3 indicted, including 2 parents, in drunk driving crash that killed high school student
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(GEORGIA) — Three people have been indicted over an alleged drunk driving crash in Georgia that killed a high school student in February — including parents accused of letting the teens drink before the crash.
Sumanth and Anindita Rao, who are 50 and 49 respectively, face charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless conduct and maintaining a disorderly house, DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston announced in a press conference Wednesday.
The car’s driver, 18-year-old Hannah Hackemeyer, faces numerous charges, including vehicular homicide and driving under the influence of alcohol under the age of 21.
On Feb. 24, Hackemeyer crashed a car after drinking alcohol at the Raos’ home, police said. She and the Raos’ teen daughter, Ananya, were able to crawl out of the flipped vehicle, but a third passenger, 18-year-old Sophia Lekiachvili, was trapped in the front passenger seat.
Lekiachvili was transported to the hospital, where she died of her injuries, according to police.
Hackemeyer had allegedly been driving more than 60 miles per hour over the speed limit when she crashed, and had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.046, more than twice the legal limit for a person under 21, police said.
According to Boston, the three teenagers had spent the evening leading up to the crash at the Raos’ home, where they drank wine, allegedly “in plain view of Ananya’s parents.”
Shortly before midnight, they allegedly told Sumanth Rao they wanted to go for a drive, Boston said.
“Ananya’s parents knew the girls had been drinking, but they still let them get into a car and leave the house with an open bottle of wine in the front seat,” Boston said. “Less than 30 minutes later, a little more than a half mile away, that decision would prove deadly.”
Boston alleged that allowing the teens to drink was “not an anomaly” at the home of the Raos, who she said had a “long-standing, repeated pattern of allowing teenagers to drink in their home.”
“The Raos’ home was the party house where teens could freely consume alcohol without interference from the adults who lived there — the adults who should have accepted responsibility,” Boston said. “It is a miracle that nothing happened prior to Feb. 24.”
Lekiachvili’s death was a “foreseeable consequence” of the Raos’ alleged permissiveness with teen drinking in their home, Boston said.
“As a prosecutor and a mother of two teenage daughters, I have never seen a more egregious disregard for safety and well-being of young people as I have in this case,” Boston said.
Attorney information for Hackemeyer and the Raos was not immediately available.
(NEW YORK) — New York City police are searching for five suspects wanted in a “gang assault” on former New York Gov. David Paterson and his 20-year-old stepson on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, according to officials.
The attack, which unfolded around 8:35 p.m. Friday by 96th Street and 2nd Avenue, began as a “verbal altercation” between the suspects and the 70-year-old former governor and his stepson, the NYPD said.
The suspects had had “a previous interaction” with the stepson, Paterson’s spokesperson told ABC New York station WABC, noting that the attack took place near the victims’ home.
The suspects hit the victims in the face and body, police said.
Paterson and his stepson managed fight off the attackers, the spokesperson said, and the suspects fled on foot, according to police.
Paterson and his stepson were both taken to the hospital in stable condition, police said, and they’ve since been released, the spokesperson said.
Paterson, a Democrat, served as governor of New York from 2008 to 2010. Paterson was New York’s first African American governor and the nation’s first legally blind governor.
Paterson and his wife “are thankful for the quick response time from the police and the outpouring of support they have received,” Paterson’s spokesperson said, adding, “The Governor’s only request is that people refrain from attempting to use an unfortunate act of violence for their own personal or political gain.”
“Governor Paterson’s main concern today is Kodai Senga and the New York Mets, but we will provide any additional updates as necessary,” the spokesperson added.
The NYPD asks anyone with information to call the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS or submit information online at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org.
(HOUSTON) — A helicopter that crashed into a radio tower in Houston, Texas, Sunday left four people killed, including a child, officials said.
The crash happened at approximately 7:54 p.m. local time, when a private aircraft struck a radio tower in Houston’s Second Ward, Houston police said in a press conference Sunday night.
All four of the individuals killed were aboard the helicopter and no one on the ground was injured in the crash, officials said.
No residences and structures were impacted except for the radio tower, police said, but noted the fire that erupted from the crash spanned two to three blocks.
The location of the crash was cited as the intersection of Engelke Street and N. Ennis Street, just five minutes away from Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros.
Houston Fire Department officials extinguished the fire after the crash.
The crash is being investigated by Houston authorities, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.
(WASHINGTON) — The United States has seen a significant increase in the use of clean energy over the last few years; however, Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of energy, has claimed otherwise.
Wright, chief executive of Liberty Energy — the world’s second-largest fracking services company — has made several comments chastising efforts to fight climate change. One example is a video he posted to LinkedIn last year in which he denies the existence of a climate crisis and disputes a global transition to green energy.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said.
Wright has been an outspoken critic of policies aimed at curbing climate change, including the Department of Energy’s goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
While Wright does not dispute the existence of climate change, he has argued that policies aimed at reducing the impact of climate change are misguided and alarmist, claiming that any negative impacts of climate change are “clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption.”
But the IPCC, the world’s most authoritative body on climate change, has stated that human-amplified climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe, and this has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.
And the clean energy momentum the country is experiencing will continue as alternative sources of fuel take more market share in the energy sector, experts told ABC News. That’s despite efforts by Republican politicians to bolster the fossil fuel industry in the U.S.
The Department of Energy’s website even states, “A clean energy revolution is taking place across America, underscored by the steady expansion of the U.S. renewable energy sector.”
And the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels. Investment in solar panels now surpasses all other generation technologies combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
“The U.S. is definitely in an energy transition, as is the rest of the globe,” Lori Bird, U.S. energy program director at the World Resource Institute, told ABC News.
Coal is one of the industries in which the energy transition is most apparent, Bird said.
Coal plants are seeing an average of 10,000 megawatts of capacity closures per year, according to the Institute for the Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Installed U.S. coal-fired generation capacity peaked in 2011 at 317,600 megawatts and has experienced a consistent downward trend ever since, the analysis found. In 2020, during the pandemic, coal’s share of power generation in the U.S. fell below 20% for the first time. In 2024 so far, coal’s share of power generation barely topped 16%.
“Based on current announcements and IEEFA research, we expect operating coal capacity to continue its steady decline for the remainder of the decade,” the report states.
Accompanying the sharp decrease in coal generation and usage has been the increase in capacity and storage for electricity generation from solar, wind and battery power, Bird said.
A record 31 gigawatts of solar energy capacity was installed in the U.S. in 2023 — roughly a 55% increase from 2022, according to a report by the World Resource Institute that found that clean energy continues to be the dominant form of new electricity generation in the U.S.
“Everywhere you look, in every facet of the economy, there are clean technologies ramping up and being brought to bear,” Julie McNamara, senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ABC News.
In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act stimulated an “unprecedented” slate for the creation of domestic clean energy manufacturing facilities, the report found. Since August 2022, 113 manufacturing facilities or expansions, totaling $421 billion in investments, have been announced, according to American Clean Power.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that came before it includes tax credits for both the home and commercial installation of charging stations for electric vehicles, evidence in the growing market share for EVs, which reached 10% in U.S. automotive sales in the third quarter of 2024, Bird said.
But the federal government isn’t the ultimate decider of the energy transition in the U.S., Bird said. While there could be a slowdown in progress during the next administration, the energy transition will continue to be driven by other stakeholders “who want this to happen,” she said.
“It would be impossible to halt the energy transition at this stage,” Bird said.
States in the U.S. are also continuing to pass ambitious climate and energy policies, a trend experts expect to continue despite who is living in the White House. State actions are considered critical to ensuring a successful clean energy transition, as federal actions alone are insufficient, according to the WRI. There are 29 states that have renewable electricity standards or clean energy standards in place, and a third of U.S. states have have standards to shift to 100% clean electricity, Bird said.
At the beginning of 2023, Minnesota adopted a 100% clean energy standard, while Michigan did the same later that year, joining states like California and New York in passing permitting reforms intended to make it easier to build clean energy and transmission.
“While the federal leadership may slow some of this transition, it’s being driven by states,” Bird said.
Another critical piece of the energy transition is tech companies, which are very large users of energy. committing to using sustainable energy to power their data centers, Bird said. One example is Microsoft paying to restart one of the nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania to power the company’s AI data center.
“Those companies that are driving a lot of this want clean energy,” Bird said. “That’s not going to go away. They’re committed.”
Throughout the 2024 election, Republicans stuck to party lines when it comes to rhetoric about the fossil fuel industry, which invests heavily into GOP politicians and candidates, David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, told ABC News in August. The rhetoric often includes misrepresentations on clean energy solutions rather than all-out climate denial, experts told ABC News.
The fossil fuel industry, through its lobbying in government, has attempted to slow any efforts at the energy transition, McNamara said.
“The only reason to say there’s no energy transition underway is to attempt to solidify policies and incentives that that anchor short-term profits for fossil fuel interests,” McNamara said.
Misinformation and disinformation about the climate crisis is “not helpful to the situation,” especially given that people all over the world are already experiencing the impacts of a warming climate in the form of extreme weather events, Bird said, adding that bipartisan support will be crucial going forward.
“We’re hopeful that with the new administration, that additional progress could be made,” Bird said.
ABC News’ Peter Charalambous, Matthew Glasser, Calvin Milliner and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
