Kirby Wallace arrested: Manhunt for murder suspect ends in ...

A week-long manhunt ended peacefully Friday morning for Kirby Wallace, the 53-year-old suspect who authorities say killed two people and seriously injured a third during crimes at two separate Middle Tennessee homes.

Just before 10:30 a.m., the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced Kirby — who'd been on the lam for seven days — was in custody.

Wallace, wanted on charges of first-degree murder, felony murder, aggravated arson, especially aggravated kidnapping, especially aggravated robbery, especially aggravated burglary and theft of property, was captured without incident in Stewart County.

"It's been tough, we could've changed course. But we stayed the course because we knew...we would see an end to this," Stewart County Sheriff Frankie Gray said during an 11:30 a.m. news conference in Woodlawn which is in Montgomery County.

Gray said he was happy and relieved but sad for the victims' families.

“This is an absolute victory," Henry County Sheriff Monte Belew said who with help from Cpl. Stacey Bostwick were able to ambush Wallace from a deer stand. "Everyone came together."

During the Friday morning search, Belew said that by "sheer luck" he came upon two deer stands about 50 yards apart.

Bostwick handles a blood hound, Rowdy, and had gotten a good track and direction of travel at about 2 or 3 or 3 a.m., Belew said Friday.

They found two elevated deer stands about 50 yards apart. Belew and Bostwick each got in one and waited.

At about 10:15 a.m. Belew saw Wallace coming toward him about 40 yards away.

"He walked right to us," he said.

When Wallace was 25 yards away, Belew had an AR-15 trained on him.

Wallace started to surrender, but then stepped behind a tree and came back out with his hands near his waist. But then he put his hands back up and surrendered, Belew said.

"He decided not to (pull his gun) at the last moment," he recalled.

Wallace then stepped back out, went to his knees, and Bostwick handcuffed him.

They found a loaded handgun in Wallace's waistband, Bellew said.

"We are very fortunate we didn't end up in a shootout," Belew said of Wallace. "He told us it crossed his mind."

Earlier Friday

After a "credible sighting" of Kirby Wallace in Stewart County earlier Friday morning, the search area was moved from Montgomery County to Stewart County.

Authorities said Wallace was spotted hiding behind a chicken pen on a family's property in Indian Mound.

Mitchell Allen said that sometime after dark, his neighbor spotted a man 600 to 700 feet from Allen's home, in the 100 block of Wild Creek Road.

"He was hunkered down beside of a chicken pen behind a truck," Allen told The Leaf-Chronicle.

Allen's family was told to stay in the house as a SWAT team searched Allen's garage, his dad's barn and grandmother's shed. They cleared those areas and had several helicopters and officers searching the area.

The Cumberland City ferry has been shut down until further notice and all roads in Montgomery County were opened later in the morning.

Wallace: A TBI Most Wanted Fugitive

Officials had been searching Wallace, a TBI Top 10 most wanted fugitive, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighs 157 pounds, with gray and brown hair, hazel eyes, and possible facial hair.

Wallace was considered armed and dangerous. Authorities had been searching near the area of Cumberland City Road and Frankie Road and on Thursday the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said more than 400 tips had been called into the county's 911 center.

On Thursday, the reward for information leading to his capture increased to $20,000, and more than 400 tips had been received in the search.

Authorities had been asking residents to remain vigilant, lock windows and doors, and report any suspicious activity. The Tennessee Highway Patrol is warned residents not to try to confront Wallace, but to call 911 and wait for law enforcement to arrive.

KIRBY WALLACE TIMELINE:The series of events leading up to Tennessee manhunt

KIRBY WALLACE MANHUNT:Murder suspect spent childhood in woods, learning to survive

The biggest lead in Kirby Wallace search for days

On Wednesday, Stan Hembree, who lives in the Woodlawn area, found a dry sleeping bag and blanket on his property while on a perimeter check with authorities.

He said the authorities told him it was one of their best leads to date.

For Hembree, it was a worrisome development in a saga he wishes was over already. "He just needs to turn himself in," he said of Wallace.

WHO IS KIRBY WALLACE:For 10 years, Clarksville family welcomed him in

Kirby Wallace's victims

Gray said a man was found shot to death Monday, with his truck stolen, in the search area for Wallace in Montgomery County.

The man, whose identity has not been released, was found at the corner of Poplar Springs Road and Welker Road.

The man's Ford truck was stolen, and Wallace was later seen driving the truck, said Montgomery County Sheriff's spokeswoman Sandra Brandon.

TBI said on Monday morning that the truck had been recovered, and they believed Wallace was on foot in the area of Cumberland City Road and Frankie Road.

Just one day earlier, authorities say Wallace attacked a couple and set their home on fire, killing the wife and seriously injuring her husband.

Gray said Brenda Smith, 63, and her husband Teddy Smith came home from church Sunday to find a person in their home on Rorie Hollow Road. Gray said the couple was bound and the house set on fire.

The woman's husband, who managed to escape the home, was taken to Tennova Healthcare-Clarksville, where he continues to be treated on Monday.

The couple's son, who lives less than a quarter mile away, arrived at the house with a family friend who lived in the area. He had to break a glass window to get his mother out

The neighbor, Steve Downs of Indian Mound, said the woman's arms were tied with what appeared to be electrical wire.

"She was already dead," when they pulled her up the hill," Downs said.

KIRBY WALLACE:Burglar ties woman to bed, takes credit card, TVs in Clarksville

Reach Natalie Neysa Alund at nalund@tennessean.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

1969 York, Pa. race riots: The murder of Lillie Belle Allen

Kim Strong

York Daily Record

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the York Daily Record on December 18, 2002.

- From April 19, 2016: Allen's sister, Hattie Dickson, dies at age 70.

- From 2003: As he lay dying: The murder of Henry C. Schaad. (Kim Strong's companion piece to "Silent No More.")

***

One crisp morning in April 2000, along a dusty road in East Manchester Township, Donnie Altland stopped running away.

He made peace with his family, asked God for forgiveness, pulled a .22 pistol out of his pickup and squeezed a bullet into his temple.

The secret he held for three decades was out.

It was an awful secret about belonging to a gang that drew a line around its neighborhood July 21, 1969, then grew bloodthirsty awaiting a carload of black people.

Lillie Belle Allen, the daughter of a Baptist minister, became the sacrificial lamb that hot summer evening. The 27-year-old divorced mother of two innocently stumbled into the middle of a city's civil racial war, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

But no one would win this war. Each side would blame the other; some would call it "even," as one black woman and one white police officer lost their lives. After one week of fighting, the war ended, but a battle raged on in York.

Lives had been reshaped and recast, unalterably changed.

Hattie Dickson would never move far from where her sister Lillie Belle's blood spilled across York's railroad tracks, staining the hands of boys and men.

Donnie Altland would return to the city every weekday to earn his keep. He and his wife would raise two daughters, and he would become a church-going man and homeowner, forever haunted by a night long passed.

And one day, the name Lillie Belle Allen would move across the lips of a prosecutor, as single-minded as Altland and his friends.

Tom Kelley had been a kid growing up near Philadelphia when the riots occurred, raised by a mother who had encouraged him to study history's greatest leaders, men who had made the right decisions in tough times. As the second-in-command in the York County District Attorney's Office, he would be undeterred by the years that had passed since York's civil war, unfazed by the dirty secret many people wanted to keep hidden and unwavering in his determination to give a 30-year-old murder its day in court.

1965 — The Follower

Donald Eugene Atland peeks out from behind a row of boys in a photograph of his 10th-grade homeroom at William Penn High School. His short, dark hair and white button-down shirt reflect the times - 1965. And the single photograph of him in the yearbook reflects the 17-year-old boy who stayed in the background and would remain there most of his life.

Even as a teenager, he was good with his hands, working on machines and fixing things. He just didn't find a place where he belonged in high school. He didn't join the football or basketball team. He didn't belong to the marching band or the foreign language club.

His friends didn't either.

The wind was shifting for teenage boys by 1965. Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and The Temptations' "My Girl" told one story of life in the '60s. But the times, they were a changin'. Young Bob Dylan and his contemporaries sang of war and peace, revolt and revolution, as conflict had become the American way of life.

On black-and-white television sets, the images of Vietnam - of America's sons - flickered right before their eyes.

A fierce fight for territory was playing on the streets of American cities, too. The turf war between blacks and whites made the nightly news, as a young minister from the South led black folks out of the back seats and the colored bathrooms. Martin Luther King Jr. had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 with a message of change through peaceful means, but riots erupted anyway.

The Watts area of Los Angeles tangled in riots for six days in August 1965. Thirty-four people - most of them black - were killed.

But the message of change was quiet in predominantly white York. Equality? Tolerance? Hush now. Let's not talk about it, and maybe those contentious issues with the coloreds would go away.

Young black men and women, though, no longer accepted the place in which their parents were confined.

Although York's city schools had completed their desegregation 10 years earlier, blacks and whites still lived in separate neighborhoods in 1965. Like pieces of a puzzle, they fit together in odd ways, but they were rubbing uncomfortably.

Donnie Altland learned those territories as a city boy. He lived at 758 W. Poplar St., one of four children of John William and Margie Ellen Altland. Dad punched a timeclock at Borg-Warner as a sheet metal worker.

A few blocks away lived another blue-collar family with a brood of boys well-known in the North Newberry Street neighborhood, the Messersmiths.

Bobby Messersmith and Altland were the same age, both in the Class of '68 at William Penn, both interested in shop more than math.

Their similarities ended there.

Messersmith, like his dad, intimidated people. John Messersmith was abusive and a drinker. Classmates didn't see Bobby Messersmith pummel anyone, but they knew he could. More importantly, they knew he would.

He was the type of guy you either followed or avoided.

Altland, meanwhile, blended into the background. Yeah, everyone was aware he was friends with Bobby Messersmith, but Altland wasn't a guy to be feared. He smoked and drank with the Newberry Street crowd, but he was harmless, easygoing actually.

The only thing to fear in Altland was his penchant for following the lead of Bobby Messersmith.

More:York's race riots were a war that left dozens injured and two people dead

1966 — A Free Spirit

Hattie Dickson's free spirit couldn't fly far in 1966. A rambunctious child who had grown into an independent young woman of 20, she craved change from the country life where she had been raised.

The backdrop for Dickson's childhood was Aiken, S.C., a southern town where rich white folks had moved at the turn of the century to build their large homes in the country.

Dickson's parents, the Rev. James and Beatrice Mosley, raised their children in more humble surroundings. James Mosley worked at a funeral home by day, but his true vocation was as a Baptist minister. A deeply religious man, Mosley had strict standards for his children - no shorts or short-sleeved shirts and no dating until they were older teens. They couldn't attend basketball games at their all-black high school, and they weren't allowed in theaters or public places where they would be forced to sit in segregated areas.

The Mosleys shielded their children from much of the overt racism in Aiken, butHattie and her brothers and sisters knew it was there. They were called coloreds and, occasionally, niggers.

Dickson, married with two children in 1966, lived as exciting a life near the South Fork Edisto River as she could manage. She and her husband, Murray, rode to juke joints out in the woods or traveled to the stadium to watch rasslin'. But it wasn't enough. Dickson was a woman thrilled to travel where the wind blew, so when Murray Dickson's relatives in Pennsylvania suggested he bring his family north, they packed up for an adventure.

Murray Dickson moved first, sending for his wife and children after he found a construction job.

When Hattie Dickson arrived in York, she was excited to make friends and find new ways to plug into her social frame of mind. She danced through her house, singing with the sounds of Marvin Gaye and Rufus Thomas, raising her little ones, Todd and Joe. And she soon fell in love with life in a city of 51,000 people.

She knew that when her Aiken family traveled to visit her, she would have so much to show them in the bustling city of York, especially her effervescent oldest sister, the woman who Dickson saw as a second mother, Lillie Belle Allen.

1968 — The Sacrifice

In 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad carried passengers from Philadelphia and New York City to points west, cutting through the middle of a tiny borough two stops from Philadelphia, called Narberth.

Aristocrats had ridden past the Narberth Train Station since the railroad opened to build their country estates along the Main Line. Instead of attracting wealthy Philadelphia commuters, Narberth housed the Irish and Italian Catholic laborers whose ancestors had built the railroad then later worked in local industry.

The borough in 1968 didn't reflect the diversity of Philadelphia or its rich culture because it was only a half square mile, only big enough for a small downtown, row houses and a variety of old Victorian homes.

Narberth didn't replicate the race wars going on all over the country, and even if it had, Tom Kelley wouldn't have cared much. He was only 4 years old, and a more important battle to him was going on in his own home.

Time and time again, Kelley watched his father physically abuse his mother.

Anne Quinn Kelley, the one-time model and former college student, was a proud woman, feminine and loving but bold and determined. She taught her three children to be independent, raising them with the philosophy, "The only way you learn is if you do it for yourself."

She wanted to live that theory, too, but she was caught. Surrounding Narberth were the most affluent areas of Pennsylvania, yet she and her hus band shared none of that prosperity. Without much money, getting out of an abusive relation ship would be difficult, and she had two daughters and a son to worry about.

Each of the children was a handful, especially her boy. Tom looked like his father, but shared few other similarities. Much like his two older sisters, he reveled in the spotlight. Anne Kelley knew he would need firm discipline to seek the right path and the guidance of men more stable than his father.

Could she handle raising Tom and the girls as a single woman? That wasn't the path many women chose in the 1960s. They didn't often divorce their husbands, fight for custody of their children, return to college and start a new life. Anne Kelley had taken the abuse long enough, yet she would take it for a few more years before she ended her marriage.

When his mother finally took that leap, young Tom Kelley would learn that doing what is right can take great anguish and sacrifice.

1968 — The First Riots

Like many American cities, York was evolving.

In 1968, the National Commission on Urban Problems shared its study on the changes expected in America's cities over the next two decades. It found that cities would increasingly draw blacks and other minorities, while the white population would shift to the suburbs.

The chairman of President Johnson's Commission on Civil Disorders, former Sen. Paul H. Douglas, hoped the report was a wake-up call to suburban neighborhoods. They needed to absorb blacks in larger numbers because if black popula tions grew too large in cities, violence would follow, he told reporters.

Actually, the violence followed blacks' desire for change and the resistance to change - sometimes violent - from the white population.

The growth of the black population in York made the pieces of that strange city puzzle change their shapes and sizes. The chafing between them began to change the city, but change wasn't what city leaders wanted, and it wasn't what some of the residents wanted.

In York, city cops took barking dogs into black neighborhoods night after night. Black residents asked for the dog patrols to end almost from the time they started in 1962. Instead, Mayor John L. Snyder in 1968 increased the number of dogs along with the number of canine cops.

In the summer of 1968, riots began, rising and falling through July and August. Black residents had grown frustrated by the dog patrols and tired of racist cops picking on them. Black teenage boys would do much of the fighting, sparked initially by city police officers shooting into a pack of black teenagers.

In mid-July, boys threw stones at a car driving along East College Avenue. When police cars arrived, the boys bolted across a playground in a black section of town. Police Chief Leonard L. Landis said one officer shot once; neighbors who witnessed the shooting said more than one officer shot more than one time. No one was hurt.

Landis agreed the patrolman who shot at the boys was wrong but defended the action by saying the police officer had shot above the boys' heads.

His words didn't ease the minds of the black community. About 50 black residents met at Penn Common one night later to talk about the city cops. When Landis arrived, they held nothing back.

One resident told him, "What you don't seem to understand is that you have racists in your outfit. Definite racists. Bigots."

Landis admitted he couldn't easily change the 90 men under his command. Yet he failed to see the warning signs that black residents had lost their patience.

Black folks knew which cops had a grudge against their race, but naming them publicly changed nothing. Black residents formed a committee to ease tensions between cops and teenagers. The mayor refused to meet with them.

Mayor Snyder downplayed what was happening in his city, calling the teenagers throwing bricks and rocks at passing cars just a "few rabble-rousers."

The violence turned up a notch in the days that followed, as black teenagers began hurling bottles and rocks at cops and firefighters while they did their jobs. Black teenagers told newspaper reporters that police beat them with billy clubs and harassed them. Older black residents said they had faced years of job, education and housing discrimination in York. Complaining, they said, didn't work.

Chief Landis put cops on 12-hour patrols, sometimes 70 at a time.

He defended the police. The mayor defended the city. The black residents seethed at the defensive posture.

The violent episodes eased after a week, but the dogs continued to patrol, four cops named by black residents as racist instigators continued to walk the beat, and city leaders ignored the volatility of the problems bubbling under the surface.

Early Sunday morning, Aug. 4, 1968, Chester Roach, a 58-year-old white man who lived above Hoffman's Meat Market, 226 S. Penn St., burst from his apartment to yell at the black teenagers making noise on the sidewalk. He fired shots at the youths, injuring 11 people, 10 of them black.

Police charged him two days later with aggravated assault with intent to kill and aggravated as sault and battery.

The summer of tumult ended when the children returned to school. And despite significant property damage done primarily in the city's black neighborhoods, city leaders viewed that small leak in the city as patched.

1969 — One of the Boys

Bobby Messersmith, Donnie Atland, Mike Berry, Stewy Aldinger and the guys who lived in the Gap, the North Newberry Street area, rotated through Art Morris' North End Cigar Store on Gay Street daily. Morris never minded the neighborhood guys hanging out in the back of his place because he made a mint off the cigarettes, candy and food he sold them.

The Newberry Street Boys considered Morris' business their headquarters. They would run into each other at the store, which sat beside a set of railroad tracks that broke the hill on North Newberry Street.

The club's first president, Bobby Messersmith, called meetings at a location north of the store, the Farquhar Park pavilion. Thirty or 40 boys gathered to talk about their organized activities, while Messersmith took notes. They talked about cleaning up gar bage along the neighborhood streets and railroad tracks, holding sub sales to add to the club's coffers and handling trouble stirred up by other gangs.

When a new member wanted to join, he was asked to take a walk along a dirt path near the park as the members discussed whether the kid was nice, stayed out of trouble enough to keep the cops off their backs and was known in the neighborhood.

Gangs had evolved in the 1960s, some from social or athletic clubs. The Girarders grew out of the Girard Athletic Association in the city. The men wore satin jackets to display their affiliation to the club, so the boys followed. The Girarders sported gray windbreakers with dark letters.

The Newberry Street Boys had organized because they were tired of being chased down by Gi rarders in their own neighborhood. The NSBs wore maroon jackets with yellow letters - the club name across the back of the jacket and the gang member's name over the heart. A hardware store in York produced the jackets for about $15, a hefty sum for the teenagers. But territorial cliques needed easy ways to identify who was in, who wasn't. The jackets were a badge of honor.

The Newberry Street Boys patrolled the street where the Messersmiths lived. Their turf stretched from Philadelphia Street to Farquhar Park. The Girarders owned the area around Girard Park in the city's east end. The Swampers covered the Arch Street neighborhood. The Yorklyn Boys came from a neighborhood in Springettsbury Township.

Anyone could walk through another gang's territory without fear of a scuffle. But if Swampers drank beer in Girard Park or chased a girl dating a Yorklyn Boy, the gangs fought.

They used their belts as whips and beat each other with baseball bats. They might even use crude weapons they had made at the York County Area Vocational-Technical School from chains and pipes. They left bruised and sore, but no one was knifed, no one was shot, no one was killed.

On warm summer nights, the Newberry Street Boys rode the loop - Philadelphia, King and three lanes on Market Street. East of the city, they would stop at Gino's, which served the first 15-cent hamburgers in town. Sometimes they drag-raced. Mostly they drank beer and hit on girls, although some of the gang members were into the harder stuff, marijuana, even acid when someone had it.

Altland, a reserved guy, hovered close to his buddy Messersmith. Gang members either lead or follow. Most are followers, most want to belong to something powerful because individually they don't have much influence.

In January 1969, Richard M. Nixon had become the 37th president of the United States and offered this advice in his inauguration speech: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken softly.

Bobby Kennedy had spoken softly.

But their measured tones were silenced.

Now, change was a thunder roaring through city after city, and resistance was trying to be heard over it.

A music festival near Woodstock, N.Y., turned into a hippie drug fest and created a dissonant soundtrack for America's college-age generation. Sonny and Cher and the Temptations didn't represent these anti-war, pro-feminism activists, but the brash voices of Country Joe McDonald and Janis Joplin did. This young generation that watched the tug-of-war in Vietnam, race riots and the proliferation of illegal drugs wanted desperately to make a political statement all its own.

The German roots buried deep in York's soil shied away from dramatic reform. They avoided voting for the loudest candidate; they valued the politician with the subtle message. They depended on consistency and permanency. After all, many of them still lived in the same town where their parents and grandparents lived. They weren't always conservative in politics, but they were conservative in action.

They were watching with great interest America's plan to land on the moon. The disturbances of a year earlier had vanished from the minds of many of York's white residents.

In the summer of 1969, Donnie Altland, 21 years old, had a full-time job working on the city park crew.

The crew trimmed bushes, mowed lawns and dumped garbage. Altland, lean and muscular, drove a trailer with a hitch on the back, lugging the mower behind it.

He was nice and friendly to the guys on the crew, working hard and using his good mechanical skills on the job. He was rough around the edges, cursing and smoking a lot, but he wasn't intimidating. In fact, he didn't mention his connection with the Newberry Street Boys - until after the riots that summer.

July 17, 1969, was a warm Thursday afternoon in York, as a 12-year-old black boy and his friend experimented with lighter fluid and matches. The boy burned his face and was taken to the hospit al. Questioned by police, he blamed the Girarders, the white gang at Girard Park.

The lie spread through the city in a flash.

What had been a small flicker of anger and tension in the city turned into a raging blaze. The ease with which so many people had ignored the complaints and anger from black residents a year earlier wouldn't work this time. City leaders, city residents young and old, and the previously untouched in the suburbs and rural areas of York County would become swallowed up by the rage of boys and men.

The city would be forever changed, marked by fighting and conflict, black on white, white on black, boys on boys. And several uniformed police officers, charged with keeping the peace, would hide behind their badges as they cheered racist behavior by the city's impressionable teenagers.

Bobby Messersmith didn't need much encouragement to become involved in the city riots. His Newberry Street Boys had become a gang to be feared. They were tough and increasingly violent - because their leader was a hood, a ruffian.

Almost as soon as word spread about the young boy's lie, commotion between the races began. This time, the gang wars were white on black and black on white.

That night, TakaNii Sweeney, a black teenager, and another boy broke the windows out at Morris' North End Cigar Store. They knew the trouble they were stirring up. If the lie about the Girarders wasn't bad enough, the NSBs were really hot now about this intrusion on the sanctity of their headquarters.

Sweeney was in more danger than he was aware. He had toyed with Bobby Messersmith, whose father had an arsenal of firearms in the basement. Quick to anger and ready to do battle, Messersmith had a weapon in his hands before Sweeney left the area.

When Detective George Smith stopped Sweeney for violating the city's youth curfew that evening, Messersmith hid in the shadows and shot the teenager in the back.

Pandemonium ripped through six blocks downtown. Blacks and whites huddled behind bushes and poles, throwing rocks at one another and shooting rifles until early the next morning.

The anger of a year earlier had exploded into hate from the city's young blacks. The response from young whites brought the sky down on all of them.

By the second day, Friday, July 18, firefighters and police officers worked around the clock, as young men firebombed city homes and businesses with Molotov cocktails.

The cops and firefighters would one day be labeled by the handful of overt racists among them, but many of these men bravely faced the dangers of the streets each day and night. Firefighters ar rived at fires prepared to wash away the flames, but boys shot at them from windows and rooftops. Police officers, prepared to chase teenagers from criminal acts, feared gang members would rise up against them.

What was expected in a civilized society had been turned upside down in a number of city neighborhoods. Vigilantes created anarchy.

Fire alarms rang throughout the city, some at blazes, others false. A team of three city cops cruised the streets of York in Big Al, one of the city's two armored trucks. After protecting firefighters at a mattress fire in the middle of Hope Avenue, Big Al headed toward the shooting of a motorcyclist at Pershing and College avenues, where police had requested the armored vehicle.

Big Al's exterior, the cops believed, would deflect bullets. But as the truck sped toward the scene, a steel-jacketed bullet punctured the steel wall of the truck and fractured into three pieces. All three pieces hit a young police officer sitting inside the truck.

Henry Schaad, the 22-year-old son of a city detective, was paralyzed by one fragment that reached his spine. The bullet also hit his shoulder and ribs before he slumped to the floor. Still alive, Schaad told the other two cops, "I've been shot." They rushed him and the injured motor cyclist to the hospital.

The heat rose in the city, as more firebombs hit businesses, more rocks hit windows, and the toll of injured climbed in the emergency room. Mayor Snyder declared a state of emergency for the city. Anyone 21 or younger had to stay inside between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. He closed liquor stores and taverns and restricted the sale of guns and gasoline.

As Schaad lay dying in York Hospital, state troopers joined city cops on the streets of York. Schaad was one of 27 people injured in the first four days of riots. Three of the injured were children.

While York raged, much of the world grew still to watch something historic that Sunday. At 4:18 p.m., the Eagle landed. The first manned spacecraft touched down on the moon, and almost eight hours later, Neil Armstrong took the first steps on its surface.

American history beamed right into the homes of York residents. They watched the American flag pierce the moon's surface and heard Buzz Aldrin describe it as "magnificent desolation." But many eyes in York searched the darkness that enveloped the city, drawing out criminals for the fourth night in a row.

A meeting between the chief of police, the Community Progress Council, the district attorney and members of the black community that Sunday relieved none of the hysteria in the city. The chief wasn't willing to change how grievances with the police were handled or appoint a liaison to help those arrested find attorneys. Talk to the mayor or the public safety director, he said. He admitted that as many white folks were creating the violence as black.

That same day, several city cops cruised the streets of York, telling white gang members to meet at Farquhar Park for a rally. These guys always ran from cops, not toward them, but what had been normal wasn't anymore. They headed to the park.

Several uniformed officers jumped out of their police cruisers to lead the young crowd of boys in a chant of "White power!" One of those men on the bandstand stage was a 35-year-old cop who many of the boys knew as Charlie.

Charles Robertson, born and raised in York, typically had a congenial air about him. He coached city sports teams, invited boys over to his house to play sports, watch sports and even drink beer. Some of these guys knew him well.

The other cops were strangers to most gang members, men the boys had feared. But this time, they were on the same side, fighting the coloreds. The cops who led the white power chant were furious that one of their own was dying of his wounds.

Take up arms in your neighborhoods, the cops told the boys. Protect your families. Then they added another layer of fear to the young boys: The Black Panthers were coming. The police had been watching the movements of the militant Black Panthers for several days, fearful the men would join what was already a city out of control.

North Newberry Street had been a prime area for shootings. Several people walking along the road were shot over the weekend. Similar stories were told from the Penn Street-College Avenue area and Penn Common. Sometimes, reports of shootings would be called in to the police as a tactic to draw them into an area for an ambush.

One story of a light-colored car driving up North Newberry Street about 9 p.m. Sunday night would be frequently disputed. It was said that a black man was driving, the trunk popped open and a gunman fired a double-barreled shotgun. Boys later said they chased the car out of the neighborhood with rocks.

That same evening, the Cottage Hill Road home of Jimmy and Sherman Spells' mother was firebombed. Jimmy Spells learned from his white friends that the kings of Newberry Street had done it, Bobby Messersmith and his young brother, Artie.

The next morning, the Messersmiths' buddy, Donnie Altland, appeared for his shift with the parks crew.

Monday, July 21, was hot, nearly 90 degrees.

Barricades prevented traffic from entering city streets that had been under siege since Thursday. Only residents could pass through.

North Newberry Street was one of those neighborhoods, but late in the afternoon on that Monday, Jimmy and Sherman Spells knocked on the door of John Messersmith's home. They talked to his son, Bobby.

Jimmy Spells told the NSB leader that his mother had nothing to do with the riots. Call off his boys, Spells said, or Messersmith would be held personally responsible if Spells' mother was hurt. Boys on the street that afternoon claimed the Spells brothers drove a white Cadillac into the neighborhood.

As the long July day began to grow dark, at least 100 boys gathered in the neighborhood known as the Gap, most out in front of the Messersmiths' 229 N. Newberry St. house, next to the railroad tracks at Gay Street. John Messersmith's basement held an array of rifles, guns and ammu nition, which many boys grabbed to await the Black Panthers or a light-colored car whose trunk might hold a gunman or Jimmy and Sherman Spells.

Boys pointed their rifles out of the Messersmiths' second-floor windows or stood on the rooftop. Others lurked around the railroad tracks or hid in empty boxcars. They swarmed the street, darkened because they had shot out the street lights. They eyed a few cops down on Philadelphia Street stationed next to wooden barricades and directed to keep cars from traveling north on Newberry Street.

Donnie Altland grabbed a rifle and took a position on the Messersmith roof with a few guys, including Gabriel Mark Barr, an immigrant from Ireland and NSB member.

As soon as a white Cadillac turned from Philadelphia Street onto Newberry, the boys began shouting, "The niggers are coming. The niggers are coming."

Like a ball bouncing up the road, those words reached each group of boys, at least one-third of them armed.

Altland pointed his rifle at the car, as boys shouted for some of their sharpshooters to take aim. The car slowly reached the railroad tracks and inexplicably began turning around. As it stopped, straddling the tracks, a black woman stepped out of the back seat holding her hands in the air.

"Don't shoot," she called out.

Boom.

A gunshot punctured her chest, and she collapsed to the pavement.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

The boys surrounding the car fired on it again and again.

When the shooting ended, Barr turned to Altland, asking if he shot at the car.

The 21-year-old answered, "Yes, once."

1969, The 1970s and '80s — The Guilt

Lillie Belle Allen lay dying just outside Hattie Dickson's car door, moaning, "Somebody help me. Would you please help me?"

Horrified, Hattie and Murray Dickson and James and Beatrice Mosley cowered in the car as bullets dug into the doors and trunk. Glass shattered on them. Windows burst. For one minute or more, gunfire followed gunfire. It felt like forever.

The boys closest to the Dicksons' white Cadillac could hear the screams from inside the car, so high, so piercing that they sounded like children.

Murray "Bubba" Dickson, in the front passenger seat, tried to sit up and see what was happening. In the back with her husband, Beatrice Mosley cried for the oldest of her eight children. Lillie Belle was so near at that moment, yet Mama could do nothing for her.

When the shooting paused, Hattie Dickson rose from the driver's seat, opened the door and began running down the railroad tracks. She wanted to run into the darkness, where no one could see her and hurt her. But she forgot that the car's lights shone toward her. She returned to the car to turn off the lights, and her husband pulled her into the seat, begging her to stay there where she might be safe.

More shots stung the car.

When an armored truck arrived, a police officer jumped out, telling the boys to hold their fire. "It's me, Charlie," Officer Charlie Robertson said to settle them.

"OK, Charlie, we won't shoot," someone shouted back.

Robertson had been down this street before and talked to these boys. This was the man who had been with them one day earlier at a white power rally, whose fellow officers had told these white gang members to take up arms in their neighborhoods, to defend themselves against the Black Panthers.

The folks in the car were no Black Panthers.

"Is everybody all right?" one of the officers asked, leaning into the car.

"My daughter was shot," Beatrice Mosley answered.

Allen was taken to the hospital, and the officer told the family to drive the car out of the neighborhood.

"Keep your heads down, and get the hell out of here," he said.

The windows had been shot out. The lights had been shot out. The tires were flat. Hattie Dickson crouched so low in the driver's seat that she could barely see over the dashboard to return down the North Newberry Street hill where she had first seen the boys with the rifles pointed at her car.

All she had wanted to do that evening was take her parents and Allen, visiting from South Carolina, to J.M. Fields Discount Department Store. They needed a few supplies to go fishing the next day, and while they were on Loucks Road, Dickson had wanted to show them the grand fountain at the North Mall. But they never made it out of the city.

Hattie and Bubba rented a two-story brick house at 334 S. Pershing Ave., several blocks south of the Gap. Their house, where they had recently moved their five children, was sandwiched into a series of row houses, with no front yards and narrow back yards abutting an alley.

The Dicksons' front windows faced Penn Park. The Dickson children had played there on and off throughout the hot summer day with their cousins, Debra and Michael Allen, and their teenage aunt, Gladys Mosley, who were visiting from South Carolina.

It was long past dusk when 11-year-old Debra Allen heard a thumping sound coming up Pershing Avenue. Her grandparents, mother, aunt and uncle had taken much longer at J.M. Fields than the children had expected.

The children crawled to the window and peeked out. They saw a car creeping up the road. Thump. Thump. Thump. Then it slowed and stopped in front of the Dicksons' home. It was Uncle Bubba's Cadillac. The children moved away from the window and waited for the grown-ups to come inside.

Debra watched as her grandmother, grandfather, aunt and uncle entered. Their hair glistened in the room's light.

Debra waited for her mother to walk in the door. She must be out pulling packages from the car, Debra thought. But the door closed behind her relatives.

"Where's Mama?" she asked.

The Mosleys told young Debra that Lillie Belle had a cut on her finger, and she was at the hospital. They wanted to clean up and leave for the hospital to see her. This time, they would take the Rev. Mosley's Cadillac.

But Lillie Belle never came home again. She would never hold her beautiful babies in her arms, never laugh with them or soothe them or wipe the tears from their eyes. When the Mosleys and Dicksons arrived at York Hospital, they learned that Lillie Belle Allen had been declared dead at 9:50 p.m. They returned home and told the children.

July 21, 1969, slipped into July 22 as Allen's children, sisters, brother-in-law, nieces, nephews and parents rested together on the living room floor of 334 S. Pershing Ave., wrapped in each other's arms. They left the lights on all night.

The terror of that night would change the directions of their lives, each and every one. It would leave an impression that no love, no faith, no memory could erase, but they would all try.

When the sun rose on the next day, York returned to its chaos. Vigilantes retaliated again and again.

But Lillie Belle Allen's family saw none of it.

As her lifeless body returned by plane to Aiken, S.C., for burial, her loved ones in York piled into the Rev. Mosley's Cadillac Tuesday evening - eight children, Hattieand Bubba, the Rev. Mosley and Beatrice. They sat on one another's laps, pulled together as they had the night before, taking comfort in the presence of one another.

The sky opened up that Tuesday, releasing rain onto the hot, sticky surfaces of York. The Rev. Mosley drove through the day and into the night in that rain, 600 miles to Aiken. He asked Hattie to drive. She tried but couldn't do it. She was drained, frightened and grieving.

One week later, a Sunday, the vivacious Lillie Belle Allen was laid into the ground at Pine Lane Memorial Gardens.

When Hattie and Murray Dickson returned to York with their children, much had changed - for them and for the city they called home.

The fierce fighting that killed Dickson's sister had ended. It had filled seven days, required the assistance of National Guard troops and injured dozens of people, including children.

The toll on the City of York would be measured for decades to come. County residents, wary of conflict and impatient with radical behavior, would mark the city as a scary place to go, a place where the riots happened and could happen again. Cities all across the country suffered through riots in the 1960s, but in York County, the city would never fully recover.

And neither would Officer Henry Schaad. After two weeks in the hospital battling his gunshot wounds, he, too, slipped away.

Donnie Altland told his co-workers at the city parks crew that he was up on Newberry Street the night the black woman was shot. He had a rifle, he told them. They could see he was telling the truth, but he was clearly uneasy about it.

The woman who had suffered the loss of her sister didn't lock down her house. She didn't grow fearful walking to the store. She didn't close her children off from school or play.

Hattie Dickson carried on with her life.

It was not the life she had imagined, although she still smiled and laughed, still played soulful music in the house, still held her children tightly every night.

She was a changed woman. Guilt lived inside her.

Her parents would never talk much about Lillie Belle's violent end, and Hattiewouldn't much either.

It ate at her, though, and threatened to eat right through her.

The early '70s ushered in a new era in the United States. Soldiers continued to pour into Vietnam, and record numbers died there. Peaceful marches to improve civil rights never returned to what they had been before King died, and the tide of violence that had come with cultural changes receded slightly.

President Nixon lectured on global issues, and a new conservativism caught fire in the country.

The first half of the '70s was trying for Dickson. She spiraled into a dark place that she would never say much about. It affected her deeply. She wanted her kids to finish high school and go to college. She wanted her youngsters to have more opportunities than she had, but she became mired in her own life, falling fast.

Dickson had turned from the church. Her father exuded the ministry every moment of his existence. He was a spiritual man, a Baptist through and through. He sifted every message through the Bible and his faith when Hattie grew under his wing. Now, she had her own babies under her wing, yet she lost Jesus somewhere between here and there. She had turned down a road without a sanctuary.

The cross she bore in the early 1970s was her own, but she knew that everyone around was carrying it with her.

Dickson drew strength from her family and friends through those darkest moments of her life. They helped lead her back to God, and when Dickson finally opened the church door, faith and hope washed over her. Light replaced darkness, and Dickson began to rebuild her life.

She knew it was too late to save her whole family. Her children, Todd, Joe, Angelina, Stephanie and Toby, struggled sometimes in school. They got into fights and ran home for their mother's comfort. She was finally there, finally able to do something for them. She felt guilty that she had for so long failed in her duties as a mother.

The happy-go-lucky girl she was had evolved into a woman with responsibilities and concerns.

Dickson and her family moved from home to home in York. They struggled sometimes. But Dickson lived for family and church. She really knew very little of what was going on around her in the city or county.

She saw herself as a country girl from Aiken, never a piece of the community she lived in.

John L. Snyder, the anachronistic mayor of York, had died in 1969 during emergency surgery. The York Charrette of 1970, credited with easing racial tensions in the city, passed without Dickson's involvement.

The Vietnam War ended after 11 years. More than 11,000 York County residents served in it, and 101 gave their lives.

The county became more diverse as Latinos began to migrate here, and the city elected its first woman mayor in 1977. Farmland had started to lose its dominance in the county.

Dickson moved in and out of jobs, working when Bubba wasn't — at the sewing factory, Danskin, the candy factory. But through the '80s, her favorite job was caring for elderly people. She cooked, cleaned and chauffeured them around town. She wanted to brighten their days, and she did so with a warm smile, a loving hug, and a gentle laugh.

The elderly have a wisdom she admired. They reminded her of her grandmother, who would tell rich, colorful stories of days gone by.

In the '80s, Dickson stopped voting — the politicians didn't deliver on their promises. She watched two of her children graduate from high school. Her children didn't go to college, as she had hoped. They didn't have easy lives. They had their dark times, too, but Dickson stayed true to them.

Then, Dickson struggled with a question.

"What is hate?" she asked God. She didn't feel it and didn't understand it, but she could see it around her, had felt its presence throughout her life. "What do it do?"

1987 — The Idealist

By his final year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Tom Kelley had a reputation for making friends easily. Gregarious, fun, handsome and smart, T.K., as he was known, appealed to many of his classmates. He had been president of Alpha Chi Rho, vice president of the interfraternity council, a football player, boxer and actor. He was also a good student, preferring to study for exams over the course of days rather than cramming in one night.

Some people, though, were turned off. People, he learned, were either hot or cold on him and always would be. He was the guy for whom everything seemed to come easily.

Far from it. After his parents' bitter divorce in the early 1970s, Kelley's father practically vanished from his life. His mother, Anne Kelley, had inspired him to be successful, teaching him to be a fighter. She lectured on holding to his ideals, pushing him to make something of his life.

Anne Kelley supported her children by selling Revlon, then she returned to college. When Tom Kelley was considered for a football scholarship to a good private high school in Philadelphia, his mother told him to decline. She couldn't afford to supplement the high tuition, as she already had one daughter in a private school.

Then, young Tom became a bit of a hell-raiser. Even Anne Kelley's boyfriends faced the teenage boy's cross-examination technique.

People told Kelley he should be a lawyer because he was so argumentative.

He started looking at colleges. Dickinson, which he had heard created good lawyers, was the only place he applied as an undergraduate, and the college took care of him with a lot of financial aid.

Eventually, though, money grew scarce, and Kelley turned to the one thing in his corner: the law. He sued his father to help pay tuition at Dickinson and won.

He wouldn't open up to a relationship with the elderly Kelley for several more years, shortly before his father died of cancer.

After four years dating the same girl, Kelley broke off the relationship. They were too much alike, both outgoing, both always wanting to be at the center of the stage. He needed someone to complement him, he knew, and he had law school ahead of him.

He was headed to the University of Richmond, where he would study the art of law. Money didn't lure him into the profession. He believed his mother when she told him that there's a difference between people with money and people with power. He had grown up surrounded by money, even though he had none of it himself. Cash never appealed to him but influence did.

He hoped that practicing law would help him change people's lives.

The 1990s — Spiritual Woman

Church and family anchored Hattie Dickson to the spinning world. Her parents had always shielded her from overt racism as a child, even though she knew it was there. Now, she ignored it, turned her back when it slapped her in the face. Her friends were black and white, old and young. She welcomed strangers with the love she had for friends. Bitterness and anger didn't find a place inside her.

Dickson traveled as often as she could to visit family. And her family came to York, too. A decade earlier, her younger sister, Gladys, had asked Dickson if she could move in with her family. Dickson told her to pack her bags, and they would make room for her. Gladys Oden lived with the Dicksons until she found a job and could move out on her own.

Dickson had never plugged into York politics, staying out of the machinations of her city.

But in the '90s, she would stand face to face with York's mayor.

Dickson stopped at a city Laundromat one day to do her wash. Her friend pointed out the tall, broad man doing his laundry as Charlie Robertson, the mayor of York.

Dickson lived in the city for most of her life, but she didn't know the mayor to see him and didn't recognize this man as the cop at the scene of her sister's murder two and a half decades earlier.

Well what was the mayor of York doing in a Laundromat, she wondered. Intrigued by him, she stared. When she finally worked up her nerve, she approached him. With her friend by her side, she asked Mayor Robertson a question. He turned to answer and glanced past Dickson, directing his comments instead to the friend. They stood just so for several minutes, the mayor speaking to the friend and ignoring Dickson.

She turned her back. She knew what was happening. Her friend was white. The mayor was ignoring the black woman.

Hattie Dickson's independent spirit rejected discrimination. She turned away from him and let the moment go. The lessons of her parents stayed with her even as she passed the age of 50. They had protected her from racism. Now, she protected herself.

Dickson saw her mom and dad and siblings at Christmas and Thanksgiving, funerals and vacations. They all traveled to the Mosleys' for holiday gatherings, filling their Aiken home. The Rev. Mosley was by then training men at the funeral home and remained solidly a man of faith.

He never spoke of his eldest daughter's murder, nor did his wife.

Dickson didn't dwell on it much either, but she always avoided Newberry Street.

1999 — Seeds of a Case

A reporter called York County prosecutor Tom Kelley one summer day in 1999 with a question about the 1969 murder of Lillie Belle Allen.

Lillie Belle Allen?

He had never heard of her.

Sure, he knew that a young police officer named Henry Schaad was murdered in 1969, but how and why weren't clear to him. Kelley had been only 5 years old when whites, blacks, gangs and armored vehicles rolled over the streets of York. He knew nothing of the riots and nothing of a young black woman killed then.

But he would learn.

He had started his job at the District Attorney's Office two days before Christmas in 1991, driving his new Honda Civic, the first car he ever had. He had just married his University of Richmond sweetheart, Natalie, and just passed the bar. After Kelley prosecuted one of his first cases, York County Judge Sheryl Ann Dorney leaned over and said to District Attorney Stan Rebert, "You won't keep him long."

Eight years later, Kelley, 35, was the first assistant district attorney and a York City councilman.

Curious after the reporter's phone call, he asked his boss if he could pull the case file. Sure, Rebert said, but he wouldn't find much there.

In fact, all that existed in the county's Lillie Belle Allen file were Pennsylvania State Police reports from the summer and fall of 1969, interviews with suspects and witnesses. The case was never solved, never reopened, never prosecuted. Kelley scanned the thin folder and rested it on a filing cabinet in his office, where it would most likely gather dust.

Neither the Allen nor Schaad cases had much to go on.

On June 25, 1999, the Daily Record published a retrospective on the riots and murders of 1969. One month later, The York Dispatch published its 30-year anniversary pieces on the riots.

All the secrets of 1969 had stirred quietly in a closet for 30 years, but the retrospectives published in the two newspapers knocked on that door hard enough that people started to open it. Calls began to trickle into the District Attorney's Office. They were tips, details, little pieces of evidence about the Schaad and Allen shootings.

The Allen file still might be sitting on Kelley's filing cabinet, if it weren't for those calls. He might have ignored two murders that were 30 years old, as prosecutors had for years before him. But the information leaking out of that closet couldn't be ignored. He had to open the door, had to let it out, had to see how deep that secret lay buried.

He would find it buried under guilty consciences, faded memories, dead witnesses, scarce evidence and a thick layer of fear and frustration. Some local folks felt that what had been left in the dark for so long should stay in the dark. He would be lambasted and admonished for taking on the case, and before it ended, he would wonder how he and his family survived it.

He and his wife, a part-time accountant, had two children, Connor, 3, recently diagnosed with a mild form of autism, and Quinn, 1.

But Kelley couldn't see the massive amount of work and anguish ahead of him as the case began. He was idealistic. He believed in justice. It was why he had become a prosecutor.

He fought hard to put child abusers in jail. He skewered rapists in the courtroom to move juries toward guilty verdicts. He was a passionate, intense man who had fought hard to become a prosecutor. The truth must be told, and when it came to light, everyone would see that he was doing the right thing, he believed.

Both 1969 murder cases opened up, as tips led the District Attorney's Office toward names and details. Much of the information trickling in began to pile up in the Schaad murder. Rebert and Kelley decided that they must separate the two cases and build their own teams. Rebert took Schaad; Kelley took Allen. They would work independently and at their own speed.

The first person Kelley chose for his team was Rodney George, a York County detective who had served on the York City police force. He had two things going for him: He was an excellent investigator, and he worked damn hard.

George became the guy who cleaned the closet, from top to bottom. He would ferret out every witness still living. He would search for every gang member he could locate, talk to every cop he could find who worked in 1969 and was still alive. In the beginning, he and Kelley rarely saw one another. George dropped his investigation reports in a box at the county's old Zion Lutheran Church property, and the assistant D.A. combed through them when he had time.

Detective George started with the file Kelley already found: the 33 pages of Pennsylvania State Police reports from 1969. He would reinterrogate the people interviewed 31 years earlier. The state police had talked to boys who had been on the street July 21, 1969, as well as the people in the car with Lillie Belle Allen.

George and Detective Dennis Williams, one of several investigators enlisted to help with the Allen case, knew that Hattie Dickson was a crucial witness. She was the only person still alive who was in the white Cadillac with Allen the night of her murder.

James Mosley, her father, died in September 1994 of a heart attack. He was 72. Four months later, her mother, Beatrice Mosley, died of ovarian cancer. She, too, was 72. A year later, 71-year-old Murray Dickson died, after suffering with heart trouble and high blood pressure.

On Feb. 7, 2000, the detectives knocked on Hattie Dickson's door. They noticed her reticence as soon as they explained who they were and why they had come. Kelley, who met them back at his office, also noticed Dickson's defensive posture. Her sister's death was ignored for 30 years. She had grown cynical and distrustful of a system that had done nothing for her Lillie Belle, but she answered their questions anyway.

Her statement to the men that day faltered little from the original statement she gave to the state police three weeks after her sister's death. At that time, she had told the police about fishing that day with her husband, parents and sister, stopping for a little food and returning home before heading to J.M. Fields.

She said: "Just as I was going over the railroad, I saw the guys with guns. I got so scared I started to turn around. They (her family) wanted me to go straight ahead. When I turned, I had my head laid over. They said, 'Stop, you are going to hit the pole.' My foot was on the brake, but the car was moving. I stopped. I didn't cut the car off.

"Lillie said, 'Stop the car, and I'll take the wheel.' When I stopped, she got out of the back and went to open the front door. There was a shot fired. I put the car in park and pushed my door open and got out. Lillie was lying at the door. I could see her insides hanging out, and her head was toward the front of the car.

"I got up and started up the railroad track, and I saw the car lights were on. I came back to the car to turn the lights out. I started to get into the car and wasn't completely inside, and a second shot was fired. My husband pulled me back into the car down on the seat. There was more shots fired."

April 2000 — A Man's Conscience

When one of Donnie Altland's old Newberry Street buddies would call his home, he wouldn't take the call. He had built a separate identity from the one he lived as a young man. Altland, 51, hadn't run with the guys in decades, and his old buddy Bobby Messersmith had moved to the Philadelphia area.

Altland had married Cindy Bateson 25 years earlier, and they had raised two daughters in a home on Park Street in East Manchester Township. A century earlier, city residents had traveled by trolley to East Manchester Township, up this same road. Some would stay at their summer bungalows there and swim at the Conewago Creek.

In 2000, residents of Park Street owned or rented these homes, which had long ago been converted into four-season houses.

Altland still enjoyed a social life but now north of the city. He worked as a mechanic at York's wastewater treatment plant and socialized at Mount Wolf Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Vigilant Social Club. He attended Ambassadors Bible Chapel.

He once stopped in at a reunion of the old Newberry Street guys, but he didn't talk to many of them. He hardly knew anyone. The Newberry Street Boys who Altland had seen emerge in the '60s continued cleaning the railroad tracks and playing ball games long after Altland and Messersmith moved on. Altland hadn't stayed in touch.

Altland's life in the background continued through adulthood. He was seen as a friendly guy who stayed out of trouble, a good father and husband.

The only time a Northeastern Regional Police officer encountered Altland was when a construction company that had worked at Altland's home illegally dumped some of its trash. The police asked Altland if he could provide any information about the company. Altland, congenial and open, offered what information he could.

His next encounter with the police would be unexpected.

One spring morning in 2000, Cindy Altland answered the phone when a police detective called for her husband. He had questions about an incident 30 years earlier that Altland had witnessed on North Newberry Street.

"Oh, Bobby Messersmith," Cindy Altland responded. She told the detective that her husband had mentioned Messersmith being involved in a shooting back then.

When Altland returned the call that afternoon, County Detective Rodney George asked him to drive down to the District Attorney's office to talk about the shooting.

The detective knew Altland had talked to the cops once before; he also knew someone had given Altland up to the police three decades earlier. George had copies of the state police reports and the interviews with gang members from 1969.

One of those reports involved a brag started by a Newberry Street Boy, Gabriel Mark Barr, to his father, Mark Barr. The younger Barr, a 1968 graduate of William Penn, had been home from military service when the riots occurred. He told his dad he had been at the shooting over at that Negro's murder in July and that she had a gun and fired it at the boys.

His father boasted to his co-workers at a used car lot of his son's involvement.

Arthur Murphy, one of those co-workers, didn't believe the story and told Mark Barr that his son was lying. Soon after, Gabriel Mark Barr called Murphy at work to repeat his story, unaware that Murphy had one of his co-workers listening on the other line. Two witnesses were better than one.

They called the police.

By the time an investigator was assigned to interview Barr, the boy had returned to military service at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois. That's where Pennsylvania State Police troopers interviewed him on Sept. 3, 1969.

Yes, he told the troopers, he was on Newberry Street July 21. He had been there since about 5 p.m., hanging out at Bobby Messersmith's house. As the sun set, Barr heard shouts that the car was coming and someone yelled to Girarder Greg Neff, "Get 'em Neff." The firing lasted about one minute. No, he wasn't one of them, but he stood on the roof of John Messersmith's house next to a guy who said he shot at the car: Donnie Altland.

Just a couple of months later, Trooper Dale E. Allen asked Altland to meet him at the Pennsylvania State Police substation, 1195 Roosevelt Ave., the local barracks where 38 troopers worked.

Donnie Altland had turned 21 just a month before the riots. He had moved out of his parents' home and was living at 573 W. Market St. when Allen interviewed him Oct. 14, 1969. Still friends with Bobby Messersmith, Altland wouldn't give the trooper any information about who was on Newberry Street that night or who had weapons. Unaware that Barr had snitched on him, Altland told his version of the story:

"I was in the alley, and it was about 9:15 p.m., and I heard a shot, then I heard a lot of shots, and I ran out front of the house. I saw the armored car go down the street. I guess they took the person away.

"I was carrying a baseball bat, and I didn't have any gun. I saw several boys with guns, but I don't remember their names.

"I was up on the roof earlier in the evening, and there were several persons there with guns, but I don't know their names. After the shooting, we stood out front of the Messersmith home and talked for a while and then a policeman came over and talked for a while and then I left the Messersmith home and walked to where I live. I think that was around 10 p.m.

"I can't remember too much about what happened that night. It was so long ago." That was just three months after the shooting.

In 1969, Altland had been a thin, muscular young man with dark hair. On April 10, 2000, his salt and pepper hair framed a wider face. He had become a big man with an easy smile, a nice guy, well-liked by most people who knew him.

Altland had no idea that Gabriel Mark Barr had squealed on him to the police 31 years earlier. But the secret had been doomed to leak. So many people had known, so many of the boys that night had bragged about what they had done. But by now the gang members were older. Now they had children of their own. Now most of them saw that what they had done was nothing to brag about. They had shot at a frightened black family that had caused them no harm, held no gun, had no chance against their ambush.

Gabriel Mark Barr was dead, father of three taken by cancer in 1999, but his 1969 statement to police was on the record. He couldn't testify in court, but in his youthful past, he had offered the detectives the name of a man who would live most of his life quietly behind the scenes, Donnie Altland.

In the 90-minute interview in 2000 with detectives George and Williams, Altland broke. He ad mitted that he shot at the car's trunk that night. He told the police what he knew, but he implicat ed no one else. Something remained from that bond with the NSBs.

George now had a shooter, a credible man who admitted to being on Newberry Street that night. That was the piece he needed to help the case move forward.

But Altland was anguished. He returned home from the interview sweating. Donnie and Cindy Altland stayed up that night, talking about what happened. He felt sorry for what he did and wondered if it was his bullet that hit her.

His wife always knew Bobby Messersmith had been involved in the shooting, but she learned that her husband had his secrets, too. He feared what this investigation would do to his family. He might go to jail, and his two daughters would see that happen. He wondered how he could put them through such an ordeal.

Cindy Altland consoled him through the night. When she left for work in the morning, she assumed he was leaving for work, too. But before he left his home that day, he prepared two audio cassette tapes. One was for his family, telling them he was sorry for letting them down and explaining the days of rage that haunted him throughout his life. He gave them his love.

The other tape was for the police, his second admission of guilt.

He drove out of the Manchester area April 11 to a remote section of East Manchester Township near Brunner Island. He turned down Gut Road, a bumpy dirt road crowded by trees so thick that the wide Susquehanna River is impossible to see through them.

A man driving over Gut Road about 10 a.m. was the first to notice Altland's body and called the police. A road crew traveling back and forth on the same road that morning told the police he couldn't have been there long because they had just been past.

Indeed, Altland planned to take his life, and once he arrived at his destination - far enough from his home that his loved ones would never witness this tragedy - he acted without hesitation.

Dressed in blue jeans and a red flannel shirt, Altland rested on a mound of dirt, his gun underneath him. A pack of Marlboros sat next to the tapes in his truck, along with a note scrawled on a napkin, "Forgive me, God."

2000-2002 Bid For Justice

Atland's death stunned Tom Kelley and Rodney George. This part-time investigation, this long-buried case meant a whole lot more to a number of people than it would have appeared from that thin file Kelley pulled out of the courthouse attic so many months earlier. Now a man had died for his crime, at his own hands.

There was no turning back.

As the investigation cranked up a notch, George asked Mayor Charlie Robertson, his former boss, if he could meet with him. George needed advice about how to proceed. Police from 1969 would need to be questioned, and George was sensitive to how his fellow men in blue would respond to the interrogations. These men shared a bond that broke through generations and police departments. His police department had already put a city detective on the case.

Robertson was an affable man, a longtime public servant who had dreamed of becoming mayor since he was a small child growing up on York's streets. Although Robertson wasn't a brilliant politician, he hired people who wrote the budget and set his agenda and lured businesses into the city. He did little of that himself.

What he was good at was what he had always been good at - being a friendly guy, shaking hands and showing up on time dressed in a suit. He was dependable and most of the people who lived in York all their lives knew just who he was.

Robertson had watched the city grow and change and diversify from the same perch, the house in which he was raised on West Princess Street.

Pictures of his family and ball teams filled his living room. His parents, Milford and Margretta, were both dead. He never married or had any relationship that was publicly known. He lived alone most of his adult years.

When George talked to Robertson, he hadn't known the mayor was anywhere near the scene of the Allen murder. Although he knew Robertson had worked that night, George hadn't been aware that Robertson was one of the first cops on the scene of the crime.

But what the detective began to learn in interview after interview was that a 30-year-old secret could be dusted off a little easier than it might have been shortly after it happened. People thought the case was so far in the past that it wouldn't hurt to tell the truth now.

One day in the District Attorney's Office, Bill Graff, a county prosecutor, suggested to Kelley that a grand jury be impaneled to aid in the investigation.

Grand juries aren't like trial juries. They help ferret out information. In the grand jury room, jurors can ask questions of witnesses. In a trial, a prosecutor would be a fool to ask a witness a question that he doesn't already know the answer to. Unprepared prosecutors can damage their case if they use the witness stand as an investiga tive tool. In the grand jury room, though, the jurors are investigators, too.

Kelley liked the idea and moved on it.

This was an opportunity, one that hadn't been undertaken in York County in three decades.

But county natives were restless.

The mayor had gone on the attack. At a York City Council meeting in June 2000, Robertson said, "Is it being done now for political reasons? I don't know. Is it being done now to embarrass the city? I don't know."

This was the same council forum in which Kelley, a Republican, had lambasted Robertson, a Democrat, for leasing a car with city funds and argued for limiting the mayor's ability to temporarily serve as a city department director.

Regardless, Kelley was stunned to find Robertson, a former cop and head of the police department, disparaging the reopening of the murder cases.

The accusations stung.

Police Commissioner Herbert Grofcsik publicly declared that Robertson was not suspected of any wrongdoing in either homicide.

The District Attorney's Office retorted that no one had been exonerated in the case, and behind the scenes, they wondered why there was this public condemnation of their cases by law enforcement leaders. Unsolved crimes are reopened in cities across the country, some even older than this.

But Robertson was a study in contrasts. He bent with popular opinion or with the views of the people closest to him.

The county's prosecutors had no idea where Robertson's comments were coming from this time, but they would soon find out there might be more to it.

Thirty York County people were chosen by computer to serve on the grand jury, two days each month for up to 18 months in or near 1 Marketway West. There, in a room closed to the public, the all-white jury listened to testimony from every witness, suspect, cop or former cop who detectives could locate in both the Allen and Schaad murders. Common Pleas Court Judge John C. Uhler presided.

Kelley was the prosecutor inside the grand jury room, aided by other prosecutors. And another member was added to Kelley's team: Assistant District Attorney Tim Barker.

Barker has a savvy mind for the law, a man whose brain never shuts off. He had known Kelley since their college days at Dickinson, Barker a freshman when Kelley was finishing his degree. Barker signed on to become the prosecution team's researcher, a behind-the-scenes role for now that would eventually draw him closer to the investigation and bind him to the Allen case for its length.

Helping Detective George was Trooper Keith Stone, who the Pennsylvania State Police had offered as an investigator.

While the grand jury started to see witnesses in the fall of 2000, politics overwhelmed the national news. The next president of the United States was anyone's guess, even after the polls closed. Democrat Al Gore didn't concede the presidential race to George W. Bush until Dec. 13, five weeks after the election ended.

A political race for mayor of York began in the new year. It seemed like an uneven match from the beginning. The primary pitted Robertson, an eight-year incumbent lucky to have ridden on a good economy, against Ray Crenshaw, a city councilman who, if elected, would be the city's first black mayor. The winning Democrat was expected to face Republican Betty Schonauer, a former city school board member.

Inside the grand jury room, York County jurors heard Robertson's name come from witnesses. The first of them was shocking: former York Police Officer Dennis McMaster. On the stand, McMaster admitted he saw Robertson hand out ammunition to gang members. His implication of Robertson came not as the result of a question from Kelley, though. One of the grand jurors dug out this detail.

When asked if other cops were involved, witnesses said that they were. Who were they? No one remembered.

But they remembered Robertson.

He was a victim of his own celebrity. Robertson coached boys baseball back in the '60s and refereed basketball games. Most boys growing up in York knew Charlie Robertson, and through the years, he never stepped from the spotlight. The boys who saw him in York in 1969 watched him become mayor in 1994.

When Robertson took the stand in the grand jury room, he took the Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

Kelley wasn't a Robertson fan, but he cringed to hear evidence that the mayor might have done anything illegal when he was a cop. Kelley works with cops every day. His job as a prosecutor is to defend the investigations and actions of the police in solving crimes. If the grand jury handed down a recommended charge on the mayor, Kelley would have to prosecute a former cop. He thought it unlikely that Robertson would be indicted.

When the recommended charges came from the grand jury, Kelley was surprised that 10 were there for the Allen case, one of those for Charlie Robertson.

The grand jury's affidavit said, in part: "The grand jury found that based upon the evidence, the record supported a probable cause finding that Charles Robertson acted as an accessory before the fact in the crime of first-degree murder in the death of Lillie Belle Allen."

Behind Kelley's back, rumors swirled that he was just an aggressive, politically savvy young man climbing the ladder to Rebert's chair. At one of her daughter's swimming lessons, Natalie Kelley sat beside a woman chattering away about how awful Tom Kelley was to prosecute the Allen case. Neither Kelley nor his wife knew the woman. While public opinion leaned heavily against the re-emergence of this case, Kelley felt vindicated by the unanimous decisions. The grand jurors - 30 local folks who saw the evidence - agreed that the case must move to trial. April 26, 2001, just over one year after Altland's suicide, Kelley had the first two men arrested for the murder of Lillie Belle Allen - Bobby and Artie Messersmith. The first assistant district attorney viewed Bobby Messersmith as the most culpable person in the crime. Bobby Messersmith had been arrested before - twice - for shooting people in York. Neither died. He served nine months for shooting TakaNii Sweeney the night the North End Cigar Store's windows were broken on July 17, 1969.

Three years later, Messersmith shot 16-year-old Charles W. Keener Jr., a stranger, as he walked along Salem Road. He served six months in a mental hospital and nine months in jail for the crime. Arresting the Messersmith brothers first could make other people squawk, a tactic for confessions or pleas.

Bobby Messersmith talked. He blamed the shooting on someone who couldn't defend himself: Donnie Altland.

"I hate to do this. I hate to do this because he was a friend of mine, but Donnie Altland was the one who killed that woman," Messersmith said. Prosecutors didn't buy it. They believed Messersmith's shot ended Allen's life. Eight more men arrested in Allen's death marched into court one by one: Former Girarder Rick Knouse, former leader of the Girarders Gregory Neff, William Ritter, Clarence "Sonny" Lutzinger, former Newberry Street Boy Chauncey Curvin Gladfelter, former Yorklyn Boy Thomas Smith and, on May 12, 2001, Mayor Charlie Robertson. (Ezra Slick, who lived on Newberry Street, was arrested in July 2002. His arrest was slowed only because the prosecution team had been so busy.)

The District Attorney's Office timed the mayor's arrest to come after the primary, which he won over Ray Crenshaw. Kelley had received a letter from Richard Oare, one of Robertson's attorneys, warning him not to arrest the mayor before the election because the District Attorney's Office could be accused of tampering with the process. Charged with murder, a crying Robertson admitted only that he said "White power" at the rally in 1969. Before the end of May, Robertson dropped out of the mayoral race and gave up his political career. Kelley was drained. He had worked part time on this case for months, as had detectives George and Stone and prosecutor Barker. Kelley had taken every hit on the District Attorney's Office for a year.

In June 2001, one month after the mayor's arrest, a letter was sent to the York Daily Record and York Dispatch, their owners and then-Gov. Tom Ridge by some of the most powerful people in York County. In it, they expressed their displeasure with media coverage: "We believe newspaper coverage has been entirely excessive as well as irresponsible. We believe that in the guise of covering the news the local papers have done and are doing a grave disservice to the community. We fear that this unrelenting attention to the tragedies of 32 years ago, if continued, will have grave social consequences which have already begun to be manifested."

The Daily Record printed the letter and the 94 names of the people who signed it. Prosecutors viewed it as York County's elite subtly nudging the District Attorney's Office to drop the case. The lawyers were astonished and unmoved. Between the arrests and the preliminary hearing, Kelley and Barker set the case aside. Their day in court was coming. But not before a motion was filed by defense attorneys to drop the charges because of the 32-year time delay in arresting defendants. It didn't work. The prosecution offered deals to some of the defendants to testify against other defendants, and pleas came from most of them. They offered Bobby Messersmith nothing. Two weeks prior to the trial in 2002, the prosecution team assembled its trial manuals - a Kelley staple - at a retreat site in the mountains west of Mifflinburg. In large, three-ring binders, Kelley organized all the notes taken on each witness who would be called to testify, and his co-counsel was expected to do the same. Included in his team now was Fran Chardo, a Dauphin County prosecutor who had offered to help with the case.

Even this close to trial, the prosecutors were deciding which of the 400 witnesses the detectives had interviewed would be called to the stand. Too many witnesses would bore the jury. Too few could weaken their case. On the walls of their room, the lawyers hung photos, reminders of why they were there: Lillie Belle Allen. On Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2002, the courtroom of Judge Uhler filled early. Guards stood at the door checking identification tags. When the doors closed and court began, no one could enter. Twelve white jurors and six alternates had been chosen to hear the trials of Robert Messersmith, Gregory Neff and Charles Robertson. Unlike Messersmith, Neff had been offered a plea deal. When he testified at the preliminary hearing that Allen had been armed on the night she was shot, his plea was revoked. Robertson's attorney would only consider a plea agreement if it meant no jail time. It wasn't offered. At the front of the packed courtroom sat the three defendants, each at his own table with one, two or three lawyers. Tom Kelley's team sat in front of the judge's bench - Tim Barker beside Kelley, Fran Chardo behind Kelley and Rodney George beside Chardo. The opening arguments set the stage for what would be a 13-day trial with nearly 100 witnesses.

The first witness was Debra Taylor, a graceful woman in her 40s and the daughter of Lillie Belle Allen. Holding back her tears, she described the night her mother never came home, the firecrackers she thought she heard in the distance that night and her Uncle Bubba's white Cadillac that she saw the following day on Pershing Avenue, covered with dings and holes. The next person to take the stand was a 56-year-old woman dressed in black with her hair piled behind her. Her jet-black hair was streaked with strands of white. Still a small-town girl from the South, Hattie Dickson was terrified of the witness stand. She told the same story she had told before - traveling down the wrong road at the wrong time, unaware of the danger ahead, trying to turn the car, her sister jumping out to take the wheel and the bullets that followed.

"I heard my sister," Dickson testified in her soft Southern voice. "I heard her cry out to us. I heard her cry out. She said, 'Somebody, will you please help me?'"

The witnesses who followed her told their own versions of the events that night. Philip Grosklos, a teenager in 1969 who lived on Atlantic Avenue, cried on the stand as he described the Mosleys and Dicksons screaming while bullets hit their car. Former cops took the stand. Former firefighters. Former gang members. Former residents of the Gap. Some forgot details. Some remembered vividly. The night of the shooting was no longer the black and white image many had of that night. It had become painted in with the rich strokes of men and women, some deeply affected by what happened, a few just as bigoted today as they were in 1969.

In the light of 2002, the picture became as clear as it could be 33 years after the fact. A woman died. One shot killed her. The man who prosecutors believed shot her had bragged of his deed, but the evidence of a fragmented bullet was gone, the memories of those he told hazy.

For his closing arguments, Robertson's attorney, William C. Costopoulos, clicked through a slide show of the riots, disturbing pictures of the National Guard rolling through town on personnel carriers and police officers in riot gear. He talked of his client's heroism in the riots and of the lack of evidence that he supplied ammunition to any gang members. Harry Ness told the jury that his client, Neff, was caught up in the times. He had used birdshot, nothing that could kill a woman.

"These kids on the bandshell that night (at Farquhar Park) were incited," Ness said. "Had they (the police) done their jobs, no one would be here today." Kelley dramatically delivered his closing argument, shouting at times and quieting his voice to a hush at other times. "These guys weren't protecting themselves," he said. "They were trying to suck people into a war." He had the final word of the trial: "Is it ever too late to do the right thing? Is it ever too late for justice? Go back there and do justice."

When he retired to the prosecution's office, otherwise known as the squirrel hut, to await a verdict, Kelley was relieved. He hadn't seen his kids much over the last two months. He had read to them at night then retired to the basement of his spacious home to review his notes. Natalie Kelley had taken on the role of single parent while he handled this case. It took its toll.

He had dreamed about this trial and worried about what effect all of this would have on his life after the verdict. He would like to run for judge one day. He believed the answer from this jury would reflect the work he had done.

Over the next couple of days, he and his team pondered questions that came from the jury, analyzing them and trying to read their meanings. The microsopic study frustrated the prosecutors, so they watched a "Godfather" marathon on television.

The jury returned with a verdict at 4:20 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19. Two hours were given for the judge, attorneys, defendants, families, friends and media to assemble in the courtroom. Robertson was the first person in the room, sitting at the table at about 4:30, but he was emotional. His lawyers took him out.

At 6:20 p.m., the doors closed, the judge spoke to the court's audience, then the jury entered. Some of them had been crying. They would say later that this was one of the hardest things they ever had to do.

The families of the defendants sat on the left of the courtroom, three, four and five rows back. Hattie Dickson and her family sat in the same row they had been in the whole trial, on the right side, with victim-assistance coordinators Missy Barker and Karen Fry.

The jury foreman was asked the verdict for Robertson. First degree murder. Not guilty. Second degree murder. Not guilty.

For Bobby Messersmith. First degree murder. Not guilty. Second degree murder. Guilty.

For Gregory Neff. First degree murder. Not guilty. Second degree murder. Guilty.

The defendants' families gasped, Robertson hung his head, weeping. Hattie Dickson leaned forward in her chair with a small smile on her face, shaking her head in affirmation.

Absent from the courtroom was Donnie Altland, betrayed even after his suicide by his closest Newberry Street friend, Bobby Messersmith.

Tom Kelley offered no emotion from the front of the courtroom. He watched, though, as guards handcuffed and led away Neff and Messersmith. It took him three agonizing years to reach this point, to bring these men to trial, to find justice for the murder of Lillie Belle Allen.

THE AUTHOR

Kim Strong is the editorial page editor and writing coach at the York Daily Record. In 2002, Strong won a first place Keystone Press Award for editorial writing and her editorial page and Comment section won a first place publishers' award. In 2001, the Daily Record won state and national awards - including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award- for the series "Paper Shield: The Battered State of PFAs," whichStrong helped to edit. Strong has also edited "Never to be Forgotten," "Nine Months in York Town" and "Almost Forgotten," three local history books written by Daily Record Managing Editor James McClure. She speaks at national and state journalism conferences as well as individual newspapers about editing, coaching and writing. She serves on the Pennsylvania Society of Newspaper Editors' board of directors. A Penn State graduate, Strong initially worked as the police and court reporter at the Lewistown Sentinel, where she won state and regional journalism awards. She then worked for six years as the news adviser for Penn State's Daily Collegian.

ON SOURCES

This story was written without direct attribution, although every detail is taken from people, reports or historical documents. All of the direct quotes were taken directly from news and police reports. The following sources provided all the details: the Daily Record staff and archives; The Gazette and Daily; Tom Kelley; Hattie Dickson; Gladys Oden; Jennie Settles; Fred Flickinger; Tim Barker; York City Police reports; Pennsylvania State Police reports; FBI reports. The trial of Robert Messersmith, Gregory Neff and Charles Robertson; "Never to be Forgotten"; Daryl Albright, Northeastern Regional Police chief; Jim Hubley, a former editor at The Gazette and Daily; Dickinson College; Gary Sheaffer, a former president of the Newberry Street Boys; Jerry Francis, president of the Lower Merion Historical Society; William Penn High School's Tatler; the York County Heritage Trust; Debi Beshore of the York City School District; Jean Parks of the York County School of Technology; Jack Lewis of the Pennsylvania State Police. Missy Barker of the York County Victim Witness Program; Northern School District; Barre Shepp of York County Veterans Affairs; Manchester Union Cemetery; the Associated Press; the Seattle Times; The Independent in London.

ON THE COVER

The photograph at the top of the front cover taken in 2002 by the York Daily Record's Paul Kuehnel shows a van traveling up North Newberry Street, nearing the railroad tracks that run parallel to Gay Street. This westward view of the railroad tracks is the same direction Hattie Dickson stopped her husband's white Cadillac on July 21, 1969, minutes before her sister, Lillie Belle Allen, was killed. Just south of the railroad tracks is a small convenience store, known in 1969 as the Newberry Street Boys' headquarters.

WHERE CASES STAND TODAY

The sentences Robert N. Messersmith: Scheduled to be sentenced today after being convicted of second-degree murder. His lawyer plans to appeal the verdict. Gregory H. Neff: Scheduled to be sentenced today after being convicted of second-degree murder. His lawyer plans to appeal the verdict. Arthur N. Messersmith: Sentenced to 1 1/2 to three years in state prison for felony at tempt with the intent to kill, and a concurrent one to two years for misdemeanor criminal conspiracy to commit the unlawful act of first-degree murder. He was taken to county prison and is awaiting transfer to a state correctional institute. The other five men who entered guilty pleas to the misdemeanor conspiracy charge all can apply to the outmate work release program. Rick L. Knouse: Sentenced to nine to 23 months in county prison with a reporting date of Jan. 1. He also must perform 200 hours of community service and pay his share of the costs of prosecution. Knouse has asked that he be allowed to serve his sentence on house arrest because of health problems. Clarence 'Sonny' Lutzinger: Sentenced to nine to 23 1/2 months in county prison with a reporting date of Jan. 1. William C. Ritter: Sentenced to nine to 23 1/2 months with a reporting date of Jan. 2, a $500 fine, 200 hours of community service and his share of court costs. Thomas P. Smith: Sentenced to three to 23 1/2 months, a $500 fine, 200 hours of community service and a share of court costs. He reported to prison Friday. Chauncey Gladfelter: Sentenced to three to 23 1/2 months, a $500 fine, 200 hours of community service and a share of court costs. He reported to prison Dec. 10.

Awaiting trial

Defendant Ezra Slick , arrested in 2002, is scheduled to be tried separately, possibly in 2003. The affidavit for Slick's arrest indicates that Slick told investigators he fired four shots from a handgun in the direction of the Allen family's car. He is charged with criminal homicide.

Schaad case

York Police Officer Henry C. Schaad was shot July 18, 1969, and died Aug. 1. Police arrested Stephen Donald Free land and Leon Forrest Wright on Oct. 30, 2001, and charged them in connection with Schaad's murder. On Nov. 19, 2001, Bucks County Senior Judge Edward G. Biester Jr. ruled the police and prosecution were not at fault for the 32-year delay in the arrests, and the charges would remain. Defense attorneys had argued that the delay made it impossible to mount an adequate trial defense. Judge John C. Uhler said he will rule before Christmas on requests by defense lawyers that include Freeland's motion for a separate trial and Wright's petition for the trial to be held outside York County. A trial date has not been set.

Details emerge about the man who shot 3 Wilmington officers

The four-story stone-and-brick apartment building at 2450 N. Market St. in Wilmington was quiet Friday as local residents went about their day as usual.

Aside from what appeared to be two bullet holes in a concrete slab at the back of the building, the structure looked ordinary, a sign for Mary Herring Daycare posted in a first-floor window.

Till statue, Lin-Manuel Miranda: News from around our 50 states

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Alabama

Russellville: A northern Alabama community with large numbers of Hispanic immigrants is using federal COVID-19 relief money to fund an experiment to better serve students who are still learning English. They are hiring and certifying more local, Spanish-speaking staff. More than half of 2,500 students in the small Russellville city school district identify as Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are learning English. But the district at times has struggled to find the people and money necessary to help those students achieve. As part of a recent exercise to help the class learn English, a third grader pulled a block from a Jenga tower and read aloud a question written on one side. “Where,” the boy read, then slowly sounded out the other words: “Where would you like to visit?” “Disneyland,” one student said. “Space,” another chimed in. “Guatemala,” one girl said. Kathy Alfaro, a new English language teacher at Russellville Elementary, exchanged a few words with the girl in Spanish, then turned to the other students. “Do y’all know what she said?” Alfaro asked the class. “She said she has a lot of family in Guatemala because she was born there. And I told her that I was born here, but I also have a lot of family in Guatemala.” Districtwide, the percentage of students who met their language proficiency goals increased from 46% in 2019 to 61% in 2022. At the two elementary schools, proficiency jumped by nearly 30 percentage points.

Alaska

Anchorage: U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress, received a hero’s welcome Thursday when the Democrat gave the keynote address at the Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage. Those attending the largest annual gathering of Natives in Alaska showered her with standing ovations, spontaneous songs and gifts, including a bolo tie worn by her Republican predecessor, the late Don Young. Young’s daughter Joni Nelson presented the tie to Peltola, saying it was a passing of the mantle to her. The surprise presentation came after Young’s adult children joined Peltola on stage as she paid tribute to Young, who held Alaska’s sole seat in the House for 49 years until his death in March. Peltola defeated Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich in an August special election to finish out Young’s term. Those three, along with Libertarian Chris Bye, are competing for a full two-year term in the November election. Another of Young’s daughters, Dawn Vallely, later said on stage that her father would have been happy with the results of the special election, won by Peltola. Nelson wore the white beaded tie – which features the state of Alaska in blue beads – onstage but removed it to place it around Peltola’s neck when she greeted the family.

Arizona

Phoenix: The state has sued the federal government to be able to keep more than 100 double-stacked shipping containers that Republican Gov. Doug Ducey had placed to fill in gaps along the U.S.-Mexico border near the southwestern desert community of Yuma. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Arizona on Friday asks that the state be allowed to take the unilateral action it believes necessary to defend its residents from migrants illegally crossing the border. Ducey complains the U.S. government is not doing enough to stop migrants from coming to Arizona, forcing the state to take action. The shipping containers went up in August. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation last week sent a letter telling Arizona to take down the containers, saying they are unauthorized and violate U.S. law. Arizona refused. The Cocopah Indian Tribe in southwestern Arizona also complained that some of the containers were placed on its reservation without permission. The Bureau of Reclamation also demanded that no new containers be placed, saying it hoped to prevent conflicts with federal construction contracts to fill the gaps in the wall near the Morelos Dam in the Yuma area.

Arkansas

Conway: Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders defended her avoidance of local media in her bid for governor Friday as she appeared in her only debate ahead of next month’s election. Sanders, the Republican nominee who is heavily favored in the November election, has conducted few local interviews during her bid for the state’s top office. Sanders had agreed to only one debate with Democratic nominee Chris Jones and Libertarian Ricky Dale Harrington. Sanders said she’s been speaking directly to voters by campaigning around the state. “Freedom of the press is incredibly important, but with freedom of the press comes a great deal of responsibility,” Sanders said. “When they don’t live up to their end of the bargain, it forces some of us to go outside the box, which I have done every single day for the past two years.” Public polling has shown Sanders leading by double digits, and she’s shattered fundraising records in the predominantly Republican state. Early voting begins Monday in Arkansas. During her two year term as ex-President Donald Trump’s chief spokeswoman, Sanders scaled back televised news briefings after repeatedly sparring with reporters who aggressively questioned her. Sanders often sought to justify the lack of formal briefings by saying they were unnecessary when journalists could hear from Trump directly.

California

Atherton: Three decades after a car was reported stolen in Northern California, police are digging the missing convertible out of the yard of a $15 million mansion built by a man with a history of arrests for murder, attempted murder and insurance fraud. The convertible Mercedes Benz, filled with bags of unused concrete, was discovered Thursday by landscapers in the affluent town of Atherton in Silicon Valley, Mayor Rick DeGolia said, reading a statement from police. Although cadaver dogs alerted to possible human remains Thursday, none had been found more than 24 hours after technicians with the San Mateo County Crime Lab began excavating the car, DeGolia said. Police believe the car was buried 4 to 5 feet deep in the backyard of the home sometime in the 1990s – before the current owners bought the home. The car was reported stolen in September 1992 in nearby Palo Alto, he said. By Friday, the technicians had been able to excavate the passenger side of the convertible, which was buried with its top down. They also opened the trunk, where they found more bags of unused cement. Cadaver dogs were again brought back to the house and again “made a slight notification of possible human remains,” DeGolia said.

Colorado

Castle Rock: Brewing beer, cooking food, and refilling water bottles with recycled wastewater could soon become standard practice in a state that’s synonymous with its pristine-tasting snowmelt and mountain springs. Last week, Colorado’s water quality agency gave unanimous preliminary approval to regulate direct potable reuse – the process of treating sewage and sending it directly to taps without first being dispersed in a larger water body. Pending a final vote in November, the state would become the first to adopt direct potable reuse regulations, according to state and federal officials. “Having well-developed regulations … helps ensure projects are safe and that project proponents know what will be required of them,” said Laura Belanger, water resources engineer with the non-profit Western Resource Advocates. As the state’s population explodes, and regional water supplies dwindle, recycling water for drinking is a significant opportunity for stretching a limited supply, said Kevin Reidy, conservation specialist for the Colorado Water Conservation Board. And he said it’s a game changer in a place like Castle Rock, a city of 75,000 just south of Denver nestled under its prominent namesake butte, that relies primarily on pumping finite groundwater for drinking.

Connecticut

East Hartford: The grieving widows of two slain police officers gave tearful tributes to their husbands Friday during a funeral attended by thousands of law enforcement officers from around the country. Others who spoke at the service for Bristol Officers Dustin DeMonte and Alex Hamzy pleaded for an end to hatred and suspicion against the police. “To Alex and Dustin, you were both true heroes, amazing people, and you will be missed beyond words by everyone,” said DeMonte’s wife, Laura, who is pregnant with their third child. “I am so sorry this happened to you. Two of the very best humans. So kind, positive and fun-loving.” DeMonte, Hamzy and Officer Alec Iurato were shot Oct. 12 in what police believe was an ambush set up by a 911 call made by the shooter, Nicholas Brutcher. Iurato, who survived a gunshot wound to his leg, struggled to get behind a police cruiser and fired a single shot that killed Brutcher. Brutcher’s brother, Nathan, also was shot – possibly by his brother – and survived. DeMonte was a sergeant with 10 years’ experience on the force, and Hamzy was an officer for eight years. The funeral included formal, posthumous promotions of DeMonte to lieutenant and Hamzy to sergeant.

Delaware

Dover: The state auditor was sentenced Wednesday to one year of probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and complete 500 hours of community service for official misconduct and conflict of interest convictions. Auditor Kathy McGuiness avoided jail time for the misdemeanors, each of which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison, news outlets report. McGuiness maintains her innocence, and prosecutors sought a sentence of 30 days in prison for the Rehoboth Beach Democrat based on her lack of remorse. Her attorney argued that a $1,000 fine was sufficient. In July, a Kent County jury convicted McGuiness on three misdemeanor counts but acquitted her on felony charges of theft and witness intimidation. A judge later threw out a misdemeanor conviction for improperly structuring contract payments to a consulting firm, rejecting her request for a new trial. The conflict of interest charge involved the May 2020 hiring of her daughter Elizabeth “Saylar” McGuiness. Prosecutors alleged that Saylar McGuiness, 20, and a friend were hired even as other part-time workers in the auditor’s office left because of a lack of work during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Authorities said McGuiness then allowed her daughter special privileges that were not available to other “casual-seasonal” workers.

District of Columbia

Washington: First lady Jill Biden will host a roundtable Monday on breast and cervical cancer, part of the administration’s “moonshot” effort to reduce deaths from cancer, the White House said. The event is one of many being launched by the American Cancer Society. Singer Mary J. Blige, an advocate for cancer screening, will participate in the roundtable with Biden. President Joe Biden announced in February his goal of halving cancer deaths in the next 25 years. The issue is personal for the president, whose son Beau Biden died in 2015 of brain cancer. Biden launched the cancer moonshot the following year when serving as then-President Barack Obama’s vice president.

Florida

Miami: More than 230 pythons were removed from the Everglades as part of an annual competition to eliminate the invasive species from the South Florida wetlands preserve. Florida wildlife officials said Thursday that 1,000 hunters from 32 states and as far away as Canada and Latvia removed 231 Burmese pythons during the 10-day competition known as the Florida Python Challenge. Matthew Concepcion won the $10,000 top prize for removing 28 Burmese pythons. Another hunter, Dustin Crum, won a $1,500 prize for removing the longest python, a snake that measured over 11 feet long. Pythons became invasive in Florida after they were brought into the state as pets and then abandoned in the wild by their owners, wildlife officials say. Since 2000, more than 17,000 wild Burmese pythons have been removed from Florida, where they are a destructive presence for native species, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Every one of the pythons removed as part of the Challenge is one less preying on our native birds, mammals and reptiles,” said Rodney Barreto, the commission’s chairman.

Georgia

Atlanta: A beer garden near downtown Atlanta filled for a recent event hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock aimed at Latino voters. Some said they came to seek Warnock, who is seeking reelection in the midterm elections Nov. 8 against Republican challenger Herschel Walker. But others came to see a particularly high-profile Latino who would be speaking on Warnock’s behalf: composer, actor and filmmaker Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Who I’m really here to see is Lin-Manuel Miranda because I’m a really big fan of his,” said Camilla Estrada, of Atlanta, who described herself as liberal and said she plans to vote for Warnock. Georgia Democrats spent the first week of the state’s 19-day early voting period in frantic activity, as they implore supporters to vote in advance. Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams each held multiple events a day. Miranda also appeared with Abrams at a restaurant in suburban Lawrenceville on Wednesday, while the Abrams campaign later rolled out a recorded chat with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday night. Almost 575,000 people had voted in Georgia by the end of Thursday, roughly on pace with the 2020 presidential election, when 5 million votes were cast in the state, buoying Democratic hopes that a big turnout might help them.

Hawaii

Honolulu: Hawaiian Airlines will operate 10 cargo planes for Amazon.com starting next fall under a deal that could eventually involve more planes and give Amazon a 15% stake in the airline. The airline’s parent company, Hawaiian Holdings Inc., said Friday that it will fly and maintain an “initial fleet” of 10 leased Airbus A330-300 jets for the retail giant. The fleet could grow “depending on Amazon’s future business needs,” the company said. Hawaiian said it issued warrants that Amazon can exercise over the next nine years and acquire up to 15% of Hawaiian stock. Shares of Hawaiian Holdings jumped 13% in afternoon trading Friday. When travel plunged and consumer spending spiked early in the pandemic, airlines began carrying more cargo and demand for freighter planes grew. More recently, the cargo business has cooled off as consumer spending shifted away from goods toward services including travel, and airlines have been stuck with excess cargo capacity. Global demand for cargo fell 8.3% in August compared with a year earlier, the International Air Transport Association reported this month. Hawaiian said it won’t use any of its current planes to serve Amazon. Instead, Amazon’s air division will lease the first 10 planes -- which will be converted from passenger jets to freighters -- from leasing company Altavair.

Idaho

Boise: It’s not uncommon for Idaho wildlife officials to be called for help when a moose, mountain lion, black bear or other wild animals wander into one of the state’s rural communities. But Idaho Fish and Game officials are asking the public for help with a particularly unusual find – a 3.5-foot alligator that was discovered hiding in the brush of a rural neighborhood about 40 miles northwest of Boise. Southwest Region spokesperson Brian Pearson told the Idaho Statesman that a New Plymouth resident was walking their dog Thursday evening when they noticed something moving in the brush. Further investigation revealed the alligator – a creature commonly found in the coastal wetlands of the southeastern U.S., but certainly not native to Idaho. Pearson said the resident put the alligator in a nearby horse trailer until Idaho Fish and Game conservation officer could pick it up Friday morning. The department has the animal in captivity for now, but Pearson said it will be euthanized or given to a licensed facility unless the owner is located. Idaho Fish and Game officials are hoping members of the public will call the department if they have any information about the alligator’s origins.

Illinois

Chicago: Three young men were fatally shot and two more seriously wounded early Sunday during what police called a caravan of street racers involving about 100 vehicles that took over an intersection on the city’s Southwest Side. The shooting happened about 4 a.m. in Brighton Park after the caravan blocked streets leading to the intersection for illegal street racing, Chicago police Cmdr. Don Jerome said during a news conference. Those killed were between the ages of 15 and 20, Jerome said, adding that the two wounded are expected to survive. Police made no immediate arrests. Caravans blocking streets for drag racing, cars turning doughnuts and “drifting” are a “semi-recent phenomenon where they gather throughout different points of the city, and there were several others last night of no consequence … until this one,” Jerome said. The City Council member for the neighborhood where Sunday’s shooting happened said police and other city officials needed to act more aggressively to shut down such caravans. “This is not just fun and games on the street,” Alderman Raymond Lopez told reporters at the scene. “We are seeing gangs and criminality join into the drifting and drag racing.”

Indiana

Crown Point: A northwestern Indiana man who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting his 9-year-old daughter as he was talking to her two brothers about gun safety won’t serve any prison time for her 2017 death. A Lake County judge sentenced Eric S. Hummel, 38, on Thursday to one year to be served in the county’s community corrections program while living at home, followed by 31/ 2 years of probation. Judge Natalie Bokota accepted the Hobart man’s guilty plea to reckless homicide and neglect of a dependent charges in Olivia Hummel’s death, The (Northwest Indiana) Times reports. Prosecutors had sought an 81/ 2 -year prison sentence for Hummel, but Bokota said she agreed with Hummel’s attorneys that incarcerating him would result in further trauma to his boys. According to court records, Hummel said he was showing a handgun to his sons and telling them to never play with it “because it can kill someone” when he accidentally shot and killed his daughter. Hummel told a 911 dispatcher he didn’t realize the gun was loaded when he pulled the trigger. He admitted in his plea agreement that he was talking to his sons about gun safety in a bedroom of his Hobart home in June 2017 when he pointed a handgun at the boys and pulled the trigger.

Iowa

Grinnell: In a rare move, leaders of Grinnell College and the city appealed this month for the public’s help to put an end to racial harassment, slurs and graffiti that have shaken the campus community this fall. In an open letter to the public Oct. 16, Grinnell Mayor Dan F. Agnew and Grinnell College President Anne F. Harris asked residents to mobilize against the harassment against black citizens, students and community members and not be complacent to any racism they may witness. They urged residents to report any harassment or vandalism to police, tip police if they know any individuals who have been involved, and to enroll in bystander intervention training to help prevent future incidents. Grinnell police said Friday that they had only one formal incident report, and no arrests had been made. But in a statement to the campus community Oct. 12, the private college said there had been several incidents, including defacement of campus signs and vehicles with racist and white supremacist graffiti and harassment of community members by “unknown individuals screaming slurs from moving vehicles.” “We also know that additional incidents may not have been reported,” the statement said. Grinnell, routinely ranked as one of the nation’s best liberal arts colleges, has a diverse student body.

Kansas

Topeka: Two years after her mate’s death, a female lion at the Topeka Zoo has grown a mane. The confident, sassy African lion named Zuri was always pretty much in charge of her three-member pride at the zoo, said her animal curator, Shanna Simpson. But staff members were still taken aback when, in the wake of her mate’s death two years ago, the aging lioness began growing what appeared to be a “mohawk” atop her head. That was followed by a rare and significant growth of the fur around Zuri’s head and neck, Simpson said. Zuri is intelligent, feisty and easy to train, Simpson said. The Topeka Zoo acquired Zuri and sister Asante in 2005 from the Fort Worth Zoo in Texas, then in 2006 it acquired Avus from the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin, to mate with Zuri and Asante. Avus had a large mane. Female African lions are attracted to males with large manes, Simpson said. Those manes help protect the males as they fight with other lions and with predators such as leopards and hyenas, she said. Zoo staff suspect Zuri’s increase in fur was triggered by the death of Avus, which left she and her sister as the only remaining members of their pride, Simpson said. “She feels like she needs to protect her pride, so her testosterone increases,” Simpson said. “And boom, she’s got more fur around her neck.”

Kentucky

Louisville: Local public transit workers have authorized a strike, but they aren’t walking out just yet. Union members with the Transit Authority of River City voted 95% in favor of the strike authorization Thursday, amid contentious contract negotiations. For now, buses will continue to run as scheduled, with no immediate plans to initiate a strike, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1447 President Lillian Brents said after the vote. The two sides are set to return to the bargaining table Nov. 2. Union leadership said workers want “a safe workplace and a fair contract.” The union is asking for a 6% raise for all workers after one year and 4% raises after years two and three, along with a cost-of-living adjustment of 1.25% every six months. TARC has offered a 3% raise for technical maintenance workers and radio room employees, a 2.5% raise for coach operators and a 1% raise for nontechnical maintenance workers, according to the union. The raises would take place in each year of the three-year contract. They do not include a cost-of-living adjustment. TARC claims the union’s salary demands are unrealistic and would exceed TARC’s annual budget, which is set by Louisville’s mayor and Metro Council.

Louisiana

New Orleans: Prohibitions against nonunanimous jury convictions – outlawed by Louisiana voters in 2018 and, later, by the U.S. Supreme Court – do not have to apply retroactively to earlier convictions, Louisiana’s highest court ruled Friday. The ruling came in the case of Reginald Reddick, convicted of murder by a 10-2 jury vote in 1997, but the court acknowledged it had implications for hundreds of others convicted with 10-2 or 11-1 jury votes. In 2018, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment prohibiting nonunanimous verdicts in trials for crimes committed after Jan. 1, 2019. At the time, Louisiana was one of only two states allowing such verdicts. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous verdicts were unconstitutional, broadening the effect of the state constitutional amendment. But in 2021, the Supreme Court made clear in a case known as Ramos v. Louisiana that its decision against nonunanimous verdicts applied only to future cases and cases in which the defendants’ appeals had not been exhausted. Friday’s state high court majority ruling by Justice Scott Crichton cited the Ramos case and other jurisprudence in determining that neither federal nor state law required a retroactive application of the prohibition.

Maine

Lewiston: A Republican congressional hopeful in a highly competitive race is spreading misinformation about the state’s housing policies, public housing directors said. Former U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, who narrowly defeated the Republican in 2018. During his campaign, Poliquin has relayed a story about a woman living in her car who allegedly told him she was taken off a housing list because of immigrants who are living in the country illegally. Poliquin, who has focused his campaign on issues such as curtailing immigration and protecting gun rights, used the anecdote as part of his argument for increased border security. The Maine Association of Public Housing Authority Directors rebuked the story on Thursday with a statement to the Bangor Daily News that did not name the candidate but came in response to his statements. The statement said: “Such misinformation erodes trust in the public housing system on which so many individuals and families depend for safe, quality affordable housing, and it cannot be left uncorrected.” Eligibility for federal housing assistance is limited to U.S. citizens and noncitizens who have eligible immigration status, federal rules state.

Maryland

Annapolis: A video shows Republican Dan Cox, who is running for governor, accepting a gift from a young man wearing a shirt with a Proud Boys insignia during the candidate’s primary victory party this summer. The video, obtained by The Washington Post, shows Cox accepting a comb from him. “Here, this is a present from Maryland Proud Boys to you,” the young man said in video footage publicly posted on Cox’s Vimeo account. Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, were involved in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After accepting the gift, Cox asked the man’s name and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you,” Cox said, before greeting other supporters. The Washington Post reports the clip was removed after the newspaper contacted Cox’s campaign, which responded with a statement denying an association with the young man. “In the noise of the victory celebration, it was hard to hear what was being said,” Cox said, adding that he was surprised by the man handing him something and that “frankly, I did not even keep the comb.” Cox has reiterated false claims that the 2020 presidential election “was stolen” from Donald Trump, and he volunteered to help decertify results in Pennsylvania. He has also issued denials and apologies about his conduct surrounding Jan. 6. Although he said he attended the “Stop the Steal” rally, he has said he left before the march to the Capitol.

Massachusetts

Plympton: A nearly three-week strike by truckers at New England’s largest wholesale food distributor has come to an end with a new labor agreement, the Teamsters union said. The five-year agreement includes an immediate $5 per hour pay raise, an $11 per hour raise over the course of the agreement, improved retirement benefits, and keeps drivers on the union health insurance plan, the Teamsters Local 653 said in a Facebook post Thursday. About 300 workers at the Sysco facility in Plympton south of Boston went on strike Oct. 1. “I’ve never been prouder to be a Teamster. This fight proves that we truly are the biggest, fastest, strongest union in the world,” Local 653 shop steward Kevin Whitten said. “This strike brought members together like never before and built solidarity that will continue for years to come.” An email seeking comment was left Friday with a spokesperson for Houston-based Sysco. More than a dozen picketers at the facility were arrested early Monday after blocking the exits with tractor-trailers and preventing some employees from leaving. Sysco, which has distribution facilities across the country, supplies food to schools, hospitals, nursing homes, restaurants and other businesses. The Plympton facility remained operational during the strike with third-party drivers.

Michigan

Detroit: A teenager accused of killing four fellow students and injuring more at his high school is expected to plead guilty to murder this week, authorities said Friday. Ethan Crumbley had created images of violence during a classroom assignment last November but was not sent home from Oxford High School in southeastern Michigan. He pulled out a gun a few hours later and committed a mass shooting. Authorities have pinned some responsibility on Crumbley’s parents, portraying them as a dysfunctional pair who ignored their son’s mental health needs and happily provided a gun as a gift just days before the attack. They also face charges. Crumbley, 16, is due in court Monday. “We can confirm that the shooter is expected to plead guilty to all 24 charges, including terrorism, and the prosecutor has notified the victims,” said David Williams, chief assistant prosecutor in Oakland County. A message seeking comment was left for the boy’s lawyers. Crumbley was 15 when the shooting occurred at Oxford High, roughly 30 miles north of Detroit.

Minnesota

Minneapolis: Two former Minneapolis police officers charged in George Floyd’s death are heading to trial on state aiding and abetting counts, the third and likely final criminal proceeding in a killing that mobilized protesters worldwide against racial injustice in policing. J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao have already been convicted of federal counts for violating Floyd’s civil rights and begun serving those sentences. Many witnesses expected to testify at their state trial have already done so at both their federal trial and at the state trial against their former colleague, Derek Chauvin. While much of the evidence in this proceeding will look similar, there will be some key differences. Jury selection gets underway Monday.

Mississippi

Greenwood: Hundreds of people applauded – and some wiped away tears – as the community unveiled a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, not far from where white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager over accusations he had flirted with a white woman in a country store. “Change has come, and it will continue to happen,” Madison Harper, a senior at Leflore County High School, told a racially diverse audience at the statue’s dedication. “Decades ago, our parents and grandparents could not envision that a moment like today would transpire.” The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The 9-foot-tall bronze statue in Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, dress shirt and tie with one hand on the brim of a hat. The rhythm and blues song “Wake Up, Everybody” played as workers pulled a tarp off the figure. Dozens of people surged forward, shooting photos and video on cellphones.

Missouri

Columbia: Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a top Republican prospect for governor, wants to block public funding for library books that might appeal to the “prurient” – meaning sexual – interests of minors. Ashcroft proposed the new rule on libraries last week. It does not include a more-detailed definition or include examples of which specific books would be restricted as appealing sexually to children or teenagers. In a statement, the Missouri Library Association called Ashcroft’s rule “an infringement on the professional judgment of librarians, and an effort to further stoke division in the communities that libraries serve.” The group warned that small and urban libraries, which rely most on state funding, would face the greatest impact from the policy. Ashcroft on Friday said he didn’t propose the rule in response to any particular book but hoped it would prevent potential issues. “I know that a lot of Missouri libraries are doing a good job on this and reflecting the values of the taxpayers that paid for the materials,” Ashcroft said. “But I just think it’s good to have some guidelines to make sure that we’re reinforcing that parents are in control.” The proposal would require state-funded libraries to adopt policies on the age-appropriateness of literature, which is already common at both school and public libraries in the state. And under the rule, anyone could challenge access to books. The proposal is what’s known as an administrative rule, which would have the same effect as a law if enacted.

Montana

Helena: Two physician groups have asked state election officials to issue a correction to statements printed in a voter information pamphlet that they argue are false and and could confuse voters as they consider an abortion-related ballot measure. The complaint comes from two groups that oppose a referendum that would raise the prospect of criminal charges for health care providers unless they take “all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life” of an infant born alive, including after an attempted abortion. At issue is language in the pamphlet written by supporters that explains the proposed measure. Supporters say the referendum requires medical care to be provided if an infant is born alive after induced labor, cesarean section, attempted abortion or other method. The physicians say that supporters dropped a word from the language of the proposal and that the law, if passed, would also apply to an infant born as a result of natural labor, even if a fetus was born extremely preterm, and regardless of the infant’s prognosis or the family’s wishes. The complaint was made Friday by the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology on Friday. They asked the Montana Secretary of State’s Office to issue a correction to statements.

Nebraska

Omaha: Union Pacific delivered 13% more profit in the third quarter, but the railroad predicted Thursday that its customers will ship fewer items than it expected, confirming the economy is slowing down in the face of soaring inflation. The Omaha-based railroad said it now expects the number of shipments it handles to be up about 3% this year and match the third-quarter number. Previously, Union Pacific had predicted that volume would be up 4% to 5% this year. “I have no idea if we’re in a recession or one is looming,” UP CEO Lance Fritz said. “I do know that the economy is slowing down.” Union Pacific reported $1.9 billion profit, or $3.05 per share, in the quarter. That’s up from $1.67 billion, or $2.57 per share, a year ago, but this year’s results were weighed down because the new contracts the railroads agreed to with their 12 unions cost $114 million more than Union Pacific had been planning on. Without that one-time charge for the new contracts, which only half of the unions have approved, Union Pacific would have reported earnings per share of $3.19. The results exceeded Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of seven analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $3.06 per share.

Nevada

Reno: A rural county can start hand-counting mail-in ballots two weeks before Election Day, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday, but it won’t be allowed to livestream the tallying and must make other changes to its plans. The ruling came in response to an emergency petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, which challenged several aspects of Nye County’s plan to start hand-counting votes this week. The ACLU said in its lawsuit that the plan risked leaking early voting results. It also said that rules on touch screens to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act were too vague and restrictive and that the county violated state law with its “stringent signature verification” for voter ID. Located between Las Vegas and Reno, rural Nye County was one of the first jurisdictions nationwide to act on election conspiracies related to mistrust in voting machines. Alongside the primary machine tabulation process, Interim County Clerk Mark Kampf’s plans to publicly hand-count all paper ballots. The hand count was first proposed to county commissioners by Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant in response to false claims about Dominion voting machines. Sadmira Ramic, the ACLU of Nevada’s voting rights attorney, praised the ruling.

New Hampshire

Keene: A small plane crashed into a building, killing the two people on board and sparking a large fire on the ground, authorities said. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement Saturday that a single-engine Beechcraft Sierra aircraft crashed into a building north of Keene Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Keene on Friday evening. City officials said on their Facebook page that no one was injured in the building hit by the plane but that “those on the plane have perished.” “The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate. The NTSB will be in charge of the investigation and will provide additional updates,” the FAA said. Keene Mayor George Hansel told the Associated Press that two people on the plane died but that they have not been identified. He said the the plane hit a two-story barn connected to a multi-family apartment building. All eight people were evacuated from the apartment building due to the subsequent fire. At a morning press conference, Hansel said the plane was owned by Monadnock Aviation, which is based at the airport. He said it was unclear where the plane was headed, and no one answered the phone at Monadnock. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, and the operations at the airport were not affected, he said.

New Jersey

Trenton: The state’s new K-12 public school mental health plan is facing lots of opposition from state lawmakers who say they won’t back its proposal to eliminate the decades-old School Based Youth Services program, which provides critical counseling and support for teens in low-performing districts. The School Based Youth Services program, set up in 90 of the state’s public schools, is scheduled to be eliminated by June 2023 to make way for NJ4S, New Jersey Statewide Student Support Service Network, an expanded and revamped system that would be available to all or most of the state’s 2,400 schools. Unveiled in October as a “first-in-the-nation” effort to centralize services and spread them beyond schools and into libraries, group homes and social service agencies, NJ4S was in the works for more than a year and created as a response to the pandemic’s teen mental health crisis under the guidance of Department of Children and Families’ Commissioner Christine Norbut Beyer. But it was immediately met with intense criticism from educators and advocates who support expanding services but said the time-tested school-based programs must also stay.

New Mexico

Albuquerque: The U.S. Department of Agriculture will waive cost-sharing requirements for farmers and ranchers affected by the largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history. U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján on Thursday announced that the agency will cover cost sharing for emergency forest restoration, conservation and other environmental improvement programs. The move follows the approval of a massive federal spending bill that included $2.5 billion in relief for those affected by the fire and post-fire flooding. That bill included a provision to waive cost sharing for all programs administered by the USDA. The wildfire was sparked by two government planned burns earlier this year. It ripped through hundreds of square miles of forest and grazing lands, destroying homes and the livelihoods of many of the rural residents. Through no fault of their own, Luján said, residents lost large swaths of cherished lands and will have to grapple with the effects for years. “Our farmers and ranchers, business owners and families deserve relief to recover,” he said in a statement.

New York

Buffalo: The victims of a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket will be honored with a permanent memorial in the neighborhood, elected and community leaders announced Friday. The shooting “is part of the Buffalo story forever going forward,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said. “We want to do something that people remember. A place to come and reflect. A place to honor. And a place to say never again.” Former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, whose 86-year-old mother Ruth Whitfield was among the 10 Black people killed May 14, is among those appointed to a planning commission tasked with acquiring land, seeking input on the design, securing funds and maintaining the monument. Buffalo NAACP President Mark Blue will lead the effort. “It’s not going to take the place of my mother or the lives of the other loved ones that were lost here,” Whitfield said. “So we will forever miss them and honor their legacy by what we do going forward.” The officials did not specify a budget or timeline for the project’s completion. Brown said numerous businesses and people have offered to contribute. Payton Gendron, 19, has been charged with killing 10 and wounding three others at the Tops Friendly Market. Investigators said he drove 200 miles from his Conklin home intending to kill as many Black people as possible at the store, which he targeted because of its location in the predominantly Black East Buffalo neighborhood. He has pleaded not guilty.

North Carolina

Salisbury: A man who was shot during a weekend concert at Livingstone College has been identified as a suspected shooter and is now facing charges, officials said Tuesday. The shooting took place Saturday during a performance featuring rapper Asian Doll at the historically Black college in Salisbury. Police are also asking for help identifying another person of interest. Salisbury police obtained a warrant charging Talib Latrell Kelly, 21, of Salisbury, with attempted first-degree murder, discharging a firearm on educational property and possession of a firearm by a felon, the department said. Kelly is not a Livingstone student, Salisbury police Capt. P.J. Smith said at a news conference. Officers were called to the campus about 11 p.m. and found gunshot victims and others who had been hurt as concertgoers fled the gunfire, city officials said in a statement. Video footage from the event shows that a fight broke out while Asian Doll was on stage. Two male victims were taken to Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center in Charlotte with gunshot wounds, and officials also identified a woman who had a superficial wound to her neck, Smith said. None of the victims’ injuries were considered life-threatening, he said.

North Dakota

Bismarck: A North Dakota farmer who had been detained in Ukraine since November 2021 on accusations he planned to kill his business partner is back home, the state’s two U.S. senators announced Friday. Kurt Groszhans, from Ashley, North Dakota, has ancestors from Ukraine and went there to farm in 2017. The relationship with his partner, law professor Roman Leshchenko, crumbled after Groszhans alleged that Leshchenko embezzled money from him. Groszhans and his assistant were arrested on charges of plotting to assassinate Leshchenko, who was then Ukraine’s agriculture minister. Groszhans said in a statement Friday that the Ukrainian officials made up the charges in an “effort to shut me up” after he discovered corruption “at the highest levels” of the government. “I am grateful to be home after this horrible ordeal,” Groszhans said in a statement. “My family and supporters worked tirelessly over a long period of time to make this happen and it was nice to be able to celebrate my birthday on North Dakota soil. The fact they refused to classify me as a wrongful detainee was an unfortunate and politically cowardly act that cost me almost a year of my life,” he said.

Ohio

Cincinnati: The state of Ohio will not require the COVID-19 vaccine for school students despite a recommendation from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel. A panel with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday recommended adding the COVID-19 vaccine to the federal government’s list of routinely recommended vaccinations. The panel’s decision, likely to be adopted by the CDC director, formally adds the shot to a list often used by schools and health officials in making vaccination requirements. Ohio leaders made it clear Friday that the vaccine would not be required for Ohio students. “The State of Ohio does not mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for school attendance. The ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) vote does not change Ohio law. The state’s list of required vaccines can only be changed through legislation,” Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff said in a statement. Indeed, not every vaccine on the list has been adopted by Ohio as a requirement for schoolchildren, such as flu shots. A list of required vaccines for schools and child care in Ohio can be viewed on the Ohio Department of Health website.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma City: A private foundation has raised more than $6 million to build a residence for future Oklahoma governors and their families, under a plan that calls for the current mansion near the state Capitol to be used for official meetings and special events, according to Gov. Kevin Stitt and people involved in the project. Talks about building a new home on the mansion grounds predate Stitt’s inauguration in 2019 and grew out of concerns about the cost of renovating the century-old structure. Stitt told reporters on Wednesday that he and his family – who lived only temporarily in the mansion – would not live in the new residence if he wins a second term next month. “It will not benefit Gov. Stitt,” he said. The foundation, Friends of the Mansion, is expected to announce plans for the residence after the Nov. 8 election. The foundation was created in 1995 by former Gov. Frank Keating and former first lady Cathy Keating to pay for renovations and additions. The new residence is envisioned for land behind the current mansion. Plans would have to be approved by two zoning commissions that oversee the area near the Capitol.

Oregon

Portland: The mayor plans to ban camping on city streets and move unhoused people to designated campsites, as the growing homeless population has become the top concern for the vast majority of residents. “The magnitude and the depth of the homeless crisis in our city is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said Friday. “We need to move our scattered, vulnerable homeless population closer to the services that they need.” The resolution would establish at least three large, designated outdoor camping sites, with the first opening within 18 months of securing funding. Wheeler didn’t specify when the funding would be confirmed or how much the measure would cost. The designated camping sites would initially be able to serve up to 125 people and would provide access to services such as food, hygiene, litter collection and treatment for mental health and substance abuse, Wheeler said. The sites could eventually serve 500 people. Oregon’s homelessness crisis has been fueled by a housing shortage, the coronavirus pandemic and drug addiction. More than 3,000 people are living without shelter in Portland, a 50% jump from 2019, and there are more than 700 encampments across the city, Wheeler said.

Pennsylvania

Harrisburg: The state’s elections chief wants legal penalties against two Republican county officials and their lawyer for what she calls in a new court filing their “unprecedented, reckless decision” to give an outside group access to voting machines during pending litigation on that subject. Lawyers for acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman last week asked the state Supreme Court to hold in contempt the two Fulton County commissioners and to dismiss the litigation that had been scheduled for oral argument before the justices this week. Chapman was appointed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf. On Friday afternoon, the justices appointed Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer as a special master to gather evidence on the contempt request and make a report with recommendations by Nov. 18. During their long-running dispute with the state, Fulton County GOP Commissioners Stuart Ulsh and Randy Bunch had allowed one group, Wake TSI, access to voting machines as part of the failed effort to locate fraud that might overturn ex-President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat. That prompted the Department of State to tell counties they “shall not” allow such access to voting machines. Ulsh and Bunch were moments away from permitting a second group, Envoy Sage, to inspect the machines in January when the state Supreme Court put that on hold. The inspection planned in January was to involve computers, electronic poll books, ballot scanners and possibly more.

Rhode Island

Providence: A lawsuit claiming that Brown University failed to protect female students from sexual harassment and assault can move forward in part, a federal judge ruled last week. Four former students filed a federal class action suit in August 2021 alleging that the university systemically and repeatedly failed to protect women from harm, including rape, despite knowing that sexual assault on campus is “endemic.” Two current students later joined the suit. The university moved to dismiss the suit in March. On Oct. 18, U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr. allowed the plaintiffs’ claim for injunctive relief to go forward but denied their efforts to seek monetary relief. The plaintiffs were enrolled between 2018 and 2021. The plaintiffs can sue to force Brown to “ensure that the Title IX office receives, investigates and resolves complaints.” The plaintiffs must still prove that their suit meets the criteria for class-action certification. Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or in activities that receive federal financial assistance.

South Carolina

Columbia: Months after accusing disbarred attorney Alex Murdaugh of killing his wife and son, investigators and prosecutors have released few details about the evidence that they believe connect him to the shootings. That’s led Murdaugh’s lawyers to file a flurry of court documents requesting information from the prosecution, seeking to publicly weaken the case before the January trial has begun. The defense attorneys argue that there was unknown DNA found under Murdaugh’s wife’s fingernails. They also have a different suspect, Murdaugh’s friend Curtis Eddie Smith, arguing that he failed a lie detector test regarding the killings. Murdaugh has already admitted to asking Smith to arrange Murdaugh’s own death to defraud his life insurance company. Those defense documents even boosted a story from Smith that prosecutors later said had no evidence to back it up – that Paul Murdaugh killed his mother, Maggie, when he caught her with a groundskeeper at the family’s Colleton County hunting lodge, and the groundskeeper then shot the son. Alex Murdaugh, 54, has proclaimed his innocence ever since June 2021, when he found the bodies, each shot several times. He has said through his lawyer he “loved them more than anything in the world.”

South Dakota

Vermillion: The University of South Dakota may welcome a new sorority chapter in the coming years. Alpha Pi Omega, the country’s oldest Indigenous Greek letter organization, could open doors on campus if enough students express interest, according to a flier circulated on social media promoting an informational session held Oct. 13. APO is a sisterhood of Indigenous women who are committed to each other, communities, tribes, families, academic excellence and self-empowerment, according to the flier. Its philanthropic cause is the National Indian Education Association. Hanna Delange, a spokesperson for USD, said nothing has been solidified yet with the sorority’s plans but confirmed the informational session took place as a chance for students to learn about the potential organization. Brooke Poppe, director of sorority and fraternity life on USD’s campus, said while there is no current timeline to open the sorority, the plan moving forward is on hold until there is enough student interest. It takes five or more students to start any student organization on campus. When or if Poppe receives a list of interested students, USD can move forward with the APO national organization in the expansion process. Poppe said her office hopes to have that potential list together by the end of the semester.

Tennessee

Chattanooga: Employees of Bess T. Shepherd Elementary School blasted a recent nighttime prayer meeting over the school’s exterior loudspeaker, although district officials said it was an accident. An unidentified neighbor who could hear the praying from inside his or her home Monday night posted a video on the Reddit website that recorded about two minutes of a speaker praying over the intercom, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports. “This went on for 45 minutes,” the video caption said. The video included a woman’s voice repeatedly saying, “We need you in this school, God. We need you in every school, God.” She spoke of casting the things of hell “back to the abyss” and said: “You cannot rule in this school. You cannot rule in the hearts and minds of the children.” The speaker also prayed over staff members. District officials said the prayer meeting occurred about 6 p.m. Monday, although they were not aware of it until Thursday morning. “There were staff members inside the building praying who were unaware the external intercom system was enabled,” district spokesperson Steve Doremus said in an email. “As soon as they were made aware, the intercoms were turned off.”

Texas

Austin: The Texas Department of Public Safety fired an officer Friday who was at the scene of the Uvalde school massacre and becomes the first member of the state police force to lose their job in the fallout over the hesitant response to the May attack. The department served Sgt. Juan Maldonado with termination papers, spokeswoman Ericka Miller said. No details were offered about his role at the scene of the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School or the specific reason Maldonado was fired. The firing comes five months after the mass shooting that has put state police under scrutiny over their actions on the school campus as a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 children and two teachers. Maldonado could not be reached for comment Friday night. Body camera footage and media reports have shown the Department of Public Safety had a larger role at the scene than the department appeared to suggest after the shooting. State troopers were among the first wave of officers to arrive but did not immediately confront the gunman, which experts say goes against standard police procedure during mass shootings.

Utah

Salt Lake City: Gov. Spencer Cox hosted the first of what governors across the U.S. are planning to be a series of new discussions on how states could address mental health issues. Neither Cox nor other governors involved are proposing specific policy solutions so far, but that isn’t the point – the idea is to listen to physicians, pediatric psychologists, educators, parents and others to try to find areas of consensus. Cox, the vice chair of the National Governors Association, is among a bipartisan group of governors who have joined NGA chair Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, in forwarding the “Strengthening Your Mental Health” initiative, with the ultimate goal of finding nonpartisan policies that states everywhere might adopt. Over two days at a roundtable event in Salt Lake City, Cox, a Republican, and Murphy, a Democrat, hosted a series of conversations on the topic, hoping to hear experts’ opinions on potential solutions connected to prevention, early intervention and resilience building. “Youth mental health is an urgent issue in Utah and nationwide,” Cox said. “The (COVID-19) pandemic has heightened the problem, and it’s important that we be proactive in bolstering support resources and letting young people know that help is available.”

Vermont

St. Albans: A fired deputy who is the only candidate on the November ballot to become sheriff of the county where he served was charged Friday with simple assault for kicking a shackled prisoner, authorities said. John Grismore, 49, of Fairfax, was cited on the charge Friday through his attorney. He is due in court Monday in St. Albans to answer the charge, Vermont State Police said in a news release. Surveillance cameras recorded the prisoner being kicked Aug. 7. In the Aug. 9 primary, Grismore won the nominations of both Franklin County’s Republican and Democratic parties to have his name on the November ballot for sheriff. But after the video became public, he was suspended and then fired by outgoing Franklin County Sheriff Roger Langevin. The county Republican and Democratic parties gave their support to a write-in campaign by Sheriff’s department Lt. Mark Lauer, a 27-year Vermont State Police veteran who has been at the department for nearly a decade. Gale Messier is also running a write-in campaign. He spent decades in law enforcement including 20 years at the sheriff’s department in Chittenden County, Vermont’s most populous county. On Friday, Grismore said in an email that “the story is still the same” and that he had nothing new to add.

Virginia

Fort Belvoir: A “barricade situation” drew the FBI and other law enforcement officials to a U.S. Army base outside the nation’s capital Sunday, according to the official Twitter account of Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia. The base tweeted shortly before 1 p.m. that its law enforcement officials, local police and the FBI had responded “to a barricade situation” Sunday morning. “The situation is ongoing, & we cannot comment further at this time,” the base tweeted. It provided no other details except to say some of the gates to the installation remained open. The situation was inside a home, WUSA-TV reports. Fort Belvoir sits on about 8,800 acres of land along the Potomac River in Fairfax County and is located about 20 miles south of Washington. The base is home to several Army command headquarters, elements of the Army Reserve and Army National Guard and nine Department of Defense agencies, according to a Department of Defense website that serves the military community. The installation has 2,154 family housing quarters and seven child youth service facilities, according to Fort Belvoir’s 2022 strategic plan.

Washington

Seattle: Authorities said Friday that they arrested three suspects in the slayings of two people and shooting of a police officer after a daylong search on a tribal reservation in northeastern Washington. The Colville Tribes Emergency Services said on Facebook on Friday evening that the third suspect was arrested in Elmer City, one of several small communities on the rural reservation. Two others were arrested earlier in the day. The search for the suspects began after the Colville Tribal Police Department responded to a report of a shooting Thursday in Keller, a small community about 275 miles east of Seattle. Officers found two people dead, and an officer who came across a vehicle described as having left the scene was shot in the arm, according to the department. He was doing well after being transported for medical care, the department said in a news release. Police identified two of the suspects as Curry Pinkham and Zachary Holt. Robin Redstar, a Colville Tribal member and Nespelem resident, said she and other residents waited in their home for hours, and at one point one of the suspects was believed to be in a gully behind her house. Authorities eventually arrested a man in front of her home around 10 a.m. after he tried to enter her neighbor’s back door, Redstar said. Her neighbor, a hunter with guns, was able to detain the man and get him to the street, where a tribal police car was waiting, Redstar said. “It was pretty quick. Corbie (the neighbor) was giving him a good speech about morals,” she said.

West Virginia

Charleston: Voters will get the final say on a ballot question that would amend the state constitution to give the Republican-dominated Legislature control over virtually every aspect of public schooling. The vote comes amid a fight raging nationally over the politicization of schools. West Virginia’s Republican leaders have joined politicians elsewhere in pushing to regulate how subjects such as race are taught in classrooms and funnel public money into alternative education options, including charter schools and voucher programs. Just this year, the state Board of Education joined a lawsuit against top Republicans over a school choice program – one of the nation’s most expansive – alleging it unconstitutionally drains money from public schools. The case went to the state Supreme Court, which sided with lawmakers. And in a state that once was a stronghold of organized labor, some see the proposed amendment as part of an effort to defang the most formidable center of union power left standing: public school employees. Four years after more than 30,000 school workers went on strike in one of the nation’s poorest states, igniting teacher walkouts nationwide, many say they’re overworked and exhausted.

Wisconsin

Milwaukee: A Milwaukee County judge on Friday denied a Republican Party of Wisconsin request to stop the city of Milwaukee from continuing a get-out-the-vote effort that the city argues it neither runs nor funds. Judge Gwen Connolly wrote that the arguments made by the party and Milwaukee voter Elizabeth Burke were “deficient” and that issuing such an order would chill constitutionally protected free speech. The lawsuit was one of two filed by the Republican Party of Wisconsin and other plaintiffs in the weeks after Mayor Cavalier Johnson made comments Sept. 12 about an initiative dubbed “Milwaukee Votes 2022” and referenced door-to-door canvassing funded by the “private sector.” Johnson’s spokesman then said the campaign conducting the canvassing is privately funded, and the city’s association was “limited to the mayor voicing support for the work.” The first lawsuit, which centered on an open records request, was dismissed earlier this month after the party said it had received the requested records from the Milwaukee Election Commission and Mayor’s Office related to the get-out-the-vote effort. In the second lawsuit, filed Sept. 28, Burke and Republicans argued that though Milwaukee Votes 2022 is a purportedly nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort, the city would partner with an organization, GPS Impact, that openly works to elect Democratic candidates and advance progressive causes.

Wyoming

Pinedale: A hunter accidentally shot himself in the leg while trying to fight off a grizzly bear attack in west-central Wyoming – the second such attack in a week’s time, officials said. Lee Francis, 65, of Evanston, was taken to the University of Utah Health hospital for treatment after the encounter Friday, the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office said. Francis was hunting with his son in an area south of Grand Teton National Park on Friday evening when the bear attacked him. He was able to fire several rounds from his handgun, causing the bear to run away, but one of the rounds hit Francis in the lower leg, the sheriff’s office said. His son used a satellite phone to call for help just before 6 p.m., then began providing first aid. His son was able to help his father onto a horse, and they headed toward a nearby lake to meet search and rescue crews. Francis was eventually taken to the hospital via helicopter, the sheriff’s office said in a statement. Wildlife officials had not located the grizzly bear, Sgt. Travis Bingham with the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office said Sunday. Because it was snowing, Game and Fish planned to try to search for the bear again Monday, weather permitting, he said.

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Uvalde ofrenda, Tulsa graves: News from around our 50 states

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Alabama

Tuscaloosa: Hundreds of Scouts from around west Alabama camped, played games, practiced skills and enjoyed the outdoor life at the Moundville Archaeological Park. The celebration, which marked the Black Warrior Council of the Boy Scouts of America’s 100th annual encampment, was held over the weekend at the park, one of the nation’s premier Native American Heritage sites. “We cover 12 counties. This anniversary is a testimony to Scouting’s relevance in today’s society. Go back a hundred years. It was relevant back then to young people, and it still is today,” said Bill Gosselin, CEO of the Black Warrior Council. Gosselin said he is excited about the future of Scouting. Membership in the various Scout organizations in west Alabama grew last year, and there were more than 700 people participating in the encampment. The kids participating Friday ranged from 5-year-olds in the Lion Cubs program to 20-year-old Venture Scouts. The 100th encampment included model rocket launch demonstrations, archery, sling shots, tomahawk throwing, camp cooking, ham radio demonstrations and the ability to visit the museum at the Moundville Archaeological Park.

Alaska

Kipnuk: Students are learning remotely this week after an as-yet unexplained fight between a school district and tribal council led to a principal being banished from the village, Alaska Public Media reports. The Kipnuk Traditional Council last month barred students from attending in-person classes, pointing to safety concerns, and the Lower Kuskokwim School District said Monday that Chief Paul Memorial School would close. The council also formally banished Principal LaDorothy Lightfoot last week, saying she should be flown out by noon Friday. The causes of the developments remain unclear, according to Alaska Public Media.

Arizona

Phoenix: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered armed members of a group monitoring ballot drop boxes in the state to stay at least 250 feet away from the locations following complaints that people wearing masks and carrying guns were intimidating voters. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi said members of Clean Elections USA, its leader and anyone working with them are also barred from filming or following anyone within 75 feet of a ballot drop box or the entrance to a building that houses one. They also cannot speak to or yell at individuals within that perimeter unless spoken to first. The temporary restraining order was requested by the League of Women Voters of Arizona after Clean Elections USA encouraged people to watch 24-hour ballot boxes in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county. “It is paramount that we balance the rights of the defendant to engage in their constitutionally protected First Amendment activity with the interest in the plaintiffs and in voters casting a vote free of harassment and intimidation,” Liburdi said. A second set of defendants in rural Yavapai County – groups known as the Lions of Liberty and the Yavapai County Preparedness team, who are associated with the far-right anti-government group Oath Keepers – were dismissed from the case Monday after they pledged to stand down their operations.

Arkansas

Horseshoe Bend: A man who was reported missing while hiking in the Ozark Mountains has been found alive after a four-day search, officials said. Clinton Preston Smith, 67, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was found “in good spirits” about noon Tuesday, according to a statement from the Buffalo National River, which is part of the National Park Service. He had been reported missing Oct. 27 after he failed to return home from a hike on a trail near the Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas, officials said. Crews found Smith near the river in the area of Horseshoe Bend, which is about 105 miles north of Little Rock. Newton County Sheriff Glenn Wheeler said Smith was sore, hungry and dehydrated but did not appear to have any serious injuries, Springfield, Missouri, TV station KY3 reports.

California

Santa Ana: A health emergency has been declared in Orange County due to rapidly spreading viral infections that are sending more children to the hospital, health officials said Tuesday. The county health officer issued the declaration Monday due to record numbers of pediatric hospitalizations and daily emergency room visits, the county’s health care agency said in a press release. The move allows the Southern California county of 3 million people to access state and federal resources and enlist assistance from non-pediatric hospitals to help care for sick children, said Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, the county’s health officer. “Our concern here is that it is reaching even record levels,” Chinsio-Kwong told reporters. “We want to make sure we are prepared to care for any sick child in the county who falls ill and requires hospital care.” The county has seen a growing number of children with respiratory syncytial virus, which can cause severe breathing problems for babies, while flu cases are also starting to rise. The situation is similar in much of the country, where doctors are bracing for the possibility that RSV, flu and COVID-19 could combine to stress hospitals. Last week, neighboring San Diego County’s public health agency sounded a similar alarm.

Colorado

Boulder: Seeking a second term as governor, Democrat Jared Polis is referring to himself as a “happy dad” as he fends off attacks from Republican Heidi Ganahl, who is trying to channel the angst of parents worried about underperforming schools, drugs and post-pandemic crime with the campaign slogan “#MadMom.” “We have skyrocketing crime, out-of-control inflation, a huge fentanyl problem that’s killing our kids, and our kids can’t read, write or do math at grade level,” Ganahl said in a recent debate. All are nationwide issues. Polis, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and former U.S. representative, counters with a rosy picture of the state under his watch and insists Colorado’s best days are ahead as it emerges from the pandemic with a strong economy and healthy state revenues bolstered by federal relief spending. “My opponent identified herself as a mad mom. I identify myself as a happy dad, of two great kids, 11 and 8, raising my kids in the best state of all the states,” Polis responded at the debate. Ganahl, a University of Colorado regent, mother of four and successful entrepreneur, faces stiff odds but is undaunted in a state that has become increasingly Democrat-controlled in the past decade, said Dick Wadhams, a former state Republican Party chair. “Heidi is very competitive, but it’s a high bar,” Wadhams said.

Connecticut

Killingly: A scathing report from the state Department of Education found the Killingly school board engaged in apparent “deliberate indifference” when it came to addressing student mental health issues. “And it is that systemic indifference that distinguishes this from other school boards confronting these issues,” according to the report from Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker which accused the Killingly board of “repeated failure and refusal to implement reasonable interventions to address students’ clear mental health, socio-emotional and behavioral needs.” The 38-page report, which includes information obtained by sworn affidavits of district officials and others, is the culmination of a months-long state investigation into a citizens’ complaint filed in the wake of the board’s rejection of a grant-funded school-based health center in March and its alleged failure to offer substantial alternative behavioral health options. The report – and its recommendation that the Connecticut Board of Education order an inquiry into the matter – was released Monday, just days before the state board was scheduled to discuss the topic. State education investigators upheld the complainants’ allegation that the Killingly board “failed or is unable to make reasonable provision to implement the education interests” of the state.

Delaware

Dover: While overall college enrollment is dropping nationwide, Delaware State University has set an enrollment record, topping 6,000 students for the first time in its 131-year history. Enrollment of 6,268 for the fall 2022 semester is a jump of nearly 11% from last year’s previous record of 5,649 and an increase of 33% since 2017, said DSU director of news services Carlos Holmes. This semester’s first-year class totals more than 1,400, also a record. Meanwhile, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that undergraduate enrollment in the U.S. fell by 4.7%, with 662,000 fewer students in the spring 2022 semester than in 2021. Graduate and professional student enrollment dropped by 1% from last year. Delaware State University president Tony Allen said one of the goals in the DSU strategic plan is to reach 10,000 students by the end of the decade. He credits the success to a university-wide commitment to access and opportunity, including a stronger emphasis on online and graduate programs, enhancements to the state-funded Inspire Scholarship Program and expansion of its Early College School. Online enrollment soared by 56.8% compared to last year, while graduate enrollment rose by 5.7%.

District of Columbia

Washington: Protesters opposed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning abortion rights briefly interrupted arguments at the court Wednesday and urged women to vote in next week’s elections. It was the first courtroom disruption since the justices’ decision in June that stripped away women’s constitutional protections for abortion after nearly a half-century under Roe v. Wade. Three people stood up in the first few minutes of Wednesday’s session to denounce the abortion ruling. “Our right to choose will not be taken away,” one protester said. “Women, vote for our right to choose.” The justices did not appear to react to the disruption. The protesters did not resist when police led them away. The protesters, identified as Emily Archer Paterson, Rolande Dianne Baker and Nicole Elizabeth Enfield, were charged were violating a law against making a “harangue” in the Supreme Court building and another barring interference with the administration of justice, court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said by email. After a 19-month closure because of the coronavirus pandemic, the courtroom was reopened to the public in October. The last time Supreme Court arguments were interrupted was in 2015 when opponents of rulings that lifted limits on money in political campaigns voiced their protest and even managed to get a camera past court security.

Florida

Tallahassee: A national anti-discrimination group is now involved in a discipline case at a Leon County charter school. A lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center is representing the parents of a child who they say was wrongfully expelled from Florida State University School. “I think that the administration response has been ... completely disproportionate, and it has escalated this issue terribly,” said Cecilia Chouhy, the child’s mother. “They have shown no concern for the welfare of my child.” Chouhy said in October the school issued a “withdrawal without invitation,” which means her son has been removed from the school and not allowed back. The parents appealed the decision, and at a private hearing between the school and the child’s parents Friday, the school did not make a final decision. The parents said the school unfairly disciplined their 6-year-old son, who they say does not have a disciplinary record, after he threw a temper tantrum and allegedly hit a teacher after he took away the child’s Pokémon card. The school allegedly told the parents and their son, who are Latino, that administrators contacted law enforcement and that the child could be charged with a felony for the incident. Florida law, however, prohibits arrests of children younger than 7 years, except for felonies such as murder or manslaughter.

Georgia

Atlanta: Mayor Andre Dickens announced Monday that he has appointed the city’s interim police chief to fill the position permanently. Darin Schierbaum, who has served as interim chief since June, has been with the Atlanta Police Department for two decades. Dickens said in a news release that Schierbaum shares his vision for public safety in Atlanta and was selected after a national search. “He has earned my trust, the respect of our community, and the support of the women and men of the Atlanta Police Department,” Dickens said. “A proponent of 21st Century Policing, Chief Schierbaum will continue building deep ties between the Atlanta police and the community they serve.” Schierbaum joined the department in 2002 after graduating as valedictorian in his police academy class. He had previously worked for 10 years with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department in Illinois. During his career in Atlanta, he has led the Community Liaison Unit, the LGBT Liaison Unit, the Hispanic Liaison Unit and the Graffiti Abatement Unity, the release says. He has also been involved in training officers and has overseen public safety for major events in the city. “I thank Mayor Dickens for the opportunity to serve this city and the incredible men and women of the Atlanta Police Department,” Schierbaum said in the release.

Hawaii

Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam: The Navy on Tuesday said it will ask the public how it should use a fuel storage facility in the hills above Pearl Harbor once it has finished draining petroleum from its massive storage tanks. The Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility leaked petroleum into Pearl Harbor’s tap water last year and sickened nearly 6,000 people, mostly those living in military housing. The Navy said it would seek permission from the Hawaii Department of Health to leave the tanks inside the hillside, where they were built during World War II. Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations and environment, told reporters at a news conference that it would be safer for the environment to leave the tanks in place once they are cleaned. The Navy also said leaving them there would allow them to be put to another use. The Navy hasn’t determined what they will be used for yet, only that they won’t be used to store fuel again. The Navy plans to ask the public for ideas through meetings and webinars. One possibility is to use the tanks to store water for a pumped hydroelectric power facility.

