By David Aaro, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Dr. Elizabeth Soda felt helpless as she frantically messaged her co-workers Friday once a gunman had opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The 40-year-old, who works at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, had just left her CDC office 30 minutes before the shooting. Now her colleagues were stuck and barricaded inside.

“There were lots of messages,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “You just never think it’s gonna happen to you until it does.”

While her co-workers ultimately made it home safely, she said fear still lingers two days after the shooting, which left responding DeKalb County police officer David Rose dead. Bullets struck the windows of her office on building 16, just feet from where she normally works. At least three other buildings at the Atlanta-based public health agency were hit by gunfire, officials said.

“It’s terrifying,” Soda told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re just here to work hard and save lives as best we can. We can’t do that if we can’t come to an office where we feel safe.”

Soda was one of dozens of Atlantans, including past and present CDC employees, who attended a news conference Sunday in Piedmont Park to condemn the attack. Those in attendance spoke about the importance of the agency amid significant cuts by the federal government and scrutiny over vaccines under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Many held up signs that read “CDC saves lives, ”Save the CDC,” and “Resign Stand Down RFK!!!” The CDC is one of the largest employers in the state and had around 2,000 layoffs under Kennedy.

The shooter, identified by the GBI as Patrick Joseph White, was found dead on the second floor of a CVS across the street from the CDC. White blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

White, who was armed with several firearms and at least one long gun, also tried to get into the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta but was stopped by guards, according to that report.

Soda declined to comment on White’s motives, but stated that Kennedy was “propagating misinformation and distrust.”

“He’s full of quack theories. It’s not science-driven. It’s not what the American public deserves,” said Soda, who has worked at the CDC since 2016. “The vaccine has saved so many lives.”

Saturday, Kennedy’s official social media account posted a message of support for CDC employees. A longer one was emailed to them directly.

“We know how deeply unsettling this is, particularly for those working in Atlanta,” the statement said. “The shock and uncertainty that follow incidents like this are real, and they affect us all in different ways. We want everyone to know, you’re not alone. Leadership is in close coordination with CDC teams to ensure support is available on the ground.”

Anna Yousaf, an infectious diseases physician at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said Kennedy needed to “take responsibility for his (previous) language” following the recent statement.

“(Kennedy) has likened the CDC to a Nazi death camp. He’s told his followers that we are committing atrocities against children, and he needs to take ownership of that language, denounce it and tell his followers that those statements are untrue,” Yousaf said. “This violence is unacceptable and we cannot stay quiet about it. … Our leadership at every level, in every institution and across the government needs to come out and say, ‘This needs to stop.’”

White House officials have not released a statement. The AJC on Sunday reached out to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which did not immediately respond for comment.

Yousaf is normally at her CDC office and has been with the agency since 2019. But on Friday, she was working remotely when the alert system notified her around 5 p.m. about the active shooter.

In a panic, she tried to message her team at her office. All they knew was that workers were hearing gunshots and seeing bullets hit the windows next to them. They eventually made it out without any physical injuries, but the mental damage was done.

“They told me they couldn’t stop shaking. They needed to throw up. They were crying uncontrollably, and I heard that people were going to Emory with acute stress symptoms and panic attacks,” Yousaf told the AJC.

During the chaos, about 90 children were being held at the CDC child care center. That included Abigail Tighe’s 1-year-old boy, who was with the other kids under lockdown. She said she was initially “very scared” until the center let her know that everyone was safe.

“There’s nothing like being reunited with your child after you’re worried they could have been in a mass shooting when they’re a year old,” Tighe said.

During the news conference that was organized by Fired But Fighting, a network of former CDC professionals, attendees also spoke in admiration for Rose, who was critically injured and died at Emory University Hospital. He was the fourth Georgia law enforcement member killed in the line of duty this year.

“Officer Rose made the ultimate sacrifice to save hundreds of lives. We are all forever grateful and indebted, indebted to him and his family,” Tighe said.

Employees were told there would be increased patrols in the area after the shooting and that law enforcement and security teams were still assessing next steps.

Both Soda and Yousaf said they were told to work remotely until at least Monday. They said no time off has been given to them.

“I want to do my work, but I don’t want my colleagues to be retraumatized by walking past all these bullet holes in the glass that are right next to where they sit,” Yousaf said.

“Sitting there will never feel the same to me again,” Soda added.

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©2025 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

NEW YORK — A recently detained immigrant filed a potential class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration on Friday, denouncing the conditions inside holding cells at the main federal immigration offices in Manhattan as overcrowded and unsanitary.

The cells belong to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at 26 Federal Plaza. They have drawn scrutiny as ICE has hastened the pace of arrests in New York City, with migrants filling the holding facility on the building’s 10th floor. In the past, the cells were used to hold migrants for just a few hours, but amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, migrants often remain there for days or for more than a week.

The lawsuit said that migrants often sleep on the concrete floor or sitting upright, lack access to legal counsel and are subjected to a “horrific stench” emanating from toilets next to where they sleep.

A video recorded by a migrant who sneaked in a cellphone last month appeared to confirm some of those complaints, as has recent reporting by The New York Times.

The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan federal court by Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, a Peruvian immigrant who entered the United States in July 2022 and lives in New Jersey. He was arrested by ICE on Friday as he was leaving a routine appearance in immigration court, where he was facing deportation proceedings and applying for asylum after being charged with entering the country unlawfully.

Barco Mercado, a father of two, including a 3-month-old, is being held at 26 Federal Plaza, where the lawsuit said dozens of people were often crammed into a space that was just 215 square feet. His lawyers are seeking that a judge certify the suit as a class-action lawsuit.

“People are being deprived of their basic rights, facing medical neglect, and they lack access to adequate food and hygiene,” said Harold Solis, a co-legal director of Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group representing Barco Mercado. “This cruel detention policy is immoral and inhumane.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The agency has denied claims of unsanitary conditions at 26 Federal Plaza, telling the Times recently that “overcrowding or subprime conditions at ICE facilities are categorically false.” Agency officials have described the holding cells as temporary processing centers, not long-term detention facilities. They have used that designation to justify denying access to members of Congress who have sought to inspect the cells in recent months.

The 10th-floor cells hold detainees who are in the U.S. illegally and were arrested by agents at the city’s immigration courts, one of which is just two floors above the cells. Immigrants held there are typically processed and shuttled to detention centers elsewhere in the New York area or in other states, including Pennsylvania and Texas.

New federal data analyzed by the Times shows that about half of the more than 2,300 people arrested by ICE in the New York City area since Trump returned to office in January have been held at 26 Federal Plaza. Concerns about detention facility conditions have surfaced across the country as Trump officials race to find enough space to hold the migrants whom Trump wants to expel as part his mass deportation campaign.

The lawsuit argued that detainees have no way to communicate with their lawyers while being held in the lower Manhattan cells, are denied access to their prescribed medications and are served meals so meager that one detainee lost 24 pounds. It also said that ICE was violating its own policies that limit stays at such facilities to 72 hours. The lawsuit said that some detainees have been held for more than a week and that one person was held for 10 days.

Barco Mercado is also being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Wang Hecker.

Some of the same groups filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 1 challenging the federal government’s practice of arresting migrants showing up for routine hearings in immigration court. That lawsuit, coming two weeks after a similar class-action lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., argued that the arrests had turned the courts “into traps.”

The courthouse arrests have driven a spike in the detention of immigrants without criminal records in New York, according to the recent Times analysis. The lawsuit filed Aug. 1 in Manhattan argued that the arrests have undermined due process and discouraged immigrants from appearing for their mandated court hearings, which in turn puts them at risk of deportation.

Trump officials have defended the courthouse arrests as a “common sense” tactic to easily arrest and swiftly deport migrants who entered the country illegally during the administration of former President Joe Biden without having to send ICE agents into neighborhoods.

Democratic members of Congress from New York have sought access to the holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza but have repeatedly been denied entry by ICE. A dozen Democratic lawmakers — including Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman of New York — sued the federal government last month because of its refusal to allow members into immigration facilities in California, New York, Texas and elsewhere.

Many migrants held at 26 Federal Plaza are moved to detention centers in the New York City region, including a new facility in Newark, New Jersey, known as Delaney Hall, a county jail on Long Island that began holding immigrants for ICE this year, and long-standing facilities in the Hudson Valley and near Buffalo, New York.

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Under a recent agreement with the Bureau of Prisons, ICE also began holding more than 100 detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which has a long history of conditions that some federal judges have described as “barbaric.”

Goldman and Espaillat, along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., were denied access to the Metropolitan Detention Center on Wednesday after showing up to conduct oversight.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The day after a lone gunman opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer and shattering windows across the agency’s campus, employees were reeling from shock, fear and rage.

“We’re mad this has happened,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, said in a large group call Saturday morning with Susan Monarez, the agency’s newly confirmed director, who tried to reassure them. Another employee on the call, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, asked Monarez: “Are you able to speak to the misinformation, the disinformation that caused this issue? And what your plan forward is to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”

The investigation into the shooting and the gunman’s potential motives was still in early stages Saturday. But law enforcement officials said that the suspect identified in the shooting had become fixated with the coronavirus vaccine, believing that it was the cause of his physical ailments.

Inside the CDC, the shooting was viewed as part of a pattern in which health workers have been targets of political, verbal and physical assaults on them and their workplaces.

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the CDC’s respiratory diseases division, told Monarez on the call that employees wanted to see a plan for their safety and an acknowledgment that the attack was not just “a shooting that just happened across the street with some stray bullets.”

Daskalakis was not in his office when its windows were pierced by one of the gunman’s bullets.

Many Americans, and even some top federal health officials in the Trump administration, have blamed the CDC for lockdowns, school closings and vaccine mandates, even when some of those decisions were made by state and local governments, or businesses.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

“I am heartbroken, angry and somehow not surprised,” said Dr. Anne Zink, a former president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials who served as Alaska’s chief medical officer until last year.

Threats against her have increased even though she is no longer a government official, she said.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

The Times spoke with or texted a dozen CDC scientists Saturday, who discussed the shooting on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. They described being terrified as bullets shattered the glass windows, and some recounted the chilling sight of casings littered in front of the CDC.

In interviews, the employees conveyed sadness about the police officer who had died trying to keep them safe, and a feeling of betrayal and devastation at being demonized while working to improve Americans’ health.

The sound of rapid gunfire started around 4:50 p.m. Friday. One scientist who evaluates COVID vaccines had just stepped out of her building to walk to her car. As she headed to pick up her infant daughter from day care, she heard shots over her right shoulder, she said. She turned around, ran back inside and called security to confirm what was happening.

“CDC SHELTER IN PLACE. GUNMAN AT EMORY POINT,” she wrote to friends and colleagues in a group chat at 4:57 p.m. (The agency sent its alert to employees at 5:13 p.m.)

The employee and three others barricaded themselves in an office, moving two loaded bookshelves against the door. She put a sticky note over the motion sensor for the light switch and laid flat on the floor for hours, before a SWAT team arrived to clear the floor.

She finally made it home to her husband and two young children around midnight. In a text message sent at 3:11 a.m., she said she was still awake, too traumatized to sleep.

At least four buildings were damaged by bullets, Monarez said in a statement Friday night. Photos shared by workers revealed glass windows shattered by bullet holes. One showed as many as 18 bullet holes in a single building.

One of the buildings included a containment lab of the highest biosecurity level, but under tight security and with reinforced walls. It was not hit in the attack. The CDC studies some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world, including Ebola and Marburg viruses and the bacteria that cause anthrax.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, did not make a statement Friday. Late Saturday morning, more than 30 minutes after posting photos of himself fishing on social media, Kennedy posted condolences on his official X account and pledged to support CDC employees.

In an email sent later in the day to the entire Department of Health and Human Services, including the CDC, Kennedy wrote: “This is a reminder of the very human challenges public servants sometimes face — even in places dedicated to healing and progress. But it also reinforces the importance of the work you do every day.”

On the Saturday morning CDC call, an employee asked Monarez twice if she had spoken to Kennedy. Both times, Monarez replied that she had been in touch with the “office of the secretary.”

Kennedy has previously called the CDC a “cesspool of corruption” and a fascist enterprise. He has accused the agency’s scientists of ignoring vaccine harms to children, comparing it to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sex abuse. He has also disparaged the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it the “deadliest” vaccine ever made.

Some scientists said the attack was an extreme example of the violence many health workers have experienced since the pandemic began.

“The intersection of disinformation, conspiracy theories and political violence is getting scarier by the day,” said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center. “I’m very worried about how this is now going beyond defunding of infectious diseases and public health to political violence against the people working in those fields,” she said.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Nearly 9,000 employees and contractors work at the campus where the shooting took place, but it is unclear how many might have been absent because of off-site work and vacations, or because they had just left the office.

Dr. Fiona Havers, who resigned from her position as a senior CDC adviser on vaccine policy earlier this year, was on lockdown at Emory University Hospital while visiting a colleague. She heard the sirens, and stayed in close contact with her friends and former colleagues, including in a 900-person chat group where CDC employees shared terrifying details of the shooting.

“I am feeling very angry and very sad for my colleagues that are still at CDC,” said Havers, who quit after Kennedy fired all 17 members of a committee that makes recommendations on which shots Americans should take and when.

“This was a major attack on a federal facility,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

In the wake of a trade deadline selloff that jettisoned 10 regulars, the Twins are managing to play some pretty good baseball with prospects, minor league vets and healthy veterans who survived the purge.

The Twins made Sunday’s series finale against Kansas City a bullpen day, and fielded a starting lineup that included only two players you’d call major league veterans, but beat the Royals, 5-3 in 11 innings, in the rubber match of a three-game series in front of 26,746 at Target Field.

The Twins have now won 2 of 3 series, and are 5-4 overall against the three teams ahead of them in the American League Central, since the trade deadline drastically altered the roster.

Rookie infielder Luke Keaschall, who earlier extended his hitting streak to start his mejor league career to 11 games, hit a two-run, two-out home run off reliever Carlos Estevez for the winning runs. Michael Tonkin (1-0) pitched scoreless 10th and 11th innings for the win.

With starting pitchers Pablo Lopez (shoulder) and Simeon Woods Richarson (illness) on the injured list, the Twins got a good collective start from Jose Urena, Kody Funderburk and Pierson Ohl, who turned a 2-1 lead over to Cole Sands with two out and none on in the seventh inning.

Sands allowed base hits to the first two batters he faced, the second a two-run home run by Vinnie Pasquantinto that made it 3-2.

But the Twins quickly got a break when Royals left fielder John Rave tried to make a sliding catch on a low liner from Austin Martin with one out in the eighth inning. Martin wound up on third, and scored on Ryan Jeffers’ two-out single to left to tie the game 3-3.

With the team’s best player, center fielder Byron Buxton, on the IL with rib cage inflammation, Jeffers and Trevor Larnach were two of three players in the lineup who made the team out of training camp. The third was Mickey Gasper, who made the active roster as a utility player but has spent most of the season at Class AAA St. Paul — and was making his first major league start at catcher.

The Twins took a 2-1 on Ryan Fitzgerald’s two-run home run off starter Ryan Bergert in the third inning.

With Gasper on base on a leadoff walk in the third, Fitzgerald, a minor league veteran playing in his fourth major league game, hit a line drive into the home run porch in right field to make it 2-1. It was the infielder’s first major league hit, and the 15th time a Twins player had homered for his first MLB hit.

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