Monday, July 18 top stories
It is Monday, July 18. Here are today’s top stories.
Indiana mall shooting
On Sunday evening in Greenwood, Indiana, a 20-year-old man named Johnathan Sapirman brought a rifle into the food court of a shopping mall and opened fire, killing three people.
A 22-year-old man, Elisjsha Dicken, who was legally carrying a handgun reacted quickly by shooting the shooter, killing him. Police said the 22-year-old man is a Good Samaritan and “the real hero of the day.”
The three victims are Pedro Pineda (56), his wife Rosa (37), and a 30-year-old man named Victor Gomez.
The shooter’s age is 20, which makes him yet another recent mass shooter under the age of 21. The Uvalde and Buffalo shooters were both 18 years old. The Highland Park July 4 parade shooter was 21 years old. It is a pattern of young men.
80-year-old woman killed by two gators
On Friday in Florida, an 80-year-old woman died after she fell in a pond along a golf course and was grabbed by two alligators.
Law enforcement said when she fell, she struggled to stay afloat before she was attacked. She was pronounced dead on the scene.
A professional alligator trapper was called to the scene and they were able to remove two alligators, both about 8 feet long.
It is rare for there to be a fatal alligator attack, but there have been at least three incidents in recent months, with the first a man killed while searching for disc golf frisbees in a Florida lake and the second a person killed after an alligator took hold of them near a pond in South Carolina. Now we have this third incident.
Deadly heat wave hits Europe
There is a deadly heat wave that is moving through Europe. News reports said over 1,000 people have died from heat-related causes in Spain and Portugal since July 10.
Heat waves are a bigger concern in Europe compared with the U.S. because Europeans do not use air conditioning as much as we do.
A city in northwest Spain reached almost 110 degrees F and a city in central Portugal reached 115 degrees F. There are wildfires in the aforementioned countries and also in France.
The heat wave is now impacting France and the U.K. It is forecast that temperature will break all-time national high temperature records.
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Trial to determine Parkland shooter’s penalty
In Florida, opening arguments began today for the trial to determine whether the Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz will be sentenced to death or life in prison for killing 14 children and three school employees in 2018.
A jury of seven men and five women will recommend the penalty at the end of the trial, which is expected to last about four months. The trial was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic and legal battles.
News reports said relatives of the victims were sobbing in the courtroom as prosecutors described the day of the shooting and how many times each victim was shot.
Ivana Trump died after falling down staircase
New York City’s medical examiner said Ivana Trump died of blunt impact injuries to her torso.
ABC News said according to police sources, Ivana was found unconscious at the bottom of a set of stairs in her apartment. Police said there does not appear to be any criminality related to her death.
Police said they received a 911 call at about 12:40 p.m. ET on Thursday and found Ivana unconscious and unresponsive. The fire department said they received a call that a person was suffering cardiac arrest.
The New York Post explained that Ivana lived in a four-story home that had a large staircase.
Her funeral will take place on Wednesday in New York City.
Jim Thorpe’s Olympic golds reinstated
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced they would reinstate U.S. Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe’s gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon from the 1912 Olympic Games.
Thorpe won both events but had his medals stripped because he earned a bit of money playing professional baseball before he played in the Olympics. It was considered a violation of amateur status, which prohibited earning money. There has been a long controversy over what happened with many perceiving it as an act of injustice against a Native American.
Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma. Many consider him one of the greatest athletes of all time because not only was he an Olympic champion, he also played in both the MLB and NFL. Thorpe died in 1953. Now we can officially call him a two-time Olympic gold medalist.
That is all the top stories for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/17/us/indiana-greenwood-park-mall-shooting/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/sport/jim-thorpe-reinstated-olympic-champion-1912-intl-spt/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/sports/olympics/jim-thorpe-olympics-medal-restored.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/26/us/myrtle-beach-alligator-attack-trnd/index.html
https://www.axios.com/2022/07/18/heat-wave-europe-death-toll
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/07/18/us/parkland-trial-school-shooting
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/18/death-penalty-trial-of-parkland-high-school-gunman-begins
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/politics/ivana-trump-cause-of-death-medical-examiner/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/ivana-trump-wife-president-trump-dies-age/story?id=86834496
https://nypost.com/2022/07/16/ivana-trumps-friends-worried-about-treacherous-staircase/