The full implication of the most recent rightward movement in the constant swing of the pendulum between the polar opposite conceptions of what criminal justice reform in the State of California should be came too late to save Deputy Hector Cuevas Jr.’s life or spare the man now charged in his death, Ryan Dwayne Turner Jr, from what will very likely prove to be a lengthy or even lifelong prison sentence,
There is irony in the consideration that the lighter sentences that were meted out to Turner for his past criminal transgressions now mean, at least according to a significant number of local law enforcement professionals, that Turner will need to endure a long and sad consignment to prison. The sympathy of those sworn to uphold the law locally does not lie with Turner, however. Far worse, they say, indeed almost unbearable, for them is knowing that Cuevas is irretrievably gone and that they and Cuevas’s family will need to live through a loss of nearly infinitely greater dimension than Turner’s surrender of his freedom.
Turner and Cuevas were a half-generation and a world removed from one another.
Cuevas was born on January 26, 1989 in Los Angeles. His lineage included African, indigenous North American, European, Dominican, Puerto Rican and El Salvadoran roots. He was proud, it is said, to be identified as African American, though many who knew him only casually assumed he was Latino. He spent a major portion of his youth in Rialto, and attended Carter High School, where he was a standout on the football team and graduated in 2007.
Eventually, Cuevas matriculated at Central State University, a historically black land-grant college in Wilberforce, Ohio. While there, he played football and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration, graduating in 2013. Continue reading →

March 19, 2025
THE WHITE HOUSE
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
Honorable
President Donald J. Trump 45th & 47th President of The United States of America

SUBJECT: “DEATH PENALTY EXECUTIVE ORDER”

Dear Honorable Donald J. Trump, 45th & 47th President of the United States of America:

Today, the People of the State of California & the Law Enforcement Community grieve the loss
of San Bernardino County Deputy Sheriff Hector Cuevas Jr.
On March 17, 2025, Deputy Sheriff Hector Cuevas bravely & courageously joined a high-speed vehicle pursuit of a grand theft auto suspect fleeting in a stolen vehicle.
During the pursuit, Deputy Cuevas’ patrol vehicle collided with another vehicle, a Toyota, at an intersection, causing the deputy’s vehicle to spin out of control. The point of impact was a street pole & the patrol vehicle was split in two.
Deputy Hector Cuevas Jr died in a violent crash at the hands of a repeat offender with an extensive criminal record during a high-speed pursuit.
The suspect, later identified as Ryan Dwayne Turner Jr, was later taken into custody after a foot
pursuit. Documentation indicates that Ryan D. Turner Jr possesses an extensive criminal history, which includes felony evading of a police officer, which in one case led to significant injuries of a Rialto police officer.
It is clear on its face, that the California legislators seeks to “protect, support & defend violent offenders & criminalize our law enforcement personnel,” leading to no consequences for violent offenders who engage in heinous acts and pose a significant threat to the lives and safety of the community, which include our “First Line of Defense – Law Enforcement Heroes.”
For that reason, please consider fully supporting & endorsing California gubernatorial candidate Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco in his run for office and ensuring voter integrity and accurate tallying of our ballots.
The State of California cannot survive without Sheriff Chad Bianco as our next governor.
More importantly, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is seeking the filing of numerous charges against suspect Ryan Turner. Murder charges are justifiable pursuant to California’s Felony Murder Rule. A death has occurred during and in the furtherance of the commission of a felony, further establishing the element of malice. Additionally, the high-speed pursuit significantly endangered the lives & safety of the community. Suspect Ryan Turner, a repeat offender, manifested a reckless disregard for the life & safety of the deputy & had a history of felony evasion(s) of police officers, and more…
Therefore, “We, the Silent Majority and the People of the State of California and abroad come before you with a prayer that you immediately implement a “death penalty – executive order,” which is not limited to the “Felony Murder Rule.”
In closing, and on behalf of the Silent Majority across the United States of America – “We
come before you and pray that there will be an equal amount of justice to be served to
all offenders who have taken the lives of our law enforcement personnel and that an eye
for an eye trial come before God on the throne.
The brave men & women in uniform who placed their very lives in jeopardy to protect us should not be allowed to have died in vain.
We come before you as the voice of the brave men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate price and made the final sacrifice to request that you honor them with a “Death Penalty Executive Order.”
This request is held in prayer.
With honor, admiration & respect,

