Longview Daily News from Longview, Washington • 3

mm UN Saturday, May 23, 1987 The Daily News A3 Low-income folks to own homes Jurv can reach verdict for third cocaine suspect By Kathleen Reinholdt The Daily News Several Longview families who can't afford to buy homes will soon own homes anyway. The Longview Housing Authority received $100,000 this week from the federal government's Homesteader program, according to Housing Authority director Steve Citron. Low-income families will move into Longview homes that are now owned by the federal government because of foreclosures. If they restore the homes properly and live in them for five vears. they will become the owners.

The federal funds received this week will be used for the repairs. Most of the homes, valued at less than $20,000, are in the Columbia Valley Gardens, Highlands or Broadway neighborhoods. As many as five or six families will be chosen to receive the money provided by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Citron said the families must meet strict eligibility requirements. They must meet low-income guidelines, own no land, live in substandard housing, have no prospect of becoming homeowners through usual means and meet several other requirements.

The Housing Authority has appointed several local people to serve on a committee to screen the applicants. After choosing which families will receive homesteading funds, the Housing Authority will maintain a waiting list of other families that meet the eligibility requirements. Starting Tuesday, applications can be picked up at the Longview Housing Authority office at 1312 Hemlock Street, Suite 21. Maverick macaw frolics on freeway A federal prosecutor and drug agents will meet next week to decide whether a Californian should face trial again on cocaine distribution charges, one of the agents said Friday. Mike Jewell, a Longview police detective, said a U.S.

District Court jury in Tacoma deadlocked on Wednesday over whether to convict Scott T. Hann of Santa Rosa, of 43 counts of narcotics trafficking. The jury earlier had convicted two other Californians indicted along with Hann 51-year-old David Smith of Palm Springs and Matt Koalkin, 28, of San Francisco. Judge Jack Tanner had set a new trial date of July 27 for Hann, but he allowed Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Diskin and Jewell to interview jurors so they could evaluate whether to prosecute again.

Jewell said jurors changed their minds several times during deliberations before deadlocking, with five members each voting for acquittal and conviction, and two remaining undecided. Hann, Smith and Koalkin were ac cused of running one of the largest cocaine-distribution rings on the West Coast. Some of the cocaine was sold to Donald Sowell Jr. and Richard Stanley of Longview, both of whom are serving prison terms. Jewell is a member of the federal-state-local task force that has investigated cocaine distribution in Cowlitz County and the West Coast.

The investigation had resulted in 34 convictions before the most recent trial. Another person indicted in the investigation pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court, Jewell said. Katherine Gail Davenport of British Columbia admitted to two counts of illegally transporting $5,000 across the Canadian border to purchase cocaine from Sowell at motels at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Tumwater. Davenport had fought extradition from Canada and only recently lost her last appeal before being taken to Tacoma.

Jewell said she will be sentenced July 10. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison or a $500,000 fine. ARCO searches for gas under wildlife refuge lower Columbia region. The company had wanted to run tests using explosive charges along two lines on 268 acres near the middle of the refuge. The company has leased the subsurface mineral rights from the Washington Department of Natural Resources.

But Hidy said the company agreed to run tests on only one line and to change the location so ARCO wouldn't have tb cut through brush. The company also agreed not to do the testing in June or July, when newborn fawns would have been affected. In conducting seismic tests, explosive charges are placed in 25-foot-deep holes every 110 feet along lines. When the charges are detonated, echos in the earth are monitored by equipment. Should natural gas be discovered in enough quantity to warrant drilling, Greenstein said ARCO would have to comply with environmental restrictions imposed by the federal agency.

The ARCO Oil and Gas Co. Friday completed taking seismic readings on the Columbian White Tailed Deer National Wildlife Refuge near Cathlamet but won't know for months whether natural gas is beneath the surface, a company spokesman said. Al Greenstein, ARCO's manager of media relations in Los Angeles, said the brief series of seismic tests this week is part of a program to find out how far north the Mist gas fields in Columbia County extend. The company also has been doing some seismic testing in the hills of Wahkiakum County. Greenstein said it would take about three months before the company decides whether data from the tests indicate natural gas exists or whether further data may be needed.

The method of testing was a compromise from the company's original plans, according to Jim Hidy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's complex director for three refuges in the i XiO Aw BELLEVUE, Wash. (AP) Commuters get a rude awakening when the "freeway parrot" strafes cars on Interstate 405 in the suburbs east of Seattle. For nearly five months, motorists have muttered about the mysterious marauder that roosts in trees near Totem Lake, swoops in front of windshields in a flash of royal blue and lemon yellow, or flies parallel to cars, peeking in the windows. Turns out the mischevious fowl with the four-foot wingspan is a maverick macaw named Max, who lives with Wayne Irelan.

