Veteran comedian, actor and Southern California native T.K. Carter has died. He was 69.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies arrived at the actor’s Duarte home Friday evening after receiving a call about an unresponsive male, the Associated Press reported. He was declared dead at the scene. No foul play is suspected, though officials have not yet released a cause of death.
Born Thomas Kent Carter in New York City, Carter was raised in the San Gabriel Valley, according to IMDb.
After several small roles in 1970s sitcoms, including “Good Times,” “The Waltons” and “The Jeffersons,” he found his breakthrough role in the 1982 horror movie “The Thing” as the chef Nauls.
He went on to play teacher Mike Fulton in “Punky Brewster” and Clarence Hull in “The Sinbad Show,” among a host of other film and television credits through the 1980s and ‘90s.
In later decades of his career, he took on consulting roles in addition to on-screen appearances.
He worked with Chris Tucker as a dialect coach on the 1998 film “Rush Hour,” and was brought on to the set of the 1996 movie “Space Jam” to help the film’s star, Michael Jordan, learn lines and feel more comfortable in front of the camera.
“T.K. was a terrific actor, and I wanted him to help Michael with his dialogue,” director Joe Pytka told The Times in 2020.
While Carter was best known for his comedic work, describing himself in his Instagram bio as a writer and performer “born to act and make you laugh,” he also took on more serious roles.
He starred in the 2000 HBO miniseries “The Corner,” a drama in which he played Gary McCullough, a west Baltimore father struggling with addiction.
“I just totally felt for Gary,” Carter told The Times. “I’ve had drug problems and cocaine addiction. I lost my father to a drug-related death. I’ve lost a lot of friends. I was fortunate to come out on the other side and get my life together. But I haven’t forgotten. I kept Gary with me all the time. I slept Gary. I breathed Gary.”
As news of the actor’s passing spread, friends and colleagues took to social media with tributes.
“As a young kid, I looked up to T. K. because seeing an African American actor starring in a major film meant a lot to me. I always felt he was headed for stardom,” entrepreneur Shavar Ross posted on X. “I want to send my heartfelt condolences to his family, his friends, and everyone who loved and admired his work. He will always be remembered and respected.”
The UCLA baseball team was cleared to resume using its baseball stadium at noon Tuesday after a judge temporarily lifted an order barring the team from the stadium on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ West Los Angeles campus.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter entered an order Monday restoring UCLA’s access to Jackie Robinson Stadium through July 4, allowing the team to complete its coming season. After that, the stadium will face an uncertain fate.
After a four-week trial this summer, Carter ruled the lease to UCLA of 10 acres on which the stadium sits was illegal because it did not predominantly focus on service to veterans. He ordered the stadium cordoned off in late September.
A class-action lawsuit alleged that the VA had failed in its duty to provide adequate housing for disabled veterans and that its leases of portions of the 388-acre campus for other purposes violated the 1888 deed of the land to the U.S. government for the “establishment, construction and permanent maintenance” of a home for disabled soldiers.
In an attempt to regain use of the stadium, UCLA attorney Raymond Cardozo said the university was willing to nearly double its rent to $600,000 and release two acres for housing. Carter initially spurned that offer while working with attorneys in the case to identify parcels where an initial 106 modular units of temporary housing could be placed.
After selecting the stadium’s parking lot and two other parcels during a hearing Friday, Carter abruptly changed direction, asking attorneys for the veterans who sued why they shouldn’t take the $600,000 and allow the baseball team to play at the stadium when the veterans were not using it. He gave them the weekend to confer with their clients.
Returning to court Monday, attorney Roman Silberfeld said they objected to the terms the judge described.
But Carter said he thought it would not make sense to pass up money that could be used for housing now.
He again urged the university and veterans to come up with a “holistic” agreement by July 4, when the grace period expires, and made it clear he still considers the stadium as a potential site for housing. He suggested that one option would be for UCLA to use more than 30 acres it owns in the Palos Verdes Peninsula for a new stadium.
UCLA praised the decision in a statement attributed to athletic director Martin Jarmond.
“We are excited to practice and play in Jackie Robinson Stadium this season,” it said. “Our young men have been working hard and keeping a positive attitude throughout this period of uncertainty, and we are pleased that they will be able to resume their regular training at the stadium.”
Rob Reynolds, a veteran who acts as a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said Carter’s change of heart “caught everybody by surprise.”
Reynolds said the veterans felt insulted that the amount offered was less than the UCLA baseball coach’s salary.
