Tracey Hughes’s suspicions hardened into certainty when her husband’s phone sounded as he stood in the shower. She had long wondered whether Clayton was involved with his fiery, red-haired boss, but he had denied any affair. Then a message appeared.

Sent via Snapchat by a woman using a red-haired avatar, it read: ‘I hate when I wake up in the morning before you. I love you. And I had the worst nightmare about us last night.’

Hughes was first shocked—and then enraged.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘I took the phone while he was still in the shower, and I said to him: “Tell her her nightmare came true.”‘

It was not an empty threat. Hughes intended to confront the woman and end the relationship.

Last month, six years after that message was sent, Hughes won $850,000 in damages from Jennifer Jo Cobb, one of the few women to reach NASCAR’s highest levels of competition.

Cobb, 53, remained legally married to Eddie Troconis, once the crew chief of her NASCAR team, when a private investigator told the court he had discovered her having ‘rambunctious’ sex with Clayton Hughes, Tracey’s husband of 17 years.

Clayton, now 58 and the father of the couple’s two sons, was working as Cobb’s ‘spotter’ at the time. From a grandstand roof, the spotter watches the race through binoculars and relays vital information to the driver over a headset. In this case, the pair’s mutual attraction had consequences far beyond the track—ultimately helping bring Clayton’s marriage to an end.

A North Carolina jury concluded that Cobb had seduced Hughes’s husband and awarded the betrayed wife substantial damages under the state’s controversial ‘homewrecker law.’ The statute is often called the Jolene law, a reference to Dolly Parton’s 1973 song about another woman trying to take a lover.

Hughes, 63, laughs when asked about the twist of a woman with the ‘flaming locks of auburn hair’ mentioned in the song becoming the other woman in her own story.

‘Oh, Jolene,’ she said. ‘I know.’

North Carolina is among only four states where these laws remain on the books. Utah and New Mexico abolished theirs this year.

In North Carolina, Mississippi, Hawaii and South Dakota, a spouse can bring a civil case against the person accused of breaking up the marriage if they can show that the relationship was loving and committed. Claims may seek damages for ‘alienation of affection’ and ‘criminal conversation,’ the legal term for sexual intercourse. These cases are known as ‘heart balm torts’ and are intended to offer financial compensation to a betrayed spouse.

Kyrsten Sinema, the former Arizona senator, is also facing a lawsuit from a North Carolina woman who alleges that Sinema seduced her husband while he was employed as Sinema’s bodyguard. A judge rejected Sinema’s bid to dismiss the case in September, allowing the proceedings to continue.

In November 2025, a jury ordered 27-year-old TikTok influencer Brenay Kennard to pay Akira Montague $1.75 million after finding her liable for contributing to the collapse of Montague’s marriage to Tim Montague. Kennard, who is now married to Tim, is appealing the decision.

And in 2011, a North Carolina judge ordered the mistress of trucking executive Donald Puryear to pay $30 million to his former wife, Carol Puryear. It remains unclear whether the award was ever collected. Neither Carol Puryear nor her attorneys responded to the Daily Mail’s requests for comment.

The legal tradition dates back to England, where an abolished statute once allowed husbands to seek compensation from men accused of taking their ‘property’—their wives.

Critics argue that although both men and women can now be sued, the law, dating from the mid 1800s, is outdated and should be repealed.

Victoria Gillispie Hardin, founder and owner of Hardin Law Firm, said she often advises wronged spouses against pursuing the claim.

‘The only people who win in these cases are the lawyers,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘Unless it’s a professional athlete, it’s rarely worth it.’

Gillispie Hardin said some may pursue the case to ‘make this other woman’s life a living hell.’

She added: ‘But I would say to her, rather than spending hundreds of thousands on an attorney, go take that trip of a lifetime, get that plastic surgery.’

Those caught up in the cases can find themselves ruined. Michael Freeman, 54, was sued by Brian McCoy after McCoy claimed his wife of a decade, Angela, left him amid a brief relationship with Freeman.

