In brief: City’s water, wastewater lines cross
A cross-connection between the city of Pullman’s water system and its wastewater treatment plant Tuesday may have contaminated the city’s water, the city said.
The cross-connection occurred about 1 p.m. and lasted about an hour.
“Contamination of the city water system is unlikely, but possible,” a city news release said.
City crews began flushing and increasing chlorination to the water system in the area of the wastewater treatment plant, 1025 N.W. Guy St. Water samples have been taken; results were expected late today.
The state Department of Health said boiling water is not necessary, according to the news release.
Spokane
Nominations sought for new award
A new award has been established in Spokane to honor people who take steps to improve the environment or promote peace.
Nominations for the Spokane Peace Prizes will be accepted through March 14. Prizes will be awarded March 21 during a ceremony at the Community Building, 35 W. Main, said Tom Brooks, a math tutor who is organizing the event. That gala, free and open to anyone, will begin at 6:30 p.m., he said.
About 90 nominating essays have been received, said Brooks, who plans to name recipients who work locally, nationally and internationally in each of the two categories. Among those nominated in the peace category, Brooks said, are President Carter and Spokane activists Rusty and Nancy Nelson.
For more information or to nominate someone, call (509) 455-6284.
SEATTLE
Court sends gun case back to judge
As part of the investigation into the 2001 slaying of Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Crane Wales, a federal grand jury asked Bellevue gun collector Albert Kwan to turn over documents detailing everyone he had come in contact with in the previous 11 years.
For at least two years, he’s been trying unsuccessfully to get those papers back. Following an extraordinary secret hearing before the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last month, he’ll have another chance.
“It was just a huge fishing expedition and should have never been allowed to happen,” his lawyer, Joseph R. Conte, wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.
In January 2006, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman issued a one-sentence order denying Kwan’s request to order the government to return the papers. Kwan appealed, and last month, three appeals court judges heard arguments on a sealed-off floor of the Park Place Building downtown. They sent the issue back to Pechman to have her conduct a hearing on whether the papers should be returned, Conte said Tuesday.
Though the ruling had not been expected for several months, the appeals panel issued it in mid- to late January, Conte said. The ruling itself remains sealed.
Kwan, 53 and a sergeant in the Army reserves, is not a suspect in Wales’ killing, but was arrested and held about three weeks in early 2005 as a material witness. Investigators say that Wales was killed with a Makarov pistol outfitted with a replacement barrel, and that sale records indicate Kwan had purchased two such barrels.
Kwan denies he ever owned more than one barrel, which he turned over to the FBI, but according to the government he failed a polygraph test, Conte has acknowledged.
Steven Clymer, the Department of Justice special prosecutor heading up the investigation, has declined to comment in the past and was out of the office Tuesday. He did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
In reviewing Kwan’s papers, the grand jury was likely trying to determine if he had any connection to an airline pilot who is the only publicly identified suspect in the case. The pilot formerly lived in Bellevue and was once prosecuted by Wales in a fraud case.
VANCOUVER, B.C.
Pickton may not be tried for 20 deaths
A farmer convicted of butchering six women and feeding them to his pigs may not go to trial for the 20 other deaths he is charged with, British Columbia’s attorney general said Tuesday.
Attorney General Wally Oppal said he will not proceed with a second trial if Robert Pickton loses his appeal of the December conviction on six counts of second-degree murder.
A second trial would serve no purpose because Pickton, 58, would already be serving the maximum sentence of life with no possibility of parole for 25 years, Oppal said.
Police say the discovery of the slain women, most of whom were prostitutes and drug addicts from a seedy Vancouver neighborhood, represented Canada’s worst serial murder case.
The judge in the first trial proceeded with just six of the 26 murder charges because he felt all of them would be too much of a burden on the jury.
Lilliane Beaudoin, whose sister is among the 20 slain women, said she’s outraged Pickton might not be tried.
“To me, that’s telling me I’ll never actually know who committed this crime. And I will never see punishment for my sister,” she said.
“That’s injustice.”
Beaudoin, who has had contact with some of the other family members, said they knew when the charges against Pickton were separated into two cases that they may not see justice.
Police also are investigating 40 other women who are missing.