Following the Boy Scouts of America's vote on Thursday to end its policy banning gay kids and teens from joining the organization while continuing to bar adult gays from serving as Scout leaders, reaction poured in from across the Internet. Here's a sampling.
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This story was originally published on Thu May 23, 2013 6:21 PM EDT
A 15-year-old in Utah was arrested Thursday in the deaths of his two younger brothers, ages 4 and 10, police said.
Authorities are treating the case as a double homicide, NBC affiliate KSL reported.
The victims are said to have suffered injuries "consistent with penetrating knife wounds," Davis County Sheriff Todd Richardson told KSL.
"As a result of our investigation, this morning we have taken the 15-year-old juvenile into custody," Sergeant Susan Poulsen of the Sheriff's Office, adding that prosecutors were expected to formally charge the boy on Monday. "We believe he acted alone."
The boys' mother discovered her 4-year-old son dead on the floor Wednesday afternoon upon returning to her West Point home from a dance recital with her three other children, KSL reported. Police later found the second body.
The 15-year-old, who is not being identified because he is a minor, was found late that night wandering the streets about five miles away. He was taken to a hospital for evaluation and minor injuries, officials said.
According to KSL, the teenager has made headlines before, when he ran away from home in 2011. He was eventually found about four miles away.
Ann Durrwachter, a neighbor whose son attends school with the teenager, told KSL the boy was a "model student."
"From what I understand, he's a model student, from what I've heard. I've never had any complaints about him or his family. I always figured him as model 15-year-old that every mom dreamed of having. He was just carefree almost. He just kind of did his own thing as most boys do."
The boys' father is on active military duty. Four of the couple's children were adopted, including the two victims, The Associated Press reported. The 15-year-old is the couple's biological child.
The gruesome act has left the quiet community in shock.
"West Point is just a quiet area. Not that many people even know it exists," Durrwachter told KSL, adding that the family was kind and loving.
"They were definitely a very positive family," she told KSL. "Sweet, sweet family. Our kids played together. They walked up and down our streets, rode bikes."
The arrest comes amid heightened national attention to violence by children following the high profile stabbing death last month of an 8-year-old California girl, Leila Fowler. Her 12-year-old brother has been charged with second-degree murder in her death.
Reuters contributed to this report
Jewel Samad / AFP - Getty Images
Lightning strikes during a thunderstorm as tornado survivors search for salvagable items at their devastated home on May 23, in Moore, Okla.
The decimated city of Moore, Okla., will hold a public memorial service Sunday evening, six days after a tornado killed 24 people, injured 377 and destroyed hundreds of homes.
Gov. Mary Fallin said the prayer service at the First Baptist Church will be "open to all," though it was unclear if President Barack Obama, who is visiting Oklahoma that day, will attend.
The gathering will be the first opportunity for the suburb of 56,000 to mourn and take stock as a community since the twister came through with apocalyptic force on Monday afternoon, wrecking houses, businesses, schools and lives.
The landscape of the community will be scarred for some time, but the mood in Moore seemed to be shifting from awe and disbelief to resolve to carry on.
"We will rebuild and we will reopen and we will have school in August," vowed city school superintendent Susan Pierce, even as she wept while talking about the first funeral of a student held Thursday.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin announces that a memorial and prayer service will be held this Sunday for tornado victims adding, "we can honor those we have lost, pray for those they left behind, and begin to heal together."
"I've never been more proud to be a member of a community," said Pierce, who has lived in Moore since 1960.
Officials praised citizens of the town for pulling together to help those who had lost everything.
More than 20 Red Cross vehicles were handing out meals and offering mental health counseling Thursday. Diana Mitchell, a retired nurse from Enid, Okla., who has been working in health care for 42 years, was manning one of the trucks.
"My husband decided we needed something to do," she said with a smile.
And cemeteries that had asked for assistance removing debris in time for the Memorial Day weekend were stunned when 1,500 people showed up to help.
On a street near the a hospital that had been destroyed, volunteers were cleaning up the home of a neighbor they barely know.
“These citizens are awesome. I mean they’ve lost everything but they’ve still got a sense of humor,” said Moore deputy city manager Stan Drake.
Officials were also focusing on the strides made in the chaotic post-storm days: Since Monday's twister hit, 2,200 people have registered for help with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state legislature has released $45 million in aid, and six people who were thought to be missing have been found.
One of them had put a note on their door that said, "Tornado's coming. I've left."
Forecasters predict an "above normal and possibly an extremely active" Atlantic hurricane season. NBC News' Chris Clackum reports.
Batten down the hatches.
Forecasters said Wednesday that the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is likely to be "above normal and possibly extremely active," predicting three to six major hurricanes this season.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its outlook that it forecast seven to 11 Atlantic hurricanes for the 2013 season, which officially begins on June 1.
"NOAA predicts an above normal and possibly an extremely active hurricane season with a range of 13 to 20 named storms," seven to 11 of which are forecast to turn into hurricanes and three to six of which are forecast to turn into major hurricanes, said Kathryn Sullivan, acting NOAA administrator.
Major hurricanes are defined as Category 3 or above, with winds of more than 110 mph.
The last time a major hurricane made landfall in the U.S. was Wilma, in 2005, according to the Associated Press. The seven-year landfall drought is the longest in the U.S. on record, The AP reports.
Hurricane Sandy was downgraded to tropical storm status just before it made landfall in New Jersey last October. Sandy caused $50 billion in damage.
NASA via Getty Images file
In this handout satellite image provided by NASA, Hurricane Sandy off the East Coast as it moves north on Oct. 28, 2012 in the Atlantic Ocean.
The numbers for 2013 are above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, six hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. Last year was the third-busiest storm season on record.
NOAA's seasonal hurricane outlook does not predict how many storms will hit land or where the storms will strike; it only provides an overview of the season.
"With the devastation of Sandy fresh in our minds, and another active season predicted, everyone at NOAA is committed to providing life-saving forecasts in the face of these storms and ensuring that Americans are prepared and ready ahead of time," Sullivan said.
Several climate factors are contributing to the upcoming season being busier, forecasters said.
"These factors include a continuation of the climate pattern that has been responsible for the ongoing era of high activity in the Atlantic that began in 1995; warmer than average sea-surface temperatures across the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea; and near-normal, year-average seasonal temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which means El Nino ... is not expected to develop and suppress hurricane formation this hurricane season," Sullivan said.
Atlantic hurricane season lasts for six months, typically peaking between late August and mid-October.
"This year, oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic basin are expected to produce more and stronger hurricanes," said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. "These conditions include weaker wind shear, warmer Atlantic waters and conducive winds patterns coming from Africa."
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AP / The Lowell Sun & Robin Young
Boston Marathon bombing suspects, from left, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev landed on America's terrorist watch list in 2011. Tamerlan's younger brother, Dzhokhar, now charged in the Boston Marathon bombing case, seems not to have made the list.
Ultimately, Tamerlan's inclusion on the watch list did not lead investigators to detect the April 15 bomb plot that killed three and wounded at least 260 – prompting inevitable questions about why not, and whether "dots" of intelligence and information that could have been connected were not.
America's terrorist watch list is all about connecting dots – and it is certain to be a focal point for future congressional hearings pegged to the Boston case. A key part of the vast counter-terrorism net cast by the federal government after the 9/11 attacks, the watch list is actually at least nine lists drawn from a single government database. Criteria for determining who gets "nominated" for inclusion in that database – and, then, who actually makes it onto an agency's specific list – are tightly guarded secrets.
CSMonitor quiz: How much do you know about terrorism?
What does seem clear, however, is that the spigot opened wide in the past three years, leading to torrential growth in the core terrorism database. Whether those extra mounds of data give investigators a more accurate view of the universe of terrorists, or whether they have the unintended effect of making prospective terrorists harder to find and the dots harder to connect, is a matter of hot debate – and one that the Boston bombing case may well intensify.
"There's absolutely no question that they're just choking on the volume of information, both classified and unclassified, that's going into the system," says Dakota Rudesill, a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center who served, during President Obama's first term, as special assistant in the policy, plans, and requirements directorate of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which includes the National Counterterrorism Center. "You're taking on this immense challenge with all this data – like finding a particular needle in a haystack of needles."
US officials bridle at inferences that the system is overwhelmed.
"Certainly, the volume has grown, and the list has grown for a number of reasons," says a US counterterrorism official who spoke on background because he is not permitted to speak on the record. "The intelligence is better; the value of sharing information is seen as better by the agencies involved. The watch list is created specifically to be one of the big dot-connectors in the counterterrorism effort – it's among the most sophisticated systems the government has – and it's proven itself to be effective."
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The making of the watch lists
Like a giant digital vacuum, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), a highly classified database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va., each day sweeps up thousands of names, aliases, birth dates, and other potential terrorist tidbits – known as "derogatory information" – and tries to match them with hundreds of thousands of names, faces, and identifying biometric data also sent in by the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other US agencies.
"TIDE is the granddaddy repository – not a watch list itself, but it feeds the lists," says Mark Randol, a specialist on domestic intelligence and counterterrorism formerly with the Congressional Research Service (CRS). "The whole deal with a watch list is that you need a place where the objective is to see if you can identify, and stop, people you think are terrorists from just coming into the US and disappearing into the woodwork to plot attacks."
As of December, TIDE contained the names of 875,000 individuals (not including aliases), the counterterrorism center reports. Each day, TIDE sends a river of new names to the Terrorism Screening Center, run by the FBI. The screening center combines TIDE's names with those on the FBI's own domestic terrorism list to create the Terrorism Screening Database (TSDB) – America's master terrorist watch list.
Both TIDE and the TSDB have been expanding fast. TIDE grew from 740,000 names in 2011 to 875,000 in 2012 – an 18 percent jump. The TSDB, for its part, jumped 23 percent from 423,000 individuals in May 2010 to 520,000 in October 2012, according to the CRS and the Terrorism Screening Center.
What happens to the identifying information about a known or suspected terrorist after it is put onto the master terrorism list? The FBI's screening center sends that information to four US agencies with primary responsibility for straining out would-be terrorists, which then add it to their own unclassified watch lists.
State Department. Its Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS) screens passport and visa applicants.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It uses the Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS), which flows into the Interagency Border Inspection System and the Automated Targeting System – lists used by the US Customs and Border Protection for border and port security.
FBI. Its National Crime Information Center list is disseminated as a tool for police departments across the United States. The bureau also has its own Guardian database (different from the TSDB), and Tamerlan Tsarnaev was reportedly on it.
