Trinity River

Thousands of dead fish turned up along a 50-mile stretch of the Trinity River, possibly because recent rains had stirred up sewage sediment on the river bottom, suffocating the fish, a wildlife expert said Tuesday. The major fish kill last weekend is being studied by state and federal officials, who are still counting the dead. The kill will likely surpass a series of 1984 kills that wiped out 171,000 fish, fishery biologist Allen Forsage of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said.

The bogus drug busts are notorious: Mexican immigrants were jailed, went broke or got deported, only to have the evidence against them fall apart. The bricks of white powder they were charged with peddling turned out to be plaster of Paris--not cocaine or speed, as police had claimed. In all, more than 70 arrests have come unstrung this winter in a very public crescendo of bad cop work and shoddy prosecution. Now Dallas is in an uproar. Federal investigators are probing the police department.

After a week of searching through swampy, bug-swarming river bottoms, law officers hunting death row inmate Martin E. Gurule finally found their man Thursday--dead, beneath a bridge over the Trinity River near Huntsville, with tantalizing hints about how he'd made his way over the prison's two razor-wired security fences. The body of Gurule, 29, was swathed in cardboard and two sets of heavy underwear, according to officials.

In a 57-acre valley, where the traffic consists mostly of deer and rattlesnakes, 19-year-old Christophe Devlies and the four other unpaid farm workers take a break. Their morning began at 5 a.m. with yoga or meditation; now, the fields of organic eggplant and other crops can wait. Lanky, with a blond ponytail, Devlies ducks into the four-bedroom farmhouse to escape the heat in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest.

A man armed with a knife hijacked a bus early Thursday, stabbed the driver, sexually assaulted a woman passenger and stabbed her to death, then fled into the darkness, police said. The driver, David Jeanfreau, 22, escaped from the bus after struggling with the suspect, then swam across the Trinity River and scrambled to the side of a highway, where he flagged down a passing motorist, police said.

Hundreds of families took refuge from rising rivers in Arkansas and Texas as work crews shored up levees and operated pumps to fight the worst flooding in at least six decades, authorities said. Up to 450 families remained out of their homes in Arkansas and another 200 families fled the surging Trinity River in Texas, officials said. No deaths or serious injuries were reported in Arkansas, but nearly 200 head of cattle were swept to their deaths north of Little Rock.

Ending a four-year fight, the Hoopa Valley Tribe claimed victory Friday over a Central Valley water district that attempted to block a restoration plan for the Trinity River, the broad tributary that winds through the tribe's Humboldt County reservation. Westlands Water District and the Northern California Power Agency told a U.S.

Thunderstorms and showers hit rain-weary Texas and the South, while central Texas recovered from tornadoes. Rain fell across parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana and continued to fuel flooding along the surging Trinity River in southeast Texas. The National Weather Service also reported severe flood damage in Indiana and Ohio. More rain was expected through Wednesday.

Floodwaters along the Trinity River receded enough to allow some people to return home, but Liberty County officials warned that the Liberty area, near Houston, could get as much as four more inches of rain. The National Weather Service said there was a 60% chance of thunderstorms. The river at Liberty stood at 28.9 feet, nearly five feet above flood stage, after almost 1 1/2 inches of rain fell at Lake Livingston Dam over the weekend.