Amber Alert issued for 5-year-old girl left unattended in running vehicle that was then stolen: Police
Police in St. Louis County said they are searching for a missing-5-year-old girl. (St. Louis County Police Department)
(AFFTON, Mo.) — A 5-year-old girl is missing after she was left unattended in a running vehicle that was then stolen, authorities in Missouri said Monday.
An Amber Alert has been issued for Aleise Dawson, who was taken around 8 a.m. local time in Affton, Missouri, according to the St. Louis County Police Department.
“The vehicle has been recovered, but the child has not,” the St. Louis County Police Department said.
The child started living with a guardian, who is believed to be a relative, within the past few weeks, according to St. Louis County Police Department spokesperson Vera Clay.
The guardian had placed the child in the car, gone inside a residence to get something and “came back out and the car was gone,” Clay said during a press briefing on Monday.
Officers responded to search for Aleise, and the vehicle was located several blocks away, according to Clay.
It is unclear if the person who took the vehicle is known to the child and guardian, or if this was “completely random,” Clay said. Police are treating it as an abduction, she said.
“There’s a 5-year-old out there and no one knows where she is. So we are going to utilize every resource that we have available to our department,” including helicopter air support, Clay said.
The police department said it does not have a photograph of the child, whom they described as a Black girl standing 2 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 60 pounds. She has four ponytails and was last seen wearing a pink T-shirt with the words “Flower Power” on it and blue shorts, police said.
Anyone with information is urged to call 636-529-8210 or 911.
Family photo posted on Eric Richins’ Facebook. (Facebook / Eric Richins)
(NEW YORK) — The murder trial of Kouri Richins, a Utah mom accused of fatally poisoning her husband with fentanyl who self-published a children’s book on grieving following his death, is set to get underway with opening statements on Monday.
The 35-year-old realtor was charged with aggravated murder in connection with the 2022 death of her husband, Eric Richins, following a lengthy investigation. Prosecutors allege she spiked his cocktail with a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Her charges also include attempted aggravated murder, with prosecutors alleging she gave her husband a sandwich laced with fentanyl on Valentine’s Day two weeks before his death in an initial, failed attempt to kill him.
She has pleaded not guilty. The trial in Park City is scheduled to last up to five weeks.
“Kouri has waited nearly three years for this moment: the opportunity to have the facts of this case heard by a jury, free from the prosecution’s narrative that has dominated headlines since her arrest,” Kouri Richins’ attorneys — Wendy Lewis, Kathy Nester and Alex Ramos — said in a statement ahead of Monday’s opening statements. “Now the state must prove the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“What the public has been told bears little resemblance to the truth,” the statement continued. “We welcome the courtroom, where evidence is bound by rules, not sensational coverage. Kouri is a mother who wants to go home to her children. We are confident this jury will make that possible.”
Prosecutors allege that Kouri Richins was in “financial distress” due to her realty company’s debts and believed she would have financially benefited from her husband’s death, according to the charging document. They also allege she was having an affair and purportedly told a witness months before her husband’s death that she “felt ‘stuck’ and ‘trapped’ in her marriage and it would be better if Eric Richins just died,” according to the charging document.
Eric Richins, 39, was found dead in the couple’s bedroom in the early hours of March 4, 2022. An autopsy determined he died from fentanyl intoxication, and the level of fentanyl in his blood was approximately five times the lethal dosage, according to the charging document. The medical examiner determined the fentanyl was “illicit fentanyl,” not medical grade, according to the charging document.
Prosecutors allege that Kouri Richins purchased illicit fentanyl shortly before the Valentine’s Day incident and again before his death, at which point she allegedly asked for stronger drugs.
Weeks before her husband’s death, she is accused of fraudulently securing a life insurance policy for her husband with his forged signature, and then fraudulently claiming the benefits following his death, according to the charging document.
Kouri Richins has proclaimed her innocence, speaking out from jail in an audio recording released in May 2024.
