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• June 14, 2011 50¢
Serving Central Oregon since 1903 www.bendbulletin.com
Diocese sued in 2 abuse cases
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A window onto Bend
One suit claims Bend church was negligent
In 1909, Marjorie Smith was the first baby born
By Nick Grube The Bulletin
in Bend’s first hospital • Later in life, the former
Two lawsuits, arising from an incident involving sexual abuse and a separate allegation, have been lodged against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baker. In total, the suits seek nearly $6 million in damages from the diocese, which oversees parishes throughout Central, Northern, Eastern and Southern Oregon, including those in Bend, Redmond and surrounding areas. Both suits have been filed in Deschutes County Circuit Court. One comes from an unidentified 49-year-old Wasco man, who claims that a priest molested him when he was 15. The priest, the suit alleges, visited him while he was in the hospital recovering from a high school football injury. The other suit involves a 2009 inci-
schoolteacher enjoyed watching the city pass by from her apartment on Wall Street • And before she died last year, Smith willed that apartment — where she’d lived nearly her entire life — and the belongings inside to historical groups.
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Legislative boundaries signed into law for 2013
dent at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Bend. Two years ago, the suit alleges, a 12-year-old boy sexually assaulted twin girls, who were 5 years old at the time. It claims the church was negligent in supervising the children, all of whom were placed in the church’s child care. The lawsuit also alleges that church and diocese officials, after learning about the abuse, essentially told the twins’ parents that they should attend services at a new church. The boy has since pleaded guilty to charges related to the crime. The diocese directed all questions about the lawsuits to its attorney, Gregory Lynch, of Miller Nash LLP in Bend. Lynch filed a response to the negligence complaint involving the twins that denied the allegations. See Diocese / A4
Bend names its finalists for police chief
GATEWAY TO FUN — OPEN!
By Lauren Dake The Bulletin
By Nick Grube
SALEM — As Oregon lawmakers congratulated one another Monday for negotiating a plan to redraw legislative boundaries, the governor signed their work into law. “I realized over the weekend that had we taken all the bets from the beginning of the session from lobbyists who had given us 100-to-1 odds of us getting this done, we would have had enough to balance the budget,” said Rep. Chris Garrett, D-Lake Oswego, who served on the four-person negotiating team that redrew the boundaries. “I’m sorry we didn’t get that done, but I’m incredibly proud to be here.” Once every decade, based on Census numbers, the Legislature takes a crack at creating new districts. The process is highly political. The agreement by lawmakers this session marks the first time in decades the two parties could agree on a plan. The new lines officially become law in January of 2013, and they will have meaning for candidates seeking legislative office in 2012. Sen. Chris Telfer, R-Bend, who was also on the negotiating team, called the agreement a “thoughtful compromise.” See Boundaries / A5
The Bulletin
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
Devin Settles, an equipment operator with the Deschutes County Road Department, unlocks the gate on the Cascade Lakes Highway near Mt. Bachelor on Monday, opening the highway for the season. See Well Shot! on Page C1 for reader-submitted photos of the Cascade Lakes.
With 1.2 billion people, India Debt collectors’ plea: still seeks a good hangman Hey, we’re people, too By Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar New York Times News Service
Correction In a religion brief that appeared Saturday, June 11, on Page A4, the day for a speech by Elaine Sanchez at the First Presbyterian Church in Bend was incorrect. Sanchez’s free presentation, “So God … What are WE Going to Do Today?” is on Thursday at 7 p.m. The Bulletin regrets the error.
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MEERUT, India — India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman. Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India’s president unexpectedly rejected a last-chance mercy petition from a convicted murderer in
the Himalayan state of Assam. Prison officials, compelled to act, issued a call for a hangman. No one answered. Not initially. The nation’s handful of known hangmen had either died, retired or disappeared. The situation was not too surprising, given the ambivalence within the Indian criminal justice system about executions. Capital punishment was codified during British rule, with hanging as the chosen method, but recent decades of litigating and legislating limited the actual practice to “the rarest of rare cases.” See Hangman / A4
The Bulletin An Independent Newspaper
Vol. 108, No. 165, 40 pages, 7 sections
By Andrew Martin New York Times News Service
EDINA, Minn. — As a longtime debt collector, Lesllie Rogers has been routinely insulted, pummeled with obscenities, crudely propositioned and threatened with violence by the people she calls. “They want you to feel as small and insignificant as possible,” said Rogers, who works for a collection agency in Rochester, Minn. “The guy who sits across from me just was threatened with getting his legs and arms cut off.” Debt collectors like Rogers are well aware that they are not a sympathetic lot. But now they are saying enough is enough. See Collectors / A5
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On Monday, the city of Bend named the five people it will interview next week to replace retiring Police Chief Sandi Baxter. Baxter, whom City Manager Eric King appointed to the top job in 2008, is retiring after more than 30 years with the police department. She retired in 2007, but was lured back just seven months later Inside to take over • See the as chief. candidates, None of Page A4 the candidates in the running for her position work for the Bend Police Department, and all of them are from either California or Washington. “This is the first time in 30 years that we have gone outside of the police department to look for a police chief,” Assistant Human Resources Manager Kurt Chapman said. “There were no internal candidates, and there were no candidates in the 22 (qualified applicants) that were from the Central Oregon area.” Three of the five candidates are current city police chiefs, including John Foster, of Grass Valley, Calif., Garr Nielsen, of Eureka, Calif., and Jeffry Sale, of Cheney, Wash. According to the city, Nielsen is a former Multnomah County Sheriff’s captain, and Sale is a former Washington State Patrol lieutenant. The other two candidates are Michael Davies, who is a retired police chief from Brentwood, Calif., and George Delgado, a commander from the Vancouver, Wash., Police Department. See Police / A4
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GOP DEBATE: 7 candidates reserve most barbs for Obama, Page A3