Updated 8:30 AM PDT, Tue, Sep 15, 2009

Meet the Geriatric Bandits: One has a cane, the other needs an oxygen mask. They’re old enough to be your grandfather. This past week, they’ve both robbed banks. And one is still at large.

On Saturday, a man carrying an inhaler or an oxygen tank robbed the San Diego National Bank in La Jolla. The man, wearing a white beret, argyle sweater and sports coat, walked into the bank on Ivanhoe Avenue with a demand note.  In the picture caught by surveillance cameras, he looks to be in his 70s. An oxygen tube appears to hang from his face.

Investigators don’t know if he was armed, but they do know that he got away with some cash. Just look at him – would you stop him?

Then, two days later, another bank robbery. This time, the target was the Bank of America on El Cajon Blvd in City Heights. A 70-year old man — with cane, mind you — walked into the bank with a note and demanded a large amount of cash.

The bank manager attempted to evacuate the bank and lock the suspect inside, but Geriatric Bandit No. 2 was too crafty. Despite dozens of police cars surrounding the bank, he hobbled out of the bank using a side door and tried to hide on the porch of a home a few blocks away.

Police found him lying on the porch and arrested him — maybe his bright red hawaiian shirt gave him away.

First Published: Sep 15, 2009 7:47 AM PDT

San Diego Reader | Pedicab Wars.

Soon after the robbery in Lincoln, an off-duty Thunder Valley Casino employee saw surveillance footage of the suspect in the news media, and recognized the suspect as a recent visitor to the casino. The casino employee drove to work on his day off, and located surveillance video of the suspect and his vehicle, which helped identify the suspect.  Thunder Valley Casino officials provided the information to law enforcement, and Roseville Police investigators located the suspect  at a Roseville hotel. On June 26, Roseville Police investigators conducted surveillance on the hotel and arrested the suspect, Scott Stewart Singewald, 42, of Roseville, without incident.

According to a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release, on September 5, Singewald pleaded guilty before United States District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. to seven counts of bank robbery.  A U.S. Attorney’s Office representative said that on January 9, Singewald was sentenced to 97 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $34,237 in restitution.

Roseville Police Chief Mike Blair said, "This case was a great example of the partnership among  local and federal law enforcement agencies, Roseville Crime Stoppers, and the community.  We are indebted to Thunder Valley Casino for their outstanding cooperation in this case, to their employee who went beyond the call of duty to help identify a criminal, and to Roseville Crime Stoppers for providing the reward." 

The casino employee’s tip lead to Singewald’s arrest and conviction on the following bank robberies:

September 1, 2007, Bank of America, 2400 N. Texas St., Fairfield
May 3, 2008, Bank of the West, 186 Main St., Woodland
May 16, 2008, Central Valley Community Bank, 1919 Howard Rd., Madera
May 24, 2008, Washington Mutual Bank, 2866 W. March Ln., Stockton
June 11, 2008, River City Bank, 3992 Douglas Blvd., Roseville
June 20, 2008, Bank of the West, 3509 El Camino Ave., Carmichael
June 23, 2008, Wells Fargo Bank, 945 Highway 65, Lincoln

The arrest resulted from the casino employee’s tip and a joint investigation by the Roseville and Lincoln Police Departments, and the Sacramento Violent Crimes Task Force, comprised of investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

Per Roseville Crime Stopper’s policy, the tipster remains anonymous. Anyone wanting to provide information about a Roseville-area crime may call Roseville Crime Stoppers at (91…. Roseville Crime Stoppers pays cash rewards for anonymous tips about crimes in Roseville leading to arrest.

– via Rocklin and Roseville Today

via – http://www.siskiyoudaily.com/news/x1589176906/Kirk-Andrus-signs-letter-opposing-cuts

Posted: 12/28/2008 09:58:08 PM PST

LONG BEACH – For the first few months afterward, whenever the doorbell rang, 5-year-old Dieon Rin rushed to answer yelling, "It’s Daddy! Daddy’s home!"

