Decade in review
Attention-grabbing stories of the 2010s
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
A man is led from the scene following his rescue from the collapsed building on North Main Street, Washington, on July 12, 2017.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Investigators retrieve a purse from the site of the house explosion July 31, 2019, in North Franklin Township.
Gideon Bradshaw/Observer-Reporter
State Attorney General Josh Shapiro addresses reporters during a news conference on former priest John Sweeney’s guilty plea. Behind Shapiro, from left, are Senior Deputy Attorney General Daniel Dye; Sweeney’s victim, identified only by his first name, Josh; First Deputy Attorney General Michelle Henry and Executive Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Selber.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Firefighters try to reach Megan Angelone, who was trapped when part of the building at 15 N. Main St., Washington, collapsed on July 12, 2017.
Bill DeWeese
Associated Press
In this Dec. 13, 2011, photo, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky arrives with his wife, Dottie Sandusky, for a preliminary hearing at Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte.
Observer-Reporter
Former Washington County Judge Paul Pozonsky leaves Washington County Courthouse after his sentencing in August 2015.
Bashioum
T. Thomas
Katie Roupe/Observer-Reporter
Pennsylvania State Police troopers drive on Pike Street during Officer Scott Bashioum’s funeral procession.
Sabae
Snowmageddon 2010
Observer-Reporter
Neighbors on South Jefferson Avenue in Canonsburg were out in force as they dug out from the massive snowstorm Feb. 7, 2010.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Hundreds of police officers file into Church of the Covenant in Washington to honor Officer Scott Bashioum on Nov. 16, 2016.
Every year in December, the editors and reporters at the Observer-Reporter nominate and vote on the top 10 news stories of the year.
As a new decade is about to begin, we went into the newspaper’s archives to share the biggest stories in Washington and Greene counties from the past 10 years.
2010: ‘Snowmageddon’ buries region
A powerful, record-setting snowstorm crippled Western Pennsylvania in February, leaving the region with the most widespread power outages in history.
The severe weather would be nicknamed “Snowmageddon” because of the devastation it caused Feb. 5 and 6, when nearly two feet of heavy, wet snow blanketed the region.
“It’s a catastrophic situation. It’s the worst storm in the history of our company,” Allegheny Power spokesman Doug Colafella said while the company worked to restore power to more than 200,000 customers on this side of the state.
The Washington County coroner’s office attributed several deaths to the storm, including that of Carl “Puddy” Sabatasse Jr., 62, who owned Sabatasse’s Market in Hanover Township. Local police said he died in a fall while clearing snow from his store roof.
Before the week was out, the region braced for a second snowstorm that did its share to leave the Pittsburgh region with more than 40 inches of snow that February, breaking the record set in January 1978, the National Weather Service said.
“I can’t even fathom where we are going with this,” said Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates as 911 dispatchers were flooded with phone calls that month.
Snow and ice caused at least six buildings to collapse or buckle in the area, including a large section of an arched roof at Rostraver Ice Garden in Rostraver Township. A fire department garage roof was sagging in Amwell Township, while a vacant building collapsed in Donora onto a neighboring house.
Meanwhile, power outages made it difficult for some public water companies to keep pump stations open while it took Allegheny Power more than a week to repair its lines.
State Rep. Peter J. Daley would hold a public hearing into the storm, and later conclude there needed to be better severe storm preparations among utilities and municipalities, which spent more than $1.5 million in Washington County alone to remove snow from streets.
2011: Sandusky indicted in sex scandal
Jerry Sandusky’s longstanding reputation as a champion for at-risk boys dissolved into that of an alleged pedophile when he was charged in November with 40 counts of sexually assaulting young boys.
The allegations against the Washington native and former Nittany Lions football coach not only shocked his childhood friends but also quickly resulted in additional accusations by young victims, plus firings and criminal charges against those in the highest echelon at Penn State University.
On Dec. 13, Sandusky, 67, waived his preliminary hearing on 52 criminal counts for what a grand jury called a series of sexual assaults and abuse of 10 boys dating to the 1990s.
The assaults allegedly occurred in hotel swimming pools, the basement of his home in State College and in the locker room showers at Penn State, where Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant football coach at the time, testified he saw a naked Sandusky having sexual contact with a boy.
