Latest news with #Chicago-bound
Mint
5 days ago
- Mint
Kansas man arrested for dragging American Airlines flight attendant up the aisle mid-air, faces up to 20 years in jail
A 24-year-old man from Kansas has been arrested for assaulting an American Airlines flight attendant on board, reports quoting prosecutors have said. According to a report by The New York Post, the man, identified as Julius Jordan Priester assaulted the flight attendant after ripping off his shirt. He allegedly threw the employee to the ground and dragged them up the aisle, as per the report quoting prosecutors. Priester, a 24-year-old resident of Wichita, boarded the American Airlines flight from Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. The Department of Justice said he was arrested and charged for assaulting the cabin crew member. The incident happened at around 10 pm when the Chicago-bound flight was mid-air, The Post reported, resulting in chaos. 'Thirty minutes to an hour into the flight, Priester stood up, began to take off his shirt, then ran to the back of the plane yelling 'Help me,'' United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut David Sullivan was quoted as saying. Priester then grabbed the victim who was seated, forcefully bringing them to the ground. 'He then grabbed a flight attendant ('the victim'), who was seated, shouted, 'You're coming with me,' and forcefully brought the victim to the ground,' Sullivan said. The attacker tried to drag the cabin crew member up the aisle but was stopped by passengers who rushed to save the employee. Sullivan's office further added that Priester continued to shout incoherent comments even after passengers helped him get seated. American Airlines issued a statement regarding the matter, lauding its cabin crew members for their assistance. 'We do not tolerate violence, and we thank our team members for their professionalism and our customers for their assistance,' it said. However, the incident forced the pilot to divert the plane back to Bradley after the captain declared an emergency. Following the safe touchdown of the flight, Connecticut State Police arrived onboard to arrest Priester, who was then taken to a hospital for evaluation. Prosecutors have also revealed that Priester already has a criminal history in Kansas, with charges including that of an aggravated assault. He is currently in police custody and will be produced at the court soon. Priester can face imprisonment for up to 20 years with charges of interfering with flight crew members and attendants. The condition of the affected flight attendant has not been revealed.
NDTV
6 days ago
- NDTV
US Man Charged For Assaulting American Airlines Flight Attendant In Mid-Air Meltdown
A 24-year-old Kansas man has been charged after he allegedly grabbed a flight attendant and dragged her up the aisle of a Chicago-bound flight, leaving from Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. The Department of Justice said Julius Jordan Priester was arrested and charged with assaulting the cabin crew member. The incident took place on Tuesday (May 27) when the American Airlines flight was over 30 minutes into the journey, according to a report in the New York Pos t. United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut David Sullivan said Priester stood up, started taking off his shirt and ran to the back of the plane yelling, "Help me". He added that Priester then grabbed a flight attendant, who was seated, and shouted, 'You're coming with me,' and forcefully brought the victim to the ground. As the kerfuffle ensued, several passengers intervened and managed to subdue Priester, bringing him back to his seat in the process. Although he continued acting erratically and making incoherent statements, the authorities added. Priester arrested The plane was diverted back to Bradley after the captain declared an emergency. As the plane safely touched down, Connecticut State Police arrived onboard and arrested Priester, who was taken to a local hospital for evaluation. The condition of the flight attendant, whose identity has not been disclosed, remains unknown. Meanwhile, American Airlines issued a statement, lauding the flight crew for their reaction to the incident. 'We do not tolerate violence, and we thank our team members for their professionalism and our customers for their assistance,' the statement said. Prosecutors revealed that Priester already has a criminal history in Kansas, including an aggravated assault charge. Priester remains in police custody with a court hearing lined up. The charges of interfering with flight crew members and attendants carries a maximum term of 20 years of imprisonment.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Wichita man charged with assaulting flight attendant
HARTFORD, Conn. (KSNW) – A 24-year-old Wichita man is facing a federal charge after allegedly assaulting a flight attendant aboard a Chicago-bound flight that departed from Bradley International Airport in Connecticut on Tuesday night. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut, Julius Jordan Priester was arrested and charged with interference with flight crew members and attendants — a felony that carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison. Federal authorities say Priester, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 3359, became disruptive about 30 minutes after takeoff. He reportedly stood up, began removing his shirt, and ran to the back of the plane yelling for help. Officials allege he then grabbed a seated flight attendant, shouted 'you're coming with me,' and pulled the attendant to the floor in an attempt to drag them up the aisle. Kansas farmer indicted for defrauding the government Several passengers intervened and restrained Priester in his seat, where he continued acting erratically and speaking incoherently, according to court documents. The pilot declared an emergency and returned the plane to Bradley, where it landed safely. Priester was taken into custody by Connecticut State Police and transported to a hospital for evaluation. He appeared in federal court in Hartford on Wednesday and remains in custody pending a bond hearing scheduled for May 30. The incident is being investigated by the FBI, with assistance from the Connecticut State Police. For more Kansas news, click here. Keep up with the latest breaking news by downloading our mobile app and signing up for our news email alerts. Sign up for our Storm Track 3 Weather app by clicking here. To watch our shows live on our website, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hindustan Times
06-05-2025
- Sport
- Hindustan Times
Teenager Anahat ready for senior world squash debut
New Delhi: Anahat Singh is a busy girl. Between reading A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, writing her Class 11 exams, catching up with family and painting, the 17-year-old is also gearing up for her first senior World Squash Championships. Anahat Singh will feature in her first senior World Squash Championships that is set to be held on May 9-17 in Chicago. (Getty Images) The India No.1 and the only woman player in the four-member Chicago-bound squad is unfazed. After blazing her trail on the junior circuit — she has three British Junior Open titles across age-groups — Anahat has made an encouraging foray into the senior circuit. With nine PSA titles out of 10 appearances, Anahat knows how to win. The double bronze medallist at the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games is going into the May 9-17 event having won her third British Junior Open. She then had an unblemished run at the 2025 Asian Junior Team Championships which helped India claim the bronze medal. The Delhi-born player then won the SRFI Indian Tour and the Indian Open events to break into the top 70 in the PSA rankings. 'I've been in good form over the past 2-3 competitions, the body is feeling good, the belief is there. Even during practice, I'm confident with the way I'm playing. I think it's the best I've played in the last few years,' she said. The senior worlds though 'feels different'. 'I've grown up watching this tournament. It is one event where the world's best turn up, and it's something I've always wanted to compete in,' she said. 'This year, I'm not really going there to win or anything. I'm just trying to go and play my best and do as well as I possibly can.' That means, by her own admission, getting past the second round. The world No.62 will open her campaign against Marina Stefanoni of US, ranked 28. Should she win, she'll meet either world No.15 Fayrouz Aboelkheir or world No.34 Hana Moataz, both from Egypt. The rankings gap notwithstanding, Anahat believes she can beat them. 'In my first two rounds, I'll meet opponents who I have seen a lot and I've played with them as well. And they're not in the top 10. There's always a chance to win and if I'm playing well, they'll be under pressure because they're ranked higher and more experienced.' She would know, considering the tables turn when she plays the juniors. 'There, I am expected to win every time, which puts a bit of pressure; I know there would be little challenge till the semis. But in seniors, even the opening rounds are very tough.' With squash making its debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Anahat is keen to grow in the game. Having the seasoned Saurav Ghosal as a mentor helps. The 38-year-old primarily helps Anahat manage and structure her calendar. 'I am not picking the tournaments blindly,' she said. 'We plan when and where I need to play, how much to exert, and so forth. Since LA is in the picture, it was more important for me to play the senior tournaments a bit more. While the qualification criterion is still not known, I want to climb the rankings as much as I can to put myself in the reckoning.'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Fiery 1960 rail disaster killed 14, but it brought out the best in Bakersfield
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — Hageman Road once cut a straight and direct east-west line through the alfalfa fields and grazing pastures of northwest Bakersfield, including the tiny farm town of Green Acres. Not anymore – not completely. Now, Hageman has a bump – a curved, northerly detour near Allen Road. The road then curves back to the south before resuming its straight course. The reason for the rerouting: So that Hageman approaches the Santa Fe railroad tracks at a 90-degree angle, rather than the acute, visibility-skewing angle it took at 5:08 p.m. on March 2nd, 1960. That's the moment all of Bakersfield shook with the hellish roar of death. The moment a geyser of fire shot 100 feet into the sky. The moment the Santa Fe Railway's Chicago-bound San Francisco Chief passenger train – flying down the tracks at 75 mph, and perhaps faster — smashed into a big rig pulling two trailers containing 8-thousand gallons of highly volatile, freshly refined Kern County fuel oil. The explosion killed 14 people instantly. 