Dead Celebrity Alert

Services are set for April 20 in West Palm Beach for Vernie A. Boots, whose ordeal as a 14-year-old in the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane was one of the most compelling stories of America’s second-deadliest natural disaster.

Mr. Boots died Thursday at a Tampa nursing home where he’d lived for more than a decade.

Mr. Boots lost his parents and a brother on Sept. 16, 1928, when the storm washed a wall of water over what was then a 6-foot muck dike, killing perhaps as many as 3,000.

Later in his life, Mr. Boots farmed and designed farm equipment and worked on the giant Herbert Hoover Dike, built to prevent a repeat of the 1928 catastrophe. … Read full obituary

About the Okeechobee Hurricane

Bob DeBuhr is known as the former Red Cross manager who rushed to help citizens after Mount St. Helens ruptured — even though his own home had been ruined in the volcano’s wake.

Others recall his humorous commentary, 30-year career in the Boy Scouts of America and his devotion to wife Bette DeBuhr, who died in 1999 after an eight-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Bob DeBuhr died Wednesday at the Hospice Care Center. He was 88. …

Mud flows from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens destroyed the DeBuhrs’ Toutle River home, but DeBuhr didn’t return to his house until after a week of providing transportation, housing and food to victims, and after several people told him they’d seen his home floating down the river. The house was found on the banks of the Toutle River with a foot and a half of mud in the couple’s bedroom. … Read full obituary

The last American to remember seeing hundreds of fellow passengers drown in the icy North Atlantic when the Titanic sank 94 years ago has died at age 99, a funeral home spokesman said on Sunday.

Lillian Gertrud Asplund was returning home to the United States from Sweden with her parents and four brothers when the ship, believed to be “unsinkable,” struck an iceberg on April 12, 1912. …

A lifetime resident of Massachusetts, Asplund was an intensely private person who shunned all publicity surrounding the disaster…

The funeral home spokesman said she instructed relatives to keep quiet about what she saw and even asked that the disaster not be mentioned in her obituary.

The two last Titanic survivors are said to be living in England but both women were infants when they were rescued and have no memories of that disastrous night, Titanic experts say.

Asplund lost more than half her family in the accident when her father and three brothers stayed behind as crewmen rushed the young girl, her younger brother and their mother into a lifeboat. … Read full obituary

The controversial mountaineering legend, Heinrich Harrer, died peacefully over the weekend; he was in his nineties. Harrer is likely most known by younger climbers through the film, Seven Years in Tibet, which was based on his life.

In 1938, Harrer joined the German-Austrian climbing expedition that conquered Eiger’s North Face. The following year he was part of a disasterous expedition by a German Nazi team trying to climb Nanga Parbat, according to Deutsche Welle. The team did not summit and was arrested by British forces. These were the early days of WWII.

Rumors swirled around Harrer’s involvement with the Nazis. Sixty years later, Harrer confirmed that he had been part of the Nazi expedition and was an officer in the paramilitary group, the Schutzstaffel, a post he was given after meeting Hitler and, he said, that was due to the Eiger feat. Harrer claimed that his involvement with the Nazis was solely based on the Nanga Parbat expedition and that he had a “clear conscience” as to his role with the organization. … Read full obituary

BURLINGTON — The pilot of a plane that crashed in Skagit County over the weekend had been flying for 34 years and was known throughout the world for his aerobatic stunt flying.

Eric Anthony Beard, 47, of Auburn died Friday night in a crash of his twin-engine Piper aircraft near Skagit Regional Airport, the Skagit County Sheriff’s Department said. His name was released Saturday by deputy coroner Bob Clark.

Beard, who learned to fly at 14 by taking lessons at a Georgia crop-dusting strip, died in what apparently was a routine flight for Seattle-based Airpac Airlines. … Read full obituary

Uli Derickson, a flight attendant who displayed remarkable courage while dealing with terrorists threatening passengers aboard a hijacked international flight in 1985, has died. She was 60. …

Derickson was the lead flight attendant on TWA Flight 847, carrying 152 passengers and crew on a flight from Athens to Rome on June 14, 1985. Just after takeoff, two Lebanese gunmen commandeered the plane and started it on an odyssey of terror and brutality throughout the Middle East.

The violence was immediate. … In the late 1980s, she acted as a consultant for the NBC-TV movie, “The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story.” Actress Lindsay Wagner played Derickson. The film was nominated for five Emmys in 1988.

