Two people, including a minor, have been arrested after a shooting in downtown Lodi that left two people injured, Lodi police said.Officers responded to the 300 block of North Sacramento Street at 8:17 p.m. Sunday. They found two gunshot victims, who were taken to area hospitals in unknown condition.A KCRA crew at the scene spotted multiple evidence markers placed on the ground outside of a bowling alley.According to police, officers located the suspect vehicle nearby, and the two people inside were identified as being involved in the shooting. Police identified the suspects only as a juvenile and an adult.Officers searched the vehicle and found two firearms inside, police said.A motive for the shooting is unknown, but police said it is being investigated as a targeted incident.Police said there are no active or outstanding threats to the community.Community members are urged to avoid the area as investigators continue collecting evidence through the night.See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
LODI, Calif. —
Two people, including a minor, have been arrested after a shooting in downtown Lodi that left two people injured, Lodi police said.
Officers responded to the 300 block of North Sacramento Street at 8:17 p.m. Sunday. They found two gunshot victims, who were taken to area hospitals in unknown condition.
A KCRA crew at the scene spotted multiple evidence markers placed on the ground outside of a bowling alley.
According to police, officers located the suspect vehicle nearby, and the two people inside were identified as being involved in the shooting. Police identified the suspects only as a juvenile and an adult.
Officers searched the vehicle and found two firearms inside, police said.
A motive for the shooting is unknown, but police said it is being investigated as a targeted incident.
Police said there are no active or outstanding threats to the community.
Community members are urged to avoid the area as investigators continue collecting evidence through the night.
Signs pop up at former Pulse memorial rainbow crosswalk saying ‘Defacing Roadway Prohibited’
AND LOOK AHEAD TO THE WEEKEND IN MINUTES. SEE YOU THEN. ERIC ALSO DEVELOPING RIGHT NOW. THE BACK AND FORTH CONTINUES OUTSIDE OF PULSE, WHERE PEOPLE ON THEIR HANDS AND KNEES ONCE AGAIN COLORING THE CROSSWALK THAT THE STATE CONTINUES TO ERASE. TODAY, THAT CONTROVERSY REACHED A NEW LEVEL AS LAW ENFORCEMENT CONFRONTED PEOPLE USING CHALK AND WARNED THEM THEY COULD BE ARRESTED IF THEY CONTINUE. WESH TWO GREG FOX LIVE OUTSIDE PULSE FOR US, WHERE FRUSTRATIONS CAN BE FELT TODAY. GREG WHAT EXACTLY DID LAW? WHAT LAW COULD THEY BE VIOLATING? WELL, A COPY OF IT WAS GIVEN TO ME BY THE SERGEANT WITH THE FLORIDA HIGHWAY PATROL OUT HERE SAID HE WAS ALSO GIVING A COPY OF THIS TO THE PEOPLE THAT HE WAS WARNING TODAY. IF THEY WERE CAUGHT TRYING TO COLOR THE PAVEMENT FOR A WHILE TODAY, IT LOOKED LIKE THERE COULD BE ARRESTS. JUST AFTER 3:00 FRIDAY MORNING, FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION CREWS ARRIVED AT THE CROSSWALK NEXT TO THE PULSE NIGHTCLUB MEMORIAL. THEY HOSED DOWN THE FRESHLY CHALKED RAINBOW FLAG PAVEMENT AND THEN POSTED SIGNS READING DEFACING ROADWAY PROHIBITED AND NO IMPEDING TRAFFIC. BUBBA TRAHAN, WHO PROVIDED WESH TWO NEWS WITH THIS VIDEO, TOLD US AN FDOT WORKER EXPLAINED THAT VIOLATORS WOULD BE WARNED FIRST AND SECOND OFFENSES WOULD RESULT IN ARREST. FDOT HAS TO COME OUT HERE AND WE HAVE TO PAY THEM SO THAT PRICE IS, YOU KNOW, TOO HIGH FOR US TO HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN AND AGAIN. BY LATE MORNING, DEMONSTRATORS WERE TESTING THE RESOLVE OF THE FLORIDA HIGHWAY PATROL TROOPERS GUARDING THE CROSSWALK. SO THEY’RE EXERCISING THEIR FREEDOM OF SPEECH. WE GOT A LOT OF CARS COMING THROUGH HERE. CITING SAFETY CONCERNS, MORE LAW ENFORCEMENT ARRIVED, INCLUDING ORLANDO POLICE, AS CONFRONTATIONS HEATED UP BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WANT PEOPLE TO PLACE ON THE CROSSWALKS. SO WHAT ARE THEY VIOLATING? YOU CALL THEM. THEY’LL TELL YOU. SO WHAT? COULD YOU POSSIBLY ARREST THEM FOR IF YOU CAN’T TELL THEM WHAT THEY’RE VIOLATING? THERE’S A FEW PEOPLE ALREADY GIVE OUT WARNINGS TO TWO PEOPLE. FOR WHAT? WHAT DID THEY VIOLATE? WITH NO ONE ARRESTED, THE EARLY AFTERNOON SAW A SQUAD OF DEMONSTRATORS BEGIN FILLING IN THE REST OF THE BLANK SPACES WITH RAINBOW COLORS, SOME OF THEM CLEARLY FRUSTRATED BY WHAT THEY CALLED HEAVY HANDED TACTICS BY THE ADMINISTRATION OF GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS. ONE CROSSWALK IS ALL WE ASK FOR IN ORLANDO, AND THEY HAVE TO GET UPSET ABOUT THAT. YOU KNOW, 49 PEOPLE PASSED AWAY. IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE. DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKER ANNA ESKAMANI WONDERS WHEN THE STREET COLORING SHOWDOWN WILL END. THEY COULD SOLVE REAL PROBLEMS LIKE THE PROPERTY INSURANCE CRISIS, BUT INSTEAD THEY’RE FOCUSING ALL THEIR TIME AND ENERGY ON ON BULLYING AND HARASSING LOCAL GOVERNMENTS. AND WESH TWO NEWS REACHED OUT TO THE FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, THE FLORIDA HIGHWAY PATROL AND THE ORLANDO POLICE DEPARTMENT TO GET SOME KIND OF A STATEMENT FROM THEM ON EXACTLY WHAT WAS GOING ON HERE, HOW LONG IT’S GOING TO LAST, HOW LONG WE’RE GOING TO CONTINUE TO SEE TROOPERS OUT HERE. WE’LL UPDATE OUR STORY WHEN WE HEAR BACK. COVERI
Signs pop up at former Pulse memorial rainbow crosswalk saying ‘Defacing Roadway Prohibited’
Road signs have been placed at the former Pulse memorial rainbow crosswalk that warn against defacing the roadway and impeding traffic. Demonstrators told WESH 2 that troopers warned them that if they use chalk to re-color the crosswalk, they could be arrested for criminal mischief.It’s the latest development in an ongoing fight over colorful crosswalks and street art in Florida that the state is targeting. FDOT Secretary Jared Perdue said, “Anything previously permitted or installed you can bring up from past is irrelevant now, (there is) new law and standard and it’s the … pavement art not allowed and we’re removing everything that’s not compliant with state federal standards … “Surveillance video obtained by WESH 2 shows FDOT crews erasing the rainbow crosswalk at Pulse last week in the middle of the night. Protesters have been coloring in the crosswalk, while FDOT crews continue to paint over it with black and white.Now, the signs appear to be an effort to stop the use of chalk. At one point, Orlando police and Florida Highway Patrol were stationed 24/7 at the crosswalk near Pulse – the site of the 2016 massacre. >> This is a developing story and will be updated
ORLANDO, Fla. —
Road signs have been placed at the former Pulse memorial rainbow crosswalk that warn against defacing the roadway and impeding traffic.
Demonstrators told WESH 2 that troopers warned them that if they use chalk to re-color the crosswalk, they could be arrested for criminal mischief.
It’s the latest development in an ongoing fight over colorful crosswalks and street art in Florida that the state is targeting.
FDOT Secretary Jared Perdue said, “Anything previously permitted or installed you can bring up from past is irrelevant now, (there is) new law and standard and it’s the … pavement art not allowed and we’re removing everything that’s not compliant with state federal standards … “
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Protesters have been coloring in the crosswalk, while FDOT crews continue to paint over it with black and white.
Now, the signs appear to be an effort to stop the use of chalk.
At one point, Orlando police and Florida Highway Patrol were stationed 24/7 at the crosswalk near Pulse – the site of the 2016 massacre.
KINI, Mexico — On a hot June night Jesús Cruz at last returned to Kini, the small town in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula where he spent the first 17 years of his life.
His sister greeted him with tearful hugs. The next morning she took him to see their infirm mother, who whispered in his ear: “I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
After decades away, Cruz was finally home.
Yet he was not home.
So much of what he loved was 3,000 miles away in Southern California, where he resided for 33 years until immigration agents swarmed the car wash where he worked and hauled him away in handcuffs.
Cruz missed his friends and Booka, his little white dog. His missed his house, his car, his job.
But most of all, he missed his wife, Noemi Ciau, and their four children. Ciau worked nights, so Cruz was in charge of getting the kids fed, clothed and to and from school and music lessons, a chaotic routine that he relished because he knew he was helping them get ahead.
“I want them to have a better life,” he said. “Not the one I had.”
Now that he was back in Mexico, living alone in an empty house that belonged to his in-laws, he and Ciau, who is a U.S. permanent resident, faced an impossible decision.
Should she and the children join Cruz in Mexico?
Or stay in Inglewood?
Cruz and Ciau both had families that had been broken by the border, and they didn’t want that for their kids. In the months since Cruz had been detained, his eldest daughter, 16-year-old Dhelainy, had barely slept and had stopped playing her beloved piano, and his youngest son, 5-year-old Gabriel, had started acting out. Esther, 14, and Angel, 10, were hurting, too.
But bringing four American kids to Mexico didn’t seem fair, either. None of them spoke Spanish, and the schools in Kini didn’t compare with those in the U.S. Dhelainy was a few years from graduating high school, and she dreamed of attending the University of California and then Harvard Law.
There was also the question of money. At the car wash, Cruz earned $220 a day. But the day rate for laborers in Kini is just $8. Ciau had a good job at Los Angeles International Airport, selling cargo space for an international airline. It seemed crazy to give that up.
Ciau wanted to hug her husband again. She wanted to know what it would feel like to have the whole family in Mexico. So in early August she packed up the kids and surprised Cruz with a visit.
The Cruz family — from left, Dhelainy, Angel, Esther, Jesús, Gabriel and Noemi — head to the vaqueria, a traditional Yucatecan festival in Kini.
(Juan Pablo Ampudia / For The Times)
Kini lies an hour outside of Merida in a dense tropical forest. Like many people here, Cruz grew up speaking Spanish and a dialect of Maya and lived in a one-room, thatched-roof house. He, his parents and his five brothers and sisters slept in hammocks crisscrossed from the rafters.
His parents were too poor to buy shoes for their children, so when he was a boy Cruz left school to work alongside his father, caring for cows and crops. At 17 he joined a wave of young men leaving Kini to work in the United States.
He arrived in Inglewood, where a cousin lived, in 1992, just as Los Angeles was erupting in protest over the police beating of Rodney King.
Cruz, soft-spoken and hardworking, was overwhelmed by the big city but found refuge in a green stucco apartment complex that had become a home away from home for migrants from Kini, who cooked and played soccer together in the evenings.
Eventually he fell for a young woman living there: Ciau, whose parents had brought her from Kini as a young girl, and who obtained legal status under an amnesty extended by President Reagan. They married when she turned 18.
As their family grew, they developed rituals. When one of the kids made honor roll, they’d celebrate at Dave & Buster’s. Each summer they’d visit Disneyland. And every weekend they’d dine at Casa Gambino, a classic Mexican restaurant with vinyl booths, piña coladas and a bison head mounted on the wall. On Fridays, Cruz and Ciau left the kids with her parents and went on a date.
As the father of four Americans, Cruz was eligible for a green card. But the attorneys he consulted warned that he would have to apply from Mexico and that the wait could last years.
Cruz didn’t want to leave his children. So he stayed. When President Trump was reelected last fall on a vow to carry out mass deportations, he tried not to worry. The government, he knew, usually targeted immigrants who had committed crimes, and his record was spotless. But the Trump administration took a different approach.
On June 8, masked federal agents swarmed Westchester Hand Wash. Cruz said they slammed him into the back of a patrol car with such force and shackled his wrists so tightly that he was left with bruises across his body and a serious shoulder injury.
Ciau, who was helping Esther buy a dress for a middle school honors ceremony, heard about the raid and raced over. She had been at the car wash just hours earlier, bringing lunch to her husband and his colleagues. Now it was eerily empty.
At the Westchester Hand Wash last June, an employee tells a customer that they are closed due to a recent immigration raid. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
At a news conference in June at Culver City Express Hand Car Wash and Detail, Noemi shows a photo of her husband, Jesús, who was taken into custody by immigration agents that month at a car wash. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Cruz was transferred to a jail in El Paso, where he says he was denied requests to speak to a lawyer or call his family.
One day, an agent handed him a document and told him to sign. The agent said that if Cruz fought his case, he would remain in detention for up to a year and be deported anyway. Signing the document — which said he would voluntarily return to Mexico — meant he could avoid a deportation order, giving him a better shot at fixing his papers in the future.
Cruz couldn’t read the text without his glasses. He didn’t know that he very likely would have been eligible for release on bond because of his family ties to the U.S. But he was in pain and afraid and so he signed.
Returning to Kini after decades away was surreal.
Sprawling new homes with columns, tile roofs and other architectural flourishes imported by people who had lived in the U.S. rose from what had once been fields. There were new faces, too, including a cohort of young men who appraised Cruz with curiosity and suspicion. With his polo shirts and running shoes, he stood out in a town where most wore flip-flops and as few clothes as possible in the oppressive heat.
Cruz found work on a small ranch. Before dawn, he would pedal out there on an old bicycle, clearing weeds and feeding cows, the world silent except for the rustle of palm leaves. In all his years in the big city, he had missed the tranquility of these lands.
He had missed his mother, too. She has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair. Some days, she could speak, and would ask about his family and whether Cruz was eating enough. Other days, they would sit in silence, him occasionally leaning over to kiss her forehead.
He always kept his phone near, in case Ciau or one of the kids called. He tried his best to parent from afar, mediating arguments and reminding the kids to be kind to their mother. He tracked his daughters via GPS when they left the neighborhood, and phoned before bed to make sure everyone had brushed their teeth.
