Ex-aide to Josh Shapiro allegedly invoked Pennsylvania governor’s name in threat that left woman ‘weeping’
(WASHINGTON) — A one-time aide to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro left a woman “weeping and in shock” after threatening her on a phone call in 2018, according to an email the woman sent to state lawmakers in 2023, five years after the alleged conversation.
The former aide, Mike Vereb, allegedly invoked Shapiro’s name on the call, telling the woman that “by the time he and Josh were done with me, I would be worse than nothing,” said the woman, who requested that her name not be published, in an interview with ABC News.
“You are going to continue to be nothing by the time Josh and I get done with you,” the woman quoted Vereb as saying, telling ABC News that she was left “shaken” by the way in which Vereb “freely” referenced others in power.
“Obviously part of what left me shaken was not just Mr. Vereb’s aggressive and unrelenting tone, but how freely he made it seem he was speaking beyond himself,” she said.
News of the alleged 2018 incident, which has not been previously reported, comes as Shapiro emerges as a leading contender to become Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket.
There is no evidence that Shapiro, who was at the time Pennsylvania’s state attorney general, was aware of Vereb’s allegedly threatening call.
The 2018 incident marks the second allegation of wrongdoing against Vereb — who was once one of Shapiro’s closest aides. After bringing him to the governor’s office in early 2023, the Shapiro administration settled an unrelated sexual harassment complaint against Vereb last September for nearly $300,000, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Weeks later, Vereb resigned.
Critics say the allegations against Vereb raise questions about whether Shapiro should have known about his alleged behavior and worked harder to prevent it.
Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro, claimed the then-attorney general was not made aware of the woman’s complaint at the time and more broadly condemned Vereb’s alleged behavior.
“This incident occurred 6 years ago and was not reported to agency leadership at the time,” Bonder said in a statement to ABC News. “This alleged behavior would be completely inappropriate and would not be tolerated — and any use of the Governor’s name in this manner is unacceptable.”
Vereb declined to comment for this story.
In the fall of 2023, within weeks of Vereb’s resignation, the woman transmitted an email recounting her experience to one of Shapiro’s deputy chiefs of staff and a group of state legislators, both Republicans and Democrats.
“[Vereb] confronted and threatened me that evening leaving me weeping and in shock standing alone in a parking lot,” she wrote of the phone call in the October 2023 email, which was obtained by ABC News. “Then and now I was struck by how he seemed so at ease in threatening me.”
She wrote that she had raised the incident at the time in 2018, including to a member of Shapiro’s office who “compassionately listened” but later passed away without getting back to her. It is not clear what the employee did with the information before she passed away.
In her 2023 email, the woman — a self-identified independent who was once a registered Republican — hinted at the use of the governor’s name: She wrote that Vereb was “naming a handful of folks with some power in Harrisburg” and made “some implication of the OAG” — an apparent reference to the Office of the Attorney General.
The woman, who runs an independent nonprofit advocacy group for abused children, wrote she received the phone call from Vereb in 2018 in the course of a policy dispute between her organization and the attorney general’s office.
As attorney general, Shapiro supported a change to Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services Law in the wake of his office’s high-profile investigation into child abuse within the state’s Catholic church. The woman’s organization had pushed back on elements of the pending legislation — citing potential “unintended consequences,” she wrote — which the woman said precipitated the call from Vereb.
The woman wrote in the email that she felt compelled to come forward again and write the email after news broke that Shapiro’s administration had reached a settlement with an employee who accused Vereb of sexual harassment and retaliation, writing that “the recounting of how she felt intimidated and retaliated against resonated with me.”
Of the $300,000 sexual harassment settlement Shapiro’s administration brokered, a spokesperson said that “Shapiro and his Administration take every allegation of discrimination and harassment extremely seriously and have robust procedures in place to thoroughly investigate all reports,” but “in order to protect the privacy of every current and former Commonwealth employee involved, the Administration does not comment further on specific personnel matters.”
State Rep. Abby Major, one of the Republicans who received the woman’s 2023 email, told ABC News on Wednesday she had previously known the woman through legislative work and was “proud” of her for coming forward last year — suggesting that even if Shapiro was unaware of this specific incident, he bears responsibility for what she said were Vereb’s well-known antics.
“[Vereb and Shapiro] have a history of Mike being his enforcer — they play good cop, bad cop,” Major said. “Mike [was] out doing Josh’s dirty work so Josh can be the guy that everybody loves.”
Erin McClelland, a Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania Treasurer, appeared to criticize Shapiro’s handling of the sexual harassment allegation on X last week.
“I want a VP pick that’s secure enough to be second under a woman, is content to be VP & won’t undermine the President to maneuver his own election & doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug,” she wrote.
Other Democrats in the state have defended Shapiro’s ability to work with women and his handling of the sexual harassment settlement, which precipitated Vereb’s resignation.
“We know that Josh Shapiro would be an incredible pick [as the vice presidential nominee] — I hope that he is highly considered,” state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democrat, said this week. “But obviously, Vice President Harris knows what she’s doing.”
(NEW YORK) — In an encore “20/20” airing August 16 at 9 p.m. ET, the show, which originally aired in 2020, revisits the case of Pamela Smart, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for being an accomplice in her husband Gregg’s murder in 1990.
Smart, whose murder trial was the first in U.S. history to be broadcast on television gavel-to-gavel, maintained her innocence for 30 years. But this summer, in a stunning turn of events, she admitted to her role in her husband’s murder for the first time. “20/20” looks at the series of events that led to Gregg Smart’s murder and its aftermath and offers the latest news in what could be Pamela Smart’s last chance at freedom.
After nearly three decades behind bars for plotting to kill her husband at their home, Pamela Smart is still proclaiming her innocence.
“I have been portrayed as [an] ice princess, a black widow, a killer, and none of those things could be further from the truth,” Smart told “20/20” in a new interview.
Smart’s story made national headlines in the 1990s when she went to trial on charges she coerced her teenaged lover Billy Flynn into a plot to kill her 24-year-old husband Gregg Smart.
Pamela Smart’s trial took place before the high-profile trials of the Menendez brothers, John and Lorena Bobbitt and O.J. Simpson.
The trial was broadcast live on TV and it subsequently launched a media frenzy. A local New Hampshire TV station preempted daytime soap operas for trial coverage. The sensational event led to a made-for-TV movie, features in various true crime TV series in the U.S. and abroad, as well as the 1995 feature film “To Die For,” starring Nicole Kidman.
Watch the full story on “20/20” Friday, Jan. 10 at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
In March 1991, Pamela Smart was convicted of witness tampering, conspiracy to commit murder and being an accomplice to first-degree murder. Under New Hampshire law, the accomplice charge carried a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole. She was 23 years old at the time.
Smart, now age 52, has spent the last 29 years incarcerated and is currently at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, New York.
“I wanted to be [a] mother and now I’ve lost all my years,” she said. “It seems like the whole world’s passing by and, you know, I’m still here.”
Over the years, Smart has filed numerous appeals and lost each time. With all her appeals exhausted, she said it’s difficult to hope she’ll ever leave prison alive.
Through it all, her mother, Linda Wojas, has continued her crusade to fight for her daughter’s freedom.
“I just hope God lets me live long enough to see her free,” Wojas said in a new interview with “20/20.”
Pamela Smart’s time in prison was difficult from early on. In 1996, she was beaten by two inmates who left her with injuries so severe that she needed a metal plate to be inserted into the side of her face.
Since then, Smart has earned two master’s degrees. She said she participates in a leadership team for the prison’s church and that she’s the director of its “praise dance” group. She said she also works as a liaison between inmates and the prison superintendent.
Wojas, who firmly believes in her daughter’s innocence, said she once asked Smart to apologize for her husband’s murder in hopes that it would help get her out of prison. Pamela Smart has consistently denied for decades she had any involvement in her husband’s murder.
In February 2018, Smart’s legal team submitted a petition for her sentence to be commuted, including testimonials from people she knew in prison.
“I was struck by the letters of support. I was struck by how well Ms. Smart has conducted herself in prison. And then I got to the memo that she personally wrote,” New Hampshire Executive Council member Andru Volinsky told “20/20.”
“In the very first paragraph, she claimed she had no involvement with his death,” Volinsky said. “That is at great odds with the evidence in the case. The failure to recognize her own culpability was what convinced me to vote against the hearing. How do I trust someone who hasn’t even come to terms with her own responsibility for the death of her husband?”
Smart was ultimately denied a sentence reduction hearing.
A life in prison is a world apart from the life Smart imagined for herself as a newlywed making a home in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1990.
“I was only 21 years old when I got married. I was very much in love with my husband,” Smart told “20/20.” “I thought that Gregg and I, that we would have a fulfilling future. That we would have a family and children.”
Pamela Smart, who goes by Pame, worked at a local high school as a media and journalism coordinator while her husband went into the insurance business with his father.
On May 1, 1990, Smart said she came home from work to find her husband dead from a gunshot wound to the head inside their condominium.
“What happened to Gregg is the most horrible thing I’ve ever gone through in my life, and I’m still haunted every day by memories of what must have happened to him inside our house before he was killed,” Smart said in her most recent interview. “Although I wasn’t there, I feel that because of that I’ll never know how Gregg was feeling at the time. I keep thinking of how afraid he must have been and how senseless this whole tragedy was. A lot of the times, I still can’t even believe that he’s gone.”
Police were investigating the case for six weeks before they got their first break. Vance Lattime Sr. went into the Seabrook Police station with his .38 caliber revolver, telling authorities that one of his son’s friends had told him it may have been used to kill Gregg Smart.
Once ballistics results confirmed a match between bullets fired from the gun and the bullet that killed Gregg Smart, police brought in Vance Lattime Jr.’s friend, Ralph Welch, for questioning.
Welch told police he had a conversation with Lattime Jr., and Patrick “Pete” Randall in the Lattime home, who talked about how Gregg Smart was killed.
He said he heard the boys discuss how Lattime Jr., Randall, and two other boys, Raymond Fowler and Billy Flynn were there that night. Welch said Lattime Jr. and Randall said that Lattime Jr. drove the group to the Smarts’ condo, and that Flynn and Randall went inside while Fowler remained in the car.
“They [Flynn and Randall] went there, and they broke into the place. They set it up to make it look like a burglary. I guess the guy tried to run or something, they grabbed him, they threw his dog in the cellar,” Welch said. “Pete said he held the guy’s head while Bill shot him.”
Welch told police that he’d also heard Pamela Smart had promised his friends $500 each out of a life insurance policy, which investigators later learned totaled $140,000.
Investigators were at a loss for how these high schoolers were connected to Pamela Smart. Then, police got an anonymous tip about Cecilia Pierce.
Pierce, another high school student who was interning for Smart, provided the link police were missing: Pierce said Smart was not only hanging out with the high schoolers she worked with but she had also begun an affair with Flynn, the young man who Welch claimed pulled the trigger.
Pierce told police that Pamela Smart was “kinda like a big sister” to her. She told them she knew Smart and Flynn were having sex, because one night, the three were watching a movie together when Smart and Flynn went off to have sex, and Pierce “walked in on them,” Pierce said.
Smart admitted to “20/20” that her relationship with Flynn “was totally wrong.”
“It was actually very difficult because I had feelings for my husband. I loved him and I also had developed feelings for Bill, and I knew that I couldn’t continue like this,” Smart said. “It wasn’t, you know, gonna work like this forever. It was only a short relationship.”
In July 1990, Pierce wore a police-monitored body wire that recorded Pamela Smart’s apparently telling Pierce to lie to investigators.
“I’m just telling you, you know, if you tell the truth, you’re gonna be an accessory to murder,” Smart said to Pierce in the recording. “Now, you know you’re gonna be on the witness stand…and then he’ll say, ‘Did you know?’ And you’re gonna say ‘no.’ ‘Did Pame do it?’ ‘No.’”
Smart argues, however, she was only pretending to be involved, hoping it would make Pierce give her information about what police knew.
“All I wanted to know was did [Flynn] really kill my husband,” she said. “More than anything I wanted this not to be true…because I felt responsible.”
“I thought there was no way, because the person I knew, I never saw him violent, or anything like that,” Smart said of Flynn.
Smart says that her attorney had even warned her not to trust Pierce before this conversation took place.
“Let me tell you how out of whack I was,” Smart told “20/20.” “The day before this [conversation with Pierce], I had a lawyer, and he calls me up and he says, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk to her…because she’s coming in and she’s gonna be wired.’”
Smart was arrested in August 1990. She said that at the time, she “was not really worried about it.”
“I knew that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’m thinking this is gonna get straightened out,” Smart said.
But the young man Smart said she had developed feelings for decided to cooperate. Flynn told investigators she coerced him to commit the murder.
