Police say a boy accidentally shot himself and his friend inside a South Philadelphia home Monday night.
The 13-year-old boy was playing with a gun inside a home on the 2100 block of Etting Terrace when the weapon went off, police said. The boy was struck in the left hand while his friend, a 12-year-old girl, was struck in the knee.
Both children were taken to the hospital where they are in stable condition. Officials have not yet revealed the owner of the gun.
A speeding car crashed along a normally busy South Jersey roadway overnight leaving a trail of debris that impacted people, homes and other vehicles.
"There's stuff everywhere, 100 feet around the car," said witness Walter Dilson.
The unidentified driver of a maroon Chrysler 300 lost control along Haddon Avenue at Newton Avenue in Camden, New Jersey (not far from Cooper University Hospital) around 2 a.m. and slammed into at cars and the porches of some homes.
"The vehicle was one fire, and, like I said, the cops showed off immediately afterwards and he said, 'stay away,'" said Dilson.
The crash left the driver critically injured, ejected from the car, said Camden County Police.
People in a car he sideswiped were treated and released for undisclosed injuries, said police sources.
Car parts, bricks, stone, parts of a porch and a downed pole remained on the scene as investigators tried to figure out exactly what caused the wreck that also left seven parked cars damaged.
Investigators were working under the premise that the driver was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the wreck, said police.
Residents from six homes were displaced as crews determined if the homes are structurally sound. A crew was called in to demolish a dangling porch.
Expect traffic closures throughout the morning as crews investigate and work to clear the debris.
More than 35,000 people died in traffic crashes nationwide in 2015, ending a five-decade trend of declining fatalities with a 7.2 percent increase in deaths over the previous year, federal officials say.
The data released Monday by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed traffic deaths rising across nearly every segment of the population. The last single-year increase of this magnitude was in 1966, when fatalities rose 8.1 percent year over year.
“Despite decades of safety improvements, far too many people are killed on our nation’s roads every year,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “Solving this problem will take teamwork, so we’re issuing a call to action and asking researchers, safety experts, data scientists, and the public to analyze the fatality data and help find ways to prevent these tragedies.”
Ten years ago, the number of traffic deaths was nearly 25 percent higher, with 42,708 fatalities reported nationwide in 2005. Since then, safety programs have helped lower the number of deaths by increasing seat belt use and reducing impaired driving, federal officials say. Vehicle improvements, including air bags and electronic stability control, have also contributed to reducing traffic fatalities. After a decade-long downward trend, traffic deaths in 2015 increased by nearly one third compared with 2014.
According to NHTSA, job growth and low fuel prices were two factors that led to increased driving, including increased leisure driving and driving by young people. More driving can contribute to higher fatality rates, the agency says. In 2015, vehicle miles traveled increased 3.5 percent over 2014, the largest increase in nearly 25 years.
Pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities increased to a level not seen in 20 years. Motorcyclist deaths increased by more than 8 percent. NHTSA also noted human factors continued to contribute to the majority of crashes. Almost half of passenger vehicle occupants killed were not wearing seat belts. Research shows almost one in three fatalities involved drunk drivers or speeding, the agency said. One in 10 fatalities involved distraction.
“The data tell us that people die when they drive drunk, distracted, or drowsy, or if they are speeding or unbuckled,” said NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind. “While there have been enormous improvements in many of these areas, we need to find new solutions to end traffic fatalities.”
In response to the increase in traffic deaths, DOT, NHTSA, and the White House are issuing a call to action to involve a wide range of stakeholders in helping determine the causes of the increase.
A 69-year-old former postal worker and his wife are among the non-Jewish residents of a New Jersey condominium complex frustrated by rules that limit mixed-sex swimming to two hours per day Sunday through Friday.
Jewish law prohibits men and women from bathing together, and the rules at A Country Place were implemented to accommodate the majority of Orthodox Jewish homeowners at the 376-unit Lakewood adult community, according to The Asbury Park Press. Anyone who violates the rules on mixed-sex swims faces a $50 fine, which was what Steve Lusardi encountered when he went for a swim with his wife earlier this summer, the newspaper said.
During the summer, the pool is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, but mixed-sex swimming is permitted only 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday through Friday. There is open swimming on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
Lusardi and the few other non-Orthodox residents in the community have protested the pool rules, but Lusardi says the board won't listen.
“I’ve been told, ‘This is a Jewish community. Get used to it,’” Lusardi said.
Another resident who got fined for swimming during men-only hours told The Asbury Park Press she spoke with a lawyer who told her that, under state housing non-discrimination laws, the board's rules were acceptable as long as they did not deny pool access to anyone based on sex or religion altogether.
