(NEW YORK) — One dad is going the extra mile for his daughter — literally.
Chris Brannigan, 41, from England, is currently walking 1,200 miles barefoot from Maine to North Carolina in order to fund research on gene therapy for his daughter Hasti, 9, who has a rare genetic disorder called Cornelia de Lange syndrome.
Although the exact number of cases is unknown, the CdLS Foundation estimates that CdLS occurs in 1 in 10,000 live births.
“If you have a rare disease you don’t have the same treatment options or the same quality of healthcare so parents like us have to fight endlessly,” Brannigan told “Good Morning America.” “The sad truth is there’s just no money for rare disease research so it’s left to families like ours to undertake these fundraising campaigns just so we can get treatments for our kids.”
The disorder affects a person’s growth and development, and symptoms include seizures, gastrointestinal problems, autistic-like behavior, heart defects, hearing loss, myopia, and body malformations and other abnormalities.
As a child gets older, more serious symptoms such as anxiety and self-injurious behavior may appear. The CdLS Foundation found that self-injurious behavior occurs in 60% of children and adults with the disorder.
“It gets worse over time,” Brannigan said. “For my wife and I, that was really frightening.”
After Hasti was born, Brannigan said he and his wife, Hengameh, “knew straightaway something was wrong.”
“She looked unhealthy to us,” he said. “She was jittery. She was underweight. When we got her home from the hospital, she had a seizure within the first 24 hours.”
Many of Hasti’s developmental milestones were delayed. Brannigan said she didn’t walk until she was almost 2 years old and didn’t feed voluntarily for the first year of her life.
“There were so many indications but the diagnostic odyssey in the rare diseases world is so long and painful,” he said.
At age 4, Hasti had blood tests done to check for CdLS but the results came back negative, much to the family’s relief.
“I sort of did a little jump for joy because we knew how difficult a condition it was, having researched it after speaking to the doctor,” Brannigan said.
To figure out what could be wrong, Hasti was then enrolled in the 100,000 Genomes Project in the U.K., where they sequenced her genome and looked for common gene errors or mutations. The project took two years, Brannigan said, and the new results showed that she did actually have CdLS.
To manage the disorder, Hasti receives a number of daily treatments, such as hormone replacement therapy via injections and speech and language therapy.
“The cycle of therapies and medical appointments is just never-ending,” Brannigan said.
The fact that CdLS is a rare disease means not much is known about it and how to treat it, which is why Brannigan said he and his wife have had to become experts on the disorder.
“If your child has something terrible like cancer, doctors know what to do because they’re well-practiced in those things,” he said. “But if your child has a rare disease, they just don’t know and that causes a lot of anxiety for parents.”
He added, “Parents have to be experts because no one else is.”
The reality of having a rare disease
After Hasti received her initial diagnosis, Brannigan said he and his wife reached out to numerous doctors around the world to ask them to take a look at gene therapy as a way to help manage the disorder.
“Through online research we came to realize that other rare conditions like spinal muscular atrophy were achieving gene therapies that were transforming children’s lives,” he said, adding that several medical professionals said they would be willing to look into it but it would take “a lot of time” and “cost huge sums of money.”
“When we realized something could be done, we were presented with a question, which was: ‘Do we do this? Do we throw everything we have at our disposal at creating a therapy for Hasti and all the other kids with CdLS? Or do we consciously not do that?'” he said. “As parents I don’t think there’s any other choice you can make. You can’t choose to not help your child.”
The family created the charity, Hope for Hasti, in order to raise the money for research into CdLS gene therapy. After consulting doctors and researchers on how much would be needed to fund the research, they set a $3 million target.
“Raising money has been incredibly hard through the pandemic so my wife and I decided that we should run a fundraising event that would help focus people on not just fundraising but also how difficult it is to manage the life of a child with a rare disease,” Brannigan said.
According to Dr. Wendy Bickmore, director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh, gene therapy will likely not be a cure but a way to treat some of the disorder’s symptoms.
“Gene therapy encompasses several things,” Bickmore told “GMA.” “It can be adding back in an extra copy of the gene, which has been mutated, or it can be gene editing where you go in with these CRISPR molecular scissors and try and correct the actual spelling mistake of the genome. They both have the ultimate aim of trying to repair the genetic defect.”
All of the preclinical research will be handled by the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. According to Dr. Cathleen Lutz, the lab’s senior director, they’re working with mouse models with various genetic mutations, including one with Hasti’s specific mutation. As CdLS can be caused by any number of genetic mutations, a therapy that works for one may not work for another.
“I think we all recognize we’re in uncharted territory, no one is rushing here,” Lutz told “GMA.” “We’re trying to explore the potential for these therapeutics. Even if gene therapy turns out not to be a path forward for CdLS, we’re going to have so much information to plug into new potential therapeutics.”
In a recent statement, the CdLS Foundation announced a partnership with Jackson Laboratory to coordinate research efforts for all genes implicated in CdLS. The goals of the collaboration include advancing basic science around the disorder, creating a centralized repository of existing and new mouse models with CdLS features, and testing various treatment options.
A British army major, Brannigan calls himself the “Barefoot Soldier.”
“The idea of being barefoot is to make it really difficult because Hasti’s condition makes her life incredibly challenging,” he said. “Things that other children find easy, she finds very hard. It seemed only fair that I do something that was equally difficult and challenging.”
Brannigan has already completed one barefoot walk so far. From July 6 to August 18, 2020, he walked 700 miles from Land’s End in England to Edinburgh in Scotland.
“I wounded both of my feet,” he said. “It took weeks for them to heal.”
