Thieves slipped watch off Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler's arm, police say

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Thieves slipped watch off Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler's arm, police say

2024-10-09 04:45 Last Updated At：04:51

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thieves surrounded Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Walker Buehler last month outside a horse racing track in a Los Angeles suburb and slipped an expensive watch off his arm as he jostled through the crowd, police said Tuesday. It came weeks after another professional athlete in California was the victim of a brazen mugging.

Buehler was not threatened during the theft Sept. 28 at the Santa Anita Park horse racing track in Arcadia, police there said. They are investigating two similar episodes the same day that officials say were by organized groups who steal high-end watches in large crowds during events.

Buehler was at the track that day with his wife, McKenzie, and his teammate, starting pitcher Jack Flaherty, to attend the inaugural California Crown races. Buehler, a Lexington, Kentucky, native, is a major fan of the sport.

While walking from the paddock to his seat, Buehler was “unknowingly the victim of a snatch and grab robbery of his watch," his agency, Excel Sports Management, said in a statement.

“We are grateful Walker and McKenzie were not harmed and Walker is focused on the playoffs,” the agency said.

The Dodgers declined to comment and referred media to the Arcadia police.

In one of the three episodes of stolen watches being investigated that day, police arrested a 24-year-old man from Los Angeles. Police said the value of the watches stolen was $100,000 for one and $250,000 for the other. They did not say which one was Buehler's.

The theft came days after Buehler's last regular-season game and a week before the Dodgers began the National League Divisional Series against the San Diego Padres on Saturday. Buehler is slated to start Game 3 of the series against the Padres on Tuesday night in San Diego.

On Aug. 31, San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall was walking alone to his car after shopping at luxury stores in San Francisco's Union Square when the NFL player was robbed at gunpoint by a teenager who took his Rolex watch and other expensive jewelry, prosecutors said.

A struggle ensued, and gunfire from the teen struck both Pearsall and the suspect, who was shot in the arm. Pearsall was shot through the chest at close range, officials said. His mother, Erin Pearsall, posted on social media that the bullet went through the right side of her son’s chest and out his back without striking vital organs. He was released from the hospital a day later.

Smash-and-grab thefts have been captured on videos in cities from Los Angeles to San Francisco and gone viral, feeding widespread concern about crime in the state. Voters will decide on a ballot measure that would roll back parts of a 2014 law that made many nonviolent thefts misdemeanors instead of felonies.

Associated Press reporter Beth Harris contributed to this report.

Harris gets personal in media blitz, balks at breaking with Biden on policy

2024-10-09 04:43 Last Updated At：04:50

NEW YORK (AP) — Kamala Harris wanted to help voters get to know her better with a cascade of media appearances on Tuesday, but the most lasting impression might have been her unwillingness to break with Joe Biden.

Asked on ABC’s “The View” how she would be different from the president she’s served under for four years, Harris said “we’re obviously two different people” and “I will bring those sensibilities to how I lead.”

However, she was not able to identify a decision where she would have gone another way. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said.

The exchange encapsulated Harris’ struggle to portray herself as a candidate who can deliver the change voters crave while also remaining loyal to the current administration. Some Harris aides privately winced as gleeful Republicans swiftly circulated clips of her response and Donald Trump swiped at her in a social media post, calling it “her dumbest answer so far.”

It wasn’t until later in the show that Harris named something that she would do differently than Biden — she would put a Republican in her Cabinet.

The Democratic nominee said she would welcome contributions from the other party “because I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”

The interview was a reminder that friendly media venues — the women of “The View” were nearly rapturous in their embrace of Harris — can be as treacherous for politicians to navigate as hardball journalistic interrogations. And it came at a delicate moment for Harris, whose motorcade whisked her from studio to studio in New York on Tuesday.

Even though her abbreviated and unexpected campaign for the presidency is more than half over, Harris is still racing to introduce herself to voters who haven’t made up their minds about her or whether to cast ballots in this year’s election. After “The View,” she spoke to radio host Howard Stern and planned to tape a show with late-night comedian Stephen Colbert. The trio of appearances came after Harris granted interviews to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which aired Monday night, and Alex Cooper’s podcast “Call Her Daddy,” which was released Sunday.

It's a kaleidoscopic media blitz intended to reach key demographics, from men who are longtime fans of Stern to young women who follow Cooper's frank conversations about sex and relationships.

Harris' decision to open up is a sharp shift after largely avoiding interviews since replacing Biden at the top of the ticket, and it’s an acknowledgment that she needs to do more to defeat Trump.

Getting personal has never been easy for Harris, a lawyer by training whose first job in public life was making opening and closing arguments as a courtroom prosecutor.

“It feels immodest to me to talk about myself,” Harris said to Stern. “A friend of mine actually said, ‘look, this is not a time to worry about modesty, because obviously you gotta let people know who you are.’”

By the time she was finished with the interview, Harris had, by her standards, bared her soul. Some examples:

She ate a family sized bag of Doritos after Trump beat Hillary Clinton. She works out on an elliptical every day. Her first job was cleaning test tubes at her mother’s laboratory, and she got fired. Her favorite Formula One driver is Lewis Hamilton. She went to see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and she recommends going with a “clear head,” meaning not high on drugs, because “there’s a lot of visual stimulation.”

Harris also said “I literally lose sleep” over the election because “the stakes are so high.”

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Harris has to energize people who have tuned out politics because they believe “all the politicians are the same, they all say the same thing, they don’t know anything about my life, I can’t relate to them at all."

“They want to like and trust you," she said.

Jennifer Harris, the former White House senior director of international economics, said Harris has a steeper hill to climb because of the way she became the Democratic nominee.

“We did not have a good long primary to meet Kamala Harris in the way most voters are accustomed to,” she said. Harris has to find a way to demonstrate the instincts and principles that ”will be guiding any number of hundreds of specific policy questions that will come up in the course of the presidency.”

Harris used her Tuesday appearance on “The View” to discuss her proposal to have Medicare cover in-home care for the elderly, helping to relieve the burden faced by an increasing number of families.

“There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle," she said. "They’re taking care of their kids and taking care of their aging parents.”

She spoke about taking care of her own mother when she was dying of cancer, including cooking for her and picking out soft clothing that wouldn't irritate her. And she criticized Trump as selfish and uninterested in helping Americans. If you watch his grievance-filled rallies, she said, “he does not talk about what your parents need, what your children need.”

Instead, Harris said, “he talks about his needs.”

It was a moment that Harris' campaign would much rather get noticed than her answer about Biden. They believe that a small yet pivotal numbers of undecided voters want to know more about Harris before making up their minds, and that the more those voters see Harris, the more they like her.

Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden said defining Harris in voters' eyes is the central challenge of the campaign.

“This race is actually pretty simple in the sense that the next few weeks are about who’s going to fill in the blanks on who Harris is,” he said.

Harris' name recognition grew when she became vice president, but 1 out of 10 people still said they didn't know enough about her to have an opinion, according to AP-NORC polling. Recent shifts in her favorability numbers suggest that views on Harris may still be somewhat malleable.

Other polls have similar results. One-quarter of likely voters said they still feel like they need to learn more about Harris, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after her debate against Trump, while about three-quarters say they pretty much already know what they need to know about her.

Near the end of Harris' interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Cooper confronted the vice president with one of the central questions of this campaign.

So many people, Cooper said, are “frustrated and just exhausted with politics in general," so "why should we trust you?”

Harris answered by saying “you can look at my career to know what I care about.”

“I care about making sure that people are entitled to and receive the freedoms that they are due," she said. "I care about lifting people up and making sure that you are protected from harm.”

Megerian reported from Washington. AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.