FBI: Elderly man robs Niles bank

Suspect in the robbery of a Niles bank. (FBI / February 9, 2013)

Staff report

9:53 p.m. CST, February 9, 2013

A man the FBI said appeared to be in his 70s and walking with a cane robbed a bank this morning in north suburban Niles.

A man who is estimated to be in his 70s robbed the Harris Bank branch at 7077 W. Dempster St. at 9:45 a.m., according to FBI spokesman Joan Hyde.

The robber was wearing a brown coat and walked with a cane during the incident, she said.

He displayed a weapon during the robbery, but no one was hurt, according to Hyde.

Niles police were not available immediately. 

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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The fine line between legitimate businesses and pyramid schemes

Controversy is again casting a shadow over the multilevel marketing industry, as nutritional supplement company Herbalife Inc., which has thousands of distributors in the Chicago region, has been publicly called a pyramid scheme by a prominent investor — an allegation the company vigorously denies.

Meanwhile, a different multilevel marketer, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, was shut down in recent weeks after a lawsuit was brought by regulators and several states, including Illinois, alleging the company scammed consumers out of $169 million. The scheme affected an estimated 100,000 Americans, including some in Chicago, where it targeted Spanish-speaking consumers, the Federal Trade Commission alleged.

Most people outside the industry might have only a vague notion about multilevel marketing, also called network marketing and direct selling. It often involves personal sales of cosmetics, wellness products or home decor items — or as critics flippantly call it, "pills, potions and lotions" — usually sold through product parties hosted by friends or relatives.

For sellers, the companies offer the appeal of starting a business on the cheap with little training, working from home and being their own boss, if only for part-time money. Some might recruit friends and family to become sellers, which augments their own commissions and gives them a shot at the six-figure compensation many such marketing companies tout but few distributors attain.

The largest multilevel marketing companies, often known as MLMs, are household names: Avon, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and Amway. MLMs have annual sales of about $30 billion, with about 16 million people in the United States selling their products, according to the industry group Direct Selling Association, which represents these firms and others.

The recent controversies might raise the question: What's the difference between a legitimate multilevel marketing company and an illegal pyramid scheme, in which only people who get in first — at the top of the pyramid-like structure — make money and everyone else is a dupe?

The harshest critics maintain there is no difference, that there's no such thing as a legitimate MLM and that the industry's secrets stay safe because of a cultlike mentality and a blind eye of regulators.

Jon M. Taylor, who was once a seller for an MLM company, said he has studied the industry for 18 years and analyzed more than 500 MLM companies. He maintains the website MLM-thetruth.com and offers a free e-book there.

"I have not yet found a good MLM — a good MLM is an oxymoron," Taylor said.

He said all MLM companies have the same flaw: They depend on endless chains of recruiting new members.  "There is no more unfair and deceptive practice than multilevel marketing," Taylor said.

Tracy Coenen, a forensic accountant and fraud investigator with Sequence Inc. in Chicago and Milwaukee, is author of the Fraud Files Blog. She is also a critic.

"Multilevel marketing companies are pyramid schemes that the government allows to operate," said Coenen. "The only difference is that Herbalife, or any multilevel marketing company, has a tangible product that they use to make their pyramid appear legitimate."

The Direct Selling Association says MLMs are legitimate businesses, and that the group has about 200 members carefully screened by the organization to ensure they are not pyramid schemes and don't use deceptive practices.

The Federal Trade Commission agrees there are legitimate MLMs. The difference between a legitimate business and pyramid scheme comes down to products.

If the company and its distributors make money primarily from the sale of products to end-users (and not boxes of product accumulating in a distributor's garage), it's OK.

By contrast, a pyramid scheme compensates those at the top of the pyramid with participation fees paid by those recruited at the bottom. It eventually collapses when the scheme can't recruit more people.

But identifying a pyramid scheme can be difficult because MLMs typically have product sales, along with recruitment fees and recruitment incentives.

"It gets cloudy when you have a situation where you have fees being paid for both," said Monica Vaca, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices. "It's very nuanced."

While prosecuting an MLM can seem somewhat of a judgment call, cases have a common factor: deceptive promises about how much money distributors will earn, Vaca said.

In the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing case filed last month, C. Steven Baker, director of the FTC's Midwest region, said, "These defendants were promising people that if they worked hard they could make lots of money. But it was a rigged game, and the vast majority of people lost money."

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Blizzard hits Northeast closing roads, cancelling flights

A blizzard slammed into the northeastern United States on Friday, snarling traffic, disrupting thousands of flights and prompting five governors to declare states of emergency in the face of a fearsome snowstorm.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced a ban on most car travel starting Friday afternoon, while in Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy closed the state's highways to all but emergency vehicles.

Winds were blowing at 35 to 40 miles per hour (56 to 64 km per hour) by Friday afternoon and forecasters expected gusts up to 60 mph as the evening wore on.

The blizzard left about 10,000 customers along the East Coast without power, and almost 3,500 flights were canceled.

Forecasters warned that about 2 feet of snow would blanket most of the Boston area with some spots getting as much as 30 inches. New York was due to get about a foot in some areas, while heavy snowfall was also expected in Connecticut and Maine.

"We're seeing heavier snow overspread the region from south to north," said Lance Franck, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Massachusetts, outside Boston. "As the snow picks up in intensity, we're expecting it to fall at a rate of upwards of two to three inches per hour."

Early Friday evening, officials warned that the storm was just ramping up to full strength, and that heavy snow and high winds would continue through midday on Saturday. The governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Maine declared states of emergency and issued bans on driving by early Friday afternoon.

In many cases, authorities ordered non-essential government workers to stay home, urged private employers to do the same, told people to prepare for power outages and encouraged them to check on elderly or disabled neighbors.

People appeared to take the warnings seriously. Traffic on streets and ridership on public transportation was significantly lighter than usual on Friday.

"This is a very large and powerful storm, however we are encouraged by the numbers of people who stayed home today," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino told reporters.

In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested the storm created an opportunity to relax and catch up on sleep.

Even so, the storm caused a few accidents, including a 19-vehicle pile-up outside Portland, Maine, that sent one person to the hospital.

In addition to Friday's cancellations, more than 1,200 flights scheduled for Saturday were scratched, according to the website FlightAware.com.

The storm also posed a risk of flooding at high tide to areas still recovering from Superstorm Sandy last October.

"Many of the same communities that were inundated by Hurricane Sandy's tidal surge just about 100 days ago are likely to see some moderate coastal flooding this evening," said Bloomberg.

Brick Township in New Jersey had crews out building up sand dunes and berms ahead of a forecast storm surge, said Mayor Stephen Acropolis.

Travel became more difficult as the day progressed.

Amtrak suspended railroad service between New York, Boston and points north on Friday afternoon.

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Humble Damon cheers Oscar hopeful, friend Ben Affleck

BERLIN (Reuters) – It seems that wherever Matt Damon goes to promote his movies he is asked about something else altogether – his old friend and collaborator Ben Affleck, whose Iranian hostage drama “Argo” is in the running for a Best Picture Oscar.

Damon shared a screenplay Academy Award with Affleck for the 1997 film “Good Will Hunting” and has gone on to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, with blockbusters including the “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Bourne Identity” series.

He was in Berlin on Friday for the festival premiere of “Promised Land”, a tale set in rural America that tackles the controversial gas extraction technique known as “fracking”.

At a news conference following the press screening, the 42-year-old did not have to wait long for a question about Affleck, and, once again, he lavished praise on an actor who he said had endured his share of tough times.

“His life is so interesting that I kind of never get tired of talking (about it),” Damon joked.

Of the critical acclaim and string of awards for “Argo,” he said: “I’m really happy for him. He certainly deserves it.”

“He’s worked so hard and he’s taken it on the chin for years from the press and just from everywhere. He was really in a rough spot 10 years ago,” Damon told reporters, referring to the ridicule Affleck suffered during his romance with Jennifer Lopez and their 2003 movie flop “Gigli.”

The actor recalled Affleck once telling him he was “in the worst place you could be career-wise: I sell magazines and I don’t sell movie tickets’.”

Damon singled out some “fantastic” performances by Affleck in recent years: “Hollywoodland,” “The Town” and “Argo” itself, the last two of which he also directed.

He would not, however, be drawn on the chances of “Argo” landing the big prize at the Oscars on February 24.

PROMISED LAND “BOMBS”

Less successful has been “Promised Land,” which Damon readily admitted had “bombed” in the United States. It opens across Europe in February, March and April.

According to Boxofficemojo.com, the movie earned just $ 7.6 million at the North American box office.

“I’m leery of becoming one of those people who lives so much in a bubble that I just think everything I do is great,” he said. “I try to be mindful of that and listen.

“I’ve had a lot of movies that … haven’t been well received by an audience and I’m realistic about that, but with this one I just really love it and a big part of my heart is in it and I don’t understand what I’m hearing back.”

He said it was possible that “Promised Land,” also starring Frances McDormand and directed by “Good Will Hunting” filmmaker Gus Van Sant, would be appreciated more in the future.

“I’ve had movies bomb worse than this one and then actually make their money back.”

“Promised Land” is one of 19 movies in the main competition at the Berlin film festival running from Thursday to February 17.

Also screening on Friday were Polish entry “In the Name of” and Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Hope,” the final part in a trilogy looking at the lives of a single family, in this case an overweight teenager sent to a diet camp.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Jill Serjeant and Doina Chiacu)

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Well: Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient

The Challenge: Can you solve the mystery of a middle-aged man recovering from a serious illness who suddenly becomes frightened and confused?

Every month the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to sift through a difficult case and solve a diagnostic riddle. Below you will find a summary of a case involving a 55-year-old man well on his way to recovering from a series of illnesses when he suddenly becomes confused and paranoid. I will provide you with the main medical notes, labs and imaging results available to the doctor who made the diagnosis.

The first reader to figure out this case will get a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” along with the satisfaction of knowing you solved a case of Sherlockian complexity. Good luck.

The Presenting Problem:

A 55-year-old man who is recovering from a devastating injury in a rehabilitation facility suddenly becomes confused, frightened and paranoid.

The Patient’s Story:

The patient, who was recovering from a terrible injury and was too weak to walk, had been found on the floor of his room at the extended care facility, raving that there were people out to get him. He was taken to the emergency room at the Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment. Doctors thought his delirium was caused by the infection, but after 24 hours, despite receiving the appropriate antibiotics, the patient remained disoriented and frightened.

A Sister’s Visit:

The man’s sister came to visit him on his second day in the hospital. As she walked into the room she was immediately struck by her brother’s distress.

“Get me out of here!” the man shouted from his hospital bed. “They are coming to get me. I gotta get out of here!”

His brown eyes darted from side to side as if searching for his would-be attackers. His arms and legs shook with fear. He looked terrified.

For the past few months, the man had been in and out of the hospital, but he had been getting better — at least he had been improving the last time his sister saw him, the week before. She hurried into the bustling hallway and found a nurse. “What the hell is going on with my brother?” she demanded.

A Long Series of Illnesses:

Three months earlier, the patient had been admitted to that same hospital with delirium tremens. After years of alcohol abuse, he had suddenly stopped drinking a couple of days before, and his body was wracked by the sudden loss of the chemical he had become addicted to. He’d spent an entire week in the hospital but finally recovered. He was sent home, but he didn’t stay there for long.

The following week, when his sister hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she forced her way into his home. There she found him, unconscious, in the basement, at the bottom of his staircase. He had fallen, and it looked as if he may have been there for two, possibly three, days. He was close to death. Indeed, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart had stopped. Rapid action by the E.M.T.’s brought his heart back to life, and he made it to the hospital.

There the extent of the damage became clear. The man’s kidneys had stopped working, and his body chemistry was completely out of whack. He had a severe concussion. And he’d had a heart attack.

He remained in the intensive care unit for nearly three weeks, and in the hospital another two weeks. Even after these weeks of care and recovery, the toll of his injury was terrible. His kidneys were not working, so he required dialysis three times a week. He had needed a machine to help him breathe for so long that he now had to get oxygen through a hole that had been cut into his throat. His arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them, and because he was unable even to swallow, he had to be fed through a tube that went directly into his stomach.

Finally, after five weeks in the hospital, he was well enough to be moved to a short-term rehabilitation hospital to complete the long road to recovery. But he was still far from healthy. The laughing, swaggering, Harley-riding man his sister had known until that terrible fall seemed a distant memory, though she saw that he was slowly getting better. He had even started to smile and make jokes. He was confident, he had told her, that with a lot of hard work he could get back to normal. So was she; she knew he was tough.

Back to the Hospital:

The patient had been at the rehab facility for just over two weeks when the staff noticed a sudden change in him. He had stopped smiling and was no longer making jokes. Instead, he talked about people that no one else could see. And he was worried that they wanted to harm him. When he remained confused for a second day, they sent him to the emergency room.

You can see the records from that E.R. visit here.

The man told the E.R. doctor that he knew he was having hallucinations. He thought they had started when he had begun taking a pill to help him sleep a couple of days earlier. It seemed a reasonable explanation, since the medication was known to cause delirium in some people. The hospital psychiatrist took him off that medication and sent him back to rehab that evening with a different sleeping pill.

Back to the Hospital, Again:

Two days later, the patient was back in the emergency room. He was still seeing things that weren’t there, but now he was quite confused as well. He knew his name but couldn’t remember what day or month it was, or even what year. And he had no idea where he was, or where he had just come from.

When the medical team saw the patient after he had been admitted, he was unable to provide any useful medical history. His medical records outlined his earlier hospitalizations, and records from the nursing home filled in additional details. The patient had a history of high blood pressure, depression and alcoholism. He was on a long list of medications. And he had been confused for the past several days.

On examination, he had no fever, although a couple of hours earlier his temperature had been 100.0 degrees. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was sky high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his reflexes were very brisk. Indeed, when his ankle was flexed suddenly, it continued to jerk back and forth on its own three or four times before stopping, a phenomenon known as clonus.

His labs were unchanged from the previous visit except for his urine, which showed signs of a serious infection. A CT scan of the brain was unremarkable, as was a chest X-ray. He was started on an intravenous antibiotic to treat the infection. The thinking was that perhaps the infection was causing the patient’s confusion.

You can see the notes from that second hospital visit here.

His sister had come to visit him the next day, when he was as confused as he had ever been. He was now trembling all over and looked scared to death, terrified. He was certain he was being pursued.

That is when she confronted the nurse, demanding to know what was going on with her brother. The nurse didn’t know. No one did. His urinary tract infection was being treated with antibiotics, but he continued to have a rapid heart rate and elevated blood pressure, along with terrifying hallucinations.

Solving the Mystery:

Can you figure out why this man was so confused and tremulous? I have provided you with all the data available to the doctor who made the diagnosis. The case is not easy — that is why it is here. I’ll post the answer on Friday.

Friday Feb. 8 4:13 p.m. | Updated Thanks for all your responses. You can read about the winner at “Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient Solved.”

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Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the comments section below.. The correct answer will appear Friday on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

Correction: The patient’s eyes were brown, not blue.

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S&C relay at center of Super Bowl outage

An electrical relay device supplied by Rogers Park's S&C Electric Co. was found to be at the center of the Super Bowl power outage in New Orleans, the company said Friday.

S&C Electric Co. said the outage, which lasted for more than 30 minutes at Sunday's game, happened when the demand for Superdome power exceeding a "trip setting" for its electrical relay.

But the device didn't malfunction, S&C said. Instead, it said it found in testing that system operators didn't account for the amount of power needed at the Superdome. S&C doesn't control the power settings on its equipment.

S&C wouldn't go into more details, but the power provider for Sunday's game was Entergy New Orleans, a unit of Entergy Corp.

In a statement, Entergy said the relay device had functioned properly at other high-profile sporting events, including the Sugar Bowl.

The relay was designed to prevent an outage if a cable connection to the stadium failed.

"S&C continues to work with all those involved to get the system back online, and our customers can continue to rely on the quality and performance of our products," Spokesman Michael Edmonds said in a statement.

S&C equipment is commonly used where high reliability is critical, he said, including data centers for United Parcel Service Inc., drug manufacturing centers and hospitals. The company also works with other stadiums throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Entergy said in a statement that the Superdome relay has been removed and replacement equipment is being examined.

That statement came before a special meeting of the New Orleans City Council's Utility Committee Friday morning to discuss the root cause of the outage.

Immediately after the game, Entergy indicated its equipment was functional and the problem must have come from the Superdome, but later said it was launching an investigation to determine the source of the problem.

"While some further analysis remains, we believe we have identified and remedied the cause of the power outage and regret the interruption that occurred during what was a showcase event for the city and state," Entergy New Orleans President and CEO Charles Rice said.

sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel

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Chicago area could get up to 5 inches of snow

A winter storm dumped almost 9 inches of heavy, wet snow in some far northern suburbs before tapering off this evening.

A winter storm warning was set to expire at midnight for Lake and McHenry counties, with Cook, DuPage and DeKalb counties under a winter weather advisory until midnight.

Some areas, such as near Beach Park, had 8.5 inches by this evening, with suburbs in Lake and McHenry counties expected to get a total of at least 6 inches, according to the National Weather Service. By this evening, Elgin recorded 4 inches, while Hanover Park saw 3.2 inches and Evanston 2.1 inches, according to the weather service.

Chicago sent out 199 of its snow and salt trucks and expected to patrol main streets throughout the evening rush.

The Illinois Tollway mobilized its full fleet of 182 snowplows during rush hour and throughout the evening across the 286-mile system, according to a release.

North and northwest suburbs saw numerous accidents, from Barrington to Antioch, according to Traffic.com.

In McHenry County, police warned motorists to avoid U.S. Route 31 between Crystal Lake and McHenry because the road was "impassable" where it crosses over a hill.

The Weather Service warned that today's storm produced what's "often referred to as a heart attack snow" because wet snow can cause people to overexert themselves, causing heart attacks.

"Be sure to take frequent breaks while shoveling so as not to overdo it," the weather service warned.

Some snow accumulation is possible into the early morning hours, with up to an inch in northern suburbs, according to the weather service. After a possibility of flurries Friday morning, the day will turn sunny and temperatures will go up to the low 30s. There will be gusty winds of up to 35 mph in the afternoon. Saturday is expected to be sunny and in the mid-30s. A high in the mid-40s is expected Sunday, with rain.

Photos: Chicago winter 2012-13

Still, the storm was nothing like the one barreling toward New England with forecasts of up to two feet of snow. A blizzard warning has been issued for New York City, Connecticut and the Boston area.

Forecasters warned the snow would begin lightly on Friday morning but ramp up to blizzard conditions by afternoon, leading Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to order the city's schools closed Friday. He asked businesses to consider allowing staff to stay home.

"We are hardy New Englanders, let me tell you, and used to these types of storms. But I also want to remind everyone to use common sense and stay off the streets of our city. Basically, stay home," Menino told reporters. "Stay put after noontime tomorrow."

The National Weather Service said Boston could get one to two feet of snow on Friday and Saturday, which would be its first major snow fall in about two years. Light snow is expected to begin falling around 7 a.m. EST on Friday, with heavier snow and winds gusting as high as 60 to 75 miles per hour as the day progresses.

"It's the afternoon rush-hour time frame into the evening and overnight when the height of the storm will be," said Kim Buttrick, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton, Massachusetts. "That's when we expect the storm to begin in earnest."

The heaviest snow was expected around Boston, the region's most populous city, with cities from Hartford, Connecticut to Portland, Maine, expected to see at least a foot.

If more than 18.2 inches of snow fall in Boston, the storm will rank among the 10 biggest snowfalls on record in the city. The heaviest snowfall ever recorded in Boston was a 27.6 inch dump that accompanied the blizzard of February 17-18, 2003.

The storm's timing brought back memories of the blizzard of 1978, Boston's second-heaviest recorded snow fall, which roared in on an afternoon, dropping 27.1 inches of snow, trapping commuters on roadways and leaving dozens dead across the region, largely as a result of downed electrical lines.

Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said one of the state's biggest worry is power outages.

"It being winter, folks losing their power means they're also losing their heat, and if you lose heat during the middle of the storm, you're not going to be able to go out to get to a shelter," he said, adding that the agency would begin 24-hour operations at its emergency compound at noon (1700 GMT) on Friday and would be in close contact with local utilities.

Unlike the 1978 blizzard, which had been forecast to drop far less snow than it actually did, he said he hoped several days of news coverage about this storm would prompt people to stay off the roads.

"People have been warned, they have been told what the issues are," Judge said. "We don't expect people to be surprised."

Reuters contributed to this report.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Twitter: @chicagobreaking

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Daniel Doctoroff Enlists Bloomberg in A.L.S. Research

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Daniel L. Doctoroff, second from right, chief executive of Bloomberg L.P., at Columbia University’s Motor Neuron Center.

Daniel L. Doctoroff watched in pain as his father developed a limp one day, was found to have Lou Gehrig’s disease, and died within two years. Then an uncle also developed symptoms of the same disease, and died soon after.

Now Mr. Doctoroff, like many other relatives of Lou Gehrig’s disease victims, worries that he or his children may someday develop the illness.

But unlike many, he is in a position to try to do something about it. At a time when scientists are making rapid gains in the genetic roots of many diseases, Mr. Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor and private equity investor, is working with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and a private equity director, David M. Rubenstein, to put together a $25 million package of donations to support research to try to cure this rare and usually fatal degenerative neurological illness.

“This is a devastating disease,” Mr. Doctoroff said in an interview this week in the glass high-rise on the Upper East Side that houses Bloomberg L.P., the mayor’s media and financial information company, where Mr. Doctoroff is now chief executive. “Up to now, there’s been basically no hope. I have the resources, and I think it’s my obligation to do that.”

The gift is part of a wave of investment based on the booming field of genomic analysis. The money will go to a project called Target A.L.S., a consortium of at least 18 laboratories, including ones at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins, the mayor’s alma mater, working to find biological “targets,” like gene mutations, and the biochemical changes they cause in the spinal cord, that could be used to test potential drug therapies for the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

It comes on top of a previous $15 million gift by Mr. Doctoroff, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other donors. By comparison, the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of research financing for the disease, expects to give $44 million in 2013.

This is not Mr. Bloomberg’s first time supporting charitable causes that are dear to his close associates. The mayor quietly gave at least $1 million to put the name of his top deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris, on a new academic center at her alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

Mr. Doctoroff said the conversation about A.L.S. in which he got Mr. Bloomberg involved “lasted about five seconds.” He declined to say what share of the money each of the three donors was giving.

Mr. Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group, said Wednesday that he had long been fascinated with A.L.S. because of its association with Gehrig, the baseball player who died of it. He wondered why more than 70 years later so little progress had been made in treating it.

He said he jumped at the chance to join in because he thought that A.L.S. research was underfinanced owing to the rarity of the disease, and that even a small amount of money could make a big difference.

In the Bloomberg administration, where he was deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding from 2002 to 2008, Mr. Doctoroff was best known for his dogged — and ultimately dashed — attempt to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York City. (London got the Games.) Now that he has left City Hall, he no longer rides his bike to work — he says the 2.6-mile route from the Upper West Side to his office is too short — but he sometimes runs.

At Bloomberg, he sits in front of a conference room with walls of hot-pink glass, while carp swim in a giant fish tank nearby. He keeps no family photos or other personal mementos on his desk, and talking about his family’s disease history does not seem easy for him.

A.L.S. is rare, with about 2 new cases diagnosed a year per 100,000 people, according to the A.L.S. Association. A vast majority of cases are “sporadic,” in people who have no family history, while only 5 to 10 percent of cases are inherited. There appear to be no racial, ethnic or socioeconomic predispositions.

There is some speculation about environmental factors, like exposure to toxic chemicals and high physical activity that athletes might endure, “but nothing firm,” said Christopher E. Henderson, a researcher at Columbia and the Target A.L.S. project’s scientific director. Some researchers suspect a link between A.L.S. and head trauma suffered by professional football players.

Mr. Doctoroff’s father, Martin, an appeals court judge in Michigan, received the diagnosis in 2000 and died in 2002. One of Martin Doctoroff’s brothers, Michael, was found to have the disease in 2009 and died in 2010.

“When my father contracted the disease and passed away, it was very easy to chalk it up to bad luck,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “When my uncle got it, it obviously had broader implications.”

Given his family history, Mr. Doctoroff estimates that there is a 50-50 chance that he has the gene, C9orf72, that could lead to A.L.S. But he has chosen not to be tested, which would have implications not just for him but for his three children. “It’s very personal, but I’m not sure that I want to know,” he said.

