oddball, weird, assorted: March 2008 Archives

Matt Drudge headlined his link to an AP story about the latest freeway shooting “War zone: Driver found shot in L.A. freeway wreck.”

War zone. Interesting choice of words.

Ever since moving here in the early 1980s, I’ve always been hyper-conscious of the possibility of encountering a gun on a freeway.

I’m pretty sure that in ’85 or ’86 a really mad guy driving a Bimmer near the junction of the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways waved a piece out the window at me in my beat up, air-conditionless 1974 Mustang II. It occurred right after I crossed something like three lanes of traffic to go from the south 55 to the south 405, because that interchange was pretty darned confusing and difficult to navigate back then.

In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a spate of shootings on area freeways, all of which have baffled police and frightened motorists. The outcomes weren’t as benign as my encounter 20-plus years ago.

At least two of the recent incidents were fatal. A couple of others nearly fatal. One may have been the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Here’s the roundup:

[BULLET]On March 12, Deborah Lynn Lepper, a 54-year-old Rancho Cucamonga chiropractor, was shot to death along a stretch of the 10 Freeway near White Avenue in Pomona. The case remains unsolved.

[BULLET]On Feb. 27, just a few miles north on the 210 Freeway between Irwindale and Grand avenues, a 46-year-old man was shot several times.

Azusa police told reporters a compact car pulled alongside the unidentified man and started shooting.

“And as he’s traveling eastbound at some point a vehicle opened fired on his car, striking his car several times on the passenger-side door,” Lt. Paul Dennis, of the Azusa Police Department, told a KABC reporter. “The vehicle was struck several times and our victim was hit a couple of times as well.”

[BULLET]This past Saturday night a man driving on the northbound 710 Freeway near Del Amo Avenue was apparently shot several times by someone in another car.

[BULLET]On Sunday the alarm was sounded when a man was found shot to death on the 101 Freeway in Sherman Oaks. It turns out his death may have been a suicide.

So much for the war zone theory.

Of course the truth is there are probably people getting killed every day on the freeway — just not by gunfire. So we don’t notice it as much, unless it ruins our commute or its gruesome enough to make the morning news.

After a day or so of keeping up with news accounts, reading blogs and listening to radio traffic reports about the recent shootings, it dawned on me that our freeways no longer have names.

There is no San Bernardino, no Pomona, no Long Beach, no Santa Monica, no Hollywood, no Golden State, no Artesia, no San Diego, no Foothill, no Harbor, no Pasadena, no San Gabriel River.

All those places, all those evocative names, they all add up to one two-word phrase that just as aptly describes the area outside of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

War Zone. Thanks, Drudge.

This from night cop reporter Brian Day. The photo of the suspected thief comes from the West Covina PD The photo of Moe comes from the archive:

WEST COVINA - The former owners of "Moe" the chimp are offering a reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of a woman who stole from them Saturday.

La Donna and St. James Davis, who now uses a wheelchair after being attacked by chimps in March of 2005, were shopping at Target in the

Eastland Shopping Center when the theft occurred, West Covina police officials said.

As La Donna briefly turned away from the cart, where her purse was, a woman stole the purse containing the Davises IDs, credit cards, bank cards, and St. James medication and medical information, said a friend of the Davises, Michael McCasland.

The thief quickly left the store and got into a waiting white dodge truck, he added.

McCasland said he believes the Davises were targeted because while La Donna was distracted, the thief hoped to take advantage of a man in a wheelchair.

Some pointy-headed poindexter in Great Britain came up with this one, it's called Nomophobia. Simply put it's the fear of being without your mobile telephone for any length of time.

I apparently suffer from this disease. Although I'll confess that when I first saw the term I assumed it applied to fantasy baseball managers thinking about drafting a certain (non) starting pitcher who's attempting a comeback with the Kansas City Royals.

It actually had nothing to do with Hideo Nomo, so there's still no word in the language to cover those fantasy sports sickos who will do anything to get a post draft bargain.

Nomo's apparently hurt anyway with a pulled groin muscle that will keep him on the bench for a few weeks.

But I digress.

Here's a snippet from the AFP about true nomophobia:

Some 58 percent of men and 48 percent of women panic when they hit a problem with their cellphone, while nine percent of people feel stressed when they turn their mobiles off, it said.

Pollsters YouGov, commissioned by the Post Office, questioned 2,163 people online earlier this month.

Stewart Fox-Mills, head of telephony at the Post Office, said "nomo-phobia" -- which he used to mean a fear of being without a mobile phone -- was "very real for many people in the UK".

*Here's what Coroner's Lt. Fred Corral said regarding the Ernesto Frayre case.

*This is a transcription of my notes from a phone conversation with Corral on Monday afternoon:

The victim suffered a "gunshot wound to the head." The coroner's investigator wrote his report and assigned a double mode to the case. "Suicide vs. homicide," Corral said.

What this means Corral said is that the homicide detectives think one thing may have happened while the coroner's investigator think it was something else.

Homicide dets are leading toward homicide, coroner's investigator is leaning toward suicide.

Corral would not say if a gun was recovered at the scene. He also wouldn't say if there was a note of some sort.

