Suspect arrested after lockdown at Riverside City College
Man who allegedly killed sheriff's K-9 had 3 arrest warrants
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Billionaire Harlan Crow bought Riverside supervisors approve $18.46M property from Clarence Thomas. purchase for sheriff's plane, helicopter The justice didn’t disclose the deal. By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, ProPublica
By City News Service
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n a 4-1 vote, the Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's request to purchase a new helicopter and airplane for patrol and other deployments at a total cost of $18.46 million. "Our aviation division is robust for a patrol setting," Bianco said ahead of the vote. "But you look at the size of our agency and the county, and it's almost laughable. Aviation is absolutely necessary for an efficient law enforcement operation." Board Chairman Kevin Jeffries cast the sole dissenting vote against the expenditures, citing his disagreement with the sheriff's position on declining to make at least one of the choppers available for firefighting operations. "The Orange County Sheriff's Department provides water-dropping capabilities when requested," the chairman said. "The San Diego County Sheriff's Department
This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
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health lockdown, and the 2022 show was dropped after base administrators expressed concerns about potential ongoing exposure risks among large crowds. The show's marquee event — and the capstone on both days — will be the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, perform-
n 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives. The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse. The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the twobedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints. A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica. The disclosure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the identity of the buyer in any private transaction, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank. “He needed to report his interest in the sale,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “Given the role Crow has played in subsidizing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to wonder if this was an effort to put cash in their pockets.” Thomas did not respond to detailed questions for this story. In a statement, Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. “My intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
See Air show Page 28
See Harlan Crow Page 27
Search-and-rescue officers load a stretcher onto an Airbus AS350 helicopter. | Photo courtesy of Macacones/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
provides water-dropping capabilities when requested. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department offers water-dropping capabilities. This could be beneficial to (our) residents. This county has so many fires where we don't have enough aircraft." Bianco replied that the
department's six Airbus AS350 patrol helicopters are not certified for firefighting operations. The agency's twin-engine Airbus H-145, purchased last year, can be outfitted for short-haul water drops. However, Bianco said the helicopter's primary mission is search-and- rescue,
and converting it to firefighting ops would require removing the expensive gear on the underside of the chopper, leaving his crews standing by for fire dispatches instead of law enforcement missions. See Helicopter Page 16
March air show schedule confirmed, featuring over a dozen performances By City News Service
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he full slate of performers with slots in March Air Reserve Base's first air show in five years was confirmed Friday, featuring the famed Air Force Thunderbirds, a mock aerial dogfight, a B-1 bomber flyby, a parachute drop and other airborne thrills. "It's free family fun that you can't experience
anywhere else," according to the March ARB Twitter feed. The "Southern California Air Show" will be held Saturday, April 22, and Sunday, April 23, running from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. It's the first aerial entertainment event offered at the base to the general public, free of charge, since April 2018. March ARB is located
just east of Interstate 215, at Ellsworth Street and Cactus Avenue. Maps and other details regarding the show and base access are available at https://socalairshow.com/. The event is the de facto replacement of the March ARB "Air Fest," which was nixed in both 2020 and 2022. The first cancellation stemmed from the base's coronavirus public