(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court has rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham’s wholesale bid to block a subpoena for testimony before a Georgia grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn 2020 election results in that state.
An unsigned statement appended to the order, however, made clear that Graham does not need to answer questions about conduct protected by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The 2022 campaign is shaping up to be a historic, decisive moment in American politics.
From our reporters across the country, ABC News brings you all the latest on what the candidates are saying and doing — and what voters want to happen in November’s midterm elections.
For more from ABC News’ team of reporters embedded in battleground states, watch “Power Trip: Those Seeking Power and Those Who Chase Them” on Hulu , with new episodes on Sunday.
Here is the latest from the campaign trail. All times Eastern.
Nov 01, 12:44 PM EDT
Arizona Libertarian Senate candidate drops out of race, throws support to GOP nominee Blake Masters
Arizona’s Libertarian Senate candidate Marc Victor dropped out of the race on Tuesday, putting his support behind Blake Masters, the Republican nominee.
His move, made a week ahead of Election Day, gives Trump-backed Masters a further boost as Victor’s candidacy was forecasted to split off some of the Republican vote in the race to unseat incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly.
Victor told ABC News in a written statement Tuesday that Blake Masters approached him, agreeing to the Libertarian’s offer to both his opponents on “why it was in the interests of freedom, peace, and civility for me to step down and endorse either of them.” Their taped conversation “impressed” the Libertarian, Victor said, prompting him to drop out.
“I publicly offered to meet with either Mark Kelly or Blake Masters to have an unscripted discussion about why it was in the interests of freedom, peace, and civility for me to step down and endorse either of them,” Victor told ABC News.
“Blake Masters availed himself of that opportunity yesterday, and we had a public conversation where I asked him whatever I wanted. I was impressed with Blake Masters and his commitment to being a Live and Let Live Senator from Arizona,” Victor told ABC.
In the [,]() Victor said this decision to drop out one week before Election Day will make some people “very upset” and others “very happy.”
Masters responded to the new support in a campaign press release.
“Marc Victor joins a growing list of Arizonans from across the political spectrum who are fed up with open borders, big government corruption, and rising crime. We are building a broad coalition to defeat the worst Senator in America. This is another major boost of momentum as we consolidate our support against the extreme and radical policies of Mark Kelly and Joe Biden. Live and Let Live,” Masters said.
Victor will still be on the ballot, but any votes cast for him will not be tabulated, according to a spokesperson at the secretary of state’s office.
(WASHINGTON) — Chief Justice John Roberts has granted a temporary administrative stay of a lower court order as the House Ways and Means Committee attempts to gain access to former President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
The ruling prevents the committee from accessing Trump’s tax returns as the court considers a final decision.
Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to block the House Ways and Means Committee from accessing his tax returns.
The committee has requested six years’ worth of Trump’s returns as part of an investigation into IRS audit practices of presidents and vice presidents.
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Trump accused the committee of seeking his taxes under false pretenses.
“The Committee’s purpose in requesting President Trump’s tax returns has nothing to do with funding or staffing issues at the IRS and everything to do with releasing the President’s tax information to the public,” the petition said.
A federal appeals court ruled in August that tax returns should be handed over to the House committee. The committee first sought the returns in 2019.
Trump most recently failed to block the request on Thursday when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down his request to reconsider a unanimous opinion from one of its three-judge panels approving the committee’s access to the documents.
While Trump’s team claims the panel’s bid to obtain the tax returns is purely political, the committee insists the documents are valuable to assess how the Internal Revenue Service performs. presidential audits.
“The law has always been on our side,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement after Thursday’s ruling. “Former President Trump has tried to delay the inevitable, but once again, the Court has affirmed the strength of our position. We’ve waited long enough—we must begin our oversight of the IRS’s mandatory presidential audit program as soon as possible.”
At the heart of the dispute is a federal tax law mandating that the Treasury Department “shall furnish” tax information requested by the Ways and Means Committee, a law Trump’s lawyers suggest is unconstitutional.
Democrats have been clamoring to get a glimpse of Trump’s tax returns since 2015 when he launched his bid for president and broke decades of precedent by not releasing the documents.
Besides having his personal tax returns sought after, Trump is also facing pressure by criminal probes into his personal business, possession of government documents after leaving office and efforts to block the certification of the 2020 election results.
(NEW YORK) — Midterm election results may come down to the price of a gallon of gas.
Roughly half of Americans say either the economy or inflation is the most important issue in their vote for Congress, making bread-and-butter financial issues by far the most dominant in the lead-up to the midterm elections, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.
