(VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.) — The United States Coast Guard is urgently searching for a couple from Virginia Beach, Virginia, who were last heard from hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean while they were on a sailing trip to the Azores, Portugal.
Yanni Nikopoulos and Dale Jones, both 65, departed from Hampton, Virginia, en route to the Azores on June 8. However, Nikopoulos and Jones reported to Jones’ daughter five days later on June 13 that they had encountered inclement weather approximately 460 miles east of Virginia Beach and that they had made the decision to turn around after their vessel sustained damage during the storm, according to a statement released by the United States Coast Guard (USCG).
The couple have not been heard from since.
Four days later on June 17, the United States Coast Guard Fifth District command center watchstanders received a report from Jones’ daughter informing them that she still hadn’t heard anything from Nikopoulos and Jones and that she was extremely concerned about their whereabouts and wellbeing.
“While no date had been established for their return, an anticipated return date of June 20 was communicated by the daughter,” the USCG said in their statement.
Subsequently, Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City conducted two overflights by HC-130 Hercules crews in the approximate region where the missing boaters were last reported and an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast was also issued by the Fifth Coast Guard District which notified boaters in the region about the wayward couple. No evidence of Nikopoloulos, Jones or their vessel — named Kyklades — has turned up yet.
“In situations like this, where there are so many unknowns, our coordination efforts need to cast a wide and intentional net,” said Chief Brian Gainey, command duty officer. “We’re tracking cell phone and radio pings as we work with our counterparts in Bermuda to accurately determine the most intelligent search area for our air crews. It’s a lot of detective work, but it’s all in service to finding these two individuals and bringing them home to their families.”
(AUSTIN, Texas) — A top law enforcement official in Texas testified Tuesday that efforts by law enforcement to end the Robb Elementary School mass shooting sooner were an “abject failure,” laying much of the blame at the feet of a local police chief who waited well over an hour to breach a classroom door and kill the gunman.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw appeared before the Texas state Senate panel investigating the May 24 shooting in Uvalde, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
McCraw’s testimony, supported by an updated timeline of events that he said was based on police body camera and surveillance videos, and a transcript of police communications during the rampage, appeared to offer the most complete version of events to date — and heightened scrutiny of Pete Arredondo, the embattled school district police chief in who was the on-scene commander during the shooting.
Here are five key takeaways from Tuesday’s hearing.
Officers could have ‘neutralized’ shooter within minutes
In a striking rebuke of the responding authorities, McCraw claimed that enough officers and equipment had arrived on the scene within three minutes to “neutralize” the shooter, who had by then entered the classroom and begun firing on students and teachers.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” McCraw said, referring to Arredondo, who McCraw said “decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
McCraw’s testimony shattered previous claims that officers who responded immediately lacked the necessary equipment and weapons to breach the doorway, instead opting to wait as more resources arrived.
“One hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds. That’s how long the children waited and the teachers waited in rooms 111 and 112 to be rescued,” McCraw said. “And while they waited, the on-scene commander waited for radios and rifles. Then he waited for shields. Then he waited for SWAT.”
“Lastly, he waited for key that was never needed,” said McCraw.
The door to the classroom may not have been locked
McCraw sought to clarify some confusion over whether the exterior and interior doors used by the gunman to enter Robb Elementary School were locked — and whether officers even needed keys to breach the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself.
According to McCraw, the door to the classroom containing the gunman could not be locked from inside, meaning it was likely unlocked for the duration of the shooting.
“I have great reasons to believe [the door] was never secured,” he said.
McCraw later said it appears that officers on the scene never checked whether the door to the classroom was unlocked, even as they waited for additional equipment to breach it and worked to secure a set of keys.
“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?” McCraw said he would ask the officers who responded first.
Communication failures crippled law enforcement response
A staggering series of communications failures plagued the police response at Robb Elementary, McCraw said Tuesday, including problematic radio reception inside the school building.
McCraw confirmed previous reporting that Arredondo arrived at the school without a radio. Later, according to McCraw, local police and Border Patrol lost radio communication signals inside the school.
Those circumstances ultimately led Arredondo and others to communicate with dispatchers on their cell phones, McCraw said.
