National briefs

Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 9, 2000

New York top cop resigns

NEW YORK -- Howard Safir, whose leadership of New York's Police Department was marked by plummeting crime rates and racial incidents that drew national attention, announced Tuesday he is resigning as commissioner.

"I am leaving probably the best job that any human being could have," he told a City Hall news conference with, as usual, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani at his side. "Crime is the lowest it's been in three decades."

The mayor, who will lose one of his closest confidants, praised Safir as the city's "greatest police commissioner."

Unlike his predecessor, William J. Bratton, who sought the media spotlight, Safir's loyalty to the mayor was complete.

The two stood shoulder-to-shoulder during investigations of the police station house torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, the killing of Amadou Diallo in a barrage of 41 police bullets and the slaying by an undercover detective of Patrick Dorismond. In the shooting incidents, neither victim was armed.

"So many men and women of this police department do an outstanding job day in and day out," Safir said, warning against criticism of the entire 41,000-member force because of "three horrible incidents.

"I think the perception and the reality are very far apart," he said.

The 58-year-old Safir, who like Giuliani is being treated for prostate cancer, will join Choice Point, a corporate security company.

Giuliani declined to discuss a successor, concentrating instead on praising Safir for his 25 years in law enforcement.

Boy who lived with dead mom is moved

JACKSON, Miss. -- The boy who lived with his mother's corpse for a month is now staying with the woman who discovered the macabre scene.

Deputies removed 10-year-old Travis Butler from his grandparents' custody Friday and placed him with Dorothy Jeffries, a family friend who found the boy with his mother in a Memphis, Tenn., apartment in December.

Travis' maternal grandparents, Shirley and H.P. Wilder, had been caring for him at their home in rural Carthage. But after a custody hearing last week with Chancery Judge Bill Lutz, Travis was moved to Jeffries' Olive Branch home.

Last fall, Travis lived for 33 days with his dead mother, too afraid to tell anyone because he feared being placed in foster care. His mother, Crystal Wells, died Nov. 3 from a lung tumor.

AirTran flight makes emergency landing in N.C.

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- A cockpit fire forced an airplane with 62 people on board to make an emergency landing in North Carolina on Tuesday. Five people were treated for minor injuries.

AirTran Flight 913 from Greensboro to Atlanta reported the fire when it was about 20 miles south of Greensboro, said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta. The DC-9 turned around and landed safely about 3:45 p.m. at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, authorities said.

Two men and two women suffering from smoke inhalation and a man with a twisted knee were taken to the hospital, officials said. All the injuries were minor.

AirTran, based in Orlando, is the former ValuJet, whose plane crashed in the Everglades in May 1996, killing 110 people.

Elsewhere . . .

STOWAWAY RELEASED: The man found in the wheel well of a jumbo jet after a flight to Los Angeles from Tahiti last week has been released from a hospital after four days of treatment. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Rico Cabrera said the man's identity could not be made public. It wasn't clear how soon he would be sent home by Air France.

SPACE DOCKING: An unmanned Russian cargo ship docked safely with the international space station Wednesday, carrying 2.4-tons of fuel, clothing and other supplies.

- Information from the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

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