Flagstaff Today - News and Photos

NEW YORK (AP) - The daughter-in-law of New York City’s public advocate was found dead in a police holding cell in Phoenix.

Forty-5-year-old Carol Anne Gotbaum of New York was arrested yesterday after a conflict at Phoenix Sky Harbor with gate crews who refused to allow her to board a plane.

US Airways says the plane was already preparing to depart. Gotbaum was rebooked on the next flight, but an airline spokeswoman says the woman became extremely irate and started running up and down the gate area.

Officers handcuffed her and took her to a holding room, where police say she kept screaming.

Police say officers checked on her when she stopped screaming and found her unresponsive.

Authorities are investigating if Gotbaum choked herself while trying to get free from the handcuffs.

Police say neither a Taser stun gun nor pepper spray was used on the woman.

The woman’s mother-in-law and New York City’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, says the family is extraordinarily upset and that her daughter-in-law had three young children.

KOLD

One of the “persons of interest” in a shooting death earlier this month is being held on a related federal weapons charge.

Jose Antonio Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was charged with being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm after his palm print was found on an assault rifle found near the body of murder victim Roman Rodriguez, 22.

According to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Flagstaff, the Romanian-made AK-47 was found near Rodriguez’ body after he was found shot to death in a west Flagstaff apartment on the morning of Sept. 9.

Sanchez was also found near the body, “passed out,” the complaint stated.

azdailysun.com

A Flagstaff resident will be able to continue manufacturing and selling T-shirts bearing the names of deceased soldiers after a federal court ruling Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Neil Wake in Phoenix issued a preliminary injunction sought by Daniel Frazier, an anti-war activist who owns and operates a Web site, carryabigsticker.com, where he sells T-shirts using the names of deceased soldiers from Iraq in small print along with slogans such as “Bush Lied, They Died.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona filed a lawsuit on June 28, challenging a GOP Legislature-led bill that became law with Gov. Janet Napolitano’s signature in May. The law bans the use of names of troops killed in Iraq without the permission of their families.

Wake wrote in his 30-page decision that “the political and commercial expressions of speech cannot be separated because the mode of expression has a cost.”

“The nation’s debt to its fallen soldiers may not be paid by giving their families a toll on free speech,” Wake wrote. “The debt must be paid in other ways.”

Arizona Republic

Steady production from local high-tech industries in the Flagstaff region has helped keep the metropolitan area on a list of the best-performing cities across the nation.

The Milken Institute, an independent public-policy think tank, recently ranked the Flagstaff metropolitan area 21st on its list of 179 small cities.

The Flagstaff Metropolitan Area includes most of northern Arizona and a small section of southern Utah.

The study used several criteria to rank the 179 communities, each with a population under 235,000.

Flagstaff has been ranked by the Milken Institute since 2004 and receives high ratings primarily because of growth at W.L. Gore & Associates and the good salaries that come with those jobs.

The report, released Wednesday, ranked the northern Arizona region as fourth in the nation among small cities in terms of high tech production for a five-year period.

azdailysun.com

Fall is in the air and there are plenty of places to take a drive to see Arizona’s beautiful colors.

Heather Ainardi of the Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau said the next three weeks should be great for leaf viewing. “So, if you can get up here for a weekend in October, you should be able to see the brilliant colors of all the reds, golds, yellows - all the aspens changing.”

Other places to see the leaves change in Arizona include Hannigan Meadow in eastern Arizona and the Chiricahua Mountains in Cochise County.

If you go:

For Flagstaff hotel information, call the Flagstaff Visitors Bureau at (928) 774-9541 or visit www.flagstaffarizona.org.

For information on additional Arizona leaf viewing sites, visit www.fs.fed.us or call the U.S. Forest Service at (800) 354-4595 and press 3.

Also, the October issue of Arizona Highways Magazine will have information on leaf viewing sites.

