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DALLAS (AP) — The CrossFit Games resumed Friday, a day after competitor Lazar Dukic died after going underwater and not resurfacing during a swimming event in a Texas lake.

In a post on the social platform X, CrossFit Games officials said that they and the entire CrossFit community were “shattered,” and while their first instinct was to “shutdown,” “isolate” and “mourn,” they decided “the best way to grieve is together.”

After the remainder of Thursday’s events were canceled, competition resumed with a moment of silence and an announcement that this year’s games, which run through Sunday, would be dedicated to Dukic. Many of the athletes who lined up for the ceremony were in tears.

Here are things to know about the tragedy and the CrossFit games:
Who was Lazar Dukic?

Dukic was a 28-year-old competitor from Serbia. The CrossFit Games said in its post on X that in addition to being “one of our sport’s most talented competitors,” he was “a son, a brother, and a friend to practically everyone who knew him.” It called Dukic “fiercely competitive, incurably joyful and uncommonly kind.”

Dukic’s biography on the CrossFit website says he was the third-ranked CrossFit athlete in Serbia and 88th worldwide. He finished ninth in his debut in the games in 2021, eighth the next season and ninth in 2023.

Dukic, who also played water polo, was an athlete ambassador for FITAID, a sports drink brand, said Gijs Spaans, the general manager for FITAID in Europe. Spaans said Dukic was a driven athlete and “just a really, really good dude,” the kind of person who “lights up the room.”
How did Dukic die?

Fort Worth police said officers who were working the event were told a participant was unaccounted for after last being seen in the water and not resurfacing. The fire department was called out at around 8 a.m. to assist, and its dive team recovered Dukic’s body from Marine Creek Lake just after 10 a.m.

The Tarrant County medical examiner has not yet listed Dukic’s cause of death.

Prior to the 800-meter (0.5-mile) swim, participants took part in a 3.5-mile (5.6-kilometer) run.

Kaitlin Pritchard, a spectator, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she was by the finish line at the swimming event when she saw Dukic approach. She said he was among swimmers she noticed had changed up their swimming patterns, which she thought could have been because they were tired from the run.

Pritchard saw people she assumed were lifeguards on paddleboards on the lake but didn’t notice any of them jump in to try to rescue anyone, she said.
What safety precautions were in place?

CrossFit CEO Don Faul said in a statement Friday to The Associated Press that safety is “of paramount concern” and officials have “rigorous protocols in place for each event at the CrossFit Games.” He added that the organization has initiated an investigation into Dukic’s death, which will include “an independent third party review.”

The previous day Faul said at a news conference that safety personnel were on site at the swimming event, but he did not provide additional details. CrossFit did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking details on its safety plan.
What is CrossFit?

CrossFit was founded over 20 years ago, starting out in a garage gym in Santa Cruz, California.

It says on its website that it is a fitness program featuring workouts with “constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movements.” CrossFit said Friday that it has over 12,000 affiliated gyms across nearly 150 countries.

CrossFit’s popularity is tied to the bonding atmosphere created by the high-intensity workouts, said Darin White, executive director of the Center for Sports Analytics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.

“It’s very community-based, you’re part of the gym, you’re part of that community and you encourage each other,” White said.

Training activities include everything from weightlifting and gymnastics to running, swimming and boating, White said.
What are the CrossFit Games?

The mission of the games, first held in 2007, is to “find the fittest athletes in the world,” according to the CrossFit website. They change every year, and often the details are not announced until just beforehand. Competitors come from around the world.

The City of Fort Worth said on its website that this year’s games were expected to draw 10,000 people.

White said ESPN’s broadcasting of the CrossFit Games in recent years has helped spread its popularity around the world. He said the games are similar to a decathlon only with a dozen or more separate events, and sometimes athletes don’t know their next event until minutes before it starts.

CrossFit said that over 343,000 participants from around the word competed in this year’s CrossFit Open, the first stage of their competitive season, which ends at the games with the crowning of the champions.