A self-employed construction equipment mechanic, Irelan has owned Max for lt years, preferring the bird's company to that of two former wives. When Max arrived, he was a terror, Irelan says. He squawked and fought. His two-inch beak, capable of 2,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, bit easily through Irelan's asbestos glove. But with patience, a bond grew between the two.

Now Max's $500 macaw cage stands empty. The pair share coffee in the morning and shower together twice a week. Max sits on Wayne's shoulder to read and watch TV. Max chews through ax handles instead of fingers. He sharpens his beak on the threaded ends of three-eighths-inch bolts that Irelan provides.

The bird's beak has ruined a coffee table, a dining room table and numerous chairs. He chews the plastic off baseball caps at the rate of four a week, and has destroyed the sun visor in Irelan's truck. "You can't blame him. He's a perpetual mun-cher," Irelan says. Max is familiar to area residents, as he rides Irelan's shoulder into banks, hardware stores and auto parts shops.

Bank tellers hand a dog biscuit to Max and offer a few more for Irelan's "house horse," a great Dane named Sir Bluekur. Dog and bird coexist with "Bozo, the braindamaged squirrel," a rodent Irelan nursed back to health after finding it dazed on the street in front of his house. The three are his family. "I feel so rejuvenated and refreshed after communicating with the animals," he says. "They're not deceiving.

They don't mean to hurt you. They don't ask for much." It's Max who steals Irelan's sunglasses, nuzzles his cheek or hangs upside-down to cheer him up when he's blue. "I've had canaries. They're birds," he says. "Max is like people." Max escaped from the house last November.

For 10 frantic days, Irelan dashed through the neighborhood, responding to one siting after another before the bird returned on its own. After Max escaped again in December, Ireland decided to let him roam at will. The 3-year-old Central America macaw could live to be 85 and outlast him, the 42-year-old Irelan reasoned. So Max spends nice days flying around the neighborhood, eating pine-cone buds or adding to the legend of the freeway parrot. "He likes rush hour, because the traffic is slower then," Irelan says.

Every night, unless he's hiding from rain, Max comes home. Irelan worries about his parrot getting shot. He once caught a teen-ager who aimed a pellet gun at Max until being warned "exactly which parts I'd rip off and stuff where." But Irelan says he's not worried about the Welding spark sets off fire in Norpac building A spark from a welder's torch started a fire in a bag house at the Norpac plant in Longview this morning a little before 10. It took fire crews from Weyerhaeuser and the Longview Fire Department about 20 minutes to put out the blaze. The Weyerhaeuser Co.

is part owner of the plant. Dick Evans, head of security for Weyerhaeuser, said workers were welding a piece of equipment when a spark fell into the sawdust stored in the bag house. The bag houses act as a vacuum system to collect sawdust from the sanding machine at Norpac. Evans said there were no injuries in the blaze. He said the damage was confined to equipment in the one bag house, which was blackened on the outside by the fire.

The inside of the bag house was gutted by the fire, said Lt." Tom Friedlein, who led a crew Of four men with one engine from the Longview Fire Department. He said an internal duct system that pumps water into the bag houses in case of fire was already turned on by time the Longview crew arrived. Evans said that under an agreement with Weyerhaeuser the Longview Fire Department assists the company when needed. He said there is no cost estimate yet on the damage. Associated Press photo Wayne Irelan's pet macaw likes to strafe cars on Interstate 405 near Seattle $2,300 bird getting captured.

ireian says he should get a commission from Would-be captors have climbed trees and wat- the pet store, "because so many people buy food ched Max hover just out of reach, or tried to entice Max from a tree, without success to lure him with seeds. "But they'll never catch him Oregon Senate OKs bill on rescue devices Story of Kyra's amnesia to be told on TV show But the majority Democrats defeated that effort after arguing that it would set a bad precedent to give blanket immunity to any maker of a product that could turn out to be seriously defective. The Senate then voted 28-1 to send the bill to the House for consideration. The Senate vote upset a representative of the Mountain Signal Rescue Fund, which has raised money for an electronic search program at Mount Hood. "I'm very dismayed about what happened today," said Scott Russell, co-chairman of the group.

