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A Colorado dentist accused of killing his wife by poisoning her protein shakes was indicted Thursday after a family friend said she was «shocked» to learn of his double life.

Prosecutors filed a first-degree murder charge against James Toliver Craig in Arapahoe County District Court, accusing him of mixing Angela Craig’s drinks with arsenic and cyanide.

Police allege in an arrest warrant that Craig, 45, a dentist in Aurora, killed his wife to work on «starting a new life» with another woman.

Angela Craig, a mother of six children, was declared brain dead on Saturday. She had gone to the hospital three days earlier complaining of a «bad headache» and dizziness, the third time she had been to the hospital in less than two weeks, according to her husband’s arrest warrant. That afternoon, she had a «severe seizure» and began to decline «rapidly,» according to the arrest warrant. Ultimately, she was placed on life support and she died.

She was remembered in his obituary for having a «boundless sense of humor and quick wit» and as someone who «used her gifts to uplift those around her, especially her children.»

She was also active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, holding multiple positions, including choir director, teacher, youth organization leader and family history consultant, according to the obituary.

“Ang’s most endearing trait was showing up to everything. Weddings, funerals, graduations, baptisms, birthday celebrations, reunions, service projects, Christmas celebrations of family and friends,” the obituary says. “She made sure she was always where she was needed, which is what she continues to do now. Ang is now and will always be missed.»

Laura Packard, a family friend whose husband grew up with James Craig in Kansas, said Angela was «a great mother» who supported her children and her husband for 23 years, as well as an active member of her church and community. . She said that she had not been aware of the marital problems between the couple and that the two «seemed happy when we were around».

He said he would have described Craig as intelligent and hard-working, as well as a deeply religious person who «came from a good family».

“We were very impressed with the things that he had done with his life and there is no doubt that he would do less than that,” he said.

“He was raised better than this,” she said.

She said her family was «devastated» when they learned Angela had died and then in shock and disbelief at the allegations against Craig.

“The whole situation is just a shock, but to think that he supposedly had another life, that something else existed apart from what we saw on the surface, that is also a shock to me,” he said.

The public defender listed as representing Craig did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The state public defender’s office says on its website that it is its policy and practice that attorneys and others who represent people charged with criminal offenses do not comment on criminal cases.

Angela Craig had previously been hospitalized, court order says

The police warrant, which provides details about the Craigs’ troubled marriage, reveals that friends and colleagues suspected James Craig may have played a role in making his wife sick and shared those fears with authorities.

After learning that Angela Craig was in the hospital on March 15, one of Craig’s business associates told a nurse that he suspected she might have been poisoned, according to the court order.

The business partner, who said he and Craig had known each other for more than 20 years and had been partners since Craig acquired his dental office in August 2002, later told police that Craig had recently shipped an order for cyanide from potassium to his office. although there was no medical reason for such a substance in a dental practice, the order said.

The business associate told police that Craig had confided in him that he and Angela had marital problems, according to the court order.

Angela’s sister told police that the marriage had «always been tumultuous» and that Craig «had multiple affairs with various women,» had been «addicted to pornography» and had drugged Angela about five or six years ago. according to court order.

The sister said Angela had told her several times over the years that she was leaving her husband, but said «James always talked her out of staying,» the order says.

An office manager also told police the couple were having marital problems and that Craig had recently mentioned that his wife wanted a divorce, according to the court order. The office manager also told officers that she had intercepted a package of potassium cyanide that had been delivered to the office days before Angela was hospitalized and that she knew she had been sick twice before.

Angela was first hospitalized on March 6, the office manager told police, according to the court order. James Craig made himself and his wife protein shakes before working out that morning, he said.

The office manager said that after the training, Angela became «dizzy and passed out» and James Craig had to take her to the hospital, according to the court order.

The office manager said that during Angela’s first two hospitalizations, Craig had said that he did not believe his wife would «survive,» according to the court order.

Potassium cyanide was sent to the dental practice of James Craig

Police said that before Angela’s third visit to the hospital, Craig told the office manager that he was receiving a personal package that was not to be opened. When the office manager found the package, which had already been opened, he noticed a biohazard label and a container labeled «potassium cyanide,» according to the court order. The office manager saw that the package was for Craig, sealed it and delivered it to him, the order says.

The official manager later did a Google search for potassium cyanide and noted that the side effects of ingesting it “matched the same symptoms Angela had been exhibiting for the past week, including nausea, vomiting, and low blood pressure,” according to the court order.

The office manager contacted another colleague with information about the potassium cyanide package after Angela went to the hospital for a third time with the same symptoms, according to the court order.

That coworker told the business associate about the contents of the package, he said.

When the business associate confronted Craig about the package, Craig first said it contained a ring to surprise Angela, according to the court order. But then he admitted to its contents, saying he bought potassium cyanide at Angela’s request, but he didn’t think she would «actually take it,» according to the court order. The business associate then told Craig to stop talking and find a lawyer, according to the court order.

According to the order, Craig told a Child Protective Services caseworker on March 16 that Angela was suicidal and her depression had increased after he filed for divorce in December.

Police said that during their investigation, «no person has suggested or seen any source of Angela’s suicidal ideation.»

«In total, this investigation has shown that James has done everything possible to attempt to end his wife’s life,» the order reads.

Emails detail relationship with another woman

The order also details a relationship between Craig and a Texas orthodontist, whom he arranged to fly to Colorado while his wife was hospitalized.

Police said they discovered Craig was using a new email account with multiple requests for poison, as well as emails that were «intimate in nature and contained sexually explicit conversations» with the Texas dentist.

«It appears that James was taking this woman to Denver while his wife and the mother of his children were dying in the hospital,» the order read.

The emails included dates for the Texas dentist to travel from Austin to Denver from March 8 to 10, according to the court order. Angela was in the hospital from March 9-14. A flight itinerary for another trip, March 16-20, was also among the emails, police said.

Police included in the warrant an email purporting to be from the Texas dentist, in which it appears Craig told him something had happened to Angela.

“Hello honey, I am so sorry about what happened this week in your world,” the email read, according to images included in the arrest warrant.

«I want to give you as much comfort as I can, but I also don’t think it’s right for me to mix with everyone who comes together to mourn Angela and I don’t want to meet your family as a friend and try to hide what happened.» I feel sorry for you,» the Texas dentist wrote, according to the image of the order. «I love you.»

The Colorado high school student who shot and wounded two school administrators after his weapon was discovered during a mandatory pat search was on probation on a weapons charge, a law enforcement source said Thursday.

Austin Lyle, 17, who shot two deans at Denver East High School on Wednesday, was arrested on a 2021 weapons charge shortly before he was expelled from Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, the source said.

Overland High School classmates flagged posts about weapons on Lyle’s social media, prompting police to visit his parents’ home, the source said. His parents let officers in and found a rifle with a «high-capacity magazine and silencer» in his bedroom. Lyle was charged with a felony, but the court dismissed the charge and put him on a year’s probation for the incident, the source said.

A representative for the Cherry Creek School District said Lyle was «disciplined for violating board policy» during the 2021-2022 school year and consequently «removed from Overland High School.» It is not clear if the incident with the weapons was the rape.

Lyle then began attending Denver East High School and was subject to a «security plan» that stated that he agreed to be searched every morning, Denver police said.

The teen opened fire on two school employees after they discovered a weapon during their search Wednesday morning. Lyle was found dead in a nearby county after the incident, authorities said. Park County Coroner David Kintz Jr. said preliminary autopsy results indicate Lyle died as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It is unclear if Lyle’s earlier weapons charge prompted his security plan. Both the Denver Public School District and the Cherry Creek School District declined to provide details about Lyle’s safety plan, citing children’s privacy under state and federal laws.

Safety plans are very common in schools, and depending on the size, schools can have hundreds of these plans for students at any one time, said John McDonald, chief operating officer of the Council for School Safety Leadership, a national organization. focused on helping school governance. teams prepare for and react to significant school crises.

It’s a «behavior contract» between the student, parent and school drawn up after a threat assessment based on past behavior or current threat, McDonald said.

“The safety plan really sets out what the expectations are for the student and spells out what the student can and cannot do and tells the student what the school is going to do,” he said.

Security plans may include things like mandatory drug or other item searches, supervised bathroom visits or random backpack searches, McDonald said. “It’s up to the school to deliver on that every day to achieve a good climate culture, good security inside the school and to protect all the other children,” she added.

Denver East High School students said they were still processing how Wednesday’s shooting happened, less than a month after another student was killed. shot while sitting in his car outside of school.

“The main focus should be why this student had a weapon and what was causing him to resort to this violence,” said Clara Taub, a Denver East High School sophomore and a volunteer with the school’s Students Demand Action, a national defense group fighting guns. violence. “Clearly he had a history of this. He got kicked out of Overland High School and sent to East High School, but clearly this student needed more support that he wasn’t getting.”

The Senate Ethics Committee said Thursday that Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., violated Senate rules during an appearance on Fox News last year when he solicited donations for Hershel Walker’s Georgia Senate campaign.

in a letter Posted publicly by the panel, Democratic Chairman Chris Coons of Delaware and Republican Vice President James Lankford of Oklahoma said Graham violated Senate rules during the Nov. 30 interview when he solicited funds in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building. It’s against Senate rules to search for campaign donations in a federal building.

The committee said that during the roughly nine-minute interview, more than four minutes were devoted to a discussion of the 2022 runoff in Georgia between Walker and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, with Graham soliciting campaign contributions «five separate times.» .

In its letter, the ethics panel issued a «warning» but chose not to penalize Graham.

“The public should feel confident that members use public resources only for official actions in the best interest of the United States, not for partisan political activities,” they wrote. “His actions fell short of that standard, resulting in damage to public confidence in the United States Senate. You are hereby warned.

Graham responded in a statement: “It was a mistake. I take responsibility. I will try to do better in the future.”

The panel also said Graham was a repeat offender, noting that he had solicited donations in an impromptu media interview at Dirksen’s Senate Office Building in October 2020.

«In response to a reporter’s question about his re-election campaign fundraising, he directly solicited campaign contributions for his campaign committee,» Coons and Lankford wrote.

Coons and Lankford said they had considered «various mitigating factors» in the 2020 complaint and determined that Graham’s conduct was «inadvertent, technical or otherwise.» de minimis nature.» They said they dismissed that claim and reported their findings to him in private.

frank thorp contributed.

Illegal crossings into the US from Canada have risen to historically high levels, although they are still a fraction of the crossings into the US from Mexico.

In the Swanton sector of the US border, which covers New Hampshire, Vermont and parts of northern New York, illegal border crossings increased 10-fold during a recent five-month period compared to the same period last year past, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.

From October 1 to February 28, some 2,000 migrants were apprehended crossing the border illegally in the sector, compared to just 200 in the same period a year earlier.

Mexicans desperate to enter the US have been flying to Canada to try to cross the border in freezing temperatures, NBC News reported. The United States has begun moving migrants detained at the northern border to south Texas, and CBP transferred an additional 25 agents to the northern border this month.

The United States and Canada are also prepared to apply the terms of an existing «safe third country agreement» to asylum seekers who cross between ports of entry, the US official said Thursday.

That agreement means that people must apply for asylum in the first safe countries they arrive in, with exceptions, instead of going to Canada and then the US, or vice versa.

Asked to comment on the expected deal, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the United States and Canada «are engaged on all aspects of irregular migration, including the Safe Third Country Agreement.»

“We will continue to work with the United States in this and other areas of border cooperation,” the spokesperson said.

This week, Biden is making his first presidential visit to Canada, where Trudeau has offered to help the Biden administration stem the flow of immigrants entering Canada from the US and seeking asylum.