Transportation Security Administration. The TSA, part of the DHS, keeps three air-passenger screening lists – "no fly," "selectee," and "secure flight." The no-fly list is one of the most exclusive watch lists, winnowed to those tagged as possible terrorists who are to be blocked from getting on a US-bound flight. The selectee list signals that an air traveler requires extra screening but being on that list does not necessarily prevent that person from boarding. Both lists have about 20,000 names, the Terrorism Screening Center reports. The secure flight list allows expedited boarding for passengers whose prescreened personal information is compared with watch list data.
Actions that lead to a person being nominated to TIDE as a "known or suspected" terrorist include engaging in terrorist activity, preparing or planning an attack, gathering information on targets, raising funds for attacks, and soliciting membership in a terrorist organization. Less-obvious criteria remain cloaked in secrecy, including nominations that come from foreign intelligence agencies. In 2009, the FBI's own inspector general noted some dissatisfaction with the process, saying the bureau "failed to nominate known or suspected terrorists in 15 percent of the cases we reviewed."
Getting off the list has been problematic, too. The inspector general criticized the FBI for being "untimely in its removal of the subjects" from the watch list in 72 percent of cases reviewed. Travelers who are often delayed at airports are not usually on a watch list; rather, their names and personal information are similar to that of someone who is. In 2012, at least 14,000 records were deleted from TIDE or terrorist watch lists after it was determined that the people no longer met the criteria for inclusion, the counterterrorism center says. US residents make up about 1 percent of TSDB listings.
But civil liberties experts are not satisfied.
"We still don't have access to the information we need to allow us to evaluate how well it's working or how many [who should not be on the list] have been able to get off," says Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, a Washington-based civil liberties group.
How Tsarnaev made the watch list
In March 2011, the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev after Russian intelligence services warned that he had become radicalized. By June, the FBI concluded a basic "assessment" without adding derogatory data to his file, The Washington Post reported. His name, however, did remain in the FBI's Guardian database – an internal watch list.
In September, the Russians again sent up a flare about Tsarnaev's radicalization, this time to the CIA. By year's end, his name had been added to TIDE and the TSDB watch list, the Post reported.
Three days before Tsarnaev left for southern Russia, his name popped up in the TECS system. It is not clear why the rising number of red flags – including his travel to a part of Russia where Islamic radicals are active and his online postings of jihadist videos – did not set off alarm bells. Some analysts say they believe that some important details simply didn't make it into the database.
"If they get the Russian tip, and they were also aware of [the] fact he was visiting Russia and jihadist websites, then I'm not altogether convinced the FBI would have said they found nothing on him," Mr. Randol says. "The fact they didn't see a problem means to me they were not aware of these details."
The near miss that changed watch-listing
AFP - Getty Images file
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab set off a bomb in his underwear aboard a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009. A month before his father had warned U.S. authorities. Abdulmutallab's name was added to TIDE -- but didn't make it onto the watch list.
Connecting dots so that clues are not left floating in a sea of data was a top goal after the near-miss Christmas Day bombing attempt in 2009. Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab famously tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane using plastic explosives hidden in his underwear.
On Nov. 18, 2009, Mr. Abdulmutallab's own father reported his son's radicalization to US Embassy officials in Nigeria. A week later, the son's name was added to TIDE, but not to the watch list – in part because the source of the derogatory information was not included, weakening it. Five weeks later, Abdulmutallab tried to blow up the plane.
Afterward, President Obama ordered a review to determine why Abdulmutallab's name had not appeared on the master watch list. Later in 2010, the nominating criteria changed, with the result that more names and data flowed into TIDE and the TSDB. One measure of the increase: The number of US citizens and lawful permanent residents on the no-fly list more than doubled, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a 2012 study of watch list changes.
Even before the changes, concern was evident within the intelligence community about the huge amount of data being funneled into TIDE. Back in March 2010, Russell Travers, then deputy director of information sharing and knowledge development at the National Counterterrorism Center, told a Senate panel that the inflow of 10,000 names a day to TIDE had required some adjustments. Among them was the advent of special "pursuit teams" of analysts to explore threads, threats, and loose ends that would help "connect the dots," he said, acknowledging that the step was "an experiment."
The 2012 GAO report likewise noted concern among "nominating agencies" about their abilities to process so much information – especially after the changes that followed the underwear bombing attempt. It noted that "agencies are ... pursuing staffing, technology, and other solutions to address challenges in processing the volumes of information."
A notable watch list success
U.s. Marshals Service / AP file
Faisal Shahzad, shown in a U.S. Marshal's Service mugshot, got on an airplane for Pakistan after the attempt to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square. A watch list flagged him, and authorities arrested him on the jet.
Despite the fire hose of incoming information, the US saw some success in apprehending terrorism suspects. After someone tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1, 2010, investigators traced the crime to Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad – and added his name to the no-fly list at 12:30 p.m. on May 3. Later that evening, Mr. Shahzad was indeed attempting to make his getaway to Pakistan. Minutes before his flight was to depart, authorities spotted his name during a final check.
"What used to happen in days now happens in minutes or seconds," the US counterterrorism official says of recent watch list updating and technology upgrades. "The Times Square bomber actually got on the plane thinking he was getting away. But we have a real-time transactional interface with the Customs and Border Patrol. They screened the passenger manifest, arrested him, and took him off the plane."
Today, says the US counterterrorism official, the backlog of information has been eliminated and analytical resources are adequate. The number of names on the TSDB fluctuates, but during the past year appears to have "leveled off" at about a half million, he says.
Unconnected 'dots' in Tsarnaev case?
Questions remain, however, about the government's handling of Tsarnaev during the year leading up to the Boston bombings. Some wonder why he was not a candidate for extra scrutiny by a pursuit team or by the FBI. Others ask why federal authorities did not inform local police of the warnings about Tsarnaev's possible radicalization, so they could possibly keep an eye out.
Were there dots that, if connected, would have led to closer FBI scrutiny and prevention of the Boston Marathon bombings? If so, did data overload play a role?
"No, actually more data makes it more effective," insists the counterterrorism official. "The more derogatory information in there, the better able the system is to screen, and the better the whole system works."
But data overload is likely to be raised in future hearings on Capitol Hill, some say.
"I hope the Boston case will lead to a new revision of the watch list, to see whether we are adding just too much information on people so that it leads to a needle-in-the-haystack problem," Randol says.
"Right now, it isn't clear that there are plans in place to review the effectiveness of the watch list or whether the level of misidentification is growing because the haystacks are getting too big."
This report, "Terrorist watch lists: Are they working as they should?," first appeared on CSMonitor.com.
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Amid a raft of Pentagon initiatives to slow its suicide crisis, a new Army report Thursday showed the pace of self-inflicted deaths among soldiers — and all service members — has barely budged so far this year from the record rate the military suffered during 2012.
Through April, the U.S. military has recorded 161 potential suicides in 2013 among active-duty troops, reservists and National Guard members — a pace of one suicide about every 18 hours. The Army, the largest contingent of the armed forces, sustained 109 reported suicides during the first four months, according its latest report.
Last year, when self-inflicted military deaths outstripped the number of troops killed in combat, there was one suicide every 17 hours among all active-duty, reserve and National Guard members, according to figures gathered from each branch.
"We are still continuing to fight this problem with the same intensiveness," said Cynthia O. Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman. "We are still focused on preventing suicides from occurring in the Department of Defense. We are doing everything we can to ensure that service members are getting the proper health care they need to prevent this type of event from happening.
"It concerns us deeply."
The number of suicides the military has suffered in recent years has brought new initiatives and programs aimed at stemming the epidemic. But advocates fear the rate will climb in coming years as more troops are drawn down in Afghanistan.
And research published last week has experts concerned that American troops who survived multiple nearby IED blasts while in Afghanistan and Iraq now are at greater jeopardy for harming themselves.
People who have suffered numerous mild traumatic brain injuries — or concussions — carry a higher suicide risk, according to the first study to make that connection.
"We’re starting to see now: It’s the build up, it’s the accumulation of brain injuries that increases the risk for suicide,” said Craig Bryan, the study’s lead author, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah, and associate director of the National Center for Veterans Studies.
The research team made that correlation by surveying 161 troops who served in Iraq, were evaluated for TBIs — some reporting as many as 15 — and who acknowledged later enduring suicidal thoughts or behaviors, according to the study, published last week in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry.
Courtesy of Jeremy Lattimer
Marine Sgt. Jeremy Lattimer, far left, stands with members of his squad in Iraq. Lattimer received a mild TBI from an IED blast. He has not struggled with suicidal thoughts but he is working through the symptoms of his TBI at a military hospital.
One in five surveyed veterans who had sustained more than one TBI also experienced thoughts about — or preoccupation with — suicide, the study found. For patients who received one TBI, 6.9 percent reported having suicidal thoughts. And the soldiers surveyed who never were diagnosed with a TBI reported no suicidal ideations, the study showed.
Marine Sgt. Jeremy Lattimer, 26, who earned a Bronze Star for his 2009 actions in Afghanistan, can count at least three concussions he’s sustained through sports and combat — moments when he briefly lost consciousness.
Military doctors believe he sustained a mild TBI in 2005 during an IED detonation. Six years later, he developed speaking, hearing and sleep problems often affiliated with mild brain injuries. A brain scan later confirmed that Lattimer had suffered a past TBI, he said.
But some of “the biggest blasts” that he and his fellow unit members experienced in combat came from their own outgoing rockets, added Lattimer, an outpatient at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center where he’s receiving TBI treatment and therapy.
Courtesy Jeremy Lattimer
Marine Sgt. Jeremy Lattimer, right, receives the Bronze Star in 2011. He earned the award for his 2009 actions in Afghanistan: While under machine gun fire, he maneuvered his squad in a position to help other troops escape an enemy ambush.
“They put out a tremendous blast wave. One (firing episode) was close enough to ring my bell more intensely than the IEDs that went off in my vicinity,” Lattimer said. “To get back into my train of thought, to read my GPS, it took a minute or two before my brain kicked back in. It’s like you’re in a daze.”
The Pentagon’s own tally shows 266,810 service members received a traumatic brain injuries between 2000 and 2012. More than 80 percent of those TBIs were not deployment-related cases. Many occurred amid crashes of privately owned cars and military vehicles.
In March, more than 50 members of Congress formally asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to investigate whether mild TBIs sustained in American troops may be fueling the military’s suicide crisis.
Anonymous / AP
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric and recruiter for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen, in an October 2008 photo.
Now that the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged that it launched a drone strike that killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen two years ago, a federal judge has asked the Justice Department to explain what effect the admission will have on a lawsuit filed by al-Awlaki’s father.
In an order issued late Wednesday, Judge Rosemary Collyer ordered the Justice Department to file a memo stating how Attorney General Eric Holder’s confirmation Wednesday that the government had targeted and killed al-Awlaki “affects the legal issues in the case.”
