Survey: 1 in 5 households paying student loans

  HOPE YENWASHINGTON -- With college enrollment growing, student debt has stretched to a record number of U.S. households - nearly 1 in 5 - with the biggest burdens falling on the young and poor.

The analysis by the Pew Research Center found that 22.4 million households, or 19 percent, had college debt in 2010. That is double the share in 1989, and up from 15 percent in 2007, just prior to the recession - representing the biggest three-year increase in student debt in more than two decades.

The increase was driven by higher tuition costs as well as rising college enrollment during the economic downturn. The biggest jumps occurred in households at the two extremes of the income distribution. More well-off families are digging deeper into their pockets to pay for costly private colleges, while lower-income people in search of higher-wage jobs are enrolling in community colleges, public universities and other schools as a way to boost their resumes.

Because of the sluggish economy, fewer college students than before are able to settle into full-time careers immediately upon graduation, contributing to a jump in debt among lower-income households as the young adults take on part-time jobs or attend graduate school, according to Pew.

As a share of household income, the debt burden was the greatest for the poorest 20 percent of households, or those making less than $21,044. In all, 40 percent of U.S. households headed by someone younger than age 35 owed college debt, the highest share of any age group.

"Comparing the debt to their economic resources, the lowest-income fifth of households are the ones experiencing the greatest stresses," said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew who analyzed the numbers.

Noting that college enrollment has continued to climb since 2010, Fry added: "Until college enrollment peaks, I would not expect the amount of outstanding student debt to level off."

The study released Wednesday is based on the Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted every three years and sponsored by the Federal Reserve. The numbers are as of 2010, the latest available for that survey. Separate Fed data have pointed to subsequent increases in student loans since 2010 that totaled $914 billion in the April-June quarter, but don't provide demographic breakdowns on who shoulders the biggest burdens.

Both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger in this year's election, Mitt Romney, have been seeking to court young voters with differing visions on how to address rising tuition and growing college debt. Obama wants to make tax credits for college expenses permanent and expand Pell grants for lower-earning families. Romney says that making government the direct source of federal student loans has not worked and simply drives tuition higher. He stresses the need to curb college costs.

The Pew report found that the richest 20 percent of households, or those with annual income of $97,586 or higher, owed the biggest share of outstanding student debt - 31 percent, up from 28 percent in 2007. The poorest 20 percent of households also saw their debt grow, to 13 percent from 11 percent.

The richest households saw significant increases in per-household debt. For those with annual income of $97,586 to $146,791, college debt rose from $25,921 in 2007 to $31,989. For the richest 10 percent, making at least $146,792, college debt increased from $36,033 to $44,810.

Across all households, the average outstanding college debt increased from $23,349 to $26,682. For the poorest 20 percent of households, the average debt rose from $19,018 to $20,640.

In recent years, Americans have cut back on several other types of borrowing such as credit card use, with average household indebtedness falling from $105,297 in 2007 to $100,720 in 2010. Broken down by income levels, however, average total indebtedness for the bottom 20 percent of households by income actually rose from $17,579 in 2007 to $26,779; for the higher income groups, average indebtedness either was unchanged or declined.

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Snake bite costs exchange student $143,000

  Eyewitness NewsSAN DIEGO (WABC) -- The cost of hospital treatment for a snakebite victim in California is making headlines overseas.

A Norwegian exchange student at the University of California was recently bitten by a rattlesnake in San Diego.

He was treated overnight at a hospital.

His insurance company in Norway howled at the bill, which topped $143,000.

The biggest bites came from two doses of anti-venom. One cost $102,440, while the second rang up at $25,610.

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Search intensifies for missing student

Dozens of people gathered to ride the route presumably taken by missing Louisiana college student Michaela "Mickey" Shunick when she vanished on her bike last Saturday.

Friends and searchers took to the route at dusk Thursday, following the path on which Shunick set out in the early hours of Saturday morning. FBI, U.S. Marshals and local police are involved in the search that they are treating as a missing-person case, but have not ruled out foul play.

Shunick, 22, a senior anthropology major at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, left friend Brettly Wilson's house on her bike just before 2 a.m. Saturday after a night out, and hasn't been heard from since.

"I asked her to be safe ... I saw her get to the driveway and that was the last time I saw her," Wilson said.

