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Reporting from Sacramento — Three quarters of California voters believe the state should restrain home building in areas at high risk of wildfires, a new survey has found.
“The voters think there should be limits,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll.
The survey revealed broad backing across party lines, demographic groups and all regions in California for restricting growth in wildfire zones. Nearly 85% of Democrats support doing so compared with 57% of Republicans and 72% of independent voters.
At least 66% of respondents in every region of the state back the idea, including the non-Bay Area northern section. This includes the area surrounding Paradise, which was almost entirely destroyed in last fall’s Camp fire and where many homeowners have said they hope to rebuild.
Overall, 37% of voters surveyed said they supported strongly limiting new home building in wildfire areas with an additional 38% saying they somewhat supported the idea.
Source: UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll
(Kyle Kim / Los Angeles Times Graphics)
Despite voters’ willingness to restrict growth in wildfire areas, Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers have not openly discussed the idea among other options to prevent destructive infernos. State leaders have instead focused their discussions on utility companies’ financial responsibility for the blazes, how to pay for damages from wildfires and cutting back vegetation and other ways to manage the state’s forests.
Last year Ken Pimlott, the recently retired head of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said that government should consider stopping home building in threatened communities because of the substantial loss of property and lives.
“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said. “I’m not advocating for no” building.
Stanford University’s Michael Wara, who serves on a state wildfire commission, said the scale of recent fires is influencing how Californians think about development, even those whose property is safe.
“They wake up and go outside and they can’t breathe and there’s ash on their car,” said Wara, who directs the school’s climate and energy policy program. “It’s not something you read about in the newspaper. It’s something you experience.”
But Wara said any decision to limit growth in fire zones remains politically difficult. People who own land or might want to build in those areas strongly prefer to maintain the status quo.
“This is an issue where there’s concentrated very powerful interests that have a lot to lose by changing the rules,” he said.
It’s also possible that voters might support the idea for limiting growth but not the details of what a plan might look like, said DiCamillo, the pollster. A recent Cal Fire report said 1 in 4 Californians live in areas considered at high risk for wildfires, including in suburban Southern California and the Bay Area.
People who live in parts of Marin County may not realize they reside in one of these zones when answering that question, he said. “They’re probably thinking about all these rural areas.”
The Berkeley poll also examined other housing issues and found less consensus among voters than that of limiting growth in wildfire areas. The survey offered respondents three proposed solutions for making housing more affordable: offering more tax breaks or subsidies for lower and middle-income homebuyers; allowing more apartment or condominium construction along mass transit routes; or increasing the share of apartments with rent control.
Source: UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll
(Kyle Kim / Los Angeles Times Graphics)
None of the three answers achieved close to majority support. Additional tax breaks ranked highest with 34% backing. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed did not agree with any of the options.
Voters were evenly divided over whether the state should take a more aggressive role on housing issues and require cities and counties to build more homes in their communities. The poll found 51% in support of the idea.
The lack of agreement on how to address California’s housing problems, including the state government’s responsibility, could help explain why lawmakers recently turned away major housing legislation, DiCamillo said. Last month, legislators shelved Senate Bill 50, which would have boosted building near transit lines and in single-family home neighborhoods. They also blocked and weakened measures that aimed to add protections for renters.
Addressing the housing problem with a specific solution, DiCamillo said, is “the big dilemma for the Legislature. They might not have the public behind them when they do it.”
The survey did find a split among age and demographic groups on whether the state should take a larger role on expediting more housing. Nearly two-thirds of those ages 18 to 29 wanted more state intervention compared with 45% of those 65 and older. Similarly, more than 60% of Latinos, blacks and Asians backed a more expansive state role, compared with 45% of whites.
The online survey of 4,435 California voters took place June 4 to 10 and has an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5%.
Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of slain President John F. Kennedy, is battling a rare form of leukemia and may have less than a year to live.
In an essay published Saturday in the New Yorker, the 35-year-old environmental journalist wrote her illness was discovered in May 2024 after she gave birth to her daughter. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3 and has undergone several treatments, including chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants.
In her essay, Schlossberg acknowledged that her terminal illness adds to a string of tragedies that has befallen the famous political family. Her grandfather was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Nearly five years later, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was fatally shot in Los Angeles after giving a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel following his California presidential primary win. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when his small plane crashed.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote.
“Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
She wrote her diagnosis was stunning. She had just turned 34, didn’t feel sick and was physically active, including swimming a mile one day before she gave birth to her second child at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York.
After the delivery, her doctor became alarmed by her high white blood cell count.
At first, medical professionals figured the test result might be tied to her pregnancy. However, doctors soon concluded she had myeloid leukemia, a condition mostly observed in older patients. She ended up spending weeks in the hospital.
“Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders,” Schlossberg wrote. “I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later.”
She has endured various treatments. Her older sister, Rose, was one of her bone marrow donors.
In the article, Schlossberg mentioned the Kennedy family’s dilemma over controversial positions taken by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her mother’s cousin. Schlossberg wrote that while she was in the hospital in mid-2024, Kennedy suspended his long-shot campaign for president to throw his weight behind then-Republican candidate President Trump.
Trump went on to name Kennedy to his Cabinet as secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In one of his early moves, Trump demanded a cut in government money to Columbia University, which employs her husband, George Moran.
“Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs,” she wrote. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.”
On Saturday, her brother Jack Schlossberg, who recently announced his bid for Congress in a New York district, shared on Instagram a link to her New Yorker essay, “A Battle with My Blood.”
Southern California lawmakers are demanding answers from U.S. Homeland Security officials following the deaths of two Orange County residents and nearly two dozen others while in federal immigration custody.
In a letter Friday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Reps. Dave Min (D-Irvine) and Judy Chu (D-Pasadena) pointed to the deaths of 25 people so far this year while being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The number of in-custody deaths has reached an annual record since the agency began keeping track in 2018.
Two Mexican immigrants — who had long made their homes in Orange County and were sent to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center north of Hesperia — were among the deaths.
“These are not just numbers on a website, but real people — with families, jobs, and hopes and dreams — each of whom died in ICE custody,” the lawmakers wrote. “The following cases illustrate systemic patterns of delayed treatment, neglect, and failure to properly notify families.”
Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, died Sept. 22 about a month after being apprehended while working at the Fountain Valley Auto Wash, where he had worked for 15 years, according to a GoFundMe post by his family.
He had lived in Westminster since he was 4 years old, and had previously been protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The Times previously reported that his application for continued protection was not renewed in 2016.
Ayala-Uribe’s relatives and members of Congress have alleged that he was denied proper medical care after being taken into ICE custody in August. Adelanto detention staff members were aware of his medical crisis, according to internal emails obtained by The Times. But Ayala-Uribe initially was taken back to his Adelanto dorm room, where he waited for another three days before being moved to Victor Valley Global Medical Center in Victorville.
ICE officials acknowledged that Ayala-Uribe died at the Victorville hospital while waiting for surgery for an abscess on his buttock. The suspected cause of the sore was not disclosed.
A second man — Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, 56, who lived near Costa Mesa — died Oct. 23, about a week after being detained.
ICE said Garcia-Aviles was arrested Oct. 14 in Santa Ana by the U.S. Border Patrol for an outstanding warrant, and eventually sent to the Adelanto center. ICE said in a previous statement that he was only at the Adelanto facility for a few hours before he was taken to the Victorville hospital for “suspected alcohol withdrawal symptoms.”
His condition rapidly worsened.
The deaths have focused attention on the treatment of detained immigrants as well as long-standing concerns about medical care inside Adelanto, one of the largest federal immigration detention centers in California. The situation raises broader concerns about whether immigration detention centers throughout the country are equipped to care for the deluge of people rounded up since President Trump prioritized mass deportations as part of his second-term agenda.
“These deaths raise serious questions about ICE’s ability to comply with basic detention standards, medical care protocols, and notification requirements, and underscore a pattern of gross negligence that demands immediate accountability,” Min and Chu wrote in the letter to Noem and Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE.
The letter was signed by 43 other lawmakers, including Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), J. Luis Correa (D-Santa Ana), John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) and Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).
An ICE representative did not immediately respond to an email Saturday seeking comment.
The lawmakers stressed the need to treat the immigrants with humanity.
The lawmakers said Garcia-Aviles had lived in the U.S. for three decades. His family did not learn of his dire medical condition until “he was on his deathbed.” Family members drove to the hospital to find him “unconscious, intubated, and . . . [with] dried blood on his forehead” as well as “a cut on his tongue … broken teeth and bruising on his body.”
“We never got the chance to speak to him anymore and [the family] never was called to let us know why he had been transferred to the hospital,” his daugher wrote on a GoFundMe page, seeking help to pay for his funeral costs. “His absence has left a hole in our hearts.”
BISMARCK, N.D. — Abortion is again illegal in North Dakota after the state’s Supreme Court on Friday couldn’t muster the required majority to uphold a judge’s ruling that struck down the state’s ban last year.
The law makes it a felony crime for anyone to perform an abortion, though it specifically protects patients from prosecution. Doctors could be prosecuted and penalized by as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Three justices agreed that the ban is unconstitutionally vague. The other two justices said the law is not unconstitutional.
The North Dakota Constitution requires at least four of the five justices to agree for a law to be found unconstitutional, a high bar. Not enough members of the court joined together to affirm the lower court ruling.
In his opinion, Justice Jerod Tufte said the natural rights guaranteed by the state constitution in 1889 do not extend to abortion rights. He also said the law “provides adequate and fair warning to those attempting to comply.”
North Dakota Republican Atty. Gen. Drew Wrigley welcomed the ruling, saying, “The Supreme Court has upheld this important pro-life legislation, enacted by the people’s Legislature. The attorney general’s office has the solemn responsibility of defending the laws of North Dakota, and today those laws have been upheld.”
Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, who introduced the 2023 legislation that became the law banning abortion, said she was “thrilled and grateful that two justices that are highly respected saw the truth of the matter, that this is fully constitutional for the mother and for the unborn child and thereafter for that sake.”
The challengers called the decision “a devastating loss for pregnant North Dakotans.”
“As a majority of the Court found, this cruel and confusing ban is incomprehensible to physicians. The ban forces doctors to choose between providing care and going to prison,” Center for Reproductive Rights senior staff attorney Meetra Mehdizadeh said. “Abortion is healthcare, and North Dakotans deserve to be able to access this care without delay caused by confusion about what the law allows.”
The ruling means access to abortion in North Dakota will be outlawed. Even after a judge had struck down the ban last year, the only scenarios for a patient to obtain an abortion in North Dakota had been for life- or health-preserving reasons in a hospital.
The state’s only abortion provider relocated in 2022 from Fargo to nearby Moorhead, Minn.
Justice Daniel Crothers, one of the three judges to vote against the ban, wrote that the district court decision wasn’t wrong.
“The vagueness in the law relates to when an abortion can be performed to preserve the life and health of the mother,” Crothers wrote. “After striking this invalid provision, the remaining portions of the law would be inoperable.”
North Dakota’s newly confirmed ban prohibits the performance of an abortion and declares it a felony. The only exceptions are for rape or incest for an abortion in the first six weeks of pregnancy — before many women know they are pregnant — and to prevent the woman’s death or a “serious health risk” to her.
North Dakota joins 12 other states enforcing bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Four others bar it at or around six weeks of gestational age.
Judge Bruce Romanick had struck down the ban the GOP-led Legislature passed in 2023, less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and opened the door to the state-level bans, largely turning the abortion battle to state courts and legislatures.
The Red River Women’s Clinic — the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota — and several physicians challenged the law. The state appealed the 2024 ruling that overturned the ban.
The judge and the Supreme Court each denied requests by the state to keep the abortion ban in effect during the appeal. Those decisions allowed patients with pregnancy complications to seek care without fear of delay because of the law, Mehdizadeh previously said.
President Trump’s pledge to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is triggering fear in the state’s deeply rooted immigrant community, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
In a social media post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.
The announcement was immediately challenged by some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the nation.
“There’s no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections,” she added.
The protection has been extended 27 times for Somalis since 1991, with U.S. authorities determining that it was unsafe for people already in the United States to return to Somalia.
The Trump administration could, however, move to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally. But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at 705 nationwide.
“I am a citizen and so are [the] majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat born in Somalia, said in a social media post Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”
Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.
“This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”
In his social media post, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali gangs had targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Federal prosecutors have in recent weeks brought charges against dozens of people in a social-services fraud scheme. Some of the defendants are from Somalia.
Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.
“It’s not surprising that the president has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “This is what he does to change the subject.”
Community advocates say that the Somali diaspora in Minnesota has helped to revitalize downtown corridors in Minneapolis and plays a prominent role in the state’s politics.
“The truth is that the Somali community is beloved and long-woven into the fabric of many neighborhoods and communities in Minnesota,” Altman said. “Destabilizing families and communities makes all of us less safe and not more.”
As part of a broader push to adopt hard-line immigration policies, the Trump administration has moved to withdraw various protections that had allowed immigrants to remain in the United States and work legally.
That included ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under former President Biden. The Trump administration has also sought to limit protections previously extended to migrants from Cuba and Syria, among other countries.
SACRAMENTO — The day after the last out-of-town TV news bureau was shut down and state capital correspondent Ginger Rutland and her producer-husband Don Fields were fired, the couple got a panic call from their former employer, KRON-TV in San Francisco.
It was the first week of November and real news–not that stuffy, dull legislative dross that blows through the halls of the state Capitol–was happening in Sacramento.
“They wanted us to go out and cover the body search at the landlady’s house. You know the one who was accused of doing in all the old men?” said Fields. “Everyone wanted that story. Nobody wants to know about budgets or bills that might raise their taxes or ruin their water.”
Indeed, TV stations throughout the state–including KABC-TV Channel 7, KNBC Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles–dispatched correspondents to Sacramento that Friday afternoon in November to cover the Dorothy Puente “Arsenic and Old Lace” case, because not a single out-of-town TV station in California now has its own bureau here.
“It’s an absolute outrage,” said Harry Snider, West Coast director of Consumer’s Union. “We have a state that is supposed to have the 10th largest economy in the world and not a single TV station covering how it’s governed.”
With the shutdown of the KRON bureau, only TV reporters from Sacramento’s own stations cover legislative news on a regular basis.
“California is only one of three states in the country that don’t provide live coverage of debates in their state legislatures. Wyoming and Montana are the others,” said Tracy Westen, a USC professor who is writing a book on media coverage of state and local government in California (see accompanying article).
“Democracy is eroding in California,” Snider said. “Government does not work for the people, and the reason government doesn’t work is that public officials are able to escape the spotlight of public attention.
“All of them, from the governor on down, know that they can ride out a print story or a radio sound bite on the Michael Jackson show. But none of them want to be caught giving away the farm on the six o’clock news in Los Angeles or San Francisco.”
While TV stations have been pulling out, the state’s newspapers have been increasing capital coverage, according to a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco). Currently, 30 newspapers and wire services have bureaus here.
Both Gov. George Deukmejian’s office and state Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti’s office are disturbed by television’s departure from the scene.
“The shutdown of the KRON bureau really is the culmination of a very disturbing trend,” said Kevin Brett, Deukmejian’s press secretary.
“What will be missed will be the original reporting and investigative reporting,” said Bob Forsyte, Roberti’s press secretary. “That kind of reporting can only be done with sustained coverage from a bureau. The viewers will miss what will only come to them now through the print media.”
KNBC News Director Tom Capra said the decision to shut down its bureau six years ago was based on financial considerations–determining how limited resources should be allocated.
“The real crux of this is the expense,” he said. “It costs about $100,000 a year to have someone in Sacramento. I would rather spend that money covering the news in Southern California. I’d a helluva lot rather have a bureau in Orange County or even Riverside than in Sacramento.”
Capital veterans such as Rutland and Fields, who have been in Sacramento for 10 years, and KCRA-TV’s Steven Swatt, who has been reporting state government news for nearly 20 years, say the benign neglect of Sacramento can’t be blamed on rising costs.
“Logistically and economically, its’s easier and cheaper than ever before,” Rutland said. “We’ve got videotape. We’ve got satellites. The fact is stations don’t do it because they’d rather put crap on the air.”
“It’s greed,” Swatt said. “You’ll see them send up people for things like the body search or a plane crash, but why aren’t they here when the Legislature’s trying to raise taxes or the CHP wants to upgrade its radar or there are hearings being held on changing school textbooks or day care?”
When he headed the Sacramento bureau for KNBC a decade ago, Steve Mallory says, it used to cost about $250,000 a year for an out-of-town station to maintain a capital bureau.
“Most stations like to have their own person on the scene, but if they can’t, they’ll take anything they can get,” said Mallory.
That’s what Mallory is banking on, at any rate. Last summer he created the Northern California News Satellite service to fill the void left by the TV exodus from the state capital. So far he has 13 subscribers, including KNBC, and several other stations and networks that buy his daily satellite video feeds on a spot basis. Both KCBS and KABC have bought stories from him, he said.
“If they get it for one-tenth the price from us, they’ll take it,” said Mallory, who, like a newspaper wire service, spreads his costs over a number of clients. “Public service isn’t the prime concern of television news anymore. The bottom line is.”
That doesn’t mean he offers second-rate goods, Mallory maintains.
“We’re their bureau in the state capital,” he said. “Our stories are written for a general statewide audience unless we get a specific request from a subscriber to do something. But we give them what they want.”
A recent typical NCNS news day involved covering a press conference on a new drunk driving bill, comment from Gov. Deukmejian on the Armenian earthquake, dedication of the state Vietnam Memorial and a plan authored by the state Department of Social Services to pressure absentee parents to make their child support payments.
“When the story broke about the woman who planted the people in her back yard, we dropped everything else,” Mallory said “It was the only story we did for three or four days. It was the only one our clients wanted.”
Fields is not surprised.
“Why try to inform the public about issues that are going to affect their lives when life can be made so much easier dealing with a car accident or an unexplained shooting or some bizarre thing on ‘Entertainment Tonight’?” he asked.
KNBC’s Capra maintains that his station gets all the state legislative news it needs–from wire reports, selected satellite feeds from Mallory’s NCNS, its Sacramento sister station and elected officials downstate for a visit to their constituents.
If a bill is controversial or of particular interest to Los Angeles audiences, Capra does what his rivals at KCBS and KABC do: He sends a reporter to Sacramento upstate for a few days to get the story.
“There’s not much in Sacramento that we don’t know about,” he said. “I don’t have a problem with the way Sacramento is covered and I don’t think we’re doing a disservice to the public by not following a bunch of rich lobbyists around. How many times can you cover that story?”
Snider’s answer is fast and angry: every day.
“It is amazing to me that legislators spend $100 million every two years to seek legislative office and TV stations don’t think they’re important enough to cover,” he said.
The voters are the ultimate losers, according to Swatt and Rutland.
“All the surveys say that 66% of the population gets its news from the TV,” said Swatt. “If they don’t even know what’s going on up here, that’s frightening.”
“We live in a democracy where public opinion is far more important than ever before,” said Rutland. “The Field Poll and other polls influence legislators. And the initiative process puts more and more power directly into the hands of the public. But the public doesn’t know what’s going on.”
Two out of three think the county is headed in the wrong direction. Four out of five feel its leaders are closely connected to “big money interests, lobbyists, and developers,” and the same fraction felt county supervisors were effective “only some of the time” — or not at all.
How to turn things around? Seven out of ten agreed the county government needed “major reform.”
Those are the top-line findings from a new survey on local governance published this week by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
The survey, paid for by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, took the pulse of just over 1,000 registered voters and found most were feeling quite glum about the local state of affairs.
“Voters and residents are in a state of distrust and think that the government is not working,” said Fernando Guerra, the center’s director.
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But the survey was meant to show more than just a dejected electorate, Guerra said. He argued it made another point: Now is not the time for opponents to try and undo Measure G, a controversial measure that overhauled the county’s form of government.
“There are some people that are trying to relitigate Measure G, and I’m talking at the level of political elite,” said Guerra, who supported the overhaul. “What these numbers are suggesting, and what I’m suggesting, is if it were to be put up for an election again, it would pass again.”
It’s been almost exactly a year since voters approved Measure G, bringing something akin to a wrecking ball to the county’s governance structure and promising to replace it with something unprecedented in California: namely, nine supervisors instead of five and an elected county executive rather than an appointed one.
The measure was always controversial, with criticism lobbed at the position of chief executive, who opponents said would now hold far too much power over a $45-billion budget and the well-being of the county’s 10 million residents.
The measure barely passed, with a little more than half of voters agreeing to give it a shot. But the ultimate bureaucratic flub is giving some opponents of the overhaul new ammo to bring it back to voters.
Due to an error with how the county handles charter updates, voters inadvertently gave a 2028 expiration date to a different ballot measure that allocates funding for anti-incarceration efforts — known as Measure J — when they approved Measure G. (The head-scratching error is a wonky one — readers curious as to how it came about can find out here.)
Months after the error came to light, the county has still not said how it plans to fix the mistake. There are a few options, including putting either of the measures back on the ballot.
The survey of voters was not an election poll, and respondents were not given opposing arguments. Most voters did not seem to know much about the impending county government overhaul and the survey did not ask about the bureaucratic screw-up, which could be seized upon in a campaign. About half didn’t remember how they voted.
It’s not clear who exactly is pushing so hard for G’s demise currently. While the overhaul had its vocal opponents — including two supervisors — the effort would be extremely expensive and some may not relish the idea of a campaign that may come with an acute sense of déjà vu.
Some on the government reform task force who opposed Measure G said they didn’t think it was in the cards — though those who opposed the measure said they didn’t think it was such a bad idea.
“I have not heard that,” said John Fasana, a task force member who first noticed the error and voted against both Measure G and J. “I think that’s what they should do: if they’re going to do one, I would say it should be G.”
Instead, the county appears to be leaning toward a ballot measure involving Measure J for 2026.
