Yeah, sure, we could have done what we’ve done in past years. We could have foisted upon you an end-of-year edition giving month-by-month blow-by-blows of select news goodness (and badness) plucked from the Weekly’s Navel Gazing news blog. But we wanted 2010 to be special because it caps a decade (or starts one, if you count that way). And 10 is a round number. And most of all, because we were sick of doing it the other way. So here, in David Letterman-style reverse order, in all their pot-smokin’, Octomommin’, dirty-coppin’, Ponzi-schemin’ glory, are 10 Top 10 lists for 2010.
TOP 10 MOST READ NAVEL GAZING POSTS*
10. Vanessa Bryant Wears “Do I Look Illegal?” T-Shirt to Lakers Game!
9. Lawrence Joseph Brown, Violent Rapist of Little Girls, to Be Freed—Pissing Off OC Cops and DA
8. How Chapman University’s Logo Got a Cameo in The Fourth Kind
7. State Bill Would Knock Possession of Less Than an Ounce of Marijuana to an Infraction
6. Debra Ayala Tapia, 38, Tapped by Teen, Having His Baby and Facing Charges
5. Michael Jason Wilson Tried as Adult for Facebook War That Ended in Bloodshed
4. People of the Park Focuses On the “Fashionably Challenged” of Disneyland
3. PHOTOS: Ariel, Belle and Minnie Like You’ve Never Seen—Burlesqueland!
2. Benny Hinn and Paula White Deny Affair
1. Benny Hinn Goes On Air to Counter Estranged Wife
*OC Register Reader Fustercluck of the Day, which is posted every weekday, collectively had enough 2010 page views to land in the top 10.
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TOP 10 HEINOUS MURDERS
10. Marco Rojo Nieto, a 36-year-old homeless, married father, was beaten to death on a busy Santa Ana street in July. Jorge Alejandro Lopez, 33, of Santa Ana, has been charged with Nieto’s murder.
9. After winning big at the Hawaiian Gardens Casino on Sept. 2, 55-year-old Chi Ngoc Bui of Westminster had his car cut off while driving in Santa Ana; he was then forced out of the auto and run over. Investigators say Michael William Ross, 26, of Long Beach, watched Bui leave the casino with his winnings and alerted Tad Allen Carroll, a 41-year-old transient, and Barbara Ann Hamel, 47, of Long Beach, to follow Bui home and rob him. All three have been charged with murder.
8. Tuyet Thi Huynh, 38, of Garden Grove, was holding cash as she walked up to a car parked at Russell Paris Park in Westminster to buy drugs. But when she reached the passenger side of the vehicle, the passenger grabbed the cash and the driver hit the gas. Huynh’s purse became tangled in the car, and she was dragged for about a mile through several streets before slamming into the pavement. Christopher Dai-Ichi Yu, 18, of Fountain Valley, and Lynn Ai Quach, 19, of Garden Grove, are up on murder charges.
7. The body of 26-year-old Santa Ana landscaper Hipolito Tapia Bravo was found hanging from a fence post in front of a South Baker Street apartment complex in Santa Ana in June. The condition of the corpse, the way the body was positioned and evidence found at the scene lead police to believe Bravo was strangled with a rope, then hung on the 5-foot chain-link post. No arrests have been made.
6. Donald Homer Shinkle, 80, was found dead and stuffed in his Garden Grove apartment’s bedroom closet in April. A neighbor had spotted Shinkle’s 50-year-old roommate, James Leon Howieson, driving the older man’s pickup, something Shinkle never would have allowed. With police closing in, Howieson blew off his own head with a shotgun in Westminster. Shinkle’s truck was nearby.
5. Randall Yancey, 40, waited for his estranged wife outside her parents’ Fountain Valley home one evening in November. After Theresa Yancey and the couple’s 8-year-old daughter, Madison, got out of the car in the driveway, Randall walked up and started arguing loudly with his ex. Relatives inside the home came out and escorted Madison inside as the argument continued. Randall then shot Theresa, killing her, and forced himself inside the home, where he shot and killed Madison and himself.
4. Wayne Zickefoose shot and killed his 39-year-old wife, Herminia, with a handgun in the back yard of their Anaheim home the night of June 13 before firing three shots into his 3-year-old son, firing at and missing his 5-year-old son, and then fatally shooting himself. Both boys survived. Money problems reportedly sent the Buena Park automobile-repair-shop owner and online-investing and theta-healing expert over the edge.
3. Richard Gustav Forsberg, 61, allegedly hit his college sweetheart in the head with a statue in their Rancho Santa Margarita home in February, killing her. He is accused of then telling concerned friends, neighbors and family members conflicting stories that his wife, Marcia, was visiting relatives in Arizona, that she had left him and that she was soon returning home to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Authorities believe he buried her in a fire pit at Lake Piru Recreational Area in Ventura County.
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2. Bessie Mae Whyman, 84, was beloved at her former Bank of America workplace and in her Anaheim neighborhood. So it was shocking and repulsive that such a sweet old lady would be brutally raped, tortured and fatally stabbed by an intruder. Anthony Darnell Wade, 25, of Los Angeles, was arrested on suspicion of Whyman’s murder after being found in San Bernardino with the widow’s car.
1. Daniel Wozniak, a 27-year-old Costa Mesa community-theater actor, is alleged to have shot 26-year-old Samuel Eliezer Herr to death in May before chopping up the Afghanistan-war veteran and hiding his torso in the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base theater and dumping his head in a trash can at El Dorado Regional Park in Long Beach. Prosecutors say that in between performances of the musical Nine in Fullerton, Wozniak, using Herr’s cell phone, sent texts to Juri “Julie” Kibuishi, 23, of Irvine, posing as her friend Herr and asking her to come to the dead man’s Costa Mesa apartment. There, Wozniak is accused of shooting and killing Kibuishi before stripping and posing her as if she’d been raped. Police, who at first surmised Herr killed the woman and fled, picked up a teen using Herr’s ATM card in Long Beach. The teen led police to Wozniak, who was arrested at his bachelor party in Huntington Beach. The motive, according to investigators: money. Wozniak, cash-strapped as his wedding day approached, was allegedly draining Herr’s bank account.
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TOP 10 REAL FAMILY MEMBERS OF THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ORANGE COUNTY
10. Briana Wolfsmith, the daughter of Vicki Gunvalson, who proved to a Weekling in a local emergency room on the first day of 2010 that she is a good nurse, someone who hasn’t let quasi-fame go to her head and, unlike her mom, the epitome of class.
9. Ryan Vieth, son of Tamra Barney, who turned heads in January by posting a self-photo of his buffed self on Guys With iPhones, a site that features often-nude pics men have taken with their iPhones.
8. Melania and Mackenna Bellino, the twin daughters of Jim and Alexis Bellino, whose stroller rolled into the Balboa Bay Club pool while their parents partied hearty on the Fourth of July. The girls, who were plucked out by their dad and a security guard, were 2-and-a-half years old at the time.
7. Micah Tanous, the husband of new cast member Peggy Tanous, who has been observed at parties in the real OC performing amazing, perplexing card tricks. Hey, maybe the Bellino babies rolling into the Bay Club pool was one of his illusions.
6. Raquel Curtin, the spoiled-brat daughter of Lynne Curtin, who, after getting a new Beemer for her 18th birthday, showed up at her party in a form-fitting dress that her boyfriend said made her look like a stripper. Actually, she borrowed the dress from mom.
5. Slade Smiley, the fiance of Gretchen Rossi, who first appeared during season one as the fiance of Jo De La Rosa, then briefly dated Lauri Waring (who went on to marry developer George Peterson to end season three) and finally wound up with Rossi (who was engaged to the much-older Jeff Beitzel, who went on to die of cancer as season four aired). Bravo may be positioning the Slade-Gretch “power couple” for a spin-off fake-reality show.
4. Simon Barney, the estranged husband of Tamra Barney, who was treated to a restraining order in September after throwing a retractable dog leash at his ex-, who had traded Simon in for a younger stud.
3. Kara, Colton and Shane Keough, the children of Matt and Jeana Keough, who launched a Twitter war after Jeana and Tamra Barney had a drink-throwing catfight in October. “@KaraKeough: @TamraBarney to hear you threw a drink in @jeanakeough’s face makes me sick—she called me in tears—can’t believe I considered you a friend.” “@ShaneKeough: @TamraBarney you are low-class trash. How dare you threaten my mother when you are wrong to begin with. If you want privacy then leave OC.” A family that tweets together . . . stays together!