Earlier, a letter that Holder sent to Congress confirmed that the U.S. had targeted al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born radical cleric who died in a Sept. 30, 2011, drone strike. The letter also acknowledged that the U.S. had killed three other Americans in drone strikes, including “Inspire” magazine editor Samir Khan, who died in the same Sept. 30 attack, al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, and Jude Kenan Mohammed. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki died in an October 2011 Yemen drone strike, while Mohammed was killed in Pakistan in November 2011.
Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser, a citizen and resident of Yemen, is suing the U.S. government over the killing of his son and grandson. Samir Khan’s mother, a U.S. citizen, has joined the lawsuit.
The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to throw the case out, mainly on the grounds that the courts have no role in passing judgment on what is essentially a military and foreign policy decision to target someone overseas. But the government also argues that the targeted killing program is classified.
"Plaintiffs' allegations that Department of Defense and CIA officials targeted al-Awlaki and then 'authorized and directed' a series of missile strikes in Yemen,” says the government, “are claims which ... would 'inevitably require an inquiry into classified information.'"
A hearing on the government's request to dismiss the lawsuit is scheduled for June 19.
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Kael Alford / for NBC News
Missy Hall shows the gold necklace that her brother gave to their mother before he died of cancer 13 years ago. More than a dozen volunteers came to the area to help search for the necklace and photographs that were buried in the rubble of the family's home after a tornado ripped through the neighborhood.
Pat Hall had one request for volunteers scouring the rubble of her ripped apart home in a rural corner of Oklahoma City: find the necklace that her son, who died quickly from cancer, gave her before his death.
She got her wish. Brian Foster, an Air Force Master Sgt. volunteering with his local church, plucked the necklace with a gold nugget out of a pile of debris where Hall thought it might be.
“This is my son that passed away 13 years ago. He got me this, so I really wanted to find this,” she said, breaking down as she held up the necklace from her son Chad, who died at 36 from a rare form of cancer.
“We built here because Chad our son lived right down there (the street). … we wanted to be close to him and his family.”
Foster was helping at another tornado-torn house when he and a few volunteers heard about the search for the necklace and came over. He said they moved a wall out of the way in the debris, where the family thought the necklace was, when they came across jewelry and then the cherished find.
“Very, very lucky. In the midst of all this to actually come across that is amazing,” he said as he took a break from the cleanup. “The one thing that they absolutely wanted to find and amongst everything. And just to be able to pull that out of all of this has definitely been a blessing.”
Kael Alford / for NBC News
Photographs and other sentimental items recovered by volunteers and family members from the rubble of Pat and Quentin Halls' home.
“It was incredible,” Missy Hall, Pat's daughter said of the find. “That's the only thing she wanted.”
Pat and her husband, Quentin, are staying with Missy while they consider the path ahead. At this point, she doesn't think they'll rebuild.
“It's just devastating. You don't know what to do first. You don't know what to do second. You don't know what to do,” she said.
“But the Lord doesn't make any mistakes. He's going to get us through it.”
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Scott Shaw / The Plain Dealer
Charles Ramsey talks to media as people congratulate him on helping some women get out of a home in the 2200 block of Seymour Ave on May 6, 2013.
Cleveland’s most camera-ready hero may now also be its best fed.
More than a dozen Ohio restaurants and at least one in Pennsylvania have pledged free burgers for life to Charles Ramsey, the Big Mac-munching man who was credited with helping a woman escape from the home where she had been held captive, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports.
Ramsey mentioned in numerous interviews earlier this month that he had been chowing down on a McDonald's burger when he heard screams from the house across the street, spurring the fast-food giant to tweet they would “be in touch.”
The hometown hamburger homages began with an 8-ounce Angus beef patty with a secret sauce devised by Chris Hodgson, chef at the downtown restaurant where Ramsey works as a dishwasher.
“He’s calm in the face of crazy and hectic things going on,” Hodgson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer after police rescued Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight from the house where they were allegedly held captive and raped for a decade. “He always steps up to do anything you ask.”
The “Ramsey Burger” started out as a temporary menu item, but has since become permanent and the idea has spread to other restaurants, according to the Plain Dealer.
“We want to honor our local hero with local food,” Cleveland restaurateur Scott Kuhn told the paper. “He stopped his meal midway through to help those women. We’re now making sure he has other opportunities to go out and fully enjoy his burger.”
Ramsey gained instant celebrity with his candid and profanity-flecked retellings of how he kicked in the door of suspect Ariel Castro’s home so Amanda Berry and her child could climb out.
But the man, who has been traveling on paid leave according to the Plain Dealer, said he didn’t have any choice but to help.
“My father would have whupped the hell out of me if I cowered out,” Ramsey told a reporter after the rescue.
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Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper delivers remarks on his decision to block the execution of a convicted killer who murdered three people at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese, saying "If the state of Colorado is going to take the responsibility for executing someone, the system should be flawless."
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is under fire for his decision to block the execution of man convicted of massacring four people at a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora, Colo., two decades ago.
The Democrat has vowed not to sign a death warrant for Nathan Dunlap as long as he's in office, even though he declined to back an outright repeal of capital punishment two months ago.
Hickenlooper's decision on Dunlap — a day before lawyers for Aurora movie-theater massacre suspect James Holmes were due in court to challenge the death-penalty statute — infuriated some victims' relatives and law-enforcement officials.
"He should die," former Aurora Police Officer Dan Jones, who was the first to arrive at Chuck E. Cheese the night of Dec. 14, 1993, told NBC station KUSA.
"What he did was horrific. And now 20 years later...the governor passes the buck."
Bob Crowell, whose 19-year-old daughter Sylvia was one of those killed, called Hickenlooper a "chicken governor."
"We've waited an awful long time," Crowell said after a heated conference call with the governor on Wednesday. "It's a little like carrying a knife in my back. Today, that night was severely twisted."
Colorado has had the death penalty since 1977, although only one person has been put to death since then and there are just three on Death Row.
Helen H. Richardson / AP
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper says he will block the execution of convicted Chuck E. Cheese massacre killer Nathan Dunlap for as long as he is in office.
Dunlap, who ambushed the restaurant workers after he was fired, was scheduled for an Aug. 18 execution. Hickenlooper signed an executive order that will remain in effect at least until his first term ends in 2015.
The governor is running for re-election, and his critics accused him of trying to have it both ways on the divisive death penalty issue.
"It's not a perfect decision and I recognize that," he told KUSA. "But I think the reasons we are doing it this way override that lack of closure [for the victims' families]."
Hickenlooper said he did not support a bill to repeal capital punishment earlier in the year because he did not want to force that decision on his constituents.
At the same time, he said, he could not in good conscience let Dunlap be put to death when studies show execution is not a deterrent to crime and is often applied inconsistently.
“It’s hard to defend the death penalty," he said.
Dunlap's lawyers had asked Hickenlooper to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole, but he declined to do that, leaving open the possibility for his successor to overturn the executive order and send the 39-year-old to the death chamber.
Araphoe County District Attorney George Brauchler said Hickenlooper's move would please few people.
"One person will go to bed with smile on his face and that's Nathan Dunlap," Brauchler said.
Brauchler is seeking the death penalty for the man accused in Aurora's bloodiest crime, the murder of 12 people at a midnight "Batman" screening last July.
James Holmes' lawyers will be in court Thursday to challenge the capital punishment statue on the grounds that it makes an insanity plea untenable.
They said that certain conditions Holmes must accept to mount an insanity defense would hamper their ability to argue he should be spared death during the sentencing phase if he's convicted.
This story was originally published on Thu May 23, 2013 9:01 AM EDT
Jim Mone / AP
Rescue personnel gather near an entrance to Lilydale Regional Park above the Mississippi River during a suspension of search efforts to find a fourth child missing after a landslide swept over a group of children on a fourth grade field trip Wednesday, May 22, 2013, in St. Paul, Minn.
Authorities recovered the body of a Minnesota child who went missing after a gravel slide swept several members of an elementary school class on a school fossil-hunting trip into a pit, bringing the death toll in the incident to two.
Crews recovered the boy’s body on Thursday after bad weather briefly let up, St. Paul Assistant Fire Chief Jim Smith said, according to NBC News affiliate KARE.
The boy’s family had been notified, Smith said.
The fourth-graders from a St. Louis Park elementary school were hiking in Lilydale Regional Park on Wednesday when a steep slope soaked by rain gave way, authorities have said. Two trapped children were dug out by firefighters who clawed away gravel with their hands and shovels, they said.
“It appears they were walking along and the ground, after the rain we’ve had, was so soft and it gave way and they fell into what became a hole and the earth came on top of them,” St. Paul Fire Marshal Steve Zaccard said at a news conference, according to KARE.
Scott Takushi / AP
An emergency worker attends to a person on a stretcher, being evacuated out of a rockslide site by helicopter, on the West Side of St. Paul, Wednesday, May 22, 2013.
One of the children pulled from the pit later died, and has not yet been identified by authorities. One child injured in the slide has been released from the hospital and another remains in serious condition, officials said on Thursday.
“The slide had fallen down on top of them," Zaccard said. “One was partially buried, one was completely buried.”
The search for the missing student was suspended overnight as rescuers battled worsening conditions.
“Water is flowing right into the hole making it extremely dangerous for rescuers to work anymore,” Zaccard said. “We are working with our partners in Parks and Public Works to make the scene safe for what’s become a recovery effort for what might be a fourth victim.”
A man who identified himself as the missing child’s uncle said the student “liked geology,” according to the Minnesota Star Tribune.
“Thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the children and to our first responders who continue to deal with the situation as it develops,” said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman.
Classes went on at Peter Hobart Elementary, where the students were from, on Thursday, district officials told KARE
“This is an incredibly sad time for our schools and our entire school community. Our hearts go out to the families, friends, and everyone touched by today’s accident,” St. Louis Park Public Schools Superintendent Debra Bowers said in a statement. “We, like everyone else, want to understand how this tragedy occurred, but today we ask for your continued thoughts and prayers for everyone involved.”
Brendan Smialowski / AFP - Getty Images
A construction worker takes measurements at a commercial construction site May 2, 2013 in Washington, DC. New Census figures shows major cities have seen marked population growth.
New census estimates show that most of the nation's largest cities further enhanced their allure last year, posting strong population growth for a second straight year.
Big cities surpassed the rate of growth of their surrounding suburbs at an even faster clip, a sign of America's continuing preference for urban living after the economic downturn quelled enthusiasm for less-crowded expanses.
Farther-out suburbs known as exurbs saw their growth slip to 0.35 percent, the lowest in more than a decade.