At the time Freeman was a courthouse deputy in North Carolina’s Iredell County, while Angela was a courthouse clerk.

‘I was introduced to Angela in March of 2004, and did tell Angela that out of respect for Mr McCoy, she would have to obtain legal separation papers before I would start seeing her,’ he said. ‘She got those papers on April 9th of 2004.’

Nonetheless, McCoy sued the following year, and in July 2011 was awarded $2.3 million in damages, which Freeman told the Daily Mail ruined him.

‘I wasn’t even invited to the trial in 2011 – and I didn’t know about the damages until four years later,’ Freeman said. ‘I brought a case against my accuser in 2015, and he then did not show. It was an extremely painful mess.’

Freeman, who claims he was never given a chance to defend himself, said the bank foreclosed his home, and Iredell County fired him from his job. He then was declared bankrupt.

Robert Inge, McCoy’s lawyer, told the Salisbury Post in December 2011 that the case was not about the money, but rather about making a point. Inge did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment, and McCoy died in a hospice in April 2020, at the age of 48. Angela, now remarried and contacted by the Daily Mail, declined to comment.

Hughes, however, said the law was her salvation.

‘I am so thankful I lived in North Carolina,’ she said. ‘I would hate to have been on the floor of that bathroom for three months, broken and not been able to do something about it. You become very despondent. You stay depressed, you make irrational decisions, if you didn’t have a way to kind of fix it, get your pride back. I don’t know what I would have done.

‘It got me off the floor. And got me moving again.’

Hughes, born and raised in North Carolina, was working as a flight attendant for one of the big airlines, jetting all over the world, when she met and eventually married Clayton. She was 39 and gave up her work when she fell pregnant with their first son.

‘I really wanted to be home with them, and we could afford it,’ she said. ‘He was very hardworking. He always worked in NASCAR, but he also had a wholesale car business with his father.

‘We lived beneath our means, so never in debt. We took a vacation twice a year, our house was paid for – we also had a cabin in the Uwharrie Lakes, and a rental property. We lived very comfortably, but not fancy.’

As the boys got older, Hughes slowly started working again, finding a job within NASCAR, too, as a flight attendant for one of the teams.

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‘We both travelled for a living,’ she said. ‘He worked in NASCAR throughout our marriage. We were always on the phone. I knew where he was. I knew where he was staying. And when I was traveling for NASCAR, we would stay together – whoever had the nicer hotel. 

‘We had many great times together where we were away from the kids and could have a nice dinner and spend quality time together.’

Clayton often wrote his wife a stream of lyrical love letters and notes, dated and inscribed. They happily discussed renovating the lake cabin, with plans to spend their retirement on the water. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to Clayton Hughes and his attorney for comment.

He had worked as a spotter for NASCAR champion Martin Truex, before joining Cobb’s team. Then, Hughes claimed, things fell apart.

‘He stopped wanting me to come stay with him,’ she said. ‘He would say the hotel’s under construction. And then the next week, I’d say, “Am I going to come see you?” And he said, “well, the hotel’s under construction.” I said, “Again? Another one?”‘

In September 2020, when their sons were 12 and 16, Clayton said he wanted a separation.

Hughes asked him outright if he was having an affair with his new boss, and he denied it.

‘I knew she was having problems in her own marriage,’ said Hughes. ‘And she’s very flashy. She’s not like me at all. She does all these promotional things, talks a lot about women’s empowerment,’ she added, eyebrows raised.

Neither Cobb nor her lawyers have responded to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.

Tracey and Clayton decided to stay together until after Christmas, for the sake of their sons, but in October 2020 she found that fateful message, and immediately contacted divorce lawyers.

‘I was aware of the alienation of affection laws, but didn’t know anybody who’d ever been involved in one,’ she explained. ‘When I told my divorce attorney he might be having an affair, she said: “We’ll hire private investigators.”

