Foreigner is in the midst of their farewell tour, and frontman Kelly Hansen is certainly going to miss his bandmates when it’s all over.
“This band is very rare in the sense that you can never anticipate the personalities that are going to be playing in a band with you,” he tells ABC Audio, sharing how special it is “to be in a band where we really enjoy each other’s company, we hang out on off times when we’re not on the road.”
He adds, “We share the same goofy, outrageous sense of humor, so I won’t have those times. That’s gonna be the toughest part I think.”
Kelly says he has great memories of touring with Foreigner, including the people he’s worked with, the venues and the fans.
“I understand how fortunate I’ve been to be involved with this band, and this catalog of songs and these people,” he says. “I don’t take that for granted.”
He says the decision to stop touring wasn’t one he “made lightly,” but says, “I don’t want to give anyone out there any less than I should, or these songs deserve.”
Foreigner’s farewell tour comes to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, May 23, with dates confirmed through November 13 in Charleston, South Carolina. A complete list of dates can be found at foreigneronline.com.
Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are JUST FRIENDS in the show Platonic, premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+.
They star as a pair of old friends who reconnect, and chaos ensues. But don’t expect it to be a will they/won’t they type of show, watching it and expecting their characters to hook up.
“We work so hard for that not to happen,” Byrne tells ABC Audio. “We wanted the audience to be relaxed, to let go of that expectation, and just enjoy what was going to happen.”
“It’s not a show about that,” she adds. “It’s a show about a friendship.”
Rogen echoes the same sentiment, stating, “These two people were not romantically interested in one another. Even if her husband had a hard time believing it and my friends had a hard time believing it.”
“And that all feels very real, you know? But we also firmly believe that it is possible and real for a man and woman to have a friendship, you know?”
Even though Byrne and Rogen wanted to steer clear of the expectation that their characters hook up, they did have some fun with the notion.
“It’s a trope that we’re playing with, obviously,” Bryne explains. “So inspired by a lot of, like, the classic When Harry Met Sally, for instance. But this is not that. This is saying that you can do it.”
“And in the end, the show is about these personalities, this friendship that just can’t sustain because it’s too extreme, you know, high highs and lows,” she continues. “And can they ever just have a more of a, you know, happy medium.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — Plans are moving forward to demolish the site of the school shooting last year in Uvalde, Texas, officials said Monday.
The leaders of the small Texas community also said they’re close to finalizing an agreement that would allow city investigators access to police records to determine whether or not any law enforcement officers should be fired or disciplined for the failed response to the shooting on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary.
“We don’t have all the answers,” Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said. “For that, I apologize.”
McLaughlin made his comments during a news conference that kicked off a week of commemorations to mark one year since the massacre. The site of the second-deadliest school shooting in American history took place at Robb Elementary, where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
The city manager, Vince DiPiazza, said the city’s leadership wants to conduct its investigation through proper channels, emphasizing that “we don’t want any backtracking. We don’t want any do-overs.”
“The city has been pushing; [the city] has not had access to the material but has reached an agreement with the judge to look over both parties,” DiPiazza said.
ABC News and other media outlets have broadcast and published evidence and recordings obtained through the criminal investigation being conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The city, however, has yet to be given access to the records, which, it has long argued, it needs in order to properly investigate police actions.
The final release to clear the way for the school’s demolition needs to come from District Attorney Christina Mitchell, according to interim schools Superintendent Gary Patterson. The school board trustees decided in early June 2022 to demolish the elementary school, yet plans have yet to be announced. At the news conference Monday, Patterson said he hopes the process can move forward by this summer.
The district attorney’s office did not respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
“These families have had nothing but pure hell for a year,” McLaughlin said. “I wish I had a playbook.”
The mayor asked the community and media to show compassion and privacy for the families. For the last two weeks, families of some of the victims visited the school and walked the building and property where their children took their last breaths, as promised months ago by the school district.
Some families of victims say they want the school demolished, including Jerry Mata, who lost his 10-year-old daughter Tess.
A new elementary school, yet to be named, is scheduled to open by fall 2024. More than 75% of the $60 million has been raised for school construction, according to the Uvalde CISD Moving Forward Foundation. The foundation says it continues to raise funds.
The mayor said that amid the continued grief, “together we will move forward.”
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.
(NEW YORK) — More than 50 years ago, a plane carrying 45 passengers and crew, including a Uruguayan rugby team and some of their friends and family, crashed in the Andes mountains in Argentina.
For 10 weeks, the survivors had to deal with the extremes before they were rescued, including subzero temperatures, two back-to-back avalanches and near starvation, left with no choice but to eat from the remains of their deceased friends to stay alive.
“We are dead men walking, but…we are still walking,” Nando Parrado, one of the 16 survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash, told ABC News.
Parrado and others who lived through the ordeal share their incredible story of fear, loss and survival in an ABC News Studios documentary “Prisoners of The Snow” premiering on ABC on May 22 at 9 p.m. ET and streaming on Hulu the next day. In addition to interviews with survivors, mountaineers and survival experts, the two-hour program will include photographs taken by the passengers who lived through the 72-day ordeal.
On Oct. 12, 1972, the flight was supposed to take the amateur Old Christians Club rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, for an exhibition match against the Old Boys Club, an English rugby team in Santiago.
Bad weather prevented the team from making it all the way to Santiago, and the plane was forced to land in Mendoza, Argentina overnight.
Despite high winds, the next afternoon, the plane took off again for Santiago. The Fairchild aircraft was unable to climb to the necessary 26,000 feet to fly directly over the Andes Mountain range, so the pilots opted for a U-shaped route where they were able to fly lower through a mountain pass, according to aviation expert and ABC News contributor John Nance.
With the air traffic control clearance, the pilots began their descent. However, they didn’t realize it was too soon, and that they were headed straight in the heart of the Andes, Nance said. The pilot was unable to clear the ridgeline and the airplane hit the mountain.
Upon impact, both wings and the tail tore off. The remaining fuselage slid down the mountain at high speed until it hit the bottom of the valley.
“I was thrown with an incredible force, and as I was fainting, I was realizing that I was alive and the plane had stopped,” Roberto Canessa, one of the survivors, told ABC News.
Twelve people were killed as a result of the crash. The remaining 33 survivors had varying degrees of injury.
Two of the survivors who had medical training, including Canessa who was a medical student at the time, quickly scrambled to tend to the wounded. Parrado’s mother died in the crash and his sister was badly injured. She died days later.
Parrado himself suffered a skull fracture and was in a coma for three days before he woke up.
“I said, ‘I’m not dead. Why? Because I was thirsty. I was thirsty.’ And I said, ‘If I’m thirsty, I’m not dead,'” Parrado recalled.
Parrado and the other survivors would face a struggle to quench their thirst and hunger until their expected upcoming imminent rescue. But that rescue wasn’t coming.
And although they were surrounded by snow, there were no initial means to melt it into drinking water.
“You can eat snow, but the snow hurts your mouth,” survivor Carlos Páez Rodríguez told ABC News.
Eventually, the survivors used metal from the wreckage to construct a device that melted the snow to water using sunlight. But their food supply was limited, according to mountineer Ricardo Pena. Survivors said in those first few days, they would share a little square of chocolate or a little bit of cracker with a little bit of fish in it, and some wine.
By day 10, they learned from the plane’s transistor radio that a search had been called off.
After long discussions and out of desperation, the survivors said the group came to a painful decision to harvest the bodies of the dead passengers for food. It was their only option for survival. They compared it to taking communion.
“We shook our hands and we say, ‘If I die, please use my body. So at least you can get out of here. And tell my family how much I love them,'” Parrado said.
As the group continued to plan for a way to safely look for help, they would face another deadly obstacle on day 17. Two avalanches swiftly raged down the mountain and the fuselage became entombed in snow with everyone inside.
