(NEW YORK) — The Monday night Powerball prize rose to an estimated $610 million, giving players a chance at winning the eighth largest jackpot in the game’s history. The prize has a cash value of $292.6 million.
The game has had 34 drawings in a row without a winner. Saturday night’s Powerball prize had been an estimated $580 million, with a cash value of $278.2 million.
The Powerball jackpot was last won with a ticket in Pennsylvania, which won a $206.9 million jackpot on Aug. 3.
There have been a total of five Powerball jackpot winners this year.
Three winners in Saturday night’s drawing matched all five white balls to win $1 million, Powerball said. Those tickets were sold in New York, South Carolina and Texas.
The top winners from Wednesday night’s drawing include two tickets sold in Michigan and New Jersey that won $1 million each and a third ticket sold in New Jersey that won $2 million.
The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9 million and the odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million, according to a statement from Powerball.
The largest Powerball jackpot in the game’s history was $1.586 billion, won on Jan. 13, 2016. The winning tickets were sold in California, Florida and Tennessee.
Powerball tickets are sold in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to a Powerball website.
(MINNEAPOLIS) — The 2020 death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer is set to be thrust back into the national spotlight as two former cops already convicted on federal charges of violating the 46-year-old Black man’s civil rights go on trial Monday in Minnesota state court.
The joint state trial for former Minneapolis police officers J. Alexander Kueng, 29, and Tou Thao, 34, comes after they reported to separate prisons this month to begin their federal sentences.
Both men have pleaded not guilty to charges of aiding and abetting in second-degree unintentional murder and aiding and abetting in manslaughter stemming from the Memorial Day 2020 death of Floyd, which ignited massive protests across the nation and world.
The trial in Hennepin County District Court in Minneapolis begins Monday with jury selection, which is scheduled to take three weeks, a spokesperson for the court told ABC News.
Opening statements in the trial are scheduled to get underway on Nov. 7.
The state trial was initially scheduled for June 2022, but Judge Peter Cahill delayed it over concerns it would be difficult to seat an impartial jury given the pretrial publicity. Earlier his year, Thao, Kueng and a third defendant, former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane, were convicted on federal civil rights charges stemming from Floyd’s death and Lane later pleaded guilty to state charges.
At the time of his decision, Cahill said postponing the trial should “diminish the impact of this publicity on the defendants’ right and ability to receive a fair trial from an impartial and unbiased jury.”
Lane, 39, pleaded guilty in May to state charges of aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. In exchange for the plea, state prosecutors agreed to dismiss the top charge against him of aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder. Lane was sentenced in September to three years in prison, which he is serving concurrently with his federal sentence of 2 1/2 years.
Kueng, Thao and Lane were convicted in February by a federal jury on charges of violating George Floyd’s civil rights by failing to intervene or provide medical aid as their senior officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on the back of Floyd’s neck, while he was handcuffed, for more than nine minutes.
Kueng, a rookie cop at the time of Floyd’s death, was sentenced to three years in federal prison, followed by two years of supervised release. Thao, who had been a nine-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department at the time of Floyd’s death, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, also followed by two years of supervised release.
Floyd suffered critical injuries when he was placed in handcuffs and in a prone position on the pavement after being accused of attempting to use a fake $20 bill at a convenience store to buy cigarettes. Videos from security, police body cameras and civilian cell phone cameras showed Floyd begging for his life and complaining he could not breathe as Chauvin held his knee on the back of his neck, rendering him unconscious and without a pulse, according to prosecutors. Floyd was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Chauvin was convicted in state court last year of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.
While Chauvin’s state trial was livestreamed gavel-to-gavel due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic limiting the public’s access to the courtroom, cameras are not being allowed at the trial for Kueng and Thao. Cahill ruled in April that conditions “are materially different from those the Court confronted from November 2020 through April 2021 with the Chauvin trial.”
The 46-year-old Chauvin also pleaded guilty in December to federal charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights and was sentenced in July to 21 years in federal prison.
During their federal trial, Lane, Kueng and Thao each took the witness stand and attempted to shift the blame to Chauvin, who was a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department. Lane told the jury that Chauvin “deflected” all his suggestions to help Floyd, while Kueng testified that Chauvin “was my senior officer and I trusted his advice” and Thao attested that he “would trust a 19-year veteran to figure it out.”
