A 15-year-old Florida teen has been arrested and charged with the murder of a Miami high school football coach, whom he was related to, and stealing over $7,000 from his home, according to multiple reports.
Charles Alexander faces charges of second-degree murder and armed grand theft, and will eventually be charged as an adult, the Miami Herald reported.
An arrest report released on Friday states that investigators believe Alexander was staying with Miami High coach Corey Smith, and used the coach’s own 9mm handgun to shoot him inside a den.
Units responded to reports of a person shot inside a residence, and responders pronounced Smith dead at the scene. Alexander reportedly claimed he was in the bathroom at the time of the shooting and had found Smith’s body, CBS Miami reported.
Investigators said Alexander provided inconsistent statements during questioning. A search of the house uncovered “six FC 9mm Luger spent shell casings and additional firearms evidence. Also, a large sum of U.S. currency was discovered, bundled with rubber bands and concealed among the defendant’s personal belongings.”
A Beretta belonging to Smith was found in a garbage can on the side of the house, and ballistics confirmed the spent shell casings were fired from the gun. The recovered sum of money totaled $7,450.
Alexander’s mother called the police on Wednesday to say that her son had confessed to her that he had killed Smith. Police arrested Alexander the following day, with a judge ordering that Alexander be held in secure detention.
Charles is the son of Lamar Alexander, an ex-con who hijacked a UPS driver in November, led police on a high-speed chase and died during a televised shootout on a South Florida street.
Lamar Alexander and Smith were cousins, but they were raised as brothers and Smith considered Charles Alexander to be his nephew.
“He asked to come over,” Amina Smith, the coach’s wife, told the newspaper. “We hadn’t seen him since his dad passed. Corey picked him up Sunday night and he spent the night. I left to go to work.”
During a hearing Friday morning, an attorney for Alexander told the judge his client was found incompetent four different times in the past two years. The attorney asked that he be given a psychological evaluation.
“There are many juveniles who also suffer from early childhood trauma, learning deficiencies and mental illness, and the criminal justice system can no longer afford to allow them to fall through the cracks,” Ron Vereen, defense lawyer for Alexander, said.
Hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were vitamin D sufficient, with a blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D of at least 30 ng/mL (a measure of vitamin D status), had a significant decreased risk for adverse clinical outcomes including becoming unconscious, hypoxia (body starved for oxygen) and death. In addition, they had lower blood levels of an inflammatory marker (C-reactive protein) and higher blood levels of lymphocytes (a type of immune cell to help fight infection).
“This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,” explained corresponding author Michael F. Holick, PhD, MD, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.
A blood sample to measure vitamin D status (measured serum level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D) was taken from 235 patients were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. These patients were followed for clinical outcomes including clinical severity of the infection, becoming unconscious, having difficulty in breathing resulting in hypoxia and death. The blood was also analyzed for an inflammatory marker (C-reactive protein) and for numbers of lymphocytes. The researchers then compared all of these parameters in patients who were vitamin D deficient to those who were vitamin D sufficient.
In patients older than 40 years they observed that those patients who were vitamin D sufficient were 51.5 percent less likely to die from the infection compared to patients who were vitamin D deficient or insufficient with a blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D less than 30 ng/mL.
Holick, who most recently published a study which found that a sufficient amount of vitamin D can reduce the risk of catching coronavirus by 54 percent, believes that being vitamin D sufficient helps to fight consequences from being infected not only with the coronavirus but also other viruses causing upper respiratory tract illnesses including influenza. “There is great concern that the combination of an influenza infection and a coronal viral infection could substantially increase hospitalizations and death due to complications from these viral infections.”
According to Holick this study provides a simple and cost-effective strategy to improve one’s ability to fight the coronavirus and reduce COVID-19’s adverse clinical outcomes, including requiring ventilator support, overactive immune response leading to cytokine storm and death. “Because vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is so widespread in children and adults in the United States and worldwide, especially in the winter months, it is prudent for everyone to take a vitamin D supplement to reduce risk of being infected and having complications from COVID-19.”
Reference: “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection” by Zhila Maghbooli, Mohammad Ali Sahraian, Mehdi Ebrahimi, Marzieh Pazoki, Samira Kafan, Hedieh Moradi Tabriz, Azar Hadadi, Mahnaz Montazeri, Mehrad Nasiri, Arash Shirvani and Michael F. Holick, 25 September 25 2020, PLOS ONE.
Legendary NFL quarterback Joe Montana reportedly confronted a home intruder over the weekend after the burglar allegedly grabbed one of his grandchildren.
