Inland Empire, CA: Rodney King faces new arrest

Rodney King, whose videotaped beating by police ultimately led to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence on Tuesday, police said.

King was behind the wheel of a 1994 Mitsubishi when he was pulled over in Moreno Valley, in Southern California's Riverside County, the city's police department reported. Officers saw King -- who has acknowledged a longstanding drinking problem -- commit "several traffic violations," a police statement said.

"A preliminary evaluation of the driver indicated he was possibly driving while impaired. The subject was transported to the Moreno Valley Police Department for a further evaluation," police said. He was booked after that further evaluation, they said.

King's 1991 beating by Los Angeles police officers after a traffic stop left him with skull fractures and brain and kidney damage. It was captured on video by a nearby resident, and four officers were indicted as a result.

But their trial the following year led to three acquittals and a mistrial in the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, verdicts that set off three days of riots in African-American neighborhoods. By the time it was over, 55 people were dead, more than 2,000 were hurt, and property damage exceeded $1 billion.

Two of the officers were later convicted of federal civil rights charges, and King won $3.8 million in damages from the city in a civil suit.

King was on parole for robbery at the time of the beating and has had several run-ins with the law in the ensuing years. He served a 90-day jail term in 1996 for a hit-and-run involving his wife at the time, and pleaded guilty in 2004 to reckless driving and driving under the influence of a controlled substance.

In March, he was cited for driving without a license after being pulled over in Arcadia, California.

Corona, CA: SAFE taskforce arrests sex offender during child porn download

On June 2, 2011, about 11:45 AM, investigators and officers with Riverside County's multi-agency Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Task Force, working with detectives from the Riverside Community College District Police Department, arrested Ryan Scott Barnhart, age 33 of Moreno Valley, while he was in the act of downloading child pornographic images and video via the Internet using a publically accessible computer located in the Business Education Building on the Riverside Community College District's Riverside Campus. Barnhart, who is a registered sex offender currently on parole, is currently enrolled as a student at the campus.

Barnhart was arrested without incident; he was subsequently booked on multiple felony charges related to this investigation at the Riverside County Sheriff's Robert Presley Detention Center.

The SAFE Task Force is a collaboration of multi-disciplined law enforcement agencies including the Riverside County District Attorney's Office, Riverside County Sheriff's Department, Riverside County Probation Department, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, California Department of Justice, and Corona Police Department. Working together in seamless cooperation, SAFE Task Force personnel are focused on reducing incidents of sexual assault countywide by means of comprehensive registered sex offender monitoring and enforcement.

Inquiries regarding this action can be referred to the SAFE Task Force Director, Commander Jose Rodriguez of the Riverside County District Attorney's Office (Bureau of Investigation), at (760) 863-8710. For more information on the SAFE Task Force mission and its operations, visit www.rivcosafe.org.

Corona, CA: DA will not seek death in kidnap-slaying of Corona man

Riverside County prosecutors will not pursue the death penalty next month in the murder trial of a man charged with helping kidnap a Corona real estate broker and burying him in a Moreno Valley backyard.

After evaluating the case of Oscar Ortiz Martinez, Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach ruled the evidence did not warrant capital punishment. Martinez could face life in prison without parole if convicted of all charges.

The decision was made as part of the district attorney's review of all of the county's death penalty cases, authorities said.

"We believe this is the most appropriate decision, based on the evidence of the case," district attorney's spokesman John Hall said.

Martinez was among three people charged with murder in the death of Orlando Duarte Sr.

Duarte, also a court clerk in Orange County, was taken from his Corona home March 14, 2008. His body was found five days later in a 5-foot-deep grave behind a home on Atwood Avenue in Moreno Valley. He had been bound with an extension cord.

Corona police arrested Martinez a month after the body was found. His estranged lover, Cynthia Rodriguez, and her brother-in law Arturo De Oca, are also charged with murder but remain at large, possibly in Mexico, authorities said.

Police said Rodriguez was living with Duarte and Martinez became jealous.

FBI agents said Duarte may have been taken to Mexico and held for ransom before he was killed.

Days after his capture, his family received phone calls demanding $2 million. While he was being held captive, Duarte called his family and told them he had been taken to Mexico.

Martinez told police that it was Rodriguez who asked for help getting rid of Duarte.

"The evidence shows he (Martinez) wasn't the impetus behind it," Supervising Deputy District Attorney John Henry said. "Cynthia Rodriguez was the driving force."

Martinez's trial is scheduled to begin May 10 in Riverside.

Corona, CA: Tie For First Place In Riverside Spelling Bee

Two students tied for first place at the 34th annual Riverside County Spelling Bee in Moreno Valley today.

Thirty students from public and private schools across the county competed in the bee at the Moreno Valley Conference & Recreation Center but after 3 1/2 hours and 18 rounds, only two survived. Eanna Mejia, who attends Corona Ranch Elementary School, squared off against Raymond Galloway, of Vista Verde Middle School.

“Judges finally called the match a draw after what they said was the longest one-on-one showdown in memory,” said Rick Peoples of the Office of Education, with the kids sounding out such words as sequacity and impuissant.

According to the County Office of Education, Galloway, who has been competing in spelling bees since he was five, was selected to advance to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.. Mejia will represent Riverside County in the California Spelling Bee in Stockton on April 16.

The end of the dream?

The suburbs have been hit hard by the housing crisis. But reports of their death are exaggerated

“KEEP your house” reads the handwritten sign on a chain-link fence some 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is an advertisement, although it could be the attitude of an overstretched buyer who owes the bank more money than his home is worth. Many people in Moreno Valley have simply walked away from their properties. As abandoned lawns turn brown in the desert climate, the fallout spreads. It is no longer a matter of saving individual houses, but a whole city.

