Security News
August 5, 2013Venice crash: Italian newlywed died of blunt force trauma
The Italian newlywed killed after a car tore across a crowded Venice Beach boardwalk died of blunt force trauma to the head and neck, coroner’s officials said Monday.
The autopsy on Alice Gruppioni, 32, was completed, and L.A. County coroner’s spokesman Ed Winter said her death had been ruled a homicide.
The tourist was on her honeymoon when the blue Dodge Avenger plowed along the boardwalk Saturday, striking pedestrians and vendors on the popular Ocean Front Walk. Eleven others, including Gruppioni’s husband, Christian Casadei, were injured.
The suspect, identified as Nathan Louis Campbell, 38, turned himself in to Santa Monica police shortly after the incident. He was arrested on suspicion of murder and remained jailed Monday in lieu of $1-million bail.
Sources familiar with the investigation said Campbell made spontaneous statements to police at the time of his arrest, implicating himself in the hit-and-run.
Sources said Campbell had possibly been living in his car, purchased in Colorado about a month ago. Public records indicated Campbell had addresses in Florida, Georgia and Colorado.
Records also showed that Campbell had a history of arrests for minor crimes in both Denver and Florida, including a reckless driving citation involving alcohol in Panama City Beach.
In Colorado, a Nathan L. Campbell with the same date of birth as the suspect was accused of shoplifting in February 2009 and spent five days in a Denver jail; he also was accused of trespassing in July 2009 and spent 10 days in jail.
He had also been accused of trespassing in 2008, Denver County court records show. Denver police confirmed the records and jail time.
Florida public records show that a Nathan Louis Campbell was arrested in April 2008 by Panama City Beach police and charged with reckless driving with alcohol. He was listed as a transient born in Georgia.
The man’s date of birth, height and other physical descriptors matched those of the suspect in the Venice hit-and-run. Panama City police indicated they had received calls about the reckless driving records.
Witnesses said Sunday the car appeared to reach speeds near 60 mph as it moved about a quarter-mile down the boardwalk. The driver seemed to go out of his way to hit pedestrians, they said.
Video taken from a restaurant on narrow Dudley Avenue shows a man believed to be Campbell pacing near a sedan, then getting into the car and driving suddenly forward, out of camera range.
Another video shows the moments that followed: the sedan slamming into pedestrians and ramming a canopy before turning left and speeding down Ocean Front Walk at an hour when many people were waiting to watch the setting sun.
The driver first tried to exit through a parking lot but struck a sunglasses stand, onlookers said. The car then backed up and exited at Park Avenue, a street with no blocking barriers, they said.
Officials said the motorist entered Ocean Front Walk by driving onto a sidewalk and maneuvering past five narrow concrete pylons, a barrier meant to block cars.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called Saturday’s rampage a tragedy, adding that he plans to get in touch with Gruppioni’s husband and family.
“This should have been the happiest moment of her life,” Garcetti said.
The victim’s family arrived in Southern California on Sunday night, NBC Los Angeles reported.
“She was robbed of her life while living her dream visit to California with her husband,” Katia Gruppioni, her aunt, told NBC4 in a text message. “This was a tremendous injustice. Alice was a remarkable young lady making her personal dreams come true.”
Federal probe of L.A. County jails expected to wrap up this year
The federal investigation into allegations that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies abused inmates is expected to conclude within the next five months, according to U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr., who is overseeing the probe.
“My sense is the investigation, one way or the other, will culminate certainly before the end of this year,” Birotte said during an interview with The Times’ editorial board last week.
The FBI has been investigating the sheriff’s jail system — the largest in the nation — since at least 2011. Sheriff Lee Baca told The Times he has been assured he’s not a target; but he, his spokesman and many of his top commanders have been interviewed. Federal authorities have also interviewed inmates and lower-level jailers, and have subpoenaed extensive internal records.
Sources familiar with the investigation have said that at least two federal grand juries have taken testimony. Legal experts say that allegations of abuse, if substantiated by investigators, could result in charges against the deputies involved and possibly their direct superiors if, for example, they played a role in covering it up.
Federal authorities also have been investigating whether sheriff’s officials purposely hid an inmate from the FBI after they discovered he was secretly working as a federal informant and collecting information on allegedly abusive and corrupt deputies.
In that case, The Times reported that sheriff’s officials launched an operation called Pandora’s Box, in which they moved the inmate — a convicted bank robber — to a different jail under fake names, including Robin Banks. Baca’s spokesman has said the inmate was moved not to hide him from the FBI but to protect him from deputies because he was “snitching” on them.
Deputies involved in the operation have said otherwise and pointed to Baca and his top aide at the time, Paul Tanaka, as being involved.
When that inmate informant was first discovered, Baca publicly blasted the FBI and defended his jails. But he’s since agreed to a sweeping set of reforms aimed at preventing abuse and improving accountability.
So far, only one deputy has been convicted in connection with the federal probe: a jailer who admitted to taking a bribe to smuggle the inmate informant a cellphone.
Interviews with people with knowledge of the probe, however, have revealed that the federal scrutiny of the Sheriff’s Department has extended beyond the jails to deputy cliques and allegations of corruption. One deputy said he wore a wire for the FBI to secretly record a department supervisor over allegations of improper fundraising.
Federal authorities have generally remained tight-lipped or vague about what they’re looking at and about what kind of indictments — if any — they expect.
Last week, Birotte said, “There’s a lot of information. It’s a big investigation. I’m very big on the notion that you dot your I’s and cross your Ts.”
He said he’s been getting briefed on the probe every couple of months and is urging his people to be thorough so the end result will stand up to scrutiny.
In South L.A., a bitter case of mistaken identity
It’s not every day someone chases you down with citizenship papers to prove her name. Then again, Annie Shin managed to live for 64 years without being accused of killing someone. You do what you have to do.
“My name is Annie Shin!” she shouted in fractured English, waving her heavily creased documents for emphasis. Then, in case there was any confusion: “No Du! No Du!”
That name — Du — might not ring a bell. It’s been a long time since a woman named Soon Ja Du shot Latasha Harlins in a liquor store at 91st and Figueroa streets. Long enough that you may have forgotten. South Los Angeles has not.
On a Saturday morning in 1991, Latasha, 15, walked down to Empire Liquor, put a bottle of orange juice in her knapsack, then went to the counter. Du, the store owner, accused Latasha of trying to steal the juice. According to witnesses, Latasha told Du she had every intention of paying and revealed two dollar bills in her hand.
Du grabbed Latasha’s sweater. The two struggled. Latasha struck Du in the face, broke free, tossed the juice on the counter and walked for the door. Du picked up a .38-caliber handgun and fired a shot into the back of Latasha’s head.
Latasha was studious, with designs on law school; she was convinced that, had she been the prosecutor, she would have won more prison time for the man who shot and killed her mother six years earlier.
There wasn’t much mystery, meanwhile, to Du’s wariness of her customers. Korean Americans owned almost half of those liquor stores back then; 19 had been killed on the job in the previous decade. Du had begged her husband to sell the store. The stress — long hours, a razor-thin profit margin, shoplifters — gave her migraines.
Still, the details of the case were damning. Du’s husband had called the police to report that his wife had shot a “robber lady.” Police concluded that there had been “no attempt at shoplifting” — “no crime at all.” A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, with a maximum sentence of 16 years in prison. The judge gave her probation, community service and a $500 fine.
In the African American community, it was outrage piled atop tragedy.
Outside of South L.A., Latasha’s case isn’t as well known as Rodney King’s. But some say it had as much to do with the “Rodney King riots” — which left scores of Korean American-owned liquor stores in ashes — as the King verdict itself.
Even today, in this neighborhood, there are few worse things to call someone than “Soon Ja Du.” And then, last week, it happened.
A flier started circulating through the community. No one’s sure why, or how it started. It landed on doorsteps and in churches, got passed out on bustling sidewalks, wound up tacked to the wall of a bookstore in Leimert Park. Above a photograph of Du, the flier read: “THIS WOMAN OWNS BUDDHA MARKET. SHOP AT YOUR OWN RISK!”
Really? Could Soon Ja Du be back in business? Here?
I headed to Buddha Liquor Market, down Slauson Avenue, past the ghosts of the long-closed factories that had lured thousands of African American families to Los Angeles. I asked for Buddha’s owner, who came out wearing a prim cardigan. She looked about right — coiffed black hair, roughly the right age. Maybe that was part of the problem. I told her I was from the paper, and I showed her the flier: “Is this you?”
She groaned, as if a part of her had just died, and beckoned me into her cramped office, its wood-paneled walls jammed with bottles of liquor. On her desk was a copy of the flier; it turned out that people had begun confronting her with it, taping it to the windows of the store.
She rummaged through her purse to produce her driver’s license. She pointed a crooked index finger at the name: “Annie. Shin. Me.”
Sure enough, property records showed the same: nothing about Du; ownership by Shin. Before long, she produced her citizenship papers. They said the same thing. Annie Shin is 64; Soon Ja Du, wherever she may be, is 73. Shin said she had never heard of Du — not until her customers started confronting her with a picture of another woman.
Shin apologized for her English; I told her my Korean was worse. Hers was a classic immigrant’s tale: She emigrated from South Korea in 1975, found work in a sewing factory and saved enough to buy her first liquor store, a tiny place in Compton. Every few years, she would sell her store and upgrade. She bought the Buddha, her fourth store, for $1.5 million in 2010.
This one was different — a full-fledged grocery store, or as close as you can find for miles on end in South L.A. There is fresh produce, still rarer than you might think around here. You can also buy Moet & Chandon champagne for $62.
Shin said she’s terrified that the neighborhood is going to turn on her. “Why Buddha?” she asked. “Why me?”
She has reason to worry, said one of her employees, Jose Bendezu. “A lot of customers are black people,” he said. “It’s a problem.”
One of them, 61-year-old Ernest Mixon, came in a few minutes later, fully prepared to raise hell. Somebody left one of the fliers on his doorstep. Bitter memories of Latasha’s case came flooding back. If it was true, he was ready to lead a protest against the store. Shin pulled out her naturalization papers and implored Mixon to look.
“You didn’t change your name?” he asked. “No!” she pleaded. He shook his head. “I’ll be darned,” he said. “That’s a vicious rumor — and it’s all over the neighborhood. It’s going to hurt her. Hurt her business. Hurt everything.”
The cynical take here is that fear and loathing are very much alive in South L.A. That no, we can’t just get along.
But — there are fewer liquor stores. Relations with police have improved. Violent crime has plummeted. And there are suggestions that this time, South L.A. might circle the wagons around Annie Shin — one of their own, despite it all.
A steady stream of customers, almost all African American, offered their support. One said he called Shin “mom” and thanked her for giving him a little credit the other day. Shin’s butcher has developed a nice little reputation; Dion Johnson and her husband said they’d made their long monthly drive for liverwurst and neck bones, and pledged their support.
“A lot of people are haters,” Johnson said, shaking her head. “These are beautiful people.”
One change, at least, can be tracked with certainty: The bottle of orange juice Latasha didn’t steal cost $1.79. Shin had it for $2.39. Time marches on.
50 Cent pleads not guilty in domestic violence case
Rapper 50 Cent, real name Curtis Jackson, pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of domestic violence and vandalism stemming from a June 23 incident in Toluca Lake.
The 38-year-old performer, who reportedly remained quiet during the hearing in Van Nuys and let his lawyer speak for him, was ordered to stay away from and not try to contact model Daphne Narvarez, a.k.a. Daphne Joy, and was told to turn in all his guns.
The charges — one of domestic violence and four of vandalism — arose from an argument that escalated, prosecutors said. After Joy locked herself in a bedroom, the rapper allegedly kicked down the door and caused her an unspecified injury, Today reported, with police estimating thousands of dollars in damage to furniture, lighting fixtures and a TV.
Joy had been in a three-year relationship with 50 Cent and they have a child together, prosecutors said. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to five years in jail and $46,000 in fines for allegedly injuring the woman and destroying $7,100 in property during the altercation, L.A. Now reported.
50 Cent “denies these allegations as made against him,” the rapper’s attorney said in a statement obtained by TMZ in early July. “It is important to note, Mr. Jackson has not been arrested and there is no warrant outstanding for his arrest.”
Indeed, 50 Cent had joke-tweeted about his whereabouts when the story broke in early July, writing things such as, “I’m not in jail I’m on my Gucci couch” and “I’m not in jail I’m by my pool,” and including corresponding pictures.
On Monday, he Instagrammed something less jovial: “I learned to use confusion for fuel. It sparks my creativity,” he wrote, including an image with this statement: “Step into my shoes and walk the life I’m living and if you get as far as I am, just maybe you will see how strong I really am.”
He is due back in court for a pretrial hearing Sept. 4.
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