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(NEW YORK) — The woman accused of fatally pushing an 87-year-old woman on a New York City street was indicted on a manslaughter charge and ordered held without bail on Tuesday.

Lauren Pazienza, 26, pleaded not guilty in New York State Supreme Court to charges stemming from the March 10 attack, including one count of first-degree manslaughter and two counts of second-degree assault. She was remanded into custody, with the judge citing a recent bail reform change that allows judges to consider the seriousness of harm caused, according to New York ABC station WABC.

Prosecutors allege that on the evening of March 10, Pazienza crossed the street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and “shouted obscenities” at the victim, Barbara Maier Gustern, a well-known and beloved member of the city’s cabaret scene and a vocal coach. Pazienza then “intentionally shoved her to the ground,” prosecutors allege.

Gustern hit her head on the ground, causing a hemorrhage to the left side of her brain, and died five days later in the hospital after she was removed from life support, according to prosecutors.

“This was a senseless and unprovoked attack,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., said in a statement. “Barbara Gustern was a beloved vocal coach who lived a vibrant and active life at the age of 87, and her loss was felt deeply by many throughout the city.”

Prosecutors allege Pazienza “went to great lengths to avoid accountability for her actions,” including leaving the scene as Gustern lay bleeding on the ground. The suspect stayed in the area for about 20 minutes, during which time video footage showed her have a “physical altercation” with her fiance and watch the ambulance arrive, before they headed back to their apartment in Astoria, Queens, according to prosecutors.

Following the incident, Pazienza deleted her social media accounts, took down her wedding website and “eventually fled to Long Island to stay with family,” according to prosecutors.

Pazienza allegedly admitted to her fiance that she pushed Gustern, prosecutors said. She turned herself in to police on March 22, nearly two weeks after the incident, and was arrested on manslaughter and assault charges. She was initially released on $500,000 cash bail.

A motive for the attack remains unclear.

Following her arrest, her attorney called the victim’s death a “tragedy.”

“We’re just going to get to the bottom of what really happened that day after we have all the evidence that’s in possession of the prosecutors because we don’t have any evidence,” her attorney, Arthur Aidala, said in a statement at the time.

Pazienza is next due in court on July 26.

ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

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(ATLANTA) — Gun homicides increased 35% across the country during the pandemic to the highest level in 25 years, according to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Unfortunately I am not surprised,” Debra Houry, acting principal deputy director of CDC and director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told ABC News, “but it is heartbreaking.”

Firearm murders increased most markedly among youth and young adults — 40% for those 10 to 24, the CDC data shows. The increases were also highest for people of color: rates of gun homicide involving Black males aged 10 to 24 years — which were already 21-times has high as white males of the same age — increased further still in 2020.

The study suggests that the rise in violence could be attributed to the social and economic pressures stemming from the pandemic that reinforced “longstanding” inequities between communities.

The report also found that while the increase in firearm suicides was less than firearm homicides, the sheer number of suicides involving guns continued to outpace homicides. There were 24,245 suicides involving firearms in 2020, the report found, compared to 19,350 firearm homicides.

“These stats have devastating effects on families, schools, and entire communities, and have lasting consequences on us as individuals and as a society,” Thomas Simon, associate director for science at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

“Our reports contain statistics and numbers, but it’s also important to reflect on the individual lives lost,” he added, “and even one homicide or suicide is too many.”

The new CDC data confirms trends identified by ABC News as it studied data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive over the past year. It also builds upon other research demonstrating rising rates of gun purchasing and gun violence during the pandemic.

Guns remained available for purchase throughout the pandemic — even during intermittent stay-at-home orders — due to exemptions designating firearm retailers (and shooting ranges) as “essential businesses” in all but four states. A December study found that 7.5 million Americans became new gun owners during the pandemic — 5 million of whom lived in a household that previously hadn’t had guns.

