A half dozen officers with the Chino Police Department sojourned to Mason City, Iowa recently, seeking clues and assisting local authorities there in the dragnet for the so-called AK-47 bandit.
On July 28 the Heartland Community Credit Union in Mason City was robbed in a brazen daylight heist by a man fitting the description of the AK-47 Bandit.
On February 29, 2012, the California Bank and Trust at 12th Street and Riverside Drive in Chino was robbed by the individual dubbed the AK-47 Bandit. In pulling that job, the thief wounded a Chino police officer, shooting him in the leg. The officer has not been publicly identified.
In carrying out his thefts, the robber carries an AK-47 rifle. He is believed to be a Caucasian, 25 to 40 years of age, five foot-nine inches to six foot tall with a medium build. He often employs a black ski mask and gloves in carrying out his depredations.
Shortly after the Mason City robbery, Chino Police Chief Karen Comstock dispatched a lieutenant, a sergeant and four detectives to Iowa for four days. During that time they coordinated with the FBI, Mason City and Cerro Gordo County authorities in the manhunt for the bandit. They were in Iowa from July 28 until July 31.
Shortly after the Chino robbery, an individual believed to be the AK-47 bandit botched a heist at a Tri-Counties bank in Sacramento. Less than a week later, he carried off a robbery at a Bank of the West in Vacaville.
In July 2012, authorities said the same man robbed a Chase Bank in North Bend, Washington. In November 2012, he hit an East Idaho Credit Union in Rexburg.
On August 22, 2014, he struck again, knocking over a First Nebraska Bank in Nebraska City, Nebraska. During that job, he used a duffel bag and an assault rifle with a drum magazine similar to the weapon seen in his earlier robberies.
In Mason City, a man wearing a black ski mask, gloves and armed with an AK-47 robbed Iowa Heartland Credit Union at about 10 a.m. on the last Tuesday in July. Employees were herded into the bank vault and what appeared to be an “improvised explosive device” was used to threaten the victims. It was left behind. The Iowa Fire Marshal’s Office examined it, determining it was harmless.
The robber was last seen in Mason City driving a 2007-09 black or dark-colored Toyota Camry. The license plate was obscured.

After 57 years of being operated by the Twentynine Palms Water District, the Twentynine Palms Fire Department is on the verge of being subsumed by the San Bernardino County Fire Department as one of its regional fire districts.
On August 5, the Twentynine Palms Water District board of directors initiated on a 4-to-1 vote a service annexation application with the San Bernardino County Local Agency Formation Commission for fire protection in the city and its surrounding sphere of influence.
With Carol Giannini dissenting, the water board approved the application and a motion calling upon the city of Twentynine Palms to consent to the annexation. The board directed water district staff to work with city and county fire staff to prepare the application and bring it to the board of directors for consideration and approval.
Since 1958, the fire department in 29 Palms has been overseen by the water district. At its peak, the department grew to include two fire stations and seven firefighters to cover the 55 square miles within the Twentynine Palms City Limits and the 33 square miles of unincorporated county area that also falls under the water district/fire department’s 88-square mile jurisdiction. The department has since shrunk in size. The city does not contribute to, participate in or subsidize the fire department’s operational budget, which is infused entirely by a special tax on landowners within the fire department’s service area.
At present, the fire department functions using $1,244,800 in revenue from the special tax imposed on residents and businesses within the fire department/fire district service area. Current fire chief Jim Thompson has pared operations such that the department is run out of a single fire station, employing only himself and four other paid firefighters, functioning within the parameters of a budget that allows for $1,209,525 in annual expenditures, while salting away $52,775 in a reserve account. The department’s five paid firefighters are augmented by 28 reserve/volunteer firefighters, all of whom have attended a fire academy. Four of those are local volunteers. The others are aspiring firefighters from more distant areas in San Bernardino County, or Los Angeles, Orange or Riverside counties. Each serves a one-day 24 hour shift per week in Twentynine Palms. The 24 who do not reside in or near Twentynine Palms return to their distant abodes upon the conclusion of their shifts.
The city of Twentynine Palms has not been willing to take on operational and financial responsibility for the fire department. An effort to beef up the fire department in a way that was independent of the city was made in 2012, when a ballot initiative, Measure H, was offered to the voters for approval. Measure H would have increased the special tax customers of the Twentynine Palms Water District pay from the current $80 per unit to $120 per unit annualy with an additional $6 per year increase for the next 10 years to provide enhanced fire protection and emergency medical aid to the community. Voters nixed the initiative, with 850 votes of endorsement, or 48.27 percent, and 911 in opposition, or 51.73 percent, during the mail-in balloting concluded on April 17, 2012, in which 1,761 voters, or 32.93 percent of the 5,421 eligible to participate returned ballots.
