Records shape story of Pinyon Pines killings

The 449 pages of court records obtained by The Desert Sun document evidence that convinced a 19-member grand jury to indict Robert Pape in the deaths of Rebecca "Becky" Friedli, her mother, Vicki Friedli and her mother's partner, Jon Hayward.

Becky Friedli's remains were found in the wheelbarrow. The shot, then burned remains of Vicki Friedli and Hayward were found in what was left of the torched house.

Read the full story from The Desert Sun here.

Denver is raking in significantly more money from parking tickets than it did just five years ago — largely because of added meters, overnight downtown parking hours, technology that speeds up ticketing and hiked street-sweeping fines.

A Denver Post analysis of parking-citation data found that collections from tickets and penalties reached $30.5 million last year.

Read the full story from The Denver Post here.

Clayton Lockett’s death took nearly four times as long as most Oklahoma executions because a failed IV line started by a medical professional whose credentials remain secret under state law slowly leaked a drug combination that experts had warned could potentially be inhumane, a Tulsa World investigation has found.

When state officials realized what was happening, they technically halted Lockett’s execution, but they had no backup drugs to restart the process. Unlike protocols in other death-penalty states, Oklahoma’s policy contains few — if any — fail-safes or backup plans in case something goes wrong during an execution.

Read the full story from the Tulsa World here.

Elected officials, law enforcement officers and others proclaim there’s a heroin “epidemic” sweeping the country, and it’s taking hold in rural and suburban communities once considered unlikely places to find illicit drugs.

But nobody knows how many people have died.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 3,036 people died in 2010 from heroin overdoses, but due to problems with how death investigations are conducted and how those deaths are documented, the CDC estimates that its tally is at least 25 percent short, possibly more.

Read the full story from Digital First Media, published on The Times Herald's website, here.

Lamberts Point, a coal terminal on the banks of the Elizabeth River since 1885, never had an air permit because it predated the 1970 federal Clean Air Act and the resulting oversight.

In effect, there are no coal dust emission limits for Lamberts Point, provided the terminal doesn’t handle more coal than allowed each year by the state; the company hasn’t come close in years.

Lamberts Point is a regulatory relic, grandfathered in before the days of modern air pollution control.

Read the full story from The Virginian-Pilot here.

Anesthesiologist K. Dean Willis is now garnering national attention and new scrutiny. For the first time, newly released Medicare data has identified the costs associated with specific doctors performing procedures or administering drugs. The data allows for the identification of “hotspots” for particular treatments. The Washington Post found that the Huntsville area ranked fourth in the nation in Medicare spending per enrollee for drugs administered by doctors in 2012, the only year for which data has been released.

The procedures driving much of the cost were injections of “unclassified” drugs, a catchall category used by Medicare that includes drugs mixed at compounding operations, such as the one inside Willis’s clinic. Huntsville ranks No. 1 in that category.

Read the full story from The Washington Post here.

Six lawmakers likely owe taxpayers money, following findings from our "Louisiana Purchased" investigation. And some have already written checks to return cash that they never should have collected. It's the latest report in a joint investigation of campaign finance by FOX 8 News and Manuel Torres of NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune.

But that hasn't stopped some lawmakers from dipping into two pots of money at the same time, for the same expense.

Read the full story from WVUE - New Orleans and The Times-Picayune here.

Sixty years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in 21 states was unconstitutional, diversity is not guaranteed in Maryland's schools. Ten percent of the schools in Maryland have a high percentage of black students, nearly all of them in Baltimore City and Prince George's County, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis. And no political or education leaders are recommending a consolidation of suburban and urban districts that experts say would be needed to truly address an imbalance driven largely by neighborhood demographics.

Read the full story from The Baltimore Sun here.

Recent salary survey shows that City of Springfield wages often were less than the wages offered for comparable jobs in other cities.

But a News-Leader analysis of public employee salaries shows that city government workers have no more — and no less — cause for complaint than other area workers.

Overall, city wages appear to mirror those of others in the community. As of February, the average hourly wage of a City of Springfield employee was $17.75, according to payroll records obtained by the News-Leader.

Read the full story from the Springfield News-Leader here.

More than half of the private wells in the Town of East Fishkill have higher concentrations of sodium from road salt than some government health standards recommend, according to a new study by local scientists.

The findings by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies are preliminary. But they represent the first scientific analysis of well test data collected as a result of laws enacted in 2007 by three southern Dutchess County towns. The findings highlight the potential for continued and deeper analysis of the growing body of well test data, which include results for dozens of other contaminants at each location.

The data were provided to the Cary Institute by the Poughkeepsie Journal, which used custom software to collect and collate the well test results from the Dutchess County Department of Health's website.

Read the full story from the Poughkeepsie Journal here.