Rhett Beutler, co-owner of Beutler and Son Rodeo Co. near Elk City, told KFOR-TV that the horses died shortly after being fed.

“We didn’t know what was going on, we just got the feed and started feeding it like always,” Beutler said. “Then all of a sudden looked up and there was horses just falling over, dying.”

Beutler and Son officials did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday.

“All them horses are kind of like my kids; I’ve raised them from time they were born,” Beutler told KOKH-TV, “Once you lose one, that’s one too many.”

The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry said in a statement that it was notified Aug. 23 of the horses’ deaths related to a bulk order of feed and has opened an investigation.

“An inspector visited the Beutler and Son site on behalf of the department on Monday, August 26, and learned that the feed originated in Kansas,” according to the statement. “The ODAFF inspector collected a feed sample which is being analyzed in two state-certified laboratories.”

The department said it is working with the Kansas Department of Agriculture to investigate the company that provided the feed.

“We have initiated an investigation which includes labeling procedures, operating procedures and a review of their records to ensure the appropriate protocols were followed” in producing and shipping the feed to Oklahoma, said Kansas agriculture spokesperson Jamie Stewart.

The company that provided the feed has not been identified because of the ongoing investigation, Stewart said.

Dr. Gregg VeneKlasen, of the Timber Creek Veterinary Hospital, the Beutlers’ veterinarian, declined to comment on the deaths other than to call it a “tragedy.”

Beutler and Son was founded in 1929 as Beutler Brothers near Elk City, about 105 miles (169 kilometers) west of Oklahoma City, and provides stock for rodeos, including the National Finals Rodeo.

The company is providing the majority of stock for the Elk City Rodeo starting Friday night, according to Elk City Rodeo board member Randy Hargis, who said the events include bareback horse riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding and steer wrestling.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A World War I veteran is the first person identified from graves filled with more than a hundred victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that devastated the city’s Black community, the mayor said Friday.

Using DNA from descendants of his brothers, the remains of C.L. Daniel from Georgia were identified by Intermountain Forensics, said Mayor G.T. Bynum and officials from the lab. He was in his 20s when he was killed.

“This is one family who gets to give a member of their family that they lost a proper burial, after not knowing where they were for over a century,” Bynum said.

A white mob massacred as many as many as 300 Black people over the span of two days in 1921, a long-suppressed episode of racial violence that destroyed a thriving community known as Black Wall Street and ended with thousands of Black residents forced into internment camps overseen by the National Guard.

Brenda Nails-Alford, a descendant of massacre survivors and a member of the committee overseeing the search for victims, said the identification brought her to tears.

“This is an awesome day, a day that has taken forever to come to fruition,” Nails-Alford said.

More than 120 graves were found during searches that began in 2020, with forensic analysis and DNA collected from about 30 sets of remains. Daniel’s remains are the first from those graves to be linked directly to the massacre.

The breakthrough for identifying Daniel came when investigators found a 1936 letter from his mother’s attorney seeking veteran’s benefits. Alison Wilde, a forensic scientist with Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Forensics, said the letter provided by the National Archives convinced investigators that Daniel was killed in the massacre.

No members of Daniel’s family, many of whom don’t know each other, attended the news conference announcing the identification, which was made earlier this week, Wilde said.

“I think it’s shocking news, to say the least” for the family, Wilde said. “We know we’ve brought a lot into their lives”

The massacre began when a white mob, including some deputized by authorities, looted and burned Tulsa’s Greenwood District. More than 1,200 homes, businesses, schools and churches were destroyed from May 31-June 1.

Forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield said Daniel’s remains were fragmented and a cause of death could not be determined.

“We didn’t see any sign of gunshot wounds, but if the bullet doesn’t hit bone or isn’t retained within the body, how would we detect it?”

Oklahoma state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said the remains that were exhumed, including Daniel, were found in simple wooden boxes — and Daniel’s was too small for him.

“They had to bend his legs somewhat at the knee in order to get him to fit,” Stackelbeck said. “His head and his feet both touched either end of the casket.”