2. Matt Keough, Jeana’s estranged husband, who was placed behind bars for a third time after being convicted of DUI in October. The former Oakland A’s pitching ace missed one sentencing hearing after his attorney determined he was too drunk.
1. Josh Waring, the son of Laura Waring Peterson, who kept a jail cot warm for Keough after getting picked up on a parole violation in July. Once famously turned in to authorities by his mom, Waring the younger boasts possession of heroin and Ecstasy and intent to sell, possession of drug paraphernalia, battery on a spouse or significant other, and false imprisonment on his rap sheet. And he’s only 21!
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TOP 10 THIEVING FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS
10. William Phillip Armentrout, 32, of Anaheim, was found guilty in December of stealing $42,158 from the Veterans Administration by posing as his father, a Vietnam War veteran who’d died in 2005 of terminal brain and lung cancer, and cashing 18 forged checks at liquor stores, mostly in Placentia.
9. Bridget Dominique Ganier, a 38-year-old former executive assistant at the nonprofit Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, was sentenced in April to three years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $306,000 from the hospital cafeteria’s cash registers. She was also ordered to give back the money.
8. Crystina Renee Bock, 34, of Ladera Ranch, pleaded guilty in March to stealing more than $200,000 in weekly offerings made by congregants at Compass Bible Church in Aliso Viejo, where she was the financial secretary. She was sentenced to five years in state prison and ordered to pay back all she took, which means she’s got a lot of envelopes to lick.
7. Shandie Marie Lacsamana Rosete, 34, of Placentia, was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty in August to stealing more than $100,000 from developmentally disabled adults and one client’s blind, 93-year-old aunt. Rosete was their caretaker through the nonprofit Project Independence.
6. Robert Adrian Rizzo, 56, of Huntington Beach, has not been convicted (yet) but stands accused of misappropriating $5.5 million in public funds as tiny Bell’s city manager. Paid more than $1.5 million in 2010 salary and benefits by taxpayers, “Jabba the Corrupt” allegedly doled out loans totaling $1.6 million to more than 50 city officials, including himself.
5. George Steven Kooshian, the well-known, 59-year-old physician who operated clinics in Garden Grove, Laguna Beach and Long Beach, was sentenced in February to 15 months in the federal pen for injecting AIDS patients with saline and vitamins instead of the expensive drugs they were billed for. He was also ordered to pay $660,955 in restitution to 18 insurance companies for 21 patients who were sub-dosed so he could pay for a lavish lifestyle that included a five-bedroom, 17,500-square-foot, ocean-view, Newport Coast mansion and a fleet of sports and luxury cars. When the Weekly’s R. Scott Moxley first broke the story a decade ago, many in the local gay and AIDS-services communities refused to believe it.
4. Jared Tornow, 34, of San Clemente, was sentenced in January to nearly six years in federal prison for what U.S. District Judge David O. Carter called one of the most sophisticated and arrogant frauds he has ever seen. Through several companies, including Orange-based Lucrativo Real Estate Solutions, Tornow solicited home buyers and assisted them in obtaining mortgages, often by submitting fraudulent paperwork to lending banks. After Tornow and his partner received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and commissions, most of the mortgages went into foreclosure, leaving countless lenders with bad paper.
3. John Anthony Miller, 52, of San Clemente, was sentenced in January to 13 years in the federal pen for stealing more than $21 million from investors who were guaranteed annual returns of as much as 18 percent per year from his Newport Beach-based JAM Jr. Enterprises and Forte Financial Partners, which were supposedly investing in foreign-currency trading, oil wells, real estate and other vehicles. Actually, the Ponzi scheme was lining Miller’s pockets. The judge labeled Miller “amongst the most egregious of any investment fraudster or Ponzi schemer this court will ever see.”
