Blog

  • Everett Homicide Suspect Admits to Shootings

    denny halverson 2

    Everett Police are identifying the suspect in a shooting that took two lives and left a woman hospitalized. Tye Fleischer is charged with two counts of second-degree murder and one count of first-degree assault.

    Killed were Kevin Odneal and Denny Halverson. The injured woman was struck in the pelvis and is expected to survive.

    Officers were at Odneal’s home in December 2014 to investigate a possible chop-shop.

    In May 2011, a robbery at the home turned deadly. The target of the robbery told police he’d been hit in the head with a flashlight and began to lose consciousness as he fatally shot one of the attackers.

    Odneal pleaded guilty to robbery and unlawful gun possession. He was sentenced to a year and five months in prison in 2012.

    The victim was not charged. Police said he was acting in self-defense.

    In 2008, a man was shot and killed at the same home. In that case, investigators believe three men, including Odneal, were arguing about drugs and a car.

    The argument spilled outside, where the man was shot. The shooter pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

    Your help is still needed. An account has been set up by Denny’s aunt, Jocelyn Warriner, to help defray funeral expenses.

  • Bringing Back the Firing Squad

    Nevada has more than 80 prison inmates on death row, but no one’s been put to death since 2006 and no executions are scheduled. Now state prisons Chief Greg Cox wants $800,000 to build a death chamber at Ely State Prison about 35 miles west of the Utah line and another $7.6 million for a hundred more guards.

    Talk about another waste of tax money.

    Nevada lawmakers should consider the route Utah is taking. A recent proposal to bring back Utah’s use of firing squads to carry out executions passed Utah’s legislature.

    For years, states used a three-drug combination to execute inmates. But European drug makers have refused to sell the drugs to prisons and corrections departments out of opposition to the death penalty.

    The drug shortage and trouble with administering lethal injections have led several states to begin revisiting alternatives during the past year. A bill to allow firing squad executions is working its way through Wyoming’s Legislature, while lawmakers in Oklahoma are considering legislation that would allow that state to use nitrogen gas to execute inmates.

    A handful of inmates on Utah’s death row, sentenced before the law changed, still have the option of going before a firing squad once they’ve exhausted all appeals. It was last used in 2010 when Ronnie Lee Gardner was successfully  executed by five police officers using .30-caliber Winchester rifles.

    Doug Fabrizio, one of a small group of witnesses described Gardner reaction after being shot to ABC News: “He clenched his fist and then let go and then he clenched it again.”

    Two minutes later, Gardner was dead.

    Washington D.C. – based, Death Penalty Information Center says firing squads are not foolproof because the inmate could move or shooters could miss the heart, causing a slower, more painful death. One such case they point out happened in 1879 when Utah was still a territory.

    In an article titled, “Six Men Legally Killed”, the New York Times’ May 16, 1879 edition describes Wallace Wilkerson’s death as he sat unrestrained before the firing squad: “Wilkerson leaped from the chair exclaiming, “Oh, God” fell forward on his face, and continued writhing and gasping for 27 minutes, when the physicians pronounced him dead.”

  • Your Help is Needed After a Senseless Act of Violence

    “My niece was walking out the door when the guy got out of his van and just started shooting everybody,” writes my friend, Jocelyn Warriner. “I’ve lost a wonderful person in my life. Her two daughters have lost a wonderful mom and my sister lost great daughter.”

    “You will be missed Denny, rest in peace,” she adds.

    Denny Halverson

    She’s talking about 42-year-old Irene Denean Halverson who was better known to family and friends as “Denny.”

    It began Friday evening, February 14, 2015 around 7 pm, when Everett, Washington Police arrived at a home on 75th Street Southeast to discover three people shot. When officers approached, they found a woman and a man dead and third person seriously injured.

    Witnesses say a van pulled up to the home, where the gunman got out, took a rifle from the vehicle, walked to a nearby fence and started shooting. Denny died as she exited the front door.

    After closing down the roadways in the area and getting help from King County Air and a SWAT team, police were able to arrest a suspect. He was taken into custody after stopping his vehicle at Forest Park and talking with police on a cell phone.

    He is in the Snohomish County Jail facing assault and 2nd degree murder charges. The suspects name has not been released.

    Another witness said he spoke with the suspect and one of the victim’s jus’ hours before the shooting. He told reporters that the suspect seemed level-headed but was struggling with his own sobriety.

    Kevin Odneal, who shared the home with his mother, also died in the attack.

    Local news agencies say two men were killed in separate murders at the home in 2008 and 2011. The house has also been the scene of many incidents including a search warrant in December by the Snohomish County Auto Theft Task Force.

    Jocelyn and I have been life-long friends since our days together at Francis E. Warren AFB, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  She has set up an account to help defray the funeral expenses.

    Please give any amount possible and keep Jocelyn and her family in your prayers as they grieve.  I thank you in advance.

  • Presidents Day Weekend a Deadly One Overseas

    “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry Sprague on January 26, 1900, while serving as New York’s governor.

