Years of child abuse allegations preceded charges against mother

Long before Ingrid Brewer was charged with torturing her children, one of them told a social worker that she was scared.

After visiting Brewer's Palmdale home while assessing her application to adopt the children, the social worker reported that the girl, now 7, and her half brother, 8, appeared stiff in Brewer's presence and had to ask permission to do anything.

Despite that report, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services looked no further and contact with the family was soon terminated.

Even before the adoption was finalized, the county's own files contained at least nine investigations of alleged abuse involving Brewer going back a dozen years, according to a person familiar with the investigation who provided a detailed account to The Times.

Philip Browning, who has led the department as its permanent director for less than a year, said he could not explain why Brewer, a nursing assistant, was allowed to adopt the children — but he was deeply disappointed that the system appeared to have failed. Multiple workers involved in the case, he said, have been placed on desk duty pending possible disciplinary action.

"This is a very serious situation," Browning said. "There is a thorough investigation that is going to be conducted to determine what happened, why it happened and how it happened."

Brewer was arrested last month after the boy and girl were found bruised and beaten on a Palmdale street without winter clothes, huddled under a blanket in 20-degree weather.

They had run away because they were "tired of being tied up and beaten," said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. Brian Hudson of the Special Victims Bureau.

The children told deputies that Brewer had locked them in bedrooms when she went to work, bound their hands with zip ties and beat them with electrical cords and a hammer, Hudson said.

They had been deprived of food and forced to use wastebaskets as toilets. Both had injuries consistent with the alleged abuse, Hudson said.

When detectives interviewed Brewer, she told them the children were punished for stealing food. The case "even shocked some of our most veteran children's case workers," Hudson said.

Brewer pleaded not guilty to eight felony counts, including torture, cruelty and assault with a deadly weapon at her arraignment Jan. 18. Her attorney, alternate public defender Hung Phi Du, declined to comment.

After Brewer's arrest, county investigators uncovered a history of child maltreatment investigations involving Brewer going back to 2001, when callers to a hotline twice reported that she was abusing her two biological children. Both times, social workers concluded that the allegations were unfounded.

In 2006, Brewer was recruited by a private agency called Aspiranet. Based in South San Francisco, the contractor is one of the state's largest foster care providers, serving 2,000 children a year.

Aspiranet placed 23 children in Brewer's care over the next five years, among them the half siblings she ended up adopting.

The children's mother had been found to be suffering from schizophrenia and depression. They came to Brewer in 2009; it was their fourth foster home.

During Brewer's five years as a foster parent, the county child-abuse hotline received at least seven calls from people alleging that she was maltreating children, including the half siblings.

The allegations, involving eight children, included emotional abuse, belt whippings and pinches that left marks on a child's neck, according to the source.

Each time, social workers determined that the allegations were inconclusive or unfounded, though their reports said some of the children had visible injuries.

The county and Aspiranet began proceedings to allow Brewer to adopt the half siblings when a court terminated their biological parents' rights.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

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Rape trial of teenaged football players to be open to public: Ohio judge

(Reuters) – The controversial trial of two high school football players accused of raping a classmate will remain open to the public and will not be relocated to another town, an Ohio judge ruled on Wednesday.

Prosecutors and an attorney representing the accuser had sought a closed trial, arguing that public access to the juvenile trial would subject the accuser to unwanted publicity and make potential witnesses reluctant to testify.

Visiting Hamilton County Judge Tom Lipps said the presence of the media would prevent inaccurate reporting and enhance public confidence in the juvenile justice system, according to his written ruling, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.

“An open hearing is especially valuable where rumors, mischaracterizations and opinions unsupported by facts have reportedly been repeated in social media postings and other published outlets,” Lipps wrote. “An open hearing will diminish the influence of such postings and publications.”

Prosecutors have accused Ma’Lik Richmond and Trent Mays, both 16, of raping a classmate at a party attended by many teammates last August in Steubenville, a close-knit city of 19,000 near the Pennsylvania border.

The case attracted national attention after the hacker activist group Anonymous publicized a picture of two young men carrying a girl by her wrists and ankles and released a video showing other young men joking about the alleged assault.

Richmond’s lawyer, Walter Madison, said previously on CNN that his client was one of the young men in the photograph – which he said was taken out of context – but does not appear in the video. A lawyer for Mays has not publicly commented on the postings.

Community leaders have accused authorities of protecting the school’s popular football program by not charging more players who could have prevented the alleged attack.

Lipps also ruled on Wednesday that the trial will remain in Steubenville. He set a trial date for March 13.

