(OSHKOSH, Wisc.) — Anissa Weier, one of the two 12-year-old girls who said they attacked a friend to please the fictional character “Slender Man,” will be released from a mental health institution on Monday. Weier is now 19.
In 2014, Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner, also 12, to the woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier watched. Leutner was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries but survived.
Judge Michael Bohren on Friday approved the conditions of Weier’s release from Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The full report on those conditions hasn’t been released to the public.
In 2017 Weier was sentenced to up to 25 years in a mental institution.
At a March court hearing, Bohren reviewed several medical reports and a letter written by Weier. “I have exhausted all the resources available to me at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be a part of society,” Weier wrote.
Weier said she’s taken the responsibility that comes with “living with a mental illness, by communicating with total transparency to my treatment team members, participating wholeheartedly in all aspects of my treatment, and maintaining 100% medication adherence.”
“I am sorry and deeply regretful for the agony, pain, and fear I have caused,” Weier wrote, adding, “I take full responsibility for my actions.”
“I vowed after my crime that I would never become a weapon again, and I intend to keep that vow,” she said.
Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide. Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was found by a jury to be not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser pleaded guilty to the first-degree charges, and in 2018, as a part of her plea agreement, Geyser was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Geyser was sentenced to up to 40 years in a mental institution. Last year a state appeals court upheld her sentence.
Geyser and Weier said they had intended to kill Leutner to appease the fictional character “Slender Man” — often depicted online as a horror figure who stalks children — and prove that he was real.
After Geyser stabbed Leutner, she and Weier left Leutner alone in the woods. Injured and bleeding, Leutner pulled herself out of the woods and into the open where someone could find her.
“If the knife had gone the width of a human hair further, she wouldn’t have lived,” Dr. John Kelemen, who operated on Leutner that day, told ABC News in 2014.
In a 2019 interview, Leutner told ABC News she was doing well and that her hope was to “put everything behind me and live my life normally.”
ABC News’ Jason Volack, Allie Yang and Sean Dooley contributed to this report.
Cliff Lipson/CBS 2021 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Cedric the Entertainer is hosting the Emmy Awards for the first time, and he says he has something special for the viewers and live audience.
“We wanted to do something that reminded viewers of the big shows,” The Neighborhood star tells People.”We didn’t want to go Broadway with it, but we do want to do something similar to that. So we got a big, fun number to open up and show that’s got some sketches.”
The veteran comedian, whose credits also include The Steve Harvey Show, Barbershop and The Last O.G., says TV has been vital to our world as we cope with the pandemic.
“Throughout the roller-coaster of a year that we have all lived through, television has helped us stay connected as a society like never before,” Cedric comments. “It not only entertained us, but as it always has, it helped to open our eyes, educate us, and hopefully brought about a better understanding of who we are as a people.”
There will be a limited live audience for the Emmys, and Cedric admits that it’s a challenge appearing in front of an in-person crowd again after show business has been dominated for over a year by virtual performances.
“I think that had me a little, say, nervous if you will, to think about like, ‘Oh, I’m the guy that’s bringing it back out.’ This is how we set the mark,” he notes. “So I think that that’s the only place where I feel like there’s pressure, but I plan on having a good time.”
The 73rd Emmy Awards will air live on Sunday, September 19, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on CBS.
(NEW YORK) — Taking his toughest tone yet against those Americans still unvaccinated, President Joe Biden has triggered vows of legal challenges from GOP governors representing some of the very states where he’s trying to use mandates to get more people inoculated.
At least 19 Republican governors have lashed back at Biden’s promise to use OSHA to pressure employers with more than 100 employees to mandate COVID-19 vaccines or have workers submit to weekly testing. The Republican governors called the mandate an overreach that will force Americans to choose between their job and the vaccine.
While Biden said on Friday morning, during a visit to local middle school, that all scientists would agree with his new strategy — that using protecting public health as a justification for mandates makes “considerable sense,” his taking a combative tone may come with new political and public health risks and further polarize Americans, fueling the already bitter political divide around the pandemic.
South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, tweeted to Biden, “see you in court,” while Mississippi GOP Gov. Tate Reeves compared him to a “tyrant,” and South Carolina GOP Gov. Henry McMaster said he’ll “fight them to the gates of hell” to stop the move. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Biden’s approach “flat-out un-American.”
When ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott asked Biden on Friday what his message was to Republicans threatening to challenge his move in court, he responded, “Have at it.”
He continued, “Look, I am so disappointed that particularly some Republican governors have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities. We’re playing for real here — this isn’t a game.”
While Biden has previously said he wouldn’t impose vaccine mandates, he said Friday that vaccine requirements are “nothing new.” However, past vaccines requirements for measles, mumps and rubella, for instance, have historically been implemented at a state and local level — and at times when the country wasn’t already so divided politically
In his address to the nation on Thursday introducing his new six-part approach, a frustrated Biden went after the unvaccinated and elected officials for standing in the way of public health measures and, he said, causing people to die.
“These pandemic politics, as I refer to it, are making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die. We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal,” Biden said.
“My message to unvaccinated Americans is this: What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see?” he said. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
He called out the governors, many of whom are now criticizing his approach, saying, “if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.”
He added, “Let me be blunt. My plan also takes on elected officials in states that are undermining you and these life-saving actions. Right now, local school officials are trying to keep children safe in a pandemic while their governor picks a fight with them and even threatens their salaries or their jobs,” he said. He promised his administration would to pay back salaries withheld from those opposing mask bans.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked on Friday what caused Biden and the rest of the administration to change its tune on blaming the unvaccinated for the pandemic — after Psaki said in June that she didn’t want to place blame.
She said Biden on Thursday was “channeling the frustration” of millions who are vaccinated as the pandemic rages, while pointing a finger at Republicans.
“We didn’t anticipate, I will say, that when there was a vaccine approved under a Republican president, that the Republican president took, that there would be such hesitation, opposition vehement opposition in some cases from so many people of his own party in this country,” she said.
While 75% of adults have gotten a shot, per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccinations have stalled in recent months despite widespread availability as the hospitals across the country face another surge of the virus timed with the start of a new school year.
Biden’s new approach to getting more shots into arms comes as his approval for handling the pandemic has dropped sharply from 62% in June to 52% now.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found also that vaccine hesitancy has subsided in the face of the delta surge, with the share of Americans who are disinclined to get a coronavirus shot now just half what it was last January. Among those unvaccinated adults, about 7 in 10 are skeptical of the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness, 9 in 10 see vaccination as a personal choice rather than a broader responsibility and just 16% have been encouraged by someone close to them to get a shot.
It’s unclear if Biden will break through to that group.
A White House spokesman declined to say whether public polling on why certain people remain unvaccinated informed the decision to institute these new requirements, or otherwise explain how Americans’ attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines impacted the president’s decision.
The spokesman said the decision to enact the new requirements was “not rooted in any political focus, rather on what’s going to work.”
As some GOP governors say they’re preparing lawsuits, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients in defending the mandates on Friday argued that COVID-19 is a “public health issue, not a political issue.”
“We know that vaccination requirements work,” Zients said, pointing to “significant increases in vaccination rates at companies, health care systems, universities, that implement vaccine requirements.”
As Biden did on Thursday, Zients pointed specifically to companies like Fox News — which has provided a platform for vaccine misinformation and has repeatedly railed against Biden’s COVID-19 response — but which is also participating in a version of a vaccination reporting requirement itself.
“The president’s actions will accelerate that number of companies across the board for employers over a hundred, and that includes Fox News, which already has that vaccination requirement in place to keep its own employees safe.”
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson and Sasha Peznik contributed to this report.
BLACKPINK is now officially the most subscribed artist on YouTube, with over 65.5 million subscribers.
The K-pop girl group breaks the record previously held by Justin Bieber. In a statement, the group calls the achievement “unbelievable.”
“It’s a precious moment gifted to us by our BLINKS(Fans),” they say. “We would like to dedicate this honor to all of our fans around the world who have loved and supported us throughout.”
BLACKPINK adds, “Our BLINKS contributed a lot to this achievement, therefore we hope they also enjoy this honor. The YouTube platform was one of the most effective ways of communicating with our fans under the unprecedented situation. We will continue to bring positivity and great energy through our music and videos.”
BLACKPINK also has four of the all-time top 24-hour music video debuts and boasts four entries in YouTube’s Billion Views Club. Over the past year alone, the ladies have racked up more than 9.7 billion views globally and are among the top-10 most-viewed artists in the world.
