Suit Settled In Dumbwaiter Death

ELLENSBURG - The Cle Elum-Roslyn School District has agreed to pay $700,000 to the mother of a boy who died after being trapped for hours in an abandoned school's dumbwaiter shaft.

The settlement was reached last week in Kittitas County Superior Court, just as Penny Krahenbuhl's wrongful-death lawsuit was to begin.

On Sept. 18, 1995, the doors to the abandoned school were chained shut. But Krahenbuhl's 11-year-old son, Barrett Lange, slipped in and climbed into a dumbwaiter shaft, a two-foot cubicle.

Fire crews freed the boy, but he died of internal injuries the next morning.