Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 39

ST. PETERSBURG THE SUNCOAST i FLORIDA section THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1978 ST. PETERSBURG TIMES Panel holds early-morning meeting, cancels legal aid to poor Editorial 12-A By VIRGINIA ELLIS Pataraburg Tlmaa Staff Wrltar state money from Florida Legal Services which provides free lawyers for the poor, the retarded, migrants and others unable to afford attorneys. Two subcommittee members said later they saw no reason for the action to be scheduled at 6 a.m. other than to discourage citizen groups and the press from appearing.

"We could have done it later today," said Rep. Sam Bell, D-Daytona Beach. "We didn't spend that much time on this. There's no way to logically explain what happened." Rep. Elaine Gordon, D-Miami, drew laugh from the subcommittee when she protested the early morning hour by appearing in a gold bathrobe and black slippers.

(She later shed the bathrobe to reveal a red and white print dress underneath.) Subcommittee chairman Earl Dixon, D-Jacksonville, who scheduled the meeting, insisted that the early morning hour was necessary to meet a Friday deadline for of several successful lawsuits by the group. Sonata "You mean we were paying them to sue defeats us? Good gracious alive," gasped Rep. Jerry appointive Melvin, D-Fort Walton Beach. MN But Bell said the suits often pointed out the mistakes that were being made by the An inoraaaa department. education "What we are talking about is a variety financing of legal services, some of which may well be propoaad to have a client challenge something this de- but thare't a partment has done," Bell said.

catch Sea MEETING. 1 2 Storiaa, 4-8 completing the committee's portion of the budget. Bell and Ms. Gordon, however, insisted that the Legal Services matter, which took 20 minutes, could have been settled when the committee met at its regularly scheduled meeting later in the day. Legal Services drew the ire of some committee members after they were told that the giant Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) had been forced to change some of its procedures as a result TALLAHASSEE At a crack-of-dawn meeting that one legislator attended in her bathrobe and slippers, a House subcommittee voted Wednesday to wipe out state support for a private organization that provides legal services for the poor, Keeping themselves awake with steaming cups of coffee, a House appropriations subcommittee voted 6-3 to withdraw all it- 4," 9 lv vr rr Polnce rep caDDs crime by eDdeirDv aDairmiiinig By DAVID SMITH St.

Patartbur Tiithi Staff Writar Mattress and smashed furniture are all that remain of trailer destroyed I Hainesworth, in 'J LTl Jjfj Alachua County. I The occupants were hospitalized. rfiT department's planning division, said he is most concerned about increases in criminal activity among the elderly since 1974. In that year, according to the report, elderly persons were suspects in 241) crimes. The number jumped to 441 in 1975, then dropped to 371 in 1976 and to 346 in 1977.

"The reason we thought it was alarming was because of our experience in 1974 (compared to the figures in later years)," Smith said. "You look at the items people are stealing (and) you're seeing a very serious economic problem." Eighty-five per cent of all shopliftings committed by the elderly in the last four years involved items worth less than $10. Theft of food accounted for 44 per cent of the shopliftings, followed by thefts of clothing generally worth $10 to $25. Drugs were the third most frequently shoplifted items. The reports notes that 51 per cent of the city's elderly residents have incomes less than $5,000 per year.

Department stores were most often the victims of elderly shoplifters, with grocery stores the second most frequent. "A lot of department stores have gone to private security firms since 1974, and with private security you get more (shoplifting) arrests," Deputy Police Chief Fred Mein said. MEIN ALSO cited economic pressures as a partial explanation for the increases since 1974. "One answer is probably more education," Mein said. "A lot of people think that just because they're old, they can steal and get away with it.

If there were more education to tell people what will happen to them if they shoplift, it would go down." See CRIME. 12-B Elderly St. Petersburg residents have been turning up in "alarming" numbers as suspected criminals, a Police Department report concludes, and officials say the residents are stealing what they can't afford to buy. Although the number of elderly crime suspects dropped last year for the second year in a row, it was still 42 per cent higher than the number reported in 1974, tentative figures in the report show. Meanwhile, elderly residents were victims in 16 per cent of all major crimes reported in the last four years, although the elderly compose more than a third of the city's population.

