Author: Amanda Covarrubias

Four teenage boys wanted in Yucaipa on suspicion of posting nude and semi-nude photos of at least eight girls on a social networking site have been identified and issued citations, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The girls’ photos have been taken off the website, which was not identified, at the request of authorities, said Arden Wiltshire, public information officer for the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department.

The case will be forwarded to the district attorney’s office for prosecution, she said.

The incident, which involved students at Yucaipa’s 9th Grade Campus, came to light Monday when police were notified of a website showing illicit photos of the 14- and 15-year-old girls.

The photos had been freely sent by the girls to their friends, Wiltshire said. But then someone posted them on a major website, which was not identified.

The practice of sending nude or semi-nude photos via cellphone or computer is known as "sexting." Wiltshire said statistics show one in five teenagers have done it – 22% of teen girls and 18% of boys.

Fifteen percent of teenage boys send racy photos of their ex-girlfriends far and wide once they break up, she said.

The suspects in this case are four 15-year-old boys. They are being sought for possession of harmful matter depicting a person under 18 and sexual exploitation of a minor.

— David Kelly

Police in Yucaipa are looking for four teenage boys who posted nude and semi-nude photos of at least eight girls on a social networking site.

The incident, which involved students at Yucaipa’s 9th Grade Campus, came to light Monday when police were notified of a website showing illicit photos of the 14- and 15-year-old girls.

The photos had been freely sent by the girls to their friends, said Arden Wiltshire, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s
Department. But then someone posted them on a major website, which was not identified.

The practice of sending nude or semi-nude photos via cellphone or computer  is known as "sexting."
Wiltshire said statistics show one in five teenagers have done it – 22% of teen girls and 18% of boys.

Fifteen percent of teenage boys send racy photos of their ex-girlfriends far and wide once they break up, she said.

The suspects in this case are four 15-year-old boys. They are being sought for possession of harmful matter depicting a person under 18 and sexual exploitation of a minor.

— David Kelly

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are scheduled to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a luncheon Wednesday at the Getty Center, according to the mayor’s office.

Merkel is in Los Angeles as part of a two-day visit to California following President Obama’s nuclear arms  summit in Washington, D.C.

At the luncheon, Merkel will meet with business leaders, entertainment executives and scientists. She is scheduled to address Stanford University on Thursday before heading home.

Germany is the fourth-largest source of direct foreign investment in the Los Angeles area, with German-owned and affiliated companies employing nearly 3,000 people. That amounts to about $149 million in wages paid to employees, according to Villaraigosa’s office.

Villaraigosa visited Berlin last year to sign a memorandum of understanding between the L.A. Community Redevelopment Agency and a German technology park to share best practices on the construction of clean-technology-development companies.

A woman was found shot to death inside her car in North Hollywood, and police Wednesday were trying to determine her identity and learn what led to the shooting.

Police found her in the 12200 block of Gault Street being notified at 10:09
p.m. Tuesday, said Lt. Leon Mims of the North Hollywood
station.

Anyone with information was asked to call the North Hollywood
station at (818) 623-4016.

— Los Angeles Times wire services

Investigators are looking into two suspicious fires that broke out early Wednesday at Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley.

The first fire was reported at around 4:51 a.m. in a large trash bin at the school at 17000 Haynes St.

Firefighters extinguished the blaze and noticed another fire inside a student store in the cafeteria area, said Erik Scott of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Both fires were put out by 5:21 a.m., he said.

An investigation has been launched into the cause of the fires.

It was not immediately known whether the incidents would affect the school’s schedule.

— Los Angeles Times wire services

The series of major water main breaks that occurred around Los Angeles last year was caused by the city’s water conservation program, which put too much pressure on aging cast iron pipes, according to a city report released Tuesday.

The report is a step forward in solving a mystery that has bedeviled city officials and engineers and enraged some residents who had to endure the flooding and road damage.

A team of scientists and private-sector experts charged with looking at the pipe breaks concluded that the city should rework its conservation plan, which limited the use of sprinklers to Mondays and Thursdays.

The team recommended that the Department of Water and Power find ways of “avoiding abrupt variations in water pressure as much as possible.”

“These findings conclude that the sudden changes of water pressure in the system, attributable to the water-rationing system, had a negative impact on cast-iron pipes with lower fatigue resistance (i.e. especially corroded cast iron pipes,” the report stated.

One alternative would be to require homes with even-number addresses to conserve on even-numbered days and requiring homes with odd-numbered addresses to conserve on odd-numbered days, the team said.

“The bottom line is, you want to create a more even usage of water pressure so you don’t have a sudden drop of water pressure at a given time of the day,” said Jean-Pierre Bardet, professor and chairman of USC’s civil and environmental engineering department, who headed the team.

