GA News Messenger, Friday, April 18, 1997 Texas Authorities find teacher's body in caliche pit Four teens charged in death of Midland teacher 'I 1 MIDLAND, Texas (AP) Four Midland teens remained jailed Thursday and faced capital murder charges after the stabbing death of a local schoolteacher, whose body was discovered in a caliche pit outside of town. One of the suspects lived next door to Helen R. Johnson, 53, who was stabbed several times at her home during an apparent robbery, police spokesman Doug Crabtree The three 17-year-olds and one 16-year-old initially were arrested early Wednesday morning for possession of alcohol in what turned out to be Ms. Johnson's car, police said. A sheriffs deputy reported finding women's jewelry in the vehicle.
Arrested were Frederick Ernest Keck, James Garibay and Fernando Lujan, all 17, and a 16-year-old male. The three adults were being held in lieu of $125,000 bond after their arraignment on Wednesday. Keck was a neighbor of Ms. Johnson's, and the Midland Reporter-Telegram reported that police consider him the main suspect. All four have gang ties, police said.
The suspects disclosed where the woman's fully clothed body was buried, police said. Their informa? tion also led to a knife that police think may have been used to kill the fourth-grade teacher. A search of Ms. Johnson's house later Wednesday turned up blood in "several different areas," police spokeswoman Tina Sanders said. Ms.
Johnson had lived alone at her central Midland duplex unit since 1989, neighbors said. There was no sign of forced entry at her home and no blood in the vehicle or on the suspects, according to the police report. Ms. Johnson once taught in the Midland school district before switching over to Dowling Elementary School in nearby Odessa. Tudicial selection! proposal may die AUSTIN (AP) Legislation seeking to change the way appellate judges are selected in Texas may be dead after minority lawmakers -on Thursday refused to support the proposal and the measure's sponsor rejected a compromise.
At issue is a proposed constitutional amendment to set up a system under which appeals court judges would be appointed, then subject to election to keep their seats. Currently, appellate judges are elected. Minority lawmakers oppose the measure, sponsored by Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, because they say it does not address ethnic and. racial disparities in the judiciary.
Ninety percent of the state's appellate judges are white, while 88' percent of the district court judges are white. At a news conference, black and Hispanic legislators repeated vows to kill Duncan's proposal unless lawmakers also consider a plan to change how district judges are selected. "What we want to do is make sure there are people who look like us in the judiciary. It ought not remain all white," said Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, who is black.
Ellis has proposed legislation that attempts to boost minority representation by having district judges run in nonpartisan elections and, in the largest counties, be elected from smaller districts. However, Ellis said he doesn't have enough support for his pro-. posal to be considered by the Senate. Duncan says he does have enough support to pass his measure, but Ellis has threatened to filibuster the proposal if a compromise is not worked out. On top of that, minority House members promised to kill Duncan's measure should it reach their chamber.
"This plan is going to meet very stiff resistance because it does not address the whole problem; it is only piecemeal," said Rep. Hugo Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, chairman of the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus. Duncan, however, rejected the possibility of a compromise and ac-' knowledged that the chances of passing a judicial reform measure this session were dwindling. "It's very clear to me that a comprehensive approach dealing with the district courts at this time is not feasible. There's not the political support of any plan at the district court level," he said.
"I never will foreclose the possibility of coming up with something that will work, but right now, we're not there." Minority lawmakers argue that appointing judges would not nec-" essarily increase diversity on the bench. They point to Republican Gov. George W. Bush's judicial appointments, noting that of the 67 judges he appointed since January 1995, 57 are white, five are black and five are Hispanic. A spokesman for Bush didn't immediately comment.
Photo by The Associated Press LAW ENFORCEMENT personnel remove the body of Helen R. Johnson, 53, out of a caliche pit where they found her buried in a shallow grave Wednesday in Midland. Four Midland were charged with capital murder for the death of Johnson, who was stabbed several times during an apparent robbery at her home, police said. Properly tax bill needs much work, coalition says AUSTIN (AP) A bill heralded by many as offering Texans significant school property tax cuts needs a lot of work before it will be acceptable, according to a coalition of liberal and moderate lawmakers. Rep.
Kevin Bailey, D-Houston, head of the Legislative Study Group, on Thursday joined several lawmakers in announcing their concerns about the bill, which cleared a House committee Wednesday. The bill would cut local school property taxes by about 50 percent. To pay for the cuts, the bill would raise some state taxes, apply the state sales tax to more goods and services, expand the state business tax and dedicate $1 billion in additional state funds and lottery proceeds to education. Lawmakers concerned about the proposal said the expanded taxes meant to pay for the property tax cuts could hit low- and middle-income Texans hardest. "If it does, we will have a problem," Bailey said.
Some of the key issues for the coalition include: Provisions assuring that all renters share in the property tax cuts. That the expanded sales taxes and other taxes won't force poor and middle-class Texans to pay more. That all Texans pay a fair share of the cost of education. The coalition, which represents about 70 of the House's 150 members, is not opposed to the bill but is not supporting it. The bill needs a simple majority of lawmakers to pass, but an accompanying constitutional amendment needs at least 100 votes to pass.
"Rep. Glen Maxey, D-Austin, said the coalition will determine its position on the bill after a so-called tax equity note is completed. That document, required by law, will tell lawmakers how the plan affects people of various income levels. It must be released before the full House can debate the bill. The bill contains a provision forcing landlords of rental property with four or more units to share their tax cut savings with their tenants for three years.
Rep. Hugo Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, said that provision leaves out more than half of Texas' millions of renters. Most of them, Berlanga, said live in single-family rental homes and duplexes. "Those individuals get no benefit," he said, adding that they still would have to pay some higher and new taxes to pay for the property tax cuts. Rep.
Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, said the main concern is how average people would be affected. "Do Texans end up with more in their pockets?" Turner said. Rep. Paul Sadler, D-Henderson, chairman of the committee that approved the bill, said the state's tax system will continue to be unfair to poor and middle-class Texans. He said the proposed changes will make it better, but not perfect.
Bailey said the coalition isn't looking for perfect, but doesn't want something even more unfair that the current system. Vietnam War leaders confer in West Texas Jarvis Christian College Appreciation Day Alumni and Friends are invited to enjoy the Jarvis Christian Choir 10:50 a. m. Sunday, April 20 Fir st Ckistiafl Cliafcli 1101 Indian Springs Rd. For details call 938-4047 LUBBOCK (AP) Twenty-five years ago, Bui Tin would have made a prime target for many of the veterans attending this weekend's Teaching Vietnam Conference here.
These days, he's a mentor. Tin, the former North Vietnamese colonel who accepted South Vietnam's surrender in 1975, said it's ini-portant to keep talking about the various scars the war caused. "We will speak about reconciliation between Americans and Vietnamese, between Americans and themselves and between Vietnamese and themselves," said Tin, who rejected his country's hard-line ways in 1990 and moved to Paris, leaving a wife and daughter behind. Once the editor of Vietnam's Communist Party daily newspaper and an associate of leader Ho Chih Minn, Tin on Friday is to join a panel with retired U.S. Adm.
Elmo Zumwalt and former South Vietnamese prime ministers Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Khanh. The conference is designed to facilitate the teaching of Vietnam-related issues to modern students, many of whom were born after Saigon fell to the communists on April 30, 1975. The director of Texas Tech's Center for the Study of the Vietnam Conflict, 20-year naval veteran James Reckner, said that such a conference is important for this generation to get a firsthand impression of their parents' war. "I have a large group of graduate students, and most are working on topics related to Vietnam," said Reckner, who during the war manned the same riverboats mythicized in the film "Apocalypse Now." "My goal is for them to discover new topics of study. There is a great reward in seeing this young generation and assisting them in producing new research." Reckner added that younger scholars aren't stained by the pro- or anti-war biases that virtually all historians of his era carry.
Tin, a communist for 40 years, said that the idealism of everyone involved was to be respected. However, he didn't approve of the postwar policies that jailed some 300,000 South Vietnamese and forced more than 1 million abroad. "(The North Vietnamese) were the victors of the war, but they did not digest the victory," he told the Associated Press after arriving in Lubbock on his fourth visit to the United States. Tin, 70, admits he considered Vietnam free when his forces' tanks roared through the gates of the former Presidential Palace in Saigon, now Ho Chih Minh City. His viewpoint soured over the years as the government restricted basic freedoms such as speech and religion.
Since he left seven years ago, Tin has been broadcasting pro-freedom radio programming from France back to Vietnam. "The Communist Party considers people like myself to be traitors," he said. "Many honest people are in jail now simply because of their political opinions." Tin said that Vietnam's thirst for foreign investment will make normalization between it and its former enemies easier, but still tentative. The tougher task, he said, is for each country to make amends from within. "Teaching about Vietnam is a way of reconciliation between the doves and the hawks," he said.
FREE Delivery To Texas Arkansas Prices SLASHED On Our Beautiful Front Porch Model Universities trying to better prepare teachers I Sr irmi 53 ro it II Fo1 I IEL r3 Sf fte'l3" rT oon I A M. 1 0 (I I Schools would start Sept. 1 AUSTIN (AP) Public schools in Texas could not start classes before Sept. 1 unless they obtained a waiver from the state under a bill approved Thursday by senators. The bill by Sea Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, is backed by the tourism industry, which wants to leave families free to travel to vacation spots such as South Padre Island and amusem*nt parks through the Labor Day holiday.
Lucio said the bill, approved 25-6 and sent to the House, would also allow more time for students to earn money from summer jobs and enable teachers to enroll in summer college courses. The measure would make Sept. 1 the starting date for classes unless a school district asked the commissioner of education to begin earlier. The bill was criticized as "frivolous" by Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amar-illo, the Senate Education Committee chairman.
"This is a terrible idea," Bivins said. "It forces school districts to jump through yet another bureaucratic hoop in order to run their business." I .11 II a- I AUSTIN (AP) At the Universi- ty of Texas at Brownsville, admission standards are being raised for teacher education and one department has even posted in its stairwell a list of the skills students must have to teach. It's all part of an effort to better prepare people studying to be teachers in the wake of a report earlier this year that Texas falls short of national standards. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which received the report in January, heard Thursday from officials representing UT-Brownsville and Texas Southern University in Houston about what they're doing to improve low student scores on the exam to certify teachers. At UT Brownsville, just 57.1 per cent of the students who took the test to teach secondary English passed, according to 1995-96 results, while none of the TSU students who took that test passed.
"We are committed to preparing the best teachers," said Raymond Ro-drigues, vice president of academic affairs at UT-Brownsville. Besides posting skills needed to pass the test on the stairwell, one department is developing a computer-assisted practice exam, he said. Admission standards are being raised for teacher education, meaning fewer teachers will be graduated at first, he said. English courses are including methods of teaching and instructional strategies because students did poorly on that part of the test. 28x70 Only One At This Price $49,900 Vinyl Siding, Plywood Backer, Porcelain Sinks, Storm Windows, Thermal Patio Door, Plywood Floors, 1 Pc.
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Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, would centralize fraud investigation and prosecution efforts under the Health and Human Services Commission's newly-created Office of Investigations and Enforcement. It would tighten the screening process for welfare benefits providers through the use of background checks and on-site inspections; require health and human services agencies to use advanced fraud- detection technologies; and enact stiffer penalties for fraud, especially for fraud against the elderly, disabled and children. The measure was approved 31-0 and forwarded to the House. Lt. Gov.
Bob Bullock told senators, "This is one of the most important bills you will consider this session." Texas spent more than $7.3 billion for Medicaid services and $1.3 billion for financial assistance and food stamp programs in fiscal year 1995. But fraud may account for as much as 10 percent of all Medicaid, financial assistance and food stamp claims, according to state figures. Call About Free Qualifying 'ioxmim PARENT MARQMAI I TV -rcc-rn Nn rl I Di ccc 'ijl.
