(EAGLE PASS, Texas) — One man has been arrested in connection with the smuggling incident that led to 17 migrants becoming trapped on a train on Friday in Uvalde County, Texas.
Denniso Carranza Gonzales, a Honduran national, was allegedly a foot guide for a group of 12 Honduran migrants that day, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas and obtained by ABC News.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), 15 men and two women were discovered on the Union Pacific train.
Gonzales stated that he had been guiding groups of undocumented immigrants from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas, for three months “as a way to pay for his own smuggling costs,” according to the criminal complaint. He said the smugglers told him he would be “taken care of” for continuing to smuggle groups, the complaint says.
The groups would be guided onto train cars on the way to San Antonio, he said, according to the complaint.
The initial 911 call came in at 3:50 p.m. local time on Friday from an “unknown third-party caller” advising there were numerous immigrants “suffocating” inside of a Union Pacific train, Uvalde police said in a statement posted on Facebook.
U.S. Border Patrol was able to stop the train two to three miles outside of Knippa, Texas.
“We are heartbroken to learn of yet another tragic incident of migrants taking the dangerous journey,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement on Saturday.
Court records allege that Gonzales says he brought the group to a designated train where another man arrived and told him they would be placed in a Conex box on a rail car. The doors were closed once Gonzales and the group boarded the train.
According to the complaint, he told investigators that the group became worried once the train started moving.
He added he “told the people to remain calm and breathe deep” and that the doors would be opened once the train arrived in San Antonio, the complaint says.
Gonzales said he called the man who placed them in the Conex box when “the box became extremely hot and the air was getting harder to breathe,” the complaint alleges. When the man did not answer, Gonzales told the group to start calling 911, he told investigators.
He says he did not know a person had died in the incident, according to the complaint.
HSI is still investigating the second fatal train incident that happened over the weekend in Eagle Pass, Texas.
The Eagle Pass incident occurred about 4:30 p.m. on Saturday at a Union Pacific rail yard, when someone from inside a boxcar parked at the yard called 911, a Union Pacific spokesperson said.
Law enforcement found 12 migrants trapped inside a stifling boxcar, including one who was pronounced dead at the scene and three others in need of hospitalization, officials said.
Homeland Security has launched a human smuggling investigation into the incident. No arrests have been announced.
It’s unclear if the Uvalde County and the Eagle pass incidents are connected.
Sarah A. Miller/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(BOISE, Idaho) — A new Idaho bill would make it illegal to aid minors in traveling across state lines for abortion care while concealing it from their parents. The proposed bill is set to be voted on by the state Senate.
The proposed bill names a crime called “abortion trafficking,” which criminalizes any adult who aids or obtains abortion pills for a minor in another state while seeking to conceal it from their parents or legal guardians.
Nearly all abortions have been banned in Idaho, with exceptions for medical emergencies, rape and incest. However, women are required to file a police report and show it to the medical provider before they can get abortion care in cases of rape or incest. The state also requires parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion care, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The bill makes it a crime for any adult to procure or obtain abortion pills for a pregnant minor “by recruiting, harboring, or transporting the pregnant minor within this state” while intending to conceal the abortion from the pregnant minor’s parents or guardians, according to the bill.
Anyone found guilty of committing abortion trafficking could face from two to five years in state prison.
The proposed bill passed through the Idaho House of Representatives earlier this month with a 57 -12 vote. If approved by the state Senate, it heads to Gov. Brad Little’s desk for approval before it can become law. A representative for Little declined to comment on the bill or if Little would sign it into law.
The bill would also allow civil lawsuits to be brought by the family of the minor who sought the abortion care or the father of the fetus. Civil suits could also be brought against medical professionals who provide abortion care, asking for at least $20,000 in damages.
Last week, an Idaho hospital announced it will end labor and delivery services in part due to the “political climate.”
Last June, Little celebrated the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending federal protections for abortion rights.
“I join many in Idaho and across the country today in welcoming the high court’s long-awaited decision upholding state sovereignty and protecting pre-born lives. The decision provides clarity around landmark cases at the center of passionate debate in our country for nearly five decades. This is now clear – the ‘right’ to an abortion was a judicial creation,” Little said at the time.
The high court’s decision paved the way for an anti-abortion trigger law approved by Little to go into effect last summer.
“Abortion is not a right expressed in the U.S. Constitution, and abortion will be entrusted to the states and their people to regulate,” he said.
Idaho’s six-week abortion ban is one of the strictest in the country. As part of a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, a judge blocked part of the ban in August that would have prohibited providers from providing abortions in medical emergencies.
Little criticized the lawsuit, which he claimed is “interference with Idaho’s pro-life law and another example of Biden overreaching yet again,” he said in a statement in August.
“Here in Idaho, we are proud that we have led the country in protecting pre-born lives. I will continue to work with Attorney General Lawrence Wasden to vigorously uphold state sovereignty and defend Idaho’s laws in the face of federal meddling,” Little said.
If you’re heading to the U.K. to catch Harry Styles’ Love on Tour, the originators of the Harry Styles and One Direction club night are putting on a series of The Love On Tour Aftershow parties from May 22 to June 21, after each of his 11 shows, across the country. The parties are 18+, and tickets can be purchased via Eventbrite.
Rihanna revealed her pregnancy cravings — drive-thru pasta. She shared two snaps to her Instagram Story taken from her point of view when looking down at her pregnant belly, with plates full of spaghetti and what appears to be gnocchi. The singer is expecting her second child with boyfriend A$AP Rocky.
Ed Sheeran displayed what all the different vinyl editions of –, pronounced Subtract, will look like. He showed off the albums on his official HQ account and told fans where they can buy all the different versions, which come in sun yellow, white, silver, gold and clear.
Speaking of Ed, he recently performed in Scotland and shared his favorite thing about the country. Instead of choosing a landmark or signature dish, he said his favorite thing about Scotland is Lewis Capaldi.
Shania Twain approves of all those “That Don’t Impress Me Much” memes. After one Instagram meme account shared a collage documenting some of the best jokes about her 1998 song, the hitmaker hit the like button and commented, “The caption” with a series of crying laughing emojis.
Andy Grammer drops the music video for his new song “I Need a New Money” on Friday, March 31. He shared a preview to his Instagram.
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick are reflecting on their decadeslong love story.
The two actors met on the set of the movie Lemon Sky in 1987 (it aired on PBS the following year), and the rest, as they say, was history.
“I was knocked out,” Bacon, 64, told People of seeing future wife Sedgwick, 57, for the first time. “I thought she was amazing.”
Sedgwick, who hadn’t seen Bacon in the now-iconic film Footloose at the time, said her first impression of him was, “He thinks he’s really cool.”
The pair eventually went on their first date, and Sedgwick said the morning after she realized Bacon was the one for her.
“I remember waking up and going, ‘I feel like home,'” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh, that was him.'”
Bacon and Sedgwick married in September 1988 and have two children together, 33-year-old son Travis Sedgwick Bacon and 31-year-old daughter Sosie Ruth Bacon.
Sedgwick said she and Bacon have “always been each other’s biggest support and fans” and credited their successful marriage to a “crucial” sense of humor, calling her husband “very freaking funny.”
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Diana Ross is heading out on tour this summer. The legendary singer just announced dates for The Music Legacy Tour 2023, where she’s celebrating her greatest number one hits.
The tour kicks off June 9 in Temecula, California, and wraps July 2 in Chautauqua, New York, with more dates to be announced. A complete list of tour dates, along with ticket sale information, can be found at dianaross.com.
In 2022, Ross released her first album of new material in 20 years, Thank You, and toured on the album. She also dropped a new single, “Turn Up the Sunshine,” last May. The collaboration with the band Tame Impala was featured on the soundtrack for Minions: The Rise of Gru.
(NASHVILLE. Tenn.) — When the suspected shooter drove into the parking lot of Nashville’s Covenant School at 9:53 a.m. local time on Monday, a maintenance worker was standing outside with a leaf blower and a group of children were at a playground, some enjoying the sunny spring morning on a swing set, according to security video from the hilltop campus.
The suspect, identified as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, circled the nearly empty parking lot in a four-door Honda Fit, driving by the playground before parking.
Hale sat in the car composing an Instagram message to Averianna Patton, a former middle school basketball teammate, and sent the message at 9:57 a.m., writing, “I’m planning to die today. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!!!”
“You’ll probably hear about me on the news after I die,” Hale wrote, according to the message Patton shared with ABC News. “This is my last goodbye. I love you,” Hale wrote, adding a heart emoji. “See you again in another life.”
A police spokesperson told ABC News that Hale was assigned female at birth, identified as transgender, and pointed to a social media account linked to Hale that included use of the pronouns he/him.
Hale once attended the Covenant School, a preschool to sixth-grade institution run by the Presbyterian church, and did not have a criminal record. But law enforcement officials said medical professionals treated Hale for an emotional disorder.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake said Hale left home on Monday morning with a red bag. Before walking out the door, Hale’s mother asked what was in the bag, Drake said.
“I think she just dismissed it because it was a motherly thing and didn’t look in the bag because, at the time, she didn’t know (the suspect) had any weapons and didn’t think any differently,” said Drake, adding that the investigation revealed Hale had purchased seven weapons, including two assault-type rifles and a pistol Hale was armed with during the rampage that left three adults and three 9-year-old children dead.