Taylor Swift’s Midnights broke all kinds of streaming records less than 24 hours after its release on Friday.
On Spotify, the album became the most streamed album in a single day. Taylor also became the most streamed artist in a single day in Spotify history, breaking the record set by Bad Bunny earlier this year.
In response to the Spotify news, Taylor tweeted to her fans, “How did I get this lucky, having you guys out here doing something this mind blowing?! Like what even just happened??!?!”
Midnights also broke the record for the biggest pop album of all time on Apple Music by first-day streams. The song “Lavender Haze” debuted at number one on Apple Music Top 100: Global.
And on Amazon Music, Taylor had the most first day album streams globally of any artist, as well as the most Alexa requests ever.
(NEW YORK) — Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump’s namesake family real-estate business, which was charged last year by prosecutors in Manhattan, New York with orchestrating a years-long scheme to evade taxes.
The Trump Organization compensated certain executives with off-the-book perks — including rent, utilities and garage expenses at a luxury apartment building, private school tuition and leases for luxury cars — that were never accounted for on the company’s payroll taxes, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“This was a 15-year-long tax fraud scheme,” Carey Dunn, then-general counsel at the Manhattan DA’s office, said when the indictment was unsealed last summer. “It was orchestrated by the most senior executives.”
The company has pleaded not guilty and Trump has dismissed the investigation as a “hoax.” A spokesperson for the Trump Organization previously said in a statement that the company will “look forward to having our day in court.”
A corporate defendant cannot serve prison time. A conviction could require the Trump Organization to pay a maximum fine of $10,000 and, potentially, the taxes allegedly skirted.
More significant, according to authorities, are the potential collateral consequences that could come with a conviction. Existing contracts could be voided if a counterparty has rules against doing business with felons, and banks could consider calling in loans or altogether terminating their relationship with the Trump Organization.
“One major issue when considering a corporate conviction is reputational harm,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a partner in Buckley’s New York office and formerly the chief assistant district attorney in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
On the other hand, said Alonso, “In this case, I’m not sure the Trump Organization’s reputation could be harmed much more than it has been.”
The trial, which is expected to last into early December, comes as Trump faces a half-dozen other investigations into his business practices, his efforts to overturn the Georgia vote, his alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack, and the removal of documents with classification markings from the White House.
Among those testifying in the Trump Organization trial will be the company’s longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty last month after being charged as part of the alleged scheme.
The longtime CFO pleaded guilty to all 15 counts he faced, including conspiracy, criminal tax fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records. He conceded that he skirted taxes on nearly $2 million in income, including fringe benefits like rent, luxury cars and private school tuition for his grandchildren.
Weisselberg, who first met Trump in the 1970s when he began working for his father, was required to testify against the Trump Organization as part of his plea deal, and to serve five months in jail.
“The case against [the Trump Organization] is dramatically strengthened,” prosecutor Josh Steinglass said of Weisselberg’s guilty plea at a hearing in the case in September.
“During the operation of the scheme, the defendants arranged for Weisselberg to receive indirect employee compensation from the Trump Organization in the approximate amount of $1.76 million … in ways that enabled the corporate defendants to avoid reporting it to the tax authorities,” the indictment against Weisselberg said.
The charges are a “disgrace” and “shameful,” Trump told ABC News last year after the indictment was unsealed, calling Weisselberg “a tremendous person.”
The indictment said that, beginning in 2005, Weisselberg used the corporation’s bank account to pay the rent for his apartment, and he and others paid their utility bills using the corporation’s account. The indictment also accused Weisselberg of concealing “indirect compensation” by using payments from the Trump Organization to cover nearly $360,000 in upscale private school payments for his family, and for nearly $200,000 in luxury car leases.
“Weisselberg intentionally caused the indirect compensation payments to be omitted from his personal tax returns, despite knowing that those payments represented taxable income and were treated as compensation by the Trump Corporation in internal records,” the indictment said.
