Myopia is an all too common condition, both physically and metaphorically. I myself suffer from it, more so in one eye than the other. Here in America it is known as near-sightedness and in Britain short-sightedness. It is a condition where the light that enters the ocular orb does not focus on the retina but rather in front of it, causing the image that one sees when looking at a distant object to be out of focus, but a close object to be seen with sharp clarity…
I shall not bore the reader with the too many examples in my long life when I focused on the immediate at the expense of the long term or took a route of convenience one day that I deeply regretted the next or even ever after. I have not been immune to foolhardy blunder, and if the truth were known to the general public, the catalog of my own errors would undercut whatever air of authority I try to assume…
A benefit of living as long as I have is that it leaves one with a degree of wisdom, the ability to see error when none was perceived before, the ability to acknowledge error after having foolishly attempted to hide it for so long, and the ability to recognize myopia whereas before it seemed to be simple focus…
What brings this up is the recent appearance of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, before a joint session of Congress. His message was that the United States, by dialoging with Iran and attempting to arrive at some accommodation over that country’s acquisition of nuclear technology, is endangering Israel, the United States and the rest of world. According to the prime minister, the greatest danger facing the globe is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. He said that Iran is intent on imposing a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world…
I think I can understand his perspective, as his country perceives the regime in Iran as one antithetical to the interests of his own people. And I understand, or think I understand, why he feels that Iran’s possession of nuclear technology could undermine the security of his country…
At the same time, I think it is myopic for the prime minister to believe, or anyone to believe, that the nuclear genie can ever be put back into the bottle. While it may be possible for us present day nuclear-haves to delay for a few years, or maybe a decade, or even a generation the nuclear-have nots from obtaining such technology, we cannot suspend the proliferation of that technology forever. The know-how to harness the atom exists. It is taught at hundreds of universities throughout the world. It is unrealistic to think that we can stop the spread of knowledge…
The difficulty is that we are all functioning from our own limited national perspective with little appreciation for the perspective of others or a clear understanding of what our actions are going to provoke. I am reminded of the Suez Crisis of 1956, when four countries, all of whom had far more interests in common than differences of any sort, acted and reacted in ways that immediately seemed in keeping with each’s own interest but which collectively proved damaging to the long term prospects of all four…
The crisis was precipitated by Israel’s invasion of Egypt, which was quickly followed up by invasions by Britain and France. Each invading country had its own motives, but all shared the common aim of removing Egyptian President Gamal Nasser from power, attenuating Soviet influence in the region and regaining Western control of the Suez Canal. And while the Israeli, British and French military forces executed well, with the Israelis overrunning the Egyptian Sinai, the British and French using that as a pretext to issue a joint ultimatum for a cease fire followed by the landing of paratroopers along the Suez Canal and the defeat of Egyptian forces, the move proved a debacle. Despite the denials of their governments, it became clear that the Israeli invasion and the subsequent well-coordinated Anglo-French attack had been planned beforehand by the three countries. As the fighting progressed, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations forced the three invaders to withdraw. Shipping through the canal was blocked entirely until March 1957. Nassar remained in power. President Dwight Eisenhower, miffed at the British action, which he had previously warned against, threatened action against the British financial system, opening up a rift in the Western Alliance. The Soviets then exploited this to the detriment of the West, using the opportunity the disarray presented to crack down on growing dissent in Hungary, where the populace was progressing toward throwing off the yoke of communism. Many historians believe that the Suez Crisis, more than any single other event, precipitated the utter demise of the British Empire…
In the current circumstance involving Iran, all parties need to remind themselves that precipitate action, while perhaps useful in stemming what may be perceived as an immediate threat, carries with it a long term implication that may saddle all of us with a legacy we would rather not bear…

By Ruth Musser-Lopez
It’s funny how I think of my Aunt Miriam and Aunt Pauline whenever I hear someone use the word “ascared.” I always liked that word…”ascared.” To me, it means both “afraid” and “scared” so it gives the feeling of really being frightened…I must have heard that word from my mother. But, when I was just a little girl, my aunts (my mother’s sisters) fresh back from the African mission field where they had worked side by side with real English people from the UK told me that to use that word “ascared” would be IMPROPER…an improper use of the English language and would make me sound uneducated. “Ain’t” was another of these “forbidden” words that they concerned themselves with and corrected me for.
