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New murder charge for North Dakota man who ran over teen
A North Dakota man accused in the fatal hit-and-run of a teenager after a small-town street dance is now charged with murder, after prosecutors say he intentionally ran over the 18-year-old, according to upgraded charges made public Friday.
Shannon Brandt, 41, was initially charged with criminal vehicular homicide in the Sept. 18 killing of Cayler Ellingson, but that charge has been dropped. The new charge — murder with a dangerous weapon — is a felony that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison upon conviction. Brandt is also charged with leaving the scene of a crash that resulted in death.
According to a probable cause affidavit released Friday, Brandt told a 911 dispatcher that if it was a total accident he wouldn’t be so scared, “but I know it was more than that.”
Brandt initially told authorities that there had been a political argument and that Ellingson was part of a “Republican extremist group.” Many conservatives took to social media to decry the alleged motive in Ellingson’s death. But investigators have said the case was not political in nature and that there is no evidence to support Brandt’s claim that Ellingson was a Republican extremist.
Brandt’s attorney, Mark Friese, said Friday that he would not comment yet because the Ellingson family is grieving, the community is in mourning, and he hasn’t received all of the case background.
The hit-and-run occurred early Sunday, after a Saturday night street dance in McHenry, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of Bismarck. According to an initial probable cause affidavit, Brandt told investigators that he struck Ellingson “because he had a political argument with the pedestrian and believed the pedestrian was calling people to come get him.”
But a new probable cause affidavit released Friday says Brandt called 911 and told a dispatcher that he hit a man with his SUV, and he asked for an ambulance. While Brandt was on the phone, he “made comments regarding the incident being intentional and not an accident,” the affidavit said.
He allegedly asked the dispatcher if he was going to go to prison. He told the dispatcher that Ellingson wasn’t going to let him go and “I hit him and I didn’t mean to and he’s subdued I was scared to death but he’s subdued, he can’t do anything to me now.”
Brandt later said: “I almost oh god, I almost just runaway but I thought jeez obviously if it was a total accident I wouldn’t be scared but I know it was more than that,” according to the affidavit.
Brandt told the dispatcher that Ellingson had called others and Brandt was worried they were on their way. Brandt said Ellingson also wouldn’t let him leave and called someone to come “handle him,” the affidavit said. The investigation showed that the only calls Ellingson placed before the accident were to his mom and dad.
The affidavit says that in one of the phone calls, Ellingson asked his mother if she knew who Brandt was. In another, Ellingson told his mother that maybe he should call his cousins or “posse.” His mother told him that he didn’t need to do that and she was on her way to pick him up. She told investigators that at that point, she didn’t know if her son felt threatened.
Ellingson’s mother received another call at 2:42 a.m. in which Ellingson said someone was after him.
“Sheri Ellingson said the phone call dropped and that was last time she spoke with C.E.,” the affidavit says.
Before investigators arrived, Brandt left the scene and went to his home in Glenfield. Authorities arrived to find him visibly intoxicated, the affidavit said. Officials have said that a breath test showed Brandt’s blood alcohol level was above the legal limit to drive.
The highway patrol’s investigation shows no acceleration marks or skid marks in the gravel alley where Ellingson was hit. Investigators also found little to no damage on the front of Brandt’s SUV, according to the affidavit.
An autopsy showed Ellingson was on the ground when he received his fatal injuries, which indicates “the injuries weren’t caused from being struck by Shannon Brandt’s vehicle and were caused by being run over,” the affidavit says.
An Israeli airstrike hit a mosque in central Gaza and Palestinian officials said at least 19 people were killed early Sunday. Israeli planes also lit up the skyline across the southern suburbs of Beirut, striking what the military said were Hezbollah targets.
The strike in Gaza hit a mosque where displaced people were sheltering near the main hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah. Another four people were killed in a strike on a school sheltering displaced people near the town.
The Israeli military said both strikes targeted militants, without providing evidence.
An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital morgue. Hospital records showed that the dead from the strike on the mosque were all men, while another man was wounded.
In Beirut, the strikes reportedly targeted a building near a road leading to Lebanon’s only international airport and another formerly used by the Hezbollah-run broadcaster Al-Manar.
