February 7, 2007
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- They were police detectives, shot at close range
Chuck Robinson/Associated PressThe execution chamber at the United States Penitentiary in Terra Haute, Ind., where there people, including Timothy J. McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing, have died of lethal injection since 2001.
Geography and Emotion Helped Sway Jurors’ Vote
They were police detectives, shot at close range, in the backs of their heads. Fellow officers and relatives filled the courtroom, day after day, during the trial of the man accused of pulling the trigger, who mostly kept his emotions to himself.
Add to that where the jurors came from — Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island, but not Manhattan. And that the detectives knew, and were known in, the neighborhood, which gave the case a strong local connection — unlike, say, a case involving terrorist acts overseas.
Taken together, all those elements were so powerful, death-penalty specialists said yesterday, that the jury’s verdict seemed almost inevitable. The seven women and five men decided that the defendant, Ronell Wilson, should die.
That made him the first person to face death in a federal case in New York since the 1950s, a fate that other defendants have managed to avoid, even though some of them have been accused of killing far more people. “There was a confluence of factors,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law. “I think it’s highly unlikely there will be another case with all these particular elements anytime soon.”
For that reason, she and other lawyers interviewed yesterday said they doubted that the Wilson verdict signaled a shift in public attitudes about the death penalty. Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland, noted that advances in DNA testing have uncovered faulty convictions and made juries nationally more hesitant to impose the death sentence. But he said there were no such doubts in the Wilson case.
“This case is one that shocks the conscience,” he said. “The brutal nature of it, I think, aligned the stars for this kind of verdict.”
Still, some attitudes may have changed. Several years ago, when Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered United States attorneys to seek the death penalty, he ran into resistance in New York, where some prosecutors feared such a possibility could cause jurors to acquit.
Counting Mr. Wilson, there are now 47 federal prisoners on death row. But prosecutors in New York have failed to obtain death sentences in recent years, even in closely watched terrorism trials involving embassy bombings in Africa in 1998.
Some death-penalty opponents said that the Wilson case proved the exception because the victims were police officers.
Ronald J. Tabak, a special counsel at the Manhattan law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and the president of New York Lawyers Against the Death Penalty, said that when New York changed its law on capital punishment in the 1960s “in what was considered a virtual abolition of the death penalty,” the murder of a police officer remained a death-penalty offense.
The last federal inmate to be executed in New York State, Gerhard Puff, in 1954, had been found guilty of killing an F.B.I. agent during a bank robbery. At the state level, no trials involved the killings of police officers between when the death penalty was reinstated in New York in 1995 and when it was invalidated in 2004, according to Kevin Doyle, the New York State criminal defender. Nor did any of the federal cases tried in New York since 2001.
But in the Wilson case, death-penalty lawyers said, the jury could not have missed the large turnout of police officers and relatives.
“It’s hard to resist that kind of pressure,” said David A. Ruhnke, a lawyer who is representing a convicted drug trafficker in another federal death-penalty case in Brooklyn, that one involving racketeering and murder.
Last week, the judge in that case told the prosecutors that the Justice Department should drop its push for the execution of the defendant, Kenneth McGriff. The judge, Frederic Block, said that pressing on to the penalty phase of the trial would be “absurd” and “a total misappropriation” of taxpayer dollars.
In analyzing the Wilson verdict, some death-penalty lawyers said they had figured that sooner or later, a jury in New York would vote to send a defendant to die. Mr. Tabak said that of the seven state cases that ended in death-penalty verdicts between 1995 and 2004, all but two originated in the area that makes up the federal Eastern District: Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, and Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island.
Lawyers consider prospective jurors in those areas more likely to support the death penalty than those in Manhattan. Still, some lawyers said the importance of geography was minimal when compared to the particular circumstances of the Wilson case.
“It was the kind of case that no matter where it tried and no matter where it was brought, the likelihood of a death verdict was high,” Mr. Ruhnke said. “Sometimes the facts of a case simply blot out everything else.”