KTAR

Officers say they’ve never investigated a burglary like this. They’re looking for someone who stole bras, lots of bras. According to police, about 15-thousand dollars worth of underwear from Victoria’s Secret was taken without tipping off employees.

Flagstaff police say they’re not dealing with the average caper. Those responsible were able to haul about 350 bras out the main entrance during business hours.

Officers are not sure why the anti-theft tags didn’t activate the alarm. Police say there is no surveillance footage of the crime. The culprits attempted to haul out so many bras, police say they had to leave some behind.

Investigators say they believe the culprits may be trying to sell the bras on their own. Investigators say they’ll be monitoring online auction activity to see if anything appears to be connected to the Flagstaff heist.

KPNX

The University of Arizona will become the first state university to have a full-time director of gay and lesbian affairs.

In what is hailed by local gay-rights groups as “groundbreaking,” Cathy Busha will join the university as director of the newly created Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Affairs Office.

“This represents President (Robert) Shelton’s strong commitment to creating a safe, welcoming and diverse campus,” Busha said.

While the university has a number of organizations that support the LGBTQ community, Busha said, “all the great work has been done with volunteer time.”

….Both Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University have LGBTQ student organizations through their student centers, according to representatives from those universities, but do not have paid positions to support those groups.

Tucson Citizen

The Flagstaff police officers involved in the Sept. 10 shooting death of a mentally ill man have been cleared of any criminal charges.

Coconino County Attorney Terence C. Hance said the evidence presented to him did not indicate any basis for criminal charges in the death of Mark Steiger, according to a letter sent to Police Chief Brent Cooper Monday.

“In fact, it tells a tragic story of patience and courage on the part of the individual officers in attempting to exercise all reasonable means to bring a dangerous situation to a nonlethal ending,” Hance wrote.

In making his determination, Hance stated he reviewed interviews and reports of the police officers involved, digital recordings of the scene autopsy reports.

According to a press release from the police department, Cooper has returned all the officers involved in the shooting back to full duty.

azdailysun.com

Carl Muecke, a retired federal judge who handled many important decisions during his years based in Phoenix including desegregating Arizona schools before the U.S. Supreme Court made it federal law, died in his sleep Friday at his summer home in Flagstaff. Muecke, who had battled Alzheimer’s disease and other ailments, was 89.

“He had strong liberal convictions, like many of us who grew up during the Depression,” said longtime friend and former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. “He made some people unhappy as a judge, but he had a sense of justice that was striking.”

If Muecke’s decisions were controversial, U.S. District Judge Stephen McNamee said, it was because “a lot of the decisions that come before you make you controversial. Carl never shied away from his principled positions — whether people liked it or not.”

Los Angeles Times

The first inmate to successfully escape from the county jail since it opened in 2000 surrendered himself in the jail lobby Monday morning.

Emerson White, 27, is back in jail with an additional charge of second-degree escape, which is a Class 5 felony punishable upon conviction by up to three years in prison, according to information from the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office.

“He returned himself to custody this morning,” Gerry Blair, sheriff’s office spokesman, said Monday.

Apparently, he was taken into custody at about 10:20 a.m. by the jail lobby support staff, Blair added. White was accompanied by a few friends or family. He was quickly taken to intake, where he was rebooked back into the jail.

White escaped from a minimum security recreation yard at about 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Another inmate who witnessed the escape told detention staff. He appeared to have forced an opening in the fence that surrounds the yard. No detention officers were physically in the yard at the time of escape, but the yard is watched with surveillance cameras.

azdailysun.com

The housing party is officially over, according to the Arizona Blue Chip Economic Forecast.

Although home sales plummeted, appreciation has held the line. But second-quarter 2007 saw an 0.3 percent drop in value compared with the first three months of the year and a national increase of 0.1 percent.

The only other Western states showing a decrease were California and Nevada, according to the Blue Chip. In Arizona, Flagstaff saw the biggest drop at 0.6 percent from the first quarter. Values in the Phoenix area dropped by 0.5 percent.

