A deadly shooting at a Waffle House restaurant in suburban Nashville in the early morning hours of April 22, 2018 ended with four people dead and another four wounded before a heroe patron wrestled the gun away from the shooter. After being disarmed, the shooter, identified as 29-year-old Travis Reinking, fled on foot. Reinking was taken into custody the next day not far from his apartment complex, after an intense 34 hour manhunt.
Reinking reportedly arrived at the Waffle House naked, except for a jacket, armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle just after 3am. He fatally shot two people just outside the Waffle House, 20 year old Joe Perez and 29 year old waffle house employee Taurean C. Sanderlin before entering and continuing his rampage. Once inside, he killed DeEbony Groves and shot 23 year old Akilah DaSilva, who was rushed to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he later died.
DaSilva’s 21-year-old girlfriend Shanita Waggoner and 24-year-old Sharita Henderson were also shot and wounded in the shooting. Two other people were wounded by breaking glass during the shooting. Twenty-nine year old James Shaw Jr., who suffered a bullet graze wound, has been hailed a hero for ending the bloodshed. Shaw hid near the restaurant’s bathrooms when the shooting began but when he saw an opportunity, he rushed the shooter and wrestled the rifle away. The gunman then fled on foot, leaving behind his rifle and ammunition.
Reinking was from Morton, Illinois but moved to the Nashville area in the Fall of 2017. He has had a history of erratic and delusional behavior. In May 2016, Tazewell County police responded to a call from Reinking’s parents in the parking lot of a drugstore, where a paramedic said Reinking had delusions that Taylor Swift was stalking him and hacking his phone. Reinking had previously lived in an apartment above his father’s crane rental business in Tremont, Illinois. In June 2017, an employee of the business called police, saying Reinking had come downstairs carrying a rifle, wearing a pink dress, and using an expletive before tossing the rifle in his trunk and leaving the building. On another occasion around the same time, a public pool director called police to report Reinking had come to the pool in a “pink women’s housecoat” and then exposed himself to lifeguards.
In July 2017, the U.S. Secret Service arrested Reinking near the White House after he crossed a barrier and refused to leave. The Secret Service said Reinking had said he “wanted to set up a meeting with the president.” Reinking was charged with a misdemeanor, unlawful entry and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in July 2017. Reinking performed 32 hours of community service and was ordered to stay away from the White House. Reinking successfully completed the program in November 2017 and the court dismissed the case.
A month after his arrest, Illinois authorities revoked his state firearms authorization and seized four of his weapons, including the AR-15 used in the Nashville shooting. Two additional rifles and a handgun were also seized. The sheriff of Tazewell County, Illinois, said that Reinking’s father, Jeffrey Reinking held a valid state authorization card and asked sheriff’s deputies whether he could keep the guns. They allowed him to do so after he assured them he would keep them secure and away from his son. Reinking’s father now could face criminal charges after he admitted that he eventually gave all four guns back to his son which is potentially a violation of federal law.
Read more
A federal jury convicted three Kansas militia members were for their role in plotting to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali refugees. The plot was thwarted by another member of the group who tipped off federal authorities about escalating threats of violence. Gavin Wright, Patrick Stein and Curtis Allen were convicted of one count of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and one count of conspiracy against civil rights. Wright was also convicted of a charge of lying to the FBI. Sentencing is scheduled for June 27.
An FBI informant said they were plotting to use guns and car bombs to mass murder Somalis. The three men belonged to a militia called the Crusaders which was a splinter group of the militia Kansas Security Force. Testimony and recordings indicate the men tried to recruit other members of the Kansas Security Force to join them. The men were indicted in October 2016 for plotting an attack for the day after the presidential election in the town of Garden City, about 220 miles west of Wichita.
According to prosecutors, Stein was recorded discussing the type of fuel and fertilizer bomb that Timothy McVeigh used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. The men discussed obtaining vehicles and filling them with explosives and parking them at the four corners of the apartment complex to create an explosion that would level the entire complex. They downloaded recipes from the internet and they experimented with and tested those explosives. Stein was arrested when he delivered 300 pounds of fertilizer to undercover FBI agents to make explosives. Wright is captured in one recording saying he hoped an attack on the Somalis would “wake people up” and inspire others to take similar action against Muslims.
