(NEW YORK) — A 17-year-old girl has been charged with murder in the overdose deaths of two of her classmates, authorities said Thursday.
Two teenage girls were found dead Tuesday at Fayette Ware Comprehensive High School in Somerville, Tennessee, after overdosing on fentanyl. A third teenager was transported to the hospital in critical condition. One of the girls was 16 years old and the two others were 17 years old, according to the school district.
District Attorney Mark Davidson told ABC News the surviving girl was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of possession of a controlled substance.
All three girls were juniors at the high school, which held its graduation ceremony just hours after the overdoses.
The school held a balloon release vigil for the students in the school’s parking on Thursday. The school also made counselors and religious leaders from across the district available to the community through next week.
“We want to send our thoughts and prayers to the families of the young ladies who lost their lives. A common thread throughout our district is family. This situation has rocked our family,” Versie Hamlett, Fayette County Public Schools’ superintendent, said in a letter to the community.
Murder charges for someone involved in overdose deaths are “unusual,” Davidson said.
“I’ve never seen it; not in a situation of this gravity,” he added, saying his office has charged adults for providing deadly drugs but never a juvenile.
The girl, who has not been named by officials, will appear in juvenile court June 7 for a status hearing.
(NEW YORK) — A middle school teacher in Illinois says she was forced to resign from her job after parents called the police on her for including the book This Book is Gay in a slate of books made available to students during a reading activity.
Sarah Bonner, who has been a teacher for roughly 20 years, says she is just one of many teachers facing pressure from certain parents to shun LGBTQ identities from classrooms.
“I think the day that we give up on public education is a very sad day,” she said. “I feel like this particular incident has empowered me to do more.”
She told ABC News that she and her students had Reading Mondays, when they celebrate independent reading and the love of reading.
Students get to share and swap ideas about what they love to read and what they’re reading, she said.
In March, Bonner said she held a “book tasting,” so students can see what books are out there and available to read. She teaches in a rural setting, and said “sometimes access to books can get shaky.”
She said she went to a local library to gather almost 100 titles based on the interests her students had expressed and on the recommendation of several young adult literature lists.
“I thought about my student interests and the questions that they had been asking around some of the research things that we’d been working on in class, and I developed a whole entire list of young adult reads at the library that day,” Bonner said.
However, several parents filed a report to local police over that one book, claiming Bonner was “grooming” students with the book. Opponents of the book criticized the book’s reference to sexual activities. This Book Is Gay is one of the top targeted books, according to the American Library Association.
ABC News confirmed with police that the information was recorded by them, and a fact finding investigation was to be pursued. Bonner was to then be placed on leave with pay by school officials, according to the police report.
The report states that the police were “not aware of any student that had actually been affected by the book being in the classroom” except for one student who was instructed to take pictures by their parent. None of the parents wanted to pursue this criminally by the end of the police investigation, the report states.
When Bonner spoke with her husband regarding the report, “we both looked at each other and just said I had to resign, there was no way I was going to be able to go back and be the teacher that I want to be or could be with my students having this now be put in place.”
Although she believes the police report would not have gone anywhere, she said she worked with administrators to draw up settlement agreements for her resignation following the accusation.
As a teacher, Bonner said she has fought to include a diverse set of reading materials so students who grew up in her predominantly white, rural town can learn about different perspectives and experiences.
“I did that through literature. I did that through bringing in books that not only the students can see themselves in, but also to see others as outdoor windows into spaces that they had never seen before,” Bonner said.
She urges parents with concerns to reach out to teachers: “Dialogue between parents and teachers are so key because we both want the best for your children,” she said.
Bonner, who won an award from the National Council of Teachers of English for “Outstanding Middle Level Educator” in 2018, said she fears for the state of public education amid attacks on different identities.
“The importance of representation — it’s needed now more than ever,” Bonner said. “We need more inclusivity, we need more access, and the books, literatures, texts — they are so key to supporting our students’ ability to read the world.”
Jamie Gregory, a librarian in South Carolina, has been facing similar backlash for tweeting about her teen child’s defense of a highly-banned book called “Gender Queer,” and his opposition of its removal from local schools.
The book has been criticized for its depiction of nudity and sexual references.
Book ban efforts have risen dramatically across the U.S., with a record-breaking 1,269 demands made to censor library books and resources in 2022 alone, according to the American Library Association.
These efforts primarily target books written by or about people of color or who are LGBTQ, according to the ALA. Librarians and teachers continue to face immense pressure from political groups about what they can and cannot talk about — with laws across the country restricting content about race, gender identity, sexual orientation and more in schools.