“Cell phones did work, obviously, inside the school,” he said. “It’s just the portable radio devices that first responders had didn’t.”
State police ‘don’t have authority’ to overrule on-site commander
Multiple state senators challenged McCraw to explain why arriving officers from larger law enforcement agencies did not take over command from Arredondo when they saw he was waiting to breach the classroom.
“I don’t see why y’all didn’t take command once you had DPS agents inside the hall pushing to breach the door,” one state senator asked McCraw. “Lives would have been saved.”
“They don’t have authority by law,” McCraw shot back.
McCraw explained the normal procedure is that the agency with the most direct order of expertise should take command — and that the school district police chief, in this circumstance, was the best person to deliver orders.
“I’m reluctant to encourage — or even think of any situation — where you’d want some level of hierarchy, where a larger police department gets to come in and take over that type of thing,” McCraw said.
Arredondo is under growing pressure to provide his account
New revelations from the Senate hearing put an additional spotlight on Arredondo. The embattled school district police chief spent Tuesday in the neighboring Texas House chamber, where he testified behind closed doors for nearly five hours.
A lawmaker on the state Senate panel called on Arredondo to appear before their committee in a public setting.
“I challenge this chief to come testify in public as to what happened here,” said Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican on the state Senate committee. “Don’t go hide in the House and talk privately — come to the Senate, where the public … can ask these questions.”
Arredondo has largely remained silent in the four weeks since the shooting, save for an interview with The Texas Tribune earlier this month.
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the paper. “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.”
Arredondo, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other law enforcement agencies that responded to the shooting have declined a long list of media requests and requests from families to release underlying records.
(SHEFFIELD LAKE, Ohio) — A second Sheffield Lake police officer has filed a charge of discrimination with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission against former police chief Anthony Campo.
A.J. Torres, the police department’s only Latino officer, spoke publicly about the race and religion-based harassment he alleged he experienced by Campo for the first time Tuesday in a news conference.
Last fall, Keith Pool — the only Black officer in the department at the time — filed a discrimination charge over an incident caught on video showing Campo placing a “Ku Klux Klan” sign on Pool’s jacket and then wearing a makeshift KKK hat. Pool also spoke at the conference.
In his charge, Torres alleged that Campo mocked his Latino heritage and Catholic faith, including his observance of the Sabbath and Lent.
Torres also wrote that Campo posted offensive images of him on the police department bulletin board, such as a photoshopped image of Torres on a jar of salsa with a sombrero and of Torres’ face superimposed onto a priest’s body.
Campo also allegedly posted a photo from one of Torres’ annual mission trips to El Salvador, in which he is pictured with two children, and added a speech bubble implying that Torres is a pedophile, in reference to the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal.
When Campo’s alleged mistreatment of Torres first began, Torres said he attempted to keep his head down and “stay quiet.”
“I would try to have faith, calm down,” Torres said at the conference. “But then the icing on the cake is when Pool’s situation came up, and I said, ‘He’s not alone.’ I had to step forward.”
Following the release of the KKK video, Campo retired in June 2021 after 32 years in the department and eight years as chief. Campo could not be reached for comment by ABC News.
At the time, Sheffield Lake Mayor Dennis Bring called the incident the “the most egregious and offensive thing you could possibly do.”
However, in both Pool and Torres’ cases, the city has denied that Campo’s conduct was “severe or pervasive,” characterizing it as merely “banter,” according to Ashlie Case Sletvold — partner at Peiffer Wolf, the law firm representing Torres and Pool.
“I don’t put away my ethnicity and heritage when I come to work, and I shouldn’t have to hide my religion, either,” Torres said. “My faith and my humanitarian work on my personal time make me a better police officer. I am disappointed that the city I serve is not taking what former Chief Campo did to me more seriously.”
Bring and Sheffield Lake Law Director David Graves did not respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
In addition to the claims filed by Pool and Torres, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission is currently investigating a third charge against Campo alleging sexual harassment.
Pool also filed a petition with the Supreme Court of Ohio last July to force the department to produce public records, including images Campo created and posted mocking employees based on race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.
