The two victims suffering from critical and serious injuries from the shooting are expected to make full recoveries, Houston officials said Monday evening.
The Houston Police Department would not confirm the identity of the suspect, citing the on-going investigation. Several news organizations, though, have identified the shooter as Nathan DeSai.
Officials did confirm the suspect had two weapons in his possession during the shooting, both of which were purchased legally: a .45 semi-automatic handgun and a Thompson submachine gun, commonly known as a “Tommy Gun.” They added that the suspect had several other weapons at his residence.
Police said the suspect wore “military-style apparel,” but could not confirm if the uniform had a particular affiliation, as previous unconfirmed reports stated he wore a Nazi-style uniform. Police, though, did confirm that Nazi emblems were found on his person and at his residence.
The suspect’s motive has not yet been determined. He is believed to have acted alone.
Multiple news organizations identified the alleged shooter as Nathan DeSai. The Houston Chronicle reports that a .45 pistol was used in the shooting. Investigators, the newspaper added, also found a long gun and ammunition in the shooter’s car.
DeSai’s father, in an interview with the local ABC affiliate, said his son had been having business troubles.
KPRC, the local TV station, cited two unnamed law-enforcement sources as saying the shooter wore a Nazi uniform during this morning’s shooting. That claim has not been independently verified.
Some witnesses have described the gunman firing dozens of shots at cars passing through a condo complex, which is near the affluent West University Place community. Several cars with bullet holes and shattered windows were at a parking lot near the condo complex.
Eduardo Andrade, 42, was driving his Audi A3 this morning on his way to LA Fitness when he found himself thrust into the middle of an active shooter scene.
"As I was driving by Law Street I suddenly hard a big explosion," said Andrade. "I covered myself, accelerated and tried to get out of there. I did not know if someone was following me or trying to shoot me."
Two bullets struck his vehicle, one came through the windshield and the other the front-passenger window.
"One bullet hit here and the other here," he said, while pointing at the holes. "I felt the hot air."
The father of two who works in the oil and gas industry was on his way to exercise at his gym at about 6:25 a.m. when the shooting happened.
"It's so random, think of it, if I was driving a little faster or a little slower, the bullet would have had a different trajectory," he said.
At a news conference Monday, Martha Montalvo, the Houston police chief, said, in all, nine people were injured: Three of them were treated on the scene and released; six were taken to area hospitals. One person suffered critical injuries, Montalvo said; another had serious injuries. The identities of those shot have not been released.
Montalvo said the suspect was a lawyer, “and there were some issues concerning his law firm.” He lived in the neighborhood, she said, but did not provide further details. The suspect was shot and killed by police, Montalvo said.
The Houston Police Department says the suspect who opened fire near a shopping center early Monday is dead . The location of the shooting is active, but contained, it added.
The motive for the shooting isn’t clear. More information on the shooting will be provided at a news conference later Monday.
Richard Mann, the executive assistant chief of the Houston Fire Department’s Emergency Response Command, told reporters the suspect had been “neutralized.” He did not elaborate whether that meant the suspect was injured or killed by officers responding to the shooting.
Mann also said six people were taken to hospital after the shooting. Their status is not known.
I can go just about anywhere with my German passport. But almost no one wants to let in Americans these days.
Becoming a United States citizen was meaningful to me for a great number of reasons. German by birth, I had come to feel at home in America, and to love it. For all the deep injustices that shape this country, I remained convinced that the United States was more likely than just about any other place in the world to build a thriving, diverse democracy. And when I wrote about the danger that right-wing populists like Donald Trump pose to the American republic, I cherished being able to speak about his assault on our, as opposed to your, values and institutions.
Alongside all these serious reasons, I also had a very practical one: the power of the U.S. passport. It granted access to just about everywhere, and escape from just about anywhere. Which country—Germany or the United States—would be more likely to rescue me if I got stuck in some foreign country in the middle of a perilous political crisis? Would the last plane to evacuate foreigners from Chad or Chile or Canada before that country devolved into civil war be sent by the Bundeswehr or the U.S. Air Force?
The U.S. has never had enough coronavirus tests. Now a group of epidemiologists, economists, and dreamers is plotting a new strategy to defeat the virus, even before a vaccine is found.
