The operator of a boot camp for troubled teenagers where a 14-year-old boy died Sunday has a long history of violence, deception and shady financial dealings that sparked a state Attorney General’s Office investigation in the mid-1990s.Charles “Chuck” Long has left a trail of angry investors who claim they are…
Shalom RunPeace offering: I am disappointed that political instability threatens the safety of athletes competing for their country (“This Jew Won’t Bunt,” Paul Rubin, June 28). It is indeed a sad day. All of us can only hope, dream and pray for a day when the world will be at…
As one of Arizona’s most influential lobbyists and business leaders, Marty Shultz isn’t accustomed to getting his political butt kicked. In 1995, Shultz was asked by Arizona’s Supreme Court justices to lead a high-powered commission to reform Arizona’s limited-jurisdiction courts, the bottom tier of Arizona’s judicial pyramid where more than…
A few hours after Kelly Blake set fire to herself and her three kids on the morning of March 20, 1998, a Phoenix police detective spoke with her surviving child.Detective Dave Swain had the unthinkable job of telling John Fausto Jr., then 14, that his 9-year-old sister was dead, and…
Nancy Etta Elliston, the longtime leader of Arizona’s private fiduciary industry, was sentenced Friday afternoon to six years in prison for stealing money from clients over a period of several years. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Louis Araneta ordered the 50-year-old Glendale resident to report immediately to the state prison…
Divorce Precedings Ex’s baggage: It’s no surprise to me that Donna Van Dyke experienced a delay in having her order of protection served. (“Beaten By the System,” John W. Allman, June 21) An order of protection may well be the most abused and misused court document there is. Often, an…
I was watching CNN on the evening of June 1. The news hit me hard. “It was the beginning of the Sabbath weekend,” anchor Bill Hemmer said, “and countless young Israelis were out to enjoy a Friday night. The mood shattered, though, when a suicide bomber wandered into the crowd…
Marion Blake is stuck between a rock garden and a hard place.An art history major at New York University, Blake was visiting Phoenix when someone took her to see the Grover Cleveland Thompson rock garden in 1979. “I couldn’t believe such a place existed,” gasps Blake, who bought the house…
The body count of culture is on the rise. In the past half year alone, more than 200,000 people passed through the Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum. Another 19,000 took in the James Turrell show at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Last year, ASU’s performing arts…
Donna Van Dyke never imagined accusing her boyfriend of beating her baby.She never conceived of having to seek a court order to remove him from the Mesa apartment they shared. And she never thought that the last place she should turn for help would be the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office…
Bear Essence Cheap shot: So, Tony Fabriger sees this magnificent bear, and realized it was going to just walk right by him, still a little “dazed” from being in hibernation (“Kodiak Moment,” Patti Epler, June 7). Did the “Great Hunter” need food or was he under attack? No, he just…
It goes without saying — but you know I’m gonna say it anyway, right? — that music provides much of life’s soundtrack, and the privately shared experience, between listener and creator, forges a deep bond. Such has been the case for your humble writer and Tucson’s Calexico. One of those…
A slab of tiling from a long-gone Valley supermarket. A 1958 Edsel station wagon with a bum transmission and four flat tires. A forest of fake Christmas trees, inhabited by a plastic deer. If the Smithsonian is the Nation’s Attic, the grounds surrounding Gus Brethauer’s north Phoenix home are the…
The charges sounded more fitting for a mob kingpin than an alleged eco-arsonist. U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton solemnly drove home the severity of the 22 federal counts being levied against Mark Warren Sands, the Phoenix marketing consultant accused of being the Phoenix Mountains Preserve arsonist. Seven counts of extortion affecting…
The rumbling engine of a crop duster’s airplane jolted Frances Sebring awake. The cooler in her mobile home was sucking in the vapor of chemicals that were supposed to have landed on a nearby cotton field. The cloud of insecticides swept across the mobile homes of Sebring and her two…
Three pictures and a poem, published more than a year ago in a Glendale Community College literary magazine, have more than a dozen conservative Republican legislators demanding more than the right to determine what type art is acceptable.Some now want the president of the college fired, along with the faculty…
The financial controller got the phone call just before lunch on March 1. Eight officials from the Arizona Department of Revenue had stormed Norman’s Arizona at 40th Street and Campbell. They wanted access to all of the restaurant’s files. But Norman Fierros, the eatery’s owner, didn’t know where anything was…
Jane Dee Hull turned around and smiled at the two widows who were standing behind her.”I’m happy to have this bill in front of me — at last,” the governor said, moments before she signed into law House Bill 2393. “I know how important this is to you and everyone…
Suspension of Disbelief Cover story: On June 2, I entered my place of work, a local grocery store. I passed right by the New Times stand to see an attractive young lady with a pleasant grin on her face looking back at me. I had to look again to realize…
The bear appeared suddenly. Tony Fabriger had spent five cold and wet days on Kodiak Island, home to the world’s largest bears, with no sign of the fabled browns, not even a giant paw print in the spring snow. The unpredictable Alaska weather, sunny when the float plane dropped him…
Ramon Gomez isn’t used to being on the defensive. Gomez, Chandler’s most strident Latino activist and the self-appointed president of an organization called the National Civil Rights Movement, has spent the last four years in a perpetual pit-bull snarl. Along the way, he’s annoyed and embarrassed local officials with a…
The Arizona Museum for Youth has a reputation for innovative offerings. Yet in the coming months, it will be giving families access to something they won’t find at many other major American children’s museums.Gun lockers. The lockers aren’t part of some new museum campaign to entice the pistol-packing crowd toward…
