Northeast
Times Square shooting: Gunman on the loose after shooting woman, firing at police
A manhunt is underway for a suspect who shot a woman at a clothing store in Times Square late Thursday before he opened fire on responding police as he fled the busy tourist hotspot area, according to police.
The shooter, described as a Hispanic male aged between 15 and 20 years old wearing all white, is wanted for the attempted murder of a police officer and was part of a trio that was suspected of shoplifting at JD Sports on West 42nd Street and Broadway at around 7:05 p.m., police said at a late-night press conference.
A female security guard confronted the group and took the stolen merchandise when chaos erupted in Manhattan’s gun-free zone.
The shooter pulled out a gun and fired at the security guard, NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell said. The bullet missed the security guard and struck a 37-year-old female tourist in the leg. She was taken to a nearby hospital.
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The shooter, described as a Hispanic male aged between 15 and 20 years old wearing all white, is wanted for the attempted murder of a police officer and was part of a trio who were suspected of shoplifting at JD Sports on West 42nd Street and Broadway at around 7:05 p.m. (NYPD)
The shooter and a male accomplice — who was wearing a blue jacket and is a 15-year-old Hispanic male — then fled the store and ran towards 47th Avenue, Chell said.
Two police officers patrolling the area then gave chase, capturing the suspect in the blue jacket. The juvenile has since been released without charge.
However, the shooter kept running along 47th Street towards Sixth Avenue with one of the officers on his tail.
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The shooter fired twice at police, the NYPD says. (Fox News source)
The shooter ducked inside a gap between two buildings on the block before opening fire on the chasing police officer, Chell said.
“Our officer draws his weapon, but he cannot fire, too many people around,” Chell said.
“As the male in the white goes further into the cut, under his armpit he fires another shot at our officer. Again, our officer does not return fire.”
The shooter then bolted into the subway station at 46th Street and Sixth Avenue, where police say they have footage of him on the tracks. He then returns from the subway station and is still at large.
Image from the shooting scene at Times Square.
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Chell said that he tossed his white jacket but had a white T-shirt on, as well as white sneakers.
“That is the last we have seen of him at this point. We have numerous resources scouring this area, looking for that male,” Chell said.
“He shot at our cops not once but twice, and also shot an innocent female, one time in the leg.”
The male in the blue jacket was brought back to the precinct. It is unclear what happened to the third person in the shoplifting group. There is now a $13,500 reward being offered for information regarding the incident.
A wanted poster describing details of the suspect wanted for shooting at a police officer in Times Square on Thursday. (NYPD)
On Friday, Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny posted a wanted poster of the suspect, with a $13,500 reward being offered for information that will lead to his arrest.
“We need the public’s help to identify and locate this individual before he hurts anyone else,” Kenny wrote on X. He already shot an innocent person and tried to murder a NYC Police Officer.”
He urged anyone with information to call 1-877-577-TIPS.
The shooting comes nearly two weeks after two police officers were attacked by a mob of migrants in Times Square. Pickpocketing and shoplifting have become a major problem in the area.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Second Amendment, New York officials limited where firearms can be legally carried in public. (Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
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Vermont
Vermont has joined 49 lawsuits against the Trump administration. What have they accomplished? – VTDigger
During the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2021, the Vermont attorney general’s office joined in on 54 lawsuits against the federal government, according to data provided by the office.
Fifteen months into Trump’s second term, the state has joined 49 lawsuits against his administration, making Vermont well on track to beat its previous total. In fact, another lawsuit was announced on Friday afternoon just as this story was being edited: Vermont joined a coalition of 14 states and local governments suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over its failure to implement standards governing soot.
Jared Carter, a Vermont Law School professor and constitutional law expert, said the rate was “unprecedented” — but he was clear that it isn’t really Vermont that’s acting in an unprecedented manner.
“My view is that these are a response to unprecedented actions by the federal government,” he said. “The scope of what the Trump administration has attempted to do through executive action, for example, is pretty astounding.”
Vermont has joined suits challenging everything from Trump’s tariffs to federal workforce layoffs to the rollback of gender-affirming healthcare, cases that, if successful, could preserve tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for state programs and protect services that Vermonters rely on. But in the winding legal system, whether those early courtroom wins translate into lasting results remains to be seen.
Attorney General Charity Clark and her office have joined in on a wide range of lawsuits generated by multistate coalitions dedicated to pushing back on Trump’s allegedly illegal actions.
