Three people were wounded, one critically, by gunfire Friday night in the Town of Clover, according to the Halifax County Sheriff's Department.
The sheriff's department refused to release the names of the three wounded individuals, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation.
The three subjects were wounded in a shooting which occurred near a nightspot in downtown Clover, police said. One suffered a bullet wound to the chest area, near his heart, and was later transferred to Duke Hospital in Durham, N.C., police said.
All three victims drove in a private vehicle to the Halifax Regional Hospital immediately after the shooting. Reportedly, several bullet holes were seen on the car which was confiscated by police near the emergency room.
Efforts to reach Major Ray Link of the sheriff's department for identities of the victims or further details of the incident were unsuccessful.
The initial investigation is complicated by the fact that numerous people interviewed so far by investigators have given different accounts of what has happened, a police source said.
In other crime:
A Bold Springs road man was charged with a felony count of malicious wounding Friday at the Halifax County Middle School.
Stanley Ralph Parker Jr., 35, was arrested after he allegedly severely beat his stepson, Christine L. McDougald, inside the middle school, according to the Halifax County Sheriff's Department.
The alleged beating also continued outside in the school's parking lot. Parker was also charged with a misdemeanor count of assault and battery of his steps, police said.
Parker is currently being held in the Halifax County Jail pending his trial in the Halifax County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court on June 30. He was arrested by deputies J.L. Lucia and Q.W. Clark.
In another case, deputies arrested Lawrence Maurice Watson, 19, of South Boston on a misdemeanor count of brandishing a firearm at Maria Hicks, police said.
The alleged incident occurred Thursday and Watson was arrested the next day, according to the investigation.
Watson was released on bond pending his trial in the Halifax County General District Court on August 7. He was arrested by Clark.
The Halifax Educational Foundation will ask the Halifax County Board of Supervisors tonight to hold a public hearing on a $1.75 million bond referendum for the CEC Expansion Project.
In a June 24 letter to fellow board members of the Halifax Educational Foundation, Chris A. Lumsden outlined the request which, if eventually passed, would have an estimated 1 1/2 cent impact on the county's real estate tax rate.
The request is contingent upon the HEF's ability to raise matching funds through private campaign efforts, Lumsden pointed out in the letter.
The money would be used by the HEF to complete the Continuing Education Expansion Project. Currently, the CEC operates in facilities in the Love Shop area of South Boston, near the intersection of Rt. 129 and Rt. 614.
The HEF is planning to move the Continuing Education Center to a vacant building off Factory Street in the southern downtown district of South Boston.
If the board of supervisors agree to hold a public hearing on the referendum request at a later date (after it is duly advertised), they would then vote to determine whether or not the bond referendum will appear on this November's ballot, officials said.
A facet of the expansion project is a proposal by Longwood College to create an Institute for Innovative Teaching, Technology, and Business Applications program.
The institute project will require funding of $475,00 for instructional equipment technology and $250,000 per year for a period of three years for other costs such as salaries for an Institute Director and two faculty members, officials said.
It is anticipated that after the initial three-year period, the institute will be self-sufficient, according to documents from Longwood College.
The business development portion is estimated to require funding of $250,000 per year for three years. Two business analysts and one trainer will be hired.
The overall project is being sought as a means to increase local economic development, officials said.
Tonight's meeting of the Halifax County Board of Supervisors will be held in the second floor meeting room of the Mary Bethune Office Complex in Halifax. The meeting will begin at 7 p.m.
Just before the July 1 deadline, the 1998-99 fiscal general budget for Halifax County will be voted on during tonight's meeting of the Halifax County Board of Supervisors.
The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. and will be held in the second floor meeting room of the Mary Bethune Office Complex in Halifax.
This year's budget is a record $54,926,719, an increase of $1,444,142 over last year's budget of $53,482,577. The 1997-98 county budget passed by a 5-3 vote.
South Boston Town Council is expected to appoint a new member of Council tonight to serve the remaining two years of a term held by Deborah Morris, who resigned recently.
Council will take action during a session that is being continued from a special meeting of June 29.
According to the published agenda, Council will meet in executive session at 5 p.m. to consider the list of some two dozen possible appointees, then will meet with the affected residents of River Road about water and sewer extensions in that area.
At 6:30, there will be a reception in Council Chambers for the new Council members, after which these newly elected members will be sworn in by Judge Joel Cunningham.
Starting at 7:15, Council will reconvene to take up business left incomplete from a continued meeting of June 15.
This includes consideration of appointments to Council vacancies, consideration of annual appropriation resolution and reiteration of tax rates for fiscal year 1998-99, and a public hearing on disposal of the town's one-third interest in the W. M. Tuck Airport.
Council also is expected to make appointments to the Industrial Development Authority and the Southside Regional Partnership.
