Authorities: Dispute led to deadly Calif. fire station shooting
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — A Los Angeles County firefighter appeared to have a longstanding job-related dispute with the colleague he fatally shot at their small, rural fire station in what was California’s second deadly workplace shooting in less than a week, authorities said Wednesday.
The gunman also critically wounded a fire captain at the station about 45 miles north of Los Angeles on Tuesday before setting his house on fire in a nearby community and apparently killing himself, officials said.
Preliminary interviews with other employees at Fire Station 81 indicate the shooter and the fellow veteran firefighter who was killed had “some workplace beef,” said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Brandon Dean, who is overseeing the homicide investigation.
He said investigators will review the Fire Department’s personnel files to see if any official complaints had been made or disciplinary actions had been taken before the bloodshed.
It was not immediately clear how long the two had worked together at the station in Agua Dulce, a rural community of about 3,000 people in the desert of northern Los Angeles County.
The coroner’s office on Wednesday identified the firefighter who died as Tory Carlon, a 44-year-old fire specialist whodrove the fire engine. He was shot several times in the upper torso, authorities said. Carlon had three daughters and had been with the department for more than 20 years.
The 54-year-old fire captain who was wounded was in critical but stable condition. He is expected to survive, Dean said. Sheriff Alex Villanueva said the captain had previously been a deputy before transferring to the Fire Department.
The gunman was 45-yearold fire specialist Jonathan Tatone, the coroner’s office said. Property records show Tatone owned the homethat burned in the community of Acton, about 10 miles from the fire station.
Tatone was a county firefighter since at least 2012, according to public payroll and pension records kept by Transparent California.
Tuesday’s shooting occurred less than a week after Samuel Cassidy, 57, opened fire at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority bus and rail yard in San Jose, killing nine of his co-workers and then himself as law enforcement closed in. He had rigged his home to burn before heading to his longtime workplace.
NewMexicoelection: Democrat Melanie Stansbury won election to Congress for New Mexico on Tuesday with a campaign closely tied to initiatives of the Biden administration.
Stansbury prevailed in an open, four-way race to fill a vacant seat previously held by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
The 42-year-old state legislator outpaced her Republican rival by more than 30,000 votes, garnering roughly six of every 10 votes as ballots were tallied into the night.
Stansbury’s victory preserves an all-female House delegation for the state. She defeated thirdterm Republican state Sen. Mark Moores to fill an Albuquerque-based seat that has been held by Democrats since 2009.
The district’s voters have
heavily favored Democratic candidates in recent years. Russia jails activist: A Russian court on Wednesday sent a prominent opposition activist to jail pending a probe, as authorities continue to crack down on dissent ahead of September’s parliamentary election.
In Krasnodar, a court ordered Andrei Pivovarov, the head of the Open Russia movement that has just disbanded itself, to be held for two months pending an investigation, rejecting the defense’s appeal against his arrest.
Pivovarov was pulled off a Warsaw-bound plane at St. Petersburg’s airport just before takeoff late Monday and taken to Krasnodar, where authorities accused him of supporting a local election candidate last year on behalf of an “undesirable” organization.
Philippines storm: A tropical storm left at least three people dead and displaced
thousands of villagers in the southern and central Philippines, where it triggered floods and landslides, officials said Wednesday.
Forecasters said storm Choi-wan was blowing off Victoria, a town in Oriental Mindoro province south of Manila, on Wednesday afternoon with sustained winds of 40 mph and gusts of up to 56 mph. It was moving northwestward and may weaken as it blows toward the South China Sea on Thursday, they said.
At least three people died, including a 14-year-old villager who rushed with her father to a riverbank to rescue their farm animals in intense rain but were swept away by strong currents in Norala, South Cotabato province. A baby died in a landslide that hit a mountainous town in southern Davao de Oro province and a 71-year-old man drowned in Davao del Sur province, also in the south, officials said.
Wandering elephants: A herd of 15 wild elephants that walked 300 miles from a nature reserve in China’s mountain southwest were approaching the major city of Kunming on Wednesday as authorities rushed to try to keep them out of populated areas.
Chinese wildlife authorities say they don’t know why the herd left a nature reserve last year near the city of Pu’er. The group was 16 animals, but the government says two returned home and a baby was born during the walk.
Authorities have blocked traffic on roads while the elephants crossed and were setting up barriers and using food as bait to try to keep them away from Kunming and other populated areas.
On Wednesday, the herd was in Yuxi, about 12 miles from Kunming, a city of 7 million people, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
New ‘Mein Kampf’: A new,
heavily annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf ” was published in France on Wednesday, aiming to break down his hate-filled, anti-Semitic ideology with expert analysis and a new translation that better conveys the original text’s muddled prose.
The book — “Historicizing Evil: A Critical Edition of Mein Kampf” — runs to nearly 1,000 pages, with twice as much commentary as text. Scholars, researchers and teachers are the main target audience.
“Mein Kampf,” or “My Struggle,” the Nazi leader’s manifesto and memoir, first appeared as two volumes in 1925 and 1927 and was banned in Germany by the Allies in 1945. It was not officially published again there until 2016, when scholars and historians released a nearly 2,000-page edition with thousands of annotations after a 70-year copyright held by the state of Bavaria expired.