(HELSINKI) — Finland’s leaders on Thursday said the country would apply to join NATO “without delay.”
“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement. “We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.”
Leaders in both Sweden and Finland had been expected to announce their positions on joining NATO this week, as the war in Ukraine continues to have unintended consequences for Russia by potentially pushing two more of its neighbors to the transatlantic alliance.
Finland’s decision to apply for NATO membership is a threat to the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, Russia’s presidential press secretary, said on Thursday.
“Another enlargement of NATO does not make our continent more stable and secure,” Peskov told reporters.
Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ann Linde said on Thursday that Finland’s leaders had delivered an “important message,” adding that her country “will decide after the report from the security policy consultations has been presented.”
Sweden’s ruling party is expected to announce its position on May 15. Finland’s parliament is expected to debate the issue and then vote a day later.
The Scandinavian countries have long held neutral status when it comes to European conflict. Finland became a neutral country after the Second World War, while Sweden has resisted military alliances long before that.
Yet fears that Russia could do to other non-NATO countries what it has done to Ukraine has sparked a rapid shift in public opinion in both countries, one of which, Finland, shares an 830-mile land border with Russia.
Both could be on the cusp of joining NATO. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has publicly said the Nordic countries would be welcomed into the alliance.
Ahead of any official announcement from both countries for NATO membership, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed mutual security assurances in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
NATO’s expansion would be yet another unintended consequence for Russia, as they continue to be met with fierce resistance in Ukraine and a more united West than their intelligence assessments anticipated. Part of Russia’s security demands ahead of the invasion in Ukraine included reverting NATO forces to 1997 positions.
Since NATO was founded in 1949, the alliance has expanded to include 30 member countries, including three former Soviet republics, and the inclusion of Sweden and Finland would further expand the alliance’s influence in the Arctic and in the areas around Russia.
Stoltenberg said just days ahead of the invasion “if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO. And if it wants to divide NATO, it will only get an even more united Alliance.”
This prediction now appears to be coming true — although Peskov last month said that NATO is a “tool sharpened for confrontation” and it is “not an alliance that ensures peace and stability” when asked about Sweden and Finland. Experts say the expansion will be evidence of yet another strategic blunder on Russia’s part.
Even as public opinion has shifted, there are still those who oppose NATO membership for the Nordic countries, fearing it would lead to increased tensions with Russia.
“I’m afraid that NATO membership will increase actually the tensions in the Baltic Sea region and also will increase the tensions in Finland, especially regarding the eastern border,” Veronika Honkasalo, one of the few members of Finland’s parliament who doesn’t believe the country should join, told ABC News.
Furthermore, there are concerns that Sweden and Finland could be vulnerable to Russian attacks during the application process, though State Department spokesperson Ned Price moved to reassure both countries last week, saying: “I am certain that we will find ways to address concerns they may have regarding the period between the potential application and the final ratification.”
However, polling reported in both countries appears to show a significant majority are in favor of NATO membership.
“[Putin] has for years said Finland and Sweden joining is a red line,” Charly Salonius-Pasternak, lead researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told ABC News. “He’s managed to drive both Finland and Sweden towards NATO. So I think a massive miscalculation for him, but I think a positive thing for the rest of Europe.”
“It’s very clearly the population that changed its opinion in, say, six months, radically so,” he said, adding that the shift in public opinion had a snowball effect into Sweden, as fears grew about what could happen without the umbrella protection of NATO membership as the war in Ukraine continued.
“Now Russia has gone so far that joining NATO seems to be the only genuine solution here,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — What was once unthinkable — is now a reality.
One million Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday by President Joe Biden, marking a long-dreaded milestone for an incomprehensible tragedy.
“Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19. One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them,” Biden said in a statement. “As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember.”
The president plans to order flags to half-staff in remembrance.
Over the last two years, the deadly virus has kept the nation tightly in its clutch, with wave after wave of the virus washing over with only relatively brief respites in between.
