August 30, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Nathan Howard/Getty ImagesBY: MORGAN WINSOR, ABC NEWS    

(PORTLAND) — One person was shot and killed in downtown Portland on Saturday night, as protests in Oregon’s largest city entered their fourth month.

Portland police officers located the individual with a gunshot wound to the chest, after hearing gunfire in the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street at 8:46 p.m. local time. Medics responded and pronounced the victim dead at the scene, according to a press release from the Portland Police Department.

A homicide investigation is underway. No suspect information is being released at this time, police said.

Anyone who was a witness, has video or has information about the incident is urged to contact the Portland Police Department.

“It is still early in this investigation, and I ask everyone to give the detectives time to do their important work before drawing conclusions about what took place,” Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in a statement early Sunday. “If anyone can provide information about this case, I ask them to please reach out to our detectives. This violence is completely unacceptable and we are working diligently to find and apprehend the individual or individuals responsible.”

The deadly shooting occurred as dueling demonstrations took place throughout downtown Portland. A car rally in support of President Donald Trump had gathered earlier that evening and held a massive procession that was ultimately met by counterprotesters supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Portland ABC affiliate reported seeing clashes between the two groups on the streets.

Investigators have not said whether the shooting was connected to the demonstrations or clashes.

According to a separate press release from the Portland Police Department, there were “hundreds of vehicles” that participated in Saturday’s rally and a “significant number” drove into downtown as part of the procession. People in the cars “periodically exchanged words” with pedestrians and, at times, fights broke out. There were also some minor collisions, police said.

“Portland Police responded to scenes of fights, disturbances and collisions throughout downtown and made some arrests,” police said in a statement early Sunday.

The caravan of vehicles left the downtown area by about 8:30 p.m. local time, according to police. Over the next two hours, groups of people moved through downtown streets and there was “sporadic fighting and vandalism,” police said. The crowds slowly began to dissipate around midnight.

Police arrested 10 people overnight, mostly for disorderly conduct.

Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Portland and other cities across the United States following the May 25 death of George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man who died in Minneapolis after a white police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck as three other officers watched. The protesters are calling for an end to police brutality and racial injustice.

In a speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Trump invoked Portland as a “Democrat-run” city plagued by “rioting, looting, arson, and violence.”

Trump took to Twitter early Sunday to comment on the latest violence in Portland, calling the city’s mayor “incompetent” and “a fool.” While retweeting a video that purportedly shows Trump supporters in their cars firing paintballs and pepper spray at counterprotesters on the street, the president remarked that the “big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected.”

“The people of Portland won’t put up with no safety any longer,” he tweeted. “Bring in the National Guard!”

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August 29, 2020 • No Comments • National News

z1b/iStockBy ERIN SCHUMAKER, ABC News

(KENOSHA, Wisc.) — The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for Kenosha’s top law enforcement leaders to resign after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was paralyzed after being shot in the back by a white Kenosha officer, and resulting protests turned deadly.

Two days after Blake was shot, a counter-protester allegedly shot and killed two demonstrators. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, has been charged in Wisconsin with two counts of homicide, one count of attempted homicide, two counts of recklessly endangering safety and one count of possession of a dangerous weapon.

The ACLU called for the immediate resignation of Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis and Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth in a statement this week, charging that Beth’s deputies “fraternized with white supremacist counter-protesters” and “allowed the shooter to leave as people yelled that he was the shooter.” The ACLU further alleges that Miskinis “blamed the unidentified victims in Tuesday night’s shooting for their own deaths.”

At a news conference following the death of the two protesters, Miskinis pointed out they had broken the city’s 8 p.m. curfew.

“Persons who were out after the curfew became engaged in some type of disturbance and persons were shot,” he said. “Had persons not been in violation of that, perhaps the situation might not have happened.”

Miskinis has since said his comments were taken out of context.

During a Wednesday news conference, Beth attributed officers’ failure to arrest the shooter on the spot as having “tunnel vision” in a high-stress situation. While Beth himself wasn’t at the scene after the shooting, he imagined that the “screaming,” “hollering,” “chanting” and nonstop radio calls contributed to a chaotic scene in which the shooter walked free.

Beth previously had been criticized for making racist public comments. At a 2018 news conference, he called a group of Black individuals who were arrested after shoplifting and getting into a high-speed car chase with police “garbage people.”

“We need to build warehouses to put these people into it and lock them away for the rest of their lives,” Beth said during the 2018 new conference. “Let’s stop them from truly, at least some of these males, from going out and getting 10 other women pregnant and having small children.”

After meeting with the NAACP, Beth released a public apology letter.

“I should have kept my comments better directed toward the incident itself and not allowed my emotions to get the better of me,” he wrote. He would go on to recant that letter. “Everything I basically said in the press conference is really the way I feel,” he told the Kenosha News.

“The ACLU strongly condemns Sheriff Beth and Police Chief Miskinis’ response to both the attempted murder of Jacob Blake and the protests demanding justice for him,” said Chris Ott, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin. “Their actions uphold and defend white supremacy, while demonizing people who were murdered for exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking out against police violence.”

