Pro skateboarder Ryan Sheckler's white pickup was stolen some time Friday night and, after a short pursuit of the truck Saturday morning, an Orange County Sheriff's deputy fired at least two shots at a 17-year-old driving toward the deputy and his partner.
Meanwhile, the Orange County Register is making an issue out of the Sheriff's Department failing to inform the public about the officer-involved shooting until this morning.
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No one was injured.
Sheckler told deputies he left his keys in truck's ignition while he was attending a party in San Clemente Friday night. Deputies around 12:20 a.m. Saturday discovered the pickup at the scene of a drunken-driving crash on Zocala.
But the driver sped away, leading to a chase that wound up on Camino de los Mares, where deputies got out of their car and tried to get the driver to stop. But the sheriff's department maintains the driver instead made a U-turn and drove toward the deputies.
One unidentified deputy then fired out of self defense, hitting the windshield but not the driver, who was slightly hurt by the broken glass and surrendered without further incident.
Deputies only identified him as a 17-year-old boy.
“Public Not Told of Deputy-Involved Shooting for 2 Days,” complains the Register story under the dual byline of Kimberly Edds and Salvador Hernandez.
Four reporters from the paper “made repeated calls to the Sheriff's
Department watch commander over the weekend, but the shooting was never
mentioned,” states the piece, which quotes Sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino saying he also did not learn of the shooting until this morning.
The District Attorney's Office and the Office of
Independent Review were notified of the shooting that night, Assistant
Sheriff Mike James reportedly says.
Sheckler, who began teaching himself to skate at 18 months of age after
finding his dad's old-school board, turned pro in 2003 after winning the
X Games, Gravity Games, Vans Triple Crown and Slam City Jam.
The 20-year-old appears
in movies (both skateboard and mainstream), as a character in Tony Hawk
video games and, until last year, on his own MTV reality show, Life of Ryan. His Sheckler Foundation has raised thousands of dollars for the less fortunate.
Sheckler was the victim of a different kind of crime last year, according to the Orange County
District Attorney, which charged the chief financial officer of companies owned by the skateboarder with embezzling more than $365,000.
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.