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(NEW YORK) — Artists and environmentalists are one and the same at a New York theater company, that has made it its mission to put sustainability at the forefront of its operations.

The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, a nonprofit theater company nestled in the sprawling hills just north of Manhattan, has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2040, meaning its performances will carry no net release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Sandra Goldmark, director for campus sustainability and climate action at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, told ABC News.

The primary way the theater company plans on achieving this feat is by altering how the building is powered — employing solar panels, natural convection heating, stormwater reuse, as well as providing EV charging stations, Davis McCallum, artistic director of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, told ABC News.

Deep thought has also been given to the way the theater company will reuse garbage and food scraps around its 98-acre campus, McCallum said.

The site of the festival itself was once a golf course that was then donated to the nonprofit by a local philanthropist. The theater company is now allowing the land to rewild and “heal,” Goldmark said, describing the process as a “beautiful mini play” about what needs to happen elsewhere in the country.

“We’ve really abused the land in ways, much like we do on golf courses,” she said. “And so it’s exciting to watch a group of artists and storytellers reclaim a very small piece of it.”

Sustainability goes beyond the infrastructure of the festival, though. The theater company is adamant on implementing the idea of a circular economy, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible.

Designing wardrobes that are made to last and pass onto new actors in the future is one of the basic ways the nonprofit is applying circularity to its operations.

The idea of sustainability is rooted in the arts — an industry that is constantly recycling, repurposing and reusing old ideas for a modern audience. A sustainable venue is the natural progression of the sustainability already rooted in theater culture and allows the participants to come together as a community to build a greener culture, Goldmark said.

“I mean, we’ve been producing Shakespeare’s plays for hundreds of years, and every time, or hopefully every time, they feel new,” Goldmark said. “And I think that idea is really important as we think about sustainability going forward.”

The theater is embarking on its lofty sustainability goal due to the looming threat of climate change, McCallum said.

“None of us are going to be spared the impacts,” he said. “If we want to make a difference in this shared future, then we all have to come together to embrace the call to climate action.”

The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival will run through Sept. 17.

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(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Lee is churning over the Atlantic Ocean as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with winds of 155 mph, just below the strength of a Category 5, which begins at 157 mph winds.

On Thursday, Lee strengthened from a Category 2 hurricane to a Category 4, and finally to a Category 5 by 11 p.m. ET.

Lee will remain a powerful, major hurricane through the weekend.

Lee will bypass the northern Caribbean islands, sparing Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The only impact on the islands will be 10-foot waves and life-threatening rip currents this weekend.

Hurricane Lee will slow down Sunday and early next week, allowing 10-foot waves to reach the Southeast U.S. mainland.

By Thursday, Lee will be near Bermuda, bringing waves up to 20 or 30 feet.

By Friday, as Lee passes east of the Northeast U.S. coast, waves reaching 10 to 20 feet will be possible along the coasts of New Jersey, Long Island and New England.

It is too early to predict Lee’s path, but the latest models show Lee possibly making landfall near the Canada and U.S. border next Friday night into Saturday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has pre-deployed assets to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, according to the White House.

President Joe Biden was briefed Thursday on the latest trajectory and FEMA’s preparations, the White House said.

 

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(NEW YORK) — The Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a man sitting in his car last month surrendered to authorities Friday morning on murder charges.

Mark Dial, the officer accused of fatally shooting Eddie Irizarry Jr. on Aug. 14, was also charged with voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment of another person and official oppression, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said during a press conference where he showed unedited body camera video from the incident.

“These videos speak for themselves,” Krasner said.

Originally, police had said that Irizarry was outside the car and was killed after lunging at police with a knife, but two days later the department acknowledged that he was shot while inside his car. Irizarry’s family released security camera footage that showed him fatally shot by police in his car just seconds after Dial exited his cruiser.

The district attorney’s office showed footage from the body-worn cameras of Dial and a second officer who was at the scene. Irizarry’s family and their counsel had previously seen the videos and requested that they be played in their entirety, he said.

Krasner warned that the footage “will in some ways be traumatic.”

The footage shows Dial getting out of his cruiser and approaching Irizarry’s car with his gun drawn. “I will f—— shoot you,” he says, before firing into the front driver’s seat where Irizarry was seated. Prior to shots being fired, an officer can be heard yelling at Irizarry to show his hands.

Dial fired six shots “at close range,” Krasner said. The DA was unable to answer how many times Irizarry was struck, pending a final autopsy report.

Dial can also be seen pulling a bloodied Irizarry out of the car and then, with the second officer at the scene, carrying him to their police cruiser. The second officer can be heard radioing that they are “scooping” a man to bring to a hospital.

The second officer has not been charged in the incident and his name is not being released at this time, Krasner said.

Bail has not been set yet, Krasner said. A preliminary hearing is expected to happen Friday, he said.

“To charge officer Mark Dial with murder is abhorrent,” Brian McMonagle, one of Dial’s attorneys, told reporters following the surrender Friday morning. “The undisputed facts of the case are that an individual made an illegal turn right in front of police officers, took off at a high rate of speed, and then tried to evade officers by going down a one-way street the wrong way, tried to hide from them.”

“And when police officers ordered him to show his hands, he instead produced a weapon and pointed it at an armed police officer,” he continued.

Dial has already been suspended for 30 days and the city’s police commissioner said she intended to fire the officer at the end of the suspension.

Then-Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has since left the department, said on Aug. 23 that an administrative investigation found Dial violated department rules against “insubordination” by allegedly refusing to obey “proper orders from a superior officer.” She said the administrative investigation also accuses Dial of “conduct unbecoming” an officer for “failure to cooperate in any departmental investigation.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing Philadelphia police officers, said last month it was standing by Dial.

“Officer Dial has the full support of the Fraternal Order of Police and we continue to review the facts and circumstances surrounding this tragic incident,” Dial’s lawyer, Fortunato N. Perri, Jr., said in a statement last month to ABC News.

ABC News’ Alex Faul contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Lee, now a powerful Category 4 hurricane, is one of only a handful of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin during the satellite era to intensify by 85 mph or more within a 24-hour period.

The storm intensified more than twice the National Hurricane Center’s definition of rapid intensification. Rapid intensification is defined as a storm increasing in wind speed by 35 mph or more in 24 hours.

At 5 a.m. ET on Thursday, Lee was a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph. Twenty-four hours later, Lee had strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane with whopping 165 mph winds.

Other notable storms to achieve this include Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and the record Hurricane Wilma in 2005. In just 24 hours Wilma increased from 75 mph winds (a Category 1 hurricane) to 185 mph winds (a Category 5 hurricane).

Last week, Hurricane Idalia rapidly strengthened from 75 mph winds on Tuesday morning to 130 mph winds by Wednesday morning.

Warm water is a major reason for Lee’s rapid intensification; Lee is in waters that are 3 to 4 degrees above average.

Lack of wind shear in the atmosphere and Lee churning over the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean are other important variables.

Water temperatures in the Atlantic are influenced by a number of factors, including the overall weather pattern, and human-amplified climate change due to increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Lee weakened slightly to a Category 4 storm by Friday midday.

The storm is expected to move north of the Caribbean islands over the weekend and early next week, sparing them any direct impacts. However, rough surf and life-threatening rip currents are a growing concern for many islands in the region.

Long-range models can change over the next week, but they currently show Lee moving parallel to the eastern United States coastline. If Lee stays on that course, the East Coast would also be hit with rough surf and life-threatening rip currents throughout the upcoming week.

ABC News’ Ginger Zee and Dan Manzo contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — In a normal year, the young students at Lahaina’s King Kamehameha III Elementary School would be entering their second month of classes.

Now, all that’s left is a gray hazmat zone filled with the sorrow of what has been lost.

The school, which served around 650 preschool to fifth-graders in the historic West Maui town, burnt down in the wildfires that ravaged the community last month, killing at least 115 people and displacing thousands more.

