(NEW YORK) — He was 39 years old, but those who knew Carl Asaro remember him as “a big kid.” He was a man who loved music, his wife, six children and his job as a firefighter.
“He would still have like a lot of energy and come play with all of the neighborhood kids,” his daughter Rebecca said. “He was big on riding his bike, throwing the football around and playing his guitar. If he wasn’t with us, that’s all he did. He was a huge Grateful Dead fan. He was either humming the songs or playing on the guitar.”
Asaro worked at Engine 54, only four miles from the World Trade Center.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he was one of the first responders who answered the call to help. Of the 15 people who left from Engine 54, Ladder 4 that day, none returned home.
Now, 20 years later, 65 children of New York firefighters who died have picked up their own helmets, inspired by their loved ones’ ultimate sacrifice.
“I think during this time it’s kind of expected to feel those old feelings and feel them resurge, but the days in between, when you don’t expect it — when a song comes on the radio and you see something that reminds you of him, those are the days that hit you a little bit harder,” Asaro’s son Carl Jr. said.
Four of the six Asaro children went on to continue his legacy as firefighters — Carl Jr., Matt, Rebecca and Mark, who were 13, 12, 9, and 7 on 9/11.
Rebecca remembers it was her mom’s turn to carpool that morning.
“I saw my dad that morning. That night before I asked him for tic tacs. I remember I was begging him, so before he went to work he dropped ‘em off and he kissed us goodbye,” she said.
“In school they kept calling us one by one. My mom when she picked me up… she was just so frantic… I remember my mom was back and forth on the phone,” she said. “I was 9 and didn’t really understand much of what was going on… I thought my dad pulled up one day and it was the chief to tell my mom what was going on. My mom didn’t understand so then it finally hit her days later that he wasn’t coming home.”
Matt took the bus home that day, knowing his dad was at ground zero.
“I was proud but I didn’t know what happened. I didn’t know the severity of it,” he said. “We didn’t have no cell phones back then, and I remember just calling him and beeping and no answer, no answer. That’s how life got to be without him. Coming down here and just waiting — people getting found everyday- alive, dead. They didn’t find nothing, not a bone, not a hair, not a memento. It just kind of sucked.”
Asaro’s body was never found, so his family opted to bury a guitar instead, filled with notes from loved ones — a symbol of his love of music.
Rebecca was eventually inspired to follow her dad’s footsteps as a firefighter by seeing his impact.
“It’s like the department’s small and my dad had such a big heart,” she said. “Through the years after 9/11 we talked to people.. He impacted so many.”
For Matt, he said the bond formed at the firehouse “is like no other.”
“We grew up here,” Carl Jr. said. “I think for us to give back and live a life of service is one way to really feel connected with my dad and for us to feel whole in a way.”
The siblings agreed that being a part of the FDNY helped them cope with the incredible loss.
“They’re a big part of our lives — has been and always will be,” Matt said, joking that his dad might have pointed out he wanted them to become doctors instead.
For five years, his namesake Carl Jr. didn’t visit ground zero. Now, he finds it peaceful, saying that because it was the last place his father was, he considers it his father’s final resting place.
On the eve of the anniversary of one of the darkest days in American history, Carl Jr. reflects on a discussion he had with his sister.
“We were talking about how you’re only truly dead when your name is mentioned for the last time, and I thought that was powerful,” he said. “If that’s the case my father and these men that were killed that day and sacrificed their life, they’re going to live forever through their legacy and their actions.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden paid tribute to the victims of the Sep. 11 terror attacks Friday, commemorating their lives and the losses of their families in a somber six-and-a-half-minute video.
Biden, in prerecorded remarks to the nation on the eve of the 20th anniversary, hailed the shared sense of national purpose that Americans felt after 9/11, and called unity the “greatest strength” of the country.
“Unity is what makes us who we are, America at its best. To me that’s the central lesson of Sept. 11,” he said. “Unity doesn’t mean we have to believe the same thing. But we must have a fundamental respect and faith in each other and in this nation.”
Biden will travel to New York City Friday evening and will attend 9/11 memorials in New York City; Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on Saturday.
“No matter how much times has passed, these commemorations bring everything back,” Biden said in the video, addressing the families of the victims. “Jill and I hold you close, and send you our love.”
“There are people around the world who you will never know who are suffering their own losses, who see you,” he continued. “Your courage … gives them courage that they too can get up and keep going.”
Biden said the 9/11 attacks also exposed the “darker forces of human nature,” acknowledging the wave of Islamophobia that followed the attacks as “fear and anger, resentment and violence against Muslim Americans, true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.”
“We saw a national unity bend and we saw that unity is the one thing that must never break,” he said.
Biden recalled speaking to a family friend in the days after 9/11 on the way to a meeting with students at the University of Delaware. The friend, Davis, had lost his eldest son at the World Trade Center, and his youngest son in a boating accident three years earlier.
