Milestones

By Melissa August, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Clayton Neuman, Julie Norwell, Logan E. Orlando

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION INITIATED. Into the death of PAT TILLMAN, Arizona Cardinals defensive back who quit football to join the Army after 9/11 and was killed in Afghanistan in April 2004, after fellow Rangers mistook him for a Taliban fighter; by the Defense Department's inspector general; in Washington. The Army originally blamed enemy fire for Tillman's death. Tillman's family has criticized three previous Army investigations as incomplete.

ELECTED. EFFA MANLEY, as the first woman member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The white co-owner of the Newark Eagles, one of baseball's Negro National League teams in the 1930s and '40s, was a civil rights activist; she died in 1981. After selling the club in 1948, Manley lobbied for the Hall of Fame to include Negro League stars; 16 will be inducted with her in July in Cooperstown, N.Y.

SENTENCED. RANDY (DUKE) CUNNINGHAM, 64, California Republican who resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty last fall to taking $2.4 million in bribes; to eight years and four months in prison, the longest term ever given a Congressman; by a federal judge in San Diego. At his sentencing, Cunningham, a decorated Vietnam vet, tearfully said, "After years of service to my country, I made a wrong turn."

DIED. OCTAVIA BUTLER, 58, novelist who was the first black woman to achieve major success in the white-male-dominated genre of science fiction; of head injuries from a fall; in Seattle, Wash. A loner and self-described "oil-and-water" mix of "ambition, laziness, insecurity [and] certainty," Butler subverted sci-fi stereotypes to tackle issues like racism and poverty in books like Kindred, the tale of a black woman who time-travels back to the antebellum South. In 1995, she became the only sci-fi writer ever to receive a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.

DIED. OTIS CHANDLER, 78, California beach boy who, during his aggressive 20-year tenure as publisher of the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s and '70s, transformed the paper into one of the country's premier exemplars of daily journalism; in Ojai, Calif. The great-grandson of Harrison Gray Otis, who became publisher and part-owner of the Times in 1882, Chandler--a surfer who loved racing his Porsche--was the last in his family to head the paper.

DIED. DENNIS WEAVER, 81, gangly cowpoke actor best known as the limping sidekick in Gunsmoke and as the titular Manhattan cowboy cop in the 1970s series McCloud; in Ridgway, Colo. The prolific Weaver had leading roles in 40 films, including Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and the 1971 highway thriller Duel, directed by an up-and-comer named Steven Spielberg. A committed environmentalist, Weaver spent the past 16 years living in an Earthship--a 10,000-sq.-ft. house made of tin cans and tires.

DIED. DARREN MCGAVIN, 83, movie-set painter turned actor who played a streetwise crime reporter in the 1970s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the Old Man, Ralphie Parker's curmudgeonly dad, in the 1983 classic A Christmas Story; in Los Angeles. He won an Emmy in 1990 for playing the title character's father in Murphy Brown.

DIED. OWEN CHAMBERLAIN, 85, Nobel-prizewinning physicist at the University of California, Berkeley; in Berkeley, Calif. Chamberlain worked on the Manhattan Project and later apologized to the Japanese for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1955, he and fellow Manhattan Project alum Emilio Segre identified the antiproton, the negatively charged mirror of the subatomic particle, a discovery that sparked still unresolved debates about the composition of the universe.