The Home Improvement Licensing Division: Fill & Download for Free

Call the Home Improvement Licensing division of the State Department of Consumer Protection:Call a lawyer to sue the son of a bitch;Call the police if you believe fraud was involved:THIS COMMUNICATION CREATES NO ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE OR RELATIONSHIP BUT IS FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY!!!!!!!!!!Shalom aleichem.

In my opinion, no. However, the standards could be improved.The question falls to the states and the needs will differ city to rural, etc. Outside of densely populated older cities with lots of no drivers, the public transit in the US is not great. Dallas has fought to build the mass transit in our part of the state for decades, and people still need to drive in some areas.I was living in Germany at age 16 in a military family, so driver's education and a license were not possible. Upon returning to the US for my last two years of high school the school was ridiculously unacommodating for being right outside a huge military base with lots of families coming in and out all of the time. I never got driver's education! It was a hardship not being able to drive when there was no public transportation. I had lots of activities including academic contests, music rehearsals and competitions, sports, etc.Instead of driving about three very safe miles from home to school, I was stuck catching rides from other students or my parents. It caused me to be behind the curve as a new driver only getting my license after I graduated! Therefore, I drove away to a university alone having had my license for less than three months. My parents were both trained, professional drivers for many years, and they were diligent about preparing me. Yet, I managed to have a very minor accident during my freshman year that with hindsight I know was due to my lack of experience in judging distances in low light.I worked for Texas DPS as an attorney, and when I transferred to Denton my office was right behind the driver's license public area sharing space with a driver's license division trooper and a civilian driving examiner. Oh man was that an eye opener. I was in civilian clothing with my back to people brought back there by the trooper.I heard parents telling their teens to forge numerous hours into their driving journals that was part of the requirements under the law for “parent taught" drivers. If you want to know why we have so many terrible drivers doing unsafe things in the US, it's not merely the age for the new drivers. Some are brilliant driver's at age sixteen. It is the terrible drivers “teaching" their teens to be the next generation of terrible drivers. The ones who I caught faking the minimum driving time got to go home and try later. I told the trooper about the false entries, and she sent them home. No road test for liars.

The 1986 Murder of Sherri RasmussenOn February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in California. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle.The LAPD initially considered the case a botched burglary, and were unable to identify a suspect but Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer, Stephanie Lazarus, who maintained a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect.Sherri RasmussenJohn RuettenStephanie LazarusWhile an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego, occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California. Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team. Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him naked while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around." They had sex for the first time after he graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis and she applied to the city's police academy, becoming a uniformed officer with the LAPD. In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend.Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduate of Loma Linda University who was on a fast career track in critical care nursing. She entered college at 16, and by her late 20s was the director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, giving presentations and teaching classes for fellow nurses.At one point, Lazarus threw Ruetten a surprise party on his 25th birthday, unaware that he had been dating other women or that he had developed a serious relationship with Rasmussen.When she learned he was seriously involved with Rasmussen, Lazarus was despondent. "I'm truly in love with John and the past year has really torn me up," Lazarus wrote to Ruetten's mother in August 1985. "I wish it didn't end the way it did, and I don't think I'll ever understand his decision." In her own journal, she wrote, "I really don't feel like working. I found out that John is getting married."Depressed, Lazarus visited Ruetten at his condo, and the two had sex "to give her closure," Ruetten testified years later, for what he says was the only time before Rasmussen's death. Later that night, Lazarus awoke a fellow officer she roomed with to commiserate.During their engagement, Lazarus brought her skis to the apartment Ruetten shared with Rasmussen and asked him to wax them, and despite Rasmussen's objections, he complied. Rasmussen felt this was a little strange, since Lazarus was dressed in flattering workout clothes, and after Lazarus left, his fiancée asked if their relationship was truly over. Ruetten convinced her the two were just friends. A few days later Lazarus returned to pick up the waxed