Texas briefs

Texas court rejects appeal in dismemberment case

AUSTIN (AP) — The state's highest criminal appeals court has rejected a petition from a former University of Texas student convicted of killing a 21-year-old woman whose body was found in a bathtub with her head and hands cut off.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Colton Pitonyak's petition for review without comment Wednesday. His lawyers had argued that the police search warrant was invalid because it was based on criminal trespassing by the boyfriend of the victim's mother.

After police declined to forcibly enter the building, the boyfriend broke into Pitonyak's apartment and discovered Jennifer Cave's body in the bathtub, her head and hands in a bag on the floor. Cave, 21, had been missing for two days.

Pitonyak was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the 2005 murder.

"This is strictly a matter of state law interpretation," said Joe Turner, one of Pitonyak's lawyers, in a story in the Austin American-Statesman. "And if the court refuses to hear it, then that decision is final."

Cave's mother, Sharon Cave, celebrated the ruling in an e-mail to the newspaper.

"YEA!," she wrote. "Now if we can just get past Laura (Hall)."

Hall is appealing her five-year sentence for evidence tampering in the case. Prosecutors argued that Hall, a friend of Pitonyak's, helped dismember Cave's body.

9 endangered prairie chickens released into wild

VICTORIA (AP) — Environmental groups on Wednesday released nine endangered Attwater's prairie chickens onto a 6,000-acre private ranch, the latest step in an effort to reintroduce the dwindling species into the wild.

The population of the chickens, named for amateur naturalist Henry Philemon Attwater, who supervised the Texas natural history exhibit at the World's Fair in New Orleans in 1884, once numbered 1 million. But as suitable coastal prairie habitat dwindled in Texas, fewer than 100 birds remained in the wild, conservation officials said.

Environmental groups last year began releasing chickens bred in captivity onto private ranches, hoping they would flourish. Just eight of the original 55 birds have survived, said Wade Harrell, coastal prairies project director for the Nature Conservancy of Texas, in a story Thursday in the Victoria Advocate.

Hawks and ground predators feed on the chickens. The agencies are hoping for a 20 percent annual survival rate, Harrell said.

The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other partners began releasing another 135 birds in August, Harrell said.

The chickens released Wednesday hatched in May from Sea World and the San Antonio Zoo. The others being released come from breeding programs at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose and the Houston, Caldwell and Abilene zoos.

"They have to learn to be wild birds," Harrell said.