Locke signs bill requiring notice of sex offenders

OLYMPIA — Sheriff’s departments will have to notify the community that a sex offender is moving to town through an advertisement in the local newspaper, under a bill signed Monday by Gov. Gary Locke.

Tom Osborn of Shelton said the law might have saved his daughter’s life. Jennie Osborn, 15, died of pelvic injuries after being raped in February.

Joseph Rosenow, 46, has pleaded innocent to a charge of first-degree murder in her death and is awaiting trial. A neighbor and father of one of Jennie’s friends, Rosenow has convictions for sexual assaults in 1993 and 1999 and is classified as a Level 3 sex offender, considered most dangerous.

"I would have known," Osborne said. "I would have stuck it on the fridge" had the local newspaper ran notice that Rosenow was a registered sex offender.

The Shelton-Mason County Journal doesn’t print sex offender notices as news because Publisher Charlie Gay believes the offenders, released from prison, have paid their debt to society. The newspaper will take paid ads on sex offenders, Gay said before the bill was passed.

Agreement reached on spring chinook management: The U.S. government, the state of Washington and two Indian tribes agreed Monday on management of spring chinook salmon from hatcheries in the upper Columbia River Basin. Wild Chinook and steelhead are extinct in at least 12 areas of the upper river basin, and elsewhere their numbers are so low they are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. The agreement provides a framework for dealing with hatchery fish as they return from the Pacific Ocean, along with struggling wild salmon stocks, said Rob Jones, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland, Ore. In recent years, fewer than 5,000 wild chinook have returned annually to spawn. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-run hatcheries drew protests last June over plans to fatally club unwanted hatchery fish, a practice hatchery managers said was necessary to protect small stocks of returning wild fish in the Methow River Basin.

Man sentenced in Internet sex case: A Kansas man has been sentenced to federal prison for having sex with a 12-year-old Wenatchee girl he met in an Internet poetry chat room. U.S. District Judge Fremming Nielsen on Friday ordered Eugene K. Dickens, 56, to serve 7 1/2 years in prison. Dickens pleaded guilty in November to travel with intent to engage in a sexual act with a juvenile. The girl was with Dickens when FBI agents arrested him last July 11 at a bus station in Lawrence, Kan. He allegedly used a University of Kansas computer to correspond with the girl, now 13. Court documents say the girl’s mother called authorities after finding Internet e-mail on her home computer indicating her daughter planned to travel to Spokane to meet with an unknown man. The girl told authorities she met Dickens in Wenatchee June 27. The two took a bus to Spokane and then to Montana, where they attended Rainbow Fest, an alternative-culture gathering near Dillon, Mont. Dickens said he met the girl in a poetry chat room in January 2000.

Key backer of 1962 World’s Fair dies: H. Dewayne Kreager, a former White House economic staffer and banker who played a key role in organizing the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, is dead at 88. Kreager, who initially sought a career as a newspaper reporter, died May 6 of complications from a stroke he had two years ago. He was listed as one of the five most influential figures in the city in a Seattle Magazine article in 1968. A native of Ritzville, Kreager received a bachelor’s degree at Washington State University. After three months as a newspaper reporter in Juneau, Alaska, he quit because of low pay, then earned a doctorate at Harvard University in 1947. He worked in the executive office and on the White House staff of President Harry S. Truman, and then as a consulting economist with then-White House chief of staff John Steelman. Returning to Washington state, he became the first director of the state Department of Commerce and Economic Development. During that period he worked closely with Edward Carlson, president of Western International Hotels, which later became the Westin chain, to arrange financing for the world’s fair. It was Carlson who first sketched the Space Needle on a cocktail napkin. Kreager also was president of the Seattle Opera, founding chairman of the Washington State Council on International Trade and a Washington State University regent.

Family of girl who committed suicide sues state: The family of a 17-year-old girl who hanged herself at Echo Glen juvenile detention center is suing the state for $2 million, saying the girl was known to be suicidal and should have been monitored constantly. Angela Miller had been taken off suicide watch 10 days before she slipped her braided necklace around a ceiling air vent at the center, near Snoqualmie, on March 1. She had been locked in her room that day for skipping school and was being checked by staff at 15-minute intervals. Miller, of Riverside in Okanogan County, should not have been left alone with anything she could have used to kill herself, her family’s lawyer, Tim Tesh, told a Bellevue newspaper. The state Department of Social and Health Services wouldn’t comment on the litigation, said Cheryl Stephani, assistant secretary of juvenile rehabilitation. The department is awaiting the results of investigations into Miller’s death, she said.

Senate narrowly defeats Ten Commandments bill: A bill that would allow public schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms was defeated in the Oregon Senate on Monday, though it was just two votes shy of the majority needed for passage. Senators had been advised by legislative counsel that the bill was blatantly unconstitutional, but the measure proceeded to the floor and provoked a lengthy debate. Opponents of the measure said the bill was an obvious violation of the separation between church and state. One of those opponents also happened to be a Methodist minister. Sen. Frank Shields said that though he would uphold the principles of the Ten Commandments in his church and home, he would never force those beliefs on others. "I can’t vote for this because we’re in the middle of a pluralistic society," the Portland Democrat said. But supporters said the measure merely gives schools the option of posting the Ten Commandments alongside other historic documents. They say displaying the commandments would give today’s troubled youths some much-needed guidance.