Longtime AP Bureau Chief David Pyle Has Passed Away

By The Associated Press

David L. Pyle, a longtime bureau chief, news editor and reporter during his 33-year career with The Associated Press, has died. He was 61.

Pyle, who worked for the news cooperative in five states, most of it as bureau chief in Minnesota and Wisconsin, died at his home Monday in the St. Paul suburb of Apple Valley, according to his son, Christopher Pyle.

The Iowa native joined AP as a newsman in Omaha in 1979. He later worked in Dallas and Providence, Rhode Island, before moving in 1991 to Minneapolis, where he spent the last two decades of his career and oversaw major breaking news.

Such stories included the 2007 Minneapolis bridge collapse, in which 13 people were killed and 145 injured when the Interstate 35W bridge broke apart over the Mississippi River during evening rush hour, and U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death in a plane crash in 2002. He also oversaw the marathon recount of the state’s U.S. Senate race in 2008, and coverage of a teenage gunman’s 2005 shooting at a high school on the Red Lake reservation that killed 10 people.

Read more of the AP’s remembrances of Pyle here.

A memorial service is scheduled for Pyle at 11 a.m. on Friday, April 17. More info is in the Star Tribune obituary.