But it never was Daddy. Never will be. The truth is something even Dieon’s mother has been unable to grasp, much less explain to her son – Daddy can never come home again.

The father, Phally Rin, was deported to Cambodia in April for a crime committed more than a decade earlier.

Under U.S. law, he is permanently barred from returning to this country.

Veasana Ath was a carefree young man. He wasn’t a bad kid, just easily swayed by friends. His older sister, Sophea, would scold him and say he’d wind up in trouble one day.

Neither realized how right she

Phally Rin, raised in the United States but born in Cambodia, was deported there in April.

was.

After being convicted of residential burglary in early 2004, Ath was put on a plane in December of that year and sent to Cambodia.

Rin and Ath are part of a growing number of Cambodian-American men who have been deported from the United States to the impoverished land of their birth.

Before deportation, the two had little or no connection to their ‘homeland.’ They fled the ravages of the Cambodian genocide with their families as young children.

They were raised and schooled in the U.S. and yet, from now on, they are forever Cambodian, with no hope of returning to their families and the land where they were raised, but not born.

Rin and Ath are just two of 189 Cambodian- Americans deported for a variety of crimes, ranging from murder and rape to lesser offenses like burglary and crimes committed long ago.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data on removals in

2008, of more than 111,000 criminal removals, 30 percent were for "dangerous drugs" and

17 percent were for violent crimes. The rest were for a range of lesser crimes, including traffic offenses.

Nationally, an estimated 1,700 Cambodian-Americans are under deportation orders and can be rounded

Solony Kong and her sons were forcibly parted from her husband in April, when he was deported to Cambodia for a crime he committed as a youth. Kong says her younger son has been unable to understand that his father, forever barred from the United States, won t be able to return home. (Jeff Gritchen/Staff Photographer)

up at any time. Another 1,700 may be eligible for deportation but have not been charged. Many live in Long Beach, which has the nation’s largest population of Cambodian refugees.

Overall, nearly 350,000 aliens were deported in 2008, the majority to Latin America.

Innocents suffer

The families of Rin and Ath are the innocents caught in the aftermath of laws passed in 1996 that changed U.S. deportation policy and have resulted in a staggering increase in removals of immigrants, who became eligible for deportation when Congress expanded the list of deportable crimes.

ICE has ramped up its efforts to snare criminal aliens by working more closely with prisons and jails to identify incarcerated noncitizens.

It

The Ath family, which gathered years ago in a Thai refugee camp, has been torn by the deportation of Veasana Ath, who was found guilty of burglary in 2004. Ath has no relatives in Cambodia now.

is a strategy endorsed by many in Congress.

"I would suggest that anything that is a felony, any behavior that causes someone to be convicted, is a good reason to deport them," says Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach, whose district includes portions of coastal Long Beach.

Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Long Beach, did not respond to several interview requests.

The Human Rights Watch estimates the deportation of legal immigrants has separated 1.6 million children and adults.

In Long Beach, a large number of Cambodians have been expelled. Their family members, many of them American citizens, are the collateral damage.

Suely Ngouy, the executive director of Khmer Girls In Action, which is involved in immigrant

After the deportation, Dieon Rin kept expecting his daddy to show up at the family’s door.

and refugee rights issues, says deportation has ripped a swath through the local Cambodian community, and crushed an already fragile segment of the population.

"It has devastated families emotionally," says Ngouy, who knows many affected families. "It takes away a son, a daughter, a sibling that has kept together the fabric of what little stability exists."

Since Ath’s deportation, his mother has had a series of health problems, including minor strokes, that the family attributes to stress.

Kim Hok, 61, doesn’t speak much English. But as she listens to the family talk about Veasana, she understands enough. Her eyes fill with tears. She excuses herself from the room and rises unsteadily. The only sound is her cane clicking on the tile floor.

For many families, the shame they feel over deportation leaves them suffering in silence and fear.

Tuy Sobil, a former Crips gang member convicted of armed robbery and deported to Cambodia, has become a success story in Phnom Penh. He has turned around his criminal life and now runs a successful nonprofit called Tiny Toones that helps children from the slums through break dancing, of all things.

Despite his turnaround and newfound celebrity, Tuy’s parents turn down requests for interviews.

"It’s just too hard for them," says Dabson Tuy, Sobil’s brother.

Horrors revisited

Most Cambodian families are refugees from the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970 s that claimed about 2 million lives. Most saw family members, friends, children and adults removed by a ruthless government. They fled to escape that.

"We came here because of U.S. intervention and involvement (in our country)," Ngouy says.

The damage is extensive, she adds – retraumatization from the removals, deepening of poverty from the loss of wage earners and additional mental health problems, such as depression.

"To have to go through this exhausts what little resources they have to survive and it’s affecting the second generation that is supposed to be the hope," Ngouy says.

To her, the longer-term outcome has been to retard the growth of the overall community, because younger Cambodians see little hope and opportunity after witnessing their parents’ struggles.

Lekha Khin, the brother-in-law of Ath, says he lost 50 to 60 family members in the genocide and is one of the few left. It dismays him that the United States is now tearing his family apart.

"The government, they don’t feel nothing," Khin says
.

Sakhoun Yim, Rin’s mother, says she dragged her family for a week through rice paddies and minefields to escape the holocaust before reaching a refugee camp.

In 1997, Yim watched in horror from her porch in central Long Beach as her youngest son, Simona Rin, was shot in the back by a drive-by shooter as he was going to play basketball. A 16-year-old at Wilson High, Simona was described by as a "model kid," with no gang history.

Yim lost another son, Akhara Rin, to street violence in Lowell, Mass., in 1993, and a grandson, Kerry Ya, was fatally shot at a friend’s house in Long Beach in 2003.

And now she has lost Phally.

"I hurt so bad in my heart," she says in a choking voice. "I have two kids killed here. I don’t want to live any more. I want they kill me."

Admittedly, many Cambodian-American deportees led violent lives, spent long stretches in jail and were members of notorious gangs. Several we met in Cambodia said the U.S. has been right to deport them.

Still the one-size-fits-all justice that can treat a petty one-time criminal like Ath the same as a career gangster has many deportation-reform advocates dumbfounded.

"The laws are not only cruel in their rigidity, they are senseless," said Alison Parker, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in a report for that organization. "How do you explain to a child that her father has been sent thousands of miles away and can never come home simply because he forged a check?"

Ghosts of crimes past

In 1989 as a teenager, Rin was in a friend’s car in Massachusetts. When the teens were pulled over, a gun was found in the car and Rin did 18 months in state and INS custody on the gun charge.

He was ordered removed, although it meant little because Cambodia did not accept U.S. deportees.

Rin stayed out of trouble after the arrest and moved with his family to California.

Federal law changed in 1996, in the wake of the first bombing of the World Trade Center and widespread demands for immigration reform.

As part of the overhaul, a long list of crimes was added that made legal immigrants eligible for deportation, including crimes predating the law, such as Phally’s gun charge. In 2002, Cambodia signed an agreement with the U.S. to accept deportable aliens.

Without knowing it, Rin had become deportable.

In 2004, neighbors called police during a domestic dispute in which Rin struck his wife, Solonly Kong. After being charged with spousal battery, Rin learned he was eligible for removal for the 15-year-old gun charge.

In 2007, Rin was fitted him with an ankle bracelet to monitor his movements and ordered to report regularly to immigration offices.

"They just put it on his ankle and said, ‘Maybe in two years we’ll let you go,"’ Kong recalls. "They just lied."

Four years later, Rin was put on a plane to Cambodia.

Kong says Rin was the ideal husband, who stayed home and tended to his family.

"He make one mistake," she said in halting English. "If he was a bad guy, I don’t feel this way. But he was always working seven days to support his family, even if he have an ache he did not stop. Any kind of job he would work."

Dieon is not the only child who is struggling without a father. Kong says she has a 15-year-old son from a previous relationship, who is "out of control" without the influence of a stepfather.