The Kenosha Police Department didn’t immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

ABC News’ Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report.

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August 29, 2020 • No Comments • National News

Oleksii Liskonih/iStockBy KIARA BRANTLEY-JONES, ABC News

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed an order on Friday obtained by ABC News, activating up to 1,000 National Guard members in the state.

The Republican governor did not cite a specific reason for signing the order.

The activation began on Friday and will continue until “further order” of the state’s senior National Guard officer, according to the statement.

The deployment is to “provide necessary assistance to State and local civilian authorities and/or special duty and emergency assistance for the preservation of life and property, preservation of order, and to afford protection to persons,” the order says.

The Guard members are being deployed “in the event that municipal leaders require their assistance,” according to a statement released by an unnamed spokesperson for the state’s Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, and is “only at the request of, and in coordination with, the communities seeking support.”

The order comes amid protests in Wisconsin sparked by civil unrest over police brutality. Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday night.

Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday he authorized 500 members of the Wisconsin National Guard to support local law enforcement there after three people were shot and two killed in Kenosha overnight Tuesday into Wednesday.

There were, however, no known major protests planned in Massachusetts this weekend.

ABC News’ Ahmad Hemingway contributed to this report.

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August 29, 2020 • No Comments • National News

sonreir es gratis/iStockBy ERIN SCHUMAKER, ABC News

(TUSCALOOSA, Al.) — As of Saturday, more than 1,200 students and 166 employees and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 at the University of Alabama.

Positive tests among students have more than doubled since the university unveiled its COVID-19 tracking dashboard early this week. The dashboard, which includes case counts, positivity rates, isolation and space occupancy, is similar to what many state health departments use to report coronavirus data to the public.

“The rise we’ve seen in recent days is unacceptable, and if unchecked, threatens our ability to complete the rest of the semester on campus,” University of Alabama president Stuart Bell said at a press conference this week. “Now is the time for action.”

In recent days, students have shared photos on social media of crowds and lines outside of bars in Tuscaloosa, where the university is located. Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox responded by issuing an executive order to close bars for 14 days, from Aug. 24 to Sept. 8.

“Based on my discussions with the University over the past 48 hours, the ever-increasing number of coronavirus cases on campus will create two major disruptions for Tuscaloosa if left unabated,” Maddox said at the Monday news conference.

While many universities have opted for remote-only learning because of the pandemic, large outbreaks linked to colleges and universities have been increasingly commonplace at schools that encouraged students to return to campus. In addition to the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Central Florida are among the schools reporting spikes in COVID-19 infections among students and staff.

Alabama had recorded at least 113,700 COVID-19 cases and more than 2,000 deaths linked to the virus, according to the state health department.

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August 28, 2020 • No Comments • National News

kuzma/iStockBy KARMA ALLEN, ABC News

(STANLY COUNTY, N.C.) — A North Carolina man hugged his family as a free man for the first time in decades this week after serving 44 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Ronnie Long was greeted by family and community members who had long proclaimed his innocence on Thursday afternoon when he made his long-awaited exit from the Albemarle Correctional Institution in Stanly County, North Carolina.

He had spent 44 years arguing for an appeal, along with a team of advocates and pro bono attorneys, in an effort to overturn his 1976 conviction. The team logged a victory earlier this week when the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Long’s constitutional rights had been violated during his trial.

Long was 20 years old when an all-white jury sentenced him to 80 years in prison for raping a notable white woman in his hometown of Concord, North Carolina. He was convicted despite a lack of physical evidence tying him to the rape. In 2005, his attorneys discovered evidence that was withheld during the trial and could have proved his innocence, according to a website dedicated to freeing Long.

“At the beginning of this ordeal, if anyone would have told me that I would be locked up for forty-three (43) years, I would have thought them to be totally insane. There isn’t no way I can put up with this monotony for 43 years,” Long wrote in a journal entry posted on the website. “Throughout history Black men has been a marked product for racial discrimination … so why not me.”

In a separate part of the entry, Long indicated that he was simply convicted because of his race, saying the cards were always “stacked against” him.

“After really contemplating on the subject, the evidence may not have made a different because the deck was stacked against me, and it wouldn’t have mattered what type of evidence I had against the state,” he said. “I were going to prison. I had been chosen and I were going to prison. Some 40-plus years later, I’m still around, still here fighting, and if it be the will of the Creator, I shall overcome.”

Long, just days from his 65th birthday, said he got through the ordeal due to God and family.

“That was my inspiration,” Long told Charlotte ABC affiliate WSOC, gesturing to his family. “I got my inspiration from them, and God. It felt good because I was getting feedback that I was loved and supported.”

“They will never, ever, ever, ever lock me up again,” Long added.

A GoFundMe campaign set up by his wife, Ashleigh Long, had raised about $12,000 as of Friday afternoon. Ashleigh Long, who married him in 2014, said she set up the $500,000 fundraiser to help with her husband’s transition to life outside of prison.

“Ronnie is going to need everything when he is freed. ANY amount helps. Everything donated will go to Ronnie to use when he is free,” the campaign said. “Come on #TeamRonnieLong let’s get Ronnie set up to enjoy his life as a free man!”

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