Before she became a jailhouse lawyer, Christina Jay Acker preyed on old ladies. In 1990, Acker was sentenced to 36 years in prison for kidnaping and robbing a 78-year-old Phoenix woman. That same year, a Colorado judge sentenced Acker to life in prison for beating a 72-year-old Colorado woman to…
Twenty-three years ago, Arizona lawmakers set up a trust fund for the state’s prisoners. The lawmakers’ idea was simple enough–profits generated from prison convenience stores, hobby shops and the prisoners’ telephone system would go into a Special Services Fund that would be held in trust by the Arizona Department of…
Santos Jaco, a small man barely five feet, four inches tall, stands on his toes and peeks over the shoulder of a bearded norteamericano wearing a Maya-style woven pullover. Jaco is trying to see a detailed charcoal drawing hanging on the gallery wall. The drawing depicts corpses, men and women,…
Ivan Makil sets down his chopsticks, gives the Szechuan chicken a rest. A slim guy, he watches what he eats. He’s reminiscing about his high school days, when he played trumpet in South Phoenix for a blues band called the Soulsations. “I was the only Indian guy in the band,”…
Professor Leonardo Felix lets out a hoot. He shakes his head. He turns another page. “Es ridculo,” he says. He is reading the official Spanish version of the Arizona Driver’s License manual, which is supposed to inform monolingual Spanish speakers of state traffic laws so they can pass their driver’s…
Feeding data on carcinoma cases into a computer is a fairly ghoulish form of bean counting. But the way Georgia Armenta Yee sees things, it’s a good way to protect the public’s health. If only some cancer doctors would obey the law. Yee is manager of the Arizona Cancer Registry,…
On May 6, 1992, New Times began a series of investigative reports detailing extensive groundwater pollution linked to Motorola, an $11 billion multinational electronics manufacturing company that is the state’s largest employer. Among the findings: Motorola’s two flagship plants have been linked to severe contamination of two separate aquifers in…
Thirteen months ago, Kathleen Stanton handed me a blue vinyl three-ring notebook. Kathleen, a reporter and co-worker I count as a friend, had been cleaning out her office. She was leaving Phoenix, moving on to a university job in a different town. I knew Kathleen had always meant to do…
I wanted to call in a mountain lion. I was 10 years old, and during the spring and early summer, it seemed that all I’d heard my father and other northern Arizona cattle ranchers talk about was the big mountain lion too smart to be tracked and treed and shot–the…
A 22-year-old Havasupai woman was the first to speak. Carlotta Tilousi fixed her eyes on Ed Fox, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. “My people live in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. There are only 800 of us,” she said. “Our main source of water comes from…
Celebrities, ambassadors and politicians crowded into the Greenwood Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Jesse Jackson was there. Cicely Tyson was there. Dick Gregory was there. Attallah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, was there. Dignitaries from Senegal and the Gambia were there. They had come to mourn Alex…
A prisoner described by fellow inmates and others as one of the most influential people at the state prison in Florence has entered his tenth week of a hunger strike, vowing that he’s ready to die unless officials transfer him to a less harsh area. Chuck Shepherd, a 39-year-old Sikh…
On May 6, 1992, New Times began a series of investigative reports detailing extensive groundwater pollution linked to Motorola, an $11 billion multinational electronics manufacturing company that is the state’s largest employer. Among the findings: Motorola’s two flagship plants have been linked to severe contamination of two separate aquifers in…
The gloves came in all sizes. There were white nylon gloves and wrist-to-elbow gauntlets and men’s cotton work gloves. For ten years, from 1962 to 1972, a young mother named Patricia Smith would make weekly trips to the warehouse of the Motorola Semiconductor plant on 52nd Street and McDowell in…
Ten years ago, when state health officials first learned that children in Maryvale were dying of leukemia at twice the national rate, they delayed further health studies of the west-side community and quietly covered up the problem. When news reports of Arizona Department of Health Services’ four-year delay in studying…
As a child, Kim Allen would watch the crop-dusting airplanes buzz low over west Valley cotton fields, leaving clouds of pesticides in their wake. This did not alarm her. To any kid growing up in the homes on tracts of land skirting the west-side farming regions, crop dusters were simply…
Last Wednesday, state Superfund managers from across the nation quietly gathered at Red Lion’s La Posada Inn in Scottsdale. The purpose of the meeting: For EPA officials to explain the new plan to “revitalize” Superfund. The plan is called SACM, or the Superfund Accelerated Cleanup Model, and it may not…
By 1994 there will be a new building at 8600 East Thomas in Scottsdale. Concealed behind the building’s adobelike faade will be a multimillion-dollar plant designed to strip health-threatening chemicals, principally the suspected carcinogen trichloroethylene, or TCE, from drinking water pumped out of the north Indian Bend Wash Superfund site…
Motorola: The Story So Far On May 6, 1992, New Times began a series of investigative reports detailing extensive groundwater pollution linked to Motorola, an $11 billion multinational electronics manufacturing company that is the state’s largest employer. Among the findings: Motorola’s two flagship plants have been linked to severe contamination…
Terry Gaskin glanced out the window of a downtown Circle K last Wednesday afternoon and witnessed the best-documented spill in the history of Phoenix. What apparently was a truckload of documents tumbled off a vehicle as it sped through the intersection of Third Street and Thomas. Clouds of paper, whipped…
For well over a year, ailing America West Airlines has been scrambling to put together deals with lenders and investors worldwide. The implication is always that if America West can only get another $50 or $100 million, it will be rescued from this self-imposed disaster. One recent proposed deal involved…
When a hospital technician attached a gizmo onto Sam’s penis to measure his responses to sexually explicit photographs, it is unlikely that he was terribly surprised. After all, 12-year-old Sam has undergone various types of “sex therapy” for half of his life. His mother molested him when he was 3…
