HOSPITAL REPORT GIVES RCH A ‘C’
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April 19 2013 www.newwestnewsleader.com
People who believe the messages in attack ads shouldn’t be allowed to vote, says Richard Dal Monte. see page A6
Cold case a real New West thriller Local authors aim to solve decades-old murder Mario Bartel
photo@newwestnewsleader.com
contriButed photo
Kelly Sartorius of New Westminster celebrates finishing the Boston Marathon on Monday with her husband Andy. A short while later they were in a cab headed back to their hotel with two explosions ripped through the area causing the deaths of three people and wounding more than 170.
Fast run kept woman from harm’s way Grant Granger
ggranger@newwestnewsleader.com
New Westminster’s Kelly Sartorius rose to the challenge of becoming the first Canadian with multiple sclerosis to qualify for the Boston Marathon. After Monday’s tragic events, she won’t be going back. Sartorius, 39, is fortunate she’s fast. The Royal Columbian Hospital dietitian breezed through the 42-km course through Beantown and its suburbs on Monday in three hours, 16 minutes and 14 seconds. That put her in the top 5,000 overall
and 590th among women, which is pretty darn good for anyone, let alone someone with MS. She crossed the finish line about a half hour before the big bangs heard round the world went off. She waded her way through a maze of corridors to get her medal, food, drink, a blanket to keep her warm and to find her husband Andy and his father. After snapping a few pictures, they hopped in a cab and headed back to their hotel along the Charles River about five or six blocks away. That’s when the bombs at the
finish line went off. They were too exhausted and weary to hear the explosions, though. Fearing her legs would seize up if she sat down they decided to rent some bicycles and explore instead of going up to their rooms. By then chaos had erupted. Sirens were blaring all over the place. Frightened people on cellphones were crying and screaming saying there was a bomb. “It’s very unnerving, it’s kind of a shellshocked feeling to it because it was all hearsay,” said Sartorius on Wednesday after returning to New
Westminster. Their hotel was on lockdown with police all over it. Eventually they holed up in a little doughnut shop that seemed benign and innocuous enough not to be a potential target. “It was very surreal. We just didn’t know where a safe place was,” said Sartorius. They didn’t return to their hotel until about 7:30 p.m., about four and a half hours after the explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 170 had gone off.
JUDY DARCY for New Westminster
Change for the better, one praCtiCal step at a time
Please see possiBly, A3
www.judydarcy.ca 604-517-8400 Authorized by Financial Agent Cheryl Greenhalgh, 604-517-8400
When Dr. Robert MacLauchlan and his wife Margaret were found shot dead in their Fifth Street bungalow on March 21, 1966, it was New Westminster’s first murder in 32 years. It’s still unsolved. A pair of local writers, Rod Drown and Ken McIntosh, have spent two years researching the execution-style killings. The story they’ve unraveled so far reads like a mashup of F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Elmore Leonard. Its tendrils wind deep into New West’s history, old Hollywood and the opium dens of Shanghai. It is, says Drown, “like putting a jigsaw puzzle together.” One with many tragic, dark, sordid pieces, and some still missing. MacLauchlan was the son of a wellrespected physician in Calgary. After graduating with a gold medal from McGill medical school in 1919 he “charmed and philandered his way through San Francisco, 1930s Shanghai and other exotic settlements of the French overseas community,” says McIntosh. Please see story, A3