That became impossible to ignore on Wednesday, when ICE agent Jonathon Ross killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in cold blood. By now, you don’t need me to recount her brutal last moments. But the footage (graphic and disturbing as it is) is out there, and we can see the Trump administration’s propaganda about the event for what it is.
What changed this week was, arguably, that the victim wasn’t a brown-skinned person. ICE claimed the life of a white American citizen, one who, according to her wife, was a kind, loving mom and a Christian. Unfortunately, the US has a dark history of shrugging off violence as long as it’s directed towards a marginalized group. That wasn’t possible for mainstream newsreaders here.
LOS ANGELES, CA – JANUARY 8, 2026 Dozens, holding photos of Renee Nicole Good, protest her death a day after an ICE agent killed Good in Minneapolis, in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on January 8, 2026. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) (Genaro Molina via Getty Images)
On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance smeared Good baselessly, insisting the mother was part of a “left-wing network.” He also claimed ICE holds “absolute immunity” when it comes to doing things like killing Americans in broad daylight. Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the deadly incident as the “result of a larger, sinister left-wing movement that has spread across our country.” And the FBI has blocked Minnesota’s criminal investigation bureau from accessing evidence to complete a thorough examination of the homicide.
In short: an agency with the full backing of the federal government killed an innocent citizen, and while there are tools to inform the public about the likely locations that agency may be acting in, Apple has chosen to keep them from us.
Apple has a history of presenting itself as a safer, socially progressive alternative within Big Tech. Its keynotes are replete with heartfelt testimony of iPhone and Apple Watch features saving lives. It releases Pride-themed accessories to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community and the company has (so far) resisted government pressure to eliminate its DEI programs. Hell, its modern era was kicked off by the “Here’s to the crazy ones” TV ad, which intercut images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Gandhi — explicitly cloaking its corporate image in civil disobedience and social justice.
A photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Apple’s homepage (2015) (Apple / The Internet Archive)
But the company also wields that progressive image for selfish reasons, wrapping business priorities in the guise of conscientiousness. For example, when government regulations push for openness or interoperability, Apple warns of the security and privacy risks for its users. When Apple tightly controls where you can buy apps, it’s about keeping porn away from the kids. And Apple has decided the theoretical safety of ICE officers is more valuable than the very real threat they pose to the communities they harass.
ICEBlock’s availability on the App Store may not have changed the outcome of Wednesday’s events. But it could resume its job as a community informer. It could make it easier to notify the public of where these masked thugs are congregating, perhaps even helping others avoid Good’s fate.
Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment on reinstating ICEBlock; we’ll update if we receive a response.
If you spend much time in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, you will notice, amid the clamor of buses and trucks and car horns and vendors hawking their goods, a nearly steady symphony of sirens.
They scream day and night in rapid response to an endless run of emergencies, many of them in and around MacArthur Park. But it’s not usually a fire that LAFD Station 11 is responding to. Through August of this year, there have been 599 drug overdose calls, compared with 36 runs for structure fires.
“I’ve had three in one day, same person,” said firefighter/paramedic Madison Viray, who has worked at Station 11 for nine years.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
That’s just one measure of how bad the epidemic is in the low-income neighborhood where homelessness is rampant, drugs are sold and consumed in the open, 83 people died of overdoses in 2023, and merchants complain of gang threats and thefts by addicts.
In the middle of it all is Station 11, located on 7th Street two blocks from the park, with its trucks rolling out around the clock in every direction. Hanging on a wall inside the station is a proclamation from Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez and her colleagues honoring the crew for being ranked by Firehouse Magazine as the busiest ladder company in the nation in 2022.
This year, Station 11 ranks just behind Station 9 in Skid Row (site of the city’s other major drug zone) for total runs, but it is on course to match last year’s total of 15,262 calls for fire and medical incidents (the majority of which do not involve overdoses).
Photographs of the crew at Los Angeles Fire Station 11 are mounted in the recreation room of the firehouse.
While I was meeting with several members of the crew in Station 11 Wednesday afternoon, Viray and engineer Cody Eitner left abruptly to answer a call from an alley near 6th Street and Burlington Avenue. They returned a short time later to say they were too late to save the victim.
