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(NEW YORK) — Hurricane Fiona strengthened to a Category 4 storm on Wednesday, after killing at least four people in Puerto Rico and leaving the entire island without power.

The storm dropped 6 to 20 inches of rain in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with up to 30 inches of rain falling in southern and southeastern Puerto Rico. The rain caused rivers to rise over their banks and triggered rock and mudslides, according to officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As of early Wednesday morning, the storm system was carrying maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour as it moved away from Turks and Caicos after dropping heavy rains over parts of the islands. Winds could possibly increase to 140 mph, according to the National Weather Service.

Fiona is expected to move parallel to the eastern United States, passing between the East Coast and Bermuda late Thursday into early Friday, the National Weather Service said.

The East Coast could see high surf, rip currents and even coastal flooding over the coming days. Meanwhile, a tropical storm watch remains in effect for Bermuda, which could see heavy rain, gusty winds and coastal flooding on Thursday night and Friday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

FEMA officials said during a press conference Tuesday that at least four people have died in Puerto Rico due to Fiona. A public health emergency was declared in the U.S. territory.

On Monday, officials reported that one person was killed as the then-Category 1 storm slammed the island. The Arecibo resident was attempting to fill his generator with gasoline while it was on, causing an ignition, officials said.

No one has been reported missing as of Tuesday afternoon, according to Steve Goldstein, the National Weather Service’s liaison to FEMA.

FEMA officials were still assessing the extent of the damage in Puerto Rico, saying it is too early to estimate the financial impact of the storm.

Fiona made a second landfall Monday in the Dominican Republic near Boca de Yuma on the eastern side of the island with sustained winds of 90 mph and even higher gusts.

Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi warned residents that more rain was expected on the island through Tuesday evening.

“We are going through a difficult moment but our people are strong and very generous,” he said during a press conference.

Four helicopters are in the air surveying damage from Fiona. The governor said it would take at least a week to determine the extent of the damage left by the storm.

In addition to the four deaths cited by FEMA, at least two other people died in a shelter due to natural causes, but those have not been labeled as storm-related, Pierluisi said.

Restoring power in Puerto Rico

LUMA Energy said that only 300,000 out of 1.5 million clients have had power restored on the island as of Tuesday morning, with more expected in the coming days.

“We assure you that a large part of Puerto Rico will have electricity today and tomorrow,” Abner Gomez, spokesperson for LUMA Energy, said at a press conference Tuesday.

In an update Tuesday afternoon, FEMA said that 80% of customers still remain without power.

The governor said Monday the goal is for “a large number of LUMA customers” to have power “in a matter of days.” However, LUMA said in a statement Sunday that “full power restoration could take several days.”

Hospitals on the island are currently operating on generators, according to the governor.

Only 34% of households on the island have potable water after rivers grew and heavy rainfall impacted the system — meaning more than 834,000 people are without drinking water, the governor said Monday.

More than 1,000 people have been rescued by authorities, including a woman rescued Sunday who was stuck in a tree for seven hours after trying to look at the damage, officials said.

Heavy rainfall causes flooding across the island

Fiona strengthened to a hurricane from a tropical storm Sunday morning. The National Hurricane Center said Fiona made landfall in southwestern Puerto Rico on Sunday at 3:20 p.m. ET, dumping torrential rain on much of the island.

Some regions measured up to 25 inches of rain by 8 a.m. Monday.

A flash flood emergency was issued due to many rivers rising very quickly out of their banks. The Rio Grande de Arecido river rose 13 feet in one hour.

A bridge near Utuado, a town in the central mountainous region of the island, has collapsed, cutting off the communities of Salto Arriba and Guaonico, local newspaper El Vocero de Puerto Rico reported.

The portion of the bridge that collapsed is on Highway 123, a branch of Highway 10, which serves as a link between both roads and is one of the accesses to the University of Puerto Rico at Utuado campus, according to El Vocero.

The bridge, installed by the National Guard following Hurricane Maria, cost about $3 million to construct, the newspaper reported.

The rain saturated areas in the southeastern part of Puerto Rico, along with the mountainous areas, where potential mudslides could cause the most damage.

Prior to landfall, Pierluisi said Puerto Rico was prepared as it could be, with enough resources and manpower in place to respond — adding that the island learned its lessons from the devastating effects of Hurricane Maria in September 2017.

“We’re much in a much better position than we were five years ago,” he said.

