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Early Start with Rahel Solomon

Providence Mayor Seeks To Reassure The Public; Reiner Family Announces Deaths Of Rob And Michelle Reiner; Australian Leaders Agree To Tighten Gun Laws After Shooting; Witkoff Says "Progress Made" In U.S.-Ukraine Talks; Trump Vows Retaliation After Three Americans Killed In Syria; Police: Two Suspects In Bondi Beach Attack Are Father And Son. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired December 15, 2025 - 04:30   ET

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

[04:30:00]

BRIAN ABEL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Stories at this hour, including the investigation into the Brown University shooting on Saturday. Police have released a man detained as a person of interest, saying evidence is now pointing them in a different direction.

The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, saw to reassure the public that the city is safe.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRETT SMILEY, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAYOR: We know that this is likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community. And we want to reiterate what we said earlier, which remains true, which is ever since the initial call, now a day and a half ago, we have not received any credible or specific threats to the Providence community.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ABEL: Meanwhile, we are continuing to follow developments out of Australia where the worst mass shooting in nearly 30 years has left at least 15 people dead and dozens more injured. Mourners gathered at Bondi Pavilion today close to where the shooting happened to pay their respects to those killed.

Among the dead, a 10-year-old girl, a Holocaust survivor, and a rabbi. The shooting happened on Sunday as members of the Jewish community gathered for the first night of Hanukkah. As for the suspects, officials say they were a father and son. The father was shot and killed by the police.

One of the neighbors of the suspects is now speaking out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How are you feeling knowing that it was your neighbors?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Terrible, terrible. I never thought we're living near something like this. It's scary. It is. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Tell me the last time you saw them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mm. I think it was last week I saws the some coming up, putting the rubbish out here. They're like normal people.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How would you describe him?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's quite here. Quite. Doesn't say hello or talk to anyone.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the father?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We -- we don't talk to -- don't even talk to him.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why is that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They're just weird people, not saying hello to anyone here.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you describe as keeping to themselves?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, yes. Very quiet people.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's shocking. It is shocking. Terrifying. Yeah.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ABEL: And more now on the breaking news out of Los Angeles, politicians, celebrities, and fans alike expressing shock and offering their condolences after the family of director Rob Reiner announced his death and that of his wife, Michelle.

This comes, as police say, they are investigating an apparent homicide. And a law enforcement source confirms that the bodies of Rob and Michelle were found in their home. Police say they are seeking a search warrant to conduct a full crime scene investigation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALAN HAMILTON, LAPD DEPUTY CHIEF: The current death investigation that is being conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department is going to be handled by the homicide special section of robbery homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

That investigation will move forward through the night. And tomorrow morning, we will probably have additional information regarding what occurred here on Chadbourne and our investigation moving forward.

We will not be releasing any further information regarding the investigation that is occurring here in Brentwood tonight. Our detectives will be responding along with our forensic science division and our technical investigation division investigators to conduct a full crime scene investigation and determine the appropriateness of the investigation moving forward.

At this time, the Los Angeles Police Department is not seeking anyone as a suspect, or as a person of interest, or in any other manner. And we will not be doing that until we conduct our investigation and we move forward.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ABEL: CNN's Julia Vargas Jones brings us more on the investigation and the latest reactions from Los Angeles.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JULIA VARGAS JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The investigators are expected to work through the evening. That's LAPD detectives, forensic scientists, to work on this scene. You know, a little bit before that press conference that became quite tumultuous.

We did hear from a press officer here in -- in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles that the scene was exactly as it was when they arrived here, that they hadn't yet processed the scene and they were waiting on a warrant in order to be able to proceed.

That just indicates how early this investigation is still. How much we are still in those early stages of the investigation, the chief, the deputy chief of LAPD, Alan Hamilton, saying that at this point, they're not seeking any suspects or any persons of interest until they find out more.

The police detectives though have been speaking to a family member this Sunday evening. That's according to sources with knowledge of the investigation that have told CNN. But the deputy chief did say that they were going to try to speak to every family member that they could in order to get the facts of this investigation.

[04:35:11]

We also know at this point that the person who reported the crime was at the location, was at the house when they called. The police and CNN also knows that according to a source close to the investigation as well, that it was a family member who found the bodies of Rob and Michelle in their home here in Brentwood.

Now my producer, Sarah Moon, also spoke to a neighbor here who said that he was scared when he heard those helicopters flying around the neighborhood thinking that perhaps they were still looking for a suspect and explaining the location of all of this.

You know, this is a very much a residential neighborhood. And -- and there were at least two properties that the family owned very close to one another. And one of them was from a neighbor that had a kind of a shared backyard situation.

And we have seen many neighbors come and go. A big part of this has been the police presence here. Surely being a parts intimidated -- intimidating and reassuring. Some neighbors have come and had had to remove their vehicles to make room for police and the media as well.

And we've also witnessed some of those neighbors taking a moment to -- to grieve together and witnessed a couple of people on the street holding each other and crying for a moment when we first got here on the scene.

And it just goes to show how beloved this couple was, how important they were in the market they have made not only in their neighborhood but in the world as a whole. There have been an outpouring of condolences coming from everybody from the entertainment industry to former president Barack Obama, governor of California, Gavin Newsom, former vice president Kamala Harris.

The Los Angeles mayor calling the Reiners' death a devastating loss for the city and the country. But, of course, so many questions still to be answered on this horrific incident that took place here in Brentwood.

And we are expecting to learn more only in the morning hours of Monday.

Julia Vargas Jones, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ABEL: Still to come, mourners paid their respects to those killed at Bondi Beach as we hear from more witnesses about what they saw in Sydney.

And President Trump's special envoy says progress has been made and talked with Ukraine. The latest on negotiations for a peace deal, just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:40:29]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw and open the blinds and see what was going on. And I just saw an older lady get shot and she was on the floor. Saw an older guy get shot. A body injured on the left-hand side. And I just saw a bunch of people screaming around towards me. I didn't know what was going on.

At the time, I was at the place I was on to them. So it was just showing and screaming and saying, get cover, get cover. So I ran to my front door, put the lock on and then ran to my bedroom. Put the blinds down and just took cover in my wardrobe a little bit. And because my window --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ABEL: That was a witness recounting what he saw during Sunday's shooting at Australia's Bondi Beach. At least 15 people were killed. And what authorities are calling a terror attack on Sydney's Jewish community.

Now, just a day after it happened, Australian leaders have already announced plans for even tougher gun laws, including limits on who can get a gun license and how many guns someone can own.

With us now is Greg Barton, a Professor of Global Islamic Politics at University in Victoria, Australia. Professor, thank you for your time.

I do want to start there because a mass shooting like this, and we're working on getting some tech issues cleared out, it looks like. So we will try to get him back here in just a moment.

In the meantime, let's move to the war in Ukraine. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff says progress has been made during talks with Ukrainian officials in Berlin.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been meeting with Witkoff and President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as European officials.

On social media, Witkoff said Sunday's meeting lasted over five hours. He also said the delegates discussed the peace plan to end the conflict in Ukraine as well as economic agendas. Those talks are expected to continue today.

Let's get more now from CNN's Clare Sebastian. She's joined us live from London. And, Clare, give us the latest landscape here on these negotiations.

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. The beginning of a very intense week, Brian. These talks in Berlin began on Sunday between the U.S. and Ukrainians brokered by Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, the host in that.

And today, we're going to see those talks continue, joined later on by some of the European leaders as well as we think the leaders of the European Union and NATO as well.

So things are ramping up, the momentum is there. But what we understand, certainly from comments coming out from the European leaders over the past few days and President Zelenskyy in a sort of Q&A that he did with journalists as he arrived in Berlin on Sunday, is that there are still -- there's still some distance.

[04:45:11]

And I'm not even talking about between Ukraine and Russia, between Ukraine and its European allies and the U.S. side on certain issues. There seems to be not an outright rejection, but some resistance to the U.S. idea that emerged last week of a demilitarized zone or a free economic zone in the part of the Donbas, that Ukraine still controls which Russia is demanding it withdraw from Europe is also, and Ukraine obviously pushing very hard for watertight, legally binding security guarantees before any talk of territorial concessions can happen.

Obviously, this is something that Ukraine wants in place. It is now accepting that NATO is essentially off the table, but instead, it wants bilateral security guarantees that mirror NATO's Article Five, that all for one, and one for all principle. So that is where we stand. There's a level of urgency, I think quite clearly driven by President Trump's impatience, but also by the U.S. posture, the national security strategy that was out last week has clearly now concentrated minds in Europe when it comes to their role going forward in terms of supporting Ukraine militarily, in terms of financing Ukraine.

So that is going to be something on their minds as well as we advance from these talks today and by a little onto a crucial European leader summit later this week, Brian.

ABEL: All right. Clare Sebastian for us in London. Clare, thank you.

Syrian forces have arrested five suspects in connection with an ambush that killed two U.S. soldiers and a U.S. civilian interpreter. U.S. officials say the attack was carried out by a lone ISIS gunman who also wounded three other people on Saturday.

CNN's Oren Liebermann has latest on President Trump's reaction.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF: President Donald Trump has vowed there will be a U.S. response after two U.S. service members and a U.S. civilian interpreter were killed in a suspected ISIS attack on .U.S forces in central Syria on Saturday afternoon.

Trump told reporters in the White House on Saturday, we will retaliate. And then he underscored that point a short time later on social media saying, there will be very serious retaliation.

Trump has blamed ISIS for the attack, although ISIS has not yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Syria's interior ministry says, Syrian forces warned U.S. forces that the ISIS was planning to carry out an attack on U.S. troops that were in the country.

The attack happened during a joint patrol between Syrian and U.S. forces. Now, the U.S. has been in Syria for years, especially recently operating as part of the coalition to defeat ISIS. But it was only one month ago that Syria joined that coalition under its new leadership.

Trump has welcomed that leadership and pointed the cooperation between U.S. and Syrian security forces when he vowed that there would be a response.

Iowa's governor said that the service members who were killed were part of the Iowa National Guard, which deployed some 1,800 troops to Syria and to the region earlier this year.

In terms of what the response might look like, Trump has not given an indication, only said it will be coming.

Oren Liebermann, CNN, in Jerusalem.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ABEL: Oren, thank you.

Let's go now to Nic Robertson for the latest on the Bondi Beach shooting. Nic.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Well, we know that there were only two attackers. The police had earlier said there might be a third. They've said that's not the case now. Father and son, 50- year-old father, he's dead shot at the scene on the bridge where they began that attack.

Literally, firing about point blank range almost 70 yards away from that gathering for first night of Hanukkah, just about to light the first candle on the (TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY) people in that crowd say that's when the gunman started firing.

Saw that -- that man comes forward. One of the gunmen comes off the bridge, he's tackled, he's disarmed, but he goes back to the bridge.

And what we've learned from the police now, that the man who was tackled was the 50-year-old father. He, according to police, had a firearms license, which is pretty tough to get in Australia. The police say that he had six weapons. And we can see at least three of those weapons, at least three in the social media video that came out of the attack.

All those three weapons appear to be long rifle type weapons, perhaps shotgun type weapons that they had, but the police say they'd recovered all six of those firearms that were registered to the father. The 24-year-old son in hospital in critical condition.

One of the big takeaways for me watching that police press conference was a question from a journalist. The police had found the vehicle. It had two IEDs in it. The journalist asked the question about an -- an apparent ISIS flag being found at that vehicle.

Now, the police wouldn't comment on that. They didn't deny it, but they wouldn't comment it. They said the investigation was ongoing. And the -- and the focus of their investigation, they said, was to find out what motivated this father and son to mount this horrendous attack on what was supposed to be a beautiful celebration this evening.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

[04:50:15]

ABEL: All right. Nic Robertson, thank you.

We do want to go back to our guest now that we have on this. Greg Barton, Professor of Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University in Victoria.

I think we have a strong connection now, Professor. So, I do want to ask you about the gun laws here, because the prime minister is saying that they -- they wanted to strengthen the gun laws. But this kind of mass shooting has not happened in nearly three decades with gun laws in the country, much more restrictive than here in the U.S.

So, can you walk us through them and maybe why the sound of gunfire may have been foreign to those at the beach?

GREG BARTON, PROFESSOR OF GLOBAL ISLAMIC POLITICS, DEAKIN UNIVERSITY: Yes. Thirty years ago, Brian, we had a massacre at Port Arthur, a former penal colony in Tasmania.

A prime minister, John Howe, at the time, pushed through really courageously gun reforms that banned automatic weapons, anything that couldn't be justified for sports shooting and for hunting.

The weapons used in the Bondi terrorist attack were bolt action single shot hunting rifles. They can carry large rounds and they'd be very lethal, but, you know, they're -- they're not automatic weapons.

The proposed gun reforms now would have to do with gun licensing, reviewing the licensing after a period of time and imposing restriction on the number and type of weapons.

So, it's not a big leap forward from where we are. It's an incremental improvement, but the big leap came 30 years ago. And had the gunman been using AR-15 style assault rifles in Bondi and that would be the death toll, it would be much higher.

ABEL: And -- and focusing in a little bit more on these new restrictions that the prime minister is floating here as a possibility.

Is there any sense at -- at this point how much support those measures would have?

BARTON: I think if people understand them to be reasonable. I mean, if -- if they allow people to carry on with sports shooting and hunting, but just impose reasonable restrictions, I think the public will accept that the public is horrified by what was the worst terror attack on Australian soil occurring in Sydney, Bondi on -- on Sunday evening. So, you know, there's -- now is the time to act.

One criticism is that the father-son gunmen, the son was under investigation by ASIO, the internal intelligence agency back in 2019, but the father -- father's gun license wasn't caught into question at the time. And the reformist is suggesting that when situation changes, gun licenses should be reviewed.

ABEL: I do want to focus a bit more on the humanity of all this. This tragedy really does showcase that anti-Semitism is global. The victims of this, crossing generations, the youngest 10, the oldest 87 years old, a Holocaust survivor, a rabbi among those killed.

Give us a sense of the Jewish community in Sydney and what impact this is having there.

BARTON: It's devastating. This is a very close-knit community, both in Sydney and in Melbourne, the two big cities with Jewish populations. Melbourne has the largest Holocaust survivor community in the world. This is a tight-knit community. Everyone knows each other.

ABEL: And that was Greg Barton, professor, for us there.

Greg, we appreciate you and -- and apologize for our technical difficulties. Let's turn now to a JetBlue flight heading to New York that narrowly avoided a mid-air collision with a U.S. military plane off the coast of Venezuela.

According to an air traffic control recording, the pilot blamed the Air Force refueling tanker for crossing its flight path. Saying the aircraft did not have its transponder turned on.

The controller responded, saying there's been unidentified aircraft within our air. JetBlue says it has reported the incident to federal authorities. The Air Force has not yet responded to a request for comment.

All right. Thank you for joining us. I'm Brian Abel in Washington, D.C. I'll be back with another hour here of early start right after a quick break.

Stay with CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is CNN Breaking News.

[04:55:34]

ABEL: Welcome. I'm Brian Abel in Washington, D.C. We are following a number of major breaking news stories this hour.

In Los Angeles, the family of famed director Rob Reiner has announced his death and that of his wife Michelle. This comes after a 78-year- old man and 68-year-old woman were found dead and an address associated with the Hollywood director.

The L.A. police department says they are investigating an apparent homicide but are not seeking any suspects at this stage of the investigation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chief, why are you not exactly looking for a suspect?

[05:00:00]