Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 32

1 SOODFELLOWS IQTTERY 2 Holidays 3 CRIME 4 CBITUARIES 8 1 SECTION INCLUDING REPORTS FROM AROUND THE STATE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2000 1 44 -v ''t iri Warden fired for failed security Westmoreland prison placed under sheriff By Ernie Hoffman Post-Gazette Staff Writer Westmoreland County Prison Warden Kurt Scalzott was fired yesterday, just a little more than 24 hours after the release of a state grand jury report detailing gaping security lapses at the institution where a convicted drug-ring boss had so much control of the operation that the inmate was referred to as the "little warden." The county prison board, after a 2 'A-hour executive session, voted unanimously to put Scalzott on administrative leave with pay until April 30, when his job will be terminated. The board named first-term Sheriff Chris Scherer to head the prison on an interim basis with the aid of Deputy Warden Bill Whirlow, who agreed to help Scherer until a new warden or prison-management company is hired. Scherer, a member of the prison board, voted to fire Scalzott, but abstained from voting on his own appointment as interim warden. The board also ordered its attorney, Tom Pellis, to seek transcripts from the Harrisburg grand jury investigation in order to look into possible disciplinary action against other prison employees who were unnamed in the report. County Commissioner Tom Cera-so, prison board chairman, said the moves were necessary to restore public confidence in the prison, which has been under a cloud of mistrust since June 22.

State police raided it that night and arrested seven people, including inmate Ronald Whethers and guard Anthony Shawley, for running a drug ring from the 440-bed facility. That sparked a grand jury investigation, which found that drugs and other contraband were readily available at the prison because of a SEE PRISON, PAGE B-2 Geraldine Prysock watches her daughter, Elementary School in Lawrenceville. The Martha RialPost-Gazette fourth-grader Janisha Prysock, watch the annual Christmas show yesterday at McCleary Pittsburgh school board voted Wednesday night to close McCleary in 2002. 1 63 Jl loss of schools; educators look ahead Families mourn By Eleanor Chute Post-Gazette Education Writer Christie Taylor of Lawrenceville attended McCleary Elementary School as a child. Her daughter is a first-grader there, and Taylor hoped her baby, due in February, also would one day walk the halls of the small neighborhood school.

But Wednesday night's school board vote to close the school in the fall of 2002 dashed those hopes. Instead, the 156 McCleary pupils will be assigned to a new elementary school at Ar FIRST LIGHT DAN MAJORS "he folks in lab coats can roll out all the biological evi-' dence of a thousand years of science, they still won't be able to convince me that there isn't a little bit of a miracle involved in every birth that takes place on this planet of ours. 1 know what the data looks like. The laws of probability and outcome and nature and all. I still say it's a wonder, and I marvel at it.

One month ago today, I was at Magee-Womens Hospital in Oakland, waiting in one of their visitors' rooms while the odds were once again defied. In one of the more special nights of my life, Ann, a coworker of mine, and Jen, one of my dearest friends, became mothers on the very same day. Since then, I've spoken with each woman about her child and the extraordinary blend of blessings and responsibilities involved in their new lives. Ann hopes that her daughter has a sense of humor, which makes all the sense in the world. If she's anything like her mother, she will be a bright light in any gathering, sparking conversation and amusement.

(Although I'm not sure whether her daughter should have the same room-piercing laugh.) Jen, looking ahead, wants her child to have manners, a priority that I found to be unique and refreshing. And, knowing Jen as I do, her daughter will always be a polite and pleasant presence, welcomed wherever she goes. Jen also hopes that her daughter will have a life filled with joy. It sounds so simple and natural. But it is not a wish to be taken for granted.

Like Ann's wish for her little girl: A life filled with love and family. Fortunately, her child couldn't be off to a better start. My personal wish is that little Charlotte will grow up in a world of compassion and caring. And that she'll find that the riddles of the universe aren't really that complicated at all if you approach them open-minded and open-hearted. Today, as the extended Christmas weekend begins, it's a wish I share with everyone.

Always. You can tell it to Santa or tell it to the Marines Another one of those miracles is how, no matter how bad things look, people step up at this time of year. The Toys for Tots program is a case in point. Running short of toys for needy children, the United States Marine Corps is moving in. Page B-3 Gliding along with the song of a wintry fairy land It's been years since we had a white Christmas.

Five years, in fact. What are our chances of pulling it off this year? Staff writer Jonathan D. Silver has the story straight from the National Weather Service. Page B-3 0 Christmas tree how faithful are thy branches? Profits remain evergreen as Pennsylvania's Christmas tree growers have one of their best crops in years. Page B-6 Not everyone wants a nose like a cherry Now that you've finished your shopping for the holiday season, it's time to address that other painful season flu season.

The Visiting Nurse Foundation is ready for its next wave of vaccination clinics. Staff writer Virginia Linn provides the times and locations you need to know. Page B-5 City sidewalks, not-busy sidewalks On Christmas Day, all city, county, state and federal offices will be closed, along with banks and liquor stores. Garbage pickup will be delayed by a day. Port Authority Transit will operate on a holiday schedule.

Post Your Problems Tangled up in red tape? Our guy can i reiu vuu (JUL i 'iL! through it. senal Middle School, more than a mile away. Years ago, a wing of Arsenal included an elementary school. "I'm devastated," said Taylor. McCleary is one of 11 schools, as well as the Ridge Avenue building, that will be closed next year or in 2002 as a cost-cutting move.

The board also raised property taxes by 20 percent to help eliminate a $36.5 million deficit. After weeks of debate and revisions in school-closing proposals, families and schools now face the reality of those decisions. ceives government approval. The announcement was welcomed by roughly 5,000 mechanics and related maintenance support personnel who feared they might lose their jobs if United abandoned US Airways' plans to build a new facility at the airport. "This is terrific news for thousands of hard-working men and women in the Pittsburgh region who, for months now, have worked with a cloud hanging over their Yesterday, school leaders were trying to focus on the business at hand: educating the children.

"We have to give these kids the best we have to offer them now," said Valerie Harris, principal of Gladstone Middle School, which will close next fall. Gladstone has 303 pupils. After announcements on the intercom yesterday, Harris said she told the students, "It was going to be business as usual. I have the same high expectations. We SEE SCHOOLS, PAGE B-12 heads," said Gov.

Tom Ridge, who helped broker the deal. The expanded maintenance facilities, which will consist of two new hangars with four aircraft maintenance bays, are expected to cost about $130 million. In addition, United plans to refurbish four existing US Airways maintenance hangars at a cost of $30 million. United will provide $100 million toward the project, while Pennsylvania will kick United agrees to expand airport maintenance facilities Why can't evil take a holiday? to come the idea tossing Alex from a second-floor window into the morning she ex By Frank Reeves and Mark Belko Post-Gazette Staff Writers United Airlines said yesterday it has reached an agreement with state and Allegheny County officials on a $160 million plan to expand and overhaul maintenance facilities at Pittsburgh International Airport. However, United said it would only go through with the project if its proposed $11.6 billion acquisition of US-Airways re Tony Norman 7, vil has a way of making it-f V7 self known, even in the shadow of Christmas.

kJ2 Two days ago, the photograph of a mother sobbing in the arms of her baby's father ran on the front page of this newspaper. Dawn Mraz of Youngstown, Ohio, her anguished face cupped in the arms of Joshua Zalovcik, is inconsolable in the photo as any mother would be after the horror of previous days. Zalovcik's left hand strokes her hair, his lips close to her right ear, but there are no words he could whisper that could stem the flow of the devastated mother's tears. Their 3-month-old son, Alex Zalovcik, is dead, killed by Jackie Colon, a 14-vear-old neighbor girl and family friend. With a few days left until Christmas, people all over the region are asking how an adolescent girl could usher such terrible darkness into the world.

Just how deep into her own abyss did Jackie Colon have to reach up with of Zalovcik frigid air? Had hausted the knife ground, the Did from sense thinking bus in our age, trouble question in $35 million and the Airport Authority of Allegheny County will come up with $25 million. Much of the state's share will come from economic redevelopment assistance money similar to the tax dollars used to help pay for Pittsburgh's two new sports stadiums. Another $10 million will come from a rollback of the 7 percent airline catering tax, SEE UNITED, PAGE B-2 when Emperor Constantine bap-' tized Saturnalia, the winter solstice that enshrined Roman decadence, and made it the anchor of the Christian calendar. Even the Christmas tree, the symbol of holiday jubilation, is a sly update of the totems once used by fertility cults throughout Europe. But despite the filters we've assembled to shield us from the legacy of our most cherished holiday, the blood always manages to seep through.

We put on rose-colored glasses so we cati't see Santa's blood-splattered suit, but we can't superimpose peace and happiness on the world, even for a holiday. Is 14-year-old Jackie Colon evil? Was Herod? Whatever the answer is, we can only be sure of one thing: No matter now much it depresses us, the evil that men' do is as much a part of Christmas story as the cry of a baby. Tony Norman's e-mail address is: byproduct of it. Michelle Colon tried to have her daughter placed in residential treatment facilities, but to no avail. Jackie also went untreated by health agencies that could have helped defuse her murderous impulses.

For her conscientiousness in the face of her daughter's strange behavior, Michelle Colon was given a prescription for Ritalin and a pat on the back. Perhaps the first act of evil, intentional or not, was telling the mother of a child who would later kill the infant son of her friend that she was out of luck and that the system couldn't help her. Now that Jackie Colon has done something unspeakable, she'll finally get the kind of psychiatric attention that only money or a murder rap can buy. And if she can free herself of her obsession with the sitcom "Full House" and emerge from her fog with some semblance of a conscience, her self-oathing over what she's done will begin. Her life is over.

But these are hardly the thoughts we want to dwell on so close to Christmas, so we turn to our favorite diversions: Madonna's wedding, raffles to blow up Three Rivers Stadium, Bush Cabinet appointments, whatever takes our eyes from the image of a murdered child in the snow. Why can't Christmas be an evil-free zone, we ask as we avert our gaze. We've trained our eyes to skip lightly over the chapter of Matthew where Herod's willing executioners slaughter every young boy and infant in Palestine in a futile search for the Christ child. The Slaughter of the Innocents in that account of Jesus' birth has never fit with our sentimentalized notion of Christmas. Narratives of alternating light and darkness terrify us, so we depend on the metaphysicians of Madison Avenue to sanitize and drain the blood from the holiday.

This process began in antiquity her capacity for evil when she silenced baby's crying with multiple attacks as he lay on the or was she just scratching surface? Jackie Colon walk away the murder scene with a of psychic relief, the demonic voices in her head temporarily assuaged, or was she of more mundane matters when she boarded the school that morning? However madness is defined heavily psychoanalyzed Jackie Colon will have no filling the bill. The bigger is whether evil is an integral part of madness, or just a EyVlAIL: fl PHONE: 412-263-1601 S3 WEB: WWW.P0ST-GAZETTE.COMREGI0NSTATE 1.