Shortly thereafter, the community was given a wakeup call by the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees jurisdictional issues throughout the county. In its five-year service review of Twentynine Palms delivered on May 7, 2012, the commission’s staff stated that the demands of operating the fire district have for some time been outrunning the water district’s funding ability. The report, authored by Local Agency Formation Commission executive officer Kathleen Rollings-McDonald, assistant executive officer Samuel Martinez and project manager Michael Tuerpe, said the district suffered from “a significant deficiency in funding” such that “the water district’s fire operations are unsustainable as presently financed.”
Rollings-McDonald told the water district’s board members that the district would have to overcome the financial challenges facing the fire department, or cede control of the department to another entity by July 1, 2013. That deadline passed, however, without any change, after the water district and the city of Twentynine Palms worked on a proposal to have the county’s fire division take on the fire department. County fire chief Mark Hartwig said that in working within the confines of the $1.244 million in available special tax funding for local fire service, the county would need to close down one of the fire stations and reduce the department to no more than four firefighters.
The water board retained control of the fire department and has sought to induce, cajole, shame, provoke or otherwise motivate the city of Twentynine Palms to take over directly or share in the operation of the fire department. Only councilwoman Cora Heiser has proven supportive of such a move, as the remainder of the city council has expressed reluctance to assume such a financial liability.
Conflicting imperatives have created gridlock and paralysis with regard to the fire department. Some residents are vociferous in calling for maintaining local control but their passion is not matched by a willingness of the citizenry in the 25,768-population city or its more sparsely populated outlying area to tax themselves to achieve that goal. City officials are unwilling to transform Twentynine Palms into a full service city. The city does not boast municipal water or sewer divisions, and contracts with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement service. The water district, clearly, is staggering under the responsibility of running the fire department. After years of seeking to work out a cooperative arrangement with the city for the operation of the fire department, the Twentynine Palms Water District Board of Directors in June called for the creation of an ad-hoc committee to consider the fire department’s fate, essentially signaling the water district would no longer go it alone in propping up the fire department.
The August 5 meeting entailed a level of intensity, with discussions moving close to the realm of argument.
Local Agency Formation Commission Executive Director Kathleen Rollings-McDonald’s sober assessment of the financial and administrative reality, however, pulled the collective away from the brink of chaos. Rollings-McDonald said the community would need to act with dispatch to meet the timelines for bringing the fire department under county management by the beginning of the 2016-17 fiscal year, which begins next June 1. She said the fire protection service annexation application, which is to entail a service protocol and a five-year financial analysis, would need to be on her desk by September 30. She said an “arduous… six-month” evaluation of the application will follow. Only if that application passes muster, Rollings-McDonald said, will the commission sign off on it. But the commission’s approval would not cinch the county fire department takeover, she said. The commission’s board approval of the annexation would simply clear the way for a review by the voters living in the 88-square mile service area. That review would consist of a protest period. If 50 percent plus one of the area’s registered voters lodge objections, the application would be rescinded. If the protest meets a 20 percent threshold, then an election would be held.

In a further indication that grocery chains featuring an overpriced line of goods are losing traction in the Southern California market, Haggen Inc. this week moved to close 16 of its supermarkets in Southern California and two more in Central California.
In a risky move, Haggen, which established itself as a purveyor of top of the line meats and vegetables and specialty grocery products in the Pacific Northwest at 18 large-scale stores, in December initiated a deal to buy 146 former Albertsons and Safeway grocery stores, 83 of which were in California, after the Federal Trade Commission required that those stores be spun off after the Albertsons/Safeway/Vons/Pavilions merger last year. The Federal Trade Commission approved the deal on January 27, 2015.
Albertsons’ share of the Southern California Market was already eroding, however, as a consequence of its high-priced goods. Customers were abandoning many Alberstons as virtual ghost stores for better priced groceries at Super King, Cardenas, WinCo, Food For Less and Superior.
Upon the takeover by Haggen in March and April, customers were shocked to find that Haggen’s prices were steeper than those at the Albertsons markets they replaced. Large numbers of those customers have yet to return to Haggen stores.
The entire matter has been complicated by disputes that erupted between Albertsons and Haggen, even before the transitions in the 146 stores were fully made. According to Albertsons, Haggen had agreed to pay almost $41 million for the inventory at 38 of the former Albertsons stores. Haggen did not make good on that commitment. In June, Haggen, communicated to Albertsons that it believed Albertsons had violated certain tenets of the purchase agreement and was out of compliance with anti-trust provisions of the U.S. Code. Without directly stating that its failure to make the nearly $41 million in payments was due to those violations, the company gave indication it would withhold the payment for the inventory.
Last month Albertsons filed a lawsuit in federal court against Haggen, accusing the company of fraud in failing to pay more than $36 million toward inventory at 32 stores and almost $5 million in inventory at an another six stores. Haggen slyly waited until the deals relating to the sale of all 146 stores closed before notifying Albertsons in writing it was withholding payment for the inventory, according to the suit. Haggen’s ostensible reasons for withholding the payment relating to “issues occurring during the acquisition process” are “baseless,” Albersons maintains. It accused Haggen of “acts [that] were fraudulent in nature and done with malice and a willful disregard for Albertsons’ rights.”
Some Haggen executives dispatched from the Pacific Northwest to oversee operations in Southern California now acknowledge that the company misread the Southern California market, basing the company’s estimation that it could adapt its product line into the Albertsons locations based upon the higher prices of goods on Albertsons’ shelves noted during a survey late last year. Haggen’s estimate failed to take into account that Albertsons’ prices were already at the top of the scale in Southern California and that sales at the Albertsons markets were sluggish, at best. In response, Haggen has cut staff hours and laid off workers, reducing the vaunted level of customer service that has been its trademark, while maintaining prices that are higher than all of its competitors, giving shoppers virtually no reason to shop there.
Having gone from 18 stores to 164 in a four month period, Haggen seriously miscalculated the overall cash flow the expanded operation would provide and for six months has been hemorrhaging red ink. Shortly after its first two dozen California stores opened in March, roughly 1,000 items were given serious mark-ups at eleven of the Haggen supermarkets in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties. When those prices were remarked upon by shoppers, the company maintained those mark-ups had been done in error. Industry analysts say the impression yet lingers with consumers that the mark-ups were deliberate and are a harbinger of what the stores will charge across the board on most if not all of its products. Less than three percent of the stores’ inventories were impacted by the mark-ups.
Of note is that none of the stores to be closed in this round are in San Bernardino County. Those to be shuttered include four in Orange County, four in Ventura County and six in the San Diego area, as well as one in Bakersfield location and a store in Los Osos. Company executives, however, did not rule out closing out further stores, including those in San Bernardino County, saying they are yet refining the company’s “right-sizing strategy.”

The number of candidates for countywide office in 2014 who have been charged with campaign finance reporting violations has jumped to eight following the state Fair Political Practices Commission’s citation and fining of San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon and Fourth District Supervisor Curt Hagman.
Of note is that five of those eight individuals were ones who hold or aspired to law enforcement office. The California Fair Political Practices Commission fined McMahon and Hagman $1,500 each for transgressions pertaining to irregularities in campaign finance reporting or funding violations that occurred last year and further fined McMahon’s and Hagman’s treasurers, Marvin Reiter and John Fugatt, respectively, as well.
The McMahon and Hagman matters were given final adjudication at the Fair Political Practices Commission’s August 20 meeting after McMahon, Hagman, Reiter and Fugatt stipulated to the violations and paid the fines.
McMahon and Reiter ran afoul of the state’s regulations through McMahon accepting a $500 political contribution in the form of a cashier’s check and a $100 contribution in the form of a money order, neither of which were drawn from the bank account of the contributors.
McMahon characterized his campaign’s action as “a mistake.”
Hagman and Fugatt were fined for accepting an $8,200 cashier’s check that was not drawn from the bank account of the contributor.
In May, the commission imposed fines of $6,000 against the Rancho Cucamonga Professional Firefighters Association IAFF Local 2274 PAC; $5,000 against district attorney Mike Ramos; $3,000 against San Bernardino County Sheriff candidate Clifton L. Harris and $1,500 against San Bernardino County Sheriff candidate Paul Schrader; $1,500 against county supervisor candidate Randolph Beasley; $1,500 against district attorney candidate Grover Merritt; and $150 against county auditor/controller/treasurer-tax collector Larry Walker. All proposed fines stem from the 2014 election cycle.
The fines against McMahon and Hagman bring to a total $16,500 in fines assessed against County candidates in the 2014 election cycle.
Since January 2013, the county has had a contract with the state Fair Political Practices Commission to monitor county elected officials and county political candidates with regard to compliance with state and county campaign finance law and ordinances. The county has paid the commission $113,159.06 for its services during the 31 months the contract has been in effect.