For Lahaina’s youngest residents – its “keiki” – the fire has completely uprooted their daily routines. They are processing the disaster while dealing with destroyed homes, missing family members and classmates among the deceased.

Myles Verrastro, 6, was about to start his first-grade year at King Kamehameha III, but now his school, along with his home, lie in ashes. Myles and his mom Sarah are sheltered in a hotel just outside of Lahaina.

“I don’t know where we’re going after this. My mom might not find a place after this. We only get a month here,” Myles told ABC News.

Sarah Verrastro managed to get Myles into a new technical school through a lottery, although the makeshift school has not yet been set up.

“They need resources. They need staff,” Verrastro told ABC News. “They need a larger location eventually, if they’re going to accommodate kids that are displaced from the local school. A lot of us don’t know long-term and nor can we even really think long-term. We’re thinking short-term.”

Myles is one of the lucky children of Lahaina, as thousands of students are still without a school.

Only 1,652 of the 3,000 children from Lahaina have been enrolled in other public schools or distance learning on the island, according to the Hawaii Department of Education.

Ruben Brillantes and his large extended family are all still living in a two-bedroom space far from home just to be near the children’s new schools. There are 27 people who live there, with only one bathroom, Brillantes said.

On weekends, the family travels to the Royal Lahaina resort and two other hotels in West Maui. Brillantes says his 7-year-old nephew Kurt is struggling with being away from home.

“I want everything to be the same in Lahaina, and I miss my school. Or I just miss my friends, that’s all,” Kurt told ABC News.

An emotional Brillantes says there were nine or 10 kids from the neighborhood who used to play on their street every afternoon.

“They can’t do that anymore,” Brillantes said.

On his days off, Brillantes drops off the children at three different schools across the island.

“I’ve got to be tough because if I’m going to be weak, then my kids is going to be weak, too. So yeah, I don’t know. Just be strong every day, all day, every day,” Brillantes said.

Three of the four schools damaged in the Lahaina fire may reopen in mid-October, pending environmental tests.

For Brillantes, schools opening back up raises new concerns about what’s to come.

“When schools open up, I don’t know what’s going to happen because we might get kicked out at my working place. They’re still only allowing us to stay over there until October 31, I think. After that, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” Brillantes said.

For now, more than 100 of the displaced students are attending Sacred Hearts, one of the few Lahaina schools that is open. After two of its three buildings were destroyed by the fire, principal Tonata Lolesio created a makeshift school in a church just north of Lahaina.

More than half of Lolesio’s 220 students are new to Sacred Hearts after their public schools were damaged in the fire, with 180 more on the waiting list.

Lolesio’s goal is to provide stable learning for the keiki – now the last generation of what was once Lahaina.

“They lost their first home, we had to restore their second home, and because they are the future and our hope for our rebuilding and healing, this is the best we could do for now until we secure a new school here,” Lolesio said.

Dean Wong, head of Imua Family Services, explains the magnitude of this tragedy on children, not just in Lahaina, but all of Maui.

“This is absolutely a trauma. I’m traumatized. You know, something that was here that was a part of our life doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s just gone. It’s demolished, devastated,” Wong said. “And the pictures of everything – that is also traumatizing. And all of us want to process that differently. Each of us, you and I, as individuals, process trauma and grief, loss, things differently. And that’s true with children as well.”

For the keiki all around the island, going back to school has no precedent or timeline. The process has been slow, but families who spoke to ABC News say they’ve already been through the worst.

Back at Sacred Hearts, Lolesio stresses how important children are to the future of the island and its cultures.

“They know the stories of Lahaina before it burnt down. They know our history, our traditions, and our legacies,” she said.

ABC News’ Stephanie Wash and Emily Lippiello contributed to this report.

 

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(NEW YORK) — The Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a man sitting in his car last month surrendered to authorities Friday morning.

It is not clear what charges Mark Dial, the officer accused of fatally shooting Eddie Irizarry Jr. on Aug. 14, faces from the incident. District Attorney Larry Krasner will hold a press conference at 11:30 a.m. to release unedited body camera video from the incident and discuss the charges against Dial.

