Other days

100 YEARS AGO

Feb. 25, 1918 FORT SMITH — A Washington’s birthday celebration terminated fatally yesterday, when Bessie Henderson, aged 11, was burned to death. The girl had participated in the celebration in a tartan dress that caught fire from an open gas stove which she passed in her home, upon returning from the exercises at school. She died within a few hours. 50 YEARS AGO

Feb. 25, 1968 CUMMINS PRISON FARM — Anyone who intends to remove 6-weekold Woody Dwayne from his home with a Cummins Prison Farm warden “should come prepared to remove all children from the prison grounds,” state Prison Superintendent Thomas O. Murton said Saturday. In a prepared statement, Murton said that the inmate mother of the baby had entered into a “written foster home agreement” and that Frank Crawford, the warden, and his wife, Beatrice, had taken over the care of the child. The baby had been kept in the corner of the barracks of the women’s reformatory since mid January so he could be with his mother. 25 YEARS AGO

Feb. 25, 1993 PINE BLUFF — A 26-yearold Fordyce (Dallas County) man will be charged in the rape of five youths, and a 15-year-old youth is being sought at Fordyce in separate assaults on two of the man’s alleged victims, authorities said. “He (the 15-year-old) was not an accomplice but involved in separate attacks,” investigator Ted Grigson of the Arkansas State Police said Wednesday afternoon. “He probably won’t be charged as an adult. All of the people involved are relatives.” Michael Dean Harris, 26, of Fordyce was in the Dallas County Jail Wednesday afternoon.

10 YEARS AGO

Feb. 25, 2008 Escaped inmates from an eastern Oklahoma prison often flee to Arkansas because the jail’s search team halts its manhunts at the state line, an Arkansas border sheriff said. Since 2000, the Jim E. Hamilton Correctional Center in Hodgen, Okla., has had 17 escapes. The minimum-security prison has no fences and sits 10 miles from Polk County. While prison officials keep no records of convicts’ escape paths, Polk County Sheriff Mike Oglesby said at least half who escape cross into his rural county before capture. Prison officials confirmed in interviews that it’s happened multiple times.