The mother of a local tennis star joined Los Angeles County prosecutors on Monday in calling for stricter DUI penalties in California after they say her son was killed by a two-time drunk driver.
Braun Levi, an 18-year-old South Bay tennis standout, was struck and killed by a car in the early-morning hours of May 4 in Manhattan Beach.
According to Los Angeles County prosecutors, 33-year-old Jenia Resha Belt was behind the wheel, speeding while driving on a suspended license and with a blood alcohol level almost twice the legal limit. Belt, prosecutors say, has a previous conviction for driving drunk.
“California’s current DUI laws are broken and weak and fail to protect families like ours, and it’s devastating,” Braun’s mother, Jennifer Levi, said at a news conference Monday. “His death haunts my every breath, every day.”
Although his parents were proud of his athletic and academic achievements, they were most proud of how he treated other people, Levi said. “He had a smile for everybody. He had a heart for everybody. I miss him so much.”
In light of her son’s death, Levi said she would work with state Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera), whose granddaughter died after being hit by a drunk driver last year, to write and pass a bill that will restructure the state’s DUI penalty laws and requirements, she said.
“The feeling, the sight, the smell of identifying our son’s body will never leave my mind, body or soul, so I will not be silent,” she said.
The SoCal athlete, who died a month before his high school graduation after entering the top national ranks in boys tennis, is part of a larger trend of DUI-related deaths over the last 15 years, according to a CalMatters investigative series that L.A. Dist. Atty. Nathan J. Hochman referenced.
Roadway deaths have been steadily rising since 2010, partially due to repeat drunk drivers and people driving over the speed limit, CalMatters reported. Alcohol-related deaths have increased by 50% over the last decade, according to the investigation.
“Braun should be home right now from his first semester at UVA, spending the holidays with his family, their first as a family still displaced by the Palisades fire,” said Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades.
“He should be planning his future, not being remembered for the way his life was taken from him.”
California’s DUI laws, although considered to be nation-leading in the 1980s, have fallen behind the curve, Hochman said.
Hochman warned drivers, especially ahead of the New Year’s Day holiday, that his office would continue to charge them — and potentially those who over-serve alcohol at bars or parties — with serious crimes.
“We are here to prevent crimes and send crystal clear messages to would-be drunk and drug drivers, to people who want to engage in excessive speed on our roads: We will come after you,” Hochman said, calling the issue a “fight for people’s lives.”
Belt is charged with second-degree murder, felony gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and a misdemeanor count of driving with a suspended license after a DUI. She is being held on $2-million bail and faces life in prison if convicted.
There was no shortage of engrossing art with which to engage in Southern California museums during the past year, although the considerable majority of it had been made only within the past 50 years or so. Art’s global history before the Second World War continues to play a decided second fiddle to contemporary art in special exhibitions.
Our picks for this year’s best in arts and entertainment.
The chief exception: the Getty, where its Brentwood anchor and Pacific Palisades outpost accounted for three of the 10 most engrossing museum exhibitions in 2025, all 10 presented here in order of their opening dates. (Four are still on view.)
Art museums across the country continue to struggle in attendance and fundraising after the double-whammy of the lengthy COVID-19 pandemic shut-down followed by culture war attacks from the Trump administration. That may help explain the unusually lengthy, seven- to 14-month duration of half of these shows.
Gustave Caillebotte, “Floor Scrapers,” 1875, oil on canvas.
(Musée d’Orsay )
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men. Getty Center
An emphasis on men’s daily lives is very unusual in French Impressionist art. Women are more prominent as subject matter in scores of paintings by marquee names like Monet, Cassatt and Degas. But homosocial life in late-19th century Paris was the fascinating focus of this show, the first Los Angeles museum survey of Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings in 30 years.
A view into a dance gallery is framed by Guadalupe Rosales’ “Concourse/C3” installation.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Guadalupe Rosales – Tzahualli: Mi Memoria en Tu Reflejo. Palm Springs Art Museum
Vibrant Chicano youth subcultures of 1990s Los Angeles, during the fraught era of Rodney King and the AIDS epidemic, are embedded in the art of one of its enthusiastic participants. Guadalupe Rosales layers her archival work onto pleasure and freedom today, as was seen in this vibrant exhibition, offering a welcome balm during another period of outsized social distress.
Don Bachardy, “Christopher Isherwood,” June 20, 1979; acrylic on paper.
(Don Bachardy Paper / Huntington Library)
Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits. The Huntington
The nearly 70-year retrospective of portrait drawings in pencil and paint by Los Angeles artist Don Bachardy revealed the works to be like performances: Both artist and sitter participated in putting on a pictorial show. The extended visual encounter between two people, its intimacy inescapable, culminates in the two “actors” autographing their performed picture.
“Probably Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha,” China, Tang Dynasty, circa 700-800; marble.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia. LACMA. Through July 12
“Realms of the Dharma” isn’t exactly an exhibition. Instead, it’s a temporary, 14-month installation of Buddhist sculptures, paintings and drawings from the museum’s impressive permanent collection, plus a few additions. It’s worth noting here, though, because almost all of its marvelous pieces were in storage (or traveling) for more than seven years, during the lengthy tear-down of a prior LACMA building and construction of a new one, and much of it will disappear again when the installation closes next summer.
Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas.
(Anna Arca)
Noah Davis. UCLA Hammer Museum
A tight survey of 50 works, all made by Noah Davis in the brief span between 2007 and the L.A.-based artist’s untimely death in 2015 at just 32, told a poignant story of rapid artistic growth brutally interrupted. Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even while still in invigorating development.
Weegee (Arthur Fellig), “The Gay Deceiver, 1939/1950, gelatin silver print. Getty Museum
(Getty Museum)
Queer Lens: A History of Photography. Getty Center
Assembling some 270 photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, “Queer Lens” looked at work produced after the 1869 invention of the binaries of “heterosexual and homosexual,” just a short generation after the 1839 invention of the camera. Transformations in the expression of gender and sexuality by scores of artists as well-known as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske were tracked along with more than a dozen unknowns.
“Sealstone With a Battle Scene (The Pylos Combat Agate),” Minoan, 1630-1440 BC; banded agate, gold and bronze.
(Jeff Vanderpool)
The Kingdom of Pylos: Warrior-Princes of Ancient Greece. Getty Villa. Through Jan. 12
The star of this look into the ancient, not widely known Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos was a tiny agate, barely 1.3 inches wide, making its public debut outside Europe. The exquisitely carved stone, unearthed by archaeologists in 2017, shows two lean but muscled warriors going at it over the sprawled body of a dead comrade. Perhaps made in Crete, the idealized naturalism of a battle scene rendered in shallow three-dimensional space threw a stylistic monkey-wrench into our established understanding of Greek culture 3,500 years ago.
Ken Gonzales-Day digitally erased Illinois Black lynching victim Charlie Mitchell from an 1897 postcard to focus instead on the perpetrators.
(USC Fisher Museum of Art)
Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s “Nevermade.” USC Fisher Museum of Art. Through March 14
The ways in which identities of race, gender and class are erased in a society dominated by straight white patriarchy animates the first mid-career survey of Los Angeles–based artist Ken Gonzales-Day. The riveting centerpiece is his extensive meditation on the American mass-hysteria embodied by the horrific practice of lynching, in which Gonzales-Day employed digital techniques to erase the brutalized victims (and the ropes) in grisly photographs of the murders. Focus shifts the viewer’s gaze toward the perpetrators — an urgent and timely transference, given the shredding of civil society underway today.
Kara Walker deconstructed a monument to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson for “Unmanned Drone,” as seen at the Brick gallery as part of “Monuments.”
(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)
Monuments. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick. Through May 3
The nearly two-year delay in opening “Monuments,” an exhibition of toppled Confederate and Jim Crow statues that pairs cautionary art history with thoughtful and poetic retorts by a variety of artists, turned out to give the much anticipated undertaking an especially potent punch. As the Trump Administration restores a white supremacist sheen to “Lost Cause” mythology by renaming military installations after Civil War traitors and returning sculptures and paintings of them to prior perches, from which they had been removed, this sober and incisive analysis of what’s at stake is nothing less than crucial.
