Off the I-15

I find covering court cases fascinating. But I hate having to rely on the timetable of the court system to get anything done.

Here’s a typical day in the life of a court reporter.

I show up at the courthouse at 9 a.m. for closing arguments in an attempted murder case. The attorneys are conferring with the judge, and then everyone has to take a break, and the hearing doesn’t actually start until 10:30.

When the jurors are finally brought in and the court is back in session, the judge starts reading the jury instructions. It takes more than an hour because everyone has to take a twenty-minute break half way through, and the word “firearm” has to be defined separately for every charge, of which there are four, and for every possible lesser charge or special allegation, of which there are many. Then everyone breaks for lunch. By this point, I am grinding my teeth, because I have just wasted the entire morning and I still need to finish and file another story today.

After a two hour lunch break, during which I have just enough time to write up my other story before rushing back to the courthouse, the attorneys actually make their arguments, and I can go back to the office with something to show my editors.

I wish that I could spew the definition of “firearm” word-for-word right now for dramatic effect. But I confess that I didn’t write it down and was too busy checking the time repeatedly on my cell phone and silently cursing to commit it to memory.

The Desert Dispatch gets a lot of its national news from the AP wire feed. The wire displays only a short “slug line,” basically two or three words that identify the article. With only 2 words to describe the article and catch the editor’s attention, slug lines can be unusual. These are just a few that caught my attention this week:
–”BigfootFound”: Two men in Georgia have a “hairy body” in a freezer.  They claim this body is the legendary Bigfoot, and that DNA tests will prove it.  I hope for their sake that this is Bigfoot, and not just a hairy hiker that they shot and stuffed in a freezer.
–”lawn birth”: Exactly as the slug promises, a woman in Fullerton gave birth on her front lawn. What must the neighbors think?
–”Gay Mormons”:   A support group for gay members of the Church of Latter-day Saints is asking for a meeting with church officials.  The group wants to promote support for gay and lesbian church members.  According to the AP article, gay church members are allowed to fully participate in religious activities as long as they remain celibate.
–”MusicKillin…” : This story was about an LA man who shot his neighbor for playing loud music. “Kill” is also newspaper speak for “get rid of this story permanently.”  Early versions of the story started with “MusicKilling has been killed” because of AP editing mistakes.
–”sophoclesfo”:  What? How is anyone supposed to know that “sophoclesfo” is code for “Greek theater helps soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder?”
–”marijuana”:  I guess one word says it all for this article.

Andee Goodwin | Desert Dispatch Intern

The filing deadline has not even passed yet, but already political signs for Barstow’s mayor race have shown up in town.

Thus far, I have seen two signs in favor of Mayor Lawrence Dale. One is at the corner of West Main Street and Avenue A, the other I have seen from the 40. It is on National Trails on the way to the Marine Corps Logistics Base, Barstow.

The Dale sign is dark blue with orange writing and a simple message telling voters to re-elect the two-term mayor.

Thus far, Dale is the only candidate I’ve seen with signs. No word from either the Joe Gomez camp or the Nathaniel Pickett campaign.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

In the news business, like anything else, it seems that it’s always feast or famine. Some days I find myself juggling five breaking news stories, and other days I find myself grasping around for anything to fill the “news hole,” as we call it. I know some people are firmly convinced that the media just sits around making things up. I wish it was that easy.

Today, for instance, I started out with about four story ideas, none of which ended up being the one I wrote. I spent the morning following multiple leads, but it eventually became obvious that none of them were going to come through in time for our 3 p.m. deadline. Some of my sources never called back, some were on their days off, some couldn’t tell me anything, and some just didn’t have the information I needed.

By 1:30, with deadline looming ahead of me, I was desperately scanning through the police logs in search of a hidden crime trend or interesting incident I might have missed. I called over to the sheriff’s station to ask about a couple of vehicle thefts that had been reported in the same area. Was this a trend? The sergeant I talked to didn’t think so, but had I heard about the two guys they arrested on suspicion of stealing fence posts?

