Woman found murdered at Hamptons resort, suspect dead
Douglas Sacha via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The suspect in the murder of a woman at a high-end Hamptons resort has died from apparent suicide, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
A staff member at the Shou Sugi Ban House found Sabina Rosas, 33, of Brooklyn, New York, dead in a guest room on Monday afternoon, Suffolk County police said.
The luxurious, exclusive spa retreat is popular with celebrities and is in Water Mill, located between Southampton and Bridgehampton.
A law enforcement source told ABC News that Rosas checked in with a man who left alone on Monday morning.
The suspected killer appears to have been a boyfriend of the victim, the sources said.
The victim’s cause of death has not been released.
(NEW YORK) — The co-founder and former CEO of OceanGate said the company originally never planned to build its own submersibles while testifying during a hearing on the deadly implosion of its Titan sub.
Guillermo Sohnlein co-founded OceanGate in 2009 with Stockton Rush, who was one of the five people killed in a catastrophic implosion while on a deep-sea voyage to see the Titanic wreckage in June 2023. He left the company in 2013, years before OceanGate began conducting dives to the Titanic with the Titan, an experimental, unclassified vessel.
While testifying on Monday during the U.S. Coast Guard’s two-week hearing on the implosion, Sohnlein said when they founded the company, “developing our own subs was not in the original plans.”
He said their vision was to acquire a fleet of deep-diving submersibles that could carry five people up to 6,000 meters that would be available for charter. They didn’t want the subs to require a dedicated mothership or support ship so that they could easily go anywhere in the world and operate off any ship.
He said most active commercial submersibles dive relatively shallow — less than 1,000 meters — limiting how much of the ocean can be explored.
“We wanted to change that,” Sohnlein said. “We wanted to give humanity greater access to the ocean — and specifically the deep ocean, anything deeper than 1,000 meters.”
OceanGate pivots to building own submersible using carbon fiber
Sohnlein said they eventually realized they would need to build their own submersible to achieve that business model.
“If you think about our business requirements of being able to carry five people 6,000 meters without a dedicated mothership deployable anywhere in the world — none of the sub builders could really do that,” he said. “Then, if you did factor in the cost, yeah, it was going to be ridiculously expensive.”
Sohnlein said Rush “convinced ourselves that it’d be possible to build a sub that would meet all of our business requirements.”
Sohnlein said they started looking at carbon fiber as a potential alternative for a pressure hull.
“That’s not a novel idea,” he said. “It wasn’t innovative, it was just something that we started looking at while I was still there.”
Roy Thomas — an engineer with the American Bureau of Shipping, which classifies submersibles — testified during the hearing on Monday that under ABS underwater rules, carbon fiber pressure hulls are “not acceptable materials for submersibles.”
“They have very low resistance to impact loads, and the hull is susceptible to deformation under applied external loading,” he said.
Rush became CEO of OceanGate in 2013, as the company shifted to developing its own submersibles.
“We were transitioning from an operations phase to an engineering phase, and that was really his strength and not mine,” Sohnlein said of Rush. “It made sense for him to take the reins of the company.”
Sohnlein said he made the “difficult decision” to leave the company at that point because there wasn’t going to be much for him to do in terms of operations.
Sohnlein said he still retains approximately 500,000 common shares in OceanGate but has “basically resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably never going to see anything out of that equity stake.”
OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion.
OceanGate co-founder never went on Titan
Sohnlein said he was offered “many times” to go on dives on the Titan, though he never did.
“As a shareholder, I didn’t want to take up room in the sub. I wanted to make that available for the people that the dive was intended for,” he said, people for whom seeing the Titanic was their “life dream.”
He also said he just wasn’t interested in going to the Titanic.
“Neither Stockton nor I were ever driven by tourism,” he said. “We were never motivated by going somewhere that people had already been before. The reason we got into this was because we both wanted to explore. We wanted to not only explore ourselves, but create the technologies that would allow us to explore the ocean.”
“So going to see a shipwreck that had already been well-documented, and that a bunch of people had already gone to, that didn’t excite me. It didn’t excite Stockton,” he continued.
