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MEMPHIS, Tenn. - A Memphis-Shelby County Schools (MSCS) member reversed course Wednesday after making a Facebook comment threatening to have someone deported.

In a Facebook Messenger exchange, a woman told MSCS School Board Member Towanna Murphy that she is "an embarrassment to Memphis and to our students," called Murphy a "stupid (expletive)," and asked her to resign.

Murphy responded, saying, "Baby be quiet before I have you deported."

The school board member later posted to Facebook saying that she did not know the woman who initiated the conversation.

"She was the first to display disrespect. Although I regret my response, I spoke in the heat of the moment. So my question is why did she take this action? I should have been the bigger person, but I am human, we all are," Murphy wrote.

The school board member later posted, "I don't mind you having an opinion, we can agree to disagree, but when you are calling me and my colleagues out of our name I will give you that same energy. That's not called for. I'm not accepting that PERIOD." And in a comment, Murphy wrote, "I move differently, and I will not accept that. If they come at me that way I'm coming back that way."

But a statement distributed by a public relations director on Murphy's behalf Wednesday afternoon had a different tone.

"I want to apologize to the community and my board colleagues for my interaction in a social media direct message with a member of our community," Murphy's statement said. "While I found the initial message from the individual to be disrespectful and upsetting, my response did not represent the professionalism and respect that I know should be a standard in my service as an MSCS Board Member. It certainly was not a reflection of my true feelings or intentions toward the Latino community. I recognize the trauma and challenges facing our immigrant and refugee communities and regret that this interaction did not reflect my understanding and concern for these issues. I want to assure my constituents that I know our schools must be safe and welcoming environments for all students and families. This interaction comes at a time when we need to show support to ensure public education is available for all. I am committed to learning from this experience, rebuilding trust with our full community, and working towards my goal to lead with professionalism and compassion."

Hours earlier, Shelby County Board of Education Chair Joyce Dorse Coleman released a statement condemning Murphy's deportation comment.

"I am aware of the recent social media activity of my colleague, Board Member Towanna Murphy. As duly elected officials, all board members are expected to uphold the highest standards of decorum and professionalism while representing the district and the Board at all times. I must publicly acknowledge that her recent social media comments fall well short of those expectations," Coleman said.

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Memphis, TN (April 1, 2025) – A vehicle collision resulting in injuries occurred on Lamar Ave, drawing a response from local emergency services in southeast Memphis.

The incident was reported around 5:50 a.m. near the 2900 block of Lamar Ave. Although exact vehicle details have not been confirmed, preliminary information indicates that the crash involved more than one vehicle and resulted in injuries to at least one person at the scene.

First responders, including paramedics, assessed and treated individuals hurt in the crash. A variety of injuries were reported, though no further updates have been released on the victims’ conditions.

Traffic along Lamar Ave experienced slowdowns while responders worked to secure the area and assist those involved. Authorities remained on-site to investigate the cause of the collision and gather necessary details.

Officials have confirmed that the investigation remains ongoing at this time.

Our thoughts are with those affected by this accident.

Traffic Safety and Collision Risks in Memphis

The crash on Lamar Ave adds to a growing list of traffic-related injury incidents across Memphis, where high-volume corridors and early morning travel times increase the risk of collisions. Lamar Ave, a major east-west artery in the city, frequently sees heavy commuter and commercial vehicle traffic, especially near industrial and distribution hubs.

According to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, Shelby County continues to report one of the highest rates of injury crashes in the state. Contributing factors often include distracted driving, fatigue, and speeding—especially during early morning or pre-dawn hours when driver alertness may be compromised.

When a crash occurs, injured individuals may find themselves facing unexpected medical costs, missed work, and emotional stress. Understanding your rights after such an accident is vital. Victims of collisions involving negligence may be entitled to financial compensation to help with recovery expenses.

Drivers are encouraged to remain vigilant, especially during early hours when traffic is lighter but visibility and awareness can be diminished. Extra caution at busy intersections and along major corridors like Lamar Ave can go a long way toward preventing future incidents.

