Miramar Police Department via TwitterBy CHRISTINA CARREGA, ABC News
(HOLLYWOOD, Fla.) — The vehicle last driven by a mother whose toddler was found abandoned in a Miramar, Florida, parking lot has been recovered about 15 miles away from there.
Leila Cavett, 21, was reported missing after her toddler, Kamdyn, was found wandering by himself on Sunday morning.
Miramar police on Wednesday evening turned over Cavett’s disappearance case to the Hollywood Police Department.
Police in Miramar aggressively searched to identify the child by sharing his photograph on social media and with news outlets.
The child’s relatives in Jasper, Alabama, about 12 hours away, were alerted on Monday.
Police also circulated photographs of a white Chevy 3500 that Cavett reportedly was last seen driving. The truck was found in the parking lot of a Walmart near Hollywood Boulevard and U.S. 441, ABC affiliate WPLG reported on Wednesday night.
The Hollywood Police Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News on Thursday.
This morning, detectives met with Leila Cavett’s family. As the search for the missing mother continues, we request anyone who has seen her or has information on her whereabouts contact @crimestoppers2 at 954-493-TIPS. Calls can be made anonymously. #MiramarPD#FindLeila#Missing
(CORAL SPRINGS, Fla.) — When Florida students return to school next year, there will be a new safety measure in place thanks to a bill signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last June. Alyssa’s Law, named after 14-year-old Alyssa Alhadeff, a victim of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, requires all Florida public and charter schools to implement a mobile system that silently alerts law enforcement and first responders of potentially life-threatening situations — from shootings to medical emergencies.
But one Florida school is ahead of the pack. Coral Springs Charter School installed and began testing a panic alert system in February before the spread of the novel coronavirus. ABC News saw the system in action before the pandemic with assistance from Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow, 18, was also killed in the Parkland shooting.
It’s been more than two years since a grieving and angry Pollack told President Donald Trump at a White House meeting, “There should’ve been one school shooting and we should’ve fixed it.”
Now, Pollack said he hopes the launch of his new program, School Safety Grant, and the implementation of ALERT, or Active Law Enforcement Response Technology, will be one fix when gun laws fail.
The “School Safety Grant,” Pollack says, will help fund school safety enhancement nationwide by distributing grants. Police departments will be awarded up to $40,000 and $20,000 per campus for school districts.
But it’s not just schools, says Lee Mandel, CEO of IntraLogic Solutions. Hospitals, movie theaters, houses of worship and other mass-gathering locations will be eligible. The grants will cover the “full implementation, full deployment and all the software for life,” says Mandel.
IntraLogic Solutions, along with the other School Safety Grant partners, Actuate and SaferWatch, are initially donating up to $20 million worth of software licenses and deployment services that will allow grant recipients to use their existing infrastructure to connect them to their local police departments.
ALERT gives police access to real-time surveillance cameras within a building once a panic button is hit during an active incident or a button is hit on a phone application.
Dispatchers can then identify and track a suspect’s location, and relay crucial information to officers as they respond.
“When they arrive on the scene, they know exactly where to go, how to get in, where the shooter is,” Mandel told ABC News. Mandel began developing the ALERT software after 26 people, including 20 children, were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.
“It really hit home,” Mandel said. “And we said, ‘How can we make a difference?'”
Mandel said he met Pollack shortly after the Parkland shooting that killed 17 and injured 17 others. Since his daughter’s death, Pollack has been involved in legislative efforts, including the signing of the School Safety Bill in Florida, that in part raised the minimum age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21, banned bump stocks and imposed a three-day waiting period to purchase a gun.
“For me, it’s always been about school safety,” Pollack said. “I don’t want to debate about anything else.”
“If this type of software was in place … she’d be alive today,” Pollack said.
“There were so many miscommunications, human errors, people not trained properly,” he continued. “This makes police departments efficient. It takes them into the 21st century of response.”
Identifying and solving the problems
Coral Springs police were the first to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School the day of the shooting. The department is the first in the nation to receive ALERT.
“[Marjory Stoneman Douglas] had a good camera system, but the department didn’t have access,” Coral Springs Police Chief Clyde Parry told ABC News. “Without us being able to tie in and look at the cameras, it obviously hampered our response in that situation.” He noted that at one point information was delayed by as much as 20 minutes and officers believed the shooter was on the third floor when in reality he had left the building.
Another problem, Parry said, was the fire alarm. “It was hard for some of the students to hear … any announcements over the intercom,” he said.
“We’re going to look at being able to disable the fire alarm remotely so that now we can give clear directions, ‘A code red has been called — enter your classroom, lock yourself down,’ you know, so that those things, you know, can’t happen again.”
“We looked under every rock, we turned every leaf over,” Parry said. “It’s important to go through them thoroughly, vet them and find out what did I do good. What did I do bad? What can I fix for the next time?”
