16 Mar 2024

Owner of Willmar massage business charged with forcing woman into prostitution

by | posted in: News | 0

WILLMAR, Minn.  — The Willmar business owner arrested last weekend in an alleged assault at her massage business has been charged with inducing a woman into prostitution.

Ying He, 55, made her first court appearance Tuesday in Kandiyohi County District Court on charges of inducing a a female employee to engage in prostitution at her massage business in Willmar, a felony offense. A gross misdemeanor charge of running a disorderly house and a misdemeanor fifth-degree assault charge also were filed against her.

Minnesota statute defines a disorderly house as a location where habitual violations of the law occur, which could include prostitution, sale or possession of controlled substances, gambling or unauthorized sale of liquor.

Judge Melissa Listug set $150,000 bail with no conditions. Conditional bail was set at $50,000, including the conditions that He have no contact with the victim and turn in her passport within three hours after her release.

She remained in custody as of Friday at the Kandiyohi County Jail. Her next scheduled court appearance is for a remote hearing on March 20.

According to the criminal complaint, Willmar police were dispatched March 9 to a business in the 2400 block of First Street South. The owner was waving the officer down outside, but the 911 caller was said to be inside the business.

The caller, the woman from California, was sitting on the floor of the business and appeared to be crying. She told the officer through an interpreter that He, her boss, had confined her in a small room within the building, would not let her eat or drink or turn on lights, and would not allow her to leave.

She advised the officer that she had flown to Minnesota from California on March 3 and had been living inside the business since then. She alleged that He would lock her inside a small room every day whenever there was no business appointments.

According to the complaint, the woman told the officer that she had given a 30-minute massage to a customer that day and when the customer asked for more work to be done, He became upset with her and punched her on the head. She further stated that she felt dizzy and had a headache.

The woman was transported to the hospital via ambulance for treatment of minor injuries.

At the hospital, she told a detective that she had been in Willmar for approximately one week after she found employment through an agency based in Los Angeles.

According to the complaint, she paid the agency $100 and was told her flight to Minnesota would cost about $630. She advised she paid for half of her flight ticket and He, her new boss, paid for the other half and arranged an Uber to bring her to Willmar from the airport.

The woman told police that He controlled her movements and she was forced to begin working the day after she arrived. She further stated He told her to do “whatever the customer wanted her to do.”

The woman alleged He told her to perform sex acts on customers, clarifying that “small jobs” meant masturbating the customer, and “big jobs” meant having intercourse with the customer.

According to the complaint, when the woman refused to do as instructed, He got mad at her and allegedly threatened that she would find her if she tried to leave. He allegedly described her own boss in Los Angeles as a lawyer who worked for the courts.

When He spoke to the responding officer, she denied hitting the woman and said the woman had yelled at her and tried to hit her with a water bottle, according to the complaint.

She told police the woman was driving customers away because she did not know how to do massages. She told the officer she wanted the woman to leave and denied forcing her to live there, according to the complaint.

Police later returned to He’s business and viewed surveillance video. According to the complaint, the video shows an interaction between the woman and He in a hallway outside a client room that an adult male was seen entering.

It is unclear what the interaction was about, according to the complaint, but the two women passed each other and the video shows that He punches the woman on her head and punches her a second time before the woman starts walking away.

After reviewing the video, officers placed He under arrest.

According to the complaint, law enforcement seized eight different cellphones along with business ledgers and DNA swabs from inside the business while executing a search warrant.

Related Articles

Crime & Public Safety |


Terminated St. Paul firefighter loses appeal over subduing patient with neck pressure points

Crime & Public Safety |


Inmate sentenced for assaulting Oak Park Heights prison sergeant

Crime & Public Safety |


Teen driver fled police as passenger fired shots at Ramsey County sheriff’s deputy, charges say

Crime & Public Safety |


Man found fatally shot in vehicle in St. Paul’s Dayton’s Bluff

Crime & Public Safety |


St. Paul man charged with shooting at Ramsey County sheriff’s deputy

 

16 Mar 2024

Pamela Paul: Colleges are putting their futures at risk

by | posted in: Society | 0

For more than a century, an understanding existed between America’s universities and the rest of the country.

Universities educated the nation’s future citizens in whatever ways they saw fit. Their faculty determined what kind of research to carry out and how, with the understanding that innovation drives economic progress. This gave them an essential role and stake in both a pluralistic democracy and a capitalist economy — without being subject to the whims of politics or industry.

The government helped finance universities with tax breaks and research funding. The public paid taxes and often exorbitant tuition fees. And universities enjoyed what has come to be known as academic freedom, the ability for those in higher education to operate free from external pressure.