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Miller reported from Oklahoma City. Associated Press writer Josh Kelety in Phoenix and AP Sports Writer Pete Iacobelli in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed.

PHOENIX (AP) — An appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction and life sentence of a man found guilty of killing a U.S. Border Patrol agent whose death exposed the botched federal gun operation known as “Fast and Furious” has been overturned, a U.S. appeals court said Friday.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the convictions of Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, saying his constitutional due process rights had been violated, and sent the case back to the U.S. District Court in Arizona for further proceedings.

Osorio-Arellanes was sentenced in 2020 in the Dec. 14, 2010, fatal shooting of Agent Brian Terry while he was on a mission in Arizona.

Osorio-Arellanes was convicted of first-degree murder and other charges after being extradited from Mexico. He was among seven defendants who were tried and convicted in Terry’s killing.

The appeals court said Osorio-Arellanes had confessed to “essential elements” of the U.S. government’s case against him while being interrogated in a Mexico City prison.

On appeal, he argued that he was entitled to a new trial because his confession was taken in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as well as his Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. He also argued that he did not have a fair trial, and his attorney said he is illiterate and didn’t understand the proceedings.

The Obama administration was widely criticized for the “Fast and Furious” operation, in which U.S. federal agents allowed criminals to buy firearms with the intention of tracking them to criminal organizations. But the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost track of most of the guns, including two found at scene of Terry’s death.

Terry, 40 and a former U.S. Marine, was part of a four-man team in an elite Border Patrol unit staking out the southern Arizona desert on a mission to find so-called “rip-off” crew members who rob drug smugglers. They encountered a group and identified themselves as police.

The men refused to stop, prompting an agent to fire bean bags at them. Members of the group responded by firing AK-47-type assault rifles. Terry was struck in the back and died soon after.

“Our holding does not decide Osorio’s ultimate responsibility for his actions. The Government can still retry this case,” the appeals court said in its new ruling. “Nevertheless, his direct appeal reaffirms the potency of our Constitution’s procedural protections for criminal defendants, which ‘are granted to the innocent and the guilty alike.'”

Terry’s killing sent shockwaves through the Border Patrol’s ranks, and it remains a potent reminder of the dangers associated with the job.

The appeal court’s ruling came the same day the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector announced it had recently seen a significant rise in nonfatal attacks on its agents, including 66 so far this year in that area along the entire southern border of New Mexico and part of west Texas.

TEXAS (AP) – Students who started school during or after the COVID-19 pandemic have a harder time saying goodbye to their parents when they drop them off, Plains Independent School District Superintendent Robert McClain said.

Third graders are behind in their reading, teacher Heather Harris said, so the district hired a reading specialist to work with their youngest students.

They’re also struggling in math, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.

“When I go into classrooms of students who are currently fourth graders or fifth graders who were either kindergarten or first grade (during the pandemic), you can see that there is a lack of mathematical fluency around basic facts,” he said.

Texas school administrators, educators and education policy experts say they’re seeing troubling signs that students in the earliest grades are not doing as well academically as children who started school before the pandemic. State and federal officials devoted significant resources to help students affected by the pandemic but they mostly focused on older children whose schooling was disrupted. Experts worry that the state’s youngest students will have a harder time catching up without intervention.

A recent study by Curriculum Associates Research looked at national academic growth trends in the last four years and compared them with pre-pandemic data. It found younger students — like those who were enrolled in kindergarten or first grade in 2021 — were the furthest behind in both reading and math compared to their peers before the pandemic.

According to the report, those students may be struggling because of disruptions in their early childhood experiences, difficulties building up foundational skills like phonics or number recognition, problems engaging with virtual learning during the pandemic or insufficient resources being devoted to help children in the earliest grades.

Aquino, San Antonio ISD’s superintendent, said attendance in early grades is lower than before the pandemic, which is impacting foundational learning.

“We told families to stay home during the pandemic. Now we’re sending the message: You have to be in school,” Aquino said.

