Family members noticed a change in the man charged with firing an assault rifle in a Washington pizza parlor after he hit a 13-year-old pedestrian with his car in October, his parents said.

Edgar Maddison Welch shifted from energetic and outgoing to melancholy and quiet, Terri Welch and Harry Welch Jr. told The Washington Post at their son's public defender's office Monday.

"He was very traumatized. We feel that accident changed him," Harry Welch said, and his wife said they have wondered whether it could have been a catalyst for the incident at Comet Ping Pong.

Police and prosecutors say that on Dec. 4, Maddison Welch went into the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle multiple times inside. No one was hurt.

He told police "he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves," and he wanted to investigate, according to court documents.

The couple from North Carolina was in town to attend a Tuesday court hearing for their son, whom they have not spoken with since the shooting. The 28-year-old Welch, of Salisbury, North Carolina, has been in jail since the shooting. He faces charges including assault with a dangerous weapon.

Harry Welch said his son felt guilty after the crash and worried about the long-term effects for the child, who had to be airlifted to a hospital with broken bones and a head injury. His parents said Maddison Welch began having nightmares but did not to seek help.

The Supreme Court has denied appeals from death row inmates in Louisiana and South Carolina who questioned their lawyers' actions.

The justices on Monday did not comment on the cases of James Tyler of Louisiana and Sammie Stokes of South Carolina.

Tyler's lawyer conceded his client's guilt in the hope of drawing a life sentence, even though Tyler repeatedly objected to that strategy y.

Stokes' lawyer had previously prosecuted him for assaulting his ex-wife. The lawyer never informed the judge of his earlier role, not even when the ex-wife took the stand against Stokes.

Texas' highest criminal court lifted a reprieve on Wednesday that, for the second time in a decade, prevented a convicted hit man from being executed for the 1992 slaying of a San Antonio woman.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals didn't rule on the merits of the appeal filed by 44-year-old Rolando Ruiz, who was five days away from execution when the court stepped in on Aug. 26. Instead, the court ruled that his appeal was not legally proper and dismissed it, clearing the way for prosecutors in Bexar County to seek a new execution date for Ruiz.

Investigators said Ruiz collected $2,000 to kill Theresa Rodriguez at her home in San Antonio at the request of her husband, Michael, and a brother-in-law as part of a life insurance scheme.

Ruiz was convicted of being the triggerman in the plot. Michael Rodriguez also was convicted in the case — but he wound up on death row after becoming one of the notorious Texas Seven gang of inmates who escaped from a prison in December 2000 and killed a Dallas-area police officer. Rodriguez was executed in 2008.

In Ruiz's appeal, his attorneys argued that his trial lawyers and his original appeals lawyers failed to investigate and present mitigating evidence, like his long-term drug abuse and a troubled childhood, that could have convinced jurors to decide on a punishment other than death.

But in a 6-1 ruling with two judges not participating, the criminal appeals court said that claim had been "fully and completely vetted" by the federal courts over the past seven years. The court said the claims of poor legal help at Ruiz's trial had been "inspected, scrutinized, studied, probed, analyzed, reviewed and evaluated by the three main levels of the federal court system."

The court also said it had previously rejected the argument raised in the appeal that executing Ruiz more than two decades after his conviction amounted to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

A Chinese court says a star securities trader who was arrested following last year's stock market collapse has pleaded guilty to insider trading and manipulating share prices.

The court in the eastern city of Qingdao said in a statement Tuesday that Xu Xiang and two co-defendants pleaded guilty at the start of a trial but no verdict had been issued.

Xu was arrested in November after a rapid rise in Chinese share prices collapsed. Top executives of China's biggest state-owned securities firm also were arrested in a separate case.

The court statement said Xu and his co-defendants were accused of conspiring with executives of 13 companies from 2010 to 2015 to inflate their share price and then sell.

The Supreme Court is taking up a pair of cases in which African-American voters maintain that Southern states discriminated against them in drawing electoral districts.

The justices are hearing arguments Monday in redistricting disputes from North Carolina and Virginia.

The claim made by black voters in both states is that Republicans created districts with more reliably Democratic black voters than necessary to elect their preferred candidates, making neighboring districts whiter and more Republican.

A federal court struck down two North Carolina districts as unconstitutional because they relied too heavily on race. In Virginia, a court rejected a constitutional challenge to 12 state legislative districts. The justices have frequently considered the intersection of race and politics.

The Supreme Court won't hear a dispute over whether a physical fitness test for FBI special agents is biased against men.

The justices on Monday turned down an appeal from an Illinois man who failed the test after completing 29 out of 30 untimed pushups.

Jay Bauer said it's unfair that female trainees have to do only 14 pushups as part of the fitness test that includes situps, a 300-meter sprint and 1.5-mile run.

A federal judge ruled that the test discriminates on the basis of sex. But a federal appeals court sided with the FBI, saying it used "gender-normed" standards that require the same level of fitness for all trainees.