A jury has convicted a Minneapolis man of bringing a 14-year-old girl and a 20-year-old woman to his alleged accomplice’s Mahtomedi apartment where they were given drugs and sexually assaulted earlier this year.

Billy Ray Wiley, 52, was found guilty Tuesday in Washington County District Court of two counts of sex trafficking and one each of first- and third-degree criminal sexual conduct in connection with the case, which followed a multi-agency investigation led by the East Metro Human Trafficking Task Force.

Billy Ray Wiley (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Wiley looked for women and girls in the Twin Cities area, often approaching them near grocery stores or in the street in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He would offer them rides, drugs or money.

“This case is a horrifying example of a predator preying on the most vulnerable members of our community,” County Attorney Kevin Magnuson said in a post-verdict statement. “I truly admire the courage of the two young victims who not only survived these horrific assaults, but also bravely testified at trial — despite being forced to relive their trauma when the defendant, representing himself, cross-examined them in open court.”

Jurors answered yes to all four questions on a verdict form, allowing the prosecution to argue for an upward departure from state sentencing guidelines. Wiley remains jailed ahead of sentencing, which is set for Jan. 7.

Michael Lewis (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Co-defendant Michael Lewis, 69, of Mahtomedi, faces two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct. He remains jailed, and is due back in court Friday.

According to the criminal complaints:

Officers were called to the Piccadilly Square Apartments, a 62+ housing community near Wildwood and Stillwater roads, on June 30 on a report of a teenager dancing in the parking lot and screaming, “no no no.” The person who called said an unknown man dropped her off about four hours earlier.

A man identified as Lewis stepped out the front door of the apartment. The teen, later identified as the 14-year-old, pointed to him and said she was with Lewis and one of his friends, the complaints said. Officers spoke with Lewis, who said he did not know the teen.

Officers searched her purse and found several unopened condoms and drug paraphernalia.

She was taken to the hospital, where investigators met with her and asked how she knew the man who brought her to the apartment. She said he was a “friend,” who she referred to as “Billy,” and she said he often drove around her neighborhood.

The teen told investigators in a follow-up interview several days later that “when Wiley picked her up, she knew she would be expected to engage in sexual acts in exchange for money and drugs.” She said Wiley had given her crack cocaine and brought her to the apartment, where she was sexually and physically assaulted by Wiley and the other man. She identified Lewis as the man inside the apartment after looking at a photo.

Earlier, on June 13, a 20-year-old woman reported to St. Paul police that a man, later identified as Wiley, picked her up while she was waiting for a bus on Lake Street in Minneapolis. She said he brought her to an apartment, where he physically and sexually assaulted her.

After the assault, Wiley drove her to downtown St. Paul. Once she got out of the car, she asked people on the street for help and they flagged down an officer.

She told police he recorded the sexual assault on his phone, and investigators later recovered the video and identified the location as Lewis’ apartment, the complaints said.

Law enforcement obtained a tracking warrant and arrested Wiley on July 8 when he drove by the Piccadilly apartments.

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Law enforcement also arrested Lewis, and drug paraphernalia was found in his apartment.

A 17-year-old girl was in the car with Wiley. She said that earlier in the day, in the area of Dale Street and University Avenue in St. Paul, Wiley “pulled up right next to her and asked her what she needed. He then gave her a cigarette and asked if she wanted to go for a ride,” the complaints said.

She said they drove around for several hours, and he “told her that she was pretty and had a nice body,” the complaints said. She said she told Wiley several times to drop her off, but he kept driving.

The teen also told officers “that many girls who are struggling with addiction hang around Dale and University” and “said that Wiley is known to pick up a lot of girls in the area,” the complaints said.

When you are going through a tough stretch, some friends reach out with words of encouragement. Gophers men’s hockey coach Bob Motzko — whose team is off to its most challenging start in his eight seasons at the helm — has also heard from true friends who offer, well, other sentiments.

Motzko’s Gophers are 2-7-1 in their first 10 games. They lost twice at home to Minnesota Duluth to close the nonconference schedule, then opened Big Ten play with a pair of losses at Wisconsin last week, marking the first time in Motzko’s tenure at Minnesota that the Gophers have been swept in back-to-back series.

“I’ve been reminded of that,” Motzko said this week. “One of my good buddies called, said, ‘Good. This hasn’t happened to you. Glad you’re going through it. You live like the rest of us.’”

Motzko would not officially reveal the caller’s name, but he has spoken often in the past about his lifelong friendship with Bemidji State coach Tom Serratore. And Motzko confirmed the call came from a 218 area code number.

For the first time since before the 2020 pandemic, the weekly national college hockey rankings did not include the Gophers this week.

The numbers paint a clear picture of what hasn’t worked in the season’s first five weeks.

Minnesota is last in the Big Ten offensively, scoring just 2.2 goals per game, and is last defensively, allowing 3.5 goals per game. Similarly, their power-play and penalty-kill stats sit in the cellar among the seven teams in their conference. And they are short four players due to injury currently.

There’s a certain correlation with Motzko speaking about the dearth of goal scoring in the same week that Oliver Moore was called up to make his NHL debut with the Chicago Blackhawks and Matthew Wood scored his third NHL goal for the Nashville Predators. Those two, and St. Louis Blues rookie Jimmy Snuggerud, were members of the 2024-25 Gophers, and all three opted to sign at the end of last season rather than play another year in maroon and gold.

Tackling the Gophers’ challenges one at a time as Notre Dame comes to Minneapolis this weekend for the first Big Ten home series of the season, Motzko talked about improving the penalty kill primarily by staying out of the penalty box, and seeing his sophomore defensemen make a needed step into bigger roles.

One of those second-year blueliners, Leo Gruba, won a state peewee title for the combined Johnson/Como/North St. Paul youth hockey team. As a prep at Hill-Murray, he was a state champion in 2020. Before arriving on campus, Gruba’s Fargo Force team won the national junior title in 2024. But along the way, he learned a lesson about perseverance that they’re hoping to apply with 25 games remaining and ample time to right the ship.

“I was a first-year bantam and our goalie quit. We didn’t have a goalie, so we lost like the first 15 games of the year. Literally 0-15. Might be a record in there somewhere,” Gruba recalled. “I try to pull from those experiences. As a kid, you just get frustrated and you kind of want to quit, but it’s a good lesson in there for us. That specific season, we actually turned things around, made the regional. We had a good season.”

Alex Begley, a junior defenseman who also made his way to Dinkytown via Hill-Murray, said the focus now is to take the lessons from those tough first 10 games, then forget all the rest.

“It gets us ready for the whole season, but I think we put that behind us,” Begley said. “Forget about it but learn from it and take some positives out of it. But we also need to learn from those mistakes that cost us some games.”

Motzko admitted that he’s hearing from restless fans, and joked that his wife even locked him out of the house upon returning from Madison. But the person ,who more than anyone helped bring sellouts back to the Gophers’ home rink, knows that the fans haven’t gone away, they’re just eager for better results.

“We have to own where we’re at,” he said, referencing the army of Gopher fans who invaded Florida for the 2023 NCAA Frozen Four. “The criticism that comes now, we’ll take it. It’s the same program that, when we go to Tampa Bay, has 11,000 people there. So, we’re going to have a loud crowd both ways.”

Notre Dame comes to Minneapolis with a 3-4-1 record under first-year head coach Brock Sheahan. The Gophers and Irish — who lost a pair of home games to Michigan last weekend — are the only Big Ten teams not nationally ranked currently. The Friday and Saturday games are both 7 p.m. starts.

Briefly

According to Motzko, Gophers freshman forward Teddy Townsend is expected to join the team’s lineup later this month. Townsend, 20, was hospitalized following an on-campus assault the night of Sept. 20 and has not played as a result of the injuries suffered in the attack. On Oct. 29, U of M Campus Police arrested a former high school and college hockey player as a suspect in the attack. He was booked into the Hennepin County jail, and released two days later. He has not been charged. Townsend, who is from Eden Prairie, had 40 points in 56 junior hockey games for the Waterloo (Iowa) Black Hawks last season.

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By ELLIOT SPAGAT

CHICAGO (AP) — An employee of a Chicago daycare center and preschool was detained by immigration authorities at work as children were being dropped off Wednesday, according to witnesses, reflecting the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive enforcement tactics.

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The employee ran from a vehicle into the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center after officers pulled in the parking lot right after her, Alderman Matt Martin said, citing witness accounts. The employee was detained between two glass doors at the entry while telling authorities she was a U.S. citizen, he said. Authorities went inside to question several people around 7 a.m., when the facility opened, according to witnesses.

