Utah man arrested after explosive device found under news media vehicle
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(NEW YORK) — A Utah man is facing terrorism charges after being arrested for placing an incendiary device under a news media vehicle in Salt Lake City, according to authorities.
Adeeb Nasir, 58, of Magna, Utah, was arrested Sunday on suspicion of placing the explosive device, which was lit but “failed to function,” according to police.
On Friday, Salt Lake City Police Bomb Squad and Unified Fire Authority Arson/Bomb Squad responded to a suspicious device placed underneath a news media vehicle parked next to an occupied building, which was found to be real.
Nasir faces nine charges, including two counts of weapon of mass destruction and two counts of threat of terrorism.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assumed primary jurisdiction over the investigation and served a federal search warrant at the residence on Saturday with the help of local authorities’ bomb squads.
“The FBI discovered what appeared to be potentially hazardous materials that could pose a threat to public safety,” the FBI said in a statement to ABC News.
After the FBI’s initial investigation, two suspects were associated with the incident and both resided at the same residence where the search warrant was served.
The second individual was listed as Adil in Nasir’s probable cause summary, and arrest documents have not been found at this time. The relationship of the two individuals has not been released.
“The initial FBI search warrant authorized the seizure of evidence specifically related to the incendiary devices,” documents said.
Squad members cleared the home and found two hoax weapons of mass destruction inside, along with two firearms and illegal narcotics.
Neighboring homes were evacuated during the search due to the explosives found.
There was no information about a possible motive.
Nasir was booked into Salt Lake County Jail and ordered to be held without bail, according to documents.
(NEW YORK) — After a gunman opened fire in a New York City office building and killed four people, experts expressed some concerns regarding security in workplace environments.
Four people were killed and one was injured on Monday after police say 27-year-old Shane Devon Tamura entered a Midtown Manhattan office building — which is home to the NFL headquarters — wearing body armor and opened fire with a high-powered rifle, according to authorities.
Donald Mihalek, a senior ABC News law enforcement contributor and retired United States Secret Service agent, said these types of workplace shootings are on the rise due to people — employees and those not affiliated with the company — feeling more comfortable with vilifying corporations and taking out their grievances through violence.
From 1994 to 2021, 16,497 U.S. workers were “intentionally killed while at work,” according to 2024 study. Other recent shootings that occurred at workplaces include the 2021 incident at an office complex in Southern California, killing four people, and a 2023 incident at a bank in Kentucky, killing five and injuring eight.
“Corporations are now feeling what governments have felt for many years, being targeted, being vilified,” Mihalek told ABC News.
So, what was learned from this incident and how can office buildings help mitigate these shootings from escalating?
Security outside an office building and artificial intelligence monitoring potential threats
On Monday, the suspect emerged from a double-parked BMW with an M4-style weapon Palmetto State Armory PA-15 rifle, entered the lobby alone, immediately opened fire on a New York Police Department officer and sprayed the lobby with bullets.
Richard Frankel, an ABC News contributor and retired FBI special agent, said Tamura’s ability to leave his vehicle double-parked and walk with a visible weapon “without anyone even thinking about it or causing concern” is “a little bit of an issue.”
“It’s crazy that he was able to walk on a Manhattan street into a building and not be seen carrying a long gun,” Frankel told ABC News. “How was he able to just walk with no one seeing him carrying an assault weapon and actually having it dangle out from his jacket?”
To prevent something similar happening in the future, Frankel said a corporation increasing its security presence outside the building — by establishing a private government partnership or hiring individuals — could help prevent the threat from actually entering the presence.
Frankel also said there is artificial intelligence and video technology used by federal buildings that could “observe what somebody is doing and consider whether that’s a threat or not.” If an armed individual is approaching the building, “an alarm would go off” with this technology, Frankel said.
Understanding the difference between handgun and rifle violence
With this shooting, the gunman opened fire using a rifle, which is a “more powerful weapon” that can travel a greater distance and has a greater capacity to penetrate compared to a handgun, Mihalek said.