Coral Springs police has begun working toward interoperability between fire departments and the sheriff’s office. They have also established mutual aid agreements with the jurisdictions around them so that they are able to respond to events if they are within striking distance.
As for the ALERT technology, “It’s life changing,” Parry said. “It’s taking us from being in a rowboat to being in a starship.”
Parry told ABC News that information given during 911 calls can often be unhelpful if the caller is under stress and shock.
“With this technology, it allows us to be able to have well-trained people give defined answers and directions of where to travel, exactly where the problem is,” he said. “If you have a camera and I’m looking for somebody who’s wearing black pants in a maroon shirt … you can do that. You can give a direction of travel. You can tell them which area to enter the school. More importantly, which area not to enter the school, [like] if we see that somebody is maybe set up in a sniper situation.”
“In some instances I imagine it will go faster than even receiving our first 911 call,” Parry said. “In any emergency, where seconds matter … this is technology that is going to trim off as many seconds as you can.”
Although this technology is a step forward, those on the receiving end are confident it is not an end-all, be-all solution.
“Shooters are constantly evolving and are constantly learning,” Parry said. “You can never rest on your laurels.'”
“But it will bring school safety to a different level than what we have right now. And I am excited about it. I look forward to it. And I’m embracing it,” Parry added.
Coral Springs Charter School, located just two miles from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, is also a grant recipient.
“When it’s literally down the street from you, I think that has much more of a significant emotional impact,” Principal Gary Springer told ABC News. “Parkland is not just our neighbor. They’re literally a family member.”
Springer’s school sits on a 200,000-square-foot campus, and houses 1,700 students from grades 6 to 12 and 150 faculty members.
“I think it’s really crucial that we’re able to have the latest and greatest technology … at our fingertips,” Springer told ABC News. “For our first responders to have instant access into our building and a bird’s-eye view … into what’s going on at our school at any time during the day, I welcome that.”
The school has upward of 100 cameras throughout the building.
“This provides immediate response in order for the situation to be controlled at a greater rate,” he said. “The school now has the ability to automatically set off the panic alert and that’ll shut down the school. And what that’ll do is immediately alert first responders upon arriving on the scene. They will already have access to a full picture of the school, which includes an overlay of the entire footprint of the school that allow someone to communicate with first responders and automatically unlock the doors that are on lockdown.” ALERT demonstration
ABC News was there in February as Coral Springs police used ALERT for the first time at Coral Springs Charter School.
Officers were prepped beforehand by Coral Springs Director of Emergency Management Alex Falcone. The drill began when Coral Springs Police Department communication center manager Kathy Liriano received an alert that a panic button was hit at the school. Liriano immediately alerted police, then took over the school’s PA system to address the shooter.
“Police are on scene. Shooter, drop your weapon,” Liriano said.
“Once they start talking over the intercom, the shooter may realize, ‘All right, the police are here,’ and they may abandon what they’re doing and try and escape or … shoot themselves. We know that a lot of these active killers have [died by] suicide once the police show up,” Parry said.
Liriano then relays crucial information to officers, including the race of the suspect and their clothing. With the school on lockdown, she is able to unlock the door for police.
And as officers rush to the scene, the dispatcher continues to track the shooter in order to give police step-by-step directions to locate and apprehend the shooter upon their arrival.
On the first drill, Coral Springs police apprehended the shooter in less than four minutes.
The officers then conducted a second drill in which the shooter entered the school and moved at random.
“What we’re really going to try to test with this is how quickly we can guide officers through the hallways. We’re going to test using a lot of different cameras. We’re gonna test using all of the features that the system has to offer,” Falcone told ABC News correspondent Victor Oquendo. “They’re going to have to search the school and they’re gonna have to rely on the information provided to us from the software in order for them to find them.”
But a few minutes into the drill, Liriano selected a button that opened up nearly 300 camera views at once.
“We’ll disable that button so you can’t accidentally click 10 cameras at the same time, because otherwise you’re going to have too much on the screen,” Mandel told Liriano.
“This is an excellent opportunity for us, so we want to make sure that we drill and we drill hard because if we can identify issues now on a safe day in a controlled environment, we can fix that,” Falcone said.
They then elected to restart with a new drill. This time officers apprehended the shooter just one minute after entering the building.
Mandel says the purpose of the drill was to locate additional features and challenges of the software to make it efficient and effective for users. Following the drill, the company removed the feature.
After the drill, 15-year veteran Coral Springs Officer Robert Cherry is impressed, calling ALERT an incredible tool.
“It gives us a huge advantage to know exactly where the suspect is at any given moment and a school of this size, you never know where they can be,” Cherry said.
Cherry was a first responder to the Parkland shooting.
“It’s invaluable to have if, God forbid, there’s another incident like that,” Cherry said about the software.
