National Roundup

Pennsylvania
Police say inmate who admitted to 6 killings spoke of other murders

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A Florida inmate who admitted he killed six people in Pennsylvania in the 1970s also discussed five to seven other slayings in the state, and police in those areas have been alerted, an investigator said Thursday.

Trooper Max DeLuca obtained those details in March from Edward A. Surratt about cases that are not under the state police’s jurisdiction, so he has since contacted those other departments, he said.

Surratt, serving life at a state prison in Raiford, Florida, implicated himself in Pennsylvania slayings that occurred during 1977 and 1978, state police announced Wednesday.

State police said prosecutors do not plan to prosecute Surratt for those six deaths, in part because of the security challenges involved in transporting an inmate and because he is already serving a life sentence, DeLuca said.

DeLuca said he first contacted Surratt as part of an investigation into another killing. When DeLuca met with him in Florida in March, Surratt provided details that were not publicly known about the six deaths in Fulton, Bedford and Beaver counties, confirming his role to investigators, DeLuca said.

Surratt would not say how many people he killed in Pennsylvania, DeLuca said.

“He wouldn’t give me a number,” the trooper said in a phone interview. “I asked for a number.”

DeLuca said Surratt did not appear to be seeking attention, nor did he seem boastful.

“He is not someone who is bragging about this,” DeLuca said. He said Surratt appears to be in good health, considering he is 79 years old.

“He’s definitely not proud,” DeLuca said. “He did express, I would say, some regret about two of the victims but they weren’t in my jurisdiction.”

Surratt, a truck driver and former resident of Aliquippa, implicated himself the slayings of William and Nancy Adams in Beaver County, Guy and Laura Mills near Bedford, Joel Krueger near McConnellsburg and John Shelkons in Beaver County.

He is serving two life sentences in Florida for crimes there and was convicted of murder in South Carolina.

In 2007, Surratt told an interviewer he was involved in Pennsylvania and Ohio killings dating to the 1970s. He has been incarcerated since October 1978.

DeLuca declined to identify where the additional suspected Pennsylvania murders are because they are not being handled by Pennsylvania State Police.

“He discussed like five to seven,” DeLuca said.

Vermont
Court affirms tuition for students at religious school

A federal appeals court on Wednesday explained its decision to stop Vermont from excluding tuition funding for students who attend a religious school, saying a lower court ruling from earlier this year did not go far enough to accomplish that.

The opinion followed an injunction granted by the 2nd Circuit in February against the state, and in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that said states can’t cut religious schools from programs that send public money to private education.

The appeals court had issued its injunction on behalf of four Catholic high school students, their parents, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington.

The case deals with a voucher program that allows students in communities that don’t have schools or are not part of supervisory unions to attend schools of their choice, including approved private institutions. The students applied for tuition reimbursement at the Catholic high school, but were denied on the ground that the school is a religiously affiliated school.

A federal judge agreed in January that the students should not be excluded from the funding, but did not allow them to participate in the voucher program until the case was resolved. The judge reasoned that the state needed an opportunity to develop new criteria for voucher eligibility. But the students wanted to take part in voucher program this semester.

The appeals court ordered the judge to amend the decision so the students could get reimbursed.

“Today the court powerfully affirmed the principle that people of faith deserve equal access to public benefits everyone else gets,” Paul Schmitt, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, who represented the students, said in a statement Wednesday. “Once Vermont chose to subsidize private education, it could not disqualify some private schools solely because they are ‘too religious.’ When the state offers parents school choice, it cannot take away choices for a religious school.”

Ted Wilson, spokesperson for the Vermont Education Agency, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a Montana scholarship program that allows state tax credits for private schooling in which almost all the recipients attend religious schools.

A lawsuit by three families in Maine who want the state to pay for religious school tuition was rejected by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. The families have taken their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Delaware
Collision on Aisle 5: Jury to decide grocery crash

DOVER, Del. (AP) — A jury must decide whether a grocery store should be held liable for a collision between a vendor’s snack food cart and a shopper riding an electric scooter, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden refused to grant summary judgment in favor of Acme Markets Inc. in a lawsuit stemming from the 2016 accident.

Court records indicate that Theodore Heine was using an electric shopping cart scooter at an Acme store while an employee of a company called J B Inc. was pushing a large cart of Tastykake snack cakes to be stocked on the shelves.

The scooter and cart collided, prompting Heine to sue Acme and J B Inc., along with Pennsylvania-based Tasty Baking Oxford Inc. and its parent company, Georgia-based Flowers Foods.

Acme argued that it should be dismissed as a defendant because it does not tell J B employees how to stock shelves and has no duty to oversee their activities.

Heine’s attorney argued that Acme has a duty to protect its shoppers and that a jury should decide whether it was negligent.

Jurden said the case is similar to one involving a different grocery company, an employee of an ice cream company who was stocking product, and a shopper who slipped and fell in the frozen food aisle. In that case, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that a jury could conclude that the grocer or the ice cream company should have known that stocking ice cream might result in condensation dripping onto the floor.

“Both allegedly unsafe conditions resulted from the activity of a third party. And both third parties performed their activities without the supermarket’s oversight,” Jurden wrote.

Based on the previous Supreme Court ruling, Jurden concluded that a jury must decide whether Acme was acting as a “reasonably prudent shopkeeper” when it failed to prevent the Tastykake collision.