Latest news with #HallieJacksonNOW
NBC News
6 days ago
- Health
- NBC News
The Seminole Sentinel chronicled the public health crisis. Shelby Tauber for NBC News Measles Outbreak How measles tore through a remote West Texas city Anti-vaccine activists seized on a deadly outbreak in Seminole, setting off a battle between fringe doctors and mainstream medicine.
June 4, 2025, 5:00 AM EDT By Brandy Zadrozny SEMINOLE, Texas — On a Saturday in mid-March, Dr. Ben Edwards put on his scrubs and drove to a sheet metal building in this tiny West Texas city to treat children with measles. Red spots mottled his face; Edwards was sick with measles, too. An outbreak of the disease was swelling in Gaines County, a rural community with one of the lowest childhood vaccination rates in the country. For two weeks, lines of families had snaked around the building's dusty parking lot, almost all belonging to the area's Mennonite community, a religious group known to speak Low German and keep to themselves, mostly sending their children to church-run schools. The parents were concerned by the illness that had speckled their children's bodies and weakened their breathing, but their distrust of vaccines and hospitals ran deeper. Edwards' alternatives seemed a safer bet. Hastily repurposed from general store to clinic, the space Edwards worked in held little besides folding tables, plastic chairs and boxes of vitamins and supplements flown in by private plane. Feverish children coughed and whimpered. A flushed baby lay in his mother's arms. Another child curled under a blanket on her mother's lap. A crew from the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense documented it all. Edwards handed out cod liver oil — pungent liquids and pills rich in vitamins A and D — and prescribed steroid inhalers. Neither treatment can prevent or cure measles, and medical associations have warned against them; Edwards said he had seen the therapies ' work beautifully.' 'They had nowhere else to turn,' Edwards said later on his podcast, defending his decision to run the children's clinic while he was contagious. But down the road at Seminole's only hospital, a waiting room made for measles patients often sat empty. And even as infections soared, there was little demand for the only proven way of preventing them: On a recent weekday, just four people had come by the county's free vaccine clinic. For more on this story, watch "Hallie Jackson NOW" on NBC News NOW at 5 p.m. ET So two responses were in motion to deal with an extremely contagious disease that threatens small children the most. One was grounded in science and evidence, led by overwhelmed public health officials. The other was driven by distrust and propaganda — spread by anti-vaccine activists and alternative practitioners like Edwards, and, for the first time in memory, backed by the federal government itself under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As founder, chairman and chief counsel of the nonprofit Children's Health Defense, Kennedy had spent two decades building the modern anti-vaccine movement. Now, as health secretary, he was downplaying the dangers of measles, spreading falsehoods about the risk of vaccines and urging parents to 'do your own research.' Kennedy broadcast these messages as the worst measles outbreak since the 1990s flared in one of the most vulnerable places — an isolated Mennonite community already skeptical of outsiders, primed to resist government intervention and influenced by misinformation that Kennedy had helped mainstream. In a matter of weeks, an illness once eradicated in the United States would burn through Gaines County's unvaccinated, hospitalizing scores of children and leaving two little girls dead. During the surge, the anti-vaccine movement came to town and turned Seminole into a front line in an information war — fought by fringe doctors, anti-vaccine activists and politicians pushing unproven cures, false hope and a narrative that shifted the blame back to conventional medicine once the costs of vaccine refusal became devastatingly clear. The story of Seminole — based on dozens of interviews, podcasts and news reports and descriptions from public health officials, Mennonite residents, traditional and alternative doctors and anti-vaccine organizations — offers a look behind the battle lines, as well as a warning for a country increasingly fractured not just by politics, but by competing realities. Measles arrives, then misinformation Sick children began showing up at Texas hospitals in January. Dr. Leila Myrick was on call when the first child landed in Seminole's emergency room, where she consulted a medical textbook to confirm measles, a disease she had never actually seen. Myrick had moved her family from Atlanta to Seminole in 2020, drawn by the promise of small-town medicine in a city cut out of the desert, a conservative but diverse community where many of her patients were Mennonite and Latino. She had taken care of their families in the five years since — through Covid and baby deliveries and everything in between. A framed poster of Myrick cradling newborns hangs in the hallway outside her office. Measles now threatened these children, and Myrick did what she could to persuade parents to vaccinate them. She gave interviews, answered calls on a local German-language radio show, stayed late at her clinic and worked weekends at the hospital. But her message faced competition. Children's Health Defense, the country's largest anti-vaccine nonprofit, has downplayed the danger of measles for decades, falsely calling it benign and beneficial to the immune system. Seminole's outbreak didn't deter the group, which wrongly suggested it had been caused by a local vaccination campaign and then floated other contradictory theories: that the vaccines were failing, shedding the measles virus, or perhaps working too well, leading somehow to a super virulent strain. Myrick watched her neighbors repeat these distortions in a local Facebook group, 'Seminole TX Residents NEED to KNOW,' sometimes naming her directly. 'Every doctor that pushes the jabs gets commission from the big Pharma,' one woman wrote. In late February, the Gaines County library posted a flyer 'kindly' asking that unvaccinated and measles-sick patrons not come in. By the evening, after an outcry in the comments, the library removed the post. 'I see a vulnerable population getting fed the wrong information and making decisions for their children's health based on wrong information,' Myrick said. 