‘I was scared to death to go down that road. I didn’t know what it entailed, because they wanted to put GPSs on his cars which really scared me – that made me very nervous – but that’s how you get the evidence. Even though he was having the affair, I felt like I was somehow betraying him. It’s weird, mentally, to change gears like that.’

The private investigators were careful not to share much information with Hughes, fearing she would give the game away, and she never confronted the cheating couple personally.

‘I was emotional,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t let on to my husband what they were telling me, as it would blow their surveillance and make their job very difficult. So they told me a little bit – yes, we saw them together – but not necessarily what they were doing, because I was still emotionally a mess, crying, broken, debilitated. They knew from experience not to tell me something that might really upset me, because I’d confront him. It would lose my case.’

By January 2021, Clayton filed for legal separation and moved out, and the private investigators had the evidence they needed.

By October 2021, Cobb’s husband Eddie Troconis had also evidently found out about the affair: that month he was charged with assaulting Clayton near a racetrack in Talladega, Alabama – ‘sucker punching’ him, according to Chief Deputy Josh Tubbs, and then kicking him in the back multiple times while he lay on the floor.

Troconis was sentenced to a year in prison in February 2023, local media and NASCAR sites reported. Clayton was left with significant injuries and required rehabilitation to walk again.

And when the Hugheses’ case finally came to trial, the letters and retirement plans were key for proving the sound state of the marriage, while the investigators’ files were crucial in confirming that Clayton and his boss were indeed having an affair.

The court heard from one of the private eyes who booked a hotel room next to the pair and described in toe-curling detail the sounds of their tryst.

‘People need to know that if you don’t have the evidence, you’re not going to win,’ Tracey said.

‘It’s one of the darkest places you can go – betrayal by your spouse – and it’s just so cruel and humiliating. We were in the same sport, so it was really humiliating. My passengers knew it, but I didn’t. I’m healed up now, but those were really tough days.’

‘I had $1,000 in my bank account when he left me,’ she said, worried first and foremost about her sons.

She had signed a prenup two weeks before the wedding, when she was pregnant with their first child and didn’t see any way to bargain with the document. Part of the divorce involved her suing for a greater share of their marital assets, including the three homes.

‘I was so scared I wouldn’t even have a place to live. It was during the COVID housing crisis. And I had a friend who was a realtor. We finally found a house because [Clayton] gave us a deadline to be out. I couldn’t find anything. I said to him, “I need more time.”‘

But what really inspired her, she said, was Clayton’s dismissive attitude.

‘He underestimated me,’ she said. ‘He told me I wouldn’t do anything, because, A, I didn’t have the money, and B, I was scared of her. And that really got me going.’

Cobb is currently appealing the judgement, so it is too soon for Hughes to plan how to spend the money.

Her sons are her priority, she says. Her youngest is a senior in high school, and her oldest now works as a private pilot: perhaps, she says, she will move to be closer to her siblings and mother. Hughes now is currently employed as a tour guide at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

But after the three-day trial in September in which she was awarded $850,000, her future finally looks bright, money or not.

She said: ‘I broke down in tears after the jurors left the room, because I’d been holding it in, and it had been five years. And the first thing that my lawyer said to me was: You’ve been vindicated. And I can tell you – that was better than the $850,000.

‘Because they had been going around telling everybody that they didn’t start dating until after we’d broken up. Just the audacity of that – and also telling my kids that. They were trying to make me look like a liar to my kids, like I was just out for revenge.’

And she has no regrets.

‘It kind of brought life back to me because I had a mission,’ she said.

‘It gave me a job to do, pulled me out of my grief, and I got my self-pride back. It gave me something to do where I wasn’t just rolling over and taking it.

‘I would hate to be in a state where I just had to take it and there’s nothing I could do. It empowered me. North Carolina gave me the power to do something about it.’

Body camera footage captures the heartbreaking moment a Georgia police officer fatally shot HeeHaw, a beloved 1-year-old donkey.