Other death-penalty lawyers said the Wilson trial differed from those involving drug dealers accused of killing other drug dealers, or those involving terrorists. Twice in 2001, a federal jury in Manhattan deadlocked over whether to impose the death penalty on three terrorists in the 1998 bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. In the federal courts, a deadlock means the defendant is automatically sentenced to life in prison.
Richard Burr, who was one of Timothy J. McVeigh‘s lawyers in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, said that a case involving a terrorist attack overseas “is not the sort of immediate, frightening incident that the killing of police officers in your own town is.”
“It’s not immediate, it’s not here, it’s not that visceral response,” he said.
The Wilson case, which centered on the murders of Detectives James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews on a Staten Island street in 2003, had an emotional component that the lawyers said had been lacking in other death-penalty trials in New York. This was partly because such violence seemed out of place on Staten Island, and partly because the detectives were the first two officers killed by gunfire on a single day in 15 years.
“The ingredient that this case had that the others have not had was the powerful emotions on the part of the victims’ survivors, both their individual families and the police community,” said Kevin McNally, a Kentucky lawyer who is director of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which provides information to defense lawyers in capital cases. “You simply don’t see that kind of a packed courtroom in these other trials, and jurors are affected by that.”
Nor had juries taken up a case in which the victims were police officers. David Bruck, who runs the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at the Washington and Lee School of Law, said that juries “impose the death penalty to avenge the murders of people with whom they identify.”
“People identify with brave, hard-working, young police officers who lost their lives and had families and people who loved them,” he said.
In addition, Professor Denno said the way Mr. Wilson had handled himself during the trial — even sticking out his tongue as the victims’ families rejoiced after the verdict — “stands out” among death-penalty defendants in this country.
“I think people expect this from terrorists who are instigated by an ideology that of course we can’t fully understand,” she said. “But the American public has particular difficulty with a defendant like Ronell Wilson, who showed so little remorse, no remorse.”
Ramin Talaie for The New York TimesRoslynn R. Mauskopf, left, the United States attorney, with Rose Nemorin, center, and MaryAnn Andrews, right, the slain detectives’ widows.
Jury Agrees on Death Sentence for the Killer of Two Detectives
Correction Appended
A federal jury sentenced a 24-year-old Staten Island man to death yesterday for killing two undercover police detectives in 2003. It was the first successful federal capital punishment prosecution in New York in more than 50 years.
After the verdict was read, the defendant, Ronell Wilson, 24, rubbed his palms, looked at his mother, then stuck his tongue out at the families of his victims. His younger brother loudly cursed the jurors, while their mother cried out that they were “the murderers now.”
The widows and other relatives of the slain detectives applauded briefly from the gallery, crying, “And the Lord rejoices.”
In December, the anonymous jury of seven men and five women convicted Mr. Wilson of shooting the two detectives, James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews, in the back of the head in a car during a weapons sting on Staten Island on March 10, 2003.
They reached their verdict yesterday after nine hours of deliberations that started Monday afternoon. They found Mr. Wilson devoid of remorse and directed Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of federal court in Brooklyn to impose sentences of death by lethal injection on five counts.
Three men have been executed in federal cases in the United States in recent decades, first among them Timothy J. McVeigh, for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Mr. Wilson will join 46 other people on the federal death row.
But in the 20 years since a moratorium on federal capital punishment was lifted, prosecutors in New York have failed to win death sentences against at least 14 defendants, including violent gang members. Federal jurors even refused to execute two terrorists involved in the bombing of United States embassies in East Africa in 1998, after their lawyers argued it would turn them into martyrs. The last federal inmate to be executed in the state was Gerhard Puff, in 1954, a bank robber convicted of killing an F.B.I. agent.
But the murder of two undercover detectives, found bleeding on a Staten Island street in the aftermath of a botched gun transaction, resounded in a city still shaken by the terror attacks of 2001. They were the first two officers killed by gunfire on a single day since 1988.