“Over the past fifteen months, I truly believe that state attorneys general have served as a bulwark, protecting the Constitution and the rule of law, by blocking dozens of unconstitutional and illegal acts by the Trump Administration,” said Clark, who has served in the role since 2023, in a statement. Clark declined to be interviewed in the story, citing scheduling conflicts.
In an email, Gov. Phil Scott’s press secretary, Amanda Wheeler, said there have been instances where Scott has agreed with Clark’s decision to sign onto lawsuits from other states. There have been times when the two conflicted. In 2025, Clark implied Scott had stalled electric vehicle funds stemming from a lawsuit.
“In some cases, we’ve seen the positive outcomes of those lawsuits which is good news for Vermont,” Wheeler said.
She added, “The Governor has been clear that when it comes to the Trump Administration, he’ll continue to call balls and strikes and stand up for what’s in the best interest of Vermont and Vermonters.”
Data from the attorney general shows that the state has joined lawsuits throughout the past 15 months, with activity peaking in mid-2025. Clark has also filed 53 amicus briefs, or “friend-of-the-court” reports arguing in favor of the plaintiffs.
That gender-affirming care lawsuit has become one of the state’s most clear-cut successes: A federal judge ruled in favor of the coalition on April 18, blocking a rule that would have restricted gender-affirming care for minors.
“This decision is a victory in our ongoing fight for bodily autonomy and the rights of transgender youth,” said Clark in a statement Monday. “We will continue to fight to ensure that gender-affirming care remains safe, effective, and protected.”
But according to a document provided by Amelia Vath, Clark’s senior advisor, few lawsuits have had such a definitive victory. In 19 of the 49 cases, federal judges have ruled in Vermont’s favor, but most of those still have the possibility of an appeal.
“In law, we learn never to pop the champagne bottle,” Carter said. “It’s always going to be an ongoing legal battle.”
Yet looking at the lawsuits so far, he said he believes Vermont has a good “batting average” on the suits it’s part of.
“When you see things like courts granting preliminary injunctions, what that means is a court is telling the Trump administration, ‘You cannot do this,’ or they’re telling the Trump administration, ‘You must do this,’” he said. “So a preliminary injunction is a win for a plaintiff like the state of Vermont and all the other states.”
Even after a win, enforcing court orders has been a challenge with Trump, Carter said. The U.S. Department of Justice “does his bidding” to find loopholes in judicial decisions.
“I think the Trump administration has taken that” to another level “when it comes to trying to figure out ways to work around decisions of the Supreme Court,” he said.
He gave the example of Trump’s tariffs on imported international goods. Vermont was a part of the case in which the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs in March. Trump then immediately attempted to impose new tariffs, leading to yet another lawsuit Vermont joined.
Only two cases have been total failures, according to the attorney general’s records. One was a suit challenging the Trump administration’s defunding of Planned Parenthood, which the plaintiffs withdrew in March. The other was a suit attempting to block mass layoffs of federal employees, a decision one circuit court blocked but another overturned on appeal.
Vermont has yet to take the lead on any of the cases it’s joined, according to the attorney general’s records. It has also joined just a small part of the more than 700 lawsuits against the Trump administration, including 84 led by state plaintiffs, according to Just Security, a law and policy journal.
According to the attorney general’s records, 16 of the lawsuits explicitly mention funding for state programs or federal programs that provide services to Vermonters, such as federal food assistance, natural disaster aid and energy programs.
“Because of these lawsuits, my office has brought back tens of millions of dollars that were illegally withheld from Vermont,” Clark said in her statement. “I am very proud of the hardworking and patriotic lawyers in my office and our united mission to protect Vermont and our country.”
Carter said the direct financial consequences of Trump’s actions mean that these lawsuits seem like a good return on investment. Even non-financial lawsuits are important, though, because they rest on principles of equity and the rule of law, he said.
“Even if you just got a preliminary injunction, and it doesn’t result in money coming into the state, you still stood up on the right side of history and said, ‘What’s going on here is not legal,’” he said.
Carter himself has taken part in legal actions against the federal government before. He said that filing a suit against powerful figures like the president could be “intimidating,” but he also found it empowering.
“Plaintiffs with strong legal arguments and conviction in their constitutional rights can be more powerful than the president,” he said.
Disclosure: Jared Carter has provided pro bono legal assistance to VTDigger.
A jury on Friday convicted a man of the brutal 1993 killing of a woman outside Buffalo, closing the latest chapter in a winding, decades-long saga, with a swift guilty verdict on all counts.
The defendant, Brian Scott Lorenz, was facing his third trial for the murder of Deborah Meindl, a 33-year-old nursing student who walked into her Tonawanda, N.Y., home on a cold February afternoon and encountered a terror.
