Month: January 2026

By Madeline Montgomery

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    ATLANTA (WUPA) — Some young adults in Atlanta who are coming out of foster care are starting the new year with a new home.

Wellroot Family Services is almost done renovating an apartment building in East Lake that will house 20 people aging out of the foster care system. They’ll live there rent-free.

Anwar Hogan lives in Wellroot Family Services’ young adult transitional housing in Atlanta.

“I grew up in Atlanta. Born and raised. My father passed away when I was 13, and three months later my brother passed away. It took a toll on me,” Hogan said. That heavy toll is one of the reasons he ended up in foster care.

“A lot of financial struggle. My mom at the time, she didn’t have a job,” he said. “We had a 30-day eviction notice on our door. We were trying to figure out where to go and anything to keep a roof over our head. So I ended up in foster care,”

After he aged out of the foster care system, Hogan wasn’t sure about his future.

“I just wanted to have a home. It was overwhelming,” he said.

That’s until the DeKalb County School District connected him with Wellroot. Every year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 700 young adults in Georgia age out of foster care. One in six ends up homeless.

“Being 18, you kind of are spreading your wings to fly, but you also need support. You need to be able to go back home to be able to check in with your parents, and young people that we work with don’t necessarily have that,” Wellroot Family Services President Allison Ashe said.

The faith-centered organization is deeply rooted in the United Methodist Church. Wellroot was founded in 1871 as an orphanage for children orphaned because of the Civil War. It has since expanded to help young adults — men and women 18 to 21 — aging out of foster care.

“These people impacted my life, telling me I could do it. It felt good,” Hogan.

Right now, 11 young adults live on the campus for free, and that number is about to double.

This transitional housing campus is getting more apartments — and a larger community center.

“It’s not just a place they do their laundry, but they actually learn to do their own laundry,” Ashe said. “It’ll be a great place to prepare food for the holidays and things of that nature, but it’s also a place where they can learn to cook.”

They also help with tutoring.

“My first three weeks here, I got my GED. I locked in. The next week, I got a job working at the airport. I was grinding. I’m in grind mode,” Hogan said.

And with room to house 30 people, more young adults, like Hogan, can feel confident about their future.

“I feel passionate about what I’m doing. I feel supported,” Hogan said.

A type of support hundreds of young adults leaving Georgia’s foster care system need every year.

The new apartments will be ready on Jan. 28.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

WBZ

By Juli McDonald

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    BOSTON (WBZ) — Investigators revealed the man who opened fire at Brown University and killed an MIT professor days later, recorded a series of videos confessing to the shootings before he took his own life. Claudio Manuel Neves Valente said he had planned the attack for six semesters.

Survivor Jacob Spears, who is recovering at his home in Georgia, spoke with WBZ-TV after reading the transcripts from the videos.

“I’m like six semesters? That’s a long time. That’s before I even was there,” Spears said. “This was my first semester. I’m a freshman. So this was like, before I was even there you were planning this.”

Spears was shot in the back in a Brown engineering building in Providence, Rhode Island on Dec. 13. Students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed and nine others were wounded.

“Mukhammad, he was my friend,” Spears said. “That was my friend, so reading it I tried to keep him out of my mind because I knew that would make it even harder. But I couldn’t.”

Transcripts of the chilling reflections by Neves Valente were released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday.

“I am not going to apologize, because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me,” Neves Valente said in the video discovered in the Salem, New Hampshire storage unit where his body was found.

No motive revealed for shootings He did not reveal a motive for the campus shooting, or the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro two days later in Brookline, Massachusetts. Neves Valente attended school in Portugal decades ago with Loureiro.

Neves Valente did mention his interaction with a witness, which ultimately led to police identifying him.

“I was almost confronted by a guy there that day… Not almost, I actually was confronted and he knew my… my… my license plate, I honestly never thought it would take them so long to find me,” Neves Valente said.

In an interview with WBZ-TV, security expert Todd McGhee stressed the importance of reporting suspicious behavior.

“Brown University was the target, and so that just indicates to me, that all the phrasing of ‘see something say something,’ that’s what we need to do,” McGhee said. “We don’t need to look for people conducting criminal actions, we need to look for people that are acting suspicious.”

McGhee, who had a career in law enforcement and now specializes in security analysis, says even without a clear motive, the videos provide an opportunity for police to tap into his mindset and could lead to former colleagues or friends coming forward with key information.

As Brown University continues efforts to transform security across campus, Spears says it’s only there that he’ll be able to find some healing.

“I love the community. I love my friends,” Spears said. “I want to go back, and I want see them and I just want to like try and get back to something kind of normal even though I know for a long time nothing, nothing there will be normal.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Juli McDonald

Click here for updates on this story

    BOSTON (WBZ) — Investigators revealed the man who opened fire at Brown University and killed an MIT professor days later, recorded a series of videos confessing to the shootings before he took his own life. Claudio Manuel Neves Valente said he had planned the attack for six semesters.

Survivor Jacob Spears, who is recovering at his home in Georgia, spoke with WBZ-TV after reading the transcripts from the videos.

“I’m like six semesters? That’s a long time. That’s before I even was there,” Spears said. “This was my first semester. I’m a freshman. So this was like, before I was even there you were planning this.”

Spears was shot in the back in a Brown engineering building in Providence, Rhode Island on Dec. 13. Students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed and nine others were wounded.

“Mukhammad, he was my friend,” Spears said. “That was my friend, so reading it I tried to keep him out of my mind because I knew that would make it even harder. But I couldn’t.”

Transcripts of the chilling reflections by Neves Valente were released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday.

“I am not going to apologize, because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me,” Neves Valente said in the video discovered in the Salem, New Hampshire storage unit where his body was found.

No motive revealed for shootings He did not reveal a motive for the campus shooting, or the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro two days later in Brookline, Massachusetts. Neves Valente attended school in Portugal decades ago with Loureiro.

Neves Valente did mention his interaction with a witness, which ultimately led to police identifying him.

“I was almost confronted by a guy there that day… Not almost, I actually was confronted and he knew my… my… my license plate, I honestly never thought it would take them so long to find me,” Neves Valente said.

In an interview with WBZ-TV, security expert Todd McGhee stressed the importance of reporting suspicious behavior.

“Brown University was the target, and so that just indicates to me, that all the phrasing of ‘see something say something,’ that’s what we need to do,” McGhee said. “We don’t need to look for people conducting criminal actions, we need to look for people that are acting suspicious.”

McGhee, who had a career in law enforcement and now specializes in security analysis, says even without a clear motive, the videos provide an opportunity for police to tap into his mindset and could lead to former colleagues or friends coming forward with key information.

As Brown University continues efforts to transform security across campus, Spears says it’s only there that he’ll be able to find some healing.

“I love the community. I love my friends,” Spears said. “I want to go back, and I want see them and I just want to like try and get back to something kind of normal even though I know for a long time nothing, nothing there will be normal.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.