Michael Mina is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, where he studies the diagnostic testing of infectious diseases. He has watched, with disgust and disbelief, as the United States has struggled for months to obtain enough tests to fight the coronavirus. In January, he assured a newspaper reporter that he had “absolute faith” in the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to contain the virus. By early March, that conviction was in crisis. “The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect,” he told The New York Times. His astonishment has only intensified since.
Many Americans may understand that testing has failed in this country—that it has been inadequate, in one form or another, since February. What they may not understand is that it is failing, now. In each of the past two weeks, and for the first time since the pandemic began, the country performed fewer COVID-19 tests than it did in the week prior. The system is deteriorating.
Social gatherings provoke moral indignation—but bringing in law enforcement will promote injustice, not reduce infections.
State and local officials across the country are unleashing a new weapon in America’s war against the coronavirus: the cops. Citing parties as the cause of recent clusters of infections in Massachusetts, Governor Charlie Baker recently authorized state and local police to crack down on public and private gatherings that violate social-distancing guidelines. The sheriff’s office in New York City took on new coronavirus duties, including the enforcement of party bans. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the city will shut off power and water to residences where large gatherings take place, and the county public-health department, in what it described as a “legally binding order,” declared that party hosts will be subject to fines, imprisonment, or both.
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.
Communities that worked hard to beat the coronavirus should reap the benefits of doing so.
Because the coronavirus is still spreading rapidly in much of the country, not every school district can bring children and teachers back safely and equitably this fall. But among those that can is Somerville, Massachusetts—the city of about 80,000 just northwest of Boston where my family and I live. After a biotech conference in late February spread the coronavirus in the Boston area, public officials in Somerville reacted quickly. The city shut down bars and required masks before most other communities did. Residents stayed home. Playgrounds closed. “Avoid playdates,” urged Mayor Joe Curtatone, a progressive who prides himself on making data-driven decisions about the problems that test the city and its residents. We knew our children felt lonely and confused, and still we buckled down.
The president has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize the federal government to his advantage.
President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage.
Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me.
Biden’s running mate is two decades younger than he is; the potential vice presidency seems like merely a first step.
If Joe Biden is elected in November, his presidency will likely be defined by history-shaping decisions made after long, deliberative, some might say operatic processes. Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate—the first woman of color to appear on a major-party ticket—was precisely that sort of careful, drawn-out decision.
Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, says that Biden’s selection of a Black woman with Indian and Jamaican parents shows that Biden is running a very different campaign than Donald Trump. “In the selection of a vice president, he’s created a deep contrast between the pettiest of men and a man who obviously has no pettiness within him,” Tanden told me, minutes after Harris was announced.
Polished, soft-spoken, and a self-styled moderate, Jared Kushner has become his father-in-law’s most dangerous enabler.
Jared Kushner, the second-most-powerful man in the White House, is quite a bit smarter than the most powerful man, his father-in-law, the president. Donald Trump possesses a genius for the jugular, but he evinces few other signs of intelligence. He certainly displays no capacity, or predisposition, to learn. His son-in-law, by contrast, appears to have sufficient analytic acumen to comprehend that the country has been brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic. Kushner might not be the brightest public servant in American history—he is a Harvard graduate who is also a leading symbol of college-admissions corruption, and a businessman with a substantial record of failure—but he has shown flashes of effectiveness in his time at the White House. Because he projects a facsimile of capability and because he shows, at irregular intervals, a seemingly genuine interest in governing, he is also an exasperating mystery.
Zvikorn, whose bio on the site describes an Israeli teen into sports history, has made more than 2,300 edits to Wikipedia articles over the past few years. “The main reason I edit Wikipedia is a strong belief that every person on the planet has the right to access the accumulated knowledge of humanity,” he wrote. “Today it is only getting more important for mankind to find out the truth and not be exposed to believe fake news.”
No matter what Trump says, the USPS has the money and the capacity to handle a huge surge in mail-in ballots. But new restrictions could disrupt the election.
President Donald Trump and his allies might well succeed in undermining the United States Postal Service’s ability to handle an expected surge in mail-in ballots this fall. But the biggest immediate threat to voting by mail isn’t blocked funding.
Trump acknowledged yesterday that he opposes a major stimulus deal with Democrats in part because he wants to stop an infusion of $25 billion to the Postal Service ahead of the election. “They need that money in order for the Post Office to work, to take in these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. But the president doesn’t want more voting by mail, and he doesn’t want the Postal Service to have any more money to help with it. “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. That means they can’t have it.”
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