SAN DIEGO — Padres owner Peter Seidler, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring a long-elusive World Series championship to San Diego, died Tuesday, the team announced. He was 63.

A cause of death wasn’t disclosed. Seidler, a third-generation member of the O’Malley family that used to own the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, was a two-time cancer survivor. The team announced in mid-September that Seidler had an unspecified medical procedure in August and wouldn’t be back at the ballpark the rest of the year.

The Padres planned to open Petco Park on Tuesday afternoon for fans who wished to gather to pay respects.

“Today, our love and prayers encircle Peter’s family as they grieve the loss of an extraordinary husband, father, son, brother, uncle and friend,” Padres CEO Erik Greupner said in a statement. “Peter was a kind and generous man who was devoted to his wife, children and extended family. He also consistently exhibited heartfelt compassion for others, especially those less fortunate.

“His impact on the city of San Diego and the baseball world will be felt for generations,” Greupner said. “His generous spirit is now firmly embedded in the fabric of the Padres. Although he was our Chairman and owner, Peter was at his core a Padres fan. He will be dearly missed.”

Seidler was part of a group that purchased the Padres in 2012, and he bought out Ron Fowler’s majority stake in November 2020. Seidler also bought Rawlings Sporting Goods Company Inc. in conjunction with MLB in 2018.

It was with Seidler’s blessing that the Padres boosted their payroll to about $258 million on opening day, third-highest in the majors, after making a stirring run to the NL Championship Series the previous fall. The Padres underwhelmed most of the season despite having a star-studded lineup and missed the playoffs.

Seidler shrugged off questions about whether the Padres’ big spending on players like Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts was sustainable and mentioned how badly he wanted a championship parade for a city that has never had one.

“Do I believe our parade is going to be on land or on water or on both?” he said. “Putting a great and winning team on the field in San Diego year after year is sustainable.”

“I am deeply saddened by the news of Peter’s passing,” Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement from Arlington, Texas, where Major League Baseball owners are holding league meetings this week. “Peter grew up in a baseball family, and his love of the game was evident throughout his life. He was passionate about owning the Padres and bringing the fans of San Diego a team in which they could always take pride.”

Machado was a personal favorite of Seidler, and the slugger received a new $350 million, 11-year deal last spring training despite saying he would opt out of the original $300 million deal he signed in 2019.

The Padres gave Bogaerts a $280 million, 11-year deal last December. In 2021, the Padres signed Fernando Tatis Jr. to a $340 million, 14-year deal. They traded for young star Juan Soto at the deadline in 2022.

Seidler’s death comes at a critical time for the franchise. The Padres are closing in on hiring a manager to replace Bob Melvin, who left for San Francisco last month after clashing with general manager A.J. Preller. The Padres also are debating whether to keep or trade Soto, who is under control for just one more season.

Maryanne Trump Barry, the eldest sister of former President Donald Trump, has died, two sources with knowledge of the matter told CNN. She was 86.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., spoke briefly about his aunt as he exited a Manhattan courthouse Monday, calling it a “rough day for myself and my family,”

Trump Jr. told reporters after testifying in a civil fraud trial that he had been informed of the news as he pulled up to the courthouse Monday morning.

“I’m very close with her grandson. We hang out all the time. And so it’s obviously a rough day for that,” he said.

Barry, a former federal judge and prosecutor, was selected by President Ronald Reagan to serve on the Federal District Court in New Jersey in 1983. She was subsequently nominated by President Bill Clinton to the 3rd Court of Appeals in 1999 and retired in 2019.

Her retirement came amid an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by committing tax fraud following reporting from The New York Times that alleged the former president and his siblings utilized tax schemes to inflate their inheritances. A disclosure form from Barry’s Senate confirmation that presented a $1 million contribution from a Trump family-owned company reportedly played a vital – though inadvertent – role in uncovering the alleged fraud.

Because she retired, the investigation into Barry closed, leaving her entitled to an annual retirement salary and free from judicial rebuke. Her attorney denied the allegations.

Donald Trump’s rise in politics would soon bring further attention to his family. Though Barry never spoke publicly about disagreements with her brother, audio excerpts from conversations between Barry and her niece, Mary Trump, obtained by CNN in 2020 unveiled Barry delivering sharp criticism of the then commander-in-chief. The Washington Post first obtained the previously unreleased transcripts and audio from Mary Trump.

