(ALLEN, Texas) — The suspect accused of shooting and killing eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, earlier this month “fixated on mass shootings and held views consistent with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist … ideologies,” according to a new bulletin released Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security.
ABC News has previously reported the suspect in the Allen, Texas, mall shooting had tattoos of Nazi symbols on his body, and on a call with reporters, senior DHS officials told ABC News the shooter in Texas had a “neo-Nazi ideology.”
“Recent tragic events highlight the continued heightened threat environment our nation faces, and these threats are driven by violent extremists who seek to further their ideological beliefs and personal grievances,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Officials said it is a pattern they have seen in the United States and internationally.
“It is something unfortunately that we are seeing with greater frequency,” a senior official said. “And not just here in the United States, but it’s something that seems to be gaining frequency internationally as well.”
The bulletin says the U.S. is in a “heightened threat environment.”
“Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland,” the bulletin says. “Both domestic violent extremist (DVEs) and those associated with foreign terrorist organizations continue to attempt to motivate supporters to conduct attacks in the Homeland, including through violent extremist messaging and online calls for violence.”
The updated National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) bulletin says the coming months could be dangerous.
“Factors that could mobilize individuals to commit violence include their perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues. Likely targets of potential violence include US critical infrastructure, faith-based institutions, individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, schools, racial and ethnic minorities, and government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement,” it said.
In particular, officials said that a candidate who casts doubt on the election system “would contribute to the potential of violent acts.”
Other incidents that were mentioned in the bulletin are the Nashville Christan school, plots against power substations and foreign terrorists who “continue to use media to call for lone offender attacks in the West, condemn US foreign policy, and attempt to expand their reach and grow global support networks.”
Officials said that while they didn’t include it in the NTAS, they are concerned that violent extremists could still target the border because of the rhetoric they are seeing online.
(NEW YORK) — Three years ago this week, George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis after Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was the lead prosecutor in the case against Chauvin, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison in 2021.
Ellison’s new book, “Break the Wheel Ending the Cycle of Police Violence,” explores the George Floyd case and offers insights for future cases of police brutality, aiming to foster justice, accountability and the end of the violent cycle within the criminal justice system.
Ellison spoke with ABC News Live Tuesday about the book and the anniversary.
ABC NEWS LIVE: So you transformed your personal diary entries from the Derek Chauvin trial into this book…documenting every step of the way. That had to change your perspective from the start of the trial to the end of the trial. What was your perspective like toward the end of the trial?
KEITH ELLISON: I was ready for it to be over. I can tell you that when we received the jury instructions and the jury was given the case and told to go to the jury room, we were sitting there on pins and needles.
And I had no idea what the outcome was going to be. In fact, I presumed that the odds were in Derek Chauvin’s favor.
ABC NEWS LIVE: Really? No inclination at any point thinking it was going to go in one way or another.
ELLISON: I did not know, but I thought if history was any judge and we looked at the first George Floyd state trial acquittals, Walter Scott hung jury. You had the Philando Castile case which happened in Minnesota acquittals. And when the jury, when the judge read the verdict, guilty, guilty, guilty on all counts, I was surprised, but I wasn’t necessarily joyful about it.
I was relieved that it was over, and I was relieved that the jury saw what we were trying to tell them, which is that this was a criminal act and they needed to say so. That’s what a verdict is, the truth.
ABC NEWS LIVE: Do you think the landscape of the Derek Chauvin trial changed other police brutality cases or will change them in the future?
ELLISON: I think the answer to that is yes, and I’ll tell you why. If you look at this tragedy involving Tyre Nichols in Memphis, I’m impressed by how the police chief got out there, [and] released the video fairly quickly. The county attorney gave people confidence that there was going to be real accountability in this matter.
I think we’ve turned the corner in terms of how we handle these things, but I must say, we have not turned the corner in terms of police deaths. We have not reduced the number of in-custody shootings or officer-involved-of deadly force encounters. And so we still have a lot of ways to go before we break the will.
