Texas authorities are using helicopters and dogs to search for two "dangerous" Texas inmates who escaped from jail this morning by squeezing through a gate, leaving behind their black and white prison suits on the railroad tracks behind the jail.
Authorities believe Brian Tucker, 44, and John King, 39, escaped from Hopkins County Jail in Sulphur Springs, Texas, at around 8:30 a.m. today.
"Both are considered dangerous," Deputy Alvin Jordan of the Hopkins County Sheriff's Office told ABCNews.com.
Area schools are on lockdown and businesses are on high alert, according to police.
Tucker was awaiting trial in jail for capital murder charges and King had been indicted for evading arrest.
The Hopkins County Sheriff's Office/AP Photo
This booking photo provided by the The... View Full Size
The Hopkins County Sheriff's Office/AP Photo
This booking photo provided by the The Hopkins County Sheriff's Office shows John Marlin King, left, and Brian Allen Tucker, right, an inmate awaiting trial on a capital murder charge in a 2011 slaying; the two men broke out of the Hopkins County Jail.
"They were put out on rec yard to have outside rec and undoubtedly squeezed through the gate and took off," Jordan said. "We did find their black and whites about 100 yards behind the facility."
Tucker and King were both segregated from other inmates because of the types of crimes they have committed, according to Jordan.
It is unknown what the men are wearing, whether they may have used some kind of transportation after leaving the jail yard and whether they are still together, Jordan said.
Asked if there is any reason to believe they could be armed, Jordan said, "At this point, unless they picked up anything from here to where they're at, the weapons part is unknown."
Their only known connection at this time is that they were inmates at the same time in the same jail with no known previous ties.
Authorities are warning people to be careful and call 911 if they see the men.
"If they're spotted, make sure they lock their doors, call 911 and tell us what area they're in," Jordan said. "Don't try to let them approach you."
Tucker is 5-foot-7-inches and about 170 pounds. He has brown eyes, brown hair and multiple tattoos. King is 5-foot-8-inches and 165 pounds. He has black hair, hazel eyes and multiple tattoos.
It isn'tquitethe first of April yet, but that hasn't stopped YouTube from launching the first salvo of what will surely be an entertaining 2013 April Fool's Day online.
The popular video-sharing website quietly released a video Sunday morning, the day before April Fool's, titled, "YouTube's ready to select a winner." In it, employees from YouTube explain that, starting at midnight tonight, the site will go offline. They'll then begin narrowing down the best video, with a winner announced when YouTube goes back online in -- wait for it -- 2023.
"We're so close to the end," explains YouTube's "Competition Director," Tim Liston, in the video's opening scene. "Tonight at midnight, YouTube.com will no longer be accepting entries. After eight amazing years, it is finally time to review everything that has been uploaded to our site and begin the process of selecting a winner."
Antoine Dodson, a judge in the contest (and YouTube celebrity) adds, "We are all story tellers, that's what pulled me into this contest... I encourage everybody to watch as many videos as possible before YouTube deletes everything tonight."
Other notable YouTube celebrities appear in the video as well, each sharing their dream to be selected as the best video on YouTube. "I'd better win," says Matt Harding of "Where the Hell is Matt? 2012" fame. "Otherwise, all those years travelling the world were just an expensive waste of time."
In addition to YouTube glory, the winner will also walk away with an Mp3 player that clips to their sleeve and $500 toward their next creative endeavor.
KAUFMAN, Texas — Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland took no chances after one of his assistant prosecutors was gunned down two months ago. McLelland said he carried a gun everywhere he went and was extra careful when answering the door at his home.
"I'm ahead of everybody else because, basically, I'm a soldier," the 23-year Army veteran said in an interview less than two weeks ago.
On Saturday, he and his wife were found shot to death in their rural home just outside the town of Forney, about 20 miles from Dallas.
While investigators gave no motive for the killings, Forney Mayor Darren Rozell said: "It appears this was not a random act."
"Everybody's a little on edge and a little shocked," he said.