“You certainly have the right as a parent to tell your child what they can and cannot read, but explain to them how that doesn’t mean, though, that you actually remove the materials so that no one else can access it,” Gregory added.
Once Gregory’s tweet was spread online by conservative extremists, she told ABC News she began receiving threatening messages and had her personal information shared online.
“It’s not just political rhetoric. I’m a real person. And this has really happened to me. In my life,” Gregory said she told a representative from a conservative group backing book bans. “You’re saying things that are not true, and making people paranoid and making people angry. You’re accusing people like me of felonies.”
Gregory and Bonner say their experiences represent a growing hostility towards public education and its inclusion of marginalized identities. The increased scrutiny has come amid growing fears of teacher shortages, and empty positions plaguing school districts nationwide.
Shelly Fitzgerald, who was fired from her teaching job at a Christian school in 2018 for being a lesbian, believes her firing was a sign of what was to come, and what people are experiencing now.
She believes laws that restrict content in classrooms in Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere are designed to “stop teaching empathy,” “support” and “history.” She fears how laws restricting discussion on gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom will impact her daughter, who has two mothers and could be restricted from talking about her home and family life.
Bonner, who now teaches pre-service middle school teachers, urges her students to prepare for a fight ahead.
“The more we ban, the more we erase,” Bonner said. “My heart just aches for the LGBTQ students in my classroom that have questions.”
(NEW YORK) — A small earthquake shook buildings across the New York metropolitan area Friday morning.
A 2.2 magnitude impacted the New York metropolitan area around 1:50 a.m., according to the United States Geological Service.
The tremor struck south of Hastings-on-Hudson, a village in Westchester County about 10 miles north of New York City. There were no initial reports of damage or injuries from the seismic activity.
Residents in New York and New Jersey described the quake’s impact as dramatic and noticeable, though it did not cause any damage.
Yonkers, NY, resident Sophia Balaj told ABC News that the quake produced a loud rumble for a few seconds, noticeable enough to prompt all the members of the video call she was on to ask each other if they felt the same shaking.
Englewood, NJ, resident Erica Diggs, a military veteran who completed two deployments to Iraq, compared the feeling of the earthquake to a mortar.
“What it felt like was a mortar, and what it sounded like was a mortar.” She later added the quake “gave me flashbacks of being in my trailer when I was in Iraq and the mortars would hit that close.”
White Plains, NY, resident Allison Solin added that her unfamiliarity with earthquakes as a New Yorker led to some panic about the source of the shaking that impacted her home.
“I was like, ‘That’s not wind,’” she told ABC News. “And then I thought, oh my god, is there a bomb explosion nearby?”
Like Solin, many residents near New York City took to social media early Friday morning to ask if others had felt a similar shake.
Earthquakes near New York City are relatively uncommon, though the occasional tremor has impacted the region.
A 5.8 earthquake struck Virginia in 2011, sending noticeable tremors up the eastern seaboard, including New York City. Another 3.9 magnitude earthquake in 2010 off the coast of Southampton caused similar alarm for residents in New York.
The New York earthquake occurred the same evening as a significantly stronger 7.7 magnitude earthquake generated a small tsunami in the Pacific Ocean.
(WORCESTER, Mass.) — The detention hearing for the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard charged in connection with the leaked documents probe is expected to continue Friday.
Jack Teixeira is scheduled to appear in federal court in Worcester, Massachusetts, at 3:30 p.m. ET Friday.
The federal magistrate judge first heard arguments last month over whether Teixeira should be kept in federal custody ahead of his trial. The judge, David Hennessy, said he needed more time to review before making a decision.
Prosecutors have argued that Teixeira is both a flight and national security risk and, if released on bail, they say he could “further disseminate classified information” and “take refuge with a foreign adversary.”
Teixeira’s public defender, meanwhile, has argued that the airman should be permitted to remain out of pretrial detention in the custody of his father or confined to a home with the presence of either his father, mother, stepfather, Air Force personnel or his lawyers. Teixeira’s father testified during the April 27 detention hearing that he was prepared to serve as a third-party custodian pending his son’s release.
Teixeira, a native of Dighton, Massachusetts, has been charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information, as well as willful retention of classified documents, which collectively carry a maximum of 15 years in prison. He has yet to enter a plea.
The FBI-Boston tactical team arrested Teixeira on April 13 and he made an initial appearance in federal court in Boston the following day.
The criminal complaint alleges that Teixeira “improperly and unlawfully retained and transmitted national defense information to people not authorized to receive it.”