Stackelbeck said investigators were searching for simple caskets because they were described in newspaper articles at the time, death certificates, and funeral home records as the type used for burials of massacre victims.

Bynum said the next search for victims will begin July 22.

“We’ll continue the search until we find everybody that we can,” Bynum said.

A lawsuit by the two known living survivors of the massacre was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in June.

Attorneys for the two, Viola Fletcher, 110, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, are asking the court to reconsider the decision. Attorneys are also asking the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into the massacre under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, which allows for the reopening of cold cases of violent crimes against Black people committed before 1970.

SULPHUR, Okla. (AP) — Tornadoes killed four people in Oklahoma, including an infant, and left thousands without power Sunday after a destructive outbreak of severe weather flattened buildings in the heart of one rural town and injured at least 100 people across the state.

More than 20,000 people were still without electricity hours after tornadoes began late Saturday night. The destruction was extensive in Sulphur, a town of about 5,000 people, where a tornado crumpled many downtown buildings, tossed cars and buses and sheared the roofs off houses across a 15-block radius.

“You just can’t believe the destruction,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said during a visit to the hard-hit town. “It seems like every business downtown has been destroyed.”

Stitt said about 30 people were injured in Sulphur, including some who were in a bar as the tornado struck. Hospitals across the state reported about 100 injuries, including people apparently cut or struck by debris, according to the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. An infant was among those killed, Hughes County Emergency Management Director Mike Dockrey told Oklahoma television station KOCO.

White House officials said President Joe Biden spoke to Gov. Stitt on Sunday and offered the full support of the federal government.

The deadly weather in Oklahoma added to the dozens of reported tornadoes that wreaked havoc in the nation’s midsection since Friday. On Sunday, authorities in Iowa said a man injured during a tornado that hit the town of Minden on Friday had died, according to local reports.

Authorities said the tornado in Sulphur began in a city park before barreling through the downtown, flipping cars and ripping the roofs and walls off of brick buildings. Windows and doors were blown out of structures that remained standing.

“How do you rebuild it? This is complete devastation,” said Kelly Trussell, a lifelong Sulphur resident as she surveyed the damage. “It is crazy, you want to help but where do you start?”

Carolyn Goodman traveled to Sulphur from the nearby town of Ada in search of her former sister-in-law, who Goodman said was at a local bar before just before the tornado hit the area. Stitt said one of the victims was found inside a bar but authorities had not yet identified those killed.

“The bar was destroyed,” Goodman said. “I know they probably won’t find her alive … but I hope she is still alive.”

Farther north, a tornado near the town of Holdenville killed two people and damaged or destroyed more than a dozen homes, according to the Hughes County Emergency Medical Service. Another person was killed along Interstate 35 near the southern Oklahoma city of Marietta, state officials said.

Heavy rains that swept into Oklahoma with the tornadoes also caused dangerous flooding and water rescues. Outside Sulphur, rising lake levels shut down the Chickasaw National Recreation Area, where the storms wiped out a pedestrian bridge.

Stitt issued an executive order Sunday declaring a state of emergency in 12 counties due to the fallout from the severe weather.

At the Sulphur High School gym, where families took cover from the storm, Jackalyn Wright said she and her family heard what sounded like a helicopter as the tornado touched down over them.

Chad Smith, 43, said people ran into the gym as the wind picked up. The rain started coming faster and the doors slammed shut. “Just give me a beer and a lawn chair and I will sit outside and watch it,” Smith said. Instead, he took cover.

Residents in other states were also digging out from storm damage. A tornado in suburban Omaha, Nebraska, demolished homes and businesses Saturday as it moved for miles through farmland and into subdivisions, then slammed an Iowa town.

The tornado damage began Friday afternoon near Lincoln, Nebraska. An industrial building in Lancaster County was hit, causing it to collapse with 70 people inside. Several were trapped, but everyone was evacuated, and the three injuries were not life-threatening, authorities said.

