Will Fritz: My year in review

There's really no other way to put it: 2020 has been a crazy year. From elections, to the wildfires that are an ever-present danger here in Southern California, to the raging pandemic that has upended all of our lives, there has simply been a lot of news to cover.

There is not nearly enough room in this newspaper to do all of it justice, and indeed, it has often felt like there was not enough time to cover it all. All of that said, I have put together some thoughts on six of what I consider to be my most noteworthy stories I have written for Village News in 2020.

Some of them were stories that I simply enjoyed covering.

Many of them, though, are not stories that anyone "enjoys" writing – but they are important, and must be done nonetheless.

Here they are:

Longtime Fallbrook resident teaches children anti-bullying through storytelling (Jan. 17)

Starting off the year on a light note, in January I interviewed a longtime Fallbrook resident who has made it her mission to educate children about diversity and acceptance through storytelling.

Arelene Yates, who lived in town for nearly 30 years before moving to nearby Temecula, is a professional musician, songwriter and recording artist with more than four decades of performing experience.

In recent years, she's taken her skills and put them to use teaching children to be tolerant and kind and not to be bullies through her character Haja, a boy who is teased by his peers for his unusually long arms.

After publishing books about Haja that are aimed at children who are just learning how to read, Yates got the attention of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District and performed for their elementary school students. Recently, she was hired as a teaching artist for the district.

Yates said while she started off her musical career playing in an all-girl rock band, she's had a long-running interest in writing and performing for a younger audience and wrote her first story for children in the early 1980s. She said she initially wanted to take old nursery rhymes – many of which can be negative and off-putting when their true meanings are analyzed – and turn them into positive stories for children.

I thought Yates' story was neat: a true example of someone taking their talents and finding a way to put them to use in a way that will do the most good.

Bus crash on I-15 near Fallbrook kills 3, leaves 17 hospitalized (Feb. 22)

On Feb. 22, I ended up having to cover a deadly tragedy. A bus heading from El Monte to San Ysidro overturned on Interstate 15 near Bonsall, killing three and injuring the 18 other people on the bus. I had been covering a Habitat for Humanity event in Lake Elsinore for our other publication, Valley News, the morning of the crash, and had to race down to North County for a press conference at the crash scene (which I did not end up getting to in time because traffic was backed up for miles).

The three who sadly died in the accident were identified as 73-year-old Julia Perez Cornejo of Pasadena, 67-year-old Maria de la Luz Diaz of Riverside and 23-year-old Cinthya Karely Rodriguez-Banda of Mexico.

Of the 18 hurt, a 5-year-old boy suffered major injuries and was airlifted to Riverside University Health System hospital in Moreno Valley, where he later recovered. The bus driver, a 52-year-old Whittier man, was not suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol or other substances. He suffered minor injuries.

I've covered many fatal crashes and probably will cover many more in the future. But for some reason, this one sticks in my head, and I think about the three victims each time I drive down that stretch of freeway as I commute between my home in Escondido and assignments in Fallbrook and the Temecula area. I think of how the victims, being bus passengers, had zero control over the circumstances of their deaths. There was simply nothing at all they could have done to avoid their fates. And I also think of the driver, and how it was, at the end of the day, an accident. He surely never intended for the crash to happen. He was not under the influence at the time of the crash. It was just a mistake – but one with life-changing implications for the victims, for him, for the families of all involved. And much as we all turn up our noses at drivers who pass us a little too fast for the rainy weather, or who, perhaps momentarily distracted, drift a bit too far over into our lane, the truth is that none of us are perfect, and no matter how hard we try, all it takes is one slip-up to produce an outcome as tragic as that bus driver's fateful error. But life goes on nonetheless – how many of us drive that stretch of southbound I-15 nearly every day, as though nothing ever happened?

North County firefighter tests positive for coronavirus, fire district spokesman says (March 14)

It's probably fair to say March was a pretty strange month for most of us. Remembering the swine flu pandemic in 2009 that, for the most part, ended up being a non-issue for most Americans, and the mild panic that some had over the Ebola crisis in West Africa back in 2014 that ultimately did not affect the United States to any significant degree, the coronavirus was mostly off my radar. I knew it was going on, but to me at least, it was not something I needed to concern myself with – it was a story for someone else to worry about.

Of course, that's probably the worst I've ever misjudged a story as a journalist. Once sports games started to be canceled, it felt a bit real. Then when local schools suddenly decided to close on March 13, it felt more real. But it still didn't feel completely real for me until the next day on March 14, when I had to report that a North County firefighter had tested positive for the virus.

The unidentified firefighter was asymptomatic before developing a fever Saturday and notifying his captain, then was tested for the virus, North County Fire spokesman John Choi told me at the time.

The fire district did not disclose which station the infected firefighter worked at but the district decided Sunday, March 15, to suspend most firefighter and paramedic public interactions.