skis, in uniform and armed, after Ruetten had already left for work.Rasmussen was unnerved by these visits and pleaded with Ruetten to tell Lazarus to stop coming by. Ruetten only said there was nothing to their relationship and that she should ignore Lazarus.According to Nels Rasmussen, Sherri's father, Lazarus later visited Rasmussen at her office to tell her that things were not over between her and Ruetten and told Rasmussen, "If I can't have John, no one else will." Shortly before her death, Rasmussen again confided to her father her fear that Lazarus was stalking her on the street. Ruetten and Rasmussen were married in November 1985.On the fateful morning, Ruetten left the couple's condominium to go to work. Rasmussen was scheduled to give a motivational speech at work that day, a managerial tactic she did not feel was effective. To avoid it, she told Ruetten she might call in sick, using a back injury she had incurred while doing aerobics the day before as an excuse.At 9:45 a.m., a neighbor noticed that the Ruettens' garage door was open, with no car visible. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Ruetten made the first of several unanswered calls home over the course of the day. Rasmussen's sister also called without answer. At noon, two men, who the neighbor believed were gardeners in the compound, gave her and her husband a purse they found that turned out to be Rasmussen's. A maid cleaning a nearby unit said she heard something that sounded like two people fighting, and then something falling, at around 12:30 p.m.When Ruetten returned home in the evening, he found his garage door open and broken glass on the driveway. In addition, he discovered that the BMW he bought for Rasmussen as an engagement gift was missing. Because of Rasmussen's morning plans, he found it strange that she would have later gone out without letting him know. The house's answering machine had not been activated, despite both of them usually activating it when leaving the house unoccupied.Inside, Ruetten found Rasmussen dead on the living room floor, shot three times. There were signs of a struggle, such as a porcelain vase that had apparently been broken over Rasmussen's head prior to the shooting, a bloody handprint next to the burglar alarm's panic button, and a toppled credenza. It appeared that someone at least attempted to bind Rasmussen at one point. She had defensive wounds and a bruise on her face that appeared to have been inflicted by the muzzle of a gun. The gun had been fired through a quilted blanket, apparently to muffle the sound. The investigating criminalist also observed a bite mark on Rasmussen's arm, and took a swab from it.LAPD detectives investigating the case quickly concluded that Rasmussen had been surprised and killed by a burglar. Rasmussen's attire (a bathrobe, nightgown, and underwear) suggested she was not expecting visitors. Although a maid in a neighboring unit reported hearing screaming and fighting earlier in the day, she did not recall hearing gunshots. She thought the whole event had been a domestic dispute and did not call police. It appeared that the perpetrator had been in the process of taking electronic equipment when Rasmussen came upon them, and as a result, jewelry had been left behind and the vehicle taken as a getaway. The abandoned BMW was recovered a week later; it yielded no new evidence. The only other thing that appeared to have been taken from the home was the couple's marriage license.Lead detective Lyle Mayer did consider other possibilities. He quickly ruled out the grieving Ruetten as a suspect. Ruetten quit his job and moved away from Los Angeles shortly after the murder. Nels Rasmussen and his wife, Loretta, told Mayer about Lazarus' harassment, and that he made a note of it. Ruetten later told police that he and Rasmussen never discussed Lazarus.Regardless, the police remained focused on the possibility of burglary, especially in light of one reported later in the same area, in which one of the two reported suspects had been carrying a gun, possibly a .38 caliber like the one that had fired the three bullets into Rasmussen that were later identified by experts as Federal .38J Plus-P. Mayer's partner, Steve Hooks, found the bite mark unusual, as bites during struggles are much more commonly inflicted by women, while the majority of burglars are men. However, because men have bitten opponents during fights as well, the burglary theory stood.The suspected burglars to whom detectives ascribed the crime remained at large, despite a follow-up newspaper story eight months later and a reward offered by the Rasmussen family. The LAPD, preoccupied with the violence resulting from gang wars and the crack epidemic plaguing the city at the time, was unable to devote much more attention to the case. Detectives at the Van Nuys office were, the Rasmussens say, often unhelpful when the family called, hanging up or putting them on hold. A year after the murder, the frustrated family reiterated their offer at a press conference and called for more action. Nels wrote to Daryl Gates, then chief of the LAPD, about the possibility that Lazarus might have been involved. Detectives told him he "watch[ed] too much television." He continued to publicize the reward, and later worked with the short-lived television series Murder One on a segment inspired by the case.Nels in particular was unconvinced that Sherri, who had been 6ft tall, had a large frame, and was in good physical shape, had been the victim of a botched