Category: National

(NEW YORK) — Trevell Coleman, known professionally in the rap music world as G. Dep, is best known for his hit songs ‘Special Delivery’ and ‘Let’s Get It’. But his success was overshadowed by the overwhelming guilt he felt for shooting a man in 1993 and he decided one day in 2010 that he could no longer bear that burden.

Coleman, who joined P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records in 1998, was only 18 years old when he shot a stranger, in the chest with a .40-caliber handgun near the James Weldon Johnson Houses, located on Park Avenue and E. 114th Street in Harlem.

The case remained cold for 17 years until Coleman made the shocking decision to confess to his crime.

“I think I was just at a point, you know, where it was like enough is enough,” Coleman told ABC News’ Deborah Roberts from prison in 2013.

Coleman said he ambushed the man during an attempted robbery and then fled the scene. He wondered for years whether the man had survived the shooting. After a weeklong trial in 2012, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

At the end of 2023, after serving more than 13 years, G. Dep was shown mercy. With the original prosecutor’s and judge’s support, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul granted him clemency.

He walked free in April 2024.

“It’s still things that I have to,” Coleman said. “You know, I would like to give back to the society.”

Coleman, at 50, is searching for a new beginning. He earned an associate’s degree in prison and has the support of his wife, Laticia, and his adult children.

Coleman now works in music production at SCAN-Harbor, a nonprofit organization serving at-risk children and families in Harlem and the South Bronx.

He speaks to young people and shares his story to motivate them to avoid a life of crime, emphasizing the importance of staying out of prison.

“You take somebody’s life like, what do you do to make up for that,” Coleman told SCAN-HARBOR youth. “But, you know, all you can do is make steps toward it, you know, making it better.”

While he now tries to help guide vulnerable kids down the right path, Coleman understands the harsh reality that many end up in prison — some even for life.

“Yeah, he did something wrong,” Lew Zuchman, Scan-Harbor executive director, said. “But… that his conscience, which moved him to turn himself in, is very special to me. And I’m hoping that he can… really share this and explain this to our young people.”

Federal and state officials have debated suitable sentences for youth offenders who have committed violent crimes, as has the Supreme Court in a series of rulings.

In 2012, Miller v. Alabama found that mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders was unconstitutional. Four years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Montgomery v. Louisiana that the 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision should apply retroactively to juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole.

Since the rulings, more than 1,000 juvenile lifers have been released. As of today, 28 states and Washington, D.C., have banned such sentences.

“I was a follower in a way,” Coleman said. “Like, I learned that, you know, I wasn’t really thinking and I wasn’t really being an individual.”

While Coleman and others were given a second chance, youth in other states have more challenges. Pennsylvania is one of the states where regulations for young offenders remain among the strictest, making advocacy even more imperative.

Pennsylvania had the highest number of so-called “juvenile lifers” of any state at the time of Miller v. Alabama, with the majority coming from Philadelphia.

In Pennsylvania, children as young as 10 can be charged, prosecuted, and convicted as adults. This is something that John Pace, a senior reentry coordinator at the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, highlights.

At the age of 17, Pace was sentenced to life in prison for second-degree homicide. He served 31 years and earned a college degree while incarcerated.

“The ’80s was a time period in which the war on drugs was very prevalent,” Pace said. “It made it easy for legislators to create laws that would make it easy to prosecute young people as adults.”

Pace now helps mentor incarcerated youth through the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project. One of those youths is 26-year-old Raequan Deal, born and raised in Philadelphia. In 2016, when he was 17, Deal was convicted of two felonies and served a total of twenty-two months in an adult county jail.

While incarcerated, Deal found support from the Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project, an organization dedicated to preventing children like him from being placed in adult jails and prisons and advocating for the release of “juvenile lifers.”

“Being in jail was no fun place, it can make or break you. Luckily it made me, you know,” Deal said. “So I kind of see though I went to prison, I came out as a better person.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Wednesday banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, senior administration officials told ABC News, fulfilling a promise that was at the center of his 2024 campaign.

The order will establish sweeping mandates on sex and sports policy and will direct federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, to interpret federal Title IX rules as prohibiting the participation of transgender girls and women in female sports categories, according to a White House document on the upcoming executive order obtained by ABC News.

