Armed Robbery at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts Thursday Night
Thursday night around 9PM, reports came in about an armed robbery at the O’Reilly auto parts store, off Water street near Ocean. Police were looking for the suspect in the San Lorenzo park area. The suspect was described as a Black male with a hoodie and revolver. SCPD brought in a K9 unit that seemed to track the suspect toward the U-Haul place on Ocean. At the time we published this week, the suspect was still at large.
Lingerie Thieves Arrested at Gunpoint on Highway 17
I’ll bet I got your interest with that headline! In the grand tradition of keeping Santa Cruz weird, we get this made for the tabloids story on Monday. Around 12:30PM on Monday afternoon, Scotts Valley Police Department officers pulled a VW Jetta over at gunpoint on Highway 17 near Sugarloaf Road. More than $1,000 worth of stolen lingerie was found inside the car. Two teenage girls and two women were arrested and taken into custody. They were charged with felony evading and burglary. No injuries or collisions resulted from the incident. It all began at the Capitola Mall when a Capitola Police Department officer spotted a black VW Jetta that was connected to an ongoing Victoria’s Secret lingerie theft investigation. The officer saw the Jetta pull out of the mall’s parking lot and called for backup from the CHP as he chased the Jetta along 41st Avenue, where the suspects got on Highway 1 and the chase continued south. After exiting at the Rio Del Mar exit, the Jetta turned around and sped back onto Highway 1 heading north. The chase was later called off as being too risky around noon as the Jetta drove recklessly through traffic around the fishhook and sped into downtown Santa Cruz. Police knew that the women would eventually attempt to drive north back to Oakland, so officers were staked out at key positions along Highway 17, where they eventually caught and arrested them near the Sugarloaf Road exit. The four women were arrested on burglary charges. The driver was also charged with felony evading. All of the women had been released from the Santa Cruz County Jail by Tuesday afternoon. In one day, out the next! That’s Santa Cruz! The County Shuffle™
Knife Fight at CVS on Front
Monday night around 8:30PM, a report came in that a man was fighting and lunging at another man with a knife downtown. SCPD arrived pretty quickly and arrested the man at gunpoint. At least I think they arrested him. Because an hour later…..
Man Pulls Out Knife While Wandering Aisles at CVS on Front
Around 9:30PM on Monday, a man was wandering the aisles holding a knife and saying he was looking for “loss control”. Described as a Hispanic man in a tank top, SCPD sent multiple units to the scene. I heard they detained him and had him in cuffs. I hope it wasn’t the same guy from an hour earlier (but honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised in this town).
Body Pulled Out of Ocean Off West Cliff Drive
Around 11AM on Thursday morning, I heard about a water rescue, which turned out to be a body recovery, off West Cliff Drive, near Fair Avenue. Witnesses reported a decomposed, dead body was found at the waterline on the beach. No word on whether foul play was involved.
Car Hits Tree on Mission Street
Thursday afternoon around 4PM, I heard reports of a car crashing into a tree on the 600 block of Mission street. Apparently the driver was injured bad enough to require an air ambulance evacuation. No word on their current condition.
Local Bike Thief Arrested
A Santa Cruz man was arrested on Monday, after SCPD said a cyclist chased and photographed an accused bike thief after they witnessed the theft of a $5,000 Santa Cruz mountain bike. The suspect allegedly stole the bike from its owner near Ocean and Felker streets on Sunday, according to SCPD. The witness chased the suspect to the area of railroad tracks near Encinal Street, where the witness took photos of the suspect as he fled in traffic. SCPD located the man and arrested him riding a different bicycle in the same area on Monday. When he was arrested, information led SCPD to another bike, a $3,000 Specialized Epic bike, which was found in the bushes near San Lorenzo Park. The suspect was arrested on suspicion of three felonies, theft, assault with a deadly weapon and probation violation, according to court documents. He was held at Santa Cruz County Jail in lieu of $40,000 bail Wednesday afternoon, according to jail records. I looked this guy up. He’s a local recidivist (of course he is!). Since 2015, he’s been arrested 12 different times. I’m sure number 13 isn’t far behind, because we know how the County Shuffle™ works! In one day, out the next!
Body Found In Aptos Creek
Monday afternoon, a hiker found a decomposed body in Aptos Creek. The body was discovered around 3:00PM in a heavily wooded section of Aptos Creek between Highway 1 and the Spreckels Drive bridge. The Santa Cruz County coroner’s office is performing an autopsy and working to make an identification of the remains. The body appears to be an adult male.
