A correction has been made to this article.

The fertilizer storage facility that exploded this week in the town of West, Texas, had informed a state agency in February that it was storing up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate – the highly explosive chemical compound used in the domestic terror attack on the Oklahoma City federal building.

The company's risk management plan, filed with the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, made no mention of ammonium nitrate. (Update: Reuters news agency reported that the EPA does not require disclosure of the ammonium nitrate, but the Department of Homeland Security does require that disclosure, which the company did not do.)

It's not clear whether the ammonium nitrate, which was not initially reported as being present at the site in the wake of Wednesday's massive blast, was responsible for the explosion, or whether volunteer firefighters battling a fire at the facility knew of its presence. Under state law, hazardous chemicals must be disclosed to the community fire department and to the county emergency planning agency, in addition to the state. News reports on Thursday focused on tanks of anhydrous ammonia –a less volatile fertilizer.

Adair Grain, doing business as West Fertilizer Co., told the Texas Department of Health Services on Feb. 26 that it was storing up to 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, along with up to 110,000 pounds of the liquid ammonia, according to the disclosure report. (Read the document provided by the state.) The company's disclosure was first reported Thursday evening by The Los Angeles Times.

The facility in West served primarily as a distribution point for fertilizer to farmers, a retail outfit, not a manufacturing plant, it said in its regulatory filings.

A deadly history
Ammonium nitrate fertilizer was involved in the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, when a container ship exploded in 1947 in Texas City, Texas, killing more than 500 people. It also was combined with fuel and used by Timothy McVeigh in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Firefighters were trying to put out a blaze at the facility when it exploded on Wednesday evening. An official with the Texas Division of Emergency Management told reporters that he believed ammonium nitrate was one of the chemicals on site, but authorities have not said what chemical was responsible for the tremendous explosion, how much of each chemical was stored at the time or what caused the fire.

Making sure that firefighters know what chemicals are on site is a primary reason for the disclosures such as the one the company made to the state in February. Spokesman Carrie Williams of the Department of Health Services told NBC News that although the state requires registration of hazardous materials to alert emergency planners and the community, the department's role is limited to receiving the reports and making them available to the public. More than 65,000 facilities in Texas submit reports, which are available in the state's Emergency and Chemical Inventory.

West Fertilizer said in its 2011 risk management plan filed with the EPA that its anhydrous ammonia did not pose any threat of fire or explosions.  "The worst-case release scenario would be the release of the total contents of a storage tank released as a gas over 10 minutes," the plan said. Ammonium nitrate isn't listed on the plan, which is described as a five-year update to the EPA. A copy of the plan was posted online by the watchdog group Center for Effective Government.

"Last night’s tragic explosion points to the need for stricter regulations of plants that store and use large quantities of hazardous chemicals," said a statement from Tom O’Connor, executive director of a union safety group, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. "We need a system in which facilities that are inherently dangerous are required to develop detailed disaster prevention plans before they’re allowed to operate."

West Fertilizer is owned by Adair Grain, a small company with only seven or eight employees. The company declined to comment when reached by phone by NBC News.

The company has been the subject of several disciplinary actions from state and federal regulators:

• Last summer, the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fined West Fertilizer $10,000 for safety violations, including planning to transport anhydrous ammonia without adequate security and failing to properly label ammonia tanks. The company paid a reduced fine of $5,250 after agreeing to take corrective action. The fine was reported by several news organizations.
• In 2006, the company was fined $2,300 by the EPA for not having filed a risk management plan, according to the EPA's compliance database. The EPA said it had poor employee training records, failed to document hazards and didn't have a written maintenance program. The EPA said the company corrected the deficiencies and filed an updated plan in 2011 – making no mention of the presence of ammonium nitrate – and was then in compliance with EPA regulations.
• Also in 2006, the state Department of Environmental Quality found that the company was operating without a permit for its two 12,000-gallon tanks for anhydrous ammonia, which is stored as a liquid under high pressure. The state department hadn't known about the tanks until a neighbor complained of a "very bad" smell of ammonia at night. The chemical is used on farms directly as a fertilizer, and can be combined with nitric acid to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer. No state permit for the tanks had been required when the plant was built in 1962, and it was grandfathered in until a 2004 change in state law required even those older plants to have permits.
• State environmental officials received two complaints about the company. One, in 2002, said, "This place is in the northern part of town and every day during the grain harvest season there is a cloud of dust. Particles are falling like snow around town. People are afraid to complain, however this is effecting (sic) neighbors' health with scratchy throats, cough and sneezing." The other was in 2006, and led to the plant getting a permit for its anhydrous ammonia tanks: "Ammonia Smell very bad last night from fertilizer plant, lingered until after they went to bed," it said.

Location is up to zoning rules
The spokeswoman for a trade group, The Fertilizer Institute, said the West plant was not a manufacturing facility but instead a retail distribution point for farmers to buy fertilizers. The spokeswoman, Kathy Mathers, said there are 5,000 to 6,000 such facilities in the U.S. Such facilities must register with the EPA and with state authorities, she said. But any limits on their placement near homes or schools would be limited only by local zoning ordinances, Mathers said.

The county engineer in McLennan County, Texas, in the county seat of Waco, said counties in the state don't have zoning regulations, and neither do most towns. He said he didn't know if the town of West had rules that would have affected this plant. Although some homes were close by when the fertilizer facility opened, a subdivision, schools and a nursing home were built near the plant in subsequent years.

Mathers said Thursday that the most recent fatal accident involving a fertilizer facility in the U.S. was in 1994 in Port Neal, Iowa, where four workers were killed and 18 injured. (Read the EPA investigative report.)

She said the institute's employees on Thursday were "pretty damn mad," because an incident such as this can sully a good industry's reputation. "This industry has ethics," she said. The Fertilizer Institute sponsors training sessions for the industry, in addition to performing the usual support and lobbying functions of a trade group.

The Fertilizer Institute removed from its website on Thursday morning a map of fertilizer production and mining facilities. Mathers said officials did so because people were confusing those facilities with smaller storage and mixing facilities, like West Fertilizer. "We weren't trying to do anything dirty or underhanded," she said. A copy of the map is available here.

The accident is being investigated by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. An article this week from the Center for Public Integrity described how overworked and underfunded that agency is.

Polly DeFrank and Rich Gardella of NBC News contributed reporting.

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This story was originally published on Fri Apr 19, 2013 4:58 AM EDT

Interactive map: A long weekend of gun deaths. Click to enlarge.

It was after midnight, early on a Saturday in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and student Jason "Cowboy" Monson was at the police station to get back his Desert Eagle .45-caliber handgun.

In McDonough, Ga., about the same time, two teenage brothers were still awake. A friend was sleeping over, and their mother had let the boys handle her .38-caliber revolver, which was unloaded. She'd gone to bed.

In South Valley, N.M., it was quiet at the Griego household as 15-year-old Nehemiah waited for his father to come home from the night shift at a homeless shelter. The son was holding his father's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In the next few hours, the freshman in Idaho, one of the brothers in Georgia, and most of the Griego family would be dead, victims of three forms of gun violence — suicide, accident and murder — that are everyday occurrences in the United States.

Their deaths, and scores of others, occurred over a holiday weekend, the third weekend in January, when America celebrated the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a victim of gun violence. It also was the weekend the nation swore in a re-elected president whose inaugural address referred to guns, though he didn’t actually say the word: "Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm."

San Antonio Express-News via Zuma Press

One of 91 deaths identified by guns across America on a long holiday weekend: Officers with the Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff's Office investigate the shooting death of Jesse Rosas, whose bullet-riddled body was found on the side of a road near San Antonio on Jan. 21. Police have not identified any suspects.

By the end of the long weekend — after President Barack Obama had spoken and the red, white and blue confetti strewn along Pennsylvania Avenue had been cleaned up — at least 91 people across America had been killed by guns. That's more than three times the number of caskets needed in Connecticut after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. These 91 people died, not in a single burst of violence over a few minutes, but spread over a three-day weekend, like an autoworker stealing an entire convertible one part at a time to escape notice.

In the aftermath of the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting, during a renewed national debate about gun rights and gun control, NBC News picked the weekend of Jan. 19-21 to examine gun deaths across America. Today and on Monday and Tuesday, we'll tell you what we found and introduce you to some of the victims and their families. We also invite you to look at our online map and to draw your own impressions from the stories of violence.

We don't pretend to have found all the gun deaths over that weekend. There is no official census of gun deaths, and it takes the federal government many months to compile national crime and suicide statistics. We drew our list from the deaths that were reported in the press, and confirmed the details with authorities in all but a few cases. If you only want to know how many people are killed by guns on an average day in America, simply divide the annual figure, about 31,300, by 365 days, and there's your average: about 86 people a day.

Why did we find “only” 91 in three days? The main reason is that hardly any suicides get reported in the media. Suicides by gun are twice as common as gun homicides. Some homicides don't get any publicity either. Unless a killer chooses a public place, annihilates an entire family or shoots up a Wal-Mart, he might not even get on a website, in the newspaper or on TV, not on a holiday weekend competing with the festivities in the nation's capital and the Ravens-Patriots and Falcons-Seahawks games. The Griego family massacre in New Mexico was the only incident that long weekend to get significant national news attention. It also could be that holiday weekends with NFL championships are safer, with so many young men – who are statistically far more likely to shoot someone — inside instead, watching the games.

