Survivor of Vegas shooting now victim in hometown attack
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Tel Orfanos lived through the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history only to lose his life in another one less than 10 minutes from his home barely a year later — a tragic coincidence that has devastated his friends and family.
The 27-year-old Navy veteran was among at least several survivors of last year’s Las Vegas massacre who were at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks when a gunman stormed in and killed 12 people late Wednesday. While the others became two-time survivors, Orfanos died.
“He survived Vegas, where a lot more people died than this. It’s just unreal,” his friend Aliza Thomas said Friday. “It’s not fair.”
Thomas, who has known Orfanos since they were in high school, said her friend didn’t talk much about his experience in Vegas. Orfanos liked to focus on the positive.
“He was always such a happy person,” she said.
Orfanos’ mother, Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, was shaking with rage and grief when she spoke about how her son was unable to survive two mass killings.
“Here are my words: I want gun control,” Schmidt-Orfanos said. “I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts.”
She said she wanted Congress “to pass gun control so no one else has a child that doesn’t come home.”
Dani Merrill, who survived both Vegas and Borderline, was among mourners at a packed theatre Thursday honouring Orfanos and the others who lost their lives in the shooting at the bar.
“I’m super upset that it happened in our home, and I feel awful for the families that have to go through this,” said Merrill, the exhaustion evident in her eyes.
“I didn’t sleep,” she explained. “It’s hard to sleep after these kinds of things. You don’t know how to feel.”
Brendan Kelly, a 22-year-old Marine, also survived Vegas and was at the Borderline bar when Wednesday’s shooting happened.
“I already didn’t wish it on anybody to begin with for the first time,” Kelly said outside his home in Thousand Oaks. “The second time around doesn’t get any easier.”
Kelly said he was dancing with his friends when the bullets began flying.
“The chills go up your spine. You don’t think it’s real — again,” he said.
Victim of Michigan airport attack speaks
FLINT, Mich. — A police officer who was stabbed at a Michigan airport in an alleged act of terrorism told jurors Friday that he fought the urge to lie down as he bled from the neck.
Lt. Jeff Neville said that he was attacked in June 2017 with a “Rambo knife,” comparing its large size to the knife used by Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo character in the 1982 movie “First Blood.” He said he fell to his hands and knees at Flint’s Bishop Airport.
Amor Ftouhi, a Tunisian who was living in Montreal, is charged with terrorism and other crimes. He legally drove into the U.S. at Champlain, New York, and arrived in Flint five days later. The government said his plan was to stab Neville, get the cop’s gun and shoot others.
Airport police Chief Chris Miller said he jumped on Ftouhi and tried to handcuff him.
“He said, ‘Allahu Akbar. You have killed people in Afghanistan, and you have killed people in Iraq,”’ Miller testified. “That’s not something that you normally hear every day. It’s distinctive in my mind. We were fighting. There was a lot of blood.” Neville no longer works at the airport. “It’s something that you never forget because you can’t feel half of your face,” Neville said. “Even sleeping is different.”
Execution set for Alabama murderer
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama has set an execution date of Feb. 7 for an inmate sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of a 15year-old girl.
Tiffany Harville disappeared from her Selma home on July 15, 1995. Her decomposing body was found in a field a month later.
Dominique Ray was convicted in 1999 after co-defendant Marcus Owden testified that Ray cut the girl’s throat after they picked her up from her home and raped her. Owden said they also took the girl’s purse which had $6 or $7 in it.
A judge sentenced Ray to die after jurors voted 11-1 to recommend that he receive the death penalty.
Months before his death penalty trial, Ray got a life sentence for the 1994 slaying of two brothers who refused to join a gang organized by Owden and Ray.
California man pleads not guilty in killing
SANTA ANA, Calif. — A Southern California man pleaded not guilty on Friday to the
He said he threw two of his friends to the floor and covered them with his body. Then he got a look at the shooter and the terror unfolding and decided they needed to escape.
Kelly said he dragged one woman out a back emergency exit and then, using his belt, T-shirt and Marine training, applied a tourniquet to his friend’s bleeding arm. Two of his friends were killed in the shooting.
In Las Vegas and Thousand Oaks, country music fans were the victims. Borderline was having a weekly country night and the Vegas shooter targeted a crowd of country fans gathered for the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
Kelly, who has a tattoo on his left arm memorializing the Vegas shooting, said that Borderline had become a safe haven for dozens of Vegas survivors and it was common for many of them to hang out there together. “It is our home,” he said. A few weeks after the Vegas shooting, the bar held a benefit concert for five people from the area who were killed, and noweerie social media posts show a number of survivors holding up a “Route 91” sign inside the bar at a six-month anniversary event.
Kelly said living through Vegas changed his life and he doesn’t know how a second mass shooting will affect him down the road.
“Everywhere I go, everything I do is affected,” he said. “You’re always overanalyzing people.” murder of a gay University of Pennsylvania student in a hate crime.
Samuel Woodward, a 21-year-old from Newport Beach, Calif., is charged in the January stabbing death of 19-year-old college sophomore Blaze Bernstein, who was home visiting his family on winter break.
Bernstein, who was gay and Jewish, went missing after he went out with Woodward to a park in Lake Forest, Calif. His body was found days later buried at the park in a shallow grave.
According to authorities, Woodward picked up Bernstein from his parents’ home and stabbed him nearly 20 times in the face and neck. DNA evidence links Woodward to the crime and his cellphone contained troves of anti-gay, anti-Semitic and hate group materials, prosecutors have said.
If convicted of first-degree murder and the hate crime allegation, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole.
Arizona park shootout leaves 3 dead
TUCSON, Ariz. — Tucson police are trying to determine what prompted a shootout that left three people dead in a park on the city’s east side.
Police say 21-year-old Matthew Favela, 16-year-old Carlos Ross and two friends went to Lakeside Park on Thursday before 5 p.m. to meet with 16-year-old Amonn Sandoval and an unknown male.
According to investigators, the two parties briefly talked and then exchanged gunfire.
Witnesses in the park said they heard at least a dozen shots fired.
Favela, Ross and Sandoval were fatally shot. The two friends were in the car and uninjured and called 911.The unknown male fled before police arrived and detectives are searching for him.
Sgt. Pete Dugan says the shooting does not appear to be gang related.
North Carolina man scraps with bear
WAYNESVILLE, N.C. — A North Carolina man says he duked it out with a mother black bear when it charged him as he worked in his driveway.
WLOS-TV in Asheville reports 78-year-old Sonny Pumphrey was at his home Tuesday when he noticed two bear cubs near him. Those bears ran off, but the mother bear soon showed up.
Pumphrey said as the bear prepared to attack, he punched it “right dead on the point of the nose.” He said the bear fell back down onto all fours and bit him in the hip.
The bear ran off after Pumphrey’s wife came out of the house and fired a shot into the air.