Family and volunteers, donned in high-visibility vests, will be walking Highway 69 between Cushman and Batesville this afternoon looking for 71-year-old Anna Faye Cowden. She has been missing since Sunday. Cowden, who is a diabetic and does not have medication with her, was last seen Saturday afternoon when she left her Cushman home on Lilac Street driving a white 1993 Toyota Camry to clean a nearby church.
The staff and volunteers with the Arkansas Department of Health Hospice of Independence County held a breakfast/memorial ceremony Tuesday morning for families and friends who have lost a hospice patient to an illness in the past year. Volunteer coordinator Vicki Presley said every year the department holds a candle lighting ceremony to honor the memory of those who have passed. “This year we are offering survivors a Christmas ornament decorated with the family member’s name as a keepsake to be passed on,” Presley said.
Fire destroyed a small repair shop attached to a larger repair facility belonging to Galloway Sand and Gravel on Stadium Drive in Batesville. The Batesville Fire Department was sent to the fire around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday and arrived just minutes later to find the small enclosure engulfed in flames. According to radio transmissions by firefighters at the scene, an unidentified person who had been living in the building was safely outside with firefighters.
Off-duty Batesville firefighter/policeman Fred Friar said when he came out of the Tripp’s Hardware Store on Lawrence Street Thursday afternoon, he could see a large black cloud of smoke to the north and west and knew something was wrong. When he learned the Batesville 911 Dispatch office had no calls of a fire in the area, Friar decided to investigate and followed the smoke to property owned by Steve Carpenter. When he arrived at the end of Broadwater Lane in west Batesville a trash fire was burning behind a barn.
An extensive search Tuesday of a densely wooded area in west Batesville turned up no clues as to the whereabouts of Ronnie Paul Russell, 29, who has been missing since Thursday. Independence County Sheriff’s Detective Mike Mundy said search teams from the sheriff’s office, the Office of Emergency Management, Wildlife Officers from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and a K-9 team from Lawrence County spent several hours combing a wooded area immediately behind the North Heights Church of Christ where a command post was established.
The third suspicious fire in a week on Hideout Road destroyed a vacant mobile home and burned nearly 50 acres of sage grass fields and woods before being brought under control Wednesday afternoon, according to Pleasant Plains Fire Chief Stacy Caplener. The Pleasant Plains Fire Department was dispatched to 970 Hideout Road around 12:18 p.m. and stayed on the scene until 4 p.m., according to police dispatch records. Caplener said the fire started alongside the road on property owned by the Hays family.
A Batesville High School Resource Officer who collapsed at a local football game Friday night is OK and back at work today. “I feel fine, everything’s OK,” Lynn Bachman told the Guard this morning. Bachmann, 40, suffers from a form of brain cancer that has recently become active after several years in remission. He suffered a seizure after collapsing on the sideline of the Batesville/Blytheville game at Pioneer Field.
Pioneer Pizza of Batesville is now under new ownership and management by the husband/wife team of Chris and Marcala Brashers who have many years experience serving the public in the restaurant business. Located at 1614 Harrison St. next to Hon’s Save-On Drugs, Pioneer Pizza offers a menu for everyone.
A person of interest has been developed in the case of a homemade bomb found on a bridge in rural Independence County Saturday morning. Independence County Sheriff Alan Cockrill said the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms sent an agent to Batesville Monday to examine evidence collected at the bridge after the bomb was detonated by a member of the Arkansas State Police Bomb Squad.
It wasn’t a game this time around. Unlike the suspicious ammo can found on the White River Bridge recently that turned out to be part of a geocaching computer game, the suspicious canister found on the Dota Creek Bridge on Galloway Road near Newark Saturday morning turned out to be a real bomb. Independence County Sheriff Alan Cockrill said this morning the bomb was found by a motorist who saw something on the bridge that didn’t look right. “He got out to move it off the road, thinking it was something else, and realized it was a bomb and called us,” Cockrill said.
