(NEW YORK) — A woman who died after being set on fire on a New York City subway train this month has been identified, according to police.
The woman was identified as 61-year-old Debrina Kawam of Toms River, New Jersey, according to the New York Police Department.
Kawam was sleeping on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn on the morning of Dec. 22 when she was set on fire allegedly by a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally, according to police.
The suspect, Sebastian Zapeta, has been charged with first-degree and second-degree murder and first-degree arson, according to police. He has yet to enter a plea.
“The depravity of this horrific crime is beyond comprehension, and my office is committed to bringing the perpetrator to justice,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement released shortly after the homicide occurred. “This gruesome and senseless act of violence against a vulnerable woman will be met with the most serious consequences.”
The suspect allegedly “approached and lit the victim on fire” with a lighter, police said.
Police officers in the area at the time smelled smoke and went to the train to investigate, where they found the woman standing inside the car “fully engulfed in flames.” She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Images of the suspect were captured on officers’ body cameras, as that person stayed on the scene after the incident, sitting on a nearby bench.
Those images were released as police requested the public’s assistance in identifying the man, who fled the train.
Three high school students recognized him and contacted police.
The suspect was taken into custody in a subway car at Herald Square within hours of the incident, according to police. When he was captured, the suspect had a lighter in his pocket.
A motive for the crime remains under investigation.
Zapeta was initially removed from the U.S. back to Guatemala in June 2018 after U.S. Border Patrol encountered him in Sonoita, Arizona, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson said. He unlawfully reentered the U.S. at an unknown time and location, the spokesperson said.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations will lodge an immigration detainer with the NYPD location where Zapeta is being held, an agency spokesperson said.
During a news conference on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Kawam briefly stayed in a city homeless shelter. He said authorities have been in contact with her next of kin, but he released no additional information about her.
“Our hearts go out to the family,” Adams said, calling the homicide a “horrific incident to have to live through.”
He said such high-profile “random acts of violence” have overshadowed the success police have achieved in bringing crime down in the subway system. NYPD crime statistic show that as of Sunday, overall crime in the subway system is down 5.4% compared to last year.
“It was just a bad incident and it impacts on how New Yorkers feel,” said Adams. “But it really reinforces what I’ve been saying: People should not be living on our subway system. They should be in a place of care. And no matter where she lived, that should not have happened.
(NEW YORK) — Multiple rounds of frigid, arctic air could sweep across the eastern half of U.S. in the coming weeks, ushering in an abnormally cold start to 2025.
The first blast of bitter cold hits the Northern Plains and the Midwest on Wednesday and Thursday and then reaches the Northeast by the end of this week.
The surge of arctic air will likely be the start of multiple back-to-back cold blasts lasting throughout much of January, unleashing freezing temperatures across a large swath of the country.
Beginning next week, the polar vortex will likely trigger even colder air across the eastern half of the U.S.
The polar vortex lives in the upper atmosphere and is located near the North Pole in the arctic. When the polar vortex is strong, it locks the cold air in the arctic. When the polar vortex gets weaker, or breaks up, it unleashes cold air to the south.
Temperatures will likely be below average throughout most of January for the eastern half of the U.S., especially the East Coast.
It is too early to know exactly how cold it will get, but there could be dangerously freezing temperatures for millions.
With the surge in cold temperatures, odds favor more precipitation falling as snow rather than rain in many spots.
A large, fast-moving storm may bring snow to parts of the Midwest and severe thunderstorms to the South early next week. Some of that snow may reach the mid-Atlantic, as well.
(NEW YORK) — A woman who died after being set on fire on a New York City subway train this month has been identified, according to police.
The woman was identified as 61-year-old Debrina Kawam of Toms River, New Jersey, according to the New York Police Department.
Kawam was sleeping on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn when she was set on fire allegedly by a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally, according to police.
The suspect, Sebastian Zapeta, has been charged with first-degree and second-degree murder and first-degree arson, according to police. He has yet to enter a plea.
