Valley Center deputy sheriffs have started to move into their new, 6,000 square foot substation at the corner of Ahern Ranch Road & N. Lake Wohlford Road (across the street from the middle school).
The completely up-to-date substation is several times as roomy as the 1200 square foot trailer the 18 deputies assigned to VC and the surrounding area have been working out of for years.
The deputies will probably grow into this new substation rapidly. Population is growing, three casinos are operating nearby and deputies have a lot more work to do—although for the moment they will be doing the work with the same amount of personnel.
The deputies first began sharing space with the VC Fire Dept. 15 years ago at the fire station on Lilac. For years they had a small room at the station.
Then they moved to a trailer on land rented from the fire district. The fire district sold them the land and the County committed to building a full-service substation.
At last year’s groundbreaking for the substation, Supervisor Bill Horn commented about how small the substation is: “The last time I was here at that closet they call a trailer, as I walked out by the exit, a deputy was talking to a suspect. I had to ask him to stop talking to the suspect so I could get out. That was a clue that it was a little bit small.”
This week Lt. Maury Freitas gave The Roadrunner a tour of the building.
A lot of things remain to be installed, although the carpeting and most of the shelving is in.
Because the old substation is just next door to the new one, Lt. Freitas and his deputies have been able to provide a lot of input to the builders.
“I’m over there several times a day,” Freitas said.
The new building includes cubicles and computers for all of the deputies, offices for two sergeants and the lieutenant, an interviewing room, an evidence room, holding cells, men’s and women’s locker rooms, and a kitchen. It also includes a conference room that will be available as a community room for use by the public.
The conference room could also be used as a command center, combining fire and police services, in case of an emergency. The new substation also has its own power generator.
The move is taking place in two phases. The first phase, (under way now) includes starting to occupy the new building.
The second phase will complete this job, and turn the land now occupied by the trailer into a parking lot.
By DAVID ROSS
An Escondido woman who escaped from the second World Trade Center tower a few minutes before it collapsed on 9/11 will be the Grand Marshal for this year’s Western Days Parade.
Joy Shepard was on the 61st floor of the second tower on the morning of Sept. 11, when the first of the hijacked airliners struck the other tower.
After 28 years of teaching, she had decided to change her career and become a financial advisor. She had arrived in New York City a few days before to begin the final three weeks of training at Morgan Stanley’s headquarters in the tower.
On Monday she went to work in high heels, but because she was uncomfortable in them, she changed into flats before going to work on Tuesday. That was one of the factors that may have saved her life.
About 9:30 a.m. they got a break in the training. Mrs. Shepard went out to the break area to get some decaf.
A young man told her, “We’ve been bombed!”
She looked out the window. She could see the Statue of Liberty, and she could see the fiery hole in the tower next to them.
“I could not believe my eyes! The PA came on and said, ‘Go back to your rooms,’ but I didn’t. I stared at the fire ball. I saw a gaping area and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I saw an airplane tail being consumed.”
That didn’t make sense at the time, because most people then thought that a bomb had gone off in the tower.
“I just stared at it. I kept staring at it and analyzing it,” she recalls. She flashed on what had happened on her birthday in 1993. That was the day that someone drove a truck full of explosives into the World Trade Center.
She eventually wandered back to her office, stood in the door looking at her cell phone and day planner and thought; “I’ve got to go down.”
She told one of the trainers, “I’m really sorry. I can’t stay. I’ve got to get back to the ground.”
She started down the stairwell At the 44th floor she left the stairwell. The elevator stopped and someone offered to hold the door open so she could go back up. The PA came on again and repeated the announcement for people to return to their jobs.
She decided to continue down, this time through the stairwell. “If everything is all right, I’ll return,” she told herself.
The second plane slammed into the second tower while she was in the stairway.
Two women who were climbing down with Mrs. Shepard were knocked down by the impact. She kept her feet.
“When it hit, it just jolted the whole stairway. You could smell the jet fuel. A crack appeared in the wall. Smoke filled the stairwell. The skylight above us blew out of the building.”
Both women with her were wearing heels. One said she couldn’t go on.
“You’ve got to!” she told her. “I’m from California. This is like a little earthquake. You can do it. Put one foot in front of the other. We can make it.”
They heard the thunder of people entering the stairwell.
“Honey!” she told the woman. “You’ve got to get up right now. It’ll be a disaster if you don’t.”