Barry was one of the former president’s closest confidants throughout his life, and one of the few people whose counsel he sought, though a rift in the relationship happened during his last year in office when his niece released recordings of Barry speaking critically of her brother. Trump was deeply hurt by the comments, a source directly familiar with the comments told CNN at the time.

“Donald’s out for Donald,” Barry said to her niece, an outspoken critic of Trump’s presidency and the author of a bombshell book about him: “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

“His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” Barry said on the recording. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying.”

At one point in the recording, she called her younger brother “cruel.”

“He has no principles,” Barry said. “None.”

She also suggested her brother tried to take credit for her legal career, adding, “I have never asked him for a favor since 1981.”

But in 2015, the current GOP presidential frontrunner spoke glowingly of his sister, suggesting she could be considered for the Supreme Court.

“I think she would be phenomenal; I think she would be one of the best,” he told Bloomberg TV, characterizing her as “very smart and a very good person.”

In 2020, Mary Trump sued Donald Trump, Barry and the executor of her late uncle Robert Trump’s estate and alleged “they designed and carried out a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift, and deceive her about the true value of what she had inherited.” A judge dismissed that lawsuit last year, citing a decades-old settlement.

Barry, the oldest of five children, told New York Magazine in 2002 she did not pursue a law career until her son was in sixth grade. She graduated from Hofstra University’s law school in 1974, according to the Federal Judicial Center.

In that same interview, she said she chose not to join the family business, saying, “I knew better even as a child than to even attempt to compete with Donald.”

Donald Trump, who was one of five children, now has one living sibling, his sister Elizabeth Trump Grau.

The former president’s younger brother, Robert Trump, died in 2020 at 71, and Trump held a service at the White House in his honor. His older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of a heart attack at 42, which the family blamed on alcoholism.

Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, died in 2022 at the age of 73.

Associated Press contributed to this report.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10 times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, has died. He was 95.

Borman died Tuesday in Billings, Montana, according to NASA.

Borman also led troubled Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and early ’80s after leaving the astronaut corps.

But he was best known for his NASA duties. He and his crew, James Lovell and William Anders, were the first Apollo mission to fly to the moon — and to see Earth as a distant sphere in space.

“Today we remember one of NASA’s best. Astronaut Frank Borman was a true American hero,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Thursday. “His lifelong love for aviation and exploration was only surpassed by his love for his wife Susan.”

Launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Dec. 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 trio spent three days traveling to the moon, and slipped into lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. After they circled 10 times on Dec. 24-25, they headed home on Dec. 27.

On Christmas Eve, the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis in a live telecast from the orbiter: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Borman ended the broadcast with, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

Lovell and Borman had previously flown together during the two-week Gemini 7 mission, which launched on Dec. 4, 1965 — and, at only 120 feet apart, completed the first space orbital rendezvous with Gemini 6.

“Gemini was a tough go,” Borman told The Associated Press in 1998. “It was smaller than the front seat of a Volkswagen bug. It made Apollo seem like a super-duper, plush touring bus.”

In his book, “Countdown: An Autobiography,” Borman said Apollo 8 was originally supposed to orbit Earth. The success of Apollo 7’s mission in October 1968 to show system reliability on long duration flights made NASA decide it was time to take a shot at flying to the moon.

“My main concern in this whole flight was to get there ahead of the Russians and get home. That was a significant achievement in my eyes,” Borman explained at a Chicago appearance in 2017.

It was on the crew’s fourth orbit that Anders snapped the iconic “Earthrise” photo showing a blue and white Earth rising above the gray lunar landscape.

Borman wrote about how the Earth looked from afar: “We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality, an intensely emotional experience for each of us. We said nothing to each other, but I was sure our thoughts were identical — of our families on that spinning globe. And maybe we shared another thought I had, This must be what God sees.”

After NASA, Borman’s aviation career ventured into business in 1970 when he joined Eastern Airlines — at that time the nation’s fourth-largest airline. He eventually became Eastern’s president and CEO and in 1976 also became its chairman of the board.

Borman’s tenure at Eastern saw fuel prices increase sharply and the government deregulate the airline industry. The airline became increasingly unprofitable, debt-ridden and torn by labor tensions. He resigned in 1986 and moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico.