“The depravity of this horrific crime is beyond comprehension, and my office is committed to bringing the perpetrator to justice,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement released shortly after the homicide occurred. “This gruesome and senseless act of violence against a vulnerable woman will be met with the most serious consequences.”
The horrific incident unfolded around 7:30 a.m. on Dec. 22 as Kawam, who is believed to have been homeless, was asleep on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn, according to police.
The suspect allegedly “approached and lit the victim on fire” with a lighter, police said.
Police officers in the area at the time smelled smoke and went to the train to investigate, where they found the woman standing inside the car “fully engulfed in flames.” She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Images of the suspect were captured on officers’ body cameras, as that person stayed on the scene after the incident, sitting on a nearby bench.
Those images were released as police requested the public’s assistance in identifying the man, who fled the train.
Three high school students recognized him and contacted police.
The suspect was taken into custody in a subway car at Herald Square within hours of the incident, according to police. When he was captured, the suspect had a lighter in his pocket.
Zapeta is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson. He was initially removed from the U.S. back to Guatemala in June 2018 after U.S. Border Patrol encountered him in Sonoita, Arizona, the spokesperson said. He unlawfully reentered the U.S. at an unknown time and location, the spokesperson said.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations will lodge an immigration detainer with the NYPD location where Zapeta is being held, an agency spokesperson said.
(NEW YORK) — Though Jimmy Carter was a U.S. president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of a global organization, The Carter Center, to his more than one dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he was a grandfather first and foremost, his grandson Jason Carter told “Good Morning America.”
“He’s an interesting guy, but he really was a grandfather to me first,” Jason Carter said in a live interview Tuesday on “GMA,” just days after the former president’s death on Dec. 29, at age 100.
“He was my grandfather so I have a lot of memories, like others do, of him taking me fishing or sitting around and talking about what I should do in my life,” Jason Carter continued. “When I graduated from college, he and I sat down and I said, ‘What would you do if you were me?,’ and he said, ‘I would go to Africa and join the Peace Corps,’ and so I did that.”
Jimmy Carter is survived by four children and around two dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, according to the Jimmy Carter Library.
He was preceded in death by his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, who died on Nov. 19, 2023, at age 96.
Jason Carter, the son of the Carters’ eldest child, John William “Jack” Carter, described his grandparents’ decades-long marriage as “one of the great American love stories.”
He said a photo of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter kissing each other amid the backdrop of the U.S. presidency shows who they really were at heart, two people who remained in love after meeting in the small town of Plains, Georgia.
“He spent eight years in politics, and the other 92 years he spent at home in Plains, Georgia,” Jason Carter said of his grandfather. “Obviously, working around the world, doing things for The Carter Center and otherwise, but really, he was a small-town guy who lived out that faith that is reflected in that picture and the love that is reflected in that picture.”
Jason Carter, who plans to deliver a eulogy at his grandfather’s funeral on Jan. 9, said he sees his grandfather’s legacy as one of someone who stayed true to himself even while reaching the highest heights of power.
During his own political career, including a run for Georgia governor in 2014, Jason Carter said he tried to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps in that way.
“He’s one of those people who demonstrates that you can be in politics and not change who you are, that you can be an honest person, a person who lives out his faith and love in the real world, and still be in politics, and I think that was my hope,” he said. “Our politics is messy, and he was always one of those rare people who was able to reach the highest levels of it without compromising who he was, and we talked about that aspect of it a lot.”
Now, as his family moves forward after the death of their patriarch, Jason Carter said they are reflecting on the annual New Year’s family vacation that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hosted every year and sharing memories of sipping champagne together on New Year’s Eve.
As they look ahead to the new year, Jason Carter said he and his family want to continue their grandfather’s work at The Carter Center, which describes itself as a “nongovernmental organization that helps to improve lives by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy and preventing diseases.”
“He built this remarkable organization over 40 years that’s really been his life’s work,” Jason Carter said of The Carter Center, of which he has served as chair of the board. “There’s 3,000 employees that work all over the world … and of those 3,000 employees, only a couple hundred are in the U.S., and the rest are in Ethiopia or Sudan or Mali or Chad or Bangladesh, the places where the center can do the most good for the most people.”
(GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA) — The U.S. Department of Defense on Monday announced that Guantanamo Bay detainee Ridah Bin Saleh al-Yazidi had been repatriated to Tunisia, a transfer that leaves 26 detainees at the U.S. facility in Cuba.
Yazidi arrived at Guantanamo Bay the day it opened on Jan. 11, 2002, and was never charged. He was handed over to the Tunisian government, the Pentagon said in a press release on Monday.
“On Jan. 31, 2024, Secretary of Defense (Lloyd) Austin notified Congress of his intent to support this repatriation and, in consultation with our partner in Tunisia, we completed the requirements for responsible transfer,” the press release said.
The transfer came days after the Pentagon announced the repatriations of three other detainees, as the Biden administration pushes to reduce the number of people held at the notorious facility.
The Pentagon said in a press release earlier this month that Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep, who are both Malaysians, were sent to their home country to serve the remainder of a 5-year sentence imposed in June. Officials had also announced the transfer of Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu to Kenya.
Fourteen of the remaining 26 detainees are eligible for transfer, according to the Pentagon. Another three are eligible for periodic review.
“The United States appreciates the support to ongoing U.S. efforts toward a deliberate and thorough process focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility,” the Pentagon said in a statement announcing Bajabu’s repatriation earlier this month.
The cases of seven other detainees are ongoing under military commissions, the tribunal process under which detainees are tried. Two detainees have been convicted and sentenced by those commissions.
ABC News’ Luis Martinez contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — As world leaders mourn the death of former President Jimmy Carter and remark on his political and policy legacy, doctors are remembering his efforts to prevent disease, and his legacy in furthering global public health.
The 39th president spent five decades working to eradicate a parasitic disease, helped organize a major-drug donation program, and made advancements addressing the mental health crisis in the U.S.
Dr. Julie Jacobson, currently a managing partner of the nonprofit Bridges to Development, helped to provide funding for the Carter Center’s work in the Americas, Nigeria and Ethiopia while she worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for over a decade.
“He was hugely influential, I think particularly for the diseases that most of the world doesn’t appreciate even exist,” Jacobson told ABC News of Jimmy Carter’s work. “He was a true champion for the neglected tropical diseases, which are some of the most common infections of people who live with the least resources. And he found these diseases and then really wanted to do something about them, and used his voice, his influence, his passion, to continue to push forward where others were really not interested.”
Near-eradication of Guinea worm disease
Following his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982, a non-profit organization that “seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health,” according to the Center’s website.
Among the organization’s many efforts, the Carter Center helped spearhead a successful international campaign with the goal of eradicating dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated drinking water.
Water from ponds or other stagnant bodies of water can contain tiny crustaceans commonly known as water fleas, which in turn can be infected with Guinea worm larvae, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
About one year after infecting a human host, the Guinea worm creates a blister on the skin and emerges from it, which can cause burning pain, fever and swelling, according to the CDC and the World Health Organization.
“Nobody else wanted to take it on,” Jimmy Carter told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos during a 2015 interview on “Good Morning America”. “So, I decided to take it on.”
In 1986, Guinea worm disease afflicted 3.5 million people every year in 21 African and Asian countries. Disease incidence has since been reduced by 99.99%, to just 14 “provisional” human cases in 2023, according to the Carter Center.
Jacobson said that success is even more remarkable because there are no vaccines available to prevent Guinea worm disease and no drugs to treat it. Tracking Guinea worm disease, according to Jacobson, involves following possible cases for a year to determine if they are infected, checking to see if infected humans have any infected water sources near them, and monitoring the community as a whole.
“To think that you could eradicate a disease without any tools is really still just a crazy idea, but he did it with perseverance and working with people in the grassroots within communities and putting together teams of people to go and work with people in those communities and empower the communities,” Jacobson said.
The Carter Center says if efforts are successful, Guinea worm disease could become the second human disease in history to be completely eradicated, after smallpox, and the first to be done without the use of a vaccine or medicine.