His current walk will see him do 1,200 miles through 12 states over 53 days. So far, Brannigan’s made it well over halfway and expects to complete the journey in late October.
“It’s been incredibly painful and I think I have nerve damage in my foot,” he said. “I’ve cut my feet. I’ve stood on glass. I’ve had more blisters than I can count. I’ve encountered some really challenging road conditions and it’s slightly dangerous.”
Though Brannigan plans to finish out the walk no matter what, the kindness he’s experienced along the way has kept his spirits up. People have walked with him for parts of the journey, given him food and drink, and even housed him for a night.
“Hasti is a child like every other child who has hopes and dreams and we want her to realize those,” he said. “She deserves to be happy and healthy.”
(NEW YORK) — Retired British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to discuss his so-called “Steele dossier” for the first time publicly, describing his efforts as apolitical and defending his decision to include the most explosive and criticized claims about Donald Trump contained in his controversial 2016 report.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about how he gathered his intelligence, and the life-altering events that ensued after his work and identity were made public.
The dossier’s contents, laid out in 17 memos, upended Washington and quickly ricocheted across the globe after BuzzFeed News published the bombshell reports in early 2017 — 10 days before Donald Trump was sworn into office. The salacious mix of sex, spies, and scandal made for an irresistible political drama. But the real-world implications of its claims, even though unproven, exacerbated an already fraught moment in American history.
Trump and his allies immediately lashed out at the allegations laid out in the dossier, calling it “fake news” and “phony stuff.” The president’s detractors embraced it, using it to buttress growing suspicions about what they saw as Trump’s odd infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Over time, journalists and experts from both sides of the political aisle grew increasingly skeptical about the dossier’s claims, noting that despite deep investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and others, many of Steele’s allegations have never been verified, and some have been debunked.
“Everyone with whom the dossier was shared sent reporters out, tried to confirm the basic allegations within it. And it never got any traction because no one could nail anything in it down,” said Barry Meier, author of “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies,” and a vocal critic of Steele’s.
“Bearing in mind, this was raw intelligence,” said Chris Burrows, Steele’s partner in the private investigative firm Orbis Business Intelligence. “Raw intelligence in the sense that what we sent over was the initial findings.”
Yet in many ways, the dossier proved prescient. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton. Investigators determined there had been “numerous links — i.e. contacts — between Trump campaign officials and individuals having ties to the Russian government.” And, proof emerged that the Trump Organization had been discussing a real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign.
All were findings that had been signaled, at least broadly, in Steele’s work.
Cloistered in his London home and his firm’s office, Steele has never responded to his critics in public. Through all the cacophony of political rhetoric and cable news punditry, one notable voice has been missing: Steele’s.
Now, nearly five years after his report became public, Steele has broken his silence to defend his name, his credibility, and the dossier that captured the world’s attention.
“It was credible reporting,” Steele told Stephanopoulos. “We knew some of it was right, and we suspected some of it may never be provable.”
“Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier” is available Monday, October 18, on Hulu.
A sordid conspiracy
Christopher Steele penned his reports between June and December of 2016 for a law firm that represented Democrats and the campaign of party nominee Hillary Clinton. His reporting was initially meant to be internal work for the firm conducting opposition campaign research.
Over seven months, the memos laid out a series of damning claims alleging that the Russians were attempting to influence the campaign in Trump’s favor, that members of the Trump campaign had various connections and communications with Kremlin officials, that the campaign had coordinated with Kremlin officials and accepted a flow of anti-Clinton information, and, most alarmingly, that the Kremlin perhaps had materials with which it could blackmail or exercise leverage over Trump.
Steele said that as he worked on the report, he grew increasingly alarmed by the picture it was painting.
“It meant that, for the first time, there was a potentially serious situation of ‘kompromat’ against a presidential candidate. And therefore, it became much more of serious issue than we had expected,” Steele recalled. “I was surprised and shocked.”
Even before the dossier surfaced publicly on Jan. 10, 2017, the FBI and several news outlets had already seen Steele’s intelligence reports and had attempted to corroborate their contents, but could not. Within days of its publication, some allegations fell apart quickly. Reports that Trump’s personal attorney and self-described fixer Michael Cohen had relatives who maintained ties to Putin were swiftly debunked.
Trump’s allies mounted a full-fledged campaign to pick the dossier apart — and malign its author. Trump himself repeatedly lashed out at Steele and the report. At one point, then-President Trump tweeted of Steele: “This man should be extradited, tried, and thrown into jail. A sick lier [sic] who was paid by Crooked Hillary & the DNC!”
Asked if he was ever worried about Trump’s calls for his extradition, Steele at first laughed: “He also called me a liar, spelled L-I-E-R, George. So, you know, these things have to be taken, I think, with a pinch of salt.”
But Steele said that the ensuing investigations, legal fights, and withering attacks — including Trump’s claims that his reporting was a “hoax” — did take a toll.
“The idea that somebody with my track record — and I’ve never had my integrity, professionalism, or expertise on Russia questioned at any point in my career — would be inventing some strange, fabricated document or information, is absolute anathema, and I wouldn’t be a successful businessman if that were the practice,” Steele said.
The dossier did deal a series of blows to Steele’s credibility in both media and government investigations, most notably a December 2019 Justice Department inspector general report that cast doubts on his sources.
The inspector general wrote that “certain allegations” in Steele’s reporting “were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.”
“Do you accept that conclusion?” Stephanopoulos asked Steele.
