Richard Truly, a naval aviator and astronaut who flew aboard two early Space Shuttle missions and, as NASA administrator, led the agency’s return to space after the Challenger disaster, died Feb. 27 at his home in Genesee, Colorado . He was 86 years old. .

The cause was atypical Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife Colleen (Hanner) Truly.

Mr. Truly joined NASA in 1969, but didn’t venture into space for 12 years. when he was the pilot of the shuttle program’s second orbital flight. The success of that flight proved that NASA could safely relaunch the Columbia shuttle and return it safely to Earth seven months after its maiden flight.

But the mission, which was supposed to last five days, was cut to two days after one of the Columbia’s fuel cells failed. (That mission was separate from the 2003 Columbia disaster, long after Mr. Truly left NASA, which killed a crew of seven.)

In 1983, Mr. Truly, who was a captain at the time, commanded Challenger on its third flight, eighth overall in the shuttle program. It took off at night and landed in the dark – a first for the program. The flight also marked a personal distinction: Captain Truly was the first American grandfather in space.

Shortly thereafter, he retired from NASA to become the first commander of the Naval Space Command, which consolidated the Navy’s operations in space communications, navigation and surveillance.

But he returned to NASA in 1986 as associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program, less than a month after the Challenger disintegrated in 73 seconds during its flight, partly due to the launch at too low temperatures, killing the seven-man crew was killed. including a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.

A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would launch only in daylight and warm weather (the Challenger launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“I don’t want you to think that this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the right thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “Flying in space is a daring undertaking.”

He added: “We can’t print enough money to make it completely risk-free. But we’re certainly going to correct any mistakes we’ve made in the past, and we’re going to get it going again as quickly as possible under these guidelines.”

Captain Truly was also the chairman of the internal NASA task force that provided support to the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster. But his main task was to get the shuttle program flying again.

“He was widely recognized as having done an excellent job in that responsibility,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email.

The job took 32 months: Discovery’s launch on a four-day mission in late September 1988 ended a long period of gloom and self-doubt for the agency.

“The nation,” said Mr. Truly, who was then a vice admiral, “will have the shuttle as the backbone of its space program well into the next century.”

Richard Harrison Truly was born on November 12, 1937 in Fayette, Miss. His father, James, was an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. His mother, Jessie Smith (Sheehan) Truly, was a teacher. They divorced when Richard was young.

Mr. Truly didn’t grow up wanting to be an aviator; he remembered dreaming of driving a fire truck. “I never really intended to be a pilot,” he said in a NASA oral history in 2003. “It just never occurred to me that that would be a possibility.”

He studied engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship and became intrigued by aviation during two summers of Navy and Marine Corps indoctrination. After graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he trained as a naval aviator and was assigned to a fighter squadron.

Between 1960 and 1963 he made more than 300 landings, many at night, on the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, after which he became a flight instructor.

In 1965, he was assigned to the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a Cold War surveillance program that planned to send astronauts into orbit in a modified Gemini capsule connected to a cylindrical, 50-foot-long laboratory . But the program was canceled in June 1969, and two months later Mr. Truly was one of seven astronauts from that program to join NASA.

He worked in capsule communications for the crewed Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s, then became a shuttle test pilot and backup pilot for the first shuttle mission in 1981.

He left NASA shortly after his second shuttle mission when John F. Lehman Jr., the Secretary of the Navy, asked him to take over the newly formed Naval Space Command in Dahlgren, Virginia. While there, he was promoted to vice admiral.

But after the Challenger tragedy, Mr. Lehman and the White House persuaded him to return to NASA. He recalled walking into his office on his first day as deputy administrator and finding people crying in the hallway “because of the media bashing they were getting,” he said in a 2012 interview. interview with the Colorado School of Mineswhere he was curator at the time.

“By then,” he added, “instead of a plane crash, it was portrayed as if NASA had killed its crew. It was the beginning of the most tumultuous technical, political, cultural and social undertaking I have ever been involved in.”

After three years as deputy administrator, Admiral Truly was appointed administrator by President George HW Bush, the space agency’s top position.

“This is the first time in its impressive history that NASA will be led by a hero of its own making, an astronaut who has been to space,” President Bush said at a news conference.

