Nov.26, 2007
Pasadena, Texas police are still investigating the Joe Horn case. Horn is the 61-year-old retiree who, wielding his 12 gauge, shot two burglars escaping from his neighbor's house on Nov 14. The case has incited national interest because in Horn's conversation with a 911 dispatcher, he is repeatedly told not to go out of his house to engage the burglars. The burglars, Miguel DeJesus, 38 and Diego Ortiz 30, died from the shotgun wounds.

What has incited so much debate is whether Horn was not only legally justified in killing Ortiz and DeJesus, which he does not deny, but whether he was morally right. "This is not an individual who stepped outside and gunned down two pedestrians on the sidewalk," Pasadena Police Capt. A.H. "Bud" Corbett said in yesterday's LA Times. "In a situation where there is some uncertainty about which side of the law someone was on, the best thing to do is assemble all the information and present it to the grand jury."

Several key investigative questions remain unanswered:

• On the 911 tape are three shotgun blasts
• There were two burglars
• Why did Horn need to take the third shot?
• Was Horn actually outside his house when he fired?
• If he was, exactly where was he?

The moral question is more perplexing. Since Horn was not in harm's way to begin with, should he have shot Ortiz and DeJesus simply for burgling his neighbor's house? "I'm not going to let them get away with this," Horn told the 911 dispatcher who responded, "Property's not worth killing someone over."

Nov. 18, 2007

DOCTORS FROM HELL was my first true crime book. That was over a decade ago. My agent has been after me to do a revision and for some stupid reason, I didn't listen to her. Somehow, it just didn't seem like the right time. It is now.

Dr. Jan Adams has pissed me off. That really doesn't happen to me very often, where a person being investigated in an untimely death evokes any emotions within me. Most of us here can't allow that to happen because we'd go nuts every time we worked a case. But it happens that somebody got me into Kanye West's music. I like the guy and I know how much his mother, Dr. Donda West, meant to him.

Dr. West died last week at 58-years-old after Dr. Jan Adams did a tummy tuck and breast reduction on her. She died soon after and the autopsy was inconclusive with toxicology tests pending. Adams is a non board certified plastic surgeon who had a long-running TV series on the Discovery Channel where he touted, among other things, the safety of plastic surgery procedures.

Unfortunately no one vetted his credentials. Had they done that, they would have seen that the good doctor's on-screen persona was exactly that. He has already lost two malpractice cases totalling 500K with more allegedly ready to be filed. I've seen some of his work and it wasn't pretty. He has a long record of DWI arrests and convictions. Even his own uncle, a plastic surgeon himself, commented in print that his nephew might have done something...wrong.

EXCLUSIVE TO IN COLD BLOG
Dr. Adams may already have a license to practice in other states, either under his name or an assumed one. And/or, he may already have licensing applications at state medical boards other than California. The Governator will probably have the medical board lift his license. While reciprocity does exist in state by state medical licensure, that assumes that California for example talks to New York.

As for my agent, you'll have the proposal tomorrow.

Well, I had to try writing a headline about Kiefer Sutherland's DWI predicament the way Variety might.

Kiefer's DWI, the lowest level of a misdemeanor, is merely another of many ways Hollywood makes money off suffering, not to mention crime. Does anyone seriously think the suits as Robert Blake used to call them, care what happens to Kiefer? You think one of them will suddenly show up on the 24 set and demand Kiefer attend AA meetings for his own good? The suits are not humanitarians. As long as he puts the asses in the seats to watch 24, he's gold.

Studio heads today don't care any more than Louis B. Mayer did about Judy Garland's health when doctors were giving the teenager all kinds of medications to get about her business and get on camera. Who knows what colors Judy saw when she gazed up the Yellow Brick Road.

Alcohol? Hollywood has a history of exploiting alcoholics. Just ask Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Lon Chaney, Jr. and a whole bunch of others. It's like my professor at USC's film school used to tell us. His name was Art Murphy, better known as A.D. Murphy. Writing for Variety, the former Navy officer literally invented the weekend box office gross as an indicator of a film's subsequent success.

Art taught us that the movie business survives on a principal called "Junkie/Pusher." Someone has something, which someone else desperately wants and will pay lots of money to obtain. It makes no difference if obtaining that money involves enabling an alcoholic like Kiefer or Mel Gibson. And if, God forbid, a Hollywood star is driving drunk and kills somebody?

Hey, that's what lawyers are for.

.....one more time somebody say that 9/11 was the worst day in United States history, I'm going to puke. Even when it happened, it wasn't. And I'm sick and tired of everyone from media pundits to stupid TV hosts like Ty Pennington using what was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil as an excuse to sell soap and United States Army enlistments.

America endured many terrorist attacks prior to 9/11, not the least of which was the first World Trade center attack. "Only" six people were killed then but was my mentor, John DiGiovanni, my Hunter College communications professor. John left academia to become a dental supply salesman. He was in the WTC garage when those idiots blew it up.

Regarding the loss of life on 9/11 due to Al Quaeda's mass murder, 3173 lost their lives.

Contrasted with the other event it is most compared to, Pearl Harbor, it surpasses the day of the cowardly Japanese bombing with a loss of 2200 lives. Of course, 9/11 pails in historical significance to Pearl Harbor since that began the U.S. entry into World War II.

As for actual loss of American life on U.S. soil due to a criminal act, a total of 46,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives during the two day Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 (pictured above). The battle was fought for exactly that reason -- the Southern states had committed the criminal act of secession in violation of the U.S Constitution. The stakes during the Civil War were much, much higher -- the very preservation of the Union.

What 9/11 did prove is that when the country is in trouble, the good people come to the fore, from the strangers who helped strangers get out of the rubble, to the congressional representatives who refused right from the beginning to allow the Bush administration to politicize an essentially criminal act and use it as an excuse for a totally unnecessary, undeclared war on Iraq.

Where I come from when a president lies to the American people in a State of the Union message and knows the truth, that certainly qualifies as a "misdemeanor." As for "high crime," the so-called Iraq War has cost almost 4000 American lives to date. For what? That's not to say I don't take Al Quaeda seriously. Of course I do. But they are criminals first and foremost and like most, the more they put their heads out there, the more the good people will chop them right off...figuratively. But if we were so concerned with them, why didn't we stay in Afghanistan and finish them off?

History has shown and will continue to show that the biggest danger to the Union lies not from without but within.