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Captain Kristen Griest and 1st Lieutenant Shaye Haver this week became the first women to graduate from the U.S. Army’s Ranger School. Both Captain Griest and Lieutenant Haver are West Point graduates…
Apparently, they are in pretty good shape and have strong legs. One of the feats required of Ranger School graduates was carrying a fifty pound backpack over a twelve mile course. It was reported that they covered the distance faster than some of their male counterparts…
Lieutenant Haver is an Apache helicopter pilot…
Captain Griest is an Airborne-qualified military police officer…
I have just received a report that a train operated by the Germans in Poland during World War II has been found by two men and that on board is 300 tons of gold, precious stones and weapons…
I am skeptical, too…
I have a few questions. How does a train get lost for 70 years, even in a place like southwest Poland? Is that 300 tons of gold? Isn’t that more gold than exists in the entire world?
Or does the 300 tons apply to the gold and the jewels? Or does it apply to the gold, jewels and the weapons?
Supposedly, the two men who came across this train have had written communication through a lawyer with the governmental district council in Walbrzych and have offered some tantalizing evidence that this cache exists, but are holding off on spilling the beans on exactly where it is until they are provided with a guarantee by the Polish government that they will be provided with a ten percent finder’s fee from the proceeds of their discovery…
I’ve been to Walbrzych and I don’t remember seeing any neglected trains scattered about. That doesn’t mean much, since it is being suggested the train is inside some secret tunnel once used by the Nazis. Indeed the Nazis did use trains to transport loot taken from Eastern Europe back to Berlin. The train in question is rumored to be somewhere in the vicinity of Ksiaz castle, which is roughly 46 miles southeast of the Polish village of Wroclaw…
My guess is that the Polish government has a pretty good idea of where the railroad tunnels in that country are located. For that reason, the ploy of using a lawyer to make a ten percent claim on the find might not work out the way these two fellows, one of whom is a Pole and the other a German, are hoping…
Trophies and being put on a pedestal are honorifics some, maybe even many, people aspire to, but it turns out there are some trophies you might rather not be a part of and some pedestals you really wouldn’t want to be mounted on…
Since 1914, archaeologists have been digging through the ruins of the Mayor Aztec Temple in Mexico City. For more than a hundred years, archaeologists have been making comparisons of the physical evidence found at, beneath and around the temple to accounts given by the Spanish conquistadors of what they observed at the temple complex almost five centuries ago…
Something that is both gruesome and riveting are paintings and written descriptions from the early Spanish colonial era of what are known as “tzompantli.” These were racks of human skulls that had been joined together with a type of mortar. No such artifacts had in fact been previously found. But in February, archeologists in Mexico City came upon something on the western side of the temple that verified the actual existence of tzompantli, shedding yet further light on the concept. What was discovered is what is now believed to be the main trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Templo Mayor…
The Aztecs used the tzompantli to display the severed heads on wooden poles pushed through the sides of the skull. The poles were then suspended horizontally on vertical posts.
Eduardo Matos, a leading archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, says the Aztecs displayed the tzompantli to send a message to foe and friend alike. The message? Something on the order of this: Don’t mess with the Aztecs…
The skulls are recurrent at the temple. One of the temple’s platforms that was uncovered between February and May featured heads mortared together in a circle, looking inward. It is not clear what was at the center of this circle. This is just the topmost, now visible layer. There are likely more skulls in the layers below and it is not yet known how those skulls are arranged. Archaeologists must proceed slowly, so as not to damage what they are uncovering. It appears likely that the skulls were used as a type of building material for a portion of the temple…
Some archaeologists believe that the skulls were utilized while they still had upholstery, i.e., flesh and scalp and hair, attached. Thus the term “head rack” is more appropriate than skull rack, those archaeologists suggest. One wonders about the curator at this temple. Did he have a certain standard for the heads he wanted to, er, uh, mount? If you were really ugly, do you think he might have elected to not have you beheaded?

By Mark Gutglueck
In 1856, when Southern California was hit with a severe drought, ranchers in San Gabriel, Pomona and Chino and Cucamonga drove their herds up the Cajon Pass where they could graze in pastures alongside the Mojave River.
In this way, portions of the Mojave became used as rangeland.
Early in 1858 the Mormons in San Bernardino pulled up stakes and began an abrupt but ordered mass exodus back to Utah at the calling of Brigham Young, who believed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was on the verge of going to war against the United States, then under the sway of the James Buchanan administration. Before making the trek across the vast California and Nevada deserts, many of the Mormons massed to allow their cattle to graze in the particularly verdant meadows located near what is now Sixth and D streets in Victorville, an area that became known as Mormon Crossing.