The slayings came less than two weeks after Colorado's prison chief was shot to death at his front door, apparently by an ex-convict, and a couple of months after Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was killed in a parking lot a block from his courthouse office. No arrests have been made in Hasse's slaying Jan. 31.
McLelland, 63, is the 13th prosecutor killed in the U.S. since the National Association of District Attorneys began keeping count in the 1960s.
Sheriff David Byrnes would not give details Sunday of how the killings unfolded and said there was nothing to indicate for certain whether the DA's slaying was connected to Hasse's.
El Paso County, Colo., sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Joe Roybal said investigators had found no evidence so far connecting the Texas killings to the Colorado case, but added: "We're examining all possibilities."
Colorado's corrections director, Tom Clements, was killed March 19 when he answered the doorbell at his home outside Colorado Springs. Evan Spencer Ebel, a white supremacist and former Colorado inmate suspected of shooting Clements, died in a shootout with Texas deputies two days later about 100 miles from Kaufman.
McLelland himself, in an Associated Press interview shortly after the Colorado slaying, raised the possibility that Hasse was gunned down by a white supremacist gang.
The weekend slayings raised concerns for prosecutors across Texas, and some were taking extra security precautions. Byrnes said security would be increased at the courthouse in Kaufman but declined to say if or how other prosecutors in McLelland's office would be protected.
Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson said he accepted the sheriff's offer of 24-hour security for him and his family after learning about the slayings, mostly over concerns for his family's safety. Anderson said also would take precautions at his Houston office, the largest one in Texas, which has more than 270 prosecutors.
"I think district attorneys across Texas are still in a state of shock," Anderson said Sunday.
McLelland, elected DA in 2010, said his office had prosecuted several cases against racist gangs, who have a strong presence around Kaufman County, a mostly rural area dotted with subdivisions, with a population of about 104,000.
"We put some real dents in the Aryan Brotherhood around here in the past year," he said.
In recent years, the DA's office also prosecuted a case in which a justice of the peace was found guilty of theft and burglary and another case in which a man was convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her 10-year-old daughter.
McLelland said he carried a gun everywhere, even to walk his dog around town, a bedroom community for the Dallas area. He figured assassins were more likely to try to attack him outside. He said he had warned all his employees to be constantly on the alert.
"The people in my line of work are going to have to get better at it," he said of dealing with the danger, "because they're going to need it more in the future."
The number of attacks on prosecutors, judges and senior law enforcement officers in the U.S. has spiked in the past three years, according to Glenn McGovern, an investigator with the Santa Clara County, Calif., district attorney's office who tracks such cases.
For about a month after Hasse's slaying, sheriff's deputies were parked in the district attorney's driveway, said Sam Rosander, a McLelland neighbor.
The FBI and the Texas Rangers joined the investigation into the McLellands' deaths.
McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were the parents of two daughters and three sons. One son is a police officer in Dallas. The couple had moved into the home a few years ago, Rozell said.
"Real friendly, became part of our community quickly," Rozell said. "They were a really pleasant, happy couple."
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Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Michael Graczyk in Houston, Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth and P. Solomon Banda in Denver contributed to this report.
GALAX, Va. — Nearly 100 vehicles crashed Sunday along a mountainous, foggy stretch of interstate near the Virginia-North Carolina border, killing three people and injuring 25 others.
Police said traffic along Interstate 77 in southwest Virginia backed up for about 8 miles in the southbound lanes after the accidents. Authorities closed the northbound lanes so that fire trucks, ambulances and police could get to the series of chain-reaction wrecks.
Virginia State Police determined there were 17 separate crashes involving 95 vehicles within a mile span near the base of Fancy Gap Mountain, spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. The crashes began around 1:15 p.m. Sunday when there was heavy fog in the area.
"This mountain is notorious for fog banks. They have advance signs warning people. But the problem is, people are seeing well and suddenly they're in a fog bank," said Glen Sage of the American Red Cross office in the town of Galax.
Since 1997, there have been at least six such pileups on the mountain but Sunday's crash was the most deadly, according to The Roanoke Times. Two people died in crashes involving dozens of vehicles in both 2000 and 2010.
