In Maryland, a self-described white nationalist Coast Guard lieutenant pleaded guilty to four federal weapons and drugs charges, after investigators uncovered his plot to kill high-profile liberal figures, including Democratic lawmakers, media personalities and judges. Fifty-year-old Christopher Hasson was arrested with a stockpile of 15 guns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, after he used his work computer at the Coast Guard to read the manifestos of mass killers and to research sniper attacks.
Hasson worked as an acquisitions officer and was arrested at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington in February. Investigators said they found 15 firearms, two homemade silencers and more 1,000 rounds of ammunition in his Maryland home, as well as at least 100 pills of the painkiller Tramadol and more than 30 bottles of purported human growth hormone. Two of the four counts in Hasson’s indictment charged him with illegally possessing unregistered and unserialized silencers. He also was charged with possession of a firearm by an unlawful user or addict of a controlled substance, and illegal possession of tramadol, an opioid painkiller.
Inspired by the manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, Hasson spent hours researching the tactics of domestic terrorists, prosecutors said. “I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on earth,” he wrote on his computer, saying he would “have to take serious look at appropriate individual targets, to bring the greatest impact.” Among the targets on a list found on Hasson’s computer were Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes and Democratic Senator Kamala Harris. Hasson also targeted two Supreme Court justices and two social media company executives and searched online for their home addresses in March 2018, within minutes of searching firearm sales websites, according to prosecutors. Prosecutors wrote that the former Marine considered them “traitors.”
In a 2017 letter he sent to himself as a draft and apparently wrote to a neo-Nazi leader, Hasson identified himself as a white nationalist for over 30 years and “advocated for ‘focused violence’ in order to establish a white homeland,” prosecutors said. He researched how to make homemade bombs and mortars, studied sniper training and used his government computer to search for information about Nazis and Adolf Hitler, prosecutors said.
Federal prosecutors did not file terrorism charges against Hasson. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom indicated the government may seek the maximum sentence of up to 31 years in prison at the sentencing hearing scheduled for January 31, 2020. Hasson’s attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, said she intends to seek a 3.5-year sentence for her client. Oyer said Hasson “was not plotting a terrorist attack or any of the abhorrent acts that the prosecution has repeatedly speculated about but never actually charged. Mr. Hasson never meant any harm to anyone. He deeply regrets the pain and embarrassment that he has caused his family and the U.S. Coast Guard”. Oyer has said prosecutors found no evidence to back up terrorism allegations. She accused them of seeking to punish Hasson for “private thoughts” he never shared.
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MGM Resorts International has agreed to an $800 million settlement with more than 4,000 survivors of the 2017 massacre outside the Mandalay Bay casino. The settlement was announced after survivors joined friends and families of those killed at a commemoration ceremony marking the second anniversary of the massacre. An independent claims administrator will be appointed by a court to distribute money from a settlement fund. The payout process is expected to be completed by late 2020, lawyers said.
It was October 1, 2017, when a lone gunman named Stephen Paddock used semiautomatic rifles altered with bump stocks to open fire from the resort’s 32nd floor on a country music festival below, killing 58 people and wounding 851 others. Paddock, a reclusive 64-year-old gambler, sprayed bullets on a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, which is owned and operated by MGM Resorts. He fired for between 10 to 15 minutes at the country music festival.
It remains the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Lawyers representing survivors and victims’ wanted MGM held liable for negligence because the shooter was able to enter the hotel with luggage that held an arsenal of high-powered, assault-style weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Paddock was found dead in his hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Federal investigators have still not been able to identify a motive for the shooting.
Police found 23 guns inside his hotel suite and discovered that he had brought more than 10 suitcases to the room over several days, authorities said. Lawsuits filed since the shooting questioned how and why the hotel did not know he was hoarding high-powered weapons and ammunition in his hotel room in the days leading up to the attack. Attorney Jim Frantz, who represents nearly 200 survivors and the families of four victims, said the settlement “should be a message to all the other corporations and businesses around the country-that they need to step up their security.”
MGM Resorts International and attorneys for about 4,440 plaintiffs, said the final amount of money awarded will depend on the number of plaintiffs who choose to take part in the settlement. “While nothing will be able to bring back the lives lost or the undo the horrors so many suffered on this day, this settlement will provide fair compensation for thousands of victims and their families,” Robert Eglet, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, told reporters. Eglet called the settlement a “milestone in the recovery process for the victims of the horrifying events” of Oct. 1, 2017. Eglet and lawyers from two California firms represent about 2,500 plaintiffs.
