Sunday, April 12, 2015
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Cops: Remains may be those of missing UVa. student
Further forensic tests are needed to confirm whether the remains are those of Hannah Graham, but Graham's parents were notified of the preliminary findings, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo told a news conference.
The Albemarle County Police Department also said a volunteer search for Graham that had been planned for Sunday has been canceled so law enforcement can turn their attention to the new evidence.
Longo said a search team from the Chesterfield County Sheriff's Office found the remains on an abandoned property in southern Albemarle County — the same region where police found the body of 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington three months after she vanished in 2009.
Last month, after arresting a suspect in Graham's disappearance, police said they found a "forensic link" between the two cases.
Thousands of volunteers had searched for the 18-year-old Graham in the weeks since her disappearance.
View galleryCharlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, right, and …
Charlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, right, and Albermarle County police Col. Steve Sellers, lef …
"Countless hours, thousands of hours, have been spent by literally hundreds of law enforcement, civilian volunteers in an effort to find Hannah," Longo said. "We think perhaps today proved their worth."
Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., 32, has been charged with abduction with intent to defile Graham. A preliminary hearing is set for Dec. 4 on the charge. In the meantime, Matthew is being held in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
Albermarle County Police are now taking over the investigation. County Police Chief Steve Sellers said anyone who may have seen suspicious activity in the area or may have seen someone who fits Matthew's description in the area after Graham's disappearance, should contact police.
"Today's discovery is a significant development and we have a great deal of work ahead of us," Sellers said. "We cannot and we will not jump to any conclusions regarding today's discovery, so I ask for the public's patience as we move forward and pursue what is now a new ongoing death investigation."
Police officials Saturday afternoon had blocked the road leading to the site where the remains were found.
View galleryPolice block the road leading to the scene of a death …
Police block the road leading to the scene of a death investigation in connection with the disappear …
Surveillance videos captured some of what Graham did the night she vanished. Authorities say she met friends at a restaurant for dinner Sept. 12 before stopping by two parties at off-campus housing units. She left the second party alone and eventually texted a friend saying she was lost, authorities said.
She can be seen walking unsteadily and even running at times, past a pub and a service station and then onto a seven-block pedestrian strip that includes the Tempo Restaurant.
Tempo Restaurant owner Brice Cunningham has said Graham appeared to be incapacitated as she walked away with Matthew. Police have said they have no reason to believe she and Matthew knew each other before their encounter.
Matthew, an operating room technician at the university's hospital who sometimes drives a taxi, had been drinking at the bar earlier that night before he encountered Graham, Cunningham has said.
A week after Graham went missing, Longo publicly described Matthew in detail without naming him, saying investigators wanted to talk to the "person of interest" and had searched his apartment because he was the last person to see her.
View galleryCharlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, wears a Find …
Charlottesville Police Chief, Tim Longo, wears a Find Hannah button as he and Albermarle County poli …
Matthew showed up at police headquarters, asked for a lawyer, and then sped away, according to a police account. His exit prompted a warrant for "reckless driving," a charge that Longo cited as he named the suspect and appealed for information from anyone who saw him with Graham the night she disappeared.
Matthew was arrested a few days later in Galveston, Texas.
While Matthew was a fugitive in Texas, Virginia police added a charge of abduction with intent to defile, a violent felony that under Virginia law compels suspects to submit to DNA testing.
Very quickly thereafter, Virginia State Police announced a "forensic link" to Harrington's killing. That case, in turn, has been linked by DNA evidence since 2012 to the rape of a woman in Fairfax, Virginia, who survived after a passer-by startled her attacker, the FBI has said.
Following Matthew's arrest, Christopher Newport University released a statement noting that he had been named in a police file involving a Sept. 7, 2003 sexual assault on the Newport News campus. Matthew was a student there from January 2003 through Oct. 15, 2003.
Matthew had transferred to CNU after three years at Liberty University, where he also was briefly on the football team.
When he was at Liberty University, he was accused of raping a student on campus. That charge was dropped when the person declined to move forward with prosecution, Lynchburg Commonwealth's Attorney Michael Doucette said.
__
Associated Press Writer Brock Vergakis in Norfolk, Virginia, contributed to this report.
