Police are investigating after plastic bags filled with fliers containing hate messages and conspiracy theories were thrown onto residential driveways in Fresno Friday morning.
Residents in a suburban neighborhood found the bags and reported them to authorities, the Fresno Police Department said in a statement. Police canvassed the neighborhood — which authorities did not identify — to remove any additional fliers and search for any homes or businesses that could have useful video surveillance.
The recovered fliers do not contain “direct threats to any members of our community,” authorities said, but rather “general hate propaganda and unfounded conspiracy theories.”
“This is currently being investigated as a hate incident,” the department said in its statement.
This is far from the first sudden appearance of hate-filled and antisemitic fliers in California. Recent years have seen such fliers anonymously littered or posted in communities including Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Redlands, as well as in Orange County.
Anyone with information about this latest incident is encouraged to contact the Fresno Police Department at (559) 621-7000.
When Pastor Frank Wulf thinks about his congregation being unable to worship in their home of 100 years, he is reminded of the Old Testament scripture of the Israelites in exile.
Wulf’s church, Echo Park United Methodist Church on North Alvarado Street and Reservoir Street in northeast Los Angeles, is not currently safe for occupation. The century-old dome over the church’s bell tower was damaged by the recent atmospheric rivers that pounded California, and structural engineers say it could topple into the church and lead to a snowball effect of collapses that could injure people inside the structure.
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1.Pieces of a collapsed roof lay on the floor below the golden dome that sits atop Echo Park United Methodist Church. 2.Notices are taped to the doors at Echo Park United Methodist Church, which has been a community beacon for 100 years. 3.Rain damaged and moldy walls inside Echo Park United Methodist Church, which has been a community beacon for 100 years.(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
But just as the Israelites did when the Persians let them back into the land of Israel, Wulf says they will rebuild.
“The church is really not a building but a community of people, a community that’s cared for each other over a long period of time,” Wulf said.
Wulf’s congregation has been out of its historic home since Feb. 1, the pastor said.
That came after the first pounding storm of the season led to the partial collapse of the tower, exposing the wood that holds up the golden dome.
The wood had badly deteriorated: There was dry rot, termites and water damage.
The first structural engineer who inspected the building told Wulf and his team that the church was not a safe place for groups to congregate.
The evacuation of the building affects not just the 40 or 45 people who attend Sunday services, but also the others in the community whom the church serves.
Wulf said services for homeless Angelenos, such as showers outside the building and free food, have had to be paused.
He also had to inform the 12-step groups for people struggling with alcoholism or other substance use disorders that they could not meet at the church, at least for now.
Pastor Frank Wulf of Echo Park United Methodist Church in one of the rooms severely damaged by the recent heavy rainfall.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
The church had been building temporary shelter for migrants bused to Los Angeles from Texas. It was supposed to welcome four families to live in the space in mid-February, but it had to halt that program as well.
“Our primary commitment is to keep everyone safe,” the church team said in a statement on a GoFundMe page they posted to raise money for the work needed to reopen.
Wulf has not decided yet if they will repair the century-old building.
“Would this be the appropriate time to perhaps take the whole building down and start from scratch?” he asked.
A woman who allegedly grabbed and then tried to run off with a 4-year-old boy from an L.A. Target store earlier this week is now in police custody.
The unidentified woman was found and taken into custody shortly after 11:30 a.m. Wednesday in North Hollywood near the intersection of Magnolia Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue, the Los Angeles Police Department announced on X.
On Sunday, a woman allegedly tried to kidnap the child — grabbing the boy forcibly from behind and carrying him out of a Koreatown Target store, according to the LAPD.
She put the boy down outside the store after his parents confronted her and then ran away.
The incident is under investigation, and the suspect’s name has not been released. As of early Wednesday evening, she had not yet been arrested but remained in police custody, according to the LAPD.
Undocumented immigrants could have a new pathway to the American dream of owning a home.
Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula (D-Fresno) introduced Assembly Bill 1840 last month to expand the eligibility requirement for a state loan program to clarify that loans for first-time buyers are available to undocumented immigrants.
The California Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loans program that launched last March by the California Housing Finance Agency offered qualified first-time home buyers with a loan worth up to 20% of the purchase price of a house or condominium. The loans don’t accrue interest or require monthly payments. Instead, when the mortgage is refinanced or the house is sold again, the borrower pays back the original amount of the loan plus 20% of the increase in the home’s value.
The original program was established in an effort to help low- and middle-income individuals buy a home, but the program doesn’t address eligibility based on immigration status, Arambula said.
“It’s that ambiguity for undocumented individuals, despite the fact that they’ve qualified under existing criteria, such as having a qualified mortgage,” he said in an interview. “Underscores the pressing need for us to introduce legislation.”
If Assembly Bill 1840 is passed, it would broaden the definition of “first-time home buyer” to include undocumented immigrants.
Without the explicit status, undocumented individuals may be discouraged or left out of the opportunity to participate, Arambula said.
“Homeownership has historically been the primary means of accumulating generational wealth in the United States,” he said. “The social and economic benefits of homeownership should be available to everyone.”
The California Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loans program hit its applications limit of about 2,300 applicants in 11 days last year and the program was halted.
This year, the program will replace its first-come, first-serve basis with a lottery. Interested people can submit their application now, with the lottery taking place in April.
Another change to the program is its income eligibility threshold, which was 150% of a county’s median area and has been dropped to 120%. That means applicants must earn less than the threshold annually to be eligible. In Los Angeles County, the income threshold is $155,000.
A California legislator is proposing a new law that would require routine tests of statewide wastewater for illicit drugs to better inform public health and law enforcement officials.
Propelled by the success of epidemiological sewage testing during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials have continued to build on ways that wastewater monitoring can be used to inform policies and practices. In December, the National Institute on Drug Abuse announced a pilot program to test wastewater for illegal drugs and overdose reversing agents, such as Narcan, in 70 cities across the nation, including San Francisco and San Diego.
Haney’s new bill, AB 3073, would require biweekly testing of the state’s largest wastewater facilities for drugs, including fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine and xylazine, an increasingly deadly drug also called Tranq. If passed, the law would create a process for the collection and testing of sewage, led by the State Water Board with the State Department of Public Health, which would publicly share the results.
“Wastewater drug testing empowers us to be proactive and respond effectively and immediately when we see spikes in certain areas or of particular drugs,” Haney, chair of the state’s Select Committee on Fentanyl, Opioid Addiction and Overdose Prevention, said in a statement. “The state cannot simply wait for people to die before we act.”
He said the wastewater results can provide “critical information to respond quicker to stop these drugs and intervene smarter and deploy resources with more precision.”
The bill hasn’t yet been analyzed for its fiscal impact, but Haney’s spokesperson Nate Allbee said their office estimates that a test for each major plant — of which there are 250 statewide — would cost about $200. Done twice a week, which the bill said would provide sufficient data to analyze drug trends, the testing regimen would cost the state an estimated $100,000 a week.
Testing wastewater for illicit drugs has been implemented widely in Europe for the past 20 years, Allbee said. He said this practice has helped local governments detect spikes in the use of certain drugs and identify new, potentially dangerous drugs entering the illicit market.
“Despite the fact that the United States is experiencing an unprecedented deadly epidemic from drug overdoses, we are way behind the curve in adopting wastewater-based drug testing” to combat the opioid epidemic, Haney said. “Other countries have proven that testing wastewater for illicit drugs allows public health departments to identify trends in drug use in neighborhoods and proactively target public health interventions in communities before overdose deaths occur.”
Under the canopy of the enormous olive tree that shades his home, Daniel Gerwin’s 11-year-old son ascends the tree’s gnarled trunk like an expert climber while his brother, 7, reads a book a few feet away inside the house.
Standing nearby, architect John K. Chan, who recently renovated the interiors and designed a modern 500-square-foot addition, can’t help but smile as he watches the boys’ parents cook dinner amid all the activity.
“It’s so wonderful to see the house working for them,” Chan says as the family and their dog, Phoenix, circulate in and out of the house through sliding glass doors — a classic California indoor-outdoor move. “As an architect, the sweetest gift you can get from your clients is seeing the house working. Sometimes Daniel will text me, ‘This is happening right now,’ with a photo of the kids doing something we designed, and it’s so gratifying.”
“The olive tree is the soul of the house,” says homeowner Daniel Gerwin. “So we built the house around it.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Gerwin and his wife saw plenty of promise in the 1,100-square-foot home when they purchased it in 2016. Like many traditional homes built during the 1930s, the house featured a simple floor plan with two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room with a fireplace, and a formal dining room and entryway.
Despite its compact layout, the house had many perks: It was within walking distance of a good elementary school and across the street from the Ivanhoe Reservoir. The majestic olive tree, which the couple guesses is as old as the house, was another bonus.
At first, the house was fine.
But as their family grew and they adopted a large Rhodesian Ridgeback, the single-story home’s compartmentalized rooms began to feel claustrophobic.
“The boys’ room was OK when it was just a crib and a toddler bed,” Gerwin says, noting the tiny bedroom connected to the primary bedroom through a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, “but it was not sustainable.”
Adds Chan, co-founder of the Chinatown-based firm Formation Association: “It was a traditional house carved into rooms.”
Chan, who began rethinking the house in 2016, says his challenge was to add everything the family wanted — an open floor plan, storage and natural light — on a small, triangular lot.
They also wanted to preserve the olive tree, which absorbs noise from the preschool across the street and shades the house and backyard.
“The olive tree is the soul of the house, and we feel connected to it,” says Gerwin, an artist. “It feels good to have a huge olive tree anchoring our house.”
The silvery green leaves of the olive tree resonate throughout the house, including the front door.
Daniel Gerwin and his family’s renovated Ivanhoe Vista house is built around a giant olive tree.
The modern addition, left, and the traditional home, right, can be seen from the backyard where architect John K. Chan plays with the family dog.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Chan agreed as someone interested in architecture as a cultural project. “When we do research for a house, we need to meet the client’s needs and address the practical concerns, but we are also interested in the poetics of the site, the specific cultures and ecologies of sites and their narratives,” he says, recalling the wooden cover that shielded the Ivanhoe Reservoir in the 1930s.
“The house’s sensibility is very East Coast,” Chan adds, noting the neighborhood’s Spanish, Tudor and Modernist homes by architects Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. “We decided to tailor the addition to the site’s landscape.”
The newly remodeled house, which took a year to complete, demonstrates Chan’s vision. The silvery and green hues of the olive leaves repeat throughout the house, in the living room furniture, the kitchen’s stained oak cabinets and the olives and leaves preserved in the concrete flooring.
“Every day you see the tree, you sense its roots,” Gerwin says. “It’s nice to see it resonate throughout the house.”
To open up the interiors, Chan removed walls and the fireplace, enlarged the narrow galley kitchen, and added a two-story, 500-square-foot primary bedroom and bathroom that overlooks the reservoir, connecting the family to the lake, the walking path and an olive grove in the pocket park across the street.
When you enter the house, the kitchen faces an open dining room and living room bathed in natural light thanks to the shifting rooflines that create transitions instead of walls. Adding further drama is a giant bay window in the living room that overlooks the backyard. When it frames the boys playing outdoors, Gerwin likens it to a “diorama in a zoo or natural history museum.”
The cabinets in the kitchen are painted a gray tone that echoes the olive tree outside.
(Stephen Schauer)
Walls were removed to open up the partitioned interiors of the traditional home. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house,” says the homeowner.
(Stephen Schauer)
“One of the things that I enjoy about the house is the geometry,” Gerwin says. “A lot of exciting plane changes occur inside the house. It takes a certain kind of person to want to invest time and energy into something like that. John is that person. It continues to be a pleasure for me as I live here.”
The elevated reading nook above the kitchen allows the children and guests to visit Gerwin while he cooks. It also offers a reverse panorama of the house. Instead of being shut off in separate rooms, the family can face one another while cooking and doing homework in what Chan describes as an “egalitarian” design choice.
“Socially, the kitchen is not for the servants; it’s for the whole family,” he says.
Daniel Gerwin fixes dinner while his son reads in a nook.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Because their home sits on a corner lot and is exposed to hundreds of people who walk around the reservoir daily, Gerwin and his wife were acutely aware that their new bedroom, which faces the pedestrian walkway, would have a fishbowl effect.
Chan felt it was important to connect the addition to the reservoir. “The house has its protected spaces, and oddly, as an inversion, it profoundly connects them to the lake,” Chan says. “The bedroom brings you to the lake.”
If you’ve walked around the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, you can’t miss the addition, with its modern spiked roof, glass picture window, corrugated roof and dark cedar siding.
The homeowners say they are comfortable with being exposed this way.
“It forces me to make the bed,” Gerwin jokes. “I often see people looking up at me from the walking path. But we aren’t in our bedroom during the day. In the morning, I can open the top of the blackout roller shades and still have the bottom portion closed for privacy.” (Chan installed a clear glass guardrail in front of the sliding glass doors for safety, allowing easy access to the windows and sliding glass doors and an uninterrupted view of the lake.)
When Gerwin looks out the bedroom window, he sees a community and, eventually, when the Ivanhoe Reservoir is refilled with water, a sea of blue.
The windows of the primary bedroom connect the home to the Silver Lake reservoir, its community and the pocket park across the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
The house, seen as a speck in the suburban landscape, overlooks the Ivanhoe Reservoir in 2022 before it was drained for new aeration and recirculation infrastructure.
(Stephen Schauer)
Similarly, in the new bathroom, where the pitched rooflines and angles converge, the color of the cement tile echoes the reservoir and the sky.
Below the house on the ground floor, a previously unpermitted tandem garage conversion now is a part of the house. Chan updated the side-by-side spaces to include an art studio for Gerwin, an office and guest room with a Murphy bed and a small existing bathroom.
Chan considered permitting the garage as an ADU, but it wasn’t a priority for the family. Although Gerwin predicts one of his sons may inhabit the space someday, until then, it works as a guest room for the couple’s parents and for work needs.
The art studio functions well for Gerwin, who previously had a studio in Lincoln Heights. “It’s a little narrow, but I can open the doors for ventilation, and at night, I can close the bug screen so I don’t have to scrape insects off my paintings.”
Photos by Stephen Schauer
Artist Daniel Gerwin in his studio, directly below his bedroom and facing the street.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He can also do carpentry in the driveway and work in the evenings when his family is asleep.
“If I have a one-hour window, I can walk downstairs and work instead of driving to a studio,” he says. As the president of the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation, Gerwin also can hold board meetings in the office space.
Chan, who argues that the addition reconnects the family to where they live, says that by embracing the olive tree’s narrative, it became the house’s substance.
“It was important for the house to emerge from the foliage,” he says. “The roof’s pitch is designed to accommodate the tree growing at this angle. It has a strong presence but is integrated in its context. The large hedge and the shade of the olive tree looming over the house are all important aspects. “
To many people, the Silver Lake Reservoir is an oasis in a frenetic city. But for this family, it’s an extension of their home.
“It’s fun to see people walk or run by,” Gerwin says as he walks Phoenix along the pedestrian path. “Living near a lake is a pleasure. How many people get to do that?”
Spring is less than a month away, and with it typically comes a busy time to buy and sell a home in Southern California.
The holidays have passed. The weather is warmer. At least in theory, families should have enough time to find a home, move and settle in before their children start school in the fall.
But during four years of a pandemic-influenced market, seasonality has at times gone by the wayside and home prices have whipsawed up, down, then back up again.
So what should you expect if you are looking to buy or sell a home this spring?
Borrowing costs
If you are buying a home, prepare to pay a high mortgage interest rate.
Prospective buyers had received some good news in recent months as the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage fell from a high of 7.79% at the end of October to 6.6% in January.
Mortgage interest rates tend to follow inflation and during that time inflation showed signs of easing. But in recent weeks, economic reports have signaled inflation may be harder to eradicate than some expected and mortgage rates have resumed their climb.
As of lastweek, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.9%, according to Freddie Mac. That means the monthly payment on an $800,000 house is $128 more a month than that bottom in January, but $387 cheaper than the peak in October.
According to the latest forecast from the Mortgage Bankers Assn., buyers shouldn’t expect drastic relief this year. The trade group expects rates to average 6.6% during the second quarter and end the year at 6.1%.
If you are selling your home, high rates mean you will have fewer people touring your open houses than during the pandemic boom and you may need to rethink what your home is worth.
However, there are buyers out there at today’s higher rates and some houses still receive bidding wars. Wealthy buyers can easier stomach a mortgage rate around 7% and may be able to pay all cash.
“I wouldn’t call it a hot market,” said Tracy Do, a real estate agent who specializes in Northeast L.A. “It’s very tempered.”
Homes for sale
If you are looking for a home, you may wonder where they’ve all gone. However, the experience might be somewhat easier than it’s been.
For the first time since 2021, new listings in January — homes hitting the market for the first time — were up compared with a year earlier in L.A. County, according to Zillow. Similar trends were seen across Southern California.
Inventory has been extremely tight because many homeowners have decided not to sell, unwilling or unable to give up their 3% and below mortgages.
Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist with Zillow, said he believes that “lock-in” effect is starting to wear off, as more people decide they’d rather get on with their lives and move than keep a low mortgage rate.
But Divounguy and other economists don’t expect a return to normalcy soon, given the depths of the inventory crisis. In part that’s because of the difficulty of building houses in places like California, but also because high mortgage rates will still prohibit some from selling.
According to Zillow, there were a total of 10,887 homes on the market in January in L.A. County, both new listings and homes that remain on the market unsold. That was 13% below a year earlier, but an improvement from the 26% annual decline recorded in September.
Real estate agent Do said she is not seeing a flood of calls from people seeking to list their house.
Some of the calls she does get come from people asking her to run the numbers to see if it makes more financial sense to lease their house rather than sell it since rents are high and they have sub-3% mortgage rates.
“They are just thinking of keeping it as long-term investment, because they can,” Do said. “They have such a low overhead.”
High prices
If you’re looking for a screaming deal, you’ll be disappointed, according to many economists.
According to Zillow, home prices across the six-county Southern California area dipped slightly in November and December, while they remained largely flat in January.
Part of the reason is high mortgage rates prevented buyers from bidding up the cost of housing. But economists say part of the lack of movement in values is seasonality, since the winter is typically a slow time in the market.
As buyers return this spring, some experts predict there will be enough of a mismatch between supply and demand to send prices back up.
Overall, Zillow expects home prices in January 2025 to be 4.5% higher than January 2024 in the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino. Across Los Angeles and Orange counties, prices are predicted to climb 2.6%.
However, economists say prices could fall if the Federal Reserve’s actions to beat back inflation push the nation into a recession.
After several days of sun, L.A. County is expected to see mostly cloudy skies and light rain this week, according to forecasters.
There’s a chance of rain late Monday into early Tuesday, but the shower should only bring a quarter of an inch or less, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“It should be quite a bit weaker than most of the storms we’ve had recently. No significant impacts are expected with it,” Wofford said.
Temperatures are expected to range from the high 50s to the high 60s throughout much of the week, according to the weather service.
The region is expected to see some sunny skies on Wednesday and Thursday before a stronger storm system rolls in on Friday, with temperatures dropping into the 50s over the weekend. Saturday is expected to remain mostly cloudy with a 40% chance of rain across the Los Angeles County area.
Wofford said the Santa Monica Mountains, Hollywood Hills and hillsides in Palos Verdes will be the most vulnerable to landslides, but the risk won’t be as great as it was earlier this month, when monster storms pummeled the region.
Nancy Iskander arrived at the graves of her two young sons a few hours after a jury on Friday convicted Rebecca Grossman of murdering them.
It was the end of a wrenching day. Three years after Grossman sped through a Westlake Village crosswalk in her Mercedes-Benz, hitting Iskander’s sons as she watched in horror, she had finally found some level of closure.
“Someone was held accountable for your murder sons. Sleep tight. Rest in peace,” she wrote on X along with a dusk photo of the marble headstone.
It took jurors a little over one day to convict Grossman on all charges.
In doing so, the jurors appeared to embrace the prosecution’s case that Grossman — the scion of a prominent medical family — was reckless and impaired by margaritas and Valium when she plowed through the residential intersection and hit the children in a marked crosswalk.
The jury convicted Grossman on two counts of murder, two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter and one count of hit-and-run resulting in death. Those were the maximum charges sought by prosecutors. The jury could have opted for lesser charges, such as vehicular manslaughter with ordinary negligence.
Mark Iskander, left, and his brother Jacob in a family photo.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
For Iskander, it was a moment of satisfaction and grief. She had been bearing witness for her boys, testifying in court and demanding authorities take the case seriously.
“My family has been waiting for this for 3½ years now. I’ve been waiting for the trust of the justice system. So today we’re just giving glory to God; the God of Mark and Jacob has been with us through that time and helped us through, carried us,” she said outside court.
She said sitting through the high-profile trial “felt like I am attending the funeral of the boys again, day after day. That’s how it felt, seeing the defendant and defense attorneys.”
But with the conviction, she felt, it was all worth it.
“We were trusting the justice system,” she said. “We have a justice system you can trust from our experience. It’s not a justice system where people get away with things just under the color of their skin or their wealth or anything. You commit a crime, you will be held accountable.”
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1.Mark Iskander2. Jacob Iskander.(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
On Sept. 29, 2020, when Iskander and her three sons approached the crosswalk, wearing inline skates, she began to cross Triunfo Canyon Road at Saddle Mountain Drive. Her youngest son, Zachary, was next to her on his scooter. Mark, on a skateboard, and Jacob, also wearing inline skates, followed a little over arm’s length behind.
Prosecutors accused Grossman of reaching 81 mph before lightly braking and hitting the brothers at 73 mph, based on the car’s data recorder and the distance Mark was found from the crosswalk.
Prosecutors allege Grossman, 60, had cocktails with her then-boyfriend Scott Erickson, a former Dodgers pitcher, and then raced with him — he in his black Mercedes sport utility vehicle and she in her white Mercedes SUV — along Triunfo Canyon Road until they reached a crosswalk.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
Prosecutors also alleged that Grossman traveled a third of a mile after hitting the children before safety features in her car automatically shut it down.
Iskander’s witness testimony was a highly charged moment in the trial, as she described watching Grossman’s SUV plowing into her sons.
“I heard the loud noise, and I heard the driver of that car kept going,” Iskander told jurors. “I started screaming, ‘I can’t find them.’”
“Nobody came back to help,” Iskander said. “She did not come back to the scene.”
“She killed my kids,” Iskander said of Grossman. “They aren’t at school. They are not playing sports. They are at the cemetery.”
Grossman was taken into custody after the verdict. She faces a sentence of 34 years to life in prison based on the conviction. Grossman’s lead attorney, Tony Buzbee, called the verdict unexpected and vowed to appeal.
Nancy and Karim Iskander with their children, Mark, Jacob and Zachary.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
Nancy Iskander said it didn’t bring her any joy to see Grossman in handcuffs. Grossman’s daughter was overcome with emotion and yelled, “Oh, my God,” as the first word “guilty” echoed across the courtroom.
“No one wishes that on anyone,” Iskander said. “I promise I do not have any hate for her. My heart broke for her children. … It wasn’t easy, but it will bring me closure.”
Iskander also took time to talk about her sons.
“Well, they were golden-age children. They loved God. They were raised at the church. They were hardworking. They were honest. They cared about the truth,” she said. “And they were spoken for by a prosecution who’s also just that hardworking, honest, who cared about the truth.
