Best story of the morning goes to John Gittelsohn at the Register for his report on the weekend Strawberry Festival activities of Mark Dornan.
To best appreciate this tale you have to know Mark. The son of legendary Republican congressman Bob Dornan, a onetime congressional candidate himself, onetime Susan Kang (Schroeder) BF and present day OC school teacher, Mark is, well, not shy. If you’re in a fight, you want this energetic guy on your side. I’ve witnessed him put the fear of God in usually arrogant Dana Rohrabacher.
Anyway, here’s John:
Mark Dornan saw a man shooting photos of his 5-year-old daughter after the annual Strawberry Festival parade Saturday morning and gave chase.
“I snapped. I was going to get him,” Dornan said Monday, still fuming two days after the incident.
Dornan, the son of former Congressman Bob Dornan, was helping his wife run a festival booth selling belts for kids. He said the photographer fled and appeared to be deleting photos from his camera when he noticed Dornan on his trail.
Dornan said he tackled the photographer and wrestled away the camera. He said he saw a handgun fly from the man’s pants.
“I go for the gun,” Dornan said. “He goes for it. I get the gun. He’s laying there deflated, like the air went out of his balloon.”
Gittelsohn went on to report that a witness saw the photographer–an off-duty Los Angeles police officer–allegedly taking pictures up the skirt of Dornan’s 5-year-old daughter. Dornan held the suspect and gave the guy’s camera to Garden Grove police, who did not arrest the cop. An investigation is ongoing.
To see the entire story, go here.
This isn’t the only time Mark Dornan has played cop. In Oct. 1996, he performed a citizen’s arrest on Stephen Brixey, the then-husband of Loretta Sanchez. During a night in the heated Dornan-Sanchez campaign, Brixey illegally removed Dornan’s campaign signs. Mark happened to witness the incident. Brixey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor vandalism and was ordered to pay $640 in fines.
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.