1st Dallas nurse with Ebola arrives in Maryland
FREDERICK, Maryland (AP) — The first nurse to be diagnosed with Ebola after treating an infected Liberian man at a Dallas hospital walked gingerly down the stairs of an executive jet into a waiting ambulance at a fog-shrouded airport Thursday.
Nina Pham was being transported to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center near Washington for treatment in a specialized isolation unit. The NIH campus is in Bethesda, about 35 miles from the Frederick Municipal Airport where she arrived shortly after 10:30 p.m. EDT.
The agency said staff specializing in infectious disease and critical care will treat the 26-year-old nurse at the isolation unit, one of four in the nation.
Reporters, who were kept more than 100 yards from the plane by police, watched the patient in protective clothing exit the aircraft, helped by similarly garbed workers on the ground. The process took about 30 minutes, from the plane's landing to the ambulance's departure, escorted by police cars with flashing lights.
The event in a remote corner of the airport attracted a small crowd of onlookers. Ashley King, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from nearby Walkersville, carried a large sign reading, "Get well soon, Nina."
King said she wanted to "get some positive thoughts going."
Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas said Wednesday that Pham was in good condition.
Pham was seen for the first time since her diagnosis in a video shot in her Dallas hospital room and posted online by the hospital's parent company Thursday. In the video, she smiles as she sits upright in a hospital bed while a man identified as her treating physician can be heard thanking her for getting well and being part of the volunteer team that took care of Thomas Duncan, who died of Ebola last week.
"Come to Maryland. Everybody," Pham laughs into the camera before wiping away tears with a tissue handed to her by an attendant in full protective gear
Nina Pham was being transported to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center near Washington for treatment in a specialized isolation unit. The NIH campus is in Bethesda, about 35 miles from the Frederick Municipal Airport where she arrived shortly after 10:30 p.m. EDT.
The agency said staff specializing in infectious disease and critical care will treat the 26-year-old nurse at the isolation unit, one of four in the nation.
Reporters, who were kept more than 100 yards from the plane by police, watched the patient in protective clothing exit the aircraft, helped by similarly garbed workers on the ground. The process took about 30 minutes, from the plane's landing to the ambulance's departure, escorted by police cars with flashing lights.
The event in a remote corner of the airport attracted a small crowd of onlookers. Ashley King, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from nearby Walkersville, carried a large sign reading, "Get well soon, Nina."
King said she wanted to "get some positive thoughts going."
Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas said Wednesday that Pham was in good condition.
Pham was seen for the first time since her diagnosis in a video shot in her Dallas hospital room and posted online by the hospital's parent company Thursday. In the video, she smiles as she sits upright in a hospital bed while a man identified as her treating physician can be heard thanking her for getting well and being part of the volunteer team that took care of Thomas Duncan, who died of Ebola last week.
"Come to Maryland. Everybody," Pham laughs into the camera before wiping away tears with a tissue handed to her by an attendant in full protective gear
How Ebola was discovered
With health officials around the world scrambling to stop the Ebola outbreak, it's worth taking a look back at how the deadly virus was first discovered.
In 1976, Peter Piot, then a 27-year-old microbiology student in Belgium, was studying infectious diseases when the lab he was working in received a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had died in Zaire.
"It came with a question mark, 'Yellow fever or not?'" Piot told the Wall Street Journal. "So we isolated the virus and to our big surprise, when we looked at the virus under our electron microscope, it was something completely different than what we had expected."
Piot sent the sample to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which confirmed it was indeed a new virus.
Piot and his colleagues then traveled to Zaire to study what he called "an epidemic of unknown origin and transmission."
"It was really frightening," Piot said. "You ask, 'Is this transmitted by mosquitoes? By food? By water?' ... you try to see, 'What is the pattern?'"
Those who died from the virus, the team discovered, were mostly pregnant women in their 20s and 30s who had been to the same antenatal clinic.
"It turned out that nearly everybody received an injection," Piot said. "The problem was that there were only five syringes and needles."
Those syringes and needles were reused over and over again, spreading the virus.
Piot, now director and professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says he is shocked at the scale of the current outbreak — and fears that the isolation and contact tracing utilized by health workers won't be able to contain it.
According to the World Health Organization, there have been 9,216 reported cases of Ebola in seven nations since the outbreak began in West Africa, and 4,555 deaths associated with the disease.
“Something that is easy to control got completely out of hand," Piot told London's Guardian newspaper earlier this week. "It may be that we have to wait for a vaccine to stop the epidemic."
