(JUNEAU, Alaska) — A search is ongoing for a 62-year-old cruise passenger who went missing while on a hike in Alaska, authorities said Thursday.
Marites Buenafe, of Kentucky, was reported missing Tuesday, a day after her birthday, when she did not return to the cruise ship Norwegian Bliss, according to the Alaska State Troopers.
That morning, she had texted her family “stating she was heading up Mount Roberts Tramway and then planned to hike Gold Ridge to Gastineau Peak,” the Alaska State Troopers stated in a missing person bulletin.
Buenafe was captured on security footage at the top of Mount Roberts Tramway at about 7:30 a.m. local time Tuesday, troopers said.
She was reported missing to local state troopers Tuesday afternoon when she did not return to the ship by the all-aboard time while docked in Juneau, a Norwegian Cruise Line spokesperson said.
Rescue crews have conducted a ground search, and the aerial search has included thermal drones and helicopters, troopers said.
On Wednesday, over a dozen professional volunteers from Juneau Mountain Rescue and SEADOGS joined state troopers and Juneau police officers “for an extensive search using drones, K-9s, and ground teams, with no signs of Marites,” Alaska State Troopers said in a dispatch.
“Weather conditions allowed limited helicopter searches late in the day,” it added.
The ground and aerial search is ongoing Thursday, troopers said.
Norwegian Cruise Line is “providing assistance to local authorities as appropriate” amid the search, the spokesperson said, adding, “Our CARE team is providing support to the guest’s family and our thoughts are with them during this difficult time.”
Buenafe is 5 feet tall and weighs 118 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes, troopers said. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to contact the Alaska State Troopers in Juneau at 907-465-4000 and reference incident AK25063914.
(MIAMI) — An Oklahoma doctor has been arrested for allegedly murdering her 4-year-old daughter while on vacation in Florida and staging the death as a drowning, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
Dr. Neha Gupta, a pediatrician from Oklahoma, was arrested on Monday and faces a first-degree murder charge. She is accused of smothering her daughter, Aria Talathi, to death and attempting to cover it up as a drowning, the sheriff’s office said in a press release on Wednesday.
Back on June 27 at approximately 3:41 a.m. local time, officers were called to a residence in El Portal, Florida, “in reference to a 4-year-old who was found unresponsive within a swimming pool,” according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News.
Gupta, 36, directed officers to the backyard of the residence, where they found the child “submerged in the deep end of the pool,” the affidavit said.
The 4-year-old received CPR and was taken to a local hospital but “despite all life-saving measures,” she was pronounced deceased at 4:28 a.m., officials said.
Gupta, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, told authorities that the two traveled from Edmond, Oklahoma, to Miami and rented a short term rental home through AirBnB — which is where the 4-year-old was found dead. Gupta’s ex-husband, Dr. Saurabh Talathi, said he was unaware the child had left the state of Oklahoma and that the two parents were in an “ongoing custody battle,” the affidavit said.
Prior to the incident, the mother and daughter arrived at the rental property on June 26 between the hours of 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. and the child was “tired after a full day of riding jet skis along with spending the day at the beach and was asleep,” she told authorities.
Gupta told officials she carried her daughter into the residence and woke her for dinner at approximately 9 p.m. The child fell asleep at around 12:30 a.m. and the two “co-slept on a bed located within the master bedroom,” the affidavit said.
Then, at approximately 3:20 a.m., Gupta claimed she was awakened by an “unidentified noise,” realized her daughter was not in the bed and that the glass sliding door leading to the patio was open, the affidavit said.
Gupta said that was when she allegedly found her daughter submerged underwater, the affidavit said. She attempted to remove her child from the pool, but was “unsuccessful due to the fact that she is unable to swim,” the affidavit said. She told officials she attempted to assist her daughter for 10 minutes before calling paramedics.
On Sunday, an autopsy report revealed that the child’s lungs and stomach did not contain any water and were considered “dry” — ruling out drowning as the cause of death, the affidavit said.
The medical examiner also noticed “cuts within the mouth and bruising within the cheeks” of the child’s face, which is consistent with asphyxiation by smothering, the affidavit said. Officials also determined that the child was deceased before being placed in the pool, the affidavit said.
The 4-year-old’s stomach was also empty, which contradicts the mother’s statement that her daughter ate dinner several hours before the incident, the affidavit said.
Authorities then concluded that Gupta “attempted to conceal the killing” of her daughter by “staging an accidental drowning within the swimming pool,” the affidavit said.
Once they obtained an arrest warrant, detectives traveled to Oklahoma City and with the help of local officials, were able to locate and take Gupta into custody, according to the sheriff’s office.
Gupta is pending extradition to Miami-Dade County where she will be charged with first-degree murder, officials said.
It is unclear whether Gupta has an attorney who can speak on her behalf.
(NEW YORK) — Severe storms are closing in on the Northeast and extreme heat is headed to the Midwest as Americans gear up to enjoy the long Fourth of July weekend.
Here’s what you need to know about the holiday weather forecast:
If you’re hitting the road in the Northeast on Thursday afternoon or evening, be mindful of storms.
A level 2 out of 5 severe risk is in place across the Northeast, from Philadelphia to New York City and Vermont to Maine. Be prepared for damaging winds, lightning and possibly large hail.
A level 2 severe risk is also in effect in North Dakota, where damaging winds, large hail and tornadoes are possible.
On July 4, temperatures will be abnormally high in the Upper Midwest.
A heat advisory is in effect in Minnesota, where the heat index — what temperature it feels like with humidity — could near 100 degrees. On Saturday, Chicago is forecast to reach 97 degrees.
The heat will then spread to the East. Burlington, Vermont, could hit a record-tying 95 degrees on Sunday.
In Texas and the West, temperatures will be below average on Friday. The high temperature is forecast to reach just 82 degrees in Los Angeles and Dallas. In San Francisco, the high temperature will be just 62 degrees.
Dallas will rebound to temperatures in the mid-90s by Saturday.
There’s also fire danger on the Fourth of July. Red flag warnings are in place for parts of Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and Utah.
Meanwhile, Florida will have widespread showers and thunderstorms on July 4.
Through Monday, rain totals could reach 4 inches in parts of Florida, while coastal Georgia and the coastal Carolinas could see up to 2 inches of rain.
Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
(ESPARTO, Calif.) — Seven people remain missing after a warehouse filled with fireworks exploded Tuesday evening in Northern California, officials said.
The blast occurred at a pyrotechnics facility in Esparto, located in Yolo County, triggering a series of massive explosions that began around 6:02 p.m., according to fire authorities.
“First responders and investigators are working diligently with the property owner to determine the whereabouts of those individuals,” Cal Fire and the Esparto Fire Protection District said in a joint statement Wednesday.
Officials are using drones to assess the area due to ongoing safety concerns.
“We obviously do our best to train for every type of incident, but an incident like this is like a once-in-a-career type of incident,” Esparto Fire Chief Curtis Lawrence said Wednesday at a press conference, adding they couldn’t immediately get close enough to the building considering the risk.
The site remains under evacuation orders as authorities warn of a continued threat to the immediate area. While officials said the risk has decreased since Tuesday, they’re maintaining the evacuation zone until a full safety assessment can be completed.
The press conference Wednesday was also interrupted by an angry family member who said her boyfriend and brother-in-law were in the building.
“We’re all sick to our stomach, and we’re all waiting on the information [officials say] we should receive until Saturday, when I want to know today,” she said.
Cal Fire’s Office of the State Fire Marshal said it believes the facility belongs to a licensed pyrotechnics operator. Investigators are working to determine if the operation complied with California’s strict pyrotechnics regulations and federal explosive storage requirements.
“This type of incident is very rare,” Cal Fire officials said, noting that such facilities must follow stringent safety protocols.
The California Highway Patrol is assisting with security while investigators treat the location as an active crime scene.
“Our hearts and thoughts are with those we lost, their families, and everyone impacted in our community,” the management for Devastating Pyrotechnics, the company that owns the pyrotechnics business, said in a statement. “We are grateful for the swift response of law enforcement and emergency personnel. Our focus will remain on those directly impacted by this tragedy, and we will cooperate fully with the proper authorities in their investigation.”
Chicago Fire Department cleans up the crime scene where numerous people were shot at Artis Restaurant and Lounge/Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images
(CHICAGO) — Four people were killed and 14 others wounded in a mass shooting Wednesday night in Chicago, police said.
The carnage erupted in the River North neighborhood, on the 300 block of West Chicago Avenue, when a vehicle pulled up to a location and at least one gunman opened fire on a crowd standing outside, Chicago police said.
The vehicle fled the scene immediately and no one has been taken into custody, police said.
Four people were killed — two men and two women — and 14 others were wounded, including several who were hospitalized in critical condition, according to police.
“When I arrived last night it was absolute chaos,” Pastor Donovan Price, who works to help victims of violence, told reporters. “From people screaming, to blood on the streets, to people laying on the streets, a massive police presence. Just horrific. More than I’ve ever seen.”
The hospitals were “almost as chaotic” as the crime scene as people searched for their loved ones, Price said.
The injured victims are all in their 20s and 30s and 11 of the 14 people hurt are women, police said.
“Seems there was some album release party, people coming from that. An SUV pulls up and just opens fire on a crowd of people,” Price said.
“It can happen anywhere,” he warned. “It’s devastating.”
Despite the shooting, murders were down 32% year-to-date in the city as of June 29 and shooting incidents were down 39%, according to Chicago’s crime data.
(TEXAS) — A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the family of the man charged in the deadly Molotov cocktail attack in Boulder, Colorado, can be deported, dismissing a challenge to their removal filed last month.
Hayam El Gamal, the wife of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was apprehended following the attack and was initially slated for expedited deportation.
The deportation case involving Soliman’s wife and five children was transferred to Texas. Last month, a judge issued a temporary order halting the family’s deportation, which remained in place until now.
Dismissing the family’s legal challenge, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia wrote, “Upon review of the parties’ advisories, the record, and the applicable law, the Court finds that it lacks jurisdiction to grant Petitioners the relief they seek and must dismiss this case without prejudice.”
Soliman has been hit with several state charges, including first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and assault. A preliminary hearing in the state case is set for July 15.
Soliman, who is being held in federal custody, has pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges.
Authorities said Soliman threw Molotov cocktails at a group of marchers who were advocating for the release of the Israeli hostages outside the Boulder courthouse on June 1, yelling “Free Palestine” during the attack.
(GALENA PARK, Texas) — A 9-year-old girl has died in after she was intentionally left alone in a hot car while her mom was at work, according to Harris County, Texas, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.
The girl’s 36-year-old mother left the child unattended in a white Toyota Camry on Tuesday from approximately 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. while she worked at a manufacturing plant in Galena Park, Texas, near Houston, the sheriff’s office said during a press conference.
The mother left the child with some water, partially rolled down the windows of the vehicle and then “proceeded to go to work for the day,” officials said.
“There’s never an excuse to leave a child unattended,” Gonzalez said during the press conference.
Upon returning to the vehicle later in the afternoon when her shift ended, the mother found her daughter unresponsive. Law enforcement was contacted at approximately 2:06 p.m. and detained the mother, officials said. Temperatures in the Houston area reached around 93 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.
The child was transported to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead, officials said.
Detectives continue to speak with the mother to gain more insight on why the child was kept in the car and the exact timeline of how long she was alone in the vehicle, the sheriff said. Officials are also waiting to receive the child’s autopsy results before deciding whether to press any charges.
Gonzalez said the incident, “which could have been prevented,” is a “unique” situation, since most hot car deaths are typically an accident.
“Maybe she has to make ends meet and keep food on the table and work. But the risk of death or harm — there’s just no reconciling that in my mind. You got to make other arrangements. It’s not worth it to put a child at risk like this, for any particular reason,” Gonzalez said.
He went on to say that nothing at this point shows that the mother “thought this would be the outcome.”
This tragedy marks the third hot car death to occur in Texas in the last four days and at least the 13th child to die in a hot car nationwide this year, according to Kids and Car Safety, an organization focused on “saving the lives of children and pets in and around vehicles.”
(WASHINGTON) — A member of a white supremacist online terror group has been indicted for allegedly conspiring to develop a hit list of “high value targets” for assassination — including federal officials, according to the Justice Department.
Federal prosecutors allege that 24-year-old Noah Lamb was part of a broader group called “The Terrorism Collective,” which is a group that communicates on the site Telegram, an encrypted messaging server.
The group promotes “white supremacist accelerationism: an ideology centered around the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action,” according to federal prosecutors.
The indictment further states that the group advocates that “violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of the white ethnostate.”
The group allegedly had a hit list of targets, which included a U.S. senator, federal judges, a former U.S attorney and state and local officials.
They allegedly described it as “a kill list in book form” and had a card for each target, including “a kill book complete with full doxes and images,” according to the indictment.
Lamb and the other members of the group allegedly targeted the members based on their race.
“Each List card includes reasons why Terrorgram considered the target an enemy of the cause of white supremacist accelerationism,” according to the indictment.
“For example, the List describes Federal-official 1 as an ‘Anti-White, Anti-gun, Jewish Senator,’ The List calls Federal Official 2 ‘an invader’ from a foreign country and highlighted the judge’s ruling on an immigration issue,” according to the indictment.
Lamb’s primary role, according to the DOJ, was to find their home addresses and include their personal information.
“The defendant collaborated with members of the online Terrorgram Collective to create a list of targets for assassination,” acting U.S. Attorney Michele Beckwith for the Eastern District of California said in a press release.
“Individuals on the list were targeted because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity, including federal officials,” Beckwith said.
The identities of the officials included in the alleged hit list were not named.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s administration is pausing over $6 billion of congressionally-appropriated federal funding for after-school, student support, teacher training, English language and other education programs, according to a Department of Education memo obtained by ABC News.
In a letter to Congress from the agency’s office of legislation and congressional affairs Monday afternoon, the DOE said a notification would be sent to certain grantees alerting them that funding for the upcoming school year would be reviewed on July 1 and decisions concerning this academic year have “not yet been made.”
“The department will not be issuing grant award notifications obligating funds for these programs on July 1 prior to completing that review,” the memo reads in part. “The department remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities and the department’s statutory responsibilities.”
The statutorily mandated special education funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have been awarded to states on time, according to a DOE source.
But school budgets for the year are typically approved in May or June and are ready to be allocated by July 1, according to education finance experts. The abrupt messaging from the administration gave scant details on how the key programs would be impacted moving forward and comes just weeks before many state education agencies return students to the classroom.
The 2024 National Teacher of the Year Missy Testerman, an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor in Tennessee, told ABC News any withholding of funds will affect schools.
“School budgets are already very tight, so withholding funds for required programs — such as those for English learners — will certainly place a burden on school systems,” Testerman wrote in a statement to ABC News.
“This likely will mean that systems will face the difficult decision to make budget cuts in other areas, affecting students. In rural systems like mine, this could mean a reduction in overall staff or the elimination of crucial supports for students such as afterschool and tutoring programs,” Testerman added.
House Education and Workforce Committee Ranking Member Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., called the move to withhold the appropriated funds a violation of federal law with potentially devastating consequences.
“The halting of these critical funds harms the students, educators, and schools that strive to provide quality public education with the meager funds and challenges they face,” Scott wrote in a statement to ABC News.
“Cash-strapped school districts, particularly those in low-income and rural areas, cannot afford this delay and will likely be forced to either lay off staff or cut back on programs and services while the White House Office of Budget and Management ‘reviews’ the funding,” Scott said.
State attorneys general are expected to sue the administration over the reviews, according to a source familiar with the matter. Parents groups and education advocates decrying the decision are also mounting lawsuits against the administration, the source confirmed. Advocates accuse the administration of undermining public education in a “cruel betrayal” of students.
“Schools are already grappling with severe teacher shortages, burnout and under-resourced classrooms, and here comes the federal government ripping resources away from public schools. It is outrageous and unconscionable,” said National Education Association President Becky Pringle.
“Educators and parents will not be silent while students are undervalued, unheard and unsupported,” Pringle wrote in a statement, adding, “We will stand up, speak out and take action to ensure every classroom is a place of dignity, opportunity and respect.”
Education providers are sounding the alarm about the funding that impacts millions of students, teachers, and families, telling ABC News they fear that low-income students and families will be left in a bind with no other options of care for their children.
The Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit organization, said, “If these funds are not released very soon, we will quickly see more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs, and a less STEM-ready and successful workforce as our child care crisis worsens dramatically.”
The pause comes as efforts to dismantle the Department of Education have been blocked by lower courts. The Supreme Court is also expected to weigh in on the firing of nearly 2,000 employees at the agency.
The DOE referred additional questions to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
An OMB spokesman told ABC News the pause is due to an “ongoing programmatic review” of education funding, adding no decisions have been made yet.
Many of the programs “grossly misused” government funds to promote a “radical leftwing agenda,” the OMB spokesperson added. In some cases, the programs allegedly promote illegal immigration advocacy and queer resistance in the arts, according to the spokesman.
(NEW YORK) — Ward Sakeik — a stateless Palestinian woman who was detained on her way back from her honeymoon — has been released from ICE detention nearly five months after her arrest, her husband confirmed to ABC News.
Sakeik, who is married to a U.S. citizen, was arrested at the St. Thomas Airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands in February.
“The Trump administration’s brazenly unconstitutional attempt to deport this young woman in violation of a federal court order should shock the conscience of every American. Had we not intervened, she may very well be in a foreign country right now, separated from her family like so many others illegally deported to third countries,” Eric Lee, Sakeik’s attorney, said in a statement Wednesday.
The government had attempted to deport Sakeik twice — the first of which was to Israel just hours before it launched its attack on Iran in June. The second attempt to deport her was made despite a federal judge ordering that she remain in the northern district of Texas and not be removed from the U.S.
Sakeik’s family is from Gaza, but she is legally stateless and has lived in the U.S. since she was 8 years old. Her family had traveled to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum, according to Shaikh.
Sakeik was issued a deportation order more than a decade ago after her asylum case was denied, but she was permitted to stay in the U.S. under what’s known as an “order of supervision,” in which she was given a work permit and regularly checks in with federal immigration authorities, according to her attorney and her husband.
The first stage of her Green Card application was approved last week, according to her husband, Taahir Shaikh.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
