LOS ANGELES – Dive teams yesterday raised a 26-foot boat from the ocean floor off Los Angeles, but didn't find the couple believed to have been aboard, the brother of two Southern California congresswomen and his girlfriend.
Divers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Port Police used hard plastic balloons to raise the boat to just below the surface yesterday. Authorities believe the boat belongs to Henry Sanchez, 51, who has been missing since Oct. 2 along with his girlfriend, Penny Avila, 48. The crews plan to lift the wreckage onto another boat and bring it ashore.
Investigators believe the boat collided with a barge being towed near the Los Angeles harbor entrance. Henry Sanchez is the brother of Reps. Loretta and Linda Sanchez.
Associated Press
Prison overhaul funding questioned
SACRAMENTO – A federal judge yesterday ordered Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell the court whether the state has the $250 million needed to start an $8 billion overhaul of the prison health care system.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson said the administration also must say how and when the state will make the money available to a court-appointed receiver.
Receiver Clark Kelso, who is in charge of inmate health care, wants the money immediately to design the first three of seven planned prison medical and mental health centers. Those centers would house 10,000 inmates. Kelso said he needed more than $3 billion this fiscal year, despite the state's mounting financial problems.
Associated Press