The board declined comment to The Asbury Park Press.
City-owned pools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, another area densely populated with Orthodox Jews, came under fire this summer over similar sex-specific swim schedules. The city added more mixed-sex swim times as a compromise.
An investigation is underway after a vandal or vandals spray painted swastikas at a New Jersey park.
On Monday a concerned citizen reported to police that swastikas had been spray painted at Echo Lake Park on 1205 Maxim Southard Road in Howell, New Jersey and later provided photos of the vandalism. Officials say Echo Lake Park is often visited by members of the Jewish community and attracts many people each day.
Howell Police responded to the park and found nine swastikas spray painted in white near the horseshoe pits on the backboards and benches located around 300 feet from the roadway and parking lot. Investigators also say they found random, non-distinct spray paint on the gazebo floor and they believe the vandalism occurred sometime within the past week.
The Howell Township Department of Public Works painted over the vandalism Monday though the investigation continues and police are seeking the public’s help in identifying the person or people responsible.
If you have any information on the incident, please call Detective Sergeant Christian Antunez #243 at 732-938-4575 ext. 2883 or email him at cantunez@howellpolice.org.
This Wednesday, Aug. 31, is International Overdose Awareness Day. NBC10 this week is revisiting the stories of people you first met earlier this year in Generation Addicted, our in-depth special report on the heroin and opioid epidemic in our region and beyond. Watch Generation Addicted again this Wednesday at 7 p.m., only on NBC10.
DAYS BEFORE her son's 23rd birthday, Angel Miller came face-to-face with exactly what she feared might happen: She found her son, Michael, in their Philadelphia home with a needle in his arm.
"He was relapsing," Angel Miller said on Monday, tears shining in her eyes. "He was hiding it pretty well, but I kept finding stuff pawned."
Michael Miller, whose story was featured in NBC10's in-depth special report, Generation Addicted, battled opioid and heroin addiction for the past two years after a friend encouraged him to try prescription painkillers. He got hooked, and soon, he was injecting heroin.
For Michael, recovery proved to be like holding sand. Just as he'd get a grip on it, it would slip away -- a slow trickle at first, as he'd take liberties using his Suboxone prescription to achieve a small high. Then in a crushing wave, when he'd find himself back in Kensington copping heroin on a corner to mainline into the crook of his arm.
So when her son seemed to achieve a stint of sobriety earlier this year, Angel, a psychiatrist assistant who helps people get into drug rehabs, was wary. She had a feeling Michael's battle may not have been over then, and her intuition was on: She started to suspect Michael was using again in the spring, and in April, she opened the bathroom door in the family's Wissinoming apartment to find Michael shooting heroin.
"I said, 'You gotta go.' I'm not doing this," Angel told NBC10 on Monday. "I'm not gonna open the bathroom door and you're dead on the floor."
And Michael went. On May 3, four days before he turned 23, he headed to the Malvern Institute, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Willow Grove.
Malvern marked Michael's second stint in rehab, after he went to a treatment center in Florida last year, and then relapsed, as addiction experts the majority of people trying to escape heroin addiction do.
But this time, Angel said, Michael seemed to have a new resolve to leave behind the drug that stole his dream of graduating Drexel University with an engineering degree and nearly killed him several times.
"This time, he wanted to go. That's the difference," Angel said. "He was ready. He was packing his bags, and he was ready to go."
Michael thrived in his new rehab program, Angel said, and spent a little more than a month there, then won a scholarship to move into a $175-a-week sober-living house in Levittown. Now, Michael has logged four and a half months sober -- his longest stretch of sobriety in a long time, his mom said.
He got a job working for a company that prepares houses for people to move in, and goes to support group meetings every day with friends from his recovery house. Angel said the other young men in the house provide a solid network that Michael didn't have back home in Philadelphia, where many of his longtime friends are themselves battling addiction.
Michael plans to eventually become a counselor to help other people out of addiction, both he and his mother said.
Angel motioned toward Michael's dark bedroom door, set beyond a wall plastered full of photos of him in his younger years, smiling back into the apartment. "I miss him," the mother said through tears, her dark hair spilling over her shoulders. "I look at that door and that empty room sometimes, and I say, 'He did it for now.'"
But, as lonely as her home may be without Michael, she still visits him every weekend. She feels safer now than she has in months knowing that Michael is somewhere stable where he can continue to put distance between himself, the heroin and Philadelphia's badlands.