Working from 29 pages of questions, the jurors dissected a series of factors weighing for and against execution. Affirming elements of their conviction, they found that Mr. Wilson had acted with the intent to kill. They endorsed all the prosecution’s assertions, including that Mr. Wilson would remain a danger in prison.
The jurors, who declined interview requests conveyed by the judge, unanimously endorsed nearly all of the defense team’s mitigating factors, finding that Mr. Wilson had grown up depressed, sick and trapped in a realm of poverty, deprivation, drug abuse and violence. They wrote in another factor weighing against the death penalty: “Ronell Wilson was possibly subject to peer pressure.”
But they unanimously rejected the notions that he has adjusted well to federal prison, taken responsibility for his actions or “has remorse for the murder of Detectives Andrews and Nemorin.”
Federal prosecutors vigorously sought the death penalty against Mr. Wilson, taking the case from state prosecutors in Staten Island after the New York death penalty was largely invalidated in 2004. They endorsed plea bargains with seven defendants, young men based around the Stapleton Houses project in northeastern Staten Island.
The group members had forged their camaraderie on admiration for a slightly older man, nicknamed Keyo, who had been killed under unresolved circumstances.
“I heard different stories,” testified one group member, Mitchell Diaz, who has pleaded guilty to supplying the murder weapon.
Bearing Keyo tattoos and T-shirts, the men gave themselves nicknames like O and Mal-G, evidence and testimony showed. Between the humdrum stuff of growing up, community college courses, talent shows and outings to Six Flags Great Adventure, they mastered gang signs, sold crack cocaine and beat and robbed their rivals.
On that March night in 2003, the men sold a handgun to Detective Nemorin, 36, a Haitian immigrant and father of three, admired by other officers for his ability to convincingly shed dapper silk scarves for the trappings of a street tough.
As his supervisor would later testify, Detective Nemorin arranged to buy a second gun, a Tec-9 assault pistol, at a rendezvous by the Stapleton Houses a week later. For backup, he brought Detective Andrews, 34, a Navy veteran and separated father of two with a reputation for making tough arrests.
In a police-issued Nissan Maxima, the detectives approached the towering Stapleton Houses with a handgun for protection and a surveillance transmitter disguised as a pager. As Detective Nemorin drove, they exchanged goofy banter between calls for directions.
On the other side of the telephone line, plans for the transaction were shifting from sale to robbery, members of the group later testified. Outside the housing project, Mr. Wilson climbed into the backseat with Jessie Jacobus, at 16 a 6-foot-3, 240-pound enforcer for the group.
As they circled the streets, Mr. Wilson voiced suspicions of a police presence in the neighborhood.
“It’s mad hot,” Mr. Wilson said, according to a surveillance recording.
He also questioned the presence of Detective Andrews, who Detective Nemorin claimed was his brother-in-law. The detectives sought to reassure him with canny street talk and evasive driving, to little discernable effect.
On a dark dead-end street, with no apparent warning, Mr. Wilson fired a single .44-caliber bullet into the skull of each man, starting with Detective Andrews. Gunpowder residue on Detective Nemorin’s hand would later bear evidence of his efforts to survive. It was never proved whether Mr. Wilson knew his victims were officers, and an accomplice’s recantation eventually prompted prosecutors to drop such charges.
But Mr. Jacobus testified that Mr. Wilson gave a reason for the shootings in the minutes after he pulled the trigger. He quoted Mr. Wilson as saying he did it because he did not care about anybody.
After losing their surveillance signal, police supervisors frantically searched Staten Island, only to find the blood-soaked bodies of their undercover detectives. They temporarily shut down traffic out of the borough, recalling departed ferries and closing bridges. They rounded up the crew within two days.
The prosecutors, Colleen Kavanagh, Morris J. Fodeman and Jack Smith, assisted by Special Agent Thomas Shelton of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobaco, Firearms and Explosives, presented three weeks of testimony and evidence from members of the gang, scientific experts, civilian witnesses, investigators and audio and video surveillance recordings that led to the conviction.