Meanwhile, research has established a relationship between gas prices and presidential approval ratings that reaches back decades, despite the limited control that presidents exert over fuel costs, experts told ABC News. Presidential approval ratings, in turn, mark a key indicator of midterm success or failure for the party in control of the White House, they said.
After reaching a summer peak, gas prices declined for about 100 consecutive days, buoying Biden’s approval rating. But a price spike in early October weighed on his approval.
Over the last few weeks, prices have returned to a steady decline – though they remain elevated – leaving an open question about whether consumers will recognize the trend and reward the Democrats or punish them for too little, too late.
“Swing voters will be deciding as they’re literally walking into the voting booth,” Colin McAuliffe, co-founder of left-leaning research firm Data for Progress, told ABC News.
The ubiquity of gas prices emblazoned on towering roadside signs can affect the financial attitude of those who do not even purchase gas. For those who do, filling up the tank offers a few minutes of repose with little to do but watch the price slowly add up, the experts said.
“People know their grocery bill has gone up but they can’t say necessarily how much the price of meat versus milk versus cereal has changed,” Laurel Harbridge-Yong, a professor of political science at Northwestern University who has studied the political implications of gas prices, told ABC News. “Gas is a very visible item and an item you buy one at a time, without bundling it with others.”
In 2016, a study in the academic journal Political Psychology examined the relationship between gas prices and presidential approval rating between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s, finding that elevated gas prices drove a president’s approval downward. To be exact, each 10-cent increase in the gas price was associated with more than half a percentage point decline in presidential approval, the research showed.
Further, the researchers studied press coverage of the gas prices, finding that the effect on presidential approval occurred regardless of how much attention the prices got. On that score, gas prices contrast with other economic indicators, like the unemployment rate or overall inflation, which typically require media coverage that gives voters a sense of the trend, said Harbridge-Yong, one of the researchers who conducted the study.
McAuliffe, of Data for Progress, has established more recent findings, demonstrating a correlation between gas prices and presidential approval during Biden’s time in office stretching to as recently as August. “The correlation has held up pretty strongly,” he said.
The continued salience of gas prices amid inflation under Biden comes as no surprise to Jon Krosnick, a professor of political science at Stanford University who co-authored the 2016 study. “When we see gas prices go up as much as they have gone up, clearly there are implications,” he said.
Despite the relationship between gas prices and presidential approval rating, presidents exert little control over fuel costs, leaving them largely powerless to address perceptions of their performance in this area, experts said.
The U.S. is set to produce an average of 11.8 million barrels oil per day in 2022, which stands 500,000 barrels short of a record set in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But oil prices are set on a global market, where supply shortages caused by the Russia-Ukraine War and OPEC+ output cuts cannot be offset by a comparable short-term increase in U.S. oil output.
Typically, gas prices drop ahead of midterm elections, since the Fall brings a decline in demand as Americans scale back from summer travel, said Patrick De Haan, an oil and gas analyst for GasBuddy. In recent weeks, the drop has also stemmed from the repair of damage at a string of oil refineries, which brought them back online and increased overall output, he added.
“It’s normal for prices to go down this time of year,” De haan told ABC News. “It’s not political.”
The price relief may have arrived too late for voters to notice, said Krosnick, of Stanford University.
“There’s not a lot of time between now and election day,” he said. “Obviously any change in gasoline prices has to take place and be detected by the public.”
Biden highlighted the issue on Monday, threatening oil and gas companies with higher taxes if they do not relieve a supply shortage with increased output. Many of the major oil producers have reported recorded profits in recent quarters.
On election day, gas prices will play an unmistakable role in the outcome, Krosnick said.
“People bring to the table a mix of issues. You can think of it as making a complicated soup with lots of ingredients that play a part,” he said. “Gas prices clearly are a part of the soup.”
(NEW YORK) — New research is shedding light on just how much higher proportions of dangerous toxins people in minority communities are breathing in.
Populations in racially segregated communities in the U.S. may be more likely to be exposed to a form of air pollution, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.
Researchers combined air pollution monitoring and American Community Survey data from 2014 to 2019 to assess air pollution exposure across the U.S. and found that communities with a high degree of racial residential segregation are exposed to concentrations of total fine particulate matter that are two times higher. Concentrations of metals from anthropogenic sources are over 10 times higher when compared to communities with a low degree of racial residential segregation, John Kodros, who authored the study as a research scientist at Colorado State University, told ABC News.