Sick woman at Dallas train station not on Ebola watchlist: official
A Dallas bus and train station was closed on Saturday after a report that a woman fell ill at the facility, but the transit authority denied an earlier report that the woman had been on a watchlist for possible exposure to Ebola.
The woman exited a northbound train at the White Rock Station and vomited, leading the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system to close the station as a precaution.
"The person being treated by Dallas Fire Rescue at White Rock Station is NOT on any Ebola watchlist," Morgan Lyons, a DART spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
"There are no indications of any biohazards or spills on any vehicle she has used," said Lyons. "We're inspecting the train and the platform and will clean the facility and vehicle as needed consistent with our protocol."
Earlier, a Dallas television station reported the woman had been one of the people in the area monitored for possible exposure to the often-fatal Ebola virus.
The incident highlights the heightened state of awareness of the dangers of spreading the disease, especially in Dallas, where a Liberian national became the first person infected with the virus to die in the United States. Two nurses who cared for him have also contracted the virus.
(Reporting By Frank McGurty and Grant McCool)
Ebola scare at Pentagon after woman vomits in parking lot
By Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon was gripped by an Ebola scare on Friday after a woman vomited in a parking lot, triggering authorities to send in a HazMat team and shut off part of the military complex before concluding she did not have the deadly virus.
The Pentagon initially said in a statement that the woman indicated she had "recently visited Africa."
But her employer told Reuters she had not traveled abroad recently and local county health authorities later acknowledged that her travel history had been uncertain.
"Based on the public health investigation, which included the travel history of a woman who became ill this morning in a Pentagon parking lot ... medical authorities are confident that she does not have Ebola," the local health authorities said in a statement.
The public health investigation also included questioning of the woman by medical staff, they said.
View galleryEmergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon …
Emergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon parking lot after a woman who recently traveled …
There has been mounting alarm in the United States about the risks from Ebola after two nurses who cared for an Ebola patient in Texas contracted the virus. Ebola has killed more than 4,500 people, mostly in West Africa.
The incident outside the Pentagon triggered emergency protocols. The Arlington County Fire Department sent emergency medical aid and a HazMat response team, and the Pentagon closed down part of the parking lot and one of its entrances.
Since the woman had briefly boarded a bus before falling ill, the vehicle and its passengers were stopped for about four hours, one passenger recounted to Reuters. The passengers included uniformed Marines headed to a Marine Corps ceremony attended by top brass and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
The Pentagon later said the passengers were being screened.
"An investigation of this person and her illness led investigators to believe at the time that they were potentially dealing with a person with an infectious disease," it said.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Mohammad Zargham, Frances Kerry and Ken Wills)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon was gripped by an Ebola scare on Friday after a woman vomited in a parking lot, triggering authorities to send in a HazMat team and shut off part of the military complex before concluding she did not have the deadly virus.
The Pentagon initially said in a statement that the woman indicated she had "recently visited Africa."
But her employer told Reuters she had not traveled abroad recently and local county health authorities later acknowledged that her travel history had been uncertain.
"Based on the public health investigation, which included the travel history of a woman who became ill this morning in a Pentagon parking lot ... medical authorities are confident that she does not have Ebola," the local health authorities said in a statement.
The public health investigation also included questioning of the woman by medical staff, they said.
View galleryEmergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon …
Emergency workers in hazmat suits work in a Pentagon parking lot after a woman who recently traveled …
There has been mounting alarm in the United States about the risks from Ebola after two nurses who cared for an Ebola patient in Texas contracted the virus. Ebola has killed more than 4,500 people, mostly in West Africa.
The incident outside the Pentagon triggered emergency protocols. The Arlington County Fire Department sent emergency medical aid and a HazMat response team, and the Pentagon closed down part of the parking lot and one of its entrances.
Since the woman had briefly boarded a bus before falling ill, the vehicle and its passengers were stopped for about four hours, one passenger recounted to Reuters. The passengers included uniformed Marines headed to a Marine Corps ceremony attended by top brass and U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
The Pentagon later said the passengers were being screened.
"An investigation of this person and her illness led investigators to believe at the time that they were potentially dealing with a person with an infectious disease," it said.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Mohammad Zargham, Frances Kerry and Ken Wills)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)