She took her hand and they went down together.
On the way down a man, Mike, from the 84th floor, joined them. He had seen the first plane hit. He tried to persuade his co-workers to leave with him. Most of them stayed. Those who did were killed.
“We walked down together,” Mrs. Shepard recalls. “All of us. Nobody panicked. We kept each other calm. We prayed. We moved like one giant organism. Two by two all the way down the stairs.”
A young black man offered her his shirt to breathe through. She gave it back after a few minutes and told him he needed it for himself. She breathed through her blouse from then on.
They made it to the ground floor. It was dark. All the lights were off. .
Some firemen with flashlights met them. Her friend needed oxygen.
“By that time it was just Mike, the second woman and I,” she remembers. “A lot of people were trying to get through the revolving glass doors.
“Mike and I noticed that no one was going through the doors to the right. He held her hand and they both ran.”
She thought she would be OK on the ground, but it was worse than inside the building.
“People and debris were falling all around me. Wounded and torn people. It was a horrible disaster!”
Sheets of concrete fell like bombs. “ I don’t know how I was missed because I saw people being killed by concrete as big as buses. It was the grace of God that I survived.”
Mike told her: “We’re going to go north on Broadway.”
“OK, I’m with you kiddo,” she answered.
“I know a little Irish pub there. Do you want a drink?”
When they arrived he ordered a beer and she ordered ice water.
Suddenly there was a rumble and the pub shook from side to side.
“Joy,” Mike said. “Tower two is coming down.” There was a huge plume of smoke and a tidal wave of debris coming towards them.
“They are after the symbols of America. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. Let’s go to Greenwich Village. Nobody wants Greenwich Village,” he said.
They kept moving quickly, as did many. Others just stopped like deer in the headlights, and stared at the carnage.
They went to an apartment of a friend of Mike’s in Greenwich Village.
Mrs. Shepard was unhurt, except for some bruises on her left arm.
She was one of a handful from San Diego County who survived the attack. She is astounded that people want to hear her story.
“People are just amazed and I think my story had a happy ending. People like to hear happy news.”
Since September she has spoken to the journalism class at the school in San Dieguito where she taught for many years.
She’s also spoken at a Lutheran Church.
She told the school children, “There’s evil in the world, but there’s so much more good. I saw people helping people, and what was lost is a human loss, not a financial loss. If those buildings had been filled to capacity it could have been 50,000 dead.”
Her own firm lost 12 people out of 3500 employed.
Mrs. Shepard is very flattered by being named Grand Marshal. “I don’t know why I was chosen.”
She doesn’t know either why she was invited to speak to a gathering at National Heroes Week.
She told the audience, “First of all, I want you to realize, I’m not a hero. I’m a survivor. That’s the only distinction I have. The people who are your heroes are your parents because they are with you 24/7 and the teachers, the armed forces, your firemen and your police, who literally protect us and give up our lives in order to protect us.”
She remembers the firefighters who were waiting when she reached the ground floor, and who stayed at their posts with flashlights.
“I call them my golden guardian angels. They lit the way for us.”
They didn’t make it out themselves.
“I don’t think anyone thought those buildings would come down. They were magnificent buildings.”
She has a fear of heights, and that, more than anything, was probably what told her to start down when the first airplane hit, and what gave her the andrenaline rush to complete the climb down.
For several hours her husband of 43 years, Alan, and oldest son, David, thought she had perished.
Her husband had been awakened by his sister-in-law shortly after the first plane struck.
Her son, David, was driving to work when he heard the news. He turned around and returned home.
They watched TV for more than three hours, while Mrs. Shepard kept hitting the redial on a borrowed cellphone, trying to get through.
Finally she did.
Alan didn’t recognize her voice. He had already given her up for dead.
“Darling, it’s me, I made it!” she told him.
“What’s your birthday!” he demanded before he would believe her. They told her youngest son, Steven.
Another son, John, is a flight attendant living in France. He lost some of his friends on one of the three hijacked flights.
He spent the night in a cathedral, praying for his mother, until he finally got word that she was alive.
She was stranded in New York City for two days.
“I’m telling you, the way people helped each other back there. The spontaneous vigils. When the troops were coming into the city, the New Yorkers would form a parade route for them and hold up signs saying, “Welcome to our armed forces!”
A young woman from Florida offered her a car ride west to St. Louis, where she was able to book a flight out on Saturday.
