(NEW YORK) — Tribal land in Virginia will be returned to the Rappahannock Tribe during a celebration hosted by the Department of the Interior Friday.
Secretary Deb Haaland will join the Rappahannock Tribe, Chesapeake Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in honor of the tribe’s historic reacquisition of roughly 465 acres at Fones Cliffs.
The Fones Cliffs lie on the eastern side of the Rappahannock River and are located within the authorized boundary of the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
“Threatened by development for decades, this ‘crown jewel’ of Virginia has immense significance, not only for the surrounding environment but for American history,” the Conservation Fund’s website states.
According to the organization, the Fones Cliffs are the site where Captain John Smith and his crew were ambushed by Rappahannock Tribe members.
Smith’s ships continued their journey unharmed, but the fund states that the Fones Cliffs are a reminder of the tribe’s dedication to preserving its land.
The land will remain publicly accessible and will be given to the Rappahannock Tribe with a permanent conservation easement that legally limits the use of the sacred land for conservation efforts.
The news comes just as the Virginia state legislature passed a bill to create the Virginia Black, Indigenous and People of Color Historic Preservation Fund.
The fund would award grant money to recognized tribes and nonprofit organizations to acquire and preserve land that is of cultural or historic significance to Black and Indigenous communities, as well as other communities of color.
The legislation is now awaiting Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s signature.
(NEW YORK) — A Connecticut judge has denied a motion to halt financial penalties imposed on Alex Jones. As of Friday, the conspiracy theorist and right-wing provocateur owes $25,000 for declining to sit for a deposition in a defamation lawsuit by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims.
Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis assessed the fine, which increases exponentially each day Jones refuses to appear, and on Friday denied his motion for a stay.
Jones appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court.
“The defendant in this case is Alex Jones, and, to many, that is reason enough to uphold any fine or sanction. But the law, our law, is better than mere vendetta,” defense attorney Norm Pattis wrote in the state supreme court appeal.
Jones, founder of Infowars, claimed the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. Families of those killed sued him for defamation and Jones failed to comply with court orders to appear at a deposition on March 23 and 24.
In Novemeber, Bellis found Jones liable for damages by default because Jones and his companies, like Infowars, showed “callous disregard” for the rules of discovery. She previously faulted the Infowars host for failing to comply with requests for documents and other procedures.
Jones’ attorneys said he can sit for a two-day deposition April 11 and 12. That would make his running fine $525,000, Pattis said.
“Jones and others are sued for comments they made denying that the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 took place. For many Connecticut residents, that is reason enough to hate Jones. One suspects Judge Bellis has succumbed to that hatred,” Pattis wrote.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Mattei argued, successfully, to keep the fines in place, saying a promise to appear April 11 is not the same as “real-life attendance” at the deposition.
“The escalating fines were imposed to compel his appearance and should not be set aside merely because Mr. Jones has yet again said he will appear,” Mattei wrote in a court filing.
Twenty children and six staff members died in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut, school at the hands of gunman Adam Lanza.
(NEW YORK) — Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families over a span of 150 years, made to live in boarding schools across the U.S. that were run by the federal government and churches in an effort to force assimilation.
“It was a national policy to take Indian children, to beat their native language out of them, to remove them from their families so they wouldn’t have that cultural teaching,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland told ABC News’ Nightline.
“Native kids are born into not just their mother’s arms, but into the arms of their entire communities … when you are born into that nurturing community and all of a sudden [you’re] ripped away from that – imagine how much trauma that would have on a child,” she continued.
According to Denise Lajimodiere, a Native American scholar and the author of Stringing Rosaries, the purpose of these residential schools was “total assimilation into white European culture.” Native American children were forced to cut their hair and wear uniforms to conform.
“I think they just saw these kids that they weren’t even human. They saw them as savages,” she told Nightline.
Once they were at the schools, the children were forced to work without getting paid and some children never made it home.
