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(NEW YORK) — The Smith County district attorney, where three sets of remains that belong to Rasheem Carter were found, disputed that a fourth set were part of his remains but said they were animal bones.

Carter’s family’s attorney Ben Crump held a press conference on May 11 demanding answers from Mississippi officials on whether the fourth set of remains belonged to Carter.

“One day after the press conference, I was given oral confirmation by the Mississippi Crime Laboratory that the bones, as suspected, were animal bones. There was never any reason or evidence to suggest that the bones found in Simpson County, Mississippi, were related to Rasheem Carter’s case,” District Attorney Chris Hennis said in a statement on Monday.

This was Hennis’ first official statement since Carter, a 25-year-old Mississippi Black man who went missing last October.

Local officials originally said that they believed there was no foul play in the disappearance. The cause of death remains undetermined. Carter’s family believes that doesn’t hold water.

“Unlike Attorney Ben Crump, my office, as well as law enforcement, has a responsibility to the Carter family, and to the public, to base the investigation on facts and evidence developed during the investigation not on reckless speculation and conjecture,” Hennis said in the statement. “Such misinformation only serves to slow down and hinder the ongoing investigation.”

According to Hennis, the local sheriff notified Rasheem Carter’s family on May 4 that the most recent remains found were suspected to be animal bones.

“Mr. Crump’s statement questioning my office and law enforcement’s dignity and respect towards Rasheem Carter’s family by not notifying them of new remains was not only completely baseless,” Hennis said in the statement. “It also appears to be callously made to inflame public opinion.”

On Nov. 2, 2022, the first set of remains were found in Smith County. Carter’s skull and spinal cord were located in separate locations classifying them as two sets of remains, according to Crump’s office.

Another set of remains that matched Carter’s DNA were found on Feb. 23, also in Smith County, according to Crump’s office.

Attorneys representing Carter’s family are calling for a federal probe into his death, arguing that the Smith County Sheriff’s Department’s original conclusion that there was no foul play seemed dubious.

“I am overwhelmed with the oppression that this state have caused in our lives. I want something done, and I want it done immediately. I’m tired of waiting,” Tiffany Carter, Rasheem’s mother, said at the press conference with Crump last week. “I know I can’t change what has happened, but we can make the change that this doesn’t happen to another family.”

On the day of his disappearance, Rasheem Carter allegedly sent a text to his mother saying that he was afraid for his safety and that men in trucks yelling racial epithets were after him, his family has said.

Crump said Mississippi officials didn’t notify the family of the fourth set of remains. He said a bystander filmed police retrieving the remains and sent the video to the Carter family.

“There is no excuse for bystanders coming showing video to the family, and officials not having the dignity and respect to notify the family immediately, and say ‘we found more human remains in the vicinity where your son head and spinal cord and other bodily remains were found,'” Crump said at the press conference.

Smith County Sheriff Joel Houston told ABC News that the sheriff’s department stands behind its earlier determination that no foul play was involved in Carter’s death. Earlier evidence “didn’t suggest anything,” he said.

According to an autopsy report on the first two sets of remains, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, most of what was found was bone and the cause of death was undetermined.

“Nothing is being swept under the rug,” Houston said. “There’s nothing to hide.” Houston added that the department is awaiting results of search warrants before ruling out foul play.

“Mississippi, all America’s watching to see if you’re going to do right by Rasheem Carter,” Crump said. “His brokenhearted mother has nightmares at night about what her son must have been doing as a result of this lynching in 2022.”

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(NEW YORK) — For some people, a parking spot is a nightmare and for others it’s a status symbol tied to their homes and vehicles.

Slate reporter Henry Grabar, who wrote the book “Paved Paradise How Parking Explains the World,” however said that that piece of concrete or a spot inside a garage has wide ranging impacts on the environment, health, and even policy.

He spoke with ABC News Live about what he found in his research.

ABC NEWS LIVE: All right. Right off the top, people are going to say, why did you write a book about parking? Why should it matter to us?

HENRY GRABAR: Well, I’m a reporter, so I spent a lot of time looking into stories about housing, about transportation, about the environment, infrastructure, architecture, all these subjects. And it seemed to me that whatever the question, the answer was always parking. Which is to say, cars have obviously had an enormous effect on the American landscape. The car spends 95% of its time parked. There’s more land used for parking in this country than there is for housing.

ABC NEWS LIVE: And I read some reviews of the book that I want to just showcase here. “Parking is the primary determinant of the way the place you live, looks, feels and functions.” And also this one, “A parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself.” So in simple terms, explain why parking is so central to the lives of everyday Americans.

GRABAR: Well, because we live in a country where almost all of us have to drive almost all of the time to get wherever we want to go. So when I say a parking spot is the link between driving and life itself, what I mean is you can’t do whatever you set you set out to do in the car until you can park. You can’t get out of the car until you can find a parking space. So, of course, parking functions as a kind of third rail in American politics.

