Milestones

By Melissa August, Amanda Bower, Mitch Frank, Ellin Martens, Sora Song, Joel Stein, Heather Won Tesoriero and Josh Tyrangiel

SETTLED. BRIDGESTONE/FIRESTONE with the family of MARISA RODRIGUEZ, 39, a paralyzed and brain-damaged victim of a Ford Explorer rollover in March 2000; in McAllen, Texas. The company will pay the plaintiffs a reported $7.5 million.

SENTENCED. TOM GREEN, 53, brash Mormon Fundamentalist with five wives and 30 children; to five years in prison and repayment of $78,000 in state welfare checks; in Provo, Utah.

DIED. PETER MAAS, 72, writer who chronicled the lives of Mafia insiders; in New York City. He collaborated with such high-profile Mob informants as Joseph Valachi (The Valachi Papers, 1969), confidant to Vito Genovese, and Sammy (The Bull) Gravano (Underboss, 1997), whose testimony helped undo John Gotti. In between, Maas wrote the best-selling Serpico, about a steadfast New York City cop who exposed graft in the police ranks.

DIED. KIM STANLEY, 76, protean Broadway actress, most admired for portraying a dizzying range of characters--a tomboy kid sister in William Inge's Picnic (1953), a nightclub chanteuse in Bus Stop (1955)--with notable humor and pathos; in Santa Fe, N.M. Stanley also made a few scattered but striking film appearances, earning Academy Award nominations for her roles as a deranged psychic in Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and the tyrannical mother in Frances (1982).

DIED. E.T. HALL, 77, archaeologist and leading archaeometrist who famously uncovered the Piltdown Man hoax; in Oxford, England. Using X-ray fluorescence, Hall showed that the Piltdown Man's skeleton--once thought to be evolution's "missing link"--had been stained to look fossilized and that the teeth of an orangutan had been filed to appear more human.

DIED. KATHLEEN FREEMAN, 82, seasoned character actress whose performances in 70 feature films (from Singin' in the Rain to Nutty Professor II), hundreds of television shows and numerous plays made her trademark jowls and agitated expression unforgettable; of lung cancer; in New York City. She gave her final, Tony-nominated performance in The Full Monty on Broadway, finishing two shows just five days before her death.

DIED. SIR FRED HOYLE, 86, eminent but irascible astronomer who coined the term Big Bang theory to distinguish it, derisively, from his own belief that the universe was infinite in time and space; in Bournemouth, England. A popular science-fiction novelist (The Black Cloud, 1957) and former BBC radio broadcaster, Hoyle was best known for his monumental 1957 paper on the origins of elements, for which--to his annoyance--he was passed over for a Nobel Prize.