As the Mormons, or most of them, were leaving California, Aaron G. Lane, who had fought in the Mexican War and who had fared well in the gold fields, set up a ranch on the west bank of Mojave River at the point known as “Last Crossing,” thus becoming the first permanent American settler in Victorville.
Lane’s ranch, which used the Mojave River banks as pasture land, became a way station for all order of travelers through that area.
In 1861, a gold strike in Holcomb Valley near Big Bear Lake brought hundreds of miners and entrepreneurs looking to cater to those miners. Jed Van Dusen was hired by the miners to grade a road from the northwestern ridge along the natural slope toward Victor Valley and across to Cajon Summit and then John Brown graded the road up the Cajon Pass with the understanding that he was authorized to operate it as a toll road.
Northern interests in New England, interested in monopolizing in Union coffers as much gold as possible, shipped mining and refining equipment to the Colombian port city of Christobal on what was then known as the Isthmus of Darien and today known as the Isthmus of Panama. From Christobal the equipment was transported by train to the Pacific port of Balboa and reloaded on Yankee ships bound for port San Pedro in California. There, with the assistance of men from the U.S. Garrison at Los Angeles, the heavy machinery was offloaded onto wagons and with teams of horses, transported, via Brown’s road up the Cajon Pass and Van Dusen’s road up and across the north face of the San Bernardino Mountains, to reach the mine high in the remote San Bernardino Forest.
While the Civil War raged on the middle and eastern side of the continent, more settlers, including some original jack Mormons who had not returned to Utah upon Brigham Young’s 1857 edict, as well as adventurers and prodigals and pilgrims from the war’s destruction and violence, had established homesteads within the Mojave River Basin. But with the encroachment of whites into what had been the Indians’ homeland, violence less disciplined and prolonged but every bit as brutal as that between blue and grey was perpetuated back and forth between the white and red races in the Mojave. Even before the war’s end, military outposts were established in the desert as a hedge against the Indians.
In the 1860s, John Brown and two of his sons made use of the fertile land around the Mojave River as range land for the cattle they were marketing to the Army and in 1867 established what was known as the Verde Ranch in the meadowlands above the Mojave Narrows.
The military presence and the proliferation of mines in the region greatly increased the freighting of goods through the area and first Aaron Lane and then later others began operating way stations in the area, taking advantage of the abundant pasture lands that surrounded the river. In 1874 Heber Huntington purchased and operated with his wife one particularly popular way station near where the Mormons had grazed, now known as Sixth and D streets in Victorville.
As the city of San Bernardino grew to become what was referred to as the granary and storehouse for the mining camps that were proliferating in the region, Victorville became a satellite to San Bernardino, one that was much closer to the desert mines. Victor Valley ranchers experienced boom years in the 1870s, raising hundreds and eventually thousands of head of cattle, which were then dispatched to mining camps in the desert and San Bernardino Mountains and eventually eastward on the Old Spanish Trail to Nevada and Arizona.
In 1870 Max Stroble bought the entire Hesperia townsite for cash.
In 1874, Jed Van Dusen, the blacksmith who had graded the road between the Victor Valley and the San Bernardino Mountains, was given a contract to carry the U.S. Mail from San Bernardino to Prescott, Arizona, ensuring weekly postal delivery to what had become known as the Mojave River Settlement.
In 1876 and 1877 a Forty-niner by the name of Samuel Rogers developed an irrigation system that consisted of a dam and intake ditch just below the Upper Mojave Narrows and conveyed water to what was to become the heart of Victorville where he had an alfalfa and barley farm.
At this time there was also much agitation with the toll road franchise arrangement that had been granted to John Brown, with both desert and San Bernardino residents who had to often traverse the pass calling upon the county board of supervisors to rescind Brown’s franchise. Petitions to this effect were signed but failed to achieve the desired end, and the toll road remained in place for another decade until the California Southern Railroad constructed a separate road up the pass to assist in the delivery of cross-ties and rails and then turned that road over for public use.
By the late 1870s, the population of the Victorville settlement had grown to the point that in 1879 a schoolhouse, which also doubled as a grange, was erected.
In 1880, a prospector named A.J. Spencer found rich silver ore in Oro Grande and within two weeks, after an assay office in San Bernardino pronounced that one of the ingots Spencer had produced was nearly pure silver, the place was flooded with miners who lived in temporary camps among the cottonwoods. Six months later, many of those miners had built homes and the U.S. government established a post office in the town, which at that point boasted a general store, two butcher shops, a boarding house and a hotel.