The Cedartown Police Department released the footage showing HeeHaw—who stood barely waist-high to the officers—approaching them as they searched a field for a missing 12-year-old girl.

“Firearm discharged at a donkey. It was trying to attack us on a pasture,” Officer Trenton Garner told dispatch in the video.

The footage shows HeeHaw slowly walking toward the officers with his ears raised as they moved through Elsberry Riding and Farm ranch in Rockmart, Georgia, at about 12:45 a.m. on Oct. 4.

HeeHaw approached one officer, who quickly deployed a Taser. The device failed, according to Garner’s incident report.

Garner then fired a Glock 17 at HeeHaw from approximately 10 yards away.

The injured donkey ran from the area before collapsing. He was later found dead from the gunshot wound.

In his report, Garner said a Cedartown officer, a K-9 handler and a bloodhound team searching for the girl had been able to scare away horses on the property. He said HeeHaw was the only animal that allegedly charged at them.

Hannah Israel, HeeHaw’s owner, mourned the loss of the bottle-raised yearling and disputed the officer’s description of what happened.

“HeeHaw thought people were his family, and HeeHaw was family,” Israel told WSBTV.

“Cops entered my pasture searching for a missing person WITHOUT permission or warning and shot and killed my bottle raised BABY donkey,” Israel wrote online Sunday, adding that she planned to pursue legal action.

“We are heartbroken. He was my SON!!” she wrote.

Israel operates Elsberry Riding and Farm ranch, where HeeHaw was part of the petting zoo.

Garner has been placed on administrative leave.

The Georgia Department of Agriculture is investigating the shooting.

Neither Israel nor the Cedartown Police Department could be reached for comment.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Demonstrators, including the high-profile CodePink activists, are expected to arrive in the nation’s capital late Saturday afternoon for a “coordinated global day of action” targeting Israel. Their rally will form part of a worldwide series of marches and planned disruptions that may initially appear to be organized separately.

In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, anti-Israel protesters on Friday held signs using intensely emotional language about Israel. One displayed a Palestinian flag beside a bloodied hand and the words, “STOP GENOCIDE.” Nearby, two women carrying mock machine guns stood beside a cardboard depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs, a noose drawn around his neck.

However, a News Media investigation found that the protest’s “communications framing” and international action plan had been prepared well before the first demonstrators assembled. Banners had been designed, protest tactics circulated and a media strategy developed to “turn public outrage into collective leverage.”

The campaign materials direct participating organizations to urge protesters to “shut down city squares,” “encircle government buildings” and “blockade complicit corporate hubs.”

“This is not a symbolic march and not a routine protest,” the document states.

News Media identified 179 organizations in the coalition, while an interactive Google Map published by the network lists 322 events scheduled across three days through Sunday. They include a rally on an “Intifada Trail” in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, a protest in Bangladesh by the “Bangladesh Intifada Youth Collection” and actions in South Africa by “Social Intifada.” All three use “intifada,” a term associated with Palestinian uprisings against Israel, including periods marked by deadly terrorist attacks. Activists describe the term as a call for resistance.

The international coordination shows how modern protest movements can combine global leadership, local activist networks, uniform visual branding, emotionally charged slogans and conventional media outreach. Together, those elements create a mobilization system in which professional political organizers amplify the sincerely held beliefs of individual protesters.

CodePink is among the participating groups. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit has received $1.33 million from Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based technology tycoon who has directed $278 million to a network of nonprofits now under scrutiny from the House Ways and Means Committee and its chairman, Rep. Jason Smith. The committee has raised allegations that some of the organizations function as “Trojan horses” and proxies for the Chinese Communist Party and other malign foreign interests. CodePink and the other groups under scrutiny have denied wrongdoing.

Two days ago, CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and D.C. coordinator Olivia DiNucci sent members a letter urging them to join the “Feminist Contingent” at the Library of Congress for the “global day of action.”