Defense attorneys argued that the FBI set up the men with a paid informant and all the talk about violence wasn’t serious. They said the men had a right to free speech and association under the U.S. Constitution. Prosecutors argued that the plot was more than just words and presented enough evidence to convince the jury of a conviction.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the verdicts a significant victory against domestic terrorism and hate crimes. “The defendants in this case acted with clear premeditation in an attempt to kill people on the basis of their religion and national origin,” Sessions said in a news release. “That’s not just illegal — it’s immoral and unacceptable, and we’re not going to stand for it.”
Read more
The federal government, along with state regulators have halted the demolition of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until a safe plan can be developed after the discovery that dozens of demolition workers have inhaled or ingested radioactive particles in the past year. The Hanford site is a plutonium processing plant from the 1940s located Richland, Washington that took liquid plutonium and shaped it into hockey puck-sized disks for use in nuclear warheads. The plant helped create the nation’s nuclear arsenal and made key portions of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan that ended WWII.
Plutonium production ended in the 1980s and by 1989, the site switched its focus to cleanup of nuclear wastes. The contamination is a discouraging delay in a massive $2 billion a year cleanup effort that started in 2016. Hanford is the nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site. The Energy Department, which owns Hanford, has launched an independent investigation into the spread of radiation at the plant.
Hanford officials issued a report in late March that said a total of 42 Hanford workers inhaled or ingested radioactive particles from demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant when they were exposed during contamination events in June and December of last year. Radioactive contamination was also found outside plant offices and inside two dozen vehicles, the report said. Seven workers’ homes were checked for radioactive contamination, with none found, the report said. The report concluded Hanford officials placed too much reliance on air-monitoring systems that failed to pick up the spread of radioactive particles.
According to the report, managers of the private contractor performing the demolition work for the federal government were caught between maintaining safety and trying to make progress toward project deadlines. The risk escalated as walls of the plutonium plant were knocked down and the rubble was stored in piles. The report stated that fixatives sprayed on the rubble to keep radioactive particles from blowing away may not have been effective. This theory seems to be backed up by the the state Health Department’s findings of very small amounts of airborne radioactive contamination near Highway 240 in the past year that is believed to have come from the plant demolition 10 miles away.
The amount of radiation involved was reportedly low, lower than naturally occurring levels of radiation people are exposed to in everyday life. The amounts of radiation that have escaped are considered too small by state experts to pose a health risk. All the contamination was found on lands that are closed to the public. The project was not supposed to exposed workers to any contamination but in June radioactive particles escaped and traces were found inside 31 workers. In December, eleven more workers were found to be contaminated which prompted the government to shut down demolition.
The state Health Department said there is presently no threat to public health from the releases. “However, we are concerned if work resumes without better controls, a risk to the public may develop,” the agency said in a recent letter to Hanford managers.
Read more
Mark Zuckerberg spent two days on Capitol Hill seeking to placate angry lawmakers by saying he would be open to some sort of regulation to protect the privacy of users on his global social-media platform. The hearings are the result of revelations last month that a company called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of 50 million Facebook profiles. This information was allegedly used to map out voter behavior in 2016 for both the Brexit campaign and the US presidential election.
Cambridge Analytica is a British company that helps businesses “change audience behavior”. Back in 2015, a Cambridge psychology professor called Aleksandr Kogan built an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” and Kogan’s company Global Science Research had a deal to share info from the app with Cambridge Analytica. The app was a personality quiz that asked Facebook users for information about themselves and an estimated 270,000 Facebook users signed up and took personality tests. The app collected the information of each user’s Facebook friends, who had not provided consent.
The company used the data to build psychological profiles of 87 million Facebook users in order to tailor ads that could sway their political views. Since the breach was revealed Facebook has stated that Kogan’s app picked up information in “a legitimate way” but that their rules were violated when the data was sold on to Cambridge Analytica. Around the same time the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, news that Facebook has been collecting and storing call records and SMS data from Android devices for years.