An unidentified 39-year-old woman entered the Los Angeles County home where Montana and his wife were staying on Saturday at around 5 p.m. using an unlocked door, law enforcement sources told TMZ Sports.
At that point, the suspect allegedly saw a woman holding a baby, grabbed the child and walked to a different part of the house.
According to the report, Montana and his wife confronted the woman and wrestled the baby away from her. She fled the scene but was captured by police, who happened to be in the area for an unrelated matter, just a few blocks away.
She has since been charged with kidnapping and burglary, TMZ Sports reported.
Montana, 64, played 13 years for the San Francisco 49ers and led them to four Super Bowl championships. He then left the 49ers to play for the Kansas City Chiefs for two seasons. He got the Chiefs as far as the conference championship during the 1993 season and to the AFC Wild Card in the 1994 season, but never to the Super Bowl.
A large group of New York City police officers charged at protesters, diners and pedestrians in Manhattan’s West Village on Saturday night, arresting 12 people and raising questions about the aggressive response.
After raiding a peaceful art protest in Washington Square Park, NYPD officers rushed the group on a nearby street around 8 p.m., according to NBC New York. The protesters at the scene had walked towards the police precinct house in the neighborhood because officers had seized their music equipment.
Police officers with bicycles stand near the corner of Hudson and West 10th streets in New York City on Sept. 26, 2020.Molly Dillon via Twitter
Police said in a statement they “responded to a large disorderly group obstructing vehicular traffic in the vicinity of 10 Street and Hudson Street within the confines of the 6 Precinct.”
But photos and videos from the incident appeared to show a different scene. Images captured from different angles seem to depict a small group of protesters on one side of the street and dozens of officers on the other side.
After a message played on a loudspeaker saying, “Please be advised that pedestrians are not permitted to walk in the street or roadway,” the police ran towards the protesters on the opposite sidewalk, grabbing people and arresting them. Videos show some people trying to flee, as police pushed them into diners eating an outdoor meal.
People who weren’t part of the small protest said they found themselves running away from the police.
Molly Dillon, a policy advisor to New York state senator Alessandra Biaggi, told NBC News she was in the neighborhood when she saw “the massive amount of police officers.”
“All of the sudden the police all at once came running across the street toward the people watching them,” Dillon said. “People were not in the street. People were not chanting. People were stopped to look at the 100 or 200 NYPD gathered around milling about.”
“As soon as the police started running my friends and I ran down the sidewalk and up against the wall of the restaurant behind us next to a table of diners who allowed us in there,” she said.
Dillon added she noticed very few of the officers were wearing masks and there was no social distancing.
Rebecca Fishbein, a journalist and author who was at the scene, said on Twitter she was “walking down Hudson after a micro-wedding on the water, not there in a reporting capacity.”
“I’ve lived in New York for 31 years and this was the most unhinged thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.
The NYPD said a statement that “a group of roughly 150 demonstrators came to the 6th precinct and blocked traffic,” and they took people into custody “after multiple warnings to clear the sidewalk.”
In total, police arrested 12 people, eight of whom received summonses for disorderly conduct, the NYPD said.
Brad Hoylman, a New York state senator for Manhattan, said his office was in touch with police about their use of force on Saturday evening.
“We’re exhausted of seeing video after video, and hearing from constituents in person, of inexplicable escalations that undermine an already fragile trust,” he wrote on Twitter.
Ibram X. Kendi, an American author who became the new director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University in July, railed against Barrett on Twitter for adopting two Black children from Haiti, equating her and her husband to “White colonizers.”
“Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity,” Kendi wrote Saturday.
He was responding to a since-deleted tweet about White parents adopting Black children.
“And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist,” Kendi continued.
“I’m challenging the idea that White parents of kids of color are inherently ‘not racist’ and the bots completely change what I’m saying to ‘White parents of kids of color are inherently racist.’ These live and fake bots are good at their propaganda. Let’s not argue with them.”
The conservative Barrett, 48, currently serves as a judge on the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. She is a devout Catholic and a working mother to seven children, including two adopted children from Haiti. She previously clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, and is devoted to the literal interpretation of the Constitution known as originalism.
Critics claim her nomination risks an overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, as well as the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare.
“Make no mistake: A vote for Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a vote to eliminate health care for millions of Americans and to end protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions in the middle the COVID-19 pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted Sunday.
Other Democrats, including Sen. Ed Markey, who co-authored the Green New Deal with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also threatened to pack the Supreme Court.