The number of people applying for asylum after crossing the border from the US at unofficial border crossings has been on the rise since 2017, the CBC has reported.

Monica Alba

Monica Alba is a White House correspondent for NBC News.

phil helsell and didi martinez contributed.

WASHINGTON — Our ability to care about others may have very, very ancient origins, a new study suggests.

It could have been deeply rooted in prehistoric animals that lived millions of years ago, before fish and mammals like us diverged down the tree of life, according to researchers who published their study Thursday in the journal science magazine.

«Some of the mechanisms that underlie our ability to experience fear, or to fall in and out of love, are clearly very old pathways,» said Hans Hofmann, an evolutionary neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the research. .

Scientists are often reluctant to attribute human feelings to animals. But it is generally accepted that many animals have moods, including fish.

The new study shows that fish can detect fear in other fish and then become afraid too, and that this ability is regulated by oxytocin, the same brain chemical that underlies the ability to empathize in humans.

The researchers demonstrated this by knocking out genes related to oxytocin production and uptake in the brain of zebrafish, a small tropical fish often used for research. Those fish were then essentially antisocial: They didn’t detect or change their behavior when other fish were anxious.

But when some of the altered fish received injections of oxytocin, their ability to sense and mirror the feelings of other fish was restored, what scientists call «emotional contagion.»

“They respond to other people who are scared. In that sense, they behave like us,» said University of Calgary neuroscientist Ibukun Akinrinade, a co-author of the study.

The study also showed that zebrafish will pay more attention to fish that have previously been stressed, a behavior the researchers likened to comforting them.

Previous research has shown that oxytocin plays a similar role in fear transmission in mice.

The new research illustrates the «ancestral role» of oxytocin in the transmission of emotions, said Rui Oliveira, a behavioral biologist at Portugal’s Gulbenkian Institute of Sciences and a co-author of the study.

This brain processing «may have been in place about 450 million years ago, when you and I and these little fish last had a common ancestor,» Hofmann explained.

Oxytocin is sometimes thought of as a «love» hormone, but Hofmann said it’s actually more like «a thermostat that determines what’s socially relevant in a particular situation, activating neural circuits that can cause you to flee from danger or engage in courtship behavior.» ”

That could be critical to the survival of many animals, especially those that live in groups, said Carl Safina, an ecologist at Stony Brook University, who was not involved in the study.

“The most basic form of empathy is contagious fear: it is a very valuable thing to stay alive, if any member of your group detects a predator or some other danger.”

Two House committee chairs are asking the Defense Department to provide more information about the military records of congressional candidates that were released without their consent last year, shortly before the midterm elections.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., of the Oversight panel and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., of the Armed Services Committee sent a letter Thursday to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seeking documents and answers about what led to unauthorized releases. .

Republican lawmakers said an earlier response from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall fell short.

“This response is late, threadbare, and unresponsive. It omits obviously pertinent information about the nature of the requests that lead to the improper disclosure of service member records,” they wrote. “We have not yet heard from any other services regarding this matter.”

The committee chairs requested a list of congressional candidates and those elected to Congress between January 1, 2021 and January 3, 2023, whose records were improperly released from any service without consent.

They also requested the identities of those involved in the approval process, as well as any details about any punitive measures taken against them.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the letter.

In October, Political reported in military records belonging to Jennifer-Ruth Green, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for a House seat in Indiana. The history included a detail about Green’s alleged sexual assault while serving in Iraq. The Air Force later acknowledged the improper disclosure of the information, according to a report from The Hill at the time which included a statement from an Air Force spokesperson.

In a joint statement last week, Comer and Rogers said the Defense Department «failed to protect our service members’ private information» and called for responses from other services after the incident. Revealed Air Force more candidates had been affected.

Thursday’s requests from Comer and Rogers come after sensitive personal information belonging to some lawmakers and congressional staff was released online following a «significant data breach» by DC Health Link, Washington’s health insurance marketplace. , DC.

More than 1,000 people with employment information indicating they work for the House or Senate were allegedly exposed in a database in that breach.