(HOLYOKE, Mass.) — A Massachusetts judge has dismissed all criminal charges against two former officials from the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home, citing no “reasonably trustworthy evidence.”
The facility made national headlines last year, when 77 veterans, who were residents of the home, died of coronavirus in the early months of the pandemic.
In September 2020, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey asked a grand jury to indict former superintendent Bennett Walsh and ex-medical director Dr. David Clinton, on charges of elder neglect, and on permitting bodily injury.
The prosecution focused on a decision, taken on March 27, 2020, to consolidate two dementia units into one.
Healey alleged that Walsh and Clinton were “ultimately responsible for the decision” that led to tragic and deadly results” of combining the 42 veterans into a single unit that usually accommodates 25 beds. Six or seven veterans were placed in rooms meant to hold only four people. Due to overcrowding, nine beds also were placed in a dining room.
The placement of symptomatic residents, including confirmed COVID-19-positive residents, and asymptomatic residents, within feet of each other, thus increased their risk of exposure, Healey said.
“There is insufficient reasonably trustworthy evidence that, had these two dementia units not been merged, the medical condition of any of these five veterans would have been materially different,” wrote Hampden Superior Court Judge Edward J. McDonough, Jr., in a dismissal on Monday. “Therefore, because the evidence does not support a finding of probable cause to believe Mr. Walsh or Mr. Clinton committed any crime, I must dismiss the indictments against both.”
The five specified veterans in the original suit had “already” been exposed to COVID-19 before the merger took place, the judge wrote.
In a statement to ABC News, a spokeswoman for Healey wrote that the office is considering other legal options moving forward.
“We are very disappointed in today’s ruling, especially on behalf of the innocent victims and families harmed by the defendants’ actions. We are evaluating our legal options moving forward,” wrote spokeswoman Jillian Fennimore.
When the suit was filed in September of 2020, Susan Kenney, whose father, Charles Lowell, served in the Air Force from 1960 to 1965, during the Vietnam War, and died at the facility as a result of the outbreak, told ABC News that she welcomed the charges.
“I think that Bennett Walsh and Dr. Clinton should have to dig every grave that hasn’t been dug yet — as well as whatever time they receive if they’re found guilty,” Kenney said last fall. “They need to accept responsibility and account for their behaviors and the actions that they took.”
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will take to the skies in 2022 on a historic debut spaceflight to the International Space Station.
Watkins will become the first Black woman to embark on a long-duration mission at the space station, where she will live and conduct research in the microgravity laboratory as it orbits the Earth.
NASA announced that Watkins will serve as a mission specialist for the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the fourth rotation of astronauts on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. This will be her first journey to space since becoming an astronaut in 2017.
She will join NASA astronauts Robert Hines and Kjell Lindgren, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The group is scheduled for liftoff in April 2022 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Watkins was born in Maryland and now calls Colorado home. Previously, she worked as a geologist with a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles.
She joined NASA as an intern and has worked at various research centers in California. At the time of her astronaut selection, Watkins worked as a post-doctoral fellow on the science team for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity.
When Watkins launches into space next spring, it will be the realization of a dream she’s held since she was in elementary school.
“A dream feels like a big faraway goal that’s going to be difficult to achieve or something you might achieve much later in life,” Watkins said in a video released by NASA last year. “But in reality, what a dream realized is just one putting one foot in front of the other on a daily basis. If you put enough of those footprints together, eventually they become a path towards your dreams.”
Deep Purple has released a cover of Huey “Piano” Smith‘s classic 1957 tune “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” as the third single from their upcoming studio album, Turning to Crime, which arrives this Friday, November 26.
The track is available now via digital formats, while an animated music video for the tune has debuted at the earMUSIC label’s official YouTube channel. The clip tells the fantastical story of the rise and fall of a piano that plays music by itself.
As previously reported, Turning to Crime is the first Deep Purple album made up entirely of songs originally recorded by other artists. The band made the album remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Regarding why the band chose to record “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” Deep Purple keyboardist Don Airey explains, “I’m supposed to say it’s a song I always wanted to do since I was a child, but at the same time it was quite new to me. I didn’t know the original very well, but I knew Professor Longhair‘s version, which is the one that inspired my arrangement.”
He adds, “I just love the whole thing, that style of piano playing…Very, very hard to replicate. It was a bit of a challenge. And when it came back from the other members of the band with all this other music on it, I just thought: ‘Wow, that worked out. What an insane arrangement!'”
Probably the best-known version of “Rockin’ Pneumonia” is the one by Johnny Rivers, which hit #6 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973.
Turning to Crime also includes covers of Fleetwood Mac‘s “Oh Well,” Bob Dylan‘s “Watching the River Flow,” Cream‘s “White Room” and more.
(BOSTON) — The death of Elijah Lewis, the 5-year-old boy from New Hampshire who went missing before being found dead in Massachusetts last month, has been ruled a homicide, authorities said Monday.
Lewis died from “violence and neglect,” John Formella, the New Hampshire attorney general, said in a release. The boy suffered “facial and scalp injuries, acute fentanyl intoxication, malnourishment and pressure ulcers.”
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Massachusetts conducted the autopsy.
Lewis’ body was found late last month, after “credible information” led investigators to a wooded area near Boston, the local district attorney said at the time. There, a cadaver dog found Lewis’ remains “buried in the ground.”
Two people — Lewis’ mother, Danielle Dauphinais, 35, and her boyfriend, Joseph Staph, 30 — remain held without bail on charges of witness tampering and child endangerment, which were brought against them last month after they were arrested in New York City.
Both allegedly asked other people to lie about where the 5-year-old was living, “knowing that child protection service workers were searching for Elijah,” the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said.
“The endangerment charge alleges that they violated a duty of care, protection or support for Elijah,” the office said.
The two pleaded not guilty to both charges in a New Hampshire court.
The Merrimack Police Department began investigating Lewis’ disappearance on Oct. 14, after the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families reported to police that his whereabouts were unknown, according to the state’s attorney general’s office. The child welfare agency’s involvement with the boy is unclear.
The search for Lewis involved multiple New Hampshire and Massachusetts state and county agencies, as well as the FBI.
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(GROVELAND. Fla.) — A judge in Florida posthumously exonerated four Black men, known as the “Groveland Four,” who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in the central Florida town of Groveland in 1949.
Their families have been fighting to clear their names for decades, and in October, Florida State Attorney Bill Gladson filed a motion to posthumously clear the “Groveland Four” of their criminal records after the state determined that the evidence against the men was falsified.
Charles Greenlee’s daughter, Carol Greenlee, told ABC News that knowing her father has been exonerated has cleared a “cloud” that has followed her for 72 years.
“All my life I’ve been waiting to hear those words: ‘Restore presumption of innocence,'” she said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis granted posthumous pardons to the men — Charles Greenlee, Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin — in 2019.
“Even a casual review of the record reveals that these four men were deprived of the fundamental due process rights that are afforded to all Americans,” Gladson wrote in the motion that was heard in court Monday morning. “The evidence strongly suggests that a sheriff, a judge and prosecutor all but guaranteed guilty verdicts in this case.”
Following the rape accusation in 1949, an angry mob shot and killed Thomas before he could be arrested. Charles Greenlee, Shepherd and Irvin were all put to trial and convicted.
Charles Greenlee was given a life sentence. Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death and successfully made an appeal. In 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated their convictions and ordered a new trial for each. Following the new indictment, a Florida sheriff, Willis McCall, shot and killed Shepherd and attacked and injured Irvin.
Records show that the indictment against Thomas and Shepherd were never dismissed by the court, according to Gladson’s motion.
Irvin was retried, convicted and again sentenced to death, but later had his sentence commuted to life in prison.
Following the hearing, Gladson addressed reporters in a press conference and was joined by family members of the Groveland Four.
The first of the family members to speak was Carol Greenlee, who broke down in the court when the judge announced her father’s name would be cleared.
“This is a day that God has made,” she told reporters and thanked everyone who has helped her along her journey to fight for her father.
Carol Greenlee, who is 72, is just as old as the case of the Groveland Four. She was born a few months after her father was wrongfully imprisoned for rape.
Charles Greenlee, who was only 16 at the time, received a recommendation of mercy from the jury and received a life sentence instead of a death sentence. He did not appeal the verdict, but he was released on parole when his daughter was 11 years old. He died in 2012.
In an emotional interview with ABC News, Carol Greenlee, who said she took on the fight to clear her father’s name because he didn’t appeal his conviction, reflected on the “hole” in her life that the Groveland Four case has left and how it impacted her relationship with her father.
She said that she grew up visiting her father in prison until she was 3, when he asked her mother not to bring her back because it was “too painful.” But he continued to send her things from prison and didn’t miss a birthday card, she said.
