NEWARK, N.J.

Pioneering disc jockey dies awaiting trial on sex charge

Dave Herman, a pioneering New York City radio personality who was in a New Jersey jail awaiting trial on charges in a child sex sting, died Thursday. He was 78.

Herman died at University Hospital in Newark, attorney Marc Agnifilo said. He was rushed from the county jail to the hospital late Wednesday after complaining of chest pains, Agnifilo said. No official cause of death was announced.

Herman had been living in St. Croix, where he was arrested at the airport in October on a charge he tried to transport a 7-year-old girl to the U.S. Virgin Islands for sex.

He had pleaded not guilty to the federal charge, but was denied bail. Agnifilo had suggested that Herman was duped by an undercover police officer.

Herman was a pioneering rock disc jockey in the late 1960s and ’70s, when he began experimenting with free-form rock music programming, something that was novel at the time on FM radio.

DALLAS

Texas prisons can protect supplier of execution drugs

Texas’ prison system doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its execution drugs, the state attorney general said Thursday, marking a reversal by the state’s top prosecutor on an issue being challenged in several death penalty states.

Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican nominee for governor in the nation’s busiest death penalty state, had rebuffed three similar attempts by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice since 2010. However, on Thursday, he sided with state prison officials who said their supplier would be in danger if identified, citing a “threat assessment” that they then declined to release.

His decision, which can be appealed to the courts, came the same day that Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said his state should consider creating its own laboratory for execution drugs rather than relying on “uneasy cooperation” with outside sources. A state-operated lab would be a first, and it wasn’t immediately clear if Missouri could implement the change without approval from the Legislature.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska

Woman who played dead survives brown bear attack

Jessica Gamboa grew up hearing you should play dead during a bear attack, and she did just that when she was pummeled by a brown bear that left her bloodied on a remote road at a military base in Alaska.

Gamboa said in a videotaped interview from her hospital bed that she surrendered to the bear during the attack May 18 at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage. Gamboa is married to a soldier there.

The Army on Thursday released the interview of Gamboa and a combat medic who rescued her after the mauling.

Gamboa and her husband were jogging at the sprawling base when they became separated. The mauling left her with lacerations to her neck, arms and legs, and neck fractures.

– From news service reports

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