This week: a Czech footballer, an octogenarian adventurer and an icon of the civil rights movement
THE footballer Josef Sural, pictured, who died aged 28 in a minibus crash involving a number of his team-mates, played for the Turkish side Aytemiz Alanyaspor and the Czech Republic. He earned the last of his 20 caps for his country in the Nations League defeat to Ukraine in October last year.
The forward and six of his team-mates from the Turkish top-flight club were travelling in a private minibus following a game in Kayserispor when the accident occurred.
Sural started his career at FC Zbrojovka Brno having come through their football academy. He made 37 appearances for the club before moving to Slovan Liberec in 2011.
He then moved to Sparta Prague in 2016, where he was captain until his move to Turkey in January.
Sural scored once during his 20 caps for his country in a 3-2 win against Holland in October 2015. He was part of the squad that participated at Euro 2016.
He is survived by his wife Denisa and their daughters Vanessa and Melissa Denise.
THE businesswoman and adventurer Heidi Hetzer, who has died aged 81, attracted fame late-in-life when she decided to drive around the world in an American vintage car.
A trained mechanic who once lost a finger repairing an engine, Ms Hetzer took over the family car business in 1969, turning it into one of Berlin's biggest.
Having taken part in various car rallies for decades and driven from Germany to China in 2007, Ms Hetzer decided to take her 1930s Hudson Greater Eight on a world tour in 2014.
She documented her journey on Instagram and received a hero's welcome on her return to Berlin in 2017.
Ms Hetzer's family said she died at her home in the German capital over the weekend with the cause of death unclear.
THE American judge Damon J. Keith, who has died aged 96, was a grandson of slaves who became a leading figure in the civil rights movement.
Keith served more than 50 years in the federal courts, and before his death still heard cases about four times a year at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
A revered figure in Detroit for years, Keith captured the nation’s attention with the wiretapping case against Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell in 1971. Keith said they could not engage in the warrantless wiretapping of three people suspected of conspiring to destroy government property. The decision was affirmed by the appellate court, and the Nixon administration appealed and sued Keith personally. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the judge prevailed in what became known as “the Keith case.”
Keith revisited the civil liberties theme roughly 30 years later in an opinion that said President George W. Bush could not conduct secret deportation hearings of terrorism suspects. Keith’s opinion contained the line, “Democracies die behind closed doors.”
“During his more than 50 years on the federal bench, he handed down rulings that have safeguarded some of our most important and cherished civil liberties, stopping illegal government wiretaps and secret deportation hearings, as well as ending racial segregation in Pontiac (Michigan) schools,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement.
Keith said the phrase, “Equal justice under law,” etched onto the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, inspired him and always summoned the lessons Thurgood Marshall taught him as one of his professors at Howard University. Marshall became the first black Supreme Court justice in October 1967.
He recalled Marshall saying, “The white men wrote those four words. When you leave Howard, I want you to go out and practice law and see what you can do to enforce those four words.”
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