Azusa: July 2008 Archives

This photo comes from the SGVT circa 1970. It shows Azusa police dispatcher Kandee Kahn hard at work. Here's Kandee's story, which reads like something from the wild west.

Jennifer McLain shot this picture at lunchtime near the intersection of Arrow Highway and Enid street in Covina/Azusa.

Apparently a car blew through the intersection about 12:30 p.m. and caused a three car accident that sent three people to the hospital with minor injuries.

A passerby saw the body in a flood channel near Pasadena Avenue and
Duell Street about 6:50 p.m., said Azusa police Sgt. Sam Fleming. The age and gender of the body could not be immediately determined due to the severe decomposition, he said.

Kandee Kahn worked as a police dispatcher throughout what might be considered the Wild West.

In more than 35 years on the job, Kahn, who grew up in La Puente, spent time in some pretty rough towns -- places like Yakima, Casper and Reno.

But perhaps the roughest place she worked was Azusa in the early 1970s as one of the city's first civilian dispatchers.

I came across Kandee in a sort of unusual way -- via a phone call from a copy machine place in Reno. The clerk had a customer who wanted to photocopy an old newspaper. The clerk wanted to know if it was OK to copy it.

Thinking it might be one of my masterpieces, I asked the clerk what the article was about.
"Judging from the clothes and the hairdos it looks like something from the late '60s or early '70s," she said. "It's titled, 'She was not too young at all.'"

The clerk said the story was about a teenaged police dispatcher in Azusa who had earned the admiration of her colleagues and the city's police chief.

I said, "Hey, do you have the number of the guy who wants the copies?" I got it, dialed away and left a message.

Bob Kahn called me back and put Kandee on the line. He was making a copy of the article in honor of the couple's 20th wedding anniversary. And, they wanted their two children to have a memento of an interesting life.

"I was 19 when they wrote that article, and too young to be working," she recalled. "I mentioned that to one of the reporters and he wrote about it."

Police Department rules at the time required dispatchers to be 21, but the administration winked and looked the other way.

As Kandee tells it, those were some wild days in Azusa.

One Saturday afternoon a couple of cops responding to a rambunctious wedding reception somewhere in town were hauled out of their car and nearly beaten to death.

"It was a pretty tough community during that time," Kandee said. "It got to a point that I remember officers from other agencies would call and ask, 'Where do you think the riot is going to be this weekend?'

"A lot of times when swing shift went off duty instead of going home they would sit in the dispatch center waiting for the riot of the day," Kandee continued.

Then there was the day an angry mob of 300 or so marched down Foothill Boulevard from the drive-in headed straight toward the police station.

The sergeant comes in and says, 'they are coming here to the station to get the prisoners and they claim they are going to kill anybody in the station.'"

Kandee said her boss handed her something like a "flamethrower" and gave her a hand gun as well because he didn't have enough people to protect the police headquarters. His final instructions were simple:

"'If they come in here, grab the records clerk and run into the back office and pray,'" she recalled.

Kandee hasn't been back to the San Gabriel Valley since the early 1980s. But at least she has a souvenir that's better than any postcard.

Although we initially reported the unidentified man who was killed in this incident was from an unidentified street gang, officials now say the dead man was a member of the Azusa 13 Gang.

From Brian Day's story:

AZUSA - A man was shot to death early Sunday in a gang-related attack, authorities said.

The shooting occurred about 1:15 a.m. in an alley in the 100 block of Newburgh Street, said Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Rick Pedroza.

The dead man was initially described only as a 23-year-old Azusa resident pending notification of family members, said Los Angeles County

Department of Coroner Investigator Jerry McKibben.

He is believed to have been a member of a local street gang, Deputy Derrick Thompson said.

The man died at the scene after being shot several times in the "upper torso," said Deputy Derrick Thompson.