The deadly crash killed four people, including a child, after the helicopter struck a radio tower and sparked a large fire in Houston on Sunday, officials said.

The helicopter, which was operating as an air tour flight, had taken off from Ellington Airport in Houston, the NTSB said. It was not equipped with a flight recorder or “black box.”

“Our condolences go to the family and friends of those who were lost,” NTSB investigator Brian Rutt said on Monday, adding the wreckage is a “complex scene” and officials are being meticulous in examining all the evidence available.

As part of the crash investigation, NTSB officials are investigating the pilot, the aircraft and the operating environment, NBC affiliate KPRC-TV reported on Tuesday. NTSB officials also began recovering debris for further examination.

Officials are also gathering additional information such as the helicopter’s maintenance records, flight track data as well as air traffic control communication recordings, surveillance videos and witness statements, KPRC reported.

The crash also damaged some vehicles on the ground but no people were reported injured, Houston police Lt. Jonathan French said.

“This was a horrible tragedy, but obviously it could have been much worse,” French said on Monday.

The NTSB expects to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

Police Chief J. Noe Diaz said at a news conference that four people were on board, including a child, and that there were multiple deaths when the private helicopter crashed.

The Houston Fire Department initially reported the crash took place in the city’s Second Ward neighborhood, where the helicopter appeared to have struck a radio tower before it sparked the fire about 7:54 p.m. local time.

PIO is en route to a reported helicopter crash at Engelke & Ennis. Preliminary info that a helicopter hit a radio tower at about 7:54 pm. No details yet on injuries/fatalities. All info further information will come from the scene. #hounews

— Houston Fire Dept (@HoustonFire) October 21, 2024

At the news conference, fire officials said a blaze spread as far as three blocks before it was stopped. Businesses in the area were closed at the time.

Diaz said it did not appear anyone on the ground was hurt. He described the helicopter as a Robinson R44.

The identities of the people on board have not been released.

Officials said the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration would investigate.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Robert Adolph Boehm, the subject of the humor-filled eulogy, died on Oct. 6 at the age of 74, according to the obituary shared by Robertson Funeral Directors — based in Clarendon, Texas — in a Facebook post that quickly went viral.

The post features the eulogy’s opening lines, which describe Boehm’s death as having occurred “in accordance with his lifelong dedication to his own personal brand of decorum, (he) muttered his last unintelligible and likely unnecessary curse shortly before tripping backward over ‘some stupid m———— thing’ and hitting his head.”

Boehm, a father of four, is remembered for his conveniently timed evasion of the Vietnam draft by becoming a father three times between 1967 and 1972.

“Much later, with Robert possibly concerned about the brewing conflict in Grenada, Charles was born in 1983,” the obituary continued.

According to The Washington Post, the obituary was written by Boehm’s aforementioned youngest child, Charles Boehm.

Boehm’s obituary noted that his lack of military service “was probably for the best,” given that he managed to shoot holes in his own car’s dashboard on two separate occasions. The obituary quipped that his late wife Dianne, who had become accustomed to such mishaps, “may have actually been safer in the jungles of Vietnam the entire time.”

Adding more about his wife, who died earlier this year, the obituary stated: “In February, God finally showed mercy upon Dianne, getting her the hell out of there for some well-earned peace and quiet.”

The tribute to Boehm continued with more colorful anecdotes about his life, noting that he “became a semi-professional truck driver — not to be confused with a professional semi-truck driver.” It also highlighted his fascination with historical weapons (despite his aversion to actual war zones), his collection of harmonicas, and later, his roadshow, which he created to entertain his local community.

“A man of many interests, Robert was not to be entranced by historical weapons alone, but also had a penchant for fashion, frequently seen about town wearing the latest trend in homemade leather moccasins, a wide collection of unconventional hats, and boldly mismatched shirts and pants.”

The obituary wrapped up with some fun-loving final lines.

“We have all done our best to enjoy/weather Robert’s antics up to this point, but he is God’s problem now.”

It also invited attendees to Boehm’s “final farewell tour” with a request to honor him with “outlandish or mismatched outfits, a nod to his eccentric fashion sense.”

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Paxton alleged that Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone-replacement therapy to 21 minors between October 2023 and August for the purpose of transitioning genders. In 2023, Texas enacted a law, Senate Bill 14, banning hormone-replacement therapy and other forms of gender-affirming care for minors.

“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement Thursday. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

The statement issued by Paxton’s office alleged that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” in order to mask “unlawful prescriptions.”

Neither Lau nor her employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, immediately returned requests for comment.

If found to be in violation of the law, Lau could have her medical license revoked and face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Texas Oct 15

Texas county adopts policy to ensure unclaimed bodies are treated with dignity

Abortion Oct 7

Supreme Court nixes Biden administration appeal in Texas emergency abortion case

Death penalty Sep 24

There are 5 executions set over a week's span in the US — that's the most in decades

Paxton’s suit is the first in the nation by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a restriction on transition-related care for minors.

So far, a few attorneys general, including Paxton, have subpoenaed hospitals and practices that provide such care to minors for those patients’ records. Twenty-six states have bans on at least some forms of gender-affirming care for minors, according to LGBTQ think tank Movement Advancement Project.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’ restriction on transition-related care in June 2023, though it was initially blocked by a court following a lawsuit from families and doctors. In September 2023, the Texas Supreme Court allowed the law to take effect pending an appeal from the state, and in June of this year, it vacated and reversed the previous injunction, allowing the law to stand.

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A Texas county that for years gave unclaimed bodies to a local medical school without families’ consent will now cremate or bury those people instead — but only after officials document that they have done all they can to contact relatives.

The revamped rules, approved unanimously Tuesday by the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, are the latest change prompted by an NBC News investigation that revealed how the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth cut up and leased out the remains of hundreds of unclaimed people to other schools, medical technology companies and the Army. The vast majority of the unclaimed bodies — people whose families could not afford funeral arrangements or could not be found — came from Tarrant and Dallas counties, which each saved half a million dollars a year in burial and cremation costs. 

“The county is now in a position to do things ethically, as opposed to before, when we counted on the University of North Texas Health Science Center to handle our business,” Commissioner Alisa Simmons said after Tuesday’s vote. 

Tarrant County had delegated the work of contacting dead people’s families and cremating their remains to the Health Science Center. The new policy brings that responsibility back to the county — at an estimated cost of $675,000 a year.

Officials in Tarrant and Dallas counties had justified sending unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center by saying their use for training and research would help improve medical care for the living. NBC News found repeated failures to contact relatives who were reachable before the bodies were declared unclaimed. 

The Commissioners Court did not publicly discuss the details of the new policy — or its costs — before it voted unanimously to adopt it. Commissioners Court records indicate that the county has $57,760 in a burials account and will have to find additional money to cover the cost of the new policy.

A spokesperson for Judge Tim O’Hare, Tarrant County’s top elected official, said in a statement that Tuesday’s vote was important “to honor the dignity and memory of deceased individuals the County is responsible for handling after they pass away.” 

The policy document directs the county medical examiner’s office, along with funeral homes, medical facilities and nursing homes, to try to locate and notify deceased people’s relatives “using all information and means available” and to detail those efforts in writing. Before cases can be referred to the county as unclaimed bodies, the facilities must either file affidavits with the county clerk saying they cannot identify the people’s next of kin; make at least three attempts on three separate days to contact family members by phone, email, text or door knocks; or determine that the families refuse to accept responsibility or cannot afford to. The policy also adds another layer of oversight by having the county Department of Human Services make its own attempts to contact families.

Only then, and after 11 days have passed since people’s deaths, can the county cremate or bury the bodies.

The revamped rules give preference to cremating unclaimed bodies, which is cheaper than burial. But they allow for burial if deceased people are unidentified, are military veterans or had wills that prohibited cremation or if the families object to cremation. The new policy also requires the county to give “due consideration” of the dead people’s religion.

Tarrant produced the new policy with help from Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington. For years, Shupe urged officials to stop providing unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center, saying it was immoral to have them dissected and studied without consent.

Although the practice is legal in most of the country, including Texas, many body donation programs have halted it, and some states have prohibited it. The changes are part of an evolution in medical ethics that calls on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients. 

In an interview Tuesday, Shupe said she approved of the policy, although she would have preferred burial as a default, rather than cremation, because many religions favor it.

“The county has done a very good job at taking responsibility for its ethical oversight and correcting it here,” she said. 

The NBC News investigation found that the Health Science Center had received about 2,350 unclaimed bodies from Tarrant and Dallas counties in the past five years. The center leased out some of them, charging $1,400 for whole bodies, $649 for heads and $900 for torsos.

Dale Leggett, who died at a Tarrant County hospital in May 2023, was among those whose bodies were given without consent to the Health Science Center and leased to out-of-state companies — a fact his brother, Tim Leggett, learned only two weeks ago after NBC News published the names of 1,800 people whose corpses went to the program.

Tim Leggett said his brother, 71, was private and reclusive, so it was not unusual to go more than a year without hearing from him. Dale did not even like having his photo taken; there is no chance, Leggett said, he would have wanted his body dissected for research. 

While he is still waiting to hear from the Health Science Center about the location of his brother’s body, and he remains angry that he and his sister were left in the dark, Leggett said he was relieved to learn that Tarrant County was implementing a policy to prevent similar failures in the future.

“Nobody,” he said, “should have to learn about the death of a family member from a news article.”

NBC News has now identified at least 21 cases in which families learned weeks, months or years later that relatives had been provided to the Health Science Center. Seven families, including Leggett, found out what happened from NBC News.

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María Guadián, her 86-year-old grandmother, did not expect to see her house filled with her grandchildren. But before she knew it, she was having her arms painted and giving each of them a tight hug. 

Mier’s family is from Texas and Guadián is originally from Juárez, Mexico.

“I feel good because I know that my grandchildren love me very much and I love them very much, so that is a very nice memory that they will have,” Guadián said in Spanish. “When I am gone they will have that.”

The video shared on social media garnered over 66 million views on TikTok. Mier said she never expected her video to receive so much attention. 

“I think it’s just with anyone that you absolutely love and you want to keep a part of them forever with you,” Mier said. “It can be your parents, a sibling.”

Thousands of viewers left comments on Mier’s TikTok video, expressing how it brought them to tears and some saying it inspired them to do the same thing with their own grandparents.

“Does anyone know, if I can borrow my grandma from heaven for a bit?” one user commented. 

“What a beautiful moment you shared with us,” another said.

The video shows Guadián sitting in a chair and looking down at her arms covered with pink paint as Mier carefully brushed it on. 

Guadián stands up as her grandchildren approach her one by one, embracing her in a warm hug.

When they let go, Guadián’s arms were painted onto the backs of their sweaters, giving them a memory of their beloved grandma that they can take wherever they go. 

Mier, 35, said she got the idea to do this when she came across a video of a woman named Anna Kloots from Los Angeles who made sweaters with her parents’ painted handprints for their 50th anniversary. 

Kloots said in her social media post that she had gotten the idea from another person, Jimmi Valdez, who did the same thing with her group of best friends. 

When Mier saw Kloots’ video, she knew she wanted to do the same thing with the only grandparent she had left.

After Mier’s video went viral, she made a follow up video to answer questions about what kind of sweaters and paint she used for this idea. 

She said she even had people asking if they could purchase a sweater from her with her grandma’s handprints, some even saying they no longer had their grandparents with them and would like a hug from Guadián. 

“I don’t know that feeling of not being close to your grandparents because just my family alone, we’re very family oriented,” Mier said. “And for those that have never had that kind of relationship I was like ‘well you know what, my grandma is your grandma.’”

Mier said she and her fiancée then had the idea to make these sweatshirts and sell them online. They are hoping to partner with the Miracle Foundation to donate a portion of their sales to the organization that works with orphanage and foster care systems.

FlightAware shows the Cessna 177RG Cardinal RG took off from Dallas Executive Airport at 9:30 a.m. and made multiple turns over North Texas before attempting to land.

The pilot of the plane, registered to Redwing Aviation LLC in San Antonio, reported issues with its landing gear and burned off fuel before attempting to touch down.

“We circled for an hour troubleshooting systems,” said Ryan Short with Red Wing Aerial Photography who took control of the plane when the landing gear wouldn’t come down. “We had a pretty good idea what might be wrong.”

Texas Sky Ranger was there as the single-engine aircraft circled and came in to land at 11:18 a.m.

Two of the three wheels under the aircraft collapsed as they came into contact with the runway.

“It’s not my first rodeo, I’ve had a lot of experiences flying aircraft, and, you know, sometimes you just have to recognize you’re in the situation and execute the best you can and hope things turn out well,” said Short.

Short and the other man who was piloting the aircraft when they experienced the landing gear issues immediately got out to assess the damage as emergency crews met them.

No one was injured.

A Texas state legislator is vowing to ban the use of unclaimed bodies for research in response to an NBC News investigation that found a local medical program obtained and studied hundreds of human specimens without families’ permission.

Sen. Tan Parker, a Republican whose district includes portions of Dallas and Tarrant counties, said he would introduce a bill in the legislative session in January to prohibit the use of people’s bodies unless they or their survivors give full consent.

Parker has sought in the past to crack down on the largely unregulated body broker industry. Still, he said he had no idea before seeing NBC News’ investigation that the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center had made money off of unclaimed bodies by dissecting them and leasing the parts to for-profit medical companies and other institutions, including the Army. Some of the people whose remains were used this way had families who were searching for them.

“I was outraged and completely just disgusted to see what had been occurring,” said Parker, noting that he fully supports the use of bodies to advance medicine, but only when the dead or their families give permission. “Human life is sacred and needs to always be protected, and that is a core principle to me.”

The Health Science Center did not comment on Parker’s plans for legislation. In a statement Thursday, university spokesperson Andy North said the center “fell short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.”

A half-century ago, U.S. medical schools routinely used unclaimed bodies for research and training, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. But some states — and many body-donation programs — have halted the practice to reflect changes in medical ethics that demand doctors and scientists handle bodies with the same respect shown to living patients.

Officials in North Texas justified sending unclaimed bodies — those without families who could afford to make funeral arrangements or whose families could not be reached — to the Health Science Center by saying the deals saved local governments on burial and cremation costs, helped train physicians and aided lifesaving research. However, NBC News found repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties and by the Health Science Center to contact relatives who were reachable before declaring the bodies unclaimed.

The reporting prompted immediate changes, along with public outrage and shocked responses from federal, state and local government officials. The Health Science Center suspended its body-donation program, fired the officials who led it and said it would stop accepting unclaimed bodies. Some medical device and research companies, as well as the Army, said they were rethinking their arrangements with the center and planned to examine their own internal policies to ensure they don’t use unclaimed bodies in the future.

Alisa Simmons, a member of the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, said she will push the board to adopt new policies to ensure the ethical and respectful treatment of the unclaimed dead. Dallas County officials have said moving forward they won’t provide unclaimed bodies for research unless survivors choose to do so.