"Hopefully, the House will amend the bill allow the equipment to be available." failed to work because of gross negligence or sabotage. Giles Thompson, 17, and Brinton Clark, 16, two survivors of the 1986 Mount Hood tragedy involving a climbing party from the Oregon Episcopal School, attended a hearing on the bill several weeks ago to show their support. Sen. Jim Simmons, R-Tigard, said the amended bill wouldn't satisfy an Arizona company that makes a homing device that a mountaineering group wants to use in a program for climbers at Mount Hood. Simmons and other Senate Republicans tried unsuccessfully to have the bill shipped to a Senate committee so it could be rewritten.

SALEM (AP) The Oregon Senate has approved a bill intended to make homing devices available to climbers in the wake of the 1986 Mount Hood climbing accident that claimed nine lives. The measure cleared the Senate Friday despite objections by Republicans who said the bill was changed in a Senate committee in such a way as to blunt its intended effect. The original bill would have provided immunity from lawsuits to makers of signal devices that could be used to help rescuers locate mountain climbers who become lost or stranded. But SB915 was changed in the Judiciary Committee so that the maker of the homing devices could be held liable if it could be shown the device no memory of her family, her friends or the first 18 years of her life. The show will explore various theories about what might have happened to Kyra, who showed up in the Cowlitz County Hall of Justice parking lot Sept.

8 not knowing who she was. A production crew came to Longview in February to film Kyra at St. John's Hospital, the Hall of Justice and the Longview post office. The unsolved mystery of a Longview teen-ager's rare form of amnesia will be featured on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries at 10 p.m. Monday on cable channels 5 and 8.

A story about Kyra Cook, who suffered total episodic amnesia in a mysterious incident Sept. 8, will be one of five segments in the show, hosted by actor Karl Maiden. Total episodic amnesia means Cook retains academic skills but has Speakers describe how system strives to protect abuse victims By Kathleen Reinholdt The Diily Newt A court that decides to end a parent-child relationship commits in effect a crime equal to murder, a Cowlitz County Juvenile Court worker said Friday. The family unit, which the court sees as sacred, is killed when parental rights are terminated, Mary Johnson Johnsnn was one of three seminar speakers Friday who reasonable doubt that the parent is guilty of acts that make it unsafe for the child to remain in the parent's care. Short of terminating parental rights, Johnson said, the law might place a child in foster care, or the family might remain under strict supervision of the court and Child Protective Services, a state agency.

Children who are physically battered are immediately removed from their homes by police or child-protection workers, Johnson said. In other cases, such as when a child appears to be undernourished or unclean, agencies quickly begin an investigation but may not immediately remove the child from the home. The type and extent of the abuse determines the extent to which the courts will intervene in private family matters, Johnson said. Any intrusion by the courts into people's lives and families can be a complicated process, Johnson said. Johnson reminded her audience that people who suspect a child is being abused are responsible only for health professionals to commit people to hospitals, even against their will.

People who are acutely suicidal, psychotic or gravely mentally disabled to the extent they can't take care of themselves can be placed in the psychiatric ward at St. John's Hospital, said Deputy Prosecutor David Koss. But, he said, "The courts and Legislature are very protective of the rights of the patient. Someone involuntarily committed to the hospital is guaranteed a hearing within 72 hours to determine whether further hospitalization is necessary or whether less-restrictive measures such as referral to outpatient treatment and supervision would be appropriate. If hospitalization is determined to be necessary, a judge may decide to order up to a 14-day stay.

But the patient or his doctor may petition for a new hearing during that time, Koss said. If a patient needs hospitalization beyond the 14-day period, Koss said, the court orders a transfer to Western State Hospital. reporting their suspicions not proving them "That'll come out later," if the case goes to court, she said. Kathryn Barnhouse, a Longview city attorney, told people attending a seminar on domestic violence intervention that police are required by law to arrest anybody they think may have battered a family member. Changes in state law within the past few years have made it possible for police to arrest batterers even though police haven't witnessed the violence, she said.

Officers must take special care, when they respond to domestic violence calls, to apprise victims of their rights to get protection orders, no-contact orders, shelter care and child-custody orders, Barnhouse said. Divorce actions are completely separate from domestic-violence cases and have no bearing on whether protection, no-contact or custody orders will be issued, she said. In addition to laws prohibiting child abuse and domestic violence, there are laws that enable mental explained how the legal system removes children from troubled homes, keeps abusers away from their victims and hospitalizes people who are a danger to themselves or others. The seminars, at the Hall of Justice, were part of an inform al training program for people working in the legal system. Each speaker said the law's intent is to serve, not punish, those who are victims of crime or who are ill.

In order for such measures as drastic as severing parental rights, Johnson said, it must be proved beyond.