Guns by the numbers: how violence adds up

Our goal was not, however, merely to count the deaths, but to share the stories of the people who died, to see what lessons one might learn from those whose deaths usually go unnoticed, that don't prompt the president to order the White House flag to half-staff.

#####

It's an inescapable conclusion, even from our small sample, that there are many ways to get killed with a gun in America.

Based on interviews with police, prosecutors and family members in all but a few of the cases, we tallied 53 homicides where one person killed another. There were another three homicides where multiple people were killed. There were six murder-suicides, and six suicides. Five accidental shootings. Three shootings by police, and at least two by civilians in self-defense. That's 78 horrors with 91 dead. On a different randomly chosen weekend, the count might shake out differently.

You can get killed throwing your daughter a 17th birthday party, if your angry estranged husband shows up. Without a gun, you might have an angry confrontation and maybe some tears. With a handgun, the birthday girl in Grapevine, Texas, lost her mother and father in a murder-suicide, police said.

Or you can get killed buying a taco from a vendor on the street in Los Angeles, if you get into an argument with the wrong person, and that person has a gun.

Or catching a train: A bystander was killed at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in San Leandro, Calif., when a couple of gangs started trading shots.

You can get killed spending an afternoon with grandma. Just as the president was beginning his inaugural address and talking about making children safe, a gunman in Cocoa, Fla., burst into a home before a children's birthday party, shooting to death the mother of several of the children and seriously wounding their grandmother.

Or visiting a strip club. A U.S. Army soldier from Oklahoma's Fort Sill was killed outside a strip club during a dispute over a woman.

Manatee County Sheriff's Office

James Brady, 26, was shot and killed in Bradenton, Fla., Jan. 20, as he and two other masked men attempted to rob a resident in his carport, police said.  One alleged robber, Jared Lee, has been charged with felony murder in Brady's death. Authorities are seeking a third man, Charles Jones.

You can get killed for what may seem like like a pretty good reason, if, as the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre put it after the Newtown shooting, you're a “bad guy with a gun” who happens to run into a “good guy with a gun.” There were two shootings by citizens that apparently were justified over the long weekend, including one by a man in Bradenton, Fla., who was ready with his own handgun and a concealed weapons permit when three armed robbers wearing masks confronted him and his roommate in their carport, according to police. He killed one of them, and authorities determined it was in self-defense. There also were three shootings by police officers that have tentatively been ruled as justified, including one in which an ex-con was shot dead after he threatened to kill his hostage following an armed robbery.

Las Vegas Police

Las Vegas Police Lt. Hans Walters, 52, killed his wife, former police officer Kathryn Michelle Walters, and their 5-year-old son, Maximilian, called 911 to confess and then set his house on fire on Jan. 21, according to police. Walters killed himself with the handgun as police moved in.

But as we saw last week when a former Los Angeles police officer allegedly went on a murderous rampage against fellow law enforcement officers, the “good guys” aren’t immune to the demons that trigger gun violence. Over the inaugural weekend, a Las Vegas police lieutenant used a handgun to kill his wife, herself a former police officer, and their 5-year-old son, before killing himself, according to police, just as the president was taking his seat on the West Front terrace of the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning.

You can get killed when your fists are outgunned, like the 22-year-old man who his family said was standing up for his friends in a brawl, when someone else pulled a gun and shot him dead, according to police. They were in Torrance, Calif., attending a punk rock festival headlined by a band called "Aggression."

You can become an ironic headline, like the 20-year-old man in Lafayette, La., who was shot dead about 60 yards from the Martin Luther King Jr. recreation center, on Monday, the day when Dr. King's legacy of nonviolence was being celebrated. That shooting occurred about the time the Obamas left the White House for their inaugural ball.

Or you can be ignored as just another victim of a street crime or a drug deal, barely making the local newspapers if you're killed in a "confrontation at a mobile home park" or "shot and killed in an argument in a parking lot."

#####

One of the surprises in our snapshot of gun violence was how young many of the victims were.

Oregon State Police

Kayla Ann Hendrickson, 16, was killed alongside an Oregon highway on Jan. 19, by her boyfriend, Jacob Allen Green, 24, after an argument, according to police. Green committed suicide near the California border, they said.

Twenty of the 91 were too young to buy a beer at a baseball game. There's the 16-year-girl in Oregon named Kayla, who was shot to death by the highway, apparently by her 24-year-old boyfriend, who then shot and killed himself with the handgun, according to police. The 6-year-old girl in Cleveland —  her name was Navaeh, and her family called her "Nae Nae" — who somehow got her hands on what police said was the illegal handgun of her felon father, and shot herself in the face. The 18-year-old in Baton Rouge, Terrance, who was playing with a .357 Magnum; when it went off, the bullet missed him, and hit his 2-year-old brother, Travin, in the chest.

It's hard to miss how male the victims are: Out of 91 dead, 75 were men or boys. And the men were even more likely to be the ones pulling the trigger.

There's no way to count them all, but the press accounts of these deaths are sprinkled with deadly encounters fueled by drugs and alcohol. We didn't trace the race or ethnicity of victims or shooters for this project; though research indicates that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be involved in gun violence. But the cases over this weekend were not limited to "urban" violence, with the deaths happening in cities and small towns and suburbs across many class and ethnic groups.

Looking through the deaths from just that one weekend, one wonders how many of these deaths could have been prevented by the gun-control and gun-safety changes that are being discussed in Washington. There are no easy answers, but one can draw an overall conclusion: Because the types of gun deaths vary greatly, so the solutions would have to vary as well.

David Hemenway, a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health, says it will require a national mindset shift to make big inroads into the number of gun deaths, similar to the change that occurred in how child abuse – a condition once considered so endemic that it couldn’t be addressed – was viewed after new laws against it were passed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"If it was in your safety to have a gun in the home, people in public health would try to get you to own a gun," he said last month at a forum on gun violence sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Reuters news agency. "But what evidence we have is that it's against your self interest."

Improvement in mental health efforts, as proposed by the president, might make a difference, particularly in the 12 suicides and murder-suicides. But many of the cases will forever remain a mystery.

Warwick, R.I., Police Capt. Robert Nelson, who is investigating the murder-suicide of a longtime married couple on the MLK Day weekend, said the law enforcement system is set up to find and punish wrongdoers, not determine root causes: “We don’t have clear motive, and you know, you rarely do,” he told NBC News. “… As seen around the country, when someone kills somebody else then kills themselves as a result of that, you very rarely have any clear motive.”

In the Griego family massacre in New Mexico, as in the Newtown school shooting, there still is no clear understanding of what may have driven a young man to commit mass murder. Nehemiah Griego, 15, is facing murder charges in adult court. Police say the minister's son shot his mother and three younger siblings with a .22-caliber rifle as they lay in their beds early on that Saturday, then waited to shoot his father with the father's military-style AR-15 rifle.

What about the proposal to take "weapons of war" — or assault-type weapons —  off the streets, as Obama put it? Police are reluctant to give out details of the type of weapon used in a crime, because that's the sort of fact that they can use when interrogating witnesses and suspects. You'll see a lot of "unknown" for gun type on our map, and we don't have reliable information in most deaths about whether a gun was purchased or owned legally. There are several cases in which guns were not possessed legally.

The weekend of gun violence does leave an impression that few crimes are committed with the assault weapons whose legality is being debated in Washington. We saw one Detroit homicide where a witness said the gun was an AK-47, but police won't say one way or another. And Nehemiah Griego is said to have used a .22-caliber rifle, then a .223-caliber military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Most of the killing, however, is done with handguns that are not on the political radar, one or two victims at a time, not crimes that depend on high-capacity magazines with more than 10 bullets.

“Certainly I’m not naive enough to say that if we were to ban military-style assault rifles and if we were to ban high-capacity magazines, that we’re not going to have killings or murders," said George Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney, an advocate of banning those weapons and high-capacity magazines. He was discussing the death of Daniel Colon, 44, who was killed with an unknown weapon on the morning of the inauguration, as he was walking home with his cousin from a bar where he had celebrated the football victory by the 49ers. "All we’re saying is that we can reduce the mayhem, and we can have greater control to make sure that the people that own weapons do so in a lawful fashion.”

Accidental shootings of children may be the most preventable, when children get their hands on guns that adults have not secured.

In McDonough, Ga., where the mother was asleep, the sheriff's office says the mother had let the children handle her .38-caliber revolver earlier in the evening, when it was unloaded. Sometime in the night, one of the boys loaded the gun.

The mother was awakened around 2:30 a.m. by a gunshot.

The mother's 14-year-old son had pointed the gun at his 15-year-old brother's chest and squeezed the trigger, the sheriff’s office said. The sheriff and the district attorney haven't released the names of the boys, and say they haven't decided whether to charge the brother with a crime. The sheriff's office said it didn't consider charging the grieving mother, because her gun was legally owned.

Many gun owners say they need their guns to be at hand and ready in case of an intruder breaking in during the night. "You try to look at the science," Hemenway, the Harvard professor, said at the gun violence forum. "There's no evidence at all suggesting that having the gun that you can get within two seconds matters more than the gun you can get within 10 seconds. ... There is a huge amount of evidence that having an unsecured gun leads to all sorts of death in the family."

#####

Looking at the gun deaths across the land, on just one weekend, is a reminder how ingrained the gun culture is in America, a large part of the story the country tells about itself, especially in the way its young men find identity.

Consider Jason "Cowboy" Monson, the freshman from the University of Idaho who went down to the police station to get his gun back.

