NOVATOWNHALL

About 530 residents showed up at Park View High School in Sterling tonight for an ad hoc emergency public meeting to address the recent crime wave in the community.

The Loudoun County Government was represented by Sheriff Steve Simpson and Supervisors Susan Buckley, Andrea McGimsey, Eugene Delgaudio, Stevens Miller and Scott York. (Supervisors Lori Waters and Kelly Burk, whose districts don’t overlap with the “Sterling” area, were also present but not on the dais.)

Supervisor York did an excellent job moderating what was, undeniably, a harsh situation. He took some shots from an audience that was clearly on edge and often near combustible.

But Sheriff Simpson had to absorb more criticism than any other party and he handled it well, if perhaps too impassively. I think Simpson is a good guy and good sheriff but an incredibly tone deaf public official. In personal conversations Simpson has expressed to me he understands the problems we face in Sterling. He should do a much better job explaining how he “feels our pain” and is committed to doing more to solve our problems. Standing in a large auditorium full of people on the verge of rage over the crime problem here, he talked at length about how the Sheriff’s Office is doing all it can do and more than most people realize.

This was, to put it mildly, not the information the audience was seeking. Consequently Simpson was literally shouted down a couple times during his remarks by audience members demanding to know what more would be done, and York had to step in and restore order. At one point a gang task force deputy went to the podium to explain in more detail what was being done in the investigations that was not showing up in the news.

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When the government refuses to do its job and the citizens are left helpless, with no legal means to fend for themselves, you have a crisis of confidence. That, I submit, is the situation in Sterling.

Spend a few minutes perusing the most recent reports at the LCA Blog and you’ll get a vivid picture of what I am talking about. (Go to Sept 22 and scroll down).

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The new category here is Sterling Crime Wave. Click on it frequently to see what is happening to our neighborhoods in eastern Loudoun County.

When the enlightened beings of the mainstream media declared Sterling Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio off-base several months ago for saying that our community was at risk of becoming a cesspool because of illegal immigration, local liberals parroted the politically correct line. They ridiculed Delgaudio.

What out-of-touch idiots they have been proven to be.

Sterling, Virginia is a suburban community which at first glance looks like every other suburb you have ever seen. But just beneath the surface lies a festering problem which becomes evident if you spend more than five minutes observing our neighborhoods.

Root of the problem? No zoning enforcement.

Our ineffectual Department of Building and Development allows illegal boarding houses for illegal aliens to operate without any threat of law enforcement whatsoever.

Lock and load, neighbors: the Loudoun County government has left us to fend for ourselves.

Following are the fruits of our feckless Department of Building and Development.

Here is last night’s headline:

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Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio just sent a notice that Sterling rape suspect Martin Jose Morales-Mancia is now in the custody of the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.

Looking forward to more info about this guy.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is investigating two violent crimes that occurred in Sterling late Saturday evening into the early morning hours of Sunday.

Shortly before 10 PM Saturday Loudoun Sheriff’s Deputies responded to the 300 block of North Argonne Avenue for two victims suffering from gunshot wounds. An 18-year-old male and 17-year-old female were airlifted to INOVA Fairfax Hospital where they are being treated for life-threatening-injuries. The investigation is currently in the preliminary stages but investigators believe the two victims were possibly targeted.

Around midnight on Sunday deputies responded to the 1500 block of North Amelia Street for a victim of a stab wound. The victim, a 25-year-old male, was located in the street suffering from a stab wound. He was airlifted to INOVA Fairfax Hospital where he is being treated for life-threatening-injuries. Investigators are working to determine where the assault occurred.

Anyone with information about either of these incidents is asked to call the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigations Division at 703-777-0475. If the caller wishes to remain anonymous they are asked to call Loudoun Crime Solvers at 703-777-1919. If the information leads to an arrest and indictment the caller could be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1000.

What do you know, another incident in Sterling with a person menacing an elderly woman, and the only public announcement sent out by e-mail which only a fraction of Sterling residents receive. Excluding me, for instance, although I am a “tech guy” I am not on the list for the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office announcements. So it is safe to assume a lot of people in Sterling will get no information about this incident just like they got no information about last week’s incident.