Fence posts didn’t sound like much of a story, but I was willing to write about just about anything at that point. A couple of phone conversations later, I had my story for the day and it was actually a good one — a concerned citizen chased suspected metal thieves from Hinkley to Lenwood, after seeing them uprooting steel fence posts on Bureau of Land Management property. The chase ended with two men being arrested after being caught with about 80 fence posts. Hey, it wasn’t what I had in mind for the day, but I’ll take it.

There is some new commercial on the radio about the abundance of bugs in the Barstow area right now. It contains a line that goes something like, “It’s hot outside so the bugs want to be inside.” Starting to ring a bell? No. It’s OK; I didn’t pay too much attention to it either.

But now I will.

Sunday night, my roommate and I were grilling burgers — the new specialty ones they have at Stater Bros. like bacon and cheddar cheese, blue cheese, pepper and garlic and jalapeño, have you tried them — and had the back slider open to make running in and out of the house easy.

It also made it easy for bugs to fly in and out of the house. Just as we were about to sit down to eat, a friend pointed out that we had a lot of bugs in our house.

Nothing out of the ordinary, really. We do have our fair share of flies and such, but this was ridiculous. An entire wall was nearly black with this little winged creatures. Save their heads, large black and gray wings hid their entire bodies.

There were so many, we stood there dumbfounded. We did not know how to rid the house of so many bugs. I figured they had just moved in for their duration of their lives and hoped they did not live very long.

Luckily, the bugs died easy. With a few fatal swoops of a broom, most we dead and lying near the baseboard, a scattering of wings everywhere.

So next time that commercial comes on the air, I’m going to listen.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

Weather can change quickly in the desert. One minute you are baking in the summer sun. Then storm clouds swoop down from the mountain and it rains, for a few minutes. The sun peeps out again, its hot, humid and a probably windy.

The weather can also change, at any given moment, as you travel across town.

Last night, Abby Sewell, a reporter at the Desert Dispatch, called me around 8:30 p.m. She had just been out on Soap Mine Road where a car got stuck in a flooded wash and its passengers had to be rescued by fire crews.

Not wanting to miss a precious rain shower, I immediately looked out a window at my house on the opposite side of town in Lenwood but saw no rain. It had sprinkled earlier in the day, but my dirt backyard was light brown and dry.

Across town, however, it was raining. Soap Mine Road flooded. A levy at the drive-in broke spilling mud every where, and rushing water took down a tree in Ms. Willis’ front yard out on Arbor Way.

All things considered, it was a pleasant evening in Lenwood. My roommates spent most of the night sitting on the back patio.

Jim Harrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, said spotty weather is common in the desert. He said sometimes it is raining on one side of the street and dry on the other. Last night, I think that street was Barstow Road.

Do you have stories or photos from this recent spell of weather? Share with the community here at “Off the I-15″ or in a gallery at www.desertdispatch.com.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

A year ago today, the Desert Dispatch learned that Petty Officer First Class Steven Phillip Daugherty, a Barstow High grad, had been killed in Iraq. Below are my memories of that day.
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I came into work that Tuesday morning knowing there would be a message on my phone that would either make or break my day.

On July 6, Petty Officer First Class Steven Phillip Daugherty, a code breaker assigned to a Navy Seal group operating in Iraq was killed. Daugherty grew up in Barstow, Calif., graduated from Barstow High School in 1997. He planned to come home for his 10-year class reunion scheduled in August and to see his mother and father. He had a wife and a little boy who lived in Washington. The nature of his work kept the details of his death secretive. He was 28, and the first local casualty from the Iraq war I had to write about as a reporter for the Desert Dispatch, Barstow’s daily newspaper.

At the time, an easel stood in the corner of our news room with a large memo pad on it. Written on the pad was a list of potential big stories that the reporters had to be prepared to cover – wild fires, flash floods, city officials resigning, police officers shot in the line of duty, a local politician elected to national office, the announcement that an Indian gaming casino was coming to Barstow and the death of a local soldier in Iraq. We had to develop a plan to cover these stories effectively. Who would we call? What reporting could we do ahead of time? How would we organize the story? Web version? Print version? Graphics? Photos?