Immediately following the Council meeting, the two standing work committees of the governing body--the Current Issues Committee and the Finance Committee--will have meetings.
The committees will formulate recommendations on various issues to take before Council at the next regular meeting on July 13.
By ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Hundreds of doctors across the country own and profit from tons of tobacco, despite decades of health warnings, scolding from peers and in some cases their own ethical reservations.
They're family practitioners who warn teen-agers not to smoke, psychiatrists who treat addiction, oncologists who identify malignant tumors and surgeons who remove them.
One tobacco-owning doctor was a longtime regional medical director for the American Cancer Society. Another runs a public health department. A third writes a newspaper's health tips column.
Almost none smoke themselves.
''I won't smoke,'' says Stephen Jackson, an orthopedic surgeon in Paducah, Ky., who co-owns the government rights to grow 1,400 pounds of burley tobacco a year. ''I mean, it will kill you.''
All tell their patients not to smoke or chew tobacco.
''I get mad with them, fuss at them every day,'' says Richard Rush, a family practitioner from Conway, S.C., with more than 11,000 pounds of flue-cured tobacco allotted to his farm.
Nonetheless, they are among at least 760 doctors and other health care workers who own valuable federal tobacco-growing rights, known as allotments or quotas, according to a computer analysis by The Associated Press. They practice in 23 states, from Florida to Alaska, Massachusetts to California.
Some of the doctors own minuscule government rights, as little as 21 pounds annually; one in South Carolina has 932,000 pounds.
All told, these doctors control production of more than 7 million pounds of tobacco - enough to make 193 million packs of cigarettes a year. They also grow nearly 290,000 pounds of the varieties of leaf used in chewing tobacco and cigar wrappers.
At last year's sales prices, their leaf would be worth $13 million - although a large portion of that goes to family members, sharecroppers and those who lease much of the crop.
For professionals who have taken an oath not to do harm, those numbers are ''shocking and disappointing,'' medical ethicist Arthur Caplan says.
''I think you just cannot argue that you're going to make money on the back of this obvious health menace,'' says Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. ''To own and farm and produce tobacco as a doctor, especially in small communities, sends a resoundingly wrong message.''
The fact that many of these doctors grew up in those small communities is often their reason for being involved in tobacco. Even so, some are uneasy about it.
Dr. Edwin Norris has no doubt that a three-pack-a-day habit hastened his father's death at age 53 from coronary disease. And the Mountain City, Tenn., general practitioner and cosmetic surgeon has little doubt that tobacco produced under his 1,925-pound quota is harming other people's fathers.
''Even though it's legal,'' Norris says, ''we're still responsible for some of the effects of it.'' His explanation for keeping the tobacco: Neighbors who actually raise it for him need the poundage to make a living.
Other physicians bought their farms as investments and acknowledge tobacco proceeds contribute to their wealth.
Although they may only get a nickel to 15 cents a pound for leasing their tobacco rights to farmers, quotas help pay mortgages and add to the land's assessed value. With talk in Washington about possible $8-a-pound federal tobacco buyouts some day, the leaf could constitute an even more valuable asset.
''I'm too greedy,'' George Burrus, a cardiovascular surgeon in Nashville, Tenn., says when asked about his decision to keep his 6,500-pound quota, even though he says he knows tobacco is ''killing people.'' He clears about $4,000 a year from leasing his leaf.
''I don't worry about it enough to (sell out) since I don't feel like, say, the guy that's raising dope.''
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The AP identified these doctors by cross-checking a federal farm database with medical rosters from tobacco states. To verify matches, the AP contacted scores of physicians by telephone.
Some hung up when they heard the word ''tobacco.'' Most who stayed on the line expressed ambivalence.
''Absolutely schizophrenic'' is how Dr. William Grigsby described the notion of physicians growing tobacco.
''It's crazy, but I'll tell you why we do it,'' says the general surgeon from Kingsport, Tenn., who owns about 3,700 pounds of quota. ''Almost the only doctors who raise tobacco have grown up on the farm and have the kinfolks there.''
One is Richard Calhoun. He was raised on a tobacco farm, and tobacco money helped put him through college and medical school.
On Wednesdays, when other doctors hit the golf course, Calhoun dons bib overalls and a baseball cap and drives a beat-up red flatbed truck around his mountainside farm in western North Carolina. He raises hay, cattle, Christmas trees and about 7,000 pounds of burley.
''Tobacco is a proud heritage for North Carolina,'' says Calhoun, who practices in Jefferson, near the Tennessee line. ''I want to maintain that part of my heritage.''
So while he lectures his three children - ages 9, 11 and 13 - on the ills of smoking, he makes sure they help out on the farm.
''They're still young, but they know what it is to work in the dirt - and that this is actually a cash crop that can be grown for farm income.''
