This entry on Rip Post is so accurate it’s scary. I worked there in the late 80s right up until the last day. (that’s me in the back row holding a cigarette)

Let us now turn to the departed L.A. Herald-Examiner, in late 70s and early 80s, where the only stability was instability. This was newsroom as chaos theory. When I was first offered a job there, I looked around the place and turned it down. Picture: rows of ancient metal desks with reporters shouting into phones, shouting at editors, banging on old Royal and Olympia mechanical typewriters, waiting in line to use the dozen-or-so computers available (waiting in line to make deadlines!), smoking (cigarettes, cigars, pipes), cursing, running to move cars so they didnt get parking tickets. Bus diesel blew in through opened windows, past Venetian blinds not changed since the 40s or 50s. I later came to my senses and took the job.
          The Her-Ex at that time was a Mardis Gras of union disputes, threatened strikes, city editor reshuffling, section redesign, occasional physical confrontation, and extremely hard work. Duly legendary editor-in-chief Jim Bellows stocked the place with free-spirits, top-to-bottom. As Im fond of saying, even the assholes were talented. There were no weak personalities there. They would not have lasted long. Top reporters salary: about five bills a week. Most made four or less. Imported big-gun (highly paid) columnists worked right in the newsroom with the mostly kid reporters.
          I recall an editorial clash being resolved, more or less, by a reporter shot-putting a typewriter into a wall. Then there were the occasional sleepover parties, when cots were rolled in during periods when strikes were feared, so management could live on the premises if necessary. One city editor regularly returned from lunch very hyped up and sniffling a lot. A columnist came to work a few times in drag (he was writing a lot about transvestites at the time.)
          One horrid day in 1980, we all arrived to find that our friend and colleague, Sarai Ribicoff, had been murdered in a robbery. A couple of months later, the newsroom drafted me to write a letter to Rolling Stone criticizing an article about the murder for RS freelanced by a Her-Ex columnist. Being idealistic and stupid (often the same thing), I wrote the letter, and was later attacked in the newsroom by the columnist, who first tried to choke me to death over a dictionary (poetic!), then pummeled me in the face, head, and neck until a copyboy and city editor Larry Burrough pulled him off. 30! (Yes, I threw one punch in retaliation, but, sad to say, it did no harm.) When the supervising editor refused to come to my aid, I called the cops. They came to the newsroom, did their interviews, and were given milk and cookies.
          Then I went back to work.
          There was a rumor that a reporter fired a pistol in the office, but that was before my time. (The late City Hall reporter Mike Qualls was said to have one strapped to his calf.) There were very few neckties at the Her-Ex, and decidedly not-couture apparel among the ladies (fashion editors excepted.) Half the staff was in and out of Corkys Bar across the street all day and night, some of them puking in the gutter before going back to meet a deadline. Irreverence, irony, sarcasm, and Pepto-Bismol were exalted.
          Small wonder that the paper poked fun at The Times, calling it The Whale in its Page Two column. Small wonder, also, that the Her-Ex beat the Times in several L.A. Press Club competitions in those years, in total number of awards.
          Point being: that place felt like a newspaper. A roiling, percolating den of ideas and disputes, with news-beats kind of spilling over into each other. We did a great job in spite of—or because of—instability. Once again, John Carroll:
          The more worried everyone got, the better the work seemed to get.

This from police reporter Robert Hong in the PSN:

PASADENA – Standing at darkened Lincoln Avenue at MacDonald Street, Brother Jaysee watched as the sinister-looking car cruised past slowly, then abruptly wheeled around in a circle.

Driving directly at him, the sedan came to a screeching halt less than a foot away. Inside, the driver leaned out the window and stared hard for a moment at the 49-year-old community activist and the weather-worn sign he was holding.

“Save a life, soldier,” Jaysee softly told the man, who paused for a few seconds before pulling away and driving off.

Tense questions mingled in the air with the car’s exhaust: Were the driver or his passenger armed? Had they intended to do him harm? Did the message on his tattered sign – “We Must Stop Killing Us!” – just save his own life?

Continue reading here. 

This is the third-day story following the murder of Suzanna Jaramillo by Gustavo Tellez, who later committed suicide.

Tellez was a illegal alien with a criminal record that stretched back to 1991. Among his crimes: Assault with a deadly weapon, spousal abuse, resisting arrest and possession of narcotics. Additionally, Tellez had been deported four times by agents with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

Here’s the story:

WHITTIER – Whittier police responding to a domestic dispute in 2006 routinely consulted a national criminal database to see whether Gustavo Tellez or Suzanna Jaramillo were subject to arrest warrants or immigration hold.

The checks came back clean, though Tellez – a convicted felon – was in the country illegally after being deported four times by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

And, he presented a valid California driver’s license, officials said Wednesday.

Tellez on Monday killed Jaramillo and then fatally shot himself in a Whittier apartment.

“I guarantee if this guy had a warrant or anything from ICE in that file in ’06 he would have gone to jail,” said Whittier police Chief David Singer.

Information about an ICE hold on Tellez should have been added to a database file maintained by the National Crime Information Center, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said, adding she was uncertain whether a routine background check would have revealed Tellez’s history.

“A lot of times there’s no hit on first entry,” Kice said. “There are tens of thousands of offenders like this in the system and even the more egregious are sometimes overlooked.”

Tellez, 35, had a criminal history that stretches back to the early 1990s. He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, spousal abuse and drug possession among other offenses. He lived with Jaramillo, 32, in an apartment in the 7600 block of Newlin Avenue.

Orange

County CHP officers cited Tellez in July and December 2007 for speeding, according to court records.

Like most agencies, neither the CHP nor Whittier police run extensive criminal background checks until they have arrested someone.

“If we run somebody and they come back as a felon subject to deportation, at the very least we’re going to (take a report) and contact ICE. We don’t just give them a revolving door,” Whittier police spokesman Jason Zuhlke said. “A lot of times on these domestics you see it’s a genuine couple that had a verbal argument and that’s it.”

Anything more than a routine warrant check is unlikely, he said.

In 2001, Tellez was deported for the first time. That same year federal agents arrested Tellez, and he was sentenced to 60 months for “felony re-entry,” Kice said.

Kice said Tellez appealed his first deportation order in 2001. He lost the appeal and was deported to Mexico in 2004.

In February 2005, ICE agents found Tellez in the Ventura County jail serving time for drug possession and resisting arrest, according to officials and court records. He was deported, that time, from Los Angeles County Jail.

Days after the deportation, Tellez was caught trying to cross back into the United States at San Ysidro, south of San Diego, Kice said.

“That’s the last record we have of him,” she said. “This is a man who did not have any regard for our borders or our laws.”

The bodies of Tellez and Jaramillo, 32, were found by a friend Monday, police said.

Investigators believe Tellez fatally shot Jaramillo before shooting himself, Zuhlke said.

frank.girardot@ sgvn.com

(626) 962-8811, Ext. 2717

http://www.insidesocal.com/sgvcrime