NE Harris County: Man killed, father and young child injured in Atascocita Road collision, officials say
Officials say an SUV was traveling west, then veered into the eastbound lanes.
The SUV was struck head-on by a pickup truck in the eastbound lanes.
The SUV driver was pronounced dead at the scene.
HUMBLE - A man has died after a head-on car crash in the Humble area on Friday night, according to officials. Another man and his young child were also injured in the wreck.
What we know
The crash was reported at about 10:45 p.m. in the 1300 block of Atascocita Road, near the Wilson Road intersection.
According to Harris County Sergeant Villacorta, an SUV was west on Atascocita when it lost control while going through a curve. The vehicle veered into the eastbound lanes, then collided with a pickup truck in those lanes.
The SUV driver was pronounced dead at the scene. He was the only one in the vehicle. Officials say the driver may have been drinking prior to the crash.
A father and his 8-year-old child were in the pickup truck. Sgt. Villacorta says the two suffered minor injuries and were taken to a hospital for evaluations.
What we don't know
The deceased driver will not be identified by officials. Sgt. Villacorta described the driver as a Black male in his late 60s.
The Source
OnScene and Harris County Sergeant Villacorta
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Los Angeles Times
30 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Six decades after the Watts riots, too little has changed
On Aug. 11, 1965, 60 years ago, I stood transfixed with hundreds of others on the corner several blocks from my house in South L.A. watching what seemed like a horrid page out of 'Dante's Inferno.' But this was real life. Liquor stores, a laundromat and two dry cleaners blazed away. There was an ear-splitting din from the crowd's shouts, curses and jeers at the police cars that sped by crammed with cops in full battle gear, shotguns flailing out of their cars. There was an almost carnival air of euphoria among the roving throngs as packs of young and not-so-young people darted into the stores snatching and grabbing anything that wasn't nailed down. Their arms bulged with liquor bottles and cigarette cartons. I was 18 and felt a childlike mix of awe and fascination watching this. For a moment there was even the temptation to make my own dash into one of the burning stores. But that quickly passed. One of my friends kept repeating with his face contorted with anger: 'Maybe now they'll see how rotten they treat us.' In that bitter moment, he said what countless other Black people felt as the flames and the smoke swirled. The events of those days and his words remain burned in my memory on the 60th anniversary of the Watts riots. I still think of the streets down which we were shooed by the police and the National Guard during those hellish days. They're impossible to forget for another reason. Exactly six decades later, some of those streets look as if time has stood still. They are dotted with the same fast-food restaurants, beauty shops, liquor stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores. The main street near the block I lived on then is just as unkempt, pothole-ridden and trash littered now as it ever was. All the homes and stores in the area are hermetically sealed with iron bars, security gates and burglar alarms. In taking a hard look at what has changed in Watts — and all of America's neighborhoods like Watts — since the riots, the picture is not flattering. According to Data USA, Watts still has the runaway highest poverty rate in L.A. County. Nearly one-third of the households are far below the official poverty level. It has the highest jobless rate. It is still plagued by the same paucity of retail stores, healthcare services, chronically low educational test scores and high dropout rates. The near-frozen conditions in Watts were hideously punctuated in the lengthy battle that residents and advocacy groups waged last year against city agencies to clean up the contaminated water that posed huge safety and health hazards to thousands. It's a battle that's still being fought. In some ways, what I see in Watts now is worse than what I remember before the riots. Despite the grinding poverty among many in Watts six decades ago, nearly all the residents had shelter. The sight of people sleeping on the streets, at bus stops and in the park was practically unimaginable in Watts in 1965. That is not the case today. Homelessness, as in other parts of South Los Angeles, is a major problem. However, this is only one benchmark of how little progress has been made since the riots in confronting racial ills and poverty in a still grossly underserved Watts. Many Black people in the six decades since the riots have long since escaped such neighborhoods. Their lives, like mine, are now lived far from the corner in South L.A. where I once stood amid the flames and chaos. Their flight was made possible by the avalanche of civil rights and voting rights laws, state and local bars against discrimination, and affirmative action programs