Scholars estimate that tens of thousands of children died at the schools from abuse or disease and, in some instances, their remains were buried in unmarked graves in school cemeteries. Some children died while working on what was called an “outing,” where children from the boarding schools were hired out to work for families.
“The corporal punishment was pretty horrendous. Boarding school survivors tell of kids being taken away and disappearing and never being seen again,” Lajimodiere said.
A legacy of generational trauma
For more than a century, Native Americans have urged the government to acknowledge and address the generational trauma and lasting impact from the boarding school era, which spanned from 1869 through the 1960s.
After nearly 1,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children were unearthed in June 2021 at Indigenous boarding schools in Canada, Haaland, who is the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position, launched a federal boarding school initiative to investigate the United States’ role in implementing these policies.
“Families deserve to know what happened. And so we are working to compile decades and decades of information so that we can hopefully give them some answers,” she said.
Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, oversees the government agency that historically played a major role in the forced relocation and oppression of Indigenous people. Haaland’s great grandfather was taken to the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which was open from 1879 to 1918.
Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa or Ojibwe, said that the painful legacy of these boarding schools has impacted every Native American family.
Her father attended the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, from 1925 to 1929 when he was 9 years old.
“He was stolen,” she said.
At Chemawa, Marsha F. Small is on a mission to locate human remains of Indigenous children who were buried on school grounds.
“People don’t like to learn the ugly America. They want the America the beautiful,” Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and a doctoral student at Montana State University-Bozeman, told Nightline.
“Without this healing, I don’t think that America itself can heal,” she added.
Small and her team use ground penetrating radar technology to look for graves. So far, she says they have found about 222 graves, with some dating back to 1885.
“When I go into cemeteries …I talk to the children and I, and I tell them, you know, that those that want to go home may have a possibility of going home. You’re not forgotten,” she said.
A journey of healing
The boarding school era lasted for more than 150 years. By the late 1970s, many schools had closed, but others like Chemawa remained open.
Today, Chemawa’s mission is to honor “unique tribal cultures.”
The number of boarding schools that were run by the U.S. government is unknown, so Lajimodiere launched her own efforts to locate as many boarding schools as she could.
Rita Means, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, attended St. Francis Indian Mission School — a school operated by Jesuits from 1886 until 1972 — from the sixth grade until the 12th grade.
“In my time, I don’t think anybody was forcibly taken, but I know that feeling of separation from your family,” she said.
“Any place that you can’t leave is a prison. We were definitely locked in until we, you know, had to go to church at six in the morning,” she added.
Her daughter, Shelley Means, said that two generations of her family were disconnected from their children, who attended Indigenous boarding schools.
“[They] didn’t learn parenting skills the way traditionally we would have taken care of each other,” she told Nightline, adding that she had to work hard at learning how to emotionally support her own daughter, Shylee Brave.
For Brave, her grandmother is a “survivor” and she is doing her own part to bring healing to her community.
As part of the Sicangu Youth Council in Rosebud, South Dakota, Brave traveled in July 2015 to the school in Carlisle, where more than 150 children from over 40 tribes were buried, including nine from the Rosebud Sioux tribe.
“The thing that really sparked this whole movement was asking, why are our kids still there?” she said.
“It like, really hit, like, wow, this could be my cousin, this could be my uncle, this could be my relative. What if I didn’t get to go home? It just really like sunk in, like, what if this was me?” she added.
After sharing her experience with her grandmother, the Sicangu Youth Council launched an effort to bring the remains of the children of the Rosebud Sioux tribe at Carlisle back home.
They had to request the remains from the U.S. Army, which owns the school, and on July 2021 the remains of six children were finally brought back home and were escorted by Brave and members of the the youth council.
The children are now buried in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Veterans Cemetery in South Dakota. Their names are Maude Littlegirl, Lucy Take the Tail, Alvin Braveroaster or One that Kills Seven Horses, Dennis Strikesfirst, Warren Painter and Rose Long Face.