He worried about them, especially Dhelainy, a talented musician who liked to serenade him on the piano while he cooked dinner. The burden of caring for the younger siblings had fallen on her. Since Cruz had been taken, she hadn’t touched the piano once.
During one conversation, Dhelainy let it slip that they were coming to Mexico. Cruz surged with joy, then shuddered at the thought of having to say goodbye again. He picked them up at the airport.
That first evening, they shared pizza and laughed and cried. Gabriel, the only family member who had never been to Mexico, was intrigued by the thick forest and the climate, playing outside in the monsoon rain. For the first time in months, Dhelainy slept through the night.
“We finally felt like a happy family again,” Ciau said. But as soon as she and the kids arrived, they started counting the hours to when they’d have to go back.
Noemi Ciau is comforted by her cousin Rocio after listening to her talk about her husband’s time in immigrant detention.
(Juan Pablo Ampudia / For The Times)
During the heat of the day, the family hid inside, lounging in hammocks. They were also dodging unwanted attention. It seemed everywhere they went, someone asked Cruz to relive his arrest, and he would oblige, describing cold nights in detention with nothing to keep warm but a plastic blanket.
But at night, after the sky opened up, and then cleared, they went out.
It was fair time in Kini, part of an annual celebration to honor the Virgin Mary. A small circus had been erected and a bull ring constructed of wooden posts and leaves. A bright moon rose as the family took their seats and the animal charged out of its pen, agitated, and barreled toward the matador’s pink cape.
Cruz turned to his kids. When he was growing up, he told them, the matador killed the bull, whose body was cut up and sold to spectators. Now the fights ended without violence — with the bull lassoed and returned to pasture.
It was one of the ways that Mexico had modernized, he felt. He felt pride at how far Mexico had come, recently electing its first female president.
The bull ran by, close enough for the family to hear his snorts and see his body heave with breath.
“Are you scared?” Esther asked Gabriel.
Wide-eyed, the boy shook his head no. But he reached out to touch his father’s hand.
Later, as the kids slept, Cruz and Ciau stayed up, dancing cumbia deep into the night.
The day before Ciau and the kids were scheduled to leave, the family went to the beach. Two of Ciau’s nieces came. It was the first time Gabriel had met a cousin. The girls spoke little English, but they played well with Gabriel, showing him games on their phones. (For days after, he would giddily ask his mother when he could next see them.)
Seperated for months, Jesús Cruz and Noemi Ciau share a moment at her parents’ home in Kini.
(Juan Pablo Ampudia / For The Times)
That evening, the air was heavy with moisture.
The kids went into the bedroom to rest. Cruz and Ciau sat at the kitchen table, holding hands and wiping away tears.
They had heard of a U.S. employer who, having lost so many workers to immigration raids, was offering to pay a smuggler to bring people across the border. Cruz and Ciau agreed that was too risky.
They had just paid a lawyer to file a lawsuit saying Cruz had been coerced into accepting voluntary departure and asking a judge to order his return to the U.S. so that he could apply for relief from removal. The first hearing was scheduled for mid-September.
Cruz wanted to return to the U.S. But he was increasingly convinced that the family could make it work in Mexico. “We were poor before,” he told Ciau. “We can be poor again.”
Ciau wasn’t sure. Her children had big — and expensive — ambitions.
Dhelainy had proposed staying in the U.S. with her grandparents if the rest of the family moved back. Cruz and Ciau talked about the logistics of that, and Ciau vowed to explore whether the younger kids could remain enrolled in U.S. schools, but switch to online classes.
When the rain began, Cruz got up and closed the door.
The next morning, Cruz would not accompany his family to the airport. It would be too hard, he thought, “like when somebody gives you something you’ve always wanted, and then suddenly takes it away.”
Jesús comforts his son Angel as they walk to the car to leave for the airport. (Juan Pablo Ampudia/For The Times)
Jesús hugs his son Gabriel as they say goodbye. (Juan Pablo Ampudia/For The Times)
Gabriel wrapped his arms around his father’s waist, his small body convulsed with tears: “I love you.”
“It’s OK, baby,” Cruz said. “I love you, too.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said to Ciau. He kissed her. And then they were gone.
That afternoon, he walked the streets of Kini. The fair was wrapping up. Workers sweating in the heat were dismantling the circus rides and packing them onto the backs of trucks.
He thought back to a few evenings earlier, when they had celebrated Dhelainy’s birthday.
The family had planned to host a joint sweet 16 and quinceñera party for her and Esther in July. They had rented an event hall, hired a band and sent out invitations. After Cruz was detained, they called the party off.
They celebrated Dhelainy’s Aug. 8 birthday at the house in Kini instead. A mariachi band played the Juan Gabriel classic, “Amor Eterno.”
“You are my sun and my calm,” the mariachis sang as Cruz swayed with his daughter. “You are my life / My eternal love.”
After one day of widespread, dangerously hot temperatures — including a few that broke daily records— National Weather Service officials are warning Southern Californians that this prolonged heat wave is just getting started.
Friday is forecast to bring more sizzling heat, with temperatures and conditions similar to Thursday when highs hit over 105 degrees in many Los Angeles County valleys and over 110 in some deserts. A widespread extreme heat warning remains in place for much of Southern California through Saturday, warning of “dangerously hot conditions” causing a high risk for heat illnesses.
Many areas Thursday night into early Friday experienced little cooling, with temperatures across the L.A. Basin remaining above 70 degrees. Experts warn that lack of nighttime relief can be the most dangerous situation, as it doesn’t give the body a chance to recover from daytime highs — and can help fuel a wildfire, if one ignites.
“Extreme heat is dangerous even at night,” the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center wrote in a heat wave update. The extreme heat poses “a threat to anyone without effective cooling and adequate hydration.”
The National Weather Service continues to warn of a trio of threats through this weekend: the extreme heat, elevated fire conditions, and a chance for monsoonal thunderstorms. A red flag warning remains in effect for the Los Angeles and Ventura County mountains and foothills through Saturday night.
Thunderstorms, mostly in the mountains and deserts, could remain a threat through Monday. Forecasters say the storms could bring localized winds, flooding, debris flows and the chance for dry lightning, which could spark fires.
Temperatures are expected to fall a few degrees by Saturday, and will continue to do so into early next week — though highs will remain above average for this time of year.
Record-breaking high temperatures Thursday:
These are a few of the daily high temperatures records around Southern California that were tied or broken on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service:
Camarillo Airport: 89 degrees (tied with prior record)
Campo: 106 degrees (prior record was 103)
Lake Cuyamaca: 96 degrees (prior record was 94)
Palomar Mountain: 93 degrees (tied with prior record)
In this business of ours, there are stories, and there are Stories.
Small-s stories come and go, usually as fast and forgettable as that family-sized bag of potato chips you ate all by yourself as you binge-watched the night away.
But Stories — Stories have legs, and this was a Story.
It checked all the boxes, and made some new ones: Conspiracy theories. Sex. Helicopters thwapping low over nice little neighborhoods in the dead of night. A one-legged Green Beret captain chugging a beaker of pesticide. Trippy protesters. TV comedians’ jokes. Tacky souvenirs.
And bugs.
Innumerable bugs, each one less than half the size of a housefly, but primed to chaw their way through a $16-billion California industry exactly like you did to that bag of chips.
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The Story was, most of all, war — wars, plural. In the early 1980s, in the 1990s, returning like a malarial fever, the enemy was the Medfly, the Mediterranean fruit fly — pest, parasite, glutton for our golden harvests, despoiler of sunny citrus and rosy peaches, murderer of guacamole avocados.
And for most of this year, it was back. Then, in the deep-fryer depths of this summer, L.A. County agriculture officials ended a months-long quarantine of fruit coming out of Leimert Park, along with parts of Inglewood, Hawthorne and Culver City.
Didn’t even know there was a quarantine? Well, if you’d been around here in the ‘80s and ‘90s, “Medfly” would have been all you needed to hear to know just how serious this can get.
You do not want to see one of these in your yard.
(Stephen Osman / Los Angeles Times)
Ninety-one degrees — way above what a new autumn day should be, even here. It’s Thursday, Sept. 25, 1975, and in a backyard citrus tree on South Glencoe Avenue in Venice, a Medfly is showing its foul face, its blue eyes and yellow belly.
For years, as an early-warning alert system, the county agricultural people had been hanging Medfly traps hither and thither among our pretty, fructiferous trees — little A-frame-shaped cardboard doohickeys with a dab of fly attractant.
This was no idle, make-work program. The Medfly, ceratitis capitata, had eaten its way through Iberia at the turn of the century, and in 1910 managed to reach Hawaii. In 1929, it rampaged through Florida’s ag business like Visigoths sacking Rome. The Medfly is not a finicky eater; its menu is as long as a Cheesecake Factory’s: 200-plus fruits and veg from every climate.
Like aliens and “Alien,” the mama Medfly makes a slit in the skin of a ripening piece of produce, lays her eggs inside, and deposits her spawn there to eat the fruit to death, from the inside out, leaving a hollow skin that plops to the ground like a zombie husk.
So when that little trap yielded its six-legged killer on Sept. 25, the county ag commissioner was not at all overreacting when he said, “I can think of no pest that sends chills down my spine like this one does.”
A few zombie fruits soon turned up nearby. It all made a good case for the Medfly having been brought in by some traveler packing a juicy souvenir.
The ag patrols jumped right on it. They laid out a quarantine map, banned commercial nurseries inside its perimeter from selling fruit trees, and stripped off what fruit they were bearing. They plucked the produce out of family gardens. They began spot-spraying with a pesticide called malathion, which was about to become a household word.
They drove around neighborhoods in trucks, dumping millions of sterile male fruit flies from cardboard Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. The male Medflies were chilled to a stuporous 40 degrees, so by the time they thawed, they’d be ready for action, yet any lady Medflies they knocked up would be laying their only-once-in-a-lifetime offspring as sterile, harmless larvae.
To the massive relief of the state’s agribusiness, this outbreak and most of those to come — unlike the desolation of Florida’s commercial agriculture — were aggressively confined pretty much to small-scale commercial growers and to gentlemen cultivators with backyard trees, the kind of pocket orchards that had enticed Midwestern immigrants here with the promise that you could just step off your back porch to pluck your morning orange.
And so matters stayed, uneasily but alertly, until 1980.
A worker at C&S Nursery in Baldwin Hills works near a section of quarantined citrus trees in October 2023.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
You say the names now — Sunnyvale, Cupertino — and they mean software and tech and billionaires in hoodies.
But for long, long decades before, Santa Clara County was “the Valley of Heart’s Delight,” a bee-and-blossom Eden of fragrant fruit: cherries, apricots, and mostly plums for prunes. Santa Clara County’s prune crop kept one-third of the world regular.
The orchards were still flourishing in 1980, during the first week of June, when bad news flew in on two wings and six legs: two small insects stuck in a backyard trap in San Jose.
The drill began anew: quarantine, fruit-stripping, ground-level pesticide spraying, more buckets of frosty male Medflies.
This time, the drill didn’t work.
California and D.C. had already begun some preliminary beat-downs over the Medfly. The new president was Ronald Reagan, and as governor, Reagan had been the Republican meat sandwiched between two California Democratic governors, Pat Brown, who had lost to Reagan, and his son, Jerry, who succeeded Reagan.
The Supreme Court had already decided that yes, indeed, Texas — which spent a hundred million buckaroos a year on California produce — could throw up its own quarantine on Golden State goods. Other states and other nations would do the same if this Medfly thing wasn’t stopped, and pronto.
As far as the feds were concerned, that meant dropping pesticide on the little buggers from the air — the same advice Brown was getting from his state ag officials.
The environmentally minded Brown argued with himself in public about whether aerial malathion spraying was the safe thing to do, and landed on “no.”
The great Medfly cafeterias of the Central Valley and the Imperial Valley, the fecund cornucopias of the nation, lay vulnerable — but arguably out of reach, Brown calculated. “Those flies,” he reasoned, “could reach Nevada a lot quicker than they could get to the Imperial Valley.”
That didn’t wash in Washington.
Unless California began aerial spraying, the feds would quarantine the entire state. And the feds threatened to take over the Medfly war themselves if Brown wouldn’t do it their way.
Politics won. Brown ordered the flying fleet aloft. The first aerial sorties went up at midnight on Bastille Day, July 14.
The public displeasure that would only swell over the next couple of years was obvious from the get-go: We don’t believe no stinkin’ studies about malathion being harmless in these doses. We’re being poisoned!
A state worker trying to send up a balloon to guide the spray helicopters had his arm slashed by a protester with a knife (it would have been smarter to slash the balloon). The state health department set up a hotline for reassurance.
Within a couple of weeks of the first spraying sorties, Palo Alto police heard what sounded like gunshots as the helicopters passed overhead. A bullet hole found in one copter had already prompted the CHP to send up an escort helicopter to accompany the flying formation of malathion sprayers.
In the meantime, the young people of the California Conservation Corps were the ones on the ground in the quarantine zone, stripping off fruit, hand-spraying with the malathion recipe. Some of them were worried, some were afraid, and some of them said they were actually sick.
And so, on the night that the aerial spraying began came what was, for my money, one of the greatest political PR moments in the history of that devilish art. There were hundreds of witnesses — but alas for the world, evidently no TV news cameras, which would never happen now, in the age of cellphone videography.
B.T. Collins headed the CCC. He was already a legendary character in an administration of outsize figures. He was a Green Beret captain and Vietnam veteran with a fake right leg and a hook as a right hand, standing in for the real ones he lost to a grenade in a Mekong Delta firefight nearly 15 years before.
He was a Republican of the Lincoln mold — honest, fearless, witty and ecumenically beloved. He had shaped this CCC into a model agency, and if his kids were worried, well, he’d do something about it.
So standing in front of a meeting of about 900 of them on that Tuesday night in the auditorium of a state mental hospital in Santa Clara, he held up a glass of the malathion recipe — and chugged it down. “I drank it because you don’t ask your troops to do anything you wouldn’t do.”
I know you are wondering, so no, he didn’t die until 1993, 13 years later, and then he was felled by a couple of massive heart attacks after long years of drinking and smoking.
Gov. Jerry Brown leans on a box of confiscated fruit at a Medfly checkpoint south of San Jose in 1981.
(Sal Veder / Associated Press)
As the malathion mix drifted down, so did Brown’s poll numbers. Even though he protested that his hand had been forced by the Reagan administration, ag people blamed him for not acting faster, and others blamed him for agreeing to aerial spraying at all.
