Florida resident under Hurricane Milton evacuation order explains why he’s not leaving
ABC News
(MARCO ISLAND, Fla.) — Marco Island, a barrier island off southwest Florida, is under a mandatory evacuation ahead of Hurricane Milton’s anticipated landfall late Wednesday.
Though not everyone has evacuated.
Michael Sean Comerford, 65, told ABC News he decided to stay and watch his parents’ condo on the 23rd floor of a building while they evacuated to Naples, where his sister lives.
“I’m prepared,” he said Wednesday. “The island is closed. I have food and water for the next two days.”
Comerford said he’s not the only one who stayed behind in the building, which he said is expected to suffer a power outage in the storm.
“I feel like I’m going to survive it,” he said. “We’re not going to get the worst of it, but it’s going to be uncomfortable, given that there’s going to be power outages and it’ll be hot and dark.”
Comerford said he wanted to document what he sees for a book he’s writing about climate change, in which he talks to people on the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts.
Milton is expected to make landfall on Florida’s west coast Wednesday night, likely as a Category 3 hurricane.
The storm is forecast to make landfall farther north of Marco Island, though Comerford said there is still the “fear of the unknown.”
“If it takes a turn here this way, I don’t know what could happen,” he said. “I just don’t know. We’re getting all sorts of alarming warnings, but I think they’re directed at the people north of us.”
Comerford said he is preparing himself for “dramatic” storm surge. Marco Island could see 5 to 8 feet, according to forecasts.
“It’s going to be not insubstantial here,” he said. “The whole island could go underwater.”
ABC News’ Mark Guarino contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A New York grand jury has indicted disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein on Thursday, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in court.
Weinstein — who is recuperating after emergency heart surgery — was not present, and prosecutors asked the judge to set a date for his arraignment.
Judge Curtis Farber ordered the city corrections department to house Weinstein in the Bellevue Hospital prison ward, if medically necessary.
“Inattention at Rikers carries very real risks. He could find himself again in crisis,” Farber said.
The new indictment remains sealed until arraignment, so the charges are not yet known. As ABC News previously reported, prosecutors presented evidence of three alleged sex assaults from varying time periods that were not part of his previous case.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office previously presented evidence to the grand jury over an alleged sexual assault that occurred sometime in a four-month time period between late 2005 and mid-2006 in a lower Manhattan residential building, according to a transcript of a court hearing last week.
Prosecutors also indicated they were aware of two other potential offenses: a sexual assault in May 2016 in a hotel in Tribeca and a potential sexual assault that occurred at the Tribeca Grand hotel.
Thursday’s hearing was held days after Weinstein was rushed from Rikers Island, where he is being held, to Bellevue Hospital for emergency heart surgery after experiencing chest pains, his representatives told ABC News.
His trial is tentatively scheduled for this fall.
Weinstein has denied any wrongdoing and has said his sexual encounters were consensual.
The indictment comes months after the New York Court of Appeals overturned his 2020 rape conviction.
In a scathing 4-3 opinion in April, the court found the trial judge “erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes.”
The court said that testimony “served no material non-propensity purpose” and “portrayed defendant in a highly prejudicial light.”
Weinstein has also appealed a conviction on sex offenses in Los Angeles. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison there.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — A Bronx man who helped Daniel Penny restrain Jordan Neely on a New York City subway car last year ”jumped in and tried to help” so Penny could release his chokehold, according to the man’s testimony Wednesday at Penny’s manslaughter and negligent homicide trial.
Eric Gonzalez, who is seen on video holding Neely by the wrist, boarded the subway at Broadway-Lafayette and noticed Penny holding down Neely “with his legs around his waist and his arm around his neck.”
Gonzalez testified he did not know why Penny, a former Marine, was restraining Neely but he heard people yelling for police to be called. He also said he noticed “Jordan Neely’s clothing was that of a vagrant, as if he was homeless, dirty, ripped off.”
Gonzalez said he waved his hands in front of Penny’s face to get his attention.
“I said, ‘I will grab his hands so you can let go,’” Gonzalez told the jury. “Just giving him a different option to hold his arm — well, to restrain him until the police came.”
Asked by prosecutor Dafna Yoran to clarify, Gonzalez said: “If I held his arm down, he could let go of his neck.”
“And why is it you wanted him to let go of his neck?” Yoran asked. “Didn’t think anything at the moment. I was just giving him an alternative to let him go,” Gonzalez responded.
The testimony came as the trial entered a fourth week. Penny has said he put Neely in the chokehold to protect subway riders.
Prosecutors said it would have been “laudable” except Penny held on too long, well past the point when Neely posed any kind of threat.
Gonzalez said he saw Neely’s body go limp and let go of him before Penny did the same.
“I tried to shake Jordan Neely to get a response out of him, feel for a pulse, and then I walked away,” Gonzalez said.
(WASHINGTON) — The crew of the Titan’s support ship felt a “shudder” around the time they lost contact with the submersible during its doomed dive to the Titanic shipwreck, the Coast Guard said Friday.
U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation Chair Jason Neubauer revealed during the last day of a two-week hearing on the implosion that the master of the Polar Prince told them that in hindsight, he believes he felt the ship “shudder” around the time when communications with the sub were lost during the June 2023 expedition.
The statement was provided to the board in October 2023, when the unidentified master was asked if he or crew members heard anything indicating the OceanGate submersible imploded, Neubauer said.
“The answer from the master was, ‘With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe I felt the Polar Prince shudder at around the time communications were reportedly lost, but at the time, we thought nothing of it. It was slight,'” Neubauer said.
Capt. Jamie Frederick with U.S. Coast Guard Sector Boston, who testified Friday on the Titan search and rescue mission, said if that information had been reported immediately to the Coast Guard, that could have had a “drastic impact on the search efforts.”
“My initial reaction is, if that was information they have, to me personally, it would be unconscionable that they would not share that with the unified command,” Frederick said.
Neubauer added that from the crew’s perspective, the shudder was “not immediately connected to the event” so wasn’t reported to the Coast Guard.
Frederick detailed during his testimony the complex, international search and rescue response, which culminated with a remotely operated vehicle able to go to a depth of 6,000 meters finding the Titan debris on June 22 on the ocean floor.
“They discovered the tail cone first. And then as we continued to find additional debris, it became apparent that it had been a total loss,” he said.
The implosion killed all five passengers, including Stockton Rush, the co-founder and CEO of the sub’s maker, OceanGate. French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, were also killed.
Frederick said the responders understood the Titan had survival systems on board and that they “never even got to the point to have the discussion of suspension.”
“I wouldn’t even want to speculate on when that would happen,” he added.
Frederick also addressed knocking noises detected by sonar buoys in the vicinity of the search location the day after the Titan imploded. He said the data was given to the U.S. Navy, which determined two days later it was not anyone knocking on the hull of the Titan. “They were 100% certain that it was not human in nature,” he said.
He also addressed an “anomaly” consistent with an implosion that was detected by the U.S. Navy in the general vicinity of where the Titan was at the time communications were lost. He said he was informed of the data a day after the Titan was lost and the information was classified at the time.
“It was one piece of data. It wasn’t definitive,” he said. “The Navy couldn’t tell us that it was 100% definitive, that it was an implosion.”
Rush said he would ‘buy a congressman’ to make Titan problems go away: Ex-employee
A former OceanGate employee testified during the hearing on Friday that he resigned from the submersible company after Rush told him he would “buy a congressman” to make problems with its Titan vessel go away.
Matthew McCoy was an active duty member of the U.S. Coast Guard prior to joining OceanGate as an operations technician in April 2017 as the company was building the first Titan prototype, which was never used on Titanic dives. He said he quit six months later, in September 2017, a day after his conversation with Rush.
McCoy said he told Rush he was concerned about operating the experimental Titan vessel without a certificate of inspection and that it would not be inspected by the U.S. Coast Guard. He said Rush responded that the Titan would be operating in the Bahamas and launch out of Canada and would not fall under U.S. jurisdiction.
“I think I had expressed to him that still taking U.S. passengers on there for hire at any point in time, if they touched the U.S. land, you know, U.S. port, that would also be of consideration,” McCoy said.
He said the conversation became “tense” and ended with Rush saying that “if the Coast Guard became a problem, he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away.”
“That will stand in my mind for the rest of time,” McCoy said. “I’ve never had anybody say that to me directly, and I was aghast. And basically, after that, I resigned. I couldn’t work there anymore.”
Asked by the Marine Board of Investigation if he felt like Rush was trying to intimidate him or if it was “more like bluster,” McCoy said he felt like Rush was trying to “either intimidate me or impress me.”
McCoy, a member of the Coast Guard Reserve, said he wasn’t clear on the regulations for the sub but was concerned about potentially violating U.S. law. He said he considered whether to notify the Coast Guard but OceanGate hadn’t done any dives in the U.S. with Titan.
He said he subsequently learned of a complaint OceanGate whistleblower David Lochridge filed in 2018 with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration following his termination. McCoy said he thought there would be a “deeper investigation” into OceanGate at that point. Lochridge’s whistleblower retaliation case was closed in late 2018 after he and OceanGate entered a settlement agreement in their respective lawsuits, OSHA said. Lochridge’s safety allegations regarding the Titan were referred to the Coast Guard, OSHA said.
McCoy said there was an “alarm bell” before he quit that made him concerned about OceanGate’s operations and the production of the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull.
When he started, he said, it was “made very clear” OceanGate was working with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Boeing, “so they had a lot of what sounded like legitimacy behind them, as far as the engineering.”
But he said he soon learned the company had broken ties with the laboratory and Boeing wasn’t going to be doing the layup for the carbon fiber. He said he felt OceanGate’s engineering department “didn’t seem overly qualified” and there were mostly “college interns” during the summer he was there.
He said after he left OceanGate he didn’t keep tabs on the company for long.
“I just kind of quit following the company, not thinking that they would ever actually dive the Titan,” he said.
Coast Guard investigation continues into ‘unprecedented’ incident
OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion.
The main purpose of the hearing was to uncover the facts related to the implosion and to make recommendations, the Coast Guard said.
At the conclusion of the two-week hearing Friday afternoon, Neubauer said the Coast Guard will conduct an analysis of the evidence collected and issue any recommendations to the commandant of the Coast Guard “to help ensure that nobody has to endure a future similar occurrence.”
Neubauer said that process can take several months but his priority is to “get this investigation done expeditiously, because I feel there are global issues at stake.”
Any determination on potential criminal acts will also be sent to the commandant of the Coast Guard, who would decide whether to make a referral to the Department of Justice, Neubauer said.
The National Transportation Safety Board will issue a separate report on its findings, including their official determination of the probable cause of the incident, at a later date, Marcel Muise, an investigator with the agency’s Office of Marine Safety, said at the conclusion of the hearing.
Neubauer offered his condolences to the families of those killed and thanked the more than two dozen witnesses who testified in the proceedings.
“It takes courage to testify in the public spotlight, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event,” he said. “The subject matter covered during the sessions was often highly technical and emotionally charged, and I’m grateful to each witness who stopped and assisted in our efforts to fully understand this unprecedented incident.”