Even when family members develop the disease, it can occur at vastly different ages, so he could still be in suspense even after testing. “Assuming you have the gene, you don’t know when you would actually get the disease,” he said. His uncle was 71. His father was 66. He is now 54.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 8, 2013

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Thursday with an article about efforts by Daniel L. Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York, to research Lou Gehrig’s disease misstated his title at Bloomberg L.P. in some editions. He is the chief executive, not the executive director.

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Justice weighs action against Moody's

(Reuters) - The Justice Department and multiple states are discussing also suing Moody's Corp for defrauding investors, according to people familiar with the matter, but any such move will likely wait until a similar lawsuit against rival Standard and Poor's is tested in the courts.

Inquiries into Moody's are in the early stages, largely because state and federal authorities have dedicated more resources to the S&P lawsuit, said the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about enforcement discussions.

Moody's spokesman Michael Adler and Justice Department spokeswoman Adora Andy declined to comment for this story.

Moody's in the past has defended itself against similar allegations, including a 2011 congressional report that concluded the major ratings agencies manipulated ratings to drive business.

The firm previously said Moody's takes the quality of its ratings and the integrity of the ratings process very seriously. It also said the firm has protections in place to separate the commercial and analytical aspects of its business.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a $5 billion lawsuit against S&P late on Monday and accused it of an egregious scheme to defraud investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, fueled by a desire to gain more business.

Shares of McGraw Hill Cos Inc , which owns S&P, have fallen more than 25 percent since news of the lawsuits. Moody's shares have fallen about 15 percent, even though it was not named in any of this week's actions.

"Don't think Moody's is off the hook," said one law enforcement official.

Another rival, Fimalac SA's Fitch Ratings, is unlikely to face similar action, the sources said, since it is a much smaller player in the U.S. ratings industry. The firm also escaped the brunt of scrutiny from congressional investigators.

In a sign of just how high-stakes the battle is, S&P hired prominent defense attorney John Keker, who has represented everyone from cyclist Lance Armstrong to Enron's Andrew Fastow.

S&P said in a statement on Tuesday that the lawsuit is meritless and said it will vigorously defend itself.

A similar coordinated federal-state action against Moody's would follow lawsuits two states have already filed against the ratings firm. Connecticut, which led the states in this week's actions, sued Moody's and S&P in March 2010.

In January a state court in Hartford denied the last of the preliminary motions Moody's had filed to have the case thrown out. That case and the one against S&P are proceeding to trial in the second half of 2014.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who as then-attorney general brought the cases against S&P and Moody's in 2010, said he found rampant abuse across the credit rating industry.

"The difference is one of degree and scale rather than essential modus operandi," Blumenthal said in an interview. "S&P is the largest and they did the most sizeable amount of ratings with the largest profits."

CASE THEORY

Those earlier cases and the more recent ones against S&P are based on a theory that the firms misled investors by stating that their ratings on mortgage products were objective and not influenced by conflicts of interest.

Instead, the lawsuits contend, the firms inflated ratings and understated risks as the housing bubble started to burst, driven by a desire to gain more business from the investment banks that issued mortgage securities.

Framing the cases in that manner steers clear of attacking individual ratings, which have largely been shielded under free speech protections. Instead, the focus is on proving false just one statement S&P made - that its ratings were objective.

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Postal unions angry, customers unfazed about Saturday cut

Chicago Tribune reporter Rob Manker gathers some reactions to the recent news that the U.S. Postal Service plans to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August. (Posted on: Feb. 6, 2013.)

The U.S. Postal Service's plan to end Saturday first-class delivery in August angered unions that stand to lose jobs and faces an uncertain fate in Congress.

But the decision, which the Postal Service says will save $2 billion a year, barely fazed a number of people interviewed at Chicago-area post offices.

"No one really sends letters anymore," said David Braunschweig, 63, who was at the Arlington Heights post office to mail a gift. "Putting away mail (both Saturday and Sunday), it won't kill anyone."

Hammered by competition that includes the Internet, the Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion last year and said doing away with first-class mail on Saturdays is essential to its recovery plan.

"It's an important part of our return to profitability and financial stability," Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe said at a news conference Wednesday in Washington. "Our financial condition is urgent."

The agency will continue delivering packages and filling post office boxes six days a week, and all offices that already were operating on Saturdays will continue to do so. Package volume is one bright spot for the Postal Service. It's up 14 percent since 2010, which officials attribute to the growth of online commerce.

The end of Saturday delivery would be the biggest change to mail service since the end of twice-daily delivery in the 1950s. Overall mail volume dropped by more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2011, which could explain the shrugs from several Chicago-area postal customers.

"I was accustomed to getting mail on Saturdays, but we will get accustomed to not getting it as well," Rich Klimczak, 74, said outside the Tinley Park post office. "The only thing I would not like to see is (postal workers) losing their jobs."

The move, which would take effect Aug. 5, aims to reduce the postal workforce by at least 20,000 more employees through reassignment and attrition. It would also significantly reduce overtime payments.

Local union officials estimated that 10,000 postal workers will have their workweek reduced because of the move. On Wednesday afternoon, the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers called for Donahoe's resignation.

"USPS executives cannot save the Postal Service by tearing it apart," Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a statement. "These across-the-board cutbacks will weaken the nation's mail system and put it on a path to privatization."

The National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, which has about 1,500 members in the Chicago suburbs, said the elimination of Saturday service puts the Postal Service in a "death spiral."

Although the Postal Service no longer receives taxpayer money, it remains subject to oversight by Congress, which since 1983 has repeatedly passed measures requiring six-day delivery. Donahoe's announcement appeared to be an effort to force action in Congress after comprehensive postal reform legislation stalled last year.

While many members of Congress insist they would have to approve the cutback, Donahoe told reporters that the agency believes it can move forward unilaterally. The current mandate for six-day delivery is part of a government funding measure that expires in late March.

"There's plenty of time in there so if there is some disagreement" with lawmakers, "we can get that resolved," he said.

The divide among lawmakers on the issue does not break cleanly along party lines. Lawmakers who represent rural areas, who tend to be Republicans, generally have opposed service cutbacks. So have those with strong backing from postal labor unions, mostly Democrats.

Last year, the Senate approved a bill that would have allowed the Postal Service to end Saturday delivery after a two-year period to evaluate the potential effects. Similar legislation in the House never came up for a vote.