'And I feel helpless.' Responsibility for managing the outbreak fell on Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District. Holbrooks grew up in Seminole and after stints in Lubbock and Austin moved back in 2008 to lead public health across four counties. Run on about $2 million in grants a year, the health department's responsibilities are broad — vaccines and family planning, but also disaster response, fire protection, food safety, landfills, inspections, permits and more. Holbrooks didn't see measles coming, though he is quick to say he probably should have — vaccine exemptions in Gaines County had more than doubled in the last 10 years, and about 1 in 5 kindergarteners were now skipping the shots. When the first cases were confirmed at the end of January, 'my heart sank,' Holbrooks said. The district kept only a couple of doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines on hand — enough for new families moving into the area, not to meet the sudden need of an outbreak. The two epidemiologists Holbrooks had on staff were immediately overwhelmed by case investigations. Holbrooks also didn't have outreach materials in Low German or a relationship with the Mennonite community, which he now urgently needed a way into. He turned to the state, which brought in nurses, testing supplies and vaccines. He set up a vaccine and testing clinic outside Seminole Hospital District; a spray-painted arrow on unfinished plywood signaled where to go. Billie Dean, a nurse and site leader at the clinic, remembered one Mennonite woman who drove by every day in a compact gold car. 'We would see her pull in, and we were like, 'Oh, she's back,'' Dean said. Each day, they told her how many people had gotten vaccinated the day before, how none had come back with side effects. After two weeks, she rolled down her window and said she was ready. A few days later, she came back with her daughter and grandson. Holbrooks printed flyers in English, Spanish and, with the assistance of a local author, Low German, to distribute at grocery stores, libraries, post offices and churches, and he gave updates on the local TV and radio stations. Still, cases in the area ticked up, nearly doubling in a week to 80, a sure undercount, since officials knew many people weren't being tested. In a letter published in February in The Mennonite Post, a German-language newspaper, a married Seminole couple reported 'a lot of sick people here. Many have fever or diarrhea, vomiting or measles.' Epidemiology deals in numbers. With measles, they go like this: With 1,000 cases, about 200 children will require hospitalization, 50 will develop pneumonia, and one to three will die. The numbers caught up to Seminole on Feb. 26. A child's death brings anti-vaccine activists to town Kayley Fehr was 6 years old. She had two brothers and two sisters and, according to her obituary, she loved to sing and make people laugh. She was unvaccinated. Kayley got measles around the same time as her four siblings. As her fever rose, she struggled to breathe and became tired. The doctor gave her Tylenol and something for her cough, but she was still unable to catch her breath and couldn't eat because of the sores in her mouth. Kayley's parents took her to Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted to the intensive care unit. Kayley deteriorated quickly. Her final hours were spent too weak to speak, her breathing shallow, her mouth sticky from thirst. She was sedated, intubated and placed on a ventilator. The details surrounding Kayley's death came weeks later when her parents sat for an interview with Children's Health Defense. Speaking through an interpreter and tears, they shared the story of their loss. That interview solidified a shifting narrative. After Kayley's death, Children's Health Defense pivoted to a frame that the group had sharpened during previous outbreaks and perfected with Covid: that Kayley had died with measles, not from it; that the virus was incidental and some other ailment or failure had killed her. To communicate that story, the activists needed someone with more authority. They needed a doctor. Ben Edwards practiced conventional family medicine in a small-town clinic in Post, Texas, but around 2013, as he tells it, he grew disillusioned, awed by an Amarillo holistic practitioner who denied the power of germs and preached the outdated theory of terrains: that the body's constitution determines whether a sickness takes hold. Edwards' new guru, who had lost his medical license and who the Texas Medical Board called a 'threat to the public welfare,' sold nutrition, supplements and lifestyle coaching — and some unorthodox and unproven interventions, such as ketamine to 'cure' autism. When Edwards tried to implement what he was learning, he was fired from his county clinic — now free, as he saw it, to strike out on his own. More than a decade later, Edwards has a sleek cash-only clinic in downtown Lubbock with a small waterfall outside the lobby, a lounge for IV treatments and a studio where he hosts his podcast, 'You're the Cure.' Kayley's death set off a series of events that brought Edwards — and later Children's Health Defense — to Seminole. At the end of February, Edwards got a call from Tina Siemens, one of his earliest patients, who often describes herself as 'the bridge' between Seminole's Mennonites and the outside world. Siemens, who runs a small museum of local Mennonite history, had helped local officials translate materials on vaccination and testing into Low German. Now, she told Edwards that Kayley's parents were worried about their other children, who were still sick with measles. Edwards met the family at Kayley's viewing on March 1, where he gave them cod liver oil and a prescription for budesonide, a steroid inhaler that's mostly used for asthma. Edwards had gotten the idea from Richard Bartlett, a devout Christian and emergency medicine doctor in Odessa, who said he discovered the steroid as a ' silver bullet ' against Covid after being divinely inspired during a nap. (Research on its efficacy is mixed.) The next morning, Edwards wondered: What if he could treat everybody? He ordered 1,000 bottles of cod liver oil and vitamin C from his supplier, and a pilot — also a patient of Edwards — flew to Scottsdale, Arizona, to pick them up. Volunteers back in Seminole unloaded the boxes of capsules and liquids in the empty space next to a Mennonite-owned shop, Health-2-U. By the afternoon, people had brought in tables and chairs, making a waiting room on one side and a clinic on the other. Children's Health Defense launched a fundraiser, taking in more than $16,000 to 'defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles.' About 70 kids came through the first day by Edwards' count. Some were already sick — with fevers that wouldn't break and coughs that lingered. Others were just beginning to show symptoms. Edwards returned to his pop-up clinic the next day. Another packed room waited for him. The story of the Lubbock doctor helping kids for free spread fast. Asked about his newfound popularity among the Mennonites, Edwards began to cry. 