burglary. It would have been a struggle for anyone to subdue her in close quarters, and Mayer had told him at one point that the events may have lasted an hour and a half, a long time for burglars primarily after items of value in the home. Further, whoever shot his daughter had fired directly into her chest at close range and taken the trouble to muffle the shot with the quilt, suggesting that the killing was deliberate and not the accidental byproduct of a struggle.Mayer eventually retired, and the new detective assigned to the case told Nels that he was unable to follow up on Mayer's notes and did not think that any new leads would emerge. Nels was rebuffed again in 1993 when he offered to pay for DNA testing on the evidence from the murder, now that the technology was available; he was told that the police had to have a suspect in order to proceed with testing. Lazarus briefly reunited with Ruetten in 1989; Mayer's notes show that Ruetten had called him and asked if he was absolutely sure there was no evidence linking Lazarus with his late wife's death.In the meantime, Lazarus continued working with the LAPD; she went on to start her own private investigation firm, Unique Investigations. In 1987, she earned medals, including one gold, at the World Police and Fire Games in San Diego. In 1993, after stints at the department's Drug Abuse Resistance Education and internal affairs divisions, she became a detective. Three years later, she married a fellow officer and adopted a daughter with him; at work, she became an instructor at the police academy. Ruetten eventually remarried as well; he did not pressure the police as his former father-in-law had.In the late 1990s, after DNA testing had become more prominent, the LAPD formed a new unit that looked through the forensic evidence collected from the department's cold case files to determine whether any had the potential for new leads through DNA testing. Among the evidence seen as likely to do so was that collected from the Rasmussen residence. However, it was not until 2004 that another criminalist, Jennifer Francis, was able to analyze it. Some of the evidence from the Rasmussen case, including that which might have contained the suspect's DNA, was missing, having been collected in 1993 by another detective.Francis did not find any matches in the Combined DNA Index System database, but did find that the saliva in it had come from a female, undermining the initial detectives' burglary theory. Several years later, Francis claimed that, unusually, she had access to not just the sample but the entire case file, which had been given to her to help her decide which other samples to analyze. Upon discovering that the biter and likely perpetrator was female, she reviewed it and came across a report of a "third-party female" who had allegedly harassed the victim at her job and residence before the murder.Francis asked the detective supervising her if this woman had been investigated, to which he supposedly responded with, "Oh, you mean the LAPD detective." He elaborated that the woman, a former girlfriend of the victim's husband, was in fact a current LAPD detective but "she's not a part of this." He insisted that the case was simply a burglary as the department had long concluded. No other detective would pursue the case, and the evidence went back into the files.By 2009, crime in Los Angeles had declined enough from its earlier levels that detectives began looking into cold cases to increase their clearance rates. In Van Nuys, Jim Nuttall and Pete Barba reviewed the Rasmussen file and found it interesting enough to be worth pursuing. Because the DNA test pointed to a female suspect, they decided the burglary theory was invalid and they would have to start from the beginning.Nuttall and Barba looked at the case as a murder, with the burglary staged to throw the police off the trail. Many aspects of the crime were improbable for a break-in, especially one committed in daylight: Rasmussen's jewelry box, an inviting target for a burglar, was in plain view atop her dresser and had not been touched. The condo was in the middle of a gated complex, surrounded by other units from which burglars could have expected to be easily observed. The front door had an alarm warning, and had not been forced open, as it might have been if the putative burglars had not expected anyone to be at home.Inside, a key aspect of the crime scene was also inconsistent with the burglary theory. At the top of the stairs was a stack of stereo equipment atop a VCR. If, as the evidence suggested, the struggle between Rasmussen and her attacker had begun upstairs and then continued downstairs, that stack would likely have been knocked downstairs and scattered as well. It made more sense to assume that it had been stacked afterwards, when an actual burglar would have fled the scene immediately after the shooting.The forensics reinforced this theory. On a record player atop the stack was a thumb-shaped bloodstain. It had no print, suggesting whoever left it was wearing gloves to avoid leaving identification. But the blood was Rasmussen's, suggesting the equipment had been stacked after the struggle and shooting. It had been left behind, the detectives realized, to make the crime look like something other than what it really was.From the four bound volumes of the case file they developed a list of five female suspects. Nuttall was taken aback when Ruetten told him over the phone that Lazarus was a police officer. By then, Lazarus had been