Two people are in custody following a kidnapping at the Lovejoy Walmart Saturday, July 16.
Khaliyah Jones, 18, was allegedly taken from the store’s parking lot by her ex-boyfriend Cameron Hopkins, 19.
Witnesses told police Hopkins broke a window of a vehicle Jones was in with a handgun, pulled her from the car and forced her into his vehicle and then fled.
Later, Hopkins left his vehicle and called Demarco Jennings to pick him up. When Jennings arrived Hopkins allegedly forced Jones in the car and they began traveling to Albany.
Police said Jones was able to escape the car and ran to a nearby business for help while providing police the location the two were heading to.
With the help of the Albany Police Department and information from Jones, both Hopkins and Jennings were arrested and returned to Clayton County where they remain in jail. . . . Hopkins is charged with making terroristic threats, kidnapping, criminal damage and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. For his part, Jennings is facing kidnapping charges.
A man accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend was out on bond at the time of the alleged crime after the Clayton County District Attorney’s Office missed a crucial administrative deadline, court records and District Attorney Tasha Mosley confirm.
Cameron Hopkins faces malice murder and other charges after allegedly abducting and fatally shooting his 19-year-old ex-girlfriend, Khaliyah Jones, on July 16.
At the time, court records show that the 20-year-old Hopkins was out on bond for similar charges from one year earlier. On July 16, 2022, arrest warrants allege he abducted Khaliyah from a Lovejoy Walmart at gunpoint. In the warrant application, the investigator wrote: “After kidnapping the victim… Cameron Hopkins was contacted via phone at which time he said if the police attempts[sic] to pull him over as he flees with the victim that he will shoot and kill her.”
Khaliyah’s family is now left wondering how Hopkins was ever released on bond. “Why? Why was he let out?” asked Khaliyah’s mother, Bridgette Jones.
An error made by prosecutors may be responsible.
Under current Georgia law, a felony defendant cannot be held in jail without bond for more than 90 days after their arrest without an indictment. If prosecutors do not obtain an indictment within that 90 day timeline, a judge is typically required to grant the defendant bond — regardless of the charges.
“You’re on the clock,” said Danny Porter, who served as Gwinnett County’s district attorney for decades before leaving office in 2020.
“DA’s offices have to have some kind of a system,” he said. “You have to track these.”
Clayton County prosecutors did not obtain an indictment until March 2023 — more than seven months after Hopkins’ July 2022 arrest, according to court documents obtained by 11Alive.
Court records show that a magistrate court judge initially denied Hopkins bond on his July 2022 kidnapping and related charges, but after more than 90 days passed without an indictment, a superior court judge reversed course in October 2022 and granted bond.
In a phone interview, Clayton County District Attorney Mosley said “we did miss the 90-day time period to indict.” She called the oversight “a mistake.” “My child is dead because of a ‘mistake’?” asked Bridgette Jones. “I do not accept that.”
According to the October 2022 Clayton County Superior Court bond order granted after prosecutors missed their 90-day deadline, Hopkins was ordered to wear a GPS ankle monitor, stay out of Clayton County except for court dates or attorney meetings, and stay away from Khaliyah Jones — in addition to meeting a $150,000 bond.
“We did everything that we could with the bond conditions to ensure that she was as safe as we possibly could,” District Attorney Mosley said.
While out on bond from those 2022 charges, law enforcement says Hopkins abducted Jones once again. This time, they allege, he led law enforcement on a high speed chase that ended at Lovejoy High School. Police say he fatally shot Khaliyah in the school driveway.
It’s the same school where, one year earlier, she received her diploma.
“In my eyes, the police did their job. They caught the criminal,” Bridgette Jones said. “But between the prosecutor and the courts, y’all failed.”
Hopkins has pleaded not guilty to all of his 2022 charges, according to his attorney Steve Frey. He has not yet had an opportunity to enter a formal plea for his 2023 charges, according to Frey.
