5-year-old boy with autism goes missing from home during nap with mom: Sheriff
Coos County Sheriff’s Office
(HAUSER, Ore.) — A search is underway for a 5-year-old boy in Oregon who has been missing since Saturday.
Joshua McCoy went missing from his home in Hauser, according to the Coos County Sheriff’s Office. He and his mother had taken a nap Saturday afternoon, but when his mother woke up around 5:30 p.m. local time, Joshua was missing, according to the sheriff’s office.
Joshua has autism and may not respond when called, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office has activated CORSAR — the California Oregon Regional Search and Rescue Task Force — to help search for the child.
Drones and K-9 resources have been involved in the search. The sheriff’s office said it has also requested assistance from state and federal agencies, with additional resources expected to arrive on Tuesday.
The sheriff’s office said they have found “some clues” so far during the search, though “nothing definitive.”
“Nothing is being ruled out at this time as we are considering all possible avenues,” the Coos County Sheriff’s Office said in an update on Monday. “We maintain hope that Joshua will be found alive and well.”
Joshua, who turns 6 on Saturday, was described by authorities as 3 feet, 6 inches tall and 50 to 60 pounds, with brown eyes and brown shoulder-length hair.
(NEW YORK) — Police are investigating the murder of a woman at a high-end resort in the Hamptons.
A staff member at the Shou Sugi Ban House found the victim dead in a guest room on Monday afternoon, Suffolk County police said. The resort is in Water Mill, located between Southhampton and Bridgehampton.
The woman hasn’t been identified, police said, adding that her cause of death will be determined after an autopsy.
No one has been taken into custody.
Police ask anyone with information to call the department at 631-852-6392 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to say if he’s been in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin since he left the White House but said it would have been smart if he had.
“Well, I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait at the Chicago Economic Club. “If I’m friendly with people, if I have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Trump’s interactions with Putin have been the source of speculation since journalist Bob Woodward’s book reported that the two have communicated multiple times since Trump left the presidency in early 2021.
Throughout his presidency, Trump praised Putin, including saying he believed Russian intelligence over the U.S. intelligence community with regard to Moscow’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.
Trump last week flatly denied during an interview with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl that the two leaders had recently been in touch.
“So, you haven’t spoken to him since you left the White House? Karl asked Trump. “No, I have not. That’s false.”
Despite repeatedly touting his close relationship with Putin in the Tuesday interview, Trump insisted he was tough on him, again saying he terminated the Nord Stream II pipeline.
“I said I don’t comment on those things,” Trump said when Micklethwait repeatedly followed up.
Trump also insisted that the 2020 election ended with a peaceful transition of power despite the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a pro-Trump mob on the U.S. Capitol.
“People were angry,” Trump said of the reaction to the election results before noting that he traveled home to Florida the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated.
“And it was love and peace. And some people went to the Capitol and a lot of strange things happened there. A lot of strange things with people being waved into the Capitol by police, with people screaming, ‘Go in,'” Trump said.
Looking forward to a possible second Trump administration, the former president defended his plans to slap significant tariffs on many imports, which critics have said will amount to a sales tax on American consumers.
Micklethwait opened up the conversation with a critique from multiple economists — a concern that his proposals for tax cuts would raise the national debt by trillions. Trump reiterated his claim that a major growth from his proposals would make up for the cuts, saying the auto industry and other factories will come back to the United States.
“We’re all about growth. We’re going to bring companies back to our country,” Trump said. “And we’re going to bring the companies back. We’re going to lower taxes still further for companies that are going to make their product in the USA.”
Trump claimed that he’s not going to allow foreign companies to sell a single car in the United States, throwing out self-admittedly random numbers for tariffs like “100%, 200% or 2,000%.”
“The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn’t have to pay the tariff,” Trump said.
Text messages sent between parents and students at Apalachee High School during the Sept. 4, deadly shooting are shown here. — ABCNews Photo Illustration/ Sonya Turner/ ABC via Erin Clark/ Becky Van Der Walt
(WINDER, Ga.) — As students hid behind desks and doors during the latest deadly school shooting in the United States, they pulled out their cell phones.