Mining companies such as the Garabaldi Group, Buckingham & Co., and the Oro Grande Company as well as a number of lone prospectors operated a number of colorfully named mines, such as the Coyote, Oro Grande, Oro Fino, Garfield, Buena Vista, Contention, Sidewinder, Blue Jacket, Chimney Corner, Willis, and Iris. A group of loosely affiliated miners from the South operated a handful of mines at what was called Dixie Camp. Most of the mines were developed by means of shafts and tunnels. Mines were worked at varying depths, including 20, 25, 50, 60 and as far down as 200 feet. Several of the Oro Grande miners partnered to form a company to operate first a water-powered ore-reduction mill, capable of processing both silver and gold, and later a melting furnace to process different ores. The Oro Grande mill soon was drawing ore from mines located all over the desert. In May of 1881 wagoneer [freighter] J. D. Burkhart was hauling, at a rate of “one dollar and a half per ton,” 25 tons of ore per day to the mill.
Shortly after the boom in Oro Grande, miners in Calico hit paydirt and arranged to have the ore they produced refined at the Oro Grande mill.
In 1881, Jacob Nash Victor was 46 years old and at the seeming end of his railroad career, working as a freight agent in Colton California. As a very young man he had worked as a printer, but at the age of 20 went to work for the Mad River Railway, the first railroad in Ohio. During the Civil War, he was put in charge of the military railway under General James B. McPherson. He later served under General Sherman in Georgia in a similar capacity in the closing year of the war. After the surrender at Appomattox, Jacob Victor moved to Kansas City, where he was in charge of the Pacific Dispatch, a fast freight line then with International & Great Northern Railway of Texas in Houston and Galveston. In the 1870s he moved to New York where his health broke down. To recover, Victor, a civil engineer, in 1881 accepted a position in Colton with the California Southern Railroad, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, initially as a freight agent and then as general manager of operations.
Over the previous two years, San Bernardino County surveyor Frederick T. Perris had been assiduously lobbying Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway officers to construct a line from San Diego northward to San Bernardino to be augmented with the extension of the line up the Cajon Pass and then north to junction with the Atlantic & Pacific-Santa Fe line at Waterman, i.e., present day-Barstow. While Perris was making his entreaties, a dispute had arisen over Southern Pacific Railway’s refusal to permit other railways to cross its tracks. Perris’ efforts paid off, convincing AT&SF officials, who were itching for a route to effectively break the Southern Pacific Railroad’s monopoly on transportation into Southern California, to brave the engineering and grading challenges.
Victor, an expert on trestles and bridges, was chosen to oversee Perris and other engineers brought in to supervise the Chinese coolies who laid the track. As the general manager and chief engineer of the California Southern Railroad, Victor incorporated a “Y” track into the two sets of tracks to allow free standing locomotives to turn around and reattach themselves to assist long and heavy trains up the grade to the Cajon Summit. In 1884 the California Southern Railroad reached San Bernardino, but the same year Nash encountered a devastating, though temporary setback, when roughly 30 miles of track were swept away by floods. By 1885 the track was rebuilt and extended through the Cajon Pass.
Victor designed the bridge across the Mojave. Though the bridge was destroyed in the flood of 1938, the granite abutment to the bridge is still in use and stands as the oldest structure in the Victor Valley. Once the track had reached the Summit, Victor was kept on as the superintendent of desert construction, a $1,750,000 undertaking to connect the rail at the top of Cajon Summit with the A & P Railroad at Barstow.
Following the completion of the railway to its eastern connection a consideration was effected with the Santa Fe Railway under the management of C. W. Smith. Victor retired in 1888 and moved to Chino, where he was elected to the board of supervisors as the representative of the county’s Fourth District. He subsequently served for three years as board chairman.
Victor’s home in Victorville was located at 8th and D streets and was known when it was owned by Mrs. Jennie Mae Richardson in the 1940s as the Hillcrest Lodge. By the late 1880s the area around his home came to be known as Victor.
The advent of the railroad had major effects on the High Desert. It brought a seemingly unending stream of Easterners through the area and intensified an already flourishing mining industry. Moreover, the building of the railroad required granite excavation and limestone excavation. Quarrying for those commodities, as well as marble eventually outgrew silver and gold mining.
Whereas in 1885 there were three houses in what was to become known as the town of Victor, with one of them used as a stage station, within five years the town had grown tenfold.
