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(HIGHLAND PARK, Ill.) — The man accused of carrying out a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, on the Fourth of July is set to appear in court Wednesday for his arraignment.

The suspect, Robert Crimo III, is facing 117 charges for killing seven people and injuring more than 30 others.

The 21-year-old is charged with 21 counts of first-degree murder (three counts for each victim) as well as 48 counts of attempted murder and 48 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm (for each person hit by a bullet, bullet fragment or shrapnel). The suspect has not entered a plea.

Five of the victims killed in the shooting died at the scene, one died at a hospital the same day and the seventh victim succumbed to his injuries at a hospital on July 5, according to police.

The suspect allegedly fired more than 70 shots from a perch on top of a building overlooking the Chicago suburb’s July 4 parade route, according to police.

The suspect planned the shooting for several weeks, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

Crimo was dressed in women’s clothing, apparently to blend in with the crowds as he made his escape, according to police. A semi-automatic rifle was found at the scene after it fell out of the suspect’s bag while leaving the area, according to police.

Investigators said they found a second rifle, purchased legally, in the car the suspect was driving when he was arrested several hours later. The suspect also legally purchased three other weapons, including two pistols, which investigators seized from his father’s home.

Two troubling encounters with police did not surface when background checks were run on Crimo, a part of his application for a gun license.

Police had checked in on the suspect in April 2019 after he attempted suicide, but his parents assured police he was getting help from mental health professionals. The second encounter came when police were called to his home in September 2019 after a family member claimed Crimo was threatening to “kill everyone,” according to police records.

At the time, the Highland Park Police Department determined that the shooter posed a “clear and present danger,” according to police records.

This was just months before he passed four background checks as part of his application for a firearm owner identification card, at the age of 19.

Because he was under 21 at the time, his father sponsored his application and state police said there was an “insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger and deny the FOID application.”

State police said they had reviewed the suspect’s criminal history before approving his application and only found a January 2016 ordinance violation for being a minor in possession of tobacco.

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(NEW YORK) — A repetitive meteorological event combined with the landscape in eastern Kentucky was a recipe bound for disaster, which led to dozens of deaths as a result of devastating flooding, scientists told ABC News.

A stubborn stationary front draped across the region for several days in a row, resulting in the formation of “training thunderstorms,” storms that repeatedly move over the same region in a short period of time. These types of storms typically drop very heavy rain that leads to flash flooding, with rainfall rates reaching 4 inches per hour at times across the complex terrain of the Appalachia.

This system is exactly what occurred in Kentucky last week, creating the “perfect meteorological setup” for catastrophic flooding, Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, told ABC News.

The front and the copious amounts of moisture that it contained allowed the storm “to really warm and move and develop in the same locations” over a short period of time, Shepherd said.

Rainfall estimates so far show that 14 to 16 inches fell during a five-day period, beginning on July 27.

Most of the rainfall fell the next day — with the excessive amounts of rain leading to major flooding along the rivers in eastern Kentucky, shattering records along the North Fork of the Kentucky River.

Preliminary stream data from the U.S. Geological Service shows that the flow at the North Fork of the Kentucky River in Jackson, Kentucky, reached a peak that was the highest observed there in 95 years, Robert Mason, extreme hydrologic events coordinator and Delaware River master for the USGS, told ABC News via email. In addition, flood flow at the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Whitesburg, Kentucky, reached the highest flow observed there in 47 years.

The topography and geology of the land in eastern Kentucky also played a significant role in exacerbating the effects of the heavy rainfall, the experts said.

The rainfall last week resulted in the biggest 24-hour event seen in the past 50 years of recording in Kentucky’s Robinson Forest, Chris Barton, a professor of water hydrology and forest management at the University of Kentucky, told ABC News.

The land is steep, rugged and “very dissected,” with the only flatland in the area located right at the floodplain, where the majority of the houses are because it is the only suitable flatline where people can build, Barton said. The onslaught of rushing water then flows quickly into those mountainous and valley communities.

The Robinson Forest, an old and established forest with no impervious surfaces, still could not handle the streams with multiple watersheds flowing onto the land as a result of the downpour of precipitation, Barton said. The geology of the area allows the water to move through the soil and into these ephemeral channels very quickly, which then results in a “really flashy” stream.

When Barton went to sleep the night the flooding began, he knew he would wake up to a disaster, he said. As of Monday, Robinson Forest was still a “complete mess,” with no electricity or solar power, he added.

Another contributing factor to the flooding is that the engineering infrastructure for stormwater removal for many cities and towns around the country was engineered for the rainstorms of the 1970s and 1960s and prior, Shepherd said. But storms are now raining “with much more vigor and intensity” than 50 years ago, he added.

Climate change is expected to increase annual flooding costs in the U.S. by 26% to $40.6 billion, a study published earlier this year in Nature found. The cost of the additional damage will be borne disproportionately by disadvantaged communities, the study found.

At least 37 people have been confirmed dead in Kentucky, the majority of whom likely lived in impoverished communities, Shepherd said, citing research conducted at the University of Georgia that found that communities of color and poor communities tend to be disproportionately living in some of the most flood-prone areas in the country, whether in cities or in mountainous terrain.

The region in eastern Kentucky where some of the worst flooding occurred has historically served as a mining community, Barton said.

While the history of mining on the land likely did not contribute to the severity of the flood, many of the people who were displaced or suffered loss of life likely worked, at some level, either at the mines or supporting the mining industry in the area, Barton said.

The number of victims killed in the flooding is expected to grow, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said on Tuesday, describing the event as the most “devastating and deadly” of his lifetime.

The flooding events are expected to increase at such a rate that what were once 1-in-100-year floods could soon be known as 1-in-30-year floods instead, Shepherd said.

“We have warned for decades now that as our climate warms, there’s more water vapor available to these storms,” Shepherd added.

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(LOS ANGELES) — Jury selection in the trial of former UCLA Health physician James Heaps, who is accused of sexual abuse, began on Monday and is expected to take place the rest of the week.

Heaps faces 21 charges in an ongoing criminal case brought against him in a Los Angeles County Superior Court, according to court records. He has pleaded not guilty.

The trial is expected to last throughout September, the Los Angeles Superior Court told ABC News.

In February, the University of California announced it had reached an agreement to pay $243.6 million to 203 women, settling lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct by Heaps.

Last year, the university agreed to pay $73 million in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed by seven women, on behalf of 5,500 women who were patients of the former UCLA gynecologist, court records show.

In a statement from 2019 following Heaps’ arrest, the school said it fired Heaps after sexual misconduct allegations emerged and removed him from clinical practice.

“Sexual abuse in any form is unacceptable and represents an inexcusable breach of the physician-patient relationship. We are deeply sorry that a former UCLA physician violated our policies and standards, our trust and the trust of his patients,” the school said at the time.

Heaps was an OB-GYN with ties to the school for more than three decades, the school said in its press release.

In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court last year, two women accused Heaps of fondling and groping their breasts without gloves during what were supposed to be breast examinations.

The women also accused him of touching both of their genitals in a sexual manner during a purported vaginal examination, according to the lawsuit.

“The conduct alleged to have been committed by Heaps is reprehensible and contrary to the university’s values. We express our gratitude to the brave individuals who came forward, and hope this settlement is one step toward providing healing and closure for the plaintiffs involved,” UCLA told ABC News in a statement in February.

More than 500 lawsuits were filed against Heaps and the school, accusing UCLA of not protecting patients after it found out about the alleged abuse, according to ABC News Los Angeles station KABC-TV.

An attorney for Heaps, Leonard B. Levine, told The Washington Post in May that Heaps is “adamant” about his innocence.

“He’s looking forward to a jury trial where he believes he’ll be totally exonerated,” Levine told the newspaper.

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(UVALDE, Texas) — ABC News pieced together what happened the day Salvador Ramos allegedly killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School, using maps, video evidence and information from law enforcement.

In the days immediately following the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, city leaders were bombarded with requests for information from journalists covering the attack. More than a hundred submissions were sent to city hall and the police department under the state’s public information law, to request documents and video that could help make sense of a mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

But it wasn’t just members of the media who were seeking such records; the FBI was too, according to government emails newly obtained by ABC News.

In the wake of one of the deadliest school shootings in America’s history, the nation’s premier investigative agency used, among other means, the Texas Public Information Act to seek relevant information — the same method used by news reporters and TV producers.