Michael's on Vivitrol now, a medication that helps to stop cravings, and he looks better -- more like himself -- than he has in a couple years, Angel said. And though she knows recovery can be a tenuous state, she believes fiercely in her son and said that despite his past relapses, this time, she has a feeling he will make it.
"I couldn't be prouder of Michael," Angel said. "I would do anything for him. There isn't a day go by that I don't talk to God and ask him to watch over me and my kid."
Construction workers struck a gas main in South Jersey Tuesday morning causing the evacuation of some nearby businesses.
The line was struck in the area of Stokes and Dixontown roads in Medford around 9 a.m.
Some nearby businesses were evacuated as a caution but the Starbucks in nearby Ironstone Village Center remained opened despite one of its entrances being blocked off.
No word yet on when the main will be repaired.
No injuries were reported.
Philadelphia Police plucked a body from the Schuylkill River Tuesday morning.
The body, of a man believed to be in his late 20s, was seen floating in the water off Schuylkill Avenue, not far from Trolley Works Field in the city’s Grays Ferry neighborhood, around 10:45 a.m.
There were no visible signs of trauma to the body, which appeared to have been in the water for the past three days, said Philadelphia Police.
Police didn’t immediately have an identification for the dead man.
A new exhibit at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute promises to be "the closest you will ever come to living dinosaurs."
The science museum at N 20th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway revealed details Tuesday of "Jurassic World: The Exhibition."
The exhibit – set to run from Nov. 25, 2016 to April 23, 2017 – based on the blockbuster movie franchise was created in collaboration with renowned paleontologist Jack Horner.
"Travel to Isla Nublar as a VIP guest and explore Jurassic World," said a news release announcing the exhibit Tuesday. "Stare in wonder at a towering Brachiosaurus; come face-to-face with a Velociraptor; and get a rare up-close look at the most vicious dinosaur of them all, Tyrannosaurus rex."
Besides robotic dinos, the exhibit also is looking to add an educational element with interactive features that look at dinosaur DNA, said the museum.
The exhibit costs range from $17.95 to $34.95 depending on when you visit the museum and if you go with a group or not. (Prices are less for members.) You can sign up for presale tickets now. General admission tickets go on sale Sept. 10.
A human skull turned up Monday on the property of a rural Pennsylvania energy company.
Pennsylvania State Police said troopers were called to Schuylkill Energy Resources along Yatesville Road in Shenandoah, Schuylkill County around 8:30 a.m. after someone made the discovery in a wooded area, said state police.
No other skeletal remains were found during a search that continued into Tuesday, said police.
Forensics experts would analyze the skull in hopes of identifying the person and determining a cause of death, said police.
This Wednesday, Aug. 31, is International Overdose Awareness Day. Watch NBC10's special report, Generation Addicted, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, or attend one of these events in our area to get involved in raising awareness about the heroin and opioid epidemic.
Editor's note: The story has been updated to include comments from District Attorney Tom Hogan, who pointed out the distinction between a recent federal report on the presence of opioids in death investigations and deaths classified as overdoses. The headline has been changed to reflect the difference.
In a suburb of rolling hills and picture-perfect neighborhoods near the edge of southeastern Pennsylvania, three moms are taking a stand to speak out and bring people together against a hidden monster they say is tearing apart families and slowly destroying their community.
Lynne Massi, Jacki Smiro and Gina Dischert have all faced the horrors of heroin and opioid addiction in their own families. Smiro lost her son, RJ, to an overdose in 2008 when he was 17. Massi watched her nephew, David, spend a short stint battling heroin addiction before dying of an overdose three years ago. And Dischert has spent the last three years watching two of her four children struggle with their own heroin addictions, ping-ponging from use to rehab to recovery, then back again.
All three women are on a crusade in their small corner of the world -- Chester County, or, as they call it, "the forgotten county" -- to push for awareness and change around an epidemic they say is killing local kids with regularity but remains shrouded in secrecy and denial.
The women played instrumental roles in organizing Chester County's first-ever International Overdose Awareness Day candlelight vigil to bring people affected by the heroin and opioid epidemic in their community together in hopes of attacking stigma and affecting change. The vigil will take place Wednesday, Aug. 31 at 7 p.m. at the New Garden Township Building in Landenberg.
"We're tired of burying our kids," Smiro said Tuesday. Since her son died, she's watched too many of his friends to count struggle with their own addictions. She flipped through haunting photos on her iPhone: One of one of her son's friends, alive, crouching by his headstone. The next, of the same friend's grave next to her son's, where he was buried after dying of an overdose last year.
