Jake Haro, in an unanticipated move during a court hearing to finalize arrangements for his preliminary hearing and that of his wife and co-defendant, pleaded guilty this morning, Thursday October 15, in Riverside Superior Court to second degree murder in the death of his infant son.
The plea provides some but not all of the answers to a set of evolving questions that have been extant for more than two months. It seemingly confirms what investigators and prosecutors and a significant portion of the public has believed and alleged for some time, which is that the original story about the disappearance of 7-month Emmanuel Haro told by the child’s mother, Rebecca Haro, was patently untrue.
In that version of events, provided to members of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department on August 14, she, her husband, Jake, Jake’s two-year-old sister and his ten-year-old half brother had driven to Yucaipa from the Haro home in Cabazon in Riverside County so the ten-year-old could participate in a football scrimmage/practice at the large sports facility there. According to Rebecca Haro, she went to the Big 5 Sporting Goods Store several blocks from the sports facility to purchase a mouth guard for her stepson, where in the parking lot she stopped to change Emmanuel’s diaper. As she was doing so, sometime 7:44 p.m. and 7:54 p.m., with the 7-month-old on the backseat of the family vehicle, she said, she was sucker-punched by a man who had greeted her in Spanish. When she came to on the ground moments later, she said, Emmanuel was gone.
Initially, her story was lent credibility by the consideration that she had a blackened right eye. An all points bulletin went out as an intensive search was initiated, which resulted in a report that the child had been sighted in Kern County near Bakersfield. Continue reading →

Cody Holmes, whose greed and the position of trust bestowed upon him at the age of 27 combined to threaten the viability of two of the more promising homeless rehabilitation programs undertaken in San Bernardino County and, indeed, the state of California, has been charged by federal authorities with fraud, more than two years after the extent of the embezzlement and other depredations he engaged him became publicly known.
Cody Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills, was arrested Thursday morning on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud, a felony offense that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
Holmes made his initial appearance this Thursday afternoon in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles. No plea was taken.
Holmes perfidy undid the efforts of dozens or scores of local officials in four municipalities in California and San Bernardino County’s governmental structure, and destroyed or nearly destroyed benefits intended for hundreds of people living on the streets.
Redlands and the cities of Salinas, King and Thousand Oaks were among  dozens of California cities that moved to take advantage of money being offered by the State of California through its Department of Housing and Community Development via the so-called Homekey Program, which was being pushed by Governor Gavin Newsom at around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. San Bernardino County also sought to make use of that program.  Continue reading →

Approaching three years into the Helen Tran Administration, San Bernardino City officials have now resolved to deal with one of the vestiges of the mayoral reign of John Valdivia. While there is relief among many that the city is at last dealing with a hazard and an eyesore that has gone unaddressed for too long, there is far from universal satisfaction with the means that will be used to make the fix, which a good cross section of the impacted public feels represents an environmental danger in and of itself.
The circumstance came about as part of an untoward arrangement that involved money passing into the hands of Valdivia, who was mayor from 2018 until 2022.
On June 5, 2020, a fire broke out in the 600,000-square foot Kuehne & Nagel warehouse, located in the 2200 block of West Lugonia Avenue in Redlands. The structure had served as a holding/distribution/dispatch facility for large items sold by on-line retail behemoth Amazon. The fire gutted the building, which was a total loss.
The concrete walls were torn down. Initial plans were to haul them off to whatever landfill would take them changed when Eric Cernich, the principal officer with Newport Beach-based Oxbow Communities, Inc. indicated he had a use for the over one thousand tons of fragmented concrete.
Some but not all of what occurred next is known, with some events opaque. Cernich ingratiated himself with Mayor Valdivia, first with a $750 donation to Valdivia’s campaign fund on July 14, 2020, which he followed up with another $750 installment on September 8, 2020. Greenleaf Engineering of Huntington Beach, owned by Tim Greenleaf, who had the contract for the demolition of the Kuehne & Nagel warehouse and relocating its concrete walls to San Bernardino, made an effort to get on Valdivia’s good side, providing his election fund with $2,000, likewise provided in two increments, in Greanleaf’s case, $1,000 each, one on October 2, 2020 and the other on October 7, 2020. Continue reading →

