A Forest Lake man has been sentenced to a year in the Ramsey County workhouse and seven years of probation for selling fentanyl-laced heroin to a childhood friend who then overdosed and died at a White Bear Lake hotel in 2021.

William James Dykes, 31, was charged with third-degree murder last year in Ramsey County District Court in connection with the death of 28-year-old Joseph Michael Nash at the Best Western Plus along U.S. 61.

William James Dykes (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Judge Nicole Starr on Friday followed a plea agreement that Dykes reached with the prosecution in March, giving him 364 days in the workhouse and staying a seven-year prison term in favor of probation. He was ordered to complete 48 hours of community service at a treatment recovery facility.

According to the criminal complaint, officers responded to the hotel about 11 a.m. Nov. 8, 2021, on a possible overdose and found Nash unresponsive in a second-floor room. Medics transported him to Regions Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A 27-year-old woman and 25-year-old man were in the room when officers arrived and both said Nash had used heroin shortly before his death. They didn’t tell officers where Nash got the heroin, and neither of them made themselves available for follow-up interviews throughout the investigation, the complaint says.

An autopsy showed Nash died of mixed drug toxicity and that he had fentanyl and alcohol in his system.

Nash’s former girlfriend told police she had spoken with the 25-year-old man and that he said Nash asked him if “snorting heroin was better than smoking it,” the complaint states. Nash snorted the heroin and became unresponsive five minutes later.

Investigators spoke to Nash’s mother. She said that on the night before his death, he had left his Apple Watch at her home and she was able to monitor messages between her son and Dykes. In the messages, Nash asked Dykes when he was going to arrive at the hotel.

She said her son and Dykes grew up together and played football together. Dykes also used to work for her family’s business, she said.

She said that she called Dykes the morning of her son’s death because she was looking for him. Dykes said he sold her son marijuana.

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In a recorded phone conversation, the 25-year-old man told Nash’s former girlfriend that Dykes had delivered what was “supposed to be heroin but that everything is cut with fentanyl these days,” the complaint reads.

Cellphone records showed texts between Nash and Dykes that mentioned meeting at the hotel the night before the death. They also showed that Nash paid Dykes through Venmo.

Dykes told investigators that he and Nash were childhood friends and he was not sure when he last saw Nash. When asked what he knew about his death, Dykes asked to end the interview.

Dykes’ attorney did not return messages left Monday asking for comment on his sentence.

By KEN SWEET

NEW YORK (AP) — Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: the aggravated customers, the constant searching through menus for information and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled.

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Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece, is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may already know what problem the customer has before even saying “hello.” He can spend more time actually serving the customer.

“A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said.

Roughly 3 million Americans work in call center jobs, and millions more work in call centers around the world, answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call center operations.

Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit.

Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as “break/fix,” which means something is broken — or wrong or confusing — and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem. Now, it’s a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a computer, or a human augmented by a computer.

Already, AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks. Some jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future job market for these individuals, ranging from modest single-percentage point losses, to as many as half of all call center jobs going away in the next decade. The drop likely won’t match the more dire predictions, however, because it’s become evident that the industry will still need humans, perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training, as some customer service issues become increasingly harder to solve.

Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer service issues.

Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, replaced 700 of their roughly 3,000 customer service agents with chatbots and AI in 2024. The results were mixed. While the company did save money, Klarna found there was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain circumstances, such as complicated issues related to identity theft. Earlier this year, Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle these issues.

Earlier this year, Klarna hired a handful of customer service employees back to the firm, acknowledging there were certain issues that AI couldn’t handle as well as a real person, like identity theft.

“Our vision of an AI-first contact center, where AI agents handle the majority of conversations and fewer, better trained and better paid human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a reality,” said Gadi Shamia of Replicant, an AI-software company that trains chatbots to sound more human, in an interview with consultants at McKinsey.

The call center customer’s experience, while improved, is still far from perfect.

The initial customer service call has long been handled through interactive voice response systems, known in the industry as IVR. Customers interact with IVR when they’re told “press one for sales, press two for support, press five for billing.” These crude systems got an update in the 2010s, when customers could prompt the system by saying “sales” or “support” or simple phrases like “I’d like to pay a bill” instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options.

But customers have little patience for these menus, leading them to “zero out,” which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human. It’s also not uncommon that after a customer “zeros out” they will be put on hold and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request.

Aware of Americans’ collective impatience with IVR, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia have introduced the “Keep Call Centers in America Act,” which would require clear ways to reach a human agent, and provide incentives to companies that keep call center jobs in the U.S.

Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly understand customer service requests and predict where to send a customer without navigating a menu. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is coming out with its “ChatGPT Agent” service for users that’s able to understand phrases like “I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year, please give me options for clothing and gifts.”

Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such features into “Erica,” its chatbot that debuted in 2018. When Erica cannot handle a request, the agent transfers the customer directly to the right department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical, and knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the same service.

Bank of America said this month that Erica has been used 3 billion times since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher case load of customer service requests. The chatbot’s moniker comes from the last five letters of the company’s name.

James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at TTEC, has spent much of his career trying to make customer service calls less painful for the caller as well as the company. He said these tools could eventually kill off IVR for good, ending the need for anyone to “zero out.”

“We’re getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person for your problem without you having to route through those menus,” Bednar said.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and JOSHUA GOODMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Coast Guard detects and detains scores of drug-running vessels in the Caribbean every year in its role as the world’s drug police on the high seas.

Now, that anti-narcotics mission may look vastly different after a U.S. military strike on a vessel off Venezuela. Trump administration officials asserted last week that gang members were smuggling drugs bound for America.

The Trump administration has indicated more military strikes on drug targets could be coming, saying it is seeking to “wage war” on Latin American cartels it accuses of flooding the U.S. with cocaine, fentanyl and other drugs. It is facing mounting questions, however, about the legality of the strike and any such escalation, which upends decades of procedures for interdicting suspected drug vessels.

“This really throws a wrench in the huge investment the U.S. has been making for decades building up a robust legal infrastructure to arrest and prosecute suspected drug smugglers,” said Kendra McSweeney, an Ohio State University geographer who has spent years investigating the legal infrastructure of U.S. drug interdictions at sea.

Citing self-defense and an ‘immediate threat’

Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted while visiting Latin America last week that drug cartels “pose an immediate threat to the United States” and that President Donald Trump “has a right, under exigent circumstances, to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a joint news conference with Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld at the Palacio de Carondelet, in Quito, Ecuador, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool)

A U.S. official familiar with the reasoning also cited self-defense as legal justification for the strike that the administration says killed 11 members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, which has been dubbed a foreign terrorist organization. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

The administration used a similar argument months prior to justify an intense bombing camping against Houthi rebels in Yemen. However, behind the scenes, the justification for strikes against the cartels appears to be far more complex.

The New York Times reported last month that Trump signed a directive to the Pentagon to start using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. That reporting was related to the Venezuela strike, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

Touting the strike, but no details on how it happened

Vice President JD Vance celebrated the strike over the weekend, suggesting that the use of force is necessary to protect American families from deadly drugs.

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance said on X.

Several Democrats and even some fellow Republicans criticized Vance’s comments. Congressional leaders also have pressed for more information on why the administration took the military action.

The Pentagon has been silent about any details on the strike. Military officials have not divulged what service carried it out, what weapons were used or how it was determined that the vessel was operated by Tren de Aragua or carrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that “foreign terrorist organizations have been designated, we have those authorities, and it’s about keeping the American people safe. There’s no reason for me to give the public or adversaries any more information than that.”

Pentagon officials did not respond to direct questions about the legal justification for the strike and whether the military considered itself at war with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Hegseth traveled Monday to Puerto Rico, where troops deployed for a training exercise and where the U.S. is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets for operations against drug cartels.

‘There’s no authority for this whatsoever’

Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, said “extrajudicial killing” would be a better term to describe the strike. She sees it as an outgrowth of the two-decade blurring of the lines between law enforcement and armed conflict.

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Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. started designating members of foreign terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Taliban, as unlawful combatants, making them vulnerable to U.S. attacks even when not directly engaged in warfare.

Trump has designated several Latin American cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations. But that in itself does not make a U.S. strike against suspected members of the group legal, Finkelstein said. Congress has not authorized the use of force against Venezuela nor are there any U.N. resolutions that would justify the U.S. actions.

“There’s no authority for this whatsoever under international law,” she said. “It was not an act of self-defense. It was not in the middle of a war. There was no imminent threat to the United States.”

A pair of armed Venezuelan planes flew by a U.S. warship in the Caribbean days after the strike, and Trump warned Friday that any future flights would be met with gunfire.

The strike “quite arguably is an act of war against Venezuela and they would potentially be justified in responding with the use of force,” Finkelstein said. “Could you imagine what would happen if their navy was 12 miles off the coast of the U.S.?“

Turning to the seas during the drug war

The search and seizures by sea are a routine feature of America’s first “forever war” — the drug war, which President Richard Nixon declared in 1971.

In 1986, at the height of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin drug cartel, Congress passed the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, which defines drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States and gives the U.S. unique arrest powers.

