NW briefly HIV-positive man pleads guilty to pair of assaults

Herald staff

MOUNT VERNON – A La Conner man infected with the virus that causes AIDS has pleaded guilty to first-degree assault for knowingly infecting two Skagit County women.

Prosecutors said Mitchell Anfield is the first person in the state to be convicted of first-degree assault for infecting someone with HIV.

They are seeking a 13-year prison term for the 40-year-old Anfield, who entered the plea Friday in Skagit County Superior Court.

Prosecutor Tom Verge said Anfield probably won’t live to serve his sentence.

Anfield said he knew he had the human immunodeficiency virus in 1998 and 1999, when he had sex with two women he dated. Both women have tested positive for HIV.

Sentencing is set for July 21.

SEATTLE

FBI launches search for robbery suspect: The FBI has launched a national search for a man sought in a Seattle bank robbery that left one suspect dead and one police officer wounded. A federal warrant was issued Friday charging 24-year-old Aristotle Napoleon Marr with unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution. The warrant allows the agency to join the hunt for the Rainier Beach High School graduate. Marr’s attorneys, John Crowley and Robert Leen, say he is no longer in King County and is afraid of turning himself in to Seattle police. Marr is being sought on a warrant charging him with first-degree burglary. He is accused of breaking into the home of an elderly couple after the robbery attempt went bad.

oregon

Girls settle in strip-search case: Three McMinnville girls who sued after they were strip-searched at their middle school have settled their case against the school district and the city. The amount of the settlement will not be disclosed until a judge approves it, attorneys said Thursday. The girls were in gym classes at Duniway Middle School in January 1998 when they were searched by female police employees investigating locker-room thefts of CDs, jewelry, makeup and money. Forty-five girls were taken in pairs into the locker room and asked to lift their shirts, shake out their bras and briefly lower their pants to their hips. No stolen items were found. The school district and the McMinnville Police Department apologized, saying the searches were inappropriate. Most of the girls accepted an insurance company’s settlement offer of $5,000 and legal fees, but the families of six sued in federal court in Portland. One lawsuit was settled out of court, and two lawsuits are still pending.

B.C.

Phone shutdown angers firefighters: Kitty lines, private phone lines to Vancover’s fire stations have been disconnected following a magazine report that firefighters were using them to arrange hot dates. Firefighters were plenty hot themselves following the action taken Thursday by deputy fire chief Fred Bird pending an investigation of the lines, which are paid for by the firefighters’ union out of petty cash: the kitty. The private lines, which date from 1962, are intended for use by on-duty firefighters to chat with spouses, children and others without tying up work phones. In the August edition of Chatelaine, Laura Robinson wrote that some firefighters use the kitty phones to arrange dates with eager women. In one encounter, Robinson wrote, she had a three-way foot massage with firefighters in an east Vancouver fire hall, followed by bawdy sex talk over cocktails in a bar. Jeff Dighton, president of the Vancouver Fire Fighters Union, said he protested the shutdown of the kitty lines directly to Bird.