Well, here is what happened last night, in the words of the woman who was at the center of the incident:

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Outrage.

The Loudoun County government is screwed, and needs to be eviscerated, burned down, and replaced. Something happened in Sterling Thursday night which should make every resident of Loudoun County wonder what the hell is going on with our Sheriff’s Office and our zoning enforcement “team”.

I will tell you in the next paragraph what actually happened, from conversations with someone who happens to know the victim, and below the fold is what the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office deigns to reveal. Please notice the differences.

Late Thursday night, August 28 (early Friday morning, August 29) around midnight, a large, Spanish-speaking male knocked down the door at a house on Ironwood Road in Sterling, occupied by a woman in her early 70s. The man had a very large knife. He shouted at the woman “I am going to cut you to bits! I am going to cut you to bits!” He slashed her numerous times with the knife. He beat her, and forced her into a position where he was poised to rape her, but at the last moment suffered a “performance” problem and could not complete the act. He fled. The woman called 911, but by the time law enforcement showed up the attacker could not be found.

The neighborhood in which this incident occurred, in the area of Ironwood Road, Redwood Road, and Greenthorne Avenue, is one of the worst-hit in Sterling by illegal aliens. I have spent some time driving through the area over the past couple years and I can attest that it is terrible, with numerous residences displaying the signs of illegal flophouses, including screen doors propped open (signifies “rooms for rent”), lots of cars per residence, plenty of signs of MS-13 activity, and a generally crappy atmosphere. I am told by people familiar with zoning enforcement complaints that the area has been the subject of many overcrowding complaints sent to the completely non-functional Loudoun County Department of Building and Development (aka, the Black Hole), and, as we have established, it is apparently just another section designated for Loudoun County Government-sponsored blight.

From everything I have seen, submitting an overcrowding complaint from Sterling is pointless because Terry Wharton’s department gets paid to do absolutely nothing. Here’s an interesting question about Wharton’s “Department”: How much could we save if we just fire them all - and I mean all? Let’s have no “Department” and, on the rare occasion such a “Department” would actually need to do some work, we could hire subcontractors. It might not be perfect, but it also would not cost us any money to have sections of our neighborhood allowed to be cesspools. I mean, if cesspools are deemed necessary, then let’s not be paying the salaries of Loudoun County “zoning enforcement” staff. Not add insult to injury, as it were.

But while we can and should point fingers at Terry Wharton’s miserable farce of a government agency, and by extension we should ask what the hell our county supervisors and county administrator are doing by allowing the blight to fester here, and why the citizens have not yet marched with torches and pitchforks on all of the above, the biggest question of all is:

What is our Sheriff’s Office doing? Or rather, what are they NOT doing?

Or further: Who the hell is letting the LCSO get away with what they are getting away with?

I point you to below the fold - the “alert” helpfully provided by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office. This is all the citizens have seen, and frankly the only citizens who have seen it are those who are on the e-mail list (I am not) and those who happen to read the report in whatever local paper happened to reprint the news release. It is a completely whitewashed version of the incident, which almost no one in Sterling will even get to read. It indicates the attacker “spoke with an accent.”

Hey, friends, that is a bit inaccurate. In fact, it attempts to erase from the incident report the basic fact the attacker was a Hispanic in an area where Hispanic criminals might well be considered a key problem in the neighborhood. It also tones down the severity of the attack.

Bottom line? In my view, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is attempting to hide the facts of the incident.

In short, no one - no one official in Loudoun County - cares. What a fricking disgrace. Hey, friends: Maybe now you understand why we wanted Greg Ahlemann to be our Sheriff.

The neighborhood area beset by illegals, and a vicious sexual attack by a Hispanic male, are facts that are being swept under the rug. The LCSO is not doing ANY community outreach to warn the residents of Sterling Park. The local media are NOT investigating the incident - they never managed to get the info I have, which is hard to believe.

Why is the Loudoun County Government not conducting a major communications offensive to alert residents that they need to be on the watch for Hispanic males who may be trying to do home invasions? Why are the LCSO and “zoning enforcement” allowed to not do their jobs?