“He told me to tell people, ‘Don’t be afraid. Tell them don’t be afraid.’ The absolute courage it took after two unimaginable losses is extraordinary, yet the most ordinary of American things. To know that life can be unfair and uncertain … but even in the darkness, to still be the light,” Biden recalled.
He invoked his friend’s words at the end of his remarks.
“We find strength in the broken places, as [Ernest] Hemingway wrote. We find light in the darkness,” he continued. “We find purpose to repair, renew and rebuild. And as my friend told me that September, 20 years ago, we must not be afraid.”
(BOWLING GREEN, Ky.) — With millions of Americans still unvaccinated, hospitals across the country are once again facing the overwhelming pressure of caring for thousands of COVID-19 patients — with more than 100,000 people in beds as of Friday.
While hospitalization rates in states like Florida and Mississippi, hit hard early in the delta surge, are beginning to decline, other southern states, including Kentucky, are showing no signs of infection and hospitalization rates slowing down.
“We walk into the hospital and it feels like the world is on fire,” Dr. Karan Singh, a pulmonologist at Med Center Health in Bowling Green, Kentucky, told ABC News.
Statewide, there are more than 2,600 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 — the highest on record, and currently, just 7% of intensive care beds remain available. At the state’s previous peak last December, there were 1,000 fewer patients hospitalized.
Last week, Kentucky reported more than 30,000 new cases, according to Gov. Andy Beshear, a weekly record since the onset of the pandemic.
“Our hospital situation has never been more dire in my lifetime than it is right now,” Beshear said. “We cannot handle more sick individuals.”
More than 400 members of the Kentucky National Guard, as well as strike teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency medical services, have now been deployed to help struggling hospitals across the state.
“I would honestly say it’s at least three times worse than what it was the first time,” nurse Kerri Eklund, from Baptist Health Hardin, in Elizabethtown, told ABC News. “We’re seeing a lot of people getting really sick. There are patients that will come in and they’ll be doing okay for a few days and then, in the blink of an eye, they go downhill.”
The current wave of infections caught many health care workers by surprise, added Heather Brock, another nurse at Baptist Health Hardin. Earlier this year, with vaccinations available, there was a sense that things would return to normal. However, nearly nine months into the country’s vaccination rollout, and less than 50% of Kentucky’s total population has been fully vaccinated.
“I wasn’t expecting this much of a surge again. In my opinion, it’s worse than the previous ones,” Brock said.
Front-line health workers said that the situation escalated quickly, after a short period of relief earlier this summer, and nearly all patients have been unvaccinated.
Across Kentucky, state data shows that 91.6% of COVID-19 related hospitalizations between March 1, and Aug. 31, have been among partially or unvaccinated residents.
“The patients who are vaccinated are doing a lot better,” said Eklund. In fact, “patients who are vaccinated, most of the time don’t even need oxygen, and they’re just here because they have a few of the other complications and they’re monitored. Most of the patients who end up going downhill, unfortunately, have not been vaccinated.”
Many patients the teams are treating remain in the intensive care unit for weeks at a time, said Baptist Health Hardin nurse Clara Robertson, while “suffering and struggling for breath, that entire time. And then a lot of times, unfortunately, losing that battle, and dying.”
The state’s most recent wave has been a difficult reality to face, added Eklund, as well as emotionally crushing for the medical staff to watch so many patients suffer.
The patients, “have been doing all they can and trying their hardest, and then they just get to the point that their body can’t handle it anymore. And I think their minds start to break, because they’ve been giving it all and they’re still not getting any better.”
Medical professionals, whether doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants or respiratory therapists — all are stretched so thin that many are experiencing exhaustion, compassion fatigue and burnout.
“We’re being tasked with daunting assignments, and everyone is emotionally, physically and mentally exhausted,” noted Brian Deweese, a respiratory therapist at Med Center Health. The fatigue is such, he said, that “we are seeing highly experienced and exceptional health care workers walk away from their profession altogether, because of the stress and anxiety they’re having to deal with.”
Outside the walls of the hospital, Singh said many community members do not fully realize the severity of the COVID-19 crisis across the state.
“When we leave, and we go to the grocery store, or we talk to people not in medicine, it’s like the world is just unaware of what is happening,” Singh said.
And front-line workers say they worry this surge will only further deteriorate, as they prepare for fall and winter.
“I’m really worried that it’s just going to keep getting worse, and I hope that we’re able to find a way to protect everyone, and have what we need, because we all know that winter is the worst time for health issues all together,” said Eklund. “I’m really hoping that we’re not going to have to see a lot of lives lost.
(NEW YORK) — Hours before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, pretrial proceedings in the case against the five accused orchestrators started and ended on Friday with none of them present in the courtroom for the final public session of the week – while multiple defense teams raised formal objections against the judge continuing to preside over the military commission.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, had been present during public sessions of the proceedings on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, even taking the rare moment out of his detention cell to wave at reporters in the public gallery in the courtroom. But he and his co-defendants surprised reporters Friday by skipping the final public portion of the commission before the world recognizes the solemn commemoration on Saturday.