In July 2018, MGM spurred outrage when it aggressively tried to avoid liability by filing federal lawsuits against more than 1,000 victims in a legal maneuver aimed at avoiding liability. In its civil actions, MGM claimed it did not have to pay damages to shooting victims because the company was protected by 2002 legislation, the Support Anti-Terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies, or Safety Act. It protects corporations in the event of mass attacks committed on U.S. soil, provided services certified by the Department of Homeland Security were deployed. The company cited a federal law passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that encouraged companies to deploy anti-terrorism security technology without fear of being held responsible for damages in the event of a terrorist attack.
MGM Resorts Chairman and CEO Jim Murren now says that “prolonged litigation around these matters is in no one’s best interest. It is our sincere hope that this agreement means that scenario will be avoided.” The deal is not an admission of any wrongdoing by MGM, Murren said in the statement
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General Motors has told the UAW that it will continue to pay for health coverage for striking workers. GM told the union after it went on strike Sept. 16 at company sites nationwide that it was kicking health care costs to the union, a move that UAW leaders said blindsided them, even though they had anticipated picking up those costs at some point through the strike fund. GM stated they have chosen to work with their providers to keep all benefits fully in place for striking hourly employees, so they have no disruption to their medical care, including vision, prescription and dental coverage.
The strike is the UAW’s first since the Great Recession and GM’s federally induced bankruptcy in 2009. Experts say as the strike continues toward the end of its second week, it has left a lasting economic impact. Strike pay is $250 per week, but it won’t be distributed until the 15th day of picketing. The starting wage for temporary production workers at GM is $15.78 per hour, which is about $630 per 40-hour week. Top-paid production employees, however, earn $30.46 per hour, or about $1,218 per week.
The UAW says that temporary workers are union members doing the same work as permanent employees, but they get half the pay and far fewer benefits. The union wants those workers to get a path to being permanent and get pay and benefits that more closely match their permanent counterparts, even when they’re temporary. GM counters that employing temporary workers is good for permanent employees because they enable the full-time staff to take time off. Hiring temps also gives the company flexibility to scale up production for new models and combat employee absenteeism
The UAW is also fighting for the retention of a health insurance plan in which workers pay about 4% of the costs, an improved pension and assurances that GM — the maker of Buick, Cadillac, GMC and Chevrolet — will not close four plants in Maryland, Ohio and Michigan.
The strike has affected GM facilities in Ohio and Ontario not represented by the UAW. All told more than 3,200 GM workers represented by other unions have been laid off. On Monday, the automaker notified 525 employees at its DMax Ltd. engine plant in Moraine, Ohio, that they temporarily were laid off. GM suppliers, such as Magna International Inc. and Nexteer Automotive, also said they temporarily have had to lay off employees during the strike.
Analysts agree that the cost of the strike is mounting daily for both GM and striking workers, as well as for the broader community. Anderson Economic Group, an East Lansing-based consultant, said in a new analysis Thursday that GM probably has lost profits of $113 million so far, and is now losing money at the rate of $25 million a day. As talks continue toward a UAW-GM contract, negotiations have entered a new stage and moved to the main table. In recent days, talks have been confined to smaller committees as the two sides struggled to hammer out details.
Union leaders have argued that GM workers deserved a bigger slice of the company’s profits, which they say have totaled $35 billion in North America over the last three years. Union members are calling for fair wages, saying for every $1 a GM employee made, CEO Mary Barra made $281. As the strike enters its 3rd week, the national impact will continue until an agreement is reached.
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Hurricane Dorian ravaged the Bahamas, killing at least 50 people. As the clean-up operation continues, the death toll is expected to rise. About 1,300 people are missing after Dorian, while at least 15,000 are in need of shelter, food and medical care. Compounding the Bahamas’ misery is a massive oil spill that’s begun to spread into the ocean off the southern coast of Grand Bahama island after Hurricane Dorian blew the lids off six giant crude oil tanks.
Dorian was packing Category 5 winds with speeds of 185mph when it made landfall at Elbow Cay on the Abacos on September 1st. It is the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Atlantic basin since 1935. Rescue efforts were hampered as Dorian stalled, grinding in place for hours instead of moving back over open ocean. It equaled the highest winds ever recorded for a hurricane at landfall when it struck the Abaco Islands.
On the Abaco island chain, which is less developed than the tourist areas of the country and populated by fishermen and Haitian migrants — thousands of homes are expected to have been damaged or destroyed. A Redcross spokesman said it is believed that 13,000 houses — nearly half of all the homes on Grand Bahama and Abaco — suffered severe damage or were entirely destroyed. During the storm, images showed profound levels of flooding and rainfall, with as much as 30 inches falling in some areas. The Grand Bahama International Airport in Freeport, the archipelago’s second-largest city, was five feet underwater.
United Nations officials say that over 60,000 people on the two islands need emergency food access, and that around 62,000 need access to clean water. The main hospital on Grand Bahama is reportedly unusable, while the hospital on Abaco desperately requires food, water, and medical supplies. The U.N. estimated that at least 70,000 people are homeless on Abaco and Grand Bahama. More than 5,000 people have been evacuated from those islands to New Providence, where the country’s capital Nassau is located. The Minister of Health, Dr. Duane Sands, said 80 people with injuries were evacuated from the island of Abaco and five or six from Grand Bahama island. He said injuries ranged from broken bones to head injuries to “maternity-based issues.” Sands said some among the dead succumbed to their injuries after being evacuated. The Prime Minister encouraged parents to send their kids to school when they are evacuated to Nassau, and said the government would continue to provide food and healthcare.
The devastation wrought by Dorian after its day-and-a-half mauling of the Bahamas, left ravaged infrastructure that has impeded search and recovery efforts. The islands remain a mess of splintered buildings, torn-off roofs, snapped power poles and scattered vehicles. The hurricane destroyed the island’s power grid and severed most communications, although occasional text messages were getting through in Marsh Harbor, the biggest town. Risk modeler Karen Clark & Co. estimates that devastation from the storm could cost the country $7 billion in insured and uninsured losses. The preliminary estimate combines damage to commercial, residential and industrial properties as well as business-interruption expenses, the company said in a report. The figure doesn’t include vehicle losses or damage to infrastructure.
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A 50-year-old Kansas woman became the sixth person in the USA to die of a vaping-related lung illness, an outbreak that has ramped up health concerns nationwide. Kansas State Epidemiologist Farah Ahmed said in a statement that the unidentified patient had a history of underlying health issues and had been hospitalized with symptoms that progressed rapidly. Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said that the patient did have underlying health issues but nothing that would have foretold the fact that within a week after starting using e-cigarettes for the first time, she developed full-blown acute respiratory distress. Doctors say it’s clear the vaping related lung illness is responsible for her rapid deterioration.
Kansas health officials noted six more cases associated with the outbreak, three patients confirmed with the illness and three cases under investigation. Five previous vaping-related deaths were confirmed in California, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Oregon. After the Kansas fatality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallied six deaths and more than 450 possible cases of severe lung injury in 33 states and one jurisdiction. The CDC confirmed that investigators narrowed their focus and that the additive vitamin E acetate is a chemical involved in many of the cases, but officials emphasized it is not in all of the cases being reviewed.
People with a history of vaping who experience lung injury symptoms should seek medical care, according to Kansas health officials. Nationally, symptoms include shortness of breath, fever, cough, vomiting and diarrhea. Other symptoms reported by some patients include headache, dizziness and chest pain. Though many patients across the nation have been in their late teens, 20s or 30s, the Kansas death is a warning that older adults may be at particular risk.
Patients tend to arrive at the hospital short of breath and coughing. Many have also had fevers, general fatigue and gastrointestinal problems. It is not unusual for patients to be put into intensive care units, and on ventilators. All reported vaping nicotine, THC or a combination of the two in the days and weeks before falling ill. The CDC has recommended people stay away from vaping devices while investigators work to pinpoint exactly what’s behind the illnesses.
The rapid and worrisome increase has now prompted a Congressional hearing on the matter, after a policy discussion on the matter. The recent death has prompted the U.S. President to call for a ban on thousands of e-cigarette flavors in an effort to get people to give up e-cigarettes. E-cigarette companies have been given years to gather and submit evidence their products are safe and effective ways to quit smoking traditional tobacco. A federal judge has set a May 2020 deadline for companies to do so.