As the paper’s military reporter, the eventual Iraq death of a soldier from Barstow was my story. A few weeks before Daugherty’s death, a soldier from Grand Rapids, Mich., near where I grew up, was killed. I read the stories in the Grand Rapids Press and took notes. They called the soldier’s family, talked to teachers from his high school, city officials and military personnel. I made my own list.

I found out about Daugherty’s death on July 9, the following Monday. I put the story I planned to file that day on hold as well as a phone call to my sister. It was her birthday. I forgot the plan I made and just started to react. The first story, posted online that morning, came straight from the Naval press release.

“Daugherty, 28, a cryptologic technician, was killed by an improvised explosive device while supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom,” I wrote.

I did not know what a cryptologic technician did. Later that morning, a sailor at his base in Virginia Beach, Va. filled in the details. The Daughertys listed in Barstow’s phone book were not related to the sailor. Some, if the conversation went that far, said how sorry they were to hear about his death. One man said he was proud to share his last name. Someone gave me the number of another Daugherty not listed in the phone book. Someone in the newsroom thought she had a son in the Navy.

I waited to make the call.

I write about deaths frequently, among other topics during my daily grind. I cover court trials, graduations, environmental clean-up programs, the heat during desert summers and new literacy programs for teens at the county library. I break down municipal ordinances, peg facts to trends and make sure those who work for us actually work for us. I am a daily source for the news, but the one time my words mean something rather than just inform is when I memorialize someone’s life in death on the front page of the paper.

The act of dying does not entitle someone to an elegant eulogy; nor does it guarantee column inches in the local paper. Some deaths do make headlines, and then there are formulas: the friends and family portrait of a homicide victim, the retrospective of a local celebrity who passes, and the somber culmination of life and duty for those who served – he was a soldier and father; she was a police officer and a mother. The reporter takes the formula and uses it to create a lasting memory. The death grabs the readers, and now the journalist has the final say on the departed.

Meanwhile, the family just hopes you spell the names right and say something nice.

Mrs. Daugherty asked me to do that when I finally made the call that afternoon. She begged me not to politicize Steven’s death to make commentary on the war, not to say anything that would jeopardize the safety of his fellow sailors – Steven wouldn’t want that, ever, she said – to say how much Steven liked being a sailor and how proud his family was of him.

“He loved the Navy. He loved everything about it. He was just proud to do his job,” she said.

She passed the phone around the room, brothers and a sister made similar pleas. I assured each that this was not about the war but about Steven. They continued sharing. His story, at least the version I would put on the front page, began to weave together. An honor roll student who wanted to join the Air Force. A community college graduate who enlisted in the Navy to see the world.

“And he did,” his mother added.

A cryptologic technician, an enabler according to people from his base, who provided critical intelligence to the Navy’s finest, the Seals. A musician, a son, a brother, a husband and a father.

I tried I captured it all, but I did not. You never do. The task of capturing a life through phone calls, past photographs, press releases and about 20 inches is admirable, formidable and impossible. I just hoped I spelled the names right and said something nice, something meaningful.

I had two messages on my machine when I came into the office the day the story ran. Steven’s sister called to thank me for the article. The family read it and were proud of Steven, she said.

Steven’s wife called too. I could not reach her for the article; this was the first time I heard from her. She asked me to send two copies of the article to her in Washington. One for the family’s refrigerator and one to put in Steven’s 5-year-old son’s scrap book.

“So he can remember his father,” she said.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor

How many cups of coffee do you drink? If you’re like me, you probably drink a lot.

I like a cup of coffee in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening. In fact, I plan to brew a pot when I get home from the office tonight. If there is coffee in front of me, I’ll probably drink it. I even like gas station coffee.

Well, fellow java chuggers, there’s good news. According to researchers in the United States and Spain:

“Drinking two or three cups of coffee a day did not increase risk of death in either men or women and in fact both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee were linked with a slightly reduced risk of death from heart disease. “

The study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health and published in the 17 June issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. The study suggests more investigation into the results.

And to be fair, I found out about the report from the Barstow Community Hospital monthly newsletter.