In the midst of the California land boom of 1888, a former Nevada mining engineer, Robert Widney, diverted water from Deep Creek Canyon and conveyed it a mile-and-an-eighth in a 14-inch hand-riveted pipe which ran for a portion beneath the river, giving the water in it enough forward momentum to expel its contents even after the pipe was angled up onto the Hesperia mesa.
Widney’s Hesperia Land & Water Company, in league with investors from Los Angeles, undertook significant improvements in Hesperia, including the construction of the 36-room, three-story Hesperia Hotel, made of adobe bricks freighted over from Oro Grande and then painted red. By 1890, a general store, post office and a school were completed to complement the hotel but six months later, the land boom went bust.
In 1888, F.O. Wyman set up a lime burning operation in Oro Grande.

The county is refurbishing the hoisting winch for its helicopter fleet at a cost of $125,930.
According to sheriff John McMahon, “The department’s aviation division utilizes helicopters for patrol and rescue operations throughout the county. The helicopters are outfitted with hoists to be used during rescue missions allowing for the recovery of victims, regardless of the terrain conditions at the rescue site.”
McMahon asked the board of supervisors to spring $125,930 “to issue a purchase order to Goodrich Corporation – Hoist and Winch Division for overhaul services of the helicopter rescue hoist system used in rescue operations. The recommended purchase order will allow the department to secure the mandatory ten-year overhaul service of an existing rescue hoist in a timely manner. The overhaul will replace most of the moving parts, lift cable, and electrical components of the hoist, extending the useful life of the equipment for another six to eight years. The current hoists are manufactured by Goodrich Corporation SAS; therefore, Goodrich needs to provide this service and required parts for system compatibility.”
The board of supervisors accordingly agreed to contract for the overhaul without a competitive process, based upon McMahon’s assurance that “[The] purchasing [department] concurs with the non-competitive acquisition of these services based on the proprietary nature of the service and parts provided by Goodrich.”

Actress Tomeise Michelle Ray has been charged with the February 16 slaying of Anthony Pineda during a robbery at a San Bernardino marijuana dispensary.
Ray, 23, of Los Angeles was arrested August 14 in connection with the murder of Pineda, 25, of Rowland Heights.
According to the San Bernardino Police Department on February 16, two gunmen, initially described as black males, came into the marijuana dispensary in the strip mall at 2844 W. Rialto Avenue and then forced their way into the rear portion of the business.
Pineda was fatally wounded shortly after that.
Curtis . Jackson, 21, of Los Angeles was charged on April 27 with Pineda’s murder. He is in custody, bars charged with Pineda’s murder. Jackson ‘s jury trail is set to begin on August 24. His relationship to Ray is not clear.
There are four others associated with the case: Samuel Lawrence Griffith, Mario Santoscoy, James Raymond Greeno, Jr and Breanna Erica Vasquez, court records show. They are not charged with murder, but with failure to appear at previous hearings with regard to the case, FSB1502799. The case against Griffith Santoscoy, Green and Vasguez is given as FSB1501377. They are not in custody.
Ray made an appearance in Division S-11 for her arraignment before Judge Rafael Arreola on August 18. Deputy district attorney William Lee represented the People of California and deputy public defender Yarrow Neubert represented Ray. She was charged with murder and second degree robbery
Authorities have not made a public disclosure of their theory as to Ray’s involvement in the murder, citing an ongoing investigation. Neubert was given a copy of the complaint and discovery material, but information contained therein was not available at press time.
Ray has done both acting and modeling work

German mini-supermarket operator Aldi will open two grocery stores in San Bernardino, city officials disclosed this week.
Aldi has plans for establishing 45 of its discount grocery operations in Southern California.
San Bernardino represents a ready location for the company’s business model. At present the company intends one location at the south end of the city and the other higher up, most likely on or just off of Highland Avenue.
Just a few years ago, grocery chains such as Vons, Stater Bros and Albertsons were closing out smaller stores and building 40,000 and 45,000 square foot behemoths. Aldi’s model runs in the face of that, with more compact stores that have 10,000 square feet to no more than 15,000 square feet of shopping space, typically featuring five or six aisles.
Aldi’s move into the area comes on the heels of the apparent failure of Haggen Stores to make an inroad into Southern California. Haggen operated 18 huge high end stores in the Pacific Northwest and late last year and early this year expanded exponentially by purchasing 146 Albertsons and Safeway stores, 83 of which were in California. But the combination of Haggen’s high prices and steep competition from other grocery chains that emphasize low prices has resulted in Haggen taking massive losses, culminating in a recent decision to shut down 16 of the California stores it just purchased.
