Flying bullets aside, soccer park needs help
The Kern County Soccer Park is one of the finest recreational amenities in the Bakersfield area. The fields are usually in excellent shape, and the setting is spectacular. Out-of-town visitors to the 40-acre, 24-field complex are often heard commenting that the soccer park, nestled among the foothills just west of the Kern River Canyon, completely changed their perception of Bakersfield.
But, as Saturday's shooting incident reminded us, the soccer complex has some physical shortcomings. The facility has only one accessible entrance/exit, which is bad enough on typical Saturdays, when thousands of people at a time, and perhaps 5,000 over the course of a day, squeeze in and out through the bottleneck front gate.
Throw in flying bullets and you have a significantly more dire set of circumstances.
That's what happened Saturday a little after 1 p.m., when, according to Kern County Park Rangers, Jerry Keller, 25, gave his girlfriend, Christy Dawn Milner-Tucker, 25, some shooting lessons with a 9 mm handgun. They found an open space on the north side of the Kern River, placed a few cans on a tree limb and proceeded to shoot toward the soccer park -- and thousands of young soccer players and their families -- to the immediate south. They fired about 20 rounds.
The shooters, who now face several felony weapons violations, allegedly managed to hit a woman in the head, although the velocity was so low that the bullet didn't break her skin. A man who was walking along the river closer to the shooters was forced to run for cover after realizing bullets were whizzing all around him.
Park officials, properly assuming the worst, issued an evacuation order almost immediately, but by some accounts the ensuing traffic jam had some families taking 40 minutes to inch less than 200 yards onto Alfred Harrell Highway.
It's time for Kern County, which owns the soccer complex, to bring all involved parties to the table: the Kern County Soccer Foundation, which leases and operates the complex, the Bakersfield Fire Department, which provides fire and medical emergency services, the Kern County Park Rangers and Kern County Sheriff's Department, which share law enforcement duties, and the Kern County Parks & Recreation Department, which helps coordinate them all.
Not only does the soccer complex need a second and possibly third public-access gate, it needs a solution to its ongoing parking problem. Parking limitations force many families to park along Alfred Harrell Highway and run across the road -- a tragedy waiting to happen and a liability issue for county taxpayers. The city Fire Department, which serves the soccer park by way of Station 10 near Lake Ming, has stepped in before to rectify access (and liability) issues at City in the Hills and the Canyons. It wasn't consulted when the soccer park was developed, but fire officials need to jump in now and help to come up with common-sense solutions.
Those solutions won't be cheap, but they're essential. The soccer park provides an important and useful diversion for Kern County youth, and the tournaments it hosts help fill local hotels and restaurants. It's worth the investment.
