100 years ago
March 12, 1919
• That the man said to be W. E. Burnett who drank a quantity of carbolic acid at a barber shop ... from the effects of which he died before medical aid could be secured, drank it with suicidal intent, was the opinion of Dr. H. F. Villars, deputy coroner, who viewed the body at Cook's undertaking parlors. ... Burnett entered the barber shop and went to the rear. In a few minutes he came back to the front, asking that a physician be summoned, as he had drank a quantity of carbolic acid by mistake. He fell to the floor and died before medical aid arrived.
50 years ago
March 12, 1969
• A teenaged boy who was cooperating with the police went to 31 liquor stores Friday night and Monday night in Little Rock to see if he could buy either beer or whiskey. In 21 stores, he made a purchase, Chief R. E. Brians announced Tuesday as the police began making arrests. Brians said, "We found a boy whose parents were indignant that anyone would sell to minors, and the parents agreed to let him help us." Brians said the use of the teenager was authorized by the prosecuting attorney. ... The police chief said the youth would enter a store and attempt to buy either liquor or beer. If the sale was made, he said, the youth would bring the liquor or beer outside and turn it over to waiting policemen. The officers would then go inside and take the name of the clerk who made the sale. Nineteen of the 21 suspects were charged Tuesday with either selling whiskey to a minor or selling beer to a minor, or both.
25 years ago
March 12, 1994
FORREST CITY -- Doctors at Baptist Memorial Hospital listed Ruby Pearl Miller, 61, of Wynne, in stable condition Friday after she had walked away from a nursing home Feb. 23 and wandered outdoors for nine days. Doctors admitted her in critical condition March 4 for extreme hypothermia. The average temperature during that time was 31 degrees with a low one night of 17, the National Weather Service at North Little Rock said. Joe Ann Franklin, administrator of the Crestpark Retirement Inn in Forrest City, said she did not know why Miller, a month long resident and one of the youngest of the 64 residents, wandered off. ... A nursing home yard worker found her March 4 morning lying beside a fence about 40 feet from the nursing home parking lot.
10 years ago
March 12, 2009
• The state Board of Health on Wednesday ordered closed a ramshackle trailer park in Garland County where raw sewage has backed up into homes and leaked into the ground, threatening the safety of residents' drinking water. The move to shut down the All Seasons Mobile Home Park for health violations is unprecedented. Arkansas Department of Health officials said after a unanimous board vote that they had never before shut down a trailer park. The handful of residents who still live at the trailer park off a rural stretch of Arkansas 7 south of Hot Springs will be forced to leave in coming days. ... One of those residents is Anthony Wheeler, an unemployed 18-year-old who said his mother and sister have become sick from drinking the water in their trailer. His sister, Teagan Blankenship, 16, was curled up under a blanket Wednesday afternoon. "She gets bad headaches, stomachaches and nosebleeds," Wheeler said.
Metro on 03/12/2019