Woman arrested on suspicion of assault

A 42-year-old Spokane woman was arrested on suspicion of first-degree assault Sunday night for allegedly trying eight to 10 times to run over her husband and father-in-law with a vehicle.

Jean Elizabeth Rottmayer was driving on the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Browne Street when police officers arrived, according to court documents.

A report filed in Spokane County District Court says Rottmayer’s husband, David Rottmayer, and her father-in-law, William Rottmayer, told the officer they had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit.

The court document doesn’t say why the two men didn’t stay out of harm’s way after their first escape, nor does it say why Rottmayer allegedly was trying to run them down.

Okanogan County

Body found over month after accident

The body of an Okanogan County man who drove into flood-swollen Sinlahekin Creek last month was found Sunday night.

Sheriff Frank Rogers said William L. Burton, 19, was last seen about 2 a.m. May 22, at the Loomis-area ranch where he was working. Burton was believed to have been on his way home to Tonasket.

Burton’s pickup was found a day later in 10 to 12 feet of murky water, where it apparently crashed through a gate and a barrier at the edge of Totes Coulee Road, just north of Loomis. A window had been broken out, and there was no trace of Burton.

Daily searches failed to find Burton’s body until Sunday, when it was found buried in a sandbar about a quarter-mile downstream, Rogers said.

RICHLAND

Hanford demolishes incinerator

Workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation have completed demolition of a former plutonium incinerator, once one of the most contaminated buildings in that section of the site.

From 1963 to 1972, the 232-Z Incinerator burned combustible material contaminated with plutonium. Plutonium ashes recovered from the process were then used to produce nuclear materials for national defense.

The building was located in the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex, which produced two-thirds of the U.S. supply of plutonium for national defense between 1949 and 1990.

“While the incinerator building was small in stature – measuring approximately 2,100 square feet – it looms large in the history of this plant that was once a workhorse of the Cold War,” Keith Klein of the Department of Energy’s Richland Operations office said in a statement Monday.

Workers spent two years removing contaminated equipment and debris from the building, and began tearing down the structure June 11.

Under the Tri-Party Agreement, a cleanup pact signed by the state and federal governments, the U.S. Energy Department must demolish and building and remove debris by September. The agency expects to meet or beat that deadline, according to the statement.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. It is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup expected to last until 2035.

SEATTLE

Woman charged with kidnapping baby

A woman whose family says she took her baby from a Seattle hospital because she opposed a planned operation has been charged with second-degree domestic violence kidnapping.

Tina Marie Carlsen, 34, of Sumner, was being held in the King County Jail on $500,000 bail. She’s scheduled to be arraigned Monday. Court documents say Carlsen did not have legal custody of 9-month-old Riley Rogers last Thursday, when she put him in a bag and carried him out of Children’s Hospital.

Child Protective Services had taken custody of the baby because Carlsen opposed surgery for a life-threatening kidney condition.

The child became a ward of the state after months of back-and-forth between medical professionals, who had insisted that he get dialysis, and his parents, who favor herbs, vitamins and other alternative treatments.

After a statewide Amber Alert was issued, Carlsen was arrested early Saturday when police found the boy with her in Yelm.

The baby is back in the hospital awaiting surgery.

BREMERTON

Damaged submarine to get a new nose

Workers at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard are preparing to transplant the nose of a soon-to-be-retired submarine, the USS Honolulu, onto the USS San Francisco, which ran into an undersea mountain in 2005.

“A bow replacement on an operational hull is unique and has never been accomplished before,” said Pat Dolan, spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C.

The operation is scheduled to begin in November and will take nearly two years to complete but is expected to save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

The Honolulu is on its final deployment. The San Francisco has been in Bremerton since September, awaiting permanent repairs. Both are Los Angeles-class submarines.

Replacing the bow is expected to cost $79 million, Dolan told the Kitsap Sun newspaper, well below the $170 million that would have been required to refuel the Honolulu’s nuclear reactor.

The San Francisco is four years older than the Honolulu but was refueled and overhauled in 2000-02.

The retiring Honolulu would come to Bremerton for decommissioning even without the plan to reuse its bow because the shipyard houses the Navy’s nuclear ship and submarine recycling program.

– Compiled from staff and wire reports