“This unthinkable tragedy will forever appear in the history books,” said John Brownstein, Ph.D. an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
The loss of one million lives is a reality that is still difficult for many to comprehend, and to accept. In some respects, the death toll remains hidden from view.
Experts said the statistic, however massive, does not fully capture the magnitude of the human tragedy.
“It’s one thing to talk about numbers, but then to realize that each one of those numbers represents a grandparent or a spouse or someone with their own unique story that we’ve lost. Already over a million of those stories in you know, in this country alone — it really is a tragedy and a tragedy, in many ways, of unprecedented proportions,” Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News.
But the impact of the deaths extends far beyond the total number of deaths. An analysis published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that nine million family members — mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and children — may be grieving the loss of a loved one killed by the virus.
Making sense of the numbers
The staggering number of deaths due to COVID-19 is now equivalent to the population of San Jose, California — the 10th largest city in the U.S.
“If you were to tell people that an American city had been wiped off the face of the earth, people would be shocked and horrified. But since this has been a kind of a gradual burn over two years, we’ve gotten so used to hearing the headlines and so tired of having to deal with a pandemic. That sense of horror and devastation has been lost,” Dowdy said.
COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2021, following heart disease and cancer, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of Americans lost to COVID-19 also continues to dwarf the number of deaths from influenza. Between Oct. 1, 2021, and Apr. 30, 2022, the CDC estimated that there have been around 3,600 – 10,000 flu deaths. In the same time frame, more than 280,000 Americans have reportedly died from COVID-19.
Racial and ethnic minorities in the country have also faced increased risk of testing positive, requiring hospitalization and dying from COVID-19. According to federal data, adjusted for age and population, the likelihood of death because of COVID-19 for Black, Asian, Latino and Native American people is one to two times higher than white people.
Many experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths, a measure of how many lives have been lost beyond what would be expected if the pandemic had not occurred.
A recent report from the World Health Organization also found that globally, estimates show there were nearly 15 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 — more than double the official global death toll count of 6.2 million confirmed virus-related deaths.
‘I really don’t think people understand’
It has been more than two years since Pamela Addison lost her husband, Martin, a healthcare worker, to COVID-19, in the very early days of the pandemic in April 2020, but the grief is still raw.
“The day he died, I was stunned and in shock, and I was thrown into this new life,” Addison said. “I know that [my two young kids] were going to miss a lifetime of moments with their dad.”
After the loss of her husband, the 38-year-old New Jersey teacher found herself a single mother to the couple’s two young children, Elsie, then 2, and Graeme, then 5 months old, overnight.
Martin, a speech pathologist at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey, was just 44 when he became ill with the virus in late March of 2020. Within a matter of weeks, Martin was hospitalized and on a ventilator, and despite numerous interventions and efforts, Martin succumbed to the virus just over a month after he developed his first symptoms.
“Knowing that I wasn’t there when my husband died, I never saw him again after he left that door … that’s something that I will carry with me forever,” Addison said. “I said goodbye on FaceTime and I didn’t even know it was going to be the last time I loved him… I wasn’t able to have a funeral for my husband, and I really don’t feel like people understand just how difficult it is to grieve.”
The loss has deeply impacted the couple’s two young children, who still frequently talk about their father and their longing to hug them.
“I felt so unprepared to make [my daughter’s] pain go away,” Addison said.
A few months after the death of her husband, in an effort to find a community of others who could be experiencing the same grief as she had, Addison founded the Young Widows and Widowers of COVID-19 on Facebook, which now includes hundreds of members.
“When I lost Martin, it was this sense of loneliness,” Addison explained. “Knowing that other people experienced that same sort of inability to be there with their loved one … it gives me some comfort to know that I’m not alone… there are so many people grieving a loss to COVID-19.”
‘A myriad of outcomes that would not have resulted in a million deaths’
In the early days of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump predicted that the U.S. COVID-19 death toll would be “substantially” lower than the initial forecasts suggested.
