Truck Rolls Into House
May 26, 2011
Emergency crews responded to a home in Bratt Thursday afternoon after a pickup truck rolled into a house.
A surprised neighbor found that his unoccupied Ford F150 had rolled across a backyard and into a utility room at a his neighbor’s home, causing just minor damage. There were no injuries.
The Walnut Hill Station of Escambia Fire Rescue, Escambia County Sheriff’s Office and Atmore Ambulance responded to the call.
NorthEscambia.com photo, click to enlarge.
Escambia School District Websites Hacked, Proclaim Love For Iran
May 26, 2011
Many of the Escambia County School District’s websites were hacked Wednesday night and replaced with a page in support of Iran and displaying an obscene gesture.
The hacker’s page proclaimed “this Website Has Been Hacked…N3td3v!l Was Here” and proclaimed “We Love Iran”. The page also included a skull and crossbones image, along with a drawing of an obscene finger gesture. To see an image of the complete page (Warning: Including the obscene gesture!), click the image on the left.
By midnight, the hacker’s page had been removed from the school district’s main pages, but it remained on the pages of several schools, including Northview High and Ernest Ward Middle, at 7 a.m. Thursday.
Pictured: A portion of the Northview High School website as seen about 12:30 Thursday morning.
Editor’s note: On the image of the hacked page, we have digitally altered the NorthEscambia.com IP address used to visit the page; the page displayed the Internet address of any computer visiting the site.
Getaway Driver: Woman Found Guilty In Molino Pharmacy Robbery
May 26, 2011
A Cantonment woman was found guilty Wednesday on multiple charges related to the September 2010 armed robbery of Scott’s Pharmacy in Molino.
It took an Escambia County jury less than two hours to return the verdict about 7:00 Wednesday evening against 24-year old Krystal Lynn Collins. She was found guilty of armed robbery with a firearm and a half dozen felony drug charges. She will be sentenced July 26.
According to the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, Collins drove the getaway car for Joseph Daniel Flowers during the holdup. Flowers remains in the Escambia County Jail awaiting a July trial.
For a photo gallery from the robbery scene and the suspect’s home, click here.
About 1:15 the afternoon of September 20, 2010, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department believes Flowers robbed the pharmacy at Highway 29 and Molino Road at gunpoint while wearing boxer shorts on his head.
The bandit was described by witnesses as a white male in a navy blue bathrobe, blue jeans, black house slippers, yellow kitchen-type gloves, and with boxer shorts on his head. He entered the store and announced that he was robbing the business. Employees said he was armed with a revolver that was wrapped in a plastic bag and pointed at a store employee as he demanded prescription narcotics. Flowers threatened to kill witnesses if the police responded, the report states.
Flowers fled the store with a large quantity of narcotics worth several thousand dollars in two plastic bags, according to the ECSO report.
A witness saw Flowers get into a silver, mid-size vehicle parked behind the pharmacy after the robbery. He was unable to get the tag number from the car, but he did note two stickers, one red and one white, on the on the vehicle.
Scott’s Pharmacy personnel told deputies that they believed Flowers, a pharmacy customer, was the robbery suspect, based upon recognizing his voice and a unique gait due to a back injury. Deputies found a silver Honda Civic at Flowers’ residence in the 400 block of Molino Road that matched the description given by the witness.
Collins was present at the home on Molino Road, according to the Sheriff’s Office. She told deputies that she had driven Flowers to a Dollar General Store near the pharmacy prior to 11:00 that morning and she had not gone anywhere else. Surveillance video from the Dollar General placed Collins in the store between 1:06 and 1:08 p.m. — just prior to the pharmacy robbery.
She purchased a bottle of Coca-Cola and a Mountain Dew at the Dollar General, according to deputies. Flowers dropped the red cap from a bottle of Coca-Cola inside the pharmacy during the robbery, deputies said. A Coca-Cola bottle without a cap was discovered in the vehicle at Flowers’ residence.
Inside the home, deputies recovered a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver matching the description of the one given by store employees, according to the report.
Pictured top: Krystal Lynn Collins’ mugshot from the Escambia County Jail. Pictured middle inset: Collins (then with blond hair) was briefly taken into custody after the robbery before being released. Pictured bottom inset: The alleged getaway car with two stickers as noted by a witness. NorthEscambia.com photos, click to enlarge.
vehicle.
‘Functional Consolidation’ Could Happen With Escambia, Pensacola Emergency Calls
May 26, 2011
Escambia County and the city of Pensacola could combine their emergency dispatch services.
County Administrator Randy Oliver, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan, Mayor Ashton Hayward’s Chief of Staff John Asmar, and Pensacola Police Chief Chip Simmons met Monday afternoon to discuss moving forward with a plan to implement functional consolidation of emergency dispatch operations. The goal of all the entities is to see if it is feasible to maintain the same level of service to the public while saving taxpayers money.
In order to move forward the plan would have to provide a cost savings for county residents while maintaining standards of service. Although cost savings would come from reducing duplicated services, officials said the effort would not result in any staff layoffs except through attrition, as dispatch staff retire.
Representatives from the above agencies will visit Mobile — which recently completed a similar consolidation — to study how functional consolidation was accomplished there.
Drought Now ‘Extreme’
May 26, 2011
Our rainfall deficit continues to worsen, with the North Escambia area now official in an extreme drought with no significant rainfall in weeks. The U.S. Drought Monitor map shows all of Escambia and Santa Rosa counties in a severe drought, along with the southernmost part of Escambia County, Alabama.
The U.S. Drought Monitor is published by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln using a variety of climatic data.
Pictured top: A field of corn is irrigated recently at Highway 4 and Dortch Road in Bratt. NorthEscambia.com photo, click to enlarge.
Santa Rosa Cuts 7th Period, Teachers
May 26, 2011
Changes are is store next year at Santa Rosa County middle and high schools with the elimination of one class period per day, and several teachers could be out of job.
With an $11 million cut in funding from the state, Santa Rosa will have six periods per day rather than the current seven for grades 6-12. The number of elective classes will also be cut, and students will only be required to have 24 credits to graduate rather than 28.
In all, 64 teaching positions and 13 math coaches will eliminated with the end of seventh period. But, due to state-mandated class-size limits, there will be 30 new teachers and nine support staff members hired at the elementary level.
Playground Blaze Causes Minor Damage
May 26, 2011
A playground blaze caused minor damage Wednesday afternoon at the Bratt Community Park on West Highway 4. The fire burned a large area of wood chips around the park’s playground equipment, which was not damaged. The cause of the blaze was not immediately available.
The Century, McDavid and Walnut Hill stations of Escambia Fire Rescue responded to the 4 p.m. fire.
Pictured: Firefighters work to extinguish smoldering wood chips on the playground at the Bratt Community Park Wednesday afternoon. NorthEscambia.com photos, click to enlarge.
The
New Poll Says Rick Scott, Florida Budget Unpopular
May 26, 2011
Voters might not be that familiar with the nuances of Gov. Rick Scott’s policies or the budget he will sign Thursday, but they don’t care for either, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.
The survey of 1,196 registered voters, parts of which were released Wednesday, showed Scott’s disapproval rating climbing to 57 percent, up from 48 percent in April and 22 percent in February. The governor’s approval rating slid to 29 percent after having held steady at 35 percent in the earlier two polls.
“These are not good numbers,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “There’s no way to spin these numbers that they’re good for the governor.”
Most of the newly critical voters appear to have been undecided in February, when 43 percent offered no opinion, far more than the 14 percent who didn’t weigh in during the May poll.
Brown said the approval ratings are the worst numbers for a governor in any of the six states Quinnipiac regularly polls.
The brief honeymoon for Scott from Florida voters isn’t surprising, said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. Scott narrowly won the general election in November and has since had to contend with a legislative session that ended badly and a painful budgeting process. He’s also taking heat for the slow economic recovery.
“If people are suffering in a bad economy, and you promise to create jobs, you’ve got to deliver — and people aren’t too patient,” MacManus said.
And as Scott heads to The Villages on Thursday to approve the state spending plan and nix some proposals with his line-item veto, the poll suggested both the budget and Scott’s handling of it are unpopular.
Voters disapproved of the governor’s approach to the budget by a 59-30 margin, and only 24 percent of those responding to the poll approve of the spending measure.
Despite Republicans’ largely successful efforts to hold the line on tax and fee increases during the last legislative session, voters split 42-40 when asked if Scott has kept his promise not to raise taxes.
At the same time, more than half (54 percent) said Scott shouldn’t have made that pledge, and only about a quarter (26 percent) think the spending plan will help create jobs — something the governor and lawmakers have said is at the enter of the proposal.
“The voters who are aware of the cuts he has made to the budget are not particularly happy about it, and those who might be expected to support him because (lawmakers were) able to balance the budget without raising taxes don’t know that that’s the case,” Brown said.
In an interview with WQAM, a sports-talk radio station in Miami on Wednesday, Scott suggested the steps he’s taken to deal with the state’s budget crisis are partly to blame for the poor numbers.
“When you go make all the tough decisions, when you walk into a budget deficit of $3.7 billion and you hold people accountable, you make sure that education’s headed in the right direction, you make sure that you’re getting the jobs back — it takes time for those things to happen,” Scott said. “We’re on the right track, the right things are going to happen.”
Some of the confusion over taxes could stem from discussions by county commissions and school boards about whether to increase revenues as they try to close out their budgets, MacManus said.
“The bottom line is, whether it’s state or local, it all ends up on the governor’s desk,” she said.
Sensing an opening, Democrats amped up long-shot efforts to get Scott to veto the entire budget. Party Chairman Rod Smith sent an email to supporters calling the blueprint “nothing short of a nightmare for Florida” and asking them to sign a petition. At least two lawmakers — Reps. Dwight Bullard of Miami and Mark Pafford of West Palm Beach — issued statements supporting a veto.
“By vetoing the entire budget — rather than simply rejecting a few token line items — and calling the Legislature back into session to craft a better state spending plan, the governor can help prevent the hardship that this budget will bring to thousands of Floridians,” Pafford said.
Pollsters also asked voters about property-insurace rates and regulation. Only 3 percent of voters think it’s getting easier to buy property insurance in Florida; 59 percent of those polled favor more government regulation of the market. That includes 67 percent of voters in Southeast Florida and 64 percent in the Tampa Bay area.
At the same time, lawmakers and Scott have pushed to loosen rules on private insurers and push property owners out of the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, saying those moves would help encourage new insurers to enter the state market. Critics of those efforts quickly pounced on the numbers.
“It’s not surprising that Floridians are rejecting Rick Scott and the Republican Legislature’s rate hikes and insurance industry giveaways,” said Sean Shaw, a former state insurance consumer advocate who now works for Merlin Group, a law firm that specializes in suing insurers. “Most Floridians aren’t worth $300 million, which makes it a little harder to swallow higher insurance bills and less insurer accountability.”
By Brandon Larrabee
The News Service of Florida
Photos: EWMS Band, Chorus Perform
May 26, 2011
The Ernest Ward Middle School Music Boosters held a Spring Concert and Spaghetti Dinner Tuesday night in Walnut Hill. All proceeds from the event, which featured performances by the school’s band and chorus, benefited the school’s music programs.
For more photos from the event, click here.
Pictured: The Ernest Ward Middle School chorus (above) and band (below) perform during an event Tuesday night at the Walnut Hill Community Center. Submitted photos by Leslie Gonzalez for NorthEscambia.com, click to enlarge.
Northwest Escambia Closing Ceremony Tonight
May 26, 2011
Closing ceremonies for Northwest Escambia Little League in Walnut Hill will be this evening at 6:30. All players should arrive in uniform by 6 p.m.
Everyone is invited to attend. Organizers said there will be a “secret” event for the kids.
Junior and senior baseball and senior softball will play after the ceremonies, about 7:30 p.m. and will continue through June 14.
NorthEscambia.com file photos, click to enlarge.