8-year-old Navajo Nation girl may have been struck and killed by a truck, FBI says
The FBI is looking for information about the death of 8-year-old Maleeka “Mollie” Boone in Coalmine, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation. (FBI)
(NEW YORK) — An 8-year-old Navajo Nation girl who mysteriously died last month may have been struck and killed by a truck, the FBI said.
Maleeka “Mollie” Boone was “likely struck by a passing vehicle” and it’s possible the driver hit the 8-year-old “without realizing it,” the FBI in Phoenix announced on Wednesday.
The 8-year-old went missing on Jan. 15 in her neighborhood in Coalmine, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, the FBI said.
Mollie was playing late that afternoon and was walking home when authorities believe she was struck, according to the FBI. Her body was found the next morning.
The FBI said it’s looking for information about cars on Cedar Loop Road in the Coalmine Navajo Housing Authority between 5:50 p.m. and 6:20 p.m. on Jan. 15. The driver may have been in a larger car, possibly a pickup truck, the FBI said.
Anyone with information is asked to call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov.
Alex Murdaugh listens to testimony about cellphones during his trial for murder at the Colleton County Courthouse on Feb. 10, 2023, in Walterboro, South Carolina. (Joshua Boucher/The State/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — The lead prosecutor in the Alex Murdaugh trial, Creighton Waters, said that he is “disappointed in the court’s decision” to vacate two murder convictions for Murdaugh, and that he hasn’t ruled out an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Speaking to George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” Thursday morning, Waters said “we disagree” with the decision, but that “we respect the court and respect the process and we’ll continue on as we always do.”
The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned Murdaugh’s 2023 murder convictions in the deaths of his wife and younger son. The court said the court clerk had “improper external influence” on the jury, denying him a fair trial.
Murdaugh’s wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, were found dead from multiple gunshot wounds near the dog kennels at the family’s hunting estate in 2021.
Murdaugh was convicted of murdering them following a six-week trial, with jurors deliberating for nearly three hours before reaching a guilty verdict.
Waters said that an appeal to the Supreme Court is “still on the table,” and that he and his team have 90 days to decide to do that, though he added that “probably our best best is just going to be to tee this thing up again.”
“There is some question among the law as to how do you apply these alleged jury tampering issues,” Waters said. “I think as we look at what’s best long term for this case and what’s best for justice, it’s to retry this case and do so as soon as we can.”
Following Wednesday’s decision, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office will “aggressively” seek to retry Murdaugh for the murders “as soon as possible” — possibly by the end of this year.
Murdaugh was also convicted on several financial crimes following the murder trial and is serving a 27-year sentence on state charges and a 40-year sentence on federal charges related to those crimes.
“Let me be clear — this decision does not mean Murdaugh will be released,” Wilson said in a statement. “He will remain in prison for his financial crimes. No one is above the law and, as always, we will continue to fight for justice.”
Murdaugh’s lawyers said they “look forward to a new trial conducted consistent with the Constitution.”
Murdaugh has continued to maintain his innocence about the deaths of his wife and son. His defense alleged that jury tampering and evidentiary errors — including the inclusion of his financial crimes — denied him a fair trial.
Murdaugh’s attorneys allege that Colleton County Clerk of Court Mary Rebecca “Becky” Hill tampered with the jury by “advising it not to believe Murdaugh’s testimony and other defense evidence, pressuring it to reach a quick guilty verdict, misrepresenting information to the trial court in an attempt to have the court remove a juror she believed to favor the defense.”
Hill denied these claims but would later resign from her position and pleaded guilty to two counts of misconduct while in office and one count each of obstruction of justice and perjury.
Waters, however, said he planned on being aggressive and was confident he could win in another trial.
“Assuming that we don’t decide to appeal any further, [we] are going to get this thing before a jury as soon as we can,” Waters said.
– ABC News’ Meredith Deliso contributed to this report.
The syringe and liquid authorities said Anthony Kazmierczak used, which was taken into evidence by the Minneapolis Police Department. (US District Court. District of Minnesota)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — The man who was arrested after charging at Rep. Ilhan Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis has been charged by the Justice Department with assaulting a federal representative, a complaint shows.
Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, has been charged with “forcibly assaulted, opposed, impeded, intimidated and officer and employee of the United States,” according to the federal complaint.
He allegedly had a syringe filled with apple cider vinegar when he charged at Omar while she stood at a podium on Tuesday, according to the affidavit.
“I squirted vinegar,” he allegedly said after being tackled by security, according to the affidavit, which included an image of the syringe.
At the time of the incident, Omar was talking about how Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should resign.
“She’s not resigning. You’re splitting Minnesotans apart,” Kazmierczak allegedly said as he was being led away, according to the affidavit.
He was arrested and initially booked into Hennepin County Jail on suspicion of third-degree assault, Minneapolis police said Tuesday.
A “close associate” of the suspect told the FBI that several years ago, Kazmierczak allegedly said, “Someone should kill that b****,” while talking about Omar during a phone call, according to the affidavit.
After the incident, Omar told reporters that she won’t be intimidated.
“You know, I’ve survived more, and I’m definitely going to survive intimidation and whatever these people think that they can throw at me because I’m built that way,” she said.
Tuesday’s attack came amid tensions in Minneapolis between local officials and the Trump administration over the immigration crackdown in the city that has seen two U.S. citizens killed in shootings involving federal law enforcement.
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 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.
Blanche pushed back on the notion that the DOJ 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. 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 told ABC News Chief Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas.
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.
A team of 500 attorneys from the Justice Department worked around the clock to redact and review material, Blanche said.
“If any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the response of production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the department to do so, and we’re happy to do that,” said Blanche.
Friday’s tranche is the latest in a series of releases that began last month in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed Congress overwhelmingly and was signed into law by President Donald 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.
The DOJ to date 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.