promoted to a higher level of detective and was working art theft cases as part of the Commercial Crimes Division.As one of the two detectives in the nation's only full-time unit devoted to that specialty, Lazarus had gained some local media attention when she and her partner had recovered a statue stolen from Carthay Circle. To better understand the field, she told a local newspaper, she had begun learning to paint. Off the job, Lazarus had been active in the Los Angeles Women Police Officers Association and organized childcare for families of officers. She also made chocolate-covered cherries and homemade soap for her neighbors in Simi Valley for Christmas.Since Lazarus was still with the department, Nuttall and Barba realized they would have to proceed carefully. Still, they ranked Lazarus as the least promising of the five suspects, since they read in the files that she and Ruetten had ended any relationship they had had over the summer before the murder.Nuttall and Barba's investigations soon eliminated all but one of the other women. The other, a former coworker of Rasmussen's who had had some disputes with her, was eliminated by a covertly collected DNA sample.With only Lazarus left, they kept their investigation a closely guarded secret; not only did her husband also work in Commercial Crimes Division as a detective, she may have had other friends who could have tipped her off. If she were the killer, she could have improved her defense; if she were not, then they could have unintentionally smeared a fellow officer who had had an unblemished service record over the course of her career, with no disciplinary investigations or civilian complaints. They only referred to her as "No.5", worked on the case after hours or behind closed doors, and developed cover stories to explain why they wanted to look at personnel records for one particular officer from 20 years ago.The detectives began looking into other aspects of Lazarus' life during the mid-1980s. Another detective recalled that at that time, most LAPD officers had preferred a .38 as their backup or off-duty carry gun; in fact they were required to only purchase weapons compatible with the Federal Plus-P ammunition that had been used in the murder. State and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed owned a Smith & Wesson Model 49 .38 at the time, and reported it stolen to Santa Monica police (but not to her own department's armorer) thirteen days after the murder. Since the location where Lazarus had reported it stolen from was near a popular pier, they assumed she had thrown the gun into the Pacific Ocean. Without the weapon, DNA would be the only definite way to connect the crime to Lazarus.Nuttall and Barba theorized from their own experience about how an LAPD officer would commit a murder. It would be better to do it on a day off, and departmental records showed that Lazarus had indeed been off the day Sherri Rasmussen was killed. An officer would know better than to use his or her duty gun, since it would have to be disposed of after the crime and the penalties for losing a duty gun or failing to prevent its theft were severe. Instead it made sense to use a backup gun like Lazarus' .38. Lastly, a working patrol officer would know how to do just enough to make the crime scene look like an interrupted burglary to satisfy an overworked detective.Nels told Nuttall about Lazarus' continued contact with his daughter, which had not been in the files, despite him mentioning it frequently during Mayer and Hook's interviews.Realizing that Lazarus was now their prime suspect, the detectives informed their superiors and arranged to discreetly collect a voluntarily discarded DNA sample from her, knowing they could do so without having to get a warrant, which would have let Lazarus know she was under investigation. While off-duty running errands, Lazarus discarded a cup from which she had been drinking, which other police retrieved. A sample was taken from it, and it matched the DNA from the bite mark on Sherri Rasmussen.Rob Bub, the homicide detective supervisor at Van Nuys, began letting his senior officers, all the way up to Chief William Bratton, know of the case along with senior prosecutors from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. It was transferred to the Robbery-Homicide Division, which handled many of the department's high-profile cases, including the art theft bureau where Lazarus herself worked.Her arrest was planned carefully.On the day of the arrest in June 2009, dozens of officers arose before dawn. After being briefed on a search warrant they were told would be executed outside the city, but with few details beyond that, they went to wait near Lazarus' home in Simi Valley and that city's Metrolink station, where Lazarus commuted to the city.A short time later, detectives from the RHD who had been selected for their lack of personal connection to Lazarus called her from the lockup at Parker Center, the department's headquarters. Bratton had ordered that location be used since Lazarus would have to surrender her gun in order to enter it, limiting the possibility she might resist violently when she was arrested (immediately following the interview, as was the plan) or realized that she was the prime suspect. The detectives, Greg Stearns and Dan Jaramillo, told her they had someone in custody who wanted to talk about an art theft.After Lazarus had checked in her gun and entered the interrogation room, they explained that this was really about some loose ends they were trying to tie up in the Rasmussen case, since her name had come up in the investigation. They claimed they wanted a private setting because, while Ruetten was an old boyfriend, Lazarus had long been married to someone else and they did not want her private life to become the subject of office gossip. Stearns and Jaramillo knew they would have to tread carefully since Lazarus herself was well aware of police interview techniques and her rights to silence and legal counsel, which she could invoke at any time.They rambled and digressed from the subject at times, sometimes discussing unrelated police business, but eventually came back to Rasmussen. Lazarus claimed to recall little due to the intervening years, but gradually revealed more and more knowledge, including oblique acknowledgements of her visits to the Ruetten condo and a specific encounter at Rasmussen's office, until she accused her colleagues of considering her a suspect. The detectives mentioned it was possible they had DNA evidence from the crime scene, and requested DNA samples from Lazarus. Lazarus declined and thereafter left the room.She was immediately arrested and charged with the murder.Once she had been arrested, the teams in Simi Valley began searching Lazarus' home and car. In her house they found her journal from the mid-1980s, with numerous mentions of her love for Ruetten and her despondence over his engagement to Rasmussen but no mentions of her gun having been stolen. Her computer showed that she had searched the Internet for Ruetten's name on several occasions during the late 1990s.As the investigating detectives had been, many LAPD officers were stunned at the idea that Lazarus might have murdered someone. Fellow detectives recalled her as vivacious and supportive, although some also recalled that her behavior when angry had led some to refer to her as "Spazarus" behind her back. A case she had been developing from her art-theft work, with elder abuse and real estate fraud aspects, had to be dropped since it was highly unlikely that it could be prosecuted successfully if the lead investigator herself were facing a murder charge.Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women.Source:Murder of Sherri Rasmussen - Wikipedia1985 murder in Los Angeles by jealous off-duty cop On February 24, 1986, the body of Sherri Rasmussen (born February 7, 1957 [1] ) was found in the apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, in Van Nuys , California , United States. She had been beaten and shot three times in a struggle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) initially considered the case a botched burglary , and were unable to identify a suspect. Rasmussen's father believed that LAPD officer Stephanie Lazarus, who maintained a relationship with Ruetten, was a prime suspect . Detectives who re-examined the cold case files in 2009 were eventually led to Lazarus, by then herself a detective. A DNA sample from a cup she had thrown away was matched to one from a bite on Rasmussen's body that had remained in the files. Lazarus was convicted of the murder in 2012 [2] and is serving a sentence of 27 years to life for first-degree murder at the California Institution for Women in Corona . [3] Lazarus appealed the conviction, claiming that the age of the case and the evidence denied her due process . She also alleged that the search warrant was improperly granted, her statements in an interview prior to her arrest were compelled, and that evidence supporting the original case theory should have been admitted at trial. [4] In 2015, the guilty verdict was upheld by the California Court of Appeal . [5] Some of the police files suggest that evidence that could have implicated Lazarus earlier in the investigation was later removed, perhaps by others in the LAPD. Rasmussen's parents unsuccessfully sued the department over this and other aspects of the investigation. [6] Jennifer Francis, the criminalist who found key evidence from the bite mark, unsuccessfully sued the City of Los Angeles , claiming she was pressured by police to favor certain suspects in this and other high-profile cases and was retaliated against when she brought this to the LAPD's attention . [7] Background [ edit ] While an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1978 to 1982, John Ruetten, a mechanical engineering major from San Diego , occasionally dated Stephanie Lazarus, a fellow Dykstra Hall resident and a political science major from Simi Valley, California . Both were avid athletes; Lazarus played on UCLA's junior varsity women's basketball team . Lazarus would steal Ruetten's clothes when he showered and take photographs of him naked while he slept. Ruetten never considered the relationship as anything more than "necking and fooling around." They had sex for the first time after he graduated, when he accepted a job with hard-drive manufacturer Micropolis [8] and she applied to the city's police academy and became a uniformed officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1983. [9] In court, he later testified that they had sex "twenty to thirty times" between 1981 and 1984, but that she was never his girlfriend. [10] Ruetten later met Sherri Rasmussen, a graduatehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sherri_Rasmussen#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThat%27s_the_evidence_that_will%2CStephanie_Lazarus_murdered_Sherri_Rasmussen.%26text%3DThe_trial_began_in_early%2CSherri_Rasmussen%27s_relationship_with_Ruetten.?wprov=sfla1