District Attorney Mosley says that her office has changed its procedures in an effort to prevent an oversight like this from happening again. They’ve implemented changes in the ways they interact with magistrate court, including “a shared email just going to… the top command so that we get those cases and start working on them quicker,” she told 11Alive.
Bridgette Jones says those changes came too late for her daughter.
“We lost a great human that was going to help a lot of people,” she said. “Khaliyah just wanted to help people.”
Before we get to the matter of the prosecutor’s error that led to this murder, let me ask something: Who posted bail for Cameron Hopkins?
Last time I checked, bail bondsmen required 10% of the bond amount to be paid in cash, so if the bond for Cameron Hopkins was $150,000, somebody had to pay $15,000 cash to get him out on bond. Now, suppose one of your kids got messed up and committed a heinous crime like this. Would you pay $15,000 so your child could be released from jail while awaiting trial? As for me, the answer is hell, no. My children better not ever do anything like that, but if they did, they could just sit their ass in jail, because I sure as hell don’t have a spare $15,000 laying around.
Now what about that Clayton County district attorney, whose “mistake” — oops! — let Cameron Hopkins get out of jail, because her office missed the deadline to get him indicted so he could be held without bond? It took seven months for them to get the indictment, by which time Hopkins had been out of jail for more than four months. Shouldn’t there be some kind of accountability for such a failure? Georgia legislators thought so, which is why they passed a law creating a commission with the power to remove local prosecutors who “refuse to uphold the law.”
A coalition of Georgia district attorneys is suing to challenge a state law that created a commission to remove and discipline state prosecutors.
The group of four district attorneys is challenging a recently signed bill that established the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission (PACQ), which holds the power to remove local prosecutors who “refuse to uphold the law.” At the time, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said the commission would curb “far-left prosecutors” who are “making our communities less safe.”
The effort is being led by DeKalb District Attorney Sherry Boston and also includes Towaliga District Attorney Jonathan Adams, Augusta District Attorney Jared Williams, and Cobb District Attorney Flynn Broady. The prosecutors in a press release said that Senate Bill 92 (SB 92) “overrides the will of voters, threatens prosecutorial independence, and violates federal and state constitutions.” . . .
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in Fulton County Superior Court, questions the constitutionality of the bill and says it oversteps by requiring district attorneys to review every single case. It says that it violates the separation of powers clause in the Georgia Constitution, noting that district attorneys fall within the jurisdiction of the judicial branch.
“This duty is practically unworkable, limiting district attorneys’ ability to define enforcement priorities and approaches and distracting from the prosecution of meritorious cases,” the lawsuit states. . . .
“Not only is SB 92 unconstitutional, this new Commission is also unnecessary and wasteful,” Boston said. “Georgia already provides other ways to address misconduct by prosecutors — including Bar discipline, impeachment, and ultimately, the ballot box.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr vowed to defend the law in court, saying that district attorneys are “not immune from accountability.”
“I have great respect for the important role District Attorneys play in protecting Georgia’s citizens,” Carr said in a statement. “Unfortunately, some District Attorneys have embraced the progressive movement across the nation of refusing to enforce the law. That is a dereliction of duty, and as a result, Georgia’s communities suffer.”
What about the murder of Khaliyah Jones? Isn’t this a clear example of the kind of “dereliction of duty” that Attorney General Carr wants to prevent? And where are the “social justice” activists? Where is Black Lives Matter? Why aren’t they protesting outside the Clayton County courthouse, demanding that District Attorney Tasha Mosley resign? As for the feminists who love to lecture us about “violence against women” — Amanda Marcotte, Jessica Valenti, et al. — they haven’t said say a word about the murder of Khaliyah Jones, for some reason.