“And don’t forget to WEAR PINK!” they wrote.

The network’s connections were on display again last week, when CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans, who married Singham in 2017, attended an anti-Israel protest in New York City. She marched behind activists from Revolutionary Communists of America as they chanted, “Long live the intifada.”

Evans told News Media that Singham supports CodePink’s work and the “amazing work” of nonprofits that “stand up when violent things are happening.”

Viewed together, the documents describe a coordinated protest and influence campaign operating across continents. Its tactics include accusations of Israeli “genocide,” criticism of the news media, workplace and university walkouts, blockades, political lobbying and carefully managed publicity.

The planning documents portray the wave of anti-Israel demonstrations not simply as a protest effort, but as a psychological operation built around a shared playbook. That strategy combines allegations of Israeli “genocide,” attacks on journalists and news organizations, walkouts at workplaces and universities, blockades, political pressure and coordinated media exposure.

Three organizations sit at the center of the international campaign identified in the documents: the “Global Alliance for the Palestinian territories,” founded in London in July 2025 as a “truly international popular front for Palestinian liberation”; the “Anti-Apartheid Movement for Palestine”; and the “Global Coalition to End the Occupation of Palestine.”

An online directory features the logos of 179 participating organizations from around the world. News Media extracted the names shown in those logos and used them to create a coalition database.

A similar model of coordinated activism has appeared in another international protest movement: the so-called “student protests” spreading across France.

A separate News Media investigation found a network of 50 organizations coordinating and amplifying those demonstrations. Just 15 were identified as youth- or student-led groups. The other 35 included communist organizations, labor unions, political groups and professional protest organizers.

Organizers supplied participating groups with campaign materials, coordination and strategic support to “turn public outrage into collective leverage.”

In an August “Launch Statement,” the alliance laid out a strategy to synchronize student demonstrations, workplace actions, rallies and civil disobedience across Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The stated objective wasn’t simply to organize demonstrations, but to add Israel’s war in Gaza to the international media agenda, turning separate protests into a coordinated communications effort intended to shape what audiences around the world see, hear and think about the conflict.

But the most revealing aspect of the operation may be its stated objective: shaping what the world sees, hears and thinks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a “Launch Statement” in August, the alliance declared that the demonstrations are intended to return Israel’s military campaign against Palestinians to the international media agenda.

The campaign materials describe a strategy of synchronizing protests across continents, connecting student demonstrations, workplace actions, rallies and civil disobedience from Asia to the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The result is a coordinated communications campaign designed to transform demonstrations organized by separate groups into the political impact of a single international mobilization.

Weeks before the demonstrations, the alliance had already prepared a collection of campaign posters in seven languages – English, Arabic, Turkish, Finnish, French, Portuguese and Spanish. They supplied graphics for a large street banner carrying carefully selected slogans, along with protest-sign designs from folders marked “HANDHELD PLACARDS” and “STREET DEMANDS.”

One of the downloadable images is a poster with the message “GAZA GENOCIDE” next to graphics of barbed wire and watermelon, both symbols of Palestinian “resistance” against Israel.

In Malaysia, a woman wearing a black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh raised her fist while holding a printed version of the watermelon-and-barbed-wire placard], with the organizers’ branding in smaller letters on her sign: “GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR PALESTINE.”

Behind her, other women carried the same sign and other signs featuring additional graphics from the same campaign materials.

Other placards held by protesters in Malaysia yesterday, read, “HUMANITY IS NOT A CRIME” and “STOP THE GENOCIDE WAR!”

Another downloadable sign, carried in Malaysia, reads: “LET GAZA LIVE!”

The campaign’s “Communications Framing” employs familiar techniques of political persuasion: repetition, emotional imagery, collective identity, moral urgency and the portrayal of inaction as complicity.

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The materials offer a window into the battle for public attention that increasingly accompanies international conflicts.

One poster declares, “You cannot erase a homeland.”