Aldi does not feature brand redundancy in its offerings, generally limiting customers to one brand of a particular food. Still, Aldi officials insist, they feature only quality brands and their bulk buying of large wholesale lots from the suppliers they have an established relationship with assures low prices.
This week the LaVerne City Council approved Aldi moving into a vacant Office Depot store in that city.
Aldi has plans to set up an operation in Yucaipa, where Yucaipa Companies owner Ron Burkle lives.
Yucaipa Companies owns or owned Food 4 Less, Boys Markets, Alpha Beta Markets, Smitty’s and Ralphs Grocery Company.
Aldi’s move into California is part of an effort by the German company to tap into the American grocery market, which is to entail a $3 billion investment aimed at opening 650 stores in 48 states. The company’s Southern California headquarters is in Moreno Valley.

With distinctive long ears and long powerful rear legs like other jackrabbits, the black-tailed jackrabbit, an inhabitant of San Bernardino County, can reach a length of two feet and weigh anywhere from three-and-a-half to six pounds.
The third largest of North American hares, the Lepus californicus can be vicious, and, according to Mexican legend, will attack and even kill humans who are lost, weakened or disoriented in the desert. The species ranges throughout the deserts of the Southwest and into Mexico, where they have been referred to as “El Conejo de Muerta (The Rabbit of Death).”
Black-tailed jackrabbits are not rabbits but hares and, sporting 24 chromosomes, they cannot interbreed with domestic rabbits, which have 22 chromosomes.
The black-tailed jackrabbit’s dorsal fur is a dark buff sprinkled with black and is creamy white on its underside and the insides of its legs. The ears are black-tipped on the outer surface, with no pigment inside. The tail’s ventral surface is grey or white, and the tail’s dorsal surface is black, forming a black stripe. Females are larger than males.
Black-tailed jackrabbits generally occupy mixed shrub-grassland terrains and in California prefer chamise and chaparral, while avoiding closed-canopy chaparral. Strict vegetarians, black-tailed jackrabbits forage shrubs, grasses, sagebrush, and creosotebush, broom snakeweed, mesquite, yucca and cacti. They drink rainwater, springwater or dew when it is available but rely mostly on acquiring water from the plants they eat.
Male black-tailed jackrabbit reach sexual maturity at about seven months of age. Females usually breed in the spring of their second year, although females born in spring or early summer may breed in their first year. Ovulation is induced by copulation. There are two peak breeding seasons in California, one lasting from January to March and the other in June. The gestation period ranges from 41 to 47 days. In California the average litter size is three.
Female black-tailed jackrabbits do not prepare an elaborate nest, but rather give birth in shallow excavations called forms that are no more than a few centimeters deep which are sometimes bare or sometimes lined with hair prior to giving birth. Young are borne fully-furred with eyes open, and are mobile within minutes of birth. Other than for nursing, which lasts for no more than eight weeks, females do not hover around, stay with or protect their young. Siblings will stay together for about a week after leaving the form and then move out on their own.
Black-tailed jackrabbits do not migrate or hibernate during winter; staying in place. On a daily basis, however, they may move about anywhere from two to ten miles, staying within or near shrub cover during the day and foraging at night.
A black-tailed jackrabbit can reach a speed of 40 miles per hour and leap well over ten feet, allowing it to outrun most of its natural predators. The hares also sprint in a zig-zag pattern, further confounding their pursuers. The species’ natural predators include hawks, owls, eagles, coyotes, dogs, foxes, badgers, mountain lions, housecats, bobcats and snakes. Raccoons and skunks will prey on young black-tailed jackrabbits.
Despite the somewhat dubitable legend that black-tailed rabbits have on occasion actually killed humans, the reverse is in fact far more common. The hares are known to destroy crops and for that reason are not suffered gladly by farmers. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was a bounty on jackrabbits in the area in and around Hesperia. As many as 35,000 of the creatures may have been killed in a single exterminating go-round.
The black-tailed jackrabbit has somehow withstood the onslaught of human destruction, in some measure because of its prolific breeding capability but also, paradoxically, because the parasites that hector it are even more loathsome to humans.
The black-tailed jackrabbit population is riddled with ectoparasites, such as fleas, ticks, lice, and mites, as well as endoparasites including trematodes, cestodes, nematodes, and botfly (Cuterebra) larvae. Black-tailed jackrabbits are diseased with tularemia, equine encephalitis, brucellosis, Q fever, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. As such, informed humans are reluctant to catch black-tailed jackrabbits as game. Those who do are well advised to wear gloves while handling carcasses and to cook the meat thoroughly to avoid contracting tularemia, which can result in death.