"That's the new norm," Smiro said. "There are more families with a kid addicted than not."
Chester County overdose deaths totaled 54 in 2014 and 55 in 2015, according to District Attorney Tom Hogan, who added that the county coroner only recently began charting the presence of opioids in death investigations.
Hogan said that might explain alarming figures released by the Drug Enforcement Administration's most recent analysis of drug-related deaths in Pennsylvania. That report showed a 400 percent increase in deaths where heroin was present from 2014 to last year.
"The DEA recently produced a report, which relied on raw coroner data and the raw data included every death that had heroin present in the person's system," Hogan said. "That included murder, suicide, car crashes, not just overdoses. They are reflecting non-overdose deaths."
Massi crusaded for the passage of David's Law in her nephew's name. It takes aim at preventing overdose deaths with a two-prong approach: Creating a good Samaritan law in Pennsylvania to protect anyone who calls 9-1-1 to report an overdose from prosecution for their own drug use or possession at the time, and providing for access to naloxone, an antidote than can rapidly reverse the effects of a opiate or heroin overdose.
The law has seen some gains, Massi said, saving more than 1,600 lives in less than two years. But she, Dischert and Smiro say that in Chester County, despite its prevalence, addiction still carries a serious stigma.
"Everybody's in such denial," Massi said.
The women said pushing for awareness, acceptance and change hasn't been easy. They shared anecdotes of their frustration as they try to talk with parents about drugs permeating schools in the area, their pleas often falling on deaf ears.
"The most dangerous words are, 'Not my kid,'" Dischert said. For her, it has been her kids. But, she said, once she got past the shock of it, she started to fight for change.
"We couldn't believe it. It blew our minds," Dischert said of the moment in 2013 that she and her husband discovered two of their children were using heroin. "Never in a million years did we ever expect our kids to use heroin."
She cautioned other parents that even though they may think addiction won't come into their homes, it's more likely than not that it will -- if not in their own children, then in their friends and classmates. Her kids started using by taking Percocet pills they got at school.
"Taking that one pill, it's Russian roulette," Dischert said.
The women said they're looking ahead and hoping to bring more help for people battling addiction to Chester County after Wednesday's vigil. They hope to establish a Young People in Recovery chapter there, as so many of those dying of overdoses are young adults, and dream of someday pushing for more rehabilitation services, including a rehab high school, to their community.
They're all things they say are desperately needed there to prevent more funerals -- because as things are, they all know the next one is just around the corner.
"I have a feeling it's not going to be a happy ending for a lot of these kids," Dischert said.
"It's a matter of time. I don't think it's going to end well, but as humans, you have hope."
The Lower Merion School District must go back to the chalkboard and do its 2016-2017 budget again, a judge ordered Monday.
The ruling is a result of a lawsuit filed in May seeking to overturn the district's 4.4-percent tax increase in the fiscal year that begin July 1.
Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Joseph Smyth ordered the district to revisit their annual spending plan and capped any tax increase at 2.4-percent, which is the limit under the current formula designed by the state to keep tax hikes in line with inflation.
Lower Merion resident Arthur Wolk, an attorney who filed the complaint, said after the ruling that the district has routinely underestimated revenue projections during the last decade. He said the practice created a $57 million surplus in district banks accounts as taxes for township residents rose 53 percent over the same period of time.
Smyth, in his ruling, said annual budgets dating to 2008-2009 greatly exceeded district officials' yearly revenue expectations.
"In fact, for every fiscal year from 2008-2009 through 2014-2015, the School District passed a budget that projected multimillion-dollar deficits, yet year-end audits showed multimillion-dollar surpluses, amounting to a total during that span of over $42,500,000," Smyth wrote.
Wolk said Tuesday the district shouldn't have more than about $20 million in reserves, according to state law that allows for 8 percent of a district's total budget to be held in surplus. Lower Merion has a budget of about $260 million, he said.
In addition to calling out district officials for acting "as if they're running their own kingdom," he blamed the elected school board members.
"The board is a rubber stamp." he said. "They absolutely have no real power. They are inexperienced. They have no training."
In a statement, district Superintendent Robert Copeland and school board President Robin Vann Lynch defended the budget and said they would appeal the ruling.
"The Court’s decision imposes legal standards upon LMSD that are different than any other public school district in Pennsylvania and makes the District’s budgeting even more challenging by introducing greater uncertainty into the process," the statement said. "The District has consistently been lauded for sound fiscal management by credit ratings agencies, resulting in a desirable Aaa bond rating and savings to taxpayers."