Overhead message boards warned drivers since about 6 a.m. Sunday to slow down because of the severe fog, Geller said. The crashes were mostly caused by drivers going too fast for conditions.
At the "epicenter" was a wreck involving up to eight vehicles, some of which caught fire, Geller said. Photos from the accident scene showed a burned out tractor-trailer and several crumpled vehicles badly charred. Those taken to hospitals had injuries ranging from serious to minor.
School buses took stranded people to shelters and hotels.
Nina Rose, 20, and her mother, were driving home to Rochester, N.Y., when they encountered the pileup.
"With so much fog we didn't see much around it," Rose told the Roanoke newspaper. "As we got further up we just saw a bunch of people standing on the median, just with their kids and families all together. There were cars smashed into other cars, and cars just underneath other semi-trucks."
Darrell Utt, 17, of Moore County, N.C., was stuck in the northbound lanes for about three hours as he traveled to Huntington, W. Va.
"It was really foggy at first," he said. "We probably saw over 50 tow trucks. We saw about five cars come down and three semi-trucks. One of them, it didn't even look like a car, it looked like a chunk of metal."
Utt said motorists were calm, despite the traffic jam.
"There was no road rage or anything, everyone understood the severity of how bad this was before we even began to figure out what exactly happened," he said.
Authorities reopened the northbound lanes Sunday night and hoped to have the other side cleared later in the evening.
Police did not immediately release the names of those killed.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Usain Bolt opened his season with a 150-meter win on a track set up at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday.
Bolt cruised to victory in 14.42 seconds, falling short of the world-best mark of 14.35 he set on the streets of Manchester in 2009. Brazilian sprinter Bruno Lins was second in 14.91, ahead of Ecuador's Alex Quinones and Antigua and Barbuda's Daniel Bailey.
Bolt said he was satisfied with his performance after the race, which was held under scorching heat on a four-lane track built on Copacabana beach in the host city of the 2016 Olympics.
"It was my first sprint race, definitely a good start for the season," Bolt said. "I'm looking forward to coming down here in 2016.
Bolt celebrated by dancing with a few Brazilian dancers after the run, which was an official event supervised by the IAAF. There were huge lines as fans tried to get near the track to see the Jamaican star.
Bolt, the first man to successfully defend the 100 and 200 titles at the London Olympics, was in Rio for four days, visiting social projects and participating in promotional events.
Also Sunday, double-amputee Alan Oliveira of Brazil beat American runner Jerome Singleton at the Copacabana track.
Oliveira had been initially expected to race against Oscar Pistorius, who withdrew after being charged with the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Oliveira beat the South African in the 200 at the London Paralympics.
MIAMI, FL -- A little girl has died after being shot Saturday night in front of other children in a car in Northwest Miami-Dade.
Four-year-old Rahquel Carr suffered a gunshot wound to her upper body, according to Miami-Dade Police, and was pronounced dead at Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Detectives are still investigating to determine who shot the gun inside the white Mercedes-Benz, which the Miami Herald reports was parked in the girl's grandparents' driveway in the 12000 block of Northwest 20th Avenue.
Relatives told CBS Miami they believe the girl's six-year-old brother was playing with the gun when it went off accidentally, but MDPD spokesman Det. Roy Rutland said circumstances are still unclear.
"There's a lot of speculation right now as to who had that firearm at the time, but we're not in the business of speculating, we're in the business of facts," Rutland said, noting that an adult was nearby and several children were inside the car when the shooting happened around 6 p.m. Saturday evening.
The Associated Press reports the owner of both the weapon and the car was not present at the time of the shooting and has not been charged.
Florida law requires firearms to be securely encased when in a vehicle, according to NBC6.
“To know that a kid has access to a gun and to be able to have that kind of tragedy happen right in front of your home it’s sad,” neighbor Kendrick Williams told CBS. “Our prayers are with the family and everybody else involved in this situation. The sad thing is someone’s going to have to get in trouble for this for being irresponsible with the unsecured weapon.”