He knows the links between the crop he grows and diseases he treats, from cancer to heart disease. Is that inconsistent?
''I do feel that tobacco is harmful to one's health,'' Calhoun replies. ''But more importantly than that, I feel that, as citizens of the United States, we have the freedom of choice. And I don't think that governmental regulation should infringe upon one's ability to make choices in this regard.''
Dr. Wendell Levi Jr. agrees. In 45 years as a thoracic surgeon, he has removed cancer-ravaged lungs, but he has little sympathy for smokers.
''If they're stupid enough to smoke, that's (their) business, I suppose,'' says Levi, a Sumter, S.C., tobacco owner. ''I've never had time to feel guilty about something like that.''
Yes, he urges patients to quit smoking. ''But it's not very effective.''
But given the addictiveness of nicotine, quitting may not really be a choice, as even some tobacco-owning physicians acknowledge.
William Gause, a family practitioner in Columbia, S.C., says he quit cigars shortly before the U.S. surgeon general first warned against smoking's health hazards. But he knows how hard it is for others to stop.
''It's easier for me to get somebody off of, say, cocaine than it is to get them off of tobacco,'' Gause says.
Still, he says he never gave much thought to how his 3,000 pounds of allotment, passed down through the family for three generations, might be fueling that addiction.
''I've so many other things going right now,'' Gause says. ''I've never really sat down to think about it. I may feel that way when I do - if I do.''
Others have thought about it - a lot.
John Patterson, family practitioner and owner of a 900-pound quota in Irvine, Ky., has reached a moral bargain with himself.
He is the Kentucky Medical Association's liaison with two farm health groups and says the $230 a year he earns from tobacco pays for the gasoline he uses traveling the state trying to help farmers diversify from burley.
''I think the question is: What is that doctor doing with that base?'' Patterson says. ''That is the way I've dealt with my ethical dilemma.''
Elizabeth Ward feels as if she's a hostage of tobacco.
Ward, a physician's assistant in Wilmington, N.C., watched two years ago as her father slowly succumbed to smoking-related emphysema 15 years after he'd quit.
Around the same time, Ward bought a farm from her aunt because it adjoins her mother's property. The farmer who rents her mother's tobacco allotment says he can continue doing so only if he can also continue renting the tobacco on Ward's property.
''I'm a crusader against tobacco,'' Ward says between patients. ''Every day, all day long, I talk to sick people, and a lot of their problems come from their bad habits - and bad habits I indirectly promote.''
But her mother wants to live out her days on a working farm. So Ward keeps her connection to the industry and takes her $300 annual share of the tobacco lease money.
Many physicians make more than that on their tobacco.
Dr. Pickens Moyd answers several questions in a phone interview, but when the issue turns to how much the Hartsville, S.C., surgeon earns from his 2,000 pounds of tobacco, irritation creeps into his Southern accent.
''I'll tell you what,'' he tells a reporter. ''You send me a check for half of what I'll lose, and I'll eat the other half. ... YOU'RE not going to cough it up to stop this cigarette thing.''
Frank Sessoms, a family practitioner in Pittsburgh who owns 2,200 pounds of allotment on a North Carolina farm that's been in his family for generations, also voices indignation. He's not part of some social problem, he says.
''I have a lot of patients, man, who always make excuses for themselves, for their behavior, whether it's alcohol, cocaine, tobacco, food,'' says Sessoms, one of 10 children of a steel mill worker. ''I'm overweight and I ain't blaming Heinz because they make ketchup with sugar in it.
''I'm blaming me, because I'm just greedy as hell.''
The income that medical oncologist Stanley Sides of Cape Girardeau, Mo., makes from 3,200 pounds of tobacco grown on his farm four hours east in Kentucky, he shares with a now-elderly neighbor who has helped tend the crop for 25 years.
But he resents being singled out as a physician.
'You could argue that the farmers in South and North Dakota that raise barley (for beer companies) are also contributing to a product that ... hurts the lifestyle of many families. The issue is how far we take it.''
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional reporter, based in Raleigh, N.C. AP news data manager Drew Sullivan performed computer analysis for this report.
Mr. William Allen Hall of Halifax died Saturday, June 27 at Halifax Regional Hospital. He was born in Charlotte County August 9, 1926 and was 71 years old. He was the son of Mr. Claborne Eli Hall and Mrs. Ora Langford Hall and was married to Alma Jean Hall.
Mr. Hall is survived by his wife, Alma Hall of Halifax; one daughter, Kathy Ricca of Fayetteville, N.C.; two step-daughters, Patricia Toombs of South Boston and Debra Collins of Mt. Laurel; two sons, Wesley Hall of South Boston and Wayne Hall of Beaufort, S.C.; one stepson, Bill Toombs of Halifax; two sisters, Zelia Barksdale of Phenix and Elevyne Clay of Richmond; and 11 grandchildren. Mr. Hall was preceded in death by eight brothers and sisters.
Graveside services will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. at Oak Ridge Cemetery with the Rev. Rudolph Jacobs conducting.
The family will receive friends at Powell Funeral Home tonight from 7:00 until 8:00 and at other times at the home, 2158 James Hagood Hwy., Halifax.
Georgia Edna Hall of Paces died Friday, June 26 at Piney Forest Health Care in Danville. She was born August 24, 1905 in Halifax County, and was the daughter of the late Charles W. and Mary Ellen Vaughan Martin. She was 92 years old.
Miss Martin is survived by two sisters, Katie Mae Martin of South Boston and Alice Dean of Danville and one brother, Lucas Martin of South Boston. She was preceded in death by two brothers, Commillious and Jesse I. Martin, and one sister, Clara Bass.
The funeral was at Brooks Funeral Home yesterday with the Rev. Kenneth Williams as the officiating clergy. Burial took place in Halifax Memorial Gardens.
The family requests that anyone wishing to give memorials to please consider the Turbeville Volunteer Fire Department.
Mrs. Nadie Eanes Fallen of Halifax died Friday, June 26 at Halifax Regional Hospital. She was born in Halifax County June 21, 1914 and was 84 years old.
She was the daughter of Paul C. Fallen and Georgia Noblin Fallen, and was a member of the Hunting Creek Baptist Church.
Mrs. Fallen is survived by one daughter, Frances F. Arnold of South Boston; one sister, Pauline F. Collins of Madison, N.C.; three grandchildren, Brian Arnold of Fairfax, Matthew Arnold of South Boston, and Wendy Fincher of Rocky Mount, N.C.; and two great-grandchildren, Benjaman Arnold of Fairfax and Megan Fincher of Rocky Mount, N.C.
Funeral services were held yesterday at Hunting Creek Baptist Church with the Rev. Lee Roy Davis conducting. Burial took place in the church cemetery.
The family will receive friends at the home of her daughter, 1215 Terry Ave., South Boston.
Mr. George Allen Foy of South Boston passed away Thursday, June 25 at Halifax Regional Hospital at the age of 65. He was born in Halifax County May 1, 1933.
Survivors of Mr. Foy include three daughters, Sandra F. Williams of South Boston, Cheryl F. Craig and Georgie F. Edmonds of Richmond; one son, Gerald Foy of South Boston; nine grandchildren and one great-grandson; two sisters, Harriet Chalmers and Nevern Smith of Albany, N.Y.; and three brothers, John Foy of Clover, Rev. Pleasant Foy of Selkirk, N.Y. and Alvin Foy of Albany, N.Y.
Funeral services will be held today at 1 p.m. at Banister Hill Baptist Church in South Boston. The Rev. William Carr will officiate, with interment taking place in the Pound family cemetery. Remains will lie-in-state one hour prior to the service.
The family will receive friends at the home of the deceased, 1230 Old Grubby Rd., South Boston.
Infant Tehya Lena Jackson of South Boston passed away Friday, June 26 at Halifax Regional Hospital in South Boston. She was born in Halifax county June 14, 1998.
Infant Jackson is survived by her mother, Lachon Jackson of South Boston and father, Kenneth Traynham of Halifax; one sister, Briana Jackson of South Boston; one brother, Jawon Jackson of South Boston; her grandmother, Nannie Coleman of Crystal Hill and grandfather, Luther Jackson of Halifax.
Graveside services were held yesterday at Sunflower Baptist Church in Nathalie. The Rev. James Traynham officiated.
Katherine "Kitty" Jones Hastings, 80, of Clarksville died Friday, June 26 at the Johnston Willis Hospital in Richmond. She was born in Mecklenburg County.
Mrs. Hastings is survived by her husband, Clinton "Charlie" Barrow Hastings, Sr.; one son, Clinton "Barry" Barrow Hastings, Jr. of Clarksville; two daughters, Carol H. Thompson and Pamela H. Bess of Richmond; two sisters, Doris J. Nicely and Edna M. Jones of Richmond; five grandchildren, Richard C. Thompson, Mark A. Thompson, John H. Thompson, Katherine G. Thompson and Sarah G. Bess; one great-granddaughter, Cassidy M. Thompson; and two nephews, J. Douglas Jones and William H. Jones.
Funeral service will be held at 2 p.m. today at Watkins Cooper Lyon Funeral Home Chapel with Rev. Keith Moore officiating. Interment will follow in the Oakhurst Cemetery in Clarksville.
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Mecklenburg County Lifesaving and Rescue Squad or Jamieson Memorial Methodist Church.