Page 7 - Ipoly High School News Today

While awaiting his murder trial, Adrian Berumen volunteered to live with mentally ill inmates. His experience caring for them could shape the jail system's future.

- ADVERTISEMENT - Poly is a uniquely beloved school in Long Beach and beyond, famous nationwide for its rigorous academics and Grammy-winning music program as much as its football team that consistently pumps out NFL stars like Willie McGinest and JuJu Smith-Schuster. As Poly’s slogan next to its signature Jackrabbit mascot tells you, it’s the “Home of Scholars and Champions.” So when recent graduate Anais Lopez heard from her younger sister that the magnet program they both attended wa...

- ADVERTISEMENT - Long Beach police officers first headed to her home in the 700 block of East 15th Street in a neighborhood just south of Poly High School when a possible shooting was reported shortly after 5 a.m. Thursday, authorities said. The woman told officers that she though her home was being broken into, prompting her to fire the gun, according to the Long Beach Police Department. After officers found no evidence of a break-in, they took the woman into custody on suspicion of negligent...

- ADVERTISEMENT - Former Long Beach Councilman Steve Neal said the goal was to create a team of city government officials, nonprofits, religious groups, mental health professionals and former gang members to share how to prevent violence from continuing to spread across the streets. “We’d like to build a network here to connect the dots to address social ills, particularly gun violence,” he said. Overall, 381 shootings took place across the city in 2020. The previous four years had an ann...

- ADVERTISEMENT - “This is not normal,” Stark said, after two shootings occurred within earshot of his apartment on two consecutive nights in December. Since then, Stark has taken up listening to a police scanner and monitoring local Facebook groups to scrape together a better sense of what’s going on in his neighborhood. Because the Long Beach Police Department does not regularly release statistics about shootings, it’s been hard for Stark to quantify his gut feeling about a spike in s...

Fran Blowitz Fran Blowitz, who with her husband John owned and operated the Gazette Newspapers from 1981 to 2004, died in November. After purchasing the paper, Fran and John developed Gazette Newspapers into a two-paper, 66,000 combined-circulation business employing 20 people. Fran and John were co-publishers, with Fran handling the business end of the operation. She worked tirelessly to keep the business in the black. John said many times that he might be the public face of the Grunion, but ...

- ADVERTISEMENT - Among other high-profile state and local positions, opponent Tonia Reyes Uranga served for eight years on the Long Beach City Council. Her husband, Roberto Uranga, is now in his second council term in that same seat. “I had multiple people saying that I was wasting my time and wasting my efforts,” Miller recalled in a recent interview with the Post. “It really only drove me even further and made me work harder.” That approach to adversity and opportunity seems to be a ...

Photo by Samuel Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Coming out of Baltimore’s Poly High School, Tyrese Chambers was one of only two wide receivers to make all USA Today’s Maryland first-team all-state list, hauling in 54 receptions for 1,200 yards and 21 touchdowns in only 10 games. The other, Daniel George, was rated a four-star recruit and signed with Penn State. However, Chambers was overlooked by many programs and landed at Fort Scott Junior College in Kansas, where he excelled in th...

- ADVERTISEMENT - Fundraising for his annual toy drive, Diamond Christmas, a beloved local event where thousands of toys are given out to children in underserved communities, tends to take up the better part of his month. But, given the strange, doozy of a year it’s been, Rodriguez thought, why not do something he’s never done before? “The pandemic sucks. People don’t have money for Christmas trees, so I thought let’s try and buy some families some trees and do something cool for them...