FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — A parent of a Kentucky State University student has been charged with murder in an on campus shooting that killed one student and critically injured another.

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Jacob Lee Bard was at the school’s campus in Frankfort on Tuesday and fired shots at the victims at a residence hall, police said in a statement.

Investigators said the shooting was isolated, but they have not publicly shared details of the circumstances or a possible motive. The shooting killed 19-year-old De’Jon Fox of Indianapolis. A second student who was shot remains in critical condition, but his name has not been released, police said.

Bard, 48, was booked into jail on murder and first-degree assault charges. Police said Bard is from Evansville, Indiana, which is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Frankfort.

Bard is being represented by a public defender at the Franklin County Department of Public Advocacy, which declined to talk about his case Wednesday.

University police officers were near the scene of the altercation that ended with the shooting and immediately arrested Bard, police said.

Investigators have watched video taken by others at the scene and surveillance footage.

Asked by reporters about alleged videos showing a fight involving Bard’s sons preceded the shooting or whether Bard might have come to campus to talk to administrators about his sons’ safety, Frankfort Assistant Police Chief Scott Tracy refused to say what may have led to the shooting.

“It’s really too early in the investigation right now to really give any details that led up to it. A lot of it would be speculation,” Tracy said Wednesday.

The shooting happened at Whitney M. Young Jr. Hall. It was the second shooting in four months near the student residence.

Someone fired multiple shots from a vehicle on Aug. 17, striking two people that the university said weren’t students. Frankfort police said one victim was treated for minor injuries and a second sustained serious injuries. The dorm and at least one vehicle were damaged by gunfire.

University President Koffi C. Akakpo said the school brought in more police officers after the first shooting and will evaluate whether more needs to be done to keep students safe once the investigation into the latest shooting is complete,

“The campus is a safe place,” Akakpo said at the news conference.

Kentucky State is a public historically Black university with about 2,200 students. Lawmakers authorized the school’s creation in 1886.

The school sits about 2 miles east of the Capitol building in Frankfort.

A 55-year-old woman was fatally shot at a Maplewood apartment complex Wednesday morning by a suspect who then shot and wounded himself, police said.

Officers about 10:45 a.m. were called to a report of gunshots and someone lying on the ground at Pondview Apartments in the 2500 block of Ivy Avenue, north of Maryland Avenue and west of Century Avenue.

The woman was found in a hallway with gunshot wounds and taken to Regions Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Officers learned the suspect, a 56-year-old man, was possibly inside the woman’s apartment and armed.

A perimeter was set up, and neighboring apartment units were evacuated. A shelter-in-place order was issued.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team responded and made entry into the apartment, where they found the man with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. His condition was not released by police.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assisting Maplewood police in the investigation.

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By MIKE SCHNEIDER

The ranks of U.S. government statisticians have been gutted in the past year due to layoffs and buyouts. That along with diminished funding and attacks on their independence have put at risk the data used to make informed decisions about everything from the nation’s economy to its demographics, according to a new report from outside experts released Wednesday.

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One agency lost 95% of its staff, while others dropped by about quarter to more than a third, due to government downsizing this year during President Donald Trump’s first months in office, according to the report released by the American Statistical Association. Besides veteran employees with deep institutional knowledge, some of the cuts hit new hires meant to infuse new blood into the agencies, said the annual report.

“Things are getting a lot worse,” Nancy Potok, a former U.S. chief statistician during the first Trump administration who was on the team that produced the report, said Wednesday. “It’s kind of dropping off the cliff there and in a really dire situation.”

The administration’s Office of Management and Budget, home to the U.S. chief statistician who coordinates the system of gathering data, didn’t respond Wednesday morning to an e-mailed inquiry about the report.

However, when asked last month about concerns that the statistical agencies were getting politicized, Mark Calabria, who was appointed in July as the U.S. chief statistician, said: “Everything in government is embedded in politics and is embedded in accountability.”

“So these kinds of debates about independence and accountability, they’re oranges and apples to some extent,” Calabria said during a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “What you have is wanting to make sure that the data gives you the right answer.”

In the first months of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal government workers were shown the door as part of efforts by the White House and its Department of Government Efficiency. The White House also offered a “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, like months of paid leave, to almost all federal employees who opted to leave their jobs. It also moved to lay off probationary employees — those generally on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection.

“The statistical system is still functioning, but the threats are very serious,” said Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, who was not involved in the report. “There are staffing reductions, contracted services that have been reduced. We’re seeing that showing up in the cancellation of data products, the reduction in data collection on things like consumer prices.”

The team behind the report noted that they had a “sparsity of information” about the detailed impacts of the cuts since the agencies wouldn’t provide them “perhaps out of caution or because they are not allowed to communicate with outside entities.”

The hardest hit agency was the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Education, which lost 95% of its staff. The agency tracks educational trends with the goal of improving outcomes, and the staff losses halted most of its data collection earlier in the year, according to the report. Many outside contracts have since been restored but with a reduced scope, the report said.

The Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics’ workforce in the Social Security Administration was almost halved. The cuts eliminated retirement and disability research, among other things, the report said.

The Energy Information Administration, the Economic Research Service in the Department of Agriculture and the National Agricultural Statistics Service each lost between 25% and 40% of their staff. The cuts have resulted in discontinued or delayed reports about the energy industry and the cancellation of a survey about farmworkers and some state-specific agricultural reports.