“I think they are putting too much store, frankly, into what FBI knew about early on in the campaign,” Steele said. “I think the FBI is generally an effective organization. I’m not sure the extent to which FBI has got good coverage of Moscow and Moscow politics and Moscow operations.”
Through it all, Steele said, he has remained confident in the broad strokes of his dossier, which he insists remain “still very credible.”
“I think there are parts of the dossier which have been stood up, there are parts of the dossier that haven’t been stood up,” Steele said. “And there are one or two things in it which have been proven wrong.”
Drafting the dossier
Steele’s firm agreed to take on the project at the behest of Fusion GPS, a Washington-based corporate research firm, in the spring of 2016. Fusion GPS’s initial client had been a Republican financier, but when Trump emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, a law firm representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign agreed to inherit Fusion GPS’s research.
Steele said he knew within the first month of his reporting that “supporters of Hillary Clinton” were funding Fusion GPS’s work, and by extension his own.
“I didn’t know what opposition research was,” Steele said. “But from our perspective, what we were doing was very similar to other project work we’d done, which is getting human intelligence out of Russia on an issue of interest to a client.”
Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee the assignment for Steele was relatively simple — Donald Trump had made repeated trips to Russia during his career as a real estate mogul, but not sealed any deals.
“He was the lead Russianist at MI6 prior to leaving the government and an extremely well-regarded investigator, researcher, and, as I say, we’re friends and share interest in Russian kleptocracy and organized crime issues,” Simpson testified regarding Steele. “I would say that’s broadly why I asked him to see what he could find out about Donald Trump’s business activities in Russia.”
Steele told ABC News that the mission expanded almost immediately into two main threads: “One was what the Russians were doing in terms of potential interference in the campaign; and two, what the links were between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russia,” Steele said.
“We realized it was potentially quite a big project and potentially quite a controversial project,” he added. “But frankly, George, when we went into it, we weren’t expecting to find a great deal.”
Steele soon became convinced he had wandered into something more involved, and more concerning.
The four pillars
In defending his work, Steele describes his intelligence reports as resting on “four pillars” of information that he believes have held up over time as accurate.
“One was, there was a large-scale Russian interference campaign in the American election in 2016,” he said.
“The second was that this had been authorized and ordered at the highest levels, including Putin,” he said.
“The third had been that the objective of this was to damage Hillary Clinton and to try and get this rather unorthodox candidate, Donald Trump, elected,” Steele said. “And the fourth was, there was evidence of collusion between Trump and people around Trump and the Russians.”
Part of the challenge — and the intrigue — of Steele’s reporting is that much of it is virtually impossible for lay people to verify. When the Department of Justice’s inspector general examined the dossier’s claims, he concluded that what Steele described as “raw intelligence” amounted to little more than rumor and bar talk.
Very little corroborating evidence has emerged to support the dossier. But neither, Steele points out, has there been much concrete contradictory evidence either.
His critics have taken issue with that particular line of defense.
“The common refrain when people were speaking about the dossier is, ‘Well, we don’t know if that’s not true,'” Meier said. “People who are intelligence operatives anchor their reports to rumors, to hearsay, to bar talk, to smoke. That’s the world that Christopher Steele operated in. And I guess that’s the world he continues to operate in. I prefer the world of facts. That’s the world I’m comfortable in.”
It isn’t just Steele’s critics who have accused him of trafficking in rumors. His own collector — the person who actually traveled to Russia on his behalf to gather information, including the “pee tape” allegation — later told the FBI that he “felt that the tenor of Steele’s reports was far more ‘conclusive’ than was justified,” and that “information came from ‘word of mouth and hearsay’ … ‘conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers,'” according to a Justice Department inspector general report.
Steele suggested his collector may have “taken fright” at having his cover blown and “[tried] to downplay and underestimate” his own reporting when he spoke to the FBI. Steele added that the information he gathered passed through an important filter: his experience as an expert on Russian intelligence activities going back decades. He said his confidence in the dossier’s claims about Russia’s interest in Trump is based on his knowledge of Putin — a figure whom he has studied for decades.
“This is the M.O. of the KGB and its successor organizations,” Steele said, referring to Russia’s intelligence services.
Skeptics of Steele’s reporting, however, suggest he may have fallen victim to another trademark of Russian spy craft: disinformation. Speaking to congressional investigators in October 2019, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration and a longtime friend of Steele’s, called Steele’s dossier a “rabbit hole.”
“It’s very likely that the Russians planted disinformation in and among other information that may have been truthful, because that’s exactly, again, the way that they operate,” Hill said.
Steele acknowledged that “there is a chance” the Russians intentionally tainted his reporting, but said he felt it was “very unlikely.”
“Ultimately, any disinformation operation has an objective,” Steele said. “Seems to me pretty far-fetched that the Russians’ objective during the campaign of 2016 was to aide Hillary Clinton and to damage Donald Trump. And I just don’t think you can get past that.”
The ‘pee tape’
One allegation from Steele’s dossier stood out immediately: a claim that the Russians had obtained a compromising video of Trump at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013. According to the dossier, the tape purportedly showed Trump “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him” on a bed where the Obamas supposedly once stayed.
The supposed “pee tape” never emerged. But the claim may be the public’s most enduring symbol of Steele’s work — particularly after it became a favorite of late-night comics.
Steele told ABC News he believes the alleged tape “probably does” exist — but that he “wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asked him to explain why the tape, if it does exist, has not been made public, Steele replied that “it hasn’t needed to be released.”
“Because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.,” Steele said.
“[Putin] wouldn’t be releasing it in a hurry for all sorts of reasons,” he continued. “He would put it under very strict lock and key and make sure it never got out, unless he chose for it to get out.”
