Pittsburg, PA
Police release more details about raid on Pittsburgh homeless encampment
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Police in Pittsburgh raided a homeless encampment on Wednesday, but officers said their targets were people preying on people experiencing homelessness.
KDKA-TV was there on Wednesday night when two dozen Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officers descended on a homeless encampment on Grant Street, arresting suspected drug dealers.
Acting on search warrants and the findings of a months-long investigation, narcotics and violence prevention officers converged on the Downtown encampment, handcuffing and detaining several people as they searched the tents. According to incident reports, they seized large quantities of suspected crack cocaine.
“After police activity and investigation, they realized there were people coming into this encampment, as we’ve seen on others, that are preying on the vulnerable population, using them as camouflage or cover to engage in illegal activity, including drug dealing,” Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt said.
Officers arrested five individuals, including two who they say did not live there but stored and sold drugs from two of the tents.
Deidra Lomax of Washington County is charged with possession with intent to distribute 50 individual bags of crack cocaine. The criminal complaint says Davidt Brown of Turtle Creek had 39 pieces of crack as well as powder cocaine he had been selling to the people experiencing homelessness there.
Lomax was released on her own recognizance, but Brown remains in the Allegheny County Jail unable to make his $1 bail.
“We never want to go after people in our vulnerable population,” Schmidt said. “We want the people who are the perpetrators and the predatory actions stopped.”
According to the criminal complaints, police began their investigation by responding to complaints from business owners who had observed open-air drug transactions, violence, public urination and defecation at the site.
Schmidt said the site is not being decommissioned but is under study by a city and county committee that evaluates the encampments and whether they should be taken down.
About half of the encampment was taken down during the raid. And while many of the residents left, others returned on Thursday while the city and county evaluated whether to take down the rest of it.
Growing up in the northern Pittsburgh suburb of Mars, Pa., Wetherholt was a big Pirates fan and idolized outfielder Andrew McCutchen. There was also a time, as a child, when Wetherholt was late to his own party at
A historic number of people flooded into Pittsburgh for the NFL Draft on Thursday.
Around 320,000 fans attended the opening round of the draft on Thursday night just outside of Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh, which marked an attendance record for round one of the draft, ESPN announced on Monday afternoon. In total, about 805,000 people attended the three-day event.
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ESPN also said that about 13,2 million people tuned in to watch the first round of the NFL Draft on Thursday night, which made it the third-most watched opening round under the current format, which started back in 2010. Only the 2025 and 2020 editions of the draft drew a bigger audience on the first night.
The league said that a record amount of merchandise was sold throughout the NFL Draft weekend, too, though it did not provide a figure or metric there. The previous record on that front was set last season in Green Bay.
The Las Vegas Raiders used the No. 1 overall pick on Indiana quarterback and reigning Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza on Thursday night. Mendoza, who led the Hoosiers to the national championship earlier this year, was not in attendance in Pittsburgh. Instead, he celebrated with his family from home in Miami.
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The NFL Draft will be held next spring in Washington D.C. for the first time in modern history. It’s expected to be held on the National Mall. Washington D.C. held the draft one other time back in December 1940.
Pittsburg, PA
Overreactions to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2026 NFL Draft Class: Will Howard’s future, Omar Khan without Mike Tomlin, and more
The Pittsburgh Steelers had a 2026 NFL Draft that was, well, perplexing to put it nicely. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat when it comes to the draft process, and in three to four years, there’s a chance we look back on the class and the prevailing notion was dead wrong.
So today, we are going to name the three biggest overreactions to what the Steelers just did over the course of the weekend. Let’s jump in.
Overreaction No. 1: Max Iheanachor is another Broderick Jones
Look, if we want to reprimand what happened in the first round and the phone-gate debacle, that’s fine. But as Omar Khan said after the draft, the Steelers stuck true to their board and went with their highest rated player once Makai Lemon was poached by the Eagles.
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And yes, Iheanachor is raw. Yes, he didn’t start playing football until very recently and was mostly a soccer player. But the truth is, there might not be a tackle with higher potential and a greater ceiling than Iheanachor.
The feet, the length, the traits, it’s all there. Sure, the Steelers will need to be patient, but this isn’t a player who is fundamentally flawed the way that Jones was. This is a player who you don’t have to fix; you have to build up. So it’s far too soon to write off Iheanachor.
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Overreaction No.2: Mike McCarthy doesn’t like Will Howard
When the rhetoric coming out of Pittsburgh is always about how much the Steelers love Will Howard, and on day two, with their third pick in the draft, the Steelers take another quarterback that many view as a reach, it’s easy to see why some may believe that McCarthy doesn’t like Howard.
The truth is, McCarthy doesn’t know what he likes. He needs to see both Allar and Howard competing in a live environment before making any rash decisions. And when you don’t have an obvious quarterback of the future, taking as many shots as possible makes a lot of sense.
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Overreaction No.3: Omar Khan was carried by Mike Tomlin
If you look at Omar Khan’s draft history since he took over for Kevin Colbert in 2023, you see draft classes littered with talent and starters. And honestly, just about every time it reached Sunday of draft weekend, the consensus view was that Khan and the Steelers nailed the draft.
Well, the only obvious difference in the decision-making process this year was no Mike Tomlin. And under Mike Tomlin, the Steelers were at every big-time Pro Day, the Senior Bowl, and well represented at the NFL Combine. A lot of that changed this year, but it doesn’t mean that Omar Khan wasn’t heavily involved, if not making picks, before.
We’ll see if the media and fans, or Khan and co., are right in 3-4 years.
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