North Oakland Now
A gas line exploded into flame last night in a residential neighborhood of San Bruno. Four people are reported dead and 20 injured. Early this morning, San Bruno officials said the fire was 75 percent contained. Melanie and Bryan Perkin and their three children fled their house last night as the vinyl from the window frames melted into the grass of their lawn in the intense heat. “I’m just so grateful to be alive,” Melanie Perkin said. Read more at…
On Labor Day in 2009, 17-year-old Desiree Davis was killed in a drive by shooting in North Oakland. After her death, a brand new Oakland North reporter named S. Howard Bransford spent time with Davis’ family and wrote movingly about the teenager’s life. His story, “Slain student, a taunted outsider, was fighting hard to grow up”, broke the news that Davis had fled New Orleans with her mother in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Recently, Bransford published a followup piece…
A legislative session that ran to the wee hours last night ended with a proposed statewide ban on plastic bags having been voted down, according to SFGate.com. Such bans have been enacted in individual cities, like San Francisco, and have been proposed across the U.S. but have found little purchase here. USA Today gets into the details. Our own Dara Kerr reports on a current ban that’s not working as well as law enfocement officers might hope: cell phones in…
The art expert who helped to establish that a box of photo negatives from a Fresno garage sale was the lost work of Ansel Adams recently had a change of heart about the images. Robert Moeller III, a former curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, had initially said the negatives came from Adams, but recently told The Bay Citizen that the images are instead probably the work of an unknown photographer named Earl Brooks. Moeller’s reversal came…
After a chase that ran from Oakland to the California-Mexican border, Andrew Barrientos, 20, was arrested Saturday afternoon on charges of shooting a Fremont police officer twice in the abdomen, according to an article in the San Jose Mercury news. Officer Todd Young was attempting to serve Barrientos with a search warrant in the 2000 block of Aueson Ave. in Oakland when the shooting took place. The Merc has the full story. And to pump our own stories a bit…
Oakland thermometers showed a record high of 99 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday afternoon, but things cooled a bit today and are expected to return to normal temperatures for the rest of the week. The heat wave meant opened fire hydrants and higher air conditioning use, according to the Tribune, but the one day of hot temps did not cause any massive problems unless you credit yesterday’s two homicides to the heat. Don Perata is currently leading in a poll on Oakland’s…
Earlier today, over 100 supporters of former BART officer Johannes Mehserle gathered at the Contra Costa County courthouse to voice their opinion that the involuntary manslaughter verdict Mehserle got for shooting Oscar Grant in January 2009 was too tough. One hour into their rally, a counter-rally with twice as many protesters, who were in support of Oscar Grant, took over the sidewalks. Despite a lot of yelling between the two groups, the rally remained peaceful.
A notice from our colleagues in UC Berkeley’s News 21 program, a national partnership between 12 universities and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative to support in-depth and investigative reporting. They are looking for Bay Area residents to interview for a project that may run on Oakland North in the future. They write: We’re two journalists participating in a project called News21, looking at crime and California’s prison system. We’re working on a video about victims of crimes, and the sense of loss they…
Got something to say? We’ll give you a place to say it! Tomorrow, Oakland North will launch our brand new community Op-Ed page, and we’re inviting our readers to contribute essays of approximately 500 – 1,000 words on any Oakland-related topic of community interest. Please send all submissions for consideration to: staff@oaklandnorth.net — we’ll choose some to appear on our Op-Ed page. Oakland North will have the right to edit submissions for length, clarity and spelling/grammar. We’re looking for thoughtful…