SOUTHFIELD, Michigan: The parents of a 17-year-old girl who was shot in the neck at Oxford High School during a mass shooting that left four students dead filed a pair of lawsuits seeking $100 million each against a Michigan school district, saying Thursday that the violence could have been prevented.
The lawsuits were filed in federal court in Detroit and Oakland County Circuit Court by Jeffrey and Brandi Franz on behalf of their daughters, Riley, a senior who was wounded Nov. 30, and her sister Bella, a 14-year-old ninth grader who was next to her at the time she was shot, attorney Geoffrey Fieger said.
The parents attended a news conference Thursday with Fieger in his Southfield offices. Jeffrey Franz appeared stoic, staring ahead as the personal injury lawyer accused school officials and staff at Oxford High of not doing enough to prevent the shooting and protect students.
Brandi Franz sat, often with head bowed. The parents did not address reporters.
The lawsuits are the first known civil suits filed in connection with the shooting. Named in the suits are the Oxford school district, Superintendent Tim Throne, Oxford High School principal Steven Wolf, two counselors, two teachers and a staff member.
Ten students and a teacher were shot at the school in Oxford Township, roughly 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Detroit.
Ethan Crumbley, a 15-year-old sophomore at the school, was arrested at the school and has been charged as an adult with murder, terrorism and other crimes. His parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, later were charged with involuntary manslaughter and arrested.
Personal-injury lawyers have expressed doubt that the school district could be successfully sued for letting Crumbley stay in school. That’s because Michigan law sets a high bar to wring liability out of public schools and other arms of government.
“You have to show that the administration or faculty members were grossly negligent, meaning they had a reckless disregard for whether an injury was likely to take place,” said attorney A. Vince Colella.
Fieger acknowledged Thursday that state law makes it difficult to successfully sue public bodies like school districts. He said a federal lawsuit allows him to subpoena the school district for records and evidence connected to Crumbley and the shooting.
“I understand that this is not going to be easy,” Fieger said. “However, now is the time to do something about it.”
The gun used in the shooting was bought days before by James Crumbley and their son had full access to it, prosecutors said.
The morning before the shooting school officials met with Ethan Crumbley and his parents after a teacher found a drawing of a gun, a bullet and a person who appeared to have been shot, along with messages stating “My life is useless” and “The world is dead.”
The Crumbleys “flatly refused” to take their son home, Throne has said.
The Franz family lives in Leonard, just northwest of Oxford. One of the lawsuits criticized school officials for not expelling, disciplining or searching Crumbley prior to the shooting which allowed Crumbley to return to his classroom “and carry out his murderous rampage.”
The lawsuit alleges civil rights violations under the 14th Amendment and also said the school district “knew or should have known that the policies, procedures, training supervision and discipline” staff members named in the suit “were inadequate for the tasks that each defendant was required to perform.”
“There’s a responsibility that our society shares in protecting our children,” Fieger said. “There is a responsibility among teachers, counselors and school administrators who could easily have prevented and stopped this slaughter.”
Riley Franz was hospitalized following the shooting. She now is recovering at home, Fieger said.
A 17-year-old student — the remaining victim hospitalized from the shooting — was removed Thursday from an intensive care unit, the Oakland County sheriff’s office said.
She was moved to a standard room and was expected to remain in a hospital for the next four to six weeks while undergoing rehabilitation.
On Wednesday, a statement posted on the district’s website by Throne said that after all the facts have been obtained and released through the course of the prosecution, he will recommend to the Oxford Board of Education that the district initiate a review of its entire system “as other communities have done when facing similar experiences.”
“Our goal with all of this is to bring together all of the facts of what happened before, during and after this horrific incident,” he wrote. “We are committed to doing this in a way that allows our community to move forward and does not re-traumatize our community members, who are reeling and suffering from this horrible event.”
The criminal cases against Ethan Crumbley and his parents are being overseen by the Oakland County prosecutor’s office, and Michigan’s attorney general said Tuesday her office will review events that occurred before the mass shooting, despite the district’s rejection of her offer to be its third-party investigator.
The district’s lawyer told the attorney general’s office Monday it was fully cooperating with local law enforcement.
Michigan school district faces two $100m suits after Oxford shootings
https://arab.news/rnhsk
Michigan school district faces two $100m suits after Oxford shootings
18 soldiers killed as militants attack town in southwestern Pakistan – official
QUETTA: At least 18 soldiers were killed and five, including two civilians, were injured after separatist militants launched overnight attacks in a southwestern town, an official confirmed on Saturday after a van carrying the soldiers was targeted in one of the attacks.
