(HOUSTON) — A bond was raised Friday for the mother of an 8-year-old boy whose remains were left in his Houston home, along with three malnourished siblings.
Gloria Williams, 35, was arrested last week and charged with injury to a child by omission and tampering with evidence, according to the sheriff’s office. Her bond was set at $1,550,000 for the two charges.
Williams’ boyfriend, 31-year-old Brian Coulter, has been charged with capital murder in the 8-year-old’s death, prosecutors said.
The skeletal remains of Williams’ 8-year-old son were discovered on Oct. 24 along with three malnourished brothers, ages 7, 9 and 15, when the eldest boy called authorities.
The teen reported that the body of his 8-year-old brother — who died from “multiple blunt-force injuries” around November 2020, authorities said — was kept in the room next to his, the sheriff’s office said.
The teen told police his parents hadn’t been in the apartment for several months, authorities said. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez described the home as “unspeakable living conditions,” with soiled carpets, roaches and flies. The apartment wasn’t furnished, prosecutors said.
Williams’ attorney, Neal Davis III, said Friday that he needs “to find out more information” about his client’s “mindset.” When asked if he thinks Williams understands the severity of the charges she’s facing, he replied, “I don’t think she does fully, no.”
Davis added, “I don’t want her to be painted in the same light as the co-defendant.”
The children were taken to a hospital and the Texas Department of Family and Protective services received emergency custody of them, Gonzalez said.
Authorities said last week that one of the boys had a jaw injury, allegedly caused by Coulter several weeks ago, and will need surgery.
Coulter and Williams have not entered pleas.
ABC News’ Izzy Alverez and Zach Ferber contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Some 100 million American workers are expected to be impacted by the Biden administration’s new workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandate come January, under a sweeping new plan that labels coronavirus as an occupational hazard in the workplace.
Here is what to know about the new regulations, enforced by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and how it might impact you.
Will the vaccine mandate apply to me?
Most likely, as it’s estimated that the regulation will cover the majority of the nation’s workforce. There are four types of workers who fall under some kind of mandate: federal workers, federal contractors, health care workers and anyone employed by a company with 100 or more employees.
Federal workers are required to get the shot by Nov. 22. Everyone else in the private sector has until Jan. 4.
Some workers also have the option to test weekly for the virus instead, but this only applies to people in the private sector who don’t work with the federal government or in health care facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid. If you work at a large company that is included under the federal rule, it will be up to your employer to decide if you will be given the option to test weekly and wear a mask instead.
Firms that don’t comply could be fined $14,000 per infraction, and health care facilities like nursing homes and hospitals could lose access to Medicare and Medicaid dollars.
What if I work remotely?
If you work remote full-time, your company isn’t required to mandate a vaccine or weekly testing. But you will fall under a mandate if you go into the office or workplace even some of the time.
Keep in mind, your employer might require vaccination anyway as a term of employment. Some businesses, including some hospitals, have already done so.
Private businesses also can decide against giving the option of testing as allowed under the federal regulation.
What if I work at a franchise outpost of a larger company?
You wouldn’t fall under the mandate if the number of employees at your site is under 100 workers, and so long as the franchise location where you work is independently owned and operated.
Corporate employees at a company’s headquarters and employees at other franchise sites would be counted separately.
For example, if you work at an independently owned local gym that only has 50 employees, you would not be included in the mandate — even if that gym is part of a larger, nationwide chain.
Won’t this hurt the trucking industry ahead of the holidays?
Probably not, because the rule exempts people who work by themselves. Truck drivers who drive alone in their cabs wouldn’t be at risk of exposure.
The Truckload Carriers Association, which issued a statement insisting the rule would “undoubtedly ensure the trucking industry loses a substantial number of drivers,” did not immediately respond to ABC News’ inquiries about why they believe their members would be impacted.
It’s possible the rollout of the new regulations could cause some hiccups in the mounting supply chain issues the nation is seeing, but economists have expressed hope that these troubles will be temporary and lessen as the pandemic wanes. Vaccinations, meanwhile, have been effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, which in turn helps the overall job market and economy.
What about the impact on other businesses like retail?
As for other industries, the regulation’s impact remains to be seen. Because the rule for the private sector won’t take effect until Jan. 4, the Biden administration says it’s unlikely to cause problems ahead of the holiday season.
Still, businesses will have to prepare to implement a vaccine verification program during the busy shopping season.
It’s also possible a few workers with hardline views on the vaccine will try to opt out of the job market to wait out the regulation. As a temporary emergency standard, it’s expected to expire eventually although the government hasn’t said yet when that might happen.