“The minimum number was 100,000 lives, and I think we’ll be substantially under that number. … So we’ll see what it ends up being, but it looks like we’re headed to a number substantially below 100,000,” Trump said in April 2020.
Similarly, at the onset of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, in his most pessimistic scenario, did not envision the possibility that the number of Americans dead from the virus could ultimately be so staggeringly high, telling CNN in late March 2020 that preparing for one million to two million Americans to die from the coronavirus is “almost certainly off the chart.”
“Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely,” Fauci said.
The uncertainty of the federal response in the early days of the pandemic has come under repeated scrutiny from public health experts, who say more should have been done to keep the virus at bay.
“To imagine where we were just over two years ago, we lacked the clarity, the preparation and really the political will to properly respond to a viral threat that would bring the world to its knees,” said Brownstein.
On average, more than 300 Americans still dying of COVID-19 every day
Although COVID-19 death rates are significantly lower than they were in the winter of 2021, when more than an average of 3,400 Americans were dying from the virus every day, the death toll is still averaging more than 300 a day, according to federal data.
“We would not tolerate that sort of burden or mortality from a preventable disease in any other situation, and we shouldn’t be tolerating that for COVID-19 either — just because we’ve been dealing with this for a long time,” Dowdy said.
Since the onset of the pandemic, older Americans have largely borne the brunt of the COVID-19 deaths, despite having higher vaccination rates than the overall population. Overall, people over the age of 65 years old account for more than three-quarters of virus-related deaths in the U.S, according to federal data.
More than 90% of seniors have been fully vaccinated, and about two-thirds have received their first booster shot. However, despite high vaccination rates in older populations, in recent months, during the omicron surge, 73% of deaths have been among those 65 and older.
There has also been an increasing rate of breakthrough deaths among the vaccinated, an ABC News analysis of federal data shows.
In August of 2021, about 18.9% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among the vaccinated. Six months later, in February 2022, that proportional percent of deaths had increased to more than 40%.
Comparatively, in September 2021, just 1.1% of COVID-19 deaths were occurring among Americans who had been fully vaccinated and boosted with their first dose. By February 2022, that percentage of deaths had increased to about 25%.
Health experts said that the risk to the elderly population and waning immunity re-emphasizes the urgency of boosting older Americans and high-risk Americans with additional doses. And it brings into focus once again the deeply political battle over vaccines.
“Even as we hit this unthinkable milestone, the country is still massively divided on the reality of this pandemic and the tools we have to combat it. Not only do these safe and effective vaccines remain hotly debated but so do masks, a non-invasive tool widely recognized as basic personal protection,” said Brownstein.
Sally Hayden/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — In northern Kenya’s drought-stricken Turkana County, a group of children carried sacks of palm fruit atop their heads as they walked across the parched earth back to their tiny village.
They walk more than 20 miles to gather the small, bulbous fruit from the African oil palm several times a week. It will be their breakfast, lunch and dinner. One of the children, Ekiru, said the last time he ate something other than palm fruit was when a goat died of starvation and his village divided up the carcass.
“There is nothing else,” Ekiru’s grandmother, Nakaleso Lobuin Nipayan, told ABC News. “When the palm fruit go away, we will die.”
Famine is just around the corner for many others here. Up to 20 million people across the wider Horn of Africa region could go hungry this year as delayed rains exacerbate extreme drought amid soaring prices of food and fuel as well as a shortfall in humanitarian aid, according to the World Food Programme, the food-assistance branch of the United Nations.
“If they don’t receive assistance, we will see them go into something we call severe acute malnutrition,” Lauren Landis, WFP’s country director for Kenya, told ABC News. “And there’s the threat of death.”
According to a report released Wednesday by the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, the number and duration of droughts have increased 29% globally since 2000. While droughts represent just 15% of the world’s natural disasters, they took the largest human tool — approximately 650,000 deaths from 1970 to 2019. This year, more than 2.3 billion people face water stress, while almost 160 million children are exposed to severe and prolonged droughts, according to the report.
