victorpatton's blog

I was running around the track at Merced College yesterday and a semi-magical moment happened: I had my first close-up glimpse of a wild fox.
 
I know -- a lot of y’all are probably saying, "So what, big deal?" Well, as a guy who has spent much of his life in urban environments, seeing a fox outside of a zoo is pretty cool. I am the kind of person who just gets excited seeing a deer -- so you can imagine the impact seeing a wild fox has on me.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog asking readers if they read the police log.

I was a little worried that no one would respond to my inquiry, because about 10 days went by without a response.

To date, however, I have had five responses. Not as many as I had hoped -- but at least I now have confirmation that indeed somebody out there is reading the police log. So the 30 minutes or so that I spend every day typing out the log has not been in vain.

That's the irony I was struck with, while sitting in a court hearing this week regarding Hussein's death.

Hussein was a 25-year-old immigrant from the Middle Eastern country of Yemen, who came to Merced County with his family for a better life and opportunities. He ultimately joined the U.S. Army and served in Afghanistan, according to his brother, Khaled Hussein.

After returning from Afghanistan, Hussein was a clerk at his family's business -- the Santa Nella Market on Highway 33, near Interstate 5. Not long after he started work there, Merced County Sheriff's deputies found Hussein's dead body in a back room of the market, his hands tied behind his back, stabbed eight times in the face and torso with a filet knife. As if that were not enough, the person who killed Hussein during the apparent robbery also jabbed him in the eye with the knife during the assault.

The debate over whether a Taser can kill is about the heat up in a very big way.

Recently, the coroner in the small town of Winnfield, La., ruled that a suspect died in police custody -- and that his death was due to being shocked by a Taser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrjBbx5dyKY&feature=related

This case is particularly interesting because it is rare -- if not unheard of -- for a coroner to rule that a suspect was killed by a Taser. This particular suspect was Tasered nine times.

One of my daily jobs as the Sun-Star's crime and courts reporter is typing out the police log from the Merced Police Department. In a nutshell, the police log is a list of the calls the department receives during a 24-hour period. The log is not a definitive list of every crime that goes down during a day -- but it is a glimpse into what alleged crimes police respond to during the day.

Of course, the department receives literally hundreds of calls on a daily basis -- so there is no way I can type out all of the calls. That's why the police log in the Sun Star carries a disclaimer that states it is only a "short list" of calls the department receives. For example, the calls that I include on the logs generally include aggravated assaults, burglaries, auto burglaries, thefts, missing persons, etc. Oftentimes if I see a call that stands out, such as a shots fired call or an aggravated assault, I will call the department to get more information.

I had the pleasure of meeting Louis Palmer on Friday -- a Swiss man who is five months away from being the first person to circle the world in a solar-powered, zero-carbon emission car.

For those that have not yet read the whole story about his stop in Merced, click here: http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/353793.html

The thing that amazed me the most about Palmer (besides the fact that he speaks six languages) is the fact that he envisioned building his solar-powered car at age 14. At an age when most kids are caught up in trying to be cool among their peers (myself included), this guy was trying to figure out how to build the vehicle of the future.