Girls rugby coach seriously beaten
Rohnert Park, Calif. A girls rugby coach was beaten until he was bloody and unconscious during a weekend match, and police were seeking criminal charges against as many as 10 people.
The violence erupted during a tournament game between the Rohnert Park Girls Rugby Club and a team coached by Craig Stewart, 55, the Alameda High School Riptide club team.
The conflict began when a referee ordered a spectator off the field and was punched in the face by the brother of the coach of the Rohnert Park team, police said.
Stewart intervened, but the Rohnert Park coach and up to eight spectators attacked Stewart.
Police were working on identifying everyone involved, some who fled the scene. No one had been arrested by Monday.
Park-ride operator guilty of homicide
Sevierville, Tenn. An amusement park manager was found guilty Monday of reckless homicide in the death of a woman who was thrown from a ride last year, but he avoided a murder conviction.
Charles Stan Martin, 56, was originally charged with second-degree murder in the death of June Carol Alexander, 51, who died in March 2004 after her safety harness broke on the ride, sending her tumbling 60 feet to the ground.
Martin faces up to four years in prison when he’s sentenced in July. He could have received up to 25 years in prison if convicted on the murder charge.
The defense said the responsibility fell on the ride’s Italian manufacturer.
Medal of Honor winner dies at 94
San Antonio Jose M. Lopez, a World War II veteran who was awarded the Medal of Honor for single-handedly killing more than 100 German soldiers in a single skirmish, died Monday of cancer. He was 94.
Lopez won the nation’s highest military honor for his heroics during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. He was the oldest living Hispanic recipient of the Medal of Honor and among a dwindling group of recipients from World War II.
His health had declined in recent years, but Lopez visited Washington in January for President Bush’s second inauguration.
Jackson guard says teenagers had wine
Santa Maria, Calif. A security guard at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch testified Monday that he caught the pop star’s teenage accuser and his brother with a bottle of wine, and a maid told the jury that she saw adult magazines in the brother’s backpack.
Defense attorneys in Jackson’s child molestation trial called the Neverland employees to challenge prosecution claims that it was Jackson who exposed the children to alcohol and adult materials – suggesting instead that the boys found the items on their own.
Jackson, 46, is accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy in February or March 2003 and giving him wine. He is also accused of conspiring to hold the boy’s family captive to get them to rebut a TV documentary in which the boy appeared with Jackson, who said let children sleep in his bed but it was nonsexual.
Prosecutors have said Jackson showed the boys sexually explicit material on the Internet and in adult magazines, suggesting it was a precursor to molestation.
Security guard Shane Meredith testified Monday that he found the boys in the wine cellar, which has an entrance behind a juke box in Neverland’s arcade, after noticing that the juke box door was open.