The malathion-Medfly warfare illuminated a shift in the nature of California and Californians. I have a turn-of-the-century California map that describes each county by the things it grew. The figure of the woman on the state seal in one corner is Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. It could just have as easily been Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture. By the 1980s, in counties like Santa Clara and Los Angeles, the wealth was coming more from real estate profits, not so much from agriculture. Into the 1950s, L.A. County had been the single most profitable agricultural county in the nation. The new crop now was subdivisions.
The residents of this new California were urbanized people who probably felt more threatened by bug spray than by the more abstract prospect of the state’s $14-billion annual ag business being laid waste by Medflies.
Anyway, back to the early ‘80s Northern-ish California battle:
To meet the demand for irradiated, sterile male Medflies to confound the female of the species, California had ordered several million from Peru. The state pretty quickly was aghast to realize that many tens of thousands of the Peruvian Medflies weren’t sterile at all; they were fertile, horny ringers.
But when California tried to cancel its orders, the Reagan administration stepped in: California had to keep buying Peruvian bugs, it insisted, to spare Peru any diplomatic embarrassment.
The 1981 quarantine perimeter spread like a gourmand’s belt size: 450 square miles in August, to 3,100 by September. Medflies were turning up farther afield; one in the East Bay, and another in San Joaquin County, which was tantamount to seeing gold thieves approach Fort Knox with a full set of keys.
Since the Medfly can’t fly any farther than a couple of city blocks from its larval cradle, it had to be getting human help. Roadblocks and checkpoints were set up on half a dozen highways at the quarantine’s edges. Five million cars and trucks were stopped.
Somehow, something broke through the blockade, and the Medfly made its appearance hundreds of miles to the south. Which is to say, here.
On Aug. 27, 1981, the big headlines appeared too: SOUTHLAND BATTLES THE MEDFLY. In the venerable citrus belt of the San Gabriel Valley, maggots turned up in a Baldwin Park garden, eating their way through their favorite peaches, and doing the same not far away, in a pineapple guava tree.
This time, the spraying began virtually at once. No messing around. Japan, the biggest foreign market for California fruit, was already banning imports from the quarantine zone, and considering a full ban on California green goods.
The protesters weren’t messing around either. A few days after the first spraying foray, some kids clustered in a Baldwin Park parking lot and cursed the helicopters, which passed overhead in a flotilla, outnumbered by news choppers.
Caltrans ringed the now 105-square-mile quarantine zone with freeway signs: “LEAVING MEDFLY QUARANTINE AREA. NO FRUITS/VEGETABLES TO GO BEYOND THIS POINT.” This time, there was no inspection of cars leaving the zone.
Plans were afoot to hang more Medfly traps, a lot more. Until now, they’d been sparse, partly because some study suggested that Medflies couldn’t hack it in chilly weather, which turned out not to be true. So about 120,000 traps, each with a drop of lure at the bottom, and costing 17 cents each, would now be found at 100 per square mile.
Now we arrive at the stage of kitsch, which is an absolute requirement for any story to become a Story.
In 1981, Johnny Carson costumed himself as a Medfly for this exchange with sidekick Ed McMahon.
Ed McMahon: “Don’t you think the federal government should protect Florida’s fruit?”
Mediterranean Fruit Fly: “Not according to Anita Bryant, no — they shouldn’t.”
To get the joke, you need to know two things. Anita Bryant, a singer and former beauty queen, was making commercials for a brand of Florida orange juice when, in the 1970s and ‘80s, she also crusaded against gay rights and, as a forerunner to the current “grooming” madness, warned ominously about gay “recruiting.” Millions boycotted the orange juice, and Carson mocked her regularly on his show.
Second thing: “fruit” was then in pretty free use as a synonym — now it’s regarded as a slur — for a gay person.
Kitsch indeed.
(Patt Morrison / Los Angeles Times)
The knick-knacks churned forth: anti-malathion spraying and anti-Jerry Brown T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers. Also in 1981, Chris Norby, a future mayor of Fullerton, Orange County supervisor and Republican Assembly member, created “The Medfly Game” for two players — Jerry Brown and the Medfly.
As for the conspiracies, in December 1989, people calling themselves “The Breeders” wrote anonymously to newspapers, state legislators and to L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley.
We did it, they claimed. We’re spreading around Medflies to protest the state’s agricultural policies. “Every time the copters go up to spray, we’ll go into virgin territory or old Medfly problem areas and release a minimum of several thousand blue-eyed Medflies. We are organized, patient and determined.”
In the fall of 1982, after two wearying years of quarantines that ultimately extended through six counties and some 3,000 square miles, California declared victory. The Medfly had been eradicated.
Hubris, right? Wait for it.
A year later, Jerry Brown was termed out, and the Medfly seemed to have been sprayed out.
But in 1989, there was a flare-up in Whittier. The new governor, first-term Republican George Deukmejian, had learned from Brown not to let anyone hang this buggy albatross around his neck, and left it to his ag folks to spray and protect.
Malathion-spraying helicopters cruise over a Camarillo neighborhood where many residents covered their cars with plastic tarps during anti-Medfly spraying in October 1994.
(Alan Hagman / Los Angeles Times)
The spraying created a boomlet for carwashes and the plastic sheeting trade. A woman driving her 5-day-old Nissan Maxima was caught in a malathion shower on her way home to Rowland Heights, where her equally new car cover awaited. She filed a claim for $2,754.14 (Earl Scheib would have painted that car for only $99.95).
The most serious claim I found came from a 14-year-old Los Angeles boy named Juan Macias. On March 28, 1990, he had run outside to tell his dad to be sure to cover his truck because the spray helicopters were coming. He was hit by the malathion, his lawsuit claimed, and went blind. Five years later, the suit was still going forward.
Other kinds of pests pretty regularly turned up here and there around the state, but none as dangerous, as omniphagous, as the Medfly. That’s why counties like Los Angeles have kept up vigilant monitoring and fly-murdering programs, sometimes with new tools, to protect the state’s agricultural cordon sanitaire from Napa and Sonoma to the Mexican border.
At Christmastime in 2016, a Medfly appeared in Panorama City, and 101 square miles of the San Fernando Valley were briefly quarantined. This time, the pesticide of choice was Spinosad, an organic pesticide made from soil bacteria, not chemicals.
As for malathion, a 2000 federal review found it posed no threat to people when used correctly.
That may be fine for people. But in 2013, the feds decided that the pesticide family that includes malathion was indeed dangerous — even toxic — to many species of fish, plants, insects and animals, including the Mississippi sandhill crane and bees.
Four years later, the Trump administration asked a federal judge for a two-year delay in the pesticide review — another piece of the Trump administration’s top-to-bottom kneecapping of science and rollback of scores of environmental measures.
PBS reported that the EPA eventually threw in the towel, backtracking on its conclusion that malathion can imperil all manner of species, in exchange for a promise from pesticide makers to change their labels to exhort consumers to be more careful when they use it. It sounds like very weak medicine indeed.
In October 2023, the Medfly reappeared in L.A., in a persimmon tree and a pomegranate tree in Leimert Park. A quarantine of about 90 square miles of the city and county went into force, and nearly 2 million sterilized male Medflies, all dyed Laker-ish purple, were shoved out of planes over the nine-square-mile Medfly ground zero. This drop was to be replayed every three or four days for months. Again — not messing around.
UC Davis entomology professor James Carey, who has decades of Medfly study on his resume, told The Times: “Nowhere in the world are fruit fly invasions as frequent, recurrent, persistent, continuous, contiguous, widespread, and taxonomically diverse as those that have occurred in California.”
So we’re really left with three options on the persistence of the Medflies among us:
One, that there’s now a low-grade, permanent localized Medfly population that shows itself to us every now and then; two, that Medflies are still finding obliging humans to bring them in from places yonder; or three, that that there’s so little agriculture left hereabouts that, however they get here, Medflies just can’t find much to infest anymore.
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
Didn’t know where else to post about this but Our samsung electric range caught on fire near the knob control panel on the back last night. Almost burned our entire house down. I had to spray water on it and shut off the breaker so i could pull it out and unplug it. House was FILLED with toxic smoke. I have looked it up and apparently a lot of other people with the same model number have had the EXACT same issue with that control panel catching fire. I have never thought about being in a class action lawsuit but I’m pretty sure if this is a for real defect on this range then it could potentially take houses and lives. IDK honestly it’s been a rough 12 hours since then. My eyes and throat burn and we’ve been on the phone with insurance/samsung for hours. If any one here has experience with class action lawsuits or just lawsuits in general feel free to drop a comment or PM me some info because we almost died and lost our home and I want SAMSUNG to ******* pay. (S/N NE59J7630 in case anyone has this oven do not leave it alone) I would love to take those ******* to court. (I am located in Oklahoma in case state matters for lawyer stuff)
Larry weighs in on the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. He’s then joined by producer Will Packer to discuss his new Peacock limited series Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist. They begin their conversation by discussing the premise and history behind the project, which leads to a discussion about the art of creating content in today’s entertainment industry (12:57). After the break, Larry and Will shine a light on the artistic way Don Cheadle, Kevin Hart, Terrence Howard, and Samuel L. Jackson embody their individual characters in Fight Night, which tells the story of a heist that took place at a Muhammad Ali boxing match (37:52). Finally, Will talks about his journey to becoming one of Hollywood’s top producers and shares some sage advice for aspiring filmmakers (56:06).
Host: Larry Wilmore Guest: Will Packer Producer: Chris Sutton
Surprise a date with a trip to Nine Bar, a speakeasy hidden behind Chinatown takeout spot Moon Palace Express. The glowing pink, green, and blue hues in the Blade Runner-inspired space provide a moody venue to share dumplings, cold sesame noodles and Asian-inspired cocktails like the Neo Toyko blended with Suntory Toki, ginger, and lemongrass or the Paradise Lost, a rum-based drink incorporating mango cordial, ube and Thai coconut milk.
Two street takeovers in South Los Angeles veered into vandalism early Tuesday morning as the window of a local car dealership was smashed and cars were set on fire.
The Los Angeles police and fire departments responded a few minutes past midnight to a call of a vehicle on fire and a possible street takeover at the intersection of Normandie and Florence avenues. The vehicle was so charred, it was not driveable and had to be impounded, according to police.
Margaret Stewart, a public information officer with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said the large crowd and vehicles were packed tightly, and firefighters struggled to reach the flaming vehicle.
The second call came at 3:23 a.m. from the intersection of Jefferson Boulevard and Figueroa Street, walking distance from the main USC campus. Los Angeles police officers and firefighters responded to another report of a rowdy takeover, with a second vehicle that had caught fire, this one containing fireworks.
In video of the street takeover obtained by KABC7, loud popping noises can be heard in the background as crowds run past Felix Chevrolet on Figueroa Street. Glass is scattered on the ground from a shattered window at the car dealership. One individual in a ski mask appears to grab items from a gray sedan that is on fire.
In each takeover incident, fresh black skid marks on the asphalt traced where drivers had spun “doughnuts” repeatedly in the night.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department, there were no injuries and no arrests at either incident.
Residents of South Los Angeles are crying foul.
“I live in the neighborhood and I can hear it at night,” said Emma, who works at a local business. Emma, who provided only her first name out of fear for her safety, says the noise often wakes her and her neighbors in the middle of the night, with the abrupt explosion of fireworks setting off car alarms. She said these late-night rendezvous have increased to several times a week.
The Avalon Gardens resident believes the culprits have been emboldened by law enforcement that she says remains lax in spite of neighbors’ numerous complaints to the city.
“When [police] do arrive, it’s 15 minutes too late,” when the crowds have already dispersed and gone home, she added.
From 2019 to 2020, the number of street takeovers nearly doubled amid the pandemic. The illegal sideshows have been deadly, as The Times has previously reported. Earlier this year, another street takeover left two sedans burning at the intersection of West 18th and Main streets.
A former friend of Kevin Hart has accused Hart in a lawsuit of submitting fabricated evidence to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office stemming from his 2017 sex tape scandal, and alleging that investigators accepted the evidence and acted upon it without proper vetting.
In an amended complaint filed Aug. 6 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Jonathan “J.T.” Jackson — who sued the “Get Hard” star in July for breach of written contract — further alleged that Hart and the D.A.’s office contributed to false extortion accusations against him that hurt his reputation.
Representatives for Hart did not immediately respond to The Times’ requests for comment.
Jonathan “J.T.” Jackson, left — a Navy veteran, professional bowler and actor — has updated his lawsuit against comedian Kevin Hart.
(Arnold Turner/ Chris Pizzello / Associated Press)
Jackson — a Navy veteran, professional bowler and actor — sued Hart for allegedly botching a settlement agreement meant to clear Jackson’s name relating to the fallout from Hart’s 2017 scandal. He accused Hart of not using the “meticulously negotiated” and agreed-upon wording from their 2021 settlement when Hart addressed the scandal in an Instagram post that same year, resulting in July’s $12-million breach of written contract lawsuit that Jackson updated last week.
Jackson’s amended complaint includes a transcript of a 2017 interview of Hart by D.A.’s investigator Robin Letourneau said to confirm “multiple key points” that refute the claims made against Jackson and show that Hart allegedly instigated criminal extortion charges that led to Jackson’s arrest.
The amended complaint said that Hart and his legal team “fabricated evidence and provided misleading statements that contributed and led to [Jackson’s] wrongful implication and arrest.” According to the original complaint, the alleged evidence was an April 2018 email addressed to Hart by someone identified as Juan Carlos Yépez, who demanded 20 bitcoins to prevent the tape’s release (after the tape had been released eight months earlier). The email, a copy of which is included in the complaint, also included accusations of molestation and attempted rape.
Jackson, 47, was the target of a January 2018 raid at his home in which he and his wife were held at gunpoint by investigators with the district attorney’s office. Investigators were looking into allegations of extortion in the raid, which Jackson believes Hart’s allegations instigated. Jackson was arrested a few months later, and the complaint said a voice recording made during his arrest captured Letourneau “specifically stating that Plaintiff was responsible for the extortion email that Hart allegedly received on April 27, 2018.”
Jackson claimed in his lawsuit that the extortion report hinged on the email, and he argued that it had not been properly authenticated, although Hart claimed to have forwarded it to his legal team, which then forwarded it to the D.A. But the email lacked forwarding headers and other digital markers, leading Jackson to believe that it was potentially fabricated, according to the lawsuit. However, Jackson alleged, investigators were expected to further scrutinize and verify the digital evidence but allegedly did not and the email was still used to prosecute him.
