Mom in horrific fatal crash in Clay remembers car flipping through air (Our top stories for the week of Oct. 13)

Each week, syracuse.com will look back at some of our best stories from the previous week. Here are six stories for the week of Oct. 13, 2024.
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It was just chance that Shaylee Allen was driving through an intersection in Clay on Sunday when a speeding car drove through a red light and slammed into her car. Allen, 26, of Tully, said in an interview from her hospital room Monday that she doesn’t remember the start of the crash. What she does remember is this: Her car kept rolling over and over.
For more than a year, the city paid one of its highest-paid public works employees to not work while investigators probed claims he lied about his hours to boost his overtime pay. The head of human resources recommended Hunter be fired. Instead, Mayor Ben Walsh’s administration settled for a two-week suspension. In the end, Hunter’s union fought even that suspension and won.
After he flipped a New York State Senate seat that had been in Republican hands for more than 50 years, it didn’t take John Mannion much time to separate himself from his fellow Democrats. Three months into office, Mannion became the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against a priority of his colleagues and advocates for criminal justice reform – a bill to end solitary confinement in New York prisons. Nearly four years later, an examination of Mannion’s voting record and legislative work shows a consistent pattern: He has emerged as a moderate lawmaker who, at times, has pushed back against key priorities of the governor and Senate Democratic majority.
Dostdar Ali Khel and his family moved to the United States in 2017 from Afghanistan to start a new life. They were escaping the violence of that country after Dostdar’s father was killed in a bombing. Dostdar’s mom and her nine children made their home in Syracuse. On Oct. 7, Dostdar, 16, was shot and killed at a friend’s home on the North Side. “He was just a kid,” said Jameel Ali Khel, 23, his oldest brother. “It’s too young. For that age, to die like that, it is too hard.”
SU is 5-1, tied for second in the ACC and winning the type of close games it routinely lost in recent seasons. By most metrics, and certainly the important ones, Syracuse is having a successful season. For those watching, coaching and, most importantly, among the players themselves, there is an acknowledgment that a sizable list of things remain that require either fixing or fine-tuning for the success to continue.
Onondaga County’s most populous town has no downtown or central square where people gather to work, shop, dine and hold events like July 4th parades. The closest Clay ever got was Great Northern Mall, but that’s a ghost mall, for now. All that could change if the town adopts a new land use plan that would guide development in the coming Micron era.