“Someone found him and called, but they’d been gone for too long and there was nothing we could do,” Eitner said.
The word on the street is that the drugs in the neighborhood are dirty. Cocaine might be spiked with fentanyl, and fentanyl might be spiked with the veterinary tranquilizer Xylazine, or “tranq” —all of which elevates the possibility of bad reactions.
It’s not uncommon to see people in the park with multiple festering ulcers on their arms and legs — one of the side-effects of tranq. Nor is it uncommon to see people bent in half, like twisted statues, because of muscle rigidity the firefighters refer to as the “Fentanyl fold.”
“Most of the time they’re thankful for saving their lives,” Cody Eitner said about the people they have revived from drug overdoses.
Battalion Chief Brian Franco, who first worked at Station 11 two decades ago as a firefighter, said, “we’ve seen a lot more fatalities from the overdoses than we did with heroin.”
And yet with fentanyl, the drug naloxone, if administered quickly enough, can reverse the effects of opiates and save lives. Sometimes it’s used by friends of the victim, or by a MacArthur Park overdose response team recently initiated by Councilmember Hernandez and the L.A. County Department of Public Health. Or by crews from Station 11.
“The vast majority of our [overdose] calls now are fentanyl,” said Capt. Adam VanGerpen, who serves as a public information officer but also goes on runs. “If we see that there are very shallow respirations … then we’re gonna open up their eyes and see if their pupils are pinpoint. Now we know it’s probably not … cardiac arrest or … respiratory arrest. Now we’re thinking, OK, this is an overdose.”
It can be easier to treat a fentanyl case than a PCP or meth overdose, VanGerpen said, because the latter two drugs can make a person agitated and combative. If it’s a fentanyl overdose, responders will administer the naloxone as a nasal spray (Narcan), inject it into a muscle, or pump it through an IV, depending on the situation.
“Anytime we’re successful, it’s satisfying,” said Capt. Adam Brandos. “In a station like this, where we run so many calls as we do, and it’s kind of a monotonous routine, those little wins are really good with the morale. But it’s not so satisfying to see the repeat. And we’re not changing the cycle at all. … It keeps repeating itself over and over again.”
Two men slump on a bench in MacArthur Park.
Sometimes, Brandos said, a single response can trigger a cascade: “We may go on one call in the park where that call turns into four, because … of the other guy who’s over by the tree, and the other gal that’s over by the lake, and then the other person that’s over here. So that’s pretty normal.”
What is most striking about it all, Brandos said, is that these scenes play out so frequently they have become normalized.
When you first set eyes on the depths of social collapse and public distress, it’s shocking. But it’s all there again the next day, and the next, and although the shock endures, a bit of numbness takes hold, along with doubts that anyone in power is up to the task of restoring any semblance of order.
Anthony Temple, an emergency incident technician at Station 11, took me on a dark virtual tour of a typical day, beginning at the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro Station, which has doubled in recent years as subterranean hall of horrors:
Capt. Adam VanGerpen watches as a fire truck is deployed from Station 11.
“People have overdosed … on the subway platform while people are getting out of the train,” Temple said. “You’ve got people moving around this person, and we all come down there and do what we’ve got to do and take them to the hospital and leave. And you go back to the station and you get dispatched on another overdose where the person will be down, on the sidewalk, kind of like hanging into the street. …
“It’s just day in, day out, morning, noon, night, sidewalk, platform, staircase, park,” Temple said. “You know, it’s just like everywhere.”
Two members of the crew, Viray and Brandos, said they’ve brought their children to the neighborhood to show them where Dad works, and to show them a world they couldn’t have imagined.
And the reaction?
“Shocked,” Viray said of his 14-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.
Emergency medical technicians and paramedics with Los Angeles Fire Station 11 keep an eye on a man they revived from an overdose.
“I wanted to show them what some decision-making could look like,” said Brandos, whose girls are 9 and 11. “They wanted to know why everybody was leaning over on the sidewalk. … I told them exactly what was going on.”
The crew told me they share a camaraderie that’s specific to the demands of Station 11. If you choose to work there, it’s because you like staying busy, you take pride in the number of runs, and you learn to accept that you didn’t create the crisis and can’t fix it. You can only respond to it, one call at a time.