ABC NEWS LIVE: Well, let’s talk about the potential conflict of interest between prosecutors and police. You write in the book, “It’s hard to prosecute police for a number of reasons. But one of the more notable is that police and prosecutors enjoy a close professional relationship, which prosecutors often use to protect their police officer allies.” So what steps do you believe need to be taken to address that potential conflict of interest?
ELLISON: Well, one thing we have to do is just remind prosecutors you are to pursue justice and truth without fear or favor of anyone. If you feel you can’t do that, move the case to another county, [or] send the case to the attorney general’s office. But if you have any relationship issues which make you have to back off pursuing justice, you should transfer that case out of your office.
ABC NEWS LIVE: You mentioned police deaths, still people dying at the hands of police. According to the website Mapping Police Violence, police have killed at least 363 people so far this year. How can law enforcement officers be held more accountable for acts of violence that do possibly cross the line?
ELLISON: Let me say, those 363, maybe some of those shootings or deaths are within the law. Police officers are allowed to use force, including deadly force, if their lives are threatened or if the lives of others are threatened. So I don’t want to say all of those are bad. But I would say that it’s very unlikely that, really, too many of those, more than maybe 2%, will ever be held accountable because of just the way we do it.
ABC NEWS LIVE: What do you do in that situation if you are that young officer that is looking up to someone like Derek Chauvin, who’s in charge and is doing the wrong thing. What do you do in that situation?
ELLISON: What we say now is you better do something because you have a duty to intervene. If you’re seeing your officers doing something that you can plainly see is against policy, you may be held accountable yourself if you don’t do something.
What if they just said, “You know what? He’s subdued,” and stood up. Now, you might not be popular back at the station, but maybe George Floyd would be alive right now.
(MACON, Ga.) — Family members of Brianna Grier, the Georgia woman who died last year after falling out of a moving police vehicle, said they are filing a lawsuit against the officers involved in the incident.
The complaint, which was obtained by ABC News, names Lt. Marlin Primus, Deputy Timothy Legette and Hancock County Sheriff Tomlyn Primus as defendants.
The lawsuit claims that deputies “unlawfully and willfully seized and restrained the decedent, falsely arrested the decedent, unnecessarily handcuffed the decedent, picked her up and dropped her multiple times, ignored her cries for help and deprived her of medical assistance, caused injury to her head and brain and ultimately caused her death.”
Mary Grier, Brianna Grier’s mother, spoke out at a press conference on Wednesday, saying the officers were aware of Grier’s mental health issues. “I don’t think they did her right,” she said.
According to Mary Grier, her daughter “was a good person” who struggled with her mental health and what happened to her “wasn’t her fault.”
Mary Grier said that when her granddaughters — Brianna Grier’s twin daughters — asked about their mother, “we tell them that she’s gone home to live with God.”
ABC News’ requests for comment to the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office were not responded to.
ABC News’ attempts to directly reach the officers named in the lawsuit were unsuccessful. It is unclear if they have retained attorneys.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which conducted an independent investigation into the incident, closed Grier’s case last year and found that she fell out of the moving police vehicle because the door wasn’t closed properly.
Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale III reflected on his decision not to bring the case to a grand jury last November in an interview with Macon, Georgia, ABC affiliate WGXA, saying his decision came after his office reviewed the GBI report.
“We didn’t make a decision lightly,” he said. “There’s nothing criminal on the part of those two deputies based on the facts and evidence we have.”
ABC News has reached out to Barksdale for further comment but has not received a response.
Grier, a 28-year-old mother of two, was arrested by Primus and Legette on July 15, 2022, after Grier’s mother called 911 to report that her daughter was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Body camera footage released on July 29, 2022, by the GBI shows Grier resisting officers as they tried to put her in the patrol car. The 10-minute clip shows officers struggling to get Grier into the back seat of the police car but does not show how she ended up falling out of the moving vehicle.
