CNN
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UK police have seized a 4-foot-long caiman – a carnivorous reptile native to Central and South America – during a drugs raid in Essex, the force said on Friday.

Officers found the animal at a property in Aveley, a small town in Essex on the outskirts of Greater London.

They also seized a “significant cannabis grow” as well as several weapons including knives, and arrested two people, police said in a statement.

A 36-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of producing cannabis, contravening the dangerous wildlife act and possessing an offensive weapon.

And a 35-year-old woman was arrested on the same charges and also on suspicion of possessing with intent to supply drugs.

Both of them were later released under investigation.

“Drugs cause misery in our communities and we work hard to tackle their production and sale. We know this matters to the public and we value our neighbourhoods so these issues matter to us,” inspector Dan Selby, from the Grays Neighbourhood Policing Team, said in the statement.

Caimans, which resemble small crocodiles and can measure up to 5 feet in length, normally live in the rivers and wetlands found in central and southern America.

Police released a photo of this caiman pictured in a makeshift tank, and entrusted the animal to the RSPCA, Britain’s largest animal welfare charity.

CNN
 — 

The United States could end its efforts on ending the Ukrainian conflict within “days” if there are no signs of progress, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Friday.

“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” he told reporters before departing Paris, where he had held high-level talks with European and Ukrainian officials. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable,” he said.

Rubio’s comments point to mounting frustration within the Trump administration at the lack of progress at bringing the three-year full-scale war to a halt and come as the US has proposed a framework to drive an end to the conflict that includes the administration’s readiness to recognize Russian control of Crimea, according to an official familiar with the framework.

Later Friday, President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Rubio was “right,” but he didn’t provide a timeline for the US to walk away when pressed. “No specific number of days, but quickly, we want to get it done.”

Asked to clarify what Rubio meant that the US would “move on,” a US official told CNN the secretary of state was talking about the US moving on from negotiations and that the next few days will be important to figure out where things go from here.

A source familiar with negotiations for a Ukraine peace deal told CNN’s Pamela Brown that Rubio was “communicating the president’s views.” Characterizing the administration’s thinking on where things stand in the conflict, the source said, Trump “doesn’t have limitless patience for people to posture and play games.”

“It’s time to get serious,” the source added.

Trump expressed that view on Friday, saying, “If, for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘You’re foolish, you’re foolish. You’re horrible people,’ and we’re just going to take a pass — but hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

Trump declined to say whether he is prepared to walk away completely from the talks or whether he would support Ukraine militarily if talks fall through.

Asked what progress he would need to see to continue negotiations, Trump said he would “have to see an enthusiasm to want to end it” from both sides, predicting he would know “soon.”

A broad framework has been presented to both sides, Rubio and the State Department have said, to determine whether the differences can be narrowed in this short timeframe. Rubio said it would be taken by the Ukrainians back to Zelensky to discuss, and it was raised between Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov on a call on Thursday.

The Trump administration is ready to recognize Russian control of Crimea as part of the proposal, the official familiar with the framework said, which would be a win for President Vladimir Putin after Russia illegally annexed the territory from Ukraine in 2014. The proposal would also put a ceasefire in place along the frontlines of the war, the official said.

There are still pieces of the framework to be filled out and the US plans to work with the Europeans and the Ukrainians on that next week in London, the person said. The Trump administration is simultaneously planning another meeting between Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Russia to get Moscow on board with the framework, the source said.

If there’s no movement, the US official said, the administration will have to make significant policy decisions. Trump has threatened secondary sanctions and tariffs on Russia. But he has also said the US won’t continue to fund Ukraine indefinitely and that Europe needs to step up, the US official noted.

Moscow has stalled on negotiations and rejected a ceasefire proposal agreed by Kyiv. Having promised on the campaign trail to end the fighting in a day, Trump more recently said “Russia has to get moving.”

The Kremlin said Friday that Russia was “striving to settle this conflict.”

“The contacts are quite complicated because the topic of Ukrainian settlement is also not simple,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Responding to a question on Rubio’s remark, Peskov acknowledged the progress already made in talks. “Certain developments already exist, but of course there are still many difficult discussions ahead,” he said.

Elsewhere, Evgeny Popov, a well-known face on Russian state TV and Duma representative, described Rubio’s comments as Washington issuing an “ultimatum” to Kyiv.