Where Fiona heads next

After passing through the Caribbean, the storm system will head northward, passing just east of Turks and Caicos before tracking near Bermuda, forecasts show. The storm system will continue to gradually strengthen in the coming days as it moves north and then northeast this week.

The Dominican Republic is expected to receive up to 10 inches and some regions in Turks and Caicos are expected to see 8 inches of rain.

On Tuesday, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic will continue to see gradually improving conditions, however, lingering showers and thunderstorms will still be likely, potentially impacting initial cleanup and recovery efforts.

Winds could be as high as 125 mph as the storm passes near Bermuda, bringing strong winds, heavy rain and storm surge. The latest model shows Bermuda will not see a direct hit, with the worst of the storm passing just west of the island.

While it won’t make landfall in the U.S., the hurricane will affect the entire East Coast with huge waves, rip currents and coastal flooding from Florida to Maine as it moves northward.

President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico on Sunday, which allows federal agencies to coordinate all relief efforts.

Biden’s decision has the “purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, and to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in all 78 municipalities in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,” the White House said in a statement.

FEMA Administrator Deanna Criswell arrived in Puerto Rico on Tuesday to coordinate the emergency response, the White House said. “Hundreds” of federal responders are already on the island, including members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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(NEW YORK) — When terrible things happen, like the kidnapping and murder of Memphis, Tennessee teacher Eliza Fletcher, many wonder what could have been done to prevent it.

A young woman who said she was sexually assaulted by the same suspect in the murder of Fletcher said police did not do enough for her case — and failed Fletcher.

“I’m angry. Not a day goes by that I didn’t think about this,” said Alicia Franklin.

Franklin, 22, spoke to ABC News’ Good Morning America in her first television interview.

Franklin was allegedly assaulted by suspect Cleotha Abston Henderson a year before Fletcher went missing, but the DNA results from her rape kit were not reported until after Fletcher disappeared.

“They had more than enough evidence that night when they interviewed me to get him off the streets. But they didn’t,” Franklin told ABC’s Erielle Reshef.

Henderson only appeared in court last week for charges related to Franklin’s incident, including especially aggravated kidnapping, aggravated rape and illegal possession of a firearm after results from the submitted 2021 rape kit linked him to Franklin’s case. He pleaded not guilty.

Franklin and her lawyers contend that if Franklin’s rape kit had been processed sooner, authorities would’ve been able to identify Henderson and get him off the streets.

“I didn’t want to believe it because I just never thought that my case would have [been] tied to [Fletcher’s] case. I was shocked,” she said. “I’m still kind of trying to process everything.”

In Sept. 2021, Franklin said she met a man who went by “Cleo” on an online dating site and the two texted and talked on the phone for weeks before finally planning to meet in-person for a dinner date.

She said she agreed to pick him up from what he claimed was his apartment, which she says turned out to be abandoned.

“When we walked in the house, he put a gun to my neck,” said Franklin, who said he brought her to a White Dodge Charger behind the apartment. “He forced me in the car, he raped me.”

At the time, Franklin says she was four months pregnant.

“I told him I was pregnant. He didn’t care,” she said.

Afterwards, Franklin said he brought her back into the vacant apartment at gunpoint before he left in a car and Franklin escaped.

She said the next thing she did was drive herself to the hospital, then to a Rape Crisis Center, where she was given a rape kit and interviewed by sex crimes detective. She said, on the night of her attack, she gave authorities the man’s phone number, walked them through the crime scene, described his car, his dating profile and all the details of the assault.

Franklin said she was told at the time that there was “not enough evidence” to charge the man for rape. Over the next year, she said she kept pressing authorities for answers, but felt she was given the “runaround.”

GMA reached out to the Memphis Police Department for comment, but did not receive a response. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) said they were unable to answer specific questions about Franklin’s case, but offered a statement.

“TBI’s role in forensic processing of evidence and providing the results of that analysis is to support law enforcement investigations,” the TBI said in part of a statement. “We do not make decisions on how the information we provide is utilized. That decision is solely made by the investigative agency, usually in consultation with the prosecuting attorney.”

Franklin is now suing the city of Memphis and the apartment complex where she says the attack happened.

Earlier this month, Henderson was charged with especially aggravated kidnapping and tampering with evidence in connection to Fletcher’s disappearance. Henderson has yet to enter a plea to the charges stemming from Fletcher’s homicide.

