Seattle police arrest armed man during New Year’s Eve celebration
Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images
(SEATTLE) — Police in Seattle have arrested a 21-year-old man armed with a shotgun, pistol, and carrying multiple rounds of ammunition near the Space Needle during Seattle’s New Year’s Eve celebration, authorities said.
On New Year’s Eve at approximately 7:20 p.m., patrol officers in Seattle responded to reports of a man sitting on a bench near the Pacific Science Center holding a partially concealed shotgun, according to a statement from the Seattle Police Department.
“Witnesses saw him holding the gun by the grip, causing alarm, while facing the area where spectators were gathering for the fireworks display,” police said. “The suspect, wearing all black clothing and a red hat with “WAR” written on it, cooperated with police.”
Officers safely recovered the shotgun and the suspect, who was also armed with a handgun, had a valid concealed carry permit, police said.
Police assigned to the event center arrested the man without incident, authorities said.
Seattle Police Department’s arson bomb squad were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle and swept the car for potential weapons or explosives, though none were found and it was determined the vehicle did not pose a threat, officials confirmed.
Police subsequently booked the suspect into the King County Jail for unlawful use of weapons and detectives reviewing the case referred criminal charges to the City Attorney’s Office, authorities said.
The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing.
A judge ruled on Tuesday that a judgement could not be entered against blogger Milagro Cooper for the defamation count in a lawsuit filed by hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion in October 2024.
Cooper was found liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and promotion of an altered sexual depiction by a Miami jury on Monday.
However, Chief U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga ruled that a media defendant “precludes judgement for Plaintiff on the defamation per se claim because it is uncontested that Plaintiff did not provide Defendant pre-suit notice,” according to the court’s final judgment obtained by ABC News on Tuesday.
In Florida, a media defendant must be served by the plaintiff with a legal notice at least five days before filing a defamation suit, according to court documents obtained by ABC News on Tuesday.
Megan Thee Stallion, whose legal name is Megan Pete, testified during the trial in November that Cooper, who is known on social media as blogger Milagro Gramz, participated in a targeted and coordinated social media campaign to harass, intimidate and defame her.
Pete alleged Cooper was a “paid surrogate” for rapper Tory Lanez and spread lies on his behalf. Lanez was convicted of shooting and injuring Pete in a July 2020 incident.
(LOS ANGELES) — The judge decreased the damages Cooper owes Pete from $75,000 to $59,000, according to legal documents. Altonaga upheld the other two counts of intentional infliction of emotional distress and promotion of an altered sexual depiction.
“Cooper ultimately prevailed on Ms. Pete’s leading accusation, defamation, and the jury awarded a nominal amount of damages compared to millions of dollars Ms. Pete demanded from Ms. Cooper throughout the course of the litigation,” Cooper’s attorney said in a statement on Wednesday obtained by ABC News.
Pete’s attorneys said in a statement obtained by ABC News after the jury’s verdict on Monday that Cooper is also required to cover costs for the rapper’s legal bills.
“Request for costs and fees shall not be submitted until after any post-trial motions are decided or an appeal is concluded, whichever occurs later,” the judge stated in her final judgment.
ABC News has reached out to Pete’s attorneys, but requests for comments were not immediately returned.
The lawsuit alleges that Cooper spread lies about Pete to punish her and attempt to discredit her after she publicly named Lanez as her shooter.
“She’s created a space for a lot of people to come speak negatively about me,” Pete said in trial testimony last month of Cooper, referencing social media posts where the blogger attacked Pete’s character, casting her as a liar and mentally unstable.
Cooper, who took the stand earlier in November, testified that as a blogger, she discussed the shooting on her social media accounts without the influence of Tory Lanez, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson.
But Cooper did acknowledge that she spoke with Peterson and was hoping to have him as a guest on her channel. She also testified that she received payments from Peterson’s father, Sonstar Peterson, but claimed they were for “personal” reasons like her children’s birthdays and “promotional” work.
The jury was shown social media posts in which Cooper claimed that Pete was not shot.
When asked if she believed that Pete was shot, Cooper said, “I can’t say she lied about that because I wasn’t there,” but then Cooper said that she believed that Pete was not shot and had stepped on glass — a claim that Pete made in her initial statement to police.
Peterson is not named as a defendant in Pete’s defamation lawsuit but was asked to give a deposition ahead of the trial. ABC News has reached out to his attorneys, but requests for comment were not immediately returned.