Hussein Malla / AP
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. As the Israel-Hamas war reaches the one-year mark, nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon in the latest conflict, most of them since Sept. 23, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
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With just a month to go before Election Day, Sabrina German sees herself as an essential worker for democracy. The director of voter registration in Chatham County, Ga., German has found herself in the spotlight as she works to comply with sweeping changes to state election rules in this critical battleground state.
“The first three words in the preamble, it says, ‘We, the people,’ meaning that we, as public servants, we are working for the people to make sure that they have a fair choice and a voice for the candidates that they’re choosing,” German said.
The overhaul in Georgia has many fronts, from the Republican majority on the state election board, to the Georgia legislature, which has made it possible for individuals to file a flurry of challenges to the voter rolls.
German said she had a thousand challenges to voter registrations in just one county.
Attorney Colin McRae, who chairs the non-partisan County Registration Board (on which he has served for two decades), said, “It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the agenda behind some of the challenges,” he said. “In a recent set of names that were submitted to us, it included hundreds of college students. And it didn’t take a lot of research to figure out that all of the college students whose registrations were being challenged, all attended Savannah State University, [a] historically Black university.”
While these issues might seem local, they have a national political charge; and former President Trump has weighed in on the campaign trail, praising Republicans on Georgia’s election board. “They’re on fire,” he said. “They’re doing a great job. Three members. Three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”
“Sunday Morning” reached out to the members of Georgia’s election board praised by Trump. They have long defended their work, and one member told us the controversy over their efforts is “manufactured to suit some other agenda.”
What’s happening in Georgia is just one example of how challenges to the vote are roiling the nation. And the question remains: Are recent changes to state election laws addressing real problems? Or, is it just politics?
David Becker, a CBS News contributor who directs the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, D.C., said, “I’ve been looking and researching the quality of our voter lists for about 25 years now, and there’s no question that, right now, our voter lists are as accurate as they’ve ever been.”
So, what is fueling suspicion of voter rolls? “We see a lot of their claims about the elections driven just by outcomes,” said Becker. “They’re not about the actual process.
“The voter lists are public. They could have challenged these things in 2023 or 2021 or 2019. They’re waiting until right before the election, which tells you that they’re not actually interested in cleaning up the lists. What they’re really trying to do is to set the stage for claims that an election was stolen after, presumably, their candidate loses.”
The 2020 election still casts a long shadow. State officials like Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, are bracing themselves for another contsted election.
On January 2, 2021, Raffensperger got an infamous call from then-President Trump asking if he’d “find” votes so Trump could win. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have, because we won the state,” Trump said in a recorded conversation.
Raffensperger resisted pressure to not certify the 2020 election in Georgia. Asked if he would resist pressure again, he said, “I’ll do my job. I’ll follow the law, and I’ll follow the Constitution.”
Raffensperger will once again oversee and certify Georgia’s elections. Asked whether he believes any of the changes put forth by the election board are necessary, Raffensperger replied, “No. Not one.”
Raffensperger says voting is safe and secure in Georgia. Asked why the election board members keeps making changes to the rules, he said, “I think that many of them are living in the past, and they can’t accept what happened in 2020.”
Bloomsbury
Carol Anderson, an author and voting rights activist who teaches at Emory University, said, “One of the things about voter suppression is that it always looks innocuous, it always looks reasonable, except it’s not. What’s happening in Georgia with voting rights is that, you have a massive change of demography happening. So, you have a growing African-American population. You have a sizable Latino population. You have a sizable and engaged Asian-American population.
“And so, it is a power clash between a vision of a new Georgia and … the vision of the old Georgia, our old ways,” she said.
Chatham County’s Sabrina German said, because of the pressures on election workers, she thinks about leaving every day. German may be weary, but she and Colin McRae say their experience in 2020 has prepared them for whatever comes next.
McRae said he took it personally when Donald Trump asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,000 votes to put him over Joe Biden. “Of course, we took it personally; any criticism of the system is a criticism of the individuals who make up that system,” said McRae. “Again, the truth will come out. The truth will win out.”
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Carol Ross.
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