'It makes me real sad,' Edwards said in a phone interview in March. 'Why am I the only doctor out there treating these kids?' Meanwhile, Edwards urged his friend Bartlett, the doctor who advocated for budesonide, to go to Covenant Children's Hospital to intervene in the most serious cases. Wearing his white doctor's coat, Bartlett met the parents of one sick child as she lay in the pediatric ICU. Announcing himself as a 'friend of the family' — a term he later said on his podcast he used to gain access to the secure floor — he pulled Covenant's attending doctor aside. Bartlett said that budesonide had saved Covid patients and it would work now. According to Bartlett, the doctor relented and added the treatment, because the parents wanted it. Bartlett then went to another pediatric ICU room. 'The same doctor looked at me,' Bartlett said. 'He was ticked. He said, 'You again?'' Covenant Children's Hospital viewed Bartlett's intervention as interfering with care. The hospital issued a trespass warning and put a photo of Bartlett in the security office. Children's Health Defense glowingly covered Edwards' makeshift clinic, and Kennedy spoke directly to the doctor, praising his treatments on Fox News as producing 'very, very good results.' The following week, Children's Health Defense landed in Seminole and turned the crisis into content. Led by Polly Tommey — a self-described autism mom and co-creator of the anti-vaccine 'Vaxxed' films — they drove in from Austin through dust storms, 'to see for ourselves what was going on.' A group of Mennonite parents, including Kayley's, gathered to tell their stories of vaccines and measles on camera. They described a boy who developed seizures after an MMR shot when he was a baby in Mexico; a teenage girl with exhausting tics and limb pain caused by childhood vaccines; a mother whose church raised money for a stem cell transplant in China to undo the vaccine damage that had left her son in a wheelchair. These stories — compelling and unverifiable — were the kind Children's Health Defense had used to raise more than $67 million over the last decade. Siemens, who had brought Edwards in to treat Kayley's siblings, hosted the taping in her museum of Mennonite history. She described the parents' stories as 'mighty, mighty testimonies,' living warnings passed through the community's families and congregations that led the newest generation of parents to decide that vaccinating their children was too great a risk. Kayley's parents knew those stories well. They told Tommey that even now, they still wouldn't vaccinate. 'The measles wasn't that bad,' her mother, Eva Fehr, said. The hospital's insufficient care, she implied and Children's Health Defense outright said, was to blame for Kayley's death. Kayley's parents didn't respond to requests for comment. After the video featuring them circulated online, Covenant Children's issued a statement saying it contained 'misleading and inaccurate claims.' While the hospital was bound by patient confidentiality, 'What we can say is that our physicians and care teams follow evidence-based protocols and make clinical decisions based on a patient's evolving condition, diagnostic findings, and the best available medical knowledge.' Children's Health Defense, Tommey and Siemens did not respond to requests for comment. Bartlett declined to comment. Stopped recently on a walk near his clinic, Edwards said he would only speak off the record, but he later responded to several questions in writing. Doctors and nurses at Covenant Children's who were mourning Kayley — and were still caring for the sickest measles patients — took the claims personally. 'It is exhausting to hear, 'I have my own facts, and I've done my own research, and I don't believe your facts, and I know you're a doctor, but I have different knowledge,'' said Dr. Lara Johnson, the hospital's chief medical officer. 'And I always want to be compassionate and sympathetic to patients, because everyone's trying to do the best for themselves, everyone's trying to make the best decisions that they can.' The alternatives came with their own complications. Johnson said children with measles turned up at the hospital with liver problems from taking too much vitamin A, one of the supplements promoted by Edwards. In a text, Edwards discounted the idea that any children got sick from cod liver oil. 'I have a suspicion that the alleged vitamin A toxicity diagnosis is very questionable,' he said. For Johnson, the public mistrust felt like a replay of Covid. 'Everyone's kind of mourning the loss of the way it used to be,' she said. Federal public health workers try to build bridges Kayley's death spurred Texas to ask for federal help. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a group of epidemiologists to Lubbock, and one of them, Jonathan Yoder, moved into Holbrooks' Seminole office. Yoder had asked to come. He'd grown up in a conservative Amish Mennonite church. His father, who he says 'got off the farm and went to school,' ran a small environmental health department in the Florida panhandle, fielding calls about septic tanks, rabid animals — whatever came in. Yoder swore he'd never work in public health. He studied psychology and worked as a social worker, but he burned out, and after going back for a master's degree in public health, Yoder ended up at the CDC. For two decades he's traveled to disasters around the globe: Ebola, Covid and Flint, Michigan. Once in Seminole, Yoder started making calls to pastors, midwives, the county judge, the host of the German-language radio show, the editor of a 50-year-old Mennonite newspaper — anyone with a link to the community. He speaks softly, with a slow, careful cadence. On these calls, he mostly listened. He learned that the Mennonite pastors weren't keen to talk about vaccination from the pulpit and no one wanted a clinic in their church or school. Mistrust of outsiders generally and governments specifically was woven into the community's history. The conservative Anabaptist group had settled in Gaines County after moving from Mexico in the late 1970s. After