Carter told ABC News during the 2015 interview that eradicating the disease entirely was his goal: “I think this is going to be a great achievement for, not for me, but for the people that have been afflicted and for the entire world to see diseases like this eradicated.”
Mass drug distribution for river blindness
The Carter Center also works to fight other preventable diseases, including the parasitic infections schistosomiasis and lymphatic filariasis – more commonly known as snail fever and elephantiasis, respectively – as well as trachoma, which is one of the world’s leading causes of preventable blindness. It’s also working with the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic to eliminate lymphatic filariasis and malaria from the island of Hispaniola, which both countries share and which is “the last reservoir in the Caribbean for both diseases,” according to the Carter Center.
Carter and his organization also played a part in organizing a major drug-donation program to help eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, which is transmitted to human through repeated bites of infected blackflies, according to the CDC.
Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. had been implementing field studies in Africa which showed that the drug ivermectin was effective at treating river blindness in humans. The Carter Center partnered with Merck to mass-distribute ivermectin, brand name Mectizan, “as much as needed for as long as needed” in Africa and Latin America. To date, the Carter Center has assisted in distributing more than 500 million treatments of Mectizan, according to Merck.
In 1995, Carter negotiated a two-month cease-fire in Sudan to allow health care workers there to more safely help eradicate Guinea worm disease, prevent river blindness, and vaccinate children against polio.
“When we have known solutions, it is ethical to make sure they’re available to the people who need it most,” Dr. Usha Ramakrishnan, chair of the Department of Global Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told ABC News. “And that’s where we were with river blindness. There was a treatment, but improving access to medications, making it affordable, reaching the people they need was very much along the lines of the work [the Carter Center] was doing.”
Addressing mental health
Carter was also committed to tackling mental health issues. During his presidency, he created the Presidential Commission on Mental Health, which recommended a national plan to care for people with chronic mental illness.
Although it was never adopted as policy by the Reagan administration, the plan’s recommended strategies were adopted by some mental health advocacy groups to “make gains in the 1980s,” according to one study.
Carter also signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which provided funding to community mental health centers.
After his presidency, Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter continued working to improve access to mental health.
Ramakrishnan said the Carters’ work helped to reduce some of the stigma associated with mental health.
“There continues to be a lot of stigma, but they truly got it out [in] the conversation and mainstreaming mental health as an important aspect of health and well-being,” Ramakrishnan said. “There’s still a lot of challenges, and there are many capable people that they have mentored and trained who are carrying that mantle forward.”
(MEMPHIS, TN) — The gatekeepers of Elvis Presley’s estate are trying to recover a potential trove of records and memorabilia left behind by the King of Rock and Roll, according to a lawsuit filed in California.
The lawsuit, filed just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 24, is a fitting coda to a year that saw Presley’s iconic Memphis home nearly auctioned off as part of what federal authorities now call an attempt to defraud both Presley’s family and Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Now, the operators of Graceland allege “irreplaceable” items they bought more than three decades ago from Presley’s longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker, have fallen into the hands of people who have no right to them and are now trying to sell them in an online auction.
“It is now clear that some of the material that the parties to the Parker Acquisition intended to be transferred to [Elvis Presley Enterprises], never was,” the lawsuit claims. Despite “clear and repeated demands” that the defendants stop hawking what was not theirs to sell, those demands were “ignored,” according to the filing.
At issue is a collection that allegedly includes everything from contracts and agreements signed by Presley, to a telegram from associates congratulating Elvis and his then-wife Priscilla on the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie. Elvis Presley Enterprises contends the cache of memorabilia is valued at upwards of $2 million, though the “unique” artifacts are “priceless.”
The items were listed on the website of GWS Auctions, a California company that boasts sales of “celebrity” items from the likes of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Cash. The Presley items listed in the lawsuit appeared as available online in mid-November under the heading “The Lost Collection of Elvis, Col. Tom Parker & More.” Elvis Presley Enterprises alleges the auctioneeing company advertised while knowing the sellers had no legal right to the items, which the company denies.