“The District Attorney’s blanket reliance on Hart’s authentication, despite clear discrepancies, raises significant doubts about the validity of the evidence and the thoroughness of its verification,” the lawsuit said.
A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said Friday that the office did not comment on pending litigation.
Jackson, who also goes by “Action Jackson,” was charged in May 2018 with attempting to extort money from Hart after claiming to have a secret video of the comedian engaging in extramarital sex in Las Vegas in August 2017. The charges were eventually dropped by prosecutors (whom Jackson also sued in December), but Jackson claimed that his “reputation was unjustly tarnished due to a series of malicious actions by the defendants,” including when Hart released the 2019 Netflix docuseries “Don’t F— This Up.” In the series, Hart mentioned extortion and alleged that Jackson had been involved in the creation and dissemination of the sex tape. Jackson was later cleared of all charges brought against him by the D.A. A $60-million lawsuit filed by Montia Sabbag, the model who appeared with Hart in the sex tape, was dismissed in 2020.
Hart told Letourneau that no one else was in his private bedroom within his suite on the night of the sex tape recording except Sabbag and another female friend, identified as Morgan in the lawsuit.
“Hart emphasizes that no one else had access to his room,” the amended complaint said. “Hart states he was discombobulated and not in control of his actions but implies that Sabbag was aware of the camera’s placement. Hart suggests Sabbag knew where to position herself and Hart to be recorded.”
In the Sept. 18, 2017, interview transcript, the “Jumanji” and “Die Hart” star also admitted to taking the hallucinogenic drug Molly, claiming that a friend, whose identity he did not reveal, pressured him to do the drug.
“F— it, I said, and I put it in my drink,” Hart said in the D.A. interview, which is included in the complaint. “I had some water there. It was watered down. Because it’s in my drink, I’m fine. I’m fine with drinking. The night is good. As the night goes, I’m now with the girl Montia at the end of the night.”
Hart said that he did not have sex with Sabbag that night, but had sex with her the next morning when he “woke up to sexual activity.” That’s when he realized she was trying to get closer to the hidden camera that recorded the sex tape, although he noted that he never felt Sabbag leave the bed.
Hart also mentioned that his friends, including Jackson, were downstairs in his suite for about only 10 minutes and that his private bedroom was upstairs. That claim contradicts “any implication that [Jackson] had an opportunity to place or manipulate the camera.” Hart also noted that Sabbag and Morgan were the only people who could have taken pictures or been involved in the recording or have access to Hart’s private bedroom upstairs in the suite, “strengthening the claim that Plaintiff was not involved,” the complaint said.
“I am a calculated guy. And I know how to maneuver. There’s no way, there’s no way that I can [be] videotaped sleeping in bed with somebody else in the room with me not having knowledge of a person in the room,” Hart said in interview, adding that he “100%” believes that it was all “calculated” by Sabbag during the time he was sleeping in bed by himself.
Hart also explained how he later learned about the sex tape being “shopped” around to celebrity media outlets, indicating a focus on selling the tape rather than extortion, the complaint said.
Hart stated that he was “informed” about the video by a person from Media Take Out, not directly by the purported seller, “highlighting that he was not directly contacted or threatened or extorted,” according to the lawsuit. He was told that the tape would not “come cheap” and that it could ruin his career, “framing it as a sales pitch and business deal rather than a direct threat … supporting that it was a negotiation to sell the video, not extortion.”
The complaint said that Hart’s representatives engaged in this alleged negotiation and that the seller of the sex tape had no idea that he or she was negotiating with Hart’s representatives. The actor-comedian, a seller identified in the documents as a “Hollywood Sex Tape Broker” named Kevin Blatt and Fred Mwangaguhunga from Media Take Out negotiated a price for the recording, “reinforcing the transactional nature of the interaction,” the complaint alleged.
In a Friday statement to The Times, Mwangaguhunga,, said that neither he nor Media Take Out “has ever engaged in any negotiation for a sex tape.”
“That is illegal. We were approached by a person looking to sell a purported video of Kevin Hart, and we immediately notified his representatives. Weeks later, law enforcement asked us for a copy of the email solicitation and we provided it,” Mwangaguhungasaid. “To be clear, it is not true that I, or any representative of Media Take Out, solicited or entered into any business agreement over an illegal video. It is also not true that either I, or anyone at Media Take Out, have ever acted as a representative for Kevin Hart in any negotiation.”
Blatt told The Times on Friday that he was contacted to buy the tape but was never told who the seller was.
Letourneau confirmed under oath at a Sept. 23, 2019, preliminary hearing that the interaction between all parties “was seen as a business deal and not extortion,” Jackson’s amended complaint said. “This detailed evidence collectively shows that Hart was involved in a negotiation over the sale of the video, not extorted, which is extremely crucial for understanding the legal and public perception of the incident.”
After that fated Las Vegas trip, Hart met with Sabbag in Los Angeles, which further contradicts Hart’s “claims and narrative of being a victim of any crime committed,” the complaint said.
“Additionally, officials named in [the complaint], including members of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, contributed to the false accusations against [Jackson] by accepting and acting upon the fabricated evidence without proper investigation and verification. The media then sensationalized these false accusations against [Jackson], further damaging his reputation,” the amended complaint said.
“[Jackson] was wrongfully accused of extorting Hart using the sex tape, leading to significant social and professional fallout. This forced [Jackson] to navigate the legal system and endure hostile public opinion.”
Jackson’s lawsuit initially accused Hart and his co-defendants — Hartbeat LLC and several individuals identified as John or Jane Doe — only of breach of written contract, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress, but the amended complaint updated the allegations to include fraud in the inducement, malicious prosecution and defamation. Jackson claimed that the fabricated evidence and fraudulent actions induced him to enter into the contract with Hart, one he argued “was seemingly designed to mitigate the fallout from the fabricated accusations” against him.
In addition to $12 million, Jackson is seeking punitive damages to be determined at trial, legal costs and fees and injunctions requiring the defendants to exonerate him, as well as the removal of “all the false statements” about him in Hart’s 2019 Netflix docuseries.
A newly released video has generated fresh controversy over the 2021 arrest of a top aide to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón during a traffic stop in Azusa.
Gascón’s chief of staff, Joseph Iniguez, and his then-fiance were arrested late on the night of Dec. 11, 2021, on suspicion of public intoxication and driving while intoxicated, respectively.
Both Iniguez and his then-fiance were later released from custody and charges were never filed. In January 2022, Iniguez sued the department, claiming his civil rights were violated during the stop.
The video, which was taken by Iniguez and obtained by The Times from the city of Azusa via a public records request, depicts him arguing with police and claiming his then-fiance, who stood handcuffed several feet away, did nothing wrong.
“You have pulled over the wrong person,” he tells the officers in the five-minute video. “This is not right,” he adds later.
Police reports released by the department in 2022 stated that the officers pulled over Iniguez’s fiance — to whom he is now married — after he allegedly made an illegal U-turn and that both the driver and passenger showed visible signs of alcohol intoxication.
The Azusa Police Department settled Iniguez’s federal lawsuit last July for $10,000, stating at the time that it was less expensive than taking it to trial.
Both the police and Iniguez claim the video vindicates their respective interpretations of the events of that night in Azusa.
In a statement provided to The Times, Azusa Police Capt. Robert Landeros said the department conducted an internal review that found “the officers involved acted in full accordance with the law and the policies of the Azusa Police Department.”
Landeros added that the city and department “stand firmly behind our employees and the decisions made during this arrest.”
Landeros told KTLA-TV in an interview that he believes the video proves “our officers were treated with disrespect” during the stop. “It’s not uncommon. It’s disturbing when it involves a public official.”
Glenn Jonas, an attorney for Iniguez, said in a statement that the video is evidence that “Iniguez was 100%, without a doubt falsely arrested,” and that he “was lucid, calm, direct and in full control” during the stop.
“Mr. Iniguez in my book is a hero,” Jonas said in an email, noting that the official donated the settlement money to a nonprofit. “He took a false arrest and used it to protect the good citizens of Azusa who are now because of him protected with Body Worn Cameras.”
Gascón’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
In a mostly quiet neighborhood of older homes and small apartment buildings, some residents have drawn their own no-go zones around what might sound like a crash pad for traveling backpackers: hostels.
At least two of them have popped up onWest View Streetin Mid-City Heights in the past few years, with more in surrounding neighborhoods.
Residentssay they’ve seen strangers smoke marijuana and drink alcohol outside the newly built buildings. They say the properties draw drug deals and a frequent police presence. A few months ago, a woman ranted in the street outside one of the properties for hours, at times alleging someone stole something from her.
Adriana Marcial said one night her husband caught two men having sex in front of the home they share with their two children. When he startled the men, she said they left and entered one of the hostels.
“About a year ago, we stopped walking through there,” said Marcial, 38. “You get that vibe of feeling unsafe.”
Long associated with backpackers and young travelers, hostels typically offer cheap dorm-style beds and a shared kitchen. They can be a social place to meet people from around the world and, at times, the start of an alcohol- or drug-fueled night.
In Europe, such facilities often are located in bustling corners of the city. But in Los Angeles, hostels are opening for business within residential neighborhoods they’re not allowed in, drawing the ire of some Angelenos who say a revolving cast of characters has brought an increase in noise and crime.
With beds as cheap as $25 a night, the properties also serve as an option for people struggling to make ends meet, providing a relief valve in an expensive city where thousands sleep on the streets.
According to the Department of City Planning, hostels are banned in low-density residential neighborhoods like Mid-City Heights. The budget-stay properties can operate in high-density residential neighborhoods like parts of Koreatown, but need a special permit to do so.
A recent Times search of an online booking site found seven Los Angeles hostels advertised in low-density residential areas where the planning department says the facilities aren’t allowed.
The numbers could be greater. According to an October motion from Councilwoman Heather Hutt, there were at least 28 illegal hostels operating in Council District 10 alone. The district includes Koreatown and parts of South L.A., as well as Mid-City Heights and the larger Mid-City neighborhood.
Some people who stayed at one hostel described it as a quiet, affordable place as they traveled L.A. or sought a full-time job. Others were students or had low-wage work.
“Everyone here is trying to get by,” said Chris Smoot, who had been staying in a West View Street hostel for three weeks. The 44-year-old was trying to find work and establish permanent housing so he could bring his family out from Florida.
Hutt’s motion paints a more ominous picture, saying neighbors have complained that a variety of crimes are “radiating from these properties” —including battery and drug use — and that the police department has experience “heightened” calls for service.
In approving the motion in December, the City Council ordered multiple departments to create a plan to crack down on illegal hostels, which the motion said two departments have been unable to do so, in part because of jurisdictional issues.
The council also established an enforcement task force specifically for Mid-City.
Devyn Bakewell, a spokeswoman for Hutt, said the task force’s work is ongoing and that the city attorney has issued “citations to certain addresses and has put several locations on notice about illegal land use.”
In Mid-City Heights, residents say officials should have — and still need to — act faster, noting at least one hostel still appears in operation.
Neighbor complaints also extend to two other newly built buildings that house short-term residents, which they say shouldn’t be in a neighborhood with children.
One is a sober-living home owned in part by a man named Nathan Young, according to his attorney Marc Williams. Young and others were sued last year by insurance company Aetna, which alleged they ran sober-living homes in Los Angeles and Orange counties that were “little more than drug dens.”
In a statement shared by Williams, Young denied Aetna’s allegations and said the sober-living home in Mid-City Heights is “dedicated to housing families with a parent in addiction recovery” and it has been successful in rebuilding lives.
Neighbors say they’ve seen people from the facility drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana in public and one neighbor said he saw what appeared to be a Nazi SS flag draped from a window on the site.
Young said they had the offensive flag taken down immediately after hearing of it and that “idea that we encourage the use of drugs and alcohol is ridiculous and diametrically opposed to our mission.”
The other property is leased by a homeless-services provider who previously provided housing on site to people exiting jail and prison, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which funded the program.
LAHSA said that this use stopped in September and that the service provider, Abundant Blessings, told the agency that a County Department of Mental Health-funded program has operated on site since.
A spokesperson with the mental health department said they found no record of a department program operating at the address and that the department does not have a relationship with Abundant Blessings.
Alex Soofer, executive director for Abundant Blessings, declined to comment, including to say what his organization currently uses the property for.
Barbara Matson lives behind that property with her husband and 8-year old daughter. Last year, she said, she awoke around midnight to a man throwing furniture.
“I am free,” Matson recalled the man screaming and using profanities. “I wasn’t sure if . . . he might jump over my fence.”
Matson said she no longer hosts backyard birthday parties for her daughter.
The uses Mid City-Heights residents cite as concerns exist in a type of housing that’s grown increasingly common in some Los Angeles neighborhoods where single family homes sit on lots the city has long zoned for a few more units.
There, developers are knocking down small, old houses and building multistory box-like structures with as many as five bedrooms. At some developments, there are two new duplexes on a lot, while others have a new single-family home on one side and a duplex on the other.
In some corners of South L.A., landlords specialize in renting these new properties to large families on a permanent basis.
Near USC, the housing style is used for student housing and has led to concern developers have displaced long-term residents.
Some in Mid-City Heights said since the new buildings went up in their neighborhood they’ve noticed an increase in strangers — some of them aggressive — walking the streets, but don’t always know where they come from. They also say they’ve found more syringes, condoms and other trash.
With more duplex developments underway, neighbors have concerns. They said they would welcome it if people looking for a permanent home moved into the buildings, but want temporary stays ended.
“We are being oversaturated,” said Roxana Brusso, who has owned a home in the neighborhood since 2008. “The city is asking us to sacrifice our safety, quality of life and property values.”
Marcial put it this way: “You just never know who is coming. Maybe it’s not always bad people, but it’s not always good people.”
The city has taken some action against the West View Street hostels.
In 2023, the Department of Building and Safety cited a newly built duplex for use as an unapproved hostel and the building appears to no longer be used as such, according to neighbors.
On the other side of the street and a few doors down, LA Modern Hostel received the same citation more than a year ago. Two Times reporters booked beds there in early May.
Located at 2125 S. West View St., the hostel sits inside a white single-family house with gray trim. Built in 2021, the three-story box sits on the front of a 6,000 square-foot lot. In the back is a duplex, built the same year.
Written reviews on the website Hostel World are mostly negative and describe a difficult check-in process, with one person saying they never got inside and were forced to “walk all night.”
Another reviewer described a dirty bathroom and a room where “it seemed nobody had personal hygiene skills.”
