Whale WailingA whale-hugger responds: Had you asked us, we could have saved you reams of the valuable newsprint you were forced to expend on John Dougherty’s inch-deep, mile-wide hagiography of the Makah whale hunt (“Resurrection,” July 12) with the following simple summary: After Japanese commercial whaling reps told the Makah…
John Unger couldn’t believe his first assignment as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. It was April 1999. A few days earlier, he had spotted an Apache Junction newspaper ad touting delivery jobs at the local Pizza Hut, with pay starting at $12 an hour. He had just spent the…
The dead Hispanic male lay face up in the grass, one bullet in his brain. He was a young man, barely 20, wearing a blue-and-white-checkered shirt and the new white jeans his sister had recently purchased for him. Phoenix Police Sergeant Lowell Spalla was not absolutely certain that the bullet…
David Hans Schmidt cackles gleefully every time he sees the 13-inch surgical scar down the belly of Jefferson Davis McGee. It’s just such a great visual: Here’s this 21st-century American with what looks like a Civil War triage scar. Combine that with McGee’s perpetually bewildered “what just happened to me?”…
More than 30 community leaders, including academics, clergy, public defenders and a former state senator, are calling on Governor Jane Dee Hull to create an independent task force to review conditions at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections in response to a New Times special report.The “Slammed” series (“The Kids…
Juvie, Juvie, JuvieCorrect deficiencies, build on success: As Chairman of the Arizona Juvenile Justice Commission, it was with great interest that I read Amy Silverman’s article on the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (“The Kids are NOT Alright,” July 5). Ms. Silverman’s article raises a number of serious and significant…
Lately it seems that any discussion of country music must necessarily concern itself with image, marketing, unit sales, and play-list rotation, while ignoring the two most important aspects of the conversation: the country part and the music part. Nashville has become so preoccupied with its enormous pop success that it…
Eben Paxton’s job was getting routine. Year after year his crew of bird banders with the U.S. Geological Survey were hiking to the same breeding spots mapped out on the dry bottom of Roosevelt Lake logging them on their yearly survey. It was downright boring. Fortunately, the 1998 summer nesting…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question –…
Two-year-old Mason Alan couldn’t have known about the fierce custody battle raging between his original adoptive parents and another caretaker struggling to keep the youngster at her side. Nor would he have cared. The brown-eyed, brown-haired imp just wanted what all babies want: loving arms to hold him, food in…
Kids on the SkidsThe paper’s not alright: The agency that Amy Silverman described on July 5 (“The Kids Are NOT Alright”) doesn’t look anything like the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.The ugly images that Ms. Silverman conjures up are not accurate. She describes trash-filled rooms smeared with body fluids. Yet…
The recovery of the Eastern Pacific gray whale from the brink of extinction is the single greatest turnaround of a marine mammal population, and the whale’s myriad connections to human cultural conflicts are no less impressive in their scope. In New Times’ special project “Shades of Gray,” reporters from several…
Legal issues and other questions are swirling around a proposed Deer Valley charter high school that last year was touted as a national model and a creative way for the school district to quickly solve overcrowding problems.Envisioned as a new stand-alone high school with an emphasis on technology, the school…
A federal judge has convicted Fen-Phen doctor Pietr Hitzig of illegally prescribing the now-banned diet-drug combination over the Internet to patients he’d never examined in person. The 58-year-old West Virginia man faces up to 104 years in prison when he is sentenced in Baltimore on August 16.One of Hitzig’s 12…
Youth MovementMay the task force be with you: I am disturbed by the allegations and the compelling evidence presented by Amy Silverman in her articles on the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (“The Kids Are NOT Alright,” July 5). As a result, I have written a letter to Governor Jane…
You’re Tim Anthonise. You’re the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for Gloritone, one of the Valley’s better bands of recent years. You’ve played touch and go with major-label success, earning and then ending a deal with RCA Records, and you’ve toyed with more alternative methods of attracting attention by way…
Margarite Faras tried to fight the endemic corruption in the tribal government of the San Carlos Apache. For her effort, her political enemies began a campaign late last year to strip her of her tribal council seat, destroy her reputation and run her out of business.They held rallies outside her…
Editor’s note: The names of juveniles throughout these stories have been changed to protect their privacy. Although their criminal case files are public record, their corrections files are not. The boys in the Nova cottage at Adobe Mountain School had been locked in their cells for six days. They had…
On a warm day in mid-May, the Black Canyon School campus is quiet and clean, the rose and hibiscus bushes as well-groomed as the girls in their white sneakers, khakis and regulation bras visible beneath peach polo shirts. The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections girls school — off Happy Valley…
Fifteen-year-old Sun Lynn Henage threatened another girl with a butter knife after the girl cut ahead of her in line for the shower at the group home where they both lived. The court sentenced Henage to 90 days at Black Canyon, the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections detention facility for…
A burgeoning partnership between Phoenix’s La Campesina radio station and a new business relocating to the Valley is expected to shake up a growing money transfer market that currently sends about $6 billion a year south across the Mexican border. The deal, still being finalized between the United Farm Workers…
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…
