Man who hates big pharmacies allegedly guns down Walgreens worker: Police
Madera Police
(MADERA, Calif.) — A man who said he hates big pharmacies allegedly gunned down a Walgreens worker in California, according to police.
Narciso Gallardo Fernandez had a handgun in his pocket when he went into a Walgreens in Madera, shooting out a security camera before he allegedly shot and killed employee Erick Velasquez around 9:30 p.m. Monday, Madera police said.
Fernandez then fired his gun at other store employees as they fled, police said.
Velasquez died at the store, where bystanders were sheltering in place, police said.
Responding officers found the 30-year-old suspect in the parking lot, reloading his gun, according to police. Fernandez was taken into custody to be booked for homicide, police said.
Madera is about 25 miles outside of Fresno.
The victim and suspect didn’t appear to know each other, but Fernandez allegedly told investigators he hates big pharmacies, Madera Police Chief Giachino Chiaramonte told ABC News.
Chiaramonte said he does not believe this shooting was inspired by Luigi Magione, who is accused of the targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.
Velasquez was a Walgreens worker, but not a pharmacist, the chief noted. The pharmacy was closed at the time of the shooting and the victim was not shot in the pharmacy area, he added.
Fernandez is expected to appear in court on Wednesday.
(WASHINGTON) — When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger’s station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist.
When he wasn’t researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a “red-card” carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation.
In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures.
“I’m so proud of everything I’ve done,” Flaherty told ABC News. “Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, this fits. I’m running with it. This is me.'”
But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end.
As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration’s sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what’s obviously a politically motivated illegal termination,” said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn’t scheduled to end until November of this year. “I mean, I’ve got 13 years’ worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS “probationary, non-firefighting employees” were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters.
“To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.
Rollins, according to the USDA statement, “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”
“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy,” the USDA statement reads.
‘These fires are going to get exponentially bigger’
While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is “committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland.”
But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency’s ability to respond to wildfires.
Steve Gutierrez, NFFE’s national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400.
Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as “militias” comprised of trained secondary firefighters.
“When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray,” Flaherty said.
Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service’s total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country.
“When I say ‘non-fire personnel,’ we can’t totally think that they don’t ever touch fire, that they’re not important,” Gutierrez said. “They’re all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They’re either ecologists, they’re mechanics, they’re pilots, they’re water systems operators, they’re grants and agreements folks, they’re land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire.”
He added, “They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire.”
Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago.
“They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA’s most devastating wildfires that we’ve ever had and now they’re terminated because they have ‘poor performance,'” Gutierrez said. “It’s just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it’s a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public.”
Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of “fuels management,” which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush.
“If we’re not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not going to be just a California problem. It’s going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It’s not going to stop. It’s a national issue.”
Almost stranded in Louisiana
Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he’d have to get his own transportation back to Oregon.
“He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon.
“It’s just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn’t understand the impacts of what they’re doing when they swipe their pen,” said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. “They don’t understand the complexities of the entirety of the government.”
Flaherty said the “insult still rings true even though I am back home.”
“To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is,” Flaherty said. “I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It’s harming people’s physical and mental well-being, and it’s criminal.”
‘Dream job’
Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee.
“I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position.”
Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, “the Valentine’s Day massacre.”
“You finally get your dream job that you’ve been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics,” said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met.
“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor),” reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News.
“This is a lie. This says I’m fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I’m no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I’m crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function,” Anderson said. “It’s a bit maddening.”
A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee.
“My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren’t getting fired,” Anderson said.
In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land.
“When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river,” Anderson said. “By mid-August or so, we’re pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires,” Anderson said. “A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters.”
In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.
He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades.
“Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that’s just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it’s important,” Anderson said. “I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they’re just slashed without any real cause.”
(WASHINGTON) — Pete Marocco, the Trump administration official tasked with dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, told State Department staff on Tuesday night that he is stepping away from his role at USAID and returning to his previous role at the State Department, according to an email obtained by ABC News.
“It’s been my honor to assist Secretary Rubio in his leadership of USAID through some difficult stages to pivot this enterprise away from its abuses of the past,” Marocco said in the email. “Now that USAID is under control, accountable and stable, I am going to return to my post as the Director of Foreign Assistance to bring value back to the American people.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio named Marocco USAID deputy administrator in early February, and Marocco — along with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — led the widespread effort to dismantle the agency by laying off thousands of employees, revoking funding for more than 80% of its programs, and shedding its Washington, D.C., headquarters.
Marocco said in his email that he is leaving now that “USAID is under control, accountable, and stable” — however many of the administration’s moves are currently being challenged or stalled in the courts, with a judge on Tuesday ruling that the dismantling of USAID was unconstitutional.
A State Department official confirmed that Marocco would return to his role as the agency’s Director of Foreign Assistance, and that two political appointees would assume the responsibilities of the deputy administrator.
Those two individuals are Jeremy Lewin, who will serve as USAID COO and Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programs, and Ken Jackson, who will be USAID CFO and Deputy Administrator for Management and Resources, according to Marocco’s email.
Lewin, 28, has been working with DOGE at the State Department, helping in the effort to dismantle USAID, sources told ABC News. He graduated in 2022 from Harvard Law School, where he co-authored multiple op-eds with renowned liberal constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe.
He was later hired as an associate in the Los Angeles office of the law firm Munger, Towles & Olsen, according to a now-defunct profile on the firm’s website.
Lewin appears to have no apparent government experience, though his law firm bio claimed that he had “confidentially advised senior global policymakers — including the U.S. President and senior Congressional leaders, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zekelsnkyy, and senior members of the G7 and UN — on matters of international law and policy.”
Critics of the Trump administration say its efforts to nullify the agency will cripple American influence overseas and carry devastating effects for some of the most vulnerable populations in the world, which relied on U.S. funding for health care, food, and other basic needs.
In a statement shared by the State Department, Marocco said that “the crisis-level issues that had plagued USAID were far worse than we anticipated,” and that “It has been an honor and a privilege to help restore accountability and transparency at USAID.”
(NEW YORK) — After a scrubbed attempt this week, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission successfully lifted off Friday evening from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida headed for the International Space Station.
NASA astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Butch Wilmore are now one step closer to returning home from the ISS.
Powered by a Falcon 9 rocket, the spacecraft reached a speed of 17,500 mph as it headed into space after lifting off on Friday at 7:03 p.m. ET.
Docking at the ISS is scheduled for Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET. They will open the hatch and enter the station at 1:05 a.m. ET on Sunday.
The launch was initially planned for Wednesday evening but postponed due to a problem with a ground support clamp arm on the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX subsequently said the hydraulic system issue was fixed and the crew was once again cleared for take-off on Friday.
Dragon is transporting the Crew-10 team made up of NASA astronaut Anne McClain, the mission’s commander; NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, the mission pilot; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi; and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, with Roscosmo, Russia’s space agency.
Crew-10 will relieve four astronauts who are part of the current station crew, including Williams and Wilmore. The two astronauts planned to spend about a week on the ISS, but that brief stop turned into a nine-month mission when NASA determined that it was unsafe to bring them home on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they rode into orbit.
The duo arrived at the ISS in early June, but in September, NASA opted to bring the Starliner back home empty due to concerns about technical issues with the craft. This mission marked Boeing’s first crewed flight of the Starliner. An empty Starliner landed safely back on Earth on Sept. 6.
The two American astronauts became part of the ISS Crew-9 team and have been actively engaged in research and maintenance of the station ever since. The extended time in space also allowed Williams to break the record for the most spacewalking time by a woman, with 62 hours and 6 minutes in the vacuum of space.
NASA has long insisted that Williams and Wilmore were never stuck or stranded.
In September, three months after the pair arrived at the ISS, a Roscosmos Soyuz spacecraft arrived at the station with two cosmonauts and an American astronaut. Several weeks later, American astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov arrived at the station onboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft. Both vehicles have remained docked to the ISS and available for emergencies ever since.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom capsule that brought Hague and Gorbunov to the ISS is currently docked at the station will be the one that brings Williams, Wilmore and the two other Crew-9 astronauts back home. Endurance will remain docked at the station along with the Soyuz.
There is a period of overlap when the new team and the current crew of seven work collaboratively to ensure a smooth handover. NASA has said Williams and Wilmore could be home as soon as Wednesday.
NASA said that Crew-10 will conduct more than 200 scientific experiments and technology demonstrations during their mission to help humans eventually go deeper into space.
