A Cheshire Boy Scout Troop is left scrambling after their trailer full of camping equipment was stolen.

“I’m sure they’re all devastated,” said parent Karin Arai. “They know they need this equipment and it’s going to be hard to replace it.”

Cheshire Police say the trailer was stolen out of a troop leader’s driveway Sunday night.

Committee Chairman of Troop 198, David Arai says the equipment is worth thousands of dollars.

“This is stuff that we’ve accumulated over years,” he said. “Things that people have given to us. Some of the items are handmade by some of the dads and moms, so there is some sentimental value there.”

The troop is more than 34 boys from sixth grade through high school.

Arai says they need the equipment for their next camping trip in six weeks. Troop leaders are meeting tonight to talk about what to do next.

“Somehow we’ve got to get all this together in six weeks. There’s a lot of planning involved,” Arai said.

Suffield Public Schools’ superintendent and other school administrators are being investigated after reports they may not have carried out their duties as mandated reporters.

According to Connecticut law, mandated reporters are required to report suspected child abuse or neglect. School employees are considered mandated reporters. Failing to report suspected abuse can result in criminal charges.

In a notification to the community, the Suffield Board of Education said they were aware of the investigation, which centers on one incident, and that the board and administrators are cooperating. Details of the incident were not released.

“Should we find after an investigation that any employee has failed to adhere to his or her obligations as a mandated reporter, we will take all appropriate action to hold the responsible employees accountable and to keep our students safe. We wish to assure all Suffield residents that the safety of our children is our foremost concern, and that we will continue to monitor the situation as the investigation unfolds,” the statement from the board read.

A petition from parents declaring no confidence in Superintendent Karen Berasi has been circulating. The petition cites a range of issues, from the investigation to concerns about transparency, decreasing enrollment and lower SBAC scores. The petition requests that Berasi’s contract be terminated.

At 11 a.m. Tuesday, the two Democrats vying to become Connecticut’s next lieutenant governor rolled out their latest slates of endorsements.

For Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, her list was a group of lawmakers in the Connecticut General Assembly who have been looking to pull the Democratic agenda further to the left. She held her event in front of the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

Susan Bysiewicz made her announcement in Milford, and was flanked by a handful of local leaders like mayors and first selectmen who were all backing Bysiewicz to be the Democrats’ nominee.

"We're putting up a very balanced ticket with Susan as lieutenant governor,” said Derrylyn H. Gorski, Bethany’s first selectman.

That distinction is key because Lamont announced Bysiewicz as his preferred running mate before the party’s May nominating convention.

The Democrats in Bermudez Zimmerman’s corner, however, believe their candidate is a better reflection of the party.

"Eva represents what we say we are as a party,” said Sen. Gary Winfield, a state senator who turned down the opportunity to run for lieutenant governor after weeks of contemplating it.

Winfield was joined by Sen. Martin Looney, Rep. Josh Elliott, Rep. Robyn Porters and many others, who are all considered to be further to the left than many of their Democratic colleagues.

They argue that Bermudez Zimmerman could provide a voice in the campaign that is currently missing on the Democratic side.

"I think working class people resonate with Eva's message and I do think being a part of this whole effort since the convention that the support for Eva is more diverse than people might think it is," Winfield said.

For Bysiewicz, her closing argument has to do with experience. She served multiple terms as both a legislator and secretary of the state, which she says, makes her the ideal selection to join the Democratic ticket as the nominee.

"My opponent has never won elective office,” Bysiewicz said. "Whoever fills that role will have to preside over the state Senate and I believe that legislative experience is critical to that and I'm the only lieutenant governor race on the Democratic side of the aisle that brings that sort of experience to the presider role."

Two people are dead after a crash on Route 16 in East Hampton.

East Hampton police confirmed crews responded to the two-car crash on Route 16 near Salmon River around 5:50 p.m. Two people were killed, police said.

The victims have not been identified.

The road is closed in both directions for investigation. Police said drivers should avoid the area, and detours are expected for hours.

Check back for updates.

A Baltic teen is looking to supply veterans and active duty military with guitars to help those suffering from PTSD and dealing with challenges they’ve encountered after serving in the United States Armed Forces.

“If you’re feeling anxious or you just don’t know what to say—say you’re mad—you (play music) because that’s just an easier way to say it. ‘Cause talking is hard,” said 17-year-old Marcus Gada who is spearheading “SOUND OFF: Music for Heroes.”

For the last four months Gada, a student and lacrosse player at Norwich Free Academy, and his father have been dismantling old, donated guitars from the community and from Craigslist, then restoring them. A couple even needed new frets.

They’ll be used at Progressions Music Therapy Sessions in Old Mystic for “SOUND OFF,” a free, weekly program to teach guitar to those who’ve served or are serving the Armed Forces.

“Music is a different way to speak,” Gada, who attends Progressions, said. It’s a chance to give these military men and women their own language through music, he added.

Courtney Biddle is Gada’s music therapist and will co-lead the class. She’s seen the impact of music on veterans and active military first-hand.

“Music can give people a purpose, a reason for improving themselves, a reason for being,” Biddle said.

“They gave so much of themselves and we don’t even know them—they don’t know us, yet they’re fighting for us,” Gada said.

It’s a cause close to the teen’s heart. His mom, Shelly, was in the Marine Corps from 1986 to 1990.

“I have friends that are ill. And PTSD is a big thing. I was lucky enough to never have anything that caused any of that for me,” Shelly Gada said, adding that she’s extremely proud of her son.

“Da dum, da dum, da dum. You have a natural beat,” Marcus Gada said, adding the song “’Wrong Side of Heaven” by Five Finger Death Punch helped inspire the project. “No matter where you are, where you come from: music is everybody’s way.”

For more information on classes or to donate a guitar, here is the link to the “SOUND OFF” program website here.

“Look before you lock!”

That’s the potentially life-saving message to parents who might have kids in their car. It’s especially important with more warm days in the forecast.

Experts say those with kids in the car can do something simple to remember the backseat passenger before you get out.

Whether it’s leaving a picture of your kid on the passenger seat or even taking off one of your shoes and leaving it in the back where a car seat would be. It could prevent a tragedy.

“Honestly this is the best thing that can happen for new mothers,” said Denisha Allen, who attended a clinic at St. Francis Medical Center Tuesday.

Allen is all about protecting her little girl with those twinkling eyes and infectious smile. And she’s all too aware of the dangers of driving with kids.

St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center teamed up with the Hartford Fire Department to educate parents at a car safety clinic.

They offered a car safety clinic for parents.

“We know that people’s routines change and children have been forgotten. We know tragedies happen nationally,” explained Marisol Feliciano, the Violence & Injury Prevention Program Coordinator at St. Francis Hospital Medical Center.

One of the big lessons was about heatstroke, with 18 kids passing away so far this year across the country after being left in hot cars. Earlier this month in West Haven, police say a 4-year-old boy got into a hot car and later died.

While a national study found about 30 percent of cases involve kids who enter a car themselves, about half were simply forgotten. And those could have easily been prevented.

“Something you can do easily is set some reminders, set a routine with your daycare provider,” Feliciano said.

Or in Allen’s case a new sticker is a sign of her precious cargo.

“A reminder, hey, please, you wouldn’t want to leave yourself in the car, please don’t leave your child in the car,” Allen said.

Experts say cars can heat up quickly even on a day that’s not incredibly hot, and kids can overheat up to five times faster than adults.

Three people were rescued by passing witnesses when fire broke out at home in Bloomfield Tuesday.

Crews responded to a home on Cottage Grove Road in Bloomfield Tuesday evening. Fire officials said three people inside the house were rescued by two people passing by – a retired Hartford firefighter and a Plainville firefighter. A fourth person escaped the home under their own power.

All four victims were taken to Hartford Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Fire officials said the fire was difficult to knock down because it spread rapidly.

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The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Arms control experts confirmed that both satellite photos and U.S. intelligence show North Korea is continuing to produce ballistic missiles and work on its missile program, even after the historic June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, NBC News reported.

The experts pointed to a July 7 satellite photo specifically that shows activity consistent with missile production.

News of the continued missile production was first reported by the Washington Post. It came one month after NBC News was first to report that North Korea had increased production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites, and that the North Korean regime was working to conceal those facilities from the U.S.

After the summit in Singapore, Trump and Kim issued a communique to establish U.S. and North Korean relations. Missile production was not addressed in the written statement. 

When Facebook revealed on Tuesday that it had identified and stopped a covert new campaign to spread divisive political messages, it did not reveal some of the most divisive posts, NBC News reported.

A review of some of the deleted pages found efforts to target people with liberal politics or Hispanic and African heritage. One deleted event by a group called "Resisters" called for an occupation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; 131 people marked themselves as having attended the June 27 rally. 

Facebook declined to identify who was behind the campaign but did say it bore similarities to the efforts by Russia's Internet Research Agency to influence the 2016 election.

"The goal is to create fear in the audience that things are unstable and that democracy and its institutions are failing," said former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts.

A 32-year-old West Haven man was shot in New Haven early Wednesday morning.

Police said they responded to the area of Winchester Avenue at Ivy Street at 12:30 a.m. and found Jonathan Lee Pickett in the second-floor hallway.

They said he was shot in the chest and hands during what was likely a domestic dispute into an apartment house.

Four children were home when the shooting happened, according to police.

Pickett was transported to Yale-New Haven Hospital and medical staff said his injuries are not life-threatening, according to police.

Police are investigating. No additional information was released.

Part of Mountain Road in Farmington is expected to remain closed to through traffic until 3 p.m. Wednesday after a pole was broken during a car crash, according to police.

One vehicle was involved in the crash and the driver was injured and transported to the hospital, police said. No one else was in the vehicle. 

Eversource told police that Mountain Road will be closed between Birdseye Road and Reservoir Road to through-traffic until 3 p.m., according to police. 

Residents of Mountain Road will be able to get to and from their driveways, according to police.  

Police are investigating the crash and no additional information was immediately available.

A child was kicked by a horse in Pomfret Tuesday and was taken to the hospital, according to Quinebaug Valley Emergency Communications. 

Officials from QVEC said they received a call at 2:14 p.m. and an ambulance responded to Searles Road in Pomfret. 

The child was transported to Day Kimball Healthcare. 

No additional information was immediately available.

One person is being taken to the hospital after suffering severe electrical burns in North Haven, according to the fire department.

A Tweet from the North Haven Fire Department said firefighters responded to 55 Defco Park Road and they are treating one person who sustained severe electrical burns after an accident within the building.

The patient is being transported to the Bridgeport Burn Center.

Fire officials said multiple agencies on scene investigating at this time.

Milford police have arrested a local woman who they say opened a GoFundMe account for an animal rescue group then deposited some of the funds donated to it into her own bank account. 

Police took 47-year-old Suzanne Maraczi, of Milford, into custody on Friday. 

They said they received a complaint on Feb. 27 that she opened a GoFundMe page for an animal rescue group and had the donations deposited into her personal bank account. 

Some of the donations raised were turned over to the animal rescue group, but the complaint says Maraczi failed to turn over the remaining money that was donated after several requests. 

She has been charged with fourth-degree larceny and is due in court on Aug, 21.

New London police have arrested a Massachusetts resident who is accused of leaving two dogs in a hot car without water. They said the temperature inside the car reached 107 degrees.  

Police responded to the parking lot of Ocean Beach Park Tuesday after someone called them right before 5 p.m. and said two small dogs has been left in an unoccupied car. 

Officers who went to the park found an unlocked vehicle with the windows barely open and saw two small dogs in a plastic cage without water, police said. 

The dogs were removed from the vehicle and given water. 

Officers found the owner, 38-year-old Nicholes Seguin, of Palmer, Massachusetts, around 5:40 p.m. and learned that Sequin had arrived at the park around 3:16 p.m., according to a news release from police. 

Seguin was issued a summons for cruelty to animals and unvaccinated animals. 

The animal control officer took the dogs.

In a bid to make Facebook and Instagram more "intentional," Facebook is giving users more ways to manage how much time they spend on the apps.

Upcoming versions will give users a way to check how much time they've been thumbing through Facebook and Instagram on their device through a dashboard that displays the average amount of time they spend on the apps. 

Users will also be able to set a reminder for when they've been using the app for a certain amount of time, like 30 minutes, and turn off notifications for a period of 15 minutes, 1 hour or longer.

"We want the time people spend on Facebook and Instagram to be intentional, positive and inspiring. Our hope is that these tools give people more control over the time they spend on our platforms and also foster conversations between parents and teens about the online habits that are right for them," two Facebook executives wrote in a blog post announcing the changes on Wednesday.

In December, Facebook acknowledged that social media can leave people feeling bad, if they "spend a lot of time passively consuming information" rather than interacting with people.

Researchers have wondered whether there's a link between a recent rise in rates of suicide and social media use. A 2017 study in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that more teens were using electronic devices like smartphones for at least five hours a day, and that those teens were 70 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions than those who reported using such devices for one hour a day.

In its announcement Wednesday, Facebook pointed to other ways it's tried to help give users control their time on the platforms, like letting them prioritize or hide other users they follow on Facebook and adding a "You're All Caught Up" message to the Instagram feed.

The announcement also comes a day after Facebook said it banned 32 accounts on Facebook and Instagram for taking part in a coordinated campaign to influence U.S. politics.

SUICIDE PREVENTION HELP: Here is information on suicide prevention from the National Institute of Mental Health. If you are in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting 'Home' to 741741.

New Britain police have made a second arrest in a 14-year-old murder.

Police have charged 41-year-old Sorek Minery, of Burlington, with murder in connection with the death of Paul Sweetman, of Southington in July 2004.

Sweetman was 70 years old when he was killed.

Rudy Hannon, 72, was also arrested in connection with the case and charged with murder.

Warrants for both suspects are sealed.

Minery has been charged with murder and felony murder.

He was held on a $5 million bond and is due in court today to be arraigned.

New Britain police, along with Connecticut State Police, the Southington Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Connecticut Forensic Science Lab, and the State’s Attorney’s Office have been investigating.

Political ads on television are easy enough to spot: anyone who lives in a battleground state or watches TV in late October can recognize the attack ads and candidate promos that blanket the airwaves, always with a disclaimer.

Facebook ads have been much different: Ahead of the 2016 campaign, each user saw a tailored set of advertisements and political ads that often appeared as just another post in the newsfeed.

Facebook has changed its rules to make political ads more obvious. New data released by Facebook and collected by researchers at NYU shows that Americans are still seeing plenty of political ads there — at least 2.2 billion times since May.

Use the tool below to explore political ads that were targeted toward your state, gender and age group, sorted by the advertisers who reached the most people in the demographic you select.

Some pages that Facebook announced this week had been banned for taking part in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" ahead of the midterm elections did not appear in the Political Ad Archive database.

Still, the database shows both the size and the continued murky nature of political advertising on Facebook, even after Facebook started requiring that ads disclose their source of funding.

While some ads clearly support political campaigns, others promote a cause and some sell politically charged merchandise — clothing brand American AF has the second-most impressions of all advertisers on the platform. And some of the biggest political groups in the country, like Democratic super PACs Priorities USA Action and Senate Majority PAC, run ads through "community" pages that don't appear political on their surface.

"Advertising is a deliberate and strategic behavior seeking to influence voters, and voters have a right to know who is influencing them," said Young Mie Kim, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied political advertising on Facebook. "In the 21st century digital media environment, it's incredibly difficult for voters to understand who is targeting them."

The new data comes from Facebook's Political Ad Archive tool, a transparency initiative the social media giant began after receiving bipartisan criticism over the spread of misinformation on its platform in 2016. The tool is one of several the company created to better regulate its own platform — social media is largely unregulated in the U.S., though lawmakers are considering ways to step in.

The database indicates that political advertisers spent between $21 million and $108 million between May 1 and July 18, receiving between 2.2 billion and 5.9 billion impressions in the time period. (Facebook does not provide precise numbers, instead offering a range for each figure to protect advertisers’ confidential information.)

Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee was the top overall spender in the period, spending between $344,000 and $2.3 million. Also included in the top 10 are advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood, companies like ExxonMobil and politicians like Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, who is running to replace Republican Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

TRUMP CAMPAIGN'S INNOVATION
Trump's 2016 presidential campaign was one of the first political campaigns to use Facebook advertising on such a large scale, spending tens of millions of dollars on narrowly targeted ads. Sometimes each ad would have thousands of variants, with subtle tweaks in color or wording to test what would perform best.

After the election, Facebook executives internally praised the Trump campaign as an "innovator" in advertising on the platform, according to BuzzFeed News.

But this year, Trump-affiliated firm Cambridge Analytica was revealed to have obtained personal data of 87 million Facebook users through a personality quiz taken by only a few hundred thousand people. Authorities are investigating whether Cambridge Analytica used that data to influence the campaign.

Amid the fallout, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress to testify about how his platform was used in 2016 and to explain what it would do to ensure foreign actors couldn't influence future elections. Facebook was also hit with fines in the United Kingdom and could face more in the U.S. for allowing Cambridge Analytica to collect data without users permission, while the data firm eventually filed for bankruptcy amid investigators' scrutiny.

Cambridge Analytica wasn’t the only group to be accused of using Facebook unethically during the election.

In late 2017, the House Intelligence Committee revealed that Russian intelligence services had purchased thousands of Facebook ads in support of the Trump campaign, many of which promoted false news stories or aimed to suppress voter turnout among people who were likely to support Hillary Clinton. Russians created Facebook groups with names like "Secured Borders," "Blacktivist" and "Heart of Texas," according to an indictment filed in February by special counsel Robert Mueller.

And on July 31, the company announced that it had already discovered suspicious activity from bad actors who were running pages to try to influence voters ahead of the 2018 elections. Thirty-two pages and accounts with tens of thousands of likes were taken down. They had names like "Black Elevation," "Mindful Being," and "Resisters" and shared a variety of content to make their pages harder to identify than in 2016.

Nevertheless, the Trump campaign's Facebook strategy was effective, so other campaigns are now trying to learn from it. A New York Times report on an earlier version of the NYU dataset cited political consultants who said Republicans generally spent more on digital ads than Democrats did, but noted that trend may be changing — some prominent Democrats appear high in the lists of top spenders.

Boston University professor Tobe Berkovitz, a former political advertising consultant, told NBC that the Trump campaign's micro-targeting strategy has become an important tool for campaigns because traditional, unifying messages aren't as effective on social media.

"Very few people are persuaded by social media because it all comes from a highly partisan position," he said in an email. "It's better to reinforce existing attitudes or target people with weakly held positions and political affiliations."

IDENTIFYING ADS
This spring, Facebook announced a number of new policies, among them creating the Political Ad Archive, to protect the platform from misuse of data, misinformation and foreign interference.

In a blog post explaining some of the new rules, Facebook said it would apply extra scrutiny and disclosure rules for ads that have "the goal of either influencing public debate, promoting a ballot measure or electing a candidate." The policies aim to prevent malicious activity from interfering in the 2018 midterm elections.

This brings the platform more in line with rules for broadcast political ads, which require that advertisements state the candidate or group that paid for them. Yet there are no legal regulations on political advertising on the internet, which means it's up to companies to make rules it as they see fit.

Many of the advertisers whose activity Facebook has flagged as political are similar: generic-looking news or community pages that share local stories, memes and short viral videos.

But one top advertiser in many locations is shirt vendor American AF, which offers apparel with phrases like "Kill a commie for mommy," "Guns don't kill people, I kill people" and "Shut up Hillary."

Its products are broadly supportive of Trump — shirts shows him riding a T-Rex or pumping iron — while all 15 products on the website that appeared in a recent search for "Hillary Clinton" were critical of her, including one that alludes to a vulgar word for women.

The brand has a large national presence on Facebook with more than 1 million likes and appears in the database as a top advertiser for men in age groups from 18 to 44 for most states across the country.

In an email, brand founder Shawn Wylde told NBC his page spent approximately $900,000 in Facebook ads since May. He said the ads do "remarkably well," although he disputes why they should be included in the political ads database.

"We don't feel the majority of our patriotic products are political in nature," Wylde said in an email. "American AF is a humor page where we make fun of both parties; however, since we find President Trump so funny, we currently offer more products based on him."

Yet, American AF has had run-ins with Facebook's ad moderators, Wylde said: "We have had ad representatives revoked, patriotic ads and posts removed, profile accounts banned and were denied the blue checkmark verification badge. I think the page gets punished because some Facebook employees think it’s conservative."

Devon Kearns, a Facebook spokesman, said the company regularly bans fake accounts but will allow anyone who goes through their verification process to post political ads. Facebook then evaluates each ad on a case-by-case basis, taking down ones that violate the rules — including an ad from American AF that contained a slur against Native Americans, which was removed when NBC brought the page to Facebook’s attention.

Many of these rules are recent, and Facebook is still working to balance free speech and regulations for ads on its platform. Berkovitz, the former political advertising consultant now with Boston University, explained that political advertising on the internet was once a free-for-all and the rules are still evolving today.

"There were basically no rules until Cambridge Analytica," he said. "Now there's an effort to create guidelines and procedures. ... I think increased transparency on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is a trend that will continue."

The election advertising researchers who spoke to NBC for this article said Facebook's disclosure requirements aren't stringent enough. Facebook requires that groups put their legal name in the "paid for" statement, which is sometimes vague: the database includes sponsors like "One Nation" and "American Action Network" which don’t provide much more context for the average viewer.

"Now we have one more layer of information," said Kim, who said the change is a step in the right direction, but she would prefer more. "We really need to look beyond not just the face of the ad but the pages and the sponsors – and the payer who could even be different."

WHERE THE MONEY COMES FROM
It isn't always clear from looking at a page that it is being used for political purposes. That's the case for "Hoosier Country," a top advertiser in Indiana that calls itself "a community for anyone who wants to show their Hoosier pride" and has run attacks against Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Braun.

The page appears at the top of the list of advertisers for most demographics in Indiana, and it spent between $78,000 and $384,000 in the state, according to the Facebook data. All of those ads are funded by the Democratic super PACs Priorities USA Action and Senate Majority PAC, a fact that Facebook now points out on the advertisements.

Buying this kind of ad is an extension of the common political practice of creating small targeted websites to share information with voters, explained Priorities USA Action spokesman Josh Sherwin.

"These are locally focused pages for sharing articles and information from reputable news outlets," he said in an email, adding that the pages are "clearly labeled" as political sites. Yet as of Aug. 1, the page's "about" section did not mention its political aim or backers.

Before May 24, when the political advertising rules went into effect, it would have been much harder to know these ads were funded by two of the largest super PACs in the country. And researchers say there are thousands of smaller "dark money" groups across the country who quietly spend on advertising campaigns.

Kim and her team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers looked at political ads on Facebook in 2016 and found that it was usually difficult to determine who was behind them.

"More than half the groups we examined were unidentifiable," she said, noting that if academic researchers had trouble identifying advertisers, voters would have an even harder time.

Her team found that in the six weeks before Election Day in 2016, some voters saw about 35 ads a day. "It's unfair and unreasonable to expect voters to figure out who are behind them," she said.

Facebook now says it's planning ahead and doing all it can to limit the misuse of political advertising on the platform for the upcoming midterm elections in November. In an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher this month, Zuckerberg admitted that the company was unprepared in 2016.

"This was a new thing," he said. "I think we understand that we were slow to it and need to do a better job ... defending against nation-states, which is not really a top-line thing that was a major focus before."

Now that Facebook has close to double the number of users as the population of China, this is the new reality the company will have to face. In the interview, Zuckerberg reiterated his commitment to doing better.

"A lot of people are using [Facebook] for a lot of good," he said, "but we also have a responsibility to mitigate the darker things that people are gonna try to do."

The man New Haven police have been searching for since May in connection with the shootings of two women is dead after a shootout with police in Virginia, according to the New Haven police chief. A state police dog was also killed in the shootout, according to Virginia state police.

Tramaine Marquese Poole, 41, was suspected of shooting of his 36-year-old wife on May 7, then shooting and killing 28-year-old Tyekqua Nesbitt in front of her children on May 31, according to police.

Authorities have said the shootings are connected, but not how.

Authorities had been searching for Poole and New Haven's police chief said Wednesday afternoon that Poole is dead after a shootout with Virginia State Police in Sussex County.

Virginia State Police said that a trooper traveling north on Interstate 95 in Sussex County, Virginia at 8:18 a.m. saw a vehicle that had been reported stolen out of Connecticut and tried to stop the driver, but the person sped away.

During the case, someone in the vehicle started shooting at the trooper's vehicle and took exit 24 and the stolen vehicle approached Loco School and Bell roads, where Virginia State Police stopped the stolen vehicle.

Virginia state police fired at the state police vehicles and one of the suspect's bullets pierced a K9 trooper's back passenger window and struck a state police canine riding in the back seat compartment, Virginia state police said, and did not survive his injuries.

Once the stolen vehicle was stopped, state troopers and the suspect enchanged shots were fired and the male suspect died at the scene, Virginia state police.

A female passenger in the suspect vehicle was transported to a nearby hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.

No troopers were injured in the course of the incident.

Virginia state police have not identified the suspect who died in the shootout and a news release from New haven police said the person Virginia State Police shot "may be" Poole and the positive identification process will likely take some time. Homicide detectives are going to Virginia.

New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell said he is “extremely confident” the person who died in the shootout is Poole.

“Once it’s absolutely confirmed, an entire community can rest knowing that they are safe and this killer will no longer be able to harm anyone again, today justice was served.” Campbell said.

The initial investigation into Poole began his wife contacted authorities at 2:20 p.m. Monday, May 7, as she was being driven to the hospital, and reported that her husband had shot her on Henry Street.

Then police somehow linked him to a fatal shooting nearly three weeks later, on May 31.

Police said Nesbitt was in a car with her two children, ages 6 and 11, when she was shot at Wilmot Road and Wintergreen Avenue in New Haven. During a news conference Tuesday, police said the two shootings are connected.

An arrest warrant for Poole in connection with the May 7 shooting includes charges of first-degree assault, risk of injury, criminal possession of a firearm, carrying a pistol without a permit and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

Charges for the May 31 slaying include murder, criminal possession of a firearm, carrying a pistol without a permit, two counts of risk of injury and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

Back-to-school shopping isn't getting more expensive for once, according to new survey.

The cost of classroom supplies dropped across every grade level ahead of the 2018-19 school year, according to the latest Huntington Backpack Index.

While some costs fell, college preparatory material costs increased 10 percent.

The index is an annual survey that analyzes the costs of school supplies and other expenses arranged by The Huntington National Bank and nonprofit organization Communities in Schools.

(Disclosure: Communities in Schools is a partner of NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations' Supporting Our Schools campaign.)

This year, parents can expect to pay less for students’ school supplies and other school fees than they did in 2017. According to index data, parents will pay about $637 for an elementary school child, $941 for a middle school child and $1,355 for a high school student.

A middle-income, two-child and married-couple family will spend about $13,000 per child each year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data on the cost of raising a child. Child care and education accounts for 16 percent of that figure.

The decrease in the cost of school supplies will likely prove beneficial to teachers, as well. Ninety-four percent of public school teachers pay for classroom supplies, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The price changes come after last year’s index revealed that school supplies became more expensive between 2007 and 2017. Over that 10-year period, prices for supplies increased by about $10.

Each year, Huntington receives classroom supply lists from elementary, middle and high schools throughout eight states and constructs a representative list of required supplies and fees. Then, it selects moderately priced items at national online retailers to determine the costs.

“We need to ensure that every child in America comes to school equipped for success,” said Dale Erquiaga, president and CEO of Communities In Schools, in a statement. “Regardless of reduction in cost,the price of school supplies remains a challenge for low-income families and for teachers who often supplement supplies for their classrooms. That’s why we bring existing community resources inside schools to make sure that no student starts out behind.”