Despite US officials holding talks with Ukrainian and European counterparts on Thursday in what the State Department touted as an “excellent exchange,” and progress being made toward a landmark minerals deal between Washington and Kyiv, peace still feels out of reach. Meanwhile, a partial ceasefire on energy infrastructure brokered by the US came to an end on Thursday, an agreement both sides frequently accused each other of violating.

Vice President JD Vance said hours after Rubio’s comments that the Trump administration feels “optimistic” they will ultimately be able to successfully negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“I want to update the prime minister on some of the negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and also some of the things that have happened even in the past 24 hours,” Vance said in Rome during a bilateral meeting with Italy Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

He continued, “I think we have some interesting things to report on, of course, in private, some negotiations. I won’t prejudge them, but we do feel optimistic that we can hopefully bring this war, this very brutal war, to a close.”

A US-authored outline of a peace plan had received an “encouraging reception” at the talks in the French capital on Thursday, according to a State Department readout, which did not give details on the outline. Rubio also spoke with Lavrov and conveyed the same outline, the readout said.

Speaking Friday, Rubio said he and Witkoff had come to Paris to “begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end the war” and whether or not this is a war that can be ended.

“If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen then I think the president is probably at a point where he’s going to say we’re done,” he said.

“It’s not our war. We didn’t start it. The United States has been helping Ukraine for the past three years and we want it to end, but it’s not our war,” he added.

Meanwhile, Russia launched a missile attack on Ukraine overnight, hitting a residential neighborhood of the city of Kharkiv. The strike killed one person and wounded 67 others, authorities said Friday, adding they feared more people could be trapped beneath the rubble of a damaged apartment building.

Rubio’s words of warning on Friday come after the US and Ukraine moved closer toward clinching an agreement on a minerals deal on Thursday night.

Kyiv and Washington have now signed a memorandum as a move towards the proposed agreement, Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.

“We are happy to announce the signing, with our American partners, of a Memorandum of Intent, which paves the way for an Economic Partnership Agreement and the establishment of the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” Svyrydenko said in a post on X.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said earlier Thursday that a memorandum related to the deal could be signed remotely that day.

“This document is the result of the professional work of the negotiating teams, which recently completed another round of technical discussions in Washington,” Svyrydenko continued. “Ahead is the finalization of the text of the agreement and its signing — and then, ratification by parliaments.”

“There is a lot to do, but the current pace and significant progress give reason to expect that the document will be very beneficial for both countries,” Svyrydenko concluded.

An earlier iteration of the minerals deal went unsigned following a public argument between Zelensky and Trump in February.

Details of the proposed deal have since been in flux, with Treasury officials meeting a Ukrainian delegation in Washington this week to hammer it out, sources told CNN.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Pamela Brown, Alex Marquardt, and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

CNN
 — 

A Florida State University student accused of killing two people and injuring six others in a shooting at the university on Thursday is the son of a local sheriff’s deputy, authorities say, and spent time training with law enforcement and serving on a sheriff’s advisory council in the years before his alleged attack.

When he was taken into custody after being shot and injured by university police, Phoenix Ikner, 20, was carrying a handgun that used to be the service weapon of sheriff’s deputy Jessica Ikner, according to officials and records.

Police have not disclosed any potential motive in the shooting. There don’t appear to be any connections between the suspect and any of the victims, Tallahassee Police Chief Lawrence Revell said Friday.

Since the shooting, Ikner’s previous classmates from his time at Tallahassee State College have said his political beliefs were extreme and they were made uncomfortable with his “concerning rhetoric” – including describing Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks as being “in the wrong,” defending the use of Nazi symbols, and disparaging pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s not clear if politics was a factor in Thursday’s shooting.

More about his childhood and upbringing is also coming into focus. A review of court records shows Phoenix Ikner had a tumultuous childhood, with a woman — identified in the documents as his biological mother — accused of removing him from the US in violation of a custody agreement when he was 10 years old.

Sheriff Walter McNeil told reporters that the suspect was “steeped in the Leon County Sheriff’s Office family and engaged in a number of training programs that we have, so it’s not a surprise to us that he had access to weapons.”

Jessica Ikner has served at the sheriff’s department for more than 18 years, McNeil said, adding that “her service to this community has been exceptional.” She did not respond to a request for comment.

The sheriff’s office said Friday that Jessica Ikner requested and was granted personal leave and was also transferred to the property crimes unit due to the circumstances of the situation. She previously served as a school resource officer, McNeil said during a news conference Thursday.