An assistant staff judge advocate, identified only by a pseudonym “Pa,” testified to their absence and provided signatures acknowledging their “voluntary” decision not to attend. James Connell, defense counsel for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, aka Ammar al-Baluchi, attempted to have the military witness identify himself, but the government objected, insisting the testimony should proceed anonymously and was within the regulations of the military commission and not a violation of the Sixth Amendment.
Connell’s complaint was less about identifying this particular witness on the record, and more about expressing his continuing objection to the government’s use of unnamed witnesses. The interaction illustrated not only the tedious nature of the pretrial proceedings where nearly every action warrants deliberation, but it also revealed another unusual aspect of this case: the defense does not have access to their own clients — even when the court is in session – unless the accused actually attend the hearings.
The assistant staff judge advocate testified that one 9/11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi was sleepy and chose to nap rather than attend Friday’s public session. No explanation was given for the absence of the other four defendants, though Connell was able to extract details that the condition worsened of another Gitmo detainee, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi – who is charged in another case but shares communal living quarters with some of the 9/11 defendants.
Al-Iraqi now claims that he is paralyzed and has lost the function of his legs, so al-Baluchi apparently aided him throughout the past several nights after the detainees rejected the assistance of a female corpsman. (His lawyers say that her initial offer was an invasive exam as the reason al-Iraqi waved off care.) The assistant staff judge advocate rejected the claim that Al-Iraqi is paralyzed.
Col. Matt McCall, presiding over the proceedings, offered to make a change to the schedule to allow the defendants more time to sleep Friday morning and attend today’s proceedings in the afternoon, but the defense counsel ultimately refused the accommodation – rather than face the prospect that the codefendants would be dragged out of their cells and forced to attend in person.
After discussing the judge’s qualifications at length this week, Mohammed’s lawyer Gary Sowards surprised many in the courtroom by announcing he would seek to disqualify McCall from sitting on the bench, saying there is a reasonable question about the judge’s impartiality, given the “extra-judicial” nature of McCall’s removal from the case after he was initially assigned. (Sowards argues the decision was made without appropriate litigation and at the behest of the Pentagon.)
A second chief counsel argued not for McCall’s removal from the case, but that he needed more time to read in on the case at hand and capital law.
“You’re not familiar with the record,” defense counsel Cheryl T. Bormann told the judge. “You are not familiar with the law as it applies to capital cases. Being a judge in a trial courtroom requires you to rule spontaneously on objections.”
A third lead attorney echoed both Sowards and Bormann. Connell declared he had no objections with McCall and would not seek to disqualify him. The final team deferred for now.
McCall said he would consider the arguments and render a decision on his own position.
The teams then moved into arguing over discovery, one of the most contentious issues in this case. The defense teams argued in favor of a motion demanding the government turn over more detailed evidence from the CIA black sites where KSM and the other detainees were held. After pointing out that the government provided limited assessments of more than 800 interrogation sessions, the defense further pressed the government’s secrecy.
In step with this line of questioning, Connell also revealed to reporters after the session that he could now share that the prosecution had withheld evidence linking an FBI interrogator that was part of the so-called “clean team” that questioning the detainees after they arrived at Guantanamo and the CIA black site program, providing fresh scrutiny surrounding the 2008 testimony from the detainees that the government is expect to build much of its case upon.
This slow drip of information and lack of transparency creates a significant hurdle for each defense team, they argue. “We don’t know what we don’t know,” Corey Krzan, one of Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s lawyers, said before the judge.
After about three and a half hours of public session, the court recessed for lunch and a classified session. The public portion of the proceedings will resume on Monday.
(OSHKOSH, Wisc.) — Anissa Weier, one of the two 12-year-old girls who said they attacked a friend to please the fictional character “Slender Man,” will be released from a mental health institution on Monday. Weier is now 19.
In 2014, Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner, also 12, to the woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier watched. Leutner was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries but survived.
Judge Michael Bohren on Friday approved the conditions of Weier’s release from Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The full report on those conditions hasn’t been released to the public.
In 2017 Weier was sentenced to up to 25 years in a mental institution.
At a March court hearing, Bohren reviewed several medical reports and a letter written by Weier. “I have exhausted all the resources available to me at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be a part of society,” Weier wrote.
Weier said she’s taken the responsibility that comes with “living with a mental illness, by communicating with total transparency to my treatment team members, participating wholeheartedly in all aspects of my treatment, and maintaining 100% medication adherence.”
“I am sorry and deeply regretful for the agony, pain, and fear I have caused,” Weier wrote, adding, “I take full responsibility for my actions.”
“I vowed after my crime that I would never become a weapon again, and I intend to keep that vow,” she said.
Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide. Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was found by a jury to be not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser pleaded guilty to the first-degree charges, and in 2018, as a part of her plea agreement, Geyser was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Geyser was sentenced to up to 40 years in a mental institution. Last year a state appeals court upheld her sentence.
