After decades of debauchery and an untold number of conceptions, revelers at Burning Man celebrated a rare birth at Black Rock City on Wednesday morning, after a festivalgoer unexpectedly went into labor on the Playa.
Some longtime Burners have dubbed the infant “Citizen Zero.”
“Baby girl arrived weighing 3 lbs 9.6 oz and measuring 16.5 inches long,” the infant’s aunt Lacey Paxman wrote in a GoFundMe appeal for the family. “She is currently in the NICU, gaining strength every day. Mom and baby are both doing OK, but she will need to stay in the hospital until she is ready to come home.”
Family members said the woman did not know she was pregnant until she felt the baby coming early Wednesday morning. According to one Redditor, an obstetrician and a pediatric trauma nurse were both camped nearby and rushed to aid the delivery when she went into labor.
The parents then drove themselves to the campground’s medical facility before being airlifted to a major hospital where the baby could receive specialized intensive care, the Redditor said.
“Since this is their first child and the pregnancy was completely unexpected, my brother and his wife don’t have anything prepared — no baby supplies, no nursery, nothing at all,” Paxman wrote.
“On top of that, the unexpected circumstances have created a heavy financial burden: NICU care (with no release date yet), medical bills, and travel and lodging expenses while they are far from home,” she said.
Surprise deliveries are uncommon but far from unheard of, experts say. About 1 in every 500 pregnant women discovers she’s expecting more than 20 weeks along — a phenomenon known as “cryptic pregnancy.”
Cryptic pregnancies are more common among very young mothers, as well as those who may have other health conditions that mask pregnancy symptoms such as nausea, exhaustion and even missed periods. Like the Burner mother, a subset of such parents only discovers they’re pregnant when they go into labor.
Pregnant women, young children and even babies are a regular feature of the nine-day Burning Man festival, which draws tens of thousands of people each year to a desolate strip of the Nevada desert about 120 miles north of Reno.
Still, births are all but unheard at the celebration of “community, art, self-expression and self-reliance.”
The surprise delivery occurred just hours after a white-out dust storm ground incoming traffic to a halt as festivalgoers streamed in and attempted to set camp on Monday.
The dramatic weather recalled torrential rains that flooded the camp in 2023, leaving thousands stranded in deep, sticky mud.
YOJUELA, Mexico — Modesta Matías Aquino was working her regular morning shift — 3 a.m. till noon — at the Glass House Farms in Camarillo, caring for rows of marijuana plants.
Among her co-workers on the morning of July 10 were two of her daughters, aged 16 and 19.
“With everything going on, with the raids, there had been rumors that something bad might happen,” Matías recalled.
About 9 a.m., she said, phalanxes of masked agents in tactical vests sealed off the sprawling compound. Matías and her daughters were among more than 300 undocumented immigrants — including at least 10 minors — who, according to U.S. authorities, were detained at a pair of Glass House sites.
The raids, like other such operations across the United States, split many so-called “mixed-status” families, those with both U.S.-born citizens — often children — and undocumented relatives, typically one or both parents.
Matías’ family life is, by any definition, complicated, including seven daughters in all. Her two youngest daughters, aged 2 and 5, are U.S. citizens, born in California. Her 2-year-old grandson —the child of Matías’ 16-year-old daughter — is also a native Californian. So when Matías was held in a federal lockup in downtown Los Angeles, she faced a momentous choice — one that would mark her family for life.
Matías, 43, could accept removal to Mexico. But that might effectively banish her from returning to the United States, where she had toiled as a field worker for most of the past quarter-century — and where she had deep family ties.
Alternately, she could fight expulsion in court. But that would leave her in custody, possibly indefinitely.
“They told me I could be locked up for months, maybe a year, and never see my children,” Matías said, recalling what U.S. agents informed her in Los Angeles. “I just couldn’t endure that.”
Instead, Matías said, she agreed to return voluntarily to Mexico, but with a caveat: She had to be accompanied by her two youngest daughters and her grandson. After some haggling — federal authorities initially balked at sending U.S. citizen minors to Mexico, Matías said — an agreement was reached. (The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to inquiries from The Times.)
She and four daughters — the two undocumented teenagers who worked at Glass House and the two U.S. citizen youngsters — were soon in a van en route to Tijuana. The U.S.-born grandson was also with them.
“Go ahead,” an agent told Matías upon letting the family out at the border. “You’re back in your country now.”
Ailed Lorenzo Matías and her son, Liam Yair, in the family home in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, have a video chat with the boy’s father, who is in California.
(Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)
Back to Yojuela
The hamlet of Yojuela is home to some 500 people — all of Indigenous Zapotec origins — who reside deep in the Sierra Madre Oriental, in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state. The area is known for its clay pottery, fired from distinctive reddish earth, and for something else — dispatching its offspring to work in the fields of California, supporting loved ones left behind in a time-tested rite of passage.
The scripted sequel is the triumphant homecoming of those who moved on but never forsook their roots. These days, however, many return to places like Yojuela broke and embittered, casualties of President Trump’s deportation onslaught.
Matías and her family showed up last month, just 20 days after she was detained. She had last set foot here seven years earlier.
“This is is where I was born and reared,” Matías said with both resignation and pride, ushering visitors onto a verdant patch shimmering in the aftermath of recent rains.
Reaching the ancestral hearth involves a two-hour, uphill drive on a washboard road from the nearest city, and then a short hike — across a stream and up a steep hill, past fields of corn and beans and stands of pine, all to a soundtrack of clucking turkeys and braying donkeys.
Accompanying Matías were two U.S.-born daughters, Arisbeth, 2, and Keilani, a onetime Oxnard preschooler who turned 5 in Tijuana. Also present were Matías’ 16-year-old daughter, Ailed, and Ailed’s U.S.-born son, Liam Yair, 2.
I’d like like to go back to California
— Ailed Lorenzo Matías
It marked the first time that the native Californians met their extended family, including a platoon of curious cousins.
Seasoned to the periodic reunion ritual was Cecilia Aquino, mother of Matías and her five siblings— all of whom had made the trek to California. For decades, her adobe dwelling hosted waves of grandchildren and great-grandchildren as sons and daughters went back and forth, entrusting expanding broods to the matriarch.
Matías and her mother, now 72, embraced, no words needed. Each examined the other closely. Time had taken its melancholic toll.
“All of my children had to go away and leave their kids with me — there’s no work here,” said Aquino, worn down by years of toil, as she prepared coffee on a kindling-fired stove. “Then they come back. Then they leave again. It’s sad. The children never really get to know their parents. I wish the officials on the other side [of the border] would let them be together.”
Leaving home
Matías joined the migrant trail as a teenager, following the harvests — strawberries, celery, broccoli and more — from California to the Pacific Northwest. Through the years, she gave birth to her seven daughters — four in the United States, three in Mexico — as she crisscrossed the border a dozen times.
“I was always a single mother, always battling on my own for my children,” Matías said. “I earned everything through my own sweat and toil. The fathers of my kids never gave me anything.”
Her last journey north, in 2018, was the most difficult, as the once-porous international boundary had become a militarized bulwark. She vowed it would be her last crossing. Four years ago, she said, she secured work at Glass House Farms, a major player in the legalized cannabis boom.
“It was the best job I ever had,” she said.
There was no back-breaking stooping: Trimmers sat on benches. The pounding sun wasn’t an issue in the temperature-controlled facilities.
Matías said she rose to become a crew chief, overseeing 240 workers. She said she earned more than $20 an hour, and, with overtime, regularly grossed in excess of $1,000 a week — a unfathomable haul in Oaxaca, where field hands pocket the equivalent of about $10 a day.
Her plan, she said, was to remain in California until she turned 65, then retire to Yojuela, using savings to open a shop.
“I never wanted to stay forever in Oxnard,” she said.
Then came July 10.
‘Total chaos’
“People were running all over the place,” Matías recalled of the raid. “Some tried to hide inside the greenhouses. Others crawled inside the ventilation shafts. It was total chaos.”
One worker, Jaime Alanis García, 56, died from injuries suffered when he fell from a greenhouse roof, apparently while trying to evade arrest.
Blocking any escape for herself and her two daughters, Matías said, were los militares — heavily armed U.S. agents in martial getup.
That evening, Matías said, she spent a sleepless night in detention in downtown Los Angeles. The next day, she accepted a “voluntary return” to Mexico.
For almost a week, the family stayed in a shelter in Tijuana, awaiting the arrival of her male partner and the boyfriend of her 19-year-old-daughter. Both were also among the of Glass House detainees. The three-day bus ride south included a frenzied, crosstown change of terminals in Mexico City at midnight to catch the last coach for Oaxaca.