that for many of them crumbled the nation's historic racial barriers. The parade of top Black appointed and elected officials, including one former president, the legions of black mega millionaire CEOs, athletes and entertainers are evidence of that. However, that does not alter the hard reality that a new generation of Black people now languishes on corners like the one I stood on in August 1965. For them there has been no escape. But it's not all doom and gloom. There are advocacy groups such as Watts Rising that press L.A. city and county officials for greater funding initiatives and programs in every area of life, including housing, jobs and income boosting programs, along with huge investment in improved healthcare services. One other memorable moment for me during those hellfire days was when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Watts at the height of the riots. He was jeered by a few Black residents when he tried to calm the situation. But King did not just deliver a message of peace and nonviolence; he also deplored police abuse and the poverty in Watts. Sixty years later, he would almost certainly have the same message if he came to South L.A. or any of America's other similar neighborhoods. Too little has changed. Too much has gotten worse. What I see in those communities 60 years after the Watts riots remains stark and troubling proof of that. Earl Ofari Hutchinson's latest book is 'Day 1 The Trump Reign.' His commentaries can be found at
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Attorney says heart device did not shock Tennessee man in execution who said he was 'hurting so bad'
TENNESSEE-EJECUCIÓN NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man who said he was 'hurting so bad' during his lethal injection this week for the 1980s killings of his girlfriend and her two young daughters was not shocked by his implanted defibrillator, his attorney said Friday. Kelley Henry, the federal public defender for Byron Black, said her team received an initial evaluation of the data from his implantable cardioverter defibrillator. The ICD information eliminates one possible cause for Black's comment about pain during his execution Tuesday, and other actions such as when he picked his head up off the gurney and groaned, she said. But many questions remain unanswered, she said. 'Make no mistake, we all saw with our own eyes that the pentobarbital did not work like the State's expert testified that it would," Henry said in her statement, referencing Tennessee's execution drug, pentobarbital. "Mr. Black suffered.' Black was executed after a back-and-forth in court over whether officials would need to disable his ICD due to claims it might cause unnecessary, painful shocks to try to fix his heartbeat as the drugs were administered, potentially prolonging the execution. An autopsy report is expected to be released in eight to 12 weeks, Henry said. She also said their team will be making public records requests to try to piece together what happened. She has said this includes access to Black's electrocardiograph readings from the execution. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said Friday that news of the lack of a defibrillator shock was 'just as the state's medical expert predicted and entirely contrary to the confident predictions of Black's expert.' Skrmetti cited Black's numerous failed legal challenges and said, 'Byron Black's execution was entirely legal.' 'Every American has the right to their own opinion about the death penalty, but courts rely on actual facts and actual law, not on theatrics and passion,' Skrmetti said in a statement. Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya Clay, 9, and Lakeisha Clay, 6. Prosecutors said he was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work-release while serving time for shooting Clay's estranged husband. Black died at 10:43 a.m. on Tuesday, prison officials said. It was about 10 minutes after the execution started and Black talked about being in pain. Ahead of that, when he was asked for any last words, he replied, 'No sir.' Black looked around the room as the execution began, lifting his head off the gurney multiple times, and could be heard sighing and breathing heavily. All seven media witnesses to the execution agreed he appeared to be in discomfort. 'Oh, it's hurting so bad,' Black said, as he lay with his hands and chest restrained to the gurney, a sheet covering up past his lower half, and an IV line in his right arm visible to media witnesses. 