(December 11)  SAN BERNARDINO—2013 is in a dead heat with 2012 in the tally of homicides in the county seat.
On December 10, police were summoned by a 12:38 a.m. call from a man driving around looking at Christmas lights who spotted a man lying just beyond the paved section of Palm Avenue on the city’s north end north of Melvin Avenue. When officers arrived, they confirmed the man was dead. It was unclear whether the victim, s 21-year-old Hispanic whose name has not been released had expired on the scene or had been transported there.
The victim, who was pronounced dead on the scene, was the third homicide in a spate of homicides since Saturday, December 7, and the 45th of the year. He had sustained multiple gunshot wounds.
Two days previous, on Sunday December 8, Thomas Wayne Scholes, 57, a transient, was found stabbed to death in another part of the north side of San Bernardino.
Scholes, who was subsisting in homeless shantytowns that are hidden from open view less than a half-mile distant from where he was found, was lying on the ground in the cemented wash area near the 2200 block of West Donald Street when he was spotted by a passerby at 7:38 a.m. About six hours earlier, there had been a barking of dogs and nearby residents heard a car door slamming shut
Police have concluded that Scholes, who was knifed multiple times in the upper torso, was not stabbed at that location and was transported there.
On Saturday December 7 at around 10:31 p.m., police on patrol heard the gunshots that felled Kameron Brandon Patterson, 18, of San Bernardino. In attempting to determine where the gunshots had emanated from, they came across Patterson lying face down on the north side of the sidewalk at Evans and E Streets at about 10:35. He had been shot multiple times in the upper torso. He was transported immediately to St. Bernardine Medical Center but died shortly after physicians began attending to him.
San Bernardino’s 45 murders as of the close of the first 344 days of 2013 on December 10 were only two fewer than the 47 homicides recorded in San Bernardino during the 366 days of 2012.
Last year’s deadly mayhem continued right up to its final minutes.  A little more than an hour before midnight on December 31, Jason Kenneth Anderson of Victorville became the last and 47th homicide victim in the city of San Bernardino in 2012 when he was gunned down at 10:50 p.m. at 677 W 28th Street. The hail of bullets that felled Anderson injured three others.
The pace of killing in San Bernardino over the last two years represented a significant uptick from 2011, when 30 people in San Bernardino died at the hands of others.
The rash of murders over last weekend and Tuesday did not match the wave of carnage that took place in the final days of April and first week of May in 2012, when, between April 28 and May 7, a period of nine days, eight people were murdered in the city. In May 2012, 12 people were murdered in San Bernardino.
Despite the deadly pattern of violence this and last year, the murder counts were and are not on a pace equal to the city’s record high of 58 killings in 2005.