By MARK SCOLFORO and MARC LEVY, Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Investigators worked Tuesday to uncover the motive behind an arson fire over the weekend at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s mansion, the latest act of political violence in the U.S.

They dug into Cody Balmer’s background after, authorities say, he scaled an iron security fence in the middle of the night, eluded police and set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion.

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Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg, was denied bail Monday as he faced charges including attempted homicide, terrorism and arson. He did not enter a plea to the charges.

He had told police he planned to beat Shapiro with a small sledgehammer if he encountered him after breaking into the building, according to court documents. A motive for the attack, including whether it had anything to do with Shapiro’s politics or religious beliefs, wasn’t immediately clear.

Balmer’s mother told The Associated Press on Monday that she had made calls in recent days about his mental health issues, but “nobody would help.” Christie Balmer said her son was not taking his medicine.

However, in court, Balmer politely told a judge he did not suffer from any mental illness.

Fire caused significant damage and forced an evacuation

The fire caused significant damage and forced Shapiro, his family and guests, including other relatives, to evacuate the building early Sunday. The residence, built in 1968, did not have sprinklers, and the damage could be in the millions of dollars, Harrisburg Fire Chief Brian Enterline said.

Shapiro said he, his wife, their four children, two dogs and another family had celebrated the Jewish holiday of Passover in the same room Saturday night along with members of Harrisburg’s Jewish community. They were awakened by state troopers pounding on their doors at about 2 a.m. Sunday. They fled and firefighters extinguished the fire, officials said. No one was injured.

Balmer had walked an hour from his home to the governor’s residence, and during a police interview “admitted to harboring hatred towards Governor Shapiro,” according to a police affidavit that did not expand on that point. Afterward, he returned home, where police said they later found clothing he wore at the time and a small sledgehammer.

Balmer turned himself in at state police headquarters after confessing to his former partner and asking her to call police, which she did, the affidavit said. Authorities did not say whether he has a lawyer.

Man charged in fire had been due in court this week

Balmer, who said he was an unemployed welder with no income or savings, had been due in court later this week in an assault case in which he was accused of punching two relatives and stepping on a child’s already broken leg in 2023. In court Monday, he told the judge he did not have any drug or alcohol problems, but acknowledged missing a few court dates in the past.

Cody Balmer is escorted from court after his preliminary arraignment on Monday, April 14, 2025, in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP Photo/Mingson Lau)

Hours after the fire, an emotional Shapiro, who is viewed as a potential White House contender for the Democratic Party in 2028, said the intruder could not deter him from doing his job or observing his faith.

“I refuse to be trapped by the bondage that someone attempts to put on me by attacking us as they did here last night,” Shapiro said Sunday. “I refuse to let anyone who had evil intentions like that stop me from doing the work that I love.”

The attack appeared to be carefully planned, police say

Balmer, who is registered as an unaffiliated voter, appeared to have carefully planned the attack, police said. He was inside the residence for about a minute before he escaped and was later arrested in the area, Pennsylvania State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens said.

He hopped over a nearly 7-foot-high iron security fence surrounding the property, eluded officers who became aware of the breach and forcibly entered the residence before setting it on fire, authorities said. He used beer bottles filled with gasoline to make Molotov cocktails, documents say.

Balmer has faced criminal charges over the past decade including simple assault, theft and forgery, according to online court records. He also had financial problems in recent years, including a lender filing for foreclosure on a modest Harrisburg house he owned in 2022 over missed mortgage payments, court records show. A deed transfer shows Balmer sold the house for $60,000 last September to settle the debt.

He is the father of at least three children, with two women filing court complaints seeking child custody agreements in 2012 and 2023.

The fire badly damaged the large room that is often used for entertaining crowds and for art displays. Large west- and south-facing windows were missing their glass panes and shattered glass littered pathways. A charred piano, tables, walls, metal buffet serving dishes and more could be seen through broken windows and fire-blackened doors.

Associated Press reporters Michael Biesecker and Michelle Price in Washington and Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

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By DEVNA BOSE, Associated Press and BENJAMIN THORP, Side Effects Public Media

AURORA, Ill. (AP) — At her mother’s home in Illinois, Tracy Balhan flips through photos of her dad, Bill Speer. In one picture, he’s smiling in front of a bucket of sweating beers and wearing a blue T-shirt that reads, “Pops. The man. The myth. The legend.”

Balhan’s father died last year after struggling with dementia. During one episode late in his life, he became so agitated that he tried to exit a moving car. Balhan recalls her dad — larger than life, steady and loving — yelling at the top of his lungs.

His geriatric psychiatrist recommended she take him to the emergency room at Endeavor Health’s Edward Hospital in the Chicago suburb of Naperville because of its connection to an inpatient behavioral care unit. She hoped it would help get him a quick referral.

Boni Speer, left, and her daughter, Tracy Balhan, hold a photo of Bill Speer, Tracy’s father, in Aurora, Ill., on Friday, March 14, 2025. (Benjamin Thorp/WFYI Public Media via AP)

But Speer spent 12 hours in the emergency room — at one point restrained by staff — waiting for a psych evaluation. Balhan didn’t know it then, but her dad’s experience at the hospital is so common it has a name: ER boarding.

One in six visits to the emergency department in 2022 that resulted in hospital admission had a wait of four or more hours, according to an Associated Press and Side Effects Public Media data analysis. Fifty percent of the patients who were boarded for any length of time were 65 and older, the analysis showed.

Some people who aren’t in the middle of a life-threatening emergency might even wait weeks, health care experts said.

ER boarding is a symptom of the U.S. health care system’s struggles, including shrinking points of entry for patients seeking care outside of ERs and hospitals prioritizing beds for procedures insurance companies often pay more for.

Experts also warn the boarding issue will worsen as the number of people 65 and older in the U.S. with dementia grows in the coming decades. Hospital bed capacity in the U.S. may not keep up. Between 2003 and 2023, the number of staffed hospital beds was static, even as emergency department visits shot up 30% to 40% over that same period.

Number of hospital beds at issue

For older people with dementia, boarding can be especially dangerous, Chicago-based geriatric psychiatrist Dr. Shafi Siddiqui said. One research letter published in June 2024 in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at more than 200,000 patients and found long ER stays could be linked to a higher risk of dementia patients developing delirium — a temporary state of mental confusion and sometimes hallucinations.

“People need to be enraged about (boarding),” said Dr. Vicki Norton, president-elect of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine.

National emergency physician groups have lobbied for years to keep boarding under control. While they’ve made some progress, nothing substantial has changed, despite concerns that it leads to worse patient outcomes.

Dr. Alison Haddock, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said that’s because boarding is a failing of the entire health care system that manifests in the ER, so solving it demands a systemic approach.

Federal and state policy decisions made nearly 40 years ago limited the number of hospital beds, said Arjun Venkatesh, who studies emergency medicine at Yale. People are now living longer, he said, resulting in more complicated illnesses.

In 2003, there were 965,000 staffed hospital beds compared to 913,000 in 2023, according to the American Hospital Association. And another JAMA research letter published in February shows there are 16% fewer staffed beds in the U.S. post-pandemic.

The ones available may be prioritized for “scheduled care” patients who need non-urgent procedures, like cancer care or orthopedic surgeries. Insurance companies pay hospitals more for those surgeries, Haddock said, so hospitals aren’t likely to move patients into those beds — even as emergency rooms fill up.

Where can people go?

Though long stays in the emergency department are common, there isn’t good data that tracks the extremes, emergency medicine experts said.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently ended a requirement that hospitals track the “median” wait times in their emergency departments. An advisory group that develops quality measures for CMS recommended that the agency try to more accurately capture long emergency department stays. That measure has recently been submitted to CMS, which can choose to adopt it.

Patients’ families worry that long emergency room stays may make things worse for their loved ones, forcing some to search for limited alternatives to turn for support and care.

Nancy Fregeau lives in Kankakee, Illinois, with her husband Michael Reeman, who has dementia.

Last year, she said he visited the Riverside Medical Center emergency department several times, often staying more than four hours and in one case more than 10, before finally getting access to a behavioral care bed. Riverside declined to comment on Reeman’s case.

During long waits, Fregeau doesn’t know what reassurance she can offer her husband.

“It’s hard enough for anyone to be in the ER but I cannot imagine someone with dementia being in there,” she said. “He just kept saying ‘When am I going? What’s happening?’”

