Cop Car

A police officer's testimony about a fatal stabbing at a Southwest Philadelphia bar in 1984 - which helped convict Anthony Woodward of murder - was inaccurate on several important counts, two more eyewitnesses have told the Daily News. The two witnesses, friends of the victim, were interviewed by police after the stabbing but were not called to testify at the trial. The Daily News reported in March that two other witnesses, who also never testified, support Woodward's version of the incident.

The unmistakable smell of death lingered in the humid air over a weed-strewn lot in North Philadelphia yesterday. It was there, in the waist-high weeds at Hope and Turner streets, that Liz Campbell spotted the decaying remains of a man in his 30s. "She was going to the store with my daughter, and then she saw something," said Campbell's husband, Edward. "She got on the phone and called police. It ain't the first time this happened out there. " Homicide Sgt. Frank Hayes said police learned about Campbell's grim discovery at 5:12 p.m. Hayes said investigators were unsure of the cause of death and weren't identifying the victim.

A new witness has emerged who says that he, too, saw a cop car stopped behind Aimee Willard's the night she was murdered. His story renews questions about the all-American athlete's stalled murder probe and could be important to ex-Pennsylvania State Trooper Ryan Hutchinson, who was convicted last month of filing false police reports in the case. Hutchinson, 30, claims he saw an Upper Providence police car parked behind Willard's on a Blue Route exit ramp June 20, 1996, the day she was killed.

A 2-year-old Gibbstown girl was in critical condition at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia after falling into a backyard pool in East Greenwich yesterday afternoon, police said. The toddler had wandered away from her mother, who was getting her 5-year-old son into a costume at a friend's home at 251 Kings Highway in East Greenwich. About six children and four adults were in the house preparing to go trick-or-treating, the friend, Susan Tighe, said. "We did not even see her go out the back door," Tighe said.

Andre Baker, 22, had a good reason to panic when he saw a cop car signaling from behind while driving along Ridge Avenue on Feb. 2. Barker, of Cumberland Street near 24th, didn't have a driver's license and was at the wheel of a car that had an expired license tag, said Assistant District Attorney Mark Gilson. So Baker sped into the opposite lane and forced oncoming traffic to veer out of his way, Gilson said. When Baker pulled around 23rd Street, he lost control, ran up onto the sidewalk and struck two men walking toward a bus stop.

A University of Pennsylvania police officer fatally shot a carjacker yesterday at the edge of the school's campus in West Philadelphia as the two struggled over control of the officer's gun. A university health system employee also was injured when the stolen van that the man was driving jumped a sidewalk as he tried to evade traffic and struck her. The man, who was not immediately identified, had been armed during the carjacking, but he...

TAMERA MEDLEY begged the police officer to stop slamming her head - over and over - into the hood of a police cruiser. Thinking they were helping, passers-by Shakir Riley and Melissa Hurling both turned their cellphone video cameras toward the melee that had erupted on Jefferson Street in Wynnefield, they said. But then the cops turned on them. Riley had started to walk away when at least five baton-wielding cops followed him, he said, and they beat him, poured a soda on his face and stomped on his phone, destroying the video he had just taken.

EXCUSE US if we're confused. Metal detectors in city schools are OK, but armed cops aren't? Even though the cops won't cost the city a dime and have proved effective in reducing violence in other schools? This strange thinking comes from our mayor, who believes putting Philadelphia police officers in troubled high schools will turn them into "armed camps," as a mayoral spokeswoman said. Come on, we're not buying that. Lack of student discipline is the most important concern teachers have and a major reason why many of the young ones leave, Ted Kirsch, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, told City Council this week.

Police Commissioner John Timoney said yesterday that the Friday afternoon crash in Feltonville that killed a man was not the result of police chasing a man driving a stolen Mercedes. "Our preliminary investigation shows . . . that it was not a chase in the general sense," he said. "It's more that the guy sees the cops and takes off in the other direction. " Ralph Morales, 28, was killed on Friday about 2:30 p.m. after William Williams ran a stop sign while driving a stolen Mercedes and crashed into Morales' Plymouth Neon at D and Loudon streets.

This sounds like the kind of stunt that rotten kids on a television show would pull: spike their teacher's Snapple with dog tranquilizer while she concentrates on grading papers. Only it wasn't television. It was a real-life eighth-grade classroom at St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School on Route 13 in Croydon, Bucks County. Two kids plotted the sick stunt one morning last week. By recess, their 38- year-old lay teacher was feeling so poorly she went to the school nurse, complaining of headache and dizziness.