‘Every parent's worst nightmare': Tragic end to search for missing North Carolina teen who sent chilling final text to mom
Giovanni Pelletier, 18, was discovered in a retention pond near I-75 in Florida on Friday, near where he had traveled to visit his estranged father's family, the Manatee County Sheriff's Office said, according to Gulf Coast News.
Detectives 'preliminarily determined' the body to belong to Pelletier, pending further testing. An autopsy was scheduled for Sunday, and the death investigation was ongoing, the sheriff's office said.
The boy's mother, Bridgette Pelletier, said on Facebook that she was living 'every parent's worst nightmare,' and noted her son was found by her family, not authorities.
'My son was recently found after a desperate search by OUR FAMILY ALONE, and we are still facing an active investigation into his death,' she wrote.
'I am living every parent's worst nightmare, trying to find the strength to give him the goodbye he deserves.'
Giovanni Pelletier was unable to meet with his father, who is currently incarcerated, his aunt Desiree Pelletier previously told ABC News, but he had plans to meet three cousins for the first time.
However, things took a turn after the cousins picked Giovanni up for a three-hour drive to their home in Mims, Florida, on August 1.
About 25 minutes into their drive, he texted his mother, 'Help me.' He also sent similarly frightening messages to his grandfather and another aunt.
According to the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, the cousins told investigators Giovanni 'began to act erratically before exiting the vehicle' on I-75 near State Road 70.
The teen's backpack and cellphone were found on the side of the road by a truck driver that same day.
In an update Saturday to a GoFundMe, which the family started to cover hiring a private investigator to help in the search, Bridgette Pelletier noted the funds would now go toward 'funeral, medical and legal costs' as they 'struggle to honor [Giovanni's] memory through this unimaginable heartbreak.'
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The Guardian
24 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump to hold press conference after ordering homeless to leave Washington DC
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
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Ohio law requires buses for private school kids. Public school students have to find their own ride
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For the past several years, school administrators in Dayton, Cincinnati and elsewhere have been trying to get around the problem by issuing students with bus passes for public transportation. But children riding public buses have reported being subjected to a variety of dangers. Public transportation administrators have also reported difficulties trying to serve the public and thousands of students all at once. The situation came to a tragic head on the morning of 4 April when 18-year-old Alfred Hale III was shot dead at the public bus hub in downtown Dayton when en route to class at Dunbar high school. Shortly after Hale's killing, Ohio lawmakers introduced a law making it illegal for Dayton public schools (DPS) to buy public bus vouchers for students. The burden of getting children to school now falls on students' parents, grandparents, local churches and charities, say officials. Families who choose to continue to have their students use public buses to get to and from school will have to fork out at least $540 per high school student per year. 'There seems to be an aggressive approach to the most vulnerable families and people in America,' says DPS's superintendent, David Lawrence. 'Not only is it unfair, it's onerous that public schools have to provide transportation to non-public school students.' What's happening in Ohio is a result of a wider effort by conservative politicians to push for more children to attend charter and private schools, many of which are run by religious organizations. Republican politicians hold a super-majority across Ohio's legislature and have built up a $1bn fund in the form of vouchers for families who want to send their students to private and charter schools. Ohio isn't alone. Republican-dominated state legislatures have been pushing for or have already enacted laws that see billions of dollars of taxpayer money directed to funding private school voucher systems in Texas, Florida, Iowa, Tennessee and elsewhere. In Pennsylvania and Minnesota, where political control is largely split between Democrats and Republicans, public schools are required to provide transportation for students attending non-public schools. In January, Donald Trump signed an executive order steering taxpayer funds from public schools to private schools. Many in Democratic-leaning cities say they are being targeted. In Cincinnati, children as young as 13 are being forced to use public transportation to get to and from school due to funding shortages that this year will see more than 100 yellow bus routes cut. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion In Columbus, where more than half of all students are African American, the public school system is required to bus students of 162 private and charter schools. About 1.8 million, or 80%, of all school-going students in Ohio attend public schools and nearly two-thirds of students attending Dayton public schools are African American. In July, the state passed a budget that saw the smallest increase in spending on K-12 public education in more than a decade. 'It's simple – if we did not have to bus non-public school students on our transportation, we could transport every single one of our K-12 students on yellow buses,' says Jocelyn Rhynard, a member of the Dayton public school board. DPS transports between 4,000 and 5,000 charter and private school students every school day. 'It's a direct result of the legislation from the extremist Republicans at the Ohio statehouse mandating that we must transport non-public students as well as public students in our district.' But Republican politicians disagree. 'We had an 18-year-old get shot and killed. The environment for the students is not good down there. The NAACP interviewed the children, they don't want to ride the public transportation buses, they want to ride the yellow school buses,' says Phil Plummer, a Republican party state representative who spearheaded the budget amendment banning DPS from giving its students public bus vouchers. Plummer says he and others 'found 25 school buses' that DPS could purchase. 'They decided not to transport their kids,' he says. DPS administrators, who pay drivers the highest rates in the region, say about 70 buses would be required to meet the need, a number that could take up to two years to procure. Lawrence says the process of buying buses and training drivers is not simple. 'It's an 18-month cycle. They [buses] are $150,000 to $190,000 each to buy, and ones with back-up cameras and air conditioning are [even] more expensive. Then drivers have to take at least 10 tests before they become fully qualified,' he says. With the law coming into effect just months before the new school year, parents, students and public-school managers have been left in a difficult situation. 'I'm a single dad raising two kids on my own. We all have to be at school at the same time. That's a big dilemma,' says William Johnson, an educator at DPS whose daughter is no longer able to get to school using a bus provided by or paid for the district. 'I'm lucky that my 80-year-old father is going to help out taking them to school. But I ask the state [politicians] – please come up with a solution. We're going to lose a whole generation of kids if this continues.'