The report, entitled ”Drought In Numbers, 2022,” warned that unless action is stepped up, an estimated 700 million people will be at risk of being displaced by drought by 2030; an estimated one in four children will live in areas with extreme water shortages by 2040, and droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population by 2050.
Following several consecutive poor rainy seasons, the Horn of Africa is facing what’s been described as its worst drought since 1981. Aid workers fear the outcome will be deadlier than the severe drought that affected all of East Africa between 2011 and 2012, claiming the lives of an estimated 260,000 people.
In Kenya, the drought has been declared a national emergency. Between 80% and 90% of reservoirs and dams are drying up in Turkana, Kenya’s largest and northwesternmost county. It is also one of the hottest and driest. The communities here can no longer survive on farming, fishing or livestock.
ABC News traveled to Turkana County with the International Rescue Committee in early May. At an IRC-run hospital within a refugee camp in the rural town of Kakuma, cases of malnutrition have increased four-fold in recent months. The refugees had fled their homes in neighboring countries and crossed into Kenya — considered one of the richest East African economies — only to find little food or water.
“People [are] coming from all over the region thinking that they can find safety and nourishment in Kenya,” Dr. Sila Monthe, who works at the Kakuma refugee camp, told ABC News. “[But] Kenya is in a drought and can’t really support all of these people.”
The hospital’s pediatric wing is reaching capacity, with currently an average of 20 admissions per day, according to Monthe. Many of the children being treated here exhibit the telltale signs of severe malnutrition, with some even too weak to cry.
“People have been dying just trying to get to the hospital,” Monthe added.
Although the success rate of the pediatric wing’s stabilization ward is consistently above 85%, Monthe said that means 15% of the patients — mostly young children — still die.
“Because they are so malnourished, the whole body shuts down,” she told ABC News. “That includes the digestive tract, so they’re usually unable to digest food.”
The situation in the Horn of Africa has also been compounded by the fallout from a war on another continent, thousands of miles away.
Since Russian forces invaded neighboring Ukraine in February, the cost of grain, fuel and fertilizer has skyrocketed worldwide, worsening hunger crises. Many countries in East Africa rely on Russia and Ukraine for a significant percentage of these agricultural commodities, according to data collected by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Kenyan government also raised the price of petroleum products for March, April and May, citing the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the cost of WFP’s local food basket — the minimum food needs per family per month — has increased by 23% in the past year, driven in part by the Ukraine war.
Back in Ekiru’s village, near the town of Lorugum, he and his grandmother smashed palm fruit against rocks to extract the fibrous, faintly sweet flesh.
“This normally will sustain them until God remembers them,” the grandmother, Nipayan, told ABC News, noting that she has “never seen” a drought as “bad “as this.
Thunderclouds suddenly rolled in overhead and it began to pour with rain.
“I feel happy,” said Ekiru, whose name means “rain” in the Turkana language.
But the sporadic and localized rainfall is not enough, even as it triggers a deluge in Ekiru’s village.
“We were hoping that this rain will be good enough to be able to pull out some of the population out of the situation they were in,” Shashwat Saraf, the International Rescue Committee’s regional emergency director for East Africa, told ABC News. “But this rain also feeling and being below average will actually result in catastrophic consequences for the population.”
“We are talking about lives of millions of people in the region,” he added, “and I think we cannot say in words in terms of what it means for those individuals and families that are impacted by this crisis.”
One of the goats belonging to Ekiru’s family died during the recent heavy rain, providing them with a rare meal other than palm fruit. They once owned 20 goats, but now only have eight.
More than three million livestock have died in the Horn of Africa amid the ongoing drought, according to WFP. In Kenya alone, more than one million livestock deaths have been reported across several northern counties, including Turkana, “majorly as a result of starvation and diseases,” according to the National Drought Management Authority’s bulletin for April.