The nation’s largest statistical agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, lost at least 15% of its staff this year, according to the report.

Besides the staff cuts, some barriers to the statistical agencies’ political independence were removed this year. The Trump administration made unsubstantiated claims of biased data; removed the heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics; failed to fill key leadership vacancies; and named political appointees who hold other jobs to fill in leadership positions that had been held by career civil servants, according to the report.

“These actions undermine public trust in federal statistics,” the report said.

Follow Mike Schneider on Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON

MIAMI (AP) — Democrat Eileen Higgins’ victory in the Miami mayoral race marks a setback for Republican President Donald Trump, who endorsed her rival and has touted his 2024 win in the area as a testament to his appeal in Florida and particularly among Hispanic voters.

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Higgins, who will become the city’s first female mayor, secured a decisive win of approximately 19 points over Trump’s pick, Emilio Gonzalez, signaling a potential shift in voter sentiment.

In becoming the first Democrat to lead the city of 487,000 in nearly 30 years, Higgins said she will explore legal ways to unwind an agreement between the city and the federal government that empowers police officers to conduct immigration enforcement.

“We need to look at all our legal options to ensure that our city police work for our neighborhoods and not on checking residents’ papers,” Higgins said in Spanish at a press conference Wednesday.

While harshly criticizing Trump’s immigration crackdown, Higgins has been more measured than her counterpart in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, in her approach.

Higgins’ message for Trump

Higgins’ victory occurred on the same night that Trump delivered a speech in Pennsylvania meant to emphasize his focus on combating inflation. But the president appeared dismissive on an issue that has damaged his popularity, saying inflation was no longer a problem and that Democrats were using the term “affordability” as a “hoax” to hurt his reputation.

The Associated Press asked Higgins after her win what she would tell Trump.

“When I hear what the residents have to say about affordability, it’s real. They’re facing expensive rent, expensive property insurance, costs of all sorts of things, especially even now the things they’re buying in the stores due to the tariffs,” she said. “I think every leader in America needs to think deeply about what they can do to help get the affordability crisis under control for the American people.”

At the press conference on Wednesday, Higgins, however said that sometimes she and Trump have been in agreement, praising the president for maintaining funding for a new local transit project.

Voters face ‘frustration’ and ‘fear’

Higgins, a former county commissioner, commented on a shift among voters she noticed compared to when she ran in previous years, when people wanted the government to be run more efficiently and to finish projects from housing to transportation.

Miami mayor-elect Eileen Higgins speaks to her staff before a news conference at her campaign headquarters Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

“This is the first election where when I speak to our residents, it’s not just about frustration, it’s also about fear,” Higgins said at the press briefing. “They’ve never been afraid of their government before. And now they are.”

Higgins said she heard from a medical clinic that had to immediately fire 27 employees who lost work authorization when the Trump administration stripped legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

“That’s 27 families without a breadwinner. And a health clinic that’s short 27 employees to take care of people,” she said. “We want a strong border, we want a path to citizenship. We don’t want law-abiding people to be ejected from our country, impoverishing their family and driving our economy into ruin.”

Turnout was high for a mayoral race

Both major national political parties took an interest in the race, which was a runoff between the two top finishers in the Nov. 4 general election. Trump talked up Gonzalez on his social media site, and national Democratic figures weighed in for Higgins.

Turnout in Tuesday’s runoff was huge for a mayoral election in Miami. At a little more than 37,000 votes, it nearly matched turnout in the Nov. 4 general election, which was 36% higher than the turnout four years ago.

However, the number of votes was still much lower than in a typical midterm election, like the one that will be held in 2026. For example, 92,500 voters in the city of Miami cast ballots in the 2022 election for governor.

Miami may become home of the Trump presidential library

Higgins could join the growing local opposition to Trump’s presidential library, which Republicans have pushed to build in downtown Miami. Earlier this month, the Miami-Dade College board voted to donate a nearly 3-acre undeveloped lot, valued at over $67 million, located on the iconic Biscayne Boulevard. However, a judge had temporarily blocked the transfer while a lawsuit plays out.

At a debate aired last month on Miami television station CBS 4, Higgins said that while it is “an honor” to be home to a presidential library, she felt this was a “land giveaway.” She said the state could have sold the land and paid for things that have been cut such as food aid and money for transit.

Miami mayor- elect Eileen Higgins speaks at her campaign headquarters Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

“We gave away very valuable land to a billionaire for free,” she said. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Miami will host next year’s G20 summit

Earlier this year, Trump was accompanied by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who Higgins will succeed, at the White House in announcing Miami will host next year’s Group of 20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, a suburb of greater Miami. He argued it was “the best location” for the international gathering.

Suarez said such gathering put the city “on the global map.”

Trump has been known for his public feuds with Democratic mayors and governors. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, had to confront a federal law enforcement intervention into her city launched by Trump. She announced last month that she would not seek reelection.

At the press conference, Higgins was asked if she was scared Trump could retaliate in any way against her.

“No tengo ningún miedo de él,” she said, Spanish for “I am not scared of him, at all.”

Associated Press journalist Stephen Ohlemacher in Washington contributed in this report.