Thus, corporations should think to make a “significant investment” in armor and bulletproof glass around the entranceways of the building, he said. While it is “very difficult” for someone to protect themselves from a rifle, a “man trap system” — where somebody has to be let through different phases of the building in order to get to the heart of the structure — could also help slow down the attack.
Conducting threat assessments
Mihalek also recommends that corporations conduct threat assessments, where a business identifies individuals — both employees and those not affiliated with the company — who may be potential threats of violence due to a recent termination, relationship turmoil or social media posts showing grievances toward the company or individuals at the company.
While it is unclear whether the suspect in Monday’s shooting was posting threats on social media, officials had found a note in his pocket accusing the National Football League of concealing the dangers to players’ brains to maximize profits, sources said. So “chances are he had some type of social media presence or online presence somewhere where he might have said a few things about the NFL,” which could have alerted of a potential threat beforehand.
This behavioral assessment is a holistic process that detects, identifies and processes potential threats, Mihalek said.
“This individual could have perhaps said something concerning online or elsewhere but if no one reports it or is looking, it can’t be detected,” Mihalek said.
Implementing active shooter drills, training for employees
Along with buildings implementing additional security and keeping a lookout for potential threats, both Mihalek and Frankel said corporations should implement routine active shooter drills and provide both online and in-person training conducted by local law enforcement.
Mihalek said buildings should also partner with local law enforcement and emergency medical services so they can “understand the layout of the building” so that they are prepared for a potential threat to that particular office space.
The Department of Homeland Security also has basic active shooter protocols instructing individuals in an active shooter situation to “run, hide and fight,” which Mihalek said is used in many schools and is “simple, effective and it works.”
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.
An incident was reported at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Special Enforcement Bureau compound in East Los Angeles, July 18, 2025. KABC
(LOS ANGELES) — Three Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies were killed in an explosion at a law enforcement training facility on Friday, county officials said.
The victims appeared to be handling explosives when there was a blast, sources told ABC News. The Biscailuz Training Center in Monterey Park, a Special Enforcement Bureau compound, also houses the bomb squad, sources said.
The cause of the explosion is not known, according to LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn.
Arson investigators from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Los Angeles Fire Department are among those responding, LA Mayor Karen Bass said. The FBI is also on the scene, Attorney General Pamela Bondi said.
“This is an extraordinarily painful day for our Sheriff’s Department and for LA County. My prayers are with the families of the deputies and their colleagues in law enforcement who are reeling from this tragedy,” Hahn said in a statement. “I am offering my full support to our Sheriff Robert Luna and his department as they not only work to support our deputies but to investigate what went so wrong. We need to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure that it never happens again.”
“Please pray for the entire Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” Bondi wrote on social media.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — The risk of the catastrophic flooding that struck Texas Hill Country as people slept on July 4 and left at least 120 dead was potentially underestimated by federal authorities, according to an ABC News analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data, satellite imagery and risk modeling.
Some of the youth camps and recreational areas most devastated by the extreme weather were established on land designated by the FEMA as “special flood hazard areas” or in the river’s floodway, making them especially vulnerable to the July 4 flash floods that exceeded some federal estimates for a worst-case scenario.
At some points, water extended for hundreds of feet outside the Guadalupe River’s banks and beyond FEMA estimates, according to satellite data. First Street, a risk modeling company, told ABC News that the company believes that more than double the 8 million homes nationwide that are designated by FEMA to be in flood zones are actually at risk, finding that government models are outdated and fail to consider extreme weather events. Devastated camp ‘predominantly in a flood zone’
Along the river banks in Kerr County, the all-girls Camp Mystic was overrun by flood waters, which claimed the lives of 27 campers and counselors and swept multiple buildings from their foundations. According to FEMA maps, more than a dozen of the 36 cabins were located within areas designated as high risk for potential flooding on the river and nearby Cypress Creek.
“We knew this camp was predominantly in a flood zone, and even the areas that we showed that were outside were right on the edge of a flood zone,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications research at First Street, which provides climate data for companies like Zillow and Redfin.