(NEW YORK) — The sky was clear and blue. The gray towers stood, both guarding and welcoming, at the gateway to the nation. Out of nowhere came the impact, the blaze, the smoke — and then the towers were gone. When the dust and flames finally cleared, a new world had emerged.
The death and destruction defined that late summer day and remain seared in the minds of those who lived through Sept. 11, 2001. From the ashes and wreckage rose a new America: a society redefined by its scars and marked by a new wartime reality — a shadow darkened even more in recent days by the resurgence of fundamentalist Islamist rule in the far-off land that hatched the attacks.
Twenty years later — with more than 70 million Americans born since the crucible of the attacks — the legacy of 9/11 remains. From airport security to civilian policing to the most casual parts of daily life, it would be nearly impossible to identify something that remains untouched and unaffected by those terrifying hours in 2001.
This week, ABC News revisits the 9/11 attacks and unwinds their aftermath, taking a deep look at the America born in the wake of destruction. “9/11 Twenty Years Later: The Longest Shadow” is a five-part documentary series narrated by George Stephanopoulos. Episodes will air on ABC News Live each night leading up to the 20th anniversary of the attacks, from Sept. 6-10. The series will be rebroadcast in full following the commemoration ceremonies on Saturday, Sept. 11.
Part 5: A shadow so long, it covers all
The blue light may have been the strangest part.
On the streets of Baltimore, where crime proliferates in the poorest neighborhoods and economic desperation can run thick, the blue cast made it feel like one of those science-fiction movies set in a dark future of robots in control.
“I found it extremely oppressive and dystopian,” said Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson, a contributor to Baltimore magazine and a Pulitzer Center grantee.
The blue lights are meant to be seen. They are security cameras, and police want them to both solve crimes and deter them. In the city famed as the birthplace of America’s national anthem, the lights announce that the people are being watched.
Critics say these neighborhoods coated in blue also represent something else: the failures of an overzealous surveillance state, militarized and armed to the hilt in the years since terrorists attacked the nation on Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite the city’s high-tech efforts to curb crime, Baltimore still suffers from some of the highest homicide rates in the country. The city’s public image — shaped for many by the HBO crime drama “The Wire” — remains tethered to the fraught relationship between the police and the community.
For Baltimore and other major metropolitan areas, ubiquitous surveillance and a tragic cycle of police-involved killings continue to animate the debate over U.S. law enforcement. Many of the most controversial policing practices date to 9/11, when local governments were flooded with a surge of money, technology and new crime-fighting strategies — on top of a new mindset that assigned local cops to the front lines of the Global War on Terror. It was a time when many police departments re-fashioned themselves as paramilitary organizations, as their core mission was recalibrated from performing the traditional role of “protect and serve” to preventing the feared “second wave” of attacks for a terrorized and traumatized nation.
Police departments across the country, eager to avoid the failures that led to 9/11, scrambled to equip officers with the latest in military equipment and technology — much of it made available by a federal government that would spend almost 20 years at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the police forces — always eager to hire military veterans — were being staffed by people trained to police populations under occupation, not communities on the home front who get to decide how they want to be governed. Critics charged that racial profiling proliferated in cities like Baltimore, where the blinking blue lights became a symbol of life under a surveillance state.
“Over-policing, the racial tension — it just exponentially grew for local policing,” said Chris Burbank, a former police chief in Salt Lake City, who’s now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity.
From aerial surveillance in Baltimore to national terrorist watch lists, local police departments experimented with novel approaches to securing their streets in the years following 9/11. A scarred nation largely acquiesced.
Over time, critics of these methods say that the trauma suffered by heavily policed communities — and the toll on residents’ civil liberties — have done more harm than good. As protests erupted across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020, the gap between police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect had never seemed wider.
“This separation between policing and community, I think you have to view 9/11 as gasoline that was poured on that fire,” said Lawrence Grandpre, a Baltimore-based community activist and author.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a wariness of Muslims swept the country. Hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed. Mosques became inundated with threats.
“Anything that showed that you were an Arab or a Muslim caused everyone to be suspicious of you,” said Sahar Aziz, director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.
In response to the terror attacks, police departments in some major cities compiled vast databases of alleged potential terrorists and undertook ambitious surveillance missions targeting Muslim communities.
