By DANIEL LOVERING, Associated Press Writer

BROCKWAY, Pa. - A fire engulfed a house in rural Pennsylvania early Thursday, state police said, killing as many as 10 people and forcing one of the survivors to jump naked from the second floor.

Eight people were killed and two were missing and presumed dead, state police said. Two others escaped.

The blaze badly damaged the light blue house, making it difficult to find and remove the two people who were missing, said Trooper Bruce Morris. The eight victims who were found ranged in age from four months to 40 years.

The house’s facade was gone, leaving a view of the inside of the home, remnants of a front porch and a lopsided stove. Two children’s bicycles sat in the rubble.

Crying as she spoke, family friend Carol Paruso said three generations lived there.

“They were a tight family and they all took care of each other. That’s who they were and that’s what makes it so sad,” she said.

Bill Fustini, a mail carrier who lives nearby, said his dog woke him up at about 2:30 a.m. When he saw the smoke, he called his son, a firefighter, who told him the home had gone up in flames.

“There was a little girl living in that house and she met me every day and she was the sweetest thing,” Fustini said.

He said he believed the couple who lived there also had two adult daughters living with them, and that the father worked at a nearby glass container factory.

“They really didn’t have much,” he said.

Jaime Hynds, who lives across the street from the home, said she was awakened at about 2:30 a.m. by a naked woman shouting for help. The woman, believed to be about 19 years old, had jumped from the second floor and ran to Hynds’ home, she told The Courier-Express of DuBois.

Hynds said at least five children lived in the house.

Trooper Mark Schrecengost said fire crews arrived within minutes and the house was already ablaze. The fire was under investigating, but police said the fire did not appear suspicious.

Firefighters brought in wood beams to fortify the structure.

A minivan in the home’s driveway was partly burned. Vinyl siding on the house next door had partly melted away from the heat.

Brockway is a rural town of about 2,000 residents set among rolling hills and farmland 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The home was on Pershing Avenue, a main drag lined with several other single-family homes.

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Associated Press writer Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Pittsburgh contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that vehicle in driveway was a minivan, not an SUV)

By BEN GREENE, Associated Press Writer

BALTIMORE - A man who had argued with his estranged wife over the custody of their three children has confessed to drowning them in a hotel bathtub on the night they were to go back with their mother, police said Monday.

Mark A. Castillo will be charged after he is released from a hospital where he is being treated for self-inflicted cuts on his neck, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said at a news conference.

Police did not cite a motive.

But his wife wrote in court documents that her husband had threatened to make her suffer by killing the children. She sought a protective order Dec. 25, 2006 and asked that the court order Castillo to receive counseling.

“He has never actually hurt (the children), but did tell me that the worst thing he could do to me would be to kill the children and not me so I could live without them,” she wrote in the petition.

She also wrote that when her husband took the children for visits, he would not tell her where they were staying.

A temporary protective order was approved three days after the petition was filed, but Circuit Judge Joseph Dugan rejected a permanent order Jan. 10, 2007. In explaining his decision, Dugan wrote there was “no clear or convincing evidence that the alleged acts of abuse occurred.”

Police identified the children as Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 2.

Castillo, 41, of Rockville, and the children spent time Saturday afternoon at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, then checked into the Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor. The children were drowned, one at a time, in the tub that night, Bealefeld said.

Police said Castillo called the hotel front desk Sunday afternoon, saying he’d killed the children and was going to commit suicide. Baltimore police and firefighters were sent to their 10th-floor room and discovered the bodies, Bealefeld said.

Castillo was supposed to have returned the children to their mother in Silver Spring at 8:30 p.m. Saturday. His wife called Montgomery County police shortly after that time to say that her husband had not returned the children, Bealefeld said.

Baltimore police did not know how Montgomery County police responded, but said the cases were not connected until after the children’s bodies were found.

Bealefeld wouldn’t discuss the crime scene in detail but said police seized a laptop from the hotel room and were searching Castillo’s home.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant, Zach Dunlap says he feels “pretty good.”
Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested.

As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his recovery.

On Monday, he and his family were in New York, appearing on NBC’s “Today.”

“I feel pretty good. but it’s just hard … just ain’t got the patience,” Dunlap told NBC.

Dunlap, 21, of Frederick, said he has no recollection of the crash.

