CEO shooting latest: New video shows suspect waiting for victim moments before attack
NYPD
(NEW YORK) — New video obtained by ABC News shows UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer waiting for him moments before shooting him outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
The video shows others pass by, and then, when the masked gunman sees Thompson, he runs across the street and opens fire.
The video, which has not previously been seen publicly, appears to support the police narrative that the shooter targeted Thompson in the Wednesday morning attack because he loitered while others wandered by.
Police haven’t established a motive but said they haven’t uncovered evidence that would show the killing had anything to do with Thompson’s private life.
The unidentified suspect appeared to have planned his movements with precision, but law enforcement is “on the right track,” Mayor Eric Adams told New York ABC station WABC on Sunday.
“As I say, the net is closing and closing,” Adams said. “This was an extremely challenging investigation. A fully masked person. The amount of detective work it took to put the pieces together — we feel we’re getting closer and closer.”
NYPD detectives arrived this weekend in Georgia. Investigators have said the suspect took a bus to New York, arriving on Nov. 24 from Atlanta, although it was unclear if his travels began in that city. And the FBI is assisting the nationwide manhunt, according to law enforcement sources.
Back in New York on Sunday, members of the New York Police Department’s dive team were again searching underwater in the Central Park. They were seen in the water near the Bethesda Fountain.
The masked gunman shot Thompson at point-blank range at 6:44 a.m. on Dec. 4 outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where Thompson’s company was holding an investors conference. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch described the attack as “brazen” and “targeted.”
Adams on Sunday declined to comment on specific evidence, saying only that “every piece is important.” And he spoke generally about the ongoing underwater search.
“Everywhere is important. Everyplace is important,” Adams said, adding a moment later, “It’s dark down there, you know.”
The suspect’s backpack — with Monopoly money inside — was found nearby in Central Park. Police have not yet recovered the distinctive gun used in the shooting.
On Wednesday morning, right after the shooting, the suspect fled by bike through Central Park to the Upper West Side. He then took a taxi to the Port Authority bus facility at 178th Street and boarded a bus out of New York City, according to police.
NYPD officials released new images this weekend of the suspect in the back of a taxi, where he could be seen peering through the open slider in the partition between the seats. Another photo appeared to show the man walking by the window of a cab.
“I don’t want to do anything that’s going to tip him off that we’re on his trail, but we feel really good where we are,” Adams said on Sunday. “Finding the knapsack, getting the cab photos, looking at some of the evidence that we have available to us, we feel really good where we are.”
ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson, Jon Haworth, Ivan Pereira and David Brennan contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A Manhattan judge on Wednesday granted a motion by prosecutors to combine Harvey Weinstein’s retrial on sex crimes charges with his trial on a new charge of forcing oral sex on a woman in 2006.
Prosecutors convinced Judge Curtis Farber to consolidate the cases into a single trial in part by arguing separate trials would be “extraordinarily inefficient.”
Farber did not set a new trial date but suggested it would likely occur in the spring, displeasing the defense, which had hoped for a quicker resolution.
Weinstein is next due in court Jan. 29.
He appeared in court in a wheelchair Wednesday following his recent bone marrow cancer diagnosis.
Weinstein is currently being held in prison on Rikers Island in New York, where he has experienced a slew of health issues amid his ongoing sexual assault trials.
He has denied all claims of sexual misconduct, saying his encounters were consensual.
He pleaded not guilty to the new charge, based on the 2006 incident, last month.
“Mr. Weinstein has been very consistent from the time of his investigation. He never forced himself on anybody,” his attorney, Arthur Aidala, told reporters outside the courthouse following the arraignment on Sept. 19.
He is also charged in a previous New York State Supreme Court indictment with criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
Operation Bear Claw reveals suspects allegedly wore bear costume to commit insurance fraud. Image via California Department of Insurance
(LOS ANGELES) — Four individuals were arrested Wednesday for allegedly attempting to defraud their insurance companies by claiming a bear had damaged their vehicles — when in fact it was a person in a bear costume attacking the cars.
The suspects were all Los Angeles-area residents, according to a statement released Wednesday afternoon by the California Department of Insurance.
The suspects varying in age, were Ararat Chirkinian, 39, of Glendale; Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, of Glendale; Ruben Tamrazian, 26, of Glendale; and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Valley Village.
The statement said that all four were charged with conspiracy and insurance fraud.
Suspects claimed on Jan. 28, 2024, that a bear entered their 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost and caused interior damage, according to the Department of Insurance. They provided video footage of the incident, stating that it had occurred during their visit to Lake Arrowhead.
Upon reviewing the footage, the Department of Insurance said that it suspected fraud. Officials said that they believed right away that the bear in question was actually a person in a bear costume.
Initiating an investigation — named Operation Bear Claw — the department learned that two other claims had been filed to different insurance companies with similar details: the same location and the same date.
Similar to the claim that originally drew the unit’s attention, the two other reports stated that a bear had attacked their cars: a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350, according to the statement.
Each of the two other claims had submitted video footage as part of their evidence. And in both of those videos, the department said it believed that they were looking at the same bear costume.
However, the department said that it sought an outside opinion on the case before making a final determination. Investigators reached out to a biologist from the California Department of Wildlife, who then independently reviewed the evidence for Operation Bear Claw.
The biologist stated that “it was clearly a human in a bear suit,” according to the statement.
Authorities were able to execute a search warrant for the people involved in the alleged insurance fraud scheme.
Officials confirm that a bear costume was found in one of the suspects’ homes.
At the time of the arrests, officials reported that the insurance companies had already paid out some of the claims, totaling $141,839.
The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting the case.
(NEW YORK) — Righteous Torrance “Chevy” Hill had great plans for his future, cut short by a fatal shooting in front of his own home in February.
Hill, a transgender man, left behind a budding legacy of activism as the founder of an LGBTQ-focused salon and barber shop called Evollusion. The salon was born out of his desire for a space where he and other clients weren’t faced with uncomfortable or disparaging comments.
“There’s a need for this,” said Terri Wilson, Hill’s partner of six years. Their relationship began at the salon when Wilson herself came to get her hair done.
The two stayed talking for hours, a common occurrence at Evollusion. Clients often made themselves comfortable in the salon well after the end of their appointments to discuss politics, society and life in the shop — the salon was abuzz with laughter or chatter.
“He wanted to make sure that the trans community had the resources that they need,” Wilson told ABC News.
Wilson told ABC News that Hill believed Atlanta, often touted for having a large and inclusive LGBTQ+ community, was the perfect place to create such a space. Wilson has vowed to continue his work following his passing.
“Grief just hits out of nowhere, like the day can be going wonderful, and then I can just think of something or read something or see something online that I want to share with him, and I know that I’m not able to share it with him,” Wilson said.
Hill is one of at least 36 transgender and gender non-conforming victims of fatal violence from last year’s Transgender Remembrance Day to this year’s, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the vast majority of whom were killed by a gun. Some anti-gun violence advocates told ABC News that growing anti-transgender sentiment in the U.S. is a major cause for concern for the trans community.
“No matter what gender they are, what socioeconomic class they’re from, what race or ethnicity they are — those lives mattered and a lot of the policies that we have in place and even the way that we investigate these homicides send a message about the disposability of these lives,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, Senior Director of Research of gun safety advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, told ABC News.
New research from Everytown published in honor of Transgender Remembrance Day on Wednesday aims to highlight the impact gun violence has had on the trans community. Everytown found that roughly 7 in 10 transgender victims are killed with a gun, which is similar to the national rate. Black transgender residents — particularly Black transgender women — face the brunt of this gun violence, according to Everytown.
More than half of all transgender gun homicides took place in the South, according to Everytown. Burd-Sharps also notes these deaths happen predominantly in Southern states with more lenient gun laws.