“Mark and Jacob didn’t die. Mark and Jacob were murdered,” she added.
She said her family was able to cope with the tragedy because of a large support group. “We’re thankful for our community. We’re thankful to everyone here.” Her son Zachary, who was 5 on the day of the crash, continues to deal with the trauma of losing his brothers.
Iskander’s husband, Karim, said he hoped the verdict would be a turning point.
Jacob, left, and Mark Iskander.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
“We finally can move on. Finally. We have been waiting for the closure,” he said.
He also thanked the jury, saying they saw past “the imaginary conspiracy theories and tricks…. and focused on the evidence and they took it seriously.”
The team gathered at 4th and Crocker streets and headed south, into the blue-tented netherworld of social collapse, armed with life-saving drug-overdose kits and injectable, long-acting anti-psychotic medication.
“We’re trying very aggressive treatment on the streets,” said Dr. Susan Partovi. “Housing definitely saves your life, but there’s a small sub-group of people who won’t accept housing because of their mental illness.”
She figures that if she administers medication that lasts a month and can help stabilize patients — with their consent — they’ve got a chance.
“They don’t think there’s anything wrong, and they think they don’t need housing,” Partovi said. “They don’t think rationally, and so once you treat their delusions and their irrationality, they start to realize, ‘Oh, I do need resources.’ ”
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Partovi, who began practicing street medicine in 2007 in Santa Monica, has never been shy about her lack of patience with the official response to the entrenched humanitarian crisis. In 2017, I shadowed her as she walked through Skid Row with County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, advocating for broader authority to assist those in obvious acute mental and physical distress, even if they refused help, and despite opposition from civil rights attorneys and others.
By administering long-acting meds, Partovi—author of the just-published “Renegade M.D.: A Doctor’s Stories From the Streets”—is once again pushing boundaries. She’s acting out of a belief that her approach is medically sound, and with frustration sharpened by her street-level view of the countless bureaucratic cracks and canyons in the system. She’s driven, too, by an uncompromising compassion for homeless people who are so sick, she can sometimes predict who will die next.
Critics might say a person in the throes of impairment isn’t competent to give consent for a month-long dose of medication, and that such meds are neither a panacea nor a substitute for intensive ongoing case management. But to Partovi, the slow pace of intervention — along with multiple daily deaths on the streets — add up to a human rights violation and a moral failure, so she’s stepping into the breach.
But she’s not a psychiatrist, and her street medicine team’s approach is not fully embraced by the L.A. County Department of Mental Health. DMH has psychiatric street medicine teams operating in several parts of the county. The Skid Row unit —which is led by Dr. Shayan Rab and injcludes psychiatric nurses, social workers and addiction counselors, and sometimes conducts sidewalk court hearings for those who resist treatment — was featured in a September 2022 article by my colleague Doug Smith.
Dr. Susan Partovi, left, and Dr. Steven Hochman talk to a woman during their medical outreach.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Dr. Curley Bonds, chief medical officer of the department, says DMH psychiatrists first establish a working relationship with the client and invest time in determining a clinical history, including prescribed medications and dosage. It can be difficult, he said, to distinguish between psychosis and the effects of street drugs like methamphetamine, but trained psychiatrists have an advantage over doctors with other specialties. Treatment would ordinarily begin with short-term oral medication, Bonds said, to establish the “efficacy and tolerability of the agent.”
Only then would long-acting injectables be an option, he continued, but even then, the civil rights of the patient would have to be a consideration.
“We are more cautious about making sure there is informed consent and … we really want to respect a person’s autonomy for decision-making,” Bonds said. Despite procedural differences and quibbles over the Partovi team’s approach, Bonds added, “I don’t want to put us at odds with them … because what they are doing is important work.”
A glance at the reality on the streets of Los Angeles makes clear that far more help and substantially greater urgency are badly needed. And Partovi is not alone in practicing what she calls “low barrier bridge psychiatry.”
Dr. Coley King, director of homeless healthcare at the Venice Family Clinic, is not a psychiatrist, either. But as a street medic in L.A., the national capital of homelessness, he works in what is essentially an outdoor mental hospital, with tents instead of beds. King treats mental illness and whatever else he sees — and what, often, no one else is treating.
He told me he has used both short-term and long-term anti-psychotics, depending on the situation. The risks posed by medication are not as great, he said, as the risk of being homeless, sick and untreated.
“The need is so dire, and the patients are dying at such a young age, and the lack of available psychiatry is so marked,” said King, who leads a street medicine team through Westside streets four days a week and often works with a psychiatric nurse practitioner. “We’re not doing this in any sort of cavalier fashion. We’re doing it very thoughtfully with a mind to knowing our medications and knowing our diagnosis and treatment are based on a ton of experience and a lot of exposure to working side-by-side with psychiatrists in the field.”
In 2020, I wrote about a formerly homeless Santa Monica woman whose life had been turned around after King treated her for her addiction and physical and mental ailments. The treatment included a long-acting injection the woman agreed to, and when I met her, she was living in a hotel before moving into housing arranged by the outreach team.
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When I met with Partovi last month on Skid Row, her team consisted of Dr. Steven Hochman, an addiction specialist; David Dadiomov, director of USC’s psychiatry pharmacy program; and social worker Sylvia Meza. It was Meza who established this nonprofit outreach team — it’s called SUDIS, for Substance Use Disorder Integrated Services — and brought in Partovi as medical director last year.
Overdose bags contain Naloxone — a medication designed to reverse an opioid overdose — fentanyl strips to detect the presence of fentanyl and reading materials about avoiding overdose.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
As someone who works the aging beat, I was struck by how many of the people we encountered were late middle age and beyond. Partovi estimated that about 50% of the people served by the team are 50 and older.
“They got caught up in Skid Row when they were young and were never able to get out of it,” Meza said. “Skid Row is like bondage. People are trapped in there. They have this poverty mentality where they feel like they can’t get out, but they can. It’s just about motivating them to see the cup as half full and not half empty.”
A gray-haired man crossed the street before us, and just up ahead, 63-year-old Israel stood near a tent, not far from a woman named Diane, who said she was 60 and was caring for her two cats, Gold and Silver, along with two dogs owned by a woman who’s in jail.
“That’s French Fry,” Partovi said as one of the dogs, a white terrier, crossed the street.
She knew the dog’s name because that’s how outreach works— you get to know people, their routines, their histories, even their pets. Neither Diane nor Israel was interested in medication on this day, but a connection was made, the first step in building trust.
Hochman spoke to Israel in Spanish and English, letting him know he’d be back again, and that medication was available. He told me the outreach team tries to determine a patient’s medical history, and at times does prescribe short-term medication if there are concerns about tolerability. But people often lose their daily medication, Hochman said. Or they forget to take it. Or it gets stolen, or swept away in storms or street-cleaning sweeps. A month-long dose can up the chances of turning things around.
On Crocker Street, where the team distributed Narcan kits to slow the epidemic of overdose deaths, Meza was joking with a 68-year-old man when we noticed that Partovi, a half block away, was waving for the team to join her.
Dr. Steven Hochman, left, Dr. Susan Partovi and Sylvia Meza check on the well-being of a man in downtown Los Angeles.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The doctor had spotted a woman she thought would be a candidate for an injection. Amanda, 51, said she had been diagnosed with two psychiatric conditions. She listed her most recent medications and said she wanted something to treat her depression.
Partovi asked several questions, including whether Amanda had a history of adverse reactions. Partovi has a network of psychiatrists she can consult, but she didn’t think she needed to in this case. She informed Amanda that with the injection, she’d be medicated for a month. Amanda gave her approval.
“I’m gonna hold your hand,” Meza said as Partovi rolled up Amanda’s sleeve and poked a syringe into the soft tissue of her right shoulder.
“We want to do this every month,” Partovi said as Amanda grimaced from the sting.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, almost done,” Partovi said before adding: “OK, now you’re good.”
Partovi said that in the best scenarios, the “word salad” dissipates, patients express themselves more clearly, and they make better decisions about recovery. “In my experience, once they get their mental health stabilized, then they want to work on substance abuse,” she said.
I asked how she can distinguish between mental illness and the effects of drug use.
“We’re not treating a diagnosis,” she said. “We’re treating symptoms. If someone is having psychiatric symptoms, the literature shows that whether it’s meth-related or organic schizophrenia, the anti-psychotics are going to work. That’s been my experience as well.”
Among the homeless people of Skid Row or anywhere else, the back stories are usually long and messy narratives involving childhood trauma, domestic abuse, sexual assault, chronic disease, poverty, incarceration, a lack of affordable housing, mental illness and self-medication with increasingly dangerous street drugs.
Amanda said she’d been homeless since 2017 after doing some jail time and that she couldn’t recall having a place of her own. Meza promised Amanda she would investigate options for housing and other services.
“Do not lose my number,” Meza said, handing Amanda her business card. “This is my personal cell number.”
They posed together for a photo, and then the team kept moving, getting approval for injections from two more clients over the next 20 minutes.
I first connected with Partovi many years ago, after I’d met a homeless Juilliard-trained street musician whose career had been derailed after a diagnosis of mental illness. In full disclosure, at her request, I interviewed Partovi about her work and “Renegade M.D.” at her book-launch party last month.
In the book — a compelling and personal front-lines look at who becomes homeless and why, complete with triumphs and tragedies and an unflinching examination of a fragmented system that is a often a barrier to recovery — Partovi says that as a Westside teenager, she traveled to a leprosy clinic in Mexico with a Christian service group and medical team. She knew then what she wanted to do with her life.
“I made the commitment to become a doctor and focus on patients who experience the worlds of poverty and injustice,” she writes.
In 2007, while working as a street doctor in Santa Monica, she came upon “a woman who looked to be in her 80s but was probably younger. Living on the streets ages people quickly.”
She thought of her own grandmother, who had passed away in her 90s.
“If my grandmother had wanted to panhandle on the Promenade in her flannel nightgown, I would have picked her up … and thrown her into my car. … I would never allow my family member to live on the streets. … Why do we, as a society, allow it?”
Southern Californians can brace for another round of wet weather, with a storm expected to hit the region early next week to cap off a month of historically wet weather.
The slow-moving storm is expected to reach the Los Angeles area by Monday night or Tuesday morning before tapering off later Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. It’s projected to drop between a quarter of an inch and half an inch of rain in coastal areas and valleys and up to an inch in the mountains.
The storm isn’t expected to pack the same punch as the storms earlier this month.
“It’s considerably weaker,” said Mike Wofford, a NWS meteorologist in Oxnard. “This would be a light storm even in a fairly quiet winter pattern.”
But because the ground is still saturated from the back-to-back historic storms earlier this month that triggered debris and mud flows, damaged homes and killed several people across the state, there’s still the risk of landslides in areas adjacent to hills. That includes the Santa Monica Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains, the Rancho Palos Verdes area and anywhere in the Hollywood Hills.
“Landslides can happen at any time now that the grounds are so wet,” Wofford said. “Any additional rain would make it worse. That’s something people will have to live with for a while until things dry out.”
Downtown Los Angeles has received 17.79 inches of rain since the water year began on Oct. 1 and 12.56 inches in February alone, making it the fourth-wettest February since the weather service started keeping records in 1877. This February is also the wettest month in 26 years and is tied for the seventh-wettest month ever.
To put things into context, downtown L.A. usually gets about 10 inches by this time in the typical water year and about 15 inches over a 12-month period.
“If we didn’t get any rain between now and October, we’d be almost three inches above the normal for the entire year,” Wofford said. “That’s telling.”
Following three years of severe drought, California is now experiencing one of its wettest years on record. Elsewhere in the state, the storms dropped enough snow on the Sierra Nevada to eradicate fears of a “snow drought” and build up the snowpack to 86% of normal for the date.
California’s major reservoirs are also at 118% of their average levels for this time of year.
“Some of the reservoirs had to do releases ahead of approaching storms so they can take in the water that falls,” Wofford said. “That’s not something we normally have to deal with in a typical winter.”
All dogs may go to heaven, but California landlords aren’t as accommodating.
Pet owners can have a tougher time finding apartments because of the surfeit of landlords who don’t allow dogs, cats or other animals in their buildings. A new bill, however, seeks to open more apartments to renters with pets.
The legislation, in fact, would allow landlords to ask about pet ownership only after a tenant’s application has been approved, says Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), author of the bill.
Haney’s proposal would end blanket bans on specific pets, he said, adding that the measure would help ease California’s housing crisis.
Haney introduced Assembly Bill 2216 earlier this month, which he said in a news release requires landlords to “have a reasonable reason[s] for not allowing a pet in a rental unit.”
“I’ve heard from many constituents about the incredible hurdles and challenges they faced in finding homes simply because they own pets,” Haney told The Times on Wednesday. “They’ve been repeatedly denied because they have a dog — even if their dog is an emotional support animal — and they need accommodations.”
Haney said he found inspiration from a British bill introduced in Parliament in May that makes pet ownership “an implied term of an assured tenancy,” unless “the landlord reasonably refuses.”
Haney said that landlords’ restrictions on pets are crippling for the majority of California renters.
He noted that nearly 70% of the state’s 17 million renting families are pet owners and, of those, nearly 3 million live in Los Angeles County.
Statistics on pet ownership vary.
The American Veterinary Medical Assn. said that, in 2020, 45% of all U.S. households owned dogs and 26% owned cats. Among those, 39% of all renters favored canines and 29% preferred felines.
What is indisputable, Haney said, is the low number of rentals in California that say they are “pet friendly.” His staff identified daily listings over the course of a week on real estate website Zillow that showed 21% of available rentals in San Francisco allowed pets, and 26% in Los Angeles.
“California pet owners are over two-thirds of renters, and they’re excluded from units,” Haney said. “I’m a huge supporter of building access to housing, and this is a housing issue.”
Andrea Amavisca, a senior legislative advocate at the California Immigration Policy Center, said she and her partner spent more than a month trying to find a two-bedroom rental unit in Sacramento that permitted their small mixed-breed dog.
“Landlords that initially liked our application would suddenly stop answering our calls once they found out we had a dog,” Amavisca said in a statement. “Or others would require a pet deposit close to $1,000 that would put the unit totally out of our budget.”
Amavisca said it was unfair that nearly every landlord “had a different pet policy with fees that varied based on discretion,” meaning they could charge what they pleased. Some charged only $20 a month, while others asked for $100 and some wanted four-figure cleaning deposits.
Haney’s bill does not address fees, and the legislation wouldn’t bar landlords from excluding certain types of pets.
“We’re not saying every landlord should have to accept every animal,” Haney said.
Haney’s bill defines “a common household pet” as “a domesticated animal, including a dog or cat, that is commonly kept in the home for pleasure rather than for commercial purposes.”
When asked if boa constrictors, lizards, fish or other legally acquired pets met the definition, Haney said the bill was centered on “companion animals” such as dogs or cats.
Calls and emails to the California Apartment Assn. and the Apartment Assn. of California Southern Cities seeking comment on this bill were not returned.
California Oaks Property Management, which manages residential and commercial properties in Ventura County, listed a series of cons regarding pet ownership in a 2023 post to landlords that included property damage, noise complaints and liability issues from possible animal attacks.
California Oaks recommended that landlords charge an added deposit of $250 to $500 depending on breed.
Haney said he expected to receive some pushback from landlords.
“I understand some will be concerned about the potential of taking on renters with pets that do damage in ways they want to avoid,” he said. “I’m open to dialogue.”
The bill is in its infancy and has yet to be referred to an Assembly committee, according to state legislative records, although it may come up for a hearing March 9.
A Minnesota man has been arrested as a suspect in the September killing of Maleesa Mooney, a 31-year-old model and real estate agent in Los Angeles who was pregnant at the time of her death, police announced Wednesday.
