(NEW YORK) — Power was restored 90% customers in Puerto Rico as of 11 a.m. on Saturday, after a massive outage left 1.5 million customers without power, according to LUMA Energy, the company that took over transmission and distribution from the island’s power authority.
Power has been restored to 1.3 million customers, LUMA said.
LUMA said it will continue working to restore power to across Puerto Rico and asked customers to conserve their power usage on Saturday “to help reduce energy demand and support the restoration process until more generation is online.”
LUMA earlier warned that, “While electric service to parts of the island have been restored, some areas may experience temporary power loss for brief periods of time as we work to balance generation and stabilize the energy grid.”
The power outage came after a fire erupted at one of the island’s four main power plants. The exact cause of the interruption of service is under investigation, LUMA said.
“The extent of the outage has impacted each generating facility in Puerto Rico and a significant effort to restore service is underway,” LUMA said in a statement.
It will be weeks until officials know what caused the fire that knocked out power to Puerto Rico, the head of the island’s energy company told ABC News.
LUMA Energy CEO Wayne Stensby joined ABC News Live and described the electrical grid as being in “dramatically worse shape than any electric system that people in the mainland U.S.” would be serviced by.
Stensby said some of the same emergency response teams that have been brought on ahead of hurricane season are working to restore power to customers who are still in the dark.
Given how widespread the outage is, the government and the energy company said there is no timetable for full restoration.
“We are continuing to make progress in restoration but due to extensive damage at Costa Sur substation, we are not in position to provide an estimate of full restoration at this time,” LUMA said.
Public schools were closed to students on Thursday and Friday due to the outage, according to the island’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi.
Around 100,000 customers were also without water on Thursday due to the power outage, according to president of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, Doriel Pagán Crespo.
The outage also affected some traffic intersections by shutting off traffic lights, officials warned.
Only essential personnel are being summoned to central government agencies on Friday, Pierluisi said, in another tweet.
Addressing the upcoming hurricane season, Josue Colon, the executive director of the power company, said the electrical grid still needs to be reconstructed and that it would not be responsible for them to say that the island’s grid could withstand a hurricane like 2017’s category 5 Maria.
(NEW YORK) — A 17-year-old suspect was arrested early Saturday in connection with the shooting outside of a New York City high school the previous day that left one teen dead and two others injured, police said.
The unidentified suspect was located Friday night, just hours after the incident outside the South Bronx Educational Campus, and was taken into custody following a brief standoff at his home, police said.
Angellyh Yambo, 16, was killed in the shooting and two other unidentified teens were wounded, police said.
A weapon believed to be a ghost gun, a weapon that is typically sold in parts online, was found nearby the suspect’s home, according to police.
Police haven’t yet determined a motive behind the shooting. The investigation is ongoing,
(AUSTIN, Texas) — Eleven people were injured after a car crash involving multiple pedestrians and a food truck in Austin, Texas, Friday.
A car crashed into an unidentified food truck around 8:35 p.m. at 1800 Barton Springs Road in South Austin, according to Austin-Travis County EMS. Officials said two vehicles were involved in a T-bone collision, with one being pushed into a group of pedestrians at the food truck.
FINAL Major Collision involving multiple vehicles & pedestrians at 1800 Barton Springs Rd: 11 total involved: 9 patients transported (2 serious potentially life-threatening, 7 non-life-threatening, 2 no patients). MEDIA brief information to follow in a separate tweet.
Nine people were transported to the hospital, EMS said, including two people in “potentially life-threatening” condition. There were seven people transported with non-life-threatening injuries, though two had “potentially serious” injuries. Two others were treated on scene.
Six patients were taken to South Austin Medical Center, including one with life-threatening injuries and five others with non-life-threatening injuries.
Three patients were taken to Dell Seton Medical Center, including the other patient with life-threatening injuries.
Capt. Christa Stedman of the Austin-Travis County EMS said at 8:42 p.m. the first ambulances arrived and 911 calls began to flood in.