Mr. Wilson’s lawyers, Ephraim Savitt, Mitchell Dinnerstein and Kelley J. Sharkey, sought to save Mr. Wilson’s life by recounting the circumstances of his childhood. Before the jury retired, Mr. Wilson read a brief, heavily edited statement of remorse.
And the prosecution, in proceedings that began two weeks ago, argued that Mr. Wilson did not deserve to live. They depicted a life of crime that started at 11 and included violent behavior in jail and out of it.
Yesterday afternoon, the jury foreman, dressed in a suit and tie, gave the panel’s answers in a loud crisp voice, glancing now and again at Mr. Wilson. He ordered the death sentence, in response to a question, with the word “yes.”
From the victim’s families came calls of “God bless.”
As the jurors receded, Mr. Wilson kissed his forefinger and middle finger, then waved to his mother.
The case could be appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, said Russell Neufeld, a capital defense lawyer who was not involved in the case. If a majority of judges upheld the sentence, it could ascend to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If the sentence is sustained on appeal, it will be carried out by lethal injection.
The appeal will be the second before the circuit under the modern federal death penalty. The first, from Vermont, entered the appeals court about a year ago and has yet to be decided.
Ephraim Savitt, a lawyer for Mr. Wilson, predicted an appeal based on the jury selection process, among other issues. He lamented the sentence. “It’s a very sad day for the justice system,” he said, “when justice and vengeance become one and the same.”
Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives Endowment Association, said that “If any case screamed out for the death penalty,” it was Wilson’s.
Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said, “Today justice has been served, and it has been served by a jury from this community. “
In a statement, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said, “I want to commend the jury for their difficult and courageous work.”
When the courtroom was cleared, the prosecutors emerged to a sustained round of applause.
Derek Williams, a cousin of Detective Andrews who testified in the penalty phase of the trial, said: “It is some measure of relief, but it is not full closure. It won’t be full closure until the sentence is carried out.”
The relatives of Mr. Wilson walked away in the dark, under the glare of TV camera lights. He was removed from the courtroom through a different passage.
Reporting was contributed by Clyde Haberman, Jennifer 8. Lee, William K. Rashbaum and Matthew Sweeney.
Correction: February 3, 2007
A front-page article on Wednesday about a death sentence handed up by a federal jury for a man who killed two police detectives on Staten Island misstated the marital status of one victim, Rodney J. Andrews, and referred incorrectly in some copies to the federal trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of terrorism charges related to Sept. 11 but did not receive the death penalty. Detective Andrews and his wife were separated, not divorced, and Mr. Moussaoui’s case was tried by prosecutors in Virginia, not New York.
Clark County Fire Department spokesman Scott Allison answers questions about Tuesday’s accident at MGM Mirage’s Project CityCenter. The 66-acre building site is behind him.
Photo by Ronda Churchill.
Two workers killed at Project CityCenter
Two others injured at megaresort construction site
By DAVID KIHARA
REVIEW-JOURNALTwo construction workers were crushed to death Tuesday, and two other men were injured when a pair of 3,000-pound walls fell at the MGM Mirage’s Project CityCenter building site on the Strip, authorities said.
A little after 3 p.m., work crews were using cranes to move the two large steel walls, which act as concrete molds.
One wall slipped and fell against the other, said Scott Allison, spokesman for the Clark County Fire Department.
The construction workers who were killed were both on the ground when the walls toppled onto them, Allison said.
A worker who was on top of one of the walls rode it down and suffered an injury to his abdomen but was conscious when paramedics got to him, Allison said.
One of the walls fell on another construction worker’s legs, but he managed to climb out with only minor injuries and a gash to his forehead.
“I am amazed that he was able to push himself out, but I don’t know how far underneath the wall he was,” Allison said. “When you get into dire straits the adrenaline kicks in. We’ve heard about little old ladies who lift cars off (people).”
The two survivors were taken to University Medical Center, but their injuries did not appear to be life-threatening, Allison said.
Gloria Denetsosi, who said she is the fiance of one of the survivors, arrived at UMC Tuesday night saying he had called her about 5:30 p.m. with the news that he was at the hospital.
