Hostages taken at N.Y. school Fired teacher's aide kills self after releasing last of students By PAT MILTON Associated Press Writer BRENTWOOD, N.Y. A fired teacher’s aide who blamed students for “messing up my career,” shot a student and a principal and held sttident hostages for 9M> hours at a junior high school yesterday before releasing the pupils and fatally shooting himself. The gunman, 24-year-old Robert 0. Wickes, shot himself in the right temple as his lone remaining hostage, a boy, looked on, authorities said. He died at 11:41 p.m., Suffolk County police said. Dressed in Army fatigues and carrying a .22-caliber rifle, Wickes invaded Room 201 at East Junior High on Long Island about 12:45 p.m. Wickes ordered a message read on a local radio station in which he threatened to “paint the road with carnage,” and said “You dirty swine. You turned your back so now I reciprocated, you see.” Wickes shot hiihself just after a local radio station met his request to play the song “Fooling Yourself” by Styx and to dedicate it to Wickes’ brother and parents. Dilworth said police became pessimistic when they learned of the song’s lyrics, which spoke of “killing yourself.” Both shooting victims were taken to Southside Hospital, where the boy was reported in stable condition and the principal was treated and released. Police theorized that Wickes was trying to get revenge after being fired from his job May 5 for getting into an altercation with Louis Borgos, the 15-year-old student he wounded yesterday. School spokesman Jerry Steiner said he did not know what that fight was about. Wickes promised to release one student every time his message was read over the air and every time a song he requested was played on the air. “Penny Lane” by the Beatles, “Angie” by the Rolling Stones and “Lonely People” by America were played at his request. Parents rushed to the two-story red brick school as police negotiated with the gunman. Students who had been evacuated stood outside in a driving rain as the ordeal dragged on. None of the hostage students were immediately identified. As they were . released during the evening, they got into police cars with their families and were driven away. Suffolk County police spokesman William McKeon said when Wickes entered, he ordered the teacher to leave the room, then shoved her out of the room when she ran to an intercom to summon help. Plant adjacent to Drake drawing new attention By BRIAN MAGEE and S.A. MILLER Collegian Staff Writers While responsibility for much of the toxic contamination found at Lock Haven has been directed toward Drake Chemical Co., more interest may soon be focused on the larger American Color and Chemical Co., adjacent to Drake. A recent report prepared for the Environmental Protection Agency states, “The source of the present contamination (leachate stream) leaving the site is either Drake Chemical Co., the American Color and Chemical Co., or both.” . The report, prepared for the EPA by Roy F. Weston Inc. of West Chester, Chester County, in December and Kenneth R• Reeher the daily Wilfred Mercado, 15, of Bay Shore, said Wickes then ordered everyone on the floor and told the class: “I’m not leaving here alive. You kids messed up my career." Mercado said that when principal Stephen Howland came to the room and looked in through the door, Wickes fired his rifle, hitting Howland in the cheek. East Junior High School Principal Paul S. Howland has his head bandaged as he is taken from an ambulance at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore on New York’s Long Island yesterday afternoon. January, also states that the groundwater flows from AC&C toward Drake, so some contaminants found in Drake’s groundwater may have originated at AC&C. Frank Furl, spokesman for Citizens and Laborers for Environmental Action Now and a former Drake employee, said of the 1982 emergency cleanup at Drake: “(The EPA) went in to clean up one site and found another.” Furl said a former AC&C employee told him that the contamination problem at the plant may be 100 times worse than at Drake. The Weston report listed several compounds found in AC&C wells at concentrations greater than one milligram per liter, including “1,2 dichlorobenzene,” which is considered toxic at concentrations greater than 0.002 milligrams per liter. It harms the liver and State needs more funding for education, official says By ALECIA SWASY Collegian Staff Writer HARRISBURG If higher education does not receive additional funding, Pennsylvania may never regain its place as the “industrial might of the East,” said the executive director of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. Kenneth R. Reeher said the state is already in trouble because young people and jobs are moving to other states. “I don’t know if we can recover. But I know without higher education we won’t,” he said. The assets of Pennsylvania in the past have been natural, Reeher said. “But if we don’t develop the brainpower we’re Collegian School Shooting The principal and a 15-year-old boy were shot yesterday at a junior, high school in Brentwood, N.Y. The man who tired the shots held 18 hostages in a second-floor classroom, police said. jr v j m ■ 1 Jr* . *C' V ‘v- i V* . ,yt 1 i^l e- *l3 *VK' V ; 'jo. ,-*jr.vn« kidneys, the report said. • Also found in the AC&C groundwater was chlorobenzene, which exists at the site in concentrations greater than 50 times its maximum allowable concentration of 0.02 milligrams per liter. This chemical is a central nervous system depressant and has been shown to cause degeneration of liver and kidney tissue, the report said. The report said it is reasonable to predict that these and other contaminants found at AC&C “may be in the groundwater on the Drake site at.similar levels.” Because both plants made similar chemicals and made chemicals for use by the other, pinpointing the source of pollutants is difficult. Until recently, AC&C employed about 400 workers, compared to Drake’s 40. The Drake plant has closed, but in trouble.” Higher education is experiencing a lot of trouble at the graduate level, he said. The fact that state grants have been available to undergraduates for 17 years, while none are available to graduate students illustrates