Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss was arrested for drunk driving on Oct. 1, according to court records.

The arrest took place on the 2000 block of Calvert Street NW, on or near the Duke Ellington Bridge between Woodley Park and Adams Morgan. Records contain few further details regarding the circumstances of the arrest.

Strauss, an attorney by trade, was charged with driving under the influence, driving while intoxicated, and operating while impaired—three offenses with different definitions under District law, yet routinely charged together after drunk-driving arrests. According to the court documents, this is the first time Strauss has been charged with DWI. He is due to be arraigned on Thursday, Nov. 6.

It’s not his first arrest, though. In July 2005, he was detained on a disorderly conduct charge after “confronting officers as they arrested another man,” according to a contemporary account. Regarding that arrest, Strauss told a previous LL, “I was just trying to be helpful,” Strauss says. “I was asking basic questions like ‘Where are you taking him?’”

Strauss, a Democrat, is seeking, and is likely to win, a third six-year term in next Tuesday’s election. LL left a phone message for him last night; Strauss sent a text message in response asking about the nature of the inquiry. LL sent a text message back telling Strauss he was asking about the Oct. 1 arrest. No response came.

Readers may wonder: Why is LL breaking this story a month after the incident in question and days before the election? That’s because LL was informed of the court proceeding by an anonymous tipster on Wednesday. Strauss’ name had been entered into the Superior Court docket system as “STRAVSS,” which would have foiled any earlier attempts at due diligence.

At 8:25 p.m., several police officers, in uniform and plain clothes, surround a woman. They don’t just surround her, they huddle over her. It is impossible to see this woman. All you can do is hear her. She is screaming.

“I’m going in the street!” she bellows. This is her plea. She has a right to it.

Up the street is her brother. He is behind police tape. He lies motionless at 11th and Harvard Streets NW. He is wearing a red jacket and blue jeans and sneakers. He is dead. Someone shot him, according to police.

The sister tries to wriggle free. She is not wearing a shirt. All she has on is a black bra. A cop grabs her and holds her. He hugs her. “I will stay here with you,” he pleads. D.C. Police Department Chief Cathy Lanier stands nearby, close as she can to the mass of officers, and the sister.

After a brief moment of calm, the sister breaks free from the police and runs. It is cold and blustery. Crowds have gathered at two of the intersection’s four points. The sister doesn’t care that she is only wearing a bra. She dashes down Girard. The officers follow and attempt to pull her back in, to pull her close, to calm her down.

A woman takes in the scene just behind the yellow tape. She says the man lying up there–that was her best friend. She says she works at the group home just up Girard. The man’s family lives a few doors down. “He was a good friend,” she says. He was 39. He liked the Redskins. “He’s just a sweet person,” she adds. That’s all she can say at the moment.

It is 8:35 p.m.

A man comes up to Lanier. He is dressed in a track suit. He has a puffy goatee. They talk for a brief moment in the middle of the intersection. He just tells her this: “She is crazy.”

A few moments later, the decedent’s mother arrives and heads straight for her son. She has to be held back by police and bystanders. She pleads her case. She jumps up in the air. She claps. Her shock is uncontrollable and heartbreaking. She is screaming.

Lanier comes over and puts her arms around and escorts her to a police cruiser. The mom takes the passenger seat.

Lanier crouches next to her and talks. She gets a small miracle: laughter.

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Via the Cleveland Park message board, a Porter Street resident warns:

“During the past several years, vehicles belonging to my wife and I were vandalized while parked behind our Porter Street house, on either Quebec Place or Rowland Place. On Halloween Eve in 2006, my wife’s car was egged pretty well…

And in 2007, my motorcycle got more of the same (despite being covered), damaging the paint and cracking the windshield (and resulting in a faint “burned omelet” smell when I rode it, no
matter how hard I cleaned it). Both times, it happened behind our house on Quebec Place — but if memory serves, others reported similar incidents elsewhere as well.

So this year, I’m parking elsewhere — downtown if need be. Just thought I’d remind folks in Cleveland Park that we do have a history of this taking place, and that you may want to take similar precautions on Friday night.”