Just before 6:30 p.m., a call came in. A middle-aged man was down at Alvarado Street and Wilshire Boulevard, across the street from the park, in possible cardiac arrest from an overdose. A truck and an ambulance rolled, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They were on the scene in less than three minutes.
The subject was down in front of Yoshinoya Japanese Kitchen, which is bordered by vendors selling electronics, clothing and toiletries. Some of them were closing down in the fading light of day, and people were still gathered behind the restaurant in an alley that serves as a drug bazaar. It’s a hellscape that has become part of the terrain, like the palm trees that rise over Alvarado Street and the street lamps that have gone dead.
One vendor went about his business as if he’d seen this scene play out so often he didn’t need to look again. Some passersby paused to check out the commotion, perhaps waiting to see if the unconscious man would make it. A boy of 10 or so moved in close enough to watch as three firefighters moved toward the man.
The air was rank with the day’s burned energy and wasted chances, and in the spot where I stood behind the ambulance, trash fanned out six feet into the street from the curb. A bag of chips. A Yoshinoya takeout bag. Coke cans. Empty food containers.
All of this is the normalized reality of a neighborhood that once stood as a gem of the city, and now suffers in wait for someone, anyone, to stand up and say this should not exist, cannot exist, and must end, for the sake of civility and for the benefit of the working people who make up the majority of the residents here, raising children who deserve better.
Emergency medical technicians (EMTs) and paramedics with Los Angeles Fire Station 11 get ready to take a man, they just revived from a drug overdose, to the hospital at the corner of S. Alvarado and Wilshire Blvd.
Firefighter/paramedic Luke Winfield put on a pair of white latex gloves and prepared a nalaxone IV, tied a blue tourniquet around the man’s upper arm and plunged the life-saving drug into the crease of his elbow.
After several seconds, the man jerked up as if on springs, back from the edge of death. He asked what had happened.
“You overdosed,” one of the firefighters said.
Still wobbly, he fell onto a vending cart and lay on his back, looking up at the reincarnated sky as it faded to pink. He was going to make it. This time. They loaded him into the ambulance for a ride to the hospital.
I asked Winfield how many times, in his two years at Station 11, he had done what he just did.
Where Wilshire Boulevard begins in downtown Los Angeles, thousands of miles of undersea fiber-optic cables disappear into an ordinary-looking office tower.
One Wilshire is the mother of all data centers in the West, a discreet terminus for major digital links between Asia and North America that help sustain the world’s bottomless need for data storage and computing power.
Once a workplace for lawyers and other white-collar types, the mid-century office building‘s 30 floors are now stuffed with cables, pipes, coolers, generators and other equipment needed to support online functions that power the economy and our private lives at unmatched speed. (If you could get inside — and you can’t — the building’s internet connection would give you a split-second jump over others when tickets for the World Series or a concert went on sale.)
“We’re all consumers of data centers,” whether its scrolling social media on our smartphones, watching streaming services such as Netflix on TV or ordering a dog food delivery on our our laptops, said Maile Kaiser, chief revenue officer of data center operator CoreSite, the largest tenant in One Wilshire. “Any content that we make is stored in a data center.”
City Hall is framed by windows at an office space that has been stripped and is available to be used as a data center at One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The digital transformation of One Wilshire, which is nearing completion with the recent departure of one of the last conventional tenants, is part of a larger real estate boom underway across Los Angeles County.
As artificial intelligence and cloud storage hoover up more and more space on the nation’s computer servers, real estate developers are racing to build new data centers or convert existing buildings to data uses. The need is so great, they’re having a hard time keeping up with demand as businesses in search of secure spots for their servers rent nearly every square foot that becomes available. Large-scale backup generators to keep the 24-7 operations running in the event of a power failure are in short supply.
Construction of new data centers is at “extraordinary levels” driven by “insatiable demand,” a recent report on the industry by real estate brokerage JLL found.
Electrician Oscar Rivas works on a new generator system on the third floor of One Wilshire, a high-rise office building that has been almost entirely converted into a data center in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“Never in my career of 25 years in real estate have I seen demand like this on a global scale,” said JLL real estate broker Darren Eades, who specializes in data centers.