Since November, Reeman has been going to the MCA Senior Adult Day Center in Kankakee. Fregeau said Reeman treats the day center like it’s his job, offering to vacuum and clean, but comes home happier after having time around other people and away from the house.

In Illinois, there are fewer adult day centers than there are counties, and other resources for people with dementia are shrinking, too. A report from the American Health Care Association and the National Center for Assisted Living found that 1,000 nursing homes in the U.S. closed between 2015 and 2022. At least 15 behavioral health centers, which are facilities that specialize in treating mental health issues, closed in 2023.

With fewer places for patients to go after being discharged, hospital beds are being used for longer, exacerbating the boarding problem. It’s becoming more difficult to get a specialty hospital bed, especially when patients’ dementia causes aggression.

That was the case for Balhan’s father, who became increasingly agitated during his ER stay. Hospital staff told Balhan the behavioral care unit wasn’t taking dementia patients, so Speer was stuck in the ER for 24 hours until they found a behavioral health facility, separate from the health system, that would take him.

While the hospital couldn’t comment on Speer’s specific situation, Endeavor Health spokesperson Spencer Walrath said its behavioral care unit typically admits geriatric psychiatry patients, including those with dementia, but it depends on factors like bed availability and the patient’s specific medical needs.

Balhan feels that the U.S. health care system failed to treat her dad as a human being.

“It didn’t feel to me like he was being treated with any dignity as a person,” she said. “If anything could change, that would be the change that I would want to see.”

AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.

This story is a collaboration between Side Effects Public Media, a health reporting collaboration of NPR member stations across the Midwest, and The Associated Press. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

By STEVE PEOPLES and FATIMA HUSSEIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Joe Biden returns to the national stage Tuesday to elevate liberal concerns that President Donald Trump’s agenda is threatening the health of Social Security.

The 82-year-old Democrat has largely avoided speaking publicly since leaving the White House in January. That’s even as Trump frequently blames Biden for many of the nation’s problems, often attacking his predecessor by name.

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Biden is expected to fight back in an early evening speech to the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. While Biden has made a handful of public appearances in recent weeks, Tuesday’s high-profile address focuses on a critical issue for tens of millions of Americans that could define next year’s midterm elections.

“As bipartisan leaders have long agreed, Americans who retire after paying into Social Security their whole lives deserve the vital support and caring services they receive,” said Rachel Buck, executive director of the ACRD. “We are thrilled the president will be joining us to discuss how we can work together for a stable and successful future for Social Security.”

Trump almost immediately began slashing the government workforce upon his return to the White House, including thousands of employees at the Social Security Administration.

Along with a planned layoff of 7,000 workers and controversial plans to impose tighter identity-proofing measures for recipients, the SSA has been sued over a decision to allow Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access individuals’ Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information.

Musk, the world’s richest man and one of Trump’s most influential advisers, has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

At the same time, Social Security recipients have complained about long call wait times as the agency’s “my Social Security” benefits portal has seen an increase in outages. Individuals who receive Supplemental Security Income, including disabled seniors and low-income adults and children, also reported receiving a notice that said they were “not receiving benefits.”

The agency said the notice was a mistake. And the White House has vowed that it would not cut Social Security benefits, saying any changes are intended to reduce waste and fraud.

Biden will be joined in Chicago by a bipartisan group of former elected officials, including former Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., former Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and former Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley.

“Social Security is a sacred promise between generations,” O’Malley said. “We are deeply grateful to the President for joining us at ACRD to discuss how we can keep that promise for all Americans.”

Biden is not expected to make frequent public appearances as he transitions into his post-presidency. He still maintains an office in Washington, but has returned to Delaware as his regular home base. Trump has revoked his security clearances.

While Biden may be in position to help his party with fundraising and messaging, he left the White House with weak approval ratings. Biden also faces blame from some progressives who argue he shouldn’t have sought a second term. Biden ended his reelection bid after his disastrous debate performance against Trump and made way for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the fall.

Just 39% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Biden in January, according to a Gallup poll taken shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

Views of the Democratic former president were essentially unchanged from a Gallup poll taken shortly after the November election. They broadly track with the steadily low favorability ratings that Biden experienced throughout the second half of his presidential term.

Peoples reported from New York. Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.