ABC NEWS LIVE: And you do have some funny little stories, anecdotes in there about a man who called 911 in Utah because he can’t find a parking spot [and] a lady who lost 11 pounds because she didn’t want to lose her parking spot, and so she walked everywhere instead. You also talk more seriously, though, about how there have been crimes and murders committed because of parking. How did we get here to that extreme?

GRABAR: Well, again, we live in a place where most of us are dependent on parking. So to some extent, I’m not surprised that people have become so emotional about this subject. At the same time, the degree to which we prioritize great parking sometimes at the expense of everything else means we’ve lost out on some other things that we also care about deeply as a society. Things like affordable housing, nice architecture [and] walkable neighborhoods, all of those things have been sacrificed to create enough parking.

ABC NEWS LIVE: Explain to us the idea of parking minimums and how that determines who gets or I should say, which buildings get built and where.

GRABAR Sure. In most cities and suburbs in the United States, the city code requires that every building come with a certain number of parking spaces. So that means you want to open a restaurant, you are obligated to provide a certain number of parking spaces dependent on your square footage you want to open. You want to build some housing, you have to provide a certain number of parking spaces. And the reason this is important is because parking and for one takes up a lot of space.

And number two is very expensive to build. So when you put these restrictions on builders in terms of what they could do with an existing property or an old building or something like that, you’re putting a massive imposition on the types of results that we can get in terms of the built environment and also just an enormous cost that’s added on to everything we build.

ABC NEWS LIVE: So what’s the solution here? How do we solve all of this?

GRABAR: Well, I think we could start by saying to builders, you can decide to build however much parking you want to build. You think that your tenants or your clients or the people who are buying your apartments, you think they want parking? Well, then you should build enough parking for them.

But what we’ve seen in the United States, in places that have begun to reform these policies, is that there are builders who have decided that, in fact, many people would actually prefer to pay less in rent and figure out the parking situation themselves.

I talked to a developer in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is nobody’s idea of a particularly walkable place, but nevertheless, he said, I could build the building with parking and it’ll be $75 million, or I can build it without parking and it will be $60 million and the rents will be $200 lower a month, and the tenants can figure out what they want to do with their cars themselves.

But at the very least, it’s not going to be bundled into their rent.

ABC NEWS LIVE: Do you think that there is a way that cities can be re-imagined, perhaps, where we don’t need this reliance on parking garages?

GRABAR: One thing we’ve done is we’ve created a cycle where the more parking we build, the more people drive. And that’s both because it functions as a subsidy for driving. If you buy a house and it was required to include a two-car garage, you’ve made it essentially a down payment on car ownership and in fact, a down payment on owning two cars. So that’s an incentive for driving.

And the other one is that when we build all this parking, we create an environment where it’s really hard to walk around or bike or it just feels unsafe and dangerous. And so there is also a virtuous cycle that can be unlocked if you create.

Places where parking is deprioritized, where the parking lot is behind the building instead of in front of it. Where there’s slightly, slightly less room for parking and slightly more room for buildings and for people. People are going to want to walk.

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(FARMINGTON, N.M.) — At least 150 rounds were fired by an 18-year-old gunman and responding officers during an apparently random shooting in a neighborhood in northwestern New Mexico on Monday, authorities said.

Three people driving through the area were killed shortly after the gunman opened fire at approximately 10:56 a.m. local time in a residential area of Farmington, about 15 miles south of the border with Colorado, police said.

The suspect — identified by police Tuesday as Beau Wilson, a student at Farmington High School — was shot dead by officers at 11:06 a.m., police said.

A motive remains unclear at this stage in the investigation, police said.

“This incident appears to be purely random,” Farmington Deputy Chief Kyle Dowdy told reporters Tuesday. “It had no specific targets or motives to be identified at this time.”

Most of those shot were driving through the area, Farmington Deputy Chief Baric Crum said. Those killed included a woman in her 90s and the victim’s daughter, who was in her 70s, Crum said. The third victim was also in her 70s, he said.

The deceased victims were identified by police Tuesday as Shirley Voita, Melody Ivie and Gwendolyn Schofield.

Two of the victims were pronounced dead at the scene, while a third died at a hospital, police said. Six other victims, including two police officers, were treated at San Juan Regional Medical Center and have since been released, the hospital said. Other victims were treated at the scene, authorities said.

Police have not found any links between the suspect and the victims, police said.

“We’ve discovered nothing that leads us to believe that this suspect knew any of the people,” Dowdy said. “That we’re pretty confident in, because this was pretty random. Because the shooting was arbitrary and up and down the street.”

The suspect walked through the neighborhood, shooting “indiscriminately” at houses and cars, Dowdy said. At least six houses and three cars were hit by gunfire over the course of a nearly quarter-mile crime scene, Dowdy said.