The biggest drivers are AI and cloud service providers that include some of the biggest names in tech, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
With occupancy in conventional office buildings still down sharply following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and property values falling, data centers represent a rare ripe opportunity for real estate developers, who are pursuing opportunities in major markets like Los Angeles and less urban locales that are served by plentiful and preferably cheap power needed to run data centers.
“If you can find a cluster of power to build a site, they’ll come,” Eades said of developers.
Construction is taking place at an “extraordinary” pace nationwide and still not keeping up, the JLL data center report said. “Vacancy declined to a record low of 3% at midyear due to insatiable demand and despite rampant construction.”
Development increased more than sevenfold in two years, with the pipeline of new projects leveling off in the first half of 2024, a potential signal that the U.S. power grid cannot support development at a faster pace.
Satellites and antennas are perched on the rooftop at One Wilshire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
But when projects currently under construction or planned are complete, the U.S. colocation market, in which businesses rent space in a data center owned by another company for their servers and other computing hardware, will triple in size from current levels.
With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence-driven products and platforms became ubiquitous seemingly overnight, JLL said. The huge amount of computing power required by generative AI is having the greatest impact on data storage, followed by continued cloud growth.
Real estate investors and landlords are being drawn into the market because demand from tenants is high and they are likely to renew their leases after shouldering the costs of setting up data centers.
“They invest in their space and in your space and they tend to stick around longer,” said Mark Messana, president of Downtown Properties, which owns offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “As we all know, the office market is struggling a little bit, so it’s nice to be able to have some data customers in the mix.”
Rents at One Wilshire, for example, can be double what they are at newer downtown office high-rises, according to real estate data provider CoStar.
Servers, power lines and cooling equipment have almost completely taken over the building that was once a prestigious address for businesses. There are electric conduits running up stairwells and racks of cables hanging from ceilings. Two elevators were removed so the empty shafts could hold water pipes used to help keep the temperature cool enough for the heat-producing servers.
Crypto.com Arena is seen from the rooftop of One Wilshire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The recent departure of a law firm that had been in the building more than 50 years cleared out five floors that will quickly be re-leased to data tenants, said Eades, who represents the landlord.
Challenges in the rapidly expanding data center industry include finding trained workers to staff facilities around the clock, seven days a week.
“These are high-paying, high-demand jobs,” Eades said, with employers scooping up computer science and engineering majors out of college.
The job can take a toll on workers, though. There are long hours in enclosed buildings with limited contact with the outside world, and working night shifts “can be challenging for employees to endure,” the report said. Thirty percent of data center workers quit in the last year, citing unhappiness with their work/life balance, the JLL report said.
Filling second- and third-shift jobs can add an additional month or more to the hiring process because of applicants’ reluctance to work off hours, even when they pay more than day jobs, according to the report.
Southern California suffers from a shortage of new data centers, as new users enter the market daily and demand continues to grow, JLL said. That’s spurring development in smaller markets in Los Angeles County such as Vernon, which has its own power plant that provides electricity at cheaper rates than are found in surrounding cities.
Monterey Park, which is served by Southern California Edison, is also “a hot area,” Eades said, where two new developments will be announced in the next month or so.
Power demand for computing is growing so intense that it threatens to strain the nation’s electrical grid, sending users to remote locations where power is plentiful and preferably cheap.
Data center developers are working in Alabama, the Dakotas and Indiana, “traditionally states that wouldn’t have data centers,” Eades said.
A company called CalEthos plans a data center near the south shore of the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial County. Electricity for the data center’s servers would come from the geothermal and solar plants built near the site in an area that has become known as Lithium Valley. That data center would cover land the size of 15 football fields and require power that could support 425,000 homes.
Data centers have long been big power users. But the specialized computer chips required for generative AI use far more electricity because they are designed to read through vast amounts of data.
The new chips also generate so much heat that even more power and water are needed to keep them cool.
By 2030, data centers could account for as much as 11% of U.S. power demand — up from 3% now, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Last week a deal was announced to reopen the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in order to power Microsoft’s data centers performing cloud computing and artificial intelligence programs.
