Tag Archives: San Jose

The Scourge Of Fentanyl

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On Friday, The U.K. Daily Mail reported that Joanne Marian Segovia, 64, the executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, has been charged with attempting to unlawfully import valeryl fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.

The article reports:

Starting in 2015, Segovia had at least 61 drug shipments mailed to her San Jose home from India, Hong Kong, Hungary and Singapore with manifests that listed their contents as ‘wedding party favors,’ ‘gift makeup,’ ‘chocolate and sweets’ and ‘food supplement,’ according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday.

In at least once instance she is accused of using her work computer and address and the police union’s UPS account to ship the drugs within the U.S.

Tom Saggau, a spokesperson for the police union in San Jose, said Segovia has worked for the union since 2003, planning funerals for officers who die in the line of duty, being the liaison between the department and the officers’ families and organizing office festivities and fundraisers.

He said that federal officials informed the union last Friday that Segovia was under investigation and that no one else at the union was involved or knew about Segovia’s alleged acts.

The revelation shocked her colleagues, Saggau said.

‘We didn’t have any reason to suspect her,’ he said, adding that the union’s board of directors has pledged to fully support the federal investigation.

Federal prosecutors said that in 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers intercepted a parcel being sent to her home address that contained $5,000 worth of Tramadol, a synthetic opioid, and sent her a letter telling her they were seizing the pills. 

The next year, the CBP again intercepted a shipment of Tramadol valued at $700 and sent her a seizure letter, court records showed.

But federal officials didn’t start investigating Segovia until last year when investigators found her name and home address on the cellphone of a suspected drug dealer who is part of a network that ships controlled substances made in India to the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the complaint. 

The article concludes:

Fentanyl has now infected almost every major city in America, turning once-thriving streets in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia into wastelands.

Scenes of zombified addicts shooting up or smoking the drug in front of children increasingly becoming a part of everyday life.

Many people who die of overdoses do not know they are taking fentanyl and the drug has partially been blamed for America’s sharp decline in life-expectancy.

Experts have described the drop in life expectancy from 78.8 in 2019 to 76.4 in 2021 as ‘dramatic’ and ‘substantial’.

Officials in Washington state have said that they’ve run out of space in morgues and crematoriums as the drug tears through local communities.

We need harsh penalties for drug dealers and treatment programs for addicts. However, the problem with treatment programs is that they don’t work unless the person is willing to let go of their drug habit.

Infringing On The Second Amendment

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Yesterday I posted an article about a law going through the Pennsylvania legislature that would infringe on the rights of gun owners. Today NewsMax posted an article about a move by the City of San Jose that also infringes on the rights of gun owners.

The article reports:

The city of San Jose, California, will require gun owners to pay a yearly fee and purchase liability insurance.

A new law would make San Jose the first city in the nation to require owners of firearms to have insurance and pay fees to relieve taxpayers of the costs of responding to gun violence, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The city council voted unanimously to draft the law on Tuesday.

The move comes about a month after a gunman killed nine workers at a rail yard in San Jose.

The article continues:

The gunman shot himself as police closed in on him. The shooter and the nine victims were employees of the transit agency situated near the city’s airport.

“Grieving communities don’t have the luxury of forgetting,” Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose wrote in a column posted by CNN on June 15. “We live among devastated family members, we hear the echoes of painful eulogies, and we work with traumatized friends.

“I joined several colleagues to propose a comprehensive set of initiatives to reduce gun-related harm in San Jose.

“These proposals include two measures that no other city nor state in the United States has ever tried: mandatory gun insurance to support victims, and mandatory gun fees to compensate taxpayers. As with many other Silicon Valley innovations, we intend to implement and test these ideas, learn from our mistakes, improve, iterate and provide a platform for others to scale them to benefit their own communities.

Instead of punishing the gun owners, why not increase the penalty for a crime involving a gun, and hold the criminals with the guns accountable for their actions?

The article concludes:

“We will require gun owners to pay a modest annual fee to compensate taxpayers for the cost of gun-related violence. Every day, our residents bear the financial burden for police officers who bravely respond to shootings, for ambulances that transport the wounded, and for trauma surgeons to save them.”

It is uncertain just how much the fees will be, but the Chronicle reported that Liccardo said it would probably be “a couple dozen dollars” and would not be charged to those who could not afford it.

Fox News noted that officials said that anyone found to be in noncompliance will have their weapons confiscated.   (emphasis mine)

When Government Ignores The Constitution

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Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday about an incident in San Jose, California, that should give us pause.

The article reports:

In 2013, Lori Rodriguez called San Jose police to her home because her husband was having a mental health crisis and making violent threats. Seven years later, she is petitioning the Supreme Court to force the city to return her guns.

“It’s not right. I shouldn’t have to do this to get back what’s mine,” Rodriguez told the Washington Free Beacon. “They violated several of my constitutional rights.”

Rodriguez claims police ordered her to open the couple’s gun safe so they could seize all of the weapons in the home after her husband was detained for making threats that the city says included “shooting up schools.” Cops seized not only her husband’s weapons but also the guns that were personally registered to Rodriguez. The city has repeatedly rebuffed her requests to return her property.

The suit is now the sole case with Second Amendment implications remaining before the Court after the justices rejected 10 other gun-rights cases on June 15. Rodriguez’s legal challenge comes as the federal government and a number of states debate “red flag” bills that would allow authorities to deny gun rights to citizens. It has the potential to clarify the extent to which the Second Amendment protects individuals from seizures of firearms.

San Jose city attorney Richard Doyle did not respond to a request for comment. The city defended its actions, saying that authorities were within their rights to confiscate the guns, calling Rodriguez’s claim “borderline frivolous.”

“If the government has lawful authority to effect the forfeiture and observes the requirements of due process in so doing, it has complied with the Constitution,” Doyle said in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. “The forfeiture does nothing whatever to impair the previous owner’s right to buy, possess, or use firearms, and notwithstanding that the owner may recover the full market value of the guns through their transfer and sale.”

The article continues:

Several of the guns confiscated from Rodriguez by San Jose police have special sentimental value, according to Rodriguez. Police confiscated not only handguns that she and her husband purchased but also a war souvenir inherited from a family member.

“One of them is a gun my great uncle brought back from WWII,” she said. “I really want that one back. You can’t replace that one, obviously.”

Don Kilmer, Rodriguez’s lawyer, said that while the case implicates the 2nd Amendment, in addition to the 4th and even 14th Amendments, it ultimately comes down to an undisputed fact: Lori Rodriguez is not prohibited from owning the firearms San Jose took from her house.

“Her mental health has never been at issue,” Kilmer told the Free Beacon. “The law that the city is holding these guns under says that you can confiscate weapons of people who are mentally ill. Lori is not mentally ill.”

In the years since the initial police call, the Rodriguez family continues to live together, but Lori has taken steps to ensure she can legally own the confiscated firearms. She has transferred all of the firearms into her name and she is the only family member who knows the combination to the gun safe. Her lawyers argue that she is in compliance with all California gun laws—including those for individuals who live with people who can not own firearms themselves.

If her husband was the problem and he had no access to the gun safe, how can the city justify taking her guns away? This is definitely overreach.