Emotions boiled over into outrage during a Friday afternoon sentencing hearing for a self-proclaimed spiritual healer who molested a 6-year-old child on South Whidbey.
A 53-year-old Oak Harbor resident is accused of assaulting his wife and then attacking a neighbor who came to help the woman, court documents state.
Prosecutors charged Michael Monschau in Island County Superior Court July 14 with assault in the second degree, assault in the fourth degree (domestic violence) and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Beaten and bloody, Peter Brandt lay in the darkness in the back of his own van. His hands and feet were bound with zip ties. He didn’t know where his captor was taking him and he didn’t know if was going to be killed.
Brandt didn’t panic, but entered into a dazed state.
“The curious thing about it is I felt so relaxed on the ride,” he said. “There was something in me that just went with the flow. I decided that I wasn’t going to be confrontational. I wasn’t going to try to escape.”
An elderly woman reported missing from her North Whidbey home twice sought court orders last year to protect her from her adult son. She claimed in one petition that he pointed a rifle at her head, court documents indicate.
A former Navy man who was accused of raping a small boy in Oak Harbor four years ago has filed a lawsuit against the attorneys who defended him in two separate trials.
Bryon Koeller and his wife, who are representing themselves in the lawsuit, filed the complaint for damages against Coupeville attorney Tom Pacher and former Coupeville attorney Darrin Hall, alleging that they failed to fully investigate the defense. Pacher contracts with Island County to provide public defense and Hall formerly worked for him.
The owner of an Oak Harbor used-car dealership that was shut down because of methamphetamine-contaminated vehicles two years ago has filed a lawsuit against Island County in federal court.
Mark Brown and his wife filed the complaint in U.S. District Court earlier this year and asked for unspecified damages. Brown, who’s not related to the sheriff of the same name, is a retired Oak Harbor school teacher and the owner of the former car lot, O&J Sales.
Fifty years ago this month, a seed of sorts was planted in the small farming town of Coupeville.
A group of business leaders and farmers started their own community bank, the first such bank on Whidbey Island. As the story goes, they wanted a bank run by local people which would invest in the local economy.
They called it Whidbey Island Bank. It opened with four full-time employees at the single Coupeville branch.
A 64-year-old Oak Harbor man who raped two young girls is facing more than 12 years in prison.
Richard Tice Sr. pleaded guilty in Island County Superior Court July 7 to two counts of first-degree rape of a child as part as a plea bargain. He repeatedly raped a 4-year-old girl and an 8-year-old girl.
A 22-year-old Oak Harbor man is again facing a felony charge for allegedly driving a motorcycle into a parked car while he was intoxicated and injuring his passenger last summer, court documents state.
A commissioner from the Port of Seattle visited Coupeville Thursday to urge government officials and business leaders to join a new state tourism-promotion group.
Bill Bryant, president of the Port of Seattle’s board of commissioners, simultaneously decried state lawmakers’ decision to cut all funding to tourism promotion and hailed it as an opportunity to finally do the job right.
“I think we have an opportunity to build a much stronger and sustainable organization than if we just relied on state funding,” he said.
A 60-year-old Coupeville woman accused of conning an elderly Alzheimer’s patient out of more than $2 million was charged with mail fraud in federal court July 1.
Shea Saenger, a convicted murderer, lived with her husband in a Coupeville mobile home park for older adults, but has been in the Kittitas County jail for contempt of court since Jan. 10. She refused to comply with a judge’s ruling that ordered her to answer questions about what she did with all the ill-begotten money.
Jhonas Burke went through misery that’s shockingly common for teenagers on happy Whidbey Island and elsewhere across the nation.
He was so depressed that there were times when he wanted to die. He felt like an outcast, an outsider. Thoughts ran like a freight train through his head, but he had no one to share them with. He’s a smart kid, but he was falling behind in classes at Oak Harbor High School.
The road construction season is underway in Island County, which means drivers can expect delays, the summertime smell of hot asphalt and, in the end, smoother roads.
Work crews are busy preparing the base, surface, and roadside for 26 miles of roads that will be resurfaced this summer as part of the county’s paving and oiling program.
