A man shot by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in Florence-Firestone early Wednesday morning appears to have been unarmed. Authorities have identified the man as 23-year-old Cristian Rene Medina.
The incident occurred around 4:30 a.m. near a payphone at the corner of 64th Street and Holmes Avenue.
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillermina Saldana said deputies from the Century Station were responding to a report of a robbery in progress nearby. When deputies arrived, Medina was standing alone near the payphone in front of a liquor store, she said. The department said Medina matched the description of the robbery suspect.
Guillermina said Medina took a “shooting stance” as though he were pointing a weapon. The deputies fired and Medina died on the scene. No weapon was found.
Manuel Romero, who lives near the corner where the shooting took place, said he heard the gunshots.
“I heard like maybe eight times,” Romero said. By the time he walked over to see what happened, authorities had blocked off the street.
Neighbors told KPCC Medina lived about a block away but many were reluctant to talk to a reporter about the incident.
A KPCC investigation into officer-involved-shootings in L.A. County found one in four people shot by police and deputies between 2010 and 2014 were unarmed.
KPCC’s data showed that in the five year period, at least eight people were shot by deputies in the slice of unincorporated Los Angeles where Medina died.
The area also has a high gang presence and a relatively high number of homicides, compared with other areas patrolled by the sheriff’s department. In 2015, Century Station has the third-highest homicide rate of any other sheriff’s patrol station.
Overall, crime has been dropping in the area. Violent and property crimes did rise about 6 percent in 2015, compared to the year before. But they’re still lower than they were five years ago.
LOS ANGELES (RNS) Alongside programs like “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards,” Netflix now offers users another type of content: Christian sermons. The online video streaming service added lectures by four popular Christian pastors in early December.
“I believe if Jesus were on planet Earth today in the flesh he’d be on Netflix,” said Ed Young, one of the pastors, in a phone interview.
Young spearheaded the effort to get Christian talks onto Netflix. He said he believes, like Jesus, he should find ways to appeal to the masses. It’s that attitude that makes the partnership with Netflix an unsurprising, if unprecedented, convergence of evangelical faith and popular media.
“It fits with patterns that are long-established,” said Stewart M. Hoover, director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hoover pointed out that evangelical churches have been quick to adapt to radio, then television and other technologies as they have developed.
Young’s Dallas area-based Fellowship Church is no exception. Young has penned more than a dozen books; he has had television programs on the E! network and other cable channels; he hosts iTunes podcasts and offers video content on YouTube and Roku. He has also gained attention for media stunts such as his 2012 “bed-in,” when he and his wife spent a day in a bed on the roof of their church to generate discussion around sexuality in Christianity.
“Jesus said that we should become fishers of men. If I’m going to catch the most fish, I’ve got to put a lot of hooks in the water,” Young said of his many media projects. “But I’m most excited about Netflix right now.”
Ed Young’s “Fifty Shades of THEY” appears on Netflix.
Young’s “Fifty Shades of THEY” Netflix series includes five episodes. The pastor paces a colorfully lit stage, offering jocular interpretations of Christian teachings to an audience of hundreds. The three other series have similar formats.
In “#DeathToSelfie,” young, T-shirt-clad pastor Steven Furtick talks identity. Georgia pastor Andy Stanley addresses working through challenges in “Starting Over.” And in “Winning Life’s Battles,” evangelical icon Joyce Meyer preaches to a massive auditorium.
Like Young, the other three pastors have media teams, YouTube videos, active social media accounts and personal websites to connect visitors to more content.
Young said he and his team started dreaming of Netflix about a year ago. Netflix was receptive to the idea, he said, and it was not hard to bring other Christian pastors on board with the plan either.
Paul Huse, executive director of marketing for Joyce Meyer Ministries, said Meyer’s team was pleased to take part.
“More and more people are cutting the cord,” Huse said. “Even though we’re on six or seven cable networks, more people are moving away from that and we want to be where they can still access us.”
Netflix did not provide many guidelines in terms of content for the episodes but did ask that the programs avoid product promotion or invitations for viewers to make donations, Huse said.
The move to Netflix made sense for the pastors, but for Netflix it’s a logical fit too, said Tom Nunan, lecturer at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and longtime Hollywood producer.
“Most people perceive Netflix as a competitor to HBO or Showtime,” Nunan said, pointing to the original edgy, adult content that has earned the platform industrywide recognition. But in many ways, Netflix is the opposite of traditional networks, which target specific niche audiences, Nunan said. “Netflix is trying to be all things to all people.”
Nunan added that the entertainment industry has profited from religious content since the days of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.”
“Spirituality, generally speaking, is very good business,” Nunan said.
David Clark, executive media director for Ed Young’s Fellowship Church, said it has a two-year contract in which Netflix pays the churches for the shows. He declined to specify the amount, except to say that it was “nothing astronomical.” Still, he added that it was a much more preferable arrangement than the traditional cable TV model, which usually required large costs on the churches’ part.
Representatives from Netflix declined to give an interview for this story but issued a statement saying, “Titles are continuously being added to the service to meet the diverse tastes of our more than 75 million members around the world.”
Young hopes access to those users might attract new followers to Christ.
“We’re always working to try to market to the people who normally would not go to church,” Young said.
But Hoover predicts the new sermon series are more likely to attract Christian customers to Netflix than they are to convert Netflix users to Christianity.
“Evangelicals tend to think that because they are in the public media they’re going to cross over to more mainstream audiences, but evidence shows that they’re mostly just preaching to the choir, and I think that will be the case here,” Hoover said.
But for Young, the goal is clear: He plans to continue bringing Christianity to popular media in whatever forms technology provides.
“Jesus was the most creative communicator in history,” Young said. “If we’re taking a page from his playbook, the church should be the most creative entity in the universe.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Saturday signed a law hiking the city’s minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 by 2020, an increase that will affect hundreds of thousands of workers.
Garcetti, speaking in English and Spanish, told a crowd of hundreds at the signing event that he wanted to lift the city’s lowest-paid workers out of poverty.
“Too many Angelenos have been left behind even as we’ve put the recession in the rearview mirror,” he told union representatives, immigration and activists at the ceremony.
The Los Angeles City Council approved the wage hike in May with a 14-1 vote. The law requires businesses with 25 or more employees to increase pay for minimum wage workers to $15 by 2020.
The pay hikes start in July 2016 with a jump to $10.50. Smaller businesses will have an extra year to meet the new minimums.
Opponents say the law will place an unfair burden on small businesses and will drive employers away from the city.
Addressing those concerns, Garcetti said: “We would not have done this if we believed this would hurt our economy.”
The city council included in the law a stipulation that the city’s minimum wage should continue to increase based on the Consumer Price Index starting in 2022.
The legislation also included a $500,000 budget to establish an Office of Labor Standards. It will investigate whether businesses in the city are paying workers fairly.
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. Other U.S. cities such as Seattle and San Francisco have increased minimum wages in recent years.
The new law will impact an estimated 600,000 workers in Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city.
“The winds of this country blow from West to East,” Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson said at the event. “Don’t believe people across the country are not watching this.”
The city council in September approved a pay increase for hotel workers to $15.37 an hour.
In a classroom at Cal State San Bernardino, Ernest Siva shares a traditional Serrano story with students. He reads aloud in a language that was spoken by as many as 30,000 Native Americans in the San Bernardino mountain areas before settlers arrived in the 18th century.
78-year-old Siva remembers speaking Serrano at home with his mother and grandfather as a child. But in his generation, pressure to assimilate led English to become the tribe’s dominant language. Now, Siva is one of just two living speakers of Serrano. He’s hoping to pass on as much as he knows.
“I hope more and more people learn enough about it to keep the fire going. It’s our heritage. It does mean something to us and it really was important to the people,” Siva said.
The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians has been making a formal effort to preserve the Serrano language since 2004. Two years ago, the tribe teamed up with Cal State San Bernardino to offer college courses in the language.
The challenge was finding an instructor who could teach a language almost no one speaks.
Michael Navarrete, who describes himself as “Nicaraguan-Sicilian-German-Russian-Jewish,” is one of the people the tribe turned to. Navarrete said he didn’t even realize there were still Native Americans in California when he got the job. But, as a trained linguist, the idea intrigued him.
“It really is kind of a linguist’s dream job that I’m working on. For all intents and purposes it’s an extinct language but I’m trying to bring it back, so it’s very interesting even if I can’t talk to anyone,” Navarrete said.
