The Mexican navy announced Friday it had seized more than 8.3 tons of drugs in the Pacific Ocean, a record for a single operation at sea. The illicit cargo was intercepted from six different vessels, including a semisubmersible “narco sub” that held about 4,800 pounds of narcotics, officials said.

“Navy personnel seized 8,361 kilograms of illicit cargo, which represents the largest amount of drugs seized in a maritime operation, unprecedented in history,” the Ministry of the Navy said in a news release.

It did not specify the type of the drugs, but said they were valued at 2.099 billion pesos (about $105 million).

Twenty-three people were arrested during the bust which took place southwest of the port of Lazaro Cardenas, off the western coast of Mexico.

The drugs were distributed in six small boats and one of the vessels was a semisubmersible — commonly known as a “narco sub” — which officials said required a “complex” action on the part of the sailors.

“The strategy and high level of training of the naval personnel allowed an aerial insertion from a helicopter onto said vessel in full motion, a high-risk maneuver since it requires absolute mastery of boarding techniques in extreme conditions,” the navy said.

Semi-submersibles, which cannot go fully underwater, are popular among international drug traffickers as they can sometimes elude detection by law enforcement. 

The navy released more than a dozen images of the operation, showing the “narco sub” as well as hundreds of packages of alleged drugs, including some emblazoned with the Pepsi logo and others marked “JK8.”

The largest drug seizure in Mexico’s history was 23 tons of Colombian cocaine in November 2007.

Mexico has for decades been the hub of drug trafficking to the United States, with a large number of cartels fighting for control of the trade.

The state of Michoacan, off the coast of which the seizure took place, is the scene of clashes between criminal gangs, including the powerful Jalisco Nueva Generacion cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful and violent criminal groups.

The latest raid reported on Friday was carried out “days ago” by surface units backed by a helicopter, the ministry said.

Some 8,700 liters of fuel, another of the illicit trades controlled by drug cartels, were also found on the raided vessels.

On August 23, authorities reported they had impounded about seven tonnes of drugs in two separate operations in the same area of the country.

The Mexican navy, which conducts surveillance operations on a permanent basis, has discovered all kinds of drug shipments, including one of cocaine stuffed in 217 barrels of chili sauce in 2016. Earlier this year, the navy seized more than seven tons of suspected cocaine in two separate raids in the Pacific Ocean, and dramatic video captured the high-speed chases on the open sea.

Mexico has for decades been a drug trafficking route to the United States, which has sparked disputes between different narco groups.

The country’s first woman president Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office on October 1, faces a major challenge to tackle the drug cartels and related crimes.

She has pledged to stick with her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy of using social policy to tackle crime at its roots.

Across Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands have gone missing in a spiral of violence since the government deployed the army to combat drug trafficking in 2006.

After midnight on July 6, Sonya Massey called 911 to report a prowler. When sheriff’s deputies responded, she answered the door in her nightgown, thanking and welcoming them into her home in Springfield, Illinois. But two minutes later, Sangamon County Deputy Sean Grayson took aim at Massey’s face and fired a fatal gunshot, killing her in her kitchen. The morning prior, her mother Donna had warned police that her daughter was in the middle of a mental health crisis.

“Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced,” Donna Massey pleaded to a 911 operator. “I’m scared of the police.”

Grayson was fired less than two weeks later and charged with Sonya Massey’s murder. He pleaded not guilty. It’s the only criminal case in recent history against a Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputy for actions on duty, according to a review of court records dating back to 2007, and local officials characterized Massey’s fatal shooting as an aberration. 

But CBS News subsequently obtained thousands of pages of law enforcement files, medical and court records as well as photo and video evidence which indicate that the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has a history of misconduct allegations and accountability failures that long predate Deputy Grayson. These records challenge the claim that Massey’s death was an isolated incident by one “rogue individual,” as the then-sheriff said at the time. 

Local families assert that Massey’s death is the latest in a pattern of brazen abuse that has gone unchecked for years.

“This is not a one-off. This is one of apparently many examples of wrongdoing,” said county board member Marc Ayers, who is among several local officials calling for independent inquiries and widespread reforms of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.

At least eight other deaths in the custody of Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office deputies and corrections officers have occurred under circumstances where officials’ conduct was called into question. In at least five of those cases, officers acted in ways that appeared to have violated local law enforcement policies as well as state and federal standards, according to a CBS News review of two decades’ worth of documents obtained through court records and Freedom of Information Act requests. Police in other communities who used similar tactics have sometimes been charged criminally.

