Manhunt underway in Tennessee for veteran with extensive survival training accused of trying to kill wife
Craig Berry is seen in an undated photo released by the Stewart County Sheriff’s Office. (Stewart County Sheriff’s Office)
(TENNESSEE) — A manhunt is underway in Tennessee for a man with “extensive” survival training who is accused of shooting his wife then fleeing into the woods, authorities said.
Local, state and federal authorities are involved in the search for Craig Berry, who is wanted for second-degree attempted murder, according to the Stewart County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies responded to a domestic altercation at his residence in Dover around 1:30 a.m. on May 1, according to Stewart County Sheriff’s Office. Berry fled into the woods near his home after allegedly shooting his wife and was gone before deputies arrived, authorities said.
His wife was transported to a medical facility, according to the sheriff’s office, which did not provide details on her condition.
The sheriff’s office said Berry is very familiar with the area and warned it could be a “lengthy process” to capture him.
“Berry is a retired special forces veteran and has extensive training in survival tactics,” Stewart County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Paulette Redman said in a statement on Monday. “He is an excellent swimmer and diver, and is in good physical shape.”
Berry is armed with “at least one handgun” and may have taken extra ammunition, according to Redman. He is not believed to have any phone or other means of communication on him, she said.
Berry was captured by a trail camera wearing camouflage clothing, the sheriff’s office said while releasing the photo.
“We are not ruling out the possibility that he has received some outside assistance after the incident,” Redman said.
The U.S. Marshals Service, Tennessee Highway Patrol and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation are assisting in the search, the sheriff’s office said.
There is no information indicating that he is no longer in the area, the sheriff’s office said Monday.
He was last seen near River Trace Road, and authorities are conducting a “very detailed search” of the area from River Trace Road to Highway 79 to parts of Highway 232 this week, the sheriff’s office said Monday.
The sheriff’s office advised residents to call 911 if they see anything suspicious.
(NEW YORK) — As forests shrink and wildlife disappears, mosquitoes are increasingly turning to people for their blood meals, a shift that raises real concerns about the potential spread of diseases that affect humans.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers suggests these buzzing, biting insects are playing a growing role in the increased transmission of Zika, yellow fever, dengue and other diseases that mosquitoes pass on to people, thanks in part to disappearing habitats.
Deforestation, which is the widespread clearing of forests, and other human activity has vastly reduced local populations of plants and animals while increasing human populations in the same areas, according to the study.
“Mosquitoes that are normally feeding on other hosts within the habitat can shift to humans if the habitat is no longer suitable for those hosts and they leave,” Laura Harrington, a Ph.D.-level professor of entomology at Cornell University, told ABC News.
Human blood was widely found in nine types of mosquitoes in two formerly uninhabited areas in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, preliminary study results found. This area was once a part of the Atlantic Forest that covered 502,000 square miles. Today, it has shrunk to 29% of its original size as a result of deforestation and development, according to the final study.
The researchers point to past studies showing that areas with heavier deforestation have a higher mosquito abundance and higher rates of mosquito-borne disease because disturbed habitats favor species that thrive near people. At the same time, reduced biodiversity removes animals that can dilute disease transmission, making humans more likely to become the primary blood source.
Sérgio Lisboa Machado, a co-author of the paper and a professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, said mosquitoes are opportunists who don’t venture far to find food.
“So they start searching for humans because mosquitoes rarely fly very long distances,” he told ABC News. “They are not going to pay a lot of energy to find [other food sources].”
More than 17% of all infectious diseases are caused by vector-borne diseases, meaning a disease that’s transmitted to humans by a living organism, such as mosquitoes, ticks, and flies, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports. These biting insects cause more than 700,000 deaths globally.
Mosquitoes alone transmit dozens of serious diseases to humans, according to the WHO, which consequently considers them the deadliest animals on Earth.
Female mosquitoes are the culprit. They must drink blood to get the protein and iron they need to develop their eggs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There is a “reproductive drive for them to feed on blood, and if there’s no other host there, most mosquitoes would feed on a human,” Harrington told ABC News.
Male mosquitoes buzz, but they don’t bite, instead dining on nectar and plant sugars.
There are 3,500 mosquito species globally, Harrington said, noting that there are only a handful that truly prefer the taste of human blood over other animals. When given a choice, only a small fraction of mosquito species regularly seek out humans.
“It’s something that we’ve known for a long time,” Harrington said. “This notion that manipulating the landscape can alter mosquito feeding patterns and sometimes shift feeding patterns towards humans.”
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and Palestinian activist, who was arrested by US immigration authorities in mid-April 2025, attends the inauguration ceremony at City Hall in New York, United States, on January 1, 2026. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — For the second time in a little more than a week, attorneys have announced that an immigration court has terminated deportation proceedings against a pro-Palestinian student after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed they posed a threat to foreign policy.