Ruth Marie Cordova

By Mark Gutglueck
San Bernardino City Clerk Genoveva Rocha is departing San Bernardino after five years with the county seat, having achieved, it is said, the municipal employment equivalent of winning the lottery by landing the city clerk’s post in Vernon.
Within the next ten years, it is anticipated, Rocha will be able to accumulate personal wealth in excess of $5 million, merely by facilitating the traditionally corrupt governmental operations in the city where she is now employed.
Over the past five years, Rocha has survived in a political/governmental atmosphere in which adhering to the dictates of the city’s often conflicted leadership has allowed her to keep her job which provides her with a $145,761.48 salary, $14,346 in perks and pay add-ons and $65,577.87 in benefits for a total annual compensation of $225,685.35. In that role, she had to navigate a path between warring factions and shifting alliances among the city council members as well as those occupying the position of city manager and city attorney. She had been promoted to city clerk during the John Valdivia mayoral administration, in the middle of one of the more notably corrupt periods in the history of a city at the forefront of what is widely considered to be among the most politically corrupt counties in the United States, one rife with pay-to-play politics in which unquestioning service to benefit the most generous of the donors to the campaign funds of the elected leadership is considered a requirement to remain employed.
Vernon, which is located not in San Bernardino County but in Los Angeles County, is one of the few cities in the United States which is demonstrably more corrupt than the legion of the most outrageously graft-ridden municipalities in San Bernardino County such as San Bernardino, Upland, Ontario, Adelanto, Fontana, Colton and Hesperia.
Co-founded in 1905 by John Leonis as a railroad hub/“exclusively industrial” city roughly five miles south of downtown Los Angeles despite having a negligible population base, the city was dominated for more than four decades by Leonis, who served on the city council for 45 years. In the late 1940s, John Leonis was indicted by the Los Angeles County District Attorney on charges that he was a political boss engaged in voter fraud by stuffing ballot boxes to keep himself and his cronies in power and that he did not actually live in Vernon but rather in a magnificent mansion in Hancock Park. Leonis’s fortune, which at that time exceeded $8 million allowed him to legally outmaneuver the district attorney’s office, which dropped the charges. Continue reading →

David Myers, the most dynamic of San Bernardino County’s conservationists of the current or preceding generations, has died.
Born in La Habra, not too distant from the southwesternmost extension of San Bernardino County, in 1952, his family relocated to Chino Hills when he was a toddler. He ambled and sometimes rode horses among the wildlands around his home, with its Oak Trees, fields full of lizards, horned toads and tree frogs, as well as its streams, rivulets and rills, filled with crawdads, frogs and snails in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while it was still an unincorporated county area consisting primarily of agricultural uses.
As Orange County was expanding by leaps and bounds and undeveloped land there was being sold off to developers, yielding for its owners a tremendous profit, be watched the earth movers, Caterpillars, earthscrapers and bulldozers eliminate the elements of nature he loved. It registered with him that the Canadian geese and arctic gulls that flew south every fall and wintered in Chino Hills would one day lose their destination, if that developmental frenzy continued it eastward progression. On occasion, during summer vacations, he was removed entirely from Southern California and the encroachment of civilization on nature, when he vacationed with his family in the Sierra Nevadas. At 17, he hiked the John Muir Trail.
In 1970, he began studying for a college degree in liberal arts at Cal State Fullerton, taking botany, religion, psychology and literature classes. In the summer of 1971, he managed a ranch in the Great Basin
While in college, he was alarmed to learn that a plan was afoot to establish an international airport in Pipes Canyon, between Yucca Valley to the east and the San Bernardino Mountains to the west. Networking with others, his group arranged to purchase property that they felt would be crucial to the airport development project, and the airport was never seriously pursed.
He did not graduate from college, becoming a carpenter who took pride in delivering high quality furniture to his customers. He never lost his interest in preserving nature, wherever he could.
Despite despising the manner in which real estate developers utilized the leverage of their wealth or access to financing to overwhelm landowners to purchase property at as low of a price as possible before obtaining an entitlement to build on it or get zoning alterations to maximize its value when it was developed, Myers learned from them and adopted their tactics, recognizing that he could purchase property that lay in the footprint of where those intent on building were going to place their next project. He would acquire some of that acreage and then bargain with the developers, getting top dollar for it and then using that money to purchase wildland acreage he and his cohorts were determined to save from development into perpetuity. Continue reading →