Low pre-K enrollment during the pandemic may be another factor. Children who attend pre-K are nearly twice as likely to be ready for kindergarten, said Miguel Solis, president of the education research nonprofit Commit Partnership.

In the school year 2019-2020, there were 249,226 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten in Texas, according to state data. This number dropped by nearly 50,000 in the following year.

Low academic attainment can compound in ways that become increasingly difficult to fix. Harris, the Plains ISD teacher, said it’s hard for third-grade students who fall behind to catch up because their teachers will likely not be able to spend much time helping them develop foundational skills they already should have learned.

“Pre-K through second, you’re learning to read, and then third grade on up, you’re reading to learn. So there’s that huge switch of what you’re teaching,” she said.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, an education analyst at the public policy think tank Texas 2036, said the Curriculum Associates Research study raises concerns about young learners but it’s difficult to pinpoint the impact in Texas because of a lack of data.

“We have very limited data on how younger students are doing that’s consistent across grade levels,” Pruneda said.

Without data to help diagnose the problem, students are being set up for continually low results in the state’s standardized test, she said.

There are some indications of how the problem might be manifesting in Texas. In Dallas County, for example, declines in math and reading scores between 2023 and 2024 were most acute among third graders, who would have been in kindergarten during the pandemic, Solis said.

Solis said the state needs to start collecting literacy data for early grades to identify students who are not on track and intervene. He’s hopeful because some lawmakers in both the Texas House and Senate have already expressed interest in taking a close look at how young students learn foundational skills, he said.

“We can’t wait until the third grade STAAR to see how younger students are progressing,” he said.

Pruneda said one step Texas can take to start reversing the trend is raising spending in public education — something educators are desperate for — to help school districts hire and retain the best teachers possible. The superintendents of both Plains and San Antonio ISDs said it is imperative for the Texas Legislature to approve a significant funding boost next year after lawmakers failed last year to do so amid the fight over school vouchers.

High-impact tutoring, like the one legislators mandated for grades 3-8, may also help early-grade students, she said.

DALLAS – The Dallas Morning News says that Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday ordered the state’s health agency to monitor and report the cost of treating undocumented migrants in state public hospitals. Abbott, who has taken a leading role in criticizing Democratic border policies in a presidential election year, said the state will seek reimbursement from the federal government for costs associated with the “reckless open border policies” of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “Texans should not have to shoulder the burden of financially supporting medical care for illegal immigrants,” Abbott said in a statement accompanying his executive order. Abbott directed the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to require state hospitals to document, and report quarterly, the costs of treating “patients who are not lawfully present in the United States.” The state agency will begin providing an annual report of costs to the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the Texas House beginning in January 2026.

Hospital employees must inform patients that if they are undocumented, it will not affect their ability to receive care, according to the executive order. Luis Figueroa, the chief of legislative affairs for Every Texan, a left-leaning public policy nonprofit, said in a brief phone interview that he feared the executive order could lead migrants to avoid care over fears they will be reported to federal immigration authorities. “People are going to be hesitant to go to emergency rooms, which only makes our communities less safe when it comes to receiving the care that they need,” Figueroa said. Kassandra Gonzalez, a staff attorney for the Beyond Borders Program with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in an email that the executive order is “xenophobic smoke and mirrors” because “there is no evidence that Texas loses money because of undocumented immigrants’ healthcare costs.” Gonzalez pointed to a 2023 study by the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, that found on average immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits. “Thus, Abbott’s cruel policy is targeting the very people who provide state services – services that we all depend on and use,” Gonzalez said. A spokeswoman with the Texas Hospital Association said in an emailed statement that Abbott’s order is a new requirement and hospitals currently don’t ask a patient their immigration status as a condition of treatment.