Navarrete is teaching the introductory Serrano class at the university with Siva’s help. This semester they have just seven students.
None of the participants in Navarrete and Siva’s class have Serrano heritage. Most of them enrolled out of simple curiosity.
21-year-old psychology major, Vanessa Rodriguez already speaks Spanish and Romanian. She said Serrano just seemed interesting.
“I can learn a language outside, but this is a language that not many people know, so it’s not easy to come across to go find a book or something where I can learn from there,” she said.
The university hopes offering these courses will encourage students to take an interest in the cultural history of Southern California and help connect students with other parts of the community.
Carmen Jany, chair of CSUSB’s Indigenous Languages program, said, “The local tribes are part of our university community so we obviously want to serve the tribes as well. What is their main concern? To keep their languages and cultures alive, so we want to help them in that endeavor.”
The university started the program in 2012. They now offer courses in three Southern California indigenous languages: Luiseño, Serrano and Cahuilla. This year, the school also introduced a certificate program in California indigenous languages and cultures. Jany says the courses are available to community members as well as university students. She said she hopes that CSUSB students might someday learn enough about indigenous languages to work on the tribes’ reservations as teachers.
So far, enrollment has been low. The individual tribes pay for language instruction and Jany said without the tribes’ backing, the university probably wouldn’t be able to offer these courses.
Still, it’s an investment the tribes are willing to make in their future.
“Based on my experience, most tribes in the U.S. are playing catch up,” Navarrete said. “Most linguists think more than half the world’s existing languages will disappear by the end of the century.”
Southern California’s native languages are among those threatened, Navarrete said.
Navarrete and other linguists have helped compile a dictionary of about 4,000 Serrano words, but a lot of the language has already been lost. It’s something that concerns Siva.
“The main thing is to pass that on as much as we can,” Siva said.
Siva never thought he’d see a university teaching his language his lifetime. This course makes him feel hopeful.
There’s a traditional Serrano teaching on the matter, Siva said. “If you lose your language, you won’t have the deep roots of the oak, you’ll have shallow roots like grass, which withers and is gone.”
It’s a sentiment he hopes future generations will share.
More than 90 percent of long-distance hikers who attempt to tackle the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail start at the Mexican border, making their way north to the Canadian border. Almost everyone who attempts the daunting journey over the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges does so in spring and summer months.
Forry, 33 and Lichter, 34, are hiking the PCT from north to south, and they’re doing it during the coldest months of the year. They started at the Canadian border in late October and expect to make it to the Mexican border around March 1. No other hikers are known to have accomplished this before.
“There’s been a bunch of people calling us ‘the crazy ones,’” Lichter said in an interview. He and Forry took a break to speak to The Grizzly when they passed through Big Bear on Feb. 20.
Shawn Forry looks out over Mount Jefferson in Oregon. In Oregon, Forry and his hiking partner Justin Lichter faced stormy conditions and frostbite. (Courtesy of Shawn Forry)
When they started walking in Washington last autumn, they never expected to make it all the way to Southern California. Forry said they estimated they had less than a 20 percent chance of finishing.
“So much has to line up along the way,” Forry said. Hiking through snow and over mountains, Forry and Lichter knew the slightest twist of an ankle could derail their itinerary.
So why risk unpredictable weather and difficult conditions to head south during the winter? “Because that’s what the birds do, right?” Lichter joked.
In truth, the pair was ready for a formidable challenge. Lichter and Forry have hiked a combined 50,000 miles or so on trails around the world. They have both completed the Pacific Crest Trail (in warmer weather) in years past, not to mention the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and several other monumental outdoor feats. They also have adventurous careers—Forry is an instructor for the outdoor education nonprofit, Outward Bound, and Lichter is a ski patroller. Both men grew up on the East Coast, but moved to California for more outdoor opportunities.
“I just like being outside and seeing new places,” Lichter said. “I couldn’t even picture myself at a desk or in a cubicle.”
But even with an incredible amount of experience, the two have had a number of difficult days since they set out four months ago. Near Mount Hood in Oregon Lichter and Forry were caught in a serious storm where they both ended up with frostbitten feet. “Ironically, that’s one of the easiest sections of the trail and it turned into one of the hardest for us,” Lichter said.