On Nov. 3, Dawyn Harrison, the county’s top lawyer, laid out the possible options for the board to “reverse the error and honor the will of the voters.” That memo included language for various ways to enshrine Measure J through a ballot measure and make sure it doesn’t go poof in a few years.
Brian Kaneda, who is part of the coalition that got Measure J passed, said the group believes the county has multiple options to fix the blunder. But putting Measure J back on the ballot, they warn, should be the last thing the county considers.
“If evidence surfaces that a new ballot measure is legally required, we’re ready,” said Kaneda. “But we believe the county should rectify this internally, honoring the will of 2.1 million voters.”
State of play
— RUFF WEEK: One of the opponents of L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia accused the controller of misusing city resources by using images of his corgis and other graphics for both his office and his campaign. A campaign spokesperson suggested the opponent was “jealous of our cute corgi graphics.”
— BIN BONANZA: Los Angeles has left dozens of green bins on city blocks, so residents can dump their food waste and comply with a state composting law. Some residents say it’s overkill.
— ‘SMEAR’ STANCE: Newly appointed Fire Chief Jaime Moore says the media is trying to “smear” firefighters. The accusations appear to be in reference to a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area of the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, which would reignite into the deadly Palisades fire.
— FIRE FUND: The city’s firefighter union plans to propose a ballot measure that would increase the sales tax for Angelenos by half a cent in perpetuity, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually for the department to build dozens of new stations, add rigs and increase the size of the department by more than 1,000 by 2050. “This is the most important thing for the LAFD really ever,” said Doug Coates, the acting president of UFLAC.
— FRAUD PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said his office will investigate claims that plaintiffs made up stories of sexual abuse in order to sue L.A. County. The announcement follows Times investigations that found nine people who said they were paid by recruiters to join the litigation.
— RESERVOIR QUESTIONS: State officials determined that even if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been full during the Palisades fire, the water system still would have been overwhelmed and quickly lost pressure. Officials concluded the water supply in Southern California was “robust” at the time of the fire and that the water system isn’t designed to handle such large, intense wildfires.
QUICK HITS
Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to Beverly Boulevard and Mountain View Avenue in Historic Filipinotown, an area represented by Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez. Outreach teams also returned to previous Inside Safe locations in Echo Park, Van Nuys, Mar Vista, Little Armenia, Sun Valley, Woodland Hills and the Figueroa Corridor, according to Bass’ team.
On the docket next week: The county supes will consider deferring permit fees for some homeowners who are rebuilding single-family homes in areas of Malibu after the Palisades Fire.
Stay in touch
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SACRAMENTO — With patients facing increasing threats from antibiotic-resistant “super bugs,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday signed two measures requiring California hospitals to strengthen their efforts at preventing staph outbreaks and to reveal to the public their rates of infection.
The move was a reversal for the governor, who vetoed similar legislation four years ago. Since then, concerns about the growth of these bacteria — and state inspections finding that some hospitals were not preventing their spread — have made infections a top public health priority.
Hospitals have had an especially tough time combating strains like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The bacteria can spread from patient to patient through unsterile clothing, ventilation systems, surgical equipment or room furnishings. If they get into a patient’s body, they can be fatal.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2 million patients nationwide contract an infection each year, and about 100,000 die. State health officials estimate that between 5% and 10% of patients in California hospitals develop infections, often through catheters, IV lines and ventilators or during surgery. Treating those sicknesses costs about $3.1 billion a year.
One of the new laws requires high-risk patients to be tested for MRSA within 24 hours of admission. The bill, SB 1058 by Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara), also requires hospitals to beef up their infection control rules and report to the state their infection rates. Those will be put on the Department of Public Health website starting in 2011.
The second bill, SB 158 by Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter), bolsters the public health department’s surveillance efforts of hospitals and requires doctors and other medical professionals at hospitals to be trained in preventing the spread of infections.
Betsy Imholz, an advocate at Consumers Union, said the new laws will help public health officials get a handle on the extent of the spread of these bacteria.
“We don’t even know the extent of the problem in California,” she said.
In 2004, Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill, writing that state and industry efforts to scrutinize hospital infection programs were working. “This calls into question the need of a new program to address this issue,” he wrote, adding that the costs of compliance might be too onerous for some hospitals.
In his statement Thursday announcing his signature on the latest bills, Schwarzenegger wrote:
“These important measures will help save lives and healthcare dollars by reducing the number of infections that people are exposed to while staying in the hospital.”
Carole Moss, a Riverside County resident whose 15-year-old son, Nile, died in 2006 of an infection contracted in a hospital, said too many facilities and physicians have refused to recognize that infections can be avoided.
“There’s a few that have made it a priority, but the attitude across the board is that infections are in hospitals and that’s what happens,” said Moss, who pressed for the bills in Sacramento.
WASHINGTON — No one seems to know what happened to Vicente Ventura Aguilar.
A witness told his brother and attorneys that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, who doesn’t have lawful immigration status, was taken into custody by immigration authorities on Oct. 7 in SouthLos Angeles and suffered a medical emergency.
But it’s been more than six weeks since then, and Ventura Aguilar’s family still hasn’t heard from him.
The Department of Homeland Security said 73 people from Mexico were arrested in the Los Angeles area between Oct. 7 and 8.
“None of them were Ventura Aguilar,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant Homeland Security public affairs secretary.
“For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” she added.
McLaughlin did not answer questions about what the agency did to determine whether Ventura Aguilar had ever been in its custody, such as checking for anyone with the same date of birth, variations of his name, or identifying detainees who received medical attention near the California border around Oct. 8.
Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing Ventura Aguilar’s family, said DHS never responded to her inquiries about him.
The family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, 44, says he has been missing since Oct. 7 when a friend saw him arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Homeland Security officials say he was never in their custody.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
“There’s only one agency that has answers,” she said. “Their refusal to provide this family with answers, their refusal to provide his attorneys with answers, says something about the lack of care and the cruelty of the moment right now for DHS.”
His family and lawyers checked with local hospitals and the Mexican consulate without success. They enlisted help from the office of Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), whose staff called the Los Angeles and San Diego county medical examiner’s offices. Neither had someone matching his name or description.
The Los Angeles Police Department also told Kamlager-Dove’s office that he isn’t in their system. His brother, Felipe Aguilar, said the family filed a missing person’s report with LAPD on Nov. 7.
“We’re sad and worried,” Felipe Aguilar said. “He’s my brother and we miss him here at home. He’s a very good person. We only hope to God that he’s alive.”
Felipe Aguilar said his brother, who has lived in the U.S. for around 17 years, left home around 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 7 to catch the bus for an interview for a sanitation job when he ran into friends on the corner near a local liquor store. He had his phone but had left his wallet at home.
One of those friends told Felipe Aguilar and his lawyers that he and Ventura Aguilar were detained by immigration agents and then held at B-18, a temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.
The friend was deported the next day to Tijuana. He spoke to the family in a phone call from Mexico.
According to Felipe Aguilar and Toczylowski, the friend said Ventura Aguilar began to shake, went unconscious and fell to the ground while shackled on Oct. 8 at a facility near the border. The impact caused his face to bleed.
The friend said that facility staff called for an ambulance and moved the other detainees to a different room. Toczylowski said that was the last time anyone saw Ventura Aguilar.
She said the rapid timeline between when Ventura Aguilar was arrested to when he disappeared is emblematic of what she views as a broad lack of due process for people in government custody under the Trump administration and shows that “we don’t know who’s being deported from the United States.”
Felipe Aguilar said he called his brother’s cell phone after hearing about the arrests but it went straight to voicemail.
Felipe Aguilar said that while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.
His family and lawyers said Ventura Aguilar might have given immigration agents a fake name when he was arrested. Some detained people offer up a wrong name or alias, and that would explain why he never showed up in Homeland Security records. Toczylowski said federal agents sometimes misspell the name of the person they are booking into custody.
Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing since Oct. 7, had lived in the United States for 17 years, his family said.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
But she said the agency should make a significant attempt to search for him, such as by using biometric data or his photo.
“To me, that’s another symptom of the chaos of the immigration enforcement system as it’s happening right now,” she said of the issues with accurately identifying detainees. “And it’s what happens when you are indiscriminately, racially profiling people and picking them up off the street and holding them in conditions that are substandard, and then deporting people without due process. Mistakes get made. Right now, what we want to know is what mistakes were made here, and where is Vicente now?”
Surveillance footage from a nearby business reviewed by MS NOW shows Ventura Aguilar on the sidewalk five minutes before masked agents begin making arrests in South Los Angeles. The footage doesn’t show him being arrested, but two witnesses told the outlet that they saw agents handcuff Ventura Aguilar and place him in a van.
In a letter sent to DHS leaders Friday, Kamlager-Dove asked what steps DHS has taken to determine whether anyone matching Ventura Aguilar’s identifiers was detained last month and whether the agency has documented any medical events or hospital transports involving people taken into custody around Oct. 7-8.
“Given the length of time since Mr. Ventura Aguilar’s disappearance and the credible concern that he may have been misidentified, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for during the enforcement action, I urgently request that DHS and ICE conduct an immediate and comprehensive review” by Nov. 29, Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter.
Kamlager-Dove said her most common immigration requests from constituents are for help with visas and passports.
“Never in all the years did I expect to get a call about someone who has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, and also never did I think that I would find myself not just calling ICE and Border Patrol but checking hospitals, checking with LAPD and checking morgues to find a constituent,” she said. “It’s horrifying and it’s completely dystopian.”
She said families across Los Angeles deserve answers and need to know whether something similar could happen to them.
As California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta ponders a run for governor, he faces scrutiny for his ties to people central to a federal corruption investigation in Oakland and payments to private attorneys.
Bonta has not been accused of impropriety, but the questions come at an inopportune time for Democrat, who says he is reassessing a gubernatorial bid after repeatedly dismissing a run earlier this year.
Bonta said the decisions by former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla not to seek the office altered the contours of the race.
“I had two horses in the governor’s race already,” Bonta said in an interview with The Times on Friday. “They decided not to get involved in the end. … The race is fundamentally different today, right?”
Bonta said he has received significant encouragement to join the crowded gubernatorial field and that he expects to make a decision “definitely sooner rather than later.” Political advisors to the 54-year-old Alameda politician have been reaching out to powerful Democrats across the state to gauge his possible support.
Historically, serving as California attorney general has been a launching pad to higher office or a top post in Washington. Harris, elected to two terms as the state attorney general, was later elected to the U.S. Senate and then as vice president. Jerry Brown served in the post before voters elected him for a second go-around as governor in 2010. Earl Warren later became the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Bonta, the first Filipino American to serve as the state’s top law enforcement official, was appointed in March 2021 by Gov. Gavin Newsom after Xavier Becerra resigned to become U.S. Health and Human Services secretary. Bonta easily won election as attorney general in 2022.
Bonta was a deputy city attorney in San Francisco and vice mayor for the city of Alameda before being elected to the state Assembly in 2012. During his tenure representing the Alameda area, Bonta developed a reputation as a progressive willing to push policies to strengthen tenants’ rights and to reform the criminal justice system.