But Admiral Truly’s three years at the top of NASA were difficult ones. The agency had problems with launch delays, shuttles leaking fuel and the discovery of a defective mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.

He was eventually forced to resign after clashing over NASA’s leadership with Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was chairman.

Mr. Logsdon said that senior NASA employees, aerospace contractors and Congressional regulators had given positive assessments of Admiral Truly’s performance, but that his tenure was viewed negatively by “those reformers who believed that NASA needed fundamental change and concluded that Truly was not the person to lead that change.”

After leaving NASA in February 1992, Admiral Truly served as vice president and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a nonprofit organization of Georgia Tech, and subsequently as director of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He retired in 2005.

His awards included the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, the Presidential Citizens Medal and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.

In addition to his wife, Admiral Truly is survived by his daughter Lee Rumbles; his sons, Mike and Dan; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Admiral Truly admitted that he was sometimes afraid when he encountered danger and technical failures as a Navy pilot and astronaut.

“Fear is a beautiful, healthy phenomenon,” he once said. “Any pilot who says he has never been afraid is lying.”

Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health and moved it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases to major issues of fiscal and social responsibility in medicine, died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 98.

His son Jonathan Hiatt said the cause was pulmonary hypertension.

Harvard Public Health, a journal published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for twelve years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt ‘made public health the conscience of medicine’.

Early in his seventy-year career, Dr. Hiatt in Paris with future Nobel Prize winners on the discovery of messenger RNA, a key element of cellular biology. He later visited the White House to urge President Ronald Reagan to end the era’s nuclear weapons buildup, which Dr. Hiatt called “the last epidemic.”

Dr. Hiatt, a Harvard-educated physician who held leadership positions at some of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, was an outspoken critic of inequities in American health care. He accused American medicine of favoring expensive, high-tech treatments while excluding millions of people from basic care.

In a 1987 book, “America’s Health in the Balance: Choice or Chance?”, he advocated government-run universal health insurance, modeled after aspects of the systems in Britain, Canada and China. “I especially want to reach those who are so callous as to accept the prospect of two-class medicine in America,” he told The Toronto Star.

At the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health), where Dr. Hiatt was dean from 1972 to 1984, he brought together experts from various disciplines, including biostatistics and health management, to focus on the economic, political and social causes of poor health, not just the biological factors.

“He transformed education at the Harvard School of Public Health and the very definition of what the field of public health meant,” Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, a colleague of Dr. Hiatt, who became president of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 2002, said in an interview.

Dr. Looking beyond America’s shores, Hiatt later founded the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an unusual commitment by a teaching hospital to expand its resources to care for the sick and poor abroad .

The program was a launching pad for Partners in healtha critically acclaimed nonprofit organization providing health care to poor communities in Haiti, Africa and elsewhere, founded in 1987. The organization’s founders included two Harvard medical students, Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, who became Dr. regarded Hiatt as a father figure.

“He took it upon himself to mentor literally hundreds of young people who came through Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital who wanted to make a difference in the world,” said Dr. Kim in an interview.

When Dr. Kim and Dr. Farmer discovered a drug-resistant outbreak of tuberculosis in Peru in 1995, they were left with a $100,000 bill at the Brigham hospital pharmacy for specialty drugs. Soon the hospital president was on the phone with Dr. Hiatt, who complained about the debt. Dr. Hiatt found a donor to cover the costs, and later helped Partners in Health secure a $45 million grant from the Gates Foundation.

Dr. Farmer, the subject of a 2003 book by Tracy Kidder, ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World’, died in 2022. Dr. Kim later became president of Dartmouth University and the World Bank.

When Dr. Kim learned in 2011 that Dr. Hiatt had not actually graduated from Harvard College—he had transferred to medical school—he wrote a “diploma” on a napkin from the Hanover Inn, awarding Dr. Hiatt a Dartmouth B.A. Dr. Hiatt framed it and hung it in his home.

Howard Haym Hiatt was born on July 22, 1925 in Patchogue, NY, on Long Island, the son of Alexander and Dorothy (Askinas) Hiatt. His father had emigrated alone from Lithuania at the age of 15. The family, whose name changed from Chaitowicz to Hiatt, moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where Alexander Hiatt ran a small shoe company.