“It was a really hard, long journey. I mean, we really had to fight,” Brave said.
“They didn’t get to grow up. They didn’t get to have a family,” she added, as she visited the cemetery. “I’m really happy that they’re home, but at the same time it’s like this shouldn’t have happened.”
Haaland, whose great grandfather attended Carlisle, told Chief White House Correspondent Cecilia Vega that she is “grateful” to have an opportunity to address this painful past.
“I have a great obligation, but I was taught by my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother that when you are asked to do something for your people that you step up,” she said.
For Lajimodiere, Haaland’s efforts are part of her journey of “healing.”
“I just wept,” she said, recalling Haaland’s announcement.
“It’s like, finally, finally, after a decade of working toward this moment, here it is. And it took a native female head of the Department of Interior to make this moment happen and to start the healing journey for so many survivors,” Lajimodiere added.
(NEW YORK) — David Berry and Morgan Helquist grew up in Rochester, New York, without knowing they were each other’s half-siblings.
It was only when Berry, now 37 and living in Miami, took a DNA test several years ago that he began to unravel his biological history.
He said he learned his father was not his biological father. He also learned he had half-siblings, including Helquist, whom he reached out to and then met in-person.
“We were just talking, I grabbed his face, I just looked and I was like, ‘Why is your face on my face?'” Helquist, 36, told ABC News of one of their initial meetings. “I just couldn’t understand. It was the craziest experience I’ve ever had.”
Helquist, who still lives in the Rochester area, and Berry, would go on to find more half-siblings, as first reported by The New York Times.
“There was five of us and we were all the same age — and 6 and then 7 — and it started to feel like, well, if there’s seven, there might be 20 and if there’s 20, there might be a hundred,” said Helquist. “And I started to feel terrified.”
Helquist and Berry said their half-siblings’ mothers used artificial insemination using the same fertility doctor: Dr. Morris Wortman.
When a biological daughter of Wortman’s agreed to take a DNA test, Berry said her DNA matched his and Helquist’s and their half-siblings.
Both Helquist and Berry’s mothers said Wortman told them he was using sperm from an anonymous medical student, not on his own.
“He had my permission to use a donor, specifically a medical student,” Karen Berry told ABC News. “He did not have my permission to use his own sperm for a donation.”
David Berry said of the revelation, “I’m the product of something that should have never happened with a an unconscionable violation of ethics at a minimum.”
“I can’t escape because his DNA is in me. His DNA is in my son,” he said. “I wrestle with that.”
Describing how she told her mother the news, Helquist said, “When we found out there wasn’t any need to tell her. I was screaming and sobbing at the top of my lungs.”
Helquist said Wortman had been her gynecologist for the past decade. “He knew the whole time who he was, and I didn’t. He took away that choice for me.”
She filed a lawsuit against Wortman in September, alleging, among other things, that he committed medical malpractice by treating her when he likely knew he was her biological father.
Wortman has denied the charges through his legal team.
Only seven states in the U.S. specifically penalize physicians for fertility fraud. Other states, like New York, only have laws pending.
Helquist is the only one of her half-siblings who may have a legal cause of action, which she said rests on Wortman’s past role as her gynecologist.
“I do not have a fertility fraud case,” she said. “I have a case because he touched my body without my consent.”
(NEW YORK) — The body of a Nevada teenager who was allegedly kidnapped from a Walmart parking lot over two weeks ago has been found, authorities said.
Naomi Irion, 18, was last seen inside her car outside a Walmart in Fernley, Nevada, outside Reno, on March 12, according to the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office. Surveillance video captured a man getting into the driver’s seat of her car and leaving in an unknown direction with Irion in the passenger seat.
A tip regarding her disappearance led investigators to a remote part of neighboring Churchill County on Tuesday, where they found a “possible gravesite” and recovered the body of a woman from the scene, authorities said. On Wednesday, the remains were identified as Irion’s by the Washoe County Medical Examiners Office.
