LAPD OFFICERS CLEARED AFTER ATTORNEY ADMITS THAT VIDEO WAS PHONY

The story below is about a video that that supposedly proved that police officers had lied about their probable cause to search a suspect’s car—a search that produced an illegal gun. It turns out now that the video proved no such thing: It was doctored:

Here’s Jack Leonard’s report for the LA Times.

It was meant to be a smoking gun: A grainy security video that proved police corruption.

Officers said they had stopped Rafat Abdallah because his white Mercedes was missing a license plate. During a search of the car, they discovered a loaded handgun — a serious crime for a convicted felon like Abdallah.

But the footage, taken from a surveillance camera, clearly showed a license plate on Rafat Abdallah’s white Mercedes as he left his business just moments before officers pulled him over.

The video was proof, Abdallah’s attorney contended, that the police officers fabricated their story about the missing license plate.

But it was the video that was fabricated.

Defense attorney Jim Epstein conceded in court Friday that he had come to believe that the footage — taken from a surveillance camera at a wholesale produce business owned by Abdallah — was a fraud.

The Fox News report above was the result of attorney Epstein’s PR efforts with the phony tape.

(NOTE TO MR EPSTEIN: when you’re peddling a video as yet untested for its veracity, it’s wise to ditch the smug routine when you yourself are on camera.

(NOTE TO FOX 11: When you screw up badly by airing an unvetted tape like this one, a correction would be nice.)

MOVE CA PRISONERS TO MEXICO???….

KPCC’s Julie Smalls reports on Governor Schwarzenegger’s latest hare-brained scheme idea to reduce the state’s prison population:

Governor Schwarzenegger railed against what he called “reckless” state spending on prisons during a speech at the Sacramento press club today. The governor suggested that California pay Mexico to house some of the undocumented inmates in state prisons.

In truth, it’s not an altogether crazy idea since those Arnold was talking about moving would be deported to Mexico anyway, after they’d served their terms. I suppose, at least, it shows he’s trying to think creatively.

EVIDENCE LILY BURK FOUGHT HARD FOR HER LIFE

In the preliminary hearing that occurred on Monday, Lily Burk’s alleged killer, Charles Samuel, was bound over for trial for the murder of the 17-year old.

In a part of the hearing, the prosecution presented the coroner’s report. which demonstrated that Lily Burk had fought hard to save her life. Lily’s mother cried after the report was read. Her father couldn’t bear to be in the courtroom.

I understand. I can barely stand to read the information once removed in the LA Times, and she is not my daughter.

ABOUT THOSE GUNS AND BIBLE VERSES….

Benjamin Busch was an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps. He is also a writer. He wrote the essay that begins below for NPR:

As a Marine invading Iraq in 2003, I thought we actively separated church and state from our motives.

I know that Scripture embedded in the obscure numbers on rifle scopes may seem like a small detail, and that manufacturer Trijicon likely intended no particular malice by placing biblical references on its equipment. Like, 2COR4:6 represents 2 Corinthians 4:6, “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” There seems to have been neither marketing nor secrecy associated with the presence of these inscriptions.

But these are not innocent times, and the codes are still messages printed and sent out. These notes have now been read and exposed, and we have the baggage of explaining ourselves to people convinced that many of our actions are motivated by religion instead of self-defense, justice or altruism. …

Read the rest.

From the program for Lily Burk’s memorial service at Barnsdall Art Park last Sunday.

Comments are closed.

The memorial service for 17-year-old Lily Burk will be held at 5 p.m. Sunday night at Barnsdall Art Park. The press has been wisely excluded from the service, except for a single pool camera. Rick Wartzman, one of the Burk-Drooz family spokespersons, has asked that media members kindly refrain from questioning mourners on their way to and from the memorial. Let us hope that the media complies.

Of course, Greg Burk, Lily’s father, is himself a member of the press. So too are many of the friends and extended family members who have clustered around Greg and his wife, Lily’s mother, Deborah Drooz in this time of unimaginable sorrow. Yet those press will be at Barndall Park to grieve and to offer whatever comfort they can, not to report.

In the coming days and weeks, however, it is likely that Lily Burk’s name will be invoked frequently as California state legislature again takes up its discussion about how to cut $1.2 from the state’s corrections budget.

It would be helpful if those discussions could be fact based . But, if past days are any indication, all too many of them will not be.

I have an op ed in Sunday’s LA Times that talks about the dangers of politicizing a horrifying crime like the murder of Lily Burk.

There is much more still to talk about.

Here is the essay’s opening:

Some deaths trigger our collective grief and fury more than others. In the spring of 2008, it was the killing of college-bound running back Jamiel Shaw II, a handsome boy shot dead on an L.A. sidewalk a hundred yards from his front door while his Army sergeant mother served her country 8,000 miles away in Iraq. This summer, the horror that grabbed us was the kidnapping and murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk.

Yet, as is often true with such heart-lacerating cases, with every new revelation about Lily’s murder these last two weeks, the voices of those who seek to morph our grief into this or that public policy agenda grow ever louder.

Like Jamiel Shaw, Lily was a kid we could each imagine as our own. She was smart, a national merit scholar. She was unusually well-liked — the comments on the Facebook page created in her memory express this in vivid detail. Through repeated exposure to the photo her parents provided to the media after her death, we were able to believe that we knew her: Lily Burk with the open, world-welcoming gaze surrounded by a tangle of teenage hair. We could envision her future while in the same moment reeling with the knowledge that all of her tomorrows had irrevocably vanished under nightmarish circumstances.

It is precisely that nightmare that is the other signal reason we have been seized by the death of Lily Burk…..

You can find the rest here.

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PERSONAL NOTE: Like many, I wish I had some kind of better comfort to offer Greg Burk and Deborah Drooz. But I do not. For some things there is no real comfort. There can only be the willingness to stand in fellowship.

This morning, the LA Times has introduced some impressive gee-whiz gadgetry with its new Charles Samuel Arrests and Incarceration Timeline flash thingy. (I can’t explain the contraption. You’ll have to look for yourself. It’s quite cool, actually.)

Moving back to a more traditional delivery system (you know, prose), the Times has a news story in this morning’s paper that is both intriguing and troubling.

In it, reporters Richard Winton and Jack Leonard, have dug up information that sugguests that Charlie Samuel, the alleged killer of Lily Burk, could have gotten 25 to life, had a series of legal and clerical decisions played out differently.

If you will remember, Samuel’s one violent or serious felony occurred in 1987. It consisted of a home invasion burglary of a man’s home, a trailer, while he was in it, and robbery of the man himself. Samuel and another man (also involved in the crime) evidently jacked the man’s car too. The details of the crimes, based on the existing paperwork (which the Times has posted in PDF form) remain a bit fuzzy.

In any case, the crime was a serious matter that had violent overtones. And more importantly for discussion purposes these days, it was a crime that could have been charged as two strikes under today’s law. Instead, in that all three counts were part of a single crime, it was counted as one strike.

Under California’s 1994 three-strikes law, prosecutors are allowed to charge any felony — however minor — as a third strike if a defendant has previously been convicted of two crimes considered violent or serious.

Court records reviewed by The Times show that Samuel pleaded guilty to robbery and residential burglary in 1987 in connection with a home-invasion robbery in San Bernardino.

Residential burglary and robbery qualify as violent or serious strikes under the law.

A law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity said Samuel’s rap sheet lists his robbery conviction but does not describe his burglary conviction as a residential burglary. Under the three-strikes law, non-residential burglaries do not count as strikes.

It is unclear who was responsible for the error.

Alright that was 1987. So fast forward ten years to 1997, when Samuel’s next felony arrest occurred. Although the conviction was for 2nd Degree Burglary, what Samuel actually did, the Times reports, was to attempt to “steal a bottle of alcohol from a Food 4 Less store in Barstow.”