Geyser and Weier said they had intended to kill Leutner to appease the fictional character “Slender Man” — often depicted online as a horror figure who stalks children — and prove that he was real.
After Geyser stabbed Leutner, she and Weier left Leutner alone in the woods. Injured and bleeding, Leutner pulled herself out of the woods and into the open where someone could find her.
“If the knife had gone the width of a human hair further, she wouldn’t have lived,” Dr. John Kelemen, who operated on Leutner that day, told ABC News in 2014.
In a 2019 interview, Leutner told ABC News she was doing well and that her hope was to “put everything behind me and live my life normally.”
ABC News’ Jason Volack, Allie Yang and Sean Dooley contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Taking his toughest tone yet against those Americans still unvaccinated, President Joe Biden has triggered vows of legal challenges from GOP governors representing some of the very states where he’s trying to use mandates to get more people inoculated.
At least 19 Republican governors have lashed back at Biden’s promise to use OSHA to pressure employers with more than 100 employees to mandate COVID-19 vaccines or have workers submit to weekly testing. The Republican governors called the mandate an overreach that will force Americans to choose between their job and the vaccine.
While Biden said on Friday morning, during a visit to local middle school, that all scientists would agree with his new strategy — that using protecting public health as a justification for mandates makes “considerable sense,” his taking a combative tone may come with new political and public health risks and further polarize Americans, fueling the already bitter political divide around the pandemic.
South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, tweeted to Biden, “see you in court,” while Mississippi GOP Gov. Tate Reeves compared him to a “tyrant,” and South Carolina GOP Gov. Henry McMaster said he’ll “fight them to the gates of hell” to stop the move. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Biden’s approach “flat-out un-American.”
When ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott asked Biden on Friday what his message was to Republicans threatening to challenge his move in court, he responded, “Have at it.”
He continued, “Look, I am so disappointed that particularly some Republican governors have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities. We’re playing for real here — this isn’t a game.”
While Biden has previously said he wouldn’t impose vaccine mandates, he said Friday that vaccine requirements are “nothing new.” However, past vaccines requirements for measles, mumps and rubella, for instance, have historically been implemented at a state and local level — and at times when the country wasn’t already so divided politically
In his address to the nation on Thursday introducing his new six-part approach, a frustrated Biden went after the unvaccinated and elected officials for standing in the way of public health measures and, he said, causing people to die.
“These pandemic politics, as I refer to it, are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die. We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal,” Biden said.
“My message to unvaccinated Americans is this: What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see?” he said. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
He called out the governors, many of whom are now criticizing his approach, saying, “if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.”
He added, “Let me be blunt. My plan also takes on elected officials in states that are undermining you and these life-saving actions. Right now, local school officials are trying to keep children safe in a pandemic while their governor picks a fight with them and even threatens their salaries or their jobs,” he said. He promised his administration would to pay back salaries withheld from those opposing mask bans.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked on Friday what caused Biden and the rest of the administration to change its tune on blaming the unvaccinated for the pandemic — after Psaki said in June that she didn’t want to place blame.
She said Biden on Thursday was “channeling the frustration” of millions who are vaccinated as the pandemic rages, while pointing a finger at Republicans.
“We didn’t anticipate, I will say, that when there was a vaccine approved under a Republican president, that the Republican president took, that there would be such hesitation, opposition vehement opposition in some cases from so many people of his own party in this country,” she said.
While 75% of adults have gotten a shot, per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccinations have stalled in recent months despite widespread availability as the hospitals across the country face another surge of the virus timed with the start of a new school year.
Biden’s new approach to getting more shots into arms comes as his approval for handling the pandemic has dropped sharply from 62% in June to 52% now.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found also that vaccine hesitancy has subsided in the face of the delta surge, with the share of Americans who are disinclined to get a coronavirus shot now just half what it was last January. Among those unvaccinated adults, about 7 in 10 are skeptical of the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness, 9 in 10 see vaccination as a personal choice rather than a broader responsibility and just 16% have been encouraged by someone close to them to get a shot.
It’s unclear if Biden will break through to that group.
A White House spokesman declined to say whether public polling on why certain people remain unvaccinated informed the decision to institute these new requirements, or otherwise explain how Americans’ attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines impacted the president’s decision.
The spokesman said the decision to enact the new requirements was “not rooted in any political focus, rather on what’s going to work.”
As some GOP governors say they’re preparing lawsuits, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients in defending the mandates on Friday argued that COVID-19 is a “public health issue, not a political issue.”
“We know that vaccination requirements work,” Zients said, pointing to “significant increases in vaccination rates at companies, health care systems, universities, that implement vaccine requirements.”
As Biden did on Thursday, Zients pointed specifically to companies like Fox News — which has provided a platform for vaccine misinformation and has repeatedly railed against Biden’s COVID-19 response — but which is also participating in a version of a vaccination reporting requirement itself.
“The president’s actions will accelerate that number of companies across the board for employers over a hundred, and that includes Fox News, which already has that vaccination requirement in place to keep its own employees safe.”
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson and Sasha Peznik contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke — and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality — a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later — with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks — the legacy of 9/11 remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the 9/11 attacks and unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. “9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow” is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Part 5: A shadow so long, it covers all
The blue light may have been the strangest part.
On the streets of Baltimore, where crime proliferates in the poorest neighborhoods and economic desperation can run thick, the blue cast made it feel like one of those science-fiction movies set in a dark future of robots in control.
“I found it extremely oppressive and dystopian,” said Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a contributor to Baltimore magazine and a Pulitzer Center grantee.
The blue lights are meant to be seen. They are security cameras, and police want them to both solve crimes and deter them. In the city famed as the birthplace of America’s national anthem, the lights announce that the people are being watched.
Critics say these neighborhoods coated in blue also represent something else: the failures of an overzealous surveillance state, militarized and armed to the hilt in the years since terrorists attacked the nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite the city’s high-tech efforts to curb crime, Baltimore still suffers from some of the highest homicide rates in the country. The city’s public image — shaped for many by the HBO crime drama “The Wire” — remains tethered to the fraught relationship between the police and the community.
For Baltimore and other major metropolitan areas, ubiquitous surveillance and a tragic cycle of police-involved killings continue to animate the debate over U.S. law enforcement. Many of the most controversial policing practices date to 9/11, when local governments were flooded with a surge of money, technology and new crime-fighting strategies — on top of a new mindset that assigned local cops to the front lines of the Global War on Terror. It was a time when many police departments re-fashioned themselves as paramilitary organizations, as their core mission was recalibrated from performing the traditional role of “protect and serve” to preventing the feared “second wave” of attacks for a terrorized and traumatized nation.
Police departments across the country, eager to avoid the failures that led to 9/11, scrambled to equip officers with the latest in military equipment and technology — much of it made available by a federal government that would spend almost 20 years at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the police forces — always eager to hire military veterans — were being staffed by people trained to police populations under occupation, not communities on the home front who get to decide how they want to be governed. Critics charged that racial profiling proliferated in cities like Baltimore, where the blinking blue lights became a symbol of life under a surveillance state.
“Over-policing, the racial tension — it just exponentially grew for local policing,” said Chris Burbank, a former police chief in Salt Lake City, who’s now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity.
From aerial surveillance in Baltimore to national terrorist watch lists, local police departments experimented with novel approaches to securing their streets in the years following 9/11. A scarred nation largely acquiesced.
Over time, critics of these methods say that the trauma suffered by heavily policed communities — and the toll on residents’ civil liberties — have done more harm than good. As protests erupted across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, the gap between police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect had never seemed wider.
“This separation between policing and community, I think you have to view 9/11 as gasoline that was poured on that fire,” said Lawrence Grandpre, a Baltimore-based community activist and author.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a wariness of Muslims swept the country. Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed. Mosques became inundated with threats.
“Anything that showed that you were an Arab or a Muslim caused everyone to be suspicious of you,” said Sahar Aziz, director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
In response to the terror attacks, police departments in some major cities compiled vast databases of alleged potential terrorists and undertook ambitious surveillance missions targeting Muslim communities.
“You had massive surveillance programs by the NYPD, and the LAPD, and the FBI,” said Aziz. “Muslim student organizations at universities, Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, anywhere where Muslims congregated was systematically surveilled … we were sitting ducks.”
At the time of the attacks, the conversation around law enforcement was trending toward stricter guidelines for equitable policing — including halting some of the most invasive tactics like stop-and-frisk. Years of advocacy and lobbying in Washington culminated in the End Racial Profiling Act — a bill incoming President George W. Bush supported on the campaign trail in 2000.
“And then 2001, 9/11 happened, and it was completely off the table,” Aziz said. “It was a nonstarter.”
Before the 2001 terror attacks, John Farmer was the New Jersey attorney general who led the push to reform a state police culture that had itself acknowledged racial profiling and had vowed to eliminate it. After the attacks, as Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he said he had to watch as 9/11 “had the effect of deferring the debate on racial profiling.”
“Suddenly,” Farmer said, “no one wanted to talk about it anymore.”
Over the next decade, as American military forces engaged terrorists abroad, veterans of war returned home to continue their service as police officers. Together, with the influx of weapons of war, police throughout the U.S. began to look more and more like they were deployed on a forward operating military base.
“Police departments all over the country have acquired a pretty significant amount of military-grade weapons and equipment since 9/11,” said Loren Crowe, an Army officer who served two deployments overseas. “My local police department would be well-equipped to go fight in the mountains in Afghanistan.”
It all amounted to a post-9/11 “over-policing” that has had debilitating effects on police-community relations, according to many who have spent their careers in law enforcement.
“At that time there was so much fear in communities because of 9/11,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who experienced the changes as he worked his way up through the ranks in the New Orleans Police Department. “And it became a concept of more police — and do more with more police.”
In Baltimore, where the death of Freddie Gray in 2016 ignited nationwide protests and added new urgency to the debate over post-9/11 policing, the local police department led the charge in advancing novel and controversial police tactics.
Blue-light cameras flooded crime-prone streets. Facial recognition software and phone data collection were employed to fight crime.
Perhaps the most jarring to residents were the so-called “spy planes” deployed to surveil large swaths of the city. Launched in 2016, the nation’s first-ever aerial surveillance experiment was meant to be secret. The manned airplanes’ immense capabilities allowed them to record the outdoor movements of an entire city. An independent audit later found that nearly all of the spy planes’ flights tracked over majority Black communities.
The police department has since suspended the program, and Harrison, the new commissioner, is focused on mending the strained relationship between the police and the community.
“Let’s try to tamper down the militaristic look and mindset, and move away from the warrior model into the guardian model, where we’re guardians of our community, not necessarily warriors of the community,” says Harrison.
Still, wounds run deep.
“Baltimore is one of the cities that is a pioneer in surveilling its own citizens,” said Simpson, who has reported on the city’s surveillance programs for Baltimore magazine. “There’s a lot of desperation to get a handle on the crime … so Baltimore has become a destination for police surveillance technology companies, to try out their wares.”
Grandpre, the community organizer, said this experimentation with electronic surveillance “just exacerbates the notion of a divide between the police force and the community.”
“After 9/11 and with Baltimore’s high crime rate, there’s a notion that anything is acceptable,” Grandpre said.
Now, two decades on, Americans are finally returning to pre-9/11 conversations about policing and what it really means for a nation to govern itself.
“Absolutely there’s bias. Absolutely there’s racism. And we can start to talk about some of these things,” said Burbank.
Supporters of these police programs stress the need to try something new and different. “What we’ve been doing has not been working,” said Joyous Jones, a retired nurse and proponent of police surveillance in Baltimore, who decided to start working for the surveillance company running the planes after the program became public.
“The [American Civil Liberties Union] and all those people that really complain about their civil liberties — I don’t have that because when I walk outside, I have to look and dodge bullets,” Jones said.
Jones is not alone in her support for the programs. “There was public support for it,” Commissioner Harrison said. “There were community surveys that were in high percentage in favor of it … and we looked at all of that.”
But after a year of high-profile police-involved killings and a spike in violent crime in many cities, reformers continue to ask: Are these police practices even working?
“People talk about the dichotomy: Do we want security, or do we want liberty? But some of the experts I spoke with say that’s sort of a false dichotomy,” Simpson said. “Are you getting more security with this technology? Is the crime rate in Baltimore getting better? No.”
“All these technologies have been added, a lot of them since 9/11,” Simpson said. “And what are you losing by deploying all this?”
ABC News’ Sarah Kate Caliguire, Alexandra Myers, Abigail Roberts and Tom Sampson contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Vaughn Allex will never forget the faces of two of the 9/11 hijackers. He looked them in the eye that morning and asked who packed their luggage.
Allex was an American Airlines ticket agent at Dulles International Airport on Sept. 11, 2001 when two men ran into the terminal — appearing lost — and approached his counter.
Brothers Salem and Nawaf Al-Hazmi arrived late that day, but with two full-fare, first-class passengers standing in front of him, instead of rebooking them, Allex ensured they made flight 77.
Allex has lived with that decision for the last 20 years.
“The check-in was odd. The two that I checked in, two brothers, one was kind of gruff and the other one was standing a couple of paces behind him. And this sounds odd, but this is what caught my attention. He was almost dancing, he was moving from foot to foot and grinning and looking around, and my thought was, here’s somebody that’s never been on an airplane and boy is this guy excited,” Allex recently recalled in an interview at Dulles airport in Virginia.
“And I kind of watched him for a couple of minutes as we went through the whole check. And he was totally unresponsive as far as whatever we asked him to read, to look verbally. He just smiled and danced and was oblivious to what was going on,” he continued. “That’s the image I have, is the two of them standing there and the one just dancing, it was the oddest thing.”
When the pair couldn’t answer basic security check-in questions, Allex marked their tickets for additional security.
There’s more Allex has had to live with — 24 hours before Allex checked-in the brothers, his longtime co-worker and close friend MJ Booth asked for advice on a trip to Las Vegas. She considered flying to Chicago or Dallas to connect to Las Vegas, but Allex encouraged her to take flight 77 instead and connect through Los Angeles.
“I said, first of all, it’s a better flight. It’s a transcontinental flight. You get a meal and a movie and it’s relaxing.” Allex recalls. “She said that sounded good, but that she’d never written a ticket that way and we were just transitioning to electronic tickets. Could I help her? So I wrote her ticket from Dulles to Los Angeles with a connecting flight back to Las Vegas. And then the following day, I saw that she had gotten on the flight on the ticket I’d written.”
Allex left Dulles on Sept. 11 grieving, but had no idea it was about to get so much worse.
“I didn’t know on September 11th, on that night and the morning of September 12th, I was dealing like everybody else was with what happened with losing friends, losing passengers, losing the crew. I knew all of the crew on the flight deck and I knew all of the cabin crew, I’d worked with them for years. What I didn’t know until about mid-morning (Sept. 12) when the FBI was talking to me was that those last two passengers that I checked in were actually two of the hijackers. I had no idea until that moment that I had been involved in it,” Allex said.
On Sept. 12, Allex was summoned to his boss’ office. There, a woman introduced herself as an attorney for American Airlines, adding “I am not your attorney.”
Allex recalls the chill that went through his body. That’s when he says two FBI agents walked in, handing him a passenger manifest.
“I started to run my hand down the list and I saw the names of the two people I checked-in, and in that moment and that instant, that’s when I looked at him and I said, ‘I did it, didn’t I?’ And they said, ‘what did you do?’ And I go, ‘these were the two that I put in,'” Allex said. “I think they, they knew exactly who they were looking for, but they wanted me to come to that conclusion. And once we did, the interview strictly focused on these two individuals. And the rest is history, that the whole transaction came back, I didn’t know all of September 11th until that moment on September 12th — I did not realize that I had checked-in two of the hijackers.”
Guilt tortured Allex for years to come. Twenty years later, there are still some things he’d rather not discuss.
“I blame myself, I thought, you know, if I had done something different, if I’d not let them on, if I just said to the agents, these two guys are late, let them get the next flight. We have one at noon. It’s no big deal,” Allex said.
Over the years, friends and professionals told Allex that he was just doing his job.
“That’s what they tell me, that’s what they tell me, but, what you do, what your — your own mind does is, is crazy sometimes,” Allex said.
“I realize that there’s probably nothing I could’ve done to prevent what happened. I’ve come to terms with that.”
His mind continued to play games with him for years. It wouldn’t be until 2004, with the purchase of a book that everything turned around.
“The turning point for me, I had been interviewed by the 9/11 Commission. And it wasn’t until the 9/11 Commission report came out and I bought the book and here is this book with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, and I’m on page three. I have a little paragraph and a footnote, footnote number 12.”
Allex explained that single footnote — his name next to so many others — is what finally set him free of guilt and the feeling of responsibility years after the attacks.
“That’s when it started to get better. That’s when I went — oh my gosh. There were so many other people involved, there were so many innocent people that just touched on this. And I had just such a small, tiny five-minute part of it. But before that, it was — it was terrible.”
Allex retired from American Airlines in 2008. He now works for TSA.
“I joined the Department of Homeland Security working for the Transportation Security Administration and ever since I’ve been with them, it’s been great. I feel like the work that they do is so important to keep everybody safe. And the fact that I have just such a small little part there, I’m like the happiest person at TSA. And I’ll tell anybody that,” Allex said with a smile.
On Aug. 23, Allex walked with ABC News through the doors he saw the two hijackers run through that fateful morning. As he stood there, recalling the memory of the men responsible for starting the war in Afghanistan, Afghan refugees had just arrived from evacuation flights. They filed past the American Airlines ticket counter and through the very doors that the hijackers walked in 20 years earlier — grateful to start a new life in America.
(TALLAHASSEE, Fla.) — In a victory for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, an appeals court ruled Friday to keep the state’s ban on student mask mandates in place, at least until it issues a final ruling on the legality of the ban.
The ban on mask requirements — issued by the Florida Department of Health in August after DeSantis directed it to “protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks” — had been suspended Wednesday by a judge in Tallahassee. Judge John C. Cooper had ruled that the state could not keep punishing school districts that require masks while the appeals court works toward a final ruling.
Friday’s order overrides Cooper, giving the Florida Board of Education the green light to continue withholding the salaries of school board members in districts that require face coverings for students. The state has imposed that punishment on two districts and has announced investigations into several others.
“Just like last year in the school re-opening litigation, the First District Court of Appeal has reinstated Florida’s ability to protect the freedom for parents to make the best decisions for their children while they make their own ruling on the appeal,” Taryn Fenske, communications director for DeSantis, said in a statement to ABC News. “We look forward to winning the appeal and will continue to fight for parents’ rights.”
DeSantis tweeted, “No surprise here – the 1st DCA has restored the right of parents to make the best decisions for their children. I will continue to fight for parents’ rights.”
Alachua County, one of the districts where school board members’ salaries are being withheld for imposing a mandate, said in a statement that despite Friday’s ruling it will “continue to enforce universal masking in our schools.”
“The decision is disappointing, but we understood from the beginning that the legal battle over masks in schools would take time and not every decision would be favorable,” Alachua County Public Schools Superintendent Carlee Simon said in a statement.
“While Alachua County Public Schools is not part of this particular lawsuit, we certainly support it,” Simon continued. “We are pleased that the plaintiffs plan to continue their fight. In the meantime, our legal challenges are just beginning, and we support the other Florida districts and families who are also taking the state to court over this issue.”
At least 13 school districts, including Florida’s six largest, have implemented mask mandates.
