The deaths of an elderly couple who were fatally shot over the Memorial Day weekend at a home near Padre Dam Park have been ruled a murder-suicide, authorities reported Tuesday.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said that deputies responding to a call in the 300 block of Lantern Crest Way in the Santee area at around 11:30 a.m. Sunday found the bodies of David Soulner, 82, and his wife Claire, 79.

Investigators concluded that David Soulner shot his spouse before turning the gun on himself, sheriff’s Lt. Michael Krugh said.

“The circumstances and motivation for this crime are still under investigation,” Krugh said Tuesday.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Homicide Unit at (858) 285-6330 or San Diego Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477.

City News Service contributed to this report.

A 40-year-old man from Homeland remained under arrest Tuesday on suspicion of murder, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department announced.

Deputies responded to the 31000 block of Neer Street in Homeland around 5:30 p.m. Sunday to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon.

Upon arrival, deputies found a man suffering from a gunshot wound in a vehicle. The man was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. He was later identified as Ryan White, 43, of San Diego County.

Deputies contacted and detained a possible suspect at the scene. The man also required medical attention and was rushed to a nearby hospital. He was later identified as Benjamin Velez of Homeland.

Velez was arrested on Monday and booked in to the Riverside County Jail where he was being held on a $1 million bail.

Anyone with additional information was encouraged to contact investigator K. Farag at 951-955-2777.

Trial attorney Milton J. Silverman, who successfully defended the family of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe and Black community activist Sagon Penn in high-profile murder cases, died last week at the age of 80.

He is considered by many of his contemporaries as one of the best, if not the best, trial lawyers of his time. The San Diego attorney’s cases and clients regularly made headlines, beginning in the 1980s and continuing beyond.

“Milt Silverman is a lawyer the likes of whom we will never see again,” said longtime San Diego defense attorney Eugene Iredale. “For 20 years Milt had criminal and civil cases with miraculous results because of his scrupulous attention to detail and his understanding of how to tell a story with his unique voice.”

Silverman passed away peacefully on May 21. “I was so blessed,” said Silverman’s wife, Maria. “We were a team. He loved me; he loved the children. Milt treated me like a delicate flower.”

Silverman handled a wide breadth of cases in his career, but perhaps the best known were the murder of Stephanie Crowe and the arrest that resulted in Sagon Penn shooting and killing a police officer.

Crowe was stabbed to death in her rural Escondido home. There was no sign of forced entry into the home and no forensic evidence that identified the killer. Her brother, Michael Crowe, then 14, and two of his friends confessed to the killing during intense, prolonged police interrogations.

Silverman represented the Crowe family, and his actions led to a dismissal of charges against the boys. Instead, a transient who had Stephanie Crowe’s blood on his shirt was charged. And 13 years later, the Crowe family agreed to accept $7.25 million to settle a federal civil-rights case filed against the cities of Escondido and Oceanside. 

Silverman also represented Penn, a man acquitted of killing a police officer in a case that divided San Diego County. He had shot and killed a San Diego police officer, run over another officer and wounded a civilian observer after a traffic stop in Encanto went horribly awry in 1985. Silverman, argued that Penn acted in self-defense in the face of excessive force from police.

San Diego criminal attorney Bob Grimes described Silverman as “an absolute, first-class trial lawyer who excelled at getting a vision of the case with a meticulous investigation and analysis.” Grimes added that Silverman was the only lawyer he ever encountered who “excelled at both criminal and civil cases.”  

While many of his criminal cases were headline-grabbing, his legal career spanned a variety of cases as diverse as product liability, toxic torts, defamation, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and misrepresentation, according to his biography.

“He was deadly on cross examination,” said friend and fellow attorney Dennis Schoville. “Milt had an innate ability to really understand people” and “his trial technique and his insight into what he needed to do in cross examination was exemplary.”