A member of the Hollywood elite, actress Debra Messing, accused Trump of pushing to have Barrett approved for the Supreme Court before November so she can vote him in for a second term if the election results are contested.
Meanwhile, songwriter Diane Warren said Barrett was a hybrid of Aunt Lydia, a character in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and a Stepford wife.
Newsweek had to run a correction after incorrectly reporting that Barrett was affiliated with the same group that inspired “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the popular Amazon series based on the novel by Margaret Atwood depicting a fictional society that forces the few remaining fertile women into sexual servitude.
The publication incorrectly claimed that the novel was based on People of Praise, a Christian parachurch organization based in South Bend, Ind., which Barrett and her husband both have ties to. Atwood has never said “The Handmaid’s Tale” was inspired by People of Praise, and a 2017 profile on the author published by The New Yorker mentions a newspaper clipping as part of her research for the book of a different Catholic group, People of Hope.
NEW YORK (AP) — At a University of Maryland lab, people infected with the new coronavirus take turns sitting in a chair and putting their faces into the big end of a large cone. They recite the alphabet and sing or just sit quietly for a half hour. Sometimes they cough.
The cone sucks up everything that comes out of their mouths and noses. It’s part of a device called “Gesundheit II” that is helping scientists study a big question: Just how does the virus that causes COVID-19 spread from one person to another?
It clearly hitchhikes on small liquid particles sprayed out by an infected person. People expel particles while coughing, sneezing, singing, shouting, talking and even breathing. But the drops come in a wide range of sizes, and scientists are trying to pin down how risky the various kinds are.
The answer affects what we should all be doing to avoid getting sick. That’s why it was thrust into headlines a few days ago when a U.S. health agency appeared to have shifted its position on the issue, but later said it had published new language in error.
The recommendation to stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) apart — some authorities cite about half that distance — is based on the idea that larger particles fall to the ground before they can travel very far. They are like the droplets in a spritz of a window cleaner, and they can infect somebody by landing on their nose, mouth or eyes, or maybe being inhaled.
But some scientists are now focusing on tinier particles, the ones that spread more like cigarette smoke. Those are carried by wisps of air and even upward drafts caused by the warmth of our bodies. They can linger in the air for minutes to hours, spreading throughout a room and build up if ventilation is poor.
The potential risk comes from inhaling them. Measles can spread this way, but the new coronavirus is far less contagious than that.
For these particles, called aerosols, “6 feet is not a magic distance,’’ says Linsey Marr, a leading researcher who is studying them at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. But she says it’s still important to keep one’s distance from others, “the farther the better,” because aerosols are most concentrated near a source and pose a bigger risk at close range.
Public health agencies have generally focused on the larger particles for coronavirus. That prompted more than 200 other scientists to publish a plea in July to pay attention to the potential risk from aerosols. The World Health Organization, which had long dismissed a danger from aerosols except in the case of certain medical procedures, later said that aerosol transmission of the coronavirus can’t be ruled out in cases of infection within crowded and poorly ventilated indoor spaces.
The issue drew attention recently when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted and then deleted statements on its website that highlighted the idea of aerosol spread. The agency said the posting was an error, and that the statements were just a draft of proposed changes to its recommendations.
Dr. Jay Butler, CDC’s deputy director for infectious disease, told The Associated Press that the agency continues to believe larger and heavier droplets that come from coughing or sneezing are the primary means of transmission.
Last month Butler told a scientific meeting that current research suggests aerosol spreading of the coronavirus is possible but it doesn’t seem to be the main way that people get infected. Further research may change that conclusion, he added, and he urged scientists to study how often aerosol spread of the coronavirus occurs, what situations make it more likely and what reasonable steps might prevent it.
Marr said she thinks infection by aerosols is “happening a lot more than people initially were willing to think.”
As a key piece of evidence, Marr and others point to so-called “superspreader” events where one infected person evidently passed the virus to many others in a single setting.
In March, for example, after a choir member with coronavirus symptoms attended a rehearsal in Washington state, 52 others who had been seated throughout the room were found to be infected and two died. In a crowded and poorly ventilated restaurant in China in January, the virus evidently spread from a lunchtime patron to five people at two adjoining tables in a pattern suggesting aerosols were spread by the air conditioner. Also in January, a passenger on a Chinese bus apparently infected 23 others, many of whom were scattered around the vehicle.
Butler said such events raise concern about aerosol spread but don’t prove it happens.
There could be another way for tiny particles to spread. They may not necessarily come directly from somebody’s mouth or nose, says William Ristenpart of the University of California, Davis. His research found that if paper tissues are seeded with influenza virus and then crumpled, they give off particles that bear the virus. So people emptying a wastebasket with tissues discarded by somebody with COVID-19 should be sure to wear a mask, he said.