After Fletcher’s body was found near a vacant duplex, Henderson was also charged with first-degree murder, premeditated murder and first-degree perpetration of kidnapping.

Fletcher, a married mother of two, was last seen jogging near the University of Memphis campus early in the morning, when she was approached by a man and forced into a dark-colored GMC Terrain, which was caught on surveillance video.

If her case had been processed sooner, Franklin claims that Fletcher’s death could have been prevented.

“I definitely believe she would have still been alive today,” she said.

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(JACKSON, Miss.) — When Jackson, Mississippi, residents lost access to clean water late last month, federal, state and local officials scrambled to fix an infrastructure problem deeper than just money could solve.

In August, historic flooding in Mississippi damaged a major pump at the O.B. Curtis Water Plant, the main water treatment facility in Jackson, which left around 150,000 of the city’s mostly Black residents without drinkable water.

Residents were forced to line up on streets and highways throughout the city to pick up water at distribution sites because of the shortage.

The most recent water crisis highlighted residents’ yearslong plight with the city’s ongoing water issues, and raised questions about how the city came to be in this situation and what the long-term plans are to fix the issue.

How did Jackson get here

While water pressure did return to Jackson about a week after the shortage, the city’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, at a press conference earlier this month, attributed the crisis to staffing shortages, system issues and multiple equipment failures.

“This is due to decades, decades and decades, of possibly 30 years or more of deferred maintenance, a lack of capital improvements made to the system, a lack of a human capital, a workforce plan that accounted for the challenges that our water treatment facility suffers from,” Lumumba told “ABC News Prime” last month.

Over the last 40 years, Jackson’s population has shrunk as more of the city’s white residents left and moved to the suburbs, a practice known as “white flight,” resulting in not as many taxes coming into the city, policy experts told ABC News.

“Infrastructure is crumbling in a lot of different places, not just Black places,” Andre M. Perry, Ph.D., a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, a policy arm of the Brookings Institution, told ABC News. “However, in Jackson, there was a direct link to a loss of revenue to white and middle-class flight, which were facilitated by investments in the ’60s and ’70s that led to the building up of the suburbs.”

Black people make up 82.5% of Jackson’s population, while white people make up 16.2%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The most recent census data also showed that Jackson’s population went from slightly more than 173,000 people in 2010 to around 149,000 people as of July 2021.

That “white flight” cost the city of Jackson the opportunity to build its infrastructure, according to Perry.

“In its highest form, infrastructure lays the foundation for economic and community development across regions,” he said.

Here are the issues experts and officials say Jackson needs to address to move forward and tackle its water crisis:

Show me the money

Mississippi is one of the most dependent states on the federal government, currently ranking third in federal funding, behind West Virginia and New Mexico, according to a 2022 study from financial tech company SmartAsset.

For every $1 it pays in income tax, the state receives $2.53 in federal funding, according to SmartAsset.

Government officials have discussed how much it will cost to fix Jackson’s water issue, and the figures have varied.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Eagan met with Lumumba and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves earlier this month to discuss the water crisis and said the state has already received millions of dollars to solve the water issue.

Mississippi is set to receive more than $26 million in State Revolving Funds (SRF) this year, which is on top of the $30 million it received in 2021 for Jackson, Eagan said during a Sept. 7 press conference. Around $13 million is currently being spent, he said.

The state funds help public water systems bankroll the costs of infrastructure projects needed to reach or maintain compliance set under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

In December, the EPA announced that Mississippi would get nearly $75 million for water infrastructure projects, as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021; in the next five years, Mississippi is expected to receive $400 million through the law, Eagan said.

Lumumba estimated it would cost at least $1 billion to fix the water distribution system and billions more to resolve the issue altogether.

During a Sept. 7 press conference, Reeves said that one of the solutions is to fix the water billing system so that people who get water are being billed for it.

City residents have long complained about a malfunctioning water meter system, preventing them from receiving their bills, according to Jackson ABC affiliate WAPT-TV.

“Within that funding structure and the rate structure, we have to make sure we have adequate dollars in there so as to fund routine maintenance on a regular basis. Those are areas that have been a challenge in the immediate past,” Reeves said.

How Jackson’s water system works

The city of Jackson runs its own water, making it harder to fix the system because not enough taxes are being collected due to shifting demographics, according to Perry, who believes there is a shared responsibility to fix the issue.