The origin of the dispute dates back to 1990, when Col. Parker, “known as a meticulous record keeper and a real pack rat who held onto everything,” directly sold EPE “perhaps the greatest collection of Elvis-related documents and memorabilia ever held by anyone other than Elvis himself,” the suit alleged, adding it is the “entire collection” as it pertained to “Elvis and Elvis related memorabilia, irrespective of where such material was located.”
EPE acquired the collection as part of its ongoing effort to catalogue, preserve and showcase artifacts connected to the life and career of one of rock and roll’s first global superstars. One of the company’s executives, Jack Soden, “had dealt with and known Col. Parker for many years” and said he “was acting with the authority of Elvis’s widow Priscilla Presley, was intent on acquiring from Parker every scrap of Elvis-related material Parker owned.”
The lawsuit alleges company leaders believed all the items covered in the agreement “had been collected,” only now to find otherwise. Some of those items “ended up in the possession” of one of Parker’s former longtime employees after Parker’s death in 1997, according to the filing.
Then in December 2021, the lawsuit says, the co-founder of GWS Auctions, Brigitte Kruse, reached out to both Priscilla Presley and Graceland’s chief archivist to tell them she knew that the employee had items that should be in EPE’s custody. Kruse allegedly even shared videos of her discussions with him acknowledging who owned what.
Kruse allegedly told Graceland’s archivist Angela Marchese “that she knew these materials were involved in ‘theft’ and rightfully belonged to EPE,” according to a signed declaration by Marchese obtained by ABC News.
When a Presley executive confronted the employee directly, he backtracked, saying it had all been “a misunderstanding,” and he only had “photocopies,” not originals, the suit says.
“Some of the very documents and memorabilia Kruse claimed [the employee] possessed have now been listed for sale,” the suit alleges, adding “it is apparent” how those items “made their way” to the auction house.
“Kruse listed the Property for sale despite knowing, as she made clear in her email to Marchese and contemporaneous conversations with Marchese, that Kruse knew these items to be stolen Property rightfully belonging to [EPE],” the suit said.
EPE sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kruse earlier this month.
In response, a lawyer for GWS said the company “denies any wrongdoing whatsoever,” and denies that the “characterizations of the communications between” Kruse and Marchese “are accurate or complete.” GWS also denied EPE’s property interest and said that they would “proceed with the auction,” according to the suit and appended exhibits.
In a statement to ABC News, Kruse pushed back on the allegations against her and her company, saying that the assertions are “unfounded and without merit.”
“EPE and Graceland’s assertions are unfounded and without merit. This is merely another attempt to discredit our founder and the company. Under no circumstances would we engage in the sale of “stolen” items, and this collection was sought after by auction houses globally,” Kruse said.
“The items in question successfully passed our auction house’s due diligence process and were subsequently offered for public sale. Furthermore, no police report has ever been filed by EPE/Graceland, and the owner has possessed this collection for several decades,” Kruse added.
As of Monday night, the auction site is still up, though bidding is closed.
The keepers of the Presley legacy say the decades-long story of Elvis is one of people trying to profit off of the King – and often at the expense of him and his family.
In May, Elvis’ idyllic Graceland retreat was mysteriously announced for auction by an unknown company calling itself “Naussany Investments,” which claimed that Lisa Marie used Graceland as collateral to take out a $3.8 million loan and had not repaid it.
The ensuing investigation stretched all the way from Memphis to Florida, where the notary whose fake seal was used for the alleged fraud spoke up — and Presley’s granddaughter countersued, stopping a possible sale. In August, the alleged perpetrator behind that alleged fraud was arrested in the Ozarks: Lisa Findley was apprehended on Aug. 16, the 47th anniversary of Elvis’ death. Federal prosecutors charged the Missouri woman with mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. The case is still pending, and Findley is last listed in custody in Tennessee.
“People have been trying to take from Elvis since Elvis was Elvis,” Joel Weinshanker, managing partner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, told ABC News this fall. “Elvis was a human being. He was a really good human being,” he said. “Pick on somebody else. Have a heart, have a conscience. And even if you don’t have a heart or have a conscience — know that you won’t get away with it.”