A DWP spokesman said scientists at the utility "have not yet analyzed Dr. Bardet’s findings but look forward to doing so."

Joe Ramallo added that DWP’s internal investigation explored water rationing as a factor, but "found the data … to be inconclusive." The internal investigation found that a more likely cause was corroded, aging cast-iron pipes.
That finding is not inconsistent with Bardet’s report, however.

Bardet pointed out that pressure fluctuations put increased pressure on the cast iron pipes, causing them to rupture sooner than they may have otherwise

The investigation team, which appeared before the council’s Energy and Environment Committee, found a connection between the city’s water-rationing program and the increase in pipe breaks last summer, particularly with cast iron pipes.

At various locations in the DWP water distribution system, water pressure fell significantly on Mondays and Thursdays after the beginning of the water-rationing program on June 1, 2009, the report said.

“Those water pressure drops on these days were caused by an increased water flow during the watering of lawns,” the report said. “As a result, the cyclic levels of water pressure increased and accelerated the metal fatigue failures of aged and corroded cast-iron pipes.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the council and the DWP agreed last year to restrict the use of sprinklers to 15 minutes a day on Mondays and Thursdays. No watering is allowed between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Hand-watering — using a hose with a nozzle — is allowed on a daily basis, although not between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.

The city had 101 breaks during summer 2009, compared to 42 in summer 2008 and 49 in summer 2007, according to the report.

So far, the city has been hit with 108 legal claims regarding water
pipe breaks, 41 of them from homeowners. Of the latter number, 25 claims
have been paid, three have pending documents, two were denied and 11
are awaiting more documents, according to one DWP lawyer.

Last fall, The Times reported that some experts believed the city’s recent decision to allow sprinklers to run only on Mondays and Thursdays may have played a role in the breaks.

They say that if more water flows through the system on those two days when people water their lawns and then pressure suddenly changes on other days, it could put added stress on already aging pipes.

— David Zahniser and Phil Willon at L.A. City Hall, and Jessica Garrison in Los Angeles

Hours before the afternoon start of the Dodgers’ home opener Tuesday, fans converged on the stadium shortly after the gates opened at 10 a.m. dressed in every iteration of Dodger blue — hats, jackets, long-sleeve shirts and sleeveless ones.

For many, it is a decades-old tradition — gathering up family and friends, dressing in blue, splaying open the back of the SUV and unwrapping food and drinks in the stadium parking lots with their panoramic views of the city. But this year, doing that brought some unwelcome attention.

“We’re trying to tailgate,” Ray Barbosa said, standing in a Dodgers parking lot with his friends next to his GMC Sierra.

“The only thing big enough to carry a party,” his friend Tom Lerma said of the Sierra.

“That means we’ve been visited four times in seven minutes,” Barbosa said, referring to the seemingly ever-present Dodgers security and LAPD officers who approached on bikes, in carts and on foot to suggest that fans move inside the stadium.

“You can take your food,” offered one.

Security personnel said it’s not just the illegal drinking of alcohol in parking lots that is forbidden. All tailgating — or congregating — is off-limits in the vast expanses of parking lots around the stadium. For longtime fans, that’s crushing a tradition as cherished as watching the actual game.

“We’ve been doing this since we were in high school,” said Roberto Ortiz, 30, an assistant chef at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey.

He and his friends were dining on tuna salad tostadas and Coke and Gatorade for the gathering.

“It kind of deters us coming early," Ortiz said. "We’ll just stay home, barbecue and watch it on TV.”

— Carla Hall

Arraignment for the 20-year-old man accused in a triple murder at a beach home near Ventura has been delayed until May 12.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Bruce A. Young also revoked the $2.2-million bail on which Joshua Graham Packer has been held since Sunday. Such actions are routine when defendants are charged with crimes for which they might face the death penalty.

Packer is accused in the May 2009 stabbing deaths of Brock and Davina Husted at their home in the gated community of Faria Beach. Their two children were home at the time, and Mrs. Husted was six months pregnant.

An unemployed Ventura resident, Packer is being represented by the Ventura County Public Defender’s Office.
Howard Asher, an attorney with that office, asked for the continuance to allow the defense more time to prepare.

About a dozen of the Husteds’ family members packed the courtroom’s front rows for the brief hearing.
A number of Packer’s friends and relatives also were present.

Afterward, prosecutor Michael Frawley said it would be several months before the district attorney’s office decides whether to seek the death penalty or a life sentence without parole.
Packer is charged with robbery and burglary, as well as murder. Frawley declined to say what items had allegedly been stolen.

The judge granted Asher’s request to bar cameras from the courtroom, agreeing that the killer’s identification could be an issue at trial.

Ventura County sheriff’s officials disclosed Monday that they picked up Packer after matching DNA found in the Husted home with a DNA specimen taken from Packer after Santa Barbara authorities arrested him earlier this year in an alleged armed robbery at a gas station.

— Steve Chawkins

Ventura County law enforcement authorities said Monday they have arrested a 21-year-old Ventura man in the stabbing deaths last year of a husband and wife at their Faria Beach home.

Joshua Packer was arrested Sunday evening, detectives said.

The arrest was a breakthrough for a case that languished for nearly a year after Brock Husted and his pregnant wife, Davina, were killed by an intruder wearing a motorcycle helmet who entered their home through an open patio door.

“It was a well-publicized case," said Capt. Eric Dowd of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. "To make an arrest, I am sure they are pretty pleased with it.”

More details will be released at a 3 p.m. news conference in Ventura, Dowd said.

The Husteds, both 42, died of multiple stab wounds. Their two children fled to a neighbor’s house and were unharmed. But their 9-year-old son. who was watching TV at the time, apparently witnessed the murder.

– Ching-Ching Ni

The Los Angeles Police Department will hold a closed-casket visitation starting at noon Monday for SWAT Officer Robert J. Cottle, a Marine reservist killed in a roadside bombing in southern Afghanistan.

The viewing for the 45-year-old Yorba Linda resident, who was a sergeant major in the Marines, will be held in downtown L.A. at police headquarters on First Street.

Cottle and Lance Cpl. Rick Centanni, 19, also from Yorba Linda, were traveling with other Marines in the Marja region of Afghanistan last month when their armored vehicle struck an improvised explosive device, killing the two men and seriously wounding two others.

Cottle and Centanni, who became friends during their deployment, were part of the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, based at Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County.

Cottle began working for the LAPD in 1990 and joined SWAT six years later. He is the first active LAPD officer to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

His private memorial service will be held Tuesday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in downtown Los Angeles.

Cottle leaves behind a wife, Emily, a naval officer stationed in Hawaii, and a 9-month-old daughter. He was a veteran of two tours in Iraq and will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

— Richard Winton

Photo: Undated photo of Sgt. Maj. Robert  J. Cottle , 45, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite SWAT unit, who also served as a U.S. Marine and was killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. Credit: LAPD

Scattered showers were expected to continue into Monday afternoon, and the rest of the week was looking dry, if on the cool side, according to the National Weather Service.

The storm that hit Southern California early Monday dumped between ¾ to 2 inches of rain across the region. Downtown Los Angeles received just under an inch, and up to 2 inches fell on the Station fire burn areas in the foothills, although no mudslides were reported.

Only light showers were expected Monday afternoon, said Jamie Meier, a meteorologist with the NWS in Oxnard.

“The average rainfall for April is about an inch, so it’s certainly not out of the question to see a storm like this,” Meier said.

No rain is expected for the remainder of the week, when temperatures are expected to hover below normal, barely reaching 70 degrees, Meier said.

— Ching-Ching Ni

Long Beach police were questioning a man Friday after a 61-year-old man was stabbed to death at a senior living home.

Police arrived at the center in the 1900 block of East 5th Street about 7 a.m. and found the victim with stab wounds, said Officer Jackie Bezart of the Long Beach Police Department. The man was taken to a hospital, where he later died.

News helicopters captured video of a man being taken away from the home in a police car. Long Beach homicide detectives were questioning a man in connection with the stabbing but had not arrested anyone, Bezart said.

— Richard Winton

Map: The location of the stabbing. There have been 52 homicides within two miles of this location since Jan. 1, 2007, according to the Times’ Homicide Report interactive map and database.

A municipal water district engineer was arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty after he killed the dog of an Agoura Hills woman he used to date and dumped the small Maltese in a West Hills trash bin, investigators said Friday.

Rommel Marzan, 44, was arrested Tuesday after investigators deemed his story that he had fallen on the small dog as less than credible and a veterinarian determined the animal died from blunt head trauma, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Det. Steve Colitti.

Marzan works for the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District.

After the woman went home and found her dog missing, she received a call from Marzan, who told her he had accidentally killed it, Colitti said.

“He told her he had fallen on the dog and then panicked and dumped the dog,” Colitti said.

The woman immediately called sheriff’s deputies, who contacted Marzan. He told deputies the same story — that he had accidentally fallen on the dog and killed it and dumped it in a San Fernando Valley trash bin in a panic, Colitti said. Skeptical deputies “felt he was not being forthcoming,” Colitti said

Marzan later acknowledged that he “may have stepped on the dog,” Colitti said.

The Maltese was retrieved from the dumpster, and a veterinarian determined the dog had died from blunt force trauma to the head.

