March 31, 2021 • No Comments • National News

ABCBy ASHLEY LOUSZKO, ALLIE YANG, LAURA COBURN, JINSOL JUNG, and NEIL GIARDINO, ABC News

(PITTSBURGH, Penn.) — Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rev. Paul Abernathy has been helping his Pennsylvania community navigate the virus’ devastating impact.

Now, as the end feels within reach, Abernathy has been preaching beyond the walls of St. Moses the Black Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh. He’s also by going door to door throughout the city to say a prayer for guidance and spread the gospel of health.

Abernathy and his team at the Neighborhood Resilience Project are trying to convince residents in the predominantly Black and underserved Hill District to get vaccinated.

“We have to understand that if we are going to preach the gospel, it isn’t with words by which we preach it most loudly, but it is with action,” he said.

Watch the full story on “Nightline” TONIGHT at 12:35 a.m. ET on ABC.

COVID-19 is the latest trauma to rip through the neighborhood, which he says has long been plagued by poverty and gun violence.

“This pandemic has been a traumatic experience for the nation,” Abernathy said. “Having said that, it has been so much more traumatic for those communities that were already inundated with trauma.”

Perhaps those old wounds in part help explain why Abernathy says he has been met with a great deal of resistance as he tries to sign people up for a COVID-19 vaccine shot.

Multiple people told Abernathy’s team they’re not interested in getting the vaccine. One man joked with Abernathy, saying he feels like the shot is the Antichrist.

“Obviously, I’m wearing a collar, so I’m concerned about those things, too,” Abernathy told the man. “So, what I would say is, what is very important is that God is a God of life. This is very important and, sometimes, when we pray, he gives us blessing by way of medicine [and] by way of vaccines.”

Abernathy and his team were able to convince the man to give them his name and number so that he could be added to a waitlist for the vaccine.

As the vaccine rollout continues to expand, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that communities of color, including Black Americans, are getting vaccinated at disproportionately lower rates than white Americans.

Abernathy says he believes it’s because these communities have less access to the vaccine. For many, there’s also hesitance to trust the institutions that have created and encouraged it.

“Anecdotally, there are really three overarching cultural attitudes as to why people have been hesitant to receive the vaccine. The first would be a distrust of the government. There’s a history of government systems in our community that have failed or sometimes been overtly oppressive,” he said.

He continued, “The second would be a history of clinical abuse. … A lot of people reference Tuskegee … but Tuskegee has become a term that calls to mind all of the lived experience of clinical abuse that people have in not only their family history but also in their lived experience. And the third, [an] overarching cultural attitude that I’ve confronted would be a distrust of corporate America.”

For these reasons, Abernathy believes that faith leaders like himself should step in and help boost peoples’ confidence in the vaccine.

“Part of our church, part of our vocation, is to help lead our communities, even in the face of decisions that our communities are not comfortable with,” Abernathy said.

He says it’s important to validate the community’s legitimate concerns.

“We also want to say at the same time [that] although there have been historical challenges, historical injustices, this has to be a time where really we come forward and try to forge a new way forward,” Abernathy said.

He says helping people get vaccinated is work that moves him.

“It is all of the broken-hearted prayers that are uttered day and night in our community that moves me. There are people who are on their knees, they are crying out to the heavens… They do not believe in their heart of hearts that anyone here on Earth is listening to them,” he said.

It is a prayer uttered across the United States, from metropolises to the countryside.

In Tuskegee, Alabama, Lucinda Williams Dunn served as the city’s first female mayor from 2000 to 2004. It’s the same city where the infamous syphilis study took place.

From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. government recruited Black men to take part in a study, but did not tell them about the study’s true purpose: to observe the effects of untreated Syphilis. Those who had the disease did not receive proper treatment to be cured.

“You can understand how our folk have suffered a long time with the abuse of the medical field,” Dunn said. “It is not just about the public health syphilis experiment. It is about decades of distrust that was built. Every time you started trusting, someone would come along and change that whole phenomena. And there we are, you know, like ‘I’m just having a baby and you cannot give me the proper care because I’m a Black woman.’ Right now, Black women are suffering from an increase in deaths from childbirth.”

