Ventura County's 2003 was memorable for its battles to rescue an old rugged cross and save a small rural hospital, for generating the first graduates from the region's new university and for taking the final steps to shield open space from development.
The year started with a fugitive rapist and ended with a run on community clinics, as streams of residents waited hours for flu shots in a mad scramble to fend off the bug.
And it was marked by a gun battle at the Sheriff's Department station in Thousand Oaks and a pair of fast-moving brush fires that raced for a week from one end of the county to the other, leaving a trail of blackened land and gutted homes.
In between, it featured acts of good will, including a Christmas gift giveaway by Ventura police to children living in motels.
"There are so many needy kids out there and they really are the victims of circumstance," said Det. Pat Stevens, who launched the program years ago. "It's really nice to be able to help."
Help came from an unlikely source after accused rapist Andrew Luster, the great-grandson of cosmetics legend Max Factor, fled in January. He was being tried on charges that he drugged and raped three women at his Mussel Shoals beach house.
In his absence, a jury convicted Luster of multiple counts, and a judge sentenced him to 124 years in prison. Enter Duane "Dog" Chapman, a leather-clad bounty hunter in snakeskin boots who set out to track down the fugitive in hopes of collecting part of Luster's forfeited $1-million cash bail.
It took five months for Chapman to sniff out Luster's trail, finally tracking him down outside a sidewalk taco stand in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Luster went to prison. But Chapman came away empty-handed after a judge said he could not condone tactics used by Chapman, who ran afoul of Mexican law, in capturing Luster.
In another high-profile law enforcement case, former handyman Michael Schultz was sentenced to death in March for the slaying of Port Hueneme resident Cynthia Burger a decade ago. At trial, prosecutors argued that Schultz, 34, raped Burger in her Port Hueneme townhouse and then strangled her so she could not identify him.
In November, Simi Valley serial rapist Vincent Sanchez, convicted of the kidnap-slaying of 20-year-old college student Megan Barroso, was sentenced to death. The case had cast fear over the suburban community, routinely ranked as among the safest in the nation. For five years, residents had been terrorized by a rapist who brazenly slipped into the homes of young women and assaulted them at knifepoint.
