SPORTS: The Kansas football team works to stay focused on the Oklahoma State game, Page 11
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
VOL.102.NO.49
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1992
ADVERTISING:864-4358
(USPS 650-640)
NEWS: 864-4810
KU police assist 911 upgrade
By Tiffany Lasha Hurt Kansan staff writer
on upgraded 911 system for Douglas County has prompted KU police and the Lawrence police department to work together.
For the first time, the KU police dispatch center will serve as a back-up for the 911 system in Douglas County. Lt. John Mullens of KU police said that if something happened to the county's system, the county's dispatchers would operate from the University.
Don Dalquest, 911 coordinator and undersheriff for the Douglas County Sheriff's Department, said the upgraded system, Enhanced 911, included three features.
included three features.
After a caller call 911, the dispatcher will know within four seconds:
  the name of the individual that the
  reader was reading.
the location of the call, and
depending on the location of the call, what agencies should respond, such as the fire, police and ambulance services.
Before the installment of the Enhanced 911 system, it took two to three hours to trace a call, Dalquest said. If the caller hung up, the dispatcher could reach the caller by activating radial. But if the caller did not answer the phone, the dispatcher would have to call the phone company to have the call traced before an officer was sent to the location.
Basic 911 has been installed in Lawrence since 1967, but not all of the cities in the county included 911
systems. In January, Basic 911 systems were installed in the county as a step toward Enhanced 911.
the installment of the enhanced computer system cost the county $180,000. Dalquest said.
To pay for the system, county commissioners passed a resolution in 1900 that required an added 50-cent surcharge to the phone bills of Dougall County residents. The county has received about $250,000 from the tax.
Besides the labor and the funds involved in installing the enhanced system, the county had to assign new addresses to residents in rural areas of the county because the addresses represented post office boxes, not actual residences.
By the end of this month, each resi
dence in rural Douglas County will have a new address. They will receive a notice indicating that they must use the address issued by the county after the first of the year.
Sgt. Mark Warren of the Lawrence police department said that workers were in the third stage of installing the enhanced system, which will be ready for testing within a week. He said the computerized system must be tested to ensure that the hardware works and that the database is accurate.
With the enhanced system, the Lawrence police department's phone bill will increase from $400 to $4,000 a month.
Bonne Brahler, a telecommunicator with the Lawrence Police department, tests an updated version of the 911 emergency system.
Race to recovery Runner battles injury, memories of accident
By Joe Harder
Kansan staff writer
Jeremy McClain sits on a couch in his parents' Overland Park home, a foot-ball-shaped scar gaping on his extended left leg. A pair of steel crutches waits between the couch cushions. He is talking about running.
"There's a real runner's high, a real good feeling about getting out on the street and running," he says. "It's definitely a part of my day."
His words give no hint of the nearly two-foot rod that runs lengthwise deep inside his swollen left shin, or of the six-to-eight-inch scars that snake down both knees.
He continues.
"It's definitely a part of my day that's missing" he says.
The last time McClain, a sophomore and Kansas cross country and track runner, was 4:45 p.m. Sept. 2, when he started across the intersection of 23rd and Louisiana streets during a seven-mile training run.
The impact with an Oldsmobile Cutlass knocked him out of both of his shoes and launched him into the air.
"I was going south across there, and I saw the east-west light turn red and my light turned green," he says. "I started across, and as soon as I got to the second lane, I heard the sound of brakes, and I barely had enough time to look to see him hit me."
"I was in the air, like slow-motion," he says,
describing the sensation as "pretty weird."
"I can remember what I was thinking. I was praying that I didn't land on my head."
His slow-motion trajectory ended when his body shattered the windshield of an east-bound Ford Mustang stopped in the next lane, about 15 feet from the point of impact.
He struck the Mustang with such force that the driver thought she had been hit by the same.
"I landed pretty hard" he says.
Thanks pretty much, he says.
He smiles easily when speaking of his accident. The gesture reveals a reminder: a two-tooth gap in the left side of his mouth.
He is clad in shorts and a white, long-sleeved T-shirt that reads "Kansas Cross-Country." His collar length, loose brown hair is pushed back from his face. A pince-nez another reminder of his hairstyle.
Both legs look brutalized. The reddish-brown football-shaped scar is about eight inches long and four inches wide and dominates the outside of his lower left leg. Several rectangular red patches on his left thigh mark where the skin was stripped to graft to the wound.
He talks quietly, almost shyly.
1 jumped off the car and stood up, and this leg just kind of went like this, and I realized that the bone was destroyed," he said, leaning forward with his hands the wobble was damaged left.
The driver of the car that hit McClain took him to Lawrence Memorial Hospital, where doctors stitched up his cut chin. Within an hour, they realized that he was in danger of losing his left foot, whose circulation was being cut off by swelling in his lower leg. He was taken by helicopter to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan.
There, doctors sliced open his lower leg to relieve the pressure and inserted the rod from a hole near the knee down through the shin to reinforce its shattered bone. Swelling in his leg caused the wound to split to its present four-inch width.
Doctors also did exploratory surgery on his uninjured right knee and stitched up the eight-fingered foot.
--mountains all summer. You're in great shape. You've got a great heart. You've got great lungs, keep fighting.
But the shattered bones had yet to finish their work on his body.
On Saturday, Sept. 5, McClain began to have trouble breathing and complained of headaches. The problem was diagnosed as Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome. Fat released from the shattered bone in his leg was picked up in his blood and deposited in his lungs. The syndrome has about a 60 percent rate of care. He was moved into the intensive care unit.