For his part, Trump has repeatedly and firmly denied this specific allegation. At a press conference the day after BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier, Trump told reporters that he was “a germaphobe.” As recently as last week, Trump reportedly told donors at a private speech that he is “not into golden showers.”
Pressed by Stephanopoulos on how he can assess the likelihood of a seemingly outlandish allegation without concrete evidence, Steele cited his lengthy career as a British intelligence officer focused on Russia.
“When you’ve worked on Russia for 30 years like I have and you’ve spent as much time, sadly, in the brains of the Russian leadership as I have, you begin to understand these things,” Steele said. “And you actually sense whether something’s credible or not.”
Still defiant
Steele’s dossier took its first major hit with the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated report, which largely omitted mention of Steele’s name or his claims. The most significant mention of Steele was not positive.
The report cast doubt on one of the dossier’s most striking claims: that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, had traveled to Prague in the summer of 2016 for “secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials.”
Cohen has vehemently denied ever traveling to Prague or meeting with Russian interlocutors. The Justice Department inspector general reinforced Mueller’s findings, saying the FBI had determined that this specific allegation was untrue.
To this day, Steele says he remains unmoved.
“Do you accept that finding, that it didn’t happen?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“No,” Steele replied. “I don’t.”
“But the FBI looked into this and said it wasn’t true,” Stephanopoulos said.
“I don’t know to what extent they were able to look into it. I don’t know what evidence they gathered,” Steele said. “I haven’t seen any, if you like, report on that aspect. So, from my point of view, I think it’s still an open question.”
Reached for comment, Cohen sarcastically told ABC News, “I’m pleased to see that my old friend Christopher Steele, a/k/a Austin Powers, has crawled out of the pub long enough to make up a few more stories.”
“I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and that Elvis is still alive,” Cohen said.
Stephanopoulos pressed Steele: “Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?”
“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100% accurate,” Steele replied. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”
Dismissing claims that subsequent government reports undermined his findings, Steele argued that, in his view, Mueller’s team actually served to reinforce the broad strokes of his dossier — those “four pillars” he described.
“Those four pillars that we mentioned … when you actually look at the detail, if you’re forensic about looking at the detail of the report, then it paints a totally different picture, in my view,” Steele said. “And I think there’s a lot of supportive commentary and evidence and so on, there, for the work we had done.”
But further investigative efforts undertaken at various levels of government have appeared to confirm the notion that Steele’s reporting was at best flawed and at worst incorrect.
A bipartisan report published by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2020 found that Steele’s assertions about Trump campaign aide Carter Page — which accused him of conducting “secret meetings in Moscow” with Kremlin leaders — were incorrect. Page himself would later testify before Congress that he spoke briefly with a mid-level Russian official during a visit for a Moscow speech, but that the conversation was short and inconsequential.
“Other than … facts which were readily available in news reports at the time of their inclusion in the dossier — the Committee did not find any information that corroborates the allegations related to Page in the dossier,” the report concluded.
Stephanopoulos asked Steele about the FBI decision to rely in part on his work in seeking and obtaining court approval to eavesdrop on Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“Any regrets about that?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“It had nothing to do with us,” Steele replied. “I didn’t even know what FISA was, frankly, in 2016. We were not told of any use of our material in such a process. And therefore, if there were problems with that process, they weren’t our problems, they were the problems of the people conducting it.”
A potential threat
Steele conceded in the ABC News interview that he could not provide evidence for many of his claims, including those about Page. But pressed by Stephanopoulos on some of the findings that have come up against the harshest criticism, Steele remained defiant.
“Not the ‘pee tape,’ not Michael Cohen in Prague, not Carter Page?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“None of those things, to my mind, have been disproven,” Steele replied. “They may not have been proven. And we maybe will hear more about those things as we go forward.”
Steele said he is watching American politics from a distance these days. He said he has concerns about a potential Trump return to the presidency in 2024.
“So, Donald Trump, in your view, is a continuing threat, as long as he’s an active political player, to the national security?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“A potential one,” Steele replied. “Yes.”
And as long as Trump remains active in politics, Steele contends that more evidence to support the dossier’s claims may still surface.
“I don’t think this book is finished,” Steele said. “By a long shot.”
(LOS ANGELES) — Robert Durst has been diagnosed with COVID-19, his attorney confirmed Saturday, two days after the real estate heir was sentenced to life in prison on a first-degree murder conviction.
Durst, 78, was sentenced Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 2000 killing of Susan Berman, his close confidant. The wheelchair-bound Durst appeared in the courtroom for his sentencing, looking frail and wearing a face mask.
His attorney, Dick DeGuerin, did not share any additional details on Durst’s condition.
The high-profile trial has been plagued by a series of delays due to the pandemic. After two days of testimony, the trial was delayed for 14 months after the coronavirus shuttered courts, with testimony resuming in May.
In August, testimony was briefly paused again after a courtroom observer tested positive for COVID-19. There was another holdup in June, when Durst was hospitalized for an unspecified health issue.
Durst did not appear in the courtroom when the verdict was announced in September because he was in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 by one of his sheriff drivers. Jurors found him guilty after deliberating for about seven hours over three days.
The New York real estate scion was accused of killing his best friend, Berman, who was shot in the back of the head in her Los Angeles home in 2000. Prosecutors alleged Durst killed Berman to prevent her from telling police she helped him cover up the unsolved murder of his wife, Kathleen Durst, in 1982. Durst has never been charged in his wife’s disappearance.
