Whether this is a hate crime or simply a theft, we are flabbergasted that this story has barely made the news. The valuable bronze plaque commemorating the Armenian Genocide that occurred in the early 20th century was discovered missing on Sunday the 23rd, during an event to recognize Armenian Independence Day.

Although police are calling this a "a very serious matter," word hadn't gotten out until this last Thursday. In cases like these, one would think time is of the essence. For all we know the plaque has already been sold off for its valuable bronze.

Oh No, Chris Kavanaugh! Berkeley's own Ed Jew, a Green Party member of the Berkeley rent board who was actually living (and litigating with his landlord) in Oakland, pled not guilty to three charges of voter fraud, one charge of perjury, and one of grand theft (for taking a stipend from the Berkeley rent board) yesterday. Kavanaugh spent Friday night living in the Santa Rita jail before being released on $30,000 bond, and will report back to court on Oct. 26. Kavanaugh has reportedly told other board members that he lives in Berkeley but his girlfriend lives in Oakland.

You know we gotta click on an article entitled "Would-be Hamburglar Arrested in SF"! Turns out someone stole the charitable donations bin at the McDonald's on Haight Street (the one by Amoeba, we assume). Hamburglar John Glass ordered food to distract the counterpeople, stole the bin, left, and then came back for his food and tried to steal another bin. The cops later found him on the steps of a church on Masonic in a sleeping bag, wearing the same hat he wore to the robbery, at which point he was arrested. It's too much to hope for that Glass responded with "robble robble robble," isn't it?

...and on the positive side, three women were honored by the SFPD and FD yesterday as heroes for their quick actions during last year's SUV hit and run rampage. One woman ran into the street and dragged an injured man to safety before he could be hit by the SUV again, and the other two women, who were nurses on a lunch break, ran out to tend to the victims. Ohmeed Popal, the mentally ill driver of the SUV, is still awaiting trial.

Aw. This kind of sucks. School teacher Margaret Pavese got slapped with a misdemeanor charge for causing the 47+-acre Lick fire that erupted on Labor Day Weekend.

Apparently, she was using a burn barrel to get rid on some refuse the environmentally happy way. Oops.

According to the Chronicle, she could "face a maximum of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine...or all of the $13 million it cost to fight the fire, prosecutors said." On a teacher's salary, plus years of turning tricks, that's going to take eons to pay off.

You know we usually try to hoard up all the crime-type news for the Tuesday and Friday blotters, but there was enough vaguely unsettling news this weekend to warrant a post a little early, we thought. To wit:

--Fernando Gonzalez, an 18-year-old Redwood City man, died after he fell into a vat of sulfuric acid. Gonzalez was working the early-morning shift at Coastal Circuits Factory this weekend, without a protective face mask, when he appeared to be overcome by fumes and fell into the vat, which was filled about waist-high with the acid. Even more gruesomely, his body was discovered by his father, who went to the factory after his son failed to come home.

--A scholarship honors student from UC Berkeley was killed in Sacramento last week while working at his hometown barber shop. Rodrigo Rodriguez (pictured at left) was 21 years old and the first member of his family to go to college. Rodriguez would go home on weekends and work cutting hair. The gunman apparently waited for him to get off work and then shot him and fled the scene. Rodriguez wasn't involved in any gangs or drugs activity, had no criminal record, and tutored at-risk kids.

--And there were five assaults/shootings/stabbings over the weekend in San Francisco (none fatal), one at Church and Market, one in the Tenderloin, two near Mission Terrace and one in Visitacion Valley. On top of that, there were two murders in Berkeley (3rd and 4th for the year) and one murder in Mountain View (2nd for the year). (Also, one in San Jose and one in Oakland.)

What's going on in SOMA? Is there a stolen bike chop shop in the area?

We've heard rumors for a while now about what happens to bikes and bike parts that get stolen in San Francisco. But we don't know for sure. You people are smart AND street smart, so tell us the details. Please leave a comment, and see what somebody did to our beautiful Trek 8000, after the jump.

At Pine and Divisadero on Wednesday afternoon, a man severely slashed a woman with a box cutter (some reports we saw said she might die, while others said the wounds were not life-threatening); the cops subsequently caught him.

A police officer in Oakland shot a man to death yesterday afternoon at 54th and MLK, where a number of shootings have occurred recently. The officer confronted the man for reasons that they declined to specify to the media, and a fight broke out. After the officer's attempts to taser the suspect didn't work, the suspect reached into his waistband, at which point the officer shot him. The suspect was later found to have a loaded handgun in his possession.

And hey! Remember all those women pretending to live at Stanford when they didn't really? Well, Azia Kim (the girl who pretended to be a freshman and got away with it for almost a whole school year, by sneaking into dorms through open windows and just pretending she always lost her ID card) still hasn't heard from the Santa Clara DA's office, despite Stanford's saying they were going to press charges for trespass. Santa Clara says they're still waiting on paperwork from the Stanford PD. Elizabeth Okasaki, on the other hand, the other squatter who had been living in a Stanford physics building for four years, moved to UCLA and their music library, pretending to be a grad student in the "philosophy of music." UCLA managed to evict her after only four months, in part due to a suspicious administrator who had heard about Okasaki's time at Stanford.

Picture of the Stanford campus by Franco Folini, off flickr.

More vigilantes? A shooting yesterday afternoon in the Loin may have been an attempt to clean up the neighborhood. At around noon yesterday, authorities found a man with non-life threatening wounds after hearing reports of one shot being fired. The shooter was arrested a few hours later, after what the report called an "intense" building search. Witnesses say the shooter was acting as an armed vigilante of some sort, but the cops won't comment about that. The shooter may also have shot someone on Sunday; the cops are investigating that too.

In a somewhat-better type of neighborhood self-policing in Berkeley, neighbors are now going in large groups to Becky Temko Tot Park in downtown Berkeley, so another neighbor won't yell at them. Local parents who went to the park alone would often get targeted by the neighbor, who'd yell profanities at them and blare obscene hip-hop music. Parents report that the neighbor would threaten them if their kids were playing, saying, "I know where you live," and "this is war." The neighbor's wife says that her husband doesn't like all the noise because he's recovering from a workplace injury. We try not to take sides here at the blotter, but dude, could the angry recovering neighbor maybe close a window or something? If you live near a park, don't you expect there to be some kind of noise from kids playing? Also -- isn't the loud hip-hop music the guy's playing not really going to help him if he wants it quieter? A number of people have called the cops but they say the neighbor hasn't technically broken the law so they can't really do anything.

And Oakland City Council president Ignacio de la Fuente's started a website saying that the Oakland PD trumped up the criminal charges against his son to derail de la Fuente Sr's mayoral campaign and because they were biased against him as a Mexican-American. Earlier this year, De la Fuente's son pled guilty to rape charges, lodged by four separate women (three of whom were prostitutes). De la Fuente Sr. says he agrees that his son didn't pay the prostitutes but disagrees that they were raped. In response, the Oakland PD says they have "no question" as to de la Fuente's son's guilt. De la Fuente Jr. has been sentenced to a 14-year prison term.

According to the Chronicle, police arrested a suspect in the killing of a man and wounding of a woman outside Jillian's nightclub -- a venue known in the club scene for its somewhat douchebaggie clientele -- located at the steely mega-complex, the Metreon. The shootings took place before 2 a.m. this morning at Fourth and Howard Streets. The area has seen a spike in crime since the openings of Bloomingdale's and the Westfield Shopping Center Centre.

Alas, this year's crime wave in SF sees no signs of abating. Maybe it will during the autumn months? We'll see.

Image: Satori

San Francisco's white-hot crime trend continues to soar. Early this morning, someone fired shots from a car on the 3400 block of 19th Street, landing two victims a stay in the hospital, according to the Examiner (via Bay City News, a service we love more and more). What's more::

It was kind of startling — everyone wanted to know what was going on,'' said Melissa Scott, a customer at Lexington Club, which is located near the site of the shooting. "But then it was just business as usual.

Awesome! Melissa, you sound like our kind of binge-drinking buddy. Such tenacity. We're so heading there tonight.