Dunn is now the founder and president of the Tuskegee Macon County Community Foundation and holds a Ph.D. in program development and administration. She says there’s an urgent need to understand how decades of institutional inequality have resulted in a mistrust of the COVID-19 vaccine in some communities of color. That’s one of the reasons why she herself is hesitant to get vaccinated.

“I’m not going to do it right now,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not ever going to take the vaccine, I just believe that we haven’t had enough time to successfully develop the vaccine that’s going to cure and/or prevent coronavirus.”

The vaccines were developed and authorized within a year, but the trial process for safety and efficacy did not skip any steps and the technology used to make them had already been in development for years.

Dunn does not believe her stance sends a mixed message to her community.

“Because I’m quite frank about it,” Dunn said. “I am truthful about how I feel about the vaccine and I don’t mind sharing that. But what I am not saying to people is that you got to follow me along that pathway.”

She also spoke about the role her identity and her community’s experiences influenced her decision.

“I have to put who I am, my community and my race, in the concept of racism. Racism is not dead,” Dunn said. “You fooled us before. Are you fooling us now? I mean, that’s a legitimate concern in our community, and it has nothing to do with the syphilis study. … It is about a whole lot of different things that have been passed down from [my] great-great grandmother all the way down to me.”

But distrust toward the health care system is only part of the story. A recent NPR analysis found that COVID-19 vaccine sites, particularly across the South, were largely missing from predominantly Black and Hispanic communities whereas fewer whiter neighborhoods were without one.

These sobering statistics, which point to a lack of access, are one of the reasons why some Black churches across the country have paired up with clinics to not just bridge the mistrust gap, but to expand vaccine accessibility.

Bishop John Borders runs Morning Star Baptist Church, located in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the south side of Boston. He has turned this house of worship into a house of healing, both spiritually and physically.

He hopes that as a result of this work, “those who desire to take the vaccine … will not have to walk far” to get it.

Borders’ church partnered with Boston Medical Center to offer COVID-19 vaccinations to community members. He says making the vaccine more accessible to people is key to achieving a buy-in.

“When you ask them to come out to Gillette Stadium or something like that to take a vaccine, you’re not going to receive much of a response,” he said. “But when they know they can leave their houses, go to their house of worship and find trained, skilled people working in collaboration with their spiritual and religious leaders, there’s a level of trust that they develop, and people are lining up to take the vaccine.”

Borders has been a pastor at the church for more than 40 years. In 1992, he had another community crisis on his hands when gang violence spilled into the sanctuary as rival gangs clashed during a funeral service. A young man was stabbed and several others were injured in the attack.

“In 1992, we were right in the midst of gang violence in Boston,” he remembered. “We saw 300 ministers from every walk of life and every major religion meet in our former funeral home at that time to discuss the gang problem. … Violence among gangs went down to zero [for] five to 10 years as a result of the work that we did here with local clergy.”

Now, he and his colleagues are coming together to face the latest crisis: the coronavirus. The city of Boston has seen more than 1,300 deaths.

“My heart breaks when I hear that members have passed away without a funeral,” Borders said. “When I would go to give the last rites to someone who’s passed on or about to pass on, and we’ve had to do it with a camera, that’s heartbreaking. I’m looking for a time when we could have funerals again and we can have weddings again, and that will not happen unless everyone takes the vaccine.”

The vaccine program, which launched in mid-February, has administered 5,300 first doses of vaccines so far across the city. He credits the program’s success to its partnership with Boston Medical Center and its doctors, like emergency medicine physician Dr. Thea James.

“At my hospital, the majority of our patients reside in communities that have been historically disinvested in,” James said. “I understand that they cannot prioritize health, and they’re using their resources to maintain some sort of stable housing and to buy food for their families and to pay for utilities. There’s nothing really left over to use for prioritizing health.”

She explained that addressing the root causes is essential to fixing systemic racism.

“These days, we’re talking about treating our patients by going upstream,” James said. “If you imagine walking along a stream and you see children floating down with broken arms, most well-meaning people will stand at the bottom of the stream, and pull them out, all day long, for decades, quite frankly. But until we’re able to go to the top of that stream and understand where that’s coming from, we will never have an opportunity to mitigate it, or even eliminate it.”

For community leaders like Borders, James, Dunn and Abernathy, this moment in our nation’s history is about so much more than getting shots in arms. It signals the first steps in what they hope will be a new foundation of trust, dignity and resources in these communities, long left anemic by generations-old inequality. Each leader hopes this pandemic will manifest a vaccine to cure old pains.

“It takes a lot to undo that narrative for ‘othering’ people,” James said. “So, it’s not extremely complex and complicated. But it requires intentionality to be able to address it and to disrupt it because, until that happens, we can’t expect that the data will ever change.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

March 31, 2021 • No Comments • National News

ABC NewsBy Max Golembo, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — A large storm system is moving east across the U.S., with tornadoes and flash flooding expected in the South and a wintry blast to the north.

There were two reported tornadoes Tuesday in Mississippi and numerous damaging storm reports across the South from straight-line winds.

Flash flooding is ongoing in southern Tennessee Wednesday morning from heavy rain overnight. Local law enforcement is reporting that there were multiple water rescues.

Locally, more than 4 inches of rain fell in Tennessee overnight. A flash flood warning has been issued for the area.

There are several watches and warnings Wednesday as this storm moves through from the Plains and into the Northeast.

Severe weather is expected from Mississippi to North Carolina Wednesday, but the biggest threat for tornadoes will be in Alabama.

These severe storms could produce damaging straight-line winds from Georgia to North Carolina.

To the north, a winter-like air mass is moving in with snow expected for parts of the Northeast Wednesday night into Thursday morning.

Winter storm watches and warnings have been issued for Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont. Locally, more than 10 inches of snow is possible by April 1.

Behind this storm system, it’s very cold for late March and early April.

Wind chills Wednesday morning are running in the teens and single digits in the northern Plains and the Great Lakes.

A freeze warning has been issued as far south as Arkansas and Kentucky.

This cold air mass will move east into the Northeast by Thursday night into Friday morning.

On Friday morning, wind chills will be in the teens and 20s for the I-95 corridor.

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

March 30, 2021 • No Comments • National News

Pool via ABC NewsBy BILL HUTCHINSON, ABC News

(MINNEAPOLIS) — A Minneapolis firefighter broke down in tears on Tuesday at the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, testifying that she felt helpless and “desperate” when the police prevented her from giving medical aid to George Floyd as he lay handcuffed on the ground in physical distress with the weight of three police officers on top of him.

Genevieve Hansen, 28, who has been a firefighter for two years and holds both state and national certifications in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, said that when she first noticed Floyd’s condition as she walked up to the scene of his attempted arrest on May 25, 2020, she was immediately concerned.

“I was concerned to see a handcuffed man who was not moving with officers with their whole body weight on his back and a crowd that was stressed out,” Hansen, wearing her dress firefighter’s uniform, testified in Hennepin County District Court in Minneapolis.

She said she was off duty that day and not in uniform when she walked over to the officers, identified herself as a firefighter and asked if she could provide medical help or at least show them how to check for a pulse and perform first aid.

“It didn’t take me long to realize that he had an altered level of consciousness,” she said of Floyd. “In our training, that is the first time that somebody needs medical attention. So my attention moved from Mr. Floyd to how can I gain access to this patient and give him medical attention or direct the officers.”

Hansen described Floyd’s face as “puffy and swollen” and that she saw fluid she assumed was urine coming from Floyd’s body, explaining that patients often release their bladder when they die.

“What I needed to know is whether or not he had a pulse anymore,” she said.