Originally, police had said that Irizarry was outside the car and was killed after lunging at police with a knife, but two days later the department acknowledged that he was shot while inside his car. Irizarry’s family released security camera footage that showed him fatally shot by police in his car just seconds after Dial exited his cruiser.

Dial has already been suspended for 30 days and the city’s police commissioner said she intended to fire the officer at the end of the suspension.

Then-Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who has since left the department, said on Aug. 23 that an administrative investigation found Dial violated department rules against “insubordination” by allegedly refusing to obey “proper orders from a superior officer.” She said the administrative investigation also accuses Dial of “conduct unbecoming” an officer for “failure to cooperate in any departmental investigation.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing Philadelphia police officers, said last month it was standing by Dial.

“Officer Dial has the full support of the Fraternal Order of Police and we continue to review the facts and circumstances surrounding this tragic incident,” Dial’s lawyer, Fortunato N. Perri, Jr., said in a statement last month to ABC News.

ABC News’ Alex Faul contributed to this report.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

 

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(LAHAINA, Hawaii) — Wildfires tore across parts of Maui last month and now the displaced community searches for answers about their future.

Thousands were displaced, as their homes and businesses were burned to the ground. 115 people have been pronounced dead in connection with the blazes.

The disaster area is dotted with crews dressed head to toe in hazmat suits and hard hats who are sifting through the rubble searching for hazardous materials in the first phase of the rebuilding effort to return Lahaina to what it was.

A laundry list of concerns have compounded onto a community reeling from the trauma: looking for lost loved ones, identifying those who’ve been declared dead, being uprooted from their homes, finding reliable education, and hoping for an eventual return to normalcy.

“It feels like no time has gone by since the start of the fires,” said Khara Jabola-Carolus, a volunteer with Roots Reborn Lahaina, a resource hub for immigrants impacted by the wildfires.

She continued, “It’s really surreal to be in the experience of a humanitarian crisis … when the world starts moving on, but you’re still in crisis mode. I worry that attention is flickering.”

Early phases of rebuilding begin

Some people may not return to their land any time soon, as crews from the Environmental Protection Agency go from property to property in search of dangerous chemicals and materials like propane tanks, batteries, fertilizers, and more that were left behind in damaged structures. This could go on for months, officials say.

So far, they’ve cleared more than 340 properties, which is over 15% of the properties in need of searching, according to Tom Dunkleman, EPA’s incident commander on the wildfire response.

These materials need to be cleared out before residents and property owners can return to the burn site.

A five-mile swath of Lahaina, a historic town with deep cultural significance for the Native Hawaiian community, was damaged in the wildfire on the West side of the island.

Cultural monitors have been hired to work with official crews alongside their search, “advising us of cultural and historic items that might be present on the property, so we can make sure that they’re not further disturbed by our activities,” according to Dunkleman.

Once this process is done, officials can begin phase two of the disaster cleanup, including the removal of ash and debris by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. A FEMA spokesperson told ABC News that rebuilding decisions will be led primarily by property owners following cleanup efforts.

FEMA reports that about 5,800 survivors of the tragedy are currently staying in hotels and motels funded by the organization in coordination with state partners and the American Red Cross, while the state’s Air B&B program is also housing survivors. It is also working to help survivors move beyond hotels into more long-term housing solutions in the near future.

With wildfires and their destruction wreaking havoc more frequently in recent years due in part to climate change, FEMA said it has become more well-versed in such recovery efforts, pointing to the recovery of Paradise, California in 2018 following similarly devastating fires.

Long road ahead

Summer Sylva, the senior advisor for Native Hawaiian Affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior, has been assigned to FEMA’s Cultural Protocol Task Force to ensure that the federal response to the devastation is sensitive to the needs of the community.

Sylva, who is kanaka maoli, a Native Hawaiian with roots in Lahaina, said the destruction has highlighted the longstanding tensions between Hawaii residents and the federal government.

Especially when it comes to the land and how it’s treated, she told ABC News.