The city has yet to provide the records, Sletvold said at the conference.
The police department has also yet to mandate any diversity training for its employees and has rejected offers for people to come in and provide such training for free, Sletvold said.
Sheffield Lake Police Department declined to comment to ABC News.
“There’s no change,” Pool said. “We haven’t moved forward as a department to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
(VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala.) — The alleged shooter who killed three people in an Alabama church last week had multiple firearms violations against his federal firearms business in 2018, according to Bureau of Alcohol Firearms and Tobacco documents obtained by ABC News.
Robert Findley Smith allegedly failed to keep receipts of firearms he sold at his business.
“The Licensee failed to record the disposition of [redacted] firearms, of which [redacted] were reconciled and [redacted] was reported as missing inventory,” the report from ATF said. Additionally, he was a repeat offender for this offense, according to the ATF.
Following its investigation into Smith’s business, ATF issued him a warning letter in February 2018, which is the “least severe action the ATF can take against a licensee with compliance issues,” according to a joint report by The Trace and USA TODAY.
Smith, 70, is facing capital murder charges after allegedly walking into a potluck dinner on June 16 at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, killing three parishioners: an 84-year-old man who died at the scene, a 75-year-old woman and an 84-year-old woman who later died at a hospital.
A church member reportedly restrained Smith at the scene until authorities arrived. He’s being held at the Jefferson County Jail on no bond.
According to reports, 25 people were in the church at the time of the shooting.
Ann Carpenter, the reverend’s wife, said Smith attended service almost every Sunday but described him as a loner to ABC News, saying he “sat in the back” and “didn’t have much interaction with anybody.” Right before the shooting, he reportedly drinking liquor alone.
“My wife says he looked like he didn’t take very good care of himself,” the founder of the church, Rev. Douglas Carpenter, told ABC News. “And he had a hard time communicating with people.”
ATF documents showed that Smith bought guns for local dealers, fixed and then sold the weapons at “gun shows, auctions or through the website Gun Broker.”
(NEW CASTLE, N.H.) — A New Hampshire lobster fisherman saved three people and two dogs from a burning yacht near New Castle on Saturday.
An investigation is currently underway into what caused the 70-foot yacht to burn and eventually sink, authorities said.
“We don’t know what caused the fire and we probably never will because the boat burned down to the waterline and there is nothing left of the boat,” Sgt. Steve O’Conner of the New Hampshire State Police Marine Patrol told WMUR-ABC.
Tom Hadley, from Hollis, New Hampshire, said he had noticed a bit of smoke coming from a yacht he had passed on his small fishing boat, and decided to turn around to offer his help.
The yacht, at the mouth of Little Harbor on the Piscataqua River, had burst into flames by the time Hadley came back to it. He told WMUR that he could see three people and two dogs standing on a platform in the stern of their boat.
Hadley said that they were holding pool noodles, so he yelled for them to jump into the water and then dumped his own lobster traps into the harbor to make room for the rescues.
“At first I hauled a lady on board and then we put the two dogs on board” Hadley told WMUR. “And then a younger man was half in, I hauled him over the side.”
Hadley said he then saw a small fishing boat which he called over to help a third man who was clinging to the side as the heat coming from the boat increased.
“If there were an explosion the thought of being showered with burning fiberglass was not too appealing,” Hadley said.
The three individuals were taken to the dock of the Wentworth Marina before being brought to Portsmouth Hospital, where they were treated, released and reunited with their dogs.
New Hampshire State Police reported that the two dogs were safe and unharmed.
A statement from the New Castle Fire Department only reported one minor injury among the three escaping the fire.
“If you ever think somebody is in distress out there, it doesn’t hurt to cruise on over and check it out to make sure that they’re OK,” Hadley said.
The New Hampshire State Police received a 911 call about the boat fire just after 4 p.m., and was on site within minutes, according to a statement from the department.
According to police, the yacht, “Elusive”, was headed toward the Wentworth Marina went one of the passengers noticed smoke below deck. The three passengers reported to police that the smoke had completely filled the boat within minutes.
Jarrod Tubbs, 33, of Jupiter, Florida, Kitt Watson, 67, and Diane Watson, 57, both of New Canaan, Connecticut — a couple and their first mate — lived on the yacht. As the boat has been completely lost, so have all of their belongings.
“This was just arms are open, come on board, get warm, we’re going to take care of you and it really restored my faith in humanity,” Kitt Watson told WMUR-ABC.
Marine Patrol, New Hampshire fire departments from Newington and Rye, the Kittery Harbormaster, and the Salisbury Fire Department from Massachusetts, assisted at the scene, state police said.
The tide pushed the burning yacht away from the coast, and after efforts by several agencies were unsuccessful, it sank in approximately 75-feet deep water, state police said. Within two hours of the initial 911 call, the boat had been submerged and will not be recovered.
The U.S. Coast Guard and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Protection have been monitoring for any excess oil spillage from the sunken yacht.
A spokesperson for the New Hampsire Department of Environmental Protection told ABC News that a sheen of diesel fuel was seen as a result of the incident, but that crews are not aware of any shoreline impacts.
(SUFFOLK COUNTY, N.Y.) — Suffolk County, New York, police are looking for a man and a young girl who took money for Girl Scout cookies that residents say were never delivered.
Police on Long Island said they received at least 11 reports from people who said they gave money to buy cookies they never received.
During some of the incidents, money was given to the man who was accompanied by the child, while in other cases, the girl was alone, according to police.
Police are investigating the incidents to determine whether they are connected. The incidents occurred between February and May and were reported to police between June 18 and June 20, according to police.
The Girl Scouts of Suffolk County said in a statement that it was working with law enforcement and encouraged victims of the scam to file a police report.
The Girl Scouts also said they will provide cookies to anyone who placed a bogus order, “because nothing is more disappointing than not getting your Girl Scout cookies,” according to the statement.
“The Girl Scout Council of Suffolk County was saddened to learn that somebody would use the inherent goodwill of the Girl Scouts to take money from their neighbors under false pretenses,” the organization said.
The cookie season runs from just before New Year’s to the end of April or early May, the Girl Scout Council said.
“Anyone selling cookies at this point in the year is not representing our council and its efforts,” it added.
Girl Scouts sell cookies during booth sales or will have an order form with the information to be taken. They do not ask for payment upfront, according to the council.
“Anyone recording a sale in a makeshift book and taking money is not accurately representing Girl Scouts of Suffolk County,” the council said.
(AUSTIN) — The Texas state Senate heard testimony Tuesday on the deadly school shooting in Uvalde as part of a committee hearing on preventing future mass shootings in Texas. Among those testifying was Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, whose office is conducting one of multiple investigations into the law enforcement response to the massacre.
Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was the incident commander on site, was the lone witness in a separate hearing on the shooting held Tuesday in executive session by the Texas state House of Representatives.
Here’s how the news developed. All times Eastern.
Jun 21, 3:21 pm
McCraw concludes his testimony
After nearly five hours of testimony, the committee chairman of the Texas state Senate concluded Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw’s portion of Tuesday’s hearing.
The panel was scheduled to hear additional testimony from experts in Texas law enforcement training and protocols, with an eye toward preventing future mass shootings in the state.
Jun 21, 3:16 pm
McCraw recommends equipping troopers with ‘go-bag’
Among the recommendations that Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw made with an eye toward improving police response to future mass shootings was equipping all officers with a specialized “go-bag.”
“I’d like a go-bag for every trooper, that has the shield that I discussed … and certainly breaching tools. And then not just issued but trained on them,” McCraw said.
Jun 21, 3:08 pm
Lawmakers question why state troopers ceded command to local police chief
Multiple state senators challenged Texas Director of Public Safety Steve McCraw to explain why arriving officers from larger law enforcement agencies did not take over command during the Uvalde shooting, instead leaving those responsibilities to Pete Arredondo, the local school district police chief.
McCraw explained that the agency with the most expertise should take command — and that the school district police chief, in this circumstance, was the best person to deliver orders.
“I’m reluctant to encourage — or even think of any situation — where you’d want some level of hierarchy, where a larger police department gets to come in and take over that type of thing,” McCraw said.