pooling their money and pouring millions into bad land deals — which secured acres of farmland but not the rights to the water below it — hundreds of families were told within months that they would be deported. They pushed back, and their work ethic and faith won over neighbors, the mayor of Seminole, Texas lawmakers and, eventually, Congress, which passed a law in 1980 granting them residency. Fears of being kicked out of the country lingered, though, as did anxiety among undocumented Mennonite families who had come from Mexico more recently. Yoder knew it would be important, as Lubbock's public health director had written in an email to the state earlier in the year, to 'not go in telling people what to do.' So Yoder focused on building bridges. In March, he met with John Dueck, a former school superintendent in Paraguay and long-haul truck driver who now edits The Mennonite Post, a bi-monthly newsletter that connects far-flung communities from Bolivia to Canada, where Dueck now lives. Many of the Post's readers live in rural areas — some without internet or cell service — where the paper serves as a lifeline, delivering news of births, deaths and harvests. Dueck travels to gather stories. On Dueck's trip to Seminole, he couldn't stay with families as he usually did — too many kids were sick. A few weeks later, he published an editorial outlining the facts about measles and vaccination. 'Let's demonstrate our love and care for others by taking steps to prevent the spread of this disease,' he wrote. Dueck faced criticism, which he said he understood. Many of the people he'd spoken with in Seminole believed newer vaccines were more dangerous. Some told him the Covid pandemic had shown how health authorities might orchestrate a crisis — or even use vaccines to control people's lives. 'They were afraid,' Dueck said. A second death draws RFK to Seminole A little over a month after Kayley, another child died. Daisy Hildebrand was 8 years old. She had blonde hair and wore glasses. She was the oldest of three children and she loved to play outside. She was unvaccinated. Daisy was generally healthy but had been feeling bad for weeks. On a family trip to Mexico, her eyes got sore and she had trouble breathing. She was diagnosed with measles and pneumonia. When Daisy was admitted to UMC Health System's hospital in Lubbock, she fought to breathe, was intubated and on April 3, she died. A cast of fringe doctors associated with Children's Health Defense returned to the playbook, separating the pneumonia from the measles that preceded it, and claiming, once again, that the hospital was at fault. Via webcam this time, Tommey interviewed Daisy's father, Peter Hildebrand, who blamed the hospital for Daisy's death and stood by his choice not to vaccinate. Tommey told him the interview would 'save lives.' In the weeks that followed, as Hildebrand tried to get measles removed from his daughter's death certificate, he and his wife started getting 'random phone calls, people telling us that we're going to hell for killing our daughter.' 'I love my kids,' he said in a phone interview. 'On top of what I've been dealing with, I don't need that type of bulls---, you know?' UMC Health declined to comment, citing patient confidentiality. Hildebrand drew support from a surprising official source: Kennedy, who flew to Seminole to attend Daisy's funeral on April 6, and then publicly shared her name for the first time on X. It was a stunning departure from public health protocol, in which the deaths of individual patients — especially children — are shared carefully. Kennedy bucked other norms. The HHS secretary communicated directly with Siemens, who ran the Mennonite history museum, and Edwards, who ran the makeshift clinic. He offered only the faintest endorsement of vaccines — while downplaying their effectiveness and exaggerating their risks. He incorrectly speculated on national television that the girls who died may have been unhealthy or malnourished. He praised Edwards' unproven therapies as 'miraculous.' Now he was in Seminole: the nation's top health official championing alternative medicine in the midst of a deadly outbreak. That evening, after Daisy's funeral, Kennedy joined the families for a quiet dinner at Siemens' museum. Edwards and Bartlett, the budesonide advocate, were there. Holbrooks, who led the county's measles response, came too, shaking Kennedy's hand and thanking him for sending Yoder. Kennedy later tweeted photos from the gathering. In the caption, he called Edwards and Bartlett 'extraordinary healers.' The firestorm recedes By early May, the outbreak had finally run out of unvaccinated children to infect. Yoder had packed up and returned to Atlanta. At an empty show barn that still offered drive-through vaccines, it was getting too hot for the pair of nurses who staffed it — and there were few takers left. And the metal building at the center of town showed no trace of Edwards or his treatments. It's now a general store, where traditional Mennonite dresses hang beside bolts of fabric, herbal teas and soft lovies crocheted by the shopkeeper's granddaughter. 'Sigh of relief,' Rob Franklin, editor of the Seminole Sentinel, the long-running semiweekly newspaper, said of its May headline: No New Measles Cases in County. Franklin said the community was fed up with the outside attention. Everyone just wanted to move on. 'They got tired of being portrayed like a problem,' he said. Holbrooks is still working to capture the full toll of the outbreak, collecting data from alternative practitioners. On Friday, following an inquiry from NBC News, Edwards emailed Holbrooks the accounting of his measles patients: 261 cases, nearly all children. In his office recently, when asked what he's learned over the last few months, Holbrooks paused. He ticked off the people who helped him — doctors, city judges, epidemiologists, paramedics, school leaders — and seemed to regret the relationships he hadn't been able to cement. 'If it taught me anything, it's just how important it is to build connections before an outbreak,' he said. 'Don't wait.' Holbrooks recalled a pre-dawn tornado that tore through Seminole in 1982, leveling some homes and businesses and leaving others untouched. One reporter wrote the city looked like it had survived a small war. The recovery effort pulled the town together, Holbrooks remembered. 'You never know when you're going to need your neighbor.' Brandy Zadrozny Brandy Zadrozny is a senior reporter for NBC News. She covers misinformation, extremism and the internet. Erika Edwards contributed.