The research also suggests these communities were exposed to an even more toxic form of air pollution, with a three times higher mass proportion of known toxic and carcinogenic metals — including lead, nickel and chromium.
“What this is showing, is that communities across the United States are not exposed to the same mixture of particulate air pollution,” Kodros said.
While scientists have long proven that residents in impoverished and minority communities are suffering greater environmental detriments than other populations, little was previously known about the distribution of exposure among racially segregated communities to specific toxic chemical elements contained in particulate matter, the researchers said.
There has been “extensive research” looking at the disparities of total fine particulate matter across lines of racial and ethnic demographics, Kodros said. The new findings illustrate the disproportionate burden of air pollution faced by some populations, according to the study.
“Even normalizing by total air pollution, the concentrations of these metals are much higher in content in more racially segregated communities compared to well integrated communities,” Kodros said.
Segregation has “been systematic in the history of our country,” Kodros added.
“Often when areas are building a road or a factory, it goes into a certain part of the city,” Kodros said. “Putting in that factory or that highway often ends up in areas that are more racially segregated and in the communities of color.”
This leads to emissions from the factories and roads occurring at different rates based on segregation and race and ethnicity, Kodros said.
The researchers found evidence that disproportionate exposure could be reduced through regulatory action, including recent regulations on marine oil that have reduced concentrations of vanadium and lessened the pollution risk faced by racially segregated communities
The scientists hope the research helps to inform regulations to reduce air pollution exposure.
Policymakers also need to consider targeted regulations to reduce emissions through a lens of environmental justice, as opposed to just trying to reduce emissions everywhere, Kodros said.
“We need to really think about reducing emissions in communities that are not often well representative at the table,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Family members of the 17 students and staff killed in the Parkland high school massacre are addressing gunman Nikolas Cruz in victim impact statements in court on Tuesday before Cruz is formally sentenced to life in prison.
Last month, a Florida jury rejected prosecutors’ appeals for the death penalty, reaching a verdict on life in prison for the 2018 mass shooting Cruz committed at age 19 at South Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Many victims’ parents were outraged by the verdict, arguing that sparing Cruz the death penalty may send a bad message to future school shooters.
The jury’s decision needed to be unanimous to sentence Cruz to death.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Nov 01, 11:02 AM EDT
Victim’s sister calls Cruz ‘remorseless monster’
Meghan Petty, sister of 14-year-old victim Alaina Petty, said she feels “betrayed by our justice system” with the jury rejecting the death penalty, and feels vulnerable sharing her pain with the public.
Alaina was shot multiple times, including through the heart, she said. Alaina died scared on a classroom floor, trying to hide behind a desk, she said.
“This entire ordeal has pushed me to my emotional, physical and mental limits. It will continue to do so for the rest of my life, even more so now that he has escaped being punished to the fullest extent of the law,” Petty said.
She called Nikolas Cruz a “remorseless monster who deserves no mercy.”
“This incredible darkness that he has within him — which has been labeled here as mental illness — is something that should be considered unacceptable and intolerable,” Petty said. But she said his life sentence sends the message to future shooters that “if one stretches the truth, they can get away with not only murder, but mass murder.”
“What we’ve been told here is 17 lives are worth nothing if you can make enough excuses for your actions,” she said.
Petty noted that she and Cruz are the same age.
“I could sit here and complain, as he has, that I’ve had a hard life. I was bullied in school. I’ve lost 15 family members and loved ones since I turned 9 to sickness, suicide, accident and now murder. Not once have I turned to ever hurting others … because I’m not a coward and I’m not weak,” she said.
“I will never get to say goodbye to her,” she said of her sister. “She’s never going to go to college, get a job, get married … or even breathe again. But he’ll be able to draw breath.”
Nov 01, 10:40 AM EDT
Victim’s daughter-in-law calls Cruz a domestic terrorist
On the day of the shooting, Ines Hixon, daughter-in-law of slain coach Chris Hixon, was deployed on a U.S. aircraft carrier off the coast of Iran.
“He would’ve given the shirt off his back. He was a courageous, loving and wonderful man. And I never got the chance to tell him that,” she said through tears.
“As a service member, I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. And to the defendant, that’s exactly what I view you as — a domestic terrorist,” Ines Hixon said. “I wish no peace for you. I wish nothing but pain. And I hope that every breath you take, you remember that’s a breath you stole.”
After Ines Hixon spoke, Judge Elizabeth Scherer called her a “hero,” adding that her “beautiful family” has “made such an impression on this court.”
“I thank you for your service and bravery,” the judge added.
Nov 01, 10:22 AM EDT
Mom to Cruz: ‘Your living hell is about to get started’
Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin, was among the victims, said in an impassioned statement, if this case “doesn’t deserve the death penalty, what does?”
“You had in your head enjoyment,” she said directly to Nikolas Cruz. “Listen to me, defendant — enjoyment while killing my son, Joaquin Oliver, and coming back to him to blow his brain out.”
“Your living hell is about to get started,” she said. “Joaquin is a legend for what he is and for what he will be. Nice,
Nov 01, 10:06 AM EDT
Parents of injured teen say he’s still recovering
Bree Wikander was overcome with emotion as she spoke on behalf of her son, Ben, who was shot three times, including in the back. Ben was 17 at the time and suffered extensive injuries.
“One of Ben’s trauma surgeons … once said to us, Ben sustained injuries similar to what a soldier would in combat,” she said.
“To this day he is still recovering,” Bree Wikander said. “You will never understand the pain that he has gone through. His life and the lives of our entire family have changed forever both physically and mentally.”
Ben’s father, Eric Wikander, said he hopes Cruz has a “painful existence” in prison, adding that it would still be “a fraction of what Ben endured.”
Nov 01, 9:51 AM EDT
Victim’s grandma tells Cruz to ‘burn in hell’
Terri Rabinovitz, grandmother of 14-year-old victim Alyssa Alhadeff, said Florida’s Supreme Court should reexamine the law that requires a jury’s decision be unanimous for the death penalty.
“I’m too old to see you live out your life sentence, but I hope your every breathing moment here on earth is miserable and you repent for your sins, Nikolas, and burn in hell,” she said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has called on the state legislature to change the death sentencing rules in the wake of the Cruz verdict.
Nov 01, 9:35 AM EDT
‘You did not receive the justice that you deserve’
Debbie Hixon, wife of Chris Hixon, a 49-year-old coach killed in the school shooting, addressed Nikolas Cruz directly on Tuesday morning.
She said her husband “was stolen from us by an unimaginable act that you planned and executed.”
“You did not receive the justice that you deserve,” she said. “You were given a gift — a gift of grace and mercy. Something you did not show to any of your victims. I wish nothing for you today. After today I don’t care what happens to you … you’ll be a number.”
“Today we close this chapter,” Hixon continued.
She said she’ll choose to remember all of the positive memories of her husband, instead of the “darkness.”
Nov 01, 7:03 AM EDT
Outraged parents: ‘This jury failed our families’
Hours after the sentence was announced on Oct. 13, Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin, was among the victims, told ABC News Live he had hoped for the death penalty.
“Even the death penalty was not enough for me,” he said. “The way that Joaquin died … the amount of suffering and pain, the shooter will have never received that punishment.”
His wife, Patricia Oliver, told ABC News she feels enraged by the jury’s decision, and said her son did not get justice.
To jurors who voted against the death penalty, she said, “They have to live with that in their conscience. Life is about karma. They will remember what they did when the time comes.”
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the massacre, said he was “stunned” by the verdict.
“I could not be more disappointed,” he told reporters on Oct. 13. “I don’t know how this jury came to the conclusions that they did.”
“This decision today only makes it more likely that the next mass shooting will be attempted,” he said.
Guttenberg said he thinks the next mass shooter is planning his attack now, and “that person now believes that they can get away with it.”
“There are 17 victims that did not receive justice today,” Guttenberg said. “This jury failed our families today. But I will tell you: The monster is gonna go to prison, and in prison, I hope and pray, he receives the kind of mercy from prisoners that he showed to my daughter and the 16 others. … He will die in prison, and I will be waiting to read that news on that.”
Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The amount of time women will have to travel to receive an abortion has quadrupled from about half an hour to nearly two hours since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade this summer, a new study finds.
The decision — known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — determined that there is no constitutional right to an abortion and gave individual states full power to regulate abortion.
Researchers from several institutions, including the University of California, San Francisco; Boston Children’s Hospital; Boston University; and Harvard University looked at how far women lived from an abortion clinic while Roe was still in effect — from January 2021 to December 2021 — compared with how far women lived post-Dobbs.
Of the at least 749 abortion clinics that were operating pre-Dobbs, the team determined that women lived an estimated 27.8 minutes.
However, post-Dobbs, several abortion facilities in states with either total or six-week abortion bans closed, leaving 671 open.
The team found that women now lived an average of 100.4 minutes from a facility, which could equate to living hundreds of miles away.
