Woman found guilty of stowing away on Delta flight from New York to Paris
Niagara County Sheriff’s Office
(NEW YORK) — A federal jury has convicted Svetlana Dali of stowing away on a Delta flight to Paris last November after passing through security in a lane reserved for crewmembers and bypassing gate agents by blending in with boarding passengers.
Dali had been charged with a federal stowaway count for boarding an overnight Delta flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City on Nov. 26, 2024, and traveling to Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport in France without having a ticket. She had pleaded not guilty.
A Brooklyn federal jury found her guilty on Thursday.
Dali, a Russian citizen and U.S. permanent resident who most recently lived in Philadelphia, took the witness stand during the brief trial. She admitted she did not have a boarding pass when she walked onto the flight.
Instead, she said she walked through to “where the people were boarding the flights and then I just walked into the airplane.”
Dali said she stayed in the bathroom “almost the duration of the flight, almost from the beginning to the end.”
A sentencing date was not immediately set.
In a video obtained by ABC News, Dali can be seen walking up to gate B38 at Terminal 4 while other passengers have their boarding passes and passports checked for the Paris flight. After gate attendants assisted a separate group of customers and ushered them toward the jet bridge, Dali followed immediately behind, the video shows.
Dali was ultimately spotted by Delta employees before the plane landed in France, according to the FBI complaint. The complaint stated that Dali was unable to provide a boarding pass and that once the plane landed, French law enforcement would not allow her to pass the customs area.
During an interview with the FBI upon her return, Dali reportedly admitted to flying as a stowaway and stated she did not have a plane ticket and that she intentionally evaded TSA security officials and Delta employees so she could travel without buying one, according to the complaint.
Officials attempted to send Dali back to the United States on another flight shortly after, but Dali was removed from the plane after insisting against her return.
She was eventually brought back to New York to face charges. After being released, Dali allegedly cut off her ankle monitor and traveled to Buffalo, where she tried unsuccessfully to cross over the Peace Bridge into Canada on a bus.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(BOISE, Idaho) — The world came to know the feisty older sister of University of Idaho murder victim Kaylee Goncalves after she gave a ferocious victim impact statement at Bryan Kohberger’s sentencing last week. She said she memorized her speech so she wouldn’t break eye contact with him in the courtroom.
Alivea Goncalves said to Kohberger, “You’re a delusional, pathetic, hypochondriac loser who thought you were so much smarter than everybody else. … You aren’t special or deep, not mysterious or exceptional. … No one thinks you are important.”
“I was fueled by seeing the rage on his face,” she told ABC News. “Man … was he mad. That was obviously a big point of why I did what I did — to make him feel small.”
Alivea Goncalves also asked pointed questions like, “What was second weapon you used on Kaylee?” A hypothetical question in the moment, but one that investigators have yet to figure out. Kaylee Goncalves had unique injuries described as a horizontal pattern, and it’s not clear what caused them, police confirmed to ABC News.
“I had one shot at it and I was gonna make the most of it,” Alivea Goncalves said.
Alivea Goncalves said she did eliminate a few thoughts from her statement after realizing Kohberger’s mom and sister were in the courtroom.
“I didn’t anticipate his mother and sister being there,” she said. “And I had specific lines that were directed towards his relationship with his mother and directed towards the shame that he has caused his family, and how the ultimate move of a coward is for him to sit behind bars while the rest of his family has to bear the real weight, the shame of what he’s done.”
She concluded her statement with memorable words to Kohberger, saying that if he hadn’t attacked the students in their sleep, “Kaylee would’ve kicked your f—— ass.”
“I got up there knowing that my speech wasn’t to Kaylee and Maddie — it was for them. … I just wanted to reclaim their power,” she said.
Kaylee, Kaylee’s lifelong best friend Maddie Mogen, their roommate Xana Kernodle and Xana’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death at the girls’ off-campus house in the early hours of Nov. 13, 2022. On Wednesday, their killer was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences on the four first-degree murder counts and the maximum penalty of 10 years on the burglary count after pleading guilty to all charges.
Kaylee Goncalves was stabbed more than 30 times and had defensive wounds, according to a police report released for the first time last week. The 21-year-old was described as “unrecognizable as her facial structure was extremely damaged,” the report said.
