Thread: AZ: Recent crimes point to need for change

4/11/2007 4:00:00 AM
Recent crimes point to need for change
Has anyone caught the common thread in some of the worst crimes in Yavapai County in the past year?

This past Friday, Prescott Valley police spent most of Friday chasing three individuals. Department of Public Safety officers had pursued a pickup they had seen weaving in and out of traffic on Highway 89A and later stopped it in the Manzanita area and arrested the driver. After highway patrol officers released the passenger, PV police tried to pull him over for questioning when he left in another car. The driver of that car allegedly tried to ram a police car and ended up damaging an innocent bystander's car.

Officers, including the SWAT team, eventually ran the car's three occupants to earth and arrested them at the Robert Road Baptist Church. The whole chase started because two of the individuals were in the United States illegally and didn't want police to find out.

Later that evening, four Hispanic men invaded a Prescott Valley home. One attacked a woman holding a baby with a baseball bat, and another slashed her fiancé with a machete.

For good measure they threw concrete blocks through the kitchen window of the home and the windows of three cars.

In Prescott this past Oct. 28 a gang of Hispanic men attacked two brothers who had argued with them earlier in the evening about blocking the entrance to an East Gurley Street motel. One of them stabbed Daniel Cook to death and severely cut his brother, Lance, on the arm.

Two weeks later police took out a felony warrant on Joel Medina-Ortiz, an illegal alien, as the primary suspect in the stabbing and arrested three of his relatives and another Mexican National in the case on charges of felony rioting. Medina-Ortiz is still at large and probably back in Mexico.

The thread is not racial; it's national. We don't yet know the citizenship of the home invasion defendants, but in the other cases the defendants were not here legally, and the Friday chase and SWAT team outing arose directly from that fact.

It's painfully obvious that Immigration Customs and Enforcement is writing off those illegals who get past the border and head north. ICE has been reluctant to come and get the illegals that local authorities arrest.

Any worthwhile solution * at least in the short term * will have to be local. If illegals commit crimes here and local authorities catch them, the local justice system needs to handle it and come down hard. It's better to fill our jails and prisons with them than hope the government deports them and have them back in a week.

The federal government continues to prove with dismal regularity that people are more interested in winning the 2008 elections than in solving the problem.


http://prescottdailycourier.com/main.as ... M=25370.42

Sure looks like they're good, hardworking folks. Send them all to Crawford.