“I don’t see why y’all didn’t take command once you had DPS agents inside the hall pushing to breach the door,” one state senator asked McCraw later. “Lives would have been saved.”
“They don’t have authority by law,” McCraw shot back.
Jun 21, 2:21 pm
State senator calls on chief to testify in public
New revelations from the Senate hearing have put an additional spotlight on Pete Arredondo, the embattled school district police chief who was the on-site commander during the Uvalde shooting but has largely remained silent in the wake of the mass shooting.
Arredondo has spent the day in the neighboring House chamber, testifying behind closed doors. A lawmaker on the state Senate panel called on Arredondo to appear before their committee in a public setting.
“I challenge this chief to come testify in public as to what happened here,” said Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican on the state Senate committee. “Don’t go hide in the House and talk privately — come to the Senate, where the public … can ask these questions.”
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told The Texas Tribune on June 9. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. 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.”
Jun 21, 1:24 pm
‘Not enough training was done’ in Uvalde, McCraw says
Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw alluded on multiple occasions to specific lapses in protocol and training during the Uvalde shooting — but his overall message is that police officials on site were not trained well enough.
“Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-site commander,” McCraw said.
Asked what one recommendation he would make to prevent a repeat of Uvalde, McCraw was unequivocal: “We need to train more men.”
He also suggested that the police failures at Robb Elementary could pose lasting harm to law enforcement’s reputation.
“Mistakes were made. It should have never happened that way. And we can’t allow that ever to happen in our profession,” he said. “This set our profession back a decade, is what it did.”
Jun 21, 12:35 pm
Door to classroom might not have been locked, McCraw says
Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw sought to clarify some confusion over whether the exterior and interior doors used by the Uvalde gunman to enter Robb Elementary School were locked — and whether officers even needed keys to breach the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself.
According to McCraw, the door to the classroom containing the gunman could not be locked from inside, meaning it was likely unlocked for the duration of the shooting.
“I have great reasons to believe [the door] was never secured,” he said.
McCraw later said it appears that officers on the scene never checked whether the door to the classroom was unlocked, even as they waited for additional equipment to breach it and worked to secure a set of keys.
“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?” McCraw said he would ask the officers who responded first.
Regarding the gunman’s entry into the building, McCraw confirmed previous reporting that a teacher at one point propped a door open but later closed it before the gunman arrived. He did not clarify how or why the door closed but remained unlocked.
“The only way you can lock these exterior doors in the West building … the only way to do that is from the outside. You can’t do it otherwise,” McCraw said. “So when [the teacher] knocked the rock out, it closed securely, but there’s no way for her to tell that the door was unlocked. The only way to know that the door is unlocked is to go out, close the door, OK, then try it.”
Jun 21, 12:00 pm
Police radios didn’t work well in school, McCraw confirms
Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw laid out a series of communications failures that exacerbated the decision-making missteps that hampered the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
McCraw confirmed previous reporting that Pete Arredondo, the on-scene commander, arrived at the school without a radio. Later, according to McCraw, local police and Border Patrol lost radio communication signals inside the school.
Those circumstances ultimately led Arredondo and others to begin communicating with dispatchers on their cellphones, McCraw said.
“Cellphones did work, obviously, inside the school,” he said. “It’s just the portable radio devices that first responders had didn’t.”
McCraw also said “there was no duress system throughout the campus,” which caused confusion among those inside the building. The principal of the school did trigger an emergency alert system called Raptor, but the program did not appear to sufficiently inform those inside the school about the shooting.
“It’s not the same as a direct system,” he said.
Jun 21, 11:28 am
‘We’re trying to preserve life,’ commander said on police radio
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw walked through an updated timeline of events from the Uvalde shooting and read aloud from a transcript of police radio communications.
The transcript describes Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo and other officers speculating on the status of those inside the classroom and painstakingly debating whether and how to breach the door.
Nearly an hour after the gunman entered the school, according to the transcript, an officer told Arredondo, “People are going to ask why we’re taking so long.”
“We’re trying to preserve life,” Arredondo replied, per the transcript.