“He told me he’s doing OK,” she said.
She said her fiance and the other man injured at the site are brothers who are always together, but she declined to identify the men.
Just hours later, a vigil was held outside UMC for the survivor of an industrial accident that killed two men Friday at The Orleans.
One of the men had cut open a large sewage pipe to try to make repairs and fell in and the other men had tried to save him.
Richard Luxier, 48, and Travis Koehler, 26, were killed in the sewer line that was filled with methane and hydrogen sulfide gas.
The survivor of that incident, David Snow, remained in critical condition at UMC Tuesday night.
The three were stuck in the sewer for at least 50 minutes.
About three dozen co-workers and friends of the three men attended Tuesday night’s vigil at UMC. They held candles as they remembered Luxier and Koehler and prayed for Snow’s recovery.
“They’re just heroes. They did what they could for a fellow worker. Not a lot of people would do that,” said Richard Antala, who worked with the three men at The Orleans.
Chris Waters, a friend of Snow, said the injured man is in his late 20s, has lived in Las Vegas for 19 years, has two young daughters and worked at The Orleans for about a year.
Snow probably wouldn’t have hesitated when he saw one of his co-workers in trouble, Waters said.
“I don’t doubt for a minute that he didn’t think twice before going to help his friends out,” Waters said. “I’ve been trying to tell his wife that he’s going to bounce back from this, that he’s going to be 100 percent. And when he does I’m going to kick his ass.”
Allison, the county Fire Department spokesman, answered questions Tuesday at Project CityCenter just as he had at The Orleans on Friday.
“It’s another sad day at a (construction) site,” he said.
The state Occupational Safety and Health Administration is responsible for determining the causes of both accidents.
Project CityCenter, a $7 billion, 66-acre development that is to include a 4,000-room hotel casino and retail and entertainment district, is on Las Vegas Boulevard at Harmon Avenue between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo.
From July 2005 to June 2006, OSHA investigated 15 work site fatalities in Clark County and 22 statewide, the agency reports. The agency looked into 15 work site deaths in Clark County and 23 statewide from July 2004 to June 2005.
The tallies from June 2006 forward were not available Tuesday night.
MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman said Tuesday that the corporation is working with investigators to determine the cause of the accident at Project CityCenter.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the deceased workers and for the recovery of those who were injured,” Feldman said via e-mail.
A construction worker at a neighboring site near the Bellagio said he had watched as ambulances and firetrucks converged on Project CityCenter and tried to rescue the workers.
He said paramedics stripped one of the survivors of the accident of his clothes and wrapped him in a white sheet before rushing to the hospital.
When asked whether, as a construction worker, he felt unsafe in light of the four deaths in five days, he said, “Accidents happen.”
Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated PressMolly Ivins in 2006.
Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62
Correction Appended
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.
Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the muckraking paper that came out every two weeks and that would become her spiritual home for life.
Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every village is about to lose its idiot.”
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.
On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he “respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.”
Mr. Bush added: “Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.”
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944, in California and grew up in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative Republican, was general counsel and later president of the Tenneco Corporation, an oil and gas company.
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt out of place. “I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,” she said.
She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet,” she told Texas Monthly.
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, she wrote, “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.”
Like her mother, Margot, and a grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to become co-editor of The Texas Observer.
Covering the Legislature, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how fast she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice. Sometimes she combined them, as in, “The sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo.”
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Texas Observer, said the political circus in Texas inspired Ms. Ivins. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and it’s wide open,’ ” Mr. Dugger said.
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley‘s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky Mountain States, where she continued to challenge her editors’ tolerance for prankish writing.
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”
But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, until 1992, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque. One of her closest friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of good-ol’-boy stories.”
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote for Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work overload might have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages Ms. King had written and using them in 1988 for an article in Mother Jones. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”
But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”
Correction: February 3, 2007
An obituary on Thursday about the political humor columnist Molly Ivins included incorrect information from Creator Syndicate about the year she began writing for the syndicate. It was 1992, not 2001. The obituary also incorrectly described River Oaks, where she was reared, in some copies. It is part of Houston; it has not been a suburb since the 1920s.
Josh Haner/The New York TimesCarlos Arredondo, Wednesday in Times Square with a memorial to his son, a marine killed in Iraq.
A Father With a Coffin, Telling of War’s Grim Toll
Carlos Arredondo leaned toward the coffin in the back of his pickup truck yesterday and renewed a promise to his dead son, one that he has kept for more than two years.
In a whisper, he vowed never to let his son’s death be forgotten. He closed his eyes and slid his right hand across the American flag stretched over the coffin, his fingertips tumbling over each of its faded red stripes.
“This is my whole world,” he said, facing the truck, his arms open wide. “This is my burden.”
Mr. Arredondo, 46, stood on West 43rd Street in Times Square, shivering in the morning chill. His son, Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arredondo, 20, was a marine killed in Iraq in 2004 while fighting in Najaf.
Passers-by slowed or stopped to view Mr. Arredondo’s mobile memorial: the coffin, filled with his son’s prized possessions, and the green Nissan truck, each side adorned with poster-size photos of the young marine. Some pictures show him smiling, his teeth bright white. Others show a machine-gun-toting warrior in battle gear. Another shows him lying dead at his funeral.
The display is sad, personal and emotionally jarring. But this is how Mr. Arredondo honors and mourns his son, who was a fire team leader in Battalion Landing Team 1/4, 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), First Marine Expeditionary Force. This is how Mr. Arredondo heals.
“As long as there are marines fighting and dying in Iraq, I’m going to share my mourning with the American people,” he said.
Mr. Arredondo, who lives in Boston, travels the country putting his sorrow on display. He accepts donations along the way. The coffin he takes with him holds some of his son’s things: a soccer ball, a pair of his favorite shoes, a Winnie the Pooh. He also shows people his son’s boots, uniform and dog tags.
Healing has been long and slow. First there was denial and self-destruction.
It all began on Aug. 25, 2004, Mr. Arredondo said, his 44th birthday. A government van eased in front of his home, then in Hollywood, Fla., and three Marine officers in dress blues stepped out.
At first Mr. Arredondo thought it was his son making a surprise birthday visit. Instead, the officers told him that his son had been killed in a hail of gunfire after being trapped in a four-story hotel that his platoon had been clearing. They were surrounded by enemy fighters. It was his son’s second tour of duty in Iraq.
“I just screamed,” he said. “I said ‘No, no! It can’t be my son.’ “
Mr. Arredondo said he “lost it.” He ran to his garage and grabbed a gallon of gasoline and a propane torch.
He took a sledgehammer and smashed the government van’s windshield and hopped inside. As the officers tried to calm him, Mr. Arredondo doused himself and the van with gasoline and lit the torch.
There was an explosion, and the officers dragged Mr. Arredondo to safety. He suffered second- and third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body.
“I went to my son’s funeral on a stretcher,” he said.
After nearly 10 months of healing, including several in the hospital, Mr. Arredondo became a full-time war protester, quitting work as a handyman to remind people across the country of the human price of war.
His son was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart. But no commendation will fill the void he left behind, Mr. Arredondo said.
“Every day we have G.I.’s being killed, and people don’t really care enough or do enough to protest about how the war is going,” Mr. Arredondo said yesterday. “Some people say I’m dishonoring my son by doing this, but this is my pain, my loss.”
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesFORTY WINKS At Yelo in New York, Marilyne Neuchat indulges in a nap while Kendall Eaton gives her a hand reflexology treatment.
Lars Klove for The New York TimesPILLOW TALK There are now so many products dedicated to inducing sleep that an insomniac might try counting them instead of sheep, including body washes, balms, mists and aromatic roll-ons to apply to pulse points.
Skin DeepHey, Sleepy, Want to Buy a Good Nap?
