Month: March 2023

CNN
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Three suspects have been arrested in connection with the alleged assault and robbery of rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine at a South Florida gym last week, authorities announced Thursday.

The suspects – Rafael Medina, Jr., 43, Octavious Medina, 23, and Anthony Maldonado, 25 – were arrested Thursday, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a tweet.

6ix9ine was transported from an LA Fitness Gym to a hospital on March 21 after being injured when “an altercation occurred inside the business between several individuals,” the sheriff’s office said last week. The rapper’s injures were non-life-threatening.

Lance Lazzaro, 6ix9ine’s attorney, said in a statement that the performer was “attacked in a Sauna at a gym by three or four thugs who beat him up (he tried fighting back).”

“He had cuts to his face and bruises. Employees heard the disturbance and the perpetrators fled,” Lazzaro said.

All three suspects are being held in the Palm Beach County Jail on preliminary charges of robbery and battery, according to jail records.

CNN has been unable to determine if the suspects have legal representation.

CNN
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A massive fire ripped through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh’s southern district of Cox’s Bazar on Sunday, leaving around 12,000 people homeless, local Superintendent of Police Mohammad Mahfuzul Islam told CNN.

Sweeping through the Kutupalong refugee camp in the afternoon, the blaze gutted around 2,000 huts before it was brought under control, Islam said.

No casualties have been reported so far, he said, adding that the cause of the fire is not yet determined but an investigation is under way.

Authorities are working with international and local humanitarian organizations to provide food and temporary shelters to those who have lost homes, he added.

“We will ensure no one sleeps under the open sky. Everyone will get a temporary shelter,” Islam said, with community centers and mosques providing housing to those affected by the fire.

Ninety facilities including hospitals and learning centers were burnt down, the Bangladesh branch of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR tweeted on Sunday.

“Rohingya refugee volunteers trained on firefighting & local fire services have controlled the fire,” it added in another tweet.

Humanitarian organization Save the Children said Sunday’s fire was a “ghastly reminder that children stuck in the camps in Cox’s Bazar face a bleak future.”

“Today’s massive fire will have robbed many families of their safety and what little belongings they have left,” it said in a statement, adding “they continue to grapple with inadequate education, concerning levels of malnutrition, stunting, child marriage, and child labor.”

The UN’s International Organization of Migration (IOM) in Bangladesh said on social media that “they are assessing the needs of people to provide support.”

Sunday’s blaze marks one of the largest of several fires that have plagued the camp in recent years.

An estimated 1 million members of the stateless Muslim minority Rohingya live in what many consider to be among the world’s largest refugee camps after fleeing a brutal campaign of killing and arson by the Myanmar military.

CNN
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Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old former Covenant School student who killed six people at the school Monday, carefully planned the attack, according to officials.

Hale’s parents, who lived with the shooter, said Hale was under a doctor’s care for an “emotional disorder,” Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at a news conference Tuesday.

The shooter had various writings and maps of the school, as well as drawings of how to enter, Drake said.

Police know Hale left home Monday morning with a red bag and that Hale’s mother did not know weapons were inside, Drake said.

Authorities continue to work to answer questions about who Hale was and the motive behind the school shooting. While the shooter’s gender identity is unclear, police told CNN that Hale was assigned female at birth and used “male pronouns” on social media.

Less than 20 minutes before the shooting, Hale sent an eerie Instagram message to Averianna Patton, a former basketball teammate who told CNN’s Don Lemon she’s “still trying to process it all.”

“I knew her well when we were kids,” Patton told Lemon on “CNN This Morning” on Tuesday. Patton, now a Nashville radio host, said she hasn’t had a relationship with the shooter since they were children and has only ever referred to Hale as Audrey or “she.”

“I didn’t know the adult … I don’t know that side of her,” Patton told Lemon when asked about Hale.

Patton said she received the Instagram message at 9:57 a.m., which read, “One day this will make more sense. I’ve left more than enough evidence behind. But something bad is about to happen,” according to screen grabs sent to CNN affiliate WTVF.

