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(AKRON, Ohio) — Jayland Walker’s sister wants the world to know him as she did: a funny, kind brother who looked out for his family and had big goals for his future of investing and buying a home.

“It’s hard to just talk about somebody who you expect to live your life out with,” Jada Walker told “Good Morning America.”

Jada opened up about her relationship with Jayland in her first interview since the body camera footage of his death was released. She said her brother always made time to reach out and connect with her and their mother. On Sundays — “family day,” as Jada calls it — they would get together.

“If it ain’t a movie, we just listening to new music,” she said. “We both have our own lives, but we always made sure to check in with each other.”

Watch the full exclusive interview with Jada Walker, the sister of Jayland Walker, on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, July 6, beginning at 7 a.m. ET.

Jayland Walker was unarmed when eight Ohio officers opened fire on him on June 27, fatally shooting him after a traffic stop turned into a pursuit.

Jada has yet to make sense of the events that unfolded, ending in her brother’s death. She has yet to look at the body camera footage of his death.

She says hearing sirens or seeing vehicles that look like Jayland’s silver Buick is triggering for her.

“I just want to know, what was the reason? Why you had to resort to him being gunned down in such a manner?” she said.

The release of body camera footage of his June 27 death has reopened wounds for Jada, who says she still doesn’t understand what went wrong.

“None of this is making sense to me,” Jada said.

Officers said they attempted to pull Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old Black man, over for a traffic and equipment violation when he refused. It turned into a car chase, as police continued to pursue Jayland Walker.

Officials said the muzzle flash of a gun came from the driver’s side of Jayland Walker’s car, while officers in another video said they heard at least one shot being fired from his car. The lawyer representing the Walkers, Bobby DiCello, said his team is looking into these claims.

“There’s no video of him pointing the weapon out the window or out the door, and there’s no bullet holes in the car,” DiCello told “GMA.” “The conversation about whether there was a shot needs to happen. We’re not sure that there was a shot.”

According to body camera footage, Jayland Walker slowed down and exited the vehicle from the passenger side door, running away from officers. He was killed by a barrage of dozens of bullets as he was running, DiCello said. In total, eight officers fired at him several dozen times, according to the attorney.

He was unarmed when he was fatally shot. Police say they recovered a handgun with a separate loaded magazine and what appears to be a gold ring left on the driver’s seat of Jayland Walker’s car.

DiCello also said a preliminary autopsy report that his team reviewed found that the gun was initially recovered in the backseat.

“I need to know how the gun got in the front seat,” he said. “All nicely presented with the ring in the car. The cartridge pulled out and the bullets there. This looks like a staged picture.”

In a later statement on Wednesday, the legal team of Walker’s family clarified, saying it has no reason to believe that the initial report from the Summit County Medical Examiner’s Office “conflicts with the ongoing BCI [Bureau of Criminal Investigation] investigation or prior statements of the chief of police or the city of Akron.”

The State Attorney General’s Office and the Akron Police Department did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment on this allegation or the incident.

DiCello said a lack of dashcam footage from police vehicles has left many of the early parts of the exchange unclear, including the initial attempt at a traffic stop. DiCello said that Akron police do not use dashcams on their vehicles.

“They’re trying to turn this wonderful young man into a monster,” he said. “They’re trying to turn him into someone that he wasn’t. They’re trying to give him motives, and an intent to harm officers that he didn’t have.”

Jada said she grieves not just for Jayland, but for other Black men who are victims of police violence.

“Many black men who have been killed and many families who experience this … it’s really hard,” she told “GMA.” “I’ve been saying to myself: in time, it’ll get better. Just looking forward to the future and hoping that we get the right answers and out of answers, just getting justice for him as my main priority.”

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(HIGHLAND PARK, Ill.) — The parents of a young child were two of the victims in the mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.

Irina McCarthy, 35, and Kevin McCarthy, 37, were among the seven people killed during Monday’s massacre, Highland Park city manager Ghida Neukrich told ABC News. The couple leaves behind their 2-year-old son, Aiden McCarthy, who was separated from his parents during the shooting. The toddler was later reunited with his grandparents, according to Neukrich.

Dana and Gregory Ring, who survived the shooting, told ABC News how another parade-goer handed the little boy to them in the chaos after the rampage, with his parents nowhere in sight.

“Every time I tried to ask him what his name was, the response he gave to me was, ‘Mama, Dada come get me soon. Mommy’s car come to get me soon,'” Dana Ring recalled in an interview that aired Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”

Unsure of what to do, the Rings took Aiden to a nearby fire station.

“When we pulled in, the cops looked like they were getting ready for war,” Gregory Ring recounted during the interview. “I’ll never forget. I pulled up and I said, ‘This is not our kid. It’s not his blood, he’s OK. What should we do?'” And the cop said, ‘We can’t be babysitters now. Can you take care of him?’ We said, ‘Of course.'”