For that reason, Pollack said he hopes this technology expands nationwide and is the future of responding.
“In my head,” he said, “my daughter will be saying, ‘Well, look what we did now, Daddy.'”
(NEW YORK) — Tropical Storm Isaias is bringing heavy rain and high winds to Puerto Rico Thursday morning.
The storm is located about 100 miles WSW of Ponce, Puerto Rico, and is moving NW at 21 MPH bringing with it winds of 60 mph.
Tropical Storm force winds extend outward 415 miles from the center and a station in southern Puerto Rico reported a wind gust of 59 mph Thursday morning.
Isaias will likely make a landfall in the Dominican Republic Thursday and be near the Turks and Caicos Islands and Southern Bahamas on Friday.
Some fluctuation in intensity is expected as the storm interacts with the more mountainous terrain in Hispaniola.
If the storm can maintain its organization and some intensity past Hispaniola, there will be some opportunity for strengthening on Friday and Saturday as the storm moves through the warm waters near the Bahamas and east of Florida.
Tropical Storm Warnings are in effect from parts of the U.S. and British Virgin Islands, through Puerto Rico, into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as well as parts of the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Bahamas. There is also a Tropical Storm Watch in parts of the northern Bahamas.
Isaias will bring tropical storm force winds of over 50 mph to Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Locally 4 to 8 inches of rainfall is expected across these Caribbean Islands, which could cause flash flooding and mudslides. Additionally, there will be dangerous surf.
Over the last 24 hours, some of the model consensus has shifted eastward as the track has shifted eastward. Once the storm passes Hispaniola, there will be a better understanding of how this storm will behave as it moves towards the United States.
If the storm manages to stay east of Florida and avoid a tremendous amount of land interaction, conditions may be conducive for some strengthening off the Southeast coast line.
Water temperatures are very warm along nearly the entire U.S. East Coast and that will help the storm maintain intensity or gain strength slightly.
This is reflected in the official forecast track. The cone of uncertainty includes the possibility of the storm staying just offshore and traveling along the U.S. East Coast into early next week.
If this happens, there could be some impacts to the Georgia, the Carolinas and perhaps the Mid-Atlantic and into part of the Northeast U.S.
Regardless of the exact forecast track, impacts from Isaias remain quite possible along the U.S. East Coast even though the exact location and magnitude of the these impacts remains uncertain.
Jesse Grant/Getty Images for NAMMA few weeks ago, Garth Brooks and his wife Trisha Yearwood announced that they were postponing a performance due to possible exposure to COVID-19. They ultimately tested negative, but now Garth has revealed that the person who was the source of that exposure was his youngest daughter.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Garth said daughter Allie had tested positive for the coronavirus, and while he hadn’t seen his daughter, he noted that her husband “works with us every day,” which is why everyone got tested. Allie quarantined for 14 days after she tested positive, and she’s fine now except for a sore throat, Garth said.
“As a parent, nobody knows what COVID is going to do in the future so you just watch over them,” Garth said. “You pray a lot and hopefully she will come out of this thing with just that.”
He added, “As parents like you, like me, all you do is pray your knee bones off and hopefully following the guidelines so hopefully your family doesn’t have to experience this.”
The superstar went on to say that he and Trisha had used quarantine “as a time to face everything, ’cause now you can’t leave, you can’t walk away. This is probably, you know, the blessing and the curse.”
Admitting that the experience of the past few months has “probably been the most we’ve ever gone through as a couple,” Garth noted, “What’s on the other side is so great, especially when you are with the right one.”
Garth also announced yesterday that he was taking himself out of the running for CMA Entertainer of the Year, having already won the coveted honor seven times.
ABC News/Steve Iervolino(LOS ANGELES) — Sometime soon, Dancing with the Stars will return for its 29th season, but not without some major changes. Most noticeably, there will be a new host this season, Tyra Banks.
The America’s Next Top Model creator revealed to Us Weekly how she feels about taking over for longtime host Tom Bergeron and summed it up in one simple word, “Pressure!”
However, she’s not sweating it and touched upon what she intends to bring to the dance floor when the series premieres later this fall on ABC.
“My goal is for a 12-year-old to be sitting on the couch with their parents and grandparents and everybody can relate personally to what they see on that screen,” said Banks.
However, when Us tried squeezing more information out of the former supermodel, Tyra refused to budge.
“Not giving up the goods,” the 46-year-old chided. “You’ll have to tune in!”
Tyra won’t only serve as the show’s first solo-host, she will be pulling double duty as the new executive producer of DWTS.
She previously revealed that she’s been a longtime fan of the show, saying in a press release that “the fun mixed with raw emotion, seeing celebrities push past their comfort zones, the sizzling dance performances” is what made her a fan from the very start.
Miramar Police Department via TwitterBy CHRISTINA CARREGA, ABC News