The FBI would not comment on the record as to why it used a process geared toward public information requests as part of its official investigation. But state officials have noted that the aftermath of the shooting has been plagued by a lack of communication on the part of numerous agencies — much to the frustration of victims’ family members who still have unanswered questions about the attack.

Emails show the that the FBI ended up getting the information it was seeking — but not through the Public Information Act request.

The requests were made on May 26 and May 27 by personnel from the FBI’s field office in San Antonio, Texas, who submitted three separate public records requests with the city of Uvalde seeking, among other things, police reports associated with the shooter and any reports associated with the home where he was living with his grandmother, who he shot in the face before heading to Robb Elementary.

A law firm representing the city of Uvalde told the FBI that its requests should be directed to the Uvalde Police Department, rather than the city itself, and that public records requests from the FBI put the city in a “difficult legal position.”

“The state rules do not allow for an intergovernmental transfer of records with a federal agency,” a representative from the law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech wrote to the FBI in an email.

“Additionally, the rules require that the requests from your agency be treated in the same manner as all other requestors,” the email said. “Unfortunately, compliance with the rules is counterproductive and does not make any sense in this situation. However, we cannot advise our client to ‘not follow the rules.'”

The law firm suggested that the Uvalde Police Department could provide the FBI with the records it requested without having to rely on the Texas Public Information Act.

“The provision of records would be under separate law that allows for cooperation with other agencies for law enforcement purposes,” the law firm said.

On June 16, the FBI emailed the law firm, saying, “We no longer need these records,” and withdrew its requests.

Uvalde:365 is a continuing ABC News series reported from Uvalde and focused on the Texas community and how it forges on in the shadow of tragedy.

A spokesperson for the city of Uvalde told ABC News that “initially, the FBI’s request was treated like open records because of the sheer volume the city received,” which the spokesperson said included 244 open records requests related to the shooting.

“But the city inevitably cooperated with the FBI and made sure they had what they needed,” said the spokesperson.

The information was provided by the Uvalde Police Department, the spokesperson confirmed.

“The city has processed all open records requests in accordance with the laws that guide us,” said the spokesperson.

The emails obtained by ABC News, which themselves were obtained through a public records request, also included requests from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state’s top law-enforcement agency, that were made directly to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office for information related to the shooting and the suspect.

Similar to a request made by the City of Uvalde to the AG’s office, the Texas DPS initially asked that this information be withheld from the public. In an email to Paxton, DPS officials argued that the records needed to be kept confidential because the public “knowing the location where surveillance assets and Department employees focus during operations, knowing how many law enforcement personnel are participating and their response capabilities, will compromise law enforcement purposes by enabling criminals to anticipate weakness in law enforcement procedures.”

Meanwhile, DPS officials confirmed to ABC News that they received requests from the FBI relating to the case and shared evidence with them through intergovernmental transfers.

DPS officials also said recently that they had, themselves, shared some information with the public that had been requested though the Public Information Act.

“DPS has released some emails and text messages in response to specific public information requests,” a DPS spokesperson said, adding that the agency “is waiting for rulings” from the AG’s office on several requests.

“The first ruling should be issued sometime in the middle of August,” the spokesperson said. “The Texas Ranger investigation remains active and ongoing. We are also waiting for further instruction from the Uvalde County DA with regard to the release of additional information.”

The mystery and confusion surrounding the shooting cropped up almost immediately after the attack, as several law enforcement and elected officials shared misleading or contradictory information in the hours and days following the massacre.

“The fear of a coverup is palpable here, and while most see it as simply part of an intragovernmental ‘blame game,’ others have made wild accusations that authorities are sweeping some major scandal under the rug,” a Texas House of Representatives committee wrote in an extensive report on the shooting released two weeks ago.

“It does become harder to proclaim the truth when it is so opaque. Most fundamentally, there has been a loss of trust in government,” the report said.

In response to many media outlets’ requests for records and other information, the city of Uvalde has claimed that “any release of records” would “impede a thorough and complete investigation.” Several media outlets, including ABC News, are planning to mount a joint challenge to government agencies’ limited response to requests.

ABC News’ Mike Levine contributed to this report.

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