(FORT HOOD, Texas) — After a two-day visit to Fort Hood, Texas, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy said the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen will lead to changes to prevent cases like hers from happening again. McCarthy said the Army’s broad review of the culture at Fort Hood will help identify and fix the “root causes” that have led to the high number of violent acts at the base.
“I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m disappointed, we’re heartbroken,” McCarthy said candidly in describing his thoughts about Guillen’s murder at a press conference wrapping up his visit to the sprawling base.
“Vanessa was our teammate; we let her down, we let her family down, and it hurts,” said McCarthy.
“We’re going to do everything we can to prevent these types of things from happening again, to learn from this, and to move on,” said McCarthy. “We will do everything we can to protect her legacy by making enduring changes.”
During a visit to Fort Hood, McCarthy held what he called “incredibly candid” meetings with soldiers of all ranks to discuss issues of concern at the base.
McCarthy has ordered a broad independent review of the command culture and climate at Fort Hood that was prompted by concerns from Guillen’s family that the 20-year-old soldier was too intimidated to step forward with claims of sexual harassment.
The recently named panel carrying out that review will visit Fort Hood in late August. McCarthy said the review will look at “the root causes associated with the rise of felonies and violent acts, to better understand why this is happening at this installation” so that they can be fixed.
“The numbers are high here; they are the highest and some [of the] most cases for sexual assault and harassment and murders, for our entire formation in the U.S. Army,” he said.
“We’re going to put every resource, and all of the energy we can in this entire institution, behind fixing these problems,” he said.
On Wednesday, Fort Hood announced the death of Pfc. Francisco Gilberto Hernandezvargas in a boating accident, marking the eighth non-training death at the base since March 1.
Guillen was last seen on April 22, but investigators did not find her remains until June 30. Her alleged killer, Spc. Aaron Robinson, took his own life as investigators closed in on him. His girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, has been charged with helping him dismember and bury Guillen’s body. She pleaded not guilty last month.
McCarthy said Guillen’s death had left him “markedly disappointed and saddened,” because it was “a shot at the system and it rattles the system of the trust that you have to have in this profession.”
“The only thing we can do is come together and have very hard conversations and invest in each other and learn about each other so that we know who our teammates are,” he said.
He said a focus will be on improving the quality of the people coming into the Army, noting that the Army reflects the nation and that sometimes some bad apples make into uniform.
“At times, some people infiltrate our ranks; we got to find them, we got to root them out,” said McCarthy.
Various investigations continue into the case, including an Army investigation that looked at the family’s claims that Guillen was sexually harassed.
McCarthy described Guillen’s murder as “an inflection point” for service members and victims who have stepped forward with their own stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault with the “IAmVanessa” hashtag.
Noting how Guillen’s death had resonated throughout the Army, McCarthy said that during a recent trip to Poland and Italy soldiers there asked him about the case.
Ovidiu Dugulan/iStockBy MORGAN WINSOR and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(NEW YORK) — A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 708,000 people worldwide.
Over 18.8 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some national governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their outbreaks.
Since the first cases were detected in China in December, the United States has become the worst-affected country, with more than 4.8 million diagnosed cases and at least 158,445 deaths.
Here’s how the news is developing today. All times Eastern.
12:55 p.m.: Fauci: ‘Do not abandon’ distancing, masks in anticipation of vaccine
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is urging the public to “not abandon” public health measures “in anticipation of a vaccine.”
“When you’re talking about public health measures, there are many, many things that we can do,” Fauci said at a briefing Thursday hosted by the Alliance of Public Health. “But you can distill them down to five or six that everyone should be doing: masks, physical distancing, avoiding crowds, outdoor better than indoor, washing your hands with soap and water or with an alcohol-based type of sanitizer.”
Fauci said we could see different scenarios as we get into flu season this fall, including a situation where the seasonal flu is crowded out by COVID-19 infections.
But he said he hopes to see more people getting the flu shot this year. Approximately 170 million people did last year.