A summary of the final GBI report on Grier’s death said “the only possible way Grier exited the vehicle was through an already opened, not latched, rear passenger side door at the time of arrest. It was clear from the investigation that Deputy Legette and Lt. Primus were unaware the door was not closed.” The report also said “a ‘door open’ indicator light could be seen on the cluster of the vehicle.”
A medical examiner at GBI’s Division of Forensic Sciences found that Grier’s cause of death was “blunt force head trauma” with “delayed complications” and her manner of death was ruled “accident.” An independent autopsy ordered by Grier’s family also lists Grier’s cause of death as severe blunt force injury to the head.
Barksdale told WGXA that he understands why the family would file a civil lawsuit but added that “what the community needs to understand is that I’m committed to following the law and applying the evidence and facts.”
He added that Grier’s case highlights the need for mental health care reform and “the need for more resources to be poured into this state to address those needs.”
ABC News’ Kendall Ross contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The strongest tropical cyclone to impact Guam in decades is bringing “life-threatening” conditions to the U.S. island territory.
Typhoon Mawar’s eyewall “clipped” the northern portion of Guam early Thursday local time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The storm is bringing “destructive winds, a life-threatening storm surge and torrential rain” to the island, NOAA said.
Maximum wave heights of more than 40 feet were recorded near Guam amid the storm. The highest winds recorded on Guam were 105 mph before the anemometer broke.
The center of the typhoon passed about 15 miles to the north of Guam Wednesday evening local time. At that time Mawar’s maximum sustained winds were near 140 mph, equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane.
As the storm slowly moves away from Guam, the weather is expected to gradually improve on the island.
Most of Guam was without power by Wednesday afternoon, with the island’s energy grid providing electricity to only 1,000 of its approximately 52,000 customers due to Mawar’s “severe adverse conditions,” according to the Guam Power Authority.
“We were able to avoid a complete island-wide blackout when the system severed into two grids,” the agency said in a statement. “We are working hard to maintain the last remaining customers through the storm which contributes to quicker recovery after the winds die down later tonight or in the early morning hours.”
An earlier forecast projected Mawar to hit the island as a super typhoon packing winds as strong as 160 mph — equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.
The National Weather Service has issued typhoon, extreme wind and flash flood warnings for Guam, which is the westernmost territory of the United States, located in Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean.
Rainfall from Mawar could accumulate to as much as 20 inches on Guam, while the storm surge is forecast to reach as high as 25 feet. The typhoon was already producing waves up to 45 feet in the ocean near the island on Tuesday.
“Several inches of rain have already fallen,” the NWS said in a bulletin on Wednesday. “Flash flooding is ongoing. Considerable flash flooding is likely, even for locations that do not normally flood.”
Guam’s Office of Civil Defense advised residents on Tuesday to seek shelter immediately, as Mawar is “expected to make a direct hit or very near passage for Guam.”
“There is a potential of a catastrophic and devastating event for Guam,” the office said in a bulletin.
Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero also urged residents to take cover on Tuesday, as “damaging winds” were expected to start soon.
“Please take all the necessary precautions in an abundance of safety before we feel the full strength of the super typhoon,” Guerrero said in a social media post.
President Joe Biden has declared an emergency in Guam due to Mawar and ordered federal assistance to support the response to the typhoon.
Mawar is one of the strongest typhoons to impact Guam since the 1960s — the start of the satellite era.
The most destructive typhoon to hit Guam was Karen in 1962, with 155 mph winds and wind gusts of at least 170 mph, according to NOAA. Most homes on the island were destroyed.
More recently, in 2002, Super Typhoon Pongsona moved near the island with 144 mph winds and gusts up to 173 mph, causing $700 million in damage at the time, according to NOAA.
ABC News’ Ahmad Hemingway contributed to this report.
