Oak Harbor News

UPDATE: Kalob Tatum says his stolen violin was recovered Thursday night. Details about how the violin was returned are sketchy, but Tatum said it is damaged and needs to be repaired before he can play it.

When Stephen Rodrick returned to Oak Harbor and started unpeeling layers from his past, part of him became a frightened 13-year-old boy again.

Human rights vigil The Snohomish County Commission on Human Rights is hosting a May 29 vigil honoring Brisenia and Raul Flores, the 9-year-old Arizona girl and her father murdered in 2009 by an anti-immigrant activist from Everett.

Carl Smith blows his shofar at the National Day of Prayer event in Coupeville. The shofar is a ram's horn used in Jewish ceremonies such as Rosh Hashanah.

Jonathan McLaughlin, a junior at Oak Harbor High School, discovered that after trying to return a woman's purse last month.

He came to Oak Harbor Monday night to facilitate a workshop for the Oak Harbor School District board, offering his wisdom, guidance and advice on how to proceed in replacing Rick Schulte as the school district's superintendent.

As fathers go, Commander Peter Rodrick was a boyhood fantasy dashing, decorated, able to land a jet on a tiny aircraft-carrier flight deck.

An Oak Harbor man crashed his car through barriers during the city's Holland Happening event earlier this month, forcing pedestrians to flee as he drove past vendor tents on the closed-off road, according to court documents.

The drill will be conducted May 9 by the Navy, Coast Guard and Washington State Department of Ecology off Whidbey Island Naval Air Station's Seaplane Base in Oak Harbor.

Island County prevailed once again in litigation over the City of Oak Harbor's efforts to expand its western boundaries.

It's taken a couple of years of negotiating, but North Whidbey artist Wayne Lewis may soon send his 3-foot clay sculpture of a Native American to be cast in bronze.

Rob McGowen had been involved with flowers for his whole adult life. He says, "It's what I love to do." As a young person, his first significant job was working in a florist shop.

Island County Sheriff Mark Brown asked for the community's help last week in locating Robert Dean Burns, who was wanted on warrants out of Island County, Oak Harbor and Renton.

WEAN spokesman Steve Erickson spoke out on the issue between City of Oak Harbor and Island County, saying expansion of the UGA would be bad for the environment and Swan Lake.

Barbara Shaw or Oak Harbor paints stripper onto the roof of a Civilian Conservation Corps 1930s picnic shelter at Bowman Bay in Deception Pass.

A number of local offices are up for election this year, and the time to step up and be part of a solution is just around the corner.

Swinomish Tribal Community may not be alone in suing the City of Oak Harbor over the inadvertent discovery of Native American remains during the 2011 Pioneer Way project.

As the front end manager of Island Drug, she's been tasked with leading a smooth transition between the current store site on Pioneer Way and the new building on State Highway 20 that opens to the public Monday morning.

A controversial plan to let future state employees opt into a 401 style pension plans – instead of fixed-payment pensions that most receive today – won passage in the state Senate by a narrow vote of 25 to 22 on Thursday.

Businesses in Washington would get the right to refuse services to gay and lesbian customers if "providing those goods or services" conflicts with the religious or philosophical beliefs of the business owner, under a bill introduced Thursday in the state Senate.