Friends and family held a candle light vigil Tuesday night, and announced a reward of $20,000 for tips leading to her whereabouts. Searches by K-9 units, police and volunteers have turned up no hints of what happened, but her family remains hopeful.

"I think she's OK, I think she's alive. I think she's out there," Mickey's sister, Charlene, told ABC affiliate KATC-TV in Lafayette, La.

The FBI, state and local police, and nearly a thousand volunteers are searching this morning, but have found no trace of the young woman. Friends say she wasn't drinking, and that Shunick was an avid cyclist, so riding her bike at that hour was not unusual.

Shunick's older sister says she never would have left on her own, and that Saturday was her brother's graduation. Monday was Mickey's own 22nd birthday, and the two had big plans.

"She's my mini-me. She's one of my best friends and I just miss her and I want to know what's going on," sister Charlie Shunick said through tears.

For her father, not knowing is the hardest part.

"If she has been taken by somebody, where is she? What are they doing to her? It's better being around people like over here. It's tougher when you're alone at night," Tom Shunick told ABC News.

Her family says they can't think of any reason anybody might want to harm Shunick, and her father said although he's grateful for the search efforts, he wishes the search had started earlier.

"None of the video cameras got checked over the weekend because the managers weren't in and waited two days to check the video cameras," he told Lafayette newspaper The Advertiser. "If somebody has abducted her and taken her on the interstate [highway] or something, they got a two-day head start."

Mickey Shunick always carried mace when she rode her bike, her family says, adding that they will keep searching, no matter how long it takes.

"We're going to see her soon, we're going to get her home and this is going to be over soon," friend Wilson said.

Shunick's family is offering a $25,000 reward for any information in the case. They say that they hope everyone is on the lookout for her, including those in states that border Louisiana.

The family plans to send out a robo-call today to the entire parish -- which consists of hundreds of thousands of people in the region -- hoping that someone knows where Mickey is.

Shunick is 5-foot-1 and 115 pounds. She was last seen wearing a pastel multi-colored striped shirt, light-wash skinny jeans and gray shoes.

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Blast near Italian school kills student

  by FRANCES D'EMILIOROME -- A bomb exploded Saturday outside an Italian high school named after a slain anti-Mafia prosecutor, killing a student and wounding several others, officials said, and rattling a country already tense over a spate of attacks on government officials and buildings.

The device went off a few minutes before 8 a.m. in the Adriatic port town of Brindisi in the country's south just as students milled outside, chatting and getting ready for class at the mainly all-girls Morvillo-Falcone vocational institute.

The school - which prepares students for jobs in fashion and social services - is named in honor of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge who died with her husband in a 1992 highway bombing in Sicily by the Cosa Nostra.

Mesagne Mayor Franco Scoditti identified the victim as Melissa Bassi, 16, from the town. Brindisi civil protection agency official Fabiano Amati said she died of her wounds after being taken to hospital.

One of the shaken students who witnessed the attack told reporters that one injured girl, her hair charred, screamed the name "Melissa, Melissa" when she realized her friend was gravely injured.

Amati said at least seven other students were hospitalized, but some news reports put the figure at 10. Perrino health director Graziella Di Bella said most of them suffered burns and shrapnel-like wounds, and several had undergone surgery.

"The explosion sent out fragments and flames ... pieces of iron," Di Bella told Sky TG24 TV in an interview. She said a team of four psychologists were working with the students.

"One of the (injured) girls asked me: 'What do we have to do with this?" Di Bella said, adding the students were feeling a sense of "disorientation, terror" as well as anger.

Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino Hospital physician who helped treat the injured, told reporters that one of them was a teenage girl who was in a grave but stable condition after surgery.

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Cataldo Motta, based in the nearby port of Lecce, told reporters that there had been no claims of responsibility. He added that the bombing didn't appear to be the work of organized crime, since fuel and not dynamite, the Mafia's traditional choice of explosive, was used. Motta said the "international terrorism" angle was unlikely, but stressed that investigators had not ruled out any hypothesis.

Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Sicilian highway that killed the prosecutor and his wife, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to Saturday's explosion.

Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, in charge of domestic security, said she was "struck" by the fact that the school was named after the slain hero and his wife, but she cautioned that investigators at that point "have no elements" to blame the school attack on organized crime.

"It's not the usual (method) for the Mafia," she told Sky in a phone interview. The Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra usually targets specific figures, such as judges, prosecutors, turncoats or rival mobsters in attacks, and not civilian targets such as schools.