(CHARLESTON, S.C.) — A grand jury has indicted convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh, the disgraced South Carolina attorney, on federal fraud charges, prosecutors announced Wednesday.
Murdaugh, 54, is currently serving life in prison after being convicted of murdering his wife and their youngest son.
The federal grand jury returned a 22-count indictment against Murdaugh for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud; bank fraud; wire fraud; and money laundering, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina said.
The indictment alleges that Murdaugh “engaged in three different schemes to obtain money and property from his personal injury clients” between 2005 and 2021 while working as a personal injury attorney at his Hampton law firm.
The alleged schemes involved routing clients’ settlement funds to his own accounts as well as a fake account under the name “Forge,” as well as conspiring with a banker to commit wire fraud and bank fraud. The banker, Russell Laffitte, was convicted on six federal charges in connection with the scheme in November 2022, prosecutors said.
The indictment further alleges that Murdaugh conspired with another personal injury attorney to defraud the estate of his former housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, who died after a fall at Murdaugh’s home in February 2018, and funnel nearly $3.5 million into his “fake Forge” account “for his own personal enrichment,” prosecutors said.
“Trust in our legal system begins with trust in its lawyers,” U.S. Attorney Adair F. Boroughs said in a statement. “South Carolinians turn to lawyers when they are at their most vulnerable, and in our state, those who abuse the public’s trust and enrich themselves by fraud, theft, and self-dealing will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Murdaugh’s attorneys said in a statement that he is cooperating with federal prosecutors.
“We anticipate that the charges brought today will be quickly resolved without a trial,” his attorneys, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said in a statement to ABC News.
Murdaugh resigned from his firm, Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth, & Detrick, in September 2021. The firm has also sued him for allegedly funneling stolen money from clients and the law firm into a fake bank account for years.
Murdaugh also faces about 100 other state charges for allegations ranging from money laundering to staging his own death so his surviving son could cash in on his $10 million life insurance policy to misappropriating settlement funds in the death of his housekeeper.
Murdaugh was found guilty in March of fatally shooting his wife and younger son at the family’s property in June 2021.
The jury reached the verdict after deliberating for nearly three hours following five weeks of testimony from more than 70 witnesses — including Murdaugh himself, who denied the murders but admitted to lying to investigators and cheating his clients.
During the high-profile trial, state prosecutors argued that years of lies and theft were about to catch up to Murdaugh and the murders were a way to divert attention.
Murdaugh’s attorneys are seeking to appeal his conviction in the double murder case.
(NEW YORK) — Rapper Fetty Wap was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for his role in a drug trafficking conspiracy that blanketed parts of Long Island and New Jersey in cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and crack.
Prosecutors said the 31-year-old hip-hop star, whose real name is Willie Junior Maxwell II, was a kilogram-level redistributor for the trafficking organization.
The drugs were obtained from the West Coast and brought to the East Coast either through the mail or by drivers with hidden vehicle compartments to transport the drugs to Suffolk County, New York, where they were stored, prosecutors said.
The drugs were then distributed to dealers, who sold them on Long Island and in New Jersey, according to prosecutors.
The rapper pleaded guilty in August in a New York federal court to conspiracy to distribute and possess controlled substances.
Maxwell was arrested on Oct. 28, 2021, during the Rolling Loud Music Festival in Queens, New York, on charges stemming from the drug trafficking conspiracy. He was charged with five others, including a New Jersey corrections officer, in the case.
The former corrections officer, Anthony Cyntje, was sentenced in March to 72 months for his role in the conspiracy. The remaining four defendants have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.
(NEW YORK) — After news broke that Amanda Gorman’s historic poem “The Hill We Climb” was moved to the middle school section of a Miami-Dade school, the poet slammed efforts to restrict or censor books in schools.
“I’m gutted,” she said in a statement posted to her social media accounts.
