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(MOSCOW, Idaho) — Asbestos and lead — in addition to objections from some of the victims’ families — have delayed the process of tearing down the Idaho home where four college students were stabbed to death last fall.

The University of Idaho announced the sudden halt to the high-profile demolition Wednesday, saying it would pause plans for the house until October, which is also when the trial for Bryan Kohberger, the man accused in the murders of Ethan Chapin, 20; Madison Mogen, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20, and Kaylee Goncalves, 21, is set to start.

“While we look forward to removing this grim reminder of this tragedy, we feel holding until October is the right thing to do,” University President Scott Green said in a statement, acknowledging “every action and decision around this horrific incident is painful and invokes emotions.”

He also noted “every decision we have made” has been “with the families of the victims and our students in mind.”

Disaster response crews have been on-site for weeks, preparing for the eventual demolition of the home on King Road in Moscow, Idaho, cleaning and clearing out the property, and hauling out personal belongings for families to collect.

The investigative work that occurred after the bodies were found exposed “hazardous” materials, including asbestos, which must be eliminated before the building can be razed, Jodi Walker, the spokesperson for the University of Idaho, which now has control of the site, said in an interview.

Walker said the “lead and asbestos mitigation” inside the home requires meticulous “expertise” to “safely demolish the house.”

In the early morning hours of Nov. 13, 2022, prosecutors allege that Kohberger, a 28-year-old criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University, broke in and stabbed to death Chapin, Mogen, Kernodle and Goncalves inside the girls’ off-campus home.

A massive investigation ensued, and in their hunt for clues and evidence at the crime scene and the cleanup that followed, authorities scoured every inch of the property, cutting into walls and even pulling up flooring.

After a six-week hunt, police zeroed in on Kohberger as the suspect, arresting him on Dec. 30, 2022, at his family’s home in Pennsylvania. He was indicted in May and charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of burglary. At his arraignment, he declined to offer a plea, so the judge entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.

Now, the interior of the King Road home bears little resemblance to how it looked before the killings, Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson, leading the case against Kohberger, told the university in an April email to the school, obtained by ABC News.

After the killings, the property owner donated the home to the school, which announced in February the site would be torn down as a “healing step” that “also removes efforts to further sensationalize the crime scene.”

Neither the prosecution nor Kohberger’s defense pushed back on the planned demolition, according to emails obtained by ABC.

In early April, Kohberger’s attorney Anne Taylor told the university that the defense had “no objection” to the school “proceeding as it sees fit” with the residence.

In another email obtained by ABC, prosecutor Thompson told the school’s general counsel he too had “no objection,” adding that the scene was “substantially altered from its condition at the time of the homicides” with “removal of some structural items such as wallboard and flooring.”

Though the site is so drastically changed from its original appearance, the structure remains standing and has become a “daily reminder of the horrific crime that happened there,” Walker said — explaining why the university had decided the house would be demolished.

“We have family members of the victims that look out on that house every day that they’re on campus,” she said. “On the flip side, it’s also that last visible piece of where those students lived.”

Moscow Mayor Art Bettge said it’s been tough for the community, too.

“Your eyes are drawn that way; you can’t help it. And it’s just sitting there boarded up and derelict. But it really should go; it needs to go away,” Bettge told ABC News.

The university had wanted it torn down before students returned from summer break. But now, more than seven months after the killings and just weeks before the fall semester begins, there is still no demolition date set for the house, Walker said.

The decision on timing is “incredibly difficult,” Walker said, and though the time-consuming process is underway, the university is weighing both families’ concerns and the health of those nearby.

“It is in a residential neighborhood, so we want to make sure that that process is done as safely as possible for the people in the other structures around,” she said. “There’s a whole expertise to that, that we certainly don’t have.”

Not everyone agreed with the plan to demolish the building. Some of the victims’ families said they fear the elimination of the home now, before Kohberger’s trial, could cause unanticipated problems for prosecutors as they work to secure a guilty verdict.

Shanon Gray, a lawyer representing the Goncalves family, had said postponing demolition “until after the trial would honor the [families’] wishes and support the judicial process if the home is needed in the future by the prosecution, defense or jurors.”

“The Goncalves Family, members of the Mogen Family and members of the Kernodle family have all expressed to the University that they do not want the home demolished,” Gray said in a statement before the university said they would pause their plans, adding those families “believe that there is an enormous amount of evidentiary value to the home.”

Kohberger’s trial in the quadruple homicide has been set for Oct. 2, though that could be delayed.