Marzan was released in lieu of $50,000 bail. A supervisor at the Las Virgenes water district said Marzan has been placed on leave.

— Richard Winton

The union that represents Los Angeles police officers says the number of civilian vacancies in the LAPD means officers are increasingly being diverted from the streets to perform administrative duties.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League said the department was authorized last June to employ nearly 4,000 civilians but now has fewer than 3,000, and that the figure is expected to drop below 2,900 by July 1.

League President Paul Weber said that every 100 officers pulled from field work to back-fill vacant civilian positions equates to removing about 30 police cars citywide. He said line officers are reporting daily that they are spending increasing amounts of time in police stations performing administrative tasks, rather than patrolling the streets.

Even before the city’s current budget crunch, Los Angeles police managers complained that their civilian ranks were severely understaffed. Civilian employees perform much of the department’s paperwork and day-to-day processing of data and information.

The union’s statement comes as a new fiscal year approaches, with the prospect of even greater reductions in the LAPD’s civilian workforce.

— Richard Winton

Photo: An LAPD patrol car. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles police on Friday were investigating a robbery in which the victim told authorities the assailants stole $8,000 from him outside a Boyle Heights gas station.

The robbery occurred 4 a.m. Friday outside the gas station and mini-mart at Soto Street and Wabash Avenue, police said.
The man told police that he was attacked by assailants in a minivan and that they stole the money he was carrying, which was related to his business.

Police have not yet released a description of the suspects.

— Richard Winton

A former producer of the "Survivor" reality TV show, questioned in the death of his wife in Cancun, Mexico, has been released without being charged but must remain in the country until an investigation into how she died is complete, a Mexican newspaper reported Friday.

Reforma, based in Mexico City, said Bruce Beresford-Redman, 38, was questioned by state police and released late Thursday.

On Monday, Beresford-Redman, who also created the "Pimp My Ride" reality show, reported his wife, Monica, missing while on vacation in Cancun. Her body was found Thursday in a drainage pipe near their hotel. She had scratches on her face, and there were signs she had been strangled, the newspaper reported.

Guests at the Moon Palace Hotel in Cancun reported hearing a loud fight coming from the room the couple shared last weekend with their children.

Monica Beresford-Redman, a native of Brazil, owned the Zabumba Restaurant on Venice Boulevard, near Overland Avenue.

— Sam Quinones

Photo: Promoter John Smith stands near a sidewalk memorial to Monica
Beresford-Redman, owner of Zabumba Bar & Restaurant on Venice
Boulevard. (Reed Saxon, Associated Press / April 8, 2010)

L.A. City Hall reporter Phil Willon will be chatting with readers Friday about the city’s budget turmoil and the drastic steps Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has proposed, including shutting down city services two days a week.

As Willon and colleagues Maeve Reston and David Zahniser have reported, a key piece of the budget puzzle is $73.5 million that the City Council wants the DWP to turn over, but which the agency has refused to do.

For details on the live chat, read the Readers’ Representative Journal blog on latimes.com.

The California DNA databank has matched 2,000 crime scene samples to suspects and set a record in March with more than 400 matches, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown announced Thursday.

The database averages 300 matches a month, and the number jumped to 405 in March, Brown said.

"This is a remarkable milestone in the advancement of criminal justice technology," Brown said in a statement. "The DNA database has been used in over 12,000 investigations and contributed to thousands of convictions of the most violent criminals. Otherwise, these crimes are likely to go unsolved."

The state’s DNA databank became operational in 1994 and now contains more than 1.5 million DNA samples, according to the state department of justice. Officials say about 25,000 DNA profiles are added to the database each month.

The database received a significant boost in 1994 when a voter-approved initiative, Proposition 69, required all defendants convicted of a felony to submit a DNA sample. The requirement was extended in 2009 to all adults arrested on felony charges.

The DNA profiles uploaded to California’s database also are given to the national Combined DNA Index System.

In February, the database tied convicted sex offender John Gardner III to rape and homicide in the disappearance of Chelsea King, a 17-year-old high school student from San Diego County. In that case, forensic experts compared crime scene samples to DNA from convicted offenders and arrested suspects in the databank.

The database has also revealed new crimes committed by already imprisoned offenders. In 2009, Richard Ramirez, a death row inmate known as the "Night Stalker," was connected to the 1984 killing of a 9-year-old San Francisco girl, Mei Leung.

Last August, a 34-year-old cold case was solved when Dennis Vasquez, 50, of Los Angeles, was arrested and required to submit a DNA sample to authorities. Vasquez’s DNA matched the DNA found at a murder scene in 1975. He is being prosecuted for murder by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

— Richard Winton