Attended a post work function the other night at Crown City Brewery in Pasadena and met David Allen, my counterpart at the Daily Bulletin.

He's into Tuna Melts and was having soft drinks. I stuck with PBR on tap. The rest of our crowd was doing the hef and lemon thing.

I told him how I knew several people who live and die with everything he writes. (it's true) I also mentioned how I liked his ongoing looks at things that don't exist anymore in Pomona and the Inland Empire.

Anyway in the aftermath of the summit meeting, a recent entry on David's blog caught my attention, had to with a place in West Covina where several legendary bands (like The Doors) played shows.

Sounds cool. BTW here's what doorshistory.com says about the gig:

Carousel Theater - West Covina, CA On the first night, Jim is full of energy, as he usually is after a lengthy break, repeatedly crashing down onto the stage and jumping back up to shout out the songs throughout the evening.  On the next night, Jim is just the opposite and the performance suffers due to his ever increasing intakes.  Also performing: The Sunshine Company (both nights)

Crime Scene has its own list of things that no longer exist in the SGV, I'm adding Stan's in El Monte and The Carousel Theater. (I think others have mentioned them but what the heck; I didn't know the whole Doors connection.)

From the PSN:

It's called Rate My Cop and essentially it allows users to rate their interaction with the cops on the beat or at the station.

Seems to have a lot of potential, but it's not really being hit -- yet.

I attempted to look up officers from Covina, Alhambra and the LAPD without much success. I'm sure the size of the database will grow as it gets more use.

The site is here.

*After a little more searching of the site I came across some ratings for El Monte Police officers. Of the 148 listed officers, four have been rated, including Chief Weldon. There's also this gem from user "flores666":

"This officer helped me with my problems even though he has arrested me in the past. He is fair."

This photo, from the LA Daily News, came with this caption:

 Gino Sesto operates his RateMyCop.com website out of his Culver City  

 

This guy is not called "Super Mojado." *He's "Viper," Super Mojado's arch enemy.* I heard about the duo on the Bill Handel show, and found this Fox News story on them . Here's an excerpt:

 

Super Mojado — Super Wetback, if you translate the Spanish slur — is a new Mexican wrestler making his debut Saturday in Van Nuys, Calif., to help raise money for some of the more than 100 undocumented workers busted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month.

"We decided to make a hero that would be for all the people that don't have papers," said Joseph Medina, a wrestling promoter and the character's creator. He said Super Mojado's role is to educate the public.

 

 

No word on whether these guys are suspects in the Lucha Libre/ WWF Shotgun Bandit spree. We'll keep an eye on it, but don't bet on it.

In the meantime, don't forget Wrestlemania is just a few days away.

*As for Super Mojado, here he is!

Thanks Trench

San Marino has been a pretty newsy town the past couple of days.

First there's a million bees in stately Stats Manor. Now there's a suspected TB outbreak at San Marino High School. Here's a snippet from Caroline An's story:

SAN MARINO - Los Angeles County Public Health Department officials tested nearly 300 San Marino High School students and staff for tuberculosis Tuesday, an action prompted after officials earlier this month said an individual at the school had contracted the disease.

Skin tests administered by a team of nurses and physicians were given to 270 students and staff members identified by San Marino Unified School District officials and public health officials as possibly having been exposed to TB from contact with the individual.

I heard this story last night at the Herald Examiner reunion and it bears repeating, simply because it's a fascinating look at how newspapers are shaped and what's news.

The story was told by Ron Kaye, the editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. He worked at the Her-Ex and specifically on the early morning shift, where his goal was to put out a late street edition of the paper.

One day, making cop calls I assume, he heard the story of a group of "punks" riding around in the back of a pick up truck spraying a fire extinguisher at unsuspecting people waiting at bus stops.

One lady was so incensed when this happened to her she climbed on the bus and asked the bus driver to chase the pick up. He did, and somehow the bus managed to catch up to the pick up and block it in such a way that the driver couldn't escape. 

The police came, caught the bad guys and that was that.

Later when Kaye's editor, the legendary Jim Bellows came into the office, Kaye told him he had three stories to report, a homicide, some sort of robbery and the bus stop caper.

Bellows told him to lead with the bus stop story, simply by framing the information in a headline:

"Bus Riders Turn Crime Fighters"

Who wouldn't want to read that? 