63 others – many of them broken, burned or both – were hospitalized. The worst train wreck in Kern County history made the front page of the New York Times and inspired a years-long safety review and infrastructure improvements that we still enjoy today. And it happened 65 years ago. The driver of the fuel truck – owned by Oglesby Brothers Petroleum Transportation Company – was 48-year-old John Garrett of Bakersfield. There were no rail-crossing arms at the intersection to warn vehicle traffic, only a reflector-sign on the side of the road. A coroner's inquest found that the train, a diesel electric, sounded its horn several times, but Garrett proceeded across the tracks anyway at 5 or 6 mph. The big rig driver may have realized, in his final moments, what was happening, because witnesses told investigators he turned his vehicle so it was almost parallel to the tracks as the thundering Chief bore down – behind schedule, according to a Santa Fe official, and so possibly exceeding the prescribed speed. The 11-car passenger train might have been going as fast as 90. We'll never know what Garrett was thinking because he was immediately incinerated. The explosion of metal against metal sent flaming oil raining down. 11 of the 83 passengers were killed, along with two Santa Fe employees, engineer Lanson Snyder and fireman A.H. Brawley, both of Fresno. Their charred bodies were found some distance from the front of the train, as if they had tried to scramble away at the last instant. Astronauts return home aboard SpaceX capsule after being stuck for 9 months The train rumbled on for a quarter-mile after the crash before it twisted and jerked to an agonizing halt. Some of the cars hung precariously over a 30-foot embankment. The screams of the trapped, injured and dying pierced the steady roar of the flames. 22-year-old Earl Blakely, a year out of the Army, had just arrived home from work when his father, Fred Blakely called. 'My father said, 'Earl, we've got a bad accident out here,' so I immediately got out here as fast as I could,' said Blakely. 'And we just started working, trying to get people out of the cars.' Fred Blakely had recently plowed his fields, and ambulances arriving on the scene couldn't get traction in the loose dirt to reach train cars containing the injured. The farmers of Rosedale and Greenacres came to the rescue. 'It looked like a sea of tractors, coming this way. And they were going across Allen Road,' said Blakely. A convoy of farm tractors converged on the crash scene to tow the ambulances into position. As doctors tended to the wounded, tractors scraped and flattened the ground so the ambulances could get out again. 24-year-old, Bob Hodel, was driving a company car home from Cal Kern Farm Supply when, about a mile directly ahead, he saw the eruption of flames and the plume of black smoke. Hodel, now 89, drove straight to the crash scene, arriving before any first responders. 'I was one of the first ones there,' said Hodel. 'I drove up on it and I came upon the carnage. I couldn't believe that,' said Hodel. 'Like Pick-Up Sticks…the cars were all kind of ways and it was a mess. People were coming out of windows. When I drove behind the train wreck and got out of my car there were screams and there was a lot of chaos, then I happened to see him under the metal. And he needed the most help, I thought, and so I centered on him.' The man's name was Archie, a young man about Hodel's age, and he was buried in twisted metal from the waist down. 'I don't know how he lived,' said Hodel. Hodel quickly drove home, grabbed his father's acetylene welding torch, and hustled back. For the next several hours, assisted by four or five others, Hodel painstakingly cut away the steel. 'Anyway, we talked to him for about three hours to keep him going. We knew that when we would release the metal that the blood would flown, so we had a doctor there,' said Hodel. 'I remember we lifted the metal up that was pressing his thigh down and it wasn't pleasant. We got him out of there.' 19-year-old Stephen Preston came upon the same nightmarish scene, pulling up alongside the tracks in his red-and-white 1959 Chevy Impala. Preston, now 84 and living in Contra Costa County, had just gotten off work at Brock's Department Store downtown and was driving home. He lived with his parents, in a house directly behind their family-run, roadside hamburger joint – Glen's Drive-In, which occupied the spot on Rosedale Highway where Country Boy Drive-in now stands. He saw some haunting things that evening. 'The first passenger car was on its side with the floor partially broken open and you could see, pretty sure it was a man, except he was looking like soup cans, and you could see him through this crack,' said Preston. 'There were three of us and somebody got an axe so we could break some of that metal away and we pulled him out, but he was dead, deceased.' The eastbound Chief, which left the East Bay city of Richmond, near Oakland, just before noon the morning of the crash, was in pieces. The Santa Fe Train's four diesel engines, two baggage cars and the first three passenger cars had hurtled off the tracks and lay scattered across a pasture, tangled in a grotesque, geometric design. The inferno was so hot, the truck's motor had been fused into the jumbled, molten mass of the train engine. Physicians climbed over and around the wreckage, feeling for pulses. Rescue crews rushed cutting torches to the scene to pull out trapped passengers. Floodlights turned the gathering dark into a false day as dozens, then hundreds, gathered at the site of destruction. Fred and Flossie Blakely's thousand-square foot house was only about 100 yards from the crash scene. With the Blakelys' permission, rescue workers, Santa Fe officials, law enforcement, media and aid workers moved in. 