On Friday, just before our weekend clock began, Jason's roommate spoke with his resident adviser in the dorm, saying he was afraid because Jason was keeping his Desert Eagle handgun under his pillow.

Jason was raised on a small horse farm in Middleton, Idaho, hunting and fishing, playing football for a Christian school. He was raised around guns. Jason's father is a county sheriff's patrol sergeant, and his mother is a former Boise police officer. (His parents did not respond to a request from NBC News for an interview.) Jason won a national speech competition with 4H, and was studying communications. He was also in the Air Force ROTC and hoped to serve his country. He had a new girlfriend and a sense of humor, and posted a lot of funny stuff on his Facebook page.

His online summary of himself was unassuming: "im a total cowboy. I hunt cowboy mounted shoot and drive an old ford diesel. Ive broken several bones and most recently chainsawed my foot, that was a great two months, insert sarcasm. I own several guns and will be in the ROTC at the u of I this fall. any questions message me."

Family photo

Jason Monson aims a blank pistol at the camera. Jason, who grew up on a small horse farm in Idaho, was active in Cowboy Mounted Shooting, which uses blanks.

Cowboy Mounted Shooting looks like a lot of fun. (Watch a primer on YouTube.) The riders train skilled horses and compete on an obstacle course, wearing a Western long-sleeved shirt and a cowboy hat and shooting guns loaded with powder cartridges--blanks--at ballooons. Jason had already won a couple of belt buckles. One of his fellow competitors described him as "very nice, respectful, personable and outgoing." It's a great sport for someone who likes people, horses, and guns.

When the roommate reported the gun, Jason was not at the dorm. The school called the city police, and an officer came and took the gun away. The police chief in Moscow (for non-Idahoans: that's "MOS-ko"), David Duke, said there was no hint that Jason had made any threat against anyone, and Jason wasn't in a whole lot of trouble.

After all, this is Idaho, where guns are freely allowed with no registration, and one can openly carry a gun without any permit. Jason had violated no criminal law by bringing his handgun to his dorm room, the police chief said. It was against the school rules to have it there — students have to keep their guns in the central gun locker provided by the school. Jason could have faced student judicial charges, but it wasn't a criminal matter.

When Jason got back to the dorm, his roommate had been moved to another room, and Jason was told that his gun had been confiscated. He called the Moscow police about 10 p.m. to get his gun back, and the officer asked him to come down to the station. He came down about 1 a.m., and the officer said he could have his gun, but not until Tuesday, after the MLK holiday, so he'd have a chance to lock it up at school.

At 8:46 a.m. local time Sunday morning, just as the Obama family was participating in a day of service by fixing up an elementary school in the nation's capital, Moscow police got another call from the University of Idaho, from the same dorm.

One of Jason's suitemates had found him, shot in the head, next to notes he'd written to his family.

Idaho has one of the highest rates of suicides in the country, mostly from guns. It also was the only state in the union without its own certified hotline with counselors trained in suicide prevention; a hotline opened in November, but it's open  only Monday through Thursday, 9 to 5. Chief Duke says he gets a call about suicide on campus every couple of years or so.

It turned out that the Desert Eagle .45 was not Jason's only gun. Sometime in the night, he'd gone out to his pickup truck for his Smith and Wesson Model 66 .357-caliber revolver.

'Flashpoint: Guns in America,' an NBC News special report 

In his obituary, his parents took the opportunity to plead against gun control: "Let us drag the evil hiding in the darkness of the most dangerous places on earth: Gun free zones."

Jason's photo with his obituary shows Cowboy Monson with a big grin, wearing a black hat and astride a reddish-brown horse at a canter. Jason is looking directly at the camera, where he is pointing his blank pistol.

That image is the profile photo atop his Facebook page, too, now and perhaps forever, along with the cover image of two semi-automatic rifles criss-crossed over the U.S. Constitution.

Read Part 2: The faces behind the numbers: Six victims of long weekend's violence

 Also contributing to this story and map for NBC News: Daniel Arkin, Meredith Birkett, John Brecher, David Friedman, Kriss Chaumont, Tracy Connor, Polly DeFrank, Matthew DeLuca, Miranda Leitsinger, Shezad Morani, Lisa Riordan Seville, Jonathan Sweeney and Lisa Wilkins.

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Mel Evans / AP

Officers from the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office work at a two-day gun buyback event in Trenton, N.J., on Jan. 26. People were allowed to drop off weapons with no questions asked.

On average, about 86 people a day are killed by firearms in America, or 31,672 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control tally for 2010, the latest year available.

That year, the CDC counted 19,392 gun deaths by suicide, 11,078 homicides with firearms, 606 deaths by accidental shootings and 596 with other or undetermined cause. (Read the full report.)

A child aged 5 through 14 in America is about 13 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than children in Japan, Italy or other industrial countries, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. (Watch the Harvard forum on gun violence.)

Larry W. Smith / EPA

Guns lie in a chair at the First Presbyterian Church parking garage in Dallas during a gun buyback program on Jan. 19, 2013. Across the street, gun-rights advocates were offering to auction off guns at higher prices.

Guns are used in about seven out of 10 murders in the U.S., according to FBI statistics. The weapons of choice are guns, 68 percent; knives, 13 percent; fists or feet, 6 percent; other, 6 percent; and unknown, 7 percent. (See other statistics in a chart from The Dallas Morning News.)

The crime rate has been declining steadily for firearm crimes. In 1993 and 1994, for example, the rate was above seven firearm crimes for every 1,000 people age 12 or older. It has fallen pretty consistently to 1.8 in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics have been tallied, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Even in Chicago, which has a strict gun control law and received a lot of publicity in recent months for a spike in homicides, the number of killings has declined sharply over the past 20 years. The number was consistently above 800 in the early 1990s, but fell to the 700s, to the 600s in the early 2000s, and near 500 or below for every year since 2004, according to a report by the Chicago Police Department.

There is considerable disagreement among researchers, however, on whether the high-rate of U.S. gun ownership has a direct correlation to violent crimes and, if so, what it's impact might be. Here's a recent analysis by FactCheck.org that does a good job covering that terrain.

Related story

A look at some nations' gun ownership rates.

Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

Thirty-three percent of American households have a gun. That rate varies from Georgia's 41 percent down to New Jersey's 11 percent, according to a 2002 federal survey.

Here are some civilian firearm ownership percentages for selected countries, according to The Small Arms Survey: Germany, 30 per 100 residents; Iceland, 30; Austria, 30; Canada, 31; Iraq, 34; Saudi Arabia, 35; Switzerland, 46; Yemen, 55; United States, 89.

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A long-lost relative of the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, who could have inherited $19 million of her $300 million fortune, has been found dead under a Union Pacific Railroad overpass in Wyoming.

Children sledding found the body of Timothy Henry Gray, 60, Thursday afternoon in Evanston, a small mining town in southwestern Wyoming near the Utah border. The coroner said it appeared he died of hypothermia. The low temperature that day was 10 degrees, and had hit zero in the previous week. Lt. Bill Jeffers of the Evanston Police Department said there was no evidence of foul play, and Gray was wearing a light jacket. Gray's siblings said they hadn't heard from him since their mother's funeral in 1990, when he disappeared without a word.  It wasn't clear whether Gray was living under the overpass, where transients have been known to camp.

Tim Gray was an adopted great-grandson of former U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark, known as one of the copper kings of Montana, a banker, a builder of railroads and the founder of Las Vegas. The senator's youngest daughter, Huguette Clark, was a recluse who died in 2011 in New York City at age 104, after living in hospitals for 20 years while her palatial homes sat unused. Gray was her half great-nephew.

In her will, Huguette Clark left no money at all to her family, leaving it instead to her nurse, goddaughter, attorney, accountant, hospital, doctor, favorite museum and various employees, as well as  to an art foundation to be set up at her oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara, Calif.  None of her relatives had seen Clark in at least 40 years, though some had been in touch with her through holiday cards and occasional phone calls.

Nineteen of Clark's relatives have stepped forward to challenge her will in a New York court. A public administrator joined the challenge on behalf of Gray. When lawyers tried to find him to let him know about the Clark estate battle, they found his belongings had been abandoned in a storage locker, according to court records, and private investigators were not able to find him.

If the relatives win their court challenge, Gray's estate would be entitled to about $19 million before taxes, or 6.25 percent of Clark's copper mining fortune, which has been conservatively estimated at $307 million by the administrator of Huguette Clark's estate. If Gray, who apparently had no spouse or children, died without a will, his siblings would receive his share in addition to their own.

Gray was not using the money he already had. The coroner said Gray's wallet contained a cashier's check, from 2003, for "a significant amount."

Gray's older brother, Jerry, said Tim had worked as a cowboy and lived in the Rocky Mountain states. "He was homeless essentially. If we had proper mental health services in this country, we could have been notified and known to do something."

Huguette Clark attracted the attention of NBC News in 2009 because of her vacant but well-manicured mansions and questions about the management of her money. The battle over her estate could go before a jury in 2013, though settlement talks have begun.

The archive of Clark stories, photos and videos is at http://nbcnews.com/clark/.

Do you have information on the Clark family?
Reporter Bill Dedman is co-authoring "Empty Mansions," a nonfiction book about Huguette Clark and her family. If you have documents or information, you can reach him at bill.dedman@msnbc.com.

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John L. Wiley, http://flickr.com/photos/jw4pix/

The mysterious oceanfront home of Huguette Clark in Santa Barbara, Calif., could become an arts institution open to the public. Community leaders are siding with her last will and testament, which has been disputed by Clark's relatives.

Community leaders in Santa Barbara, Calif., have begun a public relations effort to encourage preservation of the oceanfront home of the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark as an arts institution, as provided in her last will and testament.

Clark's entire estate, which is being contested by her relatives in a New York court, is valued conservatively at $307 million. The case could go to trial in 2013, if it isn't settled first. Attorneys were meeting Friday for preliminary settlement discussions.

The estate's largest asset is Bellosguardo, her cliffside vacation home above Santa Barbara's East Beach. The property on 23 acres is valued by her executor for tax purposes at $85 million.

Her will called for creation of a Bellosguardo Foundation as an educational institution "for the primary purpose of fostering and promoting the arts." She left to that foundation most of her works of art, as well as 15 percent of her estate after the payment of other bequests. Clark was a member of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from the 1940s until her death.

If the home goes to the foundation, it may someday be opened up for public viewings. Few people have been allowed inside the mysterious home, which has been carefully maintained even though Clark and her immediate family stopped visiting approximately 60 years ago. "It could be a house museum. I believe people would pay to go through it, to see it," said Sheila Lodge, a former Santa Barbara mayor who visited the house about 20 years ago.

If Clark's relatives are successful in their challenge to her will, the home presumably would be sold so the money could be divided among them.

Community leaders speaking out in favor of the Bellosguardo Foundation include Lodge, Mayor Helene Schneider, and leaders of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Music Academy of the West and the Santa Barbara Foundation. The group held a news conference on Oct. 31, and has established a website, which declares, "The Last Will is still being contested by lawyers in New York courts. The participants do not care about Huguette Clark's wishes or about Santa Barbara."

Huguette (pronounced "oo-GET") Marcelle Clark, born in Paris in 1906, inherited her fortune from William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), a U.S. senator from Montana who was among the richest men of the Gilded Age, a copper miner, banker, builder of railroads and founder of the city of Las Vegas.

His youngest daughter attracted the attention of NBC News in 2009 because of her vacant but well-manicured mansions and questions about the management of her money. She lived her last 20 years in spartan hospital rooms, dying in May 2011 just weeks before her 105th birthday. The archive of all Clark stories, photos and videos is at http://nbcnews.com/clark/.

To direct her fortune, at age 98, Huguette Clark signed two wills in 2005.

The first will left $5 million to her private-duty registered nurse, Hadassah Peri, and the bulk of her estate to her relatives from her father's first marriage. The family members were not named in that will, which left the estate to her "intestate distributees," legal language for the people who would inherit if she died without a will. Because Clark had been married only briefly, and had no children, her closest relatives were the descendants of her father from his first marriage. These were Huguette Clark's half great-nieces and half great-nephews, and their children. Huguette and her four half-siblings had each received one-fifth shares of W.A. Clark's empire in 1925. Huguette's mother, Anna, received Bellosguardo, which then passed down to Huguette when she died.

Just six weeks passed before Clark signed a new will. It specified that she intentionally left no money to family, with whom the will said she had little contact. The family is claiming that this will was the product of fraud and undue influence by Clark's nurse, attorney, accountant and others. The newer document makes specific bequests to her attorney, accountant, doctor, hospital and several employees, and the remainder is split among the nurse, a goddaughter and the Bellosguardo Foundation. (See the earlier story and read the two documents: A twist: Heiress Huguette Clark signed two wills.)

The Santa Barbara community leaders are not forming another legal entity or seeking to intervene in the legal case, but said they wanted to make known that the community encourages the prospect of this new cultural institution and wants to make sure that Huguette Clark's wishes are followed.

Besides the current and former mayors, members of the Santa Barbara committee include Edward Birch, chairman of the board emeritus, Santa Barbara Bank & Trust; Ginny Brush, executive director, Santa Barbara County Arts Commission; Sarah Chrisman, president, Granada Theater; Robert Emmons, former chair, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Lotusland Foundation; Larry Feinberg, director and CEO, Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Ron Gallo, president and CEO, Santa Barbara Foundation; Karl Hutterer, executive director, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Palmer Jackson, philanthropist ; Robert Light, philanthropist; Peter MacDougall, president emeritus, Santa Barbara City College; Sara Miller McCune, publishing executive and philanthropist; Scott Reed, president and CEO, Music Academy of the West; Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree, CEO and chairman of the boards of Pacific Air Industries and Air-Cert, philanthropist; Andre Saltoun, president, Community Arts Music Association; Michael Towbes, philanthropist; Anne Smith Towbes, former president, Lobero Theatre Foundation; and Sharon Westby, chair of the board, Music Academy of the West.

More information
The Santa Barbara Independent, The Los Angeles Times and KEYT TV have reported on the community effort.

Do you have information on the Clark family?
Reporter Bill Dedman is co-authoring "Empty Mansions," a nonfiction book about Huguette Clark and her family. If you have documents or information, you can reach him at bill.dedman@msnbc.com.

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David Friedman / NBC News

Neighbors Bob Reilly, left, and Jim McGovern embrace among the burned-out remains of their Breezy Point, N.Y., homes on Wednesday.

BREEZY POINT, N.Y. —  As Hurricane Sandy turned the streets of this community into raging rivers on Monday evening, one company of volunteer firefighters ditched their rescue boats and sought refuge in the community center. Inside they found another bunch of volunteer firefighters, also stranded by rising water, who asked, "Are you here to rescue us?"

That was shortly before 70-mph winds blew embers the size of baseballs through the heart of this close-knit community on the Rockaway Peninsula in New York City’s Queens borough.

Interviews with residents and firefighters on Wednesday provided a more complete account of how the disaster unfolded in this beachside town when Sandy blasted ashore.

In a community where firefighters are demigods, where a memorial at the end of the point honors more than 30 residents who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, three companies of volunteer firefighters were overwhelmed by flooding and an inferno that destroyed more than 100 houses. Yet they fought the elements all night, saving many people and protecting houses on the perimeter of the burn zone, including the home of a 9/11 widow.

David Friedman / NBC News

The Rockaway Point Fire Department, one of three volunteer fire houses in Breezy Point, was unable to get its flooded trucks running during the storm. The men took to boats to pull people from the water.

When the water hit about 5:30 p.m., quickly disabling the fire engines and ambulances of the Rockaway Point Fire Department, its volunteers abandoned their firehouse. But when a call came in to rescue a wheelchair-bound elderly woman trapped in a flooded house, Lt. Jimmy Morton and four of his men put on their wetsuits and headed out in two motorboats — a 14-foot inflatable Zodiac and a 15-foot fiberglass Wheeler, steaming up the road into a hurricane.

Breezy Point residents search for the past, look to the future

The Breezy Point peninsula was inundated, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean merging with the waters of Jamaica Bay. Electrical transformers arced and sparked in the sky. Streets were disjointed as entire blocks of houses were shifted off their foundations. The winds blew 3-foot waves into the boats. Debris wrapped around the propellers. Finally they had to turn back, ditching their boats at the community center, crawling up a ladder and through a window to safety. They still don’t know what happened to the woman in the wheelchair.

Inside the community center, known as the Clubhouse, the Rockaway Point crew found 20 firefighters from the Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Department, who had abandoned their own firehouse next door when it flooded. They were tending to about 20 people, mostly elderly and disabled. All were huddled on a stage where schoolchildren usually put on summer plays, with rising water lapping just a few inches below the lip of the stage.

David Friedman / NBC News

Chairs sit on the elevated stage of The Clubhouse, where Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Chief Marty Ingram and fellow firefighters huddled with rescued residents to escape rising floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy.

The Point Breeze fire chief, Marty Ingram, a retired Air Force helicopter pilot, had just finished leading the group in a prayer, an Our Father in the candlelight, when the Rockaway Point firefighters arrived.

A glow in the sky
"I was scared. We all were," Ingram said. "I told everyone, ‘We're beach people. Just imagine it's a summer day and you're standing in three feet of water at the beach, and relax.’" Afraid they would drown when water got higher than the windows, blocking escape, Ingram decided that if the water reached two inches on the stage, the men would take down the Christmas lights strung across the ceiling and use them as a rope line to try to cross the rapidly flowing Point Breeze Avenue to reach a two-story house. He finished a second Our Father, when everyone agreed the water might have receded a little bit.

David Friedman / NBC News

Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Chief Marty Ingram. "I told everyone, 'We're beach people. Just imagine it's a summer day and you're standing in three feet of water at the beach, and relax.'"

It was about 8:30, just before high tide, when they first noticed a glow in the sky.

Breezy Point: 'Whatever is not flooded is on fire'

Glenn Serafin had been one of the first to see the flames, near his home on Atlantic Avenue, on the ocean side of town in the knotted area of tightly grouped houses known as the Wedge, where the streets are as wide as sidewalks, the lots only 20 by 43 feet, the houses seven to 10 paces wide. He had been tending his pump, ignoring repeated phone calls from the community safety office insisting that everyone evacuate. He was expecting a few feet of water in his basement, as had happened in previous hurricanes, but he allows that "my thinking was flawed." He took a nap about 6:30 p.m., but was awakened by water in his basement, which had risen  neck high. Then the electrical outlets started popping from the salt water, and he heard the rush of water moving up the street.

