03/05/2024
Today I’m asking you for your Vote for Valerie Summers for Judge! If anyone deserves the bench it’s Valerie. I have had the honor to work along side Valerie throughout my law enforcement career. One of her most notable cases was murder of Charlie Keevers and Jonathan Sellers. Two beautiful boys who’s lives were cut short by a serial killer and sexually violent predator. Valerie helped find justice for these two boys and their families. I ask you for your vote for Valerie Summers for judge today! Thank you 🙏🏽
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I wish I could tell you what it was like to produce re-enactments. One of the most compelling and heart wrenching segments I ever produced was the murder reenactment of Charlie Keevers and Jonathan Sellers. I was able to recruit two young actors to play the boys. I’ll never forget asking photographer David Defrenchi to go in in the police helicopter to get the final shot. I asked these two young boys to lie still in the blowing reeds as the helicopter did a low hover and then rose above the actual location of the real crime scene. It was surreal. I remember thanking the boys and being moved by the filming because just yards away two rusty crosses stood marking the actual location of their murders in San Diego’s South Bay. In fact I included this fact in my script. This story went national. I include part of this story below as it was written in the year 2000. Which reminds me I have been at this producing thing for a long time. i became friends with both mothers over these years and in fact was present when the suspect was finally sentenced in a downtown courthouse. He recently died of covid while serving his sentence on California’s death row.
I will forever be grateful to both moms and for the lead Detective Sgt Holmes for believing in me and trusting me with their story. I am also grateful for Alberto Pando , Fox 6 news director and his entire team for all they did to make this happen. Al was the first person in news to really see my potential as a producer and on air host…
We did some good work back then and I miss them all…Rest in Heaven Charlie and Jonathan 🎥🎬🙏🏽♥️⚖️
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Fox’s most provocative new “news” segment, San Diego’s Most Wanted, runs on Saturday evenings. The program follows the popular Fox show America’s Most Wanted. An offspring to the network program, San Diego’s Most Wanted publicizes an unsolved crime or an elusive fugitive by reenacting and videotaping the crime, usually in black-and-white film, and showing it in letterbox format. The production value recasts the “look” from the typical news style of complementary colors and galloping graphics and a crime scene with a body already covered. News is seldom about the crime itself (and most stations will not show any murder or su***de, whether live or on tape). Colorless reenactments have the semblance of “reality” on a low budget or, at least, the kind of “reality” that we think of as un-filled-in.
Deputy Sheriff Pete Carrillo oversees San Diego’s Most Wanted. Though paid by the Sheriff’s department, Carrillo works for the nonprofit Crime Stoppers, which has since 1984 been producing 30- and 60-second public-service announcement videos about unsolved crimes. Video production has blossomed in recent years parallel to more local news coverage. In planning the new series, Carrillo says Crime Stoppers first contacted Channel 8; the station wanted an exclusive. The Crime Stoppers’ board, however, wanted the broadest coverage possible. No deal. Next they approached Fox 6 news director Al Pando, recognizing the value of America’s Most Wanted as a lead-in. The deputy sheriff sings Pando’s praises: “He opened up his door and said, ‘What do you need?’ We wanted a photojournalist to shoot the videos and he agreed. He said, ‘You can have two minutes of the news every Saturday night.’ ” Carrillo calls his agreement with Fox “unprecedented” because of Fox’s generosity to “distribute copies of the tape to other TV stations in town, and the other stations are running them.” Carrillo has, “to put it mildly, been inundated with calls from victims, families, detectives, requesting their cases be profiled. It’s a positive yet overwhelming thing for me and my partner.” Since the debut of San Diego’s Most Wanted in February, Crime Stoppers has garnered national attention for reenacting the Stephanie Crowe murder case. After another show, two fugitives they profiled “turned themselves in as a result of seeing themselves” on TV. “This program [on Fox] has breathed new life” into Crime Stoppers, Carrillo says.
In mid-June Fox 6 uplinks with a morning show from Court TV to discuss a brutal San Diego murder. Two boys, Jonathan Sellers and Charlie Keever, were molested and killed seven years ago in an Otay Mesa riverbed. Still unsolved, and still the boys’ shaken yet relentless mothers, Milena Sellers and Maria Keever, seek venues to proclaim their search for the killer. Today on the studio set with Carrillo is another chance at publicity.
In the control booth I watch the surreal display of how live television moves from the comic to the somber. The mothers endure technicians crawling over them with mike cords, telling them which camera to look into, then changing their minds and shifting to another camera, asking the women if they’re OK (who say they are, then sigh volubly), joking with Carrillo who says gee, he almost feels like a big-time anchor, and everyone keeps it light because they await the end of Court TV’s first 10:00 to 10:20 segment about (get this) a stripper (got to be 55) who’s complaining to a bemused anchor about a judge who, because of her overt nudity (they flash a few clips of pasties flying), shut her public access program down.
A large black woman in a bright purple suit, Milena Sellers solemnly reviews the facts, then Maria Keever, short and hand-wringing, in limited English, says, “It is like a nightmare. I don’t rest every day. Just from the finding of who killed my son. I wish this program would help. If anybody knows anything about it, to please call Crime Stoppers.” The program, presided over by Jane Wallace, is part provocation, part plea. Looking first to provoke, she asks Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular TV at Syracuse University who is on the screen from another location, whether these newscast dramatizations sensationalize the crime. Yes, he’s worried that television might, to boost ratings, be producing such dramas only to court the public’s attention. During the Wallace-Thompson exchange, the murder reenactment keeps running. (It will during the 20-minute segment run a half a dozen times or more.) I see Milena Sellers in the studio when she’s off camera, looking down and downcast: There’s a studio monitor running the same program she is on. She can’t watch it, she tells Wallace: “I live it every day.” But she does want others to know what they’ve suffered. Any discussion of the case helps.
Carrillo speaks of how important it is for these reenactments to follow the loyal viewership of Fox’s America’s Most Wanted. “As far as I’ve heard, the ratings have been great. We’re keeping the audience, and that’s a win-win for Crime Stoppers and Fox.” (A remark that the techies in the control room cheer.) Thompson criticizes the “win-win,” but Carrillo defends it. He says higher ratings means “more eyes. The more people who see this reenactment, the more people who talk about it, the more potential that someone will call. I’m not concerned about the money a station makes, but I’m concerned about helping these moms find closure.” The mothers repeat the importance of publicity, costs be damned. In 1997 they helped pay for a billboard with their sons’ faces on it a half-mile from where their boys’ bodies were found. Through Crime Stoppers there’s a reward of $10,000. From here out, the dialogue is memorably reactive.
Jane Wallace: “Bob Thompson, do you worry that this could go a step further? This is done relatively low-key. In today’s media marketplace, the more entertaining, the more eyes you get on this? Do you worry about selling crime-as-entertainment to an extreme?”
Thompson: “I do. You come up with an idea and it’s done for a noble purpose. The film is using melodramatic techniques that make us a little uncomfortable, the Clapton song in the background. But you know, Sesame Street used Madison Avenue commercial techniques to get [kids] to learn how to read and the alphabet. So far this is being done for a good and noble cause. I look at this, though, and if I think like a television executive, all kinds of not-so-noble things come in to my mind.”
Wallace: “I’m concerned about watching two actors die in what looks like a news format. I must say I find it hard to watch.”
Thompson: “You’re right. This is designed almost like we’d see a Stephen King film designed. You can’t quite see the face, the music, and all the rest of it. We’re walking a very fine line here, and it doesn’t mean we should quit doing these kinds of things. But we’ve got to be very, very careful how it is we do it and where the line between journalism, entertainment, and law enforcement blur and come together and how we are unable to negotiate the calculus of that.”
Carrillo: “I want to make a comment about television in general. I think people are desensitized to crime. You read it in the paper, you see it on the news. We want to forget about it real easily. My purpose in helping to produce this with the Fox people here is, I wanted to take the viewer to that day, to what happened, to make them feel the pain, the fright, just how horrible it was. I think we accomplished that. Because we get desensitized. When something happens like this, we see a quick burp on the news and two days later something else happens and we forget. It’s not done to overdramatize. What we did this for was to take people there to feel [it] — you know, we lose feeling for people. This is real.”
Wallace: “You’re right. I understand that.”
I ask Paul Levikov, who’s been watching this program with me, about blurring the line between crime and entertainment. He says the reenactment is not “very entertaining. It is emotional. It does provoke emotion. I’ve been doing this so long that I feel hardened for most things. When I saw that [video] — and now I’ve got a three-and-a-half-year-old kid — I got all choked up. It takes a lot to choke me up. It’s heart-wrenching. I agree with Pete. Whatever it takes to get these guys is worth it. We don’t do it because we’re trying to make money off it. We do it as a public service. The bottom line is, we’re here to inform the public. I can go home and look at myself in the mirror every night and think hopefully I’ve done a service to our viewers and not just entertained them. There’s that element [of drama or entertainment] to it, but that’s not what it’s really about.”
Carrillo believes the most powerful way to get an audience to recall the crime and its victims is for the victims themselves to be remembered by their families. In a reenactment of an Escondido homicide, aired in July, Carrillo cites an interview with a mother in Spanish as “very emotional; you don’t have to understand the language” to be touched by her pain. “It’s not just another fake crime on TV,” he says. As for profiling fugitives and reenacting crimes, Carrillo would “love to see it run as a half-hour show, maybe once a month.” Using television to extend the arm of the law is inevitable: “For many years, media and law enforcement have been at odds. ‘Get that camera out of my face.’ ‘What can we expose that the police shouldn’t be doing.’ But now with Crime Stoppers, we’re working together. That’s why I have to commend Fox for sharing the tapes with other stations, which is unheard of.” He’s right; journalists and stations seldom share information. They fight over it like puppies on a teat.
