(NEW YORK) — A teenager was killed and another was critically injured when gunfire erupted at a popular Halloween hayride attraction in a Pittsburgh suburb, and police said the suspected gunman remained on the run Sunday.
The shooting unfolded around 8:15 p.m. Saturday at the Haunted Hills Hayride, about 13 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, according to the Allegheny County State Police.
Police said gunfire broke out near the ticket booth about 15 minutes before the annual charity event was set to open for the first night in a run scheduled to go through Halloween.
Several hundred people, including parents and children, were waiting to get into the event when multiple shots were fired, sparking a chaotic scene of people scrambling to get out of harm’s way, according to police.
Law enforcement sources told ABC affiliate WTAE in Pittsburgh that the shooting appeared to have stemmed from an argument near the ticket booth.
Lt. Venerando Costa of the Allegheny County Police Department said at a news conference that two 15-year-old boys were shot and taken to an area hospital, where one was pronounced dead and the other was in critical condition. Their names were not released.
Costa said witnesses described the suspected gunman as Black, 15 to 17 years old, 5 foot 9, with short hair and wearing dark blue cargo shorts and carrying a black backpack.
It was unclear if the suspect fled the scene on foot or in a vehicle.
No other injuries were reported.
“What goes through my mind when a 15-year-old gets shot at a hayride? I think it’s a terrible shame,” Costa said. “Anybody could have been hurt.”
The Haunted Hills Hayride, which also features a haunted trail lined with actors dressed in Halloween costumes, is an annual charity event to benefit the Autism Society of Pittsburgh.
(NEW YORK) — Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., reiterated his call on Sunday for a strategic pause on the $3.5 trillion budget resolution, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., doubled down on the need to pass both the bipartisan infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills.
“The urgency — I can’t understand why we can’t take time to deliberate on this and work,” Manchin told ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos.
In an interview that followed, Sanders told Stephanopoulos that he believes both bills will be passed.
“I think we’re gonna work it out, but it would really be a terrible, terrible shame for the American people if both bills went down,” Sanders said.
Manchin on Thursday wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a “strategic pause” on the budget resolution Democrats took the first step in passing last month. Debate continues over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, with some Democrats threatening to hold up the bipartisan infrastructure bill on the passage of the reconciliation package.
The Senate returns on Monday and the tentative deadline for Senate committees to turn in their draft legislation to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sanders, the Budget Committee chairman, is Wednesday.
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy defended President Joe Biden’s new actions to combat COVID-19, calling it an “ambitious” and “thoughtful” plan to increase vaccinations as the country has faced more than 100,000 cases a day for the past four weeks and roughly a quarter million new cases being reported among children.
“The requirements that he announced are not sweeping requirements for the entire nation,” Murthy told ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “These are focused on areas where the federal government has legal authority to act.”
Reaching a milestone this week, 75% of American adults have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but Murthy warned that the delta variant is a “tough foe” that has “thrown curve balls” at any progress made and said Biden’s actions “have to be taken” to help get through the pandemic.
Biden on Thursday announced his furthest measures yet to combat the delta variant — unveiling a six-part strategy that includes a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule for private businesses with over 100 employees to either require workers to be fully vaccinated or face weekly testing, covering roughly 80 million workers.
“We know that these kinds of requirements actually work to improve our vaccination rates,” Murthy said. “Tyson Foods, for example, which put in a vaccine requirement recently saw that its vaccination rate went from 45% to more than 70% in a very short period of time and they’re not even at their deadline yet.”
The president’s mandate on private businesses received swift criticism and legal threats from Republican governors, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who called it “fundamentally wrong” for someone to lose their job for not being vaccinated.
Murthy pushed back against opposition, saying Sunday that “there are requirements that we put in workplaces and schools every day to make sure that workplaces and schools are safe,” such as mandatory vaccines for children to attend school.
“This is not an unusual phenomenon. What it is, is I think an appropriate response for us to recognize that if we want our economy to be back, if we want our schools to stay in session, we’ve got to take steps to make sure workplaces and learning environments are safe and these requirements will help do that,” he continued.
The surgeon general also defended the administration’s actions against legal challenges, saying it “wouldn’t have been put forward if the president’s administration didn’t believe that it was an appropriate, legal measure to take.”
“The COVID virus is a dangerous virus,” he continued. “It makes our workplaces and our schools, far less safe than they should be. So this is an appropriate action, we believe, and it’s certainly from a public health perspective — most importantly — will help keep workers safe.”