For his unsuccessful 1997 booze snatch, Samuel received a sentence of 2 years and 8 months in prison. Leonard and Winton report that, had prosecutors seen the 1987 combo residential burglary and robbery as two strikes, they could have struck Samuel out.

Or maybe they could have.

As it was still not legal to count two parts of a single crime event as two strikes (that would become part of an amended three strikes law a year later, in 1998, based on a California Supreme Court ruling), so it is unclear whether prosecutors could or would have tried to strike Samuel out had they been aware of the specifics of his earlier convictions.

Plus, even when three strikes was fully up and running, not every prosecutor or judge went after the mandatory 25-to-life for a third strike such as attempting to steal a single bottle of alcohol.

Samuel’s only other crime of note occurred nine years later, in July of 2006, when he committed petty theft. It was a misdemeanor charge, but because of the previous failed liquor bottle theft conviction, it was bumped up to a felony. Samuel got another two years, eight months.

Scattered through those twenty-two years, and earlier, there were many little crimes like driving with an expired license, feeding a slug into a parking meter, public drunkenness, being “under the influence of a controlled substance,” and many unspecified parole violations, most, one suspects, having to do with drugs.

And then on July of 2009, Charles Samuel was on a day pass from his court-mandated rehab program, but AWOLed from his “escort”—and allegedly encountered Lily Burk, allegedly kidnapped her, allegedly traipsed her around from ready teller to ready teller trying to get money, and when that didn’t work, allegedly bashed her head and slit her throat.

There are several ways to parse out the meaning of the facts that I have just laid out for you here, courtesy of the good reporting by Jack Leonard and Richard Winton.

And there are assuredly facts still to come.

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PS: I just listened to Monday’s To the Point, with Warren Olney, which is an excellent show—really, really good—about how the new budgetary necessities could affect prison and parole reform, a topic that is front and center in the upcoming legislative discussion about the proposed cuts in our California corrections system, and interwoven in our examination of the death of Lily Burk. If you have 25 minutes, listen to the podcast. It is very much worth your time.

What’s up with the LA Times and their fact checking?

Yesterday the Times ran an unsigned editorial about the proposed cuts to the California prison system and how the tragedy of Lily Burk’s murder might be used as a cudgel by conservative law-and-order factions to try to derail the cuts, which are to be voted on by the state legislature this month. (I am summarizing here.)

Sensational crimes are often followed by get-tough-on-crime legislation, especially in a state where systems that promote direct democracy encourage headline-based lawmaking. Hence the passage of Megan’s Law, named after 7-year-old murder victim Megan Kanka, by the Legislature in 2004

So far so good.

But then the Times wrote:

Lily Burk might not have a law named after her, but the 17-year-old’s abduction and murder, allegedly at the hands of a parolee who was living at a local drug-treatment center, has political ramifications. That’s because it comes at a time when lawmakers are considering cuts to the state prison budget that could mean early release for more than 27,000 inmates.

Say WHAT??? What in the world are they talking about? “….early release for 27,000 prisoners….?

Uh, Guys. It does not help the effectiveness of your editorial if you get the story’s most significant fact wrong.

No one is proposing letting 27,000 prisoners out of the door.

You know that, right? Even the LAPPL—the police union—has been careful to drop using that number.

(I blogged about what the governor and company are, in fact, proposing last Friday.)

But that wasn’t the end of it. The LA Times folks didn’t just write the fallacious number once, they repeated it all over again near the story’s end.

That’s not to say we’re thrilled by the prospect of 27,000 inmates being released early and all at once. Unfortunately, though, there is a dearth of good alternatives.

NOoooooooo-o-o-o-o-o-oooo!

How could the editorial board (which normally is quite careful with its facts) use a number that is not only dead wrong, but one that will, I guarantee, be swung around like pair of nun chucks by those on the most alarmist end of the conservative spectrum— in other words, those who want to defeat the proposed cuts and reforms—and to do it with extreme prejudice.

To make absolutely sure I wasn’t missing something, after I read the piece yesterday morning, I called Seth Unger, the spokesman for the CDCR, and asked him if maybe the Times knew something I did not.

Unger groaned. “Yeah, I saw the editorial,” he said, and he wasn’t at all happy about it either. Not only did the Times have their facts wrong about the 27,000 and this whole “early release” thing, Unger said, but they put a weapon the hands of right-leaning partisans looking for an excuse to shoot down the plan. . “I mean that number is absolutely radioactive,” he said.

Yep.

The CDCR planned to write a letter to the editor, Unger said. Not that he expected that would undo the damage.

Bottom line, please be more careful with your facts, dear LA Times, especially when the stakes are this high.

PS: While you’re correcting things in the editorial— which, aside from the monster factual crater, is actually very good—you might want to correct this:

“Most inmates serve their full terms, and all are placed on parole for three years,” the editorial says about midway through the piece in a paragraph about the world of problems that were ushered in when California became a determinate sentencing state. The paragraph makes an important point. But again all future discussion the editorial might stimulate is hobbled by a factual blooper, albeit a smaller one than the radioactive 27,000.

Under determinate sentencing inmates do not serve their full terms. Unless you have an L after your sentence (life), nobody does. Serious and/or violent felons serve around 80 percent, the rest serve around 50. Those numbers can go up (but not down) according to prior convictions, strikes and other elements that trigger sentencing “enhancements.”

But what is true in determinate sentencing, is that every inmate knows before he or she enters prison, exactly what day he/she will be released. There is no earned credits or early release or time off for good behavior. Bad behavior, however, can earn extra time on the sentence. But stellar behavior cannot subtract months or years. And then when the release date arrives—as you have stated—every inmate, no matter how harmless or violent is dumped into the same three-year parole system to be “supervised” if you can call it that, by hideously overburdened parole agents.

The mistake might seem a small thing. Yet when we are discussing these traditionally reform-resistant, emotion-prone matters, it helps if we are all dealing from the same factual deck.

There was much quarreling in the past two weeks about the proposed $1.2 billion dollars that is slated to come out of California’s corrections budget. The implication has been that the proposed cuts would drastically impair public safety, triggering a virtual crime wave.

The fighting has amped up considerably in the wake of the murder of Lily Burk.

First of all, what many people may not realize is that, at this point, the argument is no longer about if that $1.2 billion will be cut. That number is part of the budget that the governor signed yesterday.

The question at hand is what will be cut from where-–all of which will not be decided until the legislature returns in mid-to-late August.

Earlier in the week, I spent an hour on the phone with the California legislative analyst’s office talking about the latest corrections cuts proposal—and what it means.

(A copy of the broad strokes of the suggested cuts may be found after the jump).

It was an instructive conversation. For one thing, analyst Paul Golaszewski told me that while there is some talk of early release for certain inmates under certain prescribed circumstances, no one is talking about releasing 27,000 prisoners. “We never saw a proposal like that,” he said. “Nothing even close.”

In other words, there will be no inmate dump, okay? So let us stop talking in those terms, shall we?

(I noted that Ron Kaye was still marching out the 27,000 figure as recently as yesterday. He did it, as many have done this week, in reference to the alleged murderer of Lily Burk, Charlie Samuel:

“Well, there are going to be 27,000 just like him!” announced Kaye. “[Samuel] is someone who shot, kidnapped and…” And Kaye’s fact-free recitation went on from there.

Instead, why don’t we look at what is actually is on the table.

PART I – REDUCING THE ADP

One of the lynch pins of the governor’s proposed CDCR budget cuts, has to do with reducing by 19,000 inmates what is called the ADP—or average daily population. This will supposedly produced a savings of $400,000—or around $21,000 per person per year.

