Didn&#39;t get out for St. Paddy&#39;s Day - glad you made it to the parade, Ray.  I was so content being off, I just stayed home all day.  Don&#39;t even think I put on any green and no green beer, either - I did have a couple of very minty mojitos, however.<br /><br />Am working today...and it&#39;s d#@* cold here in the basement which is where our CASARC offices are located - in one of the antique buildings on the San Francisco General campus.  I&#39;m bundled up in a shawl and a blanket.  We&#39;re not doing any scheduled interviews today because our video equipment ( state of the art ) turned out to be a lemon and is being replaced.<br /><br />Sometimes this work is so frustrating.  This made yesterday&#39;s paper - this was the case I was in on for ten hours on Saturday.<br /><br /><br />Juvenile alert: <br /><br />The search is on for an armed 17-year-old who allegedly raped and shot a teenage girl in San Francisco just days after juvenile authorities let him walk away after his guilty plea to stalking and assaulting an ex-girlfriend.<br /><br />The fugitive juvenile, whose name has not been disclosed because of his age, had struck a plea deal in late February under which he was supposed to be returned to the custody of his grandmother in Yolo County and kept under the watchful eye of probation officials there. But somewhere he fell through the cracks.<br /><br />Officers down at the San Francisco Hall of Justice are furious - not just that a dangerous kid went unmonitored, but that police brass tried to keep a lid on the incident and didn&#39;t tell the public that a potential menace was on the loose.<br /><br />&quot;We have every right to talk about this kid - he&#39;s a dangerous entity,&quot; said one department higher-up, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity surrounding the case.<br /><br />But police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens said other law enforcement agencies and people who know the suspect had been alerted and that putting out the information to the public risks &quot;spooking the guy.&quot;<br />What we know is the teen was arrested and charged with attempted murder after he allegedly choked and beat up a former girlfriend in San Francisco - then left threatening messages on her cell phone - sometime around the start of the year.<br /><br />In February, sources tell us, he pleaded guilty in juvenile court to felony assault. A judge ordered him placed on probation in the custody of his grandmother. The judge also ordered him to stay away from San Francisco.<br />Juvenile probation officials tell us the kid was to report to officials in Yolo County, though there is some question whether the paperwork and handoff of the case were ever completed.<br /><br />&quot;Our expectation was that the matter would be transferred to another county,&quot; said Bill Sifferman, San Francisco&#39;s juvenile probation chief. He added that he was &quot;comfortable&quot; with the way his department had behaved in the matter.<br /><br />Nonetheless, somewhere the ball was dropped. It&#39;s unclear where - probation officials in Yolo County did not return our phone calls Friday.<br /><br />On March 8, the 17-year-old showed up at a home in the Mission District, where he got into a fight with a teenage girl around 3:30 a.m. over her iPod, police say. The youth allegedly raped the girl, then shot her in the leg when she tried to escape, authorities tell us.<br /><br />She was rushed to the hospital for surgery and now is in hiding, and her fugitive assailant hasn&#39;t been seen since.<br /><br />Police question why the 17-year-old wasn&#39;t ordered to wear a monitoring bracelet when he was released after his guilty plea, as is typically done for violent offenders. Sifferman says such tracking devices aren&#39;t used for youths transferred outside San Francisco.<br /><br />Anyway, he said, the department&#39;s &#036;100,000 budget for the program had already been burned up halfway into the fiscal year - so there were no bracelets available.<br /><br /><br /><br />Of course, they don&#39;t have the information correctly in terms of when she was shot...it all happened on March 15th, in the early AM.  But, either way, it sounds like the assailant shouldn&#39;t have been on the streets in the first place.  Sad to think that, at 17, he&#39;s well on his way to a life of crime&#33;&#33;&#33;<br /><br />Sometimes I think I will relish doing a normal job where you aren&#39;t waiting for the pager to go off because some horrible thing has been done to someone by another human being.  Most of the folks with whom I deal can&#39;t even relate to the nicer things in life.  I guess, in one respect, it does make me appreciate so much what I have.<br /><br />Thanks, crazies, for making my stops here a bright spot for me&#33;<br /><br />