This is the first time OSHA will create a rule requiring vaccinations and White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that they are hoping the rule making proceeds “as quickly as possible.”
The vaccine mandate is now also required for 17 million health care workers and 4 million federal government employees and contractors, but they won’t have the option to undergo weekly tests.
(NEW YORK) — In the wake of a Florida judge calling the state’s anti-riot law unconstitutional, advocates are saying it should serve as a warning to other states looking to implement similar legislation.
Chief Judge Mark Walker sided Thursday with civil rights groups suing Florida who alleged HB1 deters and punishes peaceful protests. Walker argued the language in the law was “vague to the point of unconstitutionality” and temporarily blocked the law from being enforced while legal challenges continue.
“Its vagueness permits those in power to weaponize its enforcement against any group who wishes to express any message that the government disapproves of.” Walker wrote. “If this court does not enjoin the statute’s enforcement, the lawless actions of a few rogue individuals could effectively criminalize the protected speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding Floridians.”
Plaintiffs in the case praised the judge’s decision, saying it will contribute to the safety of protesters not just in Florida but across the nation.
“We’re happy about it, we’re happy that people can continue to take to the streets, and can continue to protest and feel safe doing so.” Jessika Ward, press secretary for Dream Defenders, one of the plaintiffs in the case, told ABC News. “We don’t want people to be in harm’s way and be arrested, just for, you know, saying how they feel and speaking up for injustices happening in our country.”
HB1, which was touted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, as necessary to protect law and order during protests, was passed on partisan lines earlier this year and was part of a growing movement from mostly Republican-backed legislatures around the country to pass similar legislation after 2020 was marked by demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The laws criminalize protests that turn violent and adds harsher penalties for people participating in these demonstrations, whether they were perpetrators or not.
Since the murder of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, 11 states have passed anti-riot legislation and at least 231 bills cracking down on protests have been introduced across 45 states, according to the nonpartisan International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks legislation targeting the right to protest.
Florida’s court decision could set a precedent for other states who are trying to or have already passed similar legislation. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed anti-riot legislation in his state a day after HB1 was temporarily blocked. That legislation would have also imposed harsh penalties for protesters charged with rioting.
While state lawmakers could bring a veto override, activists in North Carolina say what happened in Florida could dim those prospects.
“I’m hopeful that the court decision could actually discourage them from even trying to override the veto. Because, you know, maybe they’ll just see the writing on the wall,” said Ann Webb, a policy analyst of the ACLU of North Carolina.
In Oklahoma, civil rights groups are preparing for a similar legal challenge as in Florida for their state’s anti-protest legislation set to take effect Nov. 1. The law uses vague and overbroad vocabulary and discourages participation in protests by criminalizing it lawyers allege in the filing.
As states continue their legal challenges, lawyers say Florida serves as a powerful reminder for how constitutional freedoms will be upheld in court.
“Just as bad laws have a dangerous way of being contagious, orders striking down bad laws or recognizing their unconstitutionality equally sends a message.” Max Gaston, a staff attorney of the ACLU of Florida told ABC News. “I think it’s a powerful reminder that such unjust and unconstitutional efforts cannot be tolerated and that courts will not tolerate them.”
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court allowing an unprecedented pre-viability abortion ban to go into effect in Texas has prompted questions on the status of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that’s supposed to protect the right to abortion nationally.
To some experts, this marks the end of the line for the right to abortion to be federally protected, especially with an upcoming case soon to be heard by the court that directly challenges Roe.
“Roe v. Wade is dead in Texas, the second-most-populous state,” Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas at Austin School of Law professor, told ABC News, “and I think it’s really hanging by a thread for much of the rest of the nation.”
Not overturned, but some say ignored in Texas case
The Supreme Court did not remark on the constitutionality of the Texas law, but it did reject a request for an emergency injunction, citing technical grounds, in a brief so-called shadow docket, allowing the law to go into effect while it’s being legally challenged.
“So we don’t see a citation to Roe v. Wade, we don’t see a discussion of the constitutionality of banning abortion, but here we are, right?” Sepper said. “Abortion is banned in the state of Texas, and that speaks volumes beyond this mealy mouthed sentence and the one paragraph we got from the court.”
In 1973’s Roe and in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court affirmed “the constitutionally protected liberty of the woman to decide to have an abortion before the fetus attains viability and to obtain it without undo interference from the State.”
The Texas law bans physicians from providing abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — well before viability.