Economists generally had played down the recent city boom as an aberration, predicting that young adults in the recovering economy would soon be back on the move after years of staying put in big cities. But the widening gains for cities in 2012 indicate that young people — as well as would-be retirees seeking quieter locales — are playing it safe for a while longer in dense urban cores, where jobs may be easier to find and keep.
Prior to 2011, suburbs had consistently outpaced big cities since 1920, with the rise of the automobile.
The new census estimates are a snapshot of population growth as of July 2012. The Associated Press sought additional analysis from William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, and Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire.
Cities with booming regional economies continue to see the biggest gains — from Seattle and San Francisco to Austin, Texas, Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C., locales seeing a burst of new apartment construction.
"Cities have become more appealing to young people, with more things to do and places to see," said Mark Obrinsky, chief economist at the National Multi Housing Council, a Washington-based trade group. "Many of the cities are committing themselves to regrowth and development, and in newer cities like Dallas we're beginning to see new restaurants, bars and apartments in the downtown areas that put it a bit closer to being a 24-hour city."
He noted that the division between city and suburbs is blurring, too. There's no longer a clear line between an economic center where people work and suburban bedroom communities. Both can be home to major companies and residences.
Census data show that many closer-in suburbs linked to a city with public transit or well-developed roadways are benefiting from strong city growth, while far-flung areas near the metropolitan edge are fizzling after heady growth during the mid-decade housing boom.
Suburbs in the South and West also are seeing some gains, such as those around Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Jacksonville, Fla.
New Orleans, which saw its population shrivel in the mid-2000s after Hurricane Katrina, continued to post the biggest increase in city growth relative to suburbs in the past year — 2.5 percent vs. 0.6 percent. Atlanta, Richmond, Va., Denver, Boston and Charlotte, N.C., also showed wide disparities between city and suburbs.
Other big cities showing faster growth compared with the previous year include Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio.
In all, primary cities in large metropolitan areas with populations of more than 1 million grew by 1.12 percent last year, compared with 0.97 percent in surrounding suburbs. In 2011, the gap between city and suburb growth was narrower — 1.03 percent vs. 0.96 percent.
During the mid-decade housing boom, city growth had come to a standstill, while exurban growth rose by 2 percent, as the wide availability of low-interest mortgages pushed new residential development outward.
"The country has been exposed to a very difficult five years, and many people are reluctant to take chances," said Johnson, the University of New Hampshire demographer. "Marriages are still down, births are still down. Economists may say that the recession is over, but the recovery has not yet been fully reflected in demographic trends."
Other findings:
—New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston each grew faster between 2010 and 2012 than they did annually between 2000 and 2010.
—Texas continued to be the big population winner, accounting for eight of the 15 fastest-growing cities with populations of 50,000 or more from 2011-2012.
—New York remained the nation's most populous city, at 8.3 million, with the rest of the top 10 unchanged. Austin, Texas, moved up from 13th to 11th, supplanting Jacksonville, Fla.; Indianapolis slipped from 12th to 13th.
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A Texas deputy who was shot by a wanted Colorado man says he only remembers bits of what can be seen in video from his dashboard camera.
Evan Spencer Ebel, who was suspected in the slaying of Colorado's prisons chief and a pizza deliveryman, shot Montague County Deputy James Boyd three times at point-blank range during a traffic stop.
Montague County Sheriff Paul Cunningham on Wednesday released dash-cam video of the March 21 shooting.
The video shows Boyd stopping the car for driving in the left-hand lane and not passing. As soon as Boyd approaches the car, Ebel can be seen quickly shooting Boyd three times -- twice in the chest and once in the head. He then speeds away.
After a minute, drivers stop to help Boyd and call emergency crews.
"I can remember stopping the car, making the approach, knowing something's not right," said Boyd, who has been recovering at a rehabilitation center in Dallas.
"I can remember being shot, and that's about the point I blacked out for 30, 45 seconds," he said.
"The only thing I can consciously remember is seeing the gun shoot off at me," he said.
Boyd is scheduled to go back to work on Friday, nearly two months after the shooting.
Even now, the video is still hard to watch, the sheriff said.
"I mean, I don't know what else to say-- I was mad," Cunningham said. "That was somebody [who] hurt one of my deputies. You know, you want to strike back."
"It's hard every time you watch it," he said, choking back tears. "You can almost feel the bullets when you're watching it."
Ebel was killed later that day in a shootout in Wise County after the high-speed chase.
Boyd said he's just grateful that his encounter with Ebel wasn't worse.
"If it would've gone one way or another, I could be dead," he said. "It was a very close call. It just wasn't my time."
Kael Alford for NBC News
From left to right: Amber Bowie, 37, Johnny Knight, 66, Rebecca Garland 63, Janis Knight, 62, Jana Portell, 32, Todd Portell, 31, Chase Shelton, 15, and Dan Garland, 65, pose for a portrait around the underground storm shelter that saved their lives during the tornado that struck Moore, Okla., on May 20. The storm destroyed their 3000-square-foot home.
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — A little treasure in the debris of a home that once welcomed Rebecca Garland's four grandchildren gave her such a delight as her friends and family scoured the mountain of rubble for any mementos left behind by Monday's powerful tornado.
“This is where we measured the kids' height!” she exclaimed as her son Lee held up a piece of a wall showing the rising tick-marks as his three boys and little girl grew taller and taller — her "sugars," she calls them. “Oh! Oh! ... That's priceless.”
“Little stuff like this,” said Lee, 41. “It can go in the new house.”
Such was the talk among the Garlands, their two adult children, and the many friends who stopped by on Wednesday — with brownies and cupcakes, plastic boxes and a couple of hugs and laughs — as the couple contemplated the road ahead after Monday's tornado tore apart their house, which was built by Rebecca's husband, Dan.
The pair, who have owned a construction business for more than 30 years, also built the homes next door for Dan's 91-year-old mother, Bobbie, and his neighbor, Ron Bowie.
Those houses were destroyed, too, as the tornado tore a devastating swath through their scenic neighborhood of rolling green hills, century-old trees and farm animals.
Kael Alford for NBC News
Lee Garland found a piece of sheet rock marked with the heights of his children from his parents' home May 22 in Moore, Okla. He cut the piece out of the wall when going through the rubble to save and install when his parents rebuild.
Bobbie won't rebuild, but Bowie said if he does, he'll enlist his neighbors again.
“It's kind of an emotional thing,” said the Garlands' other son, Max, 36, as he stood next to the many jagged and splintered pieces of wood that once made up his parents' one-story home. “We framed and built these houses.... Part of your life is destroyed in a way.”
The Garlands plan to rebuild, which could take up to nine months — depending on when they get started. For now they are bunking with Max, and they'll soon head to the house of family friends — the Portells — who hunkered down with them during the tornado in their storm shelter.
“What's good about this group is you can always find a blessing in disguise,” said Todd Portell, 32, who works in sales and whose wife, Jana, has known the Garlands since she was a child. “Through the rubble we've always found something to laugh about, something that's good.”
There were many laughs and giggles among the group of friends and family, especially from Rebecca, 63. As a wind picked up two cardboard boxes, swirling them through the air, she cracked: “Oh, look at a wind tornado! How dare you!”
“Hey you little pipsqueak, we're not scared of you!” Dan, 65, chimed in.
“We've laughed a lot,” his wife noted. “We've cried, too, but we've laughed.”
As they scrolled through items like their wedding album and a scrapbook (“Here we are when we were king and queen. And here we are as Sonny and Cher,” Rebecca mused of the photos), Dan had a difficult moment.
“There's sentimental value, and that makes it a little more touching and a little more emotional. (Other stuff) is just scrap and junk that you can replace. Memories ... (it's) hard to replace those things,” he said as he choked up.
“At least they're in the heart,” Rebecca said.
“Yeah but, I mean, it's the end of things,” Dan said.
That ending began Monday, when the Garlands, Bobbie, seven friends and two dogs sought safety in the storm shelter at the foot of their house.
With the more than 200 mph whipping winds, Dan struggled to hold the door shut, and Portell and another friend jumped up to help him. That door, dated in pen "05/1/01" for when the shelter was put in, is now bent, revealing the precariousness of their safety.
Kael Alford for NBC News
Rebecca Garland is comforted by a friend outside their house on 149th Street that was destroyed in the tornado that struck Moore, Okla., on May 20. The family hid in their storm shelter with neighbors.
“The whole storm shelter was vibrating. We thought it was going to suck us out of the ground, the whole thing. It was the most frightening thing I've ever experienced in my life,” Rebecca said. “The sound was 1,000 times at least louder than airplane jets. Your ears were popping, just, pop, pop, pop.”
That the storm shelter barely held has Rebecca making the case for a storm cellar built into the basement of their new house, although they don't know yet what the rest of their new home will look like. Dan had always resisted going in the detached storm shelter during tornadoes, but he is now angling for a safe room.
“I prefer the safe room on top of the ground if I can convince her that that would be safe,” Dan said.
“I was underground, and I didn't feel safe, so I'm not sure,” Rebecca said.
But first, they'll have to finish scouring the debris for mementos, bulldoze everything to the street, take out the footing, foundation — everything — from the house, Dan said.
“We're starting from scratch,” Rebecca noted.
Insurance should cover the cost, they hope.
“If I think about this ... the work and the time spent, it's emotional ... just emotional,” Dan said. “I'm not as young as I used to be. I'll do it over again, that's it.”
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Shayla Taylor tells the story of being in active labor as her hospital room crumbles around her during the deadly Moore, Oklahoma tornado.
Antonia Candelaria, 9-years-old
A nine-year-old girl killed by the Oklahoma tornado was mourned at a memorial service Thursday, with her family taking comfort in the belief that she was with her best friend when she died.
Antonia Candelaria is one of seven children who perished at the Plaza Towers elementary school in Moore, Okla. Her closest friend, fellow third-grader Emily Conatzer, was with her — a source of solace for her parents.
'I know Tonia and Emily were together and holding hands and taking care of each other," Antonia's mother said after learning of her daughter's death, according to Moore Schools Superintendent Susan Pierce.
Antonia's funeral was the first of three to be held in the next two days for children who died in Monday's storm, which claimed a total of 24 lives and damaged or destroyed 13,000 homes in the Oklahoma City suburb.
“She was a beautiful young lady on the inside and out,” said an obituary for Antonia published in The Oklahoman newspaper. “She had her own most special and beautiful way of looking at the world. She could find the positive, good and joy in everything.”
Tannen Maury / EPA
A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.
Nicknamed "Ladybug," she was “specially gifted in art as well as music” and “loved to draw, paint, color and make crafts,” the obituary said.
“We will miss our precious little Ladybug everyday but will rejoice for the day we will be reunited with her again someday," it added.
