Maricopa360.com

(Steve Miller/Maricopa360.com)  May 28, 2013 — For over two and one half hours, the Maricopa Fire Department battled a house fire in the 19000 block of North Shelby Drive.    Starting just before 7:00 PM this evening, the fire, which appeared to be coming from the garage of the two story home, also damaged a car in the driveway.  Although the structure was occupied when the fire broke out, everyone inside made it to safety.  No injuries were reported.

Photo Credit:  Howard WaGGner/Maricopa360.com

Steve Miller/Maricopa360.com May 16, 2013 – The Maricopa Police Department, along with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team are working to end a barricade situation near Hayley Road and Hillman Drive in the Rancho El Dorado subdivision.  Calls came in about 5:00 this afternoon.  The situation started earlier as a domestic violence situation.  A woman was confirmed to have been injured.

As of this writing, police negotiators are in contact with the a male subject.  It is unclear of the subject is armed.  The police have the area closed to traffic.  Neighbors can be seen observing the situation from a distance.

UPDATED INFORMATION: At 9:45 PM, scanner traffic was picked up that indicated the man had exited the residence and was in custody.

Photo credit: Howard WaGGner/Maricopa360.com

(Howard WaGGner/Maricopa360.com) March 30, 2913 – Nineteen year old Army Private First Class Coral Heazlit returned home from a tour of duty in Afghanistan to a huge surprise homecoming on Friday afternoon.

She knew something was up after she was picked up at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix by her mother, Wendy, and did not come straight home. She stopped at Maricopa Fire Department’s Station 571 where she met her father, Bill, who had not seen her in fifteen months. She was warmly greeted by firefighters and two members of the media. The fire department told her that they wanted to take her home in style in their ladder truck. She hopped in and proceeded home.

What she saw next took her breath away.
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By Steve Miller
Maricopa360.com

You don’t build a world class school district by closing down schools.  Maricopa Unified School District already has image problems as evidenced by the number of school buses from Kyrene that are headed up SR 347 every morning.  Instead of closing down schools, MUSD administration needs to focus on increasing enrollment so that they don’t have to.  I would suggest that if the current administration is incapable of doing that, then perhaps it’s time for new administrators.

Everyone is painfully and acutely aware that the last budget override request failed.  It didn’t fail because the voters are not pro-education.  It failed because they don’t have confidence that the administration is properly managing our public resources.  That perception hasn’t changed.

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(Maricopa360/March 25, 2014) — A small plane made a hard landing in a Maricopa field near this afternoon. Reports were that the plane was experiencing engine trouble before it made an emergency landing southeast of White and Parker and Honeycutt Roads. Fortunately, there were no injuries to the pilot or the two passengers.

Another aircraft (the yellow Cessna pictured) actually landed on a nearby dirt road to check on the downed aircraft.

Maricopa Fire, Maricopa Police, Southwest Ambulance responded to the scene. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Photo Credit: Howard WaGGner/Maricopa360.com

(Pinal County Sheriff’s Office Press Release) March 18, 2003 The terrorist attacks on the United States of America on September 11th, 2001 were the most devastating to ever occur on U.S. soil. On November 27th, 2002 the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission was formed. The Commission acknowledged there are some real security interests which must be kept in secrecy but these concerns must be weighed against other pertinent concerns such as transparency:

“The culture of agencies feeling they own the information they gathered at taxpayer expense must be replaced by a culture in which the agencies instead feel they have a duty to information—to repay the taxpayers’ investment by making that information available.”

On Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 Immigration Customs Enforcement employees who work as Detention Removal Officers were called into work and 207 illegals were processed and released from the ICE Eloy facility on this date alone. Of the 207, a total of 48 of them had been charged or convicted in the United States with either manslaughter, child molestation, aggravated assault, weapon offenses, forgery, drug offenses and or other serious crimes.
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PINAL COUNTY, Ariz. – On Friday, March 8th, 2013 at 3:50 a.m., a Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy attempted to stop a 2000 silver-colored Chevy Tahoe with no brake or tail lights traveling westbound on I-8 in the Vekol Valley corridor.

The deputy pulled behind the vehicle to initiate a traffic stop at milepost 149. As he did, the driver failed to yield and instead drove across oncoming lanes of traffic and into the desert. The deputy began to pursue the vehicle which then suddenly came to a stop after driving into a wash and hitting an embankment. The driver and passenger both males ran from the vehicle and into the desert.
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