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The Times-News from Twin Falls, Idaho • 14

Publication:
The Times-Newsi
Location:
Twin Falls, Idaho
Issue Date:
Page:
14
Extracted Article Text (OCR)

7 7 m9 B-2 Times-News, Twin Falls, Idaho Monday, February 4, 1980 Mew rmmim Mexico fit risoe riot Gov. King says obviously there was a guard shortage UPI SANTA FE, N.M. (UPI) New Mexico Gov. Bruce King said Sunday it's clear guards at New Mexico State Penitentiary were outmanned in their battle to stop the outbreak of an inmate riot early Saturday. "How can you expect 11 or 12 guards to handle 1,300 prisoners," King asked reporters rhetorically.

While King's figures on the number of guards did not agree with figures released earlier by Warden Jerry Griffin, it was clear that the guards were vastly outnumbered. Griffin said there were 22 guards on duty the night of the takeover, which was "somehwat short of what we normally have." The governor said the incident had prompted him to meet with the state's legislative leadership about the problem of understaffing and underfundingof the prison. "They are more than willing to make more money available," King said. "This will be handled in a workmanship manner to improve the lot of the prisoners and the guards." Military troops moved into position, helicopters thumped overhead and smoke poured out of shattered cellblock windows. The scene around the outer fence of the New Mexico State Penitentiary resembled a battleground.

But the battle was being waged inside the prison, where as many as 25 inmates may have been killed and scores more injured. The prison, a drab gray two-story structure located in rolling treeless hills about 15 miles southwest of Santa Fe, bore obvious scars of the battle. Broken windows and blackened concrete could be seen from the press area on a two-lane road about a half-mile away from the main entrance to the institution. Smoke still belched from the windows of some sections of the building Sunday. The cellblocks extend as wings from the main building and the entire structure was under the control of the approximately 250 rebellious inmates.

Surrounding the prison were about 150 National Guard troops and an equal number of policemen from various agencies were poised for action. The numbers climbed steadily through the day. National Guard troops bivouacked on the grassy hills surrounding the prison's double wire fence. Individual tents, field tents and a temporary mess hall were set up for the troops. At one point, a National Guard vehicle arrived at the gates with a small artillery piece pulled behind it.

Guard troops marched through field maneuvers and changed positions outside the prison compound as they prepared for possible action. Policemen from various law enforcement agencies around the state stood in small groups at strategic positions around the the main prison compound, talking with each other as they waited. Inside the prison fences, about 600 prisoners who did not want to participate in the riot were moved to a separate facility for women or were forced to stay outdoors in a recreational yard away from the main building. The inmates who stayed outside tore down bleachers of a baseball stadium on the prison grounds and used the wood to build a bonfire. Police threw blankets over the fence to the inmates.

The inmates outside the main prison building also received food, but it was not immediately clear how it was delivered to them. Occasionally, an inmate would run screaming from the main building to the fence and ask officers for instructions on where to go for safety. The home of the warden, in a housing area outside the main prison compound, was established as a temporary command post. An injured prisoner is rushed into a Santa Fe hospital after a helicoper ride from the riot-torn prison southwest of the state capital Hospital scenario not as ghostly now even know their own names." People, some apparently relatives of inmates or hostage guards, gathered outside the hospital to watch the arrivals. On what normally is the hospital's biggest visiting day, friends and family were conspicuously absent.

Visitation was canceled. The two-day inmate takeover at the maximum security prison southeast of town had precipitated chaos. "It's been a madhouse up in the emergency room. That's why we had to call off visiting today," Ms. O'Kearney said.

"They get in the way, and we can't move patients around because there are people all over the place. We just feel it's more important to save lives than to have these visitors." The night before, a National Guardsmen M-16 slung across his shoulder patrolled the hospital entrance, checking IDs of those trying to enter. Scores of doctors and orderlies, some still wearing civilian clothes, scurried through the hallways. Volunteer aides passed out fruit, soft drinks and sandwiches. An exhausted physician, his blood-spattered surgical gloves still on his hands, munched a ham sandwich near the emergency room door.

An inmate identified as Rudy Perez arrived on a cot. His face and chest were drenched with blood. Emergency room staff prepped him for surgery. A corrections officer, Lt. Joe Anaya, arrived.

Hospital staff pronounced him in good shape although he was unconscious and being sustained by oxygen. Eleven members of the Santa Fe police force were called about 11 p.m. to quell a disturbance in ward 2-A where treated inmates were kept. An inmate in the emergency room received an injection to still his convulsion-wracked body. Nursing supervisor Madalyn Dunn nodded toward ward 2-A: "They're starting to raise hell up there," she said, trying to suppress her disgust.