Authorities said Thursday they believe everyone who was missing after the twister has been tracked down and the death toll will stand at 24, including 10 children.
The victims include a mother who sought shelter in a 7-Eleven that collapsed, killing both her and her four-month-old son, and two sisters who were torn from their mother as she huddled with them in a bathtub.
Laurinda Vargyas, 30, told the Oklahoman that she was flopped around and when she landed, 4-year-old Karrina and 7-month-old Sydnee were gone.
She found the baby in a driveway, "just laying there helpless."
"All I could do was sit there and hold her. She was already gone. They say she didn't suffer. So I've got to find peace with that,” she told the newspaper.
Karrina's body was found later in the rubble of a neighbor's house. Varygas and her husband have two older children who were not harmed.
Beyond the human cost, the damage from Monday’s EF-5 tornado could top $2 billion, officials said late Wednesday as the focus shifted to huge task of clearing mile upon mile of of debris.
Moore Mayor Glenn Lewis said Wednesday he would propose an ordinance in the next couple of days to require all new homes to have storm shelters.
NBC News' Tracy Connor and Kate Snow contributed to this report.
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This story was originally published on Thu May 23, 2013 4:43 AM EDT
Dr. Scott M. Lieberman / AP
A pair of lightning bolts are seen striking the ground as a line of thunderstorms passes over Tyler, Texas.
Thunderstorms -- bringing large hail and the chance of "a tornado or two" -- were expected to hit central and southwestern Oklahoma and parts of Texas Thursday as bad weather continued to hit the Plains.
The National Weather Service published a map showing much of the U.S. had a “slight risk” of severe thunderstorms. The risk area extended from Texas and Florida to New England and the Great Lakes and from Texas up to Montana and Washington.
“The activity is expected to be far less significant than the outbreak earlier this week, but hail could be particularly large in northwest Texas and western Oklahoma,” the weather service said.
Tannen Maury / EPA
A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.
In its outlook for Thursday posted at 1:52 a.m. ET, the weather service said that it expected that storms would develop early Thursday across northwestern Texas and into southwestern and central Oklahoma.
“Primary threat will be very large hail. A tornado or two may also be possible especially during the early evening,” it added.
In the Northeast, the weather service said “storms may undergo a gradual intensification” with a chance of “mainly isolated damaging wind.”
“Any severe threat should diminish by early evening,” it said.
Parts of Massachusetts were hit by severe storms on Wednesday evening that at one point prompted the weather service to issue a tornado warning. There were no reports of one touching down.
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Win Mcnamee / Getty Images
With the Boy Scouts of America set to vote on a policy that would allow openly gay youths to participate, activists ramp up the volume on their protests.
After years of emotional debate, the Boy Scouts of America are considering a proposal at their annual meeting to allow gay youths to participate openly in the popular organization for the first time.
The exclusion of gay Scouts has been the subject of much wrangling and soul searching in the century-old organization -- from local troops and councils to online petitions to national board meetings. The dispute was even heard by the Supreme Court, which said 13 years ago that as a private membership organization the BSA was free to decide who it would admit.
Here is a rundown of what is at stake in the vote, which is scheduled to take place Thursday among the 1,400 delegates of the National Council gathered in Grapevine, Texas.
What would the new membership policy look like?
The proposal would lift the organization’s ban on openly gay youth participants, but it would continue to bar gay adults from being Scout leaders.
Subject to gut-wrenching debate over morality and rights, the proposal would impact more than 100,000 scouting units, such as Cub Scout packs and Boy Scout troops, that involve nearly 3 million youths and more than 1 million adults. Generations of Scouts have weighed in on the issue in private and in public, with partisans on both sides threatening to withdraw from participating depending on how it is resolved.
Why is the scouting organization considering this change now?
BSA leaders won’t say exactly why now, but more than a decade after the Supreme Court said the organization was on solid legal ground in excluding gays, the debate quite simply won’t go away. Last summer, the Boy Scouts reaffirmed their anti-gay policy, after a two-year examination by a committee. Since then, some local chapters have been pushing for a reconsideration.
Meanwhile issues related to gay rights -- such as gay marriage and adoption -- are gaining wider public acceptance, and lobbying campaigns by Jennifer Tyrrell, a lesbian who was ousted from her role as den mother last year, and Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout who was raised by two lesbian mothers, kept the debate in the public eye. Activists have also pressured corporate sponsors, many of which have non-discrimination clauses tied to their giving, to withdraw funding unless the policy is changed.
Stephen B. Thornton / Stephen B. Thornton for NBC News
Pack 215 Cub Scouts recite the Pledge of Allegiance at their pack meeting at Eagle Heights Baptist Church on Tuesday in Harrison, Ark. The church's pastor has said it will not stay on as sponsor if the policy is changed.
Who is for the proposal, and who is against?
It’s unclear exactly how many scouts and councils -- which oversee the scouting units -- are on each side of the debate, and we’ll have to wait for the results of the secret ballot to see which side is victorious. Some councils have publicly said they will not continue if gay youths are allowed, while others have called for gay adults to be included too.
Religion looms large over the debate. The Scouts explicitly invoke God in their membership guidelines, and more than 70 percent of Boy Scout units are sponsored by religious groups. One of the Southern Baptist Church leaders, Dr. Frank Page, last week implored the Boy Scouts not to change the policy. But The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints – the BSA's biggest charter partner-- has given tacit endorsement to the plan; the National Catholic Council on Scouting has yet to take a position.
Even Barack Obama and Mitt Romney weighed in on the debate during the presidential race. Perhaps one of the most important voices, BSA President Wayne Perry on Wednesday wrote an op-ed in USA TODAY supporting the inclusion of gay boys.
Under the proposal, what would happen to an Eagle Scout who is gay and wants to volunteer as an adult? That wouldn’t be allowed?
That is the big criticism of this policy in more progressive quarters: That life-long, successful scouts essentially will be banned from the organization on their 18th birthday because they are gay. Conservatives also note the tension inherent in the policy, saying it could be a slippery slope: They believe allowing gay youths would undermine the legal underpinnings of the Supreme Court decision, ultimately leading to gay adult volunteers being admitted into the organization.
Will individual local troops be allowed to exclude gay youths if they have moral objections?
In short, no. Here is how Deron Smith, spokesperson for the BSA puts it: “If passed, no youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.” This has led some parents and Scout leaders who object to homosexuality to consider alternatives to Scouting, for fear that the resolution might pass.
If gays are allowed, will parents be able to object, for example, to their son sharing a tent with a gay Scout?
This is a real concern among some parents, as evidenced by its inclusion on the BSA’s internal survey on the issue. But Scouting leaders haven’t addressed the matter directly. Instead, they refer generally to maintaining a “supportive and safe environment for young people.” The organization has created a task force to make sure the policy could be implemented smoothly, and they are looking into how other organizations have handled these issues.
If it passes, will this proposal end the infighting, or is this just the beginning?
The BSA may hope this vote will end the debate, but more likely, it will touch off a whole new one. Some troops may disband. Those affiliated with Southern Baptist churches, for example, could lose their charters. And more liberal Scout leaders will lobby to have gay adults included as well -- an issue that is not going to fade anytime soon.
If you are a current or former member of the Boy Scouts and would like to share your thoughts on how your troop, pack or council is handling the possibility of a change in the membership policy, you can email the reporter at miranda.leitsinger@msnbc.com. We may use some comments for a follow-up story, so please specify if your remarks can be used and provide your name, hometown, age, Boy Scout affiliation and a phone number.
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Tim Sharp / Reuters
A huge blast rocked a small Texas town, killing 14 people and injuring some 200 more.
The fertilizer-plant explosion that killed 14 and injured about 200 others in Texas last month highlights the failings of a U.S. federal law intended to save lives during chemical accidents, a Reuters investigation has found.
Known as the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, the law requires companies to tell emergency responders about the hazardous chemicals stored on their properties. But even when companies do so, the law stops there: After the paperwork is filed, it is up to the companies and local firefighters, paramedics and police to plan and train for potential disasters.
West Fertilizer Co. of West, Texas, had a spotty reporting record. Still, it had alerted a local emergency-planning committee in February 2012 that it stored potentially deadly chemicals at the plant. Firefighters and other emergency responders never acted upon that information to train for the kind of devastating explosion that happened 14 months later, according to interviews with surviving first responders, a failing that likely cost lives.
Related story: 800,000 live near large amounts of chemical blamed in blast
It's a scenario that has played out in chemical accidents nationwide - one that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board has repeatedly identified as contributing to deaths and injuries spanning more than a decade.
The emergency response to the fire and explosion in West is among the issues the board is examining as it investigates the disaster, said Daniel Horowitz, the regulatory board's managing director.
"One universal finding about these sorts of accidents is no one fully recognized how hazardous the material or process was," he said. "And I don't think this one will be any different."
The problem with the Emergency Planning act is that it relies on small fire departments to plan and train for fires and explosions involving any number of highly hazardous chemicals, said Neal Langerman, chemical and health safety officer at the American Chemical Society. Those fire departments are often staffed by volunteers, funded by charitable contributions and lacking high-tech equipment.
"The West, Texas, first responders were doing the best they could under the circumstances," Langerman said. "The failure was in the community, county and state leadership to provide emergency planning and implementation guidance."
Mariah Garcia/Photo via NBCDFW.c
Smoke rises from the scene of an fertilizer plant explosion near Waco, Texas.
"I don't think it's appropriate to beat up on what the first responders did at the time of detonation, but everything that led up to it - preparedness and preparation - was lacking," Langerman said.
West Mayor Tommy Muska, a member of the volunteer fire department, said he does not want to engage in second-guessing. "I think our fire department did an excellent job in protecting the people," he said. Ten first responders died in the disaster.
Langerman said he has seen the same problem again and again, and not just in Texas: Many first responders across the United States lack the training and resources to respond to hazardous chemical accidents, he said.
See Reuters' interactive map of sites storing large amounts of ammonium nitrate
The lack of preparedness endangers not only firefighters and emergency medical technicians, but also people nationwide living near chemical stockpiles similar to those that exploded in West.
At least 800,000 people in the United States live within a mile of 440 sites that store potentially explosive ammonium nitrate, which investigators say was the source of the explosion in West, according to a Reuters analysis of hazardous-chemical storage data maintained by 29 states.
Hundreds of schools, 20 hospitals, 13 churches and hundreds of thousands of homes in those states sit within a mile of facilities that store the compound, used in both fertilizers and explosives, the analysis found.
Of the remaining 21 states, 10 declined Reuters' requests for data, and one declined to release the information in electronic form. The rest either provided incomplete information, did not respond, don't maintain the filings electronically or are still considering the requests. Federal law requires such information be made available to the public within 45 days of a request. Reuters requested the information four weeks ago.