The school bombing is an attack of "unprecedented cruelty," the minister said.

"The big problem now is to get intelligence" on the attack, said Cancellieri. She added that she had spoken by phone with Italian Premier Mario Monti, who is in the United States for the G-8 summit.

Monti's office said that the premier ordered flags flown at half-mast for the next three days. He pledged that the government would work to crack down on crime and to "favor the maximum cohesion of all political and social forces to prevent the return in our country of subversive attacks," a statement said.

National police chief Antonio Manganelli told Sky TG24 in a phone interview that Italy's "best investigators" had been dispatched to Brindisi to determine who was behind the attacks. National anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso arrived and surveyed the blast scene without making comments to reporters.

Manganelli said there were "shadows" of doubt clouding the hypothesis that the school blast was caused by organized crime because the Sicilian-based Mafia usually targets precise individuals. Still, he said, neither the hypotheses of organized crime nor that of subversives have been ruled out.

Outside the school, textbooks and notebooks, their pages fluttering in the breeze, and a backpack littered the street near where the bomb exploded. At the sound of the blast, students inside the school ran outside to see what had happened.

Officials initially said the bomb was in a trash bin outside the school, but later the Italian news agency ANSA, reporting from Brindisi, said the device had been placed on a low wall ringing the building and near the bin. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. Sky TG24 said the device included three containers of fuel. It was unclear if the blast was triggered by a remote control or by a timer.

Public high schools in Italy hold classes on Saturday mornings.

The bombing follows a spate of attacks against Italian officials and government or public buildings by a group of anarchists, including the shooting and wounding of an official from a nuclear engineering firm, which is part of a state-controlled company. An anti-nuclear anarchist group that previously had targeted Italy's tax collection agency claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Authorities have said the Italian anarchists have worked in the post in close contact with Greece-based anarchists. Brindisi is a major point of departure for ferries between Italy and Greece, but there was no immediate indication from investigators of any Greek link.

The attacks and threats lodged against authorities prompted the government earlier in the week to assign bodyguards to 550 individuals, and deploy 16,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.

Minister Cancellieri indicated that after the school blast authorities' sense of possible targets had been tested.

"Anything now could be a 'sensitive' target," she said, adding that the "economic crisis doesn't help." Austerity measures, spending cuts and new and higher taxes, all part of Monti's plan to save Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis roiling Greece, have angered many citizens, and social tensions have ratcheted up.

Brindisi is a lively port town in Puglia, the region in the southeastern "heel" of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula. An organized crime syndicate known as the Sacred United Crown has been traditionally active there, but crackdowns have been widely considered by authorities to have lessened the organization's power.

The brother of the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor , Alfredo Morvillo, a prosecutor in Sicily, told reporters in Tuscany at a ceremony to honor his slain sister and brother-in-law that the "Mafia angle is, at the moment, the most credible," ANSA quoted him as saying "I say that because of the place and the timing," ANSA reported, in reference to both the name of the school and the many memorial services for the 1992 attack that were being held on Saturday.

Brindisi's mayor, Mimmo Consales, noted that an anti-Mafia procession was scheduled for the town in the evening, but added that many such memorial ceremonies were scheduled to be held on Saturday throughout Italy.

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Colorado student in black face sparks racial debate

  Eyewitness NewsCOLORADO SPRINGS (WABC) -- A school project in Colorado turned into a debate about racism after an 8-year-old boy in Colorado Springs dressed up like Martin Luther King, Jr.

The second grader, Sean King, went all out for the assignment to portray a historical figure and even painted his face black.

"I worked very hard," King said. "I tried my best."

The school district says a staff member at the Meridian Ranch Elementary School and some students were offended.

The student and his parents were called to the principal's office, and Sean was asked to wash the paint off.

"They thought it was inappropriate and it will be disrespectful to black people, and I say its not, I like black people," he said. "It's just a costume. I don't want to insult anybody"

His parents pulled him out of school and say they aren't sure if they will send him back, even though the school district says he can return without consequence.

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Student banned from prom because she has no date

  Eyewitness NewsPENNSYLVANIA (WABC) -- A Catholic high school student in Pennsylvania has been banned from attending the prom because she does not have a date.

Amanda Dougherty had already shelled out nearly $1,000 on a prom dress, shoes and tickets.

But when her date suddenly backed out, she was told by the school that she could not go alone.