Now later on in my life, as an anthropologist, I rather enjoy hearing the use of this American slang. I also love the very recent new wave of “stateside” regrouping of words to form new words like Disney’s “imagineering,” one I heard on Family Feud, “fish-cation” and the one that is on my husband’s manly Old Spice deodorant “Believe in your Smellf.” I think of variations, new accents and dialects as “tracers” of cultural movement either by migration (people moving) or diffusion (ideas moving).
My mother’s younger sisters who followed in her footsteps and left the family farm in the midwest, also migrated to California on Route 66 during the 1940s from the southern Kansas/Oklahoma area. Both sisters went to Upland College, a “Brethren in Christ” church college that is no more but did once occupy the complex that does now still exist on the southeast and southwest corner of San Antonio and Arrow Highway in Upland. Both of the younger sisters became English teachers, and then went “abroad” to Africa for five or ten years to teach English at the Matopo “Brethren in Christ” mission in a country that was then called Rhodesia.
I was a young girl in the 1950s when my aunts returned. Later I understood them to say that the English were turned out of the newly reformed country that eventually became known as “Zimbabwe” with governance returned to its native people. Nonetheless, there were apparently an abundance of Brits in Africa at the time Pauline and Miriam were there, from whom they could learn very proper English.
Both found teaching positions at schools in the Upland area when they returned and were quite successful. Pauline, passed away last year. She had taught school in the Ontario-Upland School District and her only child, a daughter, Marjeanne, is also a grade school teacher today. The other aunt, Miriam, now retired from teaching, is living in an assisted care facility in the Upland area.
I haven’t heard the word “ascared” for years but this week, we had a guest in our home and I was pleased to hear him using the word “ascared.” He used that word to describe his little doggy’s reaction when she had obviously become spooked by some dolls with big eyes sitting on a little chair in the corner of my kitchen. Later in the conversation, the young man told me that he was from Oklahoma—near the southern region of Kansas where my mother and her sisters were from.
This all makes sense from an anthropological “glottochronology” perspective. Anthropologists who specialize in linguistics, will take a word like “ascared” to track and connect cultural groups and to make inferences about movement of cultural groups through time. This is called glotto for “tongue” or “language” and chronology for “time” and involves lexicostatistics dealing with the chronological relationship between languages–language changes over time.
You might wonder what all of this has to do with rock art in San Bernardino County. The study of language connections and changes through time, glottochronology, is important to understanding who made the prehistoric rock art not just in San Bernardino but in other places in the world.
For example, we have an “archaic” style of rock art in San Bernardino County that no one really knows who made. Yet this archaic style and the abstract art that characterizes it is found broadly dispersed throughout the west, often underlying newer art motifs. We also have a linguistic family, the Hokan, that appears to be one of the oldest if not the oldest language families in California and western states.
The Voegelin & Voegelin (1965) Native American language classification was the result of a conference of Americanist linguists held at Indiana University in 1964. This classification identifies 16 main genetic units of which Hokan is one. There’s been some variations on this idea, but depending if you are a lumper or splitter, it is generally agreed that the Hokan language family includes ten or fifteen “phylums” one of which is the Yuman language which is used by the tribes on the lower Colorado River including our San Bernardino County Pipa Aha Macav or “Mojave.” Linguistically, the Yuman-Cochimi are related to other Hokan speakers in northern and coastal California, including the Pomoan, Washo, Shastan, Salinan, Karuk, Himariko, Palaihnihan, Yana, and Esselen. South of the Yuman-Cochimi are the Seri.
Coincidentally, a young visitor accent engaged me in an intellectual conversation that got me thinking again about what glottochronology and lexicostatistics can tell us about who made the rock art here in San Bernardino County.
Since we are both interested in the prehistory of the East Mojave Desert, we were discussing the possible direction of migration of the Yuman speakers who lived along the lower Colorado River, including the Mojaves. He was of the opinion that glottochronology would prove that the tribes would have moved up the river from the ocean, the Bay of California, and that the oldest branch would be the ones living closest to the ocean, down the river from Needles to the south near the border of Mexico—that would be the Seri. My friend’s supposition could be shown if the southernmost tribes shared the most root words common with other related phylum dialects.
I suggested that, on the contrary, lexicostatistics indicate that the pattern of movement was overland for the Hokan speakers who I asserted were the likely occupants of the western pluvial lakes of the Mojave Desert and Great Basin during the archaic period and that I believed that the Needles area would be shown to have the most root words in common with all of the other tribes along the river since the Hokan speakers entered the Colorado River area from inland. I suggested that they would have subsisted off of the pluvial lake resources after the ice age and wound up on the lower Colorado River as warming and dessication of the desert lakes continued. I suggested to him what the late Dr. Clement Meighan, founder of UCLA’s Archaeological Survey, who studied under the great anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, said to me: the Needles area/Mohave Valley is the cultural hearth for the river tribes of Yuman-Hokan speakers.