The Obama administration had included a proposal for five-day mail delivery in its 2013 budget plan. White House officials, however, had said they supported that change only in concert with other reforms. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that officials had not yet studied the latest plan.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, expressed concern that the Postal Service's unilateral announcement could complicate his plans for overall reform.

However, he added, "It's hard to condemn the postmaster general for moving aggressively to do what he believes he can and must do to keep the lights on."

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How Ang Lee Took a Tiger by the Tail to Create ‘Life of Pi’

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – It would have been foolish to predict what “Life of Pi” – has become: a box-office phenomenon that has swept one country after another, a game changer in its use of 3D and computer graphics and a critical darling with 11 Oscar nominations including best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography and two for composer Mychael Danna.

“It still comes as a surprise,” director Ang Lee told TheWrap. “But a wonderful surprise. For a long time I felt that it’s a privilege to even make this movie. So we’re very happy.”

Everything about “Life of Pi,” based on the bestselling novel by Yann Martel, represented an uncommon risk. A pensive drama without a single movie star or, for that matter, a face vaguely familiar to American audiences, the project cost $ 130 million, highly unusual in today’s Hollywood. (Even “Les Misérables” cost just $ 60 million.)

Further, the movie takes place almost entirely on the ocean, in 3D and with a CG tiger, factors that required technological machinations not guaranteed to work. Beyond that, given its ponderous price tag, the movie had to appeal to a very broad audience to pay off.

And it has. An uplifting story about the survival of the human spirit and the power of imagination, “Life of Pi” has been embraced across cultures and nations around the globe, with the movie setting new benchmarks in China, sweeping Latin America and taking in $ 450 million worldwide while still in release.

“The pattern of how this movie plays is kind of strange. I’ve never experienced it before,” Lee said of “Pi’s” overwhelming international appeal. “It was made to be a big movie, with lots of commercials everywhere. But it’s a philosophical movie – an Indian boy, a digital tiger, an ambiguous ending. I didn’t know if it would work or not.”

The novel tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian boy, Pi, adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and adds a twist at the end to make you question everything you’ve read. “Pi’s” journey to the screen took the better part of a decade and began conventionally enough. Producer Gil Netter sent Fox 2000 veteran producer Elizabeth Gabler the book shortly after it was published, and they optioned it for Fox in 2002.

She commissioned a script from Dean Georgaris for director M. Night Shyamalan, but Georgaris never completed it. Director Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”) signed on and then left. Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen”) picked up the project, then he dropped out, too.

Finally she approached Lee, whom she’d admired for years. “He told me I was crazy,” Gabler said. “I told him he had to do it.”

The problem was, most people considered the story of young Pi to be unmakeable.

You couldn’t film it with real tigers. Could a computer-generated tiger be believable? For Lee, who was revered for such movies as “Brokeback Mountain” and “Sense and Sensibility,” but who had also learned a lot making the tech-heavy but unsuccessful “Hulk,” the impossibility of the challenge was part of the appeal.

“That’s a small part,” he confessed. “That’s ego. But that’s not a good enough reason. Artistically, it’s a philosophical book. The movie has an unfriendly ending. It pulls the rug out from the audience’s feet. Your attention is mandatory.”

And those difficulties, to Lee, were irresistible. “It’s challenging, but it’s a thrill. If you can do it, you can swagger around. When people say, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ there’s a certain amount of satisfaction.” The night before Lee spoke to the TheWrap, he had been at a critics’ award ceremony where he was approached by Steven Spielberg. “He said to me, ‘I tried to figure out how you do that,’ Of course, that’s nice!”

But back to the movie: Lee dove into making the story his own, conducting intensive research on tigers and computer graphics, and investigating the logistics of creating a set where the ocean would seem like a real character. He decided to do the film in 3D. The price continued to rise – and with it the anxiety of then-Fox chairmen Jim Gianopulos and Tom Rothman.

Gabler recalled: “Tom and Jim said, ‘We can’t make this movie. It’s too risky. Give it back to him.’” Lee got on a plane to Los Angeles. At a meeting with the studio chiefs, he showed an animated mock-up of the shipwreck scene, complete with swimming zebras. And he showed them a 12-minute tape of an unknown actor, Suraj Sharma, reciting the monologue from the end of the movie: Pi, in a hospital bed, recounting an alternative, grisly fate that could have befallen the survivors of a shipwreck. “When we saw it, the lights came up, and they said OK,” said Gabler.

So the studio, in Lee’s words, “sweated it out” with him over four years, gambling on the notion that the film just might be the international hit it would have to be to make back Fox’s investment.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

The time included three months of rehearsal with the inexperienced Sharma and another seven months shooting. The Taiwanese government gave favorite son Lee an abandoned airport where the filmmakers built a series of soundstages, saving the production millions.

One studio was used to build a massive water tank, where the challenge was to simulate the waves of a vast ocean and not see the water that bounced off the sides of a tank. They built 12 machines to suck in water and shoot it out, creating two-story waves and endless ripples.

As for Sharma, Lee took the 17-year-old novice under his wing, teaching him method acting and guiding him in yoga practice. The two became inseparable, and Sharma watched as Lee increasingly took on the qualities of the character Pi.

“He himself is a very intense person,” Sharma told TheWrap. “Ang moved toward Pi right through the movie. It was really intense. And in many ways I feel like he was a little like Pi; the way he thinks is similar. The aura is similar. He has that similar patience with things but a certain perseverance to it. But nice at the same time – I can’t explain it. It’s the way his back is bent … Ang is a lot like his work. It’s very simple from the outside but it has a lot of complexities on the inside. Kind of like Pi.”

For Lee, the result was one that both exhausted and exhilarated him. The story of Pi, he says, is the story of the essence of filmmaking.

“It’s a project that examines illusion. The power of storytelling. The importance of illusion – is it more real than what we can prove?” he reflected.

“I’m a storyteller. I create illusions. I believe in that more than in things I can touch. And this gets to the bottom of it all.”

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Psychiatric Hospitals Alter Rules on Patient Smoking

MANDEVILLE, La. — Annelle S., 64, who has paranoid schizophrenia, took an urgent drag on a cigarette at a supervised outdoor smoke break at Southeast Louisiana Hospital.

“It’s mandatory to smoke,” she explained. “It’s a mental institution, and we have to smoke by law.”

That was 18 months ago, and Annelle’s confusion was understandable. Until recently, Louisiana law required psychiatric hospitals to accommodate smokers — unlike rules banning smoking at most other health facilities. The law was changed last year, and by March 30, smoking is supposed to end at Louisiana’s two remaining state psychiatric hospitals.

After decades in which smoking by people with mental illness was supported and even encouraged — a legacy that experts say is causing patients to die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses — Louisiana’s move reflects a growing effort by federal, state and other health officials to reverse course.

But these efforts are hardly simple given the longstanding obstacles.

Hospitals often used cigarettes as incentives or rewards for taking medicine, following rules or attending therapy. Some programs still do. And smoking was endorsed by advocates for people with mental illness and family members, who sometimes sued to preserve smoking rights, considering cigarettes one of the few pleasures patients were allowed.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the nearly 46 million adults with mental illness have a smoking rate 70 percent higher than those without mental illness, and consume about a third of the cigarettes in the country, though they make up one-fifth of the adult population.

People with psychiatric disorders are often “smoking heavier, their puffs are longer and they’re smoking it down to the end of the cigarette,” said William Riley, chief of the Science of Research and Technology Branch at the National Cancer Institute. With some diagnoses, like schizophrenia, rates are especially high.

A report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors said data suggested that people with the most serious mental illnesses die on average 25 years earlier than the general population, with many from smoking-exacerbated conditions like heart or lung disease.

Now more treatment facilities are banning smoking, with some finding it easier than expected. Others still allow it, usually outside on their grounds during scheduled times. About a fifth of state hospitals are not smoke-free, a survey issued in 2012 by the State Mental Health Program Directors association found. Occasionally, hospitals that banned smoking have reinstated it to avoid losing patients.

Moreover, smoking is so deeply ingrained that smoke-free hospitals can only dent the problem; many patients are now hospitalized only for short stints and resume smoking later.

New research suggests scientific underpinnings for some of the affinity, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Nicotine has antidepressant effects and, for people with schizophrenia, helps dampen extraneous thoughts and voices, she and other experts said.

Other chemicals in cigarette smoke set off a perilous cycle, causing some medications to be metabolized faster, making them less effective and allowing symptoms to return. Because patients feel sicker, they may seek even more comfort from nicotine. “You may think, ‘Well, I need to smoke more,’ ” said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then, as smoking increases, “blood levels of their medication go down, and they end up back in the hospital,” said Judith Prochaska, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center.

Socially, smoking provides “cover rituals for patients having psychiatric symptoms,” said Dr. Rona Hu, medical director of the acute psychiatric inpatient unit at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. “You tamp the box, you kind of play with the lighter, you can exhale and look into the middle distance and not look like you’re hallucinating.”

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said hospitals had historically resisted going smoke-free, fearing it would interfere with treatment. “In my very first job as an aide in a psychiatric hospital,” he said, “if patients behaved better they got additional cigarettes.”

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Penny Pritzker a candidate for Commerce secretary

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has been a prominent Barack Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune / April 8, 2011)

By Katherine Skiba and Christi Parsons




Washington bureau

7:30 p.m. CST, February 6, 2013

Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker has emerged as a leading candidate to serve in the administration of President Obama, for whom she has long been a campaign supporter and top fundraiser.

A senior administration official cautioned that no announcement is imminent and that Obama has made no decision. But Pritzker is under consideration to serve as Commerce secretary or perhaps in another senior position involving relations between Obama and business leaders, according to officials close to the process who spoke anonymously to comment on internal deliberations.

Pritzker is a member of the Chicago family behind the Hyatt Hotels Corp. She has been a prominent Obama friend and supporter since his early days in politics and ran his 2008 campaign fundraising operation.

 She is founder and CEO of PSP Capital Partners and the Pritzker Realty Group, as well as chair of the Artemis Real Estate Partners. She is also a member of the Chicago Board of Education and has had two White House appointments, serving on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Forbes’ annual list of the world’s billionaires last March put Pritzker at No. 719 and said her hotels and investments were worth $1.8 billion.

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Grieving mom of slaying victim: 'The sight of them disgusts me'

The 4 people accused of killing 2 men in Joliet face a bond judge today. ( WGN - Chicago)

Bobby Jones clenched his fists in his lap as he stared at the four people charged with murdering his son.

He watched from the front row of a courtroom in Joliet on Tuesday morning, getting his first glimpse of the defendants in person.

"I wanted them to see the pain and the anger that they caused our family," Jones said after the arraignment hearing. "I wanted them to know that Eric had loved ones."

Adam Landerman, 19; Alisa Massaro, 18; Bethany McKee, 18; and Joshua Miner, 24, each pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges and remain in custody on $10 million bond each. Landerman is the son of a Joliet police officer.

The four are charged with strangling Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins, both 22 and from Joliet. Police said they suspect robbery was the motive for the deaths of the two friends at a Joliet home last month.

Jones, who made eye contact with Landerman and Miner, was in court along with his wife and other family and friends of both victims.

"I only can sum it up in one word — anger," Jones said. "The sight of them disgusts me."

Glover's fiancee, Heather Gossman, echoed his sentiments, saying she felt "sick to her stomach" when she saw the defendants.

Prosecutors remain tight-lipped about what happened in the Joliet home on the 1100 block of North Hickory Street. Acting on a tip, police went to the home Jan. 10 and found three of the defendants — Massaro, Landerman and Miner — along with the bodies of the victims, officials said. Authorities have described the scene as one of the most horrific they have encountered in years. Police said the three defendants were continuing to party even as the victims lay dead in the home.

McKee, who was arrested in another town, had allegedly left the home earlier and called her father to tell him what had happened. William McKee then alerted Shorewood police, who in turn contacted Joliet police.

William McKee watched from the back of the courtroom Tuesday and sat quietly in the hallway as friends and family of the victims discussed the case nearby.

"I wanted to show them respect," he said.

Though he said he understands the anger from the victims' families, he added that family members are still reeling from Bethany McKee's arrest and are trying to find answers themselves. His wife cries daily, and their two teenage children are dealing with threats and comments at school about the case, he said.

"All (my son) hears are stupid comments like his sister is a murderer and he should die with her. … My kids don't know how to deal with this," William McKee said.

"This isn't something that is supposed to happen to any family," he said, adding that no family should have to lose someone to homicide either.

He said that when his daughter called to tell him what had happened, she was "terrified." He said he then called police out of love for her.