With her remaining savings, Matías purchased an unfinished, cinder-block house on the outskirts of Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, a historic but drab city that hosts a federal prison. It’s about a two-hour drive on a rough track from Yojuela, but offers baseline schooling and job prospects.
The expulsion to Mexico shattered a family that had attained a modicum — perhaps an illusion — of stability in California.
Keilani Lorenzo Matías, 5, a U.S.-born daughter of Modesta Matías Aquino, at the family’s new home in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz.
(Liliana Nieto del Rio / For The Times)
Like her mother, Ailed Lorenzo Matías, 16, succumbed to the siren call of the border. She was 14 when she and her boyfriend crossed into California. She struggled to climb the fence and descend on the U.S. side, worrying about her baby. She was five months pregnant.
The other day, Ailed sat in a stairwell of the new home in Miahuatlán, cuddling her son. They were sharing a video call to Oxnard with the boy’s father, who also worked at Glass House. But, in a twist of fate, he was off duty on July 10.
“I’d like like to go back to California,” the soft-spoken Ailed said. “My son was born there. And that’s where his papá is.”
Unlike Ailed, her sister, Natalia Lorenzo Matías, 19, has no intention of returning.
“No, I don’t want to go back,” Natalia said. “You don’t have a real life there. You spend your time working and locked in your house, always afraid that you will be arrested.”
Her mother is deeply tormented but endeavors to conceal her despair. “I have to be strong for the kids,” Matías said. “When I’m alone, I begin to cry.”
She says she understands Trump’s point: He wants to deport criminals. But, she asks, why target hardworking immigrants?
“In all my years in the north,” she said, “I never saw an American working in the fields.”
Her plan, she says, is to stabilize the family, enroll her 5-year-old in school, find some work — and, then, perhaps in a year or two, set off once more.
For now, though, Matías says she is concentrated on helping her family adjust to a new way of life — albeit, she hopes, a transitory one, until they get back on the road to California.
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed.
The Apopka Police Department arrested a man after he allegedly shot at his neighbor several times following an argument over loud music.Nobody was hurt in the shooting, but Matthew Howard said he was inches away from losing his life after his neighbor, 34-year-old Charles Vega-Guzman, allegedly fired at him several times on Sunday, Aug. 17.Howard pointed out several bullet holes in the patio screen of his Apopka home to WESH 2 on Tuesday. He said that he’s had problems with Vega-Guzman and his mother since “day one”.Howard said he was on his patio with his mother-in-law when the shooting happened. He said after looking at the holes in his patio screen, he believes,”If I was an inch in any other direction if either of us were… we could be seriously hurt on dead,” he said.According to the arrest report, Vega Guzman was taken to the police department. He told officers he grabbed a gun during an argument with the neighbors to scare them, and claimed to have fired rounds into the air, and later he said it was into the ground.His mother told police their neighbors are “very argumentative and pick on her.” She also told police her son fired four shots into the ground.According to the arrest report, police found four spent shell casings on the porch and said, “based on the projectiles’ suspected path of travel, the Defendant intentionally aimed for the victims.”
APOPKA, Fla. —
The Apopka Police Department arrested a man after he allegedly shot at his neighbor several times following an argument over loud music.
Nobody was hurt in the shooting, but Matthew Howard said he was inches away from losing his life after his neighbor, 34-year-old Charles Vega-Guzman, allegedly fired at him several times on Sunday, Aug. 17.
Howard pointed out several bullet holes in the patio screen of his Apopka home to WESH 2 on Tuesday. He said that he’s had problems with Vega-Guzman and his mother since “day one”.
Howard said he was on his patio with his mother-in-law when the shooting happened. He said after looking at the holes in his patio screen, he believes,
“If I was an inch in any other direction if either of us were… we could be seriously hurt on dead,” he said.
According to the arrest report, Vega Guzman was taken to the police department. He told officers he grabbed a gun during an argument with the neighbors to scare them, and claimed to have fired rounds into the air, and later he said it was into the ground.
His mother told police their neighbors are “very argumentative and pick on her.” She also told police her son fired four shots into the ground.
According to the arrest report, police found four spent shell casings on the porch and said, “based on the projectiles’ suspected path of travel, the Defendant intentionally aimed for the victims.”
José Antonio Rodríguez held a bouquet of flowers in his trembling hands.
It had been nearly a quarter of a century since he had left his family behind in Mexico to seek work in California. In all those years, he hadn’t seen his parents once.
They kept in touch as best they could, but letters took months to cross the border, and his father never was one for phone calls. Visits were impossible: José was undocumented, and his parents lacked visas to come to the U.S.
Now, after years of separation, they were about to be reunited. And José’s stomach was in knots.
He had been a young man of 20 when he left home, skinny and full of ambition. Now he was 44, thicker around the middle, his hair thinning at the temples.
Would his parents recognize him? Would he recognize them? What would they think of his life?
José had spent weeks preparing for this moment, cleaning his trailer in the Inland Empire from top to bottom and clearing the weeds from his yard. He bought new pillows to set on his bed, which he would give to his parents, taking the couch.
Finally, the moment was almost here.
Gerardo Villarreal Salazar, 70, left, is reunited with his grandson Alejandro Rojas, 17.
Leobardo Arellano, 39, left, and his father, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, are reunited after 24 years.
Officials in Mexico’s Zacatecas state had helped his mother and father apply for documents that allow Mexican citizens to enter the U.S. for temporary visits as part of a novel program that brings elderly parents of undocumented workers to the United States. Many others had their visa applications rejected, but theirs were approved.
They had packed their suitcases to the brim with local sweets and traveled 24 hours by bus along with four other parents of U.S. immigrants. Any minute now, they would be pulling up at the East Los Angeles event hall where José waited along with other immigrants who hadn’t seen their families in decades.
José, who wore a gray polo shirt and new jeans, thought about all the time that had passed. The lonely nights during Christmas season, when he longed for the taste of his mother’s cooking. All the times he could have used his father’s advice.
His plan had been to stay in the U.S. a few years, save up some money and return home to begin his life.
But life doesn’t wait. Before he knew it, decades had passed and José had built community and a career in carpentry in California.
Juan Mascorro sings for the reunited families.
He sent tens of thousands of dollars to Mexico: to fund improvements on his parents’ house, to buy machines for the family butcher shop. He sent his contractor brother money to build a two-bedroom house where José hopes to retire one day.
His mother, who likes talking on the phone, kept him informed on all the doings in town. The construction of a new bridge. The marriages, births, deaths and divorces. The creep of violence as drug cartels brought their wars to Zacatecas.
And then one day, a near-tragedy. José’s father, jovial, strong, always cracking jokes, landed in the hospital with a heart that doctors said was failing. He languished there six months on the brink of death.
But he lived. And when he got out, he declared that he wanted to see his eldest son.
A framed artwork depicting the states of California and Zacatecas is a gift for families being reunited.
A full third of people born in Zacatecas live in the U.S. Migration is so common, the state has an agency tasked with attending to the needs of Zacatecanos living abroad. It has been helping elderly Mexicans get visas to visit family north of the border for years.
The state tried to get some 25 people visas this year. But the United States, now led by a president who has vilified immigrants, approved only six.
José had a childhood friend, Horacio Zapata, who also migrated to the U.S. and who hasn’t seen his father in 30 years. Horacio’s father also applied for a visa, but he didn’t make the cut.
Horacio was crestfallen. A few years back, his mother died in Mexico. He had spent his life working to help get her out of poverty, and then never had a chance to say goodbye. He often thought about what he would give to share one last hug with her. Everything. He would give everything.
He and his wife had come with José to offer moral support. He put his arm around his friend, whose voice shook with nerves.
Horacio Zapata, 48, hoped his father would be able to come to Los Angeles through the reunion program, but his visa request was denied.
East L.A. was normally bustling, filled with vendors hawking fruit, flowers and tacos. But on this hot August afternoon, as a car pulled up outside the event hall to deposit José’s parents and the other elderly travelers, the streets were eerily quiet.
Since federal agents had descended on California, apprehending gardeners, day laborers and car wash workers en masse, residents in immigrant-heavy pockets like this one had mostly stayed inside.
The thought crossed José’s mind: What if immigration agents raided the reunion event? But there was no way he was going to miss it.
Suddenly, the director of the Federation of Zacatecas Hometown Assns. of Southern California, which was hosting the reunion, asked José to rise. Slowly, his parents walked in.
Of course they recognized one another. His first thought: How small they both seemed.