TEXAS – NBC News reports that shelters on the southern U.S. border and in some major cities that were inundated with migrants a year ago say they are seeing sharp declines in migrants seeking refuge, some reporting drops as high as 60% in just the past few months. In July, the White House said that the number of migrants apprehended at the southwest border had dropped 50% in the month since President Joe Biden’s executive action in June limiting asylum claims went into effect. Now the effect of Biden’s order is being felt by the emergency shelter infrastructure that has developed over the past few years to manage what was a record surge of migrants. The long Texas border with Mexico was one of the busiest for migrant crossings a year ago. But in Del Rio, Texas, Tiffany Burrow of the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition said the flow of migrants needing shelter is now “drastically, drastically less.”

At the Rescue Mission of El Paso this week, there were about 80 to 90 people using beds, compared with about 200 the same week a year ago, CEO Blake Barrow said. At the nearby Annunciation House shelter, Executive Director Ruben Garcia said he had received only seven migrants needing beds from the Border Patrol that day and 25 people the day before — a drastic decrease from last year, when the Border Patrol would send migrants in the hundreds to shelters like his. But Garcia said the drop wasn’t all due to Biden’s executive action. “We started seeing a much clearer reduction after Biden’s executive order went into effect,” he said, “but we were already seeing a decline because of Mexico’s enforcement. I think if Mexico stopped its energetic enforcement, it would make Biden’s executive order very hard to enforce.” After negotiations with the Biden administration, the government of Mexico under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his like-minded successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who takes office on Oct. 1, has stepped up efforts to stem the flow of migrants northward through Mexican territory. Data from Mexico’s National Institute of Migration shows how critical Mexico’s enforcement role has been in blocking, interdicting and, in some cases, deporting U.S.-bound migrants.

RIO GRANDE VALLEY (AP) – When a group of state health officials and members of Texas’ maternal mortality committee gathered to review applications for new members, they easily agreed on who should fill five positions reserved for medical professionals.

But the two spots for community members were more difficult to fill, records show.

For the rural community member position, the committee did not choose a candidate, instead advancing the top two choices. The candidate who scored highest on the application rubric was an obstetrics nurse and nursing professor from the Rio Grande Valley; the next highest was Dr. Ingrid Skop, a prominent anti-abortion OB-GYN in San Antonio.

Department of State Health Services deputy commissioner Kirk Cole broke the stalemate, writing in a memo that “although the applicant did not have the highest score, I recommend selecting Dr. Ingrid Skop.”

Cole wrote that Skop’s application “indicates previous practice in rural areas” and noted her involvement in community organizations that serve rural interests. Her resume, however, shows a career spent entirely in San Antonio, and volunteer work primarily at anti-abortion organizations based in cities.

For the other community member position, reserved for someone from one of the state’s urban centers, the application review committee recommended Queen Esther Egbe, a Black woman who had personally experienced maternal health complications. Egbe runs a nonprofit that helps Black women advocate for themselves during childbirth, and serves on the Tarrant County infant mortality review committee.

Cole nixed that recommendation, however, instead advancing Dr. Meenakshi Awasthi, a Houston pediatric emergency fellow who scored higher on the application rubric.

The two spots reserved for community members are now both filled by doctors, and more than 90% of the members have a doctoral degree. Committee chair Dr. Carla Ortique said at the June meeting this was “cause for concern.”

“It is rarely possible for those who sit in positions of privilege to truly be the voice of at-risk communities,” she said. “We can and should at all times be voices that support and attempt to foster positive change. We can be trusted allies. However, we cannot truly be their voice.”

State Rep. Shawn Thierry, an outgoing Houston Democrat who authored the legislation that increased the number of community members from one to two, said it was never the intention to have those spots filled by more doctors.

“The goal was quite simple, just to add an additional voice so that the existing community member would not be the sole voice for the community on the panel,” Thierry said. “Two voices was better than one.”

Now, there are none.

DALLAS (AP) — A Serbian competitor in the CrossFit Games died while competing in a swimming event Thursday morning at a Texas lake, officials said.

CrossFit CEO Don Faul said during a news conference that they were “deeply saddened” and were working with authorities on the investigation into the death of one of their athletes at Marine Creek Lake in Fort Worth.

