DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The teenage shooter in a deadly attack at a small-town Iowa high school in January sought to gain fame with the shooting, tried to livestream his actions and had planned for weeks, according to investigators.
The town of Perry, located about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of Des Moines, was rocked when 17-year-old Perry High School student Dylan Butler opened fire on students and staff before the start of classes on Jan. 4, the first day back after the winter break. Butler took his own life with a single gunshot minutes after shooting at others.
The shooting occurred in the school's commons area, where about 50 students and staff had gathered for breakfast before classes. According to a new report summarizing the investigation, Butler arrived at the school at 7:12 a.m. with a shotgun, revolver, knife and homemade explosive device concealed on him and immediately went to a bathroom near the commons area. While in the restroom, Butler posted on social media and began livestreaming, the report said.
The livestream was active on Instagram for a “very, very short period of time” before parent company Meta took it down, Iowa Department of Public Safety Commissioner Stephan Bayens said Friday during a news conference. Butler had a limited following on the platform, so it is unlikely many people saw the livestream, which Meta later provided to investigators, Bayens said.
Evidence gathered suggested Butler showed signs of an obsession with violence and school shootings at least a year prior and had begun planning the shooting six or more weeks beforehand, Bayens added.
Bayens noted there was no evidence to substantiate claims that Butler was acting on a grievance or because he was bullied, as some who knew him had suggested.
Based on Butler's writings, “he desired to be famous, he desired to commit suicide, he desired to take others with him," Bayens said.
The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation conducted an exhaustive investigation, Bayens said Friday. Based on that investigation, Dallas County Attorney Jeannine Ritchie released a report Thursday summarizing the findings and her office's assessment of criminality. They concluded Butler acted alone and the investigation found no evidence that anyone had specific knowledge of Butler’s plans or helped him in the shooting.
Butler emerged from the bathroom 23 minutes after arriving at the school, wielding the shotgun, and began firing. Within the first 24 seconds, Butler fatally shot 11-year-old sixth-grader Ahmir Jolliff and wounded four other students and Perry High School Principal Dan Marburger, the report said.
Bayens and Ritchie both highlighted the heroic actions of Marburger and others to intervene, detailing how the principal and Assistant Principal Brad Snowgren moved towards the source of the gunfire when it began.
Snowgren triggered an alarm informing first responders of an active shooting at the school 10 seconds after the first shot was fired and 25 seconds before the first 911 call, the report said. The first police officer entered the school less than two minutes after that alert, much sooner than the “less than seven minutes” initially reported.
The report says Marburger had a chance to escape the building but remained inside and pleaded with Butler to stop shooting. Bayens said Marburger “saved lives that day” by distracting Butler, calling out his name repeatedly to allow others time to escape.
Investigators could not determine how or where Butler retrieved the shotgun he used, but Bayens said it was probably resold in a private sale and “likely came from a large gun collection within the extended family … and was likely taken without the owner’s knowledge.”
The handgun Butler carried into the school was not used in the shooting and had been taken from an unsecured place in his parents' home, investigators determined. Regardless, Ritchie wrote that Butler's parents were unaware of his plans and evidence in the case “does not support charges at the state level against anyone.”
School staff frequently interacted with Butler, according to the report, but they had no reports regarding Butler’s intentions on the day of the shooting. Butler also was not the subject of any prior law enforcement investigations or threat assessments, the report said.
However, investigators found Butler had shared an obsession with prior school shootings with people in the community and online chat rooms, and he had years of behavioral and mental health concerns that were known by people in his life.
“I can say that others were aware of the shooter's general interest in school shootings. Others were aware of his fascination for violence. Others were aware of his concerning behaviors,” he said. “Those concerns, along with a number of other warning signs, were unreported or were otherwise unrecognized.”
Bayens said some people interviewed indicated their regret for not reporting concerns and implored people to speak up.
“School safety strategy has to be holistic,” he said. “We need parents, we need teachers, we need friends. We need those partnerships if we're going to prevent this.”