Two other Penn State officials, Tim Curley, who is on administrative leave as athletic director, and Gary Schultz, a retired senior vice president, also were held for court on perjury charges, accused of lying to a grand jury about what McQueary told them and failing to report the suspected abuse.
In addition, university President Graham Spanier and legendary football coach Joe Paterno were fired by the board of trustees for their failure to act in 2002 after learning of the alleged shower incident.
2012: DeWeese convicted
In February, Bill DeWeese was found guilty by a Dauphin County jury of using taxpayers’ money for political purposes. His conviction came more than two years after he was indicted in December 2009 by Attorney General Tom Corbett on four counts of theft and one count each of conspiracy and conflict of interest.
The former House speaker from Waynesburg resigned from the state House prior to being sentenced to a 2 1/2- to- 5-year prison term on April 24, the day of the spring primary in which he won the Democratic nomination.
However, once he was sentenced he became a convicted felon, banning him from serving in the Legislature.
DeWeese began serving his sentence May 14. However, he was released four days later when the state Superior Court found Judge Todd Hoover, who presided at trial, had failed to rule on DeWeese’s motion to grant bail while he appealed his conviction.
Hoover ruled on the motion May 22, denying bail pending appeal and sending DeWeese back to prison.
A motion DeWeese filed with Superior Court seeking to appeal Hoover’s ruling on bail pending appeal was denied May 23.
One issue that had local and state Democratic and Republican party leaders scratching their heads over the muddled mess in the 50th Legislative District was resolved when House Speaker Sam Smith decided in May not to schedule a special election to fill the seat vacated when DeWeese resigned.
In August, a Commonwealth Court judge ruled that DeWeese was ineligible to run for re-election, opening the door for the State Democratic Committee, along with committee member from the municipalities in Greene, Washington and Fayette counties that compose the legislative district, to select a candidate to run in the general election.
Greene County Commissioner Pam Snyder was the one selected, and she went on to defeat Republican Mark Fischer in November.
2013: Former county judge charged
Less than a year after he resigned from the bench when it was revealed a grand jury was investigating his conduct, former Washington County Judge Paul Pozonsky returned to the area from his new home in Alaska to face accusations he stole cocaine evidence from criminal cases he presided over.
Pozonsky, 58, was charged May 23 with conflict of interest, theft, obstruction of justice, possession of a controlled substance and misapplying entrusted government property, and has since waived all pretrial hearings as he prepares his case for trial in 2014.
The state attorney general’s investigation and subsequent charges were a shocking fall from grace for the longtime and well-respected jurist.
Pozonsky, who grew up in the Cecil Township village of Muse, started his judicial career as a district magistrate in 1984. He spent 13 years working in the McDonald and Cecil areas before winning a seat as a Washington County Common Pleas Court judge in 1997. He won reelection to another 10-year term in 2007, but trouble soon followed.
In the spring of 2011, former District Attorney Steve Toprani said he heard from various sources of “curious practices” about how evidence in Pozonsky’s courtroom was being handled. Toprani eventually referred the matter to the state attorney general’s office, which launched the grand jury investigation.
In May 2012, the drug treatment program Pozonsky started years before was temporarily shut down and President Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca suspended him from hearing any criminal cases. Pozonsky resigned from his seat on June 27, 2012, and moved to his new home near Anchorage, Alaska, with his wife.
Pozonsky is believed to still be living there while out of jail on $25,000 unsecured bond. A trial date has not yet been set.
2014: 10-year-old girl shot, killed
Four men are awaiting trial in the March 31 shooting death of a 10-year-old girl inside her West Chestnut Street, Washington, apartment.
Ta’Niyah Thomas was in her bedroom when gunshots rang out and was running across the hall to her mother’s bedroom when she was shot. The 10-year-old was struck in the back of the head and left shoulder by bullets fired through the door of the apartment at 450 W. Chestnut she shared with her mother, her mother’s boyfriend and her baby brother.
Charged in the murder of the fourth-grade student at Washington Park Elementary School are Douglas Cochran Jr., 18; Anthian Goehring, 28; Malik Thomas, 21; and Richard White, 18, all of Washington. The four were taken into custody five days after Ta’Niyah was killed. Goehring and White are half brothers, while Thomas is the girl’s cousin.
