One escaped monkey captured in South Carolina, several others located on property
Yemassee Police Department
(YEMASSEE, S.C.) — The ongoing operation to capture 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina lab nabbed at least one of the furry runaways on Saturday, according to officials.
Officials in the town of Yemassee said they recovered overnight one of the rhesus macaque monkeys that had escaped from Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center on Wednesday.
“She is well and having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard said in a statement.
Yemasee officials said that “a significant number” of the escaped primates were located in a facility near where the rescued animal was found and were “jumping back and forth over the facility’s fence.”
“Alpha Genesis management and staff are on-site, actively feeding and monitoring the animals, and they will continue these efforts throughout the weekend,” the town’s officials said in a statement.
“The primates continue to interact with their companions inside the facility, which is a positive sign,” they added.
Westergaard said the monkeys were having a nap Saturday afternoon.
“They are coming down to the ground a bit more now. It is a slow process,” he said.
The creatures escaped when a new employee at the Alpha Genesis center left the door to their enclosure open, Yemassee Town Administrator Matthew Garnes said during a briefing Thursday with town officials.
The primates are all very young females weighing 6 to 7 pounds each who have never been tested, according to police. There is no public health threat, police said.
ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.
(DELPHI, Ind.) — The small town of Delphi, Indiana, is reeling with grief and shock after the horrific double murder of two teenage girls in broad daylight, forever changing the lives of those who knew and loved the victims.
Now, seven years later, one man is standing trial in the murders.
The story of the Delphi murders begins and ends on the Monon High Bridge Trail. It was here that police believe Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14, spent the last moments of their lives.
On Feb. 13, 2017, the two best friends went missing and were found dead the following day. Tens of thousands of tips were received, dozens of people were interviewed, and a crucial piece of evidence emerged: a video recorded by one of the girls that pointed directly to a suspect.
“For a long time, the question was, ‘Who is Bridge Guy?'” ABC News’ Janel Klein said. “A lot of people in town thought they recognized him.”
The case went cold but five years after the murders, in 2022, police arrested Richard Allen, who worked at a local CVS store in Delphi. He was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of murder while kidnapping in the deaths of Abby and Libby.
Today, the question is whether Allen is the man on the bridge as he stands trial.
Allen has pleaded not guilty to the murders, but the prosecution claims they have more than 60 confessions from him admitting to killing the girls. He allegedly confessed to wardens, inmates, family members, and almost anyone who would listen within the prison and jailhouse setting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before,” Tracy Walder, a former FBI special agent, said. “They typically confess one time, right? They don’t do so over and over and over.”
A key moment in the trial was when audio recordings of Allen calling his wife and mother from jail were played. The audio reveals Allen admitted to committing the crime, and asking his wife Kathy, “Do you still love me?”
Despite the alleged confessions, Allen’s defense has called a list of experts as they try to poke holes in the state’s case.
Allen’s defense has sought to focus the jury’s attention on Allen’s mental health, and addressed the issue of him declining after being held in solitary confinement for months.
“We heard from his psychologist who testified as to what a decline he had and some of the behaviors that he displayed in prison were alarming. He was naked a lot,” Klein said. “He was rolling around on the floor. He was eating paper. He was drinking from his toilet. All of these things, they say, were proof that he was really suffering mentally and entering psychosis, including at the time when he was admitting to these crimes and making numerous confessions to his wife and mother.”
Another key point for the defense is that investigators found no DNA evidence at the scene linking Allen or anyone else to the crime.
In an unusual memorandum filed with the court which the judge ruled cannot be allowed into court, Allen’s team is alleging that the double crime was committed by a mysterious group they refer to as a white supremacist cult of Odinism.
“The defense from the beginning has been blaming the murders on Odinism, what they describe as a Nordic cult with ties to white supremacy,” ABC’s Alex Perez said.
“They believe (the cult) were carrying out some sort of ritual when they killed the girls,” Perez said. “And the defense attorneys in their memorandum pointing to certain things at the crime scene that they believe they say were signs the way branches were laid around the bodies of the two girls.”
Allen’s team said in the filing that the girls’ bodies were found in unusual positions with branches over them, and the defense argued that the branches resembled Pagan Runes.
Jefferson Calico, an associate professor at University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, studied Pagan religions, including Odinism, and explained what this means.
“So runes are widely incorporated into Odinist culture as well,” Calico said. “So if there were runes in the crime scene, then that would be a reason to suspect pagan or Odinist involvement for sure. For instance, the sticks over the body, possibly a rune mark on a tree. It’s not convincing to me as someone who studied these religions, but it provides an interpretation of some of the details of the crime scene.”
But Calico also said that Odinists were not known to engage in human sacrificial rituals and added that, as believers in white supremacy, it would make no sense to kill two Caucasian girls.
The Delphi murder trials are continuing, and 12 jurors will decide Allen’s fate. If convicted, he faces 130 years in prison.
“Even once they arrested Richard Allen, there’s been so much doubt across the board as to whether he’s responsible,” Klein said. “There are many people attending the trial and weighing in on social media that will say there is no way he did this. Whether he’s convicted or not, I think there will always be that speculation in Delphi as to who really is responsible for this crime.”