Multiple buildings at Camp Mystic, including four cabins, were built within the Guadalupe River’s “regulatory floodway,” where most new construction is severely limited due to flood risk and to “protect human life and health,” according to Kerr County’s Flood Damage Prevention Order from 2020. The document noted that the stretch of land where Camp Mystic is situated is “an extremely hazardous area due to the velocity of flood waters which carry debris, potential projectiles and erosion potential.”
An additional 12 cabins at Camp Mystic were built on land designated as “special flood hazard areas,” where residents face a 1% chance of flooding annually and are normally required to have flood insurance.
“These should guide where you should or should not construct, whether you should have mitigation processes in place, like putting homes on elevated beds,” said Jonathan Sury, a senior staff associate at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University in Manhattan.
But some of those structures at the nearly 100-year-old camp were built decades before FEMA began issuing its flood maps in the 1960s and were likely permitted to remain despite modern construction regulations, Porter noted.
A row of cabins at Camp Mystic sat directly behind the “special flood hazard area” and was deemed a lower risk for typical flooding. However, the extreme flash-flooding over Independence Day weekend inundated even the area thought to be at lower risk for flooding, satellite and radar analysis show.
‘Outdated’ maps
At its maximum point, the floodwaters were recorded to be more than 500 feet from the Guadalupe River banks, and more than 200 feet from the edge of the FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area, according to the satellite data. The satellite data was collected and provided to ABC News by ICEYE, a company operating synthetic aperture radar satellites, which can obtain real-time data worldwide by using radar pulses to generate data. The data collected measures the depth of the water in a given location.
Other areas along the Guadalupe River were not only vulnerable to flooding but also saw a higher-than-expected water level, exceeding the area marked for a 0.2% annual chance of inundation. Experts told ABC News that Texas practices “very little oversight” over youth camps, and state officials last week approved Camp Mystic’s emergency plans.
At the Heart O’ the Hills Camp for Girls – where 1 person was killed – at least seven structures were built in the Special Flood Hazard Area. The data shows that the floodwater reached up to 220 feet from the riverbed.
Floodwaters devastated RV parks north of the other camps on the Guadalupe River. More than 60 RV spots had been situated in the FEMA-designated Special Flood Hazard Area. Satellite data shows the area was covered in floodwater spanning the entire RV park.
Lorena Guillen, the owner of the Blue Oak RV Park, told ABC News that she was familiar with where her business fell on the FEMA flood map and never considered that the floodwaters could reach as far as they did last week.
“It’s always come up…but there was nothing that would give us an indication that the flood was going to get all the way up 35, 40 feet high in 40 minutes,” she said. “Everything is gone. And there is so much debris, so much cleanup to do that it is going to take, it’s going to take months and months.”
Requests for comment to the camps and FEMA were not immediately answered.
“Our City of Kerrville and Kerr County leadership are committed to a transparent and full review of processes and protocols,” the Kerr County Joint Information Center said in an email. “The special session [of the state legislature] will be a starting point in which we will begin this work, but our entire focus since day one has been rescue and reunification.”
According to Porter, the extent of the flooding at Camp Mystic and other areas is representative of a broader problem with FEMA’s modeling, which places 8 million properties across the country at risk of a 100-year flood.
FEMA’s flood maps are generally used by the government to determine what insurance requirements are needed for homeowners, according to Lidia Cano Pecharroman, a researcher at MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.”When planning for flooding we cannot be over-reliant on these maps,” she said. “They are a useful tool but they are based on limited modeling and data.”
FEMA’s model considers factors like coastal storm surge and risks of flooding along river channels, but does not take into account heavy precipitation, such as the extreme rains that swept across Texas last week, Porter said.
“They’re outdated in the sense that they’re not climate corrected,” Porter said. “As those intensities increase of those rainfall events, we’re getting more rainfall happening all at once. It’s filling the waterways, and we’re seeing rapid increases in the river levels.”
First Street estimates that there are more than 2.2 times the number of properties at risk of hundred-year floods than FEMA’s model suggests.
“It’s a devastating event that occurred, but people should look at it and say, you know, if we know our risk, we should retrofit our buildings,” said Porter. “We should make sure that they’re designed to a standard that can withstand the risk that exists in an area right outside of that flood zone.”
