News Scan

Dining Out In LA:   The decision to take your family to a patio restaurant in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice has probably been a bad idea for the last several years.  The beach communities in Southern California, and particularly Venice, have been awash with vagrants for quite some time.  But since California’s decade of compassionate reforms which have allowed thieves, addicts and the mentally ill to take over public spaces, many neighborhoods along the Pacific Coast Highway are no longer safe for law abiding people.

ABC news in Los Angeles reports that last Saturday night, while a family with young children were having dinner on the patio of a Venice restaurant an obviously mentally ill or drug-impaired vagrant made multiple attempts to pull a six-year-old girl from her mother’s arms to “save her.”  Finally the father and his brother put the vagrant to the ground and held him for police.  It took six police officers to take the man identified as Evan McLaurin-Nelson, into custody.  He had previously been arrested in both Nevada and California for battery and indecent exposure and is now being charged with attempted kidnapping and resisting arrest.  The sad truth is that he will probably be offered a plea bargin on reduced charges, get released to a rehab program and be back on the streets in a few weeks.