Mississippi

Shooting injures two at shipyard

A veteran employee opened fire at a shipyard Monday, wounding two co-workers, police said.

Police charged Alexander L. Lett, 41, with two counts of aggravated assault, but were still trying to figure out what prompted the shooting in Pascagoula.

“We have no reason … only speculation, and I don’t care to go there right now,” police Lt. Paul Leonard said.

Lett was a quality inspector who had worked at Northrop Grumman Ships Systems more than 20 years, police said. The shipyard is Mississippi’s largest private employer, with more than 12,000 workers, and builds ships for the Navy and Coast Guard.

About 30 people were in the vicinity Monday morning when Lett began shooting inside a warehouse with a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, police said.

Two employees were injured, one critically.

Other employees stopped Lett when he tried to leave the building, police said. He was being held on $500,000 bail at the Pascagoula Municipal Jail.

Texas

Landowner discovers missing mother’s SUV

A sport utility vehicle belonging to a missing pregnant woman was found in a creek Monday as police searched for her and her 7-year-old son, two days after a pool of blood was found in their home.

Officers on horseback and using dogs concentrated the search in a rural area of Denton, about 30 miles northeast of Fort Worth, after a landowner found the SUV belonging to Lisa Underwood and her son, Jayden. The vehicle was nose down and partly submerged in a creek.

A statewide Amber Alert was issued after the woman failed to show up for her baby shower Saturday, and the alert was expanded to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Police would not give details of what they found at Underwood’s Fort Worth home, but a police report said relatives checking her house Saturday found a large pool of blood on the living room floor.

Florida

Report tracks infections of surgery patients

Hospitals nationwide are contributing to the illnesses and deaths of thousands every year by failing to follow basic, pre-surgical procedures to reduce the chances of infection, according to a study released Monday.

Every year, 90,000 Americans die from infections they pick up in the hospital. The second most frequent site of infection is at the surgical incision.

The new study focused strictly on this problem, and whether doctors were following standard practice by giving patients antibiotics within 60 minutes of their surgeries.

But they found that nearly 44 percent of the 34,133 patients who were tracked did not receive the medication in that 60-minute target zone. Almost 10 percent didn’t get a dose until four hours after the doctor began operating.

While the vast majority of patients did receive antibiotics at some point (99 percent), doctors have known since the 1960s that the drugs are most effective when given within that one-hour window.