José Antonio Rodríguez and his mother, Juana Contreras Sánchez, wipe tears from their eyes after being reunited.
José gathered his mother in an embrace. He handed her the flowers. And then he gripped his father tightly.
This is a miracle, his father whispered. He’d asked the Virgin for this.
His father, whose heart condition persists, was fatigued from the long journey. They all took seats. His father put his head down on the table and sobbed. José stared at the ground, sniffling, pulling up his shirt to wipe away tears.
A mariachi singer performed a few songs, too loudly. Plates of food appeared. José and his parents picked at it, mostly in silence.
At the next table, José Manuel Arellano Cardona, 70, addressed his middle-aged son as muchachito — little boy.
In the coming days, José and his parents would relax into one another’s company, go shopping, attend church. Most evenings, they would stay up past midnight talking.
José Antonio Rodríguez holds a bouquet of flowers for his mother and father.
Eventually, the parents would head back to Zacatecas because of the limit on their visas.
But for now, they were together, and eager to see José’s home. He took them by the arms as he guided them out into the California sun.
A man was fatally shot in a drive-by shooting Saturday night as he and his mother were leaving a home in Compton, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.
The shooting occurred around 9:15 p.m. as the victim and his mother were exiting the home in the 800 block of South Chester Avenue, authorities said. One or more occupants of a white sedan traveling southbound opened fire on the victim before speeding away.
Deputies who responded were directed to a local hospital where the man had been taken by a family member and later died, authorities said.
The sheriff’s department has not identified the victim or determined a motive for the crime.
No arrests have been made, and there was no additional information about a suspect or suspects in the case.
Anyone with information is asked to telephone the sheriff’s department at (323) 890-5500.
Amid relentless criticism from former President Trump that she is responsible for out-of-control illegal immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday made her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since 2021, announcing more stringent measures she would take as president to restrict border entry.
“The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border, and to enforce them,” Harris told a crowd in Douglas, Ariz., gathered in a small auditorium at Cochise College Douglas Campus, where the stage was flanked by large signs that read, “Border security and stability.” “We are also a nation of immigrants. The United States has been enriched by generations of people who have come from every corner of the world to contribute to our country and to become part of the American story.”
Harris said she would go beyond Biden administration policies to further restrict border access outside of official ports of entry.
Earlier in the afternoon, Harris visited a port of entry less than 10 miles from the campaign event. Two Border Patrol agents walked with her along the towering fence, which was built during the Obama administration. Harris later told reporters that she had thanked them for their work.
“They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated,” she said. “And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them.”
She advocated for hiring more officers and adding more fentanyl detection systems at border entry points.
“I reject the false choice that suggest we must either choose between securing our border or creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”
Immigration reform has bedeviled presidents of both parties for decades.
A bipartisan proposal earlier this year that combined increased funding for border security and foreign aid for Ukraine appeared to be the first breakthrough until it was derailed when Trump urged Republicans to oppose it.
Kamala Harris speaks at Cochise College Douglas Campus in Douglas, Ariz., on Friday.
(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)
That deal fell short of comprehensive plans discussed for decades that would revamp the asylum system and the legal immigration process and provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people in the country without legal authorization, including those who arrived as children. Harris on Friday mentioned farm workers and immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers.”
“As president, I will put politics aside to fix our immigration system and find solutions to problems which have persisted for far too long,” Harris said.
In advance of Harris’ visit to the border, Trump pointed to reports that there are more than 425,000 convicted criminals who are in the country illegally but not detained by federal authorities, according to data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to a lawmaker’s request.
That includes more than 13,000 convicted of homicide and more than 15,800 convicted of sexual assault, according to the ICE data shared on X, formerly Twitter, by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).
Trump said Thursday that 21 million people entered the country illegally in just the last four years. He framed the bipartisan effort that he helped defeat as “her atrocious border bill.”
“It was not a border bill. It was an amnesty bill … ,” he said at a news conference in Manhattan. “Fortunately Congress was too smart for it.”
The bill would not have provided a path to citizenship for people who lack legal status.
The GOP nominee’s appearance at Trump Tower was reminiscent of his 2015 campaign announcement there, notably his references to other nations purposefully sending criminals to the United States.
His remarks included multiple falsehoods, such as saying Harris approved a raft of changes to the nation’s immigration policies that as vice president she had no control over, and that she was the Biden administration’s “border czar.” She had been charged with trying to improve conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stop those nations’ residents from fleeing their homelands.
That assignment has been a political headache for Harris — drawing criticism from the left and right.
In a 2021 visit to Central America, Harris told would-be migrants that they would be deported if they crossed the border, angering allies of immigrants who said they were fleeing poverty, corruption and violence.
“Do not come,” she said at the time. “You will be turned back.”
On the same trip, Harris laughed off questions in a nationally televised interview about why she had not yet visited the border as vice president, inflaming critics on the right.
Border stops hit a record in December, with agents making nearly 250,000 arrests. As the political problem raged, Biden signed an order in June to heavily restrict asylum claims, prompting a sharp drop in border encounters, to fewer than 60,000 in July and August.
Republicans have been hammering the issue, with GOP members of Congress filing a resolution that “strongly condemns the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border” one day after the president announced he would not seek reelection.
While some of the former president and his allies’ claims are demonstrably false and have been denounced by GOP elected officials, such as allegations that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, concerns among some voters about the impact of an insecure border on the economy, crime and the fentanyl crisis are palpable in many communities.
Friday’s visit was Harris’ second to Arizona since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, according to the Harris-Walz campaign. While Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and others have swung through the southwestern battleground state, Harris has focused much of her in-person campaigning in critical states farther east, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.
Hours before the vice president landed in Arizona, Republicans held a press call featuring two mothers whose daughters were raped and killed by immigrants who were in the country illegally and the mother of a teenage son who overdosed on fentanyl. The women lambasted Harris for the administration’s immigration policy and for visiting the border so close to the election.
“I’m trying very hard not to cry. We live 1,800 miles away from the border,” said Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a mother of five who was brutally attacked while walking a bucolic and well-traveled public trail in Maryland. Her body was discovered in a drain pipe.
“No one is safe in America, no one is safe. If you have a sanctuary city in your state, you’re not safe,” she said. “They have bused, flown, trained illegal immigrants to literally every nook and cranny and every tiny town in the whole of the United States.”
Such fears are among the reasons the Harris campaign released an ad about immigration in Arizona on Friday, and visited the Southern border less than a month and a half before election day. As vice president, she previously visited the region once in 2021, when she toured the port of entry and border operation in El Paso.
Mehta reported from Phoenix and Pinho reported from Douglas. Times staff writers Noah Bierman and Andrea Castillo contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
The 34-year-old Norco man arrested on suspicion of starting the Line fire, which has raged through San Bernardino County, tried multiple times to start a fire before succeeding, prosecutors allege.
The San Bernardino County district attorney’s office filed criminal charges Thursday against Justin Wayne Halstenberg. He’s facing multiple counts of arson, including using incendiary devices to start fires and arson causing great bodily injury. Prosecutors said additional charges may be filed for any further structure damage or injuries as the fire continues.
“The devastation that has unfolded due to the alleged actions of one man cannot be undone,” Dist. Atty. Jason Anderson said in a statement, adding that “37,000 acres of forest land and mountain communities might never be what they once were.”
“My hope is that with the investigative efforts of our law enforcement partners and thorough prosecution of this case,” he said, “we can offer some measure of justice.”
The man’s mother spoke out in her son’s defense, telling The Times on Thursday that he “did not light that fire.”
A helicopter drops water on the Line fire Monday in Mentone, Calif.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Connie Halstenberg made the comment in a text message response to The Times in which she said that she was not talking to the press.
But, she said: “I do want to say this about my baby boy. He did not light that fire, I repeat he did not light that fire.”
She said there are things that her son does that she does not approve of but that “he is not an arsonist.”
In filing charges, prosecutors said Halstenberg attempted to start multiple fires within an hour in the city of Highland. His first alleged attempt occurred at Bacon and Lytle lanes. That fire was reported and extinguished by local firefighters.
Justin Wayne Halstenberg, 34, is being held without bail. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday at Rancho Cucamonga Superior Courthouse.
(San Bernardino County sheriff)
Prosecutors said he tried a second time just east of Bacon Lane, near Base Line and Aplin streets. They said the fire was stomped out by a good Samaritan.
“Undeterred, he ignited a third fire which is what we now know as the Line Fire,” prosecutors said in the statement.
