Missing prosecutor declared dead

A Pennsylvania district attorney who vanished six years ago has been declared legally dead.

The ruling last week on Ray Gricar allows the missing man's daughter to settle his estate but does not end speculation about what happened in April 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Sunday. Gricar, who was 59 at the time, was planning his retirement after 20 years as the elected district attorney in Centre County, a rural region that is home to Penn State.

A few hours after Centre County District Judge David Crine issued his ruling July 25, online speculation began about a man arrested for trespassing in Utah who had refused to identify himself. He has since been determined not to be Gricar.

Gricar told his girlfriend, who shared his home in Bellefonte, he was on a trip in search of antiques in Lewisburg, 50 miles away. His car turned up in a Lewisburg parking lot and his laptop computer was found in the Susquehanna River.

Investigators are split between suicide, homicide and a voluntary disappearance. One defense lawyer suggested to the Inquirer that Gricar is in the federal witness protection program.

Amos Goodall, who represents Gricar's only child, Lara, believes the district attorney is dead.

"I can't believe that he would have spent the last six years causing his family to be in the real purgatory that they have been in," he said. "If he were alive, he would've contacted his family."

Girl, 13, dies; her warning saved friends

A 13-year-old girl killed by a vehicle that crashed into her home warned other children to get out of the way before she was struck, New York City police said.

Investigators were still trying to determine the sequence of events that left Kira Goddard and the driver of the sport utility vehicle dead Saturday in the borough of Brooklyn, The New York Times reported.

Police said Kira and a group of friends were hanging out about 10 p.m. in front of the four-story building where they lived when a Range Rover sideswiped a row of double-parked cars. The driver, Sean Lewis, then put the vehicle in reverse and it overturned, crashing into the building where the children were playing.

"She said, 'It's reversing back -- run, run!'" said Alexia Joseph, 12, one of the children with Kira when the accident occurred. "That's when we ran back inside [the building], but she didn't because she was shocked."

Kira was crushed when the vehicle pinned her against the building, police said.

When police arrived, they discovered that Lewis had been stabbed and was apparently driving himself to a hospital when the accident occurred, the New York Daily News reported. Police were trying to find out the circumstances surrounding Lewis' injury.

Lewis, who was dead on arrival at Brookdale Hospital, had a string of petty-crime arrests, the New York Post reported. Lewis reportedly had an argument with someone over a debt a short time before the accident.

"[They] had been arguing over money the past couple of weeks," one neighbor said.