“I meet Pame Smart and she’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, you know, she’s an adult…and she likes me,” Flynn told police. “She said the way she sees it, the only alternative…is to kill him.”
Flynn told police she would bring up the plan to kill her husband “almost every day… She said she hated him.”
“She had told Billy something along the lines that [Gregg Smart] mistreated her, and trying to give Billy some motive…[that he] was a bad guy and deserved to die,” Paul Maggiotto, the former New Hampshire assistant attorney general who prosecuted Smart’s case, told “20/20” in a new interview.
“She had used her sexual powers to influence Bill Flynn,” Maggiotto added. “But I can’t tell you that she didn’t legitimately love him.”
Flynn, Randall, Lattime Jr. and Raymond Fowler eventually confessed to their roles in the murder and pleaded guilty to various charges. They later cooperated with authorities in their prosecution against Smart.
Randall testified that he asked her to go over “the plan” ahead of Gregg Smart’s murder. Pamela Smart gave herself an alibi by being at a work meeting while the boys killed her husband.
“I wanted to make sure everything was gonna work. And she told me she was leaving the backdoors unlocked, we could go in, make sure we didn’t turn on any lights,” Randall said on the stand. “[She said] not to hurt her dog, and that we could ransack the apartment, the condo, take what we wanted. And wait for Gregg to come home. And when Gregg came home we were to kill him.”
When Gregg Smart walked in, Flynn and Randall said they jumped him and forced him to kneel down on the floor. Randall said he held a knife in front of his face but it was Flynn who fatally shot him. Meanwhile, Fowler and Lattime Jr., the latter of whom was driving the getaway car, were waiting in the car outside.
Mark Sisti, Pamela Smart’s defense attorney, said there was “a tsunami” of media attention around Smart’s trial. He told “20/20” in a new interview that “most of it was over-the-top drama.”
“We did not have a jury that was sequestered. So, naturally, we were concerned that they were going to be affected,” Sisti said.
Sisti argued at Smart’s trial that the prosecution “made a deal with the devil.”
“Like any other wild animals, they’d chew off their own arm if they were caught in a trap,” Sisti said during Smart’s trial, referring to the four teens who cooperated with the prosecution.
During the trial, Flynn took the stand and emotionally recounted how he’d been convinced that he and Smart could only be together “if we killed Gregg. Because she can’t divorce him.”
Flynn testified at trial how he paused just before shooting Gregg Smart in the head.
“A hundred years, it seemed, and I said ‘God forgive me.’ [Then] I pulled the trigger,” Flynn said.
“I didn’t want to kill Gregg. You know, I wanted to be with Pame. And that’s what I had to do to be with Pame,” he said.
Smart said that when she sensed the jury empathizing with Flynn, she “wanted to scream.”
“I wanted to get up and say, ‘Stop lying!’” she said.
Smart told “20/20” that she “absolutely” believes Flynn lied to get a lesser sentence.
“I know he lied,” she said. “There’s only two people — three — that know the truth: me, him and God.”
“I was a woman. This happened in a small New England town and it seemed like the whole Salem witch trial thing all over again,” Smart said. “The media latched on. I was like the proverbial woman with the scarlet letter. You know, everybody could project everything on me and hate me.”
Wojas also believes her daughter did not receive a fair trial.
“When you have publicity…1,200 newspaper articles screaming her guilt, [then] you’ll put in safeguards,” Wojas said. “Stay the trial while the publicity abates. You change the venue. And you sequester the jury.”
The jury was not sequestered and the venue was not changed.
Flynn and Randall each served 25 years in prison for second-degree murder and both men were paroled in June 2015. Lattime Jr. served 15 years in prison and was paroled in August 2005. Fowler served 12 years in prison and was paroled in 2003.
When ABC News’ Diane Sawyer interviewed Flynn in 1995, she asked him what the one question he would ask Smart, if given the chance, would be.
“Whether or not she really ever loved me,” Flynn said at the time. “In hindsight, that might not seem like a very big deal to most people, but knowing that she had me do this and that I did go through with it and that she never really loved me would probably kill me.”
In a separate interview with Sawyer in 1995, Smart told her, “Yes… I think I did really love him.”
Even today, Smart says she loved Flynn.
“I loved him,” she told “20/20.” I cared for him. I had feelings. People act like I just used him and went lurking through the school looking for somebody to manipulate. And it was just really wasn’t even like that.”
