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Just another Day-In-The-Life . . . .
There was a time when August Busch IV would enter bars here and approach total strangers, the ones bold enough to sip on a Coors or Miller in public. He would ask if he could buy them a Budweiser, usually politely but sometimes adding enough of a jostle to knock over the offending beverage.
This was, after all, a Budweiser town, and Mr. Busch — dark-eyed, square-jawed and known for chasing women and trouble — was the dashing new face of the family that had produced the local brew for generations.
But he was also the man in charge when Anheuser-Busch was sold two years ago to a Belgian company in a deal that earned him the enduring scorn of this city.
And for the last two months, Mr. Busch, 46, has found himself again playing the role of public villain, after his companion, an aspiring model, was found dead in his bed with a significant amount of oxycodone and cocaine in her system.
This week, the death of the woman, Adrienne Martin, 27, was ruled an accidental overdose of oxycodone, a powerful painkiller that she did not have a prescription for.
The storm of questions about Mr. Busch’s possible role were partly answered on Thursday with the announcement that — barring new evidence — Mr. Busch would not face criminal charges.
Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, said the investigation had hit a “dead end,” partly because Mr. Busch declined to answer questions about the case. “Mr. Busch has refused to cooperate since his initial statement to the police,” he said.
Mr. Busch, who is often referred to locally by his suffix, “the fourth,” had mostly retreated from the public eye since the $52 billion sale of the company his great-great grandfather founded to InBev three years ago.
In the last two months, though, people in this city began repeating the decades-old stories about his brushes with the law and trading conspiracy theories about odd details of his girlfriend’s death, including why it took four days for it to come to light.
“His last name is Busch, he’s loaded, and he can do what ever he wants,” said Jason Powers, sipping a Bud Light early Thursday at the Filling Station bar.
His critics can recite the stories. Like the time in 1985 when the police engaged in a 15-minute high-speed chase that ended after they shot the tire of the Mercedes-Benz they were pursuing. After discovering the driver’s identity, the police proceeded to change Mr. Busch’s tire, according to Terry Ganey, co-author of “Under the Influence: the Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty.” (Mr. Busch was tried and acquitted of misdemeanor charges stemming from the chase.)
Two years earlier, while Mr. Busch was a student in Tucson, he flipped his Corvette after leaving a local bar, killing a waitress who was riding in the passenger seat, according to news reports at the time.
Police found Mr. Busch hours later at his home, bloody and claiming he had no memory of what had happened. Charges were never filed against him.
And now there is Ms. Martin’s death on Dec. 19. According to sometimes-conflicting reports released on Thursday, Mr. Busch told the police that he woke up before 1 p.m. and when he returned to the bedroom after making a breakfast shake he discovered that Ms. Martin was not breathing.
A household employee called the police. The cocaine and oxycodone were in empty bottles bearing Ms. Martin’s name.
“It’s a terrible situation but I’m surprised at the vitriol,” said Pete Rothschild, a leading local developer. “Now that the brewery is sold everyone can’t wait to pile on the guy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...ml?_r=1&ref=us
PHILADELPHIA — A grand jury on Thursday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after a grand jury report documented abuse by more than 50 priests.
The new report said a senior church official charged with investigating allegations of sexual abuse by priests had in fact allowed some of those accused to remain in posts that gave them continued access to children. It charged him with endangering the welfare of minors and accused three priests and a teacher of raping two boys between 1996 and 1999.
“By no means do we believe that these were the only two parishioners who were abused during this period,” the report said.
At least 37 priests who are subject to “substantial evidence of abuse” are still in roles that bring them into contact with children, the new report said, and 10 of those have been in place since before 2005, when the last grand jury made its allegations.
The Rev. Edward Avery, 68, and the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 64, were charged with the rape and indecent assault of a 10-year-old boy in St. Jerome Parish in Northeast Philadelphia in 1998 and 1999. The teacher, Bernard Shero, 48, was accused of assaulting the same boy in 2000.