Jun 21, 11:17 am
McCraw says commander was ‘only thing’ holding back officers
Reviewing the timeline of the Uvalde shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, said that enough officers and equipment arrived on-site “within three minutes” of the gunman entering the school to “neutralize” him.
McCraw said the on-scene commander, Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, was the “only thing stopping” officers from breaching the classroom.
Arredondo, McCraw said, “decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
In his opening statement, Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw said his department’s ongoing probe has uncovered “compelling evidence” to suggest that the police response “was an abject failure.”
“Three minutes after the subject entered the west hallway, there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor, to isolate distract and neutralize the subject,” McCraw said in reviewing the timeline of events. “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
“The officers had weapons — the children had none. The officers had body armor — the children had none,” he said.
“One hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds. That’s how long the children waited and the teachers waited in rooms 111 to be rescued. And while they waited, the on-scene commander waited for radios and rifles. Then he waited for shields. Then he waited for SWAT. Lastly, he waited for key that was never needed,” McCraw said.
Jun 21, 11:10 am
Hearing gaveled in with moment of silence
Committee Chairman Sen. Robert Nichols, a Republican, gaveled the hearing to order shortly and immediately asked those present to observe a moment of silence for the lives lost in Uvalde.
Members of the panel then had an opportunity to make brief opening remarks, where lawmakers wasted little time criticizing law enforcement officials who presented shifting narratives about the Uvalde shooting in the ensuing days and weeks.
“I have never seen in my entire public policy career facts that change 180 degrees from one week to the next,” said Texas state Sen. Paul Bettencourt. “I hope today with the witnesses that we have, we can get nearer to the bottom of the facts because they’ve been elusive … we are all in the dark.”
(HOUSTON) — A 5-year-old boy has died after being left in a hot car in Houston as record-high temperatures struck the city.
The boy had been inside the car, which was parked outside his home, for several hours before he was found dead on Monday, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
Houston hit a scorching 102 degrees Monday, marking the hottest temperature this early in the summer since 2011.
The family told authorities they had been preparing for the boy’s sister’s birthday party, the sheriff’s office said.
The boy’s mother was “excited, trying to get things together [for the party] … with the busyness of the activities that they were preparing for, it took them awhile to notice that the child wasn’t in the house,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told reporters.
The sheriff said it appeared the boy knew how to unbuckle himself from his carseat and exit his family’s car on his own, but it’s believed that on Monday the family had a rental car.
“Perhaps the child wasn’t as familiar with” the rental car, the sheriff said, noting, “the door didn’t have any kind of child safety lock.”
The sheriff’s office said “investigators will meet with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to present their finding of the investigation.”
The little boy, who hasn’t been identified, is the fifth child to die in a hot car in the U.S. this year, according to national nonprofit KidsAndCars.org. Click here for tips on how to keep children safe from hot cars this summer.
(NEW YORK) — As millions of U.S. children prepare to go off to summer camp, a shooting at one in Texas last week has left some parents like Janill Briones-Lopez with concerns that go far deeper than the normal bumps and bruises kids experience during what has traditionally been a fun-filled respite from the classroom.
While hoping her 7-year-old son will have a safe experience at the free Summer Rising camp run by the New York City Department of Education, Briones-Lopez told ABC News she plans to question camp organizers about staff training on active shooter protocols.
With recent mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 that left 19 students and two teachers dead and an attack on the summer youth camp in Duncanville, Texas, in which an armed suspect was killed in a gunfight with police as campers hid, Briones-Lopez said she can’t help but worry that summer camps “may become targets for these types of attacks.”
“I will be bringing it up at the orientation,” said Briones-Lopez, adding that money-conscious couples like her and her husband depend on the city-run summer camp to provide free care for their children while they are working.
The mother said she has spent the past two-and-a-half years worried about her son contracting COVID-19 and that just as the virus vaccine has allayed some of her worries, the rising epidemic of gun violence across the country has given her something else to be anxious about.
“I am worried about guns and gun violence, but I don’t let myself worry about it on a daily basis because at what point do we shutter ourselves away and become too afraid to go outside?” Briones-Lopez said. “We still have to live our lives.”