(NEW YORK) — Haitian migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio, shared with ABC News their harrowing experiences of living in constant fear, expressing deep concerns about their safety that prevent them from venturing outside their homes.
In a town of more than 58,000 residents, threats of bombings and shootings led to the closure of city buildings and schools for several days. Wittenberg University canceled all activities on Sunday and classes on Monday as a precautionary measure.
James Fleurijean, a Haitian Community Help & Support Center member, stated that the continual spread of false and divisive statements from prominent politicians was fostering an environment of fear.
“I know some parents like for this period of time they’re trying to keep their children home, like, by the time they see how things gonna be, like, wait for a couple of weeks to see if things that are calm down, or if things gonna escalate,” Fleurijean said. “You see, that’s why, like some parents, they don’t even send their children to school, like, for this week.”
Politicians, including former President Donald Trump, have heightened their fears. At the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Trump claimed, “In Springfield, people are resorting to eating dogs, cats, and other household pets.”
Trump did not specify the ethnicity of the migrants he claimed were eating pets in Springfield, but on X, his running mate JD Vance continuously raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services.
“Kamala Harris dropped 20,000 Haitian migrants into a small Ohio town and chaos has ensued,” Vance said on X.
Vance appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and informed reporters that Ohio locals have been lodging complaints for at least a year now.
“I have heard firsthand from multiple constituents – people who made 911 calls a month ago, a year ago, who were making these complaints,” Vance said. “I trust my constituents more than I do the American media that has shown no interest in what’s happened in Springfield until we started sharing cat memes on the Internet.”
ABC News spoke with a 28-year-old Haitian man who wanted to remain anonymous. He said he had come to Springfield from New Jersey less than a year ago to search for work. While waiting for ABC News, a passerby yelled “TRUMP” at him, he said.
The man mentioned that he used to see a lot of Haitians on the street, but he doesn’t see them anymore. He believes they are afraid. He mentioned that the Haitian community has felt terrorized.
Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has dismissed the rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets as nonsense. He says the discussion has to stop and the focus should be on moving forward, not dogs and cats.
“Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in,” DeWine said. “These Haitians came in to work for these companies. They’re very happy to have them there. And, frankly, that’s helped the economy.”
The majority of the 12,000 to 15,000 migrants who have arrived in Springfield over the past four years are from Haiti, according to the city of Springfield. These Haitian migrants left their country due to gang-related violence and poverty, in search of stability, safety, and job opportunities. They came to the U.S. under the Temporary Protected Status designation.
(NEW YORK) — Four people are dead after a small plane crashed in Vermont on Sunday, police said.
Vermont State Police identified the deceased as Paul Pelletier, 55; Frank Rodriguez, 88; Susan Van Ness, 51; and Delilah Van Ness, 15.
Pelletier was an aerospace and manufacturing teacher at Middletown Public Schools in Connecticut, the school said in a statement. Delilah Van Ness, a sophomore, was one of his students, and Susan Van Ness was her mother.
“This unimaginable loss has left a void in our hearts and our community,” said the district’s superintendent, Alberto Vázquez Matos. “Paul, Delilah, and Susan were special individuals whose absence is already being felt throughout our district and city.”
Officials did not provide information on Rodriguez’s connection to the others in the crash.
According to Connecticut ABC affiliate WTNH-TV, Delilah Van Ness had been taking flight lessons with Pelletier.
Police said the four departed Sunday morning in a privately owned four-seat aircraft from Windham Airport in Connecticut and flew about two hours to Basin Harbor Airport in Ferrisburgh, Vermont. Upon reaching their destination, the occupants had brunch, then left the restaurant shortly after noon to fly back to Connecticut.
A witness said they saw the airplane on the runway at about 12:15 p.m. local time, state police said.
State police said they did not receive any reports of a plane crash or an aircraft in distress, but after the plane did not return to Connecticut, relatives contacted police.
Just after midnight on Monday, investigators found the crashed aircraft in a wooded area east of the airport in Vermont.
All four occupants were found dead.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the incident.
The cause of the crash has not yet been determined.
Middletown High School will be closed Tuesday, and crisis teams will be made available for members of the school community in need of counseling or other support, the school said.
“As the community grieves, Middletown Public Schools calls for unity and mutual support,” the school said in a statement. “The district aims to honor the memory of Paul, Delilah, and Susan by upholding their legacies of compassion, dedication, and kindness.”