Hansen said she was immediately ordered by officer Tou Thao to get on the sidewalk and was told “if you really are a Minneapolis firefighter you know better than to get involved.”

“First I was worried that he wasn’t going to believe me and not let me help,” she said. “That’s not right. That’s exactly what I should have done. There was no medical assistance on scene and I got there and I could have given medical assistance.”

Instead, she said she could only watch as Floyd’s life faded away and call 911 to report what she had just witnessed.

When prosecutor Matthew Frank asked how it made her feel to not be allowed to help Floyd, Hansen said, “totally distressed.”

“In my memory, I tried different tactics of calm and reasoning. I tried to be assertive. I pleaded and was desperate,” Hansen said breaking into tears.

She said she began raising her voice and directed foul language at the officers.

“I was desperate to help and wasn’t getting what I needed to do, which was gaining access,” she said.

She said that at the same time she saw Chauvin continuing to press his knee into the back of Floyd’s neck.

Hansen, who video recorded some of the episode, said Chauvin, who did not speak to her, “seemed very comfortable” with the majority of his weight balanced on top of Floyd’s neck.

“In my memory, he had his hand in his pocket he looked so comfortable,” Hansen said.

Under cross-examination from Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, Hansen conceded that she didn’t know that paramedics had already been called and that she was unaware if the officers on top of Floyd had checked his pulse.

Nelson also asked if she and the other bystanders were getting angry and hostile toward the officers.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone killed but it’s upsetting,” she answered.

Nelson objected to her answer and Judge Peter Cahill had it stricken from the record and after dismissing the jury for the day, the judge scolded Hansen for being argumentative with the defense attorney.

She is scheduled to return to court on Wednesday to resume her testimony.

Chauvin is charged with second-degree attempted murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. He has pleaded not guilty.

He is being tried separately from three other former police officers involved in Floyd’s death. Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane are each charged with second-degree aiding and abetting felony murder and second-degree aiding and abetting manslaughter. They have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go on trial in August.

‘He had a cold look, heartless’

Also called to testify on Tuesday was a teenage bystander who took a viral video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck.

To protect her identity, Judge Cahill allowed the young witness, who is now 18, to testify off-camera in the televised trial and to use only her first name, Darnella, during her stint on the witness stand.

Asked by prosecutor Jerry Blackwell how her life has changed since she took the 10-minute video and uploaded it on Facebook, she struggled through tears to explain.

“When I look at George Floyd, I look at my dad, I look at my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles because they’re all Black,” Darnella testified. “And I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them.”

She said she has spent nights agonizing over what she saw on May 25, 2020, and wishes she could have done more to save Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man she had never met.

“I stayed up apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more and not physically interacting, not saving his life,” Darnella said.

She said she came upon the incident while walking her 9-year-old cousin to the Cup Foods store to buy snacks, and asked her cousin to go into the store while she circled back to where police officers had the handcuffed Floyd prone on the ground next to a patrol car. She identified Chauvin in court as the officer she saw with his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck.

Darnella said she immediately pulled out her cellphone and started recording video.

Asked by Blackwell to describe what she saw, Darnella said, “A man terrified, scared, begging for his life.”

“It wasn’t right,” she said. “He was suffering. He was in pain. I heard George Floyd saying, ‘I can’t breathe. Please get off of me.’ He cried for his mom. It seemed like he knew it was over for him.”

She said that when she started recording, she was the only bystander around. Soon a crowd gathered and began yelling at the officers to get off of Floyd, she said.

Asked by Blackwell if she witnessed any violence at that particular instance, she said, “Yes, from the cops.”

She said that the more bystanders pleaded with Chauvin to relent, the more he seemed to use force.

“If anything, he was actually kneeling harder. He was shoving his knee into his neck,” she said of Chauvin.

She said at one point, Chauvin and a fellow officer, Tou Thao, put their hands on their Mace canister, apparently to prompt the crowd to back up as witnesses grew louder and shouted expletives at the officers. She said nothing the bystanders said to Chauvin seemed to matter.

