Rory
Appleton, Chowchilla News
CHOWCHILLA
— For 40 years, strangers from around the world have asked Jennifer Brown Hyde
about her kidnapping.
“People
find out and are fascinated,” Hyde said. “And that’s fine. I don’t mind sharing
it because the world stopped and was on its knees praying for us. And I feel,
40 years later, that I owe it to those people to share where I am at in life.”
Hyde
was one of 26 children abducted July 15, 1976, during a summer school bus ride
in Chowchilla. The students and their bus driver were taken at gunpoint and
eventually were piled into a moving van and buried in a Bay Area quarry. They
escaped without any physical injuries after less than a day in captivity.
CALIFORNIA INMATES
Hillel
Aron, LA Weekly
Erika Rocha spent her 35th birthday— her last birthday — at
California Institution for Women (CIW), the smaller of the state's two
female-only prisons. In the yard of the Chino Valley facility, about an hour
east of downtown L.A., her friends threw her a Tinker Bell party.
"For two weeks Erika was asking what kind of party she was
having," one of her friends, nicknamed Grumpy, would later write in a
booklet distributed at Rocha's memorial service. "Everyone kept telling
her, 'You're just having a private little dinner with your honey.' She came up
to [another friend] Dreamer and was all, 'I know you can't hold water, so what
are you guys doing for my B-Day?' [Dreamer] can't keep those kinds of secrets
so [she] just smiled and was like, 'You're having a little dinner like you
wanted.'"
DEATH PENALTY
Alison
Vekshin, Bloomberg
Some
of Silicon Valley’s biggest names are pouring money into an effort to overturn
California’s death penalty as support for capital punishment has declined to
the lowest in decades.
Reed
Hastings, the billionaire chief executive officer of Netflix Inc., donated $1
million, and Salesforce.com Inc. CEO Marc Benioff gave $50,000 to support a
measure on the November ballot that would replace death with a life sentence
without parole. Seven wealthy donors from technology companies have contributed
the bulk of the $4 million raised so far.
CORRECTIONS RELATED
Rachel
Cohrs, The Sacramento Bee
Between
June 1 and July 2, 15 state employee bargaining units’ contracts expired. So
far, only one of them has come to an agreement with the governor.
This
round of negotiations is particularly sticky because California Gov. Jerry
Brown is trying to chip away at nearly $72 billion in retiree health benefit
obligations over the next 30 years by getting state employees to contribute
from their paychecks. With certain units, that strategy hasn’t gone over
smoothly.
International
Union of Operating Engineers representative Steve Crouch said while the union
agrees with the concept of pre-funding retiree benefits, it disagrees with the
amount of money that should be taken out of workers’ paychecks.
Kathryn
Skelton, Lewiston Sun Journal
AUBURN
— After a rough start and years in federal prison, Titan Gilroy took an
entry-level job at a machine shop and learned the trade — then built his own company.
With
a few smart moves, it took off like a shot.
"I
went from $1 million (the first year) to $1 million a month for the next 24
months — 55 employees, 20 Haas (high-tech) machines," Gilroy said.
Correctional
News
SANTA
MARIA, Calif. — Now that the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors awarded
construction contracts in early July for the Northern Branch jail in Santa
Maria, final state approval is required before continuing with plans to build
the facility. That includes review by the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation (CDCR), State Public Works Board and Pooled Money Investment
Board.
The
$77.7 million construction bid package was awarded to Costa Mesa, Calif.-based
SJ Amoroso Construction Inc., and locally based Spiess Construction Co. Inc.
was awarded the $2.9 million bid package for off-site utility and road
improvement work, according to Noozhawk.
OPINION
The Turlock Journal
Forty-five
years ago in a bone-chilling, blood-curdling cover story for The Los Angeles
Free Press about California’s gas chamber (“How Long Can You Hold Your
Breath?,” December 4, 1970), author, musician, and beatnik activist Ed Sanders,
decried state-sponsored, tax-payer funded executions as a “ritual of filth.”
Sanders exhorted: “Isn’t it time to crush that cruel nose-cone at San Quentin
in the jaws of the nearest auto compactor or in the nearest junk yard?”
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