Reuters generally does not identify people who say they have been victims of sex crimes.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch, Bernard Orr)

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Jason London Suffered 'Brutal Attack' While Being Arrested: Rep

By Maggie Coughlan and Ken Lee

01/30/2013 at 08:30 PM EST

After being arrested following a bar fight in Scottsdale, Ariz., over the weekend, Jason London insists the incident isn't what it seems.

"The details of the events leading up to the incident are still being worked out with the help of many eyewitness testimonies; people who were there with Jason for the duration of the evening and with the recollection Jason does have. We will undoubtedly get to the bottom of the specifics. Neither Jason nor any of the witnesses we have spoken to have any recollection of anything even feeling like it was going south," according to a statement released by London's rep.

The statement claims that "excessive force" was used by the four bouncers during the altercation at the Martini Ranch.

The statement continues: "Bars are institutions where there are drunk people who are sometimes inappropriate and even violent. It is the bouncers' job to remove the problem and if it is necessary, to use force in order to secure the safety of the establishment and patrons. It is not acceptable to retaliate with brutality once that has been accomplished."

London's injuries include "a right orbital fracture, a right maxillary sinus fracture, multiple contusions, multiple hematomas and concussion."

But the cause of the scuffle remains unclear: "In the midst of having a good time, Jason does remember one of the guys saying something about Jason looking at his friend's girl wrong and grabbing and dragging him. The next thing Jason remembers was coming to with the cops arresting him," the statement reads.

Following his arrest, the actor – who is best known for his role in Dazed and Confused – allegedly intentionally defecated in the backseat of a patrol car, the police report claims.

The report also states that the twin brother of Jeremy London continually cursed at the officer, dropping a homophobic slur and telling the officer to "look me up" because "I'm rich" and "a famous actor."

Managers for the Martini Ranch weren't immediately available for comment.

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Sex to burn calories? Authors expose obesity myths

Fact or fiction? Sex burns a lot of calories. Snacking or skipping breakfast is bad. School gym classes make a big difference in kids' weight.

All are myths or at least presumptions that may not be true, say researchers who reviewed the science behind some widely held obesity beliefs and found it lacking.

Their report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine says dogma and fallacies are detracting from real solutions to the nation's weight problems.

"The evidence is what matters," and many feel-good ideas repeated by well-meaning health experts just don't have it, said the lead author, David Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Independent researchers say the authors have some valid points. But many of the report's authors also have deep financial ties to food, beverage and weight-loss product makers — the disclosures take up half a page of fine print in the journal.

"It raises questions about what the purpose of this paper is" and whether it's aimed at promoting drugs, meal replacement products and bariatric surgery as solutions, said Marion Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition and food studies.

"The big issues in weight loss are how you change the food environment in order for people to make healthy choices," such as limits on soda sizes and marketing junk food to children, she said. Some of the myths they cite are "straw men" issues, she said.

But some are pretty interesting.

Sex, for instance. Not that people do it to try to lose weight, but claims that it burns 100 to 300 calories are common, Allison said. Yet the only study that scientifically measured the energy output found that sex lasted six minutes on average — "disappointing, isn't it?" — and burned a mere 21 calories, about as much as walking, he said.

That's for a man. The study was done in 1984 and didn't measure the women's experience.

Among the other myths or assumptions the authors cite, based on their review of the most rigorous studies on each topic:

—Small changes in diet or exercise lead to large, long-term weight changes. Fact: The body adapts to changes, so small steps to cut calories don't have the same effect over time, studies suggest. At least one outside expert agrees with the authors that the "small changes" concept is based on an "oversimplified" 3,500-calorie rule, that adding or cutting that many calories alters weight by one pound.

—School gym classes have a big impact on kids' weight. Fact: Classes typically are not long, often or intense enough to make much difference.

—Losing a lot of weight quickly is worse than losing a little slowly over the long term. Fact: Although many dieters regain weight, those who lose a lot to start with often end up at a lower weight than people who drop more modest amounts.

—Snacking leads to weight gain. Fact: No high quality studies support that, the authors say.

—Regularly eating breakfast helps prevent obesity. Fact: Two studies found no effect on weight and one suggested that the effect depended on whether people were used to skipping breakfast or not.

—Setting overly ambitious goals leads to frustration and less weight loss. Fact: Some studies suggest people do better with high goals.

Some things may not have the strongest evidence for preventing obesity but are good for other reasons, such as breastfeeding and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, the authors write. And exercise helps prevent a host of health problems regardless of whether it helps a person shed weight.

"I agree with most of the points" except the authors' conclusions that meal replacement products and diet drugs work for battling obesity, said Dr. David Ludwig, a prominent obesity research with Boston Children's Hospital who has no industry ties. Most weight-loss drugs sold over the last century had to be recalled because of serious side effects, so "there's much more evidence of failure than success," he said.

