It doesn’t have the gritty look you’d expect of a 20-year-old jail that has housed thousands of accused murderers, robbers, gang members and immigrants detained by federal authorities. Two-person dorm-style cells remain clean and tidy, with dark blue tables, mint green bunk beds and doors with glass windows rather than cage-like metal bars. There is clean, blue and beige carpet to muffle ambient noise and large areas where inmates can mingle, watch TV, play board games or…
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How a violent month in Santa Ana set the stage for Council infighting, election angst and jobs possibly lost
Just minutes into the new year last year, a 22-year-old man was gunned down walking in the alley behind the Santa Ana apartment where he lived. Two days later, a 19-year-old was fatally wounded in a car-to-car shooting near the city’s Centennial Regional Park. Over the next 24 hours, two more men were killed in gun violence a mile apart in a gang-plagued area already targeted for special enforcement by police and prosecutors. The four…
Read MoreFamily members, national groups push to solve 1985 Santa Ana terrorist attack case
SANTA ANA – Helena Odeh remembers going with her father Alex Odeh, then the West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, to his second-floor office on 17th Street in Santa Ana in the 1980s. “His work was his life,” she said. “That’s what he stood for. He wanted peace.” On Oct. 11, 1985, the morning after he appeared on local and national television praising Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat as “a man…
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