Santee's Weekend Dose: Super Moon!

Events

Las Brisas Model Grand Opening Celebration This Saturday, May 5th

11 a.m. - The three-day Fiesta Old Town Cinco de Mayo will
continue, with more than 40 musical acts on three stages, ballet folklorico
dancers and food.

Super Moon

Look up into the sky on Saturyday night and you won't see any normal moon- this one will be "super!"

20 percent brighter and 14 percent bigger than a regular full moon, it will dominate the sky. It is the closest, biggest and brightest full moon of the year.

At it's closest it will be about 221,802 miles from Earth, about 15,300 miles closer than average.

The super moon looks the largest when it is near the horizon, so check it out around sunset. Last year's super moon was about 240 miles closer than this year.

Check back at Santee Patch for local super moon photos and upload our own!

Santee NWS Weather Forecast:

Saturday: Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 75. Calm wind becoming west between 5 and 10 mph.

Saturday Night: Patchy fog after 11pm. Otherwise, cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around 51. West wind between 5 and 10 mph becoming calm.

Sunday: Patchy fog before 11am. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 73. Calm wind becoming west around 5 mph.

Sunday Night: Patchy fog after 11pm. Otherwise, partly cloudy, with a low around 53.

Car Bombing Jury Deliberation

Jurors deciding the fate of a Rancho San Diego man accused of booby-trapping his wife's pickup truck with a pipe bomb, seriously injuring her, deliberated for a second day Friday without reaching a verdict.

Lawrence "Larry" Hoagland, 50, faces life in prison if convicted of premeditated attempted murder and other felony counts stemming from the attack on his wife, Connie, on Sept. 23, 2010.

Jury deliberations will resume Monday in the courtroom of El Cajon Superior Court Judge Herbert Exarhos.

Deputy District Attorney Kurt Mechals told jurors in his opening statement that the 52-year-old woman was injured when the bomb went off as she left work at a daycare center about 4:20 p.m. The force of the explosion blew out windows of the victim's 2003 Ford truck and bent its roof upward, he said.

Connie Hoagland had no enemies, but she and her husband of 25 years were $80,000 in debt, upside-down on their home mortgage and had filed for bankruptcy, the prosecutor said.

One of her husband's partners in a photography business suspected he was having an affair with a Pennsylvania woman from high school and noticed the defendant was looking for a job in that state, Mechals told the jury.

On Sept. 8, 2010 -- the same day the defendant took a trip to Pennsylvania -- a bomb wired to a cellphone was found in the middle of the street near the Hoagland home on a road that the victim normally took, the prosecutor said. It did not go off.

When the defendant was arrested five days after the bombing that injured his wife, investigators found numbers for prepaid cellphones linked to the bomb that hadn't gone off, Mechals said.

Deputy Public Defender Tom Palmer told the jury that his client did not build a bomb, didn't design a bomb and never meant to harm his wife.

The defendant was having an affair with a woman in Pennsylvania and planned to get a job there and leave San Diego quietly, Palmer said.

-City News Service

Friday's stories of note