Howard was his high school valedictorian, but he was initially denied admission to Harvard; there was, as he recalled later in his life, a quota on the number of Jews who could be accepted at the time. After the principal of his high school protested to the dean of admissions, he was allowed to enroll in 1944. Two years later he entered Harvard Medical School.

While there, he met Doris Bieringer, a student at Wellesley College; The couple married in 1948, the year Dr. Hiatt received his doctorate. Ms. Hiatt studied library science and founded a magazine that reviewed books for school libraries. She died in 2007.

In the mid-1950s, Dr. Hiatt researcher at the National Institutes of Health. That job led to a year-long laboratory job in 1960 at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, then a center of the exciting new field of molecular biology.

In Paris he worked under Jacques Monod and François Jacob, the future Nobel Prize winners who were the first called and described messenger RNA, a molecule that carries genetic codes to make proteins. It was messenger RNA that formed the basis for the first Covid-19 vaccines approved for use in the US60 years later.

Back in Boston, Dr. Hiatt became both professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1963 and physician-in-chief at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His research focused on applying molecular biology to medical problems, particularly cancer. He was one of the first to demonstrate messenger RNA in mammalian cells.

As he raised research and clinical standards at the hospital, it became a magnet for medical school graduates seeking residency. Medical schools tried Dr. Hiatt to become their dean. He turned down Columbia and Yale before accepting the leadership of the Harvard School of Public Health.

“Historically, the school has been very strong in tropical medicine, sanitary engineering and other specialties that in recent years have seemed to have little relevance to the public health problems facing this country,” The Boston Globe wrote when Dr. Hiatt’s was appointed in 1972.

But the rapid changes he implemented made him enemies, and in 1978 a group of tenured professors signed a petition calling for his ouster, complaining of his “administrative incompetence.”

Derek Bok, the president of Harvard, who Dr. Hiatt, rejected the attempt to oust him.

In December 1981, Dr. Hiatt joined a delegation sent by Pope John Paul II to explain to President Reagan the medical consequences of a nuclear exchange. “The president was not very comfortable with our visit,” says Dr. Hiatt remembered in 2006 for Web of Stories, an archive of oral histories by scientists and others.

In addition to his son Jonathan, an employment lawyer, Dr. Hiatt is survived by a daughter, Deborah Hiatt, an artist; a brother, Arnold Hiatt; eight grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and his longtime companion, Penny Janeway. His son Fred Hiatt, the longtime editorial page editor of The Washington Post, died in 2021.

In 2004, Dr. Hiatt and his wife established a residence at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which trains physicians in internal medicine and global public health. Many of the approximately 70 physicians who have completed the program since then have gone on to work in Haiti, Lesotho and other impoverished countries where Partners in Health operates.

Dr. Hiatt attended many of the international clinics, which gave him inspiration and purpose in his later years, Jonathan Hiatt said.

“That actually added 15 years to my father’s career,” he added.

Max Hardy, who helped bring a new level of chef-driven yet accessible cuisine to his native Detroit and was widely considered one of the most promising of a young generation of black culinary stars, died Monday. He was 40.

His publicist, David E. Rudolph, announced the death but did not provide a cause or location. He said Mr Hardy was in good health as recently as this weekend.

Although born in Detroit, Mr. Hardy moved to South Florida with his family at a young age. As an aspiring chef, he drew from the region’s Latin American influences, as well as his mother’s Bahamian heritage, and mastered dishes such as roasted pork ribs, fried plantains, and ackee and saltfish, Jamaica’s national dish. He married those influences with a deep love of South Carolina Lowcountry cuisine, such as shrimp and grits, fried fish and hop John.

After more than a decade as a private chef for basketball star Amar’e Stoudemire, followed by a few years working in the kitchens of New York City, he returned to Detroit in 2017 to open a string of high-profile restaurants, including River Bistro , Coop Caribbean fusion and Jed’s Detroit, a pizza-and-wings shop.

