Friends,
Today’s story on the Riverside Press-Enterprise blog seems troubling. Apparently, our local retirement and manufactured home haven has themselves a wee little gang problem. For some reason, the city isn’t too enamored of the motorcycle-based social clubs in town, so it’s not a big surprise to learn that those dapper young gentlemen have taken it upon themselves to retaliate against this scrutiny. John Asbury takes it from here:
Hemet police are investigating four city code enforcement pickups that were torched in the city lot about 11:30 p.m. Hemet police have closed several blocks of Florida Avenue after the fires were reported to police. Both the vehicles and City Hall were vacant. No one was injured, Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana said.
Police arrived within about a minute of the fire and found the trucks completely destroyed. Police are considering it a threat against the Police Department and the city. Detectives have not determined how the vehicles were ignited, but reported no explosions.
Now if you stop right there, that’s bad enough. Setting fires to city-owned pickup trucks is pretty serious, I think you’ll agree, but as another installment in our continuing series—It’s Related—Mr. Asbury lays out the other bizarre crap that’s been going on in Southern Riverside County’s former potato capital…
On New Year’s Eve, the gasline to the Hemet-San Jacinto Valley Gang Task Force was rerouted to fill the office with natural gas, aimed at triggering an explosion when officers went inside to start working.
The same building was targeted again in February when a gun was rigged to the gate of the Gang Task Force office and fired a bullet, missing an officer as he was opening the parking lot.
A week later, a Hemet gang officer discovered a deadly device beneath his car designed to kill the officer, before it fell off in a gas station parking lot.
Unnamed sources have offered on deep background that there has also been internet chatter between groups in the San Jacinto valley and one Acme Corporation.
Earthquake pills. That’ll never work…
– bob
**UPDATE: Well, well, well. Look who finally has come to the reporting party. It’s our old friends at the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Kelly hits on the points I made here, of course, but misses the potatoes and the cartoon violence reference. I think that we should cut him some slack though. After all, he’s just a journalist.