Washington state teen sent text invite for lunch to students, then shot them at table
Washington state teen sent text invite for lunch to students, then shot them at table
MARYSVILLE, Wash. — A popular student responsible for a shooting at a Washington state high school on Friday invited his victims to lunch by text message, then shot them at their table, investigators said Monday.
Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary said at a news conference that the five students were at a lunch table when they were shot by 15-year-old Jaylen Fryberg. Fryberg then committed suicide.
Detectives are digging through reams of text messages, phone and social media records as part of an investigation that could take months, Trenary said.
“The question everybody wants is, ‘Why?’” Trenary said. “I don’t know that the ‘why’ is something we can provide.”
Fryberg, a football player who was named a prince on the school’s Homecoming court one week before the killings, was a member of a prominent Tulalip Indian Tribes family. He seemed happy although he was also upset about a girl, friends said. His Twitter feed was recently full of vague, anguished postings, like “It won’t last … It’ll never last,” and “I should have listened. … You were right … The whole time you were right.”
Divers helping aquatic archaeologists explore ancient Mediterranean shipwreck
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The divers descended 410 feet into dark Mediterranean waters off Italy, their lights revealing the skeleton of a ship that sank thousands of years ago when Rome was a world power. A sea-crusted anchor rested on a rock. The ship’s cargo lay scattered amid piles of terra cotta jars, called amphora.
Highly trained technical divers with a Florida-based group called Global Underwater Explorers — GUE for short — are helping Italian researchers unlock the mysteries of an ancient shipwreck thought to date to the second Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. Able to descend hundreds of feet farther than most divers, they aide the archaeologists by swimming about the wreck fetching artifacts — as no robotic submersible can.
On this dive, they swam past the large amphora used to carry wine, olive oil and other cargo on Mediterranean trade routes centuries ago — feeling as if they were transported to another time.
“It felt very much like a ghost ship awaiting the boarding of ancient mariners,” said Jarrod Jablonski, one of the divers with the exploration group based in the Florida community of High Springs.
Many of these divers honed their deep-water abilities in Florida’s labyrinths of underwater caves. Now GUE provides the technical divers needed to access cargo and other artifacts from a ship thought to have sailed around 218-210 B.C. — when Rome and Carthage were fighting for naval superiority in the Mediterranean.
Columbian mammoth skull, tusk discovered in Idaho may indicate rare complete skeleton
AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho (AP) — A portion of a Columbian mammoth skull and tusks have been uncovered in southeastern Idaho, and experts say a rare entire skeleton might be buried there.
Experts estimate the mammoth was about 16 years old and lived about 70,000 to 120,000 years ago in what was a savanna-like country populated with large plant-eaters and predators.
The skeleton was spotted earlier this month by a fossil hunter working as a volunteer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation near American Falls Reservoir. It was partially excavated by students and instructors from Idaho State University.
But the team had to postpone their work Oct. 18 as the reservoir’s water level rose, completing some of their tasks while standing in water. They plan to return next summer when the reservoir drops.
“It gives us a little more time to prepare if this is a complete mammoth, to get the funds together,” said Mary Thompson, Idaho Museum of Natural History collections manager and a university instructor. “This is going to be substantial to go out and excavate a complete mammoth.”
By wire sources