“We need a regional approach to managing water, in which taxes for infrastructures are collected on a regional level and dispersed equitably based on need,” he said.

Jackson’s water system only serves the city’s residents, which is detrimental to Jacksonians, according to experts.

“If [we] drink from the same water source, even if [we] don’t like one another, we’re sort of handcuffed, whether we like each other or not, we’re drinking from the same water, so we both have an interest in making sure that it’s good,” Manny Teodoro, an associate professor at the LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News.

No easy solution

Jackson City Councilman Aaron Banks told ABC News that there needs to be an in-depth analysis of all the conditions and system components impacting Jackson’s water system, as well as policy in addressing how much it would cost.

“I think all options are on the table when it comes to oversight,” Banks said. “We as the council need to know what it costs so we can begin working with our partners to invest money, whether federally or state, and begin prioritizing our budget.”

However, throwing money at the problem isn’t going to immediately solve Jackson’s long-stemming water issues, which are more systemic and structural, Teodoro said.

​​”The disaster is a legacy of racial hatred, but also the work of leaders who found it politically expedient to ignore the city’s water problems for decades instead of solving them,” Teodoro wrote in a blog post on his website.

This week, Jackson residents filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the city; past and current city officials, including Lumumba and former mayor Tony Yarber, and infrastructure engineering companies for their purported roles in the water crisis. Spokespersons for Lumumba, Powell, Miller, and Siemens declined to comment when reached by ABC News. Yarber, Smash, and Trilogy Engineering did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.

Some suggestions in handling Jackson’s water issues include the state creating a regional water authority to operate the system, creation of a state commission to take control of the system and privatizing the city’s system, according to Teodoro.

“Even if somebody could wave a magic wand and Congress, by some miracle, were to pass a bill that would give Jackson $1 billion to completely overhaul its infrastructure for water and sewer, we’d be right back in this situation five, 10, 20 years down the road because we haven’t fixed those underlying structural problems,” Teodoro said.

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(HOUSTON) — A toddler was found dead inside a car that was stolen after the child’s father was shot and killed in Houston on Tuesday, police said.

“We are asking for a lot of things from the public right now,” Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite told reporters during a press conference Tuesday night. “First and foremost, to pray for this family. A mother lost her husband and she lost her 2-year-old child today. We are also asking the public’s help in identifying the suspect. He is still at large.”

The Houston Police Department received a 911 call about a shooting in the area of El Camino Rey Del Rey Street and Chimney Rock Road at around 1:46 p.m. local time on Tuesday. Upon arrival, officers found a 38-year-old man who had been shot to death, according to Satterwhite.

Investigators believe the victim was meeting with another man at the location when possibly an argument ensued. The other man took out a gun and shot the victim multiple times before stealing his black SUV and fleeing the scene, Satterwhite said.

That evening, at approximately 6:36 p.m. local time, a woman called 911 to report her husband and 2-year-old son missing. The information she provided was specific enough that police soon realized the shooting victim was her husband, according to Satterwhite.

“We never knew about the child until she called,” he told reporters.

The stolen SUV with the little boy inside was found on Elm Street, more than 10 miles away from the shooting scene. Officers shattered the windows of the locked vehicle to get to the child, then immediately tried to render aid and called for an ambulance, according to Satterwhite.

“Sadly, it was too late. The chid had passed in the car,” he said. “At this time, we don’t know why or how or what the cause of death will be. It could be something like heat exhaustion, we just don’t know. That will be determined later through autopsy.”

Investigators believe the suspect had left the car there, locked up and turned off, with the child in the backseat, according to Satterwhite.

“It’s the hardest thing we do,” he told reporters. “Children are innocent.”

The unidentified suspect, who remains on the loose, is described as a Black man wearing a white t-shirt, black shorts and a black Oakland Raiders cap.

When asked if he had a message for the suspect, Satterwhite said: “Turn yourself in. Turn yourself in now.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The Washington Monument has been temporarily closed after a man vandalized the national landmark with profanities and red paint.

The incident occurred on Tuesday evening when the unnamed male suspect splashed the base of the historical monument with red paint and wrote an obscene message across the side of the structure.

“The United States Park Police has an adult male in custody for vandalizing the base of the Washington Monument with paint,” the United States Park Police said in a statement obtained by ABC News. “The area at the base of the monument will be temporarily closed.”