He worked continuously and with the energy of an entrepreneur. He had his own lines of chef’s clothing and dry spices. He partnered with Kellogg’s to bring plant-based products from the company’s Morningstar Farms brand to restaurants like his. And he regularly appeared on Food Network shows like “Chopped” and “BBQ Brawl.”

Until recently, Detroit was a gastronomic desert, with few options other than fast food and chains. But in the 2010s, a wave of young chefs like Mr. Hardy to change the city’s image.

“He had something of a reputation as a personal chef for a very prominent NBA player, but I noticed he returned to town with very little ego,” he said. Kiki Bokungu Louya, a chef and executive director of the nonprofit Detroit Food Academy. “He was very willing to find out who was already doing the work on site.”

He founded his own non-profit organization, One chef can satisfy hunger, which raises awareness about food insecurity and healthy eating, especially among young people. During the 2019 government shutdown, he offered free lunches to laid-off federal workers; During the pandemic, he opened pop-up food kitchens to feed Detroit’s at-risk residents.

“When I can go into a kitchen and prepare meals for 500 or 1,000 people, it energizes me and takes me away from the daily grind of restaurants,” he told The Detroit Free Press in 2021. “It’s actually peace for me. to cook for a few hundred people and give something back. And it nourishes the soul. It feels really good to do this.”

In 2017, The New York Times named Mr. Hardy one of the “16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America” (Ms. Louya was among the others), not only for his skill in the kitchen but also for his willingness to push the boundaries of to renovate his kitchen. what defines a successful fine dining chef.

“Growing up in Detroit, you didn’t see chefs and restaurants as elevated,” he told The Times. “It was Motor City, not Food City. Now I can create a dinner based on the recipes of Hercules, a slave who was George Washington’s personal chef, and I can have my restaurant, and I can teach children in the community. There are so many more ways to strive for greatness as a chef.”

Maxcel Hardy III was born on December 5, 1983 in Detroit and moved to Tampa, Florida as a child. His first love was basketball, but an injury in high school ended his dreams of a serious career.

His high school had recently opened a culinary arts program, and he soon found himself under the mentorship of the principal. He worked at Ruby Tuesday after school and won a scholarship his senior year to continue his education at Johnson & Wales University in North Miami.

By age 21, he was a chef at a country club in the Miami area, and within a few years he had his own luxury catering company. From 2009 to 2014, he was Mr.’s full-time personal chef. Stoudemire, who played mainly for the Knicks in those years. The two published a cookbook in 2014, ‘Cooking With Amar’e’.

Survivors include his mother and two daughters.

Mr. Hardy’s first restaurant in Detroit, River Bistro, closed after a few years, but by then he had opened two more. He was working on a third one, specializing in fish, when he died.

“My goal is to always open restaurants downtown to help serve the community while providing great food,” Mr. Hardy told the website Eater Detroit in 2022. “I feel that while it may be easier to open in a larger suburban area, it is typical and would only serve myself.

“Food is at the center of everything,” he continued, “and I want to create restaurants that help support communities in need. I also try to show that you can open successful restaurants in your hometown.”

Mary Bartlett Bunge, who with her husband Richard studied how the body responds to spinal cord injuries and continued their work after his death in 1996, eventually discovering a promising treatment to restore freedom of movement to millions of paralyzed patients, died at 17 February. at her home in Coral Gables, Florida. She was 92.

The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a non-profit research organization to which Dr. Bunge (pronounced BUN-ghee) was affiliated, announced the death.

“She was absolutely the top woman in neuroscience, not just in the United States but in the world,” said Dr. Barth Green, co-founder and dean of the Miami Project, in a telephone interview.

Dr. For much of her career, Bunge’s focus has been on myelin, a mix of proteins and fatty acids that coat nerve fibers, protecting them and increasing the speed at which they conduct signals.

Early in her career, she and her husband, whom she met as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, used new electron microscopes to describe the way myelin developed around nerve fibers and how, after injury or disease, it retreated, in a process called demyelination.

Treating spinal cord injuries is one of the most frustrating aspects of medical research. Every year, thousands of people become completely or partially paralyzed after car accidents, falls, sports injuries and gun violence. Unlike other parts of the body, the spinal cord is stubbornly difficult to rehabilitate.