"I kept a day-by-day diary, which we were glad I did, because I didn't ever remember it all," his mother, Linda, said. "After he woke up, he went out through what he happened to him every day."
"After that, I remember very little until about two weeks later." he said.
But while he dozed in a drug-induced haze, his parents and two brothers lived through every harrowing minute.
By Sunday morning, tests showed that McClaim was not able to get enough oxygen into his blood without assistance, and he was placed on life-support systems.
But it was his body that had to conquer the lung problems.
Jeremy McClain, Overland Park sophomore and former KU cross country runner, plays his keyboard in front of a painting done by his father at his house in Overland Park. The painting was done in 2014.
Linda McClain said doctors told the family that much was unknown about what unconscious patients could and could not hear.
"We kept talking to him, telling him to fight this thing, visualize that jung coming out of his burps," she said. "We kept reminding him: You're young. You've been running in the
"And he did," she added simply. He went home Friday, Sept. 25.
Panel OKs detention center site
Bv Kristy Dorsey
Story continues, Page 3.
Controversy about a proposed juvenile detention center ended quietly last night when the Douglas County Commission voted unanimously to purchase three acres in the North Lawrence Industrial Subdivision for the facility.
Kansan staff writer
The commission's decision to buy the property was an action on its 90-day option with the Lawrence Industrial Development Company. The purchase of the $60,000 tract met no opposition.
Residents near the industrial park, about one block east of Third Street on Industrial Lane south of the Kansas Turnpike, had expressed disfavor with the proposed location during public hearing last month.
However, when county commission chairperson Mark Buhler asked for public input on the issue, no one came forward to speak. Craig Weinaug, county administrator, said he had received no comments on the proposal since the last public hearing, which was Sept. 30.
"All the controversy came up before at the meetings, and I guess we did such a good job then that a lot of the conflict died down," he said.
Residents at a North Lawrence Improvement Association meeting last month expressed concerns that the facility might threaten security and property values in their neighborhood. But Pam Weigand, director of the center, assured residents that the facility would be fenced and closely supervised by staff authorities.
At that same meeting, county commissioners explained that the site was chosen because it met a majority of requirements set by the commission. Some of those requirements included price, existing water and sewer service, no existing buildings on the property and access to major highways and judicial facilities in Lawrence.
The 9,100-square-foot facility will house juveniles from 13 counties in northeast Kansas. It is one of six centers being constructed statewide to comply with federal mandates that prohibit locking up juvenile offenders in county jails after Jan. 1, 1993.
Candidates in the 2nd district State Senate race offer their ideas to some of the problems facing Kansans.
State Senate race
See stories, Pages 6, 14.
Student Senate's finance committee approved every bill that was brought to the floor last night, including more than $2,000 to support three for-credit jobs and $500 to finance two engineering projects.
Student Senate
See story, Page 3.
Witches mark Salem trial's 300th anniversarv
By Delin Cormeny
They don't fly through the night on brooms and wear pointy hats. They don't make potions out of lizard tails, hair or magical herbs. Nor can they turn into black cats.
ansan staff writers
Members of the witchcraft community of Lawrence and Topeka will present a forum titled "No More Burning Times: Before and Beyond Salem" at 7:30 tonight at the Lawrence Public Library.
The forum will include a video and a panel speaking on the connection between incidents in 1692 in Salem, Mass., and current events. Civil rights attorney Kenji Zwygyardt will address First Amendment issues relating to the practice of modern witchcraft and a question and answer session will follow.
But they are witches.
The purpose of the forum is to mark the 300-year anniversary of the Salem witch trials and to dispalay negative stereotypes of
witches.
"Witches are not satanists," said Tim Miller, KU assistant professor of religious studies. "They are very different things. Most worship the earth. I would call witchcraft a nature religion of which there are many in the world."
Bruce Blanc, a Lawrence resident who is a witch, said witches, or neo-pagans, throughout the world belonged to differing cultures which have varying practices and beliefs.
"Ne-pagannism is a very eclectic and individual spiritual approach." Blanc told a gathering of about 40 students yesterday at Corbin Hall. "Therefore, it's a very antidomotic spiritual practice."
Miller estimated that more than 100 people in the Lawrence area—male and female—consider themselves to be witches. Most belong to one of three groups: the Web of Oz, the Turtle Island Anarchopagans or a nameless group based in Jefferson County.
"Witches were virtually unknown in this
n'tnise said that many people had misconceptions of what neo-pagan magic really is.
country 20 years ago," he said. "They have gone from an obsolete status to certainly tens of thousands, if not more."
"Our definition of magic is it's the art and science of changing consciousness in conjunction with the will," he said. "What I will is what will happen."
The main differences between Christianity and witchcraft are that witches worship outdoors, women generally are in charge, they worship several deities instead of one god and they bring earth offerings to the altar. Miller said.
Banc told the Corbin gathering that they could cast a spell to forget an ex-boyfriend by writing down everything that they cared about in the relationship, tying the note to a rock and dropping it into the Kansas River while the moon waned.
There are eight main holidays that witchies celebrate. They fall on the spring and fall equinox, the summer and winter solstices
Bruce Blanc, local Witchcraft practitioner, speaks to about 40 students at Corbin Hall.
and the points halfway in between.
and the points halfway in between:
"Halloween is the classic craftswitch holi-
The Salem Tercentenary Remembrance Committee is sponsoring tonight's event.
Staff writer KC Trauer contributed information to this story.