In his role as the state’s top law enforcement official, Bonta has aggressively fought President Trump’s policies and actions, filing 46 lawsuits against the administration.
Bonta also faced controversy this past week in what Bonta’s advisers say they suspect is an attempt to damage him as he considers a potential run.
“Political hacks understand it’s actually a badge of respect, almost an endorsement. Clearly others fear him,” said veteran Democratic strategist Dan Newman, a Bonta adviser.
On Monday, KCRA reported that Bonta had spent nearly $500,000 in campaign funds last year on personal lawyers to represent him in dealings with federal investigators working on a public corruption probe in Oakland.
On Thursday, the website East Bay Insider reported that as that probe was heating up in spring 2024, Bonta had received a letter from an Oakland businessman warning him that he might soon be subject to blackmail.
The letter writer, Mario Juarez, warned Bonta that another businessman, Andy Duong, possessed “a recording of you in a compromising situation.”
Duong was later indicted, along with his father David Duong and former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, on federal bribery charges. All have pleaded not guilty. An attorney for David Duong this week said that Juarez, who is widely believed to be an informant in the case against the Duongs and Thao, was not credible. Juarez could not be reached for comment.
Bonta said his legal expenditures came about after he began speaking with the U.S. Attorney’s office, who approached him because prosecutors thought he could be a victim of blackmail or extortion. Bonta said the outreach came after he already had turned over the letter he had received from Juarez to law enforcement.
Bonta said he hired lawyers to help him review information in his possession that could be helpful to federal investigators.
“I wanted to get them all the information that they wanted, that they needed, give it to him as fast as as I could, to assist, to help,” Bonta said. “Maybe I had a puzzle piece or two that could assist them in their investigation.”
He said he may have made “an audible gasp” when he saw the legal bill, but that it was necessary to quickly turn over all documents and communications that could be relevant to the federal investigation.
“The billing rate is high or not insignificant at private law firms,” Bonta said. “We were moving quickly to be as responsive as possible, to be as helpful as possible, to assist as as much as possible, and that meant multiple attorneys working a lot of hours.”
Bonta said the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission also has alerted him that it received a complaint against him. Bonta and his advisers believe is about the use of campaign funds to pay the legal expenses and suspect it was filed by the campaign of a current gubernatorial candidate.
“We’re not worried,” Bonta said. “That’s politics.”
Asked whether these news stories could create obstacles to a potential gubernatorial campaign, Bonta pushed back against any assertion that he may have “baggage.” He said he was assisting federal prosecutors with their investigation with the hopes of holding people accountable.
“That’s what I would expect anyone to do, certainly someone who is committed as I am to public safety.,” he said. “That’s my job, to assist, to support, to provide information, to help.”
In the weeks since federal investigators announced that the devastating Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of a smaller blaze, top Los Angeles Fire Department officials have insisted that they did everything they could to put out the earlier fire.
But The Times has obtained records that call into question the agency’s statements about how thoroughly firefighters mopped up the Jan. 1 Lachman fire in the days before it reignited.
In an interview last month, then-Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva said that firefighters returned to the burn area on Jan. 3 — due to a report of smoke — and “cold-trailed” an additional time, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dug out hot spots.
“We went back over there again. We dug it all out again. We put ladders on it. We did everything that we could do — cold-trail again,” Villanueva told The Times on Oct. 8. “We did all of that.”
A dispatch log obtained by The Times, however, shows that firefighters arrived at the scene that day and quickly reported seeing no smoke. They then canceled the dispatch for another engine that was on the way, clearing the call within 34 minutes. The log does not mention cold trailing. It’s unclear if crews took any other actions during the call, because the LAFD has not answered questions about it.
The Times has made multiple requests for comment to LAFD spokesperson Capt. Erik Scott by email, text and in person, but the agency has refused to explain the discrepancy. Villanueva also did not respond to an emailed request for comment and an interview request.
The conflict between the LAFD’s statements and its own records is likely to intensify frustration and anger among Palisades fire victims over contradictory and incomplete information about what was done to protect their community. With the first anniversary approaching, gaps remain in what the LAFD has told the public about what it did to prepare for and respond to the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
The LAFD’s after-action report on the Palisades fire makes only a cursory reference to the Lachman blaze. Missing from the 70-page document, released last month, are the report of smoke in the area on Jan. 3 and a battalion chief’s decision to pull firefighters out of the scene the day before, even though they warned him that there were signs of remaining hot spots.
The head of the board that oversees the LAFD has maintained that information about the firefighter warnings — or any examination of the Lachman fire — did not belong in the after-action report.
“The after-action review that was presented to the commission is exactly what we asked for,” Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said at the board’s meeting on Tuesday. She said the review was only supposed to cover the first 72 hours after the Palisades fire erupted.
“It is not an investigation,” she said. “It should not include things that the newspaper seems to feel like should be included.”
The after-action report detailed missteps in fire officials’ response to the Palisades fire, including major failures in deployment and communications, and made recommendations to prevent the issues from happening again.
Two former LAFD chief officers said the report also should have provided an examination of what might have gone wrong in the mop-up of the Lachman blaze, which investigators believe was deliberately set, as part of its “lessons learned” section.
“A good after-action report documents what happened before the incident,” said former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now emergency and crisis management coordinator for the U.S. Capitol. “The after-action report should have gone back all the way to Dec. 31.”
Patrick Butler, a former assistant chief for the LAFD who has worked on several after-action teams, including for the federal government, agreed.
“If you limit an after-action to an artificial timeline, you’re not going to uncover everything you need to learn from,” said Butler, who is the Redondo Beach fire chief.
He noted that the reports shape training and operational improvements for the Fire Department.
“To exclude the Lachman fire from the report gives the appearance of a coverup of foundational facts,” Butler added. “It’s not a harmless oversight. The consequences can be significant and far-reaching.”
The Jan. 3 report of smoke at the Lachman burn area came in shortly before noon, according to a dispatch log of the incident. Firefighters from Fire Station 23 — one of two stations in the Palisades — arrived on the scene about 10 minutes after they were dispatched.
A couple minutes later, they reported “N/S,” or nothing showing, according to the log. A few minutes after that, they canceled the dispatch for an engine from Fire Station 69, the other Palisades station.
The last entry in the log was from 12:20 p.m., indicating that an L.A. County crew was working in the area.
The L.A. County Fire Department said in a statement that the crew was at the scene for less than 30 minutes conducting an “informal ‘lessons learned’ discussion of their actions from the night of the fire.”
“They did not gear up or perform any work while there and they did not see anything of note,” the statement said.
The L.A. County crew left the scene about 12:40 p.m.
The Times previously reported that firefighters were ordered to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area of the Lachman fire on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. The paper reviewed text messages among three firefighters and a third party, sent in the weeks and months after the fire, in which they discussed the handling of the blaze.
LAFD officials also opted not to use thermal imaging technology to detect lingering hot spots. Despite warnings of extreme winds leading up to Jan. 7, they failed to pre-deploy any engines or firefighters to the burn area — or anywhere in the Palisades.
At least one battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section has known for months that crews had complained about hot spots after the Lachman fire. But the department kept that information hidden from the public.
At the Tuesday fire commission meeting, newly appointed Fire Chief Jaime Moore — in an apparent reference to The Times reporting — slammed what he called media efforts to “smear” firefighters who battled the worst fire in city history.
“Something that’s been very frustrating for me as fire chief, and through this process, is to watch my friends in the media smear our name and the work that our firefighters did to combat one of the most intense fires, the Palisades, the wind-driven monstrosity that it was,” Moore, a 30-year LAFD veteran, said on his second day on the job.
He added: “The audacity for people to make comments and say that there’s text messages out there that say that we did not put the fire out, that we did not extinguish the fire. Yet I have yet to see any of those text messages.”
Moore made those remarks despite having been tasked by Mayor Karen Bass with conducting an investigation into The Times report about the LAFD’s response to the Lachman fire.
Bass had requested that Villanueva investigate, saying that “a full understanding … is essential to an accurate accounting of what occurred during the January wildfires.”
Critics have said it would be improper for the LAFD to investigate itself and called for an independent review.
Before the City Council confirmed his appointment as chief, Moore also had called for an outside organization to conduct the inquiry, describing the reports of the firefighters’ warnings on Jan. 2 as alarming.
On Tuesday, he said he would review the LAFD’s response to the Lachman fire.
“I will do as Mayor [Karen] Bass asked, and I will look into the Lachman fire, and we will look at how that was handled, and we will learn from it, and we’ll be better from it,” he said.
A Bass spokesperson said Wednesday that the mayor “has made clear to Chief Moore” that the investigation into the Lachman fire should be conducted by an independent entity.
The LAFD has not responded to a question about who will conduct the probe.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that found Texas’ 2026 congressional redistricting plan likely discriminates on the basis of race.
The order signed by Justice Samuel Alito will remain in place at least for the next few days while the court considers whether to allow the new map favorable to Republicans to be used in the midterm elections.
The court’s conservative majority has blocked similar lower court rulings because they have come too close to elections.
The order came about an hour after the state called on the high court to intervene to avoid confusion as congressional primary elections approach in March. The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.
The order was signed by Alito because he is the justice who handles emergency appeals from Texas.
Texas redrew its congressional map in the summer as part of Trump’s efforts to preserve a slim Republican majority in the House in next year’s elections, touching off a nationwide redistricting battle.
The new redistricting map was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats, but a panel of federal judges in El Paso ruled 2-1 Tuesday that the civil rights groups that challenged the map on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters were likely to win their case.
If the ruling holds for now, Texas could be forced to hold elections next year using the map drawn by the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2021 based on the 2020 census.
Texas was the first state to meet Trump’s demands in what has become an expanding national battle over redistricting. Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats.
The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.
The Supreme Court is separately considering a case from Louisiana that could further limit race-based districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s not entirely clear how the current round of redistricting would be affected by the outcome in the Louisiana case.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a once-loyal supporter of President Trump who has become a critic, said Friday that she is resigning from Congress in January.
Greene, in a more than 10-minute video posted online, explained her decision and said she’s “always been despised in Washington, D.C., and just never fit in.”
Greene’s resignation followed a public fallout with Trump in recent months, as the congresswoman criticized him for his stance on files related to Jeffrey Epstein, along with foreign policy and healthcare.
Trump branded her a “traitor” and “wacky” and said he would endorse a challenger against her when she ran for reelection next year.
She said her last day would be Jan. 5.
The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Friday night.
Greene was one of the most vocal and visible supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again politics, and she embraced some of his unapologetic political style.
Her break with him was a notable fissure in his grip over conservatives, particularly his most ardent base. But her decision to step down in the face of his opposition put her on the same track as many of the more moderate establishment Republicans before her who went crosswise with Trump.
Greene had been closely tied to the Republican president since she launched her political career five years ago.
In her video Friday, she underscored her longtime loyalty to Trump except on a few issues, and said it was “unfair and wrong” that he attacked her for disagreeing.
“Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative,’” she said.
Greene swept to office at the forefront of Trump’s MAGA movement and swiftly became a lightning rod on Capitol Hill for her often beyond-mainstream views.
As she embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and appeared with white supremacists, Greene was opposed by party leaders but welcomed by Trump. He called her “a real WINNER!”
Yet over time she proved a deft legislator, having aligned herself with then-GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who would go on to become House speaker. She was a trusted voice on the right flank, until McCarthy was ousted in 2023.
While there has been an onslaught of lawmakers from both parties heading for the exits ahead of next fall’s midterm elections, as the House struggles through an often chaotic session, Greene’s announced retirement will ripple throughout the ranks — and raise questions about her next moves.
Greene was first elected to the House in 2020. She initially planned to run in a competitive district in northern Atlanta’s suburbs, but relocated to the much more conservative 14th District in Georgia’s northwestern corner.
She showed a penchant for harsh rhetoric and conspiracy theories even before her election, suggesting a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was a coordinated attack to spur support for new gun restrictions. In 2018, she endorsed the idea that the U.S. government perpetrated the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and mused that a “so-called” plane had hit the Pentagon.
Greene argued in 2019 that Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), both Muslim women, weren’t “official” members of Congress because they used Qurans rather than Bibles in their swearing-in ceremonies.
Greene was once a sympathizer with QAnon, an online network that believes a global cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibals, including U.S. government leaders, operates a child sex trafficking ring. She eventually distanced herself, saying she got “sucked into some of the things I had seen on the internet.”
Price, Mascaro and Amy write for the Associated Press.
Los Angeles County prosecutors moved to drop manslaughter charges Friday against two Torrance police officers who shot and killed a Black man in 2018, attempting to end a seven-year saga that saw the case rejected and then reexamined by three different district attorneys.
Matthew Concannon and Anthony Chavez were indicted in 2023 for the shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, a 23-year-old car theft suspect who was in possession of an air rifle at the time he was killed.
Michael Gennaco, a special prosecutor hired earlier this year by Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman to review the case, filed a motion to dismiss charges late Thursday, saying he did not believe prosecutors could prove voluntary manslaughter at trial. Attorneys for the officers filed a joint motion in agreement, they said in court Friday.
But in a surprising move, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta declined to rule on the motion Friday, because the case is currently under the jurisdiction of the California Supreme Court. Concannon’s attorneys had previously filed a writ of habeas corpus after Ohta rejected a motion to dismiss the charges.
“I am not going to rule on this because it would be inappropriate for me to do that at this point. The Supreme Court has to tell us its decision,” Ohta said.
One of Concannon’s attorneys, Matthew Murphy, said he felt Ohta was punishing the defendants for exercising their right to challenge Ohta’s prior ruling. Ohta slapped that argument down, pointing out it was the defense team who put the case before the California Supreme Court.
Ohta signaled he wouldn’t decide the motion until the case was withdrawn from the Supreme Court, and even then, he would need time to review the filings.
Ohta said he was “surprised” that the motion was filed at 3 p.m. on Thursday, giving him little time to digest it ahead of Friday’s 8:30 a.m. appearance.
“It’s going to be a lot of work. I’m not just going to orally say yes go ahead and dismiss the case, case dismissed,” the judge said.
Murphy said he would move to withdraw the habeas filing.
Chavez and Concannon were among those investigated in 2021 when the district attorney’s office uncovered a thread of racist text messages sent by members of the Torrance Police Department. The Times has never seen evidence that either of the two officers sent racist messages, but the scandal infuriated community activists, who have long called for them to face justice for killing Mitchell.
Jeff Lewis, a civil attorney for Concannon, said his client “never sent or replied to any racist messages.”
The shooting incident occurred when officers approached Mitchell while he was seated in the car in a Ralph’s parking lot. They said they spotted what was later revealed to be a “break barrel air rifle” between his legs.
Concannon told authorities he saw Mitchell reaching for what he believed to be a real firearm and opened fire, according to the district attorney’s office. Chavez fired two rounds immediately after. The two officers then retreated and waited for backup.
Nearly 30 minutes elapsed before anyone checked on Mitchell, who was then pronounced dead of gunshot wounds, according to court records.
But Lawrence Middleton, the special prosecutor brought on by Gascón, did not obtain an indictment in the case until 2023, more than two years after he had been hired to reconsider charges in shootings by police.
Middleton appeared in the courtroom Friday morning and sat beside Mitchell’s mother and a number of activists who have long monitored the trial. All declined to comment.
Middleton previously argued the officers “created the jeopardy that led to the shooting,” by needlessly confronting Mitchell when he was not a threat and had no means of escaping arrest as the car was parked facing a wall, according to grand jury transcripts. But Ohta disallowed that evidence after a hearing in late 2023. The shooting happened in 2018, two years before a change in California law modified the threshold by which fatal uses of force are judged.
Hochman fired Middleton shortly after ousting Gascón in the 2024 election cycle, a move which drew praise from one of Concannon’s attorneys at the time. Gennaco was hired a short time later. He also declined to comment on Ohta’s refusal to rule on the dismissal motion.
In an interview, Hochman said that while he did not believe the officers were “innocent” he also did not think prosecutors could meet the legal bar needed to prove voluntary manslaughter. He said Gascón and Middleton bungled the case.
Hochman questioned Middleton’s attempt to argue that the officers executed the arrest of Mitchell so poorly that they caused the situation that required the use of deadly force.
That evidence of so-called “officer-created jeopardy” was deemed inadmissible by Ohta last year.
The evidence might have been admissible under a change in California law passed in 2020, which lowered the standard for charging officers in fatal use-of-force cases, but it did not apply retroactively, Hochman said.
“These are difficult cases. The fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean we won’t bring them when they are appropriate,” Hochman said. “I’d say we probably spent hundreds of hours on the 12 seconds that were involved in the case.”
Hochman would not say directly if he believed the officers should have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.
“What we’re saying is this would have been a potential charge for the grand jury to consider. I can’t tell you how the grand jury would have come out on it,” he said. “It certainly would have been something that was up for consideration.”
Chavez is no longer employed by the Torrance Police Department. Concannon remains on administrative leave. An agency spokesman declined to comment.
In the 2021 scandal, The Times uncovered messages that were replete with racial slurs and descriptions of violence against Black men and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“Gun cleaning Party at my house when they release my name??” one officer asked, according to a summary of the text messages made public in a 2022 court filing, which redacted the names of the officers sending the messages.
“Yes absolutely let’s all just post in your yard with lawn chairs in a [firing] squad,” another replied.
Lewis said in a letter to The Times that Concannon was “never a part of any text thread where an N-word was used to describe Mitchell’s family.”
Concannon and Chavez are the last officers connected to the scandal with pending cases.
Cody Weldin and Christopher Tomsic — whose criminal case led to the exposure of the scandal — struck a plea deal earlier this year to vandalism charges for spray painting a swastika on a car towed from a crime scene.
David Chandler, another officer investigated as part of the scandal, pleaded no contest earlier this month to assault charges for shooting a Black suspect in the back. Chandler will eventually see his case dismissed under the terms of the agreement.
All three officers had to give up their rights to be peace officers in California under the terms of their plea deals.
The Torrance Police Department and the California Attorney General’s office entered into an “enforceable” agreement to reform earlier this year.
YORBA LINDA — Eulogizing his old boss here last week, even Henry A. Kissinger couldn’t help note the irony: Richard Nixon himself–the man who kept a list of “enemies” in the media–probably would have been overwhelmed by all the good press he’d been getting after his death.
The tributes for Nixon were unending, the tones reverent. Imagery of King Lear and Sophocles, of an indomitable warrior and an anguished soul, of reconciliation and forgiveness–all were dominant themes in the media for days.
But now, particularly in the days since Nixon’s burial, the tone of public debate seems to have shifted again, as many critics who had maintained a respectful silence have begun to demand a harsher assessment of a man who never gave up reinventing himself. For them, the plaudits had grown too loud, too quickly.
“Now we’re seeing the backlash the other way,” said Daniel Schorr, a commentator for National Public Radio, who earned a spot on Nixon’s “enemies list” in the early 1970s.
The protests of “enough already” have come from a variety of forums–from radio call-in shows to letters to the editor and television and newspaper commentaries.
Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin historian who wrote a book on Watergate and has waged a years-long legal battle for access to more of Nixon’s records, says he is confident that the critical eye of history will largely erase the current wave of pro-Nixon nostalgia.
“I expected this kind of outpouring. Nixon spent 20 years working for it,” Kutler said. “But in the final analysis, whatever space he gets in the history books will begin with this sentence: ‘Richard Nixon, the first U. S. President to resign because of scandal . . . ‘ “
Said Tom Wicker, a New York Times columnist who wrote a widely cited biography of Nixon: “This outpouring of eulogies and great long lines (at the Yorba Linda viewing) show there was always a lot of support for Mr. Nixon among people who regretted he had to resign. . . . Out of a certain respect for the dead, (critics) haven’t had much to say lately. And only now are they coming around to say, ‘Wait a second, let’s look at reality.’ ”
Perhaps the most personal plea for more balance in the public’s ongoing farewells to Nixon has come from Jack Sirica, the son of the late federal judge who became famous because of Watergate.
A reporter for Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., Sirica said that colleagues had been urging him since Nixon’s death to write a column on his father and Nixon. He resisted for several days, he said, fearing his assessment would sound too harsh.
But Sirica said he changed his mind last week when he passed a school on his way to work and saw children playing around a flag at half-staff.
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He had already read a story saying many children thought Nixon was a pretty good guy, and it was then, seeing that flag, that he decided to write a column. The piece recounted his father’s disillusionment in listening to the infamous Watergate tapes, and it ran the day after Nixon’s funeral under a headline that read: “My Dad Decided Nixon Was a Crook.”
“What concerned me more than anything was that the enormity of the crime seemed to have been getting lost,” Sirica, 41, said in an interview. “Watergate had become, if not a minor footnote, then at least something that could be quickly dispensed with in the historical record.”
But for many among the conservative supporters that Nixon liked to refer to as the Silent Majority, the adulation will continue unabated for the onetime hero of the GOP. They see this as a time of long-overdue recognition for a man who has been unfairly vilified because of a single event in an otherwise distinguished career of public service.
Even after a state funeral attended by dignitaries from around the world Wednesday, mourners continued to turn out by the thousands throughout the week to pay their respects to the freshly sodded grave at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.
Brian Hayes, 32, took two days off work as a substitute teacher to pay homage to Nixon, and he waited patiently in line for the library to reopen to the public Thursday.
“My interest in politics came about because of him. I consider him the greatest statesman we ever had,” the Long Beach man said. “Despite Watergate, there’s an outpouring of affection for the man, and I think he richly deserves it.”
Cheri Pepka, 24, of Rancho Santa Margarita, cooed softly to her four small children about Nixon’s accomplishments as they waited to sign a guest book at the library, and she told them about a scrapbook she had started to commemorate his life and death.