She continued, “I wrote The Hill We Climb so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment … Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”
Documents obtained via a public records request by the activist group Florida Freedom to Read Project found that a complaint by one parent targeted several books concerning Black history — including “The Hill We Climb,” “The ABCs of Black History,” and “Love to Langston.” The School Materials Review Committee recommended these three books be shelved in the middle school section of the media center.
The complaint said the poem “indirectly” contained “hate messages” and believed it could “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” “Critical race theory” and “indoctrination” were cited as reasons behind the complaints of the other books.
Two books on Cuba were also targeted by the parent, who cited “indoctrination about socialism” in their complaint.
In a statement, Miami-Dade County said Gorman’s poem was not banned or removed from their schools, assuring that the book remains available in the media center as part of the middle grades collection.
The Miami Herald first reported the story.
In 2022, the American Library Association documented a record-breaking number of reported book ban attempts across the country. The organization found 1,269 demands to censor or restrict library materials or resources, the highest total since it began compiling this data more than 20 years ago. More than 2,571 unique titles were targeted, with the majority of the books being written by or about LGBTQ characters or people of color.
Penguin Random House, one of the country’s largest book publishers which also published Gorman’s poem, is part of a lawsuit targeting a separate Florida school district for removing certain books from the shelves of public school libraries.
The lawsuit argues that the school board’s removal and restriction of books that discuss racism and have LGBTQ themes violates the First Amendment.
Florida has been at the center of the clashes in education, as recent legislation has led to restrictions and removals of books across the state.
(UVALDE, Texas) — When Texas state legislators delved into the circumstances that preceded the deadly mass shooting in Uvalde that took the lives of 19 students and two teachers last year, lawmakers highlighted failures of leadership, law enforcement training and communication capabilities.
But buried in their 77-page report on the shooting, committee members also took note of apparent issues surrounding the school district’s emergency alert system, called Raptor, which uses a cellphone app to disseminate lockdown information and nearby police activity. Poor Wi-Fi service and a staff desensitized to alerts by frequent notifications diminished the app’s effectiveness, the committee found.
“If the alert had reached more teachers sooner, it is likely that more could have been done to protect them and their students,” according to the committee’s investigative report, which was published in July 2022.
A year has now passed since the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School. New leadership is in place, police training protocols have been overhauled, and communications systems have been upgraded.
But the district’s contract with Raptor Technologies, the Houston-based developer of the emergency alert app used at Robb Elementary School, remains in place.
Gary Patterson, the school district’s interim superintendent, told ABC News that the school district would prefer to keep Raptor, but he said the app “hasn’t changed” — and if the district can’t “make this work” by the fall, he and the new school district police chief would consider other options.
“Could we go to another application and use that? Yes, I guess we could. But we’ve got an investment and training in it,” Patterson said of the Raptor system. “I don’t know that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Both Patterson and Josh Gutierrez, the school district’s new police chief, emphasized that Raptor cannot be relied on completely for school security safety — but that it is an important tool to help detect threats and quickly alert school staff to lock down situations.
“It’s a piece for the tool belt,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not what we’re relying on … it’ll help alert, but at the same time, we’ve still got to rely on our man-made interactions, our communication skills.”
The legislative committee’s report found that during the Robb shooting, the alerts issued on the Raptor system did not sufficiently warn school staff members after the school’s principal triggered the system. The panel said that complications with the school’s Wi-Fi may have hindered teachers’ ability to receive an alert. The district has since prioritized strengthening the Wi-Fi on its campuses.
Lawmakers also found that an influx of notifications in recent months “diluted” the seriousness of the lockdown warning. Raptor was installed just months before the shooting, and in that time, staff members received more than 50 alerts — a frequency that “contributed to a diminished sense of vigilance about responding to security alerts,” the committee said.
Most of those alerts were in response to what the committee described as nearby “bailouts,” referring to incidents when undocumented immigrants flee their vehicles and attempt to outrun police.
At least one teacher, third- and-fourth-grade teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was wounded in the attack, previously told ABC News he did not receive a message through the Raptor app.