For some families, those promises have helped soothe their pain, but they said they remain traumatized by what happened to their dead relatives.

“It infuriates me, the total disrespect,” said Brenda Cloud, sister of Victor Honey.

Honey, 58, a homeless Army veteran with mental illness, was dissected and leased to two medical companies and the Army after his death in 2022. His family members did not know until NBC News informed them this spring. In June, they buried Honey’s cremated remains at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery, among thousands of other military service members.

Cloud said she feels some relief knowing that the Health Science Center has stopped obtaining unclaimed bodies, but she wants more to be done to prevent others from going through what her family endured.

“Now that people have an awareness of what’s going on, we can look at laws being changed,” Cloud said. “Still, there is no law, nothing, that will fix what happened.”

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which helped arrange Honey’s June burial, expressed sympathy for what happened to him.

“We were extremely saddened to hear of his and his family’s story,” Terrence Hayes, a VA spokesperson, said in a statement. “Mr. Honey, like all Veterans who have served our nation with courage and honor, deserved a dignified burial at the time of his passing.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who hosts MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” and has previously condemned failures by Mississippi officials to notify families before declaring bodies unclaimed, said the Health Science Center’s activities were “a civil rights issue” that deserved government intervention.

“What you’re doing is robbing their families and loved ones and the person of their human dignity and of their rights to make a decision over their loved ones,” Sharpton said in an interview.

Some officials and medical experts reacted to NBC News’ findings by calling for federal changes. Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies, said he hoped Congress would take action.

“This should not occur anywhere within the United States,” Champney said.

Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington who for years tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Tarrant County officials from providing unclaimed bodies to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, said her state now has an opportunity to set a new national standard.

“This isn’t just a good step forward for Texas, but it could be a model for other medical schools, other counties, other states,” Shupe said, referring to Parker’s promise to end the use of unclaimed bodies.

Louisa Harvey, whose fiancé, Michael Coleman, 43, was sent to the Health Science Center even as she reported him missing and searched for him, said she was glad to see the cascade of changes and promises of reforms.

“There’s no justice for Michael or the families that have already been affected, but it’s a good thing if it can keep it from happening to anyone else,” Harvey said.

Harvey said she wanted more from the Health Science Center, whose officials apologized for the program’s failures in a statement posted to its website but hadn’t spoken to Coleman’s or Honey’s loved ones.

“That sounds like something you say just because you got caught,” Harvey said of the center’s statement.

After NBC News shared Harvey’s comments, North, the Health Science Center spokesperson, said officials had been “working to connect with families to extend our deepest apologies.”

In the meantime, Harvey said she’s been haunted by nightmares for months and still has no confidence that the box on her nightstand actually contains Coleman’s ashes.

“This is something,” she said, “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

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The child, who was not named by authorities, posted “a hoax threat to social media with the intent of causing alarm or panic,” the Kerrville Police Department said in a statement.

The department said it was aware of social media posts threatening to carry out a shooting at Hal Peterson Middle School on Tuesday and “immediately initiated a thorough investigation into these threats.”

School resource officers, working with district officials, began investigating and found that the 10-year-old made the social media posts as a hoax.

Police said “no valid threat to Hal Peterson Middle School existed.”

The school said in a Facebook post that counselors had been in classes over the last week to introduce the “See Something Say Something” campaign, an initiative that encourages people to report suspicious activity.

Kerrville police said that making a school shooting threat is a felony offense and every threat will be taken seriously. Law enforcement agencies across the country have put out similar warnings with one sheriff’s office in Volusia County, Florida, releasing the mugshots and “perp walk” videos of arrested students.

“The legal consequences for people who make threats, including juveniles, can be severe and permanent,” Kerrville police said. “We strongly urge parents to speak with their children about the seriousness of making threats, or posting information to social media that reference violence to our schools. Remind your children that school threats are a felony and will have serious consequences.”

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Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.

A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.

In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.

Honey, who died in September 2022, is one of about 2,350 people whose unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.

For months as NBC News reported this article, Health Science Center officials defended their practices, arguing that using unclaimed bodies was essential for training future doctors. But on Friday, after reporters shared detailed findings of this investigation, the center announced it was immediately suspending its body donation program and firing the officials who led it. The center said it was also hiring a consulting firm to investigate the program’s operations.

“As a result of the information brought to light through your inquiries, it has become clear that failures existed in the management and oversight of The University of North Texas Health Science Center’s Willed Body Program,” the statement said. “The program has fallen short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.”

For more on this story, watch NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. CT. 

Last year, NBC News revealed in its “Lost Rites” investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones’ deaths before burying them in pauper’s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.

Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished. 

On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”

Do you have a story to share about the use of unclaimed bodies for research? Contact us.

Proponents say using unclaimed bodies transforms a tragic situation into one of hope and service, providing a steady supply of human specimens needed to educate doctors and advance medical research. But for families who later discover their missing relatives were dissected and studied, the news is haunting, compounding their grief and depriving them of the opportunity to mourn.

“The county and the medical school are doing this because it saves them money, but that doesn’t make it right,” said Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies. “Since these individuals did not consent, they should not be used in any form or fashion.”

A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.

Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.

An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.

Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.

In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.

Before the Health Science Center announced it was suspending the program, officials in the two counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their unclaimed body agreements in light of the reporters’ findings. 

Commissioners in Dallas County recently postponed a vote on whether to extend their contract. The top elected official in Tarrant County, Judge Tim O’Hare — who voted to renew the county’s agreement with the center in January — said he planned to explore legal options “to end any and all immoral, unethical, and irresponsible practices stemming from this program.”

“No individual’s remains should be used for medical research, nor sold for profit, without their pre-death consent, or the consent of their next of kin,” O’Hare’s office said. “The idea that families may be unaware that their loved ones’ remains are being used for research without consent is disturbing, to say the least.” 

NBC News also shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Science Center to supply human specimens. Ten said they did not know the center had provided them with unclaimed bodies. Some, including Medtronic, said they had internal policies requiring consent from the deceased or their legal surrogate.

DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson company, said it had paused its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received body parts from four unclaimed people. And Boston Scientific, whose company Relievant Medsystems used the torsos of more than two dozen unclaimed bodies for training on a surgical tool, said it was reviewing its transactions with the center, adding that it had believed the program obtained consent from donors or families.

“We empathize with the families who were not reached as part of this process,” the company said.

The Army said it, too, was examining its reliance on the center and planned to review and clarify internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. Under federal contracts totaling about $345,000, the center has provided the Army with dozens of whole bodies, heads and skull bones since 2021 — including at least 21 unclaimed bodies. An Army spokesperson said officials had not considered the possibility that the program hadn’t gotten consent from donors or their families.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission, which regulates body donation programs in the state, is conducting a review of its own. In April, the agency issued a moratorium on out-of-state shipments while it studies a range of issues, including the use of unclaimed bodies by the Health Science Center.

In the case of Victor Honey, it shouldn’t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find survivors: His son shares his father’s first and last name and lives in the Dallas area. Family members are outraged that no one from the county or the Health Science Center informed them of Honey’s death, much less sought permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training.

It wasn’t until a year and a half after he died that his relatives finally learned that news — from a chance encounter with a stranger struck by the similarity of the father’s and son’s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.

“It’s like a hole in your soul that can never be filled,” said Brenda Cloud, one of Honey’s sisters. “We feel violated.”

Two years before Honey’s death, Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside a Fort Worth convenience store. County officials failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body. It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.

Five months passed before his family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ​​When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said he was told by the Health Science Center that he’d have to wait — the program was not done using the body.

Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.

“Now that the family has come forward,” he said, “you mean to tell me we can’t have him?”

Instead, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to eventually receive his brother’s ashes. A year and a half later — after the body had been leased out a second time, to a Texas dental school — the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald’s Arkansas home containing his brother’s remains. He also received a letter from Claudia Yellott, then the manager of UNT’s body donation program.

“UNT Health Science Center and our students value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,” Yellott wrote.

As of Friday, Yellott’s photo and bio were missing from the Health Science Center website, along with those of Rustin Reeves, the longtime director of the center’s anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that she had been terminated and declined to comment further. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center declined to specify who was fired. 

The Fitzgeralds’ ordeal was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner had feared in 2018, when Yellott and Reeves pitched their plan to receive the county’s unclaimed dead.

They described it as a win for everyone: The county would save on burial costs and the center would, as Yellott phrased it, obtain “valuable material” needed to educate future physicians.

The commissioners were elated at the prospect of saving up to a half-million dollars a year. But one, Andy Nguyen, questioned the morality of dissecting bodies of people with no family to consent and raised the possibility of survivors coming forward later, horrified to learn how their relatives were treated.

“Just because they don’t have any next of kin doesn’t mean they have no voice,” Nguyen said.

After the Health Science Center pledged to handle each body with dignity, all five commissioners voted to approve the agreement. A little over a year later, Dallas County struck a similar deal, with one major difference: While Tarrant County families who couldn’t afford to make funeral arrangements were given an option to donate their relatives’ bodies to the center, Dallas County gave survivors no choice.

Soon, a steady stream of bodies began to flow to the center. The program went from receiving 439 bodies in the 2019 fiscal year to nearly 1,400 in 2021 — about a third of them unclaimed dead from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Science Center’s body storage facilities and laboratories.

The supply of unclaimed dead helped bring in about $2.5 million a year from outside groups, according to financial records. Many of those payments came from medical device makers that spent tens of thousands of dollars to use the center-run laboratory space, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians on how to use their products — a revenue stream made possible by the school’s robust supply of “cadaveric specimens.”

That economic engine has now stalled; the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills lab in response to NBC News’ findings. In its statement, the center said it “is committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective actions to maintain public trust.”

The partnerships with Dallas and Tarrant counties, which drew little attention when they were adopted, quietly rippled through the community of professionals who work with the dead and dying in North Texas.

Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a Tarrant County hospice provider in late 2021 when a chaplain made a comment that rocked her.

“Oh, poor Mr. Smith,” Shupe recalled the chaplain saying. “He doesn’t have long, and then it’s off to the medical school.”

Her shock led Shupe to spend months studying the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas. As she investigated, she pondered a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they’re alive, but should that right die with them?

No, she ultimately concluded, it should not.

Shupe herself has signed up to give her body to the Health Science Center when she dies, in part to underscore that she doesn’t oppose body donation. But she emphasized that it was her choice.

“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” she said.

Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.

Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”

Experts said the Health Science Center appeared to be an outlier in terms of the number of unclaimed bodies it used. No national data exists on this issue, so NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. Each of the 44 that answered said they don’t use unclaimed bodies — and some condemned doing so.

Joy Balta, an anatomist who runs a body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University, chaired the committee that wrote the anatomy association’s new guidelines. He said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent now embraced by most experts in his field.

One reason that bodies should come only from consenting donors, Balta and others note: Some religions have strict views about how the dead should be treated.

“We don’t know if the individual is completely against their body being donated, and we can’t just disregard that,” Balta said.

Since 2021, dozens of entities have received unclaimed bodies from the Health Science Center — including some, like the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, that explicitly prohibit the practice on ethical grounds. 

The Little Rock-based school received shipments of skull bones and heads in 2023 and 2024 that included parts harvested from unclaimed bodies, records show. Leslie Taylor, a University of Arkansas medical school spokesperson, said because the UNT office that provided specimens is called the Willed Body Program, officials “believed they came from donors who willed their remains for education and study.”

Taylor said the school would adopt procedures to ensure it receives bodies only from people who have given explicit permission.

Before abruptly suspending the program last week, the Health Science Center had vigorously defended its practices. 

“An unclaimed individual is incapable of consenting to any process after death, which includes burial, donation, cremation, eco-burials or any other use of the body,” the center had said in a statement on Aug. 16. “If a relative is not located or does not claim the remains, a decision must still be made.”

Shupe argued that it’s problematic for a public medical school to benefit from the deaths of the “very poor” in its community. She has now embarked on a campaign to end the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas and nationally.

After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color. 

“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”

All Victor Honey’s family has to go by are faded memories, a handful of keepsakes, online snapshots and a trail of court records spanning eight states and Washington, D.C. These clues tell a disjointed story of an Army veteran tormented by paranoid delusions who repeatedly rejected help as he slid into homelessness and whose body went unclaimed, despite having a family who cared deeply for him.

His two sisters remember Honey teaching them math, making them laugh, shielding them from bullies and helping raise them when their parents divorced and moved the family from Mississippi to Cleveland in the 1970s. He was meticulous, hardworking, well-dressed — and in search of a calling.

After starting college, Honey joined the Army in late 1984 and reported to Texas’ Fort Hood, where he trained as a medic and, at a military club, danced with a soon-to-be Air Force enlistee named Kimberly. They married not long after and had a daughter. A son followed.

The young family lived at the base until 1988, when Honey’s enlistment ended. He then joined the Army Reserves in Dallas and was called up to support the first Gulf War. Though he didn’t want to go, he spent four months in Germany, so upset about the deployment that he rarely left his base. He remained angry after he returned home.

Kimberly Patman said Honey had multiple affairs, leading them to separate in 1992, which threw him into a deep depression. He sought mental health services from a local Department of Veterans Affairs facility and was given antipsychotic medication that he quit after a month, saying he was allergic.

From there, his life unraveled.

In 1995, Honey was arrested in Dallas for trespassing. A doctor at the jail called Patman and said he’d had some kind of breakdown. She called his father in Cleveland, who brought him home.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but refused to take the medication that eased his delusional thoughts. He was convinced people were coming after him, barricaded himself in his room and became a compulsive hoarder, filing papers in a leather satchel.

He was off his medications in early 1997 when he stole a car from a dealership and robbed three banks in three states — each time handing a teller a note demanding money. He had no weapon. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.

After he was released, Honey tried living in Cleveland, but abruptly left.

“He just disappeared,” Patman said. “They didn’t know where he was. We didn’t know where he was. And it was like that for years.”

He eventually drifted to Washington, where he wound up on the streets. He filed more than a dozen lawsuits, claiming an array of grievances. He posted a video to YouTube in which he showed his broken teeth and suggested the police were responsible. “This is a horrendous, horrendous life here in Washington,” he told the camera.

He landed in Dallas again in late 2018. He was arrested multiple times for fare evasion and filing a false police report, and appeared at city council meetings claiming he’d been wrongfully charged. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting an emergency room nurse who was attempting to provide him care.

And then came the phone call that brought the family together again.

In early 2022, a caseworker at a Dallas-area hospital contacted Honey’s daughter, Victoria, in Montgomery, Alabama, to say he was in intensive care and might not survive, the family said. Patman and Victoria rushed to his side and were told his kidneys were failing.

“We’re here, the kids are here, we love you,” Patman told Honey. In response, he opened his eyes and asked, “Why did you divorce me?” They ended up laughing about it.

Brenda Cloud, his sister, called from Cleveland. “I would just talk to him and remind him of growing up and of his children, and he had a lot to fight for,” she said.