Schoville said the Crowe case, which had bounced back and forth in the judicial system for 13 years, showed Silverman’s “brilliance and personal perseverance.” Schoville represented one of the boys wrongly accused of murder in a lawsuit against four Escondido police officers, an Oceanside police officer, and a psychologist, while Silverman represented the victim’s family. Both attorneys were victorious in securing a settlement.

Silverman would go back to court yet again, to have all those accused declared factually innocent, a rare ruling. “He just felt as a matter of justice needed to be done,” Schoville said

Perhaps his most impactful case was the Penn trial.

“In a city known for its conservatism and pro-police attitude, much of the public was convinced it was an open and shut case and guilty verdicts couldn’t come fast enough,” said journalist Tony Perry who covered San Diego for the Los Angeles Times. “Silverman proved otherwise and two juries agreed.” 

A book about the case, “Reap the Whirlwind: Violence, Race, Justice, and the story of Sagon Penn,” is set to release in July. Its author, Peter Houlahan, interviewed Silverman extensively over the past two years about his role in defending Penn. 

The importance of Silverman’s successful defense had a major impact on San Diego, “as the innocent verdict preceded the riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1992 which also spread to San Francisco and Oakland,” said the book’s author. The verdict proved to be a damper for potential violence here.

“We had been through our own crisis between police and the Black community years before Los Angeles did,” according to former Deputy Chief Norm Stamper, who is quoted in the book. Nine-term congressman Lionel Van Deerlin wrote in a San Diego Union editorial, “This city can add a name to America’s pantheon of legendary defense lawyers: Milton Silverman.”  

Mark Sauer, a veteran San Diego newspaperman who covered several cases in which Silverman was the principal attorney, recalled, “Milt Silverman embodied what it means to be a tough trial attorney. He was smart, relentless, legally cunning, with a great sense of showmanship and guile. Milt won multimillion-dollar civil judgments on behalf of noted clients, like Dale Akiki and the Crowe family, by successfully overcoming prosecutorial immunity as few lawyers ever have.”

“He was brash, flamboyant, and completely at ease in the spotlight. And he always was guided by his unerring sense of justice,” Sauer added.

Silverman was noted for his ability to master complex subject matters in preparing for a case.  An example was his successful defense of Dr. Maurizio Zanetti, an immunologist accused by the federal government of fraud involving research on HIV vaccines.

 “He would spend 14 hours a day working hard right beside me,” recalled Zanetti. “He quizzed me in every possible way,” noting that Silverman was “mentally and emotionally involved with what was happening.”  

The case was 25 years ago but Zanetti and Silverman developed a friendship that endured until his recent death.

Silverman was a graduate of San Diego State University in 1966 and UCLA School of Law in 1969. The son of an attorney, his first murder case, when he was 25, was in Vietnam while he was working with the Judge Advocate General’s office. 

When he began working in San Diego in private practice he recalled sleeping on the floor in his office and teaching class and bathing at SDSU. He recounted the anecdote in an interview he gave for his Legends of the Bar Award, one in a long list of awards and recognition he received for his years of outstanding work.

In that interview Silverman advised young attorneys new to the justice system that when he began his career, he didn’t understand what noted attorney Clarence Darrow meant when he said “there is no justice either in or out of court.” But 35 years of experience gave Silverman his answer.

“I’ve seen people with righteous cases who are ground up and eaten alive by the system” and others who “should have been punished, brought to justice laugh and sneer in the faces of who they wronged,” he said at the time.

It was those “righteous cases” that motivated Silverman, said Judge Jeffrey Miller, a Senior U.S. District judge who worked in the San Diego Superior Court system for 10 years.

“He was very selective about his cases. And he accepted only those cases that he cared deeply about, that he believed in, that there was an important right to be vindicated. Or where he felt just the need for justice,” Miller said.

Miller first encountered Silverman, who was 40 at the time, in a personal injury trial in Superior Court. 

“There were things that stood out to me at that point as he had a presence in the courtroom that I don’t know I had seen from anyone else up to that point in my life,” Miller said. “He had a compelling style about him. He wasn’t bombastic. And he had a tone, a certain way that was authoritative, without being cocky, without alienating people.” 