The prosecution has already ruled out the idea of a jury visit to the home. Though the walls still stand, because the insides have already started to get dismantled and have been “subjected to extensive chemical application creating a potential health hazard,” they concluded a “jury view” of the home “would not be appropriate,” Thompson said in his email to the school.

Gray maintains a jury walk-through could become relevant later, noting “the families [cannot] understand why” neither side has pushed back against the plans to tear the home down.

“There is simply no reason to not honor the wishes of the Victim’s families,” he said. “The reality is that what is good for the community is a fair trial and a conviction.”

While the school wants to “keep everything moving forward,” Walker said there are “many voices” to consider, and they have been in “regular contact with all of the families throughout this entire process,” who have “varying opinions and various ways of healing, much like the rest of the campus and the community.”

“And sometimes that just takes a little bit more time, and we want to make sure that we’re doing the right things for the right reasons,” she said. “The last thing we want to do is to cause any harm to those families.”

The university plans to build a memorial garden on campus to honor the slain students — something Mayor Bettge looks forward to.

“To have a place where people who go just to dwell in the horror that went on there is not useful to the community, the university, or anyone else,” Bettge said, preferring “to have a permanent memorial to them in a positive fashion that reflects the good that they were, and doesn’t dwell on the bad.”

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(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — Loved ones of those murdered in the 2022 racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store filed what their lawyers described as a “landmark” lawsuit Wednesday, alleging social media companies, firearm manufacturers and body-armor makers all helped the teenage killer “load that gun.”

The lawsuit, filed in the state Supreme Court in Buffalo, names several big tech companies as defendants, including Meta, the parent company of Facebook; Amazon, Instagram, Reddit and Google, the parent company of YouTube. Also named as defendants were Vintage Firearms, the Endicott, New York, gun dealer where mass shooter Payton Gendron legally purchased the semi-automatic Bushmaster XM-15 used in the rampage, and RMA Armament, the online company that sold Gendron his body armor.

Website and apps, such as 4Chan, Discord and Twitch, as well as Gendron’s parents, Paul and Pamela Gendron, were also named as defendants.

“Payton Gendron pulled the trigger, but he did so only after years of exposure to addictive social media platforms, which led to his radicalization and encouragement — via the Internet — to purchase weapons and body armor to commit this heinous attack,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages and a court-ordered injunction requiring social media platforms named in the legal action to “remedy the unreasonably dangerous features in its social media products, provide adequate warnings to minor users and parents that its products are addictive and pose a clear and present danger to unsuspecting minors.”

National civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of the lawyers representing the victims’ families, said at a news conference Wednesday that the lawsuit is one more step in the pursuit of justice for the 10 people murdered on May 14, 2022, at a Tops supermarket on the east side of Buffalo.

“Even though Payton Gendron fired the weapon that killed all their loved ones, and critically injured others, there were many people who helped him load that gun,” Crump said. “It is our objective … to make sure that everybody who loaded that gun is held to account. They were the conspirators.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the families of fatal shooting victims Aaron Salter Jr., 55; Margus Morrison Jr., 52; Roberta Drury, 32; Pearl Young, 77; Geraldine Talley, 65; Heyward Patterson, 67; and Ruth Whitfield, who at 86 was the oldest victim killed. Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include those wounded in the shooting, including Tops workers, Christopher Braden, 56, and 21-year-old Zaire Goodman.

A similar lawsuit was filed in May naming many of the same companies as defendants on behalf of the families of Patterson, Katherine “Kat” Massey, 72; and Andre Mackneil, 53.

Kim Salter, the widow of Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer and Tops security guard who died after confronting Gendron during the massacre, said she and the other families who lost loved ones are still grieving.

“We live with this each and every day, each and every moment of the day,” Kim Salter, the lead plaintiff in the new lawsuit, said at Wednesday’s news conference. “I stand here still grieving my husband’s loss because he sacrificed his life, not only for his family, but for a whole lot of people. And I honor him, I honor my husband.”

In October last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office released a report alleging several online platforms, including some of those named in the lawsuit filed Wednesday, played roles in the Buffalo mass shooting by radicalizing Gendron as he consumed voluminous amounts of racist and violent content, and then by allowing him to live stream the deadly attack on the website Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. James’ report contended that Twitch was “weaponized” to publicize and encourage copycat attacks.