Durst pleaded not guilty in 2018 to the murder charge for Berman’s death. His attorneys have unsuccessfully sought a mistrial, arguing the lengthy delay impeded his chances of a fair trial.
Durst was also charged in the 2001 killing of a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted.
ABC News’ Cassidy Gard contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Even before her stage two breast cancer diagnosis in 2020, Yvonne Llanes knew her strength — and her community.
Llanes, who was first introduced to “World News Tonight” in 2017, had lost both of her legs nearly 16 years ago in a freak accident. For a decade, Llanes was confined to a wheelchair.
But, in 2017, she had made a promise to herself — and her late father — to walk again.
“I was just depressed. I was sad. I was mad at the world and I wanted my life back. I wanted my legs back,” Llanes told “World News Tonight” in 2017.
Llanes found a community at the Hanger Clinic’s Bilateral-Above-Knee Amputee Bootcamp.
With the support of fellow amputees and after months of determination, Llanes pushed herself to get out of her chair and walk across a stage in front of her friends and family.
“I met a group of amputees such as myself that were doing extraordinary things. They were up and they were walking and they were out of their wheelchairs and I was just incredibly amazed and I told myself I want to be like them,” said Llanes.
“I decided enough was enough I was going to get up and get on with life,” she added.
Nearly four years later, Llanes returned to the Hanger Clinic’s Bootcamp for Amputees to celebrate another victory. This time, to announce that she was cancer-free.
She was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer and underwent surgeries in 2020 and 2021. Across the country, her Bootcamp family was there for her by sending photos and wearing “Yvonne Strong” T-shirts.
“All my amputee friends here have stood behind me through this diagnosis and have been very supportive of me 100%, and I just appreciate it tremendously,” said Llanes on Thursday.
Llanes told “World News Tonight” Friday that the community’s motto, “Decide to rise,” can be applicable to anyone.
“Life is going to throw obstacles at you — do not let those obstacles get in your way,” she said. “Have faith, have courage, have hope, overcome those obstacles and never forget to decide to rise.”
(WASHINGTON) — “I’m in danger,” the daughter cried to her father from thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.
“We cannot go outside with friends. Before, we were going outside to restaurants, shopping, but now we are like prisoners in our own home,” she said, her voice full of fear, saying Taliban fighters might find her.
“Mina” (ABC News has changed her name for her protection and that of others), a university-educated and unmarried Afghan woman, separated from her family in the U.S., was pleading for help on a call with advocates trying to get her out.
With her father having aided the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and her immediate family living in New Jersey, Mina is in hiding, saying she fears her ties to the U.S. make her a target.
On a recording of a call ABC News listened to, her voice was breaking.
“I’m not mentally good nowadays because this situation is a burden on me,” she said, adding that she did not know which relative she might find shelter with next.
“She is under pressure,” her father said, helping translate for a daughter he said is normally proficient in English. “Now in this status situation, she forgot her language. She forgot her information. She forgot her mind.”
Mina’s mother says she isn’t used to relying on medication to fall asleep, but after calls like this one, she says she needs it to escape the dark reality facing her only daughter — blaming herself for Mina being left behind.
Mina’s parents and two brothers were able to come to the U.S. in 2016 on her father’s Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granted to those who helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Her oldest brother, who also worked with the U.S., immigrated in 2018 under the same program. But Mina, now 34, aged out to qualify as a dependent.
While her father has petitioned since 2018 to bring her to the U.S. via a Petition for Alien Relative, a route that permanent, lawful residents can use to bring immediate relatives to the U.S., the chaotic evacuation of American troops from the country at the end of August ignited a desperate search for options.
“It’s life or death,” Elizabeth Dembrowsky, the attorney who’s handling Mina’s case from New York, told ABC News. “Her father’s worked and aided the United States — because of their interests — and because of that aid, he’s put his daughter at risk.”
Mina’s father said he sometimes regrets not lying about her age on the SIV application, believing, he said, that if he hadn’t abided by the rules of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, his daughter might already be with them.
He says people in Afghanistan know her immediate family lives in the U.S. and mockingly call her “‘the Americans’ daughter.'”
‘Please help my daughter’
Dembrowsky founded Good Counsel Services, a nonprofit that offers legal advice to other nonprofit organizations, in 2016. Volunteering at an immigration office while studying at Brooklyn Law School, she met a man who had helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan who then started recommending her legal services to his friends. One of them was Mina’s father who first contacted her in 2018.
“‘Please help my daughter'” were the only words in an email Mina’s father sent her last month.
Dembrowsky is actively working on filing humanitarian parole applications in 13 similar cases, a legal route she took with Mina’s case as U.S. troops left the country, taking with them the hopes of many Afghans desperate to escape.
Granted by USCIS on a “case-by-case basis,” humanitarian parole allows certain individuals to enter and reside in the U.S. without a visa. Each application comes with a $575 fee and extensive paperwork, including an “Affidavit of Support” that serves as proof a sponsor has agreed to provide financial support to the person who is known as the parolee. It’s a process Dembrowsky said has bipartisan backing.
“You can wring your hands and scream and blame the former or current president or the entire decision to go into Afghanistan, but it’s not helpful because the crisis is ongoing. We have people today that need to be taken out of there, and we as Americans can help by volunteering to serve as sponsors,” Dembrowsky said.
Once a sponsor is secured, it can take weeks to months to process applications. There’s currently a backlog of roughly 11,000, according to the National Immigration Forum. That does not include the majority of SIV holders — tens of thousands of people — who were also left behind in the abrupt evacuation. Dembrowsky is calling on the federal government to do more to expedite applications from allies and their families she says the U.S. “abandoned.”