During the drive to St. Louis she saw evidence of how the nation had pulled together. “We saw people waving flags. We saw American flags painted on the sides of barns.”
The plane home was filled with Marines, flying to Camp Pendleton.
Her family was waiting at Lindbergh Field as the plane landed shortly after midnight.
In retrospect, she’s glad she didn’t know just how serious things were on Sept. 11.
“At the time I was in a very calm mode, and maybe it was all those years of disaster training at the schools.”
She didn’t sleep for three nights after the experience, and really not for two months.
There were no nightmares, but when she closed her eyes she could see bodies falling.
“It’s with me. It will always be with me.” Vietnam vets tell her, “You’re a veteran, Joy. You were in a war zone.”
But she IS a survivor, and she feels that has to be for a reason.
“I’ve got a lot of living to do, and I’ve got a new lease on life. I’m going to do what I can to help people. I’m still an educator and enlighten them a little bit by how they can plan for their futures.”
Having a future of her own given back to her helps give her a unique perspective to that.
Ever wanted to be in a parade? — Do you have a great idea for a float, have you ever wanted to dress up like a cowboy, saloon girl, floozie, or even pay tribute to an icon or event of the old west.
Well, here’s your chance! Get together with family, friends, co-workers, members of your club or service organization — Use your imagination and come up with an entry for the parade in keeping with Western Days or one that encompasses this year’s theme “Freedom Trails.”
Entrants in the past have included: a mounted tribute to Dale Evans, Little Cowboy & Cowgirl Float, Dance Hall Girls, Mounted Posse and who can forget the Republican Women’s Club’s giant elephant?
So, dust off those boots and show off your wild side (Wild West side that is) and join in the fun.
Entry forms are available at the following locations: Valley Roadrunner; Chamber of Commerce; Parks & Recreation Department;VC Oil; Community Pharmacy; California Bank & Trust; Library; Country Junction Deli and all Feed Stores. Deadline for Official Program listing is May 10.
Call Fran DeWilde (Parade Coordinator) at 749-1339 for more information and restrictions.
Services will be held March 19 for longtime VC community leader John E. Mitchell, who died March 19 of prostate cancer at his home in Roseville. He was 76.
Mr. Mitchell was a retired captain in the United States Navy.
He was a member of the VC Planning Group and served as chairman for one year.
Mr. Mitchell was born April 18, 1925, in Washington, Pennsylvania.
He grew up in Washington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Washington High School in the Class of 1943. He attended Washington and Jefferson College and joined the US Naval Reserve V-12 Program at Union College in Schenectady, New York, during World War II.
John met Elizabeth Rose Garbarino of Boston, Mass., while stationed at the Boston Naval Shipyard. They were married in Boston on March 15, 1945. They were married for 43 years and had three children. Betty passed away suddenly on January 8, 1989.
John graduated from Northeastern University with a BBA in Liberal Arts and Business with high honors in 1956.
He received his commission as an Ensign in the United States Navy in 1945. He served as commanding officer of the destroyer USS McKean (DD-784) and the amphibious assault ship USS Duluth (LPD-6). He also served as the commodore of Destroyer Squadron 5 of the Pacific Fleet and as the Chief of the Military Advisory and Assist Group of The Netherlands before retiring from the Navy in 1975.
He was awarded the Pacific Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal, Korean Presidential Unit Citation, Korean Service Medal, Combat Action Ribbon and Meritorious Service Medal, among many others.
John & Betty Mitchell purchased property on Pauma Vista Drive in 1972. In 1975, they moved to Valley Center, where they built a house and planted avocados.
Mr. Mitchell became a real estate broker, owning Century 21 Trans World Properties.
He was an active member of the Valley Center Optimist Club for several years, and served as President of the club in 1980. He served as Lieutenant Governor of the California South District of Optimists International in 1982.
He also served on the VC Planning Group, including a year as president.
Mr. Mitchell married Jean Vastola on Aug. 3, 1991. They sold real estate together and were members of the Bethel Lutheran Church. They lived in Valley Center until about three years ago. They settled in Roseville, near Sacramento.
Mr. Mitchell is survived by wife, Jean Mitchell of Roseville; son, David Mitchell of Auburn, Alabama; daughters, Kathryn Mullaney of Hannawa Falls, New York and Cynthia McClure of San Diego; stepdaughter, Caroline Davis of Chico, stepsons, Rich Vastola of Roseville and George Vastola of Santa Rosa, Bob Vastola; eight step-grandchildren, four grand-children and one great-grandchild.
Graveside services will be held on April 19, 2002, at 11 a.m. at the Valley Center Cemetery.
* * *
A memorial fund will be set up at Light of the Valley Lutheran Church, and the family requests donations to this in lieu of flowers. The name and address of the fund will be announced in a future paper.
Deputies’ duties have changed greatly in three decades that Don Continelli was on the force
Last week a fixture of Valley Center and Pauma Valley retired from the Sheriff’s department, and, to use a tired phrase, it was the end of an era.
Don Continelli handed in his badge after 31 and a half years with the department.
It’s hard to imagine the department without Continelli, whose steady, calm presence has helped keep the local substation on an even keel for years.
He started at the old East County station in Bostonia (a name few people know today) in east El Cajon. As the department grew through the 70s they opened a Lemon Grove office and he went there.
He first came to Valley Center in May of 1974. His first working day here was at Western Days.
“It was quite a bit smaller then,” he recalls. “We didn’t have near the help putting it on that we do today.” The deputies that day were Continelli, Wilbur Van Cleeve, Stan Sullins and Randy Simpson.
“We had to close the parade route. Our day started at 10 a.m. and didn’t end until after midnight. They had dances and the old Valley Center Inn going full blast, plus the Hideaway, which is now Fat Ivor’s.”
In 1987 the department had a severe attrition problem and the Sheriff decided to transfer deputies who had never served at the jail there.
“I was one of those either fortunate or unfortunate, I did two years at Vista Jail. A lot of people don’t want to work at the jail but it’s a different aspect of the job,” he recalls.
From1989-94-he returned to VC. He was promoted to sergeant, served a short time in Julian and then San Marcos until 1996, when he returned here.
Continelli always liked the small town atmosphere here.
“I wanted to be a resident deputy when I first realized what that was in 1973 and 74, that it was an assignment in asmall rural community and which you had pretty much sole responsibility for all law enforcement activities that that community needed.”
Resident deputies were on call 24 hours a day.
“That was where my interest was. I wanted to go where I knew the people and the people knew me.”
Law enforcement spends millions of dollars annually on programs and studies to achieve this kind of connection to the community, he says.
“It’s pretty much what we’ve had in our resident program for the 30 years I’ve been here. It’s something I picked up from those who were resident deputies before me.”
The resident deputy program ceased in 1990 in VC when the substation moved to the N. Lake Wohlford Road trailer.
The substation went to having 24 hour patrols, with deputies on eight hour shifts, rather than having them on call.
“We were very fortunate to have two very good lieutenants, Jimmy Simms, who was in charge of rural enforcement and Doug Clements. They realized the importance of the resident deputy program. We tried to instill that into our deputies as we became a substation, to keep that emphasis,” he recalls.
For Continelli, the enjoyment of the work has almost been “life-consuming,” and rarely boring.
“I’ve met a lot of people— people that have been my friend for years and have helped me time and time again. There’s people I’ve had to arrest time and time again and sometimes I had to fight them to get them into custody but there was never any bad feelings afterwards. I see these guys and we shake hands and talk about the old times. Working out here has been everything I ever thought it would be.”
* * *
Continelli grew up in a Navy family. His mother and her parents were all born in California. She married his dad after WWII and he grew up in la mesa.
He attended Grossmont High school and graduated in 1964. He served in the U.S. Marines for three years, including 1965-66 in Vietnam.
Later, when he was stationed in North Island he ran into an old friend from high school.
They ended up getting married and Don and Norma have been together since 1967. They have two daughters, one married, and two grandchildren.
What does the future hold for Don Continelli?
“I’m going to find something else to do. Do a little fishing. Ride my bike. Lift weights. Take care of my yard.
“Maybe I’ll go by the office and tell them how we used to do it.”
The Valley Roadrunner
P.O.B. 1529, Valley Center, CA 92082
Tel. 760.749.1112 Fax 760.749.1688
Website: www.valleycenter.com
Email: editor@valleycenter.com
Copyright © 2000, Palomar Community Newspapers, dba Valley Roadrunner. All rights reserved. This content may not be archived, retransmitted, saved in a database, or used for any commercial purpose without the express written permission of the Valley Roadrunner.