    More than 115-years later, a video shows the mass beheading of Coptic Christian hostages by ISIS/ISIL in Libya. The 21 men, all in orange jumpsuits, were marched along a beach in Tripoli, before their murders.

    Interesting that ISIS/ISIL should select Tripoli, where the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army stormed the fortress of Derne, defeating the Eyalet of Tripolitania during the First Barbary War in 1805. Some sources say this is a direct challenge to the U.S. military’s superiority.

    And while the Egypt’s Air Force hit back at ISIS/ISIL inside Libya with airstrikes for the beheadings, the U.S. State Department issued a statement condemning the killings, but did not name the religions of the victims or of the perpetrators.

    “The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of 21 Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens.”

    Also released during the same time period is a video of children dressed in orange jumpsuits, locked in a cage in what can only be called a recreation of the ISIS/ISIL video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive.   While it’s still unconfirmed, some believe this event was just a stunt calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged atrocities to be likened to those of the jihadists.

    In yet another video released by ISIS/ISIL, orange-clad Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are paraded through the streets of the Hawija district of Kirkuk, Iraq, filled with cheering radical Islamists.  They are locked in, and shackled to large iron cages, also reminiscent of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive.

    Whether they’ve been murdered is still unknown.

    Meanwhile, Danish police shot and killed Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein after he carried out two shooting attacks.  One at a free speech event and then at a Copenhagen synagogue, killing two men, including a member of Denmark’s Jewish community and wounding five police officers.

    Danish police have since arrested two people on suspicion of aiding El-Hussein in the attacks, ending the speculation he was simply a ‘lone actor.’

    Finally, President Obama spent much Presidents Day golfing at Porcupine Creek in Rancho Mirage, California, before returning to Washington D.C. The White House says Obama’s golfing group includes three childhood friends from Hawaii.

    Obama’s idea of a ‘big stick’ is a golf club.

  • Rewarding People for Bad Behavior

    Her name is Jessica Liesmann, but she’s better known as “Mama Bear,” or the woman who confronted an armed car thief after he rammed into her mini-van in Texas. And now, she’s been ‘rewarded’ with a new vehicle.

    “A high-speed police chase came to a dramatic end Wednesday in North Dallas when the driver rear-ended a family’s minivan and was promptly tackled, dragged into the street and beaten by the mom at the wheel and her boyfriend,” reports NBC’s Channel 5 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

    Her story proves that we are desperate for anyone who resembles a ‘hero.’ After-all she leaped from her van and went after a bad guy on live-television.

    However, if you really analyze what she did, you’d realize she did this because she lost her temper, enraged by what happened. Basically, she violently attacked a man she had no knowledge about.

    “I was just angry,” Liesmann later admitted.

    It’s nice that she received a new mini-van – but why it was given to her sends a bad message to others who believe her actions were proper. After all, police discovered a hand gun in the stolen car.

    As Dallas Police Communications Services Section spokesman, Major Max Geron tweeted shortly after the suspect’s apprehension, “Thankful that the citizens who held the chase suspect weren’t injured by him. (I) would never advise you do that.”

  • Tom Golbov, 1932-2015

    From time to time, I’d see him standing out on his back porch smoking a cigarette. We would wave to each other, but hardly did we ever speak other than to say a polite ‘hello’ to each other.

    Along with this was the fact that while this man’s home was being built, Kyle saw a beginning of a fire, that left unchecked could have burned the building down. It was discovered the blaze began after some plumbers had been working on the pipes in the kitchen area and a hot-ember fell in a pile of debris.

    That was 16-years ago. Then I learned that he passed away on February 7, 2015.

    And suddenly, I find myself wishing I had tried harder to get to know him as since his death, I’ve learned he and I had more in common than either of us knew.

    His name was Tom Golbov, having been born in Oroville, California, in 1932 and moving to Eureka shortly there after. Tom was also a U.S. Army veteran, serving in Korea, and moving to Reno, Nevada in 1961, where he joined the staff as a Laboratory Technician in the Department of Physics Department of the University of Nevada.

    He also worked as a life insurance agent for Transamerica, a job that took him and his wife of 61-year, Joan to Phoenix, AZ for 13 years, until his retirement, at which time they returned to Reno to be close to their family which includes daughter Lorraine Hiatt, and sons, Alan and George Golbov.

    Tom’s wife is from Eureka, California. In fact her brother, Gerald “Dick” Atwell, was born in 1929 in Eureka. He died in Surprise, Arizona on April 26, 2010 at the age of 80.

    Dick was a general contractor “Builtwell by Atwell” for 28 years and an instructor for 25 years at College of the Redwoods. He also received the Southwest Eureka Rotary Club Vocational Service Award in 1991 for Outstanding Service to the Community and in 1996 received from the Humboldt Builders Exchange Construction Person of the Year.