“To have allowed that to happen in this procedural way,” said Kimberly Mutcherson, a co-dean and law professor at Rutgers Law School, referring to the Supreme Court, “is something that I would have thought they were at least a little bit too good for, but apparently I was wrong.”
On Thursday, the Department of Justice sued the state of Texas to block the law, with Attorney General Merrick Garland calling it “clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent.”
Ripple effect
Since the near-total ban in Texas was allowed to go into effect, Republican lawmakers in other states have said they aim to mimic the law.
Priscilla Smith, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice who argued in front of the Supreme Court in a 2000s abortion case, called the court’s action “cowardly” and “completely lawless.”
“It overturned it in effect in that it’s saying, ‘Here’s how you can get out from under Roe.’ So it’s instructing states on how to do something to make it so Roe doesn’t apply in their state,” she said.
The Texas law is different from previous bans in that it prohibits the state from enforcing the ban, instead authorizing private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion.
With that, Mutcherson said, “they created this sort of confusion and this hook that the Supreme Court was able to use.”
“This kind of tactic is going to be used throughout the country in anti-abortion states to deprive women of federal constitutional protections,” Smith said.
Upcoming case
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this term from Mississippi, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, challenging another pre-viability ban. The state of Mississippi formally asked the court to overturn Roe as part of that case.
“The Supreme Court’s decision not to decide with regard to the Texas abortion law signals quite strongly, I think, the outcome on the Mississippi 15-week ban on abortion,” Sepper said.
Because precedent might indicate the Texas ban should have been enjoined, Sepper said, “I think that does signal really the end of Roe.”
Smith agreed: “There’s no reason to think they’re not just going to overturn the right itself.”
Since 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts has stepped in as a swing vote on abortion, including siding with the liberal-leaning justices in the latest full abortion case, although his opinion followed more procedural lines.
But the Supreme Court balance has changed since 2018 with former President Donald Trump’s appointments, who have voted more conservatively. Roberts joined Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in dissenting on the Texas law, but his vote did not make theirs the majority opinion.
“Justice Roberts is no longer the swing vote,” Smith said. “I don’t think there is a swing vote.”
Acknowledging it was “possible” one of the Trump-appointed justices could side with the liberal-leaning justices, Smith said, “There’s no indication that anybody’s going to swing.”
Sepper posited the justices could overtly overturn Roe or do it in a “sneaky, silent sort of way,” like by changing a standard that opens the door for more restrictions and bans.
Possible political repercussions
While the door has arguably been opened for state lawmakers to ban abortion, some argue they may not want to because of potential political repercussions.
A 2019 ABC News/Washington Post poll showed a majority of Americans support the right to abortion, so lawmakers could face backlash from voters if they actually ban it.
Many conservative lawmakers have introduced bills restricting abortion knowing that they would probably never go into effect because they were unconstitutional, Sepper added.
“So these legislators got credit with the anti-abortion activists for passing the laws, but they didn’t have to face the electoral consequences of having banned abortion or denied emergency abortion care,” she said. “The fact that they may soon face those political repercussions is something they’re going to have to think about.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is already facing backlash for the new law’s lack of exceptions for cases of incest or rape.
One way for voters to indicate disapproval is protesting, and while there have been some demonstrations about the Texas law, Smith said she’s surprised there aren’t more.
“And I’m not sure why they’re not, except that people are getting this idea that this is just a procedural move,” she said. “If Dobbs comes through the way the anti-abortion folks want it to, if Roe gets overturned in Dobbs, then maybe people will wake up and hit the streets. But you know, if you’re in a red state right now, you better watch out
(NEW YORK) — The Biden administration in recent weeks has announced a series of mandates that require long-term care facilities to fully vaccinate staff against COVID-19, drawing mixed responses from providers, industry leaders and advocates, including those who said the federal policies will put extra strain on an industry already suffering a workforce shortage.
But some nursing homes said they’ve already successfully implemented their own mandates without a significant impact on their workforces, which officials say showcases how the new federal rules can be carried out to protect vulnerable elderly residents amid yet another coronavirus surge.
President Joe Biden’s mandate, announced last month, directly targets nursing homes — employees in long-term care settings must be vaccinated for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding. Additional White House announcements made this week could also indirectly affect nursing homes, including an upcoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule that would mandate private businesses with at least 100 employees require employees to either be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. Businesses that don’t comply with the agency’s rule could face fees of up to $14,000.
The proposed rules would also require health care facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to have a vaccine mandate.