Some business officials have argued that broader vaccine mandates might actually help by “leveling the playing field.” If every company is required to mandate vaccinations, it makes it harder for workers to jump jobs to avoid getting the shot. Supporters of the regulation also argue that while a vocal minority of workers will protest, the vast majority of Americans will wind up complying.
While once a touchy subject in the private sector, recent data has actually indicated that a majority of companies plan on having COVID-19 vaccine mandates for their workforce, separate from the federal regulation.
(EAST ORANGE, N.J.) — 14-year-old Jashyah Moore has been missing since Oct. 14. Her family is pleading with her community for answers that would help bring her daughter home.
“I cannot imagine what she might be going through just being away from us this long, being away from her family who loves her very much,” her mother, Jamie Moore, said through tears at a press conference Friday morning. “If anybody knows anything, please, please come forward.”
She was last seen around 10 a.m. at Poppie’s Deli Store in East Orange, New Jersey, after her mother asked her to go to the store for groceries. According to police, surveillance footage shows Jashyah entering the store with an older male who paid for her items. The footage does not appear to show them leaving the store together, police say.
When she returned home to her mother, Moore said Jashyah had lost the card the family uses for groceries, and Moore told her daughter to go retrace her steps to find it.
Moore says that was the last time she has seen her daughter since.
Jashyah is 5-foot 5-inches tall and weighs about 135 pounds. She was last seen wearing khaki pants, a black jacket, and black boots, according to an East Orange City Hall press release.
“Jashyah is a smart girl and I can’t reiterate that enough,” Moore said. “She would not stay out. She would not go out, go off with anyone. She’s a homebody. She plays video games. She like to cook, she likes to play with her brothers, like, her best friend.”
East Orange Police, the FBI, and the New Jersey State Police are working in collaboration to help find Jashyah. They say if anyone sees her or knows of her whereabouts, to call the East Orange Police at 973.266.5041.
“Jashyah, if you are out there, we are all looking for you,” said Chief Phyllis Bindi. “We know that you are loved by this community and your family.”
ABC News’ Kasim Kabbara contributed to this report.
(CHICAGO) — After a night out in Chicago on the night before Halloween, 23-year-old Iñaki Bascaran told his roommate he was heading home. But he never made it — and now his friends are mobilizing to find him.
Bascaran, a Glenview, Illinois, native, attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved this year to Chicago, where he works in marketing, said his friend, Kayli Fradin. She described him as “the life of the party” who “is always trying to make people laugh.”
On Oct. 30, Bascaran went to a bar with friends in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, Fradin told ABC News. Bascaran then called an Uber to go to another bar, Celeste, in the River North neighborhood. He left Celeste alone at 11:39 p.m.
Bascaran then called Fradin’s boyfriend, who is Bascaran’s roommate, on FaceTime at 12:04 a.m. to say he was going to start walking home.
“But he was also intoxicated enough at that point that he thought he was in Lincoln Park and we know now that he wasn’t,” Fradin said. “He didn’t even really realize what part of town he was in.”
About 45 minutes later, when Bascaran didn’t arrive home, Fradin said she and her boyfriend tried to track his phone location, but his phone was dead.
Around noon the next day, Bascaran’s phone was still dead, and his bed was made. Fradin said she called the police immediately.
She said police recommended a list of hospitals for her to call — but none of the hospitals had seen him.
Fradin then said she broke the news to Bascaran’s parents, calling it a “heartbreaking call.”
Chicago police confirm Bascaran has been reported missing and ask anyone with information to contact the department at 312-744-8266. They released this missing persons flyer and said no further information was available.
With no leads, Fradin turned to social media, creating a website and Instagram page to spread the news.
“Iñaki has so many friends from so many areas in his life,” she said, from his soccer league to high school to college to abroad, that “we just knew that we would get a really big group of people to care.”
On Monday, about 200 friends, family and strangers, armed with flashlights and neon vests, conducted a search, “starting at Celeste and routing people different directions that Iñaki might have done,” Fradin said.
“It’s amazing how quickly everyone has been able to mobilize,” she said.
The family hired private detective Sara Serritella to help.
“You cannot have enough resources” in a missing persons case, she told ABC News.
They followed Bascaran’s digital footprint, including surveillance videos from that night, but “the answers are not in the phones and the cameras,” Serritella said.
It’s shocking “to think that you can just disappear and go missing in spite of technology and cameras,” she said.
But Serritella said she’s “following hundreds of leads that have come in” through social media and email.