Theoretically, the Hokan speakers (lime color on map) that include the Mojave of San Bernardino County, were much more widespread in the archaic period but were split apart after waves of Penutian tribes (Yokuts, etc.) (peach color on map, Figure 8) from the north and Uto-Aztekan tribes (Shoshonean/Paiute) (plum color on map from Mesoamerica to the south moved into the area. In my “Who made the Archaic Rock Art” theory, this split would account for the blanket of older archaic rock art, which the Hokan are responsible for, underlying newer imagery throughout the California and Great Basin area. On the Lower Colorado River however, the stronghold of Yuman-Hokan speakers, like the Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave), there is archaic art but a lack of the type of representational rock art motifs and images that are linked with these later groups, such as bighorn sheep imagery and blanket people. There are other stylistic clues as well which I do not have room to expound upon here.
Similarly, style patterns, changes and differences in prehistoric rock art are used by anthropologists all over the world to make determinations as to authorship: Who made it?
The American Rock Art Research Association (ARARA) will be meeting to discuss topics surrounding rock art and report new findings. The conference will be held just beyond the easternmost edge of San Bernardino County, in Laughlin, Nevada, at the Colorado Belle Resort and Casino on May 22 – 25, 2015. I intend to present findings with regard to stylistic clues that suggest the ancestral Pipa Aha Macav (Mojave) should be credited with the archaic rock art predominant throughout the desert area.
Coincidentally to my “African Aunts” story above, one of the Archaeologists/Rock Art researchers to be making a presentation at the conference is Archaeologist Anne Stoll who, along with her husband George, conducted research in 2013 at Nanke Cave, in the Matopo Hills National Park, western Zimbabwe not far from where my aunts had taught 50 years prior.
Anne provided the Sentinel with a preview of her upcoming presentation (See Figures 2 – 6). She writes “The rock art in the shelters in the Matopo Hills (See Figure 2) was painted by the San people perhaps thousands of years ago and it has faded with time. George and I use a method of photographic enhancement called “DStretch” on all painted sites because it brings out important interpretive details which are often otherwise virtually invisible.
“The image in Figure 3 is the ‘normal’ color. To make the faint paint visible DStretch was used and you are able to see the result in Figure 4, an enhanced, brightly colored panel with imagery and motifs that were not readily visible before. Note the copious over painting and the many giraffes and kudu. The strange tube-like shape in the art work is called a ‘formling’ — just because no one really knows what these represent. There has been some good research done recently with the idea they are beehives or termite nests.”
“Formling?” –now there’s another new combo word to track.
Anne is very eager to freely pass on the DStretch technology. “Honestly, if we could get people to use Jon Harmon’s DStretch more, we’d feel very good about our message (www.dstretch.com ). It’s FREE and easy to use and replaces tracing or (horrors!) wetting a surface to bring out an image (widely done in Africa, for tourists). We’re well aware that not everyone can travel to Africa but there are many interesting painted sites closer to home that would benefit from photographic enhancement, permitting faint details to be seen, and it does work on some petroglyphs where the patina has a reddish cast as well.
“For example, the before and after DStretch of the curious motif from Los Coyotes, Baja, Mexico.”
Both Southern Californians are officially retired now from professional careers in teaching archaeology and engineering. For many years Anne and George photographed painted sites across the western US and now in over sixteen countries. The last four years the team has focused on the San painted art of southern Africa – specifically South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
San Bernardino County is very fortunate to have such high caliber rock art experts like the Stolls coming to see rock art in our county’s East Mojave. The Stolls presence elevates the ARARA conference to be held here over Memorial Day weekend which may awaken the attention of the local community as to the important work we have here at home that attracts visitors from around the world. The Stolls appearance at the conference lifts the status of rock art in the local region and lends credibility to the importance of protecting rock art on and along the Lower Colorado River.
Theirs is a “vision” for our youth which by-the-way, ARARA is now promoting a “rock art” poster contest for young people, with cash prizes. Categories are 1) new imaginative imagery/motifs and 2) site etiquette/respect. The deadline for entry is April 15. Winners will be recognized at the conference on the evening of May 23. Learn more about the ARARA conference and the contest at www.ARARA.org

YUCCA VALLEY—(March 1) The Hi-Desert Water District Board of Directors has chosen Riverside-based Carollo Engineers to manage the construction of Yucca Valley’s wastewater collection system and treatment facility.