SANTA FE. New Mexico (UPI) Military choppers carrying injured and drug-dazed inmates from New Mexico State Penitentiary shuttled in and out of St. Vincent's Hospital Sunday, but the aftermath of the prison riot was more like the result of a wild party. It was hardly the ghoulish scene that greeted off-duty emergency staffers Saturday night and early Sunday, who treated inmates that were beaten and mutilated by other inmates. "We just got three more -ODs'," said Sylvia O'Kearney, secretary to the administrator at the 231-bed facility.

"There are two more on the way. One is a National Guardsman kicked in the groin and one inmate who is having seizures right now." Reports from the prison indicated inmates had broken into the infirmary and a shoe manufacturing plant where they obtained glue to sniff. A shaken woman who saw them lying in the grass outside the facility sniffed. "They don't This freshman Wyoming senator is bucking traditions senators, always with courtly de-rerence, but he talked back. Don't tell me how to vote, he cautioned committee staffers accustomed to telling senators how to vote.

Simpson, 48, came here last year labeled as one of those new hard-core conservatives hell-bent on standing big government on its head. The game of politics, alas, is played with labels and codes and Simpson is stuck with his label. What a yuk. He is conservative and big government does not enamor him, but his By WARD SINCLAIR The Washington Post WASHINGTON A senator who finds renewal in Thurber and Mencken keeps Western originals by Russell and Remington on his walls and sees the Senate as something of a funny farm deserves a closer look. Actually, the word about Alan K.

Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, got around rather quickly after he showed up in the Senate last year. The guy is different, they were saying. He talked back to senior theater, no doubt, but most of it is the expression of a man working mightly to retain his sense of humor and balance in a generally humorless, unbalanced arena of egotists and poseurs. "If you don't know who you are before, you'll never find out here," he said the other day. "I'm trying to be the same person I've always been and see how it works in the U.S.

Senate." A Simpson story: He won't deliver a statement someone else prepared for him. He insists on asking his own questions at hearings. He delights in elbowing a colleague on the Senate floor who has just delivered a windy, canned statement. "I'll ask, 'What did you and they just look back and say, i don't It's link with the label pretty much ends there. He idolizes some of the liberals he's supposed abhor, cosponsor their bills and trade ribald stories with them.

Simpson turns out to be one of those refreshing breezes that occasionally gentles their way through the congressional pomp and fustain to remind that all is not lost; it hasn't even been found. Unlike those who promise great deeds, Simpson says he's not here to turn things around doesn't expect to, at least. Unlike others awed by the Senate, he says, "You have to look at it and laugh." Unlike those who profess high altruism, he says he wanted to be a senator because the title sounded nice. Well, now. Part of this is his wry personal Congress always has had a few of these free spirits, men who are serious about their work, but don't take it or themselves too seriously.

They are important because they give the place a human dimension. In the House, Reps. Andy Jacobs, John Burton, and Richard Kelly, are among that number who use wit as a rapier. Until he retired a year ago, James Abourezk, was the Senate's resident iconoclast. Al Simpson got here just in time to save the Senate from complete and terminal self-importance.

Another Simpson story: Early last year he had the audacity to propose a 10 percent across-the-board budget cut on environmental programs. Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, D-Maine, who opposed the idea, tore into him. Simpson tore right back.

Muskie prevailed, but Simpson made his point. His one vote from Wyoming counted as much as any other vote and so did his opinion. "My old neck muscles were pumping and I was scared," Simpson recalled. "I went to these hearings and I saw people I'd read about all my life. But I knew if I got awed I'd be totally Ineffective." When it was over, he encountered Muskie on an elevator.

"Simpson," Muskie said gravely, "I think you're going to do all right here. To get along in the Senate you have to be about one-half sonuvabitch and I think you are." That was Muskie's way of saying welcome to the club. Simpson loved it and they became respectful equals. Dora Maud Nebeker TWIN FALLS Dora Maud Nebeker, 88, of Twin Falls died Sunday morning at Magic Valley Memorial Hospital after a brief illness. Services will be announced by Reynolds Funeral Chapel.

Vernic Osterhout Smith MALTA Vernic Osterhout Smith, 83, a longtime Malta resident, died in her home Sunday morning of a lingering illness. Funeral services are pending and will be announced by Payne Mortuary of Burley. Northwest won't avoid mid-decade shortages nuclear Dlants on line and that facili PORTLAND. Ore. (UPI) Sterling solutions suitable for dealing with utilities meaning consumers In g)(ga((gg) Munro said that while there were "large opportunities for conservation and renewable resources" they would not enable the Pacific Northwest to escape the energy shortages threatening in the mid 1980s.

