Back in October, Democratic lawmakers and activists used the death of a homeless man to advocate for their progressive homelessness policies, claiming he died from the heat; in fact, he died from drug usage, some of which they may have assisted.
According to an autopsy report obtained by AZ Free News, Roosevelt White III, a 36-year-old former resident of the notorious mass homeless encampment known as “The Zone,” died in early September from complications of a left middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke. Contributory cause of death was identified as hypertensive cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, and methamphetamine intoxication. White’s fatal injury occurred when he consumed methamphetamine in the setting of underlying natural disease processes.
“In consideration of the known circumstances surrounding this death, the available medical history, and the examination of the remains, it is my opinion that the cause of death is complications of a left middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke with hypertensive cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, and methamphetamine intoxication as significant contributing conditions,” stated the autopsy report.
Nowhere in the autopsy report was heat or heat-related illness mentioned; nor was it mentioned as a contributing factor or cause of death.
Yet, multiple Democratic lawmakers told the public that White died from heatstroke. Though unclear where they obtained all of their information, it appears that their only source was a Democratic activist opposed to the cleanup of The Zone, rife with the type of drug use that ultimately took White’s life.
Among those who propagated the misinformation about White’s death were Reps. Nancy Gutierrez (D-LD18) and Analise Ortiz (D-LD24).
Gutierrez decried Republicans for denying the purported climate and housing crises plaguing the state, and said universal school choice was to blame as well. She then encouraged the public to stop voting for Republicans.
“It’s heartbreaking to hear of another heat-related death.The party in charge denies that we have a climate crisis, a housing crisis & they are giving our tax dollars to the rich for private schools,” said Gutierrez. “We must do better for the people of AZ. Your vote matters.”
It’s heartbreaking to hear of another heat related death.The party in charge denies that we have a climate crisis, a housing crisis & they are giving our tax dollars to the rich for private schools.We must do better for the people of AZ. Your vote matters. Rest in peace Roosevelt https://t.co/vTkq75hNuL
— Representative Nancy Gutierrez (@nancygforAZ) October 16, 2023
Ortiz blamed a lack of affordable housing as well, and placed blame for White’s death on the government.
“We have lost another community member to the heat and the lack of adequate shelter space and affordable housing in Phoenix. The state is failing to meet the most basic needs of our friends and neighbors,” said Ortiz.
We have lost another community member to the heat and the lack of adequate shelter space and affordable housing in Phoenix. The state is failing to meet the most basic needs of our friends and neighbors.
Stacey Champion, a public relations consultant and formerly a member of Phoenix’s Sustainability Advisory Committee and the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona board of directors, shared the post as well.
Just heard about this. 💔 The sweetest soul & so sad I haven’t been able to be out as much this summer because of how the crushing heat has affected my own health from too many years of pushing myself in it. #HeatKills#EndHomelessnesshttps://t.co/a297olzFPe
At least one media outlet also took the progressive activists’ at their word that White died from heatstroke: AZ Family.
The viral post cited by the lawmakers and fellow activists came from Megan Kepler, a Democrat activist who volunteers with an organization that feeds the homeless, Feed Phoenix.
“We at Feed Phoenix are heartbroken at the news that our friend Roosevelt passed away in his tent due to heatstroke in the Zone. He was an amazing and talented human and volunteer with Feed Phoenix who was working to better his life, in spite of the odds against him. His death demonstrates the failure of our system to provide assistance to individuals who need our help. His heart was big. He should not have died in a tent. He was 36 years old. Rest in power Roosevelt. You deserved better from us.”
Although Kepler claimed White “died in a tent,” the autopsy record noted that White died in the hospital following multiple days filled with numerous attempts to save his life, including a thrombectomy and intubation. White was admitted on Sept. 9 and died on Sept. 12.
As part of Kepler’s activism, she helped pass out “safe use supplies”: clean syringes and naloxone, to assist the homeless in their usage of drugs, such as the meth that ultimately killed White. Rep. Ortiz helped with this effort at least once.
Today was a great day in the Zone. We served over 250 folks home cooked food, snow cones, harm reduction supplies, water and lemonade. Thank you to one of my homies from my hood #ld24@RepAnaliseOrtiz for helping out on this hot Friday💙 @FeedPhoenix#MutualAidpic.twitter.com/V5SUkdqZeG
Kepler has also engaged in activism with Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro, Poder in Action Arizona, Desert Star Family Planning, Go With the Flow Mutual Aid, Radical Women Phoenix, Progress Arizona, Shot in the Dark Phoenix, Arizona For Abortion Access, Phoenix Womxn Rising, Mutual Aid Phoenix, and Women’s March Phoenix.