The Rev. James Brennan, 47, was accused of assaulting a 14-year-old boy in 1996. All three priests were under arrest on Thursday.
The report also charged Msgr. William Lynn, secretary of clergy in the archdiocese under former Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, with endangering the welfare of children by allowing “dangerous” priests to remain in place. Monsignor Lynn was responsible for investigating abuse allegations from 1992 to 2004.
“The rapist priests we accuse were well known to the Secretary of Clergy, but he cloaked their conduct and put them in place to do it again,” the grand jury said.
Monsignor Lynn faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
In a statement issued late on Thursday, Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, rejected the report’s assertion that there were active priests who had been credibly accused of abuse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...st.html?ref=us
TUCSON — In the weeks since Tucson buried Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old victim of the shooting rampage outside a Safeway supermarket, a trial under way in the county courthouse here has struggled to account for the earlier murder of yet another child of the same age.
Brisenia Flores, along with her father, Raul Flores, 29, were murdered in 2009 when robbers broke into the family’s home in Arivaca, a tiny, remote town just north of the border. The person accused of being the ringleader of the robbery crew, Shawna Forde, a 43-year-old ex-beautician who traveled in the Minuteman movement, had hoped to rob enough people in Arivaca to finance a paramilitary organization that would seal off the border to immigrants, prosecutors and witnesses said.
“She did mention she was gonna change America,” Ron Wedow, an acquaintance and a Colorado Minuteman who testified last week, said in court papers. “And raise, raise this to a whole different level, is what she said.”
The two weeks of testimony, which ended Thursday, opened a window into the Minuteman world, and focused the jurors’ attention on divisions between participants who watch the border from lawn chairs with binoculars around their necks, and those whom Mr. Wedow described to investigators as “a bunch of drunken idiots, um, running around with M4” rifles.
A friend of Mr. Wedow’s described the “cowboy” mentality of some in their Minuteman circle, relaying to investigators an anecdote about a friend whose “dumb idea was to set the prairie on fire and expose” the trails that border-crossers used, according to court filings.
Ms. Forde, who has sat through her trial with her lips pursed in a small, placid smile, had flitted among Minuteman groups in recent years, finding plenty of supporters. By 2009, she was trying to find recruits to her own group, which she told Mr. Wedow and others would rob houses in Arivaca that she believed were used to hide drugs smuggled across the border.
“This makes us drug dealers,” Robert Copley, Mr. Wedow’s friend and the former head of a Minuteman group in Colorado, recalled thinking when he heard Ms. Forde describe her plan at a Flying J truck stop in Colorado. Mr. Copley bowed out, and testified that he informed the F.B.I. of what Ms. Forde had in mind.
Prosecutors claim that, just weeks later, Ms. Forde did go through with the plan.
“I suspect there is not a lot of money to be made sitting on a lawn chair in the desert and calling the Border Patrol if you see an illegal alien,” a deputy county attorney, Rick Unklesbay, told a jury. “Shawna Forde, though, was going to finance her Blackwater, finance her crew.”
Mr. Unklesbay added, “This woman might be full of hot air, this woman might be a braggart, but this woman is a murderer.”
At about 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Ms. Forde and an accomplice, Jason Bush, burst into the Flores family home, prosecutors say. First introducing themselves as law enforcement, and then quickly dropping the act, Mr. Bush is believed to have shot Mr. Flores, and then his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and their daughter, Brisenia, investigators say.
As the two intruders rummaged through the home, Ms. Gonzalez retrieved a handgun that belonged to her husband and began to fire, hitting Mr. Bush in the leg, prosecutors say. The two intruders then fled.
Ms. Forde faces the death penalty if convicted of first degree murder, as does Mr. Bush, who will be tried separately.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...en.html?ref=us
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Investigators were preparing Friday to insert cameras into an underground gas pipeline here as they continued their hunt for the cause of an explosion that killed five people.
If the cameras are unable to detect problems in the 12-inch-wide pipes, then investigators will have to dig them up for visual inspection, Robert Scheirer, the fire chief, said Friday morning. The pipes are buried under about six feet of concrete and macadam, not to mention layers of snow and ice.
The explosion on Wednesday night leveled two row houses in the 500 block of North 13th Street and weakened the remaining six houses. Excavators began razing those six houses on Friday.
For the owners of those homes, Wednesday night went from ordinary to horrific in one unexpected flash.
Bill Yanett had just paid his bills and put stamps on the envelopes. He and his wife, Dorothy, were waiting for the 11 o’clock news to come on. A couple of houses away, Don O’Shall had just closed a book and was walking into the dining room. His son, Matt, was asleep upstairs.
Suddenly, at 10:45, an earth-shattering explosion ended the calm. The Yanetts were afraid their roof had caved in from the heavy snow. Windows were blown out and furniture crashed.
“You just heard this big bang, then all this cracking and banging and booming, like a war going on,” Mrs. Yanett, 64, said Thursday, burying her tears in her husband’s shoulder as they recounted the scene. Five of their neighbors were killed, including a 4-month-old boy.
City officials said Thursday afternoon that gas lines running underneath the neighborhood had most likely fueled a fire that ripped through the eight houses on the block
None of the neighbors said they had smelled gas at any point. John Walsh, president of UGI Utilities, the local gas company, which serves 560,000 customers in eastern Pennsylvania, said crews had completed a routine survey of the neighborhood within the last week and found nothing unusual.
Utility officials said the gas line was a 12-inch low-pressure main, made of cast iron and installed in the 1920s.
Nationwide, it was the latest of several gas-related explosions in recent months. Last month, a 12-inch gas main exploded in a residential neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing a gas company employee and injuring six other people. The cause of that blast remains under investigation. In December, two people died when a gas main explosion destroyed a furniture store in Wayne, Mich.
In September, a natural gas pipe burst in San Bruno, Calif., killing eight people and destroying nearly 40 houses. The National Transportation Safety Board said that pipe had numerous flaws in its welds.
Two gas line explosions a day apart in June killed three people in Texas.
The number of deaths here was the most since San Bruno. Local officials did not release the names of the victims, but family members and friends identified them to The Morning Call, the local newspaper, as William Hall, 79, and his wife, Beatrice, 74, of 544 North 13th Street, and Ofelia Ben, 69, Catherine Cruz, 16, and Matthew Manuel Cruz, 4 months, of 542 North 13th Street.
The initial blast was so strong that it blew Mr. O’Shall’s front door off. He thought a bomb had exploded and he ran outside.
“There was debris everywhere and the lights were all out,” Mr. O’Shall, 61, a locksmith, said. “The only light was from Bea’s house, and it was on fire.”
The next moment, he said, would be seared into his memory forever.
“Somebody said, ‘Look up there,’ and I won’t tell you what I saw,” he said, tightening his lips as his eyes grew watery. “I saw Bea. Through the window. Her house was gone,” he said, but a small portion of it remained.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us...wn.html?ref=us
CHICAGO — At a cafe in the heart of this city’s exuberant Puerto Rican community, in the neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a waitress serves up favorites from the island: café con leche, rice and beans and guava pastries. On the counter, a framed photograph of a white-haired man sits next to a stack of petitions calling for his release from prison.
The petitions are posted at more than a dozen businesses in the neighborhood, where the campaign to free 68-year-old Oscar Lopez Rivera has deep and stubborn roots: he is the last remaining member of the radical group known as the F.A.L.N. (Spanish initials for Armed Forces of National Liberation) still in prison among more than a dozen convicted in the 1980s.
Volunteers in the neighborhood, on the city’s northwest side, have increased efforts in recent weeks to collect signatures outside train stops, grocery stores and churches.
Mr. Lopez Rivera, who has been in prison for almost 30 years, is viewed by some as a political prisoner and others as an unrepentant terrorist. Since he applied for parole last year, both sides have been lobbying the four-member United States Parole Commission, which is expected to make a decision soon.
The commission has received three large boxes of letters in support of his parole and many calls against it, said Johanna Markind, assistant general counsel for the commission. The response has included passionate requests from prominent leaders, a letter supporting parole from four Puerto Rican members of Congress, and a letter against parole from Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Mr. Lopez Rivera was convicted here in 1981 of numerous charges, including seditious conspiracy, a charge used for those plotting to overthrow the United States government. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
President Bill Clinton offered Mr. Lopez Rivera and other members of the F.A.L.N. clemency in 1999, a decision that stirred an emotional debate. Mr. Clinton said their sentences were out of proportion with their offenses.
While 12 prisoners accepted the offer and were freed, Mr. Lopez Rivera rejected the chance to reduce his sentence because it did not include all the group’s members, his lawyer, Jan Susler, said. If he had accepted the agreement, she said, he would have been eligible for release in 2009.
In January, a hearing examiner for the Parole Commission recommended that Mr. Lopez Rivera should not be paroled, according to several people who were at the closed hearing.
The F.A.L.N. was involved in more than 100 bombings in New York, Chicago and other cities, according to federal officials. A bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York in 1975 killed four people, including Frank Connor, a 33-year-old banker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...go.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — In many ways, the personal injury lawsuit looked routine: In late 2001, a government employee and his family sued the agency he worked for, saying it had placed them in a mold-contaminated home that made them sick and required nearly all their possessions to be destroyed.
But this was no ordinary case. The employee, Kevin M. Shipp, was a veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer. His home was at Camp Stanley, an Army weapons depot just north of San Antonio, in an area where the drinking water was polluted with toxic chemicals. The post includes a secret C.I.A. facility.
Declaring that its need to protect state secrets outweighed the Shipps’ right to a day in court, the government persuaded a judge to seal the case and order the family and their lawyers not to discuss it, and to later dismiss the lawsuit without any hearing on the merits, Mr. Shipp said.
More than half a decade later, Mr. Shipp is going public with his story. He contends that the events broke up his marriage and destroyed his career, and that C.I.A. officials abused the State Secrets Privilege doctrine in an effort to cover up their own negligence.
Jennifer Youngblood, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, denied any wrongdoing by the agency. “The C.I.A. takes great care to help protect the health and welfare of its employees,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...ts.html?ref=us
A 37-year-old illegal immigrant was under arrest Friday after three people were found shot to death and three others were wounded at two houses just blocks apart in the northern Virginia city of Manassas, the police said.
The victims in the shooting on Thursday night included several members of the same family, but said Chief Douglas W. Keen of the Manassas Police Department said it was not clear how, or if, the victims knew the suspect, Jose Oswaldo Reyes Alfaro, 37.
Mr. Alfaro, 37, from El Salvador, had been ordered deported by a federal judge in 2002, but apparently never left the country, the authorities said.
Officers responding Thursday evening to a report of shots fired found the body of Brenda Ashcraft, 56, in the front yard of her house on Hood Road, Chief Keen said.
Inside, the police found three other family members who had been shot.
William Ashbey Ashcraft, 37, died of a bullet wound on the way to the hospital, the police said. A 34-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl were wounded; the woman is in a hospital in stable condition, and the girl was treated and released. Their names were not released.
About 30 minutes later, Chief Keen said, officers responding to another call of shots fired, on Brent Street, about a quarter-mile away, found the body of Julio Cesar Ulloa, 48.
A 77-year-old woman with head wounds — possibly from a stabbing — was also inside the house, the police said. She was hospitalized in stable condition; her name was not released.
About 45 minutes after the first call to police, Mr. Alfaro was arrested while driving nearby. Chief Keen said some of the victims had described the suspect and his car to the police.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us...as.html?ref=us
There was a time when August Busch IV would enter bars here and approach total strangers, the ones bold enough to sip on a Coors or Miller in public. He would ask if he could buy them a Budweiser, usually politely but sometimes adding enough of a jostle to knock over the offending beverage.
This was, after all, a Budweiser town, and Mr. Busch — dark-eyed, square-jawed and known for chasing women and trouble — was the dashing new face of the family that had produced the local brew for generations.
But he was also the man in charge when Anheuser-Busch was sold two years ago to a Belgian company in a deal that earned him the enduring scorn of this city.
And for the last two months, Mr. Busch, 46, has found himself again playing the role of public villain, after his companion, an aspiring model, was found dead in his bed with a significant amount of oxycodone and cocaine in her system.
This week, the death of the woman, Adrienne Martin, 27, was ruled an accidental overdose of oxycodone, a powerful painkiller that she did not have a prescription for.
The storm of questions about Mr. Busch’s possible role were partly answered on Thursday with the announcement that — barring new evidence — Mr. Busch would not face criminal charges.
Robert P. McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, said the investigation had hit a “dead end,” partly because Mr. Busch declined to answer questions about the case. “Mr. Busch has refused to cooperate since his initial statement to the police,” he said.
Mr. Busch, who is often referred to locally by his suffix, “the fourth,” had mostly retreated from the public eye since the $52 billion sale of the company his great-great grandfather founded to InBev three years ago.
In the last two months, though, people in this city began repeating the decades-old stories about his brushes with the law and trading conspiracy theories about odd details of his girlfriend’s death, including why it took four days for it to come to light.
“His last name is Busch, he’s loaded, and he can do what ever he wants,” said Jason Powers, sipping a Bud Light early Thursday at the Filling Station bar.
His critics can recite the stories. Like the time in 1985 when the police engaged in a 15-minute high-speed chase that ended after they shot the tire of the Mercedes-Benz they were pursuing. After discovering the driver’s identity, the police proceeded to change Mr. Busch’s tire, according to Terry Ganey, co-author of “Under the Influence: the Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty.” (Mr. Busch was tried and acquitted of misdemeanor charges stemming from the chase.)
Two years earlier, while Mr. Busch was a student in Tucson, he flipped his Corvette after leaving a local bar, killing a waitress who was riding in the passenger seat, according to news reports at the time.
Police found Mr. Busch hours later at his home, bloody and claiming he had no memory of what had happened. Charges were never filed against him.
And now there is Ms. Martin’s death on Dec. 19. According to sometimes-conflicting reports released on Thursday, Mr. Busch told the police that he woke up before 1 p.m. and when he returned to the bedroom after making a breakfast shake he discovered that Ms. Martin was not breathing.
A household employee called the police. The cocaine and oxycodone were in empty bottles bearing Ms. Martin’s name.
“It’s a terrible situation but I’m surprised at the vitriol,” said Pete Rothschild, a leading local developer. “Now that the brewery is sold everyone can’t wait to pile on the guy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...ml?_r=1&ref=us
PHILADELPHIA — A grand jury on Thursday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after a grand jury report documented abuse by more than 50 priests.
The new report said a senior church official charged with investigating allegations of sexual abuse by priests had in fact allowed some of those accused to remain in posts that gave them continued access to children. It charged him with endangering the welfare of minors and accused three priests and a teacher of raping two boys between 1996 and 1999.
“By no means do we believe that these were the only two parishioners who were abused during this period,” the report said.
At least 37 priests who are subject to “substantial evidence of abuse” are still in roles that bring them into contact with children, the new report said, and 10 of those have been in place since before 2005, when the last grand jury made its allegations.
The Rev. Edward Avery, 68, and the Rev. Charles Engelhardt, 64, were charged with the rape and indecent assault of a 10-year-old boy in St. Jerome Parish in Northeast Philadelphia in 1998 and 1999. The teacher, Bernard Shero, 48, was accused of assaulting the same boy in 2000.
The Rev. James Brennan, 47, was accused of assaulting a 14-year-old boy in 1996. All three priests were under arrest on Thursday.
The report also charged Msgr. William Lynn, secretary of clergy in the archdiocese under former Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, with endangering the welfare of children by allowing “dangerous” priests to remain in place. Monsignor Lynn was responsible for investigating abuse allegations from 1992 to 2004.
“The rapist priests we accuse were well known to the Secretary of Clergy, but he cloaked their conduct and put them in place to do it again,” the grand jury said.
Monsignor Lynn faces a maximum of 14 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
In a statement issued late on Thursday, Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, rejected the report’s assertion that there were active priests who had been credibly accused of abuse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...st.html?ref=us
TUCSON — In the weeks since Tucson buried Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old victim of the shooting rampage outside a Safeway supermarket, a trial under way in the county courthouse here has struggled to account for the earlier murder of yet another child of the same age.
Brisenia Flores, along with her father, Raul Flores, 29, were murdered in 2009 when robbers broke into the family’s home in Arivaca, a tiny, remote town just north of the border. The person accused of being the ringleader of the robbery crew, Shawna Forde, a 43-year-old ex-beautician who traveled in the Minuteman movement, had hoped to rob enough people in Arivaca to finance a paramilitary organization that would seal off the border to immigrants, prosecutors and witnesses said.
“She did mention she was gonna change America,” Ron Wedow, an acquaintance and a Colorado Minuteman who testified last week, said in court papers. “And raise, raise this to a whole different level, is what she said.”
The two weeks of testimony, which ended Thursday, opened a window into the Minuteman world, and focused the jurors’ attention on divisions between participants who watch the border from lawn chairs with binoculars around their necks, and those whom Mr. Wedow described to investigators as “a bunch of drunken idiots, um, running around with M4” rifles.
A friend of Mr. Wedow’s described the “cowboy” mentality of some in their Minuteman circle, relaying to investigators an anecdote about a friend whose “dumb idea was to set the prairie on fire and expose” the trails that border-crossers used, according to court filings.
Ms. Forde, who has sat through her trial with her lips pursed in a small, placid smile, had flitted among Minuteman groups in recent years, finding plenty of supporters. By 2009, she was trying to find recruits to her own group, which she told Mr. Wedow and others would rob houses in Arivaca that she believed were used to hide drugs smuggled across the border.
“This makes us drug dealers,” Robert Copley, Mr. Wedow’s friend and the former head of a Minuteman group in Colorado, recalled thinking when he heard Ms. Forde describe her plan at a Flying J truck stop in Colorado. Mr. Copley bowed out, and testified that he informed the F.B.I. of what Ms. Forde had in mind.
Prosecutors claim that, just weeks later, Ms. Forde did go through with the plan.
“I suspect there is not a lot of money to be made sitting on a lawn chair in the desert and calling the Border Patrol if you see an illegal alien,” a deputy county attorney, Rick Unklesbay, told a jury. “Shawna Forde, though, was going to finance her Blackwater, finance her crew.”
Mr. Unklesbay added, “This woman might be full of hot air, this woman might be a braggart, but this woman is a murderer.”
At about 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Ms. Forde and an accomplice, Jason Bush, burst into the Flores family home, prosecutors say. First introducing themselves as law enforcement, and then quickly dropping the act, Mr. Bush is believed to have shot Mr. Flores, and then his wife, Gina Gonzalez, and their daughter, Brisenia, investigators say.
As the two intruders rummaged through the home, Ms. Gonzalez retrieved a handgun that belonged to her husband and began to fire, hitting Mr. Bush in the leg, prosecutors say. The two intruders then fled.
Ms. Forde faces the death penalty if convicted of first degree murder, as does Mr. Bush, who will be tried separately.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...en.html?ref=us
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Investigators were preparing Friday to insert cameras into an underground gas pipeline here as they continued their hunt for the cause of an explosion that killed five people.
If the cameras are unable to detect problems in the 12-inch-wide pipes, then investigators will have to dig them up for visual inspection, Robert Scheirer, the fire chief, said Friday morning. The pipes are buried under about six feet of concrete and macadam, not to mention layers of snow and ice.
The explosion on Wednesday night leveled two row houses in the 500 block of North 13th Street and weakened the remaining six houses. Excavators began razing those six houses on Friday.
For the owners of those homes, Wednesday night went from ordinary to horrific in one unexpected flash.
Bill Yanett had just paid his bills and put stamps on the envelopes. He and his wife, Dorothy, were waiting for the 11 o’clock news to come on. A couple of houses away, Don O’Shall had just closed a book and was walking into the dining room. His son, Matt, was asleep upstairs.
Suddenly, at 10:45, an earth-shattering explosion ended the calm. The Yanetts were afraid their roof had caved in from the heavy snow. Windows were blown out and furniture crashed.
“You just heard this big bang, then all this cracking and banging and booming, like a war going on,” Mrs. Yanett, 64, said Thursday, burying her tears in her husband’s shoulder as they recounted the scene. Five of their neighbors were killed, including a 4-month-old boy.
City officials said Thursday afternoon that gas lines running underneath the neighborhood had most likely fueled a fire that ripped through the eight houses on the block
None of the neighbors said they had smelled gas at any point. John Walsh, president of UGI Utilities, the local gas company, which serves 560,000 customers in eastern Pennsylvania, said crews had completed a routine survey of the neighborhood within the last week and found nothing unusual.
Utility officials said the gas line was a 12-inch low-pressure main, made of cast iron and installed in the 1920s.
Nationwide, it was the latest of several gas-related explosions in recent months. Last month, a 12-inch gas main exploded in a residential neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing a gas company employee and injuring six other people. The cause of that blast remains under investigation. In December, two people died when a gas main explosion destroyed a furniture store in Wayne, Mich.
In September, a natural gas pipe burst in San Bruno, Calif., killing eight people and destroying nearly 40 houses. The National Transportation Safety Board said that pipe had numerous flaws in its welds.
Two gas line explosions a day apart in June killed three people in Texas.
The number of deaths here was the most since San Bruno. Local officials did not release the names of the victims, but family members and friends identified them to The Morning Call, the local newspaper, as William Hall, 79, and his wife, Beatrice, 74, of 544 North 13th Street, and Ofelia Ben, 69, Catherine Cruz, 16, and Matthew Manuel Cruz, 4 months, of 542 North 13th Street.
The initial blast was so strong that it blew Mr. O’Shall’s front door off. He thought a bomb had exploded and he ran outside.
“There was debris everywhere and the lights were all out,” Mr. O’Shall, 61, a locksmith, said. “The only light was from Bea’s house, and it was on fire.”
The next moment, he said, would be seared into his memory forever.
“Somebody said, ‘Look up there,’ and I won’t tell you what I saw,” he said, tightening his lips as his eyes grew watery. “I saw Bea. Through the window. Her house was gone,” he said, but a small portion of it remained.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us...wn.html?ref=us
CHICAGO — At a cafe in the heart of this city’s exuberant Puerto Rican community, in the neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a waitress serves up favorites from the island: café con leche, rice and beans and guava pastries. On the counter, a framed photograph of a white-haired man sits next to a stack of petitions calling for his release from prison.
The petitions are posted at more than a dozen businesses in the neighborhood, where the campaign to free 68-year-old Oscar Lopez Rivera has deep and stubborn roots: he is the last remaining member of the radical group known as the F.A.L.N. (Spanish initials for Armed Forces of National Liberation) still in prison among more than a dozen convicted in the 1980s.
Volunteers in the neighborhood, on the city’s northwest side, have increased efforts in recent weeks to collect signatures outside train stops, grocery stores and churches.
Mr. Lopez Rivera, who has been in prison for almost 30 years, is viewed by some as a political prisoner and others as an unrepentant terrorist. Since he applied for parole last year, both sides have been lobbying the four-member United States Parole Commission, which is expected to make a decision soon.
The commission has received three large boxes of letters in support of his parole and many calls against it, said Johanna Markind, assistant general counsel for the commission. The response has included passionate requests from prominent leaders, a letter supporting parole from four Puerto Rican members of Congress, and a letter against parole from Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Mr. Lopez Rivera was convicted here in 1981 of numerous charges, including seditious conspiracy, a charge used for those plotting to overthrow the United States government. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
President Bill Clinton offered Mr. Lopez Rivera and other members of the F.A.L.N. clemency in 1999, a decision that stirred an emotional debate. Mr. Clinton said their sentences were out of proportion with their offenses.
While 12 prisoners accepted the offer and were freed, Mr. Lopez Rivera rejected the chance to reduce his sentence because it did not include all the group’s members, his lawyer, Jan Susler, said. If he had accepted the agreement, she said, he would have been eligible for release in 2009.
In January, a hearing examiner for the Parole Commission recommended that Mr. Lopez Rivera should not be paroled, according to several people who were at the closed hearing.
The F.A.L.N. was involved in more than 100 bombings in New York, Chicago and other cities, according to federal officials. A bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York in 1975 killed four people, including Frank Connor, a 33-year-old banker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...go.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — In many ways, the personal injury lawsuit looked routine: In late 2001, a government employee and his family sued the agency he worked for, saying it had placed them in a mold-contaminated home that made them sick and required nearly all their possessions to be destroyed.
But this was no ordinary case. The employee, Kevin M. Shipp, was a veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer. His home was at Camp Stanley, an Army weapons depot just north of San Antonio, in an area where the drinking water was polluted with toxic chemicals. The post includes a secret C.I.A. facility.
Declaring that its need to protect state secrets outweighed the Shipps’ right to a day in court, the government persuaded a judge to seal the case and order the family and their lawyers not to discuss it, and to later dismiss the lawsuit without any hearing on the merits, Mr. Shipp said.
More than half a decade later, Mr. Shipp is going public with his story. He contends that the events broke up his marriage and destroyed his career, and that C.I.A. officials abused the State Secrets Privilege doctrine in an effort to cover up their own negligence.
Jennifer Youngblood, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, denied any wrongdoing by the agency. “The C.I.A. takes great care to help protect the health and welfare of its employees,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us...ts.html?ref=us
A 37-year-old illegal immigrant was under arrest Friday after three people were found shot to death and three others were wounded at two houses just blocks apart in the northern Virginia city of Manassas, the police said.
The victims in the shooting on Thursday night included several members of the same family, but said Chief Douglas W. Keen of the Manassas Police Department said it was not clear how, or if, the victims knew the suspect, Jose Oswaldo Reyes Alfaro, 37.
Mr. Alfaro, 37, from El Salvador, had been ordered deported by a federal judge in 2002, but apparently never left the country, the authorities said.
Officers responding Thursday evening to a report of shots fired found the body of Brenda Ashcraft, 56, in the front yard of her house on Hood Road, Chief Keen said.
Inside, the police found three other family members who had been shot.
William Ashbey Ashcraft, 37, died of a bullet wound on the way to the hospital, the police said. A 34-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl were wounded; the woman is in a hospital in stable condition, and the girl was treated and released. Their names were not released.
About 30 minutes later, Chief Keen said, officers responding to another call of shots fired, on Brent Street, about a quarter-mile away, found the body of Julio Cesar Ulloa, 48.
A 77-year-old woman with head wounds — possibly from a stabbing — was also inside the house, the police said. She was hospitalized in stable condition; her name was not released.
About 45 minutes after the first call to police, Mr. Alfaro was arrested while driving nearby. Chief Keen said some of the victims had described the suspect and his car to the police.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us...as.html?ref=us
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