That combined with COVID-19 public health measures could result in a “blunted” season for both, he said.
“That’s a goal that we should aspire to that I think is possible,” Fauci said.
12:32 p.m.: Ohio governor tests positive
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday as part of the protocol to greet President Donald Trump at a Cleveland airport, his office said.
DeWine has no symptoms and plans to quarantine at his home for the next two weeks, his office said.
11:25 a.m.: Florida has 3 counties with no ICU beds
In Florida, 17.4% of the state’s ICU beds were open as of Thursday morning, according to the state’s Agency for Healthcare Administration.
Forty-two hospitals had no available beds while 35 hospitals had just one available bed, the agency said.
Three counties — Monroe, Nassau and Okeechobee — had no available ICU beds.
These numbers are expected to fluctuate throughout the day as hospitals and medical centers provide updates.
10:50 a.m.: Birx warns about increases in percent-positivity in 9 cities, CA Central Valley
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, is warning states about an increase in test-positivity rates in nine cities across the country, as well as in California’s Central Valley.
According to Birx’s Wednesday call with state and local officials obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, Baltimore, Atlanta, Kansas City, Portland, Omaha and California’s Central Valley all remain at a “very high level.”
Three other cities, Chicago, Boston and Detroit — which Birx described as in the “green zone” — have seen a “slow uptick” in their rate of positivity.
Washington, D.C., is not considered in the “green zone,” but has also seen an increase in its rate of positivity.
Birx stressed that local officials must look at the increases “very carefully” to ensure they are kept under control.
She specifically referenced several states, including California, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, noting that their COVID-19 trends are “concerning.”
The new concerns come as the country sees “encouraging” news across the South, according to Birx, as cases and test-positivity decline.
10 a.m.: School district moves to virtual learning when over 90 staff members forced to quarantine
Over 90 staff members in Georgia’s Barrow County School System are in quarantine due to a confirmed COVID-19 case, a suspect case or direct contact with a confirmed case, prompting the district to make a last-minute switch to virtual learning, district officials announced Wednesday.
The district had planned to begin the year with in-person and virtual learning.
“If today was the first day of school, we would have been hard-pressed to have sufficient staff available to open,” superintendent Chris McMichael said.
Distance learning for all students will begin Aug. 17.
On Friday, district officials will “present a phased approach to bring students back into the classrooms as quickly as possible,” the school system said.
8:22 a.m.: France reports highest single-day rise in cases in over two months
France on Wednesday reported its highest single-day rise in coronavirus infections in more than two months amid concerns about a resurgence in Europe.
According to data published by France’s national public health agency, the country recorded 1,695 new cases in 24 hours, the largest daily increase since May 30 when 1,828 new cases were identified in a 24-hour reporting period.
Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals and intensive care units across France has decreased over the past 24 hours, according to the agency’s data.
Overall, more than 194,000 people in France have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. At least 30,305 of them have died — the third-highest death toll in Europe, according to the agency’s data.
8:07 a.m.: ‘We cannot at all exercise fatigue,’ Africa CDC warns
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned Thursday that “we cannot at all exercise fatigue” in the response to the coronavirus pandemic, as the number of confirmed cases on the African continent nears one million.
More than 992,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported across the continent of 1.3 billion people since the start of the pandemic, with more than half in South Africa, according to the latest data from the Africa CDC.
A tally kept by Johns Hopkins University shows South Africa with the fifth-highest number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases in the world.
Africa has seen an 11% jump in cases over the last week, which is lower than in recent weeks, but Nkengasong cautioned that the data must be observed over several weeks to determine the real trend.
Nkengasong also noted concerns over the low rate of testing across the continent and the rising number of cases in several African nations including Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. He said if countries do the right things to prevent further spread of the virus, “we have a good chance of beating back this pandemic.”
7:34 a.m.: Weekly testing rate falls for first time in US, data shows
The number of COVID-19 tests being conducted across the United States has apparently taken a plunge.