One of the oldest and most frustrating murder cases in recent District history may finally come to a sad end. In June 1996, Shaquita Bell disappeared two weeks before she was scheduled to testify against her boyfriend, Michael Dickerson, in an assault case. Detectives had spent tons of time and resources attempting to find her body and put away Dickerson.

The case finally started to take serious shape last year and early this year with Dickerson’s arrest on murder charges. You can read the original charging documents here.

The Washington Post reports today that Dickerson has agreed to help law enforcement find Bell’s remains.

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It only took about a couple hours before folks started calling Ashley Todd a liar. (Read the comments to her posts.)

Is this the Susan Smith Effect?

Whatever happened in that Pittsburgh parking lot, even if that’s nothing at all, today’s gonna be an uglier day because of it.

UPDATE, 11:25 a.m.: Ashley Todd has now made the comments section of her blog private. At last glance, basically every commenter was calling the attack a hoax. Todd’s second to last post, logged about the time of the alleged mugging, if the clock on the site is to be believed: “Oh the blog I will be making soon…”

UPDATE, 1:51 P.M.: Ashley Todd’s blog has been removed from the Republican staffer site. Looks like she never saw a big black attacker after all. This is a girl in trouble.

Steven Posniak, a former ANC commissioner representing the American University Park neighborhood, faces federal charges for setting the 2007 Ham Lake fire in Minnesota, the state’s largest and most expensive forest fire in 80 years.

The indictment alleges Posniak, 64, who notably fought Metro bus cutbacks in Tenleytown, was camping and left his campsite while trash was still burning. The Ham Lake fire burned more than 70,000 acres and about 150 structures, including cabins and homes, valued at $4 million. According to Pioneer Press, the fire cost more than $11 million to put out.

Reached at his home today, Posniak said he could not speak publicly about what happened and referred calls to his lawyer in Minnesota, Mark Larsen. Larsen has told the Minnesota press his client will plead not guilty.

Posniak, who is listed as a retired computer programmer and went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, will attend a federal arraignment in Minneapolis, St. Paul, or Duluth, according a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota. A trial date will be set after that.

The indictment, according to reports, alleges Posniak gave “false, factitious and fraudulent information” to the U.S. Forest Service in telling officers he camped at Cross Bay Lake and came across the out-of-control fire at Ham Lake.

Drought conditions helped fuel the fire; hundreds were evacuated and it closed the popular Gunflint Trail into Ontario for weeks. No one was injured. Larsen says Posniak has been cooperating with federal officials in the investigation and will continue to do so.

According to a mayoral press release, an arrest has been made in the beating death of Tony Randolph Hunter, the gay man assaulted on Sept. 7 near BeBar in Shaw. Last week, police announced they were seeking 18-year-old Robert Hannah in connection with the crime. No word yet on whether Hannah is the arrestee. Presser at 2 p.m.

D.C. is a crap town for public records. Especially police reports. I moved here from Seattle, where I could go down to the station and peruse stacks of reports. The Stranger, where I worked, based a weekly column off the documents, which were all written out with long, descriptive narratives. In D.C., there ain’t no way a reporter could just page through the reports. I asked my first day here and I think the clerk nearly climbed over the counter to slap me. Some reporters listen to the scanner all night and follow cruisers to crime scenes, but it’s highly unlikely you’ll get the good blotter fodder (you need the back story, which you don’t get behind police tape) unless you just get lucky and the police decide to issue a press release. Or unless you’re Jason Cherkis.

So, like many reporters, I’ve turned to the various neighborhood and police district list-serves. They send out brief arrest summaries, which range from vague to vaguely specific. The Fifth District is pretty bad:

Homicide Knife, Cutting Instrument

SHIFT: DAY 10/10/2008 0700 0707

1700 B/O 3RD ST NW, Street/Highway/Road 501 08144117

The Third District is better:

C-1 REPORTS THAT S-1 THRU S-3 APPROACHED HER BY THE LISTED LOCATION. S-1 STATED “THAT’S AN UGLY DOG, I SHOULD BEAT YOUR DOG.” S-1 THEN STATED “GIVE ME ALL THE MONEY IN YOUR POCKET.” C-1 RAN AWAY FROM THE SUSPECTS. SUSPECTS FLED IN AN UNKNOWN DIRECTION.