Through their research, the Bunges concluded that demyelination was one of the reasons spinal cord injuries are so difficult for the body to repair – an insight that in turn opened doors to the possibility of reversing it through treatments.

The couple worked closely together and always at the same institution. They both graduated from Wisconsin in 1960; she earned a Ph.D. in zoology and cytology he obtained an MD. They went on to postdoctoral work at Columbia University and professorships at Washington University in St. Louis before joining the Miami Project, affiliated with the University of Miami.

Over the decades, the couple concluded that myelin could be stimulated to regrow if the affected area was covered with transplanted Schwann cells, which typically surround axons in the nervous system and specialize in producing the proteins. They found promising potential in experiments that placed transplanted human Schwann cells in rats.

“It was an intense and exciting time, coming home between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. and getting up a few hours later to resume our work,” she wrote in a personal sketch for the fourth volume of “The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography” ( 2004). “The electron microscopic images were not only revealing, but also responded to my artistic inclination as expected; I loved taking the most beautiful microphotographs possible.”

The two divided their work: Mary concentrated on basic research, Richard on its possible applications. After his death, Mary continued to work on the implications of their work for spinal cord therapy.

Dr. Mary Bunge realized that simply transplanting Schwann cells was not enough; medications and other interventions were necessary to promote regeneration. In 2003, she and her research team announced that after using a combination of drugs and transplanted cells, rats regained 70 percent of their previous mobility after just twelve weeks.

Mary Elizabeth Bartlett was born on April 3, 1931 in New Haven, Conn. Her parents, George and Margaret (Reynolds) Bartlett, renovated houses. Her mother was also a painter and a descendant of the British portraitist Joshua Reynolds – a legacy that Mary took to heart early on, convinced that she would become an artist herself.

Her summers exploring the woods and streams of rural Connecticut convinced her to pursue a career in science instead. She attended Simmons College in Boston, where she studied to become a laboratory technician and graduated in 1953 with a degree in biology.

She turned out to be a phenomenal student, and in her senior year she received an offer to join a research laboratory as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

She met Richard Bunge early in her graduate career, and the two quickly found both professional and romantic partners. They married in 1956.

Dr. Bunge is survived by her sons, Jonathan and Peter, and a grandson.

The Bunges moved to Miami in 1989 at the invitation of the Miami Project, founded by Dr. Green, a neurosurgeon, and Nick Buoniconti, a Hall of Fame linebacker whose son was paralyzed during a college football game.

Richard Bunge was appointed scientific director of the project, and both he and his wife were given professorships at the University of Miami.

Her work in cellular transplantation revolutionized the field of spinal cord treatment, Dr. Barth said.

“She got the ball rolling, and now everyone around the world is doing cell transplants,” said Dr. Barth, adding that Dr. Bunge remained active in research and at conferences until her retirement in 2018, at the age of 86. “There’s no doubt that people stopped breathing when she walked into a room because they were so impressed with what she was capable of.

John C. Bahnsen Jr., a retired Army brigadier general who received nineteen awards for valor during the Vietnam War, mainly for his reckless, hands-on command of an air cavalry troop that saw heavy fighting, died Feb. 21 at his home. at home in Rochelle, Georgia. He was 89.

His wife, Peggy Bahnsen, a retired lieutenant colonel, confirmed the death. She said he had congestive heart failure.

General Bahnsen was one of the most decorated combat veterans in American history. He received the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for heroism after the Medal of Honor; five silver stars; four Legions of Merit; three Distinguished Flying Crosses; four Bronze Stars (three for bravery); two Purple Hearts; and the Army Commendation Medal with a “V” device for valor.

He earned most of these honors during the second of two tours in Vietnam, when he led a force from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment commanded by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, son of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. World War II fame.

The younger Patton’s battle motto was: “Find the motherfuckers and pile on them.” Temperamentally, General Bahnsen, then a major, seemed perfectly suited for the job. As James Noe, one of his pilots, recalled, when General Bahnsen took command of his troops, he asked, “Who wants to wrestle?” (No one did.)

He was also blunt in describing their mission: to kill as many North Vietnamese soldiers as possible, even as protesters at home called American troops “baby killers” and worse.