Facebook has been requesting access to contacts, SMS data, and call history on Android devices to improve its friend recommendation algorithm and distinguish between business contacts and personal friendships. Facebook appears to be gathering this data through its Messenger application, which often prompts Android users to take over as the default SMS client. Facebook has, at least recently, been offering an opt-in prompt that prods users with a big blue button to “continuously upload” contact data, including call and text history. It’s not clear when this prompt started appearing in relation to the historical data gathering,
The hearings were held to determine whether Washington will create regulations that address increasingly widespread concerns about digital privacy. During Mr. Zuckerberg’s two days of testimony, he repeatedly said that he had learned the lesson of the recent data-breach scandals, saying he thought it was inevitable that there will need to be some regulation but warned that poor regulations could leads to unintended consequences.
Following Wednesday’s hearing, House Commerce Chairman Greg Walden described it as “a wake-up call for Silicon Valley and the tech community that if you let these things get out of hand, having grown up in a very lightly regulated environment, you could end up with a lot more regulation than you seek.” “I don’t want to rush into regulation minutes after having the first hearing of this magnitude. But certainly if they can’t clean up their act, we’ll clean it up for them.” He said lawmakers would consider calling other tech CEOs.
Read more
The crude oil spill from the Keystone Pipeline in South Dakota last November has turned out to be nearly twice as big as first reported. Around 407,000 gallons spilled onto farmland when the pipeline broke near Amherst in Marshall County on Nov. 16th. TransCanada had originally put the spill at 210,000 gallons but the new number would make the spill the seventh-largest onshore oil spill since 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
TransCanada had shut down the 590,000 barrel-per-day pipeline, one of Canada’s main crude export routes linking Alberta’s oil fields to U.S. refineries, immediately following the spill. Repairs were made and TransCanada resumed using the pipeline 12 days after the leak. Immediately after the leak was reported South Dakota regulators said they could revoke TransCanada’s permit for the Keystone Pipeline if an investigation concludes that the company violated its terms. If that happens, the company would have to correct any issues—in the worst case, even replace part of the pipeline—before oil shipments could resume.
A preliminary report indicated that the pipeline might have been damaged during its’ construction in 2008, though the investigation is ongoing. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is expected to release its final report on the leak in the next few weeks. The federal agency has estimated that the leak cost TransCanada $9.57 million. The Keystone Pipeline carries oil more than 2,600 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Oklahoma and Illinois.
In February, TransCanada Corp. reported that the cleanup of the massive oil spill was halfway finished. TransCanada spokeswoman Robynn Tysver said work at the Amherst site has transitioned from excavation to remediation. She stated that all of the excavation work has been completed and most of the impacted soil has been removed. In late March, Tysver said the company had replaced the last of the topsoil and have seeded the impacted area.” The company also agreed to restore the roads used by trucks transporting equipment and soil.
A spill and activity report on the agency’s website shows that TransCanada has installed groundwater monitoring systems, which haven’t yet detected any contamination. The pipeline runs through both Dakotas and two other states and drew fierce resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota, the tribe’s allies and environmentalists. Opposition to the pipeline sparked month’s long protests, with as many as 10,000 people participating during the peak of the demonstrations.
Read more
Fox News host Laura Ingraham found herself in hot water for a tweet mocking outspoken Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg. Hogg survived the Florida shooting that left 17 people dead and 14 others wounded. He is one of twenty founding members of Never Again MSD, a gun control advocacy group led by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) students. After Hogg mentioned publicly that he had been rejected by four UC campuses, Ingraham taunted him about it on Twitter. Ingraham tweeted, “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)”
Ingraham was immediately criticized for taunting a 17 year old school shooting survivor; with many pointing out that she herself is a mother and an adult. Hogg responded with the tweet “ Soooo @IngrahamAngle what are your biggest advertisers … Asking for a friend. #BoycottIngramAdverts” He then compiled a listing of the top 12 advertisers on Ingraham’s Fox News program and urged his 722,000 followers to “contact” the companies. He labeled Ingraham as a bully and before long, Hogg’s tweet was flooded with replies from his supporters, some of whom added images of their messages to the companies mentioned.