“You don’t see, you don’t hear, you cannot move and you are dying,” Canessa said.
Eight of the initial survivors were killed in the avalanche. The remaining 19 survivors were stuck in a small space between the snow and the bulkhead, a space that would comfortably have fit four.
Their only option for food was to eat from the bodies inside the fuselage that did not survive the avalanche.
“It’s a very, very humiliating thing to eat a dead body,” Canessa said. “I thought of my mother that I had unique chance of telling her not to cry anymore, that I was alive. And to do that, I had to buy time, and to buy time, I had to eat the dead bodies.”
After three days, the survivors said they were able to tunnel their way out of the snow and see daylight.
The survivors were highly motivated to continue exploring ways to get back to civilization.
Canessa, Parrado and Antonio “Tintin” Vizintín, one of their fellow teammates, eventually found the tail end of the plane. In it, they said they found suitcases with some warm clothing, a small amount of food and batteries.
“They were like, well, we could connect that to the radio and make the radio work and call for help,” Peña said. “It was like, if we can make the radio work and call for help, let’s do that instead of risking our lives.”
But they were ultimately unable to get the radio to work.
Eventually, the survivors devised a plan where Parrado, Canessa and Vizintín were to make an escape.
Once this was decided, the survivors ensured that Parrado, Canessa and Vizintín, who they named “the expeditionaries,” ate a larger portion of the food supplies to build up their strength, according to an interview that the survivors told John Guiver, the author of “To Play the Game,” which chronicled their story.
Bolstered by several layers of clothing, and travel gear, including a sleeping bag that was patched together from materials of the plane wreckage, the men set out to be saved on Dec. 12: day 61 of their ordeal.
What they anticipated to be a one-day trek from the valley where the fuselage lay, up to the top of the mountain took them three days.
Parrado was disheartened to see snowy mountains all around them, instead of the green valleys of Chile.
“The most frightening moment of the 10 day trek for me was when I reached the summit of the first mountain and I looked what laid ahead,” Parrado said.
Parrado suggested to Canessa and Vizintin that because the trek was longer than they expected, Vizintin should go down to update the others, and leaving Parrado and Canessa with Vizintin’s food ration.
Parrado and Canessa’s trek down the mountain proved even more treacherous, and Parrado said his shoes began to break. By the eighth day of their journey, the men approached a river bank and found signs of life: including cattle, a cattle track and a rusty soup can.
The trail led them to a pivotal moment in their journey. Cannesa recalled seeing a man riding a horse down the slope of a small mountain. He immediately alerted Parrado who quickly began running down the slope towards the man.
Parrado caught the attention of this man on a horse, Sergio Catalan, but because of the loud roar of the river between them, Canessa said they couldn’t hear each other. However, he said he heard Catalan say the word “mañana,” Spanish for tomorrow, indicating when he would return.
“That dream tomorrow we always had, was real now,” Canessa said.
The next day Catalan and his two sons returned and threw Parrado a rock with some paper attached and a pencil across the river.
Parrado wrote down a message that would ultimately change his fate and the fate of his fellow survivors: “I come from a plane that crashed in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for 10 days. I have 14 friends wounded on the crash site. We need help. We don’t have any food. Please come and get us.”
“As soon as he read my message, he went for help,” Parrado said. “And that was probably the brightest moment in the 72-days.”
Catalan traveled 10 hours on horseback to alert the authorities, and soon the military, police, journalists and others came, according to Parrado.
Alipio Vera, who was a reporter for Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN) and on the scene, told ABC News, “they were very weak, their voices were barely audible…it was incredible, to see people that were rugby players, who were pretty strong, now they were almost skeletons.”
“I took their blood pressure, respiration, pulse and everything,” said Wilma Koch, the nurse who attended Parrado and Canessa upon their rescue, told ABC News. “At that moment, well, Roberto looked very faint, but with a lot of spirit. But Nando looked better.”
Back at the crash site, the remaining survivors had heard the news about the successful expedition from their radio, and they began to prepare for their own rescue.