The order, titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” sources said, will mandate immediate enforcement, including against schools and athletic associations that “deny women single-sex sports and single-sex locker rooms,” according to the document, and will direct State attorneys general to identify best practices for enforcing the mandate.

The White House expects sports bodies like the NCAA to change their rules in accordance with the order once it is signed, according to a senior administration official.

“We’re a national governing body and we follow federal law,” NCAA President Charlie Baker told Republican senators at a hearing in December. “Clarity on this issue at the federal level would be very helpful.”

Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Wednesday afternoon at a signing ceremony featuring athletes, coaches and advocates who have campaigned against transgender participation in women’s sports, sources said. More than 60 attendees, including former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, will join the ceremony.

“We want to take actions to affirmatively protect women’s sports,” deputy assistant to the president and senior policy strategist May Mailman told ABC News, who said that the executive order is designed to further overturn Biden-era policies that required schools and athletic organizations to treat gender identity and sex as equivalent. She noted that a court ruling determined such requirements were not necessary, and that the president’s executive order would explicitly ban them.

Trump’s executive order will lead to increased discrimination and harassment, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This order could expose young people to harassment and discrimination, emboldening people to question the gender of kids who don’t fit a narrow view of how they’re supposed to dress or look,” Robinson said. “Participating in sports is about learning the values of teamwork, dedication, and perseverance. And for so many students, sports are about finding somewhere to belong. We should want that for all kids – not partisan policies that make life harder for them.”

Mailman said the executive order’s goal was “not to make sure that everybody conforms to their sex stereotype as they’re playing sports” but to “protect women’s sports,” adding that options like co-ed categories would still be available.

If universities don’t comply, the White House warned they could not only lose federal funding but also face legal action.

“If schools don’t comply, it’s not just that they’re at risk of DOJ-based actions,” Mailman said. “Title Nine has a private right of action component behind it, so if schools are violating the law, they’re at risk of lawsuits from their female students, that is going to actually be more than just taking away federal funding. These are multi-million dollar lawsuits.”

The executive order also directs the Secretary of State to push for changes within the International Olympic Committee to maintain single-sex competition and the Department of Homeland Security to review visa policies to prevent transgender women from identifying as female, which would allow them to compete in women’s sports, according to the document detailing the order.

The order is the most aggressive move yet by Trump to fulfill one of his central campaign promises regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports.

Trump signed an executive order last week seeking to restrict gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.

The order would move to restrict medical institutions that receive federal funding from providing such care — including puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgeries — calling on the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

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(GREENCASTLE, PA) — Police in Pennsylvania are trying to crack the case after 100,000 organic eggs worth upwards of $40,000 were stolen from the back of a trailer over the weekend.

The theft took place in Greencastle, Pennsylvania — located approximately 65 miles southwest of the state capital of Harrisburg — when the eggs were stolen from the rear of a distribution trailer on Saturday around 8:40 p.m. while it was parked outside Pete & Gerry’s Organics.

Pennsylvania State Police Chambersburg responded to the location and discovered that around 100,000 eggs worth an estimated $40,000 had been stolen.

Authorities did not offer any insight into how such a large theft could have occurred unnoticed or if they have any potential leads in the case.

Pete & Gerry’s Organics has been around as a brand since the early 1980s but transitioned to organic farming in 1997, according to their website.

“Setting a higher standard for farming practices and animal care across an entire industry doesn’t happen without ruffling a few feathers — we squawk the squawk and walk the walk,” Pete & Gerry’s Organics said. “Pete & Gerry’s is recognized as a 2022 Best For The World B Corp in the Community impact area, scoring in the top 5% of their size group for their efforts in the community, including charitable giving, investment in diversity, and educational opportunities.”

The company works with over 200 independent, family owned and operated farms in our network, mainly located across New England, the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, the company said.

“These farms are typically run by a single family and small enough for each partner farmer to manage, delivering hands-on care to our hens, while still leading rich and fulfilling lives,” Pete and Gerry’s Organics said.

The investigation is currently ongoing and anyone with information is asked to contact Pennsylvania State Police Chambersburg.