The community of Yucca Valley is under a mandate by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board to complete, or have made substantial progress toward completion of, the first phase of the town’s sewer system in less than 14-and-one-half months.
The water district board made a commitment to the arrangement with Corollo, which will pay the firm $2.8 million over the next three-and-a-half, despite there not yet being in place an assessment district or other set means of financing the undertaking.
In 2007, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state agency responsible for protecting water quality, adopted a resolution identifying the town of Yucca Valley as one of 66 communities throughout the state with groundwater threatened by the continuing overuse of septic systems. Lacking the financial wherewithal to undertake the construction of a sewer system, local officials resisted taking immediate action. Nor did the city have the will to impose any kind of building or development moratorium that would stabilize the problem. Town and water district officials delayed the imposition of state mandates by forging a memorandum of agreement with the Regional Water Quality Control Board to allow interim permits for new septic systems while planning for a wastewater system proceeded. .
By 2010, Yucca Valley’s population had zoomed to 20,700, an increase of 3,835 or 22.7 percent over the 16,865 town residents counted in the 2000 Census, and the following year the town was firmly informed it had only five years to take a definitive step toward water quality compliance.
The Regional Water Quality Control Board at that point imposed three progressive phases of septic discharge prohibitions on Yucca Valley. Under the state mandate, phase 1 of a waste water system must be completed or significantly on its way to completion by May 19, 2016 or enforcement action will be initiated. The first phase of the project is to cover the downtown area of Yucca Valley, the area most proximate to the heart of the groundwater basin. Similarly, phase 2 must be completed or nearly completed by May 19, 2019 and phase 3 must be completed by May 19, 2022. The last two phases lie further out where future concentrated development is most likely to occur.
The imposition of that deadline four years ago was intended as a wake-up call to local officials to undertake an effort to avert the growing water quality crisis. But little progress toward the goal of planning and funding the system has been made and there has been absolutely no physical progress with regard to establishing it.
In 2012, the Yucca Valley Town Council tested the community’s willingness to pay for or otherwise finance the construction of system, sponsoring Measure U, a once cent sales tax initiative, the lion’s share of the proceeds from which town officials said would be devoted toward building the sewer system. The measure failed.
Cost projections have been made, with one covering the price for a contractor building the system and another sizing up the cost of having water district staff carry out the project. It will cost, according to this documentation, between $133,248,401 and $140,651,089 for the design and construction work to be performed by Atkins North America and somewhere between $111,539,901 and $117,736,562 for the district to construct the project using Atkins North America’s proposed design. The system would consist of a water treatment plant and a collection system entailing over 400,000 linear feet of pipe.
Within the last fortnight, a wastewater treatment assessment schedule has been drawn up, showing variable contributions from different landowners depending on the value of each parcel. Those total assessments would run from roughly $4,000 to $19,000.
Carollo was chosen to serve as the project manager because it has been involved in planning for the wastewater project for years, having represented the Hi-Desert Water District with companies considered as potential contractors or sub-contractors on the project.

(March 5) Upland city officials next week will inform both the public in general and advocates of an initiative to allow three marijuana dispensaries to function within the city limits specifically that the vote on that matter will not take place until the November 2016 election.
That development comes as a setback for the initiative’s advocates and others who want to see the sale of marijuana in the City of Gracious Living legalized.
In October, a group of Upland residents, nominally headed by Nicole DeLaRosa and James Velez and sponsored by the California Cannabis Coalition, Craig Beresh and Randy Welty, undertook a petition drive to qualify for the ballot in Upland an initiative aimed at overturning the Upland’s ban on marijuana dispensaries.
On January 14, Beresh and Welty on behalf of the California Cannabis Coalition and those involved in the signature-gathering effort came to Upland City Hall and handed over to Upland administrative services director/city clerk Stephanie Mendenhall the initiative petition endorsed with 6,865 signatures gathered in Upland. Welty, Beresh and another member of the California Cannabis Coalition, Michael Cindrich, who is also an attorney, said the signatures were sufficient to require the city to hold a special election to overturn Upland’s ban on medical marijuana dispensaries. The registrar of voters office subsequently verified that most of those signatures were, indeed, valid.
