(ATLANTA) — Extreme heat is forcing the Atlanta Zoo to close its gates early on Wednesday and Thursday.
The heat index — what temperature it feels like — is forecast to skyrocket Wednesday to 100 degrees in Atlanta.
Some animals who call the Atlanta Zoo home may be brought inside earlier in the day than usual because of the high temperatures, said Rachel Davis, the zoo’s director of communications. Animals also have access to shade or water features like water-mist fans, she said.
“The Animal Care Teams carefully monitor and check in on all animal habitats at multiple times throughout the day,” Davis told ABC News via email. Some “are native to tropical environments in Africa or southeast Asia. Others, like giant pandas, which are native to cool, high-altitude forests in China, would already, just by virtue of the season, be spending time in their indoor dayroom habitats, which are kept in the 60s Fahrenheit year-round.”
Some zoo residents even get to indulge in frozen treats!
“These vary among species and their diets — for example, for gorillas it might be frozen fruit juice,” Davis said.
The zoo said its last entry time for Wednesday and Thursday will be 12:30 to 1 p.m, with normal hours expected to resume Friday.
(LOGAN COUNTY, W. Va.) — Six people reportedly died in a helicopter crash in West Virginia on Wednesday.
The Bell UH-1B helicopter crashed by Route 17 in Logan County around 5 p.m., according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which also said six people were on board. Emergency service personnel responded to the scene.
The six people were killed, Logan County Office of Emergency Management Deputy Director Sonya Porter told ABC News affiliate WCHS.
It’s unclear what caused the crash, but there was a severe thunderstorm watch for Logan County at the time of the incident, according to the county’s office of emergency management.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA are investigating the incident.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
(SAN FRANCISCO) — The search continued Thursday for a gunman who shot two people, one fatally, on a packed Muni commuter train in San Francisco on Wednesday, police said.
The shooting occurred around 10 a.m. as the light-rail train was moving between stations, according to San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Kathryn Winters.
Winters said police were initially called to the city’s Forest Hill Muni station for a report of a shooting, but the train had already pulled away. Officers caught up to the train at the busy Castro Street Station, where they discovered the two victims, Winters said.
Police late Wednesday released a photo of a person of interest connected to the shooting.
Winters said the gunman and commuters aboard the train ran off as soon as it stopped and the doors opened at the station.
Winters said one victim, a man, was pronounced dead at the scene. A second individual was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center with non-life-threatening injuries.
The shooting happened ahead of this Sunday’s Pride Parade in San Francisco and in the heart of the city’s popular Castro District, which is expected to be filled with revelers celebrating LGBTQ pride this weekend. Winters said preliminary evidence showed that the shooting has no connection to this coming weekend’s activities or directed at the city’s LGBTQ community.
San Francisco Supervisor Myrna Melgar told ABC station KGO-TV in San Francisco that police informed her that the shooting occurred during a confrontation the gunman had with the victim who died.
“We do know the shooting happened after a heated verbal argument,” Melgar said.
It was not immediately clear whether the gunman and the deceased victim knew each other. She said the second victim who was wounded was an innocent bystander.
Winters said on Wednesday that homicide detectives were securing surveillance video from the train and the Forest Hill and Castro stations in hopes there was footage of the shooting that could help them identify the assailant.
Police had released a vague description of the perpetrator, saying he was a man wearing dark clothes and a hooded sweatshirt.
Melgar asked any commuters who were on the train and witnessed the shooting to contact police immediately.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla.) — A Florida judge told lawyers for the parents of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie that he will make a decision on whether he will dismiss a civil lawsuit brought by the Petitos in the next few weeks. The two sides appeared in Sarasota County Court on Wednesday.
Joseph Petito and Nichole Schmidt, the parents of Gabby Petito, brought a lawsuit against Christopher and Roberta Laundrie after their daughter was murdered. The Petitos claim in the lawsuit that Brian Laundrie, Petito’s boyfriend, told his parents he had killed her before he returned home alone from their trip out West.