Parrado said he led helicopter pilots to the site and the crews arrived on Dec. 22, day 71.
The 14 survivors at the fuselage were taken to safety with two trips over two days. Referring to the helicopters, survivor Carlos Páez Rodríguez recalled: “I saw them as two gigantic birds, bearers of freedom. I cannot explain that moment’s happiness.”
Upon their rescue, the survivors were treated for several conditions including malnutrition and scurvy.
When word began to spread about the survivors eating the dead, they addressed the media as a team.
“Some thought it was good, some thought it was bad, but I couldn’t care less,” Canessa said. “They don’t have any kind of right to judge us.”
Quickly the sensational headlines faded and many public figures, including the Pope, expressed sympathy for their struggles. Their story would be the subject of several books, including ones written by Parrado, Canessa, Strauch and Páez, and was adapted into the 1993 film “Alive.”
The crash would also inspire the fictional Showtime show “Yellowjackets.”
Beyond the fame and spotlight, many of the survivors would go on to lead long lives and have families.
“We trusted each other. We fought for each other,” Parrado said. “So this is a rugby story. Rugby saved my life.”
(WASHINGTON) — The special counsel investigating former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents previously requested documents from the Trump Organization related to potential business dealings with multiple foreign countries, ABC News confirmed.
The subpoena seeks details on any of the company’s possible dealings with China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to sources familiar with its contents.
The timeline on the subpoena goes back to 2017, the sources said.
News of the subpoena was first reported by The New York Times.
Representatives for the Trump Organization declined to comment when contacted by ABC News. The office of special councel Jack Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As part of Trump’s pledge prior to taking office in 2017, he promised to separate himself from his company’s foreign business dealings while he was in office.
The Trump Organization in November announced a licensing deal in Oman. It’s also been hosting Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments at Trump-owned clubs since last year, including one this week in Virginia.
ABC News’ Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.
Rick Kern/Getty Images for the Center for Reproductive Rights
(AUSTIN, Texas) — Lauren Miller is speaking out after she became one of five women who filed a lawsuit against Texas and its attorney general, alleging that the state’s abortion ban put their lives in danger.
Miller, 35, who became pregnant with twins last year, said she had to travel out of state to get care to save her life and the life of one of the unborn twins after she learned the other was not viable.
“With trisomy 18, if he made it to birth, all it says is that he’s got a pulse,” Miller told ABC News’ Rachel Scott, referring to a condition in which a baby has three copies of chromosome 18 instead of the normal two. “It’s no quality of life. It would be immediate surgeries. Life expectancy somewhere three to 15 days. Maybe he could make it a year, maybe a few years.”
For more of Lauren Miller and Dr. Austin Dennard’s story, watch “Nightline” tonight at 12:35 a.m. ET.
Around the time she got pregnant, Miller said she was following news of Roe v. Wade being overturned because she was worried about what effect it could have on her. Miller and her husband had been trying for their second child.
“There’s just that little bit of hesitancy; will this be OK? Will we be safe? Because there’s ramifications for my health now, too,” Miller said. “And you just don’t know what the law is. How close to death do I have to be before I can fully access health care?”
Texas has several abortion laws in place, prohibiting all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, except in medical emergencies, which the laws do not define. One of the bans — called SB 8 — prohibits abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which kept several plaintiffs from accessing care despite their pregnancies being nonviable, according to the suit.
More women have since joined the suit — including her 38-year-old OB-GYN, Dr. Austin Dennard — bringing the total number of plaintiffs to 15.
Miller, already a mother of one, was excited when she found out she was pregnant in July 2022. But her pregnancy was difficult from the beginning. Early on, she was diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe form of persistent nausea that can last throughout pregnancy, even heading to the emergency room when continuous vomiting left her dehydrated.
A few weeks after finding out she was pregnant, Miller and her husband learned that one of the babies, who was growing slower than the other, received the diagnosis of trisomy 18. The anomaly meant she had a high likelihood of miscarriage or stillbirth and the baby had a low survival rate beyond its first year of life.