It was unusual even under “Operation Midway Blitz,” which has resulted in more than 3,000 immigration arrests in the Chicago area since early September. Agents have rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter in a middle-of-the night apartment building raid, appeared with overwhelming force in recreational areas and launched tear gas amid protests.

The several officers at Wednesday’s arrest wore clothing that read “POLICE ICE,” identifying them as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, according to Martin, who said he gathered information from witnesses. Video circulating online showed at least one officer wore a vest that said “ICE” as the woman was restrained and removed from the building.

ICE and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rayito de Sol, which operates eight locations in Illinois and Minnesota, also did not respond to a request for comment. Following the arrest, its school in Chicago’s Roscoe Village closed for the day.

Parents gathered outside the preschool, sandwiched between dental offices in a strip mall, looking angered and dismayed.

Esmeralda Rosales rushed from work as her husband dropped off their 9-month-old child learned to show support for the staff. She said the woman arrested was her child’s teacher.

“These are the nicest, kindest people. They don’t deserve, these children don’t deserve to be living through this. This is just terrible, terrible, terrible,” she said.

Chris Widen, whose 4-month old is taught by the woman who was detained, said the operation came “at the school during the busiest time of drop-off where kids and families have to witness a teacher being forcibly removed and agents kitted up in practical gear.”

Adam Gonzalez was taking his child to Rayito on Wednesday morning to drop him off at preschool when he saw a commotion outside the school, with people yelling and federal immigration officers in body armor. Something didn’t feel right to him, he said, so he left his kid in the car and went to record the daycare teacher being detained by federal agents.

“I just thought I had to go record this,” Gonzalez said. “The world needs to see what’s happening, that this is not fake, that this is real.”

Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who has become a face of the immigration crackdown in Los Angeles and Chicago, has staunchly defended the administration’s tactics in the face of threats and protests.

“I didn’t have any reason to think it would be this bad, but it’s far worse than I ever thought,” he said in an interview Monday. He called his agents “sanctuary busters,” a swipe at so-called sanctuary cities, like Chicago, that limit cooperation with immigration authorities.

Associated Press writer Sarah Raza in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, contributed.

A 26-year-old passenger who died when she was trapped after a crash in St. Paul loved her four young children more than anything, her mother said Wednesday.

Qiara Gleason, whose nickname was Keke, was on her way home when the 35-year-old who was driving crashed and the vehicle started on fire.

Qiara “Keke” Gleason, 26, was the passenger in a single-vehicle crash on Nov. 2, 2025, at Arlington and Prosperity avenues. She died at the scene. (Courtesy of the family)

“Qiara didn’t deserve this, and for her children to grow up without a mom is unreal to me,” said her mother, Nichole Castile.

Officers responded about 3:25 a.m. Sunday to Arlington and Prosperity avenues to a single-vehicle crash. The vehicle was fully engulfed in flames and was on the grass with heavy front-end damage.

The driver, who had a leg injury, was lying behind the vehicle. She reported she’d tried to get Gleason out, but had not been able to, police have said.

St. Paul Fire Department medics took the driver to the hospital with a non-life threatening injury to her leg. She was unable to complete field sobriety tests, due to her injury, and police obtained a search warrant for medical staff to draw her blood for testing, according to police. Results are pending.

Daughter asking ‘Where’s my mom?’

The woman driving was an acquaintance of Gleason’s, Castile said. She said she wants answers about what happened in the crash and for the driver to be charged.

Gleason “had a bright smile,” her mother said. “She was a loving person. … God blessed me with her.”

Gleason’s oldest child, a girl, will turn 4 this weekend. She was also the mother to a 1-year-old son and 6-month-old twin boys.

Gleason’s daughter has been asking, “Where’s my mom? I want to go home with my mom.” Castile has been struggling with what to say. “How are you supposed to tell a kid at that age that your mama ain’t coming back?”

Relatives have started a GoFundMe (gofund.me/ec4673213), which says donations will “help support the care and daily needs of her four children as they adjust to life without their mom.” Funds will go to Castile as she raises Gleason’s children.

The family has experienced tragedy in the past. Gleason’s first cousin was Philando Castile, 32, who a St. Anthony police officer fatally shot during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights in 2016.

Gleason’s older sister, Rene Gleason, died at 31 in 2017. She was an innocent bystander when she was wounded in a shooting in Minneapolis three years earlier, was prescribed painkillers, and became dependent on them.

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