Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy Ed Reynoso said the lockdown began at 10 a.m. and lasted until approximately 10:45 a.m.  The jail continued to accept bookings once the lockdown was lifted.

The Indio jail serves the Coachella Valley and is run by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.  Constructed in 1959, the facility represents approximately 9% of the county’s 4,100 jail beds.  Booking at the Riverside County Indio Jail can take between two to four hours and includes fingerprinting, background checks, the taking of mug shots and having the defendant’s information entered into the computer system. Bail can be posted at this facility 24-hours a day.  In Riverside County, bail bonds cost 10% of the total amount of the total amount of the set bail.

Those wishing to visit an inmate are required to call the jail’s visiting number one day prior to the desired visiting date to schedule an appointment.  Visits are limited to 45-minutes and visitors are required to check in no later than 10 minutes before the scheduled visit time.  The number of visitors is limited to two per inmate, and inmates may not have more than two visits scheduled within a seven day period.

This means that some of the county’s 60,000 prisoners may now need to fork over $142.42 per day while behind bars.  Stone told CNN Money that while he understands that not everyone will pay, that those who have jobs are are arrested for crimes such as drunk driving should be required to do so.  Even if just 25 percent of prisoners pay for their jail stay the county would save in excess of $6.5 million each year.

Riverside County Counsel Pamela Walls said the law is legal under state law but determinations as to who will and who will not be required to pay will be evaluated on a “case-by-case basis”.   A primary deciding factor in those decisions, she said, will be the defendant’s ability to pay.   Monthly payment options to cover incarceration costs will be considered for those who are unable to pay the full amount all at once.

The state could possibly send some of their inmates to county jails to serve out their sentences. Because of this, Riverside County is proposing to charge inmates for the cost of incarceration.

The plan is for inmates to repay the county for housing, feeding, clothing, and supervising them. Supervisor Jeff Stone says, “It’s $142 a day that it costs the taxpayers to house our convicts in our jails which amounts to $51,830 a year.” Stone admits that the idea is a long shot.

The plan also includes charging admission fees for anyone wanting to visit inmates in jail.

Supervisor Bob Buster said, “I don’t want to malign the turnip, but it’s hard to get a lot of juice out of it,” speaking of the number of inmates who wouldn’t be able to afford paying incarceration costs.

Stone says that there are a lot of prisoners who can afford it, though, and the county could use the extra money. “White collar crimes, people that get put in jail after repetitive DUIs, they can in fact reimburse this county either through liens on their property or judgments that can be applied. Even if this nets 2 or 3 million dollars, that’s 2 or 3 million that closes that $16 million gap in the sheriff’s Department that enables us hopefully to keep the officers on the street.”

Riverside County is not the first jurisdiction to attempt to recoup the costs of housing from inmates. Porter County in Indiana has been billing inmates for the last 10 years. Riverside’s county attorneys will look over the inmate reimbursement proposal and give their report to the board of supervisors later on in the year.

In July, a customer used Bail Bonds United. In turn, the bail bond company posted the bond but the customer is said to have not been able to pay the premium (the bail bond fee, which is generally arranged in advance) to bondsman, according to the California Department of Insurance. Thus, Bail Bonds United and Damion Paul Perkins, also the co-owner, became quite dissatisfied.

Allegedly in August, Perkins (the bondsman now in custody) and a fellow male went the customer’s home, order him out at gun point, handcuffed him, placed the victim in the back of their car, and Perkins drove them around until he and they could negotiate an amount of ransom. Perkins and his accomplice apparently received illegal drugs and additional money from the victim’s family and in turn, the victim was released. Talk about unethical bondsmen!!

Perkins is being prosecuted by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. If Perkins is convicted, he will face a maximum sentence of life in prison with possible parole.

Why did he go on a firebombing rampage that lasted 36-hours?  Investigators looking at possibilities and following up on leads. Once such clue has surfaced in the form of an entry Batties made on his MySpace page more than two years ago.  On it, he lists among his desires: “blowing the world up.”

Batties’ bizarre bomb spree began on Friday evening, around 11:00, when he tossed a Molotov cocktail into the San Diego Police Department’s Mid-City station’s fenced yard.  It rolled under a car but failed to ignite. Almost immediately, SD police got a call that someone had thrown another bomb at the nearby Monroe Clark Middle School. That device landed in the schoolyard but no damage was reported there, either.

On Saturday afternoon, Mission Beach firefighters were called to the scene of a Chevy Silverado pickup that was engulfed in flames. Investigators determined the blaze was set deliberately and witnesses told police they saw a white Ford SUV driving away from the area.

Later that same evening, Batties allegedly tossed another homemade bomb over the fence of the San Diego Police Department’s Eastern Division Station.  This was followed by yet another Molotov cocktail hurled at a house on Zencaro Avenue in Serra Mesa.  The homemade bomb smashed a window and then fizzled out on the lawn.

On Sunday, a Del Mar Heights officer who answered a vehicle burglary call spotted an SUV that matched the description of the vehicle seen near the previous fire bombings and the chase was on.

Authorities pursued Batties’ SUV, which he drove at more than 100 miles per hour, to the Riverside County line.  Police said he threw gas cans and other objects, including Molotov cocktails, out the window during the entire chase. The CHP joined the chase about 20 minutes later, laying a spike strip ahead of the suspect at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Temecula. Even after he sped over the spikes and blew out his tires, Batties still managed to continue on about a mile before careening into the center divide, where he was arrested.

Batties is now in a county jail, apparently unable to make bail and prosecutors said they believe he will be arraigned on Wednesday.

In my opinion, Edward Batties’ behavior suggests he should also drop the “s” from his last name and call himself “Batty”.

On the morning of January 27, 2010, six hundred and fifty officers from thirty-four local and federal agencies swarmed the Riva Gang’s territory and arrested fifty alleged gang members, including Riva leaders and members of their rival gang, the 1200 Blocc Crips.

For years, the East Side Riva gangs of Riverside have functioned as a powerful arm of the Mexican Mafia, trafficking in methamphetamine and fighting any African American gang members or bystanders unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Last week, however, all that changed.  Authorities, responding to a federal complaint, successfully ferreted offenders out of hiding on their own home turf and took them into custody.

“We hope we made an impact,” Riverside Police Chief Russ Leach said. “Gangs don’t own the parks and the streets. The citizens do.”

Investigators reportedly spent months grilling informants and wiretapping suspects’ phones to compile evidence.  Local district attorney’s investigators worked alongside Riverside Police gang detectives and FBI and DEA special agents during Operation Promise. They discovered that Riva leaders communicated with Mexican Mafia elders in coded language about large-scale meth trafficking and “tribute” payments for imprisoned gang members’ protection. A federal agent explained that these kinds of relationships have revealed that city gang investigations must be expanded beyond geographical and jurisdictional boundaries.

Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco spoke to the press about the Riva Gang, standing behind a table littered with seized weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, knives, armor-piercing bullets.  Most bizarre was the inclusion of two venomous rattlesnakes in his display. “They don’t have jobs … They’re living off the fruits of their drug sales.” He said of the suspects.

In a related sting, authorities also arrested Riva Gang’s rivals — members of the predominantly African-American gang called the 1200 Blocc Crips. These two gangs once worked together to target mutual enemies in the Casa Blanca region of central Riverside, officials said, until the Mexican Mafia ordered the Latino Rivas to attack blacks, launching a race war.

Over the last 20 years, Riva gang members have since been convicted and sentenced in several hate crimes against innocent bystanders, including the 2005 shooting of a Nigerian tourist on University Avenue and two separate murders of 13-year-old African-American boys in 2002.

Despite Wednesday’s arrests, officials say about three-quarters of the seven hundred Riva members are still active in this community.  They also believe that about two hundred active members of the 1200 Blocc Crips roam on the streets, as well.

She’s also suspected of holding up two more banks in Poway which she’s not officially been charged for, yet. Pennock was arrested in Temecula on November 6th, just minutes after a woman robbied Temecula Chase Bank. She was later stopped in a van that witnesses identified at the crime scene.

Guilty or not, Pennock is out of jail on a $25,000 bail. Her lawyer, declined to comment after she was ordered back to court on December 17th.  Officials have some further investigations to do. The FBI is now on the case along with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

To top it all off, Roxanne Pennock lives in Poway. What a coincidence that Riverside authorities uncovered evidence from the robbery of the Chase bank in, you got it… her hometown, Poway. The van was recovered with evidence which links Ms. Pennock to the downright dastardly deeds.

Further, she lives only minutes from a San Diego National Bank on Poway Road which was robbed at semi-automatic gunpoint by a person wearing a clown mask and hooded sweat shirt.  A second robbery took place at a U.S. Bank in Poway where it was robbed by a person “matching the description of the previous suspect.” Sounds suspicious all right. I wonder if she ever saw “Mad Money…” the movie, that is.