“We are not here for people’s hearts and minds,” Mr. Noe said in an interview. ‘We are there to kill the enemy. That’s what he put into our psyche.”

Unlike fellow commanders who led from a desk, General Bahnsen led troops from his own helicopter – a tactic that allowed him to coordinate air and ground forces simultaneously, which he did while firing his rifle and grenades from his window dropped.

“We sometimes thought he had a death wish,” Mr. Noe said.

He did, but not for himself.

“The enemy of my country is my enemy, and our mission was to kill them,” General Bahnsen said an interview from 2013 with the American Veterans Center. “You could catch them if you could. We captured many in my units, but we also killed them. And my feeling was: that is our job.”

He was relentless. He often landed his helicopter to fight alongside his ground troops. One day he was shot three times. Each time he ordered the delivery of a replacement helicopter so that he could attack again.

General Bahnsen “created a legend around himself,” wrote General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the top American commander in the Gulf War, in the foreword to “American Warrior” (2007), General Bahnsen’s autobiography. “No one I know has ever doubted his dauntless courage and boundless energy in mingling with the enemy.”

General Bahnsen received the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during a battle in early 1969.

After his crew chief was seriously wounded by heavy gunfire at low altitude, General Bahnsen evacuated him, refueled and rearmed.

“I was mad as hell!” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thought those bastards just killed my crew chief.”

Not knowing whether the crew chief was alive or dead (he survived but was paralyzed), General Bahnsen returned to the battlefield.

“He forced them into a closed area, marked their position and launched five air strikes against them, while simultaneously controlling four separate rifle platoons,” he said. award quote is reading.

Enemy fire crippled his helicopter, so he returned to his base and grabbed another.

Upon his return, the citation says, “he landed to escort the lift ships carrying an additional infantry unit, then led a rifle platoon through dense terrain to personally capture two enemies attempting to escape.”

He ordered the prisoners to be evacuated by helicopter while he remained on the ground, and led his squad on foot more than a mile to a safe position.

John Charles Bahnsen Jr. was born on November 8, 1934 in Albany, Georgia, and was given the lifelong nickname Doc by his grandfather, a Danish immigrant and veterinarian who owned a dairy farm. His father was a soil conservationist and an Army reservist. His mother, Evelyn (Williams) Bahnsen, managed the household.

He graduated from Marion Military Institute in Alabama in 1952 and was accepted into the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was, by his own admission, not a particularly good student; he graduated 406th out of 480 students with a commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry.

After basic officer training, he attended airborne school and served as a pilot in the Third Aviation Company of the Third Infantry Division in Germany. He later switched to armored warfare and led a tank company.

His first tour in Vietnam took place in 1965, when he commanded a fighter platoon.

The following year he returned to the United States and served as a staff officer in the Pentagon’s Army Aviation Directorate. While there, he reconnected with the younger General Patton, who had been one of his senior officers at West Point.

When General Patton, then a colonel, took over the 11th Armored Regiment in Vietnam, he brought General Bahnsen with him to lead an air cavalry troop. General Patton, an intimidating, hard-to-please figure like his father, thought General Bahnsen was worthy of praise.

“He is one of those rare professionals who truly enjoys fighting, taking risks and sparring with a cunning enemy,” General Patton wrote in an evaluation of General Bahnsen, adding that he was “the most motivated and professionally competent leader was with whom I served. in 23 years of service, including the Korean War and two tours in Vietnam.”

General Bahnsen later served in Germany and South Korea. He retired in 1986 with one star.

He married Patricia Fitzgerald twice, in 1956 and, after they divorced, again in 1972. Their second marriage also ended in divorce. In between those marriages, he married Phyllis Shaughnessy in 1969; that marriage also ended in divorce.

He married Margaret Miller, better known as Peggy, in 1974. Lt. Col. Bahnsen was the first woman to serve as a regimental tactical officer at West Point. She was also a professor of military science at West Virginia University.

In addition to his wife, General Bahnsen is survived by three children from his first marriage: Chris, LeeAnne and Jimi Bahnsen; another child, Minh Nelson Bahnsen; eight grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a brother, Peter.

In the last weeks of General Bahnsen’s life, Mr. Noe returned for duty and helped dress and care for him.