Genesis HealthCare, one of the largest nursing home providers in the country, said almost 100% of its staff was vaccinated by Aug. 23, except for a “small number of individuals who received medical or religious exemptions,” spokesperson Lori Meyer told ABC News.
“Thoughtful and supportive dialogue, clinician-led family and peer discussions about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and the looming federal mandate all played important roles in seeing the vast majority of our unvaccinated employees choose to become vaccinated,” said Meyer, adding that two weeks after Genesis finished vaccinating its staff, COVID cases among residents declined by nearly 50%.
When the nationwide push to vaccinate the most vulnerable population began in December, nursing homes were at the front of the long-term care industry’s battle against the pandemic, with facilities across the country reporting more than 33,000 cases and 6,000 deaths a week.
Within six months into the effort, cases and deaths among residents at long-term care facilities had dropped by nearly 99%, with the vast majority of residents at long-term care facilities fully vaccinated, according to data published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services.
As of Aug. 29, the latest weekly data available, nursing homes reported an average of 84% of residents per facility vaccinated and roughly 63% of staff vaccinated, federal data shows.
In recent weeks however, COVID cases and deaths have been on the rise again in long-term care facilities as the delta variant rips through the country.
A recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the effectiveness of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines among nursing home residents has declined significantly over the past few months with the advent of the delta variant, from 74.7% in March through May to 53.1% in June and July.
Experts have cited this data to advocate for multi-pronged and layered prevention strategies for nursing homes, including vaccinations of staff members, residents and visitors, contractors, as well as appropriate testing and possible booster shots.
While the overall staff vaccination rate hasn’t gone up by much since Biden’s announcement of the nursing home mandate, more facilities are reporting a higher staff vaccination rate, CMS data shows.
As of Aug. 29, nearly 3,800 facilities out of more than 15,200 that report to the CMS have fully vaccinated less than 50% of their staff, down from roughly 4,000 facilities the prior week, federal data shows. And the number of facilities that reported vaccinating less than 30% of their staff also decreased over the week, from more than 900 in the week Biden announced the mandate to 800 the following week.
Most of the facilities with the lowest vaccination rates are in Florida, Texas, Missouri and Ohio, where vaccine hesitancy rates tend to be higher.
But more than 3,000 other facilities reported fully vaccinating more than 80% of their staff, a rate almost on par with the national vaccination rate of nursing home residents, the data shows. Among those, 122 reported vaccinating 100% of their staff.
The Jewish Home Family, a New Jersey-based senior care facility in a part of the state ravaged by the pandemic, is one of the nursing homes that’s finished vaccinating all employees. During that process, the facility ended up letting go five of 350 employees, CEO and President Carol Silver-Elliott said during a press conference last week.
“We felt it was a small price to pay to keep our elders safe, and it is something we feel very very strongly about,” Silver-Elliott said. “It doesn’t take much to invoke those images of what horrible experiences we all went through, and to all of them suffered losses of friends and colleagues and family members and elders, so I think that made a difference too.”
Dayspring Senior Living in northern Florida, near the Georgia state line, has had a vaccine mandate in place for all employees since January, achieving 99% compliance, Executive Director Doug Adkins told ABC News.
He said one employee sought medical accommodation, and another who resigned rather than get a vaccine ended up getting vaccinated and returning to work. Late last week, Dayspring Senior Living rolled out booster shots for staff and residents approaching the eight-month mark since getting vaccinated, Adkins said.
“No one likes to be told what to do — this is no different,” Adkins said, but “once the employee is vaccinated, then I believe they appreciate the fact that the majority of the workforce is vaccinated and the environment is safe.”
So far, Dayspring hasn’t seen many breakthrough cases with symptoms, Adkins added.
Despite his facility’s successful staff vaccination effort, Adkins said rather than create a mandate tied to federal funding, a better approach would have been to offer tax incentives to companies that decided on their own to implement a vaccination mandate to help them compete and develop a workforce that helps keep residents safe amid ongoing staffing shortages.
David Totaro, chief government affairs officer at BAYADA Home Health Care, a multinational long-term care provider headquartered in New Jersey, said during a press conference last week that mandating staff vaccinations could “significantly hurt” nursing homes’ ability to react to current workforce shortages as some nursing homes raise wages to retain employees.
The American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living, which represents more than 14,000 nursing homes, as well as other local nursing home advocates, are urging the Biden administration to expand the vaccine requirement to all health care settings, not just nursing homes.