About two to three hours later, a detective who had the Rings’ telephone number contacted them about Aiden.

“He took the little boy to where families were being reunited and then he told me he was eventually reunited with his grandparents,” Gregory Ring said.

The suspected gunman — identified by authorities as 21-year-old Robert “Bobby” Crimo III — was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder on Tuesday.

Crimo allegedly fired more than 70 rounds from a high-powered rifle, similar to an AR-15, into the crowd at Monday’s parade, authorities said. At least 38 people were injured in the shooting.

Five victims died at the scene of the massacre on Monday, while one died at the hospital. A seventh victim died on Tuesday, authorities said.

If convicted, Crimo faces up to life in prison without parole.

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(NEW YORK) — As the world scrambles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit future global warming, more attention has turned to one of the country’s oldest industries as one of the solutions – mining.

Today’s conversation around mining is about the minerals and metals that power almost all electronics, especially the critical batteries in our laptops, smartphones, and electric vehicles.

As the need for forms of energy that rely on batteries and electric vehicles grows, the world will need more and more materials like lithium to make enough batteries to keep up.

Reed Blakemore, deputy director of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, said the clean energy technology that helps fight climate change rely on a lot of minerals, metals, and other raw materials.

“What we like to typically say, is while we’re making this transition from an energy system that was based in hydrocarbons like oil and gas, that transition is actually moving towards a fairly mineral intensive future, one which is going to require significant amounts of cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, nickel, copper, a whole range of different materials that’ll make our climate goals happen,” Blakemore told ABC News.

President Joe Biden has taken steps to increase mining and processing of these “critical minerals” in the United States and even invoked the Defense Production Act to make more resources available for the government to support these projects.

But some Native American tribes and conservation groups say harming the environment through more mining is a step backward in the fight against climate change, and could create irreversible harm to ecosystems that need to be protected.

As the country pushes to expand this type of mining in the U.S., here’s a breakdown of what you need to know to follow this debate.

What are critical minerals?

Critical minerals are 50 minerals that the federal government considers critical to the U.S. economy or national security, identified by the U.S. Geological Survey every year.

The materials on the list are needed to produce weapons for the military, clean energy technology to combat climate change, or other uses like semiconductor chips that could significantly disrupt the economy in the event of a shortage.

The list includes materials needed to produce the rechargeable batteries that power electronics and electric vehicles, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

Why is this important?

The United Nations’ climate panel and experts from around the world say reducing greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions as rapidly as possible is the best way to prevent more damaging impacts from rising temperatures due to climate change.

One of the biggest ways to reduce emissions is to transition to forms of energy that don’t burn fossil fuels like solar, wind, and hydropower. It also means trying to get Americans to switch to electric vehicles powered by that cleaner energy.

But those clean energy technologies require a lot of new infrastructure, including increasing production of electric vehicles and the systems to charge them, and the world doesn’t currently have enough of the raw materials to meet the growing demand.

Why are we talking about these minerals now?

Critical minerals have been in the spotlight as the impacts of climate change become more severe but supply chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have brought new attention to questions about the global supply chain of these minerals.

The war in Ukraine has also added to concern that the majority of mining and processing for these minerals are controlled by countries that have a tense relationship with the U.S., especially China.

Abigail Wulf, director of the center for critical minerals strategy at an energy security group called SAFE, said there are multiple concerns about where production of these minerals are concentrated right now, especially in supplies controlled by countries like Russia or China.

“We have to talk about responsible mining because we want to make sure that the clean energy transition is actually clean. And we also want to make sure that we’re not beholden on on unreliable nations that do not share our values, whether that is supporting label labor rights, democracy, cleaning up the environment, and all of the above,” Wulf told ABC News.

Wulf said supply chains are concentrated in areas where it is cheaper to produce these minerals with less oversight, but that concentration also raises concern about the relationship between countries like China and the U.S.

“From the national security perspective, we will be completely beholden on a nation that is openly hostile to democracy for achieving those [climate] goals, and everything that you’re seeing going on within the European Union and how they are not able to make decisions in their country’s best interests because of their overreliance on Russian oil and gas will be replayed 10 times over when it comes to our minerals-based economy,” she said.

What are the consequences of this type of mining?

Minerals like lithium or cobalt occur naturally in our world, either underground or in high concentrations in groundwater, and the process of extracting them not only disturbs that land but can create waste that contaminate the nearby environment, disrupt ecosystems and watersheds, and require large amounts of energy to run.

“At the end of the day mining is land disturbance,” Wulf said.

“You’re going to be either digging a big hole or digging underground to retrieve the mineral materials that you’re going to need to process into the materials to put into your electric vehicle.”

But Wulf added that the amount of land being mined is relatively small in most places and can be done in ways that minimize the impact on the surrounding environment.

