Top Pa. stories of 2006 include Amish massacre, election, slots

The Amish thought they had created a refuge for themselves in bucolic Lancaster County, a place where they could be free to live simple lives of hard work and religious devotion with as little intrusion from the modern world as possible.
So when a gunman walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse on Oct.

2 and shot 10 girls, five of them fatally, the world reacted not only with horror, but disbelief: If the Amish aren't safe, who is?
The massacre was among the top stories in Pennsylvania in 2006, a year in which casino gambling became a reality, National Guard troops came home, low-wage workers got a raise (effective in 2007) and illegal immigrants felt the heat.
It was a great year for Democrats, a terrible one for Republicans, especially if your name was Santorum.

It was an up-and-down year for some of Pennsylvania's biggest sports stars - including a 3-year-old bay colt named Barbaro who captured the hearts of a nation as he battled back from life-threatening injuries.
And it was an exceptionally violent 2006 in Lancaster County, where 21-year-old Jesse Wise was charged with killing six family members, including his 64-year-old grandmother, after the bodies were found in the basement of his grandparents' home in Leola. Police said Wise strangled and bludgeoned them over Palm Sunday weekend and later confessed to the slayings, but gave no explanation.

Six months later and about a dozen miles away, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, entered West Nickel Mines Amish School, sent the boys and adults outside, barricaded the doors, tied up the girls and shot them at point-blank range. He committed suicide as police closed in.
As reporters from around the globe descended on the tiny village, the Amish mourned in their quiet way, then did something that outsiders could admire if not entirely understand: They forgave the killer and embraced his family.

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, the killing went on with numbing regularity. The city recorded 394 homicides through Dec. 20, the highest body count since 1997 but still far below the modern record of 500 set in 1990, at the height of the city's crack epidemic.

Police say there was no particular pattern to this year's homicides, other than a penchant for settling disputes with guns.
Some of Pennsylvania's most notorious criminals made news in 2006.
Serial killer Charles Cullen, the former nurse who gave lethal injections to 29 patients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, was given multiple life terms at the close of a bizarre sentencing hearing in which he chanted Your honor, you need to step down hundreds of times despite being gagged.

Mass murderer George Banks, who killed five of his own children and eight others in a 1982 shooting rampage, was deemed too mentally ill to be executed.
And ex-con Hugo Selenski, in whose yard police found at least five sets of human remains in 2003, was acquitted of killing two suspected drug dealers. Hours later, prosecutors charged him with two more homicides.

Politics hogged the headlines in 2006, for good reason. Republicans in Harrisburg and Washington found themselves on the defensive and, for the first time in a dozen years, out of power as voters demanded change. Two-term U.

S. Sen. Rick Santorum, a member of the GOP leadership and a conservative lightning rod, lost to Democratic state Treasurer Bob Casey, the son of the late governor, as Democrats took control of both houses of Congress.

Republicans also lost their majority in the state House of Representatives, but held on to the state Senate.
When they weren't running for office, lawmakers found time to hike Pennsylvania's minimum wage by $2 an hour, starting with an initial bump-up next month, assuring hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers their first raise in a decade.
Pennsylvania's first casino, Mohegan Sun at the Pocono Downs racetrack near Wilkes-Barre, opened Nov.

14 - more than two years after the Legislature legalized slot machines as a way to raise money for tax relief. Gamblers piled in to try their luck. A second slots casino, at Philadelphia Park racetrack in Bensalem, took a bow on Dec.

19.
The following day, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board awarded five additional licenses for standalone casinos in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem and the Poconos. Politically connected investors made out well, but the board said no thanks to a casino near the Gettysburg battlefield, and to Donald Trump's bid for one in Philly.

In Pittsburgh, 26-year-old City Council President Luke Ravenstahl became the youngest mayor of a major U.S. city when the previous mayor, Bob O'Connor, died of brain cancer in September, just eight months into his first term.

In Hazleton, where Hispanics have swelled the city's population by 40 percent, the mayor attracted national attention - and a swift legal challenge - by pushing through a tough, first-of-its-kind law targeting illegal immigrants.
Celebrity coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht, who consulted on the death of Elvis Presley and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, resigned from his post as Allegheny County's medical examiner in January after being indicted for allegedly using county employees to do work for his private pathology practice.

As the war in Iraq entered its fourth year, Pennsylvania welcomed home the largest contingent of National Guard troops deployed to a combat zone since World War II. It's nice to be in a world where people are not trying to kill you, said one soldier. More than 2,100 soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team served in Iraq; 15 died.

On the home front, Pennsylvania, along with the rest of the nation, experienced a real estate slowdown in 2006. Prices stagnated, homes took longer to sell and revenues at Horsham-based Toll Brothers Inc., the largest luxury home builder in the United States, plummeted.

Frustrated and flood-weary property owners could only wish their problem was a declining housing market. In June, thousands of structures along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers and their tributaries were inundated for the third time in two years, causing tens of millions of dollars in damage. Officials ordered 150,000 to 200,000 people in the Wilkes-Barre area to evacuate their homes as a precaution, but the levees held.

The state had its share of unusual stories in 2006.
A dancer and drum maker from New York City contracted the first case of naturally occurring inhalation anthrax in the United States since 1976, collapsing during a Feb. 16 performance at Mansfield University in north-central Pennsylvania.

The story had a happy ending, though, with Vado Diomande making a remarkable recovery from the rare and usually fatal form of anthrax.
Tanya Kach, 24, who ran away as a teenager and lived for a decade with a school security guard who allegedly kept her in his bedroom in a Pittsburgh suburb, surfaced in March and was reunited with her family. The guard was charged with sex crimes; Kach filed a lawsuit that said authorities didn't do enough to find her.

Thieves broke into a PennDOT driver's license center, swiping equipment to make fraudulent licenses and computers containing personal information on 11,000 customers - making them a prime target for identity fraud.
Pennsylvania's best-known sports figures had their highs and lows. Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger led the Steelers to a Super Bowl title, then broke his jaw and nose in a motorcycle accident.

Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby, then broke down at the Preakness and fought for survival. Penn State's Joe Paterno garnered Coach of the Year honors, then broke his leg when a player ran into him and was absent from the sidelines for the first time since 1977. Lancaster County native Floyd Landis won the Tour de France on a bum hip, but race organizers said he broke the rules by doping.

Two other sports-related stories of note: On Sept. 17, five Duquesne University basketball players were shot following an on-campus party - almost half of the school's scholarship players. And NBA superstar Allen Iverson's long, tumultuous tenure in Philadelphia drew to a close after the 76ers traded him to Denver.