“If other local health care providers and private industries are not implementing vaccine mandates, nursing homes are rightfully concerned that unvaccinated employees may leave to work elsewhere,” said AHCA spokesperson Beth Martino. “Otherwise, the administration will exacerbate an already dire workforce crisis in long-term care.”
(NEW YORK) — SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission may sound familiar, as another billionaire-backed space launch, but it’s going where neither Richard Branson nor Jeff Bezos could — into orbit.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’ Blue Origin sent civilians into space on brief, suborbital flights that lasted only for a few minutes.
But Elon Musk’s SpaceX is just days away from sending its first all-civilian crew on a three-day mission around the Earth multiple times.
Inspiration4 will orbit 360 miles above Earth, higher than the International Space Station, with no professional astronaut on board. It will be the first orbital space tourism flight that doesn’t have an astronaut to guide the passengers through launch and landing.
Commanding the mission is 38-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman, an experienced pilot. He founded a payment process company called Shift4 Payments and purchased all four seats on the flight for roughly $200 million.
Isaacman wants this launch to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He has already donated $100 million to the cause, and raised an additional $13 million through a lottery to win a seat.
One seat was reserved for a St. Jude ambassador — 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux.
Arceneaux is a bone cancer survivor who was treated at St. Jude’s as a child and now works there as a physician assistant. She will be the youngest American to go to space as well as the first person with a prosthesis.
Joining Arceneaux and Isaacman on their journey is Chris Sembroski, 41, and Dr. Sian Proctor, 51.
Proctor said she has dreamed of going to space since she was a child. She once applied to become a NASA astronaut and made it to the final 47 out of 3,500 applicants, but was cut from the final round. She burst into tears when she heard she was chosen as a member of the Inspiration4 mission.
Sembroski is an Iraq War veteran and engineer with Lockheed Martin, who won the final seat through the lottery that required a St. Jude donation to enter.
The crew has gone through partial- and full-mission simulations and has been trained by SpaceX on “the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, including a specific focus on orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing,” according to an Inspiration4 release.
They will launch from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida — the same launch pad that Apollo 11 blasted off from — sending man to the moon for the first time.
Joining Arceneaux and Isaacman on their journey is Chris Sembroski, 41, and Dr. Sian Proctor, 51.
Proctor said she has dreamed of going to space since she was a child. She once applied to become a NASA astronaut and made it to the final 47 out of 3,500 applicants, but was cut from the final round. She burst into tears when she heard she was chosen as a member of the Inspiration4 mission.
Sembroski is an Iraq War veteran and engineer with Lockheed Martin, who won the final seat through the lottery that required a St. Jude donation to enter.
The crew has gone through partial- and full-mission simulations and has been trained by SpaceX on “the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, including a specific focus on orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing,” according to an Inspiration4 release.
They will launch from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida — the same launch pad that Apollo 11 blasted off from — sending man to the moon for the first time.
(NEW YORK) — Kylie Willis says she remembers when her father told her that he wanted to enlist in the Army. She was 9 at the time, and said she wanted to tell him no.
“I think I just heard something in his voice, even at 9 years old, that made me know that this was important to him. So I said, ‘OK,'” Willis told ABC News, sitting outside her home in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
“And, you know, seven, eight years later, we lost him because of that decision. And I struggled with that for a long time,” she added, pausing to take a deep breath.
Her father, Staff Sgt. Kirk Owen, was killed in August 2011, one month into his Afghanistan tour by a roadside bomb. According to Willis, Owen took the front seat of the car because he considered it the most dangerous place to be and didn’t want another soldier to ride in that position.
“My dad went over there for a reason. He went over there to protect people. He went over there to provide them clean drinking water. He went over there to make sure that little girls could go to school. and he did that. He did his mission. He did his job. And unfortunately, he was killed while he was doing that, but that doesn’t mean his sacrifice meant nothing,” said Willis.
That sacrifice is something Willis carries with her every day. Now, at 26 years old and expecting her first child, she said there’s not a day that goes by that she doesn’t think about what her family lost. For the past decade, she searched for a way to honor him and continue his legacy of service that she said he didn’t get to finish.
Willis eventually joined Children of Fallen Patriots, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit that provides college scholarships and educational counseling to military children who have lost a parent in the line of duty. Willis was one of the more than 10,000 children who have benefited from the organization, she said.
“I make sure that the other sons and daughters of our fellow service members know that their mommy and their daddy meant something, and that we love them and we will take care of them,” Willis told ABC News, a tear rolling slowly down her face.