If you or someone you know was injured in a crash on Lamar Ave or elsewhere in Memphis, resources are available to help you move forward.

For more information or to receive help after an accident, contact Local Accident Reports.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - An unlikely army of volunteers from fourteen states spent a recent Saturday sawing, sweeping, and loading one dumpster after another at 1467 East McLemore, the site of a long-abandoned nursing home in South Memphis.

The site is smack, dab in the middle of a section of Memphis drenched in illegal drug activity.

The leader of the site restoration effort, Ben Owen, said, “It was the ‘Kings Daughters and Sons Home for the Incurables,’ and we’re fighting an incurable disease: addiction.”

Owen, a recovered drug addict, has experienced an astounding life transformation with his wife Jess that has helped many others find and maintain a life of sobriety and usefulness.

The couple leads a nonprofit called “We Fight Monsters,” a Memphis-based organization that buys and renovates former crack houses for formerly unsheltered people, including fellow recovering addicts, veterans, and especially women who have been sex trafficked and their children.

Now, We Fight Monsters wants to transform the long-neglected nursing home and turn it into a drug and alcohol treatment center.

Ben and Jess Owen say they spent years abusing drugs, witnessing sex trafficking and all kinds of illegal activity on South Memphis’ Melrose Street at East McLemore, where the road dead ends into busy railroad tracks.

“We were homeless and addicted out here,” Ben Owen said, “and we prayed a prayer that if God got us out of that hell, we’d come back for everybody we left behind.”

They did.

The couple returned to Memphis from Georgia and bought and renovated the crack houses where they had spent years in addiction.

The We Fight Monsters properties sit right next door to the former nursing home campus. It opened as the Tennessee Home for the Incurables in 1908. The name later changed to “The Kings Daughters and Sons Home for the Incurables,” a national Christian non-denominational organization.

The institution became home for people who had cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, those paralyzed from car wrecks, and other conditions regarded as “incurable.”

A 1965 report describes the Kings Daughters and Sons Home as “a non-sectarian institution that cares for more than one hundred people who have non-contagious and incurable diseases.”

Starting in the 1930s, thousands of Memphians would participate in an annual fundraiser for the Home for the Incurables, in a citywide Christmas caroling campaign.

Carolers would ring the doorbells of Memphis residents, request a donation, and then would sing “Carols for the Incurables” in gratitude. In the 1950s, as many as 3,750 carolers sang their hearts out for the Home for the Incurables citywide.

When the Liberty Bowl game moved to Memphis in 1965, carolers started singing at the entrance of the stadium and requested donations. The South Memphis campus served hundreds of people for more than 95 years of uninterrupted service until the Kings Daughters and Sons sold the property and moved to a new, modern campus on Appling Road in Bartlett in 2003.

A succession of owners of 1467 East McLemore have been unable to do anything meaningful with the property, which has become 76,000 square feet of neglect, decay, and ruin.

Now, Ben Owen and Memphis attorney Vanecia Belser Kimbrow have united forces and are seeking millions of dollars in support to transform the crumbling campus into a place where people can recover and relaunch their lives.

Kimbrow, who chairs the Board of Trustees at LeMoyne Owen College, has devoted her working life to urban and community development.

“He read our vision and mission on our website, and I read his, and we knew that the purpose and mission had been married,” said Kimbrow, who became sold on We Fight Monsters’ dream for redevelopment of the long-forgotten campus.

Even though all the windows were smashed, and many walls were filled with graffiti, Kimbrow bought the “Incurables” property with the intention of restoring it to serve South Memphis as a nursing home.

“It was dilapidated, an eyesore, had been abandoned for several years,” the attorney said.

“It’s a jewel that needed to be preserved,” Kimbrow told a reporter. “I acquired the asset, and I just knew South Memphis needed some additional resources.”

Kimbrow says she searched high and low for years for the right community partner until she was contacted by Ben Owen, who shared his vision for the site.

“So, the partnership has been forged,” Kimbrow said, “We hope we have found in Ben and We Fight Monsters the right community partner to bring treatment to the most distressed segments of our community right here at this facility.”

