Washington, D.C.

Young poet, advocate dies at age 13

Mattie Stepanek, the child poet whose inspirational verse made him a best-selling writer and a prominent advocate for muscular dystrophy, died Tuesday from complications of the disease. He was 13.

Mattie died at Children’s National Medical Center, the hospital said.

Mattie had dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, a genetic disease that impaired almost all of his body’s major functions, such as heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and digestion, and caused muscle weakness.

His mother has the adult-onset form of the disease, and his three older siblings died of it in early childhood.

Mattie’s effervescent philosophy, which he summarized as “remember to play after every storm,” attracted the attention of television talk show hosts Larry King and Oprah Winfrey and thousands of other fans.

Mattie began writing poetry at age 3 to cope with the death of a brother. In 2001, a small Virginia publisher issued a slim volume of his poems, called “Heartsongs.” Within weeks, the book reached the top of The New York Times best-seller list, the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. said. It was followed by three others.

Washington, D.C.

Study quantifies risks of smoking

Fifty years after British researchers published the first study firmly linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, the same scientist following the same group of British doctors has reported the most detailed and long-term results ever of the health effects of smoking. His stark conclusion: a life of cigarette smoking will be, on average, 10 years shorter than a life without it.

While the lethal effects of cigarette smoking have long been known, the new study, published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal, is the first to quantify the damage over the lifetime of a generation.

In the 50-year study of a group of almost 35,000 British doctors, the pioneering epidemiologist Richard Doll, who’s now 91, and his colleagues found that almost half of all persistent cigarette smokers were killed by their habit, and a quarter died before age 70.

The study also found, however, that kicking the cigarette habit had equally dramatic effects. He found, for instance, that someone who stops smoking by age 30 has the same average life expectancy as a nonsmoker, and someone who stops at 50 will lose four, rather than 10, years of life.

Virginia

Second trial date for sniper set

A tentative trial date of Oct. 4 was set Tuesday morning for the second prosecution of John Allen Muhammad, convicted last fall of masterminding the Washington-area sniper shootings in October 2002.

A Fairfax County judge also instructed Muhammad’s lawyers to decide by next month whether they want to move the trial out of Northern Virginia.

Muhammad, 43, was convicted late last year in one of the 10 sniper slayings that terrorized the region. He was sentenced to death in that killing in Prince William County, Va.

California

Mistrial declared in transgender killing

A judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in the case of three men accused of killing a transgender teen after jurors declared they were deadlocked.

The case in Haywood has been closely watched by transgender advocates, who said the verdicts would send a message about how much their lives are valued.

Michael Magidson, Jose Merel and Jason Cazares, all 24, were charged with killing a 17-year-old who was known as Gwen but was born Edward Araujo.

According to trial testimony, Araujo was beaten and strangled after her biological identity was revealed during a confrontation on Oct. 4, 2002, at Merel’s house in Newark, a San Francisco suburb. Merel and Magidson had had sexual encounters with Araujo and had become suspicious about Araujo’s gender after comparing notes, according to testimony.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Harry Sheppard declared the mistrial after the jury foreman announced that the eight men and four women were deadlocked after nine days of deliberations.

Ohio

Crash kills 6 after day at park

A sport utility vehicle carrying children home from an amusement park collided with a tractor-trailer and plunged into a creek, killing two adults and four children.

Two large yellow SpongeBob SquarePants prizes floated in the waist-deep water after the crash late Monday near Oak Harbor. The Cadillac Escalade was “disintegrated” and landed upside down in the creek after breaking through a guardrail, Highway Patrol trooper Chris Capizzi said.

The six victims — all from the Detroit area — were in the Escalade. A teenage girl also in the vehicle was the only survivor, and she was in critical condition Tuesday.

The accident occurred about a mile from the Lake Erie shoreline on state Route 2, which is heavily traveled in the summer and is a shortcut between Cedar Point amusement park and Michigan.

The amusement park in Sandusky is a popular destination with people in the Detroit area.