News

TULARE - Detectives with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office arrested 52-year-old Dale William Watson of Porterville Tuesday for the murder of eighteen year old Dynasty Alexander. Dynasty’s body was discovered in an orchard near the Elk Bayou Park on the 19700 Block of Hosfield Drive in Tulare. At the location, officers found the body of a female and determined it was county jurisdiction.

The victim had visible signs of strangulation and trauma to the upper torso when her body was found near a Tulare orchard on 3/3/19. Upon completion of the autopsy, the official cause of death was determined to be a single gunshot wound to the upper torso. The investigation is being treated as a homicide. The Tulare County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Detectives were then called to the scene and took over the investigation.

SACRAMENTO -  Kioni M. Dogan, 38, of Stockton, pleaded guilty Tuesday to separate criminal conspiracies to submit false claims for federal income tax refunds and to commit mail fraud in connection with California state unemployment insurance benefits, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced. According to court documents, Dogan and her co-conspirators together illegally sought over $2 million from the California and federal governments with these schemes.

In the tax case, Dogan conspired with her co-defendant Antonia Brasley and others to submit false tax returns to the IRS by obtaining personal identifying information from family, friends, and others, and then submitting returns seeking refunds to which the people listed on the returns were not entitled. To pursue the refunds, false statements were placed on the returns regarding income, withholding from income, and gambling losses, with fraudulent supporting tax forms. From May 2011 through April 2012, Dogan and her co-conspirators sought over $940,000 in fraudulent tax refunds, of which approximately $708,188 were paid out by the IRS.

ATWATER - On Thursday Night and Friday, February 28 and March 1, 2019, officers from the Atwater Police Department, Merced County Sheriff’s STAR team, State Parole and Merced County Probation Department conducted a series of probation and parole compliance checks in various locations in the Atwater/Winton Area. 

During the operation, Atwater Police and the Merced County Sheriff STAR team executed a search warrant in an apartment complex in the 2800 block of Nashua St. in the City of Atwater. During the search officers discovered that one of the occupants of the apartment, Gerardo Torres, 20 years old, an Atwater resident, was in possession of a firearm and ammunition. Officers learned that Torres was a convicted felon and prohibited from possessing a firearm.

FRESNO - Officers from the Fresno Police Department will be out Tuesday, March 5, 2019 during the Mardi Gras celebrations looking for drivers suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.

DUI saturation patrols will take place in areas with high frequencies of DUI collisions and/or arrests. In 2017, 1,120 people were killed in alcohol-involved crashes on California roads. In 2017, the Fresno Police Department investigated 360 DUI collisions which have claimed 15 lives and resulted in another 121 injuries.

CORCORAN – California State Prison-Corcoran inmate Juan Vallejo Corona, 85, died of natural causes at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, March 4 at an outside hospital. Corona was serving 25 concurrent life sentences for 25 counts of first-degree murder. His victims were all farm workers.

In 1971, 25 bodies buried in orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County were found. All the victims were men who had been seen with Corona or had been hired through Corona’s Sutter County labor contracting business. The number of murders set a record in the United States at the time.

SACRAMENTO -  Timothy Brian Harrison, 50, of South Lake Tahoe, was sentenced today by United States District Judge John A. Mendez to one year and one day in prison and ordered to pay $113,000 in restitution for two counts of excavation and removal of archaeological resources from public lands and one misdemeanor count of unlawful possession of methamphetamine, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

According to court documents, Harrison conducted illegal digging at prehistoric Native American archaeological sites on federal lands in Alpine and El Dorado Counties, near Lake Tahoe. He collected tens of thousands of ancient artifacts from multiple archaeological sites, and virtually destroyed two very significant archaeological sites.