Mourning

The lone surviving brother of the youth who shot and killed LAPD SWAT Officer Randal Simmons expressed his condolences to the officer's family Tuesday and said his brother had been depressed. But Wilfredo Rivera, 27, said he could not explain the events that left his father, three brothers and Simmons dead. SWAT Officer James Veenstra was wounded in the incident. "The family is at a loss," said Rivera, an air-conditioning installer who had married and moved from the family home in Winnetka.

As health concerns intensified and aid poured in from across China and the world, Beijing on Sunday began three days of mourning to commemorate the likely 50,000 deaths from the massive earthquake in Sichuan province. The toll continued to rise, with a report today by the official New China News Agency that more than 200 relief workers had been buried by mud. Details were not immediately available. This afternoon, exactly one week after the magnitude 7.

As Enterprise High School's football field swarmed with Black Hawk helicopters and armed National Guard soldiers Friday, Ben Powell thought of the last time he saw Katie Strunk. "We were sitting in history," the 10th-grader said. "She was smiling. She always smiled." Ben had a crush on Katie, who was among eight students who died at their school Thursday when a tornado slammed into the main building, ripping off concrete roofs and flattening cinder-block walls.

An elderly man sat on a chair in front of his house, lamenting the loss of yet another piece of his past. A short distance away, the skeletal remains of the Sarafiya Bridge dangled over the Tigris River. Focus on the steel-frame bridge, where a truck bomber killed at least 10 people early Thursday, was quickly diverted by the lunch-time attack at the heavily guarded parliament building. That's not unusual in Iraq, where brutal mornings often give way to uglier afternoons.

Liviu Librescu's casket came Wednesday to a place he had never been. In the heart of Borough Park in Brooklyn, the unadorned wooden casket was shouldered by Jewish men who had not known the Virginia Tech science professor but whose fathers and grandfathers were, like Librescu, Holocaust survivors. A community leader called Librescu, 76, a "hero of the Jewish people." Librescu's wife, far from her Virginia home, spoke to those who had never met him. "He was a very human person.

Thousands of mourners filed past the open casket of former Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Tuesday as his body lay in state in Moscow's main cathedral, which was demolished in Soviet times and rebuilt under his rule. Yeltsin's widow, Naina, and their two daughters sat together as a Russian Orthodox priest gave blessings and ordinary citizens placed flowers near the casket. A choir sang, candles were lighted and incense burned.

Three children whose deaths in a horrific freeway crash captured the hearts of Orange County residents and people throughout the country were remembered Saturday as loving and independent little "angels" in an emotional church service that brought mourners to tears.

On Thursday morning, it was expected that classical music luminaries would be mourning the death of Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who had died only hours earlier at age 71 at his home in Modena, Italy, after battling pancreatic cancer. One of those luminaries was Pl?cido Domingo, managing director of Los Angeles Opera -- and, along with Pavarotti and Jos? Carreras, one of the popular Three Tenors. Domingo, who heard the news while in rehearsal for Saturday's opening of L.A.

Sitting in a chair just after 7:30 a.m., beneath the amber glow of a hallway light, Carol Ashley leans over and ties the laces on an old pair of sneakers. She slips her good shoes into her purse. She knows it will be muddy in the pit. Outside, the sky is gray and rain slaps her windows. Six years ago on a Tuesday morning nothing like this one, Ashley's 25-year-old daughter, Janice, stood in this hallway wearing a taupe dress suit, a silver watch and her great-grandmother's pearl earrings.

Grieving used to be seen as a very straightforward process: You cried at the funeral, were sad for a few months, then you had some "closure" and got on with your life. Psychologists -- both pop and professional -- thought that anyone who didn't cry at the funeral or was still crying a year later was either heartless or overly emotional.