Results showed there were racial/ethnic disparities. Black, Hispanic, and American Indian women who had to travel 60 minutes or more increased disproportionately by almost 25%.
The authors note this is especially concerning because communities of color in the U.S. have a higher rate of death due to pregnancy- or delivery-related complications compared to white women.
There were also disparities when it came to geography. Women living in states that subsequently banned or severely restricted abortion after Roe was overturned saw the greatest effects, according to the study.
For example, in Texas — where a trigger ban was implemented after Roe fell — travel to a clinic increased by almost a full workday, defined in the U.S. as eight hours.
Similarly, in Louisiana, which also had a trigger ban go into effect, women in the state have to travel seven hours to get to the nearest facility.
Those without a high school diploma, internet subscription, health insurance, and were of lower income were also significantly affected, the study said.
Some limitations of the study include not considering air travel as a means of transportation, which excludes the states of Alaska and Hawaii.
What’s more, the study only examined the physical locations of abortion clinics and did not consider telemedicine visits or mail-ordering medication.
It comes after a data set shared exclusively with FiveThirtyEight showed that two months after the Court’s decision, there were 10,570 fewer abortions compared to estimates pre-Dobbs.
ABC News’ Dr. Avish Jain contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — More than 23 million people have voted early in the 2022 general election, according to data analyzed by the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project — about 15 million more than just one a week ago.
As of Tuesday morning, the project counted 23,919,686 early votes, of which 13,790,577 were mail-in ballots returned and 10,129,109 ballots cast in person so far. Last Monday, Oct. 24, the count was 8,018,219.
On Oct. 17, ElectProject.org had tallied 2,030,730 early votes, including 1,842,115 returned mail-in ballots and 188,615 ballots cast in person.
A number of states have opened up early voting within the past week, according to University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who heads the Elections Project. That has led to the sharp uptick in early vote totals. Turnout in 2022 is still projected to be higher than usual for a midterm election, according to McDonald, even though midterms have historically low participation compared to presidential cycles despite growing interest in recent years.
“It does seem very robust, early voting … I think we’re looking at more like a 2018 election, definitely,” he told ABC News, noting that the last midterm election in 2018 recorded some of the highest turnout in the nation’s history.
With the general election now 15 days away, some sort of early voting option is underway in over 35 states. Early voting periods range in length from four days to 45 days before Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The pace of early voting numbers should pick up even further this week, McDonald said, as additional states start offering in-person early voting and additional ballots should be sent out for those who have requested mail-in options.
Georgia, in its first general election test of a sweeping elections bill signed into law in 2021 by incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — legislation that Democrats widely deemed as restrictive — has been shattering past turnout trends.
Georgia has had record early voting turnout since the option to cast a ballot opened last Oct. 17, surging to nearly twice the number on the first day of early voting in 2018, according to the secretary state’s website.
Totals are within “striking distance” of the 2020 presidential election turnout.
As of Friday, Georgia was well over the one million mark with 1,250,091 voters having cast their ballots. The state noted that 18,109 showed up on the first Sunday of early voting. Sunday’s total “marks an astounding 211% of the 2018 midterm total for the first Sunday of Early Voting,” according to the secretary of state.
“One in five active Georgia voters has made a plan and gotten their ballots in early,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Friday. “They’ve played a wonderful role in reducing the lift for their county election directors come November 8th.”
On Sunday, Raffensperger said that while one in five active voters had already voted in the state, Georgia is set to hit the 2-million-mark next week.
In Florida, in-person early voting began a week ago on Monday in 37 Florida counties. The state has already seen some of the highest numbers of the cycle, mostly leading the nation in early vote totals. The state is currently totaling at 2,774,204 cast thus far, the second highest rates in the nation.
But Texas, which also started early voting last Monday, quickly shot up in ballots cast. The Lone Star State currently now leads the country in early voting, with 3,315,896 ballots returned.
“Texas blew through 1 million voted yesterday, spurred primarily by in-person early voting,” McDonald said in a tweet on Wednesday.
California has remained competitive in early voting as well, currently at 2,359,851 ballots returned.
McDonald has said that because of Florida, Texas and California’s larger size, broader voter turnout activity is expected, along with the fact that Floridians tend to use mail ballots more frequently than some of the other states have so far been casting votes early.
Of the states that record party registration, the U.S. Elections Project shows more Democrats have voted early this cycle — 44.8% compared to only 33.3% of Republicans, though Republican totals have creeped up over the past week while Democrats’ have decreased.
