A drive-by shooting that injured 10 during a West Philadelphia block party in honor of Father’s Day nearly left a dad without two of his children.
"It's a blessing though that they made it, seriously" said Tyrone Jones, who helped organize the block party on the 4100 block of Ogden Street.
Jones’ 1-year-old daughter Ashley was the youngest victim – struck twice by shotgun pellets – of the shooting during the picnic Saturday night
"We just heard shots and I got up, I picked my baby up and I just started running," said Valerie Jones, the girl’s mother. "I panicked and I just started screaming, 'my baby got shot, my baby got shot.'"
Ashley wasn’t the only one hit. Gunfire struck Valerie Jones in the arm and struck Tyrone Jones’ adult son twice in the head and once in the side.
Amazingly all members of the Jones family were expected to fully recover – young Ashley was even back to sipping on juice boxes by Sunday afternoon. But her father was angry that two men, one with a shotgun, would open fire on a family-oriented picnic then just drive away.
"To get my family shot up like that for nothing," said Jones. "None of my kids are coming back here and I'm not coming back here."
Police continued to search for the shooters, the other man possibly fired a handgun, who fled in a gold sedan.
"It looks like they just randomly fired down the street and hit anyone in their way," said Philadelphia Police Lt. John Walker.
Southwest Detectives are urging anyone with information on the shooting to call 215-686-3183/84.
First lady, Michelle Obama, posted a throwback picture of a younger Barack Obama to wish the president a Happy Father's day.
"Thinking today and everyday about the father of these two. Happy Father's Day! -mo."
The couple did not get to spend the holiday together.
President Obama spent the weekend in Southern California while Michelle is traveling back from Italy with her daughters and mother.
Authorities say a teenage boy was killed when a stone slab weighing about 650 pounds fell on him outside a business that makes countertops.
Ocean County prosecutors say the 17-year-old boy was found around 6:40 a.m. Saturday at the Berkeley Township business. It was closed when the accident occurred, and it's not clear why the teen was at the site.
It appears that the boy was trying to walk between marble and granite slabs when a massive slab fell on top of him. But it's not clear how long he had been trapped there before a passing motorist spotted him and called police.
The teenager was pronounced dead shortly after authorities arrived on scene. A cause of death has not been determined, and his name has not been released.
A Sig alert has been issued for a portion of Interstate 805 North after a car became fully engulfed in flames, officials said.
The incident happened around 7:52 a.m. Sunday at Palomar Road where an accident happened on an overpass with construction, the California Highway Patrol said.
A car became fully engulfed in flames, officials said, and the fire took over.
There is no word on injuries, the number of passengers in the car or how many cars may have been involved.
Check back for updates on this breaking news story.
A woman, one of two killed in a wrong-way crash on Interstate 15 early Saturday morning, has been identified.
57-year-old Barbara Lynn Astorga of Vista was driving at freeway speeds on southbound I-15 when her car was struck head-on by a wrong way driver, according to the Medical Examiner's office. Astorga lived with family at home, the ME's office said.
California Highway Patrol (CHP) officials said they began receiving phone calls reporting a white Honda Civic driving the wrong way northbound on southbound Interstate 15 one mile south of Gopher Canyon Road just before 3 a.m.
Minutes later, the Civic slammed head-on into a Mercedes. The impact killed the drivers inside both cars. No passengers were inside either vehicle, officials said.
CHP investigators said the wrong way driver was a 51-year-old man, but his name has not yet been released. The driver of the Mercedes was Astorga.
Officials said some items found inside the man’s sedan indicate he may have had a medical problem at the time of the crash, though that’s still under investigation. Officials do not believe alcohol or drugs contributed to this accident.
CHP Sgt. Patrick Holt said at least three lanes on the freeway would be closed for about four hours following the deadly crash.
He said in wrong way driver situations like this, CHP officers do everything they can to quickly catch up with the driver and “get ahead of the vehicle to try to stop it before any collision can occur.”
The Medical Examiner’s office will determine the cause of death for both drivers at a later time.
Looking to beat the heat?
San Diego municipal pools will see extended hours starting Monday as the summer season rolls around and more families head to the pool.
Thirteen pools will see longer hours as the weather warms up in the summer months.
Full hours for the municipal pools can be found at the links below:
The larger pools are located in Carmel Valley, City Heights, Clairemont, Miramar, Balboa Park, Allied Gardens and Tierrasanta.
For adults, a single day admission ticket costs $4, but adults can buy a 10-day pass for $15. For $45, adults can purchase a 30-day pass.
For those swimmers 16 years old or younger, daily admission is $2. A 10-day pass costs $15 and a 30-day pass costs $45. These prices also apply to those older than 61 years old.
All city of San Diego parks, pools and beaches are smoke free.
The extended pool hours will last until Labor Day on Sept. 7.
A LAN Airlines flight that departed from Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday was forced to return and make an emergency landing after smoke appeared in the cabin, airport officials said.
The source of the smoke turned out to be a defective food warmer in the galley, LAX officials said.
Flight 601 took off at 2:05 p.m. with 247 people on board bound for Lima, Peru, officials said. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner made a safe landing after returning to the airport.
No one was injured, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
United Airlines has found itself trying to put out a customer service nightmare for the second time this week after nearly 300 Chicago-bound passengers were forced to spend the night on the floor of an airport terminal.
Flight UA971 was on its way to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport from Rome Saturday when the flight had to make an unscheduled diversion due to an unruly passenger aboard. Law enforcement met the crew at a terminal in Belfast, Northern Ireland to take the disruptive passenger into custody. The Boeing 777 landed at 6.59 p.m. local time.
“Then they left all the passengers, including my husband, on the tarmac in the plane for 5 hours before removing them and telling them to take their pillows and blankets because they will have to sleep on the floor in the Belfast airport,” Jacquelyn George wrote in an email to NBC Chicago.
A spokesperson for United Airlines could not confirm how many hours the passengers sat on the tarmac during the diversion, but asserted that by the time the incident was resolved the crew had reached FAA’s maximum work hour limits, so the plane was not able to travel on.
With not enough local hotel rooms available with room for the 269 passengers, they were asked to pass the time in the terminal.
@united - the scene in Belfast. No access to checked bags. No toiletries. #ShameOnUnited pic.twitter.com/Xalih6HSIB
— Mike™ (@MTRafferty) June 21, 2015
Customers were accommodated with food and “other services” to make them comfortable for the overnight stay, according to the airline’s spokesperson.
Chicago passenger Billy Saviano told NBC News the flight was finally supposed to leave the airport Sunday at 1 p.m. local time but it was delayed until 4 p.m. — 21 hours after they landed in the U.K. and some 24 hours after they originally left Italy.
Saviano also expressed frusteration in having to sit on the tarmac for a total of five hours before they were allowed inside. Then, he says, they were left in the dark once again.
"[United] had us sleeping on the baggage claim floor and then moved us to departures," Saviano added. "They never sent us someone to explain what was going on."
Rick Sliter, 42, from San Diego, was traveling with his 70-year-old mother and two children, aged 8 and 10. He told NBC News passengers were given a $23 voucher for meals, which was later increased to $70.
"I fully understand the compliance with FAA regulations but there was zero sense of urgency,” Stiler added. “Our bags are still on the plane. I can't imagine why they didn't [have] a different crew in here as quickly as possible."
The flight of passengers is expected to make their final landing in Chicago at 7:05 p.m. Sunday.
The complaints come exactly one week after the airline fought fury for forcing passengers to spend 20 hours in a Canadian military barracks during an unexpected stop from Chicago to London.
California inmates are dying of drug overdoses at nearly triple the national rate and it's unclear whether the tough steps state officials took this year to stop illicit drugs from getting into prisons are having any effect, though they are prompting criticism from civil rights advocates.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is spending $8 million this year on drug-detecting scanners and a new breed of drug-sniffing dogs while also employing strip searches on visitors suspected of carrying drugs.
Corrections officials believe the stepped-up efforts are discouraging smuggling, but the data that's available so far doesn't support that — more than 6,000 scans have been done on visitors and employees at 11 prisons since December without finding anyone with drugs.
The state doesn't track if anyone has been arrested because of the dog searches and waited until mid-May to begin tracking the number of arrests made using any of the new procedures.
Meantime, criticism is mounting about false-positive results by the scanners and dogs that can lead to strip searches. Concerned lawmakers who oversee state prisons included language in the California budget plan passed this week that would end the searches and require an evaluation of the department's other efforts.
"It's a humiliating process, can be easily used to humiliate and demean people, and was only for visitors, often women," Democratic Sen. Loni Hancock, said of the strip searches. "There are many concerns about the dogs, which have historically been emblematic of intimidation of many communities of color, most notably during the civil rights movement."
But no one wants to see drug deaths, and she said the evaluation will show which of the new programs are effective.
More than 150 California inmates have died of drug overdoses since 2006, with a high of 24 in 2013. Moreover, the sharing of intravenous needles often spreads hepatitis C infections, which killed 69 inmates in 2013 alone.
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard recently told lawmakers that drugs are "rampant in the prisons."
"What we are trying to do is send a message to people to not try to smuggle drugs in to the institution," he said in an interview. "If we don't do this, we're going to have people keep dying, we're going to have continued violence in the prisons."
Beard is modeling California's new procedures on those used successfully in the Pennsylvania corrections department he led for a decade. While California has a long-term annual rate of eight drug- or alcohol-related deaths per 100,000 inmates, Pennsylvania's is one.
Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Texas also each averaged one death a year per 100,000 inmates from 2001-2012, according to the most recent national figures. Maryland had the nation's worst rate, at 17 deaths per 100,000 inmates.
Beard said California's program would have more rapid success if lawmakers had given him more money, and he may seek funds to expand the program as early as this fall.
He believes the ion scanners — similar to those used to screen airport travelers — are deterring smugglers. The lack of results may be because only about 5 percent of visitors and employees are being scanned, he said, though the eventual goal is 30 percent. By contrast, Pennsylvania scanned 68 percent of visitors last year and at least 20 percent of employees.
Pennsylvania officials could not say how much contraband was found by using the scanners.
Records show the German shepherd and similar looking dogs long used in California prisons have been effective at rooting out hidden drugs. But to search visitors, employees and inmates the department is turning to less aggressive dogs including Labrador retrievers — "fluffy, friendly dogs," Northern California canine program coordinator Sgt. Brian Pyle said.
The decision to use dogs to search humans, instead of unoccupied spaces as was previously the policy, prompted the resignation last fall of Wayne Conrad, the department's statewide canine program coordinator. He criticized the expense of sending California dog handlers to Pennsylvania for training, the use of breeds that he said are less reliable, and what he said was a supervisor's effort to stifle concerns about the program because it was championed by Beard.
"The dogs are going to start alerting on people whose kids are smoking dope or something," and that false positive could prompt an unnecessary strip search, Conrad said. "The next thing that's going to come is the lawsuits."
Beard said he is seeking alternatives to strip searches, and downplayed the possibility that false-positive alerts unfairly implicate innocent visitors and employees. But that's what happened to Tania Gamboa of Riverside when she went to see her brother at Kern Valley State Prison.
She initially laughed when the ion machine tested positive for exposure to heroin, saying she doesn't even drink alcohol. But she was crying after she was required to strip naked in front of two female correctional officers and squat to demonstrate that she was not concealing drugs.
"It doesn't make sense for me, knowing that I don't do all that and I got detected for it," she said.
Mohamed Shehk, an Oakland-based spokesman for Critical Resistance, which advocates for better conditions for inmates, said the policies are turning visitors into suspects.
"The statistics — $8 million, 6,000 scans and nothing to show for it — show that these are intended to intimidate and criminalize people who are going to see their loved ones inside," he said.
Crews worked to clean up an early morning water main break in Vista near the courthouse.
The break happened around 4 a.m. Sunday morning at the intersection of La Tortuga Drive and Hacienda Drive, near the Vista Courthouse.
Water crews responded to help fix the break and clean up the leak.
One person died after crashing their car car into a fire hydrant in Alpine, officials said.
The incident happened at approximately 3:30 a.m. Sunday on Harbison Canyon Road near Interstate 8, officials said.
The car hit a hydrant, causing water to shoot up into the air. The car flipped onto its roof and landed on the shoulder of the road and the hydrant was knocked onto its side.
Emergency workers on scene confirmed the driver died.
The cause of the accident is under investigation.
On the third Sunday in June, many Americans will take some time out of their day to honor the nation's 70 million dads. Father’s Day wasn’t always so popular, however, and its establishment as an American — and now worldwide — institution was long and hard-fought.
Here are some things you might not know about dad's special day:
Father’s Day was founded by a woman:
Spokane, Washington native Sonora Smart Dodd is known as the “Mother of Father’s Day.” Her mother died giving birth to her sixth child, leaving Dodd’s father to raise the kids, according to the city of Spokane. In 1909, Dodd heard a sermon about Mother’s Day and spoke with the minister after the service. “I liked everything you said about motherhood," she said, as quoted in a 1978 New York Times article. "However, don’t you think fathers deserve a place in the sun, too?”
Dodd was able to garner much local support for the new holiday. The first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane on June 19, 1910, with clergy dedicating their sermons to honoring fathers, according to the city, which claims the title of the Birthplace of Father’s Day.
Many men initially resisted the idea:
Far from feeling honored by the idea of Father’s Day, many men initially found the concept emasculating. American historian Timothy Marr wrote in "American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia" that in the holiday's early decades, men “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products — often paid for by the father himself.”
Many retailers and advertisers during the Great Depression promoted Father’s Day as a “second Christmas” for men, and they subsequently rebranded the day as a way to honor American troops during World War II, Marr explained. Despite lacking official recognition, Father’s Day was a de facto American holiday by the end of the war.