Carol Greenlee said it took her years to understand the story of the Groveland Four and why her father didn’t want to see her.
“As a child, I would play in the courtyard while they talked and this one particular Sunday, he told her not to bring me back,” she said. “And that gave me a sense of being rejected, not being wanted. For a long time, I couldn’t understand. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Carol Greenlee said that the charges against her father made her feel “guilty” growing up, and she felt like “other children that knew about it looked at me in a very strange and unforgiving way, that I was dirty.”
But as she got older, she learned more about what happened to the Groveland Four, and when she was 40 years-old, she finally asked her father and heard the story from him for the first time.
“I decided that in order to get rid of this hole that was inside of me that nobody could fill, that marching on picket lines couldn’t fill that, that everything that I did could not fill that hole — the desire to know more about my father,” she said.
Carol Greenlee said she can now begin to heal spiritually, because this journey has taught her that “hate destroys you from within, anger tears you apart.”
“But compassion, forgiveness, and hope builds you up. And as long as you got hope, you can look forward,” she added.
When asked how she wants the world to remember her father, she said, “I want the world to know Charles Greenlee as a compassionate, loving family man who cares dearly about his children and wants to protect them at all costs.”
Other family members who spoke at the press conference on Monday included Dr. Beverly Robinson, the cousin of Samuel Shepherd; Eddie Irvin and Gerald Threat, nephews of Walter Irvin; and Aaron Newson, the nephew of Ernest Thomas.
Author Gilbert King — who won a Pulitzer prize for “Devil in the Grove,” his 2012 book about the Groveland Four — also spoke following the hearing. He was joined by Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the late Supreme Court justice who represented Irvin in the trial.
Marshall Sr. was with the NAACP at the time before becoming the Supreme Court’s first Black justice. His son said the case always haunted his father.
ABC News’ Rachel DeLima contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice has reached a settlement with parents of the Parkland shooting victims, court documents obtained by ABC News show.
Parents Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg sued the DOJ in 2018, alleging that the FBI knew shooter Nikolas Cruz was “going to explode” at some point and did nothing to stop him from starting a massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Other parents of Parkland victims joined the suit.
On Feb. 14, 2018, Cruz opened fire at the school, which he attended, and killed 17 fellow students. In October, he plead guilty to 17 counts of murder, and a jury will decide if he should face the death penalty or not.
“He wanted to kill people, and he had the means to do so—he had spent the last several months collecting rifles and ammunition,” the complaint filed in federal court in 2018 says. “Forty days later, Mr. Cruz did just what tipster warned the FBI he would do. He entered his former high school—Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—and executed 17 people.”
While the DOJ did not offer any settlement details, in their most recent court filing, the details are being worked out between the parties.
The court asked that the specifics of the settlement to be reached by Dec. 20.
James Van Der Beek and his wife, Kimberly, have a long-awaited new baby to add to their family. They now have five children.
The pair has been very open with their fertility struggles, including the losses of two pregnancies at 17 weeks, and so they’re celebrating the birth of their new son, little Jeremiah Van Der Beek, with their fans as well.
In a darling Instagram post, which includes a video clip of his daughter Annabelle cradling the baby — who his parents call “Remi” and who she calls “dinosaur” — Van Der Beek says, “After experience late-term pregnancy loss twice in a row…we kept this one quiet.”
He continues, “But we found a doctor here in Texas who diagnosed the last two as having been caused by an: ‘incompetent cervix’ (I asked him what kind of misogynistic old dude invented that term and he laughed — which made me like him even more),” the Dawson’s Creek veteran joked, noting thatthe condition is now known as a “weakened cervix.”
James then notes, “A simple surgical cerclage was done, removed at full-term, @vanderkimberly gave birth naturally on the ranch… and here we are.”
The actor wanted to “spread the word” about the procedure to spare other prospective parents of the heartbreak of losing a child in utero.
“Each child brings their own energy, their own manifestation of consciousness, their own lessons,” he says. “The ones we lost each gifted us with different pieces of the puzzle…leaving us that much more grateful for the ongoing master class we get to enjoy with this sweet, wise little one.”
In the past, Kimberly told her followers that her fall 2019 and June 2020 miscarriages were “so tough,” and “one of them almost killed me.”
Former NBA player Iman Shumpert is competing in the Dancing With the Stars season 30 finale Monday night at 8 p.m. on ABC with his pro partner, Daniella Karagach, and he says his popularity from the show is far different from his fame on the court.