“It’s a travesty for them to see them get them come back for nothing,” he said.
After months of hearings, a federal judge last month ruled that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs discriminates against homeless veterans whose disability compensation makes them ineligible for housing being constructed on its West Los Angeles campus.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had earlier found that the VA has a fiduciary duty to use the 388-acre campus primarily for housing and healthcare for disabled veterans, casting doubt on the legality of leases that have turned over portions of it for sports facilities, oil drilling and two parking lots.
Neither ruling, however, gave any indication of what remedies, if any, the VA might face. That question will be at issue in a non-jury trial starting Tuesday in downtown federal court, the culmination of more than a decade of legal battles — and half a century of grievances — over the veterans’ land.
In a brief filed last month, attorneys for the veterans asked Carter to issue an order requiring the VA to provide nearly 4,000 units of permanent supportive housing on the campus. That would be an addition of 2,740 units to the 1,215 already in planning or under construction under the terms of a prior lawsuit. They also are asking for the construction of 1,000 shelter beds.
They further ask the judge to enjoin the VA from contracting with developers whose funding sources impose restrictive income limits that bar veterans with disability compensation. If granted, such an order could have a national impact on VA housing construction that relies on third-party developers.
The brief is less specific about the leases to UCLA and the neighboring Brentwood School for athletic facilities and the oil and parking operations. It asks Carter to find the leases invalid but does not say whether they should be nullified or renegotiated to better serve veterans.
American flags decorate tents at an encampment of homeless veterans along San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, Calif., on July 4, 2020.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Justice Department lawyers representing the VA argue in an opposing brief that Carter should not order more housing or issue an injunction because the remedy sought is unnecessary and unfeasible and would place an undue burden on the VA.
The lawsuit, filed last November by 14 veterans and since made a class action, reprised an earlier lawsuit that challenged the leases and asserted an unmet need for permanent housing. In a 2015 settlement, the VA agreed to develop a master plan for the campus. A draft master plan, completed in 2016, called for 1,200 units of housing on the campus in new and rehabilitated buildings with a commitment to complete more than 770 units by the end of 2022. Only 54 of those units were completed by the deadline, and only 233 are currently open.
The new lawsuit, filed by Public Counsel, the Inner City Law Center and law firms Brown Goldstein & Levy LLP and Robins Kaplan LLP, alleges that the VA has reneged on the settlement agreement.
The plaintiff’s lead counsel, Mark Rosenbaum of Public Counsel, said in a hearing last year that the new case was necessary because he had erred by not demanding court monitoring of the 2015 settlement.
“The phrase ‘homeless veteran’ should be an American oxymoron,” the complaint said. “But this is the cruel truth—the federal government consistently refuses to keep its word and take meaningful actions to bring the abomination of veteran homelessness to an end.”
The West Los Angeles campus, formally called the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, was established as a home for Civil War veterans on land donated in 1888 by Sen. John P. Jones and his business partner, the socialite and businesswoman Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker, scion of a landowning family going back to the mission era. After World War I, the campus “gradually evolved from institutional housing to medical care that allowed Veterans to reintegrate into civilian society,” according to a history on the VA website.
As many as 4,000 veterans lived on the property in the early 20th Century, but the transformation of the campus into a medical center continued after World War II, as advances in battlefield medical care resulted in greater survival rates with more serious injuries. By 1962, the West L.A. VA Medical Center was the largest in the country, with more than 6,000 patients and 4,500 staff.
But in the late 1960s, residential use declined. Then, following the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the Wadsworth Hospital building was judged seismically unsound and demolished. To make room for a temporary hospital during its reconstruction, the roughly 1,000 remaining residents of the Old Soldiers Home were abruptly evicted. Only about half relocated to other VA facilities, and, after the new hospital opened, the old buildings were left to deteriorate.
Carter ruled in December that the 1888 deed of 300 acres dedicated to the “establishment, construction and permanent maintenance of a branch of said National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers” created a charitable trust and that Congress, in adopting the West Los Angeles Leasing Act of 2016, assumed enforceable fiduciary duties to use the land to benefit veterans.
In May, Carter certified the case as a class action representing all homeless veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injuries who reside in Los Angeles County and a subclass of all class members whose income (including veterans’ disability benefits) exceeds 50% of the area’s median income.
Last month, Carter issued a partial summary judgment in favor of the veterans, finding that the VA discriminates against veterans whose disability compensation makes them ineligible for housing built by developers whose funding sources come with income limits.
“Those who gave the most cannot receive the least,” he wrote.
In the pretrial brief, Rosenbaum argued that the lack of adequate housing at the VA forces veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injury toward institutionalization.
“Homeless veterans with serious mental illness and traumatic brain injury who lack permanent supportive housing experience an institutional circuit of temporary housing, emergency departments, psychiatric institutions, and jails in order to receive healthcare, including mental healthcare, services,” he wrote.
To support their case for more housing, the plaintiffs intend to present testimony from three prominent Angelenos. Developer and former Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff will testify that he has identified space on the campus for an additional 4,000 units. Jonathan Sherin, former director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, and Benjamin Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, will testify on the mental health impacts of homelessness.
The government’s opposing brief argued that the 2022 update of the master plan provides for a “supportive, integrated community” with services, amenities and recreational, cultural and open spaces.
The plaintiffs’ demand would impose an undue burden, the government argued, by requiring the VA to build approximately 40 buildings, to obtain a new environmental report clearances for historic preservation and to extend utilities into new areas of the campus.
It cited several improvements the VA has made to its services and changes to the income requirements that make 97% of homeless veterans eligible for federal housing vouchers.
It also argued that housing a majority of veterans with serious mental illness or traumatic brain injury on the campus would “segregate them from the broader community and would likely result in their stigmatization based on their disabilities.”
Carter has not yet ruled on the validity of the leases, which reserve limited time for veterans to use the athletic facilities and generate income from the oil and parking operations for VA operations.
Rosenbaum cited a 2021 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General concluding that seven of the VA’s land-use leases, including those with the Brentwood School and the oil and parking operators, failed to comply with the West Los Angeles Leasing Act and that seven and a half years after the earlier settlement, no supportive housing had yet been completed.
Lawyers representing Bridgeland Resources LLC intervened in the case and filed a brief in which they argue that the 2017 lease under which the company uses a portion of the VA property to slant drill into a West Los Angeles oil field complies with the West Los Angeles Leasing Act because it provides a 2.5% royalty to the Disabled American Veterans Los Angeles Chapter “solely for the purpose of providing transportation to Veterans on and around the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System Campus.” If that lease were invalidated, they said, earlier leases would then take effect, allowing Bridgeland to expand its operation.
Rosenbaum said those earlier leases also would be invalid.
Neither UCLA nor Brentwood School have had lawyers present or sought to intervene. Spokespeople for UCLA and the Brentwood School declined to comment.
Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this article.
A federal judge wants an independent accounting of homelessness programs in Los Angeles — including Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe initiative.
The alliance said it wants the city to pay it $6.4 million in monetary sanctions.
Carter, who has not yet issued a ruling or spelled out the parameters of such an audit, raised concerns about how public money to fight homelessness is being spent. He requested a more detailed accounting of the work performed by nonprofit homeless service providers — including those participating in Inside Safe, which has been moving unhoused Angelenos into hotels, motels and other facilities.
“Which provider is producing results out there?” he asked. “We have no benchmark, and we have no accountability at this point. It’s just as simple as that.”
Carter also asked whether City Controller Kenneth Mejia has the authority to audit homeless programs run by the mayor’s office. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who advises the mayor and council, testified that the controller could not but said there are other ways the city can conduct audits.
Mejia disputed that notion Friday, telling the judge on the second day of the hearing that his office can audit mayoral programs.
“When it comes to a city program, especially those housed under elected officials, we have disagreements with the mayor and the city attorney’s office, but we believe there’s nothing in the charter that prohibits the mayor or the City Council from voluntarily submitting themselves to an audit, so we disagree.”
Hours later, Mejia announced on X that he is launching a “focused audit” on Inside Safe, which received $250 million in this year’s city budget.
Bass, who is in France with a delegation of city officials examining preparations for the Olympics, could not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Michele Martinez, special master for Carter, said Bass and City Council President Paul Krekorian had spoken to the judge and offered an independent auditor chosen by the court and paid for by the city.
Mejia said he intends to follow through with his audit.
“Our office welcomes an external, independent auditor to aid in that ongoing litigation,” he said in a statement to The Times. “However, the issues at play in the federal litigation are specific and unique to that case. As the City’s Chief Auditor, it is my responsibility to bring transparency and accountability to specific components of Inside Safe.”
The L.A. Alliance, a group of businesses and residents, alleges that the city repeatedly missed deadlines and negotiated in bad faith over terms of a settlement agreement to shelter at least 60% of people living on the streets in each council district.
