A few months ago an unnamed Fullerton Police Officer was allegedly stabbed in Placentia by an unidentified “Hispanic male”. Four agencies swarmed (Placentia PD, Fullerton PD, CSUF State Police & OC Sheriff’s) and a suspect was picked up, had his info blasted on social media and in press releases — only later to be cleared and released.
This is where all four agencies left things and no new information has been publicly presented.
The Fullerton Police Department, Orange County Sheriffs Department and Cal State Fullerton Police Department, made an extensive search of the area.
Officers detained and later arrested a parolee named James Carrera, a 19-year-old Placentia resident. Carrera was booked on an assault with a deadly weapon charge.
Police did not know if the officer was targeted but they said Carrera was out on parole for weapons violations and possibly knew the officer.
The victim was released hours after being treated at a local hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, according to Fullerton Police Lt. Tony Rios. He said the injured officer was at home recovering the day after the attack and is expected to return to duty in the next few days.
“I spoke to him this morning and he seems to be doing well,” said Rios. “He’s a strong young guy and he should be back soon.”
Investigators described the attacker as a Latino man in his late-teens or early-20s, of thin build. He had short, black hair and wore a baggie, black T-shirt.
Rumors lately have it that the officer made up the “Hispanic Male” and has been put on admin leave with nary a word or apology by the cites or agencies involved. Apparently now we’re hiring Leopold “Butters” Stotch’s mom at Fullerton PD:
Alas, that might turn out differently because ultimately Mrs. Stotch confessed. Instead we now actually know, thanks to diligent records requests, that the officer in question is one Nathan Roesler.
Consider if you will a version of Fullerton where Doug (Chaffee), (Acting Chief) Dunn & (City Manager) Domer have come to an agreement.
In exchange for not referring the Mayor’s wife to the District Attorney’s Office and not investigating the true extent of just how many signs Paulette stole, the Chaffees agreed to suspend Paulette’s campaign. They’ve agreed that she’ll stay out of the public eye through the election.
Doug will also skip the next Council meeting and the city will make no public statement on the matter until December. All parties agreed this was the best way to minimize impacting Doug’s campaign for Supervisor.
That wouldn’t be so hard to believe. That level of corruption feels about right for these idiots in the town we call home.
Even we have a hard time with the next part.
Apparently, Doug, Dunn, and Domer agreed to send a city vehicle to collect Paulette’s various sign caches. The collection is substantial and the triple alliance can’t decide if they’ll move the signs to the city yard to be reclaimed by their owners or to destroy them.
Keeping a crime quiet is one thing. Using city resources to cover it up? Well. That’s quite another.
How does your version of Fullerton align with this potential reality?
In any case, this clearly needs to be taken up by someone well outside Doug’s reach. It’s clear that Doug has influence over Fullerton’s management, but he may also control the purse strings of county officials soon. That means we can’t trust that favors haven’t already been exchanged with the District Attorney and Sheriff offices.
Stealing signs may be Petty Theft, but using government resources to cover up a crime is not. We hate to make a federal case over something so insane, but if Doug, Dunn & Domer really are colluding to cover up Paulette’s crime to benefit Doug’s campaign, that’s serious business.
In any case, this much is clear: we’re owed an explanation. Has Paulette and Doug’s property been searched? What about their cars where videos show her putting the stolen property? Did Doug, Dunn & Domer meet? If so, when and where? How long did the meeting last?
So far, the city has said nothing. Not one word. Not one iota of acknowledgement. Nothing from PD. Nor the Mayor. Nor the Council. Not even the City Manager. Not a word has been uttered publicly from anybody.
Even for Fullerton, that’s odd.
The County has been equally as silent. Our DA is too busy campaigning to make sure this is handled in an expeditious and honest fashion.
We think that all this silence means that at least part of this leak. . . hypothetical . . . might be true. Here’s why:
In Fullerton we’re accustomed to our city hiding behind disclosure laws to “protect the city from liability” while managing to only protect bad apples from being thrown in the waste bin. We watched it after the Kelly Thomas murder and we watched it again with the Felz Sappy McTree coverup. We’ve seen it countless times before and since.
Our rotating crop of City Council members, City Managers and staff just default to incompetency, lies and dubious readings of the law out of habit. It’s the natural state at City Hall.
Usually POBAR (the Police Officer’s Bill of Rights) can be blamed for a lot of this when a cop is involved.
Sometimes we’re told nothing for no reason whatsoever (How did that Parks & Rec vehicle end up on it’s roof and who was to blame?).
But this time is different.
Just yesterday a City Council candidate, Paulette Marshall Chaffee, dropped out of the race for the District 5 seat on council because she got caught red handed being a thief.
Oops, She Did it Again
Her pity-me-party dropout letter is nonsense and we all know she’d be at the candidate forum tonight were it not for the videos we posted here to FFFF.
This time, there’s no scapegoat. There’s no underling for the Chief of Police to blame, there’s no entry level parks employee to take the heat, and there’s no crazy homeless person to label as the problem.
This time, it’s the very rich Mayor’s wife. The Mayor who’s about to become a County Supervisor and control the very large budgets for some very powerful people.
Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody at City Hall will do the right and honest thing and tell us what’s happened so far and what’s happening.
Word has reached me that Fullerton might have leak problem – and that problem is that City Manager Ken Domer is quite mad that people would dare tell the public the things he intends to hide from us.
Such things as our Chief of Police and a Captain being caught up alleged Felony Battery on an EMT charges.
Or that one of our now former officers is being indicted for his cover-up work on the Joe Felz DUI incident.
When I first heard the rumors that Domer was hopping mad about the “leaks” coming out I brushed it off as hearsay. Then I heard it again from a different source. And again. And again still.
At this juncture I’m willing to chalk this rumor up as “Credible but without citation”.
If our city management would worry more about what their own staff is doing and the corruption therein and would be honest about it we wouldn’t need to rely on leaks from anonymous sources. And without those leaks, Domer would have nothing to be mad about in the first place.
Ultimately if he is mad it’s because he believes himself to be a part of the Ruling Elite above we the chattel and is more worried about appearances than solving problems.
The funny part for me is that I’ve tried to cultivate leaks within the city to no avail. All of the people who know me in City Hall are smart enough to not tell me anything for fear of guilt by association.
Yet here we are breaking stories of corruption and malfeasance and we get these leaks at FFFF because enough employees are fed up with the nonsense happening in Fullerton and FPD.
I salute the people who have sent us information because one of the last things Fullerton needs these days is a continuing culture of cover-ups. We respect your privacy and value the contribution to improving accountable, intelligent, and responsible leadership in our town’s government.
As you may have heard, once again Fullerton has a police chief in hot water. First we had Mike Sellers run away from his post after bungling the Kelly Thomas case, then Danny Hughes decided to give Joe Felz a pass on drunk driving & alleged hit and run and now Chief Hendricks is in trouble for unspecified reasons.
There is no official word on what’s going on from the City because City Manager Ken Domer doesn’t think we have a right to know who’s running our police department and what is happening in our city. However, thanks to a diligent city employee who shall remain nameless reaching out to several of us we know that Hendricks is on a paid vacation (with the benefit of not needing to use his vacation time) for his bad behavior and Captain Bob Dunn is now acting Police Chief.
But who is Bob Dunn?
We wrote about Dunn back in January when he came to our fair city from Anaheim. He was a Lieutenant there and somehow promoted to the position of Captain in Fullerton without much fanfare.
Now he’s been moved to acting Chief. That’s one heck of a jump in 7 months time. Is he really the best man for the job? Is he up to the task? What will he be doing and for how long? Who’s investigating Hendricks? Is Dunn overseeing an IA whitewash or has another agency been called in?
Nobody knows because Ken Domer doesn’t think you have the right to know and the city council can’t be bothered to make him talk.
A few weeks ago FFFF ran a post on the status on Dino Skokos, the FJC security goon and “disabled” former LA Deputy Sheriff who beat up and handcuffed a kid on campus in October, 2016. Right after the video of the event went viral, the district snapped into defense mode, placing Skokos on administrative leave and putting its lawyer to work on an in-house “investigation.” FJC President, Greg Schulz declared his dedication to reaching a conclusion of the incident.
The Schulz Factor: happy-looking but not credible…
The winter had passed; spring had come and gone. Summer was well along when in July, Schulz was directly confronted on the subject. In Schulz’s long and winding stream of nonsense a shiny pearl accidentally popped out of its oyster in the river bottom sludge: Skokos “was not going to be an employee of the district.”
What that meant was anybody’s guess, and some, like me, were skeptical. Was Skokos still on leave? If so, why? Who knew?
So FFFF followed up on an earlier Public records Act request that had been ignored. When that was intentionally misunderstood we filed yet another one. And finally we finally got this:
According to this list, Skokos was on admin leave – meaning he was getting paid for doing nothing – until the end of September, two full months after Schulz said he was no longer going to be an employee of the district, and almost an entire year after he assaulted that kid. And coincidentally (or not) that date corresponds exactly with the peculiar day projected earlier in the summer that Skokos was to come off administrative leave.
There was confusion on campus…
And here’s the last insult to public transparency on the part of Schulz & Co.: we have no idea whether Skokos is still employed by the district – whether at FJC, Cypress, district HQ, or at some other locale.
So how about it Greg? You promised a conclusion to this incident over a year ago. Did that promise include actually telling us about it?
In the likely event that no answer will be forthcoming from Schulz, you might try broaching the subject by our able and eager Trustee, Molly McClanahan, who has a long history of demanding accountability from her bureaucratic underlings.
Most government projects have three things in common: they are bad ideas promoted by bureaucrats, they are obscenely expensive, and there is no accountability attached to them.
In Fullerton we have lots of examples over the years that touch all three bases. But if ever one needed a veritable poster child for government fiascoes, the ill-conceived “Downtown Core and Corridors” Specific Plan would be it.
Back in 2010, the City of Fullerton put in an application for a “project” to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Strategic Growth Council” an assemblage of bureaucrats and political appointees selected by the governor to promote sustainability and responsibility in urban (and suburban planning). On the face of it, the idea was to promote development that would be eco-friendly – somehow, someway. Lo and Behold! Fullerton received a $1,000,000 grant to create the Downtown Core and Corridors Specific Plan, a massive overlay zone. In 2013 a committee was appointed to make this look like a community driven enterprise, but as so often happens the committee was led along by the consultants and staff who were being paid, and paid well, out of the grant money. Some members of this committee only went to one meeting, the last one, in May 2014, a meeting consumed by passing out certificates of participation to committee members for all their hard work.
In the meantime, the intent of the creators of the specific plan became crystal clear: opportunity for massive new housing projects along Fullerton’s busiest streets, development that would not even have to undergo the scrutiny facing normal projects so long as the permissive guidelines of the specific plan were met. Naturally, lots of people objected to the continued over-development of Fullerton, and the utter disconnect with what the Strategic Growth Council was ostensibly promoting. Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about the specific plan proposal was the way it was being used, unapproved by any policy maker, to promote other massive apartment projects already in the entitlement process.
And then a funny thing happened. The Downtown Core and Corridors Specific Plan vanished into thin air. Although recommended by the Planning Commission in August of 2014, the plan and its Environmental Impact Report never went to the city council for approval. 2015 passed; and so did 2016 without the plan being approved. Even modifications rumored to have been proposed by the now-departed Planning Director Karen Haluza never materialized for council review or approval.
I’ll drink to that!
Some cynical people believe the plan was postponed in 2014 because of the council election, an election that returned development uber alles councilmembers Greg Sebourn and Bud Chaffee. And they believe that the subsequent attempt to erase the plan from the municipal memory was perpetrated by none other than the hapless city manager, Joe Felz and lobbyist councilperson Jennifer Fitzgerald, (so the story goes) two individuals who had every incentive to shake down potential developers one by one, rather than granting a broad entitlement for new and gargantuan development. Felz had a massive budget deficit to fill, and Fitzgerald had massive lobbying opportunities from potential Pringle and Associate clients.
A chemical bond
What is undeniable is that three long years have passed and no action has been taken to either approve or deny the specific plan. The grant money approved by the State has been a complete waste – a travesty so embarrassing to everybody concerned that no one seems to want to demand an explanation for this fiasco. Neither the city bureaucrats or council, nor the State has any incentive to advertise this disaster, and you can bet there never will be an accounting.
No, there is no happy cartoon dinosaur in this story…
You remember Dino, right? He was the guy who retired from the LA Sheriff Department with a disability and then took a job as a campus security guard at Fullerton Junior College.
In October 2016 Dino assaulted a student for failing to acknowledge his august authority:
FFFF followed up, here, and here to document the remarkable lack of progress in separating this miscreant from his source of employment. Recently FFFF asked the North Orange College Community College District for a list of employees on administrative leave to see what sort of fish might be caught in the broad net. Here’s what we got back:
Fullerton College Employees on Administrative Leave from January 1, 2016 to present:
Robert Smitson – Fall 2015 to January 31, 2016
Jerry Stokes – Fall 2015 to January 31, 2016
Cynthia Wafer – September 2, 2016 to October 31, 2016
Dino Skokos – October 14, 2016 to September 30, 2017
Eileen Anguiano – February 28, 2017 to May 3, 2017
Scott Goss – May 18, 2017 to August 31, 2017
Beverly Pipkin – June 27, 2017 to July 31, 2017
Alan Gonzalez – June 29, 2017 until further notice
For some reason Skokos is not only still on leave, that leave is projected to continue for another ten weeks, meaning that the guy who attacked and falsely arrested that kid will have been on administrative leave for almost one year.
There are still lots of questions that haven’t been answered, and some that have not yet been asked (until now), such as:
What happened to the “independent” investigator, Currier and Hudson?
How much has Currier and Hudson charged us for their “services?”
Has the student who was assaulted and falsely arrested sued the taxpayers, and if so, what are the details?
Was there a settlement when no one was looking?
What happened to the Fullerton Police Department in all of this; did they ever bother investigate this themselves? If not, why not?
The Schulz Factor: simple and happy-looking but not believable
Here’s the choice nugget from the FJC president as quoted in The Hornet, way back in October, 2016, reassuring his workers, educrats and students that FJC is dedicated in settling this matter:
President Greg Schulz promised the college’s full dedication in reaching a conclusion regarding the incident.
And next time you see her clucking and harrumphing about town be sure to ask your NOCCCD Trustee, Molly McClanahan, what the Hell is going on. Good luck getting an intelligible answer!
Rumors of increased criminal activity are wafting out of city hall again. A few employees of the Public Works department are in hot water for some sort of embezzlement/kick-back scheme down at the city yard. Criminal charges are in the offing.
Something stinks.
It’s not clear to us who was involved or what was stolen. City leaders are keeping quiet right now, but hopefully they will inform the public soon.
If you have any information to contribute, please drop us a line. Discretion is our thing.
Here is the latest installment in a series by our Friend, Fullerton Engineer, describing the sad story of the ruinously expensive elevator additions at the Fullerton train station.
It may have been expensive, but it sure was unnecessary…
In my previous installments I described a project that nobody outside City Hall wanted or needed, a project that would never have been contemplated without State transportation grant monies, and that had been “designed” under a 2012 contract that had ballooned to a jaw-dropping $460,000 – including a mysterious increase of 28%. The engineer – Hatch Mott McDonald completed their efforts in 2014, per their purchase order billing record. And there the project sat for a year.
Why? The answer is not immediately forthcoming and naturally the public wasn’t informed; but the cause of the delay can be reasonably inferred from the staff report accompanying the request to award the construction contract to Woodcliff Corporation in April, 2015. For the first time we read that the OCTA is going to authorize a shift of a million dollars from transportation parking funding – money, presumably, needed to actually build the project. And we may surmise that without the funding, money spent on the engineering/design work, money authorized over three years earlier, would have been wasted.
Please observe the complete lack of transparency in the staff report, and the omission of any history that would indicate that staff and the city council in 2011-12 had committed the City to this project without adequate funding.
And note that the staff report lazily repeats the casual assertion of increasing train ridership as the justification for the project, but offers no data to substantiate the need.
The report does indicate worrisome information. The low bid, by Woodcliff is an alarming 22% over the estimate. But remarkably, this fact does not faze city staff at all, who nevertheless recommend award; nor does it alarm our city council who approved this fiasco unanimously. Staff even admits that there are potential cost savings that could be realized if the project were rebid. But nobody cared.
What the public is also not told is that toward the end of the design completion in 2014, a firm called Griffin Structures was given $6000 to provide “constructibility” services, a function that questions the competency of both the designer and the contractor whose job it is to design and build these elevators.
On Tuesday night our esteemed City Council, a clan that can never say no to a bad idea, reviewed Community Development Director Karen Haluza’s Big Plan to begin the process to create a downtown BID. For the uninitiated, BID stands for Business Improvement District. FFFF already gave the Friends a heads up, here.
To remind you, a BID means a new property lax levy. In downtown the lion’s share of any tax is going to go to the cops, whose performance shutting down the booze culture gives zero confidence that more money in their direction is money well spent. The rest of the loot would probably be wasted on stupid, footling projects that give work to Haluza’s crack staff. Here’s an example of the sort of nonsense that gave our planners the warm and fuzzies before Redevelopment was abolished.
Anyway, the Council got an earful from a few property owners – including one who vehemently denied being notified of the hearing. FFFF will soon be highlighting the comments of this gentleman who poignantly observed that his property income is his retirement income, and, pointing to the uniformed Heroes in the back of the room trenchantly noted that nobody was talking about taking their retirement away.
Our lobbyist-councilperson Jennifer Fitzgerald, who no doubt oversaw this wretched swindle in the first place as a way to keep her bar-owner pals from having to pay to clean up their own mess, moved to continue the item indefinitely. The others didn’t have a whole lot to say, which is typical.
My belief is that we have not seen the last of this obnoxious dodge, a way for the city to get somebody else to pay for their disastrous bar-on-every corner policy.
