A woman has given birth to a “miracle baby” during Hurricane Milton after making a perilous journey to hospital while in labour.
Kenzie Lewellen, who was 39 weeks pregnant, witnessed the devastation from her hospital window, with a tree being ripped out of the ground as the massive storm pounded Florida earlier this week.
She also needed a caesarean section as the baby boy was in the wrong position. “I was very scared,” the first-time mother said.
Milton made landfall as a Category 3 storm at about 8.30pm local time on Wednesday (1.30am UK time on Thursday), causing massive flooding and leaving millions of people without power.
At least 16 people have been confirmed dead in Florida in the hurricane’s aftermath, including at least five due to tornadoes in St Lucie County.
Ms Lewellen’s labour began at home in Port Charlotte at 4am on Wednesday, Sky’s US partner network NBC News reports.
At that time, the storm had not yet hit the state but Ms Lewellen and her boyfriend Dewey Bennett’s house already started taking in water before her contractions began.
“My mind was just running a million miles an hour, like, what am I going to do?” the 22-year-old woman said. “I was very nervous.”
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Florida before and after Hurricane Milton
Then, after she had been in labour for more than four hours at home, the couple started making their way to Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Venice.
“My mom was driving us, and it was extremely windy, so we were trying to be as cautious as possible,” Ms Lewellen said.
“There was not really many people on the roads, because it was so windy outside and it was raining quite a bit.”
The couple were even more on edge during the medical emergency as Mr Bennett’s father, also named Dewey, had died when Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida in 2017.
“My dad had a massive heart attack because the ambulance could not come out to us during the storm,” the 24-year-old said.
“I just didn’t want to go through what I had to go through with the last hurricane back in 2017,” added Mr Bennett.
Watching a tree uproot during labour
When the trio arrived at hospital, only one person could be with her. So, Ms Lewellen had to say goodbye to her mother.
“I was very, very upset that my mom couldn’t stay, because she is my best friend and one of my biggest supporters,” she said. But “we were able to FaceTime pretty much the entire time”.
She then went through labour in a room with a window view of the destruction as the storm struck the area.
“I was telling him [Mr Bennett], I’m like, ‘Oh, that tree looks like it’s going to fly out of the ground!’ when I was labouring, because we were just watching the storm and the wind and the rain go crazy. It was definitely intense out there,” she said.
“And it actually did uproot,” added, Mr Bennett, the baby’s father.
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Florida escapes worst of hurricane
Unplanned C-section
After being in labour for hours, Ms Lewellen was given some distressing news. The baby was in the wrong position, and she would need an unplanned C-section.
“I had so much going through my head at that point, a storm and my family,” she said.
Problems with the epidural left her in extreme pain for hours until she was given anaesthesia.
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“I was just on my own, by myself, and I was very scared. If I didn’t have the doctors and the nurses that I had, it would have been a whole lot worse,” she said.
Dewey Lester Bennett IV was safely delivered at 11.45pm, weighing 8lbs.
“He is a miracle baby,” Ms Lewellen said.
In a statement, the chief executive of Sarasota Memorial Health Care System David Verinder said: “We couldn’t be prouder of our team. They left their homes and many left their families to be here for our patients and community.”
Along with Dewey, six other babies were born at the two Sarasota Memorial hospitals during Milton, Mr Verinder said.
Bodycam footage showing prison officers fatally beating an inmate has been released by New York’s attorney general.
Prison officers at Marcy Correctional Facility in New York punched and kicked 43-year-old Robert Brooks repeatedly while he was handcuffed on an infirmary bed.
He died in hospital on 10 December, a day after the attack.
The incident has drawn outrage from political leaders and was condemned by the prison officers’ union as “incomprehensible”, according to Sky News’ partner newsroom NBC.
It is now being investigated by state attorney general Letitia James, who called the videos “shocking and disturbing” at a virtual news conference.
In the video, Mr Brooks is in handcuffs as he is carried into the infirmary by several prison guards.
They put him on the bed and begin repeatedly punching and kicking him.
He is pulled upright, where his bloodied face is visible on camera, and then yanked from the bed by his shirt collar and pushed up against a window.
One of the fourteen workers involved in the incident has resigned and the rest have been suspended without pay until the process to fire them is complete. The workers include correctional officers, sergeants and a prison nurse.
The officers had not activated their body cameras but they were still on and recorded in standby mode, without audio, during the attack.
As a result of the incident, all officers will now need to have their cameras activated any time they are engaging directly with prisoners.
Mr Brooks’ family thanked officials for taking action “to hold officers accountable” in a statement this week.
“We cannot understand how this could have happened in the first place,” the family said. “No one should have to lose a family member this way.”
The attack happened before 9.30pm on 9 December in a medical exam room after Mr Brooks had been transferred from the Mohawk Correctional Facility to Marcy Correctional Facility.
An autopsy found “preliminary findings show concern for asphyxia due to compression of the neck as the cause of death, as well as the death being due to actions of another,” according to a state corrections office investigative report obtained by an affiliate of Sky News’ partner newsroom WKTV in Utica.
Mr Brooks had been behind bars since 2017 on a 12-year sentence for first-degree assault involving a longtime girlfriend.
Officials declined to say why he had been transferred to the Marcy Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison.
Last year, an independent prison oversight group called The Correctional Association of New York released a report on the Marcy Correctional Facility.
It noted complaints of “rampant” physical abuse by staff members, with 80% of incarcerated people reporting having witnessed or experienced abuse and nearly 70% reporting racial discrimination or bias.
In response to the video, the union that represents workers at the prison said: “What we witnessed is incomprehensible to say the least and is certainly not reflective of the great work that the vast majority of our membership conducts every day.”
It adding what transpired is the “opposite of everything [the union] and its membership stand for.”
The world’s best golfer has suffered a freak injury while cooking Christmas dinner, forcing him to undergo surgery.
Scottie Scheffler sustained a puncture wound after cutting the palm of his right hand on broken glass.
The world number one required surgery as small glass fragments remained in the palm after the accident.
The injury has forced him out of the first tournament of the season, next week’s The Sentry in Hawaii.
But the 28-year-old has been told he will recover in three to four weeks, and he hopes to be back in action at The American Express tournament in California on 16 January.
Scheffler won an Olympic gold and seven PGA Tour titles in the last year and was recently named PGA Tour’s Player of the Year for a third season in a row.
In May, he was arrested by police during the US PGA Championship after he was accused of trying to drive around a traffic jam caused by a fatal accident.
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Just hours later, he was released and allowed to return to Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky to play his second round of the tournament.
Criminal charges against Scheffler were later dismissed due to a lack of evidence and a police officer who arrested him was disciplined for not having his bodycam on at the time of the incident.
The man accused of burning a woman to death on a New York subway train has been indicted on murder and arson charges.
Sebastian Zapeta is accused of setting a sleeping woman on fire and then fanning the flames with a shirt, which caused her to be engulfed by the blaze.
He allegedly sat on a platform at Brooklyn’s Coney Island station, opposite the stopped train, and watched as she burned to death.
Authorities are still working to identify the victim.
Zapeta, 33, has been charged with one count of first degree murder, two counts of second degree murder and one count of arson in the first degree.
After a brief hearing in which the indictment was announced, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said: “This was a malicious deed. A sleeping, vulnerable woman on our subway system.”
Mr Gonzalez said police and medical examiners are using fingerprints and advanced DNA techniques to identify the victim, while also retracing her steps before the murder.
“Our hearts go out not only to this victim, but we know that there’s a family,” he said. “Just because someone appears to have been living in the situation of homelessness does not mean that there’s not going to be family devastated by the tragic way she lost her life.”
Such filings are often a first step in the criminal process because all felony cases in New York require a grand jury indictment to proceed to trial, unless a defendant waives that requirement.
Zapeta was not present at the hearing. The most serious charge he is facing carries a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole and the indictment will be unsealed on 7 January.
Zapeta is a Guatemalan who entered the US illegally having already been deported in 2018, officials say.
He was taken into custody last Sunday, after three children called 911 when they recognised him from an image shared by police.
During questioning, prosecutors say he claimed not to know what happened, and noted he consumes alcohol – but did identify himself in photos and videos showing the fire being lit.