NBC News
02-05-2025
- NBC News
A Mississippi man spent 940 days in jail waiting for a trial that never came
U.S. news Sinatra Jordan was accused of firing at police officers and leading them on a chase through the streets of Jackson. Then the officers were arrested. By Jon Schuppe JACKSON, Miss. — Sinatra Jordan stepped out the glass doors of the Raymond Detention Center and headed toward his father's waiting car. It had been 940 days, and he wasn't going to linger. Jordan, 32, was dressed in the same blue T-shirt and dark denim shorts he'd been wearing since he was brought to the jail on Aug. 15, 2022, accused of starting a car chase and firing at police. Jordan insisted that he did not have a weapon. He said the officers had shot into his car without provocation, a bullet striking his friend in the passenger seat — a mother of five who was left seriously wounded. As months passed with no trial, no hearing, no updates and rare interactions with his lawyers, there were many times, alone and despairing in jail, when he wondered if anyone was listening. Then, in an extraordinary turn, the blame shifted onto the officers and the bulk of the case against Jordan was dropped. Now he was free. For more on this story, watch 'Hallie Jackson NOW' on NBC News NOW at 5 p.m. ET. I was there to greet him on the evening of March 11 — and, I hoped, to understand what exactly had happened the night of the shooting, and why he had languished behind bars for so long. I'd spent years reporting on a string of shootings by the Mississippi Capitol Police, including this one. The force had mostly provided security for government buildings, until three summers ago, when the governor deployed officers to the streets of Jackson to tamp down crime. Jordan and I communicated regularly, first by letter, then by phone, as he waited for a trial date that never came. He often asked me for news about his case, which I was unable to provide. 'I just want to go home,' he'd tell me. One option was to admit guilt and hope for an early release. Jordan would not. He insisted the police had lied, but without proof, it was his word against theirs. Even after the officers were arrested and accused of unlawfully firing on Jordan's car, which they denied, the evidence against them remained a secret to Jordan and his lawyers. The investigative file, which I obtained after Jordan's case was resolved, included hundreds of pages of notes, recordings of interviews, detailed evidence and witness information. It was a rare look inside the machinations of a criminal case. But there was no gotcha. As it turned out, Jordan's ordeal was the result of an opaque and overburdened criminal justice system where judges, prosecutors, investigators and court-appointed defense lawyers are struggling to keep pace with a tide of cases, perpetuating delays that force defendants to wait years for their day in court — and postpone justice for victims. 'It's stressful,' Jordan said, 'not knowing when you're coming home, not knowing when you'll be able to see the judge.' I attended his final court appearance and then waited for Jordan outside the jail. He emerged holding an armload of court papers, still wearing his jail-issue slides. I told him it was nice to meet him in person. Jordan grinned hesitantly, as if he weren't quite sure this was real. 'Yes, sir,' he replied. 'It's been a long time.' The night of Aug. 14, 2022, began with a casual drive, according to Jordan's telling. He and a friend, Sherita Harris, were cruising downtown Jackson with no goal other than to relax. Harris had rented the car, a Nissan Rogue with Arizona plates, after hers was damaged. Jordan was driving — even though he had a suspended license. He'd grown up in a nearby working-class neighborhood, the only son of a single mother. Jordan graduated from high school and studied business at a community college with dreams of starting an aftercare program for schoolchildren, he said. But he couldn't balance school and work, so he dropped out and took service industry jobs — Wendy's, McDonald's, Home Goods. He lived with his mother in the house where he was raised. Jordan and Harris had known each other for years, but only recently began hanging out; she was 38 and had just started a job managing a charter school cafeteria. As they drove down State Street that evening, an unmarked cop car pulled up behind them and flashed its lights. The Capitol Police officers inside were members of a new street crimes unit focused on intercepting guns, drugs and stolen cars. They had no body or dashboard cameras, and their policies on when to use force were outdated. As he moved into the right lane, Jordan said the police suddenly opened fire. He looked over at Harris, who was slumped over and covered in blood; she'd been struck in the head. Panicked that he, too, would be shot, he said he drove off to get to safety. Jordan made his way to his neighborhood, about a mile northwest. "I was just confused and didn't know what to do,' he said. He pulled over at Lamar and Adelle streets, then got out and ran. He didn't get far before he was arrested. Harris said she remembers Jordan telling her police lights were flashing behind them, but nothing more. Both were taken to a hospital. Jordan was treated for cuts on his head and sent to Raymond Detention Center. In jail, he asked how Harris was doing, according to a recording obtained by NBC News. An investigator told him Harris was in surgery. Jordan sobbed. 'I hope she's all right,' he said, his voice cracking. The officers, Jeffery Walker and Michael Rhinewalt, gave a very different version. The pair told investigators that they had pulled the Rogue over for running a red light, and when Rhinewalt started to get out of the patrol car, the driver took off. As they chased the car onto an interstate, 'I heard what appeared to be a gunshot and a muzzle flash, and noticed that the back window shattered, so I immediately leaned over,' Rhinewalt told investigators, according to recordings from the case file. 'I immediately returned fire.' Walker said the SUV slowed down at one point in the chase, and someone inside fired again. 