A D.C. grand jury on Tuesday indicted former President Trump on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Meanwhile, murders in D.C. have increased 19% this year, and are on track for a 20-year high. But you see, our violence-plagued national capital is full of Democrats, who think that sending Republicans to federal prison is necessary, whereas carjackers and drug dealers are permitted to run free. So don’t worry about the dozens of people who get robbed, raped, stabbed or shot every month in D.C. No, you should worry about “election deniers,” who don’t believe Joe Biden actually got 81 million votes.
The Criminal Class now effectively controls our government.
In the 2021 NFL draft, five quarterbacks were first-round picks:
1. Trevor Lawrence (Clemson) — Jacksonville Jaguars
2. Zack Wilson (Brigham Young) — New York Jets
3. Trey Lawrence (North Dakota State) — S.F. 49ers
11. Justin Fields (Ohio State) — Chicago Bears
15. Mac Jones (Alabama) — New England Patriots
Being a lifelong Alabama fan, of course I was outraged by the implied disrespect to my boy Mac, who had just led the Crimson Tide to an undefeated season and a national championship. Mac had the most passing yards of any college quarterback that season, and set an NCAA record for highest percentage of passes completed (77.4). My sense of insult was subsequently vindicated by the results of the first season for these five rookie quarterbacks:
Mac Jones — completed 352 of 521 passing attempts (67.6%) for 3,801 yards, 22 TDs, 13 interceptions, plus 129 yards and zero TDs rushing — 3,930 total yards, 22 total TDs.
Trevor Lawrence — completed 359 of 602 passing attempts (59.6%) for 3,641 yards, 12 TDs, 17 interceptions, plus 334 yards and 2 TDs rushing — 3,975 total yards, 14 total TDs.
Zack Wilson — completed 213 of 383 passing attempts (55.6%) for 2,334 yards, 9 TDs, 11 interceptions, plus 185 yards and 4 TDs rushing — 2,519 total yards, 15 total TDs.
Justin Fields — completed 159 of 270 passing attempts (58.9%) for 1,870 yards, 7 TDs, 10 interceptions, plus 420 yards and 2 TDs rushing — 2,290 total yards, 9 total TDs.
Trey Lance — completed 41 of 71 passing attempts (57.7%) for 603 yards, 5 TDs, 2 interceptions, plus 168 yards and 1 TD rushing — 771 total yards, 15 total TDs.
Mac Jones had more touchdowns, more passing yards and a higher completion percentage than all four of the quarterbacks drafted ahead of him. Only Trevor Lawrence was close to matching Jones’s rookie performance and, it must be admitted, part of Lawrence’s problem in 2021 was that the head coach in Jacksonville was a notorious asshole.
Leaving aside Lawrence, who led the Jaguars to the playoffs last year and appears to have a bright future ahead of him in the NFL, the three other QBs drafted ahead of Mac Jones in 2021 can all be classified as failures. The Chicago Bears still consider Justin Fields their starting QB, but the Bears went 3-14 last season, and their decision to stick with Fields is just more evidence that the team ownership is not serious about winning football games (as if more evidence were needed). The Jets, by bringing in Aaron Rodgers at QB, have more or less admitted that drafting Wilson was a mistake. And then there is the case of Trey Lance.
Prior to the 2021 draft, the 49ers traded their first-round picks in 2021, 2022 and 2023, as well as their third-round pick in 2022, to the Miami Dolphins in order to move up to the third pick in the draft. It was widely speculated at the time that San Francisco did this with the intent of picking Mac Jones who, as I say, had just won the national championship and set an NCAA record for completion percentage as a senior at Alabama. Instead, the 49ers picked Trey Lance. Why?
Despite early interest in Alabama’s Mac Jones, Lance won out at No. 3 because the Niners believed he had the traits to develop into one of those special players.
On the field, they saw above-average arm strength and elite physical attributes. Off it, they saw a magnetic personality and work ethic.
“Kyle [Shanahan, San Francisco’s head coach] is always looking for ways to expand the offense and come up with all of these great schemes that he does, and Trey was more mobile than Jimmy [Garropolo, the 49ers’ starting QB] allowed,” a team personnel source said. “That opened up possibilities.”
Lance arrived from FCS North Dakota State with the fewest college pass attempts (318) of any first-round quarterback selected in the past 41 years, so the Niners expected a learning curve.
Oh, “elite physical attributes.” Well, that hasn’t translated to a successful NFL career yet, and it probably never will. Why did Trey Lance have so few pass attempts in college? As a redshirt freshman in 2019, Lance led North Dakota State to a Division I (FCS) national championship, but the team’s 2020 season was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lance could have kept playing for North Dakota State, but opted instead to enter the NFL draft, so the 49ers were basically picking him on the basis of a single season — and not in the top tier of college competition.
Forgive me for not being impressed by the statistics that Lance accumulated in 2019 against such football opponents as Nicholls, Southern Illinois and UC-Davis. In the FCS championship game, North Dakota State defeated James Madison University — a fine school, located in the scenic Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, but what do you think would happen if JMU were to play the University of Alabama? At Alabama, Mac Jones had to wait his turn at quarterback behind Jalen Hurts and Tua Tagovailoa — both now NFL starters — and Mac’s impressive statistics his senior season were accumulated against such opponents as Texas A&M, Georgia, LSU, Florida, Notre Dame and Ohio State.
Oh, but Mac doesn’t have a “magnetic personality” or whatever, and so the 49ers, having traded away three first-round picks in order to move up in the 2021 draft, instead decided to take Trey Lance.
The idea seemed to be that Lance would serve his rookie year as an understudy to the veteran Garropolo, who had a history of injuries that might give the rookie a chance to start. Sure enough, in Week 4 of the season, Jimmy G injured his calf, and Lance came in for the second half against the Seattle Seahawks, throwing for two touchdowns, but still losing 28-21. In Week 5, Lance started against the Arizona Cardinals, and lost 17-10. Garropolo was healthy enough to start in Week 6, so Lance went back to the bench until Week 17, after Garropolo had injured his thumb in the previous week’s game. As the starter against the Houston Texans, Lance threw for two touchdowns in a 23-7 victory. But Houston was one of the worst teams in the league, finishing the season 3-14, and by the time Lance got his first NFL victory as a starter, Mac Jones had already started 16 games for the Patriots, winning 10 of them.
Despite the paucity of Lance’s success as a rookie, the 49ers named him as their starter going into the 2022 season, but that didn’t last long. He lost the season opener against the Chicago Bears, and in the second game, against the Seattle Seahawks, Lance suffered a season-ending broken ankle in the first quarter. Jimmy G then came in to lead the 49ers to victory, and remained the starting QB until Week 13, when he injured his foot in the first quarter against the Miami Dolphins and San Francisco was forced to call on the services of rookie QB Brock Purdy, whom the team had drafted with the very last pick (262nd overall) of that year’s NFL draft. The unheralded rookie proved to be phenomenal, leading the 49ers on a seven-game winning streak that only ended with a loss in the NFC Championship Game against the Eagles, after Purdy was knocked out of the game with an elbow injury.
Garropolo, as a free agent, signed with the Las Vegas Raiders in the off-season, but Purdy’s elbow is supposedly healed, and what are the chances that Trey Lance, with his “magnetic personality,” will see any significant playing time with the 49ers this year? Not too good. Lance’s “elite physical attributes” are likely diminished after breaking his ankle last season, and so it would appear that San Francisco more or less wasted their first-round pick, when they could have had Mac Jones instead.
To explain what’s gone wrong with American journalism is a task so enormous that it’s hard to know where to begin. Whatever faults and failures the profession had back in the days of printing words on paper — yes, kids, that actually happened — there were nevertheless certain standards that were enforced, because you couldn’t just delete an article that got the facts wrong. No, if you got it wrong, you had to print a correction, and when I was at The Washington Times, we didn’t have to print very many of those, while we used to laugh at the numerous corrections that appeared every day on Page 2 of our hated cross-town rival, the Washington Post. Every word in the paper got read by at least four different editors before it went to print.
