San Diego County

The chairman of the Jamul Indian Village and longtime tribal activist was killed in a motorcycle accident, authorities said. William C. Mesa, 57, was killed when his bike hit a utility pole about 5 p.m. Saturday on Lyons Valley Road in Jamul, east of San Diego, police said.

SAN MARCOS, Calif. —When paramedics arrived at the Purdy home March 20, Margaret was seated in her favorite chair in the living room. The morning sunshine streamed in through a picture window that overlooked a valley. A plastic bag was over her head, tied securely at the neck. A suicide note in her handwriting was in a folder on her desk, beneath a shelf with books about death and dying. She had written that the pain from her various medical conditions had become unbearable. Alan Purdy met the paramedics at the door.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

With an Amtrak Pacific Surfliner crossing over the new Trestles bridge on Monday morning, local transportation officials marked the completion of a multimillion-dollar project to replace the storied, but worn-down, wooden structure that has served as the gateway to a San Diego County beach regarded as a birthplace of Southern California's surf culture. The original Trestles, built in 1941, was an 858-foot stretch of wooden post-and-beam bridge. Although it remained strong, with more than 40 passenger and freight trains crossing per day, the trains were required to slow down to reduce vibration and wear and tear.

For proof that fun and education are not oxymoronic, look at your feet. Better yet, go outside and look at your feet. There's a good chance you will be standing on some sort of mineral, a mineral that can tell you a lot about the planet on which you live, a mineral that may even be able to make you a little extra money. San Diego's North County is a gold mine of minerals.

Nearly two dozens earthquakes, including a magnitude 5.7 temblor, struck Monday night near the U.S.-Mexican border in southern San Diego County. The largest of the quakes was recorded at 9:26 p.m. and was felt by residents across a wide swath of Southern California, including Los Angeles. The temblor was centered five miles southeast of Ocotillo in San Diego County and 16 miles east-northeast of Jacumba in eastern San Diego County, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The others -- ranging from 3.2 to 4.1 magnitude -- were also concentrated in the same general area, according to the survey agency.

Reporting from San Diego — The bronze moose is back. So too are the three metallic children, discovered even before they'd been reported missing. But more than a dozen other statues swiped from lawns in northern San Diego County over the last six months remain on the loose, according to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. Among the missing are a cast-iron woman in a flowing dress (stolen from Del Mar), two bronze horses (Solana Beach), a Thai Buddha (Vista), a life-size woman with a water pitcher (San Marcos)

The intense search for Chelsea King ended Tuesday when authorities unearthed a body in a shallow grave near the lakeside park where the teenager had gone running last week. There is a "strong likelihood" that the body is that of the 17-year-old Poway High School senior, though a positive identification had yet to be made, said San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore. The teenager's family was devastated, he said at a news conference, adding: "They were holding out hope, as we all were, that we would find Chelsea alive."

A property owner in rural eastern San Diego County can continue allowing a private contractor to use pigs for "live tissue" training to help teach Marines and Navy corpsmen how to treat combat wounds, county land use officials have ruled. As part of the training, the pigs are anesthetized before military personnel work on them. The pigs are later euthanized and the carcasses sent to a rendering plant. The Marine Corps has used contractors for several years to provide such training for troops deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

A 31-year-old man was shot to death, and his roommate was being held in the San Diego County Jail in connection with the slaying. Donald James Balbi, 31, of the 3200 block of Mission Boulevard died at UCSD Medical Center after being shot several times at his apartment about 3:10 p.m. Sunday, police said. Stephen Soper, 33, of the same address was being held, police said.

A man suspected of killing his girlfriend and their two young sons is in jail while authorities continue searching for the bodies after unsuccessfully combing an Orange County landfill Friday. Shazer Limas, 31, of Orange was booked on suspicion of murder in the deaths of Arlet Hernandez, 31, and their sons — a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old. Limas was arrested late Thursday after a long police chase and standoff that closed Interstate 5 in north San Diego County near the San Onofre nuclear plant, backing up traffic for miles in both directions.