Elizabeth Mitchell, the group’s attorney, said the city promised last March that it would come into compliance and provide the alliance with plans to build beds and address homeless encampments in each district.
“We were promised … that if we held off bringing this to the court for just six months, that they would have a full evaluation of each district. That, to my knowledge, has never been done,” Mitchell said. “Even the numbers that were finally agreed upon by the council members were not fully vetted.”
Scott Marcus, chief assistant city attorney, said the city did not breach the agreement when it comes to bed creation but that it did fail to communicate with the alliance when it sought a citywide program to clean up encampments, as opposed to doing so district by district.
“We could have done a better job keeping the alliance in the loop and communicating with them when our circumstances changed,” Marcus said.
Carter said he would delay a ruling while city officials and lawyers for L.A. Alliance discuss details of the audit and Bass is abroad.
However, the judge said he plans to rule that the city acted in bad faith.
The demands for increased oversight of homeless services are not limited to Mejia and the judge. On Friday, the council voted to seek a separate performance evaluation of services being provided to the city by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who drafted the proposal and sits on the homelessness committee, said the city provides tens of millions of dollars each year to that city-county agency.
“We have all known that LAHSA can be opaque at times and, frankly, downright deceptive in terms of how they secure funding from this city,” he said.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, LAHSA’s chief executive officer, said she looks forward to the assessment.
“I welcome the passage of the motion from Councilmembers Blumenfield and [Monica] Rodriguez,” she said, “and look forward to working with the city on developing a framework that provides greater insight into program performance.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
Even before the Disney+ series released this past December, the Percy Jackson universe seemed primed to expand with movie trilogy for the Kane Chronicles books over at Netflix. But four years after that reveal, author Rick Riordan has revealed the streamer won’t be going forward with that endeavor.
Dave Bautista Opens Up About His Relationship With Denis Villeneuve
Speaking to a curious fan on Goodreads, Riordan said Netflix ultimately decided to pass on bringing those books to the small screen, and ultimately let the project lapse in optioning hell for a few years. As a result, any studio that’d like to go ahead and make the films would have to cover preproduction costs before actually doing anything with them. It’s “not at all unusual,” according to him, and he was frank in saying all of streaming was tightening their belt and cancelling whatever they can to save money.
Even with the recent season two renewal for Percy Jackson & the Olympians, it didn’t stop Kane from getting the boot. As for the other planned spinoff for fellow universe character Magnus Chase that Riordan’s mentioned in the past, that one’s being “[held] in reserve. I don’t want to do that until I have enough bandwidth to do it properly,” he admitted, “and as you may have guessed, I’m pretty busy!”
The Kane Chronicles focus on magician siblings Carter and Sadie who, like Percy, are the descendants of gods. But where Percy and the immediate characters in his orbit come from Greek deities, the Kane siblings are descended from Narmer and Ramses the Great, and their adventures are more centered around Egyptian history and mythology. Their trilogy of books (and accompanying short stories) also have more of a YA bent than the mothership series.
With Percy already on Disney+, it wouldn’t be surprising if Disney decided to get Kane and just have the entire enterprise be under its banner. But it all depends on the future of the streaming industry and how long Disney is willing to stick with Percy Jackson to begin with.
The named defendant in the federal lawsuit was California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, but there was never a doubt that the target was Donald J. Trump.
For a time, as the legal maneuvering proceeded through the fall, it appeared that Los Angeles could be treated to another of its celebrated courtroom dramas, this one a constitutional showdown pitting a colorful civil rights attorney against a volcanic former president in the courtroom of a judge known for his fiery judicial flair.
The case sought an order prohibiting Weber from placing the Republican presidential front-runner on the California ballot, based on the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause.
It was also intended to be a trap. If Trump’s legal team took the bait and joined the case, then the former president could be forced to face a grilling under oath on his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
At least that was the theory of Stephen Yagman, an attorney both admired and reviled in local lore for his history of toppling sacred cows.
Over a span of two decades, Yagman broke legal ground in cases against the LAPD and the U.S. government, establishing that Los Angeles Police Department officers and their leaders can be held personally liable for civil rights violations and that prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center had a right to due process. Then he suffered an ignominious fall with a 2007 federal conviction for tax evasion and bankruptcy fraud. In his 70s, more than a decade after serving 29 months in prison, Yagman regained his law license and resumed fighting for indigent victims of government abuse.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a no less colorful figure than Yagman, has built a reputation for judicial unorothodoxy bordering on heavy-handedness. He’s held court on Skid Row and summoned mayors and supervisors to answer for their ineffective responses to homelessness. In two cases that were active at the time, Carter was holding L.A. County officials’ feet to the fire to extract a commitment for thousands of mental health beds and rebuffing efforts of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to wiggle out of a lawsuit over veterans housing.