Peterson, who chose not to take the witness stand during the 2022 trial, pleaded not guilty and his defense attorneys argued during the trial that he was not the shooter.
Peterson was sentenced to 10 years in prison without the possibility of parole on Aug. 8, 2023, after he was convicted in December 2022 of felony assault for shooting and injuring Pete in both of her feet in an incident that occurred in the Hollywood Hills on July 12, 2020.
His legal team appealed his conviction, but it was upheld on Nov. 12 by a federal court in Los Angeles.
Editor’s Note: A prior version of this story said the judge dismissed the defamation charge. Under Florida law, a media defendant must be served by the plaintiff with a legal notice at least five days before filing a defamation suit so, in this case, that judgement could not be entered.
(NEW YORK) — Voting machine company Dominion has settled its $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani over false allegations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, according to the company.
The settlement came just days after the company said they reached another settlement with another one-time Trump attorney, Sidney Powell.
“The Parties have agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News about the Giuliani case.
A court filing in the ongoing civil case against Giuliani on Friday showed the parties seeking a voluntary dismissal of the matter. No details about the settlement were made available.
“Each party shall bear its own attorneys’ fees, expenses, and costs,” the filing stated.
The “confidential settlement” would bring an end to the case that spanned over four years, since Dominion first filed is $1.3 billion dollar lawsuit against Giuliani in January 2021.
The suit accused Giuliani of carrying out “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion in the wake of the 2020 election in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.
An attorney for Giuliani listed in the case did not immediately respond to ABC’s request for comment.
Dominion also sued Powell in January of 2021 for $1.3 billion, accusing her of leading a pervasive campaign to spread false election theories that gained currency with President Donald Trump.
Last week, a filing in the defamation case against Powell also showed the parties seeking voluntary dismissal.
“The Parties have agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said.
A former federal prosecutor, Powell rose to become a close adviser to Trump in the closing days of his first term, meeting with Trump repeatedly as he mounted increasing attempts to overturn the outcome of an election he lost by more than 7 million votes.
Attorneys for Powell did not respond to ABC’s request for comment.
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Butler County district attorney Richard Goldinger said the shooter is dead after injuring former U.S. President Donald Trump, killing one audience member and injuring another in…Show more Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
(DALLAS, Texas) — As the motive in the fatal sniper-type shooting at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office this week becomes clear, law enforcement experts said the incident is part of a frightening trend of rifle-wielding shooters targeting politicians, police and others from long distances.
The Dallas shooter, according to authorities wanted to “terrorize” ICE officers not just in Dallas, but around the country. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas made clear on Thursday that the shooter “hoped to minimize any collateral damage or injury to the detainees and any other innocent people. 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.” Authorities say the suspect’s writings showed he had an anti-ICE bias.
Since an alleged would-be assassin attempted to kill President Donald Trump during a July 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, at least seven sniper-type incidents have unfolded across the country, including the Sept. 10 shooting that claimed the life of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, according to reporting by ABC News.
While such shootings have been part of America’s history, including the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, law enforcement experts told ABC News that they have never seen so many sniper-type incidents occurring in such a short amount of time.
“I believe this is the next chapter, if you will, in our history of violence, specifically active-shooter-type situations,” Jesse Hambrick, a retired Georgia deputy sheriff and counter-sniper expert, told ABC News.
The latest incident occurred on Wednesday morning when the 29-year-old suspect, identified by federal authorities as Joshua Jahn of Fairview, Texas, opened fire on a Dallas ICE facility, killing a detainee and leaving two others critically wounded, officials said. The victims were shot in an uncovered sallyport at the facility, officials said.
Jahn allegedly planned the attack for months and opened fire from the rooftop of a private office building overlooking the ICE facility, using an 8mm bolt-action rifle he legally purchased in August, Joe Rothrock, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Dallas office, said at Thursday afternoon’s news conference.
Rothrock described the shooting as a “targeted, ambush-style attack” and that the suspect engaged in a significant, high-degree of pre-attack planning, including researching the targeted building and using apps to track the location of ICE agents.
Federal officials said the suspect, a U.S. citizen who died by suicide, sprayed the length of the building with gunfire and left behind writings leading investigators to believe he wanted to shoot ICE agents, not detainees, and cause terror, federal officials said.
“Hopefully this will give ICE agents a real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP [armor-piercing] rounds on the roof?” the suspect allegedly wrote in one handwritten note, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
Patel disclosed in a social media post on Thursday that the suspect also conducted multiple searches on ballistics and the ‘Charlie Kirk Shot Video’ before carrying out the attack.