To expedite a parole application, a person can directly write or call immigration services, but advocates say an often more effective route is having a member of Congress contact them about a specific application on their behalf. Dembrowsky said she contacted the offices of Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., on Sept. 2, and of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. on Sept. 23.
“My office is working closely with the Department of State, USCIS, and family members in New Jersey to bring this young woman safely to the United States. We are making progress on her case and are confident that she will be able to join her family in New Jersey,” Pallone told ABC News in a statement on Thursday afternoon.
MORE: How are the Taliban treating Afghan women and girls?
Dembrowsky learned late Wednesday that Mina’s Petition for Alien Relative application, filed in 2018 to prove she was related to her family, was “processed,” but they haven’t been contacted about next steps. Mina’s humanitarian parole application still hangs in limbo, as they do for thousands of Afghan nationals.
The UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, has reported more than half a million Afghans have been internally displaced since January due to Taliban advances, 80% of whom are women and children.
‘Matter of political will’
Even if Mina’s parole application is conditionally approved, there’s still a major caveat.
With the U.S. Embassy in Kabul closed, she must make the dangerous and uncertain trek to an embassy or consulate in another country for additional processing. That journey has been made nearly impossible since the former Afghan government collapsed and the U.S. withdrew — with few flights out of the country and uncertainty over how to get a seat, or risky travel over land through Taliban checkpoints.
“It’s extremely difficult and that’s why, while this humanitarian parole application process can offer some hope, it’s not an easy solution,” Danilo Zak, a senior policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum, told ABC News. “In general, it’s going to be very difficult for people to escape on their own now.”
Mina’s devoted father said in the call reviewed by ABC News that he would personally find a way to get her across the border.
He just needs the paperwork.
“If the government makes excuse that there is no embassy of America in Kabul … if they issue the visa for her, paper-wise, and send by email, I can go to third country and evacuate her from Afghanistan and process her documentation and visa and fingerprint and interview with her — and then I will bring her with me,” he said.
Dembrowsky said her team is also working with veterans groups to help facilitate safe passage if and when Mina is deemed eligible and called for processing at an embassy or consulate.
Despite what may seem like insurmountable obstacles, Zak said granting humanitarian parole is the most effective option right now for those left behind because the process was designed for quick, emergency evacuations. The U.S. has repeatedly granted parole to allies, under presidents of both parties, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, including 130,000 parolees after the Vietnam War.
“We can’t discriminate against these parolees for the nature of the emergency evacuation — which is really what we’re doing here,” Zak said, arguing the need for an Afghan Adjustment Act to establish a pathway for refugees and parolees to permanent residency.
Further congressional action, such as expediting immigration processes and mandating the U.S. work with allies to create safe evacuation routes, he said, is all “a matter of political will.”
“That’s what we saw before the evacuation, where suddenly we actually were able to ramp up SIV processes. The same thing is true now,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making this a top priority to evacuate those who remain at risk in Afghanistan.”
‘What would I do?’
For now, Mina waits — in hiding.
And volunteers at Good Counsel Services continue lobbying lawmakers — and everyday Americans — on cases like hers.
When Congress passed its continuing resolution last month to prevent a government shutdown, it included a provision of benefits for Afghan parolees they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access without a visa, such as housing, childcare and federal financial support, critical for volunteer agencies and for recruiting all-important sponsors.
“The result is that resettlement agencies can play a much, much larger role for many of those who are coming in under parole, and that means that there’s less of responsibility for the sponsor, and certainly no responsibility to house them,” Zak said.
Dembrowsky, for her part, said she’s asked daily to take on more applications for people still desperate to get out, but lamented she won’t commit to them without securing financial sponsors first.
“I just don’t want to throw this life preserver and not be able to hold on to the other end of it,” she said.
One person who answered her call is Ford Seeman, a social impact entrepreneur in New York, who credited being adopted at birth for giving him a unique understanding of how one’s future can be affected by circumstance. He’s donated $10,000 to Good Counsel Services for the cause, as well as agreed to gather the necessary documents and sign on to sponsor a potential parolee.
“I’m honored and, frankly, feel somewhat obligated to share with those facing overwhelming obstacles,” he told ABC News in an email. “We are all one people and need to look out for each other.”
While thousands of Afghans like Mina face an uncertain fate, Dembrowsky said the U.S. is facing a moment of moral reckoning.
“I wasn’t alive during the Holocaust. I wasn’t alive during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. But we, as humans, ask ourselves these questions, ‘What would I do in that circumstance?'” Dembrowsky said. “Today in Afghanistan, there is something we can do, and if we refuse to do something — and if anything were to happen to her — it will be on our collective hands.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department on Friday evening issued a statement reiterating its commitment to remain independent soon after President Joe Biden told reporters he hoped that witnesses who defy subpoenas from Congress’ select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot would face federal prosecution.
“The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop,” DOJ spokesperson Anthony Coley said.
The statement came after comments from Biden following his arrival back at the White House Friday when he was asked what his message is for those who defy subpoenas from the Jan. 6 select committee.
“I hope that the committee goes after them and holds them accountable,” Biden said after returning from a trip to Connecticut.
When asked whether he thinks those individuals should be prosecuted by the Justice Department, Biden answered, “I do, yes.”
Biden’s comments came just a day after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection announced it would meet next Tuesday to consider criminal contempt proceedings against Steve Bannon, a former Trump aide who has refused to comply with a subpoena seeking testimony and any communications he may have had with with the former president in the days around the storming of the Capitol.