She said they’re using drones, man power, digital forensics and “everything possible to try to get him home.”
On Wednesday, the family held a vigil, where there was an “outpouring of support,” Fradin said, including hundreds who watched live on Instagram.
Fradin said this tough week has been filled with both sadness and hope.
“There’s been times where we’ve been sobbing together and times where we’ve been laughing together, telling our favorite stories and memories with him. … And how excited we are to make fun of him for putting us through all of this once he comes home,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that could lead to the identification or location of those in leadership positions within the DarkSide ransomware group.
Authorities also announced that they’re offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction in any country of anyone conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in a DarkSide variant ransomware incident.
“In offering this reward, the United States demonstrates its commitment to protecting ransomware victims around the world from exploitation by cyber criminals,” Ned Price, a State Department spokesperson, said in a statement Thursday.
Federal authorities have previously said they believe DarkSide operates out of Eastern Europe.
The Colonial Pipeline incident was seen as a display of how much power cyber criminals have seized in recent years, as they took aim at critical infrastructure. The company’s CEO admitted shortly after the incident that he had authorized a payment of some $4.3 million to DarkSide only hours after learning of the attacks, due to the uncertainty surrounding how long it would take to get the critical pipeline back online.
The Department of Justice later said it seized back approximately $2.3 million in Bitcoin from the alleged cyber criminals.
The reward is being offered through the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program, which has dished out more than $135 million in rewards to date and brought more than 75 transnational criminals and major narcotics traffickers to justice, according to Price’s statement.
(NEW YORK — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
The United States has a gun violence epidemic, and it’s not one shared by its peers. The nation that by one estimate has more guns than people has the highest rate of firearm deaths compared with other high-income countries. Mass shootings, an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., are also exceedingly rare in peer countries — where governments have often been quick to pass gun reform in the wake of such tragedies.
“Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. “I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we’d be better off.”
It’s unclear if gun prevalence definitively impacts gun violence, though research by Hemenway’s center has found links between a large number of guns and more firearm homicides,suicides and accidents. The implementation of new gun restrictions has also been associated with a drop in firearm deaths, a 2016 review of 130 studies across 10 countries found.
The U.S. is “not necessarily a more violent society than others,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.
“What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome — firearms,” he said.
It’s not uncommon to compare the U.S. with other developed countries, especially after yet another horrific mass shooting. There are developing countries with higher rates of firearm deaths than the U.S., though comparing gun violence among peers helps to control for other factors, Hemenway said. And while there are lessons in other nations’ policy measures that could help address the problem here, because the U.S. is on such a different plane when it comes to civilian gun ownership, it will also take more research and multiple, targeted solutions to address the scope of the problem, experts said.
“Other countries do better. We should be able to figure out how to do better,” Hemenway said.
Watch ABC News Live on Mondays at 3 p.m. to hear more about gun violence from experts during roundtable discussions. And check back next week, when we look into what some gun owners say could solve the gun violence issue.
American disease?
The U.S. has become so synonymous with its gun culture, that when Australia was working on enacting tighter firearm policies after its deadliest mass shooting ever, known as the Port Arthur massacre, then-Prime Minister John Howard pointedly said, “We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.”
In 1996, Martin Bryant used a semiautomatic rifle to shoot and kill 35 people and injure another 23 near a popular tourist resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. In the wake of the shooting, all states and territories adopted the National Firearms Agreement, which, among other things, established a national gun registry, required permits for gun purchases and banned all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns. A government buyback program also retrieved some 650,000 now-banned firearms.
In the years since the NFA, gun deaths in Australia decreased, most significantly gun suicides, a RAND Corporation survey found. The review concluded there was weak evidence to support that it had an impact on firearm homicides overall, though noted there was a decline in female firearm homicide victimization after adoption of the NFA, which included a provision denying gun licenses to people subject to a domestic violence order. A 2018 study by the University of Syndey also found that Australia only had one mass shooting in the 22 years since the NFA reforms, compared with 13 in the 18 years prior.
Mass shootings have similarly prompted Switzerland, New Zealand and, on several occasions, Canada and the United Kingdom to quickly enact gun reforms. These measures have ranged from bans on semiautomatic firearms to longer purchase waiting periods to stricter background checks and national registry requirements.
In the U.S., where guns are more accessible, the firearm death rate per 100,000 people in 2016 was nearly four times that of Switzerland, five times that of Canada, over 10 times that of Australia and 35 times that of the United Kingdom, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association. Americans are notably more likely to be killed in a gun homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than in other high-income countries, a 2015 study in the American Journal of Medicine found. Rates of nonlethal crimes and overall suicides are similar among the countries, but the U.S. does have a higher homicide rate overall, “fueled by the firearm homicide rate,” according to the study.
“What other countries have done demonstrates that you can have policymakers react quickly after a horrific tragedy to make the country and communities safer from gun violence,” Chelsea Parsons, vice president of Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, told ABC News. “I think we sometimes in this country, we’re too accustomed to federal policymaking being almost an impossibility when it comes to an issue like gun violence. But the experience of other countries just shows that it doesn’t have to be this hard.”
Unique challenges toward reform
The number of guns in the U.S. is unparalleled; the country has less than 5% of the world’s population, but 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns, according to a 2018 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. There were over 393 million firearms in civilian possession in 2017 — or 120 per 100 persons, the highest rate globally, the report found. That’s more than double the second-highest rate, in Yemen, at nearly 53 per 100 persons.
For Joel Dvoskin, a forensic psychologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine who specializes in violence prevention, reducing gun ownership to levels seen in peer countries is “literally impossible.”
“The horse is already out of the barn, as they say,” Dvoskin told ABC News.
Efforts to address the problem at the national level may be hindered by no one government agency taking “overall responsibility” for it, he said. “Our system’s spread out across a bunch of different agencies.”
The U.S. stands apart from nearly every country in the world, not its just peers, with a constitutional right to bear arms — though that doesn’t mean the federal government can’t ban certain firearms or enact other restrictions, according to Allison Anderman, senior counsel and director of local policy for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Gun advocates use the Second Amendment as a defense to any and all gun laws, but it’s not legally accurate,” Anderman told ABC News. “The Second Amendment, at least as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, permits a whole host of gun regulations, including assault weapons bans.”
Universal background checks, a key effort among gun control advocates, is a “really basic” law abroad that the U.S. lacks but nearly all Americans support, Parsons said. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six adults were gunned down, appeared to be a watershed moment for gun reform. But four months later, legislation to expand background checks failed to pass the Senate due to what then-President Barack Obama blamed on lies by the “gun lobby and its allies.” A reintroduced bill passed the House in March and is currently before the Senate.
“The difference between the United States and other countries isn’t the Second Amendment, it’s the gun lobby and the power of the gun lobby in this country, and an extremist ideology among red states, essentially, that prohibits any meaningful action,” Anderman said.
There is an “opportunity for change” when gun laws become a “single voting issue,” she said. It’s a tactic long employed by gun rights advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest pro-gun lobby. Mobilizing its 5 million members around gun policies has been a “pivotal component to our continued influence and success,” the organization told The Atlantic in an article published in September. ABC News had reached out to the NRA for this piece but did not receive a response.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll from April found that those who strongly prioritized enacting new laws to try to address gun violence versus protecting the right to own guns were nearly even — about four in 10 in both camps. Overall, the public’s priority on enacting new gun control laws has waned — to 50% from 57% three years prior, with the sharpest decline among 18- to 29-year-olds.
“When people say that they’re fed up and they’ve had enough and they’re only going to vote for representatives who reflect their interests on this topic, then there can be change,” Anderman said.
The “uneven patchwork” of gun laws enacted at the state level is another challenge in addressing the gun violence problem, Parsons said. Research by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides, the latter of which account for most gun deaths in the U.S. But regulations vary widely from state to state, with red states largely having weaker gun laws, according to the center.
“You have states that have enacted really good, comprehensive, strong gun laws, but those laws are undermined by the much weaker laws of the states surrounding them,” Parsons said.
The “classic example” of this, she said, is Chicago. Illinois is neighbored by states including Indiana and Wisconsin that have comparatively weaker laws, such as a lack of universal background checks, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“What you see is a very clear pattern of guns being illegally trafficked from some states that have much weaker laws into places and states that have much stronger laws,” she said, arguing that it makes the case for stronger laws at the federal level.
How do we live with guns?
In confronting the gun violence problem, for experts like Dvoskin and Hemenway, the conversation needs to include, “How do we live with guns?” It’s a public health approach akin to measures taken, for instance, to make driving safer or prevent smoking, and demands a broad focus.
“We’ve learned that there are limits to what you can do to prevent firearm violence if you just focus on firearms themselves,” Wintemute said. “It’s important to focus on the determinants of violence, whether firearms are involved or not.”
To that effort, Wintemute’s research program recently found a link between male gun owners with a history of alcohol charges and suicide risk, and is studying the intersection between firearm ownership and opioid use in suicide risk.
More firearms research and data are needed to find solutions in what has been for decades a federally underfunded area, Hemenway said. That could mean more studies looking at what is working in other countries to reduce gun violence. Support and funding for non-legislative approaches to the problem, such as community-based violence prevention, has also been advocated.
“With public health, it’s data-driven, so you don’t look at politics or values, you look at what the data says. And what the data says about public health, usually, is that one size never fits all,” Dvoskin said. “Different segments of the population need different strategies.”
Measures to safely live with guns, such as storage requirements, smart guns that can only be used by the owner and features that prevent guns from firing when dropped or after the magazine is removed, could also be improved, Hemenway said.
“Too many people just think gun control means taking away people’s guns,” Hemenway said. “There’s just so, so many things that we could do as a country if we wanted to reduce the problem.”
(NEW YORK) — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
Gun violence is an endemic problem in the United States — once again getting worse in some areas after many years of declines and persistent at high levels in others.
Despite being one of the leading causes of death, one thing that’s difficult to know is the scope of the problem, fueled in part by a more than a two-decade-long prohibition — recently changed — on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.”
It wasn’t always this way — the CDC in 1983 adopted a public health approach to gun violence.
“At that point in time in 1983, there were two types of frequent injury deaths. One was motor vehicle crashes, and the other was gun violence,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, CEO of the Task Force for Global Health and former member of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told ABC News.
During the 1990s, public and private programs conducted gun-related research — among them was the CDC’s Injury Prevention Program, where Rosenberg worked, and the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
But in 1996, Congress passed an amendment to the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill. The bill modification, commonly known as the Dickey Amendment, prohibited the use of federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” leading to the elimination of all CDC funding to conduct firearm-related research — having a lasting impact still limiting what we know today about gun violence.
Even though the funding spigot has recently been turned back on, researchers are still feeling the effects of the lack of data to study gun violence. Researchers say the gun violence problem is urgent and requires an outsized solution detached from politics.
Watch ABC News Live on Mondays at 3 p.m. to hear more about gun violence from experts during roundtable discussions. And check back next week, when we look into what some gun owners say could solve the gun violence issue.
“If we can understand the causes, we can change the effects and we can change the effects for the better, so science is a way to understand the causes and the effects and the way to link them,” Rosenberg told ABC News.
Here’s what to know about the data issue around gun violence and what advocates say can be done:
Impact of the Dickey Amendment
In the early 1990s, the CDC had a $2.6 million budget dedicated to gun violence research both for internal research and for external studies.
“We started looking at, what’s the problem,” Rosenberg told ABC News. The agency studied the number of people dying from gun violence, the weapons used and the causes behind it.
Dr. Garen Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, says the program received two grants at the time to conduct much-needed research on firearms.
“All of these grants made use of unique data that are collected in California,” said Wintemute, who explained to ABC News that the organization was linking gun purchases with criminal records as part of its prevention research.
But everything changed when the Dickey Amendment was introduced by former Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark.
Four years before the Dickey Amendment was enacted, the CDC had published its first study on gun violence. The report looked at the correlation between safety and guns, finding that having a weapon in a household didn’t necessarily result in safer outcomes, Rosenberg said.
“These results weren’t pleasing to the NRA. And so they stepped up their attack on our research program,” Rosenberg told ABC News.
ABC News reached out to the National Rifle Association requesting comment on the allegations made by Dr. Rosenberg but has not heard back.
The Dickey Amendment reallocated the $2.6 million away from gun research to other health research on subjects like traumatic brain injury, according to Wintemute.
Researchers fought the effects of the amendment, which prohibited advocacy for gun control — but which had an impact beyond advocacy because experts said they viewed vague language in the amendment as a “threat.”
“This Dickey Amendment had a real chilling effect,” Rosenberg told ABC News. “It was enough to discourage individual researchers and, at the same time, Congress took away the money we were using for the research we were doing.”
The CDC sent ABC News a statement saying it was “subject to appropriations language that states that none of the funds made available to CDC may be used to ‘advocate or promote gun control.”
“The lack of dedicated and sustained research funding for firearm injury… limited our ability to conduct research to gain understanding of how best to prevent firearm-related injuries and deaths relative to other public health problems,” it said.
Shortage of funds
Wintemute’s program suffered from a shortage of federal funds after the amendment passed. Although it was able to continue doing some research through private funding, that work was limited. He originally had around 12 people on his team but says he was left with only four, including himself, limiting the program’s reach.
While The Department of Justice still allocated some funds to firearm research under the National Institute of Justice (the DOJ’s research arm), Wintemute said it was insufficient.
For example, in 2004, a total of $461,759 was granted by the agency to three different institutes for gun-related research — a far cry from the millions normally required for extensive study.
“We had to revert to simpler, more descriptive studies that made use of available data. There wasn’t money to go out and collect data writ large,” Wintemute said.
Other institutions conducting research were also affected.
“Because of the Dickey Amendment, we had dropped firearm injuries from our portfolio,” said Dr. Frederick Rivara, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Washington, who was conducting research on injury prevention, including firearm-related injuries.
“It really discouraged any serious firearm research,” Rivara said.
This gap in gun research led to a shortage of people familiar with the subject and a lack of data still felt by today’s experts.
“It’ll be another five to 10 years before we have anything like an adequate number of experienced researchers on the case,” Wintemute said.
Research resumes
The need for research and data collection was finally re-addressed by the federal government after the Parkland mass shooting in 2018 that left 17 dead.
After the mass shooting, an omnibus bill was signed by President Donald Trump clarifying that restricting the use of federal funds to advocate or promote gun control doesn’t ban research.
In 2019, Congress began to again allocate funds for research and data collection on gun violence and injuries.
Although the Dickey Amendment remains in place, Dickey, its author who died in 2017, saw the consequences of it on gun-related research and changed his mind, according to Rosenberg — who later became Dickey’s friend.
“Jay Dickey eventually saw the disastrous consequences of gun violence…with mass shootings with rising numbers of gun homicides and gun suicides,” Rosenberg told ABC News. “He switched his position.”
In an op-ed co-authored with Rosenberg in 2012, Dickey says he “served as the NRA’s point person in Congress” to cut the gun violence research budget.
“We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners,” reads a section of the piece published in The Washington Post.
More funds needed
Federal funds are now available to study gun violence, but organizations working on policy recommendations are still struggling to conduct it.
“There is more money for research now. But what is missing is datasets,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, referring to datasets at the federal level that could help in the research on firearms. “We destroy background check records at the federal level in 24 hours… how do you suppose to understand who’s purchasing firearms and what the implications are, if you can’t examine that data,” he added.
The nonprofit, affiliated with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence located in Washington D.C., focuses on looking for evidence-based policy solutions and programs that can reduce gun-related violence.
“The data deficit has hurt us because we don’t understand all the solutions,” Horwitz told ABC News.
Despite the lack of research, experts say there is still a path forward for finding solutions to the high levels of gun violence plaguing the country.
“This is a solvable problem,” Rosenberg said. “We can find out what are the patterns, what’s the problem, we can find out the causes, we can find out what works to both reduce gun violence and protect gun rights.”
The key to finding possible solutions is focusing on science as opposed to politics, researchers say.
“Science is not advocacy, science is understanding things as they are,” Wintemute said.
While the landscape for gun-related research has improved, there is still a long way to go, Wintemute said.
For fiscal year 2022, Congress approved at least $25 million to fund gun violence research, according to the CDC. And although that represents an increase of $12.5 million compared with the last fiscal year, more resources are needed, according to Wintemude.
“Congress has not followed through,” he said.
He believes the budget for gun-related research has to match the extent of the problem and also help make up for the Dickey Amendment’s toll, including the gaps in data and expertise it created.
“To help get history out of the way and let us attack the problem with a program of research that’s adequate to the size of the problem itself we need to do away with the Dickey Amendment, even as amended,” he added.
(NEW YORK) — Notorious serial killer Keith Jesperson, better known by the “Happy Face Killer” nickname he was given in the ’90s, has spent decades behind bars but his daughter believes he would kill again if released from prison today.
“I sometimes now wonder, if he was freed now, if he was released, would he kill again? And I believe he would,” Melissa Moore told “20/20” in a new interview. “I don’t believe my dad is sorry at all … what he is sorry about, though, is that he got caught.”
Jesperson, now 66, is serving five non-consecutive life sentences in Oregon’s state penitentiary.
A Canadian-born long-haul truck driver and divorced father of three, Jesperson claimed to have killed eight women in five states: Washington, California, Florida, Wyoming and Oregon.
Watch the full story on “20/20” TONIGHT at 9 p.m. ET on ABC
His killing spree spanned from 1990 until 1995, when he turned himself into authorities. At the time, he was being investigated for the murder of his last known victim, 41-year-old Julie Winningham, who some described as his girlfriend.
In a 2010 interview with ABC News, Jesperson equated committing murder to “shoplifting.” When ABC News’ Juju Chang challenged him on that framing, Jesperson doubled down, saying his killings were “everything like shoplifting.”
“It became a nonchalant type thing, because I got away with it,” he continued. “It is everything like shoplifting. You’re breaking the law but you’re getting away with it. And so, there’s a thrill of getting away with it.”
He was dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” for the smiley face drawings he included on a letter he sent to a Portland, Oregon, newspaper, in which he bragged about his crimes.
“It’s just a moment in time when situations present themselves, and you become what you are,” Jesperson told ABC News in a previous interview. “I’m sorry it happened, [I] wish it never happened … it’s done, it’s over with.”
After Jesperson came forward in March 1995, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder charges for his first known victim, 23-year-old Taunja Bennett, and Winningham. Both women’s bodies were found on opposite sides of the Columbia River from each other.
“What really stood out to me about my father is that once he killed Taunja Bennett, it’s like he got a taste for blood and power and control that he’s probably never had in his life and that excited him. So much so that he seemed to start killing very rapidly again after Taunja,” Moore said.
Jesperson was linked to murdering six other women, some of which remain unknown to this day: an unidentified woman who Jesperson said was named “Claudia” in August 1992 near Blythe, California; Cynthia Lynn Rose in September 1992 in Turlock, California; Lori Ann Pentland in November 1992 in Salem, Oregon; an unidentified woman who Jesperson said was named “Carla” in June 1993 in Santa Nella, California; an unidentified woman who Jesperson said was named “Suzanne” in September 1994 in Crestview, Florida; and Angela Subrize in January 1995 in Laramie County, Wyoming.
Moore believes her father has no remorse. Even now, she said, if her father could go back in time to change anything, it would be to have never turned himself in so he could keep killing.
“I believe he would be killing more women” if he were a free man, she said.
Growing up, Moore said the father she knew as a young child wasn’t violent. He was a man who carried her on his shoulders and made her feel “on top of the world,” she said, someone who made up bedtime stories about a princess and tucked her in at night.
One of the last things he bought her, Moore said, was a karaoke and music recording system for her 10th birthday. Shortly after that, her parents got divorced and that’s when she said her father changed.
Dr. Robert Schug, a forensic psychologist, has spoken to Jesperson multiple times. He said that Jesperson’s violent outbursts may have stemmed from his divorce.
“Keith mentions this period of his marriage when things really went south, so all of this really starts creating a very turbulent emotional period for the entire family,” Schug said. “But, particularly for Keith.”
Moore said she thought her father unleashed his anger over the divorce into his killing of Bennett.
“Then after that release and that excitement and the thought that he got away with it, plus two other people getting the blame, he was free to kill again, and he did very quickly,” she said.
A jury first convicted a Portland, Oregon, woman named Laverne Pavlinac for Bennett’s murder in 1990, largely based on her detailed confession to police in which she falsely claimed she helped her boyfriend John Sosnovske rape and kill the young woman.
Sosnovske later pleaded no contest to the murder charge.
In reality, neither had anything to do with the crime. Jesperson told investigators one of the reasons he wanted to come forward was he wanted credit for Bennett’s murder and to get Pavlinac and Sosnovske out of prison. The two were released in 1995.
It had been more than 15 years since Moore spoke to her father until she said he called her this past Father’s Day. With all the time that had passed, she decided to accept the call.
“It was interesting to hear his voice again, and just that old, familiar voice. It’s aged … He sounds more like my grandfather,” Moore said. “As we signed off, he said, ‘Goodbye, my daughter,’ and it definitely asserted that he wanted to control that I would have a relationship with him.”
Now a parent herself, Moore said her children are curious about their grandfather. They had visited him in prison when they were young, but they have no memory of the meeting. In letters to ABC News, Jesperson expressed how much he would like to reunite with his family.
“For years, I have reached out to my children to be a part of their lives,” Jesperson wrote in one of these letters. “They’re in my thoughts daily and I love them and am proud of them.”
Still, Moore said she doesn’t want her children to have a relationship with her father.
“I don’t want my dad to get into the psyche of my children and hurt them in any way because he is manipulative. He is a psychopath. He has the potential, still, to hurt, even if not with physical violence or murder, but with his words,” she said.
Moore’s 21-year-old daughter Aspen Moore, who said she learned the truth about her grandfather when she was about 10 years old, agrees that she doesn’t want to meet him.
“I think that he has excuses for his actions,” she said. “I don’t feel that his actions can be just brushed off.”