The morning buzz in the newsroom Wednesday stemmed as much from the strong coffee as it did from talk about the million or so bees that were living in the walls of a San Marino estate.
</DC>I wanted to see the home and drove down there late morning, early afternoon. It was pretty easy to find.
Usually if a truck or van is parked in front of a home in San Marino it belongs to the gardener or maintenance supervisor.
It was the news vans that attracted me to the Stathatos’ home, hidden behind a 20-foot-high hedge. I guess you could say reporters were drawn to the story like bees to honey. After all, bees had been in the walls and left behind hundreds of pounds of honey that wasn’t going to be extracted.
The story apparently isn’t all that unusual, according to CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Suraya Fadel, outside with a cameraman who looked like he’d rather be covering a homicide downtown.
I overheard her trying to sell the story to an editor.
“Well we can use this as a portion of a bigger story about bees inside people’s homes all over the Southland.”
The editor wasn’t buying and shipped Fadel and the forlorn cameraman off to another, probably grittier assignment in the heart of the big city.
But not before homeowner Helen Stathatos, heading to a luncheon in Studio City and wearing a floral print scarf came out to talk about her former tenants.
The home itself, a two-story Tudor-style affair, looked like stately Wayne Manor, home of reclusive millionaire Bruce Wayne (and several thousand bats).
Beyond the gate and set back from the street by an amazing garden, full of mature trees and exotic flowers, the Stathatos home has been an on-again, off-again hive for 25 years. <NO1>Mrs.<NO>Stathatos said she believes they have a certain symbolism.
“We treat it as a token of good luck,” she said. “it’s a blessing in a way.”
Stathatos was also careful to note that the bees were treated humanely.
“The men who came here, they take them out to the wilderness and release them. They don’t destroy them.”
I got to thinking about that. The Stahatos home was once a wilderness after all. Perhaps these bees were descendants of bees that nested in the oaks on the knoll above the home.
The oaks, hundreds of years old, once lined the trail used by the Gabrieleno Indians making their way from San Gabriel Mission to El Molino, the old mill, just a short distance away.
Then again, perhaps bees’ ancestors pollinated the trees and flowers back when Gen. George Patton was a kid playing army in the wilderness of an undeveloped San Marino.
Then I got to thinking about the so-called impending extinction of honey bees. Scientists say it’s happening and they may be all gone in our lifetimes.
But until that happens, for Helen Stathatos and her family, the squatters that got an unceremonious boot this week are “not the enemy. They’re just plain old bees.”

Hmmmm:

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) _ A man and his 12-year-old son could face charges related to animal cruelty after an incident that left a mother opossum and four of her babies dead, police said.

Anaheim officers found injured baby opossums on a residential sidewalk shortly after 8:30 a.m. Monday. Witnesses told police they saw Lorenzo Oliver and his son pushing an upside-down bucket down the street with the mother opossum inside, Sgt. Rick Martinez said Tuesday. When they lifted the bucket and the opossum jumped up, the boy began striking it with a shovel, Martinez said.

"He may have been frightened by the opossum's sudden movement," Martinez said.

Oliver, 54, was arrested and released on bail. Martinez says the 12-year-old was detained and released to his mother, pending further review.

The mother possum was euthanized because of her severe injuries, said Dalene Northrup of the Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach. The five one-month-old babies that were in the mother's pouch are being cared for at the center.

This story comes from Caroline An, our Hallway Monitor and ace school reporter.

SAN MARINO — As many a million bees have left a San Marino family hundreds of pounds of honey in the walls of their home — and none of it is for their tea.
That’s because the sticky, sweet stuff is inside one of their dining room walls and it’s not coming out anytime soon, said Helen Stathatos, who lives in the house in the 1400 block of Virginia Road.
“They are making honey and we can’t even get to it,” Stathatos said.
As many as a million yellow-and-black squatters scattered throughout the Stathatos’ home are responsible for the situation, according to Dustin Mackey, a bee-buster for Bee Specialist, in Pasadena.

 

They are:

(1)genetic modification; (2) human experimentations, (3) polluting the environment; (4) social injustice; (5) causing poverty; (6) financial gluttony; (7) taking drugs.

I started to put pictures up with the post, but for some reason, the server didn't like the shots. I might try again. Thank God reading MAD magazine didn't make the list, although I'm sure it's been under consideration many times.

 

(sort of like man bites dog)

A Murrieta man is suing a blog he claims is defamatory. I took a five-second peek at the blog, not much to write home about. In my opinion the plaintiff would have been better off ignoring it. Here's a portion of an article from John Hall at the NCTimes:

MURRIETA ---- Saying that comments posted on a local blog have defamed him, a Murrieta man filed a civil lawsuit Thursday in what his attorney calls "a novel legal issue."

Roy Holmgren claims in his lawsuit that statements made about him on murrietaopinion.blogspot.com have exposed him to "hatred, ridicule, contempt and disgrace."

Holmgren is suing the operator of the blog as well as those who have posted the comments about him.

But, so far, neither he nor his attorney, Richard Ackerman, know who specifically they are suing.

"... the defendants hide behind the veil of the Internet to cover up their nefarious and tortious activities," the lawsuit states.

Ackerman said Thursday that he has tried to find out who runs the blog from the host of the site, blogspot.com, but they have yet to cooperate.

"Whoever they are, they don't have the right to publish defamatory material," Ackerman said.

Issac Hayes would have fit right in South Pasadena this week. Here's what we'll be writing about from there:

The city is recognizing this week as “Cuss Free Week” -- the first city ever in the nation to adopt a cuss-free week, according to officials. This springs from the 50-member No Cussing Club formed months ago by 14-year-old McKay Hatch, who successfully lobbied the City Council to pass the proclamation against public profanity.

Oh, Issac Hayes? Why Shaft, of course. Here's those lyrics:

You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth)
But I'm talkin' about Shaft
(Then we can dig it)