“This guy is the poster boy for a one-strike law.”
–Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas at today's press conference announcing the capture of Ali Achekzai, an alleged 32-year-old Southern California serial rapist who was found living in Salzburg, Austria through a DNA match. Capturing the onetime Ladera Ranch resident and “master of deception” took six years and the work of multiple law enforcement agencies including the FBI, INTERPOL, Tustin and San Diego police departments and the Orange County Sheriff's Department, according to Rackauckas whose office had named Achekzai to its Ten Most Wanted list. If convicted after his extradition, he faces a maximum punishment of 53 years to life in prison. Rackauckas touted the arrest as evidence that his focus on improving criminal DNA databases has been right.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.