2. Michael Vincent Petronella (also known as Michael Constantine), 51, of Laguna Hills, got 10 years in state prison after a jury in February convicted the roofing contractor of pulling off one of the largest known Workers’ Compensation Insurance fraud cases in California’s history. He and his yet-to-be-tried wife, Devon Lynn Kile, owned five properties in California and Texas; multiple luxury vehicles (including a Bentley, two Ferraris and a Range Rover); and $2.1 million worth of jewelry, shoes, clothes and other personal items from Balenciaga, Bloomingdale’s, Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Gucci, Kitson, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Yves Saint Laurent and other high-end stores that ran their American Express cards over a two-year period. Investigators also turned up Kile’s application to join the cast of The Real Housewives of Orange County.
1. Jeffrey Gordon Butler, 51, of San Juan Capistrano, was sentenced in January to 90 years and eight months in state prison for stealing the savings of more than 125 unsuspecting elderly victims in a Ponzi scheme that fraudulently solicited more than $11 million in investments through the illegal sale of unqualified promissory notes or stocks and filing false tax returns on his ill-gotten profits. Butler is lucky; the judge could have sentenced him to 300 years. And his criminal ways were kept all in the family: his wife, Peggy Warmath Butler, 49, was also convicted on four felony counts and sentenced to a year in jail and seven months of probation. She only has to pine for her husband for another 89 years.
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TOP 10 EXAMPLES OF OCTOMOM AUDACITY
10. It’s like the movie Groundhog Day: The man holding the deed to Nadya Suleman’s La Habra home threatens to foreclose due to non-payment, Octomom pleads in the gossip press for help on behalf of her 14 children, and an eleventh-hour miracle (payment from a magazine-photo shoot, foreign-media interview, animal-rights-group stunt) drops out of the sky to save her . . . until it’s all played out again. In October, it was revealed it is not her or her dad or her attorney making payments on the Madonna Lane home; it’s her “corporation.”
9. Just about every time Suleman begged for help, Vivid Entertainment pornpresario Steven Hirsch offered to bail her out. First, it was $1 million if she would have sex in an adult film. She declined. Next, it was $500,000 if she simply appeared clothed in a porn. Octomom said no. Next came a $1,000-per-day job offer as a production assistant. Nope. The most recent offer from former Orange County resident Hirsch would have Suleman co-host a Vivid party at January’s AVN Awards in Las Vegas. Hirsch is still waiting for an answer.
8. Octomom also turned down a fetish site’s 20 grand offer to wash her hair for half an hour and be tickled for an additional 30 minutes on camera.
7. In May, Suleman took $5,000 and a month’s supply of veggie dogs and veggie burgers in exchange for hanging a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals poster outside her home. “Don’t let your dog or cat become an ‘octomom.’ Always spay or neuter” was emblazoned on the sign next to the PETA logo.
6. Suleman appeared in a bikini on the cover of January’s Star Magazine. In “My New Bikini Body!” she claimed to have dropped from 270 pounds to 120 pounds through exercise, a good diet and no plastic surgery. “No way; I would feel like I cheated,” she told the gossip rag.
5. The mother of 14 posed for a Christmas-card photo that prominently featured some of her brood and, even more prominently, her breastices dangling within a tight, low-cut top. Somewhere, Baby Jeebus cried.
4. Octomom revealed in September she was going on welfare, proving that someone other than Ronald Reagan could make welfare moms look bad.
3. Suleman told the crows on The View in February that she’d like to have one more child. There was, at least, this caveat: She must be married first. Men of the world, you know what not to do.
2. With the help of a morning-radio comic, Suleman hawked autographed nursing bras, autographed pregnant panties, numerous autographed Octo toys and much more at a yard sale in front of her Madonna Lane home in September that drew as many reporters as buyers. Her goal was to raise $10,000; she made $2,600.
1. During California Medical Board hearings that could result in Octomom’s Beverly Hills fertility doctor Michael Kamrava losing his state medical license, it was revealed that 60 embryos were implanted in Suleman, including 12 in her last treatment that resulted in the single mother of six giving birth to eight more children. Some experts testified that Kamrava was using Suleman as a “human guinea pig,” but the doctor and others maintained she knew what was going on, that she demanded the multiple-embryo procedures and—most troubling—she has more on ice.
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TOP 10 CONVICTED PERVS
10. Fullerton resident Timothy Han, a 21-year-old youth pastor, had sex with a 15-year-old girl in the parking lot of Miracle Land Baptist Church in Cypress, where they also smoked marijuana. Han copped to a misdemeanor in November.
