The kidnap and murder of 17 year old Lily Burk, daughter and only child of Southwestern University School of Law Adjunct Professor, Deborah Drooz, on the afternoon of July 26th casts a long shadow.  Lily was picking up some papers for her mother at the landmark Bullocks-Wilshire campus in Los Angeles.  When Lily approached her car, she was kidnapped by 50 year old parolee, Charlie Samuel.  Samuel, just hours before, received a pass to leave a drug rehabilitation facility.  Within minutes, surveillance cameras show him driving Lily’s Volvo away from the campus with her as a passenger.  The aim of this kidnapping was presumably to secure cash from an ATM. Footage taken at 3:35 p.m., about 30 minutes after she was abducted, shows Lily walking with Samuel up to a Union Bank on Second and San Pedro streets in Little Tokyo, where Lily tried, but failed, to extract money from an ATM using a credit card.  Deeply troubling to police and many others is the fact that the bank video shows people walking past them, and even shows a customer using the ATM as they both walk away.  Yet, through all this, Lily does not call out to them for Read More …

On August 1, USC Sociologist Karen Sternheimer was interviewed on National Public Radio regarding celebrity doctors and the possible peril they pose to those they are entrusted to heal. In the cases of Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, Hippocrates himself might cringe at what he would see as a breach of the sacred, ethics-based oath that bears his name which doctors are sworn to uphold. Were their physicians so seduced by the lure of celebrity they stroked their patients’ egos in plying them with an overabundance of pharmaceuticals? A fine line is drawn between patient care and endeavoring to remain in the celebrity’s employ and “inner circle”, as well as using that status to build cache in the community and their medical practices. When sizeable amounts of money and reputations are at stake, can these doctors risk alienating  patients by not catering to their every whim?  MJ and ANS are neither the first, nor the last celebrity patients of this questionable pursuit of wellness.  It was announced MJ’s mother is considering filing a wrongful death suit against Conrad Murray who is already the focus of a manslaughter investigation.  This litigation coupled with ANS’s physicians, who are already on the Read More …