The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump stirs far-right rage despite FBI deprioritizing extremist threat
Donald Trump has faced an onslaught of criticism from opponents and Maga diehards alike, on issues such as Jeffrey Epstein, the war with Iran, and his steadfast alliance with Israel in the face of genocide. But among the ever dangerous far right, which has generally applauded Trump's efforts to deport thousands of people a day, his actions of late have stirred rage among a group experts say has benefited greatly from his administration's law-enforcement pivots. The FBI, headed by Trump acolyte Kash Patel, has reassigned the jobs of thousands of agents and eviscerated parts of the bureau tasked with investigating rightwing extremists that are considered the most dangerous domestic security threat facing the US today. Those same types, which includes a locus of fascist street-fighting gangs known as active clubs and accelerationist neo-Nazis, increasingly view Trump as an enemy, but are freer than ever to organize – almost entirely due to changes instituted in his latest presidency. 'His alliance with Israel and Netanyahu is obviously problematic for antisemites, and there have always been questions about how dedicated Trump is to the cause of a white America,' said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, referring to American rightwing extremists' view of the president. 'Frankly, white supremacists have never had it so good as they do now under Trump.' Bierich did concede the far right was 'never outwardly fond of him,' they have celebrated Trump's enthusiastic deployment of Ice raids. On a neo-Nazi Telegram channel that has become a bellwether and influencer for active clubs around the world, Trump's latest quip declaring he would not provide disaster relief in case of a natural disaster to states that do not support Israel struck a major nerve. 'Israel first, America last,' it said in a post viewed several thousands of times by followers, with a headline associated with the story. In another adjacent account, neo-Nazis went further: 'The fact that they even tried to put that in is disgusting.' In recent years, neo-fascist groups such as Patriot Front – heavily allied to the active club movement – have used natural disaster cleanups as a way to recruit and launder their image as white saviors to 'European' Americans. 'What we know is these groups are emboldened and the federal government appears to be abandoning its efforts to monitor and surveil racists and white supremacists,' Beirich said. 'They can certainly act with less concern about FBI interference, and we should expect there will be more violence and more activity on the streets from these groups given what the federal government has shut down.' One of the president's first moves, mere hours after his second inauguration in January, was to give full pardons to 1,500 people involved in the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Even research grants for academic and government researchers looking at the de-radicalization of extremists of every political persuasion have felt the force of Trump's budgetary cuts. Yet with this backdrop of helpful policies, far-right activists have found reasons to part with Trump's agenda. A near full-scale war with Iran earlier in the summer also set off a flurry of posts among some of the most hardcore and popular neo-Nazis who saw the latest geopolitical venture as a new, costly Iraq war. 'Both sides spent years hyperventilating over the undisputed lethality of Iran,' wrote one influential neo-Nazi propagandist channel on Telegram. 'I'm just happy it doesn't look like whites will be dying for Israel.' But it was a recent American Eagle ad featuring the actor Sydney Sweeney – one alluding to her jeans as a reference to physical, genetic genes – that has enraged the online hordes of the far right. One called it Maga's blatant attempt to win back their support through 'white coded media' in service of a broader agenda. 'Some Telegram propagandists have claimed that the Trump administration is explicitly attempting to appeal to white Americans to manipulate them further,' said Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst and expert on online extremists, 'whether economically, politically, or while planning a new war.' According to Fisher-Birch, an influential channel with over 2,000 subscribers within the far-right Telegram ecosystem carried out a poll in mid-July about Trump and the Epstein files, which showed that 70% of its respondents said they did not support the president. 'The irony is that they should be celebrating Trump regardless,' said Beirich, 'for the Ice raids, for appointing extremists like Darren Beattie and Stephen Miller, for putting Confederate statutes back up and assaulting DEI, not to mention the pardons.' Beattie, a senior state department official, has been linked to white nationalism, while Miller has been widely seen as the architect for the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy and has long been lambasted for his racism 'and white supremacist ideology'. Beirich cited how Patriot Front and Blood Tribe, another public facing neo-Nazi group, are marching on American streets with regularity, while people like former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio – formerly imprisoned for his role in the January 6 attacks – have become regular speaking fixtures in official Republican circles. Fisher-Birch agreed that the far right was feeling the moment. 'Many extreme right groups and propagandists certainly think that they have more latitude now than compared to a year ago,' he said. 'However, it is also important to note that some groups are worried about being targeted for their antisemitism.' Even so, there are others in the extremist world who still view Trump and the broader US government with skepticism, undeterred by recent FBI changes or the president's general tone towards them. For example, the Base, an internationally proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group with roots in the US, still sees Trump as a problem. 'We don't expect leniency from the Trump administration,' it wrote on one of its accounts earlier this year, referring to a nationwide crackdown on the group in the past. 'It was Trump's [department of justice] which conducted an aggressive nationwide dragnet targeting members of the Base in 2020.' It added: 'By comparison, political pressure against the Base was minimal when Biden was president.'