ALEXIUS OTTO, a junior at Hunter College in Manhattan, has a perfectly good bed in his apartment in the East Village. But twice over the last month he has paid to take short snoozes at Yelo, a new salon on West 57th Street that sells anxious New Yorkers the promise of a brief but cocooning sleep.
Yelo consists of seven private chambers that can be rented for 20- to 40-minute naps. Each hexagonal pod has a beige leather recliner, dimmed lighting, a soporific soundtrack and a blanket of Nepalese cashmere. Clients may also book reflexology treatments, designed to lull the body to sleep, for their hands or feet starting at $65.
On a recent Thursday, Mr. Otto lounged on a bench in Yelo’s lobby, waiting for a sleeping pod to become available. He was hoping that a nap in a cubicle far from the distractions of home would help balance his chaotic college life. He often forgoes sleep in favor of studying, meeting friends and looking for part-time work, he said.
“I’m going out tonight to meet someone about a job,” said Mr. Otto, who was visiting a friend nearby and had dropped in for a 20-minute nap. Cost: $12. “The nap will help refocus me.”
Sleep is the new bottled water. Although it can be had free, it is increasingly being marketed as an upscale amenity. Nationwide, sales of prescription sleeping medications reached about $3 billion in the first nine months of last year, according to IMS Health, a healthcare research firm. That does not include the more than $20 billion spent on nocturnal accouterments like pillowtop mattresses, adjustable beds, hypoallergenic pillows, white-noise machines and monogrammed cashmere pajamas.
And now, at a time when spas are treating everything from acne to smoking addiction, sleep is becoming a province of the wellness industry. Spa Finder, a company that compiles spa directories and publishes Luxury Spa Finder magazine, is forecasting sleep as a top spa trend for 2007.
“More clients are talking about it and more spas are offering treatments,” said Susie Ellis, the president of Spa Finder. “We are starting to see some spas doing sleep medicine or sleep education programs while others are creating sleep environments with enhanced bedding and wake-up systems that don’t involve loud alarm clocks.”
But do Americans truly need more sleep? An often-quoted estimate from the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research of the National Institutes of Health said that up to 70 million Americans — almost one out of three adults — have some kind of sleep problem.
But the Center for the Advancement of Health, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates using science as a basis for making health decisions, has criticized the statistic in its newsletter, saying that it is based more on extrapolation than on hard epidemiological data.
Jessie Gruman, the president of the center, likened the occasional sleepless night to adolescence, menopause and balding, calling them all “normal human conditions that have become medicalized.”
“Now when people can’t sleep for a couple of nights, they think they are part of a national sleep epidemic and there should be something to fix it,” Ms. Gruman said. “You can buy sexual arousal, a new shape for your face, a skinnier silhouette, so why shouldn’t you be able to buy sleep?”
According to TNS Media Intelligence, pharmaceutical companies spent almost $362 million in the first nine months of last year on advertisements for the most popular sleeping pills, marketing the idea that interrupted sleep or the lack of instantaneous sleep are alarming conditions that require intervention.
Sleep is the top concern among her clientele of hypercompetitive stockbrokers, time-pressed mothers and overworked students, said Abby Fazio, the chief pharmacist and an owner of New London Pharmacy on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea.
“The No. 1 question I get is: ‘How can I fall asleep without a prescription?’ ” said Ms. Fazio, who counsels clients in a small frosted-glass room behind shelves stocked with homeopathic remedies. “Back when I started working here as a student in the 1970s, only the elderly were on sleeping aids, but now it’s everybody ages 25 to 40.”
There are no end of products to treat self-diagnosed sleep problems. Ms. Fazio recommends nonprescription melatonin pills as well as herbal items that contain lavender or chamomile and are meant to induce calm before bedtime, leading to a more restful sleep, she said.
Well-known cosmetics and toiletry brands have also starting selling sleep. Dove has introduced Calming Night, a line of honey-infused products like soap and body wash. And Boots, the brand from the British chemist that Target sells, has created Sleep, an aromatherapy line that includes a lavender bath milk and a balm to be rubbed on the hands or temples.