Eyes on the prize, Lexington ladies.

So hey, remember that shooting that Ross Mirkarimi helped solve? According to the Chron, the cops are saying it was a vigilante father-son duo, out for revenge after the victim stole a gold chain from the son. Whoa!

The son was walking to school when a group of young men held him up and took his gold chain. The son then called his father, who drove to the scene with his wife. People heard gunfire, and then the guy who stole the chain fell down in a crosswalk. The father then hit the guy three times with his car, breaking the victim's pelvis. Then the father jumped out of the car and yelled at the son to "finish him," at which point the son fired two or three shots at him.

Turns out Ross Mirkarimi wasn't the only person who saw this; the police say there were numerous witnesses on the scene. For what it's worth, the father says while he did hit the victim three times, it was all an accident because his transmission got stuck. The victim, who was (ironically enough) supposed to appear in court later that day on a gun charge, may never walk again. The father and son have both been charged with attempted (see comments) murder (and the father with cocaine possession); the father also has a rap sheet of his own.

These vigilante stories always make us very nervous -- but we'll go ahead and illustrate this post with a picture of the poster from the new Jodie Foster movie anyways.

Do you have any information? A Fremont family is trying to get some answers about the circumstances of their father's mysterious death. The father suffered a heart attack at Van Ness and Market on June 5, and died five days later without ever regaining consciousness. The mystery is that they cannot find the car their father drove into the city that day. They have a garage parking ticket they found in his pocket, but it doesn't have a location printed on it. They've searched all the garages they can find, and the city towing lot, but to no avail. So, if by any chance you remember seeing a blue 94 Honda Accord in a garage somewhere, with a UC Berkeley alumni plate holder, they'd love to hear from you. Plate number's 3HJS376.

The San Jose police has located the body of missing 6 year old Oscar Jimenez Jr. (pictured at left), whose mother told the authorities that her boyfriend beat and kicked him to death after the 6-year-old supposedly threatened the boyfriend's 1-year-old, saying "say goodbye to your son." The boyfriend then took the body and buried it in Arizona. The 6-year-old's father became suspicious after repeated failed efforts to get in touch with his son. The mother finally broke down and confessed the whole story to the US Marshals after the father had them hunt her down as a possible child abductor. The boyfriend's been arrested in Arizona and will be extradited back to California for a hearing.

Sigh. Okay, onto the more light-hearted last Blotter item. Disgraced Democratic donor Norman Hsu is doing much better, after his weird getting-naked freakout on the train in Colorado Springs. He really is a Hillraiser!

Well, we suppose this is sort of like those Portraits In Grief type thumbnail portraits of murder victims we suggested to the Chron -- yesterday's paper featured a long article about Allan Broussard, a serial car burglar who was shot to death last month. He was shot clutching a car stereo he'd just stolen. A suspect has been arrested in the case, who has a long rap sheet of his own, but the cops won't say if the suspect's car was the one that had been burgled.

And hey -- so we were just getting out of dinner and drinks with Chron webmistress Eve Batey and SFist Rain on Wednesday when not one, not two, not three, but seven cop cars went speeding by us at 16th and Valencia, nearly hitting a bunch of people trying to make left turns onto either 16th or Valencia (don't cut off the cop cars, people!) before screeching to a halt in the middle of the block near 15th. We haven't been able to find anything about it online, so we figured we'd ask: anyone know what the heck was going on?

And your obligatory wacky item: that naked carpenter in Oakland was acquitted of public indecency charges -- while they agreed it was a little weird that he was doing construction work in the nude, the judge decided he wasn't doing anything unseemly besides just being naked at the time. The carpenter, through his lawyer, says he's probably going to start wearing clothes now, just to avoid the bother of having to go to court again. (We posted on this as a Blotter item when the guy was originally arrested in Oct. 2005, but cannot for the life of us find the article now! Sorry.)

Picture of 16th and Valencia by Francisco Cendejas, off flickr.

We're starting to run out of ways to introduce these stories about the murder count in SF, so we're going with a clip of "Miss Murder" by AFI, above.

So here's the latest: Two more bodies were found today. One person was found shot to death in the head around 9:30 last night near Monster Park, and this morning, a woman walking in Golden Gate Park saw a dead body in a grove of eucalyptus trees. The Golden Gate Park victim appeared to be a homeless person and the scene was described as "kind of a mess," in an earlier SFGate news story whose link we cannot find now. (Here's our commenters discussing it too.)

Meanwhile, remember the Canadian Navy lieutenant killed by a hit-and-run driver by the Ferry Building a few weeks ago? The cops have a description of the car: a late 80s-model silver or gray, four-door Benz. which should have extensive damage on the left front and passenger door side. The accident took place around 1:50 a.m. on August 18. and the mayor's office is offering a $10,000 reward for info -- so if you have any, call SFPD Inspector Jim Custer at (415) 553-9516 or Inspector Dean Taylor at (415) 575-4444.

Fundraiser, five-head sufferer, and possible one-time kidnapping victim Norman Hsu skipped his San Mateo County Superior Court appearance this morning and is now the lam! He is wanted for a 15-year-old felony warrant for grand theft. Some fear that since he was supposed to return his passport this morning, but failed to do so, he might be en route to Antarctica, or somewhere, by now.

Run, Norman, run!

Hsu has donated to such Democrat darlings as Mayor Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Assemblywoman Fiona M, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Sen. Barack Obama just to name a few. And if you've see this man...well, why not ask him for some rent money? He seems to have tons of it seeing as how he recently posted bail at $2 million.

Following up on yesterday's blotter, we're sorry to pass along word from today's Chronicle that one of the murder victims over the weekend, David Sterling, was killed on the way home Monday afternoon, after picking up a burrito for his girlfriend. Investigators think it was supposed to be a retaliation shooting from the guy shot in the garage by kids on bikes a day earlier, but because Sterling had no record and no known gang affiliations, the investigators think it might have been a case of mistaken identity.

Another victim profiled in the story (J. Daniel Schirra, pictured here), was a radio and television major at SF State. He was on the Dean's List and was scheduled to graduate this spring. Schirra was last seen when his friends dropped him off at his apartment around 1 a.m Monday morning. His naked body was found 2 hours later a few blocks from there.

We're currently at 81 murders for the year (the paper says 79, but two more came in after the article went to press, according to the SFCrime Blog). If the rate continues, we'll be at 120 for the year, which would be the highest number since 1993, when the count was at 133. By comparison, last year total we only had 85.

Okay, here's our thought. These two stories are really horribly sad. But why aren't we getting similar stories about the other 77 murder victims this year in the Chron? (Let us say right now that we are not interested in hearing comments about how the murder victims deserved to die or anything like that -- if you want to talk about that, go to the SFGate comment section on this story instead.) We know they're stretched pretty thin over at the Chron these days, but maybe they could do something similar to the NY Times's Portraits of Grief and do thumbnail profiles of every homicide victim this year. It might be a really interesting way to put a human face on the growing public safety problem.

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries.

Your SF Labor Day weekend homicide count: 3. One person shot in the Bayview early Sunday morning, one person in Visitacion Valley shot dead mid-Sunday morning (after being chased into a garage by two teenagers on bikes), and one found dead early Monday morning near the Balboa Park station. You can keep up with the year to date homicide count (77) at the SF Crime Blog, like we're doing. Also: a man was shot in the back this afternoon, also in Visitacion Valley. He's expected to survive. (It's not much better in Oakland either, with four shootings over the weekend. They're at 91 for the year.)

A woman in Burlingame was charged with felony child endangerment last Thursday afternoon, after bystanders freed her crying unattended 2-year-old from her car. On the bright side, the child was fine, but it was 92 degrees outside and the temperature inside the car was measured about about 125 degrees. The mother said she'd just run to the grocery store for about 20 minutes. This is the second baby in a hot car scare in the South Bay this week, with a Mountain View nanny arrested after leaving a crying baby in a car with a small gap in the window for about 30 minutes on Tuesday.

Picture of the crooked part of Lombard Street by kasei, off flickr.