SAN DIEGO - Poor planning, failure to share critical information and a series of human errors led to the massive blackout in September that plunged a swath of Southern California, Arizona and Baja California into darkness, according to a report issued Tuesday by two energy agencies. The 150-page report, produced after an eight-month study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp., portrays the complex electrical grid as vulnerable to a single small-sized failure - in this case, a transmission line in Arizona that went down and triggered a "cascading and uncontrolled" blackout that left 2.7 million customers in the dark.

A computer programmed to design a promising young Republican politician would probably spit out Nathan Fletcher. Marine; Iraq combat veteran in Iraq; smart; athletic; married to a well-situated Republican; two little boys, adopted; two dogs, ditto. Perfect - except now there's no "R" after his name. Fletcher was elected to the state Assembly from San Diego County in 2008, and he is running for San Diego mayor in a nonpartisan race that is nonetheless drawing partisan lightning. Since Fletcher changed his party registration to "decline to state," which got national coverage, polls have him second in the June 5 primary, just behind openly gay Republican council member Carl DeMaio, who won the GOP endorsement over Fletcher.

SAN DIEGO — A Marine staff sergeant pleaded not guilty Thursday to a charge of murdering the 22-year-old wife of a fellow Marine as the prosecutor announced that the victim's blood and a possible murder weapon were found in the defendant's car. A judge ordered Staff Sgt. Louis Perez, 45, held in jail on $3-million bail in the killing of Brittany Dawn Killgore, whose body was found dumped near Lake Skinner in Riverside County. Killgore had been set to attend a dinner cruise in San Diego with Perez and his girlfriend on April 13 but instead sent a text message to a friend saying she was in "distress" and needed help, Deputy Dist.

CHULA VISTA, Calif. -- Hammer throwers don't have many places to practice their sport. So Britney Henry is happy to have this vast, green field overlooking the Lower Otay Reservoir, complete with a concrete throwing ring and, on this particular morning, a built-in audience. A duck watches her fling one metal ball after another into the air. When she walks out to retrieve the hammers, her impromptu fan follows along, quacking. "It's nice having this facility," Henry says.

SANTEE, Calif. - Ladonna Maki, an unemployed waitress, stepped off the San Diego trolley on Saturday afternoon and quite unexpectedly encountered the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Celeste Innocenti, artistic director of San Diego-based Chronos Theatre Group, was providing a dramatic reading of one of Poe's best-known works: "I was a child and she was a child In this kingdom by the sea: But we loved with a love that was more...

This weekend's Fiesta del Sol in Solana Beach will combine small-town get-together and big-city beach blast. The annual festival in the San Diego County community will kick off at 9 a.m. Saturday with the City of Solana Beach's 25th anniversary parade, followed by the singing of the National Anthem. And Sunday will begin at 7:30 a.m. with an old-fashioned pancake breakfast hosted by the fire department followed by a church choir. And now for the big-city part: About 50,000 fest-goers are expected to party to a roster of musical acts booked by the city's Belly Up tavern, which has hosted everyone from B.B. King to Lisa Marie Presley.

A 55-year-old man died Wednesday after suffering hundreds of bee stings while working outdoors in the northern San Diego County city of Encinitas, the Sheriff's Department said. The man, described as a landscaper, was operating a backhoe in a brushy area near the San Elijo Lagoon when the equipment apparently disturbed a colony of bees. As he was being stung repeatedly, the man — whose name was not released — fled to an outhouse about 200 yards away. He was found there moments later by authorities responding to an emergency call.

A property owner in rural eastern San Diego County can continue allowing a private contractor to use pigs for "live tissue" training to help teach Marines and Navy corpsmen how to treat combat wounds, county land use officials have ruled. As part of the training, the pigs are anesthetized before military personnel work on them. The pigs are later euthanized and the carcasses sent to a rendering plant. The Marine Corps has used contractors for several years to provide such training for troops deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Tuesday afternoon, Kiersten Carlin had been driving around Downey for two days in search of her father, a retired San Diego County sheriff's deputy who hadn't been seen in four years — until last week. Larry Everett Starks, 69, was living in Florida when he fell off his medication for schizophrenia and was evicted from his apartment. His sister filed a missing persons' report Dec. 15, 2007, with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, said Lt. Kelly Stuart, a representative of the department.