver Sheriff Department, with a background in sniffing out narcotics and cell phones in the city’s jails.

“He exceeded the typical career in length of time,” said Stevan Allen, who runs Sierra Peaks Animal Rehabilitation.

Ten-year-old BOLO, short for be on the lookout, retired in February.

“I didn’t have to retire him because he got injured, which has made his retirement all that much more enjoyable,” said Deputy Michelle Padilla, BOLO’s handler.

BOLO went out on his own terms thanks to the work of Allen.

“My specialty was in orthopedic sports medicine, and, when I started to transition because of fun to work with dogs, I realized very quickly that there wasn’t the same training philosophy in how we treat athletes on the human side,” Allen explained.

Because of his approach to treatment, the length of BOLO’s career was nearly doubled, and he does this work at no cost to the agency through his nonprofit, Friends of Sierra. He now treats nearly a dozen K-9 unit police dogs from departments across the metro and has a waitlist of over 20 police dogs whose handlers want to get into the program.

A combination of laser therapy and cross training helps keep the K-9 unit dogs healthy and prolongs their careers during which they experience constant wear and tear on their joints. Allen says it helps save law enforcement agencies serious cash.

“We tried to calculate what would be the economic savings to a department for every year we could extend the careers,” Allen said. “We determined it was approximately $75,000 per year that we could extend the careers.”

For Deputy Padilla, Allen’s work to keep BOLO healthy both during and after his career is priceless.

“It makes me a little emotional,” Padilla said. “I’m the first female canine handler that our department has had, and now I’m a trainer for our department. He has brought me so far in my career.”

Padilla also shared the many ways BOLO’s has been there during tough times in her personal life.

“I owe everything to him to make him as healthy as possible,” she said.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Hunter Sowards

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    LOS ANGELES (KCAL, KCBS) — A group of residents who lost everything in the Palisades Fire is fighting to keep their land from being sold to a luxury developer.

More than 300 people lived in the 170 homes at the Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park, including Jon Brown and Beverly Narayan, both of whom owned houses there for about a decade.

“The way that they are marketing it is just concerning,” Brown said.

Brown is describing the real estate advertisement that calls the remnants of the Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park a “rare coastal development opportunity.”

Brown and Narayan said the property owners bypassed people who owned homes and are now trying to redevelop the land.

“Every single one of those spaces is represented by another human being,” Brown said. “To characterize this as a clean slate is an obnoxious move to kick us all while we’re down.”

For more than a year, residents have tried cooperating with the property owners, even forming a nonprofit and working with city and county officials to protect the status that says the land cannot be rezoned for commercial use.

“When you look at mobile home tenancy law, it’s pretty specific about how you can terminate a tenancy,” Narayan said. “Wildfire or destruction of the park isn’t one of them.”

Mayor Karen Bass said people have retraumatized by this battle, and she supports every person returning home. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said there are state and local laws protecting the residents. She said her office will use every tool to help them protect that right.

“We need all these agencies to apply pressure to the owners and say, ‘You’re not going to get this change of use. This isn’t going to be a Marriott Hotel,” Brown said.

The homeowners fighting to return to their homes fear that they will have to take the property owners to court.

“That’s the only thing I can think of to make them at least come to the table and start talking,” Narayan said.

The residents said property owners have ignored their good-faith offers to buy back their homes if they are looking to sell. The Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Park was a rent-controlled property with some of the only affordable homes in the entire community.

CBS LA reached out to the property owners for a statement on the residents’ claims but did not receive an immediate response.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By WCCO Staff

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    ST. PAUL, Minnesota (WCCO) — One of two men federally indicted in what officials at the time called “one of the largest” drug busts in Minnesota history pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

Guillermo Mercado-Chaparro was arrested and charged last July after authorities seized nearly 900 pounds of meth from two vehicles in St. Paul.

Court documents say an undercover police officer bought a pound of meth from Mercado-Chaparro. Through surveillance after the purchase, police learned he was traveling around south Minneapolis to conduct several suspected drug deals.

Several days later, charges say police observed Mercado-Chaparro receive two large bags from his truck’s bed and place them in a nearby Jeep.

Authorities eventually stopped the Jeep with Mercado-Chaparro and another man, Joel Casas-Santiago, inside. A drug-sniffing dog alerted officers to the odor of drugs. During a search of the Jeep, police found more than 250 pounds of meth, according to charging documents.

Police then obtained a search warrant for Mercado-Chaparro’s truck, where they seized more than 630 pounds of meth from the bed, court documents say.

A sentencing date has yet to be scheduled for Mercado-Chaparro.

Casas-Santiago has a plea hearing scheduled for March 24.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Leo Stallworth

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    LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Federal authorities said they’ve struck a major blow against one of Los Angeles’ most powerful street gangs.

A sweeping investigation targeting the 18th Street gang led to multiple arrests and uncovered what prosecutors describe as a violent criminal enterprise operating in the heart of the city.

“My office is unsealing seven indictments charging 14 defendants with racketeering and drug trafficking offenses stemming from their membership in one of the largest and most violent gangs in the Western Hemisphere,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said at a press conference Thursday.

