Teenagers charged with murder over shooting in Dadeville, Alabama

Two teenage boys have been charged with murder after the shooting at a 16th birthday party in Alabama that killed four and injured 32 over the weekend.

Ty Reik McCullough, 17, and Travis McCullough, 16, were arrested on Tuesday night, police said.

Authorities said the suspects are each being charged with four counts of reckless murder and that more charges are expected.

A prosecutor said the suspects would be charged as adults.

At a press conference on Wednesday, officials told reporters that these were the very beginning stages of the investigation into the shooting on Saturday in Dadeville and offered very few details. No information was given about a motive or the type of firearm used.

Police said that among the 32 people injured, four are still in the hospital and four remain in critical condition.

“We are going to make sure everyone of those victims has justice and not just the deceased,” Sergeant Jeremy Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) said.

The 19 July 2011 was the “most humble day” of Rupert Murdoch’s life.

Until now, at least.

On that day in 2011, the world’s most powerful media mogul was called before Parliament’s culture and media committee as the phone hacking scandal engulfed his UK newspaper operations.

The final straw had been the revelation that the News of the World had listened in to the voicemails of the murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler.

The horror of it still resonates (and the story of phone hacking is far from over).

Back then, Murdoch’s damage limitation exercise was swift. He shut down the 168-yearold newspaper and apologised privately to the Dowler family.

The man who has had such a hold over Britain’s media since he arrived in London in the late 1960s to buy the News of the World was forced into that humiliating oneliner.

“This is the most humble day of my life,” he told MPs (with the theatre of the event heightened by his then wife Wendi Deng later launching herself at a protester who attacked her husband with a custard pie).

Now Murdoch has been forced into another humiliating climbdown, this time in relation to his US operations.

Yet again, it’s the Murdoch empire’s approach to truth that is in the spotlight.

Fox News argued it was fighting a court case against voting machine company Dominion in

The agency added: “These individuals have been charged after a complex and thorough investigation was conducted with assistance from a multitude of law enforcement agencies.”

Until Wednesday, police had offered few details since the the interests of free speech, a US First Amendment right. trial shooting on any suspects in the case.

Instead, it appeared that the network relegated fact-based journalism for fiction in the wake of America’s 2020 presidential election.

We already know, from Fox News emails and messages published in February as part of the legal case, that many Fox executives and presenters didn’t believe claims of voter fraud - but broadcast them anyway.

The network carried on giving a platform to people endorsing the views of Donald Trump and his supporters that the election had been stolen - in part, it seems, because it didn’t want to upset its viewers.

Suzanne Scott, the Fox News Media chief executive, told Murdoch just before rioters stormed the US Capitol in January 2021 that the channel needed to be careful about “pissing off the viewers”.

With 7,000 documents now in the public domain, there has already been a lot of damaging material to chew over. Huge questions remain over the impact Fox News and its broadcasts had over the divisions apparently tearing the US apart. Truth took a back seat and the impact is still being felt.

Perhaps, for Murdoch, the final straw was the prospect of facing another public humiliation, this time in court. Fox’s lawyers had failed to persuade the judge that he shouldn’t be called to the stand.

District Attorney Mike Segrest acknowledged this fact, saying, “I know that there has been some frustration among our community and among media about a lack of information that has been provided up to this point.”

The deceased victims have been identified as Marsiah Collins, 19; Phil Dowdell, 18; Corbin Holston, 23; and Shaunkivia Smith, 17.

Mr Dowdell died trying to save his sister Alexis, his family has said. He was a star athlete on his high school’s American football team and had been due to graduate to go to Jacksonville State University on a sports scholarship.

One of his friends and school football teammate told the BBC: “Phil to me was an amazing friend. God’s got an angel.” more costly. Smartmatic wants more than Dominion - $2.7bn (£2.2bn) in defamation damages.

There were about 50 people at the party, which was held at a local dance studio.

Dadeville, a town of roughly 3,000 residents, is about 60 miles (100 km) northeast of the state capital of Montgomery.

Officials said the two suspects are from Tuskegee, Alabama which is about a 40 minute drive from Dadeville.

Sgt Burkett urged those who were at the party at the dance studio to contact authorities if they have not already done so.

“We need you to come forward for these families, for these victims,” he said.

The weekend attack took the US to a grim milestone of more than 160 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines such events as ones in which four or more people are shot.

In the UK, the Murdoch empire has already paid out many millions in damages to people who accused it of phone hacking.

Prince Harry is part of a group of claimants trying to take Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, which includes the Sun, to court over alleged phone hacking.

How damaging will all this be?

The $787.5m payout to Dominion is a huge amount. But Fox’s revenue in the last quarter of 2022, for example, was $4.6bn (£3.7bn) - and the share price has barely moved in light of the settlement.

Along with his son Lachlan, Fox Corporation’s executive chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch would have had to give evidence.

And it’s clear Dominion’s lawyers would not have settled for a one-liner from the media mogul.

“The most humble day of my life” simply wouldn’t have cut it. It would have been hugely embarrassing.

So Rupert Murdoch agreed a last-minute settlement, meaning Fox will pay Dominion $787.5m (£634m).

Although the case never reached trial and the Murdochs never took the stand, reputationally the damage surely equals that of the hacking scandal.

So where does this leave the man who has been integral to the fabric of the media landscape in the UK, the US and Australia for so long?

Ruthlessness and risk-taking built the Murdoch empire, whether that was his victory over the print unions in the early days of his ownership of the Times and Sunday Times, or his determination to create the right-wing Fox News, credited with helping get Trump elected in 2016.

His critics will be crowing over the Dominion settlement.

On CNN, presenter Jake Tapper (who said it was difficult to report the outcome “with a straight face”) called it “one of the ugliest and most embarrassing moments in the history of journalism”.

And this isn’t the end of the matter. Another voting software company, Smartmatic, is also suing Fox over its broadcasts about voter fraud. It could be even

Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn from 2011. At the time, the horrific story of the News of the World’s exploitation of Millie Dowler’s murder felt to many like a watershed.

It cost the empire dearly in the short term - but, while the phone hacking fallout and financial outlay are ongoing, Murdoch’s influence has only spread since then.

He’s older now, at 92. He has also suffered a more personal embarrassment recently. Having announced a new engagement and his plans to spend the “second half of our lives together”, just a few weeks later the marriage plans were off.

But if we’ve learned one thing over the past half a century, it’s that you underestimate Rupert Murdoch at your peril.

Source: BBC