Apple Valley, which over the course of its 37-year history has proven itself to be among the most stable of San Bernardino County’s 24 current municipalities, has selected as its next manager an administrator who has never overseen an entity with as much as one eighth of the town’s population.
The Apple Valley Town Council recently chose Todd S. Bodem, who has been the top administrator for the city of Guadalupe for the last six years, to replace outgoing Town Manager Doug Robertson upon his retirement as of December 1.
Robertson is the fourth town manager that Apple Valley has employed since its founding in 1988. When Bodem succeeds him, he will step into a position in which the holder of the title has averaged a tenure of nine and a quarter years or 111 months.
Throughout the vast majority of its time as an incorporated town, Apple Valley has been relatively free from political or operational dissension. Shortly after its incorporation in 1988, the maiden town council hired Bruce Williams to serve as the senior administrator at Town Hall. He lasted in that position 19 years. He was replaced by longtime Victorville City Manager Jim Cox, who came out of retirement to guide the city for two years, whereupon he was succeeded by Frank Robinson in 2009. Robinson remained in place for nine years. He was replaced by Robertson, who took a pay cut to leave his seven-year long assignment managing the larger and far more complex and challenging assignment of running Victorville. Continue reading →

San Bernardino County’s second most populous and its 12th most populous municipalities appear headed in diametrically opposite directions in terms of their acceptance of warehouse projects large and small.
In both cities, a predominant contingent of the city’s residents appear adamantly opposed to the construction of further warehouses, which are cataloged by both cities as light industrial uses. In Fontana, elected officials and the planning/land use division employees who are answerable to the management echelon at City Hall who are in turn at the beck and call of those politicians feel that popular sentiment can be disregarded with relative impunity. In Redlands, where the city council for more than two decades has been far more aggressively in favor of growth than the majority of constituents who voted them into office, city officials are more sensitive than those in Fontana with regard to the type of development that is going on within their city limits. They sense that while, on average, citizens in their city would prefer that as little new construction take place as is possible, those residents are far less tolerant of factories, foundries and warehouses than they are of houses or commercial buildings.
Throughout San Bernardino County and the Inland Empire in general, the expansion of warehousing over the last two decades has been intensive.
There is more than 940 million square feet of warehousing in San Bernardino and Riverside counties at present, with more being built. That includes 3,052 warehouses in San Bernardino County. In Ontario alone, there are 290 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet. Reportedly, there are 143 warehouses in Fontana larger than 100,000 square feet. In Chino there are 118 warehouses larger than 100,000 square feet, 109 larger than 100,000 square feet in Rancho Cucamonga and 75 larger than 100,000 square feet in San Bernardino. Since 2015, 27 warehouse project applications have been processed and approved by the City of San Bernardino, entailing acreage under roof of 9,600,000 square feet, or more than one-third of a square mile, translating into 220.38 acres. After Ontario, Fontana, Chino, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino, the city in San Bernardino County with the next largest number of warehouses of more than 100,000 square feet is Redlands, with 57, followed by Rialto with 48. In addition to those 48 larger warehouses, Rialto has another 125 warehouses of under 100,000 square feet. Continue reading →

The most recent Hail Mary thrown by the conservative values/Republican/Christian contingent on the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees failed to strike paydirt, nine years after a similar quixotic attempt by the coalition’s predecessors went to hell.
This time around, the long-range effort to reverse the 1962 Supreme Court ruling banning prayer in public schools ran into the same federal judge who had thwarted the effort in 2016. The petitioners’ hope that changes on the U.S. Supreme Court and some rulings on related or peripheral issues that had signaled a change in attitude and a tolerance for expressions of religiosity in public forums would weigh in their favor did not pan out. Once again, it appears the district will need to pay the legal fees of the advocates of religion-free public education environments as a consequence of the unsuccessful legal maneuver. This most recent setback and the expense associated with it does not seem to have dimmed the enthusiasm of the Christians on the board for engaging in the good fight, as they consider themselves, the district and the district’s taxpayers to be in for the long haul, from which they are praying they will emerge with a just and Christian victory.
In 2012, Andrew Cruz, a member of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Congregation, was elected to the school board. Cruz joined James Na and Sylvia Orozco, who were also Calvary Chapel parishioners on the panel. The pastor at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills is Jack Hibbs, a denominationalist, who holds that Christians have a duty to stand up for their beliefs by either running for election to public office themselves or supporting other Christians who do run, and then, upon taking office, Christianize public policy. Continue reading →

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