Morning Press: Firefighter cadet, tiny houses, kidney donation

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Here are the week’s top stories and some news you may have missed

Jack Fletcher’s fight: A life changes in the blink of an eye

Jack Fletcher’s life changed in an instant on the afternoon of July 30.

Just beginning a promising career as a firefighter, the 18-year-old Prairie High School graduate was driving home to Battle Ground from Central Oregon to surprise his family for a short visit. He’d finished a training session and was cleared to begin fighting fires with Crook County Fire & Rescue in Prineville, Ore. The years ahead held nothing but promise for the former captain of the Clark County Fire & Rescue cadet program.

Then a Ford pickup crossed the center line on Highway 26 near Brightwood, Ore., crashing head-on into Fletcher’s Subaru wagon.

Then a health crisis hammered home what most of us ignore, most of the time: Life is short.

“I collapsed in the grocery store and woke up in the ICU,” Williams said. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure. She was only 40 years old.

“You spend all your time running to work to make money and running home to spend it,” she realized. But in the end, the only thing she really had was time. “I wanted my time back,” she decided.

Read the full story here.

Anti-government activist’s property to go on block

Clark County will auction property belonging to anti-government activist David Darby later this month, potentially capping a multiyear dispute arising over more than $20,000 in unpaid property taxes and fines.

But Darby, who describes himself as a “sovereign citizen” who doesn’t recognize the county’s authority, said he won’t go willingly. And whoever buys the property, officials say, will be responsible for getting Darby to leave.

“We’ll have to see what happens,” Darby said. “I don’t plan on leaving. I don’t know what they’re going to try. … They know I am very serious about this. All I want is my constitutional rights protected, like every other citizen in Washington.”

In August, a Clark County Superior Court judge authorized the county to move on a foreclosure auction on Darby’s Amboy property, a 4.7-acre parcel where Darby’s house, a raised mobile home resting on cinder blocks, is located.

The minimum bid for the property, which has a total taxable value of $154,712, will be $22,823, or roughly the amount that Darby owes in back taxes. The auction will begin at 8 a.m. Sept. 16 and conclude at 11 a.m. the same day.

Read the full story here.

Stevenson woman donates kidney to Michigan man

Kia Calderon-Dillon traveled more than 2,000 miles to give away one of her organs. She made the trek from her home in Stevenson to Ann Arbor, Mich., for a man she met only a couple of months earlier on Facebook.

“I’ve just always done what I can to help people,” Calderon-Dillon said. “The chance of me needing both kidneys later is unlikely. If I can help somebody, why wouldn’t I?”

For information about becoming an organ donor, visit the Donate Life Northwest website.

Calderon-Dillon has for years donated blood, visiting the donor center every eight weeks. She gives her time, volunteering for the parent-teacher association at her sons’ school and for local political campaigns. The 28-year-old also has long had a desire to donate a kidney.

Mountain West’s Hillary Banks said rent for the units would be “market rate.”

Mountain West will finish laying foundations and underground utilities for the development’s first phase, which will include 10 buildings and 176 units, in November, Banks said.

The first building will open in June 2015, and the second is set to open the following month. All 10 buildings of the first phase should be open by November 2015, she said.

Banks said that Mountain West does not know when Phase 2 will begin, although there may be a break in construction after Phase 1. “In a perfect world we wouldn’t stop at all,” she said, “but we know that probably will not happen.”

Read the full story here.