Mooney was found dead Sept. 12 in her downtown apartment after her family requested a welfare check, police said. According to an autopsy report, her body was found in her refrigerator at the bloody crime scene. Her arms and legs had been bound, and Mooney had blunt-force trauma injuries to her head, neck, torso, arms, wrists and ankles, according to the autopsy report from the L.A. County Medical Examiner Department.
LAPD detectives identified 41-year-old Magnus Daniel Humphrey of Hopkins, Minn., as her alleged killer. Officials did not share a possible motive on Wednesday or discuss evidence that reportedly linked Humphrey to Mooney’s brutal death.
Humphrey, who had been on federal probation, was arrested at his home in Minnesota on an unrelated federal warrant, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. It wasn’t immediately clear what day he was arrested. He is to be transported to L.A. soon to face charges of murder and torture, according to officials and court records.
Humphrey is accused in court records of killing Mooney on Sept. 7, five days before she was found dead.
On Sept. 6, Mooney had spoken with her cousin over FaceTime, her family said, and had gone out with friends in Santa Monica. Her family never heard from her again.
Jourdin Pauline, Mooney’s sister, said Mooney’s phone and laptop had been stolen from her apartment along with a designer purse. In October, she told The Times that whoever killed her sister most likely knew the phone’s passcode, as someone was sending the family “vague” texts. Pauline didn’t elaborate on the text messages.
Mooney, who was two months pregnant at the time of her death, worked for Nest Seekers, a Beverly Hills real estate agency, for nearly two years, Pauline said. Mooney also modeled part time.
Times staff writer Summer Lin contributed to this report.
One of architect Frank Gehry’s long-standing wishes is finally coming to life: a new concert venue in downtown Los Angeles that will complement his famous Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Preliminary work has begun on a $335-million expansion of the Colburn School of performing arts designed by Gehry that includes a mid-size concert hall he expects to be in near-constant use for events put on by students, professional artists and academics.
“It’s a chance to do a lot of experimenting,” he said.
The long-planned Colburn School addition will be the third Gehry-designed building on Bunker Hill, which already has Disney Concert Hall and the Grand LA, a $1-billion apartment, hotel and retail complex he designed for New York mega-developer Related Cos.
An artist’s rendering of the Colburn Center at 2nd and Hill streets in downtown Los Angeles.
(Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners )
The new Colburn structure is under construction on a former parking lot, cater-cornered to the current campus, at 2nd and Olive streets just east of the Grand, creating three contiguous blocks of Gehry-designed buildings.
Colburn Center, the new building, will be modest in appearance compared with the other two but represents a significant leap for the Colburn School, which opened on Bunker Hill in 1998 and has around 2,000 students.
“The Colburn Center will be a game-changer, stepping up everything we do,” said Sel Kardan, president of the Colburn School.
The centerpiece of the expansion will be a 1,000-seat concert hall named for Pasadena philanthropists Terri and Jerry Kohl with an in-the-round design meant to create intimacy between the performers and the audience. The hall will include an orchestra pit and a stage large enough to accommodate “the grandest works,” Kardan said, making it suitable for orchestra, opera and dance.
“There’s always been a dream of having a place where our largest ensembles can play,” he said, such as the school’s symphony orchestra, bands, youth string programs and children’s choirs. “Currently, those programs take place off-site.”
An artist’s rendering of the interior of the concert hall in the Colburn Center.
(Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners)
The size puts it in a sweet spot between the 2,265-seat Disney and the popular 415-seat Herbert Zipper Concert Hall already on the Colburn campus. The nearby Dorothy Chandler Pavilion seats about 3,200 guests. Larger still is the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live, which seats 7,100.
“It’s more rare to find a kind of medium-sized venue,” Kardan said. “They’re extremely desirable and highly functional. They also have enough seats to be really economically viable.”
Japanese acoustical engineer Yasuhisa Toyota will be the acoustician for the hall, as he has been for all of Gehry’s concert halls, beginning with Disney Hall.
The Colburn Center will also more than double facilities for the school’s Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, creating what the school called “one of the most comprehensive dance education complexes in Southern California.” The dance facilities will include a 100-seat theater for dance and four professional-size studios for dance instruction and rehearsal.
Architect Frank Gehry, left, and Colburn School President Sel Karden at Gehry Partners with a model of Gehry’s design of an addition for Colburn School, a private performing arts school in downtown Los Angeles.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The center will include a rooftop garden large enough to host receptions and outdoor performances, as well as a ground-level garden with a performance space that will be open to the public.
“I think it is very exciting that the school is going to expand,” Mayor Karen Bass said. “I think one of the things the school is known for is an incredible facility and experience for young people. It also provides access through scholarships, so it is a treasure for the city that is accessible to all.”
The Colburn School estimates that it already brings in 10,000 people a week, including students attending classes, lessons and rehearsals. Others rent the current performance and lecture spaces, helping attract audiences who attend more than 500 performances a year in the existing small venues.
The Colburn School has raised $315 million to date toward its $400-million goal for the expansion, the school said. The campaign will cover an estimated $335 million in construction costs as well as $65 million in endowment and operating costs to support the activities of the Colburn Center and the Colburn School.
The new building represents the near culmination of decades of efforts to redevelop Bunker Hill, a former residential neighborhood dating from the city’s early years that was razed in the 1960s to make way for “urban renewal,” a popular concept at the time intended to remake blighted city blocks from the ground up that displaced mostly poor people.
A rendering of the Hill Street side of Colburn Center, which will include ground-level and rooftop gardens.
(Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners)
First among the new development was the Music Center performing arts complex, followed years later by office skyscrapers, a few apartment buildings and such cultural venues as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Colburn School for music and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Disney Hall opened in 2003, followed 12 years later by the Broad museum.
Gehry’s design for Colburn Center was influenced by decisions he had to make while creating a mid-size concert hall inside an existing warehouse in Berlin. The space was small, so he had to put some audience members on the same level as the musicians.
“The audience’s feet are on the same floor as the orchestra,” he said. “I had no idea, but that made a ‘wow’ difference.”
Another facet of the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin that Gehry is bringing to Los Angeles is what he calls a floating balcony. In Berlin, it wasn’t structurally possible to hook the balcony to the wall, so he suspended it in a way that gives the impression of floating above the action.
“At first, everybody said, ‘Well, that’s not going to work,‘” Gehry said. “Finally, that became nirvana. So wherever we go now, everybody wants a floating balcony.”
A view of Colburn Center east from Olive Street towards the entrance to the concert hall.
(Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners, LLP)
Hanging from the ceiling will be concrete sound clouds designed to improve acoustics and evoke a sense of airiness. Gehry hopes that catwalks can be added above the clouds that can be used in future performances.
“There’s a lot of space up there,” he said. “Our hope is once it’s built we’ll put catwalks through there and bring artists and performers so that will become another space, a part of the music.”
Upon completion in 2027, the Colburn Center should broaden the Bunker Hill arts district that is now mostly confined to Grand Avenue, he said.
“The body language of the building is to try to be user-friendly, not to preempt and become the centerpiece, but to be a part of the feeling of the district and cement it as a cultural district.”
President Biden is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles today for a campaign fundraiser at the home of Israeli American media mogul Haim Saban, possibly setting off protests over the U.S. role in Israel’s war against Hamas.
Tension has been mounting within the Democratic Party over Biden’s support for Israel as it bombards the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The Biden administration has been a steadfast ally to Israel, preparing to send additional weapons to the nation even as the president has described the military campaign against Gaza as “over the top” and reportedly privately expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The administration has called for a temporary cease-fire in a draft resolution submitted to the United Nations Security Council, according to a CNN report Monday.
But the issue has divided California Democrats — in November, their convention was shut down early after about 1,000 protesters stormed into the Sacramento venue.