Bum Camper Blocks Traffic as Driver Takes a Nap
Thursday afternoon around 12:30PM, a report came in that a beat up camper van was blocking traffic at the corner of Ocean and Water streets. The male driver was passed out and hunched over the wheel of his car, while the car was parked in one of the busiest intersections in Santa Cruz. SCPD was sent out to move the guy along.
Car Rolls Over on Branciforte at Glen Canyon
Friday night around 11:30PM, a report came in that a car had flipped over onto it’s side on Branciforte at Glen Canyon. SCPD responded with fire and rescue. Turns out the car was a Hertz rental car out of Los Angeles. OH SNAP! I hope they have good insurance.
Three Car Accident at Mission and Fair Clogs Traffic
Friday afternoon around 2PM, reports came in about a multi car accident at the corner of Mission and Fair. This is the corner where Ferrell’s Donuts is, and it’s a notorious intersection for people making left turns onto Fair from Mission (no left turn lane so it clogs the left lane if traffic is coming from the North). It didn’t sound like anyone was seriously hurt. Traffic was rerouted at Miramar.
Brent Adams Feels Your Pain Santa Cruz!
Local narcissist and serial homeless advocate Brent Adams had his bike stolen. Again. But he got it back! By paying some “junkie” (his words) $30 for it, after it had been stripped of his GoPro and other stuff. Was he an “unhoused” junkie or just your run of the mill transient bum? I’m sure he’s a regular at the Food Not Bombs slopfests outside the Post Office or in front of City hall. Did he call SCPD and report it? Apparently not. Instead, he went to his friends in the “underground bum network” of local bike thieves, drug addicts, and low hanging fruit. And they helped him out by returning his bike to him after making him pay a ransom to get it back. The jokes just write themselves sometimes! I’m glad he got his bike back, even though he rewarded his bike thief with $30 for stealing from him. He might not be the brightest bulb, but he means well.
Hugh Takes the Week Off
No “Hugh’s News” this week. Sorry. He is dealing with some personal business, and honestly, I don’t have the stomach for what he does. There was a city council meeting this past week. It was a typical circus. I tried to watch some of it but every time the incessantly whiny Krohn or goofy Brown would open their mouths, I would immediately hit mute or change channels. So instead of Hugh’s meeting notes, I’ll use his time to give my quick 6 month performance evaluations. Krohn: mouthy, whiny, obnoxious, but I do appreciate his ongoing attempts to lift the iron curtain at city hall and make the city manager and staff more transparent in what they are doing. I gave Krohn a backhanded compliment! Cheers! Mathews: I’m surprised she’s lasted this long sitting next to Krohn without spilling a hot cup of coffee on his lap. She’s status quo and she’s still status quo. Nothing new here. Watkins: I haven’t really seen or heard much from her in 6 months. Too quiet. Step up and assert yourself already. You won the last election. Show us something. Terrazas: I like what I see. DT seems to be asserting himself nicely this year, setting up for him to take over as mayor in 2018. I think he’ll be a much better mayor than Chase: Over her head. Talks in cliches and platitudes ad nauseum. Never seems to have an original thought. Can’t run a city council meeting for mierda. She’s just way too nice for this job. Noroyan: I don’t always agree with her but she’s probably the most outspoken and pragmatic of all of them. She’s doing fine, but likely feels a lack of support from other perceived “moderates” on the council. I feel that way. Brown: Goofy, seems to be unprepared for council meetings by not reading or being familiar with the material before the meeting. Asks way too many dumb questions. Tries to position herself as the “voice of the unrepresented” but usually comes across as lost, inarticulate, and leaving everyone wondering what she’s talking about.
Quote of the Week
“The Santa Cruz government is run by overworked elected residents who are in turn willing to rely on technocrats to shepherd councilmembers into making the basic decisions to keep the city running. Change does not come easy within this kind of system.”
Who said that? Why it was CHRIS KROHN! I agree with him 100% (that’s 2 Krohn compliments this week. I’m not drunk!)
The Weekly Seen
Regular Dump reader and commenter Mabel sent me this photo of the front of the Post Office the other day. That brown stuff someone splattered all over the side of the wall? You probably guessed what that is. Mierda. Shows you why the fence is there in the first place. This shows you why we can’t have nice things in Santa Cruz.