About a month before his death, White toldThe Arizona Republic that he declined shelter services during the city’s cleanup of The Zone, instead opting to relocate within the mass encampment. Per our past reporting, many of the homeless labeled as “service resistant” will turn down shelter because they can’t bring their drugs inside.
As reported in July, a majority of heat deaths in Maricopa County involved methamphetamine.
Per the autopsy report, White’s organs were taken for donation by the Donor Network of Arizona. Drug use and/or overdose doesn’t disqualify an individual from organ donation.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Derek Chauvin, the former Minnesota police officer imprisoned for the murder and civil rights violations of George Floyd, is expected to survive the stabbing he sustained last Friday at Tucson’s Federal Correctional Institution (FCI).
The incident was initially shrouded in mystery, with Chauvin’s identity released via an anonymous source to AP News, and his family kept in the dark.
Chauvin’s mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, was not informed of the stabbing for over 24 hours after it occurred, Alpha News reported. Pawlenty found out about the attack on her son through the media.
“How the hell do these news agencies know and his own mother doesn’t even know? And that [prison] has an emergency contact number [for me],” said Pawlenty.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison later confirmed to the media that Chauvin was the unidentified prisoner attacked.
A little over a week before the stabbing, Chauvin made his first public statement to Alpha News in their documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” calling his trial and sentencing “a sham.” Chauvin said that he followed his department’s Maximal Restraint Technique policy as required of him.
One of Chauvin’s attorneys, Bill Mohrman, said at the time that the Bureau of Prisons hadn’t responded to their request for information about Chauvin’s condition, even after media reports.
Another of Chauvin’s attorneys, Gregory Erickson, told outlets on Monday that the prison refused to provide him information about his client’s condition and the attack until Chauvin signed consent papers. Erickson told reporters that both he and members of Chauvin’s family had reached out to the prison multiple times to no avail.
FCI Tucson issued a press release that Chauvin was attacked around noon and that his injuries required “life-saving” medical intervention. The prison disclosed that they had also notified the FBI of the attack.
“Responding employees initiated life-saving measures for one incarcerated individual. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) were requested while life-saving efforts continued,” said the prison. “The incarcerated individual was transported by EMS to a local hospital for further treatment and evaluation.”
FCI Tucson is a medium security prison with just under 400 inmates total, both male and female. Chauvin was transferred to the prison last August from the Minnesota state prison. Unlike in Minnesota, Chauvin wasn’t kept in solitary confinement at FCI Tucson.
Chauvin is facing two concurrent sentences: 22 years for second-degree murder, and 21 years for civil rights violations. The Supreme Court rejected Chauvin’s appeal of his murder conviction last week, just days before the attack.
Floyd’s autopsy determined that his cause of death wasn’t from Chauvin kneeling on his neck, contrary to popular belief. Rather, it was concluded that Floyd’s demise came from the conjunction of preexisting health conditions — coronary heart disease characterized by an enlarged heart and untreated hypertension, with one artery blocked about 75 percent, and inflamed lungs — as well as a drug cocktail of 19 ng/ML of methamphetamine, 11 ng/ML of fentanyl, and 5.6 ng/ML of norfentanyl in his system. The fentanyl alone was determined to be a fatal dosage.
“The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation. Mr. Floyd did not exhibit signs of petechiae, damage to his airways or thyroid, brain bleeding, bone injuries, or internal bruising,” stated the report. “That is a fatal level of fentanyl under normal circumstances.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Two Arizona State University (ASU) professors are demanding an end to free speech rhetoric, as it tends to align with right-wing political agendas and undermine experts.
Just over a week ago, professors Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Dear Administrators, Enough With the Free Speech Rhetoric!: It concedes too much with right-wing agendas.” The pair argued that a greater focus on freedom of speech, or intellectual diversity, would ultimately undermine the true purpose of higher education, which they claimed was imparting the minds of experts, or “academic expertise.”
“Our contention is that calls for greater freedom of speech on campuses, however well-intentioned, risk undermining colleges’ central purpose, namely, the production of expert knowledge and understanding, in the sense of disciplinarily warranted opinion,” said Amesbury and O’Donnell. “A diversity of opinion — ‘intellectual diversity’ — isn’t itself the goal; rather, it is of value only insofar as it serves the goal of producing knowledge. On most unanswered questions, there is, at least initially, a range of plausible opinions, but answering questions requires the vetting of opinions.”