One day, while helping to clean General Bahnsen’s buttocks, Mr. Noe noticed that he had kissed many generals’ buttocks but had never wiped one.

“He had a good laugh about it,” he said. “It was an honor to be there for him.”

A New York City construction safety company and 25 people were indicted Wednesday in connection with a yearslong scheme that falsely certified thousands of workers as having completed required safety training, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said. One of the workers the company claimed to have trained was killed at a construction site.

The company, Valor Security and Investigations, and four people were also charged with recklessly endangering the life of the deceased construction worker, Ivan Frias. Six people who worked at Valor, including the founder, were additionally charged with corporate corruption and criminal possession of a forged instrument.

In recent years, Valor has become one of the largest providers of on-the-job safety training for construction workers in New York City. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the company stated that 20,000 workers had completed 40 hours of training between December 2019 and April 2023. Workers cannot work at most construction sites in the city without completing the training.

Valor and its founder, Alexander Shaporov, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney, said prosecutors believe most employees certified by Valor have never been trained. Valor submitted paperwork showing that Mr. Frias had received safety training, including eight hours of fall protection, but that he never took the courses.

Prosecutors from the city attorney’s office, along with investigators from the city’s Department of Buildings and Investigations, said they uncovered a scheme in which Valor partnered with real estate agents to help people obtain training certificates. Those charged included 19 brokers, who used Valor to produce the certificates within days, often overnight, prosecutors said.

Buildings Commissioner James S. Oddo said the department had begun an audit of Valor, which could result in the loss of its building permit. If that happens, the approximately 20,000 employees certified by Valor would lose their certification.

Mr Frias, 36, slipped from scaffolding at a residential building undergoing facade repairs in November 2022, falling about 15 stories and landing on top of a sidewalk shed. Workers were repairing the exterior of the 22-story tower at 263 West End Avenue, near West 72nd Street.

The scaffolding where he worked was missing some wooden planks to stand on, city inspectors discovered. According to the city’s Buildings Department, Mr. Frias was among 11 construction workers killed in 2022, an increase in construction site fatalities after a construction slowdown at the start of the pandemic. Nine of the deaths were the result of falls. Seven workers died in 2023, the lowest number in almost a decade, the ministry said.

At the heart of the criminal case is a New York City law that went into effect in March 2021 that requires construction workers on major construction sites, including most mid- and high-rise projects, to complete 40 hours of safety training. The training, called Site Safety Training, includes an eight-hour course on fall prevention.

Valor was one of more than 100 companies approved by the buildings department to provide the courses and certify that employees completed them. From December 2019 to April 2023, Valor was the third largest training provider in the city.

Valor was founded by Mr. Shaporov, who was also an investigator with the state Office of the Medicaid Inspector General. The city suspended Valor as a provider in April 2023.

Prosecutors said Mr. Shaporov deposited more than $1 million into a personal bank account while operating Valor, usually in increments of several hundred dollars consistent with the amount he charged for the certificates. Mr. Shaporov used that money to buy several houses, luxury cars and a yacht, she added.

After Mr. Frias’ death, the scaffolding company he was employed by, Rennon Construction Corp., was fined $10,000 by the Department of Buildings for site safety problems, including insufficient planking and guardrails. Mr. Frias was wearing a safety harness, but it was not attached to an anchor, the department said.

“Not having all these components resulted in a fall from the walker,” an inspector wrote in a citation. According to city records, the company has not yet paid the $10,000 fine.

A representative for Rennon Construction could not be reached for comment.

Rennon Construction still operates in the city and was not part of the indictment. Mr. Bragg declined on Wednesday to say whether Mr. Frias received his training certificate directly from Valor or through another entity on his behalf.

After his death, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration found similar safety problems on scaffolding Rennon Construction had built at other locations and issued nearly $139,000 in fines.

Inspectors observed people working on scaffolding that was missing planks and handrails, with some operating 60 feet above the ground without fall protection, the administration said. Rennon has disputed a number of fines.

Last year, Mr. Frias’ widow, Brenda Torres, sued Rennon Construction and two other companies operating at the site for negligence in his death. Ms Torres declined to comment on Wednesday.