“The world has yet to hear who I really am, what I’ve really done or didn’t do,” Kouri Richins insisted in the audio, provided to ABC News through a trusted confidant. “What I really didn’t do is murder my husband.”
Kouri Richins has remained in Summit County Jail since her arrest in May 2023.
A month prior to her arrest, the mom of three young sons appeared on a “Good Things Utah” segment on Salt Lake City ABC affiliate KTVX to promote her children’s book. In the segment, Kouri Richins said her husband of nine years died “unexpectedly” and that his death “completely took us all by shock.”
Kouri Richins also faces over two dozen charges in a separate case filed last year alleging she committed mortgage fraud in 2021. The charging document alleges she submitted falsified bank statements in support of mortgage loan applications for her realty business, committed money laundering and issued bad checks.
The charges in the case also allege she murdered her husband for financial gain as she “stood on the precipice of total financial collapse.” According to the charging document, around the time of Eric Richins’ death, her realty company owed lenders nearly $5 million, and his estate was worth approximately $5 million.
Bitter Cold – Tuesday AM Wind Chills Map. ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A major arctic blast is stretching from the Midwest to the Northeast, bringing dangerously cold weather to 43 million people.
On Monday morning, the wind chill — what temperature it feels like — plunged to minus 30 degrees in Minneapolis; minus 27 degrees in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; minus 22 degrees in Chicago; and minus 22 degrees in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The brutal Midwest wind chill continued on Tuesday morning, hitting minus 13 degrees in Chicago; minus 23 in Green Bay; and minus 12 in Cleveland.
The freeze hit the Northeast on Tuesday morning, with the wind chill dropping to minus 11 degrees in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; 7 degrees in Washington, D.C.; and 5 degrees in New York City.
The Arctic blast is also bringing heavy lake effect snow to the Midwest and Northeast. The heaviest lake effect snow is expected in western Michigan and western and upstate New York where, 6 to 12 inches of snow is forecast.
Click here for what you need to know to stay safe in the cold.
Colin Gray, 54, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, 14, enters the Barrow County courthouse for his first appearance, on September 6, 2024, in Winder, Georgia. Colin Gray is being charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children after his son opened fire and killed 4 at the high school on Wednesday. (Photo by Brynn Anderson-Pool/Getty Images)
(GEORGIA) — In often tearful and painful testimony, students wounded in a 2024 mass shooting at a Georgia high school took the witness stand on Tuesday in the murder trial of the alleged gunman’s father.
As the defendant, 55-year-old Colin Gray, sat just feet away listening, the students recounted the horror they endured on Sept. 4, 2024, at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, allegedly at the hands of Gray’s then 14-year-old son, Colt.
Judge Nicholas Primm, who is presiding over the case, ordered the media not to show the students’ faces during the televised trial. The defense did not cross-examine any of the students who testified.
All of the students who testified Tuesday said they were in algebra teacher Cassandra Ryan’s class when they heard a loud bang outside their classroom door.
“I remember standing up and turning my back towards the door, and that’s when I saw him, Colt. He was pointing the weapon, just aiming anywhere, I guess,” testified Melany Delira-Castaneda, who was a freshman at the time of the shooting.
The now 16-year-old girl testified that she didn’t realize she had been shot until after the gunshots subsided.
“I remember standing up and I turned around. I didn’t know I was shot, but I was. My body was telling me to hold my arm, so I was holding my arm,” Delira-Castaneda testified. “I think I was just in shock and scared.”
She said she was shot in the shoulder.
“I feel like just seeing a lot of what I saw that day, it just sticks with me, and not being able to trust certain people,” Delira-Castaneda told the court.
Prosecutors called the students to testify in an effort to show what Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith described in his opening statement as the “horrific consequences” of the alleged actions or inaction Colin Gray took with his son leading up to the shooting.
Gray is the latest parent that prosecutors in various U.S. states have attempted to hold criminally culpable for their children’s alleged deadly actions.
