The 14-year-old junior high school student accused of fatally stabbing 15-year-old Luis Angel Linares during a sprawling State Street gang brawl Wednesday afternoon made his first courtroom appearance at about 2:12 p.m. Friday afternoon. Dressed in a dark green jail jumpsuit with a cable of chains wrapped around his waist, the most striking fact about the defendant was his glaring youth.
Police identified 15-year old Luis Angel Linares as the murder victim of the gang brawl that engulfed much of State Street on Wednesday afternoon, March 14. Investigators said Linares, a student at El Puente High School who also went by the nicknames “Nacho” or “Chunky,” died of multiple stab wounds to the torso and that he’d been clubbed on the head as well by a heavy object.
The Santa Barbara City Council discussion on Tuesday of the state of its recycling efforts bore a striking similarity to a water polo game: All the real action took place out of sight.
After 16 months in operation, the number of people using the city’s newest parking structure garage-the $26 million, five-story Granada garage-has yet to equal the number who used its predecessor, the one-story lot located behind the Granada Theater.
Members of a special committee charged with exploring how best to protect the City of Santa Barbara’s affordable housing stock shied away from taking any action at their meeting on Tuesday, April 4, citing the complexity of the proposals before them. On the table were plans to expand the city’s inclusionary housing rules.
Santa Barbara Police are opposing efforts by Mel’s, one of Santa Barbara’s more entrenched watering holes, to move from its current digs within the Paseo Nuevo Mall to the 400 block of State Street. Mel’s is hoping to move south because its landlords doubled the rent, but police are objecting that the presence of the bar will contribute to the general alcoholic din-and attendant enforcement issues-that now defines the three-block spread from the 400 to the 600 blocks of State Street.
Sheriff Bill Brown has been forced to abandon one of the solutions to jail overcrowding he frequently touted during his successful election campaign last year. On the campaign trail, Brown had suggested that transferring Santa Barbara county jail inmates to a vacant jail facility located in Tulare County could provide a temporary solution to the county’s long-term need for more jail space.
Jury selection began this week for the trial of Darren Thomas, who was convicted last year of raping and impregnating an autistic woman then under the care of the Devereux Foundation and is now facing perjury charges. While perjury charges are extremely rare, prosecuting attorney Joyce Dudley is claiming that Thomas knowingly lied on the witness stand when he charged that sheriffs deputies stole his coffee cup after meeting with him at a Goleta Starbucks.
A 15-year-old Westside resident and El Puente student was stabbed to death behind Saks Fifth Avenue as part of sprawling after-school gang brawl between Eastside and Westside gang members that engulfed much of downtown Santa Barbara – and led to an impromptu suspect lineup in the middle of State Street (pictured) – on Wednesday afternoon.
Santa Barbara prosecuting attorney Hillary Dozer revealed today that he would seek to prosecute the 14-year-old Santa Barbara Junior High School student accused of killing 15-year-old Luis Angel Linares (pictured) in Wednesday’s State Street gang brawl as an adult.