Several companies have responded to the boycott call. Nutrish tweeted “We are in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.” TripAdvisor pointed to one of its company values — “We are better together” — in its decision to stop advertising on Ingraham’s show. “We do not . . . condone the inappropriate comments made by this broadcaster,” TripAdvisor said in a statement. “In our view, these statements focused on a high school student cross the line of decency.” Online home goods retailer Wayfair pulled their ads saying that Ingraham’s personal criticism of Hogg was “not consistent with our values.” Nestlé and Liberty Mutual also stated that they had no plans to buy future ads on the show. Johnson & Johnson, Stitch Fix, Office Depot, Ruby Tuesday, Miracle Ear, Jenny Craig, Expedia, Nestle, Hulu and The Atlantis, Paradise Island resort have also joined the boycott.
Following the loss of advertisers, Ingraham apologized for mocking Hogg with a tweet the next day. “Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA-incl. @DavidHogg111. On “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how poised he was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion.”
Hogg dismissed the apology as an insincere “effort just to save your advertisers” and continued to label Ingraham a bully. “The apology . . . was kind of expected, especially after so many of her advertisers dropped out,” Hogg said on CNN. “I’m glad to see corporate America standing with me and the other students of Parkland and everybody else. Because when we work together, we can accomplish anything.”
Read more
During the trial of Noor Salman, widow of the Pulse Nightclub shooter, testimony has revealed that the father of shooter Omar Mateen had worked as an FBI informant. Seddique Mateen, Omar’s father, was a confidential FBI informant from 2005 to 2016. He is now under investigation for money transfers to Turkey and Afghanistan.
FBI Special Agent Juvenal Martin, who was on the stand in the terrorism trial of Noor Salman, said Omar’s father, Seddique, was upset and had called him while his son was being investigated for the extremist comments in 2006. Martin testified that, during the call which took place a decade before the Pulse attack, Seddique told him something like “if he had done those things he was being stupid.” Martin said the FBI interviewed Omar two other times as part of that investigation, but eventually determined he wasn’t a security threat. The bureau even considered turning Omar into a confidential informant himself, according to Martin’s testimony.
The trial produced several revelations about the shooting. Prosecutors said Mateen originally intended to attack Disney World, using a gun concealed in a baby stroller, but changed his mind after seeing police at the entertainment complex. Government witnesses, using data from Mateen’s cell phone, said he looked up information about Orlando nightclubs and went back and forth between two of them before setting on Pulse as his target.
Omar Mateen’s widow, Noor Salman, was found not guilty of all charges against her in the only trial to stem from the deadly June 2016 shooting rampage. She was accused of helping her husband plan his terror assault on the Orlando, Florida, nightclub and of falsely denying her role afterward. The government equated Mateen’s actions with supporting terrorism, because he repeatedly pledged allegiance to ISIS before and during the attack, which left 49 people dead and 53 injured.
Salman was charged with aiding him in providing material support to a terror group. She was also charged with obstruction of justice, accused of misleading police and FBI agents by making contradictory statements about whether she knew what he was planning. In opening statements, defense attorney Linda Moreno said Salman was a person with a low IQ who did not know “she would wake up a widow, and Omar Mateen a martyr for a cause that she didn’t support.”
In a November 2016 interview with The New York Times, Salman apologized for her husband’s act and claimed she was unaware of his plan. “I don’t condone what he has done,” she told the newspaper. “I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.” FBI agents arrested Salman in January 2017 inside the California home she shares with her young son and she had been in custody since then.
Outside the courtroom, a spokesman for Salman’s family said “The family really wants to first say that we’re very sorry for the family members and friends of the 49 victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and also the survivors of that horrible attack.” “Noor can go home now to her son, Zack, resume her life and try to pick up the pieces.”
The June 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre was the deadliest single gunman mass shooting in United States history until the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. It is the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT people in U.S. history and the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the September 11 attacks of 2001.
Read more
Investigators searching for a potential motive for Austin Bomber Mark Anthony Conditt’s actions are no closer to answering the question of why he carried out a nearly three-week-long bombing spree that left two people dead. Conditt blew himself up inside his SUV early Wednesday, shortly after a SWAT team performed a tactical maneuver to force him to stop the SUV.
