Latest news with #BrandonCarter
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Trial delayed for Fayetteville man accused of fatally attacking unhoused resident, injuring another
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) — The trial for a Fayetteville man accused of attacking two unhoused residents, with one later dying from their injuries, has been delayed, according to court documents. Jayden Leming, 19, was arrested on May 28 and initially charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder. Following the death of one victim at a nearby hospital, prosecutors upgraded the charges to one count of capital murder and one count of attempted capital murder. Leming has pleaded not guilty to those charges. Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Brandon Carter told KNWA/FOX24 that Leming's trial, which was scheduled to begin on Aug. 13, had been delayed. Carter said that a status hearing in the case was scheduled for Dec. 2. The Fayetteville Police Department said in a social media post that on May 25, officers responded to an assault and battery call at a day center serving unhoused residents. Officers found Phyllis Garrett, 62, and Donald Tatum, 59, critically injured after being attacked with a blunt object while sleeping, according to police. Surveillance video shows suspect Leming allegedly walking past others before targeting the pair. Leming reportedly claimed he was told to attack a man and woman matching their description. Garrett later died from her injuries, leading to Leming's charges being upgraded. Court records show Leming has a history of violence, including a March 2024 assault involving a pistol. Leming is being held in the Washington County Detention Center on a $750,000 bond. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CNN
6 days ago
- CNN
Key questions in Arkansas couple's killing remain unanswered as suspect pleads not guilty
Even as Andrew James McGann sits in jail accused of the ghastly double murder of parents on a hike at a state park in the Ozark Mountains, key questions linger about the motive. McGann, 28, pleaded not guilty Thursday to two charges of capital murder, Prosecuting Attorney Brandon Carter told reporters following an arraignment. McGann's attorneys have declined to comment on the case. He is next due in court November 14, Carter said. The former teacher was arrested after a days-long manhunt as he got his hair cut at a salon in Springdale, Arkansas, about 30 miles north of Devil's Den State Park. He is being held without bond at the Washington County Detention Center in Fayetteville, according to police and jail records. Here are some of the key questions about the July 26 fatal stabbing that remain unanswered: While McGann admitted to killing Cristen Brink, 41, and her husband Clinton Brink, 43, during an interview with investigators, why he allegedly did it remains a mystery. Arkansas State Police Col. Mike Hagar previously said the killings appeared to be 'a completely random event' because there's 'absolutely no indication, no reason whatsoever to believe there was any connection at all' between the Brinks and McGann. McGann had recently been hired as a 'teacher candidate' by Springdale Public Schools, according to a district spokesperson, but had not yet started working there. State records show he is currently licensed to teach elementary and middle school grades in at least three states: Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Most recently, he was a fifth-grade teacher in the Sand Springs Public Schools in Oklahoma, just west of Tulsa, according to the district. The couple and two of their daughters were hiking at the 2,500-acre Devil's Den State Park in northwest Arkansas when McGann approached them, police said. The park has thick vegetation and little to no cell phone service. Clinton Brink was first ambushed by McGann, police said, and after witnessing the attack, Cristen Brink ran away with her daughters, ages 7 and 9. The mother returned to help her husband, Arkansas State Police Maj. Stacie Rhoads said during a news conference, but she lost her life, too. 'They (the Brinks) absolutely protected those girls to their fullest extent, to the point that it cost them their lives,' Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Brandon Carter said. 'We're in awe of this mom and dad. We're also in awe of these girls.' At some point, a hiker on the trail saw the Brink children and found the bodies of their parents, according to a probable cause document filed by prosecutors. It's unclear how much time passed before the hiker was able to call 911 and report the deaths due to the lack of cell phone service in that area of the park. The couple's bodies were found on the Devil's Den Trail, audio from first responders indicated. While searching the trail, first responders heard shouts, scanner audio indicates, though it's not clear from whom. Authorities obtained a photo of a suspect and later, items seen in that photo were found during a search of McGann's home, along with knives, Rhoads said. However, it is unclear if the weapon used in the crime was among the collected items, Rhoads added. Officials have also not said what weapon they believe McGann used in the stabbing. Authorities launched an intense manhunt for McGann that ended four days after the murders when he was quietly apprehended at a hair salon. But it's unclear what may have led authorities to the hair salon. The information needed to track down the suspect 'all started with those two little girls,' said Hagar, the police chief. At first, the only description of the suspect police had was provided by the children who bore witness to the gruesome attack. But McGann was injured in the ordeal, resulting in blood loss, which allowed investigators to establish a DNA profile, officials said. The Brinks' daughters were not harmed and are safe with relatives, police have said. The Brinks also have a third daughter who was not on the trail with them that day, authorities said. The family had recently moved from another state to Prairie Grove, a small town in northwest Arkansas near the Oklahoma state line, according to police. Their relatives asked for privacy in a statement before McGann was arrested. 