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(NEW ALBANY, OHIO) — One person was killed and five others were injured in a shooting at a facility in New Albany, Ohio, according to local law enforcement officials, who said they believe they’ve identified a suspect.

New Albany Police said they responded late Tuesday to a facility run by KDC/One, a beauty products manufacturer, for a reported active shooter situation. About 100 people were evacuated from the building.

“Police are finishing evacuating employees from the building,” the department said in an update at about 1:30 a.m. “The suspect is no longer believed to be in the area.”

Six people were transported to local hospitals, Police Chief Greg Jones told reporters at a press conference outside the facility. One of those people died, he said.

Police said they believed they knew who the suspect was, although the person had not been taken into custody.

A firearm was recovered from the scene, Jones said.

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(PHILADELPHIA, Pa.) — It was just a normal Friday evening for Philadelphia father Andre Howard and his 10-year-old son Trey Howard.

Andre Howard picked up Trey Howard and his two younger siblings from school and drove to a nearby Dunkin’.

“I promised him Tuesday that we would get donuts on Friday after school,” Andre Howard told ABC News.

However, as they were leaving the Dunkin’, about to turn on Cottman Avenue, Andre Howard said the family heard a loud bang, quickly accompanied by a “ball of fire” and black smoke. Little did they know, a medical transport jet had just crashed nearby.

Andre Howard attempted to reverse his truck, using the donut shop as a shield to stop flying debris. Then, he heard his son shout something from the backseat of the car.

“I hear my son telling his sister, ‘Get down, baby girl,'” Andre Howard said.

Trey Howard, who is in the fourth grade, used his body as a human shield to protect his younger sister from incoming debris, his father said.

“I turn around and he has metal out the side of his head,” Andre Howard said.

In efforts to protect his younger sister, Trey Howard was hit with a piece of plane debris or glass, with part of it sticking out of his head, his father said.

As Andre Howard attempted to move his son, the metal protruding from Trey Howard’s head fell out, causing blood to gush everywhere, he said. Andre Howard said he wrapped Trey Howard’s head with socks, while someone else lent a shirt — anything to stop the bleeding.

Andre Howard said he flagged down a police officer on the scene, who drove the family to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where Trey Howard underwent emergency brain surgery, and then was transferred to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Andre Howard said he was told there was a high likelihood his son wouldn’t survive.

However, after the procedure and a full weekend in the intensive care unit, Trey Howard was moved to a regular room on Monday and continues to recover from the harrowing event.

“Am I OK? No. Is his mother OK? No. Is his family OK? No. But we are going to be strong for him every step of this process to get him back to full strength,” Andre Howard said.

When Trey Howard was finally able to speak again, the first thing he asked was, ‘Daddy, did I save my sister?'”

Andre Howard said his son’s selfless act of bravery was “something that not a lot of grown men could do” and called his fourth grader his “superhero.”

The hospital is continuing to monitor Trey Howard’s skull, ensuring all of the debris has been removed, his father said. Until he is able to go home, Andre Howard said his son has been getting many visitors — including his teachers and Philadelphia 76ers player Tyrese Maxey.

“Thank God my son is still here. Thank God we didn’t go into the flame,” Andre Howard said. “I’m just happy he is here.”

The plane crash, which involved a medical transport jet, killed all six people on board, as well as one person on the ground. Officials are still investigating the cause of the crash.

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(EDGEWATER, Fla.) — A woman called 911 to report a toddler left alone in a vehicle outside a Florida bar before the mother of the child and her boyfriend were arrested for child neglect, according to newly released audio.

The Edgewater Police Department released the audio of the 911 call along with the body camera footage Monday of what they had called a “disgusting” incident.

The child’s mother, 35-year-old Kristina Vitucci, and her boyfriend, 39-year-old Joshua Harris, were both arrested after Vitucci’s 2-year-old daughter was left in an unlocked vehicle while they sat inside an Edgewater bar drinking for nearly two hours on Jan. 28, according to police.

“I don’t know that there’s an actual emergency, but there’s a baby out here in a car by itself,” the 911 caller can be heard telling the dispatcher.

“I just don’t want anybody to get mad at me. But I just, you know, this is wrong,” the caller said.

“Yeah, I agree,” the dispatcher said.