Stedman, a public information officer with the Austin-Travis County EMS, added that all of the patients involved were adults.
The drivers involved are cooperating with police.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation.
ABC News’ Nicholas Kerr contributed to this report.
Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(BOISE, Idaho) — The Idaho Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a new law that bans nearly all abortions in the state while a legal challenge plays out in court.
The court issued a stay on implementation of the bill, set to go into effect on April 22, in a ruling on Friday, more than a week after Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the restrictive abortion law.
The state has until April 28 to respond to the court.
The law bans abortions once cardiac activity in a fetus is detected, which happens at approximately six weeks of pregnancy. Many women are unaware at six weeks that they are pregnant.
The suit was filed on March 30 in Idaho’s Supreme Court on behalf of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky and Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, a health care provider who performs abortions at Planned Parenthood clinics, according to court documents.
The bill was signed by Gov. Brad Little on March 23, making Idaho the first state to model legislation after Texas’ abortion ban.
“It should be clear to everyone that the Idaho state legislature intentionally abandoned the ordinary rule of law when they passed this six-week abortion ban. Then the governor joined their effort to deny his constituents their constitutional rights when he signed the abortion ban into law — despite his own acknowledgement that it was wrong,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a press release announcing the legal challenge.
The law would also allow the father, grandparents, siblings, uncles or aunts of the fetus to sue a medical provider that performs the procedure and collect a reward of at least $20,000 for a successful claim filed within four years of an abortion, according to Planned Parenthood.
The law’s “enforcement mechanism and substance are blatantly unconstitutional, so much so that Idaho’s Attorney General’s Office released an opinion to this effect, and the Governor emphasized similar concerns upon signing,” the lawsuit states.
In a letter to Janice McGeachin, the lieutenant governor and president of the state’s senate, Little criticized the bill, saying, “I stand in solidarity with all Idahoans who seek to protect the lives of preborn babies.”
He then added, “While I support the pro-life policy in this legislation, I fear the novel civil enforcement mechanism will in short order be proven both unconstitutional and unwise.”
In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood asked the court to rule that the bill is “unlawful and unenforceable” and forbid Idaho courts from implementing civil cases as the bill allows.
Without intervention from the court, the law would go into effect, “wreaking havoc on this State’s constitutional norms and the lives of its citizens,” according to the lawsuit.
“The abortion ban blatantly undermines patients’ right to privacy. It also improperly and illegally delegates law enforcement to private citizens, violating the separation of powers and allowing plaintiffs without injury to sue, in violation of the Idaho Constitution,” Planned Parenthood said.
Added Rebecca Gibron, the interim CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky: “This law is a cruel overreach by politicians so intent on controlling the lives of their constituents that they’re willing to compromise our constitutional rights and compromise our health and safety, all in order to ban abortion.”
The lawsuit requests emergency relief by April 21 to prevent the implementation of the abortion ban before it becomes law.
“Unless this abortion ban is stopped, Idahoans will watch in real time as their government strips them of the very rights they were sworn to protect. Everyone deserves to make their own decisions about their bodies, families, and lives — and we’re going to keep fighting to make sure that is a reality,” McGill Johnson said.
(NEW YORK) — Power is still out for around 850,000 customers in Puerto Rico on Friday, after a massive outage left 1.5 million customers without power, according to LUMA Energy, the company that took over transmission and distribution from the island’s power authority.
As of 12 p.m. on Friday, power was restored for around 660,000 customers. LUMA said most of the island should have power by Friday night and it expects to restore power to “more than 1 million customers during tonight.”
The power outage came after a fire erupted at one of the island’s four main power plants. The exact cause of the interruption of service is under investigation, LUMA said.
“The extent of the outage has impacted each generating facility in Puerto Rico and a significant effort to restore service is underway,” LUMA said in a statement.
Given how widespread the outage is, the government and the energy company said there is no timetable for full restoration.
“We are continuing to make progress in restoration but due to extensive damage at Costa Sur substation, we are not in position to provide an estimate of full restoration at this time,” LUMA said.
Public schools were closed to students on Thursday and Friday due to the outage, according to the island’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi.
Around 100,000 customers were also without water on Thursday due to the power outage, according to president of the Aqueduct and Sewer Authority, Doriel Pagán Crespo.
The outage also affected some traffic intersections by shutting off traffic lights, officials warned.
Only essential personnel are being summoned to central government agencies on Friday, Pierluisi said, in another tweet.
Addressing the upcoming hurricane season, Josue Colon, the executive director of the power company, said the electrical grid still needs to be reconstructed and that it would not be responsible for them to say that the island’s grid could withstand a hurricane like 2017’s category 5 Maria.
(DETROIT) — The jury deciding the fates of four men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced Friday they had reached a verdict on some of the criminal charges but deadlocked on others.
Judge Robert Jonker announced that he received a note from the jury about the update in their deliberations Friday, a week after closing arguments ended, according to ABC affiliate WXYZ-TV. The exact details of their decisions weren’t immediately revealed.
The judge brought the jury in and urged them to continue deliberating and “keep an open mind,” according to WXYZ. Jonker told the attorneys he had already ordered them lunch and will get an update in the afternoon, WXYZ reported.
Adam Fox, Barry Croft Jr., Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were all arrested in October 2020 following an FBI sting operation against a militia group of which they were alleged members, and had openly protested Whitmer’s COVID-19 policies. All four were charged with kidnapping conspiracy. Fox, Croft and Harris were also charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Two other suspects who were allegedly part of the conspiracy, Kaleb Franks and Ty Garbin, were also arrested and later pleaded guilty to weapons and conspiracy charges.
Federal prosecutors allege the group had meticulously planned to kidnap the governor and hold her hostage along with others at the state Capitol in Lansing. Investigators said the men allegedly acquired weapons, ammunition and materials for explosives and conducted surveillance of the governor’s home.
“The evidence proves all of them were already willing to commit the crime,” U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said during closing arguments on April 1.
Undercover FBI agents infiltrated the group and recorded conversations of their alleged plotting.
The suspects’ attorneys contended that their clients did not intend to kidnap Whitmer and they were coerced by the FBI agents.
Defense attorney Christopher Gibbons told the jury that the government’s claims that Fox was the ringleader of the operation were unfounded.
“He talks bad government talk. Talk, it’s just talk,” he said during closing arguments on March 31.
Prosecutors argued that they did not entrap any of the men accused because investigators saw the men had an alleged pattern of anti-government and hateful rhetoric, and that they were serious about carrying out the plot if they were not stopped.
(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.) — A jury found two men not guilty Friday on charges connected to an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and a mistrial was called on two remaining suspects after the jury was deadlocked on their charges.
Adam Fox, Barry Croft Jr., Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were all arrested in October 2020 following an FBI sting operation against a militia group of which they were alleged members, and had openly protested Whitmer’s COVID-19 policies. All four were charged with kidnapping conspiracy. Fox, Croft and Harris were also charged with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
The jury was deadlocked on all the counts against Adam Fox and Barry Croft. The judge declared a mistrial on those charges for those men.
The jury found Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta not guilty on all counts of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Harris was also found not guilty of weapons of mass destruction and unlawful firearm charges.
Whitmer’s office released a statement after the verdict thanking the investigators and prosecutors for their work but said the plot was “the result of violent, divisive rhetoric that is all too common across our country.”
“There must be accountability and consequences for those who commit heinous crimes. Without accountability, extremists will be emboldened,” her office said in a statement.
Two other suspects who were allegedly part of the conspiracy, Kaleb Franks and Ty Garbin, were also arrested and later pleaded guilty to weapons and conspiracy charges.
Federal prosecutors alleged the group had meticulously planned to kidnap the governor and hold her hostage along with others at the state Capitol in Lansing. Investigators said the men allegedly acquired weapons, ammunition and materials for explosives and conducted surveillance of the governor’s home.