Then, after 8 o'clock, out his back window, he spotted the fire, in one of the bungalows behind the larger beachfront house of Rep. Bob Turner (who got his job after Anthony Weiner lost his for sending nude photos and risque text messages). The fire leaped to the congressman's house, then to the house next door, where an older lady has kept a parrot for 50 years, the one that entertains children by repeating some choice words it learned from her dockworker husband. Then it jumped again and again, driven by the powerful southeast wind. The phones were out. The cell phones were out. Serafin used a garden hose and a margarita pitcher to throw water on his plastic storm shutters.

Read more Sandy coverage on NBCNews.com

Everyone knows everyone in the Wedge, often hanging out together at the Sugar Bowl beachfront bar. When a friend once asked Serafin, ‘Do you know Alice” he replied, “Oh, yes. She's my wife's brother's wife's brother's wife."

The people here own the houses, but not the land. They live in a gated co-op, some here full time, but most, like Serafin, staying mainly in the summer. A bungalow sells for $350,000, a larger house up to $800,000 or a million in the overheated New York real estate market, but these are mostly middle-class families, heavily Irish-Catholic, enjoying a unique community nicknamed the Irish Riviera. The cars pushed around by the waves carried window stickers from Holy Cross and Georgetown. At the end of each block, the water lapped over yard shrines to Mary and Joseph.

At the swamped Clubhouse, the firefighters could see a firestorm of embers driven by the winds, a volcano erupting toward them in a hurricane. The smoke drove more people out of their houses, even those who had been safe on second floors.

Devastated NY community built by firefighters burned beyond their reach

Across a flooded parking lot, Jack O'Meara and his wife, Aileen, were waving flashlights to alert the firefighters. The men from Rockaway got back into their boats, dodging concrete flower pots in the streets. These men — Michael Valentine, Brandon Reilly, Brian Doyle, Michael Kahlau and Jimmy Morton — went back and forth, pulling in family after family, including the O'Mearas, along with their grown children, John and Trish, and their two cats, Leon and Bright. The firefighters plucked more people abandoning Olive Walk ("Life is good," the sign says) and Roosevelt Walk ("walk softly").

Now the firefighters were worried about embers setting fire to the wooden roof of the Clubhouse, which was starting to fill with smoke. After a third Our Father, they returned to the Point Breeze firehouse and were finally able to get their fire engines started. They began using them to ferry the waterlogged band at the Clubhouse to a more-secure shelter at the flood-damaged St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church.

The community's third company of volunteers, 10 men from the Volunteer Fire Department of Roxbury at the other end of the point, also saw the glow from the fire, but they, too, were in no position to respond. They were on the second floor of their firehouse, driven upstairs by the flood. Their fire trucks sat in four feet of water. All the radios were down, the phones dead. Only when the water went down a couple of feet could they drive to the fire.

A fire marshal whose home is in the Wedge, Kieran Burke, said it was about an hour, after he first saw the glow and smoke, before anyone began fighting the fire. Even then, until about 11 p.m., he said, there was only one hose directed at it.

Slideshow: Sandy slams East Coast

The assistant chief on scene from the New York Fire Department, Joseph Pfeifer, the same first chief to arrive at the World Trade Center on 9/11, said the department came as soon as it was called, though travel on the peninsula was slow in the high water. The timetable will be sorted out in the investigation, but Pfeifer said what's sure is that the city firefighters found an inferno, with at least 20 homes ablaze by the time they arrived. Telephone poles were on fire. Sinkholes opened up in the sandy soil, swallowing cars. Hydrants were hard to find under the seawater and had no water pressure, so the men "drafted" ocean water. Through six alarms, with nearly 300 firefighters working until mid-day Tuesday, they were able to do little more than hold the edges of the fire.

Holding the line at a widow's home
The volunteers from Point Breeze rode to the fire in the bucket of a payloader tractor, fighting alongside the Rockaway volunteers and the paid professionals until 5 in the morning. At one point they worked especially hard to save a large tan house facing the ocean. That's Sheila Scandole's house. Her husband, Robert, was a stock trader with Cantor Fitzgerald who died at the World Trade Center, and they both grew up in Breezy Point.

David Friedman / NBC News

Kieran Burke, a fire marshal, surveys the burned-out remains of his Breezy Point home on Wednesday. He was nearby at his mother's home, which survived but was flooded, when the fire started.

Slideshow: Surviving Sandy, twice

When the sun came up, the Sugar Bowl bar was gone. Kieran Burke's home was down, too, in the middle of a charred landscape the size of two football fields. Firefighters went house by house through the community, but so far found no one dead. The congressman's house was down, its white metal railing decorating a clump of debris at the edge of the burn zone. No one was quite sure what happened to the parrot next door. (Update: The parrot seems to have been rescued by an off-duty firefighter.)

But the house of Sheila Scandole, the 9/11 widow, remained, scarred but standing, staring out at the beach and the calming Atlantic Ocean beyond.

More Sandy coverage from NBCNews.com:

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• Fed up with waiting, air travelers rush rental car counters
• NY's Bellevue Hospital evacuates patients as power stays cut
• Off-duty NYPD officer dies saving his family from Sandy
• Toppled tree exposes skeletal remains, cement box
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W.A. Clark Memorial Library

Huguette Clark with a doll in the 1910s.

NEW YORK — The stakes have been set in the battle over the wealth of copper heiress Huguette Clark. More than $300 million is on the table as her extended family prepares for a court fight with her nurse and others for the last whispers of one of the great fortunes from America's Gilded Age.

At her death on May 24, 2011, in the New York City hospital where she had lived for 20 years, the daughter of one of the copper kings of Montana possessed about $306.5 million, counting all her real estate, stocks, bonds, cash, trusts and personal property. The accounting was filed this week in Surrogate's Court in Manhattan by the office of the public administrator, the temporary executor of her estate.

Clark's estimated property values:

• $84.5 million for Bellosguardo, her California beachfront vacation home on 23.5 acres in Santa Barbara. That value was reduced to reflect $502,000 in property tax liens.
• $53.0 million for her three apartments at 907 Fifth Ave., New York City. Their values are $24 million for apartment 12-W, which has been sold, $19 million for apartment 8-W, which has also found a buyer, and $10 million for apartment 8-E,  still on the market. Each apartment has approximately 5,000 square feet.
• $14.3 million for La Beau Château, her Connecticut country home on 51.7 acres in New Canaan.
• $79.3 million in stocks, bonds, cash and trusts, including $4,039 in unclaimed funds received from the state of New York.
• $75.4 million in personal property. Details are not given, but this includes a Monet and other paintings, jewelry, furniture and her doll collection.

John L. Wiley, http://flickr.com/photos/jw4pix/

Bellosguardo, the Huguette Clark summer home in Santa Barbara, Calif. Her executor estimates its value at $85 million. Other estimates have run to $100 million. It could go to a new arts foundation, or to her extended family.

The net value of the estate will be less. Federal and state estate taxes must be paid, and unpaid federal gift taxes are due to the IRS.

And the estate could increase in value if the executor is successful in efforts to claw back more than $44 million in gifts that were given to Clark's nurses, doctors, hospital and others in her later years.

Huguette (pronounced "oo-GET") Marcelle Clark, born in Paris in 1906, inherited her fortune from William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), a U.S. senator from Montana who was among the richest men of the Gilded Age, a copper miner, banker, builder of railroads, and founder of the city of Las Vegas.

His youngest daughter attracted the attention of NBC News in 2009 because of her vacant but well-manicured mansions and questions about the management of her money. She lived her last 20 years in spartan hospital rooms, dying just weeks before her 105th birthday. The archive of Clark stories, photos and videos is at http://nbcnews.com/clark/.

Signed two wills
To direct her fortune, at age 98, Huguette Clark signed two wills.

The first will left $5 million to her private-duty registered nurse, Hadassah Peri, leaving the bulk of her estate to her relatives from her father's first marriage. The family members were not named in that will, which left the estate to her "intestate distributees," legal language for the people who would inherit if she died without a will. Because Clark had been married only briefly, and had no children, her closest relatives were the descendants of her father from the first marriage. These were Huguette Clark's half great-nieces and half great-nephews, and their children. Huguette and her four half-siblings had each received one-fifth shares of W.A. Clark's empire in 1925. Huguette's mother, Anna, received Bellosguardo, which then passed down to Huguette.

Just six weeks passed before Clark signed a new will. It specified that she intentionally left no money to family, with whom the will said she had little contact. The family is claiming that this will was the product of fraud. The newer document leaves the largest share of her fortune to a museum or art foundation to be set up at her oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara. Specific bequests are made to her attorney, accountant, doctor and others, and the remainder is split among the nurse, a goddaughter and the California foundation. (See the earlier story and read the documents: A twist: Heiress Huguette Clark signed two wills.)

Originally the temporary executors of the Clark estate were her attorney and accountant, but the court revoked the accountant's authority, and suspended the attorney from his role, leaving only the public administrator to manage the estate for now. The judge, Surrogate Kristin Booth Glen, acted after the public administrator's attorney revealed that Clark had not filed gift tax returns from 1997 through 2003, leaving her owing millions in taxes plus interest and possible penalties. (See the earlier story: Judge bounces attorney, accountant.)

Preparing for trial
The parties have been collecting evidence in the case through depositions of witnesses. Judge Glen put the attorneys on a fast clock, saying she hoped to begin a jury trial this year, before her term ends on Dec. 31. The judge recently acknowledged in court, however, that such an early trial date seems unlikely, leaving the case for her successor, perhaps early in 2013.

Though a criminal investigation was launched in August 2010 into the handling of Clark's finances by her attorney and accountant, no one has been charged with any crime. Both men have maintained that they did nothing more than carry out the wishes of a woman who wanted to protect her privacy. The investigation continues by the Elder Abuse Unit of the New York County District Attorney's Office. The investigation was prompted in part by reports by NBC News about the sale of property owned by Clark, including a Stradivarius violin and a Renoir painting.

Clark's jewelry collection was sold at auction in April for $18.3 million. That money will be held by the estate during the contest over the wills. Her country estate in Connecticut is for sale, recently marked down to $15.9 million. Her estate in Santa Barbara is being carefully maintained, awaiting the court's decision. 

Do you have information on the Clark family?
Reporter Bill Dedman is co-authoring "Empty Mansions," a nonfiction book about Huguette Clark and her family. If you have documents or information, you can reach him at bill.dedman@msnbc.com.

The full story
More on the Huguette Clark mystery is at http://nbcnews.com/clark/.

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Gene Puskar / AP

Former Penn State President Graham Spanier walks on the field in 2011 before an NCAA college football game in State College, Pa.

The former president of Pennsylvania State University, Graham Spanier, has written a letter to the university trustees denying he shielded Jerry Sandusky, the child molesting assistant football coach.

Spanier rebuts the claim in the university-sponsored report by Louis Freeh, the former FBI director, that Spanier and other officials enabled Sandusky's crimes to continue and failed to show empathy for the victims. Spanier also says that he himself was the victim of abuse as a child and would never cover up or defend such action. He doesn't specify what kind of abuse he suffered, but he has previously described being beaten by his father; his attorney said Spanier was not referring to sexual abuse.

"It is unfathomable and illogical to think that a respected family sociologist and family therapist," Spanier wrote, "someone who personally experienced massive and persistent abuse as a child, someone who devoted a significant portion of his career to the welfare of children and youth, including service on the boards of four such organizations, two as chair of the board, would have knowingly turned a blind eye to any report of child abuse or predatory sexual acts directed at children. As I have stated in the clearest possible terms, at no time during my presidency did anyone ever report to me that Jerry Sandusky was observed abusing a child or youth or engaged in a sexual act with a child or youth.

"Had I known then what we now know about Jerry Sandusky, had I received any information about a sexual act in the shower or elsewhere, or had I had some basis for a higher level of suspicion about Sandusky, I would have strongly and immediately intervened," Spanier wrote. "Never would I stand by for a moment to allow a child predator to hurt children. I am personally outraged that any such abusive acts could have occurred in or around Penn State and have considerable pain that it could perhaps have been ended had we known more sooner."

ESPN has published the full letter, first reported by The Patriot-News, which is available here.

Spanier's lawyer, Peter Vaira, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that Spanier received regular "disciplinary beatings" by his father, and had to have his nose straightened several times. Vaira said the abuse was never sexual. 

The Freeh report faulted Spanier, citing a long email trail showing he was informed of the 1998 investigation and the 2001 incident.

"By not promptly and fully advising the Board of Trustees about the 1998 and 2001 child sexual abuse allegations against Sandusky and the subsequent Grand Jury investigation of him, Spanier failed his duties as President," the report says.

The report said that "the avoidance of the consequences of bad publicity" was the most significant cause for the failure to protect child victims and report abuse to authorities.

More coverage:

• The Freeh report: What it says about Penn State officials
• Freeh report increases the legal risks for Spanier
• Analysis: Paterno could've been indicted if he'd lived
• Report: Paterno, others hid Sandusky sexual abuse

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Spanier describes the 1998 and 2001 incidents

In his letter to the trustees, Spanier makes several specific rebuttals to the Freeh report.

First, Spanier says he thought that a 1998 investigation of Sandusky was being appropriately handled:

"I was apparently copied on two emails in 1998, the first, from Gary Schultz to Tim Curley on May 6 saying that 'the Public Welfare people will interview the individual Thursday.' The second email, from Schultz to Curley on June 9, says 'They met with Jerry on Monday and concluded that there was no criminal behavior and the matter was closed as an investigation. He was a little emotional and expressed concern as to how this might have adversely affected the child. I think the matter has been appropriately investigated and I hope it is now behind us.' I have no recollection of any conversations on the topic or any other emails from that era sent to me or by me. It is public knowledge that the District Attorney decided there was no crime to pursue. I don’t understand how one could conclude from such evidence 'concealment' of a known child predator."

Then Spanier provides more information about a 2001 incident in which coaching assistant Mike McQueary reported seeing Sandusky nude with a boy in a shower. He says university officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz assured him that the information was not reported as a sexual incident, a sex act, but  as one that appeared inappropriate, "horsing around" nude in the shower:

"I can assure you that I hadn’t the slightest inkling until reading the Grand Jury presentment that Sandusky was being investigated for more than a single incident in a shower in 2001, something that was described to me only as 'horsing around.'

"I never heard a word about abusive or sexual behavior, nor were there any other details presented that would have led me to think along those lines. McQueary’s name was never mentioned to me, and it is clear that Curley and Schultz had not spoken to him yet when they gave me their initial heads up. I was in fact told that the witness wasn’t sure what he saw, since it was around a corner. Dr. Jonathan Dranov’s Grand Jury and trial testimony appear to corroborate that nothing sexual was reported to him in his meeting with McQueary on the night of the 2001 incident."

Spanier also says that he shared with the trustees what he knew in 2011, when Sandusky was being investigated by a grand jury, but that the university's general counsel kept him mostly in the dark.

Detail on the 2001 incident
Spanier supplemented his letter with details on the information he says he received about the 2001 incident in the shower. Here is his account in full:

Initial Heads Up

More than a decade ago, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz asked to catch me after another meeting to give me a “heads up” about a matter. Looking back at my calendar for what is now presumed to be February, 2001, I surmise that meeting to have been on Monday, February 12, at about 2:30pm, following a scheduled meeting of the President’s Council. It was common that members of the council would catch me individually for brief updates following such meetings.

The meeting lasted perhaps 10-15 minutes. Curley and Schultz shared that they had received a report that a member of the athletic department staff had reported something to Joe Paterno, and that Joe had passed that report on to Tim and Gary. The report was that Jerry Sandusky was seen in an athletic locker room facility showering with one of his Second Mile youth, after a workout, and that they were “horsing around” (or “engaged in horseplay”). It was reported that the staff member was not sure what he saw because it was around a corner and indirect.

I recall asking two questions:

“Are you sure that is how it was described to you, as horsing around”? Both replied “yes.”

“Are you sure that that is all that was reported?” Both replied “yes.”

We then agreed that we were uncomfortable with such a situation, that it was inappropriate, and that we did not want it to happen again. I asked that Tim meet with Sandusky to tell him that he must never again bring youth into the showers. We further agreed that we should inform the Second Mile president that we were we directing Jerry to never do this again and furthermore that we did not wish Second Mile youth to be in our showers.

Notes:

There was no mention of anything abusive, sexual, or criminal.

At no time was it said who had made the report to Joe Paterno. (I never heard Mike McQuery’s name associated with this episode until November 7, 2011, when I read it in a newspaper story.)

The hour of the day was not mentioned.

The specific building and locker room were not mentioned.

The age of the child was not mentioned. I had presumed it was a high school age child under Jerry’s guardianship or sponsorship, since that is all I knew about the Second Mile.

There was no mention of any prior shower incident, and I had no recollection of having heard of a prior incident.

Follow Up

In reviewing my calendar for February, 2001, I note a double entry for Sunday, February 25. I had been out of town for several days and was scheduled to return in time to see a Penn State women’s basketball game at 2pm. My assistant noted on the calendar that I should stop in to see Tim Curley briefly in my way into the game. I have no recollection of that meeting other than that Tim was worried about how he shouldhandle things if he informed Sandusky that we were forbidding him from bringing Second Mile youth into our facilities and then Sandusky disagreed with this directive. I do not recall knowing about any prior incidents, but it is apparent from emails recently released to the media that Tim also indicated that there had been an earlier occasion when Sandusky had showered with a minor. We also now know that I was copied on two emails in 1998 that may have alerted me to that (the first one being a vague reference with no individual named) and the second essentially saying that the matter had been closed. I had absolutely no recollection of that history in 2001 nor do I recall it today. I don’t believe I replied to those emails nor was I briefed verbally.

Tim Curley sent me a follow up email that has recently been shared with the news media. My use of the word “humane” refers specifically and only to my thought that it was humane of Tim to wish to inform Sandusky first and to allow him to accompany Tim to the meeting with the president of the Second Mile. Moreover, it would be humane to offer counseling to Sandusky if he didn’t understand why this was inappropriate and unacceptable to us. My comment that we could be vulnerable for not reporting it further relates specifically and only to Tim’s concern about the possibility that Jerry would not accept our directive and repeat the practice. Were that the outcome of his discussion I would have worried that we did not enlist more help in enforcing such a directive. I suggested that we could visit that question down the road, meaning after Curley informed Sandusky of our directive and learning of his willingness to comply.

A few days after the brief Sunday interaction, I saw Tim Curley and he reported that both of the discussions had taken place, that those discussions had gone well and our directive accepted, and that the matter was closed.

I never heard another word about this from any individual until I learned of the investigation into Sandusky. I was eager to assist the attorney general and was completely honest to the best of my recollection. I had absolutely no idea until midway through my voluntary grand jury testimony that this inquiry was about anything more than the one episode in the shower.