The plant, the site of he nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979, was closed five years ago because it was losing money. Microsoft has agreed to buy power from the plant for 20 years if regulators approve its revival.
“There will always be a need for a data center,” Kaiser said. “Everybody loves to create their content now, whether it’s a photo or a video or online shopping, we’re all doing it. Now we’ll see what we do with AI.”
Times staff writer Melody Petersen contributed to this report.
Los Angeles’ most Instagrammable chapel, a midcentury modern structure with redwoods, an ocean view and a long history as a popular wedding venue, has closed indefinitely. After recent storms, Wayfarers Chapel announced that land movement in the area had increased.
Just months after the Rancho Palos Verdes church was named a National Historic Landmark, the venue was forced to shut its doors.
“Effective immediately,” a statement read, “we are extremely devastated to announce the closure of Wayfarers Chapel and its surrounding property due to the accelerated land movement in our local area.”
The statement said those with reservations would receive refunds.
The Rev. David Brown told The Times in December that more than 300,000 people visited the chapel the previous year, and about 400 couples were married there, a dip from pre-pandemic levels.
Celebrity nuptials have included Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay in 1958 and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Melinda Ledbetter in 1995. Four years after the Wilson-Ledbetter nuptials, the chapel hosted 800 weddings.
“Visitors have told me they remember watching Jayne Mansfield getting carried to the limo,” Brown said.
The 100-seat chapel, known to many visitors as “the Glass Church,” was designed by Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It was completed in 1951.
The chapel sits on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which has long been prone to landslides. The structure overlooks Abalone Cove, which is a landslide complex. Land movement has affected the area in recent decades, causing fissures and the earth and structures to buckle and drift.
The chapel had to remove its original visitors center due to land movement. The new center was designed by Lloyd Wright’s son Eric Lloyd Wright.
Wayfarers Chapel is set among trees on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where it overlooks Abalone Cove, a landslide complex.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Times staff writer Lisa Boone contributed to this report.
Early on the morning of Oct. 12, David Mays woke up in the Chevrolet he had been living in for two years, knowing this day would be different.
Safe Parking L.A. had been a blessing, providing a covered space in a downtown garage, with on-site security and access to a bathroom. That was better than sleeping on the street with one eye open.
But Mays had been hobbled by the discomfort of sleeping in the driver’s seat for months on end, and the 69-year-old caregiver had developed health concerns of his own. His legs were stiff, swollen and sore, complicating his hope of returning to work. And he was beginning to doubt promises that his wait for a place of his own would end despite the best efforts of Demi Dominguez, his Safe Parking case manager, to get him indoors.
David Mays gives Demi Dominguez, his Safe Parking L.A. case manager, a hug of support after signing papers for his new apartment.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
And then it happened. Dominguez learned in late summer of a possible slot for Mays at a soon-to-open apartment building in East Hollywood. The Wilcox was to be managed by The People Concern, a homeless services nonprofit, with on-site supportive services for adults 62 or older –- one of the fastest-growing segments of the state’s vast unhoused population.
Mays drove to the Wilcox on the 12th, sat through an orientation and, finally, was escorted to his new home, a small but comfortable second-floor studio apartment.
He was not overwhelmed, as one might expect. It was too much to process.
California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age — and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
“To be honest,” he told me, seated in his dining nook a few weeks after moving in, “I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t feeling it.”
Mays, who speaks deliberately, turned inward, searching for the right words.
“I had been taught to be justifiably cynical for so long, that when it finally happened, and it was real, and we’re doing this — this is your apartment — my brain almost kind of took a pause,” Mays said. “And then at some point, I realized — I think when I collapsed on that bed, and it took a couple of days for it to truly sink in –- this was my apartment.
After two years of living in his car, David Mays prepares to move some of his belongings into his new apartment.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“I had been out there so long that this was almost the equivalent of a daydream, because I had been so far removed from what I knew to be a normal life before it all went south, “ he said. “And then to come back to some semblance of that, after two years of nothing … it’s a quantum leap.”
Mays said the experience was “almost a shock wave … I’m lying there in that bed and I’m going, ‘Am I really here?’ I just laid out, and within 14 days, all the massive swelling went away. All of it.”
