Jonathan Brunt

A judge will decide today whether the young man accused of killing a woman as she walked her dog along the Spokane River last year should proceed to trial or be deemed too mentally incompetent. Avondre C. Graham, 18, is described by his defense lawyer as incapable of understanding the proceedings against him and unable to assist in his own defense. The defense team wants the criminal case halted, but prosecutors are objecting.

To make his team think about a fresh beginning, coach Matt Miethe asked his players to contemplate their end. In the first week of Rogers High School football practice, Miethe assigned players the task of writing their obituaries, imagining the end of their high school careers and their deaths at age 99.

A gunman ranting about “Obama” took over a Spokane pawn shop Friday, temporarily trapping a handful of people before armed employees took up positions at the front door and provided cover for the fleeing patrons. No injuries were reported in the tense two-hour standoff at Double Eagle Pawn, 3030 E. Sprague Ave., which ended about 12:30 p.m. when 26-year-old Jonathan Johnson surrendered to police. Johnson is suspected of jumping over a sales counter at the pawn shop Friday morning, grabbing a shotgun and loading it, then firing as customers and employees ran for the exits.

A dead pigeon lies in a corner of the old hardware warehouse, all bones and feathers. The fir and maple floors are dirty, scuffed and occasionally routed. The fire sprinkler pipes are rusty, vulnerable to failure. But the structure of the brick, six-story former Jensen-Byrd warehouse, just east of downtown Spokane, is sound. Its beams, a horizontal forest of fir, are thick. Although cracked at the edges, its roof keeps the rain out.

A half dozen girls point with urgency at the body displayed on the screen, identifying several broken bones. They are examining the digital corpse at Mobius Spokane’s autopsy exhibit and have spent much of their field trip in this room. “It catches my interest,” said Chanelle Bridges, 10, a Hamblen Elementary fifth-grader. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot.”

The first crews to arrive at two South Hill house fires Monday were from a fire station that lost its first-response firefighting capability this year due to budget cuts. Fire officials say it’s hard to say how much difference having a full engine crew on scene would have made.

The label in the potted soil reads “Freedom Fireworks,” but they will explode with color slowly, over the course of months. In the near-triple-digit temperatures of last week, Liberty Park Florist and Greenhouse in Spokane’s South Perry District received its first 800 of the 3,500 poinsettias it will sell for Christmas.

Perhaps lost in the recent debate about a proposed pedestrian bridge in Spokane’s University District is its massiveness. It wouldn’t be an inconspicuous walkway like the three pedestrian bridges over Interstate 90 east of downtown. Nor is it much like the quaint-by-comparison pedestrian suspension bridges in Riverfront Park.