“There is a history of land and water stewardship that has marginalized Native voices and that has put development interests and commercial development at the forefront of planning and land use,” said Sylva.

Officials of all kind have signaled that following the path forward is based on the community’s lead.

“We’re not only building back but we’re going to build back a stronger and more resilient future which means we need to withstand any challenge coming our way in rebuilding the way Maui wants to rebuild,” said President Joe Biden during a press conference.

Jabola-Carolus has been working with women and immigrant groups to ensure they get the resources they need. One month into the recovery, she said their efforts have shifted from restoring lost documents and medical care to finding housing and employment as they await for financial assistance to hit their wallets.

In the long term, Jabola-Carolus expects the conversation among residents to remain “political,” as issues like land ownership, environmental injustice, worker justice, and more are highlighted by the destruction’s impact on the community.

While stewardship of the land is likely to be a part of the requests from the community, Sylva said she can’t yet say what exactly the path looks like for people in the community.

However, she said she does believe people who are “building lives and creating families and creating multi generational legacies in this place” have “a lot of investment in seeing a sustainable future.”

This means affordable housing, and “having a meaningful voice in how those lands and those waters and all of the structures that get erected from here on are done,” she said.

“Hawaii is more than a tourist destination, right?” she added.

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(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Lee, now churning over the Atlantic Ocean, has become a Category 5.

As a Category 5, hurricane Lee is expected to have winds of 160 mph.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) sent out an advisory notice after Lee became a Category 5, warning that dangerous beach conditions were expected to develop around the Western Atlantic through early next week.

“Lee is a dangerous Category 5 hurricane, and further strengthening is possible,” the NHC said in an advisory notice at 5 a.m. on Friday morning. “Lee’s core is expected to move well north of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Island, and Puerto Rico this weekend and early next week.”

On Thursday, Lee strengthened from a Category 2 hurricane to a Category 4, and finally to a Category 5 by 11 p.m. ET.

Lee is expected to move north of the Caribbean islands over the weekend, sparing them any direct impacts other than rough surf and rip currents.

By next week, the spaghetti models show the storm turning north before reaching Turks and Caicos. Bermuda may be in Lee’s path.

Long-range models can change over the next week, but they currently show Lee moving parallel to the eastern United States coastline. If Lee stays on that course, the East Coast would be hit with large surf and rip currents by late next week.

It is too early to predict whether Lee will impact the U.S., but some models show the storm hitting the Maine/Canada border around Sept. 16. By that time, Lee will be weaker, and likely won’t be a major hurricane.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has pre-deployed assets to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, according to the White House.

President Joe Biden was briefed Thursday on the latest trajectory and FEMA’s preparations, the White House said.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department is likely to succeed on its claim that floating barriers Texas deployed in the Rio Grande to prevent migrants from crossing were illegally installed, a federal judge in Austin ruled — adding the arguments used to justify the buoys are “unconvincing” and, in at least one instance, unconstitutional.

Judge David Alan Ezra ordered the Lonestar state to move its buoys on Wednesday and said the Justice Department is likely to prevail on its claim that Texas lacked proper authority to install them in the first place and that the state had employed “unconvincing” and conflicting rationale in doing so.

The ruling grants a preliminary injunction to the Department of Justice, which sued Texas for placing the buoys in the Rio Grande in July.

“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” Ezra wrote. “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said the state will appeal the ruling, calling it “incorrect.”

Judge Ezra’s order gave the state until Sept. 15 to coordinate with the Army Corps of Engineers to move the buoys — but Thursday, a U.S. Appeals Court granted a temporary stay allowing Texas to keep the buoys in place — at least for now.

“We will continue to utilize every strategy to secure the border, including deploying Texas National Guard soldiers and Department of Public Safety troopers and installing strategic barriers,” Abbott said in a statement Wednesday. “Our battle to defend Texas’ sovereign authority to protect lives from the chaos caused by President Biden’s open border policies has only begun.”

In court filings, Texas has said the buoy system was deployed as part of that strategy to protect against a surge of “[t]housands of aliens … including members of cartels that traffic in people, weapons, and vast quantities of drugs like fentanyl.”