When I broke that story (actually, I think one of the TV stations may have beaten me, but it would have only been by a couple of minutes at most), the coronavirus was no longer a theoretical concept, but something that was spreading freely right here in our own community.

Fallbrook residents protest death of George Floyd (May 30)

All news, at the end of the day, is local. It might not often be clear, but plenty of events you see in far-flung places in national and international news have effects that reverberate in your hometown. This was especially true with the George Floyd protests, which of course started in Minneapolis but soon spread to the familiar corner of Mission and Ammunition in Fallbrook.

A few dozen protesters turned out May 30 to that corner to show solidarity with Floyd – the black man who died May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes – and the rest of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The demonstration came one day after a larger protest in Temecula turned into a tense standoff with sheriff's deputies once the Riverside County Sheriff's Department declared the protest to be an "unlawful assembly." It was also the morning after buildings burned in La Mesa, Los Angeles and other cities across the country as some protests became riots.

In Fallbrook, the demonstration was entirely peaceful, and little if any presence from San Diego County sheriff's deputies could be seen, a far cry from the inundation of law enforcement seen at other protests in the region.

One woman at the protest, Leticia Maldonado-Stamos, said she was attending the protest because of the "heartbrokenness" she said she felt from years of watching not only Floyd's death, but the deaths of other black people and people of color during interactions with police.

"My heart's just been broken by what's going on with our community and our country," Maldonado-Stamos said. "We're getting so separated and so divided and yesterday when we were watching the news it was just so much pain, and I thought I'm not white, I'm Latina, but I thought, we're all suffering. And I felt I needed to be a part of something that was expressing love and concern and I needed to be part of that."

I acknowledge this is a divisive issue. Your opinion on it is likely to differ depending on whether you get your information from Fox News or the Washington Post. It is, though, my responsibility as a journalist to talk to everyone from all sides of pretty much everything. So let's not talk about our points of disagreement for just a second. Let's take the part of this that I think everyone can get together on: how incredible it really is that we live in a country where peaceful protest is such a frequent occurrence, it is almost unremarkable. I'm not talking about whatever examples of violence you may want to cite in other places – I'm talking about your friends and neighbors who saw an issue of national importance that they care about, and were able to take to the streets of their hometown to express their views. Whatever our disagreements, that part is inspiring.

In battleground Arizona, 2 sides react to projected Biden victory (Nov. 12)

In a spur-of-the-moment decision, I drove to Arizona after the Nov. 3 election to witness and report firsthand on the scene taking place outside the Maricopa County Tabulation Center in Phoenix, where supporters of President Trump were gathering in protest after Joe Biden's victory there. I went there deeply discouraged about the state of the country – we are so divided now, that it seems most of us can scarcely talk to those we disagree with, much less try to listen to them and find a common understanding. We travel in different social circles, move to different cities and even read news from different sources to avoid confronting ideas we do not hold. But I ended up leaving Arizona with some measure of hope.

One woman, Linnea McCann, showed up outside the pro-Trump protest with a pride flag. She said she had come with the hope of being able to have honest dialogue with those she disagreed with, and found success.

"I'm not scared," she said. "Everyone here has been really nice to me, and I think that there's this idea in America that there has to be tenson all the time between everyone on each side and although I fundamentally disagree with the political views of pretty much everybody here in most ways, I can still talk to them and have open, civil conversations with them."

I don't think it will be easy or that it will happen overnight, but if we can just start talking to each other and trying to understand opposing points of view, we can get past the intense division our country is experiencing right now.

Creek Fire (Dec. 24)

2020, apparently not content with the havoc it has wrought on our lives already, decided to end the year in Fallbrook with a bang by forcing thousands to evacuate in the wee hours of Christmas Eve for fear their homes would be destroyed in a wildfire.

The fire started off at a reported 300 acres, which was revised down to 50, and then grew to more than 3,000 acres later in the morning.

Homes along much of the northwestern corner of Fallbrook were under evacuation orders on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, as the blaze extended into Camp Pendleton and threatened to affect populated areas should the winds shift.

I had been just about to go to bed when the news broke, and ended up awake most of the night trying to post updates on the fire. How cruel, I thought, of the universe, or of nature, or of whomever you want to ascribe responsibility for the randomness that befalls us, to threaten to destroy the homes of more than 7,000 people just before Christmas, of all times to do it. But it was, ultimately, just a threat – almost miraculously, the winds did not shift, and no homes were destroyed.

I wonder if that's what all of 2020 was supposed to be: a threat, a warning, a reminder, that life is precious and tragically short. That anything can happen at any time, and most of this world is beyond our control.

I have no way of knowing, of course, if there's some larger meaning behind all of this or if it's just a random mess of bad luck. But whether intended or not, I'm taking 2020's lessons to heart; my New Year's resolution, I suppose, is to savor life's experiences a little more, with the knowledge that none of this is guaranteed.

I sure do hope 2021 is better, though.