His death was announced this week in an obituary posted by the Prestige Memorial Funeral Home, in Gadsden, Ala. A cause of death was not provided.

“He is survived by his loving family. We ask that you please keep this family and those that may be going through the same lifted in prayer,” the announcement read.

Lubin, who played one season as a freshman for the Huskies from 2014-15, later transferred and played at Cal State Northridge for the 2016-17 season. He transferred again to LSU Shreveport, reported CT Insider.

The Alabama native, nicknamed “Rock” for his toughness on the court, was a highly touted three-star recruit coming out of high school.

After moving to Georgia during his adolescence, Lubin led Buford High School to the Georgia 2A state championship his senior year, averaging 20.3 points and 12.1 rebounds per game.

He was named the Georgia Sportswriters 3A Player of the Year, and ultimately committed to play for then-coach Kevin Ollie at UConn in 2013.

During his freshman year, Lubin played in 24 games for the Huskies, but was one of four players suspended from the program that November for violating team rules.

Although he was later reinstated, transferred to Cal State Northridge, where he averaged 18.2 minutes, 8.5 points and 5.2 rebounds per game.

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He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in business administration and management from LSU Shreveport, according to his LinkedIn page.

Following his basketball career, Lubin was arrested in 2019 for allegedly robbing a Jack’s Family Restaurant in Munford, Ala.

“We are delighted to see this valuable historic artifact and beautiful piece of art returned to its home here in Vermont,” Judith Ehrlich, the agency’s historic preservation officer said in a statement on Monday.

The 1910 weathervane is of a steam locomotive and coal tender and was made by W.A. Snow Iron Works Inc. It sat on top of the White River Junction station in Hartford before it was stolen Nov. 3, 1983, the transportation agency said Tuesday.

Nearly 40 years later, it was consigned to New York auction house Sotheby’s, officials said. The organization Arts Loss Register, which has a database of lost, stolen and looted art, antiques and collectibles, confirmed that the piece was the stolen weathervane, so the auction house pulled it from sale, the transportation agency said.

The state currently owns the White River Junction station. Arts Loss Register worked with the state to return the weathervane last week, the transportation agency said. Sotheby’s paid the $2,300 cost to ship it to Vermont, the state said.

Ehrlich said the transportation agency is working with the state curator to pick a great location for the weathervane “so that it may be enjoyed once more.”

The Town of Greece Police Department said in a statement that the threat was made on Snapchat against Arcadia Middle School. The message was reported by Greece Central School District security just after 6 a.m.

“We worked with security to mitigate the danger and disruption to students, staff, and parents,” the police department said.

The author of the Snapchat post was identified as a 13-year-old female student at the school who was later charged with making a terroristic threat and falsely reporting an incident in the first degree — both Class D felonies.

The specifics of the threat were not made public. The girl’s identity was not released.

“The student was issued an expedited appearance ticket returnable to Monroe County Probation. We appreciate the quick response and work done cooperatively between the school district and our officers,” the police department said.

The incident comes less than two weeks after a transphobic and homophobic bomb threat was made at Arcadia High School, leading to an evacuation. The threat referenced a fight that had occurred in the girls’ restroom earlier in February, but the school did not offer additional details.

Costas Alestas, 43, of Palmer Township, was arraigned Wednesday on multiple criminal charges and then sent to Northampton County Prison on $500,000 bail, according to arrest records.

Authorities were made aware of possible misconduct involving Alestas and a minor on May 1, Bethlehem Police Department Cpt. Nicholas Lechman said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

Officials with the Bethlehem Area School District contacted police regarding an alleged inappropriate relationship between a 14-year-old female student at East Hills Middle School and Alestas, who served as the school’s resource officer.

According to Lechman, Alestas was immediately placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, but has since been fired.

On May 2, investigators conducted an “extensive interview” with the girl, who said she had been in contact with Alestas.

After the victim’s mother discovered text messages exchanged between the two, Alestas “began using a second phone” to contact the girl.

Their conversations initially involved planning to meet to engage in sexual acts, the girl told detectives, but eventually progressed to “several encounters involving sexual contact between the two.”

Those encounters occurred both at school, during school days, and outside, when he would drop her off in areas near her home so they wouldn’t get caught.

During an encounter at school, Alestas sexually assaulted her while wearing his police uniform, officials said.

A search through his cellphone also produced an “upskirt” video of an 11-year-old girl at the school, police said.

In a message posted online, the Bethlehem Area School District said officials became aware of allegations of misconduct on April 29, “when a student shared information with their guidance counselor.”