“One day you’ll understand all of this. You’ll understand what he meant to our country,” she promised the children.
Democrats and Republicans alike stressed similar themes in the days following Nixon’s death on April 22, pointing to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, an arms control agreement with the former Soviet Union, an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and other achievements in foreign affairs.
Indeed, praise came from what once would have seemed unlikely corners.
President Clinton–who came of political age in the 1960s while protesting Nixon’s policies in Vietnam–called for a national “day of mourning” and delivered an eloquent eulogy on Nixon’s legacy. And former Sen. George McGovern, who also attended the funeral, spoke in an interview after the service about “reconciling” with the man who helped derail McGovern’s own failed bid for the Presidency in 1972 through a campaign of “dirty tricks.”
“About Nixon, Leaders Stress Triumphs, Not Downfall,” trumpeted the New York Times on its April 24 front page, a refrain carried by other newspapers around the country.
The favorable media coverage that Kissinger noted at last week’s funeral reflects a combination of dynamics–some that are particular to Nixon himself, others that are inevitable in any attempt to gauge public opinion, media and political observers say.
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In part, the positive reaction reflects the enormous efforts that Nixon made to rehabilitate his image, writing 10 books after his resignation and making frequent appearances on the world stage. As Schorr of NPR said: “He spent 20 years running for ex-President.”
In part, it reflects the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of the first state funeral for a President in more than two decades. And in part, it reflects the feeling that there is something unseemly about criticizing someone who has just died–no matter his scandals.
“It’s almost an America truism that you speak no ill of the dead,” said KABC radio talk-show host Michael Jackson. “I had one caller (on Nixon) who said: ‘My mother always told me if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. So goodby.’ ”
Yet Jackson said callers to his show resisted the general portrayal of Nixon in the media, openly criticizing the former President by about a 4:1 margin.
“They have been tough and blunt and to the point–that he’s been given a free ride,” Jackson said. “I was quite surprised. There were people who identified themselves as Republicans, and even they criticized him.”
Several scholars and media critics said they believe that Nixon’s treatment in the public eye after his death is an inevitable and, in some respects, appropriate phenomenon.
“When somebody dies, you try and look at the good things he did,” said Stephen Hess, a noted student of the media with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“We were not there to write Richard Nixon’s place in history, but to bury him. What you saw (in media coverage) was in part good manners and in part tradition,” he said. “I don’t really think that’s the time to be looking for balance.”
But Dick O’Neill, a longtime Democratic activist in Orange County who headed the state party, said he was overwhelmed by the glowing coverage that Nixon received.
“I thought, ‘Jesus, this is really something. They’re burying a field marshal,’ ” he said. “It just blew my mind, considering the guy was almost impeached. To say, ‘It’s over with, let’s forget it,’ I think that’s the best way.
“But the people here in Orange County, they went bananas. . . . The young people especially–I don’t know what happened to them. They amazed me how shook up they were, as if some relative had died,” he mused.
The low point for him, O’Neill said, came when an aide working on a Democratic campaign–”a young, progressive Democrat, “ he stressed–volunteered to drive a car for the Nixon funeral last week to help transport dignitaries. “It was beyond me,” he said.
Kutler, the Wisconsin historian, isn’t worried, though. The Nixon biographer and critic says he figures that in three months, when the 20th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation is recounted around the country, the fickle currents of public opinion will find Nixon’s supporters on the defensive once more.
“Then everyone’s going to remember again, they’re going to remember the humiliation that this country went through, the national disgrace,” he said. “And they’ll get it all straight again.”
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Times staff writer Lee Romney contributed to this report.
When Amelia Salehpour walked away from an Orange County drug treatment facility, her parents turned to the police for help. She was in danger — they were sure of it.
The 18-year-old checked herself out of Saddleback Recovery in Costa Mesa on a summer day in 2023, and hopped into a car with her ex-boyfriend and a man he called “Raider.” Together, they drove up to the San Fernando Valley.
After tracking his daughter down to what a prosecutor later called a “house of horrors” in Van Nuys, Ali Salehpour decided to call 911. Amelia, he said, struggled with mental illness and had the cognitive abilities of an eighth-grader, which made her vulnerable to manipulation. Her family pleaded for officers to come check on her.
The first cops arrived hours later. They knocked on a side gate and left after getting no response.
Undated handout photo of Amelia Salehpour who died in 2023 at age 18.
(Courtesy of Salehpour family)
The next day, after more prodding by Amelia’s father, police received permission to search some parts of the house but found no sign of her. Then, less than 24 hours later, someone inside the house called police to report a death. Officers found Amelia in a garage, next to syringes and a burned spoon with a sticky black substance.
The first LAPD investigators on scene ruled it an open-and-shut case of accidental overdose. The medical examiner’s office agreed, deciding against a more thorough autopsy.
But the family was unconvinced.
They hired a high-end investigative firm that said it uncovered evidence that Amelia was being groomed for sex work and that her death had only been made look like an overdose. A private autopsy paid for by the family found signs of strangulation.
The contradictory findings have since triggered a bitter conflict within local law enforcement. On one side are LAPD homicide detectives and some within the L.A. County district attorney’s office who maintain the original ruling of an overdose was correct.
Salehpour and his wife, Sue, maintain she was killed — and they are not alone.
Ali Salehpour reviews forensic examination evidence in the death of his daughter Amelia Salehpour. He and his wife are suing the city of L.A., alleging that LAPD officers botched or ignored numerous opportunities to save their daughter’s life.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
Earlier this year, a deputy district attorney filed criminal charges — which have since been dropped — against seven people based on evidence gathered by the family’s investigators and a pair of LAPD narcotics detectives.
Defense attorneys for the suspects have accused the Salehpours of being a rich family so blinded by the grief at losing their young daughter that they effectively bought a prosecution.
Amelia’s father is retired after helping build Applied Materials Inc., the country’s biggest supplier of equipment used to make microchips, into the $6-billion company that it is today.
Her parents said they are only doing what any parent would do in search of justice for their child — if they had the money.
Ali Salehpour said his goal from the family’s litigation is not a payout from the city.
“I’m not in this for the money,” he said. “I need [the LAPD] to do its job.”
Sue Salehpour’s voice still cracks and her eyes become watery when she talks about what happened to her daughter. Instead of admitting to their mishandling of the family’s initial pleas for help, the Police Department closed ranks and fought them at every step, she says.
“The LAPD let our daughter down, they let our daughter die in that house,” she said. “They made the decision that our daughter was a drug addict and mentally ill and they treated her that way.”
A family photo of Amelia Salehpour with her mother, Sue.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
From an early age growing up in the Bay Area city of Saratoga, Amelia was always the center of attention — “exuberant, silly, joyful,” her mother recalled. Her parents started calling her their “supernova.”
They sought to nurture Amelia’s talents by putting her in piano, violin and singing lessons.
Dark-haired, with piercing eyes, Amelia tried to maintain a normal teenage life. When she wasn’t glued to her phone, she was rifling through the racks at thrift stores or ordering Hello Kitty memorabilia online. On one birthday, her father surprised her by flying her down to L.A. to see her favorite band, emo rockers My Chemical Romance, at SoFi Stadium.
But underneath her bright smile, she struggled with a range of medical and mental health issues, her parents said.
In her early teens, her parents say, she began showing signs of borderline personality disorder, attention deficit disorder and depression. The symptoms worsened as she dealt with the loss of a cousin and both of her grandmothers in the span of a few years.
She tried to take her own life several times, and after one attempt, in 2019, her family says she was committed to a mental health facility. Soon, she began using drugs to self-medicate, keeping her parents in a state of constant worry. Desperate for a solution, they checked her into Rising Roads Recovery, a $30,000-a-month, women-only in-patient mental health treatment center.
A few months before her death, Amelia’s parents dropped her off at the clinic in Costa Mesa. In the weeks that followed, they allege in a lawsuit against Rising Roads filed in L.A. County Superior Court, the staff repeatedly misled them about Amelia’s worsening condition.
Cut off from her family and friends, she began suffering panic attacks after being sexually assaulted by another patient, the family’s lawsuit says. They claim Amelia confided in staff members that she heard nightly voices in her head suggesting she kill herself or harm others.
Ali and Sue Salehpour say they spent more than $1 million on private investigators to get to the bottom of what happened to their daughter.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
The Salehpours contend they were kept in the dark when Amelia was transferred to a sister facility for substance abuse, Saddleback, after she was caught with a vape pen.
Despite her ongoing struggles, the family’s lawsuit says that Saddleback staff allowed Amelia to check herself out of the facility on July 22, 2023. Around 3:49 p.m. that day, she walked out with a suitcase of clothes, five weeks’ worth of medication — and no cellphone or ID.
Surveillance video showed her getting into a car and driving off, the family’s lawsuit says.
An attorney for Rising Roads responded to an inquiry about Amelia’s case with a statement that said the center was “deeply saddened by her passing.”
“These are tragic and profoundly unfortunate circumstances. Rising Roads denies the allegations made against it and its staff, and maintains that its team acted professionally and in full compliance with all applicable standards, policies, and legal obligations,” said Brian Hoffman, declining to comment further.
Saddleback said it generally denied the allegations made in the Salehpours’ suit.
After learning that she may have been taken to the Van Nuys area, Amelia’s uncle, Armin, drove around for hours before spotting her outside a liquor store off Sepulveda Boulevard, which police say is a known hub for sex work.
Amelia got into his car and they cruised around for a while, talking. He tried without success to convince her to go with him back down to San Pedro, where her grandmother lived. Eventually she asked him to drop her off at a run-down house with a tall white fence at 15235 Runnymede St.
They agreed to meet the following day so that he could buy her a new cellphone. They took a selfie together, and Amelia turned to wave as she walked through the front door, her uncle testified at a preliminary hearing earlier this year.
When she didn’t show up for their meeting the next day, her parents feared the worst.
Although the perception lingers that violent crime is rampant in Los Angeles, statistically speaking murder is less common that it has been in decades. Yet even with fewer killings to investigate, homicide “clearance rates,” a measure of how often cases are solved by police, remain steady.
Cases become cold. Witnesses refuse to step forward. Killers cover their tracks.
In rare cases, slayings go undetected by authorities or are misclassified. Unlike others who have lost loved ones under circumstances that are unclear or in dispute, the Salehpours had the resources to ensure no stone was left unturned.
After Amelia failed to show up for the meeting with her uncle, the family contacted Black Box, a private security company. The firm, whose founder Edan Yemini once served as a personal security guard for Britney Spears, employs former military specialists from the U.S. and Israel to serve as armed bodyguards.
Black Box’s director of investigations, John Romero, a retired LAPD captain, called 911 on the family’s behalf.
The Salehpours have paid the company more than $1 million over three years, according to testimony in court and filings by attorneys for some of the defendants. They also hired a pair of high-powered civil lawyers, Alan Jackson, a former L.A. County prosecutor, and Caleb Mason, a former federal prosecutor in San Diego, to handle their lawsuits.
