WEST

BODY FOUND IN UTAH AVALANCHE RECOVERY

SALT LAKE CITY – Search teams digging through tons of snow Sunday found the body of one of five people feared buried by a powerful avalanche in an area that skiers had been warned to avoid.

The victim was identified as Shane Maixner, 27, of Sandpoint, Idaho. His body was found under 4 feet of snow after trained dogs alerted the teams searching the area of Friday’s slide, Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds said at a news conference. “If anybody could have survived, it would have been Shane,” his father, Joel Maixner, said from his North Dakota home.

Seven people have been killed in Utah avalanches this winter – more than any year since the state started keeping records in 1951. It’s still relatively early in the season. Sheriff Edmunds said other clothing – sweat shirts and gloves – was discovered in yesterday’s search, possibly indicating more victims. Several eyewitnesses claimed they saw multiple people buried in the avalanche near Park City, about 20 miles east of Salt Lake City

The amount of snow carried down the mountain by Friday’s slide – up to 30 feet deep at some points – meant authorities had to tally potential victims by matching eyewitness descriptions of the avalanche to a list of skiers thought to be in the area at the time.

More than 150 rescue workers and dogs had resumed the search at sunrise yesterday in an out-of-bounds area near The Canyons resort that had been marked with skull and crossbones warning signs because of the avalanche danger. An allday search on Saturday had turned up no trace of the missing people.

– Associated Press

MAN DISCOVERS 4-INCH NAIL EMBEDDED IN SKULL

LITTLETON, Colo. – A dentist found the source of the toothache Patrick Lawler was complaining about on the roof of his mouth: a four-inch nail the construction worker had unknowingly embedded in his skull six days earlier.

A nail gun backfired on Lawler, 23, on January 6 while working in Breckenridge, a ski resort town in the central Colorado mountains. The tool sent a nail into a piece of wood nearby, but Mr. Lawler didn’t realize a second nail had shot through his mouth, said his sister, Lisa Metcalse.

Following the accident, Mr. Lawler had what he thought was a minor toothache and blurry vision. On Wednesday, after painkillers and ice didn’t ease the pain, he went to a dental office where his wife, Katerina, works.

“We all are friends, so I thought the (dentists) were joking…then the doctor came out and said ‘There’s really a nail,'” Katerina Lawler said. “Patrick just broke down. I mean, he had been eating ice cream to help the swelling.”

He was taken to a suburban Denver hospital, where he underwent a four-hour surgery. The nail had plunged 1 1/2 inches into his brain, barely missing his right eye, Ms. Metcalse said. Mr. Lawler was recovering yesterday in the hospital, where he was expected to spend several more days.

– Associated Press

SOUTH

PRISON JOURNALIST SET FREE AFTER 43 YEARS

BATON ROUGE, La. – In the nation’s bloodiest prison, Wilbert Rideau became a thinking man, an award winning journalist who has been called “the most rehabilitated inmate in America.” Now, after more than 40 years behind bars, he is a free man.

Rideau, a black man convicted three times by all-white juries, walked free Saturday when a racially mixed jury found him guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter. A quietly jubilant Rideau savored his new freedom yesterday in Baton Rouge, relaxing at a friend’s house and blinking in a world he left behind when John Kennedy was the new president and “whites only” signs still hung across the South.

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it,” Rideau told the Associated Press in one of his first interviews since the verdict in his native Lake Charles. “Jail is so far distant. It’s distant.” Rideau, 62, never denied that he killed Julia Ferguson on February 16, 1961, and shot two others after a botched robbery. Testifying for the first time in this trial, he said it was an act of panic.

Prosecutors, seeking a murder conviction and a life sentence, scoffed at Rideau’s contention that although he killed Ferguson, he didn’t murder her. But after deliberating for nearly six hours, the jury of eight whites and four blacks agreed with him that the crime was not planned or premeditated. Since he has spent nearly 44 years in prison – more than double the 21-year maximum for manslaughter when the crime occurred – he was immediately released.

“It offers hope to the black community. It’s a new day,” said the Reverend J.L. Franklin of Lake Charles, who has led a minister’s group that pushed for years for Rideau’s release.

– Associated Press