January 23, 1986

Jonah Perry was acquitted yesterday of mugging a plainclothes police officer in an incident that led to the killing of his younger brother, Edmund, a youth from the streets of Harlem who won honors at Phillips Exeter Academy. At 2:30 P.M., after four hours of deliberation, the jury in State Supreme Court in Manhattan announced that it had found Jonah Perry, a 19-year-old Cornell University sophomore, not guilty of assaulting and trying to rob Officer Lee Van Houten on Morningside Heights last June 12. The jury's verdict seemed to conflict with the decision by a grand jury last summer not to bring any charges against Officer Van Houten. And in doing so, the new jury left a number of questions about who did what in the troubling case - a case involving two outstanding Harlem youths and a police officer with an unblemished record. Accusations of 'Frame-Up' From the outset, the Perry family and its lawyers portrayed the incident as a racially motivated ''murder'' of Edmund, who was 17, followed by a ''frame-up'' by the Police Department and the Manhattan District Attorney's office. The Perry family is black; Officer Van Houten, who is 25, is white.

A report in the Company News column of Business Day yesterday misstated the terms of takeover offers from Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company for the Beatrice Companies. The original offer was for $43 in cash and $7 in preferred stock; a revised offer was for $40 in cash and $10 in preferred stock.

A chart in Business Day on Monday with an article about Voest-Alpine, Austria's largest state-owned industrial concern, misstated the exchange rate for the Austrian schilling. It is 17.25 to the dollar.

Eastern Airlines is at the most critical stage in its long struggle for survival. Frank Borman, the chief executive for the last nine years, has weathered a history of crises but acknowledges that this one, heightened by the carrier's determination to permanently slash wage costs, could decide whether the airline survives. In a reflective and candid interview today in his office at the company's headquarters here, he discussed his often tumultuous relations with Eastern's unions, his strategy for dealing with the current crisis and the possibility of the airline seeking protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy laws. That might allow the carrier to restructure costs in the same way that Frank Lorenzo, the president of the Texas Air Corporation, did with Continental Airlines.

A picture caption in The Home Section on Dec. 26 with an article about the Gold and Silver Ball misidentified a guest, shown at the center of a group wearing black dresses. She was Alexis Brashich.