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Saturday, October 17, 2015, 8 p.m.

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Fundraiser
with a fling

Former shipping
containers have
been transformed
into a house at 560
Warwick Terrace in
Benton Harbor.

Safe Shelter chunks

pumpkins to mark Domestic
Violence Awareness month

Photos by
Don Campbell /
HP staff

By LOUISE WREGE
HP Staff Writer

BENTON TOWNSHIP Domestic violence isnt a problem that

happens somewhere else.
It happens right here in Southwest Michigan more often than
people realize, said Joseph Goepfrich, executive director of Child
and Family Services of Southwestern Michigan, which runs Safe
Shelter for Domestic Violence.
We are the 15th highest county
of domestic violence reported cases in the state, he said.
That is out of 83 counties.
Folks need to be aware that this
is a crime, he said. This is not just
a home issue.
Rachel Kimbrell, supervisor for
Safe Shelter, said hers is the only
shelter in Berrien County providing services for victims of domestic
violence.
We are specifically funded for
intimate partner survivors of domestic violence, she said.
In 2014, she said, Berrien County had 1,590 reported cases.
October is Domestic Violence
Awareness Month. To raise money
for the shelter and awareness of
the problem, Kimbrell said Safe
Shelter is having a Pumpkin
Chunking Challenge 4-7 p.m. Oct.
10 at Nimby Pond, 11470 Hills
Road, Buchanan.
She said the event is for families
and costs $5 per adult. Besides the
chunking challenge flinging
pumpkins with a catapult she
said there will be a pumpkin decorating contest, bean bag toss competition, live music by Terry and
the Heartbeats, a maze and a hog
roast dinner.
Kimbrell said Safe Shelter
opened in 1976 with a hot line and

A House of

STEEL

Benton Harbor couple creates house out of two shipping containers

By TONY WITTKOWSKI
HP Staff Writer

BENTON HARBOR Shane

and Vicki Franks wanted to try
something new.
Through Shanes business,
GREENSpan Construction, the
Franks did just that. In a matter
of months the Benton Harbor
couple transformed two 45-foot
shipping containers into a livable
dwelling.
Together, the intermodal steel
building units cover about 720
square feet and feature a
600-square-foot deck that wraps
around the side to the back in an
L formation.
Shane said there are a lot of
shipping containers turned into
small homes, most frequently in
Europe. In Las Vegas, there is a
$350 million project underway
for replicating a small city of container homes.
However, to get a better idea of

See FUNDRAISER, page A8

San Franciscos
last gun
store closing
doors for good
By PAUL ELIAS
Associated Press

See HOUSE, page A8 A deck surrounds the rear of a home constructed out of shipping containers.

While there are no national statistics to document the use of retrograde extrapolation, prosecutors in many states, including
Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Illinois, have
offered evidence of estimated intoxication levels at trial. But
courts in some other states have
severely restricted its use, requiring prosecutors to use only the
blood-alcohol readings taken at
the time of a persons arrest.
The general rule in virtually
every state is that it is up to a jury
to decide its relevance, said attorney Patrick Barone, who has written a textbook titled Defending
Drinking Drivers and teaches a
class at Western Michigan Universitys law school that includes a
two-hour lecture on retrograde

SAN FRANCISCO The

only gun store in San Francisco is
shuttering for good, saying it can
no longer operate in the citys political climate of increased gun
control regulations and vocal opposition to its business.
Its with tremendous sadness
and regret that I have to announce
we are closing our shop, High
Bridge Arms manager Steve Alcairo announced in a Facebook
post on Sept. 11. It has been a
long and difficult ride, but a great
pleasure to be your last San Francisco gun shop.
Alcairo said the breaking point
came this summer when a local
politician proposed a law that
would require High Bridge Arms
to video record every gun sale and
submit a weekly report of ammunition sales to the police. If passed,
the law would join several local
gun control ordinances on the
books in a city still scarred by the
1993 murder of eight in a down-

See DRUNK DRIVING, page A8

See STORE, page A8

How drunk? Estimates questioned in drunken-driving cases

By FRANK ELTMAN
Associated Press

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. The

way prosecutors see it, Oneil
Sharpe Jr. was drunk when he
raced down a Long Island highway at nearly 100 mph this summer and slammed into a car carrying a family home from a church
gathering, causing a fiery wreck
that killed a father and his two
children.
Sharpes blood-alcohol reading,
taken about four hours later, was
0.06 percent below the legal
threshold of 0.08. But he was still
charged with drunken driving and
vehicular homicide because a forensic technique estimated that
his blood-alcohol level at the time
of the crash actually was 0.12.
That technique, known as retrograde extrapolation, has been

I challenge it every time it comes up. Juries are too

frequently bedazzled by science because science
as a whole is not well understood or taught.
PATRICK BARONE

Law professor, Western Michigan University, speaking on retrograde

extrapolation
used to win convictions nationwide for decades, but has increasingly come under scrutiny by
drunken-driving experts as an unreliable measure of a persons intoxication. Some defense attorneys have even labeled it junk
science.
Government lawyers and puppet scientists know retrograde extrapolation is hogwash and will
say so when it benefits them, but
mostly they pretend otherwise because it is useful in gaining con-

The Newspaper
for Southwest Michigan

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victions, said D. Timothy Huey,

a Columbus, Ohio, attorney specializing in drunken-driving cases.
Retrograde extrapolation is
about as scientifically reliable as
astrology, added Jonathan Manley, a former prosecutor who is
representing Sharpe in the Long
Island crash. It relies on the assumption that a persons bloodalcohol content peaked prior to
the arrest without any basis to
prove that.

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