Last Friday, prosecuting attorney Joyce Dudley delivered one of the more sizzling and searing closing arguments of her lengthy legal career, castigating defendant Sylvia Vasquez as a cruelly narcissistic child abuser and “one of the worst kind of liars there is.” Judge Frank Ochoa will rule on the trial at the end of this week.
Self Inflicted Fragging:Perhaps if juvenile humans were half as important as rats, they’d have a few friends in high places. But there were precious few on hand two weeks ago to witness the Santa Barbara School Board taking out a butcher knife and gutting-albeit reluctantly-$2.5 million worth of classes, services, and after-school sports programs from the school budget.
When Judge Frank Ochoa goes behind closed doors later this week to decide the fate of Sylvia Vasquez-the Santa Barbara childcare provider who pleaded guilty to locking two adopted children in makeshift cages and a third in his room-he’ll decide whether she’s a modern-day Cruella De Vil or a heroically misguided fairy godmother struggling to cope with the insurmountable psychological problems suffered by three of her four adopted children.
The sentencing hearing against Sylvia Vasquez continued on Friday with bizarre, tearful testimony.
RIP-n-READ: One of the more depressing aspects of the self-inflicted mutilation taking place at the News-Press is its withering effect on our ability to laugh. I hate to admit it, but it’s hard to crack wise when you have lawyers threatening to sue you to kingdom come. Greeting me on my computer Tuesday morning as I sat down to write the latest installment of this agonizing tale were not one, but two threatening letters from attorneys.
Jamie Thomson, the reputed “father of stem-cell research,” will soon be operating a research lab in Santa Barbara as an adjunct professor at UCSB. Thomson will be in Santa Barbara about one month per year, leading an interdisciplinary team of about four postdoctoral researchers. The bulk of his work will remain centered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he remains a tenured senior faculty member.
Former Santa Barbara News-Press editor Jerry Roberts angrily denounced a front page article in Sunday’s edition of the News-Press, indicating that he may have downloaded thousands of pornographic images involving children and minors as “libelous,” a “smear,” and “an unconscionable story.”
Jamie Thomson, the reputed “Father of Stem Cell Research,” is coming to UCSB.
GO FIGURE: The only reassuring news to come out of the Virginia Tech slaughter is that we need not fear suicide bombers as long as we remain on American soil. Given our propensity for other forms of murder, suicide, and mayhem, most suicide bombers will seem beside the point here.
It was almost 15 years ago that Ray Higgins discovered that his son Michael had been sexually molested by Father Robert Van Handel, a Franciscan monk and former teacher and choirmaster at St. Anthony’s Seminary. Since then, Van Handel was sentenced to eight years behind bars for sexual abuse and was removed from the priesthood.