Scientists who warn about aerosols say current recommendations still make sense.
Wearing a mask is still important, and make sure it fits snugly. Keep washing those hands diligently. And again, staying farther apart is better than being closer together. Avoid crowds, especially indoors.
Their main addition to recommendations is ventilation to avoid a buildup of aerosol concentration. So, the researchers say, stay out of poorly ventilated rooms. Open windows and doors. One can also use air-purifying devices or virus-inactivating ultraviolet light.
Best of all: Just do as much as you can outdoors, where dilution and the sun’s ultraviolet light work in your favor.
“We know outdoors is the most spectacularly effective measure, by far,’’ says Jose-Luis Jimenez of the University of Colorado-Boulder. “Outdoors it is not impossible to get infected, but it is difficult.”
The various precautions should be used in combination rather than just one at a time, researchers say. In a well ventilated environment, “6 feet (of separation) is pretty good if everybody’s got a mask on” and nobody stays directly downwind of an infected person for very long, says Dr. Donald Milton of the University of Maryland School of Public Health, whose lab houses the Gesundheit II machine.
Duration of exposure is important, so there’s probably not much risk from a short elevator ride while masked or being passed by a jogger on the sidewalk, experts say.
Scientists have published online tools for calculating risk of airborne spread in various settings.
At a recent meeting on aerosols, however, Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, noted that preventive steps can be a challenge in the real world. Keeping apart from other people can be difficult in homes that house multiple generations. Some old buildings have windows that were “nailed shut years ago,” he said. And “we have far too many communities where they simply don’t have access to clean water to wash their hands.”
It might seem strange that for all the scientific frenzy to study the new coronavirus, the details of how it spreads can still be in doubt nine months later. But history suggests patience.
“We’ve been studying influenza for 102 years,” says Milton, referring to the 1918 flu epidemic. “We still don’t know how it’s transmitted and what the role of aerosols is.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content
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A Long Beach, California, woman was arrested on Saturday after allegedly ramming her car into protesters, seriously injuring two people, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
Tatiana Turner, 40, was taken into custody after striking a man and a woman with her car in the parking lot of the Yorba Linda Public Library, according to an Orange County Sheriff’s Department press release.
The release states that Turner will be charged with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon. An investigation is ongoing.
The incident took place around 3 p.m., approximately an hour after the protest began.
The protest was held by a group called “Caravan for Justice,” in support of Black Lives Matter. A counter protest was scheduled for the same time. About 150 people were in attendance at the start of the protest, the release states, with deputies present to “protect the constitutional rights of all individuals and to protect life and property.”
About 30 minutes after the start of the protests, the sheriff’s department began to receive reports of physical fights between the two groups, according to the press release.
Police declared an unlawful assembly as the fighting between to two groups continued and ordered the crowd to disperse. Police said there were also reports that those in the crowd had weapons.
One person, Jason Mancuso, 46, of Anaheim, was arrested for failure to obey the dispersal order.
The man and woman who were allegedly struck by Turner’s car were taken to a nearby hospital with serious injuries, but are expected to recover. The man had two broken legs, according to Orange County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Dennis Breckner. The woman sustained moderate injuries throughout her body, Breckner said.
Kalhan Rosenblatt
Kalhan Rosenblatt is a reporter covering youth and internet culture for NBC News, based in New York.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Sunday called on the U.S. Senate to hold off voting on President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, claiming that the right thing to do would be to wait to fill the vacant seat on the court until after January’s inauguration.
“The Senate has to stand strong for our democracy,” Biden said in remarks Sunday afternoon. He went on to say that senators should “take a step back from the brink,” and that “this is a time to de-escalate.”
President Trump told “Fox & Friends” co-host Pete Hegseth that he thinks his nominee to the Supreme Court could be confirmed ahead of the Nov. 3 election, saying there’s a “tremendous amount of time.”
“I think we could have it done easily before the election,” he told Hegseth during an exclusive one-on-one interview following the nomination, which aired Sunday morning, adding that they were “going to try and have it done quickly.”
“I think she’ll be confirmed […] relatively long before the election,” Trump said.
Biden’s criticism focused in large part on concerns that Barrett would vote to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, as the Supreme Court is readying to hear arguments in a case involving the law known as ObamaCare soon after November’s election.
This has been a common theme of Democrats’ attacks on Barrett, who has criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision upholding the law before she became a judge.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
