Long Beach Ca

The judge in the trial of 10 black youths accused of beating three white women in Long Beach on Halloween night rejected six defense attorneys' pleas Tuesday to throw out the charges against their clients because of what they characterized as incredibly thin evidence. Pleas at this stage of a trial, before the defense has challenged prosecution evidence, are not unusual.

On the southeastern edge of Long Beach near the Orange County line, Janice Dahl and hundreds of her neighbors long ago learned to coexist with a power plant and a slew of oil pumps. But a Home Depot is something else. "Power plants don't generate traffic," said Dahl, a real estate broker and the president of the 450-member University Park Estates Homeowner's Assn. "A Home Depot does -- thousands of cars per day."

Defense attorneys for black youths accused of assaulting three white women in Long Beach on Halloween night asked the judge Wednesday to reject an attempt by the prosecution to file new charges against their clients. The nine girls and one boy are charged with three counts of assault with intent to cause great bodily harm. Eight of them face two crime enhancements: for allegedly committing a hate crime and for personally inflicting great bodily injury on a victim.

Two lawyers in the trial of 10 black youths accused of beating three young women in Long Beach on Halloween night hurled accusations for much of the court session Thursday, ignoring the judge's repeated pleas to stick to the evidence. During a nearly two-hour argument over her request to dismiss the case for lack of evidence, Deputy Public Defender Stephanie Sauter accused Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas and the media of inflating a fight that got out of control into a hate crime.

Homicide detectives are investigating three suspected gang-related shootings that killed four people in the Watts area and Long Beach, authorities said Thursday. No arrests have been made in any of the cases. The first of the two Watts-area shootings, which occurred about 8:20 p.m. Wednesday, claimed the life of a 47-year-old man whose name has not been released. He was shot while standing in a parking lot with a group of friends near East 88th Place and Central Avenue.

A friend of the key witness in the case against 10 black youths accused of beating three young white women on Halloween testified Friday that the witness, Kiana Alford, arrived too late to see the attack or identify any of the assailants. Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas moved quickly in an effort to discredit the defense witness, Lineshia Hill, whose testimony directly contradicted Alford's detailed eyewitness account of the beating.

The battle over banning grocery sales at big box stores in Long Beach will now be fought at the polls and could cost the state's fifth-largest city hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Long Beach City Council voted in September to ban grocery sales at stores larger than 100,000 square feet, including Wal-Mart, even though the discount retailer had no plans for a so-called Supercenter in the city.

A 911 phone recording played Monday in the trial of nine black girls and a boy accused of beating three white women on Halloween suggested that black men carried out the attack. The call came from the unidentified owner of a home on the block where the assault took place as he apparently spoke to the victims in the frontyard. The details he gave supported the defendants' statements to police that a group of males in black hooded sweatshirts mobbed and beat the women.

The sole male defendant in the Long Beach hate case took the stand Tuesday, testifying that he did not beat three white women but rather came to their rescue as they were under assault by a group of black youths. Anthony Ross, 18, testified that he was sitting in a parked car, instant-messaging with his brother, when he saw the fight begin and a young "chubby" male strike one of the women with a skateboard and knock her to the ground.

The sole male defendant in the Long Beach hate-crime case remained unflappable on the stand Wednesday as a prosecutor accused him of being a Crip, of neglecting his girlfriend and sisters, and of beating up girls in school. At times Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrea Bouas leaned into Anthony Ross' face to question him, but he answered calmly, occasionally laughing.