Thursday Morning Update

* Two young men, accused of jumping the counter at the Walmart Jack In the Box restaurant while going after who they thought was a rival gang member who worked there, have agreed to plead guilty to a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Chris Piche, 18, and Irvin Garcia are expected to be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison. Normally such a charge carries a six year prison term, but in this case, it’s doubled. The young man they went after was not a gang member, and and suffered a minor cut on his torso. Piche has a long record with the Sheriff’s Office in that he was wounded in the face in a drive-by gang shooting on August Drive in 2006, and is considered a “person of interest” in the 2006 Longridge Drive Halloween Party shooting that killed one man and wounded another. In both incidents, no one allegedly saw anything or knew anything…revealing the depth and power of the gang-enforced rule of “don’t snitch, don’t tell.” In this latest incident at Jack In the Box, a video surveillance camera did the job.

* It appears that the next person to take over the helm of Carson High School will be Ron Beck, who has been the district’s manager of grants and special projects.  Beck, who is expected to be given the job at the next School Board meeting, will be taking over from outgoing principal Fred Perdomo who is retiring.  Perdomo is preparing for a trip to climb to a high base camp near the summit of Mount Everest in the Himalaya Mountains on the border of India and Nepal.  That’s one way to begin one’s retirement!

* A convicted murdered scheduled to be next in the Nevada Death Chamber at NSP has filed an appeal to stop his execution because, although he beat an elderly woman to death with a tire iron in 1995, he now says he doesn’t want to be subjected to cruel and/or unusual punishment by lethal injection. Condemned inmate William Castillo filed his appeal and his case is expected to take some time to wind its way back up through the state and federal court systems. It will be probably be the test case to review Nevada’s method of lethal injection to see if it complies with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave the green light for continuing such methods of execution throughout the country.

* Nevada wildlife officials say recent wildfires, drought and a harsh winter leads them to request that the number of hunting tags this year for elk, deer and antelope be reduced because of observed low survival rates for fawns and calves. They say it has caused a 23% decline in those targeted populations. A decision on the request for reduced numbers of hunting tags will be made this weekend.

* Over a hundred Fernley homeowners have filed suit in federal court to keep the Bureau of Reclamation and the Truckee Conservation and Irrigation District from filling the canal that runs through Fernley and which broke earlier this year sending a torrent of water through their homes. The suit claims that that although the hole is fixed, the canal itself could break again. Neither the TCID or the BOR would comment on the suit.

* Specially trained dogs are being used this summer to inspect boats being put into the waters of Lake Tahoe in an effort to head off the spread of a very disruptive mussel that has been migrating from lake to lake throughout the west, causing problems as it goes. It’s called the Zebra Mussel and has already showed up in the waters of lakes in California. If it gets a toe-hold in Lake Tahoe, experts say it could badly damage Tahoe’s fragile ecosystem, which would include disrupting the lake’s food system and killing off native species of plants and fish. The mussels hitch a ride on boats taken from one lake and put into another. Random searches for the troublesome mussel will begin on May 16th. The “mussel sniffing dogs” are said to be quite good at detecting even just one of the tiny creatures that can cause big damage.