Word: motel
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Super-brain. For hours, police had no idea how many snipers they were up against, but there seemed to be at least two, since blazes were set almost simultaneously on different floors. A besieging army of 200 uniformed policemen, detectives, sharpshooters and volunteers soon surrounded the motel. As the cordon tightened, the assailants found refuge behind the concrete walls of the rooftop's boiler room and stairwell casements. An armor-plated Marine helicopter made repeated passes as the cops tried to blast through the walls, but the sniper shots kept coming. Finally, eleven hours after the violence had begun...
...smell of smoke. Robert Bemish, 43, a San Francisco broadcasting executive, opened the door of his eighth-floor room at New Orleans' Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge to investigate, and noticed "light bulbs popping all over the place" from the heat. He was standing facing the motel's swimming pool when a black youth with a rifle jumped out from some bushes, stared at him for a full second, took aim and fired. Shot through his midsection, Bemish fell into the pool. He pretended to be dead, his air-filled trench coat providing just enough buoyancy...
Soon shots were ringing out from several other floors of the motel, and smoke began pouring from half a dozen balconies. One newly married couple were killed in a corridor while clutching each other in a death embrace. A fireman ascending a ladder to the tenth floor was shot. The assistant manager of the motel, investigating reports of fire, was killed as he moved down a hallway. So was Louis Sirgo, 48, the city's deputy police superintendent, as he led a search through the motel...
Convinced that other gunmen were still on the roof, police kept their vigil throughout the night and the next morning. When they finally raided the rooftop, they found just the body of the youth they had shot down 16 hours earlier. A thorough room-by-room search of the motel failed to turn up any other snipers. Said Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso: "Either there was only one, or another got away. The speculation might run the gamut all the way from negligence on the part of police to a superbrain on the part of the sniper...
While a sellout throng of 80,010 cheered the Miami Dolphins to a 20-14 victory over the Cleveland Browns in Miami's Orange Bowl last week, hundreds of other fans were enjoying the game on color TV in the ten-story Marriott Motel just two miles from the stadium. The motel management had evaded the National Football League's TV blackout in cities where games are being played by erecting a high-sensitivity parabolic antenna that picked up the telecast of the Dolphin game from a TV station in Fort Myers, 149 miles away. Taking advantage...