Conditt went to a FedEx store south of Austin on Sunday and made the mistake of parking within view of a surveillance camera that captured the vehicle’s license plates on his red SUV. Surveillance photos from the mail delivery office showed Conditt wearing a baseball cap, blond wig and pink gloves as he brought two packages to the store. Investigators used cellphone technology to track him down on Wednesday and to confirm that he had been to all of the bombing locations.
The early morning confrontation started after his SUV was located in a parking lot of a hotel in Round Rock. As plainclothes officers and unmarked vehicles descended on the area while a ballistics and SWAT team were enroute. The officers then followed Conditt as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto Interstate 35 where he ultimately detonated a bomb as officers approached his vehicle.
Investigators say they are no closer to understanding a motive and are relying on Mark Anthony Conditt’s own words from a 25-minute recording he made hours before he was confronted by the SWAT team. In the cellphone recording, Conditt, 23, refers to himself as a “psychopath” and showed no remorse for carrying out the deadly bombings and spreading fear across the city. Federal agents searched Conditt’s home in Pflugerville for almost two days, removing explosive materials and looking for clues that could point to a reason for the bombings. Two of Conditt’s roommates were detained and questioned by police. One of them was released hours after Conditt’s death and the other was released the next afternoon, police said. Neither was arrested or publicly identified.
Investigators found components for making similar bombs to the ones that exploded in the past few weeks, but no finished bombs were found, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. A law enforcement source said the devices that exploded in Austin and near San Antonio were pipe bombs with batteries and smokeless powder and were constructed with materials found in a hardware or sporting goods store. The bombs had distinctive shrapnel inside with some using “mousetrap” switches and others using “clothespin” switches. Chief Brian Manley of the Austin Police Department said that Mr. Conditt had made a 25-minute recording in which he discussed the bombs and how he had made them. The recording, Chief Manley said, was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point.”
According to friends and neighbors, Conditt was an intense, socially awkward loner, who was the oldest child in a tight-knit, devout Christian family that held Bible study groups in their home. Conditt was unemployed and had no criminal history. He had worked for a local manufacturer, Crux Manufacturing, for about four years until he was fired this past August after he failed to meet job expectations, according to a statement from the company.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler said the city’s “collective fear and anxiety” was growing as the bomber carried out the string of attacks. “There was feeling that there was not much that we could do. There was a collective helplessness, our community was beginning to fray,” Adler said at a City Council meeting. He added that it appeared that Mr. Conditt had acted alone, but authorities had not definitively ruled out whether he had any accomplices.
Read more
A gunman killed three women in a standoff at a Northern California military veterans home. The three victims—Jennifer Gonzales, 32; Christine Loeber, 48 and Jennifer Golick, 42; worked for a counseling program at the Pathway Home nonprofit, which helps military veterans overcome PTSD and transition back into civilian life. The shooter, 36-year-old Albert Wong of Sacramento, was a military veteran and former patient at the center who was kicked out of the program just days before the shooting spree, after he threatened its employees- including one of the women killed.
Records show Wong was in the Army reserves from October 1998 until December 2002 and served in active duty from May 2010 to August 2013. He was deployed to Afghanistan April 2011 to March 2012. He received several awards and medals, including an Army Commendation Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and Expert Marksmanship Badge with Rifle before being honorably discharged.
According to law enforcement sources, Wong was armed with a rifle and a shotgun when he entered the room where a going-away party for some departing Pathway employees was taking place. According to sources, Wong entered the building and exchanged fire with a deputy. Witnesses say he calmly entered the room brandishing a rifle and let at least 4 employees leave-firing shots into the rest of the room as they left.
Napa County Sheriff John Robertson said dozens of law enforcement officers responded about 10:20 a.m. local time to a report of shots fired. Reports indicate that as many as 15 to 30 shots were fired before Wong took the hostages at the Veterans Home, on the second floor of The Pathway Home. Everyone at the Veterans Home was told to shelter in place and lock their doors, and the entire facility was placed on lockdown for hours.