“You had massive surveillance programs by the NYPD, and the LAPD, and the FBI,” said Aziz. “Muslim student organizations at universities, Muslim-owned businesses, mosques, anywhere where Muslims congregated was systematically surveilled … we were sitting ducks.”
At the time of the attacks, the conversation around law enforcement was trending toward stricter guidelines for equitable policing — including halting some of the most invasive tactics like stop-and-frisk. Years of advocacy and lobbying in Washington culminated in the End Racial Profiling Act — a bill incoming President George W. Bush supported on the campaign trail in 2000.
“And then 2001, 9/11 happened, and it was completely off the table,” Aziz said. “It was a nonstarter.”
Before the 2001 terror attacks, John Farmer was the New Jersey attorney general who led the push to reform a state police culture that had itself acknowledged racial profiling and had vowed to eliminate it. After the attacks, as Farmer served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, he said he had to watch as 9/11 “had the effect of deferring the debate on racial profiling.”
“Suddenly,” Farmer said, “no one wanted to talk about it anymore.”
Over the next decade, as American military forces engaged terrorists abroad, veterans of war returned home to continue their service as police officers. Together, with the influx of weapons of war, police throughout the U.S. began to look more and more like they were deployed on a forward operating military base.
“Police departments all over the country have acquired a pretty significant amount of military-grade weapons and equipment since 9/11,” said Loren Crowe, an Army officer who served two deployments overseas. “My local police department would be well-equipped to go fight in the mountains in Afghanistan.”
It all amounted to a post-9/11 “over-policing” that has had debilitating effects on police-community relations, according to many who have spent their careers in law enforcement.
“At that time there was so much fear in communities because of 9/11,” said Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who experienced the changes as he worked his way up through the ranks in the New Orleans Police Department. “And it became a concept of more police — and do more with more police.”
In Baltimore, where the death of Freddie Gray in 2016 ignited nationwide protests and added new urgency to the debate over post-9/11 policing, the local police department led the charge in advancing novel and controversial police tactics.
Blue-light cameras flooded crime-prone streets. Facial recognition software and phone data collection were employed to fight crime.
Perhaps the most jarring to residents were the so-called “spy planes” deployed to surveil large swaths of the city. Launched in 2016, the nation’s first-ever aerial surveillance experiment was meant to be secret. The manned airplanes’ immense capabilities allowed them to record the outdoor movements of an entire city. An independent audit later found that nearly all of the spy planes’ flights tracked over majority Black communities.
The police department has since suspended the program, and Harrison, the new commissioner, is focused on mending the strained relationship between the police and the community.
“Let’s try to tamper down the militaristic look and mindset, and move away from the warrior model into the guardian model, where we’re guardians of our community, not necessarily warriors of the community,” says Harrison.
Still, wounds run deep.
“Baltimore is one of the cities that is a pioneer in surveilling its own citizens,” said Simpson, who has reported on the city’s surveillance programs for Baltimore magazine. “There’s a lot of desperation to get a handle on the crime … so Baltimore has become a destination for police surveillance technology companies, to try out their wares.”
Grandpre, the community organizer, said this experimentation with electronic surveillance “just exacerbates the notion of a divide between the police force and the community.”
“After 9/11 and with Baltimore’s high crime rate, there’s a notion that anything is acceptable,” Grandpre said.
Now, two decades on, Americans are finally returning to pre-9/11 conversations about policing and what it really means for a nation to govern itself.
“Absolutely there’s bias. Absolutely there’s racism. And we can start to talk about some of these things,” said Burbank.
Supporters of these police programs stress the need to try something new and different. “What we’ve been doing has not been working,” said Joyous Jones, a retired nurse and proponent of police surveillance in Baltimore, who decided to start working for the surveillance company running the planes after the program became public.
“The [American Civil Liberties Union] and all those people that really complain about their civil liberties — I don’t have that because when I walk outside, I have to look and dodge bullets,” Jones said.
Jones is not alone in her support for the programs. “There was public support for it,” Commissioner Harrison said. “There were community surveys that were in high percentage in favor of it … and we looked at all of that.”
But after a year of high-profile police-involved killings and a spike in violent crime in many cities, reformers continue to ask: Are these police practices even working?