    One of the homes Dick built included the “Kins Sportsman House” in 1962.  He also built the Lady Bird Johnson Grove dedication platform and supervised the building of the Evergreen Lodge.

    Tom’s father, Walter Golbov was born in Russia, January 16, 1902, dying May 5, 1958 at his home in Klamath. He had lived there for three years, and was an employee of the Arrow Mills. He’s interred in the IOOF Memorial cemetery of Crescent City.

    Tom’s mother was born August 30, 1904 in Palermo, California in Butte County. She passed away in Sparks October 17, 1979 and buried at Our Mother of Sorrows Cemetery near her grandson, Ivan who lived only 18-days, passing away April 9, 1972.

    Tom was 83-years old.

  • The Digital Dark Age

    Last year I wrote about possible world-wide financial troubles in “The Coming Bubble,” which is ready to pop, sending the U.S. in a slide worse that the Great Depression of the 1930s:

    “USA Today published an article featuring a chart showing the internet bubble, the housing bubble, and an unnamed bubble labeled a ‘stock market bubble.’

    While the article doesn’t say there is a stock market bubble occurring in the U.S., it does say, “the Fed’s monetary policies have caused stock prices to soar, doesn’t mean there’s a bubble.” It also says those same monetary policies will likely deflate as part of an overall correction of the market.”

    Now ‘Google’ vice-president Vinton Cerf is warning we could lose all of our pictures, document and other data forever.  He says the images and records of our existence that we store on our computers will disappear as the ongoing digital revolution makes older hardware and software obsolete and old files inaccessible.

    He adds, that since so much data is now kept in digital format, another problem will be future generations struggling to understand our society. That’s because more often than not, historians don’t realize how important a document is until centuries after the people who created it have died.

    This may happen sooner than later — so it’s best to start planning for it.

  • The Fool in the Mirror

    President Barack Obama once again prove jus’ how out of touch he is with America. Recently he was shown on Buzzfeed allowing his full narcissism to be on display via a string of selfies.

    Obama selfies

    The pictures (part of a video aimed to get people to sign up for Obamacare) were shot the same day the White House announced American hostage Kayla Mueller was dead. The selfies also came the day when ISIS/ISIL appeared on the doorsteps of one of the American bases in Iraq, where U.S. Marines are stationed.

    Finally, it’s not enough he’s taking a selfie — he is being photographed while taking those selfies. And he hasn’t the sense to be embarrassed by this.

  • The Cowboy, the Indian and Radical Islamist

    My friend Charles sent this joke to me — and while completely politically incorrect, I thought I’d share it.

    Three strangers strike up a conversation in the airport lounge awaiting their flights.

    One is an American Indian another is a cowboy. The third is a Radical Islamist.

    Their discussion drifts to their diverse cultures. Soon, the two Westerners learn that the third man is a devout, radical Islamist and the conversation falls into an uneasy lull.

    Finally, the American Indian clears his throat and softly speaks. “At one time here, my people were many, but sadly, now we are few.”

    The Radical Islamist raises an eyebrow and leans forward, “Once my people were few,” he sneers, “and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?”

    The Montana cowboy shifts his toothpick to one side of his mouth, and says in a drawl, “That’s ’cause we ain’t played Cowboys and Radicals yet.”

  • When Artwork Makes a Difference in Life

    It’s not often that I receive personal mail from the post office these days. Much of what I get comes via the Internet.

    So when I went to the mail box and found a small package addressed to me from Lyn and Sean Schmitt of North Las Vegas, I was excited. Once I opened it, I was even more excited to after reading this note:

    “There is a bit of a story that goes with this belt buckle. I thought you might like to know the story behind it.

    belt buckle

    Two years back, I was working the weekend shift at the power plant when we had some unexpected visitors. We were hesitant to let anyone on site on weekends, especially when they don’t have an appointment.

    The driver of that truck at the gate said he had been on site before and was there to pickup scrap from our lay-down yard. Now this is VERY unusual as we have copper and other metals that can be quite valuable and have been target of thieves in the past.

    I asked the person to come in the control room so we could talk.

    The truck came on site and in through the door walked a man and a couple of younger men who were obviously Native American. They told me they were from the local Paiute tribe and that they ran a school to teach their young men a skill to get them off the reservation.

    They owned a smelter and would melt down scrap metals to create jewelry and trinkets that could be sold. After hearing this and seeing some of their products, I agreed to let them go back and scavenge.

    They took some of our old wire and aluminum as well as a few pallets. That was the last I expected to hear from them.

    Last week, we were surprised to see that same old truck pull up to the gate of the power plant. The same man came in with another of his students.

    He presented us with a beautiful dream catcher that they made into a plaque. They also gave some of the staff belt buckles, knives and copper bangles.

    The buckle you have in your hands was made from scrap aluminum and formed in a hand-made sand mold. I hope you enjoy it even more so, knowing the story that comes with it.”

    I plan to buy a shadow box and mount both the letter and the bucket in it together as it is artwork that deserves to be shown off.