A rule by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia bans students from attending the dance without a date.

Dougherty is fighting to get the policy changed.

"For them to say that we're not good enough to go unless we have a guy standing next to us, it's just kind of sickening," she said.

"Amanda has been waiting for this for two years," her dad, Jack Dougherty, said. "To not be able to go. I feel horrible."

The school released a statement saying, in part: "Our high schools offer numerous dances and events throughout the year where dates are not required, but we view the prom as a special social event where a date is required to attend."

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GOP ignores veto threat, passes student loan bill

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Police: Student killed by officers had pellet gun

  By CHRISTOPHER SHERMANBROWNSVILLE, Texas -- An armed eighth-grader gunned down by police officers in the hallway of his Texas middle school Wednesday was brandishing a pellet gun that looked like a firearm, and he refused repeated orders to lower the weapon before the officers opened fire, police said.

The carbon-dioxide powered pellet gun 15-year-old Jaime Gonzalez was holding looked like a handgun, and the initial report to police that sent officers rushing to Cummings Middle School Wednesday morning was for a student seen holding a gun, Orlando Rodriguez, Brownsville's interim police chief, said at a news conference.

Robert Valle, a 13-year-old who was among the school's 750 students locked down in their classrooms during the confrontation, said he heard police run down the hallway and yell "put the gun down," before several shots were fired.

"He had plenty of opportunities to lower the weapon ... and he didn't want to," Rodriguez said. Two officers fired three shots, striking Gonzalez at least twice, he said. The autopsy results are pending.

Rodriguez said that before the confrontation with police, Gonzalez walked into a Cummings Middle School classroom and punched another boy in the nose. He said he doesn't know why Gonzalez was brandishing the weapon.

Earlier Wednesday, before police said the weapon was actually a pellet gun, Jaime's godmother Norma Leticia Navarro told The Associated Press she couldn't imagine what led to the fatal confrontation.

"Jaime was not a bad kid, and I wish I could ask him why he did that, why did you put yourself in that position?"

Still, she said she understood that police were doing their job, but she expressed frustration that a child was killed and wondered if something else could have been done.

"I'm not saying he was perfect or an angel, but he was a very giving person."

She said both of his parents work, and that his stepmother raised him from infancy and was very strict with him.

As word of the shooting spread quickly through the city on Texas' southern tip, where violence frequently spills over from Mexico's drug war, frantic parents rushed to reach their children.

Those who got their early on were able to retrieve their frightened children, but some who arrived later found the street outside the school lined with squad cars and blocked off. About two hours after the shooting, dozens of frustrated parents and relatives flooded out of the park pavilion without their children after school officials announced that all remaining children had been bused to a high school and could be picked up there.

Julie Tomalenas waited for an hour to pick up her 13-year-old sister before being told of the relocation.

"It was very stressful not knowing if she was OK, where she was, when we could see her again," Tomalenas said.

The lockdown was lifted about two hours after the shooting, but the students and employees were relocated while officers investigated at the school, Brown said.

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Student leaves rare violin on bus

  Eyewitness NewsPHILADELPHIA -- Police are asking for the public's help recovering a rare violin worth $172,000 that was left on board a Boston-to-Philadelphia bus by a groggy music student from Taiwan.

Philadelphia police say the instrument was left in an overhead bin on a Megabus late Tuesday.

Muchen Hsieh said she noticed she didn't have the violin after getting picked up by the family hosting her visit to the Philadelphia area. She called the bus company but was told the instrument hadn't been found.

Hsieh says a Taiwanese culture foundation lent her the violin as she studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. It was made in 1835 by Vincenzo Jorio in Naples.

Lt. John Walker says the instrument can be returned to Philadelphia police, no questions asked.

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Report: Found body is not missing IU student

  Eyewitness NewsINDIANAPOLIS (WABC) -- Police in Indianapolis say the badly decomposed body of a woman found in a local creek is NOT a 20-year-old Indiana University student who went missing in Bloomington more than a month ago.

WRTV is reporting the medical examiner says the body found on Monday is that of a black female, ruling out that it would be Lauren Spierer.

The body was spotted Sunday floating among debris in Fall Creek.

Authorities in Bloomington have been searching for Spierer, who was last seen June 3 near her Bloomington apartment after a night out drinking with her friends. Bloomington is about 50 miles south of Indianapolis.

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