Erik Menendez Gets Stung in a Cellblock Swap Meet

All in all, it turned out to be an expensive swap.

It cost Erik Menendez and two fellow inmates several weeks in “administrative segregation” at New Folsom Prison. And it cost a prison guard her job.

“Another interesting day at Corrections,” said Lynda Frost, spokeswoman for the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency, which oversees prisons.

Convicted double-parricide Menendez had traded television sets with one inmate friend. Seems Erik’s TV was larger, and the friend may have needed to stash contraband--a video game machine and a 35-millimeter camera, the latter presumably not for taking pictures on his summer vacation trip to Yosemite.

The search also found letters suggesting an unusually close relationship between the inmate and a female guard. Confronted with the letters, the guard quit.

Prison authorities speculate that Menendez may have used a friend on the outside to set up a phone call between the inmate and the female officer, who had guarded the two. In Menendez’s cell, guards found video game cards in his cellmate’s property.

All three inmates were put on “administrative segregation” on July 16, a spokesman said, and may be released back into the prison population this week.

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Four legs good, four wheels bad: A good Samaritan proposal in Pacific Grove would extend kind-or-punishment standards to creatures domestic and wild. Any driver who hits an animal would have to report the incident to police or animal officials, or face misdemeanor fines and costs.

Real estate agent Kathy Besag launched the campaign after she saw an impatient driver hit and kill a fawn, and drive off.

Besag was driving ahead of a second car carrying her clients, when both cars stopped as a doe crossed the road. But a third driver, evidently annoyed at the delay, gunned her engine and swerved around them and hit the fawn following its mother, then drove off without stopping. Besag’s husband carried the dying fawn to the roadside, and she reported the car to authorities.

The state vehicle code requires drivers to report accidents that damage property, which includes certain livestock and dogs--but not cats or wild animals.

“Just to hit [the fawn] and then hit the gas pedal,” Besag said. “The callousness upped the ante for most of us.”

Pool Peril

More than 360 children between age 1 and 4 have drowned in California residential pools and spas in the past six years. In addition, more than 1,400 children were admitted to hospitals after nearly drowning. An estimated 5% to 20% of those who nearly drown suffer severe brain damage, according to published studies.

To prevent such tragedies, some jurisdictions require metal fencing or automatic safety covers that work at the flip of a switch.

Here are the statistics:

1996

Drowned: 60

Nearly drowned: 285

Source: Epidemiology for Prevention and Injury Control Branch, California Department of Health Services.

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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No, no, nomenclature: A suggestion that East Palo Alto adopt the name it bore in the 1860s will not be rushed onto the ballot.

So East Palo Alto it will stay for the time being, rather than reverting to its old name, Ravenswood, or some other choice.

Council member Duane Bay says the city would like to study the matter and then put the matter on a big-turnout general election ballot. Five years ago, residents said no to a ballot measure asking whether the name should be changed, without any new names being mentioned. Some 30 years ago, a failed movement to rename the city had suggested “Nairobi,” “Uhuru” and “Kenyatta.”

A name change could mean a fresh start from the city’s dicey reputation of years past as a crime capital. And it could move it out from under the shadow of Palo Alto. “We’re not part of Palo Alto,” said Bay. “We’re not even in the same county.”

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One-offs: A gun dealer has sued San Leandro, claiming a new city sales tax on concealable handguns is unconstitutional and shows “racial hostility toward young African American men.” . . . In another reverberation of California’s version of Megan’s Law, the Assembly approved a bill requiring people selling houses or renting out apartments to notify prospective buyers and tenants about any registered sex offenders living in the neighborhood . . . . The once-abundant white abalone may soon be listed as an endangered species, the only marine invertebrate to face extinction through human activity--commercial abalone diving.

EXIT LINE

“I get e-mail, I get phone calls, I get letters just about every day. But I really have no idea where she is--none of the sightings have ever been confirmed and it’s a big, big ocean out there.”

--Sea World curator Keith Yip, on possible sightings of prodigal gray whale J.J., released into the Pacific four months ago. Veterinarians nursed her back to health after she was found stranded and sickly. Transmitters fell off her days after she was freed.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.