2011 began in Orange County with Robert Sickles, 27, of Mission Viejo, being stabbed to death outside a New Year's Eve party in a Costa Mesa hotel.
2012 almost began the same way, with a different victim, of course, but in the same city, only 4 1/2 miles from the New Year's Eve 2011 attack.
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A 44-year-old Westminster man was celebrating New Year's Eve at Goat Hill Tavern, the famous Newport Boulevard watering hole, when, around 2 a.m. Sunday, he got into a verbal argument with another man in the parking lot, according to Costa Mesa Police.
The other man called someone on his cell phone, and a few minutes later Stephen John Frea, 27, of Fresno, arrived, got out of a car and stabbed the Westminster man five times, police say.
The stabbing victim was taken to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana with non-life-threatening stab wounds to his torso and legs.
Frea was popped on suspicion of assault with deadly weapon and carrying a controlled substance: methamphetamine.
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.