Lead Story
When Long Island, New York, school superintendent Edward J. Murphy retired September 30, he received handsome severance pay at a time of severe financial troubles for New York schools. Under the contract he had negotiated with the local school board in 1985, Murphy was entitled to 90 days paid vacation a year (the normal is 15 to 20), plus paid sick leave–with the option of accumulating it and cashing it in at the rate of $1,000 a day. His total severance package came to more than $900,000.
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Judge Jerome Paradis of Vancouver found David Alexander Snow guilty of sexual assault in September but not guilty of the attempted murder of his victim, a 53-year-old woman. Wrote Paradis, “I cannot conclude that the placing of the wire around the neck of the victim and/or the placing of the plastic over her head are sufficient to establish a specific intent to kill.”
The Weirdo-American Community
Part-time security guard Bob Huggins, 86, was notified in November that his share of the Gaston Gazette’s pension plan is nearly $1 million. Huggins began working at production jobs in 1926 and became a guard in 1974. He had never earned more than $8,000 a year, and the company had no pension plan at all until 1989. Huggins’s award is so large because the 1989 plan was poorly designed and because Huggins outlived all others in his employee category.