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Ring allegedly burglarized homes of Times subscribers

Four men have been arrested on suspicion of burglarizing the homes of Los Angeles Times newspaper subscribers who were on vacation, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The burglars allegedly stole $1 million in property over the last three years.

Detectives said one of the suspects obtained lists of subscribers who had submitted "vacation holds" to a vendor that distributes newspapers for The Times. Officials said they have identified 25 victims but believe there are more than 100.

Sgt. Michael Maher of the sheriff's Major Crimes Bureau said most of the break-ins occurred along the 210 Freeway in eastern L.A. County and western San Bernardino County.

Approximately $100,000 worth of personal property, including artwork, golf clubs and guitars, has been recovered as a result of a six-month investigation, Maher said. But investigators believe the thieves stole many more items, including jewelry and collectible coins that they later sold.

"They took everything from televisions right down to the toothpaste," he added.

Deputies said Duane Van Tuinen, 51, of Azusa is believed to have supplied the burglary crew with addresses from stolen vacation lists. Sheriff's officials said he serviced machines in the distribution centers that subcontract with The Times to deliver the paper. He was arrested Wednesday.

Randall Whitmore, 43, of La Verne; Joshua Box, 43, of Arcadia; and Edwin Valentine, 52, of Covina have been booked on suspicion of receiving stolen property and possession of stolen property. Deputies are seeking a fifth suspect.

Sheriff's officials said The Times has cooperated fully with the investigation.

Nancy Sullivan, a Times spokeswoman, said the newspaper has made changes in its delivery policies since the incident.

"The Los Angeles Times was contacted several months ago about criminal activity which may have been linked to subscriber delivery information. We immediately launched an internal review and collaborated with the Sheriff's Department as matters unfolded, including honoring their request to keep the matter confidential because the investigation was active," Sullivan said. "The Times sympathizes with those who have been harmed and joins the other victims in thanking the Sheriff's Department for their hard work."

Sullivan added: "We continuously review and upgrade our policies and systems to protect and best serve our customers." She said that the paper will no longer share vacation information with distributors.

Authorities said the thieves would case the home of the subscribers who had submitted vacation holds to make sure the owners were away before striking. In some cases, the burglars found the victims' cars keys. They then loaded up the vehicles with stolen items and drove off, Maher said.

Officials said a break in the case came last summer, when Glendora police pulled over one of the suspects who had a list of addresses as well as stolen property. Sheriff's detectives spent weeks studying the list and eventually determined the addresses belonged to Times subscribers who had stopped delivery while on vacation. Maher said detectives at first probed whether the list was obtained through computer hacking but eventually determined that it was an inside job.

Subscribers who believe they were burglarized after placing a vacation hold are asked to call sheriff's Major Crimes Bureau detectives at (562) 946-7893 and supply a police report number as well as a description of the stolen items.

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

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Google Maps’ New Target: Secretive North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea may be the world’s most shrouded country, but on Tuesday Google Maps lifted the veil just a little, uploading a map of the police state complete with street names in the capital.

The new map, built with the help of what Google called “a community of citizen cartographers,” provides people with a peek at places they previously may only have read about, probably in articles about the North’s nuclear program or its devastating food shortages. The map of Pyongyang, the capital, shows all sorts of landmarks — the tower that celebrates the country’s self-reliance doctrine of Juche and Kim Il-sung Square, where military parades are held — as well as hotels, schools and hospitals.

Users can zoom in and post comments and photos; the map also includes what the site suggests are four gulags, marked as gray splotches. The map is still empty in most areas of the country, but is much more detailed than the one that was on the site until Tuesday, which was mostly blank.

In a sign of just how hermetic the country is, Google said North Korea was the last country in the world to get a relatively detailed map.

While North Korea experts point out that other more sophisticated maps exist and that Google Earth provides a satellite image that includes major cities and sites, some suggest that the easily accessible Google Maps will probably draw more casual viewers.

Even Curtis Melvin, who has created what many consider the most definitive public online map (on a Johns Hopkins University site), said Google Maps had “provided the umph to get more eyes focused on the issue. North Korea is a serious policy, humanitarian and security challenge, and the more information we have, the better.”

The posting of the map — and Google’s call for still more mapping information on the North from users — focused new attention on the North at a time when the country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States and its allies over tightened sanctions and has promised a third nuclear test.

Google’s initiative also came three weeks after its executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang in a highly publicized yet controversial trip organized by Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico. Mr. Schmidt said he urged North Korean officials he met in Pyongyang to let more North Koreans use the Internet.

Google said Tuesday that the posting of the map project was unrelated to Mr. Schmidt’s visit, which the company says was a personal trip.

On Tuesday, Mr. Schmidt said by e-mail that the new North Korea map “sheds a bit more light on what is happening in this remote country.”

There was no immediate North Korean reaction to Google’s announcement.

Citing privacy concerns, Google would not say how many contributors there were or who they were, but experts expect future postings to include those from the thousands who have fled North Korea in recent years.

The “citizen cartographers” were able to contribute using Map Maker, a crowdsourcing tool in the style of Wikipedia that allows users to edit or add to Google Maps. The company said the North Korea contributions had been coming in for several years, but Google held back the changes until it had time to vet the information as best it could, given how closed the North is.

Google Maps is unlikely to provide new information to policy makers who already have satellite maps from years of surveillance, nor will it get much of a following in the North itself, where the secretive leaders allow Internet access to only a small portion of the elite, who are closely watched.

But the crowdsourcing project provides a tool for users anywhere to help identify at least some features that the government in Pyongyang does not want the world to know. (The government cherishes secrecy to such an extent that its propagandists liked to boast: “When our enemies try to peek into our republic, they only see a fog.”)

Already, critics of the North’s authoritarian government and the backward economic policies that keep its people starving were posting sardonic comments by clicking on the “review” link often reserved for rating mapped businesses, restaurants and tourist sites.

One reviewer wrote, regarding bronze statues in Pyongyang of Mr. Kim, the country’s founder, and his son: “Wow, the Korean people must really have loved it under Kim Il Sung, to think they raised this gigantic statue voluntarily on their spare time while they was gloriously lacking food and metal for basic agricultural equipment.”

Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and Claire Cain Miller from San Francisco. Shreeya Sinha contributed reporting from New York.

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Ashley Judd Splits from Husband Dario Franchitti

01/29/2013 at 08:05 PM EST

Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti

Robin Marchant/Wireimage

Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti are splitting after more than a decade of marriage.

"We have mutually decided to end our marriage. We'll always be family and continue to cherish our relationship based on the special love, integrity, and respect we have always enjoyed," Judd, 44, and Franchitti, 39, tell PEOPLE exclusively in a statement on Tuesday.

After being engaged for about two years, the Missing star and the racecar driver tied the knot in a highly private ceremony in Scotland in 2001.

Judd's sister, Wynonna Judd, served as maid of honor, while the groom's brother Mario was the best man. – Julie Jordan

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Soldier with new arms determined to be independent

BALTIMORE (AP) — After weeks of round-the-clock medical care, Brendan Marrocco insisted on rolling his own wheelchair into a news conference using his new transplanted arms. Then he brushed his hair to one side.

Such simple tasks would go unnoticed in most patients. But for Marrocco, who lost all four limbs while serving in Iraq, these little actions demonstrate how far he's come only six weeks after getting a double-arm transplant.

Wounded by a roadside bomb in 2009, the former soldier said he could get by without legs, but he hated living without arms.

"Not having arms takes so much away from you. Even your personality, you know. You talk with your hands. You do everything with your hands, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," the 26-year-old New Yorker told reporters Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Doctors don't want him using his new arms too much yet, but his gritty determination to regain independence was one of the chief reasons he was chosen to receive the surgery, which has been performed in the U.S. only seven times.

That's the message Marrocco said he has for other wounded soldiers.

"Just not to give up hope. You know, life always gets better, and you're still alive," he said. "And to be stubborn. There's a lot of people who will say you can't do something. Just be stubborn and do it anyway. Work your ass off and do it."

Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, head of the team that conducted the surgery, said the new arms could eventually provide much of the same function as his original arms and hands. Another double-arm transplant patient can now use chopsticks and tie his shoes.

Lee said Marrocco's recovery has been remarkable, and the transplant is helping to "restore physical and psychological well-being."

Tuesday's news conference was held to mark a milestone in his recovery — the day he was to be discharged from the hospital.

Next comes several years of rehabilitation, including physical therapy that is going to become more difficult as feeling returns to the arms.

Before the surgery, he had been living with his older brother in a specially equipped home on New York's Staten Island that had been built with the help of several charities. Shortly after moving in, he said it was "a relief to not have to rely on other people so much."

The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

"We'll get it back together. We've been through a lot worse than that," his father, Alex Marrocco, said.

For the next few months, Marrocco plans to live with his brother in an apartment near the hospital.

The former infantryman said he can already move the elbow on his left arm and rotate it a little bit, but there hasn't been much movement yet for his right arm, which was transplanted higher up.