'You could hear shots real loud at that time,' he said. Both officers shot at the Rogue. Moments later, the officers said they saw objects tossed from the car. Jordan eventually pulled over and took off running, and Walker opened fire again, later telling investigators he thought a black object in Jordan's hand was a gun. It turned out to be a cellphone. The investigation into the shooting happened on two tracks. In one, the Hinds County district attorney's office gathered evidence to prosecute Jordan. Walker testified at Jordan's preliminary hearing, telling a judge that a neighborhood witness 'confirmed that bags of dope and guns' were thrown from the Rogue and that three armed men took them. The judge ruled the case against Jordan could proceed. He already had two unresolved felony charges stemming from a 2020 arrest when police say he stored stolen motorcycles at his mother's house. State law prohibits bail for someone facing felony charges from an earlier arrest. That meant he would wait in jail while the case moved forward. The second track was run by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, or MBI, which is required to examine police shootings, and the state attorney general's office, which determines whether the shootings are justified. In interviews with MBI investigators during his first days in jail, Jordan at first seemed confused about the chase and how long he'd been locked up. He gave muddled or inconsistent recollections, including where he drove and whether he'd thrown anything out of the window, according to a review of the audio interviews and his statements. Jordan sounded exhausted and on edge — but also eager to tell his side, even without a lawyer. He remained consistent on one point: He'd never had a gun. During one interrogation, MBI Lt. Heath Farish repeatedly suggested Jordan had a weapon. At one point, he told Jordan that a witness had seen him toss a firearm from the car, in an apparent attempt to get him to confess to a weapon. (Farish could not be reached for comment.) The only nonpolice witness interviewed by MBI had told another investigator that he did not see a gun, according to the case file. Farish also threatened to use DNA to tie Jordan to a gun found at the scene. Evidence logs show that investigators found only a starter pistol, a type of firearm that fires blanks and is usually used to signal the start of a race. Investigators never determined its relevance to the case. 'Man, we can do whatever we gotta do,' Jordan told Farish. 'And I guarantee you, when all this is over with, y'all are gonna say, 'Damn, Mr. Jordan did not have a gun on him that night.'' MBI investigators, two months after speaking to Jordan, interviewed Rhinewalt and Walker. Each had lawyers with them. These sessions were shorter, nonconfrontational and consistent. The MBI additionally collected bullet fragments inside the Rogue and spent shell casings on the street. They found surveillance video and looked for the objects the officers had said were tossed out of the Rogue, but did not find them. In November 2022, the MBI said the case file was ready for the attorney general's office to review. A decision didn't come for another two years. In Mississippi, criminal cases must go to trial no later than 270 days — about nine months — after a defendant is indicted and arraigned. But there is no limit to how long someone can wait to be indicted. In some parts of the state, including Hinds County, there aren't enough judges or prosecutors to keep up with cases, and there is still a pandemic backlog. Overwhelmed and underpaid public defenders do not have enough time to properly represent all their clients, who tend to be of limited means. In early 2022, researchers at the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit that advocates for those caught up in the criminal justice system, reported that more than 700 people were held in Mississippi jails more than a year, including 96 in Hinds County. Jordan joined that group. He was arraigned in April 2023 and pleaded not guilty. A couple months later, his court-appointed public defender asked the judge for copies of the evidence against him, and for a speedy trial. Then nothing much happened. A new public defender took over Jordan's case later in 2023, but made no motions on Jordan's behalf until August 2024, when he asked the judge to delay the trial because all the evidence still had not been turned over by the district attorney's office. The judge agreed. In early 2023, I wrote to Jordan asking for his perspective on the shooting. He sent back a handwritten note. 'I'm still sitting in jail no court date,' he wrote. He started calling me on the jail's phone line through an account paid for by NBC News. We spoke every few weeks, short conversations that often covered the same ground: I'd ask what was new in his case; he'd say he didn't know. He'd say how badly he wanted to go home. Harris, meanwhile, was suffering from deep wounds, physical and emotional. She underwent multiple surgeries to remove a bullet from her brain and repair her left eye and ear, but her face remained partially paralyzed. She struggled to chew and drink, suffered bouts of dizziness and had trouble remembering things. Her injuries made it difficult to do routine tasks, like cooking, driving, working and caring for her children. She rarely left home. 'I'm not a criminal,' Harris said outside court in December 2023 after she filed a lawsuit against the officers. The suit is on hold while the criminal cases play out. 'Why did I get shot? This changed my life forever. I can never be me, so money don't cover it. I didn't even get an apology. Do I matter?' Jordan usually didn't mention Harris unless I asked; he told me he wanted to talk to her once his ordeal was over. He had little privacy on the jail phone and rarely spoke introspectively or emotionally. I often heard inmates shouting in the background nearby. The Raymond Detention Center, which is notorious for decrepit conditions, assaults, deaths and chronic understaffing, will soon be put under the control of a court-appointed expert after a decadelong legal battle with the Justice Department. Jordan said he spent the first few months of his detention in the jail's infamous A-pod — since closed — where it was freezing in the winter and scorching in the summer. Roofs leaked, toilets didn't work, and he said he slept on the floor and went hours without seeing a guard. He was later transferred to C-pod, where members of different gangs were housed together, he said. (Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones said the jail separates gangs within housing units at C-pod.) Jordan told me he had to keep his 'game face' on and 'stay focused' to avoid trouble. He said he prayed a lot, but it was depressing. 