Peak moment: As a metaphor of white supremacy, Kara Walker’s transformation of the ancient “man on a horse” motif into a monstrous headless horseman — a Euro-American corpse that tortures the living and refuses to die — resonates loudly.
Installation view of sculptures and a painting by Robert Therrien at the Broad.
(Joshua White / Broad museum)
Robert Therrien: This Is a Story. The Broad. Through April 5
The late Los Angeles-based artist Robert Therrien (1947-2019) had a distinctive, even quirky capacity for teasing out a conceptual space between ordinary domestic objects and their mysterious personal meanings. In 120 paintings, drawings, photographs and especially sculptures, this Therrien exhibition offers objects hovering somewhere between immediately recognizable and perplexingly alien, wryly funny and spiritually profound.
Vince Zampella, the video game developer who helped launch the wildly lucrative and enduring “Call of Duty” franchise and “Apex Legends” studio Respawn Entertainment, has died.
A representative for Electronic Arts, which owns Respawn, confirmed Zampella’s death Monday in a statement shared with The Times. He was 55.
Zampella was one of two people who died Sunday afternoon in a car crash along Angeles Crest Highway, NBC 4 reported. The crash involved a red 2026 Ferrari 296 GTS, and the identities of the deceased are pending release by the county coroner, said California Highway Patrol spokesperson Sgt. Daniel Keene.
Zampella was a noted sports car collector, often sharing photos of his luxury vehicles and visits to car races on Instagram.
“This is an unimaginable loss, and our hearts are with Vince’s family, his loved ones, and all those touched by his work,” said the Electronic Arts representative in a statement. “Vince’s influence on the video game industry was profound and far-reaching.”
The CHP said in a Sunday news release that it received a call at 12:43 p.m. about a crash at Mile Post 62.70 of the scenic drive, which reopened in August after a years-long closure due to storm damage. Officers responded to the scene of the crash, and a preliminary investigation found that a car had been traveling southbound when, “for unknown reasons, the vehicle veered off the roadway, struck a concrete barrier, and became fully engulfed,” according to the release.
“The passenger was ejected from the vehicle, and the driver remained trapped,” the CHP statement said. “Both parties succumbed to their injuries.”
Video emerged online showing a red Ferrari shooting out of a tunnel along the highway at a high speed, slamming into a concrete barrier where the road curved and erupting into flames.
The 2026 Ferrari 296 GTS is a hybrid convertible powered by a twin-turbo 3.0-liter V6 and an electric motor, producing a combined 819 horsepower.
The CHP said Sunday it was unclear whether drugs or alcohol were a factor in the crash.
Zampella was a formative figure in the modern gaming scene. Alongside Jason West and former creative partner Grant Collier, he co-founded the original “Call of Duty” studio, Infinity Ward, in 2002 and released the first installment of the first-person military shooting game in 2003. Activision acquired the studio that same year. Since its inception, “Call of Duty” has spawned dozens of sequels and spin-offs across various consoles and platforms, most recently “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7,” released in November.
He and West, after an acrimonious split with Activision, founded Respawn Entertainment in 2010. Though West departed Respawn in 2013 due to unspecified family issues, Zampella remained head of the studio, overseeing the creation of titles including “Titanfall,” “Apex Legends” and “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.” Additionally, Respawn expanded its lineup with the story-driven “Star Wars” titles “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order” and “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,” starring Cameron Monaghan.
Zampella also led the L.A. branch of Swedish video game developer DICE, which was renamed in 2021 to Ripple Effect Studios, and was appointed to oversee its “Battlefield” franchise.
“A friend, colleague, leader and visionary creator, his work helped shape modern interactive entertainment and inspired millions of players and developers around the world,” Electronic Arts said in its statement. “His legacy will continue to shape how games are made and how players connect for generations to come.”
Zampella is survived by his three children, Quentin, 26; Kyle, 22; and Courtney, 19.
