Woman runs over herself in Athens parking mishap

Athens-Clarke County police say a woman from Watkinsville was injured when she ran over herself during a parking mishap.

Police said she pulled into a space about 8:40 a.m. on Wednesday and realized she had parked crooked.

Police said as she backed up to position the car better, another driver thought she was leaving and as she leaned out of her open door to say she wasn't leaving, she fell out and was run over by her own car.

Authorities said she was taken to Athens Regional Medical Center with unspecified injuries.

(The Associated Press)

Watkinsville group wants to find '46 lynching graves

Memorial march across Moore's Ford bridge, May 16, 1998.
(Courtesy MFMC)

A group devoted to remembering the 1946 lynching of two black couples on a bridge by a white mob has turned its attention to a killing four decades earlier.

Members of the Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee — named for the bridge where Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey were killed in Monroe — are hoping to find the graves of nine people shot by a Watkinsville mob in 1905. The killings — often called one of the worst racial episodes in the state’s history — allegedly left a mass grave holding eight blacks and one white, author James Allen said during a recent interview on CNN.

With success in finding and restoring the graves of the Moore’s Ford victims, the committee aims to do the same for the victims of the 1905 killings. They plan to scour church, census and county records and talk with relatives of the victims and family members of others alive then.
The story of the mass grave has never been proven other than vague newspaper accounts, said Rich Rusk, a founding member of the Moore’s Ford group.

“We’ve been working on Moore’s Ford since 1997, and we really haven’t done much at all about any of the other lynchings that have occurred in this area,” Rusk told the Savannah Morning News. “But given the national exposure given to the lynching ... we need to find out what the truth is.”

Newspaper accounts describe an angry mob of 50 people who dragged the nine men from their cells in the Watkinsville jail, tied them up and shot them to death on June 30, 1905. At least six of the victims were buried together, while the others were buried separately, according to a story in the Atlanta Constitution.

Watkinsville is about 20 miles from Monroe in northeast Georgia:

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(The Associated Press)

Iraq: GA soldier gets posthumous promotion

Leslie and Army Spc. Josh Reeves.
(Courtesy Online Athens)

A soldier who was killed in Iraq the day after his wife gave birth to their son has received a posthumous promotion to corporal.

Corporal Joshua Reeves of Watkinsville was killed September 22 when an improvised bomb exploded near the 26-year-old's Humvee while on patrol in Baghdad.

His wife, Leslie, gave birth on September 21 to their son in Tennessee.

Army officials presented Reeves' parents with their son's Purple Heart and Bronze Star medals yesterday at Evergreen Memorial Park in Athens. Army officials said his promotion was in recognition of his service.

Reeves was assigned to the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the First Infantry Division's Fourth Brigade. The brigade has been in Iraq since February, part of the surge of 30,000 soldiers aimed at ending violence in Baghdad.

Click here for previous GPB coverage of this story, and of the war in Iraq.

(AP)

Georgia soldier from Watkinsville dies in Iraq

Another soldier from Georgia has died in Iraq. The Pentagon says 22-year-old Joshua Reeves of Watkinsville was killed over the weekend when a bomb exploded near his vehicle in Baghdad. It was Reeves’ first deployment to Iraq. He entered the Army in February 2005, and was based at Fort Riley, Kansas.