Suicides

A 43-year-old patient at a troubled state-run psychiatric hospital has died in what appears to be a suicide, coroner's officials said Friday. Augie Solez, who was in long-term commitment at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, was found unresponsive at 11:34 a.m. Thursday, said San Bernardino County Sheriff's spokeswoman Sandy Fatland. He appeared to have hanged himself, Fatland said, but an autopsy has not been completed and a cause of death has yet to be determined.

Within the vaulted basilica where he lay in a glass-lid coffin, the transformation was already underway. In life, Father John Kaiser had been a troublemaker, an obstinate and single-minded man who railed against church passivity and clashed with his bishops, his missionary bosses, his fellow priests. Now, it was possible to ignore the rough edges and complicated history.

A gunman went on a rampage across two southern Alabama counties Tuesday, killing at least nine people and burning down his mother's house before shooting himself to death, authorities said. The victims included family members and apparent strangers, the Associated Press reported. Police were investigating shootings in four locations in three communities near the Florida border, all of which were thought to be the work of a single gunman named Michael McLendon.

The psychological profile of a teenager who went on a shooting rampage at his former school and killed 15 people began to take shape Thursday, as investigators described a withdrawn young man who broke off psychiatric treatment for depression. But investigators encountered a setback as they struggled to authenticate a chat room posting that purportedly warned of a bloody rampage hours before 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer wreaked havoc on this quiet town near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany.

Troubled mortgage financing giant Freddie Mac and its employees were dealt another blow Wednesday when one of the company's top executives was found dead in his Virginia home, an apparent suicide. The death of David Kellermann, 41, the acting chief financial officer, adds more turmoil at Freddie Mac.

Cadaver dogs found the body of a wanted professor "beneath the earth" in the north Georgia woods Saturday, two weeks after police say he shot his wife and two other people to death outside a community theater, then vanished. Searchers found two guns near the body of marketing professor George Zinkhan, 57, but police wouldn't say how he died. They did say it appears he buried himself in brush and dirt.

A 31-year-old Yemeni was found dead in his cell at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in an apparent suicide, U.S. military officials said Tuesday. Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih would be the fifth prisoner to take his life at the detention center since the Pentagon began holding terrorism suspects there more than seven years ago. The death late Monday spurred fresh criticism of the U.S. detention policy and demands that President Obama make good on his vow to close Guantanamo by January.

A second defendant indicted after an investigation into the theft and illegal trafficking of American Indian artifacts from the Four Corners area has been found dead in an apparent suicide, the FBI said Friday. The body of Steven L. Shrader, 56, of Santa Fe, N.M., was found behind an elementary school in Shabbona, Ill., on Friday. The DeKalb County Sheriff's Office said he died of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest.

When Marine Lance Cpl. Ray A. Spencer II and his future wife were first getting to know each other, they found a mutual interest in history. Spencer's favorite eras were Greek and Roman. He liked stories of ancient battles. "Nerdy stuff," remembered his widow, Athena Spencer. At Burroughs High School in Ridgecrest, Calif., he enrolled in the Junior ROTC program.

Sun Danyong was the mild-mannered son of a potato-farming family in an impoverished corner of south-central China. When he was offered a job at a sprawling electronics factory in the boomtown of Shenzhen last year, he accepted, figuring the experience would spur him to better opportunities one day back in his home province of Yunnan. He never got the chance.