Even the Chemical Safety Board, the federal agency charged with investigating chemical accidents nationwide, does not have access to a complete national inventory.
Since 1990, companies have reported more than 380 incidents involving ammonium nitrate to the National Response Center, a federal agency that collects reports of spills, leaks and other discharges within the United States. Eight people were killed, 66 injured and more than 6,300 evacuated in those incidents, according to the center's data.
But incident reporting is voluntary, and center officials say the records cover only a fraction of all incidents.
'No one knew'
The Texas State Fire Marshal announces that the fire, and explosions at the West, Texas, fertilizer plant remains an open case, due to an "undetermined" cause.
Preparation for a potential ammonium nitrate explosion in West should have begun after the company first reported storing the compound under the EPCRA law. That act was passed by Congress in 1986 after a chemical gas leak two years earlier in Bhopal, India, killed 4,000 people. The intention was to inform the U.S. public and emergency responders about the dangers so they could plan for accidents.
Documents on file with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show that West Fertilizer was handling thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate as early as 2006. It wasn't until February 2012 that the company listed the compound on a federally required hazardous-chemical inventory, known as a Tier II filing. The company listed ammonium nitrate on the Tier II report it submitted to the Local Emergency Planning Committee in McLennan County.
The company was required to file copies of the same report with the Texas Department of State Health Services and the West Volunteer Fire Department. Texas DSHS records show the company's February 2012 Tier II filing did not list ammonium nitrate. Company officials have declined to speak with reporters.
Local officials said they were not aware of the reporting discrepancy until Reuters brought it to their attention on Friday. State officials asked a Reuters reporter to send a copy of the local filing, and said they have alerted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about it because of EPA's enforcement authority over EPCRA.
In February 2013, the company submitted its 2012 Tier II report to Texas DSHS. The county's Local Emergency Planning Committee has no record of receiving a copy, said Mike Dixon, a McLennan County attorney.
It is unclear whether the company ever filed a Tier II report with the local fire department.
What is clear is that when the plant caught fire on April 17, people inside the fire trucks and ambulances that rushed to the scene did not know how much ammonium nitrate was on hand or how quickly it could produce a massive explosion. They had never trained for a scenario like the one that unfolded, said firefighter Kevin Maler.
In the 10 years he has served on the West Volunteer Fire Department, Maler said he never saw West Fertilizer's Tier II report. He added that the department never conducted drills to prepare for an explosion at the facility. Those observations were confirmed by other first responders Reuters interviewed who did not want to be named.
"No one ever knew you were going into something like that," Maler said.
Maler left the scene of the fire to retrieve protective gear. As he returned, the facility exploded, killing 10 first responders. The blast from the explosion shattered windows in his home, nearly a mile from the blast. His mother's house near the fertilizer facility was destroyed; she was not harmed.
Police, first responders and a witness describe the horrifying scenes in wake of a fertilizer plant blast. NBC's David Scott reports.
A professional firefighter from a nearby community said he tried to look up West Fertilizer's Tier II report on his way to the scene. He did not know how to find it online, however, and he was unable to locate it.
West Fertilizer's owner, Donald Adair, declined to discuss the plant's emergency preparedness with a reporter. He also declined previous requests for comment. Earlier, he said he had instructed his employees to cooperate with investigators.
The West fire chief was injured in the explosion and has been unable to answer questions about the department's preparedness. He has referred reporters to Mayor Muska, a volunteer firefighter who was on his way to the scene when the plant exploded.
Muska's comments added to the uncertainty about whether West Fertilizer filed a Tier II report with the department. He said last week that he believed West Fertilizer had filed one. In an interview several weeks ago, he said the fire department had no hazard plan on the company because the plant sat outside town limits.
Regardless of what reports were on file, firefighters knew generally that the plant stored hazardous chemicals, Muska said. The plant foreman, Cody Dragoo, was among the firefighters who died in the blast and knew what was stored there, he said.
Muska rejects suggestions that first responders were not prepared, and he considers their efforts a success that night.
"The City of West and the McLennan County emergency planning and response system worked on April 17, 2013," he said in a letter he prepared last week for the media. "We evacuated half of our town, secured the affected area, searched for and rescued the injured, suppressed fires, and, in about two hours, transported more than 200 injured citizens to ready and waiting hospitals.... Make no mistake: 'volunteer' does not mean 'underprepared.'"
Click on the image to see a Reuters interactive map of sites around the U.S. where large amounts of ammonium nitrate are stored.
Deadly decisions
The initial responders' fates were sealed by the decision to fight the fire, which was reported to 9-1-1 operators at 7:29 p.m. The first firefighters arrived at the plant swiftly - about three minutes later.
They began spraying water on the fire from a tanker truck, and began laying hoses to the nearest fire hydrant, about 2,000 feet from the plant, farther than the length of their longest hose, said Maler, one of the surviving firefighters. They had decided to begin hosing down anhydrous ammonia tanks on the property, worried the tanks might overheat and explode, releasing the toxic gas into the atmosphere and endangering thousands of people who lived around the plant. An apartment complex and nursing home sat within a few hundred yards.
In hindsight, Maler said, fighting the fire was the wrong call. About 20 minutes after the responders got there, an explosion sent a massive fireball into the sky, killing most of the firefighters on the scene. The state fire marshal says ammonium nitrate was the source of the explosion. The exact cause of the fire and explosion remains undetermined.
Firefighters who have battled ammonium nitrate fires elsewhere - without death or injury to first responders - say having the Tier II information was critical to their success. They knew what they were facing going in, and responded accordingly.
Called to a fire at a similar fertilizer facility in 2009 in Bryan, Texas, firefighters opted not to fight the blaze. Although the circumstances were somewhat different - firefighters knew going in that ammonium nitrate already had ignited - the first responders decided to keep a safe distance and evacuate nearby residents. No one was injured, and the fire burned itself out.
Key to the response, said Chief Joe Ondrasek of the Brazos County Fire Department Precinct 4, was having the fertilizer company's Tier II report in hand. Firefighters were unable to contact the plant manager immediately, he said, and therefore relied on the report to inform their response.
Eric Gay / AP file
Honor guards stand in front of caskets before an April 25 memorial service in Waco, Texas, for first responders who died in the fertilizer plant explosion.
A federally funded program intended to grant fire departments online access to the Tier II reports was not being used in West. Although some firefighters in Texas said they know about and use the system, known as E-Plan, others said they didn't know of its existence or how to access it.
Federal funding for the E-Plan system was eliminated last October, which could hurt efforts to keep it up and running.
McLennan County is working with a community college to develop a website that would make it easier for the public and first responders to access Tier II information, said Frank Patterson, emergency management coordinator for Waco and McLennan County.
"It's very similar to a sex offender registry," Patterson said. "It's like anything else, the more information you have, the better off you are."
Firefighters in Bryan also were better prepared to evacuate residents because they had what is known as a reverse 9-1-1 system that auto-dials residents in an affected area to notify them to get out. This is the preferred way to alert a community to an evacuation, fire safety experts say.
West lacks such a system. Emergency responders went door to door to notify residents of the need to leave, a process that Muska said started before the explosion and unfolded over about two hours. The community has emergency sirens, which sounded that night. But West residents said the sirens are used often for many types of incidents, and they had never been issued instructions about what to do when horns go off.
Applying the lessons
As part of its work in the wake of the West disaster, the Chemical Safety Board will examine the training and procedures that emergency responders had in place for ammonium nitrate and other hazardous fires, said board spokesman Hillary Cohen. The board will look for ways those procedures "can be made more protective for the over 1 million firefighters across the country," she said.
The board, in at least 15 other chemical accidents occurring in 13 different states since 2002, has found fault with companies for failing to inform responders about risks at their facilities; with responders for failing to plan, train and prepare for those risks; or with communities for failing to have effective systems in place to notify the public when an evacuation is needed.
Horowitz, of the Chemical Safety Board, pointed out the weakness of the federal reporting law.
"What we've often found is once you drill down to the local level, there's not a lot of resources for this activity," said Horowitz. "Congress provided the mandate back in 1986, but they didn't provide any real funding or regulatory authority."
Texas has awarded more than $3 million in grant money over the past three years to pay for hazardous-material training exercises and to help 26 Local Emergency Planning Committees understand the transport of hazardous materials through their communities, said Tom Vinger, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. The Texas Engineering Extension Service at Texas A&M University has trained about 6,000 first responders in handling hazardous material incidents, he said. Texas has about 50,000 paid and volunteer first responders.
Also, Vinger said, the state reviews local emergency-response plans, conducting more than 3,000 reviews in 2012. Vinger did not respond to questions about whether any money or training went to West or McLennan County.
"A common phrase in the emergency-management community is that all disasters are local," Vinger said. "The reason being that local governments and officials are best suited to identify, plan for and immediately respond to significant disasters that occur in their area."
Preparation for a hazardous-chemical incident will be discussed among emergency responders in McLennan County for a long time to come, said Patterson, the emergency coordinator. The county cannot require fire departments to develop emergency plans or tour hazardous chemical storage facilities in their communities, he said. But he said the county plans on providing them with direction and additional resources.
"There's no doubt we're going to encourage the fire departments to look at the facilities in their jurisdiction," Patterson said. "There's always lessons to learn going forward."
West's Mayor Muska agreed.
"We did a lot of things right," Muska said. "We did a lot of stuff that was probably not exactly right."
(Tim Gaynor contributed reporting from West, Texas, and Selam Gebrekidan and Joshua Schneyer from New York. M.B. Pell reported from West. Ryan McNeill and Janet Roberts reported from New York. Edited by Maurice Tamman and Michael Williams.)
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Colin Mulvany / AP
During the execution of a search warrant, members of the Joint Federal Haz-Mat Team, FBI and local law enforcement gather in front of the Osmun Apartments near the intersection of First Avenue and Oak Street in the Browne's Addition neighborhood of Spokane, Wash., on Saturday, May 18, 2013
SPOKANE, Wash. -- A 37-year-old man was arrested Wednesday after a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin were discovered in Washington state last week.
A grand jury indictment accuses Matthew Ryan Buquet of mailing a threatening communication to U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle at the federal courthouse on May 14.
The indictment did not say anything about ricin. However, the U.S. Postal Service said last week that two letters were discovered — one addressed to the courthouse and the other to the downtown post office — and they contained ricin in a crude form that did not immediately pose a threat to workers.
Buquet appeared in federal court in Spokane after the FBI said agents arrested him Wednesday afternoon. He pleaded not guilty.
If convicted of mailing a threatening communication, he could face up to 10 years in prison.