Since 2001, more than 7,000 American service members have been killed fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For some families, like Willis’, the cost was incredibly high. But each family with a loved one serving in the war made a sacrifice.
In Bethany Montjoy’s case, her father survived the war and eventually came home. But by the time her father, Technical Sgt. Tim D. Montjoy had served 20 years in the Air Force, he had already missed more than a quarter of her life.
“You have these thoughts of when are they going to come back,” said Montjoy. “[You] want to talk to them, [you] want to hug them.”
As she grew older and as her father neared retirement, Montjoy said she wanted to channel her father’s legacy of service into helping other military kids who were also missing their parents. That’s when she and her father came up with the idea of getting military kids around high-profile role models like professional athletes. The pair created Operation Teammate, a nonprofit based in Georgia that introduces kids to athletes.
Capt. Nathaniel Lee was only 7 when his father, an Air Force captain, was killed in a training accident in 1997.
“It was like in a movie where the chaplain and the commander pulled up in a car,” said Lee. “And my mom’s reaction was instant. She knew why they were there.”
Life changed quickly for Lee’s family. Without family close by, they moved back to Northern California where Lee’s mom was from. And while it was great to have the family support, Lee said that it effectively cut them off from the military community, which made it hard to relate to the new kids in his class.
“Being the new kid is already hard,” said Lee, “And I didn’t want to be [the] kid whose dad died, so I was telling people that my parents were divorced and that’s why my dad wasn’t around.”
Concerned that he wasn’t expressing his grief, he said his mother helped him find a place amid the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivor, or TAPS, an organization that works with those grieving the death of a military family member. At his first event, Lee said he opened up for the first time about his dad.
Years later, though Lee became an officer in the Air Force and later joined the newly created Space Force. He said he felt the achievement wasn’t enough in honoring his father’s memory.
Around that time he was promoted, he received an email from TAPS looking for mentors, and said he took it as a sign.
At his first event as a mentor, he said the organizers brought all the mentors into one big room.
“They said: ‘Take a seat and leave an empty seat next to you, and a kid who’s lost someone is gonna walk in and sit down next to you, and it’s your job to start talking to them,'” explained Lee, and said he was more than a little nervous at the time.
Lee was paired that first day with Annelise Miller, whose father died in 2016 after 23 years of distinguished military service when she was only 8 years old.
“I remember my brother told me that it was OK to cry, but I didn’t really feel like crying,” Miller, now 13, told ABC News, recalling the day she found out her father had died.
It’s been five years since Miller sat down next to Lee that day in the oversized room, and their relationship is more meaningful than ever, she said.
“I don’t know anyone that has gone through mostly the same thing that I have gone through,” said Miller.
“He understands what it means to lose a father figure. He lost him when he was young too, so I can relate to him,” added Miller.
(EAST SAINT LOUIS, Ill.) — Three people have been arrested for allegedly carrying out a mass shooting that injured seven, including a 3-year-old child, in southern Illinois.
Three suspects opened fire near 6th Street and Martin Luther King Drive in East St. Louis, Illinois around 4 p.m. Thursday, police said.
In the chaotic shooting, Illinois State Police (ISP) said that one of the shooting victims was a 25-year-old man who crashed the car he was driving into a MetroLink train. No passengers on the train were injured.
The seven shooting victims were transported to area hospitals and their conditions are unknown at this time, according to the press release.
Police identified the victims as a 49-year-old male of Belleville, Illinois; a 24-year-old male of East St. Louis, Illinois; a 53-year-old male of East St. Louis, Illinois; a 53-year-old male of Belleville, Illinois; and a 38-year-old female of St. Louis, Missouri, in addition to the 25-year-old car driver from East St. Louis.
A 3-year-old boy was hit in the rampage and was taken to the East St. Louis Police Department by his guardian, authorities said. From there, agents from the ISP Public Safety Enforcement Group transported him to an area hospital while performing life-saving measures.
Witnesses reported seeing three men fleeing the scene with weapons and a manhunt was launched for the assailants, police said.
Three suspects were found at 2:30 a.m. Friday in the basement of a partially demolished building, ISP said in an update.
Illinois Police State Police said Friday the suspects were: Deangelo M. Higgs, 35, of East St. Louis, Lorenzo W. Bruce Jr., 32, of Madison, and Cartez R. Beard, 30 of Cahokia, all of Illinois.
They’ve been charged with one count of felon in possession of a weapon and seven counts of aggravated battery/discharge of a firearm by the St. Clair County state’s attorney’s office. Lawyer information for the three was not immediately available.