9. James Scott Campbell of Santa Ana made sexy talk to his live-in housekeeper, who refused the 68-year-old’s advances. He then served the 48-year-old woman a bowl of ice cream that, unknown to her, was loaded with the sleeping pill Temazepam. It almost killed her, and a later search of his home turned up a cache of “sex-fuel” pills. Campbell was sentenced in November to four years in the can.
8. Richard Alan Chaney, 25, of Costa Mesa, engaged in sexually explicit conversations, mutual exhibitionism and masturbation with a 14-year-old Texas girl he met via the webcam-based Internet site Stickam.com. She later sneaked out of a house at 4 a.m. while visiting family in California and engaged in oral copulation with Chaney. When her mom found out, she contacted investigators, who found in Chaney’s possession videos of him having sex with the 14-year-old and a 17-year-old, including segments of oral copulation and digital penetration of the older girl while she was unconscious. He was sentenced in October to nine years in state prison and ordered to register as a sex offender.
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7. Alejandro Lorenzo Contreras, 24, annoyed a 12-year-old girl at the Stanton Public Library in July, pleading with her to give him pictures of herself. Cops later found him in possession of child porn, including an image on his phone of another young girl. He was sentenced in October to a year in jail and three years probation and ordered to register as a sex offender, but prosecutors fumed that Contreras should have been charged with felonies that would have resulted in a long prison stretch.
6. A woman carrying her infant son to Olivewood Elementary School in Lake Forest for lunch with her daughter passed karate instructor Amonullah Sakhi’s home. Glancing out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the 25-year-old in his doorway: His jogging pants were around his ankles as he jerked off. He told cops who arrested him at his studio that he’d put on similar shows to several other passing women. He was sentenced in August to 120 days in jail and three years of probation and ordered to register as a sex offender.
5. Jose Rama Campoverde, the 45-year-old pastor at Ministerio Cristo Vive church in Anaheim, sexually assaulted girls as young as 13 in cases stretching back to 2004. He met some victims through the church. Campoverde, who has a prior 1992 conviction for the sale or distribution of drugs, was sentenced to six years in state prison in July.
4. Jonathan Jimenez-Gonzalez, 19, followed a student walking home from Tustin High School; asked the 18-year-old if he could walk with her; and, after she refused his offer, lured her into an apartment-complex laundry room, where he sexually assaulted her. She managed to escape just after he pulled down his pants to flash his ween. He pleaded guilty in May and is awaiting sentencing.
3. El Modena High School janitor Luis Antonio Mejia, 50, of Orange, sexually assaulted a special-education student in his campus office after plying her with gifts, money, candy and cards. He was sentenced in January to six years in prison.
2. Shane Garrett Horning, a 29-year-old former Santa Margarita Methodist Church youth pastor, sexually assaulted a 16-year-old female parishioner, who did not report the crime until she discovered Horning was sending sexually explicity texts to her 15-year-old sister. He was sentenced to a year in jail (essentially time served) and five years probation in January.
1. Sheila Marie Sikat drugged her 4-year-old niece so her husband could rape the girl on film. Sikat is overheard off-camera encouraging him to “put it in her butt.” But she made shameless arguments to overturn her 50-year prison sentence, claiming she can’t be guilty of filming a minor sexually because state law requires the victim to be conscious to pose or model in the porn. A three-justice appellate panel rejected Sikat’s arguments in January and affirmed her convictions as well as her punishment. Her husband, David Hwang, a former engineer from Rancho Santa Margarita, is also serving a 50-years-to-life sentence.
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TOP 10 EXAMPLES OF DANA BEING DANA
10. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who avoided Vietnam War-era military service and in the 1990s vigorously lobbied on behalf of the Taliban while that organization was working with terrorist Osama bin Laden, continued his fantasy of being an expert on the war in Afghanistan. Having been bully on George W. Bush’s invasion and “magnificent” strategy of engagement in that country, Rohrabacher in July characterized as foolhardy Barack Obama’s adoption of the exact same policy.
9. Rohrabacher told FOX commentator Andrew Napolitano in June, “Almost all Republicans in the House of Representatives now believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake, that it was unlawful, that it was immoral, that it wasn’t worth the lives lost or the trillions that will be spent.” Nice of him to proclaim that after Dubya retired to the tumbleweed farm.
