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A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
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On this day in 2007, a Morrisville police officer charged a driver with assault, alleging that he coughed in his face three times during a traffic stop.
The driver, an accountant in Chapel Hill, explained that he had developed a nasty cough after his dog died of kidney failure, but went to work while sick, needing the money.
He admitted coughing out the window of his minivan in the officer’s direction, but insisted he aimed toward the officer’s waist.
“He says I coughed in his face,” the driver told The N&O. “But that would only work if he had a 4-foot-long face.”
He left the scene in handcuffs, but the case, ultimately, got dismissed.
The federal trial began of Eddie Hatcher, one of two armed Tuscarora activists who took more than a dozen staffers hostage for 10 hours inside the Robesonian newspaper in Lumberton. The two hoped to draw attention to information they had about law enforcement officers involved in drug trafficking. Acquitted in federal court, Hatcher would eventually go to prison on state charges, get paroled, then die in prison while serving life sentence for a 1999 murder.
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Fury spread from the top ranks of the Marines to the US Senate over housing conditions at North Carolina’s Marine base outside Jacksonville, with descriptions ranging from “abhorrent” to “one of the worst.” The N&O described the situation worsening as the Marine Corps expanded during the Korean War, forcing troops into hen houses and tar paper shacks run by “rent gougers.”
In 1926, news of a “grim, stark tragedy” struck the state after a young worshiper drowned during a mass baptism in Charlotte.
A popular faith healer best-known as “Daddy Grace” had baptized 700 people in what was then known as Clinton Park while an estimated 10,000 watched.
Willie Green was a deacon in the “House of Prayer” gathered there, and he was one of many who took to the water being unable to swim. Rescuers pulled the strugglers to the banks, including Green, who had submerged several times, but he never regained consciousness.
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