Suspect in custody following spate of stabbing attacks in Seattle: Police
mbbirdy/Getty Images
(SEATTLE) — Five people were stabbed in Seattle on Friday, marking the latest incident in a string of stabbings over the past two days in the same area, police said.
A suspect was taken into custody following Friday’s stabbing attack, which appeared to be random, Seattle Police Deputy Chief Eric Barden told reporters at a press briefing.
The suspect, whose name has not been released, is believed to be linked to several of the recent stabbing incidents, police said.
The latest stabbing incident occurred Friday afternoon in the 1200 block of South Jackson Street, in the Chinatown-International District, Seattle police said.
Four of the victims were transported to a local hospital in various conditions, including one who still had a knife in them, Barden said. A fifth victim was treated and released at the scene, police said.
A man matching a description given by witnesses was located nearby and arrested without incident, Barden said. A weapon was also recovered near the suspect, he said.
“This is a horrific tragedy, a mass casualty event,” Barden said.
In addition to the five victims in this incident, five other people have been stabbed in the area in a roughly 38-hour period, according to Seattle police.
The suspect is believed to be linked to four of those stabbings, while one is still being investigated, police said.
The first incident occurred early Thursday, in which a 52-year-old woman was stabbed eight times, police said.
Three other stabbing incidents involving male victims occurred on Thursday, police said. Two of the victims were stabbed multiple times. The other victim told police the assailant tried to stab him in the chest but he managed to block the assault, though sustained a cut to his hand, police said. The victim’s cellphone was also stolen, police said.
Another stabbing occurred early Friday, where a victim was found bleeding “heavily from the neck” and transported to a local hospital in serious condition, police said.
Barden said that beyond the robbery incident, the stabbings appeared to be “just random attacks.”
“This incident was apparently one individual over a 38-hour period of time committing random assaults. That is an aberration. That is not at all the norm,” Barden said. “With a suspect in custody, I think we are returned to normal.”
(NEW YORK) — It was a story tailor-made for Hollywood: A wealthy white family takes in a Black teenager, guiding his football career from a high school standout to Ole Miss to the NFL. However, years later now Michael Oher claims he was blindsided by the movie that so many of us know and love, underscoring the importance of his perspective for a balanced narrative.
The Tuohy family and Michael Oher’s inspiring story was a book by acclaimed author Michael Lewis and then a blockbuster movie — “The Blind Side.”
The movie premiered in 2009 and reportedly earned $300 million at the box office. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for portraying Leigh Ann Tuohy, a strong and determined character not to be underestimated.
Audiences embraced the movie’s message of racial harmony, but now the retired NFL star, who is a Super Bowl champion offensive tackle, is questioning everything he thought was true.
“The movie is something that will shadow Michael Oher for life because people think they know his story,” Michael Sokolove, a New York Times journalist and author who interviewed and spent time with Oher, said. “But that’s not actually Michael Oher.”
In a surprising turn, Oher is now suing the family that took him in.
An “IMPACT x Nightline” episode, now available to stream on Hulu, unpacks how such a feel-good story ended up mired in contentious litigation and looks at how everything went so wrong.
In his lawsuit, Oher alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy saw him as a “gullible young man whose athletic talent could be exploited for their own benefit,” and that the Tuohys claimed he was their adopted son when, in reality, he wasn’t.
“What happened is that he entered a conservatorship with the Tuohys, which is wildly different than an adoption,” ESPN reporter Kelley Carter said.
Oher and his attorneys filed a 15-page petition against the Tuohys, alleging that they and their children have made millions of dollars off Oher’s name and story while Michael Oher has made comparatively little.
The petition also accuses the Tuohys of negotiating a movie deal where they would reap millions while Oher and others received nothing.
Oher seeks a full accounting of the money earned from using his story and unspecified damages.
Oher said he did not wish to respond when ABC News reached out to him for comment.
The lawyers for the Tuohys stated that each family member, including Oher, made an equal amount of money from the film.
In court filings, the Tuohys submitted an accounting statement showing they made full payments to Oher for his equal share. The amount was a little over $138,000, one-fifth of the money they say they all made from the movie.
The Tuohy family is claiming that Oher is trying to extort them. Text messages they say are between them and the former NFL star allegedly show Oher demanding they pay him millions, writing in a text, “If something isn’t resolved this Friday, I’m going to go ahead and tell the world how my supposed-to-be parents robbed me. That’s the deadline.”
“Whether we agree with how he sees it, I think it’s understandable that someone would feel differently as a 38-year-old adult than they would as an 18-year-old or even a 26-year-old in the midst of trying to stay in the NFL,” Sokolove said.
The Tuohys filing states that the term “adopted” was always used in its colloquial sense and was never intended as a legal term of art.
“This is a sad day,” Steve Farese Sr., lawyer for the Tuohy Family, said. “It’s devastating to the family. And we hope that it doesn’t have a chilling effect on others who want to help needy individuals.”
The Touhys declined to comment to ABC News, but in an interview with The Daily Memphian last year, Sean Tuohy said lawyers advised them that they couldn’t adopt Oher since he was over the age of 18. However, it is legal to adopt an adult in Tennessee.
Attorneys for the Tuohys say Oher always knew he was in a conservatorship.
“Fact of the matter is, he wrote a book in 2011,” Randall Fishman, attorney for the Tuohy family, said. “And in 2011, he acknowledged in that book, on three separate occasions in that book, that he — that there was, in fact, a conservatorship.”
In the book “I Beat the Odds,” Oher explains that the term “adoptive parents” pretty much means the same thing as “legal guardians,” but the laws were written to consider his age. He didn’t care about the terminology which was explained to him that way by the Tuohys; he was just happy that no one could argue that they weren’t legally what they already knew was real: a family.
“Ultimately, Michael Oher did win a victory, maybe just a moral victory, in getting the Tuohys to pull down any mention that Michael Oher is their adopted son and to stop saying that going forward,” ABC News legal contributor Brian Buckmire said.
Just last year, at Oher’s request, the probate court judge dissolved the nearly 20-year conservatorship. The Tuohy family also agreed to remove all mentions of Oher’s supposed adoption from their websites, and not to mention adoption in public speeches.
“People don’t know anything about me,” Oher told ABC News’ Deborah Roberts in a 2009 interview. “I mean, you might see something on TV and think you know, but you gotta get to know me as a person. But you’ll never know a person by watching a movie or reading a book.”
Now, as the legal case wends its way through the court system, Oher is moving on to the next season of his life. Since 2022, Oher has been the president of the Oher Foundation, a nonprofit set up to empower economically disadvantaged kids through high school scholarships.
In an interview last year with “Good Morning America,” Oher said, “I shouldn’t be a miracle. And no kid — we shouldn’t be miracles. We should have opportunities and resources to live a normal, young adult, child life and grow up and be successful.”
ABC News’ Kevin Rochford, Kelley Robinson, Claire Pedersen and Jaclyn Skurie contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden will travel on Sunday to Florida areas ravaged by the back-to-back hurricanes, and announce federal funding for projects to strengthen the electrical grid, according to the White House.
Biden will be touring St. Petersburg, one of the hardest hit Florida cities from Hurricane Milton last week, and reveal $612 million for six Department of Energy projects in the southeast.
Two of the projects are focused in Florida and provide a combined $94M in federal funds, according to the White House.
Gainesville Regional Utilities will use the funding to help mitigate the effects of increasingly extreme weather in north central Florida, “through storm hardening, as well as faster restoration through deployment of self-healing devices and tools that will enable more efficient and precise dispatching of field teams during outages,” the White House said in a statement.
Switched Source, a private utility technology developer, will work with Florida Power and Light to deploy Phase-EQ, which “optimizes power flow in distribution circuits, will unlock over 200 MW of system capacity, and improve reliability on circuits serving communities that are most susceptible to prolonged outages,” according to the White House.
“These investments are part of the president’s commitment to making long-term investments that protect, enhance, and upgrade our nation’s electric grid, especially in the face of extreme weather events,” the White House said in a statement.
Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday evening. At least 16 people were killed in the storm and over a million remain without power.
Biden has spoken to numerous state and local officials, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who he said was “very cooperative.” When asked if he would meet with DeSantis on Sunday, Biden said yes so long as the governor was available.
(LOUISVILLE, KY) — Opening statements are set to begin Monday in the federal retrial of Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police officer accused of violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend and their neighbors in 2020, when Taylor was shot and killed in a botched police raid.
The initial trial ended in a mistrial last year when the jury reached an impasse because they were not able to reach a unanimous decision.
Hankison was charged in a two-count indictment in August 2022 for deprivation of rights under color of law, both of which are civil rights offenses. According to court documents, he was charged with willfully depriving Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, of their constitutional right to be free from unreasonable seizures, which includes the right to be free from a police officer’s use of unreasonable force during a seizure.
According to court transcripts, he was also charged with willfully depriving Taylor’s three neighbors of their right to be free from the deprivation of liberty without due process of law, which includes the right to be free from a police officer’s use of unjustified force that shocks the conscience.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The trial marks the third trial for Hankison, following the initial mistrial as well as a state trial in 2022, in which he was acquitted of multiple wanton endangerment charges.
U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Jennings last week granted the prosecution’s motion to exclude references to Hankison’s prior court proceedings in the retrial, according to WHAS, the ABC affiliate in Louisville covering the case in the courtroom.
The judge denied the prosecution’s request to introduce evidence of his prior alleged wrongdoing while employed as a Louisville police officer, according to WHAS.
Hankison was one of three officers involved in the raid.
The plainclothes officers were serving a warrant searching for Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who they alleged was dealing drugs. He was not at the residence, but her current boyfriend, Walker, thought someone was breaking into the home and fired one shot from a 9 mm pistol at the officers.
The three officers opened fire, shooting 32 bullets into the apartment, several of which struck Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who was in bed at the time.
Hankison fired 10 rounds, none of which hit anyone. He was fired for violating department procedure when he “wantonly and blindly” fired into the apartment. Several of the rounds entered a neighboring apartment where a man, child and pregnant woman were living, according to prosecutors. The neighbors — Cody Etherton, Chelsey Napper, and her son, Zayden — were all sleeping at the time of the shooting, prosecutors said.
The other two officers involved in the raid, Myles Cosgrove and Jonathan Mattingly, were not charged in the incident. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron called Taylor’s death a “tragedy” but said the two officers were justified in their use of force after having been fired upon by Walker.