8. Rohrabacher probably wants the U.S. military out of Iraq and Afghanistan so it can hopscotch the world map to Burma (more commonly known as Myanmar). He flipped on the war siren in a September National Review column that alleged generals running the Southeast Asian country are seeking nuclear weapons and pose a threat to the U.S.
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7. A report came out in October that Rohrabacher inserted himself in the violent 2009 coup that toppled the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. The senator and three other Republicans in Congress used about $25,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds to back the rise of Roberto Micheletti, who was also the choice of that country’s oligarchy and right-wing military. Rohrabacher also supported Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, who replaced Micheletti, and in January traveled again to Honduras to, according to his D.C. press flack, “let the newly elected government know that the Republicans supported them.” State Department documents obtained by the WikiLeaks group show Rohrabacher’s unusual delegation included real-estate investors and businessmen who are also family friends and big campaign donors. They received access to top Honduran officials, including President Lobo, with whom they discussed expanding into the tiny country.
6. Oddly wearing a windbreaker on a breeze-free, simmering-hot afternoon in October, Jack Abramoff’s career-politician pal whipped out a guitar at a teabagger rally in Garden Grove and sang a song he wrote. Sample lyric: “God bless the people who built this great country, and God bless our rights to speak and to pray.” That’s “prey” when it comes to other countries.
5. With Republicans taking the House in the next Congress, Rohrabacher in December offered himself up as chairman of the lower chamber’s Science Committee, calling himself a better fit for the post than frontrunner Representative Ralph Hall (R-Texas). Why? Because Dana is more outspoken that global warming is “a total fraud” orchestrated by Democrats seeking to wreck the U.S. economy.
4. Speaking of his science cred, Rohrabacher—in May, at the height of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster—barfed, “Reducing oil-company offshore drilling will increase the number of offshore oil-drill spills.”
3. Rohrabacher twice called Obama a “Marxist” during a Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce breakfast in April.
2. George W. Bush apparently wasn’t much better, according to Rohrabacher, who wrote on his Twitter account in November that Dubya is “not a class act, destroyed GOP, jailed [Border Patrol agents] Ramos N Compean, left us bailouts, gave more power to fed gov N China.” Later in the day, he suggested Bush wouldn’t be welcomed at the next Republican Party presidential-nomination convention before tweeting one more time that he was “making waves” in Washington.
1. The Mouth That Rohrabachered said on the House floor in December that the DREAM Act that would have provided a path to citizenship for the children of the undocumented who go to college and serve in the U.S. military was the “Affirmative Action Amnesty Act.” In case that was too subtle of a reference for his target audience of drooling whiteys, he went on to ramble that the bill would “give foreigners who are here illegally preference over non-minority citizens.”
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TOP 10 BAD COP/BAD COP ROUTINES
10. Orange County sheriff’s deputy Allan James Waters was off-duty and allegedly drugged-up when he crashed his Mercedes into a Toyota in Laguna Niguel in March, injuring a 78-year-old woman just a half-hour after he plowed into a Lexus outside Dana Point City Hall. Waters is accused of having exchanged money and fake cocaine for the Opana and OxyContin he was hopped up on; further investigation revealed he illegally obtained prescription pills by providing false information and repeatedly switching doctors.
9. Retired Huntington Park Police Chief Paul Lawrence Wadley, 56, of Anaheim, was accused in December of leaving nude photos of male and female body parts on one Anaheim Hills trail, exposing his junk and butt to a woman on another, and placing male-penis pictures in car windshields in a park’s lot.
8. Garden Grove cop Jesse Andrew Green, 33, of Huntington Beach, was charged in October with forcibly sodomizing two women on dates, one of whom he met online and the other he met through a friend.
7. Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Sean Paul Delacerda, 26, of Fullerton, was charged in April with assaulting his ex-girlfriend by pointing a gun at her—right after having put a bullet in the weapon, sticking the muzzle in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
6. Former Huntington Beach cop James Roberts III is up on a laundry list of felony charges, including raping and sodomizing his wife and mistress.