'Clinton and Cristen died heroes, protecting their little girls and they deserve justice. They will forever live on in all of our hearts,' their relatives said. Next month the Prairie Grove community is slated to host a community fundraiser to support the Brink family, Prairie Grove Mayor David Faulk told CNN affiliate KTHV. The money raised from the event will go directly to the Brink children in an effort to give them 'a breath of fresh air' and can be 'one less thing they have to worry about,' he said. 'No matter what, there's going to be a stigma in the back of their mind that they will remember this is the place that they've lost their parents,' Faulk said, adding he hopes the Brink girls also remember Prairie Grove was a place where the community came together and supported them. CNN's Dianne Gallagher, Andy Rose, Dalia Faheid, Rebekah Riess and Hanna Park contributed to this report.
Fox News
7 days ago
- Fox News
Arkansas prosecutor says he is seeking death penalty against suspect in Devil's Den murders
Washington County Prosecuting Attorney Brandon Carter said his office is seeking the death penalty against Andrew James McGann. (Credit: Derek Shook for Fox News Digital)
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Intelligent life may be more common than we thought
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The evolution of humans on Earth may not be entirely exceptional. That is because intelligent life is likely to form if certain planetary conditions are met, a new study suggests. This idea displaces the previously-held belief that humanity's appearance occurred thanks to a highly improbable series of events. For a long time, scientists believed that human life on Earth only came about by chance, and therefore the formation of intelligent life in other places would be equally far-fetched. However, a new paper published in the journal Science Advances found that there were no "hard steps" required for humans to evolve and that life is likely to have formed elsewhere in the universe as well. "Homo sapiens and analogous extraterrestrial life forms may be the probable end result of biological and planetary evolution when a planet has a certain set of attributes that make it habitable, rather than requiring countless lucky breaks," said Reuters. The theory that intelligent life forming on Earth was an incredible occurrence first originated in a 1983 paper by Australian physicist Brandon Carter, which said that the "evolutionary chain included at least one but probably not more than two links that were highly improbable (a priori) in the available time interval." Carter posited that because it took so long for human life to form on Earth, it must be difficult, making the existence of humans entirely a fluke. But this new study identified a fallacy in Carter's reasoning. Carter "specifically assumed that the age of the sun, and therefore the Earth, should have no bearing on how quickly complex life evolved," said Researchers now say that is not true. "Life might have originated very quickly once temperatures were appropriate for the stability of biomolecules and liquid water," said Jennifer Macalady, a study co-author and microbiology professor at Pennsylvania State University, to Reuters. "The Earth has only been habitable for humans since the second rise of oxygen in the atmosphere approximately 0.5 billion years ago, meaning that humans could not have evolved on Earth prior to that relatively recent moment." Essentially, life on Earth evolved exactly when it was supposed to. While this is not direct proof of the existence of aliens, it does mean "our existence is probably not an evolutionary fluke," Macalady said to Popular Science. "We're an expected or predictable outcome of our planet's evolution, just as any other intelligent life out there will be." In turn, "maybe other planets are able to achieve these conditions more rapidly than Earth did, while other planets might take even longer," said a release on the paper. There are still unanswered questions. For example, scientists do not know the origin of life on Earth. "This moment of genesis is currently lost in the mists of time, and we cannot yet say whether it was a fluke one-off event or whether it was an easy step," said While the new paper is not proof that intelligent life was intended to happen, it does offer a different perspective on evolution. The theory also opens the door to the consideration of intelligent life after humans on Earth. "If we were to go extinct, some other form of intelligent life could readily emerge in our stead," said Popular Science. "And humanity is less likely to be alone in the universe than we thought."