Her death is being investigated as a homicide, authorities said Thursday.
“The exact cause of death is known however cannot be released at this time as the circumstances around that event if released would compromise the ongoing investigation,” the Lyon County and Churchill County sheriff’s offices said in a statement.
No further information is being released at this time due to the ongoing investigation, authorities said.
“We would like to extend our sympathy and condolences to the Irion family and thank all the volunteers for their hard work in trying to find Naomi and bring closure to the family,” the Churchill County Sheriff’s Office and the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office said in a joint statement.
Irion was waiting for a shuttle bus on March 12 around 5 a.m. to take her to her job at Panasonic Energy of North America in the Reno area. Her brother reported her missing the following day when she did not come home from work.
The sheriff’s office initially characterized her disappearance as “suspicious in nature.” After locating her car on March 15 in an industrial park about a mile from the Walmart, the sheriff’s office said investigators found evidence suggesting her disappearance was “criminal in nature.”
A suspect in the alleged kidnapping was arrested last week. Troy Driver, 41, of Fallon, Nevada, has been charged with first-degree kidnapping and is being held on $750,000 bail following his first court appearance Wednesday, according to Reno ABC affiliate KOLO.
The FBI was offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to Irion’s location. The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office also released multiple photos and a video of the man authorities say entered Irion’s car in hopes of identifying him.
Driver’s next hearing is scheduled for April 5, KOLO reported.
(NEW YORK) — Police are seeking a suspect in an assault on a New York City subway train that is being investigated as a hate crime after the assailant allegedly used an anti-gay slur.
The New York Police Department recently released video and images of the attack, which it said occurred March 19 on an uptown A train in Manhattan.
The assailant approached the 22-year-old male victim on the train as it approached the 190th Street subway station at around 2:22 p.m., police said.
“The unidentified individual sat across from the victim and stated ‘I wish I had my pepper spray’ before spitting at him,” the NYPD said in a statement.
The suspect then reportedly said, “I have to start carrying my pepper spray” before spitting at the victim again, police said.
When the victim stood up, the assailant “charged” at him and “grabbed him by the hair before punching him several times in the face and head,” police said.
An apparent cellphone video of the attack released by police showed the perpetrator punching the victim on the moving train.
“The perpetrator then ripped hair from the victim’s head and stated ‘I’m sick of all you f—,'” police said.
The victim was transported to a nearby hospital in stable condition with cuts to his head, the NYPD said. He also lost hair during the attack.
The NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force is investigating the incident.
Police are also seeking a suspect in a separate subway attack that occurred Wednesday afternoon at a station in Manhattan. The suspect slashed a 47-year-old man on the arm before fleeing the Wall Street 2-train station, police said.
The city has increased the police presence in the subways in an effort to reduce crime in the public transit system since Mayor Eric Adams took office earlier this year. The killing of 40-year-old Michelle Go, who died after a stranger pushed her in front of an oncoming train, drew further attention to subway safety concerns.
“While we are by no means out of the woods, and there is a lot of progress that needs to be made on subway safety, I just want to acknowledge that the work has begun,” MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said at an MTA board meeting Wednesday. “Serious effort is underway.”
Anyone with information on the incidents is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-8477 or online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org.
(NEW YORK) — Skippy Foods announced a voluntary recall of some peanut butter products due to the possibility that a limited number of jars may contain small fragment of stainless steel from a piece of manufacturing equipment, according to a statement released by the Food and Drug Administration.
The recall includes a limited number of dates of Skippy Reduced Fat Creamy Peanut, Skippy Reduced Fat Chunky Peanut Butter Spread and Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter Blended with Plant Protein. The recalled items have use by dates from early May 2023.
The products were sold in 18 states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
There have been no consumer complaints to date and all retailers that have received the affected product have been notified.