“When people think about mining for clean energy they need to think in terms of scale. When environmentalists who are worried about the climate crisis and that’s going to affect 100% of the planet. But when you’re talking about Mining you know that land disturbance in Nevada, for instance, is only, you know, 0.3% of the land in Nevada, which is our biggest mining state in the United States,” she said.

“So you know, if you’re talking about 0.3% of land disturbance versus 100% of the earth being affected, both terrestrial and marine environments being affected, then I think that you know groups should just think of this in terms of scale.”

Conservation advocacy groups have raised concerns about the impact to animal or plant species that could face threats from nearby mining operations and in some cases petitioned to block proposed new mines.

Native American tribes have also said that proposed mines would permanently damage the land and sites that hold a sacred place in their culture. According to one analysis, 95% of critical mineral reserves in the US are within 35 miles of a tribal reservation.

Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel for the advocacy group Earthworks, told ABC News the laws that govern this kind of mining are woefully outdated, which will make it harder to ensure mines don’t cause permanent damage to cultural sites and the environment.

“We are facing an existential climate crisis and the solution to do that is to avoid emitting fossil fuels, moving away from fossil fuels. So as we transition from fossil fuels, we have to avoid repeating the mistakes of that fossil fuel industry by sourcing all of our materials irresponsibly,” Mintzes told ABC News.

“The way that we do that is through improving recycling, substitution, and sourcing materials through updated rules and regulations.”

The Biden administration created an interagency working group earlier this year to propose ways to update laws around hardrock mining, which includes many critical minerals. The group is expected to release recommendations later this year.

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(UVALDE, Texas) — There were several missed opportunities to stop the massacre at Robb Elementary School before it started, a new assessment of the law enforcement response to the Uvalde shooting released Wednesday said, while also providing some new details.

A Uvalde police officer was at the scene where the suspect, Salvador Ramos, had crashed his car. The officer had a rifle and sighted to shoot the gunman but paused to seek permission.

“The UPD officer did not hear a response and turned to get confirmation from his supervisor. When he turned back to address the suspect, the suspect had already entered the west hall exterior door at 11:33:00,” according to the assessment from Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training.

“In this instance, the UPD officer would have heard gunshots and/or reports of gunshots and observed an individual approaching the school building armed with a rifle,” said the assessment. “A reasonable officer would conclude in this case, based upon the totality of the circumstances, that use of deadly force was warranted.”

Thirty-two seconds after he entered the school, Ramos entered classroom 111, according to the assessment.

“Immediately, children’s screams could be heard along with numerous gunshots in the classrooms. The rate of fire was initially very rapid then slowed, lasting only a few seconds,” the assessment said.

Five seconds later, the suspect exited the classroom, stepped into the hallway and then reentered room 111.

“The suspect then re-enters what appears to be classroom 111 and continues to fire what is estimated to be over 100 rounds by 11:36:04 (according to audio analysis). During the shooting the sounds of children screaming, and crying, could be heard,” the assessment said.

Twenty-one people, including 19 children, were killed in the attack.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — Seventy-eight million Americans across 18 states will face dangerous heat and severe weather throughout the end of the week.

The National Weather Service reports that temperatures ranging from the upper 90s to the low 100s are expected across Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, eastern Tennessee and Arkansas on Wednesday and Thursday.

There have been more than 250 damaging storm reports from Montana to South Carolina, including three tornadoes in Virginia, Maryland and Colorado, according to the NWS.

In South Dakota, winds have neared 100 miles per hour, coupled with softball-sized hail.

Heavy rain in Minnesota contributed to flash flooding on Tuesday night near Albert Lee, where cars have been reported to be submerged in floodwaters. Local rains reached 2 to 4 inches in a matter of hours.

Washington, D.C., is under a flood watch, which has also been enacted in Ohio, West Virginia and Indiana. A flood warning has been enacted in Fort Wayne, in particular.

Washington, D.C., is also projected to have a heat index of 100 degrees on Wednesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, two regions are marked by severe weather, one from Indiana to North Carolina, including Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Raleigh.

The biggest threat to the region are damaging winds that could reach 70 miles per hour.

Severe weather will also mark Montana, where damaging winds and large hail is expected to increase.

Dangerous heat will continue to rise from Texas to Ohio and Virginia, where heat alerts have been issued.

Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis and Louisville are expected to have indexes into the 110s on Wednesday. Excessive heat warnings have been issued in those areas.

Record or near record highs are expected throughout the South into the weekend.

The NWS warns that such heat across the country will most impact vulnerable populations, particularly those aged 65 and older, infants and children, those with chronic health conditions, those with low income, athletes and outdoor workers.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, it is essential for people in these groups to drink plenty of fluids and seek cool shelter when possible.

Specifically for infants and children, hot cars pose a great risk to health. To learn more about keeping your child safe in a hot car, read here.

For hot weather tips from the CDC, read here.

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