(Whether that savings is close to accurate is something that has been convincingly questioned by my former prison warden friend, David Winett. But we’ll yank apart the numbers on another day.)

Again—and I want to make sure this is clear—that does NOT mean that 19,000 people will be slated for early release.

Instead, the governor hopes to make that population reduction in the following ways:

1. ADP reduction strategy #1: changing certain property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

These felony-to-misdemeanor reductions would include things like writing bad checks, and receiving stolen goods. The point is, as misdemeanors they would be punished by jail time and/or probation instead of swelling the prison population. (You can see the entire list below.)

This part of the strategy doesn’t mean letting people out. It means not putting them in prison in the first place—yet still demanding that they be sanctioned for their actions.

2. ADP reduction strategy #2 – Using “alternative custody options” for lower-risk offenders.

Okay, here’s where the early release piece of the puzzle kicks in.

The governor would like to make certain inmates eligible to serve the last 12 months of their sentence under house arrest with GPS monitoring. The prisoners who might qualify are those low-level offenders with 12 months or less left on their sentence, elderly inmates, and very, very sick inmates.

However the proposal stipulates that the inmates would be chosen only with input from law enforcement, victims groups and other concerned citizens.

Yes, this means that certain people would get months, or even a year, shaved off of their sentences. But, instead of being warehoused in an overcrowded, violent facility that offers little opportunity to better oneself and every possibility of becoming further criminalized, with GPS monitoring and many of these inmates would be eligible to receive drug treatment and other services or training programs, that might better help them to succeed on the outside and not return to prison. Remember, all these people—every single one— will be getting out in 12 months or less anyway. Would you rather they were released from supervision in slightly better shape than when they went in? Or only further damaged—and then dumped in the community with zero preparation or transitional supervision? Just a question.

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UPDATE: Here’s a report that KPCC’s Frank Stoltz did today (Friday) that has some additional details on this part of the proposal, plus Frank has some interesting takes on the matter from several who work in law enforcements—not all of whom agree with each other.

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FYI: had the alleged killer of Lily Burk been released early from prison under such a program (Which he wasn’t. He served 80 percent of his sentence for petty burglary as is required for second time offenders) that means he would have had on a GPS ankle bracelet so that when he AWOLed from his “escort” last Friday, the guy who was to be with him during his afternoon away from the half way house where he was assigned by the court, the cops could have been immediately alerted and could have picked picked him up right away.

3. ADP reduction strategy # 3 – Commutation of the sentences of “Select Deportable Criminal Aliens”

At his discretion, the governor can commute the sentences of undocumented prisoners who are going to be deported the minute they leave lock up anyway. That way they can be transferred forthwith to the Feds who will deport them to their country of origin and we can stop paying the tens of thousands of dollars to act as their hoteliers. (The Lege Analyst told me that it costs either $49,000 or $23,000 a year to house one of our prisoners—depending upon what expenses you count when you do the math. Don’t ask. It’s way too confusing.)

Again, the only people eligible for this commutation thing will be low level, nonviolent offenders. The petty drug dealer/user guys and the like. Anybody who has committed a serious crime will stay put.

PART 2: THE REST….

There are a number of other parts to the plan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday’s Fresh Air, featured a poet named Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno who has recently released her first collection of poetry called Slamming Open the Door that is getting a great deal of well- deserved attention.

In 2003, the lives of Kathleen Bonanno and her husband plunged into a life-shattering tragedy that was very similar to the one that has overtaken Greg Burk and Deborah Drooz, the parents of Lily Burk.

2003 was when Kathleen’s daughter Leidy Bonanno was found dead in her apartment, strangled with a telephone cord by an ex-boyfriend. The poems in Slamming Open the Door chronicle Leidy’s murder and each step of the aftermath.

The work is almost unbearable to read—or to hear read, as Bonanno does on the show—but it also shimmers with jagged-edged beauty, courage and power. The poems are rageful. Drenched in the deepest kind of grief. Totally cleansing.

It was actually WLA commenter Woody who brought the show and Bonanno’s poetry to my attention. And, in the last comment thread, he has written more eloquently about the broadcast than I have.

I was hesitant to post about this book—for obvious reasons. Yet the fearful symmetry was difficult to ignore. And I judged the poems might, for some, offer an unlikely form of comfort.

I leave you to listen and make up your own mind.

Here is the link.

And here are five of the poems. Be sure to read the last one.

Death Barged In

In his Russian greatcoat,
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.

He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.

Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck:
From now on,
you write about me.

Read the rest of this entry »

This evening at 7 p.m, {Actually our segment is on at 7:30 ] I’ll be on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA? along with LAPPL President Paul Weber.

We’ll be talking about the tragedy of Lily Burk’s death, the media coverage of the crime, and whether or not it’s being used as a political football.

We will also discuss prison and parole policy as those topics relate to the proposed $1.2 billion in cuts to the CDCR budget to be decided upon in August by the California State Leg.

Tune in at 7 p.m. at KCRW – 89.9 FM – to hear it live.

Or listen to the podcast when it goes up here.

After spending way more time than was likely sensible talking on the phone and exchanging emails with various people from the LAPD, the DA’s office, and the police union, this is what I can tell you thus far about the criminal past of Charlie Samuel, the 50-year old vagrant who is accused of the soul-wrenching murder of 17-year-old Lily Burk:

1. Samuel’s most recent felony conviction appears to be in July 2006, for petty theft, a misdemeanor charge that was bumped up to a felony because of a prior conviction. He went to prison for the theft and was paroled in February of this year.

2. Just exactly what that “prior” conviction or convictions plural was —and when it/they occurred—has yet to be confirmed. Over the years, Samuel is reported to have committed at least one burglary and/or a robbery, maybe both, maybe a number of burglaries.* [NOTE UPDATES ON OLD CONVICTIONS AT END OF POST]

What we also do know is that, between 2003 and now, other than the one petty theft, Samuel committed some very small crimes:

3, In August of 2003 he was convicted of driving with a suspended driver’s license.

4. In July of 2006, , he was convicted of putting a non-coin slug into a parking meter.

5. After he was paroled in February of 2009 for the theft, in April of 2009 he violated the terms of his parole by being found with a crack pipe.

So does all that add up to someone whom we should have spotted as a man so bad or crazy that he would kill a 17-year old girl? Or is there lots more?

When the case goes to the D.As office—which may occur today— we may be able to get a better idea, as the prosecutor will need to acquire an accurate listing of Samuel’s prior criminal activity.

Until then, it would be good to stick to what we know.

It was, for instance, not helpful when early Monday morning, Richard Winton reported for the LA Times that Samuel had a “history of violent crimes.” Winton wrote:

A law enforcement source said Samuel had a previous history of assault with a deadly weapon, robbery and kidnapping.

At first look, this was dramatic news. The man had a prior kidnapping conviction? And an assault with a deadly weapon?

Except that when the assertions were probed, it appears that the kidnapping and the assault were merely arrests, not convictions.

Yet because the Times did not differentiate but instead gave the blanket impression that all were convictions, the error was reported as fact by many in the local electronic media—and then further spun to make a political point by former Daily News editor turned blogger, Ron Kaye, and to a lesser degree, by the LA Weekly.

Finally at 6:30 Monday night, the Times corrected the story to read:

Sources familiar with his criminal past say [Samuel] has been arrested previously for assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping and robbery. He has spent several years in state prison. However, his convictions are more limited and include robbery of an inhabited dwelling, burglary and petty theft.

But by that time the correction was posted, the toothpaste was not only out of the tube, it had sprouted legs and was running down the road.

