Sudden Death

FORT MYERS, Fla. — An announcement on expanded playoffs by Major League Baseball and the players union could come soon. The field will be expanded to 10 teams with an extra wild card in each league. Three teams from the same division could make the playoffs in what would be a sudden-death opening round. The Red Sox appear to be rated below New York, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles Angels, Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers with most preseason prognosticators. They seem to enjoy that underdog role considering last year the Red Sox were considered a 100-win team at this time.

Police were investigating a report of a sudden death at an apartment building at 327 Huntington Avenue late Tuesday night. At about 11:20 p.m., workers from the state medical examiner's office carried a body on a stretcher out of the apartment. Tenants said they did not know what had happened. The building is located near several Northeastern University buildings.

A 16-year-old boy who died Wednesday shortly after being discovered severely injured at a Boston charter school apparently committed suicide, according to law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity. About a dozen grief counselors consoled students and staff at Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester on Thursday. "Our hearts go out to the family," said Bill Walczak, president of the charter school's board of directors. "We will do whatever we can during this difficult time for them.

A 16-year-old boy who died Wednesday shortly after being discovered severely injured at a Boston charter school apparently committed suicide, according to law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity. About a dozen grief counselors consoled students and staff at Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester on Thursday. "Our hearts go out to the family," said Bill Walczak, president of the charter school's board of directors. "We will do whatever we can during this difficult time for them.

On the Sunday morning of Aug. 21, David Aschauer, an economics professor at Bates, traded a couple of texts with his daughter, Erika. He was in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, ready and eager to enter his very first triathlon. Erika, 30, en route to Lake Winnipesaukee to participate in a different triathlon with her husband, Luke Rodrigue, wished her dad good luck. "It was about 6 a.m. and he wrote right back," recalled Erika, unaware that it would be the final time she communicated with her dad. "And he said, ‘I just got here … go for it!

BRATTLEBORO - Six months after his infant daughter's sudden death, a man who initially said that she choked on formula told police, "I must have lost my cool and shook her," and was charged with murder. James W. Petrin, 21, of Brattleboro, pleaded not guilty yesterday to second-degree murder in the death of 8-week-old Trisha Joy Petrin. He was ordered held on $50,000 bail. On Aug. 29, police were called to Petrin's apartment, where they found the infant not breathing. She was revived and taken to a local hospital before being transferred to Dartmouth-Hitchcock...

Police are investigating the sudden death of a 7-month-old baby in Hudson. An autopsy was to be conducted yesterday on the unidentified boy, who was reported dead about 2 p.m. Tuesday at an address on Tiger Road. The attorney general's office has joined the investigation. Captain William Avery of the Hudson police says no further information will be released until police review autopsy results. (AP)

Police were investigating a report of a sudden death at an apartment building at 327 Huntington Avenue late Tuesday night. At about 11:20 p.m., workers from the state medical examiner's office carried a body on a stretcher out of the apartment. Tenants said they did not know what had happened. The building is located near several Northeastern University buildings.

On the morning of Dec. 22, Winnie Henri called a former classmate, a young Haitian like herself, and asked him to come to her Roxbury apartment to talk. "She said, ‘You are the ones I need the most,' " recalled Frantz Sousky Etienne, an 18-year-old survivor of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. "Instead, I told her I had to do something else. " Hours later, Henri, who had been brought to Boston to save her life, lay dead, prone on the floor in a simple room where she lived alone.

TRENTON, N.J. -- Scientists in France think they have figured out how to predict which people are at risk of dropping dead from a heart attack. They found that those whose hearts beat too fast during rest and too sluggishly during exercise have a higher chance of sudden cardiac death. The research, believed to be the first on unexpected death in healthy people, relied on simple stress tests like the ones often given to people with heart problems. Specialists said the findings do not mean healthy people should have routine stress tests.

There was a story in the paper last week that said the near-death experience is nothing more than a physiological response to imminent death. A person's sense of leaving his or her body and of being drawn to a light is how flesh and blood react when deprived of oxygen and cells are dying. Science is always so eager to tell us that dead is dead. On the flip side are all the different Christian churches assuring us that dead isn't dead at all but a reward for a life well-lived or punishment for a life of sin - "well-lived" and "sin" a source of debate, but not the hereafter.

The head of Boston University's center that studies democratization and free market reform in Africa is mourning the death of President Bingu wa Mutharika of the southern African nation of Malawi. Rev. Charles Stith of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center says Mutharika was one of Africa's most courageous and conscientious leaders. Stith was commenting shortly after Malawi's Vice President Joyce Banda was sworn in as the country's first woman president after her predecessor's sudden death in office.

PALM BEACH, Fla. - While the Saints bounty case and the salary cap penalties imposed on the Redskins and Cowboys will be hot topics for weeks, the NFL finished its annual league meetings on Wednesday by adopting several rule changes for next season. The biggest adjustments will come from the postseason overtime rule being used for the regular season, and that the booth official will initiate reviews on some turnovers similar to the way all scoring plays are handled. NFL owners tabled several bylaw proposals - moving the trade deadline back two weeks, creating an injured reserve exception for one player,...

In her first interview since Whitney Houston's death, daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown said she's "doing as good as I possibly can" and recalled the tender last moments she shared with her superstar mother before her sudden death last month. "She's always with me," said the 19-year-old, Houston's only child and sole heir. "Her spirit is strong, it's a strong spirit. I feel her pass through me all the time. " Brown made the comments in a Sunday interview with Oprah Winfrey on Winfrey's network, OWN, that also featured Pat Houston, the singer's manager and...

FORT MYERS, Fla. — An announcement on expanded playoffs by Major League Baseball and the players union could come soon. The field will be expanded to 10 teams with an extra wild card in each league. Three teams from the same division could make the playoffs in what would be a sudden-death opening round. The Red Sox appear to be rated below New York, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles Angels, Texas Rangers and Detroit Tigers with most preseason prognosticators. They seem to enjoy that underdog role considering last year the Red Sox were considered a 100-win...

TORONTO - Actor Neil Hope, who starred as Derek "Wheels" Wheeler on the popular 1980s Canadian TV series "Degrassi Junior High" and had little contact with relatives and friends in his final years, died alone in an Ontario rooming house in 2007, his former fiancee confirmed Friday. Christina Boulard said Mr. Hope's family spent years trying to track him down after hearing rumors of his passing several years ago but learned just last month from police in Hamilton, Ontario, that he had died.

Voting has begun in Turkmenistan's presidential election in a race designed to cement the incumbent's hold on power in the authoritarian Central Asian nation. The seven candidates running Sunday against President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov have all made praise for the energy-rich former Soviet nation's leadership a central plank of their campaigns. Berdymukhamedov, a 54-year-old trained dentist, was elected to his first term with 89 percent of the vote in 2007, weeks after the sudden death of his eccentric, iron-fisted predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov.