Maryland town's parade honors sniper task force

SILVER SPRING, Md. -- Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose really doesn't like parades.

Still, he was persuaded to ride in a convertible Saturday, passing people wearing purple foam moose antlers and yelling his name, as grand marshal of a parade honoring the law enforcement agencies that hunted for the Washington-area snipers.

"He's the man," 12-year-old Johanna Cahill said as she watched Moose go by in a 1950s Cadillac. "He did a lot of good things for the community."

Moose dislikes parades so much that when he was chief in Portland, Ore., he stayed home when the city honored its police force in its annual Rose Festival parade.

Seven of the 13 people killed or wounded in the Washington area were Montgomery County residents or had ties to the county. It also was home to the sniper task force, a multi-agency team of thousands of police officers and federal agents.

11-year-old girl killed at home by stray bullet

MINNEAPOLIS -- An 11-year-old girl, playing at her family's computer with her 6-year-old sister, was struck and killed by a bullet that came through the window of their home.

The incident occurred shortly after 3 p.m. Friday in a neighborhood in south Minneapolis. The girl died a short time later at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Mayor R.T. Rybak went to the hospital to meet the girl's family.

"This is a good, decent, hardworking family. It's an unimaginable loss," said Inspector Sharon Lubinski, head of the police precinct that includes the neighborhood.

The girl's identity wasn't released by authorities.

Computer glitch cited as judge overturns sentence

INDIANAPOLIS -- The state Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of killing a police officer, finding that a computer glitch resulted in no blacks serving on the jury that sentenced him to death.

In its 3-2 ruling, the court said Friday that "the jury pool selection process was fundamentally flawed" when Rufus Averhart, who is black, was sentenced to death in 1996.

Averhart's death sentence had been thrown out once before, when the state Supreme Court determined in 1993 that he had had ineffective counsel.

Safety deficiencies missed before jail fire

BAKERSVILLE, N.C. -- State and county inspectors had failed to detect safety deficiencies that contributed to a jail fire that killed eight inmates, according to a state Labor Department report.

The report released Friday came a week after a district attorney decided no charges would be filed for the Mitchell County blaze.

Investigators have said the May 3 fire started in cardboard that was stacked against a heater in a storage room. Seven inmates died in a second-floor cell and an eighth died in a first-floor holding cell.

The Labor Department fined the county $1,500 last month for violations cited in the report, including a failure to follow state building regulations and fire safety rules.

San Francisco wants pet owners to be 'guardians'

SAN FRANCISCO -- In an effort to give man's best friend a little more bite, the city Board of Supervisors is considering changing the health code to make pet owners also guardians.

The city Health and Human Services Committee on Thursday urged the board to pass the ordinance so pets will be seen as animals instead of property, a change several other cities already have adopted. The new law wouldn't eliminate the word owner, but simply would add guardian to the books.

"Owner implies the same relationship as the owner of a bicycle or the owner of a toaster," said Rob Eshelman, legislative aid to Supervisor Matt Gonzalez, who introduced the legislation in September. "We're really trying to get to the heart of trying to treat animals more humanely and promote guardianship."

--From wire reports