The most intense stories of the year, part 1

Tons to cover and not a lot of space, so here is my year in review, part one, featuring my five most compelling stories from January through July, in no particular order.

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5. In June, the Weekly linked a bizarre Political Action Committee formed to thrash Sheriff Scott Miller to the Monterey County Public Defenders Association, whose representatives said they had no idea what their $2,500 donation was actually going for. We also linked the PAC to a phone either borrowed or stolen from a Democratic political consultant and a trio of former Democratic Central Committee members. All of this served to prove a few things: The Monterey County sheriff’s election (which Miller lost) is the dirtiest in recent memory, and the local Democrats need to get their house in order.

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4. In July, I stop off at a hearing of a convicted rapist who’s on trial for murdering his cell mate. I was interested mostly in checking out what security was going to be like, because if there’s a guy with nothing left to lose, that would be David Gomez. When Gomez realized there was a reporter in the courtroom, he turned and said, “Tell them there were no kids. Tell them,” he said. “There was no charge of child molestation. It’s a clerical error.” And it turned out he was right. While the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had been reporting Gomez was a child molester, he was not. It was a clerical error. In 20-plus years of doing this, it’s the single strangest encounter I’ve had in court.

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3. King City descended into chaos when, in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 25, District Attorney’s investigators, FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies rolled down Highway 101 and arrested one-third of the King City Police Department on charges that varied from minor corruption to major corruption. The major corruption part involves one officer who pulled over cars driven by mostly undocumented drivers, seized those vehicles, threw the towing business to the acting police chief’s brother and took one car for himself for about every 15 he ordered towed. That they got away with it for as long as they did is shameful evidence that nobody was really minding the store down there. That most of the officers involved are going to trial early next year means more will come to light soon.

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2. In February, the Monterey Herald ousted veteran editor Royal “Pain” Calkins, my frenemy and a fierce competitor, in a move that Santa Cruz Sentinel Editor Don Miller described as a massive reorganization of Digital First Media-owned papers. By massive reorganization, I don’t think Miller meant “it’s all falling apart,” but here we are. Calkins was followed out the door, in short order, by music writer Mac McDonald, investigative reporter Virginia Hennessey and the walking encyclopedia of city government information, Larry Parsons, who one day decided he’d just had it.

The Herald is now edited by Miller and the paper’s once-award-winning opinion page is run by the Chamber of Commerce. (Not quite, but close enough.) Two rumors for the new year, one of which might prove true: Salinas Californian-owner Gannett Inc. is interested in buying the Herald, and both the Herald and Sentinel are going to be folded into a massive regional edition run by the San Jose Mercury News.

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1. In December 2013, U.S. Air Force poster boy and Naval Postgraduate School student Capt. Nicolas Aquino was hunting around the yard of his Carmel Woods home for a package UPS said it had delivered. That prompted a neighbor to call police to report a suspicious Hispanic man in a hoodie creeping around Carmel Woods. Aquino was tackled, detained, and almost had his career ruined. His “crime?” He questioned the right of law enforcement to demand his identification while he was on his own property; he stepped into his yard to ask a sheriff’s deputy why he was there.

Then in April, just 18 days after the Weekly first reported the lame-brained case against Aquino, Monterey County prosecutors withdrew a charge against him of obstructing a peace officer. Aquino hired a litigator and has sued. The case is working its way through the system.

Mary Duan is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan