Pennsylvania, Deaths | featured news

Police say a costumed 9-year-old girl was accidentally shot outside a western Pennsylvania home during a Halloween party by a relative who thought she was a skunk. New Sewickley Township police say the girl was over a hillside and wearing a black costume and a black hat with a white tassel. Chief Ronald Leindecker told the Beaver County Times that a male relative mistook her for a skunk and fired a shotgun, hitting her in the shoulder, arm, back and neck Saturday night.

Two people were dead and more than 100,000 homes and businesses in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania were without electricity Friday morning after severe thunderstorms swept through the region late Thursday.

Mary Schaab's only daughter was fatally shot 17 months ago, so she understood the horror and pain of losing a child, even before a Pennsylvania state trooper knocked at her door late Thursday to tell her the same thing had happened again — this time to her son.

From North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Hurricane Irene appeared to have fallen short of the doomsday predictions. But with rivers still rising, and roads impassable because of high water and fallen trees, it could be days before the full extent of the damage is known. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses along the coast lost power, and at least 14 deaths were blamed on the storm.

Police say the car carrying four Pennsylvania high school football players was going at least 80 mph when it crashed in January, killing all of them.

Two people aboard a twin-engine airplane were killed Saturday when it crashed into a house in western Pennsylvania, sending the homeowner fleeing with his dog, officials said.

Tragedy struck at a Pennsylvania circus Friday after a startled elephant stomped its trainer to death, police said.

An eastern Pennsylvania man was attacked and killed by a "temperamental" pet bull a day before his 53rd birthday, the coroner's office said Monday.

A spokesman says Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine Corps officer who became an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 77.

A western Pennsylvania jury has acquitted a man of homicide but convicted him of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of his fiancee.