He noted that “Milt Silverman without a courtroom was like Pavarotti without an opera.”

Judge Leo Papas said of Silverman, “Milt knew how to connect to people in a visceral and in intuitive way. He recalled talking with Silverman about his opening statement for the Crowe case. “The civil case settled but the experience was spellbinding and gripping as any murder mystery best seller,” Papas said.

Maria Silverman recalled that she and the family became part of Silverman’s law practice, working in the office with him. She became his second set of eyes. Everywhere he went on a case, she would come along. She would sit in trial court with him, making suggestions during jury selection on which jurors she liked and didn’t like. He trusted her instincts.

When he represented the parents of a daughter who had allegedly been brainwashed by a Krishna sect, the family temporarily moved to Orange County. “We rented a trailer. We stayed there for six months,” recalled his wife. “We used to come back on the weekends, going back and forth. It was always an adventure with my husband.”  

Daughter Rose Silverman recalled fear during and after the Penn trial. Her father never left her or her brother alone. It was on a nighttime grocery trip that she saw her father carrying a gun. The family had received death threats, and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department had issued Silverman a gun permit. Eventually the children were sent out of state for their protection.

But what mattered for the family was their father’s love. “We are all about the family and supporting each other and being there for each other and loving each other,” Rose Silverman said. “He was all about family, and about law and justice.”  

The family wants their friends to know that “Milt went home surrounded by his loving family leading him into the presence of God with the beautiful music of Paul Wilbur.”

Silverman is survived by his wife Maria, daughter Rose, son Richard and four grandchildren.
A memorial service is being planned at the First Church of the Nazarene in late June.

The San Diego Unified School District kicked off major campus work Tuesday at 62-year-old Holmes Elementary School, part of a district-wide push for site modernizations.

Students at the two-time California Distinguished School joined Board of Education President Shana Hazan, Vice President Cody Petterson, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and others Tuesday to mark the groundbreaking on the construction, funded by local school bonds.

“Holmes Elementary staff have been devoted to students and the neighboring community for more than six decades, contributing to high test scores and academic success,” Hazan said. “With local voters approving our bond measures, we can match that success with high-quality, modern facilities, like the ones we will see here.”

Once completed, the project is slated to add an upper-grade classroom facility, a student services facility, a Universal Transitional Kindergarten classroom building, two kindergarten classrooms, a joint-use grass play field and other improvements, according to the district.

Existing upper-grade and kindergarten classrooms will be modernized to include new paint, flooring, finishes and white boards.

“With new housing underway down the street, now is the time to re-invigorate our campus so that it is ready to serve all neighborhood students,” Holmes Principal Jonathan Saipe said.

According to the district, additional improvements include the modernization of three classroom buildings, expansion of the food services kitchen, conversion of the student services facility into educational spaces, creation of a new parking lot with a student drop-off and pick-up area and enhancements to safety, security and exterior hard court areas.

The joint-use grass play field will feature a walking and running track, a drinking fountain, new trees, fencing and gates to separate the field from the main campus. As part of a partnership with the city, the field will be accessible to the community as a neighborhood park after school hours and during school breaks.

Construction on the project is estimated to be completed in late 2026.

City News Service contributed to this article.

San Diego may have expensive housing, but it still ranks as one of the 10 best U.S. cities for raising a family, according to the financial services website WalletHub.

The Miami-based company ranked 182 U.S. cities — including the 150 most populous, plus at least two cities from each state — on five measures:  affordability, education, health, socio-economics and family fun opportunities.

San Diego came in 8th, with measures of education and family fun outweighing affordability.

Five of the ten best cities were in California, including top-ranked Fremont, Irvine, San Diego, San Jose and Huntington Beach. Only one city in California’s arch-rival Texas — Plano — made the top ten. Pembroke Pines was the top city in Florida, coming in at 40.

“While not perfect — given personal preferences and the limitations of publicly available data — our findings will hopefully give movers a better sense of their options,” WalletHub said.

Other cities in San Diego County made the extended list, including Chula Vista at 43 and Oceanside at 70.

More than 33,000 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $468 million was offloaded by the U.S. Coast Guard Tuesday in San Diego.

Officials say the drugs were seized through eight separate smuggling vessel interdictions in February and March of this year.

The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Munro, which offloaded the cocaine on Tuesday, seized the drugs from vessels off the coasts of Mexico, Central and South America.

Rear Admiral Andrew Sugimoto, commander of Coast Guard District 11, said in a statement, “I am extremely proud of this crew and their dedication to disrupting organized crime in the Eastern Pacific. The effort put in while interdicting more than 33,000 lbs of cocaine in a few weeks’ time is unparalleled.”

The seizures took place on:

• Feb. 21, 3,946 lbs of cocaine seized
• Feb. 24, 3,803 lbs of cocaine seized
• Feb. 26, 3,108 lbs of cocaine seized
• March 10, 4,709 lbs of cocaine seized
• March 17, 7,852 lbs of cocaine seized
• March 18, 2,841 lbs of cocaine seized
• March 18, 2,841 lbs of cocaine seized
• March 23, 4,784 lbs of cocaine seized

“The crew put in an incredible amount of work over very long hours, and I couldn’t be prouder of them,” said Capt. Rula Deisher, Coast Guard Cutter Munro’s commanding officer. “Their dedication and grit goes to show that Munro is one of the best national security cutters in the fleet, and we are committed to keeping the country safe by stopping illegal drugs before they hit the street.”

City News Service contributed to this article.

Following a closure due to a shark activity in the area, ocean waters in the San Clemente area were reopened Tuesday, but a shark advisory remained in effect warning swimmers to enter the surf at their own risk.

The shark advisory will remain in place until at least 8 p.m. Tuesday, “pending no additional shark sightings,” according to city officials.

A shark knocked a surfer off of his board off the coast of San Clemente late Monday morning, prompting authorities to close the water to swimmers and others on the busy Memorial Day holiday. City officials said at the time the closure was due to “confirmed aggressive shark behavior” in the water in the vicinity of T-Street Beach.

The beaches remained open, but water access was closed.

City Councilman Chris Duncan told CBS2 that surfers reported the activity to lifeguards, who reviewed surveillance footage and found video of the surfer being knocked off his board.

According to CBS2, officials from the Long Beach State University shark lab were consulted, and they determined the culprit was likely a juvenile great white shark.

No injuries were reported.

City News Service contributed to this article.

The man who was convicted of assaulting then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 was re-sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday, with no change in the original sentence after the case was reopened so he could speak during his sentencing hearing, local news reported.

David DePape was originally sentenced to 30 years in prison on May 17 for forcibly entering Pelosi’s home in San Francisco early on Oct. 28, 2022 and clubbing her husband Paul in the head with a hammer in a politically motivated attack.

During the original sentencing, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley failed to give DePape a chance to address the court, a “clear error” under the federal judicial rules, the judge wrote in a court filing the next day.

She also scheduled a hearing for Tuesday to resolve the issue, allowing DePape to speak on his own behalf. He did, apologizing for the attack, before Corley sentenced him again to 30 years in prison, reported ABC7, a local ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

In November, a jury found DePape guilty of attempting to kidnap a federal officer and assaulting an immediate family member of a federal officer. Prosecutors said the 44-year-old was driven by the far-right conspiracy theories known as QAnon.

Paul Pelosi, 82, suffered skull fractures and other injuries that have continued to affect him, according to a letter filed in court. In addition to dizziness and a metal plate that remains in his head, Pelosi said he has struggled with balance and has permanent nerve damage in his left hand.

Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives at the time of the attack, was in Washington when it occurred.