William McKee said he had tried to keep his daughter away from Massaro for many years. He said his daughter had made positive changes in her life after her own daughter was born.

"All I can say is I love my daughter," he said.

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Question Mark: Women’s Eggs Diminish With Age

Baby girls enter the world with enough of them to populate perhaps 40 small cities. A dozen or so years later, the first will make a debut of its own. And in the months and years to come, others will appear regularly, sometimes greeted with relief, other times with disappointment, perhaps most often with a touch of annoyance.

Abdullah Pope/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Not women's eggs, obviously.

Now, for women in the baby boom generation, they may be coming more sporadically, or not at all, signaling unmistakably that one time of life is over, and another begun. But what happened to all those eggs?

When girls are born, they have about two million eggs in their ovaries, nestled in fluid-filled cavities called follicles. That may sound like a lot, but consider that months earlier, when they were still in utero, they may have had as many as six or seven million eggs. Those eggs are still immature, and the proper name for them, by the way, is oocytes (rhymes with: nothing).

The first eggs to bite the dust were those in the fetus, which waste away. And by the time a girl reaches puberty, most of her remaining eggs have also deteriorated and been reabsorbed. If that sounds ominously like something from a “Star Trek” episode about the Borg, imagine if all those eggs had to take the customary path out of the body.

Even with the Great Egg Disappearance, girls enter puberty with many more than they will use, 300,000 or more. Each month, the body produces a hormone, FSH, which stimulates the follicles to prepare an egg for maturation and release.

With eggs backed up like bowling balls on a busy Saturday night at the lanes, the ovaries can afford to be a little wasteful, and as many as several dozen follicles are called into action. Then a single mature egg — usually, anyway — gets the tap on the shoulder and begins its travels to the uterus.

As for the maturing eggs that didn’t make the grade, there is no second chance. But they do not go out on their own. “Each month you probably lose a thousand or so,” said Dr. James T. Breeden, president of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology. “There’s just a natural death of them.”

For all the eggs a woman begins with, in the end only about 400 will go through ovulation. While men produce sperm throughout their lives, over time the number of eggs declines, and they disappear with increasing frequency the decade or so before menopause. Those that remain may decline in quality. “When you have a thousand or less within the ovaries, you’re thought to have undergone menopause,” said Dr. Mitchell Rosen, the director of the Fertility Preservation Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

It’s true that women make far more eggs than they end up using, but men should not pass judgment. “They produce millions of sperm, millions,” Dr. Rosen said. “The whole process is not the most efficient in the world.”

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

Booming: Living Through the Middle Ages offers news and commentary about baby boomers, anchored by Michael Winerip. You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming. You can reach us by e-mail at booming@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described estrogen levels at the time of ovulation. They rise, rather than fall.

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Jewel to close 3 stores -- in Chicago, Aurora, Niles

Jewel-Osco plans to close three stores by April 5, the company has confirmed.

According to a company spokeswoman, Jewel has decided not to renew the leases of its stores at at 1270 N. Lake St., Aurora, which will close Feb.15., and at 8203 W. Golf Rd. in Niles, and 3940 E. 106th St., Chicago, which will both close April 5.

Some 300 employees will be affected, but they will have the opportunity to transfer to other locations, the spokeswoman said.

The decision comes weeks after Jewel parent Eden Prairie-based Supervalu said that it will sell the chain and four others including Albertsons to Cerberus Capital Management. The deal is scheduled to close this spring.

In an internal memo obtained by the Tribune, Jewel President Brian Huff told employees that "this decision was necessary to ensure our continued strength in challenging times," and "is not a result of or related to the recent transaction between Cerberus Capital Management and Supervalu."

eyork@tribune.com | Twitter: @emilyyork

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$5 million bail in 'exceptionally brutal' Aurora murder

She was beaten to death with a hammer, then burned beyond recognition. It's the first murder in Aurora in more than a year.

She was a hardworking teenager and loving family member, who wanted to become a police officer, former co-workers and relatives said Monday.

So when Abigail Villalpando didn't show up for her waitressing job Thursday, family members called authorities. They later learned that the West Aurora High School senior had been struck repeatedly with a hammer, her body doused with gasoline and set ablaze in a barrel in the backyard of an Aurora home. Her car was torched and left at another location.

The teen's remains were so badly burned that officials had to use dental records to identify her, authorities said.

Police charged three men in Villalpando's slaying, one for her death and two for concealing her homicide. Police said the victim knew the man charged with her death, but authorities did not disclose a motive in court. It was the first slaying in Aurora in more than a year.

The victim's brother, Ricardo "Ricky" Villalpando, 21, said he and his sister moved into an apartment together in September. Abby, as she liked to be called, wanted to be a police officer because of her love of children, and she planned to go to college after her summer graduation, he said.

"My sister was the most responsible 18-year-old I knew," said Villalpando, the oldest of four. "Everything she had — her car, her insurance, her clothes — she paid for on her own."

Ricky Villalpando described the suspects as his sister's best friends. They met in middle school, Villalpando said.

He said Juan Garnica Jr., the man charged with the slaying, was jealous that she was seeing someone else and was "obsessed with her."

Police have not talked about a motive.

The killing of Villalpando, who worked at Denny's, shocked those who respected her for her work ethic and buoyant personality.

Her sweet demeanor — which kept regulars coming back to the restaurant where she worked after school — made it almost impossible for those who knew her to comprehend her death.

"They can't understand why something like this would happen," said Ben Richter, manager at the restaurant where Villalpando worked for three years and where shocked customers called to express condolences. "She will be missed."

Garnica, 18, of Aurora, was ordered held on $5 million bail for beating Villalpando to death with a hammer Thursday, authorities said.

The two men charged with concealing the homicide are Enrique Prado, 19, and Jose Becerra, 20.

Villalpando was a caring person who had told family members she was trying to make some personal changes, said a friend of the family, Jose Ocampo.

"She was trying to change her life around," he said.

Villalpando transferred in mid-December from East Aurora High School, according to Mike Chapin, community relations director for School District 129.

Students at the high school were alerted of Villalpando's death in a morning announcement.

School officials spent the weekend preparing teachers and a crisis team of social workers and psychologists to help the 3,500-student population to cope, Chapin said.

"As long as any student needs assistance working through this, there will be resources," Chapin said. "It's a horrible thing for the students to even try to comprehend."

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

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