Ron Kaye wrote:

Charlie Samuel is the poster child for the kind of thugs classified as “non-violent offenders” despite a history of violent behavior — the kind of hopeless criminal who would be included in the governor’s planned release of 27,000 convicts to reduce prison cost.

The Weekly’s report was similar in tone and questioned why Samuel was “allowed to remain on the streets.”

(Oh, gee, I don’t know. It’s that pesky rule-of-law thing again. Troublesome that.)

Whatever.

Just to be clear: Speaking purely personally, if I had the foresight and the opportunity to make Charlie Samuel disappear from the earth by, say, 2 p.m. on Friday July 24, I would do so in heartbeat.

And, when everything is finally known, I’m sure we will find the actual facts of this case are quite ghastly and alarming enough.

But, until that time, no good will come of spinning, generalizing, inventing or exaggerating the truth in order to serve anybody’s personal, professional, or political agenda. No good ever does.
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NOTE: This morning’s LA Times story headlined “Collision of 2 L.A. worlds may have led to girl’s death” by Ari Bloomkatz, Joel Rubin and Richard Winton, is well reported and heartbreaking.

And for those wondering if the LAPD definitely has the right guy, this LA Times story answers that question.
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*UPDATE: This morning’s LA Times reports that:

In July 1987, Samuel was sentenced to six years in prison for robbing a residence in San Bernardino County, according to the California Department of Corrections. In the years that followed, Samuel was paroled several times and repeatedly returned to prison when he committed other crimes or otherwise violated the terms of his release, records show.

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UPDATE 2:

Here are more details on Samuel’s three felony convictions based on CDCR records:

TO RECAP: Charlie Samuel’s most recent felony conviction was in 2006 and was for petty theft, meaning he probably stole something minor from a store. As I mentioned before, because he had two prior convictions the misdemeanor charge was pushed to a felony, and he got prison time: 2 years 8 months.

His prior offenses were:

1. 2nd degree burglary in January of 1998, 11 years ago. (2nd degree means it involved a store or commercial establishment, not a home). He received 2 years, 8 months of which he served 2 years, paroled in Jan 2000.

2. In 1987—22 years ago— he was convicted of robbery of an inhabited dwelling. He got 6 years of which he served not quite 3 years, released in 1990. However he cycled back in three more times between March 1991 and April 1992, for what appear to be parole violations. Each time he spent 2-4 months locked up, suggesting that whatever it was, it was not minor. Although I cannot tell for sure.

If there are violent crimes, I have not yet seen them in his records. But we do not yet know everything.

Here’s what we know about the death of 17-year-old Lily Burk.

This terrible thing happened within a comparatively short period of time and started with no hint of anything dangerous when Lily went to run an errand for her mother in the middle of the afternoon.

She left her parents home in Los Feliz around 2:30 p.m. and drove to Southwestern School of Law that is located on Wilshire Blvd. just east of Vermont. She was going to pick up some papers that her mom, lawyer and law school prof Deborah Drooz, needed from the school. She arrived at the law school at about 2:45.
At around 3 p.m., on her way back to her car, Lily encountered a 50-year old man named Charlie Samuel near to the school. Somehow Samuel allegedly persuaded/ threatened/forced Lily back into her own car and the two drove into downtown Los Angeles where Lily tried more than once to get money out of various ATMs with her credit card, presumably to give to her abductor.

It does not appear, according to police, that Lily’s kidnapper was armed with a gun or a knife.

But he had some kind of sharp weapon.

During that same time period, she called her parents twice to ask how to withdraw funds from an ATM with a credit card (as opposed to an ATM card)—one call to her mother, Deborah, one to her father, music journalist, Greg Burk.

Greg told Lily that she couldn’t use a credit card to get money from an ATM. They arranged that Lily would drive home to get the money from from her dad. It appears Lily kept her head and was acting strategically. But she did not make it home.

Sometime in the next two hours Lily Burk struggled for her life and died in her car. The exact cause of death has not been released, but we do know there was blunt force trauma.