Welty, Beresh and Cindrich were met with Mendenhall’s assertion, based on information provided to her by city attorney Richard Adams, that the coalition did not file the proper notice that a special election was being sought at the time the petition drive was initiated in October. She informed them that the ballot measure would come before the city’s voters at the next general election in 2016. The initiative advocates overcame that obstacle in short order by virtue of the intercession of Cindrich and another attorney, Roger Diamond, who is officially representing the California Cannabis Coalition. Diamond, a top constitution issue lawyer whose reputation as a tenacious legal representative of advocates for controversial but constitutionally protected activities and enterprises such as adult entertainment and medical marijuana dispensaries proceeds him, convinced Adams that the city’s theory that the lack of a notification and request for a special election on the summary for the petition filed in October obviated the need for a special election was not legally sufficient.
Nevertheless, three of Upland’s city council members – Mayor Ray Musser, councilman Glen Bozar and councilwoman Carol Timm – who are resistant to the concept of permitting cannabis dispensaries in the city, instructed Adams to redouble his efforts to find some justification for postponing the election until next year.
The timing of the election, that is, whether it will be a specially scheduled one held this year or whether it will be consolidated with the regularly scheduled municipal election to be held next year, is a significant one for two reasons. The first is the cost. The county registrar of voters would charge the city as much as $180,000 to handle the election as a stand-alone event this year. The city would reap considerable savings by putting the election on the 2016 ballot, when the mayor’s post, a single city council position and city treasurer spot are up for reelection. Moreover, advocates of the initiative see a special election as the forum in which sale of medical marijuana within the city limits of Upland is most likely to gain acceptance of the voters participating. Informal surveys of Upland voters show that, on balance, the city’s residents are against the initiative. But special elections normally have poor voter turnout and the initiative’s advocates believe that through the aggressive and energetic use of social media and networking among that portion of the city’s electorate most favorably inclined to the accessibility to medical marijuana and marijuana use in general, they can drive enough voters to the polls to prevail in a special election while a significant portion of the city population opposed to the concept of open access fail to participate.
In this political crucible, with Musser, Bozar and Timm anxious to see the vote delayed to next year and the two-member minority of the council – Debbie Stone and Gino Filippi – more favorably inclined to a special election, Adams researched the issue and in January tentatively found what he said was potential grounds for delaying the initiative vote until the next regularly scheduled municipal election.
The initiative imposes a set of limitations on the dispensaries and a protocol for their application and licensing. Under the terms of the initiative, the number of dispensaries in the city would be limited to three and they would have to be located within the relatively confined area north of Foothill Boulevard, south of Cable Airport, and between Airport Drive to the east and Monte Vista to the west. Each of the applicants for the three dispensaries would have to pay a $75,000 nonrefundable licensing fee intended, the initiative’s sponsors say, to cover the city’s costs in carrying out background checks and making other inquiries and efforts to process the applications.
It was with regard to this last point that Adams in January said the city might yet have what he called a “profound” basis for holding off until a regular election to let the city’s voters consider the initiative.
“This particular measure calls for only three medical marijuana dispensaries to be established in the city,” Adams said. “A special $75,000 licensing fees is to be paid annually for each dispensary. The State Constitution indicates that if the fee exceeds the cost of providing the services, licensing and inspection, it is not a fee. It is a tax.”
According to the California Constitution, Adams said, a vote on a tax cannot be held in the venue of a special ballot but must be held during a regularly scheduled election.
The city council, in a split 3-2 vote, with Musser, Bozar and Timm in ascendency and Stone and Filippi dissenting, directed Adams and city staff to ascertain if in fact the $75,000 specified in the initiative would exceed the city’s actual costs in carrying out background checks and processing the applications.
The Sentinel has learned that city staff’s survey of the costs associated with such a background check and application processing has determined that $75,000 “substantially exceeds” the anticipated city outlay to perform that work, which Upland Administrative Services Director Stephanie Mendenhall quantified as $3,822. As a result, Adams next week is set to offer his recommendation that the city hold off on the election until November 2016. While it is anticipated that Musser, Bozar and Timm will follow that recommendation, the city clerk’s office has given the council three other options, including simply adopting the initiative as proposed without change; scheduling for June 16, 2015 a special election pertaining to the initiative; scheduling for June 16, 2015 a special election at which the city’s voters will be faced with the DeLaRosa/Velez/Welty/Beresh/California Cannabis Coalition initiative and a competing initiative sponsored by the city council which will ask city voters whether an “ordinance, to affirm existing local law which prohibits both medical marijuana dispensaries as well as prohibits mobile medical marijuana dispensaries, within the City of Upland, be adopted?”