“The evidence proves all of them were already willing to commit the crime,” U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler said during closing arguments on April 1.
Undercover FBI agents infiltrated the group and recorded conversations of their alleged plotting.
The suspects’ attorneys contended that their clients did not intend to kidnap Whitmer and they were coerced by the FBI agents.
Defense attorney Christopher Gibbons told the jury that the government’s claims that Fox was the ringleader of the operation were unfounded.
“He talks bad government talk. Talk, it’s just talk,” he said during closing arguments on March 31.
Prosecutors argued that they did not entrap any of the men accused because investigators saw the men had an alleged pattern of anti-government and hateful rhetoric, and that they were serious about carrying out the plot if they were not stopped.
Javed Ali, the former senior counterterrorism leader on the National Security Council, said Friday’s verdicts were a significant legal development when it comes to federal prosecutions.
“In a post-9/11 counterterrorism world, the Department of Justice has rarely lost high profile counterterrorism cases based on successful entrapment claims, and this development punches a hole in that relatively unblemished track record the past two decades,” he told ABC News. “It may also give momentum to other anti-government groups and extremists who believe in similar causes like those pursued by the individuals in this case.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates
(MINNEAPOLIS) — Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s full ban on applying for and executing “no-knock” search warrants in the city goes into effect Friday.
The policy implementation comes just two days after the announcement that no criminal charges would be filed in the case of Amir Locke, who was fatally shot in February by Minneapolis police officers executing a no-knock search warrant on the apartment he was in.
No-knock warrants allow officers to enter a private home without knocking or making their presence known.
Frey said that exceptions could be granted for hostage situations or other extremely dangerous scenarios.
The department will also establish a classification system for warrants: low, medium and high risk. Medium and high-risk warrants will require additional approval.
The new policy also established wait times for officers before they can enter a residence while executing a knock-and-announce warrant.
During the day, officers will have to wait 20 seconds after making themselves known before entering a residence. At night, the wait time is 30 seconds.
The ban would also extend to warrants carried out by the Minneapolis Police Department on behalf of other agencies, as well as those that have been requested by Minneapolis police but executed by other departments.
Frey received backlash for the previous moratorium on no-knock warrants because officials could execute such a warrant if it is determined that there is an imminent threat of harm to an individual or the public.
“It’s important to implore upon everyone, that half measures have really gotten cities nowhere across the country,” said attorney Jeff Storms, who is co-representing Locke’s family members, at a February hearing on no-knock warrants.
“It’s important that city does not just put Band-Aids on the immediate problems but spends time thinking about how to preempt the next civil rights violation, not just related to no-knock warrants, but to other areas of policy practice and training,” he added.
No-knock warrants have come under scrutiny, most prominently in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor during a botched drug raid.
Karen Wells, Locke’s mother, spoke with ABC News Live’s Stephanie Ramos Wednesday, just hours after Minnesota prosecutors announced they wouldn’t charge the officer who shot Locke.
Wells said that such warrants should be banned in her son’s name.
“They’re not good for my son. They’re not good for anybody else. Because in the end, it doesn’t do anything. It brings harm, it brings death, which is what happened with my son,” Wells told ABC News.
(WASHINGTON) — When the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s federal eviction moratorium in August 2021, experts and politicians predicted that expulsions would soar.
But eviction filings overall remained well below the historical average through 2021, according to the White House and housing experts.
“[Eviction filings] increased after the CDC moratorium ended, but they still aren’t anywhere near back to normal,” said Peter Hepburn, Princeton Eviction Lab statistician and quantitative analyst. “So we’re still at 60% of the historical average.”
Hepburn credited the influx of state and federal resources and ramped up legal assistance implemented during the coronavirus pandemic for the downward trend.
While some financial resources started during the pandemic outlasted the eviction moratorium, Attorney General Merrick Garland on Aug. 30, 2021, also called upon lawyers and law students to help fill the gap after the moratorium ended by helping with Emergency Rental Assistance applications, volunteering with legal aid providers and assisting courts with implementing eviction diversion programs, among other initiatives aimed at increasing housing stability.
Heeding that call were 99 law schools in 35 states and Puerto Rico, according to the White House.
“Over the past five months, over 2,100 law students dedicated over 81,000 hours to serve over 10,000 households,” said a statement released by the Biden administration.
Gene Sperling, the senior adviser to President Joe Biden who is spearheading the implementation of the American Rescue Plan, said the partnership with the legal community has been an “extraordinary national experiment.” The project — part of an “whole-of-government approach” — contributed to eviction diversion programs as well as rental assistance programs that kept eviction filings significantly below historic averages.
Funding worth $46 billion for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program — provided for households economically impacted by COVID-19 — also flooded the system at the same time these partnerships were emerging.
David Daix, a 45-year-old immigrant from the Ivory Coast and father of two residing in Henrico Country, Virginia, is one beneficiary of a newly beefed-up partnership between the Virginia Poverty Law Center’s eviction legal helpline and the University of Richmond School of Law.
After being let go from his customer service job in March 2020, Daix was unable to pay rent after his unemployment benefits expired a year later. His landlord filed for eviction in January 2022, he said. The helpline put him in touch with Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, which got his case dismissed in early February.
Daix is not alone. Richmond, Virginia, and its surrounding counties — Henrico and Chesterfield — have some of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to Princeton’s Eviction Lab.
These regions had a stark “access to justice” gap between represented and unrepresented individuals in court. From 2015 to 2019, only 1% of tenants in Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield were represented in local general district courts, according to the 2017 Virginia Self-Represented Litigant Study.
In 2020, tenant representation in housing court increased by 11% while 30% fewer landlords were awarded judgments, according to the RVA Eviction Lab. Four years ago, the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society didn’t have a single attorney who was practicing full-time housing law; now it has six.
“A new generation of housing advocates have been born out of this time,” Erika Poethig, White House adviser on Urban Planning and Policy, said at an eviction prevention event at the end of January.
The program began after the Biden administration reached out to Georgetown Law School Dean Bill Treanor, who spearheaded the partnership between law schools and the White House along with NYU Law School Dean Trevor Morrison.
Treanor said one of the most important legacies of the project is a renewed commitment to eviction prevention, and the White House and Department of Justice have said they intend to maintain the law school partnerships after the pandemic ends.
“Even after the pandemic is over, the underlying housing crisis will endure. This has helped make us all conscious [of] the importance of finding ways in which law students can help people facing housing crises,” Treanor said.
As part of the program, the University of South Carolina School of Law — located in Columbia, the city with the eighth-highest eviction rate in the country — helped fund Veterans Legal Clinics that serve indigent veterans with housing issues. The school also partnered with the NAACP housing navigators program.
“We’ve made the case to the General Assembly of South Carolina that these access to justice initiatives are vital to the public interest of South Carolina,” said William Hubbard, dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law.
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of Boston University School of Law, said tenants often do not have access to legal assistance and don’t know how to fight an illegal eviction, especially during a pandemic.
“[Tenants] have no way of getting it back, they have no way of fighting against a landlord who has used something that’s improper,” Onwuachi-Willig said. “And imagine and during all of that, during a pandemic, when you’re also trying not to get sick.”
Onwuachi-Willig partnered with Naomi Mann, clinical associate professor, and Jade Brown, clinical instructor in the Civil Litigation and Justice Program, last spring. Brown helped develop the MA Defense for Eviction (MADE) for students to help tenants respond to initial complaints filed by landlords against them and generate pleas based on tenants’ answers.
“Hopefully, the pandemic has sort of revealed the cracks in our system, and where they are. It has certainly shown us how enormous the unmet need is, when it comes to housing law, the unmet legal need, in particular, is what we obviously are working on,” Mann said.
Students did not need to have a background in housing law to participate and, according to Brown, the project had a “profound” impact on many of them.