The “We Fight Monsters” mission has attracted supporters from around the corner and far-flung locales across America.

Ben Owen maintains a robust presence on social media attracted people to the recent clean-up day, like Steve Williams from Washington, D.C., who found out about it through LinkedIn.

“My wife and I were looking for a way to help our adult children out,” Williams said in between toting loads of cut vegetation to a dumpster with his wife, who also volunteered.

The Williams’ children suffer from addiction, including a daughter who Steve Williams says uses fentanyl in San Francisco.

“We couldn’t get them out,” Williams said.

“We came to Ben and Jessica to see if there’s any way they could help,” the retiree said. “They gave us words of wisdom and fortitude and got us out on the streets of Tenderloin (in San Francisco) looking for our daughter. We’ve found her multiple times, but we’ve come back to try to give back to Ben and Jess what they’ve given us,” said Williams as he picked up another load of cut weeds that have gone untended for decades.

“I came from Washington State,” said Virginia Burton, a former addict now recovered for 12 years who hosts a podcast, “Modern America.”

Burton says she was an addict for 30 years, was arrested numerous times, and went to alcohol and drug treatment centers that failed to deliver permanent recovery.

“I consistently was intervened on by a system that ineffectively served me,” Burton said. “And I had to take a look at that and say, ‘If they knew better, they’d do better.‘”

Burton came to the clean-up day in South Memphis all the way from her home in Seattle, where she teaches a re-entry program inside Washington State prisons.

But Burton also travels to Nashville regularly to serve as a consultant for the State of Tennessee Department of Human Services.

“One hundred percent of my mission is to help people like me get up and get out of where they’re at,” Burton said. “I try to really focus on that at a policy level, because doing that one person at a time just isn’t enough for me, especially right now in our country, we are seeing people spiral out of control...

“We have a system that’s enabling that and we’re seeing a tremendous amount of self-destruction, and our system doesn’t know how to fix that, but we do,” the recovered addict said.

Burton sys she especially admires the We Fight Monsters model of recovery through service, “I love what Ben and Jessica are doing because we’re taking lived experience, meaning having the contributing circumstances and having overcome those things and coming in with a process that actually helps people turn and change their lives, “ Burton said.

“Ben Owen and I used to do drugs together on Melrose, probably about 20 years ago, and we kind of terrorized this neighborhood,” said Robert Kimbrell, a recovered drug addict who admits to dealing drugs and working as a pimp on the dead end of Melrose.

Kimbrel spent a recent Saturday sweeping the Incurables’ front driveway and remembering his old life.

“I was doing meth, heroin, fentanyl, crack and I did those drugs for like 16 years,” Kimbrel said. We Fight Monsters now owns Kimbrel’s former properties on Melrose, where once homeless people now live in far safer surroundings.

After Kimbrel was released from prison, he says he underwent drug treatment and was reunited with Ben Owen. Kimbrel became sold on Owen’s mission. “I haven’t found a better treatment than We Fight Monsters,“ Kimbrel said.

The Incurables project is a gigantic step of faith for We Fight Monsters and attorney Kimbrow. The nonprofit keeps buying former drug houses in South Memphis and has a team of recovered people working to restore them.

“Our goal has always been to shut down the ‘trap houses’ (Owen’s name for places where drugs and sex are sold), the drivers of every bit of instability and chaos in communities where they exist.” Owen said.

We Fight Monsters also operates REBOS (SOBER spelled backwards), Memphis houses where men and women find safe and sober housing, often after serving sentences imposed by Drug Court.

But this venture into the Incurables site reclamation is a bold and unlikely venture by any estimation.

“The fact that it butts up to our block is perfect,” Ben Owen said on the recent clean up day. “The name, the history, everything, it’s all God ordained... The community obviously supports it; I just can’t think of a better place to do this. We’re in one of the most impoverished and violent zip codes in America, and it’s ready for something different.”

“Amen!” said his wife, Jess.

And attorney Kimbrow offered her own affirmation: “What better cause? To save our community, to save our citizens, to save our families,“ the community development and urban renewal lawyer said.

Go to wefightmonsters.org to learn more and get involved.