It is currently unclear what the motivation behind the vandalism was or if the message scrawled on the base of the monument was targeting anybody specific.

“National Park Service conservators will work on the restoration process,” said the United States Park Police.

Authorities did not say how long the restoration process would take or how long the tourist attraction is expected to be closed to the public.

The investigation is currently ongoing and authorities will not be releasing any more information at this time.

The Washington Monument, completed in 1884, stands at 555 feet tall and was once the tallest structure in the world from 1884 to 1889 before it was overtaken in height by the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The historical obelisk is named after the first president of the United States and attracts over 600,000 visitors a year.

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(JACKSON, Miss.) — As Jackson, Mississippi, continues efforts to recover from the city’s water crisis this summer, residents have filed a class action lawsuit against former and current city officials, as well as infrastructure engineering companies, for their alleged role in neglecting or worsening a “foreseeable” public health crisis, according to the filed complaint.

Raine Becker, one of four named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told ABC News she was unaware of the ongoing water issues in Jackson when she moved there two years ago. Becker says her first experience with these problems came in 2021 when winter storms left her without water for two weeks.

After a failing water treatment plant led to low water pressure and the contamination of Jackson’s water supply last month, Becker says she was left wondering how she would pay her bills and care for her seven-year-old son Shylar, who is terminally ill.

“I pick up people’s laundry…bring it to my house, wash it, dry it, fold it, and bring it back. Two days without water meant two days without a paycheck,” she said. “So now I’m being hit professionally and personally.”

Becker told ABC News that Shylar, who she says was born with a heart defect and developed terminal liver disease, has a feeding tube that requires sanitary water to flush it. Using contaminated water could have fatal consequences, she says.

“I​​f I had been flushing with the water we were given through the tap, we might be in a whole different predicament right now. Like that would hospitalize him, potentially kill him,” she said. “It’s important and imperative that we have clean, safe water. I mean for everybody, not just because I have a sick child. This is a human right.”

Becker said that while she does not want to minimize the impact of officials’ efforts to mitigate the crisis, including offering state-run water distribution sites, residents should not have to rely on them.

“I feel like they were reactive instead of proactive,” she said. “And the second they knew there was a problem–the second they knew there was an issue whether it was with the plant or the pipes, they should have looked into fixing it then and they didn’t and they failed to protect us.”

Mississippi ended its boil water notice for all of Jackson’s residents on Sept. 15, nearly two weeks after water pressure returned to the state capital’s residents after days of a water shortage crisis that impacted thousands of Jacksonians.

The complaint names the City of Jackson; Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba; former mayor Tony Yarber; former public works directors Kishia Powell, Robert Miller and Jerriot Smash; Siemens Corporation, Siemens Industry and Trilogy Engineering Services as defendants.

Spokespersons for Lumumba, Powell, Miller, and Siemens declined to comment when reached by ABC News.

Yarber, Smash, and Trilogy Engineering did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.

Lumumba spoke with “ABC News Prime” last month about the roots of this water crisis, which he said has been unfolding over several years.

“This is due to decades, decades and decades, of possibly 30 years or more of deferred maintenance, a lack of capital improvements made to the system, a lack of a human capital, a workforce plan that accounted for the challenges that our water treatment facility suffers from,” Lumumba said.

Mark Chalos, a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, is one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He told ABC News that the water system’s failure last month “is not a surprise and shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone in connection with running the Jackson water system.”

Plaintiffs are seeking damages and relief including regular water testing, removal of contaminated pipes, cancellation of bills and debts for contaminated or undelivered water and community health centers for those affected by contaminated water, according to the complaint.

Chalos says he and his clients ultimately hope that the lawsuit pushes officials to resolve the water system’s issues entirely and immediately.

Becker says she hopes officials have a structured plan to prevent this from happening again.

“I have faith and I believe that hopefully they will actually fix this,” Becker said. “I hope nobody else ever has to go through this. This has been horrible. It’s been costly. It’s had a lot of bad effects. And so I hope that they can learn from this and grow from this.”

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(NEW YORK) — A Kentucky man currently serving a life sentence for a deadly 1997 school shooting said he feels responsible for school shootings that have happened in the U.S.

On Dec. 1, 1997, then-14-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on a prayer group at Heath High School near Paducah, Kentucky, killing three of his fellow students and injuring another five. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

With 24 years and nine months of his sentence served, Carneal, now 39, is seeking parole in what’s one of the first known instances of a school shooter facing the possibility of leaving prison.

After hearing testimony from Carneal and several victims this week, the two members of the Kentucky parole board were unable to make a unanimous decision on his parole, sending the decision to the full board next week.

During his parole hearing on Tuesday, Carneal, who spoke via Zoom from Kentucky State Reformatory, apologized for his actions and said since his incarceration he has received multiple mental health diagnoses, for which he takes medication.

Carneal said some of the symptoms of his illness include hearing voices, which often encourage him to behave violently. He recounted that he was hearing such voices before the shooting. Asked during the hearing if he still hears those voices, he said “Yes.” He said they told him to throw himself down the stairs as recently as two days ago, though he said he believes he now has his actions under control.

The decades since the Paducah incident have seen the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, including in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this year.

When asked about the school shootings that have followed, Carneal said, “I feel responsible for them on some level,” in particular the 1999 shooting at Columbine that killed 12 students and a teacher. He said he felt suicidal after learning about Columbine and had to be hospitalized.

At one point, the parole board members asked Carneal to name his eight victims. He said he considered one of them — 14-year-old Nicole Hadley, whom he killed — a “very good friend.”

“How does that make you feel, that you took the life or injured those eight?” Kentucky Parole Board chairperson Ladeidra Jones asked.

“It makes me feel terrible that I hurt anybody, my friends or not my friends,” he responded.

In testimony from Carneal’s victims and their families during a hearing on Monday, most encouraged the parole board to deny Carneal’s request for parole, saying his actions have caused permanent harm and he was still too much of a risk for the public.

Missy Jenkins Smith, who was paralyzed by one of the bullets Carneal fired, said keeping Carneal in prison for life “is the only way his victims can feel comfortable and safe.” She also spoke about the impact of the injuries she suffered in the shooting.

“I have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after living the consequence of Michael Carneal’s decision, to not be able to walk,” Smith said. “I’m forced to continue with every day getting harder and harder as the years pass during my life sentence. The future, and the fear of it, haunts me.”

But at least one victim, Hollan Holm, said Carneal was an adult being held responsible for the actions of a child, and that having spent two-thirds of his life in prison, deserves a chance to do some good in the community.

The parole board members noted Carneal’s attorney and family had submitted plans of action should his parole be granted, but Carneal did not submit one on his own behalf. Both parole board members appeared skeptical that he had fully thought about his plans to successfully reintegrate into society.

After hearing testimony from Carneal and several victims, the two members of the Kentucky parole board were unable to make a unanimous decision on whether to release him in November or defer his next opportunity for parole for up to five years.

The full board is scheduled to meet on Monday to decide whether Carneal should be released, serve out his full sentence or have another chance to seek parole at a later date for up to 10 years.

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(MARTHA’S VINYARD, MA) — A Texas sheriff said Monday he was opening a criminal investigation into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ migrant flight to Martha’s Vineyard as the stunt continues to draw criticism from Democrats and even some Republicans and DeSantis defends what he calls a protest of border policies.

Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar announced the probe on Monday night, saying that his office believes the migrants who were shuttled to the Massachusetts island on Sept. 14 were lured under false pretenses, which DeSantis denies.

“What infuriates me the most about this case is that here we have 48 people that are already on hard times, right?” Salazar said at a press conference. “They are here legally, in our country. At that point, they have every right to be where they are. And I believe that they were preyed upon.”

Immigration attorneys working with some of the asylum-seekers told ABC News that the migrants were given misleading information, including brochures, about benefits they could receive in Massachusetts.

The governor defended the migrant drop-off as a protest of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies as border encounters remain at a record high. DeSantis has repeatedly insisted the migrants volunteered to be taken to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas.

“Why wouldn’t they want to go, given where they were?” he said during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Monday night. “They were in really, really bad shape.”

What potential violations are being investigated?

Salazar said Monday that his office believes a Venezuelan migrant was paid a “bird-dog fee” to lure roughly 50 migrants to be taken to Martha’s Vineyard, where they would be promised work and a better life.

“There’s a high possibility that the laws were broken here in the state of Texas in Bexar County,” Salazar said.

But he declined to reveal any specific statutes he thinks may have been violated at the federal, state or local level.

He also didn’t identify any suspects.

“We do have the names of some suspects involved that we believe are persons of interest in this case at this point, but I won’t be parting with those names,” he said. “To be fair, I think everybody on this call knows who those names are already but suffice it to say we will be opening this case.”

