The Morning Report
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Was Fridoon Rawshan Nehad 10 to 15 feet away when San Diego police officer Neal Browder shot and killed him? Or was it more like 25 feet? What exactly was Nehad, a mentally ill man, doing in the moments before he was killed on April 30 in the alleyway in San Diego’s Midway neighborhood — was he running or walking toward the officer, or had he already come to a complete stop before shots were fired?
And what about Browder? He said he thought a metallic pen Nehad was holding looked like a knife, but just how threatened was the officer feeling in the moment he decided to take out his gun and shoot? And are his feelings something a so-called “reasonable officer” would share faced with the same situation?
These are just some of the questions Voice of San Diego’s Liam Dillon asks us to consider as we wait on a judge’s decision whether to release surveillance video of the shooting.
There are major discrepancies between the city’s official incident account and the events described by a witness who’s seen the video. Whether the footage is released or not, the shooting opens a window into understanding the justifications for police officers’ use of deadly force and whether they could be better prevented.
Homegrown Medical Innovations
At our Meeting of the Minds event last week, Larry Goldstein, who leads UCSD’s Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center and is the scientific director at Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, told us about some jaw-dropping discoveries he and his colleagues have been making by introducing stem cell therapy to mice with diabetes, spinal cord injuries, ALS and other diseases.
Three of the cutting-edge stem cell treatments are currently in early clinical trials, being tested on humans who Goldstein said he hopes see the same stunning, positive outcomes as the mice.
The San Diego Union-Tribune talked to Goldstein and others this weekend about the long-held promise of the cures locked inside stem cells.
The U-T also looked at other, almost sci-fi-like medical innovations coming out of San Diego and touched on discoveries being made by Illumina, a biotech company whose chief of staff, Karen Possemato, was another one of the presenters at our Meeting of the Minds event.
Possemato told us about how her company has created technology to sequence a person’s entire genome for about $1,000 (to help put that in perspective, the first human genome was sequenced over a decade ago and cost over $2 million).
We’ll be posting video of Goldstein, Possemato and our other Meeting of the Minds presentations later this week.
• A Meeting of the Minds tweet by Scott Lewis was picked as the “Tweet of the Week” in Michael Smolen’s U-T column, which was mostly musings on Marne Foster‘s “tawdry situation.” Here’s Lewis’ tweet:
“In case you came to our #mindsmeet event and you’re still not clear what I was talking about re: animal urination: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24425-universal-law-of-urination-found-in-mammals/“
Faulconer Makes His Case to Goodell
The Chargers’ dramatic win Sunday was perhaps exciting enough to get a few more fans on Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s team, rooting for him to continue bending over backward and otherwise doing whatever it takes to get the Bolts to stay in San Diego.
In Faulconer’s latest Hail Mary, he and county Supervisor Ron Roberts met with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and other team owners who help make up the NFL’s Los Angeles relocation committee, the Orange County Register reports.
The Los Angeles Times says Faulconer and Roberts touted their plan to build a new stadium in Mission Valley and tried to make the case that “San Diego is absolutely an NFL city.”
NFL team owners are meeting early this week to start making decisions on which teams, if any, will get the green light to move to L.A. but officials from San Diego, Oakland and St. Louis — the three teams vying to move there — aren’t invited.
Quick News Hits: We’re McDonalds’ Lab Rats
• Apparently, San Diegans shamelessly eat Sausage McMuffins at all hours of the day. On Tuesday, McDonald’s rolls out its new all-day breakfast offering, a campaign that was first tested out in San Diego. Mickey D’s is using our fair region as grounds for another test trial, this time for customizable fancy-pants sandwiches. We already know City Councilman Chris Cate approves.
• Councilman Todd Gloria sat down with 10News to talk about homelessness and other timely topics.
• Speaking of homelessness, there’s an effort under way to herd the well-meaning cats that are meal-serving service organizations. Then again, we’ve heard that before.
• A bill by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez that ends the practice of strip searches of juveniles by members of the opposite sex was signed into law this weekend. The legislation was inspired by a series on juvenile justice by former CityBeat staffers Kelly Davis and Dave Maass.
Put This in Your Ear
I listen to a lot of podcasts. There’s lots of good stuff being made for the internet radio waves these days, but public-radio old timers On the Media went a step above the rest this week with their “Podcast Extra: After Oregon.”