Gendron pleaded guilty in November to 15 charges, including murder and attempted murder. He is the first person in state history to be charged with domestic terrorism motivated by hate, a crime he also pleaded guilty to. He was sentenced in February to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

During the sentencing hearing, Gendron, now 19, apologized to the victims’ families and claimed he was brainwashed by online racist propaganda, saying, “I believed what I read online and acted out of hate.”

Gendron still faces federal hate crimes charges stemming from the shooting. Federal prosecutors have yet to decide whether to pursue the death penalty.

Amy Keller, another attorney representing the families in the latest lawsuit, slammed the companies named in the legal action, saying, “Corporations have put profits before people. We have detailed in our complaint how social media companies knew there was a problem” and failed to address it.

A spokesman for Google referred ABC News to a statement the company made in May when the previous lawsuit was filed by the victims’ families.

“We have the deepest sympathies for the victims and families of the horrific attack at Tops grocery store in Buffalo last year,” the Google statement reads. “Through the years, YouTube has invested in technology, teams, and policies to identify and remove extremist content. We regularly work with law enforcement, other platforms, and civil society to share intelligence and best practices.”

The other companies named in the suit did not respond to requests from ABC News for comment.

RMA Armament told ABC News in May when it was included in the previous lawsuit, that it was surprised to be included in the lawsuit and the claims lack merit.

“RMA Armament products are intended for the protection of law-abiding private citizens, police departments and government partners,” RMA’s president, Blake Waldrop, said in a statement to ABC News. “We are surprised to be named in this lawsuit and believe the claim lacks merit. We do understand this has been a difficult and painful year for the families and the Buffalo community.”

Meta previously said that as of Aug. 15, 2022, it identified more than 1,151 “militarized social movements” mostly associated with the far-right conspiracy group QAnon and removed about 4,200 pages, 20,800 groups, 200 events, 59,800 Facebook profiles and 8,900 Instagram accounts.

“We continue to strengthen our enforcement by identifying additional militarized social movements and new terms associated with QAnon,” Meta said. “We’ll continue consulting experts to inform our strategy and will identify and remove content accordingly.”

Discord also released a statement in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, saying, “We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families, and we will do everything we can to assist law enforcement in the investigation.”

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(UVALDE, Texas) — For 19-year-old Sam Schwartz, arriving in Uvalde, Texas, “was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Getting off that bus and walking to that memorial, there were 21 crosses around the fountain,” he told ABC News, calling it the “most deeply disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.”

Schwartz’s visit this week was part of a summer campaign organized by Patricia Oliver and her husband.

The Olivers’ cheerful and athletic son, 17-year-old Joaquin, was among the 17 people killed in the Parkland, Florida, high school mass shooting in 2018. Patricia Oliver and her husband have become outspoken advocates for gun control, and each summer, they ramp up their efforts to mark their son’s Aug. 4 birthday.

This summer, in honor of what would’ve been Joaquin’s 23rd birthday, they’re taking their mission on the road, visiting 23 cities across the country that have been impacted by gun violence, from Columbine, Colorado, to Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The campaign is called “Guacathon,” named after Joaquin’s nickname, “Guac.”

The tour aims to unite families of gun violence victims and offer a way for Americans “to get a closer look at what gun violence does to families, to communities,” Oliver told ABC News.

Through this unity, families impacted by gun violence could have a better chance at making the legislative reforms they’re looking for, added Schwartz.

This campaign is just as personal for Schwartz, whose cousin and best friend, 14-year-old Alex Schachter, was killed at Parkland.

“I would feel in a very depressed state if I chose not to do anything,” he said. “A lot of other people on this bus right now feel the same about the loved ones they lost.”

On Tuesday, the “Guacathon” bus stopped in Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in May 2022, in one of the latest school massacres to shake the nation.

“I’ve known these families for a year now,” Schwartz said. “Going to their community and seeing what they go through … that’s how you get to know someone — especially in this fight.”

Schwartz said he’s befriended Jazmin Cazares, a Uvalde teenager who also turned to activism after her 9-year-old sister, Jackie, was killed at Robb Elementary.

“It’s always nice to talk to kids my age, I feel like I can share my experiences,” Schwartz said.

After visiting the memorial, the “Guacathon” participants held an emotional rally where Uvalde families shared stories of their loved ones and urged people to vote for gun reform.

“Seeing all the families coming together, expressing their feelings … at the end of the gathering, they were relieved,” Oliver said. “That was our purpose — let Joaquin bring some relief, some kind of comfort.”

To Oliver, the most poignant moment was when she saw one grieving Uvalde mom, who seemed burned out in recent months, come to the rally and speak.