“We’re going to discover what extent the law can hold these people accountable,” he added.

Attorneys say DeSantis brochures were misleading

Lawyers representing the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard told ABC News that the information given to them before the journey was misleading because the migrants aren’t technically refugees. These people are seeking asylum but have not yet attained that status, the attorneys said.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country since 2014, hoping to escape political turmoil and economic strife. U.S. relations are strained with the country – which has for years been under punishing U.S. sanctions levied in opposition to the country’s president — and Venezuelans are typically exempt from being quickly expelled under Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to quickly expel migrants because of the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ivan Espinoza-Marigal, a leading lawyer representing many of the migrants, told ABC that most of the migrants’ current status is under humanitarian parole and therefore they are not eligible for the benefits described in the pamphlet they received.

“Only people who have already been granted refugee status are eligible,” American Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told ABC News. “Asylum seekers do not receive any federal assistance and cannot receive work authorization until at least six months after applying for asylum.”

DeSantis has pointed to the brochures given out by a vendor working with the state of Florida to transport the migrants as proof they weren’t duped about where they were going or what would be available to them once they arrived.

“They all signed consent forms to go,” he told Hannity. “And then the vendor that is doing this for Florida provided them with a packet that had a map of Martha’s Vineyard, it had the numbers for different services on Martha’s Vineyard and then it had numbers for the overall agencies in Massachusetts that handles immigration and refugees.”

Rachel Self, an immigration attorney helping migrants who arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, said the map on the brochures was “cartoonishly simple” and contained information on how migrants could change their address with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) when they relocated.

“This is especially troubling as anyone with even the most basic understanding of the immigration proceedings knows that USCIS was not the agency with whom the migrants would have to record their addresses and has nothing to do with their cases in any way,” Self said.

Typically, migrants granted humanitarian parole and looking to file an asylum claim have mandatory court hearings scheduled in locations where they have said they have family or at courts closest to where they were processed by immigration authorities. That means that migrants who went unknowingly or under false pretenses to Martha’s Vineyard are at risk of missing those court dates, which may result in them being fast-tracked for deportation.

“The brochure is full of lies for this particular group of people. Material misrepresentations made in furtherance of the unlawful scheme,” Self, one of the attorneys, told ABC News.

What DeSantis’ team is saying

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ communications director, responded to the investigation by the Bexar Sheriff’s Office in a social media post on Monday.

“Immigrants are more than willing to leave Bexar County after being enticed to cross the border and ‘to fend for themselves.’ [Florida] provided an opportunity in a sanctuary state [with] resources, as expected – unlike the 53 who died in an abandoned truck in Bexar County in June,” Fenske wrote on Twitter.

DeSantis during his appearance on Hannity called the accusations that migrants were deceived “nonsense.”

He has promised additional operations to send migrants to so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions,” saying last week that he intends to use $12 million from the state’s relocation program for more transports.

“Those migrants were being treated horribly by Biden. They were hungry, homeless, they had no opportunity at all. The state of Florida — it was volunteer — offered transport to sanctuary jurisdictions,” DeSantis said at a press conference on Tuesday as he doubled down on his comments made to Hannity.

Lawmakers weigh in

Members of congressional leadership on Tuesday waded into the ongoing discourse surrounding DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s moves last week to ship undocumented migrants to various cities across the U.S.

House Democratic Caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries lambasted both men during a Tuesday press conference at the Capitol, noting that the two GOP governors needed to “stop behaving like human traffickers.”

“They are putting politics over people in the most egregious way possible,” Jeffries said.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed support for the Republicans’ actions, saying he “thought it was a good idea” to send undocumented immigrants to blue states.

Though not by name, McConnell defended DeSantis and Abbott by saying on the Senate floor that they were merely giving Biden and the Democrats “a tiny, tiny taste” of what border state governors have been grappling with for years.

White House Press press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back on the idea that the GOP governors are implicating non-border states in sharing the burden of caring for migrants who come to the U.S.

“So the way that we see it is alerting Fox News and not city or state officials about a plan to abandon children fleeing communism on the side of the street is not burden sharing,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing. “That is not the definition that we see of burden sharing. It is a cruel, premeditated political stunt.”

 

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(NEW YORK) — Author George M. Johnson has found himself at the center of a culture war over what kids can read.