“The alleged inappropriate behavior violates community trust in our schools, undermines safety, and is illegal, intolerable, and inexcusable,” officials said.

According to the district, Alesas also served as a soccer coach for the school.

Alestas is charged with felonies of statutory sexual assault, institutional sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with someone younger than 16, and criminal use of a communications facility, as well as a misdemeanor of invasion of privacy.

Dontay Prophet, 33, was arrested and accused of whipping the child with a charging cable and putting him in a chokehold at Destiny Leadership Academy, a private school in Ocala.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office said there’s surveillance video of the abuse, which lasted for nearly an hour.

“Surveillance footage captured [Prophet] grabbing the victim, restraining him on the ground, and employing a chokehold,” the sheriff’s office said. “Prophet can be seen on camera using a charging cable to strike the child, causing the child to fall and sustain injuries.”

Deputies said at one point the child tried to escape and hide under a table but was grabbed again, after which Prophet “slapped the child in the face, and subjected him to further physical abuse.”

Prophet claimed he was trying to stop the student from harming himself, but deputies said the video evidence contradicted his statement.

Prophet was previously arrested for inappropriately touching a boy at his home in 2019 but those charges were ultimately dropped, officials said.

The school said Prophet was on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Prophet is being held without bond on charges of aggravated child abuse and false imprisonment of a child under the age of 13.

The identity and age of the child was not released.

The sheriff’s office said it was investigating what events occurred leading up to the assault.

Nicholas “Mitch” Karol-Chik, 19, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in connection with the death of Alexa Bartell in suburban Denver, prosecutors said.

Alexa Bartell

Karol-Chik took a plea deal in exchange for prosecutors dropping first-degree murder charges, according to the First Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

“Karol-Chik knowingly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death, under circumstances evidencing an attitude of universal malice manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life,” the office said in a statement.

On April 19, 2023, Karol-Chik and two pals — Zachary Kwak and Joseph Koenig — drove around the west Denver suburbs throwing large rocks at other vehicles, police said. The teens struck seven vehicles during their chaotic spree.

Three other drivers were injured by the rocks, while Bartell, 20, was killed when a rock smashed through her windshield.

According to police, Karol-Chik passed Koenig the rock that killed Bartell, and Koenig threw it. Kwak, allegedly in the back seat, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last week and faces between 20 and 32 years in prison.

Colorado

Koenig has pleaded not guilty and is set to stand trial beginning July 19. Kwak and Karol-Chik both agreed to testify against Koenig as part of their plea deals.

The barge collided with the Seawolf Parkway Bridge in Galveston — about 50 miles southeast of Houston — around 9:30 a.m. local time, a spokesperson for the Galveston Office of Emergency Management said.

The bridge, which connects the city to Pelican Island in Galveston Bay, is closed to all traffic in both directions while the damage is assessed and the oil spill is contained and cleaned up. The bridge is the only way on or off the tiny island by car.

The Galveston County Sheriff’s Office told KTRK that a large piece of the bridge fell, while the oil spill spanned more than 300 feet.

David Flores, a navigation district bridge operator who witnessed the crash, told the Houston Chronicle the barge was being towed by a tugboat but plowed into the bridge after getting caught in the current.

“I’ve been on the waterfront for 43 years and this is the worst accident I’ve seen,” Flores told the paper. “This is a pretty bad one.”

The crew members onboard were either thrown from the barge in the collision or jumped off. However, no injuries or missing persons were reported.

The barge has a capacity of 30,000 gallons of oil but it’s unclear how much it was carrying at the time of the crash and or exactly how much had leaked.

The U.S. Coast Guard decided to close a small stretch of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway since the oil spill was flowing in that direction, causing a major disruption to maritime traffic in the area.

The bridge, which was constructed in 1960, is nearly 4,000 feet long but has deteriorated. Construction on a replacement bridge was scheduled to begin in 2025.

The collision comes nearly two months after a container ship struck Baltimore’s Key Bridge, killing six construction workers.

Bryan Maclean Howard entered his plea from jail by way of teleconference on Wednesday. His head was wrapped in bandages during the digital court appearance, and he was also sporting a protective gown typically given to inmates on suicide watch.

The judge denied bond, appointed a public defender and set his next court appearance for June.