“It’s gruesome and it’s graphic,” Alivea Goncalves acknowledged, but she said it’s information she wanted because she knows “Kaylee absolutely fought for her life.”
In November 2022, when news of the deaths at 1122 King Road reached Alivea Goncalves, she said she started going through her sister’s phone records to see if she had made any calls, convincing herself Kaylee wasn’t picking up her phone because she was at the police station answering questions. But Alivea Goncalves would never speak to her sister again.
Their last conversation was a six-hour FaceTime during which Alivea Goncalves guided her sister through buying her Range Rover, which the 21-year-old proudly drove to Moscow to show her friends on her last trip to their college house. Their dad drives the car now. Alivea Goncalves said many of Kaylee’s other belongings were picked up by their parents, covered in blood and in hazmat bags.
Alivea Goncalves made Kaylee Goncalves an aunt twice over before she died, and twice more after. She was pregnant with a girl when Kaylee Goncalves was murdered, and she named that baby Theo MaddieKay. Alivea Goncalves calls Kaylee and Maddie soulmates, and she describes their namesake as the perfect mixture of Kaylee and Maddie.
Researchers found evidence of a large dinosaur mating “dance” arena at Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado./Courtesy of Caldwell Buntin
(DINOSAUR RIDGE, Colo.) — Researchers have discovered evidence of one of the largest dinosaur mating “dance arenas” in present-day Colorado.
Previous studies have identified a couple of “dinosaur lek” areas — where male dinosaurs likely congregated to perform courtship displays for females, primarily for the purpose of finding a mate — at Dinosaur Ridge, 20 miles west of Denver.
However, using high-resolution drone photography and photogrammetry to make 3D models of the sandstone at Dinosaur Ridge, a team reexamined the area to see if there were more markings on the surface.
What they found were dozens of lek traces tightly clustered together, suggesting the area was once a site to perform mating rituals, similar to some modern-day birds.
“So, these trace fossils, we interpret them to be evidence of dinosaur courtship activities, just from kind of process of elimination,” Caldwell Buntin, co-author of the study and a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, told ABC News.
Buntin said the team ruled out that these “scrapes” were caused by dinosaurs digging for food and water, from marking their territories or from colonial nesting, which is when animals build their nests close together in groups.
“Basically, these were a lot of organisms that were coming together, performing some kind of activity that would include building some kind of nest to display to a female, and then maybe doing some kind of a dance or scraping activity, which generates a lot of the scrapes around the nest display structure,” Buntin said.
The scrapes belong to theropod dinosaurs, characterized by hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb, which were alive during the Cretaceous period, between 145 million and 66 million years ago.
It’s not clear which species made the scrapes, but they were likely three to four feet high at the hip and were between 2.5 and 5 meters (8 to 16 feet) long, from the size of an emu to the size of an ostrich, according to Buntin.
There’s a “spectrum of different scrapes,” according to Buntin. Some are simple, shallow toe claw marks, indicating one or two scrapes from the left and right legs. There are also longer scrapes overprinting one another, resembling a wagon rut.
Additionally, there are semicircular bowl-shaped marks “associated with a step backward” with a second set of scrapes “indicating a counterclockwise or a clockwise turn.” Lastly, there are deep bowl-shaped marks with some shallow toe claw marks, Buntin said.
In terms of behavior, Buntin said these dinosaurs most resemble that of banded plovers, which are small shorebirds.
“Basically, they will dig out a nest display, basically a fake nest, to be able to show a female that, ‘Hey, I’m a strong male. I can dig this. I can make a good, strong place for you to lay your eggs,'” Buntin said. “And then when a female comes to visit, they’ll perform a dance which consists of kind of bowing, bobbing, raising their wings out, creating some scratches around the sides of that display nest.”
The authors emphasized that the site is public, meaning anybody can visit and see the scrapes for themselves compared to other scrap sites, which are on federally protected land.
“It does really make it a very, very unique site, because not only does it have this amazing like type behavior displayed, but it also is so accessible for lots of people to be able to see it and understand better about the behavior of these wonderful animals that we can see now,” Neffra Matthews, study co-author and former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, told ABC News.