Ricin is a highly toxic substance made from castor beans. As little as 500 micrograms, the size of the head of a pin, can kill an adult if inhaled or ingested.
There were no reports of illness connected to the Spokane letters.
Investigators in hazardous materials suits spent most of Saturday executing a search warrant at a three-story apartment building in downtown Spokane. Witnesses reported that agents escorted a man from the building.
The Spokane investigation comes a month after letters containing ricin were addressed to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and a Mississippi judge. A Mississippi man was arrested in that case.
Click on the image to see a Reuters interactive map of sites around the U.S. where large amounts of ammonium nitrate are stored.
NEW YORK - At least 800,000 people across the United States live near hundreds of sites that store large amounts of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate, which investigators are blaming as the source of last month's deadly blast at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, a Reuters analysis shows.
Hundreds of schools, 20 hospitals and 13 churches, as well as hundreds of thousands of households, also sit near the sites. At least 12 ammonium-nitrate facilities have 10,000 or more people living within a mile.
Fourteen people were killed and about 200 injured April 17 when a fire at West Fertilizer Co. was followed by a massive explosion. Ten of the dead were first responders from area fire departments.
Related story: Texas blast shows flaws in emergency planning law
The explosion destroyed an apartment complex and nursing home that sat within a few hundred yards of the fertilizer plant, damaged homes within a half mile of the plant and cracked windows even farther away.
Investigators say ammonium nitrate stored at the plant was the source of the explosion, but they have not identified the cause.
Since 1990, companies have reported more than 380 incidents involving ammonium nitrate to the National Response Center, a federal agency that collects reports of spills, leaks and other discharges within the United States. Eight people were killed, 66 injured and more than 6,300 evacuated in those incidents, according to the center's data. But reporting is voluntary, and center officials say the records cover only a fraction of all incidents.
Eeuters' analysis of hazardous chemical inventories found schools, hospitals and churches within short distances of facilities storing ammonium nitrate, such as an elementary school in Athens, Texas, that is next door to a fertilizer plant. The Hiawatha Community Hospital in Padonia, Kansas, is less than a quarter-mile from one site and three-quarters of a mile from another.
Tim Sharp / Reuters
A huge blast rocked a small Texas town, killing 14 people and injuring some 200 more.
The Athens school district said it is reviewing its emergency plans now, but until a reporter called on Friday had not considered the potential danger from the fertilizer plant.
"It's amazing how a tragedy like West makes us rethink things," said Janie Sims, assistant superintendent. "Who would have even mentioned it or thought of it before?"
Some sites are in heavily urbanized areas. Acid Products Co. in Chicago, which reported storing between 10,000 and 99,999 pounds of ammonium nitrate in 2012, is surrounded by about 24,000 people. Company officials declined to comment.
The number of people affected nationwide, as well as the count of nearby hospitals, churches and schools, are likely higher because Reuters was unable to get information from all 50 states.
Reuters spent about four weeks obtaining copies of hazardous-chemical inventories, known as Tier II reports, collected by states under the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act. Twenty-nine states provided information, identifying 440 sites. Not all sites in those states were included in the analysis because of incomplete location information.
Reporters used mapping software, combined with Census and other data, to identify the nearby population, schools, churches and hospitals.
Of the 21 remaining states, 10 declined to provide their data, one declined to provide it in electronic form, and the rest either provided incomplete information, did not respond, do not maintain the filings electronically or are still considering the requests. Federal law allows 45 days to provide the information.
Among those that withheld data was Missouri, which The Fertilizer Institute, an industry association, said is the No. 1 user of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer in the United States. The group said Missouri accounts for 20 percent of the nation's use of the product.
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Chip Somodevilla / Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file
Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 6.
The Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that U.S. drone strikes have killed four American citizens since 2009, including the previously undisclosed death of a North Carolina resident who left the United States for Pakistan and was later indicted on federal terrorism charges.
Attorney General Eric Holder, in a letter to congressional leaders and chairman of key congressional committees made public on the eve of what was billed as a major counterterrorism speech by President Barack Obama, also confirmed the deaths in drone attacks in Yemen of three other Americans that already had been widely reported: those of radical cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki , his teenage son, Abd al-Rahmn Anwar al-Awlaki; and Samir Khan, the American who ran al Qaeda’s web-based propaganda magazine Inspire. Previously the Obama administration had only acknowledged the senior Awlaki’s killing and refused to publicly confirm or deny reports of the other deaths.
The letter also confirmed that U.S. drones had killed Jude Kenan Mohammed of Raleigh, N.C., more than a year after a local news report quoted a friend as saying he had died in an attack in Pakistan in November 2011.
Holder said in the letter that the senior Awlaki was the only U.S. citizen targeted in a drone strike.
Anonymous / AP
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric and recruiter for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, is shown in an October 2008 file photo.
He also provided new details about what the U.S. says were Awlaki's operational roles in terror plots, including his role in a 2010 attempt to bomb cargo planes by putting bombs in printer cartridges.
It also included an explicit explanation of the U.S. policy for targeted killings of Americans, much of which was included in a “white paper” obtained by NBC News in February.
Mohammed’s death appears to have been news to the FBI, which as of Thursday still listed him on its “most wanted” list, saying, “On July 22, 2009, a federal grand jury in North Carolina indicted Jude Kenan Mohammad for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists and conspiracy to murder, kidnap, maim, and injure persons in a foreign country. Mohammad is at large … (and) is believed to be in Pakistan.”
A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity told NBC News: “We don’t know when he was killed. That fact was classified.”
FBI spokeswoman Shelley Lynch said in an email: "Jude Kenan Mohammed remained wanted until there was official confirmation of death. Until now, the matter was classified and it is now appropriate for the wanted poster to be removed from our website."
Obama is expected to discuss the drone program Thursday in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
Release of Holder’s letter came as classified documents obtained by NBC News raised new questions about the CIA-run drone program and whether it is consistent with public comments by Obama and other administration officials describing the strikes as “very precise” and targeted at specific al Qaeda operatives and their associates. In fact, the documents show, the agency has frequently attacked low-level militants and foreign fighters in Pakistan whose names and nationalities were not known, as well as militant groups not directly connected to al Qaeda.
The documents, similar to those recently reported by McClatchy Newspapers, offer a window into the secretive drone program and how its actual operations sometimes differ from the public accounts provided by the administration.
They appear to officially confirm that the agency has engaged in “signature strikes” – a much discussed and controversial practice that has never been publicly acknowledged -- in which CIA drone operators target individuals based on the “signature characteristics” of suspects but whose actual identities are not clear.
They surface at a time that U.S officials appear to be scaling back the drone program – amid warnings from some former military and intelligence officials that the attacks may be creating a backlash harmful to U.S. interests in the long run.
When Obama was asked about the drone program last year during a Google News forum, he called it “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” In an April 2012 speech, then White House counter-terrorism adviser and now CIA Director John Brennan said: “The United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific al Qaeda terrorists,” while acknowledging that drone targets included “associated forces.”
But a CIA list of 53 drone strikes in the fall of 2010 indicates that fewer than half – 22 -- listed al Qaeda operatives as the targets. Other strikes were aimed at targets that included suspected members of the militant al-Haqqani network in Pakistan, which is believed to have harbored and worked with al Qaeda; members of the Pakistani Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist military group that aims to overthrow the Pakistani government; and members of another Pakistani terrorist network identified as the “Commander Nazir Group.” Fourteen of the strikes listed the targets only as “other militants.”
Agency lists for other periods show a higher proportion of strikes being specifically aimed at Al Qaeda operatives. For example, during a nine month period between January and September 2011, 28 out of 42 strikes listed al Qaeda members as targets.
But in other accounts of the strikes, agency officials refer to the targeting of individuals whose identifies do not appear to be known. One 2009 attack was described as being aimed at “military aged males” at a site “associated with al Qaeda explosives training.” Another, in 2010, described the target as “four adult males conducting weapons training.”
The CIA and White House did not respond to requests for comment about the documents. But U.S. officials have vigorously defended the drone program and their public accounts of it, while saying they are limited in what they can say because of its classified nature and the potential impacts of full public disclosure in Pakistan. As for the use of signature strikes , they have argued that “when you have a bunch of guys building explosives, you don’t need to know who they are. They are an imminent threat.”
NBC News’ Pete Williams, Chuck Todd and Tom Curry contributed to this report.
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David McDaniel / The Oklahoman file
Oklahoma's Chief Medical Examiner Eric Pfeifer, seen here looking at an X-ray on March 21, said the toll from the tornado was "horrific."
Even to a man who deals in death every day, the toll from Monday's tornado was "horrific."
That was the word Dr. Eric Pfeifer, the chief medical examiner of Oklahoma, used Wednesday to describe the challenge of identifying and performing autopsies on two dozen victims.
After working around the clock for two days, Pfeifer emerged from the morgue exhausted, his voice hoarse, but full of praise for an overburdened staff that pulled together "to get this sad job done."
This week's disaster was not the first time Pfeifer had been confronted with nature's wrath. He had been on the job for just a few days when a twister tore across the station in the spring of 2011, killing 10 people.
"I can remember him saying that he had not ever had any cases just like that," recalled Doug Stewart, a University of Oklahoma pediatrician who sits on the board that brought Pfeifer from Minnesota to run the Sooner State's once-troubled M.E.'s office, based in Oklahoma City.
This week's storm was far worse. Less than 48 hours after the funnel cloud hit, though, Pfeifer's office had determined a cause of death for every victim, identified all of them and notified their families.
Members of his board of directors said such efficiency would have been hard to come by in the years before his arrival, when a backlog of unfinished cases hit 1,500 and the office lost its national accreditation.
"We were in a crisis when we hired Dr. Pfeifer," said Chris Ferguson of the Oklahoma Funeral Board. "But he seems to me to be a crisis manager."
Before coming to Oklahoma City, Pfeifer was a medical examiner at the Mayo Clinic and a coroner for Olmsted County, Minn. He was taking over an office that was underfunded, understaffed and filled with equipment "out of the 70s," Ferguson said.
"I knew what I was getting myself into when I accepted the Chief ME position here and have focused the last two years on campaigning for resources to rebuild this once esteemed practice as well as remaining actively engaged in the practice of medicine," Pfeifer said in an email to NBC News.
The result, Stewart said, has been "a remarkable turnaround."
He and others said Pfeifer shook up the staff, hired an administrative chief, and cut the backlog of unfiled death certificates in half. He successfully lobbied the state for $2.5 million in funding to double the number of pathologists from three to six and update equipment.
With 22,000 cases a year, the current staff of three pathologists was pushed to the limit even before the tornado.
