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Crime

Colorado Town Aiming To Boost Police Force By $10 Million As It Battles Tren De Aragua Gang

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4 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jason Hopkins

Leaders in Aurora, Colorado, are looking to boost funding of its police force by roughly $10 million as reports of local Tren de Aragua activity continue to make national headlines.

The City of Aurora’s proposed 2025 budget includes a $125 million increase in funding, with an emphasis on law enforcement as international gang activity and retail crime has increasingly become an issue for the local community. The proposed plan would boost the police budget from $155.7 million in 2024 to nearly $165 million in 2025.

“Right now, we are not at our full complement of officers,” Aurora Police Department Chief Todd Chamberlain said to CBS News Colorado. “Our patrol is impacted by understaffing issues, and so that’s what I’m looking at right now.”

“I want to be able to have our officers have a clear understanding of what they are responding to before they even get there,” Chamberlain continued. “I want to see where our crimes are occurring, when they’re occurring and who they are occurring to.”

Aurora has been subject to massive media attention after footage of armed men inside an apartment complex went viral in August. Federal immigration authorities later confirmed the men in the video footage are members of Tren de Aragua and Aurora city officials have since sought a court order to clear the apartment building, according to Fox 31.

Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis initially pushed back on allegations that gang members had taken over apartment buildings in Aurora, with a spokesperson for his office telling the New York Post last month that “this purported invasion is largely a feature of [Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky’s] imagination.” Jurinsky has consistently spoken out about Tren de Aragua’s presence in Aurora.

Jurinsky was not entirely optimistic when asked how the extra funding could help Aurora combat crime.

“We have increased funding multiple times,” the council member told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. “One of the biggest problems in this state, and other like minded states like Colorado is that people just don’t want to be police officers here like they used to.”

“We’ve thrown a lot of money at the problem, and I’m not sure it’s being solved,” Jurinsky continued.

The Aurora Police Department earlier this month confirmed that two brothers arrested for a July shooting that left others hospitalized are members of Tren de Aragua. Both men were taken into custody after the shooting, and police say another two men involved in the incident are also suspected of having ties to the international gang.

Tren de Aragua, an international criminal organization that originated in Venezuela, has increasingly gained a foothold in the United States. Immigration experts who spoke to the DCNF said identifying members of the gang can be incredibly difficult, given poor diplomatic cooperation with the Venezuelan government.

“We have next to no vetting for the Venezuelans who are entering the country, because we have no relationship with the government of Venezuela and that’s true of other migrant nationalities,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told the DCNF. “We have no way of knowing whether they were in prison in Venezuela.”

“We have no idea if they’ve been living in a third-world country for years before they tried to come to the United States,” Vaughan continued. “We’re essentially letting them in on their word.”

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Crime

RCMP Bust Industrial-Scale Superlab Outside Toronto

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Sam Cooper's avatar Sam Cooper

A months-long RCMP investigation has led to the takedown of a massive synthetic-drug operation resembling the “super labs” often found in British Columbia — but this one was discovered just forty-five minutes north of Toronto. Officers uncovered an industrial-scale facility capable of producing millions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl, methamphetamine, MDMA, and GHB.

The RCMP’s Ontario Federal Policing unit announced Friday that search warrants executed on September 7 in Schomberg, northwest of Toronto, resulted in the seizure of nearly $10 million in suspected controlled substances, along with prohibited weapons, chemical precursors, and a range of illegal production equipment.

In addition to cash, drugs, and chemicals, officers discovered a pill press, firearms, handwritten drug “recipes,” flasks, chemical glassware, and other lab components. Approximately 20,000 litres of hazardous waste were also removed from the site.

Investigators say the probe began in spring 2025, when officers detected a suspicious bulk-chemical order placed by Christopher O’Quinn, operating under the business name O’Quinn Industries. “The chemicals ordered are known to police to be used in the production of fentanyl, MDMA, methamphetamine, and for cannabis extraction,” the RCMP said.

After weeks of surveillance, RCMP officers uncovered what they describe as a large-scale clandestine lab hidden on a Schomberg property. Dismantling the facility required coordination with the Ontario Fire Marshal, Health Canada, and municipal emergency services — a hazardous-materials operation that lasted ten days.

Three suspects — O’Quinn, Liang Xiong Guo, and Katie King — were arrested and face a combined 33 criminal charges.

O’Quinn faces 20 offences, including production and trafficking of Schedule I substances, possession of precursor chemicals, and multiple weapons violations involving a bullpup-style shotgun and a .22-calibre rifle.

Guo faces nine counts linked to the production and trafficking of methamphetamine and MDMA.

King faces four counts related to meth trafficking and illegal firearm possession.

RCMP officials said additional substances are undergoing Health Canada testing to determine whether synthetic opioids such as fentanyl were present.