Those declines, however, are minor compared with long-term appreciation. Arizona housing values have double since 2001, according to the report, and even homeowners who bought a year ago saw a 2.2 percent rise in value.

Business Journal of Phoenix

Sarah Padilla is about to make a major investment.

But Flagstaff’s prices, in this case, are almost five times more than she would pay in Phoenix. Or at least they were until Padilla began her price-shopping.

Padilla isn’t buying a car or a house.

She’s having a baby.

And because of the costs, she might go elsewhere when she’s due, although by that time the price may very well have come down in Flagstaff.

Five weeks pregnant with her second child, Padilla says her insurance won’t cover the $10,097 fees at Flagstaff Medical Center unless she has complications with her pregnancy.

That’s the price the hospital charges when patients pay out of their own pockets, as occurred with 11 deliveries last year.

That figure doesn’t include physicians’ services, which she has priced out at another $3,097.

Padilla, 23, is a stay-at-home mother of a 2-year-old and a child-care provider. Her husband is an insurance salesman. The family, known in some circles as members of the “working poor,” earns $1,000 too much to qualify for state aid, but not enough to insure pregnancy at triple the insurance rates they now pay, Padilla said.

So Padilla called around and found Yavapai Regional Medical Center in Prescott charges $3,601 for delivery and that doctors there usually charge less for their services than doctors in Flagstaff.

azdailysun.com

Antiwar T-shirts that list the names of troops killed in Iraq have angered relatives of the dead while fueling a debate over free speech.

FLAGSTAFF, ARIZ. — It took Dan Frazier a long time to figure out how to make a living.

He cared for a quadriplegic. He sold health food from the back of his bicycle. He drove a van for disabled people. Then, after years of drifting from job to job, Frazier turned to the Internet. Marrying his politics and entrepreneurial instincts, he began selling left-leaning bumper stickers.

He designed one in 2003 that listed the names of troops — about 500 then — who had been killed in the Iraq war. The phrase “Bush Lied” was superimposed over the names. As the casualty count grew, the bumper sticker became a T-shirt, and Frazier added the words “They Died.”

The venture started out as a way to pay the rent, but it landed Frazier in the middle of a fight over what is free speech versus what is exploitation of the dead.

Frazier says that he has an inherent right to use the names and that he’s not ascribing any political belief to anyone. “The shirt doesn’t say these people opposed the war. Just that they died,” he said.

Some parents say their children would not want their names used this way. When they asked Frazier to remove the names from the shirts and he refused, the families turned to their elected officials. 

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Sept. 23, 2007 04:25 PM

Two of three major routes from northern Arizona to the Valley are bottlenecked with traffic after fatal automobile accidents.

Interstate 17 near New River has a 15-mile backup southbound after a fatal accident this afternoon. The single-car accident occurred about 12:30 p.m. today.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety is working the accident and recently re-opened the freeway to northbound and southbound traffic.

Meanwhile, traffic on the eastern edge of Arizona has been bottlenecked after a fiery crash involving a tanker truck.

Northbound State Route 87 is likely to remain closed overnight while road crews determine how to repair damage from the tanker accident. Southbound SR 87 also is closed but is likely to reopen later tonight.

azcentral.com

Road construction, traffic restrictions:

• Interstate 40, Riordan to East Flag
• Country Club Drive overpass
• Highway 89/Country Club Drive
• Highway 89/Townsend-Winona Road
• U.S. Highway 160/State Route 264, in Tuba City

Prescribed burns

The Coconino National Forest is planning three burns this week. If rainfall is received over the weekend, the burns may be delayed. Scheduled burns are:

• Mint Project Area
• A-1 Project Area
• Blue Ridge Broadcast Burn

The Kaibab National Forest plans two prescribed burns. They are:

• The Beacon Project Area
• Tusayan South

For more details see, azdailysun.com

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A NASA spacecraft found seven possible cave entrances on Mars, triggering interest in hunting for other caverns that might be hiding life on the Red Planet, the US space agency said Friday.