Pretty good stuff. But still not enough info to go find more info, and of course the police would explain that as protecting the privacy rights of the victims. (Although I bet most of the victims wouldn’t mind talking to a reporter about how the police handled their situation — another reason why the reports should be made available, if not necessarily widely disseminated.)

Anyway, I’ve noticed something interesting in the discussions on these list serves that gives me a little hope. Residents have been lambasting the police for not putting enough info in the online summaries. So when a guy from Cleveland Park sent a message to the list about getting robbed by two men in an SUV while he biked home one night, and mentioned that police had told him there had been a string of similar incidents, someone else emailed asking for more info. That got a response from the district commander–who basically said there had been other robberies–who in turn got criticized by another resident for not alerting the community sooner. This is the same district commander who has never returned my phone calls.

I haven’t noticed much push back from local media to get better access to public documents. Maybe in this case the people will do our job for us.

Factcheck.org has a nice rundown of all the facts the candidates got wrong in the debate last night. McCain’s creative interpretations of his “tax cuts” and health care plans are old hat. But what’s this about eBay? McCain said 1.3 million Americans make their living off the online marketplace. Wrong. The number, according to Factcheck, is more like 724,000, and only “some” of those folks rely on the site for their primary income. What really bugs me though, is the idea that all those people are somehow leading the way for a brighter future. Sure, they’re making a living, but many of them are doing it selling stolen goods.

The New York Times reported on recent testimony before a House subcommittee on a bill that would force eBay to crack down on e-fencers. A loss prevention expert from the National Retail Federation told legislators that eBay was like crack for vulnerable, would-be thieves (not his analogy).

“When they run out of “legitimate merchandise,” they begin to steal intermittently, many times for the first time in their life, so they can continue selling online… At least one major retailer has reported that 80 percent of thieves interviewed in their eBay theft cases admit that selling stolen property on eBay is their sole source of income. In fact, many of the eBay sellers have used those proceeds to obtain mortgages, new cars and even boats.”

Sounds like a great strategy for job creation.

Normally I don’t get too riled up about CNN errors, but the headline “‘Power Ranger’ faces death penalty in yacht killings” taints the entire series. The subject of the article, Skylar Deon, who is charged with the 2005 murder of Jackie and Tommy Hawks, was not a Power Ranger. He had a non-speaking, non-recurring bit part in one episode of the show (which was never renewed because the poor sap was incapable of memorizing lines).

Why does this clarification warrant a blog post at City Desk? Because the Power Rangers were the only friends I had between 1993 and 1995, and their untarnished legacy of fighting big-ass aliens while succeeding as high school students is the only thing I hold sacred.

Last week, I wrote about the extra steps taken by Judge Erik P. Christian to keep his private life private. He had his own domestic relations case sealed. Christian isn’t the most popular judge on the D.C. Superior Court, and he has a reputation among many of the attorneys I spoke with for making unreasonable demands. Here’s the PDF of his explanation for demanding a doctor’s note from a witness who wanted to tape her testimony before a trial began, since she was dying of cancer. The woman’s brother said the experience made the last days of her life “miserable.”

Here’s what he said when he first asked for the note:

“When you say any day, any day for colon cancer, certain cancers, can be tomorrow or next year.”

The prosecutor explained that doctors believe the witness would not survive another month. Christian replied:

“Well are you just saying she won’t make it another year, another month? When will she die?”

The witness died before the trial began, without taping her deposition. The defense agreed to allow the use of her grand jury testimony.

Side note: There’s an interesting comment on my first post quoting from an appellate judge who took the time to lay into Christian for handing down a 12-year sentence for a drug possession charge. The sentence was well in excess of the guidelines for violent crimes and armed drug dealing.

Last week, Todd Metrokin, whose brutal beating on Kalorama Road we wrote about, told City Desk police were close to making an arrest in his case. Today, via the Washington Blade, we learned one unnamed juvenile has been charged.

