I've covered a number of homicides, and when I arrive at a crime scene, I usually find one of two situations: If the crime just happened, I generally find an area cordoned off with police tape and crawling with officers. If it's the day after a killing, I normally find a quiet street with little evidence of the recent tragedy.

When I arrived on Stanford Avenue on Tuesday morning, more than 12 hours had transpired since someone gunned down Victor Navarro, 33, of Santa Barbara, and seriously wounded another man about 7:20 p.m. Monday.

This was one of those cases where the scene of the crime held few reminders of the terrible thing that transpired there.

One of my colleagues had been there the night before, but he didn't get much information because the whole area was blocked off and called a crime scene.

I pulled up about 9 a.m.

Cars lined Stanford Avenue, a residential street of single-family homes. The street was tidy and the houses looked well cared for. One house had pinwheels near the front door. Several had political signs on their lawns.

There were no police cars, and no crime tape. No obvious stains on the asphalt.

The only obvious reminder of the shooting was a series of orange markings on the ground, the kind police use during their investigations.

The small orange lines lined up with the wheels of many cars near the scene of the crime.

I talked to a few neighbors. Some said they didn't know anything about what happened. One said she heard shots but didn't want to give her name because she was afraid.

A reporter from a Spanish-language news television channel was on scene with a cameraman. We chatted about what we'd heard then went our sort of separate ways, interviewing people briefly as they stopped their cars to see what we wanted. Then I continued wandering, talking to people who happened to be around.

I heard a few rumors but few facts.

Some neighbors said the shooting shocked them. A few said the neighborhood was usually quiet. Some disagreed.

A few bits of information I gathered at the scene helped me frame my questions to police.

Reflecting back on the 90 minutes or so I spent at the scene of the crime, I have to say I found what I expected to find, which wasn't too much.

It feels strange, almost disrespectful, to say the scene of a killing was average, but this one seemed to be, at least from a reporter's perspective at the moment I was there.

Murders change everything for the family and friends of the victim. Some victims' families return frequently to the scene of their loved one's death as part of their grieving.

But if the scene of this crime told a story, it was ethereal.

The scene spoke of the fear violence inspires; of the challenge of learning what really happened, and why; of the vulnerability of human life...  

The killing of a mother and her teenage son in Oxnard Sept. 12 brought the total number of homicides in the county this year to 20, one more than in all of 2007.

In 2007, the Ventura County Medical Examiner's office counted 19 homicides, the lowest number since the office began keeping track in 1974.

The office defines a homicide as one person's death at the hands of another.

Here are the numbers of homicides in each Ventura County city so far this year:

Simi Valley - 3
Oxnard - 9
Port Hueneme - 2
El Rio - 1
Newbury Park - 1
Moorpark - 1
Camarillo - 2
Thousand Oaks - 1

These numbers come from our Crime Map, which we update as homicides occur. The number has not been cross checked with the Medical Examiner's office.

Related links:

Ventura County's homicide rate at record low in 2007

Homicide Map

In the journalism business, we have to choose our words very carefully, because words that may seem like synonyms can be very different.

That's why when a person is killed by another, we write that police are investigating a homicide, rather than a murder.

Merriam Webster's online dictionary defines "homicide" as the killing of one human being by another.

Meanwhile, the dictionary defines "murder" as the verb meaning "to kill (a human being) unlawfully and with premeditated malice."

Therefore police won't use the word murder until they have determined a killing was criminal, said Det. Eric Buschow of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department's Thousand Oaks office.

Police will generally be investigating a "homicide," but they may use the word murder once a suspect is identified or arrested. A suspect would generally be wanted on suspicion of murder or arrested on suspicion of murder.

Homicide can be deemed murder, or it can be deemed justified, manslaughter, etc. (Manslaughter is defined by Merriam Webster's as "the unlawful killing of a human being without express or implied malice.")

As a reporter, there's an additional level of complication I have to be aware of in cases like these: Even though the manner in which a crime might be described to me by law enforcement or other sources might vary, I have to make sure that I write things in a consistent way.

 For that reason, newspapers and other media outlets have defined "styles" for how they write certain things.

The main standard we use is a guide called the Associated Press Stylebook. It has entries on everything from academic titles to zero-base budgeting.

The entry for homicide reads like this:

"homicide, murder, manslaughter
Homicide is a legal term for slaying or killing.
Murder is malicious, premeditated homicide. Some states define certain homicides as murder if the killing occurs in the course of armed robbery, rape, etc.
Manslaughter is homicide without malice or premeditation.
A person should not be described as a murderer until convicted of the charge.
Unless authorities say premeditation was obvious, do not say that a victim was murdered until someone has been convicted in court. Instead, say that a victim was killed or slain."

I've highlighted the second to last sentence of the entry because it shows that AP style is actually more restrictive than the dictionary definition. Even if authorities are ready to call a killing a murder, we might not use that word if they have not made it clear that the act was premeditated.

I was relieved when I arrived at the office early this morning and did not hear about any crime or accident related deaths yesterday, partly because there have been five homicides in the last month.

Last Wednesday, Albino Ramirez, 26, of Casitas Springs was shot dead in Camarillo. His wife and young son were in the car, as was the suspected killer, who they knew. Investigators believe drugs played a role in the motive.

Last Monday, Tina Fuller, 39, of Oxnard was stabbed to death in Oxnard. Police arrested another woman, who was later released because a lack of sufficient evidence, authorities said.

On July 31, Jesus Elery Shinn, 29, of Port Hueneme was shot to death. His case remains unsolved.

On July 26, Linda Price, 67, of Thousand Oaks was found strangled at the apartments where she lived and worked. Police later arrested her 39 year old son, who they described as a transient.
 