Raptor Technologies declined to comment for this story when contacted by ABC News. But last year a representative from the tech firm pushed back against some of the legislative panel’s findings, telling ABC News at the time that the report “paints an ambiguous and potentially misleading picture” of Raptor’s role in the shooting.
New officials Patterson and Gutierrez cited several other improvements they’d like to see in the Raptor platform, including an upgrade to the app’s interface and an update to the “verbiage” in the app so it better aligns with the language used by law enforcement — for example using the term “lockdown” instead of “lockout.”
“It’s pretty easy — unless you’re highly trained in it — to hit the wrong button sometimes,” Patterson said. “So that’s why I’m saying that it’s not perfect. It’s a tool that we can improve in several ways.”
Raptor is part of a growing security industry that’s been buttressed by the drumbeat of mass shootings in schools and elsewhere.
School security technologies have become a fixture in many districts, with companies raking in more than $3 billion in 2021, up from $2.7 billion in 2017, according to a market analysis by technology research firm Omdia.
Critics, however, say the industry is profiting on the fears of yet another attack, and some have raised questions about how well many of the tech products work. One government-funded study from 2016 found “limited and conflicting evidence in the literature on the short- and long-term effectiveness of school safety technology.”
Patterson and Gutierrez repeatedly said that Raptor and other school safety technologies could not replace solid training and human-facing preventative measures, like engaging with students and practicing emergency lockdown scenarios with staff.
In Uvalde, members of the community remain frustrated with the lack of progress after lawmakers and law enforcement officials pledged to address a myriad of issues that contributed to the failed response to the shooting — including the district’s ongoing relationship with Raptor.
“To this day, they’re still utilizing the Raptor system,” Gladys Gonzales, whose daughter survived the shooting, told ABC News’ Mireya Villareal in an interview. “It’s not the ideal, but it’s still being used. So that in our eyes is not good.”
“You’re frustrated with that?” Villareal asked.
Yes. Yes, we are,” Gonzales said. “Many of us are.”
(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — A Tennessee judge is poised to rule on Wednesday whether to allow the parents of children killed and those traumatized in a mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School to voice their opposition in court to the release of the shooter’s writings.
Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea L. Myles said she will issue her decision by the end of Wednesday if she will allow the parents to speak on why they do not want the journals of the school shooter, Audrey Hale, who was killed by police in the March 27 rampage, made public.
“I think that is not something that we in Tennessee, and specifically in Nashville, have had to deal with,” Myles said in court Monday, referring to the massacre that left three children and three adults dead. “So, in a way, we are in unchartered territory. That moment is not lost on me.”
Myles held a status hearing on Monday in which she heard arguments from the attorneys for the parents and the Covenant School, who do not want Hale’s writings ever to be made public. She also heard from lawyers representing news organizations, a national police group and a firearms association that are suing the Nashville Metropolitan Government to get the killer’s journals released, hoping they shed light on a motive for the massacre.
Attorney Eric Osborne — who said he represents 100 families affected by the school shooting, including the parents of three 9-year-old children killed — told Myles that many of the parents want to address the court about their fears that releasing the shooter’s writings will prompt copycat attacks and add additional pain to the children who survived the attack.
Osborne argued it would violate the parent’s rights under the Tennessee Constitution if they were barred from intervening in the release of Hale’s journals.
“Once this document is released …. you can’t un-ring the bell,” Osborne said in court, adding that rejecting the parents’ request to speak in court would be “just a terrible violation of their rights.”
Attorneys for the Covenant School and the Covenant Presbyterian Church also argued they don’t want the journals and other evidence seized in the investigation released because they might contain the school’s safety plan and other documents pertaining to health and social security records of school and church employees.
Osborne said that while many parents are willing to be identified if allowed to intervene in the case, others want to participate under pseudonyms because they are afraid of reprisals if they testify.