One or possibly two tornadoes then spent around an hour creeping toward Omaha, leaving behind damage consistent with an EF3 twister, with winds of 135 to 165 mph (217 to 265 kph), said Chris Franks, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Omaha office.

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds spent Saturday touring the damage and arranging for assistance for the damaged communities. Formal damage assessments are still underway, but the states plan to seek federal help.

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Associated Press journalists Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas, and Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A 16-year-old Oklahoma student who died the day after a fight in a high school bathroom was conscious and alert when telling police about the attack by three girls that occurred after the teen squirted them with water, according to police video released Friday.

Nex Benedict’s mother called police to come to the hospital on Feb. 7 after the teen was attacked at school in the Tulsa suburb of Owasso. Nex, who identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns, died the next day after their mother called emergency responders to their home, saying Nex’s breathing was shallow, their eyes were rolling back and their hands were curled, according to audio also released by Owasso police.

In the video from the hospital the day of the altercation, Nex explains to an officer that the girls had been picking on them and their friends because of the way they dressed. Nex claims that in the bathroom the girls said “something like: why do they laugh like that,” referring to Nex and their friends.

“And so I went up there and I poured water on them, and then all three of them came at me,” Nex tells the officer while reclining in a hospital bed.

“They came at me. They grabbed on my hair. I grabbed onto them. I threw one of them into a paper towel dispenser and then they got my legs out from under me and got me on the ground,” Nex says in the video, adding that the girls then started beating Nex and they blacked out.

In the 911 call on Feb. 8, Nex’s mother, Sue Benedict, expressed concern about a head injury as she described Nex’s symptoms.

“I hope this ain’t from her head. They were supposed to have checked her out good,” said Benedict, who remained calm during the call and said she had been to nursing school. Benedict said in a statement on a GoFundMe page set up to help cover funeral expenses that the family was still learning to use the teen’s preferred name and pronouns.

Paramedics responding to the family’s house performed CPR and rushed Nex to the hospital, where they later died.

In audio of the call Benedict made to police on Feb. 7, Benedict said she wanted an officer to come so she could file charges. The officer who responded can be heard in the hospital video explaining that Nex started the altercation by throwing the water and the court would view it as a mutual fight.

According to a police search warrant, Benedict indicated to police on Feb. 7 that she didn’t want to file charges at that time. Benedict instead asked police to speak to school officials about issues on campus among students.

The Feb. 9 search warrant, which was filed with the court on Feb. 21, also shows investigators took 137 photographs at the school, including inside the girl’s bathroom where the fight occurred. They additionally collected two swabs of stains from the bathroom and retrieved records and documents of the students involved in the altercation.

While the two-week-old warrant states that police were seeking evidence in a felony murder, the department has since said Benedict’s death was not a result of injuries suffered in the fight, based on the preliminary results of the autopsy.

The police department, which didn’t respond to multiple messages sent Friday, has said it won’t comment further on the teen’s cause of death until toxicology and other autopsy results are completed.

Video released by police from the high school on Feb. 7 shows students walking into and then out of a bathroom after stacking chairs on top of tables in a cafeteria. Six students are seen entering the bathroom before Nex, who stops at a water fountain and then enters the bathroom along with two other students. A faculty member is then seen going into the bathroom, and the students walk out.

There is no indication from the footage, which only shows the bathroom door and part of the cafeteria, of what occurred in the bathroom.

The school district has said the students were in the restroom for less than two minutes before the fight was broken up by other students and a staff member. Police and school officials have not said what provoked the fight.

The family, through their lawyer, declined to comment Friday on the search warrant. The attorney did not immediately offer any comment Friday on behalf of the family on the video and audio released. Earlier this week, they said they have launched their own independent investigation into what happened.

Vigils are planned over the weekend in Oklahoma for the teen.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that she was “absolutely heartbroken” over Nex’s death.

“Every young person deserves to feel safe and supported at school,” Jean-Pierre said.

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Marcelo reported from New York and Stengle reported from Dallas.

CHICAGO (AP) — A man suspected of shooting and killing eight people in suburban Chicago this weekend was related to most of the victims, authorities said Tuesday, a day after the 23-year-old fatally shot himself during a confrontation with law enforcement in Texas.

The Illinois authorities provided a clearer timeline of the shootings on Tuesday, saying they believe all eight people killed and a ninth person wounded were shot Sunday and Romeo Nance fled the area by that evening. But they told reporters there is no evidence of a motive yet for the killings.

“We can’t get inside his head,” Joliet Police Chief Bill Evans told reporters. “We just don’t have any clue as to why he did what he did.”

Investigators believe Nance first shot seven people at two relatives’ homes in the city of Joliet on Sunday, then fired randomly at two men — one outside an apartment building and another on a residential street, Joliet and Will County officials said Tuesday.

Police said they had not yet determined the victims’ exact relationships to Nance.

The Will County coroner on Tuesday identified the victims found at the Joliet homes: 38-year-old Christine Esters, 47-year-old Tamaeka Nance, 35-year-old William Esters II, 31-year-old Joshua Nance and 20-year-old Alexandria Nance. The names of two teenage girls, 14 and 16, were not released.

Authorities previously identified the man killed outside the apartment building as Toyosi Bakare, a 28-year-old man originally from Nigeria who had been living in the U.S. for about three years.

Nance fatally shot himself Monday evening after U.S. Marshals located him near Natalia, Texas, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of San Antonio and more than 1,000 miles (1,690 kilometers) from Joliet, authorities said. He had no known ties to Texas, Illinois authorities confirmed Tuesday.

Nance’s death was announced hours after Illinois authorities used social media and a news conference to share initial details of the killings there.

Medina County, Texas, Sheriff Randy Brown said his office received a call Monday about a person suspected in the Chicago-area killings heading into the county on Interstate 35. Brown said he believes the suspect was trying to reach Mexico.

“It seems like they (criminal suspects) all head to Mexico,” which is about 120 miles (193 kilometers) south of Natalia along Interstate 35, Brown said Tuesday.

Officers from multiple agencies confronted Nance, Brown said.

The Texas Rangers are investigating Nance’s death and believe he shot himself, said Lt. Jason Reyes, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, of which the Rangers are part.

Reyes said he could not provide any other information about the circumstances of Nance’s death or his confrontation with law enforcement officers, saying his agency was only brought in to investigate after the fact. The Rangers routinely investigate deaths involving law enforcement in Texas.

The Illinois shootings represent the fourth mass killing in the U.S. this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University. The third happened Sunday in another Chicago-area suburb, Tinley Park, where police have charged a man with killing his wife and three adult daughters.

The database defines a mass killing as an attack in which four or more people have died, not including the perpetrator, within a 24-hour period.

The victims were found Sunday and Monday at three separate homes, authorities told reporters at a news conference earlier Monday evening.

Police were first notified of a man found with an apparent gunshot wound Sunday outside of apartments in Will County and pronounced dead at a hospital, later identified as Bakare. Shortly after, they learned of a man shot in the leg outside a home nearby.

Curtis Ellis said he lives next door to the man wounded in that shooting and captured it on a surveillance camera aimed at their street.

The footage shows the driver of a red car speaking briefly to Ellis’ neighbor, driving to the end of the block before making a U-turn then stopping and firing nine times. Ellis said he was watching the Detroit Lions play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in an NFL playoff game when he heard the shots, saw his hurt neighbor outside and called police.

“That could have been me or my wife in the front yard, which is scary,” Ellis, 56, said. “You haven’t done nothing to anybody, why would somebody just target to shoot you?”

Will County Chief Deputy Dan Jungles said deputies used video surveillance and license plate readers to identify the car of the suspected shooter late Sunday and to set up patrols near his known addresses. By Monday, the car hadn’t been seen locally and deputies went to Nance’s last known address around noon, the office said.

Jungles said no one answered at that home, they went to another home connected to Nance and his family across the street and saw blood on the door and bullet holes on the exterior of the house.

Police then forced their way into both addresses and found the bodies of the seven people killed, Jungles said. Authorities believed at one point that a three-year-old boy was missing, but the child was later found with a relative in another city, Evans told reporters Tuesday without providing more detail.

“I’ve been a policeman 29 years and this is probably the worst crime scene I’ve ever been associated with,” Evans said during a news conference outside the Joliet homes Monday evening.

Less than two hours later, a helicopter had identified Nance’s car on I-35 in Texas and law enforcement there surrounded him at a gas station.

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Miller reported from Edmond, Oklahoma. Associated Press writers Jake Bleiberg in Dallas, Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin; Claire Savage in Chicago; and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington; contributed to this report.

“Going forward, that heat is going to expand … north to Kansas City and the entire state of Oklahoma, into the Mississippi Valley … to the far western Florida Panhandle and parts of western Alabama,” while remaining over Texas, said Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service.

Record high temperatures around 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) are forecast in parts of western Texas on Monday, and relief is not expected before the Fourth of July holiday, Oravec said.

Cori Iadonisi, of Dallas, summed up the weather simply: “It’s just too hot here.”

Iadonisi, 40, said she often urges local friends to visit her native Washington state to beat the heat in the summer.

“You can’t go outside,” Iadonisi said of the hot months in Texas. “You can’t go for a walk.”

A heat dome occurs when stationary high pressure with warm air combines with warmer than usual air in the Gulf of Mexico and heat from the sun that is nearly directly overhead, Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.

“By the time we get into the middle of summer, it’s hard to get the hot air aloft,” said Nielsen-Gammon, a professor at Texas A&M’s College of Atmospheric Sciences. “If it’s going to happen, this is the time of year it will.”

Nielsen-Gammon said July and August don’t have as much sunlight because the sun is retreating from the summer solstice, which was Wednesday.

“One thing that is a little unusual about this heat wave is we had a fairly wet April and May, and usually that extra moisture serves as an air conditioner,” Nielsen-Gammon said. ”But the air aloft is so hot that it wasn’t able to prevent the heat wave from occurring and, in fact, added a bit to the humidity.”

High heat continued for a second week after it prompted Texas’ power grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to ask residents last week to voluntarily cut back on power usage because of anticipated record demand on the system.

The National Integrated Heat Health Information System reports more than 46 million people from west Texas and southeastern New Mexico to the western Florida Panhandle are currently under heat alerts. The NIHHIS is a joint project of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The heat comes after Sunday storms that killed three people and left more than 100,000 customers without electricity in both Arkansas and Tennessee and tens of thousands powerless in Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, according to poweroutage.us.

Earlier this month, the most populous county in Oregon filed a $1.5 billion lawsuit against more than a dozen large fossil fuel companies to recover costs related to extreme weather events linked to climate change, including a deadly 2021 heat dome.

Multnomah County, home to Portland and known for typically mild weather, alleges the combined carbon pollution the companies emitted was a substantial factor in causing and exacerbating record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific Northwest that killed 69 people in that county.

An attorney for Chevron Corp., Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., said in a statement that the lawsuit makes “novel, baseless claims.”

Extreme heat can be particularly dangerous to vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and outdoor workers need extra support.

Symptoms of heat illness can include heavy sweating, nausea, dizziness and fainting. Some strategies to stay cool include drinking chilled fluids, applying a cloth soaked with cold water onto your skin, and spending time in air-conditioned environments.

Cecilia Sorensen, a physician and associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University Medical Center, said heat-related conditions are becoming a growing public health concern because of the warming climate.

“There’s huge issues going on in Texas right now around energy insecurity and the compounding climate crises we’re seeing,” Sorensen said. “This is also one of those examples where, if you are wealthy enough to be able to afford an air conditioner, you’re going to be safer, which is a huge climate health equity issue.”

In Texas, the average daily high temperatures have increased by 2.4 degrees — 0.8 degrees per decade — since 1993, according data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration amid concerns over human caused climate change resulting in rising temperatures.

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Miller reported from Oklahoma City. O’Malley reported from Philadelphia.