Police investigate a mass shooting that erupted on June 2, 2024, that left one man dead and 28 people injured at a large street party in Akron, Ohio. (ABC News/WEWS)
(NEW YORK) — Homicides across the United States are poised to plummet for the third straight year as 2024 winds down, driving the nation’s annual murder toll down to levels not seen since before the pandemic, according to preliminary data from cities both large and small.
Based on available crime statistics from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the year is expected to end with a nearly 16% drop in homicides nationwide and a 3.3% decline in overall violent crime, Jeff Asher, a national crime analyst, told ABC News.
The dramatic drop in homicides surpasses a 13% decline in 2023, then the largest decrease on record until now. In 2022, the number of murders across the country fell 6%, according to the FBI.
The three consecutive years of declining homicides come in the wake of 30% jump in murders between 2019 and 2020, the largest single-year increase in more than a century.
“Considering where we were just three or four years ago, we’re basically looking at 5,000 fewer murder victims than in 2020, 2021 and 2022 having occurred in 2024,” said Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and a former crime analyst for the CIA and the New Orleans Police Department.
In contrast, a dozen major U.S. cities broke annual homicide records in 2021.
Philadelphia — which recorded an all-time high of 562 homicides in 2021, 516 in 2022 and 410 last year — has seen a 40% drop in homicides in 2024.
Other major cities seeing precipitous reductions in homicides this year are New Orleans, down 38%; Washington, D.C., down 29%; Memphis, Tennessee, down 23%; Baltimore, down 24%; Kansas City, Missouri, down 20%; and Los Angeles, down 15%.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, had recorded 357 homicides through Dec. 15, a 7.3% drop from 2023, according to New York Police Department crime statistics. The city — which tallied 442 murders in 2020, a 45% jump from 2019 — has seen homicides fall 15% over the past two years.
Chicago has recorded a 7% decline in homicides as of Dec. 15, down from 603 murders at this time last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s crime data. Over the past three years, homicides in Chicago have fallen 29% after skyrocketing 55% between 2019 and 2020 to 769 murders.
Homicides this year in 63 cities with populations of more than 250,000 declined by at least 15% and murders were down at least 19% in 246 cities with populations under 250,000, Asher’s research found.
“It’s a tremendous achievement in terms of how far murder has fallen in just really two straight years,” Asher said.
Property crime plummets
In addition to violent crime falling, property crime is also poised to finish the year down 8.6% nationwide, mostly due to a 21.4% decrease in motor vehicle theft, Asher said.
“Auto thefts went up 12% last year. They’re coming down more than 20% this year,” said Asher, who added that the 2023 spike in car thefts appears to be tied to social media instruction videos on how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.
Crunching the numbers
Since 2016, Asher has crunched the numbers for an end-of-the-year report on crime trends. This year, his report is based on preliminary crime statistics from 309 U.S. law enforcement agencies, the most data he has ever received.
Asher’s analysis aligns closely with data released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing murders down 14%. The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings across the nation, shows homicides are down around 11%.
“We kind of put all those together and we see a very large decline in murder, a very large decline in gun violence happening in the U.S. in 2024 on top of what was a very large decline in murder and a very large decline in gun violence in 2023,” Asher said.
Referring to overall violent crime, Asher said, “You’re probably looking at, if not the lowest violent crime rate since 1970, certainly at or around where we were pre-pandemic.”
Besides homicide, rape was down 4.5% from 2023, robberies fell 1.1% and aggravated assaults declined 3.7%, according to Asher.
The falling numbers come amid a backdrop of high-profile violent crimes in 2024, including more than 400 mass shootings, two assassination attempts on President-elect Donald Trump and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione, who police suspect was out to strike fear in the insurance industry.
The numbers also come just days after a 15-year-old girl allegedly carried out a shooting rampage at her Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a classmate, and injured six other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
The Wisconsin shooting came three months after a 14-year-old boy allegedly killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine others at his high school in Winder, Georgia, with an AR-style weapon police alleged his father gave him as a Chrismas present.