Usually, authorities stop and board boats, arrest the crew and seize any contraband. The efforts are led by the U.S. Coast Guard with support from the Pentagon, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI as well as allies from the U.K., France, Netherlands and across Latin America.

Now, warning operations like the strike “will happen again,” Rubio said Trump “wants to wage war on these groups because they’ve been waging war on us for 30 years and no one has responded.”

Under the maritime drug enforcement law, 127 new prosecutions were brought in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects Justice Department data. That compares to 131 for all of 2024.

Since each case involves multiple defendants, the actual number of foreigners detained at sea is likely much higher.

The Coast Guard announced last month what it called its largest drug haul on record from multiple interdictions over two months. Some of those seizures were carried out by a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment aboard a Dutch naval vessel in the Caribbean.

“While no one is sympathetic to the plight of drug dealers, the reason we do this through a judicial process, in partnership with other nations, is so we can collect evidence that allows us to build bigger cases and go after the cartel bosses,” said James Story, who served as ambassador to Venezuela during the first Trump administration.

Story, who ran the State Department’s anti-narcotics bureau in Colombia and Latin America earlier in his career, said 20 nations have liaisons at a multiagency task force based in the Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida, where high seas boardings are coordinated.

“Anything that could potentially jeopardize those relationships would make us less effective in the long run,” he said.

Goodman reported from Miami.

By HOLLY RAMER

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The recent identification of a little girl found dead in a New Hampshire state park nearly 25 years ago both closed a key chapter in an investigation spanning four decades and opened a new search for another likely victim of her serial killer father, authorities said Monday.

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The mystery, one of the first major cases to highlight genetic genealogy in solving crimes, began in 1985 when a hunter discovered the bodies of a woman and 9-year-old girl in a barrel at Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown. In 2000, an investigator found another barrel nearby containing the body of two more girls estimated to be ages 2 and 3.

Authorities determined that all four had been killed in the late 1970s or early 1980s and placed in the park. By 2019, they had identified all but the “middle child” and concluded based on DNA analysis that the killer was her father, Terry Rasmussen, who died in prison in 2010 after being convicted of killing another woman in California. But for years, they didn’t know the name of the girl.

That changed after the New Hampshire State Police’s cold case unit partnered with the DNA Doe Project, which used extensive DNA analysis and genealogical research to identify her as Rea Rasmussen.

“Today, we’re no longer frustrated,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Agati said at a news conference. “We can find ourselves, for once – just today – fulfilled, because we have that name, and it feels like a promise kept. It renews everybody up here to go on and continue to seek the truth.”

Building on the work of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the DNA Doe Project compiled a family tree with roughly 25,000 names. Investigators traced the descendants of a couple born in the 1780s to a woman who died in 2005, leaving a daughter named Pepper Reed. They also found a 1976 birth certificate for Rea Rasmussen listing her parents as Pepper Reed and Terry Rasmussen.

Reed has not been seen since the late 1970s in California, authorities said. Authorities on Monday urged the public to come forward with any information about Reed or Denise Beaudin, another likely victim.

New Hampshire State Police Det. Sgt. Christopher Elphick speaks to reporters on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Holly Ramer)

“Our work is not done,” New Hampshire State Police Det. Sgt. Christopher Elphick said. “If you have any information, no matter how small it may seem, we urge you to come forward. After more than four decades, your piece of the puzzle could be the one that finally brings justice.”

Rasmussen had been living with Beaudin and her infant daughter in New Hampshire when they disappeared in 1981. By 1985, he was living with the girl in California, portraying himself as a grieving widow and father, a neighbor recalled. The girl was later adopted after being abandoned.

Elphick said Rasmussen appears to have targeted vulnerable women he could alienate from their families so they wouldn’t be reported missing. He used multiple aliases including Bob Evans, Curtis Kimball and Gordon Jenson and lived in multiple states, including California, New Hampshire, Texas, Arizona, Oregon and Virginia.

Rasmussen was sent to prison for the 2001 killing of his girlfriend, whose partially dismembered body was found in their California basement. But there are large gaps of time during which he is unaccounted for, investigators said.

“It’s highly unlikely that he stopped doing what he was doing,” Elphick said. “It’s certainly possible we’re going to make some more discoveries, not just about the whereabouts of Pepper Reed and Denise Beaudin, but additional victims as well.”

On Monday, a victim witness specialist read a statement from Pepper Reed’s family thanking those involved in the investigation.

“First and foremost, we want to express that Pepper is deeply loved and missed every single day,” the family said. “Though we did not have an opportunity to meet Rea, she is cherished just as much in our hearts. Our family kindly asks for privacy as we grieve.”