No other sizes, varieties or packages of Skippy brand peanut butter or peanut butter spreads are included in this recall.
“From our family to yours, we want you to know that we take the quality of our products very seriously and apologize to our fans for this situation,” Skippy said in a statement. “Our company is committed to product quality and will continue to invest in our processes to ensure the quality and wholesomeness of our products.”
ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Nearly two months after the unexplained death of Navy SEAL candidate Kyle Mullen, his mother broke her silence, saying she wants to prevent another family from experiencing the same type of tragedy.
“I wake up every night thinking of him, thinking of how he died probably not breathing,” Regina Mullen said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
The 24-year-old former football player from New Jersey had just completed “hell week,” a grueling 5 1/2 sleepless days of underwater and tactical training designed to push seal candidates to their physical and mental limits. Those who drop out during hell week or “ring the bell” have to wait two years to try again. But Kyle Mullen made it through and texted his mom to let her know of his success.
“Hell Week secured,” he wrote.
“I saw it and I call him, and he says, ‘I did it, Mom.’ And he was so happy,” Regina Mullen said.
“And I heard him outta breath. And I said, “Kyle, are you OK? Are you hurt? Are you in a hospital?” And he just responded, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, I’m good. I love you.’ And he hung up.”
She texted her son again immediately after the call, worried about his condition, but she never reached him or spoke to him again.
As a mother and a nurse, she said she knew something was off when she last talked to her son.
“It was just his breathing. He could — it was difficult for him to form the words with the airflow. It sounded labored. He couldn’t breathe properly.”
The day after Kyle Mullen’s death, Navy officials arrived at Regina Mullen’s house, a dreaded sight for anyone with family in the military.
“I let them in, and I said, ‘He’s not coming home, is he?’ And they said, ‘No ma’am, he’s not coming home.'”
At the time of his death, the Navy released a statement saying Kyle Mullen and another sailor had “reported symptoms” and were taken to the hospital. The other sailor recovered. Kyle Mullen’s death is now under investigation and no official cause has been released.
Regina Mullen believes her son was abandoned when he was most in need.
“I believe…they laid him flat, and he had SIPE, and he most likely couldn’t breathe, and he probably suffocated from his own bodily fluids.
SIPE stands for swimming induced pulmonary edema, fluid buildup in the lungs without choking on water. The majority of cases clear up within 48 hours, but in rare instances, it can be deadly.
Regina Mullen said her son had been treated for SIPE during training in January. Later that month during “hell week,” NCIS investigators told her he was treated with oxygen twice, including on the day he died.
“My son was telling me that it’s discouraged to say, ‘I need to go to the medical.’ He said..they wouldn’t let him go [to] the medical unless you quit and ring the bell,” Regina Mullen said.
She added that when she flew out to California after her son’s death, a commander told her that he had twice been offered medical treatment but refused it.
“At that point, I said, ‘He doesn’t know what day of the week it is. He hasn’t slept in five days. How can he make that determination?'”
The Naval Special Warfare Command told ABC News in a statement that “all candidates receive head-to-toe medical evaluations, including a full set of core vitals, a minimum of once a day and as required throughout the week, as well as upon conclusion of the assessment event.”
Regina Mullen said she hopes no family has to experience what she has gone through and believes was preventable.
“They need better training. They need better monitoring. And this could never, ever happen again,” she said. “No mother should ever have to feel my pain that I have.”
Family attorney Ryan Andrews agreed that her son didn’t have to die.
“He just needed someone to care about his condition when he came off before he went to go lay down and go to sleep,” he said. “That’s it. A medical professional with a stethoscope could’ve prevented this.”
The last Navy SEAL candidate to die during this training was 21-year-old Seaman James Lovelace, who drowned in a pool during his first week in May 2016. After his drowning, the Navy instituted additional safety protocols to the swimming program.
