I was mildly surprised to see about 50 shoppers inside Nordstrom Rack at Metro Pointe in Costa Mesa seven minutes after they'd opened on Saturday morning. Sure, I wasn't expecting the power (and air conditioning) to blink, resume and then crash while I was inside a dressing room with my pants off. (I would have cursed but the gentlemen around me in other stalls took care of that for all us.) And, of course, I was amused that clerks came to the pitch dark dressing area and told us to leave immediately–as if we'd want to stay in the cramped, hotter-than-hell booths surrounded by ill-fitting clothes and sharp pins littering the floors. But no, I wasn't expecting to return inside the store and see (barely) dozens of shoppers still furiously working the clothes racks in the dark and without air conditioning as if nothing had happened.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.