Honey’s condition improved, but he ignored advice to go to a nursing home and instead checked himself out. Several weeks later, he got on the phone with his namesake son. They’d often gone years without talking, but the son said he knew his father loved him.

That was Victor Carl Honey’s last contact with his family.

On Sept. 19, 2022, Honey was discovered semiconscious in a wheelchair at a downtown Dallas light rail station and taken to Baylor University Medical Center. He died early the next morning. He was 58.

After a Baylor social worker was unable to find his family, Honey’s body was transported to the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, where an investigator was assigned to find next of kin.

The county investigator sought information from police and area hospitals but was unable to locate relatives. She then turned to the internet, where she found numbers for Patman, Honey’s brother in Ohio, his stepmother and his late father, but she reported they were disconnected. On Oct. 17, 2022, the investigator wrote that her search was complete and no family was found. The medical examiner’s office deemed Honey’s body unclaimed.

That same day, Honey was delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where he was placed in a freezer, awaiting assignment.

One of the most solemn duties of local government is notifying families when someone dies. Though the world, in so many ways, has never been more connected, finding survivors still can be difficult in an era of growing homelessness and increasingly fractured families. 

Death investigators at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office follow a detailed checklist: They reach out to area hospitals to seek emergency contact information, search missing person reports, and comb public records databases for possible phone numbers. They also call neighbors and homeless shelters. If no family is found, they must sign an affidavit stating they did all they could.

In Tarrant County, officials delegated the primary responsibility for contacting next of kin to the Health Science Center, which said it takes similar steps.

But these efforts repeatedly fell short.

For two and a half years, Fran Moore of Lodi, New York, didn’t know what happened to her 79-year-old father, Carl Yenner. She cried when an NBC News reporter notified her in February that he had died at a Dallas hospital in May 2021 and his body had been sent to the Health Science Center.

Moore said she and her brother had struggled to stay in touch with their father across the miles. After not hearing from him, her brother filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls, about two hours from Dallas, where Yenner had lived. They still don’t know how he wound up in Dallas, how he died or why nobody contacted them. A Dallas County worker signed a form in June 2021 stating she had completed an exhaustive search for possible relatives.

But after spotting Yenner’s name on a list of unclaimed bodies provided by Dallas County, NBC News quickly identified Moore and her brother as Yenner’s children and found working phone numbers for each of them.

“If you could find us,” Moore said, “why didn’t they?”

Another question left unanswered: Given that Yenner was an Army veteran and entitled to federal burial benefits, what was the economic argument for Dallas County to send his body to the Health Science Center? At least 32 unclaimed veterans, including Honey, have been given to the program since 2020, records show.

After the center was done with Yenner’s body, it was cremated and interred among fellow service members at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Moore said she’s heartbroken she couldn’t bury him with the rest of his family in New Jersey.

“To not have any kind of funeral for him,” she said, “for his family to come see him to say goodbye?”

Without commenting on specific cases, Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin offered condolences to families whose relatives were used by the program. He said his staff works hard to locate family members and treats bodies with dignity. He didn’t address the use of unclaimed veterans.

In January, in an attempt to improve its efforts to find survivors in Tarrant County, the Health Science Center hired a company called The Voice After Life, whose mission is to help governments locate families of the unclaimed. The center said it has found families in about 80% of cases since then; officials did not know the previous success rate.

In a statement issued weeks before announcing it was suspending the program, the center said it “seeks to understand and honor the wishes of the family and deceased.”

It did not, however, honor the wishes of Michael Dewayne Coleman’s relatives. 

Coleman, 43, died alone on Oct. 21, 2023, in a Dallas hospital after possibly being hit by a car. An investigator for the medical examiner signed off on his case file, saying “all reasonable efforts” had been made to find next of kin.

But his relatives should have been easy to reach. More than a week before his death, his fiancée, Louisa Harvey, had filed a missing person report with the Dallas Police Department after he failed to return from a night out with friends, not knowing he was already languishing in a hospital. She spent months searching for him, alongside two of Coleman’s sisters. She printed missing person posters and canvassed neighborhoods near their home.

She said she called the detective assigned to the missing person case almost every day, eventually suspecting that finding Coleman wasn’t a priority because of his criminal record, which included illegal drug use and two domestic violence convictions.

Harvey finally learned of his death in March, after the Dallas County medical examiner listed him as an unclaimed body in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a free federal database meant to connect missing person reports with reports of unclaimed bodies. By the time Harvey found the posting online, the medical examiner had sent Coleman’s body to the Health Science Center.

His family could have learned of his death months earlier if the police detective assigned to find Coleman had listed him as a missing person in NamUs, but records show he never did. In response to questions from NBC News, a Dallas Police spokesperson said the department had opened an internal investigation into the detective’s handling of the case and would implement a policy change to prevent similar mistakes. 

Harvey couldn’t believe Coleman’s body had been donated without the family’s consent — or his. Last year, while filling out an application for a state ID, she said, Coleman had made clear he didn’t want his organs donated because of his distrust of the medical system; she doubts he would have wanted to donate his whole body.

But when Harvey and one of Coleman’s sisters, Shea Coleman, repeatedly asked the medical examiner and the Health Science Center to release his body — or at least to let them view it — they were told no. In June, a worker at the medical examiner’s office wrote in case notes that she spoke to Yellott, the manager of UNT’s body donation program, who told her Coleman was slated to be used in a longer-term course and that his family could receive his remains when the center was finished with him.

In 12 to 24 months.

In August, after NBC News inquired about his case, a Health Science Center official told reporters that Coleman’s body would be cremated and returned to the family much sooner — an abrupt reversal that the center attributed to the Texas Funeral Service Commission’s temporary ban on out-of-state body shipments. Ten days later, the medical examiner called Harvey to let her know Coleman’s ashes were ready to be picked up.

The center’s refusal to let her see her fiancé’s body has made it harder to grieve, Harvey said.

“I’m lying awake every night thinking, ‘Is that my Michael?’” she said. “‘Did he actually die?’”

After Victor Honey’s body arrived at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the harvesting began.

Depending on how they were to be used, bodies were either frozen or embalmed. Some were left whole and set aside to train students. Others, like Honey’s, were dissected with scalpels and bone saws, to be distributed on the open market.

In November 2022, Honey’s right leg was used in a training at the center paid for by Getinge, a Swedish medical technology company that makes instruments for use in a surgical procedure called endoscopic vein harvest.

In January 2023, a week after the medical examiner’s office reported that Honey was eligible for a veteran’s burial, bones from his skull were shipped to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston — where Honey had been ordered to report before his Gulf War deployment more than three decades earlier.

In May 2023, the Health Science Center shipped Honey’s torso to Pittsburgh, where the training company National Bioskills Laboratories provided it to a medical product company renting its facilities to teach doctors a pain-relief procedure called spinal cord stimulation.

NBC News informed Getinge, the Army and National Bioskills about the center’s regular use of unclaimed bodies and Honey’s family not providing consent.

Dr. Douglas Hampers, National Bioskills’ CEO and an orthopedic surgeon, said he was disturbed to learn his company has received unclaimed bodies and expressed sympathy for Honey’s family.

While human specimens are crucial for medical advances, Hampers said bodies should not be used without consent. He said his company would ensure that it no longer accepted unclaimed bodies and would adopt policies to make certain future specimens were donated with families’ permission.

“I don’t think you have to violate a family’s rights in order to train physicians,” he said.

A Getinge spokesperson emailed a statement saying only that the company regularly reviews its policies and operations, “including what we expect from our suppliers.”

In a statement, the Army said that if Honey’s remains were procured legally, the use of his body complied with the service’s current policies.

In July 2023, after Honey’s torso had been returned to the Health Science Center, his remains were cremated and later his ashes were brought to the Dallas County medical examiner.

And there they sat, with no one to claim them. Months passed.

In late April, Honey’s son, Victor, was boxing cans at the Dallas food bank where he volunteered when a woman approached him. She’d overheard someone calling out his name. “Do you know someone else named Victor Honey?” she asked him.

The woman said she knew his father when they both stayed at a downtown homeless shelter and had heard he died. Victor didn’t want to believe it. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the next morning, he called his mother and told her what he’d heard. She cried out and burst into tears.

An internet search led Victor to the medical examiner’s office, which confirmed the details of his father’s death and later told him the remains were available to be picked up.

About the same time, NBC News had found Honey’s name on a list of people whose unclaimed bodies were obtained by the Health Science Center. Using public records, a reporter tracked down Patman, Honey’s ex-wife, and sent her a message on Facebook. She responded immediately.

On a call, the reporter broke the news of how Honey’s body was used.

His family was appalled. Patman said she would have argued against Honey being cut apart and studied, noting that he once told her that he didn’t want to be an organ donor. Victor, though, said he might have been open to donating his father’s body for medical research.

“But y’all should have asked us about it,” he said. “They just sent his body parts away.”

When the family gathered in early June to finally lay Honey to rest, many expressed remorse about not being able to help him. They were frustrated to have no say in what happened to his body. And they said they hoped sharing his story would help spare others from similar anguish.

“Victor had a big, strong family,” Patman told family members. “And now we are going to speak for him.”

On a muggy Monday morning, a couple dozen of Honey’s relatives — nieces and nephews, siblings and cousins, Patman and their children — gathered in a pavilion at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery for the farewell they had long been denied.

A recording of taps played. A soldier knelt in front of Honey’s daughter, Victoria, and handed her a folded U.S. flag “as a symbol of our appreciation of your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

After the funeral, Honey’s relatives made their way to Section 40, Grave No. 464, where a crew dug a hole and placed the urn in the ground. They installed a temporary marker that soon would be replaced by a white granite headstone standing among rows of thousands.

Brenda Cloud, Honey’s sister, is furious over what transpired in the 622 days between her brother’s death and his burial. And she wants answers for the others whose bodies were cut up and studied without consent.

“Whether they had family or not,” she said, “every person deserves to have that dignity.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. From 2023, NBC News’ “Lost Rites” investigation:

• After a mother in Jackson, Mississippi, reported her son missing, police kept the truth from her for months.
• ‘They just threw him away’: Another Mississippi man was buried without his family’s knowledge.
• America’s patchwork death notification system routinely leaves families in the dark.
• The Department of Justice took action after a Mississippi coroner buried men without notifying their families.
• The Jackson Police Department adopted a next-of-kin notification policy following NBC News’ reporting.

“It happened so fast that we didn’t have time to think about what to do — we just reacted,” Amy Simmons, the principal of Cunningham Elementary School in Wichita Falls, Texas, tells TODAY.com.

On Aug. 28, Simmons received a text message from a teacher informing her that Paige Lockstedt, a pregnant teacher’s aid, wasn’t feeling well, Simmons explained in a video posted to the Facebook page of Wichita Falls school district. Simmons then received a phone call from Lockstedt, who was in the bathroom: Her water had just broken.

Simmons tells TODAY.com that she initiated an emergency drill that alerts staff and students to stay inside their classrooms. According to the video, special education teacher Ashley Strain and others helped Lockstedt into a wheelchair and pushed her toward the building entrance while the school nurse called 911.

“She said, ‘Oh! She’s coming!’ Strain recalled in the video. “And I went into the bathroom and I caught a baby in my hands.”

The three women clustered inside the bathroom for the delivery while Paige, who was 30 weeks pregnant, stood over the toilet, according to Strain.

“I dove underneath her and caught the baby in my hands,” Strain tells TODAY.com.

Baby Isabella was born weighing two pounds, nine ounces. Simmons cranked paper towels out of the bathroom dispenser to wrap Isabella while Strain rubbed her chest and wiped her face off.

“She opened her beautiful little eyes and looked at us,” says Strain.

Initially, Isabella wasn’t crying, which concerned the women. “Once we saw her chest moving, we knew it would be OK,” says Strain.

Simmons tells TODAY.com that approximately ten minutes passed from when Lockstedt’s water broke and she was loaded into an ambulance.

Students didn’t know a teacher had given birth on campus until later that night, says Simmons.

While Isabella is still in the hospital until she gains more weight, says Simmons, a few days after the birth, Lockstedt returned to Cunningham Elementary School to eat lunch with her staff.

A sign labeled “Labor and Delivery” now hangs on the door of the bathroom where Lockstedt gave birth.

“We have four other staff members who are pregnant and one thought it would be funny to make the sign,” says Simmons. “She asked to reserve the room on her due date.”

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from Today:

• Kate Middleton announces in new video she’s completed chemo: ‘What a relief’
• Selena Gomez reveals that she cannot carry a pregnancy
• Demi Moore, about to turn 62, reveals philosophy on aging: ‘Most exciting time of my life’

A district judge approved a motion by the Dallas County District Attorney’s office to dismiss the case against Spencer, 59, who was initially convicted in 1987 of murder in the carjacking and death of Jeffrey Young.

“This day has been a long time coming. I am relieved and humbled to help correct this injustice,” said Dallas County Criminal District Attorney John Creuzot.

Spencer, who has maintained his innocence, saw his 1987 conviction later overturned. In 1988, he was tried again, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the aggravated robbery of Young.

“Benjamine Spencer is actually innocent; there exists no credible or physical evidence that he was in any way involved in this crime,” said Assistant District Attorney Cynthia Garza, who leads the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit.

Prosecution witnesses, including a jailhouse informant seeking leniency, gave false testimony, Creuzot said. He added that prosecutors at the time also failed to provide the defense with evidence that would have excluded Spencer from the crime, including fingerprints.

Spencer was released on bond in 2021 after the district attorney’s office found that his constitutional rights were violated and that he did not receive a fair trial due to false witness testimony and the withholding of evidence.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction earlier this year, sending the case back to Dallas County.

Alan Ledbetter, the jury foreman who helped convict and sentence Spencer in the 1988 trial, said he feels deceived.

“Deceit, and overwhelmed at how difficult it is to right a wrong in our judicial system,” said Ledbetter.

Ledbetter says he began to change his mind about Spencer’s guilt when he was informed about the new information in the early 2000s.

Cheryl Wattley, a professor at UNT Dallas School of Law and founder of the Joyce Ann Brown Innocence Clinic, represented Spencer for 23 years.

“When you get to stand beside a man who’s had that journey and you get to know that you had just a little piece, a little part in walking him through to the day of celebration, it helps to give meaning to your life,” said Wattley.

On Thursday night, Spencer, his wife, his attorneys, law students, and Ledbetter attended a reception at the UNT Dallas School of Law to celebrate the exoneration.

Spencer is among the top 60 longest-serving inmates to be declared innocent of the crime, according to data kept by the National Registry of Exonerations.

Young’s murder remains unsolved.

Temperatures hovered near the triple digits and the heat index made it feel even hotter Thursday, the day the driver for the Sealy Independent School District is accused of deliberately going slow on the bus route, attorney Harry Daniels said Tuesday.

The only air circulation on the bus was a fan the driver had for herself, said Daniels, who represents the parent of two of the at least 30 students he says were riding the bus.