“He just stared at us, looked at us,” she said. “He had a cold look, heartless. He didn’t care.”

She said Chauvin refused to let up even when paramedics initially arrived and attempted to check Floyd’s pulse.

She said a paramedic “checked his pulse first while Chauvin’s knee still remained on George Floyd’s neck.”

Under cross-examination from defense attorney Nelson, Darnella conceded that she did not witness any part of what happened prior to her arrival, nor did she hear the conversations between the officers.

Nelson asked her about all the cursing and shouting at the officers from bystanders, asking if the crowd became louder and hostile as the incident went on.

“More so as he [Floyd] was becoming more unresponsive,” she said.

Darnella’s 9-year-old cousin was also called to testify off-camera. She said that when she emerged from Cup Foods, she saw Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck. When an ambulance arrived, she said she saw paramedics ask Chauvin to get up so they could check Floyd’s pulse.

“I was sad and kind of mad cause I felt like he was stopping him from breathing,” she said of Chauvin.

Mixed martial arts fighter says Chauvin used ‘blood choke’

A professional mixed martial arts fighter who testified in graphic detail about seeing Floyd’s life being squeezed out of him by a “blood choke” returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, presenting the defense with what legal experts said was an uphill battle to discredit him.

Donald Williams II — a 5-foot-6, 135-pound bantamweight who fights under the nickname “DWill II” — testified for the prosecution on the first day of the trial. He said he was headed to the Cups Foods store in Minneapolis when he was drawn to a commotion. He said he saw police officers pinning a handcuffed Black man to the ground and Chauvin, who is white, grinding his knee into the back of Floyd’s neck.

Williams testified that he has been a competitive wrestler since he was in high school and turned professional mixed martial arts fighter in 2009. Given his training, he was allowed leeway by Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill to describe the hold he said he recognized Chauvin was using on Floyd.

He said Chauvin was using a “blood choke,” applying pressure with his knee on the side of Floyd’s neck and cutting off the blood flowing to his head.

“His breathing was getting tremendously heavy and tremendously harder for him to breathe,” Williams said of Floyd. “You actually could hear him, you could see him struggling to actually gasp for air while he was trying to breathe. He barely could move while he was trying to get air.”

In his opening argument, prosecutor Blackwell played for the jury a bystander video showing Chauvin with his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck for what he said was 9 minutes and 29 seconds as two other officers helped hold Floyd down. Another, identified as Thao, kept Williams and other witnesses at bay as they pleaded with Chauvin to relent.

Blackwell told the jury that Chauvin “betrayed his badge” when he dug his knee into Floyd’s neck “until the very life was squeezed out of him.”

Williams said he locked eyes with Chauvin at one point during the street encounter.

“He looked at me. It was the only time he looked at me when I said it was a blood choke,” Williams testified.

He said Chauvin was also using what fighters call a “shimmy” to tighten his hold on Floyd.

Williams added that he had gone fishing earlier that day with his son. Seeing the life drain out of Floyd reminded him of how he suffocated the fish in a plastic bag.

He said he saw Floyd “slowly fade away like the fish in the bag” with his eyes rolling back in his head until he stopped begging for his life and went unconscious.

During cross-examination, Nelson grilled Williams about the foul language he directed at Chauvin and Thao, asking if he and other bystanders were getting angry at the officers.

Williams, who also worked in security and as a nightclub bouncer, said he was angry because the officers were not listening to him. He tried to maintain his “professionalism” and in one instance stepped off the curb to approach the officer only for Thao to place his hand on his chest and direct him back.

On direct examination from prosecutor Matthew Frank, Williams said he called 911 after an unresponsive Floyd was taken away from the scene in an ambulance.

Asked by Frank, who played Williams’ 911 call for the jury, why he reported what he saw to authorities, Williams replied, “Because I believed I witnessed a murder.”

Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

March 30, 2021 • No Comments • National News

NYPDBy MORGAN WINSOR, ABC News

(NEW YORK) — The New York City Police Department is seeking the public’s help in identifying a man who was caught on video repeatedly kicking a 65-year-old Asian American woman as witnesses seemingly stood by.

Police described the incident as a “hate crime assault.”

The attack occurred Monday at around 11:40 a.m. local time in front of an apartment building in Midtown Manhattan. Police released surveillance footage that shows the unidentified man approaching the woman on the sidewalk and kicking her in the stomach, knocking her to the ground. The suspect then kicks the woman in the face multiple times while making “anti-Asian statements toward her” before casually walking away, police said.

The video also shows people inside of the building lobby who appear to stop what they are doing to watch the attack unfold. One of them then shuts the door as the suspect walks away and the woman is left on the ground.

The Brodsky Organization, the company that owns the building, announced in a statement Monday that the “staff who witnessed the attack have been suspended pending an investigation in conjunciton with their union.” The company said it “is also working to identify a third-party delivery vendor present during the incident so that appropriate action can be taken.”

“The Brodsky Organization condemns all forms of discrimination, racism, xenophobia and violence against the Asian American community,” the company added.

The woman suffered “serious physical injury” and was hospitalized in stable condition, police said.

The New York City Police Department’s Hate Crime Task Force is investigating the incident.

Also on Monday, another individual was captured on cellphone video violently punching and choking an Asian American man on a subway train in Brooklyn. The New York City Police Department said it “is aware of this video and is investigating.”

Anyone with information regarding either incidents is urged to call the New York City Police Department’s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.

It’s the latest in a spate of attacks targeting Asian Americans in New York City and across the nation. The coronavirus pandemic and its suspected origins in the Chinese city of Wuhan is cited as having led to a fresh onslaught of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States that has waged on for over year.

From March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021, there were more than 3,795 hate incidents, including verbal harassment and physical assault, against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit organization that tracks such incidents.

On March 16, a gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, in three separate shootings at spas in the Atlanta area. Rallies have been held in dozens of U.S. cities in recent weeks calling for an end to anti-Asian violence.

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March 29, 2021 • No Comments • National News

tillsonburg/iStockBY: LUKE BARR, ABC NEWS

(NEW YORK ) — The city of New York moved to end qualified immunity, making it the first city in the United States to do so.

Qualified immunity is the practice of not being able to file a civil lawsuit against a government official performing his or her official duties unless they “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

In New York, the City Council voted to end the practice for New York Police Department officers. The NYPD is the largest police force in the United States, with some 36,000 officers.

The move came days ahead of the start of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. The killing of George Floyd while in police custody sparked international protests and a debate over policing reform across the U.S. last summer.

In an interview on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” Mayor Bill DeBlasio stressed that the bill won’t have officers personally responsible.

“It makes it easier if someone has a concern to bring a legal action, but it does not put the individual financial penalty on the officer,” the mayor said. “It puts it on the department and the city, and that’s what I was comfortable with.”

City Council speaker Corey Johnson lauded the move saying that the practice of qualified immunity was rooted in the nation’s systemic racism.

“Qualified immunity was established in 1967 in Mississippi to prevent Freedom Riders from holding public officials liable even when they broke the law,” Johnson tweeted. “Rooted in our nation’s history of systemic racism, qualified immunity denied Freedom Riders justice and has been used to deny justice to victims of police abuse for decades. It should never have been allowed, but I’m proud that we took action today to end it here in NYC.”

Police union officials are speaking out against the law, which the mayor signaled he intended to sign.

“Qualified immunity is an essential part of the law enforcement profession. While it shields officers from erroneous and professionally damaging lawsuits, it does not erase responsibility. At any point in time, an agency determines the office was acting out of policy or unlawfully, qualified immunity could be removed and them exposed to full liability,” Don Mihalek, an ABC News contributor said.

“The public often confuses lawful actions by law enforcement versus public perception. What is lawful may not be clear in the public’s view. This is why an investigation is paramount to document the lawfulness of an officer’s actions,” said Mihalek, who also serves as the executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

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