5. Westminster Police Detective Anthony Nicholas Orban, 30, of Irvine, allegedly gagged with his fingers a 25-year-old waitress whom he did not know, choked her, repeatedly slapped and punched her, rubbed her face with his pistol, put the barrel of the gun in her mouth, twice threatened to kill her, ordered her at gunpoint to give him oral sex, and snapped several photos of her with his cell phone as he raped her. Orban’s friend since high school, state-prison guard Jeffrey Thomas Jelinek, also 30, is also charged in the case. Orban’s attorney will argue his client suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from his Marines service in Iraq.
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4. Orange County sheriff’s deputy Mark Wayne Hewlett, 30, of Orange, got probation in July after losing control of his personal vehicle and crashing into a planter in the front yard of Orange County Supervisor Bill Campbell’s Villa Park home. Hewlett was stinking drunk at the time of the early-morning crash.
3. Former Anaheim cop Kevin Noel Schlueter, 37, of Westminster, pleaded guilty in April to three separate cases of driving under the influence of prescription drugs, the latter involving being doped up on hydrocodone, hydromorphone, phenmetrazine, phendimetrazine and carisoprodol while weaving in and out of Interstate 405 traffic.
2. California Highway Patrol Lieutenant Stephen Robert Deck, who was caught up in a Laguna Beach police sting that had him thinking he’d be meeting and screwing a 13-year-old girl, was sentenced in March to probation and ordered to attend sex-addiction classes, register as a sex offender for life, and stay away from children and the Internet. Prosecutors had sought a four-year prison sentence.
1. Bradley Stewart Wagner, a former Anaheim cop who targeted undocumented workers near Disneyland for sexual assaults while on duty, was sentenced in December to four years in state prison.
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TOP 10 FEELINGS OF CANNABLISS
10. NASCAR gave the green light to a cannabis-promoting race car in March, allowing a stock car stickered up by the Cannabis Planet TV show on the track at the All-American Speedway in Roseville. In other news from our cannabis planet, synthetic marijuana—which trades under such names as K2, K2Herbal, Spice and Scary Spice—was banned in some states and classified a “substance of interest” by the buzzkilling DEA. Sounds like someone needs a race car.
9. Malinda Traudt, a 29-year-old woman who was born with cerebral palsy, epilepsy and blindness, sued Dana Point in May for closing her medical-marijuana provider, Beach Cities Collective in Capistrano Beach. After an Orange County Superior Court judge tossed the suit that claimed Traudt’s fundamental rights to life and safety under the California Constitution were infringed by the closure, she appealed to the Santa Ana-based 4th District Court of Appeal, which separately ruled against the Beach Cities Collective closure.
8. Isaac Robert Longo, 33, of Placentia, was sentenced in November to 15 years to life in state prison for causing a five-vehicle crash on the 91 freeway that killed a woman and injured four other people. Longo, who was under the influence of pot and pills at the time of the crash, may have been propped up as the poster child for marijuana-influenced manslaughter in the weeks leading up to the ultimately unsuccessful vote to legalize cannabis in California.
7. Yup, Proposition 19 failed 54 percent to 46 percent, and backers and opponents agreed that voter misgivings about potential social problems from increased marijuana use killed the measure. But Prop. 19’s sponsors vowed they will return . . . in 2012. “This is not a matter of if, but when,” said Yes On 19 spokeswoman Dale Jones, “and our leaders are already working on how to move this issue forward.”
6. On the same November ballot that included Prop. 19 was a measure in Long Beach to tax recreational marijuana. That’s right: not medical cannabis, but recreational pot, the kind consumed by the pride of LBC and the world’s cannambassador, Snoop Dogg. It passed.
5. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said on The Tonight Show a week after Prop. 19’s defeat that, “No one cares if you smoke a joint or not.” He was pumping up decriminalization legislation he just signed. So, spark it, Caleeforneea!
4. Prop. 19’s defeat also emboldened elected buzzkillers to declare war on legal medical marijuana. How else to explain the dispensary bans in the unincorporated portions of Orange and Los Angeles counties, tighter regulations implemented in Long Beach, and a hydroponics and indoor-gardening store being forbidden from opening in a difficult-to-lease space in Old Town Tustin?