"That's when the deficits loom largest should streamflows not be a great deal better than we can safely count upon in prudent planning," the Bonneville Power administrator told the City Club of Portland. Munro said people were aware of the time required to put coal or ties even if started now would not be producing electricity for the mid-decade crunch. "But I'm not sure that everyone understands the lead time and development that must go into conservation and renewable resources, too," he said. The BPA administrator advocated passage of the Pacific Northwest regional power bill now in the House of Representatives after passing the Senate. "I am confident that it will be passed and signed into law this year, and that it will provide the mechanisms and the institutional framework we need to work out todays prooiems and tomorrow's," he said.

"It is a unique piece of legislation written with the unique u.iacler of the Pacific Northwest in mind, and meant to apply no place else." Munro said the measure deals with the "uncertainties" about future demand and supply. He said it protects local control of public utility bodies and co-ops, while continuing state regulation of investor-owned utilities. "It faces up to the political realities by not only protecting the consumers served by public bodies and co-ops, but by enabling the residential and small-farm customers of private Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon who now feel left out to receive power at the same lowest wholesale cost as consumers served by BPA's preferential customers," he said. "The bill also authorizes BPA to sign new long-term contracts with the industries we now serve." "It even gives a 10 percent edge to conservation. That Is, conservation could cost 10 percent more than any alternative and still be the first choice.

"This 10 percent edge is intended by the sponsors to assure that no marginal conservation measures go unattempted." TWIN FALLS Services for May Elizabeth Popejoy, 81, of Twin Falls, who died Thursday, will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday in White Mortuary Chapel. Friends may call at the mortuary until 9 p.m. today and until 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Burial will be in Twin Falls Cemetery. BUHL Services for Bryce Johnson, 17, of Buhl, who died Friday, will be held at 11 a.m. today at the Buhl LDS chapel. Final rites will be held in the Gem Memorial Gardens at Burley. Man charged in LDS missionary deaths MONCKS CORNER, S.C.

(UPI) -Berkeley County officials have formally charged a local man with the slaying of two Mormon missionaries whose bodies were found in the parking lot of a North Charleston shopping center. James Arthur Brown, 24, of the Carnes Crossroads section, was charged with murder in Berkeley County because officials now believe the slayings took place there. He was also charged with raping one of the women. Brown had been charged in Charleston County for the crimes because all the evidence officials had was that the bodies were found said solicitor Capers G. Barr III.

The bodies of Elizabeth King, 66, of Kaysville, Utah, and Jane Teuscher, 65, of Fish Haven, Idaho, were discovered Dec. 15 in a car parked at Northwoods Mall. The two missionaries had been working out of Moncks Corner for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Barr said Saturday further investigation has determined the Gooding; Mrs. Jack Frey of Castleford; and Kevin Toner of Burley.

Dismissed Mrs. Shane Klundt and girl, Mrs. Edwin Barker, Mrs. Thomas Switzer, Charles Stein, Ella Orr, Eugene White, and Jamie Ahrens, all of Twin Falls; Robert Givens, Mrs. Paul Funk, and Mrs.

Michael Dodge, all of Kimberly Tammy Severance of Filer; Steven Trosper, Erich Hubert, and Mrs. John Rolrertson, all of Gooding; Clifford Brown of Buhl; Mrs. Chuck Sears and girl of Jerome; Thurlow Smith of Oakley, Wallace Long of Jackpot, lva Olson and Kevin Toner, both of Burley, and Mrs. Jerry Couch and girl of Hagerman. Births A son was born to Mr.

and Mrs. Elmer Eskridge of Twin Falls. A daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs. Jack Frey of Castleford.

MINIDOKA MEMORIAL Admitted Dora Heurigo of Rupert and Hollie Jeffe of Burley. Dismissed Al Straughn and Vanita Sanchez, both of Rupert. Births Daughters were born to Mr. and Mrs. Guillermo Heurigo of Rupert and to Mr.

and Mrs. Gary Jeffe of Burley. MAGIC VALLEY MEMORIAL Admitted Mrs. Jay Jones and Mrs. Grant Jones, both of Jerome; Howard Brlggs, Mrs.

Paul Tillman, Mrs. Elmer Eskridge, Mrs. Harold Andreason and Vonita Goodson, all of Twin Falls; Danny Castor of Hansen; Samantha Murphy of Murtaugh; Lloyd Johnson of killings probably occurred In Berkeley County and the bodies were taken to Charleston. Barr said Berkeley County arrest warrants were Issued Friday for Brown, who has been held in the Charleston County Jail. No bond was set on the murder charges, and a bond of $1 million was set on the rape charge during Brown's appearance Friday before Berkeley County Magistrate Ira M.

Grady Jr. Barr said he intends to seek the death penalty..

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