Around The Region

Officer's gun taken during bar brawl\nEVANSVILLE -- The owners of a nightclub where a police officer's gun was stolen are offering a $1,000 reward for the gun's return.\nPaul Miles, owner of the Zone Night Club, said no questions would be asked and no names reported if the gun, which belongs to Indiana State Excise Officer Charles Butler, is returned.\nThe gun was taken early Sunday during a bar brawl.\n"We're doing that of our own volition because we don't want guns on the street," Miles said. "We try to provide a very safe atmosphere for everybody."\nButler lost the gun while fighting with several of the bar's patrons during a concert by rap artist Juvenile. According to police reports, the fight began when Butler was struck with a beer bottle while escorting a man from the bar for allegedly using marijuana.\nExcise police Sgt. Charles Bauer said he believed the officers were following procedure, but could not be certain until his own investigation into the incident was complete.\n"We have the right for inspection at any given time," Bauer said. "With that in mind, I don't know that there's anything necessarily that the officers did wrong as far as how they went in there and what they were doing."\n71-year-old man biking across state to protest tuition costs\nTERRE HAUTE -- Dave Hennessy is out to prove that community activism isn't just for the young.\nThe 71-year-old from Brown County plans on bicycling 1,000 miles across Indiana and stopping at college towns to bring attention to rising tuition costs.\nHennessy started his trip Sept. 28 in Nashville and expects to finish by Oct. 25. He says he has so far traveled 530 miles, passing through Indianapolis, Columbus, Richmond, Muncie, Fort Wayne, Wabash, Kokomo and Lafayette.\nDuring a stop in Terre Haute, while on his way to Vincennes, Hennessy said middle-class families often faced the toughest choices when it comes to paying for college.\nWith an income that is often just barely too much to qualify for a federal or state tuition grant, they have two choices -- either go into debt or deny their children an education.\n"We are trying to save the middle-class families from becoming extinct at college and university campuses because of the higher cost of education," he said. "Universities have fixed costs and there is nothing we can do about that. So the only alternative is to get people interested in raising scholarships for kids."\nHennessy and his wife, Mildred, did just that by starting the Brown County Citizens' Scholarship, a trust held by the Brown County Community Foundation.\nThat trust has $18,000 in a perpetual fund that awards scholarships to Brown County high school students.\nHe hopes other people will choose to help fund scholarships through community foundations.\nHennessy said he was fortunate to have earned his bachelor's degree in 1953 under a New York state program that offered free tuition to high school students who would become teachers. He was an elementary school teacher for four years and later became an independent training consultant.\n$1.7 million aid approved for tornado\nINDIANAPOLIS -- More than $1.7 million in federal aid has been aprroved so far for victims of five tornadoes that hit Indiana on Sept. 20, state and federal officials said Tuesday.\nAid in the form of low-interest loans and grants has been awarded to 483 of the total 1,557 victims who have applied.\nMarion County, Indiana's most populous county, has received the biggest share of the aid by far, with $932,000, according to figures released by state and federal emergency management agencies. Morgan County is second, with about $500,000.\nStorm victims can apply by calling a toll-free Federal Emergency Management Agency phone number: (800) 621-3362 or (800) 462-7585 for the hearing and speech-impaired.\nThe deadline to apply is Nov. 25.\nLast month's tornadoes destroyed nearly 500 homes and damaged 2,500 others across southern and central Indiana.\n9th sniper victim native of Indiana\nINDIANAPOLIS -- A 47-year-old FBI intelligence specialist who was the ninth victim killed by a Washington-area sniper was born in Indiana.\nLinda Franklin was born in Columbus, and lived in the city for several years before her parents moved, Indianapolis television station WRTV reported Tuesday.\nGlen Easterday, an uncle to Franklin who lives in Bartholomew County, said Franklin was at the Pentagon on FBI business on Sept. 11, 2001, before the building was hit by one of the planes hijacked in the terrorist attacks. She left the Pentagon shortly before it was hit, Easterday told WRTV.\nFranklin, of Arlington, Va., studied terror threats at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center in Washington.\nThe mother of two grown children was killed by a single shot to the head Monday night as she and her husband, Ted, were loading their red convertible with items outside a Home Depot store in Falls Church, Va.\nInvestigators said ballistics evidence Tuesday connected the slaying to the gunman who has killed eight other people and wounded two more since Oct. 2.