Dr. Norman said “God only knows what all is in there. There should be a moratorium on the sale of these products until we know more.” The American Lung Association also released a statement warning the public that e-cigarettes could cause irreversible lung damage. “No one should use e-cigarettes or any other tobacco product,” Harold Wimmer, national president of the American Lung Association, wrote in the statement. “This message is even more urgent today following the increasing reports of vaping-related illnesses and deaths nationwide.”
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The U.S. Coast Guard has recovered all but one body after a commercial diving boat named the Conception, caught fire in the early hours of Monday morning off the coast of Santa Cruz Island in Southern California. The only survivors were five crew members of the 75-foot vessel who were sleeping on or above deck. All 33 passengers and one crew member sleeping below deck at the time of the fire were killed in horrific disaster. Authorities have yet to determine the cause of the fire.
The boat and company, Truth Aquatics Inc., are well-known in the tight-knit Southern California diving community, which is now reeling from the horrific maritime tragedy that killed teenagers, families, veteran divers, and one crew member, who were wrapping up a three-day scuba diving trip. Divers were inspecting the ship’s wreckage with plans to raise it from the ocean floor, but that process may be complicated by forecast high winds in the coming days.
The surviving crew members told a harrowing story of their frantic attempts to save the passengers trapped below deck in a bunk room already engulfed in flames. One member of the crew told of hearing a noise from his bunk on the wheelhouse deck of the Conception and that when he opened the door of the wheelhouse, he saw flames erupting from the galley area but never heard smoke alarms. He told investigators he tried to get down a ladder but flames had engulfed the ladder.
Scrambling, the other crew members jumped from the bridge of the boat to the main deck. One person broke their leg doing so. They then rushed to the galley’s double doors to try and reach the passengers below, but the fire was already too intense.
At around 3:15 a.m., the captain made a frantic mayday call to authorities, telling them that the boat was engulfed, 33 people couldn’t escape, and “there’s no escape hatch for any of the people on board.” At that point, due to heat, flames, and smoke, the crew had to jump from the boat. Two crew members swam to the back of the Conception to get the inflatable skiff, then collected the others and made it to a nearby fishing boat, the Grape Escape.
Shirley Hansen, owner of the Grape Escape, said that she and her husband awoke at 3:30 a.m. to “horrific pounding” and a group of distraught, wet men, some injured and just in their underwear. Once on the Hansen’s boat, the men tried to call 911 for rescue and two crew members then took the dinghy boat back to the Conception to try and rescue any survivors but there were none. The Hansen’s said you could hear explosions from the engulfed diving boat every couple of minutes.
Officials have been looking at the dive boat’s maintenance and inspection records, which the Coast Guard said were up to date, and trying to understand if the 34 victims who had been sleeping in rows of narrow bunks even had a chance to escape. Officials are using advanced DNA technology to identify the victims. None of the names of the dead, who ranged in age from 17 to 60, have been publicly released by authorities but friends and family have confirmed who was on the boat. Among the victims were a family of five, a teacher and his daughter, and a diving instructor and marine biologist.
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A patient in Illinois is believed to be the first death linked to vaping. Health officials said the patient died after contracting a severe respiratory illness, but did not give details about what the patient was vaping or which device was used. They did not provide details about the patient’s identity, saying only that the person was an adult who had vaped recently and then succumbed to a severe respiratory illness.
This comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified nearly 200 possible cases of lung disease linked to vaping in at least 22 states, including 22 cases in Illinois. The Illinois patients range in age from 17 to 38. Illinois state officials are working with local health departments to investigate another 12 individuals. Officials said earlier this week that many patients, most of whom were adolescents or young adults, had described difficulty breathing, chest pain, vomiting and fatigue. The most seriously ill patients have had extensive lung damage that required treatment with oxygen and days on a ventilator. Some are expected to have permanent lung damage.
Many patients have acknowledged vaping of tetrahydrocannabinol, or (T.H.C.), the high-inducing chemical in marijuana, according to statements from federal and state health agencies. Officials still don’t know whether the ailments have been caused by marijuana-type products, e-cigarettes, or some type of street concoction that was vaped, or whether a contaminant or defective device may have been involved.
The F.D.A. does not regulate what ingredients are used in vaping devices. The e-cigarette market has broadened to counterfeiters and a range of devices that can be packed with different substances, including marijuana, but also various flavors and concoctions that may be mixed inexpertly. Some speculate that people are emptying out commercial nicotine pods and filling them up with a combination of T.H.C. oil and other chemicals. Cannabis liquids and oils have become more widely available online and in many stores. The ingredients may not be disclosed at all so unsuspecting consumers may be exposed to a cocktail of hazardous chemicals.
