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.