1 dead, 1 injured in shooting at Kentucky State University, suspect in custody: Police
Jacob Lee Bard, 48, is accused of shooting and killing a person on the Kentucky State University campus on Dec. 9, 2025. (Franklin County Jail)
(FRANKFORT, Ky.) —One student is dead and another critically injured in a shooting Tuesday at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, according to police.
A suspect in the shooting, who is not a student at the university, is in custody, police said in a press release, identifying him as Jacob Lee Bard, 48, of Evansville, Indiana.
He has been booked into jail on charges of murder and first-degree assault.
Preliminary information indicates the shooting was caused by a personal dispute and was not a random active shooter situation, an official briefed on the situation told ABC News.
“This was not a mass shooting or a random incident based on what I’ve been told, and the suspected shooter is already in custody,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said in a video message. “That means that while this was scary, there is no ongoing threat and I believe our families are safe.”
The Frankfort Police Department said it responded to an incident on the school’s campus Tuesday afternoon “regarding an active aggressor.”
The shooting occurred near Whitney M. Young Jr. Hall, a residence hall on the south side of the campus, according to the school.
Two Kentucky State University students were shot in the incident, authorities said. One has since died while the other was transported to a hospital in stable but critical condition, Frankfort police said.
“At this time, there is no ongoing threat to the campus community,” the school said in a statement to students.
The investigation is ongoing. The university said it is working closely with local and state law enforcement.
All classes and activities at the campus, which is located approximately 25 miles northwest of Lexington, have been canceled for the rest of the week, school officials said.
“Today, indeed, was a senseless tragedy,” Kentucky State University President Koffi Akakpo said at a press briefing on Tuesday. “We’re mourning the loss of one of our students.”
Beshear urged people to pray for those affected and “for a world where these things don’t happen.”
“I’ll keep trying to build a Kentucky that we don’t see arguments ended in violence,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee appears set to amend the childhood immunization schedule, including potentially changing recommendations on a shot given to newborns.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is meeting Thursday and Friday. A draft agenda posted online on Monday provides little detail on what materials will be presented or which speakers will give presentations, but does mention a discussion about the hepatitis B vaccine on the first day as well as “votes.”
Although it’s not clear what will be voted on, past comments from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ACIP members indicate the universal hepatitis B vaccine dose given just after birth will be at issue.
The ACIP may vote to remove the birth dose recommendation or delay vaccination to a later age.
Public health experts told ABC News there is no evidence to suggest the hepatitis B vaccine is unsafe and that vaccinating babies at birth has been key to virtually eliminating the virus among children.
What is the hepatitis B vaccine?
The hepatitis B vaccine is typically a three-shot series. The CDC recommends the first dose given within 24 hours of birth, the second dose between 1 month and 2 months, and the third dose between 6 months and 18 months.
In addition to all infants, the vaccine is recommended for all children and adults aged 59 and younger as well as adults aged 60 and older with risk factors for hepatitis B.
The ACIP previously recommended that only babies screened and found to be high risk for hepatitis B receive a vaccine, but experts found that screening missed many hepatitis B-positive cases.
“Hepatitis B vaccine was initially recommended for older groups and eventually then for children, but not for newborns,” Dr. Susan Wang, a former CDC hepatitis B virus and vaccine expert, told ABC News. “We have learned over decades now of both the safety and the impact of the vaccine, and it was a very specific decision to move it, not just to infancy but … within 24 hours of birth.”
The ACIP recommended that infants begin receiving the vaccine within hours of birth in 1991 as part of strategy to stop hepatitis B transmission within the U.S.
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, told ABC News vaccination is important because if a pregnant person is hepatitis B-positive at the time of birth, the infant has an 85% chance of developing an infection.
If the infant develops a hepatitis B infection, they have a 90% chance of developing chronic hepatitis B, which can predispose them to chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and liver cancer.
What effect has the vaccine has on hepatitis B cases?
During a Senate hearing earlier this year, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician, said that before the recommendation was put in place in 1991, as many as 20,000 babies every year contracted hepatitis B from their mothers in utero or during birth.
Today, fewer than 20 babies every year get hepatitis B from their mother, Cassidy said.
Schaffner, who was part of the 1991 ACIP committee that recommended the universal birth dose, called it a “brilliantly successful program.”
“Both from a clinical perspective and a public health perspective, this has been a program that is successful beyond the imaginings of us when we sat around that ACIP room debating this in 1991,” he said. “The cases are just coming down astoundingly.”
Schaffner said if the ACIP votes to delay the recommendation, he is worried some parents will never get their children vaccinated.
“A vaccine postponed is often a vaccine never received, that is sure to happen,” he said. “There will be some children born to hepatitis B-positive mothers who, because they don’t get their birth dose, will slip through the system. They will become infected and, when they get older, they will transmit the infection to others, and we won’t be able to interrupt the transmission of this virus in our population.”
What has RFK Jr., CDC panel said about the hepatitis B vaccine?
During a June interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, Kennedy falsely claimed the hepatitis B vaccine was associated with an increased risk of autism.
Numerous existing studies have examined whether vaccines, or their ingredients, cause autism and have failed to find any such link.
Kennedy and other federal public health officials, such as Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have claimed hepatitis is mostly transmitted through sexual contact or needle sharing, and therefore babies don’t need a vaccine to protect against the infection.
They have suggested pregnant people be tested for hepatitis B and that only the babies of infected patients receive the shot at birth.
During an ACIP meeting in June, then-chair Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor, questioned whether it was “wise” to administer shots “to every newborn before leaving the hospital.”
Wang said there are a few reasons why a testing-only strategy doesn’t work, the first being that even if every pregnant person were tested before delivery and only babies born to positive patients were vaccinated, the unvaccinated babies would be unprotected against the virus, which is highly contagious.
Another reason is that not all pregnant people get tested or, if they do, they don’t get tested in time or have receive their results quickly enough, Wang said. Under a testing-only strategy, this could prevent a newborn from getting a vaccine when they need it.
“The hepatitis B vaccine is inexpensive, extremely safe, and has a high value in terms of effectiveness,” she said. “There’s no downside. And again, this has been after decades of studying this and globally, millions and millions of infants getting vaccinated. So, the value and the benefit of it is so far outweighs any possible issue.”
What if the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose recommendation is changed?
Wang compared removing the universal hepatitis B vaccine birth dose to taking a seat belt off in a car.
“The purpose of having the seat belt there is to protect you from the risk of injury and death when you’re in a moving vehicle,” she said. “It’s the same thing with the vaccine.”
Wang explained that the vaccine is given early as a post-exposure prophylaxis in case an infant is infected from their mother, but they can also contract the virus from anyone who is infected, either around the infant or taking care of them.
She added that if an infant is exposed during their first 12 months of life, the risk of chronic hepatitis B infection is substantially higher than if they are exposed during adolescence or adulthood
“If you don’t interrupt transmission, if you don’t cut it off at the pass, namely, at birth, we’ll have hepatitis B-positive people in the next generation, who, when they get into their teenage and young adults and older adult years, will pass it on sexually to others, and we will maintain this virus in our population,” Schaffner said.
Additionally, insurers often rely on ACIP recommendations to determine what they will and won’t cover, experts told ABC News.
If certain vaccines aren’t recommended by the ACIP, it may lead to parents or guardians facing out-of-pocket costs if their children receive the shot. It could also mean the shots aren’t covered by the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, a federally funded program that provides no-cost vaccines to eligible children.
A sign marks the location of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on April 30, 2025, in Washington, DC. J. David Ake/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Three million pages from the Justice Department’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are being released to the public today, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing Friday.
Blanche said the release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.
Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.
Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases, and any images depicting death or abuse.
Attorneys for hundreds of Epstein survivors tell ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in this latest disclosure, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.
“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” attorney Brad Edwards, who has represented Epstein victims for more than 20 years, said in a telephone interview with ABC News. “It’s literally thousands of mistakes.”
ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.
Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.
“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted, and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “It’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “
“They’re trying to fix it, but I said, ‘The solution is take the thing down for now,'” Edwards said. “There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.
ABC News reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Blanche also pushed back on the notion that the Justice Department might have protected President Donald Trump from his name appearing in the files.
“We comply with the act, and there is no ‘protect President Trump.’ We didn’t protect or not protect anybody,” Blanche told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas. “I mean, I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Blanche said there was “no oversight” by the White House about what the material showed.
He added that if there was evidence in the files that others had abused victims, the DOJ would pursue charges against them.
One document in Friday’s release is a chart showing connections between Epstein and various employees and associates. Many are redacted — but the faces of several remain visible, including Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate Jean Luc Brunel, and Epstein’s lawyer, accountant, and assistant. The chart is followed by a list of individuals broken into three categories: Day of Arrest, Week of Arrest, and Weeks following arrest.
This ties in with internal DOJ communications released earlier that showed a plan to contact potential witnesses following Epstein’s arrest. There are eight persons who are listed in the accompanying spreadsheet as “suspected co-conspirators,” including Maxwell, Brunel, and Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Two of those designated as “suspected co-conspirators” are also identified also as victims.
Groff has never been charged with a crime and said in a statement to ABC News in 2020 that she “never knowingly booked travel for anyone under the age of 18, and had no knowledge of the alleged illegal activity whatsoever.”
An internal FBI document produced created in August 2019, five days after Epstein’s death, shows nine persons listed as family and associates of Epstein, including eight labeled as “co-conspirators,” most with their names and faces redacted with the exception of Maxwell and Brunel. This points to potential continued interest in pursuing further charges after the death of Epstein. In his statement announcing Epstein’s death, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said “our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment — which included a conspiracy count — remains ongoing” Maxwell is the only other person to be charged related to Epstein’s crimes.
Among the other new documents released is what appears to be part of the original indictment against Epstein in his 2005 criminal case in Florida. The 100-page charging document contains information on 58 out the 60 charges against Epstein for his behavior towards six alleged victims. This document had never been made public.
Epstein ending up being offered a plea to reduced charges and was offered a non-prosecution agreement, in a deal that was highly controversial.
As of Friday afternoon, the DOJ had uploaded three “data sets” to its public website. Just one of those sets includes, by ABC News’ count, over 300,000 items.
A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to review and redact material, Blanche said at his press briefing.
Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of Epstein file releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump on Nov. 19. The act gave the Justice Department 30 days to make publicly available all unclassified records pertaining to investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
The bill contains several exceptions that allow for withholding or redacting records, notably to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims.
Prior to Friday’s release, the DOJ had posted to its online Epstein library roughly 12,000 documents totaling about 125,000 pages — just a small fraction of the millions of records the department has been reviewing.
Those materials included a record of a complaint to the FBI filed in 1996, years before the disgraced financier was first investigated for child sex abuse. The documents also included new details about the government’s investigation into potential accomplices as well as thousands of photographs of Epstein’s New York and U.S. Virgin Islands properties that were searched by the FBI after Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
The initial release of the files also contained numerous old photos of Epstein traveling with former President Bill Clinton, including pictures of Clinton lounging in a jacuzzi and one of him swimming with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking of minors and other offenses.
The images, which were released without any context or background information, contained little information related to Trump, leading a spokesperson for Clinton to accuse the DOJ of selectively disclosing the pictures to imply wrongdoing on the part of Clinton where he said there is none.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Angel Urena said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.”
In an interview with ABC News on the day of the initial release, Blanche said that every document that mentions Trump will eventually be released, “assuming it’s consistent with the law.”
“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” Blanche said.
Both Trump and Clinton have denied all wrongdoing and have denied having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Federal prosecutors have indicated in recent court filings that hundreds of government lawyers have spent weeks reviewing “several millions of pages” of materials — including documents, audio and video files — in preparation for disclosure to the public.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act came after the Trump administration faced months of blowback from its announcement last July that they would be releasing no additional Epstein files, after several top officials — including FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino — had, prior to joining the administration, accused the government of shielding information regarding the Epstein case.
The files released thus far have yet to show evidence of wrongdoing on the part of famous, powerful men, against the expectations of many of those who pushed for the files’ release.
Epstein owned two private islands in the Virgin Islands and large properties in New York City, New Mexico and Palm Beach, Florida, where he came under investigation for allegedly luring minor girls to his seaside home for massages that turned sexual. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence for sex crimes charges after reaching a controversial non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.
In 2019, prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicted Epstein on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial.
(ROCHESTER, N.Y.) — Three police officers in Rochester, New York, were shot Friday night “without warning at close range” while responding to a domestic call at a home, police said.
Emergency services received a call from a man who said his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend was attempting to break into her home and possibly had a gun, according to the Rochester Police Department. The caller also told dispatchers he had a legal permit for a firearm and was carrying a pistol.
Officers arrived a short time later and located the suspect, identified by the caller as the ex-boyfriend, along the side of the house, authorities said.
“He immediately pulled out a handgun and fired multiple shots from close range toward the officers and the victim, striking two officers,” Rochester Police Chief David Smith said during a Saturday morning news conference.
Additional shots were fired, including an exchange of gunfire between the suspect and the man who called police, which resulted in the caller being shot multiple times, Smith said.
The suspect fled the scene but was located within minutes by another officer, who was also shot after being fired upon by the suspect.
That officer and others on scene returned fire, striking the suspect multiple times and killing him, police said.
One officer was shot multiple times in the upper body and is listed in stable condition. Another officer was shot in the upper body, rushed to surgery and is listed in critical but stable condition.
A third officer suffered serious injuries but is in stable condition, authorities said. The man who initially called police was shot multiple times and remains in serious but non-life-threatening condition.
Police have not released the identities of those involved and the investigation is currently ongoing.
