Crime

The obituary in the York Weekly was heartbreaking. Just 17, Bethany Fritz was a high school senior hoping to study art at the University of Maine. She lived in an affluent coastal community of tidal pools, winding roads and thick stands of maple and oak. She loved her family and friends, her two cats and her dog, Farleigh. Unmentioned was her cause of death: an overdose of heroin.

Two summers ago, drug gangs, leftist rebels and right-wing militias traded mortar and machine-gun fire daily as they vied for control of this steamy port city. Teens were paid $200 a month -- a king's ransom in this impoverished community -- to act as lookouts for narcos. Armed groups fought it out in the neighborhoods and trash-strewn inlets from which 60-foot speedboats departed for Central America and Mexico with illicit drug loads. With an average of three killings a day, Buenaventura's homicide rate was among the highest on the planet.

The music thumps, the lights flash, the shot glasses wait for willing lips. But the bouncers are reduced to kicking at the curb, hoping somebody, anybody, will round the corner. Friday nights are slow lately in Rosarito Beach's party zone, and everyone knows the drug war is to blame. Hundreds of corpses discovered in and near Tijuana. Some of them headless, others dissolved in barrels of lye. People hear that, and they stay away. At least, most people do.

It was shortly after 7 in the morning when police spotted the man on a bicycle, a smear of blood around his mouth and more dribbling from cuts on his forearms. But he had an explanation. An ex-girlfriend "turned me on to vampirism," he told the officers, but he was ready to put all that behind him. Was there somewhere he could find a priest?

Despite a reeling economy, crime in Los Angeles and many other parts of Southern California fell in 2008 for the sixth consecutive year, challenging the widely held theory that crime rises at times of economic tumult. The continued decline, while less pronounced than in previous years, comes even as other major American cities, including New York and Chicago, have seen increases in some crimes, notably homicides.

The heavily armed rebels usually show up in groups of 20 or more, dressed in green fatigues and seeking food. "Of course you have to give it to them," said one resident of this isolated village 35 miles west of the Colombian border. "People don't like that they're here, but with few police and many informants around, they keep quiet." Then just as suddenly, the rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, melt back into the jungle.

The deed was stomach-turning: Hooded gunmen burst into a Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center, gathered together those inside and lined them up before opening fire with semiautomatic weapons. When the shooting was over, 18 people were dead. Attention focused immediately on the site of Wednesday night's killings: a rehab center, where addicts go to get clean, suggesting a new level of depravity in Mexico's drug violence. Theories abounded: The victims were targets of rival gang members.

Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey on Thursday attacked plans to roll back the sentences of thousands of federal prisoners convicted under harsh crack cocaine laws, saying that the move could return many violent offenders to the streets and increase the crime problems of U.S. cities. Mukasey told the U.S. Conference of Mayors that about 1,600 convicted criminals -- "many of them violent gang members" -- could be released as early as March under a decision by the U.S.

After gang members turned an empty house in Pomona into their party hangout, the agent representing the foreclosure property gave them the personal heave-ho by simply moving in. Nobody bothered Ron Anderson -- who is 6 foot 2 and weighs 240 pounds -- as he replaced busted windows, painted over graffiti and removed empty beer bottles from what had once been a quaint family abode.

When a Southern California nursery opened operations near here in the early 1990s, authorities say, there were gang members among the families of workers who relocated. The gang eventually took root in this unincorporated Tulare County town of about 4,000 built around a big packing plant and surrounded by orange groves. "When I moved there in 1976, nothing ever happened," recalled Sheriff's Det. Joe Aguilar.