‘I was so scared’
One of the country’s top camp directors, Tom Rosenberg, president and CEO of the American Camp Association, which advises and trains camp staffs nationwide on procedures and protocols for running safe and educational programs, said the shooting last week at the Duncanville Fieldhouse summer camp in Texas left him and others in his nonprofit organization “taken aback.”
Rosenberg told ABC News that in his nearly 30 years as a camp professional, he couldn’t recall a shooting or violent attack occurring at a summer camp in the United States.
In July 2011, self-professed white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik carried out a mass shooting at a summer youth camp in Norway on the tranquil, wooded island of Utoya, northwest of Oslo, killing 69 campers and staff. Breivik attacked the camp on the same day he detonated a car bomb at a government building in Oslo, killing eight people.
He was found guilty of mass murder, causing a fatal explosion and terrorism charges in July 2012 and sentenced to the maximum civilian criminal penalty in Norway of 21 years in prison, with the possibility of extending his sentence for as long as he is deemed a danger to society. In February, a Norwegian court rejected Breivik’s latest bid for parole, finding he still has no remorse for the attack and remains a risk to society.
“This is not unknown, but what happened in Norway hasn’t happened quite like that in our country that I’m aware of in recent times. But when we see our fellow educators in the school system dealing with this now so much, we’ve been preparing for some time around active shooter training,” Rosenberg said.
He added, “I don’t think we can say that any environment today is immune. But all places where our children are being supervised today outside of our homes really need to be prepared for all types of emergencies, period. End of story.”
On June 13, an armed 42-year-old man entered the Duncanville Fieldhouse in the Dallas suburb, where roughly 250 children ranging in age from 4 to 14 were participating in a summer camp, police said. Duncanville police officers rapidly responded to calls of a man with a handgun at the athletic complex as quick-thinking camp staffers ushered the children to safety, authorities said.
Police said the suspect, Brandon Keith Ned, confronted an employee in the facility’s lobby and fired two shots, including one at a classroom full of children he couldn’t get into because the door was locked.
Authorities said officers arrived at the facility within 10 minutes of getting the first call, engaged the suspect in a gunfight and killed him.
A motive for the shooting remains under investigation.
Ned had a felony record, having pleaded guilty to intoxication manslaughter in 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison, according to court records. His wife, LaQuitha Ned, told ABC affiliate station WFAA in Dallas that he was bipolar and that the handgun he allegedly used in the episode belonged to her.
“I didn’t know he had the gun at that time,” LaQuitha Ned said. “He’s not supposed to own a gun. I own a gun. It stays in a lock box with the key hidden.”
The shooting came less than a month after a gunman wielding an AR-15 style rifle he legally purchased after turning 18, killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
While no children were injured in the episode in Duncanville, campers like 8-year-old Trenia Summerville said the incident was terrifying.
“There was gun shooting. I was so scared,” Trenia told WFAA.
‘Summer of resilience’
Rosenberg said a positive outcome of the Duncanville incident is that camp staffers did exactly as they have been trained.
“This is an example of how this program at Duncanville Fieldhouse really did a fine job of executing their plan,” Rosenberg said. “But no one wants to see all that training have to be used in a terrible situation like this. It’s really hard to understand what motivates a person to cause that kind of terror.”
Rosenberg said the American Camp Association has advised directors at the more than 15,000 day and overnight camps expected to operate this summer on active shooter drills and procedures for other emergencies that might arise, including COVID outbreaks and wildfires, for an estimated 26 million campers and 1.2 million employees.
“We work hard to train directors and staff of all these different kinds of camps to think about security concerns and think about medical concerns, think about safety concerns around how programs operate so that everyone can be focused on making sure that everyone is safe, so everyone feels safe at camp and is physically safe at camp,” Rosenberg said.
“Typically, for example, camps have emergency action plans, which have been developed in concert with law enforcement, fire department, EMS and other consultants,” he said. “So, those kinds of things are things that they train on during staff training practice just like how do we manage the health care of all the campers? How do we deal with emotional supports that kids and staffers need during the summer?”
