(MIAMI) — A nearly $1 billion settlement in last year’s shocking collapse of a Miami Beach-area condo building was unexpectedly announced during a routine status conference in a Florida courtroom Wednesday afternoon.
Lawyers involved in the class-action lawsuit representing tenants from the oceanfront building in Surfside announced a $997 million settlement had been reached.
Upon the news, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said he was “speechless.”
“That’s incredible news,” the judge said.
“I’m shocked by this result — I think it’s fantastic,” the judge told the courtroom. “This is a recovery that is far in excess of what I had anticipated.”
Litigation stemming from the catastrophic collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, had been moving slowly as the first anniversary approached.
The 12-story residential building partially collapsed around 1:15 a.m. on June 24 at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, authorities said.
The final victim’s remains were identified more than a month later, on July 26, following a massive search and rescue mission that become a recovery operation.
The victims killed ranged from young children to elderly couples, and included families, longtime Surfside residents and tourists staying in the building.
“Some of the victims can never recover from this loss and we know that,” Hanzman said in court.
The settlement will cover families of those who died as well as survivors, according to lawyers on the case.
The judge said he wants the whole settlement finalized by the one-year anniversary on June 24, with payouts made by the fall. Motions for preliminary approval will be due no longer than a week from Wednesday.
“My goal was to do everything humanly possible to conclude this case by the first anniversary of the collapse,” he said.
All funds for the victims will go through the receivership.
“Today is one of those days in a career that I think we’re going to look back on,” attorney Michael Goldberg, the court-appointed receiver who will oversee the payouts, said in court.
One of the lead attorneys in the case, Judd Rosen, told ABC News that the settlement “represents accountability from a lot of different players.”
“It’s the largest settlement from a single incident in U.S. history,” Rosen said. “The number itself implies significant accountability on what happened.”
Plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit argued that the poor construction and maintenance of Champlain Towers South turned catastrophic with the development of a new luxury tower next door.
“CTS [Champlain Towers South] was an older building in need of routine repairs and maintenance, but it was not until excavation and construction began on the luxury high-rise condominium project next door, known as ‘Eighty-Seven Park,’ that CTS became so badly damaged and destabilized as to be unsafe,” the lawsuit stated. “First, the developers of Eighty-Seven Park improperly obtained the right to build higher and larger than originally entitled, including by buying a public street just a few feet from CTS’s foundation. Then they undertook destructive excavation and site work dangerously close to CTS, sloped their project so that water poured into CTS and corroded its structural supports, and drove sheet piles 40 feet into the ground, causing tremors and vibrations at such high levels that they cracked tiles and walls at CTS and shook the structure.”
Owners and insurers of Eighty-Seven Park had consistently denied any responsibility for the collapse.
Defendants named in the lawsuit included the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association and developers involved in the Eighty-Seven Park project.
The Champlain Condominium Towers South was built in 1981. It was in the process of a county-mandated inspection for commercial and residential buildings 40 years after they’re constructed when the building came crashing down.
In the wake of the collapse, Miami-Dade County inspected more than 500 buildings that were approaching the 40-year recertification deadline to identify any obvious structural concerns.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — What was once unthinkable — is now a reality.
One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.”
The president plans to order flags to half-staff in remembrance.
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of one million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
But the impact of the deaths extends far beyond the total number of deaths. An analysis published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that nine million family members — mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and children — may be grieving the loss of a loved one killed by the virus.
Making sense of the numbers
The staggering number of deaths due to COVID-19 is now equivalent to the population of San Jose, California — the 10th largest city in the U.S.
“If you were to tell people that an American city had been wiped off the face of the earth, people would be shocked and horrified. But since this has been a kind of a gradual burn over two years, we’ve gotten so used to hearing the headlines and so tired of having to deal with a pandemic. That sense of horror and devastation has been lost,” Dowdy said.
COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2021, following heart disease and cancer, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of Americans lost to COVID-19 also continues to dwarf the number of deaths from influenza. Between Oct. 1, 2021, and Apr. 30, 2022, the CDC estimated that there have been around 3,600 – 10,000 flu deaths. In the same time frame, more than 280,000 Americans have reportedly died from COVID-19.
Racial and ethnic minorities in the country have also faced increased risk of testing positive, requiring hospitalization and dying from COVID-19. According to federal data, adjusted for age and population, the likelihood of death because of COVID-19 for Black, Asian, Latino and Native American people is one to two times higher than white people.
Many experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths, a measure of how many lives have been lost beyond what would be expected if the pandemic had not occurred.
A recent report from the World Health Organization also found that globally, estimates show there were nearly 15 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 — more than double the official global death toll count of 6.2 million confirmed virus-related deaths.
‘I really don’t think people understand’
It has been more than two years since Pamela Addison lost her husband, Martin, a healthcare worker, to COVID-19, in the very early days of the pandemic in April 2020, but the grief is still raw.
“The day he died, I was stunned and in shock, and I was thrown into this new life,” Addison said. “I know that [my two young kids] were going to miss a lifetime of moments with their dad.”
After the loss of her husband, the 38-year-old New Jersey teacher found herself a single mother to the couple’s two young children, Elsie, then 2, and Graeme, then 5 months old, overnight.
Martin, a speech pathologist at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey, was just 44 when he became ill with the virus in late March of 2020. Within a matter of weeks, Martin was hospitalized and on a ventilator, and despite numerous interventions and efforts, Martin succumbed to the virus just over a month after he developed his first symptoms.
“Knowing that I wasn’t there when my husband died, I never saw him again after he left that door … that’s something that I will carry with me forever,” Addison said. “I said goodbye on FaceTime and I didn’t even know it was going to be the last time I loved him… I wasn’t able to have a funeral for my husband, and I really don’t feel like people understand just how difficult it is to grieve.”
The loss has deeply impacted the couple’s two young children, who still frequently talk about their father and their longing to hug them.
“I felt so unprepared to make [my daughter’s] pain go away,” Addison said.
A few months after the death of her husband, in an effort to find a community of others who could be experiencing the same grief as she had, Addison founded the Young Widows and Widowers of COVID-19 on Facebook, which now includes hundreds of members.
“When I lost Martin, it was this sense of loneliness,” Addison explained. “Knowing that other people experienced that same sort of inability to be there with their loved one … it gives me some comfort to know that I’m not alone… there are so many people grieving a loss to COVID-19.”
‘A myriad of outcomes that would not have resulted in a million deaths’
In the early days of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump predicted that the U.S. COVID-19 death toll would be “substantially” lower than the initial forecasts suggested.
“The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number. … So we’ll see what it ends up being, but it looks like we’re headed to a number substantially below 100,000,” Trump said in April 2020.
Similarly, at the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, in his most pessimistic scenario, did not envision the possibility that the number of Americans dead from the virus could ultimately be so staggeringly high, telling CNN in late March 2020 that preparing for one million to two million Americans to die from the coronavirus is “almost certainly off the chart.”
“Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely,” Fauci said.
The uncertainty of the federal response in the early days of the pandemic has come under repeated scrutiny from public health experts, who say more should have been done to keep the virus at bay.
“To imagine where we were just over two years ago, we lacked the clarity, the preparation and really the political will to properly respond to a viral threat that would bring the world to its knees,” said Brownstein.
On average, more than 300 Americans still dying of COVID-19 every day
Although COVID-19 death rates are significantly lower than they were in the winter of 2021, when more than an average of 3,400 Americans were dying from the virus every day, the death toll is still averaging more than 300 a day, according to federal data.
“We would not tolerate that sort of burden or mortality from a preventable disease in any other situation, and we shouldn’t be tolerating that for COVID-19 either — just because we’ve been dealing with this for a long time,” Dowdy said.
Since the onset of the pandemic, older Americans have largely borne the brunt of the COVID-19 deaths, despite having higher vaccination rates than the overall population. Overall, people over the age of 65 years old account for more than three-quarters of virus-related deaths in the U.S, according to federal data.
More than 90% of seniors have been fully vaccinated, and about two-thirds have received their first booster shot. However, despite high vaccination rates in older populations, in recent months, during the omicron surge, 73% of deaths have been among those 65 and older.
There has also been an increasing rate of breakthrough deaths among the vaccinated, an ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
Comparatively, in September 2021, just 1.1% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among Americans who had been fully vaccinated and boosted with their first dose. By February 2022, that percentage of deaths had increased to about 25%.
Health experts said that the risk to the elderly population and waning immunity re-emphasizes the urgency of boosting older Americans and high-risk Americans with additional doses. And it brings into focus once again the deeply political battle over vaccines.
“Even as we hit this unthinkable milestone, the country is still massively divided on the reality of this pandemic and the tools we have to combat it. Not only do these safe and effective vaccines remain hotly debated but so do masks, a non-invasive tool widely recognized as basic personal protection,” said Brownstein.
Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Several homes were destroyed in Southern California Wednesday night as the Coastal Fire continued to spread.
At least 20 homes were burned down in Laguna Niguel and the fire had reached approximately 200 acres, according to the Orange County Fire Authority, which said it had “60 different types of resources battling the flames.”
Evacuation orders have been issued for Coronado Pointe Drive, Vista Court and Via Las Rosa in the Pacific Island area, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said. Voluntary evacuations are in place for Laguna Beach residents in the Balboa Nyes, or Portafina, neighborhood.
OCFA Chief Brian Fennessy said late Wednesday there are no reports of civilian or firefighter casualties. The crews fighting the blaze are starting to get a better handle on the fire and “great progress” is expected into the night and coming days, Fennessy said.
The cause of the fire is unknown and an investigation is underway, according to the fire chief.
Fennessy said the fire started quickly and moved upslope over steep terrain, proving a challenge for hand crews to access. With fuels beds throughout the West being so dry, blazes like the Coastal Fire will “be more commonplace,” he said, adding that when winds couple with dry fuel, “fire is going to run on us.”
Strong winds were blowing embers into the attics of homes making it hard for firefighters to extinguish the blazes, as fires were jumping from house to house within the neighborhood, which is full of multimillion-dollar homes.
Laguna Niguel is south of Laguna Beach and about 25 miles down the coast from Huntington Beach.
(DALLAS) — Three women in Dallas were shot Wednesday afternoon after a suspect opened fire at a hair salon located in the city’s Koreatown, a historically Asian district.
The women suffered nonfatal injuries and were transported to a local hospital, according to police.
Police told ABC News the shooting took place on the 2200 block of Royal Lane, the address of Hair World Salon.
The shooting victims were all Korean women — the salon owner, an employee and a customer, police confirmed to WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas.
Police said they learned from a witness report that an unknown Black male parked what appeared to be “a dark color minivan-type vehicle” on Royal Lane and then walked across the parking lot into the establishment and allegedly opened fire.
“The suspect then fired multiple rounds inside the business, wounded all three victims,” police said. The suspect then drove away.
The suspect has not been identified yet, according to police, who also said the investigation is ongoing and the motive remains unknown.
A spokesperson for the FBI field office in Dallas told ABC News on Wednesday evening that the FBI is in touch with the Dallas Police Department and is monitoring the incident.
“Dallas Police Department is the lead investigating agency for this incident, but we are in communication with them and coordinating closely,” the spokesperson said. “If, in the course of the local investigation, information comes to light of a potential federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate.”
While it is unclear if the shooting was targeted, the incident comes amid a spate of attacks targeting Asian Americans across the nation.
Most recently, a Chinese food delivery worker was shot in the chest in New York City last week while riding his scooter in the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens. The motive is unclear and the investigation is ongoing in the case, according to the NYPD.
Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, FILE
(SAN JOSE, Calif.) — The San Jose City Council voted unanimously to approve an ordinance that would ban so-called ghost guns in the city.
The ordinance prohibits the possession, manufacturing, sale, assembly, transfer, receiving and distribution of firearms, as well as related components, that are not imprinted with a federal or state-authorized serial number.
Privately manufactured firearms, also referred to as ghost guns, are untraceable firearms that are often assembled by unlicensed individuals, the ordinance explains. They’re typically sold through unregulated sellers, without background checks, waiting periods, sales records retention, age restrictions or other restrictions.
San Jose follows other California cities that have banned ghost guns, including San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles.
The ordinance is part of the mayor’s move to reduce gun harm and shift the financial burdens from taxpayers and victims to gun owners, the office of San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said in a statement.
“In cities like San José and LA, a quarter of the illegal guns seized by the police are ‘ghost guns’ lacking any serial number or other identifying mark, enabling criminal gangs to deploy them without accountability,” Liccardo said in the statement.
Residents in possession of unserialized ghost gun components will have 120 days to comply with the ordinance before the rule is enforced, the statement says.
In California alone, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50% of firearms recovered at crime scenes over an 18-month period during 2020 and 2021, according to the County of Santa Clara Crime Lab.
The number of ghost guns seized by San Jose police during criminal investigations in the last five years has increased “dramatically” from nine in 2017 to 221 in 2021, the ordinance states.
The ordinance will go into effect after June 16.
San Jose passed a groundbreaking rule in January that required gun owners to purchase liability insurance and pay an annual “gun harm reduction” fee. San Jose was the first city in the U.S. to pass such a law. It goes into effect in August.