Our county government is broken. We need to fire all of them and start over again.
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We have all heard the statistic from Sheriff Simpson while on the campaign stump, that “1 in 20 gang members arrested are illegal residents”. This comment was made on October 13, 2007, at the candidates debate held in Leesburg. This statistic was recently quoted by the Honorable Stevens Miller at the July 22 Public Hearing. Mr. Miller seems sold on this, but I am not.

The Center for Immigration Studies has a very detailed report available which provides some detailed estimates and statistics on Northern Virginia gangs :

A significant portion of gang members in Virginia have violated our immigration laws.

Sizable illegal alien population facilitates gang settlement and recruitment in Virginia.

15-40% of caseload is estimated to be illegal or criminal aliens

The Report (Powerpoint)

If you do not have access to Powerpoint, you may view it in html via google.

After seeing this presentation, I had some serious reservations about this 1 in 20 number. Either Loudoun is very unique among our neighboring cities and counties, or this number is simply wrong.

In August of 2007, LCSO issued a press release which discussed the relationship between ICE and LCSO :

“Our continuing working partnership with ICE through the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force has led to a decrease in violent gang-related crimes in Loudoun County,” said Simpson. “It has been very successful,” he added.

Is this saying on one hand, that a partnership with ICE is a worthwhile endeavor, while on the campaign trail, two months later, a statement is made that pursuing gang members in conjunction with ICE is a waste of resources ?

This same press release also states :

In August, an operation targeting Criminal Street gangs’ in Loudoun County netted 13 arrests. Members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Loudoun Sheriff’s Gang Intelligence Unit worked together to locate subjects who were suspected of being actively involved in firearms and narcotics trafficking, money laundering and violent criminal activities. Four of those charged in the operation were held by federal authorities based on their immigration status.

“Our continuing working partnership with ICE through the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force has led to a decrease in violent gang-related crimes in Loudoun County,” said Simpson. “It has been very successful,” he added. In the first six months of 2007 there were 10 violent gang-related cases in Loudoun. There were 37 the previous year.

For the 1 in 20 statistic to be true, with these four August arrests alone, we would need to have had a minimum of 80 gang members arrested in Loudoun at the time of the October debate. To verify this would require hard data from LCSO, as searches of the local newspapers do not show anything close to 80 gang member arrests. Those repeating this statistic, should either back it up with hard facts, or write it off as campaign rhetoric spoken during the heat of debate.

More recently, Sheriff Simpson was quoted in the Washington Post about the recent LCSO partnership with ICE :

Simpson called the partnership with ICE a “big tool for us,” especially in dealing with gangs operating in Loudoun.

“I know when we work with gang members, a lot of times we got through a number of different identifications and different names and different aliases and that type of thing before you get to actually who they are,” Simpson said. “And if you don’t have a way of getting into this system to find out if they have ever been arrested in California, you may never know that information.”

It is obvious Sheriff Simpson has distanced himself from the comments he made at the October debate. One would think Stevens Miller would focus less on those comments and more on what LCSO has done since then.

Our Sheriff’s office appears to have moved on toward making some real progress, but Mr. Miller appears to be stuck in October of 2007. Where do we want Loudoun to be, focused on the future, or with Mr. Miller, stuck in the past ?

Cry me a frickin’ river:

Javier Martinez, 46, a construction worker who lives in Manassas, said that a year ago he was able to send up to $1,500 a month to his wife and two children in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Now he can only send about $500 a month. His work laying tiles has slowed down, and he can no longer find renters for the three houses he owns as immigrants have left Prince William County because of the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigrants.

(emphasis added)

In a nutshell there it is. The core of citizen outrage over illegal immigration in Northern Virginia is that the illegals are gaming the system to get away with stuff that law abiding residents would be penalized for. You can’t fight city hall - unless you happen to be facilitating the presence of illegal aliens, in which case city hall gives you a stack of get out of jail free cards, when you actually should be thrown in jail.

Buying single family homes, subdividing them into boarding houses and renting out floor space is a pretty fantastic investment arrangement which has also been against the law long before any Mexican entrepreneurs started doing it here. But our local government has decided to allow it to happen with the surge of illegal aliens into our communities.

In case you are new to the area, here is a basic primer: Boarding houses in neighborhoods are considered a bad thing because the boarders tend to behave badly.