Notes:

I do not recall that I was privy to any follow up discussions between Curley, Schultz, legal counsel, or others. I had five out of town trips that month, my appropriations hearings, THON, a packed calendar with 164 appointments, an average of 100 incoming and 50 outgoing emails a day, and the turmoil of the Black Caucus disruption and the takeover of the student union.

I do not recall being involved in any discussions about DPW or the police, although I now assume that DPW is the “other organization” being referenced by Curley and Schultz in their emails.

NBC News

James Eagan Holmes, right, goofing around with an unidentified fellow counselor at Camp Max Straus in summer 2008, near Glendale, Calif.

James Eagan Holmes, the suspect in the mass killing in Aurora, Colo., was a counselor in the summer of 2008 at a residential camp for underprivileged children near Glendale, Calif.

Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Los Angeles confirmed that Holmes was a cabin counselor, responsible for 10 children at its Camp Max Straus for children ages 7 to 14 from Los Angeles. Holmes was then a 20-year-old student at the University of California, Riverside, and neighbors have said he was active in the Presbyterian church that the family attended. The camp is nonsectarian.

A statement from the group said, "His role was to insure that these children had a wonderful camp experience by helping them learn confidence, self esteem and how to work in small teams to effect positive outcomes. These skills are learned through activities such as archery, horseback riding, swimming, art, sports and high ropes course."

A fellow counselor told NBC News that Holmes seemed shy.

"The entire staff was really close, considering we lived together, except for James," said the counselor, who asked that she not be named. "He really kept to himself and hardly ever went on any trips with the rest of the staff. He was very shy and reserved."

Photos of the staff show Holmes goofing around with other counselors.

"It is sickening," the fellow counselor said, "knowing that he killed kids the same age that he once cared for." The youngest of those who died in Friday morning's shooting is Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6. Holmes, who has not been charged with a crime, is scheduled to have his first court appearance on Monday and is expected to face 12 counts of homicide and many counts of attempted homicide.

The CEO of Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Los Angeles, Randy Schwab, told NBC4 Los Angeles that Holmes had no disciplinary problems. "It is with shock and sorrow that we learned of the incident in Aurora," Schwab said. "Our hearts and prayers go out to all the families and friends of those involved in this horrible tragedy."

For more on what's known about James Holmes, read our earlier story, Suspect was buying guns, dropping out of neuroscience program.

More reading: Last year, after the shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, we explored the question, is there a "type of person" who carries out such an attack? A study by the U.S. Secret Service sheds some light, and you may be surprised at the answers. Read that earlier story here: Few assassins fit the 'profile.' Most had no mental health treatment, made no threats.

Have information?
Do you know James Holmes? If you have information, send an email to Bill Dedman of NBC News.

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Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and other university leaders "repeatedly concealed critical facts" relating to assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s child sex abuse from authorities, according to Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who conducted an investigation for the university in the Sandusky scandal.

Freeh also found that "although concern to treat the child abuser humanely was expressly stated, no such sentiments were ever expressed" by university officials, including Paterno and the university president, for Sandusky’s victims. The report says that five boys were assaulted by Sandusky on university property after officials knew about a 1998 criminal investigation.

Update: Members of the Penn State board of trustees spoke at an afternoon news conference.

"Our hearts remain heavy, and we are deeply ashamed," said trustee Kenneth C. Frazier, chairman, CEO and president of Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical company. "An event like this can never happen again in the Penn State University community. Judge Freeh's report is both sad and sobering."

The president of the university, Rodney A. Erickson, said, "It has become clear to me that I need to reconsider our community's leadership culture." He said the university is partnering with the Pennsylvania Coalition against Rape, and creating a center for the protection of children. "This is a problem that plagues our nation," Erickson said, "and we have a special duty" to prevent and treat child sexual abuse.

A statue of Paterno remains outside Penn State's 106,000-seat Beaver Stadium. Members of the board of trustees were asked whether it should remain.

"The whole topic of Joe Paterno being honored or not being honored is a very sensitive topic," said Karen B. Peetz, a banker and chairman of the board. "We believe this is something that will continue to be discussed."

Trustee Frazier added, "You have to measure every human by the good they've done and the bad they've done. I'm not trying to make light of what we've found in the report, but I will say that if you want to measure the man's life," you have to measure the good and bad. "I think we have to take some reflection and some distance before we make decisions about what we think about Joe Paterno's entire life." 

The Freeh report says the main cause of the university's failure was a desire to avoid bad publicity. Also contributing:

• A striking lack of empathy for child abuse victims.
• Lack of oversight by the board of trustees.
• "A president who discouraged discussion and dissent."
• Ignorance of child abuse issues and laws.
• A football program that had opted out of university programs and training on reporting requirements.
• "A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community."

The full investigative report is available in this PDF file.

Freeh's findings may affect the reputation of legendary coach Paterno, who died soon after the Sandusky allegations became public, as well as the university's standing with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which so far has not announced any punishments of Penn State. The NCAA said Thursday it is studying the report.

Paterno had testified to a grand jury in 2011 that he knew nothing of the 1998 criminal investigation, but Freeh, based on multiple university emails, said Paterno was among the officials who knew, and who allowed Sandusky to keep his university access until 2011.

Summary of the report
Freeh was hired by the university in November to review the school's dealings with Sandusky and its response to a 2001 report that he sexually abused a boy in a Penn State shower room, an incident witnessed by football assistant Michael McQueary. (McQueary's term was allowed to expire this year, and he is no longer employed by the university.)

Freeh's team of investigators found:

"The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims. As the Grand Jury similarly noted in its presentment, there was no "attempt to investigate, to identify Victim 2, or to protect that child or any others from similar conduct except as related to preventing its re-occurrence on University property.

"Four of the most powerful people at The Pennsylvania State University -- President Graham B. Spanier, Senior Vice President-Finance and Business Gary C. Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy M. Curley and Head Football Coach Joseph V. Paterno -- failed to protect against a child predator harming children for over a decade. These men concealed Sandusky's activities from the Board of Trustees, the University community and authorities. They exhibited a striking lack of empathy for Sandusky's victims by failing to inquire as to their safety and well-being, especially by not attempting to determine the identity of the child who Sandusky assaulted in the Lasch Building in 2001. Further, they exposed this child to additional harm by alerting Sandusky, who was the only one who knew the child's identity, of what McQueary saw in the shower on the night of February 9, 2001.

"These individuals, unchecked by the Board of Trustees that did not perform its oversight duties, empowered Sandusky to attract potential victims to the campus and football events by allowing him to have continued, unrestricted and unsupervised access to the University's facilities and affiliation with the University's prominent football program. Indeed, that continued access provided Sandusky with the very currency that enabled him to attract his victims. Some coaches, administrators and football program staff members ignored the red flags of Sandusky's behaviors and no one warned the  public about him."

Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, the athletic equipment company, said Thursday it would remove Paterno's name from a child care center. Parker had given a eulogy at Paterno's funeral, defending the coach's response to the allegations. "I have been deeply saddened by the news coming out of this investigation at Penn State," Parker said. "It is a terrible tragedy that children were unprotected from such abhorrent crimes. With the findings released today, I have decided to change the name of our child care center at our World Headquarters. My thoughts are with the victims and the Penn State community."

Paterno family responds
The Paterno family released a statement saying there wasn't much new in the Freeh report: "From what we have been able to assess at this time, it appears that after reviewing 3 million documents and conducting more than 400 interviews, the underlying facts as summarized in the report are almost entirely consistent with what we understood them to be. The 1998 incident was reported to law enforcement and investigated. Joe Paterno reported what he was told about the 2001 incident to Penn State authorities and he believed it would be fully investigated. The investigation also confirmed that Sandusky's retirement in 1999 was unrelated to these events."

"One great risk in this situation," the Paterno family statement continued, "is a replaying of events from the last 15 years or so in a way that makes it look obvious what everyone must have know and should have done.  The idea that any sane, responsible adult would knowingly cover up for a child predator is impossible to accept. The far more realistic conclusion is that many people didn't fully understand what was happening and underestimated or misinterpreted events. Sandusky was a great deceiver. He fooled everyone - law enforcement, his family, coaches, players, neighbors, University officials, and everyone at Second Mile," his charity for children.

"Joe Paterno wasn't perfect. He made mistakes and he regretted them. He is still the only leader to step forward and say that with the benefit of hindsight he wished he had done more.  To think, however, that he would have protected Jerry Sandusky to avoid bad publicity is simply not realistic. If Joe Paterno had understood what Sandusky was, a fear of bad publicity would not have factored into his actions.

"We appreciate the effort that was put into this investigation. The issue we have with some of the conclusions is that they represent a judgment on  motives and intentions and we think this is impossible. We have said from the beginning that Joe Paterno did not know Jerry Sandusky was a child predator. Moreover, Joe Paterno never interfered with any investigation. He immediately and accurately reported the incident he was told about in 2001.

"It can be argued that Joe Paterno should have gone further. He should have pushed his superiors to see that they were doing their jobs.  We accept this criticism. At the same time, Joe Paterno and everyone else knew that Sandusky had been repeatedly investigated by authorities who approved his multiple adoptions and foster children. Joe Paterno mistakenly believed that investigators, law enforcement officials, University leaders and others would properly and fully investigate any issue and proceed as the facts dictated. This didn't happen and everyone shares the responsibility."

On NBC's TODAY show on Thursday morning, the coach's son, Jay Paterno, told host Matt Lauer that all the family has wanted is for an investigation to find the truth. "We have never ever at any time been afraid to see what people have had to say," and he called the Freeh report "one opinion, one piece of the puzzle." "We've never been afraid of the truth, so let's have the truth come out and let's go from there."

Former college president responds
Former Penn State President Graham Spanier has come under particular scrutiny in recent weeks amid news reports suggesting he was made aware of suspicious activity involving Sandusky in 2001 and that no report of the incident was made to authorities.

"At no time in the more than 16 years of his presidency at Penn State was Dr. Spanier told of an incident involving Jerry Sandusky that described child abuse, sexual misconduct or criminality of any kind, and he reiterated that during his interview with Louis Freeh and his colleagues,'' Spanier's attorneys, Peter Vaira and Elizabeth Ainslie, said in a written statement.

An "independent" investigation

The investigation is billed by Pennsylvania State University as "independent," though the university is paying the law firm of Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Sandusky, 68, was found guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse last month and is currently in prison awaiting sentencing. He faces a maximum sentence of more than 400 years in prison.

Jim Prisching / AP file

How will Penn State's "independent report" affect the reputation of its much-beloved former football coach, Joe Paterno, who died after the scandal broke?

Gary Cameron / Reuters file

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh was hired in November to determine whether Penn State University officials knew about child sex abuse allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

Related stories

Matt Sandusky: From staunch defender to father's most damning accuser

Ghosts of Sandusky's dreams haunt empty house where his charity was born

The Sandusky scandal led to the ouster of Spanier from the university presidency and Paterno, and charges against Timothy Curley, the athletic director who is on leave from the university, and Gary Schultz, the VP of finance and business who has since retired. The latter two are accused of perjury for their grand jury testimony and failing to properly report suspected child abuse.

Spanier hasn't been charged. He remains a tenured professor of sociology at Penn State. He has sued the university to gain access to internal emails that his attorneys say will exonerate him.

On Wednesday, the Paterno family released a letter written six months earlier by Paterno, saying, "This is not a football scandal."

More from the report:

"In critical written correspondence that we uncovered on March 20th of this year, we see evidence of their proposed plan of action in February 2001 that included reporting allegations about Sandusky to the authorities. After Mr. Curley consulted with Mr. Paterno, however, they changed the plan and decided not to make a report to the authorities. Their failure to protect the February 9, 2001 child victim, or make attempts to identify him, created a dangerous situation for other unknown, unsuspecting young boys who were lured to the Penn State campus and football games by Sandusky and victimized repeatedly by him.

"The stated reasons by Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley for not
taking action to identify the victim and for not reporting Sandusky to the police or Child Welfare are:

"(1) Through counsel, Messrs. Curley and Schultz have stated that the “humane” thing to do in 2001 was to carefully and responsibly assess the best way to handle vague but troubling allegations.

"(2) Mr. Paterno said that “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

"(3) Mr. Spanier told the Special Investigative Counsel that he was never told by anyone that the February 2001 incident in the shower involved the sexual abuse of a child but only “horsing around.” He further stated that he never asked what “horsing around” by Sandusky entailed.

"Taking into account the available witness statements and evidence, it is more reasonable to conclude that, in order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at Penn State University – Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley – repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the Board of Trustees, Penn State community, and the public at large. 

"Although concern to treat the child abuser humanely was expressly stated, no such sentiments were ever expressed by them for Sandusky’s victims.

"The evidence shows that these four men also knew about a 1998 criminal investigation of Sandusky relating to suspected sexual misconduct with a young boy in a Penn State football locker room shower. Again, they showed no concern about that victim. The evidence shows that Mr. Paterno was made aware of the 1998 investigation of Sandusky, followed it closely, but failed to take any action, even though Sandusky had been a key member of his coaching staff for almost 30 years, and had an office just steps away from Mr. Paterno’s. At the very least, Mr. Paterno could have alerted the entire football staff, in order to prevent Sandusky from bringing another child into the Lasch Building. Messrs. Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley also failed to alert the Board of Trustees about the 1998 investigation or take any further action against Mr. Sandusky. None of them even spoke to Sandusky about his conduct. In short, nothing was done and Sandusky was allowed to continue with impunity."

Land deal for Second Mile charity
According to the report, Schultz met with Second Mile officials on July 24, 2001, or six months after McQueary reported seeing Sandusky abusing a boy in a Penn State locker room, and agreed to sell 40 acres of land to the organization. The land, purchased by the university in 1999, was adjacent to the home where Sandusky started the Second Mile. It would be used to build the Second Mile's $11.5 million dollar "Center For Excellence."

In September 2001, the university's Board of Trustees approved the sale to Sandusky's charity for $168,500. 

The report states that neither Spanier, Curley nor Schultz informed the Board of Trustees of the 1998 or 2001 investigations of Sandusky: 

"Nothing in the board's records or interviews of Trustees indicate any contemporaneous discussions of the 2001 Sandusky incident and investigation, the propriety of a continuing relationship between Penn State and the Second Mile, or the risks created by a public association with Sandusky when the land transaction was discussed," the Freeh report says.

"Schultz, who oversaw the transaction, did not make any disclosure of the Sandusky incident during the Board's review of the land deal. In fact, Schultz approved a press release, issued September 21, 2001, announcing the land sale in which he praised Sandusky for his work with Second Mile."

Eight years later, according to the report, Schultz contacted a bank on behalf of Sandusky and the Second Mile, in an effort to secure financing for the Center for Excellence. In 2009 he told officials from an unnamed bank that "the Second Mile is raising funds to support an expansion of their facilities here in State College…Would you be agreeable to meet with Jerry Sandusky…and me? They are really good people and this is a great cause related to kids."

The bank officials agreed to meet with Sandusky.

More on this land deal is in our earlier story, Ghosts of Sandusky's dreams haunt empty home where his charity was born.

NBC national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, producer Tom Winter, and investigative researchers Lisa Riordan-Seville and Hannah Rappleye contributed to this report.

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Fox Business News

Charles Gasparino of Fox Business Network. His claim to be a Pulitzer Prize nominee appeared in his Fox bio, on his agent's website, in his publishing bio, and in a CNBC video.

CNBC

In a video for CNBC in 2008, Gasparino declared: "I am: a writer, son of an ironworker, son of New York, Golden Gloves prospect, a Pulitzer Prize nominee..." Click on the photo to watch the video.

NEW YORK — If you're keeping a list of journalists who have claimed for years to be Pulitzer Prize nominees without the inconvenience of actually being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, add one more name: Charles Gasparino, the pugnacious senior Wall Street correspondent for Fox Business Network.

After the outing in this space of non-nominees Jonah Goldberg (conservative columnist, Pulitzer nomination claimed on the book jacket) and Betty Liu (Bloomberg Television morning anchor, Pulitzer nomination claimed in ads on commuter trains), a reader asked, when exactly was Charlie Gasparino a Pulitzer nominee?

Let's see. Until Tuesday afternoon, Gasparino's bio from Fox Business said he was "nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in beat reporting" in 2002, when he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The same claim is made by his agents at the HarperCollins Speakers Bureau, and on the website of his publisher, Simon and Schuster. In a promotional video in 2008 for CNBC, his former employer, Gasparino declares, "I am: a writer, son of an ironworker, son of New York, Golden Gloves prospect, a Pulitzer Prize nominee..." (CNBC is owned by NBCUniversal, which is a partner with Microsoft in msnbc.com.)

Next step: Checking the official list of Pulitzer winners and nominated finalists for 2002. Though there are more than 2,000 entries submitted to the Pulitzers each year, there are only three nominees chosen by juries in each category, known as nominated finalists. The winner in beat reporting in 2002 was Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times, one of Gasparino's competitors on the Wall Street beat. The two other nominees were Patrick Healy of The Boston Globe for education reporting, and Jack Kelley of USA Today for reporting on terrorism. (Kelley turned out to have made up information in his articles, but that's a topic for another day.) No mention of Gasparino.

Fox retracts the claim
When asked on Tuesday in which year he was nominated, former boxer Gasparino jabbed back in a one-line email: "I was nominated by the wsj sir."

But the news organizations don't choose the Pulitzer nominees, any more than the record studios choose Grammy nominees. By Gasparino's reckoning, thousands of journalists each year could sell books and earn speaking fees by calling themselves "Pulitzer nominees."

Later Tuesday, Fox changed its online bio of Gasparino, keeping the P word but dropping any claim to a nomination, saying instead that his work "was submitted for the Pulitzer."

A Fox spokeswoman also sent over a statement:

"The Wall Street Journal submitted Charlie Gasparino's reporting of Wall Street research scandals to the Pulitzer Board in 2002," said the statement from Kevin Magee, executive vice president of Fox Business Network. "While Fox Business never claimed he was a finalist for the award, we've clarified his bio to reflect the submission as opposed to a nomination."

Neither Fox nor Gasparino would answer the question: Why include a "submission" in a bio at all if it didn't make the finals?

Pulitzers "discourage" such puffery
It's not uncommon for Pulitzer entrants to make false claims to be nominees. If all Pulitzer entrants could be called nominees, any publisher could give all its authors and journalists that honorific by submitting an entry form and a check for $50. (And some publishers do seem to play that game.)

As the Pulitzer board's online list of frequently asked questions explains politely, the finalists and the nominees are the same three people in each category: "Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. ... We discourage someone saying he or she was 'nominated' for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us."

Caveat emptor
The old journalism motto was, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

The new motto: If a journalist or author uses the words "Pulitzer nominee" or "nominated for a Pulitzer Prize," check it out. The searchable list of winners and nominees is on the Pulitzer site at Columbia University.