In his autobiography, Borman wrote that his fascination with flying began in his teens when he and his father would assemble model airplanes. At age 15, Borman took flying lessons, using money he had saved working as a bag boy and pumping gas after school. He took his first solo flight after eight hours of dual instruction. He continued flying into his 90s.

Borman was born in Gary, Indiana, but was raised in Tucson, Arizona. He attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1950. That same year, Borman married his high school sweetheart, Susan Bugbee. She died in 2021.

Borman worked as a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, operational pilot and instructor at West Point after graduation. In 1956, Borman moved his family to Pasadena, California, where he earned a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering from California Institute of Technology. In 1962, he was one of nine test pilots chosen by NASA for the astronaut program.

He received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor from President Jimmy Carter.

In 1998, Borman started a cattle ranch in Bighorn, Montana, with his son, Fred. In addition to Fred, he survived by another son, Edwin, and their families.

The image of 54-year-old Aniston playing a solitary figure at Perry’s service, even though she was surrounded by their beloved “Friends” co-stars, gives weight to reports that she’s having a particularly hard time coming to terms with his sudden death. Perry, who once admitted he had a crush on Aniston, died unexpectedly on Oct. 28 at the age 54 of an apparent drowning at his Los Angeles-area home.

It’s an outcome that Aniston “dreaded” for 20 years,” a friend told The Daily Mail. Perry was open about struggling with addiction to alcohol and drugs, suffering multiple relapses, stints in rehab and dire health consequences.

“It doesn’t matter whether he died as a result of a freak accident or whether it was directly connected to his drug issues, this was a day that Jennifer has dreaded coming for 20 years,” a friend told the Daily Mail. “She always wanted to help Matthew any way she could – that was a constant for her.”

Jen's grief over the day she dreaded for 20 years: Aniston was 'one of the first to arrive' at Matthew Perry's funeral and 'kept to herself'
https://t.co/f06ZG0W6Wo pic.twitter.com/BHsQr8bLAw

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) November 4, 2023

When a struggling Perry managed to join his “Friends” castmates for a reunion special in 2021, Aniston “genuinely thought his worst days were behind him,” the friend told the Daily Mail. “So his death just two years later has come as a bitter body blow to her.”

The one-hour funeral service for Perry took place Friday at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills neighborhood. Aniston was driven to the service by bodyguards. She met up with Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer and Lisa Kudrow — all dressed in black, — outside the venue so that they could walk in together, according to aerial paparazzi shots obtained by the New York Post.

Matt LeBlanc joined them later, and the group also gathered inside with Perry’s relatives, including mother Suzanne Perry, father John Bennett Perry and stepfather Keith Morrison, the Daily Mail said.

Once inside, Aniston mostly  “kept to herself,” the source told the Daily Mail over the weekend. Insiders also told Page Six that “The Morning Show” star and Cox are both “reeling” the most over Perry’s death, out of the five remaining “Friends” cast members.

“Jen is probably the one who is struggling most acutely,” an insider said. “It’s a second massive loss in less than a year, with the one-year anniversary of her dad’s death just around the corner.”

Aniston and Perry, born just six months apart, were the youngest of the six “Friends” cast members and formed an immediate camaraderie when the show first started shooting in 1994, the Daily Mail said.

In Perry’s 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” he said they had met three years before they began working together on “Friends.”

“I was immediately taken by (Aniston) (how could I not be?) and liked her,” Perry wrote, according to the New York Post. “And I got the sense she was intrigued too — maybe it was going to be something.”

“I’m really grateful to her for that,” he told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer while promoting his memoir in October 2022, the New York Post reported.

Eighteen years earlier, ahead of the “Friends’ series finale in 2004, Aniston broke down in tears while talking about Perry during an interview with Sawyer, the Post reported. Aniston said she hoped that he was “all right.”

“He struggled,” Aniston told Sawyer. “We didn’t know. We weren’t equipped to deal with it. Nobody had ever dealt with that. And the idea of even losing him. … But he’s all right.”

During Perry’s funeral service, “there was not a dry eye,” an observer told the Daily Mail. “There were a lot of tears and laughter. Only close friends and family spoke.”