The leaked documents apparently contain top-secret information about Russia’s war in Ukraine and other parts of the world. Teixeira allegedly accessed a government document on Feb. 23 and posted it online the following day, according to the complaint. It’s the disclosure of that one document that forms the basis of the initial charges.
Prosecutors allege Teixeira accessed far more classified information than what was posted. They suggested during last month’s detention hearing that given his untrustworthy nature, he would be likely to flee and compared him directly to Edward Snowden.
In a new court filing Wednesday further arguing in support of keeping the defendant behind bars until his trial, prosecutors said Teixeira was twice admonished by his superiors last year over “concerning actions” he took with regard to classified information.
Specifically, Teixeira was told by superiors in September and October “to no longer take notes in any form on classified intelligence information” and to “cease-and-desist on any deep dives into classified intelligence information,” prosecutors wrote in the filing.
Not long after the warnings, Teixeira allegedly admitted online in December that he was “breaking a ton of [unauthorized disclosure] regs” but “Idgaf what they say I can or can’t share,” according to prosecutors’ motion.
Teixeira’s behavior showed “he will be undeterred by any restrictions this court places upon him and will not hesitate to circumvent those restrictions if he deems it in his interest to do so,” prosecutors contended.
Teixeira’s defense team also filed a motion ahead of the hearing in support of his pretrial release. His public attorney, Allen Franco, cited prior cases involving people charged with various offenses related to classified information who were permitted to be conditionally released before their trials.
Franco also argued that the government has offered “no evidence” that his client ever intended for information shared online “to be widely disseminated.”
ABC News’ Luke Barr, Morgan Winsor, Alexander Mallin, Jack Date, Trevor Ault and Christopher Donato contributed to this report.
(MORAINE, Ohio) — A targeted shooting in Ohio left one dead and one injured late Thursday night.
A male suspect engaged in a “targeted attack” at an Ohio engine manufacturing facility Thursday evening around 9 p.m., shooting two victims, one of whom died at the scene of the shooting, according to Moraine Police sergeant and public information officer Andrew Parish.
Parish said that the shooting was targeted at the now-deceased employee, though an additional victim was shot and is being treated at a local hospital for a non-life-threatening injury.
“One male suspect who entered the plant and at this point, it looks like a targeted attack against one male victim who has been pronounced deceased here at the scene,” Parish told reporters late Thursday.
The shooter suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound and is also being treated for his injuries.
Parish added that “at least a couple” injuries resulted from the evacuation and “the ensuing chaos” at the shooting scene.
Dispatchers received calls about the shooting around 9 p.m. Thursday, and Parish noted that officers were able to determine that the active threat was over “within just a few minutes.”
The facility will remain closed overnight, though employees can return to gather their belongings.
Parish declined to provide additional information about the shooting, including the suspected motive and specifics of where the shooting occurred at the large facility.
The facility, operated by GM subsidiary DMAX Ltd. produces turbo-diesel engines for Chevy and GMC trucks.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(SAN FRANCISCO) — The suspect in the murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee pleaded not guilty in a San Francisco court on Thursday.
Nima Momeni, a fellow tech executive, has been accused of killing Lee last month with a kitchen knife after driving him to a secluded area.
The judge ordered Momeni to be held without bail.
Paula Canny, the defense attorney for Momeni, said after the hearing that Lee’s death arose from a mix of self-defense and accidental harm.
“There was no premeditation,” Canny said.
Rejecting that account, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said Momeni intended to kill Lee.
“We believe this was an intentional killing,” Jenkins said. “Mr. Momeni’s DNA is on the handle of that knife.”
Jenkins said that Momeni poses a flight risk because he is a person of means and “anyone that’s capable of violently killing someone is a public safety risk.”
Momeni, 38, appears to be the owner of an Emeryville, California-based company called Expand IT.
Lee, an executive at cryptocurrency firm MobileCoin, was killed in the early morning hours on April 4 in the San Francisco neighborhood of Rincon Hill, the San Francisco Police Department said last month.
During the previous afternoon, Lee spent time with Momeni’s sister and a witness, who identified him or herself as a close friend of Lee, prosecutors said. Prosecutors have not named the witness.
Later in the day, at Lee’s hotel room, he had a conversation with Momeni in which he asked Lee about whether his sister was “doing drugs or anything inappropriate,” the witness told the police, according to the document.
Lee reassured Momeni that nothing inappropriate had taken place, the witness said to police.
Early the following morning, at about 2 a.m., camera footage showed Lee and Momeni leaving Lee’s hotel and getting into Momeni’s car, a BMW Z4, prosecutors said.
Video showed the BMW drive to a secluded and dark area where the two men got out of the car. Momeni “moved toward” Lee and the BMW drove away from the scene at high speed, according to the court document.
