2 dead, 1 wounded in shooting on campus of South Carolina State University
Crime scene tape (mbbirdy/Getty Images)
(ORANGEBURG, S.C.) — Two people were killed and one person was wounded after a shooting Thursday night on the campus of South Carolina State University, the school said.
The shooting, which was reported in an apartment at the Hugine Suites student residential complex on the Orangeburg campus, prompted a campus lockdown that remained in place hours after the shooting, according to a news release from the university.
Officials have not released any details about a suspect.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) is investigating the shooting, the university said.
The university said school officials have not confirmed the victims’ identities or the condition of the wounded person.
Classes are canceled Friday, the university said.
Two shootings on the campus in October, including one at the same student housing complex, left one person dead and another wounded.
The university has a student population of about 2,800 students.
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.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and Palestinian activist, who was arrested by US immigration authorities in mid-April 2025, attends the inauguration ceremony at City Hall in New York, United States, on January 1, 2026. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — For the second time in a little more than a week, attorneys have announced that an immigration court has terminated deportation proceedings against a pro-Palestinian student after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed they posed a threat to foreign policy.
According to a letter filed in court, attorneys for Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student who was detained at his naturalization interview in April, a judge has found that the Department of Homeland Security “did not meet its burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence” that he is removable.
It comes after an immigration court terminated removal proceedings against Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk. Her attorneys announced the order in a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case challenging her detention on Feb. 9.
For Mahdawi’s case, immigration judge Nina Froes appears to have based her decision on the finding that DHS failed to authenticate a memo allegedly signed by Rubio claiming Mahdawi was a threat to U.S. foreign policy.
Mahdawi’s attorneys have argued that, like other pro-Palestinian demonstrators, organizers and students, he was being targeted for his constitutionally protected speech.
Öztürk, like Mahdawi, was also labeled a foreign policy risk by Rubio in a memo.
Both cases can be appealed by the Trump administration, so their habeas petitions will likely continue to play out in federal court.
“I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government’s attempts to trample on due process,” Mahdawi said in a statement. “This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice.”
“In a climate where dissent is increasingly met with intimidation and detention, today’s ruling renews hope that due process still applies and that no agency stands above the Constitution,” he added.
In response to a request for comment about both cases, the Department of Homeland Security sent a previous statement about Mahdawi and said: “It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country. No activist judge, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that.”
Mahdawi was detained in Vermont last spring during his citizenship interview. Arguing that he should continue to be detained, lawyers for the Trump administration pointed to a 2015 FBI investigation, in which a gun shop owner alleged that Mahdawi had claimed to have built machine guns in the West Bank to kill Jews.
However, the FBI closed that investigation and Mahdawi was never charged with any crime, a point a federal judge highlighted when he ordered Mahdawi’s release.
In response to the government’s allegations against him, Mahdawi and his lawyers have firmly refuted allegations that he ever threatened Israelis or those of the Jewish faith. He told ABC News he has been advocating for peace and protesting against the war in Gaza.
“So for them to accuse me of this is not going to work, because I am a person who actually has condemned antisemitism,” Mahdawi said. “And I believe that the fight against antisemitism and the fight to free Palestine go hand in hand, because, as Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Öztürk was detained in March by masked federal agents, and the arrest was captured on camera. Attorneys representing her said she was targeted, like other high-profile arrests of students, for her Pro-Palestinian views, specifically, for co-authoring an Op-Ed in the student paper in March 2024 calling on the school’s administration to take steps to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
A federal judge ordered her release in May.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement on Feb. 9. “Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all.”
d4vd looks on during his arraignment for the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez at Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on April 20, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Ted Soqui – Pool/Getty Images)
(LOS ANGELES) — The 14-year-old girl whose dismembered remains authorities say were found decomposing in the singer D4vd’s towed Tesla last year died by “multiple penetrating injuries,” according to the newly unsealed medical examiner’s report.
D4vd — a 21-year-old Los Angeles resident whose legal name is David Burke — has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of the teen, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, officials said. The “Romantic Homicide” singer was arrested last week following a monthslong investigation.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner found she had two penetrating wounds of her torso, including injury to her liver, and reported evidence of traumatic injury. There were presumptive positives for benzodiazepines and meth/MDMA in her system, the report stated.
There was severe postmortem change to her body based on how long she had been dead.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