After the service, Perry was buried in a dark wooden coffin in a closed ceremony, the Daily Mail said. Preliminary toxicology reports showed the actor did not have fentanyl or meth in his body at the time of his death. His full autopsy report results have been delayed pending additional testing.

Evan Ellingson, a former child actor known for roles in “My Sister’s Keeper” and “CSI Miami,” has died. He was 35.

According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Coroner’s division online records, Ellingson died on Sunday. The record notes he was found in “a bedroom” in the city of Fontana, which is about an hour east of Los Angeles County.

The cause of death has not yet been released.

Ellingson is best known for his role as Jesse Fitzgerald in the 2009 film “My Sister’s Keeper,” a drama about a family coping with their young daughter’s cancer diagnosis. Ellingson starred in the movie alongside Abigail Breslin, Jason Patric and Cameron Diaz.

He made his television debut in 2001 playing “young Chuck” in the TV movie “Living in Fear,” according to IMDb.

As a child actor, he went on to star in 19 episodes of the ABC sitcom “Complete Savages” between 2004 and 2005, and he appeared throughout Season 6 of the Fox TV series “24” alongside Kiefer Sutherland.

“My childhood was a cool one,” Ellingson said in a 2009 interview, adding, “I was busy doing the things I love. I had no regrets because I found my passion for acting early on.”

He also starred in various TV series throughout the aughts including “General Hospital,” “Mad TV” and “Titus.” In 2006, Ellingson appeared in the war-era film “Letters from Iwo Jima” and the 2007 indie comedy “Walk the Talk.”

Ellingson’s most recent credit listed is “CSI: Miami,” where he played the character Kyle Harmon for three seasons between 2007 and 2010.

According to Ellingson’s personal Facebook page, he notes his “love” for surfing, camping, hiking and riding horses in his free time.

Atlanta, GA (CNN) — Taraja Ramsess, a stuntman, actor and martial artist known for his work on the “Black Panther” and “Avengers” movies, is being mourned after he and three of his children were killed as a result of a car crash in Atlanta last week.

He was 41.

Atlanta TV station WSB-TV reported that the crash occurred just before midnight on Halloween after the vehicle Ramsess and his children were traveling in collided with a tractor trailer that had broken down in the left lane of an exit off the interstate.

“My beautiful, loving, talented son Taraja @chop.saki, along with two of my grand babies, his 13 yo daughter Sundari and his 8-week old newborn daughter Fujibo, were killed the previous night in a horrific traffic accident,” she wrote.

She also wrote that two of Ramsess’ daughters survived the accident, with his 3-year-old, Shazia, being hospitalized with his 10-year-old son, Kisasi, who she wrote was on life support.

In a subsequent post, she shared that Kisasi had also died.

His long-time friend and X3 Sports trainer Tony Tucci told WSB-TV, “When I first heard about it, I broke down. I had to sit down.”

“He was always a family man,” Tucci said. “They would come and sit and watch him train, and they would jump in and start training too.”

Famed director Ava DuVernay was also a friend and posted about the loss on her Instgram account.

“My goodness, did he love his children. A happy, whole love. Beautiful to behold,” she wrote. “He loved making movies and TV too. Held many positions over the years. Immersing himself in all aspects of the craft.”

Ramsess’ credits include “Avengers: End Game,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” “Creed III,” “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”

CNN has reached out to Marvel Studios for comment.

Apollo astronaut Thomas Kenneth Mattingly II, known for helping the crew of Apollo 13 safely return to Earth after an explosion doomed their lunar mission, has died at the age of 87, NASA announced.

“Mattingly was key to the success of our Apollo Program, and his shining personality will ensure he is remembered throughout history,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement, calling Mattingly “one of our country’s heroes.”

Mattingly died Tuesday, the statement said. A cause of death wasn’t provided.

Born in Chicago on March 17, 1936, Mattingly would go on to graduate high school in Miami and earn a degree in aeronautical engineering from Auburn University in 1958, according to his NASA biography.

“Perhaps his most dramatic role at NASA was after exposure to rubella just before the launch of Apollo 13,” Nelson said. “He stayed behind and provided key real-time decisions to successfully bring home the wounded spacecraft and the crew of Apollo 13 – NASA astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.”

Actor Gary Sinise portrayed Mattingly in the movie “Apollo 13.”

Sinise called it an “honor” to play Mattingly in a post on X earlier this year to mark the 53rd anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission.

Mattingly had “unparalleled skill as a pilot,” Nelson said, noting he was a command module pilot for Apollo 16 and spacecraft commander for space shuttle missions STS-4 and STS 51-C. “The commitment to innovation and resilience toward opposition made TK an excellent figure to embody our mission and our nation’s admiration.”

Mattingly’s contributions “allowed for advancements in our learning beyond that of space,” Nelson said.

“He described his experience in orbit by saying, ‘I had this very palpable fear that if I saw too much, I couldn’t remember. It was just so impressive.’ He viewed the universe’s vastness as an unending forum of possibilities,” Nelson said. “As a leader in exploratory missions, TK will be remembered for braving the unknown for the sake of our country’s future.”

His wife, Lynn Axelrod Mitchell, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

A gangly, grizzled former literature teacher, Mitchell also figured in a retaliatory libel suit by Synanon, the results of which advanced the rights of investigative reporters. In 1984, the California Supreme Court ruled that in certain cases they could keep the names of confidential sources secret without forfeiting their defense in libel and other civil cases.

Mitchell’s newspaper, the Point Reyes Light, was struggling financially, and the strain of keeping it afloat ultimately cost Mitchell his second marriage; his wife at the time, Catherine Mitchell, was co-publisher with him.

But the seven news articles and 13 editorials that earned the Light the Pulitzer gold medal for public service in 1979, for its “pioneering exposé of this quasi-religious corporate cult,” demonstrated the potency of local journalism and drew attention to the paper for its role in a classic David-and-Goliath story.

“It is one of those romantic Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner or Horatio Alger stories,” columnist James Reston wrote in The New York Times in 1979. “Young struggling couple out of Stanford University, David and Catherine Mitchell, buy little rag of a paper, defy the powerful interests in the community, and win the big prize.”

It was said to have been only the fourth time since the prizes were first presented in 1917 that a weekly or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. David Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe.

In 1980, when Mitchell published the book “The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult — and Won the Pulitzer Prize,” a reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor wrote that it “should be required reading for anyone who thinks a small newspaper can only serve a small purpose or that all the important news is in Washington or abroad.”

“By digging in their own backyard, the Mitchells set an example for the entire world,” The Monitor said.

The book inspired a CBS-TV movie, “Attack on Fear” (1984), which starred Paul Michael Glaser and Linda Kelsey as the Mitchells.

The Light, a 16-page tabloid, had a circulation of about 3,000 and, in its best year, made a profit of about $17,000. It shared space with a shoe repair shop on block-long Main Street in Point Reyes Station, a peninsular town of some 400 people situated about 40 miles north of San Francisco and perched precariously on the San Andreas Fault.

In 1973, a grand jury raised questions about fiscal improprieties and child abuse by Synanon, which had once been widely respected but had devolved into an authoritarian cult that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — to become tax exempt. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco found that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, California, less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding what turned out to be $60,000 worth of weapons.

Mitchell began his own investigation that same year, joined by his wife; their one reporter, John Maddeen; and Richard J. Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. To them, it was a story in their own backyard that they couldn’t ignore.

“It was a local story,” Mitchell told The Associated Press in 1979. “If it hadn’t been, we wouldn’t have written about it. We don’t even cover countywide news. If San Rafael, the county seat, disappeared in a tidal wave, the only mention would be if someone from West Marin happened to be over there shopping and drowned.”

The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.

In 1980, Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security force had conspired to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon disbanded in 1991.

Mitchell edited and published the Light for 27 years, from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1984 to 2005, when he retired. He then began writing a blog, “Sparsely Sage and Timely,” which he continued until this June.

While he became famous for his newspaper’s exposé of Synanon, he expressed even greater satisfaction in a series of articles he oversaw for two decades that sought to place the latest influx of newcomers to Marin County in the historical perspective of the waves of foreigners who had settled there since 1850.

“Probably the most important thing we’ve done, that I would take the most pride in, is helping the Mexican immigrants here become part of the mainstream,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005.

