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• Long before youth referee's death, many feared consequences of decline in sportsmanship
• The football teams were still on the field, exchanging the traditional postgame handshakes, when Pete McCabe walked by. The veteran referee heard another official call his name and turned, only to be smashed in the face with a helmet by one of the players.
• Almost every bone in McCabe's face was broken, his skull fractured in several places and his nose nowhere close to where it belonged. As he lay on the ground in Rochester, N.Y., the semi-pro player who assaulted him stood over him yelling, "Take that. Take that. This is what I'm all about."
• "I have said since this happened to me that it's going to happen again," McCabe said, "and someone is going to get killed."
• Four years later, someone was.
• McCabe was sickened when he heard the news that Ricardo Portillo had died Saturday, a week after the youth soccer referee in Utah had been punched in the head by a 17-year-old player angry over a yellow card. Just as Portillo's family is now pleading for athletes to control their tempers, McCabe has spent the last four years preaching the importance of sportsmanship in and around Rochester.
• ___
• Limo driver, survivor offer different views of Calif. limo fire that killed 5 women
• REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) -- As smoke thickened and a fire grew in the back of a limousine, Nelia Arellano desperately tried to squeeze through a 3 foot by 1 ½-foot partition.
• Stuck for a moment, Arellano made her way into the front seat. Three of her friends quickly followed. Five others didn't make it. Their bodies were later found pressed against the partition.
• Arellano said in an interview Monday with KGO-TV that she believes the driver, Oliver Brown, could have done more to help during the fire, which took place Saturday night on one of the busiest bridges on San Francisco Bay.
• "When he stop the car, he get out from the car, he just get out from the car," she said.
• Arellano and other women had started the night celebrating the recent wedding of Neriza Fojas and were headed across the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge to a hotel in Foster City.
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