A Georgia couple distributing political fliers in support of Democratic Senate contenders Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof were accused of porch package thefts, local authorities said Wednesday.
Arrest records from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office show Santina Walker and Cesar Guerrero, both 19, were arrested Tuesday afternoon. The two were each charged with four counts of misdemeanor theft, with Guerrero additionally charged with felony willful obstruction of law enforcement officer by use of force.
Sheriff’s Maj. Steve Morris told The Chronicle that Walker and Guerrero both confessed to taking the packages while distributing political fliers supporting Warnock and Ossof, who are set to face off Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, in Senate runoffs on Jan. 5.
While it is not clear what organization Walker and Guerrero were working for or how they obtained the Democratic candidates’ campaign materials, spokespeople for the Warnock and Ossof campaigns denied any association with the porch package theft suspects.
“These individuals are not associated with or paid by our campaigns and we strongly condemn this criminal activity,” Warnock and Ossoff Campaign spokespeople Terrence Clark and Miryam Lipper told The Chronicle.
The incident comes as a police body-cam video surfaced Tuesday, showing a domestic dispute between Warnock and his ex-wife Oulèye Ndoye. In the footage taken this March, Ndoye can be heard telling a police officer that her then-husband is “a great actor” and “phenomenal at putting on a really good show,” and accused him of deliberately running over her foot when arguing about divorce papers.
“This man’s running for the United States Senate and all he cares about right now is his reputation,” Ndoye said in the video, adding she had been trying to keep “very quiet about the way he is.”
“He’s like, ‘Oulèye, close the door. I’m leaving,’” she tells police crying. “And I was like, ‘Just hear me out. If your mom died, and I had the kids. Wouldn’t you want me to let them go with you to the funeral? And he just starts backing the car up. He wasn’t going fast, I’m not bleeding. But I just can’t believe he’d run me over.”
Warnock told police he didn’t think he had run over her foot. “I don’t want to get into a shoving match with her. So I go back around, get back in the car, and I slowly start to move, like I’m gonna move forward. Then she claims I ran over her foot,” he said.
