Enid, Oklahoma, surveys damage after massive tornado tears through city
Severe weather map (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — More than a dozen reported tornadoes tore through part of the Central U.S. on Thursday night, including a powerful storm in northwestern Oklahoma that spurred a tornado emergency from the National Weather Service.
A tornado emergency is the highest alert level for tornadoes.
The weather service said a “large and destructive tornado” was confirmed on the ground at 8:21 p.m. local time in the area of Enid, Oklahoma, near Vance Air Force Base, and urged residents to take cover.
“You are in a life-threatening situation,” the weather service said. “Flying debris may be deadly to those caught without shelter. Mobile homes will be destroyed. Considerable damage to homes, businesses, and vehicles is likely and complete destruction is possible.”
Enid, a city of roughly 50,000 people, is located about 90 miles north of Oklahoma City
Garfield County Sheriff Cory Rink told Oklahoma City ABC station KOCO that search-and-rescue operations were underway in “hard-hit” areas. He said he did not have word yet on any injuries.
A county emergency management official told KOCO there were reports of 10 to 11 people with minor injures and that the search and rescue operations in the Grayridge area was wrapping up.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, in a social media post, asked for prayers for the Enid community, which he said “has been severely impacted” by Thursday’s tornado.
“I have spoken with Enid’s local leaders and will continue working with them as they assess the damage and identify needs,” he said in the post.
Overall, there were 17 reported tornadoes Thursday night from Oklahoma to Iowa, and there were still several active tornado warnings along a line of dangerous storms stretching from Oklahoma to Missouri to Iowa.
Thursday is the first day of a multiday outbreak of severe weather for the Plains.
Dayton Webber is seen in this undated booking photo. (Charles County Sheriff’s Office)
(LA PLATA, Md.) — An attorney for a quadruple amputee cornhole champion who has been charged with murder says the Maryland man acted in self-defense when he shot and killed his friend last month.
Dayton James Webber, 27, is accused of fatally shooting the victim during an argument in Webber’s vehicle on March 22 in La Plata, Maryland, according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.
The victim — 27-year-old Bradrick Michael Wells, who was sitting in the front seat of the car — was found dead in a yard in Charlotte Hall, Maryland, according to the sheriff’s office.
Webber was later located in a hospital in Virginia and taken into custody, authorities said. He has been charged with first- and second-degree murder, as well as assault and firearm charges. He has not yet entered a plea.
Following Webber’s extradition from Virginia, a judge ordered him held without bond during a hearing in Charles County on Wednesday. Prosecutors argued he was a danger to society and a flight risk, according to WJLA, the ABC affiliate for the Washington, D.C., area.
Two people who were in the back seat of the vehicle witnessed the deadly shooting, the sheriff’s office said. Deputy State’s Attorney Karen Piper Mitchell said Wednesday that, according to the witnesses, a friend of Wells’ allegedly stole a weapon from Webber, and Webber was upset the two were still friends and shot Wells in anger, WJLA reported.
Defense attorney Andrew Jezic claimed that Webber acted in self-defense.
“He was 100% justified in defending his life from an immediate lethal threat,” Jezic told reporters outside the courthouse on Wednesday. “Dayton was terrified of being killed. Dayton knew that he had to shoot or be killed.”
A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for May 6.
The two witnesses reported the shooting shortly before 10:30 p.m. on March 22, according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office. Webber allegedly asked them for their help in disposing of the body, but they refused, got out of the car, left the scene and ultimately flagged down officers with the La Plata Police Department, authorities said.
Nearly two hours later, the victim’s body was found in a yard in Charlotte Hall, according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.
An officer with the Albemarle County Police Department subsequently located Webber’s vehicle at a gas station in Charlottesville, Virginia, authorities said. The suspect was then found at a nearby hospital seeking treatment for an unspecified medical issue and taken into custody, authorities said.
Webber is a notable professional cornhole player who was profiled by ESPN in 2023. He was crowned the best cornhole player in Maryland in 2020 and competed in the American Cornhole League World Championships the following year, according to ESPN.
Webber called cornhole his “calling” in the ESPN feature. He became a quadruple amputee after contracting a bacterial infection that led to sepsis at 10 months old, according to ESPN.
This photo released by the U.S. Coast Guard shows wreckage in the water after a helicopter crashed off Kalalau Beach in Kauai, Hawaii, on March 26, 2026. (U.S. Coast Guard)
(KAUAI, Hawaii) — Three people are dead and two others were evacuated after a helicopter crashed off Kalalau Beach in Kauai, Hawaii, on Thursday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Bystanders and Kauai Fire Department crews rescued and medically evacuated two survivors to Wilcox Medical Center in Lihue, Hawaii, the Coast Guard said.
According to a preliminary report, the helicopter was carrying one pilot and four passengers when it crashed at Kalalau Beach, the County of Kauai said Thursday.
“We are greatly saddened by the loss of three lives in this helicopter crash and thinking of those individuals’ families and friends,” Cmdr. Andrew Williams, search and rescue mission coordinator with the Coast Guard Sector Honolulu, said in a statement.
“We are also keeping the survivors in our thoughts as they begin their recovery. We remain grateful for close coordination with our partner agencies throughout this tragic incident,” Williams added.
Kauai Police Dispatch personnel reported a helicopter crash at around 4 p.m., with five people aboard. The helicopter landed on the sandbar 100 yards off Kalalau Beach, according to the Coast Guard. The Kauai Fire Department responded with an Air 1 helicopter crew and Ocean Safety Bureau officers aboard jet skis from Hanalei Bay, according to the Coast Guard.
The helicopter is reportedly a Hughes OH-6 Cayuse operated by Aviation Airborne, according to the Coast Guard.
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash.
In this U.S. Coast Guard handout, the Coast Guard investigates aircraft wreckage on the Potomac River on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Petty Officer 1st Class Brandon Giles/ U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday presented a cockpit visual simulation demonstrating what contributed to the deadly mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines jet near Washington, D.C., last year.
The simulation indicates it was very difficult for both aircraft to see each other before the January 2025 crash that occurred as the jet was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, according to the NTSB.
The first video shows the last three minutes before the collision from the viewpoint of the right seat of the helicopter.
Around 8:46:15, a magenta circle with a label “Flight 5342” appears just above the horizon on the right side of the upper portion of the screen. The label “Flight 5342” fades out about 8:46:35. The magenta circle tracks the lights of Flight 5342 and remains visible until the airplane becomes visually recognizable about a minute later.
After a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System warning indicated in the transcript, the local controller on the ATC recording is heard asking the pilots if they have the CRJ (Flight 5342) in sight and the pilots confirm they do. It remains unclear what they thought they had in sight. There was only one controller working both the helicopter and plane traffic, the NTSB said.
The simulation screen goes black at the moment of the collision.
The second animation shows the viewpoint of pilots from Flight 5342 as the plane approaches the runway to land. According to the cockpit voice recorder transcript shared by the NTSB, the last words about one second before the crash from both the first officer and the captain were “oh” and “ohhh ohhhh” as the animation shows the helicopter colliding with the plane.
About 90% of wreckage from both aircraft was recovered by the NTSB.
A third animationshows what the local controller from the DCA tower saw at the time of the crash as they were handling the air traffic and issuing instructions. Based on the recordings, the NTSB said Flight 5342 was not warned by the controller of the nearby helicopter at any point. A conflict alert came 26 seconds before the collision between the two aircraft as they were 1.6 miles apart, according to the NTSB.
According to the NTSB, the local tower said they were concerned about the close proximity of the helicopter and Flight 5342.
“This coupled with the conflict alert that was active at the time, the controller should have issued a safety alert, which would have included updated traffic advisory information and an alternate course of action if feasible, neither were done. In this case, had a safety alert been issued, it would have increased the situation awareness of both crews and alerted them of their closing proximity to one another. Additionally, a timely safety alert may have allowed action to be taken by one or both crews to avoid avert the collision,” NTSB investigator Brian Soper said at the hearing.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy also said that a $400 GPS device known as ADSB-In could have prevented the DCA crash. The NTSB has recommended ADSB-In be required in aircraft 17 times since 2006, but the FAA has repeatedly disregarded the recommendation, she said.
The system would have alerted the American Airlines crew 59 seconds before the crash that they were going to collide, and the helicopter crew would have been alerted 48 seconds before the crash, the NTSB chair said. The Army has since installed the system.
DCA controller overwhelmed
The controller working the night of the crash was handling both helicopter and plane traffic and had been doing so for four hours, NTSB investigators said.
A human behavior investigator said the controller’s mental awareness had diminished over time. He should have given a definitive warning of the impending collision and he should have given clear avoidance instructions, the investigator said.
NTSB investigators said the last communication between the helicopter and the controller where they asked the pilot if they have the AA5342 in sight was “not a safety alert by definition, but it was an attempt to de-conflict.”
Ninety seconds before the collision, the local controller working in the tower became overwhelmed as he was handling aircraft both on ground and in the air. On the night of the collision, the controller was working two controller positions. This is a routine practice which is usually done later at night when the aircraft volume goes down.
The NTSB said, “keeping the local control and helicopter control positions combined on the night of the accident, increased the local controller’s workload and reduced his situation awareness.”
Investigators said the controller could have asked for the positions to be decombined because of being overwhelmed, but it would have taken at least a couple of minutes before anyone else could take over. Additionally, the assistant local controller and the supervisor overseeing operations at the time could have served as an extra set of eyes to help the local controller.
However, Homendy revealed that at the time, the assistant controller was writing down information on helicopters and the supervisor did not exhibit situational awareness as they learned during the interview that the supervisor only recalled one helicopter in the area at the time when there were five.
Following the crash, the NTSB issued recommendations for better training to be provided for controllers so they can recognize safety issues and threats in the environment.
NTSB chair’s concerns
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Chair Homendy said she fears that some of the agency’s safety recommendations, which will be issued at the conclusion of the hearing, may once again go unimplemented.
“Of course I’m concerned. We have 300 aviation recommendations that still haven’t been implemented. Those recommendations were issued because somebody died or was injured, and they have not been implemented yet. So here we are again,” Homendy told ABC News.
“So yes, at the end of this, I am concerned that we’re going to issue recommendations and that they won’t be implemented,” Homendy said. “I can tell you, and anyone who knows me knows I vigorously advocate for the implementation of our recommendations. I don’t care when it is. Could be 50 years later, as I did with positive train control, and I will not hold back on these.”
At Tuesday’s hearing, NTSB investigators will present their investigative findings to board members and the public. NTSB board members, including Homendy, will then question investigators and the parties to the investigation.
At the end of the hearing, the board members will vote on the probable cause of the crash and the agency’s safety recommendations. The NTSB can only make recommendations and does not have the authority to enforce them, therefore they are not always adopted.
Though a formal final report will be released two weeks after the hearing, this hearing will mark the end of what Homendy described as “one of the most complex investigations” conducted by the agency, which they had aimed to conclude by the first anniversary of the mid-air collision.
Homendy told ABC News the investigation “was not easy and it was definitely not straightforward.”
“We will start in one direction and then take it in a different direction, depending on what we’re finding, and then we’ll exclude things that didn’t have anything to do with the investigation. But we have to do our due diligence to make sure that we’re tracking all of that down, all that evidence to support that it wasn’t a factor, while also looking at the issues that were,” Homendy said.
Homendy said the helicopter altimeter discrepancy is what surprised her the most in this investigation.
“The altimeters I did not see coming, that we would have some problems with how the altimeters were reading,” Homendy said.
During last year’s three-day investigative hearing, investigators said they found discrepancies in the altitude data shown on radio and barometric altimeters on Army helicopters after conducting test flights following January’s accident.
It is likely that the helicopter crew did not know their true altitude due to notoriously faulty altimeters inside this series of Black Hawks, according to the investigation. At their closest points, helicopters and planes flew within 75 feet of each other near DCA, an astonishingly close number. During the hearings, the NTSB was told Army Black Hawks can often have wrong readings and a margin of error of +-200 feet.
Another key focus of Tuesday’s hearing is the close proximity of the helicopter route to the runways at Reagan National Airport. According to the NTSB, which cited FAA surveillance data, there were over 15,000 close-proximity events between helicopters and commercial aircraft at DCA between October 2021 and December 2024.
Homendy said warnings about the close proximity were raised by people, but they were ignored.
“Years ago, that hot spot was identified and [people] repeatedly tried to say that the helicopter route needed to be moved, and nobody listened. It was like the ultimate in government bureaucracy,” Homendy said.
“They were completely ignored. Told it couldn’t be done, not responded to, said it would probably be too political. Those are quotes from our interviews, but they went nowhere.”
At last year’s hearing, FAA officials cited “bureaucratic process” as a deterrent to addressing these issues.
Other topics expected to be discussed include the approval of helicopter routes near DCA, the experience level of the air traffic controllers working in the tower at the time of the crash, the visibility study, and the testing of the barometric altimeters.
When asked what stays with her from this investigation, Homendy pointed to a personal item recovered with the wreckage.
“In the hangar, we had the Black Hawk laid out. We had the wreckage laid out for 5342 and on the side next to 5342 there were some personal effects, and a lot of people mentioned different things, but every time I passed, there was a brown teddy bear, just eight inches maybe, and it was muddy and dried mud, dried water, and I just kept looking at the teddy bear, and that’s the thing that sticks with me,” Homendy said.
