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The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/2003/10/08/police-identify-murder-victim/)

October 8, 2003

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Police Identify Murder Victim

By wpengine | October 8, 2003

Enrique “Ricky” Chavez, a resident of the Southside neighborhood in Ithaca was shot and killed late last Thursday night.

According to a press release issued by the Ithaca Police Department, Chavez, a 19-year-old resident of Ithaca, was found injured and “transported by Bangs Ambulance to the Cayuga Medical Center where he was pronounced dead shortly after midnight.” The cause of death was injuries sustained from a firearm.

“We have evidence to indicate that this was an intentional act,” said Lauren Signer, deputy chief of police in IPD.

The police found Chavez injured at 11:06 p.m. in his apartment at 101 Parkside Gardens when they responded to the shooting.

According to Signer, the police “have not [yet] identified any one person as a suspect.”

Chavez attended Boynton Middle School and Ithaca High School, but dropped out of high school in January of 2001. According to the Ithaca Journal he was planning to enter a GED program.

Chavez had been an active employee of the Greater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC). In the summer of 2002, he was an attendant in youth services and served lunches at GIAC’s summer camp program in 2000.

“He had this sort of old fashioned courtesy about him,” said Linda Holzbaur, a Sun employee, who has been a neighbor of Chavez’s parents since Chavez was 10-years-old. “He was very polite and always wanted to offer people drinks or something to eat. He was a simple kind of open caring person.”

According to the Ithaca Journal, neighbor James McGuire heard two gunshots fired, but Signer did not confirm this report.

“It’s a terrible thought to think that someone is out there and actually intended to murder a 19 year-old boy,” Holzbaur said. “I think originally Ricky moved here from Brooklyn and I think that his mother thought that [Ithaca] was a safer place for Latinos.”

Currently the police are attempting to piece together the hour before Chavez’s death. Anyone with any information about the whereabouts of Chavez after 10:00 p.m. on Thursday night is encouraged to call the Ithaca Police Department at 272-9973.

Archived article by David Hillis

Related

FOOD 290: Vegetarians Beware

By wpengine October 9, 2003

Where would you expect to find knife collection displays on the walls and posters with different cuts of meat? Welcome to FOOD 290: Meat Science where beef, pork and lamb reign supreme. Denny Shaw, meats manager and instructor of the course, explained, “no one goes out of this class trained as a butcher, but we do look at all aspects of the meat industry.” In lectures, students learn the chemistry, physiology and anatomy of different animals. Later in the semester, they look at the muscle which becomes meat, as well as the issues of meat quality. The class is split into slaughter labs, dissection labs, curing and sausage labs and meat cookery and sensory labs. In the two slaughter labs, students have the opportunity to do the slaughtering, but this task is not obligatory. Each lab has approximately 16 students — slaughtering tasks are split among lab partners. For example, labs often have three to four pigs, with a few students performing the stunning, others doing the bleeding and still other students doing the skinning or shaving. All slaughtering procedures must abide by Cornell regulations and the federal humane slaughter rules dictated by the United States Department of Agriculture. In the dissection lab, students learn how to do most specific retail cuts; in the curing and sausage labs, students do some taste-testing. Sausages made by the students are often sold by Shaw. In the meat cookery and sensory lab, different cooking methods are employed. The lesson includes cooking spare ribs both correctly and incorrectly, although all the ribs seem to get eaten at the same rate, according to Shaw. Former student Jessica Graham ’03 remarked that, “[the class] was a really good experience, learning good cooking techniques and where things are on the animal.” The class usually includes several field trips, one of which is to Zweigles, a regional sausage and meat packing business for the Rochester and Buffalo areas. Shaw said that Zweigles hot dogs dominate that region: “Oscar Meyer couldn’t sell a hot dog there.” Another field trip brings students to the Excel-Taylor Plant, a beef slaughter plant in Pennsylvania and a major agribusiness in the United States. Students have one month to work on a project relating to meat, which they present on the last day of class. Shaw said that most of these presentations include eating. Many make a type of sausage for their project, but past projects have included making venison, venison jerky, calf testicles and rendering pork fat into lard for use in chocolate chip cookies or pies. Other projects have focused on by-products, such as the making of perfumes, skin creams, pelts and bars of soap from animal fat. Facilities utilized for the class are unique. A slaughter room and cooler for taking the initial heat out of the meat, which must follow special regulations, are both used. There is also a warmer area for the carcasses to age, as well as two big freezers for storing it. There are approximately 50 students enrolled in the lecture, and the class has grown in the past 5-6 years, according to Shaw. About 70 percent of the students are animal science majors; another 10 percent food science majors and the remaining students from The College of Engineering and School of Hotel Administration. Why take such a class? Liz Wilensky ’05 said, “I like animals, but I just wanted to see how they did it.” “It’s amazing how far away people have gotten from agriculture,” Shaw said. He commented on past students who asked why anyone would milk a cow instead of just going to the store and buying a gallon. “This is where your meat is coming from, and it’s important to understand that there’s a whole industry behind it,” Shaw explained. Archived article by Vanessa Hoffman
Hydrocarbon Lakes Found on Titan

By wpengine October 9, 2003

A Cornell-led team of astronomers has discovered evidence of hydrocarbon liquid lakes on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The new research is a first step in exploring Titan, the only moon of any planet with an atmosphere and also the largest body in the solar system of which there is very little known. Over the past two years, the team has worked at the Arecibo Observatory, run by Cornell for the National Science Foundation, where they radiated a signal at Titan a total of twenty-five times. The signal took 2.5 hours to bounce back and create a “weak little echo” — enough to give information about the surface of the moon, according to Donald Campbell, a Cornell astronomer. The telescope put out almost a megawatt of energy in the course of the research making it “the world’s most powerful radar system by far,” Campbell explained. The bounced signal revealed a great deal: a reflection on certain areas of Titan’s surface denoted a very smooth surface, very likely a body of liquid. When the radar reached Titan, it appeared to glint off of these smooth areas, “like when the sun glints off the ocean,” explained Campbell. The hydrocarbon that may make up these lakes would be liquid on Titus, though they would be gas on Earth, because Titan is very cold, approximately -179 degrees celsius. It is unlikely that hydrocarbon lakes would serve as any determinant of possible life. “It’s just awfully cold,” Campbell said. The possibility still exists, however, that the effect could just come from an extremely smooth solid surface. The next step that astronomers are waiting for is the landing of the Cassini space craft in the Saturn system in July of next year. A probe will then parachute through Titan’s atmosphere and onto the ground in Jan. of 2005, sampling all of the atmosphere on its way. The probe will also have a camera, and may give further information to confirm or reject the new evidence of hydrocarbon lakes. “If the Huygen’s probe splashes down, then we’ll know,” Campbell said. Archived article by Amy Green