Herald staff
KENNEWICK — Police have made an arrest in the killing of a Pasco man whose handless body was found floating in a river.
Robert Wayne Siwicki, 30, was arrested Friday night at a Kennewick apartment complex that police believe is his home.
Police raided the complex early last week and questioned Siwicki, but did not arrest him then. He has one assault conviction from last December in Benton County.
The body of Marvin Love Tate Sr., 56, was found floating near the intersection of the Yakima and Columbia rivers last month. His hands were severed and he had been killed by blunt force to the head, police said.
The body was identified last week by a forensic dentist, who matched it with Tate’s dental records at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Tate’s criminal record included an arrest on assault and drug charges in the Tri-Cities and in Western Washington. He also served a one-year prison sentence, ending in 1997, for a drug conviction in Cowlitz County. And in August he was in Franklin County Superior Court for a probation violation connected to a 1993 heroin conviction, court records said.
Official broke open-public-meeting law, judge says: A judge has ruled that Pierce County Auditor Cathy Pearsall-Stipek violated state law when she kept two activists from entering a ballot-processing center because they did not have visitor badges. Thurston County Superior Court Judge Christine Pomeroy said the rules regarding visitors to the center were inconsistent and that keeping the activists out violated the state’s open-public-meeting laws. On Oct. 31, 1996, Sherry Bockwinkel and Susan Coffey — members of Citizens for Leaders with Ethics and Accountability Now — went to the auditor’s warehouse to watch election workers handle mailed ballots. When they began taking pictures, they were confronted by Sheriff’s Deputy James Loeffelholz. When Bockwinkel and Coffey refused to sign in and get visitor badges, he and election worker Billy Joe Arends forcibly removed them. In August, Loeffelholz was awarded $240,000 in damages for an account of the incident published in CLEAN’s newsletter. He said the report wrongly implied he had made a false police report and stood by while Arends struggled with Coffey. Pomeroy threw that judgment out on Friday and said she will consider granting a new trial.
Nine-time offender pleads innocent to vehicular assault: An Issaquah man with five drunken driving convictions has pleaded innocent to a charge of vehicular assault in an alleged drunken driving accident that left a church pianist confined to a wheelchair. David P. Morgan, 29, also pleaded innocent in King County Superior Court on Wednesday to a charge of first-degree driving with a revoked license. He has nine previous convictions for driving with a revoked or suspended license. He was being held on $500,000 bail. According to court documents, the accident occurred after Morgan left a tavern in North Bend about 2 a.m. on Sept. 8, crossed the centerline and collided with a car driven by Patricia Swindal, 47, of Renton. Morgan’s blood-alcohol content was recorded as .25 percent at the time of the accident, court documents say. The legal limit is .08.
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