Scott Glenn Mullins of Rosamond found guilty of murdering his estranged wife

PALMDALE - Thousands of Valley motorists faced a Monday commute covered by fog that blanketed the Valley floor and mountain passes.

Although the danger of accidents increases with fog, California Highway Patrol officers and Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies in Lancaster and Palmdale reported no fog-related traffic mishaps.

PALMDALE - Northrop Grumman will be laying off up to 1,200 employees from its B-2 bomber production site in Palmdale in 1999, a company spokesman said Monday.

About half the reduction in the workforce will be aircraft mechanics or an estimated 650 workers, company spokesman Ed Smith said Monday. Already, 150 workers have received 60-day notices and will be laid off in early January.

PALMDALE - Antelope Valley residents have enjoyed nine years of clean air.

That means, unlike the Los Angeles basin, the Valley suffered no Stage 1 Smog Alerts.

Stage 1 Smog Alerts are issued when pollution levels exceed .20 parts per million of ozone, which is a major component of smog, according to officials at the Antelope Valley Air Pollution Control District.
Dec. 2

VAN NUYS - A jury Tuesday found Scott Glenn Mullins of Rosamond guilty of murdering his estranged wife Renee by strangling her, then dumping her body in the California Aqueduct.

The five days of deliberations, lasting almost as long as the trial itself, ended when the verdict came in at 3:30 p.m. when the foreman pronounced Mullins guilty of murder in the second degree at the Van Nuys Superior Court.

HI VISTA - In a gully lined with soft sand, a CAT 325B excavator nudges old furniture aside to make room for Dumpsters set to arrive later on in the week.

A dull roar from the machine's giant engine masks the profound silence of this place.

PALMDALE - The Boeing Co., one of the Antelope Valley's largest employers, said Tuesday it will cut an additional 20,000 workers during the next two years as the world's biggest plane-maker grapples with slackening demand brought on by the Asian economic crisis.

The cuts are in addition to the previously announced 28,000 jobs that Boeing will eliminate.

LANCASTER - Two of Antelope Valley's hospitals are in the top half of a survey ranking Los Angeles area hospitals, conducted by a national health and medical information company; Antelope Valley hospital ranked in the top 20%.

A survey by a national health and medical information company ranked Antelope Valley Hospital 22nd and Lancaster Community Hospital 30th out of 72 hospitals surveyed in the greater Los Angeles area.

LOS ANGELES - A judge Tuesday denied a defense attorney request to transfer the murder trial of Mike and Kathleen Gentry - who are accused in the death of their 15-year-old daughter - to the Antelope Valley courthouse.

On Tuesday, the Gentrys - Lake Los Angeles residents accused of intentionally starving to death their 15-year-old daughter, Lindsey - entered not guilty pleas to charges of second-degree murder, child abuse and conspiracy.
Dec. 3

EDWARDS AFB - Nagging problems with the parafoil designed to slow and steer the X-38 spacecraft appear to have been solved, NASA officials said.

The X-38 is the subscale model of the lifeboat for the international space station.

PALMDALE - For eight years, Santa's Workers of the Antelope Valley has made Christmas brighter for needy families throughout the Antelope Valley by distributing refurbished and new toys to as many as 4,200 children each Christmas season.

Now it's Santa's Workers' turn to ask for a little Christmas help.

LANCASTER - In the Old West, bank robbers were smart enough to get the heck out of Dodge after they knocked over the local bank.

That wasn't the case Wednesday, when a team of money-for-nothing crooks armed with a shiny silver handgun made Northrop Federal Credit Union tellers reach for the sky at their Commerce Center Drive branch, then made off with at least $2,000 in cash.

LLANO - Homicide detectives arrested a reputed former girlfriend for investigation in the fatal shooting of a Llano man.

Cheri Mathews, 38, of Phelan, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the shooting of Llano resident Dave Hepburn.
Dec. 4

LOS ANGELES - Eager to hear all complaints of the apparent failure of Los Angeles County's district attorney to collect child support, Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich spent Thursday morning listening to all comers.

He heard from nearly 100.

EDWARDS AFB - Two models of the X-38 "lifeboat" vehicle for the international space station could be dropped from the skies above the Antelope Valley early next year.

Engineeers are making preparations at Dryden while parafoil problems are being worked out at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona, said Chris Nagy, Dryden's chief engineer for the X-38 program.

MOJAVE - Big-time technothriller author Tom Clancy is joining the space race in the Antelope Valley.

Rotary Rocket's plans for a private enterprise reusable launch vehicle are beginning to take shape at Mojave Airport with ground testing of a helicopter-like rotor.