Officers showed up and left after Romero’s 911 call, but Black Box agents kept up round-the-clock surveillance of the house. They saw people going in and out, carrying boxes out of the house onto a flatbed truck as though they were “sanitizing a crime scene,” the family’s lawsuit says.
Amelia’s father, who had flown down from Northern California, kept watch overnight outside from the back of his rental car.
Crucially, the family’s lawsuit claims, the police who arrived the following afternoon and got permission to look around did only a partial search of the house, failing to look inside a garage on the property after one of the residents asked them not to disturb a person who was sleeping.
That’s where Amelia was discovered the next day.
While the rest of the house was in disarray, the room where she was found was almost spotless. Her family told The Times that the scene — her body splayed on the floor next to an open drawer with needles and a burned spoon with black tar heroin residue — was so neatly arranged that to them it looked staged.
An investigator from the Los Angeles Medical Examiner’s office put her time of death at between 16 and 24 hours before the body was found — meaning she was likely still alive when LAPD officers were at the house the day before, the family’s lawsuit says.
But because no foul play was suspected, authorities were slow to collect and process key evidence at the scene, the family argued.
The private autopsy the family commissioned found other DNA on Amelia’s underwear and under her fingernails, as well as evidence of “severe sexual trauma.”
Unlike the medical examiner’s assessment — which found signs of “lividity,” a medical name for the pooling of blood that occurs if a body is moved after someone has died — the private exam theorized it was bruising from places where Amelia was struck with a blunt object while still alive.
Authorities later arranged for a cadaver dog to search the Runnymede house, which indicated the presence of human remains in the garage where Amelia’s body was found, as well as an adjacent shed. Inside, investigators discovered a fan belt hanging from the ceiling.
Suspecting Amelia may have been bound or strangled there, the family also sought out Dr. William Smock, a forensic medicine expert with the Louisville (Ky.) Police Department. Smock had testified as an expert on strangulation as a witness for the prosecution in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
His conclusion, according to records provided by the family: Amelia had died a violent death.
In the meantime, Black Box’s investigation had started to resemble a full-fledged homicide case. Its investigators, some of whom are former homicide detectives, started running the plates of vehicles that were photographed coming and going from the house. They pulled together profiles of the house’s occupants using information available from data brokers — building a history of the home that was so detailed that Black Box could tell “who’s received pizza there,” Romero told The Times.
The family’s probe began to focus on the man nicknamed “Raider” who accompanied Amelia and her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Reyes, to the Valley the day she left the treatment center. His name was Marlon Mancillas, and an LAPD detective testified in court that he was a reputed Blythe Street gang member with a lengthy criminal past that included a 2019 conviction for aiding a murder suspect’s efforts to elude capture.
Black Box visited Mancillas in jail, where he was locked up on auto theft charges, and he agreed to speak to them in exchange for money. That Christmas, they put about $1,000 on his books.
Nubia Diaz, an attorney for Mancillas, said her client “has always maintained his innocence.”
In an interview with another resident of the Runnymede house, the private investigators said they learned something that the Salehpours had long feared: that the police’s visit on July 24 had so panicked the occupants of the home. that “Amelia became a liability and they decided to kill her,” the family said in its lawsuit against the LAPD.
The family went back to the authorities with their new evidence.
But rather than revisit the initial findings, the lawsuit filed by the Salehpours claims, the LAPD’s Valley homicide unit and the medical examiner’s office closed ranks and refused to budge.
Unbeknown to the Salehpours and Black Box, a pair of LAPD narcotics detectives, Alexander Tan and Jose Verdin, were also investigating the Runnymede house for drug trafficking.
Tan and Verdin arrested the ex-wife of one of the home’s residents and brought her in for questioning, hoping that she would help them break the case, according to court testimony. The woman, who was on parole, offered to give police information about the Runnymede house. She asked them if they knew about a “dead girl.”
Neither detective knew what she was talking about.
Verdin testified at a preliminary hearing earlier this year that he first learned of the family’s investigation a few months into his own probe of the Runnymede address — a known “flop house” where police had received more than 300 calls for service since 2017. Weeks before Amelia’s death, officers had responded there for a report of a man beating a woman with an aluminum bat.
The home was outfitted with a security system that allowed its occupants to monitor the home’s exterior, and young women were seen coming and going throughout the day, suggesting the possibility that they were trafficked, testified Verdin, a 30-year LAPD veteran who ran the Van Nuys drug squad. When police served a search warrant on the house in February, they found 26 assault-style rifles in one of the bedrooms, he said.
Verdin contended in a whistleblower government claim against the city that as he began to unearth evidence suggesting Amelia may have been killed, LAPD higher-ups set out to “systematically” dismantle the case. His claim says the department took the extraordinary step of requiring its own detectives to obtain a court order to get access to certain body camera footage.
The city has not yet responded to the detective’s claim, which is usually a precursor to a lawsuit.
At a meeting on Sept. 12 with his higher-ups, Verdin said in his claim that he suggested the case be turned over to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. Instead, his claim alleges, he was told to “leave it alone.”
“We’re not helping the family sue us,” Verdin claims an LAPD official said.
Then, Verdin said his bosses moved his partner Tan out of narcotics without notice. And while Tan was assured that he would be given time to continue working on the case, he was soon buried with new assignments, according to Verdin’s claim.
The narcotics detectives had been in communication with Ranna Jahanshahi, a prosecutor in the L.A. County district attorney’s office. She found the evidence compelling enough to pursue charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment among others against seven defendants, including Amelia’s ex-boyfriend Reyes and the man he was driving with, Mancillas, aka “Raider.”
All of the defendants pleaded not guilty.
Dyke Huish, an attorney for Reyes, said his client faced charges even though he only dropped Amelia off in the Valley.
“This is ultimately about a young girl that passed away tragically, and parents who could not accept the reality of drug overdoses and hard living by a girl who had serious drug addictions,” he said. “I’m certain that they loved their daughter very much, but rather than accept the reality, they attempted to force it into a narrative that better suited what they wanted to believe about their daughter.”
Jahanshahi declined to comment in response to an inquiry from The Times. In an email to leadership at the D.A.’s office, she described facing resistance from colleagues along with police and medical examiners officials with whom she normally worked closely.
As she clashed with some in her office over the prosecution, her original co-counsel was suddenly reassigned. His replacement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Fred Engell, privately expressed his misgivings about the cases both to colleagues and defense attorneys.
At a hearing in mid-September, Jahanshahi lashed out at Engell in open court, accusing him of “going behind her back” and conspiring to get her removed from the case.
In her email to leaders at the D.A.’s office, Jahanshahi wrote that she had been dealing with the mental toll of fighting for justice while being constantly undermined. “I cannot take any more spoken or silently whispered backstabbing and bludgeoning of my character and identity,” she wrote in the message late last month.
Lawyers for the seven defendants have seized on the inter-office discord.
In a motion to remove Jahanshahi from the case, one defense attorney described her as a “rogue prosecutor” who had gotten emotionally entangled with the Salehpours and was leaking them discovery evidence to use in their civil case.
During a court hearing in downtown L.A. on Sept. 25, Superior Court Judge Charlene Olmedo said that she wouldn’t tolerate any game-playing by either side.
“I don’t know what’s going on in your office, I don’t know what’s going on in LAPD. I don’t know what is going on with this case,” a visibly frustrated Olmedo said to Jahanshahi.
Then, in late October, charges against all seven defendants were dropped with no public explanation from the D.A.’s office.
LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, foreground, speaks at a news conference in 2024.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Mancillas’ attorney called the decision to dismiss the charges “the right one.”
“The evidence did not support the allegations against my client,” Diaz said. “We are grateful that the legal process ultimately reflected that.”
LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton, who oversaw the department’s Valley Bureau at the time of Amelia’s death, said that he was “more familiar with the case than I care to be.”
“I don’t have to tell you: Money and influence equals power,” he said in an interview before the charges were dismissed, adding he was limited in what he could say to avoid compromising what remained an ongoing criminal investigation.
The Salehpours told The Times they were invited to a meeting last week with Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman and nearly two dozen senior members of his office, where Hochman told them that he believed that their daughter had been killed. But in order to pursue a murder case at this juncture, they said Hochman told them, it would be necessary to first drop the kidnapping and false imprisonment charges and continue to investigate further.
Keeping the lesser charges in place risked running afoul of state laws that forbid “double jeopardy” or prosecuting a defendant twice for the same alleged crime, the Salehpours said the D.A. explained.
Reluctantly, the Salehpours said, they accepted the decision to drop the charges.
According to the Salehpours, Hochman said he couldn’t make promises about any future charges but assured them that the case would be investigated by the major crimes unit, which handles the D.A.’s highest-profile and complex homicide cases. He also assured them that he would call LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell to ensure that their respective agencies were on the same page.
For Ali Salehpour, it felt somewhat vindicating to hear those words. Yet years of fighting to get police and prosecutors to take his claims seriously made him leery.
“I don’t know if he did that just to appease us. That’s my biggest fear,” Salehpour said. “Did he just say that to make us happy, and to shut us up?”
Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.
President Trump’s tight grip on the GOP, long assumed to be an inevitable feature of American life (like gravity or the McRib’s seasonal return), has started to loosen.
Republicans are now openly defying him. The man who once ruled the GOP like a casino boss can’t even strong-arm Indiana Republicans into gerrymandering themselves properly.
This sort of resistance didn’t emerge overnight. It fermented like prison wine or bad ideas in a faculty lounge. First came the Iran bombing: an early shock that suggested “America First” might also mean “Israel First,” at least to the populist-nationalist camp inside the GOP.
Then came the effort to muffle the Jeffrey Epstein files, a notion so foreign to MAGA’s ethos that the subsequent drama, according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), “ripped MAGA apart.”
Greene also expressed concern that the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies are set to lapse, and that Republicans have no plan to fix the imminent premium spikes — an occurrence that threatens to alienate the very working-class voters that MAGA now insists it represents.
The common thread in these stories is the sense that Trump’s days are numbered. The question of “Who gets MAGA when Dad can no longer operate the remote?” has become unavoidable.
True, pundits have been prematurely writing Trump’s political obituary since he first came down that escalator. But it feels different this time. The question is why.
There are likely numerous reasons, but I’ve zeroed in on the five that I think are the most important.
The first, and most obvious, reason is that Trump is now a lame duck, and everyone knows it.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) made the logic explicit when, during the Epstein-file fight, he warned his colleagues: “Donald Trump can protect you in red districts right now … but by 2030, he’s not going to be president, and you will have voted to protect pedophiles if you don’t vote to release those files.”
Once politicians and influencers start imagining their post-Trump resumes, his spell over them shatters. This probably explains why Trump has dangled the idea of an unconstitutional third term.
The second reason we are seeing Trump’s grip weaken is that, frankly, Trump’s not popular. In fact, according to a new Reuters poll, his approval rating is just 38%.
This rating plummets when it comes to the issues that divide Republicans. For example, according to that same survey, a mere 20% of American adults — including just 44% of Republicans — approve of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files.
The third reason is that Trump is increasingly isolated from the constituency that once fine-tuned his political instincts.