“She reminded me of me,” Oliver said. “Even though you see me on the road for so long, I struggle. When I come back to the hotel or I go back home, maybe I have to spend two days in bed.”

“She felt that need to express herself again. And I was so glad to hear from her,” she said.

“I feel Joaquin made that happen,” she added.

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(NEW YORK) — A sheep herder has survived after a bear woke him up and viciously attacked him in the middle of the night, authorities say.

The bear attack happened at approximately 1 a.m. Tuesday near a camp in the Weminuche Wilderness above Lemon Reservoir, located roughly 23 miles northeast of Durango, Colorado, according to a statement from Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

“The victim reported being woken up by a disturbance at the camp involving his sheep and a black bear,” CPW said. “The victim reported having fired a .30-30 caliber rifle at the bear before it attacked him.”

The unnamed 35-year-old man was a herder working for a permit holder of a sheep grazing allotment on the San Juan National Forest, authorities say, and he sustained bite wounds to his head as well as additional wounds to his left hand and arm, severe lacerations to his left hip area and scratches on his back during the attack.

“This is an unfortunate incident and we are thankful the victim was able to contact help to get emergency services deployed and that he was able to be extracted to receive necessary medical care,” said CPW Area Wildlife Manager Adrian Archuleta.

The herder was able to crawl to his tent and contact his cousin following the attack, according to CPW, and emergency services were able to locate and airlift him to Mercy Regional Medical Center where he received initial treatment before being flown to Grand Junction for surgery. The man’s current condition is unknown.

“CPW was notified of the attack at 4 a.m., and three wildlife officers were at the Transfer Park trailhead and on scene of the camp near the Burnt Timber Trail by 8:30 a.m.,” CPW said in a press release following the attack. “They quickly discovered a blood trail, the victim’s rifle and collected multiple DNA samples from the attack scene. CPW also discovered two dead sheep at the site with wounds consistent with bear depredation.”

Unsure if the bear had been hit by any of the rifle shots fired by the victim, CPW officers began to search for the animal involved in the attack and contacted an agent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) with a team of dogs to search for it.

“The dog team arrived at 5 p.m. and began to work the scene. Soon after, the hounds alerted a scent trail on the south side of the creek drainage and were immediately in pursuit of a bear suspected in the attack,” CPW said. “The hounds pursued the bear to the Florida River, and CPW officers followed in steep and treacherous terrain following the GPS signal from the collars of the dogs. At 10:53 p.m., the APHIS agent shot and killed the bear. Because the bear made contact with a human, it is classified under CPW policy as an attack and the agency’s policy is to euthanize the bear.”

The male bear — estimated to be approximately 8-years-old and weighing 250 pounds — had wounds in the chest area when it was killed but officers were unable to determine if they were due to gunshot wounds fired by the victim during the attack.

“This is a difficult part of the job,” Archuleta said. “But when it comes to injuries to humans as a result of a predator attack, human health and safety is our top priority.”

This is the first reported bear attack in Colorado in 2023 and the first in La Plata County since April 2021.

CPW collected evidence from the deceased bear and several DNA samples were sent to the CPW Wildlife Health Lab in Fort Collins for testing to compare it with samples collected at the attack scene, authorities said. Additionally, sheep wool was found in the bear’s stomach contents and the animal will be checked for disease, such as rabies, because the victim was bitten by the animal.

“Until we get results back from the lab regarding DNA testing, we can’t 100% confirm that this is the offending bear,” Archuleta said. “But based on the information we have at this point, we feel confident that it is the offending bear.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Secret Service and other Washington D.C., law enforcement agencies are looking for a hit-and-run driver, who killed a man and injured a teenager Wednesday after the suspect allegedly ran a red light during a traffic stop near the National Mall.

The incident took place around 1:30 p.m. after Secret Service agents stopped the driver of the vehicle at the corner of 17th Street NW and Constitution Avenue over an alleged expired registration, the Secret Service said.

The unidentified driver allegedly signaled he would slow down and pull over, but just before he stopped, he sped up, according to the Secret Service.

The driver allegedly crossed a red signal light and struck two people before driving off. The two victims were a 75-year-old man from Philadelphia and 13-year-old girl, the U.S. Park Police said.

The elder victim was pronounced dead at the hospital, and the teenager was treated at the scene and released, according to Park Police.

The Park Police is currently urging any person with information related to this investigation to contact the USPP tipline at (202) 379-4877 or uspp_tipline@nps.gov.

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