CBS News
Man who fatally shot woman who was mistakenly driven up his rural New York driveway sentenced to 25 years in prison
A man who fatally shot a 20-year-old woman in an SUV that was mistakenly driven up his rural driveway in upstate New York was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday.
Kevin Monahan, 66, was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Kaylin Gillis. Gillis was riding in a caravan of two cars and a motorcycle that pulled into Monahan’s long, winding driveway in the town of Hebron last April while her friends were looking for another person’s house.
The conviction had a maximum sentence of 25 years to life, which prosecutors previously said they would be seeking, with additional time for tampering with the murder weapon. The defense asked for leniency. Monahan declined an opportunity to speak.
“I think it’s important for people to know that it’s not ok to shoot people and have them killed for turning down your driveway,” Judge Adam Michelini said. Apart from the wider deterrent effect, Michelini said it’s important that Monahan remain behind bars rather than be free to harm more people.
Gillis’ death drew attention far beyond upstate New York. It came days after the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City. Yarl, who is Black, was wounded by an 84-year-old white man after he went to the wrong door while trying to pick up his younger brothers.
On the night of Gillis’ death, the group of friends were headed to a party when they accidentally turned down Monahan’s driveway. Monahan came out of his home and fired two shots from his deck, the second striking Gillis in the neck as she sat in the front passenger seat of an SUV driven by her boyfriend.
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Monahan maintained the fatal shot was an accident involving a defective gun and that he believed the house he shared with his wife about 40 miles north of Albany was “under siege” by intruders. He said he came out with a shotgun to try to scare the group away while his wife hid inside. Alexandra Whiting, a friend of Gillis’, testified in January that the gun was facing them at the time of the incident.
Prosecutors argued that Monahan was motivated by irrational rage toward trespassers. One of Monahan’s neighbors, Adam Matthews, said that he had become more and more upset in recent years at people making wrong turns into his driveway. It was established at trial that most of the friends did not notice the private property sign by the driveway.
A jury deliberated for less than two hours before returning guilty verdicts in January against Monahan for murder, reckless endangerment and tampering with physical evidence.
Gillis’ father, Andrew Gillis, has described his daughter as someone who loved animals and had dreams of becoming a marine biologist or a veterinarian.
“Every day we wake up to the harsh reality that that she’s no longer here. We will never see her beautiful face, hear her laughter,” Gillis said in court Friday before Monahan’s sentence was announced.
Her boyfriend, Blake Walsh, was behind the wheel of the SUV that night. “I will never be able to forgive you,” he told Monahan, who looked on with a stony face.
Washington — President-elect Trump is meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Chew on Monday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
The news was first reported by CNN.
A spokesperson for TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference earlier Monday, Trump had warm words about TikTok and its near-term future.
“We’ll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that,” Trump said when asked about how he would stop a ban. Harris won 54% of voters under 30, but Trump made inroads.
During his first term in the White House, Trump tried to ban the app.
President Biden earlier this year signed into law a bill passed by Congress requiring TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, face a Jan. 19 deadline to cut ties or be banned in the U.S. The companies have tried to delay the deadline pending a Supreme Court review, but a federal appeals court, which upheld the law, denied the request last week. The companies asked the Supreme Court on Monday to temporarily pause the law.
“A modest delay in enforcing the Act will create breathing room for this Court to conduct an orderly review and the new Administration to evaluate this matter — before this vital channel for Americans to communicate with their fellow citizens and the world is closed,” the emergency application said.
The filing asked the Supreme Court to make a decision on the request by Jan. 6 so ByteDance and TikTok can “coordinate with their service providers to perform the complex task of shutting down the TikTok platform only in the United States” if the justices decline.
A 90-day extension could be granted if a sale is in process by the deadline. But TikTok has argued that a sale is unfeasible and the Chinese government opposes the sale of the algorithm which powers the app.
Most Americans may consider the standard retirement age to be 65, but the so-called “full retirement age” for Social Security is already older than that — and it’s about to hit an even higher age in 2025.
Social Security’s full retirement age (FRA) refers to when workers can start claiming their full benefits, which is based on the number of years they’ve worked as well as their income during their working years. The longer someone works and the higher their income, the more they can receive from Social Security when they finally claim their benefits.
While the FRA used to be 65 years old, Congress overhauled the program in 1983 to raise the retirement age threshold in order to account for longer life expectancies.
As part of that revamp, the FRA has been inching higher by two months at a time, based on a person’s birth year. For instance, people who were born in 1957 reached their FRA when they turned 66 years and 6 months old, or starting in 2023; but people born in 1958 must turn 66 years and 8 months old to qualify for their full benefits, or starting in September 2024.
The full retirement age is set to increase again by two months, to 66 years and 10 months old, for people born in 1959. That means the higher FRA for that cohort will go into effect in 2025, with people born in 1959 starting to qualify for their full benefits in November 2025. (You can calculate when you could get your full benefits on this Social Security Administration page.)
To be sure, there is flexibility about when to claim Social Security benefits. People can claim as soon as they turn 62 years old, but the trade-off is a reduced benefit that’s locked in for the rest of their retirement.
For instance, claiming at 62 will result in a benefit that’s about 30% less than your full benefit — a sacrifice that many older Americans opt for, given that many are forced into retirement earlier than they expected or because they believe it makes more sense to claim more years of guaranteed retirement income, even if it’s at a lower amount.
Young boomers and Gen Xers
The increase in the FRA for people born in 1959 marks the penultimate age change, with the final jump occurring for workers born in or after 1960. Those Americans won’t be able to claim their FRA until they hit 67 years old, which means that someone born in January 1960 must hold off until January 2027 to get their full retirement benefits.
That will mostly impact the youngest baby boomers and Gen Xers, with the latter generation spanning 1965 to 1980.
