HEADLINE: W.V. is probing forensics death 

WEST VALLEY CITY -- Investigators are hoping fingerprints will help them determine how a nationally renowned forensics expert was accidentally shot and killed in a crime lab.

Scott Spjut, the director of forensics for the West Valley City Police Department and an expert in the field of fingerprints, died Thursday after a semi-automatic rifle he was processing accidentally discharged and struck him in the chest.

Detectives from West Valley and the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office want to examine the gun to determine how Spjut, 38, handled the rifle and how it may have gone off.

Normally, all firearms are required to be unloaded before they are booked into evidence. But this particular investigation apparently required Spjut to process the weapon while it was loaded, said West Valley Assistant Chief Craig Gibson. 

SECTION: State and Regional 

HEADLINE: Standards commission seeks decertification for seven law officers 

DATELINE: CAMDEN, Ark. 

The state panel that credentials law officers is proceeding with decertification of seven people accused of offenses that range from theft to lifting pornography from an evidence room. 

Members of the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards and Training meeting in Camden on Thursday agreed to continue with the actions against the officers, who have the option to ask for a hearing to fight the hearing. 

The panel is considering the following cases, with information from reports submitted to the commission: 

-Jason Lee Creasey, a former Benton police officer, allegedly tested positive for marijuana. 

-Richard Roy Fisher, a former employee of the Perry County Sheriff's Department, allegedly took home, watched and copied explicit sexual videotapes that were in evidence. 

-Tonya Huhn, a former employee of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Department, allegedly made harassing telephone calls to a woman while the woman was hospitalized and allegedly tested positive for drugs. 

-Milton L. Lloyd, a worker with the Arkansas State Hospital for 25 years, for allegedly abusing a patient. Board members were told Lloyd had only two hours of training during his years in service. 

-Jason K. Riley, a former University of Central Arkansas Police Department police officer, allegedly exposed himself to the janitorial staff while on duty. 

-Debbie A. Rushin, who resigned from the Jacksonville police after 10 years until September 2002, allegedly took $6,122.50 from the department's property room. 

-David Shane Thiele, former Monticello police officer, is accused of instigating an incident, drinking in a public parking lot and causing a disturbance while off duty. 

HEADLINE: Former Russell deputy faces weapons charge

ABINGDON - A former Russell County sheriff's deputy was arrested this week after federal agents seized from his home more than 50 guns and ammunition along with narcotics believed to have been taken from the sheriff's office evidence room.

Stephen Grayson Bundy, 34, of Lebanon was arrested Tuesday evening after federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and investigators from the Russell and Washington County sheriff's offices executed a federal search warrant at his home.

Bundy is charged with one count of possession of a firearm not registered under the National Firearms and Registration and Transfer record: a Cobray Street Sweeper drum-fed automatic 12-gauge shotgun.

Russell Chief Deputy Steve Dye said Bundy was dismissed from the department after his arrest. He had worked in the county jail. 

HEADLINE: Off Limits High in the sky 

The Denver Police Department had its biggest dope bust ever last week, recovering 763 pounds of pot. For now, it's stashed in the DPD's evidence room -- but once the case is adjudicated, it'll be tagged for burning at Denver International Airport. 

Yes, the incinerator is back in business after that unfortunate little problem last July, when incinerator operator Stephen Martinez was arrested for taking cocaine, marijuana and money from the oven. After that, airport officials stopped all drug-related burning while they reassessed their policies. 

"In the past, some agencies would come in, throw in the drugs, start the fire, get it burning and then leave," says Dan Melfi, DIA's assistant marketing director. "A lot of times after the police would leave, a city employee would come and turn off the fire and take what wasn't burned." 
Under DIA's new rules, city employees will never handle the contraband (which should spare them the thirty months in federal prison that Martinez was sentenced to on January 17). Instead, a DPD officer and a city employee will go into the incineration room, weigh the drugs, and log the amount. The drugs will then be placed in the burner, the fire started and the door sealed. "If, for some reason, that door is opened while the temperature is at a certain level, then an alarm is signaled in maintenance control," Melfi says. "We now have redundant systems." 

Even so, police will have to stick around until their stash is completely crisp. But don't worry that Denver's finest might get a contact high: The incinerator has a charcoal baffle to prevent exhaust from dissipating into the air. "We're restricted under environmental laws," Melfi says. "We don't have everybody getting nose hits off of it." 

He laughs, then adds, "Actually, that's why all the employees here are so happy." 
The end is near: The Apocalypse is upon us. And we have Kenn A. Solomon, better known as Nuggets mascot Rocky, to thank. 

In a special Martin Luther King Day edition of Lou Dobbs Moneyline, the conservative commentator reported on the decline of American values, focusing on the profanitization of language (with all the expletives bleeped, of course), the dysfunction of television families (they're not real, Lou), and the lack of sportsmanship in sports. 