Amesbury teaches and serves as the director for the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (SHPRS). He joined ASU in 2019. Prior to ASU, Amesbury chaired Theological Ethics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and chaired the Philosophy and Religion Department at Clemson University.
O’Donnell also teaches for the SHPRS, as well as the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Lincoln Center Applied Ethics, Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, and SST American Studies.
In their article, the professors wrote that academia is restrained by “intellectual responsibilities,” and that the social costs of unfettered free speech were too great to merit entertainment. They argued that academia has a fiduciary responsibility to the public and therefore must vet speech, dismissing the notion that the marketplace of ideas converges on truth.
“[C]olleges are under no obligation to balance warranted, credible, true opinions with unwarranted, discredited, false ones,” stated the professor. “Only by disavowing pretensions to be the public sphere can colleges perform their critical role in relation to it.”
Amesbury and O’Donnell then argued that free speech deprived faculty of academic freedom and deprived the public of the faculty’s “regime of expertise.” They lamented that experts “enjoy no special public esteem,” and that the scholarly expertise has come to be viewed as further opinion equivalent to a “flattened-out theory of knowledge.”
“When free speech drowns out expert speech, we all suffer,” said the pair. “‘Free speech’ is what we are left with when we recognize no experts.”
Ultimately, the pair said that free speech arguments weren’t about truth-seeking but a guise for the lucrative fulfillment of particular, unscholarly, and inexpert interests. As examples, Amesbury and O’Donnell cited the University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics, the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute.
“[T]he institutions themselves are peopled by faculty who serve on each other’s boards, invite and re-invite each other to give talks, appeal to the same funders, and even publish in each other’s journals and book series,” stated the professors. “[A]lthough such efforts are frequently portrayed as making colleges democratically accountable to the wishes of the public and their elected representatives, the logic of intellectual diversity arguments is toward ever greater mistrust between colleges and the public they serve.”
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Energy executives overseeing Arizona’s utility companies stand to gain financially for adherence to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria — namely, whether they stay on track to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050.
According to Arizona Public Service’s (APS) holding company Pinnacle West (PNW) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) report last year, they link 20 percent of compensation based on Clean Energy Commitment performance — specifically, the total number of “clean megawatts installed” over a period of three years.
Altogether, PNW’s seven executives made about $21.5 million last year.
PNW’s Clean Energy Commitment is to achieve a resource mix of 65 percent clean energy (45 percent of that coming from renewable energy) by 2030, end APS coal-fired generation by 2031, and ultimately transition completely to carbon-free electricity and eradicate all carbon emissions by 2050.
PNW’s progress on its Clean Energy Commitment has earned it a top-100 ranking with Energy Intelligence since 2019. In 2005, the company had achieved 24 percent clean energy; since 2019, they have maintained 50 percent clean energy. The company projects that they will reach 65 percent clean energy by 2030.
As part of their commitment, APS plans to add at least 2,500 megawatts of clean energy technologies such as solar and storage by 2025. In their 2022 SEC report, PNW projected the addition of 210 megawatts of utility-scale solar energy, 238 megawatts of wind energy, and 341 megawatts of energy storage. They also reported that APS had 2,400 megawatts of renewable capacity at present and over one million solar panels across their 10 grid-scale solar plants.
PNW reports that APS has been integrating ESG practices for nearly 30 years, but have undertaken extra steps in recent years to prioritize it. Their entire board “dedicates a significant amount of time to ESG matters,” and the company formed a Sustainability department to integrate ESG into everyday APS work and an ESG Executive Council to guide the company’s ESG pathway. That latter entity, the council, measures and reports on Clean Energy Commitment actions.
The company also tasked multiple committees to advance ESG: “Environmental” is handled by the Nuclear and Operating Committee, “Social” is handled by both Corporate Governance and Public Responsibility as well as Human Resources Committees, and “Governance” is handled by the Corporate Governance and Public Responsibility Committee.
The Corporate Governance and Public Responsibility Committee also reviews ESG trends that may impact the company. Earlier this year, PNW amended the committee’s charter to include oversight of climate change-related issues and strategies for response.
As for the Tucson Electric Power (TEP) and UNS Energy Corporation (UNS), their owner, Fortis, offers an ESG-related financial incentive of 10 percent for its executives. Fortis executives made over $4.5 million last year.
The ESG incentive is part of Fortis’ “sustainability and people performance,” factored for the first time last year. It carries a 40 percent performance pay incentive; in addition to ESG leadership, it includes the weighting factors of safety (10 percent); diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) (10 percent); and reliability (10 percent).
This year, Fortis raised the ESG incentive to 15 percent, and added climate and emissions priorities as well as a DEI objective.
Similar to PNW, Fortis has a 2050 net-zero carbon emissions goal, which includes a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and a 75 percent reduction by 2035. They established a Governance and Sustainability Committee to oversee their emissions reduction goals.
Fortis has planned additions of 3,500 megawatts of wind, solar, and storage energy expansions through 2035. In doing so, Fortis projected by 2032 that TEP will achieve a coal-free generation mix and eliminate the use of surface water-generated power and groundwater use by 70 percent. Additionally, TEP is scheduled to have more than 40 percent of its power derived from wind, solar, and battery storage by 2030, and then over 60 percent by 2033.
Last year, Fortis amended its $1.3 billion revolving credit facility to become a sustainability-linked loan; meaning, its pricing adjustments are now linked to goals related to carbon emissions and board diversity.
Both APS and TEP are part of the California Independent System Operator (ISO) Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM), established in 2014. The WEIM allows participants to buy and sell renewable energy power based on need, and offers visibility of neighboring grids. If one utility has excess hydroelectric, solar, or wind power, the ISO will deliver that energy where needed elsewhere.
APS entered the WEIM in 2016, and TEP entered in 2022. Also members are the Salt River Project (SRP), joined in 2020, and the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) Desert Southwest Region, joined in 2023.
As reported earlier this month, the world’s largest globalist investors are now backing the ESG push across Arizona’s utility companies.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Just as with the rest of the activist community, school board members are taking sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Chandler Unified School District (CUSD) Governing Board member Patti Serrano helped organize the appearance of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI-12), the only Palestinian-American in Congress, scheduled for last Friday at Arizona State University (ASU). The event has since been canceled. In an email obtained by AZ Free News, Serrano notified Arizona Palestine Network subscribers of the Tlaib event.
Serrano sent the email in her capacity as the East Valley coordinator for Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and as a co-sponsor of Tlaib’s “Palestine is an American Issue.”
The bottom of Serrano’s email identified other affiliated groups behind the canceled event: Arizona Palestine Network; Palestine Community Center of Arizona; Council on American Islamic Relations of Arizona; Jewish Voice for Peace – Tucson; Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) at ASU; Arizona Palestinian Solidarity Alliance; Arizona Democratic Party Progressive Council; National Lawyers Guild at ASU; Central Arizona National Lawyers Guild Attorney Chapter; and Middle Eastern Law Students Association at ASU.
Since ASU rejected Tlaib’s appearance on campus, student and community activists convened to protest, claiming freedom of speech was denied. In a statement, ASU said that the event was organized by groups not affiliated with the university and outside university policies and procedures, and therefore not permissible.
“Organizers of events using ASU facilities must be properly registered with ASU and must meet all university requirements for crowd management, parking, security, and insurance. In addition, the events must be produced in a way which minimizes disruption to academic and other activities on campus,” said ASU. “The event featuring Congresswoman Tlaib was planned and produced by groups not affiliated with ASU and was organized outside of ASU policies and procedures. Accordingly, that event will not take place today on the ASU Tempe campus.”
Tlaib didn’t issue any public statements following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Only after Israel issued a response to Hamas in Gaza did Tlaib call upon the Biden administration to advocate for a cease-fire. Tlaib also introduced a resolution facilitating a cease-fire.
The Biden Administration is failing in its duty to protect all civilian and American lives in Gaza.
Tlaib was censured for her repeated endorsement of the controversial slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” largely understood to be a call for the eradication of Israel from the land.
From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate. My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.
In addition to PDA, Serrano also served as an academic research project director for ASU.
Upon becoming a CUSD governing board member earlier this year, Serrano took her oath of office not on the Bible but on “Life is a Banquet,” a book containing the sexual awakening and explicit fantasies of a fictional 17-year-old and his peers, written by ASU Professor and Drag Story Hour Arizona co-founder David Boyles.
Serrano has led a number of widely-reported protests against elected leaders to advocate for various progressive issues over the years.
In 2021, Serrano was one of the activists that rallied, marched, and sat in on the office of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) to demand an end to the filibuster.
In 2020, Serrano helped organize a protest outside the Arizona Republican Party headquarters demanding greater government action to counter COVID-19, such as mask mandates.
In 2018, Serrano went to former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake’s Washington, D.C. office to demand he oppose the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, based on the sexual assault allegations.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
