(via YouTube)

Psychotherapist Lynne Rosen and her partner, John Littig, famous for hosting their self-help radio show “The Pursuit of Happiness,” were found dead in their Park Slope apartment on Monday. The couple had suffocated themselves with plastic bags, The Post reported.

Ms. Rosen and Mr. Littig’s radio show, which aired monthly, offered advice to listeners on how to lead more productive and fulfilling lives. In a show from February, they urged one caller to fight back in her battle against depression.

"Push yourself when there's nothing left to go on," Ms. Rosen counseled. "Remember, positivity is precious."

Their bodies were found when neighbors complained of a foul smell coming from the first floor. Once police arrived on the scene, neighbors told the Daily News that they were informed the couple had been dead for a week.

Ms. Rosen and Mr. Littig left behind two notes, the News reported. Ms. Rosen’s apologized for ending her life, while Mr. Littig wrote that he could not watch his wife suffer any longer.

At around 8.30 a.m. today, emergency officials responded to a 911 call from East 56th Street and Farragut Road in East Flatbush.

They found the alleged shooter, Rosette Samuel, 43, lying in bed next to her son Dylan and her boyfriend, identified by reports as Dason Peters, 33, shot to death in the front doorway.

"She shot those two then took her own life," a police source told the Daily News.

Ms. Samuel’s 19-year-old son, Dondre Samuel, escaped unharmed out a back window and called 911 after hearing an argument between the two adults. According to witnesses cited in the News, he fled the scene wearing only a pair of blue boxers and a windbreaker.

"He was jumping from the second floor to the first. He was frantic,”  Anthony Beckford, 18, said to the paper.

"His knees, elbows were scrapped, bloodily. He couldn't really talk. He was running, for his life. He just said, 'Look, look,' and pointed at a body. We saw a body on the first floor, facing up and blood all over."

By the time police arrived on the scene, three people were dead.

Rosette Samuel was an off-duty police offer from Queens’ 108^th Precinct, and a 13-year veteran of the NYPD.

Police are currently investigating the cause of the dispute. No motive for the shooting has been determined.

J.T. Ready (screengrab)

On Wednesday May 2, J.T. Ready ended a violent argument in his Arizona home with a rampage. Ready killed his girlfriend, three other adults and a toddler before committing suicide. His actions marked an explosive and tragic end to a colorful career as a cause-hopping rebel who bounced between various extreme social movements using xenophobic and racist rhetoric to grab the spotlight along the way. The Christian Science Monitor goes more in-depth:

"Ready was significant because he was at the nexus of [several] extremist movements, including the white supremacy movement and the extreme wing of the anti-immigration movement, and he operated equally well in both spheres," says Mark Pitcavage, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, who has tracked Ready's activities for a decade. "Toward the end of his life, he was even making connections with the militia movement."

VICE interviewed Ready a while back for its video series, VICE Today. They posted their video with an introduction acknowledging Ready's murder-suicide a couple of days ago, writing, "Not too long ago, we interviewed J.T. for our piece on border militias, and while we understood that J.T. had a lot of anger, we didn't realize how deep his hatred ran."

The 4:25 video is below. It reveals an oddly affable-seeming man attempting to put a friendly gloss on what he's doing.

Interview with J.T. Ready & His Border Militia: VICE Presents 010 - YouTube.

Charles Snelling (from Mr. Snelling's Facebook page)

Charles Darwin Snelling, a noted Pennsylvania Republican who wrote a "Life Report" published by columnist David Brooks in the Times last December, killed his wife and committed suicide in Pennsylvania on Thursday. Mr. Snelling was 81. He had been married to wife Adrienne for 6 decades. Mr. Snelling had been caring for his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife for six years and  in his long essay published by the Times on December 7, 2011, expressed what seemed a fundamentally positive view of the situation:

Six years ago tragedy struck our household. My dear, sweet Adrienne was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This relentless wasting disease destroys the mind. I have now seen many people with Alzheimer’s, and it is a terrible disease. Many, besides losing their memories and their cognitive abilities, also get downright ugly and hostile. Not my sweetie. Although she is a very, very sick puppy, she remains to this day a sweet, happy, loving and generous person. How lucky for both of us. To have such an affliction in the household is a very learning experience. Some people quite promptly disappear from your life. But others, indeed most, rally around in caring and support. It’s quite touching.

Mr. Snelling, a one-time chairman of the Metropolitan Washington (D.C.) Airports Authority and holder of multiple patents described in his Times piece all the support received from his community but concluded "real care for a loved one with Alzheimer's cannot be delegated."

"It's not noble, it's not sacrificial, and it's not painful," he wrote, "It's just right in the scheme of things."

Pennsylvania television station WFMZ quoted a portion of a family statement released by Mr. Snelling's family after the couples' bodies were found early Thursday in which they said that Charles Snelling apparently "could no longer bear to see the love of his life deteriorate further."

The Snellings had five children and 11 grandkids.

Don Cornelius hosting 'Soul Train' in style

Legendary creator and host of the R&B dance/variety show Soul Train Don Cornelius was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound earlier this morning in his Muholland Drive home, reports The New York Times.