“People talk about the dichotomy: Do we want security, or do we want liberty? But some of the experts I spoke with say that’s sort of a false dichotomy,” Simpson said. “Are you getting more security with this technology? Is the crime rate in Baltimore getting better? No.”
“All these technologies have been added, a lot of them since 9/11,” Simpson said. “And what are you losing by deploying all this?”
ABC News’ Sarah Kate Caliguire, Alexandra Myers, Abigail Roberts and Tom Sampson contributed to this report.
Spanish Model, the unique new album featuring a variety of Latin-music artists performing Spanish-language versions of the songs from Elvis Costello‘s second studio effort, 1978’s This Year’s Model, got its release today.
As previously reported, Spanish Model features all of the songs from This Year’s Model, plus select other tunes from that record’s sessions, with newly recorded vocals by various Latin artists accompanied by the original music by Costello and his band The Attractions.
Coinciding with the album’s release, a music video for award-winning Colombian-born singer/songwriter Sebastian Yatra‘s rendition of “Big Tears,” re-titled “Llorar,” has debuted on Costello’s official YouTube channel.
“Big Tears” didn’t appear on This Year’s Model, but was released in 1978 as the B-side of the “Pump It Up” single, and also was included on Costello’s 1980 compilation, Taking Liberties.
“‘Big Tears’ should have always been on the album, as it was at least equal if not superior to some of the other songs but we always wanted to make 7″ inch singles very special by having such a great track on the flip side of a hit record,” Elvis explains. “Yatra’s wonderful rendition of the song, only confirms my feeling that the tune is now where it has always belonged.”
Among the other artists who put their Spanish-language spins on the This Year’s Model tunes are Juanes, Luis Fonsi and Vega.
Meanwhile, the first episode of a six-part documentary series focusing on Spanish Model will premiere September 13. The series, which will roll out over the course of two weeks, will include interviews with nearly all of the artists who contributed to the album, as well as with Costello, The Attractions’ members and This Year’s Model producer Nick Lowe.
Here’s Spanish Model‘s full track list:
“No Action” — Nina Diaz
“(Yo No Quiero Ir a) Chelsea” (“[I Don’t Want to Go to] Chelsea”) — Raquel Sofía y Fuego
“Yo Te Vi” (“The Beat”) — Draco Rosa
“Pump It Up” — Juanes
“Detonantes” (“Little Triggers”) — La Marisoul
“Tu Eres Para Mi” (“You Belong to Me”) — Luis Fonsi
“Hand in Hand” — Francisca Valenzuela y Luis Humberto Navejas
“La Chica de Hoy” (“This Year’s Girl”) — Cami
“Mentira” (“Lip Service”) — Pablo López
“Viviendo en el Paraiso” (“Living in Paradise”) — Jesse & Joy
“Lipstick Vogue” — Morat
“La Turba” (“Night Rally”) — Jorge Drexler
“Llorar” (“Big Tears”) — Sebastián Yatra
“Radio Radio” — Fito Páez
“Crawling to the U.S.A.” — Gian Marco y Nicole Zignago
“Se Esta Perdiendo la Inocencia” (“Running Out of Angels”) — Vega
Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac are laughing off their viral red carpet interaction at the Venice Film Festival, where the internet collectively swooned over the Star Wars alum planting a tender kiss on Chastain’s arm.
The two were there to promote Scenes from a Marriage, an English-language remake of the critically acclaimed 1973 Swedish miniseries by Ingmar Bergman.
Speaking to ABC Audio, Chastain — who plays Mira — explained that she and Isaac first met in college and have remained great friends ever since. However, she warns that their relationship people see in real life, or on the red carpet, will be a complete 180 in Scenes from a Marriage.
“In our day-to-day, we’re [a] romcom, silly, funny friendship,” the Golden Globe winner explained. “When we’re going to act [in this movie,] we’re really going to bring out the darkness.”
Scenes from a Marriage follows a marriage slowly falling apart. While it draws inspiration from its source material, creator Hagai Levi says his vision is not an exact replica of the original miniseries.
“I had this idea of the gender swap,” the director noted. “It immediately updated the whole thing just by doing [that].”
Isaac, who plays Jonathan, while affirming that he isn’t worried about being compared to the actor who originated his role, confessed that he lifted a few cues from Erland Josephson, who played Johan in the 1973 version.
