Davies Gets His Answer Tomorrow

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Drama will be thick and irresistible tomorrow when the City Council sits down to choose the finalists for Police Chief.
     Too bad for the community that the undeniable theatrics, which will be lavishly draped over several hours of deliberations, won’t be televised. Or podcast. Or somehow trumpeted to a panting world.
     From an original field of sixty-six, six men and women are left standing. Only one candidate is a magnet, a lightning rod on two legs, attracting nearly all of the attention:
     Asst. Chief Hank Davies.
     The single surviving hometowner, he enters the first face-to-face round uniquely armed:
     Blessed and cursed, he possesses more advantages — and taller handicaps — than anyone in the fast draining pool.

Murder Rap Is Called an Oddity

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Passenger — Not Driver?—  Charged with Murder in Fatal Car Crash.
     “Strange, very strange,” one police officer said yesterday of the charges filed by the District Attorney’s Office. “It’s like man bites dog.”
     Law enforcement officials still were shaking their heads this morning. They were trying to rationalize the heavier charge against the passenger and the unusual disparity in the charges filed against the driver in last week’s school death tragedy.
     With the girlfriend driving and the boyfriend riding along, they were in the midst of feuding last Wednesday afternoon, police say, when their car allegedly ran down and killed a Culver City teacher and injured a group of students.

I Know Scott Malsin

temp65Letters

     I am a resident of Culver City, and I have not been so excited to endorse anyone more than Scott Malsin for the City Council. I met Scott five years ago as a member of the voluntary Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). During the years of friendship, I have found Scott to be very personable, very bright, a visionary, and extremely concerned about matters associated with Culver City. 

     He is currently on the Planning Commission, and he has been keenly aware and involved in making important decisions so that the city is a better place to live and for businesses to grow.
     He has gained the knowledge and experience in the workings of the city government and is now ready for the next step, being a member of the City Council.

Passenger Is Charged With Murder

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     Twisted oddly from the beginning, the case of last week’s spectacular car crash that killed a Turning Point School teacher took another peculiar turn when the passenger in the death car was charged with murder but the driver was not.
The driver, judged by the County District Attorney to be much less culpable, is facing a lighter charge.
     Nineteen-year-old Reynaldo Cruz of Los Angeles, the passenger, was charged with second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of fifteen years to life.
     The driver, Laura Samayoa, twenty, of Los Angeles, believed to be his girlfriend, also was charged with a felony. After at least one eyewitness said she fled following the crash, she was accused by the D.A. of leaving the scene of an accident in which there was a death.

Oh, Those Guilty Liberals

Frédérik SisaOP-ED

     I’ve been coming across the words “liberal guilt” often lately. My first encounter was via Salon.com’s film critic Andrew O’Hehir’s more or less tongue-in-cheek Liberal Guilt Awards (or Guilties). In this scenario, “Hollywood congratulates itself for its general condition of progressive enlightenment and lectures the rest of us from its newfound position of half-baked moral seriousness.” Website Link

     Next was Steve Lopez’s March 12 column in the Los Angels Times, in which he discusses the furor around Crash. “I’m guessing,” he wrote, “as others have, that some Oscar voters were assuaging liberal guilt over the safety of their own isolation when they feted ‘Crash’ for ‘tackling’ that old devil racism.” This is, of course, similar to what L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote about the Academy’s decision to award the Best Picture Oscar to Crash instead of Brokeback Mountain.

 

Recovering Mentally from Tragedy

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     As the students of Turning Point School in the Hayden Tract start to recover from losing one of their teachers in a bizarre car crash, they will face a checkerboard of complicated psychological issues, a Westside therapist said Friday.
     The Turning Point case involves a combination of factors, both loss and trauma, which will make it more complex for people, Dr. Carol Mayhew of Brentwood told thefrontpageonline.com.
     When she leads a group in therapy, her message is that they will be experiencing a whole panoply of feelings about their loss, including anger and sorrow.
     Additionally, they may feel trauma, which would account for anger, fear, jumpiness. Some may experience flashbacks.

Frustrations of a Special Ed Teacher

temp99OP-ED

     Okay, so special education kids are special.
     You mean they deserve special treatment?
     Special treatment like understanding their problems?
     You mean they deserve to be taught the skills they need, at a pace they can handle?
     You mean they deserve teaching assistants who are competent in relating to children, both academically and behaviorally. So what.
     I’ll tell you so what.

Was the Teacher Killing Deliberate?

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED


Ms. Samayoa                                Mr. Cruz


      On the day after a car ploughed into fifteen Culver City students on an outing and killed a young teacher shepherding them, police were looking into the possibility the crash may have been deliberate.
      A feuding young couple were at the controls of the car at the point of impact.
      “We don’t know yet if this was accidental,” Culver City Police Lt. Dean Williams said yesterday at a news conference. Directly addressing the media, he said, “We have many of the same questions that you do.”

      Police still were trying to piece together widely strewn, sometimes-conflicting parts of a bloody, chaotic scenario.

A Turning Point Family’s Love Story

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     The otherwise impenetrable wall of silence that the community of Turning Point School in the Hayden Tract imposed yesterday was breached briefly, fleetingly, a little after 8:30 in the sun-sprayed morning.
     Clasped hand in clasped hand, Clabe Hartley and his wife Thea, parents of a student, strode stolidly across the parking lot. Their eyes never adjusted their trajectory as they walked wordlessly through the huge entry-exit gateway — out into the rest of the world.
     For the longest time, the Hartleys were the only pedestrian sign of  parental life. They appeared at an hour when students, teachers and a smattering of families were mourning the senseless killing the day before of a teacher and a flamboyant assault on fifteen vulnerable students.

Turning Point Prefers Low Profile

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

     The private school Turning Point, the educational home of the teacher who was killed by a seeming runaway car on Wednesday, lives the lifestyle of most residents and businesses in the Hayden Tract. 

     Secluded. Low profile. Elegantly understated.
     Behind fencing and dense shrubbery.