Mr. Cornelius was widely credited with bringing African-American performers like Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Michael Jackson to the public's consciousness during Soul Train's almost 35 year syndicated run: one of the longest in history.

As he ended every show, the former radio jockey would turn to the cameras. "And you can bet your last money, it's all gonna be a stone gas, honey! I'm Don Cornelius, and as always in parting, we wish you love, peace and soul."

We don't feel so well. (Getty)

For almost five years now, the housing crisis has been a drag on the U.S. economy, the U.S. psyche, the U.S. spirit. It turns out it is also dragging down Americans’ health.

A new study by two economists finds a relationship between the number of foreclosures in a community and the number of hospital visits, according to The Wall Street Journal. Princeton’s Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University studied residents in Arizona, California, Florida and New Jersey, and they discovered “an increase of 100 foreclosures corresponded to a 7.2% rise in emergency room visits and hospitalizations for hypertension, and an 8.1% increase for diabetes, among people aged 20 to 49.” There has also been a rise in suicides.

The Journal notes that general financial stress could be as much to blame as the housing bubble, but since the two are so intimately intertwined, the case either way seems strong. Furthermore, because there was not a corresponding rise in cancer or elective surgeries at hospitals, it appears that the hospitalizations were more stress related than anything.

There is evidence of these problems outside the states studied, too. The Journal found Patricia Graci, a Staten Island woman whose husband lost his job as a painter in 2008, which led to two years of dwindling savings spent on mortgage payments until nothing was left. "Everything was going downhill. My savings were going down to nothing," Ms. Graci told the daily. "When I realized the money wasn't there anymore, I started getting very anxious and depressed."

Then there is the unfortunate case of Norman Adelman.

In 2008, Norman Adelman of Freehold, N.J., called his lender to ask for a forbearance of three or four months, saying he was about to undergo knee-replacement surgery. The lender complied and Mr. Adelman, who runs a home-energy business, says he began scaling back his work. He underwent needed tests and doctor visits.

After two months of not paying his mortgage, he successfully applied for a loan modification, taking his monthly payment from $2,700 to $1,900. But then the loan was sold—and a new servicer didn't recognize the terms of the arrangement, he says.

Mr. Adelman is fighting the new lender but says he has been in and out of the hospital for the last two years. He never had his knees replaced and is now on antidepressants and antianxiety medication.

"He's deteriorated. He's had sleepless nights," says his wife, Shulamis. "You always have this fear of being thrown out. He's just gotten worse and worse from not sleeping."

So which do we need more—chicken soup or loan modifications?

mchaban@observer.com

But when 40-year-old British designer Alexander McQueen committed suicide last February, the Met began to scramble furiously. They scrapped plans for the scheduled exhibition and got to work on the upcoming retrospective "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," that opens May 4.

Costume Institute curator-in-charge Harold Koda and exhibition curator Andrew Bolton reasoned they had to act quickly--there might not be another chance, since McQueen's body of work would disperse and deteriorate over time. "If you leave a show too long, there's a lot of revision that goes on," said Mr. Bolton--revisions in history, both personal and couturatorial. At Vogue, whose editor in chief, Anna Wintour, serves as annual co-chair of the event, there was "a resounding desire, both publicly and within the fashion industry, to pay homage to Alexander McQueen," said Vogue's director of special events, Sylvana Ward Durrett, in an email. "This year's Costume Institute Gala, she said, was "an opportunity to salute his legacy." Met director Thomas Campbell, who's had experience curating shows of textiles, was already familiar with McQueen's work from the Met's 2006 "AngloMania" exhibit, and gave the show the go-ahead swiftly.

No doubt the drama of McQueen's death led to some of the early urgency in the fashion community. "It was sort of like Marilyn Monroe dying right at her peak," said Tiffany Dubin, founder of the Sotheby's couture department and author of Vintage Fashion.

Mr. Bolton and Mr. Koda recognized that the theme had the formula for success--it was timely; he was popular; and McQueen was a natural provocateur: He once hired a double amputee to model a pair of hand-crafted wooden legs. He made a name for himself by parading battered models down the runway for a "Highland Rape" collection.

Still, many samples of McQueen's most notable pieces, like his famously low-rise "bumster" trousers, were missing. The house would have to track down the far-flung "club kids," as Koda put it, who had purchased much of McQueen's early work when he still needed the cash to pay rent.

In the main gallery of the Metropolitan, Mr. Bolton is refashioning McQueen's "very raw, hardscrabble" London studio, laying wood-planked floors and showing a selection of his earliest pieces. As viewers move throughout the rest of the exhibit, they will encounter hand-crafted wooden wings, Victorian corsets, ghostly projections of Karen Elson and Kate Moss, accessories from McQueen's jewelry and hat collaborations and about a hundred pieces of clothing, ranging from his postgraduate designs at Central St. Martins in 1992 to his posthumous "Angels and Demons" collection. Judging by the hype already surrounding the McQueen show, the switch was a prescient one. There's already a wait list longer than usual for the $10,000 tickets to the Institute's annual gala, on May 2, co-chaired by Stella McCartney, Colin Firth and Ms. Wintour. At a Council of Fashion Designers of America tribute to McQueen last year, executive director Steven Kolb remembered how "the audience was so, so touched. What's going to happen at the Met will be moving because he's still part of a generation of young designers."

