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BELLINGHAM, Wash. — A Mexican drug trafficker faces the potential of decades in federal prison after the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested him for peddling fentanyl from a homeless encampment in Bellingham. Prosecutors say Rigoberto Vasquez-Martinez, 32, had a "fortified compound" inside the encampment, which included armed security around the structure where he stayed. The city of Bellingham is in the process of trying to clear the encampment behind the Walmart on Stuart Road after years of shootings, explosions, overdoses, and drug crimes. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, Vasquez-Martinez was a significant supplier of drugs in Bellingham and...

The defendant in a Jan. 6. 2021 Capitol Hill protests-related case denied a claim by federal prosecutors that a boyfriend was jailed for plotting to shoot up a synagogue. Riley Williams’ filing Thursday came in response to one last week by federal prosecutors objecting to her request to loosen restrictions pending her trial. She is wearing an ankle monitor and is under house arrest at her mother’s home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Prosecutors in that filing noted that Williams had lied last August about meeting a boyfriend; Williams was required to report all her meetings, and she had told people, including...

A town which once prided itself as being the “most hippie” in Washington has taken drastic action to outlaw drugs, after state-wide decriminalization led to spiking crime and child overdose deaths. The proudly liberal city of 92,000 has been pushed to its limit, with the fire department responding to 223 overdoses — 2.5 calls per day — between January and April 12, according to Cascadia Daily. Among the dead are two teenagers and a five year old, who had overdosed on fentanyl in March and was found dead by police with foam coming from her mouth. Overdoses have become so...

Squalicum High School Assistant Principals Jeremy G. Louzao, 41, left, and Meghan V. Dunham, 50, and Bellingham High School Assistant Principal Maude Chimere Hackney, 41, have been accused of failing to report sexual assaults that a student brought to their attention nearly a year ago. Each was issued a criminal citation Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022, for failure to report, a gross misdemeanor. They have been reassigned to jobs within the school district office. The three Bellingham Public Schools administrators who were criminally cited last month for failing to report a student’s sexual assaults have been reassigned to jobs within the...

A Washington state school board director who owns a sex shop is making headlines after announcing she will teach sex education classes for children as young as 9 on topics such as "sexual anatomy for pleasure" and "safer sex practices for all kinds of sexual activities."

As parting shots go, it packed quite a punch. But then it had been coming for some time. In an open letter announcing his resignation from Portland State University in Oregon, assistant philosophy professor Peter Boghossian condemned his former employer as a “social justice factory, whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division”. What had once been a bastion of free inquiry was gripped by “a culture of offense where students are too afraid to speak openly and honestly”. His broadside echoed right across the United States. […] Today, most US universities...

Seattle – A 28-year-old Bellingham, Washington woman was convicted Thursday in U.S. District Court in Seattle of violence against a railroad carrier. Ellen Brennan Reiche, was one of two people arrested on the BNSF Railway tracks near Bellingham, near midnight on November 28, 2020. Reiche was convicted of placing a ‘shunt’ – a device that interferes with train signals – on the tracks. The jury deliberated about three hours following the two-day trial. Reiche faces up to 20 years in prison.

SEATTLE — A second defendant has been convicted of sabotaging railroad tracks near the U.S.-Canada border in Washington state just before a train carrying crude oil was due to pass through — apparently part of a campaign to protest construction of a pipeline across British Columbia.Following a two-day trial and three hours of deliberation, a federal jury in Seattle on Thursday convicted Ellen Brennan Reiche, 28, of Bellingham, of violence against a railroad carrier. Her co-defendant, Samantha Frances Brooks, 24, pleaded guilty in July.

A Mayor was rushed out of a City Hall in Washington state after protesters ripped down an American flag before storming the building during a rally against plans to clean-up a homeless encampment. Mayor Seth Fleetwood of Bellingham was escorted out of the building to safety Friday morning when a group of around 20 people entered the main lobby, according to KIRO7. Bellingham Police arrived and asked the protesters to leave. Bellingham Police Lt. Claudia Murphy told The Bellingham Herald the demonstrators left when they were told to, no one was injured and nothing was damaged inside the building.

Federal authorities in Seattle on Monday charged two women with a terrorist attack on train tracks, suggesting they were working with an anarchist community to stand in solidarity with a Native American tribe to oppose the construction of a natural gas pipeline across the Canadian province of British Columbia by trying to derail trains in Washington state.Samantha Frances Brooks, 27, and Ellen Brennan Reiche, 23, were arrested Saturday night in Bellingham, located in Whatcom County, which borders Canada, as they allegedly placed “shunts” on Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks, according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in...