It was just before 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, that Becky Van Der Walt received a text message from her son that no parent wants to receive.
“I think there’s a school shooting,” Van Der Walt’s son, Henry, a junior at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, wrote, according to text messages shared with ABC News. “We heard gunshots and the police shouting … We’re all in hard lockdown.”
Around eight minutes later, Henry sent another text to his mom with three simple words, “I love you.”
Around the same time Wednesday, Erin Clark, also a parent of an Apalachee High School student, saw a concerning text message pop up on her phone from her son, Ethan.
“School shooting rn .. i’m scared,” Ethan, the high school student, wrote to his mom. “pls i’m not joking.”
When Clark responded that she was leaving work, Ethan, too, responded with just three words: ” I love you.”
Sonya Turner was home for less than an hour Wednesday after dropping off her 15-year-old daughter at Apalachee High School when she too got a worrisome text.
“There’s a real lockdown,” Turner’s daughter Abby, a sophomore, wrote to her mom from biology class. “idk how to explain it … i heard shots but i don’t anymore.”
While Abby and her fellow classmates were texting their parents Wednesday morning, not knowing what would happen, a 14-year-old student had allegedly opened fire at Apalachee High, killing four people and injuring nine.
The 14-year-old student accused of opening fire at the school has been charged with four counts of felony murder, with additional charges expected, Georgia Bureau of Investigation officials said Thursday. A motive is not known.
Two teachers and two students were killed in the shooting: math teacher and football coach Richard Aspinwall, 39; math teacher Cristina Irimie, 53; and students Mason Schermerhorn, 14, and Christian Angulo, 14, according to officials.
Eight students and one teacher were injured, officials said, but all are expected to survive.
Becky Van Der Walt told ABC News it was “terrifying” to receive a text message about a school shooting from her son, with whom she reunited later in the day.
Ethan Clark also survived the shooting, as did Turner’s two daughters, Abby and Isabella, a 14-year-old freshman at Apalachee High.
Turner told ABC News that as soon as texts from her daughters about gunshots came in just before 10:30 a.m., she called her husband to go to the school, telling him, “It’s real. Go. Go. Go.'”
For the next hour, Turner, also the mom of a 9-year-old son, said she stayed glued to her phone, keeping her daughters calm, making sure they had safe places to hide and praying with them.
“Where are you hiding,” Turner asks in one text message, with Abby responding, “I’m behind a long desk.”
“Is there an additional closet or anything you can get in,” Turner asks Abby in a later message.
“No I can’t move … I’m not aloud to mo[v]e,” Abby replies, leading Turner to tell her, “Ok. Pray …,” while also texting prayers.
In another message, Turner asks her daughters to simply keep communicating with her so she knows they’re alive, writing to them, “Keep talking to me.”
Isabella, just a few weeks into her first year of high school, texted her mom, “I love you. Mommy im scared.” Grief counselors from Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook describe what happens after a school shooting
Turner said over the course of the morning, she received text messages not only from her daughters inside the school, but from fellow parents who were also communicating with their kids and helping each other as they intermittently lost communication.
“[A friend] has two kids [at Apalachee High School], and she couldn’t get one of them on the phone, and he turned out to be in the classroom of the first teacher that was pronounced dead,” Turner said. “She’s texting and texting and couldn’t get him and couldn’t get him, and that’s because he was trying to save his teacher.”
In another instance, Turner said she temporarily lost communication with Isabella.
“That was a total freak-out moment but her phone had gotten taken, the whole class, they took their phones,” Turner said, adding. “But when they ushered them all out onto the football field, she got to a friend who was able to text me … so I knew she was safe.”
Turner, who is recovering from abdominal surgery, said she ended up walking over one mile from her home to the high school, where, after several hours, she was able to reunite with her daughters.
“Abby just keeps hearing the gunshots, and their question now is, how do we go back to school,” Turner said. “Izzy’s stuff is all in her classroom right where she left it, and she’s like, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go get it. I don’t want to go back into that room.’’
ABC News’ Caroline Guthrie contributed to this report.