Another commands, “End the genocide. Defend the land.”

A third combines an image of a child with the message, “Defend the land. Protect its children.”

Another repeats the words “Silence normalises” across the background before presenting the word “genocide” in oversized red lettering.

But the campaign’s internal messaging guidance goes further, prescribing accusations against Israel and the news media in a section called “Slogans & Hashtags,” with “Call to Action & Core Street Demands.”

Among its recommended slogans is the blunt declaration: “Israel Kills. The Media Justifies.”

Another declares, “1,100 Days of Israeli Genocide — The Killing Continues.”

Yet another calls for action under the message, “1,100 Days — From Every Street, One Demand: End Genocide, End Occupation.”

Together, the slogans strategically combine accusations of “genocide” with demands for political action, while claiming the media “justifies” Israel’s conduct.

In its “Concept Paper,” the alliance describes Israel’s actions as a “war of extermination” and calls for countries to stop providing weapons to the Israeli state.

The same document instructs participating organizations in its “Communications Framing” to use language that is “disciplined, credible, urgent and impossible to ignore.”

It also directs organizers to portray “institutional silence” as part of the problem and public mobilization as necessary to confront what the alliance calls continuing complicity.

The objective isn’t simply to communicate a political position, but to encourage audiences to emotionally identify with a movement and participate in its activities.

The campaign presents its allegations of “genocide” and other violations of international law as established claims.

On Friday, South African human rights lawyer Navi Pillay received the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for her work, which included arguing that Israel has committed a “genocide” against Palestinians. Israel disputes the “genocide” accusation.

The organizing documents go beyond encouraging supporters to attend demonstrations.

Instead, organizers describe a campaign intended to “interrupt business-as-usual” and organize “high-visibility rallies, marches, picket lines, sit-ins and peaceful blockades” at “civic sites, government offices, financial hubs and corporate locations” that its organizers have “identified as complicit in sustaining or normalising Israeli violence.”

They also recommend synchronized “workplace, campus and creative interruptions,” including “silent walkouts,” banner drops, nighttime projections, street theater, “die-ins” and “other highly visible public actions that interrupt normal routines and make the political demand impossible to ignore.”

A detailed logistical plan urges organizations to “allocate funds,” arrange transportation and establish “legal, stewarding, and participant support.”

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The organizing documents go beyond encouraging supporters to attend demonstrations.

The campaign’s organizational structure brings together prominent political figures with longstanding backgrounds in international politics and anti-Israel activism in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

A press release for the protests identifies seven members of the international steering committee, including: former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who joined a coalition supporting the Communist Party of Cuba; pro-communist former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis; former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams; Palestinian political leader Mustafa Barghouti; former South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils; Indian activist Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla; and Italian politician Angelo Bonelli.

Anas Altikriti serves as secretary-general.

Jessica Breakey, the campaign’s public relations officer, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Beyond the streets, the alliance’s strategy documents lay out a plan to convert the demonstrations’ visibility into “sustained political pressure” on lawmakers and government institutions.

In a separate advocacy document, organizers urge participating groups to mobilize protesters to write lawmakers, submit coordinated institutional letters and arrange meetings with elected representatives.

The campaign calls for “immediate, total arms embargoes” and “comprehensive state sanctions” against Israel for alleged violations of international law.

It also urges governments to suspend preferential trade agreements and institutional partnerships associated with Israeli policies.

The alliance demands an end to what it calls Israel’s “genocide and occupation,” without specifying whether its reference to occupation encompasses Gaza, the West Bank or the entire State of Israel. The distinction takes on particular significance amid chants of “from the river to the sea” at anti-Israel demonstrations.

Organizers encourage participating groups to use “targeted, template-driven letters” and “digital briefing toolkits” to support “localised political campaigning,” adapting them to their national political systems.