LANCASTER - Juan Hernandez couldn't believe what he saw when he pulled up to the Rite Aid job fair Thursday morning: A line of applicants stretching almost a half-mile long.

"I hope it (the line) moves fast," Hernandez said. "This is a lot of people."
Dec. 5

PALMDALE - City Council members from Palmdale and Lancaster failed to negotiate an agreement on the operation of the area's only foreign trade zone before Friday's U.S. Department of Commerce deadline for accepting public comment.

Operation of the zone, which is intended to benefit regional economic development, has been the subject of disagreement between the cities since August.

VAN NUYS - An Antelope Valley mother, accused of killing her disabled daughter by starving her, collapsed in court Friday after she learned her trial was postponed again.

Kathleen Gentry, and her husband, Mike, of Lake Los Angeles are accused of intentionally starving to death their 15-year-old daughter, Lindsay. They face charges of murder, conspiracy to commit murder and child abuse.

CAPE CANAVERAL - As the space shuttle Endeavour rocketed toward the horizon, it carried with it the future of space exploration and the hopes of one local politician for achieving long-term prosperity in the Antelope Valley.

Assemblyman George Runner, R-Lancaster, who attended the launch of the Endeavour early Friday morning, said he was inspired when he saw first-hand the economic benefits that could be wrought from the space launch industry.

LANCASTER - Superintendent David Mulkey resigned from his position Friday as a key manager in the Public Works Department, more than halfway through a city-imposed disciplinary suspension for offenses ranging from racial slurs to abusing employees.

City Manager Jim Gilley announced Mulkey's resignation in a terse announcement Friday evening to the Valley Press.
Dec. 6

PALMDALE - A private consulting group has identified 14 acres on the southeast corner of Avenue P-8 and Sierra Highway as the best location for an multimodal transportation center.

As envisioned, the center would be built in two phases, the first to handle transportation needs in the next five to 10 years and the second to handle those needs beyond 10 years.

LANCASTER - A generation ago, Lancaster was a sleepy farming town of 30,000 in a valley where alfalfa was king. The crop covered acre after acre of the valley floor.

Today subdivisions have replaced the fields of green, and Lancaster is a bustling city of nearly 130,000 residents. City leaders talk with pride about the strides Lancaster has taken. City leaders say the future is even brighter.

PALMDALE - In the interest of keeping his ideas and plans for a commercial launch vehicle secret, Stephen Wurst, president of Space Access, has always kept a low profile.

With a potential payoff in billions of dollars, Wurst didn't want the competition that surrounds him - like the builders of VentureStar and Rotary Rocket - to know too much about what he was doing.
Dec. 7

LANCASTER - When Michael Walker answered his call to jury duty, he never thought that duty would include being subjected to the danger of being burned alive.

That danger came earlier this week when Walker and 152 other jurors jammed themselves into a small, portable building at the Los Angeles County Courthouse in Lancaster.

LANCASTER - Boeing and NASA are putting on hold the development of a supersonic passenger jet, saying that more research needs to be done to prove out technical and economic solutions.

Originally planned to have a supersonic jet flying by 2010, that number has been moved back to at least 2020, said Malcolm MacKinnon, program manager for the high speed civil transport program at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

LANCASTER - In the expanding environmental investigation at Air Force Plant 42, an engineering consulting firm detected levels of the carcinogen trichloroethene (TCE) in the groundwater in two wells.

While there is concern on the part of the Air Force, local officials and members of Air Force Plant 42 Environmental Restoration Advisory Board, preliminary findings by CH2M Hill in monitoring wells surrounding the area have found that the groundwater contamination appears to be contained.
Dec. 8

MOJAVE - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said Dec. 7, 1941, was "a day that will live in infamy." The day was recalled with a menacing roar in the skies above the Antelope Valley on Monday.

Distance muted the roars of the engines, but the clear morning couldn't hide the imperfect wingtip-to-wingtip formation of nine wobbly planes bearing down on Mojave Airport with bombs to drop.

LANCASTER - Sub-freezing, record-tying temperatures chilled the Antelope Valley on Monday, with more cold, crisp weather forecast for today.

While Monday's recorded low of 15 degrees tied the record for this day set in 1978, today's forecast is for more of what has occurred over the past two days in the Valley.

LANCASTER - A Paraclete High School star athlete who is helping take his team toward the CIF Southern Section Division XII championship game will face trial as a juvenile for a freeway rock-throwing incident that injured a woman driving on the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Paraclete football player Tommy Breech, 17, and Palmdale High School student Larry Scattaglia, 17, both were cited and later charged with throwing rocks off the west embankment of the AV Freeway near the Avenue M offramp.

LANCASTER - City Manager Jim Gilley said he persuaded besieged Public Works Superintendent David Mulkey to resign and wrung a promise from him not to sue the city in exchange for severance pay and some health benefits.

Mulkey, 51, was about halfway through a 15-day suspension without pay when he resigned Friday.

LOS ANGELES - Capt. Mike Aranda, chief of the Lancaster Sheriff's Station, has been promoted to the rank of commander.

The news came Monday after the swearing-in ceremony of Los Angeles County's new sheriff, Lee Baca, who defeated long-time Sheriff Sherman Block in last month's election.

LANCASTER - An executive who served as interim chief executive officer of Antelope Valley Hospital from September 1991 to January 1992 could temporarily return to the post under a proposal expected to be discussed in closed session Wednesday.

Mathew Abraham, purportedly on tap to step into the interim job, has already enjoyed a stormy, litigation-peppered past with the hospital.

Dec. 9

LANCASTER - Lockheed Martin Corp. took a giant step closer to constructing a commercial reusable space ship, forming a company with the express purpose to develop VentureStar, a company spokesman said Tuesday.

Lockheed Martin formed the limited liability company VentureStar to build VentureStar the vehicle, a proposed $5 billion single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle.

LANCASTER - More than 200 people packed City Council chambers Tuesday night, hearing a parade of former Public Works employees air grievances about the ousted former city yard superintendent.

About a half-dozen former Public Works employees said they were "Mulkenized," referring to their treatment at the hands of David Mulkey, the former city yard superintendent who quit last week under a cloud of controversy.

LANCASTER - The "space" in the Aerospace Valley continues to pour into the Valley's factories and design centers, with the Boeing Co. announcing Tuesday its plans to build its reusable space vehicle at Air Force Plant 42 in 2000.

You could even call the next step, 2001: Space Odyssey.

SACRAMENTO - State Sen. William J. "Pete" Knight wasted no time on the first day of the legislative session on Monday proposing an aggressive tax incentive initiative to lure construction of the VentureStar next generation space shuttle to California.

Right after fellow legislators took their oaths of office, Knight presented his Senate Bill 85, which will provide a 10% employee and capital tax credit to companies involved with the VentureStar project.

PALMDALE - The children seriously injured in a weekend traffic collision on 10th Street West near Best Buy are the kin of Antelope Valley judges Pamela and Randy Rogers.

Five-year-old Christie Rogers and 14-year-old Brandon McConnell, children of Judge Pamela Rogers, were listed in fair and improving condition Tuesday after a Saturday collision.
Dec. 10

LANCASTER - The Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the city of Lancaster $3.1 million for their efforts to relocate the Antelope Valley Fair and to aid in the completion of the National Soccer Complex.

The money, announced Wednesday, was lobbied by Congressman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Santa Clarita.

PALMDALE - Commuters on an Antelope Valley Transit Authority busline to Los Angeles are upset with what they contend are poor service, unsanitary restrooms, constant mechanical failures and unresponsive bus executives.

A formal complaint signed by nearly 300 disgruntled bus riders was sent to the mayors of Lancaster and Palmdale, and Los Angeles County 5th District Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich earlier in the week.

LANCASTER - City Manager Jim Gilley and his wife, Jo Anne, are suing Antelope Valley Hospital and a neurosurgeon for allegedly botching Jo Anne Gilley's neck and back surgery.

The medical malpractice lawsuit was filed last month in Antelope Valley Superior Court. The suit alleges Dr. George C. Perdikis and hospital staff and employees were negligent "in preparing for and performing the surgery."

LANCASTER - Larry Grooms, the new head of the Greater Antelope Valley Economic Alliance, told members of Lancaster's Chamber of Commerce Wednesday he thinks it's time for area business owners to stop arguing and start building a brighter future for the Antelope Valley.

Grooms, editor in chief for the Antelope Valley Press, starts his new job as chief executive officer of the Greater Antelope Valley Economic Alliance (GAVEA) next month, and appeared at the chamber luncheon to build support for the alliance.

LANCASTER - An announced attempt to launch a recall effort against the City Council failed to materialize at Tuesday night's council meeting.

On Monday two residents, Bill Hessler and Joe Villanueva, said they and dozens of other disgruntled residents would launch a recall attempt at the meeting over the council's response to problems at the city's Public Works yard.

LANCASTER - Boeing officials from Seattle will tour Air Force Plant 42 Site 4, looking at the location as a possible place for joint strike fighter assembly.

Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon extended the invitation to Boeing officials who will be touring the site next week.

Boeing is in competition with Lockheed Martin to build the JSF. Both companies are building their competition vehicles in the Antelope Valley. A portion of the fly-off will take place at Edwards AFB.