(WEST PALM BEACH, FL) — A Florida man was arrested for allegedly making online threats to President Donald Trump, according to police.
Shannon Depararro Atkins, 46, was taken into custody on Friday following a traffic stop near his home in West Palm Beach, a short distance from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Atkins had allegedly posted “violent rhetoric” about Trump on his Facebook account, West Palm Beach Police Department Chief Tony Araujo said during a press conference on Saturday.
At least one of the posts, which Araujo showed reporters, consisted of a meme relating to the assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024.
Police said Atkins admitted to writing the posts but said he had just been “joking.”
“Folks, this is not a joke. Nothing of that sort is a joke,” Araujo said.
Police said they became aware of the posts after another man, from Okeechobee, Florida, sent in a tip to the FBI.
Atkins was taken into custody without incident Friday night. He was found with cocaine on him, according to police.
It was not immediately clear if Atkins has retained an attorney. ABC News has reached out to him for comment.
Araujo said the U.S. Secret Service was notified of the arrest and is looking into it to determine if federal charges should be filed.
“In today’s climate, you really can’t say things like this,” Araujo said. “We have incident after incident, example after example, of when these threats become real, and we take these very seriously.”
(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.
Police are searching for a man who has now been missing for almost two weeks after visiting a national park in Colorado, authorities said. (National Park Service)
(MONTROSE COUNTY, CO) — Police are desperately searching for a man who has now been missing for almost two weeks after visiting a national park in Colorado, authorities said.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park staff and the Montrose County Sheriff’s Office have now asked for the public’s assistance in locating a missing person named as Jordan Marsters, a 31-year-old man from Denver, Colorado, who went missing nearly two weeks ago and hasn’t been hear from since Feb. 13, according to a statement from the National Park Service on Monday.
“Marsters was traveling through Grand Junction on February 11 and in Montrose on February 12,” officials said. “His last known locations were in Montrose on February 12 and 13 and at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park on the morning of February 13 at approximately 7:20 am.”
Marsters is described as 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighing approximately 140 lbs. with blonde hair and blue eyes. last seen wearing a tan jacket and black hoodie and police say he was driving a white Kia Fuente rental car with Texas license plates “TXH4349.”
It is unclear how long Marsters was supposed to be traveling through the national park for but authorities have asked for anybody with information about his whereabouts or who was in contact with him on the days leading up to Feb.13, to contact Black Canyon National of the Gunnison National Park immediately.
Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — One day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld federal restrictions on ghost guns, prosecutors in New York are warning 3D-printing companies their “insufficient security measures” are causing a “troubling rise in access to unregulated weaponry.”
The warning came in a letter Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sent Thursday to Creality 3D Technology Co. and other 3D-printing companies that asks them to make fixes to stop the proliferation of ghost guns on city streets. The letter makes specific reference to Luigi Mangione allegedly using a 3D-printed ghost gun and silencer to murder United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year.
Bragg said he sent the letter because of “a growing and concerning number” of ghost guns being manufactured by personal desktop 3D printers based on downloadable gun part designs and detailed assembly guides found on the “Creality Cloud.”
The district attorney said many of the guns are being assembled by felons and minors who have ready access to online instructions.
“It is paramount that you work to remove weaponry from your company’s cloud services and explicitly ban the creation of illicit weapons in your company’s user agreement,” the letter from Bragg said. “It is imperative that you take swift action to protect your customers and the communities they live in from violence and criminal activity by adopting commonsense security measures to deter the spread of illicit firearms both locally and across the United States.”
In New York City, the NYPD reported a significant increase in ghost guns seized on the streets from 2020 to 2025. In 2018, 17 ghost guns were seized. In 2024, the number was 438. Many of those were made with Creality printers, Bragg said.
“For instance, in 2023, our investigation found that an individual who was 3D-printing assault weapons and manufacturing illegal drugs utilized a Creality printer to print multiple firearms. In another instance, in 2023, an individual who threatened to kill his girlfriend was found to be manufacturing an arsenal of weapons in his apartment using a Creality printer. Additionally, recent research has found that the vast majority of illegal 3D printed guns were created using Creality printers, specifically the Ender 3 series model,” the letter said.
Creality did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
“I am concerned about the troubling rise in access to unregulated weaponry, especially among individuals convicted of felonies and minors, because of insufficient security measures connected with your products and business policy decisions,” Bragg said.
The letter did not threaten prosecution but requested a meeting with the company.