School surveillance video captured the suspect at 10:10 a.m. using one of the high-powered rifles to blast through the locked glass doors on the side of the school and stepping through the broken glass to enter the main school building.
Drake said the school custodian, 61-year-old Mike Hall, a father of seven children and a grandfather to 14, was standing in the hallway and was fatally struck by at least one of the shots the suspect fired through the glass entrance doors.
Other security video clips from inside the school showed the suspect walking by the church office before circling back and briefly entering the apparently empty office through an unlocked door and emerging, pointing the barrel of a gun down the hallway and then going through a set of unlocked double doors.
Drake said the suspect encountered Katherine Koonce, the head of the Covenant School, outside of Koonce’s office. The chief said Koonce was fatally shot in a hallway after possibly getting into a confrontation with the shooter.
Police said that at 10:13 a.m. someone from inside the school called 911, reporting shots fired.
The hallways, offices and classrooms, according to the videos, appeared empty as the suspect — wearing a red ball cap turned backward, camouflage pants, sneakers, black gloves and wielding two assault-type rifles, one being held and the other slung over a shoulder — walked around, entering doors.
At 10:20 a.m., a security video showed Hale walking down a hall, passing an office with a sign reading “Children’s ministry.”
“Based on what I know about the school and the neighborhood around it, those that fled would have been able to flee into some pretty serious cover and concealment areas pretty quick based on the terrain. But those that were not able to do that and locked down the building, from what I understand, did that correctly as well,” Brink Fidler, president of Defend System, an active shooter training company that performed drills with staff at Covenant School last year, told ABC News.
While teachers hid with students in rooms and closets, others fled the campus on foot, according to witnesses.
Actress Melissa Joan Hart told ABC News she was driving near the school with her husband when they noticed children coming out of a wooded area and stopped to help.
“We helped a class of kindergarteners cross a busy highway. They were climbing out of the woods,” Hart said. “They were trying to escape the shooter situation at their school. So, we helped all these tiny little kids cross the road and get their teachers over there. And we helped a mom reunite with her children.”
Katie Robbins, who lives near the school, told ABC News she watched the chaos unfold from her window.
“My heart almost exploded,” Robbins said. “Like, ‘Oh my God, it’s happening here.”
Robbins said she saw a group of children and their teacher sprinting from the school, crossing the street and huddling at the gate outside her home.
“A little boy said, ‘Help me get inside. How can I get inside?'” Robbins recalled. “I just wanted to help him and help all of them get inside, get away.”
She said she and a neighbor helped them get out of harm’s way.
The first officers arrived on the scene at 10:21 a.m. and entered the school two minutes later. Drake said 14 minutes elapsed between officers getting the first 911 call and when the suspect was killed.
Officer Rex Englebert, one of the first officers to arrive on the scene, immediately went to the rear of his police SUV cruiser and retrieved an assault-type rifle from a bag, according to footage from his body-worn camera that was made public on Tuesday.
“The kids are all locked down, but we have two kids that we don’t know where they are,” a school staff member is heard in the body-camera footage telling Englebert, as he approached the front door of the school.
The staffer relayed to Englebert a report she received over her cellphone from inside the school and instructed the officer how to get to the stairwell leading to the second floor, saying, “all the way down this hall. At the end of this hall is Scholarship Hall. They just heard gunshots down there, and then up the stairs are a bunch of kids.”
Englebert went to the front door and was handed a key by another school staffer standing there, according to the body-camera video. Englebert called out for three officers to join him as he used the key to open the door, yelling, “Let’s go!”
As Englebert and other officers entered the school, sirens were going off, according to the body camera footage. As the officers went classroom-to-classroom searching for the suspect and victims, one was heard yelling about the suspect, “We don’t know where he is.”
Then the officers heard gunshots. “Sounds like it’s upstairs,” Englebert is heard saying.
At least five officers are then seen going up a stairwell to the second floor at 10:24 a.m. as the gunshots grew louder. Englebert appeared to take the lead, followed by several officers, including officer Michael Collazo, who was armed with a handgun, according to his body camera video.
When they reached an open area, the officers spotted and engaged the suspect, who was standing near a broken window, at 10:25 a.m. Someone yelled, “Reloading” as Englebert shot the suspect and Collazo also opened fire. According to law enforcement sources, the suspect was killed at 10:27 a.m.
(NEW YORK) — The video game industry is one of the most lucrative tech sectors in the world, bringing in $159.3 billion globally, according to the International Trade Administration. But not everyone is getting a piece of that pot.
Only 4% of game creators identify as Black, according to a study by the International Game Developers Association.