While the possible caves discovered are too high in altitude to host life, scientists say caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet could be underground habitats or even one day become shelters for astronauts.

Images from the Mars Odyssey orbiter showed seven dark, nearly circular spots between 100 meters (328 feet) and 250 meters (820 feet) wide on the slopes of the Arsia Mons volcano, located near the planet’s highest peak.

Researchers concluded that the seven circles could be windows to underground spaces after checking their daytime and night time temperatures by using Odyssey’s infrared camera, which checks daytime.

“They are cooler than the surrounding surface in the day and warmer at night,” said Glen Cushing of the US Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Team and of Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona.

AFP

Nurses at Flagstaff Medical Center will not likely be voting on whether to unionize this month, due to new union complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Representatives for each union say the hospital management is again intimidating employees in an attempt to dissuade them from unionizing.

Two FMC vice presidents call the unions’ allegations against hospital management meritless and say this is a union attempt to delay a vote because one of the two unions, the National Nurses Organizing Committee, has not lined up enough votes to unionize.

Nurses defeated a unionization by a vote of 242 to 211 vote last June, and previously in 2003.

azdailysun.com

The author of the hugely popular book that examines what would happen to Earth if humans suddenly vanished from the planet will be speaking at 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 24, in Cline Library Assembly Hall.

Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, wrote The New York Times best-selling book, The World without Us, to demonstrate how Earth would respond if humans simply went away.

“Within two days, without pumping, New York’s subway would impassably flood,” he says. “Within twenty years, water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4-5-6 trains would corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river. In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Plugged sewers, deluged tunnels and streets reverting to rivers will conspire to waterlog foundations and destabilize their huge loads, toppling structures. Gradually the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.”

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Flagstaff, AZ – The U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fugitive Operations Team arrested Juan Carlos Ramirez in Flagstaff early this morning. Ramirez was wanted for the brutal stabbing death of his girlfriend in North Carolina. He faces a 1st Degree Murder and two Attempted Murder charges in Greensboro.

On Christmas Day 2006, Ramirez is believed to have stabbed his girlfriend and mother of their son, April Caldwell, seventeen times with a knife and then tried to stab her two roommates as they attempted to intervene. April had broken up with Ramirez weeks before, but the arrangement apparently wasn’t working for Ramirez. After April left her parent’s house, police say Ramirez followed her to an apartment she shared with two men. Ramirez asked April’s two roommates to leave so he could talk to April alone. The men and April agreed, but only for a few minutes. The men say by the time they came back, a horrible scene was unfolding. The men say Ramirez was stabbing April several times, and the enraged killer turned on them as they tried to help. Everyone ran outside the apartment, the men away from Ramirez, Ramirez after the men, and April staggering to the ground.

On July 28, 2007, America’s Most Wanted (AMW) featured Ramirez on their program and within a week of AMW airing April’s story, police were closing in on Ramirez. Cops got a tip that Ramirez was in Union City, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Manhattan. An AMW producer went along with Greensboro Police detectives and members of the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force as they hunted for Ramirez. They found his hide-out, but missed him by just a few days.

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The pilot involved in Tuesday afternoon’s plane crash near Pulliam Airport has been identified as 38-year-old Aaron Parker of Flagstaff.

Parker was taken to Flagstaff Medical Center with an injury to his lip.

No other injuries resulted from the accident, which occurred just before 5 p.m.

According to Flagstaff police, Parker exited from the single-engine plane himself. The plane was left in a crumpled heap just east of the northbound lanes of Interstate 17, between exits for the airport and Kachina Village.

The National Transportation Safety Board will continue an investigation into the crash.

The last plane crash near Flagstaff was on June 23, when a Piper PA 24-250 lost engine power and “force landed” about 27 miles east of town. That crash also resulted in only minor injuries.

azdailysun.com