State health departments are handling most investigations into the respiratory illnesses. So far, public health officials have declined to say if they are seeing a pattern that would make clear whether the problematic products are made by mass-market companies or counterfeiters, or whether the inhalants involved are standard to many vaping products or made or mixed by consumers themselves. Even though cases appear similar, it is not clear whether all these cases have a common cause or whether they are different diseases with similar symptoms.
Dozens of young people with an unidentified lung illness have been hospitalized around the country in recent weeks. It’s unclear if the condition is linked to the vaping devices or what the patients were smoking before they became sick. A recent study says that e-cigarettes impact people’s blood vessels after a single use. Officials said they don’t know why a surge of illnesses is surfacing now since various forms of the battery-powered e-cigarette devices have existed for more than a decade. E-cigarettes have grown in popularity over the past decade despite little research on their long-term effects. Millions of Americans use e-cigarettes, with the greatest use among young adults. Lat year, more than 3.6 million U.S. middle and high school students said they had used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days, according to the CDC.
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Oklahoma Judge Thad Balkman has found that Johnson & Johnson helped fuel the state’s opioid crisis, and ordered the pharma giant to pay over half a billion dollars — $572 million. It’s the first major ruling against a drug company as part of the opioid epidemic, which has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths around the country. The decision is the first to hold a drugmaker culpable for the fallout of the liberal opioid dispensing that began in the late 1990s which led to a nationwide epidemic of overdose deaths and addiction.
More than 400,000 people in the US have died of overdoses from painkillers, heroin and illegal fentanyl since 1999. In Oklahoma, more than 6,000 people have died of painkiller overdoses since 2000, the state charged in court papers, as the number of opioid prescriptions dispensed by pharmacies reached 479 every hour in 2017. Johnson & Johnson’s products — a prescription opioid pill and a fentanyl skin patch sold by its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, were a small part of the painkillers consumed in Oklahoma. Two other companies it owned had grown, processed and supplied 60 percent of the ingredients in painkillers sold by most drug companies in the US.
The decision has been hailed as a victory but the damages are much lower than the $17 billion Oklahoma had sought in the case. Balkman did not give the state everything it sought, the state attorneys asked for $17.5 billion over 30 years for treatment, emergency care, law enforcement, social services and other addiction-related needs. Judge Balkman concluded it would cost $572 million to address the crisis in the first year based on the state’s plan. He said the state did not provide “sufficient evidence” of the time and money needed to respond after that.
There are about 2,000 lawsuits in 40 other states against opioid manufacturers and distributors that are pending around the country. A massive federal lawsuit brought by almost 2,000 cities, counties and Native American tribes is scheduled to begin in October. The ruling in the first state case to go to trial could influence both sides’ strategies in the months and years to come.
Moments after the judge ruled, Johnson & Johnson, which has denied wrongdoing, said it would appeal. Company attorney Sabrina Strong said at a news conference, “We are disappointed and disagree with the judge’s decision. We believe it is flawed. We have sympathy for those who suffer from opioid use disorder but Johnson & Johnson did not cause the opioid abuse crisis here in Oklahoma or anywhere in this country.”
Oklahoma settled in March with Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of OxyContin, accepting $270 million from the company and its owners, the Sackler family, who were not named as defendants in the lawsuit. Most of that will go to a treatment and research center at Oklahoma State University, although the federal government is seeking a portion of the money. In May, two days before the trial began, the state settled with Teva Pharmaceuticals, an Israeli-based manufacturer of generic drugs, for $85 million. The Sackler family has also offered to settle the more than 2,000 lawsuits against them for their role in the opioid crisis for $10 billion to $12 billion which includes $3 billion from the Sackler family fortune. The deal was reportedly discussed last week by Purdue’s lawyers and includes a plan for Purdue to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy before restructuring into a for-profit “public benefit trust” that would allegedly serve the many plaintiffs suing the company. The Sackler family would also relinquish ownership of Purdue under the deal.
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Capital One says a hacker exposed the personal data of its customers, including about 140,000 Social Security numbers and tens of thousands of bank account numbers. Tens of millions of credit card applications were also stolen. The hack comes a week after the settlement reached between Equifax and the Federal Trade Commission concerning a hack in 2017 that affected 147 million customers.