We also reported Metrokin has been involved in the re-forming of the advocacy group Gays and Lesbians Opposed to Violence. Chris Farris, who originally blogged about the attack on Metrokin and two of his friends on thenewgay.net and is one of the organizers of GLOV, tells the Blade:

GLOV plans to follow the prosecution of the juvenile suspect arrested in the case and will look into the city’s juvenile laws, which prohibit the release of any information about criminal prosecution of juveniles. Under existing law, authorities cannot disclose whether a juvenile arrested in a crime is convicted of the crime and, if convicted, what sentence he or she receives from a juvenile court judge.

I have a message out to Metrokin and will update with his response.

This item only made it into the Washington Times’ briefs. The short story had these details: Colin Hatch, a 23-year-old Capitol Heights church deacon gets sentenced to 14 years in prison for sexually assaulting a DC prostitute at gunpoint.

Pretty bad. Here’s what they left out: Hatch was two weeks from taking a new job as a Baltimore City Police Officer. And his method of assault was particularly horrific.

According to a sentencing memorandum released by the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Hatch picked up his victim one night last November, near the intersection of 10th and K Streets NW. She got in his car, they agreed on a price ($100, for sex) and drove somewhere more private. The victim told police Hatch seemed like a nice guy at first. But when she climbed into the back seat, he turned mean. He pulled out a gun and demanded oral sex. From the memorandum:

“Once he became erect, the defendant forced [the victim] to engage in vaginal sex. During the course of the sexual assault, the defendant lost his erection and forced [the victim] to perform oral sex on him a second time so that he could regain his erection.”

Amazingly, he allowed the young woman to escape once he had finished. She immediately called the cell phone of a police officer she knew, with no answer. She called another prostitute to put out a warning. Then a friend picked her up in his car and together they trailed Hatch, who continued to cruise the area for another 15 minutes at least. All the while, the victim was trying to reach police, who finally stopped Hatch an hour and a half after the assault. Asked if he had a gun, Hatch copped to a .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun in his glove box. He didn’t have a permit to transport the gun. He said he’d meant to go to the firing range, but went to two malls, Applebee’s and a friends house to play video games instead. He said the gun had slipped his mind.

At 2 a.m. he decided to go clubbing with friends in DC. Problem was, all the clubs were closing. Then, Hatch told police, the victim flagged him down as he drove by. He didn’t realize she was a prostitute. He didn’t deny they had sex, or that a payment was eventually discussed. That might have been hard given the presence of DNA evidence.

Hatch wans”t worried about how his arrest might impact his life, at least not his role as a deacon at church. In a telephone conversation recorded from his jail cell, he told a friend: “It wasn’t like I was playing around in the church … this is something that happened on my own personal time that I just got in trouble for.”

Hatch hadn’t yet completed the background examination for his job offer from the Baltimore police. I wonder how they test for selective morality.

A few months back, I wrote a story about crews in Shaw and the murder of Deon Peoples in January 2007. Two defendants were being held in connection with the crime. Ben Barringer had been arrested last summer; Jeffrey Bright was taken into policy custody in April. As I was wrapping up the piece, I spoke with a lawyer involved in the case, who said that he believed the murder trial would take place late summer. Well, how time flies! Here we are post-Labor Day Weekend.

Time to check in and see if any sentences had been handed down. I called Leah Gurowitz at the D.C. Superior Courthouse. The answer, it turned out, was a straight “no,” though both defendants’ cases had advanced.

On May 30, Barringer pled guilty to conspiracy and carrying a pistol without a license outside a home. He will be sentenced on September 26 at 2 p.m. As for Bright, his jury trial is scheduled for February 2, 2009. It was originally set for August 11, but mid-July his lawyer asked for it to be continued at a later date.

So, any chatter about crew members re-entering the community should be pushed off at least for a while.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

From Washington City Paper Publisher Amy Austin comes word that a driver who delivers copies of Washington City Paper to streetboxes around the city was held up today at North Capitol Street and Florida Avenue. The driver lost his vehicle, cell phone, and wallet in the incident. We will be aggressively updating this story.