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EditorsAug 21, 2009
A crazy week in crime
The news this week took me back to my days at the Marietta Daily Journal in suburban Atlanta, where I spent nearly a year on the police/courts beat. I loved it but, after a while, I had had enough. There...
The news this week took me back to my days at the Marietta Daily Journal in suburban Atlanta, where I spent nearly a year on the police/courts beat.
I loved it but, after a while, I had had enough. There are only so many murder trials, so many heart-wrenching sentencing hearings you can sit through before it starts to get to you.
While I miss it sometimes, weeks like this one always pop up now and then, and I remember what it was like to be a 23-year-old reporter in a busy daily newsroom.
I didn’t realize it then, but those days represented the tail end of an era in which “breaking news” could actually be broken in the a.m. paper — our newspaper, and probably quite a few others, didn’t have a Web site that was constantly updated.
Reporters still wrote stories that happened that day for the next day’s edition, and readers eagerly awaited the arrival of the morning paper to read about the surprising shooting of the convenience store clerk in their quiet, upscale neighborhood.
But that was then and this is now, so without further ado, here’s a look at the police blotter that was National Jeweler’s Web site this week.
First, police in London nab a suspect in the big-time heist that took place at a Graff Diamonds store there.
That same day, we learned via news sources that Kenyan police had arrested a man in the brutal slaying of gemologist Campbell Bridges.
And we received very sad news out of Kearny, N.J, where a jeweler’s son was shot dead in their store during a morning robbery.
Then there was the TV preacher with the not-so-holy gem scheme that allegedly bilked people out of millions.
Rounding out the week, we had a report about a group of burglars that are hardly bungling. This crew seems to have J.C. Penney’s number.
And we received confirmation that the New Jersey jeweler found dead in shop in June succumbed to cyanide poisoning.
The week was a mix of small triumphs — arrests in the Bridges and Graff cases, the indictment of an alleged scam artist, coupled with sad news — the deaths in New Jersey — and an interesting series of burglaries that smacks of a script for the next “Ocean’s” movie.
What are they on now, 15?
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