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New York Post
6 hours ago
- New York Post
Two Reno mass shooting victims were in town for a bachelor party when they were killed
Two of the victims gunned down in a mass shooting at a Nevada Casino were in town to celebrate a bachelor party — and were shot in the back by a gunman whose seemingly random attack has left people baffled. Justin Aguila and Andrew Canepa, both 33, were waiting for a car to the airport at the Grand Sierra Resort's valet around 7 a.m. in Reno Monday when a gunman walked onto the grounds with a handgun and started spraying bullets. The alleged shooter — who is in police custody — was identified by Sparks Police as 26-year-old Dakota Hawver, a Reno resident with no criminal record, according to the Sparks Police department. 4 Justin Aguila, 33, was killed in Reno Monday morning. He had recently been engaged and leaves behind two siblings. Gofundme He also has no history of mental health issues, police said. Aguila and Canepa were headed back to their Los Angeles-area homes after a weekend of celebrating with friends, but were instead shot dead where they stood. Three other people were shot at the valet, but they survived. Hawver then allegedly fled the valet across the casino's parking lot and hid between cars — but when 66-year-old Angel Martinez happened to drive by, Hawver started shooting, killing him. From there he ran across the parking lot towards the building, where he shot at a security guard who tried to engage and then was met by police officers responding to the shooting. 4 Angel Martinez, 66, worked in casinos and restaurants across Reno for three decades and was killed Monday. Gofundme A gunfight ensued, and Hawver was eventually struck and subdued by police. Hawver fired at least 80 rounds during his rampage, police said. He allegedly used a 9mm pistol which he purchased legally two years ago, and was carrying multiple ammunition magazines. And investigators still have no idea why he carried out the massacre — confirming he has no connection with his victims. 4 Andrew Canepa, 33, was a California restaurant owner and a father. He was shot in the back on Monday morning. Andrew Canepa/Facebook 'Investigators have not found any connections to the Grand Sierra Resort or any of the victims, and his motive is unknown, at this time,' police said. 'This is an active and ongoing investigation.' Canepa was a California restaurant owner and father whose son 'was the love of his life,' a heartbroken neighbor told the Ventura County Star. Aguila was recently engaged, and leaves behind his fiancée and two siblings. And Martinez was a 30-year Reno resident who had worked at casinos and restaurants all over town in pursuit of his 'lifelong love of cooking,' according to a GoFundMe page. 4 Suspect Dakota Hawver, 26, was filmed sprinting across the casino parking lot after allegedly shooting bystanders. KRNV He was also a grandfather and father, SFGate reported. Two of the surviving shooting victims remain hospitalized in critical condition, but are expected to recover. The third wounded victim has been released from the hospital. Hawver also remains in critical condition. Footage from the incident captured the gunman dashing across the casino's parking lot, while guests fled ahead of him and cowered behind cars and columns.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Stay cool and stay inside during heat wave expected to hit California
The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for large swathes of California starting July 9, lasting through most of the weekend. A heat wave is expected to blanket the state and bring triple-digit temperatures to inland and desert regions, peaking on July 10. Most of California is expected to reach 90 degrees on the high end, with valleys, mountains, and deserts reaching temperatures above 100 degrees. The Coachella Valley and San Diego County deserts will have an extreme heat warning in place starting from July 8, 10 a.m., temperatures are expected to reach highs between 114-118 degrees. A heat advisory is in effect for valleys, mountains, and deserts in San Bernardino, Riverside, and San Diego counties starting July 9 at 10 a.m. through 8 p.m. July 10. The Central Valley is expected to be under similar conditions with a moderate risk of heat. Coastal areas such as Ventura are expected to reach 10 degrees above normal with an increased risk of wildfire threat, The Star reported. Heat-related illnesses, such as heat stroke, are caused by exposure to hot temperatures. The weather service has suggested that people drink plenty of fluids, stay in an air-conditioned room and stay out of the sun. The federal agency also recommends that you check up on relatives and neighbors. To find the forecast for your area, visit Ernesto Centeno Araujo covers breaking news for the Ventura County Star. He can be reached at ecentenoaraujo@ This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Heatwave and heat advisory expected for parts of California
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Yahoo
Oxnard police probe shooting at Colonia Park
An Oxnard man was shot in the right hip June 22 while at Colonia Park in Oxnard. The Oxnard Police Department received a call about shots fired at the park around 1:30 p.m. and found the victim who was taken to a local hospital for treatment, said Cmdr. Greg Harasymowycz. The man's wound was described as non-life threatening. Officers were still at the scene as of 5:45 p.m. actively working the case, he said. Harasymowycz said investigators had very little information to go on so far. It was not clear what precipitated the shooting. "It's like a whodunit at this point," he said. No arrests had been made and no additional victims had been identified, Harasymowycz said. Anyone with additional information can call the police at 805-385-7600 or online at Stacie N. Galang is news director of the Ventura County Star. She can be reached at 805-437-0222 or This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Oxnard police probe shooting at Colonia Park
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Roy Pinkerton's 'small, hopeful newspaper in Ventura' had a countywide vision
Editor's note: This story is part of a series to celebrate the Ventura County Star's 100th anniversary. Please pick up the June 15 edition in newsstands for our commemorative edition. There were newspapers in Ventura County when Roy Pinkerton arrived in Ventura 1925 to start his own. The city itself had two, one of which was already half a century old, for a population of about 5,500 people. Pinkerton considered the existing papers 'unenterprising,' he later wrote, parochial in their news coverage and lacking any circulation outside their home city. His newspaper, the Ventura County Star, would be different. 'The key word is 'county,'' Pinkerton wrote in his 1962 memoir, 'The County Star: My Buena Ventura.' The Star would cover the entire county: the booming oil town of Ventura, the four other cities and the farmland between them. The first issue of The Star rolled off a rented press in downtown Ventura on June 15, 1925. A year later, Pinkerton's paper was delivering its daily afternoon editions as far east as Piru and as far south as Camarillo. In the first edition's front-page editorial, Pinkerton told readers The Star would 'represent no clique, no faction.' It would be 'the organ of no party; in politics it will be truly independent, but not neutral.' 'We propose to print the news honestly and decently and fearlessly,' the editorial stated. 'We propose to comment upon it with independence. We expect to speak neither in platitudes nor in hokum. We expect to be broad minded and good natured.' For the rest of the 20th century, Pinkerton's creation grew, buying some of its competitors and driving others out of the market in an intense newspaper war. One hundred years after Pinkerton set up shop in a temporary garage in Ventura, his newspaper remains the dominant local news source for the entire county. Roy Pinkerton was born in 1885, on a farm in northwestern Minnesota, 100 miles from the Canadian border. When he was 20, he moved to Tacoma, Washington, to take a job as a reporter with the Tacoma Times. He graduated from the University of Washington with a journalism degree in 1911, a rarity for a newspaperman of the time. After bouncing around to a few papers in Seattle and Los Angeles, he returned to the Tacoma Times as its editor, at the age of 29. For the next decade, Pinkerton edited newspapers in Seattle, Cleveland and San Diego. In 1923, after his marriage to Flora Hartman ended, he met Aidrie Kincaid, a reporter in Seattle. They were soon married. By 1925, Pinkerton had caught the entrepreneurial bug. 'I decided I'd had enough of working for a salary,' he recalled in 1963, in a speech to the Ojai Valley Retired Business and Professional Men's Club. Pinkerton left the San Diego Sun and teamed up with one of its founders and owners, publishing executive W.H. Porterfield. The pair had $25,000 with which to start a newspaper — the equivalent of about $458,000 in 2025 — and no idea where this new venture would be located. They chose Ventura on a little more than a whim, but not a lot more. 'I consulted with no bankers, I talked with no merchants about how they would regard a new advertising medium. … I took no polls, make no market analysis — did not even know the terms,' Pinkerton wrote. 'I had arrived at the state of mind more through 'falling in love' with the community than by way of a conventional and objective investigation.' He did talk to as many petroleum geologists as he could, and they convinced him that the recently discovered oil fields in and around Ventura meant the region would grow and prosper enough to support a bigger, better newspaper. Roy and Airdie Pinkerton moved to Ventura on April 12, 1925, Easter morning. They hired one other employee as a reporter and one as the business manager. They couldn't find a building to rent, so they had one built, and while it was under construction they worked out of a garage on the property. They rented a printing press and other equipment, hung a sign outside soliciting subscribers, and sold subscriptions door to door. One afternoon, Pinkerton wrote in his memoir, 'three tall, dour, middle-aged men' walked into their makeshift office. One of them asked 'What's your religion?' and Pinkerton answered, 'That, sir, is none of your damn business.' They walked out, and that was the end of the Pinkertons' troubles with the small local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. By the time The Star began publishing in June, it had 850 subscribers, paying 50 cents a month for home delivery. Pinkerton wrote in his memoir that he 'often marveled' that the Star published its first edition just two months after he moved to town and started work. 'Some things were done faster in the twenties than they are in the sixties,' he wrote. Roy and Aidrie Pinkerton had a daughter, born in 1926, along with two sons from Roy's previous marriage. Airdrie Pinkerton worked full-time as a reporter until she was eight months pregnant. 'In those days a pregnant woman's place was in her home and I had defied local custom, covering my beat in a maternity costume,' she wrote in a chapter of her husband's memoir. She came back in 1928 and covered court trials and other beats, until she retired in 1936. It was a semiretirement; the couple lived in Ojai but traveled extensively, visiting 70 countries. Airdrie contributed travel articles to The Star to go with her husband's dispatches on politics and military affairs. Roy Pinkerton remained editor of the The Star until he retired in 1961. By then, circulation had grown to 25,000. Pinkerton was also the editorial director of John P. Scripps Newspapers. In 1928, John Scripps, then 16 and an heir to a prominent San Diego publishing family, had invested $30,000 of his inheritance into The Star. That got Pinkerton out of some debt he had been left with when Porterfield, his original business partner, died the year before. The Scripps investment turned The Star into the first link in a chain of newspapers, which later became part of the E.W. Scripps Company. The Scripps newspapers were acquired by Gannett in 2016, forming the nation's largest local news company. In its early years under Scripps ownership, The Star bought out both of its competitors in Ventura. In 1937, after buying the Ventura Free Press, it renamed itself the Ventura County Star-Free Press. The name was shortened back to the Ventura County Star in 1994. Both during and after Pinkerton's tenure as editor, The Star either acquired or started smaller newspapers in the rest of the county, including in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Camarillo. At first, those papers kept their original names. In Simi Valley, for instance, the newspaper owned and published by The Star was called the Simi Valley Enterprise & Star. By the late 1990s, The Star was in the process of rolling those papers into one publication, with one name. On April 30, 1998, the Ventura County Star printed its first truly countywide edition. Roy Pinkerton's vision had been fulfilled. Pinkerton died in 1974, at the age of 88. Four years earlier, his successor as editor of The Star, Julius Gius, had asked him for some words of wisdom to mark the retired editor's 85 birthday. Pinkerton said that if he had his life to live again, he'd do some things differently, Gius wrote in his column. But there was one decision he had no second thoughts about: If he were back in 1925, 'I would start a small, hopeful newspaper in Ventura.' A century of local history and big news stories Founder Roy Pinkerton's countywide vision 'Bigger than life': The face of the Star-Free Press 100 years, only nine editors How Star is living up to founder's vision in 2025 The paper's first editorial How The Star has evolved with the times Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@ This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism. This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County Star founder Roy Pinkerton's countywide vision
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Yahoo
Santa Paula man charged in slaying of Ojai woman, 2023 death of Ventura man
A Santa Paula man was charged with two counts of murder on June 6 in the recent killing of an Ojai-area woman as well as the death of a Ventura man in 2023. The Ventura County District Attorney's Office announced that Christian Alexandre Hillairet, 24, had been charged in Ventura County Superior Court with two counts of felony willful, deliberate and premediated murder, according to a DA's office news release. He has not yet entered a plea. Hillairet is also accused of numerous special allegations, including commission of more than one murder, use of a deadly weapon and a prior strike. Such allegations can carry additional jail time if he is found guilty. Hillairet is accused of killing Carolyn Nino De Rivera, 26, and William Thompson, 44. Nino De Rivera's body was found in a home in the 12000 block of Sisar Road in the unincorporated area of Santa Paula, also known as the Upper Ojai area, on May 31, authorities previously said. The home was leased by Hillairet and the two were in an "on-again-off-again" relationship, said Ventura County Sheriff's Capt. Rob Yoos. Ventura Police Department and sheriff's investigators said they found evidence tying Hillairet to the Ventura man's killing. Thompson was found bludgeoned to death in Ventura on Nov. 3, 2023, according to the DA's office news release. 'The defendant's alleged actions reflect a chilling pattern of violence and cruelty,' DA Erik Nasarenko said in the release. 'Our office is committed to securing justice for these victims and prosecuting Hillairet to the fullest extent of the law.' Hillairet was arrested by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office with the help of federal and Mexican authorities in Rosarito, Baja California, on June 4. Investigators earlier had learned that Hillairet had crossed the border into Mexico through the San Ysidro border crossing early June 1. He was booked into Ventura County Main Jail on June 5 without the possibility of bail, court and jail records show. He is scheduled to return to court June 9. Senior Deputy District Attorney Theresa Pollara with the DA's Major Crimes Homicide Unit is prosecuting the case. Ernesto Centeno Araujo covers breaking news for the Ventura County Star. He can be reached at ecentenoaraujo@ This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Santa Paula man charged in killings of Ojai woman, Ventura man