Photo by Sen. Van Hollen’s Office via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s legal team asked a judge at a hearing Friday to order that he not be removed from the United States without at least 72 hours notice should he be released on bond from detention in Tennessee.
On Day 3 of a hearing in Maryland on the government’s plans for the longtime Maryland resident this week, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis repeatedly blasted the government for what she said was an insufficient effort to address what exactly will be done to ensure due process for Abrego Garcia if he’s taken into ICE custody following his release.
“We’re asking for 72 hours, 72 hours notice, so that my client can have an opportunity to run to whatever is the appropriate court at that moment to get relief before he’s shipped off to an as-yet-unidentified country and he’s potentially subject to torture or persecution in violation of a court order. That’s all we’re asking,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney told the judge.
The judge did not rule from the bench but said she would do so soon.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution — after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which he denies.
He was brought back to the U.S. last month to face charges in Tennessee of allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S. while he was living in Maryland. He has pleaded not guilty.
Government attorneys have said that, should Abrego Garcia be released on bond, he could be deported again, but Abrego Garcia’s legal team has argued he should be transferred from Tennessee to Maryland to await trial.
Judge Xinis, however, acknowledged the government’s position that there’s no ICE detention facility in Maryland.
The judge also said that restoring the status quo would mean returning Abrego Garcia to Maryland as that’s where “he was arrested in Baltimore without any proof” — but the government argued that his removal process started in Texas when he was taken into ICE custody.
“We may have a disagreement on what the status quo is, Your Honor … with respect, we disagree, but obviously your opinion matters more,” the DOJ attorney said.
Xinis said she doesn’t necessarily think sending Abrego Garcia back to his family in Maryland is the “proper full relief,” but added, “I do know there’s a real question in my mind: Does he get the process to start over through Immigration in Maryland?”
The judge also slammed the lack of detailed answers provided by ICE official Thomas Giles during his testimony Thursday, when he was asked to explain the government’s plans for Abrego Garcia’s deportation.
“The reality is, this has been a process. From Day 1, you have taken the presumption of regularity and you have destroyed it, in my view, because I can’t presume anything to be regular in this highly irregular case,” the judge said at the start of Friday’s hearing when a DOJ attorney wasn’t able to produce Abrego Garcia’s detainer document that she had asked for on Thursday.
The government subsequently produced the document later in the hearing.
Declaring that Giles’ testimony “insults my intelligence,” Judge Xinis said that getting specific information is critical due to the extraordinary situation in which the government has already wrongfully deported Abrego Garcia once.
“So this — we’re not operating on a clean slate at all,” she said. “It seems like this would be the case where you’d want to put a little meat on the bones of exactly how you’re going to do this lawfully and constitutionally.”
DOJ attorneys said the government has yet to decide if Abrego Garcia will be removed to a third country or if proceedings to remove him back to El Salvador will be reopened, and that the decision will be made by a case officer once he comes under ICE’s custody.
When the government said an ICE case officer will decide how to move forward with Abrego Garcia’s deportation process once he’s in ICE custody, the judge expressed doubt about the agency’s process, saying Abrego Garcia’s removal process has been “altered, all depending on” the Trump administration’s interests.
“That is plainly insufficient to tell me what’s going to happen to Mr. Abrego apart from what you would have me believe, which is that we’ve given this no thought, no conversation, no pre-planning, we’re just going to roll the dice on Wednesday or whatever day he’s released, if he’s released to ICE custody. And I’m just telling you, I’m not buying that,” Judge Xinis said.
When a DOJ attorney said that’s not a fair characterization of the government’s position, saying the decision will be made by an ICE officer like all other cases, the judge accepted the answer but remarked that it makes their argument “weaker.”
Judge Xinis also repeatedly pressed the government on what she described as an “inconsistent” policy in its third-country removal process — comparing a DHS memo from March to an email advisory ICE sent out to its officers earlier this month, the latter of which described the possibility of a person being removed from the U.S. without an opportunity to contest it based on fear of torture or persecution.
A government attorney replied that “there is no meaningful difference between what’s set forth in the March 30, 2025, process and the July 9 process,” and that should the third-country removal process take place, Abrego Garcia will be given written notice and an opportunity to contest it.