The rest of the case against the Trump Organization is based largely on documents, including spreadsheets and charts, along with other accounting materials. Prosecutors say their challenge will be to spin a compelling narrative for the jury to follow.
The prosecution will be led by Steinglass, who joined the prosecution team from the district attorney’s violent crime division, and Susan Hoffinger, the head of the DA’s investigation division.
A corporate tax fraud case was not what prosecutors were after when they first filed charges against Weisselberg last summer. Sources have told ABC News that prosecutors had hoped Weisselberg would turn on Trump as part of a larger criminal investigation into the former president’s business practices that remains ongoing.
But the plea deal that Weisselberg agreed to contains no requirement that he cooperate in the criminal case against Trump himself, which centers on whether Trump knowingly misled tax authorities, lenders and insurance brokers by providing inaccurate financial statements about the value of his real estate portfolio.
Trump, who has denied all wrongdoing, has decried the investigation as politically motivated.
(UVALDE, Texas) — In the first hours and days after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, officials said they figured out how the gunman got into a building that was supposed to be secure.
“The exterior door,” the top police official in Texas told reporters, “was propped open by a teacher.”
That statement by Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, would be quietly retracted within a few days. Instead, DPS officials said later, the door had been shut by the “teacher” but, for some reason, it didn’t lock even though it was supposed to do that automatically.
For the school staffer McCraw was referring to — the very woman who called 911 to report the gunman was on the way to entering Robb Elementary School — the blame and the events of May 24 still reverberate in a life forever scarred.
Speaking publicly for the first time to ABC News, Emilia “Amy” Marin, a school aide who worked with students after school, said she still struggles through post-traumatic stress from the shooting and its aftermath. She insists that the world know what happened — and what didn’t — on a warm sunny morning that would turn unspeakably ugly in South Texas.
“I died that day,” Marin said in an interview with ABC News correspondent John Quiñones.
“Right now, I’m lost. Sometimes I go into a dark place. And it’s hard when I’m there, but I tell myself, ‘you can’t let him win. You can’t let him win,'” she said, referring to the gunman. “I’m a fighter. I will be okay. I’m going to learn to live with this.”
By now, the casualty count from the Uvalde massacre is well known: 19 students and two of their teachers were killed when an 18-year-old shooter, a former student at the school, attacked in the final days before summer vacation. What sent him to that school on that mission remains under investigation. McCraw is due to update the progress of the probe when he testifies later this week in Austin.
In the months since the rampage, official information from authorities has been limited and much of the focus has fallen on the botched response by police who did not attempt to stop the shooting for more than an hour. For Marin, who said she still cannot work and continues to replay the minutes of May 24 in her head, the struggle now defines her life.
“I am suffering mentally, of course, emotionally,” she said. “I am suffering from post-traumatic arthritis, which is very painful. There are nights when everybody goes to bed and I just stay awake with the pain and my daughter tells me … ‘Mom, soak in the tub.’ And I tell her I can’t because I can’t get out.”
“I sit there at night, replaying that day in my mind,” Marin said as she explained the events of a day that saw one of the worst school shootings in American history.
“And I see those victims’ faces. I pray for them every night,” she said. “But what I go through, McCraw doesn’t know. Nobody knows. But it was very easy for him to point the finger at me. A few weeks ago, I told my counselor ‘It would have been better if he would have shot me, too.’ because the pain is unbearable. And when you have people who are higher up in ranks like McCraw, you would think that they know their job well. He has no idea what his words did.”
“I will never be the person that I was before,” she said. “I did die that day. I see the windows boarded up and the fence around the campus. I tell my counselor, ‘I’m in there. I’m still in there.'”
In a statement to ABC News, DPS spokesman Travis Considine explained: “At the outset of the investigation, DPS reported that an unnamed teacher at Robb Elementary School used a rock to prop open the door that the shooter used to enter the school building. It was later determined that the same teacher removed the rock from the doorway prior to the arrival of the shooter, and closed the door, unaware that the door was unlocked.”
Considine said “DPS corrected this error in public announcements and testimony and apologizes to the teacher and her family for the additional grief this has caused to an already horrific situation.”
Marin worked as a speech pathologist in the special education program at Robb Elementary and coordinated after-school programs, and said she always wanted to work with children.