President Joe Biden announced a new ghost gun measure last month, in an effort to crack down on what law enforcement has been calling a growing problem. Biden also called on Congress to pass universal background checks.
“We applaud the recent steps the Biden Administration has taken to stem the rising tide of ghost guns by banning their distribution. An ocean of ghost guns remain in our cities, however, requiring local communities to act to ban the possession of these untraceable guns and their component parts,” Liccardo said in the statement.
(OXFORD, Mich.) — Oxford Community Schools rejected a second offer from the Michigan attorney general’s office to investigate a school shooting in November. The school board said it will launch a third party investigation after the civil cases against the district have been litigated.
The school board said it has been fully cooperating with the Oakland County prosecutor’s investigation and will continue to do so.
Ethan Crumbley, a former student at Oxford High School, is accused of shooting and killing four other students at the school on Nov. 30. He has pleaded not guilty and is set to stand trial in September.
His parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley, are also facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly failing to recognize warning signs about their son in the months before he fatally shot his classmates. Two judges have declined to reduce their bail.
The Crumbleys have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
A lawsuit alleges that the district failed to heed warning signs before the shooting, which the district has denied. The board said reports and analyses will be made public throughout the litigation process.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticized the board’s rejection of her office’s offer.
“I am deeply disappointed by the school board’s repeated rejection of my offers to perform an independent and thorough review of the systems and procedures in the days leading up to and on November 30, 2021,” Nessel said in a statement Wednesday.
She said her department would only be able to perform an exhaustive and thorough review with the cooperation of the school board and district.
“Absent that partnership, I am restricted to the publicly available information we have all read and reviewed,” Nessel said.
The school board said it will wait to launch the third-party investigation and said it will be engaging experts as part of the litigation process to thoroughly review the tragedy and the events leading up to it.
“The ongoing criminal cases have understandably delayed the release of information that could be essential to our extensive review. Oxford Community Schools is also responding to numerous lawsuits at the state and federal levels which will require attention and time from our legal team, our staff and the Board,” the school board said in a statement Tuesday.
The board added, “Once the litigation process is completed and all information has risen to the surface, a team of experts will conduct a third-party review.”
The board also said it is working on a three-year recovery plan which is currently under development by the superintendent and district administration. Upon completion, the plan will be reviewed by a third-party before being implemented at the start of the 2022-2023 school year.
Third-party group Secure Education Consultants have also completed an independent review into all district safety practices and procedures, the board said.
Nessel claimed the board’s rejection stands in the way of transparency.
“The rejection sends a message that the board is more focused on limiting liability than responding to the loud outcry from the Oxford community to deliver greater peace of mind to the students, parents and educators that lived through this traumatic event,” she said.
(RALEIGH, N.C.) — Friends and volunteers formed a search party Wednesday and fanned out in Raleigh, North Carolina, looking for clues and raising awareness about a popular nightclub bouncer, who they say went missing a week ago while driving home.
Robert Richardson, 41, was reported missing by friends, who say he disappeared after getting into a minor car accident on the evening of May 4.
“He’s out there somewhere and somebody knows something,” Kensley Perry, a friend of Richardson, told ABC station WTVD in Durham.
Perry works as head of security at The Village Entertainment Complex in Raleigh’s Glenwood South nightlife district, where Richardson is employed as a door bouncer.
The Raleigh Police Department confirmed that Richardson’s friends filed a missing person report, but said they have no solid leads on where he might be.
Richardson was driving home to nearby Sanford on May 4 after meeting friends for dinner and got into a fender bender, Perry said. He said Richardson exchanged insurance information with the driver of the other car.
Perry said Richardson inexplicably walked away, leaving his vehicle behind with his two cell phones and laptop computer inside. Police responded and towed the vehicle away, Perry said.
Perry said he received a report that Richardson was spotted on May 5 walking toward downtown Raleigh, but there have been no sightings since.
Worried that Richardson may have been injured in the crash and has become disoriented, friends have called local hospitals and homeless shelters looking for the man. Friends and volunteers spent Wednesday plastering downtown Raleigh with missing person fliers containing Richardson’s photo.
Richardson is described as 6-foot-2 to 6-foot-3 and around 280 pounds.
“He’s got tattoos so he sticks out,” Perry said.
Asked if Richardson, who moved to North Carolina from Pennsylvania a year ago, had disappeared before or has a history of substance abuse, Perry said, “He’s not that type of guy. No history of that, to our knowledge, whatsoever.”
Perry said Richardson is a “nice, fun-loving social dude.”
“Always got a smile on his face,” Perry said of his friend.
(MIAMI) — A nearly $1 billion settlement in last year’s shocking collapse of a Miami Beach condo building was unexpectedly announced during a routine status conference in a Florida courtroom Wednesday afternoon.
Lawyers involved in the class-action lawsuit representing tenants from the oceanfront building in Surfside announced a $997 million settlement had been worked out.
Upon the news, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said he was “speechless.”
“That’s incredible news,” the judge said.
“I’m shocked by this result — I think it’s fantastic,” the judge told the courtroom. “This is a recovery that is far in excess of what I had anticipated.”
Litigation stemming from the catastrophic collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, had been moving slowly as the first-anniversary approaches.
ABC News’ Jared Kofsky contributed to this report.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(PHOENIX, Ariz.) — Arizona performed its first execution in nearly eight years, after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an eleventh-hour request from attorneys who said the man had schizophrenia and should not be put to death.
The high court denied a request for a stay of execution early Wednesday, clearing the way for Arizona to move forward with the execution of 66-year-old Clarence Dixon by lethal injection at 10 a.m. local time. The drugs were administered at 10:19 a.m. and he was pronounced dead officially at 10:30 a.m.
Dixon was convicted of murder and sexual assault in connection with the death of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin in 1978.
The case went unsolved for decades until DNA connected Dixon to the murder in 2001, according to authorities. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008.
A judge ruled on Friday that he was mentally fit to be put to death.
Dixon gave his last words before a doctor administered the drugs for the lethal injection.
“Maybe I’ll see you on the other side, Deana,” Dixon said in part, according to officials. “I don’t know you and I don’t remember you.”
Bowdoin’s sister, Leslie James, gave a statement to the press following the execution and said that it was her late mother’s wish that her sister’s name be remembered.
“It was way too long. This process was way, way, way too long,” James said of the decadeslong case.
“I don’t know how I’m going to feel,” she said. “The process is final.”
This was Arizona’s first use of the death penalty since the execution of Joseph Wood in 2014. That execution took almost two hours and witnesses reported Wood gasped and snorted, prompting his lawyers to request an emergency halt to the procedure.
Officials said the only time Dixon showed any signs of discomfort was when the IV was put in.
Dixon was the sixth inmate to be put to death in the U.S. so far this year.
(HOUSTON) — Nearly 2,400 people required medical treatment following last year’s deadly Astroworld music festival in Houston, according to a new court filing.
Attorneys representing thousands of people suing promoter Live Nation, headliner Travis Scott and dozens of other companies over the tragedy said in a court document filed this week that 732 claimants sustained an injury requiring “extensive medical treatment” during the concert on Nov. 5, 2021. Another 1,649 claimants suffered an injury requiring “less extensive medical treatment,” according to the filing, which does not define the injury categories.
Additionally, the injuries of another 2,540 claimants are under review, attorneys said.
“Plaintiffs will continue to evaluate and update this for the Court as additional information and details are received and reviewed,” the attorneys stated in the document, filed in the 11th Judicial District in Harris County on Monday.
Ten people died in a massive crowd surge during Scott’s set, including a victim as young as 9 who was trampled in a crowd of 50,000 people at NRG Park, according to officials.
According to Houston Police and witness accounts, a wave of tens of thousands of people surged toward the stage when Scott — and later rapper Drake — appeared. Concert attendees say they were pushed into one another from all sides. As the crowd pressed its way forward, some began to fall, pass out and get trampled by others in the audience.
Hundreds of lawsuits filed against the event organizers, managers and performers in the wake of the tragedy were consolidated and are being handled by one judge.
Following the concert, Scott released a statement on Twitter, saying, “I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night. My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld festival.”
In an extensive interview with radio host Charlamagne Tha God in December, the rapper said he was unaware of the injuries and fatalities among fans until after his performance was over.
Asked if he feels responsible for the tragedy, Scott said, “I have a responsibility to figure out what happened here. I have a responsibility to figure out the solution.”
In a statement to ABC News in the days after the concert, Live Nation said it was working with law enforcement to get answers.
“We continue to support and assist local authorities in their ongoing investigation so that both the fans who attended and their families can get the answers they want and deserve, and we will address all legal matters at the appropriate time,” Live Nation said.
The Houston Police Department is investigating the deadly concert. The House Oversight and Reform Committee also launched a probe into the deaths late last year.
ABC News’ Kiara Alfonseca and Josh Margolin contributed to this report.