Patton said she was not sure why Hale reached out. “I’m asking God the same question,” Patton told Lemon.

Former teammate of Nashville school shooter got unusual Instagram messages before rampage

When they were on the team together, Patton said, Hale was “very quiet, very shy,” and they joked around together.

“We got to see her grow in her skill on the court,” Patton told CNN on Tuesday evening. “We did really good that year. We went all the way to the city (championships), so it was a really good year for us. We had a real camaraderie.”

Hale graduated from Nossi College of Art & Design in Nashville last year, the school’s president confirmed to CNN. A LinkedIn profile says Hale worked as a freelance graphic designer and a part-time grocery shopper.

An online portfolio that appears to show a collection of Hale’s work includes images of professional logos, cartoon animals and an apparent self-portrait. One image included the phrase, “To Be A Kid (forever and ever).”

Hale won “Most Improved” and “Class Participation” awards from Nossi, according to web posts by the college.

A former vice president of the college, Byron Edwards, described Hale as, “… the sweetest little thing. I’m just shocked. My wife and I have been crying all day about it,” adding that Hale “was really shy and really good.”

Over the last year, Hale posted on Facebook about the death of a girl with whom Hale apparently played basketball, as well as a request to be referred to by the name Aiden and male pronouns, a former teacher told CNN.

Hale was transgender, police have said.

“The only thing I would see (Hale) post about was this girl,” said the teacher, Maria Colomy, telling CNN she taught Hale for two semesters in 2017 at Nossi College.

“From what I saw on her social, (Hale) was suffering,” Colomy said.

Colomy also described Hale becoming upset on the first day of class when unable to figure out how to set up a password. Hale had to leave the classroom, Colomy said, adding it was Hale’s only outburst.

“After that first day, as soon as assignments started being turned in, Audrey came out of the gate at a 10,” Colomy said Wednesday afternoon. “She was an amazing illustrator.”

Colomy described Hale as confident, but not an outwardly confident or boisterous person.

“She was very quiet, very good at school, very good at art, very good at her illustration,” she said. “Everything I saw from her was very professional.”

Hale’s illustration work was “whimsical” and “childlike,” Colomy said, describing the student as small and quiet.

“I could have seen (Hale) doing children’s books for a living,” said Colomy.

One of Hale’s classmates at Nossi, who asked only to be identified by his first name Cody, said he and Hale were both commercial illustration majors.

Even though they were the same age, Cody said he thought Hale was much younger because Hale “dressed like a little kid” and brought stuffed animals to class.

Cody said he thought Hale had a “child-like obsession with staying a child.”

He described Hale as reserved, adding that Hale was serious about art and teachers lauded Hale’s artwork.

“The art couldn’t be more childish, family-friendly, G-rated, to a nauseating degree, almost,” and filled with “very garish, bright colors,” Cody said.

Colomy, one of Hale’s teachers, expressed her shock over the shooting.

“When you work on a campus, there are always one or two people who are in the back of your mind that you think something could happen,” Colomy said. “She would have been the last person on that list.”

Editor’s Note: Christina Wyman is a writer and teacher living in Michigan. Her debut novel “Jawbreaker” is a middle grade book that follows a seventh-grader with a craniofacial anomaly that’s caught the attention of school bullies — including her own sister. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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When my spouse saw on Instagram that former first lady Michelle Obama had addressed her struggles as a tall girl on the latest episode of her podcast, he immediately sent it my way. He knew it would resonate — after all, that very day, the planned publication of my latest middle grade novel had been announced: a story about a 12-year-old girl whose 4-inch summer growth spurt and accompanying signs of womanhood begin drawing unwanted attention from family, friends and strangers.

Tentatively titled “Slouch,” the book is based on my own past as a tall child trying, and failing, to fit in. Before Obama made her comments, I felt that my experience of isolation and shame was a solitary one. Having Obama speak so openly on “The Light Podcast” felt like a private validation of a very specific and scarring set of childhood events. But it was also a public one.