Howard is accused of sideswiping a bus with his truck on Tuesday, causing it to flip over. Eight people, all of them Mexican farmworkers, were killed and at least 40 others were left injured. He told investigators he left his parent’s house that morning around 6:30 a.m. to drive to a methadone clinic in Ocala, where he was supposed to undergo treatment for a chipped vertebrae in his back. He added that he was also driving extra carefully because he’d just crashed his mother’s car three days earlier, the arrest report said.

Howard was traveling east on SR-40 when his pickup truck allegedly drifted to the center of the road, then struck the bus, which crashed through a fence and into a tree before overturning. It had been carrying 53 farmworkers to a Cannon Farms watermelon field about 80 northwest of Orlando.

“Thank you to all who have reached out and offered condolences, help and prayers! We are going to remain closed through tomorrow and we let everyone know our plan as far as when we will be back at the barn tomorrow afternoon,” the farm wrote on its Facebook page Tuesday. “Thank you so much for understanding.”

Six of the deceased victims range in age from 20 to 46, according to the arrest report. They were identified as Jose Heriberto Fraga Acosta, 27; Isaias Miranda Pascal, 21; Manuel Perez Rios, 46; Cristian Salazar Villeda, 24; Alfredo Tovar Sanchez, 20; and Evarado Ventura Hernandez, 30. Two other deceased victims were identified only as Hispanic males.

Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, said via the social media platform X late Tuesday that all eight people killed were in the U.S. legally on H-2A farmworker visas.

Howard also told investigators he was hanging out with a friend who had a medical marijuana card Monday night and smoked marijuana oil with him. Before Howard went to bed, he said he also took some prescription medications.

With News Wire Services

But despite the welcoming decline of approximately 3% in overdose deaths, officials say the nation’s ongoing drug crisis continues to be “a public safety, public health and national security issue,” with more than 100,000 reported deaths from December 2022 to December 2023.

The first time the country reached that grim milestone was in 2021.

Overall last year, drug overdoses claimed the lives of 107,543 people across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the provisional data.

That number represents a national decline of 3.1% in drug deaths in 2023, though the progress was uneven — from a 25% drop in fatalities in Nebraska to an increase of just over 44% in Alaska.

In New York City, the number of fatalities dropped slightly from 3,187 in 2022 to 3,156 a year later, or a decrease of about 1%. New York State, excluding the five boroughs, experienced an even bigger change — from 3,483 to 3,362 overdose deaths, or about a 3.5% drop.

While celebrating the data as “heartening news,” which “demonstrates we are making progress to prevent deaths from drug overdoses,” Dr. Debra Houry,  chief medical officer of the CDC, said there’s more work to be done.

“There are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers,” she said. “This progress over the last 12 months should make us want to reinvigorate our efforts knowing that our strategies are making a difference.”

According to the CDC data, such shockingly high numbers are related to a massive increase in the use of chemical-based drugs, such as fentanyl and methamphetamine, in recent years.

But while the number of fentanyl deaths dropped slightly by about 2%, overdose deaths from cocaine and psychostimulants, including meth, saw a 3.4% increase.

“The shift from plant-based drugs, like heroin and cocaine, to synthetic, chemical-based drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, has resulted in the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis the United States has ever faced,” Anne Milgram, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a statement last week.

The Dali’s first blackout occurred about 10 hours before it departed the Port of Baltimore, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report.

That blackout occurred while the ship was docked, after a crew member mistakenly closed an exhaust damper, causing one of the ship’s diesel engines to stall, according to the NTSB.

Following the initial blackout, a backup generator automatically kicked on, the federal regulators said. But the backup generator failed shortly afterward due to a lack of fuel pressure, causing a second blackout.

After the back-to-back blackouts while docked in port, the crew altered the ship’s electrical configuration, pivoting from one transformer and breaker system that had been in use for several months to another, according to the NTSB.

The ship was using the new configuration when it lost power again at 1:25 a.m. on March 26 as it traveled out to sea. The Dali was only three ship lengths from the Key Bridge when it lost power for the third time, the NTSB said. The main propulsion diesel engine automatically shut down after its cooling pumps lost power, and the ship lost steering.

Despite manic efforts by the crew to drop anchor, call a tugboat, restore the power and turn the ship, the main propulsion engine remained without power, according to the federal investigators. The crew briefly restored power twice in the moments before the collision, but it was too late.

The Dali struck the bridge at 1:29 a.m., immediately sending the span tumbling into the Patapsco River. Six construction workers on the bridge were killed in the wreck.

NTSB investigators did not draw a direct connection between the earlier power outage that prompted the reconfiguration and the crash. A full report from the agency is expected to take more than a year.

With News Wire Services