The attacks began late Friday when militants attacked three different spots in Mangochar town located in Balochistan’s Kalat district around 103 kilometers from the provincial capital of Quetta, Kalat Deputy Commissioner Bilal Shabbir confirmed.
The attacks took place in Pidrang, Khazeni and Mangochar Bazaar areas of the town, the deputy commissioner shared, where militants started conducting snap checking of passenger vehicles passing through the town.
In the first incident, Shabbir said a van carrying 17 soldiers from Panjgur to the provincial capital of Quetta came under attack near the mountainous area of Khazeni, where armed men battled with paramilitary Levies and Frontier Corps’ personnel.
He said one soldier of the Frontier Corps (FC) force was separately killed in clashes with the militants.
“The bodies of the slain soldiers were shifted to Quetta,” Shabbir said. “We don’t know how many attackers were killed because they took the bodies of their fighters to the mountains in the dark.”
He said three FC personnel were also injured in the attack, adding that militants also set a private bank on fire at Mangochar Bazaar.
Banned separatist outfit Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement. The group said its fighters have captured a Pakistani security forces camp in Mangochar, which Arab News could not independently verify.
Meanwhile, Assistant Commissioner Mangochar Ali Gul Hassan said two civilians were separately injured when a Quetta-Karachi passenger bus was hit with bullets at the bazaar.
He said security forces had taken control of the area and opened the Karachi-Quetta highway and its surrounding roads for traffic.
“Security forces have completed the clearance operation in the area during the early hours of Saturday and the Quetta-Karachi highway (N-25) is opened for traffic,” Hassan told Arab News.
Arab News contacted Pakistan military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) for confirmation but did not receive a response till the filing of this report.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by landmass and rich in mineral resources, has long faced a low-level insurgency led by separatist groups like the BLA, who accuse Islamabad of exploiting the province’s natural resources, such as gold and copper, while neglecting the local population.
Pakistani governments deny these allegations, saying that it has prioritized Balochistan’s development through investments in health, education and infrastructure projects.
The BLA has emerged as a significant security threat in recent years, carrying out major attacks in Balochistan and Sindh provinces while targeting security forces, ethnic Punjabis and Chinese nationals working on development projects.
The BLA launched coordinated attacks in Balochistan in August last year, killing over 50. Last month, dozens of fighters of the separatist outfit gained control of a small town in Khuzdar for hours and snatched weapons and vehicles from the local Levies force and set the Levies station on fire.
Violence by Baloch separatist factions, primarily the BLA, killed about 300 people last year, according to official statistics, marking an escalation in the decades-long conflict.
Pope Francis stumbles while walking into Jubilee audience at the Vatican as his walking stick snaps
- Pope Francis often has to use a wheelchair or a cane because of bad knees
- The pontiff has long battled health problems including long bouts of bronchitis
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis tripped while entering the Vatican auditorium for an audience Saturday after the handle of his walking stick snapped, but he avoided falling.
The 88-year-old pope often has to use a wheelchair or a cane because of bad knees and has fallen twice in the past two months.
After Saturday’s slight stumble, two aides helped him to his chair on the stage and the audience proceeded without incident. After he recovered someone in the audience shouted “Viva il Papa” and the audience applauded.
Earlier in January, Francis fell and hurt his right arm. It wasn’t broken, but a sling was put on as a precaution.
On Dec. 7, the pope whacked his chin on his nightstand in an apparent fall that resulted in a bad bruise.
The pontiff has long battled health problems including long bouts of bronchitis. He uses a walker or cane when moving around his apartment in the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel.
Speculation about Francis’ health is a constant in Vatican circles, especially after Pope Benedict XVI broke 600 years of tradition and resigned from the papacy in 2013. Benedict’s aides have attributed the decision to a nighttime fall that he suffered during a 2012 trip to Mexico, after which he determined he couldn’t keep up with the globe-trotting demands of the papacy.
Francis has said that he has no plans to resign anytime soon, even if Benedict “opened the door” to the possibility. In his autobiography “Hope” released this month, Francis said that he hadn’t considered resigning even when he had major intestinal surgery.
Los Angeles fires fully contained after burning for 3 weeks: state agency
- Palisades and Eaton fires burned more than 150 square kilometers and over 10,000 homes
- Estimated damage and economic loss at between $250 billion and $275 billion
LOS ANGELES, United States: Two devastating wildfires in Los Angeles were declared fully contained by firefighters on Friday after burning for more than three weeks, killing about 30 people and displacing thousands more.