The Laundries filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
In court filings, lawyers for the Petitos claim the Laundries failed to disclose that Petito was killed or where her body was and then went on a vacation with their son after she was killed.
In a hearing held over Zoom, Matthew Luka, a lawyer for the Laundries, argued that the law did not oblige them to disclose any information on Gabby Petito and that they had a first amendment right not to speak.
Patrick Riley, a lawyer for Petito’s parents, told the judge the case was about Laundrie parents’ conduct after they found out that Gabby Petito was killed by their son. Riley alleged that the Laundries knew on Aug. 28 that Gabby Petito was killed, where the body was and that her family was desperately looking for information. The family then knowingly went on vacation with Brian Laundrie, Riley alleged.
Riley also alleged that a statement made by a lawyer for the Laundries saying they hope Gabby Petito is found was made while they knew she was dead and that her body was in a different location than where investigators were searching at the time.
Riley claimed first amendment protections does not apply in this case.
Judge Hunter Carroll also held a hearing in a wrongful death suit filed by Gabby Petito’s mother. Schmidt is seeking damages in excess of $30,000 and is demanding a trial by jury. Riley said he is awaiting a response from representatives for the estate before the case could move forward.
Petito and Brian Laundrie were on a cross-county trip last year, documenting their travels on social media. Petito suddenly disappeared on Aug. 25. Brian Laundrie returned home to North Port, Florida, alone.
Eleven days into the search, Petito’s body was found in a remote area in a national park in Wyoming in September. The cause of death was ruled to be strangulation.
In January, the FBI concluded that Petito was murdered by Brian Laundrie, saying that Laundrie wrote in a notebook that he killed her. The notebook was found near his body, along with a backpack and a gun.
(UVALDE, Texas) — The embattled police chief of the Texas school district where 19 children and two teachers were killed in a school shooting has been placed on administrative leave, the superintendent announced.
Pete Arredondo, the police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, has been criticized for his handling of the shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24 that killed 19 third and fourth graders and two teachers, and the decision to delay police entry into the classrooms where the gunman carried out the attack. Arredondo served as the incident commander on the scene of the shooting.
The leave will take effect immediately, the school district said in a statement Wednesday. Lt. Mike Hernandez will assume the duties of the Chief of Police, said Dr. Hal Harrell, superintendent of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District.
“From the beginning of this horrible event, I shared that the district would wait until the investigation was complete before making personnel decisions,” Harrell said. “Today, I am still without details of the investigations being conducted by various agencies. Because of the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations, I have made the decision to place Chief Arredondo on administrative leave effective on this date.”
Arredondo was the lone witness at the hearing on the shooting held during an executive session by the Texas state House of Representatives on Tuesday. Later that night, the Uvalde City Council unanimously denied Arredondo’s request for a leave of absence from future meetings. Arredondo had been sworn in as a city council member at the end of May.
During a state Senate hearing Tuesday on school safety, police training and social media in the wake of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw read aloud from a transcript of police radio communications, revealing that nearly an hour after the gunman entered the school, an officer told the police chief, “People are going to ask why we’re taking so long.”
“We’re trying to preserve life,” Arredondo replied, per the transcript.
Parents and community members called for Arredondo’s resignation on Monday, with several arguing that law enforcement should be held partly accountable for the tragedy due to what was described as inadequate decision-making.
Earlier this month, Arredondo told The Texas Tribune he did not consider himself the commanding officer on the scene on the day of the shooting and that no one told him about the 911 calls that came in during the 77 minutes before the gunman was taken down.
“We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced,” he said. “Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”
State investigators, according to a preliminary assessment, believe the decision to delay police entry into the classroom was made in order to allow time for protective gear to arrive on scene, an official briefed on a closed-door presentation by the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety told ABC News earlier this month.
However, waiting for protective gear contradicts active shooter protocols that have been adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country in the last 20 years.
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky and Bonnie Mclean contributed to this report.
(PACIFIC GROVE, Calif.) — A person was attacked by a shark at a California beach Wednesday, sustaining “significant” injuries from the bite, Pacific Grove police said.