Now some Black developers and historically Black universities are looking to change those statistics and, in turn, improve representation in the games themselves.
“We’re going to see diversity in all types of gaming, from the controllers that we use, to the storylines that are being told, to the characters that you’re seeing,” Jaycee Holmes, the director of curriculum for the nonprofit CodeHouse told ABC News. “More seats at the table means more quality gaming and experiences.”
Holmes’ brother Ernest, a software engineer at Google, co-founded CodeHouse to introduce more young Black students to the world of computer science and coding. Ernest Holmes told ABC News that he was shocked when he got to Google’s offices and saw there weren’t many minorities.
“I just do that. I want to be a part of the change to make something amazing happen,” he said.
CodeHouse has set up an annual event that invites 3,000 Atlanta high school students to meet with developers from tech companies such as Google and Netflix, and allows the young developers to get a hands-on look at how their apps and products are made.
CodeHouse isn’t the only organization helping to make these connections.
At Spelman College’s Innovation Lab, Black students are learning the foundations of video game creation. The school recently invited students from a dozen other HBCUs for a weekend crash course in game development and 65% of the students who attended had no experience in game design or development, according to Anetha Evans, a Spelman student lab leader.
Madeline Brown, a Spelman computer science major who won honors at the event, said she looks forward to connecting the world through her games.
“I wanted to be able to show a Black woman’s experience through gaming, and so I feel like gaming allows for people to step in somebody else’s shoes, and so it builds empathy with communities that you often times wouldn’t have interactions with,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is expected to return to Congress the week of April 17, after the upcoming two-week recess, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The Democratic lawmaker, who suffered a stroke during his campaign, checked himself into an impatient facility in the middle of February while suffering from depression.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WEST READING, Pa.) — A Pennsylvania woman who lives next to a chocolate factory that exploded Friday has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of negligence that led to the fatal explosion.
Betty Wright claimed that she was home at the time of the explosion and was “lifted from her feet and blown across the room causing severe and permanent injuries,” according to the lawsuit.
Seven people died and several others were injured after the explosion at the factory in West Reading.
According to officials, the explosion caused destruction to one building nearby and damaged another. West Reading Mayor Samantha Kaag said the incident was so strong it pushed a building back four feet.
According to the lawsuit, Wright sustained cervical, lumbar, hip and leg injuries in addition to anxiety and the loss of property and belongings as a result of the explosion.
Wright alleged she suffered “a significant wage loss” and impairment to earning capacity or potential, according to the lawsuit. She also said she lost access to her apartment and belongings.
She says the company failed to “properly inspect, repair and/or test the property to prevent this catastrophic explosion,” according to the lawsuit.
“Proper maintenance, monitoring, inspection and/or testing by [R. M. Palmer] would have revealed the existence of the potential explosive condition,” the lawsuit says.
Wright also alleged that at no point prior to the explosion did the company warn her of the “dangerous and explosive hazard that was present in or around her apartment which was in the zone of danger,” according to the suit.
She is asking for damages in excess of $50,000, according to the suit.
An investigation into the cause of the explosion will be conducted, officials said last week.
“In the initial incident report from Berks County to PEMA, a reference to a gas leak was included. It is really important to note that incident reports from counties are a snapshot in time of the understanding of the incident at the time the report was made,” Ruth A. Miller, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency’s communications director, said in a statement last week.
On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said it is launching a safety investigation looking into the natural gas explosion and fire.
The company established a crisis hotline for anyone who needs support and will be offering employees grief counseling, according to a statement on Facebook.
The company did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment about the lawsuit, but released a statement Saturday regarding the explosion.
“Everyone at R.M. Palmer is devastated by the tragic events at one of our West Reading facilities and we are focused on supporting our employees and their families. We have lost close friends and colleagues, and our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of all who have been impacted,” the company said on its website.
On Wednesday, HBO released the full trailer to the fourth and final season of its Emmy-winning dramedy series Barry.
The coming attraction certainly leans heavier into the drama, with Bill Hader‘s titular hitman literally and figuratively beating himself up for everything he’s done that landed him in prison, where season 3’s finale found him.
“I’m a good person,” he growls, trying to convince himself. “That is who I am.”
The acclaimed show’s other cast members are also seen, both behind bars — like Stephen Root‘s Funches — and on the outside, including Emmy winner Henry Winkler‘s Gene.
Sarah Goldberg‘s Sally confides to a friend, “The guy I was dating in LA killed my acting teacher’s girlfriend. I think I might be in a lot of trouble.”
Hader directed all eight episodes of the fourth and final season, which kicks off with two episodes Sunday, April 16, at 10 p.m. on HBO.