“Being able to work with Naomi and Jade on this definitely solidifies this is something that will be a part of my career for a long time,” said Julian Burlando-Salazar, a Boston University law student who was not previously planning to pursue housing law.
Burlando-Salazar partnered with another BU law student, Marie Tashima, to solve tenants’ disputes with landlords through mediation.
The movement toward getting tenants better representation in court was already underway in many states before the pandemic began.
Three states — Washington, Maryland and Connecticut — have enacted laws that require no necessary qualifications for tenants facing eviction to be eligible for free legal representation.
Eleven states have established a qualified right to counsel, including New York, where the state’s eviction moratorium ended on Jan. 15, 2022. That same day, Ciji Stewart was scheduled to appear in court and requested a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society.
Stewart, a mother of three living in Rockaway Beach in Queens, received a call from Sateesh Nori, the attorney in charge of the Queens Neighborhood Office of the Legal Aid Society.
“I was just telling Nori everything that was happening in my home and he got me an adjournment, which I didn’t know what was or could happen,” Stewart said. “He helped me file a suit for repairs against the landlord.”
Because she lived in New York, Stewart may have already qualified for legal representation. But since the federal program was developed, many more like her in other states have now begun to feel the same relief.
But while University of Richmond Law School Dean Wendy Perdue said the program represents progress in that it has helped show the necessity of legal representation, she said it’s still just a “drop in the bucket.”
“The Association of American law schools has collected the data nationwide — literally millions of hours of service that law students around the country provide,” she said. “It’s still only a drop in the bucket, but the only way you fill up the bucket is with a series of drops and so law students are having an important impact in filling some of the gaps that exist in legal services.”
(MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.) — Amir Locke’s mother said she doesn’t want her son’s death to be in vain and is calling on lawmakers to reform one of the most controversial police tactics.
Karen Wells spoke with ABC News Live’s Stephanie Ramos Wednesday, just hours after Minnesota prosecutors announced they wouldn’t charge the officer who shot Locke during a “no knock” warrant in February.
Locke, 22, wasn’t under investigation for the Saint Paul case which led to the warrant, investigators said.
Wells told ABC News that such warrants, which allow law enforcement members to enter someone’s home without announcing their presence, should be banned from Minnesota.
“They’re not good for my son. They’re not good for anybody else. Because in the end, it doesn’t do anything. It brings harm, it brings death, which is what happened with my son,” Wells told ABC News.
Locke, who legally owned a gun, was sleeping under a blanket on the couch on Feb. 2 when the officers came into the apartment and executed the warrant. Police body camera footage shows a gun was in Locke’s hand when he began to sit up as police approached him.
Minneapolis Police Department officer Mark Hanneman fired three shots killing Locke, according to investigators.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and Minnesota Attorney General’s office reviewed all the evidence surrounding the shooting, and said that there was insufficient evidence to charge the officer.
“Specifically, the State would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesota’s use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force by Officer Hanneman. Nor would the State be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt a criminal charge against any other officer involved in the decision-making that led to the death of Amir Locke,” the DA and AG’s offices said in a joint statement Wednesday.
Wells said she spoke with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison before the announcement was made.
“I reiterated to him that I was not disappointed. I was disgusted with the decision,” she said.
“No knock” warrants have come under scrutiny over the last couple of years due to high profile shootings of Black victims.
Louisville, Kentucky banned “no knock” warrants in 2020, a few months after Breonna Taylor was killed by police in her sleep when they executed an order. Activists and elected officials have pushed other states and the federal government to follow suit.
Ben Crump, Wells’ attorney, told ABC News that 82% of “no knock” warrants are done on Black residents’ homes.
“Until we can have it where it is done equally and justly then the Department of Justice needs to review everything that Minneapolis has done executing these warrants,” he told ABC News.
In the meantime, Wells said she hopes all elected officials take a long hard look at the police policy and think about her son’s life.
“Amir had a beautiful spirit. He had a beautiful smile. He was my baby boy,” she said.