Asharq Al-Awsat
15-02-2025
- Science
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Was the Emergence of Intelligent Life on Earth Just a Fluke? Some Scientists Think Not
Roughly 300,000 years ago, our species first appeared on the African landscape before spreading globally and coming to dominate the planet. All this happened about 4.5 billion years after Earth formed, with innumerable steps occurring in between that made our planet a cradle for intelligent life. An influential scientific thesis - called the "hard steps" theory and first presented in 1983 - has held that this outcome was a long shot and that the emergence of technological-level intelligent life on Earth or elsewhere was highly improbable. But perhaps this result was not so unlikely after all, according to scientists who are now advancing an alternative theory, Reuters reported. These scientists propose that Homo sapiens and analogous extraterrestrial life forms may be the probable end result of biological and planetary evolution when a planet has a certain set of attributes that make it habitable, rather than requiring countless lucky breaks. The path toward intelligent life, they argue, may be more of a predictable process, unfolding as global conditions allow in a manner that should not be considered unique to Earth. "In short, our framework shows how hard steps may not actually exist - past evolutionary transitions that needed to happen for us humans to be here may not have been hard or unlikely in the available time," said Dan Mills, a postdoctoral researcher in geomicrobiology at the University of Munich and lead author of the study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, opens new tab. Physicist Brandon Carter devised the hard steps theory. It stresses that the long road to the emergence of humankind necessitated passage through various intermediate steps, each highly unlikely. Over the years, scientists have tried to identify some of these hard steps. These include the emergence of single-celled living organisms on primordial Earth, the initial oxygenation of the atmosphere by photosynthesis, the evolutionary transition from prokaryotic cells that lack a nucleus and other internal structures to eukaryotic cells that have them, and the appearance of complex organisms such as multicellular animals. And then, the final proposed hard step is the appearance of Homo sapiens and milestones such as language and technology. A species with advanced technological capabilities emerged on Earth relatively late in the Earth's habitable history, with the sun expected to increase in luminosity and boil away our planet's oceans about a billion years from now. This has inspired the argument that Earth is an incredibly rare planet that managed to accomplish the needed hard steps before becoming rendered uninhabitable. The new theory was devised by a team of two geobiologists and two astronomers. They propose that humankind's emergence followed the sequential opening of various "windows of habitability" over Earth's history, driven by factors such as changes in nutrient availability, sea surface temperatures, ocean salinity levels and atmospheric oxygen levels. Due to these factors, Earth only relatively recently became hospitable to a species like ours, they said, and that once those conditions existed the evolutionary path was relatively rapid. "Biological innovations proposed as hard or unlikely might actually occur quickly - geologically speaking - as soon as the environment permits," said Penn State microbiologist Jennifer Macalady, one of the researchers. "For example, life might have originated very quickly once temperatures were appropriate for the stability of biomolecules and liquid water. The Earth has only been habitable for humans since the second rise of oxygen in the atmosphere approximately 0.5 billion years ago, meaning that humans could not have evolved on Earth prior to that relatively recent moment," Macalady added. Astronomers are searching for evidence of life beyond Earth and have identified roughly 5,800 exoplanets - planets beyond our solar system. Some of them are uninhabitable gas giants akin to Jupiter but some of them are rocky worlds like our solar system's four terrestrial planets that include Earth. Astrophysicist and study co-author Jason Wright, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, said that a best estimate right now is that somewhere around half of stars have a planet about the size of Earth orbiting at about the right distance to host liquid water, a key ingredient for life. "Understanding the probability of intelligent life emerging helps us understand our own place in the world," Mills said. "Are we humans a cosmic fluke, as the hard steps model predicts? Or are we instead the more expected and typical outcome of a living planet, as our alternative framework suggests?"