Ms. Meindl was murdered in her own dining room. She was strangled, stabbed and handcuffed, and her bloodied body was discovered by her young daughter returning home from school.
Mr. Lorenz, 56, was originally convicted of Ms. Meindl’s murder in 1994, alongside another man, James Pugh, though the two long denied any involvement in the killing. Their pleas of innocence eventually found the support of several legal advocates, defense lawyers from New York City, who lobbied for new DNA testing in the case.
That testing, performed in 2018, resulted in stunning findings: There was no genetic link to either Mr. Lorenz or Mr. Pugh at the crime scene. Nor was there any other physical evidence — like hair or fiber samples — or any eyewitnesses linking either man to Ms. Meindl’s murder.
Those DNA results, and evidence violations by prosecutors, led to the dismissal of the men’s convictions in 2023, though Erie County continued to pursue the prosecutions.
The case was a challenge: Many of the state’s witnesses from 1994, who said Mr. Lorenz had bragged about the crime, had died; others told investigators they did not remember details of their initial testimony. Still other witnesses had criminal records and, the defense said, were seeking deals for themselves.
A second trial of Mr. Lorenz last year ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. And in December, Mr. Pugh, 63, who had been released on parole after serving more than 25 years in prison, saw his charges dropped. But on Friday, Mr. Lorenz was again found guilty, after less than a full day of deliberation, on two counts of murder and a burglary charge.
The verdict, after two weeks of testimony and arguments in Buffalo, is a defining moment in a case that has perplexed and fascinated residents of Western New York and beyond.
And it was vindication for the Meindl family, represented in court by the victim’s sister, Lynne MacGill, and Ms. Meindl’s younger daughter, Lisa Payne.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Ms. Payne wore a blouse that belonged to her mother and sat in the front row of the courtroom clutching a Mickey Mouse pillow that her older sister, Jessica, had used as a comfort while testifying in 1994. (Jessica Meindl, who discovered her mother’s body, struggled with addiction and died in 2020, at 37.)
Ms. Payne also carried a small silver spoon that Jessica had used as a reminder to stay sober, and wore rings from her parents around her neck, including the wedding ring her mother had on when she was killed. As the verdict was read, Ms. Payne nodded slightly while Mr. Lorenz sat placidly, just a few feet away. He faces sentencing on July 13.
After the verdict, the two family members thanked the Erie County district attorney, Michael J. Keane.
“This outcome is not just a legal victory: It is a testament to the persistence of truth and the unwavering commitment of dedicated public servants tasked with the pursuit of justice,” Mr. Keane said in a statement.
Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers said they planned to appeal. They had spent years building a case for exoneration, citing the lack of DNA evidence connecting Mr. Lorenz to the crime and the possibility of other suspects.
“It’s very, very scary,” said Ilann M. Maazel, one of Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers. “I think innocence should matter. I think the truth should matter.”
One of the initial suspects in the case was Ms. Meindl’s husband, Donald Meindl, who had been having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl he worked with at a Taco Bell at the time of his wife’s killing. Before the murder, he had mentioned to a friend that he wanted to have his wife killed, though he later said he was joking.
But the defense suggested that Mr. Meindl was serious about finding someone to kill his wife, at one point playing audio of Mr. Meindl laughing with a friend — who was wearing a wire for the police — about his wife’s death. Mr. Meindl died in 2023, though he attended hearings about the case in 2021 and 2022.
In his summation, Earl Ward, a defense attorney, emphasized the lack of hard evidence.
“You have to ask yourself why there was none of Scott’s DNA in that house,” Mr. Ward said. “Because he wasn’t there.”
Deepening the mystery, DNA from an unknown person was found on some items used in the murder, including a knife and a necktie that was used to strangle Ms. Meindl. (The authorities in Erie County say they have not done additional testing to determine who that DNA belongs to because “the genetic material is insufficient for comparison.”)
One of the case’s lead investigators in the early 1990s, David Bentley, a Tonawanda detective, also came under scrutiny for seemingly feeding details to some witnesses. Even current prosecutors called his actions sloppy and inappropriate.
And Mr. Bentley had a close relationship with Richard Matt, a convicted killer from the Buffalo area who rose to infamy in 2015 when he and another inmate, David Sweat, escaped from a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Mr. Matt was killed by a federal agent after a three-week manhunt. Mr. Sweat was recaptured.