The share of Republicans who are recorded saying voters should be allowed to vote early or absentee without a documented reason fell drastically in the past few years, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey– down 19% from 2018. The same survey found that Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to strongly support making early, in-person voting available to voters for at least two weeks prior to Election Day.
The use of absentee and mail-in ballots have been subject to conspiracy and skepticism after former President Donald Trump said that mail-in ballots lead to voter fraud in 2020.
(DELPHI, Ind.) — The family of Libby German, one of the two teenage girls murdered on a Delphi, Indiana, hiking trail in 2017, is now grappling with the news that the suspect in custody is a local resident.
“It’s a small community,” Libby’s grandmother and guardian, Becky Patty, told ABC News hours after Richard Allen’s arrest was announced. “For it to be one of us, it’s hard.”
“How can somebody do that and then just go on living life like nothing happened?” Libby’s grandfather, Mike Patty, added.
Indiana State Police revealed Monday that Allen, 50, a Delphi resident, is charged with two counts of murder for the deaths of 14-year-old Libby and 13-year-old Abby Williams.
Abby and Libby, best friends in the eighth grade, were walking on a trail in broad daylight when they were killed on Feb. 13, 2017. Delphi, a close-knit town of nearly 3,000 residents, was filled with fear in the wake of the double homicide. For more than five years, officials pleaded with the public to come forward with information.
Libby’s sister, Kelsi German, said she always felt the girls’ killer must be someone familiar with the Delphi area, but she said she didn’t want to believe the suspect “was right here among us.”
Libby’s aunt crossed paths with Allen at CVS once, according to the Pattys. The aunt brought in pictures of Libby to print for her funeral and said Allen didn’t charge her for them.
A CVS spokesperson said in a statement, “We are shocked and saddened to learn that one of our store employees was arrested as a suspect in these crimes. We stand ready to cooperate with the police investigation in any way we can.”
Monday marks the first time police have named a suspect in the case. Police have still not released how the girls were killed.
Libby’s sister said the arrest for her brings “new obstacles and emotions that we have to learn how to deal with.”
German said she visited her sister’s grave on Sunday to talk to her about the updates in the case.
Mike Patty commended the police officers who he said were diligent and “sacrificed their own family time” trying to solve his granddaughter’s case.
“They never let up,” he said.
Allen, who was taken into custody on Oct. 26, had his initial hearing and entered a not guilty plea, Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland said Monday. He’s being held without bond and is set to return to court in January, McLeland said. The prosecutor would not say when Allen became a suspect or if he knew Abby or Libby.
“There’s a lot of questions we have that are unanswered,” Mike Patty said, “but all in due time that will come.”
Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter said the investigation is ongoing. Carter added that if anyone else was involved, that person will be held accountable.
(LONDON) — Delayed police responses and an illegal street obstruction were contributing factors to the weekend’s crowd crush in Seoul, South Korea, officials said on Tuesday.
At least 154 people were killed, and dozens were seriously injured in the South Korea capital’s Itaewon neighborhood as they celebrated Halloween on Saturday night.
The death count could further rise as many of those injured remain in critical condition, the country’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety said.
Those killed or wounded were mainly teenagers and individuals in their 20s, according to Choi Seong-beom, chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department.
Government investigators have scrambled to explain the night’s logistical failures, such as insufficient police reactions and obstructive terraces, which escalated the fatality of the crush.
The first person called for emergency rescue at the site at 6:34 p.m., four hours before the crowd crush, the National Police Agency said. Firefighters arrived after 11 p.m., they said.
In total, witnesses made 11 emergency calls throughout the night, and police dispatched officers to the site four times, the agency said. The officers presumably did not realize the urgency of the crowd, according to local reports.
The National Police Agency is investigating its protocol, seeking to uncover why the rescue squad did not arrive earlier and why the force’s control of the crowd was “inadequate,” per the wording of its police chief.
In addition to the lack of police dispatched, authorities said they were looking into two makeshift terraces on each side of the back street of the Hamilton Hotel building. The terraces were illegal and caused the crowd’s bottleneck pile-up, officials said.
Alley streets must be four meters wide, according to law, but the hotel’s terraces shrunk the alley’s width to three meters, just under 10 feet. Authorities in the ward office of Yongsan fined the Hamilton Hotel for the same violation last year, officials said.
The national police chief, Seoul’s mayor and the prime minister all had separate press meetings on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Each apologized for their inability in preventing this tragedy, vowing to prioritize public safety.