UPDATE: And we now know that her throat was slashed.

Sometime within that same two hours Samuel allegedly drove Lily’s black Volvo to 458 S. Alameda Street, where he abandoned the car with this lovely, smart, funny, talented girl’s body inside in the passenger seat.

He walked less than a mile away where he began to drink. A little after 5 p.m., two Metropolitan Division, mounted division officers, Miguel Dominguez and Gary Copeland, were patrolling downtown when they spotted Samuel drinking in public. They detained him and found a crack pipe in his possession. (Samuel is on parole, thus subject to search at any time.) At around 5:30 p.m., Samuel was arrested for Possession of Narcotics Paraphernalia, which would have been a violation of the terms of his parole at the very least. (Samuel was downtown to take part in a court-mandated drug treatment program that was a condition of an earlier conviction.) The mounted police had no way of knowing that their drunk would soon be accused of having caused the death of a promising young woman and ruining a string of lives in the process.

[Zach Behrens at LAist has constructed a Google map showing the locations. I don't know why this seems important, but it does. For those of us who sometimes must report grief-producing stories, drowning ourselves in details is a productive way of coping. ]

When Lily never came home, her parents, Greg Burk and Deborah Drooz, realized that something was terribly wrong. Too much time had passed after those odd calls. Lily was not the type of kid who would have just left her parents waiting and wondering. At around 7 p.m., they called the LAPD and reported their daughter to be missing. The case landed at the department’s Northeast division missing persons and sex crimes desk.

In the meantime, Greg and Deborah did everything they could think to do to find their daughter. They called Lily’s cell phone carrier to find out where exactly she had been when she made those two calls and found that they had been made east of the law school. They also called the bank to find out about the withdrawal attempts. Greg and Deborah gave all this information to the Northeast officers.

Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz, the commanding officer for Central Bureau of the LAPD, which includes Northeast, said that, from the beginning the case was treated seriously. Lily was not considered a runaway. Northeast detectives searched all night but found nothing, he said.

Everything changed at 6:15 on Saturday morning. That is when an employee of a downtown business saw a woman’s body in a parked car and called 911. The dead woman turned out to be young, a teenager. It was Lily Burk.

Central division homicide was quickly called in. The lead detective on the case was Robert Nelson.

The Central detectives—a group that eventually would quickly grow to six detectives, and some additional uniformed officers—- caught one small break because Samuels was stupid. Or maybe he just panicked, or was too high to think rationally, or alternately was too desperate for a fix to cover his tracks very thoroughly. In any case, police found fresh fingerprints on the driver’s side of the car that were not those of a young woman. On Sunday morning, he discovered that the prints matched a man who was already in custody.

However prints alone are not enough for a case. For the next nearly 48 hours detectives worked in the field getting what they hoped would be the rest of the evidence needed for a solid prosecution.

At 9 p.m. Sunday night, Samuel was officially arrested for Lily’s murder. According to the sheriff’s department inmate information site, he was booked at 11:27 that same night.

A law enforcement source told the LA Times that Samuel had a “previous history of assault with a deadly weapon, robbery and kidnapping.”

Although the arrest was made Sunday night, Central homicide detectives had not yet gone home when officers came into the station for the 6:15 a.m. shift change on Monday morning, a Central officer told me.

The official announcement of the arrest was made around 7. After that Detective Nelson, Detective Thayer Lake, and their core crew went to breakfast.

The department held a press conference at 11 a.m on Monday.

“This case strikes close to home for all of us with children,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz when he was in front of the press microphones. “This is really a parent’s worst nightmare.”

Yes. It does. I have already talked to my own 23-year-old son twice today because I had the irrational need to hear his voice.

I know that Chief Diaz was speaking—not just in the professional abstract, but personally. He has two kids of his own on whom he completely dotes. Two smart and talented and beautiful daughters.

Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell, who was also at the press conference, has a daughter too. She is 17.

Just like Lily Burk.