She also testified in West Germany at the trial of Mohammed Ali Hamadi, one of the hijackers convicted of murdering Stethem. He received a life sentence. She advised TWA, Delta Air Lines and the FBI on crisis management. Throughout her life, she didn’t see herself as a hero. “They threw me a hot potato, and I had to handle it,” she said. … Read full obituary

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — A German statesman, a Czech supermodel and a Swedish Olympic ski champion were among the vacationers whose search for peace and sun in tropical southern Asia was shattered by the tsunamis that spared neither rich nor poor. …

Troy Broadbridge, an Australian Rules soccer player, was on his honeymoon in Phuket when he and his bride were swamped as they strolled along a beach. Trisha Broadbridge was safe, but he was still missing Tuesday. …

Thailand’s royal family also were among the grieving. The Thai-American grandson of King Bhumipol Adulyadej, Poom Jensen, 21, was reportedly jet skiing when the tidal wave struck Phuket. His body was found later.

Hollywood actor-director Richard Attenborough’s family also suffered tragedy. His granddaughter, Lucy, 14, perished and his daughter, Jane, and her mother-in-law are missing in Phuket. Another granddaughter, Alice, 17, was being treated in a hospital. … Read full story

Kalpana Chawla, who is feared to have perished in the Columbia space shuttle mishap along with six others, had done India proud when she embarked on her first space mission on November 19, 1997.

The Karnal-born Chawla, the first Indian American astronaut, began her career at the Ames Research Center at Nasa in 1988. …

Born in Karnal in Punjab, Chawla did her schooling from the Tagore School in the city and took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.

She went on to complete her Masters from the University of Texas in 1984 earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado. … Read full obituary

Related:
Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up over Texas

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with space shuttle Columbia as the ship soared over Texas several minutes before its expected landing time Saturday morning.

The shuttle was carrying the first Israeli astronaut and six Americans, and authorities had feared it would be a terrorist target.

Fifteen minutes after the expected landing time, and with no word from the shuttle, NASA announced that search and rescue teams were being mobilized in Dallas and Fort Worth areas. …

Columbia was at an altitude of 200,700 feet over north-central Texas at a 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph when mission control lost contact and tracking data. … Read full story

Senator Paul Wellstone, a two-term Democrat locked in one of the tightest campaigns in the nation, was killed this morning when his campaign plane crashed in freezing rain near Eveleth, Minn., a small town in the northeastern part of the state.

Mr. Wellstone’s high school sweetheart and wife of 39 years, Sheila, 58; their 33-year-old daughter, Marcia Markuson; three campaign aides; and two pilots also died in the fiery crash, which obliterated their 11-seat turboprop among the pine trees.

Senator Wellstone, 58, a former political science professor, was an unabashed liberal who often landed on the short end of 99-1 votes. …

The plane crash was a shocking echo of the crash that killed Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri, the Democratic Senate nominee, shortly before Election Day in 2000. …

The cause of the crash was unknown. Officials said they lost track of the plane, which was supposed to land at 10 a.m. at the Eveleth-Virginia airport, at around 10:50. …

Mr. Wellstone and the others were flying from St. Paul to Eveleth to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a longtime steelworker whose son, Tom, is in the Minnesota House of Representatives. … Read full story

Details to come.

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - John E. Lerro, the harbor pilot who crashed a freighter into the Sunshine Skyway bridge more than two decades ago, collapsing part of the span and killing 35 people, has died after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. He was 59.

Lerro slipped into a coma last week and died Saturday, said his wife, Laila Lerro.

“He finally quit being haunted by what happened,” she said. “He finally could stop thinking about it all.”

On May 9, 1980, Lerro was piloting the 608-foot Summit Venture into the Port of Tampa when a sudden squall knocked out the ship’s radar and reduced visibility nearly to zero. …

The Summit Venture plowed into a pier, shearing a bridge support during morning rush hour. A section of concrete roadway plummeted 150 feet into the water along with a bus carrying 26 people and several cars.

Lerro was threatened and was called an alcoholic. … Read full obituary

Winnifred Quick Van Tongerloo, one the few remaining survivors of the Titanic sinking, died on July 4 in East Lansing, Mich. She was 98.

Ms. Van Tongerloo was 8 when the Titanic went down after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic on its maiden voyage in 1912. Of the nearly 2,200 people aboard, only 705 were saved. …

Ms. Van Tongerloo’s sister and her mother also survived the sinking. … Read full obituary

The last surviving hero of the Titanic, Herbert Johnston has died in hospital at Port Shepstone on KwaZulu-Natal South Coast at the age of 104 years. The man dubbed as “Pops” was a crewmember of the Carpathia, the first ship to arrive, after the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.

Johnstone lived to tell detailed stories of the fateful night in 1912 when the so-called unsinkable Titanic sank on its maiden voyage. He was a 15-year old crewmember of the Carpathia that was bound for the Italian port of Genoa when the SOS came through. … Read full obituary