Tennessee

Student killed in dorm fire

An early morning dormitory fire killed one student Tuesday, and two others were rescued from a third-story window and treated at a hospital, officials said.

The cause of the blaze in the women’s dorm at Southern Adventist University was not immediately known. Fire officials said most of the damage appeared to be around a third-floor laundry and lobby area in the brick building.

University officials identified the student who died as Kelly Weimer, a 20-year-old junior English major from Woodridge, Ill. Her roommate was among those who made it safely out of the building.

The 2,400-student university in Collegedale, a Chattanooga suburb, is affiliated with the Silver Spring, Md.-based Seventh-day Adventist Church.

New York City

DNA tests bring arrest for rapes

A man suspected of raping at least 25 women in three states has been arrested in a 1973 rape after DNA tests on the victim’s underwear linked him to the attack, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Clarence Williams, 58, was connected this month to the 1973 rape of a Manhattan woman and to strings of attacks in Maryland and New Jersey after the federal DNA database matched a sample from him to genetic evidence left in many of those attacks, said Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau.

“This case shows the importance of the federal database,” Morgenthau said. “It will send a chill through defendants to know that you can still test for DNA after 32 years.”

Williams had been charged with rape, sexual abuse, robbery, criminal possession of a weapon and several lesser crimes in the Manhattan rape. His 1974 trial ended with a hung jury. A conviction for a separate rape in Queens was reversed in 1976, Morgenthau said.