![Boyfriend of Navajo mother of 3 is sentenced to life in prison for her murder: "It hits me right in the heart"](https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/r/2024/09/24/9efee859-d676-4ad1-9c7e-aa1a847e30c7/thumbnail/1200x630/6dc86caba2f15aa13edf143efd0b2a2f/yazzie-crop-gymghltagaablym.jpg?v=d735195a810d7336123786e9bed29d16)
Boyfriend of Navajo mother of 3 is sentenced to life in prison for her murder: "It hits me right in the heart"
CBSN
After family members of a slain Navajo woman described their grief in a federal courtroom, the judge on Monday sentenced her boyfriend to life imprisonment for first-degree murder in a case that became emblematic of what officials call an epidemic of missing and slain Indigenous women.
Five years after Jaime Yazzie was killed, her relatives and friends cheered as they streamed out of the downtown Phoenix courthouse after U.S. District Court Judge Douglas L. Rayas handed down the sentence for Tre C. James.
Yazzie was 32 and the mother of three sons when she went missing in the summer of 2019 from her community of Pinon on the Navajo Nation. Despite a high-profile search, her remains were not found until November 2021 on the neighboring Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. At the time, the FBI offered a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for Yazzie's disappearance and/or death.
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More than 2 million federal employees face a looming deadline: By midnight on Thursday, they must decide whether to accept a "deferred resignation" offer from the Trump administration. If workers accept, according to a White House plan, they would continue getting paid through September but would be excused from reporting for duty. But if they opt to keep their jobs, they could get fired.
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More employees of the Environmental Protection Agency were informed Wednesday that their jobs appear in doubt. Senior leadership at the EPA held an all-staff meeting to tell individuals that President Trump's executive order, "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing," which was responsible for the closure of the agency's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office, will likely lead to the shuttering of the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights as well.
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In her first hours as attorney general, Pam Bondi issued a broad slate of directives that included a Justice Department review of the prosecutions of President Trump, a reorientation of department work to focus on harsher punishments, actions punishing so-called "sanctuary" cities and an end to diversity initiatives at the department.