The Tarrant County medical examiner’s office identified the athlete as 28-year-old Lazar Dukic of Serbia. The medical examiner’s office had not yet listed his cause of death.

An official with the Fort Worth Fire Department said they were called out around 8 a.m. to assist police because there was “a participant in the water that was down and hadn’t been seen in some point in time.”

Officers who were working the event were told a participant was unaccounted for after last being seen in the water and then not resurfacing, police said.

The Fort Worth fire official said they responded for search and rescue and were not on the scene when the initial call was made.

Faul said CrossFit had a safety plan and did have safety personnel on site at the event. CrossFit did not respond Thursday to an inquiry from The Associated Press seeking more details on that safety plan.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported the event on Thursday included a 3.5-mile (5.6-kilometer) run followed by an 800-meter (0.5-mile) swim. The newspaper said an estimated 10,000 people were in the area for the games, which began Thursday and were set to run through Sunday.

Kaitlin Pritchard told the newspaper that she was standing by the finish line when she saw Dukic approach. She said he was among swimmers she noticed had changed up their swimming patterns, which she thought could have been because they were tired from the run.

Pritchard saw people she assumed were lifeguards on paddleboards on the lake but didn’t notice any of them jumped in to try to rescue anyone, she said.

“Gauging where the people on the paddleboards were and everything, it’s just that he should have been reachable,” Pritchard told the newspaper.

Dukic played water polo and was an athlete ambassador for FITAID, a sports drink brand, said Gijs Spaans, general manager for FITAID in Europe. Spaans, who knew Dukic for three years, described him as a driven athlete and a “guy who walks into a room and lights up the room.”

“He had an incredible work ethic with his athletics career but, you know, always also made time to speak to people and make time for them,” Spaans said. “Just a really, really good dude.”

Spaans was watching a livestream of the swim miles away at the main event site. He was looking for Dukic among the swimmers coming out of the water before realizing he was missing.

“I thought he had this. And then all of a sudden I was thinking, ‘Why is his name not showing up in the finishes?’” Spaans said. “All the race, he was in top five of the race. And all of a sudden I see all these other people coming in. I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’”

“He was in it to win it,” Spaans added. “He was a great swimmer.”

The mission of the CrossFit Games, first held in 2007, is to “find the fittest athletes in the world,” the CrossFit website said. It says the games change every year and often the details are not announced until just before the event.

The CrossFit community is like a family, Faul said.

“We’re doing everything in our power during this tragic time to support the family, to support our community,” Faul said.

Dukic’s biography on the CrossFit website says he was the third-ranked CrossFit athlete in Serbia and the 88th-ranked worldwide. Dukic finished ninth in his debut in the games in 2021, then eighth the next season and ninth in 2023.

AUSTIN (AP) — The former police chief of the Uvalde school district said he thinks he’s been “scapegoated” as the one to blame for the botched law enforcement response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, when hundreds of officers waited more than an hour to confront the gunman even as children were lying dead and wounded inside adjoining classrooms.

Pete Arredondo and another former district police officer are the only two people to have been charged over their actions that day, even though nearly 400 local, state and federal officers responded to the scene and waited as children called 911 and parents begged the officers to go in.

“I’ve been scapegoated from the very beginning,” Arredondo told CNN during an interview that aired Wednesday. The sit-down marked his first public statements in two years about the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 students and two teachers, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Within days after shooting, Col. Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, identified Arredondo as the “incident commander” of a law enforcement response that included nearly 100 state troopers and officers from the Border Patrol. Even with the massive law enforcement presence, officers waited more than 70 minutes to breach the classroom door and kill the shooter.

Scathing state and federal investigative reports about the police response catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.

A grand jury indicted Arredondo and former Uvalde schools police Officer Adrian Gonzales last month on multiple charges of child endangerment and abandonment. They pleaded not guilty.

The indictment against Arredondo contends that he didn’t follow his active shooter training and made critical decisions that slowed the police response while the gunman was “hunting” victims.