He said this summer is expected to be one of the most important summers “in the history of camp in America.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic shut down summer camps almost entirely in 2020 and severely limited capacity in 2021, Rosenberg said camp directors are ready to open at almost full capacity this summer.
“Hopefully, as many children as possible will have an opportunity to experience more freedom than they’ve had in the past two-and-a-half years, opportunities to be more curious to try new things, to learn new things, make friends. Learn to have conversations in person, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, heart-to-heart with their buddies,” Rosenberg said.
“I think of this as a summer of resilience for our whole country, where in spite of COVID, in spite of gun violence, in spite of all the challenges that we have, that we can use this summer as a time for healing, a time for learning, a time for fun and a time for community. And that’s what camp is really all about,” Rosenberg said. “There’s no question everyone’s anxieties are up as a result of what happened in Duncanville and what’s happened in Uvalde and historically. But because of this summer and all the work that we’re going to do at camp, we’re going to see more resilient children as a result.”
He encouraged parents who are hesitant to send their children to camp to question camp directors about safety precautions they’ve taken to make camps safe from intruders, adding that many programs have security guards.
“Camp directors really welcome that. They want to help you understand how they do what they do; all the aspects of how they run their camp. And you should develop a relationship with them just like you develop a relationship with teachers,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg said his message to parents is that safety precautions taken to prevent gun violence “is not going to get in the way of summer camps.”
Gun violence is now leading cause of death among children
Patrick Bresette, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund-Texas, told ABC News he hopes the shooting in Duncanville will not prompt a hardening of camps to the point of militarizing them like some schools. Ohio lawmakers passed a bill on June 1 that would allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns in school safety zones, with little training.
“We’ve spent billions on that kind of approach and not spent enough time making sure people who do harm don’t have access to guns,” Bresette said. “It just doesn’t work. There’s no stat that shows hardening schools is doing nothing more than militarizing them to be honest with you. And I certainly don’t want to see that same thing happen in camps.”
Bresette said he fears while taking precautions and planning for the worst is necessary, he doesn’t want to see camp counselors spending more time training on active shooting drills than on how to provide fun, educational programs for young campers.
“Having been a camp counselor in my high school years, that’s not what I want to focus on,” Bresette said. “I’m there to provide an amazing experience for children and that’s what we should be making sure we’re training the staff for. This is not their job. Their job is to call 911.”
In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report in The New England Journal of Medicine showing that gun violence surpassed automobile accidents as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents ages 1 to 19. The report found that between 2019 and 2020 there was a nearly 30% increase in gun deaths among children.
“But there are multiples of that trauma, who were in that room,” Bresette said of the children who witnessed or heard the gunfire in the incidents in Duncanville and Uvalde. “And I think we’re living with a generation of children, unfortunately, because of the easy access to guns that are meant to kill people, who are traumatized and go to places fearful in the ways they should not be. I think that’s very saddening and the solution to that is to get more control of the guns that are just proliferating in our society.”
In the aftermath of the mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, New York, where 10 Black people were on May 14 killed in what authorities alleged was a racially motivated attack at a supermarket carried out by a suspect wielding an AR-15 style rifle he also purchased after he turned 18, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators began working on proposals to curb gun violence.
But negotiations apparently stalled after the group announced last week that they had reached an agreement on the framework for gun legislation, including bolstering red flag laws all across the country that allow courts and police departments to temporarily seize firearms from people who present a danger to themselves or to others, and closing the so-called boyfriend loophole, which allows men convicted of assaulting their girlfriends to continue to buy weapons.
The proposals, however, have been met with resistance from gun rights advocates. Over the weekend, the Texas Republican Party formally “rebuked” multiple GOP senators, including one of their own, Sen. John Cornyn, for helping lead the bipartisan negotiations.
“For our organization, we need solutions that control guns,” Bresette said. “Not more security. I mean, in this (Duncanville) case it appears the counselors did what they were trained to do, got kids safe, law enforcement was called and they got there and, thank God, no child was injured in any way. But no one should be able to just pick up a handgun and walk into a summer camp. So, the measure we really want to see are things that control access to guns. I think that that’s the bottom line.”