Robb Harvey, an attorney who represents The Tennessean newspaper, countered that the parents should not be permitted to intervene, arguing they have no standing in the case because no criminal charges have been filed due to the suspect being shot to death by police.
“As horrible a thing that happened to the parents and the families of the people who were killed, they’re not victims of a crime,” Harvey told Myles. “So, the constitutional provision doesn’t apply to them.”
Harvey added, “I know that their emotions have been just jangled and rattled and disrupted, their family lives have been disrupted, but that doesn’t make them a criminal victim.”
The Nashville Metropolitan Government requested Monday’s hearing after being sued for the release of the documents by the news organizations, the Tennessee Firearms Association Inc. and Clata Renee Brewer, a private investigator for the National Police Association.
Brewer’s attorney, Doug Pierce, suggested in court that the families of those killed and traumatized in the shooting and Covenant School officials don’t want the writings and other evidence released because they are attempting to hide what’s in the documents from the public.
“You do get the distinct impression from what has been filed, I can’t say, but it’s very strong, they all know what is in that document,” Pierce alleged.
Osborne assured Myles that none of the families are privy to what is in the police investigative file.
Laura Fox, an attorney for the Nashville Metropolitan Government, said in court that some of the material seized in the investigation through search warrants and subpoenas, including Hale’s writings, have been turned over to Myles to review in private. Fox invited Myles to come to police headquarters to review the remainder of the evidence.
Fox said the police investigation is still active and more evidence is being collected.
Myles has scheduled a “show cause” hearing for June 8 before she rules on whether to release the documents in the case.
(NEW YORK) — A powerful typhoon taking aim at Guam could be the strongest tropical cyclone to impact the U.S. island territory in decades.
As of Wednesday 7:50 p.m. local time (5:50 a.m. ET), the eye of Typhoon Mawar was passing over or very near northern Guam with 140 mile per hour winds — equivalent to a Category 4 hurricane. Mawar could make a rare landfall on Guam, which would mark the first time since 1976 that the island was directly hit by a Category 4 typhoon.
An earlier forecast projected Mawar to hit the island as a super typhoon packing winds as strong as 160 mph — equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.
Most of Guam was without power by Wednesday afternoon, with the island’s energy grid providing electricity to only 1,000 of its approximately 52,000 customers due to Mawar’s “severe adverse conditions,” according to the Guam Power Authority.
“We were able to avoid a complete island-wide blackout when the system severed into two grids,” the agency said in a statement. “We are working hard to maintain the last remaining customers through the storm which contributes to quicker recovery after the winds die down later tonight or in the early morning hours.”
The National Weather Service has issued a typhoon warning for Guam, which is the westernmost territory of the United States, located in Micronesia in the western Pacific Ocean.
Rainfall on the island could accumulate to as much as 20 inches, while storm surge is forecast to reach as high as 25 feet. Mawar was already producing waves up to 45 feet in the ocean near Guam on Tuesday.
Guam’s Office of Civil Defense advised residents on Tuesday to seek shelter immediately, as Mawar is “expected to make a direct hit or very near passage for Guam.”
“There is a potential of a catastrophic and devastating event for Guam,” the office said in a bulletin.
Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero also urged residents on Tuesday to take cover, as “damaging winds” were expected to start soon.
“Please take all the necessary precautions in an abundance of safety before we feel the full strength of the super typhoon,” Guerrero said in a social media post.
One emergency shelter in northern Guam had already reached capacity, according to the governor.
President Joe Biden has declared an emergency in Guam due to Mawar and ordered federal assistance to support the response to the typhoon.
Mawar could be one of the strongest typhoons to impact Guam since the 1960s — the start of the satellite era.
The most destructive typhoon to hit Guam was Karen in 1962, with 155 mph winds and wind gusts of at least 170 mph, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most homes on the island were destroyed.
More recently, in 2002, Super Typhoon Pongsona moved near the island with 144 mph winds and gusts up to 173 mph, causing $700 million in damage at the time, according to NOAA.