“She needs to be terminated,” he said of the driver.

The school district in Sealy, which is about 55 miles west of Houston, declined to detail the driver’s employment status and denied that she was driving slowly to punish students.

“The driver was driving a speed that they felt was safe on a dirt road,” Sealy Independent School District Superintendent Bryan Hallmark said.

Students can be heard complaining about the heat inside the bus in a video Daniels provided to NBC News. It also showed the driver stopping the bus and forcing the children to put their windows up.

Daniels said that it took the bus 30 minutes to drive 3 miles, but that it should have only taken about 6 minutes. He said he didn’t know why the driver was driving slowly or why she made the students put their windows up.

The video indicates the driver may have been upset that some students had place their hands out of the windows.

“I understand in certain positions, children can be very hard and difficult to deal with, but at the same time, you don’t subject them to some type of corporal punishment because they are misbehaving,” Daniels said. “Your job is to make sure they get home safe. Your job is not to inflict excessive heat to the element and drive a bus very slow — like a torture.”

The school superintendent on Tuesday said the district had received reports about a lack of air conditioning on many buses. He said that on Thursday a bus driver required a student who was sticking his head out the window to put the window up. During the incident, the driver stopped the bus for two minutes and 20 seconds, Hallmark said.

During the route, roof hatches and windows were open, Hallmark said.

The superintendent said the district had made adjustments to the bus route to reduce the time on dirt roads and to get students home quicker.

 “We take these concerns very seriously,” Hallmark said. “The reality is, it does get hot on our busses down here, especially in August. Thankfully, now we’re experiencing cooler temperatures.”

Hallmark said he was not aware of any reports or investigation into the incident by district police, and municipal police said any case involving the bus or schools fell outside its jurisdiction.

In a 70-second video provided by Daniels, the driver stops and tells students to put up the windows because, “you shouldn’t have your hands out the window,” according to the video.

Many of the bus riders can be heard complaining loudly about the heat.

“It’s so hot, bro,” one student says.

Another student says, “Miss, it’s hot back here. These children need to breathe, you need to get us home.”

The video ends with a student yelling, “It’s not fair,” while another shouts: “Please just take us home.”

Daniels said he represents the mother of two children, a 12-year-old boy and a 11-year-old girl, who were on the bus. In a video of the siblings arriving home, the 11-year-old girl, who has asthma, barges in the front door and exclaims, “We finally feel the air!”

Her brother walks in behind her without a shirt on. “My shirt got too wet,” he says. 

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• Trump indicted again in election interference case following Supreme Court immunity ruling
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According to a statement from Gateway Church, Executive Pastor Kemtal Glasgow was asked to step down and focus on his family after an unspecified incident.

“It recently came to light that Kemtal Glasgow had a moral failure so we’ve asked him to step down as a pastor at Gateway and devote time to his marriage and family,” the church said in a statement on Thursday. “Although his employment is ending, we are devoted to still caring for Kemtal and his family.”

According to a cached version of Glasgow’s biography published on the church’s website last month, he was an executive pastor who oversaw all Gateway campuses and gathering locations. At the time of this writing, the pastor’s biography had been removed from the webpage.

The church did not elaborate on Glasgow’s “moral failure” but did say it had nothing to do with the recent departure of founder and longtime senior pastor Robert Morris, who resigned his position in June after a woman said he sexually abused her from 1982 to 1987 beginning when she was 12 years old.

The megachurch initially said Morris was resigning due to “an inappropriate relationship” but later apologized for the mischaracterization and clarified that they believe the abuse suffered by the woman “was, in fact, sexual abuse of a child.”

Last month, the church reached an agreement with Morris’s son, James, and his wife, Bridgette, that the couple would step down from their positions in the church. James Morris had been tapped to take over Gateway Church in 2025.

“At Gateway, it’s our deepest desire for every staff member to lead a life of integrity, both in their personal and professional lives,” the church said. “We are praying for God’s grace and love to be with Kemtal and his family during this time.”

The resignation is the latest in a string of departures of North Texas church leaders, all attributed to a vague “moral failure.”

In July, Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco terminated Tony Cammarota after he “confessed to church leadership of a moral failure,” and Josiah Anthony, the lead pastor at Cross Timbers Church in Argyle, resigned after the church said multiple women came forward accusing him of sending them sexually explicit messages via text and on social media.

GATEWAY CHURCH

Crime and Courts Jun 22

Robert Morris warned sex abuse accuser she could be prosecuted for seeking compensation, emails show

Union representatives from Teamsters Local 767 shared images and a video on social media Saturday, claiming a Longview employee was sent to a UPS facility in McKinney to drive on Friday.

The crash happened on Texas Highway 121 north of McKinney. The union further wrote that the driver had started experiencing “heat-related” symptoms and called in for help but was told to drive back to the McKinney facility.

Dave Reeves, president of Local 767, told NBC 5 on Monday that several unanswered questions remained after the accident.

“Why was he able to continue to drive the package car,” Reeves asked. “There are certain heat related injuries that can be prevented.”

There are steps in there, in my opinion, in the event they were followed correctly we would be looking at a different outcome right now.”

Henry Huynh, who witnessed and recorded the crash, told NBC 5 that the UPS driver was visibly unconscious at the wheel.

“When he swerved, he went over the grass median and went onto oncoming traffic,” said Huynh. “And then all of a sudden boom, he hits the tree.”

Huynh’s video, which the labor union posted on Facebook, showed a UPS delivery truck speeding on the opposite side of the road and barely missing another vehicle before plowing into trees.

According to Teamsters Local 767, the driver was sent to the hospital following the crash and released on Saturday.

“The company continues to place packages over people,” the Teamsters Union said online. “This is unacceptable. This is the third incident in the McKinney building alone.”

NBC 5 reached out to UPS regarding the incident, and representatives from the company responded on Sunday with the following:

“We are aware of an incident involving our driver in McKinney, TX. We care deeply about his safety and well-being. We are working with authorities to investigate and defer to them for questions.”

Friday’s crash came as a shock to another McKinney family who said heat stress took the life of one of their family members who also worked for UPS.

“My heart just stopped because I cannot believe that it’s happening again,” said Neysa Lambert.

In August 2023, Neysa Lambeth’s husband, Chris Begley, was driving for UPS out of the McKinney facility when he passed out from the heat.

Lambeth said she was out of town, and instead of calling 911 or taking Begley to the hospital, another UPS employee drove Begley to his empty home. He died four days later.

“He had no idea what was going on; he was very confused, and nobody sent him to the hospital,” said Lambeth. “I don’t understand that. I will never understand that.”

OSHA fined the McKinney UPS facility more than $62,000 for Begley’s death, finding that Begley died from heat stress sustained while delivering parcels.

“When a medical facility for treatment of injured employees was not available … the employer did not have a person or persons trained to understand and render first aid treatment or ensure other medical treatment was available,” the OSHA report on the incident found.

Nearly a year after his death, Begley’s family said Friday’s incident showed the McKinney UPS center still hadn’t done enough to keep drivers safe from the heat.

“They’re having their drivers drive themselves in after a heat event? That’s insane, in my opinion,” said Lambeth. “I don’t know how they can fix it, but they need to fix it because people are dying.”

NBC 5 also contacted UPS about Begley’s family’s concerns about the McKinney UPS facility, and the company is working on an answer. However, they sent an additional statement about their heat safety protocols that are in place nationwide.

“The health and safety of our team members is important to us, and we are committed to providing a safe working environment for our employees. We have comprehensive training and protocols to support our employees and continuously work to improve these measures. We invest more than $409 million annually on safety training in the US and have added more cooling equipment to our vehicles and facilities. We provide employees with specialized cooling gear, access to ice and water, and encourage our people to take extra time to cool-down anytime they need.”

Local authorities have not yet confirmed whether they are investigating the crash and have not revealed any details about the incident.

Miranda Sipps, a cheerleader at Jourdanton Junior High School in Christine, Texas, was found in critical condition when her mother called 911 on Monday evening, according to a statement from the Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office. Christine is a small community about 45 miles south of San Antonio.

Emergency responders met Sipps and her mom on the highway after they had left their home and rushed the unconscious child to the hospital, officials said. Sipps was pronounced dead in the emergency room shortly after her arrival.

An investigation led by the sheriff’s office revealed that Sipps had suffered from severe and life-threatening injuries the previous Thursday. For the following four days, Sipps’ mother and stepfather failed to get her medical assistance even though she was largely unconscious. No other children were in the home.

“She was not talking. She basically could flutter her eyes and move her hands a little bit over a four-day period,” Sheriff David Soward said at a news conference, “and they had her laying on a pallet in the house.”

Soward said that Sipps’ parents attempted to treat her injuries by giving her smoothies with vitamins. As the girl’s condition worsened and she began having trouble breathing on Monday evening, her mother finally called 911.

“They were trying to give her smoothies, but somebody who is unconscious is not able to swallow,” Soward noted.

The mother was identified as 36-year-old Denise Balbaneda and the stepfather as 40-year-old Gerald Gonzales. Both were arrested on Tuesday afternoon and charged with a first-degree felony for injury to a child by omission.

Investigators believed the couple avoided seeking medical attention to prevent law enforcement from coming to their home. Even after calling 911, Balbaneda had chosen to leave their house and meet emergency responders on the road.

The cause of Sipps’ injuries remains under investigation. Soward declined to provide further details, stating only that they were not related to her school, which had begun on Monday. The final autopsy report is pending.

Soward expressed his surprise at the unusual nature of the case.

“This is not something we typically run across or have, but in this business it’s always that way,” Soward remarked. “The next call’s going to be something strange or something you’ve never dealt with before, and this case here is a good example of that.”

Sipps would have turned 13 later this month.

The sheriff’s office did not immediately respond to further requests for updates.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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“I’m taking him down today,” said Holly Ary.

She’s among the 15 senior moms who participated in the school’s inaugural Senior Mom Tackle. It’s a chance for moms to see the game from their kid’s point of view.

“I’ve been begging his coaches since sophomore year, can we please do the senior mom tackle and here we are, so this is a three-year excitement build coming today,” said Holly Ary.

The textbook tackles included a mom of twins, a grandma, and a mom and coach’s wife.

“I think some of us probably have some pent-up anger against our sweet little baby, baby men, and we want to take ‘em down,” said Becky Altmiller.

It’s a new tradition bringing moms and sons together.

“She means so much to me, and I’m just so glad that she’s out here,” said Altmiller’s son Hayden.

“It means a lot because, as a single parent, she still makes time. She’s that one parent figure in the house, and she’s still there 100% of the time, 110%,” said Matthew Ary.

Jonquetta Winbush’s two children, a 12-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, managed to get out while Winbush was having a seizure in late July, West Orange, Texas, Assistant Police Chief Jessie Romero said Wednesday. Winbush then passed out and put her foot on the gas pedal, plunging her vehicle into the pond.

Body camera footage from veteran patrolman Charles Cobb, who was nearby monitoring traffic, shows Winbush’s son frantically approaching the officer.

“She’s having a seizure. She’s sunk,” the boy told Cobb. “She’s in the water. Help her.”

Cobb put the boy in the back of his patrol car and raced to Winbush’s vehicle, which was almost completely underwater. Two workers from a local plant had already gotten in the water to get Winbush out, Romero said.

After dragging Winbush from the pond, Romero said Cobb administered chest compressions.

“She was totally unconscious,” Romero said. “He was able to get a pulse back while he had her there on the ground and revive her until EMS got there.”

Winbush’s sister, Bevnisha Holman, said she personally thanked one of the workers, Epifanio Munguia, for helping save her sister’s life.

“I messaged him and (said) I want to personally thank you for being there for my niece and nephew and ultimately my sister, because he really helped save her life,” Holman told Beaumont television station KBMT.

After three weeks in intensive care, Romero said Winbush is now breathing on her own.

“She’s still in the hospital, but she’s going to make a full recovery,” he said.

The accident occurred on Sunday on the I-10 East Freeway, on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez described the incident on X as “a two-car crash where one of the cars flipped over several times causing ejection.”

Among those ejected from the overturned vehicle were a four-year-old and a one-year-old, the sheriff’s office said. Video showed the two toddlers, dressed only in diapers, stranded on the highway before being rescued.

An investigation revealed that neither child was in a car seat at the time of the crash.

“They were just sitting in the back of the vehicle, not strapped to anything,” said Deputy Thomas Gilliland of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

Both children are being treated at the hospital and remain in “serious but stable condition,” said the sheriff’s office. Their father, the driver, was treated for minor injuries and released.

Texas state law requires that children under the age of 8 be secured in a child safety seat. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, child safety seats can reduce the risk of fatal injury by 54% for toddlers ages one to four. In 2022, 39% of children killed in traffic crashes were not properly restrained.

Although no charges have been filed yet, the sheriff’s office confirmed that the case remains under investigation and indicated that charges against the father “will likely be filed soon.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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NBC News’ Bryan Gallion and John Filippelli contributed.

McDowell, 21, was charged last week with murder in the July 20 shooting death of Cesar Peralta, 20, the Harris County sheriff’s office said. McDowell remained in jail Monday on $400,000 bond on the murder charge. The attorney listed for him in court records did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“This is an unfortunate situation and I am in prayer for Akili and those impacted by this tragedy,” said his manager, Jonell Whitt, adding that she had no further comment.

The sheriff’s office said deputies found an unresponsive man with gunshot wounds after responding to a call about a shooting at an apartment complex on July 20. The sheriff’s office said several witnesses told deputies the man had been in a physical altercation with another man, who fled on foot after the shooting.

“David Makes Man,” which aired on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN, followed a teen named David, played by McDowell, who tried to juggle relationships between his magnet school friends and drug dealers in his impoverished South Florida neighborhood.

According to the entertainment database IMDb, McDowell appeared in some episodes of “Billions” and “The Astronaut Wives Club,” and has a role in the recently released movie “The Waterboyz.”

The deadly crash killed four people, including a child, after the helicopter struck a radio tower and sparked a large fire in Houston on Sunday, officials said.

The helicopter, which was operating as an air tour flight, had taken off from Ellington Airport in Houston, the NTSB said. It was not equipped with a flight recorder or “black box.”

“Our condolences go to the family and friends of those who were lost,” NTSB investigator Brian Rutt said on Monday, adding the wreckage is a “complex scene” and officials are being meticulous in examining all the evidence available.

As part of the crash investigation, NTSB officials are investigating the pilot, the aircraft and the operating environment, NBC affiliate KPRC-TV reported on Tuesday. NTSB officials also began recovering debris for further examination.

Officials are also gathering additional information such as the helicopter’s maintenance records, flight track data as well as air traffic control communication recordings, surveillance videos and witness statements, KPRC reported.

The crash also damaged some vehicles on the ground but no people were reported injured, Houston police Lt. Jonathan French said.

“This was a horrible tragedy, but obviously it could have been much worse,” French said on Monday.

The NTSB expects to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

And between 2020 and 2023, that seems to have been true of population growth.

Nine of the 10 U.S. cities and towns where populations grew at the fastest clip during that period are found in the Lone Star State, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data on places with populations of 20,000 or more at any point between April 2020 and July 2023.

Here’s where populations changed the most from 2020 to 2023:

Celina, Texas, a city about 40 miles north of Dallas, earned the top spot as its population grew by more than 143% between 2020 and 2023. As of July 2020, the city had a humble population of just over 17,800. By July 2023, that number had swelled to more than 43,300, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Residents say Celina is incredibly safe, has excellent economic health and offers an overall great quality of life, according to a 2022 community engagement survey the city sponsored.

Fulshear, Texas, which lies about 30 miles west of Houston, experienced similar growth. Its population more than doubled, from 17,558 in 2020 to 42,616 in 2023.

On the flip side, Big Spring, Texas, had the fastest population decline of -14.8% over the three-year period. But it's the only Texas city among the 10 U.S. cities and towns that saw the biggest population drops between 2020 and 2023.

While the cities that grew the fastest are fairly concentrated in Texas, places where populations shrank by the largest percentages are spread across eight states, primarily in the South and Western regions. California has three entries, including notoriously expensive San Francisco.

The population growth in many Texas towns may be attributed, at least in part, to the state's relatively lower cost of living compared with many other states, plus its lack of personal income tax. Texas also ranked No. 3 in the nation in CNBC's 2024 top states for business rankings.

The state's population has been growing steadily and faster than nearly any other state since 2000, the Census Bureau reports. Despite its position along the Southern border, domestic migration has played a slightly larger role than international migration in Texas' population growth, the agency finds.

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Books.

The targets of the investigation? Three school librarians in Granbury, Texas. The allegation? They had allowed children to access literature — such as “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison — that the officer, Scott London, a chief deputy constable, had deemed obscene.

In an extraordinary look into the ramifications of the right-wing backlash against books dealing with racism, gender, sex and sexuality, an 824-page investigative file obtained by NBC News and NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth shows how, for two years, London vigorously pursued felony charges against librarians in the Granbury Independent School District.

London secured subpoenas, filed public records requests, received names of students who’d checked out certain books and, after a year, wrote draft criminal complaints.

Those charges — distributing harmful material to a minor — were never filed. The investigation came to an end in June after Hood County District Attorney Ryan Sinclair turned down London’s request to indict the librarians, citing a lack of conclusive evidence to charge them with felonies.

Sinclair declined to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions. London, who has ties to the anti-government constitutional sheriff’s movement and tried to launch a local chapter of the far-right Oath Keepers militia in 2020, did not respond to questions.

NBC News is not naming the three librarians because they were never charged with a crime. None of them agreed to be interviewed. Granbury Superintendent Jeremy Glenn declined to comment. The district released a statement saying officials looked forward to putting the matter behind them.

“Granbury ISD respects the due diligence of the district attorney and wholeheartedly agrees that this investigation was without merit,” it said.

London’s investigative file offers the most detailed and visceral picture to date of an attempt to prosecute librarians amid the nationwide campaign by conservatives to restrict children’s access to books depicting sex and LGBTQ people.

As London was conducting his probe, at least 18 states considered bills to make it easier to prosecute librarians over contested books, and three — Missouri, Indiana and Arkansas — passed them into law, although Arkansas’ is on hold pending a lawsuit filed by a group of libraries. Police and sheriff’s deputies have been called by parents and right-wing activists to investigate library books in Florida, Missouri, South Carolina and elsewhere, but free speech advocates and librarian organizations say they are unaware of any librarian or school official who has been charged over books.

“It’s as if books have become contraband, and it’s just so alarming,” said Kasey Meehan, who leads a freedom to read campaign at PEN America, a free speech nonprofit.

A series of videos captured by London’s body-worn camera in May 2022 show him striding through school hallways, interviewing administrators and perusing library shelves in search of the offending books.

In one video, a middle school librarian leans over a book check-out counter, her hands folded at her mouth, as London lays out the legal basis for his investigation. On the wall behind the librarian are colorful decorations and a quote from Dr. Seuss: “The more things you read, the more things you will know.”

“There’s been an allegation of books that were in conflict of the penal code in the library,” London tells the librarian, “and so that’s what I’m looking into.”

London says he has some questions, but under the Fifth Amendment, the librarian is not obligated to answer them.

“I really don’t want to at the moment,” she says, shaking her head.

In another video, London lays out several books on a library table and photographs their covers and copyright pages — logging each as evidence of a potential crime.

Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer for the civil liberties nonprofit the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, said the Granbury investigation stands out from other cases he’s tracked. Steinbaugh obtained a copy of London’s investigative file through a public records request.

This was the first time, he said, that his organization had seen a law enforcement official issue subpoenas and receive records showing how often books had been checked out and by whom, and the first time he’d seen an officer draft criminal complaints against librarians. Watching police body camera footage of school librarians being confronted by an investigator was deeply unsettling, Steinbaugh said.

“Anytime you’re talking about arresting a librarian for the content of books in a library, that’s going to have a chilling effect,” he said. “Why be a librarian? Why take the, frankly, little pay that librarians, especially school librarians, get, and risk going to prison?”

Granbury’s battle over school library books began in early 2022. That January, Glenn, Granbury’s superintendent, directed librarians to remove books that contained descriptions of sex and LGBTQ storylines, according to a secret recording obtained by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The district later appointed a panel of community volunteers to review dozens of books that a Republican state legislator had flagged as inappropriate.

In the end, the committee members voted to permanently ban just three of the titles, including “This Book Is Gay,” a coming-out guide for LGBTQ teens by transgender author Juno Dawson that includes detailed descriptions of sex, and returned the others to shelves.

The decision outraged a pair of conservative Christian parents who served on the review committee — a homeschooling mother named Monica Brown and Karen Lowery, who was later elected to Granbury’s school board.

On May 2, 2022, according to a case summary included in London’s investigative file, Brown and Lowery brought their concerns about “pornography” in school libraries to him. They filed a complaint naming 11 allegedly obscene books that they said could be found in Granbury school libraries. The titles, all of which contained passages about sex or rape, included a popular teen fantasy series by Sarah J. Maas and a pair of books by the acclaimed young adult author Tiffany D. Jackson.

The idea that school librarians had been handing out pornography in a town like Granbury — where many folks identify as conservative Christians and 80% of county residents voted for Donald Trump in 2020 — seemed far-fetched to some locals, but London committed himself to investigating.

In an interview with NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth that aired last year, London said the probe was simply a response to the complaint from Lowery and Brown and not driven by his own views.

“If a crime is reported to any law enforcement agency, I would expect the law enforcement agency to investigate the crime,” he said.

Lowery, however, said in an email to reporters last year that it was London who asked if she and Brown would file the complaint after he heard them speak about library books at a local Republican club.

“Monica and I agreed to do so believing we should support law enforcement,” Lowery wrote to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

A day after taking their complaint, London made his first visits to Granbury’s administrative offices, and later that week to Granbury High School and a pair of middle schools. 

Body camera footage shows London making small talk with administrators and repeating a joke about being more of a “math guy” when he was a pupil. 

In one encounter with superintendent Glenn, on May 3, 2022, London explained his approach to the case.

“Just because I work for the government, I can’t go give a 13-year-old a Hustler magazine,” London said. “If you’re showing pictures of a vagina covered in boils, it’s part of sex ed, you can justify it. But if it’s smut for smut’s sake, it’s not justified.”

In each of his meetings with the three librarians, London explained that they were under no obligation to speak with him. One by one, the librarians declined to answer questions.

“I’ll listen to what you have to say,” one librarian told London, laughing nervously.

“I was told not to say anything unless I have legal,” another told him.

Paul Hyde, a Granbury attorney who served on the volunteer committee tasked with reviewing dozens of school library books, said he informally advised two of the accused librarians early in London’s investigation and saw the toll it has taken on them. 

“These women, that are amazing educators and librarians, have been terrified for over two years now that they’re going to get arrested, hauled off to jail on a felony charge of providing pornography to minors,” Hyde said, noting that one of the librarians left the district as a result. 

“We lost a great librarian,” he said.

As the investigation progressed, London reviewed nearly 200 pages of community member complaints about books available in the Granbury district, many of which cited BookLooks, a website tied to the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty. 

He reported purchasing each of the 11 titles named in Lowery and Brown’s police report and, over the course of a few months in 2022, read them in their entirety. His investigative file included more than 120 photos of passages he believed to be obscene, with highlights he made with a marker.

London also secured subpoenas for Follett School Solutions, an education software company that Granbury uses to help manage its library collection, to obtain records for the dates and times that several titles were checked out from campus libraries.

Some of the records in London’s investigative file included the names of students who had most recently checked out the books — a clear violation of student privacy, according to First Amendment experts. It is not clear who provided those records to London. 

A Follett spokesperson said in an email, “At no time did Follett provide any data that included student names or other student information.” 

London also sought records from the district about student volunteers who helped librarians return books to shelves. According to the case records, London believed that if he could prove that librarians used minors in the commission of the alleged crimes, it would elevate the charges from misdemeanors to felonies.

After investigating for more than a year, in July 2023, London submitted the case file to Sinclair, the district attorney. By then, London had launched a campaign for Hood County sheriff — an election he would ultimately lose.

He included in his report to Sinclair drafts of criminal complaints to charge the librarians with distributing harmful material to minors, citing sections of books in which sexual acts were described.

London named six books from Brown and Lowery’s original list that he deemed worthy of charges: 

• Three titles from the fantasy series “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas, which include descriptions of sexual encounters. 
• “Gone,” a book about the consequences of an inappropriate sexual relationship between a 17-year-old and his teacher, by Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson. 
• “Fade,” a title by Lisa McMann in which a teen with supernatural abilities investigates sexual predators at a high school. 
• And “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison, a book about a Black girl in the 1940s who internalizes the notion that whiteness is the standard for beauty and whose struggles are exacerbated by rape and abuse.

Nearly one year later, Sinclair notified London that his office wasn’t going to prosecute the case, according to an email exchange last month between London and Sinclair that was included in the investigative file. (The documents released to NBC News and NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth did not include a copy of Sinclair’s letter declining to file charges, which London said was exempt from disclosure, but they did include follow-up emails describing the prosecutor’s decision and reasoning.)

Sinclair rejected the felony case because there was insufficient evidence to prove that the librarians used minors to “distribute, exhibit, or display harmful materials,” according to the emails. And at that point, the two-year statute of limitations had expired for misdemeanor charges.

Based on London’s reply, it seemed Sinclair also was not convinced that the books, taken as a whole, met the state’s legal definition of harmful material.

On May 1, London made a final plea to get Sinclair to indict the librarians.

“After reading each of these books personally in their entirety,” London wrote in a letter included in the investigative file, “I cannot fathom any scientific, educational, governmental, or other similar justifications for some of these books.”

Ultimately, Sinclair was not persuaded.

On June 24, London wrote to Glenn, letting the Granbury superintendent know that it was official: His two-year effort to charge school librarians had ended.

Brown, one of the mothers who filed the complaint, did not respond to messages requesting comment. Lowery, who continues to serve on Granbury’s school board, responded to the case’s dismissal by defending her efforts to restrict library books.

“I did what I believe I was called to do to make the community aware of this dangerous issue,” she said in a statement.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the case demonstrates the risks librarians now face and the importance of prosecutorial restraint.

“We do cling to the fact that no prosecutor has accepted this information to create a criminal prosecution,” Caldwell-Stone said. “We’re just concerned that someday someone might choose to do it.”

UPDATE (July 25, 2024, 2:00 p.m. ET): This article has been updated to reflect that it is not clear who provided London with records that included the names of students who had checked out library books, and to add Follett School Solutions’ statement that it had not provided data including student names.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Her family did not specify a cause of death, but the news comes just over one month after the Congresswoman revealed that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Jackson Lee, who has represented Texas’ 18th Congressional District for nearly three decades, revealed her battle with pancreatic cancer in June.

“Today, with incredible grief for our loss yet deep gratitude for the life she shared with us, we announce the passing of United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th Congressional District of Texas,” her family said in a statement.

“A local, national, and international humanitarian, she was acknowledged worldwide for her courageous fights for racial justice, criminal justice, and human rights, with a special emphasis on women and children,” the statement said.

The longtime congresswoman served in the House since 1995 and leaves a legacy of pushing for legislation related to civil rights. Jackson Lee was the lead sponsor of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, and she pushed for the Sentencing Reform Act of 2015, as well as the George Floyd Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act.

She sat on the Judiciary, Homeland Security and Budget committees.

Jackson Lee is survived by her husband, Elwyn Lee, and her two children, Jason Lee, a graduate of Harvard University, and Erica Lee, a graduate of Duke University, who is also a Member of the Harris County School Board in Houston. She is also survived by her two grandchildren, Ellison Bennett Carter, and Roy Lee Carter. 

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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The deadly crash killed four people, including a child, after the helicopter struck a radio tower and sparked a large fire in Houston on Sunday, officials said.

The helicopter, which was operating as an air tour flight, had taken off from Ellington Airport in Houston, the NTSB said. It was not equipped with a flight recorder or “black box.”

“Our condolences go to the family and friends of those who were lost,” NTSB investigator Brian Rutt said on Monday, adding the wreckage is a “complex scene” and officials are being meticulous in examining all the evidence available.

As part of the crash investigation, NTSB officials are investigating the pilot, the aircraft and the operating environment, NBC affiliate KPRC-TV reported on Tuesday. NTSB officials also began recovering debris for further examination.

Officials are also gathering additional information such as the helicopter’s maintenance records, flight track data as well as air traffic control communication recordings, surveillance videos and witness statements, KPRC reported.

The crash also damaged some vehicles on the ground but no people were reported injured, Houston police Lt. Jonathan French said.

“This was a horrible tragedy, but obviously it could have been much worse,” French said on Monday.

The NTSB expects to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

Ammunition is the latest product being offered at the push of a button. A company has installed computerized vending machines to sell ammunition in grocery stores. Patrons can pick up bullets along with a gallon of milk.

American Rounds, a Richardson, Texas-based company, is behind the idea. The nearest location to the Dallas-Fort Worth area is a grocery store in Kingston, Oklahoma.

“We prefer to call them automated retail machines because that’s really what they are,” said American Rounds CEO Grant Magers.

The first machine was placed inside a store in Alabama in November 2023. They’re now at eight locations in four states, and Magers said requests are growing daily.

“It’s exploding. I mean, right now, we have over 200 stores that are waiting on machines,” said Magers.

Checking out is a multi-step process after choosing ammunition on the machine’s touch screen. Magers said the first step is to verify an ID using the same scanner that the TSA uses. The scanner also verifies that the buyer is 21 or older, a requirement at each location. Then, facial recognition software validates whether the buyer is the same person pictured on the ID. After paying, a box of bullets drops down.

Magers is aware not everyone likes the idea.