FILE - Police respond to a shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa, Jan. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
FILE - Local residents pray during a candlelight vigil following a shooting at Perry High School, Jan. 4, 2024, in Perry, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
FILE - A rock is painted to memorialize Perry High School shooting victim Ahmir Jolliff at the school, Jan. 6, 2024, in Perry, Iowa. (Lily Smith/The Des Moines Register via AP, File)
With the Nov. 5 election fast approaching, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are setting their sights on the key battleground state of Michigan on Friday.
The vice president began her day in Grand Rapids before holding events in Lansing and Oakland County, northwest of Detroit.
The former president has his own event in Oakland County in the afternoon before an evening rally in Detroit.
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Here’s the latest:
Before the crowd gathered in Grand Rapids, Harris spoke for roughly half an hour about her plans for an “opportunity economy" and cast her opponent as politically and dispositionally dangerous.
Harris discussed her proposal to allow Medicare to cover in-home care for the elderly, recounting how she took care of her mother as she aged, and said she would sign a federal bill in support of abortion rights if it reached her desk.
The large crowd listened attentively to Harris’s remarks as they crammed into a space between the Grand River and a forested area in the park.
Harris told the crowd that Trump has “no plan” to protect the American people, but that she would “stand up for all Americans.” The crowd reacted by shouting “concepts of a plan,” a reference to a remark Trump made during his debate with Harris. The vice president took up the phrase, repeating it back to the crowd a few times with a laugh while making quotation marks with her hands.
She also said she's witnessed “a full-on assault” of American freedoms, saying that “so much is on the line in this election.”
Wrapping the event, Harris implored the crowd to make a plan to vote. Early voting begins Saturday in Detroit.
“Don’t ever let anybody take your power,” she said.
While Trump has backed out of some interviews with mainstream media outlets, he also continues to appear regularly on friendly cable shows and conservative podcasts — often sitting for hours of interviews a day.
On Thursday, he taped a sit-down with Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones inside a barber shop in the Bronx and later sat down with George “Tyrus” Murdoch for a video interview with OutKick, before he attended the Al Smith charity dinner, where he delivered remarks.
On Friday morning, he spent 40 minutes on set with the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” before he joined “The Dan Bongino Show,” a video podcast. He also recorded another interview before he departed for a multistop trip to Michigan.
Vice President Kamala Harris walked across a rail trail bridge to enter the outdoor stage at Riverside Park in Grand Rapids. She was introduced by a union carpenter.
Her stage front was decorated with seasonal potted chrysanthemums and pumpkins.
The gathered crowd started to sing “Happy Birthday” to Harris, who will turn 60 over the weekend on Oct. 20.
Trump said that he’s a fan of cows, but primarily as a critique of Democrats’ green energy proposals.
During a Friday morning interview on “Fox & Friends,” the GOP nominee said “I love cows” in response to a child’s video message asking him to name his favorite farm animal.
Trump then reiterated his previous arguments that Democrats’ green energy plans would restrict beef production due to how much methane cows produce.
“But if we go with Kamala, you won’t have any cows anymore because you’re not allowed,” Trump said. “I don’t want to ruin this kid’s day, but I love cows. I think they’re so cute and beautiful.”
Trump and other Republicans have been highly critical of the Green New Deal, a climate proposal put forth by liberal Democrats in 2019 that set ambitious targets to eliminate most greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming by 2030.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris said in a CNN climate town hall that she supported changing dietary guidelines to support a reduction in red meat consumption, adding, “I love cheeseburgers from time to time.”
Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer stumped for Harris in Grand Rapids, appearing with Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The three have been campaigning for Harris and Walz on a “Blue Wall bus tour.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore also joined Whitmer on stage.
“We need strong, stable partners in the White House who have our backs,” Whitmer said.
Trump has courted auto manufacturing workers in Michigan, a key voting bloc, especially in the Detroit area. Whitmer attacked the Trump administration's record on the industry as “broken promises.”
The crowd interrupted during Whitmer’s speech to chant “Big Gretch,” Whitmer’s state nickname.
On Thursday, a protester confronted Vice President Kamala Harris during a closed-door meeting with students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, based on a video posted by a pro-Palestinian student group on social media.
