California senior citizen fighting her eviction passes away at 97

Weeks ago, 97-year-old Marie Hatch received an eviction notice, informing her she had to leave the suburban San Francisco house where she had lived for the past 66 years.

Friends and neighbors — and a high-powered law firm — became her advocates, and her plight received national media attention. Efforts were underway to stop Hatch’s eviction when she was sickened by a respiratory virus.

After a brief hospitalization, Hatch died at home Thursday night, one of her attorneys confirmed to The Washington Post.

Hatch, who was battling cancer and had agoraphobia, died from apparent natural causes after a severe cold, family friends told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“It’s so sad — we will miss Marie,” Hatch’s next-door neighbor Cheryl Graczewski told the Chronicle. “She was a real sweetheart. There was a lot of spirit in that woman.”

Hatch, a retired bakery worker, had lived in the two-bedroom cottage in Burlingame for decades with her roommate, 85-year-old Georgia Rothrock. The notice came on Feb. 11 to move within 60 days or face eviction by sheriff’s deputies from the $1.2 million home in a Northern California neighborhood where property values and rents have skyrocketed.

“They’re trying to take away everything from me here,” Hatch told the Chronicle last month. “Gee whiz, I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to leave.”

She added: “I have a lot of tears, a lot of happiness, a lot of memories in this house. It is my home. Where can I go?”

— Elahe Izadi

Authorities say a high school student who went through his teacher’s cellphone, found a nude picture of her and posted it online has been charged with a computer crime and voyeurism.

Chief Sam White of the Public Safety Department in northwestern South Carolina said the 16-year-old was taken into custody Friday at Union High School.

The boy, charged as a juvenile, is being held for a hearing in family court. The teacher has said she had made a nude selfie to share with her husband. She has quit her job teaching at the school.

— Associated Press

Bobbi Kristina Brown’s autopsy shows evidence of recent cocaine use by the daughter of Whitney Houston before she was found unresponsive in a bathtub in her Atlanta home last year, but a medical examiner’s office said Friday it could not establish whether her death after months in a coma was accidental or intentional.

The 22-year-old Brown, the only child from Houston’s marriage to fellow Grammy-award-winning singer Bobby Brown, suffered brain damage and died of pneumonia resulting from drug intoxication and her face being immersed in water, the Fulton County medical examiner said.

— Reuters