“I have always loved children and I always wanted to be around them,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you are having a bad day, they will always make it better.”
A native of San Angelo, Texas, about 200 miles north of Uvalde, Marin said she wants the country to know what she did that day, when confronted with the worst-case scenario: a man with a rifle and untold rounds of ammunition heading straight for the door of the elementary school where she worked. This was the first time she detailed those events to anyone outside of her family or law enforcement.
As she prepared for an end-of-school party that morning, Marin heard the crash of a gray Ford pickup outside and called 911, thinking someone was hurt.
“I walked out and then they yelled he had a gun, I ran back in. I ran back to the building and I closed the door,” she said. “I am telling the operator that he is shooting. I could hear the kids screaming.”
Marin said that children were outside on the playground, running for their lives.
“I could hear the kids screaming. I closed the door. I went in and knocked on the teacher’s door across from me. I was banging,” she continued. “She opened it. She said ‘What is going on?’ I said there is a shooter on campus.”
Still on the phone with emergency operators, Marin decided to hide as she heard gunshots firing off.
“There was shooting and it wouldn’t stop. He just kept shooting and shooting,” she said. “I looked around and I hid under the counter. The whole time I am asking the operator, ‘Where are the cops? Where are the cops?'”
But the almost 400 law enforcement officers who would arrive on the scene did not rush in to the classroom where the killer was still confined with his victims until over an hour later. That slow response has led to a wide chorus of criticism for the police and federal agents who responded to Robb that day. The school district’s police chief has been fired, as has one of the first Texas state troopers to arrive. A second trooper who left DPS to go to work for the Uvalde school system has since been terminated by the district. And the superintendent of schools stunned the grieving community this month when he announced his retirement.
Marin said she wonders if her own death in those first few moments could have saved children.
“Every day they tell me, ‘You were there for a reason. God put you there for a reason.’ I want to know why,” she said. “If I had gone out a few seconds later I would’ve met him outside. He would have shot me. With him shooting me, would I have saved all of them? Would I have given those teachers time to save themselves and the kids?”
She says in the days after the shooting, disbelief took hold of many of the staff who survived.
“It was like did it really happen? We always say it is not going to happen here. It is not going to happen in our town,” she said. “Like in Sandy Hook, you see this story and it happened. It can happen anywhere.”
When Marin heard McCraw blame her personally for the shooter’s ability to gain access to the school, she said she became so distraught that her daughter had to take her to the hospital.
“I was shaking from head to toe,” she said. “The nurse walked out and my boss came in and I told her I closed that door.”
After the shooting, Marin said she asked to speak with Uvalde schools Superintendent Hal Harrell. She said she was told Harrell would not come see her in the hospital and he would ultimately never speak to Marin again.
“Administration let us down. They failed us. He could have defended me. He knew who ‘the teacher’ was and chose not to,” Marin said. “It makes no sense when you have dedicated your life to working for the district.”
“I wish he would’ve handled this differently. It doesn’t cost anything to check up on your employees,” she said. “I have not heard from any administration since the incident.”
Harrell this month announced he would be stepping down next week. His spokeswoman has not responded to a request for comment.
Precisely five months since the day of the shooting, Marin said she’s prepared to fight for herself.
“Maybe a lot of people didn’t know that it was me,” she said. “But they’re going to know now and I’ve always been the type. Like, I’ll be respectful, but I’ll speak up. And people don’t like it when you speak up. But you’re defending yourself. And I know that I have to defend myself.”
Marin has filed suit against the manufacturer of the gun used in the Robb shooting and she is considering other legal options.
She said she is also dismayed at the fractures that have developed in her town.
“We are supposed to as a community to be united and work through this and help these families, help everyone involved,” she said. “They say we are ‘Uvalde Strong.’ We are not. We are divided. How can we divide over 19 lives lost? It doesn’t make sense.”
As for McCraw, who pinned the blame for the massacre on her, Marin said she has one message.
“To Mr. McCraw: it is your job to investigate when any incident like that happens. You sit there and you investigate. Your job was to sit there and watch that video to watch from beginning to end. You chose not to,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — There were 2.7 million migrant encounters along the southern border of the United States in the past 12 months, the highest in the nation’s history, data released as part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s fiscal year end show.