Sohnlein reflected on a conversation when Rush told him he did want to conduct the first test dive of Titan down to 4,000 meters solo. He said Rush told him, “I don’t want anybody else in the sub. If anything happens, I want it to only impact me. It’s my design. I believe in it. I trust it. I don’t want to risk anybody else, and I’m going to go by myself.”
In addition to Rush, those killed in the Titan implosion included French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman.
The hearing into the implosion is scheduled to run through Friday.
In his closing remarks, Sohnlein said he doesn’t know what happened but he hopes they find “valuable lessons learned.”
“This was not supposed to happen,” he said. “This shouldn’t have happened, five people should not have lost their lives.”
He also said he hopes others are inspired by his and Rush’s mission.
“This can’t be the end of deep ocean exploration. This can’t be the end of deep-diving submersibles, and I don’t believe that it will be,” he said. “But I hope that someday, in the near future, we’ll look back on this time as a major turning point in human history — when the global, general public finally took an active interest in all of our efforts, everything that all of us do to explore the deep oceans, to study them and to preserve them.”
(NEW YORK) — A Georgia sheriff whose office in 2023 investigated an online school shooting threat that led to Colt Gray, the teen now accused of a deadly rampage inside his high school last week, said they “probably” dropped the ball on notifying the suspect’s school district about monitoring him.
Colt Gray, 14, is accused of killing two students and two teachers in Wednesday’s shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, about 45 miles north of Atlanta. Nine others were also injured. Colt Gray had transferred from another school in neighboring Jackson County to Apalachee only two weeks prior, the sheriff’s department in Barrow County told ABC News.
In May of last year, the sheriff’s office in Jackson County investigated an online school shooting threat that the FBI said was traced to Colt Gray. The FBI reached out to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office after Discord users alerted the Bureau about a post threatening a shooting at a middle school in Jefferson, Georgia.
An investigator interviewed Colt Gray and his father about the post at their home on May 21, 2023. The then-13-year-old told the investigator he had a Discord account but had deleted it months earlier and denied making the threats online, according to a transcript of the interview. There was no probable cause for arrest, the FBI said in a statement.
Following the investigation, a former captain in the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office sent a note to the FBI saying that “we have made area schools aware and will monitor this subject,” according to the sheriff’s office. The FBI also said in a statement that Jackson County “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.”
Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said following the school shooting in Barrow County, the FBI alerted her that the suspect was the same teenager her office had investigated last year. Mangum said in a news release on Sept. 6 that after “speaking with Dr. Donna McMullan with the Jefferson City Schools On September 5, 2024, it came to my attention they had no record of being notified of a threat by Colt Gray who was enrolled there.”
The incident raises questions about whether the previous district could have forwarded that information to Barrow County Schools officials once Colt Gray transferred to their district two weeks ago.
Asked by ABC News on Monday whether her office dropped the ball, Mangum said not on the investigation.
“But on notifying the school, probably,” she said, noting that some personnel who worked on the case left the office before the shooting incident last week. “Because I don’t know. If you say area schools are notified, who did you talk to and what school did you talk to? I don’t know.”
Mangum maintained that the 2023 investigation was “done thoroughly” but said she is unable to provide an answer about what happened with the school notification.
“I’m the sheriff. The bottom line is, it falls on me because I am the sheriff,” she continued.
Mangum said Monday her office was looking into emails to see if they could find any records, but at this time they only have the note the former captain sent to the FBI stating that the office did notify schools. She said she has yet to speak to the former captain who sent the note to the FBI and the former investigator who interviewed Colt Gray. She indicated that she didn’t know whether the former captain made phone calls to any area schools instead of leaving a paper trail.
ABC News has reached out to the former captain and investigator for comment.
As for the investigation into the online school shooting threat, Mangum said there wasn’t probable cause for an arrest or to charge the teen with making a terroristic threat.
“As far as the investigation, no, I don’t see anything else that could have been done back then in May of 2023 that he could have done. He did everything he could do at that time with what he had,” Mangum said of the investigator.