The Sentinel has learned that city officials anticipate the likelihood that Welty and the California Cannabis Coalition, represented by Diamond, will file suit to enjoin the city from delaying the initiative vote until 2016. Nevertheless, Adams has told city officials that the city’s position is well fortified and based upon Section 17.158.100 of the coalition sponsored initiative, Article XIII C section 1(e) of the California Constitution and Proposition 26 approved by California’s voters in 2010, the city will withstand any challenge against holding the vote in November 2016 and will be able to recover its legal costs from the plaintiffs after standing down that challenge.

SAN BERNARDINO—(March 6) A jury on March 2 awarded Fontana Unified School District administrative technician/police dispatcher Amanda Vandervoort $1.487 million after a 21-day trial in her lawsuit in which she alleged negligence on the part of the district and sexual assault by former district police officer John Frank Garcia.
Before the punitive damages phase of the trial was to begin on March 3, the jury was informed that the attorney for Garcia, Michael Marlatt, had agreed on $5 million punitive damages stipulation.
Unless the district appeals the award amount, Vandervoort will indeed receive the $1.487 million, which will be paid out by the district. Her prospect of receiving the $5 million is dim, since it was assessed against Garcia, who does not have sufficient assets to make such a payment. The school district, while liable for actual damages, as a public agency is immune under the law from having to pay punitive damages.
Vandervoort and three other female district employees claimed that Garcia, a former coordinator of the Fontana Leadership Intervention Program (FLIP), either sexually assaulted or harassed them while they were at work and in the field. According to statements on file with the court, Garcia repeatedly made sexual advancements to the women while making reference to his sexual prowess and bragging about his sexual conquests of two mothers of FLIP students.
Vandervoort’s ordeal with Garcia culminated in three incidents, one on November 25, 2010 and two others on unspecified dates in February and April 2011. In the first encounter, Vandervoort was working as a dispatcher for school police services during the evening shift. When Garcia’s shift ended at 11 p.m., he attacked her, forcibly disrobing her and raping her. He repeated that action some three months later and five months later.

Vandervoort eventually reported what had occurred to Fontana School Police Chief William Megenney. An internal investigation of Garcia was conducted, but he remained in place as a police officer. Vandervoort took a stress leave in November of 2011, and sought and received psychological treatment, according to court testimony.
The district considered Garcia, who was hired by the district in June of 2008, an “award winning” officer. After he was assigned to Fontana A.B. Miller High School, Garcia was recognized for several arrests he effectuated on weapons and drug possession and drug sales charges, which involved activity in close proximity to a school or city park. Due to “his commitment to duty,” Garcia received the district’s Excellence in Policing Award on May 21, 2009.
Garcia, however, had a somewhat checkered history as a police officer prior to landing with FUSD. He went to work for the Riverside Police Department in April 2001 and resigned in October 2005 for undisclosed reasons, perhaps to take a job with the Fontana Police Department, which hired him the same month. He did not make it past his 18-month probationary term after he was accused in September 2006 of sexually assaulting a 20-year-old female police cadet. He also briefly worked for the Riverside Sheriff’s Department.
A complaint relating to Garcia’s sexual assaults of Vandervoort and another district employee went to the district attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute him over either matter.
Vandervoort did not leave the employ of the district, and continues to work as an evidence clerk for Fontana Unified’s police division. The district indicated it might appeal the jury’s damage assessment, though that was seemingly contradicted by a public statement to the effect that the jury’s award was for less than 10 percent of the amount Vandervoort and her attorneys, Brian Hannemann, Angel Plaus and Joshua Milon, sought. The district sought to put the best face on the situation, declaring, “Fontana Unified School District is committed to ensuring a zero-tolerance policy for sexual misconduct or sexual harassment in the workplace and is doing everything in its power to help ensure a safe environment for all employees, students, and parents.”

The Mojave hole-in-the-sand plant, bears the Latin name of Nicolletia occidentalis and is of the asteraceae or sunflower family. It is a desert-adapted perennial herb with a skeletonlike appearance. The plant grows from a deep taproot in the desert sand and the stem is sometimes surrounded by a depression in the sand, a trait that gives it its common name. This plant bears showy flowers with curving bright pink ray florets and yellow centers.
The leaves are narrow and fleshy and end in a bristle. They have large oil glands which exude a strong unpleasant scent.
They range from the Mojave Desert to the High Sierra Nevada and most commonly inhabit sandy desert soils, such as dunes and washes at elevations of 1,800 feet to 4,200 feet. They flower from April until June.
Nicolletia occidentalis, is a dicot, native only to California , although there are other plants with dep taproots referred to as hole-in-the-sand plants.