After the shooting, police recovered an AR-15 style rifle, in addition to the .45 caliber pistol and shotgun recovered at the scene, inside the car Phoenix Ikner drove to campus, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the ongoing investigation. The car was registered to the suspected gunman’s father.

The multiple firearms indicate to investigators he may have been prepared to shoot more people had he not been confronted by law enforcement, the official added.

University police shot Phoenix Ikner on the campus Thursday after he “did not comply with commands,” Revell said, adding he did not believe Ikner fired at officers. He has “significant” but not life-threatening injuries and “will remain in the hospital for a significant amount of time” before he is taken to a detention facility, Revell said Friday.

Ikner, who invoked his right not to speak when he was taken into custody, “will face the charges up to and including first degree murder” once he is released from the hospital and taken to a detention facility, Revell said in a video message on Friday.

The suspected gunman suffered from emotional dysregulation for which he had been prescribed medication, according to the law enforcement source. Investigators were told during interviews with family members that he had stopped taking some of this prescribed medication, the source added. It’s too soon to say whether this may have played a role in Thursday’s violence but will likely be probed as investigators dig into his background.

On Instagram, an account with Ikner’s name and photo that was taken offline after he was publicly identified included a biblical quote on its profile: “You are my war club, my weapon for battle; with you I shatter nations, with you I destroy kingdoms.”

Phoenix Ikner is a registered Republican, according to Florida voter registration records. He was quoted in January in an FSU student newspaper article about anti-Trump protests in advance of the president’s inauguration.

“These people are usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons,” Ikner was quoted as saying. “I think it’s a little too late, he’s (Trump) already going to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 and there’s not really much you can do unless you outright revolt, and I don’t think anyone wants that.”

Ikner is a junior political science major at Florida State, university spokesperson Stephen Stone said Friday, noting that Ikner had transferred to FSU for this spring semester from Tallahassee State College. He received an associate’s degree from Tallahassee State in December, the college’s director of communications, Amanda Clements, told CNN.

Because Ikner’s mother is a Leon County sheriff’s deputy, the sheriff’s department won’t investigate Thursday’s shooting or have anything to do with the suspect’s detention, Revell said.

‘Concerning rhetoric’ in class and student groups

Five current and former students at Tallahassee State College, where Ikner graduated from last year, told CNN that he made peers uncomfortable in class and during political discussions by expressing what they saw as extreme views.

Two brothers, Lucas and Logan Luzietti, said they took a national government class with Ikner at Tallahassee State College in the spring of 2023, where Lucas described Ikner espousing “concerning rhetoric.”

Logan recalled a conversation about gentrification where Ikner said Black people were ruining the property value of his neighborhood. Ikner also criticized Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, Logan said. Ikner also claimed Joe Biden was not the legitimate president of the United States, Lucas said.

“He would joke about the deaths of minorities,” Lucas said. “He talked about how Stonewall was bad for our society,” he added, referring to a pivotal moment in the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

Riley Pusins, who became the president of a nonpartisan political discourse club last fall, says he remembers Ikner calling protesters in the pro-Palestinian movement and demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd “dirty rats.”

Another club leader, Andrea Miranda, said Ikner’s rhetoric toward minorities made her uncomfortable, saying the way he spoke about them was “very demeaning and belittling.”

“He never really had respect for anyone in the club that didn’t share his personal political views,” Miranda added.

CNN has not independently verified claims about the suspect’s beliefs.

Reid Seybold, an FSU student, told CNN he knew Ikner from Tallahassee State College and encountered him in an extracurricular political club a few years ago. Seybold said Ikner was asked to leave the group, which discussed current events, due to behavior that unsettled others.

“He had continually made enough people uncomfortable where certain people had stopped coming. That’s kind of when we reached the breaking point with Phoenix, and we asked him to leave,” Seybold told CNN’s Omar Jimenez Thursday.

Seybold said Ikner’s comments went “beyond conservatism.”

Ikner had been taking a class at FSU on authoritarian regimes, said David Batista, an FSU senior who was enrolled in a class with Ikner and says he was on campus the day of the shooting. He said “there were no red flags.”

“He never said anything outrageous,” he said, though there was one occasion where Ikner appeared to downplay the effects of a dictatorship. “It never struck me that he was extreme as they say he is,” Batista added.

FSU President Richard McCullough told CNN Friday he was not aware of any warnings signs or potential concerns shared with the school before the shooting.

Investigators are looking at the possibility of a connection between the shooting and a protest scheduled for 2:45 p.m. by the university’s Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society, according to the law enforcement official, but the investigation is still in its early phases. The suspect was previously critical of the student group.

Community members said they were still struggling to reconcile Phoenix Ikner’s ties to the police force with his alleged attack.

Phoenix Ikner was a member of the sheriff’s Youth Advisory Council, which is designed to “provide an open line of communication between the youth of Leon County and local law enforcement,” according to a news release from 2021. McNeil described him as a “longstanding member” of the council.

Jacob West, a member of the sheriff’s youth council, described Phoenix Ikner as “helpful and bright” and “pretty friendly and honest.”

“He wasn’t even political around us,” West said, adding that they talked about pickup trucks and video games.

To join the advisory council, students had to apply and go through a background check, so the sheriff’s office would have reviewed Ikner’s application and approved him, West said.

They then receive training on how to communicate with the public and get security clearances, West said. People on the council typically have an interest in working in law enforcement, he said. “We all had an interest in doing something good for our county.”

Kenniyah Houston, another member of the sheriff’s youth council, told CNN she was shocked to learn that the suspected shooter had served alongside her. She did not personally remember Ikner but said the advisory council was focused on making the community better and improving law enforcement, so his actions were especially shocking.

“That’s what it was all about – making better decisions,” she said. “For something like this to happen from someone in a group like that is scary … it’s devastating.”

Phoenix Ikner was born in August 2004 in Tallahassee, and was named Christian Eriksen for most of his childhood. At age 15, he changed his name to “Phoenix” because “he sees himself as a phoenix, rising from the ashes with renewed youth and life,” according to a judge’s description of his testimony.

Leon County court records – which span nearly 17 years from the time Phoenix Ikner was 2 years old until he was 19 – detail acrimonious allegations between his parents, Christopher Ikner, an American, and Anne-Mari Eriksen, a dual Norwegian American citizen.

One court filing by the biological mother characterizes the child, then 10 years old, as being “in the middle of a war.” She was prosecuted for violating a custody agreement in 2015 by taking him out of the country.

Neither of the suspect’s parents responded to requests for comment from CNN Thursday and Friday.

While the parents initially agreed to share custody in 2007, Christopher Ikner moved to modify the custody agreement when Phoenix Ikner was five, claiming that his son’s mother had left him in “deplorable” hygiene and failed to keep up with his speech therapy. Anne-Mari Eriksen denied those allegations in court documents, writing that Phoenix Ikner had been dealing with health issues.

Over the next few years, the parents traded allegations that they were harassing each other or neglecting their care of their son. The disputes came to a head in March 2015, when Eriksen took custody of the then 10-year-old during spring break.

According to allegations filed by Christopher Ikner in a later petition, Phoenix Ikner told his father he thought his biological mother was taking him to Disney World for spring break, but instead Eriksen took him to an airport and flew to Norway.

A Norwegian court ordered Phoenix Ikner to be returned to Florida in June 2015, and Christopher Ikner and his wife Jessica came to Norway to get the child. The father wrote that he was “assisted by police in Norway to find and take custody” of his son, returning to the US the following month.

Back in the US, Eriksen was charged with removing a minor from the state against a court order. She pleaded no contest to the charge, and was sentenced to 200 days in jail, followed by two years of “community control” and then two years of probation, according to court records. She was ordered to have no contact during her sentence with her son or any of his teachers, doctors or counselors, unless allowed by a court.

In February 2017, a judge granted Christopher Ikner sole parental responsibility.

During a June 2020 hearing on Phoenix Ikner’s name change, a magistrate judge in the case described him as “a mentally, emotionally, and physically mature young adult, who was very articulate, quite intelligent, very well spoken, and very polite.” The judge also said he’s an “honor roll student” who “came to the hearing dressed in his NJROTC uniform.”

His former name, the judge wrote, was “a constant reminder of the 2015 tragedy he suffered through” – an apparent reference to the Norway incident – “and of his mother who he has not seen or spoken to since 2015.” Ikner had attended counseling to “help him cope with these past events,” the judge wrote.

For the last decade, according to the records, Phoenix Ikner has been raised by his father, who is married to the Leon County sheriff’s deputy. His biological mother wrote in a 2023 court document that she had not seen her son in eight years.

But just after the shooting, the biological mother posted on Facebook complaining that her son’s dad hadn’t responded when she wrote “to ask if everything is alright with my son, who studies at FSU.”

CNN’s Taylor Romine and Blake Ellis contributed to this report.