NYC man charged with murder after intentionally hitting 16-year-old girl with his car: DA
WABC
(NEW YORK) — A New York City man has been charged with murder after he intentionally hit three people with his car, including a 16-year-old girl, who was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Queens District Attorney’s Office.
Edwin Cruz Gomez, 38, was arraigned on Sunday on charges of murder, attempted murder, assault, vehicular manslaughter and “other crimes” for “intentionally driving his vehicle at four people, including a teenager and his mother whom he sexually propositioned just minutes earlier,” the district attorney’s office said in a press release on Monday.
The incident occurred at approximately 4:10 a.m. on Saturday when the suspect — who was with several other men outside the Prima Donna Restaurant in Queens, New York — encountered the teen and her mother, “offering them both money for sexual acts,” officials said.
After the suspect “subjected 16-year-old Jhoanny Alvarez and her mother to crude sexual solicitations and harassment,” a verbal altercation, which then grew to a physical altercation, ensued between the teen’s stepfather and the suspect, officials said. Bystanders were able to intervene and separate the men, officials said.
The victim, her mother, stepfather and boyfriend proceeded to walk away from the restaurant, which is when the suspect got into his car, “barreled his 3-ton vehicle into them” and “pinned the teen against a pole” with his Chevrolet Suburban, the district attorney’s office said.
After striking the teen, her mother and stepfather, he then proceeded to put the SUV in reverse, struck an unoccupied van, abandoned his vehicle and “fled the scene on foot,” officials said.
Once emergency responders arrived on the scene, the 16-year-old was determined to be deceased, officials said. The teen’s mother was transported to a local hospital “for treatment of injuries to her leg sustained during the collision,” officials said.
The suspect, who approached “uninformed NYPD officers” a few blocks away from the scene, reported he was assaulted and then “led officers back to the location of the collision,” officials said.
Cruz’s blood alcohol content was then measured to be 0.137%, well above the legal limit of 0.08%, officials said. He was taken into custody the same day, according to court records.
The suspect’s next court appearance is scheduled for Sept. 19, according to the district attorney’s office.
If convicted, he could face 25 years to life in prison, the district attorney’s office said.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement that officials will “seek justice” for the teen and her family.
Cruz’s attorney did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
(DALLAS) — The sniper who opened fire on the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, killing one detainee and wounding two detainees, was targeting ICE agents, not detainees, officials said, citing notes the suspect left behind.
The suspect — Joshua Jahn, 29, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after Wednesday’s shooting — wanted to “maximize lethality against ICE personnel and maximize property damage at the facility,” Nancy E. Larson, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said at a news conference on Thursday.
“It seems that he did not intend to kill the detainees or harm them. It’s clear from these notes that he was targeting ICE agents and ICE personnel,” Larson said, calling it “tragic irony” that detainees, not agents, were shot.
Evidence shows “a high degree” of planning from Jahn, of Fairview, Texas, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
He allegedly left behind a note that said, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?'” Patel said in a statement, the note referring to armor-piercing bullets.
Patel said the sniper allegedly had searches last month on apps that track ICE agents and he allegedly downloaded a document called “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management,” which has a list of DHS facilities.
“He conducted multiple searches of ballistics and the ‘Charlie Kirk Shot Video'” on Tuesday and Wednesday, Patel said.
Jahn allegedly “fired indiscriminately” at the ICE building and an ICE van on Wednesday morning, killing one detainee and critically wounding two others, one of whom is a Mexican national.
Officials said they believe Jahn — armed with a bolt-action rifle legally obtained in August — brought a ladder to position himself on top of an adjacent building.
Detainees were being unloaded from a van when the gunfire erupted, officials said. The detainees in the van were being restrained for transport, per proper procedure, officials said.
“While under fire,” “heroic” officers worked to take the detainees to safety, Larson said.
Jahn’s handwritten notes indicated he did not expect to survive the shooting, officials said.
Investigators have not found that Jahn was a member of any specific group, Larson said. No government agency was mentioned in his notes other than ICE, but he did express a “hatred for the federal government,” Larson said.
Investigators believe Jahn acted alone, Larson said. She said he wrote in one note, “Yes, it was just me and my brain.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday blamed the “radical left” for the shooting.
On Wednesday, the FBI released an image of recovered bullets, including one engraved with the phrase “ANTI-ICE,” and DHS released a photo that appears to show a gunshot in an American flag display.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said he would put all ICE facilities on a higher alert.
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has called “rapidly reusable, reliable rockets” the key to humans becoming a multiplanetary society. And when it comes to his company’s Falcon 9, SpaceX has shown that a rocket can do all those things.
The Falcon 9 has now completed 542 missions, 497 landings and 464 reflights, according to the SpaceX website.
But to reach the Moon and Mars and establish settlements on both, SpaceX will need its larger, more complex and significantly more powerful Starship and its Super Heavy booster to reach Falcon 9’s level of reliability and reusability.
Soon, SpaceX will have the chance to show that Starship’s successful August flight, the first to complete all its primary mission goals, was no fluke.
Barring a delay due to bad weather or mechanical issues, the stainless steel Starship and Super Heavy booster will conduct its 11th flight test on Monday, Oct. 13, at 7:15 p.m. ET, from the company’s Starbase in South Texas. A mission the company hopes will build on the much-needed success of its previous test. SpaceX will be operating Starship autonomously and there will be no astronauts aboard during the flight.