“I remember a little bit that was about an hour before the accident happened. But then about six hours before that, I remember,” he said.

Dunlap said one thing he does remember is hearing the doctors pronounce him dead.

“I’m glad I couldn’t get up and do what I wanted to do,” he said.

Asked if he would have wanted to get up and shake them and say he’s alive, Dunlap responded: “Probably would have been a broken window that went out.”

His father, Doug, said he saw the results of the brain scan.

“There was no activity at all, no blood flow at all.”

Zach’s mother, Pam, said that when she discovered he was still alive, “That was the most miraculous feeling.”

“We had gone, like I said, from the lowest possible emotion that a parent could feel to the top of the mountains again,” she said.

She said her son is doing “amazingly well,” but still has problems with his memory as his brain heals from the traumatic injury.

“It may take a year or more … before he completely recovers,” she said. “But that’s OK. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We’re just all so thankful and blessed that we have him here.”

Dunlap now has the pocketknife that was scraped across his foot, causing the first reaction.

“Just makes me thankful, makes me thankful that they didn’t give up,” he said. “Only the good die young, so I didn’t go.”

[Source: Yahoo News]

By RACHEL D’ORO, Associated Press Writer
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The Coast Guard searched through the night for a crew member missing from a fishing vessel that sank off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, killing the captain and three crew members. Forty-two crew members were rescued.

The Seattle-based Alaska Ranger started taking on water shortly before 3 a.m. Sunday after losing control of its rudder 120 miles west of Dutch Harbor, which is on Unalaska Island.

One person fell into the water from a rescue basket as it was being lifted into a rescue helicopter, Coast Guard Lt. Eric Eggan said. It was not clear if this was the missing crew member.

“It could be, but we’re not sure,” he said.

The helicopter was low on fuel and could not perform an immediate search, Eggan said. The incident is under investigation.

The 184-foot ship’s owner, the Fishing Company of Alaska, said in a statement that it did “not have sufficient information to determine why the vessel foundered.”

Seas with up to 8-foot waves and 25-knot winds were reported at the time the ship sank, said Chief Petty Officer Barry Lane. He said the Coast Guard was investigating the cause of the sinking.

Some of those on board the Alaska Ranger were taken to Dutch Harbor in the sunken vessel’s sister ship, the Alaska Warrior. The ship arrived about midnight at a private dock, where access to survivors was not allowed. The vessel took part in the rescue operation along with two Coast Guard helicopters that were used to pluck crew members from the water and from life rafts, Lane said.

At least 13 of the crew members were not in life rafts, and were picked out of the ocean along a mile stretch. They were wearing survival suits and had strobe lights on.

Other survivors were on board the Coast Guard cutter Munro, which remained at the scene to search for the missing crew member. A C-130 also remained to help search for the missing crew member, whose name was not released.

The company identified them as ship’s captain, Eric Peter Jacobsen, 65, of Lynnwood, Wash.; chief engineer Daniel Cook, hometown unknown; mate David Silveira of San Diego, and crewman Byron Carrillo, believed to be from Seattle . The company did not give the ages of Cook, Silveira or Carrillo.

“They were incredibly brave, hard working men. Our hearts are broken,” the company said in a statement.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Monday that the company owner, Karena Adler, has an address in Mercer Island, Wash., a Seattle suburb, but could not be reached for comment. The Associated Press could not reach her Monday morning because she has an unlisted number.

State environmental regulators were notified that the ship was carrying 145,000 gallons of diesel when it sank in deep seas, according to Leslie Pearson, emergency response manager for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

According to initial reports, an oil sheen covered an area of a quarter mile by a half mile, Coast Guard spokesman Ray Dwyer said. The strong winds made any cleanup effort unlikely, but those conditions would disperse a spill much more quickly than calm weather, Pearson said.

In December, an engine fire damaged another of the company’s ships, the Alaska Patriot, while it was docked near Dutch Harbor. No one was injured in the blaze.

In 2006, the Fishing Company of Alaska, the owner of a catcher-processor ship it managed and the ship’s captains were fined a combined $254,500. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Service said the company — as well as the ship’s owner, Alaska Juris Inc., and its captains — committed numerous violations, such as tampering with or destroying equipment used by industry observers and failing to provide observers a safe work area.

Federal officials said the case stemmed from a multiyear investigation that documented a range of federal violations, including keeping inaccurate information on required reports and fishing contrary to seasonal closures.