Kong feels lost and confused. She wants to join her husband in Cambodia after her oldest son finishes high school, but doesn’t know how they would survive or what that would do to Dieon.

She wonders if Rin might be allowed to return one day.

"If he could come back in 10 years, I would wait," she says wistfully.

She asks if he can immigrate to Canada or Australia. She has no idea.

In the meantime, she calls Rin almost daily in Cambodia. Most of the conversations end in tears.

"Sometimes I go to places we would always go and I cry," Kong says.

She sees young families. She sees fathers with their sons and it all crashes in on her.

"That’s why I don’t want to go anywhere," she says. "I think I cannot live without him."

Kong says Dieon cries all the time for his daddy.

"I don’t know what to tell him," she says through translation. "He’s too young to understand that Daddy can’t come back."

The last time Dieon saw his father, Rin was at a detention facility in Los Angeles. Dieon was weeping and kicking at the door, demanding that immigration officials let his daddy go.

Kong says she told Dieon his father had to go far away for work. She says when Dieon talked to his father, he pleaded with Rin to come back.

"He was saying ‘I don’t need any toys, Daddy, just please come home,"’ Kong remembers.

Now Dieon often refuses to talk to his father on the phone because he thinks Daddy doesn’t want to live with him.

No more tomorrows

Ath thought there was always tomorrow. While his older siblings worked hard, built businesses, went on to higher education and got jobs in government and private industry, Ath drifted through life.

His older siblings became citizens, but Ath never got around to it. Now, he never will.

It was stupidity that landed Ath in jail, then a series of legal missteps and ignorance that got him deported.

As Ath tells the story, he gave a friend a ride to the home of the friend’s ex-girlfriend. She wasn’t home, but while Ath waited in the car the friend stole her car keys. A neighbor recorded Ath’s license plate.

Ashamed and embarrassed, Ath never told his family. A public defender negotiated a plea for a one-year sentence, of which Ath only had to serve a few months in county jail.

Possible immigration consequences never came up. Ath was transferred to ICE custody after serving his sentence and unwittingly signed documents, written in Khmer, accepting his removal.

Ath was released and thought if he changed his ways and proved he was responsible he would be allowed to stay in the U.S.

"I got a job and I worked every day," Ath says.

One day, however, ICE agents appeared at Ath’s home, cuffed him and soon he was on a chartered flight with other deportees to Cambodia.

Life has been harsh and lonely in Cambodia, Ath says. At first he hung out with other American deportees, but tired of being ostracized. Now he says he spends his time alone.

When Ath first arrived in Cambodia, he found work but later gave up the job because co-workers who were Cambodian nationals harassed him, defaced his locker and slashed the tires to his bike.

After being unemployed for three years and existing off what money his family can spare, Ath says he recently found a job at a hotel. He is in his probationary period with the company.

The loneliness is one of the hardest parts for Ath, who has no relatives in Cambodia and misses his family.

"I just want a chance at least to visit my family," Ath says.

Sophea, 34, is able to keep a cool exterior when talking to reporters about her brother. But as she is walking to them to the gate of her home, the facade cracks.

"I’m just so mad at him for doing this to our family," she says, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

TUESDAY: Some deportees to Cambodia find redemption, others despair and death.

greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, (562)499-1291

By Howard Mintz

Mercury News

Posted: 12/29/2008 12:01:00 AM PST

Click photo to enlarge

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Stephen Manley presides over drug and mental health court.

In Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Stephen Manley’s chaotic courtroom, the bulletin board tells the story.

The thank-you notes. The crayon drawings from grateful children. The Polaroids of former defendants who’ve regained the ability to smile.

They are all telltale signs seldom found elsewhere in the local criminal justice system, where drama and sorrow ordinarily drown out the kind of hope Manley sells inside his courtroom every day. Manley believes in reclamation projects, and he sees hundreds of them each year as he runs one of the most unique courtrooms in California for defendants facing drug addiction and mental illness.

Those defendants, when they succeed in Manley’s program, never forget the judge. And his bulletin board illustrates why he’s become one of the state’s leading judicial experts on rehabilitating convicts instead of cycling them through the prison system.

“I never find it depressing,” said the 67-year-old judge during a recent interview in his chambers. “Every day I see something I haven’t seen before, I see people do something they didn’t think they could do.”

Manley, his signature black patch over his permanently injured left eye, has become a local institution. More than a decade ago, he established groundbreaking specialty courts to serve drug and alcohol-addicted inmates, as well as for those also suffering from mental illness. He has secured millions of dollars in state and federal money to spread the programs across California, earning him a special award this fall from Chief Justice Ronald George. He’s about to unveil another special court for veterans, anticipating an influx of defendants suffering unique problems after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has crisscrossed the state and country, serving as an expert on how to treat defendants stuck in the system because of mental illness and drug abuse. He “graduates” hundreds of defendants each year who succeed in getting their lives in order through drug and mental health treatment, allowing them to avoid more prison time if they meet his rigorous test for success. For addicts facing criminal charges, Manley offers a tough choice — stick with treatment and steer clear of trouble or go back to jail.

“The thing about these courts is Judge Manley having such a huge heart,” said Nona Klippen Hughes, an assistant public defender who supervises lawyers in Manley’s court. “It’s a rare occasion when you have to worry that your client is not going to get the best thing possible.”

On a typical day in Manley’s courtroom, the atmosphere is different from any other corner of the justice system. Ordinary courtroom formalities are nowhere to be found. Defendants chat directly with the judge, who pores over their files with a frequent pause to tell them, “You are doing great!” Each case eventually shifts to a therapy session.

“Alex,” appearing on the judge’s mental health calendar, is getting praise for his treatment program, assuring Manley he’s taking his medication. When he tells the judge he’s playing piano, Manley nearly erupts: “I didn’t know you play the piano!”

As the judge is ready to move to the next case, he points to the ever-present bowl of candy on the defense table. “Have some candy,” he tells Alex. And then the crucial moment for every defendant — everyone in the courtroom, from defendants in county jail garb to sheriffs deputies, applauds, the punctuation mark on any case headed toward success.

“I prosecuted serious offenders most of my career,” said Deputy District Attorney George Chadwick, who sits in the witness box in Manley’s court, serving as the judge’s prosecutorial ear on whether defendants are keeping out of trouble. “I’m very surprised how much I’ve learned about how effective this program is.”

Manley admits he was a “traditional judge” before he launched a drug court in the mid-1990s. An appointee of former Gov. Jerry Brown, he started his career with the usual diet of criminal cases, from routine arraignments to felony trials. But after starting to see the same faces in his court, or in some instances their children, he decided he wanted to get in the business of “changing outcomes.”

He is not, he insists, soft on crime and, in fact, believes jail time is needed to get defendants to buy into treatment to get clean and sober. He initially opposed Proposition 36, which mandates treatment instead of jail for nonviolent first-time drug offenders.

“The idea this is some sort of soft on crime program is nonsense,” Manley said. “It’s harder to do this than go to jail or prison.”

With his courts now herding 1,600 defendants through his programs each year, the judge calls the current budget crunch “an opportunity to be creative.” He sticks to his own mantra, the one he preaches to the dozens of defendants who crowd into his court Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings.

In simple letters, on the courtroom door, a sign reads. “One day at a time.”

Contact Howard Mintz at hmintz@mercurynews.com or (408) 286-0236

a local institution

NAME: Stephen Manley
OCCUPATION: Santa Clara County Superior Court judge
AGE: 67
BACKGROUND: Superior Court judge since 1998. Previously Municipal Court judge, first appointed to the Santa Clara County bench in 1977 by former Gov. Jerry Brown. Staff and directing attorney for Community Legal Services in San Jose from 1966 to 1977.
EDUCATION: Law degree from Stanford University and bachelor”s degree in behavorial sciences from the University of California- Berkeley.
PERSONAL: Palo Alto resident is married with four children. He has been a referee and coach in the Peninsula Soccer League.