A total of 664,272 tests were conducted around the country on Wednesday — the lowest figure since July 8, according to data collected and analyzed by the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic.
The group attributed some of the drop in testing to technical issues with reporting systems as well as storm-related closures in some states.
“Still, the problem is broader. Weekly testing declined for the first time ever in our dataset,” the COVID Tracking Project wrote in a series of posts on Twitter. “There are widespread problems right now in the top-level data. In different ways, California and Florida have had trouble reporting complete data because of storms and IT problems. Because they are populous states with large outbreaks, that influences the national numbers.”
6:03 a.m.: Number of babies testing positive has nearly doubled in this Texas county
The number of babies testing positive for COVID-19 in Nueces County in southwest Texas has nearly doubled since mid-July, according to a report by Corpus Christi ABC affiliate KIII-TV.
Since the start of the pandemic, a total of 85 children under the age of 2 had tested positive for the virus in Nueces County by mid-July. Now, that number is “close to 167,” according to Annette Rodriguez, health director of the Corpus Christi Nueces County Public Health District.
“That number has almost doubled and that hasn’t been a very long time period,” Rodriguez told KIII.
5:28 a.m.: FEMA memo shows disproportionate number of non-white children dying from virus
A disproportionate number of non-white children are dying from the novel coronavirus in the United States, according to data released in an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News on Wednesday night.
Nationwide, the number of COVID-19 cases among people under the age of 18 from March 1 to Aug. 3 were 40% Hispanic, 34% white and 19% Black. The ethnicity breakdown of those patients who died from the disease is 38% Hispanic, 34% Black and 25% white, according to the memo.
The gender breakdown of those cases is 50% male and 50% female. However, just as in adults, COVID-19 is more fatal among males under 18, making up 64% of the deaths compared to females under 18 accounting for 36%, according to the memo. 3:39 a.m.: US records over 52,000 new cases in a single day
More than 52,000 new cases of COVID-19 were identified in the United States on Tuesday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
It’s the second straight day that the United States has recorded over 50,000 new cases. However, the latest daily caseload is still under the country’s record set on July 16, when more than 77,000 new cases were identified in a 24-hour reporting period.
A total of 4,823,892 people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 158,256 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.
By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country’s cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 70,000 for the first time in mid-July.
Many states have seen a rise in infections in recent weeks, with some — including Arizona, California and Florida — reporting daily records.
However, new data suggests that the national surge in cases could be leveling off, according to an internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News on Tuesday night. Nationwide, the last week saw a 9.2% decrease in cases from the previous seven-day period. There was also a 7% increase in new deaths compared to the previous week, but the figure is lower than the 20-30% week-over-week increase the country has seen of late, according to the memo.
Rebecca O’Donnell is seen at a court appearance in Arkansas, Jan. 29, 2020. – (ABC News)By TAMMY GLASS, CHRIS FRANCESCANI and KATE HOLLAND, ABC News
(POCOHANTAS, Ark.) — Rebecca O’Donnell faces the death penalty after being charged with capital murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence in the death of former Arkansas legislator Linda Collins-Smith.
In a surprise twist to a baffling Southern murder mystery, the main suspect in the June 2019 murder of former Arkansas Sen. Linda Collins-Smith, will spend 54 years in prison after pleading guilty to the murder in court Thursday morning.
The bombshell plea change follows one year after prosecutors in the case announced their intention to seek the death penalty against Rebecca Lynn O’Donnell, 49, who worked as both an aide to the senator, and later an employee of Collins-Smith’s business. The two were considered close friends.
Still, many questions remain — most prominently: why? Details remain sketchy.
After previously pleading not guilty to capital murder, O’Donnell changed her plea to guilty of first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse during a hearing in Pocohantas, Arkansas.
O’Donnell also pleaded “no contest” to two counts of solicitation to commit capital murder in another county. Those charges stem from what prosecutors have described as a murder-for-hire plot while she was in custody. Those pleas will be treated as guilty pleas.