Until recently Moreno Valley was one of the fastest-growing cities in America. It lies in the Inland Empire, a two-county region in southern California that is so called largely because it is difficult to know how else to characterise such a sprawling expanse of detached homes, strip malls and warehouses. Between 1990 and 2007 the Inland Empire’s population grew from 2.6m to 4.1m—the equivalent of adding a city the size of Philadelphia.

As in other regions now suffering from a rash of foreclosures and falling house prices, such as south Florida and Nevada, rapid growth is itself largely to blame. Moreno Valley had the misfortune to swell at a time of lax lending practices. Whole neighbourhoods were built on cheap credit and inflated expectations—palaces for the middle class. Around Camino del Rey, on the city’s southern edge, huge Spanish-style houses with three-car garages sit empty. The city’s population growth appears to have gone into reverse. Moreno Valley’s high schools expected to enrol 9,850 pupils last year. They fell short by 780.

Fewer people with less disposable income is bad news for shopkeepers. The Moreno Valley commerce centre (a strip mall, despite the grand title) has six vacant units in its main building. Stores along Alessandro Boulevard, the city’s main drag, have been occupied by Pentecostal churches—a sure sign of low rents. John Husing, an Inland Empire economist, says the housing slowdown has scared off financial-services and civil-engineering firms, for the moment at least.

A bigger economic threat is just coming into focus. The Inland Empire is America’s warehouse: goods, mostly from China, are sorted and assembled there before being distributed across the country. Until recently increasing trade could be counted on to prop up the economy. Traffic through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, America’s two biggest by container volume, levelled off only briefly during the early 1990s recession and continued to grow in 2001. Now it is declining. In June imports through the two ports were 15% and 12% below last year’s level. Moreno Valley’s office-vacancy rate is already the highest in the region.

All this would be a shock to any city, but it is particularly startling in a place used to double-digit percentage increases in tax revenues. Moreno Valley has been forced to tap its reserves to make up a $7.1m shortfall. That may grow, says Bob Gutierrez, the city manager. State politicians are still trying to close an enormous hole in California’s budget, which is now seven weeks late. When it comes, the budget is likely to involve a raid on local finances that will put places like Moreno Valley further in the red.

Despite the gloom, a few souls are rather cheerful. Public-transport advocates and planning groups such as the Congress for the New Urbanism have seized upon the crisis in far-flung regions like the Inland Empire as evidence that sprawl is no longer viable. “The frontier of endless mobility that we’ve known our entire lives is closing,” wrote Bill McKibben, an environmentalist, in the Washington Post. At last, the urbanists predict, Americans will return to city centres. They will swap their sport-utility vehicles for public transport and begin to act more like well-behaved Europeans.

Some of these cheerful forecasts appear to be coming true. Across southern California, use of the skeletal rail network is rising. Property prices are indeed holding up fairly well in older neighbourhoods near the coast. It can be difficult to convince people in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica that the state has a housing crisis. But the growing price gap between such burghs and places like Moreno Valley can be read in two ways. It is both a sign of the suburbs’ plight and the thing that is gradually renewing their competitive edge.

The Inland Empire’s housing market did not collapse because people chose not to live in sprawling suburbs. They clearly did, hence the huge growth there. The problem was that buyers could not really afford the houses that were being built. Now they can. Mr Husing reckons 39% of residents can now afford the average property—up from just 18% in 2005. House-builders are at last creating smaller homes, and a few buyers are returning. Now the task is to ensure that neighbourhoods are not snapped up by slumlords. The nearby city of Grand Terrace has done that in part by levying a small tax on renting.

Places like Moreno Valley retain two enormous advantages over traditional cities. They have lots of cheap, available land and a pool of workers keen to avoid the ever-lengthening commute to Los Angeles and Orange County. When it comes to attracting businesses, these two factors outweigh high petrol prices. The city of Ontario, which contains the Inland Empire’s main airport, already has more than two jobs for each home. Greg Devereaux, the city’s manager, reckons it will eventually have more than three.

Bill Batey, Moreno Valley’s mayor, is frank about the city’s present problems. When asked about its future, though, he brightens. Pointing to a large aerial photograph on the wall, he outlines plans for a new warehouse, a cluster of medical offices and a lot more houses. There is plenty of empty space in the photograph; indeed, there is a huge expanse of bare earth directly across the street from city hall. The frontier is not closed yet.

518,000-SF Stoneridge Retail Center Debuts in Moreno Valley, CA

MORENO VALLEY, CA-Shopping center developer Stoneridge Centre Partners plans to debut its new 518,000-sf Stoneridge Towne Centre at a grand opening of the first phase of the center tomorrow. The new shopping venue in this Inland Empire city is a power center with 21 stores and restaurants in the 518,000-sf first phase, which the developer expects to expand with an additional 86,326 sf that will bring the total GLA to approximately 600,000 sf on the 55- acre property.

The new center is located at the gateway of Stoneridge Ranch, a new master-planned community by Beazer Homes in East Moreno Valley, south of Highway 60 between Nason Street and Moreno Beach Drive. The center is home to Super Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s and Office Max, along with other retailers, sit-down restaurants, fast food franchises and financial service businesses.

Partner Michael Marks of Stoneridge Centre Partners notes that the developer built the new shopping center from the ground up, enabling the firm to incorporate new design techniques, easy access, large drive aisles and ample parking. Moreno Valley is ranked as the sixth-fastest growing city in California and the 26th-fastest growing in the nation, with most of the city's newly constructed or planned housing units within a three-mile radius of Stoneridge, he points out.

Earlier descriptions of the Stoneridge center by the developer noted that the Super Target was the first in California. They said that the Super Target at Stoneridge would carry the retailer's traditional offerings as well as an upscale grocery that will include an in-store bakery, deli and produce sections.