These workers, however, are among the least prepared for retirement, according to recent research. The youngest boomers — those born between 1959 and 1965 — started to hit 65 this year, but many of them lack adequate savings to support themselves in old age, the ALI Retirement Income Institute found earlier this year.
About 1 in 3 of these younger boomers will rely on Social Security benefits for at least 90% of their retirement income when they are 70, the study found. But Social Security benefits are designed to replace about 40% of a person’s working income.
Gen X, meanwhile, is also shaping up to hit retirement without enough saved for their golden years. The average retirement savings of Gen X households is about $150,000 — far below the roughly $1.5 million that Americans say they need to retire comfortably. Another study found that about 40% of Gen Xers don’t have a penny saved for retirement.
Meanwhile, older Americans can also maximize their Social Security benefits by delaying claiming until they turn 70 years old. At that point, one’s benefits are boosted about 25% higher than their full benefits. But only about 4% of Americans wait until they’re 70 to claim the maximum Social Security benefit, according to a recent study from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.
CBS News
Trump threatens to sue Des Moines Register over poll, promises more lawsuits against news outlets after ABC News settlement
The announcement Saturday that ABC has agreed to commit $15 million toward President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential foundation to settle a defamation lawsuit was a rare victory for Trump in years of lawsuits against news organizations.
In the settlement’s aftermath, Trump said Monday at a news conference in Florida that he planned to sue the Des Moines Register over a poll and vowed to continue filing suits against news outlets whom he’s long accused of bias.
He complained that the pollster, J. Ann Selzer, “said I was going to lose by three or four points,” after previous Iowa surveys showed he’d win the state easily, “by 20 points.” Trump won the state by 13 points.
“In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference,” he said, adding, “we’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register, said in a statement to CBS News, “We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.”
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” Anton said.
Such litigation is unusual for presidents to pursue, according to Ohio University professor Aimee Edmondson. Trump has a long history of suing the media, she said, though his lawsuits aren’t often successful.
“It’s a rarity that he would actually win a settlement against a journalistic outlet, when I saw that I was astonished,” said Edmondson, who researches media law and journalism history.
Trump has sued CNN, The Washington Post and the New York Times multiple times, including during his first term in office. It’s a tactic he pursued both before and after his presidency, suing journalists and their book publishers, and major outlets — including CBS News — for coverage he didn’t like.
Edmondson said the lawsuits appear to have an added benefit for Trump.
“He has really done a good job repeating that message that journalists are the enemy of the people,” Edmondson said.
During the press conference on Monday, Trump said, “I feel I have to do this,” and added, “It costs a lot of money to do it but we have to straighten out the press.”
While Trump’s recent lawsuits have focused on outlets that are subsidiaries of deep pocketed corporations, Edmondson said she worries they might inspire others to sue “mom and pop” local media in response to coverage.
“Think of the state and county local officials, who might say, “Oh, this will be a great way to punish local journalists,” Edmondson said.
Trump’s suits often demand extraordinary figures from the defendants. Trump sued Timothy O’Brien after the journalist wrote a book questioning Trump’s claims about his own net worth, demanding $5 billion in damages. The case was dismissed, and Trump later told a reporter for The Washington Post that he knew he couldn’t win the suit.
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” Trump said.
Trump sued ABC for defamation after anchor George Stephanolopous said that Trump had been “found liable for rape” during a March 10 interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
A unanimous civil jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse of the writer E. Jean Carroll. The sexual abuse claim included an allegation that Trump forced his fingers inside Carroll against her will. The federal judge who presided over the case later wrote, “the jury implicitly found Mr. Trump did in fact digitally rape Ms. Carroll.”
Trump sued CBS News in October, accusing the network of “deceitful” editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump has claimed CBS News edited Harris’ response to a question about conflict in the Middle East in order to mislead the public. He reiterated that claim Monday.
“They took Kamala’s answer which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later in the interview,” Trump claimed.
CBS News said in a statement after the lawsuit was filed that its claims are “completely without merit.” The network said it will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.
CBS filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Dec. 6, arguing the case has no merit and that it should not have been filed in Texas, which is home to neither the defendant or plaintiff. CBS is New York-based, and Trump lives in Florida.
Trump has also sued journalist Bob Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster in January 2023, claiming Woodward publicly released interview recordings made for the book “Rage” without Trump’s permission.
Trump said Monday that Woodward “didn’t quote me properly from the tapes,” and he claimed Woodward “sold the tapes, which he wasn’t allowed to do.”
The publisher’s parent company at the time, Paramount Global, was named as a defendant as well. Paramount is also CBS News’ parent company.
Soon after the case was filed, Simon & Schuster and Woodward released a joint statement calling the lawsuit meritless.
“All these interviews were on the record and recorded with President Trump’s knowledge and agreement,” the statement said. “Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words. We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor.”
The case is ongoing, and the defendants have asked a judge to dismiss the suit.
In 2022, Trump sued the board that bestows journalism’s most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize. The case revolves around a statement the board made reaffirming its decision to give The New York Times and The Washington Post an award in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
An investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III later found “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.”
Trump said Monday, “it turned out to be a hoax and they were exactly wrong.”
The Pulitzer Prize Board put out its statement after Trump called for it to revoke its 2018 awards. The board said two independent reviews found “no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”
A Florida judge in July rejected an effort by the defendants to have the case dismissed. It remains ongoing.
TikTok CEO meets with Trump ahead of January ban
Social Security’s full retirement age is increasing in 2025. Here’s what to know.
Trump threatens to sue Des Moines Register over poll, promises more lawsuits against news outlets after ABC News settlement
TikTok CEO meets with Trump ahead of January ban
Social Security’s full retirement age is increasing in 2025. Here’s what to know.