My job, on most days, was as the very lowest level — an assistant desk editor — and when I was finished editing the story, it got sent to the copy desk, where two more editors read it. Eventually, the news editor (Geoff Etnyre) would read it, and oh, my God! You did not want to be the desk editor whose initials were on a story with a mistake in it that somehow got past the copy desk and made it to Etnyre. He was a very serious man with a very short temper. This was because Etnyre was the next-to-the-last line of defense before a story made it to the eyes of the one reader who mattered most, our editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden, Jr.
Here’s the big thing: Working for The Washington Times was not an entry-level job. To get hired as a reporter at TWT, generally someone had to have 3-to-5 years experience working at another paper, like the Winchester (Va.) Star. By the time I joined TWT as an assistant national editor in 1997, I already had more than a decade of experience at smaller papers in Georgia. The national desk was a pressure cooker, and our reporters were all experienced professionals. Our youngest reporter at the time was Stephen Dinan, who’d served his time covering Virginia politics on the Metro desk before moving up to the Capitol Hill bureau.
My point is that, in the old days, kids fresh out of college weren’t writing stories about national politics. Most reporters started at some dinky small-town paper out in the sticks, and learned their craft covering city council meeting, etc. In his memoir, Prince of Darkness, Robert Novak recalls that when he joined the D.C. bureau of the Associated Press in 1957, he was the only reporter under 30 in the entire bureau. Novak started his career as a teenager writing local sports for the Joliet Herald-News at the rate of 10 cents per column-inch. In college, he wrote for the Champaign-Urbana Courier, then after serving in the Army during the Korean War, joined the Associated Press in their Omaha, Nebraska, bureau. It took him five years to make his way from Omaha to D.C.
That was how you did it back in the day — you paid your dues. But nowadays every callow punk with a laptop and a wifi connection seems to think he should be commenting on Important National Political News, and almost nobody’s getting the experience of doing basic local news stuff that was once the training ground of young reporters. Having sufficiently vented my spleen on that topic, now here’s this:
Surveying the disgraceful condition of our nation’s 21st-century news media, there are times when the question occurs to me, “What would Wes Pruden do?” During the decade I worked as an assistant editor at The Washington Times, I occasionally had the misfortune of angering our esteemed editor-in-chief, who had a low tolerance for errors. Being called on the carpet in Mr. Pruden’s office was an experience one never wished to repeat. As the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital, our work was always critically scrutinized, and Mr. Pruden enforced high standards to ensure that the news reporting in The Washington Times was always accurate. “Get it first, get it right,” was his motto, and woe be unto he who got it wrong.
Mr. Pruden died three years ago, but his memory lives on, and I have to wonder what he would make of a headline that appeared this week in the Huff Post: “RFK Jr.’s Latest Tweet Is Being Widely Interpreted As A Nazi Dog Whistle.” The key phrase there is “Widely Interpreted,” by which they mean, random people on Twitter are saying stuff.
Where did it come from, this business of turning Twitter content into “news”? The root cause of this phenomenon is probably laziness. Rather than pick up the phone and call some sources about what’s happening in the real world — or, God forbid, leave Mommy’s basement to see for yourself what’s happening — it’s much easier just to cut and paste something you found on the Internet and pretend that this is “reporting.” . . .
The 31-year-old “Knuckle Princess”, Japanese protege of former major league knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield, fought back from injuries that confined her to coaching to take another stab at pro baseball in the US. Having played previously for the Chico Outlaws of the independent Golden State League, she’s back this year with a traveling team in the Empire Professional Baseball League, another independent league in New York. Considering the longevity of most knuckleball pitchers, she could be pitching for another decade…and still looking like a teenager. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