The father is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Gray’s son, Colt, now 16, has been charged as an adult and is awaiting a separate trial on multiple counts of felony murder and aggravated assault. He has pleaded not guilty.
Killed in the shooting were math teacher and football coach Richard Aspinwall, 39; math teacher Cristina Irimie, 53; and students Mason Schermerhorn, 14, and Christian Angulo, 14, officials said.
Angulo was also in Ryan’s class when he was shot and killed.
“This case is about this defendant and his actions – his actions in allowing a child that he has custody over access to a firearm and ammunition after being warned that his child was going to harm others,” Smith said in his opening statement on Monday.
Prosecutors allege that despite repeatedly being warned about his son’s mental deterioration and that he was a danger to himself and others, Colin Gray gave the boy an AR-15-style rifle as a Christmas present and allowed him to keep the weapon propped against a wall in his bedroom. The rifle, prosecutors allege, was used in the mass shooting at Apalachee High School.
Nautica Walton, another student in Ryan’s algebra class on the day of the shooting, testified on Tuesday that when she heard a loud bang outside the classroom door, “I realized something was wrong.”
“I remember my teacher falling to the floor, and then Taylor, [a student] in front of me, I remember seeing her fall down before I turned around and saw there was somebody at the door with a weapon,” Nautica, now 16, testified.
She told the court that she got on the ground next to Melany Delira-Castaneda.
“I remember Melany, she had blood all on her arm. I remember her blood was getting on the side of me because I was lying on the side of her,” Walton testified.
Walton further testified that she was shot in the leg during the episode and recalled going in and out of consciousness.
“I remember my teacher telling me to stay awake because I was feeling really tired,” Walton said on the witness stand. “I remember Natalie [another student] lying on the floor, saying she was hit and crying with a big puddle of blood,” said Walton, adding that a classmate took off her jacket and wrapped it around her leg.
“And then I passed out after that,” she testified.
Walton also told the court that since the shooting, she has been unable to play sports and has been “very paranoid.”
“I don’t like being in front of doors at school. I don’t use the bathroom at school,” testified Walton, adding that she had nightmares for months after the shooting.
Student Taylor Jones, now 16, testified that when she realized she had been shot in the leg, she asked a classmate to hold her hand “because I was scared.”
She told the court that she remembers being on the classroom floor before she passed out and then waking up at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, where she was flown to by a medical helicopter.
Jones, a one-time volleyball player on her school team, told the court that she has since undergone multiple surgeries and has been unable to play sports.
Natalie Griffith, now 16, recalled to the court looking down at her hand during the shooting and seeing a hole and blood near her wrist.
“I didn’t know this at the time, but I had another one up on my shoulder,” she testified of a second bullet wound. “I was also worried that I was going to die and how that would affect my parents because my dad has a heart problem.”
Griffith told the court that as she was being carried out of the classroom, she saw Colt Gray on the floor being detained with his hands behind his back.
“I said a lot of curse words. I was very angry at the time because I thought they were going to have to amputate my hand,” Griffith testified. “I remember yelling at him that we were kids, because we were kids.”
Jaxxon Beaver, 16, another student in the algebra class, testified that he was also shot in the leg.
“I noticed that when I was hurt, I looked down and saw a hole in my shorts and noticed I was bleeding,” Beaver said on the stand.
Beaver further testified that he was unable to go to school for at least three months after the shooting, and eventually gave up on going back.
“Every time I went back to school, I would feel like something bad was going to happen again. I couldn’t wait and had to go home, like right after,” Beaver testified.
Ronaldo Vega, now 16, recalled to the court seeing Colt Gray at the door wearing yellow gloves and firing a rifle that had a scope.
“He shot, I don’t know how many times. I went down to duck,” Vega testified.
Vega testified that when the shooting stopped, he barricaded the classroom door with desks and chairs. He said he saw Christian Angulo curled up on the floor motionless near the door.
“A girl was screaming that he was dead,” Vega told the court.
