Crime in Carlsbad: Guns, a Samurai Sword, and SWAT

What the heck is going on here?

Sunday morning….

Carlsbad police arrested a 33-year-old man at a motel Sunday after he brandished a samurai sword at paramedics responding to an unrelated medical emergency.

Police were dispatched around 9:40 a.m. Sunday to the Carlsbad Village Inn, at 1006 Carlsbad Village Drive, according to the police.

Officers tried to make contact with the man, identified as Eliot Rauk of Lomita, through the door of his motel room. Rauk yelled through the door, threatening to kill approaching officers and brandished a handgun, seen through the motel room window. 

Some areas of the motel were evacuated, with the Carlsbad SWAT team responding shortly afterward.

Rauk barricaded himself in the motel room for several hours while the police department’s Crisis Negotiation Team attempted to contact him by phone.

At 2:36 that afternoon, after police reached him, Rauk exited his room and was safely taken into custody.

After a thorough search of the room, authorities found a samurai sword and a semiautomatic handgun.

Rauk was transported to Tri-City Hospital for a medical evaluation and will be booked into Vista Jail on suspicion of making terrorist threats, unlawfully brandishing a weapon, and threats of violence against a police officer.

Two days before that, on Friday

There was a shooting on the street in Carlsbad, which is a rare occurrence. I mean, this is a little beach town, not LA or Chicago.

An Oceanside man was arrested after shooting at a police officer during a traffic stop.

An officer with the Carlsbad Police Department stopped the driver for multiple traffic violations Friday night on Madison Street and Oak Avenue.

As the officer approached the vehicle, the driver pulled out a handgun and fired at least one round at the officer, police said.

“The officer immediately sought cover from the gunfire and returned fire with his service weapon,” the department said in a news release.

The suspect, later identified as 25-year-old Oceanside resident Patrick Harold Doherty, drove south about one-eighth of a block before stopping.

The officer called for additional units and a high-risk vehicle stop was conducted when more officers arrived, including a field supervisor and a police dog. The suspect complied with police and was apprehended several minutes later without further incident.

“Neither the suspect nor the officer was struck by gunfire. However, several rounds struck the suspect’s vehicle,” police said. “During a visual inspection of the van at the scene, a ghost-gun type handgun was seen on the driver’s side floorboard.”

Doherty was booked into Vista Jail on suspicion of attempted murder of a police officer, felony resisting, assault with a firearm on a police officer, and an outstanding arrest warrant for driving under the influence.

It seems like there’s no way to live without violence; it’s all around…in small towns, big cities, and other countries like Ukraine and Israel and Gaza.

It’s sad and scary to feel unsafe; how depressing.

(Info curated from Google.)

The Adventitious Line Up

Adventitious: associated with something by chance rather than as an integral part; extrinsic.

I didn’t realize until I checked the photo that all of those seagulls were lined up because my eyes were only focused on the waves. The gulls were an unexpected happenstance.

The term “line up” is usually associated with a row of surfers in a spot where they anticipate a good wave break, in their attempt to catch that elusive best ride of the surf sesh.

Adventitious; an unanticipated word of the day.

Hanging By A Thread

“A spider lives inside my head
Who weaves a strange and wondrous web
Of silken threads and silver strings
To catch all sorts of flying things,
Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles
And specks of dried-up tears,
And dust of dreams that catch and cling
For years and years and years…”

― Shel Silverstein

Hanging by a thread is exactly how I feel every once in a while, how about you?

This is the last of my spider posts, I promise!

You’re looking at one of the many orbweaver spiders that make my garden their home. Yes, they’re fairly large but that’s no reason to be scared of them! Orb-weavers, like most spiders, are highly beneficial and eat lots of insects: mosquitoes, bees, wasps, flies, small moths and butterflies, and even grasshoppers. 

This guy was attached to an apple tree but I’m not sure of his ultimate destination…

Green MONSTER

Have you ever seen a Green Lynx spider? I hadn’t until this morning when I saw this Godzilla-sized bright green monster watching me through the patio doors.

I took a photo and then calmly moved him to a safer (for him) location. Peucetia viridans, the Green Lynx spider, is bright green and usually found on green plants. That makes sense since he was right next to a young orange tree I have on the deck. It’s the largest North American species in the family Oxyopidae. The body was about and inch in length and the legs were more than THREE inches long. It was HUGE.

Green Lynx spiders are non-poisonous and rarely bite humans but the bite can be painful. Females, when threatened, are known to spit venom from their fangs (up to 8 inches). If venom enters the eye, it may cause irritation.

My DIL is deathly afraid of spiders, more so than anyone I’ve ever known. On a recent visit, my son and I were enjoying a quiet cuppa and some morning chat about the kids when we heard her screaming, I mean like blood-curdling screams, the kind that, if they heard, neighbors would call 911.

My Angel Boy ran up to see what was going on and I followed. Apparently, she had been on a Zoom call in AB 2.0’s bedroom when she noticed a VERY VERY large spider on his bedspread.

After we ushered her to another room so she could calm down and resume her call, we then searched high and low for the offending arachnid and couldn’t find a thing. I thought her screams might have scared him off, but my son said he actually had seen it before scurrying away and it was literally four inches in size.

We needed to keep looking because if there WAS still a spider in the little guy’s room, we needed to find and relocate it before bedtime.

I stripped the sheets off the bed, shook them out, and found nothing. We removed the top mattress and then the box springs and OMG, there it was, trying to make itself as small as possible in the corner of the bed frame. I didn’t have my phone to take a photo but you can trust me that it was one of the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen.

We ushered it into a box, clamped on the lid, and my son took it outside as far away from the house as he could, while I remade the bed and checked to make sure DIL hadn’t had a heart attack from fright.

I wonder what she would have thought of my Green Lynx with those scary, hairy legs watching her through the window?

The Annular Solar Eclipse

I couldn’t find the special eclipse glasses we used in 2017 even though I know I saved them, so I used a colander and it made some really awesome crescents on a white background. The sun was only about 70% obscured here, no ring of fire, but super cool to safely experience.

Here’s a relevant poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919) 

A SOLAR ECLIPSE

In that great journey of the stars through space
    About the mighty, all-directing Sun,
    The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one
Companion of the Earth. Her tender face,
Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race,
    Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun,
    Shines ever on her lover as they run
And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.

Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,
    Down from her beaten path she softly slips,
And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,
    Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.
While far and near the men our world call wise
    See only that the Sun is in eclipse.

Purple + White

Doomed to live and die on the same day, the morning glory is a symbol of resilience and rebirth.

This enchanted morning glory is thriving near a bunch of Natal plum bushes and their fragrant white five-petaled flowers.

The Natal plum is a tropical shrub grown mostly as a flowering landscape specimen, but also known for its small fruits which taste like cranberries and are used in jams and jellies.

Once upon a time when I was in high school, I picked a bushel of the fruits from an empty field and made the most delicious jam but the thorns on the plant almost tore my arms up so I’ve never done it again.

This is a Blue Potato Bush: The flowers are gorgeous but all parts of this part are toxic!

The sweetly scented flowers of Lycianthes rantonnetii, also known as Solanum rantonnetii, blue potato bush, and Paraguay nightshade, grows near a fence in the garden. I cut it back every year which it seems to love because it returns full of flowers that attract bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators.

Hello Kitty Sunset 🎀 | Pink Pink Pink

Or cotton candy pink. A trivial confession about me…I’ve never actually eaten cotton candy. I’ve seen it made at the fair but I never had any desire to taste it. I do love Hello Kitty, though, and she speaks to me:

“Once upon a time, there was a princess.” — Hello Kitty

Last night’s sunset was breathtaking to experience. The sky colors were pure Hello Kitty pink.

I didn’t make it to the beach in time to see the full sunset drop into the horizon, but I went outside in the garden to appreciate all of the resplendent Hello Kitty pink gloriousness.

Spooky Creepy Spider Webs

It was so foggy last night that I could barely see across the street. This morning it revealed hundreds of spider webs shrouding my garden.

I’m all ready for Halloween!

Here are just a few…

The spider webs are literally EVERYWHERE. I hadn’t noticed them before today.

I almost walked right into this one but I looked up just in time to snap a photo. If you look closely, you can see the beaded foggy drops sparkle like diamonds.

No spider web, just three dewdrops on a grape leaf…it looks like rain but it’s created by dense fog.

Day Moon Portfolio

I think today is a day I should try to not further agitate the cosmos and the gods.

I had an appointment for yearly lab work so I fasted from about 7pm last night with ZERO coffee this morning. I don’t mind not eating, but I NEED coffee to start my day.

I arrived at the office on time only to discover that I had misread the doctor’s orders and needed the labwork completed NEXT week, not today.

Not today. My coffee-deprived brain had a difficult time comprehending, as I don’t usually make dumb mistakes like that, but when the technician explained it to me, I realize it was entirely my fault which wasn’t a big deal, but sometimes the little screw-ups hit different, you know what I mean?

It tilted my reality for a minute or two until I regained my mental equilibrium. I drove all the way back home, inhaled some French roast, and looked outside to discover the most beautiful day moon staring back at me, possibly to let me know that it was confused, too,

I love day moons because they make absolutely no sense to me, but I’m over the moon (haha) with these photos because I was unable to see the full moon a couple days ago due to overcast skies at night.

Day moons are cool.

Sunday Vibes

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree. –Joyce Kilmer

I looked up from weeding the veg garden at green leaves and the bluest sky kissed by the sun. There’s a bird singing somewhere in there but I couldn’t locate it.

Had to snap a pic before this ash tree loses all its leaves for the season in the process called abcission. I wrote about that here: https://enchantedseashells.com/2020/11/20/the-process-of-abscission/

#SundayVibes