“By any account, this amounts to ‘ent[ry] in a hostile manner.’ And the State has the constitutional power to repel that invasion,” the state said.

But the judge ruled Texas’ “‘invasion’ defense” is a political question — not a legal one — and that even if there were an “invasion” at the Southern border, as they’ve claimed, then protecting American shores would be the province of the federal government, not Texas.

Ezra, appointed by President Ronald Reagan and serving since 1988, said there are “several constitutional provisions” which “assign the federal government—not states—the authority to recognize and respond to invasions,” and “the political question doctrine bars consideration of Texas’s ‘invasion’ defense.”

“Texas’s self defense argument is unconvincing,” the judge wrote.

Though the Lonestar State has repeatedly asserted its sovereignty to defend the border, federal “power to prevent unauthorized obstacles in the nation’s navigable waters trumps state policy preferences,” the judge said.

The judge rejected not only Texas’ claims of authority to install the 1,000-foot-long, four-foot-wide chain of interconnected buoys in the Rio Grande — but also the way they attempted to characterize that buoy system.

Texas takes the “confusing stance” that the buoys can’t be a “structure” (which, in navigable U.S. water, would require an Army Corps of Engineers permit) because buoys “aid navigation,” the judge wrote, quoting the state’s arguments.

But this is a “convenient” claim from Texas that “contradicts its own description,” the judge wrote — since the state had said the buoys were designed as a “physical barrier” created “to deter illegal crossing in hotspots along the Rio Grande.”

“Texas strains credulity with its argument that the floating barrier is not permanent enough to constitute a structure,” the judge wrote.

Questions also remain as to how the vast majority of Texas’ buoy barriers wound up on Mexico’s side of the river, the judge said.

In August, the Justice Department submitted a binational topographic survey, conducted in late July, which found that nearly 80 percent of the barrier was positioned in Mexican waters. A few days later, Texas was “observed seemingly ‘repositioning the Floating Barrier’ closer to the United States bank,” a footnote in the judge’s ruling says.

At a hearing, “testimony was elicited that the buoys were moved back into Texas waters. Testimony was also elicited that the buoys could not have drifted,” the judge wrote. “But in a statement on August 21, 2023, Governor Abbott indicated that they had drifted.”

“There is still some ambiguity as to whether 80% of the buoys ended up in Mexican waters by drifting or by being originally, incorrectly installed there,” the judge wrote.

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Mother allegedly confined 9-year-old daughter to home since 2017, had to ‘beg to eat’: Police
Nadine El-Bawab, ABC News

(MIAMI) — A Florida mother has been arrested and charged with felony child neglect after not allowing her 9-year-old daughter to leave their house since 2017, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Kelli McGriff-Williams, 42, did not allow her daughter to leave the home from 2017 to 2023, confining her “the majority of the time to a bedroom,” according to the arrest report.

McGriff-Williams is accused of not enrolling her daughter in school, with the report saying she was never provided with an education.

“The victim is unable to read and write,” Miami-Dade police wrote in the report. “The defendant has never taken the victim to a doctor even when she has been very ill.”

“The victim would have to beg to eat, and the defendant would not always provide food to the victim,” police wrote in an arrest report.

An officer responded to a home after a Florida Department of Children and Families investigation into the allegations. McGriff-Williams was involuntarily admitted under the Baker Act criteria at Jackson South Hospital on Aug. 26 due to her “altered mental state,” according to the arrest report.

Police interviewed the victim at her father’s residence on Aug. 30 and she confirmed the allegations.

The victim’s father told police he had been trying to gain custody of his daughter through the court system since 2017 and he told police that the allegations were correct, according to the arrest report.

McGriff-Williams was taken into custody on Sept. 1 when she was discharged from the hospital.

She was booked on Sept. 3 and is being held on a $5,000 bond, according to Miami-Dade County records.

McGriff-Williams pleaded not guilty in court Thursday. She was assigned a public defender. ABC News has reached out to her lawyer for comment.

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