'I'm so sorry. Just listen to my voice,' responded his spiritual adviser in the death chamber. In mid-July, a trial court judge agreed with Black's attorneys and ordered officials to have the defibrillator deactivated. But Tennessee's Supreme Court overturned that decision last Thursday, saying the other judge lacked authority to order the change. The state disputed that the lethal injection would cause Black's defibrillator to shock him and said he wouldn't feel them regardless. Before the execution, the state said in a court filing that a "lethal dose of pentobarbital ensures that Black will not be conscious to experience any pain." The state said unconsciousness occurs within 20 to 30 seconds of administering the drug, followed by respiratory arrest and cardiovascular collapse. Black, 69, was in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions, his attorneys have said. They said he had an intellectual disability that should have protected him from execution, but was denied a new hearing because he had already been rejected under older standards. The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center and Black's attorneys said it's unaware of any other cases with similar claims to Black's about ICDs or pacemakers. Black's attorneys said they haven't found a comparable case, either. Henry also said officials struggled to insert an IV into his left side, and ultimately did after using some medical device, presumably to find a usable vein, Henry said. They seemed to have no trouble getting an IV into Black's right side, she said. That process is not viewed by media witnesses, whose perspective begins when Black is already strapped in and hooked up to IV lines on the gurney.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
How New England built the Plains
Advertisement But something shifted quickly and irrevocably that night he wrote about in 1854. It began with a man named Anthony Burns. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Burns had stowed away for weeks in the belly of a ship to escape enslavement in Virginia. By the time he stepped ashore in Boston, he had become both free and criminal — property that had, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, escaped its rightful owner. When federal marshals arrested him on false pretenses, hoping to sneak him back into bondage before the public noticed, Boston erupted. The courtroom became a spectacle. The public was barred. Burns's own lawyer was rendered powerless — forbidden to object, speak, or protect his client in any meaningful way. And in a final insult, a government agent tricked Burns into dictating a letter affirming his status as an enslaved person. The judge empathized with Burns but nonetheless ruled against him. Advertisement Slavery, it turned out, didn't need Southern soil. It could be enforced right in the cradle of abolition, in close proximity to the Boston Common. Amos A. Lawrence in 1880. Wikimedia Commons The city's Black residents, who had always known the fragility of their freedom, mobilized first. The pastor of the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury demanded Burns's release. Protests filled the streets. Fearing an uprising, the federal government fortified the courthouse even before the trial had concluded. President Franklin Pierce ordered troops to secure the building. Soldiers lined the entrances, and chains were fastened across the courthouse doors. What changed wasn't just policy. It was perception. The moral quarantine in which elite white New Englanders had sequestered themselves failed. Slavery had entered their bubble. Henry David Thoreau, speaking just weeks after Burns's trial, demanded that his fellow citizens choose moral clarity over legal comfort. 'Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?' he asked. 'Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made?' Amos Lawrence and others like him — well-heeled, genteel, cloistered — took notice. Eventually they also took action, albeit moderated and carried out on their own terms. Calls for a more direct confrontation with slavery were not only imaginable at the time — they were already echoing through New England's streets, pulpits, and newspapers. In the wake of Burns's arrest, some abolitionists demanded open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Many had supported similar efforts just three years earlier, when Shadrach Minkins, who had fled enslavement in Norfolk, Va., was forcibly rescued from a Boston courthouse by Black activists and white allies. With the help of the Boston Vigilance Committee, Minkins escaped via the Underground Railroad and reached safety in Canada. Figures like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison urged moral suasion and civil disobedience; others, including activists in Boston's Black community, proposed disrupting the legal process altogether. In this atmosphere of mounting urgency, even violence in the name of freedom was discussed. Advertisement But rather than confronting slavery where it stood and calling for direct abolition or cutting off commercial interaction with the American South, Lawrence chose to abolish only the chances for slavery's expansion. He became treasurer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a joint-stock corporation chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature with one aim: to raise funds to send free-soil settlers west to Kansas, in order that they might outnumber pro-slavery forces and tip the future of the American West toward freedom. A war New England hoped to fund, not fight Boston didn't send revolutionaries out west. It sent Congregationalists. Missionaries. Schoolteachers. Families armed with shovels, hymnals, rifles, and righteous intent. The Emigrant Aid Company raised funds through an exhaustive network of some 3,000 churches, many of them Quaker or Congregationalist. 'For Religion,' their circulars promised. 'For Education. For Temperance.' They were advocating a version of abolition that didn't disturb Boston's own social order. It was freedom as export. Righteousness at a distance. The ask was modest — $20 per settler, roughly $700 today. Enough to transport and equip a family to settle Kansas on behalf of abolition. Donations flooded in. The Rev. Horace James from Worcester sent $23.37, boasting of his congregation, 'Never did fingers and thumbs move more nimbly in the performance of any good work.' To him that meant that 'verily there is hope for Kansas.' Others weren't so flush with cash. The Rev. W.C. Jackson from Lincoln, Mass., whose flock scraped together $15, reported, 'Your circular for the Emigrant Aid Society came rather inopportunely for us farmers.' Some ministers like Jonathan Lee from Salisbury, Conn., apologized for the frugality of their flock: 'From my scanty purse a single dollar must be accepted in testimony of my interest in the cause of truth and freedom,' because, Lee wrote, 'I am without pastoral charge or salary.' Others enclosed neat bundles of cash with effusive letters, grateful for a moral cause that could be joined without leaving home. Lawrence threw himself into the effort. He wrote President Pierce — his cousin by marriage — to chide him for failing to protect free-staters. He tracked weapons shipments. He personally funded churches, schools, and armories. He, along with many others, made Kansas a proxy battlefield, a place to perform conviction while sidestepping a harder reckoning with what could be done to stop slavery entirely. Advertisement And Kansas, as it turned out, bled. Missourians — armed and incensed — flooded across the border. Ballot boxes were stuffed. Pro-slavery militias burned pressrooms. In 1856, just as the violence crested, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a searing speech comparing Kansas to a raped virgin and accusing Southern politicians of barbarism. In a more familiar scene, days later, a South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, stormed into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. This was the war New England had hoped to fund rather than fight. But the borders were dissolving. Eventually, the South seceded. And when Kansas did enter the Union as a free state in 1861, its fate had been sealed not by New England idealism but by the absence of Southern senators in Congress. Advertisement When the Civil War gave way to a fractured Reconstruction, Kansas endured not as a solution crafted by New England elites but as a promise seized by Black Americans themselves. As Reconstruction's guarantees faltered, many formerly enslaved people fled the South for the Plains, becoming known as Exodusters. Others, like Edward McCabe, envisioned Kansas not just as a sanctuary but as a staging ground — a terrain on which to build something autonomous and Black. For McCabe, Kansas — and later, Oklahoma — offered a second chance. Edward P. McCabe, circa 1883-1887. Kansas State Historical Society via National Park Service And the names live on. The college town of Lawrence, Kan., bears Amos A. Lawrence's name, a monument to abolitionism at arm's length. In Langston, Okla., the Black town McCabe helped found, street names like 'Massachusetts' signaled to Black settlers that they were heirs to a longer freedom struggle — one rooted in, but no longer dependent on, New England's conscience. The limits of New England's good intentions The West that New England built was funded by abolitionists who had converted not to revolution but to strategy. They filtered their moral convictions through propriety. It's worth asking what their legacy means now. We live in a moment when the very institutions Amos Lawrence once stood for — elite philanthropy, intellectual inquiry, and cautious reform — have come under fire. Harvard, a beacon of New England liberalism, finds itself besieged by accusations from both right and left. Elsewhere, DEI offices are shuttered. History curricula are rewritten. Librarians contend with what books to put on their shelves. Even here, in the bluest of blue states, there's talk of 'indoctrination,' 'wokeness,' and 'elites out of touch.' And here too, migrants are detained often without the norms and sorts of protections we assumed would be durable. Advertisement In the 1850s, Lawrence and his cohort were shaken into action by a single courtroom scene on Court Street. But their response came with a caveat: They would confront injustice without addressing it at home. Today, Court Street is quieter, humming more predictably with foot and car traffic — but the moral decisions we must make haven't gotten easier. Who we detain, whose histories we erase, which freedoms we underfund — all still happen in that old Boston bubble. The difference now is that there's no Kansas to send our convictions to.
