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San Diego's undercovered violent side
Fallbrook home economics teacher, skateboarder Neil Heddings, Voice & Viewpoint publisher, abortionist Bertha Bugarin
He Should Have Known Better
- It had been another sleepless night for Chris Squire, pedaling around San Diego delivering drugs. When the sun rolled into the sky on August 14, 2006, he knew he was looking at his last few hours of freedom.
- "I had been cruising around that day, doing my hustle, and I had this impending sense of doom," he said. "This black cloud was over my head."
- By Larry Harmon, Nov. 29, 2007
Intimate Murder
- In each of the last three years, there were roughly 17,000 murders in the United States. Of these, about 11 percent were committed by women. In most cases women kill to defend themselves during a confrontation: It’s her life or his. Women seldom murder other women and almost never kill strangers. That’s what men do. When a woman kills her husband, boyfriend, or lover, the crime is called “intimate murder”;
- By Thomas Larson, July 2, 2008
Bertha Bugarin Heads to Jail
- For years, the clinic had targeted Spanish-speaking women with low-cost terminations of their pregnancies. Varga was investigating Bertha Pinedo Bugarin, a layperson who was purportedly the owner/manager of the Chula Vista clinic as well as five other medical offices in Los Angeles and Orange counties, each specializing in cash-only abortions.
- By Thomas Larson, Feb. 18, 2009
The Death of Judy Huscher
- The body lies in a position of repose, a 12-year-old girl in pajamas, on her bed, in Fallbrook, California. Her blue eyes, though open, see nothing, and for ten more minutes, no one sees her. No one knows yet that the sheets and Judy’s pajama top are stained with chocolate, that her neck is stained with chocolate, that a section of yellow toilet paper on the bed beside her is stained with chocolate, or that her arms are folded across her chest and will not be, cannot be, unfolded again. No one knows that a spoon lies balanced on her lips.
- By Laura McNeal, Nov. 7, 2002
Skateboarding Is Not a Crime But Murder Is
- On November 18, 2002, pro skateboarder Neil Heddings drove his van to San Diego to pick up his two-year-old son, Marty. Heddings’s fiancée Christine Rams, their new baby, and Rams’s four-year-old son had come with him. They collected Marty and then drove back to the house where they lived in San Jacinto. Five days later, on the morning of November 23, Heddings and Rams discovered that Marty was dead.
- By Josh Board, April 22, 2004
Dig A Little Deeper
- In September 2003, Brian Burritt rode the elevator down to the basement of the San Diego Police Department where the "murder books," the binders of the department's cold cases, many decades old, are kept in cool, dry storage. The books are paper tombs, weighted with hundreds of pages — evidence lists, crime-scene diagrams and photos, lab reports, autopsy reports, witness statements, and more. Each begins with a one-page synopsis of the crime. Over several weeks, Burritt, whose title is criminalist, checked out binders and quick-read the synopses, looking for mention of liquid evidence.
- By Thomas Larson, Oct. 12, 2006