Kirsten Noyes research contributed.

Chuck Mawhinney, whose ability to crawl through the dense jungle and looming elephant grass of South Vietnam and then wait for hours with his aiming rifle to pick off an enemy soldier made him the deadliest sniper in Marine Corps history made, died February 18. 12 in Baker City, a city in the northeastern corner of Oregon. He was 74.

His death was announced by Coles Funeral Home in Baker City. No further details were available.

Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, an average of about four per week — more than the average company, which consisted of about 150 soldiers.

US military snipers included only Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and had 160 confirmed kills, and Adelbert Waldronan Army sniper during the Vietnam War with 109 kills, had higher numbers than Mr. Mawhinney.

As a sniper, Mr Mawhinney fulfilled a number of roles. He stayed awake all night with his rifle and night vision goggles, scanning the area around an encampment for raids. He would go on patrol with other Marines, ready to support them if a firefight broke out. But most of the time, he and his spotter, a novice sniper who helped him identify targets, would go out alone, looking for individual targets to kill as a way to undermine enemy morale.

Most of his kills came slowly, a single shot from his bolt-action M40 after hours of waiting. But some came in bursts: On the night of February 14, 1969, Mr. Mawhinney watched as a column of North Vietnamese soldiers crossed a shallow river near Da Nang on their way to a Marine camp. He began firing quickly but methodically and within 30 seconds he had killed sixteen. The rest withdrew.

He claimed no special talent as a sniper, only a willingness to practice endless hours. But he also demonstrated an unusual ability to endure grueling hours of silence, hidden in the jungle, alert to targets as insects and snakes crawled over him.

He said he had a resting heart rate of just 50 beats per minute, and he used the pumping of his heart and the rise and fall of his breathing to time his shots.

Mr. Mawhinney grew up in rural eastern Oregon and learned to shoot from his maternal grandfather. He was an advocate of deer hunting, and he spent days in the woods, camping and following his prey until he got one. It was unintentionally perfect training for his wartime future.

He was neither boastful nor shy about his task. He didn’t like killing, he said, but he accepted it as an important part of keeping his fellow Marines safe.

“I was just doing what I was trained to do,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. ‘I was in the country for a long time in a very hot area. I didn’t do anything special.”

When one of his commanders installed a sniper scoreboard in their camp, ranking each man by his kill count, Mr. Mawhinney protested. It was distasteful, he said – and worse, it could encourage people to take fatal risks in the name of competition. The sign came down.

“You are at war with another country, and these people are your enemy,” he told Vietnam magazine in 2003. “I don’t think I hated the enemy at all. I did respect them. But my job was to demoralize them.”

Charles Benjamin Mawhinney was born on February 23, 1949 in Lakeview, Oregon, the son of Charles and Beulah (Franz) Mawhinney. His father had served in the Marines during World War II and fought in the Pacific theater.

After graduating high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter convinced him by promising he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.

The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the Corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.

Despite his credentials, he was initially assigned to the regular infantry. Eager to be in a sniper platoon, he feigned a toothache to be sent to the rear, where he found a unit in need of a sniper. He lobbied for a transfer and got one.

Mr. Mawhinney returned to the United States in the spring of 1970 and was discharged in August. He returned to Oregon, where he worked for the United States Forest Service. He retired in 1997.

He married Robin Hood in 1970. Survivors include their three sons, Cody, Dennis and Don.

Mr. Mawhinney was silent about his years as a sniper; most of his friends in Oregon didn’t know the details. He didn’t even tell his wife.

For decades, another Vietnam-era Marine Corps sniper has Carlos Hathcockwas credited with the most murders, with 93 confirmed – a distinction Mr Mawhinney declined to dispute.

But in 1991 a friend and former sniper came along Joseph T. Wardpublished “Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam,” in which he revealed Mr. Mawhinney’s kill count.

As his reputation became known, Mr. Mawhinney found himself increasingly in demand as a speaker, consultant and adjudicator. “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time, a biography of Mr. Mawhinney by Jim Lindsay, was published last year.

At one point, a Marine Corps admirer managed to track down Mr. Mawhinney’s M40 sniper rifle. It has been renovated and is now on display at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia.