Saturday, October 23, 2004
Officials investigate whybomb was dropped on trail
FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, Pa. -- Military officials are investigating why a jet fighter accidentally dropped a 25-pound practice bomb on a hiking trail a mile from its intended target in southeastern Pennsylvania.
No one was injured when the grapefruit-sized, cast-iron bomb fell on the trail Oct. 13 during a training mission for a pair of A-10 Thunderbolts. The bomb created a crater about 6 inches wide in the trail along an abandoned rail line in Schuylkill County.
At least one hiker was close enough to hear the thud.
"It took a while for me to realize what had occurred," the hiker said in an e-mail to the state Game Commission. "Couldn't believe it! Retraced my steps. Still couldn't believe it!"
The plane that dropped the bomb was assigned to the 111th Fighter Wing at Willow Grove Naval Air Station, said Col. Chris Cleaver, spokesman for Fort Indiantown Gap, an 18,000-acre military training site managed by the Pennsylvania National Guard.
The plane has been grounded while officials investigate what caused the bomb to drop incorrectly. Investigators have ruled out pilot error as the cause, Cleaver said.
The dropped bomb is "a significant concern on all fronts," Cleaver said. "Whether it's in peace time training environment or on the front lines of war, when you have a bomb that hangs up, that is a significant safety concern."
Space capsule lands
ARKALYK, Kazakhstan -- A Soyuz capsule carrying a U.S.-Russian crew back to Earth following six months at the international space station hurtled through the Earth's atmosphere and landed safely and on target in Kazakhstan Saturday evening.
The bell-shaped Soyuz TMA-4, carrying Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka and American partner Mike Fincke, touched down beneath a parachute at the targeted landing site, some 55 miles north of the town of Arkalyk, in pre-dawn darkness early today local time.
Russian and U.S. officials had waited alongside search helicopter crews for the first glimpse of the Russian Soyuz. It had undocked from the space station some three hours earlier and made two orbits around Earth. Other Russian rescue teams had been in position, ready to move in by air and off-road convoys if necessary.
2 U.S. citizens killed byarmed robbers in Mexico
ACAPULCO, Mexico -- Four gunmen abducted three U.S. citizens on a rural highway in southern Mexico, shot and killed two of them and left the third -- a pregnant woman -- bound and gagged, authorities said Saturday.
Reynaldo Valdez, a 22-year-old from Houston, was traveling with Miami natives Ashley Linn Diniger, 16, and Vanessa Burgos, 22, to visit Valdez's mother in Cutzamala de Pinzon, according to investigator Antonio Nogeda.
The three had left Cutzamala de Pinzon late Thursday when a vehicle carrying four men forced their vehicle off the road near Tierra Caliente, Nogeda said.
The gunmen put the Americans into a sedan without license plates, drove them to a nearby community and robbed them. The abductors later tried to sexually assault the two women, then shot and killed Valdez and Diniger at close range, Nogeda said.
They spared the life of Burgos, apparently because she was pregnant, but tied up her hands and feet and dumped her on the side of a road from a moving car, according to Nogeda.
DNA evidence links inmateto L.A. slayings, police say
LOS ANGELES -- A man in prison for rape has been linked by DNA evidence to the killings of a dozen women, including three that another man was convicted of committing, police said Saturday.
Police said they have linked Chester D. Turner, 37, to the murders of 12 women between 1987 and 1998 and they plan to give prosecutors evidence for many of the slayings next week. Turner is serving an eight-year sentence after pleading no contest to rape in 2002.
Police allege the former pizza deliveryman accosted most of his victims on a street in crime-plagued South Los Angeles and raped and strangled them before dumping their bodies.
A mentally disabled janitor was wrongly convicted of three of the killings and spent nearly nine years in prison. David Allen Jones, 44, was released in March.
District attorney spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons declined to comment on the cases.
In a somber coincidence, the mothers of two of the victims have been friends for 30 years, and have grieved together for their daughters' deaths.
"We never thought that it could be the same person," said Mildred White, whose daughter Annette Ernest, 26, was among the victims.
Associated Press