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National briefs: Dec. 14
Carolyn Kaster / AP Dotty Zimmerman pushes her grocery cart through the heavy slush of Center Street in Shenandoah, Pa., on Thursday.
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Snowstorm havoc moves toward East
COLUMBIA — A winter storm responsible for deaths in the Midwest blasted the Northeast on Thursday, dumping snow and sleet and clogging some of the nation's most heavily traveled highways.
Schools, businesses and government agencies in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Connecticut closed early. The resulting exodus choked highways and streets.
There were also hours of delays and hundreds of canceled flights at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The storm was blamed for 35 deaths, mostly in traffic accidents, since it developed last weekend.
NEBRASKA
Mall shooter's mother apologizes
OMAHA — The mother of the teenage gunman who killed eight people at a busy shopping mall last week apologized Thursday for her son's crime and said she did her best raising him.
"I have been absolutely devastated," Maribel Rodriguez told The Associated Press. "The most difficult part is giving all of my best efforts to convey to all these beautiful people that I truly am sorry."
Her son, 19-year-old Robert Hawkins, fired more than 30 rounds inside a mall department store Dec. 5, striking 11 people. Eight of them died, and he killed himself.
ILLINOIS
Police link man to unsolved killings
CHICAGO — Authorities in Illinois and Pennsylvania have identified two more women who may have been killed by Timothy Krajcir, a serial murderer whose decades-old crimes went unsolved until DNA linked him earlier this year to the 1982 strangulation of a Chicago woman.
Earlier this week, police announced that Krajcir had confessed to killing nine women in Illinois, Missouri and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s.
— From wire reports
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