Committee will help redo police oversight

Spokane police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick will assemble a committee to help her revamp how Spokane handles citizen complaints against the police.

Kirkpatrick told the city’s Public Safety Committee on Monday that she hopes to have her “stakeholders group” together by the end of the year and a new police oversight system in place by next spring.

Police unions will be included because any changes to the oversight system must be negotiated in labor union contracts, Kirkpatrick said.

Council President Joe Shogan, who also heads the council’s Public Safety Committee, told Kirkpatrick he wants to participate in the review.

Spokane currently has a six-member Citizens Review Commission. It had not heard a citizen complaint for a decade until this year, when it met at the request of Kirkpatrick, the new police chief, to review the conduct of police Lt. Judi Carl during a late-night neighborhood dispute involving two of Carl’s children.

The commission met for two weeks behind closed doors before deciding Oct. 3 that its mandate was so narrow it had no authority to hear the complaint because Carl had already received a one-day suspension from her job.

– Karen Dorn Steele

Recent rainfall tops summer’s total

More rain has fallen on the Spokane area in the past two days than was recorded all summer.

According to the National Weather Service, just over a half-inch of rainfall was registered at Spokane International Airport from June 15 to Oct. 14. The normal amount of rainfall during that time is 3 inches, said National Weather Service meteorologist Ron Miller.

Over the weekend, 0.84 inches of precipitation was measured at the airport, Miller said.

The North Idaho Panhandle and some locations in north Spokane County have also seen significant rain, Miller said. Deer Park was drenched with more than an inch from Sunday to Monday, as were some areas of North Idaho.

Today and Wednesday are expected to be cloudy but mostly dry.

Also, the National Weather Service has issued a hazardous weather warning because snow levels have dropped to 4,000 feet.

– Jody Lawrence-Turner

EVERETT

Remains cremated in ‘50 given to family

Nearly 56 years after Frank Mally died and was cremated, his ashes have been turned over to his family.

A small box of the remains, one of 25 such boxes found in the garage of a woman whose family once operated a funeral home in Snohomish, was retrieved from a lawyer’s office last week by Mally’s stepdaughter-in-law, Ruth Wilson, 74, of Marysville, and her daughter, Coni Bowman.

Wilson said she had always wondered what happened to Mally’s ashes after he died of a heart attack and was cremated Nov. 28, 1950. The family held a memorial service at the time, but his wife, Viola, never got the ashes for reasons that remain unclear.

Wilson and Bowman said they planned to place Mally’s ashes in his wife’s grave.

“To me, it’s closed a chapter,” Wilson said.

The 25 boxes of human ashes were discovered in a garage after Dorothy Rainey, whose family operated a funeral home in Snohomish, died in August 2005 at age 86. One contained the remains of an infant who was cremated on Aug. 9, 1951, and the others were marked with names and cremation dates from 1932 to 1951.

After selling the funeral home, Rainey and her husband, Vester, kept unclaimed ashes at their house in case relatives of the deceased came to claim the remains, said Jane Uzzell, of Charlotte, N.C., Rainey’s niece.

Jack Brenchley, a friend of Rainey who is handling her estate, has said that ashes which remain unclaimed will probably be put into a common grave.

– Associated Press