“The response to this shooting is an example of the Illinois State Police bringing to bear all resources at its disposal to bring justice to this community,” ISP Director Brendan F. Kelly said in a statement. “PSEG, Patrol, SWAT, Air Ops and all ISP personnel again demonstrated our ongoing commitment to protecting the people of East St. Louis.”
On Friday, East St. Louis Police Chief Kendall Perry said the shooting wasn’t random and was targeted, however a motive remains unknown at this time.
“They had a target. I don’t know what their motive was, but they weren’t shooting just randomly,” Perry said, The Associated Press reported.
Stephen Pierce was waiting for a bus with his wife and two children when he said he heard shots fired, describing it as “boom, boom boom,” according to local CBS affiliate in St. Louis, Missouri, KMOV. His wife was wounded in the arm, he said.
“Our backs were turned and the next thing you know they just started shooting and it came at the back of my head and I didn’t know what to do but to get up and run,” Pierce told the outlet.
East St. Louis Mayor Robert Eastern III announced a curfew at midnight Friday into 6 a.m. that will last indefinitely to stop criminal activity in wake of the shooting, he announced in a press conference Friday.
(NEW YORK) — Sept. 11, 2001, marked the start of a new era for Muslims in the United States.
Shortly after al-Qaida terrorists attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, many Muslims, as well as other Arab Americans, became the targets of anger and racism.
Mosques were burned or destroyed and death threats and harassment followed many Muslims in the weeks following the attacks, according to congressional testimony from the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2011. Some victims were beaten, attacked or held at gunpoint for merely being perceived as Muslim, the organization said.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Muslim, reflected on 9/11 and the discrimination that followed in an interview with ABC News. “As Americans, as people who are living here, we were also attacked,” she said. “This is our community, this is our country, and there were Muslims who lost their lives in those towers, who were Muslim firefighters, who lost their lives.”
She added, “There is a desire by many to use our faith and our identity as a weapon against us and to ‘other’ us. That has been really harmful in so many ways.”
Hate crimes against Muslims rose 1617% from 2000 to 2001, according to the FBI marking some of the highest numbers of Islamophobic hate crimes ever in the U.S.
But even as the country moved further from the attacks and the Muslim American population in the country grew, discrimination against this community has not waned, Pew Research Center reports.
After the 9/11 attacks
On Sept. 17, 2001, then-President George W. Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., to denounce hatred against Muslims amid his vows to “win the war against terrorism” in the Middle East.
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Bush said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”
And for the most part, the public agreed with the president — the Pew Research Center found that 59% of people had favorable views of Muslim-Americans following the attacks, although 40% of the public believe that the terrorists were motivated at least in part by religion.
However, those who didn’t view Muslims favorably went on the offense. Across the country, reports of bomb threats, arson and assaults against Muslims made headlines.
“In the post-9/11 period, there was a lot of fear about Muslims and terrorism in the United States and so we created all these new opportunities to surveil citizens and harass citizens and even entrap citizens in our desire to fight terrorism,” said Sally Howell, director of the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
As years passed, the number of hate crimes dropped (and then rose again in recent years), according to the FBI, but the damage was done. For years, Muslims in the United States felt unsure about their place in American society, according to the research initiative by the University of California, Berkeley called Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.
“This for me is one of the saddest pieces in the survey — we asked people, as a Muslim living in the West, if ‘I feel more strongly insecure and afraid for my family and kids,'” Hatem Bazian, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and leader of the college’s Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.
He said that of the people surveyed, almost 80% said they feel at least somewhat worried about the safety of their family in the U.S.
And each election cycle, that uncertainty about their role in American society was exacerbated. Islamophobia became a political tool, with some public figures, like former President Donald Trump and media commentators using the fear against Muslims and Arab Americans to rile up their bases.
Islamophobia as a political tool
Anti-Muslim rhetoric was used against former President Barack Obama during both of his presidential campaigns, despite the fact that Obama is a Christian. Racist and xenophobic rumors about his religion and about his birthplace were used to stoke outrage and mistrust against Obama, weaponizing pre-existing fear about Muslims.
Opponents doubled down on conspiracy theories about Obama concerning his nationality and religion — falsely claiming that he was ineligible to become the president because he was not born in the U.S., or that he secretly practiced Islam, which would not make him ineligible for the presidency.
“Islamophobia was monetized into votes at the ballot box by projecting Obama as a closet Muslim,” Bazian said.