Weekly Shoutouts
Weekly Shoutout to Jodi M who shared the latest Weekly Dump with her friends on Facebook (one of whom shared this information with me!). I love and appreciate all of you that read and share the Dump with your friends. You’re my muse here. Keep sharing it with everyone you know.
The Year of Keeping Santa Cruz Vibrantly Honest
Happy Birthday to us! Last May, I launched this website mostly on a lark. This week we celebrate our 52nd straight edition of the Weekly Dump. Through rain and snow, sleet and hail, crazy and mundane, we’ve done our best to keep it vibrantly honest here. We certainly have our fans and critics alike here. I didn’t really have a lot of goals (or forethought) about what I was trying to do here when this began. I was making it up as I went along. I did know a few things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to turn this into something commercial. No ads. No spam. I didn’t want people to think I was trying to make money off their interest here. And that still rings true going into Year 2. I didn’t want this to be predictable. I didn’t want this website to be a “left wing” or “right wing” thing. I’ve tried hard to keep it balanced, mostly because I try hard to stay balanced. And much of this site is a reflection of me. My opinion. What I deem to be newsworthy (or not). What’s worth my time to talk about (or not). It’s been a labor of love (although some might call it hate) since day 1 and that remains to this day moving forward. And big thanks to Hugh, who is a real person with a real opinion different than mine. Hugh is Robin to my Batman, Harry to my Lloyd, Ernie to my Bert. – BD
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14 Responses
I called 911 to both report the bike missing, and to alert that I was stepping in to an unknown situation to take possession of it. They offered to send a unit but I declined it. My attorney let me know that I had perfect right to grab and leave, and yet I was grateful to get it back in one piece so I gave all that was in my wallet. $30. I likely would’ve given more if there was more in there.
“I gave all that was in my wallet. $30. I likely would’ve given more if there was more in there.” This is called enabling (rewarding) bad behavior. BAD IDEA. You say you called 911 but instead of LETTING SCPD DO THEIR JOB HERE, you chose to just take matters into your own hands. Hell, you even admit this in your comments. Are you above the law? What if the bike wasn’t actually yours (but just looked like your bike)? Then you’d be stealing someone else’s bike, or in possession of stolen property. If your attorney told you that’s ok, I’d be firing his ass on the spot. That said, I’m glad you got your bike back. Most locals that get their bikes stolen daily aren’t that lucky or fortunate. You’re the poster boy for enabling bad behavior this week. Well done. And if you register your bike, SCPD will even call you when they find it and you won’t have to go all rogue enabling here next time.
Wow is this a grey area. I’d say, giving $30 might not be enabling because the junky is going to get that same $30 from anyone. Paying $100, now that would be enabling.
Happy to hear you got your bike back LNBA. Why do you have an attorney lined up for bike thefts?
Happy birthday ? Thank you for your news reports; it is always spot on! You also reported on my house fire that happened on 1/4/17. “House explodes on Delaware” Thank you for your kind words for us when we were going through such a difficult time.
Thanks Debi! I hope things have improved for you and your family since the fire.
Thanks for reporting stories our daily Senile doesn’t want to touch. Good job, even if a bit discouraging to read about the scuzzy low-lifes amongst us.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
My question: How does Brainchild Brent, the unemployable-failed-to-launch loser and career couchsurfer afford to own a bike worth stealing, a GoPro, and retain the services of an Attorney?
I have no idea. Maybe he’ll answer the question since we know he reads the Weekly Dump. In fairness to Brent, he seems pretty committed to his “warming center” idea, even calls himself the “Director” of the program, but I’m not sure he’s getting paid. Officially I mean. Maybe he’s paying himself from the donations people give. Who knows? He’s trying to help the homeless, and he’s not as belligerent and obnoxious as say Sugar Bear or Sugar Mama (who he seems to battle with for airtime all of the time). I’m never gonna “warm up” to Brent, there’s just too much dirty water under that bridge, but I’ve started to dislike him less, if that makes any sense. Mostly, I just ignore him now. He has his causes. I have mine. As long as he stays out of my way, I’ll probably do the same with him. I will say, I think a part of Brent has “seen the light” in terms of trying to work with “the silent majority” instead of constantly attacking and alienating them. It’s like he finally grew up. Others locally could learn from his example.
And how long until we start hearing about the need for a new “cooling center” for the local homeless? Counting the days. We’ll start hearing about all the homeless heat stroke victims. In Santa Cruz. Where we have this thing called “natural air conditioning” (fog) for 12 months out of the year. I’m pretty sure the County building on Ocean is air conditioned. Hang out there if it’s too hot during the day. I hear John Leopold’s office is a great place for the homeless to hang out at the county building. Nice and cool. I hear he even has snacks!