And as the Washington Post geniuses did so elegantly and unwittingly for us two years ago, they once again document how foreign nationals have been allowed to thumb their noses at our local laws and proceed to degrade our neighborhoods.

Multiply this tile worker by a few hundred and you will suddenly understand exactly what has happened in eastern Loudoun County. You will also understand why Sterling Park residents are not only asking “where is our Board of Supervisors?” but also where the hell are our Sheriff’s Office and County Prosecutor, and why the hell Terry Wharton and his entire department are still employed.

Yes, my friends, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …

The LCA group I reported on last week tonight sent notice they have begun growing from a forum to a blog, and it is a pretty impressive one at that.

What a concept: get a bunch of members of the Loudoun community to talk about what is happening in their neighborhoods, and end up with bucketloads of interesting commentary. They seem to be going in a number of different directions, but that is probably a good thing - bottom up rather than top down, and no telling where it will finally land.

My supervisor speaks out:

Our town is outraged that they don’t get with the program.

What a great one-line summary of the problem in eastern Loudoun County.

This recently came across via e-mail; Loudoun Community Association:

Important government functions meant to protect our quality of life, such as zoning enforcement, are not being implemented even to the degree permitted by existing laws…

Please consider this forum an ongoing “open letter” to our local government officials.

That reminds me, tomorrow night (Tuesday, July 22, 6:30 pm) there will be a follow up public hearing in which the Loudoun County staff and entire Board of Supervisors will be at Park View High School to deliver the findings of the previous series of public hearings held in Sterling and Potomac Districts, and also to hear public opinions. I believe people get to speak for three minutes. It is an important chance to have the whole Board hear what you have to say - say, about zoning enforcement in eastern Loudoun - and not have to drive out to Leesburg to get it done.

So be at Park View tomorrow evening if you can.

The preliminary findings of the county staff are linked at the Loudoun Community Association Web site, go check them out. I won’t have a chance to read them for a while because of work but plan to eventually give my opinion. It will be interesting to see which public comments at the previous seven hearings the county staff heard.

Have you ever wondered where all the dead are?  I know that when the physical body dies that it can be burned, buried, mulched or feed (unintentional…..maybe not) for “others”.  Now the spirit (for those that believe) lives on for eternal life or damnation.  Maybe even a personal ghost or two while waiting for resurrection.  Absolutely NO ONE comes back as a tree! 

There are cemetaries everywhere and even Arlington National is having to expand its grounds.  People are looking for alternatives-espescially the “greeners”.  Because I am old and am still making my “peace” with the creator (which, in itself, is a lifelong chore for me) I don’t necessarily want to be reminded about my vulnerability and inevitable end.  Mind you, I worked in a bone orchard for many years and it has no phasing on me whatsoever.  However, what I want to know is this:

Are all those memorials along the road right-of-ways and in the medians really gravesites?  If not, why are they there?  I won’t get into statistics but I guarantee that at least 12 people die everyday in this counrty and I probably don’t know them.  I don’t know most of the people in the cemetaries.  If I did and I really wanted to talk to a piece of marble or a dirt spot, then that is where I would go to do it. 

Death is inevitable (physical).  Sometimes it is tragic-sometimes not.  Regardless of how or where, if you want to memorialize someone then name a building or street or park after them.  Create a schlorship fund in their rememberance.  Whatever you feel you must do, do it in a way that does not get in my face or infringe on my quality of life because I don’t want to see YOUR memorial for Pop, Pepe or Pooch on the right-of-ways that I am taxed for up-keep!  It kinda bugs me just like when your favorite TV show gets done with 5 minutes of commercials, then rejoins the show while you are subjected to MORE commercials on the bottom third of the screen (especially when you can’t read the subtitles because of the commercial).  These memorials don’t belong there.  Yes, as a taxpayer AND an activist, I don’t believe….I know they don’t belong there. Period.  More signage eyesore in my book.  Put the memorials where they belong-in your locker, on the mantle, on the dash of your car, on your livingroom or bedroom wall (or bathroom for you sicko’s), in your yard.  Heck, you can stick them up your a** for all I care.  Just keep the frigin things off the road right-of-ways!!!!  Thanks.

Erica Garman spent the day wheeling around Sterling yesterday, read about it here.