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Here are some of the top stories of the week on columbian.com. Wondering what else was popular this week with readers? Check out our Trending Stories page.
In an eleventh-hour decision, the man who fatally shot a Vancouver mother and her 7-year-old daughter and dumped their bodies along a rural road near Washougal pleaded guilty Thursday in their murders.
Kirkland Warren’s trial was scheduled to begin Monday in Clark County Superior Court. Instead, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of his former girlfriend, 27-year-old Meshay Melendez, and her 7-year-old daughter, Layla Stewart, respectively. The mother and daughter were killed between March 12 and 13, 2023. Warren also entered an Alford plea to first-degree child molestation — which allows a defendant to maintain his innocence but admit there’s enough evidence to convict him — for sexually assaulting Layla.
Longtime basketball coach, teacher and school administrator John Griffin died on Saturday after battling prostate cancer. He was 64.
Griffin was an assistant coach on the Camas girls basketball team, which won the program’s first state championship when it captured the Class 4A title in March.
WOODLAND — The Port of Woodland has bought and is now operating an upscale RV park along the Columbia River outside of Woodland.
The unusual purchase comes as the government entity tasked with local economic development expands its asset portfolio. The agency hopes to harness a regional boom driven in part by tourism and industries expanding out of the Portland and Seattle areas in search of less expensive property.
The properties planned for development at Fisher Quarry have largely sat empty for years. But the gears are still in motion to transform this nearly 200-acre area into a development to rival most other major building developments in Clark County.
The area, which sits north of state Highway 14 along Southeast 192nd Avenue is broken into many smaller properties.
A long-awaited $21 million, two-year project to overhaul Main Street in downtown Vancouver is expected to begin this fall.
It took 30 years to get to this point. The city began planning for reconstruction of Main Street from Fifth to 15th streets in 1993, but budget constraints led to false starts.