Arredondo told CNN that the narrative that he is responsible for the police response that day and ignored his training is based on “lies and deception.”

“If you look at the bodycam footage, there was no hesitation — there was no hesitation in myself and the first handful of officers that went in there and went straight into the hot zone, as you may call it, and took fire,” Arredondo said, noting that footage also shows he wasn’t wearing a protective vest as officers inside the school pondered what to do.

Despite being cast as the incident commander, Arredondo said state police should have set up a command post outside and taken control.

“The guidebook tells you the incident commander does not stand in the hallway and get shot at,” Arredondo. “The incident commander is someone who is not in the hot zone.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state police and other statewide law enforcement agencies, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell declined to discuss Arredondo’s interview.

Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn Cazares was one of the students killed, criticized Arredondo’s comments.

“I don’t understand his feeling that there was no wrongdoing. He heard the shots. There’s no excuse for not going in,” Cazares told The Associated Press on Thursday. “There were children. Shots were fired. Kids were calling, and he didn’t do anything.”

Arredondo refused to watch video clips of the police response.

“I’ve kept myself from that. It’s difficult for me to see that. These are my children, too,” he told CNN. He also said it wasn’t until several days after the attack that he heard there were children who were still alive in the classroom and calling 911 for help while officers waited outside.

When asked if he thought he made mistakes that day, Arredondo said, “It’s a hindsight statement. You can think all day and second guess yourself. … I know we did the best we could with what he had.”

FORT WORTH (AP) — A competitor in the CrossFit Games has died while competing in a swimming event Thursday morning on a Texas lake.

CrossFit CEO Don Faul said during a news conference that they were “deeply saddened” by the death of one of their athletes, and they were working with authorities on the investigation into the death.

An official with the Fort Worth Fire Department said they got called out around 8 a.m. to assist police because there “was a participant in the water that was down and hadn’t been seen in some point in time.”

He said they responded for search and rescue and were not on the scene when the initial call was made. He said the athlete’s body was found about an hour later.

Faul said CrossFit did have safety personnel on site at the event.

Faul said the CrossFit community is like a family. “We’re doing everything in our power during this tragic time to support the family, to support our community,” Faul said.

A police spokesperson said that they would not currently be releasing the athlete’s name.

The mission of the CrossFit Games, first held in 2007, is to “find the fittest athletes in the world,” the CrossFit website said. It says the games change every year and often the details are not announced until just before the event.

HOUSTON (AP) – About 10 miles from Johnson Space Center, a Houston-area church takes a moment during Wednesday Bible studies and Sunday evening services to pray for two members who cannot be there. In fact, there’s no way on Earth for NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Tracy Dyson to show up at Providence Baptist Church. They’re in space, orbiting the planet. More specifically, these two members are working on the International Space Station together. Like many astronauts before them, they brought along their faith when they launched into space. “God uses all of us in pretty neat ways, and I think I get the most joy from what I do thinking about it in those terms,” said Dyson, discussing her job on the “Bible Project” podcast ahead of her March launch on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Dyson’s six-month mission isn’t scheduled to end until September, but Wilmore and his fellow NASA test pilot, Suni Williams, should have been back weeks ago. They are staying longer than expected following thruster failures and helium leaks on Boeing’s inaugural crew flight for its Starliner capsule. Wilmore and Williams have said they are confident the capsule will return them home safely; engineers are still poring over Starliner test data. There’s no return date yet, which means the congregation’s worries have subsided for now since they are safe aboard the space station, said Tommy Dahn. He is a pastor for the Pasadena, Texas, church where Dyson worships as a newer member and Wilmore is a longtime elder. It’s the launch and return days that ratchet up their anxieties — and prayers. “We will definitely be on vigil as we find out when that’s going to happen,” said Dahn, who is in close contact with Wilmore and his wife during the latest mission. Wilmore paused before boarding the Starliner on each launch attempt, huddling in prayer with technicians and Williams. He acknowledged the risks of spaceflight — especially on a test flight like his.