The purchasing patterns aren’t showing any sign of letting up, either. The FBI has conducted over 10 million firearm background checks — which are frequently used as a proxy for purchases —  in 2022 through April.

Gun violence has picked up alongside the increase in purchases, other studies found. According to an October study, gun violence increased in 28 states during the pandemic; another found that firearm incidents increased 15% — and non-fatal firearm injuries increased 34% — during the pandemic.

The youngest Americans have, increasingly, been collateral damage of this violence. Firearm deaths in children between 1 and 4 years old have increased 5% annually since 1999. And in the first six months of the pandemic, the risk of firearm injuries in children less than 12 years was 90% higher than in the pre-pandemic period.

Monika Goyal, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., called the statistics “sobering” — adding that they reinforce what she’s been seeing clinically: that children are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs.

The pandemic uptick in firearm purchasing, violence and homicide has been attributed in part, to intensifying economic pressures like unemployment, housing insecurity and childcare.

“Longstanding systemic inequities and structural racism have resulted in limited economic, housing, and educational opportunities associated with inequities in risk for violence,” the authors of the new CDC study wrote, “the COVID-19 pandemic might have exacerbated existing social and economic stressors.”

Social factors like decreases in mutual aid, pausing in-person harm-reduction initiatives and political unrest may have also fueled these patterns, researchers say.

“Stay-at-home orders and physical distancing likely increased the guardianship people had over their homes and property,” the authors of a February report wrote, which could “help explain the observed relationship with violence” and the fact that “interpersonal interactions — despite happening with lesser frequency during the pandemic — may have been increasingly violence-prone.”

According to Houry, policy changes to halt the worrisome and worsening trends in gun violence are urgently necessary.

“[Gun] violence is not inevitable,” she told ABC News, “it’s preventable.”

The authors of the CDC offered various recommendations to that end, which included expanded welfare policies, empowering community-based harm reduction efforts, and promoting strategies for urban renewal among other initiatives.

“The findings of this study underscore the importance of comprehensive strategies that can stop violence,” they wrote. “Now and in the future.”

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(PALO ALTO, Calif.) — A hate crimes investigation has been launched at Stanford University after a noose was found hanging in a tree outside a student residence hall, officials said.

It was the third time in four years that a noose has been discovered on the Palo Alto, California, campus, and the second since November, according to university officials.

Susie Brubaker-Cole, the school’s vice provost for student affairs, and Patrick Dunkley, vice provost for institutional equity, access and community, issued a joint statement condemning the act.

“We cannot state strongly enough that a noose is a reprehensible symbol of anti-Black racism and violence that will not be tolerated on our campus. As a community, we must stand united against such conduct and those who perpetrate it,” Brubaker-Cole and Dunkley wrote in their statement to The Stanford Daily student newspaper.

The noose was discovered at about 7:45 p.m. Sunday hanging on a tree outside Branner Hall, an undergraduate residence hall, and was reported to the university’s Department of Public Safety, school officials said.

Campus police immediately launched a hate crimes investigation that included interviewing maintenance staff, students and school staff in an effort to narrow down the time frame for the incident and identify a suspect or suspects, according to a statement on the Stanford’s Protected Identity Harm Reporting website.

It was not immediately clear if any campus security video captured the culprit hanging the noose.

Brubaker-Cole and Dunkley thanked the people who saw the noose and reported it to the campus police.

“We are sharing this message with the full university community so that everyone is informed and we can move forward as one committed to ending anti-Black racism,” Brubaker-Cole and Dunkley said in their statement.

It was the second noose found on the campus in six months. On Nov. 29, a student reported seeing two long cords that appeared to be fashioned into a noose hanging from a tree along a campus walking trail. Campus police investigated the incident but could not determine if the cords were deliberately fashioned into a noose or were part of an abandoned swing or rope ladder, according to school officials.

In July 2019, campus police investigated the discovery of a noose near a residence for summer students.

No arrests have been made in any of the incidents.