Harris did not allow reporters into her meeting on the Milwaukee campus.
According to the video, as Harris was telling students she was invested in them a protester interrupted her saying, “And in genocide, right? Billions of dollars in genocide?”
Harris told the protester that she wanted a cease-fire. She then said that while she respected the protester’s right to speak she was speaking.
University police escorted the person from the room as he continued recording.
The Harris motorcade drove past pro-Palestinian protesters on campus before the meeting in a university building.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris says Republican Donald Trump is unfit for office.
“He is unstable, and frankly, is a danger to our democracy as has been described by his former chief of staff, secretaries of defense, national security adviser and former vice president,” she told reporters before a rally in Michigan.
When asked about a Politico report that said Trump had declined some interviews in part because he was “exhausted” from campaigning, Harris said, “Being president of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world and we really do need to ask: If he’s exhausted on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?”
Harris and her campaign have increasingly cast her rival as “increasingly unstable” in recent public appearances.
Trump next week is set to visit Asheville, the mountainous North Carolina town where many still lack electricity and running water in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Trump’s campaign said Friday that the GOP nominee would give remarks to the press in Asheville on Monday, along with several other events planned in North Carolina.
Concerns have abounded about how voting would work this year in the southern battleground state as residents from the mountainous western portion of the state continued to recover from the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene. But on Friday, the State Board of Elections said that more North Carolina residents had turned out to cast ballots a day earlier, on the first day of early voting this year, than in 2020.
Trump has campaigned steadily in eastern North Carolina in recent weeks but hasn’t yet visited areas ravaged by Helene, although he did meet with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to gauge storm response in that state. Earlier this month, with many of the area’s roads inaccessible, Biden surveyed the storm’s aftermath in the Asheville area by helicopter.
A top campaign official for Kamala Harris said the Democratic presidential nominee is focused on seven swing states and “we are going to fight for every vote.”
In an interview with CNN’s Inside Politics Friday, David Plouffe said they believe the November election will come down to small margins in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina and “Kamala Harris has a pathway” to win in each.
Plouffe said the campaign is treating every different voting bloc “like they’re a swing voter.”
He said he believes voters don’t want four more years of Donald Trump.
Music star Usher will join Kamala Harris at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, her campaign announced on Friday.
He will speak at the event — no word if he’ll perform any of his hit songs like “DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love” or “Love In This Club.”
Harris is heading to Georgia for part of the weekend as early voting begins in the battleground state.
Perhaps in a move to instill joy back into her message again, Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak outside a “fall fest” in Grand Rapids, Michigan, hosted by the campaign. Thousands waited in long security lines to get into the rally at a park by the Grand River with food trucks, free donuts and pumpkins to decorate.
Mary Muller, 70, and Kathi Padula, 77, said the high stakes of the election motivated them to attend the first political rally of their lives. The two Grand Rapids residents volunteer with the Democratic party in Kent County, a major target within Michigan for Harris and Trump.
“I think Kamala Harris embodies everything that I’m looking for as far as having the experience, the wisdom, the dignity, the caring,” Muller said. “I love the fact that she seems to be a very joyful, caring person yet she’s very smart.”
Marnie Becker-Baratta, 32, attended the rally with the youngest two of her four children. While speaking at a pumpkin decorating table, she said she wanted her kids to see “history happen,” with Harris, who would be the first woman to hold the office of president of the United States if elected.
Becker-Baratta’s kids motivate her to vote and be politically active.
“I don’t want to see their rights taken away,” she said. “My oldest daughter identifies as trans.”
Former President Donald Trump said on Friday that rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are being treated like Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on U.S. soil during World War II.
“Why are they still being held? Nobody’s ever been treated like this,” he said in an interview with conservative commentator Dan Bongino. “Maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.”
Trump made the comments after claiming the defendants “won in the Supreme Court.” His reference concerns a ruling from this past June that limited a federal obstruction law that had been used to charge hundreds of Capitol riot defendants as well as the former president himself.
