My apologies for the dearth of posts as of late. Unlike my old crime-blogging days, where the weekend yielded plenty of fodder, it's a little slow on weekends and holidays, court-wise. I meant to update the Jury finds apartment owner liable for employee's alleged murderous habits post from late Thursday, but got caught up in the usual weekend rush. And so now, with courts closed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I'm finally getting my act together.

Here's the story from Saturday....

In an unusual civil case with little legal precedent, a jury has found a Burbank apartment owner and manager liable in the death of a former tenant because they hired a convicted felon and registered sex offender as a handyman.

Santos, an analyst with Warner Bros., was raped and killed, then stuffed into the trunk of her car. The Burbank Police Department is still investigating the case, and nobody has been arrested.

To give you some background, this was a weird story from the beginning. We got a press release from the lawyer representing Edna Santos, the victim's mother, at 6 p.m. on Thursday, right as I was packing up to go home. I wrote that initial story, which ended up holding, then came back at it on Friday morning. With some timely assistance from Jason and Mr. Dobuzinskis, I managed to rope it all together around 4:30 p.m.

To get some of the files, I had to go to the records room at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. They didn't have the files I needed, but let me use the public terminal, which is not-so-conveniently located behind a glass wall similar to what you see at a bank. You reach through a little slot to use the keyboard and mouse, then crank your neck over to see the screen, all while people are bustling around you. Suffice to say, it's not the most comfortable arrangement.

By the end, I had what I needed and was able to get to writing. There were a bunch of weird legal issues to wade through:

- The civil case, with a two-year statute of limitations, beat the criminal case to trial.
- Rodriguez's employers are held liable for misdeeds for which he's never been formally accused.
- He's been convicted and sent to prison on very similar charges, sexual battery and breaking into people's apartments where Ms. Santos lived, but there's no formal allegation he did the same to her.
- The DNA evidence from her car still hasn't come back from the Sheriff's crime lab. Unlike CSI would lead you to believe, these things take a lot of time to make it through the system.

And there's probably more than that, too. I hope we coherently sketched out what's at stake here and will be able to revisit it later on, if and when the DA's able to bring criminal charges. In the meantime, at least he's not going anywhere.