(NEW YORK) — Thousands of Amazon workers at the company’s first-ever unionized warehouse voted to authorize a strike on Friday, claiming the tech giant has refused to recognize the union and negotiate a contract at the New York City facility.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union representing roughly 5,500 workers at the warehouse, said Amazon risks a strike if it does not begin negotiations by Sunday.
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien told ABC News in a statement. “If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight.”
A strike authorization vote affords union leadership the ability to declare a work stoppage if deemed appropriate. But the vote does not guarantee that a strike will take place.
The headline-grabbing union victory at the Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York, in 2022, accelerated an upsurge of labor organizing that took hold nationwide during the pandemic.
After the union victory, however, Amazon filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, seeking to overturn the outcome, including allegations that NLRB officials showed a favorable bias toward the workers and that union leaders bribed colleagues in an effort to win their support.
So far, those legal challenges by Amazon have failed to overturn the union win. Months after the victory, a hearing officer for the NLRB recommended that the vote should stand. Soon afterward, the NLRB officially certified the union representing workers at the facility, putting Amazon under a legal obligation to bargain in good faith. Amazon appealed the ruling.
Workers have alleged that the company’s legal challenge amounts to an illegal effort to delay contract negotiations.
Amazon did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. In a previous statement to ABC News, Amazon Spokesperson Eileen Hards said the company respects workers’ right to unionize but it contests the results of the election at the Staten Island warehouse, also known as JFK8.
“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union,” Hards said. “They always have.”
“We strongly disagree with the outcome, and as we showed throughout the JFK8 Objections Hearing with dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome of the election and we don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants,” she added.
Workers at the facility previously said a union contract should include minimum pay of $30 per hour and bolstered safety protections.
A delay is typical for a first union contract, but the passage of time in this case has extended beyond the norm.
The average length of time before a new union signs its first contract is 465 days, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis in 2022. Nearly 990 days have passed since Amazon workers in New York City voted to unionize the facility.
On Friday, the Teamsters said workers at a second facility in Queens had also voted to authorize a strike.
“Driving for Amazon is tough,” Luc Rene, a worker at the Queens facility, said in a statement. “What’s even tougher is fighting a mega-corporation that constantly breaks the law and games the system. But we won’t give up.”
(NEW YORK) — The search for an unidentified gunman who fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the investigation into a possible motive, remain ongoing Friday.
Thompson, 50, was shot Wednesday morning outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, where the insurance group’s investors conference was being held. The masked gunman appeared to be lying in wait outside the Hilton hotel before shooting Thompson at close range, police said.
Police said they are interviewing Thompson’s colleagues and family about any potential specific threats while they investigate a motive into the shooting.
Evidence collected from the scene of the shocking shooting include shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on them, according to police sources.
ABC News contributor Brad Garrett, a former FBI agent, said he believes the shooter is “trying to send a message” through the words.
“It strikes me that it has to do with insurance companies using those terms in some of their processes of turning down claims,” Garrett told ABC News Live’s Stephanie Ramos when asked about the words. “It’s a common complaint by people of having claims denied, and so I think this shooter is trying to send a message that someone — either himself or a loved one or someone close to him — has been harmed by this insurance company.”
“There wouldn’t be, logically, any other reason,” he added.
The words on the shell casings also echo the title of a 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.” Police are aware of the similarity, and are investigating whether one possible motive is anger at the insurance industry, sources said.
The book was written by legal scholar and insurance expert Jay Feinman, a professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey.
It explores abuses of auto and homeowners insurance to “avoid paying justified claims,” according to its summary.
“Today the name of the game is delay, deny, defend: to improve their profits, insurance companies delay payment of justified claims, deny payment altogether, and defend their actions by forcing claimants to enter litigation,” the book description states.
This strategy is not restricted to auto and homeowners insurance, the introduction states. “All insurance companies have an incentive to chisel their customers in order to increase profits,” it says.
ABC News has reached out to Feinman for comment.
In a response to a post on X that mentioned his book and the words on the shell casings, Feinman said he has “no comment” to media inquiries.
Police are working to identify the gunman in the shooting and his whereabouts.
After the shooting, the perpetrator fled on foot into an alley, where a phone was recovered, then fled on a bike, according to NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.
Other evidence recovered from the scene includes a water bottle and candy wrapper, police sources said.
Police have also collected video of the suspected gunman all over the city, including in the subway, in cabs and a McDonald’s, since he arrived in New York City on Nov. 24 on a Greyhound bus, sources told ABC News.
In each place, he paid with cash and he made sure to keep his mask on, which indicates to detectives he knew he was coming to the city to commit the crime, sources said.
Police have released several photos of the shooting suspect while asking for the public’s help in identifying him. They include images of him unmasked taken from a surveillance camera at an Upper West Side hostel, where it appears the suspect shared a room with two other men, according to police sources.
UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the world, said they are “working closely” with the NYPD in the wake of the shooting.
“So many patients, consumers, health care professionals, associations, government officials and other caring people have taken time out of their day to reach out. We are thankful, even as we grieve,” UnitedHealth Group said in a statement on Thursday. “Our priorities are, first and foremost, supporting Brian’s family; ensuring the safety of our employees; and working with law enforcement to bring the perpetrator to justice.”
“We, at UnitedHealth Group, will continue to be there for those who depend upon us for their health care,” the statement continued. “We ask that everyone respect the family’s privacy as they mourn the loss of their husband, father, brother and friend.”
