1999 The year in review

August 1-15: Traffic fatalities dominate news

Aug. 1

PALMDALE - The dramatic disappearance of screenwriter Gary Devore is a story so resembling one of his own movie scripts that it comes complete with an amateur gumshoe who solves the mystery for the baffled police.

One year after Gary Devore vanished en route to his Carpinteria home in Santa Barbara County from Santa Fe, N.M., Douglas Crawford, an unemployed lawyer from San Diego, answered the mystery of the screenwriter's whereabouts with a week's worth of guesswork and footwork.

Aug. 2

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles County planners are balking at a proposal to develop a 10,000-home community in the Antelope Valley on the rolling green fields of Tejon Ranch.

Tejon Ranch, near Gorman, is 270,000 acres of mostly undeveloped property. Tejon Ranch Co. announced two weeks ago it had signed a letter of intent with three prominent land developers.

Aug. 3

BORON - Six people, including a family of four, were killed on Highway 58 early Monday morning when a load of concrete pipes rolled off the bed of a big-rig truck and skidded down the road, crushing two cars in the oncoming lanes. Truck driver Richard Sommerville, 59, of Riverside was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving after his truck lost its load at 12:55 a.m.

QUARTZ HILL - Sheriff's deputies believe three teenage girls arrested Sunday are responsible for a rash of home burglaries in the Quartz Hill area since January. The three girls, two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old, were arrested Sunday night in connection with at least 13 home burglaries.

ROSAMOND - Two days after the Oracle 2 international music festival at the Willow Springs International Raceway, Rosamond residents' ears are still pounding, and a few are raving, but not giving rave reviews.

Aug. 4

PALMDALE - One by one, they took to the stand to tell their tale of intimidation and harassment.

Seventeen witnesses appeared over a two-day period before a personnel commission, each recounting similar stories of abuse by Palmdale School District's ousted public relations director, Diana Beard-Williams.

VAN NUYS - Jerry Criado looked like any other happy, carefree 8-year-old Tuesday morning as he darted around his mother and grandmother in the hall outside Superior Court.

But the smile vanished as the Lancaster boy took the witness stand to tell his eyewitness account of the Dec. 19 death of his then-8-year-old sister, Sara Criado, at the hands of his mother's lover, who ran the child down with her car.

Aug. 5

LANCASTER - California's attempt to steer joint strike fighter work to the Golden State continued Wednesday when Antelope Valley and state officials paid a visit to California's 27-member Democratic Caucus in Washington.

Led by Lon Hatamiya, California's secretary of Trade and Commerce, the delegation met Wednesday with a bipartisan group of congressional staffers at the office of U.S. Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Santa Clarita.

Aug. 6

VAN NUYS - Teresa Gutierrez loved Doreen "Skinny" Gutierrez. "Skinny" was her whole world.

Teresa Gutierrez kept loving "Skinny" even after the drunken woman - her longtime lover - struck and killed Teresa Gutierrez' 8-year-old daughter, Sara Criado. Teresa Gutierrez watched her little girl die. And then, the prosecution claims, she helped "Skinny" get away.

Aug. 7

LANCASTER - If you receive a phone call summoning you to 6 p.m. jury duty or requesting your Social Security number - beware, it could be a scam.

There is no jury duty after 6 p.m. and the Los Angeles County court system won't ask for a juror's Social Security number or mother's maiden name during a phone call.

Aug. 8

BORON - The company hauling massive concrete pipes that fell from a truck and killed six people was cited seven times in the last 12 months for "unsafe condition of vehicle, load or equipment." Reasons for the citations for the trucks were not detailed in CHP records.

Aug. 9

PALMDALE - A Valley Press story about the disappearance of screenwriter Gary Devore has prompted e-mails, faxes and phone calls from readers who suggested some possible answers and more questions.

Devore, then 55, disappeared June 28, 1997, while driving home to Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County from Santa Fe, N.M.

Aug. 10

BAKERSFIELD - Physician's assistant Chris Lynch, 43, smirked in Kern County Superior Court on Monday as he sat next to his defense attorney, his hands shackled.

Lynch smirked when a 47-yearold Rosamond woman, whom a jury convicted him of raping and sexually assaulting, told how he had ruined her life and made her afraid to leave her home.

PALMDALE - The car of a Santa Barbara woman returning from Las Vegas vaulted into the California Aqueduct on Monday in a manner eerily similar to the way the California Highway Patrol believes screenwriter Gary Devore met his death. In the case of Monday morning's pre-dawn accident, the driver survived.

BAKERSFIELD - When Cynthia Austin went to the Beverly Medical Clinic in Rosamond last August, she expected the staff to treat her bad back.

But in a lawsuit in filed July 30, Austin alleges that physician's assistant and former clinic employee Chris Lynch groped her buttocks and breasts while complimenting her on her good looks.

LAKE LOS ANGELES - A 2-year-old boy was killed Monday when a car driven by his mother rolled several times on Avenue J near 175th Street East.

The mother, 31-year-old Charlotte Kinnell of Lancaster, suffered major injuries, as did four other passengers in the 1987 Honda Accord, California Highway Patrol Officer Jay Adams said.

Aug. 11

VAN NUYS - What a horrible trial. What a horrible set of charges and circumstances.

Doreen Gutierrez faces a jury that must decide not her guilt or innocence, but the degree of her guilt.

LOS ANGELES - A gunman burst into a Jewish community center Tuesday and sprayed the lobby with more than 70 shots, wounding five people, including three boys attending day camp, and then evaded a manhunt into the night.

After hours of searching the suburban neighborhood near the center, several SWAT teams converged on a hotel where authorities found a Toyota Corolla believed carjacked by the suspect. Police identified the man as Buford O'Neal Furrow, also known as Buford O. Furrow Jr., a balding, 37-year-old white man with brown hair.

Aug. 12

LAS VEGAS - The white supremacist wanted in the shooting of five people at a Los Angeles Jewish community center fled to Las Vegas in taxis, walked into an FBI office and confessed Wednesday, saying he wanted his act to be "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews," authorities said.

Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr., 37, was also charged with murder in the slaying of a postal worker who was shot Tuesday near the community center, FBI special agent Grant Ashley said. The federal murder charge could carry the death penalty, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

PALMDALE - It's official - the Palmdale School District was justified when it fired its public relations director, Diana Beard-Williams, a personnel commission ruled Wednesday.

After hearing two days of testimony from 17 witnesses, the three-member commission unanimously agreed with the district's termination of Beard-Williams in April.

VAN NUYS - It only took a jury two hours to find Littlerock resident Doreen Gutierrez guilty of second-degree murder for crushing to death her longtime lesbian lover's 8-year-old daughter.

A drunken Gutierrez ran down and killed Sara Criado with her 19-foot-long 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass on Dec. 19 following an argument with the little girl's mother.

METALINE FALLS, Wash. - Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr., the man who surrendered Wednesday in the shootings of five people at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, has a painfully familiar history: A low-profile loner with racist views and a nasty temper.

ROSAMOND - Federal agents descended on Rosamond, following a trail of leads in the search for Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr., the white supremacist suspected of opening fire at a Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles.

Furrow is believed to have lived in Rosamond for a time in the mid-1990s, and may have been laid off from the Northrop Corp. several years ago.

Aug 13

PALMDALE - Crime has been dropping in the Valley for the last two years - and is still falling.

Statistics released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department show more than a 20% drop in Valley crime for the first half of 1999 compared to the same period last year.

PALMDALE - Six years before Buford O'Neal Furrow Jr. became prime suspect in an attack on a Jewish community center in the San Fernando Valley, he was working on the B-2 stealth bomber at Air Force Plant 42.

When Furrow was fired from his job during an early round of bomber-program cutbacks in 1993, he was happy to go, said Doug Blunt, who worked shoulder to shoulder on a daily basis with the white supremacist.

LANCASTER - A businessman charged with selling rock cocaine and who allegedly bought stolen guns at his Palmdale liquor store will serve six months in jail after pleading no contest to a drug charge.

Nasry Haddad, 44, entered his plea in Antelope Municipal Court on Wednesday. He will return to court Sept. 8; at that time, deputies will take him into custody to start his sentence.

PALMDALE - If your long-distance friends and family are still dialing the 805 area code to chat, you'd better call and remind them that, as of Saturday, 805 stops working and 661 is the code they need.

Aug. 14

EDWARDS AFB - An unidentified research chemist was injured Friday when a small quantity of research fuel overheated and exploded.

The explosion involved less than 10 ounces of rocket fuel that "overheated and reacted in a fume hood during an experimental process," Air Force spokesman Ranney Adams said.

LAKE HUGHES - The Painted Turtle Camp, the latest of Paul Newman's nonprofit summer camps for chronically ill children, is being cleaned up and plans to open its cabin doors at an old Lake Hughes camp site by fall 2001.

Aug. 15

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles County children's department officials on Tuesday proposed tightening reporting requirements for the deaths of youngsters under their care.

Uploaded December 22, 1999