“Animals will die,” Ekiru’s grandmother told ABC News, “and eventually the entire family will starve.”
Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Several homes were destroyed in Southern California Wednesday night as the Coastal Fire continued to spread.
At least 20 homes were burned down in Laguna Niguel and the fire had reached approximately 200 acres, according to the Orange County Fire Authority, which said it had “60 different types of resources battling the flames.”
Evacuation orders have been issued for Coronado Pointe Drive, Vista Court and Via Las Rosa in the Pacific Island area, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said. Voluntary evacuations are in place for Laguna Beach residents in the Balboa Nyes, or Portafina, neighborhood.
OCFA Chief Brian Fennessy said late Wednesday there are no reports of civilian or firefighter casualties. The crews fighting the blaze are starting to get a better handle on the fire and “great progress” is expected into the night and coming days, Fennessy said.
The cause of the fire is unknown and an investigation is underway, according to the fire chief.
Fennessy said the fire started quickly and moved upslope over steep terrain, proving a challenge for hand crews to access. With fuels beds throughout the West being so dry, blazes like the Coastal Fire will “be more commonplace,” he said, adding that when winds couple with dry fuel, “fire is going to run on us.”
Strong winds were blowing embers into the attics of homes making it hard for firefighters to extinguish the blazes, as fires were jumping from house to house within the neighborhood, which is full of multimillion-dollar homes.
Laguna Niguel is south of Laguna Beach and about 25 miles down the coast from Huntington Beach.
(DALLAS) — Three women in Dallas were shot Wednesday afternoon after a suspect opened fire at a hair salon located in the city’s Koreatown, a historically Asian district.
The women suffered nonfatal injuries and were transported to a local hospital, according to police.
Police told ABC News the shooting took place on the 2200 block of Royal Lane, the address of Hair World Salon.
The shooting victims were all Korean women — the salon owner, an employee and a customer, police confirmed to WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas.
Police said they learned from a witness report that an unknown Black male parked what appeared to be “a dark color minivan-type vehicle” on Royal Lane and then walked across the parking lot into the establishment and allegedly opened fire.
“The suspect then fired multiple rounds inside the business, wounded all three victims,” police said. The suspect then drove away.
The suspect has not been identified yet, according to police, who also said the investigation is ongoing and the motive remains unknown.
A spokesperson for the FBI field office in Dallas told ABC News on Wednesday evening that the FBI is in touch with the Dallas Police Department and is monitoring the incident.
“Dallas Police Department is the lead investigating agency for this incident, but we are in communication with them and coordinating closely,” the spokesperson said. “If, in the course of the local investigation, information comes to light of a potential federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate.”
While it is unclear if the shooting was targeted, the incident comes amid a spate of attacks targeting Asian Americans across the nation.
Most recently, a Chinese food delivery worker was shot in the chest in New York City last week while riding his scooter in the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens. The motive is unclear and the investigation is ongoing in the case, according to the NYPD.
Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images, FILE
(SAN JOSE, Calif.) — The San Jose City Council voted unanimously to approve an ordinance that would ban so-called ghost guns in the city.
The ordinance prohibits the possession, manufacturing, sale, assembly, transfer, receiving and distribution of firearms, as well as related components, that are not imprinted with a federal or state-authorized serial number.
Privately manufactured firearms, also referred to as ghost guns, are untraceable firearms that are often assembled by unlicensed individuals, the ordinance explains. They’re typically sold through unregulated sellers, without background checks, waiting periods, sales records retention, age restrictions or other restrictions.
San Jose follows other California cities that have banned ghost guns, including San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles.
The ordinance is part of the mayor’s move to reduce gun harm and shift the financial burdens from taxpayers and victims to gun owners, the office of San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said in a statement.
“In cities like San José and LA, a quarter of the illegal guns seized by the police are ‘ghost guns’ lacking any serial number or other identifying mark, enabling criminal gangs to deploy them without accountability,” Liccardo said in the statement.