Forry added, “We had a ‘go go go’ mentality at the beginning, and I think that was what caused our oversight that the storm was a little more serious than we were anticipating.”
Forry and Lichter, who have been traveling 20 to 30 miles per day, faced constant rain and snow for the first two months of their journey. They alternated between hiking, snowshoeing and skiing. Snow was sometimes heavy enough they had to wake up in the night to dig out their own tents and sometimes thin enough they had to ski over rocks. Then came the desert. The past week, as they’ve traveled through 65 degree sunshine in Southern California, the hikers said they’ve felt overheated, having adjusted to below-freezing temperatures.
Shawn Forry carries skis through the California desert after months of hiking through snowy conditions. (Courtesy of Shawn Forry)
“It’s been almost a tale of two trips,” Lichter said, of the roller-coaster weather conditions they’ve faced.
With the most treacherous challenges behind them and the end of the trail within reach, Lichter and Forry said they have relaxed a bit. They have rewarded themselves with a few more breaks from the trail. They stayed two nights in Big Bear. When they arrived, they indulged right away in substantial quantities of Mexican food. They were also eager to check out the movie schedule at Village Theaters.
Lichter and Forry admit they’ve grown a little tired of camp food and are excited to finish their journey. But they already look back on their one-of-a-kind trek with nostalgia.
“Even to go through the some of the same places I know and see them in a different season was amazing,” Forry said.
Both hikers said getting to see isolated parts of the trail after fresh snow had fallen made for unforgettable views. Being among the first hikers to experience that scenery in the way they did made it even more exciting.
As Forry put it, “The balance of the beauty and the challenges has been really rewarding.”
The way Watts locals remember it, the Watts Happening Coffee House was the place to be in the late ‘60s.
“It was hip,” said Harold Hambrick, a longtime Watts resident and witness to the 1965 Watts Riots. “Anyone who had any kind of creative ideas could come there.” Musicians, poets, and artists gathered at the space in the years following the Watts Riots, as did political activists, Hollywood actors and members of L.A.’s Black Panther Party.
In the nearly 50 years since the Watts Riots — or Watts Rebellion, as residents prefer to remember it — the coffee house sat dormant for decades, then reopened. It has hosted some performances in recent years, but not to the scale it once did.
Now, some community members hope to bring the arts scene back to the iconic cafe. With a grant from the California Arts Council, the Watts Village Theater Company has set out to refurbish the space, now called just the Watts Coffee House. For the first time ever, the company will stage a full length play called Follow in the cafe, starting tonight.
The Watts Happening Coffee House rose, literally, out of the ashes of the 1965 violence in Watts which left 34 dead and more than 3,000 arrested. 103rd Street became known as “Charcoal Alley.” Nearly everything on the street had burned.
“It was brought out of chaos,” said Rita Cofield, project manager of the Watts Village Theater Company’s beautification project. “It was an incubator for all of these creative things in the community.”
The Watts Rebellion was a six-day struggle in response to the arrest of a 21-year-old black man by a white CHP officer, the largest civil unrest in L.A. history at its time. In the years afterwards, artists and activists transformed the Watts Happening Coffee House into base camp for civil rights efforts. Donations flowed into Watts from government agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Hollywood names like Budd Schulberg and Roger Mosley, giving rise to organizations like the Watts Writers Workshop, Studio Watts and the Mafundi Institute — all promising creative expression for survivors of the Rebellion.
But within a decade, donations slowed, public memory of the Watts Rebellion waned, and the coffee house and many of the organizations formed there closed.
Over the course of a few years, Julie lost several of her family members, then a close friend also passed away. Overwhelmed by grief, Julie developed severe depression. She cried daily. Worst of all, she had no one to talk to.
“I was definitely in a tough place with a lot to say and nowhere to say it,” said Julie, a Big Bear Lake resident who preferred not to give her last name for this story.
What she really wanted was a professional counselor, someone to speak to one-on-one in a private setting.
Just over a year ago, Julie’s doctor recommended she try a new program through the Bear Valley Community Healthcare District. Julie was among the first patients of Mindy Mueller, a psychologist offering private therapy at the district’s health clinic.
The thing is, Mueller doesn’t live in Big Bear, or even nearby. Julie would be participating in therapy sessions via video chat.
In June of 2013, the healthcare district began offering counseling with Mueller through a program called TeleConnect Therapies, a computerized video system. Sessions have been in high demand. The program has been so successful for offering quality medical services to Big Bear patients remotely, that the district has plans to expand the program this month.
Think of TeleConnect therapy like Skype or FaceTime, but more advanced. The patient and therapist look at each other on a screen. The therapist can control the cameras on the patient’s end to zoom in or change the angle of the lens. For the patient’s privacy, the Internet connection is extra secure and data is encrypted.
“It’s the coming wave of medicine—especially in rural areas,” said Ray Hino, Bear Valley Community Health District CEO.
When Julie was first seeking help, she had received some counseling at Big Bear’s Lutheran Social Services office. She also spoke to her medical doctor. But before TeleConnect therapy, she had found her mental health options on the mountain to be somewhat limited—a common issue in rural communities.
“There was a great need in Big Bear for more mental health services,” Hino said, adding, “If mental health issues go untreated, it can lead to domestic violence, problems at work or school, all kinds of negative effects.”
Without mental health services, Hino said, more pressure ends up placed on a community’s law enforcement or emergency rooms. Hino recalled one patient, whom he said used to be a regular in Big Bear’s emergency room, who has now been able reduce hospital visits just through sessions with Mueller.
Joanne Merrill stands with the healthcare district’s special computer system for TeleConnect Therapies. Merrill received special training to work with telemedicine technologies. She makes all of the appointments for the therapist who sees patients with the system and says demand for appointments has been extremely high in the first year of the program.
The district secured a $30,000 grant from the California Endowment to pay for the first year of the program. In that first year, 547 Big Bear area patients saw Mueller. Joanne Merrill books their appointments for the clinic. Merrill keeps a notebook on her desk with pages of names written inside—that’s just the waiting list.
“(Mueller) usually books up four or five weeks in advance,” Merrill said, “I’ve even seen people book two months in advance because being seen by her is so important to them.”
Mueller “beams in” to Big Bear from the San Diego area twice a week. Merrill said appointments are often booked back-to-back for 12 straight hours.
But while demand for treatment is high, TeleConnect therapy doesn’t work for every patient. “If a person has a more severe disorder with hallucinations or delusions, it’s hard because they look at the screen and are really distrustful,” Mueller said, “It can be hard for them to know if you’re really there.”
She added that some forms of therapy that she practices with in-person clients, like creating artwork or playing games, don’t work over the screen.
And for some people, the screen just feels weird. “We get the occasional person who says, ‘I don’t want to talk to a TV,’” Merrill said.
But for patients like Julie, the screen is no problem. Julie said sometimes she forgets she’s even talking to a video. “I look her in the eye and she looks at me in my eyes,” she said.
Mueller said some patients are actually more willing to talk to her at a distance since it feels less confrontational and, since Mueller lives out of town, the patients know she’s someone they won’t run into at the grocery store later.
Numerous studies have been conducted on the success of therapy conducted through phone, email or video chat. Most studies find video-based systems like the one at the Brenda Boss facility to be almost as effective as in-person therapy.
If all goes according to schedule, the healthcare district will expand the program to include video sessions with a psychiatrist this month. Mueller, as a psychologist and therapist, does not write prescriptions. A psychiatrist, on the other hand, is a medical doctor.
Mueller thinks the expansion will be an important complement to her services. “The combination of medication and therapy for some disorders is the most effective way to help, so I’m really excited people will have the option,” she said.
Hino also hopes to see the video technology program expand to bring other kinds of medical specialists beyond just mental health to Big Bear in the future. He sees the technology as an effective way to offer quality healthcare on the mountain without having to recruit doctors to move to the area.
So far, many patients seem to agree. Julie calls the day she first heard about TeleConnect therapy an act of God. A lifesaver.
“When I (have a session with Mueller) it’s like everything’s going to be OK, I’ve got someone who’s listening to me and willing to work through this with me,” Julie said. “If you can see that person—even on a computer—it makes a huge difference.”
The Mojave National Preserve — a stretch of protected desert northeast of Los Angeles — is currently reviewing its water management plan. One question officials are considering is whether to continue providing artificial water sources for desert wildlife.
As part of the Works Progress Administration, hundreds of concrete “drinkers” were installed across the desert in the 1940s. They’re giant concrete saucers that funnel rainwater into cisterns that animals drink from. But after half a century in the desert sun, most of the drinkers are cracked and needing repairs.
A group called Water for Wildlife has voluntarily repaired these drinkers for years. Now debate is underway on whether these drinkers should be removed.
In nine years, Water for Wildlife’s Cliff McDonald and hundreds of volunteers have repaired about 100 of these drinkers. They come out for one weekend a month during winter and spring. They camp overnight, and little by little, they’re making progress.
“[One] particular drinker had not been working, so we repaired it, and within 60 days there was a tortoise coming out of it where he had just gotten a drink,” McDonald said. “That same tortoise was estimated to be about 60 years old, so he could have watched the guys build it 60 or 70 years ago.”
But even if quail, tortoises, and other desert animals like having easy spots to find water, not everyone agrees that these drinkers should be maintained.
“If you’re trying to manage just one part of an [ecosystem], then you can upset the functioning of the rest of the system,” said Terry Weiner, conservation coordinator with the Desert Protective Council. “The problem [with artificial water] is that it can become what we call an ‘attractive nuisance,’ and animals that would not be drawn to that area before will perhaps go there.”
Like many other environmental groups, Weiner’s organization worries that the drinkers interfere with a desert ecosystem that evolved to survive with limited water.
That’s exactly the argument the Mojave National Preserve is weighing now as it develops a new water management plan.
“From the scientific standpoint there’s really not a lot of evidence that artificial water is all that beneficial,” said Neal Darby, a wildlife biologist with the preserve. “We know animals use it, but we can’t say that if they didn’t have it they would all die. And that’s where the problem is, it’s a very difficult hypothesis to test,” he said.
It’s difficult to test because one possible outcome of taking away the drinkers is that desert wildlife could start to die off.
Humans have been in California’s deserts for centuries, and in many cases, settlers created artificial water sources for their cattle or crops, which wildlife eventually began to rely on too. Humans have also used up some natural water sources throughout the desert. That’s why McDonald and his volunteers say maintaining artificial water is important.
But some environmentalists call McDonald’s motivations into question.
“In too many cases we find the people who are really enthusiastic about establishing guzzlers throughout the desert are people who want to make sure the population of animals is such that the can keep hunting them,” said Weiner. “We’re not opposed to appropriate hunting, but having artificial water sources to artificially pump up the population of [animals] is not a good idea.”
Like many of his volunteers, McDonald does hunt. But, he says of the hundreds of species in the desert that use the drinkers, only a handful are of any interest to hunters. And, he says, keeping all of those wildlife populations thriving should be of interest to everyone.
“If I’m the general public and I do not hunt and I want to come out here to camp, I’d want to see flickers and warblers and blue jays, and they drink this water,” McDonald said.
McDonald also said that hunting licenses help pay for a lot of other environmental projects. Darby agrees.
“There’s not a lot of funding available,” said Darby. “These sportsman’s groups really step up to the plate and help [the Mojave National Preserve] get things done.”
What Darby, McDonald, and other environmental groups can all agree on, is that California’s desert ecosystems should be protected. The question is, whether giving wildlife unnatural sources of water really helps.
It’s a major debate, but it’s not enough slow down McDonald and his volunteers.
“My dad and I hunted together, we fished together and we saw a lot of wildlife. A lot of that wildlife was drinking out of a stream or drinking out of one of these artificial drinkers and I would like the future generations to be able to see that,” McDonald said.
But in drought years like this one, if wildlife can’t get water, McDonald isn’t sure that will be possible.
After a 2-year, $45 million restoration project, LA’s Echo Park has gotten a lot of new traffic. But among the visitors to the park have been hundreds of mysterious pink blobs. It turns out they’re not supposed to be there and they may be hard to get rid of.
Southern California is known for its nice weather, but almost as popular as the sunshine is the man who delivers the forecasts. Katherine Davis had a chance to sit down with ABC7 meteorologist Dallas Raines. She learned he’s loved weather since childhood, he has some extreme hobbies, and there’s a purpose behind his flashy outfits and elaborate “moves.”