During a court proceeding in September before visiting Allegheny County Judge Edward Borkowski, White testified that the four were on their way to the Red Roof Inn for the night, but Goehring changed their plans. Goehring and Cochran reportedly decided to get money from “Oak,” who was identified as Robert Lester, the boyfriend of the girl’s mother, Shantye Brown.
White testified that Goehring and Cochran entered the apartment building. He said he saw Goehring kick at the apartment door and heard several gunshots.
Borkowski set a tentative trial date of March 30, 2015.
2015: Heroin epidemic grips region
Heroin took over countless lives this year – and took dozens away, as well.
As of Nov. 13, 57 people have died from drug overdoses in 2015 in Washington County. An indeterminable number OD’d but survived.
To put that fatality rate in perspective: There were 433 overdose deaths in the county from 1993 through 2014, an average of about 20 annually. That 2015 figure, with seven weeks remaining in the year, was nearly three times that.
Since 2010, there have been more deaths from overdoses than from car accidents, homicides or suicides. The county has had 490 drug-related deaths since 1992, according to the most recent data from the coroner’s office.
Washington County attracted the attention of national news outlets over the summer when a spate of overdoses, some fatal, happened in two consecutive weeks – three one week, five the next – as several batches of heroin were found laced with the powerful synthetic opioid Fentanyl.
Several local police departments have joined state police in training to use and keep Narcan “pens,” a fast-acting nasal spray antidote, in their vehicles. But reportage over the past year has revealed that simply reviving addicts in the hope they seek treatment hasn’t been enough.
The Communities Moving Forward Coalition, led by Canonsburg Mayor Dave Rhome and members of the Washington County Drug and Alcohol Commission, has piloted novel ways to address addiction that include bringing addicts into churches to tell stories of their struggles and recoveries. Others have talked about answering their own wakeup calls.
2016: Domestic dispute turns deadly
Pastor Jim Wilson captured the sentiment of a community hours after the murder of Canonsburg Police Officer Scott Bashioum, 52, and Dalia Sabae, 28.
“This is a tragedy we cannot explain,” Wilson said. “You don’t think something like this will happen here.”
A seven-year member of the Canonsburg police department, Bashioum was fatally shot and Officer James Saieva was injured Nov. 10 in an ambush as they responded to a domestic dispute on Woodcrest Drive. Michael Cwiklinski shot at Bashioum and Saieva before turning the gun on Sabae, his estranged wife, and killing himself.
“Bashioum was fired upon immediately from a second-floor window with a high-powered rifle and was hit twice,” said Canonsburg police Chief Alexander Coghill during a news conference days after the incident. “He returned fire, emptying his duty magazine, striking multiple rounds in and through the window. Saieva was struck by one round of a high-powered rifle as he was still in his patrol vehicle.”
Cwiklinski also fired shots at a vehicle he had parked on the street in front of the house. The vehicle was found to be loaded with gasoline, propane and acetylene tanks. Multiple law enforcement agencies were called to secure the area. A robot was used to eventually gain access to the residence.
Sabae, who was five months pregnant, had twice sought protection-from-abuse orders against Cwiklinski. Her murder sparked conversations about domestic violence around the region.
At least 800 police officers, firefighters and emergency medical responders came to pay their respects at Bashioum’s Nov. 16 funeral. People lined the streets to witness more than 300 police vehicles in a procession that traveled from Church of the Covenant in Washington, through the borough where Bashioum gave his life, to National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Cecil Township, where he was laid to rest.
“Scott always vowed to make his life as a police officer count for something,” said Bashioum’s widow, Ashley, during the funeral. “And I think it’s safe to say he succeeded.”
2017: Building collapse traps womanMore than five months since a three-story apartment building partially collapsed in downtown Washington, trapping a tenant for nine hours, the complications created by the cave-in were far from over.
The July 12 buckling of the 15 N. Main St. structure trapped Megan Angelone, 37, for more than nine hours before rescuers finally freed her. It also displaced her and other tenants and carried legal and financial repercussions that continue for the city and building owners.
The city obtained a court order allowing for demolition of the North Main building – a process that left that block of the busy street closed to traffic for months while a contractor worked to tear it down.
The city went to court in a bid to make insurers for the building’s owners – Washington landlord Mark Russo and his sister, Melissa, of Colorado – pay the more than $1.1 million to cover a bill from Allegheny Crane Rental Inc. for demolition work, legal fees and other costs arising from the demolition.
City officials cited the collapse as one reason for unexpected costs this year that prompted an increase in real-estate taxes to fuel next year’s budget.
At the time of the collapse, the Russos already were facing one citation the city code enforcement officer had filed after a tenant complained about a cracking wall he asserted was never adequately fixed.
Officials inspected several other rental properties owned by the Russos, filing more citations and evicting tenants from two – 350 Duncan Ave., which has since been sold, and 149 Hall Ave. – that they deemed uninhabitable, a step they appear not to have contemplated taking at the North Main Street building before it caved in. Most of those citations are still pending.
2018: Child sex report rocks Catholic ChurchA shocking statewide grand jury report that was made public in August identified 99 priests as child predators in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, two months before the resignation of a former bishop in the city.
In all, the 800-plus-page report, based largely on files seized from within the church, listed 301 predator priests in six dioceses in Pennsylvania and more than 1,000 child victims over the past several decades. The grand jury believed that the real numbers are higher than what was revealed in the report.
Pope Francis in October accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl as archbishop in Washington, D.C., after Wuerl was mentioned in the report that accused church leaders of covering up the abuse, with some of the complaints being aired while he served as bishop in Pittsburgh.
The allegations also involved priests who served parishes in Washington and Greene counties, and they indicated a “systematic cover-up” by church officials, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro said.
A priest who served at Sts. Mary and Ann in Marianna, Richard Zula, was entangled in one of the more bizarre cases, in which priests were accused of grooming boys for sex and giving them gold crosses that marked them as such. Zula was sentenced to 2 1/2 to 5 years in prison after pleading guilty in the case in 1990. It involved instances of wild parties with drugs and alcohol at the Marianna church.
Among those named was the Rev. John Bauer, who was accused of wrestling with minors and giving alcohol to them while on a trip when he was serving at Immaculate Conception Church in Washington in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bauer denied the allegations in the grand jury report and continued to serve in the priesthood, most recently at St. Hugh’s Catholic Church near Carmichaels.
“If there was one scintilla of doubt of sexual abuse, I would have left the priesthood,” Bauer told the parishioners gathered at the church for Mass one day after the release of the report.
But, he was placed on leave just two weeks later in August when new allegations of sexual abuse surfaced.
2019: Blast levels North Franklin home
An explosion triggered by a natural gas leak obliterated a house in North Franklin Township on July 31 and was felt for miles around. Amazingly, no one – not even the owner who was home at the time of the blast – suffered life-threatening injuries.
North Franklin Fire Chief Dave Bane said the 911 center received a call about a natural gas odor at 3:40 p.m., just 10 minutes before the explosion.
The homeowner, Deborah Braden, had just returned from work, opened her garage and “man” doors and heard a hissing sound, Bane said. He and North Franklin Fire Capt. Kris Engel turned off the gas meter connected to the house. Bane radioed to an incoming fire engine that he needed gas detection meters, but the house blew up before they arrived.
He and Engel were 30 to 40 feet away from the house at the time, and Braden was even closer. Braden suffered some hearing problems, and some minor injuries to her fingers. Two North Franklin firefighters had cuts and abrasions, and a third suffered heat exhaustion. A neighbor experienced chest pains. All five were treated at area hospitals.
Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania took full responsibility for the explosion. President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Huwar said crews had started “routine modernization work” to replace old gas mains in that area, and as part of the work, each customer’s home connected to the main line needed to have a gas regulator installed.
Because Braden’s house was on a different street than the rest of the system and sat farther back on Park Lane, the house was overlooked and didn’t get a regulator. “Therefore, when the new system was energized, and because the pressure regulator was not added, the elevated pressure led to the leak, which led to the explosion,” Huwar said.
Several homes in the area were structurally damaged, with cracks in walls and foundations. Windows of homes along Park Avenue were blown out. The front door of Deborah’s home had been blown all the way to the backyard of a Park Avenue residence.
A week later, one of Braden’s canceled checks – without a speck of dirt – was found 10 hilly miles away on a farmer’s property in Scenery Hill, obviously propelled by wind from the blast.