Three firefighters were injured in the first couple of days of the fire. At least one structure has been destroyed, and three others have been damaged, but none were homes, according to San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus. He said the fire had affected an estimated 100,000 county residents.
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Battalion Chief Matt Kirkhart, who supervises the law enforcement investigation unit, said arson investigators responded to the fire that day to determine the origin and cause of the fire.
Flames from the Line fire reach tree tops Tuesday in Running Springs, Calif.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
He said investigators immediately began to comb through video taken from traffic cameras and license plate readers in an effort to develop a lead. They were joined by detectives with the Sheriff’s Department. Kirkhart said investigators at some point were able to identify a white truck, which led them to the suspect.
Sheriff’s Det. Jake Hernandez said Halstenberg was taken into custody Tuesday at his home in the 1000 block of Detroit Street in Norco, where a search was conducted.
Halstenberg, who remains in jail without bail, is scheduled to be arraigned Friday at Rancho Cucamonga Superior Courthouse.
A 21-year-old man was indicted for murder in connection to a shooting that resulted in the death of 53-year-old Florida mother.
State Attorney Bill Gladson announced the grand jury indictment of 21-year-old Donald Donell Jamison, in connection with the July 30, 2024 shooting that resulted in the death of 53-year-old Claudia Barbosa and the injury of another individual.
Jamison has been indicted for one count of Premeditated First-Degree Murder with a Firearm, one count of Attempted Felony Murder, two counts of Robbery with a Firearm, and one count of Escape from a Law Enforcement Officer.
The day of the incident, the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) received a call for service, indicating two individuals were shot while at a Brooksville restaurant. The caller stated the suspect had fled the scene in a vehicle. When first responders arrived, they located Claudia and the second victim with apparent gunshot wounds.
Claudia Barbosa was pronounced deceased on scene, while the other victim suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis and his law enforcement officers worked diligently to investigate the incident and apprehend the suspect responsible. HCSO officials were able to obtain surveillance footage and confirm the information given by multiple witnesses on scene.
According to law enforcement, a statewide broadcast was issued for the suspect vehicle. Shortly after, the Florida Highway Patrol observed a vehicle matching the description and conducted a traffic stop.
When troopers made contact with the driver, later identified as Jamison, he matched the description of the suspect given by witnesses.
Jamison was detained and transported back to Hernando County to be interviewed by HCSO investigators. While in custody, Jamison attempted to escape but was immediately detained and arrested.
The State Attorney’s office said it acknowledges the gravity of this matter and its profound impact on the victim’s family and the community. As these legal proceedings develop, the State Attorney’s office pledged to remain committed to ensuring justice and accountability for all.
A San Dimas woman has been arrested in the fatal stabbing of her wife with a sword during a fight at their home, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said.
Weichien Huang, 44, was booked on suspicion of the murder of Chen Chen Fei, 47, on July 18.
Huang attacked Fei with the weapon during an argument in the couple’s home, the Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. She also allegedly attacked and injured Fei’s mother, who despite her injuries was able to wrest the sword away from Huang and run into the street for help.
Deputies responding to the couple’s home in the 300 block of South Huntington Avenue first encountered a bloodied woman in the street holding a sword who approached deputies as they drove up in their police cruiser, according to reporting from news station KTLA.
She complied with directions to put down the sword and directed deputies to the residence, where they discovered Fei’s body and a second uninjured woman.
Fei’s mother remains in stable condition at a local hospital.
An El Dorado County Superior Court judge Friday formally exonerated a deceased Oregon woman who had falsely confessed to a brutal murder in the Sierra Nevada foothills decades ago, bringing closure to her two adult sons who were children when she was imprisoned for a crime she did not commit.
“Oftentimes the public thinks the job of a prosecutor is to do nothing but come in and try to put people away,” said Lisette Suder, an El Dorado County assistant district attorney. “And that’s really not our job at all. Our job is to seek justice.”
She told the judge: “We are asking the court to legally undo a wrong. It was almost 40 years in the making, this wrong.”
Connie Dahl died of a heart attack in March 2014. She was 48.
(Jarred Lange)
Connie Dahl was 19 in 1985 when she and her then-boyfriend, Ricky Davis, returned from night of partying to find the desecrated body of a house guest in the upstairs bedroom.
Police quickly focused on Davis — and Dahl — as suspects rather than witnesses. But they were not charged and went their separate ways.
In 1999, investigators reopened the cold case and relentlessly interrogated Dahl. Though Dahl at first maintained her innocence, the investigators pressured her to adopt a version of the crime they believed was true, in which Dahl helped Davis carry out the killing.
El Dorado County Assistant Dist. Atty. Lisette Suder listens to Ricky Davis make a statement in court Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Davis was convicted in 2005, largely on Dahl’s false testimony, and sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. He was exonerated in 2020 based on DNA tests that proved he was innocent. The DNA also led police to the real killer, who pleaded no contest to the murder in 2022 and is now in prison. The same evidence proved Dahl was not involved in the crime, but she had died in 2014, and no one thought to clear her name.
Times reporters told El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson of the oversight, and that Dahl’s children had never been told that she was no longer considered guilty. Pierson quickly moved to ask the court to vacate her conviction and declare Dahl factually innocent.
On Friday, Pierson gathered with her two sons, Nick and Jarred Lange, at the El Dorado County Courthouse. Davis joined them.
Standing outside the courtroom before the hearing, Jarred and Nick met Davis for the first time. A colorful character wearing a bright pink tie and a leather biker vest who showed up on a red Harley-Davidson — he was, they agreed, just the kind of guy their mother would fall for.
Ricky Davis, left, speaks with El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson in court Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
“I am sorry for what happened to you,” Jarred told Davis.
“Look, I was never really mad,” Davis told the brothers. “It was a malleable time in your mom’s life.”
Davis, who has spent years looking over the transcripts of Dahl’s interrogations, trying to understand why she would implicate them both in a crime they had nothing to do with, added, “I believe she was indoctrinated.”
“Yeah, and she started to question herself,” Jarred said.
Later, Davis would tell the judge: “I want to see her vindicated. She was as innocent as I was. She was railroaded in a different way.”
These men arrived almost at once at the courthouse Friday morning, passing through the metal detector one by one, even the district attorney was forced to remove his belt by an officer who did not recognize him. They stood awkwardly greeting one another as they put their belts back on, then walked up the wide staircase to wait outside Judge Larry E. Hayes’ courtroom.
Ricky Davis addresses the court on Friday.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Then they filed in: The Lange brothers, who flew in from Oregon, took seats in the first row; Davis sat behind them. Other lawyers and family members of defendants in court for unrelated matters looked on in surprise.
“My condolences to the family and to the people who have been traumatized by this whole situation,” the judge said. “But I hope you walk out of the courtroom with finally justice being done in the correct way.”
The Lange brothers sat impassively. Nick, a father of 1-year-old twin boys, hesitated when the judge asked if they wanted to speak.
Finally, he stood: “I just wish she could be here for this. She has been gone for over 10 years, and in the 20 years I had with her she wasn’t well for most of the time. So I wish she could just be here and she would have gotten the help she deserved.”
Judge Larry E. Hayes presided over the hearing that exonerated Connie Dahl.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Earlier, Jarred and Nick described how their mother’s arrest wrecked their lives.
They were shuffled from relative to relative with little stability or understanding of why their mother was gone. When she was finally freed in 2006 and allowed to return to Oregon on probation, her record made it almost impossible to find a job or housing. For a time, they were homeless, living in a tent.
After the hearing, the Lange brothers said that they felt a sense of closure. It was not until meeting with a Times reporter in April 2023 they they learned the whole story of what had happened to her, Nick said. Ever since, he added, he has been thinking about how much his mother went through, and how the wrongful conviction affected all of them.
“Who knows what life could have been like, but it could have been better in almost any way,” Jarred said.
Pierson, the district attorney, offered an apology.
“We can’t take back or bring back the time she spent in custody here … and the negative consequences that happened in her life as well as your life as a result of it,” Pierson told the Lange brothers in court. “But we can take responsibility for it and seek to do better in the future.”
Ricky Davis approaches the lectern to speak to the court as Connie Dahl’s children, Nick Lange, left, and Jarred Lange, right, sit with Julie Ehrlich, a victim witness advocate, in the El Dorado County Courthouse.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Pierson also offered a pledge to ensure that something like this won’t happen again. This case has convinced him the methods authorities use to interrogate suspects are outdated and can lead to false confessions and wrongful convictions.
Since exonerating Davis, he has been on a quest to change how detectives are trained, so that California and the country moves to what he describes as evidence-based tactics that pursue truth and facts over confessions. In 2021, he supported legislation that would have banned the kind of interrogations Dahl endured. But that bill was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cited the high price of retraining detectives across the state.
Pierson, working with the Innocence Project, was successful with a second piece of legislation that banned lying to suspects under the age of 18. That law went into effect this year.
The district attorney has also refused to prosecute any cases in his jurisdiction where confessions were obtained with the technique, and arranges training in science-based methods for investigators across the state.
“My goal has always been to change the way we train officers to do interviews and interrogation,” he said.
The Lange brothers walked out of the dim courthouse Friday morning and into the bright Northern California sun. They were surprised by how pleasant Placerville seemed, the charm of a Gold Rush town on a summer day.
“She used to tell us all the time that we were going to be the only thing each of us had at some point,” said Nick Lange, at right with his brother. “She was right.”
(Isaac Wasserman / For The Times)
Their mom had once walked this stretch of shops and bars on Main Street in search of fun — a carefree young woman who didn’t understand how precarious her freedom was until it was gone.
They wished they could be here under different circumstances, and that she could have, too. The exoneration was important and even healing, but it was not justice.
“It’s nice to have this come to an end,” Jarred said. “It was a long time coming.”
Mother’s Day is coming around the corner on Sunday, May 12, which means Chicagoans who haven’t already made plans to celebrate are officially behind the eight ball. A special meal is a straightforward way to make any maternal figure feel appreciated, and fortunately for the procrastination-inclined, it’s not too late to book a reservation. And for good measure, here’s a hot take — screw brunch. Much like florals for spring, brunch on Mother’s Day isn’t exactly groundbreaking, so do right by the woman of the hour and take her to dinner.
Below, find Eater Chicago’s roundup featuring some of the city’s top restaurants with remaining availability during prime hours on Mother’s Day.
A charming walk through Lakeshore East Park makes for a lovely prelude to a Mother’s Day meal at this airy downtown outpost of Chicago’s mini-empire of modern Greek restaurants from the team at Avli Taverna. Its breezy rooftop space comes with stunning views of the city and Navy Pier.
Toast to the guest of honor on Mother’s Day with a glass or bottle from the fun and robust wine selection at this lively South Side spot helmed by veteran Chicago chef Lamar Moore. Families can count on warm, friendly service and a modern American menu with Southern influences.
For a sumptuous Mother’s Day meal, head to this wood grill-powered Mexican restaurant that’s had a resurgence of late thanks to new executive chef Brian Enyart, a veteran of Rick Bayless’ local hospitality empire and owner of Logan Square’s shuttered Dos Urban Cantina. Dishes like a smokey beef ribeye or whole sea bass will go a long way toward transporting mom to Baja, California.
Prime seafood, which arguably deserves a place among the love languages, is the star of the show at Boka Hospitality’s posh sushi palace in West Loop. From fatty bluefin tuna belly and unctuous uni to prized cuts of Japanese wagyu, the menu makes for an opulent spread.
If a Mother’s Day trip to Napa Valley isn’t in the budget, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises’ sprawling restaurant in Fulton Market is designed to offer a brief foray into West Coast wine country. Snap a shot of the special evening on its sweeping staircase before heading upstairs to dine on its year-round terrace and bar.
A celebrated farm-to-table destination for nearly two decades, One Off Hospitality’s game-changing Fulton Market restaurant remains a local favorite for its bustling atmosphere and penchant for pork.
The wide-open kitchen at chef Avgeria Stapaki’s inventive Mediterranean restaurant in Bucktown provides both dinner and a show for Mother’s Day celebrants as the energetic team whips up unusual spins like avgolemono “ramen.” Tama debuted in early April, so a booking might also make for a good chance to impress family with Chicago hospitality know-how.
An ode to decorated chef Carlos Gaytán’s hometown of Huitzuco, Mexico, this striking spot in River North offers an earthy departure from Chicago’s urban grit. Though the menu offers ample opportunity to fill up on favorites like Guerrero-style cochinita pibil and shrimp aguachile, wise diners will save room for dessert.
900 W Randolph St, Chicago, IL 60607 (312) 733-1975
Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger demolished a famed midcentury home designed by late architect Craig Ellwood to make room for a new, modern mansion.
That’s not how Erin Ellwood, Craig Ellwood’s daughter, said she would have gone about it.
“I think it would have been really cool to keep it and do something … add to it in a really interesting, innovative way,” Ellwood told The Times on Monday. “But you know, maybe this just isn’t their style. I mean, it clearly isn’t if they’re building a farmhouse.”
Ellwood, an Ojai-based interior designer, spoke to The Times about her father’s late ‘40s Brentwood commission, known among locals as the Zimmerman House after original owners Martin and Eva Zimmerman. The property, which she described as a “time capsule” because of its Midcentury Modern aesthetic, was purchased last year and set for demolition seemingly without reason. In recent weeks, several reports revealed that the Marvel star and Schwarzenegger purchased the lot for $12.5 million and that their new mansion — to be designed by Ken Ungar — was the reason for the teardown.
On X (formerly Twitter), the celebrity couple quickly faced ire from architecture enthusiasts and other critics. “Wow,” wrote one user who shared an Architectural Digest article. “Wow as in, this is really bad.”
“Chris Pratt bought a BEAUTIFUL 1950s mid century modern house designed by THE Craig Ellwood and demolished it to build a s— McMansion,” one X user wrote on Friday. “My mid century modernist heart is shattered.”
“Imagine tearing this historic house down to build a ‘modern farmhouse’ McMansion,” a second user wrote on Saturday.
As more reports about the Ellwood razing surfaced, handfuls of social media users also revived “Worst Chris,” a dig that stemmed from a viral tweet about the Hollywood Chrises (Chris Hemsworth, Pratt, Chris Pine and Chris Evans).
Representatives for Pratt and Schwarzenegger did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment on Monday.
Like Pratt’s online critics, Erin Ellwood said she only learned about the reason for the demolition earlier this month. But she told The Times that she understands “it comes with the territory.”
Throughout his decades-long career, Craig Ellwood brought his indoor-outdoor living approach to several properties across Southern California, including his beachfront Hunt House in Malibu. The Zimmerman house, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and open floor plans, was designed early in her father’s career and wasn’t the best representation of his work, Ellwood said.
“It doesn’t break my heart,” she added of the raze.
Still, the home, sold to “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” creator Sam Rolfe and wife Hilda Rolfe in 1975— stands for a timeless architectural movement. Erin likens her father’s lasting Midcentury designs to “the Chanel of architecture.”
“There’s certain fashions that will never go away. They’ll always stay strong,” she said.
The couple’s modern farmhouse aesthetic may not be Erin’s preferred style, but she said she understands why Pratt and Schwarzenegger would want the Zimmerman House plot: proximity to Schwarzenegger’s mother, Maria Shriver. The former first lady of California reportedly lives across the street from the property.
“I don’t feel bitter. I understand the love of family, I understand wanting to be close to my mother or my mother in-law,” said Ellwood, whose late actor mother Gloria Henry also lived by Shriver. “I understand being a multimillionaire and wanting to build exactly what I want and keep my family close. I get all that. Unfortunately, it involved tearing something down.”
Razing the Zimmerman House is not just “so brutal,” but wasteful in a variety of ways, Ellwood added. She lamented that the home did not have some kind of ceremonious sendoff — final tours for architecture students, a celebratory cocktail hour, donation of materials for architectural studies — before it was torn down.
“Is there something more creative that could’ve been done in the process of taking it away that could’ve given it some honor?” Ellwood asks.
She was speaking to The Times on what would have been her father’s 102nd birthday. She says Craig Ellwood “stood for innovation and a new way of California living.”
“I think what people are responding to is [the home] is like this time capsule,” she said. “I think that’s what hurts people so much — is that there aren’t that many great ones.”
With the Zimmerman House now a pile of rubble and Pratt and Schwarzenegger’s new mansion reportedly still in early construction, Ellwood said she hopes the couple considers giving back to the architecture community amid the backlash.
“They’ve got money,” she said. “It would behoove them to do something kind to the world of architecture.”
There’s a belief or a saying, at least, that love conquers all. In the secular world the reference is to the power of emotional love to compel men and women to do extraordinary things. Love is said to move us to do the unthinkable with sometimes positive and in many instances negative results. One of the reasons for this apparent inconsistency lies with another saying and that is “Love is blind.” Again, in this secular world nothing can be reckless and misdirected as blind love. Now take the same saying and apply it with biblical references and it takes on a whole new meaning. Love conquers all. Just for the sake of giving an example, God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son. The greatest commandment is love of your neighbor as yourself. God is Love. Out of love, we have been saved. From this perspective love takes on a set of characteristics that only result in positive endings.
I’m reminded that spiritual love differs from secular love in that one is conditional and the other is not. By that I mean love in this sense, from its biblical basis, is an unconditional state of being. Love, according to scripture, is a constant. It never ceases to be and it never ceases to give.
I believe that is what is meant by unconditional. Love by and other definition is not love. It is a perversion of God’s great gift to us. Love like faith requires covenant. I am moved by Daniel’s prayer,” O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of love with all who love HIm and obey His commands…” Daniel 9:4. I must tell you that this sums up quite a bit for me about this subject. Unconditional love begets something less than unconditional love in return. So all of this begs the question how do you love someone? How do you attempt to love God? Unconditional does not mean undisciplined. It does not preclude commitment.
As a matter of fact scripture would indicate that you can’t have anything real happen in your life unless it’s based on the love about which I speak. Our entire existence is seen from the perspective of love of family, mother, father, wife, son, husband, fellow man, God. Jesus was crucified based on this love. Isubmit to you that our obligation to each other is to attempt to love ourselves in such a manner as to recognize the God within us and to then appreciate the God in everyone else. We are then in a covenant relationship with self, each other and therefore in line with the covenant that God has with man. The end result then must be a positive outcome. Jesus’ crucifixion had a positive outcome. I submit again that his very directed and guided love will always guarantee an outcome consistent with the wishes of God. Therefore again I say in this context love conquers all. It is our reason for being. It is the reason for salvation”…God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him.” 1 John 4:16.
May God bless and keep you always.
The following passage is from “Spiritually Speaking: Reflections for and from a New Christian” by James Washington. You can purchase this enlightening book on Amazon and start your journey towards spiritual enlightenment.
The mother of a 5-year-old boy, who was found dead in a suitcase nearly two years ago in Indiana, was arrested in Arcadia in connection with his murder, according to authorities.
Dejaune L. Anderson was arrested Thursday by the U.S. Marshals Service on allegations of murder, neglect of a dependent resulting in death and obstruction of justice, Indiana State Police Sgt. Carey Huls told The Times.
Authorities were tipped off by a “concerned citizen,” and Anderson was detained while attempting to board a train, Huls said. He declined to specify further how authorities were tipped off.
On April 16, 2022, a man hunting for mushrooms in a wooded, rural area of Washington County, Indiana, found the body of a 5-year-old boy in a brightly colored suitcase, officials said. The boy was identified six months later as Cairo Jordan, an Atlanta resident.
Dejaune Ludie Anderson in a Georgia DMV photo.
(Indiana State Police / AP)
An arrest warrant was issued for Anderson in October 2022, but the boy’s mother had been on the run ever since.
Investigators from Sellersburg, Ind., were in Southern California over the weekend to try to speak to Anderson and to continue their investigation, according to Huls. Anderson has a court hearing Monday; the extradition process will depend on how she pleads. If she doesn’t fight the extradition, officials from Indiana could pick her up in the next week or two.
“If she fights extradition, then it’ll be at the mercy of California courts for it to play out,” Huls said. “A governor’s warrant would probably be requested and court system will have to work that out. It’ll be at least a month until that process will get started.”
Anderson is originally from the Atlanta area and is not a resident of Indiana, Huls said. She has no known connection to Southern California.
Anderson’s friend Dawn Elaine Coleman, 41, of Shreveport, La., was sentenced to 30 years in prison with five years suspended to probation in connection with Cairo’s death after reaching a deal with prosecutors in November.
Coleman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, aiding, neglect of a dependent resulting in death and obstruction of justice, according to authorities.
Coleman and Anderson had known each other for about a year and traveled together with Cairo; they had been staying in a residence in Louisville at the time of the boy’s death, according to police.
Coleman told police that she saw Anderson smothering Cairo by sitting on top of him when he was face-down on a bed, according to court records. Coleman said “it was already done” by the time she walked into the room and that Anderson asked her to help put Cairo inside a trash bag and then a suitcase. They drove Cairo’s body to Washington County and left him there in the suitcase, she said.
Both Coleman’s and Anderson’s fingerprints were found on the plastic bags that contained Cairo’s body inside the suitcase, investigators said.
According to a probable cause affidavit filed by the Indiana State Police for Anderson’s arrest, Anderson allegedly made references to exorcism and demonic possession regarding her 5-year-old son in Facebook posts in March 2022.
“Can’t wait to tell my story: I had to raise my frequency, heal myself and past lives, heal my ancestors, heal s— in the universe, heal Gaia to exorcism a very powerful demonic force from within my son,” she wrote, according to the affidavit.
Coleman posted similar messages on Facebook in April 2022, according to the affidavit:
“Just because the avatar is of what we call a child does not mean that it is actually a child there are beings that are here that are not supposed to be here that pick avatars to hide behind to play roles to steal energy and to ruin lives you better check to see if the children that you think are children actually have souls or if they’re not melevolent [sic] beings with a soul and in a child Avatar.”
The boy died from an electrolyte imbalance most likely due to gastroenteritis, or vomiting and diarrhea that led to dehydration, according to Indiana State Police, citing autopsy results. The boy had died a week before his body was found.
An Ohio woman gave birth and then, within the hour, was in a coma. Ashley Zinn was given just a 30% chance to live after being diagnosed with an amniotic fluid embolism. Most new moms will tell you the first few weeks of motherhood are a blur. For Ashley, it’s not even a memory.“I remember telling the staff I’m dying,” Ashley said.Just 15 minutes after delivering her son, Parker, Ashley began experiencing chest pain.“The last thing I remember after that was being hauled away to CT,” Ashley said.She was placed into a medically induced coma and diagnosed with amniotic fluid embolism, which is a rare delivery complication.“Someone finally came back and told us that her vitals were continuously dropping on the ventilator and basically told us we need to put her on life-support or she’s not going to make it tonight,” Ashley’s husband, Alex, said.Doctors gave Ashley just a 30% chance to live.“She was within minutes to hours of dying,” said Dr. Debbie Rohner, medical director of the cardiovascular ICU at Bethesda North Hospital. “Her lungs failed, her heart failed, her kidney failed, her liver failed, and her blood system failed.”Alex was pulled between looking after their new son and staying bedside next to his wife in the ICU.“It was definitely a really hard balance between being there for him and being there for Ashley,” Alex said. “I knew that time that she needed me more.”Slowly, Ashley began to make progress. Her newborn was also by her side. She is expected to make a full recovery. Doctors say it’s a miracle.“I thank God every day for giving us another day together,” Alex said. “You don’t really realize how short life is in a blink of an eye.”Ashley remembers those first moments she awoke and was reunited with baby, Parker.“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I just went through all this, and he looks just like my husband,’” Ashley said.While the first month as a new family of three hasn’t looked as expected, Ashley says it’s even sweeter.“I would go through it all over again for him,” Ashley said. “I wanted to be a mother ever since I was a little girl.”A GoFundMe has been started to support Ashley’s recovery. To donate, click here.
An Ohio woman gave birth and then, within the hour, was in a coma. Ashley Zinn was given just a 30% chance to live after being diagnosed with an amniotic fluid embolism.
Most new moms will tell you the first few weeks of motherhood are a blur. For Ashley, it’s not even a memory.
“I remember telling the staff I’m dying,” Ashley said.
Just 15 minutes after delivering her son, Parker, Ashley began experiencing chest pain.
“The last thing I remember after that was being hauled away to CT,” Ashley said.
She was placed into a medically induced coma and diagnosed with amniotic fluid embolism, which is a rare delivery complication.
“Someone finally came back and told us that her vitals were continuously dropping on the ventilator and basically told us we need to put her on life-support or she’s not going to make it tonight,” Ashley’s husband, Alex, said.
Doctors gave Ashley just a 30% chance to live.
“She was within minutes to hours of dying,” said Dr. Debbie Rohner, medical director of the cardiovascular ICU at Bethesda North Hospital. “Her lungs failed, her heart failed, her kidney failed, her liver failed, and her blood system failed.”
Alex was pulled between looking after their new son and staying bedside next to his wife in the ICU.
“It was definitely a really hard balance between being there for him and being there for Ashley,” Alex said. “I knew that time that she needed me more.”
Slowly, Ashley began to make progress. Her newborn was also by her side. She is expected to make a full recovery. Doctors say it’s a miracle.
“I thank God every day for giving us another day together,” Alex said. “You don’t really realize how short life is in a blink of an eye.”
Ashley remembers those first moments she awoke and was reunited with baby, Parker.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I just went through all this, and he looks just like my husband,’” Ashley said.
While the first month as a new family of three hasn’t looked as expected, Ashley says it’s even sweeter.
“I would go through it all over again for him,” Ashley said. “I wanted to be a mother ever since I was a little girl.”
A GoFundMe has been started to support Ashley’s recovery. To donate, click here.
Lupe Breard remembers coming to live in the Queen Anne Victorian house in Echo Park with her mother and siblings when she was a child. The memory is still vivid decades later, she says, because she didn’t want to move there — until she saw the chimney and told herself Santa Claus could bring presents down it at Christmas. She’d never had a fireplace before.
She has stayed ever since, raising her three children in the historic home and watching as the neighborhood changed from a quiet, under-the-radar community to one where homes routinely sell for well over $1 million.
Breard stayed even after her mother died in 2018, leaving the house in her will to three of Breard’s older siblings. She stayed after the family estate tried, unsuccessfully, to evict her. And she has continued fighting to stay after the house was sold in 2022 to an investor who wants her and her sister, Sarah Padilla, 73, out.
Inside Lupe Breard’s Echo Park home, various rooms are filled with decades of belongings that she sought to sell in case she had to leave.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Over the years, Breard, 64, has come to see herself as the guardian of a historic house with an important history. “The Queen of Elysian Heights,” as it is now known, is one of the earliest homes built in Echo Park. In the 1960s it was owned by members of the Arechiga family, who moved there after they drew national attention as the final holdouts resisting eviction from their home in Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium.
“I know that once I’m gone it’ll be impossible to defend it,” Breard says. “I love that house. I love the walls. I love the staircase. I love walking out on the balcony at night when you can see the stars. I love the brick underneath the house where I used to hide when I was little.”
The history of the Queen of Elysian Heights is not entirely clear, but it is believed to have been built in 1895, around the time when the community was first subdivided.
Many locals see the triplex as the cornerstone of a historic neighborhood whose connection to the Arechiga family serves as an important reminder of a dark moment in the city’s past. Though it was once stadiums, freeways and city redevelopment that regularly displaced people in Black and Latino neighborhoods, today it is more likely to be gentrification and residential real estate investors.
“The house is very special,” said Paul Bowers, a resident of the neighborhood who helped petition the city for historic status. “It’s the first house in this entire area. And there’s something magical about it.”
A sign hangs in support of Lupe Breard, 64, who faced eviction in Echo Park.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Breard’s mother was a waitress at a restaurant near Placita Olvera who stretched her tips to make ends meet. She rented the house for a few years, then bought it in 1975 for $18,500, according to public records. The neighborhood was quiet.
“You really had to tell people where Echo Park was,” Breard says.
Breard continued living in the home as an adult and raised her children there alongside her mother. Breard and her older sister, Sarah Padilla, lived in separate units in the triplex at the time of their mother’s death in 2018.
Soon after, Breard says, she learned that she and another sister had been excluded from their mother’s will. The home had been left to Padilla and two other siblings. Their older brother was named executor of the estate. Family representatives of the estate did not respond to phone calls and emails requesting comment.
Soon, plans were in motion to sell the house, which over the years had grown to be valued at more than $1 million.
Breard says she feared that she would be evicted and the house would be torn down to make room for apartments or condos. She saw it as history repeating itself. She, like the Arechigas, would soon be ripped from her home.
“It’s not just an apartment you rent. I grew up there. It took part in raising me,” she said.
Members of the LA Tenants Union were on hand during a recent yard sale to support Lupe Breard, who was facing eviction.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
She began organizing with the LA Tenants Union and along with other supporters worked to file an application to have the property designated a historic-cultural monument with the city planning department, hoping that it would deter a developer from buying the property and tearing it down.
The estate framed the moves as stalling tactics meant to keep the house from being sold, according to court records.
Breard’s supporters circulated a petition calling for a show of community support so that the sisters could remain in the house and for “the rejection of tearing it down for future development projects.”
When the home went up for auction in the spring of 2022 there were multiple bidders. It sold for a little more than $1.2 million to NELA Development. Padilla, who according to court records refused to cooperate with the sale, received about $290,000 when the estate was settled.
“Buyer to be aware that the property will be delivered with its current occupants who are not paying rent,” read a notification issued with the sale.
Padilla did not respond to requests for an interview. Representatives for NELA also did not return emails and phone calls requesting comment. The company bills itself on its website as a “family-run real estate and investment company dedicated to preserving and enhancing the many precious neighborhoods that make Los Angeles a special place to live, work and play.”
Charles Fisher, a historian who prepared the application for the home’s historic designation, said the company has been a good caretaker for historic homes in the past.
It “has got a fairly good track record in dealing with historic properties,” he said. “They’ve bought houses and fixed them up properly.”
He noted that the company had received an award from the Highland Park Heritage Trust for its work fixing and preserving two local homes.
In June 2022, shortly after the company purchased the home, Breard was given a three-day notice to “perform or quit.” It said that she had “failed and refused to permit an appraiser or other workmen to enter the property” and gave her three days to do so or face eviction.
One month later, the property management company filed an eviction case against her in court, saying she had not complied with the notice.
Breard says she was never given the opportunity to comply. In November 2022, with the eviction pending, the home won the historic designation from the city over the new owner’s objection.
In January, a jury ruled against Breard in the eviction case, setting the stage for sheriff’s deputies to soon arrive and lock her out of the house.
Not long after, Breard saw a video posted to Facebook by the new owners, with the hashtag #realestateinvesting.
“Super excited to announce our first project for 2024,” a man says, standing in front of the house, its pastel facade looking worn but stately.
“This house here in Echo Park is absolutely amazing. It’s a Queen Anne Victorian … Let us know if you have any questions or if you’d like the private viewing of this property.”
Breard began preparing for the possibility that she would have to leave the home, though she wasn’t sure where she would go. She is disabled and cannot work, she said.
This month, Breard hosted a yard sale to get rid of many of the possessions that filled the house over the decades.
A couple of days later, she got some good news. A new attorney representing her had asked the judge to set aside the jury’s decision, arguing, among other issues, that the notice to quit had been defective as it never gave Breard specific instructions on how to fix the alleged lease violation.
The judge ruled in her favor, putting an end to the eviction proceeding.
After the ruling, Breard said, she went to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and gave thanks at the tomb of St. Vibiana, the city’s patron saint. From her perspective, the win was a victory for a city where people without money are constantly being pushed out.
“I love Los Angeles, it’s my home,” she said. But “this is happening to so many people. You see people on the street and nobody even looks at them.”
Despite the win, the home’s future is still unclear. Breard’s sister still has a pending eviction case.
“The Queen of Elysian Heights” is one of the oldest homes in Echo Park.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Lupita Limón Corrales, an organizer with the LA Tenants Union, said a lawyer for the owner reached out to them and raised the possibility of selling the property to a community land trust, which would create a nonprofit that would be responsible for the home. The lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Corrales said the group is working with the sisters to come up with a proposal that it will present to the company.
If it were to happen, it could take a long time, she said. For now, their main focus is helping Padilla win her pending eviction case.
Last weekend, Berenice Alfaro completed her first marathon. It was the culmination of a journey that began in 2017 when Alfaro’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Following that news, Alfaro discovered a new passion, running. And it was with the support of her mother, now a breast cancer survivor, that she crossed the finish line.
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Authorities have released the identity of a 3-year-old boy who was killed in his Lancaster home on Tuesday night and described his mother’s boyfriend as a person of interest in the brutal slaying.
The toddler, David Hernandez, was found with his throat cut in the 43400 block of 57th Street W when deputies arrived around 10:55 p.m., officials said. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
The Sheriff’s Department said in a news release that Rena Naulls, 39, of Lancaster, was transported to the hospital after allegedly attempting to take his own life at the scene.
Investigators said Naulls is the live-in boyfriend of the victim’s mother and named him “a person of interest” in the case. Naulls was admitted to the hospital and listed in stable condition, police said.
The Times previously reported that a source with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly said a family friend went to the house at the behest of one of the boy’s relatives, found the child with his throat slit in a bathtub and called 911.
Three of the child’s older siblings, ages 9, 11 and 14, were unharmed and taken into protective custody by the Department of Children and Family Services, according to the source and the Sheriff’s Department. The Times reported that the family had no prior contacts with the Department of Children and Family Services.
Two representatives are pushing for a rule change that would make it easier for new mothers to serve in Congress. The new rules would allow mothers to vote by proxy from home for the first six weeks after giving birth. Scott MacFarlane has the story.
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She was 15. He told her he was 17, just a few months shy of 18. They met on Instagram during the summer of 2022.
The girl, who lived with her mother, younger sister and grandparents in Riverside, kept their “relationship” a secret from her family. They would send messages through Instagram and talk over Discord, an instant messaging platform that allows voice calls.
He showered her with gifts, sending her jewelry, groceries, money and gift cards. He paid for her UberEats and DoorDash deliveries and helped her buy birthday gifts for her friends, telling her he had a good job that could pay for it.
But then he got clingy — pushy, even. He was pressuring her to send nude photos, which made her uncomfortable. Right after Halloween, she broke up with him.
She blocked him on Instagram, but he still found a way to send her a suicide letter.
In reality, the “boy” she had been talking to was a 28-year-old sheriff’s deputy from Virginia named Austin Lee Edwards. And on Black Friday, a few weeks after the teen broke up with him, he drove to her home in Riverside and killed her mother, Brooke Winek, 38, and her grandparents, Mark Winek, 69, and Sharie Winek, 65. He set fire to their house before kidnapping the teen at gunpoint. After getting into a shootout with police, Edwards shot himself with his service weapon and died, according to police. The teen was physically unharmed.
New, grisly details about the incident are now coming to light through a federal lawsuit that the now-16-year-old and her foster mother filed Friday against Edwards’ estate; the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, which employed him at the time of the killings; Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis; and Det. William Smarr, the investigator who reviewed Edwards’ employment application at the agency.
The lawsuit alleges violation of her 4th Amendment rights, false imprisonment, negligent hiring, assault and battery, among other charges. Scott Perry, the teen’s attorney, said the damages amount to at least $50 million.
The filing is the second suit by a member of the Winek family against the Sheriff’s office — Mychelle Blandin, Mark and Sharie Winek’s surviving daughter, filed a lawsuit last year, alleging negligent hiring practices and seeking more than $100 million in damages. The lawsuits hinge in part on reporting by The Times that detailed how police hired Edwards despite his troubling mental health history.
In February 2016, Edwards was detained by Abingdon police in Virginia after he cut himself and threatened to kill himself and his father, who told police the incident was spurred by Edwards’ problems with his girlfriend, The Times reported. The incident prompted two custody orders, Edwards’ stay at a psychiatric facility and a court’s revocation of his gun rights, which were never restored.
Mychelle Blandin looks at photos of her mom, dad and sister, who were victims of a triple homicide in Riverside that authorities say began with a “catfishing” case involving Blandin’s niece.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Perry is arguing that Edwards should never have been hired and that the sheriff’s office failed to interview most of Edwards’ references or conduct a proper background check. If they had, they would have discovered the mental health orders, the lawsuit claims.
“The Washington County’s Sheriff’s office gave Austin Lee Edwards a gun, a badge and cloaked him with the authority of the law,” Perry said in a statement. “He used these things to gain access to the Winek home and commit these atrocities. We will prove that an adequate investigation of Edwards’ background would have prevented this tragedy.”
The teenager and her foster parent declined interviews for this story. The Washington County Sheriff’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
According to The Times’ review of Edwards’ personnel file, which includes his employment application, Smarr chose not to interview Edwards’ father, who was listed as a reference, because of their “close familial relationship,” the detective wrote. Smarr spoke with Edwards’ previous employer at Lowe’s, but he couldn’t get hold of two of Edwards’ personal references or his two neighbors.
Smarr also sought background information from the Virginia State Police, where Edwards had been employed for nine months before resigning and applying to Washington County. But Smarr was rebuffed by a sergeant there, who said he wasn’t comfortable answering whether Edwards had gotten in any trouble, been reprimanded or been subjected to an internal investigation.
In addition to Smarr, the lieutenant and captain of the Washington County Sheriff’s criminal investigation division signed off on Edwards’ employment application, as did its personnel director and chief deputy, according to the file.
“Edwards has no criminal history or civil issues, past and current employers speak positively of him, as well as his references,” Smarr wrote. “It is my belief that Edwards is hirable.”
The most recent lawsuit also answers some lingering questions about the crime, including how Edwards met the teenager, why he decided to kill her family, and where he planned to take the teen after kidnapping her. Here is an account of what transpired during that fateful Thanksgiving holiday weekend, taken from the lawsuit and previous reporting by The Times.
The teenager celebrated Thanksgiving 2022 with her mother, her younger sister and her mother’s boyfriend at Golden Corral. Afterward, they went to the Moreno Valley apartment where her mother’s boyfriend lived and stayed there overnight.
The next day, Brooke Winek and her daughters went to Starbucks, planning to go Black Friday shopping with Brooke’s boyfriend. When they got back to the apartment, Brooke got a call from her mother, Sharie, who told her to take the call off speakerphone because they needed to speak about something serious.
Undated handout photo of 28-year-old Austin Lee Edwards of North Chesterfield, Va.
(Riverside Police Dept.)
The Times reported last year that Edwards gained access to Sharie and Mark Winek’s home on Price Court by pretending he was a detective conducting an investigation involving the teenager. After getting into the Wineks’ home, Edwards told Sharie to call Brooke and tell her that she and the teenager needed to come to the house so he could ask them some questions.
In order to keep the “investigation” from her daughters, Brooke told them there was something wrong with their phones and that they needed to go back to their home on Price Court to get them fixed. Brooke then dropped off her younger daughter with Brooke’s sister, Blandin, before heading over to Price Court.
The teen recalled that, once they got to the house, Brooke put her keys in her purse and told her to wait in the car while she went inside. The teen noticed that she didn’t see her mother’s dog in the window, which was unusual because the dog always perched there whenever people visited the home.
After waiting for a while, the teen decided to go into the house. As she opened the screen door, Edwards grabbed her by the hair and pulled her inside.
In the moment, she thought the man grabbing her was the telephone repairman. She didn’t realize it was the man who had catfished her.
Then she saw the bodies of her grandmother near the entryway, her grandfather next to the stairs and her mother lying on the hardwood floor. She saw the bags over their heads, taped to their necks. Their arms and legs were bound with duct tape.
The teen started to scream.
Edwards was wearing a gold police badge on his belt in the shape of a star. As she yelled, he pointed a handgun, which also had a star engraved on it, at her.
“Stop screaming,” he said.
She recognized his voice. It was the “boy” she had met online, whom she had been talking to for months.
“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked.
“I will if you keep screaming,” he replied.
Edwards grabbed the teen and pulled her through the house, dousing everything with gasoline from a canister he brought with him and lighting the rooms on fire. He also opened the windows and doors so the flames would spread. Then he took the girl outside and forced her into the backseat of his red Kia Soul.
Family photo of slain victims Brooke Winek, 38, and her parents Sharie Winek, 65, and Mark Winek, 69.
(Winek Family Photos / Los Angeles Times)
Meanwhile, the Wineks’ next-door neighbor saw the house on fire and called 911. Another neighbor, whose driveway Edwards had parked in, also called the police. She phoned the authorities again when she saw Edwards force the teen into his car.
After speeding away, Edwards told the teen to pretend that she was his daughter if anyone asked. He said he was going to take her back to Virginia. When the girl asked why he killed her family, he said that if he didn’t, they would “report it” and he wouldn’t have enough time to escape.
Edwards also said he was a police officer and that agencies “need to do better backgrounds” because he “lied” during the hiring process. As he continued to drive toward his eventual destination of Saltville, Va., where he had recently purchased a home and blacked out the windows, he kept his hand on his gun. In the car with them was also the large, bloody knife he used to stab Brooke.
They made two pitstops during the drive to use the restroom, but Edwards never let go of the teen’s hand. They also made a stop so Edwards could clean the blood off himself. He told the girl that they wouldn’t stop for food until they left California and that they would drive to Virginia through Las Vegas, New Mexico and Texas. She would have to stay in the backseat, he said, until they got her a change of clothes.
The Riverside Police Department identified Edwards through interviews with neighbors, who provided descriptions of his car and video footage from security cameras. Police determined that he was in the Mojave Desert and alerted San Bernardino County authorities, who chased after his Kia Soul.
During the pursuit, Edwards fired his gun through the back window of the car, causing the Kia to fill with smoke. The fuel canister, which Edwards had placed in the backseat with the teen, splashed her with gasoline.
Edwards’ Kia drifted off the road and got stuck on some rocks under a bridge, enabling the police cars to catch up.
As law enforcement closed in, Edwards told the teen to get out of the car.
With nowhere else left to go, he turned his service weapon on himself and pulled the trigger.
