NOTABLE DEATHS
Blue III, 12, a retired Butler Bulldogs mascot. Blue, known as Trip, was the third in a succession of English bulldog mascots for the university. Blue became a national sensation due in large part to his social media account created by longtime handler Michael Kaltenmark, Butler’s former director of external relations. He attended all home games and some road games, including one at Madison Square Garden for the Big East Tournament in 2015 in a viral moment in which he vomited on the court. “Getting sick on the Madison Square Garden court,” Butler President Jim Danko told the IndyStar in 2019. “You cannot buy that kind of publicity. Not at a school like Butler.”
Roberto Cavalli, 83, founder of the eponymous Italian fashion house and whose bold and intricate designs were worn by Taylor Swift, Madonna, Zendaya and other A-listers. His designs were recognizable for their bold prints inspired by zebras, jaguars, cheetahs and more. Cavalli’s fans over the decades included icons such as supermodels Beverly Johnson and Cindy Crawford, and musicians Christina Aguilera and Mary J. Blige. Cavalli also had his own brand of vodka.
Eleanor Coppola, 87, the matriarch of a family of Hollywood heavyweights who directed an Emmy-winning documentary about the creation of husband Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Oscarwinning film “Apocalypse Now.” She and “The Godfather” writer/director Ford Coppola were married in 1963, a year after the two met on the set of his first feature film, the low-budget black-andwhite horror film “Dementia 13,” and enjoyed 61 years of marriage. Her most recent project involved editing a documentary about daughter Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antionette.” In 2017, Coppola debuted her first feature film, “Paris Can Wait,” at age 81.
Peter Higgs, 94, a physicist whose theory of an undetected particle in the universe changed science and was vindicated by a Nobel Prize-winning discovery half a century later. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN research center near Geneva was widely hailed as the biggest advance in knowledge about the cosmos for over 30 years. What came to be known as the Higgs boson would solve the riddle of where several fundamental particles get their mass: by interacting with the invisible “Higgs field” that pervades space. That interaction, known as the “Brout-Englert-Higgs” mechanism, won Higgs and Belgium’s Francois Englert the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013. Englert’s collaborator Robert Brout died in 2011.An atheist, Higgs loathed the nickname “the God particle,” which headline writers frequently bestowed on the boson that bore his name.
Robert MacNeil, 93, formerly the anchor of the evening news program now known as “PBS NewsHour.” The Montreal-born journalist “was on the ground in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He interviewed Martin Luther King Jr., Ayatollah Khomeini, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But he had his biggest breakthrough with the 1973 gavel-togavel prime-time coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings,” a statement from “PBS NewsHour” on X said. These special reports on Watergate, which earned an Emmy Award, led to the creation of “The Robert MacNeil Report,” which debuted in 1975.
O.J. Simpson, 76, the football star and actor whose life took a shocking turn in 1994 when he was accused of stabbing to death his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of two counts of murder during a televised trial that gripped America and divided the country largely among racial lines. But the jury in a civil trial found Simpson liable for the double murder, and he later served nine years in prison for his role in a botched armed robbery. He was granted parole in 2017. Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968 while starring at the University of Southern California. At times he looked unstoppable in the NFL, too, as a member of the Buffalo Bills who was inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.