Firefighter helps rescue dog while battling Eaton Fire: ‘I need to find that dog’
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images
(ALTADENA, Calif) — While entire neighborhoods were ablaze in Altadena, California, on Wednesday, a scared dog named Max barked at the out-of-control flames engulfing his home.
A firefighter saw him curled up in his front yard, alone and scared. As the fireman sprayed the flames, the dog got closer and closer.
The fireman put his hand out. And the dog came.
“Visibility was pretty poor initially, so we found a place that we could stake out, especially with the winds and the conditions that we were in,” firefighter Slater Lee told ABC News’ Matt Rivers.
“I heard a dog barking, and I was like, ‘I need to find that dog,'” he said.
“The whole garage was involved in pretty heavy flames, and I looked to my side, and the dog was seated with its tail between its legs, just curled in the corner of the front yard, still barking, just in a really sad position,” Lee added.
Lee put his hand down every so often to coax the 60-pound dog into feeling comfortable with him.
“I had the nozzle in one hand cooling the garage, so [the fire] wouldn’t extend over to the house, and then trying to pet the dog and make some light of the situation,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Eaton Fire has continued to grow. It has now scorched more than 14,000 acres with 37% containment, according to Cal Fire. At least 16 people have died in the Eaton Fire, according to the LA County medical examiner.
“I don’t like to take individual credit for anything, you know, and by no means was it any sort of an individual effort,” Lee said of comforting Max. “There’s my whole crew behind me.”
Lee has only been a firefighter for about six months, still on probationary status with the San Marcos Fire Department. His chief told ABC News that some new recruits come and go but “Slater is one of the good ones. He’s going to be sticking around.”
Lee kept the dog calm until another couple of concerned citizens were able to take him. They got him to safety, out of the fire zone, while Lee stayed behind, continuing his work.
Max made it back to his family, alive and well, if a bit traumatized.
(NEW YORK) — A woman who died after being set on fire on a New York City subway train this month has been identified, according to police.
The woman was identified as 61-year-old Debrina Kawam of Toms River, New Jersey, according to the New York Police Department.
Kawam was sleeping on a stationary F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn on the morning of Dec. 22 when she was set on fire allegedly by a 33-year-old Guatemalan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally, according to police.
The suspect, Sebastian Zapeta, has been charged with first-degree and second-degree murder and first-degree arson, according to police. He has yet to enter a plea.
“The depravity of this horrific crime is beyond comprehension, and my office is committed to bringing the perpetrator to justice,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement released shortly after the homicide occurred. “This gruesome and senseless act of violence against a vulnerable woman will be met with the most serious consequences.”
The suspect allegedly “approached and lit the victim on fire” with a lighter, police said.
Police officers in the area at the time smelled smoke and went to the train to investigate, where they found the woman standing inside the car “fully engulfed in flames.” She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Images of the suspect were captured on officers’ body cameras, as that person stayed on the scene after the incident, sitting on a nearby bench.
Those images were released as police requested the public’s assistance in identifying the man, who fled the train.
Three high school students recognized him and contacted police.
The suspect was taken into custody in a subway car at Herald Square within hours of the incident, according to police. When he was captured, the suspect had a lighter in his pocket.
A motive for the crime remains under investigation.
Zapeta was initially removed from the U.S. back to Guatemala in June 2018 after U.S. Border Patrol encountered him in Sonoita, Arizona, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson said. He unlawfully reentered the U.S. at an unknown time and location, the spokesperson said.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations will lodge an immigration detainer with the NYPD location where Zapeta is being held, an agency spokesperson said.
During a news conference on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Kawam briefly stayed in a city homeless shelter. He said authorities have been in contact with her next of kin, but he released no additional information about her.
“Our hearts go out to the family,” Adams said, calling the homicide a “horrific incident to have to live through.”
He said such high-profile “random acts of violence” have overshadowed the success police have achieved in bringing crime down in the subway system. NYPD crime statistic show that as of Sunday, overall crime in the subway system is down 5.4% compared to last year.
“It was just a bad incident and it impacts on how New Yorkers feel,” said Adams. “But it really reinforces what I’ve been saying: People should not be living on our subway system. They should be in a place of care. And no matter where she lived, that should not have happened.
(NEW YORK) — Public health officials are continuing to monitor an outbreak of avian influenza, also known as bird flu, as it spreads across the U.S.
The strain, known as H5N1, sickened several mammals this year before infecting dozens of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There is no evidence of person-to-person transmission of bird flu, and the risk to the general public is low, the CDC said.
But public health experts have also said it’s important to be alert during the respiratory virus season and to be aware of risks that could come from exposure to infected animals and from drinking raw milk.
Here’s the latest information on the outbreak in the United States:
What is the status of the bird flu outbreak? Avian influenza, or bird flu, is an infectious viral disease that primarily spreads among birds and is caused by infection with Avian Influenza A viruses.
These viruses typically spread among wild aquatic birds but can infect domestic poultry and other bird and animal species, according to the CDC. In the U.S., the virus infected dairy cows.
“What’s made this year’s outbreak interesting is the association with dairy cows, which is not an association that’s been seen before,” Michael Ben-Aderet, an infectious disease physician and associate director of hospital epidemiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told ABC News.
“H5N1 has been known for many, many years. It’s not a new strain of bird flu, but we haven’t seen it cross over into dairy cows and have this association with dairy cows and dairy workers,” he continued.
As of Thursday, 58 human cases have been confirmed in seven states, according to CDC data. California has the highest number of cases with 32.
Almost all confirmed cases have had direct contact with infected cattle or infected livestock.
So far, all bird flu cases in the U.S. have been mild, and patients have all recovered after receiving antiviral medication.
“There has been another strain in Canada that caused really severe disease in a teenager who ended up in critical condition in the hospital,” Dr. Meghan Davis, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News. “So yes, these [strains] are highly related, but not quite the same.”
What are the risks associated with raw milk? In April reports emerged of bird flu fragments found in samples of pasteurized milk.
However, the fragments are inactive remnants of the virus; they cannot cause infection because the commercial milk supply undergoes pasteurization.
“The good news is that pasteurization inactivates [the virus], and so, when you do that test to look at fragments of the virus, although we find it in milk, the pasteurization process ensures that live virus is not transmitted,” Albert Ko, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, told ABC News.
However, the Food and Drug Administration has previously warned of the possible dangers associated with drinking raw, unpasteurized milk due to elevated risks of foodborne illness.
On Tuesday, all of Raw Farm’s raw whole milk and cream products that were still on store shelves in California were being voluntarily recalled by the company, following multiple detections of bird flu virus in its milk and dairy supply within the past week, according to public health officials.
The CDC said it considers exposure to raw milk without personal protective equipment a “high-risk exposure event.”
“Raw milk consumers need to be aware that even handling the product itself could be a kind of exposure,” Davis said. “So, if you’re pouring it, you spill a little milk, get that on your hands, touch your eyes. You could get the same kind of exposure as someone who works in a dairy farm.”
Are we at risk of a bird flu pandemic? Experts said the U.S. is currently not experiencing a bird flu pandemic, nor is the country presently at risk of a bird flu pandemic.
However, they said with each new human case, it offers a chance for the virus to mutate, theoretically enabling human-to-human transmission to occur at a point in the future.
“I think the warning sign is just, because there’s so much transmission in birds and there’s transmission now in our cattle, particularly we really are concerned about the possibility that there may be a mutation that enables person to person or human-to-human transmission,” Ko said.
Ben-Aderet said there is also concern as the U.S. heads into the winter respiratory virus season that the seasonal flu — which has the ability to exchange parts of its genome with other influenza viruses — could do the same with bird flu.
Health officials are taking proactive measures to prevent such a situation from occurring.
The World Health Organization announced in July that it has launched an initiative to help accelerate the development of a human bird flu vaccine using messenger RNA technology.
In October, federal health officials announced they are providing $72 million to vaccine manufacturers to help ensure available non-mRNA bird flu vaccines are ready-to-use, if needed.
There are currently no recommendations for anyone in the U.S. to be vaccinated against bird flu.
ABC News’ Youri Bendjaoud contributed to this report.
(MINNEAPOLIS) — The Minneapolis City Council has approved a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to implement major reforms within the Minneapolis Police Department under the watch of an appointed, independent court monitor.
The decree still needs to go through other levels of approval, including the mayor’s office, before it is filed in federal court, according to Council President Elliott Payne.
“On behalf of the council and the entire city, I’d like to thank our community for standing together united in this and for having patience with us as we have traveled a very, very long and challenging journey,” said Payne. “We are just beginning and we know we have a long way to go.”
The police reform negotiations follow a two-year investigation from the Department of Justice into the Minneapolis Police Department’s patterns and practices.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report following a two-year investigation that found MPD was engaged in a pattern of discriminatory law enforcement practices, used unjustified deadly force in encounters with suspects, engaged in unreasonable use of force in encounters with young suspects and at times failed to give proper medical aid to people they had taken into custody.
The investigation was prompted in part by the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, which sparked racial justice and anti-police brutality protests nationwide. The report found that “the systemic problems in MPD made what happened to [Floyd] possible,” and such problems had continued despite reform efforts.
“We also found that MPD officers routinely disregard the safety of people in their custody. Our review found numerous incidents in which MPD officers responded to a person saying that they could not breathe with a version of, ‘You can breathe, you’re talking right now,'” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In one 2017 case, Garland said an MPD officer shot and killed an unarmed woman who he said had “spooked him” when she approached his squad car.
“The woman had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in a nearby alley,” he said.
MPD officers were also found to stop, search and use force against people who are Black and Native American at disproportionate rates, according to the report.
MPD is already under a consent decree from the state to “make transformational changes to address race-based policing,” following a 2023 agreement between the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and the City of Minneapolis.
The human rights agency described the consent decree as “a court-enforceable agreement that identifies specific changes to be made and timelines for those changes to occur.”
In 2022, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights similarly found that the Minneapolis Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of race discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act. This led to a state consent decree agreement that is ongoing.
ABC News’ Alexander Mallin contributed to this report.