SEATTLE - A mysterious illness that hospitalized several local children has now turned deadly. A 6-year-old boy who has been treated for the disease for more than two weeks passed away Sunday night.

Bellingham Boy Fighting Flesh-Eating Bacteria SEATTLE, Wash. -- What started as a 'fat lip' from a fall, now has a local 6 year old Jake Finkbonner fighting to survive. The boy has necrotizing faciitis, a bacteria that is attacking his face. His family says the bacteria was consuming him before their eyes. The infection is so aggressive, antibiotics aren't enough. He’s had three surgeries so far to try to save his life. Jake’s father, Donny, (says)......all of us are praying for him, and we’re just in God’s hands.” Jake’s mother, Elsa says, “he didn’t have any facial features that were...

SEATTLE -- There are more questions than answers in the case of a suspected international arms dealer caught in Washington state with a stockpile of sniper rifles. Oliver King is an Iranian citizen who, in the past, has been a licensed gun dealer. King appeared in court in Seattle on Wednesday, accused of keeping a stash of guns and ammunition hidden in a storage unit near the U.S.-Canada border. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, King lied to enter the U.S. near Blaine last week. Agents with U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement became suspicious of King when he showed up...

BELLINGHAM, Wash. — SNIPPET: "The goal, officials say, is to be ready for any emergency that might be magnified by having the Olympics and a few hundred thousand visitors next door, whether a terrorist attack, a truck overturned on Interstate 5 near the border or disruptions from the big winter storms that often pound the region."

Immigration agents this week conducted their first work-site raid since President Barack Obama took office, but it was news to their boss, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who on Wednesday ordered a review of the action. Workplace raids involving the arrests of hundreds of illegal immigrants at a time became almost routine in the last years of the Bush administration, but Napolitano's response to Tuesday's raid at a Bellingham, Wash., manufacturing plant highlighted the Obama administration's much different approach to a hot-button issue. Napolitano told lawmakers during a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday that she did not know about...

BELLINGHAM [MA] -- For too many years to recall, churches in town have been able to count on a kindness when the snow flies: Bellingham DPW plows would clear the church parking lots. But this winter season, just in time for the holidays, the town has been forced to make a decidedly Grinch-like decision to end its charitable deeds when it comes to clearing the church lots during snowstorms. "We will be curtailing that practice on the advice of (legal) counsel," Town Administrator Denis Fraine announced at a Board of Selectmen’s meeting last night. A complaint letter from Lake Street...

BELLINGHAM - Police and federal agents began rounding up members of the Bandidos biker gang across the Northwest on Thursday, after a grand jury returned a 19-count indictment accusing them of crimes ranging from racketeering and witness tampering to dealing drugs and stolen Harley Davidson motorcycles. At least a dozen had been arrested by Thursday afternoon, including the organization's international president. About 300 investigators working the case in Washington, Montana and South Dakota had arrest warrants for 20 more members, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives said in a news release. They also served 21 search warrants, including...

<p>CRIME: Western student Paul Revak had plan to bomb Coast Guard station.</p> <p>SEATTLE - A Western Washington University student charged with plotting to bomb a U.S. Coast Guard station in Bellingham has been sentenced to five years of probation with stringent conditions, including mental health treatment.</p>

KINGSTON, Jamaica June 23 — The mother of teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo says no one took her seriously before the shootings when she warned U.S. authorities her son was in danger from John Allen Muhammad. In a taped interview aired Sunday with Jamaican television station TVJ, Una James said she told police in Bellingham, Wash., in September 2001 that Muhammad was a bad influence and asked that her son be removed from his care. "They were to blame," James said of police in her first aired interview since her son's arrest. "I told them that I needed help,...

Serial killers drank here, they say at this bar on Holly Street. Its name is the Waterfront Tavern. It is a good bar that should not be judged bad simply because some customers misbehaved so spectacularly, patrons said this week. That is what they said in the mid-1970s after Ted Bundy drank here. Bundy confessed to killing 20 women. They said it in the late 1970s after Kenneth Bianchi drank here before local police charged him with killing two college roommates. He and a cousin, Angelo Buono, were later convicted in the Hillside Strangler case in Los Angeles. They said...