More to the point of Yagman’s case, Carter had found in a 2022 ruling that stripped Trump legal adviser John Eastman’s attorney-client privilege that the two had “more likely than not” attempted to illegally obstruct Congress, calling it “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
Would Carter, who drew Yagman’s case because it was related to the earlier one, follow through with that reasoning? Yagman hoped so.
When Trump’s lawyers took the bait and petitioned Carter to intervene, Yagman virtually frothed with anticipation.
“This court, right here and now, has a unique opportunity to prevent a truly deranged and dangerous fool, Donald Trump, who perpetrated an assault on American Democracy, from again being president of the United States,” he wrote in a motion, noting that Trump “improvidently (for him) has intervened to make himself a party-defendant to the instant action.”
He buttressed his ever eccentric legalese with a flight of literary allusion invoking both Socrates and The Rolling Stones.
“Trump is a vile man. He has no virtue whatsoever,” Yagman wrote, appending a long footnote on the Greek philosopher’s concept of civic virtue.
“And contrary to what the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger sings … Trump, as today’s embodiment of the devil … deserves no sympathy….”
But it was to no avail. Not once, but twice in the months that followed, Trump’s lawyers raised legal technicalities to knock down Yagman’s flaming rhetoric.
The first was based on standing, a slippery legal concept meaning something akin to skin in the game.
Yagman’s case made the tortuous argument that his client, a Republican voter who planned to vote for Trump, would be disenfranchised if, after the March California primary, Trump was ruled ineligible to be president.
Carter dismissed the case in November, finding his client did not have standing because “the harm he alleges is too generalized.”
Yagman had a backup strategy, an amended complaint changing his case to a class action representing all Republican voters and naming Trump himself as a defendant on a novel theory of negligent infliction of emotional distress.
His clients, he argued, were “direct victims of Trump’s acts in creating and participating in insurrection,” both on Jan. 6 and in the “innumerable viewings of those acts on television, on the radio and in numerous publications….”
Reconsidering, Carter set a hearing for Jan. 8. But, over the holidays, Trump’s lawyers convinced the judge that a hearing was not necessary. In a Dec. 22 filing, Shawn E. Cowles of the Dhillon Law Group gave eight reasons why the case had no merit, ranging from presidential immunity and 1st Amendment protection to “reasons to doubt the veracity of Plaintiff’s claim that he is a registered Republican voter in Los Angeles County.”
The argument that carried the day for the former president was based on the statute of limitations. Ignoring Yagman’s contention that the injury was repeated every time Jan. 6 imagery appeared on TV, radio or in print, Carter ruled the case “time-barred” based on California’s two-year statute for negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Yagman, whose past victories included establishing that lawyers cannot be sanctioned for making disparaging comments about their judges, showed uncharacteristic magnanimity in defeat.
Carter, he said, is a good judge and decent human being.
“I’m happy enough with it because it’s him,” he told The Times. “Part of me is really sorry to see it go, I really wanted to depose Trump. But I’m ashamed of that because it would just be me playing games. I wouldn’t get anything out of that except chuckles.”
Times researcher Scott Wilson contributed to this story.
ATLANTA—The heavily anticipated fight between the former U.S. president and the YouTube personality ended in a TKO Thursday night as Jimmy Carter won his debut boxing match against Jake Paul. The cruiserweight match, first announced in early April, pitted the 6-foot-1, 191-pound Paul against the 5-foot-10, 190-pound Carter in the the final fight on the evening’s card. The first two rounds featured even sparring, with the 26-year-old social media star and the 98-year-old known for his humanitarian work trading jabs and fighting conservatively as Carter made up for his shorter reach with quicker hand speed and better mobility. As the third round went on and Paul visibly tired, Carter gained the upper hand, viciously landing a flurry of blows on the influencer before the bell. The former Georgia governor’s reported nine months of 10-hour daily training sessions paid off when he landed a devastating right hook 12 seconds into the fourth round and knocked Paul to the ground, winning the match and along with it a $600,000 purse. Bloodied and grinning to show off a lost tooth as the referee raised his arm in victory, Carter repeatedly bellowed “Rosalynn” as the former first lady fought through the swarming crowd, climbed into the ring, and embrace her victorious husband.