Residents in possession of unserialized ghost gun components will have 120 days to comply with the ordinance before the rule is enforced, the statement says.
In California alone, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50% of firearms recovered at crime scenes over an 18-month period during 2020 and 2021, according to the County of Santa Clara Crime Lab.
The number of ghost guns seized by San Jose police during criminal investigations in the last five years has increased “dramatically” from nine in 2017 to 221 in 2021, the ordinance states.
The ordinance will go into effect after June 16.
San Jose passed a groundbreaking rule in January that required gun owners to purchase liability insurance and pay an annual “gun harm reduction” fee. San Jose was the first city in the U.S. to pass such a law. It goes into effect in August.
President Joe Biden announced a new ghost gun measure last month, in an effort to crack down on what law enforcement has been calling a growing problem. Biden also called on Congress to pass universal background checks.
“We applaud the recent steps the Biden Administration has taken to stem the rising tide of ghost guns by banning their distribution. An ocean of ghost guns remain in our cities, however, requiring local communities to act to ban the possession of these untraceable guns and their component parts,” Liccardo said in the statement.
(OXFORD, Mich.) — Oxford Community Schools rejected a second offer from the Michigan attorney general’s office to investigate a school shooting in November. The school board said it will launch a third party investigation after the civil cases against the district have been litigated.
The school board said it has been fully cooperating with the Oakland County prosecutor’s investigation and will continue to do so.
Ethan Crumbley, a former student at Oxford High School, is accused of shooting and killing four other students at the school on Nov. 30. He has pleaded not guilty and is set to stand trial in September.
His parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley, are also facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly failing to recognize warning signs about their son in the months before he fatally shot his classmates. Two judges have declined to reduce their bail.
The Crumbleys have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
A lawsuit alleges that the district failed to heed warning signs before the shooting, which the district has denied. The board said reports and analyses will be made public throughout the litigation process.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel criticized the board’s rejection of her office’s offer.
“I am deeply disappointed by the school board’s repeated rejection of my offers to perform an independent and thorough review of the systems and procedures in the days leading up to and on November 30, 2021,” Nessel said in a statement Wednesday.
She said her department would only be able to perform an exhaustive and thorough review with the cooperation of the school board and district.
“Absent that partnership, I am restricted to the publicly available information we have all read and reviewed,” Nessel said.
The school board said it will wait to launch the third-party investigation and said it will be engaging experts as part of the litigation process to thoroughly review the tragedy and the events leading up to it.
“The ongoing criminal cases have understandably delayed the release of information that could be essential to our extensive review. Oxford Community Schools is also responding to numerous lawsuits at the state and federal levels which will require attention and time from our legal team, our staff and the Board,” the school board said in a statement Tuesday.
The board added, “Once the litigation process is completed and all information has risen to the surface, a team of experts will conduct a third-party review.”
The board also said it is working on a three-year recovery plan which is currently under development by the superintendent and district administration. Upon completion, the plan will be reviewed by a third-party before being implemented at the start of the 2022-2023 school year.
Third-party group Secure Education Consultants have also completed an independent review into all district safety practices and procedures, the board said.
Nessel claimed the board’s rejection stands in the way of transparency.
“The rejection sends a message that the board is more focused on limiting liability than responding to the loud outcry from the Oxford community to deliver greater peace of mind to the students, parents and educators that lived through this traumatic event,” she said.
(RALEIGH, N.C.) — Friends and volunteers formed a search party Wednesday and fanned out in Raleigh, North Carolina, looking for clues and raising awareness about a popular nightclub bouncer, who they say went missing a week ago while driving home.
Robert Richardson, 41, was reported missing by friends, who say he disappeared after getting into a minor car accident on the evening of May 4.
“He’s out there somewhere and somebody knows something,” Kensley Perry, a friend of Richardson, told ABC station WTVD in Durham.
