National LGBTQ group urges New York prosecutor to pursue hate crime charges in killing of transgender man

(LOS ANGELES) — Los Angeles residents who fled devastating wildfires are facing a huge recovery and rebuilding effort, as they gather what they can from ruins that were once their homes.

As firefighters continue a massive effort to contain and subdue the historic infernos, Angelenos are grappling with unthinkable loss.

Mike Geller and his 18-year-old son spoke with ABC News among the rubble of Palisades Village, where their family’s 50-year-old jewelry business once stood.

“My family has been doing jewelry servicing of the community for almost three generations,” Geller explained as he pointed to the school next door. “My mother ran this business prior to me, when I was going to elementary school here.”

Now 48, Geller said he’s facing the reality of being forced to start over completely. His business — Jaimie Geller Jewelry — his home, car, truck, motorcycle and the personal belongings of his family of five all burned in the Palisades Fire.

“Thank God I was able to retrieve my birth certificate,” he said. “But every possession my children have accumulated… gone, decimated.”

“I’m in shock,” Geller added. “I’m not even sure how I’m talking to you. I’m absolutely in shock. I’m just going through the motions. It hasn’t really set in yet.”

Geller filed personal insurance claims, though he said he has no clue when any of them will be processed.

Geller said he and many of the older people in the Palisades don’t have the means to wait months — if not years — and rebuild.

“There are people on the Alphabet Streets who bought their homes for $75,000, $50,000,” Geller said. “Those people will not be able to come back. And if they do and they have insurance, will they rebuild? Look, if I’m 75, 80 years old… how much time do I have?”

“It’s about quality of life,” he continued. “If it takes me three years to rebuild, how much more time do I actually have left at that point?”

The Palisades Fire that consumed Geller’s home and business is still burning. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the blaze was at 23,713 acres with only 14% containment as of Monday morning.

The Eaton Fire north of Pasadena — at 14,117 acres and 33% containment — is also still raging, as is the Hurst Fire near San Fernando, which is now 799 acres in size though 89% contained.

More than 12,000 structures are believed to have been damaged or destroyed, with at least 24 people killed. About 105,000 people remain under mandatory evacuation orders and another 87,000 are under evacuation warnings as of Monday morning.

A preliminary damage estimate by AccuWeather put the economic losses so far between $135 billion and $150 billion, which would put the fires among the costliest natural disasters in American history. High winds forecast through Wednesday threaten to spread the fires further.

Geller’s family and many others are now trying to piece together a plan, even as the smoke from the wildfires hangs heavy over their ravaged neighborhood.

“My wife and I are even considering whether or not we rebuild, really, but at this point with the insurance companies, it’s a smoother transaction,” Geller said. “It’s a smoother road if you rebuild.”

In the meantime, he’s staying in a hotel. Fire victims here are in desperate need of affordable housing, according to Geller. He’s found shelter but said it’s not sustainable.

“It’s insanity,” he said. “Hotels are packed to the gills. Shelters are packed to the gills.”

“Hopefully a lot of these elderly have children,” Geller said. “I pray that they have some means of finding a place to stay, you know — get in and be a home base and just somewhere where they can just recuperate their mindset.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden has now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in history, after announcing Friday that he was pardoning nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders.

Biden said in the announcement — which came just three days before his term ends — that he is commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses and “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.”

He did not provide additional details as to the exact number of people who would be affected by the clemency action, timelines involved or any of the qualifying criteria used for assessing the pardons.

“Today’s clemency action provides relief for individuals who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine, as well as outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes,” Biden wrote.

In the 1980s, Biden supported several bills that increased penalties for drug users, including one that essentially lengthened sentences for crack cocaine users, predominantly African-Americans, as compared to those convicted of using powder cocaine, who were predominantly white.

Congress has since tried to address sentencing disparities through the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 and the First Step Act of 2018.

“This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars,” he said, with no direct mention of his prior record.

He also acknowledged that the decision would set a historic precedent.

“With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history,” Biden said in the statement.

Hinting he’s not done yet with his pardon power, Biden also wrote that he will “continue to review additional commutations and pardons.”

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(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.

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