As both a candidate and while in office, Biden has repeatedly pledged to put up a wall between the White House and the Justice Department on criminal matters that critics had argued had completely deteriorated during his predecessor’s years – where Trump repeatedly called for the prosecutions of his political enemies and pressured officials to take actions they later said they resisted.
“Though the Select Committee welcomes good-faith engagement with witnesses seeking to cooperate with our investigation, we will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral,” the committee said in a statement.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has similarly stated his desire to reinstate the department’s independence from political matters.
Prior to their statement Friday seemingly pushing back against Biden’s comments, the Justice Department has repeatedly declined to comment to ABC News on how it might act if and when the U.S. House votes for a criminal contempt referral stemming from a Jan. 6 committee witness declining to cooperate.
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
(THACKERVILLE, Okla.) — A dramatic video captured the moment an Amtrak train slammed into a semi-truck hauling several cars in Oklahoma, sending vehicles and debris flying and injuring several people on board.
The incident occurred Friday around 7 p.m. local time in Thackerville, near the Oklahoma-Texas border. Minutes before Amtrak Train 822, which operates daily between Fort Worth, Texas, and Oklahoma City, was scheduled to pass through, the car hauler tractor trailer got stuck on the train tracks, Love County Sheriff Marty Grisham told ABC News.
“The tracks are built up a little bit higher” at that crossing, Grisham said. “He had a lot of cars on the trailer. When he tried to cross over the tracks, the trailer high-centered on the tracks, causing him to be stuck and not able to move his tractor-trailer rig any further off the track.”
“Everything was just stuck,” he said.
A bystander who captured the video of the collision called 911, according to the sheriff. Authorities attempted to contact the railroad network operator, but the train couldn’t be stopped in time, Grisham said.
The video showed the railroad crossing gates partially lowered, unable to move past the cars on the upper deck of the double-decker car hauler trailer. The train’s horn blared before the locomotive collided with the trailer, sending debris on both sides of the crossing.
The driver and his dog were “shaken up” but uninjured in the collision, the sheriff’s office said. Five people on board the train were transported to two area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, the sheriff said. All patients involved in the incident have been treated released, a spokesperson for the hospitals told ABC News Saturday afternoon, though couldn’t confirm how many there were total.
There were 110 passengers and crew members on board, according to Amtrak.
“This train was canceled north of the incident scene and northbound customers were provided substitute transportation,” Amtrak said in a statement.
The Love County Sheriff’s Office warned travelers to avoid the area Friday night, as the crash scene would take “several hours” to clean up.
The site was cleared early Saturday morning “and we have resumed operations through the area,” the railroad operator, BNSF, told ABC News.
A traffic investigation is underway by local and state authorities, an Amtrak spokesperson said.
The video of the incident was captured by local Brandon Sampson, according to video licensing agency Storyful. ABC News was unable to reach him.
(STOCKTON, Calif.) — A week after a Black man was shot seven times by an assailant who was allegedly hurling racial epithets while firing at him, prosecutors said a suspect has been charged with attempted murder with a hate crime enhancement in the attack.
Michael Hayes, 31, was arraigned Friday in connection with the Oct. 8 shooting in Stockton, California. In addition to attempted murder, he has been charged with assault with a firearm with a hate crime enhancement, and carrying a loaded firearm while in a public space.
Prosecutors said, based on police reports, Hayes was “driving erratically and speeding” through a parking lot when the victim, 45-year-old Bobby Gayle, “told the driver to slow down.”
“The defendant then stopped, exited the vehicle, used racial epithets, and shot the victim seven times,” the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement Friday following the arraignment.
Bobby Gayle, whom family said had just finished a construction job at a restaurant when the shooting occurred around 11:30 p.m., was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
From his hospital bed Thursday following Hayes’ arrest, Bobby Gayle told Sacramento ABC affiliate KXTV he holds no hatred for the shooter.
“I can’t have hatred living in my heart,” the father of five told the station, struggling to talk due to his injuries.
“We come from a family, we just love everybody, there’s no hatred over here. One-hundred percent, that’s not me,” he said.
Bobby Gayle said he was shot twice in his face, as well as his neck, shoulder and legs. One of the bullets is lodged in his head and “is going to stay there because they can’t remove because it will do more damage,” his brother, Marlon Gayle, told KXTV.
The family expressed gratitude at news of the arrest.
“By God’s grace the guy is found and he’s arrested,” Marlon Gayle told KXTV. “We’ll let justice take its place.”
In an interview with ABC News earlier this week, Marlon Gayle said his brother spoke up after the shooter’s pick-up truck purportedly nearly hit him and a friend.
“According to my brother and the guy who was with him, his friend, the guy gets out of the truck, the white guy, and he has a gun, and he starts saying the n-word over and over again and started shooting my brother,” Marlon Gayle said.
The Stockton Police Department shared photos of the suspected shooter’s truck on Facebook Wednesday, describing it as a late-model Chevrolet Silverado, while asking the public for tips. A reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest was also offered.
On Thursday, police announced they had arrested Hayes the day prior. In a statement, Stockton Police Chief Eric Jones thanked the “anonymous tipster and the hard work of our detectives for bringing a quick resolution to this case for the victim and his family.”
Hayes has been remanded in custody and is scheduled to next appear in court on Oct. 28 for further arraignment, prosecutors said. ABC News has reached out to his attorney.
“The terrible actions of one is not a representation of who we are as a community. No one should be victimized because of their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation,” District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar said in a statement Friday. “My office takes these crimes very seriously. It is our goal, in collaboration with our law enforcement partners, to rid the community of hate and unnecessary gun violence.”