In late August, Starship and its Super Heavy booster successfully reached space on a suborbital trajectory at a near-orbital velocity, deploying a series of Starlink simulators before returning to Earth with such navigational precision that the reentry was captured on a camera attached to a remote buoy in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“I would give [flight test 10] an A-plus. That was an A-plus performance. The only thing that was a little bit off was that there was some damage in the aft skirt compartment of Starship during the flight, but most of the mission objectives were achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.” “I don’t think this could have gone much better,” he added.
But now, de Weck says SpaceX needs to demonstrate that it can build on its August success and move the program forward with new mission objectives.
“I think the next step is to actually land the Starship, still not go into orbit and stay over multiple orbits, but actually land and recover the actual Starship,” said de Weck. “Recovery of the Starship, an upright landing, with retro propulsion on a fixed platform, that’s the next step.”
SpaceX is not planning an upright, fixed platform landing for the upcoming 11th flight test. Like the previous mission, the Starship will splash down in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy first stage booster, with its 24 Raptor engines, which SpaceX said was previously used during flight test eight, is also scheduled to splash down in the ocean. In several previous missions, it returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower’s mechanical “chopstick” arms.
The development of Starship hasn’t come easily for SpaceX, with several high-profile setbacks along the way. However, despite an explosion on the launch pad during a pre-flight engine test and several explosions and mechanical failures during previous test flights, Musk has long maintained that learning from failures is an integral part of SpaceX’s engineering process.
“I’m not surprised where the program is. It’s moving forward through the usual SpaceX iterative development model, and not surprisingly, it’s behind SpaceX’s ambitious schedule projections,” said Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida. “But that wouldn’t make it any different than almost everything else that they’ve done in the past, other than that the scale of this is so large,” he added.
Autry is President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the chief financial officer of NASA.
Autry says he’s confident that SpaceX is headed in the right direction and said that Elon Musk and his companies tend to prove their critics wrong in the long run, delivering results even if it takes longer than anticipated.
“About ten years ago, Elon Musk promised me I was going to have a self-driving car shortly, and a lot of people said that was completely crazy. It wasn’t shortly, but I now have a self-driving car. I literally get in my car, push the button, and fifty miles later, I arrive at work. It is amazing. He delivers eventually,” Autry said.
Experts say that making the next generation of U.S.-designed and built rockets and spacecraft work is critical to achieving NASA’s goals of not only returning to the Moon but building a permanent lunar settlement and doing it before the Chinese.
During a late September ceremony at the Johnson Space Center announcing the new class of NASA astronauts, Acting NASA Administrator and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy spoke about the competition for space dominance.
“Now some are challenging our leadership in space, say, like the Chinese, and I’ll just tell you this, I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America back to the Moon,” said Duffy. “We are going to win. We love challenges. We love competition, and we are going to win the second space race back to the Moon,” he added.
Autry, who first wrote about a new space race with China back in 2010, says China is determined to reach the Moon and dominate low-Earth orbit, but he believes the global competition will push American efforts forward.
“There are very credible people saying that they’re about to eclipse us in the next five years. I think that’s great for the prospect of competition that spurs us to work harder and take our role more seriously, and frankly to put funding into programs that we badly, badly need to fund,” said Autry.
Autry says that today’s space race should be compared to the “Age of Exploration” in the 15th and 16th centuries. He points out that while China had “an ambitious sailing-exploration program” in the early 1400s, European countries overtook the Chinese when the Europeans accelerated their global exploration efforts later in the century, at a time when China was pulling back.
“We are at that same moment in time right now. The countries that aggressively pursue going to the Moon and using the assets of space will dominate human history for the next several hundred years,” Autry said.
Autry believes that the billions of dollars being spent by companies like SpaceX and the federal government to support space exploration, return to the Moon and potentially get to Mars is money well spent.
“The countries that choose to take advantage of space resources will be wealthy, prosperous and happier than the countries that don’t. We have plenty of history to show that,” Autry said.
Autry says you just have to look at the first space program to see the benefits of this kind of investment.
“We would not have the computing environment, AI, the internet, solar power, fuel cells, and a variety of technologies at the level they are now if we had not made those investments that drove so much effort into engineering development and STEM education. It created the boom we’ve experienced since the second half of the 20th century,” he added.
A photo of Taylor Taranto from a detention memo released by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. (U.S. District Court)
(WASHINGTON) — A day after the Justice Department withdrew a sentencing memo that described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” the convicted Jan. 6 participant accused in the case is scheduled to appear at a sentencing hearing Thursday.
Federal prosecutors Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were informed Wednesday that they would be put on leave after filing the memo in the case of Taylor Taranto, who was convicted on firearms and threat charges related to a June 2023 arrest near the home of former President Barack Obama, after Taranto was pardoned by President Donald Trump over his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
“On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum said. “Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building.”
The memo also detailed how Taranto traveled to former President Obama’s home only after a Truth Social post from then-former President Trump that included Obama’s address.
It’s unclear if Valdivia or White were given a reason for their suspensions, though the moves come following months of turmoil in the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office where multiple career prosecutors faced removals or demotions related to their involvement in prosecuting the more than 1,500 defendants charged in connection with the Capitol attack.
Late Wednesday, the Justice Department, in a highly unusual move, withdraw the original sentencing memo and replaced it with one in which the references to Jan. 6 and Trump’s Truth social account were eliminated.
Taranto was scheduled to appear at Thursday’s sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump-appointed judge who has described the Jan. 6 attack in serious terms.
Following Trump’s reelection victory in November, Judge Nichols said it would be “beyond frustrating and disappointing” if Trump were to pardon Jan. 6 defendants.
Trump subsequently granted sweeping pardons and commutations to all Jan. 6 defendants on his first day in office.