A senior vice president for Everytown for Gun Safety said in a statement, “Innovations that make ammunition sales more secure via facial recognition, age verification, and the tracking of serial sales are promising safety measures that belong in gun stores, not in the place where you buy your kids milk.”

Magers said his process forces ID verification, which rarely happens when ammunition is bought online or off the shelf.

“It’s the safest, most secure method of ammunition sales on the market, and it completely maintains the integrity of the Second Amendment. We don’t store the consumer’s data, we don’t take their ID or their facial, it’s not stored on any cloud,” said Magers.

Federal law requires a person to be 18 to buy shotgun and rifle ammunition and 21 to purchase handgun ammunition. Magers said their machines require a purchaser to be at least 21.

There have been 15 mass killings involving a firearm so far in 2024, compared to 39 in 2023, according to a database maintained in a partnership of The Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University.

The vending machine is another method of sale, joining retail stores and online retailers. A March report by Everytown for Gun Safety found that despite requirements, several major online ammunition retailers did not appear to verify their customers’ ages.

Last year, an online retailer settled a lawsuit brought by families of those killed and injured in a 2018 Texas high school shooting. The families said the 17-year-old shooter was able to buy ammunition from the retailer who failed to verify his age.

Vending machines for bullets or other age-restricted materials are not new. Companies have developed similar technology to sell alcoholic beverages. A company has marketed automated kiosks to sell cannabis products in dispensaries in states where marijuana is legal.

A Pennsylvania police officer created a company about 12 years ago that places bullet-vending machines in private gun clubs and ranges as a convenience for patrons. Master Ammo owner Sam Piccinini said the machines do not have an age verification mechanism but are only placed in locations with an age requirement to enter.

Piccinini spoke with a company years ago about incorporating artificial intelligence technology to verify a purchaser’s age and identity, but it was cost-prohibitive at the time, he said. For American Rounds, one machine had to be removed from a site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, because of disappointing sales, Magers said.

The machines have locations in Alabama, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Texas, but the only one in the Lone Star State is in Canyon Lake near San Antonio.

Magers said much of the early interest in the machines has been in rural communities where few retailers may sell ammunition. The American Rounds machines are in Super C Mart and Fresh Value grocery stores in small cities, including Pell City, Alabama, which has a population of over 13,600, and Noble, Oklahoma, where nearly 7,600 people live.

“Someone in that community might have to drive an hour or an hour and a half to get supplied if they want to go hunting, for instance,” Margers said. “Our grocery stores, they wanted to be able to offer their customer another category that they felt like would be popular.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

The deadly crash killed four people, including a child, after the helicopter struck a radio tower and sparked a large fire in Houston on Sunday, officials said.

The helicopter, which was operating as an air tour flight, had taken off from Ellington Airport in Houston, the NTSB said. It was not equipped with a flight recorder or “black box.”

“Our condolences go to the family and friends of those who were lost,” NTSB investigator Brian Rutt said on Monday, adding the wreckage is a “complex scene” and officials are being meticulous in examining all the evidence available.

As part of the crash investigation, NTSB officials are investigating the pilot, the aircraft and the operating environment, NBC affiliate KPRC-TV reported on Tuesday. NTSB officials also began recovering debris for further examination.

Officials are also gathering additional information such as the helicopter’s maintenance records, flight track data as well as air traffic control communication recordings, surveillance videos and witness statements, KPRC reported.

The crash also damaged some vehicles on the ground but no people were reported injured, Houston police Lt. Jonathan French said.

“This was a horrible tragedy, but obviously it could have been much worse,” French said on Monday.

The NTSB expects to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

Video showed Tabatha Sullivent pulled from the water with part of her leg missing as the shark that attacked her circled nearby.

“I can’t imagine that I actually had a shark attack. It’s kind of crazy,” Sullivent told NBC News.

Sullivent, who’s from Celina, was one of four people who officials say encountered the same 6-foot-long shark on July 4.

“I just thought it was a big fish, so I went to kick it away. And at that point, that’s when it bit me. And had I not pulled my legs up, it probably would’ve got my torso or something else,” she said.

On a GoFundMe page set up for Tabatha Sullivent and her husband, Cary Sullivent, she posted an update from her hospital bed:

“I lost my left calf. I have movement in my toes and circulation in my foot. I probably won’t have full mobility when I’m put back together and will not have the same leg I had before. But, I’m alive.”

Her husband, Cary, who helped fight the shark off, also received bites but has been released.

“That shark wasn’t in more than waist-deep water,” said Kyle Jud.

Jud was also visiting Padre from North Texas. He was one of several beach-goers who crowded around Sullivent trying to help.

“The whole time that was happening, the shark was just circling right there in the front. I mean, we could just see as plain as day the big shark with the tail and the dorsal fin were hanging out of the water, and it was just circling there as she was being taken away,” he said.

Jud praised the quick actions of first responders.

Sullivent credits her husband for saving her life.

“He fought off a shark for me. That’s pretty impressive,” she said.

She now waits to see just how long her road to recovery will be.

“I’m thankful for all of the support, and I’m alive,” said Sullivant.

Officials say Thursday’s shark attacks were the first in the area in five years.

Police were called for the attack on the man who was severely bitten around 11 a.m., according to Nikki Soto, the South Padre Island city secretary. He was initially treated at the beach by firefighters and police.

The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department said later in a statement that two people were bitten and two more “encountered” the shark but were not seriously hurt. One of the bite victims was taken to a hospital in Brownsville, and the other was “flown out for further treatment.”

Based on witness reports and images on social media, Game Warden Capt. Chris Dowdy said authorities believe a single shark about 6 feet (about 1.8 meters) long was responsible.

Beach patrol, firefighters and police were patrolling the shore and flying drones after the attacks, Soto said.

The last reported shark attack in the area was five years ago, according to Dowdy.

The Texas Parks & Wildlife is assisting with the investigation.

It happened on Thursday, June 27, at the Taqueria Mi Ranchito Mexican restaurant in Fort Worth.

According to the Fort Worth Police Department, officers responded to the restaurant in the 5700 block of Crowley Road just after 1 p.m. following reports of a woman threatening an employee with a gun.

Once police officers arrived at the restaurant, the suspect, 70-year-old Josefina Luna, was detained as authorities conducted their investigation.

An employee at the business told Fort Worth police that Luna had entered the restaurant, had started accusing the staff of taking her money, and demanded a refund.

Luna then allegedly pulled out a small black pistol from her bag and kept it pointed at the employee under a table.

Authorities stated that during their investigation, Luna accused the staff of taking her money, and she denied having a gun. However, after officers searched her bag, they discovered a firearm that matched the description provided by the victim.

Luna was arrested and charged with aggravated robbery. Booking records show she is at Tarrant County Corrections Center and held on a $25,000 bond.

The Fort Worth Police Department is dedicated to serving and protecting the community through partnerships, professionalism, and a commitment to excellence,” The Fort Worth Police Department said in a released statement on Monday.

“Our mission is to provide the highest level of service to our residents, ensuring a safe and secure environment for all.”

No injuries were reported in connection with the incident.

Friedman, 79, died Thursday at his family’s Texas ranch near San Antonio, close friend Kent Perkins told The Associated Press. Friedman had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years, Perkins said.

“He died peacefully. He smoked a cigar, went to bed, and never woke up,” said Perkins, who was working as an actor when he met Friedman at a party 50 years ago when both were signed to Columbia Records and movie contracts.

“We were the only two people with tuxedos and cowboy hats. Two Texans gravitating toward each other.” Perkins said. “He was the last free person on earth … He had an irreverence about him. He was a fearless writer.”

Often called “The Kinkster” and sporting sideburns, a thick mustache and cowboy hat, Friedman earned a cult following and reputation as a provocateur throughout his career across musical and literary genres.

In the 1970s, his satirical country band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys wrote songs with titles such as “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed.” Friedman joined part of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976.

By the 1980s, Friedman was writing crime novels that often included a version of himself, and he wrote a column for Texas Monthly magazine in the 2000s.

Friedman’s run at politics brought his brand of irreverence to the serious world of public policy. In 2006, Friedman ran for governor as an independent in a five-way race that included incumbent Republican Rick Perry. Friedman launched his campaign against the backdrop of the Alamo.

“We’re gypsies on a pirate ship, and we’re setting sail for the Governor’s Mansion,” Friedman said at the campaign launch. “I’m calling for the unconditional surrender of Rick Perry.”

Some saw the campaign as another Friedman joke, but he insisted it was serious. His platform called for legalizing medical marijuana, boosting public education spending through casino gambling, and supporting same-sex marriage. Campaign slogans included “How Hard Could It Be?” and “He ain’t Kinky, he’s my Governor.”

“Humor is what I use to attack the windmills of politics as usual,” Friedman said.

Perry won re-election in 2006, and Friedman finished last. However, he did not give up politics and unsuccessfully ran for state agriculture commissioner as a Democrat in 2010 and 2014.

Born in Chicago, Richard Samet Friedman grew up in Texas. The family’s Echo Hill ranch, where Friedman died, ran a camp for children of parents killed serving in the military.

Funeral services were pending, Perkins said.

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Over the weekend, Teijo and 74 other women participated in the Houston pageant, with Aarienna Ware ultimately crowned the winner June 22. However, Teijo stood out throughout the competition, making history as the oldest contestant to ever compete in Miss Texas USA, the organization confirmed to NBC News. 

About a month before her historic day, Teijo gushed about the pageant and explained why she signed up in an Instagram post. 

“I am delighted to be a part of this incredible new experience as a contestant in the Miss Texas USA pageant,” she said. “In doing so, I hope to inspire women to strive to be their best physical and mental self and believe there is beauty at any age.”

Leading up to the competition, she shared information about the different sponsors she received and the growing support from fans. 

On June 16, she wrote, “Thank you to all my sponsors-your support has meant so much to me. All of your generous donations have made my participation in the Miss Texas USA possible.”

She added, “I can’t wait to show we all have a new stage of opportunity, strength, and beauty!”

Teijo was eligible to compete in the pageant following a recent rule change that removed age limits, NBC News confirmed. 

In another rule change, increasing the competitions inclusivity, the Miss Texas USA website reveals that since 2023 “women who are or have been married, as well as women who are pregnant or have children” have been able to participate, as well. 

This year’s two-day event began June 21 at the Hilton Houston Post Oak Hotel. Teijo, representing Paso Del Norte, shared a photo of her posing on a red carpet after arriving in H-Town. 

The contestants were judged in three categories: personal interview, swimsuit and evening gown. Ware, who represented Dallas, was crowned Miss Texas USA 2024.

The pageant’s Instagram page uploaded a video June 22 from the moment Ware was awarded the coveted title. She strutted across the stage while holding a bouquet of flowers to celebrate her win. 

She will now prepare for the Miss USA competition, which will air live on The CW on Aug. 4.

The upcoming pageant comes after months of controversy surrounding the organization. In May, former Miss USA 2023 winner Noelia Voigt announced on Instagram that she was resigning to prioritize her mental health. A few days later, Miss USA Teen 2023 UmaSofia Srivastava and former Miss Colorado USA 2023 Arianna Lemus revealed they also decided to renounce their titles. 

Lemus said her decision was an act of “solidarity” with Voigt and Srivastava. “Silencing women is not the definition of pageantry,” she said in the caption on her post. 

In response to the resignations, the Miss USA organization, which is owned by Miss Universe Organization, issued statements on social media. 

“We respect and support Noelia’s decision to step down from her duties. The well-being of our titleholders is a top priority, and we understand her need to prioritize herself at this time,” the Miss USA organization said, in part, thanking Voigt for her “service.”

A similar statement was posted on the Miss Teen USA Instagram account to address Srivastava’s departure.  

The organization did not comment on Lemus’ resignation.

This article first appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY here:

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Some staff members appeared solemn as they found their seats. Others looked angry. One attendee pulled out her cellphone and secretly hit record. Later, she shared the audio with NBC News and described the meeting in an interview. A second person who attended confirmed her account and the recording’s authenticity.

Kenneth W. Fambro II, a real estate executive who serves on Gateway’s board of elders, struggled through tears as he delivered the news that employees had come to hear: Morris, one of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders, was resigning from the church he’d founded 24 years earlier.

“This,” Fambro said of accepting Morris’ resignation, “has been one of the most difficult decisions in my life.”

Gateway elder: ‘One of the most difficult decisions in my life’

The recording of Fambro’s remarks reveals the deeply conflicted feelings of church leaders as they come to terms with the knowledge that their founding pastor — the man who’d built Gateway into one the largest megachurches in America and served on former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory board — had confessed to engaging in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a child.

Fambro opened Tuesday by acknowledging that he and other church officials had long known that Morris had admitted to sexual misconduct when he was young. It was a story Morris told so often over the years from the pulpit and in one-on-one meetings that “you can get kind of numb” to it, Fambro said, according to the recording.

“Pastor Robert did a phenomenal job of being open and transparent about his transgressions and his past, his moral failures,” Fambro said, speaking on behalf of the elders board, which is charged with governing the church. 

“What we did not know was that she was 12 years old.”

Gateway elder says he didn’t know Morris’ ‘moral failure’ involved a 12-year-old

Cindy Clemishire, the woman who accused Morris of molesting her as a child, disputed the notion that Morris had been transparent. In a statement to NBC News, she said she was disturbed that Gateway elders struggled over whether to remove him from leadership.

“What is so difficult about accepting the resignation from a man who repeatedly sexually abused a little girl for almost five years and then lied about it?” Clemishire said after having reviewed a transcript of the recording provided by NBC News. “Why wasn’t he terminated?”

Clemishire and her lawyer, Boz Tchividjian, contend that she contacted Morris and church officials with her allegations in 2005 and 2007 and that Gateway’s board of elders should have long ago investigated Morris’ version of events. (Fambro began attending the church in 2006 and became an elder in 2014, according to Gateway’s website.)

Morris hasn’t been charged with a crime and didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.

The allegations were made public Friday in a post published by The Wartburg Watch, a website focused on exposing abuse in churches. Clemishire, 54, described in the post and in a subsequent interview with NBC News how Morris had molested her for years beginning on Christmas night in 1982, when she was 12.

Initially, Morris and Gateway’s elders responded Friday and Saturday by acknowledging in statements that Morris had several sexual encounters with a “young lady” when he was in his 20s and saying he had been transparent about his sin and had repented.

“Since the resolution of this 35-year-old matter, there have been no other moral failures,” the elders said in a message to employees Friday.

But some Gateway parishioners and staff members viewed the statement itself as a moral failure. Why had church leaders described the alleged sex abuse of a 12-year-old with euphemisms?

Fambro didn’t address that question in his remarks Tuesday, and he and other church elders didn’t respond to messages requesting comment. A spokesperson for Gateway also didn’t respond.

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The person who made the recording of Tuesday’s staff meeting said she shared it with a reporter because she believes the board of elders is “gaslighting” employees about its initial defense of Morris and needs to be replaced. NBC News isn’t naming the woman because she fears retaliation.