Four Chinese nationals were sentenced to federal prison today for their participation in a complex scheme that involved the theft of hundreds of identities to defraud multiple domestic retailers out of at least $1.2 million.
A fifth co-conspirator was previously sentenced to more than four years in prison, and a sixth is awaiting sentencing following a guilty plea.
As part of the scheme, these six defendants stole the victims’ identities – including their Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses – and used that information to make fake driver’s licenses that were used to access credit in the victims’ names at large national retailers, including Ulta Beauty, Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Williams-Sonoma, Dillard’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue.
The four defendants, all Chinese nationals who entered the country under false pretenses, were sentenced today by United States District Judge Stephen V. Wilson. All four pleaded guilty on January 6. They are:
Kar Kee “Steven” Cheung, 36, of Chino Hills, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of visa fraud, one count of possession of equipment used to manufacture false identification documents, and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud; Qian Guo, 37, of Chino Hills, was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for one count of possession of equipment used to manufacture false identification documents and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud; Chongming “Ming” Wang, 28, of Temple City, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud and one count of aiding and abetting access device fraud in excess of $1,000; and Jiaozhu “Yanny” Yan, 30, of Alhambra, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison for one count of visa fraud. Continue reading →

By Richard Hernandez
Less than a year after Governor Gavin Newsom and the two-thirds Democrat California Legislature provided free health care to low-income immigrants including those in the United States illegally, California is now confronted with a $6.2 billion shortfall in the fund for Medi-Cal services.
Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid health care program, which pays for a variety of medical services for children and adults with limited income and resources. A joint federal and state program, Medicaid provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources. Each state runs its own version of Medicaid as a program available to citizens of that particular state eligible for the service. While originally intended for and administered to provide health care insurance to California’s lowest income individuals and families, Medi-Cal’s eligibility requirements and benefits have been modified and liberalized over the years to become more and more inclusive. At present, approaching 15 million of the state’s nearly 40 million residents are recipients of some form of Medi-Cal assistance, including roughly 2.4 million noncitizens, the vast majority of whom are illegal aliens from Mexico.
As a consequence, Governor Newsom, whose final term as governor is to conclude in January 2027, and the members of his party who dominate both California’s lower legislative house, the Assembly, and the California Senate are scrambling to find some graceful and face-saving way to acknowledge that the state’s minority Republicans were correct last year when they argued that allowing able-bodied undocumented foreigners residing in California between the ages of 27 and 64 inclusive to participate in the Medi-Cal System would stretch it unto breaking. Now, those same Democrat politicians are trying to find a way to perhaps remove those most recently welcomed into the program – those being low-income adults living in California regardless of their immigration status – in the aftermath of that portion of the state’s population growing accustomed to receiving a heretofore unavailable benefit that is now perceived by those recipients as an entitlement. Continue reading →

Mostly in vain, residents of San Bernardino County’s desert areas, most particularly in and around Barstow, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms and several surrounding areas have been trying to convince California wildlife officials that the permit fees to improve property on land that involves Western Joshua Trees are too onerous.
In 2023, California approved the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act. Now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is under the gun to complete by June 30 the California’s Joshua Tree Conservation Plan, whereupon it will be fully implemented.
For many desert residents, the element of the plan most important to them is that aspect of it which will entail the fees to be paid by landowners when they undertake development on their property within a distance of 186 feet or less from Western Joshua Trees.
There is widespread concern among desert residents and landowners that the fees required to do work near western Joshua trees are too high. Despite those sentiments, Fish and Wildlife employees maintain that their hands are tied and the fees being charged, were, essentially etched into cement by an act of the legislature based upon previous discussions and determinations.
In accordance with suggestions by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, both the California Senate and the California Assembly layered into the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act a permitting process to assist in regulating how the land upon which Western Joshua Trees, known by their scientific name, Yucca brevifolia, are located are disturbed. Continue reading →