"The crime of choice for most top athletes these days appears to be wife or girlfriend beating," said CNN correspondent Casey Wian, opening the sports segment. "We counted 32 cases of domestic violence against major college or pro athletes in just the past year. Even the mascot of the Denver Nuggets was jailed following a domestic dispute." 

Solomon had the dubious honor of being tagged a wife-beater (although he has not been convicted) on national television alongside four other dubious sports entities: Dallas Cowboy Dwayne Goodrich, who killed two men in a hit-and-run accident; the entirety of the Portland Trailblazers, who are being boycotted because of their "jailblazing" activities; New Jersey Net Jayson Williams, who police allege shot his limo driver; and New York Knicks Latrell Sprewell, who has offenses too numerous to note. This was all shocking evidence that sports figures commit crimes, proving Dobbs's assertion that America may be principly challenged and its people fundamentally, fatally flawed. 

Dobbs and Wian should watch the Nuggets dancers -- there's the real crime.King for a day: This year's Martin Luther King Jr. Marade was the first to gather around Ed Dwight's million-dollar sculpture, which places the civil rights leader on top of a three-layer pedestal bearing bronze representations of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks. That sculpture replaced "King and Companion," a perfectly good -- if artistically vilified -- statue of MLK and fourteen-year-old civil rights martyr Emmett Till that stood in City Park for three decades. After first offering the spare statue -- now described as "a beautiful sculpture that has graced the city for so many years" -- to local schools, the city finally donated "King and Companion" to the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Commission and Cultural Center in Pueblo.  The center built a new base for the piece, and Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, Wilma (who pushed through Colorado's MLK day holiday when she was in the Colorado Legislature), went down for the unveiling in August. 

"He looks pretty nice down there," says Cara Roberts, director of the mayor's Office of Art, Culture and Film. 

Nicer there than here. 

HEADLINE: Investigators ask Deters about missing money 

Hamilton County sheriff's investigators have questioned Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters about money missing from a drug forfeiture fund he oversaw when he was county prosecutor in 1998.

The questions arose three weeks ago during a criminal investigation into a theft from the prosecutor's evidence room in 1998. 

Mr. Deters said sheriff's deputies wanted to know whether a $1,300 check from the drug forfeiture fund was used to cover the loss.

Authorities apparently want to know if there was an attempt to conceal the theft, Mr. Deters said.

"Some people have blown it into a scheme that I am trying to cover something up," Mr. Deters said. "To people who want to make that accusation, I seriously question their motivations."

The investigation targets a former investigator suspected of stealing $2,700 from the prosecutor's office. No charges have been filed.

Mr. Deters said deputies specifically asked if he knew about a check written by Jim Harper, then head of the civil division, and now Mr. Deters' deputy treasurer. Mr. Deters said deputies also questioned Mr. Harper about the check. Mr. Harper could not be reached for comment.

The $1,300 check was drawn from the drug forfeiture fund. Under Ohio law, law enforcement agencies are allowed to take cash or property connected to illegal drug sales. Mr. Deters said he "vaguely" remembers the check from the drug forfeiture fund as well as the missing money from the property room. But he said he doesn't recall whether there was a connection between the two events.

"I assumed people were continuing to look into (the missing money)," he said. The check was written in December 1998. Mr. Deters left the prosecutor's office in 1999 after being elected state treasurer in November 1998.

HEADLINE: POWER POLITICS IN PLUM 

Rough and tumble politics has been a way of life in Plum since the days when late Mayor Tony O'Block was the unchallenged kingpin of the borough.

But nothing in Plum's history rivals the intrigue there since the power on council shifted last January. That's when Mayor John Schmeck, a brash second-term Plum mayor, picked up the political support he had been lacking in his first term.

Since then, the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI and the state police have gone into Plum to try to resolve issues of free speech, missing marijuana and a police sergeant charged by state police with taking a gun from the Plum police evidence room.

The next act was supposed to begin Tuesday, when suspended Plum police Sgt. Andrew McNelis was to go on trial before Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning on a charge related to a gun that disappeared from the police evidence room.  But there's a new development.

District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. wrote to state police Jan. 16 asking them to refer the prosecution of McNelis to the U.S. attorney's office because the case involved a missing firearm that was sent through the mail.

"It is the policy of this office that when appropriate, firearms violations are to be prosecuted on the federal level," Zappala said through his spokesman, Mike Manko.

McNelis' attorney, Mike DeRiso, said he expected prosecutors to dismiss the receiving stolen property charge. He contends the case against McNelis is weak.

It is not known whether federal authorities will try to prosecute McNelis on mail fraud statutes.

The FBI already is investigating marijuana missing from the Plum police department's evidence room, the same place from which the gun in the McNelis case, and a second gun, disappeared.