Police later found a roughly 4-inch blade at the scene that appeared to have blood on it, the document said.
The doctor who conducted the autopsy found that Lee had been stabbed three times, including one strike that penetrated his heart, the document said.
London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, said in a statement to ABC News last month that Lee’s death marks a “horrible tragedy.”
(LOS ANGELES) — A California reparations task force has voted to approve recommendations on one of the most significant reparations campaigns for African Americans in modern U.S. history. However, some critics have questioned whether the proposed reparations are sufficient to address systemic issues in the Black community.
The task force was established through a bill authored by then-Assemblymember Shirley Weber, currently California’s first African American Secretary of State, according to task force chair Kamilah Moore. The bill was signed into law in September 2020 by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The task force’s next and final meeting will be on June 29 when the report will be released to the California legislator. Its supporters hope the report will be the foundation of a state bill, which could go to the legislature for a vote by the end of 2023 or early 2024.
Task force recommendations
The task force’s report follows the United Nations’ guidelines to remedy victims of international human rights violations, Moore told ABC News.
“The task force hasn’t necessarily endorsed any particular dollar amounts,” Moore said “We just endorsed a methodology that the economists and public policy experts we hired used to calculate the total losses in the areas of health harms, the devaluation of black businesses, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and over policing and unjust property takings.”
According to Moore, the task force proposed that eligible Californians should receive atonement under international law’s five forms of reparations: compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition.
Moore cited reparations for Japanese Americans who endured internment camps during World War II and remedies for Holocaust survivors in Germany as examples used in the task force’s proposal to state legislators.
She said all African Americans in California who can trace back an enslaved or freed ancestor in the United States dating back to the late 19th century would be eligible.
Moore said $1.2 million is the most economists determined a resident could get if they were at the life expectancy mark of 71 years of age, or older, and endured more acute forms of racism for longer periods of time. She said some media outlets have reported misleading news, including claims that the task force is pushing for every Black Californian to receive $1.2 million.
‘Deflects attention away’
According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of African Americans support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.
But at least one prominent critic says reparations do little to address persistent issues faced by the community, such as poverty and gun violence.
Bob Woodson, a Black civil rights activist and founder of the Woodson Center, which aims to reduce crime and violence, said he believes that reparations would serve as a distraction from other issues.
“It really deflects attention away from the critical problems,” Woodson said. “That is the moral and spiritual freefall that is consuming, not just Black Americans – that the highest death rate for our young people is homicide.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading cause of death for Black men under 44 years is homicide, at 26.1% for men ages 20-44 and 35.1% for those 19 and under.
But Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who studies majority-Black communities and has done studies on reparations, says it is dangerous to separate these disturbing statistics from the root cause.
“Wealth is a predictor of many behaviors,” Perry said. “People who are low wealth or have negative wealth, are much more likely to exhibit risky behaviors like violence.”
Woodson said he was concerned about the economic toll the reparations payments would inflict on the state and its residents.
“For us to be taking seriously a discussion about whether or not a state should go bankrupt, almost, paying Blacks for reparations as if that would solve the problem,” Woodson said.
Perry pointed out that states often create emergency funds when necessary and the same could be done for reparations.
Moore offered a suggestion from a state lawmaker to make payments in installments for a set number of years.
She said the economic loss faced by Black Americans in California due to systemic discrimination over the years is staggering. The amount calculated by the task force’s economists is $800 billion, she said.
‘The most important thing’
On the federal level, Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri announced a nationwide reparations bill on Wednesday that calls for $14 trillion to help close the wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans.
“The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people,” Bush said at a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
When asked how the government would pay out the sum of $14 trillion, Bush said she is engaged in talks to find the answer.
“We’re still having those kinds of conversations,” the congresswoman said at the press conference. “We’re working with this administration, we’re talking with other members of Congress… but I’ll say this, if we can continue to fund these endless wars, or we can continue to put trillions of dollars into forever wars… we’re talking about things that are happening now.”
“The most important thing – our descendants,” Andrea Jordan of Sacramento, California, said when describing what she would do with compensation through reparations. “To be able to leave that tangibles for them and otherwise I would not be able to do.”
Jordan told ABC News of the toll inflicted on her grandfather after laws were passed decades ago in Mississippi to take his land.
“He understood as a man and as a Black man what they had done,” Jordan said. “He was a mean person because of what they had done and died with a frown on his face from what he knew that he was not able to leave [for his family].”
Jordan believes African Americans deserve reparations.
“We started with such a deficit that our entire life couldn’t even dig us out of it. So, this would even the playing field. And it’s long overdue,” Jordan said. “This country is drenched in our blood.”