“SEAL training takes you beyond your personal limits,” said Eric Oehlerich, a retired SEAL and ABC News contributor. “It’s designed to push you beyond your perception of what’s possible, breaking glass ceilings of what you’re capable of both mentally and physically.”
Oehlerich said he believes the difficult training for prospective SEALs is carried out within proven medical boundaries and run by highly trained professional instructors, but he acknowledged that there are risks involved in all types of military training.
“From time to time training fatalities do occur. Although tragic, adhering to the training curriculum keeps SEALs alive in combat,” he said. “It’s necessary; it can’t be diluted.”
But Kevin Uniglicht, a family attorney for the Mullen family, took a different view.
“We’ve heard it many times, ‘No one left behind,'” he said. “And I think, unfortunately, you know, Kyle was left behind in this situation.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. State Department announced on Thursday that starting April 11 people applying for U.S. passports will be able to select “X” to mark their gender in a move designed to accommodate nonbinary, intersex and gender non-conforming individuals.
“The Department of State has reached another milestone in our work to better serve all U.S. citizens, regardless of their gender identity,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a statement released on Thursday, which marks Transgender Day of Visibility.
Blinken first announced the State Department’s intention to make this change in June and said that the option to select “X” for gender will also become available on other documentation in the coming year.
The White House introduced additional changes to travel-related policies, including replacing the Transportation Security Administration’s “gender-based system” with new and more precise technology aimed at reducing pat-downs and unnecessary additional screenings.
The Department of Homeland Security is also in the process of adding “X” gender markers to the systems to facilitate the check-in process for gender non-conforming travelers, the White House said.
“These updates to passports and TSA policy will make it safer for transgender, nonbinary, and intersex members of our community to travel and to walk through everyday life,” said the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation known as GLAAD in a statement on Thursday. “Everyone deserves the right to have identity documents that reflect who they are, and to go through airport security without harassment and public humiliation.”
The changes to the travel experience are part of a series of new policies and actions announced by the Biden White House on Thursday that address discrimination against transgender individuals and come as Republican lawmakers push a wave of transgender and LGBTQ legislation across the country that many see as discriminatory.
Most recently, Oklahoma and Arizona became the latest states to impose transgender sports bans. Similar legislation has been introduced in more than 30 states. On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill into law. The legislation, which is dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by LGBTQ activists, limits what classrooms can teach about sexual orientation and gender identity. Meanwhile, various states have introduced legislation banning and/or criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
The White House condemned anti-LGBTQ legislation and vowed to fight against it at the state level.
“The evidence is clear that these types of bills stigmatize and worsen the well-being and mental health of transgender kids, and they put loving and supportive families across the country at risk of discrimination and harassment,” the White House said. “As the President has said, these bills are government overreach at its worst, they are un-American, and they must stop.”
The White House vowed to provide additional mental health resources and investments in education for LGBTQ youth, their families and their support networks, as well as enhance federal services and benefits for the community.
“To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know that your President sees you. The First Lady, the Vice President, the Second Gentleman, and my entire Administration see you for who you are — made in the image of God and deserving of dignity, respect, and support,” President Joe Biden said in a statement on Thursday.
“We’re committed to advancing transgender equality in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, and our housing and healthcare systems – everywhere, simply everywhere,” the statement said.
Jeopardy champion Amy Schneider, the first openly transgender individual to compete on the show, visited the White House for the Transgender Day of Visibility to meet with second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Schneider, who won a historic 40-game streak, told ABC News she hopes that her visit would advance visibility for the transgender community.
“I think just the same thing that I have been accomplishing, which is being a trans person out there that isn’t monstrous, that isn’t threatening, and is just a normal person like we all are. So the more people like me can be seen, the harder it is to sustain the myths that are driving a lot [of] this hate and fear,” she said.
Many civil rights groups advocating for LGBTQ rights welcomed the changes announced by the White House.
“Today’s actions prove that transgender people have an ally in the White House, and come at a much needed time when transgender people – particularly young people – are under attack in statehouses across the country,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a statement on Thursday.
