The 552 pound grouper that didnt get away. Today, wednesday, may 27th, 2015. Announcer from nbc news this is today with matt lauer and Savannah Guthrie live from studio 1a in rockefeller plaza. And good morning. Welcome to today on a wednesday morning. Were going to need a bigger kayak. That is a big fish. A bigger fishing pole just everything larger. What a big guy. Well watch that in a couple of minutes. Well save that for later. Well roll the beautiful fish footage later. Meantime lets talk about the weather. Theres been no break from the storms hammering the south all week long. As we mentioned at the top, at least 19 people are dead. 14 others still missing at this hour. In texas 46 counties have issued disaster declarations. Houston has been brought to a stand still. The water rising there so fast drivers simply got out and abandoned 2500 cars. Lets get to Janet Shamlian. Shes in her hometown again for us. Good morning to you. Reporter good morning. No relief. As we come on the air with you right now, the rain lightning, and high winds are starting once again. With the flood waters now receding this region is a muddy, mosquitofilled mess. The families are getting a first look at what theyve lost. Even in a region used to flooding, this is unprecedented. Freeways turned into plots full of abandoned cars and trucks. A soggy standstill. We see the homes and lives and dreams of houstonians crushed by the power of the water. Reporter almost a foot of rain fell in six hours tuesday. This morning thousands are still assessing the damage. We lost both cars. We lost all of our flooring all of our walls, all of our paint. Reporter further north, utter devastation. 2 dead and 13 missing in a small town of wimberley where the blanco river burst its banks sweeping away everything in its path. Laura macomb and her children had traveled from Corpus Christi for the memorial day weekend as the house they were staying in was ripped from its foundation, laura called her sister julie. The house we were in the roof collapsed and we are now floating down the river. Call mom and dad. I love you. And pray. Reporter all three are now missing. In devine texas, mourners gathered for alyssa ramirez. A homecoming queen killed driving home from her prom. Now even as some areas dry out, officials caution the danger isnt over. We are going to continue to have rising waters. If your local elected officials tell you to evacuate its essential that you heed those warnings. Reporter and speaking of warnings we have just been issued a Flash Flood Warning for this region. Its been a couple of long days ahead. Back to you. Janet shamlian, thank you very much. Lets bring the houstons office of emergency management. Michael, good morning to you. Good morning, matt. These images were seeing are alarming. The governor toured the area yesterday and said you cannot candy coat it. Whats the state of the city right now . Well right now we still have a lot of our neighborhoods under water. The systems, the bayous are doing a good job of draining. But at a certain point, when you have this amount of rain in such a short amount of time its going to take us awhile to fully drain the city. Once we start seeing those water levels recede thats when really a lot of the hard work is going to start. Let me talk about some numbers. We have 19 confirmed dead. We have 14 listed as missing. 11 in hays county 7 in houston. Are those the latest numbers and whats being done to locate those people . Yeah. So those are the latest numbers right now for the city of houston. We still have a few folks that are unaccounted for. We have had five weatherassociated fatalities here in the city of houston. You know we are working, our search and rescue teams are out there. Unfortunately with this when you know people fall into the water, its very difficult for us to know exactly where they went at that point. You talk about moving through the cities the streets of houston. And at the height of the flooding people abandoned Something Like 2500 cars on major roadways and secondary roadways. That makes it very difficult to move around. And it also raises the question was enough done in terms of warning people and telling them to stay off the roads . You know one of the things we run into every time we have any kind of Severe Weather here is keeping people off the roads. Houston is the bayou city for a reason. We are a system of bayous. And the whole area drains here through the houston area to get into the gulf of mexico. So whenever we have rain we run into the situation. Ahead of the storm, the city was talking with the local media. We were pushing out emergency alerts through the Emergency Notification systems. We were on social media. And our main message wuss turn around dont drown. Stay out of these roadways. And unfortunately fortunately some people did heed that. Others did not. Unfortunately some of those folks ended up losing their lives as a result of that. So when you hear an emergency manager tell you that a condition is unsafe we dont take that lightly. And thats the type of information we were pushing out ahead of this storm and then as we were responding to the immediate aftermath. I know theres more rain in the forecast. We hope people heed those warnings. Michael walter thank you for joining us this morning. I know you have a busy day ahead. Thank you. Lets turn to al for that forecast. I feel like weve looked at the same map for days and days. Its going to linger into the weekend, unfortunately. Right now there is more rain as Janet Shamlian talked about. We have a Flash Flood Warning in effect for houston. Look at this line. This wall of water that is heading toward houston and will be there in the next 10 to 15 minutes as we track this. Now, again, the risk of Severe Weather today stretching from waco all the way to garden city, 8 Million People in risk. 2 Inch Diameter hail isolated tornadoes. At one point the blanco river over the weekend was going at 233 cubic feet per second. Thats 144 million gallons per day. How much rain is that . If you put it in an olympic pool it would fill up 218 olympicsized swimming pools. The city of houston in the last 24 hours got 6 inches of rain 11 inches of rain in 6 hours. And that led to 500 water rescues. Theres more rain coming. If there is any Silver Lining in this it is the elimination of drought. Look at what we had for texas and oklahoma on april 7th. But by last week it is almost all gone. Well get another update on this coming up later on tomorrow with the drought we expect to see no drought anywhere in texas. The bad news is we cannot turn off the spigot. Thank you very much. Had another major story breaking this morning. Fifa international, soccers governing body involving tournaments here in the United States and the world cup. This all stems from a u. S. Investigation thats uncovered millions of dollars in alleged bribes and kick backs. Bill neely has more on this. Good morning to you. Reporter good morning, matt. Good morning, everyone. It is known as the beautiful game but today soccer is reeling from a scandal the fbi says spans generations and involves corruption totaling 150 million. The u. S. Attorney general saying enough is enough at fifa. Thats the organization that runs the worlds most popular sport. It wasnt the wakeup call they expected. A hotel sheet used to hide the arrest of some of soccers top officials. Six men were taken from the exclusive hotel where they were prepared to elect the leader of the richest sporting organization. Among them a Vice President who runs the u. S. Region. Fifa runs global soccer. The u. S. Indictment charges the men with racketeering Money Laundering in a 24year scheme to enrich themselves. Involving 150 million in bribes and kickbacks. Fifa generates billions in revenue mostly from world cup. These charges relate to smaller tournaments. Fifa today portraying itself as the victim. Fifas suffering under these circumstances. Reporter fifas controversial announcement that qatar had been chose to host the world cup wasnt part of the indictment. But officials are investigating that and the decision to give russia the world cup in three years. Its a complete nightmare for fifa. Its the worst thing that could have happened to them. Reporter the u. S. Attorney general Loretta Lynch has supervised the u. S. Investigation in brooklyn. These charges are a bombshell for the worlds most popular sport. So its not just the fbi. The swiss are now investigating the giving of the world cup to qatar. The u. S. Equivalent is giving to marthas vineyard. Highly unusual. Now its under a spotlight like never before. Thank you so much. No offense to the people at marthas vineyard. Heres a headline that popped off the page. The irs is having to reach out to 100,000 people because their personal Tax Information was stolen by sophisticated hackers. Officials say it was part of a scheme to claim fraudulent refunds. The entry point for the hackers, an Online Service from the irs called get transcript where you can download your past filings. That site has been temporarily shut down. Natalie has new threats against passenger planes this time out west. Its happening again. The fbi investigating another threat in a series of threats made to flights headed to the u. S. From foreign airports. This time it involved a plane from taiwan bound for los angeles. Nbcs tom costello covers aviation. Hes in our washington bureau. What can you tell us . Reporter this was taipei to los angeles. Somebody called in a bomb threat. The plane landed safely at l. A. X. At about 3 30 pacific time. It was met by Airport Police the fbi, and lapd bomb squad. All of the passengers and baggage were screened by bomb sniffing dogs. Nothing found. Also another threat for a cafe pacific flight. These are just the latest in a series of threats. On monday half a dozen other threats were made by phone to International Flights to airports in new York New Jersey and massachusetts. Military jets escorted an air France Flight into new york after somebody claimed a chemical weapon was on board the aircraft. Nothing found. The fbi investigating all of these. Thanks so much. Some critical testimony tuesday on the colorado theater shooting trial. The notebook belonging to james holmes he mailed to his psychiatrist the day of the shooting was read to the jury. The 29page notebook was the subject of a Long Court Battle over whether the jury should see it. It details his lifelong fascination with death and hiss options for how to kill as many people as possible. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. New york rangers staved off elimination with a big win over the tampa bay lightning. New york scored five times in the third period alone to leave no doubt winning it 73. Whats that you hear . Thats matt lauer screaming. Yes. The seventh and deciding game friday night. Meanwhile game six of the western conference finals between anaheim and chicago is tonight on the nbc sports network. And as we showed you at the top of the show a fish tale youve never seen before. Two friends who were out shooting video for an Online Fishing video called chew on this. They wanted to see if they could reel in a big grouper from a kayak. And much to their delight, they did just that. Yeah baby thats a big boy. To say the least, it certainly is a big boy. So big, in fact his rod snapped while trying to pull it in. It weighed in at 552 pounds. A record catch from a tiekayak, mind you. The pair led it to shore. They measured it and then released it back into the water. The Overall Record by the way, 680 pounds. Matt you still question whether or not its real . No. It just kind of looked like such a confined area. And then getting in the water with it. By the way, what do you use for bait . Matt lauer . You need something really big. Thats a big fish. Good for them. Now i have to take a selfie . Please. Stop it. Mr. Roker . All right. Lets show you what weve got around the country today. We are looking at some more wet weather through the western plains. Also showers and thunderstorms through the gulf coast. Rip currents along the central gulf coast as well. Were going to get to your local did you know that every year over 400 million Vacation Days go unused . Theyre paid Vacation Days. Well book you tee times. Well get you backstage passes. Take a helicopter tour. I wanna see the sun, i wanna see the mountains. How about a fishing trip . Please . Bring the kids. Just take one more day. Just one more day. To plan your one more day, contact mastercard Concierge Services or download the app. Because one more day is priceless. Good morning, im meteorologist bill henley. Ive issued a first alert weather day for the potential for severe thunderstorms for later this afternoon and into the evening. Could bring damaging winds and heavy downpours. Before they move in the temperatures are up with a warm humid day ahead. High temperatures in the middle 80s. Steamier tomorrow up to 89 degrees with the chance of late day storms. A break from the storms saturday and finally turning cooler sunday and into next week. Have a great day. And well look at the other areas of Severe Weather a little bit later on. Okay al. This morning some new perspective. Family members of the suspect in the murders in washington, d. C. Are coming to his defense. Nbcs National CorrespondentPeter Alexander has the latest on this. Good morning to you. Reporter good morning to you. You can see the Police Presence is still here exactly two weeks to the day after police say the terrifying overnight ordeal began inside this mansion. This in many ways remains an unsolved mystery. One murder suspect is behind bars but Police Believe there may have been more than one person involved. And today were hearing from that murder suspects attorney speaking out on behalf of the family in hiss defense. He is not capable of such crimes horrific crime killing four innocent people. Reporter attorney robin thicker who represented daron wint in Previous Court cases a decade ago but is not currently representing him insists d. C. Police have the wrong man. Telling nbc news hes been in touch with wints mother brother, and sister who he says are all standing by wint. They cant believe its him because they know him as a kind gentle person. Reporter Court Records show wint has a criminal history dating back a decade with three separate and unrelated protective orders against him only one case resulted in an assault conviction. As for the pizza crust at the house that matched wints dna in an fbi database his family says thats impossible. One reason they say hes innocent is he doesnt eat pizza. He doesnt like pizza. Reporter and about the 40,000 in cash that was also delivered to the house, Court Papers Allege an assistant who worked for mr. Savopoulos lied to investigators about when and how he brought the money to the house. That assistant has not been charged. Meanwhile, with the Funeral Service for savvas amy and philip next week their friends and family are remembering the savopouloses as those who helped those less fortunate. And flip as a fun loving 10yearold mature far beyond his years who aspired to be a professional formula one race car driver. And the attorney said the family says that daron wint deserves the presumption of innocence. Thicker says that police should be looking for other suspects. And he hopes thats what theyre doing. Back to you. Peter alexander, thanks so much. Coming up a special live rossen reports. This is tied to that historic flooding in texas. Reporter good morning. Im jeff rossen live on a raging river. This is where emergency workers come to train for water rescues. We have the tips you need with the devastation in oklahoma and texas to survive devastating flood waters like this. Plus well have a live water rescue show you how dangerous it can be. Coming up at 7 30. All right, jeff. Well check in with you. Then more of our eyeopening look at the hacking of america. And this morning the inexpensive tool that criminals use to copy your credit card in a matter of seconds. Plus were checking out the wild ways that president ial candidates are trying to attract not only your votes but your money. 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