'As the evening wore on, Salvation Army ladies came on and my mom turned the inside of her house over to them and they did a wonderful job. They made sandwiches until there were no more sandwiches to be made,' said Blakely. Cranes explored the tangled mess looking for survivors – almost tenderly, in the words of a reporter for United Press International. One man, badly injured, finally was freed after eight hours. It could have been worse. Only one of the truck's two trailers exploded. 'A lot of people were walking around zombie-like. They were in shock, I'm sure…some of them were just staring at this thing wondering, 'Well, what happened,' I think,' said Preston. It took a dozen fire companies two hours to finally quench the raging flames, and many more hours for first responders to extract all of the passengers, living and dead. One man who rushed to the scene said he ran about 300 yards to the nearest passenger car. Children inside were crying. Passengers broke windows and passed the children through, into the arms of those waiting outside to take them. Radio stations put out a call for blood donations for the injured and the city responded with more than 250 pints. The crash took the life of one of the San Joaquin Valley's most distinguished medical scientists, Dr. Marshall J. Fiese, director of health services at Fresno State College. Dr. Fiese was prominent among those combating valley fever. The morning after the crash, Fred Blakely found a huge section of severed rail on his property. 'From where that piece of steel came off the rails, it threw it 250 feet through the air,' said Blakely. Santa Fe welders cut up the shattered rail into sections and hammered it into anvils, which they gave away to farmers from around the area who came to help out. The railroad people left the Blakelys with another souvenir. A melted rail car. 'They left the car intact. And they came out here with big excavators, not this modern kind we have now,' said Blakely. 'And they just kept digging until they got it deep enough and wide enough and long enough, they dropped it in there with big cranes and covered it up. That's a big hole.' As far as anyone knows, that melted passenger rail car is still buried somewhere alongside the railroad tracks, in the Santa Fe right-of-way, southeast of Allen and Hageman roads. Four days after the crash, Bob Hodel brought his mother Lydia to Mercy Hospital to visit Archie. Mother Hodel, who inspired so many of the recipes at Hodel's – the still-popular restaurant Bob Hodel would open seven years later – brought some of her renowned coffee cake. Archie wrote a letter of thanks after he recovered and made it home to Louisiana. The pages of the Bakersfield Californian were filled with letters of gratitude – both from victims from around the country who'd finally made it home and from locals. 'For Bakersfield, it was an event, it was a real event, and we were able to pitch in and did what we could,' said Blakely. For Earl Blakely, the whole tragic experience told him something important about his hometown. 'The folks in this whole Rosedale area – it was wonderful. I mean, what happened was not wonderful, it was horrible. But people all came together. They were all coming over with tools and so forth that they might never have seen again, but that wasn't the issue,' said Blakely. 'It was like what you would expect people to do.' Days after the crash, a state legislative committee launched a probe of oil tank truck accidents. Existing laws already required certain vehicles, including school buses and oil tankers, to stop at all rail crossings, regardless of whether a train was known to be approaching. But the legislature wanted to know what more could be done. Why John Garrett did not stop at the rail crossing was never clear – he had worked for Oglesby Brothers for 10 years and was on his second delivery trip of the day to the Humble Oil Company storage facility. Perhaps he was anxious to get home for dinner to his wife and 11-year-old son, and with no crossing arm to stop him, perhaps he daydreamed himself right into the path of the train. The cause of the wreck could not be officially determined; the truck driver's death made it impossible. Oglesby Brothers was named in 39 of the 40 lawsuits filed by the families of crash victims but the company stayed in business until 1979. The San Francisco Chief, which started its daily run between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1954, shut down in 1971, when Amtrak began operations. Today, a concrete train trestle crosses over Allen Road at Santa Fe Way, near Hageman, where the wreck took place, so the possibility of some kind of repeat incident is virtually nonexistent. The general problem still persists. Even though the grade crossing collision rate has dropped every year since 1978, many hundreds are killed every year. In 2024, the U.S. saw 2,045 highway-rail grade crossing collisions, resulting in 252 fatalities and 653 injuries. The rail industry continues to make a compelling case for highway safety – imploring that we respect the speed, weight and power of trains. They always win these collisions – except, as in cases like the 1960 disaster, everyone loses. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