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Good Tuesday evening, everyone:

A HISTORIC RAIN AND STORM EVENT IS IN THE MAKING FOR MEMPHIS AND THE MID-SOUTH!

A Wind Advisory is in effect for Memphis and most of the Mid-South Wednesday from 7 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. CT.

A Flood Watch is in effect for Memphis and all of the Mid-South from Wednesday afternoon to Sunday morning.

There is an Enhanced to Moderate Risk (Levels 3 and 4 of 5) for strong to severe storms Wednesday into Thursday morning.

Tonight will become cloudier and much windier.

Tomorrow will be dangerously windy well before the first major downpour occurs. Strong to severe storms develop and arrive by mid to late-afternoon. The line of strong to severe storms moves across memphis and the Mid-South from Wednesday afternoon into Wednesday night. Large hail, damaging wind, flooding and tornadoes are all on the table.

Rounds of heavy rain and storms continue through Sunday morning.

Rain chance: 0%. There'll be a Flood Watch Wednesday afternoon through early Sunday for the Mid-South. During this time, the National Weather Service said to expect "severe storms and generational flooding."

Winds: 10/15 mph.

Key Days:

Local Weather for Memphis and the Mid-South

Tuesday Night: Sunset - 7:21 p.m. CT. Increasing clouds, increasing wind speeds. Mild. Overnight lows in the 60s. Wind: SE10-20, Gusts 30-35 mph.

Wednesday: Sunrise - 6:46 a.m. CT. Dangerously windy all day as temps skyrocket. Strong to severe storms develop and arrive between 3 and 5 p.m. CT. Dangerously stormy weather moves across Memphis and the Mid-South from the afternoon into Wednesday night. Highs near 85 degrees. Wind: S 15-25, Gusts 40-50 mph.

Thursday: Showers and thunderstorms likely with a Slight Risk of strong to severe storms. Highs in the upper 70s. .

Friday: Showers and storms likely. Highs in the upper 70s.

Saturday: Showers and storms likely. Highs in the upper 70s.

Sunday: Mostly cloudy and cooler with a chance of showers. Four-to-five-day rain totals 6 to 10 inches will be common with some communities receiving up to 12 inches of rain. Highs in the low 60s.

Monday: Mostly sunny and chilly to cool. Highs near 60 degrees

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UPDATE: Billy Richmond Jr., the owner of Wing Guru, has issued a statement regarding his tax fraud and theft charges.

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The owner of popular hot wings franchise Wing Guru has been charged with theft greater than $250,000 and two counts of sales tax fraud.

Billy Richmond Jr. was indicted March 6 and jailed on a $50,000 bond, records show.

He is accused in the indictment of trying to evade state sales taxes between 2018 and 2022.

Richmond played basketball for the University of Memphis and Vanderbilt University before returning to his hometown and opening the first Wing Guru location on Mount Moriah in 2016, according to the company’s website.

Wing Guru has five Memphis-area locations, plus locations in Atlanta and Houston.

People WREG spoke with said that the writing was already on the wall for Wing Guru, citing the restaurant’s high prices.

“We knew Wing Guru was getting real expensive,” Sierra Lewis said.

After learning what Richmond is accused of, they said it all made sense.

Sierra and Carmel Lewis said they like the food but have been questioning why it’s gotten so pricey.

A WREG reporter stopped by Richmond’s last known address in Collierville to ask for a statement.

We saw someone inside, but no one answered the door.

“I think it’s not right,” Carmel Lewis said. “I think we is already in a recession. We already struggling and over-priced food is crazy.”

These charges come after the Commercial Appeal reported Richmond was ordered by an arbitrator to pay Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant more than $365,000 after using Morant’s likeness without paying him.

Morant tweeted about the contract back in 2022.

Under the contract, Morant was supposedly set to be paid $75,000 a year, but after four months, he allegedly told the Commercial Appeal that the payments stopped.

“I feel like they are going to have a hard time paying that back,” Carmel Lewis said.

WREG obtained court records from January of this year, which show Richmond has yet to be served despite several attempts from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.