“I was just reeling, because at that point I had so many plans,” Miller said.
A maternal fetal medicine specialist confirmed that the baby had several abnormalities, including cystic hygromas, sac-like structures where much of the brain should have been developing; a single artery umbilical cord; incomplete abdominal wall; abnormal heart; and abnormal nuchal translucency, according to a draft of the suit.
“Baby B was not going to survive. And every day he continued to develop put his twin and myself at higher risk,” Miller said.
“It was tough, [my doctor and I] couldn’t have an open conversation and she doesn’t even provide abortion services,” Miller added. “Her job is just to give people the worst news and tell them their options and there’s no option she can give anymore.”
Miller’s options were to continue the pregnancy and see if she would become sick enough for abortion to become an option or to take matters into her own hands and go out of state for abortion care, she said.
“For us, there was really no decision to be made. It was clear that our son was not going to survive,” Miller said.
The specialist told Miller and her husband that before the abortion ban went into effect, he would have been able to offer her a single fetal reduction, an abortion of the sick twin, to give Miller and the other one the best chance of avoiding a health crisis. But because of the ban, all he could do was tell them to go out of state, according to the lawsuit.
She gave birth to a healthy boy in March.
“If I hadn’t been able to access abortion care. My son may not have made it,” Miller said.
Miller said she hoped she wouldn’t end up so sick she would leave her son without a mother.
“I don’t want my husband to end up a single dad because the state wouldn’t let me get an abortion,” Miller said.
As a physician, Dennard said the bans have impacted what she feels she is able to discuss with patients.
“The relationship that a physician and a patient has, it’s so unique. It’s based on knowledge and trust and confidentiality. And now it’s as if there’s someone in my room with a patient building this wall up, and I can’t communicate with them and they feel scared to communicate with me,” Dennard told ABC News.
“I’ve had to change the way that I speak to my patients about abortion,” she continued. “It’s even hard to say the word because you feel like you’re gonna get in trouble just by saying the word abortion.”
Physicians in Texas who violate the bans could face fines of at least $100,000, lose their medical license or face up to 20 years in prison.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is named in the suit, did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment about the lawsuit. When the suit was first announced in March, Paxton’s office did not comment specifically on it.
“Attorney General Ken Paxton is committed to doing everything in his power to protect mothers, families and unborn children, and he will continue to defend and enforce the laws duly enacted by the Texas legislature,” his office said in March.
Dennard joined the lawsuit against Texas Monday, suing on behalf of herself and her patients.
“When these laws came into effect, it was not just violating the autonomy that I felt like I had with my own training, it was putting my own livelihood on the line in addition to, of course, my patients,” Dennard said.
Dennard had been in the same situation as Miller — as a patient who needed abortion care.
Dennard was excited when she found out she was pregnant with her third child in July 2022. But at her 11-week ultrasound, she discovered that her fetus had anencephaly, a fatal condition that causes the baby to develop with no skull and very little brain matter.
“I could tell there was something not right with the brain and it was just a moment of realizing that this was not going to end up being a sibling for my children. And then I thought to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m gonna go out of state for an abortion.’ It felt surreal,” Dennard said.
Dennard said she traveled to the East Coast for abortion care.
“I knew immediately that I didn’t want to continue the pregnancy,” Dennard said. “For me, I didn’t want to put my health — physical, mental, emotional health — at risk, continuing my pregnancy. But for somebody else, carrying a pregnancy with anencephaly — feeling their baby move, delivering their baby, holding their baby while it passes away — potentially might be what’s right for them. I just knew it wasn’t right for me,” Dennard said.
“I couldn’t believe that the state of Texas had decided for me what I could and could not do with my pregnancy,” Dennard said.
Dennard is now pregnant again and fears for her safety as a pregnant woman in Texas, according to the suit. Dennard and her husband, also a physician, are also unsure if they will continue to live in Texas.