Following the shark attack at Lovers Point Beach, the swimmer was transported to Natividad Hospital, the Pacific Grove Police Department said. The man’s condition is unknown at this time.
Police said people at the beach reported that a shark was in the water around the time of the attack. Several people went into the water to help the person who was attacked, police said.
“We want to express our gratitude and appreciation to the Good Samaritans that took immediate action and personal risk to assist the swimmer,” Pacfic Grove police said. “We thank our partners at the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of Fish and Wildlife. In addition, we thank our CERT [Community Emergency Response Team] members who responded to help with the beach closures to keep the community safe.”
“We send our prayers and thoughts to the swimmer and their family,” the department added.
Authorities launched a drone to find the shark but did not report additional sightings, police said.
The beach at Lovers Point and Sea Palm turnout has been closed and will reopen on Saturday, police said.
Located about 120 miles south of San Francisco, Pacific Grove is near Monterey and served as one of the filming locations for the hit HBO series “Big Little Lies.”
(NEW YORK) — Dramatic police body-camera video released by the New York Police Department captured two officers teaming up on a rush-hour rescue of a woman this week who collapsed on a subway platform and fell onto the tracks.
The duo sprang into action around 8:30 a.m. Monday at a subway station in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, according to the NYPD.
The officers, whose names have not been released, were on their daily transit inspection when a 25-year-old woman walking ahead of them on a subway platform “suffered a medical episode and fell onto the tracks minutes before a train rolled into the station,” the NYPD said in a statement posted on Twitter.
Officials released body-camera video Tuesday night showing the woman walking on the platform and then suddenly collapsing and falling onto the tracks.
Watch as strategically deployed @nypd68pct officers who were on their daily transit inspection came to the rescue when a passenger suffered a medical episode and fell onto the tracks minutes before a train rolled into the station. pic.twitter.com/qdGwnCFWgM
The footage shows one of the officers jumping onto the tracks and lifting the apparently unconscious woman up to his partner who pulled her out of harm’s way. The officer climbed back onto the platform several minutes before a subway pulled into the station, according to the video.
The officers were not injured in the episode. The woman, whose name was not released, was taken to New York University Langone Hospital, where she was treated for a head injury.
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — A woman who feared for her life as she was allegedly being held hostage in a New York City apartment found an alternative way to call for help without alerting her captor.
The 24-year-old woman was being held against her will in an apartment in the Eastchester section of the Bronx on Sunday after a man she met online allegedly sexually assaulted her, police told ABC New York station WABC.
The woman and the suspect had met in person for the first time months after they connected online, police said. The encounter soon turned violent, according to police, and the suspect would not let the woman have her phone — except to order food, the station reported.
Employees at the Chipper Truck Café in Yonkers, just north of Manhattan, received an order placed on Grubhub for a breakfast sandwich and a burger around 5 a.m. on Sunday, the restaurant’s owner Alice Bermejo told WABC. While the order itself was not unusual, employees noticed a hastily written note in the section for additional instructions, which said to call police and have them come with the food — cautioning them to not make the response obvious.
“She was basically saying to bring the police with the delivery,” Bermejo said.
Bermejo said her husband received a call from one of the employees who saw the order come up on the screen, asking what to do.
Bermejo’s husband instructed the employee to follow the instructions.
“He was like, ‘Call the police. Can’t take any risks. Better safe than sorry,'” Bermejo said.
Police responded and the suspect, 32-year-old Kemoy Royal, was arrested, the New York City Police Department told ABC News in a statement. Royal was charged with rape, unlawful imprisonment, strangulation, criminal possession of a weapon and sexual abuse, among other counts, police said.
Royal was also charged that day with the attempted sexual assault of a 26-year-old woman on June 15, the NYPD said. Police did not immediately say why Royal was not charged earlier for that incident.
Grubhub Chief Operating Officer Eric Ferguson reached out to Bermejo Wednesday morning and offered her $5,000 to invest in her business to recognize the quick-thinking of the owner and employee, Lisa Belot, director of public relations for the food delivery company, told ABC News over email.