But such products may provide more of a Proustian experience than quantifiably improved sleep.
“If your grandmother used lavender and you associate it with feeling safe, calm, loved and ready to go to sleep, then a lavender product will be fantastic for you,” said Sandra Cox, a formulation scientist at Boots. “But proving how the essential oils work on the brain is very difficult to do in clinical studies.”
Spas, too, have found a growing market.
Canyon Ranch was a pioneer in the field, introducing a sleep program in 1995. The company’s spas in Tucson and Lenox, Mass., offer work-ups with a doctor to determine the cause of sleep disturbances. Treatments include therapy to change sleep patterns, and breathing, meditation or visualization exercises to help reduce anxiety. The spas also offer treatments like aromatherapy massages.
“Counting sheep works for some people, lavender works for other people, and other people respond to breathing techniques,” said Dr. Karen Koffler, a specialist in integrative medicine who is the medical director at Canyon Ranch Living, Miami Beach, a residential property scheduled to open later this year. “The thing is to find the method that works for you.”
Other spas concentrate on nighttime pampering.
Lake Austin Spa Resort, for example, offers a “Texas Starry Night” treatment, an evening massage using lavender oil. Tracy York, the general manager, said the spa is developing a facial to be called “Night Night” and is considering issuing clients chamomile teabags to put over their eyes before sleep or aromatherapy “sleep patches” for the skin.
And now, for urbanites unable to travel to a remote lakeside spa for beauty sleep, there is the Yelo salon in Midtown where a reflexology treatment for the hands followed by a 20-minute nap costs $77.
Just don’t call it a sleep spa.
“It’s a corporate wellness center,” said Nicolas Ronco, the entrepreneur who opened Yelo in early January. “For people who are overstressed and overworked, for lawyers or brokers who abuse themselves, a power nap is a way to recharge naturally without caffeine.”
Yelo is designed for the harried, BlackBerry-toting, Bluetooth-connected executive in search of high-tech hibernation. It is not the first place where an urban animal can cuddle up and doze off. In Manhattan, a sleep salon called MetroNaps, with chairs encased in spherical hoods, opened in the Empire State Building in 2004, followed by a second location downtown. Some offices also provide places for employees to doze off.
On Yelo’s Web site, heloyelo.com, and in its salon window, a display charts the minutes until the next “YeloCab” (napping booth) is available. Clients pay for a time slot and are then escorted to a private pod for a relaxation treatment or a quick nap.
Inside the pods, clients can electronically adjust the angle of the leather recliners; Mr. Ronco recommended raising the leg rest above the head to slow one’s heart rate. When time runs out, ceiling lights gradually brighten, an awakening prompt meant to mimic dawn.
Mr. Ronco predicted that Yelo would appeal to commuters who want to stay in Manhattan for a late dinner and to club-goers seeking respite before a night out.
“I see 25 Yelo centers in New York, and then in every crazy low-quality-of-life city where people lack space,” Mr. Ronco said. “I see this in airports, malls, corporate offices and train stations.”
But are naps the best way for the sleep-challenged to catch up?
Dr. William C. Dement, the founder of the Stanford University sleep research center, thinks so, recommending them as a way to treat sleep deprivation, according to his book “The Promise of Sleep.”
Dr. Gerard T. Lombardo, the director of the sleep center at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, however, counsels against naps because they may disrupt the normal nighttime sleep cycle. Daytime exercise would be a better way to improve sleep, he said.
Dr. Koffler of Canyon Ranch cautioned that people beset by chronic sleep problems should see a doctor. For those who have the occasional sleepless night and are seeking relaxation, though, a salon nap or a massage could be soothing, she said.
“If it allows someone to move from a busy outer life to a calm inner one, I’m all for it,” Dr. Koffler said.
Ms. Gruman of the Center for the Advancement of Health said the idea of paying for a nap amounts to “cognitive dissonance.”
“I can’t believe people think there is magic in the pods or the cashmere blanket,” Ms. Gruman said. “But maybe they think they are going to get better sleep if they spend a lot of money.”
