If you want Inland Empire weird news, all you really need to do is keep up on Inland Empire news. The weirdness comes with the territory. For my 27th annual roundup, narrowing down the nominees meant a lot of tough choices.
Among the stories that didn’t make the cut?
A newly hired executive at Rialto City Hall left his $355,000-a-year job after three months, claiming that he was retiring to help his grandson build birdhouses.
Lego objected to social media posts about arrests by the Murrieta Police Department in which suspects’ faces were obscured by yellow bricks.
And a Ford Mustang went airborne and crashed into a Chino house. Not the house’s first level. Its second level. Now that’s horsepower.
With those also-rans out of the way, it’s time to look back, in humor or horror, at the year’s low points. Without further ado, let’s count down the Inland Empire’s Top 10 Weirdest News Events of 2024.
A murder-for-hire plot in Riverside failed with the purported victim surviving a fusillade of gunfire. Police arrested two men in the scheme, one of them a pastor in Victorville, who is accused of paying $46,000 to have his daughter’s suitor killed. Perhaps his church only teaches the Nine Commandments.
The hottest restaurant in Rancho Cucamonga is a salad buffet. A former Souplantation was reborn as Soup ‘n Fresh, which is nearly identical to the Souplantation that closed in 2020. Soup ‘n Fresh became an Instagram darling. People line up to get in. The father-and-son owners next plan to revive a former Souplantation in Chino Hills.
In San Bernardino, a long-vacant restaurant building was discovered to be housing 103 live poultry: 56 turkeys and 47 geese. It’s unclear why someone was keeping them and feeding them, rather than feasting on them, but he’d gone to the trouble of setting up panels to give them a run area. Animal Services turned the geese and turkeys over to an animal sanctuary. Honk if you like how this turned out.
In Riverside in August, half the city’s garbage trucks — 17 of 34 — were down for repairs at the same time, leading the city to hire a private company to pick up trash temporarily. A heat wave put temperatures inside the city’s trucks, which don’t have air conditioning, at 120 degrees. Some decried poor planning in all this. But in City Hall’s defense, who could possibly have foreseen that it gets hot in Riverside?
Two high school teachers were so upset about the results of the election that they went on rants in the classroom against President-elect Donald Trump. A Moreno Valley teacher compared Trump to Hitler, while a Chino teacher said of Trump: “I’m sorry, I have a daughter, I have three nieces, and he’d rape them.” Both teachers were put on leave. Can a school nurse prescribe them each a chill pill?
Let’s pause a moment. Unlike “Dune: Part Two,” the 2-hour, 46-minute sequel, my list comes with an intermission. Pour yourself another cup of coffee, or burrow under a nearby rug like a sandworm before emerging to scare your pet.
Now, back to the countdown.
On an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon to Ontario, a segment of a cabin wall exploded with a boom at 16,000 feet. “The wind, the noise, the roar. Everything was rushing out,” said a Riverside woman who was aboard. Thankfully no one was injured, but the suction was so great, a teenager’s T-shirt was ripped from his body. For everyone involved, this flight sucked.
A man was arrested at a Trump rally in Coachella in October with two guns in his (messy) vehicle, a fake passport and a homemade license plate. Sheriff Chad Bianco said deputies “probably stopped another assassination attempt” and said his conclusion was “common sense.” The man in question, Vem Miller, said he was a Trump fan exercising his Second Amendment rights. He’s now suing over what he said was an illegal search and defamation. I’m ranking this at No. 4 — with a bullet.
In the Temecula Valley Unified School District, voters ushered out Joseph Komrosky, the school board president, in a June recall election spearheaded by the One Temecula PAC and decided by 212 votes. Five months later, Komrosky was back in office after winning the election for his old seat by 227 votes. Hope he enjoyed his vacation!
In Utah, a cat hid inside a 3-by-3-foot box in which her owner was packing five pairs of work boots to return by mail to Amazon. Seven days later, an Amazon warehouse worker in Riverside opened the box to find Galena, who was mildly dehydrated and a few ounces lighter but otherwise fine. Galena was soon reunited with her owner, a purr-fect ending.
And the most bonkers local news story of the year?
Fontana police pressed a man to admit he had killed his father, saying he might have suppressed the memory. After 16 hours of interrogation, he cracked and said he’d done it. But there was no murder. His father turned out to be alive and well. Oops!
A judge said Fontana police had used “psychological torture.” The city agreed to settle the man’s lawsuit for $898,000.
Is this the weirdest IE story of the year? I confess it is.
With a bright light shining in his face, David Allen will admit he writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, and can he please have a drink of water? Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.