An officer responded at approximately 8:15 p.m. and reported that the child had been crying in the vehicle and it was unknown where her parent was, according to the body camera footage.

Upon arriving at the vehicle a few minutes later, Harris told officers that he owned the car and that the child’s mother was inside the bar, the body camera footage shows.

When Vitucci subsequently came outside of the bar to the parking lot, an officer told her, “You’ve got an idea of why we’re here,” the footage shows.

“Yeah, she said.

The officer told Vitucci her daughter was fine and to stay with him, as police continued to question the couple about the incident.

They were both arrested for child neglect, a third-degree felony.

Vitucci is scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 18 and Harris on Feb. 25, court records show.

ABC News has reached out to their public defenders for comment.

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(PHILADELPHIA) — A Temple University student has been arrested and charged with impersonating an ICE officer after showing up at a residence hall and attempting to enter.

Two “suspicious” males identified themselves as police and ICE agents to dorm security on Saturday, according to Philadelphia police. The individuals were denied access to the residence hall, according to Temple.

A third suspect — identified by police as 22-year-old Aidan Steigelmann, 22 — arrived at the building and spoke with the two suspects, before the three of them left together in a Jaguar SUV.

Two of the three were impersonating ICE officers while the third was recording the interactions, according to Temple University.
Minutes later, university police responded to a report of three suspicious males identifying themselves as police officers and ICE at an Insomnia Cookies store, according to police.

While two of the suspects left the area in a light-colored SUV, Steigelmann was identified, arrested and his vehicle was towed, police said.

“The involved student is on interim suspension. Any student found responsible for this conduct will be subject to disciplinary action under the Student Conduct Code, up to and including expulsion,” Temple University said in a statement.

The investigation is is still active and ongoing, and the two other suspects remain at large. The suspects were wearing shirts with “Police” on the front and “ICE” on the back, police said.

The Philadelphia Police Department asks anyone with information about the case to report it to 215-686-TIPS (8477).

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(WASHINGTON) — For the family and friends of Jonathan Campos — the captain of American Airlines Flight 5342, which plunged into the Potomac River on Wednesday after colliding with a Black Hawk helicopter — the feelings of grief that followed the news of his death were quickly replaced by anger.

As President Donald Trump made unfounded claims blaming diversity, equity and inclusion policies for contributing to the midair collision, Campos’ former fiancee said her loved one’s death quickly became politicized, overshadowing his life story and interrupting the family’s grief.

“This man’s body hadn’t even been pulled out of the river yet, and we’re talking about him being unqualified because his name is Campos,” Nicole Suissa told ABC News.

One day after the deadliest American plane crash in over two decades, Trump suggested during a White House briefing that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation were partially to blame for the collision.

“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”

While the cause of the crash remains undetermined and families only beginning to grieve, blaming diversity hiring on the crash was “enraging” and “infuriating” Suissa said.

“What really irked me to no end was it was, the next day they published Jonathan’s name and Jonathan’s very Puerto Rican-looking face, all I could hear in the back of my head was all these people, all these DEI fear-mongering people going, ‘You see, I knew he’d be Hispanic,’ and I lost my mind,” Suissa said. “The politicization of this man’s death is entirely inappropriate. It is abhorrent. It is disgraceful. It is insensitive to say the least.”

As of Tuesday, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board were in the early stages of identifying the cause of the midair collision that killed 67 people combined on both aircraft. Authorities have been able to identify 55 sets of remains and are continuing to recover the fuselage of the commercial airliner from the Potomac.

As the recovery operation and investigation continues, Suissa said she hopes people remember Campos for the man she knew and loved for the last 20 years — someone who overcame the hardship of his life to achieve his goal of being a professional pilot before that dream was cut short.

“He was doing everything right. He did everything he was supposed to do,” she said. “He was a by-the-book pilot, and he did everything he was supposed to do, and I thought when you do everything right, that you get to live.”

Suissa first met Campos during their freshman year at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York, watching him work for years to achieve his life goal of becoming a pilot. A 2015 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Campos flew aircraft for over a decade, including for at least six years with American Airlines. If anyone would have been able to safely land that plane last week, Suissa said she believes it would have been Campos.