“Steal, steal, steal. That’s what I say,” Isaac grinned. “Steal anything you can if it makes it better!”
Scenes from a Marriage premieres on HBO on Sunday, September 12 at 9 p.m. ET.
(WASHINGTON) — Vaughn Allex will never forget the faces of two of the 9/11 hijackers. He looked them in the eye that morning and asked who packed their luggage.
Allex was an American Airlines ticket agent at Dulles International Airport on Sept. 11, 2001 when two men ran into the terminal — appearing lost — and approached his counter.
Brothers Salem and Nawaf Al-Hazmi arrived late that day, but with two full-fare, first-class passengers standing in front of him, instead of rebooking them, Allex ensured they made flight 77.
Allex has lived with that decision for the last 20 years.
“The check-in was odd. The two that I checked in, two brothers, one was kind of gruff and the other one was standing a couple of paces behind him. And this sounds odd, but this is what caught my attention. He was almost dancing, he was moving from foot to foot and grinning and looking around, and my thought was, here’s somebody that’s never been on an airplane and boy is this guy excited,” Allex recently recalled in an interview at Dulles airport in Virginia.
“And I kind of watched him for a couple of minutes as we went through the whole check. And he was totally unresponsive as far as whatever we asked him to read, to look verbally. He just smiled and danced and was oblivious to what was going on,” he continued. “That’s the image I have, is the two of them standing there and the one just dancing, it was the oddest thing.”
When the pair couldn’t answer basic security check-in questions, Allex marked their tickets for additional security.
There’s more Allex has had to live with — 24 hours before Allex checked-in the brothers, his longtime co-worker and close friend MJ Booth asked for advice on a trip to Las Vegas. She considered flying to Chicago or Dallas to connect to Las Vegas, but Allex encouraged her to take flight 77 instead and connect through Los Angeles.
“I said, first of all, it’s a better flight. It’s a transcontinental flight. You get a meal and a movie and it’s relaxing.” Allex recalls. “She said that sounded good, but that she’d never written a ticket that way and we were just transitioning to electronic tickets. Could I help her? So I wrote her ticket from Dulles to Los Angeles with a connecting flight back to Las Vegas. And then the following day, I saw that she had gotten on the flight on the ticket I’d written.”
Allex left Dulles on Sept. 11 grieving, but had no idea it was about to get so much worse.
“I didn’t know on September 11th, on that night and the morning of September 12th, I was dealing like everybody else was with what happened with losing friends, losing passengers, losing the crew. I knew all of the crew on the flight deck and I knew all of the cabin crew, I’d worked with them for years. What I didn’t know until about mid-morning (Sept. 12) when the FBI was talking to me was that those last two passengers that I checked in were actually two of the hijackers. I had no idea until that moment that I had been involved in it,” Allex said.
On Sept. 12, Allex was summoned to his boss’ office. There, a woman introduced herself as an attorney for American Airlines, adding “I am not your attorney.”
Allex recalls the chill that went through his body. That’s when he says two FBI agents walked in, handing him a passenger manifest.
“I started to run my hand down the list and I saw the names of the two people I checked-in, and in that moment and that instant, that’s when I looked at him and I said, ‘I did it, didn’t I?’ And they said, ‘what did you do?’ And I go, ‘these were the two that I put in,'” Allex said. “I think they, they knew exactly who they were looking for, but they wanted me to come to that conclusion. And once we did, the interview strictly focused on these two individuals. And the rest is history, that the whole transaction came back, I didn’t know all of September 11th until that moment on September 12th — I did not realize that I had checked-in two of the hijackers.”
Guilt tortured Allex for years to come. Twenty years later, there are still some things he’d rather not discuss.
“I blame myself, I thought, you know, if I had done something different, if I’d not let them on, if I just said to the agents, these two guys are late, let them get the next flight. We have one at noon. It’s no big deal,” Allex said.
Over the years, friends and professionals told Allex that he was just doing his job.
“That’s what they tell me, that’s what they tell me, but, what you do, what your — your own mind does is, is crazy sometimes,” Allex said.
“I realize that there’s probably nothing I could’ve done to prevent what happened. I’ve come to terms with that.”
His mind continued to play games with him for years. It wouldn’t be until 2004, with the purchase of a book that everything turned around.
