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Police Search for Clues in Rare Case of Female Mass Shooter; CDC Confirms First Severe Case of Bird Flu in U.S.; Mass Graves Discovered in Syria; Dow Dives After Fed Forecasts Stubborn Inflation Will Last. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired December 18, 2024 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: And court records obtained by CNN showed that she had been enrolled in therapy. CNN's Brian Todd has more on just how rare it is for females to carry out mass shootings like this one.

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CHIEF SHON BARNES, MADISON POLICE DEPARTMENT: At this time, it appears that the motive was a combination of factors.

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): As investigators sort through possible motives in the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School, what's not in question is that the suspect, 15-year- old Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name Samantha, has now become part of a minuscule demographic in the archive of mass shooters in the United States.

DARRIN PORCHER, FORMER NYPD LIEUTENANT: It's extremely rare for a woman to be the subject in an active shooter investigation.

TODD (voice-over): Data from the group Every Town for Gun Safety, which advocates for stronger gun laws, shows that out of more than 540 school shootings over the past 11 years, where the gender of the shooter is known, less than 5 percent of the shooters were female. The Violence Project looked at mass shootings overall, not just those committed at schools, and found that only 2 percent are perpetrated by females. These cases are so rare that they really stand out historically.

April 2018, 38-year-old Nassim Najafi Aghdam opened fire at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, wounding three people before killing herself. She'd reportedly been upset with YouTube's practices and policies.

December 2015, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, targeted a holiday event at the public health department in San Bernardino, California, shooting and killing 14 people before they were killed by police.

The FBI later said the couple was inspired by foreign terrorist groups. Analysts who examine mass shootings and who study women committing violence say there are varied reasons why the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are male.

KRIS MOHANDIE, FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: There's a biological basis to it, but, overwhelmingly, there's a lot of sexual socialization that goes into conditioning males to resolve problems aggressively.

TODD (voice-over): Responses to being bullied or the avenging of perceived grievances, analysts say, are often handled differently between the sexes.

MIA BLOOM, AUTHOR, VEILED THREATS: The men focus the violence outwards, and women very often focus the violence inwards. Women tend to express, when they're being bullied, they tend to express the violence on themselves. The women engaged in self-harm are cutting themselves, or they've got an eating disorder, or they might take pills, but it's a different form of focusing that rage.

TODD (voice-over): And, experts say, women who do strike others often gravitate toward their targets differently.

ADAM LANKFORD, CRIMINOLOGY PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA: Women tend to strike out with their aggression at people they're close to, rather than strangers.

TODD (voice-over): But once perpetrators do commit to harming large groups of people, analysts say the underlying reasons for doing so aren't so different between males and females.

MOHANDIE: Grievance, fixation, identification with prior shooters, very similar.

TODD: Analyst and author Mia Bloom is worried that the culprit in Wisconsin might start a new and horrifying trend of female mass shooters. Bloom is concerned that Natalie Rupnow might become a symbol and incentivize other young women to follow suit.

Brian Todd, CNN, Washington.

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KEILAR: And still ahead, the CDC confirming the first severe case of bird flu in the U.S., and officials say how the patient contracted the disease is different from all previously known cases.

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BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: The CDC is now confirming the first severe case of H5N1 bird flu in a human inside the United States. A patient in Louisiana was hospitalized after being exposed to sick and dead birds in what the agency is calling a backyard flock.

KEILAR: There have been 61 reported cases of H5 bird flu in the U.S. since April, mostly among dairy and poultry workers. Let's turn now to Dr. Jeremy Faust. He's the assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. Thanks for joining us on this. I know a lot of people are paying attention to this. They are more concerned, I think, as things get started and worried about them ballooning out of control. And you have the CDC saying this is also the first U.S. bird flu case linked to a backyard flock, not a factory farm. Tell us why that's significant.

DR. JEREMY FAUST, HARVARD EMERGENCY MEDICINE PROFESSOR: Thank you for having me. Look, when I, as a frontline clinician, am looking for diseases and outbreaks that the public needs to know about, there are a couple of things that I'm looking for.

One is the severity of illness. And one is just how easy is it to get that disease? And I think the concern comes today because we have checked one of those boxes, the severity of illness. And that's something that we had not seen in the prior cases this year.

We have not checked, fortunately, the other box, the box that says, how easy is it to get our humans spreading this? And so the severity of illness is the concern here because in the cases in the United States this year, the version of the avian flu that caused it was mild. This looks more severe.

SANCHEZ: Yes. Doctor, literally moments before we came on with you, we got a notification from the state of California that the governor there, Gavin Newsom, is taking the proactive step to declare a state of emergency to further enhance the state's preparedness and accelerate the ongoing cross-agency response effort to bird flu now being discovered in 16 states. Do you think that it's important for other states to consider a similar move?

FAUST: I applaud Governor Newsom. He has often been ahead of the curve on these kinds of moves. You have to be careful not to ring the alarm bell too soon in terms of the public because we don't want what's called alarm fatigue and everything is a big emergency and then nothing is.

[15:40:07]

But in the case of the officials, they can do things like make PPE easier to get, have more testing. The resources that we know lead to public health successes, successes that we don't hear about. We only hear about the failures.

And so I applaud that move because with that increased resources and open exchange of information, it's more likely that these things will be controlled.

KEILAR: And we also should know, and we covered this last week, that California has announced a recall of raw milk and raw milk products at a large supplier there in that state. Talk to us a little bit about the ways that this virus is spread to humans and what consumers should be thinking about as they're taking precautions.

FAUST: So far, this virus, as you say, is not spreading from human to human. That could change. There are a number of ways that could change. But right now, it's coming from generally commercial situations, farm workers with a lot of exposures who need to have PPE. And as you said, from things like raw milk, which can harbor this virus.

This is not rocket science. This is settled science. We know that things like pasteurization really remove the risk. But people, they take other risks.

We have products that could harbor this virus. And I think given this situation, it makes sense to have a heightened scrutiny on those products and to be careful, buyer beware, because I don't think you want to be the first person to catch a potentially very deadly virus from something that was preventable.

SANCHEZ: Dr. Jeremy Faust, appreciate the expertise. Thanks for joining us.

FAUST: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Next, unimaginable horror revealed in Syria as mass graves are uncovered. One site alone estimated to hold more than 100,000 victims of the brutal Assad regime. Stay with us.

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KEILAR: As Syria emerges from more than five decades under the brutal Assad regime, we're getting a clearer picture of the atrocities committed over the years there.

SANCHEZ: Across the country, mass graves are being discovered which are thought to contain the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people. CNN's Melissa Bell filed this report.

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MELISSA BELL, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The tragic next step in the search of many Syrians for their loved ones, some of the first images emerging of what are believed to be mass graves that may have been used by the regime to bury some of those who were first taken to the detention centers and then tortured to death. One at Al- Qutayfah, which is on the outskirts of Damascus, not very far from the Syrian capital, where one advocacy group has been speaking of the truckloads of bodies that were brought each week. What we understand is that four tractor trailers carrying 150 bodies each were brought twice a week, between 2012 and 2018, to this particular site, now be the subject of a search for some of those bodies in the hope that some may be identified.

Another site in the southern province of Deraa, also now believed to be another of those mass burial sites. As Syrians try and establish the identities of some of the 150,000 people who've disappeared to try and figure out if any of them may lie in these sites. That's according to the International Commission on Missing Persons.

Still many relatives frantically searching for their loved ones in the hopes that they might be alive, but these are the clearest indication yet, the first tangible proof of what we've long heard about from outside of Syria during the Assad regime, of the brutality of its secret services, the brutality of its detention centers, with many of those bodies now, no doubt, beyond recognition. It's unclear also, for the time being, how many people may have been buried there.

Melissa Bell, CNN, Paris.

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KEILAR: Our thanks to Melissa Bell for that report.

And after a quick break the Dow plummets, plummets. Look at that more than a thousand points. We're going to go to CNN's Matt Egan live. He just heard from the Fed chief and we'll talk about what he said and why the markets are reacting this way.

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KEILAR: We're following breaking news on Wall Street right now. It is down. You see the Dow there taking a plunge, falling sharply on the Fed's forecast about the next year.

SANCHEZ: CNN's Matt Egan is at the Federal Reserve, where Chair Jerome Powell just spoke. Matt, why such a decline?

MATT EGAN, CNN REPORTER: Well, Boris and Brianna, this is really all about what the Federal Reserve is saying is going to happen next. Now, we knew they were going to cut interest rates today and that happened. But what's really significant is they are making clear that there are no rush to do further interest rate cuts next year.

And that has concerned investors. Market veteran Art Hogan told me that this was like a punch in the face to markets, and it really spooked investors because some of the projections changed significantly. Specifically, the Fed had been penciling in four interest rate cuts for next year. Now they see two cuts.

They also bumped up their inflation forecast for next year, and they're not projecting that they're going to get back onto target to their goal of 2 percent inflation until perhaps 2027. So when you put it all together, it paints the picture of a Fed that realizes that this last mile of inflation, of last mile of getting back to healthy, normal inflation is proving to be more difficult than expected.

And there's a lot of uncertainty out there over the incoming Trump administration's policies. And this is something that Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged today, that they just don't know how high tariffs are going to go, what countries are going to get tariffed and how are they going to respond by retaliation of their own on U.S. made products. And so you put it all together and there's a lot of moving pieces.

And so the Fed is signaling that they're probably going to pause on interest rate cuts in the coming months. And this is not sitting all that well with markets. You saw the Dow down something around a thousand points on track for its first 10 day losing streak in a half a century since 1974.

Now we should also note that the Dow is just 30 stocks. The broader markets are not down in the last 10 days by quite as much. And it's also worth stressing that markets do remain pretty close to all time highs, but still this sit from the Fed of maybe fewer interest rate cuts on the way is not sitting all that well with investors.

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KEILAR: Matt, thank you so much for that update. The closing bell, by the way, just minutes away here and CNN is going to bring that to you live. We'll be right back.

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KEILAR: Before we go, a story that touches on both the foods we love to eat and macroeconomics. Yay. Poland selling more than two million pounds of its frozen butter reserves to fight surging butter prices ahead of their presidential elections. But this got us thinking, what else does the world keep in strategic reserves?

SANCHEZ: Yes, it's an important question. In China, apparently it's pork. In Canada, it's maple syrup. And here in the United States, in addition to our big reserves of oil and gas, cheese, lots of cheese. The USDA says we have 1.34 billion pounds in cold storage. [16:00:00] News you can use and that my dog Harley loves to hear.

"THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now. Thanks so much for joining us today.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: The floodgates on Matt Gaetz are about to open. THE LEAD starts right now.

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