DePape still faces separate state charges stemming from the Pelosi break-in and attack, including attempted murder. Those charges carry a potential sentence of 13 years to life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

The county’s Tuberculosis Program was working with the Metropolitan Transit System Tuesday to notify riders of the trolley’s Blue Line that they were potentially exposed to and are at risk for tuberculosis.

The exposure happened between Jan. 27 and Feb. 29 of this year, and the specific impacted routes are:

• The Blue Line between 24th Street Transit Center and Barrio Logan Transit Center, on Monday to Friday, on an inconsistent schedule but typically between 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. in the above time frame
• The Blue line between San Ysidro Transit Center and Old Town Transit Center roughly between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., and from Old Town to San Ysidro between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 16

Since exposures occurred at inconsistent hours, the likelihood that any rider had long cumulative exposure times is low, according to the county. These exposures are not known to be associated with any previously reported exposures on the MTS system.

TB is an airborne disease that is transmitted from person-to-person through inhalation of the bacteria from the air. People with frequent and prolonged indoor exposure to a person who is sick with TB should get tested.

“Symptoms of active TB include persistent cough, fever, night sweats and unexplained weight loss,” Dr. Wilma Wooten, county public health officer, said in a statement.

“Most people who become infected after exposure to tuberculosis do not get sick right away. This is called latent TB infection. Some who become infected with tuberculosis will become ill in the future, sometimes even years later if their latent TB infection is not treated. Blood tests and skin tests are effective in determining whether someone has been infected.”

Taking medicines for latent TB infection can cure the infection and keep people from ever getting active TB disease.

According to the county, the chance of TB infection is highest for people with many hours of cumulative indoor exposure to a person who is sick with TB. Brief interactions with an ill rider are less likely to lead to TB infection than are prolonged or repeated exposures.

The County TB Control Program recorded 193 TB cases in the county in 2020, 201 people in 2021 and 208 people in 2022. In 2023, the county recorded 243 people with active TB disease.

An estimated 175,000 people in San Diego County have a latent TB infection and are at risk for developing active TB without preventive treatment, health officials said. People who test positive for TB, but who do not have symptoms of active TB, should get a chest X-ray and talk to a medical provider, as they may likely have a latent TB infection.

Anyone who would like more information on this potential exposure should call the county TB Control Program at 619-692-5565.

City News Service contributed to this article.

As the premier sponsor of the Classroom of the Future Foundation North Island Credit Union Foundation recently presented the organization’s prestigious 2024 Innovation in Education Impact Award to Grossmont Union High School District for its Patient Care Pipeline Program. 

In recognition of the award, North Island Credit Union Foundation provided Grossmont Union High School District with $10,000 to support student participation in its Patient Care Pipeline, a unique program that prepares high school students for a variety of healthcare career opportunities.

By providing access to health pathways, hands-on learning and certification programs, Patient Care Pipeline facilitates social mobility for students, removes barriers for under-represented students and prepares future healthcare workers that are in demand in the region.

Grossmont Union High School District Superintendent Mary Beth Kastan said, “We are honored to receive the Classroom of the Future Foundation’s Innovation in Education Impact Award for the Patient Care Program. This award is a testament to the unyielding efforts of our Career Technical Education leaders and teachers who provide our students with real-world experiences that are preparing them to build the best future.”

The CFF annual Innovation in Education Awards program honors innovative classroom programs, educators, and students in San Diego County schools that model the future of K-12 education. Following an intensive application and selection process, four classroom programs are recognized for their ability to get students excited about learning and enhance outcomes through the effective use of technology. The Impact Award is given to the program that exceeds all others in its ability to impact students and teachers.

In its sixth year as Premier CFF Sponsor, North Island Credit Union and its Foundation have provided $20,000 annually to support the organization’s mission. Since 1997, CFF has united business, community, and educational leaders to create innovative learning environments in San Diego County public schools that prepare students to thrive in a competitive, global society.

Visit ccu.com/foundation to learn more or make a tax-deductible donation, or follow the Foundation on Instagram@northislandcufoundation.