SHOPLIFTING of small items -most often food valued at less than $10 accounts for most of the crime committed by older residents, the report states. The report, prepared by the police department's Crime Analysis Unit, covers crimes involving persons 60 and older from 1974 to 1977. The findings are still being reviewed, and top police department officials have not yet read the report. Elderly persons still commit relatively few crimes in St. Petersburg they were blamed in only 346 of the more than 15,000 crimes reported last year.

But the report calls "alarming" the 1,401 crimes committed by elderly persons in the last four years. More than half of those offenses consisted of shoplifting, while simple assault was the second most frequent crime for elderly offenders. RICK SMITH, who supervised preparation of the report as head of the police Twistteirs being death, damage suffered back injuries. At the town of LaCrosse, north of Gainesville, five or six homes were destroyed and 20 to 25 were damaged by three tornadoes, said Police Chief Jim Willis. Six persons received cuts and bruises, he said.

Telephone lines and trees were uprooted in a number of communities, and several towns in Alachua and Marion counties had flooded streets as a result of the violent storm. Skies were clear over the Atlantic when the Eastern 727 jet was hit by three sharp jolts at feet. "People were flying all around," said Richard Blum, 41, of Burlington, Vt. "It was quite a jolt." See WEATHER. 12-B Compiled from naff and wka raporti A sudden, fast-moving storm whipped tornadoes, thunderstorms and hail across North and Central Florida Wednesday, killing one man by lightning, injuring more than 20 others and causing widespread property damage.

In addition, 1 1 passengers were injured when an Eastern Airlines flight from New York to Miami ran into turbulence over the Atlantic east of Melbourne. For the most part, the storm bypassed St. Petersburg but dropped more than an inch of rain on western Pasco County and the North Sun-coast. Construction worker Thomas E. Chew, 27, of Fort McCoy, was killed when lightning hit a tree and apparently ran along the roots to an aluminum ladder he was standing on.

The mishap occurred at a construction site in Silver Springs Shores, southeast of Ocala. About 15 persons were injured when three tornadoes touched ground in the Ocala area, Marion County Sheriff Dan Moreland estimated. Deputies reported 21 trailers destroyed at the Sunlight Mobile Homes Sales lot near Belle-view, 10 miles south of Ocala. Fred Shull, who was driving toward Belle-view when the storm struck, said, "I could see the stuff hitting the trees. It was moving so damn hard you couldn't tell what was going on until you got right on it." His wife Janet, a bookkeeper at the Sunlight trailer lot, was pinned under the wreckage and 2 bodies, tied, shot, found near Dunedin appeared to have been dead for two or three days and that the bodies were marked from "tidal action or crab bites." Shinner said the bodies were wrapped several times with a rope and entwined with an object that Shinner would not identify.

"I don't think the clothes would have washed off the bodies," said Shinner. "It looks like someone tried to sink the bodies." The bodies may have been tied to an outboard motor. A motor, an anchor, fishing poles and empty Schlitz beer cans were among the items found at the scene and brought to shore with the bodies. Shinner said he would not know the exact cause of death until an autopsy is performed today. He said he could not tell whether the man or the woman had been beaten or whether either was sexually assaulted.

Sea BODIES. 12-B By MARCIA A. SLACUM and VICTORIA POPE St. Patartoutg Timai Staff Wiitara DUNEDIN The nude and decomposing bodies of a man and a woman were found Wednesday morning tied to an object near a spoil bank in the Intracoastal Waterway about 1 ''2 miles north of the Dunedin Causeway bridge. The Pinellas County Sheriffs Department and the U.S.

Coast Guard would not identify the victims but a man who discovered the bodies has told investigators he believes they are Fred Douberley and Lou Holmes, friends of his from Lutz who have been missing since Sunday. The man was shot twice, and the woman was shot once with what is believed to have been a small-caliber handgun, Pinellas County Medical Examiner John Shinner said. THE SHERIFF'S office is investigating the deaths as murders but would not comment on possible motives. Shinner said the man and the woman, in their late 40s or early 50s, Bodies lie on sand near bow of boat at lower left. St Pataraburg Tlmaa STEPHANIE JAMES Holocaust TiniSa DISSS! Phone-shock suit settled for $157,500 By JANICE MARTIN St.