Idaho

Boise: The first confirmed case this year of chronic wasting disease has been detected in a deer in Idaho County, state wildlife officials said. Idaho Fish and Game last month said a white-tailed deer found dead along the side of the road tested positive for the disease. The agency said the cause of the deer’s death is unknown. The contagious and fatal neurological disorder was first detected in the state in the same area last fall. That area accounts for all seven detected cases in the state. The discovery of the disease last year prompted the Idaho Fish and Game Commission to designate a chronic wasting disease management zone. The disease found in game animals carries potential health concerns for hunters because it’s in the same family as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people not eat meat from animals with the disease, though it has never been documented to infect humans. The most recent deer testing positive was found in Fish and Game’s Management Unit 14, the only unit in Idaho where chronic wasting disease has been detected. All seven animals that have tested positive in the state were between the towns of Riggins and Grangeville.

Illinois

Springfield: A collection of valuable Lincoln artifacts, some of which were recently displayed in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s Treasury Gallery, is no longer in Springfield. ALPLM spokesman Chris Wills confirmed Wednesday that the 1,500 or so items were picked up Monday by the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, which had a relationship with the ALPLM until last year. The story was first reported by WBEZ-FM, a National Public Radio affiliate in Chicago. The private foundation had originally been set up as a fundraising arm of the ALPLM, but the acrimony between the two culminated over pieces in what is known as the Taper Collection and money still owed by the foundation on its purchase. Louise Taper is a southern California historian and author who sold the collection to the foundation for between $23 million and $25 million in 2007. Taper was awarded the Order of Lincoln in 2009. In the collection was a pair of bloody gloves that Lincoln was carrying and one of the two cufflinks on the shirt he was wearing when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865. There was also a number of letters in Lincoln’s handwriting in the collection.

Indiana

Indianapolis: The sidewalks of downtown spilled over with students visiting from across the country for the 95th annual FFA convention last week, with more than 69,000 in attendance over four days. “It actually felt like a pre-COVID year for our convention,” said Mandy Hazlett, the associate director of convention and events at the National FFA Organization. “We were able to bring back events in our convention that we were unable to in person last year.” The Indiana Convention Center hosted nearly 1.3 million visitors by the end of September, marking a near-complete recovery for one of the city’s most important industries. That’s about the same number the facility hosted in 2019 in that time and a big jump from the 230,000 the center hosted in 2020 and 840,000 in 2021. By the first months of next year, “Indianapolis will probably be able to proclaim 100% plus recovery from the pandemic,” said Chris Gahl, an administrator at the tourism nonprofit Visit Indy. Hotel occupancy still lags slightly behind the year before the pandemic. The economic impact of convention tourism in the first nine months of this year, some $855 million, is a huge jump from $519 million in that time frame last year, according to Visit Indy.

Iowa

Des Moines: A proposed massive development could turn the southwest corner of West Des Moines into a destination unlike any other in the state of Iowa. Developers announced plans Wednesday for The Grand Experience, a proposed $600 million, 226-acre entertainment district that could include a 100,000-square-foot indoor water park, a 400-room hotel and business conference center, a family entertainment center, a variety of dining options with different themes and experiences, new retail and office space, and 1,200 housing units with an emphasis on affordable homes for workers. The district would be located on Grand Avenue between 60th and 88th streets next to the future new campus of Des Moines University and the RecPlex. The Grand Experience would provide visitors to the newly opened sports and recreation complex with more options for entertainment nearby. “This is not scaled back,” said Riley Hogan, senior vice president for real estate services firm CBRE. “This is going big.” The centerpiece of the proposed development would be a water park two-and-a-half times the size of the Great Wolf Lodge water park in Kansas City, Kansas, and more akin to something found in the Wisconsin Dells, Hogan said.

Kansas

Topeka: Tourists who seek out every state’s replica of the Liberty Bell would no longer be directed to a storage room of the Kansas Statehouse parking garage if the Docking State Office Building renovation goes through as proposed. “The staff members of the visitor’s center brought it to our attention that a must-see or a bucket list of a lot of people coming into the capitol or with a passport is they want to see the Liberty Bell,” said Sen. Elaine Bowers, R-Concordia. “And we would say, where’s the Liberty Bell at? Well, now we discovered that the Liberty Bell was on display. It was removed during renovation. We found it.” The bell is in a locked room on the first floor of the Statehouse parking garage. The bells were part of a U.S. Savings Bond campaign in the 1950s, with the federal government giving replicas to each state and a handful of other locations. They are commonly displayed at or around state capitol buildings. Such was the case in Kansas until extensive renovation efforts began two decades ago, evicting the bell to storage. “There’s 57 total. Kansas is the only one not on display,” Bowers said. “So you can imagine the folks’ disappointment when they come to the capitol wanting to see the Liberty Bell. With permission with the security guards, the Capitol Police, they will take visitors down to see the bell so they can mark it off their passport list.”

Kentucky

Frankfort: Visibly frustrated lawmakers on Wednesday questioned subjects of a recent investigation on whether they are serving the reading needs of the state’s students. George Hruby, executive director of the Collaborative Center for Literacy Development, and Lindy Harmon, director of Reading Recovery in the state, appeared before the panel of lawmakers in a Capitol annex meeting room. The morning questioning lasted about 40 minutes. Lawmakers’ inquiries primarily focused on Reading Recovery, an intervention program under national scrutiny for its instructional methods. State Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, Sen. Steven West, R-Paris, and Rep. Tina Bojanowski, D-Louisville, each sat on the committee. The three legislators, who pushed through a new state literacy law earlier this year, said they were not satisfied with the testimony. “I think they talk in circles,” Bojanowski said after the hearing. “It’s kind of more of the same,” West said. “It’s frustrating,” Tipton said. “And it’s frustrating because we want to see improvement now.” Spring 2022 testing results show less than half of Kentucky’s third through fifth graders were considered proficient readers, while nearly 30% outright failed their exams.

Louisiana

Shreveport: A new study claims Louisiana is one of the worst states for millennials to live based on affordability, political and social environment, employment, quality of life, health, personal finance and safety. Members of the millennial generation – typically born between 1981 and 1996 – are currently among the biggest contributors to the economy. They have experienced slower economic growth than the previous generations due to the multiple recessions hitting at peak times of their lives. There are a number of challenges that will influence millennials’ decisions on where to live and work. Scholaroo’s newest report on the best and worst states for millennials gathered data on 52 metrics that affect the generation’s decisions on where to live. Considerations like the cost of living, homeownership rate, unemployment rate and more were the driving factors of this study. Louisiana came in dead last for the overall score of the worst place for millennials to live, with the breakdown ranking the state 31st for affordability, 50th for political and social environment, 33rd for employment, 28th for quality of life, 48th for health, 48th for personal finance and 46th for safety. As of 2022, Louisiana sits at the No. 2 spot for the highest mental distress rate of millennials at 21.9%, right behind Arkansas’ 23.6%.

Maine

Portland: The federal government has outlined a strategy to try to protect an endangered species of whale while also developing offshore wind power off the East Coast. President Joe Biden’s administration has made a priority of encouraging offshore wind along the Atlantic coast as the U.S. pursues greater energy independence. Those waters are also home to the declining North Atlantic right whale, which numbers about 340 in the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released a draft plan this month to conserve the whales while allowing for the building of wind projects. The agencies said the ongoing efforts to save the whales and create more renewable energy can coexist. “As we face the ongoing challenges of climate change, this strategy provides a strong foundation to help us advance renewable energy while also working to protect and recover North Atlantic right whales, and the ecosystem they depend on,” said Janet Coit, assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries.

Maryland

Hagerstown: The management of a former city pesticide plant could last decades. In 2015, a federal Environmental Protection Agency official said operators of the contaminated former pesticide mixing site along Mitchell Avenue in Hagerstown “couldn’t have picked a worse place” to run it. Bob Wallace, a remedial project manager for the EPA, said at the time that groundwater runs in all directions from the site. In an attempt to track any contamination leaving the 19-acre property, remediation crews injected dye into sink holes on the property to determine where it might flow. Wallace, who was among a number of EPA officials and others who gave an update of the cleanup of the site Tuesday, said dye showed up 2 miles to the east. It also appeared 4 miles to the west, 4 miles to the southwest and 3 miles to the north, Wallace said. But he said previously that just because dye shows up at a location doesn’t mean it’s contaminated, and he said Tuesday that analysis continues on any possible threats to nearby groundwater supplies. He said the work will probably continue at least for another year. In the meantime, project officials have constructed a facility that treats groundwater at the old industrial site. It started operation in July and has treated about 5.4 million gallons of water, Wallace said. Asked how long the plant might be needed to treat the groundwater, Wallace said it could be at least 30 years. “This is like a forever Superfund site,” Wallace said.

Massachusetts

Boston: The general manager of the region’s troubled public transit system, who shepherded the agency through the pandemic when ridership plummeted and has faced calls to resign during a federal safety review, announced Tuesday that he will step down early next year. Steve Poftak said in a letter to employees of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority that his last day on the job will be Jan. 3, just days before a new governor is sworn in. “Serving as MBTA General Manager has been the experience of a lifetime and it has been my honor and privilege to work with all of you,” he wrote. “While we have faced and will continue to face challenges, I believe in the strength and resilience of the MBTA. As I look back on my four years as General Manager, I take great pride in what we have accomplished together.” The letter did not say what his plans were. Poftak, who was appointed to the MBTA’s fiscal control board in 2015 by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, took over as general manager in December 2018 from Luis Ramirez, who spent just 15 months on the job. Baker’s term ends in January, and he is not seeking reelection.

Michigan

Benton Harbor: State officials said Wednesday that nearly all the lead pipes in Benton Harbor have been replaced roughly a year after a lead water crisis forced residents to avoid their tap water and use bottled water for simple tasks like cooking and drinking. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said last fall that the city would have its lead service lines replaced within 18 months, a fast pace for a process that often takes years or decades. Five months before the deadline, about 4,500 pipes have been replaced or confirmed not to contain lead. There are only about 40 more inspections to go, state officials said. “We are getting it done ahead of schedule,” Whitmer said in a statement. For three straight years, tests of Benton Harbor’s water system revealed lead levels in its tap water that were too high. Lead is a health hazard that can be especially harmful to young children, stunting their development and lowering IQ scores. Benton Harbor is a majority-Black community of just under 10,000 people. After complaints from activists last year that not enough was being done to combat the lead problem, officials said the city’s tap water should mostly be avoided and provided free bottled water to residents.

Minnesota

Minneapolis: A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to threatening a U.S. senator, according to federal prosecutors. Brendon Daugherty, 35, of Coon Rapids, entered the plea to one count of interstate transmission of a threat during a hearing in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis on Tuesday. According to court documents, Daugherty left two threatening voice mail messages for a senator who was unnamed but who lives outside Minnesota on June 11. In the first message, Daugherty said the senator and the Republican Party was pushing him to become a domestic terrorist, according to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger. “Have a nice (expletive) day; can’t wait to kill ya,” Daugherty said. In the second message, Daugherty threatened to carry out “nefarious goals,” Luger said. “I also just wanted to note, thank God the Republican Party is against gun control laws because it would keep guns out of the hands of a person that was disabled and volatile like I am, but you guys are totally against that,” the message said.

Mississippi

Jackson: Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday that he will ask legislators to approve about $240 million in state incentives for an economic development project in the northern part of the state. The Republican governor declined to name the company, saying he had signed a nondisclosure agreement. “Once we get through the legislative process and once we get final agreements signed, we will announce that the deal is done,” he said during a news conference. Reeves said the company is large and “has a long history of success.” Mississippi governors often have quick timelines to push incentives packages through the Legislature for large economic development projects, and it’s not unusual for them to try to keep company names secret until deals are complete. Some legislators have raised concerns about the special session that began Wednesday. “We don’t have many details at the moment, but we’re concerned that GOP leaders will try to push some kind of corporate welfare package through with little debate or oversight,” Republican state Rep. Dana Criswell of Olive Branch, a member of the Mississippi Freedom Caucus, said in an email Tuesday. Reeves announced Monday that he is calling legislators to the Capitol to consider incentives for a company that would create 1,000 jobs within the next few years. He said the average salary would be $93,000 – significantly higher than than the average pay for jobs in one of the poorest states in the U.S.

Missouri

Springfield: With winter on the horizon, the city’s crisis cold weather shelters are preparing to house more than 230 unsheltered individuals this season. The crisis cold weather season is Nov. 1 through March 31. Shelters are only open when overnight temperatures are 32 degrees or below for four consecutive hours between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. Shelters open around 8 p.m. each night and close at 7 a.m. the following morning. In previous years, folks were asked to visit the Veterans Coming Home Center to sign up for shelter access and eat dinner. Then, they’d be transported to an appropriate shelter. However, this year is different. According to Lisa Landrigan, Community Partnership of the Ozarks crisis cold weather shelter coordinator, a home base for crisis cold weather shelter signup, dinner and transportation has yet to be determined. “We are still looking,” she said. “We have several asks out, and hopefully something will come through.” Crisis cold weather shelters need about six volunteers each night, Landrigan said. Right now, these volunteers are “critically needed.” Landrigan said January is the busiest month for crisis cold weather shelters. Last November, crisis cold weather shelters were open only five nights. In January, the shelters were open for 24 nights.

Montana

Helena: Affordable housing and affordable food are the top two needs in the state, and mental health services is the third, according to the results of a statewide needs assessment released last week from Montana State University Extension. “The results of this needs assessment are already being used by our MSU Extension faculty and staff as they continue to offer programs and resources,” Carrie Ashe, MSU Extension associate director, said in a statement. MSU Extension works with local partners to examine and address emerging needs in the state, The Daily Montanan reports. In a phone call, Ashe said MSU Extension counts 90 faculty across the state working in county and tribal extension offices, and they’re already taking steps to work on housing. She said it’s the first time in roughly seven or eight years the organization has conducted such a survey. Nearly 2,500 Montanans from all counties and reservations completed the survey, according to MSU Extension. Additionally, more than 800 people participated in listening sessions. Housing affordability and availability are top issues in Montana as real estate prices have soared across the state and people and families find themselves homeless.

Nebraska

Lincoln: Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse won approval Tuesday from the University of Florida Board of Trustees to be the school’s next president despite vocal opposition from some faculty and students. Sasse, a Republican, was recommended for the top post by a unanimous vote of the trustees. A final vote to elevate Sasse as the school’s 13th president is set for Nov. 10 by the state university system Board of Governors. The recommended compensation package for Sasse comes to about $1.6 million, university officials said. That will also be finalized at the governors meeting. During a four-hour meeting Tuesday on the Gainesville campus, Sasse sought to allay concerns that he’s more a creature of politics than academia by saying he will take a “pledge of political celibacy” with regard to partisan issues. “I would have no activity in partisan politics in any way as I arrive at the University of Florida,” Sasse said, adding that his candidacy was not pushed by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis or other Florida elected officials. “There is just tons and tons of learning and listening that I need to do.”

Nevada

Las Vegas: A Nevada judge on Wednesday set an April trial date for a former Las Vegas-area elected official who has pleaded not guilty to killing a veteran investigative journalist who wrote articles critical of him and his managerial conduct. Robert “Rob” Telles, a Democrat who was stripped by court order of his position as Clark County administrator, appeared with his attorney, Ryan Helmick, for a brief scheduling hearing before Judge Michelle Leavitt. Telles, 45, did not speak in court. He remains jailed without bail in the Sept. 2 stabbing death of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German outside German’s home. Helmick declined to comment to reporters after the hearing. At trial, Telles could face a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole, after Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said last month that he found no qualifying aggravating factors to make Telles’ trial a capital case. The April 17 trial date could be delayed pending a Nevada Supreme Court ruling about whether police and prosecutors can access German’s cellphone and electronic devices despite objections raised by his newspaper about revealing the slain journalist’s confidential sources. Attorneys for police, who have German’s cellphone and laptop computers, say the criminal investigation won’t be complete until those records are reviewed.

New Hampshire

Exeter: Three major development projects bringing affordable housing to the Seacoast are receiving a financial boost this week to help make the projects a reality. The Gateway at Exeter, Epping Meadows and McIntosh Dover Apartments were among the 30 developments chosen to receive a combined $49,506,378 in grant money through the state’s InvestNH Housing Program. The Gateway at Exeter, which seeks to bring 56 affordable housing units to Epping Road across from the Mobil Station, was selected to receive $3 million. The McIntosh project will receive $2.8 million to help bring 52 new affordable units to Dover while Epping Meadows will receive $786,771 for 30 affordable units.

New Jersey

Asbury Park: A grand jury has declined to bring criminal charges against a New Jersey police officer who fatally shot a knife-wielding man during a standoff at the Jersey Shore in 2020. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office said late Tuesday that the actions of Asbury Park Police Sgt. Sean DeShader were justified under the circumstances, noting that Hasani Best held a knife throughout the 45-minute encounter with police and was not deterred by being shocked with a stun gun. A spokesman for Best’s family on Wednesday denounced the decision. “Attempts to demonize Hasani Best, who was unnecessarily murdered, and vindicate Officer Sean DeShader, who murdered this Black man immediately following the national civil rights reckoning in the post-George Floyd world, tells us nothing has changed,” said Randy Thompson, CEO of the advocacy group Help Not Handcuffs. “There continues to be no transparency when police, prosecutors and judges abuse their positions and there are no protections for civilians within critical processes such as abuses within grand jury proceedings,” he said.

New Mexico

Santa Fe: The New Mexico Supreme Court has cleared the way for the state’s largest electric utility to delay issuing rate credits related to the recent closure of a coal-fired power plant. State regulators in June had ordered Public Service Co. of New Mexico to begin issuing the credits since the San Juan Generating Station was shutting down. The utility challenged the order and requested a stay. The utility has said the cost of doing business has gone up and that delaying credits would mean smaller rate increases for customers in the future. Utility spokesman Ray Sandoval told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the utility was pleased with the decision. “All parties had the opportunity to fully present their views to the court, and the court fully considered those positions in deciding that the stay should remain in place,” Sandoval wrote in an email.

New York

New York: A man has been arrested with the gun used in a shooting last month outside the Long Island home of Rep. Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, authorities said Tuesday. Noah Green, 18, was arrested Monday in Shirley on charges of criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of stolen property, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney announced. Green’s possible involvement in the Oct. 9 drive-by shooting outside Zeldin’s house is still being investigated, the district attorney’s office said. Two 17-year-old boys were wounded in the shooting. Zeldin, who faces Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in next Tuesday’s election, was not at home when the shooting occurred but said his twin teenage daughters were in the kitchen doing homework and heard gunshots and screaming.

North Carolina

Raleigh: North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has quietly ended his litigation challenging the constitutionality of a powerful state commission that scrutinizes state agency rules, days before it was heading to court. Cooper’s private attorneys filed paperwork last Friday dismissing his August 2020 lawsuit against Republican legislative leaders. A hearing before three trial judges on the governor’s motion to have the composition of the 10-member Rules Review Commission struck down as unconstitutional was scheduled for Nov. 9. Cooper’s lawsuit alleged that a governor “lacks no meaningful control over” the commission because all of its members are picked by legislative leaders – five each by the recommendation of the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore – even though it acts like an executive branch agency. The lawsuit didn’t focus on a specific action by the commission, which decides whether to approve or reject temporary or permanent agency rules to carry out the details of state law. Rather, it examined broadly the commission’s actions in recent years and asked for a broad ruling throwing out the law. The lawsuit was dismissed “without prejudice,” which means Cooper could sue over the issue again – something that Cooper spokesperson Mary Scott Winstead could occur.

North Dakota

Bismarck: Gov. Doug Burgum rejected a plea Wednesday by North Dakota’s American Indian tribes to give them exclusive rights to host internet gambling and sports betting because it isn’t allowed under state law. “While we understand and appreciate the desire by some of the tribes to extend online gaming beyond their reservation boundaries, a clear legal path does not exist for the governor to grant such a broad expansion of gaming,” Burgum said in a statement. But Burgum did endorse the tribes’ appeal to lower the legal gambling age from 21 to 19 at the state’s five American Indian casinos, and let people use credit or debit cards to bet, spokesman Mike Nowatzki said.

Ohio

Euclid: A white police officer who fatally shot a Black driver during a struggle inside a car in 2017 must pay his family $4.4 million. An Ohio jury made the award Tuesday, finding that Euclid officer Matthew Rhodes acted recklessly when he climbed into 23-year-old Luke Stewart’s car and shot him as Stewart drove away. The shooting had inflamed racial tensions in Euclid, a Cleveland suburb, and a grand jury declined to indict Rhodes after hearing evidence from prosecutors. The jury’s finding stemmed from a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Stewart’s mother. The panel said Rhodes must pay Stewart’s family $3.9 million for the loss of his support and companionship and $500,000 for the pain and suffering he went through. But Rhodes will not have to pay punitive damages to the family or attorney’s fees.

Oklahoma

Tulsa: The search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has turned up 21 additional coffins in unmarked graves in the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery, officials said. Seventeen adult-size graves were located Friday and Saturday, Oklahoma State Archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said Monday. Additionally, the city announced Tuesday that four graves, two adult-size and two child-size, had been found. The coffins, then the remains, will be examined to see if they match reports from 1921 that the victims were males buried in plain caskets. “This is going to part of our process of discriminating which ones we’re going to proceed with in terms of exhuming those individuals and which ones we’re actually going to leave in place,” Stackelbeck said in a video statement. The work, by hand, was still under way. The types of coffins and gender of the victims have not been determined, according to the city’s statement.

Oregon

Portland: A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced an eco-activist to community service but no extra time in custody, rejecting the government’s call for a yearslong prison term for the Seattle man related to arsons decades ago. Joseph Dibee, 54, was a fugitive for more than a decade. In April, Dibee pleaded guilty to the 1997 arson of a slaughterhouse in central Oregon that butchered wild horses and sold the meat in Europe. He also pleaded to the 2001 arson of a Bureau of Land Management wild horse corral in Litchfield, California. As part of his plea agreement, federal prosecutors dropped arson charges in Washington state. He told U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken Monday by video in federal court in Eugene that he was truly sorry, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia: Philadelphia police have announced the arrest of a fourth suspect in September’s ambush shooting outside a Philadelphia high school that killed a 14-year-old and wounded four other teenagers after a football scrimmage. Police said Monday the 16-year-old is the fifth person authorities have identified as believed to have been involved in the Sept. 27 shooting outside of Roxborough High School. One 16-year-old suspect identified in the case remains at large. Authorities said five people jumped from a parked SUV and opened fire on teens who were walking away from an athletic field at the high school. Nicholas Elizalde, 14, was killed and three other teens were wounded and rushed to a hospital. One was treated at the scene. Police have said they don’t believe Elizalde was one of the intended targets of the attack. They said one of the shooters chased a 17-year-old victim down the street, striking him with shots to the leg and arm, and tried to fire as he stood over the victim but the gun either jammed or was out of bullets. Police have said they were seeking a total of six suspects: five shooters and a driver. At the time they said four suspects had been identified, they said those suspects would face charges of murder, four counts of aggravated assault, firearms crimes and other counts.

Rhode Island

Coventry: In what the the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island calls “a victory for religious freedom,” the Town of Coventry has granted a zoning permit to a small Wiccan church in the rural village of Greene. “We were relieved. It was a long process that probably went on longer than it should have,” said Gail McHugh, founder and high priestess of Horn and Cauldron, Church of the Earth. McHugh says the permit is a win not just for her church, but also for religions like hers across the country. “Minor religions are being squelched and discriminated against,” she said Tuesday.

South Carolina

Columbia: Gov. Henry McMaster has asked President Joe Biden to authorize a disaster declaration to help with Hurricane Ian recovery efforts in South Carolina, his office said Tuesday. The South Carolina Emergency Management Division and the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that 17 homes were destroyed, 232 homes had major damage and 82 had minor damage because of the storm which came ashore near Georgetown on Sept. 30 with much weaker winds than when it crossed Florida’s Gulf Coast earlier that week. Still, the storm left many areas of Charleston’s downtown peninsula under water. It also washed away parts of four piers along the coast, including two at Myrtle Beach. Ongoing assessments determined Ian cost state and local agencies more than $25 million. If the White House grants the request, the declaration would provide direct financial aid to residents who incurred uninsured damages to their property in Charleston, Georgetown and Horry counties through the FEMA Individual Assistance Program, according to the news release. State and local government agencies and eligible non-profits in Berkeley, Charleston, Clarendon, Georgetown, Horry, Jasper and Williamsburg counties also would qualify for reimbursement of some storm-related costs through the Public Assistance Program.

South Dakota

Sioux Falls: Republican Gov. Kristi Noem was looking to shore up support for her South Dakota reelection bid Wednesday through a series of campaign rallies with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Noem has risen to national prominence within the GOP during her term as the state’s first female governor but has shown some signs of political vulnerability, even in reliably-red South Dakota. The Republican governor has outspent her Democratic opponent, state lawmaker Jamie Smith, in the race by nearly six-to-one. Noem crisscrossed between the state’s largest cities for three rallies Wednesday. Smith, meanwhile, embarked on an RV tour that will circle the state in the week leading up to election day.

Tennessee

Nashville: More than 200 votes have been cast in the wrong races in Nashville since early voting began in Tennessee, election officials confirmed Wednesday. Davidson County election administrator Jeff Roberts said his office reviewed voter data throughout the night after The Associated Press first alerted officials Tuesday that voters were receiving conflicting information on what race they could vote in. That review determined that 190 voters cast ballots in a wrong congressional race, 16 cast votes in a wrong state Senate race and six cast votes in a wrong state House race. “The fix has been put in place,” Roberts said, adding he had sent the correct updates to the secretary of state’s office earlier Wednesday morning. He remained confident voters would receive the correct ballots for the last remaining two days of early voting in Tennessee. Officials say the votes that have been already cast will be counted for those races. Voters do not have an option to retract their vote.

Texas

Austin: Families of some of the 19 children killed in the Uvalde school massacre commemorated the Day of Dead with a rally, procession and a decorated altar outside the Texas Capitol on Tuesday night. Relatives, who marched to the mansion of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott carrying the altar, chose the location to again demand tougher gun laws in Texas following the May shooting at Robb Elementary School. They have been most vocal about raising the age to purchase AR-15-style rifles from 18 to 21. Abbott, who is up for reelection, has pushed back on that, saying it would be “unconstitutional.” “We are here today celebrating our children’s lives,” said Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi Rubio died in the Uvalde shooting, “but also trying to reach out to parents on a personal, on a mom and dad level. Just if you care about your children, protect them, go out to vote for candidates who support sensible gun legislation.”

Utah

Wendover: The Bonneville Salt Flats, a remnant of a prehistoric lakebed that is one of the American West’s many otherworldly landscapes, is growing thinner and thinner as the West suffers through its third decade of drought. Research has time and again shown that the briny water in the aquifer below the flats is depleting faster than nature can replenish it. As nearby groundwater replaces the mineral-rich brine, evaporation yields less salt than historic cycles of flooding and evaporation left on the landscape. It’s thinned by roughly one-third in the last 60 years. The overall footprint has shrunk to about half of its peak size in 1994. The crust keeps tires cool at high speeds and provides an ideal surface for racing – unless seasonal flooding fails to recede or leaves behind an unstable layer of salt. Racers struggle to find a track long enough to reach record speeds with only 8 miles of track compared 13 miles several decades ago. Scientists largely agree that years of aquifer overdraws by nearby potash mining have driven the problem, yet insist that there’s no hard evidence that simply paying the mining company to return water to the area will solve it amid detrimental human activity like extracting minerals or driving racecars.

Vermont

Jay: A Utah-based resort company has completed its purchase of Jay Peak Resort, the northern Vermont ski area that was at the center of a financial scandal involving its former owner and president. Pacific Group Resorts, which owns five other ski areas, announced Tuesday that the state of Vermont had approved the assignment of leases for ski terrain, allowing the sale to close. A federal judge in September approved the company’s $76 million bid to buy Jay Peak after it won an auction for the ski area. “The leadership and guests of Jay Peak are fortunate to have an experienced resort operator like PGRI take the helm from here,” said court-appointed receiver Michael Goldberg, who has been overseeing the resort for the last 61/ 2 years. Mark Fischer, PGRI’s executive vice-president and CFO, said in a statement that Jay Peak “is a highly respected resort property widely known for its prodigious snowfall and avid patrons” that fits into the company’s strategy of “geographic diversification.” He also said Jay Peak has dedicated staff that have created “a strong mountain culture.”

Virginia

Manassas: A plan to redevelop a rural swath of northern Virginia into data centers has received approval after a marathon public hearing that stretched through the night. The Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted 5-2 Wednesday morning in support of the plan over the opposition of environmentalists and conservationists. Data centers that provide the backbone for the rapid increase in cloud computing have proliferated in northern Virginia, which has long been a technology hub. The data centers have proven to be a revenue boon to local governments, but neighbors have complained about noise and environmentalists have expressed concern about the massive amounts of electricity that data centers consume. In Prince William County, concern also centered around the viewshed for nearby Manassas National Battlefield Park. Supporters of the plan said it could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue and that the plan is designed in a way to accommodate environmental concerns.

Washington

Seattle: Two foreign nationals from the Democratic Republic of Congo who pleaded guilty in federal court in Seattle to participating in a smuggling ring that brought illegal ivory, rhinoceros horn and pangolin scales into the U.S. have been sentenced. Herdade Lokua was sentenced to 20 months and Jospin Mujangi was sentenced to 14 months in prison on Tuesday, the Justice Department said. They both in July pleaded guilty to two counts of an 11-count indictment alleging they worked with a middle man to facilitate shipments of poached items into Seattle. The court determined Lokua was the organizer of a trafficking operation involving more than five other co-conspirators whose goal was to ship a cargo container full of elephant ivory, white rhinoceros horn and pangolin scales to Seattle. Mujangi helped package the wildlife products and handled the financial details to process the payment.

West Virginia

Charleston: West Virginia Republican U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney is expected to breeze to victory in deep-red West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, and he’s all but completely ignored Democrat Barry Wendell, his opponent in next week’s election. Instead, he’s spending much of his energy on Sen. Joe Manchin, who endorsed Mooney’s opponent, outgoing Rep. David McKinley, during the state’s May primary. The two GOP congressmen were pitted against each other after population losses cost West Virginia a U.S. House seat, and Mooney won handily. Manchin has not yet officially announced whether he’ll run for reelection in 2024, and Mooney vows that his primary concern is seeing himself and other conservatives get elected and take back the majority in the U.S. House.

Wisconsin

Madison: A Wisconsin appeals court and a circuit judge this week shot down attempts backed by liberals seeking orders that local election clerks must accept absentee ballots that contain partial addresses of witnesses. The rulings come within days of Tuesday’s election and as more than 503,000 absentee ballots have already either been returned or cast in person. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson are both up for reelection in the battleground state. Numerous lawsuits have been filed leading up to the election focused on which absentee ballots can be counted or rejected. The status quo for determining whether an absentee ballot has enough of a witness address to count remains as it has been for the past 56 years, Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas said in an order Wednesday. Wisconsin elections have been conducted, and absentee ballots counted, the past 56 years without a legally binding definition of what constitutes a witness address on a ballot, Colas wrote in his order.

Wyoming

Cheyenne: A southeastern Wyoming sheriff’s deputy was shot and a man was killed during an exchange of gunfire at a residence in East Cheyenne on Halloween night, marking the third fatal shooting involving law enforcement officers in Laramie County this year, officials said. Deputies responded to a residence to serve a warrant at about 8 p.m. Monday when shots were exchanged between deputies and a man at the residence, Sheriff Danny Glick said. The injured deputy was treated at the hospital and released Tuesday afternoon, KTWO-AM reported. The man died at the scene, Glick said. Officials have not released the names of either the man who was killed or the deputies involved. No one else was injured.

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Golden Gate bison, prisoner paintings: News from around our 50 ...

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Alabama

Mobile: The son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., as well as family members of a condemned inmate, is asking the governor to stop Thursday’s execution of the man convicted in the 2004 killing of three police officers but who was not the trigger man. Nathaniel Woods is scheduled to be executed by injection. Woods and co-defendant Kerry Spencer were convicted of capital murder for the 2004 killings of Birmingham police officers Carlos Owen, Harley A. Chisolm III and Charles R. Bennett. Spencer was also sentenced to death for the killings. Prosecutors said the officers were gunned down in an ambush as they tried to serve a misdemeanor warrant on Woods at a home where he and Spencer sold crack cocaine. Martin Luther King III sent Gov. Kay Ivey a letter Tuesday “pleading with you not to execute Nathaniel Woods.” King wrote on Twitter that the execution is an “injustice.”

Alaska

Juneau: Reports of felony sexual offenses are up nearly 20% across the state but on the decline in the Southeast region, the Alaska Department of Public Safety says. The department released its compilation of reported felony sexual offense numbers from 2018 last week, The Juneau Empire reports. Reports of felony-level sex offenses increased 19.5% in 2018 compared to 2017. More than 1,762 offenses were reported across Alaska in 2018, the department said. Western Alaska reported the highest rate of felony-level sex offenses statewide, while Southeast Alaska reported the lowest rate. The victims were 88% female, and 95% of the suspects were male. More than 55% of the victims were minors. Family members and acquaintances made up the largest portion of suspects at 93%, while 98% of suspects were known or related in cases involving victims under 11 years old.

Arizona

Phoenix: Mayor Kate Gallego called Tuesday for a shared regional response to surging homelessness and lack of affordable housing in and around the city, saying more money and longer-term solutions are needed to tackle what she said is “a crisis situation.” “As the nation’s fifth-largest city, we’ve seen abundant opportunity come from our historic growth, but it’s also brought challenges,” Gallego said. “Two of these challenges, a lack of affordable housing and a growing issue with people experiencing homelessness, are deeply intertwined.” Gallego wants to add $3 million to the $20 million the city already spends annually on homelessness and a shortage of affordable housing but said other cities, Maricopa County and the state should provide more help. The Maricopa County Association of Governments said a one-night count in early 2019 found some 6,600 people in metro Phoenix did not have a home.

Arkansas

Little Rock: The chief administrative law judge for the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission and wife of the state Republican Party chairman was elected Tuesday to the Supreme Court after a race that focused on her deep ties to the GOP. Barbara Webb defeated Pulaski County Circuit Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch in the race for the seat being vacated by retiring Justice Jo Hart, winning an eight-year term on the court. The race was the only statewide election on Arkansas’ ballot other than the presidential primaries. The state’s high court races are technically nonpartisan, but Webb faced scrutiny during her bid over her appeals to GOP voters. She had the backing of Sen. Tom Cotton and former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and had spoken to Republican gatherings around the state. Welch during the campaign criticized Webb over her ties, accusing her of talking to an “echo chamber of one political party.”

California

San Francisco: Five young bison have joined Golden Gate Park, doubling the bison population in time for the park’s 150th anniversary. The 1-year-old female bison arrived at the park in the heart of the city Friday, bringing the total number of bison to 10 in the paddock that has existed since the 1892. The new humpbacked, shaggy-haired wild ox were brought from the Northern California ranch where they were born. They will be formally introduced to the public on April 4, the park’s anniversary, said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. Besides more bison, the park will celebrate its anniversary with the opening of a 150-foot observation wheel, a kids carnival, community picnics, a large display of the iconic AIDS Memorial Quilt, live entertainment, and free entry into all park museums and cultural centers.

Colorado

Fort Collins: A controlled burn that became a wildfire was the result of weather conditions that were underestimated by fire personnel, state officials said. The Colorado Department of Public Safety Compliance and Professional Standards Office issued a report Sunday about the October fire in northern Larimer County. The fire burned less than 1 square mile outside the planned area but forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents in Glacier View, 35 miles northwest of Fort Collins. No one was injured, and one outbuilding was destroyed. The burn in complex terrain spread when weather conditions quickly turned drier, warmer and windier than anticipated, the state’s report said. The prescribed burn led by The Nature Conservancy on the private Ben Delatour Boy Scout Ranch was part of a forest restoration effort, the report said. Area residents were upset at the time that the prescribed burn was started despite the dry, windy conditions.

Connecticut

Hartford: Lawmakers are revisiting a proposal to greatly expand the gambling reach of the state’s two federally recognized tribes, but the governor expressed doubts Tuesday whether that’s the right approach this year. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, who previously sought a wide-ranging gambling agreement, said the General Assembly should instead support a simpler, competing bill that would authorize the tribes, the state’s lottery and existing off-track betting operators in Connecticut to conduct sports wagering. “It also builds upon the state’s existing partnership with the tribes, is more likely to withstand legal challenges from third party competitors, and promotes a fair and competitive sports betting market outside the tribes’ reservations,” Max Reiss, Lamont’s spokesman, said in a statement.

Delaware

Dover: It’s now legal to bring your dog to restaurants in the First State. Thanks to a bill that Gov. John Carney signed into law Tuesday, restaurants and beer gardens can now decide themselves whether to allow canine owners to bring furry companions to dine in outdoor seating areas. The law requires the pup to be leashed, and the restaurant still has to abide by health regulations. The bill comes after a minor controversy last summer when the Delaware Division of Public Health took a renewed interest in an existing state regulation that prohibited pets in food establishments, including the outdoor areas. The ban did not apply to service animals. “Many, including myself, had no idea this policy existed,” bill sponsor and House Speaker Pete Schwartzkopf, D-Rehoboth Beach, said in a statement Tuesday.

District of Columbia

Washington: Concerns about the coronavirus outbreak in other parts of the world could have an impact on attendance of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, WUSA-TV reports. The annual festival draws more than 1.5 million people over a four-week period to experience a wide range of events centered on the district’s Yoshino cherry blossom trees. “It’s really Washington’s grandest springtime tradition,” said Mike Litterst with the National Park Service. He said the park service is doing what it can to prepare in case there is a coronavirus crisis in D.C. While there have been no confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the district, Maryland, or Virginia, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she fears tourism might take a hit for the festival. Festival organizers say two Japanese high school music groups have canceled plans to travel.

Florida

Tallahassee: Landlords wouldn’t be able to prohibit emotional support animals, but people who falsely claim to need one could face jail time, under a bill unanimously passed by the state Senate on Tuesday. Landlords could ask people with emotional support animals whose disabilities are not apparent to document the need. Health care professionals who certify the need for the animals would have to have personal knowledge of the renter’s disability. People wouldn’t be able to simply download a certification of need from a website. Democratic Sen. Kevin Rader of Boca Raton said he often hears complaints from condominium residents about people falsely claiming their pet is an emotional support animal, saying people are “getting phony baloney psychological papers saying they’re allowed to have animals in their communities.” A similar House bill is awaiting a full chamber vote.

Georgia

Atlanta: State employees would receive three weeks of paid time off when they become new parents under a proposal backed by Republican leaders in the Georgia House. Speaker David Ralston is among the influential GOP lawmakers supporting a bill that would grant paid parental leave to nearly 250,000 state workers, including public school teachers and employees of state-run universities. Private employers would not be affected if the measure becomes law. “Our goal is not to dictate to the private sector what they should and shouldn’t be doing because that’s not consistent with what any of us up here believe,” Ralston said at a news conference Tuesday. “But hopefully they will take inspiration from us.” Currently, state employees in Georgia are eligible for 12 weeks of unpaid leave when they have a new child, as required by federal law.

Hawaii

Wailuku: The island of Molokai could have its first movie theater in 12 years if the project is approved by local regulators. The owners of the RWH Chen Building in Kaunakakai plan to open a 48-seat theater, The Maui News reports. Brad and Grace Ellis recently renovated the space on the island in Maui County. The theater would be located in the third of three units in the building, sharing the structure with two apparel stores. “When we started renovating it, we were amazed at the number of people who were saying we could use a movie theater,” Brad Ellis said. The last movie theater on Molokai was the Maunaloa Town Cinemas, which closed in 2008 after the Molokai Ranch property with a lodge, golf course and cattle operations closed and laid off more than 120 employees.

Idaho

Boise: The amount of money in the state’s rainy-day fund that serves as a cushion against a potential economic downturn would increase under legislation that headed to the governor’s desk Tuesday. The Senate voted 31-4 to approve the legislation that is in line with Republican Gov. Brad Little’s recommendation. It would increase the Budget Stabilization Fund from 10% to 15% of general fund revenues. State officials said the change plus deposits would get the fund to more than $600 million by next year. Backers said the extra money will shield the state from a recession. Opponents said the money could instead be used for education and other pressing matters long neglected. The legislation passed the House 64-2 last month.

Illinois

Chicago: Two police officers who were involved in the shooting of an unarmed man in a downtown train station last week should be completely stripped of their police powers for the time being, the head of the agency that investigates the city’s police shootings recommended Wednesday. The officers, whose names haven’t been released, were already placed on administrative duty until investigations into Friday’s shooting are completed, which is policy in cases of officer-involved shootings. But if the officers are stripped of their police powers, they would be relieved of their service weapons and would no longer have the authority to make arrests, said police spokesman Luis Agostini. Interim police Superintendent Charlie Beck was told the recommendation but didn’t immediately decide on the matter, Agostini said.

Indiana

Indianapolis: After a tumultuous year in school accountability, Indiana schools got their report cards Wednesday, but the state-awarded letter grades used to rate schools – and, in some cases, intervene in cases of poor academic performance – arrived with little fanfare. The Indiana State Board of Education released the letter grades months later than normal and without comment. The grades were delayed while lawmakers crafted legislation that renders the grades moot, protecting schools from the impact of poor performance on the state’s new standardized test, the ILEARN exam, which was administered for the first time last spring. The law says that a school’s A-F grade for the 2018-19 school year may not be lower than that same school’s A-F grade for the previous year. In order to determine the final 2018-19 grade for each school, the Indiana Department of Education awarded schools the higher of the two grades.

Iowa

Des Moines: Felons would be required to repay restitution to victims before they could get their voting rights restored under a bill passed Tuesday by the state Senate. Earlier in the day, Gov. Kim Reynolds for the first time indicated support for the measure after having previously stood firm that she didn’t want to make voting rights restoration more difficult. Currently, felons must apply to the governor individually, and Reynolds has required that they have at least a payment plan for court-ordered financial obligations but not total repayment to be considered. Senate Republicans are insisting on complete repayment to victims before they will consider passing a separate constitutional amendment that would automatically restore felon voting rights upon the completion of a sentence, a priority of Reynolds that Republicans failed to pass last year.

Kansas

Lawrence: The University of Kansas has settled an age discrimination lawsuit brought on behalf of a former employee who said he was ousted in retaliation for raising the alarm that his department was told to fill job openings with mainly millennials and other young people. Under a consent decree agreed to last week with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of former school employee Jeffrey Thomas, the university pledged not to discriminate against job applicants or employees based on age and to give Thomas $144,000 in back pay and damages, KCUR-FM reports. Thomas worked for the school from July 2004 until December 2014. As part of the consent decree, the university was required to mail a letter of reference on behalf of Thomas noting that he was promoted and received an award for his performance as a supervisor.

Kentucky

Frankfort: The state House passed a bill Tuesday requiring Kentuckians to present photo identification in order to vote. It would go into effect for the general election this fall. Senate Bill 2 passed by a 62-35 vote, with all present Republicans members voting for it and all but two Democrats voting against the legislation. Kentucky law currently allows eligible voters to cast a ballot if they present personal identification, but SB 2 would require government-issued identification that includes the voter’s photograph. Republican supporters of the bill – including new Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, who campaigned on the issue – say the bill is needed to combat voter fraud through impersonation and restore public confidence in the election system. Democrats and groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky fear it would create unnecessary barriers to voting in order to stop a form of fraud that has never been a problem in Kentucky.

Louisiana

Baton Rouge: As many as 31,000 of the state’s food stamp recipients could lose their benefits under a new Trump administration rule starting April 1 that enacts stricter work requirements on childless adults, according to estimates released Wednesday by the state social services agency. The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services will be contacting the affected people who get food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with information about how they can keep getting assistance. The new rule will limit work-eligible adults to three months of SNAP benefits in a three-year period unless they are working, volunteering or participating in a job training program for at least 80 hours a month. Exceptions are allowed for people with dependents, people who have a disability, students, pregnant women and certain other criteria.

Maine

Portland: The state Republican Party won the right Tuesday to collect signatures for a referendum drive to repeal ranked-choice voting in presidential races even as Portland residents voted to expand ranked-choice voting in local races. The GOP went to court after being denied the right to collect petitions at polling places in Portland. A judge granted a temporary restraining order Tuesday afternoon, allowing the GOP to begin collecting petitions at 3 p.m. In denying the GOP request, the city cited a state law prohibiting groups from trying to influence voters on an issue before them on the ballot. Ranked-choice voting is allowed in mayoral races in Portland; the proposal on the city ballot would allow ranked voting to apply to council and school board races. The GOP wants to roll back a ranked-choice voting law adopted by lawmakers last year to use ranked-choice voting in presidential races in Maine.

Maryland

Salisbury: The Salisbury Zoo has confirmed it lost its national accreditation during a standard five-year renewal process. The Association of Zoos & Aquarium cited the Salisbury Zoo for not meeting certain industry standards during its fall 2019 evaluation, said the zoo’s acting director, Leanora Dillon. The zoo’s level of deferred maintenance, inadequately maintained buildings and the lack of a full-time veterinarian all contributed to the zoo losing its standing. Representatives didn’t share further specifics on where the zoo fell short, but Dillon emphasized that none of the concerns had to do with animal welfare and that zoo is not in danger of losing any animals immediately. It must wait one year to reapply for accreditation while making progress toward fixing its citations. In the meantime, the zoo has been told it can maintain the animals it currently holds, such as Andean bears, otters, wallabies and jaguar.

Massachusetts

Boston: Mayor Marty Walsh’s next chief of staff will be the first indigenous person to hold a Cabinet-level position at City Hall, officials said. Kathryn R. Burton, 43, will start in her new role March 9, Walsh’s office announced Tuesday. Burton has worked as director of operations for a housing development firm for the past four years. She also previously worked as chief of staff for former state treasurer Steve Grossman. Walsh’s office said in a statement that Burton will focus on implementing the mayor’s priorities and “ensuring the effectiveness of city services.” Burton is a member of the Gesgapegiag Mi’kmaq tribe in Quebec, Canada. She grew up on the Eskasoni First Nations reserve in Nova Scotia. “I look forward to helping Mayor Walsh achieve his ambitious goals for the city and being part of the team that is leading the charge in making Boston a better place for all,” Burton said in a statement.

Michigan

Vanderbilt: The 108,000-acre Pigeon River Country State Forest is getting a nearly 600-acre addition in a land deal valued at more than $2 million, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. The property purchase, finalized last month, adds the Elk Forest at Black River, which is in Montmorency County, to the state’s public lands. The area is surrounded on three sides by existing state-managed land and includes public access to Walled Lake. “This spectacular place adds a gem to the crown of Michigan’s public lands,” said Debbie Begalle, DNR forest resources division chief. “The land will be open for hiking, hunting, fishing, elk viewing, skiing, snowshoeing, bird watching, mushroom hunting and berry picking, to name just a few activities.”

Minnesota

St. Cloud: Men incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-St. Cloud presented paintings Wednesday to honor the three Minnesota National Guard soldiers killed in a December Black Hawk helicopter crash. Kao Xiong, Jason Ricci and Sergio Zapata did not have painting experience before taking a class at the prison, but the three worked together to create pieces honoring the guardsmen. “Words cannot express our deepest condolences,” Zapata said before the artists unveiled the work, saying the process was “an honor and privilege.” Each painting contained the name of one of the soldiers killed in the Dec. 5 crash – Sgt. Kort M. Plantenberg, 28, of Avon; Chief Warrant Officer 2 James A. Rogers Jr., 28, of Winsted; and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Charles P. Nord, 30, of Perham. This was the first commission for the artists, although they paint on their own through classes at the prison, they said.

Mississippi

Bay St. Louis: The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation granted more than $2.8 million to The Nature Conservancy in Mississippi to expand its oyster reefs. The funding will be used to increase the existing oyster reef in Bay St. Louis by 20 acres, WLOX-TV reports. The reef is currently 10 acres. The project was expected to add more height to the reef so it can be stronger if there’s an influx of fresh water, such as what happened last year when the Bonnet Carre Spillway was opened twice. Oysters help maintain water quality and provide habitat for several estuarine species. But sudden influxes of massive amounts of polluted fresh water can lower oxygen levels, killing oysters and other marine life.

Missouri

St. Louis: The state is denying severely disabled children full access to services and failing to prevent unnecessary placements in institutions, according to a federal lawsuit. The suit was filed Tuesday on behalf of nine children and teenagers with medically complex conditions who are enrolled in Medicaid – public coverage administered by the state, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Though the children have been approved for intensive in-home nursing care, the state is failing to arrange for the care or make sure the services are available, the suit alleges. Also listed as a plaintiff is the Caring for Complex Kids Coalition, an association of parents and caregivers of medically complex children in Missouri. A spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Social Services said in an email that the department does not comment on pending litigation.

Montana

Helena: The state Supreme Court has upheld the certification of a class-action lawsuit against the city of Billings over franchise fees charged on residents’ water, sewer and garbage bills. The plaintiffs argue the fees, which were ended in mid-2018, constitute an illegal sales tax, and they are seeking reimbursement. District Judge Gregory Pinski certified the case as a class action involving up to 35,000 people last April. The city appealed, and the Supreme Court upheld his ruling Tuesday. The wastewater class includes people who paid the franchise fee dating back to Jan. 18, 2010, and the garbage class paid fees dating back to July 1, 2012. Justices and the plaintiffs agreed the claims over the water franchise fees could date back only to February 2014 after the city argued that water is a “good” and that a four-year statute of limitations applies.

Nebraska

Lincoln: People who are sexually assaulted could have a personal advocate to help them through the aftermath under a bill state lawmakers advanced Tuesday. Lawmakers gave the measure first-round approval on a 41-0 vote. It would create a sexual assault survivor’s bill of rights, giving survivors the right to have an advocate of their choosing present during medical exams and legal depositions. Survivors could also be interviewed by a law enforcement officer of the gender they choose. Sen. Kate Bolz, of Lincoln, said she introduced the measure to help people who have just experienced an extremely traumatic event. Some lawmakers questioned whether the measure could have unintended consequences but agreed to work on it before it receives final approval. Two additional votes are required in the Legislature before the bill goes to the governor.

Nevada

Reno: The city is making more than 100 homeless people leave an encampment along railroad tracks near a shelter in the downtown area. The city provided a week’s notice before police and other city workers began enforcing the order Wednesday. Those staying in the encampment had to pack up their belongings and take them with them, but some said they had nowhere else to go. Officials said the people were trespassing on railroad property and posed an extreme fire danger. According to the Washoe County Health District, the city had to dismantle the encampments because of health code violations. The Community Assistance Center is nearby but lacks space to house the people who have been staying in the encampment. City spokesman Jon Humbert, a city spokesman, estimated there were about 130 people in the tent encampment.

New Hampshire

Campton: Applicants are wanted for this year’s Artist in Residence program at the White Mountain National Forest and Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire. The program offers artists a chance to pursue their particular art form while being inspired by the surrounding forest and to engage members of the public with their work and artist process. The application deadline is March 15. One artist residency of at least three weeks will be offered between mid-July and the end of September. The artist will be provided accommodations on or near the forest, as well as a $2,000 stipend. Public programs may include demonstrations, exploratory walks or hikes, performances, interactive or participatory installations, group creative projects, or other programs based on the medium, interest and experience of the artist.

New Jersey

Trenton: Gov. Phil Murphy had a tumor that is likely cancerous removed from his kidney Wednesday, Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver said in a statement. Murphy’s office did not disclose the hospital, beyond saying it was in New York, or who performed the surgery but said the partial nephrectomy was done by a urologist and a team of doctors. Murphy, 62, announced late last month that doctors had found a 3-centimeter-wide tumor on his left kidney during a CT scan. It’s unknown whether the tumor was cancerous, but kidney tumors usually are, according to the Mayo Clinic. The tumor was caught early enough, Murphy has said, that his prognosis was “very good.” He ceded all his authority, such as signing bills and declaring a state of emergency, to Oliver beginning Wednesday “until further notice.” He is expected to slowly return to a public schedule of events over the next several weeks.

New Mexico

Bandelier National Monument: The National Park Service says the popular loop trail at Bandelier National Monument will be getting a much-needed facelift this summer. Officials say the 1.2-mile paved path at the bottom of Frijoles Canyon is showing the effects of weather, time and tons of foot traffic. The trail provides access to dozens of archaeological sites. Acting Superintendent Dennis Milligan said visitors should expect rerouting, closures and delays. The work is scheduled to begin in May and will last from four to six months. Starting in May, visitors also will be required to take a shuttle bus from the White Rock visitor center to access the monument’s most visited area in Frijoles Canyon. The shuttle helps relieve the shortage of parking during the busy season. The shuttles will run daily from May 14 through Oct. 14.

New York

Albany: State senators moved to strengthen seat belt laws Tuesday and approved a bill that requires back-seat adult passengers to buckle up. The legislation, passed by the state Senate and Assembly, now moves on to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Current law requires front-seat adult passengers to be buckled, but the legislation would force adult back-seat passengers to use a seat belt too – a move supporters say will save lives and cut down on the risk posed to buckled-in front seat riders. “The simple fact is you’re not any safer in the back seat. So we have to make that message loud and clear by passing this legislation,” state Sen. David Carlucci said on the chamber floor Tuesday. Carlucci, a Democrat whose district includes Rockland County, said New York in the 1980s became the first state in the nation to require people in the front seat to wear a seat belt. But since then, dozens of other states have enacted back-seat belt laws, he said.

North Carolina

Raleigh: Primary voters on Tuesday chose a Democratic former state legislator and Iraq War veteran to challenge Republican Sen. Thom Tillis this fall and the GOP lieutenant governor to try to unseat Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Cal Cunningham, who ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat 10 years ago, defeated party rival Erica Smith and three others to earn the Democratic nomination. As in 2010, he received the backing of Washington Democrats. His military career, centrist views and fundraising advantage propelled the waste-management company attorney to victory over Smith, who ran on a more liberal platform. GOP primary participants also chose Lt. Gov. Dan Forest over state Rep. Holly Grange for the gubernatorial nomination to take on Cooper. Primary voters decided dozens of nominations for federal, state government and legislative seats.

North Dakota

Jamestown: Area Republicans auctioned bottles of wine named for and signed by state Superintendent Kirsten Baesler just days after she was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. North Dakota District 12 and 29 Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner last weekend. House Majority Leader Chet Pollert says that for years the dinner has included a wine auction as a fundraiser for candidates. Eleven bottles of “Baesler’s Bulldog Red” and “Superintendent Baesler’s Honor Roll White” were auctioned. Baesler signed the bottles before the dinner Saturday, the Bismarck Tribune reports. Baesler, 50, is seeking the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement for a third term. She was arrested on suspicion of driving drunk Wednesday night.

Ohio

Columbus: A new effort to legalize recreational marijuana in the state got underway this week. Backers of a measure called the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Amendment submitted the initial petition and 1,000 signatures to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for review. A long process awaits the proposal, which backers want on the November ballot. The constitutional amendment would allow adults over the age of 21 to buy, possess and consume limited amounts of marijuana, including growing up to six marijuana plants. Voters in 2015 handily defeated a ballot issue to legalize marijuana in the state, though some opposition involved concern over exclusive rights that would have been given to initial growing sites under that proposal. The state’s current medical marijuana program, approved in 2016 and now just over a year old, would remain in place if the legalization effort passed.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma City: The state House has backed a bill that would require hundreds of public buildings in the state to display the national motto, “In God We Trust.” The House voted 76-20 on Tuesday in favor of the bill, sending it to the Senate. Critics say the bill is an affront to the separation of church and state that could alienate nonreligious people. Rep. Collin Walke, D-Oklahoma City, suggested that the bill is an election year stunt. But the bill’s Republican sponsor, House Speaker Charles McCall, said it wasn’t intended to be a religious issue but rather to honor the nation’s history. The bill could cost the state an estimated $85,000 to place the signs in 342 state buildings. Others, though, say it could be more because the bill specifies that each displayed motto match the size and placement of the one in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in Washington.

Oregon

Salem: The capital city’s fourth annual Women’s March will be held Sunday, moving this year to a new date. “Women Rising” is set for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Oregon State Capitol. In a release, march board chair Debbie Miller said the event was moved to a later date to avoid conflicts with Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, as well as to co-celebrate International Women’s Day, a global day for celebrating the achievements of women and advocating for equality. The mission of Women’s March Salem is to harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change, Miller said. The event will include a rally with speakers, booths, food and music, followed by a 1-mile march. Vanessa Nordyke, a city councilor and senior assistant attorney general with the Oregon Department of Justice, will serve as master of ceremonies. Organizers said the event will be free, peaceful and family-friendly.

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia: The City Council unveiled proposals Tuesday aimed at reducing the number of people in poverty in the city by 25%, with a goal of lifting at least 100,000 people above the threshold by 2024. A special committee released its poverty action plan with recommendations to address several areas including housing, education and guaranteed income for the city’s poorest residents through public initiatives and private partnerships. Some of the proposals include providing rent subsidies; guaranteed income; increasing the availability of adult education in every neighborhood; and streamlining the process to apply for federally funded benefits. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2018 found about 400,000 Philadelphia residents – nearly 26% – live below the national poverty level. That percentage was more than double the national average and was the highest of the 10 most populous U.S. cities.

Rhode Island

Providence: The state’s first health clinic for the LGBTQ community has opened to offer a variety of services including primary care, HIV prevention and treatment, and express screening for sexually transmitted infections. Open Door Health, an initiative of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute, opened Monday. It will fill an important role for members of the state’s LGBTQ community, who disproportionately experience poor health outcomes as well as a lack of access to culturally competent care, Executive Director Amy Nunn said. Tiara Mack, a member of the clinic’s community advisory board, said navigating the health care system as a black woman is already difficult, but it was compounded after she came out as lesbian. “I was excited to see that there is now an affirming place where my community won’t have fear of sharing their identity with their doctors,” she told The Providence Journal.

South Carolina

Charleston: Plans are moving forward to construct a memorial to the nine African American worshippers killed at church in 2015. The Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation announced Monday that Bank of America is giving the board a $250,000 grant toward the construction of a permanent memorial at the Mother Emanuel A.M.E Church in downtown Charleston, news outlets report. Construction is expected to cost about $10 million, which includes buying additional property. The foundation has raised over $7 million as of Monday, Foundation Board Co-Chair John Darby said. Plans for the memorial were designed by Michael Arad, the same architect who created the National September 11 Memorial in New York City. The Charleston site is set to include a marble fountain engraved with the victims’ names surrounded by two high-back benches facing each other that resemble “sheltering wings.”

South Dakota

Pierre: A Senate committee on Tuesday advanced Gov. Kristi Noem’s proposal to revive the state’s riot laws with criminal and civil penalties for those who urge rioting. Native American groups opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline warned that the initiative would stoke tensions that could lead to situations similar to the stand-offs over the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. The bill will next be voted on by the full state Senate. It has already passed the House. Candi Brings Plenty, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the bill “sets the stage for a continuation of tensions.” Many tribal members spoke of their experiences of demonstrations at Standing Rock and described how law enforcement used violence and threats of incitement to riot charges against them. They argued that the bill represents another step in long-standing oppression of Native American people since the violation of treaties dating back to the 1800s.

Tennessee

Nashville: An elections administrator in the tornado-stricken county that includes the capital is praising voters for turning out on Super Tuesday despite damage to voting locations and treacherous driving conditions. More than a dozen voting locations in Davidson County were damaged and closed after a tornado swept through Nashville and surrounding areas in the early morning darkness Tuesday. Voters navigated road debris and street closures to reach precincts that were not damaged to cast ballots in the presidential primary election. Polls in Davidson County opened at 8 a.m., an hour later than originally planned. A couple of locations remained open until 10 p.m. Despite the adversity, voters still made it to the polls in respectable numbers, Davidson County elections administrator Jeff Roberts said Wednesday.

Texas

Austin: A fourth area code has been approved for the Dallas area, the Public Utility Commission of Texas announced Tuesday. In a statement, the PUC said it had approved the addition of 945 as an overlay because of a looming shortage of telephone number possibilities for the 214, 469 and 972 area codes. Those codes are used by Dallas County and parts of Collin, Denton, Fannin, Hunt, Johnson, Kaufman and Tarrant counties. The new code is to be implemented over the next nine months, and telephone numbers containing the 945 area code will be assigned once the numbers available for the other three codes are exhausted early next year. According to the PUC statement, the addition of the code should be simplified because callers within the region already are required to dial 10 digits.

Utah

Salt Lake City: The state is poised to study the disproportionate violence inflicted against Native American women and girls after the Legislature voted to create a task force. Indigenous communities gathered at the Capitol to celebrate Tuesday after the proposal passed the Senate unanimously, the Deseret News reports. It now heads to Republican Gov. Gary Herbert’s desk. Democratic state Rep. Angela Romero’s plan would bring together a nine-member task force of lawmakers, researchers, tribes, law enforcement and an advocate for victims. The task force will identify data-collection gaps in local, state and federal enforcement agencies. Nationwide, American Indian women face a murder rate more than 10 times the national average, according to federal statistics. Utah had the eighth-highest number of missing and slain indigenous women in a nationwide study of 71 cities completed by the Urban Indian Health Institute several years ago.

Vermont

South Burlington: Voters in the city have overwhelmingly opposed a $209 million school bond proposal to build a new middle and high school. About 6,500 voted against the project, while roughly 1,700 voted for it, on Town Meeting Day on Tuesday. The school board said the project was needed because of overcrowding and aging infrastructure at the South Burlington High School and Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School. The board said that if the proposal were rejected, it would come up with another solution to address the concerns.

Virginia

Richmond: The Virginia Museum of History & Culture is set to open an exhibit that celebrates a century of female activism. “Agents of Change: Female Activism in Virginia from Women’s Suffrage to Today” is scheduled to open Sunday. The exhibit will feature artifacts from the museum’s collections, new acquisitions made through a major collecting initiative and rarely seen loans from private individuals. It is intended to honor change-makers who have brought about positive change in their communities, Virginia and the nation. In a news release, Museum Collections Curator Karen Sherry said the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 marked the culmination of a concerted fight for women’s suffrage and heralded a new age of female participation in American civic life. She said the stories in the exhibit underscore the importance of civic engagement.

Washington

Olympia: The Legislature on Tuesday approved a bill that reduces the crime of intentionally exposing a sexual partner to HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor. Supporters of the change to the rarely used law say the current penalties don’t have an effect on reducing transmissions or improving public health. Opponents argue the move diminishes the significance of the impact on a person who is unknowingly infected. The measure now heads to Gov. Jay Inslee, who is expected to sign it. Democratic Sen. Annette Cleveland said that the bill modernizes criminal statutes and recognizes “advancements in medical science that have rendered HIV a treatable disease.” The legislation, requested by the state Department of Health, also calls for more intervention from local and state health officers, allowing them to recommend options ranging from testing to counseling. They could even mandate treatment for an individual determined to be placing others at risk.

West Virginia

Charleston: Gov. Jim Justice urged state residents Wednesday to “live our lives” despite the emerging threat of the new coronavirus. Justice held a news briefing along with Department of Health and Human Resources Secretary Bill Crouch at the Capitol to discuss steps West Virginia is taking and to give common-sense advice on how people should protect themselves. There are no known cases of the virus that causes COVID-19 thus far in West Virginia. The briefing came after Justice held a private roundtable with administration and medical officials to make “absolutely certain that we’re ready, God forbid, if we do have a situation here in West Virginia,” Justice said. Crouch said the risk that the virus will arrive in West Virginia is low, especially due to the very small number of international travelers coming to the state. But he predicted most states will see such cases “the way it’s moving.”

Wisconsin

Suamico: Gov. Tony Evers gave out nearly $75 million Wednesday to help local governments around the state pay for 152 transportation projects and programs. The one-time funding was included in last year’s state budget as the Democratic governor and Republican lawmakers sought to provide more money for transportation. The local funding will go toward projects and programs in 66 of the state’s 72 counties. “Think about tourism or farmers getting their products from point A to point B,” Evers said. “Folks getting to and from work, to school, and our state economy absolutely depends on having good roads, safe bridges and great highways.” He announced the grants at a news conference at the headquarters of the Howard-Suamico School District near Highway M in Brown County, which will receive $1 million for a widening project.

Wyoming

Cody: Sleeping Giant Ski Area will remain open after previously planning to suspend operations for the 2020-2021 season, Yellowstone Recreations Foundation said in a statement. The ski and recreational area was scheduled to close over financial concerns after reopening in 2009, the Cody Enterprise reports. The mountain initially closed in 2004 because of similar monetary issues. No changes have been planned for the summer zipline business, which could be affected if winter ski operations are shut down about 50 miles west of Cody, officials said. The mountain has operated at about a $200,000 loss most years since reopening but nearly broke even in 2013, foundation officials said. The mountain made about $335,500 profit in 2015, including volunteer contributions. Sleeping Giant is tentatively expected to remain open until March 22, depending on conditions.

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Synagogue fight, celebrity burglaries: News from around our 50 states

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Alabama

Montgomery: Corrections officials apparently botched an inmate’s execution last month, an anti-death penalty group alleges, citing the length of time that passed before the prisoner received the lethal injection and a private autopsy indicating his arm may have been cut to find a vein. Joe Nathan James Jr. was put to death July 28 for the 1994 shooting death of his former girlfriend. The execution was carried out more than three hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a stay. “Subjecting a prisoner to three hours of pain and suffering is the definition of cruel and unusual punishment,” Maya Foa, director of Reprieve US Forensic Justice Initiative, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty, said in a statement. “States cannot continue to pretend that the abhorrent practice of lethal injection is in any way humane.” The Alabama Department of Forensic Science declined a request to release the state’s autopsy of James, citing an ongoing review that happens after every execution. Officials have not responded to requests for comment on the private autopsy, which was first reported by The Atlantic. At the time of the execution, Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters that “nothing out of the ordinary” happened. Hamm said he wasn’t aware of the prisoner fighting or resisting officers. The state later acknowledged that the execution was delayed because of difficulties establishing an intravenous line but did not specify how long it took.

Alaska

Juneau: Police in the city are trying to get DNA samples from people with certain past convictions to help fulfill the governor’s push to reduce a backlog of missing evidence across the state, Alaska Public Media reports. The ACLU of Alaska has raised concerns about DNA collection efforts and said it’s monitoring the situation.

Arizona

Phoenix: Democratic attorney general candidate Kris Mayes is calling to investigate and potentially cancel the leases the State Land Department signed with a Saudi Arabian company that is pumping from Phoenix’s backup water supply in western Arizona. Mayes is also calling for the company to pay the state approximately $38 million for using the water in La Paz County, which sits in a basin that could be tapped as future water source for the Phoenix metro area. Mayes said the leases should be put on hold while they are investigated because they potentially violate the Arizona Constitution’s gift clause, as well as a clause that requires state land and its products to be appraised and offered at their true value. The Arizona State Land Department gave a sweet deal to a Saudi Arabian company called Fondomonte to farm areas in Butler Valley near Bouse, growing alfalfa to ship it back to the Middle East to feed its cows. Fondomonte pays only $25 per acre annually, which is about one-sixth of the market price for farm land in that area, according to experts and the state’s own mass appraisal for areas in and around Butler Valley. In addition, the water that is being pumped by Fondomonte is located in what’s called a transfer basin, meaning water sucked from the ground can be shipped to areas of the state where groundwater is regulated.

Arkansas

Little Rock: A man who was beaten and held down by law enforcement officers during an arrest that was caught on a widely circulated video has filed a federal lawsuit against the officers. Attorneys for Randal Worcester filed the lawsuit Monday over the Aug. 21 arrest outside a convenience store in the small town of Mulberry that’s prompted state and federal criminal investigations. A bystander’s video shows one officer hold Worcester down as a sheriff’s deputy repeatedly punches and knees the 27-year-old man in the head before grabbing his hair and slamming him against the pavement. At the same time, a third officer also kneed Worcester repeatedly. All three officers – Mulberry Officer Thell Riddle and Crawford County deputies Zachary King and Levi White – are white. Worcester is also white, according to jail booking information. Worcester’s lawsuit accuses the officers, all of whom have been suspended, of violating his constitutional rights. The lawsuit also names the city of Mulberry, its police chief, Crawford County and its sheriff as defendants. “Any reasonable law enforcement officer should have known that his conduct violated clearly established federal law and was a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the lawsuit said.

California

Sacramento: State lawmakers on Monday approved a nation-leading measure that would give more than a half-million fast food workers more power and protections, over the objections of restaurant owners who warn it would drive up consumers’ costs. The bill will create a new 10-member Fast Food Council with equal numbers of workers’ delegates and employers’ representatives, along with two state officials, empowered to set minimum standards for wages, hours and working conditions in California. A late amendment would cap any minimum wage increase for fast food workers at chains with more than 100 restaurants at $22 an hour next year, compared to the statewide minimum of $15.50 an hour, with cost of living increases thereafter. “We made history today,” said Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry, calling it “a watershed moment.” “This legislation is a huge step forward for workers in California and all across the country,” she said as advocates offered it as a model for other states. The Senate approved the measure on a 21-12 vote, over bipartisan opposition. Hours later the Assembly sent it to Gov. Gavin Newsom on a final 41-16 vote, both chambers acting with no votes to spare.

Colorado

Denver: Two minors and an adult face charges after a teenager was fatally shot in the head while filming a video for the popular social media platform TikTok earlier this month. Three minors were filming dance videos to post on TikTok in the southern Colorado town of Monte Vista when a Glock 19 pistol discharged Aug. 7, according to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by KRDO-TV. The victim’s identity has not been released. Emiliano Vargas, 21, has been arrested for allegedly permitting or providing a minor with a firearm. The two other minors who were at the scene were arrested for alleged reckless manslaughter and possession of a handgun by juveniles, according to a statement by the Monte Vista Police Department. According to the affidavit, one of the minors told police that she saw the other juvenile point and shoot the gun at the victim before throwing the pistol on a nearby bed. When asked if it seemed like an accident, the girl said to police that “it could be.” Vargas told police he was not at the scene when the shot was fired, according to the affidavit.

Connecticut

Killingly: A high school assistant principal this month was charged with bringing a handgun onto campus – more than a year after the incident occurred and three months after state police were directed to reopen the case. Rolando Navarro, 43, was charged Aug. 16 with possession of a weapon on school grounds, a felony, and released on a $1,000 non-surety bond pending his scheduled arraignment Wednesday at Danielson Superior Court, according to a state police criminal information summary. Navarro and Principal Rafael Calixto were placed on administrative leave in February, weeks after the state Department of Children and Families and state police announced an investigation into a report of a gun discovered at Harvard H. Ellis Technical High School last year. State police from the Central District Major Crime Squad in August interviewed a former student who said he was tasked June 8, 2021, with performing a tire rotation on Navarro’s personal vehicle inside the school’s automotive shop. The student and his shop teacher said they found a gun box in the vehicle’s rear tire well containing an unloaded semi-automatic pistol and magazine. Soon after the weapon was reported, Navarro retrieved the gun box and left, police said.

Delaware

Dover: State health officials announced Monday that they will soon include fentanyl test strips in naloxone overdose-reversal kits distributed to the public. The effort is aimed at preventing accidental overdoses due to fentanyl consumption, the Division of Public Health’s Office of Health Crisis Response said in a news release. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in Delaware, found in more than 80% of fatal overdoses, officials said. There were 515 overdose deaths in Delaware last year, an increase of 15% from 2020, according to Division of Forensic Science data. Fentanyl was found in 83% of those deaths. The test strips are highly sensitive, and marijuana, cocaine, meth, ecstasy and other substances can be tested for the presence of fentanyl, officials said. Most overdoses are unintentional, officials said, and people may not realize how strong a drug is or that it contains fentanyl, which cannot be detected by sight, taste, smell or touch. The Division of Public Health also distributes 10-pack fentanyl test strip kits through a free mail-order program.

District of Columbia

Washington: During her show at The Anthem concert hall Monday, New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde caused a stir by telling the crowd she swam in the Potomac River, WUSA-TV reports. “The crowd is in SHAMBLES,” concertgoer Natalie Escobar said in a tweet. Escobar said the Grammy-winning artist told fans she did it to get a feel for D.C. Another Lorde fan said many in the venue booed. In video from the show, Lorde says she was lying in the river contemplating what to say to the crowd. “I love swimming in water where I’m playing,” said Lorde, 25. “It makes me feel like I know you a bit better.” The reaction on social media has been mixed. “She did what?!” one user wrote. Another joked that the musician is going to grow an extra limb. Others praised her gutsiness. Earlier this year, local leaders celebrated the progress made in cleaning the Potomac. “I think a lot of people still think that this river is not clean enough to swim, but we’ve been doing the testing for three straight years, every single week,” Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks said back in March. “And we’re finding that there’s plenty of days, and a lot of places more than 85% of the time, where it is safe to swim in this river. I swim in this river; my daughter swims in this river.” Swimming in the Potomac without a permit has been banned since 1932.

Florida

Fort Lauderdale: Four school board members appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in one of the state’s most Democratic counties were sworn into office Tuesday. They replace the elected Broward County board members DeSantis suspended after a grand jury investigating the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School found widespread wrongdoing. The Florida Department of Education on Monday voiced “significant concerns” about the school system’s actions before, during and after the shootings of 17 people by Nikolas Cruz, a troubled former student who attacked the high school’s campus on Valentine’s Day in 2018. In a letter sent to Superintendent Vickie Cartwright, the state cited the grand jury’s finding of mismanagement of the $800 million voter-approved bond to renovate schools, the underreporting of criminal activity to the state, the district’s “almost fanatical desire to control student data” and use it to manipulate public perception, and the practice of allowing students with serious felonies back on school campuses. “Due to the gravity of the issues outlined above, the Florida Department of Education and the Office of Safe Schools will contact you to arrange an in-person meeting this week to investigate these major concerns,” wrote Tim Hay, who directs the state’s Office of Safe Schools.

Georgia

Atlanta: A prosecutor on Monday announced a sprawling indictment against members of what she said is a violent street gang that has been targeting the Atlanta-area homes of famous athletes, entertainers and others who flaunt expensive possessions on social media. Singer Mariah Carey, Marlo Hampton of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” Atlanta United player Brad Guzan and the Atlanta Falcons’ Calvin Ridley all had their homes broken into, the indictment says. The 220-count indictment filed Aug. 22 charges 26 people, most of whom are accused of violating Georgia’s anti-gang and racketeering laws. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said the crimes alleged in the indictment – carjacking, kidnapping, armed robbery, shootings, home invasions – were committed by members of the Drug Rich gang, which she said began to emerge in 2016 in a neighboring county. In addition to the celebrity targets, social media influencers were also victimized in home invasions and burglaries, Willis said. “What they do is target people who show their wealth on social media,” she said. “So I do have a message for the public: Where it is kind of fun to put your things on social media and show off, unfortunately these gangs are becoming more savvy, more sophisticated in the way that they target you.”

Hawaii

Honolulu: The Hawaii State Capitol remained closed Monday after a power outage over the weekend. On Saturday morning, one of three high-voltage circuit breakers at the Capitol shorted, officials said. The cause is unknown. The Department of Accounting and General Services has been working with contractors to restore power as soon as possible, officials said in a statement Monday. Until the damaged equipment is repaired, the downtown Honolulu building will remain closed. The Hawaii Legislature adjourned in May. The 2023 session starts in January.

Idaho

Boise: The University of Idaho wants to build the nation’s largest research dairy and experimental farm in south-central Idaho, the geographical heart of the sector. University President Scott Green and school officials said in a presentation to Gov. Brad Little and other members of the Idaho Land Board this month that the proposed Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment will help support growth of the dairy and other industries. “CAFE will be a leader (for) water usage and environmental quality challenges while supporting the continued growth of the dairy, livestock, cropland and food processing industries,” Green told the board. The dairy industry is Idaho’s top agricultural sector and ranks third in the nation behind California and Wisconsin. Idaho’s main dairy products are milk, cheese and yogurt. The school wants the Land Board to use $23 million from the 2021 sale of 282 acres, in Caldwell, of endowment land benefitting the University of Idaho’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to buy roughly 640 acres of farmland in Minidoka County north of Rupert. The $23 million is in a fund controlled by the Land Board. The presentation was informational, and the board is expected to take action on the plan in September.

Illinois

Rockford: A federal judge sentenced a man to 55 years in prison Monday for the shooting death of a deputy U.S. marshal serving an arrest warrant for a series of downstate burglaries. U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly imposed the sentence on Floyd E. Brown, 43, of Springfield, for his April 8 conviction on charges of second-degree murder of a federal officer, attempting to kill additional federal officers, assault of federal officers and multiple firearm counts. Brown was acquitted of first-degree murder. Special Deputy U.S. Marshal Jacob Keltner, 35, was a McHenry County deputy working with a Marshal’s Service fugitive task force when he was killed March 7, 2019, at a Rockford hotel. When task force officers attempted to gain access to Brown’s third-floor hotel room, he fired 10 shots through the door and nearby walls, narrowly missing three deputy marshals, U.S. Attorney John Lausch said. Brown then jumped out a window and fired a shot that killed Keltner, who was positioned outside. Brown was arrested several hours later near Lincoln after a high-speed pursuit.

Indiana

Indianapolis: Abortion clinic operators filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block the state’s near-total ban on abortions. The lawsuit filed in a Monroe County court claims the ban, set to take effect Sept. 15, “strips away the fundamental rights of people seeking abortion care” in violation of the Indiana Constitution. It argues the law “will infringe on Hoosiers’ right to privacy, violate Indiana’s guarantee of equal privileges and immunities, and includes unconstitutionally vague language.” Indiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature approved the tighter abortion restrictions Aug. 5, making it the first state to do so since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion protections for abortions by overturning Roe v. Wade in June. The Indiana law includes exceptions, allowing abortions in cases of rape and incest within 10 weeks of fertilization; to protect the life and physical health of the mother; and if a fetus is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly. Under the law, abortions can be performed only in hospitals or outpatient centers owned by hospitals, meaning all abortion clinics would lose their licenses. Any doctors found to have performed an illegal abortion would be stripped of their state medical licenses and could face felony criminal charges punishable by up to six years in prison.

Iowa

Des Moines: Police are investigating a burglary from some unusual victims – endangered primates. Bonobos are considered humanity’s closest living animal relative, and a wooded research site in southeast Des Moines is home to seven of them out of only 250 alive in captivity. On Saturday morning, a staff member at the Ape Initiative reported an overnight burglary to Des Moines police. According to the organization’s Facebook page, the burglars did extensive damage and took a “considerable amount of tools and equipment that we use every day to keep the bonobos safe and healthy.” The investigation is active, and neither the group nor Sgt. Paul Parizek, the Des Moines Police Department’s spokesman, could share specifics of what was taken or how burglars gained access. Neither the bonobos nor the institute’s human staff were put at risk, and the animals remained safe, said Jared Taglialatela, the group’s director. The bonobos seem to be unaffected, Taglialatela said. As for the reported break-in, he said none of the scientific equipment or data on site was taken. Staff are now working on cleanup, repairs and paperwork, away from their normal responsibilities.

Kansas

Burlington: Builders of a proposed electric line taking nuclear energy from Kansas to Missouri now have eminent domain power, but they will have to wait to use it until the final route is approved. Regulators say electricity consumers in the state will be better off in the long run from cost savings, despite having to help foot the bill for sending Kansas-produced electricity out of state. The Kansas Corporation Commission granted public utility status to NextEra Energy Transmission Southwest, which plans to build a 94-mile, 345-kilovolt transmission line from the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant, near Burlington, to the Blackberry Substation in Missouri, north of Joplin. Now that NextEra has a certificate of convenience and necessity, it has eminent domain powers. But it can’t use them until it gets approval for the route, expected to run through Coffey, Anderson, Allen, Bourbon and Crawford counties. Instead of a longer route following highways in southeast Kansas, the proposal crosses large swaths of farmland, making it a shorter distance to the station. Several landowners objected to the power lines, which would require a 150-foot easement, during the regulatory proceedings. Anderson County farmer Mike Welding testified that he has no intention of allowing NextEra agents onto his property or to sign the easement contract.

Kentucky

Frankfort: The state has received a $5million federal grant to help prevent wrong-way crashes on interstates, officials said. The funding will go toward implementing a pilot program that will use new technology to detect when someone goes the wrong way and then alert the wrong-way driver, other drivers and emergency responders, according to a statement Monday from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. “Wrong-way driving is a major safety challenge,” Gov. Andy Beshear said. “These funds will allow us to use innovative video technology to help monitor and bolster safety on corridors prone to these types of incidents.” Kentucky’s Wrong Way Driving and Integrated Safety Technology System will include digital and roadway signs, cameras and sensors. Locations in Fayette and Jefferson counties – home to Lexington and Louisville, respectively – will be chosen based on crash history and interstate ramp designs, and the system could expand into other counties, officials said. “In addition to implementing this new technological system, we’ll continue researching statewide opportunities to address wrong-way crashes, such as striping and signage,” Transportation Secretary Jim Gray said.

Louisiana

New Orleans: Nearly 100 calls to report rapes this year have been quickly downgraded from emergency status, leaving survivors to wait hours for police – and, increasingly, to leave before officers arrive, a New Orleans newspaper and TV station report. The change is highlighted in a report that City Council crime analyst Jeff Asher plans to present to the council this week, WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate report. Other serious crimes, including armed robberies, carjackings, aggravated assaults and domestic disturbances, are also often being shifted from high to low priority before police arrive, Asher wrote. Advocates and officials are worried that the long waits raise the emotional cost for rape survivors and the chance that the reports won’t be investigated. The changes come at a time when the department has fallen from 1,300 officers to about 950. The reasons are not clear, but authorities appear to be trying to keep lights-and-siren treatment for still-unfolding emergencies, the news agencies report. So far this year, 98 aggravated rape reports – 40% of the total – have been reclassified from emergencies to nonemergencies while the call was being dispatched. The same happened with 1,486 domestic disturbances, 431 domestic batteries, 252 aggravated assaults and 74 armed robberies or carjackings, Asher wrote.

Maine

Portland: Parents of children enrolled in religious schools fought for years – all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – for the state to treat tuition reimbursements the same as other private schools. But only one of the religious high schools that stood to benefit has signed up to participate this fall, after Maine’s attorney general warned that the schools would have to abide by state anti-discrimination laws, including those that protect LGBTQ students and faculty. That development has frustrated the families who sued. “Their hands are tied. The state said you can take the money, but we’ll tie your hands,” said David Carson, whose daughter was a sophomore at Bangor Christian Schools when his family and two other plaintiffs sued in 2018. The Supreme Court ruled in June that Maine can’t exclude religious schools from a program that offers tuition for private education in rural towns where there are no public schools. Last year, 29 private schools participated in the tuition reimbursement program, enrolling more than 4,500 students, officials said. Those schools that meet the state’s criteria can get about $12,000 per student in taxpayer funding. So far, only one religious school has signed up to participate, and that application will go through a review process, said Marcus Mrowka, a state education spokesperson. Mrowka declined to identify the school. The deadline for applications is Thursday.

Maryland

Annapolis: Eva Cassidy may be the most famous musical artist ever to live in Annapolis, but it took 26 years and a mural dedication for the city to mount a tribute concert in her honor. Cassidy died in 1996 of metastatic melanoma. She was 33, beloved locally, with one solo album and countless gigs at Annapolis bars to her name. That album, “Live at Blues Alley,” has since sold more than 12 million copies, landing atop record sales charts around the world. No other artist who spent her recording career in the Washington area has enjoyed that level of success, with the caveat that Cassidy did not live to see it, the Capital Gazette reports. “That’s the thing about Eva: All of her success was posthumous,“ said fan Doug Gibson, who attended the recent dedication along with his girlfriend, an artist who knew Eva Cassidy through Annapolis art circles. Acquaintances, co-workers, friends, family, bandmates, roommates and even ex-boyfriends all were among the crowd of several hundred who attended the official dedication of “Maryland Songbird,” a portrait of Eva Cassidy painted on the rear of a Cathedral Street building in Annapolis. The mural was created by artists Jeff Huntington and Julia Gibb with help from local students and supported by their nonprofit Future History Now. More than 30 musicians performed at a tribute concert in the Eva Cassidy Lot.

Massachusetts

Worcester: The Worcester Housing Authority held a groundbreaking Monday for “A Place to Live,” a $7.7 million, 24-unit building that will provide permanent, supportive housing and wraparound care for people experiencing homelessness. “This will not only help people to achieve long-term housing,” Alex Corrales, executive director of the WHA, said during the ceremony Monday morning at the building site. “It will improve residents’ wellness.” The building is the first of its kind in the state and is based on the “A Place to Live” model first developed by the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance. The model offers permanent, supportive, micro-housing units for those who have been chronically homeless. The three-story, 13,340-square-foot building will include 24 fully furnished studio apartments – two of which are wheelchair accessible – as well as a unit for a resident manager and space for group meetings and individual meetings with service providers. Residents will be selected through a lottery system. “This is a sacred moment in which we are announcing and groundbreaking a project and, even more than that, a home,” Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito said at the ceremony. “This supportive housing is loving and beautiful.”

Michigan

Traverse City: A judge began hearing evidence Monday to determine if five men will face trial for their alleged roles in a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The proceedings in state court came six days after two men who were described as leaders of the scheme were convicted in federal court. Michael Null, William Null, Eric Molitor and Shawn Fix, all from Michigan, are each charged with providing material support for terrorist acts as well as a gun crime. Brian Higgins, of Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, faces the same material support charge. Judge Michael Stepka must decide if there is probable cause to send the men to trial in Antrim County, a low bar at this stage of the case. The county is the location of Whitmer’s Elk Rapids vacation home. Fourteen people – six in federal court, eight in state courts – were arrested in 2020 and charged in relation to the kidnapping plot. Federal authorities said there was support to abduct Whitmer and spark a civil war, known as the “boogaloo, before the 2020 election. It’s a “version of anarchy,” FBI agent Hank Impola testified Monday. The Null brothers, Higgins and Molitor participated in trips to see Whitmer’s home, according to evidence.

Minnesota

Minneapolis: Preparing for an unprecedented strike, hundreds of University of Minnesota service workers protested on campus Tuesday to demand an end to what they called poverty wages and abusive employment practices. “It’s shameful that the University of Minnesota has a billion dollars left over at the end of the year, coming off the backs of workers who are homeless and don’t have enough money for food,” Brian Aldes, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 320, said in a statement. “The State of Minnesota, UMN President Joan Gabel, and the Board of Regents need to understand that if our brothers and sisters at the university are forced to strike, the Teamsters are ready to take up this fight, no matter the cost.” The protesting service workers were joined by student and environmental groups, faculty members, community leaders and elected officials, including Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman. Local 320 represents 1,500 workers at UMN who clean buildings, service dormitories, maintain grounds, prepare food, maintain HVAC systems, care for research animals, drive trucks, and perform other activities across the university’s five campuses. Many of the workers are Black, including immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and other East African countries.

Mississippi

Jackson: Hunters have set a new state record after killing a female alligator that measures more than 10 feet long, state wildlife officials said Monday. A pair of hunters killed the gator Sunday on the Pearl River near the Ross Barnett Reservoir northeast of Jackson, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks said in a news release. It measured 10 feet, 2 inches long from head to tail, making it the longest female alligator harvested on record in the state. The catch would have tied a 1984 world record, but that record fell last year after a female alligator taken in Florida measured 10 feet, 6.75 inches, said Ricky Flynt, the department’s alligator program coordinator. Flynt said it’s possible the Mississippi alligator was 75 to 100 years old. The hunting season for alligators in public waters opened Friday and ends Sept. 5.

Missouri

Jefferson City: The state Supreme Court on Tuesday reprimanded St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner for mistakes made in the 2018 prosecution of then-Gov. Eric Greitens but agreed with an advisory counsel’s decision that suspension of her law license or disbarment was not merited. The brief ruling from the state High Court echoed a “joint stipulation” agreement reached in April by Gardner and the Missouri Office of Disciplinary Counsel. In that agreement, Gardner conceded that she failed to produce documents and mistakenly maintained that all documents had been provided to Greitens’ lawyers in the criminal case that played a pivotal role in the Republican’s decision to resign in June 2018. The agreement, stating that Gardner’s conduct “was negligent or perhaps reckless, but not intentional,” called for a written reprimand, but it was ultimately up to the Missouri Supreme Court to issue a ruling. In addition to the reprimand for violating rules of professional conduct, the court fined Gardner $750. Messages seeking comment from Gardner’s office weren’t immediately returned. She told the disciplinary panel in April that the mistakes were due to the fast-moving nature of the Greitens case. “Yes, we had a process. But unfortunately, that process came up short,” she said at the time.

Montana

Kalispell: Authorities say a man shot two people, killing a woman and seriously injuring her husband, during a weekend altercation at a bar near Glacier National Park. Whisper Dawn Mari Sellars, 28, of Hungry Horse, died at the scene of the shooting outside of the South Fork Saloon in Martin City, the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office said. A 40-year-old man from Kila was arrested at the scene and booked into the county jail for suspected deliberate homicide and attempted deliberate homicide. He was due to make an initial appearance Tuesday afternoon in Flathead County Justice Court, officials said. Deputies responded early Saturday morning to a reported shooting at the saloon and found a woman had been killed and a man injured, the sheriff’s office said. Just before the shooting, Sellars and another woman allegedly got into an argument with the suspect after he found them taking pictures in a golf cart that he’d driven to the bar from a nearby party, the Hungry Horse News reports, based on accounts from witnesses. After the suspect pushed Sellars, her husband pushed the suspect, who fell, got up and allegedly started shooting, the newspaper reports. The victims had five children. Martin City has about a population of 460 people and is located about 20 miles northeast of Kalispell.

Nebraska

Tecumseh: A death row inmate who strangled his cellmate after complaining he talked too much died Monday at the state prison in Tecumseh. Officials said they have not determined how Patrick Schroeder, 45, died. Schroeder died about four years after he was sentenced to death for the strangulation death of his prison cellmate, Terry Berry. Schroeder admitted to killing Berry in 2017, saying his cellmate was too talkative. After Berry’s death, the state paid his family $479,000 to settle a lawsuit that alleged the state was responsible for Berry’s death because officials put in him a cell with Schroeder, who had been convicted of murder in the 2006 killing of a 75-year-old farmer from Pawnee City. Berry, 22, of Scottsbluff, was nearing parole after being convicted of forgery. As is the case whenever an inmate dies in state custody, a grand jury will conduct an investigation of the death.

Nevada

Reno: The historic Sinai Mansion – also called the Howell House – will likely be torn down despite a proposal made last November to move it to a new location on the Truckee River. The Nevada Museum of Art, which owns the 106-year-old building, has started construction on a $60 million, 50,000-foot expansion that requires a commitment to move the house by October. It can be moved anywhere, but it can’t stay where it is next to the museum. “We know people who lived here and who grew up here at the Sinai Mansion – the Howell House – and I can tell you there’d be a lot of broken hearts in this community if this didn’t end up on its feet somewhere else,” museum executive director David Walker said by phone from the Sinai Mansion, where administrative staff are temporarily located during construction. One proposal to save the mansion comes from Reno attorney Nancy Gilbert, who submitted it to the city Nov. 2. Gilbert’s proposal would move the building 1.5 miles from its current spot to a city-owned property that’s been abandoned for over a decade. The plan is supported by the museum, the Historic Reno Preservation Society and the 1200 Riverside Drive Community Association. Gilbert envisions a coffeehouse, restaurant and event space incorporating both old buildings.

New Hampshire

Portsmouth: City officials have received a number of complaints from residents about supporters of ex-President Donald Trump who have been appearing regularly at Prescott Park. The complaints have prompted at least two City Council discussions about the issue, an investigation by the city’s Legal Department, and plans to implement more rules about the designated public forum area of the city-owned park that has long been dedicated to freedom of speech and expression. Robert Sullivan, an attorney for the city, said the complaints from citizens started last summer but “have been continuous all summer long” in 2022. He emphasized the group’s First Amendment rights to free speech, but there are questions about rules regarding the park’s designated public forum area. The pro-Trump group has also appeared downtown in front of North Church – a traditional public forum area that has seen countless political speeches, rallies and protests over the years. “We have been led to believe they are in the park nearly every day,” Sullivan said. “There’s a public forum area at Prescott Park in which constitutionally protected speech is not only allowed but encouraged. John McCain announced his candidacy for president in that very same location.”

New Jersey

Trenton: The state is using $6.5 million of federal aid to help collect and digitize school blueprints for first responders, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said Tuesday. The American Rescue Plan funds will help the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the state police devise maps for about 1,500 schools public and private schools. An additional 1,500 schools already have such digital graphics available, according to the administration. The maps are critical to help police and other responders react to emergencies in what could be unfamiliar environments, officials say. “With the epidemic of gun violence reaching every part of our communities, including our schools, we offer our families not empty promises, but concrete investments in tools and resources that will keep our students safe,” Murphy said in a statement. The announcement comes nearly a month after Murphy signed legislation requiring the state’s nearly 600 school districts to set up threat assessment teams aimed at stemming any violence in schools. The bill was introduced two days after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. That measure goes into effect in the 2023-2024 school year.

New Mexico

Santa Fe: Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Monday pardoned six people for convictions ranging from fraud and larceny to burglary and drug trafficking. The pardons represent another round of clemency decisions for the first-term Democratic governor who is seeking reelection. She has pardoned 56 people overall. The governor’s office said nearly all of the pardoned offenses stem from crimes committed a decade or more ago, and all but one involved nonviolent offenses. Among those pardoned was Cynthia Jaramillo, who escaped from serial killer David Parker Ray in 1999. The governor’s office said Jaramillo, who had a drug trafficking conviction on her record, has since dedicated her life to supporting women facing homelessness and addiction. The others were Bridgette Yvette Tabor, Jack Ferguson, Travis Earl Gatling, Randall E. Johnston and Kathleen Woerter. The governor’s pardoning power extends to all crimes committed under state law except for impeachment and treason. A pardon restores certain rights, such as the right to vote and the right to hold public office.

New York

New York: Amid the bright lights and electronic billboards across Times Square, city authorities are posting new signs proclaiming the bustling crossroads a “Gun Free Zone.” The sprawling Manhattan tourist attraction is one of scores of “sensitive” places – including parks, churches and theaters – that will be off limits for guns under a sweeping new state law going into effect Thursday. The measure, passed after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June expanded gun rights, also sets stringent standards for issuing concealed carry permits. New York is among a half-dozen states that had key provisions of its gun laws invalidated by the high court because of a requirement for applicants to prove they had “proper cause” for a permit. The quickly adopted law, however, has led to confusion and court challenges from gun owners who say it improperly limits their constitutional rights. Under the law, applicants for a concealed carry permit will have to complete 16 hours of classroom training and two hours of live-fire exercises. Ordinary citizens would be prohibited from bringing guns to schools, churches, subways, theaters and amusement parks – among other places deemed “sensitive” by authorities. Applicants also will have to provide a list of social media accounts for the past three years as part of a “character and conduct” review.

North Carolina

Durham: U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley pitched herself Monday as a bridge between law enforcement and the Democratic Party, appealing to moderate voters in one of the nation’s most competitive races for a seat in the narrowly divided chamber. Joined by more than a dozen current and former law enforcement officers at a news conference in Durham, Beasley announced new legislative priorities to strengthen public safety and mend the frayed relationship between her party and the police force. The Democrat committed to working with Republican lawmakers to secure funding for local law enforcement to train officers on deescalation techniques, mindful responses to behavioral health crises and alternatives to using force. She also told sheriffs she would fight for federal funding to help rural departments address officer shortages and the ongoing opioid crisis. With the Senate in a 50-50 deadlock, North Carolina is one of the few states where Democrats have strong potential to flip a seat this November. Beasley, former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, will face off this fall against Republican U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, who is endorsed by ex-President Donald Trump. Beasley distanced herself Monday from the “defund the police” movement – a progressive push to divest funds from police department budgets and reallocate them to social services and other community resources.

North Dakota

Fargo: A Fargo police officer was justified in fatally shooting a man at an apartment complex in July, state Attorney General Drew Wrigley said Monday. Wrigley said Officer Adam O’Brien, a more than 10-year veteran of the department, fired his gun at 28-year-old Shane Netterville, of Jamestown, after Netterville ignored commands of officers and sped out of a garage in a stolen van, narrowly avoiding officers. Netterville suffered a chest wound and died at a hospital several hours later. The shooting came after a citizen report of three “possibly deceased” people in the van, Wrigley said. The men were alive and may have been sleeping in the van. When police arrived, Netterville “failed to company with lawful orders,” he said. Wrigley said the two passengers in the van said they heard police commands and were trying to convince Netterville to comply. Wrigley and Fargo police Chief David Zibolski showed dash and bodycam video of the incident during a press conference in Fargo. Wrigley previously rejected calls to release camera footage of the shooting. O’Brien was placed on paid administrative leave while the case was being reviewed by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Zibloski said O’Brien will return to full duty Sept. 7.

Ohio

Columbus: The state Supreme Court on Tuesday said it would not take up an appeal of a $25 million judgment against Oberlin College in a business’ lawsuit claiming it was libeled by the school after a shoplifting incident involving three Black students. The court did not say why it would not hear the appeal. The 9th District Court of Appeals in Akron upheld the judgment in late March. Oberlin College said in a statement that officials are disappointed the high court did not hear the school’s appeal. “The issues raised by this case have been challenging, not only for the parties involved, but for the entire Oberlin community,” the statement said. Store owners Allyn Gibson and his son, David Gibson, sued Oberlin College in November 2017 claiming they had been libeled by the school, and their business had been harmed. The lawsuit was filed a year after David Gibson’s son, also named Allyn, chased and tackled a Black male student he suspected of having stolen a bottle of wine. Two Black female students who were with the male student tried to intervene. All three were arrested and later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. The arrests triggered protests outside Gibson’s Bakery, where flyers were handed out, some by an Oberlin College vice president and dean of students, accusing the Gibsons of being racist.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma City: The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has reinstated the murder conviction and life sentence of a man featured in the book and television series “The Innocent Man.” The court overturned a lower court decision that said prosecutors and police withheld evidence that could exonerate Tommy Ward, 61, of the 1984 murder of Donna Denice Haraway in Ada. The ruling, dated Friday, said the withheld evidence, which included witness interviews and police reports, had been available to Ward’s defense since 2003 and was not included in Ward’s direct appeal after his 1999 conviction. “Raising the same general categories on post-conviction that one raised on direct appeal, even if the basis is different, will result in a procedural bar,” according to the state court’s opinion. “He’s very disappointed that he’s still in prison for a murder he didn’t commit,” Ward’s attorney, Mark Barrett, said Tuesday. “We are pressing forward… exploring the possibility of going to federal court” with additional appeals. Barrett noted that the appeals court ordered the lower court to consider an additional claim regarding new evidence discovered in 2019. That evidence includes previously undisclosed suspects and whether police provided Ward with information about the victim’s blouse, which prosecutors said he had described.

Oregon

Portland: A federal judge has ruled that the Oregon State Hospital must impose strict limits on the length of time it treats patients accused of crimes who need mental health treatment. Judge Michael W. Mosman’s ruling seeks to ease the psychiatric hospital’s overcrowding, speed up patient admission and stop people waiting for admission from languishing in jail, The Oregonian/OregonLive reports. Effective immediately, the hospital must release “aid-and-assist” patients accused of misdemeanors within 90 days of admission and those accused of felonies within six months of admission. Aid-and-assist patients are those found by a judge to be unable to participate in their own defense at trial. The judge’s decision overrules an Oregon law that says the hospital can hold an aid-and-assist patient for up to three years, or the maximum amount of time that a person could have been sentenced to prison for their alleged crime, whichever is shorter. Disability Rights Oregon and Metropolitan Public Defenders requested the order after protesting the hospital’s lengthy admission delays. Disability Rights Oregon in 2002 won a court order that required the hospital to admit aid-and-assist patients within seven days so they can begin mental health treatment quickly.

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia: The state may not keep a cache of weapons seized from the parents of a gunman who killed one state trooper and permanently disabled another eight years ago, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The parents of Eric Frein sued after authorities refused to return 25 rifles, 10 pistols and two shotguns that were taken from their home in September 2014, days after Frein ambushed the troopers outside a state police barracks in the Pocono Mountains. Eugene Michael Frein and Deborah Frein were not charged in their son’s crime – for which he was convicted and sentenced to death – and none of their weapons were used in his deadly late-night assault. The Pike County district attorney, who was named as a defendant in the parents’ suit, had argued that authorities had the right to hold the seized weapons, saying they might be needed as evidence during Eric Frein’s state and federal appeals. The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, saying in its ruling Tuesday that state authorities never used Michael and Deborah’s weapons as evidence at their son’s trial and violated the parents’ constitutional rights by holding on to the guns indefinitely.

Rhode Island

Newport: A Jewish congregation in New York City has moved to evict Rhode Island congregants who worship at the nation’s oldest synagogue as part of a long-running dispute over control of the historic building. The New York-based Congregation Shearith Israel on Monday filed a motion in state District Court to take control of Touro Synagogue by removing its current tenants, the Newport-based Congregation Jeshuat Israel. Congregation Shearith Israel said in court documents that it sent a notice in October demanding that Congregation Jeshuat Israel leave the premises as of Monday. “CJI, and any others still in possession of the premises, must vacate the premises as of midnight on the termination date,” Shearith Israel wrote. Members of Congregation Jeshuat Israel released a statement Friday saying their goal was to have a long-term lease so the congregation could have the security of knowing they and future generations can continue to worship in the synagogue. They said they are willing to take full responsibility for maintaining the building and maintaining orthodox services, with the hope of expanding the congregation. “Touro Synagogue is our home, and the place where we have worshipped and been the sole caretakers, for almost 140 years,” members of the congregation wrote.

South Carolina

Columbia: “Cocky” will now be joined by “The General” at University of South Carolina football games this fall. The school announced Monday that its live, crowing rooster mascot will have a new name going forward. The bird had previously been called “Sir Big Spur,” but a dispute between its old and new owners led to the name change. Neither the university nor the athletic department owned rights to the former name. The rooster has had a perch at football and baseball games at South Carolina the past two decades. “The General” will be alongside human-sized mascot “Cocky” when the Gamecocks open the season against Georgia State on Saturday night. The new name comes from Revolutionary War general Thomas Sumter, who was known as “The Fighting Gamecock.” South Carolina deputy athletic director Eric Nichols said when officials realized they’d have to change the name, it seemed fitting to go back to the Gamecock nickname’s origin. “We know Gamecock fans are passionate about our traditions, and seeing the live mascot at games and other athletics events is something they look forward to,” Nichols said. The athletic department worked with the rooster’s new owners, Beth and Van Clark, in picking a name. The school’s legal department discouraged keeping any part of the old name.

South Dakota

Aberdeen: Avera Health has announced plans to resize its organization, including eliminating jobs, in response to rising expenses. The higher costs for items that include paper products, common medical supplies, software technology and more mean a reduction is coming to the workforce across the Avera network, according to a statement released by the company Monday evening. “We are resizing our organization with an even greater focus on delivering high-quality patient care while redefining our core business focus around patient care. Sadly, this will mean a reduction in our nonclinical workforce across the Avera footprint, restructuring in areas and changes in services,” the statement said. Details were not shared about how many positions are being eliminated or what specific changes are in the works. While Avera is caring for more patients, inflation is a big reason for the change, per the statement. Because of those rising expenses, Avera said it is challenging itself to “be more efficient, focused and creative in looking at health care differently and less expensively, while leveraging innovation.”

Tennessee

Nashville: A South Korean tire manufacturer plans to add almost 400 jobs in a third expansion of its Tennessee operations. The state Department of Economic and Community Development said Hankook Tire & Technology Co. is planning to add the jobs over five years at its Clarksville campus. The company plans to finish a previous expansion to double U.S. production of passenger car and light truck tires. Hankook will invest $612 million in the third expansion, which will add the company’s first U.S. production line of truck and bus radial tires. Tire production at the new phases of the plant is expected to begin in the last quarter of 2024, then reach full capacity by early 2026. The company broke ground on the Tennessee facility in 2014. Hankook has relocated its North American headquarters to Nashville. The new Clarksville expansion will bring the company’s workforce to about 2,300 people across Tennessee.

Texas

Uvalde: The Associated Press and other news organizations are suing local officials after months of refusal to publicly release records related to the May massacre at Robb Elementary School. The lawsuit filed Monday in Uvalde County asks a court to force the city, school district and sheriff’s department to turn over 911 recordings, personnel records and other documents. Newsrooms have requested them under Texas open records laws since a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers May 24. More than three months after one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history, news organizations have turned to courts in an effort to obtain information and records that Uvalde officials and state police have argued they cannot release because of ongoing investigations. The Texas Attorney General’s Office has also ruled that Uvalde officials cannot withhold all records. Misleading and outright false statements by authorities about the police response in the initial hours and days after the attack on a fourth grade classroom – which lasted more than 70 minutes – have sowed distrust that remains among many Uvalde residents. “The obfuscation and inaction have only prolonged the pain of victims, their families and the community at large, all of whom continue to cry out for transparency regarding the events of that day,” the lawsuit says.

Utah

Salt Lake City: The state reported far fewer coronavirus cases in the week ending Sunday, adding 3,143 new cases. That’s down 11.2% from the previous week’s tally of 3,539 new cases of the virus that causes COVID-19. Utah ranked 46th among the states where coronavirus was spreading the fastest on a per-person basis, a USA TODAY Network analysis of Johns Hopkins University data shows. In the latest week coronavirus cases in the United States increased 10.8% from the week before, with 654,873 cases reported. With 0.96% of the country’s population, Utah had 0.48% of the country’s cases in the last week. Across the country, 16 states had more cases in the latest week than they did in the week before. Across Utah, cases fell in five counties, with the best declines in Davis County, with 351 cases from 446 a week earlier; in Salt Lake County, with 1,294 cases from 1,376; and in Utah County, with 470 cases from 512. Within Utah, the worst weekly outbreaks on a per-person basis were in San Juan County with 157 cases per 100,000 per week; Tooele County with 116; and Salt Lake County with 112. The Centers for Disease Control says high levels of community transmission begin at 100 cases per 100,000 per week.

Vermont

Burlington: The state will spend $3million in the coming year to attract more workers, continuing an effort that began in 2019 when the state offered to cover up to $10,000 in moving expenses for people willing to move to the Green Mountain State to work remotely. In 2020, the Legislature added a program offering up to $7,500 in moving expenses to workers who accepted jobs with Vermont companies in targeted positions such as cooks and servers, child care workers, registered nurses, construction laborers, delivery drivers, elementary school teachers and retail salespeople. In 2021, the state offered both incentives again. The $3 million commitment this year comes despite widespread opposition in the Legislature – especially in the state House – and a review by the Legislative Joint Fiscal Office that rejects the conclusions of a third-party study claiming the programs paid for themselves within two years. The review stated, among other things, that the report relied on “unrepresentative and misleading data to derive its most important conclusions.”

Virginia

Richmond: Hazing charges against five former members of a now-expelled Virginia Commonwealth University fraternity in connection with a freshman’s death from alcohol poisoning after a party have been dropped. Six of the 11 former Delta Chi members charged in the death of Adam Oakes, 19, have pleaded guilty or no contest, but a prosecutor in the case declined to say why the charges against the remaining five were dropped last week, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. Last year, 11 former members of the fraternity were charged with hazing and seven of them with serving alcohol to a minor. VCU suspended the students, a defense attorney said last year, and the university permanently removed the fraternity from campus. Three of the six who pleaded guilty or no contest are eligible to have their charges dismissed if they meet the terms of their plea agreements. Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Hollomon declined to comment on the dropped charges, citing the open case status of three defendants. Both charges in these cases are misdemeanors and carry no more than a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. None of the six received jail time. The police investigation found Oakes was told to drink a large bottle of whiskey in February 2021, and the freshman from Loudoun County was found dead the next morning.

Washington

Seattle: Members of the Chinook Indian Nation rallied Monday on the steps of a federal building in Seattle to raise awareness for their long fight to get federal recognition. Chairman Tony Johnson, whose tribal name is Naschio, told KNKX Public Radio that his great-great-grandfather and other leaders first hired lawyers to sue for their lands back in the 1890s. Federal recognition would mean access to federal dollars for health care and housing for this group of tribes, which are based in southwestern Washington, particularly Pacific County. The rally was the start of a campaign by Chinook leadership, they said, to pressure U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to use their influence in Congress to get the Chinook recognized. For a brief time twenty years ago, the Clinton administration recognized the Chinook Indian Nation, but the Bush administration revoked that decision in 2002 after another Indigenous nation in Washington state, the Quinault, appealed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Johnson said during a speech Monday that the Chinook nation, which is made up of five tribes – the Cathlamet, Clatsop, Lower Chinook, Wahkaikum and Willapa – refused to sign a treaty that would force them to lose their land and therefore was never moved to a reservation.

West Virginia

Charleston: Two former teacher’s aides have been charged with failing to report the abuse of special needs students at an elementary school, the Kanawha County Prosecutor’s Office said. The charges were announced Monday in connection with a case involving former special education teacher Nancy Boggs, officials told news outlets. Boggs pleaded guilty in May to 10 misdemeanor counts of battery and was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison stemming from incidents in September 2021. The aides were charged under a state law that requires school employees to report to authorities when they have “reasonable cause” to suspect abuse or neglect or witness “conditions that are likely to result in abuse or neglect.” One aide pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance Monday, and the other postponed the arraignment until her lawyer could be present.

Wisconsin

Madison: Gov. Tony Evers is allocating $90million more in federal pandemic funding for schools. Evers said the funds are aimed at helping school officials recruit and retain teachers, combatting staffing shortages that have emerged since the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020. “Yes, they are federal funds, I understand that, but until there is a (state) budget, we need to make sure that the people that stand behind me can do the good work,” the Democratic governor said at a news conference at Leopold Elementary School in Madison. Evers is a former state superintendent and public school educator. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, both Republicans, did not react to the governor’s plan. Republican candidate for governor Tim Michels, who is challenging Evers in November, said the plan was political. “The fact that self-proclaimed ‘education governor’ Evers needs to make news on education with 70 days until Election Day shows that his anti-parents, pro-special interest education agenda isn’t resonating with Wisconsin voters,” Michels said. “Evers wants his big checks to make people forget his big failures, but his disastrous record speaks for itself.”

Wyoming

Jackson: At the Jackson Cupboard food bank, Ash Hermanowski oversees the distribution of about 1,200 free meals a day from a commercial garage after being forced from a previous site by a malfunctioning sprinkler. The food bank couldn’t afford any other place in town. Just across the street, The Glenwood, a collection of townhomes that will sell for millions, is nearing completion. “Unparalleled luxury,” its website says, in a “truly relaxing oasis.” It’s the “ultimate irony,” Hermanowski said. “The staff and I, we talk about it all the time. We all struggle to live here, and they’re building high-end residences. That dichotomy exists all over town, but people refuse to see it.” Inflation is particularly high in the town of Jackson and the surrounding Teton County, which, even before the pandemic erupted two years ago, was the wealthiest and most unequal place in the nation. The state of Wyoming has calculated that the cost of living in the county at the end of 2021 was 68% higher than in the rest of the state – with housing costs 130% higher. Roughly 85% of the food bank’s recipients have a job, often more than one, said Sharel Lund, executive director of one22, a nonprofit that includes Jackson Cupboard.

From USA TODAY Network and wire reports

Year in review: 50 stories from 50 states

Compiled by Alia E. Dastagir

USA TODAY

When the year ends, we reflect. We look back at the stories that changed the national conversation, the people who inspired us, the painful events we bore witness to, and the shifts in public opinion that showed us how America is evolving on issues both big and small.

As 2014 comes to a close, USA TODAY revisits one story from each state — the big news, the best investigations and the moments we still can't stop talking about.

Alabama: 5-year-old fan sends $1 allowance to help save UAB football

When 5-year-old Ohio State fan Bennett Williams found out that the University of Alabama at Birmingham would be shutting down its football program, he asked his parents how much money the university needed to keep it running. Bennett decided to write a note and send it to UAB, and he included his dollar allowance to help keep the Blazers on the field. The UAB athletics department sent Bennett a few gifts for his amazing act of kindness.

Alaska: The Palin family brawl

It was a birthday party gone bad, starring former governor Sarah Palin and her family. According to reports, the clan got into a big fight at a party in Anchorage, and Palin was even said to have screamed, "Don't you know who I am!?" In October, Radar Online and Extra unearthed what they say is the police recording from the scene. Listen for yourself. Palin eventually addressed the brawl on Facebook, pointing us to her daughter Bristol's version of what went down. Bristol said someone messed with her little sister.

Arizona: Dreamers get to drive

The courts ruled and on Dec. 22 the Arizona Department of Transportation began accepting driver's license applications from young undocumented immigrants known as "dreamers" who qualify under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Gov. Jan Brewer had fought to keep driver's licenses out of the hands of dreamers since August 2012, when she issued an executive order denying licenses to anyone approved for President Obama's program.

More from Arizona:Veterans health care controversy began with whistle-blower allegations in Phoenix VA hospital

Arkansas: Voter ID law struck down

It was unanimous. The Arkansas Supreme Court in October declared the state's voter-identification law unconstitutional. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Arkansas Public Law Center had filed suit on behalf of four voters who argued that the photo ID requirement would disenfranchise them. The justices ruled that Act 595, which required voters to show government-issued photo identification, "imposes a requirement that falls outside" the four qualifications outlined in the state constitution.

California: Storms put dent in state's drought

NASA has said that about 11 trillion gallons of water is needed to end the historic drought in California. That's about 130,000 Rose Bowls full of water. Storms this December offered some relief, but they weren't nearly enough to end the multiyear drought. After the storms, the percentage of the state in the worst drought category — "exceptional" drought — dropped from 55% to 32%. That's the state's lowest percentage in six months.

More from California:Steve Ballmer buys Los Angeles Clippers from Donald Sterling; 'Six Californias' fails to make California ballot

Colorado: Lighting up the new year

Jan. 1 brought the first sales of legal recreational marijuana to Colorado and the state hasn't looked back. Three more states have now either begun or approved recreational sales, and tens of millions of dollars in new tax money is flowing into Colorado's coffers. The fast-growing industry in 2014 struggled to manage the vast piles of cash it's been generating, and state regulators clamped down on the popular pot-infused candies and treats known as edibles.

Connecticut: Sandy Hook killer carefully planned attack

It's been two years since the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., shook the nation to its core. A Connecticut agency investigating the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre issued a report in November that found the killer, Adam Lanza, did not "snap" but was obsessed with mass murder and had carefully planned the attack. Lanza, 20, killed his mother at their home on the morning of Dec. 14, then went to the school he had once attended and gunned down 20 children and six staff members before killing himself.

Delaware: Beauty queen dethroned for being too old

Here's your dose of Miss America drama. A new Miss Delaware was crowned in June after the one selected earlier that month got the boot — for being too old. Brittany Lewis, 24, originally the contest's first runner-up as Miss Wilmington, got the sparkly crown lost by Amanda Longacre, who was also 24 when she competed. The Miss America Organization website says contestants must be 17 to 24 years old. Longacre was stripped of her crown because she was turning 25 in October. In July, Longacre sued the state and national scholarship pageant organizations.

Florida: Jeb Bush may ask you to extend his family's presidential dynasty

The Republican establishment likely has its first candidate for 2016. Jeb Bush made a surprise announcement this December that he will "actively explore" a 2016 presidential bid, giving his strongest signal yet about wanting to follow his father and brother to the White House (see how "actively explore" became the new "conscious uncoupling"). Bush was Florida's governor from 1999 to 2007.

More from Florida:Officials propose making 'South Florida' 51st state; Red-light camera abuses exposed

Georgia: Father indicted for murder in son's hot-car death

Immediately after Georgia dad Justin Harris left his 22-month-old son in a hot car, where he died, people rallied around him. But then evidence started mounting that Harris may have actually left his son in the sealed car on purpose. Police found that Harris, 33, and his wife had researched hot car deaths and had two life insurance policies out on their son. In September, Harris was indicted for murder. His trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Hawaii: Lava flow is slow-motion horror story

Imagine you're kicking back at home and someone tells you that 2,000-degree Fahrenheit lava is flowing toward your house. That's been Hawaii's reality this year. Molten lava emerged from a vent in the Kilauea volcano in June, and a long stretch of the flow began slowly moving toward the town of Pahoa, in a rural region of the Big Island of Hawaii. Kilauea is one of the world's most active volcanoes. In late October, the lava crossed a country road at the edge of town, covering a cemetery and claiming a home. Now, the lava is headed for a shopping center.

Idaho: The saga of Bowe Bergdahl

It was a roller coaster of emotions in Hailey, Idaho. On May 31, the town learned that local boy Bowe Bergdahl, 28, had been released from Taliban captivity in Afghanistan after five years. But joy soon turned to shock. Calls and e-mails blasted locals for planning a celebration June 28 for the Army sergeant who may have walked off his post and whose release involved the Obama administration trading five Taliban leaders. Bergdahl has been accused by some members of his former unit of intentionally leaving his post before he was captured by Taliban insurgents in 2009. This December, the Army decided to forward the Bergdahl investigation for possible court-martial. For now Bergdahl remains assigned to a desk job at an Army headquarters unit in San Antonio.

Illinois: Rahm to Hillary: 'Dead broke? Really?'

Hillary Clinton took a lot of heat this summer after she said in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer that she and Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001 "dead broke." Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, her old political pal, didn't let the comment slide at an event in Chicago celebrating her memoir, Hard Choices. "Hillary dead broke?" Emanuel asked. "Really?" Clinton acknowledged to Emanuel that it "may not have been the most artful way" of talking about her finances.

Indiana: Colts owner arrested

It was a tough year for Jim Irsay. The Colts owner was arrested in March for driving under the influence and illegal possession of prescription drugs. Commissioner Roger Goodell disciplined Irsay with a six-game suspension and a $500,000 fine — the maximum allowed under NFL rules. "I acknowledge the mistake I made last March and stand responsible for the consequences of that mistake, for which I sincerely apologize to our community and to Colts fans everywhere," Irsay said in a statement. Irsay, 55, has battled drug addictions and alcoholism for decades.

Iowa: Farm families adapt to food-conscious America

The farm family, with deep community roots and generations living close to the soil, has found itself at the center of profound demographic, technological, economic and environmental change. The Des Moines Registerintroduced readers to four Iowa farm families navigating this changing world. And, in a journalistic first, invited readers to step into the century-old Dammann farm through 360-degree video and virtual reality.

Kansas: Sen. Roberts survives close call for GOP

Veteran Republican Sen. Pat Roberts survived a surprisingly strong challenge from independent Greg Orman in November, ensuring that Republicans would continue their 82-year string of U.S. senators from the Sunflower State. Orman, a 45-year-old millionaire businessman who has never held elected office, scared Republicans with his upstart campaign against the three-term, 78-year-old Republican.

Kentucky: Cars crash in an unlikely mishap

A 40-foot-wide sinkhole at Kentucky's National Corvette Museum opened up in February and swallowed eight Corvettes. The museum owned six and General Motors owned two. GM's Bowling Green Corvette plant, the only factory that builds the cars, is across a highway less than a half mile from the museum. Security cameras caught the moment the cars slipped into the massive hole as the floor caved in.

Louisiana: Smithsonian will honor family's civil rights efforts

Small communities like Bogalusa, La., often are overlooked in histories of the civil rights movement, but a new museum on the National Mall aims to change that. Charles Hicks said it "feels good" to know his native town's civil rights contributions will be recognized by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Hicks' father, Robert Hicks, a legendary civil rights activist, died in 2010. The family's involvement in the civil rights movement will be part of an exhibit at the museum, scheduled to open in 2016.

Maine: Unlikely lobsters caught days apart

First, a rare sight landed in a lobsterman's trap in October. Jay LaPlante and his 14-year-old daughter, Meghan, caught a blue lobster about 10 miles southwest of Portland. The find is like winning the lottery: Oceanographers estimate that only 1 in 2 million lobsters is blue. Then, a week later farther up the coast, veteran lobsterman Joe Bates discovered what researchers consider a 1-in-100-million find: a white lobster.

Maryland: Boardwalk pole dancer makes waves in Ocean City

It was a mixture of outrage and awe on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Md., this summer. A 27-year-old dancer raised First Amendment issues when she set up her own pole-dancing operation on one of the busiest tourist thoroughfares in America. The resort community's officials didn't like it, but thanks in part to two federal court decisions involving Ocean City, Chelsea Plymale's show is legal. That doesn't mean it hasn't riled people, including a nearby store owner.

More from Maryland:Ray Rice won his appeal, but it's likely he still lost his NFL career

Massachusetts: Going back in time

A time capsule buried in 1795 by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams was unearthed in Boston at the Massachusetts Statehouse this December, possibly the oldest such U.S. artifact ever uncovered. About the size of a cigar box, the copper container — green from oxidation and caked in plaster — was found in the cornerstone of the "new" statehouse on Beacon Hill, which was completed in 1798. The contents of the capsule will be unveiled on Jan. 6.

Michigan: Detroit bankruptcy ends

The nightmare is over. The city of Detroit's historic Chapter 9 bankruptcy ended this December, setting in motion a sweeping plan to slash $7 billion in debt and reinvest $1.4 billion over 10 years to improve city services. Judge Steven Rhodes approved the city's restructuring plan, giving the city the authority to implement the grand bargain to help reduce pension cuts, preserve the Detroit Institute of Arts and start improving basic services. The Detroit Free Presslooks at how the case proceeded and where the Motor City goes from here.

More from Michigan:11-year-old hunter bags rare albino deer

Minnesota:Toddler ignores military protocol

Cooper Waldvogel loves his mom way more than military protocol. The 3-year-old couldn't wait to be with his mother this September after she served nine months in Afghanistan with the National Guard's 114th Transportation Company based in Chisholm, Minn. He ran to her while she and her fellow soldiers stood in line waiting to be dismissed. "I was longing to hold him, that's all that I thought about," said his mother, Kathryn Waldvogel, 25.

Mississippi: Southaven one of worst U.S. cities for LGBT rights

Across the United States, cities are increasingly embracing equal treatment and access for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans. Ten years ago, gay marriage was explicitly legal in just one state — Massachusetts. Same-sex couples now can marry in 35 states. But there are many parts of the U.S. where LGBT citizens not only lack the right to marry but also lack other fundamental protections. According to the Human Rights Campaign, Southaven, Miss., is one of just five cities scoring zero on their 2014 Municipal Equality Index. Others are in Texas: Irving, Lubbock, McAllen and Mesquite.

Missouri: Michael Brown sparks conversation on race in America

Michael Brown's death in Ferguson this summer set off protests throughout the nation. Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, was fatally shot by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Witness reports differ on whether Brown had his hands raised. Wilson said Brown became overpoweringly violent after the officer asked him to stop walking in the middle of a street. In November, a grand jury decided Wilson would not face charges in Brown's death, setting off riots. USA TODAY reporter Yamiche Alcindor was there from the beginning and was with Brown's family when they learned of the grand jury's decision. You can explore all our coverage of the shooting and its aftermath here.

Montana: State women mark 100 years of voting

The suffragette torch passed to a new generation of Montanans this November at a celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. On Nov. 3, 1914, after decades of debate, marches and politicking, Montana male voters passed the suffrage referendum, with 53% in favor. It took six more years for women across the USA to get the right to vote.

Nebraska: Rare twin tornadoes devastate town

Two powerful tornadoes leveled about half the town of Pilger in June. The twin twisters touched down within a mile of each other, demolishing homes and businesses in their path. Meteorologists said two such tornadoes from the same thunderstorm system are extremely rare.

Nevada: Tesla heads to Reno

After months of playing states against each other to boost tax incentives, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced on Sept. 4 that Nevada had beat out Texas, Arizona, California and New Mexico for its planned $5 billion battery gigafactory to be built in the desert outside Reno. The project is expected to bring 6,500 jobs to an area still struggling to rebound from the recession.

New Hampshire: 'Father of video games' dies

Ralph Baer, the creator of the first home video game console system, died at 92 in December. While working as an engineer for New Hampshire-based company Sanders Associates, Baer created the Magnavox Odyssey, a battery-powered console that included a controller with two knobs players could twist to move horizontally or vertically.

New Jersey: The Bridgegate scandal

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie faced a scandal this year over lane closures on the George Washington Bridge that gridlocked a town. The traffic jam became a major political liability for the possible Republican presidential prospect. Though a report in December suggests Christie's allies had the lanes closed because of political considerations, the New Jersey governor's role remains unknown.

More from New Jersey:Sayreville High School cancels football season after hazing scandal

New Mexico: DOJ and Albuquerque police reach deal on police use of force

Less than three weeks before Michael Brown's fatal shooting in Ferguson opened a national debate on the use of deadly force by police, city and federal authorities in Albuquerque set forth a plan to transform a local law enforcement agency with a stunningly violent reputation. The Justice Department and the city of Albuquerque announced an agreement this October that will require the police department to transform its practice of "routinely'' taking lethal action against its residents.

New York: NYC explodes with protests for Eric Garner

Demonstrations erupted in NYC this December after a grand jury decided NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo would not face charges in the July death of Eric Garner, 43, an asthmatic who was subjected to a chokehold. Garner was suspected of selling cigarettes illegally. On a cellphone video of the incident, Garner is heard saying repeatedly, "I can't breathe." A few weeks after the ruling, a gunman executed two New York Police Department officers in an apparent revenge killing for the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown.

More from New York:Buffalo Bills' famed quarterback Jim Kelly goes through cancer treatments; 14 troubled boys forsaken in life and deserted in death

North Carolina:Charlotte's ex-mayor heads to prison

Patrick Cannon went from mayor to inmate. Charlotte's former mayor was sentenced in October to three years and eight months in a federal corruption case that stunned North Carolina's largest city. In a deal with prosecutors, Cannon, a Democrat, pleaded guilty in June to one count of wire fraud. Prosecutors say Cannon accepted nearly $50,000 in bribes between January 2013, when he was a city councilman, and February 2014, three months after he was elected mayor.

North Dakota: Where the jobs are

In North Dakota, where the gas and oil industries are booming, petroleum workers are needed. But so are the electricians, pipefitters, carpenters and others who build the infrastructure. By 2017, an estimated 2.5 million new, middle-skill jobs like these are expected to be added to the workforce, accounting for nearly 40% of all job growth, according to a USA TODAY analysis of local data from Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. and CareerBuilder. Take a deeper look at USA TODAY's investigation "Where the Jobs Are."

Ohio: Lauren Hill inspires the nation

Basketball player Lauren Hill is dying of cancer, but she's not letting that stop her. The 19-year-old freshman at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer and given a short time to live, but she has made a tremendous impact both on and off the court this season. She fulfilled her dream to play college basketball, starting a game with the Lions women's basketball team and scoring a basket (or two) in front of a sold-out arena. Most importantly, she began a massive effort to raise funds for cancer research. Hill is now an honorary coach with the Lions and she's not giving up her fight to live — or the fight to raise awareness.

Oklahoma: Death row inmates appeal lethal injection ruling

Capital punishment in America is in a curious state. Manufacturers are cutting off supplies of lethal injection drugs because of opposition to the death penalty, and prison officials are improvising to make up the deficit — sharing drugs, buying them from under-regulated pharmacies or using drug combinations never employed before in putting someone to death. A group of Oklahoma death row inmates scheduled to die early next year filed notice in December that they intend to appeal the ruling of a federal judge in Oklahoma City who says the state's new lethal injection protocol is constitutional. The four condemned men who have pending execution dates, beginning with Charles Frederick Warner on Jan. 15, maintain the state's use of the sedative midazolam in a three-drug combination poses a substantial risk of unconstitutional pain and suffering.

Oregon: Brittany Maynard leaves a legacy

Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old face of the controversial right-to-death movement, died in November in Portland. When you're 29 years old, you typically don't think about your legacy. You think about the family you want to start, the house you want to buy, the promotion you want to get, the trip you want to take. You think about turning 30 and the amazing life that stretches before you. Maynard moved from California to Portland so she could have access to Oregon's Death With Dignity Act and die as she had planned – in her bedroom, encircled by family and friends. Oregon became the first state in the U.S. with a death-with-dignity law in 1997. Since then, four other states have followed suit.

Pennsylvania: One of FBI's Most Wanted captured

It was a lengthy manhunt that had Pocono Mountain communities near the search area on edge. Eric Frein, suspected of killing one Pennsylvania trooper and wounding another in a September ambush, was captured in October after 48 days on the run. In addition to first-degree murder charges, Frein is accused of terrorism for allegedly trying to start a revolution by shooting the two state troopers.

Rhode Island: Obama's sleepover makes history

The president made a little bit of history this October in Rhode Island — he spent the night there. The Providence Journal reported that the last sitting president to sleep in the nation's smallest state was John F. Kennedy, more than 50 years ago. Kennedy stayed at Newport's Hammersmith Farm, home of Jacqueline Kennedy's family, according to the Journal. Obama stayed overnight for a morning speech on the economy.

South Carolina: Judge throws out black teen's conviction from 1944

When George Stinney Jr., 14, was sent to the electric chair in June 1944, he was the youngest person in the country ever executed. In December, a judge threw out Stinney's conviction for the deaths of two white girls. Stinney was convicted of the grisly murders of Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, in Alcolu, S.C. The teen's prosecution had "fundamental, constitutional violations of due process," Judge Carmen Mullen of South Carolina's 14th Judicial Circuit said in her ruling. Her decision effectively exonerates the teen. Stinney's supporters have said he was forced to confess.

South Dakota: Case of missing girls solved after 40 years

Finally, some closure. Authorities announced in April that the skeletal remains found inside a car belonged to two teens who had been missing for 40 years. Attorney General Marty Jackley said Pamela Jackson and Cheryl Miller died when their vehicle ran off the road while they were on their way to a party in rural Union County in 1971. Jackley said there was no evidence of foul play. The final results put an end to speculation in the decades-long mystery.

More from South Dakota:S.D. teen finishes flight around the world

Tennessee: Ex-Titans kicker Rob Bironas dies in crash

On the football field, kicker Rob Bironas became known for his strong leg and his ability to come through in clutch situations. In the locker room, he was a prankster. He was the guy who would throw the rookies' clothes in the cold tub every training camp. He was quick with a joke. He liked to make people laugh. The popular kicker died in September in a single-vehicle crash in Nashville. He was 36. A toxicology report revealed he had a blood alcohol level of 0.218%, well over the legal limit (0.08).

Texas: Pipeline of children creates border crisis

According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, tens of thousands of unaccompanied children crossed the border into the U.S. this year. The pipeline carrying migrants ends at the Rio Grande, where the surge of thousands of women and children from Central America overwhelmed the Border Patrol in southern Texas. More than 70 percent are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, three Central American countries plagued by poverty and crime. The Arizona Republic'sweeklong investigative "Pipeline of Children" project looked at how gang violence, lack of opportunity and misinformation lead to a mass exodus north to the United States.

More from Texas:Rick Perry becomes first Texas governor in nearly 100 years to be indicted

Utah: Mom admits killing 6 newborns because of meth addiction

It was hard to comprehend. A Utah woman admitted to police thatshe strangled or suffocated at least six of her newborns between 1996 and 2006, stuffed the bodies into cardboard boxes and hid them in the garage of her home. Megan Huntsman was arrested in April after police discovered the remains of the infants at a house in Pleasant Grove, Utah, where she lived until 2011. Police said she killed her newborns because she was addicted to methamphetamine and couldn't cope with caring for the children.

Vermont: Former FBI director in serious accident

Former FBI director Louis Freeh was seriously injured in a car crash in Barnard in August. He later said he had no recollection of wrecking his SUV. State police theorize that Freeh, 64, may have fallen asleep during the early afternoon accident. Freeh was the FBI's director from 1993 to 2001. Freeh conducted a nearly eight-month investigation into Penn State's handling of assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky's misconduct.

More from Vermont:Local inventor battles unsafe drinking water in Africa

Virginia: The murder of Hannah Graham

The nation was captivated by the search for the freckle-faced University of Virginia sophomore who vanished from the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Va., in the early morning hours of Sept. 13. Hannah Graham, 18, became everyone's sister, daughter, and friend. In October, her remains were found on an abandoned farm on Old Lynchburg Road, just 10 miles from the mall where she was last seen. Read more about her story here.

More:Ex-Va. governor Bob McDonnell guilty of public corruption; NASA rocket explodes during launch

Washington: Massive mudslide sweeps over neighborhood

The country watched in disbelief as a devastating mudslide in March wiped out an entire neighborhood in the community of Oso about 60 miles from Seattle. Dozens of people died in the disaster that destroyed homes, completely covered State Route 530 and dammed up the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. While rescuers were searching for survivors, Snohomish County officials said they could hear cries for help from people trapped under debris. President Obama toured the devastation in Oso in April and met with families who lost loved ones.

More from Washington:'Homecoming prince' opens fire at Marysville-Pilchuck High School

West Virginia: Shelley Moore Capito makes history

Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito won the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller in November. She called her victory "a turning point" for West Virginia. Capito became the first woman to represent West Virginia in the U.S. Senate and is also the first West Virginia Republican elected to the Senate since the late 1950s.

Wisconsin: Girls stab friend to please 'Slenderman'

It was a gruesome story that left many shaking their heads. Two Wisconsin girls who allegedly stabbed a classmate were trying to please the fictional horror character known as Slenderman. Anissa Weier, 13, and Morgan Geyser, 12, were charged as adults with attempted murder for a Memorial Day weekend attack that seriously wounded another girl in a park in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha. The two told authorities that Slenderman required them to perform the crime in order to curry favor with him.

Wyoming: Wild cloud wows weather watchers

A phenomenal shot of a massive cloud near Clareton made the rounds on social media this spring. The photo was taken in May by the Basehunters storm chasers group. It shows the rotating updraft of a supercell thunderstorm over eastern Wyoming, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Jon Erdman. Supercells are the largest, strongest and longest-lasting thunderstorms. They are most common on the Great Plains.

Contributing: Associated Press