The windows of some 25 cars were smashed — minutes apart, along at least 12 streets — during a wee-hours Piedmont rampage September 22. Because Airsoft pellets were found among the shards, as were marbles, which airguns can’t shoot, “we think it was done with a Wrist Rocket,” says Piedmont police detective Catherine Carr. Of these, SlingShotShop.com declares: “These ‘Bad Boys’ have come a long way since the old days of using a forked stick and rubber bands. … These awesome slingshots use today’s technology and are manufactured from the latest space age materials. … They provide a positive grip for a steady aim and outstanding accuracy.” The site recommends “marble ammo.” Messages were also scrawled on cars, such as “I Hate BMWs” (on BMWs) and, according to Carr, “‘Fuck you, bitch’ — that kind of thing.” Her team suspects college-bound local teens wreaking leaving-soon havoc. The projectiles in a similar P-town smash-rash a few years ago were rocks that clearly “came from a particular park in our city,” Carr remembers. Local seniors who volunteer as detectives’ aides were assigned to sit in the park, casual-like, surveilling rock-gatherers. “We caught them. We got confessions,” Carr says, from kids who “said they’d done it as a political act, to protest the war in Iraq.” Cuz cars eat oil.
Mad libs: “Buenas tardes,” Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente told a crowd of 14,000 at Hillary Clinton’s September 30 campaign rally, where he was among the speakers. What he said then could as easily describe a presidential run as his current battle with the OPD over its handling of his son, who has pleaded guilty to sexual attacks on prostitutes: “It’s very easy to want to do things. It’s very hard to get things done.”
Weed eaters: Three September 26 arrests linked with Oakland cannabis confectioner Tainted, Inc. — which ordered chocolate by the ton and produced sweet products such as Toka-Cola, Stoney Rancher, Munchy Way, Pot Tarts, and Buddahfinger — is stoking fierce debates: Are pot-sweets God’s gift to the sick and hurting or simply stoner-fodder? Following a two-year Drug Enforcement Administration investigation, the arrestees include Diallo McLinn, whom the DEA calls a courier. SFGate identifies him as the son of Berkeley peace activist/artist/lawyer Osha Neumann. In his bio at Poor Magazine, where Neumann is a board member, McLinn identifies himself as the son of midwife/performer Arisika Razak, whose “Vulva Dance” is on the curriculum of courses she teaches at San Francisco’s California Institute of Integral Studies. McLinn, 35, has had a creative career apart from his alleged couriership. A graphic artist for Poor (home of the “Po’ Poets Project” and “Reviews for the Revolution”), he was also a camera loader for the 1995 John Travolta-Harry Belafonte film White Man’s Burden, set in an alternative USA where African Americans are elites and Caucasians inhabit squalid slums.
Who’s watching Junior? A twelve-year-old boy robbed an adult Oaklander at 42nd and Webster streets on September 29. The pair who robbed another Oaklander on Coolidge Street on September 12 were thirteen and fifteen. Caught for purse-snatching on 32nd Street on September 15, a thirteen-year-old Oakland boy confessed his involvement in six grand thefts. Several kids robbed a teen on 88th Avenue on September 19 — the girl who was apprehended and arrested was thirteen.
Meat my needs: A Kensingtonian called the cops on September 13 to complain, according to the police report, that “a female knocked on door asking for hamburger money.” Did she seek regular money with which to buy a hamburger — or some secret, special currency that only hamburgers can spend?
Unsafety in numbers: Outnumbered victims are still getting jumped. On Shattuck Avenue at Bancroft Way in Berkeley on September 23, four white-shirted men stole a victim’s wedding ring, necklace, and cash. On Ward Street at Shattuck that afternoon, three juveniles dressed in dark hoodies and jeans stole a wallet and phone. On September 28, two men raped a Berkeleyite they had just met at a Southside bar. In East Oakland on the same day, three men beat another with that versatile sporting implement, a baseball bat. Also that afternoon on International Boulevard, ten men and boys set upon three, shooting one. In the Fruitvale BART parking lot on October 1, three men with a shotgun robbed someone, then fled in a red van. All suspects remain at large.
Unhappy birthday: Deadly violence erupted in Walnut Creek on October 2 when, police speculate, Aurelio Ruiz-Navarro shot his estranged girlfriend Evelia Ayala to death, then killed himself. It was a bloody end to a comparatively calm, if quirky, week. On September 26, a sticky-fingered local lady was arrested for shoplifting in several downtown WC stores, having swiped two greeting cards and a butterfly costume. On September 25, the resident of a multistory building alerted cops to suspicious noises on a lower floor whose cause, the log reads, was “determined to be a smashed piggy bank and a flattened birthday cake.”