Then, during a re-investigation of the Meindl case brought on by the new DNA evidence, two Erie County prosecutors came to believe that Mr. Matt might have been involved in killing Ms. Meindl, a theory promoted by Mr. Sweat, himself a convicted killer who remains in prison. The judge in the case, Paul B. Wojtaszek, later discredited that theory, but nonetheless set aside Mr. Lorenz’s and Mr. Pugh’s convictions in 2023.
The dismissal of charges against Mr. Pugh in December and the lack of physical evidence seemed to lead to a shift in prosecutors’ strategy in the third trial; previously, they had argued that the two men had been burglarizing the Meindl home and killed Ms. Meindl to cover their tracks.
This time, prosecutors offered little in the way of motive, though a suggestion toward the end of their closing arguments that Mr. Lorenz might have killed Ms. Meindl for money drew an angry protest from the defense and a rebuke from Justice Wojtaszek. After the verdict on Friday, Mr. Lorenz’s lawyers suggested that those comments by the prosecutors could be part of their appeal.
The state’s case hinged on six associates of Mr. Lorenz who said he’d told them various details about the crime, and his involvement, back in the early 1990s. Several of those people have died, so their past testimony was read to the jury. Other witnesses for the prosecution had criminal records and troubled personal histories, including addiction and mental health issues.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Eugene T. Partridge III, conceded in his closing that “it would have been great had he confessed to a busload of nuns,” but argued that “those vulnerabilities is the reason the defendant chose them.”
Mr. Partridge also defended the long pursuit of a conviction in the case, saying “there is no expiration date on justice.”
The jury’s foreperson, Cindy Musacchio, 61, a retiree living in Tonawanda, said that prosecutors’ compilation of various statements attributed to Mr. Lorenz had swayed her.
“All the people he confessed to, all the similarities, I felt was compelling,” she said, after leaving the jury room.
For her part, Ms. Payne said in a statement that while “nothing in this world could ever justify the brutal death of my mother,” the verdict “shows that as flawed as our justice system is, it can still provide a little piece of comfort.”
“May she now finally be able to rest in peace,” she wrote.
Jonah E. Bromwich and Mark Sommer contributed reporting.
Plans to serve booze at White Stadium’s professional soccer matches in Boston have encountered pushback by critics of the city’s public-private rehab plan, but a ban on alcohol would effectively kill the $325 million project.
Buried in the city’s 321-page lease agreement with Boston Legacy FC, the National Women’s Soccer League team set to play home games at the rebuilt stadium, is a provision that allows the team to walk away from the deal should the city’s Licensing Board choose not to grant its application for a liquor license.
“If … both the Boston Licensing Board and the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission issue a final non-appealable decision in which the applicable entity refuses to grant such a liquor license (for White Stadium) … then the tenant may terminate both this lease and the stadium usage agreement,” the lease states.
“Upon delivery of such termination notice, the parties’ rights, responsibilities, and the obligations under this lease and the stadium usage agreement shall be null and void, and without recourse to either party,” the lease states.
Boston Legacy FC has signed a 10-year lease agreement with the city to share use of Franklin Park’s White Stadium with Boston Public Schools student-athletes.
The team is paying more than $190 million for its half of the stadium renovations, with the city’s $135 million half of the costs paid for by taxpayers.
The Boston City Council defeated a resolution last month, by a 9-3 vote, that sponsors Ed Flynn and Julia Mejia said sought to uphold state law restricting alcohol at public school facilities.
Mejia and Flynn argued that booze should not be sold during professional soccer matches and other private events held at Franklin Park’s White Stadium, given that it is a city-owned public school facility.
“The Boston Public School policy is clear and the state law is clear,” Mejia said last month. “Alcohol is not permitted on public school premises, except under very limited circumstances, which this situation does not meet.”
Most councilors disagreed, including Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who called the rule “antiquated” and said it was not applicable in this instance.
“I think generally this is an antiquated viewpoint of how we regulate alcohol,” Coletta Zapata said last month. “It ignores how Boston responsibly balances public use, economic opportunity and community activation. We can’t pretend that a blanket prohibition is the only pathway forward, especially in a shared-use facility like White Stadium.”
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and a group of park neighbors suing the city to try to block the project have also argued that alcohol should be banned at the facility. The lawsuit, which alleges the professional soccer stadium use would illegally privatize public parkland, is under consideration by the state Supreme Judicial Court.
— Gayla Cawley
No boos this time
Not sure what to make of Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll tossing out the ceremonial first pitch the other night at Fenway Park while the governor was away in California. The stands were still filling up, but nobody seemed to be voicing their political feelings. Is that good? As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.
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