(NEW YORK) — A Texas man pleaded guilty to smuggling a firearm that authorities linked to the deadly kidnapping of four U.S. citizens near the border in Mexico, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
Roberto Lugardo Moreno Jr. admitted to purchasing the pistol and then taking it to Mexico for the Gulf Cartel, the Wednesday statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
“These weapons often contribute to fueling the violence committed by drug cartels, which drastically affects communities both in Mexico and in the United States,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Craig Larrabee of Homeland Security Investigations San Antonio. “This investigation and prosecution highlight the fine work federal border security agencies perform each day, often behind the scenes and often unknown to the public.”
After the four Americans arrived in Matamoros, Mexico, in March, “unidentified gunmen fired upon the passengers in the vehicle,” the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said at the time. Two of the Americans were killed, and the other two were found days later in Mexico.
Five alleged members of a powerful Mexican cartel were charged with aggravated kidnapping and murder a day after the Gulf Cartel allegedly took responsibility for the kidnapping. The five men were found tied up near a pickup truck, and a handwritten note, purportedly written by members of the cartel, was found placed on the truck’s windshield.
“We have decided to deliver those involved and directly responsible,” the note said, presumably referring to the five men found tied up at the scene.
Moreno is expected to be sentenced in August. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison and the potential for $250,000 in fines.
The public defenders’ office handling Moreno’s case did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
ABC News’ Anne Laurent contributed to this report.
(CHARLOTTE, N.C.) — Over 90 firefighters responded to the scene of a massive fire at a construction site in Charlotte, North Carolina, Thursday morning and braved devastating conditions to rescue workers who were caught in the blaze.
As of Thursday afternoon, two construction workers who were at the site of the future apartment complex were unaccounted for, according to the fire department.
Firefighters responded to the residential construction site on Liberty Road around 9 a.m. and within 10 minutes, the blaze grew to five alarms, Reginald Johnson, the fire chief for the Charlotte Fire Department, told reporters.
“It was a very fast-moving fire [with] high heat conditions well over 2000 degrees. And as a construction site is open, a lot of wood is exposed the fire moved very rapidly,” Johnson said.
Firefighters rescued 15 construction workers from the fire, including one person who was stuck on top of a crane. Johnson said that firefighters had to set up hose lines to protect the crane before they could go and make the rescue.
Johnson also confirmed that two “maydays” were issued after firefighters had issues getting out of the fire while rescuing some of the construction workers.
The cause of the fire is currently under investigation, according to the fire department.
Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles tweeted a statement urging nearby residents to remain inside and thanking first responders for their work.
“Very grateful that @charlottefire was able to rescue the crane operator,” she tweeted.
(NEW YORK) — Americans can likely expect summer temperatures to be even more sweltering than usual, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Hotter-than-normal temperatures are possible for much of the U.S., with all of the East Coast, the South, the West Coast and Rockies forecast to sustain scorching conditions, according to the NOAA’s Summer Outlook, released on Thursday.
Overall, 2023 is likely to fall under the top 10 warmest years on record, perhaps even the top five, Karin Gleason, monitoring section chief for the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, told reporters during a call on Thursday.
The only regions in the U.S. that will see near normal summer temperatures will be in the Plains, the Great Lakes and the Midwest.
A large portion of the country experienced record-high temperatures to start the year, according to NOAA. Seven states on the East Coast that had its warmest start to the year include Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
Maryland also had the driest start to the year on record, according to NOAA.
Drought conditions in the West are also expected to persist, but improve, Gleason said.
“Drought coverage and intensity have steadily decreased since October 2022,” Gleason said.
Forecasts for the West favor a drier-than-normal summer, especially in Arizona, Utah, Colorado. New Mexico and western Texas, according to NOAA.
Washington, Oregon and parts of Idaho could also be on the drier side, forecasts show.
In the East, there could be more than the normal amount of precipitation. Summer is forecast to be wet and humid on the East Coast from New York to Mississippi and even toward southern Wisconsin.
Global sea surface temperature was also the warmest on record for April, which could exacerbate the effects of a strong El Nino that could develop later in the year.
A transition to El Nino is expected in the next couple of months, just in time for the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.
El Nino tends to suppress hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, but due to warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures, any tropical cyclones that develop could potentially rapidly intensify.
El Nino could also bring more heavy rain to Southern California during the wet season, which will further alleviate the megadrought.
There is a 90% chance that El Nino could persist into winter for the Northern Hemisphere, which typically means a warmer winter for northern states and wetter and cooler winter for southern states.