In each of the eight cases that CBS News identified in Sangamon County, officers had been informed that victims were experiencing some kind of mental health or other medical issue at the time of their death. Their families alleged either excessive force or deliberate indifference to life-threatening medical conditions for people in pretrial detention.

Since 2004, the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has been the target of more than 50 civil rights complaints, including 20 related to policing and another 34 related to misconduct in the jail, which the sheriff also oversees, records show. The allegations include violations of due process, excessive tasing, the rape of a woman who called 911 for help, and arrests made with no legal grounds as tools of harassment or intimidation. The sheriff’s office disputed each one of these accusations. 

In two of the civil rights cases, federal judges ruled against the sheriff’s office. And in 10 of them, the county agreed to pay settlements out of court for more than $3.6 million, without admitting fault. They paid another $9.6 million in legal fees, according to records obtained through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. All of that money came directly from taxpayers, according to county board member Craig Hall, who has chaired Sangamon County’s civil liabilities committee for more than two decades.

“If we’ve done something wrong … make what is wrong right, if that’s even possible,” Hall told CBS News. “How many people have to die before enough is enough?”

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office declined multiple requests to respond to questions for this story.

The sheriff leading the department when Grayson shot Massey, Jack Campbell, was elected in 2018 and had been second in command from 2008 to 2016. Campbell is identified in county documents as an official who, for years, ordered and oversaw misconduct investigations within the department. On Aug. 9, he resigned following pressure from the public and the state’s governor. Campbell did not respond to a request for comment on this report.  

“If it has become a systemic problem, it’s not going to be enough to change one person,” said Chiraag Bains, a former civil rights prosecutor who served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council until 2023.

History of misconduct

In 2010, sheriff’s deputies responded to a 911 call from an anxious resident about a man trying to break into their home. When deputies arrived on scene, they encountered Patrick Burns, 50, alone in a nearby ditch after he had broken the window of his neighbor’s house, and he told them that he’d smoked marijuana and crack cocaine. Burns became combative and the officers hog-tied him and tased him 21 times, according to police records.   

“He kept screaming that they’re trying to kill me,” an eyewitness later recounted to investigators, having observed the altercation through her house window. Burns was unresponsive when deputies brought him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but no charges were ever brought. The local State’s Attorney determined the use of force was justified.

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s taser policy in effect at the time stated that deputies “should generally not intentionally” tase a person excessively or at all, if the person is “handcuffed unless there is immediate threat to the Deputy/Officer, suspect or bystander.” The current policy goes further, instructing that “deputies should generally not intentionally apply more than one Taser at a time against a single subject.”

The outcome left relatives of Burns unsatisfied.

“Sangamon County does a pretty good job of hiding things or twisting things or making them seem like they’re squeaky clean. Behind the scenes, they’re anything but that,” said Richard Burns, Patrick’s younger brother. He said he felt that the sheriff’s office vilified Patrick after his death, and that the department’s treatment of the family was callous. “I want to get to the bottom of what happened to Patrick because we were being told a series of lies.”

A year earlier, a woman in Sangamon County alleged that after she dialed 911 for help before dawn on New Year’s Day 2009, she was raped by the deputy who responded. The county settled her lawsuit for $30,000 following a nearly three-year court battle, with no charges brought against the deputy. 

Sangamon County is not alone in facing allegations of misconduct. A CBS News investigation earlier this year found chronic misconduct and oversight failures that have enabled abuses to persist unchecked in sheriff’s offices around the country. 

Inside the county jail

In addition to patrolling the community, Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office also oversees the county’s jails. Several residents have alleged the agency deliberately ignored pretrial inmates in distress with serious medical concerns.  

In 2016, Tiffany Rusher, 27, who had a long, documented history of suicide attempts, was transferred from a mental health facility to the Sangamon County jail, where she was placed naked and alone in a cell with a covered window, according to her mother’s complaint. After three months of intermittent solitary confinement, Rusher died after strangling herself in her cell. With no admission of guilt, Sangamon County paid $700,000 to settle her mother’s wrongful death lawsuit in March 2022.

The very next month, Dylan Schlieper-Clark, 23, died from a treatable infection in that same pretrial jail. An internal affairs investigation determined officers ignored his complaint of pain and request to be taken to the hospital, offering no medical assistance for hours as they observed him collapsed face down on the floor, foaming at the mouth, surveillance video and law enforcement records show. 

The subsequent investigation determined one of the officers violated policy by failing to act on observable signs that medical intervention was “necessary.” She received a written reprimand. 