And as I said last ‘mierda, there’s a reason the terms “homeless industry” exist. It’s an industry. And you don’t want to run out of homeless people, do you? Lose your cash cows? No way.
I think a good example of how the “homeless industry”, “mental health industry” etc. work is, I believe it was in Australia or someplace, they wanted to get rid of possums. So they put a bounty on possum hides. They ended up with even more possums – because people were raising them to collect the bounty.
I’d not be surprised if “homeless advocates” weren’t in on meetings behind closed doors to bring in more draconian laws against being homeless. It makes the problem look even bigger, and that means they can collect more money to “take care of the problem” that never seems to go away or even diminish.
I believe in San Francisco the money given to “help the homeless” amounts to a healthy income per homeless person. But of course it doesn’t get to them. The “industry” gets it. So, say fund to help homeless people amounts to $40k per homeless person, and the homeless person gets maybe $400 a year worth of actual food and services. It’s a great racket.
All good points Alex. Think of it like this. Even a “non-profit” has to create a self sustaining business model and that means recurred revenue streams (usually in the form of grants and donations) have to at least equal costs. It’s still a business, even if they don’t claim to make a profit, they do want to continue to stay in business. Running a non-profit doesn’t mean running it at a loss. For groups like the local HSC, they saw the money from the county to house AB109 and Prop. 47 released inmates as a nice “recurring revenue stream” from the state and county. The county did an RFP when those two idiotic laws passed to house the released inmates from the probation department and the HSC stepped up and said “we want some of that pie!”. And our mayor, where did she come from again? Oh right, county probation. Of course SHE supports this.
I’m assuming you read the Bratton Report and Chris Krohn’s ramblings. I found this week particularly rambling.
Summary: the city should provide services the County is ACTUALLY supposed to provide. Using the percentage of the general discretionary fund spent on homeless services as opposed to it’s percentage of total funds (including necessities like water and such that can’t be drawn from) makes Chris unhappy with Martin Bernal (imperfect at best, but at least he knows how this stuff works as a career city manager). When considering spending more money on homeless services, it is a good idea to spend first, THEN pass a 3% hotel tax.
My take: Chris is ridiculous and lives in a fantasy world.
http://brattononline.com/
” The city manager also says that taking care of the vulnerable is not necessarily a “core” service that our city should offer since other cities do not.
Social services funding this year might hover a little over $2 million out of a $270 million-dollar total budget. That means that less than one-percent of the city budget supports programs for the most vulnerable in our community. That figure will likely rise in the next budget, but it will not get past 1%. Okay, say critics, it’s not fair to compare spending on the overall budget (I respectfully agree to disagree) because it includes restricted funds and “enterprise” funds like water, garbage and sewer fees that can only be spent on those services. So, it is fair they argue, to only look at the $98 million “General Fund,”on page seven of the current SC city budget (http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/home/showdocument?id=59794.That) is,the council can spend this money on anything the council theoretically wants. This means the $2 million social services figure then becomes approximately 2.2% of the total general fund.
Okay, for comparison let’s look at the three departments that draw the most from this “discretionary” general fund. The Police Department is by far the largest draw down at 28.5%, or $28 million. The Fire Department is next at $17.4 million, and Parks and Recreation is a bit over $15 million. And another huge area that we need to question is whether we are getting enough bang for our buck from the Planning Department and Economic Development, which combined account for another planned expenditure of over $10 million.
Remember, the Community Services Program Committee staff person, Tina Schull, reported out to the council a couple of weeks ago that the city spent over $20 million on reacting to homelessness. My motion would be to take one-fourth of that reactive budget and make it active. Create a Homeless and Housing Services Department and begin with a down payment of $5 million, or simply take the $5 million and allow current Homeless Services Center staff to open a 24/7 year-round shelter with a plan for incorporating in mental health, drug, and alcohol counseling programming as well. We can do this. The general fund is discretionary. We have the resources in the city of Santa Cruz to confront our housing and homeless crisis head-on. And later we can pass a 3% hotel tax to capitalize the newly formed department so that it has a recurring budget. We throw in a tenant’s rights office too in order to protect renters—students, working families, and those transitioning out of homelessness. We can do this. It’s our time and maybe this is why we are here. “