“Every time we see a simple but extraordinary act like this, we are amazed by how our partners positively impact their communities,” Belot said. “From drivers delivering in difficult weather to our corporate employees volunteering at food banks to these restaurant employees in Yonkers who recognized a serious situation and acted quickly, we’re grateful and humbled that Grubhub can be a part of such incredible stories of kindness and heroism.”
Bermejo said she later received a phone call from the victim’s friend, thanking the restaurant for helping her.
“We really had no idea of the gravity of the situation until after everything had happened,” Bermejo
ABC News could not immediately reach an attorney for Royal.
(UVALDE, Texas) — A state senator who represents Uvalde, Texas, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Texas Department of Public Safety, seeking access to the agency’s records of its sweeping investigation into the police response to last month’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio) is accusing the DPS, the state’s top law-enforcement agency, of unlawfully denying his records requests.
“From the very start, the response to this awful gun tragedy has been full of misinformation and outright lies from out government,” Gutierrez said in the eight-page complaint, filed in Travis County state court in the state’s capital of Austin.
DPS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
On Tuesday, DPS Director Steven McCraw testified for more than three hours before a state Senate panel investigating the police response the massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead. He said the investigation has determined that the law-enforcement response led by the local school district’s police chief was an “abject failure.”
Enough officers and equipment had arrived on the scene within three minutes to “neutralize” the shooter, McCraw testified, but instead officers did not breach the door to the classroom containing the shooter for one hour and 14 minutes.
McCraw’s testimony marked the first time in nearly four weeks that anyone in law enforcement publicly laid out details of the various investigations into the mass shooting, probes that are examining everything from the killer’s motives and planning to police actions that directly contradicted first-response protocols that mandate officers rush in to protect civilians from an active shooter.
For weeks, all official information has been laid out only behind closed doors, and law enforcement officials have not responded to requests for information from families of the victims and news media.
According to the lawsuit, Gutierrez filed his public records request on May 31 but has yet to receive a response. Texas state law requires a response to records requests within 10 days, or the seeking out of an attorney general decision, according to the complaint.
During Tuesday’s state Senate hearing, Gutierrez delivered an impassioned plea for “common sense gun solutions” and for the ongoing investigation to be conducted in the open.
“We live in a democracy. In a democracy, things need to be transparent,” he said. “As to the laws and the things, that we need to change.”
(SAN FRANCISCO) — A search was underway Wednesday for a gunman who shot two people, one fatally, on a packed Muni commuter train in San Francisco, police said.
The shooting occurred around 10 a.m. as the light-rail train was moving between stations, according to San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Kathryn Winters.
Winters said police were initially called to the city’s Forest Hill Muni station for a report of a shooting, but the train had already pulled away, Winters said. Offices caught up to the train at the busy Castro Street Station, where they discovered the two victims, Winters said.
She said the gunman and commuters aboard the train ran off as soon as it stopped and the doors opened at the station.
Winters said one victim, a man, was pronounced dead at the scene. A second individual was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center with non-life-threatening injuries.
The shooting happened ahead of this Sunday’s Pride Parade in San Francisco and in the heart of the city’s popular Castro District, which is expected to be filled with revelers celebrating LGBTQ pride this weekend. Winters said preliminary evidence showed that the shooting has no connection to this coming weekend’s activities or directed at the city’s LGBTQ community.
San Francisco Supervisor Myrna Melgar told ABC station KGO-TV in San Francisco that police informed her that the shooting occurred during a confrontation the gunman had with the victim who died.
“We do know the shooting happened after a heated verbal argument,” Melgar said.
It was not immediately clear whether the gunman and the deceased victim knew each other. She said the second victim who was wounded was an innocent bystander.
Winters said homicide detectives are securing surveillance video from the train and the Forest Hill and Castro stations in hopes there is footage of the shooting that can help them identify the assailant.
Police only released a vague description of the perpetrator as a man wearing dark clothes and a hooded sweatshirt.
Melgar asked any commuters who were on the train and witnessed the shooting to contact police immediately.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