Authorities say the gunman shot at police as they surrounded the building. SWAT, FBI, and ATF all responded to the incident, but no one was able to reach him during the standoff. The gunman and the three hostages were found deceased after a nearly seven-hour standoff. It’s not yet known what his motives were or if the victims were chosen at random. Jen Golick’s father-in-law, told news outlets that she had ordered Wong’s removal from the Pathway program two weeks prior to the shooting. She called her husband, Mark Golick, around 10:30 a.m. Pacific to let him know that she had been taken hostage. He never heard from her again.
The Veterans Home is one of the largest in the United States, housing at least 1,100 men and women. The Pathway Home, located on the Veterans Home grounds, operates an independent 35,000-square-foot center within the Yountville veterans’ home, has treated more than 400 veterans since 2008. Male veterans enrolled in the live-in program are mostly soldiers returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have difficulty transitioning into civilian life. Many returning veterans have graduated from the program, including Adam Schumann, the subject of the book and film “Thank You For Your Service”.
In 2016, the program began transitioning from a group that focused primarily on housing and treating veterans with PTSD into a program with a wider mission, including helping vets with academic and career development. Loeber was the executive director of the Pathway Home and Golick was a staff psychologist and clinical director there. Gonzales was a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Yountville Mayor John Dunbar said he was not sure when or if the facility will reopen. Six people currently enrolled in the program will continue to receive care, he said.
Read more
Authorities say six people have died after a 960-ton span of a pedestrian bridge collapsed on Thursday, onto a busy street below, killing six motorists under an avalanche of concrete and metal. At least nine others were injured in the collapse of the nearly 200-foot-long bridge, which was under construction near the campus of Florida International University. The bridge, which was still being installed at the time of the collapse, was built to connect Florida International University with downtown Sweetwater, where many students live. The bridge was not scheduled to open until 2019.
Senator Marco Rubio said suspension cables on the bridge “were being tightened when it collapsed.” Police are enlisting the help of engineers as they investigate the cause of the collapse. The National Transportation Safety Board, Miami-Dade homicide detectives and prosecutors are focusing on the government agencies and two contractors — Munilla Construction Management, which was building the structure, and FIGG Bridge Group, which engineered and designed the span.
A lead engineer with the private contractor FIGG Bridge Engineers -who constructed the bridge, left a voice mail for a state transportation official warning of “some cracking observed on the north end of the span” two days before the structure collapsed. In the message, which was not retrieved until Friday, the engineer said he did not consider the crack a safety issue. The Florida Department of Transportation official to whom the voice mail was directed was out of the office on assignment. Footage of the collapse, taken from a vehicle dashcam, suggests the concrete came apart on the north end — the same area that the bridge’s design engineer spoke about in the message.
On Thursday, shortly before the bridge collapsed, a meeting was held regarding the crack that appeared on the structure. The university said that the meeting was convened by FIGG and Munilla Construction Management (MCM), which built the bridge. “The FIGG engineer of record delivered a technical presentation regarding the crack and concluded that there were no safety concerns and the crack did not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge,” the university said in a statement, adding that representatives of the school and the state Department of Transportation attended the session, which lasted two hours.
News outlets speculating over the cause of the collapse have focused on the cracks reported but experts say other factors, including the tensioning work going on at the bridge’s north end are of more concern. They say cracking in new concrete is not uncommon and not necessarily a sign of failure. Tightening of steel cables, or tendons, that run through concrete structural elements is a delicate operation, and over-tightening can cause concrete pieces to twist and break apart, experts say.
Rescue workers dug through the rubble nonstop for two days, pulling out crushed vehicles in search of victims. All six victims were identified by Saturday morning as Florida International University student Alexa Duran, 18; Brandon Brownfield, a tower crane technician, husband and father of three; Rolando Fraga Hernandez, 60, was a systems technician at ITG
Communications; Osvaldo González, 57 and Alberto Arias, 54. Navarro Brown, 37, an employee with Structural Technologies VSL, died at a hospital shortly after the accident. Two other employees of the company were hospitalized at Kendall Regional Medical Center in Miami in stable condition.
Read more