“In basketball, it’s more so, ‘Did you guys win? That determines if I like you till the next game.’ With Dancing with the Stars, people fall in love with your story,” the 31-year-old athlete tells the NY Post. “They fall in love with you as a person, as an individual. I think Dancing With the Stars has done a tremendous job of promoting me as a father and husband, and that’s one of the most relatable things in the world. The fame is more personal in this regard.”
Shumpert, who is married to Teyana Taylor, has followed in her footsteps into the music business. He released his Substance Abuse EP in 2018, and now is planning to drop his first studio album titled, This Car Ain’t Stolen. Ironically, Teyana recently announced she is retiring from music after releasing three solo albums.
In other news, Kevin Hart and Damon Wayans will star in a live reenactment of the ’80s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes in Live in Front of a Studio Audience on December 7 on ABC, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Hart will portray Gary Coleman‘s character, Arnold Drummond, and Wayans will play his brother Willis, originally portrayed by Todd Bridges.
Finally, following the success of 50 Cent’s new BMF series and the season finale Sunday on Starz, he will also produce an eight-episode BMF documentary series. BMF tells the true story of brothers Demetrius and Terry Flenory who led an infamous crime family in Detroit in the 1980s.
(NOTE LANGUAGE) Dolph Lundgren is no amateur when it comes to firepower on a movie set, as seen in many films, including The Expendables franchise.
As both an actor and director, Dolph was stunned by Alec Baldwin‘s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the movie Rust, caused when an unchecked gun was apparently loaded with a live round.
“I’ve done a lot of movies. I’m very, very concerned and very…involved in that,” he says of gun safety.
He adds, “If anybody hands me any weapon that can fire rounds, then I will always check it myself and dry fire it,” meaning pulling the trigger to make sure it’s empty.
“In The Expendables, for instance, they use blanks…so it’s real weapons [on set],” Dolph continues. “But they have these ex-British Army guys [advising on set]. They’re serious about this s***. And there’s no way that any gun is handed to any actor without being triple checked.”
Lundgren’s new directorial effort, Castle Falls, instead used replica firearms, with digital effects added later to simulate them firing.
Lundgren predicted that “in the future, that’s probably the way it’s going to go,” noting, “I’m sure this incident that happened, which was tragic, will speed that up, and I have no problem with not firing blanks, for sure.”
He says using visual effects now is “such a standard procedure that it can actually look better [than blanks].”
Speaking of his cinematic past, Lundgren explains that he’s yet to see the new Director’s Cut of Rocky IV.
“I’m sure it’s good, and I’m sure Sly [Stallone] has made it more interesting…more modern and…probably more character development, from what I heard,” he says.
Dolph’s thriller Castle Falls, starring martial artist and Marvel movie veteran Scott Adkins, hits streaming services on December 3.
Here’s wishing a very happy 80th birthday to singer/songwriter Jesse Colin Young, who came to fame as the frontman of the popular folk-rock band The Youngbloods.
The Youngbloods are most famous for their 1967 rendition of the oft-covered Chester Powers-penned peace anthem “Get Together.” Upon its initial release, the song only reached #62 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it was re-released in 1969 after it was used in a religion-themed TV and radio campaign and wound up going to #5 on the chart.
Young also wrote many original songs for The Youngbloods, including the popular 1969 tune “Darkness, Darkness,” which was later covered by various artists, among them Mott the Hoople, Eric Burdon, Robert Plant and Ann Wilson.
Jesse had released a couple of solo albums before The Youngbloods were formed, and after the band broke up in 1972 he went back to his solo career.
His most successful solo effort was 1975’s Songbird, which peaked at #26 on the Billboard 200. His most recent collection of new songs is Dreamers, released in 2019.
Last year, Young teamed up with Steve Miller for a new version of “Get Together” that was released as part of the WhyHunger charity’s SongAid campaign. Young also recorded a new rendition of the tune with acclaimed ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro that appears on the latter artist’s new collaborative album Jake & Friends.
Young’s newest single is a cover of the 1971 Cat Stevens tune “Trouble” that Jesse recorded as a duet with his daughter, Jazzie Young.
The track, which is available now via digital formats, celebrates the 50th anniversary of Harold and Maude, the quirky film that featured “Trouble” on its soundtrack.
You can check out a music video for the duet at Young’s official YouTube channel.
