April 24, 1993

Cesar Chavez, the migrant worker who emerged from the poverty of an agricultural valley in Arizona to found America's first successful union of farm workers, was found dead yesterday in San Luis, Ariz. He was 66. Mr. Chavez, who lived in Keene, Calif., and was in Arizona on union business, died in his sleep, the local police said. An autopsy is planned.

So far, David Johnston has spent 13 hours this week in Row G of the Grand Tier at the Metropolitan Opera, watching Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung." He logged two and a half hours on Monday, five on Tuesday and five and a half on Thursday. He faces another five and a half tonight at "Gotterdammerung." For this marathon, he flew 4,000 miles from his home in Graz, Austria, which is only a couple of hours from Vienna and is not all that far from the opera house Wagner himself had built in Bayreuth, Germany. This raises the question: Why go so far for operas he could attend there?

Three Glen Ridge, N.J., men who were found guilty of sexually assaulting a retarded schoolmate were sentenced today to serve time in a campuslike complex for young offenders. Though they were sentenced to up to 15 years, they could be released after as little as 22 months. And the three were allowed to remain free on bail until exhausting their legal appeals, which could take years.

They took turns swinging batons at each other in slow motion. They put on an officer's black boot and stomped on the ground. They fired a disarmed stun gun. They got into yelling matches and called each other names. In seven days of emotional deliberations, the jurors in the civil rights trial of the four officers accused of beating Rodney G. King acted out myriad scenarios to see which theory -- the prosecution's or the defense's -- held up best.

In the early morning hours, the police alert had shattered the quiet: A tall black man in a blue jacket and sneakers had assaulted a white officer, leaving him bloodied. The radio message touched off a feverish search for the suspect through the streets of a racially mixed neighborhood in the southwest part of Yonkers, a city that has had more than its share of racial divisions. At least one black man was stopped and questioned in the vestibule of a building.