Like the suspect in the Kirk shooting who engraved shell casings found at the scene with messages — including “Hey fascist! CATCH! — authorities said the suspect in the shooting at the Dallas ICE facility also wrote a message on at least one bullet casing found at the crime scene that read, “ANTI-ICE.”
Like some of the other sniper shooters who have carried out recent attacks, the suspect seemed prepared to die, Hambrick told ABC News.
“Here’s the reality, very honestly, if someone has no fear of losing their own life, it makes them dang near impossible to prevent from taking somebody else’s life,” Hambrick said.
The shooting at the ICE facility came just two weeks after a gunman perched atop a building at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, shot and killed Kirk as the 31-year-old co-founder of the conservative grass roots organization Turning Point USA was speaking to a large crowd at an outdoor event. The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was arrested and charged with capital murder.
“The long-range threat is new, and I think that’s all stemming from Butler,” said Don Mihalek, a former senior U.S. Secret Service Agent, referring to the July 2024 attack on Trump, which killed one rallygoer and injured two others before the shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crook, was fatally shot by a Secret Service counter sniper. “I think the Butler incident is being copycatted in many ways by other people.”
Less than a month after the assassination attempt on Trump, a sniper armed with an AR-15 rifle opened fire from an overpass along Kentucky’s Interstate 75 near London, hitting a dozen vehicles and injuring eight people, authorities said. The suspect, 32-year-old Joseph Couch, a former member of the Army Reserve, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound following an 11-day manhunt, officials said.
On Sept. 15, 2024, just two months after the first attempt on Trump’s life, a Secret Service agent foiled another assassination attempt on the president at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The agent spotted the barrel of a rifle sticking out of the fence line and opened fire on the shooter, identified as 59-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, causing him to flee the area. Roth was convicted by a jury on Tuesday and faces a sentence of life in prison.
Several of the recent sniper attacks have targeted firefighters and law enforcement officers. On June 29, 2025, a 20-year-old suspect, identified as Wess Roley, allegedly ambushed and killed two firefighters in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after he set a fire they responded to, officials said. Roley was later found dead from suicide, authorities said.
On Aug. 7, a gunman identified by authorities as 61-year-old Carmine Faino shot and wounded two Pennsylvania state troopers in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, with a rifle he allegedly fired “from a position of tactical superiority” after calling 911 to report shots fired near a home he shared with a girlfriend he allegedly killed, officials said. Faino was fatally shot by a special emergency response team, officials said.
Three days after the Pennsylvania attack, a sniper opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Atlanta, authorities said. The suspect, 30-year-old Patrick White, who officials said blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him sick and depressed, died by suicide.
Mihalek said such sniper shootings present a “tremendous challenge” for law enforcement to prevent, particularly at a time when ambush attacks on law enforcement are dramatically increasing.
In a report released on Sept. 2, the National Fraternal Order of Police stated that 229 officers have been shot in the line of duty thus far in 2025, 31 fatally. In 2024, 342 officers were shot in the line of duty, including 50 who were killed, up from 46 in 2023, according to the report.
There have been at least 50 ambush-style attacks on law enforcement this year, resulting in 66 officers being shot, 15 of them fatally, according to the report. In all of 2024, there were 61 ambush-style attacks on law enforcement officers nationwide, resulting in 79 officers shot, 18 fatally, according to the National Fraternal Order of Police.
Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the country, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement this week that ICE officers are facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them since January.
In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said security protocols are being ramped up at ICE facilities across the country.
“Obviously, the next step for us is making sure our officers are safe. That’s my biggest fear every night, especially with these increases [in assaults], that everyone gets home safe every night. We’ve got to make sure our buildings and facilities are protected,” said Lyons.
Hambrick told ABC News that in the current threat environment, law enforcement agencies nationwide should be reevaluating their security tactics, including working with property owners in their communities to prevent easy access to rooftops.
“Law enforcement has to think now, ‘When I walk into a setting where I’m going to be, I’ve got to look up, and that’s not natural,” Hambrick said. “I’ve got to look around 360 degrees, and I need to secure those roofs.”
Mihalek said he believes the use of drones to scan the tops of buildings could become routine and help law enforcement agencies protect officers.
“Drones may become standard procedure in a lot of these law enforcement operations, especially for ICE,” Mihalek said.