‘We have turned the tide against violent crime’
During a Dec. 10 briefing of the Justice Department’s Violence Crime Reduction Steering Committee meeting, Attorney General Merrick Garland said preliminary crime data showed significant declines in violent crime in 85 cities in 2024, including a 17.5% drop in homicides nationwide.
“Over the past two years, we have turned the tide against the violent crime that spiked during the pandemic,” Garland said.
He said the numbers build on the historic drop in homicides nationwide last year, which he said was the lowest level of violent crime in 50 years.
Merrick attributed the tumbling violent crime rate partly to the DOJ’s Violent Crime Reduction Roadmap, a one-stop-shop created to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing and evaluating the strategies to prevent, intervene and respond to acts of community gun violence.
President Joe Biden’s administration has also sought to curb gun violence in recent years through executive actions and signing into law in 2022 the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, allocated $750 million to help states implement “red flag laws” to remove firearms from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.
Biden also established the in 2023 the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to focus on ways to assist states and cities reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Some cities such as Philadelphia have credited the work of violence interrupter programs, community-based initiatives that use peacebuilding methods to head off incidents of violence before they occur.
In Philadelphia, city leaders also pointed to a $184 million investment in gun violence initiatives in 2022, including one that attempts to identify people who are at risk of being involved in violence to provide them with mental health services or job placement. While the city also boosted the Philadelphia Police Department’s budget that year by $30 million, it instituted a violence prevention plan that emphasizes a combination of law enforcement strategies, environmental improvements and youth programs to reduce its homicide numbers.
“We need to continue pressing forward with our comprehensive approach, which is prevention, intervention and enforcement,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said at a Nov. 1 news conference on the city’s falling homicide numbers.
In October, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed six bills to strengthen New York’s gun laws, including one requiring gun sellers to post tobacco-style safety warnings and another that cracks down on illegal devices called “switches” that convert semiautomatic handguns into automatic weapons.
Asher said that in 2020 and 2021 when violent crime rose to alarming levels, programs such as community violence interruptors didn’t exist and the budgets of many police departments were getting slashed in the defund-the-police movement stemming from nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Asher said states and local governments, as well as philanthropies, are pumping money into programs to bring down violent crime.
“Some of that is undoubtedly contributing to what we’re seeing now,” Asher said. “I’m not naïve enough to suggest that that’s the entire explanation. There are undoubtedly a multitude of factors that help to explain this complex problem.”
ABC News’ Calvin Milliner contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Treasury Department was breached by a China-sponsored actor earlier this month, officials told Congress in a letter on Monday.
The “major” breach was achieved by gaining access to a third-party cybersecurity service Treasury used, called BeyondTrust, they said.
The actor then accessed Treasury workstations and “certain unclassified documents” on them, department officials said in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee.
The threat actor was able to “override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users,” the letter said.
Treasury has ceased use of BeyondTrust since discovering the incident.
“The compromised BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” according to a Treasury Department spokesperson.
The department has been working with the FBI and THE Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as well as the intelligence community to “fully characterize the incident and determine its overall impact,” the official said.
More information will be available on the hack in a supplemental notice to Congress within 30 days, according to the Treasury Department.
Treasury is mandated by policy to notify Congress of such breaches.
China is one of America’s most pernicious cyberactors, experts and officials say. Last month, officials said a Chinese-backed group hacked into nine telecommunications companies and was able to gain access to certain high-profile individuals cellphones as a result of the hack.
It is unclear if this breach is related to those actions.
(NEW YORK) — Red flag warnings were issued Monday due to critical fire danger in West Texas, eastern New Mexico and the Oklahoma/Kansas/Colorado corner.
The combination of warm temperatures, gusty winds and low humidity could produce the potential for dangerous fire conditions across portions of the area.
With wind gusts reaching over 60 mph, alerts remain in effect from Colorado to Texas.
Relative humidity may only reach the low teens or even single-digits in these areas.
The public is urged to avoid the use of open flames or any activities that may generate sparks, according to the National Weather Service. In addition, people are asked to extinguish smoking material in vehicles since accidental ignitions have the potential to grow into dangerous wind-driven wildfires.
The warnings will remain in effect through Monday evening.
