Star Tribune
Ex-manager at small town grocery store accused again of sexual assault
The victim told police on Sept. 10 that Shelton had flirted with her during work shifts and scheduled her hours to align with when he managed the store. She said they had sexually charged late-night conversations.
The victim told police that Shelton pushed himself against her one day as she was cleaning coffee pots in a back room of the grocery store. She said Shelton also inappropriately touched her in his office and in her car.
The sexual assaults stopped when Shelton’s significant other learned about the relationship in 2021 and started texting the victim. The victim said she quit her job at this point, and did not hear from Shelton until Aug. 20 this year, two days before his arrest. In text messages reviewed by police, Shelton apologized and said he missed their friendship.
Police said Shelton admitted to the three assaults.
They had arrested Shelton on Aug. 22 after receiving word that he had been exchanging explicit messages with a different teenage cashier.
The previous victim told police that Shelton, her supervisor since she started working at the Market as a 14-year-old in 2022, had sexually assaulted her inside his office on the second floor of the store.
A 24-year-old man was killed when he was hit by a car along a highway in Maplewood on Monday morning.
The crash occurred on southbound Hwy. 61 near Hwy. 36 at 5:45 a.m., according to the State Patrol. The agency did not detail how the crash happened in a news release and did not immediately return a request for more information.
The driver of the vehicle was a 30-year-old man from Maplewood, the state patrol said. No arrests were announced.
Star Tribune
Court filing describes chaotic messaging around attempted $120,000 bribe in Feeding Our Future trial
Text messages flew furiously as the bribe was delivered. The defendants in the Feeding Our Future trial knew what was at stake.
“100 [thousand] for our freedom is nothing bro,” Abdiaziz Farah sent to his co-defendant Mukhtar Shariff, “worth trying everything bro.”
The attempted bribery was in response to the sprawling FBI investigation into the Minnesota non-profit that alleged more than $250 million in federal reimbursements were stolen and spent on luxury homes, cars and other lavish expenses, in what was one of the largest pandemic-era fraud cases in the United States.
The United States Attorney’s Office detailed dozens of messages between several co-defendants on Monday as it filed a motion to supplement the presentence investigation report for Shariff. Shariff was convicted for his role in the fraud scandal, but has not been charged with bribing the juror.
“The government has learned that defendant Shariff knew about the bribery attempt and destroyed communications he had with his co-defendant Abdiaziz Farah about the bribe,” the motion reads.
As the seven-week trial was coming to a close, several of the defendants targeted a 23-year-old known as Juror 52 to deliver a bribe to try and secure a not guilty verdict. The Attorney’s Office said it was because they believed “she was the youngest juror and the only juror of color.”
One of the defendants, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, reached out to Ladan Mohamed Ali, a 31-year-old Seattle woman who prosecutors say he had a prior relationship with, to deliver the bribe. Nur and Farah conducted research on the juror and her family. They tasked others to conduct surveillance on her, photograph her home and put a tracking device on her car.
Ladan Ali, the Seattle woman accused of giving a bribe of $120,000 in cash to a juror in the Feeding Our Future trial, and her attorney, Eric Newmark, left to right, exit the Diana E. Murphy U.S. Courthouse after a hearing where she plead guilty in Minneapolis, Minn. on Thursday, Sep. 05, 2024. ] ALEX KORMANN • alex.kormann@startribune.com (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Ali flew from Seattle to Minneapolis to help. She then crafted a series of lies. She told Nur that Juror 52 agreed to the bribe and requested $500,000, both of which were not true.
An East Coast couple has been arrested and charged in Ramsey County with being part of a theft operation that is suspected of stealing roughly $1 million in goods across several states from the high-end women’s athletic wear retailer Lululemon.
Jadion Anthony Richards, 44, and Akwele Nickeisha Lawes-Richards, 45, both of Danbury, Conn., were charged Friday in Ramsey County District Court with organized retail theft in connection with crimes that spanned more than two months until their arrests Thursday.
Both appeared in court Monday and remain jailed ahead of hearings scheduled for Dec. 16. Richards’ bail was set at $100,000 and Lawes-Richards’ at $30,000. Attorneys for each defendant were not immediately available to respond to the allegations.
The County Attorney’s Office said this the first case it has prosecuted under a state statute enacted into law in May 2023 that is aimed at addressing organized retail theft.
In a nod to the work of the Roseville Police Department and its new retail crime unit, as well as other law enforcement agencies, “these individuals accused of this massive retail theft operation have been caught,” read a statement from Dennis Gerhardstein, spokesman for the County Attorney’s Office. “We will do everything in our power to hold these defendants accountable, and continue to work with our law enforcement partners and retail merchants to put a stop to retail theft in our community.”
According to the charges:
A retail crime investigator learned from police in Roseville that Richards, Lawes-Richards and an unidentified accomplice stole 45 items worth nearly $5,000 on Wednesday from the Lulelemon in Rosedale Center.
Police in Woodbury caught up to Lawes-Richards and Richards at the Lululemon in Woodbury and arrested them. Richards declined to speak with law enforcement, and Lawes-Richards denied stealing anything from the Lulelemon in Rosedale Center.