She said she believes the 2023 investigation will likely be important for the prosecution regarding the school shooting last week.
Mangum said she is “heartbroken” over the deadly incident.
“My prayers go out to those families that lost their loved ones,” she said. “It hurts me to even think that that could have happened anywhere.”
Colt Gray has been charged as an adult with four counts of felony murder. More charges will be filed, prosecutors said.
His father, Colin Gray, has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children in the second degree, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said. He is accused of “knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said last week.
The father and son both made their first court appearances on Friday. Neither has entered a plea and both are set to return to court on Dec. 4.
Alan Eugene Miller — Alabama Department of Corrections
(ATMORE, Ala.) — Alabama carried out the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday.
Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis.
Miller was executed after 6 p.m. CT at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, a state prison in Atmore, Alabama. His time of death, according to Gov. Kay Ivey’s office, was 6:38 p.m.
“Justice has been served,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. “After two decades, Alan Miller was finally put to death for a depraved murder spree that cruelly took the lives of three innocent men.
“I ask the people of Alabama to join me in praying for the families and friends of the victims, that they might now find peace and closure,” Marshall’s statement concluded.
Miller was initially sentenced to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.
Prior to the botched execution, the state had considered carrying out the death sentence via nitrogen hypoxia, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that provides data and analysis on capital punishment.
In November 2022, Alabama officials agreed not to execute Miller by lethal injection again but said if they made a second effort, the state would use nitrogen hypoxia as the method, the DPIC said.
In May 2024, the Alabama State Supreme Court agreed to let the Department of Corrections carry out Miller’s death sentence by nitrogen hypoxia.
It comes after Alabama became the first state to execute a prisoner, Kenneth Eugene Smith, by nitrogen gas in January of this year.
Nitrogen hypoxia is the term for a means of death caused by breathing in enough nitrogen gas to deprive the body of oxygen — in this case, intended to be used as a method of execution.
The protocol in Alabama calls for an inmate to be strapped to a gurney and fitted with a mask and a breathing tube. The mask is meant to administer 100% pure nitrogen, depriving the person of oxygen until they die.
About 78% of the air that humans breathe is made up of nitrogen gas, which may lead people to believe that nitrogen is not harmful, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
However, when an environment contains too much nitrogen and the concentration of oxygen becomes too low, the body’s organs, which need oxygen to function, begin shutting down and a person dies.
State officials have argued death by nitrogen gas is a humane, painless form of execution and that the person would lose consciousness within seconds of inhaling the nitrogen and die within minutes.
Three states — Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have approved nitrogen gas as a form of execution and Ohio lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year to allow execution by nitrogen gas.
However, medical and legal experts have told ABC News that nitrogen gas as a method for execution is untested and there’s no evidence the method is any more humane or painless than lethal injection.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor in the department of anesthesiology at Emory University School of Medicine, said he reviewed Smith’s autopsy which showed blueness of the skin, pulmonary congestion and edema, which he says indicated that he died from being asphyxiated “slowly and painfully.”
“If that’s what Alabama thinks is a job well done, well then there seems to be a wide disagreement on what a job well-done means,” he told ABC News. “So, if this is again, what they intend, then they intend to kill him cruelly, and they will intend to kill Alan Miller in the same cruel way.”
Zivot has previously reported analyzing autopsies after lethal injection cases and reports finding that many show signs of pulmonary edema. In 2020, NPR said it expanded this work by analyzing over 200 autopsies after lethal injection and reported that signs of pulmonary edema were mentioned in 84% of the cases it reviewed.
Attorney General Steve Marshall described Smith’s execution as “textbook” but Zivot said it’s hard to describe nitrogen hypoxia as “textbook” and that it’s a “proven method” when it’s never been a tested method.
“I recognize that [people were] murdered and that what is at stake here is a very, very serious problem,” he said. “We’re not saying that Kenneth Smith or Alan Miller have become saint-like men as they have been incarcerated. It doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad at this point with respect to how their punishment should be delivered. That doesn’t give us license to torture them.”