The previous record was 1.9 million in fiscal year 2021.
In September, there were 227,547 migrant encounters along the southwest border. CBP says 19% of those encounters were repeat offenders and represents a 12% increase from August.
CPB says they are enforcing not only Title 8, which is standard immigration removal policy, but also Title 42 — the Trump-era policy that allowed migrants seeking asylum along the southern border to be expelled under the public health emergency authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — by a court order.
The highest month in fiscal year 2022 was May, which saw more than 235,000 migrants encountered along the southwest border, according to the data.
Cocaine (-81%) and Fentanyl (-19%) seizures decreased along the border, while meth and heroin seizures increased compared to last fiscal year.
“DHS has been executing a comprehensive and deliberate strategy to secure our borders and build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system,” the Department of Homeland Security said in the statement.
(WASHINGTON) — Rep. Liz Cheney said Sunday that while the House Jan. 6 committee was “anticipating” that former President Donald Trump would comply with the subpoena the panel issued to him last week, “He’s not going to turn this into a circus.”
That meant that committee members likely weren’t interested in Trump testifying live before the committee in a public setting, as some past witnesses have, Cheney, R-Wyo., said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“The committee treats this matter with great seriousness,” she said. “And we are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath. It may take multiple days. And it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves.”
If and when Trump sits for questioning, Cheney said, the format wouldn’t be like “his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became. This is far too serious set of issues. And we’ve made clear exactly what his obligations are.”
Should Trump refuse to cooperate or fight the subpoena in court, Cheney said, “We have many, many alternatives that we will consider.” But she noted that Congress’ demands apply to everyone — not just Trump.
“We’ve made clear in the subpoena a number of things, including that if he intends to take the Fifth [Amendment against self-incrimination] that he ought to alert us of that ahead of time,” Cheney said.
The Jan. 6 committee last week formally issued its subpoena to Trump after earlier voting to approve such a move during the last public hearing. Subpoenaing a former president is a rare though not unprecedented step.
The subpoena requires Trump to turn over documents by Nov. 4 and to appear for one or several days of deposition under oath beginning on Nov. 14.
“We recognize that a subpoena to a former President is a significant and historic step,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Cheney, the committee chair and vice-chair, respectively, wrote in a letter to Trump on Friday. “We do not take this action lightly.”
In response, an attorney for Trump claimed the committee was “flouting norms.”
“We understand that, once again, flouting norms and appropriate and customary process, the Committee has publicly released a copy of its subpoena. As with any similar matter, we will review and analyze it, and will respond as appropriate to this unprecedented action,” said David Warrington, a partner at Dhillon Law Group.
In a series of hearings this summer and fall, the Jan. 6 committee has cited extensive witness testimony, documents and other materials from Trump’s aides and advisers in building a case that he was aware he had lost to Joe Biden in 2020 but illegally tried to stay in power while urging his supporters — some of whom he knew were armed — to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the riot.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and accused the committee of politically persecuting him while not presenting his defense of his actions.
Only two Republicans sit on the panel: Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, both of whom are leaving Congress in January.
Kinzinger said last week on ABC’s This Week that potential live testimony from Trump would require “negotiation.”
“He’s made it clear he has nothing to hide, [that’s] what he said. So he should come in on the day we asked him to come in. If he pushes off beyond that, we’ll figure out what to do next,” Kinzinger said then.
The committee’s work is likely to be walked back and scrutinized should the GOP retake the House in November.
Cheney acknowledged that in her appearance on Meet the Press.
“If we were in a nation where our politics were operating the way they should, the investigation would proceed no matter what,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders said Sunday that he opposes eliminating the debt ceiling, the financial limit on the federal government that could produce fierce clashes if the GOP wins back one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
“You have to increase the debt ceiling,” Sanders, I-Vt., said on CNN’s State of the Union.
“But you keep it?” anchor Jake Tapper asked him.
“Yes, yes,” Sanders said.
Those remarks come as Republicans forecast that they’ll use negotiations over the debt ceiling to extract concessions from Democrats to cut spending — a repeat of battles over the last decade starting with congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama.
Kevin McCarthy, the current House GOP leader who would likely become speaker if the party retakes the chamber, has been advocating for using the debt ceiling to win leverage over Joe Biden’s administration and Democratic lawmakers, with some House Republicans rallying to his side.
“I support that strategy because look, at the end of the day, when COVID-19 happened you had the federal government and state governments literally shut companies down. Businesses had to make tough decisions about how they were going to keep their doors open. The federal government just kept getting record revenue year over year and hasn’t had to make those tough decisions,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said on CNN on Sunday.
Democrats, meanwhile, accuse Republicans of potentially holding the debt ceiling hostage to win over their spending cuts. Forfeiting on the nation’s debts, they say, would amount to an economic calamity given that the government is already legally required to pay out spending that Congress authorizes — and so the debt ceiling should rise as that spending is passed.
President Joe Biden and others in the Democratic caucus have laid out red lines surrounding what they expect will be Republican offers to cut Social Security and Medicare in exchange for GOP votes to raise the debt ceiling.
“What Republicans are basically doing — and I hope everybody understands this — they are saying, ‘Look, we are prepared to let the United States default on its debt, not raise the debt ceiling, unless you talk about making cuts,'” Sanders said on CNN.
But he, like Biden, disagrees with calls to remove the debt ceiling. The president last week called such a move “irresponsible.”
Sanders used that word in criticizing conservatives.
“You know what they’re talking about? Cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Is that irresponsible? It is absolutely irresponsible,” he said on CNN. “You don’t use the debt ceiling to do that.”
He also argued that the party that has been hammering Democrats over inflation and the economy — as polls show voters trust the GOP more on both issues — has no real economic plan of its own.
“What do they want to do, other than complain?” he said.
McCarthy, the House minority leader, has touted a “Commitment to America,” including strengthening the economy. The platform, however, is light on specifics.
(CHICAGO) — At least five men were shot, three fatally, early Sunday when gunfire erupted at a Chicago intersection taken over by a drag-racing caravan of more than 100 cars, police said.
The shooting erupted about 4 a.m. at an intersection in the Brighton Park neighborhood on the city’s Southwest side, Cmdr. Don Jerome of the Chicago Police Department said at a news conference.
The gun violence in the nation’s third largest city erupted despite a 20% drop in shootings in Chicago through the end of summer, according to Chicago police crime statistics. Homicides have also plummeted 16% from last year.
Jerome said police officers were responding to complaints of a drag-racing caravan in the area with cars peeling rubber and doing doughnuts in the middle of an intersection.
“There was drifting in the middle of the street and approximately 100 cars had gained control of the intersection,” Jerome said.
He said officers at one of the police departments Strategic Decision Support Centers were monitoring the incident via a live video feed when they received a ShotSpotter gunshot detection alert of at least 13 shots at the intersection and “people hitting the ground.”
Upon arriving at the scene, officers learned that five people had been shot and were all taken to hospitals in private vehicles.
Jerome said four men with gunshot wounds were taken to Holy Cross Hospital and one was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital.
He said three men were pronounced dead upon arriving at a hospital, and two other men were in serious condition, but expected to survive.
Two 20-year-old men were among those who died, police said. Authorities did not release the age of the third man fatally shot. Their names were not immediately released.
The two men who were wounded were described as a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old.
Investigators recovered multiple shell casings from the crime scene, suggesting that more than one gunman was involved, Jerome said.
No arrests were immediately announced. Jerome said police are investigating if some of the people who were wounded or killed were armed and fired shots during the incident.
“All three of the decedents did have a gang affiliation,” Jerome said.
He said police are searching for “one or two” people police suspect were involved in the shooting, adding, they “are not necessarily those in the hospital.”
Chicago Alderman Raymond Lopez, who represents the area where the shooting occurred, called for a police crackdown on the roving drag-racing caravans.
“This is not just fun and games on the street,” Lopez said at Sunday’s news conference with Jerome. “We are seeing gangs and criminality join into the drifting and drag-racing.”