'I just looked at the bright side of it, like, what's done is going to come to light,' he said. 'The truth will come out.' Last August, the Mississippi attorney general's office requested a grand jury to present evidence in the car chase and shooting, according to Jamie McBride, first assistant district attorney in Hinds County, who oversees grand jury cases. The attorney general's office didn't exactly explain the delay but said in court papers that it had received an 'incomplete' case file from MBI and the MBI later added information to it. On Dec. 26, Rhinewalt and Walker were each indicted by a grand jury on two counts of aggravated assault: one for shooting Harris, one for shooting at Jordan. The indictment didn't provide many details beyond accusing them of wrongly firing on Harris and Jordan. The officers pleaded not guilty. Mississippi Department of Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who oversees the Capitol Police and MBI, updated the agency's use of force policy in 2023 following NBC News reporting on the shootings by the Capitol Police. The changes, embraced by many other American police departments in recent years, included a 'duty to intervene' to prevent another officer from using excessive force. The Capitol Police also now equips officers with body cameras. Tindell declined to comment on actions of Walker and Rhinewalt but stressed that police officers are justified in shooting if they feel their lives are in danger. 'I'm going to support the decision that they have to make in that split second, to make sure that they go home to their families,' Tindell said. But the charges jeopardized the district attorney's case against Jordan. 'When I saw the indictment come down, I knew we had a problem,' McBride, the assistant DA, recalled. From the jail television, Jordan watched the news of the officers' arrests, stunned and newly hopeful. The next time he called, I asked what it could mean for him. He hadn't heard from his lawyer, he said. In late February, a new public defender (the fourth) took up Jordan's case. Andre de Gruy leads the state Office of the Public Defender and does not typically represent defendants, but he took on Jordan as part of a project to reduce backlogs. He did not want to see Jordan's long-delayed trial — now scheduled for March 10 — postponed again. 'Two and a half years in any jail waiting to have your case disposed of should be unacceptable to everybody,' de Gruy said. But it wasn't until 11 days before the trial was to begin that de Gruy started receiving the bulk of the evidence in Jordan's case, including the MBI report. The assistant district attorney, herself new to Jordan's case, said she turned over the MBI's evidence shortly after she had gotten it. It's not unusual to receive evidence at the last minute, said Chris Routh, the deputy public defender for the Hinds County Public Defender's Office. Discovery-related delays hold up nearly all the cases his office handles. Routh said Jordan's case was 'a particularly egregious example of a widespread and systemic problem.' De Gruy began negotiating a plea deal, and on March 11, the district attorney's office agreed to drop the shooting charges. Jordan, who appeared in court in chains and a red jumpsuit, agreed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of fleeing the scene and to the 2020 felony charges related to the stolen motorcycles. The 940 days he'd spent in pretrial detention went down as time served, and he got two and a half years of supervised release. He walked free that night. The moment felt exhilarating, he said. But the cost was steep: years lost, a woman's life ruined, a felony record that would make it hard to find a job. Rhinewalt and Walker have each been charged in other criminal cases stemming from the first months of the Capitol Police street crimes unit deployment and have also pleaded not guilty in those cases, too. Rhinewalt was indicted last month in the shooting death of a 25-year-old man. Walker has been charged with violating a driver's civil rights, accused of beating him after a chase. Rhinewalt was fired in April; Walker left the Capitol Police in 2023. The officers' lawyers have argued in court filings that some of the inconclusive evidence in Jordan's case — gunshot residue tests performed by investigators and damage on the hood of their police car — suggests someone fired a gun from the Rogue. Walker's lawyer, Francis Springer, called the evidence against his client 'pitiful,' and said he was confident the charges would not stick. Rhinewalt's lawyer, Scott Gilbert, declined to comment. The officers' trial date in Jordan's case is scheduled for June — six months after they were charged. They remain free on bail. Jordan is trying to get his life back on track. He is living at his mother's and works part-time for his father, a local DJ. He had his first meeting with his probation officer, and said he is working on getting a driver's license. 'Just taking it one day at a time,' he said, repeating a line he told me often during his incarceration. A few weeks after he got out of jail, we were sitting in his mother's living room, an NBA game blaring on the TV. Jordan still hadn't contacted Harris, though he said he wanted to pay condolences and hoped she was all right. 'I thought about her the whole time,' he said. The guilty plea to fleeing from police has been difficult for him to swallow. Jordan said he was justified in driving away from the officers, but didn't want to risk trial. 'I had already been locked up for so long, and I didn't want to sit even longer,' he said. 'I had to sell out, just for my freedom.' Jon Schuppe Jon Schuppe is an enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.
