A man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of grand theft of fruit after a Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s deputy found him stealing avocados from a Goleta ranch. A deputy was patrolling the Goleta area when he noticed a vehicle stopped on the shoulder of the roadway on the 6900 block of Cathedral Oaks Road, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The deputy found 44-year-old Tim Rounds of Lompoc walking nearby, wearing a headlamp on his forehead, and holding a bucket of avocados, the department said. The deputy also found a bag of methamphetamine on the dashboard of the v ..read more

A Lompoc man has been arrested for alleged sex crimes involving multiple children, and detectives are seeking additional victims, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office announced Friday. Deputies first learned in July about alleged crimes committed by Edward Norman Hill Lewis, 43, and a monthslong investigation revealed "several additional sexual assault survivors who have reported incidents occurring throughout Santa Barbara County and date back as far as the early 2000’s," according to the Sheriff's Office. Lewis was arrested Tuesday and faces multiple felony charges, including forcible l ..read more

A man was shot and killed by Lompoc Police Department officers on Saturday, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office announced. The man, whom authorities did not name, became involved in a standoff with police after they responded to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon at 6:33 p.m., according to the Sheriff's Office. The man barricaded himself inside a residence and refused to come out, and when he eventually came to the door, he pointed a handgun at police officers before the officers opened fire, the Sheriff's Office said. The man was fatally wounded, but the three officers who were ..read more

Fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli’s request to serve the remaining three months of his prison term in the college admissions bribery scheme at home was denied Tuesday by a federal judge. Giannulli argued he should be released to home confinement for the rest of his five-month sentence because he spent eight weeks under “extreme” conditions in solitary confinement because of the coronavirus pandemic after reporting to prison in November. But U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said Giannulli failed to demonstrate an "'extraordinary and compelling' reason warranting his release," though he not ..read more

A federal prison complex in California struggled to contain the spread of the coronavirus because of staff shortages, limited use of home confinement and ineffective screening, the Justice Department watchdog said Thursday as it released the first results of remote inspections of facilities across the country. The report said that two staff members at the Bureau of Prisons facility in Lompoc, California, came to work in late March despite experiencing coronavirus symptoms, though those symptoms were not detected during screening. Officials in March also failed to test or isolate an i ..read more

Federal prison authorities must begin transferring medically vulnerable inmates at Lompoc’s prison complex to home confinement to prevent further illness after an outbreak of the coronavirus killed four inmates and infected more than 1,000 others, a U.S. District Court judge ruled. The decision last week by Judge Consuelo Marshall granted a preliminary injunction in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California that accuses the federal Bureau of Prisons of mishandling the response to the outbreak and two federal lockups in Lompoc of failing to take ..read more

The American Civil Liberties Union on Saturday filed a pair of class-action lawsuits on behalf of federal prisoners at Lompoc and Terminal Island, claiming officials mishandled coronavirus outbreaks at the facilities that have infected a combined total of 1,775 inmates, killing 10. “While the rest of California took extraordinary measures to stop the spread of coronavirus, the Bureau of Prisons failed to take preventive measures as basic as isolating sick prisoners, allowing social distancing, or providing enough soap,” Peter Bibring, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, s ..read more

Nearly half of all federal prisoners infected with coronavirus are in Southern California, with massive outbreaks uncovered at Lompoc and Terminal Island after authorities expanded testing. As of Friday, there were 823 inmates who tested positive in Lompoc, and another 644 at Terminal Island. In Lompoc two inmates have died, while six at the San Pedro facility have succumbed to the illness, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) website. Forty staff members have also contracted the disease across both facilities, officials say. It’s difficult to curb the spread of the virus in settin ..read more

The nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 in a prison is at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, where 69 inmates and 25 staff members are infected and a field hospital is being constructed on the grounds, authorities said. While about 450 federal inmates nationwide have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the Lompoc penitentiary’s level of infection has far outpaced any other facility, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Thirteen of the infected inmates have been hospitalized and two are now in intensive care, according to Santa Barbara County Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg ..read more

A woman was extradited to Santa Barbara a week after she allegedly escaped to Montana on a private jet following an unsuccessful but brutal attempt to kidnap her son during a supervised visit in Goleta, authorities announced Monday. Theresa Colosi appears in a booking photo dated Dec. 19, 2019. (Credit: Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office) Dr. Theresa Lynn Colosi, 55, was booked at the Santa Barbara County jail last Thursday with no bail on suspicion of attempted murder and attempted kidnapping, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office said. According to officials, Colosi was walking with h ..read more