Trump, in Texas, Calls Hurricane Harvey Recovery Response Effort a ‘Real Team’

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WASHINGTON — President Trump landed in storm-brushed Corpus Christi on Tuesday morning to see for himself some of the damage caused by Tropical Storm Harvey and demonstrate his personal commitment to a region still in the grips of a historic natural disaster.

Mr. Trump, who pushed aides to schedule a visit to Texas as early as possible after Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas, on Friday night as a Category 4 hurricane, initially considered touring San Antonio, which is outside the most hard-hit areas. But he settled on Corpus Christi because it was 30 miles away from the most severely impacted parts of the Gulf Coast, and suffered relatively light damage from the initial impact of the storm.

“It’s a real team, and we want to do it better than ever before,” Mr. Trump said of the response effort during a meeting with officials from local, state and federal agencies in a Corpus Christi firehouse. “We want to be looked at in five years, in 10 years from now as, this is the way to do it.”

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, sitting next to the president, sought to allay concerns about the situation at the convention center in downtown Houston, where 9,000 residents fleeing rising floodwaters have crammed into a makeshift shelter designed to accommodate 5,000.

“This is not the Superdome,” Brock Long, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said, referring to the nightmarish conditions residents of New Orleans endured while seeking shelter at a sports arena after Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago.

“At the convention center, we are sustaining food,” added Mr. Long, who sat near the state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz, who was briefly trapped by flooding in Houston on Monday.

Graphic: Maps: Tracking Harvey’s Destructive Path Through Texas and Louisiana

The people at the convention center, have food and security, Mr. Long said.

“I have an incident management team inside the city of Houston,” he said. “And more and more people are being moved to shelters to stabilize the situation.”

“All eyes are on Houston, and so are mine,” added Mr. Long.

After conferring with emergency management officials, the president, accompanied by Melania Trump, the first lady, boarded Air Force One to travel north to Austin, to meet with other officials.

As he exited the firehouse, Mr. Trump noticed a crowd of about 1,000 people, some of them cheering. He grabbed a lone star Texas flag and shouted back to the crowd, seeming to forget, for the moment, that he was at the scene of a disaster and not one of his rallies. “What a crowd!” he said. “What a turnout!”

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In the state capital, the president is also scheduled to meet with several members of Congress, and local elected officials and mayors. He has no plans to meet the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner.

“Due to the weather and all of the circumstances it’s a little bit more fluid today than a normal travel day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One during a turbulent flight.

“The president wants to be very cautious about making sure that any activity doesn’t disrupt any of the recovery efforts that are still ongoing, which is the reason for the locations we are going here today,” she said. “As of right now, I don’t know that we will be able to get to some of the really damaged areas.”

Mr. Trump, his aides say, is eager to avoid the mistakes made by President George W. Bush in 2005, when he took a relatively hands-off approach to the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Vice President Mike Pence and federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security have taken the lead on negotiating many of the details of the response, but Mr. Trump has taken pains to emphasize his involvement in the crisis.

“We are glad he’s coming,” said Ben Molina, a Corpus Christi councilman. “It’s important that he sees the damage around the coast. I’ve never seen anything like it, and neither has anybody else.”

The president on Monday pledged to quickly pass an appropriations bill to deal with the massive damage to private property and public infrastructure. He said he would return to region this weekend.

Mr. Trump left Washington on a rainy morning, boarding Air Force One with an entourage of aides that included John F. Kelly, his chief of staff; Marc Short, his legislative affairs director and his point man with elected officials in the region; and specialists from the Small Business Administration, who will assist local businesses with recovery loans.

Mrs. Trump boarded wearing a green jacket, slacks and stilettos — attire which was widely noted on social media. She emerged from the plane in Corpus Christi wearing a white jacket, a baseball cap emblazoned with “FLOTUS” and white tennis shoes. Mr. Trump did not change clothes en route. He wore leather boots, khakis and a white collared shirt with a windbreaker bearing a presidential seal; his white baseball cap read “USA.”

Correction: August 29, 2017

An earlier version of this article misattributed a series of quotations. The person describing the situation for evacuees at the convention center in Houston was Brock Long, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.

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Pregnant woman found dead may have been victim of ‘womb raiders’

The body of a missing pregnant woman was found wrapped in plastic in a North Dakota river, ending an eight-day search and raising the macabre possibility that “womb raiders” forcibly removed her baby before she was killed, authorities and reports say.

Fargo Police Chief David Todd told reporters late Sunday that kayakers found the body of Savanna Greywind, 22, hanging from a log in the Red River. Todd, who spoke to the media from the Minnesota side of the river about six miles north of Moorhead, said investigators found suspicious material at a nearby farmstead that may be a crime scene, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

Greywind, a nursing assistant at a senior care facility, disappeared on Aug. 19 from the apartment she shared with her parents in north Fargo. Five days after she went missing, a 2-day-old baby girl was found at a neighbor’s home.

A DNA test proved the baby was Greywind’s daughter — leading investigators to suspect labor was somehow induced, or that the child could have been removed from the mother’s womb.

The grisly discovery has now taken over conversations at local coffee shops, churches and hotels, where some residents are making the grim realization that Greywind may have been the victim of “womb raiders,” the Star Tribune reports.

“It’s like a Lifetime movie,” one Fargo resident, Tammy Krause, told the newspaper.

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” said Bill Larson, of Moorhead, Minn.

The woman’s parents have told police she visited a neighbor’s apartment to work on a sewing project and never came back. The two neighbors — Brooke Crews, 38, and William Hoehn, 32 — were taken into custody after the baby was found and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

“Brooke Crews was home during the execution of the search warrant,” Todd announced Thursday on Facebook. “A newborn infant was also present in the apartment. The infant was alive and was immediately taken to a medical facility. Our investigation thus far indicates the possibility that this is Savanna Greywind’s child.”

The baby was found in good condition and is now at a hospital in Fargo under the custody of Cass County social services.

Cass County State’s Attorney Birch Burdick said Hoehn and Crews are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to be formally charged with conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit kidnapping and providing false information to law enforcement. There’s no indication that other suspects are involved, WDAY reports.

Clay County Sheriff Bill Bergquist said the farmstead where the woman’s body was found has an abandoned home with barns, but hasn’t had an official address for some time. The owner of the property has been cooperative with investigators, Bergquist said.

“The team that was searching, when they went to that house, they found some things that were very, very suspicious,” he said. “That’s what brought us here.”

The Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office is expected to released preliminary information from an autopsy later Monday or early Tuesday, WDAY reports. Greywind was the victim of a “cruel and vicious act of depravity,” Todd said during a news conference on Monday.

Up to 400 people, including one man from as far away as Arizona, took part in searches for the woman since they began Friday, one day after her newborn baby was found alive, the Bismarck Tribune reports.

“It’s shocking because I knew her as a childhood friend,” said Jewel Azure, who volunteered for the search over the weekend with her mother. “It’s so sad. It seems like something you’d see on a crime show. Everything about it just horrific.”

The father of the woman’s baby told WDAY that he and Greywind had been expecting a baby girl who was due in late September. They had planned to name her Haisley Jo, he said.

“They said it’s healthy, but they’re running more tests,” Ashton Matheny said Thursday.

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