Free Republic

While the German shepherd Rumor was being crowned the top dog at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York Tuesday night (Feb. 14), police dog Freya was winning accolades of her own on the North Shore. The Bavarian mountain hound, a St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office canine that specializes in finding lost children, located a missing 14-year-old autistic child in the woods near Lacombe. Sheriff's deputies were dispatched to a residence after the child went missing. The deputies canvassed the area but could not find the child, the Sheriff's Office said. Freya and her handler, deputy Ron Olivier,...

A St. Tammany Sheriff's Office reserve deputy was stripped of his commission and arrested Saturday night (April 11) after authorities said he drunkenly stole a department patrol boat and crashed it into a piling outside a riverfront bar-restaurant in Madisonville. Danny Eckhart was not acting in any official capacity when he boarded a patrol boat docked on the Tchefuncte River and drove it downriver to the popular T Rivers Bar and Grill, St. Tammany sheriff's spokesman Capt. George Bonnett said Sunday. As Eckhart piloted the boat, Bonnett said he caused damage of an unknown amount to the craft when he...

NEW ORLEANS -- NEW ORLEANS (AP) The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is designating nearly 6,500 acres in Mississippi and Louisiana as critical habitat for the endangered Mississippi gopher frog the only endangered or threatened frog in the Southeast. About 100 live in the wild, and nearly 900 in zoos. The land includes about 1,540 acres in St. Tammany Parish, La., and in Mississippi, about 3,500 acres of federal land, 264 acres owned by the state and the rest private. Edward Poitevent, whose family owns most of the Louisiana land, has been fighting the designation. He says he cannot comment...

St. Tammany Parish Councilman Joe Impastato was arrested Tuesday for allegedly extorting a $100,000 kickback in connection with a Hurricane Katrina debris removal contract, a case that authorities called the opening salvo in a corruption crackdown by a task force weeding out fraud in storm-related contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. Impastato was arrested during an FBI sting as he accepted two cashier's checks totaling $85,000 from a subcontractor cooperating with authorities, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said at a news conference Wednesday. Impastato, 33, who represents the Lacombe area, is accused of extorting 50 cents on the dollar from...