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(NEW YORK) — Between March 2020 and February 2022, vaccine-maker Emergent BioSolutions was forced to discard or destroy up to 400 million coronavirus vaccine doses due to the contamination of ingredients, according to a congressional report published Tuesday — a figure that reflects more than five times what was previously disclosed by the beleaguered firm.

Congressional investigators probing the Maryland-based biotech company found that Emergent executives had privately raised urgent quality-control concerns even before the company began manufacturing the vaccines’ key ingredient — despite publicly expressing confidence in their ability to deliver on their multimillion-dollar government contract.

Meanwhile, according to the report, Emergent lab workers intentionally sought to mislead government inspectors about issues at its Bayview, Maryland, plant, and repeatedly “rebuffed” efforts by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson to inspect their facilities.

“Despite major red flags at its vaccine manufacturing facility, Emergent’s executives swept these problems under the rug and continued to rake in taxpayer dollars,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said of the report, which determined that the company’s “manufacturing failures and deceptive tactics” led to the largescale waste of ingredients that could have helped make millions of vaccine doses.

None of the compromised batches of the ingredient in question made it into finished vaccine doses released from Emergent’s plant, the committees said.

An Emergent spokesperson said the firm learned of the congressional report from news outlets who reached out seeking comment, and did not address a list of detailed questions from ABC News.

“Emergent has been open and forthcoming with the FDA, Congress and our partners about the work at our Bayview site and the challenges that were encountered, including providing thousands of documents, willingly participating in a congressional hearing and inviting them to visit our facilities,” the spokesperson said.

Tuesday’s joint report from the House Oversight Committee and the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis aggregates the findings of their yearlong probe into Emergent’s quality control issues. As part of their efforts, committee investigators secured internal Emergent emails and interviewed several key witnesses, including senior officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Emergent landed a $628 million contract from the Food and Drug Administration in June 2020 to help develop Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines at its Bayview facility as part of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s rapid vaccine development program.

But according to the committees’ report, issues at Bayview arose even before the firm secured its vaccine-development deal. In a flurry of internal emails during the spring of 2020, executives and managers expressed a growing concern with the firm’s response to an April 2020 FDA audit that identified troubling safety deficiencies.

Sean Kirk, at the time an Emergent executive, wrote in a June 2020 email to a quality-control manager that the situation was “deeply concerning” and demanded that he “fix this.” In email correspondence with another colleague that same day, Kirk wrote that “room for improvement” in the Bayview plant’s quality control systems “is a huge understatement.”

Outwardly, however, the firm claimed its longstanding relationship with U.S. government agencies — which included multiple contracts to develop anthrax vaccines — was evidence of its competence. But internally, said the report, alarm bells continued to sound — and anxiety over Bayview’s readiness grew.

“Of all the things we have to deliver on [Operation Warp Speed], the thing that keeps me up at night is overall perception of state of quality systems at bayview [sic],” Kirk wrote to Emergent CEO Robert Kramer in late June 2020.

The drumbeat of concern over quality control at Bayview reached a fever pitch in the fall of 2020, as internal memos ahead of a September 2020 FDA inspection indicated that executives were fully aware of gaps in quality control measures for months after vaccine development began, according to the congressional report.

“We are not in full compliance yet — BUT — we are making [vaccine] batches NOW,” Emergent’s senior director of quality wrote in an internal email, according to the report. “Our risk is high!”

In November 2020, according to an email obtained by the committees, a consultant with an outside firm warned the company that “ultimately Emergent will have to decide what level of risk they are willing to accept, but this is one of those where you really better listen to me and do exactly what I tell you to.”

“I am stating very loudly that this work is NON-compliant,” the consultant said. “And a direct regulatory risk.”

AstraZeneca representatives who visited Bayview in November 2020 complained that “a lack of fundamentals [was] contributing to bioburden issue,” and that “poor cleaning was part of the root cause” of the persistent contaminations, per the report.

Emergent executives acknowledged in internal emails that, in its rush to ramp up production, it hired temporary employees with “little or no pharmaceutical experience,” and described trash “piling up” in its facilities, said the report. FDA leaders told the committees that Emergent “hired a lot of individuals not as familiar with vaccine manufacturing, that did not have adequate training to do so” — a message it conveyed directly to Emergent as early as April 2020.

The committee found that despite these red flags, Emergent “did not remediate the issues, and problems persisted at the [Bayview] facility for months.” And from late 2020 to early 2021, the committee wrote, a series of contaminations at Bayview led to the disposal of enough vaccine drug ingredients to produce 240 million doses.

“The investigation has revealed that the impact of these issues is larger than previously known,” the committee said in its report, “with more incidents of contamination and millions more vaccines [ingredients] destroyed than previously revealed by Emergent.”

In February 2021, under pressure from manufacturers to tighten up quality controls, Emergent apparently “rebuffed multiple requests from Johnson & Johnson’s quality staff to access Bayview,” the committee wrote. Around the same time, the committee found that Bayview lab workers sought to hide the extent of their failures prior to an FDA site visit.

According to an email written by one of Emergent’s external consultants and obtained by the committees, Emergent employees removed quality-assurance “hold tags” from two batches of Johnson & Johnson vaccine drug ingredients just one hour before FDA inspectors began their tour of the facility. The “hold tags” were bright yellow and indicated that those batches may have quality issues.

“Since the tags were deemed necessary before and after the FDA’s visit, it is my understanding, based on the entirety of what I observed and was told, that the purpose of removing the QA [quality assurance] hold tags was to avoid drawing attention to the two subject containers during the tour by the FDA inspectors,” the consultant wrote.

In their report, the committees indicated that senior leaders at Emergent were aware of the removal of the tags, and that the incident amounted to an “apparent attempt to impede oversight.” The FDA inspectors “still identified serious concerns” during their visit to the site in February 2021, but did not halt production at the facility until April 2021, after Emergent alerted the Biden administration to its cross-contamination incidents.

Dr. Peter Marks, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, told the committees in a briefing that FDA leaders and inspectors bore some responsibility for the extent of leniency they granted Emergent.

“Shame on us for thinking that [Emergent’s] experience in manufacturing would mean they would be able to move ahead and make the vaccines in a high-quality manner that we would expect for an experienced vaccine manufacturer,” Marks told committee members, according to the report.

In May 2021, during a hearing before the Congress, Emergent executives said the company hoped to resume production of the vaccines “in the coming days.” According to the committees, that didn’t happen; three months passed before regulators allowed Emergent to resume vaccine manufacturing in August 2021. But even then, the problems persisted.

From August 2021 to February 2022, the committee found that Emergent manufactured 15 new batches of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, six of which — the equivalent of 90 million vaccine doses — “were either aborted or rejected by Johnson & Johnson.”

All told, Emergent was forced to discard or destroy up to 400 million doses’ worth of the ingredient that helps make the coronavirus vaccine. Company executives had previously pegged the number at 75 million.

In November 2021, the Biden administration canceled Emergent’s contract to continue developing vaccines, which at the time would have paid the company an estimated additional $320 million.

But the real victims, according to the committees, are those who would have benefited from the 400 million doses that failed to materialize.

“Emergent’s failures wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and impacted our country’s ability to meet the urgent, global need for coronavirus vaccines,” the report concludes.

The Emergent spokesperson told ABC News that the company “remains committed to being a trusted partner of the U.S. and allied governments … [and] will continue to use our more than 20 years of public health preparedness experience to help inform an all-of-the-above approach to help prepare for the public health challenges to come.”

On Feb. 7 of this year, Emergent told the committees that its Bayview plant was entering a “maintenance shutdown period.” The company said it hopes to resume manufacturing in August 2022.

Emergent still maintains a federal contract to develop anthrax vaccines.

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