When a doctor in the Tulsa office left, Pfeifer personally filled in and performed his autopsies, said Charles Curtis, deputy chief of the state Bureau of Investigations. After his deputy was bounced, he worked weekends so the office wouldn't fall behind. He refused to take an offered raise until office finances were in better shape.
"He leads by example," Curtis said.
When the bodies began arriving on Monday, Pfeifer said, his office was ready.
"This team is accustomed to working 2-3 times [the number of] nationally recommended caseloads every single day of the year," he said in the email. "This small team here didn’t even need to be asked to step up effort toward this recent horrific task."
When Ferguson went to the M.E.'s office on Tuesday — the day the tornado death toll was revised downward from 51 to 24 after double-counting in the chaotic first hours — he couldn't talk to Pfeifer.
"He was in the morgue," he said. "He's hands-on."
Outside the lab, Pfeifer is a motorcycle enthusiast and a tinkerer, a welder who likes to design and build machines and who built a wood-burning brick pizza oven in his Minnesota home, colleagues said.
"He's got a whole bunch of tools and stuff but it's all in storage because he can't find time to use it," Ferguson said.
Ferguson said it was relief that Pfeifer was in charge when Oklahoma suffered its biggest disaster in years. He said the number and age of the victims would have been tough for any doctor, even a custodian of death, to face.
"He has children around the same age as some of these victims," Ferguson said. "But I think he has the ability to set those emotions aside and get the job done."
Tannen Maury / EPA
A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.
Charlie Riedel / AP
A man salvages a guitar from a severely damaged home in Joplin, Mo., on May 23, 2011.
While Oklahoma begins to clean up after a ferocious tornado, the site of one of the worst twisters in American history — Joplin, Mo., a little more than 200 miles away — marked a solemn anniversary Wednesday.
On May 22, 2011, a tornado all but wiped Joplin off the map. The twister killed 161 people, injured more than 1,000 and wrought almost $3 billion worth of damage. It was clocked at more than 200 mph.
Two years after a tornado destroyed much of Joplin, Mo., the town has come back even stronger with changes to their infrastructures that are helping people stay safe. Now, nearly 80 percent of new homes include a safe room, and a new hospital will open in 2015 with windows able to withstand 250 mph winds. NBC's Erica Hill reports.
But the town has come back even stronger with changes to their infrastructure that are helping people stay safe. Now, nearly 80 percent of new homes include a safe room, and a new hospital will open in 2015 with windows able to withstand 250 mph winds.
“Devastation is a short walk, but determination lasts all the time,” Mayor Melodee Colbert Kean said. “Joplin is a city of hope. We know what it’s like to suffer… but know what it's like to get back up.”
Ninety percent of affected businesses are now open and 75 percent of the homes have been rebuilt.
And Mercy Hospital, once the symbol of the tornado's fury, was running again in just eight months.
A new facility will open in 2015 with walls and windows built to withstand 250 mph winds and its electrical systems securely buried under ground.
A moment of silence was held at 5:41 p.m. local time, the moment the tornado struck two years ago. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who earlier in the day was in Moore, Okla., to pledge federal help, attended the commemoration.
The deadliest tornado to hit the U.S. since 1947 struck Joplin, Mo., on May 23, 2011.
Joplin sent a support team to Moore to help with the recovery. The cities each have about 50,000 people.
The Joplin tornado damaged or destroyed 7,500 homes. On the Senate floor Wednesday, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt said there were lessons for Moore in the rebuilding.
“For the people in Joplin, they immediately began to think about Joplin tomorrow instead of Joplin yesterday,” he said. “And two years later, it’s still a community that’s dealing with loss, but a community that’s building new schools and new businesses.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided housing for 586 households after the Joplin tornado, and all but 12 have moved into longer-term or permanent homes, the city says.
NBC News' Becky Bratu contributed to this report.
Tannen Maury / EPA
A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.
This story was originally published on Wed May 22, 2013 7:22 PM EDT
Shayla Taylor tells the story of being in active labor as her hospital room crumbles around her during the deadly Moore, Okla.,tornado.
When a devastating tornado touched down in Moore, Okla., on Monday afternoon, Shayla Taylor was on the upper floor of the local hospital, in active labor with her second child.
As the floor shook “like an earthquake” beneath her and ceiling tiles and insulation fell overhead, the 25-year-old huddled with four nurses, braving both the peak contractions of childbirth and the wrath of the worst twister the veteran Oklahoman had ever endured.
“We were all just sitting there holding each other’s hands and praying,” Taylor told NBC News.
Norman Regional Health System
Jerome Taylor, left, Shayla Taylor, center, and Shaiden Taylor, right, welcomed baby Braeden Immanuel at the height of Monday's killer tornado in Moore, Okla.
Moore Medical Center, a 46-bed acute care hospital at 700 S. Telephone Road, took a direct hit from the F-5 tornado, with wind speeds that topped 200 miles per hour.
The blow devastated the hospital, as news photos plainly show, ripping away the roof and walls.
After the chaos, Taylor said she heard not the freight train sound described by so many witnesses, but the absolute silence of the storm’s center. Then she opened her eyes.
“All of a sudden I could see daylight and the wall was gone,” she said. “I look out and I see I-35 and part of the Warren theater,” which later became the triage center for victims of the tornado that killed 24 and injured more than 230 people.
Rick Wilking / Reuters
An aerial view of damage at the Moore Medical Center is shown in Moore, Okla., on May 21, after a tornado ravaged the suburb of Oklahoma City.
She had been dilated to 9 centimeters, nearly ready to deliver the baby, when nurses gave her a quick shot to slow labor during the height of the storm.
Taylor was quickly reunited with her husband, Jerome Taylor, 29, who had taken their 4-year-old son, Shaiden, to wait out the tornado with others in the hospital cafeteria. With the help of hospital workers, she was carefully carried through the destroyed building and out to a waiting ambulance, which whisked her 5 miles to another hospital in the Norman Regional Health System.
Three hours later, after doctors determined that the petite Taylor would need a cesarean section due to the baby's size, she delivered Braeden Immanuel, a healthy 8-pound, 3-ounce boy.
“His middle name means ‘God is with us,’” said Taylor. “The name had been picked out for months. Now I know why.”
Taylor is among 30 patients and staffers at Moore Medical Center who survived the tornado, which destroyed the hospital, said Kelly Wells, a health system spokeswoman. No decision has been made yet about whether to rebuild or simply raze the site.
Two days after the storm, Taylor and her family are recovering from the trauma of the chaotic birth. The family can’t locate their car, a Toyota Camry, which had been parked in the hospital lot and is now nowhere to be found.
Sossy Dombourian / NBC News
Newborn Braeden Immanuel Taylor is fine after his harrowing birth, his mother says.
“I don’t know if it ended up inside the hospital or down the street,” she said.
Their home is safe, however, and Jerome Taylor, who works for The Hartford insurance company, has been overwhelmed trying to help his neighbors cope.
Oklahomans are used to tornado warnings and Taylor said she wasn’t particularly alarmed before Monday’s storm.
“I’m used to sirens,” she said. “If you panicked, you’d be in a constant panic.”
Now, however, she’s thinking twice about living in Tornado Alley.
“The tornadoes always track through here,” she said. “It’s not to say everybody’s going to pack and leave tomorrow, but they start to reconsider things.”
Related:
Adrees Latif / Reuters
Taylor Tennyson sits in the front yard as family members salvage the remains of their home, devastated by the Moore tornado.
The tornado that roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs earlier this week damaged or destroyed as many as 13,000 homes and did as much as $2 billion in damage, authorities said Wednesday.
The figures underscored the colossal task facing emergency crews as they shifted their focus, two days after the storm, from looking for trapped victims to tackling the mountain of wreckage and helping displaced families.
Authorities said six people, all adults, remained unaccounted for, but they said those people may simply have walked away from the storm and were not necessarily buried in the rubble.
“We’re transitioning into recovery,” said Albert Ashwood, the state emergency management director. “I’d be the last one to say that it’s totally over.”
The tornado killed 24 people and injured more than 200.
The $2 billion damage figure was given by Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett and matched a preliminary estimate given by Oklahoma insurance officials to The Associated Press.
That would make the tornado, which ravaged the city of Moore and parts of Oklahoma City, one of the most expensive in American history. The tornado that all but wiped Joplin, Mo., off the map two years ago did $2.8 billion in damage.
Tannen Maury / EPA
A monster tornado hit Moore, Okla., Monday afternoon, leaving at least 24 dead.
Authorities in Oklahoma announced late Wednesday that they had identified all of the bodies, and they said that the youngest victims were infants, 4 and 7 months old. They said 10 of the 24 dead were children, up from an earlier figure of nine.
Heartbreaking portraits of the dead began to emerge. Among them were a third-grader remembered for her ever-present smile and a 65-year-old man separated from his wife when the tornado struck.
Federal relief workers set out trying to reach families displaced by the storm but said they faced challenges: Cellphones were not working in some places, and other people were focused on salvaging their belongings before they registered for help.
A White House official said Wednesday afternoon that 1,500 people had registered for federal help through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Administrator Craig Fugate said teams were going through neighborhoods looking for more.
“Right now it’s about getting people a place to stay who have lost their homes,” he said on “Morning Joe.” “We want to make sure they are getting the help they need.”
A tour given to NBC’s TODAY of Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children were killed, revealed forgotten everyday fixtures of grade school — a basketball covered by splinters of wood, a tattered map of the United States, a textbook about the volcano destruction at the ancient Italian city of Pompeii.
As cleanup crews faced acre after acre of wrecked homes, the federal government announced it would pick up 85 percent of the tab for debris removal for the first month, and 80 percent for the two months after that. President Barack Obama announced plans to visit Oklahoma on Sunday.
Authorities faced questions at a press conference about why more people did not have “safe rooms” in their homes to protect them from tornadoes. Officials in Moore had complained about red tape in trying to secure federal grants to build the rooms.
Gov. Mary Fallin said the state would open a donation fund to help pay for “safe rooms” for people who want them in their homes. But authorities brushed off questions about whether the state could have been better prepared.
“It’s the anomaly of severe weather,” Ashwood said, referring to the strength of the tornado, which was classified Tuesday as a Category EF5, meaning it had packed winds higher than 200 mph.
“This is the anomaly that flattens everything to the ground,” he said. “I think everything was done that could be done at the time.”
Meanwhile, the people of Moore planned to keep combing through the ruins and salvaging what they could.
On Tuesday, David Kirsch clutched a recovered American flag and said: “This represents the hope that we can be better off. Because where else in the world could you walk away from this and get back up on your feet?”
Reuters contributed to this report.
This story was originally published on Wed May 22, 2013 7:06 PM EDT
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