“After my abortion, my husband and I went and sat and had lunch and we talked about what else had to happen in our state for us to pack up and leave,” Dennard said. “It just feels like we can’t do our job the way that we should be able to do it and help people the way that we should be able to help them.”
(NEW YORK) — Researchers have discovered hundreds of new animal and plant species in remote parts of the world previously inaccessible to humans, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Among the 380 newly found species include animal vertebrates such as a color-changing lizard, a thick-thumbed bat, a poisonous snake named after a Chinese mythological goddess, an orchid that looks like a muppet and a tree frog with skin that resembles thick moss. They were all found in the greater Mekong region in Asia, according to the WWF’s New Species Discoveries report published on Sunday.
Along the Mekong River, which separates Laos and Thailand, lies miles and miles of forests housed in mountainous regions. Without roads, people have no access to the undiscovered species, which causes them to remain a mystery but also allows them to thrive, K. Yoganand, conservation biologist and wildlife ecologist and WWF-Greater Mekong regional wildlife lead, told ABC News.
“These species have been there,” Yoganand said. “It’s just, they’ve escaped, so far, the human destruction.”
Hundreds of scientists from universities, conservation organizations and research institutes around the world discovered 290 plants, 19 fishes, 24 amphibians, 46 reptiles and one mammal in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, according to WWF.
The lush evergreen forests drenched regularly by rainfall and hidden in the mountains may contribute to the plethora of plant and animal species that live there, Yoganand said.
Nearly 4,000 vascular plants, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have been discovered in the Greater Mekong region since 1997, according to the report.
One of the species scientists learned of is the Khoi’s mossy frog, a large, mossy-green colored amphibian, which helps it blend into the lichen and moss-covered stony, leafy background. The discovery was described as a “spectacular find” by the WWF.
An extremely venomous snake called the Suzhen’s krait was also found. It was named after the Bai Su Zhen, a snake goddess from a Chinese myth called the Legend of the White Snake, according to the WWF.
Discovered in the Tenasserim Mountains bordering Myanmar, researchers found Thailand’s bent-toed gecko, named after the mythical tree nymph Rukha Deva, who is said to live in trees and protect the forests, according to the WWF. The gecko aggressively opens its mouth and waves its tail side-to-side when threatened, the scientists said.
A semi-aquatic snake now known as Hebius terrakarenorum was found in the Dawna-Tenasserim Landscape between Thailand and Myanmar, according to the report. It is about 2-feet long and was identified entirely from road-kill specimens collected over a decade, as well as a few photos, researchers said.
Human encroachment is already affecting some of the newly discovered species. In Vietnam, agricultural encroachment and logging, as well as collection by communities to use as a traditional cure for abdominal pain and parasitic infection, is threatening the Thai crocodile newt, researchers said.
In Vientiane, the capital of Laos, the habitat of a new species of gecko is also being fragmented by construction projects, according to the WWF.
While many of the discoveries were the result of people surveying a never-before-explored area, some of the discoveries were known species that, after further analysis, researchers determined have several different subspecies, Yoganand said.
In Cambodia, researchers discovered the blue-crested agama, an aggressive lizard that changes color as a defensive mechanism. It was identified by studying lizards found near an Angkor era archeological site, according to the WWF. While the species has been known since the first specimen was collected in Myanmar in the 19th century, genetic analysis conducted in 2021 determined that these actually constitute many different species, Yoganand said.
Hayes’ thick-thumbed myotis, a mouse-eared bat with unusual fleshy thumbs that was named a new species after a specimen sat in a Hungarian museum for 20 years.
“These remarkable species may be new to science but they have survived and evolved in the Greater Mekong region for millions of years, reminding us humans that they were there a very long time before our species moved into this region,” Yoganand said in a statement.
While the Mekong region is a global diversity hotspot it is also experiencing a “vast array of threats,” WWF-US Asian Species Manager Nilanga Jayasinghe said in a statement.
“We must continue to invest in the protection and conservation of nature, so these magnificent species don’t disappear before we know of their existence,” Jayasinghe said.
