Killing suspects fight extradition
Columbus, Ohio The couple accused of killing a Tennessee corrections officer in a brazen escape said Friday they would fight efforts to send them back to face charges, with the husband declaring: “I don’t want to leave without her.”
Jennifer Hyatte’s father also told the Associated Press on Friday that he had warned a corrections officer in his home state of Utah that his daughter and her jailed husband might be up to something, but the information never reached Tennessee.
At the time, it “didn’t appear to raise any red flags,” said Utah Department of Corrections spokesman Jack Ford. He said the Utah officer planned to contact officials in Tennessee on Tuesday – the day of the shooting. In hindsight, the department should have acted sooner, he said.
Floyd Forsyth, a former sheriff’s deputy, said he suspected his daughter was planning to help free her husband after she asked him during a phone call if he had any spare handcuff keys. She also said she was putting things in storage and planned to let her ex-husband keep their three children for a while. “I thought maybe she was going to pass him a key,” Forsyth said. “There was no doubt in my mind that she was going do something. I just didn’t know it would be this.”
Jennifer Hyatte, 31, a licensed nurse with no criminal record, is accused of ambushing two prison guards as they were leading her husband, George Hyatte, from a Kingston, Tenn., courthouse where he had just pleaded guilty to robbery.
Guard Wayne “Cotton” Morgan was fatally shot before the couple sped away. More than 1,000 people attended his funeral Friday.
Irene strengthening, may avoid U.S. coast
Miami Tropical Storm Irene was nearing hurricane strength Friday, but the storm was on a course that should eventually curve away from the U.S. East Coast, forecasters said.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted that Irene would be about 350 miles east of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay by Tuesday, moving northward.
A five-day forecast predicts the storm will head northeast. However, given the margin of error in the forecasts, there is a chance Irene could near the Eastern Seaboard north of North Carolina.
Museum seeks to put bodies on display
Tampa, Fla. A decision by Florida’s attorney general Friday could scuttle plans for a controversial museum exhibit featuring human bodies preserved and posed to reveal their inner workings.
The board that oversees the use of human specimens at Florida’s medical schools wants proof that the deceased or their families authorized the use of the bodies. The Tampa Museum of Science and Industry argues that the Anatomical Board doesn’t have jurisdiction.
The bodies were obtained legally but belonged to Chinese people who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members and were preserved at the Dalian Medical University of Plastination Laboratories in China, according to the exhibition’s medical director, Roy Glover.
“BODIES: The Exhibition” features 20 cadavers and 260 other parts preserved with a process that replaces human tissue with silicone rubber. Skin is removed, exposing muscles, bones, organs, tendons, blood vessels and brains.
Manure spill pollutes New York state river
Lowville, N.Y. Three million gallons of liquid manure spilled from a dairy farm and into a nearby river, creating a smelly flow that was blamed for the deaths of thousands of fish.
The toxic tide had traveled some 20 miles on the Black River by Friday and was expected to flow past Watertown, a city of 25,000, which shut off its water intake.
Farmers in this dairy-intensive county were warned not to let their cows drink from the river, and emergency officials were trying Friday to flush out the contamination by increasing the flow from the Beaver River, which feeds the Black River.
The manure spilled from a lagoon at the large Marks Farms late Wednesday or early Thursday when an earthen wall blew out, sending the liquid into a drainage ditch and then into the river, Martin said.