“Upon our review of the trial court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,” Friday’s order states. “These doubts significantly militate against the likelihood of the appellees’ ultimate success in this appeal.”
A lawyer representing the parents who sued the state said Friday’s decision would make students less safe.
“We are disappointed by the ruling of the 1st DCA that reinstates the stay and will be seeking pass through jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Florida since this matter involves statewide issues. With a stay in place, students, parents and teachers are back in harm’s way,” Charles Gallagher, one of the lawyers representing the group of parents who sued the state over its ban on mask mandates, wrote on Twitter.
(NEW YORK) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads.
More than 654,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.6 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Just 62.5% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Sep 10, 1:48 pm
Florida governor’s school mask mandate ban is reinstated
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ school mask mandate ban was reinstated by an appeals court Friday.
This overrules a Tallahassee judge’s decision on Wednesday to lift the stay, preventing the state from enforcing the ban. (The appeals court still needs to rule on the legality of the order, but the reinstatement of the stay means that until then, the state can continue sanctioning school districts.)
DeSantis has struggled to rein in the state’s largest school systems as they implement mask mandates in defiance of state law. At least 13 districts, including Florida’s six largest, have mask requirements in place. The Florida Department of Education has threatened to withhold the salaries of school board members in most of these districts and has begun doing so in at least two cases.
-ABC News’ Will McDuffie
Sep 10, 1:00 pm
CDC studies: Vaccines still dramatically reduce risk of hospitalization, death amid delta
The unvaccinated “are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said at Friday’s White House COVID briefing.
Three new studies from the CDC show vaccines still dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death amid the delta surge.
A study of U.S. veterans fully vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna found no real change in vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization pre-delta to post-delta. A second study of all three vaccines across nine states found vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization was 86% for all age groups. A third study of all three vaccines across 13 jurisdictions found vaccines performed roughly equally well protecting against hospitalization and death during the delta surge compared to pre-delta.
Across the studies, vaccines remained 86-87% effective against preventing hospitalizations.
But effectiveness dropped more for people ages 65 and older in recent months compared to before delta, likely due a combination of vaccine effectiveness fading over time and the slight impact of the delta variant on vaccine efficacy.
Vaccines are losing some of their effectiveness when it comes to preventing mild infections among the vaccinated.
-ABC News’ Sony Salzman
Sep 10, 11:28 am
Kentucky deploys more National Guard members to help strained hospitals
In hard-hit Kentucky, over 300 more National Guard members will be sent to help at 21 strained hospitals, Gov. Andy Beshear said.
More than 300 additional @KentuckyGuard members will be deployed to 21 strained hospitals. This is the largest deployment of the Guard for a health crisis in our history. We’ve asked a lot of these heroes, but every time we’ve asked, they’ve stepped up and served us proudly. pic.twitter.com/gu4rBO4Whw
Kentucky’s positivity rate was above 14% Thursday as the state set new records for hospitalizations and patients on ventilators, the governor said.
-ABC News’ Will Gretsky
Sep 10, 9:54 am
FDA says it won’t cut corners for vaccine for young kids
While awaiting Pfizer trial data for kids ages 5 to 11, the Food and Drug Administration is vowing not to cut corners.
The FDA said, “it’s critical that thorough and robust clinical trials of adequate size are completed to evaluate the safety and the immune response.”
“Children are not small adults — and issues that may be addressed in pediatric vaccine trials can include whether there is a need for different doses or different strength formulations of vaccines already used for adults,” the FDA said.
When the FDA receives a completed emergency use authorization request, “the agency will carefully, thoroughly and independently examine the data to evaluate benefits and risks and be prepared to complete its review as quickly as possible, likely in a matter of weeks rather than months.”
“However, the agency’s ability to review these submissions rapidly will depend in part on the quality and timeliness of the submissions by manufacturers,” the FDA added.
Sep 10, 5:43 am
Milwaukee Public Schools to require COVID-19 vaccination for staff
All employees of Milwaukee Public Schools must provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination by Nov. 1, unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption, school board members voted unanimously on Thursday night.
The board also decided that staff who qualify for an exemption must take COVID-19 tests twice weekly. Anyone who does not comply with the new vaccine mandate or is not exempt would be placed on unpaid leave and ultimately could lose their job.
Students are not required to get vaccinated, but the board approved monetary incentives of $100 for those who are 12 and older and can provide proof of vaccination by the Nov. 1 deadline.
Sep 09, 7:33 pm
LA school district to mandate vaccine for students
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education unanimously voted Thursday to require the COVID-19 vaccine for all eligible students.
All students ages 12 and up will be required to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 10, 2022, unless they have a “medical or other exemption,” said the district, which is the second-largest in the nation with over 600,000 students.
All teachers and staff are already required to be vaccinated by Oct. 15.
“Today’s decision furthers our longstanding commitment to ensure the safety of our students, families, and staff,” Board President Kelly Gonez said in a statement. “The vaccine is the single best way to protect students and schools from COVID-19.”