Melissa Moore maintains she doesn’t want to have a relationship with her father and said there was nothing he could offer her to bring her “any kind of closure.”
“There isn’t going to be closure,” she said. “But I’m okay with that. I’m content with my life, and I don’t need him to say sorry. I don’t need him to ask for forgiveness, and I frankly wouldn’t believe in his request for forgiveness.”
(BRUNSWICK, Ga.) — The murder trial of three white Georgia men charged in the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man prosecutors allege was “hunted down” and shot to death while out for a Sunday jog, is set to begin on Friday with opening statements.
The evidence portion of the high-profile case will kick off around 9 a.m. in Glynn County Superior Court in Brunswick, Georgia.
“I do feel like we’re getting closer to justice for Ahmaud day by day,” Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said in an interview scheduled to be broadcast Friday night on ABC’s Nightline.
The trial will begin under a cloud of controversy after a jury comprised of 11 white people and one Black person was selected on Wednesday, prompting an objection from prosecutors that the selection process, which took nearly three weeks, ended up racially biased.
On Thursday afternoon, one of the seated jurors, a white woman in her 40s or 50s, was dismissed from the panel for undisclosed medical issues. One of the alternate jurors, a white person, replaced her, bringing the number of alternates to three. All of the alternates are white.
The three defendants are Gregory McMichael, 65, a retired police officer; his son, Travis McMichael, 35; and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52.
The men have pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, aggravated assault and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
The McMichaels and Bryan were also indicted on federal hate crime charges in April and have all pleaded not guilty.
Arbery was out jogging on Feb. 23, 2020, through the Satilla Shores neighborhood near Brunswick when he was killed.
(RICHMOND, Va.) — For a month, FBI agents listened in as two members of a white supremacist group discussed their sinister plans: a plot to use a pro-gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, to engage in mass murder and attacks on critical infrastructure, which they believed would mark the start of a racial civil war.
Patrik Mathews, a former Canadian Army reservist illegally in the U.S., and Brian Lemley, a Maryland resident and self-described white nationalist, fantasized about the brutal murders they’d soon carry out against law enforcement and Black people, all with the goal of bringing about the “Boogaloo,” or the collapse of the U.S. government in order to prop up a white ethno-state, according to recordings of the pair’s discussions.
“We need to go back to the days of … decimating Blacks and getting rid of them where they stand,” Mathews said in one recording. “If you see a bunch of Blacks sitting on some corner you f***ing shoot them.”
“I need to claim my first victim,” Lemley said in another recording. “It’s just that we can’t live with ourselves if we don’t get somebody’s blood on our hands.”
The two men were each sentenced in late October to nine years in prison, and ABC News has now obtained newly released audio from the FBI’s secret recording of Mathews and Lemley at their Delaware residence in late 2019.
The tapes offer a chilling look into the private plotting of the two members of “The Base,” a white supremacist extremist group that the FBI says has, since 2018, recruited members both in the U.S. and abroad through a combination of online chat rooms, private meetings, and military-style training camps. In their plea agreements and at sentencing, Mathews and Lemley both acknowledged their membership in the group.
After the two men were arrested in January 2020, just days before the Richmond rally was set to take place, law enforcement found tactical gear, 1,500 rounds of ammunition, and packed cases of food and supplies in their residence.
In the course of their investigation they also found that Lemley and Mathews had both attended military-style training camps with other members of The Base, and had built a functioning assault rifle that they tested out at a gun range in Maryland.
The recordings captured by the FBI included Mathews and Lemley discussing potential acts of terror they could carry out around the Richmond rally that would lead authorities and, eventually, the U.S. government, to capitulate to the chaos and bloodshed taking place.
“You wanna create f***ing some instability while the Virginia situation is happening, make other things happen,” Mathews said. “Derail some rail lines … shut down the highways … shut down the rest of the roads … kick off the economic collapse of the U.S. within a week after the [Boogaloo] starts.”
“I mean, even if we don’t win, I would still be satisfied with a defeat of the system … and whatever was to come in its place would be preferable than what there is now,” Lemley said. “And if it’s not us, then you know what, we still did what we had to do.”
Prior to their sentencing, Mathews and Lemley had pleaded guilty to firearms and immigration violation-related charges. At their Oct. 28 sentencing hearing, U.S. district judge Theodore Chuang went above the sentencing guidelines in applying a terrorism enhancement to each charge, sentencing both men to nine years in federal prison.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified earlier this year that the number of domestic terrorism investigations into white supremacist individuals and groups has tripled since he joined the bureau in 2017.