Federal agents and local police arrested 12 members and associates of the 18th Street gang, a group authorities said has been running a large-scale drug operation centered around MacArthur Park.

“The 18th Street gang is a transnational criminal organization that controls the rampant drug trafficking in multiple areas of Los Angeles, including MacArthur Park, parts of Hollywood, downtown and the San Fernando Valley,” Essayli said.

Prosecutors allege the gang transformed the park into an “open-air drug marketplace,” using tents among the homeless population to conceal narcotics sales and avoid law enforcement detection.

“Since January of 2023, the LAPD’s Gang and Narcotics Division, working with the FBI Gang Task Force, conducted a comprehensive investigation into the gang’s leadership and narcotics distribution network,” Los Angeles Police Department Chief Jim McDonnell said.

During the investigation, authorities seized more than 175 pounds of methamphetamine and fentanyl, along with cash, firearms and additional drugs.

“Evidence was collected highlighting the free flow of narcotics between distributors in the areas of MacArthur Park and Skid Row,” said Robert Molvar, acting assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “These drugs were being taxed through extortion payments known as rents by high-ranking members of the gang for continued permission to operate in their territory.”

According to the indictment, the 18th Street gang has more than 100,000 members in the U.S. and also operates in Mexico, Central America and South America.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Andrea Nakano

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    SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — It may have taken years, but a San Francisco man has been able to turn his dream into reality. Joey the Cat, as he’s most commonly known, opened an arcade in the Mission District Thursday night and he got the ball rolling on the first official Skee-Ball league.

Skee-Ball is a game most people fondly remember playing as a kid, but for Joey the Cat, he turned fun and games into a profitable business.

“The cat came from a nickname that I got in college, just sort of a metaphor for being on the prowl on a Thursday night,” Joey Mucha said. “Then, when I joined the competitive Skee-Ball league, that was my alter Skee-go that I gave.”

Mucha is a 3-time national champion and originally bought a Skee-Ball machine to practice in his home. He now owns hundreds of arcade games and rents them to dozens of bars in the city.

“My passion for Skee-Ball and then putting it into bars and other venues basically blossom to business that was very organic,” he said.

This space used to be his warehouse for the arcade games, but owning his own arcade was his ultimate dream. He started this project in 2018.

“It was a lot of work,” he said. “A mixture of red tape, construction woes, the pandemic was in the middle of all that. Then just really seeing this vision through took a lot of tenacity.

While this space is open mostly for private parties, it opened to the public Thursday night for the first Skee-Ball league kick-off party.

“I did this as a kid,” player Alisa Yee said. “We went to Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, and I’m like, oh my God, there’s a Skee league. I think it’s perfect.”

Yee is the leader of the Pickle Rollers. She says it doesn’t matter if her team finishes in last place, but she has been working on her Skee-Ball skills.

“I figured it out,” she said. “You gotta use a netting to rebound it into the other ones. You can’t just go for the concentric circles. That won’t work.”

Seeing the smiles is what Joey the Cat hoped for when he built this place.

“This is a dream come true,” he said. “Building this venue has been a lot of work but just feeling the fervor that we feel right now has really just washed over me with joy. I’m so glad to be past the construction woes and now what’s happening behind me is in the future.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Kaley Fedko

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    ATLANTA (WUPA) — International Women’s Day is Sunday, March 8, and it’s all about celebrating the women who lead, create, and lift others up.

This weekend in Atlanta, women-owned businesses are coming together for a market built around that mission at the Shed at Elizabeth and Edgewood in Inman Park.

CBS News Atlanta caught up with three entrepreneurs, part of an Atlanta business owner sisterhood selling their products on Sunday.

Kate Terentieva designed her own card game called Off The Record, meant to bring people together and start conversations.

The cards have unique questions to ask your partner, friendly or romantic, that invite conversation and depth.

The cards were designed with women top of mind.

“We do love to engage in deeper conversations and deeper discourse naturally, and that’s supported by data as well,” said Terentieva. “Two-thirds of our customers for Off The Record are women.”

A few tables down, Eva Lester will be showcasing her line of sunglass brand Gleam Eyewear that she built from the ground up.

“I just created something that I wish I had because I’ve overpaid for eyewear since I was 8,” said Lester, “and so I wanted to create, like, eyewear that was fashionable but also accessible.”

Each pair is named for a trailblazing woman in history.

The ones she was sporting were named in honor of Frieda Kahlo, the Mexican painter known for her self-portraits.

“They kind of have a fun nod to her unibrow,” said Lester.

Madilyn Dubois built a business around handbags that combine style and practicality and have a unique tieing handle feature.

“That’s our motto on the website: one bag for every moment, and that’s the goal. It’s a product you can wear from the yoga studio to the boardroom, or from the airport to soccer practice pick up,” said Dubois.

Together, the women say markets like this are about more than selling products.

“That’s the best part, truly, seeing women’s reactions when I tie the knot in front of them is just the coolest thing, and when they’re excited about the product and when they know how to style it, like when it clicks, I’m like, oh my gosh, like, that’s community,” said Dubois.

The three women will be part of a cohort of eight businesses selling on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.