So far this year, city records show police were called to the address to investigate reports of two disturbances, a theft, an instance of vandalism and a battery.
In a three-day span last year, police responded to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon, a prowler, a burglary and a disturbance.
LAPD Officer Hector Marquez said issues — including loitering, theft allegations and disputes — have spilled into the neighborhood from the property and disrupted residents’ quality of life, but there’s been no evidence of violent crime.
On a recent Thursday, the hostel was calm. At check-in, a worker told Times reporters there were no drugs, alcohol or weapons allowed. Smoking was to be in the back of the lot — in an outdoor common area behind the duplex.
Inside the single-family house at the front of the property, there were six numbered rooms across two floors. Room 2 had four bunk beds accommodating eight twin mattresses, some which had towels or sheets draped to carve out privacy.
At the back of the lot behind the duplex, people lingered outside for hours on black patio furniture. As the night progressed, some returned from work, with one man dressed in a button-down shirt and khakis finding solace in a cigarette, dragging it with a worn expression. Other guests discussed sports betting over Modelos and marijuana blunts.
Past midnight, a group gathered inside in the ground floor common area. Some read, while others watched videos or tackled schoolwork.
In several emails, a man identifying himself as the property’s owner thanked The Times for its reporting and said his “tenants” have agreed to close the “boarding house” before a June hearing date and convert it into family living.
According to the planning department, boarding houses — defined as a dwelling unit with no more than five guest rooms — are allowed in many low residential zones like Mid-City Heights. A hostel, according to city code, is any dwelling unit that is advertised as such or listed with a “recognized national or international hostel organization.” There’s no stated guest room limit.
The person who checked Times reporters into LA Modern Hostel — which had six numbered rooms, has hostel in its name and is advertised that way on websites like Hostel World — did not respond to a voice mail and text seeking comment.
In a brief interview in the outdoor common area, a man who described himself as a music producer and declined to give his name said his stay has been quiet and relatively affordable. But he added if someone built a hostel next to his house, he — like some Mid-City Heights residents — would wonder who was passing through.
There may have been a second hostel on the same property.
One of the units in the duplex between the common area and LA Modern Hostel has been advertised as LA Modern Hostel 2 — located at 2123 S. West View St.
A year ago, someone who lived in a nearby house with a similar address posted video from their security camera on Nextdoor. In the video, a man rings the doorbell and says he’s there to check into LA Modern Hostel 2.
The Nextdoor poster tells the man he has the wrong address and is on West Boulevard, not West View.
The man insists he’s correct and threatens to report the poster, who closes the door, prompting the man to repeatably bang on it.
“I am calling the police!” the man yells. “Open this f——- door!”
While appearing to call the police on the phone, the man repeatably calls the poster a gay slur in a raised voice, interspersed with expletives. He then leaves.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with my brain, I was incredibly depressed for 5 days, ready to pepsi myself and then boom, 8pm last night sitting on the couch and it went away, got up cleaned the house, went to the gym, basically like it never happened.
The drivers would circle Koreatown, piloting a van filled with party girls. The so-called doumi — decked out in bikini tops, short skirts and tight dresses — were looking to get hired at one of the many karaoke bars that fill the neighborhood.
Doumi drivers, named for the hostesses they transport, could make $40 an hour for each passenger hired to party with karaoke customers. And each month, drivers would pay a portion of their profits to Daekun Cho, a well-known figure in Koreatown.
Authorities arrested Cho last year, and he’s since been charged with 55 counts of extortion, one count of attempted extortion and another of carjacking.
In a federal trial that unfolded in downtown L.A. this month, prosecutors painted Cho, 39, as a gangster who for years extorted monthly protection fees from karaoke bar owners and doumi drivers, many of whom were in the country illegally and did not speak English fluently.
He carried out acts of violence on those who did not pay or who violated his rules, they said in court, including beating one driver with a baseball bat and shooting a doumi in the neck. Prosecutors displayed photos from Cho’s Instagram account and images of his tattoos to identify him as a member of the Grape Street Crips, a predominantly Black gang based in Watts’ Jordan Downs housing project.
By the end of the five-day trial, jurors would walk away with a better understanding of Koreatown’s underbelly and be left to determine Cho’s role in it.
“He wanted everyone in Koreatown to know about his power and that he had to be paid or else,” Asst. U.S. Atty. Jena MacCabe told the jury at the trial’s start.
But defense attorneys argued that drivers and karaoke bar owners paid Cho to be part of an “association,” akin to a union member paying dues, and that in return he kept new clubs and drivers from horning in on their businesses. They said there was no definitive proof Cho was behind the baseball bat beating or the shooting.
“He tried to bring some order into this otherwise chaotic, gray market economy,” Karen Sosa, who represented Cho, said in her opening statement. “Everybody in this case was paying to play.”
Joo Hun Lee testified during the trial that he first met Cho — known in the neighborhood as “DK” — when Lee planned to start a company called Plus driving doumi around Koreatown.
“I was told if you want to start this kind of work, you will have to get permission from an individual called DK,” Lee said through a Korean interpreter. He testified that Cho told him he was “a Korean gangster member.”
When Lee started Plus with a business partner, Yun Soo Shin, around 2019, they began paying Cho $100 each month, through cash or at times on Venmo, Lee testified. If he and his partner didn’t pay, he said, “we were not able to work.”
Drivers would pay a starting fee of around $1,500 and then a monthly association fee, according to court testimony.
On any given night, Lee testified, he and Shin would transport 10 to 15 women — whom they recruited through Craigslist — to different karaoke bars in the neighborhood. Sometimes they drove from 8:30 p.m. until 6 a.m. The drivers waited to see if the doumi were hired. If they were not, the drivers didn’t get paid.
“These girls would go inside the clubs, and they’d be paraded in front of middle-aged businessman … and these middle aged businessmen would decide whether to hire any particular girl based upon her looks, correct?” Cho’s attorney, Mark Werksman, asked.
“Yes,” Lee responded.
Werksman referenced the rules Lee and Shin set for the women they hired. Among them: no sex with customers and no drugs. Each woman was expected to work at least four nights a week.
One rule, displayed in court, instructed doumi not to lie to clients and drivers about money, stating that they only charged $120 plus tips for the first two hours and $60 plus tips for every additional hour.
Cho also set rules, witnesses testified. If he told drivers not to go to a certain karaoke bar and they went, they would be penalized. The same went for karaoke bar owners who called drivers who Cho told them were banned.
The first penalty was $200. The next, $400, according to texts sent by Cho that were presented in court.
“If u violate our rule one more time,” one text to a driver read, “U gonna see the real demon.”
Shin testified that he and Lee stopped paying in early 2021, after Cho raised prices. Within months, Shin testified, Cho and another man confronted him outside McQueen Karaoke on Western Avenue, dragged him out of his car and beat him with aluminum baseball bats, breaking his arm.
The other assailant then stole the Honda Odyssey that Shin had rented to drop off two doumi that night.
Shin said Cho was wearing a mask with a skeleton on it during the attack, but that he was able to identify him by the top half of his face and his voice. Prosecutors displayed a photo Cho posted on Instagram after the attack wearing what appeared to be the same mask.
The partners closed their business soon after, and Lee left the state.
Another witness, who said he works at Concert Karaoke, testified that he had to pay Cho $600 each month because “he threatened that if we don’t pay, we’ll lose business and he’ll do something to us.” After he stopped paying, he told the jury that Cho threatened him that he better not see him in the neighborhood.
The witness said he stopped going to Koreatown.
Prosecutors played surveillance footage depicting a shooting outside a karaoke bar on July 15, 2022, which they said was carried out by Cho. Police body camera footage showed a doumi who had been shot in the neck saying, “Help, help. Please, help.”
Sang Heun Shin, another doumi driver, testified that he had paid Cho every month for four years before deciding to stop. Then, one night in January 2023, Cho punched him in the face and threatened to kill him, he said. Sang Heun Shin began working with investigators and agreed to wear a wire the next time he made a payment.
Cho changed the meeting location three times, asking at one point, “U called cops?” before finally telling the driver to give the cash to an intermediary, according to text messages displayed in court.
During the trial, Werksman and Sosa sought to cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses, painting them as having motive to lie. They highlighted their immigration status and referenced their potential to obtain U Visas, which give immigrant victims of certain crimes the chance to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cooperate with authorities.
In his closing argument, Werksman called the witness testimony “muddled,” “evasive” and “incomplete.” Werksman referred to the drivers and Cho as “bros.”
“These drivers formed an association to bring a modicum of order to the jungle,” Werksman said.
Werksman added that the payments to Cho were a “pittance.”
“Was that a protection racket or was it a voluntary, if at times slightly chafing and unwelcome, association of street rats who needed to band together to achieve their common goal of exploiting hard-working, sexy young women who earned a few hundred dollars of cash every night abasing themselves for the pleasure of karaoke bar patrons?” Werksman said.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Kevin Butler said the 56 counts tied to an extortion payment are “just a fraction of the real amount of extortion that [Cho] was responsible for.”
“Cho was a predator. He preyed and stalked and hunted — as he called it — his victims: people in Koreatown who he thought either could not or would not go to police,” Butler said during his closing argument. “He gave each one of them an impossible, false choice: Pay him or get banned. Pay him or face the consequence. Pay him or flee the state. Pay him or get ripped out of your car and beaten with aluminum baseball bats. Pay him or get shot in the neck.”
On Tuesday morning, the jury came back with its verdict: Guilty on all counts.
Attorneys for Hidden Hills socialite Rebecca Grossman have consistently maintained it was her then-lover, former Dodgers pitcher Scott Erickson, who first struck two young boys in a Westlake Village crosswalk, a fatal collision for which she now stands accused of murder.
A district attorney’s investigator, called to testify at Grossman’s trial by the defense, leveled a further charge at Erickson on Thursday — alleging he was “cold plating,” or using the same license plate on two of the black Mercedes SUVs that he owns, one of which he was driving the night the boys were killed. The investigator said the practice was a felony.
But while Grossman’s defense team seized on the plating issue to paint Erickson as a lawbreaker, the lead prosecutor dismissed the revelation as a years-old red herring.
Grossman, 60, is accused of driving her white Mercedes SUV at speeds reaching 81 mph on Triunfo Canyon Road in the upscale suburban L.A. neighborhood, closely following the SUV driven by Erickson.
Prosecutors allege that on Sept. 29, 2020, she went from having cocktails with Erickson at a local restaurant to racing behind him along the street, where she struck Mark and Jacob Iskander, 11 and 8, as they made their way through a marked crosswalk behind their mother and 5-year-old brother.
Grossman is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, and one count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death.
Erickson told authorities he was driving his 2007 Mercedes at the time, and jurors have heard him deny on the witness stand having hit anyone.
Tony Buzbee, Grossman’s lead attorney, said that Erickson was actually driving his 2016 black Mercedes GL 63 AMG, and that it struck the young boys and vaulted one of them onto the hood of Grossman’s white Mercedes GLE 43. An accident reconstruction expert testifying for the defense on Thursday said that was what occurred.
Sheriff’s officials never inspected Erickson’s vehicle, according to testimony.
D.A. investigator Sergio Lopez testified that he was asked by his office to take a closer look at Erickson’s two Mercedes, and obtained license-plate captures from the 2007 and 2016 vehicles showing they had the same Nevada license plate.
“The issue with Mr. Erickson is using the same license for two vehicles,” Lopez said when questioned by Buzbee. The investigator said such fake plates were easily obtained — he said they could be bought on Etsy.
Mark, left, and Jacob Iskander.
(Iskander family)
Lopez testified that Erickson was “cold-plating to avoid paying registration on the 2016 model.”
Prosecutor Jamie Castro called Lopez’s testimony a red herring. Lopez confirmed that Erickson’s alleged cold-plating had occurred long before the 2020 incident.
“It has nothing to do with the collision?” Castro asked.
“Correct,” Lopez replied.
Buzbee then jumped up and asked, “Where is Scott Erickson?”
“No idea,” Lopez said.
A lawyer representing Erickson could not immediately be reached for comment.
Jurors on Thursday also heard from a teenager who was playing tennis in Westlake Village on the night of the collision. Dorsa Khoddami recounted hearing “alarming” sounds from a nearby roadway, followed by a sudden hush.
“I pieced together it was a car accident,” Khoddami testified, describing how she and her mother, a physician, dashed from the tennis courts to the accident scene.
She said they arrived to find Nancy Iskander, the boys’ mother, shoeless. The teen testified that she attempted to hand the woman some shoes they had retrieved from the street.
“She started screaming, ‘Those are my son’s shoes!’ And I immediately put them back,” said Khoddami, who was 16 at the time. “My mom described it as a war zone.”
Buzbee asked Khoddami whether she had heard two impacts, which could reinforce the defense argument that Erickson’s vehicle had struck the children first.
Khoddami testified that she’d heard an “alarming and loud” sound and then “another sound occurred,” and then “everyone paused.”
Authorities found Grossman about three-tenths of a mile from the crosswalk after a fuel cut-off safety system caused her vehicle to grind to a halt. She told a responding deputy, as well as a 911 operator, that she did not know what had happened.
The prosecution has said Grossman was not as ignorant to the night’s events as she claimed, pointing to a text that a friend testified Grossman had sent her in June 2022, nearly two years after the boys’ deaths, in which she said she’d seen Nancy Iskander — who was wearing inline skates — falling and had turned her head in the woman’s direction for a brief second or two.
An expert witness, however, bolstered the defense’s argument that Grossman was unaware of any impacts. William Broadhead, an engineering expert on car airbags and restraints, told jurors Thursday that drivers are stunned by the force of an airbag when it deploys.
Defense lawyers wanted to trigger an airbag inside the courtroom as a demonstration for jurors, a move that was rejected by L.A. County Superior Court Judge Joseph Brandolino, who said it could be shown on video. The judge did say he would allow the controlled firing of a seat-belt pretensioner, which automatically tightens the belt in a collision, but safety monitors for the Sheriff’s Department nixed that idea.
“It stuns you. … It is confusing if you don’t know you’re in an accident,” said Broadhead, describing the punch of the Mercedes dashboard and knee airbags and the noise of the belt pretensioner. “You don’t know if it is a bomb or a sniper.”
The witness said he would not expect that striking a pedestrian would cause the bags to inflate. Grossman’s “airbags fired defectively,” he concluded.
The prosecution and defense sparred over the source of Grossman’s bruises, which Broadhead said were a result of being injured by an airbag.
Prosecutor Castro confronted him with a series of text messages the Hidden Hills woman had sent to a masseuse 10 days before the accident. The messages included photos and said, “Next time don’t massage too hard. You need to lighten up. I have bruises.”
Buzbee, Grossman’s attorney, belittled the testimony, saying,”We just learned something here: Nicole has strong hands.”
He said images showed bruises on his client’s face, arm and chest that were not there before the night of the collision.
The running bit in True Detective: Night Country has been Liz Danvers repeatedly telling her protégé Pete Prior to ask the right questions if they’re going to solve the case. (“ASK ME QUESTIONS. QUESTION ME. ASK ME QUESTIONS. YOU WANTED TO KNOW. ASK ME THE FUCKING QUESTIONS. ASK THE QUESTIONS, PRIOR.”) Well, I’ll do my best with that. Here are eight crucial questions to ask ahead of the Night Country finale.
If Kate McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining are behind the killings, why are they so gruesome?
We are first introduced to Kate McKittrick as “mine bitch” in Episode 2, when Danvers asks McKittrick to thaw the corpsicle of naked Tsalal scientists stashed at the Ennis hockey rink (which is owned by McKittrick’s company, Silver Sky Mining). McKittrick doesn’t make many appearances beyond that until Episode 5, when she very conveniently spins the story that the root cause for the Tsalal scientists’ deaths was a “weather event.” She then tells Hank Prior to kill Ennis drifter Otis Heiss to keep him from leading Danvers and her partner, Evangeline Navarro, to Ennis’s subterranean ice caves—dubbed “night country” by the locals. It’s a bit of an awkwardly sudden reveal, but it’s still a reveal, which forces us to ask: If McKittrick is the kingpin behind all of this, why is she stabbing people—or at least ordering these stabbings—32-plus times, cutting out tongues, and stripping scientists naked in the freezing cold? Does she have an even darker side that will be revealed to us in a snappy conversation between her and Captain Connelly in the cold open of the finale?
(It just can’t be Kate McKittrick who killed all these people. We’ll get to more on this later.)
Will Pete Prior, the epitome of innocence, be able to rally after killing his own dad (and then cleaning up the body)?
It’s over, Petey. The story about you blowing a hockey game for a kid whose father just suffered a stroke is cute and all, but the knight-in-shining-armor schtick wears thin when you kill your own father and agree to dispose of his body without much hesitation.
Look at the positioning of Hank’s gun when Pete fired a bullet square into his dad’s temple at point-blank range:
Screenshots via HBO
That’s a little too quick and a bit tooaccurate for my taste. Yes, Hank was raising his gun to shoot Danvers minutes after shooting and killing Heiss, but convince me Pete can’t adjust the aim just a tad to rock his dad with a shoulder or even a chest shot. Is there some risk that middle-aged Hank takes either of those gunshots in stride and still shoots Danvers? Maybe! But even if he does, he’s hitting her in the hip or thigh at best with that gun positioning. I know a killer when I see one. (Hank literally said he wasn’t one, even if that’s technically no longer true.) Even if Pete was a choirboy before all of this, the soft, pillowy exterior propped up by his youth and relatable juggling of an overdemanding boss, a marriage, and a child died with Hank that night. I’m not saying the next installment of True Detective—let’s call it Day Country—will have an Episode 5 reveal that Pete is a serial killer who targets anyone that reminds him of his dad, but I’m not not saying it.
Kidding aside, the arc of Pete trying his best to not be Danvers just to end up in a worse place than she ever could be is a nice touch from the show’s creators. In the same episode in which Pete scolds Liz for covering up the William Wheeler murder, Pete in turn murders his dad and jumps at the opportunity to cover it up. Do I think this would realistically have some pretty gnarly permanent effects on my boy’s psyche beyond the occasional one-eyed polar bear flashback? Yes. Do I also think the show will tie it up a bit prettier than that to the point that killing his dad actually somehow throws him back into a healthy marriage and work-life balance? Probably.
Will Navarro survive? If so, will Mr. SpongeBob Toothbrush (Qavvik) ever have a healthy relationship?
With her haunting visions growing in frequency, I realize Navarro is getting dangerously close to following her sister’s literal path into the frozen sea. Still, I’m going to venture to guess that Eve comes out of this alive. Navarro at times feels like the true protagonist of the show, and her arc is destined for a much softer landing, one that pushes her away from continually throwing fists at the world and instead into the arms of her sweetheart, Qavvik.
The first time we see Navarro and Qavvik together is when she physically submits him into having an orgasm and subsequently steals his SpongeBob toothbrush. Not even the best couples therapist in the world will be able to handle that kind of power dynamic. Cracking this case—and finally knowing who killed Annie Kowtok—has to distance Navarro enough from her demons to pursue a healthy relationship with our boy Qavvik. (And it better! He’s a good-looking dude with a legit job in a tiny rural town. Ask Danvers how Tinder is going in Bumfuck, Alaska; I don’t think we’ve heard a notification pop up since the first couple of episodes.)
What’s the deal with the oranges and the one-eyed polar bears? Do they actually matter?
OK, this probably doesn’t fit in as the right question to ask; Danvers would not approve. We know the oranges following Navarro around throughout the series and the consistent run-ins she and Danvers have with one-eyed polar bears are both heavy-handed, inescapable symbols for our troubled duo. Surely, what they represent is infinitely more important than their potential connection to the murders of Annie Kowtok and the Tsalal scientists.
The oranges are a recurring symbol of the connection between Navarro, the living, and the dead. We don’t need anything more than the scene where Navarro throws an orange into the darkness and something dead or alive (or made-up) throws it right back.
The one-eyed polar bear stuffed animal is probably just a real-life reminder of Danvers’s son, Holden, who we know is dead due to context clues from recurring flashbacks. (But we also still don’t fully know that story … who was Holden’s dad? How did they both die? Are these the right questions, Danvers?!) However, when Navarro gets a visit from a real-life one-eyed polar bear in Episode 1, it suggests that there’s a connection between it and each of the detectives’ haunted pasts. That, and the one eye could represent that the pair might not be seeing the full picture or might be seeing only one half of the story.
I can hear Danvers screaming “WRONG QUESTION” already. But I don’t care. You can’t vehemently mix in citrus, real and stuffed one-eyed polar bears, the Carcosa spiral, a Rust Cohle family tree, and a potpourri of dead people walking around town and then expect people not to ask questions. When every inch of detail could be used as evidence in a murder case, it’s important to know whether any of this is real or not.
Where does Liz’s boy toy Ted Connelly fit into everything?
I know McKittrick has a low opinion of Connelly. She calls him a “political animal” and “weak” during her conversation with Hank right before the two form a plan to kill Heiss. But does that mean he’s completely innocent? Does he actually believe the very coincidental report that the cause of death for the Tsalal scientists was just a freak weather event? Or is McKittrick also greasing Connelly to pay him off or move him up the ladder as part of the cover-up? Navarro was pretty adamant in the closing scenes of Episode 5 that roping in Connelly would “bury” them all, but I guess it doesn’t matter to Danvers. She said the last time she and Connelly hooked up was the last time (actually this time), and her Tinder notifications are bound to heat up after she cracks the case.
How does Raymond Clark actually fit into all of this?
The leading suspect for most of the series, Raymond Clark, simply has to play a role in all of this, right? We know he’s the only living Tsalal scientist hiding in the “night country.” We also know he was the one convulsing in the opening scene of Episode 1 and who uttered the first mention of “she’s awake.” And we know that he had a “let’s get matching tattoos”–level relationship with Annie Kowtok. But when Danvers and Navarro eventually confront Clark in the caves Hank died trying to keep hidden from them, what will they learn?
My guess is Clark somehow escaped whatever killed his colleagues and has been too afraid to venture out of the caves ever since. If he was actually one of the bad guys in all of this, Clark would have run to McKittrick for protection a long time ago rather than freeze his ass off in the night country. Instead, Danvers and Navarro will find Clark in the caves scared shitless, and he’ll deliver the long-awaited “aha” moment of the series. I don’t want it to be a late-game spill of nearly all the relevant information to the case from a single source, but I think that’s what this is shaping up to be. (I blame all the time we spent chasing flat subplots!)
Have Night Country’s creators laid enough crumbs for a satisfying final twist?
OK, I’ll say it again: It can’t be McKittrick. If the series’ big reveal was actually in the penultimate episode when McKittrick and Hank talked in the car about wanting to hide the caves from Navarro and Danvers, I will riot in the streets of Ennis. We know McKittrick and Silver Sky funded the Tsalal station. We know McKittrick paid Hank to move Annie’s body and asked him to kill Heiss to help hide the cave entrance’s whereabouts. If that also means McKittrick was the ringleader in killing the scientists and Kowtok, I will be baffled in the worst way.
It just can’t happen. Someone, anyone else had to have killed them. Such an early reveal would run counter to everything True Detective diehards loved about previous seasons. That said, we must have missed something. McKittrick, Connelly, and Hank all played a part, but none of them killed anybody (outside of Heiss). They probably know who killed Kowtok and/or the scientists, but they didn’t make the order or deliver the final blow(s). There are enough loose ends (e.g., Sedna, Oliver Tagaq, Ryan Kowtok) for there to be a big reveal, but whether or not it’s satisfying comes down to whether it’s a key piece of evidence we all overlooked in the moment—like the kid’s drawing of the green-eared spaghetti monster in the first season of True Detective—or simply new information spilled out during one of the final conversations with Clark or McKittrick. (We’re all hoping for the former.)
For the final time, who done it?
It’s her. Whoever this scary woman Pete’s kid drew in the first episode is the killer. No, I’m not saying Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the underworld (though my colleague Ben Lindbergh’s deep dive into her lore is spectacular). I’m saying someone who looks like this!
Whoever killed Kowtok and/or the Tsalal scientists looked like this, which admittedly brings McKittrick into the fold again, but I’m ruling her out anyway. It could be Pete’s wife or her grandma or one of the women at the protests with Leah. I don’t know who she is exactly, but I know she’s awake.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 5.
Who Done It?
Throughout this season, Pete Prior has been a rare—perhaps the only—bit of purity and innocence in Ennis. He alone seems to have dodged the town’s darkness, projecting a sincerity and conventionality that are absent from any other character we’ve encountered. All he wants, it seems, is to be a good husband, a good dad, a good son, and—even as it increasingly conflicts with the other roles—a good cop. Ennis isn’t a place that fosters kindness, yet Pete has spent his life with a purehearted dedication to doing right by others. Indeed, we learned this week that Pete’s wife, Kayla, first fell for the former high school hockey star when he uncharacteristically blew a game—after which she learned that, without so much as a word about it to anyone, he’d done it to cheer up a player on the opposing team whose dad had just died.
This week, Pete’s innocence was finally shattered. All season long, he’s followed at chief of police Liz Danvers’s heels, palpably straining to learn from his professional hero. At long last, his questions about what caused the rift between Danvers and onetime protégée Evangeline Navarro led to the realization that she and Navarro murdered serial abuser William Wheeler years ago and covered it up. Wheeler was left-handed, Pete figures out, meaning that his right-handed fatal shot to the head couldn’t have been self-inflicted. Danvers might be a good detective, but she’s no hero.
She’s not the only one. Pete has tried throughout the season to make the best of his difficult and sometimes abusive relationship with his father, Hank. Amid a mounting pile of evidence that Hank isn’t the well-meaning cop that he has pretended to be, Pete bursts into Danvers’s home at the episode’s climax to find that his dad is just as willing to brush the law aside for his own ends. On orders from Kate McKittrick—more on her in just a moment—Hank fatally shoots the former engineer Otis Heiss. Pete responds with his own irrevocable sin, shooting and killing his father. His days of looking for the good in people are over.
Before the shoot-out, Danvers comes close to throwing in the towel on the Tsalal Arctic Research Station case: McKittrick and Ted Connelly call her into the Silver Spring Mining offices to inform her that the scientists’ deaths have been ruled not a murder but a tragic accident resulting from a slab avalanche. (Holy Dyatlov Pass, Batman.) A conversation with Leah changes her mind when her daughter asks whether she knows how bad the pollution has gotten in the Indigenous villages around Ennis—does she have any idea how many stillbirths there have been? Danvers visits the Ennis cemetery, where tiny coffins sit waiting for the ground to thaw so that they can be buried—and then she decides to keep looking for answers.
Last week, Heiss told Danvers that still-missing Tsalal researcher Raymond Clark was “hiding in the night country.” This time around, Danvers finally learns that “the night country”—all together with me now, boys and girls: Night Country!—is a term for Ennis’s subterranean ice caves. And those spirals that keep turning up? They’re markers left by hunters to warn others about thin ice above the caves.
Night Country’s answers sure seem to be in those caves. Clark, so far as we know, is still down there. And we know that Annie Kowtok was murdered somewhere inside: The recovered video of her final moments shows her telling the camera, “I found it. It’s here.” Finally, we know that McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining really, really don’t want Danvers and Navarro going in. Next week, that’s just what they’ll do, but until then it’s time for one last look at the suspects.
1. Kate McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining
A hearty welcome to the top of the suspect list goes to local mogul and Silver Sky exec Kate McKittrick.
McKittrick’s power in Ennis has thrummed beneath the surface throughout the season in ways both large and small, from her ownership of the ice rink—the town’s de facto community center turned morgue—to the fact that she holds Leah’s fate in the balance after the teen graffitied “MURDERERS” on Silver Sky’s offices.
This week, we see her summon—summon!—Danvers to Silver Sky, where the chief is shocked to find Ted Connelly waiting. (Poor Connelly catching strays: “Connelly is a political animal,” McKittrick says later on. “He’s weak, and he’s fucking her.”) First, McKittrick dresses Danvers down for an early effort to get into the ice caves with Navarro “on Silver Sky property”; then, she and Connelly present the extraordinarily dubious news that Tsalal’s scientists perished in what Connelly dubs “a weather event.” McKittrick seems positively thrilled, giddily telling Danvers, “I know it’s a relief for all of us that there’s not some killer out there on the loose.” Nothing fishy here!
As Danvers notes, it’s awfully convenient. It’s also particularly suspicious given some new evidence that Pete dug up in the tax records of the multinational conglomerate that runs Silver Sky Mining: Turns out that the LLC behind Tsalal is a partner of Silver Sky, which funds the center at least in part as a greenwashing initiative. “That means the mine bankrolls Tsalal and then Tsalal pushes out bullshit pollution numbers for them,” Danvers says. Given what we know about the rampant pollution around Ennis and its devastating human toll, the revelation raises new questions about the mine’s, and McKittrick’s, possible involvement in what happened at Tsalal, to say nothing of the murder of Annie, who was a vocal anti-mine activist before her death.
There’s not a lot of ambiguity in what comes next. Danvers tells McKittrick that she has a lead on Clark courtesy of Heiss, whom she’s secretly stashed at The Lighthouse and whom McKittrick doubtless knows has extensive knowledge of the caves. McKittrick immediately arranges a sneaky meeting with Hank Prior, telling him that if he kills Heiss, she’ll have him named as the new chief of police in Danvers’s stead. “She’s looking for the location of the Kowtok murder,” McKittrick tells Hank. “She can’t find that cave.” At minimum, this means she has intimate knowledge of Annie’s murder and that, in her capacity at Silver Sky, she wants it hidden from the police.
What is McKittrick trying to cover up by offing Heiss: the truth about Annie’s death, what really happened at Tsalal, whatever it was that Annie found under the ice, or some combination of all three? There’s just no universe in which McKittrick isn’t involved in some—or all—of the murders (let alone the pollution poisoning Ennis).
2. … Ghosts?
Just kidding—kind of. Your mileage may vary on whether you view this season’s spooky spiritual accompaniments—the jump scares, the flashes of dead-eyed zombies, the mysterious caribou stampede off a cliff, Travis’s spirit’s season premiere dance party, the reappearing orange, and so on—as an enhancement to the story or a major mark against it. Anyone who’s read Agatha Christie knows that a mystery’s seemingly supernatural explanation will be punctured in short order by the very human truth beneath the caper at hand. This late in the season, it seems clear that we’re close to the kind of culprit or culprits who can be put in handcuffs—a conclusion that Danvers has hewed to throughout the investigation.
But there’s still something going on. Many different people in and around Ennis have witnessed seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Those caribou really did run off that cliff. And just last week, Navarro had her own otherworldly moment in the dredge, leaving her with an apparently ruptured eardrum (an incident that bizarrely did not come up this week at all).
It all has me thinking a lot about another show set in a remote, icy town, where—just as in Night Country—an A-list detective comes in to solve a ghastly crime. In Fortitude, which premiered back in 2015, it’s Stanley Tucci who finds himself wading through the snow in search of the truth in a troubled town. Without spoiling too much of that series, the investigation takes a sharp turn when it becomes clear that something—something neither human nor supernatural—is affecting the townsfolk with increasingly violent results.
In Night Country, we know that the mine is polluting water for a significant portion of the Ennis area. We also know that Tsalal was hunting deep in the ice for as-yet-unknown organisms in the name of scientific discovery. What if one or the other or both of these have led to mass poisoning- or infection-induced hallucinations—or worse? Something really did make all those scientists run out onto the ice partially clothed, after all, and the people of Ennis really are seeing things that seem to defy explanation.
What if there is an explanation, and all that sinister stuff that’s been haunting the town—and the series—can be explained as the neurological aftereffects of the shady business at the mine and Tsalal?
3. Raymond Clark
After an entire season of mentions in the Who Done It? column of Ringer recaps, Clark has plummeted down the list of suspects.
That’s not to say he’s not involved—he’s still the clearest link between his onetime flame Annie and the Tsalal deaths, and it is distinctly suspicious that Clark would be the sole survivor from the research center, even before considering that he’s been on the run for the show’s duration. And Clark specialized in paleomicrobiology during his nearly two decades working at Tsalal. If one of the center’s discoveries is behind the murd—er, tragic avalanche event—he’s likely the one who found it.
“He’s crazy as shit, man,” Heiss tells Danvers early in Episode 5. “Creepy motherfucker.”
But Clark increasingly seems like a fall guy. We know he loved Annie; if Silver Sky conspired to have her killed or cover it up (or both), surely he wouldn’t have been on board. If anything, he seems like another victim of the mine’s and/or research center’s collateral damage.
4. Hank Prior
So long, Hank.
Hank has graced the list of suspects in each of TheRinger’sweeklyrecaps this season for good reason. His bitterness that Danvers was named chief, a need for money to woo the con artist formerly known as Alina, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, instability in his relationship with his son (and, before that, Hank’s now-ex-wife), his relentless, wiry anxiety—none of it paints a pretty picture for Hank.
This week, we learned that Hank had been on Silver Sky’s payroll and was involved in Annie’s murder—though he insists to Danvers shortly before Pete shoots him that he only moved her body out of the cave where she was killed and had nothing to do with the murder itself. I’m inclined to believe him: “I’m not a killer,” Prior tells McKittrick after she tells him to take out Heiss—seeming confirmation that he really wasn’t behind Annie’s murder, or any others that McKittrick is aware of.
At that point, anyway: It’s not long before he shoots Heiss. (Good for Heiss, I guess, that he got one last go-around with his beloved heroin, courtesy of Danvers, who squirrels him away from The Lighthouse in a joint intel-smack excursion. “Don’t leave a mess,” she instructs him as he slips into her bathroom. Standard police technique, am I right?) Prior Sr. is hardly heading into the great beyond with a clean conscience, but it at least doesn’t look like he harmed Annie or the Tsalal group.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
“She’s awake!” the various creeps and creepies of Ennis have told us repeatedly. While I’m tempted to write off the warning as mass delusion (see: ghosts), the fact that we keep hearing about this evidently fearsome “she”—whose awakening seems to have portended all the horror we’ve witnessed this season—seems significant.
I think we can rule out mortals for this particular role. Could she be the one-eyed polar bear—some protective, and perhaps freshly vengeful, spirit that has long lain dormant beneath Ennis? Speaking of beneath—well, I guess we’ll find out next week.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Claire: This week’s episode dealt with a whole lot of ice—most of it perilous. We see Rose Aguineau and Evangeline Navarro use an ax to hack a hole through thick ice so that Eve can scatter her sister’s ashes, only for her to wander a few steps too far and have the ice crack beneath her and nearly give way. And we finally learn what the “night country” refers to: a network of subterranean ice caves that we’re told are wildly dangerous and filled with jagged ice that cuts like glass (but that, teens being what they are, still draw out the kids to mess around and explore from time to time). Ice now feels less like a backdrop and more like a direct threat to the Night Country crew. While I recognize that Ennis’s anthill of spooky ice tunnels is probably not the norm, what can you tell me about living with the realities of ice in Alaska?
Vikram: I’ve had only one encounter with an ice cave. And after I tell you about it, I think you’ll understand why.
The glacier was huge—a thick, jagged layer of ice crawling over the mountain we had just hiked up. It looked still, but it was talking to us. We heard little cracking sounds in the distance, regular reminders that glaciers aren’t frozen in place, but rather a slow-moving river of ice.
As we got closer, the air became measurably cooler. It’s a remarkable effect, the kind of moment in nature that reminds you how helpless you are. This chunk of ice was changing the weather. It was powerful.
Once at the edge of the glacier, we scoped out what seemed to be a small opening under a brim of overhanging ice.
Courtesy of Dave McGee
After a few minutes, we got curious and squeezed through, into a cave about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, tucked under many tons of glacier ice. Inside, it was stunning; the blue was deep, the air even chillier. The inside of an ice cube. We had never done anything like this before.
Courtesy of Dave McGee
We spent the next 10 or 15 minutes inside our frozen hideaway and probably would have stayed much longer, but we had to head back soon—a friend was waiting for us on a nearby ridge. But as we made our way to the entrance of the ice cave, we heard a crack—this time, a little louder and a lot closer—just overhead. Oh shit. We walked faster. Then another crack, even louder. Run. The entrance to the cave was collapsing.
In my memory, the next few things happened almost instantaneously. We shot out the entrance. Me first, then Rob, then Dave. I tripped a few feet outside the entrance and fell to the ground. Rob, at full speed, passed by me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a chunk of glacier ice—probably two-thirds the size of a Subaru—falling from about 30 feet above Dave’s head as he lunged out of the mouth of the cave. I couldn’t tell whether he was clear of the ice or about to be crushed by it.
For a moment, I thought Dave was a goner.
Today, 17 years later, it’s still the scariest moment of my life. His too.
“I remember the feeling that things were falling behind me. I could feel the force of something hitting the ground just behind my feet. I’ve probably never moved as fast in my entire life, even though it was over wet rocks.”
Courtesy of Dave McGee
I called Dave recently to help confirm my memory. We hadn’t talked about that day at Raven Glacier in a long time. I told him I wanted to talk about True Detective: Night Country and how Episode 5 involves a network of ice caves. I tried to keep explaining the context, but he interrupted me. “Just hearing that—ice caves—makes my body shiver.”
We compared memories. Dave remembers seeing me fall and look back at him. I sure hope he can’t remember the look on my face.
“It was literally fractions of a second between life and death. Tons of ice falling right on top of me. Even if I had survived the initial blow, it would have been impossible to recover a body under there.”
After Dave scrambled away, the three of us came together. “We all looked around, at the ice, at each other. Someone said, ‘Holy shit.’”
I remember hugging—desperate hugging.
A few minutes later, we turned to leave. “We had a long, solemn walk down that hill, having a lot of thoughts about mortality.”
During that walk so many years ago, and again this week on the phone, we wondered aloud whether we had caused the collapse. “It had to be us, right? The odds seem too incredible that that piece of ice happened to fall right then. I mean, how many years does it take for a cavern like that to form? And then it collapsed … right then?”
The moment has stayed with Dave, who now lives in Chicago with his wife and their three children. “I think about it still, usually when I look at my kids’ faces. They wouldn’t exist if I had been a step slower—or if I had slipped on a wet rock. My wife would have had a different life. My kids wouldn’t be here.”
Dave doesn’t tell this story much anymore. But before he moved away from Alaska, it came up a lot. Especially with newcomers. “It obviously changed the way I look at glaciers, especially as a place of recreation. After that, I would tell anyone new to Alaska to stay away from them.
“But people ignored me. They went exploring still.” That’s the power of the ice.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
HBO
Right out of the gate, we have the woman in charge of cremating Julia Navarro—a somber duty that nevertheless seems to require some funk.
HBO
Could there be a clearer representation of Pete’s attempt and failure to hold on to the last shreds of his innocence than his decision to rock his old high school hockey sweater as Kayla is kicking him out of their home?
HBO
Leah doubles down on her activism against Silver Sky Mining, culminating in her arrest. “Coop! Book me, will you?” Has a teen ever said anything more metal?
HBO
It’s about time that we got a refresh of “heroin chic.”
This week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country opens with a clever bit of sound editing, as the signature white noise of HBO’s logo blends seamlessly in with Police Chief Liz Danvers’ (Jodie Foster) white noise machine, at her bedside, failing to relax her. She can’t stop obsessing over the video she and Navarro (Kali Reis) found of Anne Kowtok’s last moments, looking for more clues. It’s Christmas Eve, and Anne’s cries for help are about to be joined by a chorus.
“Part 4” of Night Country is the season’s most haunted hour, the ghosts in the periphery of the show taking center stage, even as its protagonists continue to deny them. The emotional crux of the episode rests on Navarro’s sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), whom Danvers finds wandering in the snow without a coat, shivering through some kind of episode. Navarro checks Julia into a facility for extended care, but it’s already too late: She sees the dead everywhere. And so she walks out onto the ice and joins them.
Night Country’s protagonists have been speeding toward the brick wall of their own denial, and Julia’s death is the collision. The injustices and tragedies that haunt Ennis and intersect with each other are boiling over, and neither Navarro nor Danvers can ignore them much longer.
That doesn’t mean they don’t try: Navarro, grieving, starts a fight and gets her ass kicked. Danvers, who has been slowly revealed to be a woman broken down and shoddily rebuilt like a work of jagged kintsugi, becomes so hostile and toxic that she can’t hit up her fuckbuddy Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) for a drunken hookup without browbeating him, and ends up spending the holiday wasted and alone. This would be a quiet, sad episode if it weren’t for the growing choir of the dead.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
The thin membrane between the living and dead in Ennis is one of Night Country’s richest thematic veins, and showrunner Issa López never turns down an opportunity to remind us of it. Sometimes it is in casual juxtaposition, staging mundane conversations in front of a horrific “corpsicle”. Other times it’s in the ways the planet’s history is engraved on its surface too deeply for us to scrub out, like the ancient whale bones frozen in the background of the ice cavern where Anne Kowtok died. And finally, it is in the angry shades of dead women who scream in Navarro’s ear.
We’re past Night Country’s midpoint, and the assorted hauntings of “Part 4” form a ghostly mosaic of the show’s many concerns about our past, and how we work hard to ignore it. The eerie secrets locked away in ice, Navarro’s distance from her Indigenous culture, the toxic entitlement of men that causes women’s opportunities to curdle — if it doesn’t snuff them out outright. History can suffocate us if we pay it no mind. We can forget the dead but the dead may not forget us.
Danvers has her own haunting to contend with, a monstrous one-eyed polar bear that causes her to drive into a snowbank — a bear that Night Country suggests is not real. It’s another haunting, the shape of Danvers’ lost son Holden’s favorite stuffed animal. It’s one of the few things of his she keeps around, one of the only signs that she’s never stopped grieving, never did the work of moving on.
“The dead are gone,” she insists to Navarro. “Fucking gone.”
Navarro says that if Danvers believed that, she wouldn’t keep that stuffed bear. And perhaps, the viewer can infer, she wouldn’t throw herself into this job, seeking justice for Anne Kowtok, working her way through the spirals hidden across Ennis, staring at horrors others look away from. The ghosts surrounding Ennis will not be ignored. The white noise isn’t tuning them out anymore.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 4.
Who Done It?
If endless darkness in the Arctic Circle didn’t sound isolating enough, try spending that time alone on Christmas. Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country sees pretty much every resident of Ennis spending the holiday solo or reckoning with some form of personal turmoil—but it wouldn’t be True Detective without festering psychological trauma and existential dread, would it? But hey, it’s still Christmas—sit down, relax, and let your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery crime drama promote your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery Christmas movie.
Screenshots via HBO
Episode 4 presents some significant progress in the Tsalal murder case. Last episode, Liz Danvers and Co. discovered a chilling video of Annie Kowtok that she took of herself just before her death. It shows Annie in an ice cave with unidentified bones embedded in the wall, which leads the crew to deduce that Annie’s body was moved from that location into town to make some sort of statement to the locals.