“The turning point for me, I had been interviewed by the 9/11 Commission. And it wasn’t until the 9/11 Commission report came out and I bought the book and here is this book with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages, and I’m on page three. I have a little paragraph and a footnote, footnote number 12.”
Allex explained that single footnote — his name next to so many others — is what finally set him free of guilt and the feeling of responsibility years after the attacks.
“That’s when it started to get better. That’s when I went — oh my gosh. There were so many other people involved, there were so many innocent people that just touched on this. And I had just such a small, tiny five-minute part of it. But before that, it was — it was terrible.”
Allex retired from American Airlines in 2008. He now works for TSA.
“I joined the Department of Homeland Security working for the Transportation Security Administration and ever since I’ve been with them, it’s been great. I feel like the work that they do is so important to keep everybody safe. And the fact that I have just such a small little part there, I’m like the happiest person at TSA. And I’ll tell anybody that,” Allex said with a smile.
On Aug. 23, Allex walked with ABC News through the doors he saw the two hijackers run through that fateful morning. As he stood there, recalling the memory of the men responsible for starting the war in Afghanistan, Afghan refugees had just arrived from evacuation flights. They filed past the American Airlines ticket counter and through the very doors that the hijackers walked in 20 years earlier — grateful to start a new life in America.
Rascal Flatts‘ Joe Don Rooney was arrested in Nashville early on the morning of Thursday, September 9.
According to The Tennessean, Joe Don, 45, crashed into a tree on Hillsboro Road, near Franklin, TN, located just outside of Nashville.
Williamson County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sharon Puckett confirmed Joe Don was arrested. He was booked into the Williamson County jail at 7:20 a.m. and released almost three hours later, at 10:17 a.m. He currently remains free on $2,500 bond Friday, online records show.
Last year, Rascal Flatts announced their Farewell Tour, though they’ve subsequently tabled it due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
(TALLAHASSEE, Fla.) — In a victory for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, an appeals court ruled Friday to keep the state’s ban on student mask mandates in place, at least until it issues a final ruling on the legality of the ban.
The ban on mask requirements — issued by the Florida Department of Health in August after DeSantis directed it to “protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks” — had been suspended Wednesday by a judge in Tallahassee. Judge John C. Cooper had ruled that the state could not keep punishing school districts that require masks while the appeals court works toward a final ruling.
Friday’s order overrides Cooper, giving the Florida Board of Education the green light to continue withholding the salaries of school board members in districts that require face coverings for students. The state has imposed that punishment on two districts and has announced investigations into several others.
“Just like last year in the school re-opening litigation, the First District Court of Appeal has reinstated Florida’s ability to protect the freedom for parents to make the best decisions for their children while they make their own ruling on the appeal,” Taryn Fenske, communications director for DeSantis, said in a statement to ABC News. “We look forward to winning the appeal and will continue to fight for parents’ rights.”
DeSantis tweeted, “No surprise here – the 1st DCA has restored the right of parents to make the best decisions for their children. I will continue to fight for parents’ rights.”
Alachua County, one of the districts where school board members’ salaries are being withheld for imposing a mandate, said in a statement that despite Friday’s ruling it will “continue to enforce universal masking in our schools.”
“The decision is disappointing, but we understood from the beginning that the legal battle over masks in schools would take time and not every decision would be favorable,” Alachua County Public Schools Superintendent Carlee Simon said in a statement.
“While Alachua County Public Schools is not part of this particular lawsuit, we certainly support it,” Simon continued. “We are pleased that the plaintiffs plan to continue their fight. In the meantime, our legal challenges are just beginning, and we support the other Florida districts and families who are also taking the state to court over this issue.”
At least 13 school districts, including Florida’s six largest, have implemented mask mandates.
“Upon our review of the trial court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,” Friday’s order states. “These doubts significantly militate against the likelihood of the appellees’ ultimate success in this appeal.”
A lawyer representing the parents who sued the state said Friday’s decision would make students less safe.
“We are disappointed by the ruling of the 1st DCA that reinstates the stay and will be seeking pass through jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Florida since this matter involves statewide issues. With a stay in place, students, parents and teachers are back in harm’s way,” Charles Gallagher, one of the lawyers representing the group of parents who sued the state over its ban on mask mandates, wrote on Twitter.