Making Father’s Day official took a bipartisan effort:
President Woodrow Wilson supported Father’s Day as early as 1916. Wilson, a Democrat, had approved a resolution designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day just two years prior. In 1924, Republican President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day, according to History.com.
In 1957, Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine forcefully argued for the holiday. Smith lamented the double standard of only acknowledging Mother’s Day and admonished her congressional colleagues in a fierce proposal, as reported in the Nashua Telegraph.
Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation acknowledging Father’s Day, dedicating the third Sunday in June to the holiday, which is when Americans celebrate it to this day. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, officially made Father’s Day a national holiday in 1972, nearly six decades after Wilson’s Mother’s Day proclamation.
Father’s Day is now an international celebration — and big business:
Dozens of countries, in addition to the U.S., celebrate Father’s Day today. Most of them, from China to Chile, also do so on the third Sunday in June.
Despite generating less business than Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is still the fourth-largest card-sending holiday in the United States, according to Hallmark. Nearly 80 million cards are exchanged annually. Nearly 70 percent of cards are purchased for fathers and husbands. The remainder is bought for other male figures, such as grandfathers, sons, brothers and uncles. More than three quarters of American adults plan to celebrate Father’s Day, according to one survey by the National Retail Federation, which estimates that Father’s Day spending this year will reach $12.7 billion.
Michelle Williams fought back tears on Sunday morning as she sat in Rock Church, thinking about the nine people killed in Charleston, South Carolina.
The service was in response to Wednesday’s shooting at the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where nine people died after 21-year-old Dylann Roof allegedly opened fire.
“We have to do more than just sit together…worship together,” she said.
"I think that the younger generation and that the kids need to be more aware of what's happening out there," Williams said.
Pastor Miles McPherson dedicated Sunday’s sermon to tackling the issue of racism.
"People don't go into churches and kill nine people every day, however, if we listen to the conversations we have, listen to what our friends and family say about people who look different than us we all know that racism is alive and well,” said McPherson, a senior Pastor at Rock Church.
Hundreds packed the Point Loma-based church, hoping discussion could help society heal.
“When we leave here, we leave our children and our children need to have a good foundation,” said Sonia Becerra, a Rock Church member.
Such a foundation that starts for some in a place for worship.
Four years of drought and a lack of rain have set up fire conditions in 2015 as the worst on record, Cal Fire said.
“We have seen, we saw it last year and we will see it again this year, we'll be reaching records for potential heat output for times of the year that would normally not be burning in those conditions,” said Ken Pimlott, Director of Cal Fire, at Wildfire Awareness Week in Pollock Pines.
The timing of rain as California heads into its fourth year of drought have created escalated fire conditions.
Throughout the state, firefighters with Cal Fire have responded to 1,100 fires so far, they said in a blog post. Generally, by June, the department has responded to fewer than 650.
Cal Fire measures the fuel moisture content in vegetation such as brush and trees throughout the state and compare it month-by-month and year-by-year, they said.
They take those numbers and then calculate how much heat the vegetation would put out when burning, Pimlott said.
One thing residents can do, Cal Fire said in the post, is to remove parts of their lawn as they dry up.
"We don't want your dry lawn and your dry brush to contribute to more of the fire hazard,” Pimlott said. “So, stop watering your lawn and remove it."
As water becomes scarcer in the state, fire officials said, they asked residents to conserve.
Shawna Legarza, Director of Fire and Aviation with the U.S. Forest Service, said in the post said some departments have been able to use recycled water in training exercises.
Temperatures above 110 degrees are expected this week for desert communities east of San Diego.
An excessive heat warning has been issued for parts of Riverside and Imperial counties according to the National Weather Service.
Areas like Calexico, El Centro, Glamis, Imperial and the Salton Sea are under the warning issued for 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The risk of heat-related illness is greater for those working outdoors, camping, hiking or living without air conditioning.
Symptoms include a headache, muscle cramps and nausea.
Residents should drink more water than usual, wear light-colored clothing and take frequent rest breaks in the shade or air conditioning.
NWS officials advise residents to never leave children or pets in unattended cars under these conditions.
Sen. Angus King of Maine said Monday he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will undergo surgery on Friday.
The 71-year-old independent said the cancer was discovered early, during a routine annual checkup. It has not spread and he said he expects to make a full recovery.
King says Maine residents should expect to see him back on the Senate floor within weeks and back on the campaign trail when he runs for re-election to a second term in 2018.
"I'm looking forward to a full recovery and to continuing my service in the Senate," King said. "And no, this does not my affect my intention to run for re-election, except my poor little prostate won't be along for the ride."
King also said that as a young man 40 years ago he was successfully treated for malignant melanoma. He said that outbreak and the prostate cancer are unrelated.
