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Couple’s fading health preceded shooting death Husband charged with wife’s murder ‘the nicest, sweetest man’ By Stephen Montemayor smontemayor@ljworld.com
There is a stillness to the house at 1610 West Second Terrace in northeast Lawrence. Weeds and brush line the strip where the curb meets the street out front, garden tools rest untouched along the home’s tan siding and dead leaves cover the yard. An olive Toyota sedan with handicap plates is the
only vehicle outside the home now, but on a cold, rainy morning last week, public safety vehicles swarmed in response to a reported shooting. Police activity — crime scene examination, interviews with residents — filled a neighborhood of people who largely keep to themselves but would answer their doors to help an aging neighbor who needed help caring for his ailing wife. Larry L. Hopkins now
sits in Douglas County Jail awaiting his next court appearance. He’s charged with first-degree murder following Tuesday’s shooting death of his 61-year-old wife, Margaret E. Hopkins. Police allege that Larry shot Margaret because of her ongoing health problems. Meanwhile, family and neighbors this week told the story of a couple whose failing health often proved too much for them to manage alone.
On Friday, one of Margaret’s few surviving family members, sister-in-law Theresa Benson, planned to drive from her home in Overland Park to Lawrence to begin making funeral arrangements. “I’m still trying to process it all,” Benson said. “It was very shocking. As we all age we all have our issues, but we just try to take care of each other.”
Mike Yoder/Journal-World Photo
Wedding photograph of Margaret and Larry Hopkins, November Please see SHOOTING, page 7A 1989.
JAYHAWK worship
KU task force to consider same-sex benefits
Fans show off crimson and blue pride in their homes By Sara Shepherd
By Ben Unglesbee
bunglesbee@ljworld.com
Richard Gwin/Journal-World Photos
PAT SULLIVAN’S JAYHAWK MEMORABILIA fills his downstairs recreation room, bar and even a bathroom. He has memorabilia from a number of KU sports, and lots of tickets to help him remember big games. ABOVE LEFT: A detail of one wall in the basement of Pat Sullivan’s west Lawrence home. This is only a sliver of the KU memorabilia he has on display. ABOVE RIGHT: Marshall and Beth Kelley’s KU room includes Marshall’s KU letter jacket (he attended KU on a gymnastics scholarship) and a signed jersey Tyrel Reed wore at a charity scrimmage.
A look inside 3 of Lawrence’s shrines to KU
A
t one time, you might have said Pat Sullivan’s basement was “decorated” with Kansas University memorabilia. But in the six years since he moved into his west Lawrence home, things have snowballed beyond decoration. Way beyond. “Now,” Sullivan said, “it’s
MORE ONLINE See a photo gallery of KU shrines featured in this story and submitted by readers at LJWorld.com. more of a jigsaw puzzle.” Starting near the top of the stairs, ticket stubs, framed T-shirts, vintage programs, photographs, newspaper collages, signed
footballs and basketballs, foam fingers, pennants and more cover nearly every square foot of the recreation room, bar and even an adjoining bathroom.
Sullivan is one of those KU fans who wears his Jayhawk pride on his walls — and he’s far from the only one. The Journal-World last week visited Sullivan’s and two other Lawrence fans’ “KU rooms” and received photos from more than a dozen others. For a peek inside three Lawrence homes, turn to page 6A.
Sparked by a rapidly changing social and legal landscape, a Kansas University Senate task force soon will look into the possibility of offering benefits to same-sex and domestic partners of KU employees. At issue is a concern for equal rights among employees as well as a desire to make the university more competitive in hiring and retaining faculty and staff. The group, established in October by the Senate, represents a second effort to extend benefits such as health insurance to domestic partners of employees. A previous similar task force failed to get action from university administration on most KANSAS of the issues it raised. UNIVERSITY That task force, formed in 2009, asked KU administration to extend full benefits to all domestic partners of employees. Not to do so was a violation of the university’s own anti-discrimination policies, the group concluded. The group’s members wrote that “married employees receive a wide range of benefits that are not available to employees with domestic partners,” which creates a “meaningful financial loss to same-sex or unmarried different-sex couples” — a situation that “discriminates against KU faculty and employees with domestic partners.”
Options unclear Since then, the Kansas Board of Regents made sick and bereavement leave available for those in a committed relationship. But some of the primary compensatory benefits of working at the university remain unavailable to same-sex and Please see BENEFITS, page 2A
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Tribe’s vision 5C, 5D 1B-9B 2B, 6C, 5D
In a letter addressed to Kansans, the chief of the Delaware Tribe indicated that pursuing a casino in Kansas is a possibility but that the tribe has a broader vision of providing services to Native Americans. Page 3A
Vol.155/No.314 32 pages