On July 19, David Rodriguez Ruelas, 29, of Oxnard was stabbed to death in a crime police believe was gang-related.

Last year, the Ventura County Medical Examiners office tallied 19 homicides, the lowest number since the office began keeping track in 1974.

So far this year, 17 people were killed by others in the county's boarders.

That doesn't include local residents killed elsewhere, such as Pamela Fayed of Camarillo, who was stabbed to death in Century City.

Authorities have not made any connections between any of the cases.

As of today, arrests have been made in nine of the killings. In at least six of those, the victim knew the suspect. Four suspects are relatives of the victim.

The fact that many of the homicide suspects knew their victims is no surprise to police.

Here's a fact from the FBI's 2006 uniform crime report, which includes data from agencies throughout the country:

"In incidents of murder where the relationships of murder victims and offenders were known, 21.6 percent of victims were slain by family members, 23.1 percent were murdered by strangers, and 55.3 percent were killed by someone with whom they were acquainted."

Here's that page if you are interested in more facts:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/offenses/expanded_information/homicide.html
 

It's big, it's hungry and it craves information.

It's always out there, and no matter what you feed it today, it's going to be hungry again tomorrow.

It's the news hole, the seemingly infinite public desire for information.

In journalism circles, it's known as the Beast, because every day we have to make sure we have information to feed it. If we don't, we might cease to exist.

And nowhere is the beast more ravenous than in the world of breaking news.

(Well, at least from my perspective as a breaking news reporter ... but really, I'm pretty sure it's not more ravenous anywhere else ... Anyway ...)

In times past, reporters rushed to get the story for the next day's paper, or maybe the evening edition. If you were a radio reporter you might break into a broadcast. A television reporter would hustle to make deadline before a newscast.

But that was before 24 hour T.V. Way before the Internet.

In the digital age, we don't feed the Beast once a day, we feed it constantly.

I was thinking about this on Wednesday after a long day of covering a homicide in Camarillo.

(Here's the final story: http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/aug/07/passenger-fatally-shoots-man-in-vehicle/)

I started covering the story shortly after 6 a.m. when I heard from the Sheriff's watch commander that deputies were investigating a possible homicide.

After putting a brief on the web, I hurried to the scene, called back to the officer to report the little I could find out, talked to the Sheriff's spokesman, and shot some video.

Then I went back to the office and put an updated story on the web.

A short time later, I called the medical examiner's office, added the shooting victim's name to the web story.

Then I set to work on a short video about the homicide.

Now, all this time, I wasn't working in a vacuum.

The local radio station, KVTA, was putting up updates, too (there were probably other news outlets involved too. That was the only one I was watching, though). And if they had something we didn't, people commenting on our web site let us know lickety-split.

When the radio reported first that the Sheriff's department had named a suspect, for example, I heard about it from colleagues and hurried to add that to my web story.

All this while, I'm trying to get in touch with family members of the victim. They are grieving, of course, and understandably busy, so I'm trying to conform to their schedule. I'm happy they want to talk to me at all.

Still, I have to drop what I'm doing to update the web story when we learn that the suspect in the homicide has been arrested.

(At some point during the tumult, I finish the video so we can put it on the web, and I speak to the shooting victim's brother.)

Later we find out that there's a press conference near the crime scene, and my breaking news partner, John Scheibe, rushes out to cover that.

With the information he gets and an additional interview with the Sheriff's spokesman I rewrite the story for publication.

Just as I finish, coworkers stop by to ask if I have anything new.

Readers are already clamoring for more.

Whenever crimes are similar, one of my first questions is: could it be a trend?

That's a question I was asking this morning when I learned Jose Luis Castro was killed during a confrontation outside a Camarillo party. Authorities believe the confrontation began after uninvited guests were asked to leave the party.

That reminded me, and others, of the tragic killing last month of Andrew John Singler. Something similar happened in that homicide, according to Singler's mother, who told me she spoke with numerous people who were there.

I also thought of the killing of Sophear Riem. Riem was shot to death in 2007 at a weekend bachelor's party in Port Hueneme. He and four other men were shot after the groom-to-be denied beer to uninvited guests and asked them to leave, Sophear's father told me.

These killings, like all homicides, are tragic and disturbing.

But as a reporter, I have to be very careful what I describe as a trend.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines trends this way:

2trend
Function:
noun
Date:
circa 1777
1: a line of general direction or movement <the trend of the coast turned toward the west>
2 a: a prevailing tendency or inclination : drift <current trends in education> b: a general movement : swing <the trend toward suburban living> c: a current style or preference : vogue <new fashion trends> d: a line of development : approach <new trends in cancer research>
3: the general movement over time of a statistically detectable change; also : a statistical curve reflecting such a change
synonyms see tendency

The similar circumstances in these killings are striking, but they don't necessarily mean that parties are becoming increasingly dangerous.

Capt. Ross Bonfiglio of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department says violence at parties is something he's seen routinely over the years.

Sheriff's officials don't think there has been an increase in groups of people crashing parties and spoiling for deadly fights.

As he sees it, the problem is that parties often bring together alcohol and or drugs and young people, who sometimes have conflicts that escalate to violence. He called them the "perfect breeding ground for violence," in fact.

"We think this is somewhat of an age old problem," Bonfiglio said.

If it's an age-old problem as Sheriff's officials assert, it's still something to be concerned about, but it's not a "statically detectable change," so it's not a trend.

But we should keep watch, because whether or not it's a trend, one killing is too many. And even if it's not a trend, if we can learn how to prevent violence by looking at similar circumstances, that's a good thing.

How we can do that is one more question I need to keep asking.

In this case, the advice from the Sheriff's Department is general. Officials want party planners to think, before they host, that in just the wrong circumstances, things can go terribly awry.