Trapped

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

At the height of his career, Michael Jackson had it all. International fame. Grammy-winning records. Unimaginable wealth. But in the final months of his life, as the King of Pop planned his ill-fated comeback in London, one of his biggest motivators was just to make enough money to buy his own home where he could raise his children, according to testimony Wednesday. Jackson broke down in tears as he confided that he was tired of "living like vagabonds" - shuttling his family between a Las Vegas rental and a Bel-Air hotel - said Randy Phillips, concert promoter AEG Live's chief executive who has spent days testifying in a wrongful-death suit filed by the singer's family.

Shannon Wright, who shielded a sixth-grade pupil from gunfire and was fatally wounded as a result, was remembered Saturday as a hero as the final victims of Tuesday's shooting spree at Westside Middle School were laid to rest. The 32-year-old teacher, who leaves behind a husband and a 2-year-old son, was memorialized at a jammed church service just five miles from the scene of the bloody schoolyard ambush that claimed the lives of Wright and four young girls and injured 10 others.

EVERYBODY IN LA JOLLA knew the Brodericks. Daniel T. Broderick III and his wife, Betty, seemed to have a classic society-page marriage. Dan was a celebrity in local legal circles. Armed with degrees from both Harvard Law School and Cornell School of Medicine, the prominent malpractice attorney was aggressive, persuasive and cunning--a $1-million-a-year lawyer at the top of his game.

In the summer of 2003, an Air Force pilot named Greg Harbin was doing desk duty at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Day in and day out, Harbin sat in front of five computer screens, scanning photographs and video sent by unmanned planes flying 1,200 miles away, over Iraq and Afghanistan. His job was to take that information, along with reports from ground troops, and identify fresh targets -- Taliban fighters or Iraqi insurgents. But one thing puzzled him.

Gale Swan has lived for 62 years by the eastern slope of the hills below where La Cienega Boulevard and La Brea Avenue crest a few miles south of the Santa Monica Freeway. The upscale homes that spider down these curving streets offer enticing views of the Los Angeles Basin. Yet, Swan is worried. She has been through L.A.'s heavy winter rains and the 1963 collapse a few neighborhoods away of the Baldwin Hills Dam. But now the foundation of her 1946 house in View Park has cracks.

Three storm chasers killed by a tornado near Oklahoma City last week were not risk-takers or thrill-seekers, but experienced researchers dedicated to advancing the field of meteorology, family and colleagues said Sunday. Tim Samaras, 54, was well-respected in the meteorological community and widely considered a leader in tornado research and data collection, experts said. He died along with his 24-year-old son, Paul Samaras, and partner Carl Young, 45, while tracking an EF-3 tornado that struck the Oklahoma City suburb of El Reno on Friday evening.

Laughing as they killed, two youths clad in dark ski masks and long black coats fired handguns at will and blithely tossed pipe bombs into a crowd of their terrified classmates Tuesday inside a suburban high school southwest of Denver, littering halls with as many as 23 bodies and wounding at least 25 others.

In 1904, when soldiers from the Civil and Spanish-American wars settled into the Veterans Home in West Los Angeles, they brought Eastern fox squirrels with them as pets (or possibly as future dinners) from Kentucky and Tennessee. Last week in the Toluca Woods section of North Hollywood, Beverlee Nelson's prized apricot crop was nearly destroyed. What's the connection? The squirrels got loose in 1904, according to a recent blog post by Lila Higgins of the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park.

Whenever Samuel Benitez, who now lives in Portland, Ore., even thinks about his old job as a Los Angeles policeman, he says he starts coughing. And the closer he gets to Los Angeles, the worse the hacking gets. Benitez, 35, claims that the cough is caused by stress from working for the Los Angeles Police Department. Complaining that the cough disabled him, he recently won a lifetime tax-free disability pension of $1,480 a month, plus $51,390 in back benefits.