At the meeting, Fambro defended the board of elders, which he said had been fielding criticism from members who felt leaders had taken too long to respond to the crisis.

He said leaders had deliberated during multiple hourslong meetings Monday and Tuesday and were following the guidance they’d long gotten from their now-former senior pastor. 

“If you’ve been here long enough, you’ve heard Pastor Robert say, ‘Before we can move, we need to hear God,’” Fambro said. 

Fambro also told employees he and the other elders “have great compassion” for Clemishire and don’t condone what happened to her.

“You won’t hear us try to explain it away,” Fambro said. 

But, he added, that doesn’t mean “we don’t love Pastor Robert, that we’re not defending him.”

He then spoke extensively about the profound impact Morris had on his life and on the lives of tens of thousands of church members. Fambro encouraged the audience not to let the revelations of child sex abuse make them lose sight of the good that God had done — and would continue to do — through Gateway and Morris.

“So yes, there is an anointing on this house. Yes, there is an anointing on Pastor Robert,” Fambro said. “But both/and, yes? There was some stuff that was done. They both can exist.”

Gateway elder says there is ‘an anointing’ on Morris

Fambro asked the staff to pray for Morris’ family, including his son James Morris, who is associate senior pastor and had been scheduled to succeed his father upon his planned retirement next year.

Robert Morris is still pulling for Gateway, Fambro said, which was why he is stepping down.

“Pastor Robert wants to see Gateway Church succeed in the body of Christ,” Fambro said. “Pastor Robert wanted to resign to not be a distraction.”

Clemishire said the elders’ continued support for Morris “makes me sick.”

“How can a church believe that a man can be anointed by God after sexually abusing a child and then lying about it for decades?” she said. “This is repulsive.”

Although elders had asked those in attendance not to record Tuesday’s meeting, Fambro seemed to sense that his words might eventually reach a broader audience. He said he worried someone would “take a sound bite, a clip, part of a sentence” and twist its meaning.

In closing, before another church leader stepped forward to describe the counseling services that would be available to employees, Fambro encouraged the audience members to focus on what they can do to help the church succeed.

“I can dwell on the past,” he said. “You guys can, as well. Or I can choose to say: ‘That’s a data point. How can I affect the future?’”

“‘How,” Fambro added, “do we move forward?’”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC:

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• Pastor Robert Morris resigns from Gateway Church after child sex abuse allegation

The board of elders at Gateway made the announcement Tuesday in a statement to NBC News.

“The elders’ prior understanding was that Morris’s extramarital relationship, which he had discussed many times throughout his ministry, was with ‘a young lady’ and not abuse of a 12-year-old child,” the church leaders said in their statement, noting that they had not known the victim’s age or the length of the alleged abuse. “Even though it occurred many years before Gateway was established, as leaders of the church, we regret that we did not have the information that we now have.”

The megachurch also announced it had hired the law firm Haynes & Boone to conduct an independent review of the allegations to ensure elders had a complete understanding of what happened.

Morris, a former member of President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory committee, had long told a story to his congregation and church leaders about a “moral failure” involving sexual sin when he was a young minister in his 20s.

Last week, Cindy Clemishire, now 54, revealed in a post on the church watchdog site The Wartburg Watch that she was 12 when Morris first sexually abused her in 1982. The alleged abuse continued for more than four years, Clemishire told NBC News on Monday.

Gateway and Morris responded to Clemishire’s allegation by releasing statements on Friday and Saturday acknowledging that Morris had engaged in “sexual behavior with a young lady” and stating that the “sin was dealt with correctly by confession and repentance.”

Clemishire released a statement Tuesday saying she had “mixed feelings” about Morris’ resignation. 

“Though I am grateful that he is no longer a pastor at Gateway, I am disappointed that the Board of Elders allowed him to resign,” she said in the statement. “He should have been terminated.” 

Clemishire added that she had repeatedly disclosed the abuse to church leaders and pastors, including at Gateway, but it was not until she spoke publicly that action was taken.

Morris did not respond to a message requesting comment.

Gateway officials did not respond to a message from NBC News on Tuesday asking why church leaders issued a statement referring to Clemishire as a young lady after she’d publicly revealed she was a child when the abuse began.

Morris is known for his efforts to advance conservative Christian morality through government and Republican politics. As news of the allegations against him spread in national media, some of his allies have distanced themselves from him.

A spokesperson for Trump said Morris was not working with the presidential campaign. And Texas state Reps. Nate Schatzline and Giovanni Capriglione, both Republicans representing areas where Gateway has campuses, issued statements condemning Morris’ actions. 

“Pastor Morris must be held accountable,” Capriglione wrote shortly before Morris’ resignation was announced. “The pain he has caused cannot be erased, and he should face the consequences of his crimes. I stand with any victims and will continue to fight for their rights and safety.”

In their official statement, Gateway elders expressed remorse over their handling of the situation.

“For the sake of the victim, we are thankful this situation has been exposed,” the statement said. “We know many have been affected by this, we understand that you are hurting, and we are very sorry. It is our prayer that, in time, healing for all those affected can occur.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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“We have our squirrel resort,” Breyana Elwell said sitting on her porch.

It started last summer, in the middle of a Texas drought and heatwave, when Elwell put out a fan on the porch rail to help her family keep the heat and flies away.

“I peeked through the window and a little squirrel was ‘splooting’ right in front of it,” Elwell said. That got her thinking.

“I took action,” Elwell said. “Rummaged through our freezer and got some fresh fruits and some water and some nuts I ordered online.”

She set out the squirrel buffet on her porch with a few fans.

“There would be only one squirrel at a time usually on the porch. Then it turned into two. Then it turned into three,” Elwell said. “Once I saw six, I was like, we need to relocate them.”

The Elwells took a downed tree and created a squirrel highway between trees in their backyard, then they added fans, food and fun.

“My husband probably thinks I’m crazy, but he’s the one who built it for me,” Elwell said. “It’s become almost like a job, but it’s not a job because it’s a hobby for me and I love it so much!”

“It’s not necessarily about the squirrels because my phobia is actually rats and mice, and if you really look at a squirrel, it’s really a fancy rat,” Elwell said. “I think it’s just my heart. I would help anything.”

Elwell occasionally posts what’s happening at her backyard ‘squirrel resort’ on Instagram and TikTok.

“I just can’t wait to see what they do next,” Elwell said.

A family trip to a drive-thru safari in Texas turned into a heart-stopping experience when a giraffe grabbed hold of a child.

In the video, the family attempts to feed the safari animal when the animal suddenly snatches the child’s shirt. Fortunately, the giraffe quickly releases the toddler, and she is not hurt in any way.

However, on Wednesday, the wildlife center’s website announced a new policy: starting Thursday, guests will no longer be allowed to ride in the bed of pick-up trucks.

This developing story will be updated as more information becomes available.

Marc Leon, 22, is charged with murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the shooting death of 19-year-old Christopher Govea.

According to the Dallas Police Department, officers responded to the 960 block of E. Irving Boulevard around 7:30 p.m. after reports of a shooting inside a fast-food restaurant.

When police showed up at the Wingstop, they found Govea’s body and another man who had been wounded by gunfire. The second victim was rushed to a local hospital and is expected to survive his injuries.

Homicide investigators said they initially learned that an argument transpired between Leon and another man, who both worked at the business.

“He was a new worker. He had like a week or two weeks of working there,” Ruby Govea said. Ruby is Christopher’s older sister.

During the shooting, an employee who was standing nearby was grazed in the head and leg by stray bullets, police said.

Christopher’s family said he had just started his shift around 5 p.m.

“A co-worker called my sister to tell her that he was shot,” Ruby said. “Just why? He was a baby. He was 19. He was just starting to live.”

The family said Christopher was the breadwinner for his parents. His father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and his mother is the full-time caretaker.

“He was a hard worker,” Ruby said. “He never, like, he never got into arguments, fights, anything like that. He’d just go to work, come home, sleep, go to work.”

The family described Christopher as responsible and with a big heart for others. He was the youngest of seven children and a proud uncle of two.

“He was always trying to make jokes. He would always be singing,” Ruby said.

Leon reportedly fled the restaurant on foot before officers got there but was later apprehended at a nearby location. He was taken into custody, and Irving officers said they recovered the handgun that Leon used.

While thankful that the suspected gunman is behind bars, Ruby said, “We just want our brother back, and we can’t have him back. Nothing is going to change anything anymore. He’s gone.”

The police department said another employee who witnessed the deadly shooting told officers Leon was the only suspect who was involved.

“Why did the guy take it to that extent,” Ruby said.

On Tuesday at 7 p.m., family and friends will host a candlelight service to honor Christopher. Those in attendance are encouraged to wear dark green.

“That was his favorite color,” Ruby said.

Jackson Lee said it is “likely” that she will be “occasionally absent from Congress,” but she assured her district, which encompasses part of Houston, that her office “will continue to deliver the vital constituent services that you deserve and expect.”

“I am confident that my doctors have developed the best possible plan to target my specific disease,” she said in a press release posted to X. “The road ahead will not be easy, but I stand in faith that God will strengthen me.”

Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, and other representatives have recently faced health issues that impacted attendance. In August of last year, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced that he was being treated for cancer. He, too, had occasional absences as he recovered from treatment.

Jackson Lee serves on the Judiciary, Homeland Security and Budget committees. She has served in the House since 1995.

“Please keep me and my family in your prayers as you have always done,” she said in the press release. “Know that you will remain in mine.”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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Another attempt by the city of Kyle, Texas, to break the world record for the largest gathering of people with one name fell short Saturday despite 706 Kyles of all ages turning up at a park in the suburbs of Austin.

According to Guinness World Records, the crown is currently held by a town in Bosnia that, in 2017, brought together 2,325 people named Ivan.

It’s not the first time the Kyles have come gunning for the Ivans. Last year, the official count at what has become known as the Gathering of the Kyles clocked in at 1,490 in the fast-growing Texas city that is about 37 miles south of Austin, the state’s capital.

Kyle is not a chart-topper among popular names in the U.S., according to the Social Security Administration, which annually tracks the names given to girls and boys in each state. The most recent data showed Kyle ranked 416th among male names in 2023.

By comparison, Ivan ranked 153.

A wide region was swamped from Houston to rural East Texas, where game wardens rode airboats through waist-high waters, rescuing both people and pets who did not evacuate in time. One crew brought a family and three dogs aboard as rising waters surrounded their cars and home.

A flood watch was in effect through Sunday afternoon as forecasters predicted additional rainfall Saturday night and the likelihood of major flooding.

“It’s going to keep rising this way,” said Miguel Flores Jr., of the northeast Houston neighborhood of Kingwood. “We don’t know how much more. We’re just preparing for the worst.”

Husband and wife Aron Brown, 45, and Jamie Brown, 41, were two of the many residents who drove or walked to watch the rising waters near a flooded intersection close to the San Jacinto River. Nearby restaurants and a gas station were beginning to flood.

Water could be seen flowing into parts of the couple’s subdivision, but Aron Brown said he wasn’t worried because their home is at a higher elevation than others in the neighborhood.

Brown, who had driven from his home in a golf cart, said the flooding wasn’t as bad as Hurricane Harvey in 2017. He pointed to nearby power lines and said that flooding during Harvey had reached the top of the lines.

Residents in low-lying areas asked to evacuate

Friday’s fierce storms forced numerous high-water rescues, including some from the rooftops of flooded homes. Officials redoubled urgent instructions for residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, warning the worst was still to come.

“A lull in heavy rain is expected through (Saturday) evening,” according to the National Weather Service. “The next round of heavy rainfall is expected late (Saturday) into Sunday.”

Up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of additional rain was expected, with up to 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) possible in isolated areas.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said more rain was expected Sunday, and if it’s a lot, it could be problematic. Hidalgo is the top elected official in the nation’s third-largest county.

Ongoing rain has left parts of Texas drenched, residents trapped

Most weekends, Miguel Flores Sr. is mowing his huge backyard on a 2.5-acre (1-hectare) lot behind his home in Kingwood. But on Saturday, he and his family were loading several vehicles with clothes, small appliances and other items.

Water from the San Jacinto River had already swallowed his backyard and was continuing to rise — what was about 1 foot (30 centimeters) high in the yard Friday measured about 4 feet (1.2 meters) the following day.

“It’s sad, but what can I do,” Flores said. He added that he has flood insurance.

For weeks, drenching rains in Texas and parts of Louisiana have filled reservoirs and saturated the ground. Floodwaters partially submerged cars and roads this week across parts of southeastern Texas, north of Houston, reaching the roofs of some homes.

More than 21 inches (53 centimeters) fell over a five-day period through Friday in Liberty County near the city of Splendora, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Houston, according to the National Weather Service.

Hidalgo said Saturday that 178 people and 122 pets have been rescued so far in the county. Scores of rescues took place in neighboring Montgomery County. In Polk County, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Houston, officials said they have done over 100 water rescues in the past few days.

Houston is one of the most flood-prone metro areas in the U.S.

Authorities in Houston have not reported any deaths or injuries. The city of more than 2 million people is one of the most flood-prone metro areas in the country and has long experience dealing with devastating weather.

Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dumped historic rainfall that flooded thousands of homes and resulted in more than 60,000 rescues by government rescue personnel across Harris County.

Of particular concern was an area along the San Jacinto River, which was expected to continue rising as more rain falls and officials release water from a full reservoir. Hidalgo issued a mandatory evacuation order on Thursday for people living along portions of the river.

The weather service reported that the river was at nearly 74 feet (22.6 meters) late Saturday morning after reaching nearly 78 feet (23.7 meters). The rapidly changing forecast said the river was expected to fall to near flood stage of 58 feet (17.6 meters) by Thursday.

Most of Houston’s city limits were not heavily impacted by the weather. Officials said the area received about four months’ worth of rain in about a week’s time.

The greater Houston area covers about 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers) — a footprint slightly bigger than New Jersey. It is crisscrossed by about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) of channels, creeks and bayous that drain into the Gulf of Mexico, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of downtown.

The system of bayous and reservoirs was built to drain heavy rains, but the engineering initially designed nearly 100 years ago has struggled to keep up with the city’s growth and bigger storms.

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“I was so angry. I was sad and mad,” Kaylee Morgan told NBC News in a phone call Wednesday. “The whole week leading up to court I couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh or cry.”

Morgan, a mother of five children, said she took five or six books out from the Navasota Public Library in Navasota, about 115 miles east of Austin, last March for her homeschooled children.

At the time, Morgan said she was pregnant and experiencing hyperemesis, extreme morning sickness, and placenta previa, when the placenta covers the opening in the cervix. It can cause bleeding around the start of the second half of pregnancy and mild cramping or contractions, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Morgan said the books were between a few weeks to a month late when her husband dropped them off, except for one that did not fit in the library’s drop box. Her stepson later dropped the book off inside the library, she said.

NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston obtained a copy of the overdue notice from the library that showed Morgan had two books due on March 31, 2023. The notice, dated April 10, 2023, said she owed a fee of $1.