A lawsuit filed by Schlieper-Clark’s mother against the sheriff’s office is ongoing. The sheriff’s office denies the allegations that it violated his civil rights.

“Training and policies are crucial and essential for policing. But training and policies without accountability are useless,” said Ed Chung, vice president of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, who previously served as a state and federal prosecutor investigating police violence and misconduct.

Internal Affairs investigations

Over the years, the sheriff’s office’s Internal Affairs unit substantiated multiple misconduct allegations detailing a variety of ways officers had abused their positions of power. And yet their misconduct appeared to continue; in some cases, it escalated.

One deputy who has faced scrutiny for his conduct is Deputy Travis Koester. The complaints against him range from using excessive force to making bogus arrests and falsifying reports about the incidents in apparent attempts to cover them up. The 6-foot-1 officer also claimed an unarmed 83-year-old woman posed a threat to his physical safety for calling him a “tough guy” while he allegedly aggressively confronted and baselessly arrested her neighbor who was trying to deliver her some biscuits. Internal Affairs investigators substantiated the incident as an abuse of his position. Even some of his colleagues reported their inability to trust him and recommended his demotion.

In all, Koester has been the subject of 13 Internal Affairs investigations and at least five lawsuits in Sangamon County over 15 years. He was exonerated once; six complaints were substantiated, four allegations were deemed unfounded and another six were unsubstantiated. He denied every allegation but, in several cases, department investigators and a federal judge determined that he violated policies and civil rights laws. After a verbal apology from the deputy but no admission of liability by the county, it paid $45,000 to settle the most recent substantiated complaint in June 2024. 

In two cases, judges ruled that Koester made unjustified arrests. He received no disciplinary action and, records show, he was later given pay increases. Illinois Judge John Madonia of the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court found that the deputy’s actions lacked “one iota of credible evidence,” characterizing the deputy’s own reports as “convolutedly crappy” and “factually incorrect.” Records show he received no disciplinary action.

Koester is currently one of Sangamon’s highest paid deputies, according to a review of county financial reports and personnel files obtained through public records requests. Koester did not respond to a request for comment through the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office.

Another veteran officer, Deputy John Gillette. was the subject of 27 complaints in eight years, most of which were never substantiated. In eight cases, he was found to have violated policy or used excessive force. Gillette resigned in 2009, less than two months after an Illinois court ordered the sheriff’s office to publicly release his misconduct records, in a landmark disclosure case. Gillette did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment.

Bains, the former civil rights prosecutor whose work for the Justice Department helped reveal unconstitutional policing and court practices in Ferguson, Missouri, told CBS News that a failure to respond to persistent misconduct is a sign that accountability is lacking.

“And a broken accountability system can be a driver of a pattern or practice of misconduct,” Bains said.

Chung, the former state and federal prosecutor who investigated police misconduct, said law enforcement agencies should resist attributing incidents to “bad apples.”

“When you have persistent and continuous patterns of misconduct that have not gone addressed, or [were] even swept under the rug, that’s not an issue about individuals, that’s an issue of systems,” he said.

At a community listening session organized by the Justice Department over the summer, some county residents said they were no longer willing to call 911 out of fear that they, too, would end up dead. 

“They would be the last people I would call if I needed any help,” Billie Greer told CBS News. 

Herself a retired Illinois corrections officer, Greer said she was arrested without basis by a Sangamon County deputy two years ago and said she’s had nightmares since Sonya Massey was shot dead. “This young lady could’ve been me,” she said.

The newly appointed sheriff, Paula Crouch, said last week that her administration is committed to making reforms. Many residents and local officials insist that a deeper, independent inquiry into the conduct of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office is overdue.

In August, the Sangamon County Board passed a resolution to form a commission to investigate issues of equality and community safety. They called it the Massey Commission, and modeled it after the one formed 10 years earlier following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The commission’s first hearing is set for Monday evening.

Saylorsburg, Pa. — Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive U.S.-based Islamic cleric who inspired a global social movement while facing accusations he masterminded a failed 2016 coup in his native Turkey, has died.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told a news conference Monday his nation’s intelligence services had confirmed the death, according to the Reuters news agency.

The Associated Press reported that Abdullah Bozkurt, the former editor of the Gulen-linked Today’s Zaman newspaper, who is now in exile in Sweden, said he spoke to Gulen’s nephew, Kemal Gulen, who also confirmed the death.

Fethullah Gülen was in his eighties and had long been in ill health.