Authorities also seized $8,000 in cash, multiple firearms, laboratory glassware, and chemicals capable of producing further drug batches valued in the millions.

“The complexity and danger of the operation required extensive inter-agency collaboration,” the RCMP said, thanking partners including the Ontario Provincial Police, Niagara Regional Police, York Regional Police, South Simcoe Police, the Ontario Fire Marshal, Health Canada, the Ministry of the Environment, and the Canada Border Services Agency.

Health Canada testing and court proceedings are ongoing.

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Courageous Discourse

No Exit Wound – EITHER there was a very public “miracle” OR Charlie Kirk’s murder is not as it appears

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By John Leake

Turning Point Spokesman: “No Exit Wound a Miracle”

Charlie Kirk Show producer Andrew Kolvet repeats extremely dubious claim purportedly made by “the surgeon who operated on Kirk.”

Monday Blaze Media (relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey) reported the following:

Turning Point USA spokesman and executive producer of the “Charlie Kirk Show” Andrew Kolvet revealed new details about the shooting that even doctors are calling a miracle. According to Kolvet, the surgeon who operated on Kirk claimed that the high-velocity bullet was powerful enough to kill multiple large animals — and “should have gone through” his body. But for some reason, Kirk’s body was able to stop it.

“I want to address some of the discussion about the lack of an exit wound with Charlie,” Kolvet wrote in a post on X.

“The fact that there wasn’t an exit wound is probably another miracle, and I want people to know,” Kolvet continued, explaining that he had spoken with the surgeon who worked on Charlie in the hospital.

“He said the bullet ‘absolutely should have gone through, which is very very normal for a high powered, high velocity round. I’ve seen wounds from this caliber many times and they always just go through everything. This would have taken a moose or two down, an elk, etc,’” he recalled.

“But it didn’t go through. Charlie’s body stopped it,” he added.

When he mentioned to the doctor that there were “dozens of staff, students, and special guests standing directly behind Charlie” when he was shot, the doctor reportedly replied, “It was an absolute miracle that someone else didn’t get killed.”

“His bone was so healthy and the density was so so impressive that he’s like the man of steel,” Kolvet recalls the doctor saying.

This is not a credible statement, and it raises a number of concerns.

It strikes me as very perplexing that a “surgeon operated on Kirk,” because in the video of the shooting, Charlie reacted with a decorticate posture—that is, an abnormal body posture characterized by flexion of the upper limbs—caused by severe trauma to the central nervous system. This indicates that the bullet either directly struck his cervical spinal cord, or the shock wave of the supersonic bullet passing near his spinal cord traumatized it.

A 150-grain, .30-06 bullet’s energy at 150 yards from the muzzle varies by ammunition, but a common hunting cartridge has an estimated value of approximately 1,800-2,000 foot-pounds (with the bullet traveling at about 2500 feet per second). In other words, the .30 caliber (.30 inch diameter) metal projectile struck his neck with sufficient kinetic energy to move a 2,000 pound mass a linear distance of one foot.

If the bullet that struck Charlie’s cervical spinal cord was a .30-06 fired from 150 yards away, it would have:

1). Severed his spinal cord, killing him instantly.

2). Passed through his neck.

Note that the cervical vertebrae are supported by strong muscles and have high compressive strength, but are far too delicate to stop a .30-06 bullet traveling at 2,500 feet per second.

If ALL of the kinetic energy of the bullet was absorbed by Charlie’s neck, it would have done spectacular trauma to his neck, as distinct from producing the clean bullet hole visible in the video footage that ruptured his Carotid artery.

Though I appreciate that some may find a supernatural explanation to be consoling, it seems to me that the investigation should not rest on the this explanation.

As I wrote a few weeks ago: If I were investigating the murder, I would consider the hypothesis that Charlie was shot with a weapon equipped with a suppressor and loaded with a subsonic cartridge to further reduce the sound. I have seen footage of someone firing a rifle with this setup, and the shot was amazingly quiet. The effective range of such a weapon is about 100 yards or less, and the shooter must be very skilled.

However, such a setup could fire a subsonic projectile that would penetrate a human neck without passing through it. In this scenario, the actual assassin (firing the suppressed rifle) hypothetically coordinated the timing of his shot with someone else firing a normal (supersonic and loud) rifle cartridge into the air at the same time to create a distraction or red herring.

In a functioning society in which the people trust their authorities—including their medical examiners—it would be easy to discover what happened and to disclose at least a preliminary report that would satisfy most reasonable people. The trouble our Republic is facing now is that so many of us no longer trust our federal and state authorities to tell us the truth.

For example, we have strong grounds for suspecting that medical examiners are not diligently investigating (with the proper analytic methods) unexpected, fatal cardiac arrests in young people to determine if they were caused by vaccine-induced myocarditis.

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