Anti-Muslim sentiment continued during the 2016 election cycle, during which Islamophobic hate crimes surged again.
According to the FBI, there were 481 incidents in 2001, followed by a significant decline in incidents the next year — 155.
In 2015, there were 257 hate crimes against Muslims and 307 in 2016. The number of incidents has declined since then through 2019, the latest year for which data is available.
Experts link the rise in hate to the anti-Muslim rhetoric being espoused on the political stage. then-candidate Trump made the Islamic faith and Muslims targets of criticism throughout his presidential campaign including proposing a ban on Muslims entering the country.
In November 2015, he made unsubstantiated claims on ABC News that Arab Americans were celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers: “There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”
In March 2016, Trump claimed on CNN that hatred defined the Islam faith, saying “I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.”
During the first months of the Trump administration, the Pew Research Center reported that roughly 75% of Muslim American adults said there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in the U.S.
Shortly into his time in office, Trump signed an executive order that barred immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries in a move that critics say enshrined his anti-Muslim stance into law. While he was a presidential candidate, he called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States.
The measure was legally challenged until the Supreme Court upheld an amended version of the order in 2018. It affected travelers and immigrants from Muslim-majority countries like Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and Libya.
It also included North Koreans and some Venezuelans, and other nations were added to the list in 2020.
From 2017 to 2021, when Biden ended the ban, more than 40,000 people were refused visas because of the executive order, according to U.S. State Department figures.
Trump and supporters of the order denied that it was Islamophobic, saying instead that it was protecting the U.S. from terrorism. But advocates say that the order, which is no longer in effect legitimized hatred and fear of Muslims, making life and immigration to the U.S. much harder.
“It takes a long time to undo the effects of these types of messages and these types of campaigns,” Bazian said. “Islamophobia is not really about Muslims. It uses Muslims, but it’s not about Muslims. It’s about the rallying the discomfort of certain pockets of Western society at a time of unsureness.”
Now, Muslim communities across the country are focused on building safe communities and curbing Islamophobia with education and outreach following years of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the White House.
Building community and combatting discrimination
Despite efforts by some groups to quell this population, Muslims have continued to grow and thrive in the U.S.
Muslims have slowly gained representation in the government, in U.S. television and a presence in the public sphere across the country.
“If you look at the Detroit area and the contributions that immigrants from the Muslim world are making to society and the economy — they’re just the bedrock and backbone of so many local industries,” Howell said.
In 2007, the first Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., was elected. In 2018, voters elected the first Muslim women to hold a seat in Congress: Democratic Reps. Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
In an interview, Tlaib told ABC News that her Muslim faith and background helps her understand the harm that can come from Islamophobia and xenophobia.
“We can be there to talk about it and say, ‘no, it didn’t work 20 years ago, it’s not going to work now. And you’re actually making us less safe in your and you’re also enabling hate and racism in our country when you target people solely based on their faith,'” Tlaib said. “I think that’s why were so strongly in opposition of the ban on people of Muslim faith into our country and so much more.”
The Muslim population in the U.S. continues to rise and is projected to have grown to 3.85 million people in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. And as more Muslims continue to cultivate communities across the country, more houses of worship in the U.S. have appeared over the last 20 years as well.
The Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership found 1,209 mosques in the U.S. in 2000 — and that number more than doubled in 2020, when researchers found at least 2,769 mosques.
Islam has been seen in the Western world in a negative light, according to Bazian, who believes this negative portrayal couldn’t be further from the truth. He says education is the first step to ridding the faith and its people of this stigma.
“They created this fear that America is being taken over by Muslims,” Bazian said, recommending training to teachers, human resources and the workplace. “We have been playing ignorant for some time, so education is still one of the primary tools to counter Islamophobia.”
Most Americans don’t know a Muslim, or admit to not knowing anything about Muslims, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
“The public has fairly limited sort of direct knowledge or interaction with Muslims,” said Dr. Besheer Mohamed, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. “People who say they personally know someone who’s Muslim, then they have more positive views toward Islam and toward Muslims than people who don’t.”
This invisibility, Howell said, is what is giving Islamophobia its power.
“It’s important that we understand that because we need to know that Muslims are not outsiders, they’re not strangers,” Howell said. “When Muslims are visible to non-Muslims through their institutions, through their names, through their headscarves, through the Halal signs on their restaurants, then people would know their co-workers, their neighbors, as Muslims, and this helps overcome whatever you know prejudice or concern they might have.”
