From the Alaska door plug incident to the Delphi double murder trial. This year was full of first-of-its-kind stories that got Americans talking. The flight was nearly full with the exception of a few seats; the two seats next to the missing door plug happened to be empty. The Boeing Max 9 safely made an emergency landing. No one was seriously injured. An NTSB preliminary report found that, before the flight, four bolts designed to prevent the door plug from falling off the plane were missing.
A Boeing executive told ABC News this summer that the fuselage came to Boeing damaged from the supplier, and to fix the fuselage, the door plug needed to come off. On March 26, a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore , collapsing the bridge and killing six construction workers who were filling potholes on the span.
Two workers survived. The crash affected entry into the Port of Baltimore for weeks, with the debris blocking entry for other ships. Crews worked to remove about 50, tons of steel, concrete and asphalt from the channel and from the container ship, the Department of Justice said. The collapse is considered "one of the worst transportation disasters in recent memory," Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said. Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of Michigan high school shooter Ethan Crumbley, were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison in April after each was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter in separate trials.
The trials were a rare case of parents facing criminal charges over their role in a shooting carried out by their child. Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 years old at the time of the shooting, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing four students at Oxford High School.
Prosecutors said Jennifer and James Crumbley ignored several warning signs in the days leading up to the shooting. The parents also bought their son the gun used in the shooting and failed to secure the weapon and limit their son's access to it, prosecutors argued. A judge dismissed Alec Baldwin's "Rust" case in July, on day three of his involuntary manslaughter trial for the fatal on-set shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