The justices, in a 6-3 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the charge of obstructing an official proceeding must include proof that defendants tried to tamper with or destroy documents.
The overwhelming majority of the approximately 1,000 people who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to Capitol riot-related federal crimes were not charged with obstruction and will not be affected by the outcome.
Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., said on Friday said: “We must never forget our vote is our voice” while endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the nation's top executive.
Martin Luther King III, his wife Arndrea Waters King and other community leaders are working to rally Black voters ahead of the 2024 election, warning about civil rights should Trump win.
King said Republican Donald Trump is who he has “always been — a man willing to hurt others for his own profit and notoriety.”
Donald Trump is expected to visit a new campaign office in one of the nation’s only Muslim-majority cities.
That’s according to a person familiar with Trump’s schedule who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the event hasn’t been publicly announced.
The visit to Hamtramck, located in metro Detroit, comes after the city’s mayor endorsed him last month.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has tried to cut into Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ support with Arab Americans in Michigan. Many Muslim and Arab voters are frustrated with Harris over the U.S. backing of Israel’s offensive in Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon, both following Hamas’ attack on Israel last October.
Trump’s allies have held meetings for months with community leaders in Michigan, which is a critical swing state in the November election and has a sizable population of Arab Americans particularly in and around Detroit.
—From Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan
Former President Donald Trump says he wasn’t a fan of many of the jokes he told at last night’s Al Smith charity dinner.
“For the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he said in a live appearance on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning.
Trump said a number of people had helped him with material, including some from Fox — though he didn’t say whom.
Trump made a similar aside midspeech after a particularly pointed joke targeting Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris.
He seemed to acknowledge he’d gone too far, calling the joke “nasty” and saying he’d told the “idiots” who’d written it that it was “too tough.”
He also said during the speech that he’d gone “overboard” in his 2016 appearance at the event when he laced into his then-rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump says he’ll “do what I have to do” to drum up support from one of his former GOP primary rivals, Nikki Haley.
Trump gave that response Friday during a live appearance on “Fox & Friends” when asked if he would seek the former South Carolina governor’s support on the campaigning trail in the election’s closing days.
Trump said Haley “is helping us already” and “is out campaigning” but questioned why political watchers seemed so concerned that she and not other former rivals, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, stump for him.
Harris has been courting some of Haley’s former supporters in the closing days of the general election campaign.
Haley, who also served as Trump’s United Nations ambassador, was the last foe remaining against Trump in the Republican primary earlier this year, shuttering her campaign after the former president’s romp through the Super Tuesday contests. She didn’t immediately endorse him in the race but said in May she’d vote for him, leaving it up to the former president to work toward winning over support from her backers.
Haley called for GOP unity around Trump in a speech at this summer’s Republican National Convention.
Grammy Award winning singer Marc Anthony in a new TV ad for Harris is lambasting Trump for blocking disaster relief for Puerto Rico after a 2017 hurricane devastated the U.S. territory.
The ad released Friday and aimed at Latino voters includes footage of the ravaged island following Hurricane Maria and Trump tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd during a visit to an island church following a hurricane, behavior from the then-president that was derided by some as disrespectful.
“Even though some have forgotten, I remember what it was like when Trump was president,” said Anthony, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “I remember what he did and he said about Puerto Rico, our people.”
Trump publicly feuded with the mayor of San Juan over her criticism of his administration’s response to the storm that killed 3,000 and withheld billions in congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico. He eventually relented and announced less than 50 days before his losing 2020 reelection bid that he was releasing $13 billion in aid. At the time, he declared himself the “best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.”
The Harris campaign said that the ad will air on the popular Spanish-language Telemundo and WAPA America TV, during this Sunday’s coverage of the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Awards and in Pennsylvania on Telemundo and Univision.
Latino voters have historically favored Democrats, but Republicans have made inroads with the group in recent years.
Residents of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of more than 3 million people, cannot vote in the general election. But there are more people of Puerto Rican descent on the mainland than on the island, and they could play a key role in the Nov. 5 vote.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Resch Expo in Green Bay, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., listens at the 79th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump gestures as he departs the 79th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
