Dream comes true for Black Rose princess
Michelle Kaye Washington joins royal court
“I grew up watching the Tournament of Roses Parade every New Years Day and always dreamed of being part of it,” said Michelle Kaye Washington, a first-year student at Pasadena City College (PCC).
Washington, who is active with Encompass Organization, Project Light, Ryman Arts, HROCK Choir and HROCK missions at PCC, will be doing just that this year. After enduring an intensive month-long interview process, the Pasadena native was selected as one of the seven members of the 2011 Tournament of Roses Royal Court.
In 2009 during her senior year, Washington participated in the Tournament of Roses Royal Court proceedings but did not make it to the final seven.
This year, she was chosen out of 1,100 young women. All of the young ladies women had to go through a rigorous review of public speaking, poise, academic achievement, community involvement, and personality.
“Being a Tournament of Roses Princess means taking part in history,” Washington said. “It means being a role model for my peers and being able to inspire others to pursue their own dreams and ambitions.”
Before attending PCC, Washington went to Maranatha High School and was part of a group of classmates who won in the Tournament of Roses’ “Roses on Parade” art contest. In high school, she was also was president of the art club and a member of the speech and debate team as well as the swim team and was involved in the school musical.
She plans to one day operate her own company that will provide opportunities for students to earn art scholarships.
Physicians Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins are lucky to be alive. Surrounded by negative influences and having few positive role models as teenagers, they made a pact in high school to stick together, go to college, graduate and become doctors. That premeditated decision helped to determine the fate of these Newark, N.J., natives.
While survival, not scholastic success, was the priority for many of their peers, these three could easily have followed their childhood friends into drug dealing, gangs, and prison.
Physicians Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins are lucky to be alive. Surrounded by negative influences and having few positive role models as teenagers, they made a pact in high school to stick together, go to college, graduate and become doctors. That premeditated decision helped to determine the fate of these Newark, N.J., natives.
While survival, not scholastic success, was the priority for many of their peers, these three could easily have followed their childhood friends into drug dealing, gangs, and prison.
According to the autopsy report on 19-year-old Kendrec Lavelle McDade, Pasadena police officers Jeff Newlen and Matthew Griffin fired eight shots, four at point-blank range.
When paramedics arrived at 11:09 p.m.on March 24, they found the youth “lying prone on the asphalt in the middle of the street with his hands cuffed behind his back,” said the report.
Family and friends of Kendrec Lavelle McDade gathered this week in Altadena to lay to rest the 19-year-old man who was shot and killed by Pasadena police.
The tearful morning funeral was held at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Altadena and McDade’s body was then taken to Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier for burial.
A man who runs a Pasadena/Altadena-based boot camp for youths was charged this week with sexually assaulting two teenage girls in 2004.
Kelvin Bernard McFarland, 42, of Monrovia, was already awaiting trial on unrelated charges for allegedly handcuffing a teenage truant, transporting the girl to a relative’s house and demanding money.
He pleaded not guilty Thursday to new charges of sexual penetration by a foreign object, forcible rape, oral copulation of a person under 16, lewd act upon a child and unlawful sexual intercourse.