“Academic freedom allows us to choose which areas of knowledge we seek and pursue them,” said Anna Grzymala-Busse, a professor of international studies at Stanford University. “Politically, what society expects of us is to train citizens and provide economic mobility, and that has been the bedrock of political and economic support for universities. But if universities are not fulfilling these missions, and are seen as prioritizing other missions instead, that political bargain becomes very fragile.”

Her remarks came during a recent conference on civil discourse at Stanford, ranging from free expression on campus to diversity, equity and inclusion hiring statements. But underlying all the discussions was a real fear that universities had strayed from their essential duties, imperiling the kind of academic freedom they had enjoyed for decades.

Of course, there have long been attempts at political interference in academia, with a distrust of elitism smoldering beneath the widespread disdain for the ivory tower. But in the past few years, these sentiments have boiled over into action, with universities jolted by everything from activism by its trustees to congressional investigations to the wresting of control by the state to the threatened withdrawal of government support.

The number of Republicans expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in universities plummeted to 19% last year, from 56% in 2015, according to Gallup polls, apparently due largely to a belief that universities were too liberal and were pushing a political agenda, a 2017 poll found. But it could get much worse.

“A Trump presidency with a Republican legislative majority could remake higher education as we’ve known it,” Steven Brint, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, warned last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, citing the potential for the Department of Justice to investigate universities for admissions procedures, for example, or penalties for schools that the government determines are overly beholden to social justice priorities. In some states, it could mean decreased funding from the state, the elimination of ethnic studies or even the requirement of patriotism oaths.

That would bump up against what many students, faculty and administrators view as the point of a college education.

“I was reading applications for my graduate program,” said Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford. “The person would describe their political activism and then say, ‘And now I will continue that work through my Ph.D.’ They see academia as a natural progression.” But, she cautioned, the social justice mentality isn’t conducive to the university’s work.

“We have to keep stressing to students that there’s something to being open-ended in our work; we don’t always know where we want to go,” Burns said.

Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.

“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”

Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”

One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.

At last month’s conference, Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.

As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless. Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern University, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.

The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.

When universities become overtly political and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.

Pamela Paul writes a column for the New York Times.

Related Articles

Opinion |


Other voices: TikTok scapegoated for failure to regulate Big Tech

Opinion |


Thomas Friedman: Netanyahu is making Israel radioactive

Opinion |


Karl W. Smith: If only Congress would focus on the deficit that matters

Opinion |


Stephen L. Carter: The Ivy League is right to revive the SAT

Opinion |


Lisa Jarvis: Sex differences could be key to treating long COVID — and so much else

16 Mar 2024

Column: New QBs coach Kerry Joseph says ‘it’s about trust’ with the Chicago Bears QB — whoever that ends up being

by | posted in: News | 0

MOBILE, Ala. — Kerry Joseph doesn’t have any thoughts yet on the Chicago Bears’ biggest offseason decision, the one that holds the key to the NFL draft.

The team’s new quarterbacks coach, hired Friday, doesn’t even know where his office is at Halas Hall. He has been on a whirlwind tour since the season ended, free to seek a new job after the Seattle Seahawks forced out coach Pete Carroll.

Joseph, the assistant quarterbacks coach for the Seahawks the last two seasons, spent one day in Lake Forest interviewing for the Bears job. In between, he was scrambling to get to Mobile, where he’s serving as quarterbacks coach of the American team in the Senior Bowl.

Somehow along the way, Joseph got hooked up with Bears gear and was wearing a team-issued navy hat, navy shorts and gray sweatshirt at practice Tuesday at Hancock Whitney Stadium on the South Alabama campus.

He doesn’t have preliminary thoughts on Justin Fields. Joseph was the assistant wide receivers coach in Seattle in 2021, when the Bears drafted Fields. He has yet to dig in on this year’s draft, in which the Bears hold the first and ninth picks and are in position to select a new quarterback.

“I was getting transitioned to coming out here,” the 50-year-old Joseph said.

It’s the first time he has been an NFL position coach — above the assistant position coach level. The connection is easy to make. He worked with new Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who came from the Seahawks. The Bears also interviewed Seahawks quarterbacks coach Greg Olson for the offensive coordinator job.

The last first-time quarterbacks coach the Bears hired was Shane Day in 2010 based on his experience working with then-offensive coordinator Mike Martz in San Francisco. Since Day, the Bears have rolled through Jeremy Bates, Matt Cavanaugh, Dowell Loggains, Dave Ragone, John DeFilippo and most recently Andrew Janocko.

