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Polar bear with carrot

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Color Coded

Mario Lopez and wife
George Djura Jakubec is the Escondido man who was arrested last week after his mexican gardener stepped on an explosive in his yard. The house was filled with lethal bomb making ingredients including  hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), Erythritol tetranitrate (ETN) and Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), the same type of explosive used by shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab last Christmas, and the UPS package bombs last month. Police also found blasting caps and homemade grenades.

 Deputy District Attorney Terri Perez described the haul as the "largest quantity of this type of homemade explosives found in one location in the history of the United States." Jakubec is suspected of several bank robberies and is an unemployed software technician, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Serbia.

Leslie and I saw the crime scene tape on Interstate 15 when we went down to her mother's for Thanksgiving dinner. The story has had a lot of traction locally, and some nationally. The local paper made it a point to write that the injured gardener was an illegal.

One place that the story has failed to fire much is in the house organ for the Republican Party, Fox News or sites like the Drudge Report. Do you think that could have anything to do with the perpetrator being a white person? Can you imagine the hoohaw if he had been an arab, mexican, black or a similarly toned individual? Or a Muslim? 

Have we deported the gardener yet?

2 comments:

North County Film Club said...

I'm amazed at the lack of national news. This seems like a very big national security news story. Frisking you at the airport sure wouldn't protect us from guys like this in our own backyard. But maybe some CIA or FBI intelligence would.

grumpy said...

my monday meanderings:

turns out another Escondido man was arrested this morning on a similar charge

http://www.thevillagenews.com/story/52783/

if i were in my backyard at 5:00 a.m. i'd be screaming, too...

...accounts i've read give the gardener's name as Mario Garcia, 49, of Fallbrook; no mention, in the Village News at least, of his being illegal...

...well, i did find a story on Jakubec on the FoxNews website, for what that's worth...

...coming home from San Jan Capistrano yesterday, i noticed that a section of the 5 freeway has been "adopted" by the San Diego Minutemen; it's nice to know they're so public-spirited...

...hope everyone had a swell Thanksgiving.