David Vokes Mitchell was born Nov. 23, 1943, in San Francisco to Edith (Vokes) Mitchell, a Canadian immigrant who sold advertising for The Christian Science Monitor, and Herbert Houston Mitchell, who was vice president of a printing company.

The family moved to Berkeley when David was 3. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University in 1965 and a master’s in communications there in 1967.

After considering a career as an artist, he recalled on his blog, “To my parents’ surprise, as much as my own, I ultimately left Stanford as a budding journalist.”

He taught at Marvel Academy in Rye, New York, and later taught speech and literature at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where he joined a drive to register Black voters. He went on to teach English literature and journalism at Upper Iowa University in Fayette and later to work as a reporter for newspapers in Iowa and California.

In 1975, he and Catherine Mitchell sold their house and invested about $50,000 in the Light, a community newspaper where one might find a photo of smiling children displaying their prizewinning pumpkins or a story about a firefighter retrieving a cow from a tree (don’t ask).

He introduced a comic strip about an organic dairy cow with a craving for junk food, a sex-and-romance column by a 78-year-old local woman, and a Spanish-language column by a 13-year-old girl.

Realizing that he was a better journalist than businessman, Mitchell sold the paper, for the first time, in 1981, when he was 37. That same year, he and his wife, who was Catherine Casto when they married, divorced, both of them weary from the pressure of keeping the Light more or less solvent as co-publishers.

In addition to his wife, Lynn, whom he married in 2018, he is survived by three stepdaughters from a previous marriage, Anika Zappa-Pinelo, Kristeli Zappa Monterroso and Shaili Zappa Monterroso; and two step-grandchildren.

After he left the Light the first time, Mitchell became a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, covering San Francisco and Central America. He reacquired the weekly in 1983, when it faced default. In 1986, Synanon dropped a libel and defamation suit against the Light and agreed to pay the Mitchells $100,000, which he invested in computers and other office equipment.

In 2005, he again sold the Light, this time to Robert I. Plotkin, a former California prosecutor, for $100,000. In his farewell column, Mitchell wrote that in his nearly three decades as publisher the paper won 109 national, regional and state journalism awards.

In the same column, he said that his goal as an editor had always been to “make sure the ‘little guy’ isn’t crushed by the powers that be.”

His staff didn’t need reminding, and neither did he. A sign in the Light’s office proclaimed, “It’s a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.”

The African-American Shakespeare Company, which performs adaptations of classic stage plays with BIPOC casts, was set to open a production of Arthur Miller’s tragic drama last weekend. But a real-life tragedy intervened.

Cast member May, 65, reportedly was walking to a rehearsal on the morning of Oct. 28 when he was struck and killed by a car at Post and Hyde streets in San Francisco’s lower Nob Hill district, officials at AASC said. According to AASC and S.F. Police Department reports, a white BMW ran a red light and struck another car, which hit and killed Ray. The BMW driver was arrested and an investigation is continuing, reports said. No other details of the accident were available.

May was reportedly walking to Taube Atrium Theater, located at the War Memorial Building on 401 Van Ness, for the final rehearsal of the production. May, a former homeless man, had finally realized his dream of working as an actor and had been cast as Uncle Ben, a relative of the play’s central protagonist Willy Loman. AASC officials said the part represented his first paying role as an actor.

“We’re all heartbroken,” said company executive director Sherri Young, “and the shock of Richard’s passing and how it occurred continues to hover over all of us. Of course we wanted audiences to see the show after all the work put into the planning and rehearsals, but this is where we are.”

The production had originally been scheduled to run through Nov. 12. Those who had purchased tickets will be refunded automatically by City Box Office, AASC officials said.

There was no word yet on any memorial arrangements for May.

Kerr, 58, didn’t cross paths much with Knight but shared one moment between them in 1986, when Kerr was on summer break from the University of Arizona and Knight was doing television commentary in the offseason from his coaching duties at Indiana. Kerr was playing for Team USA in the World Championships when Knight visited the team during practice after a loss.

Knight employed his infamous temper to great success, accumulating 902 wins, three national championships and five Final Four appearances over a 43-year career as a collegiate head coach. Kerr has found equal success in the NBA with a vastly different style.

“Nobody will ever forget him with that personality and that demeanor and the way he went about his business,” Kerr said. “Very complex guy. But an amazing coach in many ways.”