Other days

100 YEARS AGO April 20, 1917

FORT SMITH — Joseph Romano, a coal miner of Prairie Creek, was jailed here tonight as a result of the killing of Moro Colo, a young miner, at Prairie Creek last night. Colo and Frank Howard, a friend, went to Romano’s home, and failing to arouse any one by their knocks, started into the house. Romano had attached a trap gun to a screen door, and when Colo opened the door and entered the gun was discharged.

50 YEARS AGO April 20, 1967

BATESVILLE — About 200 employes of the Batesville Manufacturing Company, which makes secret defense products, walked off their jobs Wednesday afternoon. Robert King, the plant’s general manager, said the workers left their jobs apparently in protest of the suspension earlier in the day of Haskell Poff, president of Local 2248 of the International Association of Machinists. King said Poff was suspended for the rest of the week for carelessness with equipment.

25 YEARS AGO April 20, 1992

■ While Arkansas’ four senatorial candidates agree that health care reform is of major concern to the nation and especially to the state, they admit that the right solution has yet to be found. The three most common health insurance proposals being offered are a national system with the government as single payer, as is done in Canada; a “play or pay” system in which employers must provide insurance for employees or pay a tax into a public fund, and a market-based reform that will pool individuals and small businesses into larger groups.

10 YEARS AGO April 20, 2007

■ A Pulaski County jury took about 3½ hours Thursday to acquit a North Little Rock man of murder charges in a case prosecutors acknowledged was mostly circumstantial. Public Defender Lloyd Warford told jurors that the most prosecutors could prove against his client, Marcus Lamont O’Donald, 27, was that he was present when Eric Martin Jr. was shot to death late the night of May 8, 2006, in North Little Rock’s Rose City community. “At best, they proved he ran from the scene — without a gun — and refused to tell police what happened,” he said. No one saw who shot Martin, 25, outside his home at 4515 Haywood St., but Martin’s fiancee, 35-year-old Stormy Day Chambers, and her cousin, Jodi Seigrist, testified that O’Donald was the man they saw running from the home, which they shared with Martin, just seconds after he was gunned down.