3. Sunset Beach had been unincorporated until it officially became part of Huntington Beach in December. But that offered no relief to Sunset Beach’s medical-marijuana dispensers: Surf City bans them, too.
2. Maybe OC officialdom will find this easier to toke, er, take: Chapman University scientist Keun-Hang Susan Yang is developing a cannabis strain that supposedly keeps the medicinal elements but kills the buzz.
1. Try to vote it out of existence all you want, but there is still this: A study by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows that pot use is increasing among American teenagers, while drinking is on the wane.
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TOP 10 PERVY TEACHERS (CONVICTED OR ACCUSED)
10. Married history teacher Christopher John Ontiveros of the acclaimed Oxford Academy in Cypress allegedly had an illegal, five-month sexual affair with a 17-year-old student who supposedly received text messages from him that read, “I want to tongue every inch of you because I love you,” “Today I want to tear your shorts off and rub your wetness,” and “I want you to spread your legs wide for me so that I can kiss you everywhere.” Ontiveros has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges that could land him in a California prison for more than half a decade.
9. Dawn Marie Baloun, a 43-year-old teacher at the Joplin Youth Center, was accused in April of kissing and fondling a 16-year-old boy housed at the Trabuco Canyon correctional facility. Authorities said the Lake Forest resident would meet the youth in classrooms and closets, and after he was transferred to another state facility, she allegedly exchanged 65 graphic, sexually explicit letters with him.
8. Junior-high-school music teacher Mark Gerard Petrash, 42, of Lake Forest, exposed his skin flute to a receptionist at his son’s orthodontist appointment and a female colleague he cornered in a women’s-restroom stall. He was sentenced in December to 90 days in jail and got tagged as a sex offender.
7. Former El Modena High School band teacher Carlie Rose Attebury, 31, of Orange, shared with a 15-year-old boy a homecoming kiss and, after he turned 16, bodily fluids. He was later named the band’s drum major; students and parents suspected something was off-key when they saw Attebury caressing the boy’s hair and straddling him with her legs in the bleachers at a school event. She was convicted of four felonies and could get up to five years in state prison at her Jan. 7, 2011, sentencing.
6. Alonso Manuel Gonzalez, a former special-education assistant at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor abuse and annoyance of a 17-year-old girl suffering from cerebral palsy and with the mental capacity of a 7-year-old. His former Santa Ana Unified School District employers can warm the seats in hell next to Gonzalez. They first tried to cover up what was originally a felony child molestation case, and then in June rejected a claim filed by the girl’s parents on grounds she consented to Gonzalez’s attentions.
5. Former gymnastics coach and Fullerton resident Jason Wayne Scofield, 37, pleaded guilty in February to having sex with a 16-year-old girl. After it was discovered he’d had sex with the girl in his car and home, he tried to avoid prosecution by enlisting in the Army. It didn’t work, although prosecutors objected to his one-year prison sentence failing to include a requirement that he register as a sex offender.
4. Violin teacher Daniel Hansol Oh, 27, was discovered to have been engaged in continued sexual abuse of a 16-year-old female student in Fullerton. In court, he admitted to molesting three other girls, too. He was sentenced in February to 14 years in state prison.
3. Jason Alan Marian, a 31-year-old dance instructor at Mission Viejo Dance and Performing Arts Center, was convicted in May of having an unlawful sexual relationship with a 16-year-old student and secretly videotaping several other girls, ages 12 to 14, he invited to a pool party at his home. He faces up to nine years in prison.
2. Luis Alberto Pineda, a 29-year-old Anaheim resident who taught martial arts and coached youth soccer in Fullerton, in August was accused of sexually assaulting two young boys he met while coaching soccer. Conviction on all charges could get Pineda a minimum of 15 years to life and a maximum of 60 years to life in state prison.
1. Intramural football, lacrosse and basketball coach Cameron Joseph Baca, 29, of San Clemente, molested three boys, ages 11 to 13, and also showed them some of his collection of more than 2,000 explicit pornographic images and videos of children. Among his disgusting keepsakes were 50 written stories describing adult men, including coaches and babysitters, having sex with young boys. Baca was sentenced in November to 51 years to life in state prison.
This article appeared in print as “The Virtual Orange County: Looking back at 2010 on our Navel Gazing blog, one Top 10 list at a time.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
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