Chris Vogel

Last February, a bunch of school-yard bullies attending a YMCA program so savaged 9-year-old Ethan Otterbein in a game of dodge ball that he lost several teeth in what must have been a ghastly and bloody affair. In step, the mother of Otterbein has filed a lawsuit. But she is......

Horse trainer Patrick Biancone is mad as an adder. In 2007, the Kentucky Horse Racking Authority suspended the native-Frenchman after investigators found several vials of snake venom in his barns. Cobra juice, a forbidden substance, can be used to block pain in horses. Now, more than three year later, Biancone......

Can Californians get out of a divorce by simply saying that they're fucking nuts? This past year, James Sylvester of Los Angeles gave it the ol' college try, attempting to reverse his divorce settlement and gain spousal support from his ex-wife by arguing that he was mentally unstable when he......

Frenchman Fabrice Casteran could not take it any more. Enrolled in a MBA program at Vatel International Business School, one of those for-profit colleges, he was supposed to be working at a paid hotel and hospitality internship in a management position. Instead he found himself scrubbing filthy dishes and taking......

The bullet had a hollow tip. Christian Reyes felt it punch through the skin below his ribs before exploding inside him. Fragments ripped through his organs and ricocheted off his bones. Several bullet shards shattered Reyes' spine — his lumbar vertebrae 1 through 5, to be exact — injuring his......

Under California's current Three Strikes law, you can get life in prison for stealing a pair of socks if you're a repeat offender. Three strikes and you're out. But as of now, it looks like a dedicated group of Stanford law professors are trying to change the law - often......

This morning, the LA Times published a story about Gabriel Carrillo, a young man who claimed he went to Men's Central Jail in February to visit his brother when he was brutally beaten by sheriff's deputies, and then charged with assaulting the officers. As the Times reports, the trumped up......

On June 22, 2010, bi-polar real estate executive David Richard Lewis sat inside his Las Vegas home and shot a hole through his chest, taking his own life. Lewis, originally from San Bernardino, was 36 and had been vice president of The Lewis Group of Companies, reportedly "one of the......

Do autistic children need to wear shoes? What if the kid doesn't want to wear them, what then? Should we -- as the responsible adults -- strap them down and force their little autistic feet into a pair of brogans? These are just some of the questions confronting the Ventura......

Recently, there's been a rush of attention focusing on Sheriff Lee Baca and the never-ending crush of allegations of abuse at L.A. County's medieval jails. And rightfully so (see here for further reading). But in all the clamor, it's easy to loose sight of some of the good ol' fashioned......