In The News - 5/3/2025
KXLY
Spokane teen accused of brutally attacking homeless man, throwing Lime scooter at another
A 17-year-old was one of three teens accused of beating a homeless man's skull in and throwing a Lime scooter at another unhoused man.
Kage Mathews checked into the Spokane County Jail on the charges around 9:00 p.m. Thursday.
According to the State, Mathews and two others attacked a homeless man, unprovoked, who was in a sleeping bag, kicking and beating him.
That man suffered serious skull fractures, and a piece of his skull had to be removed to alleviate brain swelling.
The trio was accused of running away from the man they beat, and one threw a Lime scooter, which is over 40 lbs., at another homeless man.
The State requested bond be set at $100,000 due to the violent nature of the charges.
Superior County Court Commissioner Jerry Scharosch set bond at $20,000, noting that Mathews had lived in Spokane the last five years, has been living in a group home, and recently finished a diversion program in Cheney, Mathews' age (17), and the severity of the alleged violent crimes.
The court noted Mathews was facing pending charges from March, including malicious mischief and aiming or discharging a firearm.
The New York Times
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Sweep of Homeless Camp in Oregon Said to Be ‘Largest in Recent History
Federal officials began clearing a forest where dozens of homeless people live in derelict R.V.s and cars.
Federal forest officials began clearing thousands of acres of forest just outside of Bend, Ore., where more than 100 people live in R.V.s and cars — a move that one advocacy group called “the largest eviction of a homeless camp in recent history.”
At around 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, a phalanx of squad cars bearing the golden logo of the U.S. Forest Service arrived at the start of a logging road leading deep into a landscape of towering ponderosa pines and dusty green desert grasses in the Deschutes National Forest. The cars parked facing each other, in a formation blocking the entry. Law enforcement officers wearing green uniforms, stood sentinel. Campers and R.V.s were allowed to leave, but no one can return unescorted.
In the hours before the deadline to vacate went into effect at midnight, the people who have lived in this forest worked frantically to fix the broken-down vehicles, trucks and R.V.s so that they could move them off federal land.
Law enforcement and forest officials have crisscrossed a miles-long logging road for weeks, taping fliers to the doors and windows of dusty cars and derelict R.V.s with a stark warning: Anyone caught trespassing after May 1 would face a $5,000 fine and may be charged with a Class B misdemeanor and up to one year in jail.
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The sweep comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors in Grants Pass, a city located 200 miles south of the current encampment in Bend. The court held that cities like Grants Pass could prohibit camping in public places, even if there are no shelter beds available.
“They’ve told us that if we are not out, we will all go to jail,” said Mr. Owens of his interaction with forest officials. “When I said, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ They said, ‘It’s not our problem,’” said Mr. Owens, who said that he ended up in the woods in part because he was previously incarcerated, making it difficult to find employment — records show that in 2022, he was charged for unauthorized use of a vehicle and giving false information to a police officer.
An Effective Treatment for Opioid Addiction Exists. Why Isn’t It Used More?
A drug called buprenorphine may be the best tool doctors have to fight the fentanyl crisis. Why hasn’t it been more widely adopted?
The middle-aged patient seemed to embody all the twists and contradictions of the opioid crisis. A white-collar professional with a history of addiction, he had become hooked on prescription painkillers again after a knee operation. When doctors would no longer prescribe the opioids, he returned to heroin. But recently he had developed an abscess at an injection site on his leg. Now he was in Highland Hospital, in Oakland, Calif., claiming to have been bitten by a spider.
Andrew Herring, a specialist in emergency medicine at the hospital, vividly remembers this man, the first person he would ever treat with the drug buprenorphine. The patient was hoping to receive a few opioid pills to help with his “spider bite.” But he had also caught wind of a trial program Herring was just then starting in the emergency department. He and his colleagues were interested in buprenorphine — itself an opioid — as a way to treat addiction to more powerful opioids like heroin. The patient wanted to try that instead of attempting to finagle pills. Struck by his forthrightness and honesty, and by his evident desire to escape the downward spiral of addiction, Herring sent him home with a prescription.
This was in 2016. The previous year, doctors at the Yale School of Medicine published what would come to be seen as a seminal study in the field of addiction medicine. Their study subjects, primarily people who were using heroin or prescription opioids, had been divided into three groups. One received a referral to addiction-treatment services outside the hospital. Another group received a similar referral, along with a brief counseling session at the hospital. And a third group received both the referral and the counseling while also starting on buprenorphine, taken daily as a tablet. After a month, this last cohort was about twice as likely as the other two groups to remain in treatment. This one medicine doubled these patients’ likelihood of staying the course and greatly improved their odds of avoiding a fatal overdose.
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And there was already evidence of buprenorphine’s effectiveness, at the population level, in combating overdose deaths. Although the United States government had partly funded buprenorphine’s development as a treatment for opioid addiction, France was one of the first countries to most fully exploit the drug’s potential. In the 1990s, French health authorities began allowing any doctor to prescribe buprenorphine. By the early 2000s, overdose deaths there from heroin and other opioids had declined by nearly 80 percent.
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That same year, Herring and his colleagues established what is now called the Alameda Health System Bridge Clinic, an addiction-treatment program that has since become a model for hospitals and physicians in California and other states. In the decade that followed, the scourge of opioids only worsened. In 2022, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, most of them from fentanyl, a fatal-overdose rate nearly quadruple what it was 20 years earlier. More people died from opioid overdoses in that period — more than 700,000, according to C.D.C. data — than perished in all U.S. wars and conflicts going back to World War I.