The documents provide direct instructions that participating organizations issue local press releases, distribute “ready-made social-media toolkits,” share “graphics across digital channels” and hold briefing sessions to “ensure clear, aligned messaging ahead of the weekend.”

A pregnant woman and two children were among eight people killed in a Pennsylvania shooting, a scene police described as one of the most painful and difficult they had witnessed in their careers.

The deadly attack unfolded Friday evening along the 700 block of Perry Street in Erie, roughly 120 miles north of Pittsburgh.

Residents alerted 911 after hearing gunshots and reportedly seeing a man fire a handgun outside a house. Officers arriving at the scene found two women dead in the roadway, according to ErieNewsNow.

Reports said one of the victims was pregnant.

The suspected gunman later barricaded himself inside a house. The standoff ended when he was found dead, apparently after shooting himself.

Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah described the loss of life as “devastating” and the shooting as “deeply disturbing.”

“This is one of the most difficult and heartbreaking scenes our officers and investigators have ever encountered,” Lorah said, according to WABC–TV.

The City of Erie said Saturday that all of the victims died before police reached the location.

Officers from the Erie Police Department, along with SWAT personnel, surrounded the home following the shooting.

Police issued repeated commands for the person inside to come out, but appeared to receive no reply.

Additional loud bangs were heard during the standoff, prompting initial concern that more people might be at risk.

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Authorities later said the sounds were flash-bang devices used by police. Officers entered the house after securing a search warrant.

Lorah said he had “not seen anything like this in my 28–plus years” in law enforcement.

“I’m not sure that the city of Erie has ever seen the loss of life and the devastation that we just witnessed,” Lorah said.

Mayor Daria Devlin called the incident a “terrible tragedy” and assured residents that the situation was under control.

“Our thoughts are with the victims, their loved ones, and everyone impacted by tonight’s tragedy,” Devlin said.

Authorities have not yet revealed the victims’ identities and ages.

It is also not known if they were related, if the gunman knew the people killed or what happened before the fatal shooting.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Saturday that he was offering his full support to Erie after the mass shooting, which he called tragic.

‘My heart breaks for this family,’ Shapiro wrote on X. Details about the victims have not been publicly shared.

Erie authorities are expected to give an update this afternoon when they hold a press conference at 4pm local time to address the shooting and the timeline of events.

President Trump sharply criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday, telling reporters outside the White House that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

Trump’s remarks came only hours after his administration announced an agreement for Russia to supply 300,000 metric tons of diesel to the United States and international energy markets.

The president said the arrangement was a direct response to Ukraine’s continued strikes on Russian oil refineries, despite his request that Zelensky halt the attacks.

“I said to him: ‘Do what you want, don’t hit refineries,’” Trump told reporters Saturday afternoon as he departed the White House for a rally in Tennessee.

Trump also faulted Zelensky for failing to end the war in Ukraine, which began when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“You’ve lost 30% of your country and you’ve had over a million people killed. … I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” Trump said angrily.

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“Zelensky could have settled this war many times—many, many times. And he chooses not to. Very difficult. It’s a war that should have never been started,” he added.

Trump said he had repeatedly told Zelensky, “Don’t hit the refineries,” arguing that the strikes were creating broader problems for the global economy. “That’s a world problem that’s causing. And he wants to make problems for the world,” Trump said.

Average diesel prices in the United States have climbed above $6 a gallon, raising costs for American farmers, businesses and consumers.

Trump was traveling to Tennessee for his latest visit to a Republican-leaning state ahead of the midterm elections. Republicans are facing competitive races in several agricultural states, including Iowa and Kansas—contests that party operatives partly attribute to elevated fuel prices.

Some Republicans have opposed the diesel agreement, saying it weakens economic pressure intended to persuade Putin to end the war.

“Unfortunately, while I understand the desire to bring down diesel prices, I am concerned the lifting of sanctions on Russian oil will only fund the Kremlin’s war machine—emboldening more violence and destruction, as we have seen in recent days,” Rep. Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, wrote on X Friday.