the problem, Reeher said. “If you don’t put money into facilities and people, how do you compete with governments like Japan?” he said. Previously, foreign students had been trained in this country and then stayed to work in American industries, he said. “Now they’re bringing more of them in, training them more thoroughly, and they are going back home and competing with us.” Please see OFFICIAL, Page 4. Need for activities fee investigated by ASA By CHRISTINE M. MURRAY Collegian Staff Writer A student activities fee is definitely needed at the University and members of the Associated Student Activities budget committee are investigating the feasibility of implementing such a fee, the chairman of the committee said yesterday. Although he would like the fee, possibly $lO a semester, to be implemented this fall, John Boland said that is not possible because of the paperwork involved. Fall Semester 1984 would be a likely starting date if the University, decides to charge the fee, he said. Boland stressed the fee is only in the discussion and developing stages and no one has drawn up any type of formal proposal for the administration to consider. The activities fee is needed because not all the University money that ASA must have to allocate to student groups is guaranteed, Boland said. ASA receives $119,000 for the 130 student groups that qualify for funding, ’butthose groups need $250,000 to operate successfully. ASA usually receives the remainder of the $250,000 from the University’? general funds budget through the Office of the Provost. However, the University cannot ensure that ASA will always get the additional funds, Boland said, noting that ASA received Revenue sharing will help and confuse local officials Editor’s Note: This is the last of a two-part series examining the future of the federal revenue sharing program and its impact on Centre County municipalities. By TONY PHYRILLAS Collegian Staff Writer While the federal revenue sharing program might be the savior of many local governments, it could also become the bane of local officials trying to determine local taxing policies. The program is geared toward encouraging local governments to spend money on local services and a municipality is often penalized for reducing taxes or keeping taxes the same. A good example of what can happen is Bellefonte, where the Bellefonte Municipal Council’s attempt to hold the line on taxes for borough residents ran into problems with the revenue sharing program. In 1979, the council kept taxes in Bellefonte the same and the following year, the council raised taxes by just 1 mill. But many of the other municipalities in Tuesday, May 17, 1983 Vol. 83, No. 179 24 pages University Park, Pa. 16802 Published by students of The Pennsylvania State University AC&C maintains a skeleton crew of eight workers for routine maintenance and policing, according to an AC&C employee who refused to be identified. The employee said he did not want to reveal any plans for the plant, adding that only corporate sources can reveal future plans. However, no corporate sources were available when The Daily Collegian tried to reach them. Decisions on Superfund financing are site-specific, so it is not yet clear whether AC&C would be responsible for funding such a cleanup, said Joel Donovan, EPA public information officer. Federal Superfund money is used to clean up sites where those responsible are unknown, or if those responsible are unable to finance a cleanup. Drake, which declared bankruptcy in January 1982, relied on Superfund money for last year’s emergency cleanup. $117,000 instead of $119,000 this year because of budget cuts. ASA received $63,000 from the provost this year but it will need $115,000 to $120,000 next year, in addition to the allocation from the University, Boland said. Last year, ASA ran out of the $250,000 because it had to service 15 additional groups than the year before, he said. Boland said he is not sure how much the fee would be or what it would cover, because in addition to ASA, money must be allocated to intramural sports, the University Concert Committee and the Artists Series. Boland, Undergraduate Student Government President Emil Parvensky and Vice President for Student Affairs Raymond O. Murphy are working on the fee right now and will try to present it to the administration, but nothing is definite, Boland said. A student activities fee has been attempted in the past, but University President John W. Oswald did not want to see any more money added on to the tuition, Boland said. Therefore, Boland said, the fee would be more effective as an add-on to tuition. Boland said he could not comment on the amount of the fee until he has an idea of how many and what kinds of services or groups would be covered by the fee. Parvensky said a budget cut is expected, but it is not yet known how large • Centre County raised their taxes during the same years and when this year’s revenue sharing allocation came around, Bellefonte paid the price. Bellefonte’s 1983 revenue sharing allocation was lowered by 26 percent. The Bellefonte council passed a 7-mill tax increase this year, partly to compensate for the $19,000 federal shortfall/ “We’re being penalized by the federal government for doing what no one else did —tried to hold the line on taxes,” municipal manager Walt Peterson said. What troubles Peterson the most about this year’s allocation is that the federal government reduced Bellefonte’s funding because the borough apparently did not raise taxes high enough in 1980. “We knew for a fact that we could lose revenue sharing funds by reducing taxes, but we never realized we could lose the funds by not raising taxes,” Peterson said. But the federal government does take into account, as part of the allocation formula, what a municipality does in a measure year —whether it raises or lowers taxes. Please see REVENUE, Page 4. inside -» NCAA playoffs continue Page 13 index Opinions State/nation/world weather Mostly sunny today. High ot 63, overnight low 39. Mostly sunny tomorrow, high near 70. This is the last Spring Term issue of The Daily Collegian. We will begin publishing for Summer Term on June 15. —by Craig Wagner
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