Citizen Staff Writer
IN BRIEF
GARRY DUFFY
gduffy@tucsoncitizen.com
Remains exhumed from the site of the County-City Joint Courts Complex downtown were escorted by a large motorcycle escort of veterans Friday from Tucson to Sierra Vista.
The remains of soldiers – both cavalry and infantry – will be reburied Saturday with full military honors at a new cemetery inside the Southern Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery.
More than 60 small coffins draped in American flags with 34 stars were loaded carefully onto U.S. Army transport trucks at All Faiths Cemeteries on the East Side around 11:30 a.m.
“This is the biggest operation to date for a military reinterment in Arizona,” Dan Ferguson, state captain of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Riders, said as the caskets were carried one by one to waiting five-ton transport vehicles.
The soldiers had served at Fort Lowell in the 1860s through the 1880s, a remote, harsh territorial outpost where disease and accidents were as likely to prove as fatal as encounters with Apache warriors.
Among the caskets were those of three infants and youngsters and a civilian who also will be reburied in Sierra Vista.
More than 6,000 getting degrees from UA
LAURA MARBLE
news@tucsoncitizen.com
The University of Arizona planned to award 4,895 undergraduate degrees during its 140th commencement Saturday.
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, was to give the keynote address at the 8 a.m. ceremony at McKale Memorial Center. About 1,300 master’s, specialist and doctoral degrees were to be awarded Friday evening.
Kamen, who in 2001 announced the arrival of the self-balancing, zero-emissions personal transportation vehicle that now is a common sight on the UA campus, was to receive an honorary degree from UA.