Marrocco's mother, Michelle Marrocco, said he can't hug her yet, so he brushes his left arm against her face.

The first time he moved his left arm was a complete surprise, an involuntary motion while friends were visiting him in the hospital, he said.

"I had no idea what was going through my mind. I was with my friends, and it happened by accident," he recalled. "One of my friends said 'Did you do that on purpose?' And I didn't know I did it."

Marrocco's operation also involved a technical feat not tried in previous cases, Lee said in an interview after the news conference.

A small part of Marrocco's left forearm remained just below his elbow, and doctors transplanted a whole new forearm around and on top of it, then rewired nerves to serve the old and new muscles in that arm.

"We wanted to save his joint. In the unlucky event we would lose the transplant, we still wanted him to have the elbow joint," Lee said.

He also explained why leg transplants are not done for people missing those limbs — "it's not very practical." That's because nerves regrow at best about an inch a month, so it would be many years before a transplanted leg was useful.

Even if movement returned, a patient might lack sensation on the soles of the feet, which would be unsafe if the person stepped on sharp objects and couldn't feel the pain.

And unlike prosthetic arms and hands, which many patients find frustrating, the ones for legs are good. That makes the risks of a transplant not worth taking.

"It's premature" until there are better ways to help nerves regrow, Lee said.

Now Marrocco, who was the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War, is looking forward to getting behind the wheel of his black 2006 Dodge Charger and hand-cycling a marathon.

Asked if he could one day throw a football, Dr. Jaimie Shores said sure, but maybe not like Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco.

"Thanks for having faith in me," Marrocco interjected, drawing laughter from the crowd.

His mother said Marrocco has always been "a tough cookie."

"He's not changed that, and he's just taken it and made it an art form," Michelle Marrocco said. "He's never going to stop. He's going to be that boy I knew was going to be a pain in my butt forever. And he's going to show people how to live their lives."

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Associated Press Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee and AP writer David Dishneau in Hagerstown, Md., contributed to this report.

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California unable to disarm 19,700 felons and mentally ill people

SACRAMENTO — California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.

Those gun owners have roughly 39,000 firearms, said Stephen Lindley, chief of the Bureau of Firearms for the state Department of Justice, testifying at a joint legislative hearing. His office lacks enough staff to confiscate all the weapons, which are recorded in the state's Armed Prohibited Persons database, he said.

The gun owners typically acquired the firearms legally, before being convicted of a felony or diagnosed with mental illness. Each year, the state investigates and seizes the guns of about 2,000 people on the Armed Prohibited Persons list, Lindley said, but each year about 3,000 names are added to the list.

"Despite our best efforts, the bureau does not have the funding or resources to keep up with this annual influx," he told the 15 assembled lawmakers.

The testimony showed how some of the state's strict gun laws have been undermined by California's budget problems. Lindley said it would cost $25 million to hire enough staff to clear the backlog within three years.

Democratic Sens. Mark Leno of San Francisco and President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento introduced a bill later Tuesday that would allow the Department of Justice to dip into funds collected when gun buyers pay a fee for background checks. There is a $20-million surplus in the account that could be tapped under the pair's proposal, SB 140.

The extra money, which could help eliminate the backlog in as little as a year, "would be a very wise and worthy investment," Steinberg said.

Lawmakers are considering a dozen proposals to curb gun violence after last month's Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

Some would be funded with levies on gun owners, such as a 5-cent tax on every bullet purchased. Legislation has also been drafted that would require ammunition buyers to provide a thumbprint and ID for background checks. Some lawmakers have suggested that the state lift a prohibition on cities and counties adopting their own, tougher gun laws.

Tuesday's hearing was part business, part theater, with law enforcement officials displaying assault weapons and retired legislators testifying that they were harassed and intimidated by gun-rights advocates when they passed firearms-control laws in previous years.

Victims of gun crimes somberly recounted their stories.

Amanda Wilcox said she could not watch news footage of the Newtown parents, because it was too painful. In 2001, her daughter Laura, a college student, was shot to death in an office in Northern California by a mentally ill man with a semiautomatic weapon.

Wilcox, now an advocate with the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence, urged lawmakers to enact stricter gun controls.

"We want to prevent firearm violence by keeping dangerous weapons out of dangerous hands," Wilcox said.

During the public comment period, opponents of the new legislation took to the microphone to denounce the hearing as a platform for misinformed propaganda.

A proposal that gun owners be licensed and insured like motorists drew opposition from Sam Paredes, executive director of the advocacy group Gun Owners of California.

"There is a big question of whether you can license a constitutional right," Paredes said.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

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