“He would have done everything, everything in his power to land that plane because there were 60 people on it, and he never took that lightly,” she said.

Campos admired his father, who was an officer with the New York Police Department. But when his father died in 1999 of liver failure when Campos was just 9 years old, it fell on his stepmother and aunt to raise him. Both women traveled to Washington, D.C., after the crash to identify their son, Suissa said.

“I still wanted him to, you know, live this long, happy, fulfilling life, and I wanted him, I certainly wanted him to outlive his father,” she said. “For 15 years of my life, I thought I’d be signing his marriage license, not his death certificate. So here we are.”

Suissa herself knew Campos for more than 20 years, dating on and off, getting engaged before breaking it off, and ultimately settling on being close friends.

“It’s funny, actually, we each went to prom with someone else — more out of spite than anything,” she said. “Over the years, we had kind of accepted that the romantic piece of it was over, and we remained friends. We never really stopped talking to one another.”

Suissa — who is planning Campos’ funeral and serving as the family spokesperson — recounted their pastime of doing escape rooms across the country, including in Las Vegas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Orlando, Florida.

“We would beat the whole thing, just the two of us, in under an hour,” she said. “We sort of complemented each other in that way. Our temperaments didn’t complement each other, but our talents did.”

She described Campos as the ultimate adrenaline junkie, learning to instruct other pilots, fly helicopters, scuba dive, snowboard and skydive.

While Campos liked pushing his limits during his hobbies, Suissa said he took nothing as seriously as he did flying commercially. Epic Flight Academy — where Campos worked as an instructor — remembered him as “a skilled and dedicated pilot with an undeniable passion for flying.”

As she plans Campos’ funeral, she said she’s come to terms with the fact that he’s gone, though the political debate surrounding his death continues to enrage her.

“I don’t doubt for a moment that if there was anything at all he could have done to avert it, he would have,” she said.

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(WASHINGTON) — A group of FBI agents who assisted in criminal investigations stemming from the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol filed suit Tuesday in an effort to block the Justice Department from assembling lists of agents for potential disciplinary actions or firings.

The class-action lawsuit, filed anonymously by the agents Tuesday afternoon in D.C. federal court, includes screenshots showing a survey that was sent this week about their actions related to the Jan. 6 cases.

“Plaintiffs are employees of the FBI who worked on Jan. 6 and/or Mar-a-Lago cases, and who have been informed that they are likely to be terminated in the very near future (the week of February 3-9, 2025) for such activity,” the lawsuit said. “They intend to represent a class of at least 6,000 current and former FBI agents and employees who participated in some manner in the investigation and prosecution of crimes and abuses of power by Donald Trump, or by those acting at his behest.”

The suit specifically seeks to enjoin the DOJ from “aggregation, storage, reporting, publication or dissemination of any list or compilation of information that would identify FBI agents and other personnel, and tie them directly to Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago case activities,” referring to the Capitol attack and the probe into President Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.

The Justice Department, under leadership appointed by the Trump administration, has asked for information about potentially thousands of FBI employees across the country who were involved in work related to investigations stemming from the Jan. 6 attack.

According an email sent to the FBI workforce on Friday, and obtained by ABC News, the requested information was to be provided by Tuesday afternoon to the office of the acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, whose office will then conduct a review to determine if any “personnel actions” are warranted.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is planning to attend the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday, sources confirmed to ABC News.

The Super Bowl 59 matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles comes one month after a terrorist drove a truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people and injuring dozens more.

Officials said Monday that there’s no credible threats to the game or its many surrounding events.

There will be over 2,700 state, federal and local law enforcement members securing the game, according to officials.

The game gets a SEAR 1 rating — meaning there is a federal coordinator that is in charge of the security; in this case, it’s the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations’ New Orleans field office. Drones are not allowed anywhere near the stadium.

“We have reviewed and re-reviewed all the details of what happened on Jan. 1,” NFL Chief of Security Cathy Lanier said. “We have reviewed and re-reviewed each of our roles within the overarching security plan, and we have reassessed and stressed tested — our timing, our communication protocols, our contingency measures and our emergency response plans multiple times over, over the past several weeks.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

ABC News’ Luke Barr contributed to this report.

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