"Their loved ones seemed to be OK one day and gone the next," said Rick Young, spokesperson for the Glendale Police Department, which is heading the investigation into the claims by the former respiratory therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.
Police were still unsure if Efren Saldivar, who is in his 20s and lives in Los Angeles, told the truth when he admitting killing 40 to 50 terminally ill patients during the last decade.
"We must establish that a crime did in fact occur," Young said.
Saldivar hasn't been charged with a crime and remains free while police, prosecutors and medical regulators continue with their investigations. His license was suspended March 13, regulators announced Friday.
News of the confession shocked patients' relatives. Ana Spann went to the hospital Saturday with questions about her 95-year-old grandmother, Juana Souza, who died Jan. 10, 1996, while undergoing respiratory treatments for pneumonia.
"I want to know: Did she die in her sleep, did she feel pain, or did somebody murder her?" said Spann, of Alta Loma.
Because of that cost, and the deduction's huge popularity, it constitutes an extremely expensive but politically volatile obstacle to tax reform.
"This is the sacredest of sacred cows," said Stephen Moore, a tax specialist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Gregory Jenner, national tax partner at Coopers & Lybrand LLP, observed: "I don't think they can do tax reform without, in some way, shape or form, dealing with that issue."
In 1996, 29.4 million of the 116 million individual returns claimed the mortgage interest deduction, which lets most homeowners write off their federal income tax as mortgage interest expenses. Congress' Joint Committee on
Taxation estimates the benefit will cost $232.6 billion between 1998 and 2002.
The real estate lobby has campaigned strongly to keep the mortgage interest deduction in place, arguing its removal would create disruption and uncertainty in housing and other property markets.
DENVER - People watched from the safety of their high-rise apartments before dawn yesterday as four men beat a taxi driver to death and dumped his body in the trunk of the cab, investigators said.
"Eye witnesses saw him being beaten and dragged by his feet and thrown in the trunk, but no one called 911," said Detective Virginia Lopez. "It's disgusting."
The apartment manager said the unidentified victim may have been killed over a parking space.
"We've received loud music complaints from that area. People will call the police to complain about loud music, but not to report a murder," Lopez said.
03-30-98
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