Other days

100 YEARS AGO May 2, 1919

■ Leslie Hawkins … linotype operator employed by the Gazette, had a narrow escape from death yesterday when his seven passenger Chalmers automobile was overturned and rolled down the steep 20 foot viaduct on West Eleventh street near Joyland. Mr. Hawkins was painfully injured, but is expected to recover.

50 YEARS AGO May 2, 1969

■ Somebody used a counterfeit $20 bill to pay his taxes last month to the district office of the Internal Revenue Service. Harold W. Duke, special agent in charge of the Little Rock office of the Secret Service, said the counterfeit was discovered in a deposit made by the IRS with a Little Rock bank on April 11.

25 YEARS AGO May 2, 1994

■ Twenty-four hours after escaping from the state Department of Correction’s Cummins Unit, two convicted murderers virtually turned themselves in early Sunday in Gould. The escapees, Robert L. Williford, 26, of Hot Springs and Denver Mitchell Jr., 24, of West Frankfort, Ill., were easily arrested at 4 a.m. after bumping into two armed Correction Department officers less than 10 miles from the prison. “We were in the right place at the right time,” department spokesman Alan Ables said. “They just came walking right up the street. The officers said, ‘Halt,’ and they didn’t offer any resistance.” The men broke a window, removed a bar from their cell window and then cut two chain-link fences at 4 a.m. Saturday to escape from Cummins, about 30 miles southeast of Pine Bluff. They were confirmed missing after an emergency head count at 11:15 a.m., Ables added.

10 YEARS AGO May 2, 2009

■ A former licensed practical nurse who worked for a neurosurgeon was convicted by a federal jury of paying bribes to ensure that certain products were used during neck and back surgeries at Baptist Health Medical Center in North Little Rock. Geffrey Alan Yielding, 43, wanted the hospital to purchase Osteotech’s “allograft” bone and Orthofix’s external bone stimulators specifically, so that his wife, who coowned a medical supplies business, would earn commissions for the sales. Kelley Yielding, who died unexpectedly of an unknown medical condition in October 2006, during an investigation into the kickback scheme, earned $350,000 in commissions in 2004. After four days of trial, Geff Yielding of Jacksonville was convicted Thursday evening of both charges he faced: aiding and abetting paying kickbacks, and aiding and abetting falsifying a document. The latter charge was for trying to cover up the bribes by making checks written to fellow nurse Jody Wall appear to be a loan from the Yieldings. Wall testified that when he was in charge of the hospital’s neurosurgery operating room, he accepted kickbacks totaling about $54,000 from the Yieldings for ensuring that the operating room was stocked with the surgical products sold by Kelley Yielding’s business, Advanced Neurophysiology Inc., in preparation for surgeries performed by Dr. Richard Jordan of North Little Rock, for whom Geff Yielding worked.