O’Donnell will serve 40 years for the murder, 14 years for the solicitation counts, and three years for the abuse of a corpse charge.
The twists and turns in the case have confounded the small community in Pocohantas, about 145 miles northeast of Little Rock.
Numerous judges and a prosecutor have stepped down or recused themselves from the case in the 13 months since the June, 2019 murder — which left the ex-senator’s body so damaged that she initially couldn’t be identified by authorities, even though she was discovered outside her home.
The initial judge overseeing the case sealed the records of the investigation before recusing himself, leaving many in the small Arkansas community wondering what could have prompted such a heinous homicide. All prosecutors have revealed to date is that the motive for the murder appeared to be financial in nature.
O’Donnell was the last person to see Collins-Smith alive, her fiancé Tim Loggains told ABC News in a recent interview, and the two women were so close that O’Donnell acted as a witness in Collins-Smith’s divorce.
O’Donnell was arrested a week and a half after the murder while driving to Collins-Smith’s memorial service.
“She’s not capable of this,” Loggains told ABC News’ T.J. Holmes in that interview. “Either she is the best actress in the world and completely fooled me or there’s not a chance she did this.”
But pressing questions about the case could soon be answered.
“Everything that is not under seal will be available online,” Judge John Fogleman told the court after O’Donnell changed her plea. “It will be a few days before it can get scanned and she can check to make redactions. Be patient with the court and clerk, it will be available online one week from today.”
The judge then instructed everyone but the family to leave the courtroom.
Defense attorney Lee Short told reporters, “This is good for the Collins’ family, they’ll be able to move on.”
Zenobillis/iStockBy DANIEL MANZO and EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(SILVER SPRING, Md.) — The U.S. could be in for an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season this year, possibly “one of the busiest on record,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Thursday.
2020 is forecast to see 19 to 25 named storms, of which seven to 11 will become hurricanes. Out of those, three to six are forecast to become major hurricanes, NOAA said in its updated season outlook.
An average season brings three major hurricanes (Hurricanes that reach Category 3, 4, or 5 qualify as major).
There have already been nine named storms this season. Historically, there are only two named storms on average by early August, NOAA said.
NOAA has never before forecasted up to 25 named storms.
But 2020 is not forecast to be the most active season on record. In 2005, there were 28 named storms including Hurricane Katrina.
Just this week, the East Coast was pummeled by deadly Tropical Storm Isaias.
The storm made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane late Monday before charging up the East Coast on Tuesday as a tropical storm, delivering torrential rain and ferocious winds to the Mid-Atlantic and New England.
(NEW YORK) — Along the East Coast, where millions are still without power thanks to Hurricane and Tropical Storm Isaias, the region is set to get more rain in the coming days.
Already Thursday morning, a round of storms is moving through parts of Maryland and Virginia. These storms are headed off to Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the next few hours.
A new flash flood watch has been issued for the region because parts of the area received 7-9 inches of rain from Isaias. In eastern Pennsylvania, rivers are just beginning to recede from elevated levels due to the excessive rainfall. Any additional rain could cause flash flooding.
As of 10 p.m. Wednesday, more than 2.1 million customers were still without power along the East Coast. Those numbers are particularly bad in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where each state has more than 600,000 customers without power.
High-resolution models are showing that some of the storms will likely make it into the New York City metro area by Friday, where localized flooding will be possible.
Then it appears another wave of strong storms will arrive early Saturday morning in parts of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and perhaps New York City.
These storms could bring 3 to 4 inches of rain to parts of the Mid-Atlantic, especially northern Virginia to southern New Jersey, which means the flooding threat could last for the next few days.
Meanwhile out west, a fire threat remains from Arizona to Montana due to dry and gusty winds. In Nevada, the dry air and lightning pose a risk for fires.
US ArmyBy LUIS MARTINEZ, ABC News
