A St. Paul motorist’s blood-alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit to drive when he slammed into a tree at 60 mph in his North End neighborhood last week, killing one passenger and critically injuring the other, according to charges filed Thursday.

The crash happened just before 10 a.m. May 9 on Cottage Avenue near Galtier Street, an area four blocks west of Rice Street. A 53-year-old man who was a back-seat passenger died two days later while hospitalized. He hasn’t been named, pending notification of next of kin.

A blood sample taken from the driver, Austin Wah, 25, of St. Paul, four hours after the crash showed his blood-alcohol concentration was 0.37, according to the criminal complaint. The legal limit to drive in Minnesota is .08 BAC.

Wah, who was also injured in the crash, remained hospitalized Thursday, when he was charged by warrant in Ramsey County District Court with criminal vehicular homicide and criminal vehicular operation.

According to the complaint, police officers who responded to the crash about 9:50 a.m. in the 200 block of Cottage Avenue West found a Toyota Corolla that had crashed head-on into a tree.

The car’s registered owner, a 35-year-old man, was partially pinned in the front passenger seat and complained of a neck injury. The 53-year-old man was extricated from the car. Both men were taken to Regions Hospital in critical condition and underwent surgeries.

At the crash scene, on a boulevard, officers recovered an empty vodka bottle and another one that was less than a quarter-full.

Officers did not see skid marks in the street to indicate the driver had attempted to stop.

Officers spoke to a witness who said a bald Asian male got out of the driver’s seat and that his face and legs were bleeding. The witness said he told the driver to stay there, but the driver walked away.

Another witness told officers he knew where the driver lived and took them to an apartment at the end of Cottage Avenue. Wah answered the door with no shirt on and had injuries to his chin and left leg. He smelled of alcohol.

Wah’s grandfather told officers that Wah had drunk alcohol earlier that morning at the apartment. He said he met Wah outside after Wah was in a car accident and they walked back to the apartment.

Four witnesses of the crash later identified Wah as the man who had gotten out of the Corolla’s driver’s seat.

Medics responded to treat Wah, who told them he had not drunk alcohol or taken drugs.

At the hospital, the 35-year-old man told police that Wah drove while he was in the front seat and the man’s uncle was in the back.

A registered nurse collected Wah’s blood sample at 1:53 p.m. and it was sent to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for analysis.

Wah agreed to speak with an investigator and claimed the two men showed up at his apartment drunk and asked him for a ride to a store. He admitted to having drank two beers. He said he crashed near a stop sign and walked home, and admitted that he did not call 911 despite knowing his passengers were seriously injured. He said he has an instruction permit to drive.

The results of Wah’s blood sample came back Wednesday.

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Based on damage to the car, an investigator estimated that Wah was going 60 mph at the time of impact. Officers obtained a search warrant to collect event data recorder information from the car.

The deadly crash was the first of two over the weekend in St. Paul’s North End that involved an alleged drunken driver.

On Sunday, Paw Moo Htoo, 30, of St. Paul, was going over 100 mph when he blew through a red light and crashed into an SUV at the intersection of Dale Street and Arlington Avenue, killing the driver, Marvin Martin Scroggins, 42, of St. Paul, according to charges filed Tuesday.

By MATT O’BRIEN

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.

The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.

One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”

“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”

The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”

Musk and his companies haven’t provided an explanation for Grok’s responses, which were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment Thursday.

Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.

Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.

“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.

Graham’s post brought what appeared to be a sarcastic response from Musk’s rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“There are many ways this could have happened. I’m sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon,” wrote Altman, who has been sued by Musk in a dispute rooted in the founding of OpenAI.

Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.

Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Monday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.

In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.

Golbeck believes the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.

“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”

By Salvador Hernandez, Los Angeles Times

Officials are touting a young Tennessee gamer as a hero after the boy thwarted a mass shooting allegedly being planned and discussed on a gamer chat site by two teenagers in Tehama County, California.

