A 15-year-old girl suburban Houston girl who survived an attack in which her parents and four younger siblings were killed says she is on the road to recovery.
Cassidy Stay thanked first responders on Saturday while speaking to a crowd at an elementary school in her hometown of Spring, the Houston Chronicle reported. It was her first public appearance since the shootings.
“Happiness can be found even in darkest of times, if one remembers to turn on the light,” Stay said, paraphrasing a quote by Albus Dumbledore, the beloved headmaster of the Hogwarts school of wizards from the Harry Potter books.
Stay was released from a hospital on Friday, two days after the attack in which her skull was fractured by a bullet graze.
Authorities say her aunt’s ex-husband, Ronald Lee Haskell, stormed into the family’s home on Wednesday and fatally shot her parents and four siblings, who ranged in age from four to 13 years old. They say Stay survived by playing dead and called police to warn that Haskell intended to go to her grandparents’ house next.
A video posted on KPRC-TV’s Web site shows Stay’s grandfather, Roger Lyons, saying that “without her courage and quick thinking we might be mourning the death of 20 people today, including myself and nearly all of my children and grandchildren.”
The 15-year-old recalled feeling as if angels were with her whispering to her to be quiet, Lyons said.
“We have wondered whether those angels might have been her brothers and sisters,” he said.
“I’ll be able to see them again one day,” the girl said of her slain relatives.
People attending the ceremony released hundreds of balloons and tied ribbons of different colors to trees in remembrance of the family.
The 33-year-old Haskell is accused of killing the family members after binding them and putting them face-down on the floor of their home.
Haskell had a handful of previous run-ins with law enforcement in Utah, where he had lived with his wife. Neighbors said Haskell’s marriage was so rocky that Stay’s mother went to Utah last fall to help her sister escape the relationship and start a new life in Texas.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion