The viral video of two teens on a murderous joy ride in Las Vegas last month sparked conversations on social media about the assailants’ races. Now, the speculation can be put to rest as the teens have been identified as an Hispanic driver and a Black passenger.
Here’s the story generated by Discern Reporter, followed by my commentary…
Teens Appear in Court Following Heinous Viral Video Leading to Arrests
According to sources, two teenagers from Las Vegas have been accused of intentionally hitting and killing a cyclist. Allegedly, within a two-hour span, they also attempted to kill another biker, stole three cars, and committed a burglary, as revealed to the 8 News Now Investigators.
Records show that Jesus Ayala, who is now 18 but was 17 at the time of the alleged crime spree, is facing 18 charges, including murder, attempted murder, battery with a deadly weapon, leaving the scene of an accident, and various larceny and burglary charges. The second suspect, Jzamir Keys, 16, is also facing charges of murder, attempted murder, and battery, identified by police as the passenger in the vehicle.
The charges against Ayala and Keys are related to the death of Andreas “Andy” Probst, a retired California police chief. Probst was riding his bicycle in a marked lane on August 14 near Tenaya Way and Centennial Parkway in the northwest Las Vegas valley when Ayala allegedly intentionally crashed into him.
Initially, Probst’s death was classified as a hit-and-run. However, at the end of August, a student brought a video of the alleged murder to a school resource officer who then alerted the police about it.
Ayala was taken into custody on the morning of the hit-and-run incident, while Keys was arrested on Tuesday. Both were later certified as adults in the court system.
Sources informed the 8 News Now Investigators that the stolen car allegedly used by Ayala and Keys to murder Probst was found abandoned near Craig Road and Jones Boulevard, less than 10 minutes from the crash site. The vehicle had blood on its windshield.
Before Probst’s murder, the teenagers reportedly attempted to hit another cyclist in the area of Fort Apache and Washburn Roads, about half an hour earlier, according to the police. After Probst’s death, they allegedly stole two more cars in the area of Lake Mead Boulevard and Torrey Pines Drive. Approximately an hour later, the teenagers crashed the two stolen cars into each other near a shopping plaza at Lake Mead and Rainbow Boulevards, as per sources.
Allegedly, the teenagers then broke into a garage, taking several items, before returning to the area where Probst was hit and killed in one of the crashed stolen cars.
While Ayala was apprehended by the officers, Keys managed to flee the scene.
Back in August, the police did not have sufficient evidence to charge Ayala with murder, as the video did not surface until two weeks later.
Both teenagers made their initial appearances in adult court on Thursday.
Commentary: Growing Teen Nihilism
“They don’t care,” my adult son told me. “They just don’t have any regard for life, property, or consequences of desecrating either.”
He was referring to what seems to be an exponentially growing threat from nihilistic teens and young adults in America. I often lean on my son for understanding of youth since he is a millennial. And as he sees it, Gen Z is better than his generation in some ways but far worse in others.
Anecdotally, he is absolutely correct. We’re seeing statistics claiming more Gen Zers are leaning conservative than their millennial predecessors, but we’re also watching teen and young adult crime rising dramatically in nearly every major city in America. And contrary to popular belief from the right, it’s not just blue cities that are getting hit. While Democrat policies have exacerbated the trend, even cities that lean red are seeing crime rates rise.
As far as I’m concerned, the only thing that can reverse the course of this nation is massive revival. I know that’s arguably the answer to all of our major problems to the point that it’s almost cliche, but it’s undeniable to those of us who are emersed in the news throughout the day. Kids like the ones who casually murdered Andy Probst are not going away through counseling, more money funneled into education, or political solutions.
Only God can change hearts and minds on the massive scale that we need right now.
Sound off about this story on The Liberty Daily Substack.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
