At 8:30 on the evening of October 4, 1994, Rebecca haro, lead paramedic for Samaritan AmEvac, and her partner were parked in their ambulance near 83rd Avenue and Glendale. . A call came over the radio: A man had been injured in a fight just blocks away. All 911 fire…
In January 1993, James Elmer McPheeters was sentenced to six lifetimes in prison for sexual exploitation of a minor. McPheeters owned a collection of 30 dirty magazines, two videos and a deck of obscene playing cards, all depicting children in a sexual context, and each of those items earned him…
W. Wallace Covington, a professor of forest ecology at Northern Arizona University, likes to invoke the memory of Aldo Leopold, the naturalist and philosopher who lectured on the importance of undisturbed wilderness. Of course, there are no more undisturbed wildernesses, and after more than a century of fire suppression, grazing,…
For all of her 53 years, Donna Goodale has threaded horses and mules through nearly impassable thickets of scrub oak and manzanita behind the tiny hamlet of Top of the World, Arizona, 75 miles east of Phoenix on U.S. Route 60. Goodale is a solid-framed woman with curly blond hair…
At six o’clock on the evening of July 7, a Friday, James Witt was standing on a boulder in his front yard near the corner of Alma School and Dynamite roads in north Scottsdale, looking for the signs of a lightning strike one of his house guests had seen from…
If crime and pestilence and natural disaster and the other perils of modern life make you want to stay at home with the doors and windows locked, think again. You’re not safe even there, as a Tempe family discovered when a plumber searching out a persistent water leak from a…
At least 13 times in the last 18 months, Department of Health Services investigators have found one or another of Steve Broe’s American Child Care Centers to have more children per adult caregiver than the law allows. And last fall, Craig Barton’s Camelback Desert School in north Scottsdale, which offers…
In March, archaeologists under contract with the Arizona Department of Transportation, inching along with trowels and brushes, exhumed 57 skeletons alongside a lonesome two-lane road in the Tonto National Forest. The bodies dated to the 13th or 14th century, the earthly remains of prehistoric Native Americans, laid to rest with…
Language and the abstract thinking that makes it happen are foremost among the characteristics that make humans human. But linguists, anthropologists and psychologists cannot agree on the moment in man’s evolution when that characteristic appeared, or why. Last week, in an article published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences,…
After eight months of anguish on the part of Kimberly Nilson’s family and friends, and diligent work on the part of the Tempe Police Department, her remains were found on April 12 in a clearing beneath the paloverde that was probably her last resting place. She had been missing since…
Colorado River rafting guides are used to navigating through and around whirlpools and “keeper holes,” the kind of white-water hydraulic effects that can suck a boat down and hold it underwater. Right now they are finding themselves swamped in the wake of the U.S. Coast Guard’s decision to take away…
Although People for the West–the antienvironmental “grassroots” lobby of the mining, ranching and logging industries–boasts more than 3,000 Arizona members, fewer than 200 showed up in Mesa last Saturday for the organization’s state convention. Most of the conventioneers were over 60, the sort of right-wingers who drive slowly in the…
Representative David Farnsworth stepped to the microphone of the Arizona House of Representatives to deliver the opening prayer. “Father, there is a great battle that rages in the hearts of many of those who are really concerned about our environment,” he droned. “We pray that Thou wilt touch their hearts…
On weekends, the big dirt parking lot next to Pinnacle Peak Patio, a cowboy restaurant in distant North Scottsdale, is usually filled with the cars and trucks of climbers, who rope themselves up Pinnacle Peak, and the mountain bikers, who pedal the single-track trails through the neighboring hills. Last Saturday,…
From where he stood on the ridge, Ron Day could hear the hounds baying as they lined out on a scent, and he could make out the hunter on his mule ambling across the rocky meadows behind the dogs. He didn’t expect to see the mountain lion they were trailing,…
Johnny is a seventh grader at a public school somewhere in the Valley. His teachers believe he has normal intelligence, but it’s hard to tell because he’s autistic, a condition one special education teacher describes in this way: “A racecar whose engine is not hooked up.” Johnny attends classes designed…
Although William Kenneth “Taz” Stoner told the Los Angeles Times that he dynamited the Salt River’s Quartzite Falls to save lives, U.S. Forest Service documents suggest that Stoner had more self-serving motives, as well: Quartzite Falls was an obstruction in the flow of Stoner’s weekend job as a river guide…
The first time we saw Brian Kingman in uniform, he was wearing the green and gold of the Oakland A’s. In the late Seventies, Kingman had a blistering fastball, a baffling curve and the worst luck in baseball: Kingman stands in the record books as the last major league pitcher…
Don’t go breaking my heart. Carla was singing along to the radio as she slid out of her jeans. It was April 16, 1991, and Carla, who was 14, was spending the night with her brother and sister at the apartment of their Sunday-school teacher, Douglas Gates. Gates was a…
Bill Lowery has a police officer’s poker face and a flat and factual Jack Webb voice. “I’m not a police officer, but I talk to a lot of them,” he says. Lowery is a salesman, and he sells the future of police work in a box of circuits and silicon…
The cars seem remarkably new for a university parking lot. There are no bikes or beaters, no VW buses with bumper stickers that read “Honk if something falls off.” These are shiny Tauruses and Sentras, the sensible cars of people with jobs. The cars’ owners are middle-aged middle managers, white-collar…
The Arizona Department of Weights and Measures is breaking the law and endangering the environment by refusing to test recycled oil that is burned as fuel by heavy industry, according to an official at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Service stations and other maintenance shops must pay disposal services…