ABC News’ Adia Robinson contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Several massive asteroids are expected to whiz close to Earth in the coming weeks, including one nearly the size of the Empire State Building.
On Friday, Asteroid 2021 SM3, which has a diameter of up to 525 feet — bigger than the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt — was projected to zoom by around 3.5 million miles away from Earth, USA Today first reported based off CNEOS data.
Near-Earth objects are defined by NASA as “comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.”
But fear not, though these asteroids are passing relatively close to Earth, they’re still a great distance away, experts say.
“Astronomically, these are coming close to the Earth. But in human terms, they are millions of miles away and can get no closer than millions of miles away,” Paul Chodas, the director of the CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told ABC News.
The center tracks near-Earth objects for the entire asteroid community so that when close approaches happen astronomers can know where and when and observe their movements.
One of the closest approaches is Asteroid 2021 TJ15, which will pass the Earth at the same distance at the moon, or 238,854 miles away, on Saturday.
“That asteroid has a diameter of 5.6 to 13 meters (18 to 42 feet). That’s a tiny asteroid coming to about the distance of the moon. It’s still a long, long way, it can’t hit the Earth, there’s no chance of that,” Chodas said.
Asteroid 2004 UE is up to 1,246 feet, nearly the size of the Empire State Building, that will make its close approach Nov. 13 about 2.6 million miles from Earth.
“So that is the size of a small building. That’s approaching a medium size. But that’s 11 lunar distances approaching sequence, it cannot get any closer than 11.11 lunar distances,” Chodas said.
The center has discovered and tracked over 27,000 near-Earth objects. Asteroids range in size with most being small-, medium-size asteroids ranging from 300 meters to 600 meters (984 feet to 1,968 feet) in size and large ones 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) and up in size. He said many of the asteroids that pass Earth are tiny and burn up when they enter the planet’s atmosphere.
Unlike the apocalyptic plots in movies, the chances of a massive astroid striking the planet is extremely rare, Chodas said.
“It’s simply the fact that there are very fewer medium- and large-size asteroids that come near the Earth to begin with,” he said. “There are comparatively few large asteroids. The largest near-Earth asteroid is something like 10 kilometers. But there’s only one or two of those.”
The asteroids are discovered through observatories, cameras, telescopes and asteroid surveys that search the night sky for movement. After an asteroid is discovered, the center tracks their measurements and locations, and computes an orbit trajectory to predict its future movements to see if there’s any chance it’ll intersect with Earth.
Just how often do asteroids end up hitting Earth?
“Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve had a total of four asteroids — tiny, tiny asteroids — that have been observed in space and headed for the Earth, and have impacted the atmosphere and burned up. They became a bright fireball in each case,” Chodas said. “In two of the cases, we’ve predicted where they would hit ahead of time and predicted where to find the meteorites. Expeditions have gone out and found the meteorites. So our mathematics work pretty well.”
One of the most prominent was the Chelyabinsk Event in Russia in February 2013.
“That was the largest observed impact we’ve had in recent memory, I guess it’s a 100-kind of year event. That was a 20-meter asteroid that blazed through the atmosphere over Russia, and it disintegrated. What was started off as a 20-meter asteroid ended up as a core rock that was only one meter across, and it landed in a frozen lake and made a nice round hole in the ice,” Chodas said.
So far this year, the biggest asteroid to pass by Earth was Asteroid 2001 FO32, dubbed Apophis the “God of Chaos”, in March which was estimated to be 1,100 feet across, NASA said.
Michael Zolensky, an astromaterial curator and researcher at NASA, told ABC News asteroids are ” basically leftovers from planet formation.”
“Some of them have been whacked and broken by impacts from the other asteroids and then have kind of come back together again, as sort of traveling beanbags of loose rubble,” he said.
On Saturday, NASA’s newest asteroid probe named Lucy took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a 12-year mission to study some asteroids known as Trojans around Jupiter.
Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit these asteroids with the hopes of helping scientists learn more about how our solar system’s planets formed and how they ended up in their current configuration, NASA said in a release.
(HOUSTON) — A Texas constable deputy was fatally shot and two other deputies were wounded in what police are calling an “ambush” early Saturday morning outside a Houston nightclub.
The incident unfolded around 2:15 a.m. at the 45 North Bar and Lounge in the 4400 block of the North Freeway near Crosstimbers, Houston Police said.
Three Harris County Precinct 4 constable deputies were working an extra job at the club when they went outside to address “a disturbance” that “may have been a robbery,” Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief James Jones said during a press conference.
When they were wrestling with the suspect to either arrest or detain him, “we believe they were ambushed, shot from behind, by a suspect with a rifle,” Jones said. In total, three constable deputies were shot.
The suspected shooter was described as a Hispanic male in his early 20s. No futher information was made available.
As Chief Jones said earlier, our hearts go out to the families of the deputies and the men & women of Harris County Pct. 4.
Currently, there are no updates in the investigation. Any developments in the case will be posted here.#hounewshttps://t.co/B9s2CCCneX
Constable for Precinct 4 Mark Herman said one deputy was shot in the back and underwent surgery, another was shot in the foot who was to go into surgery, and a third was deceased at the hospital.
He described the incident as “Probably one of the toughest things I’ve done in my career.”
“We hope to have a suspect in custody soon and I hope for swift and quick justice for that individual because he ambushed my deputies,” Herman added.
The Houston Police Department is investigating the shooting.
One person of interest is in custody, but Jones said officials were not sure if he was a witness or a suspect.
“This is very tragic. I do believe that good always trumps evil and what happened tonight was evil,” Herman said.