The Trump of 2016-2020 essentially crowdsourced his political instincts at rallies, where he learned to read the room like a comedian. Now he’s physically isolated and increasingly out of touch with his base. His inner circle consists of ideologues and billionaires — people who don’t worry about the price of milk.
So when Trump insists the economy is thriving, as he hosts Gatsby-themed soirees and tears down the East Wing of the White House to build a new ballroom, populists look up from their grocery bills, spy Trump on TV meeting with the Saudi crown prince, and are suddenly flooded with buyer’s remorse. This creates an opening, and the movement’s would-be heirs can sense it.
Of course, Trump could conceivably adjust his policies and rhetoric in an effort to restore his populist appeal.
But the fourth reason for Trump’s loss of power within the GOP concerns his mortality: Trump is the oldest person to win the presidency in U.S. history. He has had two “annual” physicals this calendar year — including an MRI no one will adequately explain (this is not part of a routine physical).
This brings us to the fifth and final reason the cracks are starting to show: Trump’s 2024 coalition was always like a game of Jenga.
It was a convenient alliance of disparate factions and individuals whose interests converged because Trump’s charisma (and lack of a coherent political worldview) was like the glue holding incompatible pieces together. But as that binding force weakens, the contradictions become clear, and open warfare is inevitable.
For years now, Trump imposed peace the way an aging rock frontman keeps peace within a band. But once that star starts forgetting lyrics or showing up late, his bandmates start imagining solo careers.
We’re watching MAGA realize that the Trump era is ending, and that the next battle is about what — or who — will fill the vacuum when he’s gone.
San Francisco Bay Area Democrat Eric Swalwell, a nettlesome foil and frequent target of President Trump and Republicans, on Thursday announced his bid for California governor.
The congressman declared his bid during an appearance on the ABC late-night show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, adding a little Hollywood flourish to a crowded, somewhat sleepy race filled with candidates looking for ways to catch fire in the 2026 election.
Voter interest in the race remains relatively moribund, especially after two of California’s most prominent Democrats — former Vice President Kamala Harris and current U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla — opted to skip the race after months of speculation. About 44% of registered voters said in late October that they had not picked a preferred candidate to lead California, which is the most populous state in the union and has the fourth-largest economy in the world.
The lack of a blockbuster candidate in the race, however, continues to entice others to jump in. Earlier this week, billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer announced his bid, and other well-known Democrats are exploring a possible run.
Swalwell, a 45-year-old former Republican and former prosecutor who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020, said his decision was driven by the serious problems facing California and the threats posed to the state and nation with Trump in the White House.
“People are scared and prices are high, and I see the next governor of California having two jobs — one to keep the worst president ever out of our homes, streets and lives,” Swalwell said in an interview with The Times. “The second job is to bring what I call a new California, and that’s especially and most poignantly on housing and affordability in a state where we have the highest unemployment rate in the country, and the average age for a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old, and so we need to bring that down.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom cannot run for reelection because of term limits, and he is currently weighing a 2028 presidential bid.
None of the candidates in the race, including Swalwell, possess the statewide notoriety, success or fundraising prowess of California’s most recent governors: Newsom, California political icon Jerry Brown and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“If you look at the past three governors, they’ve all had personalities,” said Jim DeBoo, Newsom’s former chief of staff, at a political conference at USC on Tuesday. “When you’re looking at the field right now, most people don’t know” much about the candidates in the crowded race despite their political bona fides.
Nearly a dozen prominent Democrats and Republicans are running for governor next year, including: former Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa: Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond; former Controller Betty Yee and conservative commentator Steve Hilton. And speculation continues to swirl about billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta possibly entering the race.
On Thursday, Thurmond proposed a tax on the wealthy to fund education, healthcare, firefighting and construction. The proposal was seen in part as a subtle dig at Steyer and Caruso, both of whom have used their wealth to fund previous runs for office.
“The naysayers say California’s ultra wealthy already pay enough, and that taxing billionaires will stifle innovation and force companies to leave our state,” he said in an online video. “I don’t buy it.”
Steyer painted his decision to leave the hedge fund he created in California as an example of his desire to give back to the state’s residents in an ad that will begin airing on Friday.
“It’s really goddamn simple. Tackle the cost-of-living crises or get the hell out of the way. Californians are the hardest-working people in the country. But the question is who’s getting the benefit of this,” he says in the ad, arguing that he took on corporations that refused to pay state taxes as well as oil and tobacco companies. “Let’s get down to brass tacks: It’s too expensive to live here.”
Porter also went after Steyer, another sign that the intensity of the race is heating up as the June primary fast approaches.
“A new billionaire in our race claims he’ll fight the very industries he got rich helping grow — fossil fuel companies, tobacco and private immigration detention facilities — at great cost to Californians,” she wrote on X on Wednesday.
The former congresswoman was the subject of recent attacks from Democratic rivals in the governor’s race after videos emerged of her scolding a reporter and swearing at an aide. Yee said she should drop out of the race and Villaraigosa blistered her in ads.
Villaraigosa also attacked Becerra for his connection to the scandal that rocked Sacramento last week, involving money from one of his campaign accounts being funneled to his former chief of staff while Becerra served in the Biden administration.
“We don’t have a strong or robust opposition party in California, so you end up like seeing a lot of this action on the dance floor in the primary, obviously, between Democrats, which is going to be interesting,” said Elizabeth Ashford, who worked for Schwarzenegger, Brown and Harris and currently advises Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. “There’s obviously a lot of longtime relationships and longtime loyalties and interactions between these folks. And so what’s going to happen? Big question mark.”
The ability to protect California from Trump’s policies and political vindictiveness and deal with the state’s affordability, housing and homelessness crisis will be pivotal to Swalwell’s potential path to the governor’s mansion. His choice to announce his decision on Kimmel’s show was telling — the host’s show was briefly suspended by Walt Disney-owned ABC under pressure from Trump after Kimmel made comments about the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel thanked Swalwell for his support during that period, which included the congressman handing out pro-Kimmel merchandise to his colleagues in Washington, D.C., before the two discussed the future of the state.
“I love California, it’s the greatest country in the world. Country,” Swalwell said. “But that’s why it pisses me off to see Californians running through the fields where they work from ICE agents or troops in our streets. It’s horrifying. Cancer research being canceled. It’s awful to look at. And our state, this great state, needs a fighter and a protector, someone who will bring prices down, lift wages up.”
There is a history of Californians announcing campaigns on late-night television. Schwarzenegger launched his 2003 gubernatorial bid on “The Tonight Show,” hosted by Jay Leno; Swalwell announced his unsuccessful presidential bid on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Swalwell said, he traveled to nearly 40 countries, and he would try to leverage the relationships he formed by creating an ambassador program to find global research money for California given the cuts the Trump administration has made to cancer research and other programs.
The congressman is perhaps best known for criticizing Trump on cable news programs. But he’s faced ample attacks as well.
In 2020, Swalwell came under scrutiny because of his association with Chinese spy Fang Fang, who raised money for his congressional campaign. He cut off ties with her in 2015 after intelligence officials briefed him and other members of Congress about Chinese efforts to infiltrate the legislative body. He was not accused of impropriety.
He is also being investigated by the Department of Justice over mortgage fraud allegations, which he dismissed as retribution for him being a full-throated critic of Trump.
Swalwell served on the City Council of the East Bay city of Dublin before being elected to Congress in 2012 by defeating Rep. Pete Stark, a fellow Democrat.
An Iowa native, Swalwell grew up in Dublin, which he said was “a town of low-income expectations” that was smeared as “Scrublin” at the time. He said that after graduating from law school, he served on the local planning commission that helped transform Dublin. The town increased housing, attracted Fortune 500 employers, exponentially improved the number of students going to college and leveraged developers to improve schools, resources for senior citizens, and police and fire services.
“We have a Whole Foods, which no one can afford to shop at,” he said.
The Trump administration filed a federal suit Thursday against California and its public university systems, alleging its practice of offering in-state college tuition rates to undocumented immigrants who graduate from California high schools is illegal.
The suit, which named Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, the UC Board of Regents, the Cal State University Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors for the California Community Colleges, also seeks to end some provisions in the California Dream Act, which in part allows students who lack documentation to apply for state-funded financial aid.
“California is illegally discriminating against American students and families by offering exclusive tuition benefits for non-citizens,” U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement. “This marks our third lawsuit against California in one week — we will continue bringing litigation against California until the state ceases its flagrant disregard for federal law.”
Higher education and state officials were not immediately available to comment.
The tuition suit targets Assembly Bill 540, which passed with bipartisan support in 2001 and offers in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who completed high school in California. The law also offers in-state tuition to U.S. citizens who graduated from California schools but moved out of the state before enrolling in college.
Between 2,000 and 4,000 students attending the University of California — with its total enrollment of nearly 296,000 — are estimated to be undocumented. Across California State University campuses, there are about 9,500 immigrants without documentation enrolled out of 461,000 students. The state’s biggest undocumented group, estimated to be 70,000, are community college students.
The Trump administration’s challenge to California’s tuition statute focuses on a 1996 federal law that says people in the U.S. without legal permission should “not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state … for any post-secondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit … without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.”
Scholars have debated whether that law affects California’s tuition practices since AB 540 applies to citizens and noncitizens alike.
Thursday’s complaint was filed in Eastern District of California, and it follows similar actions the Trump administration has taken against Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, Oklahoma and Minnesota.
MIAMI — U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida has been indicted on charges accusing her of stealing $5 million in federal disaster funds and using some of the money to aid her 2021 campaign, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
The Democrat is accused of stealing Federal Emergency Management Agency overpayments that her family healthcare company had received through a federally funded COVID-19 vaccination staffing contract, federal prosecutors said. A portion of the money was then funneled to support her campaign through candidate contributions, prosecutors allege.
“Using disaster relief funds for self-enrichment is a particularly selfish, cynical crime,” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement. “No one is above the law, least of all powerful people who rob taxpayers for personal gain. We will follow the facts in this case and deliver justice.”
A phone message left at Cherfilus-McCormick’s Washington office was not immediately returned.
Cherfilus-McCormick was first elected to Congress in 2022 in the 20th District, representing parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties, in a special election after Rep. Alcee Hastings died in 2021.
In December 2024, a Florida state agency sued a company owned by Cherfilus-McCormick’s family, saying it overcharged the state by nearly $5.8 million for work done during the pandemic and wouldn’t give the money back.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management said it made a series of overpayments to Trinity Healthcare Services after hiring it in 2021 to register people for COVID-19 vaccinations. The agency says it discovered the problem after a single $5-million overpayment drew attention.
Cherfilus-McCormick was the chief executive of Trinity at the time.
The Office of Congressional Ethics said in a January report that Cherfilus-McCormick’s income in 2021 was more than $6 million higher than in 2020, driven by nearly $5.75 million in consulting and profit-sharing fees received from Trinity Healthcare Services.
In July, the House Ethics Committee unanimously voted to reauthorize an investigative subcommittee to examine allegations involving Cherfilus-McCormick.