There are 25 known global diversity hotspots around the world, including the Amazon in Central America and the eastern Himalayas, Yoganand said, adding that he expects the scientific community to keep discovering more and more species.
Immediate action and increased use of new technologies, such as bio-acoustics and genetic sequencing, are needed to help scientists discover more species in the region, Truong Nguyen, a researcher with the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources at the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, said in a statement.
“To reverse the rapid biodiversity loss in the region, more concerted, science based, and urgent efforts need to be made and conservation measures need more attention from governments, NGOs and the public,” Nguyen said.
(ATLANTA) — LaShawn Thompson, the man whose family claimed was “eaten alive by insects and bed bugs” in the Fulton County Jail, died of “complications due to severe neglect,” according to an independent autopsy.
Thompson’s family spoke out in a press conference outside the Georgia State Capitol on Monday, along with their attorneys Ben Crump and Michael Harper, where they announced the results of the independent autopsy in which Thompson’s cause of death is listed as “homicide.”
The autopsy report, which was obtained by ABC News, lists “dehydration, malnutrition, severe body insect infestation,” as well as “untreated decompensated schizophrenia,” as the conditions that led to Thompson’s death in the Atlanta jail on September 13, 2022.
Photos of Thompson covered with bed bugs and images of his filthy cell went viral on social media and led to widespread outrage.
“It’s enough that the bed bugs and lice sat there and ate my brother to death, but it’s the neglect that hurts me the most,” said Thompson’s brother Brad McCray during the press conference on Monday.
“These images all over the internet, all over the media. It’s disturbing. It’s horrific. And it’s a big impact on my family,” McCray added.
Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp nonprofit organization paid for Thompson’s independent autopsy, Harper confirmed to ABC News. Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers player and social justice advocate, offered to pay for an independent autopsy after a previous autopsy released by the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office on Jan. 12, 2023 listed Thompson’s cause of death as “undetermined.”
The Fulton County autopsy, which was obtained by ABC News, was completed on Sept. 14, 2022 – a day after Thompson’s death – and listed the conditions of “Schizoaffective disorder, bipolar and acute exacerbation.”
The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office declined to comment to ABC News on Monday when asked about the results of the independent autopsy.
Thompson was arrested on June 12, 2022, for simple battery against police officials, according to jail records.
His death led to resignations at the Fulton County Jail after the family claimed that Thompson was left in a filthy cell where he was “eaten alive by insects and bed bugs” where staff allegedly ignored his medical needs.
Following Thompson’s death, the Atlanta Police Department and the Office of Professional Standards launched an investigation into Thompson’s death.
Asked about the status of the investigation, a spokesperson for the Atlanta Police Department referred ABC News on Monday to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, saying that they are the lead agency in the probe.
Fulton County Sheriff Patrick “Pat” Labat told ABC News in a statement on Monday afternoon that while he has “not had a chance to fully review the independent autopsy report,” even before the report was released ” it was painfully clear there were a number of failures that led to Mr. Thompson’s tragic death.”
“I remain committed to making sure the Thompson family receives the answers they need and deserve about the unconscionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Thompson’s death,” he added.
Labat, who joined the family at a previous press conference in April, said in an April 17 statement that following the preliminary finds of the probe into Thompson’s death, there have been “sweeping changes” at the Fulton County Jail.
Labat said in the statement that he asked for and received the resignations of multiple employees at the jail, including the chief jailer, the assistant chief jailer and the assistant chief jailer of the site’s Criminal Investigative Division.
Once the investigation is complete, a report will be handed over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations for review.
“Repercussions for anyone found to be negligent in Mr. Thompson’s care could come once the full investigation is turned over to the GBI for review,” Labat told ABC News in the statement on Monday.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, called on the U.S. Department of Justice on April 20 to launch an investigation into Thompson’s death. The DOJ did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
ABC News’ Nakylah Carter and Teddy Grant contributed to this report.