Gülen spent the last decades of his life in self-exile, living on a gated compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains from where he continued to wield influence among his millions of followers in Turkey and throughout the world. He espoused a philosophy that blended Sufism – a mystical form of Islam – with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

From friend to hated foe  

Gülen began as an ally of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but became a foe. He called Erdogan an authoritarian bent on accumulating power and crushing dissent. Erdogan cast Gülen as a terrorist, accusing him of orchestrating the attempted military coup on the night of July 15, 2016, when factions within the military used tanks, warplanes and helicopters to try to overthrow Erdogan’s government.

Heeding a call from the president, thousands took to the streets to oppose the takeover attempt. The coup-plotters fired at crowds and bombed parliament and other government buildings. A total of 251 people were killed and around 2,200 others were wounded. Around 35 alleged coup plotters were also killed.

Gülen adamantly denied involvement, and his supporters dismissed the charges as ridiculous and politically motivated. Turkey put Gülen on its most-wanted list and demanded his extradition, but the United States showed little inclination to send him back, saying it needed more evidence. Gülen was never charged with a crime in the U.S. and he consistently denounced terrorism as well as the coup plotters.

In Turkey, Gülen’s movement – sometimes known as Hizmet, Turkish for “service” – was subjected to a broad crackdown. The government arrested tens of thousands of people for their alleged link to the coup plot, sacked more than 130,000 suspected supporters from civil service jobs and more than 23,000 from the military, and shuttered hundreds of businesses, schools and media organizations tied to Gülen.

Gülen called the crackdown a witch hunt and denounced Turkey’s leaders as “tyrants.”

“The last year has taken a toll on me as hundreds of thousands of innocent Turkish citizens are being punished simply because the government decides they are somehow ‘connected’ to me or the Hizmet movement and treats that alleged connection as a crime,” he said on the one-year anniversary of the failed coup.

In his news conference Monday, Fiden depicted Gülen as “the leader of a “dark organization,” Reuters reported.

“Our nation’s determination in the fight against terrorism will continue, and this news of his death will never lead us to complacency,” Fidan said.

Fethullah Gülen was born in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey. His official birth date was April 27, 1941, but that has long been in dispute. Y. Alp Aslandogan, who leads a New York-based group that promotes Gülen’s ideas and work, said Gülen was actually born sometime in 1938.

Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, Gülen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago. He preached tolerance and dialogue between faiths, and he believed religion and science could go hand in hand. His belief in merging Islam with Western values and Turkish nationalism struck a chord with Turks, earning him millions of followers.

Gülen’s acolytes built a loosely affiliated global network of charitable foundations, professional associations, businesses and schools in more than 100 countries, including 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the United States. In Turkey, supporters ran universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations.

But Gülen was viewed with suspicion by some in his homeland, a deeply polarized country split between those loyal to its fiercely secular traditions and supporters of the Islamic-based party associated with Erdogan that came to power in 2002.

Gülen had long refrained from openly supporting any political party, but his movement forged a de facto alliance with Erdogan against the country’s old guard of staunch, military-backed secularists, and Gülen’s media empire threw its weight behind Erdogan’s Islamic-oriented government.

Gülenists helped the governing party win multiple elections. But the Erdogan-Gulen alliance began to crumble after the movement criticized government policy and exposed alleged corruption among Erdogan’s inner circle. Erdogan, who denied the allegations, grew weary of the growing influence of Gülen’s movement.

The Turkish leader accused Gülen’s followers of infiltrating the country’s police and judiciary and setting up a parallel state and began agitating for Gülen’s extradition to Turkey even before the failed 2016 coup.

The cleric had lived in the United States since 1999, when he came to seek medical treatment.

In 2000, with Gülen still in the U.S, Turkish authorities charged him with leading an Islamist plot to overthrow the country’s secular form of government and establish a religious state.

Some of the accusations against him were based on a tape recording on which Gülen was alleged to have told supporters of an Islamic state to bide their time: “If they come out too early, the world will quash their heads.” Gülen said his comments were taken out of context.

The cleric was tried in absentia and acquitted, but he never returned to his homeland. He won a lengthy legal battle against the administration of then-President George W. Bush to obtain permanent residency in the U.S.

Rarely seen in public, Gülen lived quietly on the grounds of an Islamic retreat center in the Poconos. He occupied a small apartment on the sprawling compound and left mostly only to see doctors for ailments that included heart disease and diabetes, spending much of his time in prayer and meditation and receiving visitors from around the world.

Gülen never married and did not have children. It is not known who, if anyone, will lead the movement.