A week later, the library sent what it said was a second and final notice. It said Morgan had 10 days to return the books and pay a new $2 fine or the matter would be turned over to the court.

A city ordinance states that failure to return books or library items within 30 days from the due date results in their library card being suspended. If a person fails to respond to the letter of complaint within 10 days of receiving it, it is considered a misdemeanor criminal offense punishable by a fine of up to $500.

Morgan said she did not receive the library’s late notices because they were sent to an old address. The library never called her about the late books, she said.

It wasn’t until she went to renew her driver’s license last month that she was told she had a warrant for a nearly $570 ticket.

The Navasota Public Library referred NBC News to city attorney Cary Bovey. Bovey could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Morgan, who said her family cannot afford to pay the ticket, said the entire ordeal has been stressful and questioned why the punishment for overdue library books was so strict.

“I offered to pay for the books. I offered to pay for the late fees but I cannot pay $600,” she said. “I understand that we have deadlines for a reason and all of those things, but there has to be a better way to cultivate community engagement, instead of tearing the community apart.”

“You could come in and read books to the kids for community service, you could help build the little free library or bring in canned goods,” she said. “Any number of things could be done.”

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Texas Highway Patrol Troopers and Upton County Emergency personnel responded to the crash along State Highway 349 around 4:50 p.m.

The National Weather Service had warned about blowing dust and damaging winds for Monday afternoon. Motorists were urged to use caution when traveling in West Texas.

Northeast of Midland in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois, severe storms with possible tornadoes, hail, and flooding rain were moving through on Monday evening.

Multiple tornado warnings were issued in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. It wasn’t immediately known if any damage had occurred or if anyone was hurt. The National Weather Service issued severe thunderstorm warnings throughout those states and Indiana.

Northwest of Oklahoma City, a flash flood warning was issued for the cities of Kingfisher and Dover. Hail and up to one inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain had fallen, with up to two more inches (five centimeters) expected. A news outlet reported that some roads in Kingfisher were flooded.

Heavy rainfall was falling Monday night across central Illinois. The National Weather Service posted a flash flood warning after 1.5 to 2.5 inches (3.8 to 6.4 centimeters) of rain fell just south of Springfield and Decatur.

In a statement Monday, Miller’s office said the confirmation of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was received from the United States Secretary of Agriculture and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Miller said that “that rigorous safety measures and pasteurization protocols ensure that the dairy products remain unaffected by HPAI” and that there will be no supply shortages.

The commissioner’s office said cattle infected with avian flu often have a fever and their milk is thick and discolored.

“No contaminated milk is known to have entered the food chain; it has all been dumped. In the rare event that some affected milk enters the food chain, the pasteurization process will kill the virus,” Miller said.

Infected cows also have a “sharp reduction in milk production averaging between 10-30 pounds per cow throughout the herd.” The TDA said herds that are greatly impacted may lose up to 40% of their milk production for 7 to 10 days until symptoms subside. Infected cattle are expected to fully recover from avian flu.

“This presents yet another hurdle for our agriculture sector in the Texas Panhandle,” Miller said. “Protecting Texas producers and the safety of our food supply chain is my top priority. The Texas Department of Agriculture will use every resource available to maintain the high standards of quality and safety that define Texas agriculture.”

The TAD said the Texas dairy industry contributes roughly $50 billion in economic activity across the state and that Texas also ranks fourth in milk production nationwide.

Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Deon Cockrell said another vehicle was also involved in the crash in the suburbs outside Austin. He did not know which vehicles the victims were in.

Cockrell said others who were injured were airlifted to hospitals, but he did not know how many.

The Hays Consolidated Independent School District said the bus was involved in a “serious accident” while returning from a field trip to a zoo. Passengers on board included 44 students and 11 adults, the district said in a statement.

A large presence of first responders and emergency vehicles could be seen along the tree-lined highway after the crash, and the bus was upright but leaning to one side. The top portion of the bus’ front was crumpled, and much of another vehicle nearby was pulverized. Personal items were strewn across the highway.

The school district said the students attend Tom Green Elementary School in Buda, which is about 16 miles (25 kilometers) southwest of Austin.

The school district said parents of the students on the bus were notified of the accident and the district was working to reunite them.

Gov. Abbott posted on X, formerly Twitter, Friday evening addressing the crash saying in part that he is “saddened to hear about this tragic incident, and we ask all Texans to join us in prayer for Tom Green Elementary students and families during this difficult time.”

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Based on questions asked by the justices during oral arguments, Gonzalez could eke out a narrow victory.

Sylvia Gonzalez, then 72, was arrested in 2019 after recently taking office as a council member in Castle Hills, Texas, having run for election as a critic of the city manager.

She was charged with inappropriately removing a government document, identified as a citizen petition she had prepared.

Gonzalez said she accidentally muddled the petition with other papers.

The charges were ultimately dropped, but only after Gonzalez, who has no criminal record, spent a day in jail. She also quit the City Council.

Gonzalez then sued, saying that the arrest was a form of retaliation against her for expressing her complaints against the city manager, Ryan Rapelye. She claimed officials had violated the Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects free speech rights.

Castle Hills Mayor Edward Trevino, then-police Chief John Siemens and Alex Wright, a lawyer engaged to assist with the investigation, were all named as defendants.

At issue at the Supreme Court is Gonzalez’s effort to overcome a procedural roadblock to pursuing her lawsuit.

Gonzalez’s lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group, say she should be able to bring her claim under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling called Nieves v. Bartlett.

The ruling said that in most cases when police have probable cause to make an arrest, plaintiffs cannot bring retaliation claims.

But, the court added, in limited situations a case can move forward if the plaintiff can show that other people in a similar situation had not been arrested, even if there was probable cause.

During the argument, several justices from across the ideological spectrum seemed troubled that Gonzalez could not argue that no one else had ever been charged with the same crime in a similar situation in order to overcome the probable cause finding.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan indicated that plaintiffs who, as she put it, have “solid objective evidence” that they were treated differently should be able to make that argument.

A fellow liberal, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, made similar remarks.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch also weighed in, pointing to the thousands of criminal statutes that are rarely if ever enforced, meaning that the absence of prosecution of other people could be relevant evidence of a retaliatory motive.

“You’re saying they can all sit there unused, except for one person who alleges that ‘I was the only person in America who’s ever been prosecuted for this because I dared express a view protected by the First Amendment’ and that’s not actionable?” he asked Lisa Blatt, the lawyer representing the defendants.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the 2019 ruling, appeared reluctant to limit its scope by ruling in favor of Gonzalez.

Seeking to expand the type of evidence that could be submitted to rebut probable cause “seems to me to be inconsistent” with the earlier ruling, he said.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh also seemed skeptical of Gonzalez’s arguments, saying that people are frequently prosecuted for tampering with or stealing government documents. What makes Gonzalez’s case different is that she claims it was not done on purpose.

“If you intentionally stole a government document at a government proceeding — that’s not nothing,” he said.

A federal judge rejected the defendants’ bid to throw out the lawsuit on the grounds that they were protected under the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which says there must be a violation of clearly established rights for lawsuits seeking damages over law enforcement or government officials’ actions. The judge said Gonzalez did not have to “plead or prove the absence of probable cause.”

But the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying that Gonzalez’s claim was barred because of the probable cause issue.

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According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, a person in the U.S. can expect to move 11.7 times in their lifetime. Therefore, making the right choice when moving homes is crucial, as it can be one of an individual’s biggest purchases.

A new study conducted by Storage Company Pink Storage compared all 50 states across 16 key indicators, ranging from housing affordability and levels of violent crime to average life expectancy, to determine the worst and best states to live in.

According to the report, Texas is one of the worst states to live in, leaving many residents wondering what went wrong.

The research’s key findings showed that Texas ranked in the top four for slow real estate growth.

In addition, Texas residents worked longer hours than every other state except Louisiana, which ranked first for hours worked.

Furthermore, Texas ranked 12th for levels of violent crime and 10th for auto crime.

Overall, Texas ranked sixth for the worst state to live in. The five states that ranked worse than Texas were Louisiana, Tennessee, Arizona, South Carolina, and California.

A recent report conducted in February ranked Texas as one of the worst states for women to live in.

"Moving home is one of the biggest decisions that you will have to make during your lifetime, and if you are moving across state lines, the move can be even more difficult," said Scott Evans of Pink Storage.

"Everyone will have different criteria when moving homes, but most people will want to live in an area with affordable housing, good job prospects, and low crime levels. Our study focuses on these core principles and should give some insights into what can be expected when moving to a certain state."

The study's results are crucial for anyone looking to relocate, as it highlights the importance of considering all factors before making a decision.

When deciding where to live, factors such as the economy, crime rate, education, and housing market should be considered.

In conclusion, while Texas may not be the best state to live in, it's important to note that every state has its pros and cons, and the decision to relocate should be made based on personal preferences and priorities.

The charts, full report, and methodology can be found on the company's site.

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In a letter posted on its site Thursday, Pornhub deemed the new Texas law ineffective and “dangerous,” adding that it will directly impact content creators’ ability to distribute their adult content legally.

“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk,” the letter read.

The bill, officially named House Bill 118, went into effect in September last year but was prevented from going into effect a month later following a lawsuit by a coalition of groups, including Pornhub’s parent company Aylo Global Entertainment.

But last week the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals upheld the law following an appeal from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The law requires adult websites to verify users are at least 18 years old using a government-issued ID or public or private transactional data” before being allowed to access the content.

In a post on X, the bill’s author state Sen. Angela Paxton, defended the bill, adding it creates an “age verification requirement for online pornography websites in Texas to protect minors from accessing their harmful content.”

Last year Pornhub also restricted access to its site in Utah after the state passed a similar age-verification law.

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Jennifer Lynn Rossi, 45, mixed lemon, salt and vinegar into a sports drink bottle to allegedly “prevent her son’s drink from being stolen at school by other students,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

Her 10-year-old son handed the bottle to another boy during P.E. class on Tuesday, who experienced nausea and a headache shortly after drinking the mixed concoction, the office said. Deputies were then called to the Legacy Traditional School in Alamo Ranch for the sick child.

Although lemon, salt and vinegar are nontoxic ingredients, the incident resulted in the victim being hospitalized for additional medical monitoring. The student was eventually discharged.

When the school principal contacted Rossi, she admitted having “intentionally mixed the contents of the drink” after hearing from her son that the victim “stole his drink and was bullying him,” according to the arrest affidavit.

The son recounted in a written statement that his Prime drink went missing during recess the day before, and the victim “said he had it and kept bragging about it.”

After coming home to tell Rossi about the incident, she “had an idea to prank” the alleged bully, and he “did what he was told by his mother,” according to the affidavit.

The victim stated the son “accused him” and “someone tried to hit him” for allegedly taking the Prime drink.

Rossi said she “only intended to stop her child from being bullied” and that she “is a nurse and knows the mixture to be nontoxic,” according to the affidavit.

But after the victim poured the mixed concoction into his water bottle and took a “large sip of the drink,” he “then stated feeling bad.”

Rossi was charged with injury to a child causing bodily injury.

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The case involves 2-year-old Josiah Sanders, who was taken from his home by Child Protective Services more than 65 days ago.

Records show that last December, the boy’s pediatrician instructed his mother, Joslyn Sanders, who is in a wheelchair, to take her son to Josiah to Children’s Medical Center Dallas after his weight dropped and a rash became something that needed to be treated.

According to records, Sander objected to an antibiotic doctors wanted to give the boy, so she left against doctors’ advice saying she wanted to take him to his pediatrician.

During a court hearing Wednesday, the hospital’s pediatrician, Dr. Suzanne Dakil, testified Josiah’s skin was flaking off, parts of his body were swollen, and if he did not receive in-hospital care doctors were concerned he might die.

When Sanders left the hospital, doctors had to report it to CPS. A CPS worker then went to the family home in Corinth with police.

According to police, when officers refused to remove the child from the home because they did not see signs of abuse or neglect, the CPS worker took Josiah back to Children’s in Dallas, despite not having a court order. According to police, Sanders told the CPS worker she would take Josiah to Children’s in Plano.

After a two-month stay in the hospital, Children’s said Josiah has improved and he gained eight pounds after a feeding tube was placed through his nose.

A Children’s emergency room doctor testified all of this could have been avoided if Sanders had taken her son straight to another hospital and not home.

Josiah’s pediatrician says Sanders is a good mother with understandable concerns and that this happened because of a lack of communication between doctors.

The CPS investigator who took Josiah from his home has not yet testified. The hearing in Denton County court continues next week. More than ten people are set to testify.

“It’s very difficult given it’s been pushed back, and I would like my son to be returned to me as soon as possible,” Sanders said after the hearing Wednesday. “I’m keeping my faith in God and in my team as well that justice will be served and the truth will be brought to light.”

When asked about the hospital’s assertion that his health has improved in doctors’ care Sanders said, “Given that I was given that same opportunity, I would have had the same results with him. CPS rushed to judgment and didn’t allow me, or give me the opportunity to do that.”

Sanders’ son remains in the care of a woman known to the family.

Elizabeth Francis, who lives in Houston, became the oldest living person in the U.S. after the reported death of 116-year-old Edie Ceccarelli of Willits, California, according to LongeviQuest, an organization that tracks human longevity, and the Gerontology Research Group, a nonprofit dedicated to supercentenarians and longevity.

According to the company’s ranking, Francis, at 114 years and 214 days old, is believed to be the fifth-oldest living person in the world.

She is surpassed by 116-year-old María Branyas Morera, who was born in San Francisco but has lived in Spain since she was a child; 115-year-old Tomiko Itooka, from Japan; 115-year-old Inah Canabarro Lucas, from Brazil; and 114-year-old Juan Vicente Pérez Mora, from Venezuela.

Who is Elizabeth Francis? 

Elizabeth Francis was born in Louisiana on July 15, 1909, but moved to Houston as a child when she was sent to live with her aunt following her mother’s death.

According to LongeviQuest, the woman worked in a cafeteria at the ABC13 News station in Houston for nearly 20 years until she retired in 1975, nearly 50 years ago.

Longevity runs in her family

Longevity appears to run in her family. Francis’s sister, Bertha Johnson, died in February 2011 at 106 years old.

The sisters are among the sibling pairs with the oldest combined age in world history.

Additionally, Francis has a daughter, Dorothy, who is currently 94 years old. The woman also has three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren.

What is her secret for longevity?

Francis has said she attributed her longevity to her faith in God.

“It’s the good Lord’s good blessing,” she said in an interview with TODAY.com in August 2023. “I just thank God I’m here.”

During her certification as the oldest living person in the country, Francis told LongeviQuest that her life advice is: “If the good Lord gave it to you, use it! Speak your mind, don’t hold your tongue!”

Francis lives at home and is cared for by one of her granddaughters.

According to TODAY.com, she is confined to her bed and has some memory problems, but in general, she remains alert and recognizes her family.