PataraburgJjmatStaff Writar Melby enters House race St. Petersburg weeks before he was assigned to feed and care for the survivors. Through the main gate of the camp and past the guard house and the "human cord wood" stacks of bodies, Birch found himself on the sidewalk of the crematory. The sidewalk was equipped with a trap door and opened onto a basement death chamber. "If they didn't use the trap door, they would march them down," he said.

In the basement, 18 sturdy hooks protruded Former U.S. major recalls the odor of death at real Buchenwald 17 By PATRICK TYLER Sr Pataf aburg Tinwa Staff Wrjtar optometrist Robert E. Melby, a Republican, announced his candidacy Wednesday for the State House of Representatives seat held by Don Poindexter. Story. from the walls about seven feet off the floor and were spaced evenly.

"When they got them down there, they threw a rope around their neck and hung them on a hook." Those who didn't die quickly were clubbed to death, Birch said. "Buchenwald was actually considered the best concentration camp 57 Vz -ton marijuana seizure sets record The seizure of a marijuana ship off Stuart two days ago has turned out to be the biggest pot haul on record at 57 V4 tons, authorities said Wednesday. Coast Guard officers had boarded the 100-foot freighter Mocrezuma Sunday, but it wasn't until the pot was unloaded and weighed at the Port of Palm Beach that authorities knew the haul was so large. It broke the 1977 record confiscation of 54 tons taken from the 1 10-foot freighter Night Train. The Moctezuma.

of Mexican registry, was boarded about 80 miles east of Stuart in Bahamian waters after federal agents made a marijuana buy on the high seas, authorities said. Twelve Latin Americans were charged with conspiracy to smuggle marijuana into the United States. A St. Petersburg woman, who sued the phone company and a large apartment complex because of a severe electric shock she received from a pay phone three years ago, settled for $157,500 Wednesday before any evidence in the complex case was produced. Arnold Levine, the Tampa attorney who represented Donna Lynn Johnson, said General Telephone Co.

was the major contributor to the settlement, and that the apartment owners, South Colonnades contributed the second largest share. He declined to say precisely how much each agreed to pay. In opening remarks to the jury, Levine said Ms. Johnson had been hired by South Colonnades to work as a social director on weekends in addition to her fulltime outside job as a beautician. Her pay, he said, was to be a rent-free apartment that normally rented for more than $200 a month.

She had been living there for only 10 days, he said, when she went to use a pay telephone on the premises. As she was talking, he said, she was seized by a tremendous See SHOCK. 12-B Thirty-three years ago, then-Maj. William G. Birch was still 10 miles away from the German concentration camp Buchenwald when "the odor of death" told him what he would find there.

That was 1945. But Wednesday, the 68-year-old retired obstetrician sat on a back-room couch in his Largo mobile home and recounted his six-week assignment to Buchenwald as the Army physician in charge of cheating death for the 40,000 prisoners abandoned by the Nazis. Birch's encounters with death-camp typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis, which toppled Buchen-wald's emaciated survivors at the rate of more than 100 a day, were wrenched from the past this week by the television epic Holocaust, In the TV "docu-drama," Buchenwald was the camp where young Karl Weiss was initially imprisoned. He was one of two sons of the Jewish family on which the story centers. With a few pictures on the footstool in front of him, the white-haired Birch relived his tour of the liberated Buchenwald, a tour he first took two 7-B.

City Council meets today A new salary offer for St. Petersburg firefighters will be made today when the St. Petersburg City Council meets in a regular meeting. In addition, the council will vote on whether to spend $323,000 on a new, automatic garbage system. The meeting is at 9 a.m.

in the second floor council chambers at City Hall, 175 Fifth St. N. See story. City Plus section. in Germany, Birch said.

WILLIAM BIRCH bLTtC starved them. They hung them, but they didn't use gas." Bodies were loaded onto what Birch described as a "dumbwaiter" and hoisted to the crematory floor above, where three ovens reduced the murderous work to ashes. See HOLOCAUST. 12-B.