The two boys, ages 14 and 15, had planned a shooting at Evergreen Institute of Excellence, in the Northern California town of Cottonwood, where they expected to kill up to 100 people, said Tehama County Sheriff Dave Kain during a news conference Tuesday. Before the deadly attack, the two close friends allegedly planned to kill one set of their parents.

“This was serious,” Kain said. “It would have changed our community as a whole.

The two friends allegedly wrote a manifesto for the deadly attack, took photos of themselves in the same clothes and posed as the teenage killers in the 1999 Columbine mass shooting, and spoke in an online game’s chat about the planned shooting.

It was in that game’s chat that a Tennessee boy became aware of the possible attack, and decided to call the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office on the evening of May 9 about the disturbing chat.

Kain said the gamer’s decision to call authorities about the possible attack could have saved lives.

“This young man had the courage and heroic instincts to call our agency and notify us in order to mitigate any possible threat to our citizens and, possibly, our young people,” Kain said.

The gamer provided investigators with the suspect’s gamer tag, contents of the chat, as well as a shared photo one of the suspects posted of them posing like the Columbine school shooters.

Kain said the shared image helped investigators contact school administrators, identify the two students, and take both of them into custody.

“Our investigators took that tip seriously since the beginning,” Kain said.

Investigators served search warrants at the homes of the two suspects, where they found improvised explosive devices they believe were made to use in the school attack. Firearms were also seized, Kain said.

The two friends had planned to go forward with the attack on May 9, but didn’t because one of them backed out, he said. It’s unclear what the motivation for the school shooting was, but Kain said one of the teen suspects talked about being bullied when interviewed by investigators.

The two suspects were booked on suspicion of making criminal threats, possession of a destructive device, manufacturing a destructive device, and conspiracy to commit a felony, Kain said. Investigators are also working with prosecutors and looking at the possibility of a charge of conspiracy to commit mass murder.

The two teens appeared in court Thursday, and were ordered to remain in custody, per a request from the Tehama County District Attorney’s Office, according to a statement from the office.

Kain said sheriff officials have spoken with school administrators to provide additional security at the school, but said the threat was isolated to the two suspects already in custody.

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As a sign of confidence, the sheriff said his son returned to classes at the same middle school on Monday.

Kain declined to offer any details on the underage gamer who reported the threat, but said he and his parents were told they were invited to visit Tehama County to be recognized.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Three Minnesota officers who died since last year’s Peace Officers Memorial Day are being remembered Thursday, along with two who were killed nearly 100 years ago.

Law enforcement officers from around the state take turns standing guard at the Minnesota Peace Officers Memorial on the state Capitol grounds for 24 hours leading up to the Thursday night service.

The names of officers who died since last year’s memorial service are added to ribbons on a Minnesota Law Enforcement Memorial Association flag. This year, they are: Minneapolis Officer Jamal Mitchell, who was shot on May 30; National Park Service Ranger Kevin Grossheim, who drowned in Voyageurs National Park while helping a family; and Red Lake Tribal Police Officer Jesse Branch, who was in a crash when responding to a call.

Laurence Doten (Courtesy of the Minnesota Law Enforcement Memorial Association)

Two law enforcement officers killed in 1930, recently brought to the attention of LEMA, are also being memorialized this year, said Brian Hubbard, the association’s president.

Immigration and Naturalization Service Inspectors Laurence Doten and Lawrence C. Jones were both stationed in Minnesota. They were fatally shot near Emo, Canada, on Aug. 24, 1930.

It’s important to LEMA that people are “recognized like they should be,” Hubbard said Thursday.

Burnsville police officers Matt Ruge and Paul Elmstrand, who were fatally shot in February 2024, were honored at last year’s memorial ceremony.

Commander Damon Bitney, of the Bloomington Police Department, rings a bell for a fallen police officer during a vigil at the Minnesota Peace Officer Memorial on the south grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on Thursday, May 15, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Their names, along with Mitchell’s and Grossheim’s, were unveiled this week at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., this week. Branch’s name is scheduled to be added to the national memorial for next year’s ceremony.

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