Perry works as head of security at The Village Entertainment Complex in Raleigh’s Glenwood South nightlife district, where Richardson is employed as a door bouncer.
The Raleigh Police Department confirmed that Richardson’s friends filed a missing person report, but said they have no solid leads on where he might be.
Richardson was driving home to nearby Sanford on May 4 after meeting friends for dinner and got into a fender bender, Perry said. He said Richardson exchanged insurance information with the driver of the other car.
Perry said Richardson inexplicably walked away, leaving his vehicle behind with his two cell phones and laptop computer inside. Police responded and towed the vehicle away, Perry said.
Perry said he received a report that Richardson was spotted on May 5 walking toward downtown Raleigh, but there have been no sightings since.
Worried that Richardson may have been injured in the crash and has become disoriented, friends have called local hospitals and homeless shelters looking for the man. Friends and volunteers spent Wednesday plastering downtown Raleigh with missing person fliers containing Richardson’s photo.
Richardson is described as 6-foot-2 to 6-foot-3 and around 280 pounds.
“He’s got tattoos so he sticks out,” Perry said.
Asked if Richardson, who moved to North Carolina from Pennsylvania a year ago, had disappeared before or has a history of substance abuse, Perry said, “He’s not that type of guy. No history of that, to our knowledge, whatsoever.”
Perry said Richardson is a “nice, fun-loving social dude.”
“Always got a smile on his face,” Perry said of his friend.
(MIAMI) — A nearly $1 billion settlement in last year’s shocking collapse of a Miami Beach condo building was unexpectedly announced during a routine status conference in a Florida courtroom Wednesday afternoon.
Lawyers involved in the class-action lawsuit representing tenants from the oceanfront building in Surfside announced a $997 million settlement had been worked out.
Upon the news, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said he was “speechless.”
“That’s incredible news,” the judge said.
“I’m shocked by this result — I think it’s fantastic,” the judge told the courtroom. “This is a recovery that is far in excess of what I had anticipated.”
Litigation stemming from the catastrophic collapse in June 2021, which killed 98 people, had been moving slowly as the first-anniversary approaches.
ABC News’ Jared Kofsky contributed to this report.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Andy Cross/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images, FILE
(NEW YORK) — John Eastman, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to sow doubt in the 2020 election and even suggested throwing out absentee ballots so Trump could take the lead in the state, according to emails obtained by ABC News and sent to the Jan. 6 committee by the Colorado Ethics Institute.
“For example, depending on how many ballots were counted that were received after the statutory deadline (say 10,000 for example’s purpose), those 10,000 votes need to be discarded, and you can take the absentee ballot ratio for each candidate in the counties were late-received ballots were illegally counted and deduct the pro-rated amount from each candidate’s total,” Eastman wrote to Pennsylvania Republican state Rep. Russ Diamond on Dec. 4, 2020.
“Then, having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors — perfectly within your authority to do anyway, but now bolstered by the untainted popular vote,” he continued. “That would help provide some cover.”
The Colorado Ethics Institute obtained the Eastman emails via a Freedom of Information Act request for Eastman’s communications while he was employed by the University of Colorado-Boulder from August 2020 until May 2021.
The Denver Post first reported on the emails, which were later obtained by ABC News.
Eastman is under investigation by the Jan. 6 committee and a judge recently ruled he must turn over some documents to the committee he had been withholding. He drafted a plan for Trump to cling to power by falsely claiming then-Vice President Mike Pence could reject legitimate electors during the 2020 presidential election.
ABC News reported exclusively that Eastman was recently part of a small group of Trump allies who secured a private meeting in March to try and convince the Republican leader of the Wisconsin state Assembly to decertify Biden’s win.
Eastman was subpoenaed in November 2021 by the congressional committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He had been rejecting the panel’s request for documents, claiming attorney-client privilege, until a federal judge ordered most of them turned over.
ABC News’ Will Steakin and Laura Romero contributed to this report.