The Palisades and Eaton fires in Southern California’s Los Angeles County were the most destructive in the history of the second-largest US city, burning more than 150 square kilometers and over 10,000 homes, causing damage estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, updated the figures on its website on Friday to show 100 percent containment of both fires, meaning their perimeters were completely under control.
Evacuation orders were lifted earlier, with the fires not posing a serious threat for days.
Both blazes started on January 7 and their exact cause remains under investigation.
But human-driven climate change set the stage for the infernos by reducing rainfall, parching vegetation, and extending the dangerous overlap between flammable drought conditions and powerful Santa Ana winds, according to an analysis published this week.
The study, conducted by dozens of researchers, concluded that the conditions fueling the blazes were approximately 35 percent more likely due to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.
The two fires destroyed thousands of structures over more than three weeks in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and Malibu, and in the Altadena community in Los Angeles County, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate their homes.
“Our recovery effort is based around getting people back home to rebuild as quickly and safely as possible,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement Friday. “We are making sure that the Palisades will be safe as residents access their properties.”
City police chief Jim McDonnell said the presence of law enforcement officers in the area would be “more than 10 times” what it was before the start of the fires.
Private meteorological firm AccuWeather has estimated the damage and economic loss at between $250 billion and $275 billion.
African health agency says DRC fighting has spawned ‘health emergency’
- The head of Africa’s health agency said the situation in the DRC city of Goma was a “full-scale public health emergency,” warning that the fighting there could fuel major pandemics
ADDIS ABABA: The head of Africa’s health agency said the situation in the DRC city of Goma was a “full-scale public health emergency,” warning that the fighting there could fuel major pandemics.
The Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has been advancing across the Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile east, which has been the scene of numerous infectious disease outbreaks.
Earlier this week, M23 seized control of most of North Kivu’s capital Goma, a densely populated city of three million people, one million of whom are displaced.
Jean Kaseya, head of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), said it was these “extreme conditions, combined with insecurity and mass displacement have fueled the mutation of the mpox virus.”
The clade 1b variant of mpox, which has been recorded in many countries across the world in recent months, first emerged in the neighboring South Kivu province in 2023.
“Goma has become the epicenter, spreading mpox across 21 African countries,” he said in a letter sent on Friday to African leaders.
“This is not only a security issue — it is a full-scale public health emergency,” Kaseya said.
“This war must end. If decisive action is not taken, it will not be bullets alone that claim lives — it will be the unchecked spread of major outbreaks and potential pandemics that will come from this fragile region... devastating economies and societies across our continent,” he said.
The conditions had also led to “widespread measles, cholera and other outbreaks, claiming thousands more lives.”
The conflict in the eastern DRC is a dramatic escalation in a region that has seen decades of conflict involving multiple armed groups, which over the past three decades have claimed an estimated six million lives.
International observers have sounded the alarm on the humanitarian impact of the escalating conflict.
Colombia offers to pay for repatriations from US
BOGOTA: Colombia has offered to pay for the “dignified” deportation of its citizens from the United States, the foreign ministry said Friday, a week after a public spat between presidents Gustavo Petro and Donald Trump over the removal of migrants.
The two leaders had issued threats and counter threats of major trade tariffs of up to 50 percent, and Washington’s embassy in Bogota stopped issuing visas from Monday to Friday in retaliation for Petro’s refusal to allow US military planes to return Colombian migrants to their country.
Petro had accused the United States of treating the migrants like criminals, placing them in shackles and handcuffs.
Colombia’s foreign ministry said Friday it had proposed to Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s special envoy for Latin America, that Bogota would “immediately assume the transfer of all citizens deported by the United States,” covering transportation costs for its nationals, according to a statement.
Petro has said his government would not allow expelled migrants to travel in handcuffs.
The Trump administration had announced this week a series of sanctions against Colombia, before backtracking, with the White House saying Bogota had accepted its conditions and reversed course.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Colombian military and civilian aircraft repatriated the first groups of migrants to Bogota.
According to Petro, hundreds of Colombians, including several children, were returned to their country in “dignified” conditions. None of them were “confirmed criminals,” he added.
Colombia is expecting the return of around 27,000 migrants whose deportation orders have been signed in the last six months by the Trump administration or that of his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, a Colombian presidential source told AFP.
Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history, vowing to expel millions of undocumented immigrants, many from Latin American nations.
The United States is Colombia’s largest trade partner and it has provided millions of dollars in aid over decades to fight drug trafficking and terrorism.
