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Eva Beavers
TUESDAY, March 1, 2016 / Vol. 2 Issue 9 / 75 cents
Sometimes wishes really do come true
Judge considers Maggio's request An attorney for former Van Buren County Circuit Judge Mike Maggio asked a U.S. District judge Friday to allow Maggio to withdraw his guilty plea. James Hensley Jr. said his client did not understand the charges he pleaded guilty to and did not commit a federal crime. Maggio pleaded guilty in January 2015 to theft or bribery concerning programs receiving public funds. He was accused of reducing a Faulkner County jury's $5.2 million award to $1 million in a lawsuit alleging negligence in the death of a Greenbrier nursing home resident. A federal prosecutor in the case said Maggio pleaded guilty because he is guilty and said he should not be allowed to withdraw his plea. Maggio was a former circuit judge for the 20th Judicial DisSee Maggio on page 5
Snowy day
Lily, Zoey and Noah Woodward, children of Laura and Lucas Emberton, and Emily the dog take advantage of last Tuesday's snowfall to build a snowman. Parts of the county got as much as 3 inches of the snow and Clinton schools canceled a couple of bus routes. By nightfall, the snow was nothing but a memory. (Photo by Debby Prout)
Floye Utter, a 97-year-old woman who worked on the lunar landing gear in the 1960s, finally got her wish. When we first wrote about Utter last December, she shared her experiences working for Teledyne Ryan, a California-based firm, as a NASA-certified inspector on the Apollo 11 lunar landing gear. She confided that she had always wanted a moon rock. Members of her church at Sugarloaf Baptist made Utter a memento of the article, and her nephew in Indiana received a copy of it. The nephew, Darrel Eggers, took the story and ran with it. He contacted a museum in California and recently Floye Utter received a gift -a piece of the moon. Utter says the rock is "just about the size of a pinhead," but she is pleased nonetheless. Utter is a native of the Rocky Hill community, where she was born in 1918. With a ninth-grade education, she made her way west, where she went to work for the electronics agency and met and mar-
Floye Utter finally got her moon rock. ried the love of her life. She says the Teledyne employees knew they were working on something spectacular. "We knew we were working on landing gear for the first flight to the moon," she told the Voice. Her husband, Arley, worked for Teledyne as well. The couple retired to Higden, Arkansas, where they lived in a big house until Arley's death at the age of 94. Floye moved to a small rent house in Clinton, but that's another change for the widow. She has now bought a small house and moved back to Higden. She is happy to be closer to her church family and friends. We are happy Floye finally got her moon rock.
Trucks collide
The Van Buren County Rescue Squad had to extricate a victim after a two-vehicle collision near Southside Baptist Church between Damascus and Bee Branch last Tuesday morning. At least two people were injured. Arkansas State Police was in charge of the scene and no further details were available. (Photo by Joel French)
Shoplifting call leads to drug arrest What started as a shoplifting call ended up in drug charges against a Scotland man. Clinton Police Officer Jennifer Miller was called to Walmart on a theft of property investigation around 7:50 p.m. Feb. 21. She had to ask the suspect several times to empty all the pockets of his
cargo shorts, according to her report. By the time he had finished emptying them all, there was a pile of razor blades, gasket spray, several bottles of iodine, batteries and a charger, according to the report. There also was a small canister that he tried to shield in his hand from the officer, Miller stated.
When she opened the canister, she discovered several small plastic bags that appeared to contain "a crystallized substance," she reported. The suspect, Neil Adam Legenbauer, 38, of Scotland, told her it was not his, the A controlled burn Thursday night makes for a dramatic photo. Clinton Fire Chief D.L. Webb said a contractor was clearing land for See Arrest the Clinton School District on the hill behind McGee Monuments. on page 5 (Photo by Warren Johnson)