The sheriff’s office said the investigation remains ongoing.
Page A3From§Eachthe late evening edition — 3 September 2026
Authorities call motorcyclist ramming picket line 'ongoing investigation,' call protester outside ICE 'terrorism' worth 50 years.
As it ran on the front
I need somebody at an actual law enforcement agency to explain a word to me, because it's got me stuck and I don't want to guess. I'm not a lawyer. I've never played one, on television or off. But there's language in two files on my desk that means two different things depending on which file you're reading, and the people who write it for a living are the ones who ought to walk me through it.
Here's file one. A motorcyclist rode into a Teamsters picket line outside an Amazon warehouse this week. "Intentionally," the paper says — that's their word, not mine, and I trust wire reporters over my own eyeballs. Asked what happens to the rider now, the sheriff's office said the investigation remains ongoing. That's the whole quote. Ongoing.…
…(cont) Here's file two, and this is the one that stopped me, because of a single number on the second page. Fifty. As in Autumn Hill, thirty years old, who was standing outside a different kind of building last July — an ICE jail in Texas, with eight other people — and who is now serving that many years out of a correctional facility, convicted on terrorism-related charges after federal prosecutors said she and the others belonged to something they called an "antifa terror cell." She told a reporter, by phone, from prison, that she believes she's being punished for a political agenda. I can't tell you if that's true. I'm asking somebody who can.
So here's my favor. Can someone explain to me what makes one crowd, outside one building, a matter that's still open, still pending, no update since it happened — and what makes another crowd, outside another building, a matter that's closed, appealed, and sentenced? Is it the building? One was a warehouse, the other a jail. Is it the number of people standing there? Nine got charged as a group outside the jail. How many got charged outside the warehouse so far? I don't have that number. I checked.
I took both files out to the garage last night, where I do my clearer thinking, next to the car that still needs a fan belt I keep saying I'll get to, and I laid the two pages on the workbench the way you'd lay out two spark plugs to see which one's still worth using. One page said: we're still looking. The other page had the number I can't shake. I switched their order a few times. Which one changes first — the file that says ongoing, or the file that already has a sentence attached to it? That's not a trick question. One of them, by definition, has already stopped moving.
Actually — hold on. One more file landed on the desk while I was writing this, an older one, out of Italy, 2021: a driver rammed a truck into a crowd of workers picketing outside a supermarket, killed one of them, injured two more. The suspect was arrested near the scene. Not investigated. Not pending. Arrested, that day, at the scene. So here's my question, and it's the same one I started with: if that happened the same day, five years ago, in a different country, what does "ongoing" mean here? I don't know. That one's still ongoing too.
Fifty.
“Somebody rides a motorcycle into a Teamsters picket line outside an Amazon warehouse and the file says "investigation ongoing" — no name, no charge, no clock. A week outside an ICE jail with eight other people got a thirty-year-old woman fifty years, and federal prosecutors picked the words "terror cell" to explain why. Same sidewalk, same word — protest — and the sentence for standing on one is either open-ended or half a century, depending which fence you were standing outside of.”
“Look, you don't charge a motorcyclist in forty-eight hours, that's not how due process works, the sheriff's office is being careful — that's actually the system functioning correctly. The Prairieland Nine went through an actual trial, a jury heard the evidence, so comparing that to a guy who maybe lost control of his handlebars is — wait, did the story say "intentionally"? I didn't write that part. Let's just say both cases are moving through channels, at their own appropriate speeds.”
The receipts
“I’m absolutely being imprisoned for a political agenda,” activist Autumn Hill tells Democracy Now! in a phone call from Texas’s Johnson County Correctional Facility, where the 30-year-old trans woman is serving a 50-year prison sentence for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE jail last July.
· A driver intentionally rams his truck into a crowd of workers protesting outside a Lidl supermarket in Novara, Piedmont, Italy, killing one of the workers and injuring two others. The suspected attack from the morgue, 18 Jun 2021
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.