When good-natured World War II veteran Donald Coffill saw the Jan. 13 San Diego Union-Tribune article with his name in it, he said he thought it was hilarious. It said the 74-year-old Ocean Beach man had been arrested for drunken driving after taking California Highway Patrol officers on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash near Jacumba. Coffill said he hasn’t been to Jacumba in about 10 years.
“People are going to think you’ve finally snapped your twig,” daughter Joyce Fischbeck recalls telling her widowed father.
There’s no question that the article, based on information from the CHP, was wrong. The article said the CHP identified Coffill as the man arrested for drunken driving, evasion and assault. The assault charge was added because the man arrested struck an officer.
It turns out that while CHP officers were involved in a chase that lasted more than an hour and that reached speeds of 100 miles per hour, Coffill, a Navy vet and retired airplane mechanic who is called “Bumpa” by his grandchildren, was at his Ocean Beach home of 45 years, snoozing on the couch.
As the CHP later verified, the driver who had eight undocumented immigrants with him, was 24 years old. His only connection with Coffill was that he was driving the 1991 Ford Crown Victoria the older man donated to charity — sans transmission — in October. The vehicle was later sold at auction.
Coffill, who at 15 lied about his age to get into the Navy and is now a member of VFW Post 1392, said an 81-year-old friend was the first to tell him about the newspaper article. Fischbeck said the phone started ringing at 6:30 a.m. that Sunday.
Coffill, an Ocean Beach resident for 52 years, has clipped out the correction that appeared in the Union-Tribune Jan. 16 and plans to take it and the earlier article with him when he leaves tonight for a visit with his sister in Orlando. He said he’s going to show her “how much of a tiger” her brother can be.
How did Coffill’s name get into the newspaper? It came from the CHP, the reporter and his editor said. The office providing the information was in El Cajon, about 50 miles from where the chase took place.
Sgt. Patrick Symonds explained that once an officer involved in a chase gets the vehicle license number, it is radioed to others so it can be determined whether the car is stolen. If so, “that changes the way we’re going to do business,” Symonds said.
Symonds said Coffill’s name came up in a check of records. When he learned the driver was believed to be in his seventies, one of the officers involved in the chase commented he was driving pretty well for a man his age, said Symonds. Somehow, a CHP spokeswoman gave the incorrect information about Coffill to a reporter who even called back to get the suspect’s hometown.
On the night of the chase, the CHP, thinking the driver might be headed for home, called and talked with Coffill’s granddaughter. She told the caller Coffill was home and his 1994 Buick Century — the car he now drives — was in the driveway. She didn’t think anything of it until the next day, Fischbeck said.
Daughter Paula Coffill, who called the Union-Tribune about the mistake, says her father “doesn’t have any reason to be upset. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
A Jan. 14 front-page article about a Kumeyaay elder who uses herbs and seeds in the promotion of healing brought calls and e-mails from readers who said the story did not explain enough about the danger present in castor bean plant seeds pictured on the front page.
“Whoa! Careful there,” wrote biologist Douglas A. Lappi about the caption that said seeds from the castor-oil plant “can be turned into a balm for healing.”
While there is no question that there are pharmaceutical uses as indicated in the caption, Lappi wrote that the seeds “contain a high level of the toxin ricin, which is one of the deadliest molecules known.”
A. Stephen Dahms, director of the San Diego State University Center for Bio/Pharmaceutical and Biodevice Development, said there has been recent concern about the use of ricin in bioterrorism.
“Ricin is relatively easily extracted from the seed cake, is relatively robust and when freeze-dried, forms a powder that disperses readily,” he wrote in an e-mail. It is considered to be a bioterrorism threat via both ingestion and inhalation, he said.
Castor bean oil has been used “globally by many cultures for many human conditions,” Dahms said. The Kumeyaay elder probably “uses a technique long ago devised by her predecessors which heat-inactivates ricin or segregates the long-known beneficial castor (bean) oily fraction from the seed cake and water-soluble ricin-containing fraction.”
Dahms said although ricin can be misused “it is also a valuable research and potential therapeutic tool” and is being investigated for use in the treatment of cancers.