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Associated Press writer Elizabeth M. Gillespie in Seattle contributed to this report.

By PAUL J. WEBER, Associated Press Writer
DALLAS - Airlines prepared for passenger backlogs Wednesday from hundreds of flights grounded by storms that chased people from flooded homes and deluged roads in the nation’s midsection, killing at least two people in Missouri and sweeping a teen down a drainage pipe in Texas.
The National Weather Service posted flood and flash flood warnings from Texas to Ohio, with tornado watches in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Emergency officials in Mesquite, Texas, searched for a 14-year-old boy apparently swept away by floodwaters as he and a friend played in a creek. The friend was able to swim to safety, authorities said.

In northern Arkansas, rescuers searched for a man whose truck was believed to have been swept from a low-water bridge in West Fork. Authorities found only the vehicle.

Heavy rain began falling Monday and just kept coming. Forecasters said parts of Missouri could get 10 inches or more. The storms were expected to finally stop Wednesday.

Cape Girardeau County had received nearly 8 inches of rain by Tuesday afternoon, trapping some residents in their homes. About 50 roads were closed in Christian County after 7 inches of rain fell.

More than 6 inches of rain drenched areas around Dallas, including record rainfall at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where more than half of the 950 scheduled flights Tuesday were canceled.

Winds of more than 100 mph were briefly reported at the airport, which received a single-day record of 2.35 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service. The previous high of 1.52 inches was set in 1984, the weather service said.

By early Wednesday morning, the airport had opened all security checkpoint lanes in preparation for an early rush of stranded passengers. Airport officials said the backlog of flights would take most of Wednesday to unwind.

“Everybody did a great job overnight of hanging in there and trying to get some rest,” airport spokesman Ken Capps said. “The airlines will be working the lines early to try to get as many people rebooked and out of here as quickly as possible.”

Cots and blankets were given to stranded travelers overnight. The airport early Wednesday also received several hundred new passengers who were bussed from airports as far as Louisiana, after they were unable to make flights to DFW the day before.

Federal Aviation Administration officials evacuated the airport’s west tower for about 15 minutes Tuesday morning after seeing a funnel cloud. By Tuesday night, the airport was accepting about 50 arrivals and departures an hour — less than half the usual 120 flights that use the airport’s seven runways every hour, officials said.

Hundreds of people in Lancaster, south of Dallas, were advised to evacuate their homes as the Ten Mile Creek rose. By evening, the creek waters had receded. One woman was rescued from her yard and four people were rescued from their vehicles, city spokeswoman Ciciely Hickmon said.

In Arkansas, residents in parts of Baxter, Madison, and Sharp counties were evacuated because of rising floodwaters, said Tommy Jackson, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.

The Spring River was rising at a rate of 6 inches per hour Tuesday, and debris flowing in it included full-size trees. Officials said dangerous flows were occurring in Mammoth Spring and Salem, where the river was out of its banks.

To the north, Gov. Matt Blunt activated the Missouri National Guard on Tuesday as high water closed hundreds of roads.

About 300 of the 900 homes in Piedmont, Mo., were evacuated when the McKenzie Creek flowed over its banks and caused flooding 2 to 3 feet deep in the center of the town, about 125 miles south of St. Louis. Dozens of people were rescued in about 15 to 20 boat trips.

Up to 30 homes were evacuated in Winona, and some residents of Cape Girardeau were trapped in their homes, according to the State Emergency Management Agency. In Ellington, as many as 50 homes and half the businesses were evacuated, officials said.

The body of an 81-year-old man was found in the water at Ellington, said Missouri State Water Patrol Lt. Nicholas Humphrey. A 21-year-old state Department of Transportation worker was killed near Springfield when his dump truck was hit by a tractor-trailer as he helped out in a flooded area, officials said.

Scott and Marilyne Peterson and their 25-year-old son, Scott Jr., scurried out of their mobile home in Piedmont after watching the water rise 3 feet in five minutes. The family had just enough time to grab some essentials, a few clothes and the family dog.

“You didn’t have time to worry,” Scott Peterson Sr. said. “You just grab what you can and go and you’re glad the people are OK.”

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Associated Press writers Betsy Taylor in Piedmont, Mo., and Chuck Bartels in Little Rock, Ark., contributed to this report.