Chimed in New York stylist and fashion commentator Mary Alice Stephenson, who will be dressing Hilary Rhoda and Joan Smalls for this year's gala, "It will be a particularly emotional night because of what's happening with John Galliano," the recently deposed Dior designer. "There's an amplification of attention to designers who have personal histories."

Poor Charles James. Before McQueen's death, the curators were planning a show for this spring titled "Against Nature," which would have featured five houses helmed by "designers that dealt with the body in an interesting way," said Mr. Koda. McQueen was already on that list, and Mr. Koda floated the names of Christian Dior and James as possible others. New York couturier James has been the subject of retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum and F.I.T., but he has yet to receive his Met moment, and it was delayed again.

As for the McQueen show, the Met curators originally worried there wouldn't be enough material available for the kind of in-depth retrospective they had in mind. When they called London, though, they found that McQueen had kept extensive archives throughout his entire career. Years ago, the designer had kept it all "stuffed in a tiny closet," and he used it primarily for his own research, often "cannibalizing" old pieces to design new ones, Mr. Koda said. There were still some 5,000 pieces  and a repository of McQueen works at Givenchy from his tenure there.

It was a daunting task, but no doubt worth it to Sarah Burton, McQueen's longtime assistant and the label's current head, and the company. "This will cement him in fashion history," Ms. Dubin said. "Going forward, it means more awareness of the brand because exhibits produce catalogs and press. It will maybe extend his reach and create opportunities for future licensing--McQueen is not a mass-market brand and does not, as far as I know, have a huge amount of licenses."

The clothes and accessories are being mailed to the Met now, and Mr. Bolton has begun editing them down into a few main themes. The production designers, Sam Gainsbury and Joseph Bennett (who also designed some of McQueen's runway shows), took inspiration, for instance, from McQueen's 2001 "Insane Asylum" collection, in which the audience sat around a mirrored cube that lit up to reveal deranged models inside. They reinterpreted this "box within a box" leitmotif in one of the galleries with a display of McQueen's signature romantic gothic costumes, and within that room, in a box, will be a mini-collection of deconstructed pieces.

In a technical section of the exhibit, the recovered bumsters, kimono jackets, skirts and other trousers will make up a "study" of McQueen's tailoring skills. But Mr. Koda didn't want to focus too much on technique because McQueen "really is about a spirit," he said, "an approach to creativity that is the romantic hero, me against all, and making the unexpected beautiful--and that's Andrew's take on it."

The ball is the Costume Institute's main fund-raiser, generating "gobs" of money, according to Rogues' Gallery author (and gadfly to the Met) Michael Gross. "It also has a halo effect, for both good and ill. It raises consciousness of the museum around the world, and the institute's exhibits draw huge crowds who do contribute to the bottom line, but the party and its denizens--the fashion crowd and the skin puppets and rock stars who love playing dress-up for the cameras--also lower the museum's image, turning it into one more mass-market circus."

The exhibit will end July 31, but next year's show is already in the works. Mr. Koda hinted that it will likely present one of the short-listed designers in the original "Against Nature" show. Could it be Dior, or perhaps feature Mr. James? His pieces are notoriously hard to find, but since the Costume Institute acquired the Brooklyn Museum's archives two years ago--home to about 200 Charles James garments--it now seems possible.

In the meantime, one thing is certain: We can expect to see celebrities in "a parade of McQueen's greatest hits" in May, Ms. Stephenson said. "The whole fashion world will be peacocking."

Anthony and Rita Bucklew bought the home where Scott Lee Kimball allegedly killed four women, a male relative and tried to kill his own 10-year-old son, according to Housing Watch. Gruesome stuff, indeed.

"We don't want the stigma with it," said Mr. Buckley. "People are driving by the house staring, taking pictures, calling us psychos," which all seems like rather unneighborly behavior. "It has gotten out of hand," he added.

The broker reportedly says he can get them almost 50 percent off the purchase price of $525,000, and pay for a "cleansing service." Yuck.

While many states have laws requiring brokers to disclose if murder, sex scandals, suicide or certain other types of mayhem have occured in their new abode, there's not a lot of precedent. New York is one of only a couple where the contract can be retroactively voided.

Research shows that, indeed, having some horrible event occur on a property can mean it takes 50 percent longer to sell, and go for well under the market rate.

There are, of course, exceptions. After Gianni Versace was gunned down outside his mansion in 1997, the home apparently sold for $19 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a house in Miami-Dade County.

New York, along with California, is one of the few states that will grant a recision. The New York Supreme Court has been soundly mocked for a case in 1991 in which it considered the case of New York bond trader Jeffrey Stambovsky's sprawling 18-room Victorian home overlooking the Hudson River. Mr. Stambovsky said he should be able to void the contract because the house was supposedly inhabited by a cheerful “little person” in Revolutionary garb with “a round, apple-cheeked face,” who pranced around and once even ate a ham sandwich.

And he won.

lkusisto@observer.com