In December, the last time Biden visited Los Angeles to raise money, demonstrators staged major rallies in support of Palestinians, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to U.S. financial and military aid to Israel. Vandals spray-painted “Baby killers,” “LA says no to Genocide Joe” and “Ceasefire now!!! End the war crimes!” on buildings in the Westwood area.
Such protests could recur today. Saban is a major Israel supporter, and other hosts of the fundraiser have deep ties to the Jewish community. Co-host Leslie Gilbert-Lurie is a former television executive who has written a book about her experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and co-host Nicole Mutchnik is vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League, which fights antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. Other co-hosts include Casey Wasserman, chair of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee; StubHub co-founder Eric Baker; former Obama Ambassador to Germany John Emerson and former studio chief Bob Daly. Tickets for the event cost up to $250,000.
Biden has to thread a careful line, so as to not alienate core segments of the Democratic coalition — Jewish voters, young people and people of color who are key to his reelection effort. Biden administration officials met this month with Arab American and Muslim leaders in Michigan in an attempt to foster relationships with a community that could influence who wins the crucial swing state in this year’s election.
A super PAC supporting former President Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in the November general election, has seized on tension over the Israel-Hamas war as Biden arrives in California. It is running digital ads targeting social media users in Saban’s ZIP Code that focus on White House officials’ meeting with Osama Siblani, a Michigan newspaper publisher who has previously praised the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
“Joe Biden continues to embrace America’s enemies. The White House’s embrace of Osama Siblani is an affront to the dozens of Americans and hundreds of Israelis who lost their lives on Oct. 7, and the millions of Israelis who wake up every morning under siege by Islamic terrorism,” Alex Pfeiffer, spokesman for the MAGA Inc. super PAC, said in a statement.
Biden’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the attack ad.
This is probably Biden’s last trip to California before Super Tuesday on March 5, when California and more than a dozen other states hold primary elections. In the 2020 presidential contest, his campaign raised $145.4 million from Californians, the most of any state in the nation, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission. (And that doesn’t include donations to super PACs and other groups that supported his bid.)
His campaign’s fundraising efforts were stymied last year by the entertainment industry strikes.
On Tuesday, the campaign announced that the combined groups supporting Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign raised more than $42 million in January and had $130 million in the bank, the most any Democratic presidential candidate has had at this point in the electoral cycle.
“January’s fundraising haul — driven by a powerhouse grassroots fundraising program that continues to grow month by month — is an indisputable show of strength to start the election year,” campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
The president is expected to speak at an official event Wednesday before leaving the Southland and heading to the Bay Area, where he is scheduled to hold additional fundraisers before leaving the state on Thursday.
Los Angeles County can expect to see rain across the region beginning Sunday night and continuing through Wednesday, with the latest winter storm system forecast to bring the heaviest rain and threat of flooding along the Central Coast.
Compared with the historic storm that pummeled the region earlier this month, forecasters expect “much less rain” for the county this time but warned that the most intense precipitation will hit during the day Monday and Tuesday night. Over the next three days, downtown could see up to 2.4 inches of rain; Santa Clarita, 2.19 inches; Long Beach, 1.8 inches; and Torrance, 1.97 inches.
The rain may not be as intense as some areas farther north, but there are still concerns about the prospect for flooding, landslides and mudflows — particularly in the Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills — because of the soaking Southern California received from the previous storm, David Gomberg, a weather service meteorologist in Oxnard, said during an online media briefing Sunday afternoon.
A flood watch was in effect across broad swaths of California.
“Debris flows, mudslides, and landslides could happen just about anywhere within the flood watch area, as even L.A. County — which is expecting somewhat lower rainfall totals — took the brunt of the last storm, leaving them more susceptible to this kind of activity,” the weather service office in Oxnard said Sunday night.
Residents are urged to move parked cars out of low-lying flood-prone areas, to be alert for mudslides and rock slides on or below canyon roads and to prepare for possible flooding and power outages, the weather service said.
The slow-moving storm system began moving into the Central Coast region Saturday night, bringing light rain to Santa Barbara and western San Luis Obispo counties, officials said. The second, more powerful wave of the storm had arrived in Santa Barbara by Sunday evening. Officials warned of gusty winds, an increased chance of thunderstorms, and the possibility of high surf and coastal flooding.
By 8:20 p.m. Sunday, forecasters reported rainfall rates of between 0.3 to 0.5 inches per hour across the Santa Barbara area.
The Central Coast is expected to feel the brunt of this storm, according to the weather service. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo county foothills and mountain ranges could see 8 to 10 inches of rainfall. The city of Ventura can expect to see up to 3.01 inches, and the city of Santa Barbara 5.66 inches.
High surf advisories are in effect through Tuesday across all beaches in the region, with waves of up to 20 feet expected in some areas. Strong rip currents are expected with large breaking waves at Morro Bay, Port San Luis and Ventura harbors.
There is also a brief risk of “weak tornado activity” during this period in San Luis Obispo County, Gomberg said Sunday.
The greatest threat for coastal flooding — particularly in Malibu and Santa Barbara — will be Tuesday morning, Gomberg said.
Once the system has passed, the state will have a few days to wring itself out before the arrival of another possible system next weekend, Gomberg said, this time coming out of the north and potentially colder.
Times staff writer Thomas Curwen contributed to this report.
A West Covina elementary school substitute teacher is under investigation after students alleged the educator viewed “inappropriate images” on his cellphone while on campus.
The teacher, who was not identified, was immediately removed from the classroom Friday as the West Covina Unified School District conducts an investigation, the district said in a news release. School officials also alerted the West Covina Police Department and Los Angeles County Child Protective Services.
In addition, Cameron Elementary School Principal Sylvia Fullerton sent an email to parents Friday night notifying them about what happened.
“We are in full cooperation with law enforcement and child welfare authorities and are committed to implementing the necessary actions based on the outcomes of the investigation which remains ongoing,” according to the district’s news release.
The West Covina Police Department could not immediately confirm what action was taken against the teacher. KTLA-TV Channel 5 reported the teacher was not arrested because of a lack of evidence.
Outraged at the alleged incident, some parents are planning to protest outside the elementary school Tuesday morning. Parents can contact the district to request counseling services for any student who needs additional support.
Two members of the Los Angeles Fire Department are “making progress” after sustaining critical injuries while fighting a semi-truck fire that led to an explosion on Thursday, according to a department spokesperson.
Nine firefighters were injured in Wilmington by the catastrophic explosion of a tank of compressed natural gas used to power the truck, including two who were hospitalized, fire officials said.
One of those firefighters was discharged Friday night, and another is “critical but stable” and remains in the intensive care unit at Los Angeles General Medical Center, which operates a burn unit, Los Angeles Fire Department Public Information Officer Erik Scott said in a statement Saturday.
The latter firefighter has been taken off a ventilator, Scott said.
“With a happy heart and a sense of relief, we are pleased to report that our most injured #LAFD #Firefighter was successfully extubated this morning. He is awake, alert and talking. Next steps will be to introduce food as tolerated,” Scott posted to X.
The other seven firefighters “have various medical appointments and remain off duty due to their injuries,” Scott said. Some of the firefighters sustained burns, blunt-force trauma, injuries from shrapnel and hearing problems from the explosion, he said.
The cause of the explosion, which shot 30-foot flames into the air early Thursday morning at 1120 Alameda St., is still under investigation.
Firefighters responded after receiving a call that the truck had caught fire. The driver was unharmed and told officials she stopped driving after noticing “abnormalities” with the vehicle.
For sure, there was plenty of computer modeling available to indicate the Southland was in for a severe — and potentially dangerous — soaking. But based on their expertise, forecasters at the National Weather Service in Oxnard correctly anticipated that even the machine-calculated, eye-popping rain totals were probably an underprediction.
When it comes to such a serious storm event, getting the forecast as close to correct as possible isn’t just a matter of pride. Forecasters go to great lengths to assess a storm’s strength so they can accurately inform the public about the dangers it may pose.
“We don’t want to cry wolf and say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get record amounts of rain, catastrophic flooding,’ and then you get about half what you think. And people are like, ‘That was no big deal,’” said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. “And then they’ll tune us out. We don’t want that to happen.”
In this case, “We went a little bit above some of the models and, you know, we were right,” Sirard said.
A person walks under an umbrella at L.A. Live in Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Sirard said the first indications of a potentially significant rain event emerged about 10 to 12 days ahead of the storm’s actual arrival early this month.
To get an idea of a storm’s possible strength, forecasters look at data generated by supercomputers that produce “ensemble forecasts” made from a series of model runs based on slightly tweaked initial conditions, Sirard said.
But the forecast is quite uncertain that far out.
Say you’re trying to map out a forecast 10 days from now, when it looks like a storm is brewing. Half of the model runs might suggest 5 inches of rain will fall over a three-day period, but the other half could suggest less precipitation — sometimes significantly so.
Data like that might be too noisy to say anything with a great degree of confidence.
But as the storm draws closer, those models will start to align a bit more, giving forecasters a better idea of what to reasonably expect.
“And so that would increase our confidence levels,” Sirard said. “Once you get in that seven-day window … if these ensemble models are still showing, say, 60% hypothetically, 5 or more inches in a three-day period — already, our antennas are up. And it’s like, ‘OK, we got a potential for something significant coming in.’”
As forecasters get even closer to the storm’s arrival, they can employ higher-resolution, shorter-range forecast models.
Mud and debris flow from hills caused by heavy rain covered part of a parked car and knocked down the garage door of a home in the 10400 block of West Quito Lane in Los Angeles.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
At a certain point, there was enough confidence for forecasters to post an attention-grabbing warning on social media on Feb. 1, three days before the storm’s arrival: “We are expecting a major storm with dangerous, even life-threatening impacts!”
In subsequent days, local law enforcement and elected officials — from the city of Los Angeles to Santa Barbara County — held media briefings about the dire forecasts that included National Weather Service meteorologists.
Such coordination between meteorologists and politicians hasn’t always happened. Unforgettably, although the National Weather Service office in Monterey issued a flood watch three days before a significant storm landed on Dec. 31, 2022, San Francisco officials were caught unprepared by a record deluge that flooded swaths of low-lying parts of the city and left residents and business owners furious.
There have also been memorable misses. Fourteen years ago, an unexpectedly powerful, slow-moving rainstorm unleashed a torrent of mud that inundated more than 40 homes in La Cañada Flintridge, a far cry from an initial forecast of a light to moderate rainstorm.
The models for the storm earlier this month did adjust in the days leading up to the event. Initial projections about three to five days ahead of the storm suggested Santa Barbara and Ventura counties would get hit the hardest. But as it drew closer, there were growing indications that Los Angeles County would bear the brunt, said Ryan Kittell, another meteorologist in the weather service’s Oxnard office.
That ended up being the case.
The weather service also made late adjustments to what the computer models were showing. Over a four-day period, models said to expect 8 to 10 inches of rain in the San Gabriel Mountains and 4 to 5 inches of rain in downtown L.A.
Meteorologists thought the computer models were underpredicting the projected rainfall totals, so they added a couple of inches to that forecast, Sirard said.
Their instincts proved correct. The weather service’s final forecast was for 8 to 14 inches of rain in the mountains and foothills through Feb. 6. And that was very accurate — the highest rainfall amount recorded in the San Gabriel Mountains over that period was 13.86 inches.
“A lot of us have been here for 25 years. So we know the weather patterns of what can cause the maximum amount of rainfall here,” Sirard said. “You get the high amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, you get the strong jetstream aloft nearby, you have the strong southeast to south low-level flow — all that moisture throughout the atmosphere, from the ground to 20,000 feet or more — all gets squeezed up into the mountains.”
In some areas, the storm proved to be a rainmaker more prolific than even experienced meteorologists had anticipated.
Before the storm began, the weather service had forecast 6.37 inches of rain would fall over a four-day period in downtown Los Angeles. Some people might’ve been hard-pressed to believe such an astonishing amount: On average, downtown gets 14.25 inches of rain in an entire year.
For the four-day period ending at 9 p.m. Feb. 6, 8.66 inches of rain fell on downtown L.A.
Still, the range of the forecast totals helped accurately guide the kinds of warnings that needed to be issued. Once forecast totals in lower-lying cities reach “5, 6, 7, 8 inches, the impacts are pretty much the same” in terms of flooding and landslide risk, Kittell said.
That messaging helped fuel substantial storm preparedness, so officials and residents were not caught completely off guard when land began sliding in a number of hillside communities across L.A. County, including north of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Westwood, as well as in Baldwin Hills and Hacienda Heights.
Pre-storm warnings also let residents know to stock and stack sandbags. And officials readied response teams like swift-water rescue crews that were needed across Southern California.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to allot nearly $4 million to remove graffiti and secure an unfinished downtown Los Angeles skyscraper, which has been heavily tagged in recent weeks.
Councilmember Kevin de León introduced a motion this week to allocate the funds to secure the property and restore the public right of way, which is obstructed by plastic barriers, scaffolding and debris.
“I’m not holding my breath waiting for the developer to clean up their property,” De León said Wednesday. “The purpose of my motion is clear: to prepare our city to take decisive action if the Oceanwide Plaza developer ignores their responsibility and to put them on the hook for costs incurred by the city.”
The motion will move $1.1 million into a fund to fence and secure the ground floors of the building and place an additional $2.7 million into a fund for security services, fire safety upgrades and graffiti abatement.
The motion also calls on the city attorney and city administrative officer to report back to the council within 30 days with a legal strategy to recoup all of the city’s related expenses from the property owners.
The Oceanwide Plaza project, located across Figueroa street from Crypto.com Arena, has become a site for graffiti tagging and even paragliding in recent weeks and posed a headache for city officials and authorities alike. Ahead of the Grammy Awards held at Crypto.com Arena, dozens of floors of the skyscraper were tagged with colorful spray paint.
More than two dozen floors of the skyscraper were tagged with graffiti ahead of the Grammy Awards that were held at Crypto.com Arena held across Figueroa Street.
At least 18 people have been arrested, including 12 on Sunday, on suspicion of trespassing at the site, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The City Council adopted a motion earlier this month, also introduced by De León, that ordered the owners of the property to fence and clean up the area by Saturday. If they miss the deadline, the city will secure the property and charge the owners for the cost, the motion said.
Just one day before the deadline, the owners have not indicated whether they will comply with the city’s orders.
The increase of activity at the site has also stretched resources at the Los Angeles Police Department, LAPD Chief Michel Moore said during Tuesday’s Los Angeles Police Commission meeting.
Officers have spent “more than 3,000 hours” to secure the complex, Moore said.
“We have called in some officers on an overtime basis, so that we can provide for these added patrols or station them at that site to deter vandals and others from gaining access to it while also ensuring that we meet the minimum deployment requirements for stations across the city,” Moore said.
During a City Council meeting last week, Councilmember Imelda Padilla said she was surprised at how much attention the skyscraper was getting and attributed it to its large size.
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Padilla mentioned that at least four “mini versions” of the unfinished skyscraper exist across Los Angeles. The buildings include abandoned commercial, manufacturing and family business structures.
Padilla was referring to abandoned buildings on Sepulveda Boulevard and Kester Avenue, as well as a Denny’s restaurant at Vineland Avenue and Sunland Boulevard, according to a spokesperson for Padilla’s office.
The fourth building, a Roscoe hardware store, is located at Sunland Boulevard and San Fernando Road, according to her spokesperson. Padilla is currently working on getting it demolished.
“It’s upsetting that blight gets more attention when it affects wealthier parts of the city,” Padilla said in a statement Thursday. “Yet, working-class neighborhoods like the ones I represent struggle with this issue every day. Blight is unacceptable no matter the ZIP Code, and we deserve to have the same sense of urgency.”
The Oceanwide Plaza development sits among shops and restaurants near the LA Live complex.