Johnson’s memoir, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” which chronicles his experience growing up as a Black queer man, is the second most banned book in the U.S. and has been taken off the shelves in at least 29 school districts across the country, according to a Pen America report released Monday. The schools have cited the sexually explicit content, including descriptions of queer sex and sexual trauma, as reason for removing the collection of essays from bookshelves.

“It’s been bittersweet to see our stories be attacked in this way, but it is also amplifying many of our stories and I’m able to get the book out to the teen readers who really need it the most,” Johnson told ABC News Live in an interview that aired Tuesday.

“If there’s anything I’m thankful for, it’s that it’s actually getting to the hands of the people who need to read it to heal from it.”

Johnson is this year’s honorary chair of the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” celebration – an annual event that launched in 1982 – that has gained increased attention over the past two years as droves of books are being challenged and taken off the shelves in public schools and libraries across the country.

“Banned Books Week is much about providing space and opportunity for local libraries to talk about censorship and to highlight the importance of celebrating the freedom to read,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told ABC News.

PEN America, a nonprofit advocacy organization working to advance freedom of expression through literature, documents the “rapid acceleration of book censorship nationwide” in its latest report and finds that nearly 140 school districts in 32 states issued more than 2,500 book bans during the 2021-22 school year.

According to the report, the vast majority of the challenged books are written by authors of color and center on stories about people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. Meanwhile, states like Texas and Florida are leading the way, with 801 bans in 22 districts and 566 bans in 21 districts, respectively.

Following the release of the PEN America report, LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD said that “banning books is just one arm of a larger, organized campaign to target and harass LGBTQ youth nationwide.”

“Everyone deserves to see themselves represented in books and other forms of media, and the targeting of LGBTQ youth through book bans and other anti-LGBTQ school policies must end,” GLAAD told ABC News in a statement.

Republican Texas state representative Matt Krause, a leading voice on this issue, told ABC News that for him this is not about banning books.

“Being a father, I want to make sure that there are age-appropriate materials in our schools,” Krause said.

Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, two former school board members in Florida, told ABC News that as they observed their children’s experience with virtual schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, they became concerned over some of the content their kids were being exposed to.

They co-founded Moms for Liberty in 2021 — a grassroots nonprofit that grew “organically” among like-minded parents and now has hundreds of chapters in 40 states across the country, Descovich said.

The group, which fought against mask mandates in schools, is also on the frontlines of demanding that parents have more control over what their children read in school.

“When you’re talking about what’s age appropriate for children, parents need to be a part of that conversation,” Justice said.

Summer Lopez, PEN America’s chief program officer of Free Expression Programs, told ABC News that by targeting so-called “sexually explicit” content, conservative politicians and parent advocacy groups have targeted LGBTQ+ content without taking the entire work into context.

“None of this is to say that parents don’t have a role to play in their children’s education – of course they do,” Lopez said.

“The problem is when you decide that your concerns about your own child should apply to everybody else’s children,” she added.

Johnson said that when he was growing up, he did not see himself represented in books and hopes that works like “All Boys Aren’t Blue” can help children and young adults find validation and support. “It’s extremely important that our curriculum starts to mirror what our actual school systems look like,” Johnson said.

“Everyone should be allowed to be seen and represented in the books that they read in a way that I wasn’t when I was a teenager,” he added.

Lopez said that the growing national and political movement to restrict what kids can read has a “chilling effect” where fear of controversy or being targeted leads to self-censorship.

“The most nefarious restrictions on freedom of speech are the ones that the government doesn’t have to make, that we make for ourselves because of the environment that we’re living in,” Lopez said.

“In order to be a vibrant democracy, we have to make sure that people feel they can say things that might be radical.”

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(CHICAGO) — At least six people were injured in an explosion at a residential building in Chicago on Tuesday, authorities said.

Of those injured, three are in serious to critical condition, the Chicago Fire Department said.

The “mass casualty” incident occurred at Central and West End avenues.

“This is a confirmed explosion but source of explosion not known,” the fire department said.

pic.twitter.com/IKAkwhJICS

— Chicago Fire Media (@CFDMedia) September 20, 2022

Four men and three women were taken to hospitals, officials said. Their ages were not immediately clear.

A building adjacent to the site of the explosion was being evacuated, fire officials said.

Video from the scene showed debris strewn across the sidewalk, street and several cars. Windows were blown out of the building, which had extensive damage to its top floor.

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

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