It would be overly dramatic to say this is the most important offseason for a Bears quarterbacks coach. There has been urgency to get the position right for the longest time. It just so happens they own the No. 1 draft pick as they prepare to thoroughly examine a talented group of passers, including USC’s Caleb Williams, North Carolina’s Drake Maye (who was a spectator at practice Tuesday), LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy.

Joseph, who was responsible for red-zone preparation with the Seahawks, had a hand in helping revive Geno Smith’s career in Seattle as Smith threw for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns in 2022. Joseph’s knowledge of Waldron’s system will be critical whether the Bears draft a quarterback or not.

“When you think about Shane and what we were able to do with the (Seahawks) offense, I think quarterback play is about having confidence,” Joseph said. “Quarterback play is just about being competitive. It’s about being smart, being dependable, having a good IQ of the game, being passionate.

“When you think about traits, when you talk about quarterback play and when you talk about Shane’s mentality, it’s just about being connected to the play caller, being connected to the offense. There are some things you’ve got to have and you’ve got to bring to it.”

Joseph was a quarterback at McNeese State and had a 42-11 record as a four-year starter, helping the Cowboys to two Southland Conference titles. He spent time with the Cincinnati Bengals in 1996 as an undrafted free agent before playing in NFL Europe. He tried to make the Washington Redskins as a slot back and then played safety for the Seahawks from 1998 to 2001, appearing in 56 games with 14 starts.

He returned to quarterback in the Canadian Football League in 2003, winning a Grey Cup with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 2007, when he was named the league’s most outstanding player. After retiring following the 2014 season, he got into coaching at the college level with stops at his alma mater and Southeastern Louisiana before joining the Seahawks as an offensive assistant in 2020.

The diverse background — having played defense in the NFL — gives him a different perspective to teach offensive football.

“It helps me tremendously,” Joseph said, “because playing the safety position, playing that dime (position), playing down in the box helped me understand how defenses attack the offense, how guys fit. So now that I’ve gone back to quarterback, I see it from a defensive mentality.

“Being able to help guys to understand the game, not just from the offensive side but from the defensive side, kind of helped (with) where to put their eyes. That’s what it did for me as a player, and I try to teach it that way with a defensive mentality.”

Joseph will learn where his office is soon, and then he can hit the ground running as the Bears prepare for the draft and install a new offense — quite possibly with a new quarterback. As far as his philosophy on developing a young quarterback, he leaned into some basic tenets.

“I use three things: accountability, responsibility, communication,” Joseph said. “It’s about trust, believing and having confidence in each other. A quarterbacks coach and a quarterback, you’ve got to have those three things.

“Then, hey, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s about developing the fundamentals, developing the mentality to be a good leader. To be a winner. Just willing to compete. There are so many things that I have in my philosophy as a person that I take into the coaching world and into the quarterback room to help develop a group of guys.”

()

16 Mar 2024

Chicago Bears zero in on Chris Beatty — DJ Moore’s college position coach — as their wide receivers coach

by | posted in: News | 0

Chicago Bears wide receiver DJ Moore could reunite with his former college coach.

The Bears are working to hire Chris Beatty to be their wide receivers coach, though it was not yet official Tuesday morning, a source confirmed. Beatty was Moore’s position coach for two of his three seasons at Maryland, including 2017, when Moore was the Big Ten wide receiver of the year.

Beatty would join the Bears after three seasons as the Los Angeles Chargers wide receivers coach, his first NFL stint after 15 years coaching in college.

He would replace Tyke Tolbert, whom the Bears fired along with offensive coordinator Luke Getsy and three other offensive staffers earlier this month. ESPN first reported the news of the expected hire.

Along with his time at Maryland, where he was promoted to associate head coach and co-offensive coordinator, Beatty was a position coach at Pittsburgh, Virginia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Vanderbilt, West Virginia, Northern Illinois and Hampton. He was the co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach under Tim Beckman during his lone season with the Illini in 2012.

A former wide receiver at East Tennessee State and in the Canadian Football League, Beatty started his coaching career at the high school level.

He would be tasked with coaching a wide receivers group that Bears general manager Ryan Poles might look to bolster after it lacked production beyond Moore in 2023.

In his first season with the Bears and quarterback Justin Fields, Moore had a career-high 96 catches for 1,364 yards and eight touchdowns.

But Darnell Mooney had his worst season with 31 catches on 61 targets for 414 yards and a touchdown. And rookie Tyler Scott had a bumpy first season, finishing with 17 catches on 32 targets for 168 yards.

Beatty would be the fifth Bears coaching hire this offseason. They previously hired offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph and defensive coordinator Eric Washington and are hiring Thomas Brown as passing game coordinator. They also need to hire a running backs coach.

()