Hundreds of 911 calls came in during the incident, Dowdy said.

Four officers engaged the suspect in a firefight, and the suspect was ultimately killed, Crum said.

At least 150 rounds have been found at the crime scene so far, though investigators do not know who fired what yet, Dowdy said.

“We’re still counting — that’s legitimately going to go up,” he said. “At this point, we’ve got approximately 150 [rounds] exchanged between everyone.”

One of the wounded officers was shot while responding to the scene, while the second was shot during the firefight with the gunman, Crum said. The two injured officers — one from the Farmington Police Department and one from New Mexico State Police — have since been released, officials said.

The suspect was armed with multiple firearms, including an assault-style rifle, police said. Dowdy said the suspect purchased one firearm in November 2022, a month after he turned 18, and police believe he obtained the others from a family member.

Wilson had “minor infractions” as a juvenile, though nothing in his history would have led him to be on their radar, Dowdy said.

Farmington Mayor Nate Duckett thanked residents for their help in supporting law enforcement amid the response.

“There were many acts of bravery that occurred yesterday,” Duckett said.

ABC News’ Ivan Pereira, Matthew Fuhrman and Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.

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(LOS ANGELES) — The early season heat wave in the West is causing complications up and down the coast.

The Pacific Northwest is in the midst of a record-breaking streak of high temperatures for this time of year, with Portland seeing multiple days of 90-degree temps.

More record highs are possible Tuesday in Portland, Spokane, Washington, and Boise, Idaho. The high temperatures have arrived more than a month ahead of usual.

The scorching temperatures have continued further south and east as well. In California, triple-digit temperatures are forecast in some cities. Palms Springs is forecast to hit 103 degrees on Tuesday.

The rapid melting is causing some complications, with rushing water from mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevadas, the Colorado Rockies and the Cascades posing danger for flooding, mudslides and landslides.

In Huntsville, Utah, some people had to evacuate their homes on Sunday due to flooding of the Ogden River.

A portion of State Road 504 in Cowlitz County, Washington, was completely destroyed by a fast-moving mudslide off the Cascade Mountains.

Campgrounds at Yosemite National Park were closed starting on Monday over flooding threats as the snow continues to melt at a fast pace.

Heavy water flows from the Sierra Nevadas could be seen rushing into the park. The National Weather Service has issued a flood watch in the region until Friday.

Yosemite was forced to close in February after more than 15 feet of snow fell during a blizzard. Olympia, Washington, hit a record 92 degrees on Monday, surpassing the previous record of 85 degrees set in 1958.

Last month, storm runoff caused flooding of several agricultural fields in the San Joaquin Valley due to an overflowing Lake Tulare Basin.

But the major melt of the massive snowpack has yet to occur, according to the California Department of Resources.

The flooding is expected to be so severe that the National Weather Service has advised people in the region to avoid swimming in river water this summer, especially in the San Joaquin and Merced rivers.

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(ASHEVILLE, N.C.) — A girl abducted in Illinois in 2017 when she was 9 has been found safe in North Carolina.

Kayla Unbehaun, 15, was located by police in Asheville, North Carolina, after a store employee called the police after recognizing the teen’s mother, who allegedly abducted her daughter in 2017, according to the Asheville Police Department and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“It was the right thing to do,” the employee who said she called the police, told ABC News, requesting her identity and store not be published.

After investigating the kidnapping, officers consulted with the South Elgin Police Department to identify Heather Unbehaun, who kidnapped her daughter Kayla Unbehaun nearly six years ago, according to the Asheville Police Department.

“It is unusual, but it’s good that when someone does suspect that they recognize someone, no matter how old the story might be, that they are not afraid to give us a call so we can come to investigate,” Asheville Police Lt. Diana Loveland told ABC Asheville affiliate WLOS.

Her father, Ryan Iskerka, last saw then-9-year-old Kayla Unbehaun in 2017 after her mother, who did not have custody of the child, abducted Kayla Unbehaun on July 5, 2017, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“I’m overjoyed that Kayla is home safe,” Iskerka said in a statement shared by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “I want to thank @ElginPDFD, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and all of the law enforcement agencies who assisted with her case. We ask for privacy as we get to know each other again and navigate this new beginning.”

The case received attention in news reports and social media in the six years since the abduction. A photo of both Kayla and Heather Unbehaun was featured on an episode of Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” in an episode devoted to abductions by parents.

“When I found out you were gone, my heart was shattered into a million pieces….But there is nothing I want more than to have you back in my life,” Iskerka wrote in a public note on his daughter’s 12th birthday in 2020.

Heather Unbehaun was wanted in Illinois for child abduction, with an outstanding extradition warrant for her arrest. She is being held in the Buncombe County Detention Facility in North Carolina with a $250,000 bond, according to the Asheville Police Department.

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