NBC News
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
Los Angeles woman who dated Andrew Tate says she feared 'I might die'
A Los Angeles model who says she dated Andrew Tate for 10 months and alleges in a lawsuit that the online influencer threatened and abused her said she feared for her life during a violent sexual encounter with him this month. 'I was scared to death,' Brianna Stern told NBC News on Friday. 'So scared I was terrified that I might die.' For more on this story, watch "Hallie Jackson NOW" at 5:45 p.m. ET on NBC News Now. Stern, in her first interview since filing the lawsuit Thursday, said she has received online threats after coming forward about her experience dating Tate, a self-described misogynistic and anti-feminist with millions of followers on social media. 'I'm scared of him,' Stern said, adding, 'No one has ever really spoken out against him before.' Stern declined to speak directly about the complaint, which was filed in the Superior Court of Los Angeles and accuses Tate, 38, of sexual assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress. A lawyer for Tate on Friday denied Stern's allegations as 'unfounded and sensational.' She said she first met Tate and his brother, Tristan, when they invited her last summer to Romania to participate in photo shoots related to content creation for their cryptocurrency meme coin. At the time, the Tate brothers, both former kickboxers and dual U.S.-British citizens, were embroiled in accusations related to sexual misconduct in Britain and human trafficking and money laundering in Romania, which they have vigorously denied. Stern said she was unaware of the media coverage about Tate. 'He was so warm and loving and kind, and I hadn't seen anything on the internet about him,' she said. 'I guess I kind of live under a rock.' She said that she continued to communicate with Tate when she left Romania and went home to Los Angeles and that his declarations of love and seeing a future with her won her over. 'I thought these people that say negative things about him, like, that's crazy,' Stern said. 'They don't know him. And he told me everything on the internet was just a facade. There was a tough guy act that he had to put on for views, and that that equated to his income.' In the suit, Stern claims Tate's behavior 'grew more aggressive over time,' and 'the last incident was the worst.' On March 10, the suit says, the couple checked into a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where they were having consensual sex early the following morning. Tate then began to choke her, and she 'began crying and begging for him to stop. He would not,' according to the complaint. Tate continued to choke and beat her repeatedly on her face and the top of her head, and days later she was diagnosed with a concussion after seeking medical attention while in New York, according to the complaint. Stern is seeking an immediate restraining order against Tate. Tate's U.S.-based attorney, Joseph McBride, rejected the lawsuit and Stern's allegations in a statement Friday and said he would be pursuing 'all available legal avenues against those perpetuating these baseless claims.' McBride accused Stern of using Tate for 'personal gain, notoriety, and financial benefit,' including through the rising value of her own meme coin. 'We implore the public and the media to refrain from premature judgments until all facts are established and to resist the temptation to amplify the self-serving narrative of an individual seemingly more interested in profit than in justice,' he added. Stern's suit said she filed a police report in Beverly Hills earlier this week stemming from the alleged physical assault. A criminal investigation involving Tate is underway, two law enforcement sources told NBC News. Stern said she waited to go to Beverly Hills police until Tate was out of the U.S. when 'I did feel a sense of security.' In a statement to NBC News, Stern's attorney, Tony Buzbee, said she 'has demonstrated incredible courage to come forward and make her voice heard. I look forward to presenting the facts of this case in court.' Stern's suit also includes text messages she said Tate sent her over the course of their relationship. One allegedly reads: 'I will ruin your life, rape you … and kill you.' In another text, Tate allegedly wrote: 'You back talk too much whore so I beat you. I will hit you today. But I love you,' according to the suit. A third exchange in the suit allegedly shows Stern questioning Tate: 'Why do u want to beat me. It's 12:30 am I'm in the room I sleep soon.' 'What's the point in having you if I don't beat you and impregnate you. You should be thankful,' Tate responded, according to the complaint. NBC News has not independently verified the authenticity of the text messages included in the court documents. It's also not clear what communications came before and after the messages included in the lawsuit. Stern is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial. Tate and his brother, Tristan, left the U.S. for Romania on Saturday, according to reports. The brothers had been in the U.S. since late February, when Romanian officials lifted a travel ban. The ban had been in place in the wake of their arrest in Romania in late 2022 on charges of human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women. The brothers have denied all allegations. The timing of the ban's lifting led to speculation that the State Department or the White House helped the brothers, who are supporters of President Donald Trump, but the administration declined to comment and McBride also declined to comment last month. Upon their arrival in the U.S., the brothers received a cold reception from officials in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis immediately said the brothers were not welcome in the state, and Attorney General James Uthmeier said he would open a criminal investigation into the men, although he did not outline specific allegations. After leaving the U.S., the Tate brothers returned to Romania, where they have resided since 2017. On Monday, the brothers appeared at a police station to register as part of the judicial requirements in their criminal case. 'I'm a free person who has not been convicted of anything,' Andrew Tate said, according to The Associated Press, adding that he will 'comply with all judicial authorities everywhere around the world because I'm completely innocent.' Tate is the focus of other ongoing lawsuits, including one in Britain filed by four women accusing him of rape and abuse, and a countersuit in the U.S. filed last month in Florida by a woman claiming the Tate brothers coerced her into sex work in Romania. The brothers had initially filed a defamation suit against her in 2023 claiming she and another woman gave false evidence to Romanian authorities, which had led to their prior arrests. The brothers have denied the allegations against them in those suits, and contend they are being targeted because they are outspoken. Stern said that while she remains scared for her safety, the encouragement she has received from family and friends prompted her to go public. ' I'm hoping that I can encourage other women to find their voice, to walk away and to be strong,' she said. National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. The hotline, run by the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), can put you in contact with your local rape crisis center. You can also access RAINN's online chat service at