(WASHINGTON) — Americans trust that Republicans would do a better job on a key set of issues, with across-the-board, double-digit edges on inflation, the economy, gas prices and crime, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Inflation sees one of the larger gulfs — with 36% of Americans trusting the GOP and 21% trusting Democrats. Similar gaps exist around gas prices, with 36% of Americans trusting Republicans and 22% trusting Democrats, the poll shows.
Broadly considering the state of the economy, 36% of Americans trust Republicans to do a better job while 24% trust Democrats — a potentially grim tell for the left, who currently cling to razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate.
Regarding crime, a key closing issue for the GOP in the campaign cycle, Republicans also enjoy a solid advantage — with 35% of respondents trusting them over the 22% who put faith in the Democrats.
The public is much more evenly split on immigration, with Republicans trusted to do a better job by 35% of Americans compared to 32% who prefer the Democrats, the new poll shows. Americans are also relatively split on taxes, with 30% saying Republicans would do a better job versus 28% for the Democrats.
These leads for Republicans have numerically solidified somewhat since August, per the ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, after both parties flooded the market with a barrage of ads, with the right painting President Joe Biden and his party as soft on crime, weak on immigration and squarely responsible for higher prices at the pump and at the grocery store.
Just last week at the White House, Biden acknowledged the price crunch, as he announced the release of 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve in hopes to drive down the cost of gas.
“Families are hurting. You’ve heard me say it before, but I get it. I come from a family, if the price of gasoline went up at the gas station, we felt it. Gas prices hit almost every family in this country, and they squeezed their family budgets. When the price of gas goes up, other expenses get cut,” said Biden.
Democrats aren’t entirely underwater, however — seeing leads in voter trust concerning COVID-19, climate change, gun violence and abortion. Access to abortion services has been front-and-center of the Democratic messaging since the fall of Roe v. Wade, as the White House and other party leaders hope to build a blue wall to combat an anticipated “red wave” of Republican wins.
But recent polls including from Pew Research Center, suggest that the key issues their party champions are less likely to be prioritized as voting has begun in midterm races across the country. An overwhelming majority — 79% — told Pew that the economy is “very important” and 61% said violent crime is also “very important.”
One bright spot for Democrats on a different question in the ABC News/Ipsos poll is that 58% of independent voters say that if a candidate says they believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, they are less likely to vote for that candidate. Out of 522 Republican nominees for federal and statewide office around the country, 199 question the legitimacy of the last election, according to research compiled by FiveThirtyEight and ABC News.
Regardless of where they fall on the issues, voters seem hungry for new leadership at the top.
As substantial of a grip that Trump has on his own party, 44% of Republicans say that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should have “a great deal” of influence on the future of the GOP, according to the ABC News/Ipsos poll. That’s more than Trump, with 34% of Republicans saying they want the former president to have “a great deal” of influence, the poll shows. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley are among other party leaders some Republicans want to be the voice of their party.
Democrats are shying away from their leader as well, and by even more eye-popping margins. A large plurality (42%) of Democrats would like President Barack Obama to have “a great deal” of influence on the future direction of their party outpacing the sitting president, with only 27% of Democrats wanting Biden to have “a great deal” of influence, the ABC News/Ipsos poll shows.
The sentiment of wanting someone other than Biden is not necessarily a new one, yet the support of Obama aligns with a week of the most substantial midterm campaigning the former president has done this cycle, planning to travel to Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin at the end of October.
Last week, Obama argued on the “Pod Save America” podcast that Democrats can deliver a winning message to voters: “Across the board what we’ve seen is, when Democrats have even a really slim majority in Congress they can make people’s lives better. If you combine the deep concerns about our democracy with the concrete accomplishments that this administration has been able to deliver – because we had a narrow majority in both the House and the Senate – that should be enough to inspire people to get out.”
That said, in the same interview, Obama also chided his fellow Democrats for being a “buzzkill” on many issues.
And while this election has been framed partly as a referendum on Biden or Trump, a plurality of voters, 48%, say their votes are not really about either.
This ABC News/Ipsos poll was conducted using Ipsos Public Affairs’ KnowledgePanel® October 21-22, 2022, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 686 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4.0 points, including the design effect. Partisan divisions are 28-24-41 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents. See the poll’s topline results and details on the methodology here.