According to a letter filed in court, attorneys for Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student who was detained at his naturalization interview in April, a judge has found that the Department of Homeland Security “did not meet its burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence” that he is removable.
It comes after an immigration court terminated removal proceedings against Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk. Her attorneys announced the order in a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case challenging her detention on Feb. 9.
For Mahdawi’s case, immigration judge Nina Froes appears to have based her decision on the finding that DHS failed to authenticate a memo allegedly signed by Rubio claiming Mahdawi was a threat to U.S. foreign policy.
Mahdawi’s attorneys have argued that, like other pro-Palestinian demonstrators, organizers and students, he was being targeted for his constitutionally protected speech.
Öztürk, like Mahdawi, was also labeled a foreign policy risk by Rubio in a memo.
Both cases can be appealed by the Trump administration, so their habeas petitions will likely continue to play out in federal court.
“I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government’s attempts to trample on due process,” Mahdawi said in a statement. “This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice.”
“In a climate where dissent is increasingly met with intimidation and detention, today’s ruling renews hope that due process still applies and that no agency stands above the Constitution,” he added.
In response to a request for comment about both cases, the Department of Homeland Security sent a previous statement about Mahdawi and said: “It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country. No activist judge, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that.”
Mahdawi was detained in Vermont last spring during his citizenship interview. Arguing that he should continue to be detained, lawyers for the Trump administration pointed to a 2015 FBI investigation, in which a gun shop owner alleged that Mahdawi had claimed to have built machine guns in the West Bank to kill Jews.
However, the FBI closed that investigation and Mahdawi was never charged with any crime, a point a federal judge highlighted when he ordered Mahdawi’s release.
In response to the government’s allegations against him, Mahdawi and his lawyers have firmly refuted allegations that he ever threatened Israelis or those of the Jewish faith. He told ABC News he has been advocating for peace and protesting against the war in Gaza.
“So for them to accuse me of this is not going to work, because I am a person who actually has condemned antisemitism,” Mahdawi said. “And I believe that the fight against antisemitism and the fight to free Palestine go hand in hand, because, as Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Öztürk was detained in March by masked federal agents, and the arrest was captured on camera. Attorneys representing her said she was targeted, like other high-profile arrests of students, for her Pro-Palestinian views, specifically, for co-authoring an Op-Ed in the student paper in March 2024 calling on the school’s administration to take steps to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
A federal judge ordered her release in May.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement on Feb. 9. “Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all.”
A portrait stands at a memorial for Alex Pretti on January 25, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Pretti, an ICU nurse at a VA medical center, died on January 24 after being shot multiple times during an altercation with U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Eat Street district of Minneapolis. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
(MINNEAPOLIS) — A doctor who mentored and worked with Alex Pretti described him as “a good citizen” whose “life was just starting.”
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse for the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, was shot and killed by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis on Saturday. Multiple videos of the confrontation showed federal agents spraying Pretti with a substance and pinning him to the ground before the shooting.
Dr. Aasma Shaukat, who first hired Pretti as a research assistant at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System over 10 years ago, called the loss “devastating.”
Shaukat told ABC News she hired Pretti, despite his lack of experience, because he was “eager to learn.”
“He didn’t have any experience, but he was very, very eager to get the position and learn on the job and then eventually launch a career in health care,” Shaukat said. “He worked hard, he was willing to learn on the job. Really had a good work ethic.”
While working as a research assistant, Pretti delivered pizza to make ends meet and often joked that his car was too old to qualify for Uber, Shaukat said.
Shaukat said she wrote Pretti’s recommendation for nursing school.
He later returned to the VA to work as a nurse in the ICU where he was “really good” at speaking with patients, Shaukat said.
“He was just somebody you could talk to because he would get it,” she said.
Tensions are continuing to escalate in Minneapolis in the wake of Pretti’s shooting.
The Department of Homeland Security alleged that Pretti approached Border Patrol agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun and “violently resisted” when agents tried to disarm him. However, a witness said in a federal court filing that after an agent shoved a woman to the ground, Pretti appeared to try to help the woman up, and then agents threw Pretti to the ground and shot him. Local officials are accusing federal officials of rushing to “spin” the story.
Shaukat called the shooting “senseless,” adding, “I do not see him as being a troublemaker, an instigator looking for trouble, or seeking to incite violence … I truly think he was doing it out of his duty of citizenship and his civic sense.”
Shaukat said she last spoke to Pretti during the summer.
“He said things were looking good,” she said. “He finally had enough money to do repairs on his house. And I feel like his life was just starting.”