Meanwhile, when tasked with tracking down anyone who had suffered similar injuries to the Tsalal scientists, Pete discovers the record of Otis Heiss, a seemingly crucial piece of the Night Country puzzle. After surviving the injuries—which included burned corneas and self-inflicted bites, with no reported cause—Heiss went off the grid. (He’s traceable only through his police record of disorderly conduct.) When Danvers and Evangeline Navarro seek out Ennis High School teacher Adam Bryce for assistance in locating the cave Annie was likely killed in, he suggests tracking down whoever mapped out the dangerous tunnels. A quick Google search reveals none other than Heiss as the man responsible.
This episode also has no shortage of flirtations with the spirit realm—which probably shouldn’t even be described as flirtations anymore. We just flat out saw multiple Conjuring-ass ghosts. Night Country has been very clear about the possibility of the supernatural at play; True Detective Season 1 never went far beyond merely hinting at it. I still don’t believe the killer will end up being a wholly supernatural force, but visions of the dead have been shown so frequently and assuredly by multiple characters that the existence of the paranormal doesn’t seem to be just speculation at this point.
Heartbreakingly, these visions lead to the death of Julia, Eve’s tormented sister whose persistent encounters with the dead drove her to walk into the freezing ocean. In Episode 3, we discovered that Eve and Julia’s mother was also driven mad by hearing voices, and she eventually left home and was murdered by someone who was never found. With her sister now gone too, Eve fears she’s next in line to be targeted by these specters, though it wouldn’t be her first brush with the supernatural. Episode 3 showed us that Danvers and Navarro’s last case involved a man named William Wheeler who abused and killed his girlfriend—it’s suggested that either Danvers or Navarro killed him upon arriving at the crime scene and covered it up by falsely reporting his death as a suicide. Episode 4 reveals that Navarro saw the dead girlfriend’s ghost in the room before one of the cops likely pulled the trigger on Wheeler.
The episode culminates with the spotting of a man wearing Annie’s pink jacket—the same one Raymond Clark was seen wearing in a Tsalal video—near the town dredges. Navarro and Danvers go to scope it out and basically find themselves in a game of Silent Hill. They quickly locate the mysterious figure, and Danvers chases him up the ladders of a dredge, only to discover the man is actually Heiss rather than Clark. So where is Clark? “He went back down to hide,” Heiss says. “He’s hiding in the night country. We’re all in the night country now.” Hey, that’s the name of the show! As Danvers races after Heiss, Navarro starts hearing voices calling her name and follows a trail of footsteps to an ominous Christmas tree. There, she stumbles upon an apparition resembling Julia—Eve’s haunted by another woman she couldn’t save. Danvers comes down to find Eve in a catatonic state with blood dripping from her ear (akin to the ruptured eardrums the scientists suffered, perhaps?) after the encounter.
Oh yeah, this episode also treated us to more oranges and one-eyed polar bears, plus Billie Eilish songs. Are we any closer to solving the Tsalal mystery? Let’s round up the suspects.
1. Raymond Clark
The Nikola Jokic of murder suspects, our boy Raymond remains atop the list. His whereabouts are still unknown (unless “hiding in the night country” counts as a location), but that Danvers found Heiss in the state he was in, in the same Annie jacket that was last seen on Clark, indicates that something went down there. Speaking of “down there,” what exactly did Heiss mean by saying Clark “went down” to hide? Last week in this column, my colleague Ben Lindbergh introduced the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the Adlivun underworld, Sedna, as a potential suspect. It doesn’t get much more “down” than the underworld, and “night country” seems like an apt description of a frozen wasteland where souls are imprisoned. Could Clark be posing as, or possessed by, Sedna?
Clark has been built up to be such a prime suspect over the course of these four episodes that it seems almost too obvious for him to be the sole perpetrator. But the mounting evidence shows he is clearly involved in the murders somehow. That he’s been missing for so long also seems to be foreshadowing a big showdown for when Danvers and Navarro do eventually track him down.
2. Oliver Tagaq
Even though Tagaq wasn’t seen in this episode, he was still key in an important scene. As Danvers obsessively rewatches the Annie Kowtok video, she notices that it ends with the lights getting cut in the same way they do at the end of the Raymond Clark Tsalal video. Danvers surmises that there was some sort of power outage at the end of both videos, but Annie’s video was evidently taken in an ice cave—how could there have been power in there in the first place? Danvers remembers that Tagaq was an equipment engineer at Tsalal and would likely have access to the lab’s emergency generators. She sends Eve and Pete back to Tagaq’s place to investigate and, what do you know, he’s vanished. Tagaq left right after Danvers and Navarro confronted him in the previous episode, according to the others at his camp. Eve and Pete find a spiral symbol drawn on the ground and carved into a stone, and when they ask Oliver’s former neighbors if they know what the symbol is, they don’t answer—their dogs start barking, and they kind of just … stare menacingly.
My hunch is that Tagaq is a red herring who’s just very distrusting of authority. (Understandably so, after how the Indigenous population has been treated.) But he obviously knows something, and his connection to the spirals can’t be meaningless.
3. Kate McKittrick
Even if Kate didn’t actually murder the Tsalal scientists with her own two hands, she’s still evil as hell and guilty of something. Actually, we already know she’s complicit in polluting Ennis’s water supply as an executive of the Silver Sky mining company, which Annie had been protesting against before her death. Plus, we know Kate is close with Hank from their interaction at the ice rink in Episode 2, and he’s the one who hid Annie’s case files and failed to report some key evidence in her investigation.
In Episode 4, we see a brief scene with Kate after Danvers’s daughter, Leah, was caught vandalizing the mining offices, spray-painting the word “MURDERERS” across the front door (badass!). If Leah becomes a target next, that would further heighten my suspicion that Kate is involved somehow, but even if not, Kate seems very unhappy with the reputation of her company. Unhappy enough to commit murder? I’m not sure. She does have a potential motive for killing Annie, but theorizing why she would kill the Tsalal scientists is just conjecture—maybe they discovered something in their research that would be detrimental to Silver Sky if made public? And since Night Country takes so much inspiration from Season 1, Kate could ultimately serve as a Billy Lee Tuttle figure in a web of corruption.
4. Sedna
Not to copy Ben’s homework from last week, but the supernatural is still a huge possibility in unlocking the Tsalal mystery, and Sedna is still the best explanation. And Heiss’s description of Clark’s location wasn’t the only clue we got in this episode that could lead to Sedna.
Listen to the way Eve describes her family’s relationship with spirits to Danvers: “It’s a curse,” she says. “Something calls us, and we follow.” It’s been said that Sedna can imprison the souls of the living, and Julia’s death was due to walking into the ocean, which happens to be Sedna’s domain. As Julia marched in, it did seem as though she was being led somewhere—could it have been Sedna calling to her?
The prevalence of these visions makes it seem like the paranormal will play a part in solving this mystery in a way that it didn’t in past seasons of True Detective. I still believe a human will ultimately be found responsible for the murders, but there were simply too many ghosts in this episode to ignore.
5. Hank Prior
I almost feel bad including Prior here because my guy had a horrendous outing in Episode 4. He was supposed to finally meet his Russian fiancée, Alina, at the airport, but, alas, she never showed. Well, he might have seen her briefly get off the plane, make eye contact with him, and get right back on, which is an
extreme case of getting curved. But in all likelihood, Alina is probably just some dude with an internet connection catfishing Prior into sending him money. Still, Prior does a terrible job of pretending to brush off the whole situation to his son, saying that Alina’s cell service is probably just out (a classic rationale for victims of ghosting). As we see Prior sulk in front of a bottle of champagne and a rose-petal-adorned bedspread intended for a romantic night with Alina, we know he’s pretty heartbroken.
But that we get such a sympathetic portrayal of Hank in this episode doesn’t necessarily absolve him of culpability in the murders. He obviously tried to cover something up with Annie’s case, and he’s overall been a pretty big asshole to Danvers, Navarro, and his own son. But the Alina situation shows how naive Hank is, and that probably makes him a pretty terrible cop. With the Annie case, it seems possible that Hank is doing the bidding for some powerful person—maybe Kate?—while being kind of oblivious, or even willfully ignorant, about the severity of these cases. Which, again … really shoddy stuff for a cop to do. But it probably means he’s not the one committing the murders himself.
6. Captain Connelly
Let me cook for a second. The thing that raised my eyebrows this week was the way Captain Connelly responded when Danvers asked if he’d seen the Annie Kowtok video she’d sent him: a short nod and then, “You keep that on a need-to-know basis.” Yes, he’s a police captain who probably doesn’t want evidence leaking to the public, but it just struck me as a bizarre reaction to the uncovering of a crucial and traumatic clue in a years-old murder case. Plus, he’s been trying to wrangle control of the Tsalal case ever since it opened.
Danvers has made a lot of comments about how Connelly wants to look good for his future mayoral campaign (which Connelly himself has never really responded to), and that might be true—and that could certainly include ensuring that any skeletons in his closet never come out. Prior is, in all probability, compromised by his connections to Silver Sky one way or another, so why couldn’t Connelly be too? True Detective Season 1’s Errol Childress murders had connections all the way up to the Louisiana governor. A powerful and ambitious man like Connelly could easily get his hands dirty, too.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
Now let me really cook for a second. There have been multiple visions of a of one-eyed polar bear throughout Night Country so far (which have been presented in a sort of dreamlike manner but could be a real sighting in an Alaskan town). Both Navarro and Danvers have experienced these visions in the same way: by almost crashing into the bear in Episodes 1 and 4, respectively. A plush one-eyed polar bear that once belonged to Danvers’s son, Holden, has been a recurring image as well. It almost reminds me of another polar bear sighting …
Look, I realize it’s probably a different experience running into a polar bear in the Alaskan tundra than it is on a deserted island. But the polar bear sightings on Lost, surprisingly enough, actually had an explanation: They were brought to the island by the DHARMA Initiative for studies in electromagnetic research. So those polar bears had to come from somewhere. Who’s to say that the DHARMA Initiative never had a study-abroad program at the Tsalal research station specializing in polar bear recruitment? I don’t know, man, I’ll just take any opportunity I can to bring up Lost again. What a program.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Julianna: I have to be honest with you, Vikram—I’m four episodes into True Detective: Night Country and my California mind is still unable to comprehend just how cold Alaska is. I’ve lived in the Golden State my entire life and am currently typing this from Los Angeles, where it’s a lovely 73 degrees in January, and I still saw jackets and beanies outside. I could count the number of times I’ve seen snow in my life on one hand, and at least a couple of those times I’ve foolishly worn jeans and sneakers that quickly got sopping wet.
So my question is: How do you adapt to extreme cold? Do you ever get used to it? What are the wardrobe essentials for an Alaskan winter? Is an Andy Reid frozen mustache a common sighting? I realize that was multiple questions, but this is truly a world that boggles my mind.
Vikram: Like you, Julianna, I am from California. When I first moved to Alaska, I hadn’t had much exposure to cold weather, and it showed. The first winter I spent in Anchorage, my “coat” was a thin corduroy jacket, and I mostly wore a lot of sweatshirts and jeans. As many locals warned me, cotton kills. But I was too stubborn to buy myself a puffy jacket or the stretchy technical clothing that my friends wore to exercise in the cold. I was neither warm nor fashionable.
Fortunately, despite my inadequate wardrobe, my body did adjust. Exposure to cold weather activates something in our bodies called “brown fat,” which helps keep our bodies warmer, a sort of internal layer of long underwear. I noticed this effect most when I would visit my family in Los Angeles during the winter; they wore sweaters and jackets all day, while I could wear shorts and T-shirts without a shiver. It felt like a superpower.
But there’s a limit to what our bodies can withstand.
The coldest temperature I have ever been in is negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a whole different kind of cold than I had grown accustomed to in Anchorage, where the temperature rarely drops below zero. The layer of ice covering the road in Fairbanks was a few inches thick but not as slippery as warmer ice (the thin layer of melting water on the surface of the ice is what makes your car slide around on the road). Taking a deep breath at negative 35 is an adventure—air that cold tends to cause an instant coughing fit. We visited some hot springs on that trip; I remember dunking my head in the water, coming up for air, and feeling my hair freeze in seconds. Extreme cold can be delightful.
But does Ennis get that cold? It’s hard to say—there isn’t a weather almanac to consult for fictional Alaskan villages. But we can make an educated guess. Night Country creator Issa López described Ennis as a “fictionalized amalgam of northern villages Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and Nome.” These villages are further north than Fairbanks, but they are located on the water, which can help keep temperatures relatively mild—the brown fat of meteorology.
Stuck in weather-estimating hell, I reached out to Brian Brettschneider, Alaska’s leading climatologist. Brian told me that Ennis is likely “not as cold as Fairbanks, but notably colder than Anchorage. Nome, Kotzebue, and Utqiagvik are also quite windy places and are in the tundra,” where, he reminded me, trees cannot grow. Brian also sent me this handy dynamic temperature map. By my estimation, Ennis likely sees temps as low as negative 15 or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the depths of winter. In a word: brrrrr!
If you are planning to visit a northern Alaska community next winter, here are some items you will want to bring along, courtesy of my Real Alaskan Advisory Committee (Tara, Emily, Zach, and Barry):
A wool hat that covers your ears
A thick neck gaiter that you can pull up to protect your face
Heavyweight thermal underwear—this is your second skin
Mittens (not gloves!), preferably with a long gauntlet—covering your wrist and lower forearm—to keep the warmth in and the snow out
A down parka, ideally 600 fill or above, that goes down to at least your thighs and has a proper fur ruff (synthetics don’t cut it when snow is blowing sideways)
Wool socks
Bunny boots, which are cartoonish snow-white boots that keep your feet warm by trapping air and leaving room for thick socks—if you can’t find any, a pair of Bogs or Muck boots (cold-weather boots all seem to have exceptional names) will also do
Hand and foot warmers to tuck into your mittens and boots—get the foot warmers with adhesives, or you’ll end up with a crumpled mass far away from your toes
Julianna, now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll decide to visit Alaska in the winter sometime. I can’t guarantee you’ll see anything supernatural, but a snowy, dark Alaskan winter is magical all the same. The juice is worth the squeeze, even if it’s a little bit frozen.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
Rose Aguineau’s little Christmas party (and dress!) looked lovely. She seems like a great hang. Other than the fact that she has to deal with, as she says, “all the fuckin’ dead.”
Bro put on his best turtleneck and brought along a well-dressed stuffed animal only to leave the airport alone thinking he got stood up on sight. It’s so sad it almost makes me forget he’s a terrible person.
You ever look so good you cause a stranger to spiral into an abyss of loneliness and heartbreak?
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