The National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement that at a time when “transgender people are being attacked and targeted by state and local politicians,” the White House’s new policies show the community “that the president of the United States has their back.”
ABC News’ Molly Nagle, Conor Finnegan, Robert Zepeda and Luke Barr contributed to this report.
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(RIVERSIDE COUNTY, Calif.) — Top officials in California’s Riverside County said this week that they continue to be frustrated in their efforts to find out why social services systems have “harmed” some of the 13 Turpin children who were rescued in 2018 from captivity and torture at the hands of their parents.
The Riverside County Board of Supervisors had vowed to fix the system that broke down for some of the 13 Turpin siblings, but said this week that the process has been bogged down by a tangle of court-mandated confidentiality rules and other state laws that prevent information-sharing.
“We’re trying to do what we can do because we all take this very serious,” county Supervisor Karen Spiegel said Tuesday of the ongoing investigation into revelations first reported in 2021 by ABC News that many of the Turpin children were not given access to many of services and resources they were guaranteed by the system. “There are things that our hands are totally tied on.”
The 13 siblings were rescued in January 2018 from their home in Perris, California, where their parents had subjected them to brutal violence and deprived them of food, sleep, hygiene, education, and health care.
In 2021, Jennifer and Jordan Turpin spoke to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer for the first time about the challenges and hardships they and their siblings have faced in the years since sheriff’s deputies rescued them from a life of home imprisonment.
An ABC News investigation found that some of the Turpin children continue to face challenges and hardships since they were rescued, and some of them had even faced danger again.
In the wake of ABC News’ 20/20 report, Riverside County hired an outside firm to conduct an independent investigation into the county’s care of the Turpin children. The firm, headed by retired federal Judge Stephen Larson, was due to deliver its finding this week on March 31. But on Tuesday his team announced the findings would be delayed by two months as investigators continue to press for access to “vital” court and county records that underpin the Turpin cases.
“These records are vital to ensure that … the final report comprehensively addresses each area of inquiry,” Hillary Potashner, a partner at Larson LLP helping lead the investigation, told the board on Tuesday. “The process to require the records nonetheless remains slow moving.”
In the meantime, Potashner reported to the Board that the team has already reviewed more than 2,600 documents and conducted over 85 interviews — including with two of the Turpin siblings and two staffers with the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. District Attorney Mike Hestrin went public with his concerns that the county had “failed” the Turpin siblings in the ABC broadcast.
Also interviewed by the outside investigators were 11 members of the Riverside County Public Guardian’s Office, which was responsible for helping the seven oldest Turpin children obtain critical medical, educational and life-skill resources after their parents were arrested.
Still, the supervisors expressed frustration that other aspects of state and federal law have blocked them — as well as other county departments — from sharing information with each other, which has led to what Riverside County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said was a “disconnected — and I’m being generous — a disconnected level of service to our children.”
“It is the most frustrating experience in my time I’ve had on the Board of Supervisors,” Jeffries said, “to be told you’re responsible as an elected official to make sure all these things run smoothly and you have the right people in place, but you can’t ask any questions about how they do their job, or how effective they are, or the problems they face.”
Last week, a separate Board of Supervisors committee that was formed in the wake of the ABC News report found that “more must be done” to improve care and services to the vulnerable for which they are responsible, including the Turpin siblings.
“Although much work is already in process to continue to improve on our delivery of services to children and adults, leaders recognize that more must be done,” according to a five-page report issued Friday.
Among the changes the supervisors are eyeing, according to the report, is a change to the “legislative hurdle that prevents departments from sharing information.” The report said the committee is pushing to change state law to “allow for the disclosing of information between county adult protective agencies and county child welfare agencies.”
Additionally, the report said the county has created a new “multi-department, multi-disciplinary team” to oversee the care of the 13 Turpin children — one of the first reforms since the probe was enacted.