Obama didn’t just speak openly to her audience about her past. She spoke openly about her vulnerability. Whether Obama is sharing the grief she felt in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s inauguration or highlighting some of the most daunting challenges of her life, her regular dives into emotional self-reflection across multiple platforms model how our politics and culture, as well as personal identities, can be enriched by our engagement with vulnerability.

Indeed, her courage is to our benefit. We need high-profile leaders like Obama spotlighting their experiences being human and being women — especially women who are still haunted by past encounters with peers and men because of the bodies they inhabited as youth. Obama understands that speaking up is not only an exercise of her power but also empowers everyone she speaks for.

As Obama told comedian Conan O’Brien on the third episode of the podcast, adapted from the tour for her book “The Light We Carry,” she still has painful memories associated with being an unusually tall child.

“That whole thing, you grow up, nothing fits you. Clothes weren’t made for you,” recounted Obama, now 5-foot-11. She confessed, “I just desperately wanted to be like the girls I saw, the peppy cheerleaders.” Her emotional frankness and relatable imagery were refreshing for offering a poignant window into my struggles.

Like Obama, I “spent my life tugging on my pants.” My frame rendered me an outcast from the time I started kindergarten. I reached my current height of nearly 5-feet-9-inches in the seventh grade. Raised by working-class parents, I already wasn’t stylish because we could never afford the latest fashions. My frequent growth spurts made it nearly impossible to keep me in clothes that looked right. My mother was forced to shop for me in the women’s section of most clothing stores before I even hit puberty.

The difficulties didn’t stop there. No one wanted to befriend the girl who resembled Big Bird from “Sesame Street,” a likeness I wasn’t even aware of until my classmates took it upon themselves to sing the show’s theme song when they saw me in the hallways. The few friends I did have were petite and adorable. When we took pictures together, I stood out like an overgrown weed. Even now, pictures of my youth make me cringe.

When I was in high school, I learned the hard way that my height would limit my options for love interests. I was considered unfeminine and intimidating by many of my crushes. They preferred girls they “could physically throw,” as one boy put it.

But there’s a larger, darker context underpinning the life of young girls who are unusually tall for their age, and it’s one I wish Obama had taken on.

Adolescent girls in our global society are hypersexualized — as evidenced in studies of social media and its effects on sexualization and on girls’ mental health outcomes. According to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, “ample evidence indicates that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs.”

As a tall child, I naturally looked older. A lot older. Old enough to draw the attention of grown men. Men who’d decided that I was an adult long before I actually was one.

I recall as a 12-year-old when a friend’s father referred to me as an “Amazon woman” (I was his height). I later learned that this term had sexual connotations; there’s even a sexual position apparently named in its honor. I also remember grown men pulling up to me in their cars when I was that age and running solo errands for my mother in our neighborhood of Brooklyn. I began to grow terrified of the New York City streets that I used to call home.

The research on how to help tall children navigate their difficulties with their height typically deals with bullying by peers and self-esteem issues. While these are problems that certainly require intervention, the struggles of being a tall girl are about so much more.

I worry for the children born into my family of tall women (my aunts approach or surpass 6 feet). My niece is 4 years old and is the size of a 7-year-old. I fear for her future in a world that might decide she is a woman long before she actually is one, before she’s had the chance to decide what that means for herself.

There’s a lot to the story of being an unusually tall girl, and while Obama didn’t touch on every angle of that experience, I’m glad she started the conversation. She said she wanted to describe her own experiences as a tall child because it was one of the ways she felt like an outsider growing up. “So many of us in this country feel othered, we feel different,” she said. The audience applause suggested she’d indeed hit a nerve.

Yet Obama didn’t only diagnose the problem but prescribed an antidote. “We don’t see our ourselves reflected anywhere, and I hear from young people who talk about feeling invisible because they don’t see signs of themselves anywhere in the world,” she said. “So many of us are living in a world where we feel othered. That’s why it’s so important for us to tell our stories.”

For those of us who have felt that we should make ourselves invisible in order to fit in, Obama’s own willingness to be emotionally vulnerable means that we finally get to feel seen. That lets us stand up tall and proud.