Pickup Truck

Paul Gattini's 3-year-old filly, Sarah Michelle, seemed agitated when he took her from a fenced paddock Monday night for the walk back to her stall. Thirty minutes later, the racehorse lay in a crumpled heap, wedged in the back of a pickup truck whose path she had crossed while running down County Route 528. State Trooper Al Della Fave said the drama climaxed at 10:10 p.m. when the filly crashed into Michael Carroll's eastbound 1993 Dodge pickup near Milepost 5. Gattini, 58, of Allentown in Burlington County, said that something frightened the horse as he was walking her to the barn about 9:30 p.m. and that she bolted off his 40-acre spread.

"I feel like the Haitian Frank Sinatra. " - Singer Wyclef Jean, on his new album, "The Ecleftic" As if he didn't already have enough excitement in his life, Montel Williams is being credited with helping to save a teen-ager from a burning truck. The talk-show host and his driver, in rural northern Idaho visiting Williams' daughter, were out Saturday morning when they came upon a pickup that had just slammed into a tree. Brian Thorne, the 16-year-old at the wheel, had reportedly fallen asleep on his way to football practice.

A tanker-trailer that had just had its tank filled with 8,592 gallons of gasoline collided with a pickup truck, overturned, and caught fire yesterday morning on Route 72 here, critically injuring a driver. The fire after yesterday's accident burned for four hours, causing extensive damage to the road. Repairs are expected to keep a half-mile stretch of Route 72 between Routes 13 and 17 closed until 11 tonight. The driver of the pickup truck in yesterday's accident, Richard D. Florence, 31, of Bear, was in critical condition last night at Christiana Hospital in Newark.

Township officials yesterday dismissed one police officer and suspended another without pay for allegedly firing shots from a pickup truck in West Deptford early Saturday. Citing both for "serious officer misconduct," the Township Committee unanimously accepted a police department recommendation to fire Stephen Thayer, 26, of West Deptford, and to place Fred Gismondi, 28, of National Park, on unpaid administrative leave. They had been suspended with pay over the weekend. "The incident is certainly an embarrassment to East Greenwich Township, our police department and the police profession," Police Lt. Scott Goess wrote in a report to the committee.

Easter Weekend auctions will abound throughout the area with some sales scheduled over two or even three days. Here's a sampler. Auctioneer "Colonel" Rodger Paisley will hold forth at the two-day on-site estate sale of John "Uncle Jack" McCoury tomorrow and Saturday, with bidding beginning at 1 p.m. tomorrow and 9 a.m. Saturday. Uncle Jack's collecting tastes covered a broad range, from an early horse-drawn wagon to a 2001 Dodge Dakota pickup truck. Toys and child-sized pedal tractors are slated for the auction block tomorrow, with such manufacturers of quality vintage toy vehicles as Buddy L, Ertl, Hubley, Nylint, Schuco, Structo and Tootsietoy well represented.

Two holdup men, one claiming to have a gun, took an undisclosed amount of cash yesterday in a "quick hit" robbery of the Village Shires Branch of the Mellon Bank, police said. They entered the bank at East Village and Buck Roads, Holland, shortly before 11 a.m., police said, and one shoved a supermarket bag at two tellers and said, "You have 20 seconds to give us the money. " Northampton Police Detective Kenneth Barnes said that the tellers complied and that the men left in a little more than a minute, driving away in a maroon GMC pickup.

We got us a truck. I now ride high above the American highway in our moonlight blue - yes, moonlight blue, don't you love it? - pickup truck. I call him Blue. Blue kicks tail. Blue rules, baby. Admittedly, a truck is a conveyance outside my city-boy culture. Before, the biggest thing I ever rode in was the No. 6 train to Grand Central in Manhattan. But now that my wife, Linda, and I live on a farm out in God's country - well, South Jersey is considered the country of a lesser god by some people - a truck fits sweetly into my adopted rural lifestyle.

THE PROBLEM: Two years ago, when Anthony Stamato moved to Morrell Park, a quiet neighborhood in the Far Northeast, he thought it would be nice to have a creek trickling behind his new home. That is, until he looked at it. Byberry Creek, he found, had been playing garage to a '99 Chevy pickup truck. Stuck between the creek and its bank, the vehicle juts out of the water at a 45-degree angle, seemingly frozen in that position for years. With its muddy brown paint, missing tires and bright-blue graffiti, the clunker was an eyesore, but to Stamato, even more worrisome was its effect on the water - especially when it rains, he said, and the water rises, almost submerging the truck.

George Mills was charged in Superior Court yesterday with the murder of Karen Leitenberger, but no details were given about their relationship or why police believe he wanted her dead. Mills, 64, a Navy veteran, is the commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2245 in his hometown of Maple Shade, where Leitenberger worked as a bartender until she quit last week. He was arrested Wednesday morning after police received a call from his Elm Street housemate. The housemate told police Mills said that he had killed his girlfriend in her Cinnaminson home and then had left to return to the housemate's residence.

Sixteen-year-old David Ricca sat on the witness stand yesterday and recounted the moment when a truck driven by a woman who police say is a habitual drunken driver plowed into him and his close friend, Mark Shreck. The impact was sudden and unforeseen, Ricca said. It wasn't until he was lying on an emergency-room table that Ricca finally understood the collision's severity: Shreck, 16, his buddy and schoolmate, was dead. "I was laying in the emergency room . . . and [Mark's death]