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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (March 23, 2021)
148TH YEAR, NO. 114 DailyAstorian.com // TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 2021 $1.50 CORONAVIRUS Seaside takes new path on special ed Gearhart journalist dives deep into the deaths of rap legends School district to leave regional consortium By KATIE FRANKOWICZ The Astorian R.J. Marx/The Astorian ABOVE: Randall Sullivan stands next to a table of his books at By the Way in Gearhart. TOP: Sullivan’s book, ‘LAbyrinth,’ served as the basis for the fi lm ‘City of Lies.’ Film based on Sullivan’s book debuts this month By R.J. MARX The Astorian G EARHART — In 2001, Rolling Stone magazine assigned jour- nalist Randall Sullivan a story about corruption in the anti-gang unit of the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department . Sullivan worked his source, Detec- tive Russell Poole , who had evidence offi cers moonlighted as security for the hip-hop label Death Row Records and arranged the 1997 killing of rap- per Notorious B.I.G. No one has ever been charged. Sullivan’s reporting culminated in the book, “LAbyrinth: The True Story of City of Lies, the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. and the Implication of the Los Angeles Police Department.” The book has been made into the movie, “City of Lies,” starring Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker and hits theaters this month. “‘City of Lies’ is about a corrupt chief of police and a group of gang- ster cops,” Sullivan told The Astorian. “The bad guys were Black but the vic- tims were Black, too.” “It’s as if Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra had been whacked by the mob SEASIDE — The Seaside School District will leave a long-standing con- sortium that provides options for spe- cial education services to North Coast students across the region’s fi ve school districts. Seaside instead plans to develop its own programs in an eff ort to better provide services to students close to home begin- ning in the fall. It is a conversation that has been going on for some time, said Super- intendent Susan Penrod. As a fi ve-year commitment to the consortium came up for review, “we really started to evaluate: Are we serving every student?” she said. For the school districts that remain in the consortium, Seaside’s decision takes away one option for younger students and means a change in what the program costs. Because of the support and resources these students often require, the consor- tium classes can be expensive for dis- tricts to run. For Astoria, a slot for a sin- gle student has cost just over $29,000 a year. Without Seaside in the mix, that cost could jump to $35,000 per student. ‘WE’LL AGREE TO THIS ONE YEAR AT A TIME UNTIL WE FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH IT. BUT FOR RIGHT NOW, I THINK IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO.’ Astoria Superintendent Craig Hoppes Suzanne Tenner/Saban Films Johnny Depp stars as Detective Russell Poole in the movie ‘City of Lies.’ in Las Vegas in the ’50s,” he said. “Do you think that murder would go unsolved for 20 years?” A privileged position Sullivan considers himself an Ore- gonian. He and his wife, Delores, moved to Gearhart in 2018. L ocals sometimes recognize him for his roles on the popular Oprah Winfrey N et- work show “ Miracle Detectives,” or “The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World’s Longest Treasure Hunt” on the History Channel. He was born in Los Angeles but moved to Coos Bay before he was a year old. The family spent 12 years there before a move to Portland. “My dad was a walking boss,” he said. “It’s like a longshore foreman. He was a rugged man, rough and very bright.” Sullivan attended the University of Oregon and then went to Colum- bia University in New York City on a writing fellowship. He was hired at the New York Daily News, then the United States’ largest circulation newspa- per. He worked there for a year when the 1978 New York newspaper strike brought his job to a temporary halt. See Journalist, Page A6 The Astoria School District and the Warrenton-Hammond School District, which supply the remaining consortium classrooms to their own students, as well as those from Knappa and Jewell, plan to continue with the consortium for now but will need to evaluate their involvement going forward. “We’ll agree to this one year at a time until we feel comfortable with it,” Asto- ria Superintendent Craig Hoppes told the school board at a recent meeting. “But for right now, I think it’s the right thing to do.” Students enrolled in consortium pro- grams move around between the school districts that off er these classrooms. Under the agreement, Seaside, for instance, provided room to North Coast students in k indergarten-through-sec- ond grade. If what is off ered with the See Seaside, Page A6 MORE INSIDE County reports new virus cases • A6 Georgia transplant has passion for books Newsome joins Seaside library By R.J. MARX The Astorian EASIDE — Micah Newsome, his girlfriend and two Boston ter- riers drove from Augusta, Georgia, to Seaside in the midst of the pan- demic last summer. “It was a joint decision. She has family in Washington County and S we both like the area,” said New- some, Seaside’s assistant library director . “We both applied for jobs before moving, and planned to move if either of us was off ered a position. We were fortunate enough to both be off ered positions. We’re living with family in Washington County right now, so that was our deciding factor.” Newsome’s hometown of Har- lem, Georgia, is famed as the birth- place of Oliver Hardy, the more rotund half of the classic comedians Laurel and Hardy. His parents were teachers and Newsome can’t remember a time before he went to the library. He nursed his passions for sci- ence fi ction and survival tales before he discovered J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” in high school. “I tend to read fantasy to this day,” he said. Inspired by his sister and brother, who both worked in libraries, New- some studied library science at Val- dosta State University. Since gradu- ation, he’s worked as a young adult R.J. Marx/The Astorian See Newsome, Page A6 Micah Newsome is the assistant library director in Seaside.