Mays’ story is a small victory in a city with roughly46,000 homeless people, but it’s also a window into a societal collapse and a grinding bureaucracy that has long been a symbol of government failure. Crippling housing and workforce shortages and a fragmented, dysfunctional response — along with entrenched poverty, unchecked mental illness and a raging drug epidemic — have produced a simmering humanitarian crisis visible to one and all.
David Mays enters his new apartment at the Wilcox in East Hollywood for the first time as community manager Daisy DePaz watches.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“The timeline for housing remains a multi-year process,” said Emily Uyeda Kantrim, who runs Safe Parking L.A. and said Mays was in the housing queue since 2021.
Mays readily admits to his frustration.
“I lost faith,” he said, telling me he came to believe that the “system” treats homelessness as a monolithic condition. In fact, it’s 46,000 puzzles, each with a different solution, but key pieces of each puzzle are missing.
Eventually, he was buoyedby Safe Parking’s continued efforts to make a connection for him. Safe Parking helps its clients — a third of whom are older adults — with car maintenance costs and other expenses while they look for permanent housing.
“They were with me through the whole process,” Mays said, right up to the time he moved into his new home.
David Mays shares his enthusiasm about finally getting a place to live with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
On Nov. 6, while Mays was in his room, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was downstairs in the courtyard, presiding over the official grand opening of the Wilcox. Tackling the homelessness crisis was at the top of her agenda when she was elected a year ago, and I recall traveling across the city with her when she was a candidate, as she talked about blowing up the bureaucracy, leveraging her contacts in Washington and Sacramento, working with — rather than at odds with — county supervisors, and lowering the cost of new housing and building it faster.
All of that remains a work in progress, but she gets high marks from some observers. Bass’ strategy of targeting problematic encampments, cutting through paperwork and leveraging her connections has changed the dynamic, said Miguel Santana, director of the California Community Foundation. Her background as a physician’s assistant has helped, too, he said, because she’s attuned to individual needs.
“She has placed the priority on the person who is unhoused and tries to advocate for them, not for the system,” Santana said. “She’s pushing against the system.”
“She has brought … real focus to this issue in a way no other administration has, and I’ve worked with several,” said John Maceri, director of The People Concern. “Her executive orders and directives, in terms of streamlining things, are real, and that has really expedited a lot of projects that had been languishing in the pipeline for a long time.”
“I had been taught to be justifiably cynical for so long, that when it finally happened, and it was real, and we’re doing this — this is your apartment — my brain almost kind of took a pause,” David Mays said.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bass, like me, turned 70 in October. I had told her more than a year ago that while I was thinking it might be time to scale back my output, she was running for what would be the toughest job of her career. She told me she badly wanted the job.
“It’s been reported that one of the fastest-growing sectors of the unhoused population are our elders, and it is a scourge on society,” Bass told a small audience before doubling down on the need to continue addressing the crisis with a sense of urgency.
The mayor then wanted to meet some of the residents, and the first one she visited was Mays.
“How are you?” Mays asked when she stepped into his room, and Bass volleyed the question back at him.
“I’m disoriented a little bit,” Mays said. “I can’t believe that this is happening.”
They talked for several minutes about his career and his health, with Bass saying she wanted to make sure he was connected to the help he needed.
“You brighten up my day,” Bass said. “This is what we’re trying to do. This is the goal.”
Before the mayor arrived and after she left, Mays talked about his plans, which do not necessarily include a long-term stay at the Wilcox. He worked for years as a private in-home caregiver, with room and board included, but it’s a profession in which clients move on to nursing homes or die, and Mays ended up out of work and homeless.
David Mays walks past a billboard with the message: “Create Your Future.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Given multiple health challenges, he doesn’t think he can be a live-in caregiver again, but he’d like to work day shifts if he can find the right match. He said the problem is that if he were to make more than $1,000 a month, on top of his Social Security income, he’d no longer be eligible for the apartment he just moved into.
Mays said he’s got to figure out what to do about all of that, but emphasized that he doesn’t think of his arrival at the Wilcox as the end of his career or his aspirations.
“I have to work that out,” he said. “This, for me, is another rest stop. And it’s a vast improvement over the last one.”