Hill was shot outside his home in the Atlanta suburb of East Point, Georgia on Feb. 28, 2024, and pronounced dead the following day. In Georgia, about 95% of the trans or gender-expansive victims since 2013 — when the Human Rights Campaign began tracking these deaths — were killed with a gun.
Some researchers argue that violence toward trans people cannot be considered without the context of anti-transgender legislation and rhetoric.
“What it does is it sows further division. It creates an environment where even more hatred exists, which in turn creates more violence against trans folks,” Tori Cooper, the Human Rights Campaign’s director of community engagement, told ABC News.
Federal, state and local agencies across the country have warned about increases in anti-LGBTQ+ violence in recent years as state legislatures break records, introducing more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills nationwide.
“Words matter, policies matter,” Moms Demand Action Executive Director Angela Ferrell-Zabala told ABC News in an interview on the Everytown report. “When we go down this road of dehumanizing and taking away rights from folks … it’s hard for folks to access health care and other things and just kind of live full lives, then that’s contributing to the problem of violence in this country.”
Both the HRC and Everytown note in their research that there may be other cases of fatal violence against transgender or gender-expansive people that have gone unreported or misreported and, therefore, not recorded in the official count.
Researchers and advocates say deadnaming, misgendering and bias in policing or reporting may hinder efforts to track and solve these cases properly.
“Every life is important, and we need to make sure that we’re protecting everybody,” Ferrell-Zabala said. “Media and law enforcement have a duty to make sure they’re correctly reporting people’s names and genders. It’s not only out of respect for victims and their loved ones and communities, but also so that the research on the ongoing violence against transgender people is accurately understood and represented.”
According to Wilson, Hill was misgendered by law enforcement after his death, despite having the correct gender markers on his ID.
“It’s frustrating because a person who respectfully asks you to address them in a certain way, their request should be accepted. Their request should be recognized. It’s not hurting anyone else,” Wilson said. “It’s frustrating for me, so I can only understand how frustrating it was for him. It’s just from going from medical professionals, going through TSA, law enforcement.”
However, she said East Point’s LGBTQ liaison reached out to her following his death: “They have an LGBT Task Force, and they did have one of the representatives who was over this task force reach out to me, which I did appreciate,” Wilson said.
East Point didn’t respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Everytown researchers also found that clearances of trans homicides — “incidents where a perpetrator is arrested, charged, and given to the court for prosecution, or is otherwise identified” — are lower than among homicides overall nationally. Hill’s loved ones waited more than six months for the suspect — Hill’s cousin Jaylen Hill — turned himself police, and hope the arrest can finally bring some relief in the fight for justice.
Jaylen Hill is in pre-indictment hearings on potential charges of murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm. Jaylen Hill’s legal team has not yet responded to ABC News’ request for comment.
“I can’t be consumed with Jaylen and what his punishment is, because all of this revolves around [Hill]. [Hill] lost his life,” Wilson said. “So continuing what he was doing is definitely at the forefront of receiving justice for [Hill].”
Some researchers hope the new data can help law enforcement agencies and city officials nationwide to address growing concerns about anti-LGBTQ+ violence and the role gun violence plays in these deaths.
Officials in neighboring Atlanta — which has LGBTQ+ liaisons on the city and public safety levels — said it’s working to implement programs to improve the safety and concerns of the LGBTQ+ community in the region. Chief Equity Officer Candace M. Stanciel pointed to the city’s Human Relations Commission which investigates reports of discrimination or the revision of standard operating procedures for local public safety officials on how to engage with the transgender community.
“We look forward to even growing the partnership and the work that we continue to do with all of our public safety teams around supporting LGBTQ communities as a whole,” Stanciel told ABC News.
Wilson hopes Hill can be remembered for his “unconditional love.”
“He didn’t have any enemies,” said Wilson. “He had a forgiving heart. He was selfless, he was genuine. He always wanted everyone to succeed. He could see in you what you couldn’t see in yourself.”