The FBI arrested Seattle software engineer Paige Thompson over the breach and charged her with computer fraud and abuse. Thompson’s online activity led investigators to her, as she allegedly boasted about the hack on social networking sites. Thompson was allegedly able to find an opening in Capital One’s systems and exploit a weakness in some misconfigured networks, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of hundreds of Ms. Thompson’s online messages and interviews with people familiar with the investigation.
Security professionals for years have warned about that gap, which the messages and interviews suggest she used to trick a system in the cloud to uncover the sensitive credentials she needed to access the vast number of customer records. Once she found the Capital One data, she was able to download it, the people familiar with the investigation said. All, apparently, without triggering any alerts.
In online messages in accounts that prosecutors have said were Thompson’s, she claimed to have also applied those techniques to access a trove of online data from other organizations. The messages were posted in online forums. Her lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment and she remains in custody until a bail hearing scheduled for Aug. 15.
The data breach to Capital One servers on March 22nd and 23rd exposed the personal information of nearly 106 million of the bank’s customers and applicants. The breach resulted in the hacker gaining access to personal information related to credit card applications from 2005 to early 2019 for consumers, applicants and small businesses. Capital One detected the breach on July 19. Among the personal data exposed were names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, transaction data, Social Security numbers and linked bank account numbers.
About 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers were exposed, Capital One said. And for Canadian credit card customers and applicants, approximately 1 million Social Insurance Numbers. Capital One said, however, that no credit card account numbers or login credentials were revealed in the hack. Capital One said it will notify customers and credit card applicants whose data was exposed in the breach.
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Two British Columbia teenagers previously considered to be missing are now suspects in the murder of a young couple and the death of an unidentified man in northern B.C. Kam McLeod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, were last spotted in northern Saskatchewan and police believe they are the run. McLeod is described as 6’4”, approximately 169 pounds, with dark brown hair and facial hair and brown eyes. Schmegelsky is described as 6’4”, approximately 169 pounds, with sandy brown hair. The police issued a warning to the public not to approach McLeod and Schmegelsky, saying they are considered dangerous.
Police initially investigated the disappearance of McLeod and Schmegelsky as missing cases. But they say there’s now evidence to consider them suspects in the three murders. Australian Lucas Fowler, 23, and his American girlfriend Chynna Deese, 24, a young couple on a 3 week road trip through Canada to Alaska were found shot dead on the side of a road in a remote section of the Alaska Highway. Police believe they were killed sometime between July 14 and July 15.
Deese’s brother said that the couple met while his sister was working at a hostel in Croatia. He called their relationship “the most perfect love story.” He said Deese and Fowler were both experienced travelers and took precautions while visiting other countries. “For something like that to happen, it must have really been something because these are two people that have traveled around the world and were not, were not people to get caught off guard.”
Just days later, the burned-out truck belonging to the two teens was found on Highway 37 near Dease Lake in northern B.C. The body of an unknown man was found nearby. Police released a sketch of the unidentified deceased man in the hopes the public would be able to help identify him. He’s been described as between the age of 50 and 60 with a heavy build, grey hair, and a beard. The man would have been between 5’8” and 5’10” tall.
Another burned-out vehicle was found abandoned near Bird. It was not clear if this vehicle was linked to McLeod and Schmegelsky in any way but police believe the two may be switching out vehicles. Port Alberni’s Mayor says the small town where the teens’ are from has been greatly impacted by the developing situation. “We are a small community, and whether you know the boys or the community, everyone is connected in one way or another,” Mayor Sharie Minions. “It’s definitely challenging, it has far reaching impacts for sure.”
McLeod and Schmegelsky are described as lifelong friends who were former employees at a local Walmart. They were believed to be traveling while looking for work but had dropped out of contact for several days before the first bodies were found. The police named them as suspects in the murders during a press conference but did not release any additional information about McLeod or Schmegelsky, citing the ongoing nature of the investigations.
Former RCMP Deputy Commissioner Peter German said McLeod and Schmegelsky’s fast progression from missing persons to suspects shows the impressive speed of the ongoing investigation. “I don’t think anyone would have expected this turn of events but I think that says something that the police are ahead of the game on this one.” The former commissioner said investigators would have reasonable suspicion and enough evidence to publically name the teens as suspects. “They’ve obviously got forensics or witness identification of some sort that point to these two individuals. That’s not to assume guilt at all,” he said.
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